Advanced search
- TITLES
- NAMES
- COLLABORATIONS
Search filters
Enter full date
to
or just enter yyyy, or yyyy-mm below
to
Only includes names with the selected topics
to
or just enter yyyy, or yyyy-mm below
to
1-50 of 360
- Kip Niven was raised in Prairie Village, Kansas (a suburb of Kansas City in affluent Johnson County), and graduated in 1963 from Shawnee Mission East High School. After spending a year at Baylor University, he changed his mind and entered the theater program at The University of Kansas, where he performed in dozens of plays.
Niven had an impressive resume that includes films such as Magnum Force (1973), Earthquake (1974) and Midway (1976). He had performed on countless television shows, including memorable parts on The Waltons (1972), Law & Order (1990) and Walker, Texas Ranger (1993). He had roles on Broadway, in regional theater and episodic radio shows. He was probably best known for his three-year stint as Steve Marsh on the TV sitcom Alice (1976). Niven and the star of that series, (actress Linda Lavin), married in 1982. The marriage was turbulent and they subsequently divorced.
Kip was first married to Susan and had two children Jim and Kate. She tragically died in a car accident in 1981. He and his 3rd wife Beth lived in Kansas and had a daughter Maggie, who was born in 1994. He also had two grandsons.
In 1995 Kip returned to the Kansas City area where he grew up. He continued to work in local theater and on a comedy radio show. - Writer
- Actor
- Additional Crew
William S. Burroughs, one of the three seminal writers of the Beat Generation (the other two being his friends Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg), was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 5, 1914, to the son of the founder of the Burroughs Adding Machine Co. He grew up in patrician surroundings and attended private school in Los Alamos, New Mexico, chosen due to the climate as he suffered from sinus trouble (the school was later used to house the Manhattan Project during World War II)). Burroughs took his undergraduate degree at Harvard College (Class of 1936) but rebelled inwardly against the life that the upper-class Harvard man was supposed to lead during the pre-war period (outwardly he dressed the part of a patrician, with three-piece suit, necktie, black homburg and chesterfield overcoat being his standard wardrobe. His political options generally were also of his class, i.e., right-wing).
Planning to become a physician, Burroughs moved to Germany to study medicine. The plight of the Jews under the Nazis was desperate, and in 1937 Burroughs agreed to marry Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, a German Jewish woman, so she could leave Germany and eventually become a U.S. citizen. The two remained friends for many years after they moved back to the U.S., meeting often for lunch when Burroughs eventually settled in New York City in the early 1940s. They never lived together, and Burroughs formally divorced her in 1946 so he could marry his second wife, Joan.
Perhaps it was his exposure to National Socialism in Adolf Hitler's Germany that raised Burroughs' interest in his lifelong fascination: control mechanisms used by the state against its citizens. Burroughs left Germany for the United States without completing his studies, bringing along Ilse.
A homosexual in an extremely homophobic age, back in the U.S. he drifted from job to job while continuing his education as an autodidact. He lived in Chicago, where he was an exterminator, which he claimed was the best job he ever had. While in Chicago he met the young Lucien Carr (later to be the father of best-selling novelist Caleb Carr, author of "The Alienist") and David Kammerer. Kammerer was a homosexual 14 years Carr's senior who had been his private school tutor and had stalked Carr obsessively afterward, following him from city to city. While Carr was disturbed by Kammerer's behavior, he was also immature and flattered by the attention, a moth attracted to the flame. When the moth got singed, he would fly away. Carr dropped out of the University of Chicago to attend Columbia in New York in order to escape Kammerer, and when Kammerer inevitably followed, Burroughs tagged along.
Through Carr, Burroughs made the connections that would change his life: Columbia drop-out Kerouac, then in the Merchant Marine, and Columbia undergrad Ginsberg, then studying pre-law with the idea of becoming a labor lawyer. Intrigued by what he heard from Carr and Kammerer of Kerouac, he dropped in to see him at the apartment of Kerouac's girlfriend Edie Kerouac Parker, who shared the flat with Burroughs' future wife Joan.
