A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Alias:
Feodora Kathleen Alice Forde
Birthplace:
Bremen, Germany
Born:
September 9, 1909
Died:
September 13, 1996
A distinguished stage and film actress Jane Baxter was one of the most glamorous performers on the London stage. Winston Churchill, an ardent fan, once described her as, "that charming lady who grace personifies all that is best in British womanhood". Her stage career spanned half a century and she is best remembered for her role in "Dial M For Murder", in which she co-starred with Michael Redgrave. Redgrave said that she was "every undergraduate's ideal of an English rose". Born Fedora Kathleen Alice Forde in Germany, she came to London as a child and studied acting at the Italia Conti Stage School. She made her West End debut at the age of 13 in the musical comedy "Love's Prisoner". On the advice of the playwright J.M. Barrie, she changed her name to Jane Baxter and, in 1938, played the lead in the hit comedy "A Damsel in Distress". Several other West End shows followed as well as films such as We Live Again (1934), with Fredric March and The Clairvoyant (1935), with Claude Rains and, in 1935, she joined the repertory company at the Liverpool Playhouse where the leading actor was Michael Redgrave. He viewed her arrival "with some alarm", expecting "a spoilt and temperamental film star". Instead, he found "a delightful actress". Baxter eventually became godmother to Redgrave's daughter, the future actress Vanessa Redgrave. She had success again in London in 1937 with "George and Margaret", which ran for two years and, on Broadway, she co-starred with John Gielgud and Margaret Rutherford in "The Importance of Being Earnest", in which she played "Cicely Cardew". She continued to make films and appear on stage throughout the 1960s and her final London stage role was in John Mortimer's "A Voyage Round My Father", in which she starred opposite Michael Redgrave. Her last stage role was at the Churchill Theatre, Bromley in 1978 in the thriller "Assault", in which she appeared with Richard Todd. In 1992, she made a guest appearance - to a standing ovation - at the London Palladium in "A Tribute to Evelyn Laye". In her will, she requested that there be no memorial service for her but just a gathering of friends at her local church in Wimbledon, South London. Film director Bryan Forbes gave the address
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.