Rose Hobart
Birth : 1906-05-01, New York City, New York, USA
Death : 2000-08-29
History
Rose Hobart (born Rose Kefer) was an American actress and Screen Actors Guild official. When Hobart was 15, she debuted professionally in Cappy Ricks, a Chautauqua production. She was accepted for the 18-week tour because she told officials that she was 18. At that same age, she was cast in Ferenc Molnár's Liliom, which opened in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Hobart's Broadway stage debut was on September 17, 1923 at the Knickerbocker Theater, playing a young girl in Lullaby. In 1925, she played Charmian in Caesar and Cleopatra.
Hobart was an original member of Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre. In 1928, she made her London debut, playing Nona Rolf in The Comic Artist. During her career in theater, she toured with Noël Coward in The Vortex and was cast opposite Helen Hayes in What Every Woman Knows.
Her performance as Grazia in Death Takes a Holiday won her a Hollywood contract. Hobart appeared in more than 40 motion pictures over a 20-year period. Her first film role was the part of Julie in the first talking picture version of Liliom, made by Fox Film Corporation in 1930, starring Charles Farrell in the title role, and directed by Frank Borzage. Under contract to Universal, Hobart starred in A Lady Surrenders, East of Borneo, and Scandal for Sale. On loan to other studios, she appeared in Chances and Compromised. In 1931, she co-starred with Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins in Rouben Mamoulian's original film version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. She played the role of Muriel, Jekyll's fiancée. In 1936, Surrealist artist Joseph Cornell, who bought a print of East of Borneo to screen at home, became smitten with the actress, and cut out nearly all the parts that did not include her. He also showed the film at silent film speed and projected it through a blue-tinted lens. He named the resulting work Rose Hobart. Hobart often played the "other woman" in movies during the 1940s, with her last major film role in Bride of Vengeance.
The House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Hobart in 1949, effectively ending her career. She believed that she first came to the attention of anti-Communist activists because of her commitment to improving working conditions for actors in Hollywood.
Self - Interviewee
A documentary about the era of classic monster movies that were made at Universal Studios during the 1930s and 1940s.
Self
This documentary, originally presented on the television series The South Bank Show, covers actor Humphrey Bogart's life and career, including archival footage and interviews with Lauren Bacall and his son Stephen Bogart.
Self
Stephen H. Bogart narrates the rise to fame of his father, Humphrey Bogart through the use of film clips, written material and interviews of friends and co-workers.
Lady Eleanora
The tiny independent duchy of Ferrara is located between Casare Borgia's Rome and Venice, and Borgia has plans to conquer Venice via Ferrara. He murders his sister's husband and makes it appear that Alfonso D'Este of Ferrara was behind the killing. To avenge herself against Ferrara and D'Este, Lucretia Borgia marries D'Este and intends to poison him. But...she falls in love with him.
Lydia Matthews
A pretty, tomboyish teenager comes of age in an American small town.
Diantha Marl
Judge Cass Timberlane marries a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, Virginia Marshland. A baby is stillborn and she turns more and more to attorney friend of of Cass' Brad Criley. While quarreling the Judge tells Virginia to stay with Brad, but when she becomes sick he brings her home.
Agnes Meeler
A psychology professor comes up with a theory that women have a desire to be subjugated. A newswoman, using a pseudonym, accuses him of advocating wife-beating. There is trouble, when he falls in love with her, unaware of who she is.
Virginia Thatcher
After leaving her family's farm to study nursing in the city, a young woman finds herself on an unexpected path towards politics.
Marta Lestrade
Businessman Logan Stuart is torn between his love of two very different women in 1850s Oregon and his loyalty to a compulsive gambler friend who goes over the line.
Connie Palmer
A black cat is suspected of being possessed by the spirit of a elderly murdered woman.
Edith Dexter
The follow-up film to "Claudia", with Dorothy McGuire and Robert Young reprising their earlier roles as a young married couple living in a small Connecticut town.
Mary St. Aubyn (in long shot; uncredited)
On a Greek island during the 1912 war, several people are trapped by quarantine for the plague. If that isn't enough worry, one of the people—a superstitious old peasant—suspects a young woman of being a vampiric demon.
