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Louise Beavers (March 8, 1902 - October 26, 1962) was a prolific African-American film actress. Beavers appeared in dozens of films from the 1920s to the 1930s, most often in the role of a maid, servant, or slave. She was a native of Cincinnati, Ohio.
Among the many films she appeared in were Freaks (1932), She Done Him Wrong (1933), General Spanky (1936), Holiday Inn (1942), Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), and The Facts of Life (1960). Beavers' most famous and noted role was her portrayal of Delilah Johnson, the housekeeper/cook whose employer transforms her into an Aunt Jemima-like celebrity in the 1934 film Imitation of Life. One of the film's main conflicts was that between Delilah and her light-skinned daughter Peola (played by Fredi Washington), who wanted to pass for white. Imitation of Life was the first time in American cinema history that a black woman's problems were given major emotional weight in a major Hollywood motion picture.
The vast majority of Beavers' other film roles, however, were not as prestigious. Along with Hattie McDaniel, she became the on-screen personification of the "mammy" stereotype: a large, matronly black woman with a quick temper, a large laugh, and a subservient manner. Beavers' employers had her overeat so that she could maintain her "mammy"-like figure. Although Beavers did not approve of how her characters were scripted, she nonetheless continued appearing in films, because, as her contemporary McDaniel once stated, "it's better to play a maid than be a maid." [1].
Beavers was one of four actresses (including McDaniel, Ethel Waters, and Amanda Randolph) to portray housekeeper Beulah on the Beulah television show. That show was the first television sitcom to star an African American, even though the role was a somewhat subservient one.
Louise Beavers died of a heart attack in Hollywood, California on October 26, 1962 at the age of 60.
She is also a member of Sigma Gamma Rho sorority, one of the four African-American sororities.
Louise at the African American Registry
www.aaregistry.com/african_...e_Beavers
Louise at IMDB
www.imdb.com/name/nm0064792/
LB at Great Character Actors
www.dougmacaulay.com/kingspu...ex_2.php
Beavers at What A Character
www.what-a-character.com/cgi-b...ay.cgi
Among the many films she appeared in were Freaks (1932), She Done Him Wrong (1933), General Spanky (1936), Holiday Inn (1942), Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), and The Facts of Life (1960). Beavers' most famous and noted role was her portrayal of Delilah Johnson, the housekeeper/cook whose employer transforms her into an Aunt Jemima-like celebrity in the 1934 film Imitation of Life. One of the film's main conflicts was that between Delilah and her light-skinned daughter Peola (played by Fredi Washington), who wanted to pass for white. Imitation of Life was the first time in American cinema history that a black woman's problems were given major emotional weight in a major Hollywood motion picture.
The vast majority of Beavers' other film roles, however, were not as prestigious. Along with Hattie McDaniel, she became the on-screen personification of the "mammy" stereotype: a large, matronly black woman with a quick temper, a large laugh, and a subservient manner. Beavers' employers had her overeat so that she could maintain her "mammy"-like figure. Although Beavers did not approve of how her characters were scripted, she nonetheless continued appearing in films, because, as her contemporary McDaniel once stated, "it's better to play a maid than be a maid." [1].
Beavers was one of four actresses (including McDaniel, Ethel Waters, and Amanda Randolph) to portray housekeeper Beulah on the Beulah television show. That show was the first television sitcom to star an African American, even though the role was a somewhat subservient one.
Louise Beavers died of a heart attack in Hollywood, California on October 26, 1962 at the age of 60.
She is also a member of Sigma Gamma Rho sorority, one of the four African-American sororities.
Louise at the African American Registry
www.aaregistry.com/african_...e_Beavers
Louise at IMDB
www.imdb.com/name/nm0064792/
LB at Great Character Actors
www.dougmacaulay.com/kingspu...ex_2.php
Beavers at What A Character
www.what-a-character.com/cgi-b...ay.cgi
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Claire Trevor
Wed, March 7, 2007 - 3:44 PMClaire Trevor (March 8, 1910 - April 8, 2000) was an Academy Award-winning American actress, nicknamed "Queen of Film Noir" because of her many appearances in "bad girl” roles in film noir and other black-and-white thrillers. She appeared in over 60 films.
Early life
Trevor was born as Claire Wemlinger in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York, the only child of a 5th Avenue merchant-tailor and his wife. Her family was of Irish American and French American descent.
Career
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 feature film debut came in: Jimmy and Sally (1933) as "Sally Johnson".
A three-time Oscar nominee, Claire Trevor earned Oscar nominations for Dead End, a 1937 melodrama in which she played a good girl who grows up to be a prostitute, and for The High and the Mighty, a 1954 airplane disaster epic. She won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress award for her 1948 performance in Key Largo, co-starring with Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson and Lauren Bacall. In Key Largo, Trevor played the mistress to Robinson's sadistic gangster. In one scene, he forces her to sing for a drink she badly wants. Trevor struggles through the song only to be refused the drink by Robinson "because you were rotten."
In 1956, Trevor won an Emmy for Best Live Television Performance by an Actress for Dodsworth, with Fredric March, on NBC's Producer's Showcase.
The Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the University of California, Irvine was named in Trevor's honor. Both her Oscar and Emmy trophies are on display in a plaza at the School of Arts.
Private life
Trevor married film producer Clark Andrews in 1938, but they divorced four years later. Her second marriage to Cylos William Dunsmoore produced a son, Charles. The marriage ended in divorce in 1947. The next year, Trevor married Milton Bren, another film producer and soon after moved to Newport Beach, California.
