Motion Picture Herald (Sep-Oct 1948)

HOW THE SHOWMEN VOTED (.Continued from page 12) "Bombadier", "The Woman on the Beach", "The Sky's the Limit" and several others before hitting the bull's-eye in "Crossfire". He wHI be seen shortly in the completed, but urtreleased "The Boy With Green Hair" and "The Best Things in Life Are Free", and is now working in "The Setup". He was born in Chicago on November II, 1913, educated at Loyola University, where he played football, boxed and edited the college paper, moving on to Dartmouth and winning the heavyweight title. He is 6 feet 3 inches tall, weighs 194 pounds, has black hair, brown eyes, is married and has two children. Angela Lansbury, whose first picture, "Gaslight", won her an Academy Award nomination, learned acting and the alphabet simultaneously from her actress mother, Moyna MacGill Lansbury, the British stage star, and under the inspiration of her greatuncle, Robert B. Mantell. After a year at dramatic school, she took honors at the Royal Academy of Music and made her way, via a night club performance in Montreal and a job behind the cosmetics counter in a Los Angeles department store, to the attention of M-G-M. These castings included the dance hall queen in "The Harvey Girls", the torch singer in "Hoodlum Saint", a singer in "Till the Clouds Roll By", the demure school teacher in "Tenth Avenue Angel", the wide-eyed victim in "The Picture of Dorian Gray", the embittered wife in "If Winter Comes" and — completed but unreleased — "The Three Musketeers". She is 5 feet 7 inches tall, weighs 130 pounds, has blonde hair and blue eyes. Jean Peters' career is proof of the rule that exceptions prove rules. Everybody knows that "movie contest" winners get nowhere. Elizabeth Jean Peters was studying for a teacher's degree at Ohio State University when her pals entered her, with four hundred others, in a popularity contest carrying a prize of $200 and a fortnight in Hollywood, complete with Twentieth Century-Fox screen test. She won the contest, passed the test, got the contract, went back to finish the school term, and reported to the studio, which put her to work as Tyrone Power's sweetheart in "Captain from Castile" and opposite Dana Andrews in "Deep Waters". These, her only film appearances, earned her seventh place in this year's poll, and she is to be seen shortly in "Mr. Belvedere Goes to College", which is what she is doing — in her off time — to get that teacher's degree, possibly just in case. She is 5 feet 5 inches tall, weighs 124 pounds, and has brown hair, green eyes. Unmarried. Mona (Monica Elizabeth) Freeman was modeling at 14, and her face on a magazine cover got her a Howard Hughes acting contract, never implemented by production, which Paramount bought in 1943 to get her for a role in "Double Indemnity", which they didn't give her after all. So she devoted herself to the studio's study courses until they got around to making "Our Hearts Were Growing Up", in which she spoke one line, and after that she was a busy young actress, trouping in "Together Again", "Junior Miss", "Danger Signal", "Black Beauty", "That Brennan Girl", "Dear Ruth", "Variety Girl", "Mother Wore Tights" and the unreleased "Isn't It Romantic?", "The Heiress" and "Streets of Laredo". She was born in Baltimore, June 6, 1926, and married in Beverly Hills, Cal., September 15, 1945, to Pat Nerney; their daughter, Mona Freeman Nerney, arriving October 25, 1947. She is five feet, three inches tall, weighs 110 pounds, has ash^blonde hair, hazel eyes, 33 bust, 23 waist and 33 hips. Fascinated by Stock Eleanor Parker acquired acting ambitions by waiting table on the summer stock players at Marthas Vineyard, Mass., who dined at her school's commissary, and went to work at learning how. The learning how continued at Warner Brothers studio for two years after a talent scout located her at the Pasadena Playhouse, with never a screen performance until "Mission to Moscow" came along, in which she played Ambassador Davies' daughter. Then she got a principal role in "The Very Thought of You", a wifely stint in "Pride of the Marines", a feminine heavy in "Of Human Bondage", a snob in "Escape Me Never" and a dual role in "Women in White" before running away with "The Voice of the Turtle". She was born at Cedarville, O., June 26, 1922, is five feet, six inches tall, weighs 120 pounds, has light brown hair and gray-green eyes, and as Mrs. Bert Friedlob is mother of a fivemonth-old baby. Doris Day's election to Top Ten position on the strength of only one picture, "Romance on the High Seas", crosses up poll tradition, which usually ordains that a ranking Star-of-Tomorrow be seen and remembered in several widely played pictures. But producer-director Michael Curtiz, to whom she's under contract, designed that Technicolor musical with the declared purpose of show-casing his new contractee to utmost advantage, which it seems to have done. Started as Dancer Miss Day, born Doris Kapplehoff in Cincinnati April 3, 1924, set out to be a dancer and was doing well at it until she sustained a broken leg in an automobile accident at Hamilton, O., while on tour with a Fanchon & Marco unit. While undergoing hospitalization for that, she turned her attention to song, and sang her way through engagements with the Bob Crosby, Fred Waring and Les Brown bands to a stand at New York's Little Club, which preceded her discovery by Curtiz. She's five feet, six inches tall, weighs 120 pounds, has blonde hair, blue eyes, and is working now with Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan in the Warner production of "Two Guys and a Gal". The Next Fifteen Combined Vote of Exhibitors I I . Barbara Bel Geddes 12. Richard Widmark 13. Kirk Douglas 14. Dean Stockwell I 5. Wendell Corey 16. Wanda Hendrix I 7. Audrey Totter 1 8. June Havoc 19. Howard Duff 20. Robert Hutton 2 I . Olga San Juan 22. John Agar 23. Coleen Gray 24. Richard Hart 25. Pedro Armendariz Circuit Exhibitors I I . Barbara Bel Geddes I I. 12. Kirk Douglas 12. 13. Wendell Corey 13. 14. Mona Freeman 14. 15. Wanda Hendrix 15. ! 6. Audrey Totter 16. 1 7. June Havoc I 7. 18. Dean Stockwell 18. 19. Howard Duff 19. 20. Pedro Armendariz 20. 2 I . John Agar 2 I . 22. Olga San Juan 22. 23. Coleen Gray 23. 24. Robert Hutton 24. 25. Richard Hunt 25. Independent Exhibitors Doris Day Barbara Bel Geddes June Havoc Robert Hutton Wanda Hendrix Wendell Corey Audrey Totter Richard Hart Olga San Juan Kirk Douglas Howard Duff Richard Widmark John Agar Coleen Gray Pedro Armendariz 14 MOTION PICTURE HERALD, SEPTEMBER II, 1948