Born Today January 16: Irène Bordoni

 

1895 (2 sources cite 1885)-1953

 

Stage and screen actress, musical performer and Broadway fixture Irène Bordoni was born Ajaccio (Aiacciu in Corsican), Corsica, France on this day. She started acting and performing as a child in mainland France, where debuted on the stage age of ten.  We know her motion picture debut came opposite one of France's most well known dancers Stacia Napierkowska in the short film Pierrot aime les roses in 1910.  She appeared in three more short films in 1912, two of which also starred Napierkowska, while the last of them--Le club des élégants--featured star of the Paris stage André Brulé.  All four of these films were Pathé Frères productions, and all four were directed by René Leprince.  She was thereafter signed with Paris impresario André Charlot--famed for his musical revues in the capital--as her agent in 1914. She appeared in just two more films in her French stage days: Le secret du Châtelain in 1914 and Le traquenard in 1915.  Both films were directed by Paul Garbagni. This is where things get confusing. One source list her as actually born in 1885, claiming that she had traveled to the United States in 1907 at age 22...this doesn't square with her film timeline in France. But her Internet Broadway Database page also lists that year as her birth. We do know that she had been acting since childhood and that she did appear in the above French films, but since none of them have survived to screen, no one is sure at this time if she was a teenager or a young adult when she made her screen debut...it might be hard to tell in any case, as Bordoni always had a youthful look, and stuck with signature bangs hair-style all of her life. Not helping matter is that her grave marker only lists the year of her death. Her Broadway career starting in the 1910's and 1920's is much easier to assess thankfully. She was very much a success and became a popular singer as well. She first worked with the famous Shubert Brothers and actually "introduced" or debuted a number of famous songs on Broadway, including numbers by Gershwin and Cole Porter. She did not, however, appear in any American silent films. She did not make her U.S. film debut until the coming of sound when she appeared Warner Bros. revue extravaganza Show of Shows (1929) in a song performance accompanied just by a piano. She quickly signed on to star in Paris, a musical film based on a Cole Porter stage musical that she had made a hit on Broadway. The film was directed by Clarence Badger and featured Zasu Pitts and Jason Robards Sr. and released on the 7th of November of 1929; it utilized the Vitagraph sound system and was shot in one of the early technicolor processes in major portions; it is also believed lost (soundtrack survives and tape reels of the sound are preserved at UCLA). Her presence in film failed to fire off the spark that she and producers were hoping for, so despite buying a home that she kept in California, she returned to Broadway, where she continued to please audiences.  She did have quite the career on radio, making guest appearances to sing--and was a favorite on The RKO Hour. She did occasionally make the odd appearance in a film, the most significant of which was Louisiana Purchase, a Bob Hope film from 1941 which was again based on a Broadway hit that she herself starred in. She even made one appearance in a television series reprising that same role in an episode of Musical Comedy Time in their episode Louisiana Purchase, which aired live on the 22nd of January in 1951. It would be her last time in front of cameras. Bordoni succumbed to cancer just two years later on the 19th of March. Most sources cite her age at death as 58; goes without saying that she may have actually been 68.  In any case, she was laid to rest at Ferncliff in Hartsdale, New York.  Bordoni was known for her fashions both on stage and off and was an extremely extroverted person...so she made sure everyone knew have marvelous she was, always.

 

[Source: Elliott (Find a Grave)]

 

 

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Wikipedia 

Find a Grave entry 

 

