Stars of the Silver Screen: Barbara Stanwyck & Fred MacMurray (from "Double Indemnity")

In celebration of American films, Dogbotz Boneyard is making available for purchase top-quality, mint-condition, glossy black-and-white photographic prints of well-renowned movie stars of the 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s and early ‘60s. Each print comes in a clear document holder and is ready to be matted and/or framed.

Barbara Stanwyck (born Ruby Catherine Stevens; July 16, 1907 – January 20, 1990) was an American actress. She was a film and television star, known during her 60-year career as a consummate and versatile professional with a strong, realistic screen presence, and a favorite of directors including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang and Frank Capra. After a short but notable career as a stage actress in the late 1920s, she made 85 films in 38 years in Hollywood, before turning to television.

Orphaned at the age of four and partially raised in foster homes, by 1944 Stanwyck had become the highest-paid woman in the United States. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress four times, for Stella Dallas (1937), Ball of Fire (1941), Double Indemnity (1944) and Sorry, Wrong Number (1948). For her television work, she won three Emmy Awards, for The Barbara Stanwyck Show (1961), The Big Valley (1966) and The Thorn Birds (1983). The Thorn Birds also won her a Golden Globe. She received an Honorary Oscar at the 1982 Academy Award ceremony and the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1986. She was also the recipient of honorary lifetime awards from the American Film Institute (1987), the Film Society of Lincoln Center (1986), the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (1981) and the Screen Actors Guild (1967). Stanwyck received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1941 and was ranked as the 11^th  greatest female star of all time in 1999, by the American Film Institute.

Fred MacMurray (August 30, 1908 – November 5, 1991) was an American actor who appeared in more than 100 movies and a successful television series during a career that spanned nearly a half-century, from 1930 to the 1970s. MacMurray is well known for his role in the 1944 film noir Double Indemnity directed by Billy Wilder, in which he starred with Barbara Stanwyck. Later in his career, he became better known worldwide as Steve Douglas, the widowed patriarch on My Three Sons, which ran on ABC from 1960–1965 and then on CBS from 1965–1972.

MacMurray worked with directors Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges and actors Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich and, in seven films, Claudette Colbert, beginning with The Gilded Lily (1935). He co-starred with Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams (1935), with Joan Crawford in Above Suspicion (1943), and with Carole Lombard in four films: Hands Across the Table (1935), The Princess Comes Across (1936), Swing High, Swing Low (1937), and True Confession (1937).

By 1937, MacMurray had become one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors; for 1943, when his salary reached $420,000, he was the highest-paid actor in Hollywood, and the fourth highest-paid American. Despite the money and fame, he was typecast as a “nice guy.” MacMurray often said his best roles were when he was cast against type by Wilder. He is perhaps best known for his role as Walter Neff, an insurance salesman who plots with a greedy wife Barbara Stanwyck to murder her husband in Double Indemnity (1944). Sixteen years later, MacMurray played Jeff Sheldrake, a two-timing corporate executive in Wilder’s Oscar-winning comedy The Apartment (1960) with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon.

Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray co-starred in four popular films of the 1940s and ‘50s: Remember the Night (1940), Double Indemnity (1944), The Moonlighter (1953), and There’s Always Tomorrow (1956). Though never a romantic couple off film, their steamy interactions with each other in many of their films noir have become iconic and remain memorable portrayals even to this day.

NOTE: The purchase of Stars of the Silver Screen: Barbara Stanwyck & Fred MacMurray (from "Double Indemnity") comes with a free $10 Dogbotz Boneyard gift certificate, which can be redeemed during a future purchase at our online store. The expiration date of the gift certificate is one year after purchase of this item.