Recent Obituaries, Classic Films Only
TCM just showed their end of the year memorial, TCM Remembers, with short clips of the actors, actresses and other well-known film crew who have passed away in 2011. As always, it reminds me of all of the great talents who are no longer with us.
And that reminded me that we haven't started up a DU3 Classic Films Obituary thread. The DU2 version of this thread started on December 4, 2005, and its 345th post was added on December 9, 2011.
I'll christen this new thread with a death that we missed in the old thread. Bill McKinney was born on September 12, 1931, and died on December 1, 2011.
These thumbnail sketches were usually variations on a theme: southern good ole boys gone bad, men with moonshine on their breath and malevolence in mind. McKinney was mostly used as a comic foil for the perennial straight man Eastwood. But as zany as some of his performances were, there was often an undercurrent of genuine menace, especially for viewers who had seen him in John Boorman's Deliverance (1972).
Besides its duelling banjos soundtrack, Deliverance remains most famous for a queasily protracted scene in which McKinney (credited as Mountain Man) and Herbert "Cowboy" Coward (Toothless Man) set upon a couple of city slickers (played by Ned Beatty and Jon Voight) who have taken a wrong turn on a canoeing trip in the deep south. The wild-eyed, rotten-toothed Mountain Man brandishes a knife, taunts Beatty's character, forces him to undress and then rapes him, demanding that he "squeal like a pig" – perhaps one of the best-known lines in 70s cinema.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/dec/08/bill-mckinney
(TCM Remembers 2011 is a set of silent clips, backed by a soothing vocal. The only words spoken come from Peter Falk, as the Grandfather, who says "As you wish...". It's lovely!)
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From the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/feb/26/erland-josephson
Although the actors who comprised Ingmar Bergman's repertory company all went on to make their own prestigious careers, they will for ever be associated with the great Swedish film and stage director. Erland Josephson, who has died aged 88 after suffering from Parkinson's disease, was artistically linked with Bergman even more than Max Von Sydow, Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Thulin. Josephson appeared in more than a dozen of Bergman's films, and played a Bergman surrogate in Ullmann's Faithless (2000).
In middle and old age, he was chosen by directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Theo Angelopoulos for the qualities he revealed in the Bergman films – a certain self-centred introspection and a deep melancholy, etched on his lined and grizzled features. Because he became a leading film actor in his 50s, he seems never to have been young.
His work with Bergman dated back to the 1940s, when they were at the Municipal theatre, Helsingborg. They then worked together at Gothenburg Municipal theatre and the Royal Dramatic theatre, Stockholm, where he took over from Bergman as artistic director in 1966.
His credits, as per IMDB:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0430746/
She was featured in the Andy Hardy series and in Gone with the Wind, but to me, she'll always be the flighty, wayward Lydia Bennet of the 1940 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-ann-rutherford-20120612,0,7959825.story
While roller skating home from Virgil Junior High, Ann would detour to Wilshire Boulevard radio stations, where she wandered into viewing rooms to watch actors work.
"One day my English teacher criticized me," Rutherford told The Times in 1969, "and I was furious. I thought, I wouldn't have to listen to Miss So-and-So if I were an actress."
She invented an acting history and presented it to KFAC, and a month later she was voicing Nancy in the radio series "Nancy and Dick: The Spirit of 76," Rutherford recalled in 2010.
When an actress she resembled dropped out of the 1935 film "Waterfront Lady," Rutherford was cast in the first of nearly 60 movies she would make by 1950.
IMDB credits:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0751946/
It really is a gem of a movie, optimistic but also blunt about the tensions and frustrations of courtship and marriage and family life...and of hanging out with the guys, of course!
Many of her obituaries mention her comeback role in Superman, but frankly the first thing I thought of was her part in Three Sovereigns for Sarah, a harrowing and very personal TV dramatization of the Salem witch trials and their aftermath.
I'd forgotten she was John Garfield's costar in The Breaking Point, which I caught on TCM a few years ago. It's well worth seeing, and is, believe it or not, based on the same work as To Have and Have Not...and you might not know it to look at it.
From the Guardian:
[url]http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/aug/17/phyllis-thaxter[/url]
Thaxter's theatre work led to her being offered the role of the pregnant wife of the second world war pilot played by Van Johnson in Mervyn LeRoy's excellent war drama Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944). Although she had only a few scenes, Thaxter made enough impression to gain an MGM contract. According to the New York Times critic: "Phyllis Thaxter is surpassingly affecting as the wife of Captain Lawson. Her comparative newness as an actress and a wistful voice give her a rare advantage."
The role, more or less, set the pattern for her film career. However, she had a rare chance to play against her nice-girl persona in Bewitched (1945). Described on the posters as "Darling of society, Cruel love killer, She lived two amazing lives", Thaxter played a schizophrenic – both a femme fatale and a good girl, female archetypes of film noir. She is a sweet young thing, who literally hears an evil voice within her, urging her on to murder. But it was back to pure pure sweetness and light in the all-star Week-End at the Waldorf (1945), in which she wrongly believes her fiance to be in love with a film star (played by Ginger Rogers), until persuaded otherwise. In Living in a Big Way (1947), she is a pretty war widow with three children who offers comfort to unhappily married Gene Kelly, and in Tenth Avenue Angel (1948), she is the doting mother of Margaret O'Brien, the little girl who infects everyone, except the audience, with her faith and joy.
