The Life of Emile Zola is a 1937 American biographical film by director William Dieterle. The title character is played by Paul Muni. The film won three Academy Awards in 1938, including that for best film.
Louise Rainer: see Academy Awards 1936
Spencer Bonaventure Tracy (born April 5, 1900 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; † June 10, 1967 in Beverly Hills, California) was an American film actor. Tracy, who began his career on the stage and later was one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s top stars for 20 years, is considered one of the greatest character actors of the 20th century. He won the Academy Award for Best Leading Actor in 1937 and 1938. He was seen in serious as well as comic roles, and as lovers as well as in classic character roles. Because, especially in his later films, he consistently portrayed decent, sensitive and wise characters whose main concern was defending justice and humanity, he embodied for many moviegoers the “humanitarian conscience of the screen.”
Thomas Leo McCarey (Los Angeles, October 3, 1898 – Santa Monica, July 5, 1969) was an American director.
Leo McCarey began his career in the 1920s as a directorial assistant to American director Tod Browning. He won his first Oscar in 1937 for the comedy The Awful Truth. Between 1937 and 1959, seven of his films were nominated for an Oscar. Three of them were nominated for the Oscar for Best Direction.
He died of emphysema in 1969.
Alice Brady (New York, November 2, 1892 – there, October 28, 1939) was an Oscar-winning, American actress.
Alice Brady was introduced to the film industry in 1914 through her father, a major producer in the theater. She soon became famous and starred in more than fifty of those films during the silent film era. Still, she was mostly seen in the theater.
After 1923, she was a full-time actress in the theater and said goodbye to the life in the film industry. Still, she returned in 1933 and starred in one film after another. In 1936 she was nominated for an Oscar for her role in the film My Man Godfrey and in 1938 she received an Oscar for her role in In Old Chicago. However, she never saw any of her Oscar. A thief went on stage before her to receive the statuette, for her absence. The thief was never heard from again, as was the Oscar.
Even before she could get a copy, she died of cancer on Oct. 28, 1939. She would have been 47 years old five days later.
Joseph Schildkraut (Vienna, March 22, 1896 – New York, January 21, 1964) was an Austrian-American actor.
Joseph “Pepi” Schildkraut was born in 1896, the son of actor Rudolph Schildkraut (1862-1930). In the early 1900s, his family moved to the United States. Between 1913 and 1920, he returned to his homeland. He began his career in 1915 in a German feature film in which his father also starred. In 1921 he got his first role in an American film, Orphans of the Storm, in which he played the male lead alongside sisters Lillian Gish and Dorothy Gish.
His career peaked in the 1930s. In 1934, he starred alongside Claudette Colbert in Cleopatra. For his role in The Life of Emile Zola, in which he acted alongside Paul Muni and Gale Sondergaard, he received the Oscar for best male supporting actor. He also had an important supporting role in Marie Antoinette (1938), as well as in The Man in the Iron Mask (1939). After the 1930s, he received very few roles. His best-known role later in life was that of Otto Frank in the film The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) after previously playing the same role in the play of the same name.
He died in 1964 at the age of 67. He was buried in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