Before the momentous meet-up, Burroughs had begun experimenting with morphine when he acquired a stash of the drug to sell, and he subsequently became hooked. Long fascinated by "low lifes" and the vitality they retained while the rest of "normal" Americans seemed wan and dessicated (this was the Great Depression, after all), Burroughs began conducting field "research" into New York's demimonde, aided and abetted by Herbert Huncke, a junkie and thief whom Burroughs befriended and let share his apartment in lower Manhattan. With Huncke playing Virgil to his Dante, Burroughs met the "low-lifes" who would become part of his fiction as he journeyed through the rings of hell that was World War II New York. "Sailor", who showed up as a character in Naked Lunch (1991), was a thief and drug dealer who once borrowed Burroughs' pistol and went out and shot a storekeeper to death (Sailor later hanged himself in jail after being arrested for an unrelated crime. He was known as an informer and had turned in a rival narcotics dealer--he was facing beatings, torture and possibly murder when he decided to take his own life). Soon Burroughs began to deal drugs in earnest in order to keep up with his own habit and fence merchandise himself, becoming part of a den of thieves that spilled over into Edie and Joan's apartment. The patrician Burroughs, with his high standards, prided himself on giving the best "cut" of heroin available, with personal home delivery to boot.
Jack Kerouac first urged Burroughs to write. Burroughs spent a lot of time at the apartment Kerouac shared with Edie and Joan. He particularly liked to psychoanalyze Kerouac and Ginsburg, and enjoyed having them act out scenarios, little dramas in which they would play roles: Burroughs an old queen/con artist, Ginsburg her pimp, and Kerouac as the gullible young American, mouth agape in a foreign land, ripe for the plucking. Their imaginations were quite fertile, and it fed Kerouac and Ginsberg's writing. Burroughs had never really had any inclination to write until he met Kerouac, but he and Jack collaborated on a mystery novel they eventually entitled "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks," after the last sentence of a BBC-Radio report on a fire at the London Zoo. Each wrote alternating chapters, and after the book was complete, the manuscript was passed around among New York publishers. There were no takers, and for the time, Burroughs lost interest in writing.
In 1945 Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer to death during a stroll along the bank of the Hudson River below Morningside Heights that was a notorious gay cruising area. After holding the dying man in his arms, Carr weighted down the body of his former tutor with rocks and disposed of it in the Hudson. In bloodied clothes, Carr sought out Burroughs, soliciting advice. Ignoring the elder's wise counsel to get a good lawyer and turn himself in, Carr then went to see Kerouac, who helped him dispose of the murder weapon and Kammerer's glasses. Both Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested (Burroughs as a material witness; Kerouac as an accessory after the fact), but eventually both were released without being prosecuted. Carr pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sent off to the Elmira Reformatory, where he was incarcerated for two years.
New York City became increasingly untenable as Burroughs became known to the police, so -- after he and Joan married -- they moved to Louisiana to become farmers. Their crop was marijuana, and eventually they moved on to Mexico, where living was cheaper and drugs easier to come by (and there was less hassle from police). In 1951, at a party in which they both were drunk, an exhibitionistic Burroughs shot and killed Joan in an alleged accident where he reportedly attempted to mimic the "apple on the son's head" scene from "William Tell". As the story is told, Joan put a glass of liquor on top of her head after Burroughs beseeched her to perform their William Tell trick for the guests. There had never been a William Tell trick, Burroughs later ruefully admitted, and Joan wound up with a .32 ACP slug in her head. Accounts of the death, which the Mexican police ruled a misadventure caused by a mistake in judgment, have never been entirely satisfactory. Like Lucien Carr before him, Burroughs may have consciously or subconsciously rid himself of a lover whom he no longer had any use for, or was piqued at. Burroughs at the time of the shooting was in love, involved in a heavy gay affair.
