All the King’s Men ~ Best Picture 1949

All The King’s Men is the story of the rise of politician Willie Stark from a rural county seat to the spotlight. Along the way, he loses his initial innocence, and becomes just as corrupt as those who he assaulted before for this characteristic. Also included is the romance between one of his “right hand women” and the up-and-coming journalist who brings Stark to prominence.

Rossen originally offered the starring role to John Wayne, who found the proposed film script unpatriotic and indignantly refused the part. Crawford, who eventually took the role, won the 1949 Oscar for best male actor, beating out Wayne, who had been nominated for his role in The Sands of Iwo Jima.

This great political film was a breakthrough for Broderick Crawford who had previously been in mostly B pictures. His performance is extremely compelling and impressive as he is transformed from a backwoods, honest and naive lawyer into a dirty, unscrupulous and sleazy politician.  Of the film’s seven Academy Award nominations, it won three major honors, Crawford for Best Actor, Rossen as Producer and in her screen debut, Mercedes McCambridge won as best supporting actress.

Paul Scofield ~ 1922-2008

Paul Scofield, a commanding stage and screen actor indelibly stamped on filmgoers’ minds as the doomed philosopher-statesman Sir Thomas More in “A Man For All Seasons,” has died at age 86.

Agent Rosalind Chatto said Thursday that Scofield died in a hospital near his home in southern England. He had been suffering from leukemia and died Wednesday.

Scofield won an Academy Award and international fame for the 1966 film “A Man For All Seasons,” in which he played the Tudor statesman and author of “Utopia” executed for treason in 1535 after clashing with King Henry VIII.

But he followed that breakthrough with relatively few film roles. Scofield was a stage actor by inclination and by his gifts – a dramatic, craggy face and an unforgettable voice likened to a Rolls-Royce starting up or the sound rumbling out of low organ pipes in an ancient crypt.

Hamlet ~ Best Picture

 Hamlet, directed by and starring Sir Laurence Olivier. Hamlet was Olivier’s second film as director, and also the second of his three Shakespeare films. It is the only one of Olivier’s directorial efforts to be filmed in black and white.Olivier’s Hamlet is the Shakespeare film that has received the most prestigious accolades, winning the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Actor. However, it proved controversial among Shakespearean purists, who felt that Olivier had made too many alterations and excisions to the four-hour play by cutting nearly two hours worth of content.

This film has been considered a classic since its release, and earned Olivier an Oscar for his performance. However, by today’s standards, Olivier’s Hamlet seems stiff and a bit stodgy. Olivier delivers a Hamlet that is very introverted and psychologically unstable. A psychiatrist friend who believed that Hamlet suffered from an Oedipus complex, so named because the eponymous hero of the ancient Greek play kills his father and marries his mother had influenced Olivier. In Olivier’s film, Hamlet is very much a ‘Mama’s boy’, and spends an inordinate amount of time on the ramparts of a studio Elsinore talking to himself in voice-over which gives the audience access to his thoughts. Done in traditional costume, the film is dark and sobering, and Jean Simmons’s performance as Ophelia is a landmark in film presentation of madness. In the ‘nunnery’ scene, it is hard not to hate Hamlet for rejecting Ophelia’s love. The film cuts the entire Fortinbras thread of the play, which places the focus of the screenplay entirely on Hamlet, but even so, it gives a bird’s-eye view into an acting style of the early 20th century meeting the still-young medium of film.