Thaxter's last movie for MGM was Fred Zinnemann's Act of Violence (1948), in which she tries to be the voice of reason to stop an embittered ex-PoW played by Robert Ryan from wreaking revenge on his commanding officer (Van Heflin), who betrayed him to the Nazis.
Before taking up a contract with Warner Bros, Thaxter appeared in Robert Wise's noir western Blood on the Moon (1948) for RKO, where she is a wealthy cattle baron's daughter, sorely used by baddie Robert Preston, who promises her marriage. Her first role for Warners, in The Breaking Point (1950), a remake of To Have and Have Not, based on the Ernest Hemingway short story, was one of her best. Made to look dowdy, she is remarkably effective as the practical wife of a charter boat captain, played by John Garfield. Trying in vain to convince him to sell his boat and make a steady living, she tells him, "Pop says you can have a job anytime on his lettuce ranch in Salinas." Worried that he might be attracted to the blonde Patricia Neal, Thaxter desperately lightens her hair.
Her IMDB credits:
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0857187/[/url]
Karras (far right) with Victor/Victoria stars Robert Preston, Julie Andrews, and James Garner
Detroit Lions lineman Alex Karras has died. I include him in Classic Films because of his memorable role in Victor/Victoria, a very entertaining film memorable not only for its music and fun but for its (for the time) groundbreaking depiction of gay characters.
From what I've read, Alex Karras and his wife, Susan Clark, could be relied on to support Democrats and progressive causes in general.
[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/sports/football/alex-karras-nfl-lineman-and-actor-dies-at-77.html[/url]
Alexander George Karras was born on July 15, 1935, in Gary, Ind., where his father, George, a Greek immigrant, was a doctor, and his mother, the former Emmeline Wilson, was a nurse. An all-state football player in high school, he attended the University of Iowa, where in 1957 he won the Outland Trophy as the outstanding interior lineman in college football. In 1958, he was drafted in the first round by the Lions.
Karras’s other film credits included roles in the raunchy comedy “Porky’s,” the suspense thriller “Against All Odds” and the gender confusion comedy “Victor/Victoria.” He spent three seasons in the broadcast booth, working with Howard Cosell and Frank Gifford on ABC’s “Monday Night Football,” and later wrote a novel, “Tuesday Night Football,” sending up his experience. He also wrote an autobiography, “Even Big Guys Cry.”
I'll admit I was totally unfamiliar with the man. In Hollywood's golden era, he appeared alongside many notables. In recent years he was featured in Babylon 5!
[url]http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkish-hollywood-actor-dies-in-austria.aspx?pageID=238&nID=32134&NewsCatID=381[/url]
Turhan Bey, an actor whose exotic good looks earned him the nickname of “Turkish Delight” in films with Errol Flynn and Katherine Hepburn before he left Hollywood for a quieter life in Vienna, has died. He was 90.
(SNIP)
Born in Austria as Gilbert Selahettin Schultavey, the son of a Turkish diplomat, Bey assumed his stage name shortly after moving to the United States with his Jewish Czech mother from Vienna to escape the Nazis and being discovered by talent scouts from Warner Bros. studios.
His popular name was “Turkish Delight” - a reference to his suave good looks that made him an ideal partner to exotics like Maria Montez in escapist Technicolor adventure fantasies set in faraway places.
Jack Klugman: Tony Randall's costar in TV's The Odd Couple, star of Quincy (the forerunner of today's forensics series), and a tough yet likeable juror in 12 Angry Men.
Check out the write-up in The New York Times; it's quite an interesting read.
With E.G. Marshall (left) in 12 Angry Men
[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/25/arts/television/jack-klugman-stage-and-screen-actor-is-dead-at-90.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0[/url]
Mr. Klugman’s path to success was serendipitous. He was born in Philadelphia on April 27, 1922, the youngest of six children of immigrants from Russia. Most sources indicate that his name at birth was Jacob, though Mr. Klugman said in an interview that the name on his birth certificate is Jack.
His father, Max, was a house painter who died when Jack was 12. His mother, Rose, was a milliner who worked out of the family home in hardscrabble South Philadelphia, where Jack grew up shooting pool, rolling dice and playing the horses. His interest in acting was kindled at 14 or 15 when his sister took him to a play, “One Third of a Nation,” a “living newspaper” production of the Federal Theater Project about life in an American slum; the play made the case for government housing projects.
“I just couldn’t believe the power of it,” he said of the production in an interview in 1998 for the Archive of American Television, crediting the experience for instilling in him his social-crusading impulse. “I wanted to be a muckraker.”
After a stint in the Army — he was discharged because of a kidney ailment — Mr. Klugman returned to Philadelphia but racked up a debt to loan sharks who were so dangerous that he left town. He landed in Pittsburgh, where he auditioned for the drama department at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University).
“They said: ‘You’re not suited to be an actor. You’re more suited to be a truck driver,’ ” he recalled. But this was 1945, the war was just ending and there was a dearth of male students, so he was accepted. “There were no men,” he said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have taken me in.”
His credits, as per IMDB:
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001430/[/url]
[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/arts/mariangela-melato-italian-actress-dies-at-71.html?_r=0[/url]
Mariangela Melato, an Italian actress who achieved fame alongside Giancarlo Giannini portraying complicated relationships in the provocative films of Lina Wertmüller, including “The Seduction of Mimi” and “Swept Away (by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August),” died on Friday in Rome. She was 71.
