Today, on June 1, 2026, people around the world will remember the 100th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's birth. Even a hundred years after Norma Jeane Baker was born in a charity ward at Los Angeles County Hospital, her face is still one of the most famous in history. Anniversaries like this encourage us to look past the myths and see the real person. Before she became Marilyn Monroe, the movie star and cultural icon, she was a vulnerable girl facing a childhood filled with instability, foster homes, absent parents, and time at the Los Angeles Orphans Home Society. To truly understand the woman who fascinated the world, we need to look back at the child she once was.

Before there was Lassie or Rin Tin Tin gracing movie marquees as Warner Bros.' top box-office star, another intelligent, disciplined and handsome German Shepherd made Hollywood studios take notice. His name was Peter the Great. Peter appeared in several silent film favorites as action melodrama and crime thriller heartthrobs throughout the mid-1920s. He was well received by both audiences and critics alike for his astounding obedience training and ability to emote on camera

There are few figures in the history of motion pictures whose artistry seems as inseparable from the very evolution of the medium as Lon Chaney. Known to generations as “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” Chaney was more than a performer—he was a pioneer who transformed the possibilities of screen acting, makeup, and emotional expression at a time when the cinema itself was still learning how to speak.

Today we conclude our look at central Pennsylvania-born personalities—with a personal twist. Janet Blair was part of that bright constellation of performers who came to Hollywood with song-filled hearts and dreams of showbiz success, made famous starring in the cheery, upbeat musicals audiences craved during World War II and its aftermath. A talented dancer and vocalist who was never a diva type actress, Blair enjoyed success in movies and worked steadily throughout her career as cinematic musicals went out of style, performing in television shows and onstage plays before retiring from the industry. For me, however, her name has always carried an additional, more personal resonance—one woven into the half-remembered stories and unanswered questions that live quietly inside families.

Long before his name became synonymous with American music and innovation, Fred Waring was a boy growing up in the railroad town of Tyrone, Pennsylvania—a place that also happens to be my hometown. During a recent stay there, I found myself drawn to Waring’s story, compelled to take a closer look at the most prominent figure ever to emerge from its streets. Of all Tyrone’s sons, none achieved greater national prominence or cultural influence than Waring, whose career as a bandleader, radio pioneer, and ambassador of American song carried the spirit of small-town life onto a vast stage—while never entirely severing the ties to the community that first shaped him.

There are celebrities who shine brightly for a brief time and then fade. And then there are the rare few whose personas feel anchored not just to an era, but to a concept—of elegance, of glamour, of Hollywood as a place that somehow lingers between history and folklore. Loretta Young was the latter. With elegance she navigated the evolving world of American entertainment for over fifty years, radiating grace even while her personal life remained anything but graceful.

History has remembered Jesse James as one of the most famous outlaws of the Wild West. A former Confederate guerrilla who robbed banks, stagecoaches, and trains and died at the hands of a murderer. His son Jesse E. James Jr. had a less glamorous life. Jesse Jr. tried to live down his father's violent legacy by becoming a businessman and attorney before becoming a caretaker of his father's story.

Terence Edward Kilburn—forever “Terry” to film lovers who met him first as a wide-eyed Victorian waif—was born November 25, 1926, in West Ham, Essex, then a working-class pocket of greater London that produced more grit than glamour. Yet the story of Terry Kilburn is not merely the story of a child actor plucked from Britain and set down beneath the klieg lights. It is also the quieter, longer story that followed: the one in which an MGM juvenile player grew into a serious stage artist, a director, and a shaping force in American regional theatre—an “after” chapter many former child stars never get to write.

Paul Colm Michael Mescal emerged from the small town of Maynooth in County Kildare, Ireland, to become one of the most compelling and sought-after actors of his generation, a performer whose blend of introspective intensity and emotional vulnerability has earned both critical acclaim and a loyal global following.

Long before Hollywood knew how to honor its legends, Madame Sul-Te-Wan made history by becoming the first African American actor to sign a motion picture contract—and then the first black actor to become a featured player at the very beginning of the industry. Born Nellie Crawford in Louisville, Kentucky on March 7, 1873, Sul-Te-Wan grew up in a nation still stumbling under Reconstruction and hard-set systems of segregation. By the time she moved to Los Angeles in 1913, moving pictures were barely an industry—and possibilities for women of color didn't really exist. But Sul-Te-Wan would work for over forty years, ranking among the most frequently employed African American actresses of her silent and early sound eras.

Viola Davis’s greatness has never been the kind you can mistake for luck. It’s the kind forged—scene by scene—out of craft, nerve, and a lived understanding of what it means to be underestimated and still walk into the room as if you own it. Born August 11, 1965, in St. Matthews, South Carolina, Davis spent her earliest years straddling two Americas: the rural South of her family’s roots and, soon after, the hard-edged reality of Central Falls, Rhode Island, where poverty wasn’t a talking point but a daily condition. She has spoken plainly about growing up in severe deprivation—about the indignities and dangers of it, about the way hunger and instability mark a child—and those experiences did not simply “inspire” her later work. They sharpened it. They gave her an instrument most actors spend a lifetime trying to approximate: truth that cannot be faked.

Anna May Wong was born at the moment Hollywood was creating itself—and would fight for her whole life to be considered a part of it. Wong Liu Tsong was born January 3, 1905, in Los Angeles, California. She rose to prominence as the first Chinese American movie star in Hollywood, and one of the first Asian American performers to gain worldwide recognition. But firsts in a society designed to marginalize her meant a career filled with paradox: Anna May Wong was applauded for her beauty, brains and allure on screen but was continually typecast; celebrated as modern but othered as “foreign” in her hometown.