13 Things You Didn't Know About Chicagoans With Famous Handprints

By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Dec 16, 2011 7:00PM

Earlier this week, The Smurfs were permitted to cement their legacy on the Hollywood walk of fame, adding their handprints to the sidewalk outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater. To which we say: really? The Smurfs? Granted, they were part of the 19th-highest-grossing movie of the year and are sure to be around for an interminable string of sequels, but can you even tell their hands apart? Is no Tinsel Town publicity stunt sacred?

Which got us looking at that sidewalk, home to impressions of Groucho Marx's cigar, Jimmy Durante's nose, the wands of Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, and the foot or handprints of about 200 movie and television celebrities (along with those of Kobe Bryant, inexplicably).

Naturally, we wondered which Chicago natives have made the cut since the ceremony started in 1927. As far as we can tell, there seem to have been 13 locals immortalized in one of the germiest tourist attractions in the world:

• Harrison Ford, once the voice of WMTH-FM in Park Ridge, went on to become an actor.
• Hollywood convinced New Trier grad John Carter that his name was too similar to that of an Edgar Rice Burroughs hero, so he took the name Charlton Heston.
• Winnetka’s Roy Harold Scherer, Jr., went on to become a Goldwater Republican named Rock Hudson.
• Walter Koenig (Star Trek’s Chekov) stood as best man in George Takei’s wedding.
• Sherry Lansing, the first woman to head a Hollywood studio, recently donated $5 million to the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools.
• Nichelle Nichols, whose father was mayor of her home town of Robbins, IL, was dissuaded from quitting her role as Uhura on Star Trek when Martin Luther King, Jr. told her she had “the first non-stereotypical role in television.”
• An illness kept Donald O'Connor from starring in White Christmas with Bing Crosby (Danny Kaye got the part instead), but he'll always have invented break dancing.
• Louella Parsons of Freeport was the first person to be employed as a movie columnist, by The Chicago Herald, and drew up the blueprint TMZ follows to this day.
• Gloria Swanson traveled with James K. Spoor and Gilbert Anderson from Essenay Movie Studios on Argyle Street to a little scrap of orange groves and desert eventually known as Hollywood, where she played with lions.
• Waukegan native Jack Benny may or may not have been in Casablanca.
• The Muppet Movie was dedicated to Chicago-born Edgar Bergan, the ventriloquist who brought the famous Charlie McCarthy to life.
• Though born in Chicago in 1951, Robin Williams told a Mork and Mindy-era interviewer that he was born in Edinburgh, a fictionoid which persisted for years.
• South Side native Robert Zemeckis kept the over 40 rejection letters he received when shopping around a little film called Back to the Future.