(SNIP)
Ms. Melato was already a successful actress when she first appeared in a film written and directed by Ms. Wertmüller, the Italian filmmaker whose work has challenged Italian social and political mores and depicted often vicious sexual relationships. Blond and throaty-voiced, with striking green eyes, Ms. Melato played the love interest to Mr. Giannini’s bewildered chauvinist in three of Ms. Wertmüller’s films from the 1970s.
In “The Seduction of Mimi” (1972), Ms. Melato played Fiorella, a jilted Sicilian wife who takes revenge on her adulterous husband, Mr. Giannini’s Mimi, by cuckolding him. In “Love and Anarchy” (1973), Ms. Wertmüller’s anti-Fascist drama, Ms. Melato plays Salomè, a prostitute and anarchist who helps a callow farmer, Mr. Giannini’s Tunin, in his plot to assassinate Mussolini.
Probably Ms. Melato’s best-known role in a Wertmüller film was as Raffaella in “Swept Away,” a sometimes harrowing romantic comedy of class conflict released in Italy in 1974. Raffaella, a haughty member of the Milanese upper class, is outspoken in her contempt for Gennarino (Mr. Giannini), a Communist Sicilian deckhand aboard a yacht she has rented.
Though primarily known for tv roles as JR Ewing on Dallas and Major Tony Nelson on I dream of Jeannie, Larry Hagman was brilliant in the films he was in (especially Fail-Safe starring Henry Fonda) and the Eagle Has landed).
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He appeared in such feature films as The Group, Fail-Safe, Harry and Tonto, Mother, Jugs & Speed, The Eagle Has Landed, Superman, S.O.B., Nixon and Primary Colors. His television work included Getting Away from It All, Sidekicks, The Return of the World's Greatest Detective, Intimate Strangers and Checkered Flag or Crash.
He also directed (and appeared briefly in) a low-budget comedy and horror film in 1972 called Beware! The Blob, also called Son of Blob, a sequel to the classic 1958 horror film The Blob. This was the only feature film he directed
Sitcoms, suspense, Shakespeare -- he did it all, and very well.
[url]http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2013/feb/18/richard-briers[/url]
When he played Hamlet as a young man, Richard Briers, who has died aged 79 after suffering from a lung condition, said he was the first Prince of Denmark to give the audience half an hour in the pub afterwards. He was nothing if not quick. In fact, wrote the veteran critic WA Darlington, he played Hamlet "like a demented typewriter". Briers, always the most modest and self-deprecating of actors, and the sweetest of men, relished the review, happy to claim a place in the light comedians' gallery of his knighted idols Charles Hawtrey, Gerald du Maurier and Noël Coward.
"People don't realise how good an actor Dickie Briers really is," said John Gielgud. This was probably because of his sunny, cheerful disposition and the rat-a-tat articulacy of his delivery. "You're a great farceur," said Coward, delivering another testimony, "because you never, ever, hang about."
Although he excelled in the plays of Alan Ayckbourn, and became a national figure in his television sitcoms of the 1970s and 80s, notably The Good Life, he could mine hidden depths on stage, giving notable performances in Ibsen, Chekhov and, for Kenneth Branagh's Renaissance company, Shakespeare.
IMDB credits:
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001972/[/url]
He's been onstage in London's West End and on screen in Gosford Park, but Frank Thornton is perhaps best known as part of the British ensemble comedy Are You Being Served?
From the Guardian:
[url]http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2013/mar/18/frank-thornton[/url]
Born Frank Thornton Ball in Dulwich, south-east London, he was educated at Alleyn's school. He knew he wanted to be an actor from about the age of five, but first became an insurance clerk, taking drama classes at night at the London School of Dramatic Art. As a child, he described himself as "a bit of a loner, not one of the lads. I think I was probably a bit of a prig because I seem to have been stuck with this supercilious persona for as long as I can remember."
From his first professional appearance, in Terence Rattigan's French Without Tears in Co Tipperary, he swiftly graduated to companies led by the actor-managers Donald Wolfit – where he met his future wife, Beryl Evans – and John Gielgud. After reaching the West End and appearing in the first production of Rattigan's Flare Path in 1942, Thornton then spent four years in the real RAF.
After demob, he divided his time between repertory and the West End before his television comedy career took off in 1960 with Michael Bentine's frenetic It's a Square World. Regular appearances followed alongside such comic greats as Tony Hancock (including the celebrated Hancock's Half Hour episode, The Blood Donor), Benny Hill, Eric Sykes, Ronnie Corbett and even Kenny Everett, on whose show he memorably appeared attired as a punk rocker.
(SNIP)
Thornton had more than 60 film credits, including Victim (1961), The Dock Brief (1962), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (with Zero Mostel, 1966), A Flea in Her Ear (with Rex Harrison, 1968), The Bed Sitting Room (1969), The Old Curiosity Shop (1995) and Gosford Park (2001), as well as the Disney TV adaptation of Great Expectations (1991). His last appearance came in the 2012 film version of Run for Your Wife.
You'll all remember her from Going My Way (with Bing Crosby) and The Chocolate Soldier (with Nelson Eddy).
