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1-9 of 9
- Actress
- Soundtrack
Picture-pretty brunette Margaret Lindsay was one of a number of pleasant, sweet-natured ingénues who could do no wrong in a score of 1930s stylish Hollywood pictures. Such altruistic love interests were often overlooked in pictures that were carried by the flashy histrionics of a jaunty James Cagney or temperamental Bette Davis, both of whom she supported in several films. Ergo, while she was a lovely distraction and a highly capable talent, Margaret failed to ignite and command the attention of a truer star.
The Dubuque, Iowa-born lovely was christened Margaret Kies in real life, the eldest of six (she had four sisters (Helen, Jane, Lori, Mickie), one brother (Jack)). Her father, a druggist, enrolled her at the National Park Seminary in Washington, DC. The acting bug hit Margaret quite early, however, and she subsequently attended New York's American Academy of Dramatic Arts to pursue her dream. Unable to find work in New York, she traveled to England for further speech and acting study. Here she made her professional stage debut and gained experience and confidence in such plays as "Escape," "By Candlelight," and "Death Takes a Holiday". With her resume now consisting of strong theatre credits, she returned to the States hoping to finally make a mark on Broadway, but again her career stalled. While waiting for a show of hers to open following production delays (eventually she co-starred on Broadway opposite Roland Young in "Another Love Story"), Margaret had a number of screen tests arranged for her. Shelving her Iowa-based roots, Universal took an interest in the "British stage actress" and signed her on. She made her debut in Okay America! (1932) and toiled in a few minor roles before taking full advantage of her "English tea rose" reputation with a small but noticeable part in the "all-British" grand-scale epic film Cavalcade (1933) as an optimistic honeymooner on board the fateful H.M.S.Titanic.
Warner Bros. then picked up her option and began featuring her gracefully opposite such magnanimous stars as Leslie Howard, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., George Arliss and Humphrey Bogart. "Americanized" as a lead and second lead, she was able to drop the British pretense and appeared opposite Cagney in Lady Killer (1933), Devil Dogs of the Air (1935), Frisco Kid (1935) and 'G' Men (1935). The studio had her work as a second-lead to Ms. Davis as well in such films as Fog Over Frisco (1934) and Bordertown (1935). Of note, she supported Davis in both her Oscar-winning "Best Actress" pictures -- Dangerous (1935) and Jezebel (1938). She also took on a Davis castoff role in Garden of the Moon (1938), a musical in which Margaret did not sing.
Margaret's longstanding problem was that she was either involved in minor pictures that would do nothing to advance her career or was handed oblique secondary roles in "A" pictures wherein she played the star's best friend, light romantic rival or socialite. One of Margaret's sisters, Jane Gilbert was briefly an actress in the late 1930s/early '40s and was once married to Perry Mason (1957) co-star William Hopper, who played private investigator Paul Drake.
Following one of her best roles as Hepzibah in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1940), Margaret signed up with Columbia in the recurring "Ellery Queen" series (seven in all) as mystery writer Nikki Porter opposite either Ralph Bellamy or William Gargan's title crime solver. Probably her best remembered role, this renewed popularity did not guarantee "A" pictures and she remained for the most part in second tier filming. One of her more atypical roles came as a man-baiting saloon girl in The Vigilantes Return (1947). In the 1940s, she replenished her film resume with secondary ladylike roles behind Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street (1945), Lana Turner in Cass Timberlane (1947) and Barbara Stanwyck in B.F.'s Daughter (1948). Margaret also sought work on TV and on the legit stage in the next decade. Her final film was in typically pleasant mode as Nurse Colman in Tammy and the Doctor (1963) showcasing a nubile Sandra Dee.
Margaret never married in real life but remained close to her family. Her dating companions were typically "safe" stars such as Cesar Romero, Richard Deacon, and even Liberace. For much of her time in Hollywood, Margaret shared a home with a close sister. She died at age 70 in Los Angeles of emphysema in the spring of 1981.- Jun Usami was born on 1 September 1911 in Iwate, Japan. He was an actor, known for Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), Late Spring (1949) and The Seven Vows (1956). He died on 9 May 1981.
- Betty Hare was born on 31 March 1898 in Treharris, Glamorgan, Wales, UK. She was an actress, known for For the Love of Ada (1972), Tread Softly (1952) and Confessions from a Holiday Camp (1977). She died on 9 May 1981 in Chichester, Sussex, England, UK.
- Nelson Algren, the author of two of the seminal works of post-World War II American letters ("The Man With the Golden Arm" and "A Walk on the Wild Side") was born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham on March 28, 1909 in Detroit, Michigan, into a Jewish family. His paternal grandfather, who was on Scandinavian extraction, had converted to Judaism on his own volition, and then married a Jewish woman, as had his half-Jewish father. Nelson had an older sister, Bernice.
