Category: Profiles

Born Born July 10, 1883 in Philadelphia, PA, Samuel Grosvenor Wood married Clara Louise Rousch in 1908. He began his Hollywood career as an actor and assistant to Cecil B. DeMille in 1915, becoming a full-time director in 1917. He would eventually direct 82 films between 1920 and his death in 1949. Wood’s silent films…

Born July 31, 1905, in Storm Lake, Iowa, Winton C. Hoch is the only cinematographer of note working in the black-and-white era of film that never lensed a black-and-white feature film. Moving to California in 1924 and graduating in 1931 as a chemist from the California Institute of Technology, Hoch was a research physicist who joined…

Born September 16, 1903 in Los Angeles, California, Russell Harlan was the son of a couple from the Midwest who raised him and his younger brother, Richard, in Los Angeles. Harlan started in the film industry as an actor and stuntman, and by the early 1930s was working behind the camera as an assistant.  Among…

Born August 22, 1892 in Denver, Colorado, Joseph Bailey Walker worked as a wireless telephone engineer, inventor and photographer of documentaries for the Red Cross during World War I before beginning his feature film career in 1919 with Back to God’s Country, a Canadian film that was filmed near the Artic Circle. He then freelanced as…

While no film with Christmas as its main theme has ever won a Best Picture Oscar, one film in which the holiday is prominently featured did win the big prize.  That was 1960’s bittersweet comedy, The Apartment, which takes place primarily from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Eve.  Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine and Jack Kruschen…

Born in San Antonio, Texas on March 23, 1904, Lucille LeSueur’s father abandoned her mother and older brother before she was born. By age 16 she had had three different stepfathers, one of them, although her mother’s marriage to Henry Cassin was a minor impresario in Oklahoma whose vaudeville shows gave LeSueur, then billed as…

Born July 7, 1899 on New York’s Lower East Side, George Cukor’s father was a lawyer who expected him to follow in his footsteps. Instead, young Cukor fell in love with the theatre, and shortly after brief military service toward the end of World War I, had his first job in the theatre as a…

Born November 11, 1974 in Los Angeles, California, Leonardo (Wilhelm) DiCaprio is the son of a German born mother of German and Russian descent and a father of Italian and German descent. His mother worked as a legal secretary and his father as an underground performance artist. They separated when he was just a year…