Kathryn Mason
Unhappily married Richard Mason concocts a meticulous scheme to kill his shrewish wife so that he'll be free to marry her sister.
Dorothy Kent
After suffering a head injury during the Blitz, John Loder, a theatre actor comes to believe himself to be the Brighton Strangler, the murderer he was playing onstage.
Lilyan Gregg
A man recovers on his death bed after his wife makes a mysterious pact with a strange woman. But is he really alive?
Mrs. Powell
A beautiful child star tires of life in the spotlight and so disguises herself and sneaks off to join a Civilian Conservation Corps camp to work with normal kids. It doesn't take her long to discover that being "normal" isn't easy as it looks. When a crop is in danger of being ruined because there are not enough people to harvest it, the girl employs some of her famous colleagues to lend a hand. Songs include: "Too Much in Love," "Here It Is Monday," "Delightfully Dangerous," "Hawaiian War Chant" and "Notre Dame."
Mrs. Diana Burns
The Crime Doctor gets involved in the case of the poisoning of a wealthy industrialist.
Della Elliott, reporter
Dr. Alfred Morris, a university chemistry professor, rediscovers an ancient Mayan formula for a gas which turns men into pliant, obedient, zombie-like ghouls. After medical student Ted Allison becomes a guinea pig for Morris, the professor imagines that Allison's fiancée, a beautiful concert singer Isabel Lewis, wants to break off the engagement because she prefers the professor as a more "mature" lover but in reality loves Eric, her accompanist. In order to bring Ted back from his trance-like states, Morris commands him to perform a cardiectomy on recently deceased or living bodies in order to use serum from their hearts as a temporary antidote. When the serial murders seem to coincide with Isabel's touring schedule, ace reporter "Scoop" McClure gets on the mad scientist's trail.
Lead Woman (Uncredited)
Street-smart Maisie from Brooklyn lands a job at an airplane assembly plant during WWII and falls in love with handsome pilot "Breezy" McLaughlin. Breezy, however, falling in love with and getting engaged to Maisie's conniving roommate Iris, doesn't realize she's using him and it's up to Maisie to convince him.
Mrs. Carson
It is a comic book propaganda film which has Beery as a retired USMC NCO who, when the Japanese invade the Philippines, leads a heroic defense, first by strangling a Nazi agent, and then dying in his dress blues uniform while blowing up a bridge.
Trudy Muller, aka Fraulein von Teufel
A movie serial in 12 chapters: The famous comic strip character is on a mission to protect a secret tunnel passage between China and India.
Mrs. Black
The doctor (Lionel Barrymore) has a Kansan (Van Johnson), an Australian and an Asian from Brooklyn to choose from.
Rosemary Walsh
A female doctor is sent to prison for a mercy killing. She manages to escape, get married and lead a model life, but one day her secret is exposed.
Alma Pearce
A girl reporter is trying to tack down the lady-in-the-title, as a key witness in a graft trial, which involves three murder and that many failed attempts. A prosecuting attorney in the district attorneys office is aiding her in solving the mystery of the missing lady.
Carol Brent
Married sleuths (Gracie Allen, William Post Jr.) find a corpse in their closet and round up suspects.
Claire Barrington
After inheriting a New York City art gallery, bookie Milton Berle and his partner Cesar Romero decide to go into the art forgery business. Director Ray McCarey's 1942 comedy also stars Carole Landis, J. Carrol Naish, Steven Geray, Richard Derr, Rose Hobart, Elisha Cook Jr., Chick Chandler, Francis Pierlot and Jerome Cowan.
Mrs. Marion West
A wise-cracking private detective's honeymoon is interrupted by a kidnapping case.
Mrs. Harriet Donnelly
Gwen Saunders teams up with her uncle's employee, Steve Bennett, in an attempt to double her $10,000 investment in the family firm. If she can reach the $20,000 mark, her uncle T.T. Ralston will match the figure. Steve bets that if he can spend an entire day without telling a lie, Ralston and his business partners must double Gwen's money. Bennett then earns the enmity of everyone involved in his attempt to win the bet.
Mrs. Carter Wardley
Married songwriters almost split up while putting on a big show.