Born Today June 9 (Not So Silent Edition): Cole Porter

1891-1964

Master American songster of the 1920's & 30's, Cole Porter was born on this day in Indiana.  Cole Albert Porter (his first name being his mother's maiden surname) was born to a wealthy family in Peru--his mother an heiress of sorts (the daughter of a coal baron) and a pharmacist father (who was also a "lay poet").  His mother was "over-attentive" and saw to it that her only surviving child got music training very early.  He reportedly had mastered the violin by the age of six.  His mastery of the instrument that became his life's companion and key to success--the piano--was said to have been more or less complete by the age of 8.  He was also said to have composed his first song by the age of 10.  [Note: all of this is a bit hard to pin down, because he mother would tell people that Cole was actually born in 1893--his small stature allowing easily for this--to make his talent seem...shall we say more Mozart like?] His rather loud, nouveau riche grandfather insisted that he study the law and become a lawyer, but he was a genuine talent, even genius lay in music; and his early exposure to it only heightened his love for it.  Though sent back east to study in a private high school with that career in mind, he took an upright piano (read "portable piano") with him to school, and soon found himself entertaining fellow students with the instrument.  Despite all of this, he did manage to graduate Valedictorian--he eventually wound up at Yale with, amongst other things, a minor in music.  This is where things began to take shape for him as a career path as a successful song writer and musical author became clearer.  He reportedly wrote something close to 300 songs while at the university.  It was also during this time that he became very enamored with the night life of busy New York City and it's vibrant theaters.  After obtaining his B.A. from Yale, he promptly enrolled in Harvard Law school; the year by this time was 1913 and he had already composed several musical comedy fancies that would become amongst his first recognizable works.  He was not, of course, cut out to be a lawyer and it was suggested to him that he enroll at the Music school instead.  He studied at Harvard in these two disciplines from 1913 through 1916.  In 1915 he made his Broadway debut; or rather one of his songs did: the tune being "Esmeralda."  He then piled head-long into his first full Broadway musical in 1916 See America First, modeled after Gilbert & Sullivan (sounds fun!), but the production was a complete failure.  Of course, the very next year, the U.S. entered World War I and this would ultimately provide Porter with the opportunity to spread his musical wings abroad and escape from family pressures at home.  I'm not going to try to untangle what might be his service during the war, I'll leave to historians, but he did wind up moving to Paris and after the war, the move afforded him the opportunity to study music in Paris.  He then began to find the success in Europe that would mark his passage through the 1920's.  He married a divorcee 8 years his senior who was aware that he was actually gay.  With the marriage came extravagance that is hard to comprehend, even from detailed description!  Throughout the 1920's the couple through wild parties and lived in palaces from France to Venice, and his success in popular song writing flourished, despite his wife attempting to steer him toward "classical music." Turns out, many of Porter's compositions dating from this time are actually early forms of symphonic jazz, so he does get compositional credit being an one it's inventors.  By the late 1920's, he was ready to return to Broadway.  And so he did in 1928 with a big success in Paris (read up on it here).  This brings me to the movies.  The following year, a film of the musical was produced by First National Picture and distributed by parent company Warner Brothers.  Paris the film starred Irène Bordoni, who was both the star of the Broadway production and married to E. Ray Goetz who commissioned the thing for her to begin with.  The film sported Vitaphone sound and two sequences in "two-strip" technicolor; despite all of this, it did not do well and didn't get particularly good reviews.  The two color sequences were set aside for the strongest criticism in several publications who complained (independent of each other) that they detracted from the story, were too long, and the color used was inferior to other musicals from the same year that had the same process applied to scenes (my, my (!) people do get spoiled quickly). [It is unfortunate that the film is lost to us (as of this writing); as it would provide at least entertaining quench for curiosity, not least which because it the first sound film of Bordoni's and her first film appearance since the teens.]  Also in 1929, the film Battle of Paris was produced by Paramount and directed by Robert Florey, and used several of his songs in the production; it marks the first time that a film used just his songs in featured sections of the film.  The next time his songs were used in such a capacity came in 1931 in 50 Million Frenchmen.  Porter continued to have wild success in the theater throughout all of the 1930's, right up to the start of World War II. However, a horrific horse riding accident in 1937 would leave him in life-long pain and effectively crippled.  This would go, along with the war, a long way toward contributing to his lack of productivity personally and his waning popularity publicly.  During the war, he spent time writing some absolutely brilliant film music directly for film productions, but the songs did not become individually popular the way his earlier works had. However in 1946, a dressed up and smart (but highly fictionalized) biopic of his life Night and Day starring Cary Grant and directed by Michael Curtiz was a big success, despite Grant's towering height next to Porter's. He also had a big hit with Kiss Me Kate in 1948.  The 1950's were not kind to Porter, who lost his mother and wife two years apart in 1952 and 1954 (neverminding his sexual orientation, he had been devoted to his wife throughout their marriage).  He then lost one of his legs in 1958 and despite his good friend Noël Coward's prediction that the amputation would relieve his extreme pain and thus facilitate his return to song writing, it was not meant to be.  He lived the rest of his life as a recluse in his three residences, seeing only the closest of friends.  Porter eventually succumbed to kidney failure at the age of 73 on the 15th of October in Santa Monica, California.  He was buried in Peru, Indiana in the family plot at Mount Hope Cemetery (his wife, parents and grandfather are all buried there as well).  He remains one of the 20th century's most prolific "near-classical" song writers; and to date some 800+ films and series have featured his music.  The most recent credit comes from the Brazilian series Apocalipse (with announced title Darker Than You Think slated to featured two of his songs, one of which is "Night and Day").  

