Share:

People: Famous People born in 1888

People in chronological context: 1888 (MDCCCLXXXVIII) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar and a leap year starting on Friday of the Julian calendar, the 1888th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 888th year of the 2nd millennium, the 88th year of the 19th century, and the 9th year of the 1880s decade. As of the start of 1888, the Gregorian calendar was 12 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923. ()

People in decade: 1800s | 1810s | 1820s | 1830s | 1840s | 1850s | 1860s | 1870s | 1880s | 1890s | 1900s | 1910s | 1920s | 1930s | 1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s | 2020s


Sort by:
748 people found (page 1/25):

George Schaefer(† 92)

Crew | Brooklyn (US)

George Schaefer (November 5, 1888, Brooklyn, New York – August 8, 1981) was an American movie producer and business executive. Schaefer joined Paramount Pictures in 1920 and became general manager in 1933. He became vice president and chief executive officer at United Artists and was then hired as president of RKO in 1938. In 1941 Orson Welles made his classic film Citizen Kane at RKO. He was fired from RKO in 1942 because of the controversy surrounding Welles' second film The Magnificent Ambersons and due to RKO's lackluster box office receipts. Other films made by RKO during Schaefer's time at the studio include; Gunga Din (1939), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), and The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) Schaefer was the first person to receive the Motion Picture Association's award for civic and patriotic service.

* 11/05/1888

Ian Fleming(† 80)

Actor | Melbourne, Victoria (AU)

Ian Fleming was an Australian born character actor with credits in over 100 British movies. He is perhaps best known for playing Dr. John Watson in a series of Sherlock Holmes movies of the 1930s opposite Arthur Wontner's Holmes. He also essayed a number of supporting roles in many classic British films of the era including Q Planes (1939), Night Train to Munich (1940), We Dive at Dawn, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (both 1943) and Waterloo Road (1945). His later career included appearances in many television series of the 50s and 60s such as Fabian of the Yard, Hancock's Half Hour, Dixon of Dock Green, Dr. Finlay's Casebook, The Forsyte Saga and The Prisoner.

 
* 09/10/1888

Maurice Chevalier(† 83)

Actor | Paris (FR)

Maurice Auguste Chevalier (French: [mɔʁis ʃəvalje]; 12 September 1888 – 1 January 1972) was a French singer, actor, and entertainer. He is perhaps best known for his signature songs, including "Livin' In The Sunlight", "Valentine", "Louise", "Mimi", and "Thank Heaven for Little Girls", and for his films, including The Love Parade, The Big Pond, The Smiling Lieutenant, One Hour with You, and Love Me Tonight. His trademark attire was a boater hat and tuxedo. Chevalier was born in Paris. He made his name as a star of musical comedy, appearing in public as a singer and dancer at an early age before working in menial jobs as a teenager. In 1909, he became the partner of the biggest female star in France at the time, Fréhel. Although their relationship was brief, she secured him his first major engagement, as a mimic and a singer in l'Alcazar in Marseille, for which he received critical acclaim by French theatre critics. In 1917, he discovered jazz and ragtime and went to London, where he found new success at the Palace Theatre. After this, he toured the United States, where he met the American composers George Gershwin and Irving Berlin and brought the operetta Dédé to Broadway in 1922. He developed an interest in acting and had success in Dédé. When talkies arrived, he went to Hollywood in 1928, where he played his first American role in Innocents of Paris. In 1930, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his roles in The Love Parade (1929) and The Big Pond (1930), which secured his first big American hits, "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me" and "Livin' in the Sunlight, Lovin' in the Moonlight". In 1957, he appeared in Love in the Afternoon, which was his first Hollywood film in more than 20 years. In 1958, he starred with Leslie Caron and Louis Jourdan in Gigi. In the early 1960s, he made eight films, including Can-Can in 1960 and Fanny the following year. In 1970, he made his final contribution to the film industry where he sang the title song of the Disney film The Aristocats. He died in Paris, on 1 January 1972, from complications of a suicide attempt.

* 09/12/1888

Cathleen Nesbitt(† 93)

Actress | Birkenhead, Cheshire, England (GB)

Cathleen Nesbitt (born Kathleen Mary Nesbitt; 24 November 1888 – 2 August 1982) was an English actress.

* 11/24/1888

Olaf Hytten(† 67)

Actor | Glasgow, Scotland (GB)

Olaf Hytten (3 March 1888 – 11 March 1955) was a Scottish actor. He appeared in more than 280 films between 1921 and 1955. He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and died in Los Angeles, California from a heart attack, while sitting in his car in the parking lot at 20th Century Fox Studios. His remains are interred in an unmarked crypt, located in Santa Monica's Woodlawn Cemetery.

