A Majority of One 1961 premiere
Tuesday December 26th, Regency Village Theatre
961 Broxton Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024
961 Broxton Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024
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- Actress
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- Soundtrack
The middle of seven children, she was named, not for the heroine of "As You Like It" but for the S.S. Rosalind on which her parents had sailed, at the suggestion of her father, a successful lawyer.
After receiving a Catholic school education, she went to the American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York, having convinced her mother that she intended to teach acting. In 1934, with some stock company work and a little Broadway experience, she was tested and signed by Universal. Simultaneously, MGM tested her and made her a better offer. When she plead ignorance of Hollywood (while wearing her worst-fitting clothes), Universal released her and she signed with MGM for seven years.
For some time she was used in secondary roles and as a replacement threat to limit Myrna Loy's salary demands. Knowing she was right for comedy, she tested five times for the role of Sylvia Fowler in The Women (1939). George Cukor told her to "play her as a freak". She did and got the part. Her "boss lady" roles began with the part of reporter Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday (1940), through whose male lead, Cary Grant, she met her future husband, Grant's house-guest at the time.
In her forties, she returned to the stage, touring "Bell, Book and Candle" in 1951 and winning a Tony Award for "Wonderful Town" in 1953. Columbia, worried the public would think she had the female lead in Picnic (1955), billed her "co-starring Rosalind Russell as Rosemary." She refused to be placed in the Best Supporting Actress category when Columbia Pictures wanted to promote her for an Academy Award nomination for her role in Picnic (1955). Many felt she would have won had she cooperated. "Auntie Mame" kept her on Broadway for two years followed by the movie version.
Oscar nominations: My Sister Eileen (1942), Sister Kenny (1946), Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), and Auntie Mame (1958). In 1972, she received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for contributions to charity.- Actor
- Director
- Producer
Handsome and smooth natured leading man who often played oily individuals, Ray Danton was born in New York and dramatically trained at Carnegie Tech. First debuted on-screen as a moody Native American in Chief Crazy Horse (1955) and regularly guest-starred in many 1950s TV shows including Playhouse 90 (1956), Wagon Train (1957), and 77 Sunset Strip (1958)...often as a gunslinger or a slippery criminal.
Danton found plenty of demand for his talents and appeared in several minor films including The Night Runner (1957), Tarawa Beachhead (1958), in which he starred with his wife, Julie Adams, and then as a serial rapist in The Beat Generation (1959). However, his most well remembered role was as the vicious prohibition gangster Jack Diamond in the superb The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960) also starring a young Warren Oates and directed by Budd Boetticher. Danton reprised his Legs Diamond role only a year later in the unrelated, and not as enjoyable Portrait of a Mobster (1961).
Cornering the market on playing shady characters, Danton then portrayed troubled actor George Raft in The George Raft Story (1961), but he was back on the side of good in 1962 playing an Allied officer at the invasion of Normandy in The Longest Day (1962). Europe then beckoned for the virile Danton, and like many other young US actors in the early 1960s, he made several films in Italy and Spain between 1964 and 1969 with a mixture of success. Danton returned to the USA in the early 1970s and appeared in several other low budget features; however, he also turned his hand to direction and his first film was the AIP production of Deathmaster (1972) starring Robert Quarry who was riding high on the success of the Count Yorga vampire films. Danton directed another couple of minor horror films before becoming involved in television and directing episodes of some of the most popular TV series of the 1970/80s including Quincy M.E. (1976), The Incredible Hulk (1978), Magnum, P.I. (1980) and Cagney & Lacey (1981).
His final directorial work was on the TV series Vietnam War Story (1987) in 1987. Danton passed away in 1992 from kidney failure aged only 60.- Actress
- Script and Continuity Department
- Soundtrack
American character actress Madlyn Rhue was one of television's most prolific actresses and has starred in everything from sitcoms to soap operas to drama series and films for nearly 40 years. Her beautiful looks, natural red hair and brown eyes got her the attention of television producers and she found herself guest starring on such series as Rawhide (1959), Cheyenne (1955), Star Trek (1966), Hawaii Five-O (1968), Charlie's Angels (1976) and Fantasy Island (1977). She did several theatrical motion pictures, most notably Operation Petticoat (1959), He Rides Tall (1964), Kenner (1968) and It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963). In 1977, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which she battled for nearly 25 years. However, the disease never got her down; she continued to work in numerous television films and was co-starring on such series and soap operas as Executive Suite (1976), Fame (1982) and Days of Our Lives (1965) and had a recurring role on Murder, She Wrote (1984). By 1997, Rhue was unable to work, and she spent her last years at the Motion Picture and Television Country Home retirement center in Woodland Hills, California. She passed away from pneumonia and multiple sclerosis there at age 68 on December 16, 2003.- Marc Marno was born on 26 February 1936 in the USA. He was an actor, known for Diamond Head (1962), A Majority of One (1961) and Hawaii Five-O (1968). He died on 20 January 2016 in Burbank, California, USA.
- Actress
- Costume Designer
- Writer
The scintillating, sultry-eyed blonde (formerly a redhead) star of screen, TV and award-winning stage went on to become best known, however, for her sensual delivery pitching cigars in taunting '60s ads and commercials with her Mae Westian come-on line "Why don't you pick one up and smoke it sometime?" This, of course, was at a time when smoking was considered quite sexy and fashionable, and Edie Adams went above and beyond the call of duty in making these ads legendary.
Edie had her hand dipped in all pools of entertainment. She was a singing siren, an award-winning Broadway musical entertainer, a deft impressionist and comedienne, a serious dramatic actress, a commercial saleswoman and a viable TV celebrity. Off-stage, she showed remarkable poise and resourcefulness when her famous first husband, landmark TV comic Ernie Kovacs, was tragically killed in a January 1962 car crash in Los Angeles and she found her family finances in dire straits.
She was born Edith Elizabeth Enke on April 16, 1927, in the relatively small town of Kingston, Pennsylvania, but moved while fairly young to Grove City. Her family relocated again, this time to Tenafly, New Jersey, where she grew up. Following her graduation from high school, Edie aspired to become an opera singer and studied voice and piano at New York's Juilliard School of Music. She then went on to take acting classes at the Columbia School of Drama.
Her theatrical debut occurred with a 1947 production of "Blithe Spirit", and a year later she appeared in the stage show "Goodnight Ladies". Gradually building up her singing reputation via the nightclub circuit, her big break came when Arthur Godfrey booked her on his "Talent Scouts" show. She didn't come out the winner, but a TV director who caught sight of her performance envisioned in her a seductive "straight man" who could mesh well with a certain zany comedian. In 1951, Edie (then known as Edith Adams) was signed up as a featured singer on Ernie Kovacs's comedy show that originated in Philadelphia. The show, live and unrehearsed, became an innovative, groundbreaking effort in the relatively new medium. Outrageous and even incomprehensible at times, his comedy was deemed way ahead of its time and, as a result, had problems reaching mainstream audiences who didn't "get it", and the programs were short-lived. Various Kovacs platforms that included Edie were Ernie in Kovacsland (1951), "Kovacs on the Korner" (1952), and, of course, The Ernie Kovacs Show (1952). She and Kovacs eloped to Mexico City in 1954 and their union produced a daughter, Mia Kovacs. The duo were a popular couple in the Hollywood social circuit (moving there from New York in the late '50s) and the connections she developed out there were quite valuable in furthering her career.
Early '50s TV opened many doors for Edie and she waltzed right through them. Her New York stage debut in the popular musical "Wonderful Town" in 1952 had her walking away with the Theatre World Award for "Best Newcomer". A few years later, she slithered away with a supporting Tony Award for her bodacious take on the "Daisy Mae" character in the musical "Li'l Abner" (1956). Following that were more musical and dramatic ventures on the stage, including "The Merry Widow" (1957) (a show she would return to more than once), "Sweet Bird of Youth" (1960) and "Free as a Bird" (1960). On film, Edie showed the public that she wasn't just a pretty face with her sharply unsympathetic supporting performance in Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) and a funny, sexier one in the second of Rock Hudson and Doris Day's three battle-of-the-sexes romps, Lover Come Back (1961). Surprisingly, Edie and Ernie never appeared together in a film. Edie remained primarily a TV fixture and, outside of her Emmy-nominated coupling with Kovacs, winningly played the Fairy Godmother in Julie Andrews' popular TV version of Cinderella (1957), appeared regularly with Jack Paar and Dinah Shore on their respective variety shows, acted on various prime-time shows, and graced a number of celebrity game and talk show panels.
One of Edie's last pairings with Kovacs was in 1960 when they appeared as guests on the very last episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour (1957). The pair appeared as themselves, with one of the highlights being Edie crooning the lovely ballad "That's All". Kovacs' sudden 1962 death was a terrible reversal of fortunes for Edie. An inveterate gambler, he left her owing much money to the IRS. Instead of filing bankruptcy, however, she worked her way out of debt. In the process, her career received a second wind. Perhaps it didn't hurt that the public adored Edie and that she was a genuinely sympathetic figure in the wake of her private tragedy.
She returned to the nightclub circuit from whence she came, recorded albums, and also toured the country in various dramatic and musical comedy vehicles, including "Rain" (as Sadie Thompson), "Bells Are Ringing", "Annie Get Your Gun" (as Annie Oakley), "I Do! I Do!", "Anything Goes" and "Bus Stop". She also received outstanding notices in a few of her films, whether dramas (Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), The Best Man (1964)) or frivolous comedies (Call Me Bwana (1963), It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963), Under the Yum Yum Tree (1963), The Honey Pot (1967)). Moreover, she was handed her own musical variety show Here's Edie (1963) (aka "The Edie Adams Show") and received a couple of Emmy nominations for her efforts. She also took advantage of her famous impressions of Zsa Zsa Gabor and others, appearing in various TV comedy formats.
More than anything, however, it was her come-hither temptress pitching Muriel cigars that had TV audiences' tongues wagging. It was a smashingly successful and highly profitable coup for Edie professionally. Her late husband, a notorious cigar smoker, at one time sold Dutch Master cigars on TV. The idea then for Edie to pitch a competing slimmer cigar on TV was only natural. She had much to do with the direction of the commercials, which ran throughout the 1960s, providing them with a perfect blend of class, glamour and sensuality.
While growing noticeably heavier in later years, she never lost her trademark humor and sex appeal. Edie could still be seen from time to time on the stage in such shows as "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas", the female version of "The Odd Couple", "Hello, Dolly!" and "Nunsense". She remained committed to the end to restoring/preserving her late husband's videotapes and kinescopes of his ground-breaking '50s TV work. She also recalled her offbeat life with Kovacs in the book "Sing a Pretty Song", which was published in 1990.
Edie got married again in 1964, to photographer Marty Mills, with whom she had a son, Josh Mills. That union ended in divorce in 1971. The following year, Edie married jazz trumpeter Pete Candoli. She and Candoli, who died in January of 2008, divorced in 1989. In another eerie, tragic circumstance, daughter Mia Kovacs was killed in a 1982 Los Angeles auto accident at age 22 -- 20 years after her father's similar demise. Suffering from cancer and losing weight in her latter years, the beloved Edie died of complications from pneumonia at age 81 in Los Angeles.- Actress
- Additional Crew
Betty May Adams was the daughter of a travelling Iowa cotton buyer with a penchant for alcohol. Growing up in Arkansas, Betty expressed an early interest in acting and made her performing debut in a third grade play of "Hansel and Gretel." Beautiful, talented and determined, the freshly minted 'Miss Little Rock' left home at the age of 19 to live with her aunt and uncle in California. For three days a week she made ends meet working as a secretary. The remainder of her time was spent taking speech and drama lessons (in due course losing her Southern twang) and making the rounds of the various Hollywood casting departments. Her first screen role was (appropriately) as a starlet in Paramount's Red, Hot and Blue (1949). This was followed by an inauspicious leading role in the B-grade Western The Dalton Gang (1949). Over a period of five weeks she appeared in six further quota quickies of the sagebrush variety for Poverty Row outfit Lippert Productions. Since Lippert owned no actual studio facilities, most of the filming took place at the Ray Corrigan ranch in Chatsworth, California. In the summer of 1950, Betty assisted in a screen test for Detroit Lions football star Leon Hart at Universal-International. While Hart's movie career ended up stillborn, Betty clicked with producers who opted to change her first name to 'Julia.' The initial outing for her new studio was entitled Bright Victory (1951), with the budding actress a little underemployed as 'the other girl' in a love triangle involving a blind war veteran (played by Arthur Kennedy). Her career was significantly better served in her next assignment as co-star opposite James Stewart in Anthony Mann's seminal Technicolor western Bend of the River (1952) (Kennedy this time cast as the arch villain). Adams later recalled her part in this film as "a great learning experience" and one of her "fondest Hollywood memories," It also led to a life long friendship with Jimmy Stewart.
Signed to a seven-year contract (and having her legs insured by Universal to the tune of $125,000 by Lloyds of London), Julia seemed destined to remain perpetually typecast as a western heroine. A comely actress with soft, classical features, she often gave affecting performances in what amounted to little more than bread-and-butter pictures. At the very least, she got to play romantic leads opposite some of Universal's top box-office earners: Rock Hudson (in Horizons West (1952) and The Lawless Breed (1952)), Tyrone Power(The Mississippi Gambler (1953)) and Glenn Ford (The Man from the Alamo (1953)). Having played a succession of 'nice girls,' Julia took a turn as leader of an outlaw gang in Wings of the Hawk (1953), set against the background of the Mexican Revolution (Van Heflin was first-billed as a mining engineer, who, having his gold mine taken over by Federales, joins Julia's band of 'insurrectos'). 'Miss Melon Patch' of 1953 was about to experience another important career change, being famously cast as the imperilled heroine Kay Lawrence in Jack Arnolds cultish monster flic Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), a role Adams initially considered turning down. Shot in 3-D on a shoestring budget, the picture was light on script but strong on atmosphere and proved once again that style can succeed over content. The not inconsiderable physical charms of Miss Adams often dominated the scenery and gave the 'Gill Man' a run for his money. Audiences approved and 'Creature' spawned two further sequels, alas without Julia and with diminishing returns.
In 1955, having generated strong box office heat, Julia changed her moniker (with studio approval) to the less gentle-sounding Julie. Accordingly, she was now offered more varied material ranging from tough melodramas, to comedies and lightweight romances. Adams further established her credentials with roles which included a soft porn model who survives a plane crash in the Colorado Rockies in The Looters (1955); as a cop's wife in Six Bridges to Cross (1955) (a crime drama based on Boston's Great Brinks Robbery); a sympathetic school's doctor in the family-oriented comedy The Private War of Major Benson (1955) and as the wife of an assistant D.A. fighting gangland on the New York waterfront in Slaughter on 10th Avenue (1957). After 1957, her contract with Universal having expired, Adams successfully transitioned into television where she remained a firm favorite in westerns and crime dramas, guest-starring in just about every classic prime-time series covering both genres (Perry Mason (1957) being her personal favorite). Latterly, she had a popular recurring role as real estate lady Eve Simpson in Murder, She Wrote (1984). Adams was still in demand for occasional screen appearances well into her 90s.
She was married twice: first, to writer-producer Leonard Stern, and, secondly, to the actor Ray Danton. Julie Adams passed away in Los Angeles on February 3, 2019 at the age of 92. Her autobiography (co-written with her son Mitchell Danton), entitled "The Lucky Southern Star: Reflections from the Black Lagoon" appeared in 2011.- Actor
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Nick Adams, best known to audiences as Johnny Yuma of the TV series The Rebel (1959), played leads and supporting parts in many films of the 1950s, often cast in the same "troubled young man" mold as his good friend, James Dean. He was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in Twilight of Honor (1963). He died in 1968 due to an overdose of drugs he was taking for a nervous disorder.- Writer
- Actor
- Producer
Steve Allen was born on 26 December 1921 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Casino (1995), The Player (1992) and College Confidential (1960). He was married to Jayne Meadows and Dorothy Goodman. He died on 30 October 2000 in Encino, Los Angeles, California, USA.- The son of a minstrel and circus tightrope walker, Eddie Anderson developed a gravel voice early in life which would become his trademark to fame. He joined his older brother Cornelius as members of "The Three Black Aces" during his vaudeville years, singing for pennies in the hotel lobby. He eventually moved his way up to the Roxy and Apollo theaters in New York, which led to the Los Angeles Cotton Club in the west.
He began to appear in films, typically in servile bits, his best being the featured role of "Noah" in The Green Pastures (1936). He continued in that vein until a chance pairing with comedy star Jack Benny on his radio program in 1937 put him on the map. He only had a bit part on Benny's Easter show as a Pullman porter, but his scratchy voice, superb timing and comic reaction to Benny's banter earned him a fixed spot. He then was heard as Benny's personal valet, Rochester Van Jones, and the role became so popular that he became billed as Eddie "Rochester" Anderson.
In between radio assignments, he found the time to appear in both film drama and comedies, including You Can't Take It with You (1938), Kentucky (1938), Jezebel (1938), and three with Benny - Man About Town (1939), Buck Benny Rides Again (1940) and Love Thy Neighbor (1940). After the films Brewster's Millions (1945) and The Show-Off (1946), Anderson concentrated on his partnership with Jack Benny, following him into television and working with him for a total of 23 years. He returned to the screen for It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963) but ill health eventually forced him into retirement. He died of long-standing heart problems in 1977. - Actress
- Soundtrack
Blonde Pamela Austin was born Pamela Joan Akert in Omaha, daughter of Chester William Akert (1918-90) and his wife Virginia May (née Moon). She spent her pre-teens in Europe, where her father was stationed with the Air Force. Pamela studied singing and ballet in Hungary and Germany. Once her family returned to the United States, she continued to attend further dance classes at Sacramento State College. As a 17-year old, Pamela made her stage debut in the Broadway musical revue La Plume de Ma Tante (billed as a 'light soprano'). In 1961, she got her first gig in Hollywood in a nightclub act with Tony Martin. This expanded into a six months-long nationwide tour.
That same year, she began acting in films and is perhaps best remembered in that medium for her two appearances opposite Elvis Presley (both as girls named Selena, in Blue Hawaii (1961) and Kissin' Cousins (1964)). Her career gained momentum thanks to a series of TV and newspaper commercials for the automobile manufacturer Dodge. Dubbed the "Dodge Rebellion Girl", she featured in some twenty ads until her replacement by a 23 year-old in 1967. During the remainder of the 60s and 70s, Pamela made guest appearances in TV shows of diverse genres. She was featured several times in comedy skits, as well as song-and-dance routines on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (1967). The peak of her career was a starring role as the perennial damsel-in-distress in the zany slapstick comedy The Perils of Pauline (1967). It was based on the classic 1914 cliffhanger serial with Pearl White and inspired by the over-the-top antics of the 1960s Batman (1966) series. Intended as a TV pilot, it failed to gain traction, either commercially or with critics. Pamela had another lead, as amiable schoolmarm Betsy Potter in the cultish comedy western Evil Roy Slade (1972).
Pamela was briefly married (1963-64) to NFL defensive player Charley Britt of the Los Angeles Rams. Her second, also short-lived (1965-67), husband was Hollywood press agent Guy McElwaine. From 1974 until his death in 2019, she was married to the aeronautical engineer, MIT graduate and founder of Tre Corporation Leopold S. Wyler.- Actor
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Since starring in his first film, Splendor in the Grass (1961), Warren Beatty has been said to have demonstrated a greater longevity in movies than any actor of his generation. Few people have taken so many responsibilities for all phases of the production of films as producer, director, writer, and actor, and few have evidenced so high a level of integrity in a body of work.
In Rules Don't Apply (2016), he writes, produces, directs and stars in. Only Beatty and Orson Welles (Citizen Kane) have been nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as an actor, a director, a writer, and a producer for the same film. Beatty is the only person ever to have done it twice, for Heaven Can Wait (1978) and again for Reds (1981). Beatty has been nominated 15 times by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and 8 films he has produced have earned 53 Academy nominations. In 1982 he won the Academy Award for Directing and in 2000 was given the Academy's highest honor, the Irving G. Thalberg Award.
He was awarded Best Director from the Directors Guild of America and Best Writer three times from the Writers Guild of America. He has received the Milestone Award from the Producers Guild, the Board of Governors Award from the American Society of Cinematographers, the Directors Award from the Costume Designers Guild, the Life Achievement Award from the Publicists Guild, and the Outstanding Contribution to Cinematic Imagery Award from the Art Directors Guild. The National Association of Theater Owners has honored him as Director of the Year, as Producer of the Year and as Actor of the Year.