In 1978 her only biological child, her son Charles Dunsmoore, died in an airliner crash and her last husband, Milton Bren, died from a brain tumor in 1979. Trevor retired from acting in 1987. She made a special Academy Awards Appearance in 1998 at the 70th Academy Awards.
She died of respiratory failure in Newport Beach, April 8, 2000 at the age of 90, survived by several step-children by her marriage to Bren. Claire Trevor was cremated and her remains were scattered at sea.
Claire Trevor has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Claire at IMDB
www.imdb.com/name/nm0872456/
Claire Trever School of The Arts
www.arts.uci.edu/
Claire at Classic Movies.com
www.thegoldenyears.org/trevor.html -
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Lynn Redgrave
Wed, March 7, 2007 - 3:44 PMLynn Rachel Redgrave OBE (born 8 March 1943 in London) is an English actress born into the famous acting Redgrave family.
Her parents are Sir Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, Lady Redgrave, her brother is Corin Redgrave and her sister is Vanessa Redgrave. She is the aunt of Natasha Richardson, Joely Richardson and Jemma Redgrave.
Lynn Redgrave's stage debut was in the role of Helena in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Tony Richardson for the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre in January 1962. Her first film role was in a small part in Tom Jones in 1963. In 1966 she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for Georgy Girl.
She has worked on television, the London stage, and Broadway, including Black Comedy/White Lies, My Fat Friend, Shakespeare for My Father, Aren't We All?, and The Constant Wife. She has been nominated for three Tony Awards and four Drama Desk Awards (winning for Talking Heads), and is the 1977 and 1995 winner of the Sarah Siddons Award for her work in Chicago theatre.
Other films include The Happy Hooker, Every Little Crook and Nanny, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), The Big Bus, Sunday Lovers, and Shine.
From 1979 to 1981, she starred in the American television series House Calls.
In 1983, Redgrave became very well known in the United States when she began starring in a long-running series of television commercials for Weight Watchers. Prior to this, she had suffered from the eating disorder bulimia, telling People Magazine in 1992, "(Bingeing and purging) felt like a great discovery, as I suppose it is to most people. People complimented me on my weight, but inside I felt like s--t."
In 1967, she made her Broadway debut in Black Comedy/White Lies. She was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Gods and Monsters. In the film, Kinsey, which starred her nephew-in-law, Liam Neeson, she has a brief but poignant and widely praised role.
In 1993 she was elected President of The Players, the historic bastion of Anglo/American theatre history following the time when women were finally allowed to become members.
In 1989 she appeared on Broadway in Love Letters with her husband John Clark, and thereafter performed the play, only with her husband, around the country, and on one occasion for the jury in the OJ Simpson case.
In 2003 she appeared on Broadway in a one-woman play Shakespeare For My Father devised and co-written with her husband, who also produced and directed. She was nominated for Best Actress in a Play Tony Award.
In 2000, Redgrave divorced her husband of 33 years, when he revealed that he had fathered a child for a family friend in need. At the family's suggestion, the friend married, then divorced, Redgrave and Clark's son Benjamin in order to gain a green card, (after which she sued the family). Details are made available at Clark's website [1], in which he reveals his legal fights. In 2002, Redgrave announced that she has breast cancer. She has written a play, The Mandrake Root, in which she starred.
On 30 March 2005, the website of Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut states that she appeared in the play Sisters of the Garden, about the Mendelssohn and Boulanger sisters.
As of early 2005, she is reported to be writing a one-woman play about her battle against cancer, from which she is evidently in remission, and her 2002 mastectomy, based on her book Journal: A Mother and Daughter's Recovery from Breast Cancer with photos by Annabel Clark (Redgrave and Clark's youngest daughter) and text by Redgrave herself.[2]
In September, 2006, she appeared in "Nightingale", the U.S. premier of her new one-woman play based upon her maternal grandmother Beatrice, at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum. This will be her third play to concern itself with a family member.
Redgrave was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, after she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. She narrated Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis for Harper Audio.
Selected filmography
· Tom Jones (1963)
· Georgy Girl (1966)
· Smashing Time (1967)
· The Virgin Soldiers (1969)
· Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972)
· The Happy Hooker (1975)
· The Big Bus (1976)
· Centennial (1978)
· Morgan Stewart's Coming Home (1987)
· Shine (1996)
· Gods and Monsters (1998)
· Strike! (1998)
· How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog (2000)
· Venus and Mars (2001)
· Spider (2002)
· Unconditional Love (2002)
· The Wild Thornberrys Movie (2002) (voice)
· Hansel & Gretel (2002)
· Anita and Me (2002)
· Peter Pan (2003)
· Kinsey (2004)
· The White Countess (2005)
Official Site
www.redgrave.com/
IMDB
www.imdb.com/name/nm0001655/
IBDB
www.ibdb.com/person.asp -
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and just because
Wed, March 7, 2007 - 3:46 PMand just because she is my favorite actress ever and today (3/7) is her birthday, and she seems to in real life to have been a character. Happy Birthday Anna Magnani.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Magnani
www.imdb.com/name/nm0536167/ -
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Re: and just because
Wed, March 7, 2007 - 3:54 PMTwo movies I totally enjoyed Claire Trevor in. Key Largo, she rocks in this. She is also lots of fun in Murder My Sweet (Dick Powell is in this, usually he is a favorite but he is kind of odd in this role)
Lynn Redgrave is great in Gods and Monsters. When she was in "House Calls" in the 70;s-80's I had such a crush on her.
Also Louise Beavers version of Imitation of Life with Claudette Colbert is the best!!!!
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