:09:04
Born in Sicily, he'd studied music
and knew how to conduct.
:09:07
He had played the orchestra conductor
in the MacDonald/Eddy film Maytime,
:09:11
but Italian head waiters,
monks, priests and gangsters -
:09:15
often with names like Luigi,
Vito and Giuseppe-were his forte.
:09:19
But he was a utility ethnic,
also versed at playing Greeks, Mexicans,
:09:23
Syrians, Arabs and Javanese.
:09:26
Perhaps that's the secret to working
steadily for 55 years in Hollywood.
:09:31
Susanna Foster's father
was ruined by the Depression.
:09:34
Born Susanne Larson in Chicago,
she remembers being very poor
:09:38
and her mother making
her clothes out of blankets.
:09:40
Her father played the violin
and her mother read her Shakespeare.
:09:44
Susanne, as she was then called,
was a natural talent, but untrained.
:09:48
Her first idol was Bebe Daniels,
then she discovered Jeanette MacDonald.
:09:52
Susanne remembers,
at age five in Minneapolis,
:09:55
seeing The Love Parade over and over.
Her mother was a classic stage mother,
:09:59
and soon she was appearing on local
theatre stages displaying her voice.
:10:03
A recording got to William Goetz at MGM,
and a contract followed.
:10:09
Louis B Mayer wanted Susanne to play
the lead in National Velvet in the 1930s.
:10:14
Ever wilful, she refused.
:10:16
Claude Rains, too, grew up
in extreme poverty, in London.
:10:19
"Born on the wrong side of the River
Thames" he'd tell his daughter, Jessica.
:10:23
The theatre provided his way out.
:10:25
The famous actor-manager
Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree
:10:28
paid for young Willy Rains
to take speech lessons,
:10:31
giving the lisping cockney boy
one year to lose the accent. He did.
:10:36
The velvety husk of his voice
was inadvertent -
:10:38
a result, Rains claimed,
of being gassed in World War I.
:10:41
That voice was his most notable asset.
:10:44
Rains is an actor
whom one would pay big money
:10:47
to hear recite
the Manhattan phone book.
:10:53
Following The Invisible Man, Rains
became the consummate character actor,
:10:58
making his home at Warner Brothers with
work like The Adventures of Robin Hood,