He has won 16 awards from the New York and Los Angeles Film Critics, the National Board of Review, and the Golden Globes. In 1992, he was made a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France; in Italy he received the David di Donatello award in 1968 and again in 1981 and its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998; in 2001, he received the Donostia Lifetime Achievement Award from the San Sebastian International Film Festival; in 2002, he received the British Academy Fellowship from BAFTA; and in 2011, he was awarded the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award for Excellence in Film.
In December 2004, Beatty received The Kennedy Center Honor in Washington, D.C. In addition, he is the recipient of the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award, the HFPA Cecile B. DeMille Award and many others. Politically active since the 1960's, Beatty campaigned with Robert F. Kennedy in his 1968 presidential campaign. That same year he traveled throughout the United States speaking in favor of gun control and against the war in Vietnam. In 1972 he took a year off from motion pictures to campaign with George McGovern.
In 1981, Beatty was a founding board member of the Center for National Policy. He is a founding member of The Progressive Majority, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has participated in the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland.
Beatty serves on the Board of Directors of the Motion Picture and Television Fund Foundation. He previously served on the Board of Trustees of The Scripps Research Institute for several years. He has received the Eleanor Roosevelt Award from the Americans for Democratic Action, the Brennan Legacy Award from the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, and the Philip Burton Public Service Award from The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights.
In multiple forums he has addressed campaign finance reform, the increasing disparity of wealth, universal health care and the need for the Democratic Party to return to its roots.
In March of 2013, he was inducted into the California Hall of Fame.
Beatty was born in Richmond, Virginia. He and his wife, Annette Bening, live in Los Angeles and have four children.
His mother, Kathlyn Corinne (MacLean), was a drama teacher from Nova Scotia, Canada, and his father, Ira Owens Beaty, a professor of psychology and real estate agent, was from Virginia. His sister is actress Shirley MacLaine (born Shirley MacLean Beaty). His ancestry is mostly English and Scottish.- Kathy Bennett was born on 1 September 1943 in Jacksonville, Florida, USA. She is an actress, known for 77 Sunset Strip (1958), Hawaiian Eye (1959) and Spencer's Mountain (1963).
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The son of a saloon keeper, Jack Benny (born Benny Kubelsky) began to study the violin at the age six, and his "ineptness" at it, would later become his trademark (in reality, he was a very accomplished player). When given the opportunity to play in live theatre professionally, Benny quit school and joined vaudeville. In the same theatre that Benny was working with were the very young The Marx Brothers. Their mother, Minnie Marx, wanted Benny to go on the road with them. However, this plan was foiled by his parents who would not let their 17-year-old son on the road.
Having a successful vaudeville career, Benny also had a greater career on radio for "The Jack Benny Program". The show was one of the few successful radio programs that also became a successful television show.
Benny also starred in several movies, including The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929), Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935), The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945) and George Washington Slept Here (1942), although he had much greater success on radio and on TV than he did on the big screen.
He was good friends with Fred Allen, with whom he had a long-standing comic "feud".- Actor
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Edgar Bergen was born on 16 February 1903 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was an actor and writer, known for Fun and Fancy Free (1947), The Muppet Movie (1979) and Letter of Introduction (1938). He was married to Frances Bergen. He died on 30 September 1978 in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.- Actress
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In a six-decade-plus career (she started out as a radio performer at age 14), there are very few facets of entertainment that lovely singer/actress Polly Bergen has not conquered or, at the very least, touched upon. A nightclub and Columbia recording artist of the 50s and 60s, she is just as well known for her film and Emmy-winning dramatic performances as she is for her wry comedic gifts. In the leaner times, she has maintained quite well with her various businesses. Truly one for the ages, Polly has, at age 70+, nabbed a Tony nomination for her gutsy "I'm Still Here" entertainer Carlotta in Stephen Sondheim's "Follies", and was still dishing out the barbs as she recently demonstrated as Felicity Huffman's earthy mom on Desperate Housewives (2004).
Born in Knoxville, Tennessee as Nellie Burgin on July 14, 1930, her family, which included father William, mother Lucy and sister Barbra, eventually moved to Los Angeles. By the time she was 14, Polly was singing professionally on radio and managed to scrape up singing gigs with smaller bands around and about the Southern California area. She attended Compton Junior College before Paramount mogul Hal B. Wallis caught sight of her and signed her up with his studio. Having made an isolated film debut (as Polly Burgin) a year earlier in the Monogram western Across the Rio Grande (1949), Wallis showcased her as a decorative love interest in the slapstick vehicles of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, the (then) hottest comedy team in Hollywood. But At War with the Army (1950), That's My Boy (1951) and The Stooge (1951) did little for Polly although she presented herself well. MGM and Universal had the idea to cast her in a more serious vein with co-starring roles in their dramas Escape from Fort Bravo (1953), Arena (1953) and Cry of the Hunted (1953), but again she was overlooked. Disasppointed, she decided to abandon her lucrative film contract and seek work elsewhere.
That "elsewhere" came in the form of 1950s TV. Focusing on her singing, she promoted her many albums for Columbia by guest-starring on all the top variety shows of the times. This culminated in her own variety program, The Polly Bergen Show (1957). The song "The Party's Over" became her traditional show-closer and signature tune. Polly also showed some marquee mettle on the cabaret and nightclub circuits, performing at many of the top hotels and showrooms throughout the country. She made her Broadway debut along with Harry Belafonte in "John Murray Anderson's Almanac" in 1953, and went on to appear in such stage shows as "Top Man" and "Champagne Complex". A delightfully engaging game show panelist to boot, she took a regular seat on the To Tell the Truth (1956) panel for five seasons.
Polly tended to display a looser, down-to-earth personality to induce laughs but she was also was formidable dramatic player and fashion plate quite capable of radiating great charm, poise and elegance. For her role as alcoholic torch singer Helen Morgan in the special TV showcase The Helen Morgan Story (1957) , she took home the Emmy award. Unfortunately for Polly, Ann Blyth took on the role of the tragic singer in the film version (with Gogi Grant providing the vocals), in what could have been a significant return to films for her.
Instead, Polly had to wait another five years for that to happen. As the wife of Gregory Peck and designated victim of revengeful psychopath Robert Mitchum in the taut movie thriller Cape Fear (1962), her film career reignited. Other opportunities came in the form of her distraught mental patient in The Caretakers (1963), which found her at odds with nurse Joan Crawford and doctor Robert Stack; the sparkling comedy Move Over, Darling (1963), which placed her in a comedy triangle with "other wife" Doris Day and husband James Garner; and as the first woman Chief Executive of the White House in the frothy comedy tidbit Kisses for My President (1964) opposite bemused "First Gentleman" Fred MacMurray. In what was to be a tinge of deja vu, Polly again saw her movie career dissipate after only a couple of vehicles. True to form, the indomitable Polly rebounded on TV.
A mild string of TV-movies came her way as she matured into the 1970s and 1980s, most notably the acclaimed miniseries The Winds of War (1983), which reunited her with Robert Mitchum, this time as his unhappy, alcoholic wife. This, along with her participation in the sequel, War and Remembrance (1988), earned Polly supporting Emmy nominations. In the years to come, she would find herself still in demand displaying her trademark comic grit in such shows as The Sopranos (1999), Commander in Chief (2005) and Desperate Housewives (2004).
Polly returned to singing in 1999 after nearly a three-decade absence (due to health and vocal issues). Quite huskier in tone, she went on to delight the New York musical stage with stand-out performances in "Follies" (2001), "Cabaret" (2002) and "Camille Claudel" (2007). Polly still made nightly appearances and had even put together singing concert tours on occasion.
Polly has authored three best-selling beauty books outside the acting arena and has demonstrated a marked level of acumen in the business world. Founding a mail-order cosmetics business in 1965, she sold it to Faberge eight years later. She also developed her own shoe and jewelry lines.
Married (1950-1955) to MGM actor Jerome Courtland during her first movie career peak, she later wed topflight agent/producer Freddie Fields in 1957, a union that lasted 18 years and produced two adopted children, Pamela and Peter. A third marriage in the 1980s also ended in divorce. An assertive voice when it comes to women's rights and issues, her memoir "Polly's Principles" came out in 1974.
Polly played a grandmother in her last film, the dramedy Struck by Lightning (2012), and died two years later on September 20, 2013, at the age of 84.- Actor
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Perpetually glum standup comedian Joey Bishop was born Joseph Abraham Gottlieb on February 3, 1918, in the Bronx, New York. He was the youngest of five children of Chana "Anna" (Siegel) and Jacob Gottlieb, a bicycle repairman. His father was an Austrian Jewish immigrant and his mother was a Romanian Jew. He was raised in Philadelphia and learned while growing up how to tap dance, do imitations and play the mandolin and banjo. Dropping out of high school at 18, he started out in the humor business in vaudeville as part of a comedy act with his brother. Billed as "Joey Gottlieb" at the time, he later joined a comedy group that called themselves "The Bishop Trio" and kept the last name for himself after the team broke up. His nascent career was interrupted while serving in the Army during WWII, but quickly resumed things after his discharge in 1945. He appeared on television as early as 1948, but it took a while before he caught on. A master ad-libber, he became a nitery specialist at such establishments as the Latin Quarter, and served as an opening act for a number of stars, including Frank Sinatra, in the mid-50s. As his reputation increased, he became a steadfast cog on the talk show, sitcom and game show circuits. A frequent and amusing guest panelist on What's My Line? (1950), the jug-eared jokester went on to guest-host on the The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962) a record 177 times. He also frequently appeared as a guest for Steve Allen and Jack Paar in their earlier late-nite formats.
Bishop entered the sitcom venue in the early 1960s. On his first show, The Joey Bishop Show (1961), he played Joey Barnes, the host of a TV talk show in New York. Abby Dalton came on board in the second season as wife Ellie. Among his co-stars were up-and-coming stars Bill Bixby and Marlo Thomas and such character veterans as Joe Besser, of The Three Stooges fame, and Mary Treen were brought aboard for stronger support. This popular show lasted four seasons. Life imitated art several years later when Bishop went on to compete against Carson for the late-night viewing audience with his own talk show The Joey Bishop Show (1967) for ABC. The show was no match for Carson, however, and quickly dwindled in ratings, fading away after two years. His co-host/sidekick/foil was none other than Regis Philbin. Dick Cavett eventually replaced him to fill the ABC midnight void.
Relatively overlooked for his work on film, Bishop did show some promise early in the game with occasional straight roles that veered away from his sarcastic comedy demeanor with such roles in The Deep Six (1958), The Naked and the Dead (1958) and Onionhead (1958). He would also generate public interest as the less-than-slick member of Hollywood's "Rat Pack", which was comprised of ultra-hip pals Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford. Known as "Sinatra's comic" at one time (for having frequently opened for the star), Bishop wrote material and serving as the emcee for many of the clan's Las Vegas shows in the 1960s. In addition he appeared in the "Rat Pack"-oriented movies Ocean's Eleven (1960) and Sergeants 3 (1962), but the straight-laced comedian later butted heads with the party-hearty Sinatra and split while the next film Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964) was in preparation. Elsewhere, he appeared as either a foil, sidekick, or guest cameos in such standard movies as Johnny Cool (1963), Texas Across the River (1966) with Dean Martin, Who's Minding the Mint? (1967) and even Valley of the Dolls (1967).
Once his late night TV show folded he returned to night clubs for a time but gradually withdrew more and more from the show-biz limelight in the 1970s. He appeared in only three films after this point -- The Delta Force (1986), Betsy's Wedding (1990) and Mad Dog Time (1996) -- and showing up on a rare occasion as a TV guest. Married to Sylvia Ruzga since 1941, their son Larry Bishop is an actor-turned-director and producer. Long retired and the last surviving "Rat Pack" member after Sinatra's death in 1998, his wife Sylvia of 58 years died of cancer in 1999. Joey, in failing health for some time, died of multiple organ failure on October 17, 2007, at his Newport Beach, California home.- Actor
- Producer
- Music Department
Actor, singer, author and songwriter ("Exodus") Pat Boone was educated at David Lipscombe College, North Texas State College and Columbia University (from which he received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1958). His career in entertainment began when he emceed a teenage talent show on radio and television in Nashville, Tennessee. He won a Ted Mack Original Amateur Hour amateur show, and an Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts show. His first professional recording was made in 1955, and he joined ASCAP in 1961, with Ernest Gold being his chief musical collaborator. Over the years he has had many hit songs ("Moody River", "Speedy Gonzales", "Bernadine") and appeared in a string of films in the 1950s and 1960s, some successful and some not. His other song compositions include "Lover's Lane" and "The Main Attraction". He has served as a board member of the Northeastern Institute for Christian Education.- Breck was born Joseph Peter Breck, the son of a jazz musician also named Joseph (nicknamed "Jobie"). Over time, his father worked with such legendary greats as Fats Waller, Bix Beiderbecke, Paul Whiteman and Billie Holiday. Nicknamed "Buddy" while young, Peter's parents were on the road for much of his early life and he was sent to live with his grandparents in Haverhill, Massachusetts, a move that provided more stability.
His parents eventually divorced and young Peter returned to Rochester to live with his mother and her new husband, Al Weber, who was a sports editor of the Rochester Times-Union. Following his schooling at John Marshall High School in Rochester, Peter served in the United States Navy. He then turned his attention back to education and studied English and drama at the University of Houston in Houston. While performing in college plays, he started to apprentice at Houston's Alley Theatre, where he appeared in such productions as "Stalag 17", among others. He had a talent for singing and performed in several clubs in and around the Houston area.
Breck extended his stage resume at Washington D.C.'s Arena Theatre. While performing there in a 1957 production of George Bernard Shaw's "The Man of Destiny", he was "discovered" by Robert Mitchum, who cast him in an unbilled role in the film Thunder Road (1958), which Mitchum himself produced, co-wrote and starred in. Mitchum invited the young tenderfoot to Los Angeles and helped set him up out there. While Breck struggled trying to establish himself in films (he played a juvenile delinquent in the movie The Beatniks (1958)), it seemed that rugged TV roles came easier to him. He found his first series lead as "Clay Culhane" in the western Black Saddle (1959), the story of a gunfighter (Breck) who switches guns for law books and tries to tame the West through reason. Co-starring Russell Johnson (later the "Professor" on Gilligan's Island (1964)), who plays a suspicious U.S. Marshal, the series was canceled after two seasons.
A Warner Brothers studio contract, however, did come out of this-and a new visibility. Tall, dark and handsome at 6'2", Breck guest-starred on all the top Warner Bros. TV shows of the day: Sugarfoot (1957), Surfside 6 (1960), Bronco (1958), Hawaiian Eye (1959), 77 Sunset Strip (1958), Cheyenne (1955) and played a recurring "Doc Holliday" in the popular series Maverick (1957). He returned to the movies as well, but this time in stronger leads or co-leads. Handed a choice co-starring assignment in Portrait of a Mobster (1961) opposite star Vic Morrow, who played the infamous "Dutch Schultz", Peter also managed to show a rare, gentler side in the outdoor family drama Lad: A Dog (1962).
He left Warners after only a few years but managed to score the leads in two low-budget cult thrillers in its wake: Shock Corridor (1963)_ and The Crawling Hand (1963), along with a very dismal lead in the musical outing Hootenanny Hoot (1963), in which he was given no songs to perform despite his singing capabilities. Again, TV came to the rescue when he won the brotherly co-lead on The Big Valley (1965). Despite a uniformly strong ensemble cast that included oldest brother Richard Long, younger brother Lee Majors and sister Linda Evans, Stanwyck was the only performer on the show who was nominated for an Emmy during its four-season run; she was nominated twice and won once.
Following this TV peak, Breck abruptly left Hollywood and focused on the theater both in the U.S. and Canada throughout the 1970s, appearing in such showcase vehicles as "The Gazebo", "A Thousand Clowns", "The Rainmaker" and "Mister Roberts". Married to former dancer Diana Bourne since 1960, the couple settled in Vancouver, Canada, with their son Christopher, where Breck checked out the film scene. He also set up a full-time acting academy school, The Breck Academy, which ran for ten years. Tragically, it was during this time that their son, Christopher, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and died (two years later).
Breck decided to lay back following this traumatic period, but still manages to perform in films and TV from time to time. As he grew older, he joined the cast of some very offbeat "B" films: Terminal City Ricochet (1990) and and Highway 61 (1991). His more recent "B" movies included Decoy (1995), Enemy Action (1999) and Jiminy Glick in Lalawood (2004). He also wrote a western column and showed up occasionally at nostalgia conventions until he was diagnosed with dementia. He made his last film with a small role in the Martin Short vehicle Jiminy Glick in Lalawood (2004). Breck died on February 6, 2012, in Vancouver, Canada. - Actor
- Producer
- Soundtrack
Peter Brown got into acting when he was in the army by organizing a theater group on base to occupy his spare time while stationed in Alaska. After his discharge he enrolled in the acting program at UCLA, and starting in the mid-1950s found employment in many of the western films and series being turned out at the time (he is especially remembered for his work as eager young deputy Johnny McKay in the classic western series Lawman (1958) and as one of a trio of Texas Rangers in the western action/comedy series Laredo (1965)). Following the end of a contract with Universal Pictures (1965-1972), he switched to soap operas and made-for-TV films, and has been steadily employed ever since.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Tall, sultry, green-eyed blonde Peggie Castle was actually spotted by a talent scout while she was lunching in a Beverly Hills restaurant. In her films she was usually somebody's "woman" rather than a girlfriend, and her career was confined to mostly "B"-grade action pictures, dramas or westerns: Harem Girl (1952), Wagons West (1952), The Prince Who Was a Thief (1951), Jesse James' Women (1954), among others. She did, however, have good roles in such films as Payment on Demand (1951) with Bette Davis, 99 River Street (1953) with John Payne, I, the Jury (1953), The White Orchid (1954), Miracle in the Rain (1956) with Jane Wyman and in Seven Hills of Rome (1957) with Mario Lanza. After three seasons playing sexy femme lead Lily Merrill, the dance-hall hostess and romantic interest for steely-eyed Marshal Dan Troop in the TV western series Lawman (1958), she left show business in 1962. She later developed an alcohol problem and died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1973 at age 45.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Cyd Charisse was born Tula Ellice Finklea on March 8, 1922, in Amarillo, Texas. Born to be a dancer, she spent her early childhood taking ballet lessons and joined the Ballet Russe at age 13. In 1939, she married Nico Charisse, her former dance teacher. In 1943, she appeared in her first film, Something to Shout About (1943), billed as Lily Norwood. The same year, she played a Russian dancer in Mission to Moscow (1943), directed by Michael Curtiz. In 1945, she was hired to dance with Fred Astaire in Ziegfeld Follies (1945), and that uncredited appearance got her a seven-year contract with MGM. She appeared in a number of musicals over the next few years, but it was Singin' in the Rain (1952) with Gene Kelly that made her a star. That was quickly followed by her great performance in The Band Wagon (1953). As the 1960s dawned, musicals faded from the screen, as did her career. She made appearances on television and performed in a nightclub revue with her second husband, singer Tony Martin. Cyd Charisse died at age 86 of a heart attack on June 17, 2008 in Los Angeles, California.- Music Artist
- Actor
- Music Department
Nat King Cole was born Nathaniel Adams Coles (he later dropped the "s" in his surname) in Montgomery, Alabama. He received music lessons from his mother and his family moved to Chicago when he was only five, where his father, Edward James Coles, was a minister at the True Light Baptist Church and later Pastor of the First Baptist Church. At 12, he was playing the church organ. At age 14, he formed a 14 piece band called the Royal Dukes. Nat was a top flight sandlot baseball player at Wendell Phillips high school in Chicago.
His three brothers, Ike, Frankie, and Eddie Cole, also played the piano and sang professionally. Nat was an above-average football player in high school. His sister, Evelyn Cole, was a beautician in nearby Waukegan, Illinois. In 1939 he formed the King Cole Trio after his publicist put a silver tin-foiled crown on his head and proclaimed him "King". He later toured Europe and made a command performance before Queen Elizabeth II.
He had a highly-rated TV show in the 1950s but it was canceled (by Cole himself) as no companies could be found that were willing to sponsor the show. He was a big baseball fan and had a permanent box seat at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. He met his wife Maria Cole (a big-band singer) at the Zanzibar nightclub in Los Angeles through Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson show. Her parents opposed her decision to marry Cole, claiming he was "too black". They married, nonetheless, in 1948, and had two daughters, Caroline and Natalie Cole. On April 10, 1956, at Birmingham, Alabama, he was attacked by six white men from a white supremacist group called the White Cizizens Council during a concert and sustained minor injuries to his back. Cole appeared in several movies, the last of which was Cat Ballou (1965), starring Lee Marvin.
