This is one of our favorite times here at TCM because, as we've done every August for the past thirteen years, we'll be devoting each of its 31 days to a single star. That list this go-around begins with Gene Tierney on August 1 (Laura [1944], The Razor's Edge [1946], The Ghost and Mrs. Muir [1947], Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait [1943] and two TCM premieres, 1949's Whirlpool and 1954's The Egyptian) and finishes August 31 with 24 hours of Shelley Winters in films such as Kubrick's Lolita [1962], and movies with such top-tier leading men as Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman, Gene Hackman, John Garfield and Anthony Quinn.

This year we'll be covering all bases: films with such iconic legends as Fred Astaire, Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, John Wayne, Vivien Leigh, Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper and Robert Mitchum. We'll also be toasting Ingrid Bergman's 100th birthday (she was born August 29, 1915, and died on that same date 67 years later), screening 13 films in Ingrid's honor, including the "essential" Casablanca (1942) and also a Bergman film from 1973 we've never shown before, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, in which the three-time Oscar® winner plays a rich patron of the arts involved with two kids hiding out in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There will also be salutes to 15 talented folks we've never honored in August before, from Alan Arkin to Monty Woolley, as well as 20 TCM premieres. And in case you ever thought Monty Woolley perhaps made only one movie in his entire career--because he is so distinctive, so outrageous and so memorable in the great Christmas perennial The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942)--we'll give you ample proof to the contrary. Woolley indeed made some 29 films, and we'll be showing 13 of them on August 27, two of those films (1943's Holy Matrimony and 1945's Molly and Me) attempts by 20th Century-Fox to turn Woolley and then-hugely popular British music hall entertainer Gracie Fields into a Hollywood team along the lines of a working-class William Powell and Myrna Loy or a spiffier Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler. (Didn't work, although both films are quite charming and likeable.)

And if you ever wondered if the fragile Mae Clarke had much of a career beyond getting a grapefruit squashed into her face by a decidedly non-heroic Jimmy Cagney in 1931's The Public Enemy, which we'll be showing on August 20, look no further than that date when we'll be showing 16 of the 89 films Mae made (but with only that one piece of citrus involved), including the original Frankenstein (1931) and the 1931 version of Waterloo Bridge, the latter with the added plus of Bette Davis in a supporting role. And who would guess that the career of the dapper Adolphe Menjou, one of the stars of Kubrick's Paths of Glory in 1957, extended back to the silent screen days of Rudolph Valentino? In our salute to Menjou on August 3, we'll be showing that classic Valentino blockbuster The Sheik (1921) in which Menjou plays a French novelist who is a great friend of the randy Rudy.

Bottom line: look no further than TCM this month for great films, great variety, great enjoyment and that one very ripe, very juicy and very famous chunk of grapefruit.

by Robert Osborne