Truus, Bob & Jan too! posted a photo:

Vintage card, no. 799.

Demi Moore (1962) is an American actress and film producer who had her breakthrough with the Brat Pack film St. Elmo's Fire (1985). By 1995, Moore was the highest-paid actress in Hollywood thanks to such blockbusters as Ghost (1990), A Few Good Men (1992) and Indecent Proposal (1993).

Demi Moore was born Demi Gene Guynes in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1962. Her father, Air Force airman Charles Harmon, left her then 18-year-old mother Victoria (née King) after a two-month marriage and before Demi was born. When Demi Moore was three months old, her mother married Dan Guynes, a newspaper salesman, who she later saw as her real father. The family moved frequently because of her stepfather's work, more than thirty times. Her stepfather committed suicide when Demi was fifteen, two years after divorcing her mother. A year later, she dropped out of school. Her mother, Virginia Guynes, was arrested many times, including for arson and drunk driving. Moore broke off contact with her in 1990 but later reconciled with her shortly before she died of cancer in 1998 at the age of 54. In 1979, three months before her 17th birthday, Demi met the rock musician Freddy Moore, and they married in 1980. The marriage lasted four years. Moore signed with the Elite Modelling Agency and then enrolled in drama classes after being inspired by her next-door neighbour, 17-year-old German actress Nastassja Kinski. She appeared on the cover of the January 1981 issue of the French adult magazine Oui, taken from a photo session in which she had posed nude, and made her film debut with a brief role in the teen drama Choices (Silvio Narizzano, 1981). In 1982, she played an investigative reporter in the hospital soap General Hospital (1982-1983). She celebrated her first cinema success in the romantic comedy Blame It on Rio (Stanley Donen, 1983) opposite Michael Caine. Around the same time, she became addicted to cocaine. Her big break came with the film St. Elmo's Fire (Joel Schumacher, 1985) with Rob Lowe and Emilio Estevez, to whom she was engaged for three years. Reportedly, she was fired by Schumacher during filming because of her drug abuse, after which she went to rehab and returned a week later. Interestingly, her character in the film, Jules, was also addicted to cocaine. The film was a huge success, and Moore and her film counterparts were counted among the 'Brat Pack', a group of young actors with a promising future. Moore progressed to more serious material with the romantic comedy About Last Night... (Edward Zwick, 1986), co-starring Rob Lowe. It marked a positive turning point in her career. In 1987, she became even more famous when she married actor Bruce Willis.

In 1990, Demi Moore co-starred with Patrick Swayze and Whoopi Goldberg in the highly successful fantasy Ghost (Jerry Zucker, 1990), for which she received a Golden Globe nomination. The love scene between Moore and Patrick Swayze that starts in front of a potter's wheel to the sound of 'Unchained Melody became an iconic moment in film history, and the film grossed over US$505 million at the box office. 'The highest-grossing film of that year' earned her a spot on the A-list and offered her many leading roles in films. The following year, she received a great deal of media attention when she appeared naked on the front page of Vanity Fair magazine while seven months pregnant. The front page was frequently imitated and parodied in the years that followed. The next year, she starred in the blockbuster A Few Good Men (Rob Reiner, 1992), opposite Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson. The following year, she scored another big film hit with the controversial Indecent Proposal (Adrian Lyne, 1993). In this film, a rich businessman (Robert Redford) presents a couple with financial problems (Moore and Woody Harrelson) with a dilemma: he gives the couple a million dollars if he can sleep with the woman. Another blockbuster was the thriller Disclosure (Barry Levinson, 1994) with Michael Douglas. Moore produced and starred in a controversial miniseries for HBO called If These Walls Could Talk (1996), a three-part anthology about abortion alongside Sissy Spacek and Cher. Its screenwriter, Nancy Savoca, directed two segments, including one in which Moore played a widowed nurse in the early 1950s seeking a back-alley abortion. For that role, Moore received a second Golden Globe nomination as Best Actress. At the time, Demi Moore was one of the highest-paid film actresses of all time, and she was the first actress to receive more than $10 million for a film role - $12.5 million for Striptease (Andrew Bergman, 1996).