Laurence Olivier ~ Hamlet

He is one of the most famous and revered actors of the 20th century, along with his contemporaries John Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft and Ralph Richardson. Olivier played a wide variety of roles on stage and screen from Greek tragedy, Shakespeare and Restoration comedy to modern American and British drama. He was the first artistic director of the National Theatre of Great Britain and its main stage is named in his honour. He is generally regarded to be the greatest actor of the 20th Century, in the same category as David Garrick, Richard Burbage, Edmund Kean and Henry Irving in their own centuries. Olivier’s Academy acknowledgments are considerable—fourteen Oscar nominations, with two wins for Best Actor and Best Picture for the 1948 film Hamlet, and two honorary awards including a statuette and certificate. He was also awarded five Emmy awards from the nine nominations he received.Olivier’s career as a stage and film actor spanned more than six decades and included a wide variety of roles, from Shakespeare’s Othello and Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night to the sadistic Nazi dentist Christian Szell in Marathon Man and the kindly but determined Nazi-hunter in The Boys from Brazil. A High Church clergyman’s son who found fame on the West End stage, Olivier became determined early on to master Shakespeare, and eventually came to be regarded as one of the foremost Shakespeare interpreters of the 20th century. He continued to act until his death in 1989. Olivier played more than 120 stage roles, including: Richard III, Macbeth, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, Uncle Vanya, and Archie Rice in The Entertainer. He appeared in nearly sixty films, including William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake is Missing, Richard Attenborough’s Oh! What a Lovely War, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Sleuth, John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man, Daniel Petrie’s The Betsy, Desmond Davis’ Clash of the Titans, and his own Henry V, Hamlet, and Richard III. He also preserved his Othello on film, with its stage cast virtually intact. For television, he starred in The Moon and Sixpence, John Gabriel Borkman, Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Merchant of Venice, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and King Lear, among others.

In 1999, the American Film Institute named Olivier among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time, at fourteen on the list.

Jane Wyman ~ Classy Actress & Lady

Jane Wyman started her movie career in the 1930s playing wisecracking chorus girls before winning the Academy Award and three other best-actress Oscar nominations between 1947 to 1955.

She rekindled her star power in her 60s, playing Angela Channing, the domineering owner of a Northern California winery in “Falcon Crest,” which ran from 1981 to 1990.

Wyman was born Sarah Jane Mayfield in St. Joseph, Missouri. Although her birthdate has been widely reported for many years as January 4, 1914, research by biographers and genealogists indicates that she was born January 5, 1917. The most likely reason for the 1914 date is that she added to her age when beginning her career as a minor in order to work legally. She may have changed her January 5 birthdate to January 4 to coincide with that of her daughter Maureen Reagan. After Wyman’s death, a release posted on her official website confirmed these details

She had met Ronald Reagan in the late 1930s and appeared with him in the comedy “Brother Rat” (1938). They were married in 1940, had a daughter, Maureen, and then adopted a son, Michael, before divorcing in 1949.

Ms. Wyman’s Oscar came for her sensitive performance in “Johnny Belinda” (1948), in which she played a deaf woman whose pregnancy resulting from a rape causes a scandal. Archer Winsten, writing in The New York Post, called her performance “surpassingly beautiful.” She was the first person in the sound era to win an acting Oscar without speaking a line of dialogue. In an amusing acceptance speech, perhaps poking fun at some of her long-winded counterparts, Wyman took her statue and said, “I won this by keeping my mouth shut, and that’s what I’m going to do now.

“It is all the more beautiful in its accomplishment without words,” he added.

Jane Wyman died at the age of 90 at her Rancho Mirage home on Monday, September 10, 2007, having long suffered from arthritis and diabetes. Wyman’s son, Michael Reagan, released a statement saying, “I have lost a loving mother, my children Cameron and Ashley have lost a loving grandmother, my wife Colleen has lost a loving friend she called Mom and Hollywood has lost the classiest lady to ever grace the silver screen

Walter Huston ~ Father of Hollywood Elite

Born in Toronto, Ontario Canada to an Ulster-Scottish father and a Scottish mother, he began his Broadway career in 1924, he achieved fame in character roles once talkies began in Hollywood. His first major role was in 1929’s The Virginian, opposite Gary Cooper. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1936 for Dodsworth, in which he had appeared on Broadway two years earlier.

Huston stayed busy throughout the 1930s and 1940s, both on stage and screen (becoming one of America’s most distinguished actors), including introducing September Song in Knickerbocker Holiday. Among his films, he starred in Rain (1932) and Mission to Moscow (1943), a pro-Soviet World War II propaganda film as Ambassador Joseph E. Davies. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1948 for his role in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was directed by his son, John Huston, who also won the award for Best Director that year. His last film was The Furies in 1950 with Barbara Stanwyck. He died in Hollywood from an aortic aneurysm, one day after his 66th birthday.

Walter Huston has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6626 Hollywood Blvd.

