The beautiful and poised actress Grace Kelly lived a fairytale life with an enviable movie career during the Golden Age of Hollywood that led her to meet her prince charming, have a storybook wedding, and become a real-life princess. Thanks to a trip to the 1955 Cannes Film Festival and a fellow Hollywood actress’s matchmaking…
Hollywood Girl Fights: Celebrity Rivalries
In Tinseltown filled with beautiful women with stellar egos, there was bound to be jealousy and infighting. During the Golden Age of Hollywood, there were plenty of love triangles, professional rivalries, and petty jealousies that became fodder for newspapers and tabloids. Here are a few of the most notable Hollywood girl fights. Jayne Mansfield and…
Eleanor Powell: MGM’s Queen of Tap
According to insider talk, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was in danger of bankruptcy as the 1930s were drawing to a close, but the studio was saved thanks in part to the tap-dancing talents of Eleanor Powell, one of the greatest dancers of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Powell’s performance in Broadway Melody of 1936, her first starring role, was such…
Yul Brynner, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s King
With his iconic bald head and rich singing voice, actor Yul Brynner made a splash as the exotic King Mongkut in the Broadway stage performance and film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical, The King and I. Brynner was not the typical leading man of the Golden Age of Hollywood, but he proved that it…
Lucille Ball’s Early Hollywood Film Career
Before she was the zany red-headed sitcom star of the 1950s and 1960s, actress Lucille Ball appeared on the Broadway stage and on radio, but it took a while for Ball to get her Hollywood movie career off the ground. And almost as soon as it did, she transitioned to television. During the 1930s and…