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 [...]

Frank Capra, Luise Rainer, George Jessel at the 1937 Oscar ceremony, held at the Biltmore Hotel Luise Rainer, the 101-year-old, two-time Academy Award winner, was just recently interviewed by BBC entertainment reporter Colin Patterson. (You can listen to the interview here.) During the eight-minute chat, the Düsseldorf-born (Jan. 12, 1910) Rainer, whose speech lilt hasn’t changed a bit since the 1930s, talks about her Academy [...]

Renée Adorée, John Gilbert in King Vidor’s The Big Parade (top); John Gilbert, Greta Garbo in Clarence Brown’s Flesh and the Devil (bottom) John Gilbert on TCM: QUEEN CHRISTINA, DOWNSTAIRS Here are my top recommendations for John Gilbert Day (in addition to Queen Christina, mentioned in the previous post): Victor Sjöström’s touching, poetic He Who Gets Slapped (1924), which features my favorite Lon Chaney performance [...]