Cole received 28 gold record awards for such hits as "Sweet Lorraine", "Ramblin' Rose" in 1962, "Too Young" in 1951, "Mona Lisa" in 1949 and Mel Tormé's "Christmas Song". His first recordings of the Christmas Song included the lyrics, "Reindeers really know how to fly" instead of "reindeer really know how to fly", a mistake later corrected by Capitol Records. He was also a composer and his song "Straighten Up and Fly Right" was sold for $50.00. A heavy smoker, he died of lung cancer.- Actor
- Director
- Writer
Robert Conrad was a graduate of Northwestern University, spending his first few years out of school supporting himself and his family by driving a milk truck and singing in a Chicago cabaret. Conrad befriended up-and-coming actor Nick Adams during this period, and it was Adams who helped Conrad get his first Hollywood work in 1957. A few movie bit parts later, Conrad was signed for a comparative pittance by Warner Bros. studios, and in 1959 was cast as detective Tom Lopaka on the weekly adventure series Hawaiian Eye. Upon the 1963 cancellation of this series, Conrad made a handful of Spanish and American films and toured with a nightclub act in Australia and Mexico City. Cast as frontier secret agent James West in The Wild Wild West (1965) in 1965, Conrad brought home $5000 a week during the series' first season and enjoyed increasing remunerations as West remained on the air until 1969. There are those who insist that Wild Wild West would have been colorless without the co-starring presence of Ross Martin, an opinion with which Conrad has always agreed. The actor's bid to star in a 1970 series based on the venerable Nick Carter pulp stories got no further than a pilot episode, while the Jack Webb-produced 1971 Robert Conrad series The D.A. was canceled after 13 episodes. When Roy Scheider pulled out of the 1972 adventure weekly Assignment: Vienna, Conrad stepped in--and was out, along with the rest of Assignment: Vienna, by June of 1973. Conrad had better luck with 1976's Baa Baa Black Sheep, aka Black Sheep Squadron, a popular series based on the World War II exploits of Major "Pappy" Boyington. Cast as a nurse on this series was Conrad's daughter Nancy, setting a precedent for nepotism that the actor practiced as late as his tenth TV series, 1989's Jesse Hawkes, wherein Conrad co-starred with his sons Christian and Shane.
Though few of his series have survived past season one, Conrad has enjoyed success as a commercial spokesman and in the role of G. Gordon Liddy (whom the actor admired) in the 1982 TV movie Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy (1982). As can be gathered from the Liddy assignment, Conrad's politics veered towards conservatism; in 1981, he and Charlton Heston were instrumental in toppling Ed Asner and his liberal contingent from power in the Screen Actors Guild.
As virile and athletic as ever in the 1990s, Robert Conrad continued to appear in action roles both on TV and in films; he also maintained strong ties with his hometown of Chicago, and could be counted on to show up at a moment's notice as a guest on the various all-night programs of Chicago radio personality Eddie Schwartz.- Actor
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
Hans Conried was born in Baltimore and raised both there and in New York City. He studied acting at Columbia University, and played many major classical roles onstage. After having been a member of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre Company, he was heard as Prof. Kropotkin on the radio show "My Friend Irma" and had various roles on the "Edgar Bergen - Charlie McCarthy Show". He was in the original cast of Cole Porter's 1953 Broadway hit "Can-Can" and stayed with the show for more than a year. Known for his sharp wit, Conried was in demand as an actor, panelist and narrator, appearing frequently in television series and movies throughout the 1960s and 1970s.- Actor
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Wendell Corey was a hard-working American character actor who appeared in numerous movies and television productions in the 1940s, '50s and '60s. Born on March 20, 1914 in Dracut, Massachusetts, in the northeastern part of the Commonwealth near the New Hampshire border, Corey was the son of a Congregationalist clergyman. After receiving his education, Corey began his acting career in summer stock. During the Depression he worked with the Federal Theater Project, part of the Works Progress Administration that had been created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to put the unemployed to work. It was while working with the Federal Theater Project in the late 1930s that he met his wife, Alice Wiley.
He made his Broadway debut in "Comes the Revelation" in 1942, a flop that lasted only two performances. His next play, "Strip for Action" (1942-43), was more successful, lasting 110 performances. He appeared in more plays in supporting roles from 1943-45, before making his reputation as the cynical newspaperman in Elmer Rice's hit comedy "Dream Girl," which ran for 341 performances in the 1945-46 season. He was discovered during the run of the play by producer Hal B. Wallis, the former head of production at Warner Bros. who was an independent producer affiliated with Paramount Pictures. Wallis, who discovered Burt Lancaster shortly after the war, signed Corey to a Paramount contract.
It was at Paramount that he made his movie debut in Desert Fury (1947). He went on to a career as a supporting player in the '40s and '50s in A-level productions with top Hollywood stars. He also carved a niche for himself in television and in the late 1950s starred in the TV series Peck's Bad Girl (1959). In the 1960s he worked mostly in television.
Like Ronald Reagan, who was then a Democrat, the Republican Corey was interested in politics. He was elected to membership on the board of directors of the Screen Actors Guild and served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1961 to 1963. As a Republican, he was elected to the City Council in Santa Monica, California, in 1965. He made a bid for the Republican nomination to contest a seat in Congress in 1966, but was defeated in the primary.
Corey was still serving on the Santa Monica City Council when he died on November 8, 1968 at the Motion Picture & Television Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. He was 54 years old.- Kathleen Crowley represented her home state of New Jersey in the Miss America pageant in 1949, placed sixth and (with the scholarship money she won) enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York. She played the plum title roles in prestigious TV productions of A Star Is Born (1951) and Jane Eyre (1951), caught the eye of Hollywood and became a 20th Century-Fox contractee in 1952. Freelancing after leaving the studio, she kept busy in feature films (mostly Westerns and horror/sci-fi titles) and TV. Crowley turned up at film conventions in Memphis, Baltimore and New Jersey before her death in 2017.
- Actress
- Costume and Wardrobe Department
- Costume Designer
Elegance and femininity are fitting descriptions for Arlene Dahl. She is considered to be one of the most beautiful actresses to have graced the screen during the postwar period. Audiences were captivated by her breathtaking beauty and the way she used to it to her advantage, progressing from claimer to character roles.
Of Norwegian extraction, Miss Dahl was born in Minneapolis. Following high school she joined a local drama group, supporting herself with a variety of jobs, including modeling for a number of department stores. Arriving in Hollywood in 1946, she signed a brief contract with Warner Brothers, but she is best remembered for her work at MGM. The Bride Goes Wild (1948) was her first work at Metro. It was an odd but rather humorous love story, which starred Van Johnson and June Allyson.
Although her beauty captivated audiences, it ultimately limited her to smaller roles, and the mark she made at MGM was small. Some of her best films were Reign of Terror (1949), which actually required some acting and she acquitted herself quite well, Three Little Words (1950), Woman's World (1954), Slightly Scarlet (1956) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959).
Leaving films behind her in 1959, her typecasting would pay off financially as she became a beauty columnist and writer. She later established herself as a businesswoman, founding Arlene Dahl Enterprises which marketed lingerie and cosmetics.
She was married six times, two of whom were actors, Lex Barker and Fernando Lamas. She is the mother of actor / action star Lorenzo Lamas, and actually made a guest appearance in his film Night of the Warrior (1991).- Actress
- Soundtrack
Dorothy Jean Dandridge was born on November 9, 1922 in Cleveland, Ohio, to Ruby Dandridge (née Ruby Jean Butler), an entertainer, and Cyril H. Dandridge, a cabinet maker and minister. Under the prodding of her mother, Dorothy and her sister Vivian Dandridge began performing publicly, usually in black Baptist churches throughout the country. Her mother would often join her daughters on stage. As the depression worsened, Dorothy and her family picked up and moved to Los Angeles where they had hopes of finding better work, perhaps in film. Her first film was in the Marx Brothers comedy, A Day at the Races (1937). It was only a bit part but Dandridge hoped it would blossom into something better. She only appeared in another film in 1940, in Four Shall Die (1940).
Meanwhile, she dropped out of high school and became part of a musical trio which performed with the orchestra of Jimmie Lunceford. During the late 30s, she dated music composer Phil Moore, who was instrumental in launching her career as a nightclub singer and big band vocalist.
Her next few screen roles in the early 1940s tended to be small stereotypical roles of black girls or princesses - such as Bahama Passage (1941) and Drums of the Congo (1942), She was the singing star of the western themed all-black-cast "soundie" (short musical) Cow-Cow Boogie (1942) and appeared in movies that showcased her talents as actress and singer, like Hit Parade of 1943 (1943) as the vocalist of Count Basie's Band, and twice as the vocalist of Louis Armstrong's Band in Pillow to Post (1945) and Atlantic City (1944).
Those brought her headline acts in the nation's finest hotel nightclubs in New York, Miami, Chicago and Las Vegas. She may have been allowed to sing in these fine hotels but, because of racism, she couldn't have a room in any of them. It was reported that one hotel drained its swimming pool to keep her from enjoying that amenity.
In 1954, she appeared in the all-black production of Carmen Jones (1954) in the title role. She was so superb in that picture that she garnered an Academy Award nomination but lost to Grace Kelly in The Country Girl (1954). She did not get another movie role until Tamango (1958), an Italian film. She did six more films, including, most notably, Island in the Sun (1957) and Porgy and Bess (1959). The last movie in which she would ever appear was The Murder Men (1962) (1961).
Dandridge faded quickly after that, due to an ill-considered marriage to Jack Dennison (her first husband was Harold Nicholas), poor investments, financial woes, and alcoholism.
She was found dead in her apartment at 8495 Fountain Avenue, West Hollywood, on September 8, 1965, aged 42, from barbiturate poisoning. She left $2.14 in her bank account, and a handwritten letter: "In case of my death - whoever discovers it - Don't remove anything I have on - scarf, gown, or underwear. Cremate me right away - if I have any money, furniture, give it to my mother, Ruby Dandridge - She will know what to do.". She was cremated and her ashes were interred in the Freedom Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.
She was posthumously awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6719 Hollywood Blvd. on January 18, 1983.- Actor
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Comedian, author and composer, educated at Emerson College. He served in the US Infantry during World War II. Later, he was part of the team Dana and Wood on television and in supper clubs. As a single, he appeared on television with Martha Raye and Imogene Coca and was a writer for Steve Allen, and he also appeared in night clubs and on records. Joining ASCAP in 1958, his popular-song compositions include "My Name Jose Jimenez", "All About Love" and "Big Bells and Bongo Drummers".- Actor
- Soundtrack
Troy Donahue was a journalism student at Columbia University when he began playing in stock productions. He made his film debut in Man Afraid (1957) and in 1959 signed as a contract player with Warner Bros., which promoted him to stardom with A Summer Place (1959) that year. He was soon a teenage heartthrob, his blond hair and blue eyes appearing frequently on the covers of movie magazines. His most successful film was Parrish (1961), in which he played the title character. A few years after that his career went into a decline; he made only a few television movies between the mid-'60s and his small role in The Godfather Part II (1974) (in which his character's name, Merle Johnson, was actually his real name). His later films were almost entirely for the low-budget home video market, e.g., Sexpot (1990) and Nudity Required (1989).
On August 30, 2001, Donahue suffered a heart attack and was admitted to the hospital in Santa Monica, California. He died three days later on September 2 at the age of 65.- Actor
- Writer
Born in Franklin, Indiana on December 28, 1923, he was raised in Texas and went to college at Indiana University. There, on a speech and drama scholarship, he began to act and perform however this was interrupted by being called into the service. In World War II where he saw action overseas, he was befriended by actor Melvyn Douglas, who led his division. With such encouragement, as well as meeting and becoming familiar with some Broadway folks, Duggan went into acting. From 1953 onward, he was a fixture in both movies and television.
Most notably, he played General Ed Britt on 12 O'Clock High (1964), he was Cal Calhoun in Bourbon Street Beat (1959) and his most famous role as "Murdoch Lancer" in Lancer (1968) and the original John Walton opposite Patricia Neal in The Homecoming: A Christmas Story (1971). He was "Howitzer Al Houlihan", the father of "Hotlips Houlihan" (Loretta Swit) in M*A*S*H (1972). In 1954, he wed Broadway actress Elizabeth "Betty" Logue. After their deaths, they were cremated and their ashes scattered at Lake Arrowhead, California.- Actor
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The future stage, screen and TV star (real name: Fred Eisley) was born in Philadelphia. His father was general sales manager and "troubleshooter" for a large company, and his work kept the family on the move (up and down the East Coast) throughout Eisley's young life. As early as the days of school plays Eisley knew that he wanted to be an actor, but because he lacked show-business contacts he felt nothing would come of his aspiration. He later took drama courses at the University of Miami, "not because I thought I could really be an actor, but because I was taking the easy way out to get a degree". Finally following up on his longtime ambition, Eisley landed a job with a stock company in Pennsylvania, where he worked opposite James Dunn in a stage production of "A Slight Case of Murder." Later roles in long-running plays like "Mister Roberts", "Picnic" and "The Desperate Hours" ensued, along with some early movie (Operation Pacific (1951), Fearless Fagan (1952)) and television (Racket Squad (1950)) work. Eisley later went on to TV and exploitation movie stardom.- Actor
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Legendary actor Glenn Ford was born Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford in Sainte-Christine-d'Auvergne, Quebec, Canada, to Hannah Wood (Mitchell) and Newton Ford, a railroad executive. His family moved to Santa Monica, California when he was eight years old. His acting career began with plays at high school, followed by acting in West Coast, a traveling theater company.
Ford was discovered in 1939 by Tom Moore, a talent scout for 20th Century Fox. He subsequently signed a contract with Columbia Pictures the same year. Ford's contract with Columbia marked a significant departure in that studio's successful business model. Columbia's boss, Harry Cohn, had spent decades observing other studios'-most notably Warner Brothers-troubles with their contract stars and had built his poverty-row studio around their loan-outs. Basically, major studios would use Columbia as a penalty box for unruly behavior-usually salary demands or work refusals. The cunning Cohn usually assigned these stars (his little studio could not normally afford then) into pictures, and the studio's status rose immensely as the 1930s progressed. Understandably, Cohn had long resisted developing his own stable of contract stars (he'd first hired Peter Lorre in 1934 but didn't know what to do with him) but had relented in the late 1930s, first adding Rosalind Russell, then signing Ford and fellow newcomer William Holden. Cohn reasoned that the two prospects could be used interchangeably, should one become troublesome. Although often competing for the same parts, Ford and Holden became good friends. Their careers would roughly parallel each other through the 1940s, until Holden became a superstar through his remarkable association with director Billy Wilder in the 1950s.
Ford made his official debut in Fox's Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence (1939), and continued working in various small roles throughout the 1940s until his movie career was interrupted to join the Marines in World War II. Ford continued his military career in the Naval Reserve well into the Vietnam War, achieving the rank of captain. In 1943 Ford married legendary tap dancer Eleanor Powell, and had one son, Peter Ford. Like many actors returning to Hollywood after the war (including James Stewart and Holden (who had already acquired a serious alcohol problem), he found it initially difficult to regain his career momentum. He was able to resume his movie career with the help of Bette Davis, who gave him his first postwar break in the 1946 movie A Stolen Life (1946). However, it was not until his acclaimed performance in a 1946 classic film noir, Gilda (1946), with Rita Hayworth, that he became a major star and one of the the most popular actors of his time. He scored big with the film noir classics The Big Heat (1953) and Blackboard Jungle (1955), and was usually been cast as a calm and collected everyday-hero, showing courage under pressure. Ford continued to make many notable films during his prestigious 50-year movie career, but he is best known for his fine westerns such as 3:10 to Yuma (1957) and The Rounders (1965). Ford pulled a hugely entertaining turn in The Sheepman (1958) and many more fine films. In the 1970s, Ford made his television debut in the controversial The Brotherhood of the Bell (1970) and appeared in two fondly remembered television series: Cade's County (1971) and The Family Holvak (1975). During the 1980s and 1990s, Ford limited his appearance to documentaries and occasional films, including a nice cameo in Superman (1978).
Glenn Ford is remembered fondly by his fans for his more than 100 excellent films and his charismatic silver screen presence.- Actress
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Eileen Evelyn Greer Garson was born on September 29, 1904 in London, England, to Nancy Sophia (Greer) and George Garson, a commercial clerk. Of Scottish and Ulster-Scots descent, Garson displayed no early interest in becoming an actress. Educated at the University of London intending to become a teacher, she opted instead to take a job at an advertising agency. During her off hours she appeared in local theatrical productions, gaining a reputation as an extremely talented and charismatic performer. During a stage production of "Old Music," Garson was offered a studio contract by MGM Vice President of Production Louis B. Mayer while he was on a visit to London looking for new talent. Garson's very first film under that arrangement was the immensely popular Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), earning her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress - the first of six she would receive. The following year would see Greer in the highly acclaimed Pride and Prejudice (1940) as "Elizabeth Bennet". 1941 saw her earn a second nomination for her role as Edna Gladney in Blossoms in the Dust (1941), but it was the moving, if propagandist, Mrs. Miniver (1942), in a role that she would forever be known by, that actually brought her the Oscar statuette as Best Actress.
As Marie Curie in Madame Curie (1943), she would draw yet another nomination, and the same the next year in Mrs. Parkington (1944). It began to seem that any movie she was part of would be an automatic success. Sure enough, in 1945, she won yet another nomination, for her role as "Mary Rafferty" in The Valley of Decision (1945). Still, Garson began to chafe at the unbroken stream of "noble woman" roles in which the studio was casting her. MGM felt that they had an winning formula and saw no compelling reason to alter it. Two standard seven-year contract extensions kept her at MGM until 1954 when, by mutual consent, she left the only studio she had ever known. In 1946, Greer appeared in Adventure (1945), which was a flop at the box-office. 1947's Desire Me (1947) was no less a disaster, downward spiral finally arrested with the hit That Forsyte Woman (1949). The next year, she reprised her role as "Kay Miniver" in The Miniver Story (1950), though audiences were unsurprisingly put off by her character's untimely demise from cancer, leaving screen husband Walter Pidgeon to soldier on alone.
For the remainder of the 1950s, she endured several predictably unappreciated films. Then, 1960 found her cast in the role of Eleanor Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello (1960). This film was, perhaps, her finest work and landed her seventh and final Academy Award nomination. Her final screen appearances were in The Singing Nun (1966) as "Mother Prioress" and The Happiest Millionaire (1967). After a few TV movies, Garson retired to the New Mexico ranch she shared with her husband, millionaire Buddy E.E. Fogelson. She concentrated on the environment and other various charities. By the 1980s, she was suffering from chronic heart problems, prompting her to slow down. That was the cause of her death on April 6, 1996 in Dallas, Texas, at age 91.- Producer
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Daughter of Bernard Granville, Bonita Granville was born into an acting family. It's not surprising that she herself became a child actor, first on the stage and, at the age of 9, debuting in movies in Westward Passage (1932). She was regularly cast as a naughty little girl, as in These Three (1936) where she played Mary, an obnoxious girl spreading lies about her teachers. Her performance left an impression on the audience, and she was nominated for a best supporting actress award. In 1938-39 came the movies she is now best remembered for -- playing the bright and feisty detective/reporter Nancy Drew in the Nancy Drew series. She also appeared with Mickey Rooney in a few Andy Hardy movies. She never really had a movie breakthrough, and after marrying oil millionaire & later producer Jack Wrather, she retired from acting in the middle of the 1950s, although she went on to produce the Lassie (1954) TV series.- Actor
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Though born in New York City, Ty was raised in Texas and, after military service during the Korean War, took some classes at Texas A&M. He then moved west to California and won some minor roles in B movies. When TV's Clint Walker insisted on improvements in his Cheyenne (1955) contract, Warner Brothers countered by bringing in Ty as a possible replacement. Soon, Ty had his own show, Bronco (1958), which ran from 1958 to 1962. From here, he moved into a brief flurry of film activity: Merrill's Marauders (1962) and The Chapman Report (1962) in 1962, PT 109 (1963), Wall of Noise (1963), and Palm Springs Weekend (1963) in 1963, and Battle of the Bulge (1965) in 1966. After this, Ty's career drifted off into a series of forgettable movies made in Europe and, later, he worked in Prescott, Arizona, as an evangelistic preacher. Though often dismissed as just a hunk of "beefcake" -- he did a lot of bare-chest scenes -- Ty displayed a flair for light comedy in The Chapman Report (1962) and showed dramatic potential in the underrated Wall of Noise (1963).- Actor
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Laurence Harvey was a British movie star who helped usher in the 1960s with his indelible portrait of a ruthless social climber, and became one of the decade's cultural icons for his appearances in socially themed motion pictures.