* 03/03/1888

James Morrison(† 86)

Actor | Mattoon (US)

James Morrison, born James Woods Morrison, was an American silent movie actor with over 180 film credits. He later published two novels, Road End (1927) and April Luck (1932). He taught speech and drama classes at Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn for many years.

* 11/15/1888

Gladys Cooper(† 82)

Actress | Chiswick, England (GB)

Dame Gladys Constance Cooper, (18 December 1888 – 17 November 1971) was an English actress, theatrical manager and producer, whose career spanned seven decades on stage, in films and on television. Beginning as a teenager in Edwardian musical comedy and pantomime, she starred in dramatic roles and silent films before the First World War. She managed the Playhouse Theatre from 1917 to 1934, where she starred in many roles. From the early 1920s Cooper won praise in plays by W. Somerset Maugham and others. In the 1930s she starred steadily in productions both in London's West End and on Broadway. Moving to Hollywood in 1940, Cooper found success in a variety of character roles. She received three Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress, for performances in The Song of Bernadette (1943), My Fair Lady (1964) and, most famously, Now, Voyager (1942). Throughout the 1950s and 60s she worked both on stage and on screen, continuing to star on stage until her last year.

* 12/18/1888

Paul Cavanagh(† 75)

Actor | Chislehurst, Kent [now in Bromley, London], England (GB)

William Grigs Atkinson (8 December 1888 – 15 March 1964), known professionally as Paul Cavanagh, was an English film and stage actor. He appeared in more than 100 films between 1928 and 1959.

* 12/08/1888

Phil Rosen(† 63)

Crew | Marienburg, East Prussia, Germany [now Malbork, Pomorskie, Poland]

Philip E. Rosen (May 8, 1888 – October 22, 1951) was an American film director and cinematographer. He directed more than 140 films between 1915 and 1949. He was born in Marienburg, German Empire (now, Malbork, Poland), grew up in Machias, Maine, and died in Hollywood, California, of a heart attack. He was one of the founders of the American Society of Cinematographers. Rosen was married to model and actress Joyzelle Joyner.

* 05/08/1888

Earle Ross(† 73)

Actor

- No description / details available yet. -

* 1888

F. W. Murnau(† 42)

Crew | Bielefeld, North-Rhine-Westphalia (DE)

Friedrich Wilhelm “F. W.” Murnau was one of the most influential German film directors of the silent era, and a prominent figure in the expressionist movement in German cinema during the 1920s. Although some of Murnau’s films have been lost, most still survive.

* 12/28/1888

Hank Patterson(† 86)

Actor | Springville, Alabama (US)

Hank Patterson (born Elmer Calvin Patterson; October 9, 1888 – August 23, 1975) was an American actor and musician. He is known foremost for playing two recurring characters on three television series: the stableman Hank Miller on Gunsmoke and farmer Fred Ziffel on both Petticoat Junction and Green Acres.Patterson found plenty of movie work, mainly playing cantankerous types as well as blacksmiths, hotel clerks, farmers, shopkeepers and other townsmen, usually bit roles and character parts in Republic Pictures westerns, and then in popular juvenile TV westerns such as The Cisco Kid, The Adventures of Kit Carson, The Lone Ranger, and Annie Oakley.Patterson played recurring or different roles in adult/family TV westerns, including the role of "Hank Miller" in 33 episodes of Gunsmoke from 1962 through 1972, on Have Gun-Will Travel (eleven episodes), Death Valley Days (nine episodes), Tales of Wells Fargo (seven episodes), Maverick (four episodes), Cheyenne (four episodes), Wagon Train (three episodes), Daniel Boone (three episodes), The Virginian (two episodes), The Rifleman, Bonanza, and in episodes of Lawman, Bat Masterson, The Restless Gun, and many others.He made additional TV appearances, including three episodes of The Twilight Zone as well as Perry Mason, Burke's Law, The Untouchables, Judd for the Defense, My Three Sons, and in later years The Mod Squad and Love, American Style.Highway Patrol.In 1963 Patterson first appeared in what would become a recurring role as farmer Fred Ziffel on the popular CBS rural comedy Petticoat Junction. In 1965 CBS debuted another rural comedy, Green Acres. Both series were set in the mythical farming community of Hooterville, with characters from Petticoat Junction often also appearing in Green Acres, including Patterson's Fred Ziffel character. It was on the popular, irreverent Green Acres that Patterson earned his greatest fame. In 1965 and 1966—two of the years in which the two series ran concurrently—Patterson frequently appeared in both shows in the same week on primetime.The association of Patterson's character with the popular character Arnold, the pet pig whom Fred and his wife Doris treated as a son, ensured Patterson a place in TV history. Arnold attended school, watched TV and was a talented artist, piano player, and actor. He even "talked" (snorted, grunted and squealed) in a language that everyone in Hooterville seemed to understand except Oliver Wendell Douglas (Green Acres co-star Eddie Albert).According to westernclippings.com "Characters and Heavies" by Boyd Magers, "Ironically, by the time Patterson was doing 'Green Acres' he was in his late 70s and almost completely deaf, but the producers loved his portrayal so much they worked around his hearing impairment by having the dialogue coach lying on the floor out-of-shot tapping Hank's leg with a yardstick as a cue to speak his line.".

