Gold Diggers of Broadway - Cast

Cast

  • Nancy Welford as Jerry Lamar (the understudy)
  • Conway Tearle as Stephen Lee (Uncle Steve)
  • Winnie Lightner as Mabel Munroe
  • Ann Pennington as Ann Collins (the leading lady)
  • Gertrude Short as Topsy St Clair
  • Lilyan Tashman as Eleanor
  • William Bakewell as Wally Saunders (the nephew)
  • Nick Lucas as Nick
  • Helen Foster as Violet Dayne
  • Albert Gran as Jim Blake (the lawyer)
  • Julia Swayne Gordon as Cissy Gray
  • Lee Moran as the Dance Director
  • Armand Kaliz as Barney Barnett
  • Louise Beavers as Sadie the Maid
  • Neely Edwards as the Stage Manager
Cast notes
  • Winnie Lightner became one of Warner Bros. biggest stars in 1930. She starred in two lavish Technicolor features in that year: Hold Everything and The Life of the Party. Winnie Lightner's first appearance as the title character in the 1931 Olsen & Johnson comedy Gold Dust Gertie pays homage to her success in Gold Diggers of Broadway by utilizing "Song of the Gold Diggers" as the musical underscoring during this sequence. Her flapperish care-free demeanor became decidedly dated as the conservatism of the 1930s took its course and this probably explains why she retired from films in 1934.
  • In a late 1960s audiotaped interview with Winnie Lightner, she speculated that her extremely poor eyesight (which began to fail unusually early) was due to her frequent exposure to the brilliant lighting required for the string of early Technicolor films she appeared in between 1929 and 1930.
  • Director Roy Del Ruth married Winnie Lightner in 1940.
  • The only actors in the 1929 film to have also appeared in the 1923 silent version, The Gold Diggers, were Gertrude Short and Louise Beavers. Largely forgotten today, Short is perhaps best known to film buffs as the aggressive reporter who hounds Robert Armstrong in the opening reel of Son of Kong (1933). Beavers, who made her (uncredited) film debut in the silent The Gold Diggers would eventually make 156 film appearances, many of them as scene-stealing maids, and played "Beulah" for a season on the TV series of that name. She also starred with Claudette Colbert in the original 1934 version of Imitation of Life, largely considered her greatest role.

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