White Christmas

May Peace be your gift
at
Christmas
And your Blessing all year through!

Bing Crosby & Frank Sinatra
Singing "White Christmas"
Merry Christmas to all.

Laurence Olivier

Laurence Olivier (1907-1989), English actor, producer, and director, noted as one of the most accomplished actors of the 20th century.
Laurence Kerr Olivier was born in Dorking, Surrey, in 1907. Nine years later he made his first stage appearances in amateur performances of plays by English poet and playwright William Shakespeare.
Olivier made his professional debut at Letchworth in 1925. He was a member of the Birmingham Repertory Company from 1926 to 1928.
Olivier made his American theatrical debut in a short-lived melodrama in New York City in 1929. In 1930 and 1931 he appeared in Private Lives, by English playwright Noel Coward, in both London and New York City. In 1937 and 1938 he was a member of the Old Vic Shakespearean repertory company in London.
Olivier was codirector of the Old Vic company from 1944 to 1949; in 1946 he appeared triumphantly with the company in the United States. In the theater Olivier played classical roles ranging from Greek tragedy to Restoration comedy; he also appeared in various contemporary plays.
In 1939 Olivier made his first important film, Wuthering Heights. In 1946 a film version of Shakespeare's Henry V was released; produced, directed by, and starring Olivier, it became a film classic.
He produced, directed, and starred in other film versions of Shakespeare plays, including Hamlet (1948), for which he received Academy Awards for best actor, best director, and best picture of the year; Richard III (1956); and Othello (1965).
Olivier appeared in a wide variety of roles during his film career. Some of his other movies included Rebecca (1940), The Entertainer (1960), Sleuth (1972), Marathon Man (1976), and The Boys from Brazil (1978).
He received Oscar nominations for all five. He won further acclaim for his television performances, playing the role of Lord Marchmain in the Masterpiece Theatre presentation of Brideshead Revisited (1981) and the title role in a production of King Lear (1983).
A theatrical producer and director as well as actor, Olivier was head of the National Theatre of the United Kingdom from 1962 until 1973. He was knighted in 1947 as Baron Olivier in 1970.
After his marriage to actress Vivien Leigh ended in divorce, he married the actress Joan Plowright. Olivier wrote several books, including Confessions of an Actor (1982) and On Acting (1986).

Ida Lupino

Actress, screenwriter, director. Born on February 4, 1918, in London, England to a show buisness family. Ida Lupino was a popular actress of the 1930s and 1940s as well as a brave, pioneering filmmaker.
Acting ran in her family. Her father was comedian Stanley Lupino and her mother was actress Connie Emerald. A serious performer, she trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London before getting her first big break.
After her film debut in Her First Affair (1932), Ida Lupino got a contract with Paramount. One of her most notable works from this period is the musical Anything Goes (1935) with Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman. Changing over to Warner Brothers in 1939 led to more substantial dramatic fare. Lupino earned high marks from critics for her turn in The Light That Failed (1939) based on the Rudyard Kipling novel.
She also appeared in the crime thriller High Sierra (1941) opposite Humphrey Bogart and The Hard Way (1943), which earned the Best Actress award from the New York Film Critics.
Ida Lupino formed her own film company with Anson Bond called Emerald Productions in 1949, and created films that tackled controversial social themes, such as Not Wanted (1949), which she also directed and wrote.
The film explored the plight of an unwed mother. Other films addressed bigamy and rape. While her films were disregarded at the time, Lupino has come to be seen as one of Hollywood’s pioneering female directors.
After battling cancer, Ida died on August 3, 1995, in Burbank, California.

Charles Chaplin

Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, Jr. (born April 16, 1889; London – died December 25, 1977; Switzerland), better known as Charlie Chaplin, was an English comedy actor, becoming one of the most famous performers in the early to mid Hollywood cinema era, and also a notable director.
He is considered to be one of the finest mimes and clowns caught on film and his influence on performers in both fields is great. Chaplin was one of the most creative and influential personalities in the silent film era: he acted in, directed, scripted, produced, and eventually even scored his own films.
His working life in entertainment spanned over 70 years, from the British Victorian stage and music hall in England as a child performer, almost until his death at the age of 88. He led one of the most remarkable and colorful lives of the 20th century, from a Dickensian London childhood to the pinnacle of world fame in the film industry and as a cultural icon.
His principal character was "The Tramp" (known as "Charlot" in France and Spain): a vagrant with the refined manners and dignity of a gentleman who wears a tight coat, oversized trousers and shoes, a bowler hat, carries a bamboo cane, and has a signature toothbrush moustache.
Chaplin's high-profile public and private life encompassed highs and lows of both adulation and controversy. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Chaplin among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time, ranking at No. 10.
He was also named Knight Commander of the British Empire in 1975.

