- Lionel Barrymore, Ah, Wilderness! 1934. Deciding against the Eugene O’Neill story gave Rogers the time off to fly to Alaska with the famous US aviator, Wiley Post. They never flew back. They were both killed when their plane crashed. (Booked for Rogers’ teenage son, Richard, Junior Dorkin had died three months earlier in – in a car smash).
- Jean Hersholt, The Country Doctor, 1935. Rogers was a mite too folksy (and talky) for the medico delivering the “world-wide sensation” at Ontario on May 28, 1934 – Annette, Cecile, Emelie, Marie and Yvonne Dionne, the first identical quintuplets to survive infancy and attain adulthood. Hersholt, “nurse” Dorothy Peterson, director Henry King and this sound and camera team spent 17 days filming the babiews for 45 minutes a day under trhen supervision of their real boss, Dr. Allan R Dafoe. Fox, which beat Parasmount to the rights, made two other Dionne films: Reunion, 1936, and Five of a Kind, 1938. A fourth, Mother Knows Best, was cancelled because Fox knew better – at three the girls were “too old to toddle and too young to talk, sing and dance.”
Birth year: 1879Death year: 1935Other name: Casting Calls: 2