Of leading men and women in acting circles
>> 31 January 2009 –
unique world
The following text is originally lifted from the trivia section of The Jakarta Post dated Saturday, 15 March 2008.
~Compiled from various sources~
- Walt Disney had wooden teeth.
- In the late 1990s, newscaster Diane Sawyer's salary was $7 million a year.
- To help create her signature sexy walk, actress Marilyn Monroe sawed off part of the heel of one shoe.
- Alfred Hitchcock did not have a belly button; it was eliminated when he was sewn up after surgery.
- Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho was the first Hollywood film that showed a toilet flushing - thereby generating many complaints.
- Michael Keaton's name at birth was Michael Douglas.
- When screen lover Rudolph Valentino married Jean Acker, she locked him out of their bedroom, and the marriage lasted only six hours.
- Peter Falk, the actor who played Colombo, has a glass eye.
- One of the many Tarzans, Karmuela Searlel, was mauled to death on the set by a raging elephant.
- Shirley Temple received 135,000 presents on her eighth birthday.
- Long before he gained renown as Pa Cartwright on the TV series Bonanza, Canadian-born actor Lorne Greene made a name for himself as a radio broadcaster during WW2. He was known to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation listeners as the "Voice of Doom".
- Lorne Greene had one of his nipples bitten off by an alligator while hosting Lorne Greene's Wild Kingdom.
- Actor Bela Lugosi was buried, as he had requested, in his famous Dracula cape.
- Actor Sean Connery has worked as a milkman, coffin-polisher and builder.
- Pamela Anderson Lee is Canada's Centennial Baby, being the first baby born on the centennial anniversary of Canada's independence.
- Classic horror film actor Vincent Price almost became a gourmet cook instead of an actor.
- Trying to prevent aging, Charlie Chaplin, Winston Churchill and Christian Dior all had injections of fetal lamb cells. The process failed.
- Paul Newman was the oldest driver in the 1979 Le Mans 24-hour race.
- During their marriage, Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton bought an electric chair for their dining room.
- The first female theatre manager was Mrs John Drew, mother of actor John Drew II, and grandmother of the famous Barrymores (think actress Drew Barrymore). She managed the Arch Street Theatre for 30 years after her husband died in 1850.
- On 4 October 1943, the U.S. Army Air Force announced that Captain Clark Gable was awarded the Air Medal for his five combat missions.
- Jack Palance, while serving in the U.S. Air Corps during WW2, was shot down. His plane went down in flames. While he survived the crash, he received severe facial burns which required major plastic surgery.
- Humphrey Bogart's ashes are in an urn that also contains a small gold whistle. Lauren Bacall had the whistle inscribed "If you need anything, just whistle" - the words she spoke to him in their first film together, To Have and Have Not.
- Entertainers who were boxers in the early days of their careers include Roy Clark, Bo Diddley, Bob Hope, John Huston, Martin Lawrence, Ryan O'Neal and Rod Serling.
- Markswoman Annie Oakley began shooting at the age of nine.
- Annie Oakley had all of her gold shooting medals melted down, then sold the gold and gave the money to charity.
- Martha Jane Burke, better known as Calamity Jane, was married 12 times.
