The Dwindling Lights of Classical Hollywood

In the past week, two centenarian actresses (June Lockhart and Maria Riva) both passed away at the age of 100.  Lockhart is best-known for her work in television, playing lead roles on Lassie and Lost in Space, while Riva is arguably best-known today not for any of her acting work (which resulted in two Emmy nominations), but instead for being the glamorous daughter of an even more glamorous movie star mother, Marlene Dietrich.

One of the pastimes I think is interesting to talk about on this blog, which does talk about classic cinema when it's not doing elections analysis (I'm aware it's been a bit one-sided as of late...my personal & professional life has had a series of highs & lows and I am running pretty dramatically behind on my movie screenings as a result), is when an era of Hollywood ends.  These two actresses, relatively minor figures in film, dying indicates something really remarkable-they were both two of the last of their kind in terms of acting, and mark the end of something storied in the annals of a fast-fading Classical Hollywood.

Let's start with June Lockhart.  Lockhart started her career in 1938, playing one of the children of Bob Cratchit in a 1938 MGM production of A Christmas Carol.  In the film, Lockhart played the daughter of her real-life mother Kathleen and her real-life father Gene, the latter being an Academy Award-nominated actor (i.e. both Lockhart & Riva were very much what we would now consider to be NepoBabies).  Just 13 when that film was made, Lockhart would quickly graduate to key supporting roles in classics like Sergeant York and Meet Me in St. Louis before getting her first lead role in She-Wolf of London in 1946.  Lockhart was one of the actors we profiled in our article about the last-living Stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood, a list where after her passing only 25 actors still remain.

But it is She-Wolf of London that stands out as a true end of an era.  A relatively forgettable horror film (I reviewed it here, and I wasn't super kind), She-Wolf of London was one of 35 films that are generally to be considered to be the classic run of the Universal Monster movies, stretching from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1913 to The Creature Walks Among Us in 1956 and including the quintessential onscreen inhabitations of Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, & the Wolf-Man.  Lockhart's death is notable in relation to these pictures because it means that every single above-the-line actor in all 35 of these films has now died.  While not all of the actors in these films have died (we'll talk about one of them in a second, but a far more famous one, Clint Eastwood, had a bit part in Revenge of the Creature in his screen debut), there are no living lead actors in any of these films.  Several performers in these movies made it well into the early 21st Century, dying just in the past ten years like Lupita Tovar (Dracula), Ricou Browning (in all three of the Creature of the Black Lagoon films he played the creature), and Julie Adams (Creature from the Black Lagoon), but Lockhart was the last remaining one.  Fitting, a week before Halloween, that she would pass.  If you're looking to mark this occasion, I suggest you find one of these 35 pictures you've never seen before and indulge tomorrow night after the trick-or-treating has finished.

It's worth noting that Lockhart did not get screen credit for her film debut (universal screen credit for all speaking parts in films was not common until the 1960's-before then you'd regularly end up with movies where only a few actors would get credit, while others, even those with speaking parts, might be ignored).  Her first screen credit was in 1940's All This, and Heaven Too with Bette Davis & Charles Boyer.  That means that while she appeared in films of the 1930's, she didn't get credited for them, and in fact it is an extremely small list of actors that are still alive who did receive screen credit for their work in a movie of the 1930's.  This is because, unless you are over 104-years-old, you had to be a child actor to have appeared in a 1930's film, and most child actors of that era, unless they were playing key roles in a picture, didn't get onscreen credit.

One of the few that did was Maria Riva.  The daughter of Marlene Dietrich was credited solely as "Maria" when she played a younger version of her mother in The Scarlet Empress, but, to quote Whoopi Goldberg on 30 Rock "it still counts."  While as recently as the past ten years we saw proper leading ladies of the 1930's like Mary Carlisle, Jane Withers, and Olivia de Havilland pass away, as far as I can tell, Maria Riva may be the last living actress to have received onscreen credit for a Hollywood movie released in the 1930's.  I did a pretty extensive deep dive into actresses of the era (and I am open to amending this if someone corrects me in the comments), but I can't find any woman who is still alive from that era who got an actual credit onscreen rather than just extra or bit work.  The closest I got were figures like Priscilla Montgomery, Valerie Lee, & Caren Marsh Doll (all of whom were in The Wizard of Oz as extras or stand-ins but none of whom got true onscreen credit...Doll also was a background extra in the barbecue scene in Gone with the Wind, but again wasn't credited even though she is the last living person to have been known to have starred in that movie in any capacity).

Weirdly, there are at least a couple of men who are still with us (this is weird because if you look at that list of 25 living leading actors of Classical Hollywood, only 2 of them are men...men statistically die sooner).  June Lockhart's costar in A Christmas Carol Terry Kilburn was, unlike June, credited onscreen for his work as Tiny Tim and is currently 98-years-old (he'd also star in Goodbye, Mr. Chips the next year, making him the last credited member of a 1939 Best Picture nominee).  Donnie Dunagan also received screen credit in two films of the era, both 1938's Mother Carey's Chickens with Anne Shirley & Walter Brennan, and 1939's Son of Frankenstein (circling us back to the Universal Monster movies).  It is possible that there is a third that I am aware of in Sidney Kibrick, who appeared in a number of Our Gang shorts; he is the last surviving member of the Our Gang films, having played Woim, the sidekick to the series' main villain Butch, but given that short films rarely had credits at all in this era, I can't find evidence that he actually was credited in a formal way in these films, though his part would've been significant enough he would have been credited if they had them (even as a child actor, he would've gotten billing as his part would have been too big).

And as far as I can find-that's it-just three actors left from the 1930's, and all of them men.  This feels like a passing of an era, but also an opportunity for some of you to prove me wrong.  If you know of anything that contradicts what I shared here (I researched, but am not infallible), please join me in the comments (and I'll amend the article and give you credit).