After the death of Joan, Burroughs spent time journeying through Central and South America, looking for the drug called "Yage", which like peyote was rumored to offer a key to opening the doors of perception and heightening consciousness. He found it and distributed it among friends. In 1953 Allen Ginsburg managed to get Burroughs into print under the pen name "William Lee." His autobiographical novel, "Junkie", was published by Ace Books (the son of the owner, Carl Solomon, was one of Ginsburg's friends) as a 35-cent paperback original (its formal title was "Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Adict", and it was published as "Two Books in One" back-to-back with another paperback original in the same volume). Returning to Mexico City, in the mid-'50s he began writing in earnest while keeping up with his drug habit, living off the small trust fund he received as a scion of the Burroughs family. It was in Mexico City that he began writing the sketches that would turn into his major book, "Naked Lunch". In 1956 he left Mexico City for Tangiers, Morocco, as the living was even cheaper than it was in Mexico City (as were the drugs). He eventually returned to the US in the 1960s.
"Naked Lunch" has the distinction of being the last major book to be prosecuted for obscenity in the United States. The novel was written in Mexico City and Tangiers, crafted from fragments he wrote while addicted to heroin. After it was published in Paris by the Olympia Press in 1959, it quickly became notorious for its graphic descriptions of sexual encounters, sadism and murder, as well as its no-holds-barred use of language. Many stalwart defenders of the First Amendment drew the line at "Naked Lunch", stating that they did not fight the good fight to get James Joyce's "Ulysses" and the works of D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller before the American public so that something like "Naked Lunch" could be published. Grove Press acquired the rights to the book, but it was not published until 1962, as the publishing house awaited the outcome of other obscenity trials, including one involving Allen Ginsberg's epic poem "Howl", which featured Burroughs as one of its hipsters searching for "an angry fix". Guided by Justice William J. Brennan, the U.S. Supreme Court starting in the late 1950s had relaxed censorship standards to protect literature that had redeeming social value, no matter that passages in the works were accused of being obscene. To be banned, a work had to be utterly without redeeming social value. Undaunted, the Comonwealth of Massachusetts successfully prosecuted the book as obscene.
For the initial trial, Grove Press had gathered together an impressive list of "experts" such as Norman Mailer to defend the book, but Burroughs' modern classic initially lost, was declared obscene, and was banned in Massachusetts (a banned book would be destroyed, the copies already having been confiscated by the police). However, in 1966 the Massachusetts Supreme Court (in Memoirs v. Massachusetts) found that "Naked Lunch" was "not without social value, and therefore, not obscene." With this ruling an era that began in the 1870s when anti-smut crusader Anthony Comstock led the charge for stricter enforcement of obscenity laws by the federal and state governments came to an end.
By the late 1970s Burroughs had lived long enough to be hailed by critics and the public as a major American writer. He was embraced by punk rockers in New York and became an iconic figure by the 1980s. He died in 1997 at the age of 83.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Patricia Ellis called herself "the Queen of B pictures at Warner Brothers". With only three years of theatrical experience in New York under her belt, she started in films in 1932. Alongside other ladies considered to have potential (such as Ginger Rogers and Mary Carlisle), Patricia was selected as a WAMPAS (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) baby star. Within a few years she had worked her way up from juvenile supporting roles to second leads, averaging seven films a year. By 1937, she was given starring roles in comedies and the occasional mystery or crime picture, with such co-stars as James Cagney, Adolphe Menjou, and Joe E. Brown. Reviewers called her "comely and spontaneous" in the baseball farce Elmer, the Great (1933) and "personable" in Here Comes the Groom (1934) co-starring Jack Haley and referred to her "blonde winsomeness" in Boulder Dam (1936).
The problem was that the majority of her screen roles were purely ornamental and the films themselves were, without exception, second features. Towards the end of her run, Patricia appeared in the 1937 English comedy 'The Gaiety Girls' (with Jack Hulbert and a young Googie Withers) and, against type, played a femme fatale in Fugitive at Large (1939). At the end of the decade she called it a day, leaving Hollywood, first to appear in "Louisiana Purchase" on Broadway and then to marry George T. O'Malley, future president of Protection Securities Systems in Kansas City.- Mildred Holt was born on 17 July 1882 in Ellsworth, Kansas, USA. She was married to ? Holt. She died on 23 June 1991 in Ellsworth, Kansas, USA.
