Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. If 1939 was the best year Hollywood ever had, then this man was the reigning king of the supporting actors. He starred in more than 5 top films that year, including "Stagecoach", "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington", "Only Angels Have Wings", and even "Gone With the Wind". Usually with a slight Irish brogue, he would probably be recognized today as Uncle Billy in "It's a Wonderful Life". What is his name?
2. This rotund English character actor was versatile enough to play everything from the tyrannical English father of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in "The Barretts of Wimpole Street" to a Jesse Helmes-like Southern senator in "Advise and Consent". To this day he is the main image we have of Henry VIII, Quasimodo the Hunchback, Nero, Captain Bligh, Captain Kidd, and Rembrandt in the best filmed versions featuring those characters. He is remembered today as the husband of Elsa Lanchester, best known as the Bride of Frankenstein. What is his name?
3. One of the funniest, most talented men in the movies is largely forgotten by this generation. This man could sing, dance, act, but what he could really do was spit out tongue twisters and foreign accents flawlessly. His funniest film is without a doubt "The Court Jester", in which he carries around two drinking glasses one with poison and one without---and he must remember that "the pellet with the poison is in the vessel with the pestle, the flagon with the dragon holds the brew that is true!" His other great films include "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" and "The Inspector General". What is his name?
4. This fantastic English actor has not quite faded yet, but I included him here because he is only really known to this generation as the old Ben Kenobi of the early "Star Wars" films. This belies the fact that he made some of the best British films ever made, with the versatility to be just as good in screwy comedy as in action adventure. He was the favorite actor of one of the world's best directors David Lean, who featured him in leads and supporting roles in such films as "Great Expectations", "Oliver Twist", "The Bridge on the River Kwai" (he won his Oscar for this one), "Lawrence of Arabia", "Doctor Zhivago", and "A Passage to India". Before these action parts he was best known for fanstatic comedies like "Kind Hearts and Coronets" (he played 11 parts), "The Lavender Hill Mob", "The Man in the White Suit", and, best of all, "The Ladykillers" (much as I like the Coen Brothers, this is the version everyone should see). What is his name?
5. This man's personality may seem a little alienating today. A good-looking dandy in a suit, a little high on himself, with a funny sort of way of talking. Those unfamiliar with him may be put off at first. This does not explain why he has starred in almost as many recognized classics as James Stewart and Katherine Hepburn, both of whom were with him in "The Philadelphia Story". His roster of great films, too many to list here, include "Only Angels Have Wings", "Bringing Up Baby", "Gunga Din", "Holiday", "I Was A Male War Bride", "Arsenic and Old Lace", "Topper", "His Girl Friday", and "Charade". Though he was mainly a comedy actor, he was a favorite of Hitchcock who starred him in "Suspicion", "Notorious", "To Catch a Thief", and "North By Northwest". What is his name?
6. This character actor superstar did not have an incredibly versatile personality. Aside from his famous performance as a Swede in one film, he usually ranged from slightly redneck westerner to completely ignorant hillbilly. But for a while, he was the only star to have three Academy Awards, with a fourth nomination. He was most at home in westerns, playing characters with names like Cookie and Stumpy. His awards came for playing Judge Roy Bean in "The Westerner", a Swede in "Come and Get It", and a man who races horses in "Kentucky". Other famous films he appeared in are "Sergeant York", "Along The Great Divide", "To Have and Have Not", "Red River", "My Darling Clementine", "Bad Day at Black Rock", and "Rio Bravo". What is his name?
7. He is primarily known as a director now, for such films as "Cry Freedom", "A Bridge Too Far", "A Chorus Line", and "Chaplin". But before the late seventies he was a British actor with an unfair reputation as always portraying a coward. What he actually portrayed is a person caught up in a very precarious situation who had to find some way out without panicking. His best films were probably "The Flight of the Phoenix" (where he is with a group of men stranded in the middle of the Sahara), "The Great Escape" (where he is in charge of a group of men trying to tunnel under a POW camp) and especially the excellent "Seance on a Wet Afternoon" (where he helps to kidnap a little girl for money and then has regrets). What is his name?
8. Before James Dean and Marlon Brando ushered in the new era of the antihero, the method acting outsider who didn't quite fit in with society and showed it by the way he walked and the way he mumbled, there was this actor. An early prototype, this leading man was handsome but insecure, had a strong sense of what is right but quietly brooded through many of his films. He was also a superb actor in films such as "From Here To Eternity", "The Misfits", "Suddenly Last Summer", "The Young Lions", "Red River", and "Judgement at Nuremburg". His ambivalent sexuality added an edge of mystery to his screen persona, which was hightened after a bad car crash destroyed his good looks in his last several films. What is his name?
9. Though she started out as a beautiful starlet and by her own report had romantic liaisons with most of the leading men in Hollywood, nobody came to play an aging, corpulent, pathetic, shrewish mother-in-law more famously than this woman. She won awards for "The Diary of Anne Frank" and "A Patch of Blue", but is also well known for "The Poseidon Adventure", "Lolita", "A Place in the Sun", "Night of the Hunter", and "Pete's Dragon". She appears to thoroughly enjoy her life without regrets, and her acceptance of changing from beauty roles to old hag-type parts is probably the key to her longevity. She never tried to keep looking young. What is her name?
10. Before there was De Niro, there was this guy. The "man of a thousand faces", he is incorrectly thought of as disgusing himself under a lot of creative makeup when in reality he immersed his entire body into the roles he played---from tall dark and handsome marine sergeant to deformed burn victim to man with withered legs. Though he was primarily known as a horror star for his use behind makeup, he was featured in all kinds of films from comedies to dramas. One of his best roles was as a vampire in a film that no longer exists but that Turner Classic Movies presented in still frame recently, "London After Midnight". Other well known classics are "The Unholy Three", "Tell It To the Marines", "The Unknown", "He Who Gets Slapped", and his two most famous creations, "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and the "Phantom of the Opera". Who is he?
Source: Author
Hank2001
This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor
linkan before going online.
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