Harvey was born Zvi Mosheh Skikne on October 1, 1928 in Joniskis, Lithuania, to Ella (Zotnickaita) and Ber Skikne. His family was Jewish. The youngest of three brothers, he emigrated with his family, to South Africa in 1934, and settled in Johannesburg. The teenager joined the South African army during World War II, and was assigned to the entertainment unit. His unit served in Egypt and Italy, and after the war the future Laurence Harvey returned to South Africa and began a career as an actor. He moved to London after winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. He then did his apprenticeship in regional theatre, moving to Manchester in the 1940s. The tyro actor reportedly supported himself as a hustler while appearing with the city's Library Theatre. Even at this point in his life he was known to be continually in debt and adopted a firm belief in living beyond his means, a pattern that would continue until his premature death. His lifestyle would often dictate working on less worthy projects for the sake of a paycheck.
His film debut came in House of Darkness (1948), and he was soon signed by Associated British Studios. His early film roles proved underwhelming, and his attempt to become a stage star was disastrous - his debut in the revival of "Hassan" was a notorious flop. After failing in the commercial theater in London's West End, Harvey joined the company of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon for the 1952 season. Regularly panned by critics during his stint on the boards in the Bard's works, he built up his reputation as a personality by becoming combative, telling the press that he was a great actor despite the bad reviews. Someone was listening, as Romulus Pictures signed him in 1953 and began building him up as a star.
Harvey was cast as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet (1954), a film that exemplified the main problem that kept Harvey from major stardom (but subsequently would serve him quite well in a handful of roles): his screen persona was emotionally aloof if not downright frigid. Despite his icy portrayal of the great romantic hero Romeo, Harvey attracted enough attention in Hollywood to be brought over by Warner Bros. and given a lead role in King Richard and the Crusaders (1954).
In Old Blighty with Romulus after his Hollywood adventure, Harvey met his future wife Margaret Leighton on the set of The Good Die Young (1954). Other film appearances included I Am a Camera (1955) and Three Men in a Boat (1956), the latter becoming his first certified hit, and even greater success was to come. The colorful Harvey, a press favorite, became notorious for his high-spending, high-living ways. He found himself frequently in debt, his travails faithfully reported by entertainment columnists. More fame was to come.
After making three flops in a row, Harvey began a brief reign as the Jack the Lad of British cinema with the great success of Room at the Top (1958). That film and Look Back in Anger (1959), which was also released that year, inaugurated the "kitchen sink" school of British cinema that revolutionized the country's film industry and that of its cousin, Hollywood, in the 1960s.
Harvey was born to play Joe Lampton, if not in kin, then in kind. Lampton was a working-class bloke who dreams of escaping his social strata for something better. It was a perfect match of actor and role, as the icy Harvey persona made Joe's ruthless ambition to climb the greasy pole of success fittingly chilling. In bringing Joe to life on the screen, Harvey was more successful than Richard Burton (a far better actor) had been in limning the theater's Jimmy Porter in the film adaptation of John Osborne's seminal "Look Back in Anger," despite Burton's own working-class background. Burton's volcanic use of his mellifluous voice, a great instrument, is much too hot for the the small universe on the screen, a case of projection that is so intense that it overwhelms the character and the film (it took Burton another half-decade to learn to act on film, and a half-decade more to lose that gift). Whereas Burton had to learn to rein it in, Harvey's already tightly controlled persona made the social-climbing Lampton resonate. Harvey fits the skin of the character much better than does Burton. Despite not being an authentic specimen, the success of his performance as a working-class man-on-the-make proved to be the vanguard of a new generation of screen characters that would be played by the real thing: Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, Terence Stamp and Michael Caine, among others. "Room at the Top" signaled the appearance of the New Wave of British cinema. For his role as Joe, Harvey received his first (and only) Academy Award nomination.
While historically significant, "Room at the Top" is no longer ranked at the summit of other, more contemporary kitchen-sink dramas, such as Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey (1961) and Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life (1963), or even John Schlesinger's provincial comedy Billy Liar (1963), films that made stars out of the authentic working-class/provincial actors Finney, Alan Bates, Richard Harris and Courtenay, respectively. The virtue of the film is its emotional honesty about the manipulation of personal relationships for social gain in postwar Britain, a system that after a decade under the Conservatives had become self-satisfied and complacent. In its portrayal of class warfare, the film offers the most intense critique of the British class system offered by any film from the British New Wave, including "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning," which never leaves the confines of the working-class strata its main character, Arthur Seaton, is stuck in and ultimately reconciled to.
That Joe chooses a woman other than the one he really loves in order to gain social mobility, engaging in emotional manipulation of other human beings, is a brutal indictment of the class structure of postwar Britain. Joe, on his way to his wedding and his great chance, has lost his humanity. His failure is symbolic of Britain's failure as well. It is the haughtiness and narcissism of the actor Harvey (qualities his screen persona engenders in film after film) that elucidates Lampton's weakness. A further irony of Harvey's effective, if ersatz, portrayal of working-class Joe is that it made him such a success - he soon went off to Hollywood to play opposite box-office titan Elizabeth Taylor in BUtterfield 8 (1960), thus losing out on further opportunities to appear in the British New Wave he helped introduce. As well as supporting Taylor in her Oscar-winning turn in "Butterfield 8" (the two became close friends), a badly miscast Harvey also co-starred as Texas hero Col. James Travis in John Wayne's bloated budget-buster The Alamo (1960).
With the exception of the lead in the British Jungle Fighters (1961)- a war picture that was decidedly NOT New Wave - Harvey did not appear again in a major British film until 1965, when he returned to the other side of the pond to reprise Joe in the "Room" sequel Life at the Top (1965). However, if he had never gone Hollywood, he might never have been cast in his other signature role: Raymond Shaw, the eponymous The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Once again, the match of actor and character was ideal, as Harvey's coldness and affect-free acting perfectly embodied the persona of the programmed assassin. The film, and Harvey's performance in it, are classic.
In this Hollywood interlude, Harvey also appeared in the screen adaptations of Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke (1961) opposite the great Geraldine Page, Oscar-nominated for her role, and the artistically less successful Walk on the Wild Side (1962), supported by the legendary Barbara Stanwyck, French beauty Capucine and a young Jane Fonda. The critics were less kind to his acting in these outings, and, indeed, the rather elegant Harvey does seem miscast as Dove Linkhorn, the wandering Texan created by hardboiled Nelson Algren, reduced to working in an automotive garage by the exigencies of the Great Depression. Critics were even less kind when Harvey tried to follow in Leslie Howard's footsteps in the remake of Of Human Bondage (1964).
Although he could not know it then, Harvey had reached the zenith of his career. In 1962 he won the Best Actor prize at the Munich film festival in 1962 for his role in The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962). Honors for Harvey were few after this point. He co-starred with Paul Newman and Claire Bloom in Martin Ritt's film version of the Broadway re-envisioning of Akira Kurosawa's cinematic masterpiece Rashomon (1950). The result, The Outrage (1964), in which Newman played a murderous Mexican bandit and Harvey his victim, was an unqualified flop that still boggles the mind of viewers unfortunate enough to stumble upon it, so outrageous is the idea of casting Newman as a Mexican killer (a role originated by Rod Steiger on the Broadway stage). Harvey, very often a wooden presence in his less inspired performances, was appropriately upstaged by the tree he remained tied to throughout most of the film.
Along with "Life at the Top," Harvey appeared in support of Oscar-winner Julie Christie in John Schlesinger's Darling (1965), an allegedly "mod" look at the jaded and superficial existence of what was then termed the "jet set." Despite its "New Wave"-like cutting and visual sense, "Darling" - which was embraced wholeheartedly by Hollywood and originally had been envisioned as a vehicle for Shirley MacLaine - was, at its heart, an old-fashioned Hollywood-style morality play, a warning that the wages of sin lead to emotional emptiness, hardy a revolutionary idea in 1965. Christie was excellent - particularly as she metamorphosed from Dolly-bird to a more mature sort of hustler - and first-male lead Dirk Bogarde always proved an interesting actor, but it was Harvey who most clearly embodied the zeitgeist of the picture. Once again, his coldness did him well as he limned the executive who manipulates and is manipulated by Christie's Diana character.
Harvey had become at this point a kind of good-luck charm for actresses with whom he appeared. Simone Signoret, Elizabeth Taylor and Christie won Best Actress Oscars after appearing in films with him, and Geraldine Page and "Room at the Top" co-star Hermione Baddeley were both Oscar-nominated in the period after appearing opposite Harvey. Alas, no one else collected kudos in a Harvey picture: he reached the high-water mark of his career in 1962, and his star was already in in decline to a murkier, less-lustrous part of the Hollywood/international cinema firmament.
Another irony of Harvey's career is that, despite ushering in the British New Wave and a cinema more independent of the meat-grinder ethos of the Hollywood and British studios catering to popular taste, he would have been better served in the 1930s and 1940s as a contract player at a major studio. Like Michael Wilding (who also became the third husband of Harvey's first wife, Margaret Leighton), another handsome man of limited gifts who nonetheless could be quite affecting in the right role, Harvey's career likely would have thrived under the studio system, with an interested boss to guide him. Like Minniver Cheever, however, he was unfortunate to have been born after his time.
As it was, the next (and last) decade of Harvey's screen life was a disappointment, with the actor relegated to less and less prestigious pictures and international co-productions that needed a "star" name. In the 1970s, Harvey became largely irrelevant as a player in the motion picture industry. His luck had run out. Good friend Liz Taylor, whose string of motion picture successes had also run its course, had him cast in Night Watch (1973), and he directed the last picture in which he appeared, Welcome to Arrow Beach (1973). If he had lived, he might have made the transition to director (he had earlier directed The Ceremony (1963) and finished directing A Dandy in Aspic (1968) after the death of original director Anthony Mann).
Laurence Harvey died on November 25, 1973, from stomach cancer. He publicly revealed that he was dismayed by being afflicted with the fatal disease, as he had always been careful with the way he ate. Sadly, his personal luck, just as capricious as his professional career, had also gone into eclipse. One of the more colorful characters to grace the screen was dead at the age of 45, exiting the stage far too soon for the legions of fans that still admired him despite the downturn in his fortunes.- Prolific American supporting actor, a reliable presence in numerous classic prime-time TV shows for over half a century. One of three siblings, Hogan served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. Upon his demobilisation he studied engineering at New York University, but an aptitude test suggested a more humanistic career path which prompted his enrolment at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Hogan made his theatrical debut off-Broadway in 1961 and moved to Los Angeles that same year to forge a solid career in episodic television, most frequently cast as no-nonsense authority figures, military middle-echelon or police officers. His first notable recurring role was as Reverend Tom Winter in the popular soap opera Peyton Place (1964). Hogan's sceptical Police Sergeant Ted Coppersmith in The Rockford Files (1974) led to several follow-up appearances in the short-lived spin-off series Richie Brockelman, Private Eye (1978). Hogan also played diverse characters in The F.B.I. (1965), Barnaby Jones (1973), Murder, She Wrote (1984) and Law & Order (1990). For his performance as the shrewd defense attorney Clarence Darrow in the off-Broadway play Never the Sinner (based on the Leopold & Loeb murder trial of 1924) Hogan was awarded the Outer Critics Circle Award.
Robert Hogan was diagnosed with vascular Alzheimer's disease in 2013, but was able to make sporadic TV appearances for another five years. He was married to the author Mary Barbera-Hogan. - Actor
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Eddie Jackson was born on 19 February 1896 in Brooklyn, New York, USA. He was an actor, known for Roadhouse Nights (1930), Music for Millions (1944) and The Jimmy Durante Show (1954). He died on 16 July 1980 in Sherman Oaks, California, USA.- Actor
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David Janssen was born David Harold Meyer in 1931 in Naponee, Nebraska, to Berniece Mae (Graf) and Harold Edward Meyer, a banker. He was of German, and some Swiss-German and Ulster-Scots, descent. David took the surname of his stepfather, Eugene Janssen. The Janssen family settled in Hollywood when he was a teenager and he attended Fairfax High School, where he developed an interest in acting. His film debut was a bit part in It's a Pleasure (1945), and at the age of 18 signed a contract with 20th Century-Fox. However, the studio dropped him after allegedly becoming disenchanted with his odd hairline and big prominent ears. Janssen had better luck at Universal, where he signed on in the early 1950s and became a supporting player in 32 films before appearing on TV as the star of Richard Diamond, Private Detective (1956). He resumed his movie career in 1961, a year after the series ended. His biggest success came from his lead in the series The Fugitive (1963), playing the haunted, hunted Dr. Richard Kimble, on the run for a murder he didn't commit. After the series ended, Janssen launched himself into a grueling schedule by appearing in lead and supporting roles in movies, but he had better luck with made-for-TV-movie roles and a short-lived series, O'Hara, U.S. Treasury (1971). He had another hit series with the cult favorite Harry O (1973). Janssen continued appearing in lead roles in nearly 20 made-for-TV-movies during the 1970s as well as other TV projects. He died in 1980 from a sudden heart attack at his Malibu home at the age of 48. Unfounded speculation holds that Janssen succumbed to alcoholism, a problem that plagued him most of his adult life. There were even unfounded rumors about drug use. However, a much more reasonable explanation for David Janssen's sudden demise is that this intense, dedicated, determined actor simply worked himself to death.- Actor
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The only child of a stockbroker and well-to-do mother, Richard Jacobson (who changed his surname to "Jason") described himself as "second-generation nouveau riche" and a born romantic. His behavior got him expelled from eight prep schools before he managed to graduate from the Rhodes School. His father bought him a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, but Jason sold the seat and enlisted in the Army Air Corps (1943-45). After the war, he attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (AADA) on the GI Bill. While attending a New York play, he was spotted by actor-director Hume Cronyn, who immediately cast him in "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep" in 1950 as "Anselmo". Although the play closed after a month, the role earned Jason a Theater World Award and a Hollywood contract with Columbia Pictures. For the first year he was under contract, a frustrated Jason did not work. Meanwhile, MGM was searching for an actor to replace the departed Fernando Lamas in Sombrero (1953). Jason, now released from Columbia, landed the role. This success led to The Saracen Blade (1954) and RKO's This Is My Love (1954).
Twentieth Century-Fox then signed him for the male lead in The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (1956), after which he was signed to a multi-picture contract. His first project, an adaptation of John Steinbeck's "The Wayward Bus" (The Wayward Bus (1957)), earned him critical acclaim; a string of strong performances, both in films and TV, followed. In 1960, he starred as suave insurance investigator Robin Scott in The Case of the Dangerous Robin (1960). The series ran 38 episodes and made Jason the first actor seen using martial arts (karate) on television. In September 1962 he exploded onto prime-time screens as the cool, calm, and collected Lt. Gil Hanley in ABC's hit series Combat! (1962), Five seasons and 152 episodes later, Jason was a household name.
After "Combat!", Jason returned to the stage. He also made films in Japan and Israel. In 1970 he took the lead in the 1970 pilot Prudence and the Chief (1970). His TV career remained strong, and in the 1970s and 1980s he appeared in Matt Houston (1982), Police Woman (1974), Murder, She Wrote (1984), Wonder Woman (1975), Fantasy Island (1977), Airwolf (1984) and Dallas (1978). In 1973, he was a regular on the then-new soap opera The Young and the Restless (1973). After retirement, he kept busy doing voice-overs for commercials and ran the Wine Locker, a 4,000-square-foot facility used to store fine wines under optimal conditions. Sadly, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at age 77 in October 2000.- Actor
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George Jessel gained fame in vaudeville, where it was not uncommon for him--and other performers, such as Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor--to perform in blackface, and in fact at age 11 Jessel was Cantor's vaudeville partner. Jessel acted in several movies in the '30s and became a respected film producer. He was also a prolific songwriter, and was noted for his renditions of "Sonny Boy" and "My Yiddishe Mama". In his later years he made many guest appearances (always as himself) on radio, in occasional movies and on TV. He was nicknamed "The Toastmaster General" due to his appearances at many testimonial functions and dinners for various celebrities.- Actress
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Glynis Johns was the daughter of actor Mervyn Johns. Best known for her light comedy roles and often playful flirtation, Glynis was born in South Africa while her parents were on tour there (her mother was a concert pianist) but was always proud of her Welsh roots and took delight in playing the female lead (opposite Richard Burton) in the classic Under Milk Wood (1971). She was probably best known for her role as the suffragette mother in Mary Poppins (1964) although she is probably best loved for her fishy roles in Miranda (1948) and Mad About Men (1954). She had earlier showed she could take on the serious roles as well as in Frieda (1947). Most recently seen (at the time of writing) in Superstar (1999). Johns died in 2024, aged 100, having never received the damehood she had richly deserved for decades. Predeceased by her only son, she was survived by a grandson,Thomas Forwood, and three great-grandchildren.- Jack Kelly started acting at age two, modeling in soap ads and garnering a lifetime supply of soap for his pay. He continued to model until the age of nine when he appeared in his first play with Hope Emerson called "Swing Your Lady". Broadway shows and radio followed until his family moved to California in 1938. He attended St. John's Military Academy and spent two years as a law student at UCLA. For three years, he dropped acting to concentrate on school and making money. He worked as a shoe salesman, gas station attendant, lifeguard, grocery delivery boy, and men's clothing salesman. In 1945, Kelly was inducted into the army taking basic training at Camp Roberts in California. He was sent to Alaska as a weather observer and was on the first B-29 to fly over the Arctic Circle. After his discharge in 1946, Kelly returned to UCLA and worked nights on such radio programs as "Lux Radio theater", "Suspense", "Tell It Again", and "Romance of the Ranchos".
Upon leaving school he joined the Circle Theater in Los Angeles appearing in "Time of Your Life", "The Adding Machine", and "Love On The Dole". In 1949, he acted in "Anna Lucasta" at the coronet Theater. This performance brought Kelly to the attention of several Hollywood directors. He then made his film debut in "Fighting Man Of The Plains", starring Randolph Scott. In 1955, Kelly was signed by Warner Bros. to star as Dr. Parris Mitchell in the "King's Row" series of "Warner Bros. Presents". The show debuted in September 1955. Kelly was best known as Bart Maverick on Maverick (1957). His hobbies included ship models, reading historical literature, sculpting, and listening to show tunes records. He also enjoyed sailing, badminton, skin diving, golf, horseback riding and flying. - Music Artist
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An out-of-wedlock child, Eartha Kitt was born in the cotton fields of South Carolina. Kitt's mother was a sharecropper of African-American and Cherokee Native American descent. Her father's identity is unknown. Given away by her mother, she arrived in Harlem at age nine. At 15, she quit high school to work in a Brooklyn factory. As a teenager, Kitt lived in friends' homes and in the subways. However, by the 1950s, she had sung and danced her way out of poverty and into the spotlight: performing with the Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe on a European tour, soloing at a Paris nightclub and becoming the toast of the Continent. Orson Welles called her "the most exciting girl in the world". She also spoke out on hard issues. She took over the role of Catwoman for the third and final season of the television series Batman (1966), replacing Julie Newmar. Eartha Kitt died of colon cancer in her home in Weston, Connecticut, on Christmas Day 2008.- Actress
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Shirley Knight was an American actress who appeared in more than 180 feature films, television movies, television series, and Broadway productions in her career playing leading and character roles.
She was a member of the Actors Studio. Knight was nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress: for The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1962).