Demi Moore did not manage to keep up the success. Striptease (Andrew Bergman, 1996) opened to overwhelmingly negative reviews with Moore's performance being criticised and 'won' six Golden Raspberry Awards, including for worst film, worst actress and worst director. However, it was a moderate financial success, grossing US$113 million worldwide. Moore also starred in the thriller The Juror (Brian Gibson, 1996). It was a box office bomb and was heavily panned by critics. Two successes at the time were as the voice of the gypsy woman Esmeralda in Disney's animated film The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Kirk Wise, Gary Trousdale, 1996) and the voice of Dallas Grimes in the animated comedy Beavis and Butt-head Do America (Mike Judge, 1996), alongside her then-husband Bruce Willis. When her long-cherished project, G.I. Jane (Ridley Scott, 1997), for which the actress even shaved her head, turned out to be another flop, Demi Moore took a break in her acting career. As a producer, she did have a few successes with the three Austin Powers films, including Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (Jay Roach, 1997). Moore and Willis separated in 1998 and divorced in 2000. Together with Bruce Willis, she has three children: Rumer Glen Willis (born 1988), Scout LaRue Willis (1991) and Tallulah Belle Willis (1994). In 2003, she had a much-discussed relationship with the sixteen-year-younger actor Ashton Kutcher, whom she married in 2005. That same year, she returned to the big screen by playing the villain in the sequel Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (McG, 2005), starring Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu. Since 2006, Demi has been the face and muse of cosmetics brand Helena Rubinstein. On-screen, she could be seen in the ensemble cast of the drama Bobby (Emilio Estevez, 2006) and the drama Margin Call (J. C. Chandor, 2011) with Kevin Spacey. Moore and Kutcher split in 2011, and their divorce was finalised in 2013. Incidentally, she appeared in films such as the black comedy Rough Night/Girls' Night Out (Lucia Aniello, 2017) starring Scarlett Johansson. In 2019, Moore released her book 'Inside Out' about her life, which reached the top spot on the New York Times Bestseller list. In 2025, Demi made a glorious comeback in the cinema when she won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture: Musical or Comedy for her role in the British-French Horror film The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024). The film pokes fun at the American film industry, the ideal of eternal youth and the cosmetics industry. Since early 2022, Demi Moore has been in a relationship with Swiss celebrity chef Daniel Humm (46).

Sources: Wikipedia (Dutch, English and German), and IMDb.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

Truus, Bob & Jan too! posted a photo:

Vintage British postcard. Lubin, 1910s, No. 45. Photo by Gilbert & Bacon, Philadelphia, 1916.

Eleanor Caines (1870 or 1880-1913) was an American silent film actress. She spent most of her film career at the Lubin Film Company. According to IMDb, Eleanor Caines was born in 1870 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. In 1909, she began her film career at Lubin in the short comedy Blissville the Beautiful (1909) with George Reehm and Harry Myers. In the following years, she appeared in some 30 Lubin productions. Eleanor Caines died in 1913 in her hometown Philadelphia at the age of 43. The cause of her death was surgery after an accident. She was married to William Robson with whom she had a child, and till her death to Jack Le Faint.

Truus, Bob & Jan too! posted a photo:

Vintage British postcard, 1910s. Hepworth Picture Player. Photo by Lallie Charles.

British actress Chrissie White (1895-1989) was one of the most famous and popular stars of British silent cinema.

Truus, Bob & Jan too! posted a photo:

Spanish postcard by CyA, no. 81. Photo: Metro Goldwyn Mayer. John Ericson in Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, 1955). The Spanish film title was Conspiración de silencio.

German-American film and television actor John Ericson (1926-2020) started in the 1950s as a young hunk with wavy-haired good looks and an athletic build. He made a series of popular films for MGM, including Teresa (19, 51) and The Student Prince (1954). Later, Ericson worked mostly for television, most memorably as the partner of Anne Francis in Honey West (1965-1966).

John Ericson was born Joachim Alexander Ottokar Meibes in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1926. He was the son of Carl F. Meibes, a German chemist and Ellen Wilson, a Swedish actress and opera singer. Escaping from the Nazi regime, his family emigrated to the U.S. when he was three. At first, living in Detroit, they eventually settled in New York, where his dad (according to a 1955 newspaper article) found lucrative employment as president of a food extract company. After graduating from Newton High School, John enrolled at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, financially supporting his studies by working at a Walgreens drug store. Most sources, including Wikipedia, incorrectly cite his acting debut as being in 'Stalag 17' on Broadway, but Ericson himself stated (in a 1989 interview with Skip E. Lowe) that his career kick-started with the romantic wartime drama Teresa (Fred Zinnemann, 1951), filmed in Italy by Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Afterwards, he made the decision not to sign a studio contract for fear of being typecast as 'boy-next-door' types. On the strength of his performance in Teresa, producer/director José Ferrer offered Ericson not only what amounted to being the nominal lead in 'Stalag 17' (1951), but the opportunity to play an initially unsympathetic part as the slick, cynical gambler J. J. Sefton. The coveted film role was eventually assigned to William Holden, who won an Academy Award. Between 1954 and 1955, Ericson was under contract at MGM and made four films for the studio: Rhapsody (Charles Vidor, 1954) opposite Elizabeth Taylor and Vittorio Gassman, Green Fire (Andrew Marton, 1954), co-starring Stewart Granger and Grace Kelly, who had been in his class at the Academy. and the seminal Spencer Tracy Western Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, 1955) as a nervy hotel clerk.