 
* 10/09/1888
Ad Protect Your Online Privacy with a VPN

Don't risk your personal information and online activities being exposed to hackers, government surveillance, and other online threats. A VPN encrypts your internet connection and hides your IP, giving you maximum security and privacy. Take control of your online safety, switch to a VPN now. Choose one of these services to learn more:

Eugene O'Neill(† 65)

Crew | New York City, New York USA

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was an American playwright. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama techniques of realism, earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. The tragedy Long Day's Journey into Night is often included on lists of the finest U.S. plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. He was awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. O'Neill is also the only playwright to win four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. O'Neill's plays were among the first to include speeches in American English vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society. They struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, but ultimately slide into disillusion and despair. Of his very few comedies, only one is well-known (Ah, Wilderness!). Nearly all of his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.

* 10/16/1888

Henry A. Wallace(† 77)

Actor

Henry Agard Wallace was an American politician, journalist, farmer, and businessman who served as the 33rd vice president of the United States, the 11th U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, and the 10th U.S. Secretary of Commerce. He was a vice presidential candidate in the 1944 Democratic Party internal elections, and the Democratic Progressive Party nominee in the 1948 presidential election.

* 10/05/1888

Edith Evans(† 88)

Actress | London, England (GB)

Dame Edith Mary Evans, (8 February 1888 – 14 October 1976) was an English actress. She was best known for her work on the stage, but also appeared in films at the beginning and towards the end of her career. Between 1964 and 1968, she was nominated for three Academy Awards. Evans's stage career spanned sixty years, during which she played more than 100 roles, in classics by Shakespeare, Congreve, Goldsmith, Sheridan and Wilde, and plays by contemporary writers including Bernard Shaw, Enid Bagnold, Christopher Fry and Noël Coward. She created roles in two of Shaw's plays: Orinthia in The Apple Cart (1929), and Epifania in The Millionairess (1940) and was in the British premières of two others: Heartbreak House (1921) and Back to Methuselah (1923). Evans became widely known for portraying haughty aristocratic women, as in two of her most famous roles as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, and Miss Western in the 1963 film of Tom Jones. During her performance as Lady Bracknell, her delivery of the line 'A handbag' has become synonymous with the Oscar Wilde play. By contrast, she played a downtrodden maid in The Late Christopher Bean (1933), a deranged, impoverished old woman in The Whisperers (1967) and – one of her most celebrated roles – Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, which she played in four productions between 1926 and 1961.

* 02/08/1888

Jack Holt(† 62)

Actor | New York City, New York (US)

Jack Holt (born Charles John Holt, Jr.) was an American film actor. He was a leading man of Silent and sound films and known for his many roles in Westerns.

* 05/31/1888

Miles Malleson(† 80)

Actor | Croydon, Surrey (GB)

William Miles Malleson (25 May 1888 – 15 March 1969) was an English actor and dramatist, particularly remembered for his appearances in British comedy films of the 1930s to 1960s. Towards the end of his career he also appeared in cameo roles in several Hammer horror films, with a fairly large role in The Brides of Dracula as the hypochondriac and fee-hungry local doctor. Malleson was also a writer on many films, including some of those in which he had small parts, such as Nell Gwyn (1934) and The Thief of Bagdad (1940). He also translated and adapted several of Molière's plays (The Misanthrope, which he titled The Slave of Truth, Tartuffe and The Imaginary Invalid).

* 05/25/1888

Wally Patch(† 82)

Actor | London, England (GB)

Walter Sydney Vinnicombe (26 September 1888 – 27 October 1970) was an English actor and comedian. He worked in film, television and theatre.

Known for: Don Quixote
* 09/26/1888

Edward Hearn(† 74)

Actor | Dayton, Washington (US)

Guy Edward Hearn (September 6, 1888 – April 15, 1963) was an American actor who, in a forty-year film career, starting in 1915, played hundreds of roles, starting with juvenile leads, then, briefly, as leading man, all during the silent era. With the arrival of sound, he became a character actor, appearing in scores of productions for virtually every studio, in which he was mostly unbilled, while those credits in which he was listed, reflected at least nine stage names, most frequently Edward Hearn, but also Guy E. Hearn, Ed Hearn, Eddie Hearn, Eddie Hearne, and Edward Hearne.

