Melvyn Edouard Hesselberg (April 5, 1901 – August 4, 1981), better known as Melvyn Douglas, was an American actor.
Douglas was born in Macon, Georgia, the son of Lena Priscilla (née Shackelford), a Protestant Tennessee-born Mayflower descendant, and Edouard Gregory Hesselberg, a Jewish concert pianist and composer from Riga, Latvia. Though his father taught music at a succession of colleges in the U.S. and Canada, Douglas never graduated from hig...
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Melvyn Edouard Hesselberg (April 5, 1901 – August 4, 1981), better known as Melvyn Douglas, was an American actor.
Douglas was born in Macon, Georgia, the son of Lena Priscilla (née Shackelford), a Protestant Tennessee-born Mayflower descendant, and Edouard Gregory Hesselberg, a Jewish concert pianist and composer from Riga, Latvia. Though his father taught music at a succession of colleges in the U.S. and Canada, Douglas never graduated from high school. Douglas's stage surname was the surname of his maternal grandmother.
Douglas developed his acting skills with stock companies in Sioux City, Iowa; Evansville, Indiana; Madison, Wisconsin, and Detroit, Michigan. He had a long theatre, film and television career as a lead player, stretching from his 1930 Broadway role in Tonight or Never (opposite his future wife, Helen Gahagan) until just before his death. He was the hero in the 1932 horror film The Vampire Bat and the sophisticated leading man in 1935's She Married Her Boss. He...
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