Category: Profiles

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…

Born November 13, 1922 in Vienna, Austria, Oskar Josef Bschließmayer, known professionally as Oskar Werner, was brought up by his grandmother after the divorce of his parents at an early age.  An uncle got him several uncredited roles in films as a teenager. Regaled by his grandmother’s stories about the Austrian State Theater, he made…

Born August 16, 1958 in New York, New York to a social worker and her husband, Angela Bassett was raised primarily by her mother in Florida after her divorce from her father when she was four. Having graduated from Yale with a B.A. in African-American Studies in 1980, Bassett studied acting at the Yale School…

Born September 9, 1923 to the idle heir to a ranching fortune and his first of five wives, Clifford Parker Robinson III, known professionally as Cliff Robertson, his parents divorced when he was one and his mother died of peritonitis a year later.  He was raised by his maternal grandmother. Robertson served as third mate…

Born May 3, 1917 to a Brooklyn lawyer and his English teacher wife, Basya Cohen, known professionally as Betty Comden, attended Erasmus Hall High School and New York University, graduating in 1938. In 1938, mutual friends introduced Comden to aspiring actor Adolph Green, who would become her songwriting partner.  She would marry husband Steven Kyle…