Category: Profiles

Born September 28, 1950 in Schenectady, New York to Mary and Donald Sayles, a teacher and school administrator respectively, John Sayles attended Williams College with future collaborators, Gordon Clapp, Donald Strathairn, and Maggie Renzi, his longtime partner. After graduating in 1972, he moved to Boston where he worked at several blue-collar jobs while writing short…

Born August 1, 1910 in New York, New York to Yiddish comedy star, Bessie Zwerling, Walter Scharf was as much a show business baby as George M. Cohan. He started playing music at an early age, helping his uncle play the piano in theaters for silent films.  At 17, he became one of the orchestrators…

Born February 5, 1948 in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, Tom Wilkinson was the son of urban farmers, Marjorie and Thomas Wilkinson. Economic hardships forced the family to move to Canada for five years when Wilkinson was 11.  Upon their return to England, he attended the University of Kent, graduating with a degree in English and…

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…