- Cole Brings Plenty was born on 18 August 1996. He was an actor, known for 1923 (2022), Into the Wild Frontier (2022) and The Tall Tales of Jim Bridger (2024). He died on 5 April 2024 in Edgerton, Kansas, USA.
- Barry McGuire was raised in Arkansas City, Kansas, graduated from the University of Denver and broke into Broadway in his first role in 'Bernadine', which opened on February 2, 1953. After retiring, the actor, puppeteer and magician settled into tiny Elk Falls, Kansas around 2010.
Decades earlier, his creative genius had spurred an artistic revival in this dying town. He had transformed stone foundations into tiered native flower gardens that brought a new wave of tourists to this forgotten place. Through the work of a group of artists, Elk Falls became a thriving haven of creativity. McGuire had a theater constructed, and entertained tourists with puppet shows and magic acts. He left Elk Falls to return to acting. His credit list includes regional stage productions from New York to Florida to Indiana, and California.
After three years in Elk Falls, he moved to California in 2013 to live closer to friends. He died on March 7, 2023, his 93rd birthday, in Winfield, Kansas. - Director
- Actor
- Writer
Colorado-born Herk Harvey majored in theater at Kansas University, directing and acting in stage productions and later returning to the school in a teaching capacity. He broke into the film business as an actor in some of the movies being made by Centron Corporation of Lawrence, Kansas, an educational and industrial film production company for which he subsequently went to work as a director. In 1961 he took a working vacation from Centron to try his hand at feature filmmaking, producing, directing and co-starring in the creepy horror film Carnival of Souls (1962), shot in Kansas and Utah.- Owen Hart was one of twelve children from a legendary Canadian wrestling family. His brother Bret is also one of the most well known wrestlers of all time. Owen was one of the best wrestlers in the business and his major accomplishments include being the 1994 King of the Ring, former Intercontinental Champion(2), former European Champion, and co-holder of the Tag Team Championship (4). Sadly, Hart plunged to his death on May 23, 1999 during a PPV when he was performing a spectacular entrance. Hart was only 34 and is survived by his wife Martha, his son Oje and his daughter Athena.
- Victoria was born in Moline, Illinois. Her family ultimately moved to Kansas City, Missouri in 1956.
During high school she spent a year in Mexico, learning and living the culture. Then traveling to the Yucatan and Guatemala. Victoria had always been an artist, and poet interested in writing, drawing, music and most of all acting.
Victoria began her acting career at an early age, joining The Kansas City Repertory Experimental Theater Company and then the Chicago Free Street Theater. After college, Victoria moved to San Francisco to study with Leonard Pitt. Here she had the opportunity to study with one of the most famous mime artists in the world, Marcel Marceau. Soon after, she moved to Los Angeles where she pursued stage, television and movies.
Victoria played numerous important roles in television productions such as: "Blackie" in the original Twin Peaks (1990), Amazing Stories (1985), The New Adam-12 (1990) and many more. Her movie credits include: Ghoulies (1984), Maid to Order (1987), Howling V: The Rebirth (1989), and Slow Burn (1986). Victoria did not only perform in television and movies, but loved performing on stage. She was involved for 2 years with the Odyssey Theater Ensemble in Los Angeles. In 1978, Victoria was fortunate to play "Guera" in the internationally acclaimed production of "Zoot Suit" at the Los Angeles Mark Taper Forum. As a result of this play, Victoria and the other three primary cast were featured on the cover of the New York Times magazine.
Victoria was involved with local and national politics as well as numerous non-profit organizations: City of Hope, American Cancer Society, Glendale Boys Home and Ranch to name a few. She also worked as photo editor for the Disney Channel, and for various companies as script consultant, co-producer, etc. For 20 years, she reviewed movies for the Academy Awards.
