1. Fred Astaire was a skateboarder. He picked up the sport when he was in his 70s, and has a lifetime membership in the National Skateboarding Society.
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2. Also Fred Astaire started taking dance lessons because his older sister started taking dance lessons and his mom didn’t want to spend money on a babysitter, so she sent Fred, too.
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3. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford are credited with bringing Alfredo to the states after an Italian chef came up with it for his pregnant wife and the acting pair asked for the recipe on their honeymoon in Italy.
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4. Judy Garland has a rose varietal named after her. Garland rose bushes are planted outside her crypt.
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5. Humphrey Bogart was an avid chess player and played correspondence chess with soldiers overseas in WWII. He was told to stop when the FBI intercepted a letter and mistook the chess notations for a secret code.
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6. Roderick Mann, an entertainment journalist, said “Cary [Grant] told me he used to telephone Clark Gable each Christmas and say, ‘Did you get any monogrammed stuff you don’t want? If he said yes, I’d hurry ’round and we’d exchange initial presents.'”
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7. Despite winning four Oscars, Katherine Hepburn only went to the Oscars once, in 1974 to present an award, and came straight from her garden wearing her gardening clothes.
8. Prior to 1932, films James Cagney was in were shot with live ammo. For the film Taxi, Cagney started to refuse the use of live ammunition after a near miss where a bullet deflected off of the steel window and hit the wall where his head had been.
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10. Doris Day thought she was born in 1924 until the Associated Press found her birth certificate on her 95th birthday saying she was born in 1922.
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11. Bing Crosby had to re-record “White Christmas” because the original wore out from being pressed into records so many times.
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12. Billie Holiday used to babysit Billy Crystal.
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13. Tim Burton originally wanted Sammy Davis Jr. for the role of Beetlejuice (though the role ended up going to Michael Keaton after Burton was impressed by his improv skills).
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14. When Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte were teenagers, they would share single NYC theater tickets and swap out at intermission, briefing the other on the plot they missed.
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15. When Frank Sinatra was born, the doctor thought he was a stillborn and went to go tend to his mother. Frank only started breathing when his grandmother picked him up off the delivery table, ran him under cold water, and smacked his back.
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16. Louis Armstrong had callouses on his lips from playing the trumpet so much, which he would take off himself with a razor blade.
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17. Finally, Stan Lee has said that the look of Professor X in X-Men is based on Oscar-winning actor Yul Brynner.
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Do you have any favorite facts from old Hollywood? Tell us in the comments below!
