Academy Awards 1929 – 1930

All Quiet on the Western Front is a 1930 American war film directed by Lewis Milestone. The screenplay is based on the 1929 novel of the same name by German author Erich Maria Remarque.

George Arliss (London, April 10, 1868 – there, February 5, 1946) was an English actor. He began his career in theater, making his film debut in 1921 in The Devil. That same year, he starred in Disraeli, a film about the life of former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. It was a film adaptation of the play of the same name in which Aldiss had also starred in 1911. A new version of Disraeli was released in 1929, and Arliss received an Oscar for best actor. He transitioned from silent film to sound film in his career. In 1930, he received an Oscar nomination for his role in The Green Goddess, a remake of the silent film The Green Goddess in which he had the same role.
Other films in which Aldiss appeared include the historical Alexander Hamilton (1931), Voltaire (1933) and Cardinal Richelieu (1935).
Aldiss published a two-volume autobiography, Up the years from Bloomsbury (1927) and My ten years in the studios (1940).
He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6648 Hollywood Blvd.

Edith Norma Shearer (Montreal, August 10, 1902 – Los Angeles, June 12, 1983) was an Oscar-winning actress. She was born and raised in Canada and moved to the United States in 1919. There she broke into the feature film industry and became a well-known movie star in silent films. After a successful transition to sound film, Shearer was one of Hollywood’s most popular actresses throughout the 1930s. For years, the media and the public wrote about her as a fashion-conscious and well-groomed star who portrayed in films mostly showgirls, everyday women or sexually free-spirited women.
Shearer was married to influential film producer Irving Thalberg from 1927 through 1936, achieving a high social standing within Hollywood and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio in particular. Her obsession with eternal youth meant her downfall for the actress in the 1940s: she refused to play roles of older women or mothers, and eventually fell into oblivion.
Shearer remained an important figure in Hollywood and was responsible for the breakthrough of actors Janet Leigh and Robert Evans. Later in life, she suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and eventually died of pneumonia at the age of 80. For her contribution to the feature film industry, she was immortalized with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Today, she is still celebrated by cinema feminists as “the first American actress who made it acceptable for women to be both single and not a virgin on the silver screen.”