fame under 10 dollars

Herbert Lom (Czech pronunciation: [ɦɛrbɛrt lom]; 11 September 1917 – 27 September 2012) was a Czech-born British film and television actor who moved to the United Kingdom in 1939. In a career lasting more than 60 years, he appeared in character roles, often portraying criminals or villains early in his career and professional men in later years.

Lom was noted for his precise, elegant enunciation of English.[3] He is best known for his roles in The Ladykillers and The Pink Panther film series.

Lom was born Herbert Charles ‘Angelo Kuchačevič ze Schluderpacheru’ in Prague to 'Karl Kuchačevič ze Schluderpacheru,’ and his spouse, the former Olga Gottlieb.[4][5] Lom himself claimed that his family had been ennobled and the family title dated from 1601.[2] Lom’s film debut was in the Czech film Žena pod křížem (“A Woman Under Cross”, 1937) followed by the Boží mlýny (“Mills of God”, 1938). His early film appearances were mainly supporting roles, with the occasional top billing. At this time he also changed his impractically long surname - to Lom (“a quarry” in Czech), because it was the shortest he found in a local telephone directory.

Lom died in his sleep on 27 September 2012 at the age of 95.[9]

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Born September 11, 1917, Herbert Lom made his film debut in the Czech film Woman Below the Cross (1937) and played supporting and, occasionally, lead roles. His career picked up in the 1940s and he played, among other roles, Napoleon Bonaparte in The Young Mr. Pitt (1942) (and, again, in War and Peace (1956)). In a rare starring role, Lom played twin trapeze artists in Dual Alibi (1947). He continued into the 1950s with roles opposite Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers in The Ladykillers (1955) and Robert Mitchum, Jack Lemmon and Rita Hayworth in Fire Down Below (1957). His career really took off in the 1960s and he got the title role in Hammer Films’ production of The Phantom of the Opera (1962). He also played “Captain Nemo” in Mysterious Island (1961) and landed supporting parts in El Cid (1961) and an especially showy role in Spartacus (1960) as a pirate chieftain contracted to transport Spartacus’ army away from Italy. The 1960s was also the decade in which Lom secured the role for which he will always be remembered: Peter Sellers’ long-suffering boss, Commissioner Charles Dreyfus, in the “Pink Panther” films, in which he pulled off the not-inconsiderable feat of stealing almost every scene he and Sellers were in–a real accomplishment, considering what a veteran scene-stealer Sellers was. However, Lom did not concentrate solely on a film career. He had become a familiar face to British television viewers when he starred as Dr. Roger Corder in the series The Human Jungle (1963). He moved into horror films in the 1970s, with parts in Asylum (1972) and And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973). He played Prof. Abraham Van Helsing opposite Christopher Lee in Count Dracula (1970), matching wits against the sinister vampire himself. Lom appeared as one of the ten victims in Ten Little Indians (1974), playing the drunken Dr. Edward Armstrong. His career continued into the 1980s, a standout role being that of Christopher Walken’s sympathetic doctor in The Dead Zone (1983). He also played opposite Walter Matthau in Hopscotch (1980) and returned to the murder mystery Ten Little Indians (1989), this time playing The General. Lom has been taking it easy since then, though he returned to his familiar role of Commissioner Dreyfus in Son of the Pink Panther (1993). He has always been a reliable and eminently watchable actor, unfortunately not receiving the stardom he probably should have.

Francis Loftus Sullivan (6 January 1903 – 19 November 1956) was an English film and stage actor.

Francis Loftus Sullivan[1] attended Stonyhurst, the Jesuit public school in Lancashire, England, whose alumni include Charles Laughton and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

A heavily built man with a striking double-chin and a deep voice, Sullivan made his acting debut at the Old Vic at age 18 in Shakespeare’s Richard III. He had considerable theatrical experience before he appeared in his first film in 1932, The Missing Rembrandt, as a German villain opposite Arthur Wontner as Sherlock Holmes.[2]

Among his film roles are Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist (1948) and Phil Nosseross in the film noir Night and the City (1950). Sullivan also played the part of Jaggers in two versions of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations - in 1934 and 1946. He appeared in a fourth Dickens film, the 1935 Universal Pictures version of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, in which he played Crisparkle.

He was featured in The Citadel (1938), starring Robert Donat, and a decade later, he played the role of Pierre Cauchon in the technicolor version of Joan of Arc (1948), starring Ingrid Bergman. In 1938 he starred in a revival of the Stokes brothers’ play Oscar Wilde at London’s Arts Theatre. He played the Attorney General prosecuting the case defended by Robert Donat as barrister Sir Robert Morton, in the first film version of The Winslow Boy (1948).

