Actresses

Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the only child of Gertrud "Trude" Kiesler (née Lichtwitz; 1894–1977) and Emil Kiesler (1880–1935). Her father was born to a Galician-Jewish family in Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine) and was a successful bank director.[12] Her mother, Trude, a pianist and Budapest native, had come from an upper-class Hungarian-Jewish family. She converted to Catholicism and raised her daughter Hedy as a Christian as well. As a child, Lamarr showed an interest in acting and was fascinated by theatre and film. At the age of 12, she won a beauty contest in Vienna. Lamarr helped get her mother out of Austria a…

Maureen O'Hara (born Maureen FitzSimons; 17 August 1920 – 24 October 2015) was an Irish and American actress and singer. O'Hara was a famous redhead who was known for playing fiercely passionate but sensible heroines, often in westerns and adventure films. On numerous occasions, she worked with director John Ford and longtime friend John Wayne. O'Hara was one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood. O'Hara grew up in Dublin in a Catholic family and aspired to become an actress from a very young age. She trained with the Rathmines Theatre Company from the age of 10 and at the Abbey Theatre from the age of 14. She was given a screen test, which was…

Born Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland on October 22, 1917, in Tokyo, Japan, in what was known as the International Settlement. Her father was a British patent attorney with a lucrative practice in Japan, but due to Joan and older sister Olivia de Havilland's recurring ailments the family moved to California in the hopes of improving their health. Mrs. de Havilland and the two girls settled in Saratoga while their father went back to his practice in Japan. Joan's parents did not get along well and divorced soon afterward. Mrs. de Havilland had a desire to be an actress but her dreams were curtailed when she married, but now she hoped to pass on her dream to Olivia and Joan. W…

Louise was born on January 9, 1915, in New York City,[1] the daughter of Louis Fremault and Ann Fremault.[2] She attended the Professional Children's School.[3] She made her acting debut on Broadway at the age of seven, in Peter Ibbetson.[4] Within a year she was appearing regularly in Hollywood films. By her late teens, she was being cast in leading and supporting roles in major productions, and was highly regarded for her delicate features and blonde hair.[citation needed] At age seven, Louise appeared in the film Down to the Sea in Ships (1922).[5] She made her first credited screen debut at the age of nine in the film The Sixth Commandment (1924). In 1929, L…

Muazana "Ana" Golja is a Canadian actress and singer. She is known for playing Zoë Rivas in the teen drama Degrassi: Next Class and Ariana Berlin in the TV movie Full Out. Born: January 31, 1996, Mississauga, Canada ''The Fanatic'' premiere, Los Angeles, Aug 22 '19

Guan Xiao Tong Height: 172 cm Weight: 49 kg Birth Year: 1997 Nationality: Chinese

Marion Cecelia Douras was born in the borough of Brooklyn, New York on January 3, 1897. She had been bitten by the show biz bug early as she watched her sisters perform in local stage productions. She wanted to do the same. As Marion got older, she tried out for various school plays and did fairly well. Once her formal education had ended, Marion began her career as a chorus girl in New York City and eventually found herself in the famed Ziegfeld Follies. But she wanted more than to dance. Acting, to Marion, was the epitome of show business and aimed her sights in that direction. Her first film was Runaway Romany (1917) when she was 20. Written by Marion and directed by h…

eronica Lake was born as Constance Frances Marie Ockleman on November 14, 1922, in Brooklyn, New York. She was the daughter of Constance Charlotta (Trimble) and Harry Eugene Ockelman, who worked for an oil company as a ship employee. Her father was of half German and half Irish descent, and her mother was of Irish ancestry. While still a child, Veronica's parents moved to Florida when she was not quite a year old. By the time she was five, the family had returned to Brooklyn. When Connie was only twelve, tragedy struck when her father died in an explosion on an oil ship. One year later her mother married Anthony Keane and Connie took his last name as her own. In 1934, whe…

Candice Patricia Bergen (born May 9, 1946) is an American actress and former fashion model. She won five Emmy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards for her eleven seasons as the title character on the CBS sitcom Murphy Brown (1988–98, 2018). She is also known for her role as Shirley Schmidt on the ABC drama Boston Legal (2005–08). She was nominated for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Starting Over (1979), and for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Gandhi (1982). Bergen began her career as a fashion model and appeared on the front cover of Vogue before she made her screen debut in the 1966 film The Group. She went on to star in The Sand P…