During the next three decades, John Ericson worked as a freelance actor. His wavy-haired good looks and athletic build were not lost on the industry. He co-starred with Barbara Stanwyck in Forty Guns (Samuel Fuller, 1957). His career continued mostly on television. He co-starred with Anne Francis in Honey West (1965), a short-lived series apparently modelled on the British series The Avengers (1961). It featured a crime-solving, judo-savvy lady detective (even wearing Diana Rigg-style jumpsuits) and her right-hand man. The show only lasted for 30 episodes, but has since gained a minor cult following. Ericson's frequent TV guest appearances included Rawhide (1959), Bonanza (1959), Burke's Law (1963), The FBI (1965) and The Invaders (1967). For the big screen, he went to Italy and Spain. There he starred in the Peplum Io Semiramide / Slave Queen of Babylon (Primo Zeglio, 1963) about Semiramis, a queen of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (Yvonne Furneaux). He also starred in the James Bond pastiche Agente S 03: Operazione Atlantide / Operation Atlantis (Domenico Paolella, 1965) and Spaghetti Westerns. In the U.S., he had leads in thrillers such as The Money Jungle (Francis D. Lyon, 1967) with Lola Albright, Westerns like Day of the Badman (Harry Keller, 1958) with Fred MacMurray, and Science Fiction B-graders like The Destructors (Francis D. Lyon, 1968) starring Richard Egan, and The Bamboo Saucer (Frank Telford, 1968), which was Dan Duryea's last film. Ericson also starred as the titular 1930s Depression-era gangster in Pretty Boy Floyd (Herbert J. Leder, 1960). He appeared in the Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks (Robert Stevenson, 1971) and posed for the nude centrefold in Playgirl magazine's January 1974 issue. On the stage, he played King Arthur to Kathryn Grayson's Guinevere in a 1967 production of the musical 'Camelot'. A reviewer commented that what Ericson lacked in the vocal department, he more than made up for by a 'masterful performance'. His dramatic theatrical credits included 'Richard III', 'Mr. Roberts' and 'A Streetcar Named Desire'. In his spare time, John Ericson took up painting landscapes and still lifes. He was also a sculptor and a keen amateur photographer. Until he died of pneumonia in 2020, he resided in New Mexico with his second wife, Karen Huston, whom he married in 1974. With his first wife, Milly Ericson Courye, he had two children, Brett and Nicole. John Ericson was 93.

Sources: I.S. Mowis (IMDb), Wikipedia and IMDb.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

Truus, Bob & Jan too! posted a photo:

Vintage British postcard, 1910s. Hepworth Picture Player. P.C. 2. NB IMDb does not list a Alma Taylor film with the title The Girl Who Believed, so it may just be a tagline accentuating what we see.

Alma Taylor (1895-1974) was a British actress, who peeked in the British silent cinema of the 1910s and 1920s. In 1915 readers of Pictures and Picturegoers voted her most popular British performer, beating even Charlie Chaplin. Taylor acted in over 150 films, among which some prestigious examples like Shadow of Egypt (1924) by Sidney Morgan.