Sullivan also acted in light comedies, including My Favorite Spy (1951), starring Bob Hope and Hedy Lamarr, in which he played an enemy agent, and the comedy Fiddlers Three (1944), portraying Nero. He also played the role of Pothinus in the film version of George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1945). The film was directed by Gabriel Pascal, and was the last film personally supervised by Shaw himself. Sullivan reprised the role in a stage revival of the play.

Sullivan, who eventually became a naturalized US citizen, won a Tony Award in 1955 for the Agatha Christie play Witness for the Prosecution. Earlier, he had played Hercule Poirot at London’s Embassy Theatre in the Christie play, Black Coffee (1930).[citation needed]

He died of a heart attack, aged 53 (some sources claim he died from an unspecified “lung ailment”).[citation needed]

Joseph Peter Breck (March 13, 1929 – February 6, 2012) was an American character actor of stage, television, and film. The rugged, dark-haired Breck played the gambler and gunfighter Doc Holliday on the ABC/Warner Brothers television series Maverick but is best known for his role as Victoria Barkley’s (Barbara Stanwyck) hot-tempered, middle son Nick in the popular 1960s ABC western, The Big Valley. Breck was also the leading man in an earlier ABC Western television series entitled Black Saddle.

Breck was the son of Joe Breck, “a popular show business figure of the 1930s.”[1] His parents divorced when Peter was 8. Peter went with Joe, while his younger brother George accompanied their mother, resulting in a decades-long separation.[1] In 1959, an Associated Press photograph showed the brothers reunited after being out of touch for 22 years. The caption explained: “George told newsmen he saw Peter on television and recognized a resemblance. He went to the actor’s studio and the relationship was confirmed.”[2]

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Primarily remembered as Barbara Stanwyck’s rugged middle son, Nick Barkley, the handsome and strapping “loose cannon” on the popular action-driven TV western The Big Valley (1965), actor Peter Breck is a survivor who has gone through the ups and downs of not only his own personal life but also of this tough business they call acting. Like Nick, Peter has maintained a strong, positive outlook and still shows the fighter in him in a career that has touched on five decades.

He was born Joseph Peter Breck, the son of a jazz musician also named Joseph (nicknamed “Jobie”). Over time, his father worked with such legendary greats as Fats Waller, Bix Beiderbecke, Paul Whiteman and Billie Holiday. Nicknamed “Buddy” while young, Peter’s parents were on the road for much of his early life and he was sent to live with his grandparents in Haverhill, Massachusetts, a move that provided more stability. His parents eventually divorced and young Peter returned to Rochester to live with his mother and her new husband, Al Weber, who was a sports editor of the Rochester Times-Union.

Following his schooling at John Marshall High School in Rochester, Peter served in the United States Navy. He then turned his attention back to education and studied English and drama at the University of Houston in Houston. While performing in college plays, he started to apprentice at Houston’s Alley Theatre, where he appeared in such productions as “Stalag 17”, among others. He also had a talent for singing and performed in several clubs around the Houston area.

Peter extended his stage resume at Washington D.C.’s Arena Theatre. While performing there in a 1957 production of George Bernard Shaw’s “The Man of Destiny”, he was “discovered” by Robert Mitchum, who cast him in an unbilled role in the film Thunder Road (1958), which Mitchum himself produced, co-wrote and starred in. Mitchum invited the young tenderfoot to Los Angeles and helped set him up out there. While Peter struggled trying to establish himself in films (he played a juvenile delinquent in the movie The Beatniks (1960)), it seemed that rugged TV roles came easier to him. He found his first series lead as “Clay Culhane” in the western Black Saddle (1959), the story of a gunfighter (Breck) who switches guns for law books and tries to tame the West through reason. Costarring Russell Johnson (later the “Professor” on Gilligan’s Island (1964)), who plays a suspicious U.S. Marshal, the series was canceled after two seasons.

A Warner Brothers studio contract, however, did come out of this-and a new visibility. Tall, dark and handsome at 6'2", Breck guest-starred on all the top Warner Bros. TV shows of the day: “The Roaring 20’s” (1960)_, Sugarfoot (1957), Surfside 6 (1960), Bronco (1958), Hawaiian Eye (1959), 77 Sunset Strip (1958), Cheyenne (1955) and played a recurring “Doc Holliday” in the popular series Maverick (1957). He returned to the movies as well, but this time in stronger leads or co-leads. Handed a choice co-starring assignment in Portrait of a Mobster (1961) opposite star Vic Morrow, who played the infamous “Dutch Schultz”, Peter also managed to show a rare, gentler side in the outdoor family drama Lad: A Dog (1962).

