Destination: Tokyo, Arsenic and Old Lace, The Bishop’s Wife, North by Northwest, Charade, and Father Goose are the first ones I think of.
More trivia: Jamie Lee Curtis (Curtis and Leigh’s real-life daughter) starred opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in True Lies.
Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story.
Clark Gable in It Happened One Night, Manhattan Melodrama, and Run Silent, Run Deep, in addition to GWtW. Also opposite Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits.
Ooh FUN! I’ll play!
Note: there are two points in the URL where the date has to be changed.
I was born in 1975. From the Top 50 ranked by popularity (one page of results), people who died that year whose work I am familiar with are:
[ul]
[li]Susan Hayward[/li][li]Moe Howard[/li][li]Rod Serling[/li][li]Larry Fine[/li][li]Fredric March[/li][li]John McGiver (but only because I saw his photo, I would not have known him by name)[/li][li]Bernard Herrmann[/li][li]Ozzie Nelson[/li][li]Josephine Baker[/li][li]Aristotle Onassis (and I know enough to think it odd to see him on an IMDB list)[/li][li]Moms Mabley[/li][/ul]
11 out of 50. Major downer to see that both Moe Howard and Larry Fine died in the same year, I hadn’t known that.
I can tell Brian Ahern from Brian Donlevy, but the Emmys is just a parade of pretty, nameless young things to me. So I suppose it all evens out.
(frankly, the OP sounds too much of a variation on the "hey, did you know Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings? “joke”)
Less informed? No. Just informed about different things.
Not Charlie Chapman, and perhaps not Cary Grant. But the rest are for sure forgotten. Otherwise the expression is meaningless and no one is forgotten. I don’t think I know a single person who would recognize any of those other names.
I’m not sure why I also felt like writing Chapman instead of Chaplin.
Then you really should cultivate friendships with more sophisticated people, don’t you think? If you know more about Shia LaBeouf than Robert Mitchum, I actually feel rather bad for you.
My first instinct was to answer “never”. Well, not literally “never” but I would think he’ll be a pretty permanent fixture in the annals of movie history. But you [del]whippersnappers[/del] younger folk are saying otherwise so I guess I can’t argue in the face of public opinion. I have to say, that makes me sad 
I think that is a rather ridiculous suggestion. It’s not very important to me that my friends watch a lot of old movies, and I don’t see why it should be.
For starters, you’ll get a lot more of the jokes on Family Guy, American Dad, The Simpsons, and similar shows. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Forget this? Impossible. I will see that gorgeous man in my dreams til the day I die.
See, to me this is just odd. His heyday was long before I was even born and I can’t remember I time when I didn’t, if not exactly “know” who he is, at least was aware of “you dirty rat” and its context. Perhaps it’s because he was of my parents’ era and they were pretty big movie fans, as I suspect more people were back then due to the lack of tv and other forms of entertainment we have today.
I can recall in 2001, when George Harrison died and a young woman I worked with didn’t recognize his name. This was not a stupid or socially retarded (as far as I could tell) person, nor was she that much younger than I. So just because the Beatles were not of her era I shouldn’t be surprised that she doesn’t know who George freaking Harrison is? Do we limit our awareness of things to those of our own generation?
Can you name one joke on any show within the last 10 years that relies on knowledge of either Rudolph Valentino, Francis X. Bushman, Charles Laughton, Dick Powell or Alan Ladd?
I’m early sixties, but my friend’s kid listens to a lot of my generations music. And he’s not alone in that. Me, I wouldn’t have been caught dead listening to the stuff my parents liked, but since I’ve developed a taste for some Sinatra.
Some do, some don’t. I’ve been interested in the silent movie era since I was a kid in junior high school. Nobody in my family had a similar interest. That interest pre-dated VCR’s and the internet, so my viewing opportunities were limited.
I don’t have the scripts of TV shows memorized, so I can’t think of any involving those specific stars (you wouldn’t get the jokes if I could, anyway!:D). Consider this, though: The episodes of Family Guy where Stewie and Brian are “On the Road to______” are affectionate salutes to a whole series of musical comedy “Road” pictures starring a comedian and a singer who were monstrously popular for many, many years. Imagine getting the jokes that aren’t about dicks from those episodes! How splendid that would be for you!
Say what you will about Seth MacFarlane, his appreciation for bygone eras of entertainment does set him apart and gives his humor an occasional — and much-needed — veneer of innocence.
If this is the argument, then it’s really more important to be familiar with Shia LaBeouf and such, since there are more references to him and other modern actors, than to any of those in the above list.