Claire Trevor ~ Queen of Film Noir

Claire Trevor’s acting career spanned more than seven decades and included success in stage, radio, television and film. Trevor often played the hard-boiled blonde, and every conceivable type of “bad girl” role. After attending American Academy of Dramatic Arts, she began her acting career in the late ’20s in stock. By 1932 she was starring on Broadway; that same year she began appearing in Brooklyn-filmed Vitaphone shorts. Her first credited film role was in the 1933 film Life in the Raw, with her feature film debut coming that same year in Jimmy and Sally (1933), with her portraying “Sally Johnson”. From 1933 through 1938 Trevor starred in twenty nine films, often having either the lead role or the role of heroine. In 1937 she starred with Humphrey Bogart in Dead End, which would lead to her being nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

Into the 1940s Trevor began moving toward her trademark and always first rate noir personas. She started in a big way as killer Ruth Dillon with Burgess Meredith in Street of Chance (1942). She was equally convincing as the more complex, but nonetheless two-faced, Mrs. Grayle in the Philip Marlowe vehicle Murder, My Sweet (1944). But she was something very different and extraordinary as the washed up, boozy nightclub singer Gaye Dawn in her Oscar-winning performance for Best Actress opposite a great cast headed by Bogart and Robinson, as exiled gangster kingpin Johnny Rocco, in Key Largo (1948). The movie hangs on her wrenching performance of a pathetic rendition of torch song “Moanin’ Low” sung in humiliation to gain a desperately wanted drink. There were more quality movies and an additional Academy nomination (The High and the Mighty (1954)) into the 1950s, but Trevor was also doing stage and television as well. In regard to the later she was enthusiastic about live TV playhouse and appeared on several famous shows by the mid-1950s. She won an Emmy for Best Live Television Performance by an Actress as the flighty wife of Frederic March in “Dodsworth” (1956) on the NBC Producer’s Showcase. She continued with some film roles, stage, and also the variety of TV series. Later her roles were more confined to distinguished women and mothers-as varied as Ma Barker (wouldn’t you know it) for the episodic Untouchables (1959) to her final film role as mother of Sally Field inKiss me Goodbye (1982).

Having long since moved with third husband producer Milton Bren to Newport Beach, California, Trevor retired from all manner of screen work in 1987 but took a new and most active interest in theater and the arts education. In this she became impressed and associated with The School of Arts at the University of California, Irvine. She and her husband contributed some 10 million dollars to further its development for the visual and performing arts (that included three endowed professorships). After her passing in April 2000 at 91 years old, the University renamed the school The Claire Trevor School of the Arts. Her presence on the UCI campus is in more than spirit alone-visibly so-her Oscar for Key Largo stands in an exterior glass window on view in the school’s Arts Plaza complex.

Gentleman’s Agreement ~ Best Picture

Gentleman’s Agreement is a 1947 film about a journalist (played by Gregory Peck) who falsely represents himself as a Jew to research antisemitism in New York City and the affluent community of Darien, Connecticut. The movie was controversial in its time, as was a similar film on the same subject, Crossfire, which was also released the same year and also nominated for an Oscar for best picture. Gentleman’s Agreement was based on Laura Z. Hobson’s 1947 novel of the same name.

In the space of just under two hours, Gentleman’s Agreement manages to touch on nearly every form of discrimination facing Jews. Phil is turned away from one hotel that suddenly finds itself full up when the manager realizes he talking to someone “of the Hebrew faith.” His best friend, Dave Goldman (John Garfield), faces covenants written or merely understood (the “gentleman’s agreement”) against renting to Jews as he searches for housing. The movie even touches on Jewish self-hate when Phil’s secretary, Miss Wales (Havoc), who has been passing as a gentile, finds out that Phil has gotten management to bar discrimination on the basis of religion at the magazine, telling him, “It’s no fun being the fall guy for the kikey type.”

At the time Gentleman’s Agreement came out, it did what Phil’s article was supposed to do: It created a sensation and made people more aware of the racism around them. It was a critical smash, earning eight Oscar nominations and winning three, including Best Picture and a Best Director statuette for Elia Kazan.

Though the film is dated and the two main stars, Gregory Peck and Dorothy McGuire, seem somewhat naive and lifeless, this film did what it was supposed to do.  Bring to the stage and to the forefront Anti-Semitsim and how it effects us all.