While still at school Nicholas Ray wrote a radio series that won him a scholarship to the University of Chicago. He studied architecture with Frank Lloyd...
Few actors have changed their image in mid-career as totally and as successfully as Dick Powell. He joined Warners in the early Thirties in time for...
One of the true giants of the golden age of Hollywood Bette Davis’s career spanned forty years, her biggest years being from the late thirties through...
Throughout the 1980’s Barbara Taylor Bradford was Queen of the sweeping romantic drama and Channel 4 (in association with Portman Enterprises), back in 1984 and still...
Only for a short while in the Fifties were Gloria Grahame’s unique talents given full scope. She had been in films since 1944. but first caught...
One of the all time great comedians of the thirties and forties, Arthur Askey who along with the likes of George Formby and Will Hay scored...
Lana Turner’s life story epitomizes the dark, dangerous side of Hollywood glamour. Supposedly discovered skipping school one day in a drugstore on Sunset Boulevard. She had...
Good drama is good drama, right? Same goes for comedy, no? Well, not exactly. If it were that simple then David Mamet would have had a...
For ten years Ray Milland worked in Hollywood, a charming, romantic supporting actor in light comedy-dramas, steadily being groomed for better things. Fame came, but from...
At the age of 13 Fredric March was producing his own plays, but on leaving high school he worked in a bank before World War I...
Born in 1909 the son of a wealthy wool merchant James Mason had a privileged English upbringing, being educated at Marlborough and Cambridge. After a disastrous...
Claude Rains had a high reputation as a stage actor when, in his mid-forties, he made the oddest of all film debuts. James Whale cast him...
Basil Rathbone, the American screen’s most distinguished villain was British to the core even though he was born in South Africa. He moved to Hollywood in...
During a 10 year period from the mid 1960’s to the mid 1970’s the Amicus studios really gave the famed Hammer studios a run for its...
Alan Ladd had a small role in Citizen Kane as a reporter but it was two films he made in quick succession for Paramount, This Gun...