Who is/was Clifton Webb?

Answer 1

Biography for
Clifton Webb
Birth name
Webb Parmalee Hollenbeck
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Height
5' 11" (1.80 m)
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Mini biography
Already trained in dance and theater, he quit school at age 13 to study music and painting. By 19 he was a professional ballroom dancer in New York, and by his mid-twenties he was performing in musicals, dramas on Broadway and in London, and in silent movies. His first real success in film came in middle age as the classy villain Waldo Lydecker in Laura (1944), followed by the part of Elliott Templeton in The Razor's Edge (1946) - both of which won him Oscar nominations. His priggish Mr. Belvedere (series) was supposedly not far removed from his real life persona: he was inseparable from his mother, Maybelle, with whom he lived until her death (Noel Coward said "It must be tough to be orphaned at seventy-one"). The recent success of Titanic (1997) created a brief revival of interest due his having played, with Barbara Stanwyck, in a 1953 version of the story. He is interred at Abbey of the Psalms, Hollywood Memorial Cemetery.


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IMDb mini-biography by
Ed Stephan
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Trivia
Created the role of Charles Condomine in Noel Coward's "Blithe Spirit" on the London and New York stages.

Acknowledged as the inspiration for Mr. Peabody on "Bullwinkle Show, The" (1961)

Appeared on the New York stage in 1925 in a dance act with Mary Hay.

Interred at Hollywood Memorial Cemetery (now called Hollywood Forever), Hollywood, California, USA, in the Abbey of the Psalms.

It was Clifton Webb who first introduced Irving Berlin's classic song "Easter Parade" on the Broadway stage.

The part that got away: Ayn Rand wanted him to play suave villain Ellsworth Toohey in the 1943 adaptation of "The Fountainhead" and indeed it would have been superb casting (and might have significantly improved a flawed film), but studio chiefs vetoed this idea.

Webb's career ascent on Broadway paralleled Libby Holman, who co-starred with him in successful Broadway shows in 1929-30 (he tended to dance while she sang). The two (actually three, if you count Webb's mother) became lifelong friends and would re-team for the troubled 1938 production of Cole Porter's "You Never Know," which would fold after 73 performances.

Was a close personal friend of co-star (in The Little Show, Three's a Crowd, and You Never Know) Libby Holman. Sharing a common homosexual lifestyle, Webb (with his mother) would accompany Holman on frequent vacations and would remain friends until the mid-1940's.

In 1892, his formidable mother, Mabelle (1869-1960), moved to New York with her beloved "little Webb," as she called him for the remainder of her life. She dismissed questions about his father, Jacob Grant Hollenbeck, a railroad ticket clerk, by saying, "We never speak of him. He didn't care for the theater." They lived together until her death at age 91. When Clifton's obsessive grieving for his mother continued on for well over a year, close friend Noel Coward, keeping their lengthy friendship in mind, is said to have remarked with a bit of exasperation, "It must be difficult to be orphaned at seventy." Webb never recovered from his mother's death. He made one film, then spent the remainder of his life in ill health and seclusion.

Studied painting with the renowned Robert Henri and voice with the equally famous Victor Maurel

In 1925 Clifton appeared on stage in a dance act with vaudeville star and silent film actress Mary Hay. Later that year, when she and her husband, film star Richard Barthelmess, decided to produce and star in their own film vehicle New Toys (1925), they chose Webb to be second lead. The movie proved to be financially successful, but nineteen more years would pass before Webb appeared in another feature film.

Webb's elegant taste kept him on Hollywood's best-dressed lists for decades. His scrupulously gay private life remained free of scandal.

There followed an interlude in Hollywood in the early 1930s when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer put Webb on a salary of $3,000 a week. While socially it turned out to be a pleasant experience, professionally it was a disaster. For eighteen months, he swam, attended gala parties, met all the important people, but never once appeared in a motion picture. He referred to Hollywood as "a land of endowed vacations."

Answer 2

there is not any evaluation! The previous one is this type of classic tale and the hot one, nevertheless humorous, in simple terms does no longer no longer have the main tale of the performance professional mum and dad raising 12 little ones by using their clever approaches. It makes a super difference to have the relatives contained in the Nineteen 1920s whilst a super type of recent and loose impacts have been happening. Clifton Webb replaced into so ideal and stuffy. I enjoyed the scene the place he took his daughter to the dance and all the teenage females gushed over him!