Hollywood has always been a place where people come to look for stars. Some go along the Walk of Fame; some go to the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theatre and try to place their hand in the impression of a star who's been there for decades. For those who want a more personal connection with Hollywood history there's another option entirely: the cemeteries where the men and women who made the movies have all finally found their graves. Arthur Dark, filmmaker and historian, has just published a new book, Hollywood Graveyard: The Guide (Plum Hollow Press, 2026), which takes you to those cemeteries and brings the stars of old back to life.

Walter Koenig, the actor whose portrayal of Ensign Pavel Chekov on the original Star Trek made him a familiar face to generations of television viewers, died on October 26, 2026, at his home in North Hollywood, California. He was 90. His death, attributed to natural causes, was confirmed by his representative, Zachery McGinnis. With his passing, another beloved member of the original Star Trek company was gone, leaving behind a career that extended well beyond the bridge of the starship Enterprise.

When The Exorcist opened on December 26, 1973, audiences were in no doubt as to what they were in for. What they weren't expecting was the sheer sense of something genuinely terrifying having been let loose. They queued for hours, some of them fainted or went sick during the screenings, there was a considerable amount of protest from the religious organizations, and the film very quickly became a media phenomenon. The story of the making of The Exorcist is just as astonishing as the film itself. It was a production that involved very difficult casting, a lot of practical effects, injuries, a major set fire, several deaths and a whole host of bizarre coincidences which have created one of Hollywood's most enduring "cursed movie" myths.

Long before Elvira, long before the televised horror host became a genre in itself there was Vampira. She was pale, impossibly thin, black-haired and utterly unlike anything that had ever been seen on television. Behind the character was Maila Nurmi, a very intelligent, very eccentric and fiercely independent woman who created one of the most enduring of all television icons of the 1950s and then spent the rest of her life both in the shadow of and defending that icon.

Believe it or not, until this afternoon, I had never seen Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980). For more than four decades, I somehow managed to avoid one of the most celebrated horror films in movie history. Of course, I was familiar with its reputation and had seen occasional clips over the years, particularly the famous sequence in which Jack Nicholson smashes through a bathroom door and announces, “Here's Johnny!” But beyond that, I knew surprisingly little about the story. When the opportunity came to see it on the big screen at the American Cinematheque, I decided it was time to discover what all the excitement was about.

Long before Hollywood had studios, movie stars, or even its famous name, Mary Croswell Gower lived and worked on a broad tract of farmland in the Cahuenga Valley. Wheat and barley grew where soundstages would eventually rise, and the future Gower Street was little more than the edge of a family farm. Mary belonged to an earlier Hollywood, one that existed before Harvey and Daeida Wilcox laid out their subdivision, before Mary Sackett and Mary Penman Moll, and decades before the motion-picture industry discovered Southern California. Yet the land she and her family occupied would eventually become part of Hollywood's geographical heart.

Chuck Lorre has spent most of his life putting words in other people's mouths. For over thirty years his characters have been arguing, confessing, insulting, falling in love and delivering the one-liners to millions of viewers. In Sitcom: A Memoir he finally turns that same sharp, often biting voice on himself and charts the improbable journey that saw him go from struggling musician and television writer to one of the most successful comedy producers in the history of the medium.

Sir Guy Standing belonged to an acting dynasty long before Hollywood knew what to do with him. By the time American movie audiences began recognizing his stern, aristocratic face in the 1930s, he had already spent decades on the stage, served his country during the First World War, been knighted for that service, operated a business, married three times, raised a family, and established himself on both sides of the Atlantic. His Hollywood career occupied only the last few years of his life. Yet, it produced the performances for which he is most often remembered today—and one of those films would become entangled in a persistent myth about his sudden death.

Gail Russell was one of the most strikingly vulnerable screen presences of the 1940s and that vulnerability was her defining feature as well as her curse. Discovered by Paramount as a teenager she went on to have a string of successful films in the early 1940s including Henry Aldrich Gets Glamour, The Uninvited and Angel and the Badman, almost always playing the sensitive, fragile woman. She was a very distinctive actress in that respect. Behind the scenes though she was extremely shy and anxious and that anxiety developed into a severe alcoholism which in turn began to seriously damage her career. Her screen appearances became increasingly infrequent from the mid-50s, and her career was effectively over by that time. That was the background to the very sad final act.

Hollywood history is full of people whose names have been on the marquee at the theatre. Margaret Herrick wasn't one of them. She never acted in a film, she never directed one, and she never stood on the podium at the Oscars with a statuette in her hand. What she did was to take the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from a fledgling trade body to a major international organization and in the process to create the bedrock of what is now one of the most important archives of motion picture history in the world. Today, of course, thousands of researchers will know her name as they go into the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills. The vast majority of them will have no idea what a remarkable woman she was.

Long before Hollywood and Highland became one of the world's most famous intersections, strawberry fields, farmhouses, dirt roads, and scattered ranches lay beneath the foothills. Among the people who watched that landscape change was Mary Penman Moll, a schoolteacher who became a landowner, developer, businesswoman and civic figure during the years when Hollywood was still becoming a town. Her name is not nearly as familiar today as those of Daeida Wilcox Beveridge or H. J. Whitley, but portions of the Hollywood she helped create remain underfoot every day.

To movie audiences of the 1930s and 1940s, Wallace Beery was one of Hollywood’s most dependable stars. He was big, rumpled, gravel-voiced and rough around the edges, the sort of actor who could play a washed-up boxer, a pirate, a sailor, a crook or a blustering old reprobate and still somehow win the audience over. MGM understood exactly how to use him. His characters were often crude, selfish or dangerous at first, but underneath there was usually a sentimental heart waiting to emerge. Offscreen, the picture was considerably less flattering.