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- Jonathan Frid's career in drama began when he first "offered his soul" to the theater as a young boy at a preparatory school in Ontario, Canada. Following his graduation from McMaster University, he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) in the UK and later earned a Master's Degree in Directing from the Yale School of Drama.
He was a leading actor in English and Canadian repertory and went on to work in many of the most celebrated regional theaters in the United States, including the Williamstown Theatre Festival, the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, and the American Shakespeare Festival under the direction of John Houseman, performing with Katharine Hepburn in "Much Ado About Nothing".
Frid appeared in major roles on-and-off Broadway, in such productions as "Roar Like A Dove", "Murder in the Cathedral" and "Wait Until Dark". However, it was his portrayal of a complex, conflicted vampire on ABC-TV's daytime drama series Dark Shadows (1966) (he also had a cameo role in the motion picture House of Dark Shadows (1970)) which garnered him his greatest fame in the United States. Other film credits included co-starring roles in The Devil's Daughter (1973) (with Shelley Winters) and Seizure (1974) (Oliver Stone's directorial debut).
In 1986, Frid joined the Broadway production of "Arsenic and Old Lace" (co-starring with Jean Stapleton). He won critical acclaim for his villainous turn as the homicidal nephew and spent ten months with the play's national tour. That same year, Frid founded his own production company, "Clunes Associates", to create and tour a series of one-man readers' theater shows across North America. Frid continued to perform his one-man shows, now under the banner of "Charity Associates", to raise money for a variety of charities. Combining the arts of his voice and his zest for entertaining", as one critic put it. In June 2000, he returned to the traditional professional stage in the play "Mass Appeal" at the Stirling Festival Theatre in Stirling, Ontario. - Actor
- Producer
Born in Hamilton, Ontario, George Frederick Cooper attended Prince of Wales School and Central Collegiate. He became a police cadet but eventually headed to Toronto for acting jobs on the CBC. He went to Hollywood and landed contracts with Warner Bros and Universal Studios in the early 1960s. Warner initially gave him the stage name of Kyle Thomson in 1961, but he soon changed it to Jeff Cooper in order to use his own last name at least, there already being an actor named George Cooper. He played a cavalry soldier in 1966's "Duel at Diablo" with Garner and Poitier and a hippy in 1968's "The Impossible Years" with Niven, and was a biker in the first Billy Jack film, 1967's "The Born Losers." His biggest role was in 1972 when he starred as Kaliman the Incredible, one of South America's most popular comic book heroes. The film was made by a Mexican film studio and was an enormous hit in Mexico. Cooper also made films in Europe and Egypt, and in 1978, he starred in a martial arts feature called "Circle of Iron" with David Carradine and Christopher Lee. It was originally written by Bruce Lee, who had intended to star in it but abandoned the project shortly before his untimely death. To hedge his bets, Cooper got a real estate license but that same day, he landed the role of Dr. Simon Ellby on the TV show "Dallas." He never did sell a home. In 1995, he returned to Hamilton to care for his ailing mother. Wife Colette said he had become "a private person" since he returned to Hamilton and had mostly spent his final years in Hamilton learning how to play guitar, taking nature walks, working out at the downtown YMCA, and reading profusely. He was 82 at the time of his death.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Russell Arms played Chester Finley opposite Doris Day in "By the Light of the Silvery Moon" (Warner Bros. 1953). Chester, a nerd in love with Marjorie Winfield, Day's character, was Marjorie's piano teacher, a rival to Bill Sherman, played by Gordon MacRae. Arms, in 1953, was not yet a featured player on NBC-TV's "Your Hit Parade." He became one of the program's four regular singers in 1954.- Actor
- Stunts
- Soundtrack
Neil Hope was born on 24 September 1972 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was an actor, known for Degrassi High (1987), Degrassi: The Next Generation (2001) and The Kids of Degrassi Street (1979). He died on 25 November 2007 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.- Writer
- Actor
Terence Mervyn Rattigan was born in London on June 10, 1911, the son of a career diplomat and serial philanderer whose indiscretions resulted in his being cashiered by the Foreign Office. As a member of the lower upper-middle class in the inter-war period, the young Rattigan received a first-rate education at Harrow and Trinity College, Oxford. His was a privileged, intellectual background that is reflected in his plays. For a decade after the Second World War, he was one of England's leading playwrights, but the eruption of the "kitchen-sink" school of English drama in the mid-1950s scuttled his critical reputation.
Rattigan achieved his first success as a playwright at age 25 with the light comedy "French Without Tears" (1936), which was a smash in the West End. Determined to do more serious work, he wrote the satirical social drama "After the Dance" in 1939, which skewered the failure of the class of "Bright Young Things" to prevent another war. The advent of World War II truncated the play's run, but Rattigan would continue to taste sweet success for a full generation, alternating between comedies and dramas.