Wikipedia

IMDb

Songwriters Hall of Fame

New York Times Obit

An interesting bit from NPR Music

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Born Today December 31: Jason Robards Sr.

1892-1963

Jason Nelson Robards, who would later be known as Jason Robards Sr. due his son's fame from is own acting career eclipsing him, was born on New Year's Eve in Hillsdale, Michigan.  His parents were prominent in their mid-western community (his father a post-master and mother a schoolteacher).  Like so many other actors of the time, he started his career on the stage and gained some considerable fame, having trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York, before being lured into acting in films.  He was a well known Broadway player prior to this, and had a regular appearance in one long running hit in the 1910's and early 1920's.  His film debut came in 1921 with The Gilded Lilly a Famous Players melodrama about a Broadway cabaret actress played by Mae Murray (a print of the film apparently turned up sometime in 2009 or 2010 in Argentina).  Robards appeared in one more film in 1921, The Land Of Hope, before absconding back to the stage.  He wouldn't appear in another film until 1925 when he showed up in the Universal picture Stella Maris (UCLA apparently has a print in their vaults).  It would be his only film appearance in that year. In 1926, his film appearances became much more frequent and would only increase in subsequent years. Beginning with the comedy The Cohens and Kellys, he appeared in more than 20 films, most of them feature length affairs, before the end of the decade.  If my research is correct, the first talking film that he appeared in was the early 1928 Vitaphone short The Death Ship.  The fact that he was well known for his role John Marvin in the Broadway musical staple Turn To The Right, must have made him a likely candidate as an actor for producer and directors looking to make films with sounded speaking roles in the late 1920's.  After The Death Ship, he was in a number of partial silents and full early talkies in 1928 and 1929.  He has, for example, third billing in Michael Curtiz's 1929 The Gamblers (one of the several Curtiz 1920's films from the US that is presumed lost), which was one of Warner Bros. late 20's sound/partial sound vitaphone productions. [Robards had already worked on a Curtiz picture in 1926 in The Third Degree, along side Dolores Costello and Rockcliffe Fellowes {what a name!}.]  Being a man of the musical stage, it was only a matter of time before he was set up in a musical film. This happened in late 1929 with his role as Andrew Sabbot in First National's filmed version of the popular Broadway contemporary musical Paris.  Needless to say, Robards had no trouble with the coming of full talkies in the 1930's; he acted in no less than 8 films in 1930 alone (one of which was the white hot mess that is D.W. Griffith's first sound film Abraham Lincoln).  A stand-out appearance comes in, along with the first William Holden, the 1931 Warner Oland Charlie Chan film Charlie Chan Carries On.  His film work in the roughly twenty year time span between 1930 and 1950 is copious, though by the late 1940's a number of his roles were small and uncredited.  He has small parts in two Val Lewtan productions with Boris Karloff: Isle Of The Dead and Bedlam.  He shows up in a couple of Dick Tracy films (including my favorite Dick Tracy vs. Cueball), makes an appearance in the Cary Grant film Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House; and in 1945, he shows up in the Wally Brown comedy horror Zombies on Broadway as the headwaiter (of course, the film also HAS to have Bela Lugosi as the "zombie maker.").  He then went into semi-retirement in 1950 after appearing in The Second Woman, due to an eye complaint.  After surgery to remove cataracts that nearly blinded him, he made his television debut as a judge in a episode of Broken Arrow in 1958.  He would go on to appear in such shows as Wagon Train, Leave It To Beaver, and Cimarron City.  His last acting appearance came on The Adventures Of Ozzie and Harriet in the episode "Secret Agent" in 1963, the year of his death.  Robards died of a heart attack in his home in Sherman Oaks on the 4th of April.  He is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale

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