[url]http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/rise-stevens-opera-star-of-carmen-who-took-her-talents-to-radio-and-film-dies/2013/03/21/52dd80d0-c5dc-11df-94e1-c5afa35a9e59_story.html[/url]
Ms. Stevens won mass appeal by bringing her classical training to recognizable, beloved songs. Her rendition of Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria” is one of the most memorable moments in “Going My Way.” She was Anna in the production of “The King and I” that inaugurated the Music Theater of Lincoln Center in 1964. And, in the view of a Boston Globe critic, the sultry mezzo sang “Begin the Beguine,” by Cole Porter, “so insinuatingly she could have gotten herself arrested.”
Yet Ms. Stevens never set out to become a pop star. Her Hollywood career came about, she recalled in a 1990 interview with the Washington Times, when she caught the attention of MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer. It did not hurt that Ms. Stevens was about as far from the fat-lady stereotype as an opera singer could be.
After he heard her sing in San Francisco, Ms. Stevens said, Mayer called her in for a screen audition and booked her for “The Chocolate Soldier,” a 1941 film co-starring Nelson Eddy. She enjoyed the project enough to make “Going My Way,” but her life was not in the movies.
“People in the motion picture industry did not think of having a person who would want to go back to opera after having a chance to stay in Hollywood,” Ms. Stevens told the Washington Times. “Mayer told me, ‘What do you mean? I’m offering you this incredible chance at MGM.’ I told him that was my life."
This is weeks late, but I wanted to make sure Ray Harryhausen's passing was noted here.
The link will connect you to Fresh Air, a program on NPR (National Public Radio, for those of you who aren't in the U.S. or Canada).
[url]http://www.npr.org/2013/05/09/181947528/remembering-monster-maker-ray-harryhausen[/url]
"I do a lot of research when I create a creature," he told Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 2003. "I like to make him logical. That's my theory: Is that if you make them too extreme, too exaggerated, you lose your audience because they're just a grotesque piece of whatnot. You don't know quite what they are. So I try to keep them within harmony of something they've seen."
Harryhausen, a pioneer of stop-motion animation, won an Oscar for special effects with 1949's Mighty Joe Young, about a girl who raises a giant ape.
He went on to create such memorable beasts as the pterodactyl that kidnaps Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. and the animated skeleton soldiers in Jason and the Argonauts.
Official website:
[url]http://www.rayharryhausen.com/index.php[/url]
IMDB credits:
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0366063/[/url]
[url]http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-esther-williams-dies-20130606,0,68760.story[/url]
Esther Williams, a swimming champion known for the MGM “aqua musicals” of the 1940s and '50s that turned her into a major Hollywood star, died early Thursday in her sleep, her longtime publicist, Harlan Boll, announced. She was 91.
Her films had such titles as “Bathing Beauty,” “Neptune’s Daughter” and “Million Dollar Mermaid” and received mixed reviews, but they packed theaters. For seven years she was in the top 10 box-office list.
She and choreographer Busby Berkeley “turned a swimming pool into a seraglio, a sultan’s dream with breathtaking production numbers of gorgeous girls swimming in geometric shapes around blue water while Esther, with orchids and exotic plants wound round her hair framing that beauteous face, was the centerpiece,” former Times columnist Jim Murray once wrote.
Over 20 years, Williams made 26 movies; later they would be credited with paving the way for synchronized swimming as an Olympic sport.
Ansara is beloved by Star Trek fans as one of only seven actors to play the same character -- in his case legendary Klingon warrior Kang -- on three versions of the sci-fi series: the original (in the 1968 episode "Day of the Dove"
, Deep Space Nine (1994's "Blood Oath" and Voyager (1996's "Flashback" .
He also had major roles in such films as 1953's Julius Caesar and The Robe (as Judas); 1955's Jupiter’s Darling (his co-star in that film, swimmer-turned-actress Esther Williams, died in June); 1961's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (he also appeared in the subsequent ABC series); The Comancheros (1961) with John Wayne; The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965); Guns of the Magnificent Seven (1969); The Bears and I (1974); The Message (1977); and It’s Alive (1974).
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/michael-ansara-star-trek-kang-dies-598786
Margaret Pellegrini, who as a teenager was featured in the Munchkin sequence of The Wizard of Oz, has died at age 89. She was one of three surviving members of the Munchkins troupe.
[url]http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/margaret-pellegrini-surviving-munchkins-oz-dies-article-1.1421107[/url]
Then 16 years old, Pellegrini played both the Flowerpot Girl that greets Judy Garland’s Dorothy to Oz and one of the Sleepy Head Kids that appears in a scene a few minutes later. She even got to sing a couple of lines: “Wake up, you sleepyhead. Rub your eyes. Get out of Bed. Wake up, the Wicked Witch is dead.”
[url]http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/oct/08/patrice-chereau[/url]
Unusually for a director, Patrice Chéreau, who has died of lung cancer aged 68, had more or less equally prestigious careers in the theatre, cinema and opera. Although he was internationally known from films such as La Reine Margot (1994) and his groundbreaking production of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle at Bayreuth (1976), he was renowned in his native France mostly for his "must-see" stage productions, especially during his long stints as co-director of the Théâtre National Populaire (1971-77) and the Théâtre des Amandiers (1982-90).
At these two subsidised theatres, in Villeurbanne, near Lyons, and Nanterre, in western Paris, respectively, Chéreau was able to introduce modern plays and bring a freshness to bear on the classics, particularly Marivaux, whose La Dispute he directed to acclaim at the TNP in three different versions in the 1970s. At the Amandiers, his sensational 1983 production of Jean Genet's Les Paravents (The Screens) used the auditorium as an extension of the stage.