In the post-war period, he established himself as a major English dramatist with "The Winslow Boy", "The Browning Version", "The Deep Blue Sea", and "Separate Tables", all of which were made into successful motion pictures. A Rattigan play displayed keen craftsmanship and finely-structured plots; emotion was hidden in the best English middle-class tradition, but was lurking in the depths. The typical Rattigan play was a sympathetic, witty study of middle-class people in emotional distress. There was often a love triangle or a general conflict in which decent people found themselves embroiled. These characters sublimated their emotions and passions; the psychic cost of repression was a focus and theme of Rattigan's work.
Rattigan's themes were personal: the illogicality of love; the conflict between idealized love and love as realized in the here and now; the pain of lost promise; and the defeat of potential greatness by human weakness. The themes and leitmotifs in Rattigan's plays were found beneath the surface; nothing was worn on the sleeve. They were elucidated by the playwright's craft, through a well-constructed story and skillfully-observed characters.
According to Rattigan's biographer Geoffrey Wansell, he had learned how to mask his feelings from his father, whose multiple love affairs, carried on in secret behind his wife's back, appalled his son. Also, Terence was a homosexual in an era rife with anti-gay sentiment; the persecution of those suffering from what was once termed "inversion" was all too real.
Rattigan lived behind a mask (he was very discreet about his own same-sex affairs), as did the characters in his plays. Emotions were buried lest their display cause even more pain, or scandal. Wansell believes that his reticence stemmed from a deeply-rooted aversion to emotional engagement. "Behind the apparently carefree mask lived a man crying out to be loved and appreciated," Wansell wrote, "but a man who was also incapable of demonstrating that need."
For a run of almost five straight years in the 1940s, Rattigan had plays appearing simultaneously on the boards of three adjacent West End theaters. In 1956 the English stage was revolutionized by John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger," in which emotions were (in the parlance of a later generation) allowed to "all hang out." Overnight, Rattigan's dreams of emotional repression were deemed old-fashioned. Dramatists, directors, and actors who stuck with the old "well-crafted", more subtle paradigm of drama were also deemed "old-fashioned" and suffered a professional eclipse. (Laurence Olivier, who had starred in Rattigan plays and movies made from his work, kept himself relevant by offering himself to Osborne, who crafted "The Entertainer" for him. It would be many years before his contemporaries John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson would make it out of the woods, outside of Shakespeare, in terms of contemporary drama. They appeared together in Harold Pinter's "No Man's Land" 20 years after the changing of the guard).
"Look Back in Anger" was a cultural broadside against everything the Establishment represented, and Rattigan was very much part of that Establishment. In the introduction to his collected plays, published in 1959, Rattigan wrote of an archetypal playgoer, "Aunt Edna," whom he characterized as a "nice, respectable, middle-class, middle-aged maiden lady" to whom playwrights had to be responsive as she was the person who spent her money to go to the theater. What Rattigan was trying to say is that the theater must be responsive to its audience; to the new Turks, many of whom would later thrive in non-commercial, state-subsidized theater. Rattigan was a shameless old fart, pandering to the very class of people, the Aunt Ednas and the Miss Grundys, whom they despised and whose tastes, and the drama and comedies written to suit those tastes, debased the theater as an art form.
Rattigan's reputation declined and, overnight, his plays were derided by the critics. A very sensitive man who had a terrible fear of failure, Rattigan's confidence declined along with his critical reputation. He retaliated the new kitchen-sink school in interviews and via dialogue in his new plays, with the result that he underscored the new generation's contempt of him. Rattigan transformed himself into a caricature of the kind of playwright the new English theater was rebelling against: conservative, staid, old-fashioned, valuing craft above feeling, with no empathy for the modern world or for the majority of Britons. To them, he represented the complacency of a moribund Tory- and toff-dominated Britain that was no longer relevant after the Suez debacle of 1956.
Truthfully, among the post-1956 Rattigan plays are some of his finest work, including "Ross," "Man and Boy," and "Cause Celebre," but it didn't matter to the critics: he was considered hopelessly passé. Like the post- "The Night of the Iguana" Tennessee Williams, he was cruelly discarded as a contemporary artist of any relevance. He was a phantom of a past that vanished with Britain's world-power status after Suez.
Rattigan was first diagnosed with leukemia in 1962; it went into remission in 1964, but he suffered a relapse in 1968. Despising the "Mod" Britain of the 1960s, he moved to Bermuda. In that decade he supported himself by writing screenplays, and for a while he enjoyed the status as the world's highest-paid screenwriter. He was knighted in 1972 and moved back to England. His critical reputation saw a minor revival shortly before his death from cancer in 1977, and a major revival in the early 21st century after Karel Reisz staged a revival of "The Deep Blue Sea." Although he was never as successful in the United States as he was in Britain, Rattigan is increasingly being viewed in his homeland as one of the 20th century's finest playwrights.- John Dee was born on 12 April 1913 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA. He was an actor, known for Adventures in Babysitting (1987), The Ray Bradbury Theater (1985) and Read All About It! (1979). He died on 29 March 1994 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Fishka Rais was born in 1919 in South Africa. He was an actor, known for The Hilarious House of Frightenstein (1971), Moord in Kompartement 1001E (1961) and Cannibal Girls (1973). He was married to Olga Rais. He died on 17 February 1974 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.- Michael Ebbin was born on 5 June 1945 in Pembroke, Bermuda. He was an actor, known for Live and Let Die (1973). He died on 27 April 1996 in Hamilton, Bermuda.
