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1-12 of 12
- Actor
- Director
- Producer
Davis is enjoying his 9th year in L.A. as a full-time actor, doing everything from film, TV, theater, & commercials, to stand-up comedy, to hosting, and even voice-overs through the William Morris Agency in Los Angeles. It's in the accumulation of this work that Davis finds himself in that odd but respectable place where many people recognize him from something, but they're just not sure what.
Originally from Oklahoma City, Davis directed corporate videos to help put himself through SMU's Meadows School of the Arts cinema production program in Dallas, Texas, and graduated with a B.A., Cum Laude. Then, with a degree to fall back on, Davis rekindled his life long passion for performing, and began touring nationally as a stand-up comedian for 3 years, before settling in Los Angeles.
There he joined Hollywood's premier all-sketch comedy review, ACME Comedy Theater. After two years there in the main company, he joined up with The Groundlings, and graduated from their world renowned 4 level school of improv and sketch.
Along the way, Davis has racked up numerous film and television acting credits, including ABC's Desperate Housewives, Norm, and Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher (sketch-comedy), Sony Picture's feature film, Slackers, Disney Channel's, The Jersey, NBC's Providence, SCI-FI Channel's The Chronicle, UPN's All of Us, and CBS's Walker: Texas Ranger. You may have also seen Davis in his many hero roles for national commercials including Toyota, Budweiser, Circuit City, Sears, and Quaker. Or perhaps you've heard him as the "voice of" companies such as Bank of America, Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, and Coors Light.
And of course, Davis was the on-camera host and star of TV Guide's two year running, Best of Late Night TV, a fast-paced mix of original comedy, and highlights from the late night talk show, and sketch-comedy universe (think The Soup, using clips from Letterman, Leno, Conan O'Brien, SNL, etc.).
Now, Davis, who scrimped and saved to make his own little movie, has done just that with his award winning short, Boy-Next-Door, which officially premiered at HBO Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, & went on to win at WorldFest, Hollywood Shorts, Big Bear Lake Intl., and Key West Indie Fest ---- also boasting official selections at 24 other notable festivals, a distributor deal with Shorts International, and a viewer rating of 5 out of 5 stars in the ubiquitous iTunes Store.
Davis is married, has a young son and daughter, continues to live and work in L.A., and attributes his involvement in show business to his Grandfather, Seymour Davis, who was a professional entertainer for 56 years.- Make-Up Department
- Writer
- Special Effects
Jim got his start in his hometown of Hazleton Pennsylvania when Paramount Studios came into Hazleton to film 'The Molly McQuires' with Richard Harris, Sean Connery, Samantha Eggar and others as well as the famous make-up artist Wally Westmore of the famous Westmore Brothers of Hollywood. Everyday Jim would go up to Westmore and ask him to teach him make-up. Westmore would always tell him that he has all the people he needs and does not have the time to teach him. After "bothering" him for over thirty days, Westmore told him he could hang around and watch. Jim did that of course. After a few days Westmore would give Jim simple things to do such as cut white foam sponges, put powder on the powder puffs. After a couple of weeks Jim was applying bases on the actors faces. About one week before the movie was going to end, Westmore gave Jim his business card. He had told Jim if ever he was in Los Angeles to look him up and he would teach him all he knew about make-up. Jim took the card and walked 9 miles home where he took a shower, got dressed and put a one dollar bill into his pocket and told his mother he was going to meet some friends. Jim went downtown and started to hitch a ride to California. His first ride took him 50 miles away to Allentown, Pennsylvania. By the time he got to Pittsburg Jim had spent the complete one dollar bill. He kept going and after 13 days he was walking down Hollywood Blvd. He asked someone how to get to the address that was on the business card and he hitched a ride to the address. He knocked at the door and the woman who answered the door told Jim that Westmore was still in Pennsylvania because the movie went over 3 weeks. With no place to go, Jim ended up at the Famous Venice Beach where he "lived" for 3 weeks. Jim went back to the address, knocked at the door and Westmore answered the door and was amazed. He taught Jim all he knew until his death in 1973. During that time Jim befriended Richard Harris and Sean Connery as well as Malachy McCourt the famous Irish Actor. Samantha Eggar and Jim still remain friends since the filming of 'The Molly McQuires'. Jim is very well known for his burns, cuts etc which look so real he has had actors go into the hospital and the doctors would actually try to treat the wounds. Jim is a very funny man who loves to make people laugh and actors and actresses love working with him.- Actor
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Ian Wallace was an affectionately regarded example of a rare, versatile breed. An opera bass-baritone of distinction, he also helped popularise the Michael Flanders and Donald Swann revue number The Hippopotamus Song - "mud, mud, glorious mud" - and was a star of the BBC Radio 4 quiz show My Music. Wallace was as at home in pantomime as he was at Glyndebourne, while his London stage work included co-starring with Robert Morley in the musical Fanny at Drury Lane in 1956.
