Julie Newmar, Eartha Kitt, and Lee Meriweather all played Catwoman on Batman.
Eartha Kitt’s professional acting debut was as Helen of Troy in a production of Faustus directed by and starring Orson Welles. The two had an on-again/off-again affair for several years and remained friends for the rest of his life, and in later years he called her “the most exciting woman I ever knew”. (Per his daughter’s memoir, Welles proposed to Kitt and one reason she did not accept was because he was such an absentee father to his daughters.)
Orson Welles is not related to HG Wells, though he did do a production of the latter’s War of the Worlds, which was famous primarily for people panicking after taking it as a real news broadcast…which, for the most part, probably didn’t happen.
While CBS was brooadcasting Welles’ version of War of the Worlds, NBC had it’s usual Sunday night programming of the Chase and Sanborn Hour, hosted by Don Ameche and featuring ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and singer Nelson Eddy. That program regularly had a much larger audience than Welles’ Mercury Theatre On the Air.
The Mercury Theater was founded by Welles and John Houseman, that latter to win an Oscar for his role in The Paper Chase. Welles was also an Oscar winner – sharing best original screenplay with Herman J. Mankiewitz for Citizen Kane.
John Houseman has a small role (blink and you’ll miss it!) in the 1964 movie Seven Days in May, as a top U.S. Navy admiral who refuses to join a military coup plot led by Burt Lancaster’s character.
John Houseman, at some risk to his snob image, did a TV ad for McDonald’s circa
1980 (unfortunately I can’t find it on youtube, but I did want to congratulate Sampiro on incorporating my “never mind” post above into the chain).
Arthur Housman (sometimes credited as Arthur Houseman), a character actor from the 1930s, specialized almost exclusively in portraying drunks – often drunks who were all but incapacitated.
He plays such a role in several Laurel and Hardy films, most prominently in the 1932 short Scram! and 1934’s The Live Ghost.
Unfortunately for Housman, life imitated art. He developed a serious drinking problem and died in 1942 at the age of 52.
James A. Houseman was an entrepreneur during the 1890s, who tried to establish streetcar lines throughout then-sparsely populated St. Louis County, Missouri.
A man with few political connections and more schemes than cash, Houseman’s streetcar lines were constantly under financial pressure. While the tourist boom associated with the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis kept his trolleys in business for a time, Houseman finally lost the last of his holdings to receivership in 1905.
President Theodore Roosevelt was elected to a full term in 1904, having taken office after the assassination of William McKinley in 1901. He was the first man to succeed an assassinated President and then be elected in his own right. Roosevelt won in a landslide, and probably could’ve won reelection in 1908, but promised on Election Night 1904 to not run again. Many of his associates thought he deeply regretted having made that pledge, but felt he had to stick to his word. T.R. ran for a nonconsecutive term against his own hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft, in 1912, but both lost to Woodrow Wilson.
David Seville – creator of the Chipmunks (Simon, Alvin, and Theodore) – was a cousin of William Saroyan. The two of the collaborated on the song “Come on-a My House,” making Saroyan one of the few to have a #1 hit song and a Pulitzer Prize.
Carol Burnett’s first husband was Don Saroyan, another cousin of William. After their divorce she married Joe Hamilton, a divorcee with 8 children, with whom she had three daughters; he executive produced her series while they were married and later produced Mama’s Family which caused some lawsuits twixt him and her (resolved amicably). She is now married to Brian Miller, a musician who is much younger than she is.
Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds had a #4 hit in the summer of 1971 with “Don’t Pull Your Love.”
The three had been members of the T-Bones, who had a hit six years previous with “No Matter What Shape (Your Stomach’s In),” the instrumental song associated with a popular Alka-Seltzer TV commercial.
Musician Tom “T-Bone” Stankus, a former teacher, is best-known for his song, “Existential Blues”, which was one of the all-time hits on the Doctor Demento radio show.
On a T-Bone steak, the larger side is a NY Strip, and the smaller side is a tenderloin. A Porterhouse steak is technically a T-bone cut from a different section of the short loin. The bone itself is the transverse process of a lumbar vertebra.
Pork tenderloin sandwiches are generally sold only in the Midwestern U.S. – Indiana and Iowa are considered the main hotbeds of the delicacies, which are similar to wiener schnitzel.
George Lucas’s Malamute dog, Indiana, served as partial inspiration for two different classic characters. The inspiration for Chewbacca (Han Solo’s co-pilot) was Indiana sitting in the passenger seat of Lucas’s car. And, the dog’s name was used for Indiana Jones – this is obliquely referred to in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, when Indy’s father, Henry Jones Sr., says, “We named the dog Indiana.”
Character actor Henry Jones appeared in nearly 200 TV shows and movies including Vertigo (as the coroner who castigates Scotty), Support Your Local Sheriff, and The Twilight Zone. He won a Tony Award for Sunrise at Campbello.
Henry Jones played the weird janitor in the Broadway and movie versions of The Bad Seed alongside Patty McCormack as the title character, a sociopathic little girl. John Waters, who worshiped The Bad Seed as a child, recalls his meetings with Patty McCormack in the first chapter of his book of essays and remembrances, Role Models.
There were supposed to be other additional faculty charactors in The Breakfast Club originally, but John Hughes ended up cutting them out and giving all their lines to Carl the janitor.