She passed away February 28, 2024 in Merriam, Kansas. She was 71 - Best-known for performing the most popular baseball poem, "Casey at the Bat." Filmed as one of the first talkies, 5 years before The Jazz Singer (1927), Casey at the Bat (1922), was included in Ken Burns' Baseball (1994). Hopper, a fervent New York Giant fan, first performed the then-unknown poem to the Giants and Chicago Cubs, on the day his friend, Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Tim Keefe had his record 19 game winning streak stopped, August 14, 1888. The dying General William T. Sherman was also in the audience that evening, along with Keefe and his brother-in-law shortstop/attorney John Montgomery Ward. 2 months later the Giants won New York's first world championship.
Hopper recited Casey for almost 40 years in films, on stage, records, radio etc. Known as the "Husband of His Country" for his 6 marriages. He became totally hairless, with blue-tinged skin, possibly from reaction to a patent medicine. Even so, his powerful voice and great sense of humor mesmerized women all his life. One of his wives was the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. Their son, the white-maned William Hopper, played private investigator Paul Drake on Perry Mason for many years. - Dort Clark was born on 1 October 1917 in Wellington, Kansas, USA. He was an actor, known for Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972), Bells Are Ringing (1960) and Wonderful Town (1958). He was married to Marilyn Sable. He died on 30 March 1989 in Wellington, Kansas, USA.
- Jerry Fogel was born on 17 January 1936 in Rochester, New York, USA. He was an actor, known for Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), The Day of the Locust (1975) and General Hospital (1963). He was married to Sandra Adele Millstein, Barbara Kay Fromm and Brenda Elaine Levison. He died on 21 October 2019 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.
- Dennis Allen was born on 10 July 1940 in Raytown, Missouri, USA. He was an actor, known for Me, Natalie (1969), Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (1967) and Love, American Style (1969). He died on 1 December 1995 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.
- Harry S. Truman was the 33rd president of the United States, serving from 1945 to 1953. A lifetime member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as a U.S. senator from the state of Missouri from 1935 to 1945. He was chosen as incumbent president Franklin D. Roosevelt's running mate for the 1944 presidential election. Truman was inaugurated as the 34th vice president in 1945 and served for less than three months until President Roosevelt died. Now serving as president, Truman implemented the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economy of Western Europe and established both the Truman Doctrine and NATO to contain the expansion of communism. He proposed numerous liberal domestic reforms, but few were enacted by the Conservative Coalition that dominated the Congress.
- Actor
- Additional Crew
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Despite growing up in a small town in New Jersey, Keith Loneker knew early in life that he had bigger things in store for him. You'd never know by his hulking body that this giant is an underdog. Loneker has overcome many personal obstacles to defy the odds his entire life. In high school he endured a painful hip injury. Doctors said he would never play sports again. Keith decided not to accept the doctor's opinion. He became a gym rat working out 3 hours a day to rehabilitate his ailing hip. After a year of training, Loneker proved doctors wrong when he stepped onto a football field for the first time in 2 years. Loneker, who was just happy to be back among his pals playing ball, was not aware that his raw talent on the football field would land him a Division 1 scholarship with the University of Kansas. The scholarship also did not come easy to Loneker. Many local Division 1 football programs passed on Loneker. They said he was too short, injury prone, or he just didn't have the talent. Glen Mason, the former head coach of the University of Kansas, balked at Loneker's critics and offered him a full scholarship. It was apparent early in Loneker's college career that he was a special player. He played as a true freshman. Loneker was an all Big Eight tackle three years at the University of Kansas. After graduation Loneker prepared for the NFL draft. His agent and many publications projected he would be a third round draft choice. Loneker had a party at his house in