Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - Halls Of Ivy: Ronald Colman and Benita Hume

This sitcom aired from October 1954 until September 1955 on CBS.

Dr. William Todhunter Hall ( Ronald Colman) was president of scenic Ivy College, somewhere in the midwest, in this filmed comedy about a literate, witty college administrator. The school's students, its faculty and its board of governors all figured in the stories, as did Dr. Hall's wife Vicky ( Benita Hume) a former actress, their housekeeper, Alice ( Mary Wickes), and Chairman Of The Board Of Governors Clarence Wellman ( Herb Butterfield). The Halls Of Ivy was adapted from the radio series of the same name ( 1950-1952), with Ronald Colman and his wife Benita Hume re-creating their radio roles. However its very literacy and lack of physical action militated against it in the video medium and it soon disappeared. One of the more memorable elements of the series was its theme (" We love the Halls Of Ivy/That surround us here today..."), rendered in suitably collegiate fashion by a male chorus. The song achieved some popularity on records during the early 1950's.

An Article from Time Magazine right after Ronald Colman's Death

The Matinee Idol
Monday, Jun. 02, 1958

When motion pictures began to speak, more than one star of the silent screen, e.g., Corinne Griffith, John Gilbert, turned out to have a boondocks twang or a reedy pitch, and was never heard from again. But to Ronald Colman, whose English accent and pleasingly low register were envied from Metro to Paramount, the coming of sound meant second wind for one of the cinema's longest and most unvaryingly successful careers.

Born in Surrey in 1891, the son of a silk importer, Ronald Colman first headed for an engineering degree at Cambridge, but he had to leave school at 16 when his father died. One of Kitchener's "Old Contemptibles" (the first British soldiers to fight in France) in World War I, he was invalided home with an ankle injury, made his stage debut in 1916. Seeking his fortune in movies after the war, he clicked in Italy, where Henry King took him to be Lillian Gish's leading man in The White Sister. It whisked him to stardom, sent him up the matinee-idol trail (Lady Windermere's Fan, Romola, Stella Dallas) that culminated in Bean Geste. Entering talkies as Bulldog Drummond (1929), Colman soon established the cultured air of weary British dignity that became as crisp and negotiable as a sterling note. His best-known films followed in the late '30s and early '40s—A Tale of Two Cities, Lost Horizon, The Prisoner of Zenda, Random Harvest—but his only Oscar came with A Double Life in 1947. The narrator's role in The Story of Mankind (1957) completed his list of more than 100 film credits.

In recent years Colman led a squirely life in the Santa Barbara hills. With his actress wife Benita Hume he did a radio-and-TV comedy series (The Halls of Ivy), also played host to such career-long friends as Richard Barthelmess and William Powell. It fell to Barthelmess and Powell last week to escort Benita Hume Colman and the Colmans' only child, Juliet, to the funeral of Ronald Colman, dead of a lung infection.

For a look at the radio version of Halls of Ivy which ran from 1950 until 1952 and also starred Ronald Colman and Benita Hume go to http://www.retrogalaxy.com/radio/halls-of-ivy.asp

For a website dedicated to Ronald Colman go to http://themave.com/Colman/

For another Ronald Colman Website go to http://www.classicmoviefavorites.com/colman/

For a page loaded with Ronald Colman trivia go to http://www.meredy.com/colmantriv.htm

To see Ronald Colman's grave go to http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=214