Sam White (film producer) Sam White (film producer) Sam White was an American film producer, film director and actor. White was born in Los Angeles on to parents who had immigrated from Austria and Hungary. In 1937, he married Claretta Ellis, a studio contract dancer. They were married for 65 years until her death in 2002. For much of the 1930s, Sam White directed numerous musical sequences in films such as "Roberta" with Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and Irene Dunne; "Old Man Rhythm" with Betty Grable and Buddy Rogers; "Top of the Town" with George Murphy; and "Hooray for Love", with Ann Sothern. During
Ginger Rogers Harry", a 1941 comedy in which she dreams of marrying three different men; "I'll Be Seeing You" (1944), with Joseph Cotten; and Billy Wilder's first Hollywood feature film: "The Major and the Minor" (1942), in which she played a woman who masquerades as a 12-year-old to get a cheap train ticket and finds herself obliged to continue the ruse for an extended period. This film featured a performance by Rogers' own real mother, Lela, playing her film mother. After becoming a free agent, Rogers made hugely successful films with other studios in the mid-'40s, including "Tender Comrade" (1943), "Lady in