ROBERT YOUNG Evelyn Venable Orignal Photo VAGABOND LADY

MORE INFO ON ROBERT YOUNG: Robert George Young (February 22, 1907 – July 21, 1998) was an American actor, best known for his leading roles of Jim Anderson, the father of Father Knows Best (NBC and then CBS) and physician Marcus Welby in Marcus Welby, M.D. (ABC).

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Young was the son of an Irish immigrant father (Thomas E. Young) and an American mother (Margaret Fife). When Young was a child, the family moved to Seattle and then to Los Angeles where he attended Abraham Lincoln High School. After graduation, he studied and performed at the Pasadena Playhouse while working odd jobs and appearing in bit parts in silent films. While touring with a stock company production of The Ship, Young was discovered by an MGM talent scout and signed to a contract. He made his sound film debut for MGM in the 1931 Charlie Chan film Black Camel.

In spite of having a "tier B" status, he co-starred with some of the studio's most illustrious actresses such as Margaret Sullavan, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Helen Hayes, Luise Rainer, and Helen Twelvetrees, among many others. Yet most of his assignments comprised B-movies, also known as programmers, which required a mere two to three weeks of shooting. Actors who were relegated to such a hectic schedule appeared, as Young did, in some six to eight movies per year.

As an MGM contract player, Young was resigned to the fate of most of his colleagues—to accept any film assigned to him or risk being placed on suspension—and many actors on suspension were prohibited from earning a salary from any endeavor at all (even those unrelated to the film industry). In 1936, MGM summarily loaned Young to Gaumont-British for two films; the first was directed by Alfred Hitchcock with the other co-starring Jessie Matthews, and while there he surmised that his employers intended to terminate his contract. But he was mistaken.

He unexpectedly received one of his most rewarding roles late in his MGM career, in H.M. Pulham, Esq., featuring one of Hedy Lamarr's rarely lauded performances, and once remarked that he was assigned only those roles which Robert Montgomery and other A-list actors had rejected.

After his contract at MGM ended, Young starred in light comedies as well as in trenchant dramas for studios such as 20th Century Fox, United Artists, and RKO. From 1943, Young assayed more challenging roles in the films, Claudia, The Enchanted Cottage, They Won't Believe Me, The Second Woman, and Crossfire, among many others. His portrayal of unsympathetic characters in several of these latter films — which seldom occurred in his MGM pictures — was applauded by numerous reviewers.

In spite of a propitious beginning as a freelance actor without the nurturing of a major studio, Young's career began an incremental and imperceptible decline. Still starring as a leading man in the late 1940s and early 1950s but in mediocre films, he subsequently disappeared from the silver screen, only to reappear several years later on a much smaller one. Young appeared in 100 movies in a film career that spanned from 1931 to 1952.

Young is best known for his role in Father Knows Best (1949-1954 on radio, 1954-1960 on television), for which he and his co-star, Jane Wyatt, won several Emmy Awards. Young then created, produced, and starred with Ford Rainey and Constance Moore in the nostalgia CBS comedy series Window on Main Street (1961–1962) which only lasted six months.

Young later became famous for Marcus Welby, M.D. (1969–1976), which co-starred a young James Brolin, for which he won an Emmy for best leading actor in a drama series. Young became so well identified with his wise doctor persona that he became famous as the commercial spokesman for an aspirin product, saying, "I'm not a doctor but I play one on TV", while wearing a lab coat. He continued making television commercials until the late 1980s.

Young was married to Betty Henderson from 1933 until her death in 1994. They had four daughters.

Despite the fact that he portrayed happy, well-adjusted characters, Young suffered from depression and alcoholism, which contributed to his suicide attempt in 1991. Afterwards he spoke candidly about his problems in an effort to encourage people to seek help with their own. The Robert Young Center for Community Mental Health, an affiliate of Trinity Regional Health System, located in Rock Island, Illinois, is a comprehensive community mental health center. It is named after Young for his work with passage of the 708 Illinois Tax Referendum. Young died at his home in Westlake Village, California at 91 from respiratory failure. He was interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, in Glendale, California. Young has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for film at 6933 Hollywood Blvd and one for television at 6358.

MORE INFO ON EVELYN VENABLE: Evelyn Venable (October 18, 1913 – November 15, 1993) was an American actress. In addition to starring in several films in the 1930s and 1940s, she is notable as the voice and model for the Blue Fairy in the Walt Disney's Pinocchio.

For her work in motion pictures, Venable has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1500 Vine Street.

Evelyn Venable was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the only child of Emerson and Dolores Venable. She attended Walnut Hills High School where her father taught English. Her grandfather William Henry Venable also taught English there. She performed in several plays at Walnut Hills, as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, the Dream Child in Dear Brutus and Rosalind in As You Like It. She attended Vassar College for a short time before returning to the University of Cincinnati. She performed in Walter Hampden's touring productions, including Roxanne in Cyrano de Bergerac and Ophelia in Hamlet.

