Greta Garbo Articles

Frank Capra, Luise Rainer, George Jessel Luise Rainer turns 102 today, January 12. She is the oldest living Academy Award winner in the acting categories, having won two consecutive Best Actress Oscars for The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and The Good Earth (1937). Because of both her longevity and the fact that Turner Classic Movies regularly shows nearly all of her films, the Dusseldorf-born (some sources [...]

Movie Star Ramon Novarro Brutally Killed Halloween Eve 1968 Paul Ferguson, in a letter he wrote me at the time I was working on Beyond Paradise, blamed his Catholic background for Ramon Novarro's death: "When [Novarro] kissed me, I reacted like a Catholic, what they call homosexual panic. Some old guy in the desert says, 'Kill homosexuals.' It's inbred. . . . I was too [...]

Ramon Novarro Earlier today, after sharing on Facebook a photo of Greta Garbo dressed in Balinese costume in the 1931 blockbuster Mata Hari, I began thinking about 1920s and 1930s Mexican-born MGM star Ramon Novarro (photo), the subject of the biography I wrote several years back, Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro. Mata Hari was one of the biggest box-office hits in the careers [...]

Mary Pickford At the 1936 Academy Awards ceremony, D.W. Griffith became the first individual to win an Honorary Award for his body of work. Seventy-five years and 84 (my count*) Honorary Oscar winners later — including last year's Eli Wallach, Kevin Brownlow, and Jean-Luc Godard — a mere nine women have been recognized for their cinematic oeuvre and/or for their pioneering film work. The chosen [...]