The most awesome actors from the olden days who are all but forgotten by today's world

by OrdinaryDay | created - 05 Aug 2013 | updated - 08 Aug 2013 | Public

A list charting many of the great actors from yesteryear who despite being famous in their day, are pretty much forgotten by today's world.

1. Lon Chaney

Actor | He Who Gets Slapped

Although his parents were deaf, Leonidas Chaney became an actor and also owner of a theatre company (together with his brother John). He made his debut at the movies in 1912, and his filmography is vast. Lon Chaney was especially famous for his horror parts in movies like e.g. Quasimodo in The ...

2. John Barrymore

Actor | Twentieth Century

John Barrymore was born John Sidney Blyth on February 15, 1882 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. An American stage and screen actor whose rise to superstardom and subsequent decline is one of the legendary tragedies of Hollywood. A member of the most famous generation of the most famous theatrical ...

3. Sidney Drew

Actor | The Amateur Liar

His mother claimed he was adopted, perhaps because her husband had been away touring for several years before Sidney's birth and was dead before the great event took place. Ethel Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore and John Barrymore, his niece and nephews, insisted he looked too much like "Mummum" to have ...

4. Eric Douglas

Actor | The Golden Child

Eric Douglas was born on June 21, 1958 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He was an actor and production manager, known for The Golden Child (1986), A Gunfight (1971) and Tales from the Crypt (1989). He died on July 6, 2004 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.

5. Brandon Lee

Actor | The Crow

Born on February 1, 1965 to Bruce Lee (Martial Arts idol) and Linda Lee Cadwell. Brother to Shannon Lee. In 1970-71, they moved to Hong Kong, where Brandon lived until age eight, becoming fluent in Cantonese. By the time he was able to walk, he was already involved in learning about martial arts ...

6. Jean Harlow

Actress | China Seas

Harlean Carpenter, who later became Jean Harlow, was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on March 3, 1911. She was the daughter of a successful dentist and his wife. In 1927, at the age of 16, she ran away from home to marry a young businessman named Charles McGrew, who was 23. The couple pulled up ...

7. Douglas Fairbanks

Actor | The Thief of Bagdad

Douglas Fairbanks was born Douglas Elton Thomas Ullman in Denver, Colorado, to Ella Adelaide (nee Marsh) and Hezekiah Charles Ullman, an attorney and native of Pennsylvania, who was a captain for the Union forces during the Civil War. Fairbanks' paternal grandparents were German Jewish immigrants, ...

8. Cara Williams

Actress | The Defiant Ones

Perky, talented, blue-eyed redhead Cara Williams had acting aspirations from the get-go. She was born in Brooklyn on June 29, 1925, as Bernice Kamiat, to an Austrian Jewish father, Benjamin Kamiat, and a mother of Romanian Jewish descent, Flora (Schwartz). Cara began performing as a child and ...

9. John Drew Barrymore

Actor | The Big Night

American actor with a sporadic career, the son of stage and screen legend John Barrymore. His father and mother, actress Dolores Costello divorced in his infancy and he claimed to remember seeing his father only once. His mother attempted to keep him from the acting life, sending him to St. John's ...

10. Tyrone Power

Actor | Witness for the Prosecution

Tyrone Power was one of the great romantic swashbuckling stars of the mid-twentieth century, and the third Tyrone Power of four in a famed acting dynasty reaching back to the eighteenth century. His great-grandfather was the first Tyrone Power (1795-1841), a famed Irish comedian. His father, known ...



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