In 1976, Knight won a Tony Award for her performance in Kennedy's Children, a play by Robert Patrick. In later years, she played supporting roles in many films, including Endless Love (1981), As Good as It Gets (1997), Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002), and Grandma's Boy (2006). For her performances on television, Knight was nominated eight times for a Primetime Emmy Award (winning three), and she received a Golden Globe Award.- Actor
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Author, actor, comedian, composer and producer. He was educated at the New York School of Theatre, and received the Sylvania Television Award. Joining the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) in 1957, he composed a number of songs and themes, a number of which were used in his famed television comedy sketches including "Mr. Question Man". His other popular-songs included "Ugly Duckling", "So Good to Me", "The Patty Cake", "The Irving Wong Song", and many more.- Actor
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Jerry Lewis (born March 16, 1926 - August 20, 2017) was an American comedian, actor, singer, film producer, screenwriter and film director. He is known for his slapstick humor in film, television, stage and radio. He was originally paired up with Dean Martin in 1946, forming the famed comedy team of Martin and Lewis. In addition to the duo's popular nightclub work, they starred in a successful series of comedy films for Paramount Pictures. Lewis was also known for his charity fund-raising telethons and position as national chairman for the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA). Lewis won several awards for lifetime achievements from The American Comedy Awards, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and Venice Film Festival, and he had two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2005, he received the Governors Award of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Board of Governors, which is the highest Emmy Award presented. On February 22, 2009, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Lewis the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
Jerry died on August 20, 2017, in Las Vegas.- Actor
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Burt Lancaster, one of five children, was born in Manhattan, to Elizabeth (Roberts) and James Henry Lancaster, a postal worker. All his grandparents were immigrants from the north of Ireland. He was a tough street kid who took an early interest in gymnastics. He joined the circus as an acrobat and worked there until he was injured. In the Army during WWII he was introduced to the USO and to acting. His first film was The Killers (1946), and that made him a star. He was a self-taught actor who learned the business as he went along. He set up his own production company in 1948 with Harold Hecht and James Hill to direct his career. He played many different roles in pictures as varied as The Crimson Pirate (1952), From Here to Eternity (1953), Elmer Gantry (1960) and Atlantic City (1980).
His production company, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, produced such films as Paddy Chayefsky's Marty (1955) (Oscar winner 1955) and The Catered Affair (1956). In the 1980s he appeared as a supporting player in a number of movies, such as Local Hero (1983) and Field of Dreams (1989). However, it will be the sound of his voice, the way that he laughed, and the larger-than-life characters he played that will always be remembered.- Actor
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Joe Louis is considered by many fistic experts and fans as the greatest Heavyweight Boxing Champion in the sport's history. Born into a poor family, Joe Louis's mother felt the only way her son could escape poverty was through music. She bought him a violin and sent him off daily to lessons. On his way there, young Joe would pass by a boxing gym. In no time, he was working out at the gym, training for a boxing career. His amateur career started off disastrously, as he was knocked-out down 16 times in losing the fight. However, he was determined to continue and posted an outstanding amateur career with only 5 defeats in 60 fights. He turned professional and quickly racked up one of the most impressive winning streaks in boxing history. He was nicknamed, The Brown Bomber, and became the first boxer to defeat six heavyweight champions (Primo Carnera, Max Baer, Jack Sharkey, Jimmy Braddock, Max Schmeling, and Jersey Joe Walcott). After winning the championship, he held it almost 12 years to set a record, plus set another record with 25 successful title defenses. He retired with a 60-1 record, only to make an unsuccessful and very sad comeback at the age of 37. While champion, Joe Louis volunteered to join the U.S. Army at the height of his career. He made two title defenses in which he donated his entire purses to relief funds to help both the Army and the Navy. He spent almost five years in the service and boxed hundreds of exhibitions. However, after the war, he was hounded by the Internal Revenue Service to pay back taxes on the purses he had donated. He suffered terribly through this ordeal. and soon found himself broke. He launched a "controversial" pro-wrestling career and was undefeated in some 20 matches before retiring with a heart problem. He was helped by his good friend Frank Sinatra and acted in a few films, worked as a host in Las Vegas, and made numerous appearances for boxing. He died a few years after suffering a massive stroke. Joe Louis was buried with full-military honors, and it was said that he was "most" proud of his European-African-Middle Eastern Medal and his Victory Medal World War II. In or out of the ring, Joe Louis was a Champion.- Actor
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Tall, dark and handsome, not to mention a charismatic rebel of 1960s Hollywood, actor George Maharis (surname originally Maharias) was born in 1928 in Astoria, New York, one of seven siblings. His immigrant father was a restaurateur. Maharis expressed an early interest in singing and initially pursued it as a career, but extensive overuse of his voice and improper vocal lessons stripped his vocal cords, and he subsequently veered towards an acting career.
Trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse with Sanford Meisner and the Actor's Studio with Lee Strasberg, the "Method" actor found roles on television, including several episodes of Naked City (1958), and secured an early name for himself on the late 1950s off-Broadway scene, especially with his performances in Jean Genet's "Deathwatch" and Edward Albee's "Zoo Story". Producer/director Otto Preminger "discovered" Maharis for film, offering him a choice of five small roles in the upcoming film Exodus (1960), in which the actor eventually played an underground freedom fighter.
One of the episodes Maharis did of the police drama Naked City (1958), entitled "Four Sweet Corners", wound up being a roundabout pilot for the buddy adventure series that would earn him household fame. With the arrival of the series Route 66 (1960), the actor earned intense TV stardom and a major cult following as a Brando-esque, streetwise drifter named Buzz Murdock. Partnered with the fair-skinned, clean-scrubbed, college-educated Tod Stiles (Martin Milner, later star of Adam-12 (1968)), the duo traveled throughout the U.S. in a hotshot convertible Corvette and had a huge female audience getting their kicks off with the show. At the show's peak, Maharis parlayed his TV fame into a recording career with Epic Records, producing six albums in the process and peaking with the single "Teach Me Tonight".
During the middle of the series' third season peak, Maharis abruptly left the series with a number of reasons cited. Often quoted is that the virile, seductive image of a fast-rising star apparently got to him, and that he proved increasingly troublesome as he grew in stature. Tabloids reported that the actor purposefully instigated ongoing clashes with both producers and co-star Milner in order to leave the series and seek film stardom while the irons were hot. Maharis denied this, insisting that his working relationships on the set were solid and that any complaints were vastly overblown. He cited health reasons as the reason for his leaving, claiming that a long-term bout (and relapse) of infectious hepatitis, caught during a 1962 shoot of the series, forced him to abandon the show under doctor's orders. For whatever reason, Maharis left. His replacement, ruggedly handsome Glenn Corbett, failed to click with audiences and the series was canceled after the next season.
Back to working on films, the brash and confident actor, with his health scare over, aggressively pursued stardom with a number of leads, but the duds he found himself in -- Quick, Before It Melts (1964), Sylvia (1965), A Covenant with Death (1967), The Happening (1967), and The Desperados (1969) prime among his list of disasters -- hampered his chances. The best of the lot was the suspense drama The Satan Bug (1965), but it lacked box-office appeal and disappeared quickly. Moreover, a 1967 sex scandal (and subsequent one in 1974) could not have helped. In the 1970s Maharis returned to series TV in the short-lived The Most Deadly Game (1970), co-starring fellow criminologists Ralph Bellamy and Yvette Mimieux (who replaced the late Inger Stevens who committed suicide shortly before shooting was about to start). The decade also included a spate of TV movies, including the more notable The Monk (1969) and Rich Man, Poor Man (1976). In between these he appeared in Las Vegas nightclubs and summer stock, and was one of the first celebrities to pose for a nude centerfold in Playgirl (July 1973).
His last working years brought about the occasional film, most notably as the resurrected warlock in The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982) and an appearance in the horror thriller Doppelganger (1993). With his "bad boy" glory days behind him, Maharis' TV career ended rather routinely with guest parts on such popular but unchallenging shows such as "Fantasy Island" and "Murder, She Wrote". Later years were spent focusing on impressionistic painting. He has been fully retired since the early 1990s.- Actor
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Born to a Czech mother and a Serbian father in Chicago as Mladen Sekulovich, on March 22, 1912, Karl Malden did not speak English until he was in kindergarten. After graduating from high school in the nearby steel town of Gary, Indiana, Malden worked in the industry for three years until 1934, when he was frustrated with the drudgery of manual labor. He left to attend the Arkansas State Teacher's College, then the Goodman Theater Dramatic School and never looked back. Three years later, he went to New York City to find fame.
Malden rapidly became involved with the Group Theater, an organization of actors and directors who were changing the face of theater, where he attracted the attention of director Elia Kazan. With Kazan directing, Karl starred in plays such as "All My Sons" by Arthur Miller and "A Streetcar Named Desire" by Tennessee Williams. While Malden had one screen appearance before his military service in World War II, in They Knew What They Wanted (1940), he did not establish his film career until after the war. Malden won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor as Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and showed his range as an actor in roles such as that of Father Corrigan in On the Waterfront (1954) and the lecherous Archie Lee in Baby Doll (1956).
He starred in dozens of films such as Fear Strikes Out (1957), Pollyanna (1960), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), Gypsy (1962), How the West Was Won (1962), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), and Patton (1970) as General Omar Bradley. In the early 1970s, he built a television career on the tough but honest screen persona he had created when he starred as Detective Mike Stone on The Streets of San Francisco (1972), co-starring with Michael Douglas. He also became the pitchman for American Express, a position he held for 21 years. In 1988, he was elected President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a position he held for five years. Following that he, published his memoir entitled, "When Do I Start?: A Memoir", written with his daughter Carla.
Malden also courted controversy by pushing for a special salute to Elia Kazan at the 1999 Academy Awards. Malden defended both Kazan and the award, arguing that Kazan's artistic achievements outshone any shame attached to Kazan's naming names before the Congressional committee investigating Communists in Hollywood. Marlon Brando refused to give Kazan the statuette; Robert De Niro ultimately did. Karl Malden died at age 97 of natural causes at his home in Los Angeles on July 1, 2009. He was buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Westwood, California.- A beautiful auburn-haired lass with blue/grey eyes, Andra Martin was born Sandra Hildur Rehn (pronounced 'Wren') in Rockford, Illinois, of Swedish ancestry. She grew up on her parent's farm, attended high school in her home town and harboured dreams of becoming a star. Andra's first step on that projected career path was to spend two years studying speech and drama at Northwestern University. Her next stop was New York where she finagled her first job as a model while continuing part-time acting studies under the personal tutelage of Lee Strasberg. Strasberg was suitably impressed, considered her 'a natural' and recommended her to Joshua Logan to screen test for the female lead in Sayonara (1957) (opposite Marlon Brando). Alas, that fell through as did another audition at Warner Brothers for the part in Marjorie Morningstar (1958) which had already been earmarked for Natalie Wood. Universal-International eventually took up the option and signed the budding starlet under contract.The publicity machine went rapidly into top gear, comparing Andra to Hollywood's biggest and brightest, a melding of the attributes of Elizabeth Taylor and Betty Grable with the brains of a Katharine Hepburn. Sadly, her subsequent casting would tend to emphasize her beauty rather than her talent.
Andra only appeared in three pictures for Universal, none of them particularly good. The first was a second lead in a so-so romantic drama (The Lady Takes a Flyer (1958)) as the 'other woman', competing with Lana Turner for the affections of Jeff Chandler. Her character, a pilot, gets killed towards the end. Her other outing was a second-billed role in The Big Beat (1958), a youth-oriented musical which featured no less than fifteen musical numbers. Unsurprisingly, with just 81 minutes of screen time, there was little room for the semblance of a plot (or acting, for that matter). Number three was one of Universal's quota quickies, a lame horror film (The Thing That Couldn't Die (1958)) which cast Andra as a water diviner with telepathic abilities (!). She also made a few of films under contract to Warners, notably the submarine drama Up Periscope (1959) (as the perfunctory female lead) and the Clint Walker western Yellowstone Kelly (1959) (as the love interest, a captive Arapaho girl). By the end of the 50s, the newly minted Deb Star was earning $200 per week.
While her movie career was going nowhere, Andra managed quite well in securing spots as featured leading lady on many popular TV shows on the Warners roster, including Bronco (1958), Cheyenne (1955), 77 Sunset Strip (1958), The Alaskans (1959), Bourbon Street Beat (1959) and Hawaiian Eye (1959). In August 1958, she married Bronco star Ty Hardin (over the objections of their respective managers and Warner Brothers TV execs, who argued that such a union would ruin their romantic appeal to the public). The marriage ended in divorce in 1962. Andra left the film business following her second marriage to a department store heir which lasted six years. A third marriage, however, endured from 1970 until Andra's passing on May 3 2022 at the age of 86. - Music Artist
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Martin was born Dino Paul Crocetti in Steubenville, Ohio, to Gaetano Alfonso "Guy" Crocetti, an Italian immigrant and barber, and his Ohio-born wife, Angela (Barra) Crocetti. He spoke only Italian until age five. Martin came up the hard way, with such jobs as a boxer ("Kid Crochet"), a steel mill worker, a gas station worker and a casino croupier/dealer. In 1946, Martin got his first ticket to stardom, as he teamed up with another hard worker who was also trying to succeed in Hollywood: Jerry Lewis. Films such as At War with the Army (1950) sent the team toward super-stardom. The duo were to become one of Hollywood's truly great teams. They lasted 11 years together, and starred in 16 movies. They were unstoppable, but personality conflicts broke up the team. Even without Lewis, Martin was a true superstar.
Few thought that Martin would go on to achieve solo success, but he did, winning critical acclaim for his role in The Young Lions (1958) with Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, and Some Came Running (1958), with Shirley MacLaine and Frank Sinatra. Movies such as Rio Bravo (1959) brought him international fame. One of his best remembered films is in Ocean's Eleven (1960), in which he played Sam Harmon alongside the other members of the legendary Rat Pack: Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford. Martin proved potent at the box office through the 1960s, with films such as Bells Are Ringing (1960) and Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964), again with Rat Pack pals Sammy Davis Jr. and Sinatra. During much of the 1960s and 1970s, his film persona of a boozing playboy prompted a series of films as secret agent Matt Helm and his own television variety show. Airport (1970) followed, featuring Martin as a pilot. He played a phony priest in The Cannonball Run (1981).
In 1965, Martin explored a new method for entertaining his fans: Television. That year he hosted one of the most successful TV series in history: The Dean Martin Show (1965), which lasted until 1973. In 1965, it won a Golden Globe Award. In 1973, he renamed it "The Dean Martin Comedy Hour", and from 1974 to 1984 it was renamed again, this time "The Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts". It became one of the most successful TV series in history, skewering such greats as Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball, James Stewart, George Burns, Milton Berle, Don Rickles, Phyllis Diller, and Joe Namath.
His last public role was a return to the stage, for a cross-country concert tour with Davis and Sinatra. He spoke affectionately of his fellow Rat Packers. "The satisfaction that I get out of working with these two bums is that we have more laughs than the audience has", Martin said. After the 1980s, Martin took it easy until his son, Dean Paul Martin, was killed in a plane crash in March 1987.
Devastated by the loss, from which he never recovered, he walked out on a reunion tour with Sinatra and Davis. Martin spent his final years in solitude, out of the public light. A heavy smoker most of his life, Martin died on Christmas Day 1995 at age 78 from complications to lung cancer.- Actor
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Born Alvin Morris, the son of immigrants from Poland, Tony Martin received a soprano saxophone on his tenth birthday. In his grammar school glee club, he became an instrumentalist and soprano pop singer. When in high school, he then formed his first band called "The Red Peppers", eventually joining a local orchestra leader, Tom Gerun, as a reed instrument specialist, sitting along with a future band leader, Woody Herman.
In the mid-1930s, Martin left Gerun to go to Hollywood, where he would go under his stage name, "Tony Martin". in 1937, Martin married Alice Faye. After their divorce, he married Cyd Charisse in 1948 - a marriage which lasted sixty years.
Martin starred in hit movies such as Follow the Fleet (1936), The Farmer in the Dell (1936), Pigskin Parade (1936), The Holy Terror (1937), Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937), The Big Store (1941), Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), Casbah (1948), Clash by Night (1952), where he is heard on the soundtrack singing "I Hear A Rhapsody", and Hit the Deck (1955). His numerous signature standard hits include "Kiss Of Fire", "I Get Ideas", "Some Day", "Fools Rush In" and "There's No Tomorrow", for which he is possibly best remembered. From 1954-56, he hosted a weekly 15 minute variety series on NBC-TV. Over the next 40 years, he was a guest on the TV variety series of Jack Benny, Dinah Shore, Milton Berle, Merv Griffin, Dean Martin, Nat 'King' Cole, David Frost, Barbara McNair, Johnny Carson and Ed Sullivan. He has had many TV acting roles, as well.- Actor
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James Mason was born in Huddersfield and had a film career spanning over 50 years during which he appeared in over 100 films in England and America but never won an Oscar. Whatever role he played, from the wounded Belfast gunman in Odd Man Out to Rommel in The Desert Fox, his creamy velvet voice gave him away. Like Charlie Chaplin James left the screen to spend his later life living in Switzerland. His first marriage had been to Pamela Kellino, a Yorkshire mill owner's daughter and his second to Australian actress Clarissa Kaye.- Music Artist
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He was the fourth of seven children born to Clement and Mildred Mathis. His father performed briefly in vaudeville and exposed all of the Mathis siblings to music. Before he entered his teens, young John received vocal lessons from Connie Cox in exchange for performing chores around her home. When he entered San Francisco State College he originally had planned to become a physical education instructor. At San Francisco State he broke classmate and basketball great Bill Russell's high jump record. While in college he began performing at a small local bar called The International Settlement, where he met performers Maya Angelou and Joan Weldon. Later performances at a club called The Blackhawk caught the attention of Columbia Records producer George Avakian. When Avakian called for Mathis to make his first recording, the young singer and then college track star had to make a unique decision: whether to record or to tryout for the 1956 Olympics held in Melbourne, Australia. He chose to make his first single "Wonderful, Wonderful". To date he has recorded over 80 albums selling millions of albums worldwide More than 60 of his albums have been certified gold and/or platinum. "Heavenly" alone remained on the pop charts for 295 weeks. His 1958 album "Johnny's Greatest Hits" began "Greatest Hits" tradition copied by every record company since then. This album spent an unprecedented 490 continuous weeks (almost ten years) on the Billboard Top Albums Chart, and garnered notation in the Guinness Book Of World Records. For over 6 decades Mathis has continued to record, musically evolve, and perform at the world's most prestigious venues, earning a permanent place in American music history.- Stalwart American actor Donald Adam May is best known to television viewers as dapper crime fighting District Attorney Adam Drake in the long-running mystery soap opera The Edge of Night (1956). Donald was born in Chicago, one of four siblings, to Texan oil businessman Harry S. May and his wife Leontine. He attended school in Houston, and, in 1949, graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Oklahoma. His first professional acting gig was in a play with a stock company in Albany, New York. Donald subsequently appeared in a few promotional films for the Signal Corps and then enlisted in the U.S. Navy, eventually serving as a gunnery officer (ensign) on a destroyer during the Korean War. Following his demobilisation in 1955, he returned to New York to resume work on the repertory stage. The following year, he starred as a cadet in the CBS anthology TV series West Point (1956) (a show supposedly based on factual events). With a Warner Brothers contract in hand, Donald and his then wife (Yale graduate and former stage actress Ellen Cameron) relocated to Hollywood at the end of the decade. Henceforth, his rugged good looks were gainfully employed in essaying men of integrity, the 'white hat' wearers in westerns and crime dramas.
After appearing in an episode of Sugarfoot (1957), Donald played the lead in four segments of the western series Colt .45 (1957) (temporarily replacing Wayde Preston) and had further guest spots in 77 Sunset Strip (1958) and Cheyenne (1955). The next acting assignment -- his most prominent leading role to date -- was as New York reporter Pat Garrison, chronicling gangland crime in The Roaring 20's (1960). This prohibition era action series ran for two seasons and co-starred Dorothy Provine, Rex Reason and John Dehner. If it failed to do better in the ratings, it should be remembered that it was going up against and being compared to The Untouchables (1959) (which was being presented in a semi-documentary style and appeared to the viewing public as 'more authentic').
From the mid-60s, Donald May was probably one of the busiest actors in showbiz, dividing his time between the New York off-Broadway stage and acting on The Edge of Night, which was a New York-based live broadcast. By the time the series had run its course, Donald had managed to rack up an impressive 2840 episodes as Adam Drake over a period of ten years. Not finished with soaps yet, he later had further recurring roles in Falcon Crest (1981), and, as a romantic lead, in Texas (1980) (which starred his second wife, the actress Carla Borelli).
Donald retired from screen acting in 1993 and died at the age of 94 on January 28 2022. - Signed on as a Warner Brothers starlet, bouncy, blonde-coiffed Diane McBain would develop a burgeoning career as lively '60s "bad girl" and "spoiled rich girl" types on film and TV. Born in Cleveland, Ohio on May 18, 1941, the family moved to California while still young and she started things off as a "sweet 16" model in print and commercial ads. Eventually TV got more than just a glimpse of this diverting beauty after a WB talent agent spotted her in a Los Angeles play and signed her on during her senior year at Glendale High School.