Rotund and good-natured, Wallace had a unique talent as a raconteur. He had an unerring eye for human weakness and absurdity, but was himself so unmalicious that he was able to tell stories that made even the "victims" laugh. One of his favourite anecdotes concerned the occasion when he felt faint on stage in opera and grabbed the soprano in front of him for support. Afterwards she thanked him for supporting her when she felt faint. Just as Wallace seldom spoke ill of anyone, few spoke ill of him. As Jeanette Chalmers, his agent of many years, put it, he succeeded not only because he had talent but because he was very good with people - "he was very untheatrical ... and very straightforward".
He was, however, capable of straight talking. When in the 1980s the BBC accountants prescribed the abolition of some of the BBC orchestras as part of a cost-cutting exercise, Wallace was one of the performers who took the risk of publicly opposing wholesale cuts, while other BBC stars found it politic to keep their mouths shut.
From the first, Wallace had an affinity with the lighter and funnier side of life, though he did suffer early setbacks despite coming from a privileged background. Born in London, he was the son of Sir John Wallace, Liberal MP for Dumfermline between the two world wars, who wanted his son to become a barrister. For this ambition, the portents were not good. Ian and his mother Mary were fascinated by the stage. The boy made his first stage appearance at the age of five in a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, playing Bottom the weaver. During the performance he was beset by fits of coughing and only afterwards was it realised that he had been suffering from whooping cough.
Though his father did not encourage his acting ambitions, he regarded them with tolerance. Ian was taken to variety performances at the London Coliseum, and saw the Houston Sisters, Layton and Johnstone and the clown Grock.
After Charterhouse school, in Godalming, Surrey, he read law at Cambridge, a course which his father thought would set him up as a barrister and, ultimately, a politician. After making more of an impact in amateur dramatics than in the law faculty, he emerged with a good third-class degree when - as he told it - his tutor was unable to get him a bad second.
The career dilemma was postponed by the war, in which he joined the Royal Artillery but was invalided out after a motorcycle accident. He returned to military service after he recovered, but as a lieutenant was invalided out again in 1944 with tuberculosis of the spine after spending a long time in a military hospital, where he entertained fellow patients with his own show, High Temperature, despite being in a plaster cast. "I've been here about 16 months and I got bored, so I asked if I could do this show. We're having a wonderful time," he told journalists who turned up at Horton emergency hospital in Epsom, Surrey.
In the dismal two years he spent virtually on his back, his thoughts turned more and more to the theatre. He first appeared on the professional stage at the Little Park Theatre in Glasgow, playing the nobleman in Ashley Duke's The Man With a Load of Mischief. He made a guinea (£1.05p) a week. One of the critics compared him with the distinguished actor Charles Laughton, and not only because he weighed 16 stone at the time. He never received any kind of formal instruction in acting.
After a play at the Citizens Theatre and some drama and school broadcasts for the BBC, he made his London stage debut in 1945 at Sadler's Wells in James Bridie's play The Forrigan Reel. It was produced by the actor Alastair Sim. Shortly afterwards, Wallace appeared in a singing role in The Glass Slipper at the St James's Theatre. He began to feel that his future might lie in doing character parts in musicals, regarding his voice as not good enough for opera.