(SNIP)
In contrast to the rather melancholy mode of his first few films, La Reine Margot was a rumbustious adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas novel set during the religious war between the Catholics and the Protestants in late-16th-century France. With its battle scenes, sumptuous settings and depiction of the St Bartholomew's day massacre, it was Chéreau's most expensive and – at 161 minutes – longest film and his biggest box-office success by far. It led to a whole series of historical epics from France.
On a smaller scale and with much handheld camerawork, Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (Ceux Qui M'Aiment Prendront le Train, 1998), about the interplay of assorted characters on their way to the funeral of a misanthropic, bisexual minor painter (Jean-Louis Trintignant), was melodramatic, sentimental and emptily wordy.
Film credits:
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0161717/[/url]
Between this obituary and Noel Harrison's, this has been a week of Six Degrees of Separation.
Nigel Davenport's credits:
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0202638/[/url]
For some reason I never knew he was the son of Rex Harrison and the father of Cathryn Harrison. The former needs no introduction, and the latter has been in myriad British dramas (Story of a Marriage, Clarissa).
I'd also lost track of him over the years, aside from his appearance in the Henry Jaglom film Déjà Vu.
BBC obit:
[url]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24621444[/url]
The son of the actor Rex Harrison, he was best known for recording the hit song The Windmills Of Your Mind on The Thomas Crown Affair soundtrack.
It won best song at the 1968 Oscars and was later covered by artists including Dusty Springfield.
(SNIP)
He once said, of recording The Windmills Of Your Mind: "It didn't seem like a big deal at the time. I went to the studio one afternoon and sang it and pretty much forgot about it."
Harrison continued: "I didn't realise until later what a timeless, beautiful piece Michel LeGrand and the Bergmans had written. It turned out to be my most notable piece of work."
Here's a nice tribute, and a look at Harrison's multifaceted life:
[url]http://www.torquayheraldexpress.co.uk/pleasure-meet-Noel-Harrison-rare-Tinseltown/story-20007299-detail/story.html[/url]
Concealed by Noel Harrison’s modest exterior was the determination not just of a survivor, but of a winner. It may come as a surprise to learn that he represented Great Britain in the Winter Olympics of 1952 and 1956.
He was the British downhill and slalom champion in 1953, followed by winning the giant slalom championship in 1955.
In 1969 Noel decided that he “wanted to get the hell out of Hollywood and do something different”. The celebrity life had lost its excitement; there was a complete lack of anonymity and privacy. In those days, he said, it was bad enough, but nowadays it must be insufferable.
This led to him buying a 320 acre property for $23,000 in Nova Scotia, where his wooden house burnt down. So, after a couple of lessons from a neighbouring farmer in ‘God’s own country’ on how to avoid injuring himself too seriously with his newly bought and non-Health & Safety-approved chainsaw, he set to and built another one. An example unlikely to be followed by most of today’s ‘celebrities.’
IMDB credits:
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0365786/[/url]
The New York Times took the high road in their obituary and headline, mentioning her Oscar nominations, but several other news outlets mention the nasty baroness from The Sound of Music in the headlines. Sigh.
I remember being startled to realize that she played Paul Henreid's selfless wife in Between Two Worlds.
[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/movies/eleanor-parker-91-oscar-nominated-actress-dies.html?hpw&rref=television[/url]
She was nominated for an Oscar for dramatic roles as a wrongly convicted young prisoner in “Caged” (1950), a police officer’s neglected wife in “Detective Story” (1951) and an opera star with polio in “Interrupted Melody” (1955), a biography of the Australian soprano Marjorie Lawrence. She also received an Emmy Award nomination in 1963 for an episode of “The Eleventh Hour,” an NBC series about psychiatric cases.
If she never became a star, admirers contended, it was because of her versatility. Sometimes a blonde, sometimes a brunette, often a redhead, Ms. Parker made indelible impressions but submerged herself in a wide range of characters, from a war hero’s noble fiancée in “Pride of the Marines” (1945) to W. Somerset Maugham’s vicious waitress-prostitute in a remake of “Of Human Bondage” (1946).
(SNIP)
In 1953, with two recent Oscar nominations to her credit, Ms. Parker talked to The New York Times about her good career luck so far. “Things have a way of working out right for me,” she said, adding a bit later, “I maintain that if you work, believe in yourself and do what is right for you without stepping all over others, the way somehow opens up.”
“I even got my three wishes granted,” she said in the same interview. “To be in pictures, to give Mother a mink coat and buy the folks a house.”
IMDB credits:
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0662223/[/url]
With John Garfield in Pride of the Marines
Thanks for posting that; I'd entirely missed the notices.
I just discovered this blog posting on Virginia Gibson, who was of course one of the standouts among the dancers in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
With Jacques d'Amboise
[url]http://laurasmiscmusings.blogspot.com/2013/05/seven-brides-dancer-virginia-gibson.html[/url]
Matt Mattox airborne
[url]http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/audrey-totter-film-noir-femme-fatale-dies-at-95/2013/12/14/09fc25a8-64ec-11e3-a373-0f9f2d1c2b61_story.html?tid=pm_pop[/url]
Audrey Totter, an actress who specialized in playing temptresses, dangerous dames and women harboring dark schemes in a series of movies from Hollywood’s film noir period of the 1940s and ’50s, died Dec. 12 at a hospital in Woodland Hills, Calif. She was 95.
