The Early Years
The location was originally home to the respected Bliss-Hayden School of Acting run by a husband and wife team of motion picture actors—actress Lela Bliss with over 45 credits stretching from 1915 to 1965, and her husband actor Harry Hayden with over 260 credits listed from 1936 to 1955 on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Veronica Lake, Mamie Van Doren and scores of other working actors studied there.
In 1954, the Bliss-Hayden Theatre was acquired by Douglas Frank Bank and Jay Manford, and renamed The Beverly Hills Playhouse. This was a showcase for many productions written by Douglas Bank (The Preacher, and Journey to a Lonely Star) as well as well-known plays of the time including Jenny Kissed Me, Room Service, The Lawyer, Harvey, and The Second Man. Many actors had performed there including Stanley Adams, Anne Baxter, Ken Mayer, Michael Fox and Louella Parsons, and directors Larry Stewart and Arthur M. Lowe, Jr., as well as others. They owned the theatre until 1959.
Read more about this topic: Beverly Hills Playhouse
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)