Born On This Day- March 21st... Character Actor James Coco

James Coco was a pudgy & bald character actor whom I admired a great deal, for reasons you can easily grasp. He worked steadily for over 3 decades in commercials, TV, Films & on stage.

Coco's career climax came as a struggling gay actor & buddy to a boozy Broadway actress played by Marsha Mason in the film Only When I Laugh (1981). As the supportive friend who wants to be a "big, big star," Coco was winsome, waggish, winning, wise, & over the top gay. He received a well deserved Oscar nomination as Supporting Actor.


Coco was associated with the works of one of my favorite playwrights- Terrence McNally. He played in an off-Broadway double-bill of one-act plays- Sweet Eros/Witness (1968), followed by Here's Where I Belong, a disastrous Broadway musical adaptation of East of Eden that closed on opening night. They had far greater success with Next, which ran for more than 700 performances & won Coco the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance.


Coco also achieved success with Neil Simon, who wrote The Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1969) specifically for him & Doris Roberts. It won him a Tony Award nomination as Best Actor in a Play. More work in Simon projects included a Broadway revival of the musical Little Me & films: Murder By Death, The Cheap Detective, & Only When I Laugh.


Coco's other film credits: Ensign Pulver, Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, Man of La Mancha, Such Good Friends, A New Leaf, The Wild Party, & The Muppets Take Manhattan.


Coco was known for his cooking capabilities, publishing several best-selling cookbooks & making frequent guest appearances on talk shows dressed in his chef's hat & apron. Coco died of a heart attack in NYC, in 1987 at the age of just 56.

Born On This Day- March 18th... Fred Astaire's Straight Man

From the very start of film as an art form, slightly coded gay characters were used for the easy laugh: sissies, gallery owners, interior decorators, fussy bachelors & prissy artistic types. These incidental characters added spice to the urbane sophisticated comedies of the era. The homosexual hints these minor characters provided were in juxtaposition to the livelier & sexier romantic men of the era. Film comedies deftly employed actors like Clifton Webb, Frances Langford, & Edward Everett Horton as gay comic relief with stereotypes that didn’t threatened the moviegoers, male or female.



I have always had a place in my heart for the work of Edward Everett Horton. I immediately identify Horton with his work in the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals at RKO including the apt named The Gay Divorcee, but he provided notable roles onscreen during the 1930s included a portrayal of The Mad Hatter in the 1933 Alice in Wonderland, & a neurotic paleontologist, who first appears disguised as a woman, in Frank Capra's Lost Horizon (1937).

Starting in the early 1930s, Horton made at least 6 films a year for a quarter of a century. Reflecting his work on the stage, there were occasional serious variations in his roles. He played an unusually forceful role in Douglas Sirk's Summer Storm (1944), & he delivered a comedic masterful turn in Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here (1943).


Horton worked steadily for more than 60 years. He may have been a sissy, but he was no dummy. He bought up property in the San Fernando Valley starting in the 1920s. He developed what he named- Beleigh Acres, a 23-acre development where he lived with his long time partner- Gavin Gordon & his mother, who passed away at age 102.


Like a good homo, Horton collected antiques, & at the time of his death in 1970, he had a collection worth a million dollars. He was busy on television throughout the 1950s & 1960s: onscreen, voice-overs for commercials, & as host for the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show at Madison Square Garden. Horton was on the silly Western series F Troop, playing Running Chicken, a Hekawi Indian tribe medicine man. But his most enduring work from the 1960s was as the narrator of Fractured Fairy Tales, on Rocky & Bullwinkle, in which he was prominently billed in the opening credits of every episode. This work endeared him to millions of baby boomers like me. One of my favorites of his appearances is an I Love Lucy episode, where he is cast against type as a frisky, amorous suitor.




Edward Everett Horton died in 1970, at age 84. He continued to work up until the week he passed away.

The Joker's Wild... Born On This Day, Cesar Romero!

From everything I have read, Cesar Julio Romero, Jr. was the consumate professional, brimming with talent, & a total nice guy… one of the good ones. Famous as a "confirmed bachelor," the "Latin from Manhattan" was Hollywood's most popular date. After a hard day at the studio, he always dove into the nightlife & the social world. There was rarely a film or gallery where the debonair, dramatically dressed man was not seen with a famous star on his arm: Joan Crawford, Linda Darnell, Barbara Stanwyck, Lucille Ball, Ann Sheridan, Jane Wyman, or Ginger Rogers. It was reported that Romero's closets held 30 tuxedos, 200 sport coats, & 500 suits. Romero rarely spent an evening in his Brentwood home, which he shared with his sister Maria. It was well known in Hollywood that the likable Romero was gay, and it was well assumed that after he dropped off his beautiful date, he would end up in the arms of long time lover-Tyrone Power.


Cesar Romero had supporting roles in nearly 100 films from the 1930s-1980s, musicals, period pieces, westerns, noir, comedy, he did it all.

In 1953, Romero starred in a 39-episode TV serial, Passport To Danger, & he continued to do guest spots on TV shows: I Love Lucy & the special Lucy Takes A Cruise To Havana, Zorro, 77 Sunset Strip, Fantasy Island, & Murder She Wrote.

Romero achieved his greatest fame in 1966 as The Joker in the highly successful TV series Batman & repeated the role in the 1966 movie, making him the first film Joker, before Nicholson, & like heath Ledger, he was robbed of an Oscar.

Romero danced with Carmen Miranda on a live broadcast of The Milton Berle Show. Wearing glittering sequins & colorful fruit, Miranda forgot her panties while changing between acts, & when Cesar twirled her above his head, she exposed herself to millions of TV viewers across the country. Talk about your wardrobe malfunctions!

Enduringly popular, the wealthy Romero continued to work steadily through the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, & beyond.

Romero had a great sense of humor. Once, after taping a talk show featuring him & a beauty queen, the technician began removing their clip-on microphones, Romero quipped: "You can do the young lady first. The young queen before the old queen."

In 1968, Romero was named one of the “most beautiful men in the world" by T.V. Guide Magazine with "hair the color of stainless steel," an "alert, erect posture," & "charm to spare." Romero continued to appear in films almost yearly throughout the 1970's and 1980's. In 1985, the still handsome & popular man actor was cast as Jane Wyman's love interest on the popular Falcon Crest.

Romero: "Those beautiful actresses all had individuality & a flair for glamour…years ago the gals were real stars. There was an excitement to the business then."

The elegant Cesar Romero, loved & adored by his friends & fans, died of complications from a blood clot on New Year's Day, 1994.

Born On This Day- February 14th... Cool Cookie Thelma Ritter

Thelma Ritter is one of my favorites & the very essence of the term Character Actor. Thelma Ritter's career was full of excellent supporting roles. She received 6 Oscar nominations, the most for an actor with no wins (tied with Deborah Kerr). But who needs a win with a body of work this strong: A Letter to 3 Wives, All About Eve, The Mating Season, With a Song in My Heart, Birdman of Alcatraz, Rear Window, & my favorite Ritter film- Pillow Talk:


I adore Thelma Ritter. She is one of the classiest character actors to have lent an individualistic groove across cinema screens of her time. Ritter had cool. She could coolly wither many a co-star away with just one line of dialogue. She played wives, mothers, maids, housekeepers, wise types, tough cookies, working class women. All solidly real women; & all take no lip & mince no words women.

She deserves the Post Apocalyptic Bohemian Award for Coolest Character actor of the 1950s & 1960s. Don't you feel that she deserves it?