Dale Layden
A woman hoping to raise cash to pay for an operation to restore her blind brother's eyesight finds herself implicated in a nightclub murder.
Alice North
A fallen woman seeks redemption at a Singapore rubber plantation. Melodrama.
Mrs. Merton
Discovery by Flo Ziegfeld changes a girl's life but not necessarily for the better, as three beautiful women find out when they join the spectacle on Broadway: Susan, the singer who must leave behind her ageing vaudevillian father; vulnerable Sheila, the working girl pursued both by a millionaire and by her loyal boyfriend from Flatbush; and the mysterious European beauty Sandra, whose concert violinist husband cannot endure the thought of their escaping from poverty by promenading her glamor in skimpy costumes.
Ramona Lisa
Newly-elected reform Mayor Jones celebrates his victory over the crooked political machine with a party at Earl Carroll's night club. Steve Kalkus, the defeated racketeer-politician, has Earl Carroll and several of his acts kidnapped, figuring the kidnapping coup will cause Jones to be laughed out of office. In Carroll's absence his assistant, Ramona Lisa, and his press agent, Barney Nelson put on the show themselves with the remaining talent, the chorus girls and also pressing into the entertainment cigarette girls, cloakroom girls, the doorman and others including oil heiresses Brenda Gusher and Cobina Gusher. Carroll and the other prisoners make their escape when a kidnapped juggling act sends their captors down in a barrage of beer bottles.
Irene
A flighty socialite neglects her family to promote a new religious group.
Peggy Nolan
A New York attorney defends a young man with a criminal past who has been accused of murdering a police inspector.
Anne Neville
In the 15th century Richard Duke of Gloucester, aided by his club-footed executioner Mord, eliminates those ahead of him in succession to the throne, then occupied by his brother King Edward IV of England. As each murder is accomplished he takes particular delight in removing small figurines, each resembling one of the successors, from a throne-room dollhouse, until he alone remains. After the death of Edward he becomes Richard III, King of England, and need only defeat the exiled Henry Tudor to retain power.
Woman (archive footage) (uncredited)
Cornell employs clips from 1931's jungle melodrama East of Borneo – more specifically, clips of its lead actress, Rose Hobart – to disquieting effect. Through Cornell's collage editing, Hobart becomes a singular object of desire and dread, trapped in an exotic paradise.
Cynthia 'Babe' LaVal
A cabaret hostess is broken-hearted because she loves a gambler who does not love her.
Ruth Hackett
The police investigate a bank robbery, and when they don't seem to be making much headway, a newspaper reporter decides to investigate it on his own.
Claire Strong
A man is promised $25,000 if he can bring the circulation of a newspaper up to one million.
Muriel Carew
Dr. Henry Jekyll believes that there are two distinct sides to men - a good and an evil side. He believes that by separating the two, man can become liberated. He succeeds in his experiments with chemicals to accomplish this and transforms into Hyde to commit horrendous crimes. When he discontinues use of the drug, it is already too late.
Linda Rudolph
Mrs. Linda Randolph treks through darkened jungles to the land of Maradu to find her missing husband Allan, who'd left her years before when he believed she was in love with another. She finds Allan the drunken court physician to a devious prince-- Whose designs on the pair don't include a happy ending.
Molly Prescott
Two brothers, Jack and Tom, are in love with the same woman, Molly. While the two brothers go off to war and Molly does her part in the effort, Tom believes that Rose is waiting for him, while in fact, she loves Jack and only turned to Tom on the rebound. Jack and Molly meet while he is on leave, and when he returns to battle, he doesn't know how to handle the situation with his brother.
Isabel Beauvel
A wealthy industrialist's wife gets into a big argument with him; to cool off, she goes on an ocean trip. He thinks she's left him for good, so he marries another woman. When his first wife returns, complications ensue.
Julie
A carousel barker falls in love with a young woman. Both are fired from their jobs, and when the young woman becomes pregnant, the carousel barker tries to help pull off a robbery, which goes wrong. Because of the robbery, he dies, and after spending time in hell, is sent back to earth for one day to try to make amends.
Herself
An ongoing exploration of the films of Rose Hobart and a re-duplication of Joseph Cornell's infamous found footage masterpiece