Barbara Stanwyck (born Ruby Catherine Stevens; July 16, 1907 – January 20, 1990) was an American actress, model, and dancer. Starting as a Ziegfeld girl in the 1920s, she was a film and television star, known during her 60-year career as a consummate and versatile professional for a strong, realistic screen presence. A favorite of directors including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang and Frank Capra, she made 85 films in 38 years in Hollywood before turning to television. By 1944, Stanwyck had become the highest-paid woman in the United States. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress four times – for Stella Dallas (1937), Ball of Fire (1941), Double Indemn…

Angela Yeung Wing (Angelababy) Birth Year: 1989 Height: 167 cm Weight: 47kg Measurements: 81-58-86 Nationality: Chinese (Hong Konger)

Demure British beauty Jean Simmons was born January 31, 1929 in Crouch End, London. As a 14-year-old dance student, she was plucked from her school to play Margaret Lockwood's precocious sister in Give Us the Moon (1944), and she went on to make a name for herself in such major British productions as Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), Great Expectations (1946) (as the spoiled, selfish Estella), Black Narcissus (1947) (as a sultry native beauty), Hamlet (1948) (playing Ophelia to Laurence Olivier's great Dane and earning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination), The Blue Lagoon (1949) and So Long at the Fair (1950), among others. In 1950, she married actor Stewart Grange…

Olivia Mary de Havilland was born July 1, 1916, in Tokyo, Japan, to British parents Lilian Augusta (Ruse), a former actress, and Walter Augustus de Havilland, an English professor and patent attorney. Her sister, Joan, later to become famous as Joan Fontaine, was born the following year. Her surname comes from her paternal grandfather, whose family was from Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Her parents divorced when Olivia was just three years old, and she moved with her mother and sister to Saratoga, California. After graduating from high school, where she fell prey to the acting bug, Olivia enrolled in Mills College in Oakland. It was while she was at Mills that she part…

Bo She won a beauty contest at age fourteen. In 1920 her mother, Edith Shearer, took Norma and her sister Athole Shearer (Mrs. Howard Hawks) to New York. Ziegfeld rejected her for his "Follies," but she got work as an extra in several movies. She spent much money on eye doctor's services trying to correct her cross-eyed stare caused by a muscle weakness. Irving Thalberg had seen her early acting efforts and, when he joined Louis B. Mayer in 1923, gave her a five year contract. He thought she should retire after their marriage, but she wanted bigger parts. In 1927, she insisted on firing the director Viktor Tourjansky because he was unsure of her cross-eyed stare. Her firs…

Loretta Young was born Gretchen Young in Salt Lake City, Utah on January 6, 1913, to Gladys (Royal) and John Earle Young. Her parents separated when Loretta was three years old. Her mother moved Loretta and her two older sisters to Southern California, where Mrs. Young ran a boarding house. When Loretta was 10, her mother married one of her boarders, George Belzer. They had a daughter, Georgianna, two years later. Loretta was appearing on screen as a child extra by the time she was four, joining her elder sisters, Polly Ann Young and Elizabeth Jane Young (later better known as Sally Blane), as child players. Mrs. Young's brother-in-law was an assistant director and g…

Jeanette Anna MacDonald (June 18, 1903 – January 14, 1965) was an American singer and actress best remembered for her musical films of the 1930s with Maurice Chevalier (The Love Parade, Love Me Tonight, The Merry Widow and One Hour With You) and Nelson Eddy (Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, and Maytime). During the 1930s and 1940s she starred in 29 feature films, four nominated for Best Picture Oscars (The Love Parade, One Hour with You, Naughty Marietta and San Francisco), and recorded extensively, earning three gold records. She later appeared in opera, concerts, radio, and television. MacDonald was one of the most influential sopranos of the 20th century, introducing oper…

