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 CBS radio. In 1941, Rogers won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in 1940's "Kitty Foyle". She enjoyed considerable success during the early 1940s, and was RKO's hottest property during this period. In "Roxie Hart" (1942), based on the same play which served as the template for the later musical "Chicago", Rogers played a wisecracking wife on trial for a murder her husband committed. In the neorealist "Primrose Path" (1940), directed by Gregory La Cava, she played a prostitute's daughter trying to avoid the fate of her mother. Further highlights of this period included "Tom, Dick, and