New Jersey on draft day with family and close friends. Loneker was shocked when after eight rounds his name was not called by an NFL club. His family and friends could see the disappointment in his eyes after the NFL draft had finished. Then as everyone thought he may get upset, Keith turned his misfortune into fuel.. Not getting drafted made Loneker hungry to prove his critics wrong once again. He walked on with the LA Rams and immediately began turning heads with vicious play on the field. The coaches knew they had plucked a gem and Loneker not only made the team but went on to start by the end of his rookie season. Keith enjoyed his five years in the NFL and is thankful he had the chance to fulfill his childhood dream. Keith didn't realize that his football career was about to transition into a movie career. A former teammate who was working in Hollywood as an agent called Loneker and told him he had a part that he thought he'd fit perfect. Loneker had never acted before, but decided to make a tape for an audition. The producers of the film hired him off his tape alone. To Keith's surprise he landed the role of "White Boy Bob" in a Steven Soderbergh film "Out Of Sight". The part was small, but Loneker got to showcase his talent with stars like George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez, and Ving Rhames. Loneker continued his career in film and landed a small part in, "Rock Star" with Mark Wahlberg and Jennifer Anniston. Nothing has come easy for Loneker during his life, but that doesn't stop this man from trying to fulfill all of his dreams. This small town Jersey boy has shown all his critics who judged him that nothing can stand in the way of a motivated man. Some people might call Loneker's success luck, but those who know him say it is character, hard work, and a big heart that made this underdog what he is today.- Actor
- Additional Crew
American character actor and producer/director. A third-generation Kansan, raised in Hutchinson, Kansas, Smith was the son of Delos V. Smith and Bessie Bloom. He was Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Kansas, participated in the first Round the World University Afloat, attended graduate school at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and College de France. He was involved in the performing arts throughout his life, first as impresario of the General Motors Symphony of the Air radio show from 1930-36, then as a singer in a multitude of opera companies. He acted, produced, and directed on Broadway and on the London stage, and appeared in a number of Hollywood films and television programs. Following his retirement in 1981, he returned to college in Hutchinson, Kansas, studying at Hutchinson Community College for much of the final two decades of his life. At his death, he had no immediate survivors.- Holly Harris was born on 27 December 1920 in St. Charles, Illinois, USA. She was an actress, known for Once Upon a Tune (1951), Act of Vengeance (1974) and Dogs (1977). She was married to Duhhaine Waeker. She died on 23 July 2010 in North Newton, Kansas, USA.
- Music Department
- Actor
- Composer
Thomas Waller was born in 1904. He was one of the most important pianist in the history of jazz. He studied piano with James P. Johnson, one of the masters of the stride piano in the 1920s. Fats began recording his first piano solos in 1923. He worked in the revue "Hot Chocolates" in the late 1920s as a composer. Along with Duke Ellington, he is one of the most prolific composers in jazz. His best songs are, "Ain't Misbehavin' ", "Honeysuckle Rose", "Black and Blue", "Blue Turned Grey Over You" and "Keepin' Out of Mischief Now". He formed his own group in 1934, Fats Waller and his Rhythm, and recorded many records for RCA Victor. Two of his most notable film appearances were in Stormy Weather (1943) and King of Burlesque (1936). He died in 1943 on a train during a trip to California. He was just 39 years old.- Actor
- Producer
- Director
Vic Savage was born on 14 August 1933 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, USA. He was an actor and producer, known for The Creeping Terror (1964) and Street-Fighter (1959). He was married to Lois A. White. He died on 25 May 1975 in Kansas City, Kansas, USA.- Born Lafayette Russell on May 31, 1905, "Reb" Russell grew up in Coffeyville, Kansas. A superb athlete all through his school years, he was a star running back on the University of Nebraska football team, and gained even more fame when he switched to Illinois' Northwestern University, where he played fullback and was named an All-American in 1930.
