Classic

Eldred Gregory Peck (born on April 5, 1916 in La Jolla, California, died on June 12, 2003) had a long and illustrious career as a Hollywood movie star; he was a tall, dark and handsome leading man, widely admired for his rectitude and his commitment to liberal causes. In Spellbound (1945) directed by Alfred Hitchcock, he played an honest man accused of murder, opposite Ingrid Bergman.

Burton Stephen Lancaster (born in New York City on November 2, 1913, died on October 20, 1994), a popular movie star, a respected dramatic actor, a successful producer of many of his own films and others like Marty (1955) and A Catered Affair (1956) starring Ernest Borgnine, was not cast in his first film, The Killers (1946), until age 32. In his youth he was a circus acrobat and developed the athletic skills that he would display in films like Jim Thorpe All-American (1951), The Crimson Pirate (1952) and Trapeze (1956) with Tony Curtis and Gina Lollobrigida.

Italian film composer Riz Ortolani, who died recently in his villa outside Rome at age 87, was arguably one of the world’s most prolific creators of music for the movies. He scored comedies and dramas, spaghetti westerns and documentaries, erotica and horror, in a composing career that lasted some 50 years.

John Uhler “Jack” Lemmon III (born in Newton, MA, on February 8, 1925, died in Los Angeles on June 27, 2001) is an unusual movie star, because he did not play typical masculine heroes, but a great variety of everyman characters. He worked in the theatre and on television, before signing a 7-year contract with Columbia Pictures and being cast in his first film, It Should Happen to You (1954) by George Cukor, as a shy documentary filmmaker who falls in love with a girl (Judy Holliday) obsessed with seeing her name on billboards.

Olivia de Havilland was born in Tokyo on July 1, 1916, of British parents. Her father Walter was an attorney; her mother Lilian, an actress before her marriage, left her cheating husband and moved to California in 1919, with daughters Olivia and her younger sister Joan.

Before Capote, he was considered a character actor with a devoted but limited following. His scene-stealing roles in The Talented Mr.

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Maximilian Schell, the Swiss-Austrian actor who won a Golden Globe for his role in Judgment at Nuremberg (1962) and a second one in 1992 for the TV Movie Lenin, died last Saturday in Innsbruck, Austria. He was 83.

Having started acting in the theater, which remained a lifelong passion, Henry Fonda (born May 16, 1905, died August 12, 1982), nicknamed Hank, had a long and varied Hollywood career, spanning historical dramas like Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) by John Ford, comedies like The Lady Eve (1941) by Preston Sturges, westerns like My Darling Clementine (1946) by John Ford AND political thrillers like Fail Safe (1964) by Sidney Lumet.

A legendary icon of classic Hollywood cinema, Ruth Elizabeth Davis changed the spelling of her nickname, Betty, to Bette after Honoré de Balzac's La Cousine Bette. Born on April 5, 1908 in Lowell, Massachusetts, she had acted in Broadway plays before signing a contract with Warner Bros in 1932.