After busily apprenticing on various TV projects, Diane made her first big splash in 1960 (age 19) with a prominent role in Ice Palace (1960) co-starring Richard Burton, Carolyn Jones and Martha Hyer. Brimming with style and confidence, Diane was quickly ushered into other films as Warner's answer to Carroll Baker, winning parts in two consecutive soapers. The first was Parrish (1961) with beef-cake film star Troy Donahue and screen legend Claudette Colbert; the other was the title role in Claudelle Inglish (1961) opposite up-and-comers Chad Everett and Robert Logan. Neither the tawdry scripts nor the box office receipts were anything to write home about unfortunately, and her leading lady career in films started to flounder with such fodder as The Caretakers (1963) with Joan Crawford, A Distant Trumpet (1964), yet again with Donahue, and Spinout (1966). The last was one of Elvis Presley' later vehicles that signified an inevitable fadeout was on the horizon. Significantly better was her dizzy good time girl and socialite "Daphne Dutton" on the hip Warner Bros. series Surfside 6 (1960) alongside Van Williams (later TV's "Green Hornet") and Donohue. The show ran for two seasons.
Diane proved popular with the teen set with her devilish débutantes and snobby sophisticates, even accompanying Bob Hope on one of his USO tours of South Vietnam in 1966/67. On the cult series Batman (1966), she played "Pinky Pinkston" (with pink hair, pink outfits and a pink dog). By the late 1960s, however, her career began drifting into exploitation with terrible titles like I Sailed to Tahiti with an All Girl Crew (1969), Maryjane (1968) and The Mini-Skirt Mob (1968) (miscast as a biker chick) representative of what she was being handed.
Diane instead lay low for a time focusing instead on her child, Evan Burke, more or less splitting from the Hollywood scene. A few plays (Amanda in "The Glass Menagerie") and low budget films came her way, and in the 1980s she was seen a bit more on daytime soaps. The still young-looking and ever-elegant Diane was out and about in the 1990s as well, playing good-looking grandmas on such shows as Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996). The victim of a rape attack in 1982, Diane chose to rise above her traumatic circumstances and help others as a rape counselor. - Actor
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Just as strapping (6' 3") and amiably handsome as his actor/father, Joel McCrea, Jody was born Joel Dee McCrea on September 6, 1934 in Los Angeles, California, and bore a strong resemblance to his famous namesake. The oldest of three children, his mother was actress Frances Dee and his two younger brothers are David McCrea and Peter McCrea. Jody had little interest in the entertainment field until his early 20s when he began appearing in minor film roles. Making his unbilled debut in Lucy Gallant (1955), he was afforded the opportunity of first working with his dad in the films The First Texan (1956) and Trooper Hook (1957). He moved up to co-star status in the short-lived TV western series Wichita Town (1959), which again starred his dad.
From there, he found employment in other western and action films including Lafayette Escadrille (1958), All Hands on Deck (1961), The Broken Land (1962) and Young Guns of Texas (1962). However, he is most fondly remembered for his recurring comic role as the dim-eyed, carefree lug "Deadhead" (later named "Bonehead") in a number of the frivolous "Beach Party" flicks, starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, which were released by American International Pictures between the years 1963 and 1965. As a trivia note, Jody was the only cast member other than Robert Cummings who could really surf.
Jody appeared on TV over the years as well and kept his genial personality an attractive trademark. Although he secured a footing in the business, McCrea found it difficult to escape the shadow of his father, especially in western drama, but comedy served as a welcome individualistic approach. Nevertheless, outside of performing occasionally in community theater over the next few years, McCrea decided to retire from acting altogether in 1970 after appearing in and producing the film Cry Blood, Apache (1970). For the remaining decades, he became a cattle rancher in New Mexico. His wife of 20 years, Dusty McCrea (aka Dusty Iron Wing), who appeared as the Indian "Dancing Moon" in the film Windwalker (1980), died of complications from diabetes in 1996. Jody passed away in 2009 of cardiac arrest at his Roswell ranch.- Actor
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Gardner is the son of Deane McKay, an ad executive, and Catherine. He was raised in New York and Paris. He attended Cornell University two years but left when his father died. He worked in advertising for 6 months but found that he could not stand it. At age 20, he became a sculptor and had a piece displayed in the Museum of Modern Art. In 1959, he was spotted by a Hollywood producer who convinced him to join the cast of TV's Adventures in Paradise (1959). When it was over, he decided he really did not like the celebrity spotlight and proceeded to roam the world. He hiked in the Amazon, rode camels in Egypt, and crewed on Caribbean yachts. Finally, in 1980, he met Madeleine Madigan, who became his wife. The life-long bachelor settled down and decided to become a writer.- Actress
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One of four children (two older brothers, one younger sister) born to American missionaries, Jayne Meadows (née Jane Cotter) was born September 27, 1919, in China. The family returned to the US in the early 1930s wherein Jayne was forced to learn the English language, speaking Chinese and other foreign languages at the time before learning English. She settled in Sharon, Connecticut with her parents, Rev. Francis James Meadows Cotter (who was appointed rector of the town's Christ Church), and Ida Miller (Taylor) Cotter.
She developed an early interest in acting and studied at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. She made her Broadway debut with the comedy "Spring Again" (1941), followed by "Another Love Story" (1943), "The Odds on Mrs. Oakley" (1944), "Many Happy Returns" and "Kiss Them for Me" (1945). This led to a post-WWII, MGM contract in which her icy glare and imposing stance frequently made her the perfect manipulating "other woman" in such "B" heavy drama as Undercurrent (1946), Lady in the Lake (1946), Dark Delusion (1947), Enchantment (1948), The Fat Man (1951) and as Michal in the biblical film David and Bathsheba (1951). She occasionally was featured in lighter feature film fare as well, including Song of the Thin Man (1947) and The Luck of the Irish (1948).
Not satisfactorily moving up the credits ladder in films as she hoped, she sought work elsewhere in the early 1950's, especially in the new medium of TV. She became one of Hollywood's more glittery personalities on TV and variety programs, and a sparkling guest panelist on such popular TV game shows as "The Name's the Same, "Masquerade Party, "What's My Line," "To Tell the Truth" and "Password." At one point, she was a regular member of the celebrity panel on I've Got a Secret (1952).
Divorced from film and TV writer Milton Krims after six years, Jayne met her witty match when she married actor/comedian Steve Allen in 1954. They formed an extremely strong personal and professional relationship which would encompass stage ("Love Letters", in which they co-starred on and off for 11 years), film (College Confidential (1960), and especially TV (Meeting of Minds (1977)). Jayne supported Steve as a regular/guest on many of his comedy series ventures, including The Steve Allen Plymouth Show (1956), The New Steve Allen Show (1961), The Steve Allen Playhouse (1962) and The Steve Allen Comedy Hour (1967). They appeared as themselves in the film The Player (1992) they did not appear as themselves in the amusing TV movie Now You See It, Now You Don't (1968) and the all-star TV version of Alice in Wonderland (1985).
Jayne's solo work took a deliberate back seat. Usually playing elegant sophisticates, she cameoed in such films as the ribald comedy Norman... Is That You? (1976); the crime thriller Murder by Numbers (1989); as Billy Crystal's mother in the comedies City Slickers (1991) and City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly's Gold (1994); and made an appearance in what would become her last feature film The Story of Us (1999).
Over a three-decade period, Jayne appeared in a number of TV movies, including James Dean (1976), Sex and the Married Woman (1977), Miss All-American Beauty (1982), A Masterpiece of Murder (1986) and Parent Trap: Hawaiian Honeymoon (1989). She also guested on numerous established programs as well -- "Here Comes the Bride," "Here's Lucy," "Adam-12," "Switch," "Hawaii 5-O," "Matt Houston," "Fantasy Island," "Murder, She Wrote," "The Love Boat," "St. Elsewhere," "The Bold and the Beautiful," "The Nanny" and "Diagnosis Murder." Steady roles on prime-time TV series would include a recurring part as Nurse Chambers on the medical program Medical Center (1969), as well as regular roles on the sitcoms It's Not Easy (1982) and High Society (1995), the latter for which she earned an Emmy nomination for "Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy."
Known for her infectious laugh and joie de vivre, Jayne's confidence grew to include writing stage plays, teleplays, books, and columns. For the most part, however, she was Allen's creative and dedicated business partner for 46 years until his death in 2000. Younger sister Audrey Meadows, of The Honeymooners (1955) TV fame, died in 1996.
Jayne Meadows Allen lived the rest of her life quietly, occasionally granting interviews, until her death on April 26, 2015 in Los Angeles, aged 95.- France Nuyen was born on 31 July 1939 in Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône, France. She is an actress, known for Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), The Joy Luck Club (1993) and South Pacific (1958). She was previously married to Robert Culp and Dr. Thomas Gaspar Morell.
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An acting career was always in the cards for Debra Paget (nee Debralee Griffin) and her siblings, coming from a show biz family and being the offspring of a "stage mother" anxious to get her kids into the movies. Paget's sister Teala Loring got her movie breaks in the 1940s, Lisa Gaye was a film and TV star in the 50s and 60s, and even brother Frank Griffin (acting as 'Ruell Shayne') landed some film jobs. Paget got a 20th Century-Fox contract at age 14 and her first role in the film noir Cry of the City (1948), her first of nearly 20 movies at the studio, mostly Westerns, swashbucklers and period musicals. Every inch (all five-foot-two of her) the Hollywood star, Paget retired from the screen after marrying a Chinese millionaire in 1962.- Actress
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She started as a model, and in 1955 became an actress. She acted under her birth name, Marjorie Hellen, until 1959. Afterwards she was known as Leslie Parrish. She appeared in more than 100 TV shows. She is known as one of the first women producers. She's always had a passion for music. She was involved in social causes such as the Vietnam war. She met the airplane pilot/writer Richard D. Bach during the making of Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973), and they married in 1981. They divorced in 1999.- Actress
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Suzanne Pleshette achieved television immortality in her role as Bob Newhart's wife in the 1970s classic situation comedy, The Bob Newhart Show (1972). For her role as "Emily Hartley," wife of psychologist "Bob Hartley" (played by Bob Newhart), Pleshette was nominated for the Emmy Award twice, in 1977 and 1978. She was also nominated for an Emmy in 1962 for a guest appearance on the TV series, Dr. Kildare (1961) and, in 1991, for playing the title role in Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean (1990) in a 1990 TV movie. Her acting career lasted almost 50 years.
Suzanne Pleshette was born on January 31, 1937, in New York, New York, to Gene Pleshette, a TV network executive who had managed the Paramount Theaters in Manhattan and Brooklyn during the Big Band era, and the former Geraldine Kaplan, a dancer who performed under the pseudonym Geraldine Rivers. Pleshette claims that she was not an acting natural, but just "found" herself attending New York City's High School of the Performing Arts. After graduating high school, she attended Syracuse University for a semester before returning to NYC to go to Finch College, an elite finishing school for well-to-do young ladies. After a semester at Finch, Pleshette dropped out of college to take lessons from famed acting teacher Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse.
She made her Broadway debut in 1957 as part of the supporting cast for the play Compulsion (1959). Initially cast as "The Fourth Girl," she eventually took over the ingénue role during the play's run.
Blessed with beauty, a fine figure, and a husky voice that made her seem older than her years, she quickly achieved success on both the small and big screens. She made her TV debut, at age 20, in Harbourmaster (1957), then was chosen as the female lead opposite superstar Jerry Lewis in his 1958 comedy, The Geisha Boy (1958). On Broadway, she replaced Anne Bancroft in the Broadway hit The Miracle Worker (1962).
Once Pleshette started acting, her career never lagged until she was afflicted with cancer.
Her most famous cinematic role was in Alfred Hitchcock's classic, The Birds (1963), as the brunette schoolteacher jilted by the hero of the film, "Mitch Brenner" (played by Rod Taylor). Pleshette's warm, earthy character was a perfect contrast to the icy blonde beauty, "Melanie Daniels" (Tippi Hedren).
Frankly, it is hard to understand how Taylor's Mitch would jilt Pleshette's Annie, other than to work out Hitchcock's dark vision of society and psychosexual relations between the sexes, in which amoral blondes triumph for aesthetic rather than moral reasons.
Still, it is for Emily Hartley she will always be remembered, for both the original show and her part in another show that had the most clever sign-off episode in TV series history. Bob Newhart had enjoyed a second success during the 1980s with his TV sitcom Newhart (1982), and when he decided to end that series, he asked Suzanne Pleshette to come back. She did, reprising her tole of Emily in a final episode of Newhart, where Newhart woke up as Bob Hartley from "The Bob Newhart Show" in the bedroom of the Hartley's Chicago apartment, Pleshette's Emily at his side. Bob Hartley then told his wife Emily of a crazy dream he'd just had, where he was the proprietor of a Vermont inn overrun with eccentrics, the premise of the second show.
After "The Bob Newhart Show" ceased production, Suzanne Pleshette worked regularly on television, mostly in TV movies. Although she was a talented dramatic actress, she had a flair for comedy and, in 1984, she headlined her own series at CBS. She helped develop the half-hour sitcom, and even had the rare honor of having her name in the title. Suzanne Pleshette Is Maggie Briggs (1984), however, was not a success. She co-starred with Hal Linden in another short-lived CBS TV series, The Boys Are Back (1994), in the 1994-95 season, then had recurring roles in the TV series Good Morning, Miami (2002) and 8 Simple Rules (2002).
Pleshette was married three times: In 1964, she wed teen idol Troy Donahue, her co-star in the 1962 film Rome Adventure (1962) and in 1964's A Distant Trumpet (1964), but the marriage lasted less than a year. She was far more successful in her 1968 nuptials to Texas oil millionaire Tommy Gallagher, whom she remained married to until his death in 2000. After becoming a widow, she and widower Tom Poston (a Newhart regular) rekindled an old romance they had enjoyed when appearing together in "The Golden Fleecing," a 1959 Broadway comedy. They were married from 2001 until Poston's death, in April 2007.
Pleshette was diagnosed with lung cancer and underwent chemotherapy in the summer of 2006; she rallied, but in late 2007, she barely survived a bout of pneumonia. She died of respiratory failure on January 19, 2008, a few days shy of her 71st birthday.
Suzanne Pleshette was remembered as a gregarious, down-to-earth person who loved to talk and often would regale her co-stars with a naughty story. Newhart and his producers had picked her for the role of Emily in "The Bob Newhart Show" after watching her appearances with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962), where she showed herself to be a first-rate raconteuse. Because she could hold her own with Newhart's friend Carson, it was felt she would be a perfect foil as Newhart's TV wife.
She accepted the part, and TV history was made.- Actor
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Poncie Ponce was born on 10 April 1933 in Maui, Hawaii, USA. He was an actor, known for Hawaiian Eye (1959), G.I. Joe: The Movie (1987) and The Gallant Men (1962). He was married to Sherry Luke. He died on 19 July 2013 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actor
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Actor, raconteur, art collector and connoisseur of haute cuisine are just some of the attributes associated with Vincent Price. He was born Vincent Leonard Price, Jr. in St. Louis, Missouri, to Marguerite Cobb "Daisy" (Wilcox) and Vincent Leonard Price, who was President of the National Candy Company. His grandfather, also named Vincent, invented Dr. Price's Baking Powder, which was tartar-based. His family was prosperous, as he said, "not rich enough to evoke envy but successful enough to demand respect." His uniquely cultivated voice and persona were the result of a well-rounded education which began when his family dispatched him on a tour of Europe's cultural centres. His secondary education eventually culminated in a B.A. in English from Yale University and a degree in art history from London's Courtauld Institute.
Famously, his name has long been a byword for Gothic horror on screen. However, Vincent Price was, first and foremost, a man of the stage. It is where he began his career and where it ended. He faced the footlights for the first time at the Gate Theatre in London. At the age of 23, he played Prince Albert in the premiere of Arthur Schnitzler 's 'Victoria Regina' and made such an impression on producer Gilbert Miller that he launched the play on Broadway that same year (legendary actress Helen Hayes played the title role). In early 1938, he was invited to join Orson Welles 's Mercury Theatre on a five-play contract, beginning with 'The Shoemaker's Holiday'. He gave what was described as "a polished performance". Thus established, Vincent continued to make sporadic forays to the Great White Way, including as the Duke of Buckingham in Shakespeare's 'Richard III' (in which a reviewer for the New Yorker found him to be "satisfactorily detestable") and as Oscar Wilde in his award-winning one man show 'Diversions and Delights', which he took on a hugely successful world-wide tour in 1978. While based in California, Vincent was instrumental in the success of the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, starring in several of their bigger productions, including 'Billy Budd' and 'The Winslow Boy'. In 1952, Vincent joined the national touring company of 'Don Juan in Hell' in which he was cast as the devil. Acting under the direction of Charles Laughton and accompanied by noted thespians Charles Boyer, Cedric Hardwicke and Agnes Moorehead, he later recalled this as one of his "greatest theatrical excitements".
As well as acting on stage, Vincent regularly performed on radio network programs, including Lux Radio Theatre, CBS Playhouse and shows for the BBC. He narrated or hosted assorted programs ranging from history (If these Walls Could Speak) to cuisine (Cooking Price-Wise). He wrote several best-selling books on his favourite subjects: art collecting and cookery. In 1962, he was approached by Sears Roebuck to act as a buying consultant "selling quality pictures to department store customers". As if that were not enough, he lectured for 15 years on art, poetry and even the history of villainy. He recorded numerous readings of poems by Edgar Allan Poe (nobody ever gave a better recital of "The Raven"!), Shelley and Whitman. He also served on the Arts Council of UCLA, was a member of the Fine Arts Committee for the White House, a former chairman of the Indian Arts & Crafts Board and on the board of trustees of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
And besides all of that, Vincent Price remained a much sought-after motion picture actor. He made his first appearance on screen as a romantic lead in Service de Luxe (1938), a frothy Universal comedy which came and went without much fanfare. After that, he reprized his stage role as Master Hammon in an early television production of 'The Shoemaker's Holiday'. For one reason or another, Vincent was henceforth typecast as either historical figures (Sir Walter Raleigh, Duke of Clarence, Mormon leader Joseph Smith, King Charles II, Cardinal Richelieu, Omar Khayyam) or ineffectual charmers and gigolos. Under contract to 20th Century Fox (1940-46), Laura (1944) provided one of his better vehicles in the latter department, as did the lush Technicolor melodrama Leave Her to Heaven (1945) which had Vincent showcased in a notably powerful scene as a prosecuting attorney. His performance was singled out by the L.A. Times as meriting "attention as contending for Academy supporting honors".
His first fling with the horror genre was Dragonwyck (1946), a Gothic melodrama set in the Hudson Valley in the early 1800's. For the first time, Vincent played a part he actually coveted and fought hard to win. His character was in effect a precursor of those he would later make his own while working for Roger Corman and American-International. As demented, drug-addicted landowner Nicholas Van Ryn, he so effectively terrorized Gene Tierney's Miranda Wells that the influential columnist Louella Parsons wrote with rare praise: "The role of Van Ryn calls for a lot of acting and Vincent admits he's a ham and loves to act all over the place, but the fact that he has restrained himself and doesn't over-emote is a tribute to his ability". If Vincent was an occasional ham, he proved it with his Harry Lime pastiche Carwood in The Bribe (1949). Much better was his starring role in a minor western, The Baron of Arizona (1950), in which he was convincingly cast as a larcenous land office clerk attempting to create his own desert baronetcy.
With House of Wax (1953) , Vincent fine-tuned the character type he had established in Dragonwyck, adding both pathos and comic elements to the role of the maniacal sculptor Henry Jarrod. It was arduous work under heavy make-up which simulated hideous facial scarring and required three hours to apply and three hours to remove. He later commented that it "took his face months to heal because it was raw from peeling off wax each night". However, the picture proved a sound money maker for Warner Brothers and firmly established Vincent Price in a cult genre from which he was henceforth unable to escape. The majority of his subsequent films were decidedly low-budget affairs in which the star tended to be the sole mitigating factor: The Mad Magician (1954), The Fly (1958) (and its sequel), House on Haunted Hill (1959), the absurd The Tingler (1959) (easily the worst of the bunch) and The Bat (1959). With few exceptions, Vincent's acting range would rarely be stretched in the years to come.