His friends disagreed and persuaded him to audition, with the result that he got the part of Schaunard in La Bohème for the New London Opera Company. Princess Elizabeth was in the royal box on the opening night in 1946. Wallace worked for the group for two years. The musical director was Alberto Erede, and the singers were half British and half Italian.
From there he went, in 1948, to Glyndebourne, the opera house near Lewes, in East Sussex, appearing in comic roles as principal buffo at the Edinburgh Festival and broadcasting many of the productions for the BBC: his association with the company lasted till 1961. He also appeared in revue, sang under Sir Malcolm Sargent in The Mikado and Iolanthe, and performed the comic songs of Flanders and Swann. In 1953 he was in the Royal Command Variety Show at the London Palladium as well as singing in opera in major houses in Europe and beyond, and, in 1962, his stage "after-dinner entertainment" 4 to the Bar - arranged with a cast of four after he had modestly declined to bear the responsibility of a one-man show - was well received. It lampooned the then "hot" Irish playwright Brendan Behan by showing him singing about "Mountains of corn/Sweeping down to the sea". Wallace later relented and devised a one-man show, An Evening With Ian Wallace.
My Music (1967-94) always ended with singing from Wallace and John Amis, accompanied by Steve Race, who devised the questions put to them and the comedy writers Denis Norden and Frank Muir. It was just one of the programmes on radio and television that made Wallace a popular figure without his ever losing authority as an opera singer. In the late 1960s he appeared regularly with Scottish Opera in roles such as Leporello in Mozart's Don Giovanni and Pistola in Verdi's Falstaff, and 1987 saw him both as a classical singer for Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV, and as the college Praelector in the Cambridge spoof Porterhouse Blue on Channel 4.
Wallace had a handsome home in Highgate, north London, and a Norfolk cottage which was useful to a man who liked sailing, golf, photography and walking. In 1983 he was appointed OBE, and in 1991 made honorary doctor of music by St Andrews University.
In 1948 he married Patricia Black, from Fife in Scotland, and they had two children, Rosemary and John.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Actor
Franco Villa was born in 1926 in Rome, Italy. He was a cinematographer and actor, known for Marco, Nicola e Batticuore (1992), The Conqueror of the Orient (1960) and Karzan, il favoloso uomo della jungla (1972). He died on 12 October 2009.- Producer
- Director
- Writer
Mikheil Kalatozishvili was born on 19 May 1959 in Tbilisi, USSR [now Republic of Georgia]. He was a producer and director, known for Dikoe pole (2008), Rcheuli (1991) and Misterii (2000). He died on 12 October 2009 in Moscow, Russia.- Make-Up Department
- Special Effects
- Art Department
Fabrizio Sforza is known for The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), The Last Emperor (1987) and The English Patient (1996). He died on 12 October 2009 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.- Werner Rühl was born on 30 May 1935 in Darmstadt, Germany. He was an actor, known for Diese Drombuschs (1983), A Case for Two (1981) and PS - Geschichten ums Auto (1975). He died on 12 October 2009 in Darmstadt, Hesse, Germany.
- Enrique Miret Magdalena was born on 12 January 1914 in Zaragoza, Aragón, Spain. He died on 12 October 2009 in Madrid, Madrid, Spain.
- Editor
- Editorial Department
Barbara Snarska was born on 14 September 1950 in Lódz, Lódzkie, Poland. She was an editor, known for Czarne slonca (1992), Are Girls Falling from Heaven (2002) and Zal (2002). She died on 12 October 2009 in Lódz, Lódzkie, Poland.- Jean-François Bergier was born on 5 December 1931 in Lausanne, Switzerland. He died on 12 October 2009 in Blonay, Switzerland.
- Brendan Mullen was born on 9 October 1949 in Paisley, Scotland, UK. He died on 12 October 2009 in Ventura, California, USA.
- Dickie Peterson was born on 12 September 1946 in Grand Forks, North Dakota, USA. He was married to Ilka. He died on 12 October 2009 in Erkelenz, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.