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Paul Lukas
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Paul Lukas (May 26, 1895 - August 15, 1971) was an Academy Award-winning Hungarian actor. Born Pál Lukács in Budapest, he arrived in Hollywood in 1927 after a successful stage and film career in Hungary, Germany and Austria where he worked with Max Reinhardt. He made his stage debut in Budapest in 1916 and his film debut in 1917. At first, he played elegant, smooth womanizers, but increasingly he became typecast as a villain. In 1933, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He was very busy in the 1930s, appearing in such films as Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes and the comedy Ladies in Love.
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Russian-emigre Peter Stanislavsky (Paul Lukas) was a serious writer in the old sod but in America is a nightclub waiter who marries the pretty hat check gal Marcia (Loretta Young), an avid bridge player. Peter belittles bridge as a childish game, but when serving as a waiter in the Park Avenue residence of socialite Lola Starr (Helen Vinson) he's asked to sit in as fourth in a bridge game with the self-important Cedric Van Dorn (Ferdinand Gottschalk). Peter wins the game and gets publicity for beating the world famous expert; which prompts him to say he's writing a book on the Stanislavsky method of playing contract bridge. It's ghost written by the couple's pesty acquaintance Speed McCann (Frank McHugh), who ... was the ghost writer for Van Dorn's book, and becomes a best-seller, as it's promoted as a family game where couples learn to never argue about their gamesmanship anymore. The Stanislavskys become rich and famous as America's bridge sweethearts, but soon Peter starts taking his bridge playing seriously and they have a spat. Speed gets ticked off at Peter for punching him out when his wife leaves him and tells the press that Peter's a fraud.
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Paul Lukas plays a nightclub headwaiter who rises to fame as a bridge expert. He marries hat check girl Loretta Young, likewise a card fanatic. Lukas and Young find themselves vying for the national bridge championship, which results in the expected frictions. All is forgiven in the climactic scenes, in which silver-tongued radio commentator Roscoe Karns gives a play-by-play of the “big game” while director William Dieterle uses freeze frames and slow motion to beef up the tension. Grand Slam is quite an eye-opener for fans of Loretta Young, who displays an unusually generous amount of thigh in her nightclub outfit. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
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Paul Lukas writes the "Uni Watch" column for ESPN.com and has his own Uni Watch website, both of which examine sports uniform design in obsessive and excruciating detail. He has a near-pathological aversion to the color purple. Paul Oslo Davis is an illustrator based in Melbourne, Australia. He draws for various newspapers and magazines including The Age and Is Not Magazine.
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Paul Henreid (Paul George Julius von Hernried, 1908-1992) played Victor Laszlo, Ingrid Bergman's suave, crusading husband in Casablanca. He often played the worldly European in a variety of films of the 1940s and '50s. He later directed the “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” series and other TV productions. Henreid was born in Trieste (then an Adriatic naval port belonging to Austria-Hungary), the son of a Viennese banker. He was “discovered” by Otto Preminger in 1933, when Preminger was working with Max Reinhardt in Europe. Henreid was a well-known actor on the stage of Reinhardt's theater in Vienna from 1933 to 1938.
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"Just as he was in the play, Paul Lukas is the outstanding star of the film. Anything his part may have lost in the transfer of key lines to Bette Davis is offset by the projective value of the camera for closeups. His portrayal of the heroic German has the same quiet strength and the slowly gathering force that it had on the stage, but it now seems even better defined and carefully detailed, and it has much more vitality.
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Paul Lukas