Vincent's association with the genial Roger Corman began when he received a script for The Fall of the House of Usher, beginning a projected cycle of cost-effective films based on short stories by Edgar Allen Poe. As Roderick Usher, Vincent was Corman's "first and only choice". Though he was to receive a salary of $50,000 for the picture, it was his chance "to express the psychology of Poe's characters" and to "imbue the movie versions with the spirit of Poe" that clinched the deal for Vincent. He made another six films in this vein, all of them box office winners. Not Academy Award stuff, but nonetheless hugely enjoyable camp entertainment and popular with all but highbrow audiences. Who could forget Vincent at his scenery chewing best as the resurgent inquisitor, luring Barbara Steele into the crypt in The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)? Or as pompous wine aficionado Fortunato Luchresi in that deliriously funny wine tasting competition with Montresor Herringbone (Peter Lorre) in Tales of Terror (1962)? Best still, the climactic battle of the magicians pitting Vincent's Erasmus Craven against Boris Karloff's malevolent Dr. Scarabus in The Raven (1963) (arguably, the best offering in the Poe cycle). The Comedy of Terrors (1963) was played strictly for laughs, with the inimitable combo of Price and Lorre this time appearing as homicidal undertakers.
For the rest of the 60s, Vincent was content to remain in his niche, playing variations on the same theme in City in the Sea (1965) and Witchfinder General (1968) (as Matthew Hopkins). He also spoofed his screen personae as Dr. Goldfoot and as perennial villain Egghead in the Batman (1966) series. He rose once more to the occasion in the cult black comedy The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) (and its sequel Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972)) commenting that he had to play Anton Phibes "very seriously so that it would come out funny". The tagline, a parody of the ad for Love Story (1970), announced "love means never having to say you're ugly".
During the 70s and 80s, Vincent restricted himself mainly to voice-overs and TV guest appearances. His final role of note was as the inventor in Edward Scissorhands (1990), a role written specifically for him. The embodiment of gleeful, suave screen villainy, Vincent Price died in Los Angeles in October 1993 at the age of 82. People magazine eulogized him as "the Gable of Gothic." Much earlier, an English critic named Gilbert Adair spoke for many fans when he said "Every man his Price - and mine is Vincent."- Actress
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Born in India to South African parents, Juliet studied to be a dancer from the age of 4. Attending the Royal Academy of Dance, by the time Juliet was 14, she was deemed too tall to enter the world of ballet. She signed as a chorus dancer with the London Palladium and then pursued a career as a dancer in European nightclubs. While dancing in Paris, she was spotted by Hollywood choreographer Hermes Pan and signed to a role in the movie Can-Can (1960). While rehearsing for the movie, Soviet Premier Khrushchev was invited to watch the then-unknown Prowse and others rehearsing their steps. The next day, he denounced the dance as immoral and it was Prowse's photo that accompanied the news across newspapers worldwide. An instant celebrity, Juliet shot to stardom with her acting and dancing and the tabloids filled with her romance with star Frank Sinatra. That same year, she also appeared with Elvis Presley in G.I. Blues (1960) and again the tabloids followed her.
She appeared in more films the next year but, as her celebrity status waned, so did her movie career. Her engagement to Sinatra in 1962 fueled her nightclub act, but did nothing for her movie career. In 1965, she moved to television with the series Mona McCluskey (1965), playing a nutty Hollywood starlet, but the show soon ended. Her big-screen career ended with Run for Your Wife (1965) and she, thereafter, appeared on the stage and on the nightclub circuit. Some of her stage shows included "Sweet Charity", "Kismet", "Irma La Douce", "Mame" and "The Pajama Game". She also appeared as a guest on Television but, most of the time, she worked in her nightclub act. In 1994, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.- Actor
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Louis Quinn was born on 23 March 1915 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was an actor, known for All the President's Men (1976), 77 Sunset Strip (1958) and The Crowded Sky (1960). He was married to Christine Nelson and Joanne Elizabeth (Jody) Ward. He died on 14 September 1988 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actor
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Mike Road was born on 18 March 1918 in Malden, Massachusetts, USA. He was an actor and director, known for The Roaring 20's (1960), Hawaiian Eye (1959) and The Fantastic Journey (1977). He was married to Ruth Brady and Norma Lehn. He died on 14 April 2013 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actor
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Emanuel Goldenberg arrived in the United States from Romania at age ten, and his family moved into New York's Lower East Side. He took up acting while attending City College, abandoning plans to become a rabbi or lawyer. The American Academy of Dramatic Arts awarded him a scholarship, and he began work in stock, with his new name, Edward G. Robinson (the "G" stood for his birth surname), in 1913. Broadway was two years later; he worked steadily there for 15 years. His work included "The Kibitzer", a comedy he co-wrote with Jo Swerling. His film debut was a small supporting part in the silent The Bright Shawl (1923), but it was with the coming of sound that he hit his stride. His stellar performance as snarling, murderous thug Rico Bandello in Little Caesar (1931)--all the more impressive since in real life Robinson was a sophisticated, cultured man with a passion for fine art--set the standard for movie gangsters, both for himself in many later films and for the industry. He portrayed the title character in several biographical works, such as Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940) and A Dispatch from Reuters (1940). Psychological dramas included Flesh and Fantasy (1943), Double Indemnity (1944), The Woman in the Window (1944)and Scarlet Street (1945). Another notable gangster role was in Key Largo (1948). He was "absolved" of allegations of Communist affiliation after testifying as a friendly witness for the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy hysteria of the early 1950s. In 1956 he had to sell off his extensive art collection in a divorce settlement and also had to deal with a psychologically troubled son. In 1956 he returned to Broadway in "Middle of the Night". In 1973 he was awarded a special, posthumous Oscar for lifetime achievement.- The epitome of poise, charm, style and grace, beautiful brunette Barbara Rush was born in Denver, Colorado in 1927 and enrolled at the University of California before working with the University Players and taking acting classes at the Pasadena Playhouse. It didn't take long for talent scouts to spot her and, following a play performance, Paramount quickly signed her up in 1950, making her debut with The Goldbergs (1950).
Just prior to this, she had met fellow actor Jeffrey Hunter, a handsome newcomer who would later become a "beefcake" bobbysoxer idol over at Fox. The two fell in love and married in December 1950. Soon, they were on their way to becoming one of Hollywood's most beautiful and photogenic young couples. Their son Christopher was born in 1952.
While at Paramount, she was decorative in such assembly-line fare as When Worlds Collide (1951), Quebec (1951) and Flaming Feather (1952). She later co-starred opposite some of Hollywood's top leading males: James Mason, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, Dean Martin, Paul Newman, Richard Burton and Kirk Douglas. In most cases, she played brittle wives, conniving "other women" or socialite girlfriend types.
Despite the "A" list movies Barbara was piling up, the one single role that could put her over the top never showed its face. By the early 1960s, her film career started to decline. She married publicist Warren Cowan in 1959 and bore a second child, Claudia Cowan, in 1964. TV became a viable source of income for her, appearing in scores of guest parts on the more popular shows of the time while co-starring in standard mini-movie dramas.
She even had a bit of fun playing a "guest villainess" on the Batman (1966) series as temptress "Nora Clavicle". The stage also became a strong focus for Barbara, earning the Sarah Siddons Award for her starring role in "Forty Carats". She made her Broadway debut in the one-woman showcase "A Woman of Independent Means", which also subsequently earned her the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award during its tour. Other showcases included "Private Lives", "Same Time, Next Year", "The Night of the Iguana" and "Steel Magnolias". Rush continued to occasionally appear onscreen, most recently in a recurring role on TV's 7th Heaven (1996). She died on March 31, 2024, aged 97. - Handsome, rugged American leading man John Russell (whose credits are often confused with those of child actor Johnny Russell) attended the University of California, where he was a student athlete. Serving in the US Marine Corps in WW II, he earned a battlefield commission and decorations for valor at Guadalcanal. His dark good looks brought him to the attention of a talent scout after the war and he began playing second leads and occasional heavies in major productions. In the 1950s, he branched into television and starred in several popular series, most notably Lawman (1958). His appearances were sporadic after the 1960s, though he was a memorable villain in Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider (1985).
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John Saxon appeared in nearly 200 roles in the movies and on television in a more-than half-century-long career that has stretched over seven decades since he made his big screen debut in 1954 in uncredited small roles in It Should Happen to You (1954) and George Cukor's A Star Is Born (1954). Born Carmine Orrico on August 5, 1936 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Italian-American parents, Antonio Orrico and Anna (née Protettore), he studied acting with Stella Adler after graduating from New Utrecht High School.
He was discovered by talent agent Henry Willson, the man most famous for creating and representing Rock Hudson (as well as a stable of "beefcake" male stars and starlets), who signed him up after he saw Saxon's picture on the cover of a magazine. Willson brought the 16-year-old to Southern California, changed his name to John Saxon, and launched his career. Saxon made his television debut on Richard Boone's series Medic (1954) in 1955 and got his first substantial (and credited) role in Running Wild (1955), playing a juvenile delinquent. In the Esther Williams vehicle The Unguarded Moment (1956) (one of her rare dramatic roles), the film's marketing campaign spotlighted him, trumpeting the movie as "Co-starring the exciting new personality John Saxon.".
By 1958, he seemed to have established himself as a supporting player in A-List pictures, being featured in Blake Edwards's comedy This Happy Feeling (1958) headlined by Debbie Reynolds and Vincente Minnelli's The Reluctant Debutante (1958) with Rex Harrison and Sandra Dee. In the next five years, he worked steadily, including supporting roles in John Huston's The Unforgiven (1960), the James Stewart comedy Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (1962) and Otto Preminger's The Cardinal (1963) while having first billing in the B-movies Cry Tough (1959) and War Hunt (1962). Fluent in Italian, he made his first pictures in Italy in the period, Agostino (1962) and Mario Bava's The Evil Eye (1963). Despite his good work with major directors, he failed to succeed as a star.
By 1965, he was appearing in the likes of Blood Beast from Outer Space (1965), albeit, top-billed. A more emblematic picture was Sidney J. Furie's The Appaloosa (1966), in which he appeared in Mexican bandito drag as the man who steals the horse of Marlon Brando, another Stella Adler student. Saxon would reprise the role, of sorts, in John Sturges Joe Kidd (1972) in support of superstar Clint Eastwood. In those less politically correct times, many an Italian-American with a dark complexion would be relied on to play Mexicans, Native Americans and other "exotic" types like Mongols. Saxon played everything from an Indian chief on Bonanza (1959) to Marco Polo on The Time Tunnel (1966).
From 1969 to 1972 season, he was a star of the television series The Bold Ones: The New Doctors (1969), playing the brilliant surgeon Theodore Stuart. When the series ended, he took one of his most famous roles when Bruce Lee demurred over casting Rod Taylor as he was too tall. A black belt in karate, Saxon appeared as Roper in Enter the Dragon (1973). He continued to play a wide variety of roles on television and in motion pictures, with key roles in 1974's classic slasher Black Christmas (1974), 1984's groundbreaking A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and the 1990s self-referential horror films New Nightmare (1994) and From Dusk Till Dawn (1996).
John Saxon died of pneumonia on July 25, 2020, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He was 83.- Actress
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Spanish actress-dancer-singer who starred in one U.S. television series before her early death. A native of Madrid, Sierra was an accomplished tap dancer at the age of four. She appeared throughout her childhood in children's shows and later in nightclubs as a dancer and singer, touring Spain and Central and South America. At the age of 20, she arrived in the U.S. on a nightclub tour. She was a hit appearing on the Jack Paar show, but got her big break in television when Warner Bros. executive William T. Orr spotted her in performance at the Persian Room in New York. He signed her to a contract and gave her the starring role of "Cha Cha O'Brien" in the series Surfside 6 (1960). The show ran two seasons, and Sierra returned to nightclub performances. In the spring of 1963, Sierra was overcome by a heart ailment and had heart surgery. After several months, she was hospitalized again in Hollywood, where she died on September 6, at the age of 27.- Actress
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Lovely, indefatigable Connie Stevens added sparkle to a number of films and TV shows in the late 50s and 60s Hollywood. Brooklyn born Concetta Rosalie Ann Ingolia is of Italian/Sicilian and Irish descent, the daughter of Eleanor McGinley and Teddy Stevens (born Peter Ingolia). She was subsequently raised by her grandparents when her mother and father (a band singer and jazz musician, respectively) filed for divorce. Connie attended Catholic boarding schools in her formative years. Inheriting her parents' love and talent for music, she formed a vocal quartet called "The Foremost" which was comprised of Connie and three men. Those men later became part of The Lettermen.
In Hollywood from 1953, Connie formed yet another vocal group "The Three Debs" while trying to break into films doing extra work. Moving up to the co-star ranks in a few mediocre teen dramas such as Young and Dangerous (1957), Eighteen and Anxious (1957), The Party Crashers (1958), and Dragstrip Riot (1958), it was comedian Jerry Lewis who set things in motion by casting her in his comedy Rock-a-Bye Baby (1958). As such, Warner Bros. signed her up for their hot detective series Hawaiian Eye (1959) and she was off. As pert and pretty "Cricket Blake", a slightly flaky and tomboyish singer/photographer, Connie became an instant teen idol -- trendy and undeniably appealing. A couple of record offers (and hits) came her way as a result including "Sixteen Reasons" and the novelty song "Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb" (in tribute to Edd Byrnes' hip, teen idol character on the popular detective series 77 Sunset Strip (1958)).
Adored for her sexy effervescence, Connie tried to broaden her "sex kitten" image in the 60's with serious attempts at adult film drama, including the title role in Susan Slade (1961), as well as co-leads in Parrish (1961), Palm Springs Weekend (1963), and Two on a Guillotine (1965), but they were modestly received. For the most part, she remained a comfy TV presence in musical variety shows ("The Red Skelton Show," "Kraft Music Hall"), westerns ("Cheyenne," "Maverick") and game shows ("Hollywood Squares"). She also appeared opposite George Burns in a second series, the sitcom Wendy and Me (1964), and co-starred in a couple of lightweight films, Never Too Late (1965) and Way... Way Out (1966), again with Jerry Lewis.
In the 1970s, she refocused on her voice and started lining up singing commercials (Ace Hardware) while subsisting in nightclubs and hotels. Connie eventually built herself up as a Las Vegas headlining act. She also starred on Broadway with "The Star-Spangled Girl" and won a Theatre World Award for her performance in 1967. Comedian Bob Hope's made her one of his regular entertainers on his USO tours. Sporadic films came her way every now and then. A TV-movie The Sex Symbol (1974) had her playing a tragic Marilyn Monroe type goddess. There was also innocuous fun in such sporadic films as Grease 2 (1982) and Back to the Beach (1987) with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. TV episodic work on "Murder, She Wrote," "The Love Boat," "Baywatch," "Ellen," the revamped "Burke's Law," "It's Garry Shandling Show," "Baywatch" and "8 Simple Rules," plus a regular role on the short-lived series Starting from Scratch (1988) also kept her afloat.
Once wed to actor James Stacy, Connie later married and divorced singer Eddie Fisher. From her union with Fisher came two daughters, Joely Fisher and Tricia Leigh Fisher, both of whom became actors. Single with two daughters, and completely out of sync with Hollywood, Connie started experiencing severe financial woes. In the 1990s, the never-say-die personality began a new lucrative career in the infomercial game with skin-care and make-up products, and turned her financial woes around. Now a self-made tycoon with her own successful beauty line to boot, Connie is living proof that anything can happen in that wild and wacky world called show biz.
She resurged briefly in films with featured roles in Love Is All There Is (1996), James Dean: Race with Destiny (1997), Returning Mickey Stern (2002), Double Duty (2009), Just Before I Go (2014) and Search Engines (2016) which starred daughter Joely. She also was seen on TV with episodic work on "s, The recipient of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Connie was elected secretary-treasurer of the Screen Actors Guild in 2005. Since suffering a stroke in 2016, she has remained out of the limelight for the most part. In 2019, she made a brief return to films with By the Rivers of Babylon, again with Joely.- Producer
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Known primarily as a TV actor, he starred as a nightclub singer on the popular The Danny Thomas Show (1953).
He also served TV behind the cameras partnering with Sheldon Leonard and Aaron Spelling to create such shows as Dick Van Dyke's show, The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961), The Andy Griffith Show (1960) and Mod Squad (1968).
He was also dedicated to building the St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, which he founded in 1962.- Actress
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Miyoshi Umeki was born as the youngest of 9 children. The daughter of a prominent Japanese iron factory owner, she developed an early passion for music, learning to play the mandolin, harmonica & piano. She also enjoyed singing American-styled tunes, much to the chagrin of her parents. This propensity for Americanized pop songs later paid off.
Although she projected the typical Japanese female stereotype of humbleness, delicacy & subservience in most of her prime film & stage roles, she was nevertheless an assertive scene-stealer. This docile & deceptive-looking talent w/ cropped hair as well as a heart-shaped face radiated charm in addition to innocence so effortlessly, she managed to make history at Academy Awards time as the 1st Asian actor to receive an acting Oscar for her superb work in the tragic post-WWII film drama Sayonara (1957).
Following World War II, she traveled w/ a U.S. Army G.I. jazz band in Japan as Nancy Umeki & was the 1st to record American songs for RCA Victor Japan. She became an extremely popular radio & nightclub artist, which sparked a move to the U.S. in 1955. Again, she demonstrated a demure prowess for gaining attention w/ her 1-season regular role (1955-1956) on the musical variety show Arthur Godfrey and His Friends (1949). W/ that popularity, she was able to sign w/ Mercury Records, eventually releasing 2 albums.
The timing couldn't have been more perfect. From this recognition, she was immediately cast in Sayonara (1957), which was based on James A. Michener's best-selling romantic tale. Inspired casting opposite comedian Red Buttons in a tragic, counterpoint romance as a World War II airman & his naive Japanese war bride who fall victim to post-war prejudice led to supporting Academy Awards for both actors. Despite her win, she would not make another film for 4 years.
Following her Oscar win, she starred on Broadway w/ the 1958 musical Flower Drum Song, in which she proved a highlight as a starry-eyed Chinese immigrant/mail-order bride w/ her captivating rendition of A Hundred Million Miracles, earning a Tony nomination in the process. She scored additional points after recreating her role for the film version of Flower Drum Song (1961).
In total, she made only 5 American films in all. Her other appearances were supporting roles in the naval comedy Cry for Happy (1961), The Horizontal Lieutenant (1962) & A Girl Named Tamiko (1962). She also tread fairly lightly on TV w/ random 60s appearances on The Donna Reed Show (1958), Dr. Kildare (1961), Rawhide (1959) & Mister Ed (1961), among others.
Duing the 50s & 60s, she was an occasional guest on variety shows for TV titans such as Perry Como, Dinah Shore, Merv Griffin, Andy Williams & Ed Sullivan. Arguably her biggest claim to fame was Mrs. Livingston in the heart-tugging TV comedy The Courtship of Eddie's Father (1969). Following this renewed attention, she went into a complete self-imposed retirement.
She lived a sedate family life for more than 3 decades. Her 1958 marriage to TV producer/director Win Opie ended in divorce after 9 years. She subsequently married TV director Randall Hood in 1968. They ran a business renting editing equipment to film studios & university film programs until his sudden death in Los Angeles in 1976. A longtime resident of North Hollywood, she eventually moved to Missouri w/ advancing age to be nearer to her son & his family. She died of cancer at age 78 on August 28, 2007 in Licking, Missouri.- Actor
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The son of a celebrated Dutch actor, John Van Dreelen may have come by his debonair countenance with a bit of help from his continental pedigree. Fluent in several languages, he was reported to have escaped a concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Holland by disguising himself as one of the German officers he would later play so often on both big and small screens.