(SNIP)
Only later was she recognized as one of film noir’s biggest stars, along with other actresses including Gloria Grahame, Jane Greer and Barbara Stanwyck. Considered B-movie throwaways at the time, noir films are now one of the most avidly studied genres from Hollywood’s golden age.
“For years nobody bothered with me — didn’ t know who I was, didn’t care,” she told the Toronto Star in 2000. “Now I’m recognized on the street, I’m asked for my autograph, I get loads of fan mail.”
(SNIP)
“Who knew these movies would be so popular 50 years later? Maybe it’s because the world isn’t like that anymore. The fantasy of it. They painted with light in those days, it’s a look that just isn’t done anymore.”
Credits:
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0869429/[/url]
I loved him in everything he was in- he was one of the greats!!
hope you are having a happy holiday- 
[url]http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/05/saul-zaentz[/url]
The career of the film producer Saul Zaentz, who has died aged 92, was marked not only by his independence (his productions were often largely self-funded) but also by his dedication to each individual film. Unlike most producers, who have numerous projects on the go, Zaentz worked on just one at a time. This resulted in a relatively short CV but one with a high share of Oscars, including three best picture winners: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Amadeus (1984) and The English Patient (1996).
IMBD credits:
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0951763/[/url]
Her credits included Cabin in the Sky, Pinky, Imitation of Life, The Helen Morgan Story, and even Judging Amy!
[url]http://www.latimes.com/obituaries/la-me-juanita-moore-20140103,0,6850260.story#axzz2pmKiJHY9[/url]
Moore, who danced in chorus lines at swanky clubs in New York and Paris before throwing herself into her film career, died Wednesday after collapsing in her Los Angeles home. She was 99, according to her grandson Kirk Kelleykahn.
Whatever the case, she was an imposing presence — "a large, handsome woman who in her later years might have played Bessie Smith or Ma Rainey," wrote author Sam Staggs in "Born to Be Hurt," a 2009 book about "Imitation of Life."
In the film, Moore moves in with a character played by Lana Turner as the women, both single, raise teenage daughters.
http://www.latimes.com/obituaries/la-me-juanita-moore-20140103,0,6850260.story#ixzz2pmLCCtNl
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0601428/?ref_=nv_sr_1[
I was astonished by a few of the details in his obituary, including revelations about talents beyond those as actor and director.
[url]http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/celebrities/oscar-winning-actor-maximilian-schell-dies-at-83/2014/02/01/d883f642-8b4a-11e3-a760-a86415d0944d_story.html[/url]
The son of Swiss playwright Hermann Ferdinand Schell and Austrian stage actress Noe von Nordberg, Schell was born in Vienna on Dec. 8, 1930 and raised in Switzerland after his family fled Germany’s annexation of his homeland.
Schell followed in the footsteps of his older sister Maria and brother Carl, making his stage debut in 1952. He then appeared in a number of German films before relocating to Hollywood in 1958.
By then, Maria Schell was already an international film star, winning the best actress award at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival for her performance in “The Last Bridge.”
Maximilian made his Hollywood debut in Edward Dmytryk’s “The Young Lions,” a World War II drama starring Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Dean Martin.
IMDB credits:
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001703/[/url]
Last edited Thu Apr 10, 2014, 06:16 PM - Edit history (1)
April 23, 1928 - February 10, 2014
He was a cute young man and Donna Reed was a knockout when she wanted to be.
I wasn't at all familiar with his story! Read on.
[url]http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/herb-jeffries-jazz-balladeer-and-star-of-all-black-cowboy-movies-dies/2014/05/26/a2416490-c5da-11df-94e1-c5afa35a9e59_story.html?hpid=z5[/url]
Herb Jeffries, a jazz balladeer whose matinee-idol looks won him fame in the late 1930s as the “Bronze Buckaroo” — the first singing star of all-black cowboy movies for segregated audiences — died May 25 at a hospital in West Hills, Calif. He was widely believed to be 100, but for years he insisted he was much older.
The cause was stomach and heart ailments, said Raymond Strait, a friend of 70 years who had been working with Mr. Jeffries on his autobiography. Mr. Jeffries liked to exaggerate his age to shock listeners. “He wanted people to say, ‘Wow, he can still sing pretty good for 111,’ ” Strait said.
Mr. Jeffries had a seven-decade career on film, television, record and in nightclubs. His baritone voice — extraordinarily rich but delicate — was memorably captured on his greatest musical success, a 1941 hit recording of “Flamingo” with Duke Ellington’s big band.
With a towering physique and a square jaw, Mr. Jeffries was perfectly suited to capitalize on the singing-cowboy movie craze that Gene Autry and Roy Rogers popularized in the 1930s.
Last edited Fri Jan 27, 2017, 05:15 AM - Edit history (1)
Gordon Hugh Willis, Jr., ASC (May 28, 1931 – May 18, 2014) was an American cinematographer. He was best known for his work on Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather series as well as Woody Allen's Annie Hall and Manhattan.
His fellow cinematographer William Fraker had called Willis' work "a milestone in visual storytelling", while one critic suggested that "more than any other director of photography, Willis defined the cinematic look of the 1970s: sophisticated compositions in which bolts of light and black put the decade's moral ambiguities into stark relief".
When the International Cinematographers Guild conducted a survey in 2003, they placed Willis among the ten most influential cinematographers in history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Willis
There are a number of film figures who have left us recently and I've been meaning to post their obituaries quite literally for months. I'm going to start catching up, beginning with Oswald Morris.
