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Name the Actor...

LizzieMaine

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This Broadway musical-comedy star rollicked her way to big success on the early-talkie screen, appearing in a string of splashy Technicolor productions at Warner Brothers. Her marriage to a prominent director, coupled with failing eyesight, led to her premature retirement in 1934, and in later years she blamed her vision problems on eye damage resulting from endless hours spent under the blazing Technicolor studio lights.
 
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497801383247317.gif


This Broadway musical-comedy star rollicked her way to big success on the early-talkie screen, appearing in a string of splashy Technicolor productions at Warner Brothers. Her marriage to a prominent director, coupled with failing eyesight, led to her premature retirement in 1934, and in later years she blamed her vision problems on eye damage resulting from endless hours spent under the blazing Technicolor studio lights.

My first, only and wrong thought was Dolores Costello as she was about the right time period and I remember some medical condition caused by her film work ended her career. But, in checking, it turns out it was early silent film makeup had severely damaged her skin - nothing about her eye sight. That's it, I'm out of bullets on this one.
 

LizzieMaine

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Miss Winnie Lightner, perhaps most identified with this song:


Given her problems with Technicolor, it's ironic that this, her biggest hit, from the 1929 revue "The Show Of Shows," was one of the few scenes in the film shot in black and white.

For extra credit, name her boyfriend at the end of the song.
 
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Miss Winnie Lightner, perhaps most identified with this song:


Given her problems with Technicolor, it's ironic that this, her biggest hit, from the 1929 revue "The Show Of Shows," was one of the few scenes in the film shot in black and white.

For extra credit, name her boyfriend at the end of the song.

His eyes look very familiar, but I can't come up with even a guess.
 

LizzieMaine

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He was a prominent professional wrestler who became a popular actor in silent pictures, usually as some kind of thug or goon. He wasn't even the only prominent professional wrestler to move into pictures during this era, but he was the most popular.
 

LizzieMaine

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It's none other than Constantine Romanoff, a major pro rassler in the 1910s who became one of the most popular movie-comedy heavies of the twenties and thirties. He appeared in silent pictures opposite Harold Lloyd, and he made a number of appearances with Wheeler and Woolsey in the thirties -- notably in "Diplomaniacs," where he played "The TOughest Man In The World" who ended up being kissed to death by Phyllis Barry.

Despite his name he was not an actual Russian -- he was a German, who also went by the name of "Jack Meyer." He made dozens of films into the early 1950s, usually as a brutal henchman of one kind or another, but was quite good in comic roles that sent up his usual persona.
 

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