* 09/06/1888

Camillo Pilotto(† 75)

Actor | Rome (IT)

Camillo Pilotto (6 February 1888 – 27 May 1963) was an Italian film actor. He appeared in 101 films between 1916 and 1963. He was born and died in Rome, Italy.

* 01/06/1888

Gösta Cederlund(† 92)

Actor | Stockholm, Stockholms län (SE)

Gustaf Edvard Cederlund was an actor and director in theatre as well as film. One of Sweden's most popular and appreciated male character actors from 1917 and on. He didn't have any desire to direct film himself. But WW2 changed all that. Gösta Cederlund directed a handfull of important films with striking social character and consciousness. "Kungsgatan" (1943) and "En dotter född/ A daughter born" (1944) are two examples of his brilliance and ability to put female issues in focus. Gösta Cederlund appeared in some 130 feature films and tv-productions from 1917 to 1976. While he at the same time was vary active in the world of theatre.

* 03/06/1888

Christy Cabanne(† 62)

Crew | St. Louis, Missouri (US)

William Christy Cabanne (April 16, 1888 – October 15, 1950) was an American film director, screenwriter and silent film actor.

* 04/16/1888

Frank Howard Clark(† 73)

Crew | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (US)

Frank Howard Clark (1888 – January 19, 1962) was an American screenwriter. He wrote for 100 films between 1913 and 1946. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and died in Los Angeles, California.

* 05/15/1888

Gorô Kawabe(† 88)

Actor | Ōsaka (JP)

- No description / details available yet. -

 
* 07/05/1888

Jack Rube Clifford(† 85)

Actor | Elmira (US)

- No description / details available yet. -

* 12/25/1888

Barry Fitzgerald(† 72)

Actor | Dublin (IE)

Brother of actor Arthur Shields, with whom he performed in several films, most notably John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952). One of the very few character actors ever to achieve star status.Fitzgerald was the only player ever nominated for the Academy Award for both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor in the same year for the same role. The recognition was for Going My Way (1944). After he received this double nomination, the Academy immediately changed their rules to prevent this from happening again, rules which have remained unchanged to this day.One of Hollywood's finest character actors and most accomplished scene stealers, Barry Fitzgerald was born William Joseph Shields in 1888 in Dublin, Ireland. Educated to enter the banking business, the diminutive Irishman with the irresistible brogue was bitten by the acting bug in the 1920s and joined Dublin's world-famous Abbey Players. He subsequently starred in the Abbey Theatre production of Sean O'Casey's Juno And The Paycock, a role that he recreated in his film debut for director Alfred Hitchcock in 1930. He was coaxed to the U.S. in 1935 by John Ford to appear in Ford's film adaptation of another O'Casey masterpiece, The Plough and the Stars (1936). Fitzgerald took up residence in Hollywood and went on to give outstanding performances in such films as The Long Voyage Home (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), None But the Lonely Heart (1944), And Then There Were None (1945), Two Years Before the Mast (1946) and what is probably the role for which he is most fondly remembered, The Quiet Man (1952). He won the Academy Award For Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of gruff, aging Father Fitzgibbon in Going My Way (1944). He was also nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for the same role and was the only actor to ever be so honored. Barry Fitzgerald died in his beloved Dublin in 1961.

* 03/10/1888

Marcel L'Herbier(† 91)

Crew | Paris (FR)

Marcel L'Herbier (1888-1979) was a French filmmaker who achieved prominence as an avant-garde theorist and imaginative practitioner with a series of silent films in the 1920s. His career as a director continued until the 1950s and he made more than 40 feature films in total. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked on cultural programmes for French television. He also fulfilled many administrative roles in the French film industry, and he was the founder and the first President of the French film school Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC).In 1921, only three years after his first film, Marcel L'Herbier was voted by readers of a French film magazine as the best French director. In the following year, the critic Léon Moussinac marked him as one of the filmmakers whose work was most important for the future of cinema. In this period, L'Herbier was linked with filmmakers such as Abel Gance, Germaine Dulac and Louis Delluc as part of a "first avant-garde" (Impressionism) in French cinema, the first generation to think spontaneously in animated images.

* 04/23/1888

Stanhope Wheatcroft(† 78)

Actor | New York City, New York (US)

- No description / details available yet. -

* 1888

Percy Walsh(† 63)

Actor | Luton (GB)

Percy Walsh (24 April 1888 in Luton, Bedfordshire – 19 January 1952 in London) was a British stage and film actor. His stage work included appearing in the London premieres of R.C.Sherriff's Journey's End (1928) and Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1943) and Appointment with Death (1945).

* 04/24/1888

Basil Ruysdael(† 72)

Actor | Jersey City, New Jersey (US)

Basil Spaulding Millspaugh (July 24, 1878 – October 10, 1960), known as Basil Ruysdael, was an American actor and opera singer.

* 07/24/1888
previous page
next page