Barry Empire is an inspirational figure within e-commerce circles and beyond. Empire provides motivation and transformative courses (such as his sought-after Your Human Potential course) for those striving to leave their mark upon the world. Empire’s central message is: Everything is possible. Here he looks at five unsung icons of Hollywood who shaped the film industry by living up to their true potential in life. 

Etienne-Jules Marey

Surprisingly the world of film would not even exist without the work of Parisian physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey. In the late eighteen-hundreds, Marey’s photography experiments of animals in motion led him to create a camera that could take 12 pictures per second of a moving object. The technique, called Chronophotography, became one of the founding concepts for motion picture cameras.

Robert Easton 

Robert Easton started his career within 1950’s Hollywood as an actor, but he later became one of the most significant dialects coaches Hollywood had ever seen. Easton was referred to as “The Man of a Thousand Voices” for his ability to mimic and perform hundreds of different dialects, and by the 1960’s he was working as a dialect coach to some of Hollywood’s greatest stars. His work behind the scenes with film legends such as Charlton Heston and Anne Hathaway helped them achieve award-winning performances.

Daeida Wilcox Beveridge

Daeida Wilcox Beveridge’s huge contribution to Hollywood’s formation is often overlooked in favor of focusing on her husband Harvey Henderson Wilcox’s achievements. In 1887 Harvey Henderson Wilcox purchased a ranch west of Los Angeles, but his wife Daeida bestowed the name Hollywood upon the ranch. That ranch would later become the center of the American movie industry. Daeida conceptualized the opulent world of Hollywood and brought glamour and the concept of fame to California and the world.

David O. Selznick

Sometimes referred to as Hollywood’s first producer, Selznick provided the capital to finance some of Hollywood’s most iconic films. He was the financing behind the genre-defining Gone With The Wind in 1939 and Rebecca in 1940. It was Selznick who insisted that Rhett Butler’s famous line “Frankly my Dear, I don’t give a damn” in Gone With The Wind stayed in the picture when others insisted that the language was much too crass to be included in the film.

Adrian Adolph Greenburg 

Adrian Adolph Greenburg designed and created costumes for hundreds of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films between 1928 and 1941. One of his most outstanding contributions to Hollywood fashion was his creation of the ruby slippers in The Wizard Of Oz (1939). Greenburg was a staple in the dressing rooms and sets of some of Hollywood’s most iconic films. 

The tales of these unsung icons of Hollywood who shaped the film industry should inspire anyone to strive to reach their full potential in life.