His family's roots were in Chicago, Carl Sandburg's "City of Broad Shoulders", and in Black Oak, Indiana, where his grandparents owned a trading post, and in 1913, his parents moved back to Chicago, settling into what was then an Irish neighborhood on the South Side. The future writer attended the neighborhood public schools. Chicago would become his muse and be the real subject of his all his major works,a major character in his oeuvre just as it was for the writer James T. Farrell in his Studs Lonigan trilogy.
The family subsequently relocated to the Chicago's Northwest Side, where his father went into business with a tire and battery shop. The young Nelson attended Hibbard High School and roamed his neighborhood, playing pool and beginning his obsession with gambling that would continue throughout his life. After graduating from high school in 1927, he attended the University of Illinois, majoring in studying sociology. The subject was congruent with his fascination with the lower class people and culture of Chicago's ethnic neighborhoods. He often spent times in the Polish neighborhoods east and south of his own neighborhood.
After graduation from college in 1931, he hitchhiked through the Midwest in order to find a job as a journalist. During those opening years of the Great Depression, while Herbert Hoover was still president, jobs were scare. Algren worked briefly at a Y.M.C.A. in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, before returning to Chicago, but he hit the road again that autumn. Traveling south with only the Mississippi River as his pilot, Algren wound up in New Orleans, where he was struck by the great amount of poverty in the Crescent City. Algren remained in New Orleans, working as a door-to-door salesman for a coffee company and a pharmacy, before using his savings to hit the road again in 1932.
In South Texas, Algren earned his living as a fruit picker. Striking out as an entrepreneur, he tried to renovate a gas station (the location will be fictionalized over 20 years later in "A Walk on the Wildside"), but the venture was both boring and unprofitable, so like his future character Dove Linkhorn, he began again to wander. He journeyed throughout Texas, Oklahoma and Mexico.
At the end of 1932, Algren moved back to Chicago where he joined the left-wing John Reed Club (named after the American Communist buried in the Kremlin who wrote the book about the 1917 Russian Revolution "Ten Days That Shook the World", and the subject of the movie Reds (1981). His active membership in the group allowed him to befriend Richard Wright, who would later borrow the original title of Algren's first novel "Somebody in Boots" for his own classic "Native Son".
Algren hit the road again in 1933, traveling to Texas where he drifted through San Antonio, El Paso, and El Paso's border-town of Juarez, Mexico before settling in Alpine, Texas. Upon leaving Alpine, Nelson attempted to steal one of the typewriters from the local business college and was arrested. In a surprisingly long trial, Algren's lawyer defends on the common law principle that he, as a writer, is allowed the tools of his trade. Found guilty, he was sentenced to two years of punishment with the proviso he could serve the sentence wherever he wanted to. It was clearly time to leave Texas, though he would write of Texas in his first novel, "Somebody in Boots" and in his fourth, "A Walk on the Wildside" (1956) and in multiple short stories.
Back in Chicago by June 1934, Algren established himself as a member of a literary circle that met on Rush Street in the North Side. It was during this period that he wrote his first published novel, "Somebody in Boots", which received poor reviews when it was published in March 1935. The bad reviews and a poor relationship with his girlfriend led to a suicide attempt, and he received mental health care at the University of Chicago Psychiatric Center.
After recovering his mental equilibrium, he and his girlfriend Amanda moved to a small apartment on the South Side of Chicago. Algren was taken on by the Federal Writers' Project, part of the Works Progress Administration that sought to put people back to work in their areas of expertise. During frequently visits to East St. Louis, Illinois, he befriended prostitutes and junkies, the kinds of people who would become the characters in his novels and short-stories.
In a fateful decision, Algren and Amanda moved in May 1940 to the neighborhood at Milwaukee and Division Street, Chicago's so-called Polish Triangle. As the clouds of war moved closer to the United States, Algren's father and sister Bernice died, and their passing and the Polish-Americans of his new neighborhood inspired his second novel, "Never Come Morning". Though the book received good reviews, the city of Chicago banned it from its public libraries due to it potentially offending the city's denizens of Czech and Polish extraction, who have seen their native countries devoured by the Nazis. In fact, due to his pen name "Algren", the writer is attacked for being pro-Nazi, as -- in a case of reverse racism -- anyone of Scandinavian stock would be so inclined. In truth, Algren is not a fascist, or a racist; he has tried to tell the truth, and as his later friend Kurt Vonnegut would say after his death, he knew that the poor were not the saints that sentimental writers tried to portray them, as in neo-late-Tolstoy writing. The poor and disenfranchised who were his subject were, in reality, frequently mean-spirited and ignorant. It was his lack of a balancing "normative" character to redeem the others in his tales, by promising hope and a brighter future, that opened him up to charges of being mean-spirited himself.