[url]http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/19/oswald-morris[/url]
The Oscar-winning British cinematographer Oswald Morris, who has died aged 98, will be remembered for many classics, including Moulin Rouge, Fiddler on the Roof, Moby Dick and Lolita. He worked with some of the great directors, John Huston, Sidney Lumet, Carol Reed, Stanley Kubrick and Franco Zeffirelli. Many of Morris's films are landmarks in the history of colour cinematography. For Moulin Rouge (1952) he used filters to create a style reminiscent of paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec. For Fiddler on the Roof (1971), which won him an Oscar, he filmed with a silk stocking over the lens to give a sepia effect.
Morris also shot popular favourites such as The Guns of Navarone (1961), Oliver! (1968), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) and The Man Who Would Be King (1975), and photographed acting luminaries: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Gregory Peck and Humphrey Bogart. He was at the height of his profession for 30 years.
His credits, as per IMDB:
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005807/[/url]
Pictured: Fiddler on the Roof (1971)
[url]http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/gone-wind-actress-mary-anderson-694266[/url]
Mary Anderson, who played Maybelle Merriwether in Gone With the Wind and was one of the nine survivors cast adrift from a torpedoed ship in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, has died. She was 96.
(SNIP)
While attending Howard College (now Samford University) in her native Birmingham, Ala., Anderson was discovered by director George Cukor, who was searching for an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara in the adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War epic Gone With the Wind (1939).
Cukor was fired, and the role of O’Hara went to Vivien Leigh, who went on to capture the best actress Oscar. Anderson was cast in a small role as Maybelle, Scarlett’s cousin and the wife of Louisiana native Rene Picard (Alberto Morin).
In Lifeboat (1944), Anderson played U.S. Army nurse Alice Mackenzie opposite Tallulah Bankhead, William Bendix, Walter Slezak, John Hodiak and Hume Cronyn in the claustrophobic Hitchcock drama.
IMDB entry:
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0027156/[/url]
Yes, Rhett really was her surname, and she was even a native Southerner, born in Savannah and relocated to Charleston.
TCM has a lovely write-up:
[url]http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/person/160752|180318/Alicia-Rhett/[/url]
[url]http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/03/showbiz/alicia-rhett-dies/[/url]
Rhett was doing local theater productions when she was spotted for a role in the 1939 classic "Gone With the Wind," a film based on Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
She was cast as India Wilkes, sister of plantation owner Ashley Wilkes who was at odds with Scarlet O'Hara, played by Vivien Leigh.
While the runaway success and continued notoriety of "Gone With the Wind" made Rhett recognizable nationwide, she did not pursue the limelight. Instead of heading to Hollywood, Rhett went back to Charleston.
In the coastal South Carolina city, she developed a reputation as a talented artist, producing works seen in the state library and in many plantations in the area, as well as sketches of her fellow "Gone With the Wind" cast members, according to Borts.
[url]http://variety.com/2014/film/news/eli-wallach-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-villain-dies-at-98-1201246070/[/url]
Tony- and Emmy-winning actor Eli Wallach, a major proponent of “the Method” style of acting best known for his starring role in Elia Kazan’s film “Baby Doll” and for his role as villain Tuco in iconic spaghetti Western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” died on Tuesday, according to the New York Times. He was 98.
On the bigscreen Wallach had few turns as a leading man, but none was as strong as his first starring role in 1956’s “Baby Doll,” in which he played a leering cotton gin owner intent on seducing the virgin bride (Carroll Baker) of his business rival (Karl Malden). But he appeared in more than 80 films, offering colorful turns in character roles in movies such as “The Magnificent Seven,” “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “Nuts,” “Lord Jim,” “The Misfits” and “The Two Jakes.”
The actor, who appeared in a wide variety of stage, screen and television roles, was often paired with his wife Anne Jackson, particularly onstage. In 1948 he was one of the core of 20 who joined Kazan, Cheryl Crawford and Bobby Lewis in starting the Actors Studio, where he studied with Lee Strasberg. Others included Jackson, David Wayne, Marlon Brando, Patricia Neal and Maureen Stapleton.
Wallach received an Honorary Academy Award at the second annual Governors Awards, presented on Nov. 13, 2010, for “a lifetime’s worth of indelible screen characters.”
Yet he did so much more, appearing in everything from rodeos to radio to films such as Stella Dallas and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
[url]http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/dickie-jones-child-cowboy-who-became-the-voice-pinocchio-in-disney-film-dies-at-87/2014/07/08/a22918f4-06cc-11e4-a0dd-f2b22a257353_story.html[/url]
Despite more than 100 film and television credits, Dickie Jones was best known for a movie in which his face was never seen. As a child actor, he voiced the role of Pinocchio in the enduring 1940 animated film by Walt Disney.
Mr. Jones, who died July 7 at age 87, began performing when he was 4 and was billed as “the world’s youngest trick rider and trick roper” in his native Texas. He became a protege of the cowboy actor Hoot Gibson and had begun appearing in a series of low-budget westerns by the time he was 7.
After roles in the “Our Gang” serial and in the 1937 melodrama “Stella Dallas,” starring Barbara Stanwyck, Mr. Jones won an audition to become the voice of Pinocchio. He beat out 200 other child actors for the part.
“Pinocchio” was Disney’s second full-length animated feature, following “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937).
