Category: Profiles

Born March 23, 1914 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Nedrick Young was an Oscar winning writer and actor who began his acting career in film and on the New York stage in 1942.  He served overseas with the U.S. Army during World War II. Young made his film debut in 1942’s Bombs Over Burma.  Other pre-1949 films…

Born January 5, 1975 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a mother of Italian descent and a father of Irish descent, Bradly Cooper’s mother worked for the local NBC TV station, his father was a stockbroker.  He moved to New York after graduating with top honors from Georgetown University in 1997.  Studying drama at the Actors Studio,…

With a plethora of lame Christmas movies available on TV at this time of year, it’s rare to find one that compares favorably to the classics that were produced by Hollywood of old, most of which are still available on DVD and Blu-ray. While no film with Christmas as its main theme has ever won…

Born May 26, 1906 in Mexico City, Mexico, Joseph (Patrick) MacDonald was initially trained as a mining engineer at the University of Southern California. Turning his interest to film work, MacDonald served a lengthy apprenticeship, starting as assistant cameraman at First National in the early 1920s before eventually graduating to first camera operator by the…

Born May 29, 1897 in Brunn, Moravia, Austria-Hungary, now Brno, Czech Republic, Erich Wolfgang Korngold was a child prodigy. The son of a well-known music critic, young Korngold accompanied his father in playing four-handed piano arrangements by the age of five.  By the age of eleven he was appearing before enthusiastic Vienna audiences that included…

Thanksgiving Day is here again.  Time for Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, gatherings with family and friends, and if time permits, revisiting Thanksgiving Day films. Holidays have been celebrated in films since their inception.  There have been films about virtually all of them.  1942’s Holiday Inn with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire is in fact a…

Born July 25. 1935 In Evanston, Illinois, the youngest of four children, Barbara Harris was the daughter of a pianist mother and an arborist father who later became a businessman.  She began her stage career as a teenager at the Playwrights Theater in Chicago.  Her fellow players included Paul Sills, Ed Asner, Mike Nichols, and…

Born October 22, 1943 in Paris, France to stage actors Maurice Dorléac (1901-1979) and Renée Simonet (1911-2021), Catherine Dorléac, known professionally as Catherine Deneuve, was the second of three acting sisters.  Older sister Francoise Dorléac (1942-1967) was the bigger star until her tragic death in an automobile accident at the age of 25. Deneuve made…

Born December 12, 1970 in Cario, New York, Jennifer Connelly was the daughter of a clothing manufacturer and his wife.  Her father was of Irish and Norwegian ancestry and her mother was from a Jewish immigrant family. Although born in the Catskills, Connelly grew up in Brooklyn Heights near the Brooklyn Bridge, right across from…

Born March 1, 1934 in New York, New York to an Italian mother and an Irish-American father, Joa Hackett was one of three children.  A natural beauty, she left high school during the twelfth grade to become a model. On the cover of Harper’s Junior Bazaar in 1952, Hackett turned down an offer of a…