He left Warners after only a few years but managed to score the leads in two low-budget cult thrillers in its wake: Shock Corridor (1963)_ and The Crawling Hand (1963), along with a very dismal lead in the musical outing Hootenanny Hoot (1963), in which he was given no songs to perform despite his singing capabilities. Again, TV came to the rescue when he won the brotherly co-lead on The Big Valley (1965). Despite a uniformly strong ensemble cast that included oldest brother Richard Long, younger brother Lee Majors and sister Linda Evans, Stanwyck was the only performer on the show who was nominated for an Emmy during its four-season run (she was nominated twice and won once).

Following this TV peak, Peter abruptly left Hollywood and focused on the theater both in the U.S. and Canada throughout the 1970s, appearing in such showcase vehicles as “The Gazebo”, “A Thousand Clowns”, “The Rainmaker” and “Mister Roberts”. Married to former dancer Diana Bourne since 1960, the couple settled in Vancouver, Canada, with their son Christopher, where Peter checked out the film scene. He also set up a full-time acting academy school, The Breck Academy, which ran for ten years. Tragically, it was during this time that their son, Christopher, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and died (two years later).

Paul Fix

Peter Paul Fix (March 13, 1901 – October 14, 1983) was an American film and television character actor, best known for his work in Westerns. Fix appeared in more than a hundred movies and dozens of television shows over a 56-year career spanning from 1925 to 1981. Fix was best known for portraying Marshal Micah Torrance, opposite Chuck Connors’s character in The Rifleman from 1958-1963. Fix later appeared with Chuck Connors in the 1966 western film Ride Beyond Vengeance.

Paul Fix was born in Dobbs Ferry, New York, to Wilhelm Fix, a brewmaster, and the former Louise C. Walz,[citation needed] though some sources say he was born Paul Fix Morrison[1] His mother and father were German immigrants who had left their Black Forest home and arrived in New York City in the 1870s.

A veteran of the United States Navy during World War I, Fix became a busy character actor who obtained his start in local productions in New York. By the 1920s, he had moved to Hollywood, and performed in the first of almost 350 movie and television appearances. In the 1930s, he became friends with John Wayne. He was Wayne’s acting coach and eventually appeared as a featured player in about 27 of Wayne’s films.

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American character actor in scores of films after substantial stage experience. He was born in DeSoto, Missouri, but raised in Atchison, Kansas. The son of a railroad worker and law clerk (some publicity material states the father was a physician, but family and census records show otherwise), he wavered between various careers including oil exploration, but found his way after an introduction to the stage with the Atchison Civic Theatre and Kansas City Civic Theatre. He briefly attended the University of Kansas (where he was a fraternity brother of future newsman John Cameron Swayze). He moved from Kansas to California in 1930, where he lived with his grandparents and worked in the lemon groves near Pomona prior to opening a tire-repair shop in that city. He also helped found a theatre company in Pomona. He joined the Pasadena Community Playhouse, where he was spotted by a Warner Bros. talent scout looking for someone with a resemblance to Henry Clay, for the Warners short film The Monroe Doctrine (1939). He signed with Warners as a contract player and was thereafter virtually never without work. He played in an enormous number of films over the next three decades, mostly in small supporting roles. He was equally adept at playing businessmen, attorneys, or historical figures, and was a familiar face on screen and on television for his entire career, though most people would have been unable to identify him by name. Perhaps his greatest fame came in the TV role of oil company president John Brewster on The Beverly Hillbillies (1962). During the last years of his life, he was co-owner of a popular restaurant/bar in Encino, California, called The Oak Room. Wilcox died in 1974.

Frank Wilcox

Frank Reppy Wilcox (March 13, 1907 – March 3, 1974) was an American character actor who made appearances in more than 150 films and nearly 200 episodes of television programs.

