Word: warner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...same year he played Gipp, he married actress Jane Wyman. Warner assigned him to Kings Row. Playing a small-town lothario named Drake McHugh, he seduces the daughter of the town surgeon, who takes revenge by amputating both of the youth's legs. The horrible moment of self-discovery made a deep impression on Reagan. The day the scene was shot he clambered onto the sickbed, which had a hole cut in the mattress to hide his legs. "I spent almost that whole hour in stiff confinement," Reagan said. "Gradually the affair began to terrify me. In some weird...
...June 1, 1937, the 26-year-old radio spieler strode into a $200-a-week contract at Warner Bros. His visible attributes: a golden smile; a long, lanky frame; a thick mane of dark hair, slicked back. But Reagan's most supple instrument was his voice. His Chicago Cubs play-by-play gig honed his ability to deliver dialogue with speed, assurance and conversational authority. Warner was a studio of fast-talking actors, but most of the men either sounded straight off the sidewalks of New York City (Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Pat O'Brien) or had acquired a well...
...first Warner years, Reagan shuttled between supporting roles in A-level films and starring parts in B's. Brother Rat, set in the Virginia Military Institute, handed him the thankless role of the one sensible cadet in a bunch of college cutups. He was a radio announcer, again, in Boy Meets Girl--a good bit part, letting him display a frantic aplomb at a movie premiere as chaos erupts and he tries both to describe it and to rein...
...Warner, a six-day-a-week studio, kept its actors busy. Reagan made 33 films in his first five years, averaging one every eight weeks. Some of his most confident work was in four B movies made in 1939, detailing the heroics of Secret Service Agent Brass Bancroft. In Secret Service of the Air, he foils an alien-smuggling racket and, during a fight, executes a smooth backflip over a cantina table. Murder in the Air earned some later camp luster with its secret weapon, the Inertia Protector, which is able to destroy hostile bombs aimed...
Million Dollar Baby displayed a tense defiance in Reagan, an untamed sexiness that he also used in Knute Rockne. His Gipp is famous for the deathbed peroration. But it's in his early scenes that he hints at the sort of screen personality he could have become, if Jack Warner hadn't insisted he keep playing the boy next door to the male lead...