Alma Taylor was born in London, on 3 January 1895. According to Anthony Slide, brunette, blue-eyed Alma Taylor was the Hepworth actress 'par excellence'. Beginning in 1907, she already acted with producer Cecil Hepworth, playing tragic young girls. She then co-starred with Chrissie White in Hepworth's 'Tilly Girl' comic series (1910-1915) about two naughty schoolgirls, as well as in 75 or more short and long subjects by Hepworth, such as the Dickens adaptations Oliver Twist (1912), David Copperfield (Thomas Bentley) and The Old Curiosity Shop (Bentley 1913). In those days , everyone helped out at the studios, so both Alma and Chrissie helped in the processing rooms when the weather was too poor to shoot. During the First World War and soon after Taylor contributed to the war effort by acting in such propaganda films like The Nature of the Beast (Hepworth 1919). Taylor clearly was the producer's favorite, and remained devoted to him for decades, starring opposite Ralph Forbes in the rather old-fashioned British countryside drama Comin' Thro the Rye (1923), a remake of an earlier version by Hepworth. After a temporal absence from the screen, Hepworth relaunched Taylor in his last film, The House of Marney (1926), with John Longden. In 1924, the Daily News named her, along with Betty Balfour, Britain's top star. Alma Taylor only starred in four non-Hepworth films: The Shadow of Egypt (Sidney Morgan, 1924) with Joan Morgan, Quinneys (Maurice Elvey, 1927), A South Sea Bubble (T. Hays Hunter 1928) with Ivor Novello, and Two Little Drummer Boys (G.B.Samuelson, 1928). In the late silent era she did some German films, including her part of Mrs. Barrymore in Der Hund von Baskerville/ The Hound of the Baskervilles (Richard Oswald 1929), a film longtime considered lost but rediscovered in 2009. With the coming of sound, however, Taylor's career dwindled and she had to satisfy with minor, matronly roles, in small number of films, such as Bachelor's Baby (Harry Hughes, 1932), Things Are Looking Up (Albert de Courville, 1935), Lilacs in the Spring (Herbert Wilcox, 1954), and Blue Murder at St. Trinian's (Frank Launder, 1957). Uncredited, she played a box office woman in Hitchcock's second vserion of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). Probably her last part was the uncredited role of an old lady in the Titanic-drama by Rank, A Night to Remember (Roy Ward Baker 1958). Alma Taylor died in London, 23 January 1974. She was the wife of film producer and director Walter West (1885-1958), who in the late 1910s and early 1920s was the regular director of Violet Hopson, first with his company Broadwest (1914-1921) and then for Hopson's own company.

Sources: IMDB, English Wikipedia, Anthony Slide in Encyclopedia of British Film, www.allmovie.com, www.hepworthfilm.org/alma_taylor.htm.

Truus, Bob & Jan too! posted a photo:

Vintage British postcard, 1910s. Hepworth Picture Player. P.C., 3. NB IMDb does not list a Chrissie White film with the title The Winning Smile, so it may just be a tagline accentuating what we see.

British actress Chrissie White (1895-1989) was one of the most famous and popular stars of British silent cinema.

Blue-eyed and light-haired beauty Chrissie White was born Ada Constance White in Chiswick, London, on 23rd May 1895 – the year film was introduced by the Lumière brothers. She started her film career when joining the Hepworth company in 1907 as a 12-year-old girl. Under the name of ‘ Chrissie’ she became one of the first stars in British cinema, often performing in shorts by director Lewin Fitzhamon, in particular the Tilly comedies. When White was teamed with Alma Taylor, they became a popular comic duo as the naughty schoolgirls Tilly and Sally, who create havoc everywhere. The Tilly comedies were a popular series in the years 1910 and 1911. NB White supposedly rode to the studios on a bicycle in her early years as a star.

One by one, White moved from comedy to drama and romance. By 1912 Chrissie White had become Hepworth’s leading lady and the most popular British star of her time. In the same year she married Claude Witten, who also worked for Hepworth. One of her earliest features was a crime film set in the horse racing milieu: The Kissing Cup (1913); it still survives in the Dutch Desmet Collection, as well as the Tilly comedy Tilly in a Boarding House (1911). Other memorable titles were The Vicar of Wakefield (1913), and At the Foot of the Scaffold (1913). Chrissie White’s male partners in her films were mostly Lionelle Howard (from 1914 on); Stewart Rome (between 1914-1917), a.o. in Coward! (1915) and Her Boy (1915); and Henry Edwards (from 1918 on).

Edwards also directed most of their films together, such as Possession (1919), The City of Beautiful Nonsense (1919), The Kinsman (1919), The Bargain (1921) and Lily of the Alley (1923). All in all they did some 22 films together. They were also a couple in real life, as White married Edwards in 1922, and they had a daughter Henrietta, who also became an actress. Edwards and White became real celebrities in Britain, the equivalent of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. White's last silent film with Edwards was the romance The World of Wonderful Reality (1924).

When Hepworth collapsed in 1924, Chrissie White - who had worked only for Hepworth - retired from the screen, to the regret of her fans. She returned in the sound era to play in only two films more, with Edwards as her male partner: The Call of the Sea (Leslie Hiscott 1930) and the comedy General John Regan (Edwards 1933), filmed in Northern Ireland. After that White definitively retired from the screen, and after the death of Edwards in 1952 she withdrew from publicity at all. Estimates are that Chrissie White worked in between 100 and 180 films, shorts and features. Chrissie White died 18/8/1989 in Hollywood, California, and was buried at the Westwood Memorial Park.

Clips of Chrissie White's films can be traced in the BBC/BFI documentary Silent Britain (2006). See also on YouTube Tilly, the Tomboy, Gives to the Poor www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac1dVYaPN8I

Sources: IMDB, www.hepworthfilm.org/chrissie_white.htm. See also www.flickr.com/photos/truusbobjantoo/3023085296/