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1-4 of 4
- Actress
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Katherine (also called Katharine) Alexander, an excellent character actress, had been born in 1897 to a mother who was part Cherokee and to a father who farmed land on Indian territory. And yet she was never given the part of a native American in the course of her thirty-five-year acting career. Often a society lady, at times a suffering wife or a dignified mother, she was nearly always all-American. At ease in the register of drama and tragedy as well as in that of comedy, Katherine Alexander was a talented and versatile performer who alternated theater and cinema throughout a highly respectable career. An artist she was bound to be but rather a concert one than a thespian. Her mother, a frustrated musician herself, had indeed seen to it that she receive a formal musical education and young Katherine proved gifted at the violin. And she was indeed giving a violin recital when producer Samuel Goldwyn, who needed an actress who could play the violin for a play he was producing, noticed the young lady and hired her for the role. Miss Alexander, who had not yet turned twenty, realized that she much preferred acting to music playing and that was the beginning of a fruitful career on stage first and alternately on the boards and on the big screen as soon as the cinema started talking. A leading lady on Broadway (where she delivered the lines of such distinguished playwrights as Arthur Schnitzler, Robert E. Sherwood or Philip Barry),she was soon seen as an indispensable supporting actress in Hollywood movies. She was always reliable and competent and did not pale by the side of great stars like Greta Garbo (the wife of Garbo's lover in The Painted Veil (1934)), Bette Davis (the wife of a lawyer in love with Davis in That Certain Woman (1937) ; Miss Trask in Now, Voyager (1942)), Cary Grant (Mrs. Morton in In Name Only (1939)) or John Barrymore (Miss Billow in The Great Man Votes (1939). Katherine Alexander's shining hour came in 1949, two years before she retired, when she embodied Linda Loman, the no-nonsense wife of pathetic salesman Paul Muni in the London production of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman". After such a triumph, she decided to give up her career and for thirty years on, she enjoyed a happy second life until her death in early 1981.- Writer
- Music Department
- Additional Crew
Lyricist ("Summertime") and author, educated in public schools and in the College of Charleston and the University of South Carolina. He was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Norh Carolina. He was the author of several poems, novels and more, and joined ASCAP in 1936; his chief musical collaborators were George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin, and his other compositions include "My Man's Gone Now", "Bess, You Is My Woman Now", "I Loves You, Porgy", "I Got Plenty o' Nuttin'", and "A Woman Is a Sometime Thing".- Eric Dressler was born on 27 October 1896 in Brooklyn, New York, USA. He was an actor, known for Compliments of the Season (1930), The Edge of Night (1956) and Search for Tomorrow (1951). He died in August 1978 in Tryon, New York, USA.
- American mystery writer Richard Lockridge was born in St. Joseph, MO, in 1898. He attended the University of Missouri, but his studies were interrupted by a one-year stint in the US Navy in 1918. In 1921 he got a job as a reporter for the Kansas City (MO) "Kansan" newspaper, then a year later went over to the "Kansas City Star". After a few months there he traveled to New York and was hired as a reporter for the "Sun", and eventually became its drama critic.
He is best known for his mystery series "Mr. and Mrs. North", which first appeared as a story in "The New Yorker" magazine (he wrote the first one by himself; subsequent "Mr. and Mrs. North" stories were written in collaboration with his wife, Frances Lockridge). The stories, light-hearted mysteries involving a married couple in the vein of "The Thin Man" series, were quite successful and were made into a play in 1941, a film in 1942 (Mr. and Mrs. North (1942)) and a TV series in 1952 ("Mr. and Mrs. North" (1952)).
He died of a stroke in Tryon, NC, in 1982