We Nominate for Stardom — Tom Brown (1933) 🇺🇸
Motion Picture presents the coming stars — They’ll be your future favorites!
At 20, he Is the only screen hero who has had a picture named after him — namely, “Tom Brown of Culver.” And with eighteen and a half years of stage experience behind him, he knows his acting. Still growing, he’s attaining star stature!
Tom Brown — Universal
Tom Brown, like Ruby Keeler (and Gene Raymond, Anita Louise and Lillian Roth), received his first dramatic training at the Professional Children’s School. Tom gives his age as twenty, but — hist! — we hear on very good authority that he has added on a few years! We are usually a bit shy of these precocious youngsters. We have to be sold on them. But after seeing his work in “The Famous Ferguson Case,” “Fast Companions,” “Tom Brown of Culver,” “Hell’s Highway,” Laughter in Hell and “Destination Unknown,” who wouldn’t be willing to risk a reputation as a good prophet on Tom?
He has been on the stage since he was eighteen months old. When he was ten, he appeared in “Is Zat So?” with the Gleasons and stayed in the part for three years. Between times, he rescued a few people from drowning, went to school, and broadcast over the radio.
He has freckles and a good grin. He’s at the in-between age — too big to play “kid” parts and net big enough to play young lovers. Even so, they are writing in parts especially for him. He likes the girls, but cannot understand why he cannot stay in love for more than two weeks at a time.
We Believe in Him
- Because his mother is a former actress and has taught Tom “the ropes.”
- Because whenever he has shown a sign of egotism, she has known what to do.
- Because other studios are constantly trying to borrow him.
- Because, at his age, he has a formidable list of both stage and screen roles to his credit.
- Because he has few of the juvenile mannerisms that have annoyed audiences in the past.
- Because boys of his own age say that he is “regular” — a high compliment from them.
In making these prophecies about Ruby Keeler and Tom Brown, Motion Picture rounds out a full year of nominating newcomers for stardom.
Our previous Nominees, in order of selection, have been: Tala Birell and George Brent; Ann Dvorak and Randolph Scott; Gwili Andre and Bruce Cabot;Lyda Roberti and Robert Young; Gloria Stuart and George Raft; Dorothy Wilson and Dick Powell; Aline MacMahon and William Gargan; Katharine Hepburn and Lyle Talbot; Diana Wynyard and Preston Foster; Glenda Farrell and Buster Crabbe.
Several of these have already fulfilled our prophecies of stardom for them. (The only new stars of the past year have come from this group.) The others are on their way in increasingly big rôles.
Watch for their names in the casts of coming pictures. And check up on our prediction of stardom for Ruby Keeler by seeing her in the backstage drama, 42nd Street; and for Tom Brown by watching him in the rumfleet drama, “Destination Unknown.” — Editor.
Source: Motion Picture Magazine, April 1933