It was inevitable that a big, good-looking, famous football star would be courted by Hollywood, and Russell was eventually given small parts in a few films at Fox Pictures, but nothing really came of them. However, he did sign a contract with independent producer Willis Kent to star in a series of low-budget westerns. He made nine of them, with titles like The Man from Hell (1934), Lightning Triggers (1935) and Blazing Guns (1935), for Kent during 1934 and 1935, and "low-budget" is perhaps a charitable description of them. For all his athletic prowess, riding ability and good looks, Russell just wasn't much of an actor, but even if he had been he wouldn't have been able to overcome the threadbare production values, lame and trite scripts and overall shoddiness of the films themselves. They were distributed through the states-rights syndication system, which meant that basically not a whole lot of people saw them, and Russell never really made an impression on either fans or Hollywood itself. By 1935 he and Kent had parted ways. He left Hollywood and toured with several traveling circuses during the rest of the 1930s. In the 1940s he returned to Coffeyville, married and raised a family. He bought several ranches, becoming somewhat of an expert on livestock breeding. He died in Coffeyville of a heart attack in 1978. - Actress
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Myrtle Vail was born on 7 January 1888 in Joliet, Illinois, USA. She was an actress and writer, known for Myrt and Marge (1933), The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) and A Bucket of Blood (1959). She was married to George Damerel. She died on 18 September 1978 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.- Peg Hillias was born on 24 June 1914 in Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA. She was an actress, known for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Producers' Showcase (1954) and Studio One (1948). She died on 18 March 1960 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.
- Actor
- Location Management
- Transportation Department
Tony Swartz was born on 24 September 1943 in Davenport, Iowa, USA. He was an actor, known for Battlestar Galactica (1978), About Schmidt (2002) and Battlestar Galactica (1978). He was married to Helen Blume. He died on 27 September 2016 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.- Andrea Walters was born on 3 July 1953 in Rockford, Illinois, USA. She was an actress, known for Lucky Numbers (2000), General Hospital (1963) and Death Doll (1989). She was married to Mark Ganzel and Mike Saccone. She died on 27 November 2018 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.
- Art Ellison was born in 1899 in Potsdam, New York, and moved in 1914 with his family to Kansas City, Missouri. At the age of 18, he went to work at the Kansas City Power and Light Company (KCP&L) where he was employed in the credit department until he retired in 1966. Ellison got his first acting role in 1924, in a musical comedy held as a benefit for the Kansas City Women's Athletic Club building fund. After this experience on stage he joined the Chanticleer Players, an amateur group in Kansas City offering one act plays. He worked backstage and appeared in the farce pantomimes and tableaux between the acts. In 1930, Ellison joined the amateur Black-Friars, where he played a few leads, some character parts, and handled many other important duties behind the scenes. Much of Ellison's stage career was spent with the local productions of the University of Kansas City Playhouse (which later became the University of Missouri-Kansas City Theater), the Resident Theater, the Missouri Repertory Theater, and the Johnson County, Kansas Playhouse. He also played with the Provincials, the Jewish Community Theater, and Starlight Theater. During World War II, Ellison made USO appearances and recruiting records for the armed forces. He played several roles on "The Air Adventures of Jimmie Allen," a 1940s radio series produced in Kansas City and syndicated nationally, and he had a part in WDAF-TV's first program, as well as other television and radio shows, particularly for Kansas City Power and Light. He also frequently acted in industrial films made by the Calvin Company of Kansas City, as well as in a few made by Centron Corporation of Lawrence, Kansas. He had a role in Centron director Herk Harvey's 1962 feature film "Carnival of Souls," made in Lawrence, and upon his retirement from KCP&L in the mid-1960s, Ellison joined the Actors Equity Association and devoted all his time to acting. Between Kansas City theater performances and industrial films, he gained roles in the Hollywood films "Paper Moon" and "Shoot it Black--Shoot it Blue," and the network TV movies "Friendly Persuasion" and "Mary White," all of which were shot on location in the Kansas/Missouri area and recruited local acting talent. In 1979 Ellison suffered a stroke that prevented him from pursuing any further acting roles for ten years. He passed away in 1994, aged 94. Ellison was respected for his accuracy in mastering dialects and for his make-up ability, received several theater awards, and was well-known in the acting community of Kansas City. His twelve scrapbooks of materials devoted to theater and acting-related activities in Kansas City, dating from 1924 to 1992, are currently archived in the Western Historical Manuscript Collection of the University of Missouri-Kansas City.