Category: Profiles

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…

Born February 14, 1902 in Brooklyn, New York, Thelma Ritter was a hard-working, albeit obscure stage and radio actress whose movie breakthrough came in her first film, in an unbilled bit role in 1947’s Miracle on 34th Street. Her portrayal of a mother who is sent to Gimbels by Macy’s Santa made such an impression on…

Born May 20, 1908 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, James Stewart was the son of a hardware store owner and his wife.  He was educated at a local prep school where he was an athlete (football and track), musician (singing and accordion), and sometime actor.  In 1929, he went to Princeton University where he studied architecture and…

Born December 24, 1896 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary), Mano Kaminer was born into a Jewish family with two brothers and a sister. His father was a carpenter, his mother an opera singer. A born actor and director, he built a theater in the basement of his house when he was 8, performing in plays…

Born September 4, 1901 in Evansville, Indiana to a Baptist minister and his wife, Paul Osborn graduated from the University of Michigan where he later taught English. He also studied drama and playwriting at Yale University before making his Broadway debut in 1928 with his play, Hotbed. Osborn achieved great success with 1930’s The Vinegar…