Ginger Rogers

Ginger Rogers (1911-1995), American motion-picture actor, singer, and dancer, best remembered for her graceful ballroom dancing as the partner of Fred Astaire in classic musical comedies of the 1930s. Born Virginia Katherine McMath in Independence, Missouri, she began dancing professionally at the age of 14 and toured the vaudeville circuit until 1929, when she was cast as the second lead in the popular Broadway musical Top Speed.
She began her film career while still starring on the New York City stage and in 1931 went to Hollywood, where she shot a series of minor comedies and dramas for the Pathé, Paramount, and Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) studios.
Rogers was first matched with Astaire in the 1933 film Flying Down to Rio. Although they danced together in only one scene, their elegance, agility, and obvious chemistry stole the show. Subsequently, RKO paired them in vehicles of their own, including the legendary musicals Top Hat (1935), Swing Time (1936), and Follow The Fleet (1936). Their ten feature films together perfectly exemplified the refined and light-hearted charm of Hollywood’s so-called Golden Age (from about 1920 to about 1950).
Astaire was considered the better dancer of the duo, but Rogers had far greater acting range, as she proved with an Academy Award-winning performance in Kitty Foyle (1940). She was equally effective in the bubbly romantic farce The Major and the Minor (1942).
Rogers appeared regularly on screen throughout the 1940s and 1950s and returned briefly to the Broadway stage in 1965, replacing Carol Channing in Hello Dolly! In later years she made occasional television appearances and served as a fashion consultant for the J.C. Penney stores. Her autobiography, Ginger: My Story, was published in 1991.

Swing Time~Rogers and Astair

Christopher Plummer

Christopher Plummer, (born December 13, 1929) is a Canadian theatre, film and television actor. In a career that spans over five decades and includes substantial roles in film, television, and theater, Plummer is perhaps best known for the iconic role of Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music.
He was also a leading member of Britain's National Theatre under Sir Laurence Olivier, the Royal Shakespeare Company under Sir Peter Hall where he won London’s best actor Evening Standard Theatre Award. In its formative years, he played at the Stratford Festival of Canada under Sir Tyrone Guthrie and Michael Langham. He has played most of the great roles in the classic repertoire.
He also appeared in a lauded production of King Lear, directed by Jonathan Miller and performed at Lincoln Center. Plummer's performance as Lear garnered him his sixth Tony nomination. He returned to Broadway in 2007 as Henry Drummond in a revival of Inherit the Wind, winning a Drama Desk Award nomination as well as his seventh Tony nomination.
Owing to the box office success and continued popularity of The Sound Of Music, Plummer is perhaps best known for his portrayal of Captain Von Trapp.

The Sound of Music~Edelweiss!

Lana Turner

Lana Turner (1920–1995), American actress,born Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner on February 8, 1920, in Wallace, Idaho. According to legend, she was discovered at a Hollywood soda fountain at the age of 16 by a journalist, who recommended her to director Mervyn LeRoy. LeRoy immediately placed her under contract and gave her a small but telling role in his film They Won't Forget (1937).
After two more unremarkable Warner Brothers films—The Great Garrick (1937) and Four's a Crowd (1938)—Turner, known for her lazy, carnal look, moved to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer with LeRoy. Her new studio promoted her as “The Sweater Girl,” nearly always blonde, a trifle vulgar, and sexily clad in a clinging top. Posed in a tight-fitting sweater, she became a popular pinup girl during World War II (1939-1945).
Turner’s career in films spanned over 30 years, and although she was an actress with a limited range, she made good use of her gifts as the murderous wife in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) and as the emotional heroine of Homecoming (1948). Another memorable role was as a film star (inspired by the life of Diana Barrymore) in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), directed by Vincente Minnelli. But more often her films were trivial, until she began working at Twentieth Century Fox and was interestingly cast as a repressed mother in Peyton Place (1957).
In 1958, Turner’s real-life teenage daughter, Cheryl Crane, killed Turner’s gangster lover, Johnny Stompanato, in the belief that her mother’s life was in danger. The death was ruled justifiable homicide. Afterward, Turner was snapped up by Universal Studios and skillfully cast in the melodramatic Imitation of Life (1959), directed by Douglas Sirk, as an actress who has a difficult relationship with her daughter. The scandal was exploited to the hilt, and the film proved a great success. Thereafter, although Turner continued to make the occasional film until the early 1970s, she never achieved anything like a comeback. In the 1980s, however, she had a role in the television melodrama Falcon Crest.