- Aloysius Pang was born on 24 August 1990 in Singapore. He was an actor, known for C.L.I.F. (2011), Beijing to Moscow (2019) and C.L.I.F. 2 (2013). He died on 23 January 2019 in Hamilton, New Zealand.
- Bob Shreve was born on 16 July 1912 in Plymouth, Indiana, USA. He was an actor, known for The General Store (1952), 3 Stooges (1959) and A Million Laughs (1959). He was married to Mary Jane Keller. He died on 20 February 1990 in Hamilton County, Ohio, USA.
- Music Department
- Composer
- Soundtrack
Hagood Hardy was born on 26 February 1937 in Angola, Indiana, USA. He was a composer, known for Klondike Fever (1979), Avonlea (1990) and Anne of Green Gables (1985). He died on 1 January 1997 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.- George S. Patton IV was born on 24 December 1923 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He was married to Joanne Holbrook. He died on 27 June 2004 in Hamilton, Massachusetts, USA.
- Don Gibson was born on 25 March 1917 in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, USA. He was an actor, known for Lost Lagoon (1957), Saturday's Hero (1951) and Adventures of the Sea Hawk (1958). He died in October 1987 in Hamilton, Bermuda.
- Mike Sharpe was born on 28 October 1951 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He was an actor, known for WWF Championship Wrestling (1972), Spectrum Wrestling (1977) and WWF Prime Time Wrestling (1985). He died on 17 January 2016 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
- Don Keppy was born on 22 September 1928 in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. He was an actor, known for Head Office (1985), War of the Worlds (1988) and Hot Shots (1986). He died on 29 July 1998 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
- T3ehr was born on 17 September 2002. He was an actor, known for Lil Corn feat. T3ehr: Pain (2020), T3ehr: IDK (2020) and T3ehr: Changes (2021). He died on 15 February 2023 in Hamilton, Ohio, USA.
- Byron Robertson was born on 28 February 1939 in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. He was an actor, known for The Wrestlers: Land of a Thousand Dances (1985), WWF Prime Time Wrestling (1985) and Mister Universe (1951). He died on 16 August 2007 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
- Andy Stocks was born on 5 February 1942 in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. He was an actor, known for The Kids of Degrassi Street (1979) and Degrassi High (1987). He died on 19 March 2023 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
- Peter Grant was born on 13 December 1906 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He died on 10 December 1990 in Silverton, Hamilton County, Ohio, USA.
- Igor Ledogorov was born on 9 May 1932 in Moscow, RSFSR, USSR [now Russia]. He was an actor, known for To the Stars by Hard Ways (1981), Shestvie zolotykh zverey (1979) and Sezon okhoty (1997). He died on 10 February 2005 in Hamilton, Waikato, New Zealand.
- Make-Up Department
- Actress
- Costume Designer
Leighann Brokaw was born on 1 October 1985 in Hopewell, New Jersey, USA. She was an actress and costume designer, known for Gut (2012), The Bucks County Massacre (2010) and Nar-co-lap-sy (2009). She was married to David Ottaunick. She died on 6 January 2017 in Hamilton, New Jersey, USA.- Lincoln Alexander served in the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II. He was the first Black Canadian to be elected to the House of Commons in 1968. He was named Federal Minister of Labour in 1979. In 1985 he was named as Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, a position he held until 1991.
He currently serves as Chancellor of the University of Guelph, the Alma Mater of Andromeda star Laura Bertram. - Hyman Ullman was born in Cincinnati, Hamilton County, Ohio, USA. He was the founder of Rink's Bargain City, a local discount department store, and acted as host as well as sponsor for several local TV shows in the early 1960's. As co-host of Shock Theatre on Channel 9 on Fridays at 11:30pm.
He passed away on 3 January 2007 in Cincinnati, Hamilton County, Ohio, USA.
Ullner was the beloved husband of the late Geraldine Ullner, devoted father of Donna Ullner and Richard Ullner, dear brother of Sarah Schwartz, Barbara Baral, Ruth Sacolick and the late Dorothy Moss, Meyer Ullner and Coleman Ullner, loving grandfather of David and Karen Swolsky, Jason and Danielle Ullner, Jamie Ullner, Amy Lewis and Juli and Adam Swolsky, great grandfather of Jessica, Ryan, Morgan, Ben, Jacob, Caroline, Elizabeth and Katherine Swolsky and Walker Lewis, also survived by many loving nieces and nephews. - Camera and Electrical Department
- Cinematographer
- Additional Crew
Paul Mockler was born on 3 September 1944 in Canada. He was a cinematographer, known for Phoenix Blue (2001), Zeus and Roxanne (1997) and The Beachcombers (1972). He died on 18 September 2020 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.- Madeline Kronby was an actress, known for A Cool Sound from Hell (1959), The Unforeseen (1958) and Seaway (1965). She died on 14 February 2004 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.