Though he bookended and sprinkled his career with appearances in many European films, Van Dreelen is best remembered as an A-list guest star in dozens of American television shows from the early 1960s to the mid-'80s. Never a major player in American theatrical films, he nonetheless scored a few choice roles, including the Danish concert pianist who rescues and woos Lana Turner during an extended sequence in Madame X (1966). Van Dreelen also enjoyed an international stage career and starred in the original American touring production of "The Sound of Music." Despite his close identification with despotic roles, he also easily breezed through light drama and comedy and cut a dashing and memorable figure in 1960s pop culture oeuvre.- Actor
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Clint Walker was born Norman Eugene Walker in Hartford, southwestern Illinois, to Gladys Huldah (Schwanda), a Czech immigrant, and Paul Arnold Walker, who was from Arkansas. Walker almost single-handedly started the western craze on TV in the 1950s as Cheyenne Bodie in Cheyenne (1955). Growing up in the Depression era meant taking work wherever you could get it, and Walker found himself working at such jobs as Mississippi River boatman, carnival roustabout and golf caddy. He quit high school at 16 and at age 17 joined the Merchant Marine. After the war he worked his way cross country, including working in the oil fields in Brownwood, Texas, and wound up in California, where he worked as an undercover agent for a private detective agency on the Long Beach waterfront. After a while he took a job as a security officer at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. It was there that he met quite a few Hollywood people who told him that his size, physique and good looks would serve him well in Hollywood and that he should go to Los Angeles and give it a try. He met actor Henry Wilcoxon, who introduced him to director Cecil B. DeMille, and Walker found himself playing the part of a Captain of the Guard in The Ten Commandments (1956). Someone from Warner Bros. saw the film, found out that Walker was under contract to producer Hal B. Wallis, bought up Walker's contract and gave him the lead in "Cheyenne". The series was a huge hit and spawned countless other western series, from Warners and other studios. However, Walker was dissatisfied with the way Warners was handling his career -- they would let other contract players make films, for example, but he wasn't allowed to -- and that triggered a dispute which ended up with him taking a walk from the show. He and Warners eventually settled their disagreements. When the show ended Walker began to get supporting parts in features, his biggest and most successful one being The Dirty Dozen (1967). He starred in the well-received The Night of the Grizzly (1966) and the not-so-well received None But the Brave (1965), a WWII film that was Frank Sinatra's one and only stab at directing. He also played the lead in Baker's Hawk (1976), and turned in a good performance as a villain in the TV movie Scream of the Wolf (1974). Lately he and several of his colleagues from "The Dirty Dozen" provided the voices for the animated film Small Soldiers (1998).- As a child, Williams acted in summer stock productions. After graduation from high school he joined the Air Force for a four-year stint. Then, returning to New York, he took acting classes with Lee Strasberg. A few minor Broadway roles followed as did parts on some live TV dramas. One of these parts caught the eye of a talent agent and Williams signed with Universal in 1956. Universal put him into several supporting roles -- most notably as the gas-station stud in Written on the Wind (1956) -- but the high point of his career came when he played the title role in The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). Director Jack Arnold said that Williams gave an Oscar-worthy performance because, in many special-effects scenes, he could only imagine his surroundings and his fellow actors. In 1959, Williams moved over to Warner Brothers which cast him in the Hawaiian Eye (1959) TV series. After this, Williams' career faded. His last appearance may have been on a Family Feud (1976) episode in 1983 which featured other Hawaiian Eye (1959) alumni. A lifelong bachelor, Williams died in 1985.
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You could probably shoehorn actor Van Williams right in there with the other dark-haired, impossibly handsome film and TV heartthrobs Tom Tryon, Robert Logan, Gardner McKay, Brian Kelly, Adam West, Roger Smith and John Gavin of the late 1950s/early 1960s who were saddled with colorless heroic leads to play on film and/or TV -- roles that played off their photogenic prowess, manly charisma and charm but seldom tested their dramatic mettle.
Born on February 27, 1934 as Van Zandt Jarvis Williams, he was the son of a cattle rancher. He majored in animal husbandry and business at Texas Christian University but moved to Hawaii which changed the course of his life. While operating a salvage company and a skin-diving school during the mid-1950s, he was approached by Elizabeth Taylor and husband/producer Mike Todd, who were filming there. Encouraged by Todd to try his luck, Van arrived in Hollywood with no experience. Todd perished in a plane crash before he was able to help Van, but the young hopeful ventured on anyway, taking some acting/voice lessons, and was almost immediately cast in dramatic TV roles.
Warner Brothers had a keen eye for camera-loving hunks and smartly signed Van up. Fitting in perfectly, he was soon showing just how irresistible he was as a clean-cut private eye on the series Bourbon Street Beat (1959). Although the show lasted only one season, Warners carried his Kenny Madison character into the more popular adventure drama Surfside 6 (1960) opposite fellow pin-up / blond beefcake bookend Troy Donahue. Series-wise, Van tried comedy next opposite Walter Brennan in The Tycoon (1964) . After his contract expired at Warners, 20th Century-Fox handed him his most vividly recalled role, that of the emerald-suited superhero The Green Hornet (1966) with the late Bruce Lee as his partner Kato. The show, inspired by the huge cult hit Batman (1966) enjoyed a fast start but, like its predecessor, met an equally untimely finish.
Never a strong draw in films, Van revealed quite a bit of himself (literally) in his debut in Tall Story (1960) coming out of a shower. Although handed a typically staid second lead in the drama The Caretakers (1963), he focused strictly on the TV medium. Continuing well into the 1970s to guest sporadically on such TV classics as The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961), Love, American Style (1969), Mission: Impossible (1966), The Big Valley (1965)", Nanny and the Professor (1970), Barnaby Jones (1973), and The Rockford Files (1974). Another starring series attempt with Westwind (1975) failed to make the grade and he soon let his career go.
Van let his career subside and went quite successfully into business with telecommunications, real estate and law enforcement supplies among his lucrative ventures. With his glossy, pretty-boy years far behind him, he had no need to look back at his show biz success with the exception of an occasional autograph convention. He died of renal failure in Scottsdale, Arizona, on November 28, 2016, at age 82.- Actress
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Natalie Wood was an American actress of Russian and Ukrainian descent. She started her career as a child actress and eventually transitioned into teenage roles, young adult roles, and middle-aged roles. She drowned off Catalina Island on November 29, 1981 at age 43.
Wood was born July 20, 1938 in San Francisco to Russian immigrant parents: housewife Maria Gurdin (née Zoodiloff), known by multiple aliases including Mary, Marie and Musia, and second husband Nick Gurdin (née Zacharenko), a janitor and prop builder. Nicholas was born in Primorsky Krai, son of a chocolate-factory worker. Maria was born in Barnaul, southern Siberia to a wealthy industrialist. Natalie's maternal grandfather owned soap and candle factories.
Wood's parents had to migrate due to the Russian Civil War. Her paternal grandfather joined the anti-Bolshevik civilian forces early in the war and was killed in a street fight between Red and White Russian soldiers. This convinced the Zacharenkos to migrate to Shanghai, China, where they had relatives. Wood's paternal grandmother remarried in 1927 and moved the family to Vancouver, British Columbia. In 1933 they resettled along the U.S. West Coast. Nicholas met Wood's mother, four years his senior, while she was still married to Alexander Tatuloff, an Armenian mechanic she divorced in 1936.
Mary Tatuloff, Wood's mother, had unfulfilled ambitions of becoming a ballet dancer. She grew up in the Chinese city of Harbin and had married Alexander there in 1925. The Tatuloffs had one daughter, Ovsanna, before coming to America in 1930. After marrying Nicholas Zacharenko in 1938, five months before Wood's birth, Mary (now calling herself Marie) transferred her dream of stardom onto her second child. Marie frequently took a young Wood with her to the cinema, where she could study the films of Hollywood child stars.
Wood's parents changed the family name to Gurdin upon obtaining U.S. citizenship, and her pseudonymous mother finally settled on a permanent first name: Maria. In 1942 they bought a house in Santa Rosa, where young Natalie was noticed by members of a crew during a film shoot. She got to audition for roles as an actress, and the family moved to Los Angeles to help seek out roles for her. RKO Radio Pictures' executives William Goetz and David Lewis chose the stage name Wood for her, in reference to director Sam Wood. Natalie's younger sister Svetlana Gurdin would eventually follow an acting career as well, under the stage name Lana Wood.
Wood made her film debut in Happy Land (1943). She was only five years old, and her scene as the "Little Girl Who Drops Ice Cream Cone" lasted 15 seconds. Wood somehow attracted the interest of film director Irving Pichel who remained in contact with her family. She had few job offers over the following two years, but Pichel helped her get a screen test for a more substantial role in the romance film Tomorrow Is Forever (1946). Wood passed through an audition and won the role of Margaret Ludwig, a post-World War II German orphan. At the time, Wood was unable to "cry on cue" for a key scene, so her mother tore a butterfly to pieces in front of her, giving her a reason to cry for the scene.
Wood started appearing regularly in films following this role and soon received a contract with 20th Century Fox. Her first major role was that of Susan Walker in the Christmas film Miracle on 34th Street (1947), which was a commercial and critical hit. Wood got her first taste of fame, and afterwards Macy's invited her to appear in the store's annual Thanksgiving Day parade. Following her early success, Wood receive many more film offers. She typically appeared in family films, cast as the daughter of such stars as Fred MacMurray, Margaret Sullivan, James Stewart, Joan Blondell, and Bette Davis. Wood found herself in high demand and appeared in over twenty films as a child actress.
The California laws of the era required that until reaching adulthood, child actors had to spend at least three hours per day in the classroom. Wood received her primary education on the studio lots, receiving three hours of school lessons whenever she was working on a film. She was reportedly a "straight A student." Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz was quite impressed by Wood's intellect. After school hours ended, Wood would hurry to the set to film her scenes.
While Wood acquired the services of agents, her early career was micromanaged by her mother. An older Wood gained her first major television role in the short-lived sitcom The Pride of the Family (1953). At the age of 16, she found more success with the role of Judy in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). She played the role of a teenage girl who wears makeup and dresses up in racy clothes to attract the attention of a father who typically ignores her. The film's success helped Wood make the transition from child actress to an ingenue. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Her next significant film was The Searchers (1956), a western in which she played the role of abduction victim Debbie Edwards, niece of John Wayne's character. The film was a commercial and critical hit, and has since become regarded as a masterpiece. Also in 1956, Wood graduated from Van Nuys High School. She signed a contract with Warner Brothers, where she was kept busy with several new films. To her disappointment, she was typically cast as the girlfriend of the protagonist and received roles of little depth. For a while, WB had her paired with teen heartthrob Tab Hunter. The studio was hoping that the pairing would serve as a box-office draw, but this did not work out. One of Wood's only serious roles from this period was the title character in Marjorie Morningstar (1958), as a young Jewish girl whose efforts to create her own identity and career path clash with the expectations of her family. The film was a critical success, and fit well with other films exploring the restlessness of youth in the '50s.
Wood's first major box office flop was the biographical film All the Fine Young Cannibals (1960), examining the rags to riches story of jazz musician Chet Baker without actually using his name. The film's box office earnings barely covered the production costs, and MGM recorded a loss of $1,108,000. For the first time. Wood's appeal to the audience was in doubt. With her career in decline following this failure, Wood was seen as "washed up" by many in the film community. But director Elia Kazan gave her the chance to audition for the role of the sexually-repressed Wilma Dean Loomis in his upcoming film Splendor in the Grass (1961). Kazan cast Wood as the female lead, because he found in her (in his words): a "true-blue quality with a wanton side that is held down by social pressure." Kazan is credited for producing Wood's most powerful moment as an actress. The film was a critical success, with Wood nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.
Wood's next important film was West Side Story (1961), where she played Maria, a restless Puerto Rican girl. Wood was once again called to represent the restlessness of youth, this time in a story involving youth gangs and juvenile delinquents. The film was a great commercial success with about $44 million gross, the highest-grossing film of 1961. It was also critically acclaimed, and is still regarded as one of the best films of Wood's career. Her next film was Gypsy (1962), playing the role of burlesque entertainer and stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. Film historians credit the film as an even better role for Wood than that of Maria, with witty dialogue, a greater emotional range, and complex characterization. The film was the eighth highest-grossing release of 1962, and was well-received critically.
Wood's next significant role was that of Macy's salesclerk Angie Rossini in Love with the Proper Stranger (1963). In the film, Angie has a one-night-stand with musician Rocky Papasano, played by Steve McQueen, finds herself pregnant and desperately seeks an abortion. The film under-performed at the box office but was critically well-received. Wood received her third (and last) nomination for an Academy Award. At age 25, Wood was tied with Teresa Wright as the youngest person to score three Oscar nominations. Wood held that designation until 2013, when Jennifer Lawrence achieved her third nomination at age 23.
Wood continued her successful film career until 1966, but her health status was not as successful. She was suffering emotionally and had sought professional therapy. She paid Warner Bros. $175,000 to cancel her contract and was able to retire for a while. She also fired her entire support team: agents, managers, publicist, accountant, and attorneys. She took a three-year hiatus from acting.
Wood made her comeback in the comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) with the themes of sexual liberation and wife swapping. It was a box office hit. Wood decided to gamble her $750,000 fee on a percentage of the gross, earning a million dollars in profits. She chose not to capitalize on the film's success, however, and did not take another acting job for five years.
In 1970, Wood was married to the screenwriter Richard Gregson and was expecting her first child, Natasha Gregson Wagner. She went into semi-retirement to be a stay-at-home mom, appearing in only four more theatrical films before her death. These films were the mystery comedy Peeper (1975), the science fiction film Meteor (1979), the comedy The Last Married Couple in America (1980), and the posthumously-released science fiction film Brainstorm (1983).
In the late '70s, Wood found success in television roles, appearing in several made-for-TV movies and the mini-series From Here to Eternity (1979). Her project received high ratings, and she had plans to make her theatrical debut in a 1982 production of Anastasia.
On November 28, 1981, Wood joined her last husband Robert Wagner, their married friend Christopher Walken, and captain Dennis Davern on a weekend boat trip to Catalina Island. Conspicuously absent from the group was Christopher's wife, casting director Georgianne Walken. The four of them were on board the Wagners' yacht "Splendour." Earwitness Marilyn Wayne heard cries for help around 11:05 P.M. and a "man's voice slurred, and in aggravated tone, say something to the effect of, 'Oh, hold on, we're coming to get you,' and not long after, the cries for help subsided." On the morning of November 29, Wood's corpse was recovered 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) away from the boat, near small Valiant-brand inflatable dinghy beached nearby. The toxicology report revealed her blood alcohol level was at .14, over the legal limit of .10. Wood was buried on December 2 at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. Nine days later, the LACSD officially closed the case.- Actress
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When Kansas-born Patrice Wymore was only six years of age, she began touring with her family in tent shows and in vaudeville, her mother being a pianist and singer on the circuit. In contrast, her father was a trucking line exec. Trained in voice, the lovely, fair-haired teenager gambled on a try in New York and it paid off. Performing in "Up in Central Park" in 1947, she made her Broadway debut a year later in the musical "Hold It!" and won the Theatre World Award for "promising actress." Following her Broadway role in another musical, "All for Love" in 1949, the wide set-eyed beauty was handed a starlet contract by Warner Bros. and headed west to seek her fame and fortune. She found a little bit of both.
Patrice made her debut in a singing role in the nostalgic Doris Day/Gordon MacRae tunefest Tea for Two (1950). Fate took a hand when she was cast opposite the much older Errol Flynn in Rocky Mountain (1950), one of the aging actor's lesser-known efforts. Patrice became the final Mrs. Errol Flynn in October of 1950 after a hasty marriage in Monaco. Daughter Arnella, who later would become a model in Europe, was born in 1953. The couple moved to Jamaica and also traveled by yacht overseas. By the time of his marriage, Flynn was already in a severe decline both physically and mentally and the marriage was a difficult one. After typically playing the "other woman" in several other Warner efforts, including I'll See You in My Dreams (1951), She's Working Her Way Through College (1952), The Big Trees (1952), She's Back on Broadway (1953), and in the British-made King's Rhapsody (1955).
Patrice felt compelled to retire in order to tend to her ailing husband and the raising of their daughter. His drug/alcohol addictions, however, became too overwhelming, and she eventually was forced to separate from Flynn. They never divorced by the time he died at age 50 in October of 1959, although he was living with someone else. Patrice never remarried.
Following Flynn's passing, Wymore attempted a comeback and began performing in a nightclub act in Vegas and in stock musicals such as "Carnival," Guys and Dolls," "Irma La Douce," and "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." On camera she was cast in the short-lived soap opera Never Too Young (1965) and appeared secondarily in the films Ocean's Eleven (1960) and Chamber of Horrors (1966).
Patrice eventually retired again in the late 1960s and returned to Jamaica with her daughter to the mansion Flynn built and bequeathed to her along with a cattle ranch and 2,000-acre coconut plantation. She also went into business operating a boutique and wicker furniture manufacturing plant. Patrice also continued to be active in her late husband's estate and attends tributes and dedications to him.
Tragedy struck when her daughter Arnella, who gave Patrice a grandson (actor Luke Flynn), died of a drug overdose in 1998. Patrice herself died of pulmonary complications on March 22, 2014.- Actor
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It's hardly surprising that the son of renowned Russian-born concert violinist Efrem Zimbalist Sr. (1889-1985) and Romanian-born opera singer Alma Gluck (1884-1938) would desire a performing career of some kind. Born in New York City on November 30, 1918, surrounded by people of wealth and privilege throughout his childhood, Efrem Zimbalist Jr. received a boarding school education. Acting in school plays, he later trained briefly at the Yale School of Drama but didn't apply himself enough and quit. As an NBC network radio page, he auditioned when he could and found minor TV and stock theatre parts while joining up with the Neighborhood Playhouse.
Following WWII war service with the Army infantry in which he was awarded the Purple Heart after being wounded, a director and friend of the family, Garson Kanin, gave the aspiring actor his first professional role in his Broadway production of "The Rugged Path" (1945) which starred Spencer Tracy. With his dark, friendly, clean-scrubbed good looks and a deep, rich voice that could cut butter, Zimbalist found little trouble finding work. He continued with the American Repertory Theatre performing in such classics as "Henry VIII" and "Androcles and the Lion" while appearing opposite the legendary Eva Le Gallienne in "Hedda Gabler".
Zimbalist then tried his hand as a stage producer, successfully bringing opera to Broadway audiences for the first time with memorable presentations of "The Medium" and "The Telephone". As producer of Gian Carlo Menotti's "The Consul", he won the New York Drama Critic's Award and the Pulitzer Prize for best musical in 1950. An auspicious film debut opposite Edward G. Robinson in House of Strangers (1949) brought little career momentum due to the untimely death of his wife Emily (a onetime actress who appeared with him in "Hedda Gabler" and bore him two children, Nancy and Efrem III) to cancer in 1950. Making an abrupt decision to abandon acting, he served as assistant director/researcher at the Curtis School of Music for his father and buried himself with studies and music composition.
In 1954, Efrem returned to acting and copped a daytime television soap lead (Concerning Miss Marlowe (1954)). It was famed director Joshua Logan who proved instrumental in helping Zimbalist secure a Warner Bros. contract. Despite forthright second leads in decent films such as Band of Angels (1957) with Clark Gable and Yvonne De Carlo; Too Much, Too Soon (1958) starring Dorothy Malone and Errol Flynn; Home Before Dark (1958) with Jean Simmons and Rhonda Fleming; The Crowded Sky (1960) with Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming, Troy Donahue and Anne Francis; A Fever in the Blood (1961) opposite Angie Dickinson and (his best) Wait Until Dark (1967) with Audrey Hepburn, it was television that made the better use of his refined, unshowy acting style. His roles as smooth private investigator Stu Bailey on 77 Sunset Strip (1958) and dogged inspector Lewis Erskine on The F.B.I. (1965) would be his ultimate claims to fame.
A perfect gentleman on and off camera, Zimbalist's severest critics tend to deem his performances bland and undernourished. Managing to override such criticisms, he maintained a sturdy career for nearly six decades. In 1991, he made fun of his all-serious reputation and pulled off a Leslie Nielsen-like role in the comedy parody Hot Shots! (1991). In addition to theater projects over the years, he has made fine use of his mellifluous baritone performing narrations and cartoon voiceovers, including that of Alfred the butler on a "Batman" animated series.
In 2003, he completed his memoirs, entitled "My Dinner of Herbs". The father of three, grandfather of four and great-grandfather of three, he settled in Santa Barbara and later in Solvang, California with longtime second wife Stephanie until her death in 2007 of cancer. Their daughter, also named Stephanie (Stephanie Zimbalist), is the well-known actress who appeared with Pierce Brosnan in the Remington Steele (1982) television series, in which Zimbalist had a recurring role. He and his daughter also appeared on stage together in his later years, their first being "The Night of the Iguana". His eldest daughter Nancy died in 2012.
Zimbalist died peacefully at his Solvang home of natural causes at the age of 95 on May 2, 2014; he had been outside watering his lawn at his Solvang, Calif., ranch when a handyman found him lying dead in the grass. "He was healthy, playing golf three days a week, and always in his garden," Zimbalist's son said.