Phoebe Mary Waller-Bridge is an English actress and writer. She created, wrote, and starred in the BBC comedy-drama series Fleabag, and developed and writes the BBC America thriller series Killing Eve, on which she also served as the showrunner for the first season. Born: July 14, 1985, Ealing, London, UK The Hollywood Reporter Magazine, Aug 14 '19 Frank W. Ockenfels III photos

Kerstin Anita Marianne Ekberg was born on September 29, 1931 in Malmo, Sweden. Growing up with seven brothers and sisters was not an adventure, but Anita's adventure began when she was elected Miss Sweden in 1950. She did not win the Miss Universe contest but she got a modeling contract in the United States. She quickly got a film contract with Howard Hughes's RKO that did not lead anywhere (but Anita herself has said that Hughes wanted to marry her). Instead, she started making movies with Universal, small roles that more often than not only required her to look beautiful. After five years in Hollywood, she found herself in Rome, where Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1…

Anna May Wong was born Wong Liu Tsong on January 3, 1905, in Los Angeles, California. Her parents ran a laundry in the city's Chinatown section. Anna became a photographer's model when she was still attending Hollywood High School. She was fascinated with the movie industry at a young age, having observed several films being shot in and around her neighborhood. At almost 14 years old, her actor cousin, James Wong Howe, showed a photograph of her to a director, which resulted in her getting a bit part in Dinty (1920) (unfortunately for film buffs, there are no prints of the movie in existence, because of deterioration). The next year she appeared in two more films, Shame (…

She was born Vina Fay Wray near Cardston, Alberta, Canada, on September 15, 1907. Fay was from a large family that included five siblings. She moved to Arizona when she was still small in order for her father to find better work than what was offered in Alberta. After moving again to California, her parents divorced, which put the rest of the family in hard times. Being in entertainment-rich Los Angeles, there was ample opportunity to take advantage of the chances that might come her way in the entertainment industry. At the age of 16, Fay played her first role in a motion picture, albeit a small one. The film was Gasoline Love (1923) in 1923. The film was not a hit, nor …

Gloria Swanson was born on March 27, 1899 in Chicago, Illinois, USA as Gloria May Josephine Svensson in Chicago, Illinois. She was destined to be perhaps one of the biggest stars of the silent movie era. Her personality and antics in private definitely made her a favorite with America's movie-going public. Gloria certainly didn't intend on going into show business. After her formal education in the Chicago school system and elsewhere, she began work in a department store as a salesclerk. In 1915, at the age of 18, she decided to go to a Chicago movie studio with an aunt to see how motion pictures were made. She was plucked out of the crowd, because of her beauty, to be…

Susan Hayward was born Edythe Marrener in Brooklyn, New York, on June 30, 1917. Her father was a transportation worker, and Susan lived a fairly comfortable life as a child, but the precocious little redhead had no idea of the life that awaited her. She attended public school in Brooklyn, where she graduated from a commercial high school that was intended to give students a marketable skill. She had planned on becoming a secretary, but her plans changed. She started doing some modeling work for photographers in the NYC area. By 1937, her beauty in full bloom, she went to Hollywood when the nationwide search was on for someone to play the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Margare…

Shirley MacLaine was born Shirley MacLean Beaty in Richmond, Virginia. Her mother, Kathlyn Corinne (MacLean), was a drama teacher from Nova Scotia, Canada, and her father, Ira Owens Beaty, a professor of psychology and real estate agent, was from Virginia. Her brother, Warren Beatty, was born on March 30, 1937. Her ancestry includes English and Scottish. Shirley was the tallest in her ballet classes at the Washington School of Ballet. Just after she graduated from Washington-Lee High School, she packed her bags and headed for New York. While auditioning for Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's "Me and Juliet", the producer kept mispronouncing her name. She then…

Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson was born in India on February 19, 1911. She was educated in that country until the age of 17, when she left for London. Merle began her career in British films with mostly forgettable roles or bit parts. She appeared in an uncredited role in Alf's Button (1930), a pattern that would unfortunately repeat itself regularly over the next three years. However, movie moguls eventually saw an an untapped talent in their midst and began grooming Merle for something bigger. Finally she landed a part with substance: the role of Ysobel d'Aunay in Men of Tomorrow (1932). That was quickly followed by The Private Life of Henry VIII. (1933). After her port…