Though born in De Soto in Jefferson County in eastern Missouri, Wilcox was reared primarily in Atchison, Kansas. He attended the University of Kansas in Lawrence for a year, where he was a fraternity brother of subsequent newsman John Cameron Swayze. He graduated in 1933 from St. Benedict’s College, now Benedictine College, in Atchison. Years later, Wilcox was an active and honored trustee of Benedictine College.[1]

Wilcox first came to California to live with his grandparents and to work in the lemon groves near Pomona. He later opened a tire repair shop in Pomona and helped to establish a theater company. He joined the Pasadena Community Playhouse, where he met George Reeves, prior to Reeves’ being cast as Clark Kent in Adventures of Superman. He and Reeves were in eleven films together, and Wilcox was best man at Reeves’ wedding.[1]

During World War II, Wilcox earned five battle stars. During the 1960s he was the “honorary mayor” of his city of residence, Granada Hills, California. He was “honorary fire chief” of Los Angeles, which on January 11, 1964, observed “Frank Wilcox Day.” He served on the Screen Actors Guild board of directors.[1]

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American character actor in scores of films after substantial stage experience. He was born in DeSoto, Missouri, but raised in Atchison, Kansas. The son of a railroad worker and law clerk (some publicity material states the father was a physician, but family and census records show otherwise), he wavered between various careers including oil exploration, but found his way after an introduction to the stage with the Atchison Civic Theatre and Kansas City Civic Theatre. He briefly attended the University of Kansas (where he was a fraternity brother of future newsman John Cameron Swayze). He moved from Kansas to California in 1930, where he lived with his grandparents and worked in the lemon groves near Pomona prior to opening a tire-repair shop in that city. He also helped found a theatre company in Pomona. He joined the Pasadena Community Playhouse, where he was spotted by a Warner Bros. talent scout looking for someone with a resemblance to Henry Clay, for the Warners short film The Monroe Doctrine (1939). He signed with Warners as a contract player and was thereafter virtually never without work. He played in an enormous number of films over the next three decades, mostly in small supporting roles. He was equally adept at playing businessmen, attorneys, or historical figures, and was a familiar face on screen and on television for his entire career, though most people would have been unable to identify him by name. Perhaps his greatest fame came in the TV role of oil company president John Brewster on The Beverly Hillbillies (1962).

Paul Stuart

Paul Stewart (born Paul Sternberg; March 13, 1908 – February 17, 1986) was an American character actor, director and producer who worked in theatre, radio, films and television. He frequently portrayed cynical and sinister characters throughout his lengthy career. A friend and associate of Orson Welles for many years, he helped Welles get his first job in radio and was associate producer of the celebrated radio program “The War of the Worlds”, in which he also performed. One of the Mercury Theatre players who made their film debut in Welles’s landmark film Citizen Kane, Stewart portrayed Kane’s butler and valet, Raymond. He appeared in 50 films, and performed in or directed some 5,000 radio and television shows.

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Paul Stuart

Esteemed character actor Paul Stewart had a pair of the coldest orbs in town and made his living for decades playing dark, callous, shiftless villains, including a vast number of mobsters. Not a well-known name per se, he was nevertheless a reliable actor who seemed to have been born for the film noir and gangland crime drama genre with his premature silvery hair, dark thick brows and probing, deep-set eyes, all accentuated by a tough and penetrating Brooklyn accent.

Born in New York City on March 13, 1908, Stewart developed an interest for acting in his teens, making his Broadway debut with “Two Seconds” in 1931, following graduation from Columbia University. He had played a few more stage roles in New York when he met and made an impression on Orson Welles. As a result he became a founding member of the Mercury Theatre and a founding member of AFTRA when it was just a radio union.

Stewart’s tough, guttural voice became a familiar sound on the 1930s airwaves and he was among the cast in the infamous Welles broadcast “The War of the Worlds.”

He married band singer/actress Peg La Centra (1910-1996) in 1939 and over the years they appeared together on many radio programs. She also provided singing voices for such stars as Susan Hayward on celluloid.

Welles next put Stewart in his films, with the classic Citizen Kane (1941) as Raymond, Kane’s wily valet, and Stewart found himself in demand as an untrustworthy character player. He essayed a number of stark, sinister types to perfection, with roles in such films as Johnny Eager (1941), Mr. Lucky (1943), Champion (1949), Illegal Entry (1949), Twelve O'Clock High (1949), Carbine Williams (1952), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955).

On TV he became a regular on a couple of short-lived series – Top Secret (1954) and The Man Who Never Was (1966). In the 1950s Stewart turned to stage and TV directing as well, helming a number of popular crimers such as Peter Gunn (1958), Michael Shayne (1960), Perry Mason (1957), It Takes a Thief (1968), Hawaii Five-O (1968) and Remington Steele (1982).

His voice also fit the bill for cartoons in the 1960s. In 1974 Stewart suffered a heart attack while on location in New Mexico for Bite the Bullet (1975), but he returned sporadically to films, including the role of impresario Florenz Ziegfeld in W.C. Fields and Me (1976). He suffered a second and fatal heart attack in 1986 at age 77.

Philip Needs