During a performance in Los Angeles, she was recognized and offered several film contracts. After initially turning down the offers, she signed a contract with Paramount in 1932. Her contract was unique in that she would not have to cut her hair, pose for leg art, or perform in bit parts. A long-believed apocryphal story sprang up that she was forbidden by her father to engage in any kissing scenes in her films, and although this eventually proved to be false, she indeed does not have any kissing scenes in her most memorable films, not even in Death Takes a Holiday, in which she falls in love with Fredric March, or The Little Colonel, in which she plays Shirley Temple's mother. She played the lead or second lead in a series of films in the 1930s, and was the original model for the Columbia Pictures logo.

She met cinematographer Hal Mohr on the set of the Will Rogers film David Harum. They married on December 7, 1934. They had two daughters, Dolores and Rosalia.

In 1943 Venable retired from acting so that she could spend time with her family. She resumed her studies at UCLA and became a faculty member there, teaching ancient Greek and Latin and organizing the production of Greek plays within the Classics department.

Her husband, Hal Mohr, died on May 10, 1974. She died of cancer in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, on November 15, 1993, aged 80 and was cremated.

MORE INFO ON REGINALD DENNY: Acting was in the blood for Reginald Denny. He came from an acting family with his father being the stage actor/singer W. H. Denny, a member of the Gilbert and Sullivan Opera Company. The younger Denny actually already made his stage debut at 6 years old, but his future was not yet set in that direction. His schooling continued through attendance at St. Francis Xavier College in Mayfield, Sussex, and he did pass the Oxford exams. But at that point he did move into acting, though he had come to the U.S. with his family in 1908 to act in the play "The Quaker Girl". Cutting a dashing figure with his athletic good looks, he joined a stage troupe in 1912 that toured the U.S., India, and parts of the Far East. In that year he debuted in a few early British films. With a fine baritone voice he also toured with the Bandmann Opera Company. He liked what he had seen of the U. S. and returned in 1915 for his debut in American film-making two.

Denny's other talents emerged as World War I progressed. In 1917 Denny joined the Royal Flying Corp as a pilot and remained for a two-year hitch, during which he also became the brigade heavyweight-boxing champion. He took his acting and flying experiences with him to settle in Hollywood in 1919 where his film career took off in earnest. Through the Silent Era he became something of a fixture in American films-nearly 60 roles in comedy and drama with accumulating leads that covered everything from action hero to straight-laced English lord. On several films he worked as a stunt pilot and in the Universal action series The Leather Pushers (1922) he showed his boxing ability in the lead role. It was not until 1929 and his first role in a mono picture - silent but with limited sound effects and dialog - that the public realized he was British. With a fine, modulated voice he easily entered the talking era of film and was in fact one of the early emcees for The Voice of Hollywood No. 3 (1930) series of filmed radio shows.

Denny's accent was a pleasant one to mask occasionally but too British to give him the full range of lead parts he had in silent films, and of course he was more mature. Though there was no lack of roles, his earlier B leads became A seconds and character parts as the 1930s progressed into the war years to follow. Unfortunately, he is often remembered for stereotypical Brit characters and endured the run of the Bulldog Drummond movie series (1937-1939) playing the English gentlemen twit Algy Longworth, but Denny was a fine actor with depth. His fine physique and healthy face could fit all occasions from the earlier ensemble film The Lost Patrol (1934) with Victor McLaglen to a memorable second lead to Leslie Howard in the powerful Of Human Bondage (1934) featuring an incredible performance by Bette Davis. His theater experience showed well in the gorgeously filmed Romeo and Juliet (1936) as a versatile Benvolio to Leslie Howard again as Romeo. Among other films into the next decade his range of subtle emotion was sensitively revealed in his portrayal of lawyer/friend Frank Crawley to Laurence Olivier as disturbed Maxim de Winter in Rebecca (1940).

Perhaps Denny was not too concerned with the leveling off of his film career, for he was busy elsewhere. He became interested in model plane building and particularly the potential of radio-controlled model planes in the early 1930s and embarked on a surprising second career as something of an aviation pioneer (see other mini bio and trivia) in drone technology. Along with this serious business of controlled aircraft, Denny opened a model shop in 1935 on the north side of Hollywood Boulevard called Reginald Denny's Model Shop (he lived near by at 2060 N. Vine Street). The newsreel cameras were close behind providing publicity for the shop and the models via Movietone shorts. He was also featured in hobby and other magazines. Along with the model kits (many rubber band-powered but also gas-engine) developed by his company, Denny sold a great variety of model items, and his shop was to say the least a popular hangout for boys in the area for several generations (though other controlling concerns took over the aviation interest and the shop). Denny was himself a consummate modeler of great skill who built a least one special example of his large one-engine "Dennyplane" for actor Robert Montgomery. He had a full range of merchandise in the 1937 Montgomery Ward's catalog, and among others, General Douglas MacArthur ordered one of his model planes for his young son. Denny enthusiastically promoted his hobby passion with tours over the country to judge models and competitions.

Although Denny's film work continued into the late 1940s, by the 1950s he was no stranger to television, especially the progression of TV playhouse fare, where he could still do some serious acting. But he was also quite well known in episodic TV in many cameo roles in drama and light comedy. Here was a man whose contributions to the history of film led to yet other contributions far afield of stage and screen - and perhaps just as satisfying.