The 34-year old Algren was drafted into the Army in November 1943 (the draft effected all males age 18-44, as enlistments had dropped off precariously after the initial six months of the war and a military that would encompass 16 million souls before the VJ-Day was in the process of being built). Ironically, he was shipped back to Texas for infantry training, and in the spring of 1944, he was shipped on to Europe as part of the vast reserve of troops needed to bolster the upcoming invasion of Normandy. Algren, who was designated a litter bearer, never made rank, and despite being a college graduate, was never considered as a candidate for a commission, likely due to his left-wing political beliefs. While in liberated France, Algren quite naturally became involved in the demimonde, attempting to set himself up as a black marketeer. He was not a noted success.
Algren returned to Chicago in November 1945 after being demobilized, moving into another Polish neighborhood, this one located at Wabansia and Bosworth. (Towards the end of his life, Algren -- still living in poor neighborhoods -- said he felt comfortable among people who were on welfare.) Algren's life primarily was involved in reading and writing short-stories, and the translation of his work into French brought him into contact with the woman who would be the great love of his life -- and his greatest frustration -- the great French feminist intellectual Simone de Beauvoir. It was an unusual coupling as Beauvoir, descended from the Parisian haute-bourgeoisie and the "mother" of modern, post-War feminism, would visit Algren in his Chicago semi-slum and visited the dives filled with hookers, pimps, drunks, drug-addicts and thieves with him, then writing him letters from France pledging her fealty as a submissive woman. Unfortauntely for Algren, though Beauvoir loved him and was fulfilled by him sexually, her soul rather than her heart belonged to her paramour and partner, 'Jean Paul Satre. After many years of association, he would say around 1970 that the two Existentialist philosophers were less honest.
Before this epiphany, Algren moved into the Brevoort Hotel in New York's Greenwich Village with her at her urging, in April 1947. However, their new living arrangement could not last, as Algren needed Chicago and Beavoir needed Paris -- and Sartre. She and Sartre had an open relationship, and Algren visited her in Paris. Fired with energy from his new Muse, Algren immersed intensely in his writing and produced his masterpiece in 1948, "The Man With the Golden Arm", a novel about an illicit card-dealer, Frankie the Machine, who is a morphine junkie with an (allegedly) crippled wife in love with another woman and trying to stay clean in a bad, bad world that had no sympathy for junkies, pushers or anyone else, for that matter.
Algren had wanted to entitle his dark novel "Night Without Mercy," but his publisher, Doubleday, convinced him to use the title that graces the now classic novel. Published by Doubleday in November 1949, the novel won the first National Book Award in 1950. One of the seminal novels of post-World War II American letters, "The Man with the Golden Arm" is Algren's greatest and most enduring work. With its publication, and book award handed to him by Eleanor Roosevelt, Algren had reached the zenith of his craft.
Unfortunately, he would never again reach those heights, publishing only one more major novel, "A Walk on the Wild Side", seven years after "Golden Arm". It seems that Algren never really got over the failure of his relationship with Beauvoir (who featured him as a main character in her own 1957 novel, "The Mandarins", in which he is "Lewis Brogan"). "Wild Side", which in many ways was a rehash of "Somebody in Boots" and several short stories, did not receive a great critical reception, though it sold well. The recycling of earlier material may indicate Algren was suffering from a writer's block. As it were, he never again produced a major novel, though he continued writing until the end of his life.
Nelson Algren died of a heart-attack on May 9, 1981, secure in his reputation of having written one, if not two, of the great post-War novels. He was 72 years old. - Director
- Writer
- Producer
Fritz Umgelter was born on 18 August 1922 in Stuttgart, Germany. He was a director and writer, known for Bratkartoffeln inbegriffen (1967), Des Christoffel von Grimmelshausen abenteuerlicher Simplicissimus (1975) and The Violin Case Murders (1965). He died on 9 May 1981 in Frankfurt am Main, Hesse, Germany.- Nephew of Leif Juster. Fabulous singer and entertainer, famous for impersonating other Norwegian celebrities. he was a frequent guest in Norwegian television where he used to do skits, playing all parts himself. Died on stage while performing at Oslo Nye Theatre.
- Vivian Gibson was born on 22 October 1898 in Liverpool, England, UK. She was an actress, known for The Gypsy Baron (1927), Tense Moments from Opera (1922) and Der Mann, der sich verkauft (1925). She died on 9 May 1981 in Vienna, Austria.
- Actress
- Writer
- Additional Crew
Jana Werichová was born on 18 October 1935 in Prague, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic]. She was an actress and writer, known for Usporená libra (1963), The Proud Princess (1952) and Velké dobrodruzství (1952). She died on 9 May 1981 in Prague, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic].- Yevgeni Brusilovsky was born on 12 November 1905 in Rostov, Russia. He was a composer, known for Dzhura (1964), The Return of Nathan Becker (1932) and Odnazhdy nochyu (1960). He died on 9 May 1981 in Moscow, USSR.