It seems that as a young boy he had a number of small, at times uncredited roles in classic movies -- Young Mr. Lincoln, Destry Rides Again, etc.
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0427934/[/url]
With Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Response to Staph (Original post)
Last edited Sun Sep 21, 2014, 09:39 PM - Edit history (1)
With Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear
Film role info below, with a SPOILER ALERT.
[url]http://www.cbsnews.com/news/emmy-winning-actress-and-singer-polly-bergen-dies-at-84/[/url]
In 1964's "Kisses for My President," Bergen was cast as the first female U.S. president, with Fred MacMurray as First Gentleman. (In the end, the president quits when she gets pregnant.) When Geena Davis portrayed a first woman president in the 2005 TV drama "Commander in Chief," Bergen was cast as her mother.
Among her other films was "Move Over, Darling" (1963) with Doris Day and James Garner, Susan Seidelman's 1987 "Making Mr. Right," and John Waters' 1990 "Cry-Baby," with Johnny Depp.
A fierce ambition prevailed throughout Bergen's entertainment career and in her business life. She walked out of early contracts with Paramount and MGM because she thought her film roles were inadequate.
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000917/[/url]
I particularly hate having to write this one, because it's far too soon, and the circumstances are so sad, and I admired Elizabeth Pena.
As offensive as the premise of I Married Dora sounds from the description below, the show did take a serious turn when Pena's character made reference to the civil war in El Salvador.
[url]http://variety.com/2014/tv/news/elizabeth-pena-cause-of-death-1201336835/[/url]
[url]http://www.nj.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2014/10/elizabeth_pentilde_appreciation_an_actress_who_didnt_get_the_credit_or_roles_she_deserved.html#incart_story_package[/url]
A Cuban-American who studied at New York City's High School for the Performing Arts, Peña displayed a curious mixture of sensuality and tenderness in almost every part: That's what enabled her to play both alluring troublemakers (see "Down and Out in " and her voice work in "The Incredibles" and warm-hearted matrons (see "Tortilla Soup" and "Nothing Like the Holidays" . In arguably her best role, as a widow rekindling things with her onetime boyfriend (Chris Cooper) in John Sayles' "Lone Star," those seeming contradictions played beautifully off one another.
"Liz Peña was an incredible actress and a great person," John Sayles told The Star-Ledger's film critic Stephen Whitty. "It was a joy to work with her on `Lone Star' and we'll all miss her."
Alas, the great parts proved few and far between. Some of this may have been because she was ahead of her time: She emerged on the scene a decade or so before American audiences were ready to embrace complex portraits of Latina characters. In 1987, Pena landed the co-starring role in an ABC sitcom called "I Married Dora." The premise was retrograde and racist — man marries his Salvadoran housekeeper to keep her from being deported; hijinks ensue — and the show lasted only a half-season.
Credits:
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001615/[/url]
With Chris Cooper in Lone Star
The writer, director, and comedy legend Mike Nichols died November 19th.
Born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin in 1931, Nichols fled Germany when he was just a boy. As a young man he studied with Lee Strasberg, and in 1960 made his Broadway debut as a performer. His first Broadway directorial credit was for Barefoot in the Park three years later.
[url]http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/director-mike-nichols-dies-age-83-n252326[/url]
Nichols was one of a small handful of people to win an Emmy, a Tony, a Grammy and an Oscar. His body of work included some of the defining American films of the second half of the 20th century, among them “Working Girl,” “Silkwood” and “The Birdcage.” He won an Oscar in 1968 for the seminal comedy “The Graduate.”
Across an extraordinary five-decade career, he won both popular success and critical acclaim as he moved easily between farces, political satires, romantic dramas and literary adaptations. He was known as an actor’s director who gave his performers the freedom to be loose and theatrical.
“There’s nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you’re meant to do,” he once said. “It’s like falling in love.”
He was a natural-born filmmaker. Nichols had never stepped behind the camera when Warner Brothers asked him to direct the “Virginia Woolf” adaptation in 1966. But the finished product was technically self-assured and thematically mature — and Nichols quickly followed it with the cultural touchstone “The Graduate.”
[url]http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/postscript-mike-nichols[/url]
To pick one item from his many résumés seems impractical, not to say unfair. The Nichols filmography is extensive, and it represents more than forty years of work, but whether it actually represents the best of him—whether cinema, as it were, occupied more than a couple of octaves on the keyboard—is another matter. Many readers of “Oscar Wilde,” Richard Ellmann’s majestic 1989 biography, were left with the disarming suspicion that, however crystalline Wilde’s plays are (and one of them is without flaw), they somehow fall short of maximum Wildeness, and that the importance of being Oscar outshone even the dazzle of his dramatic prose. Nichols, of course, was far less tempted to self-dramatize than Wilde, and the regular striking of a public pose did not concern him; nonetheless, when you survey the richness of his gifts, a movie like “Working Girl” (1986), deft and diverting as it was, feels a little limited—lacking the gleeful pulse that Sydney Pollack brought to “Tootsie,” for instance, earlier in the decade. The smoother the expertise that Nichols displayed, the more you found yourself wondering if his passions lay elsewhere, and, indeed, what they might consist of. At a distance, it seems bizarre that a filmmaker of such well-tempered urbanity was ever considered the right choice for the rousing, barely controllable comic indignation of “Catch-22.” Why should anyone expect an antiwar broadside from a director whose idea of an antibourgeois, as enshrined in “The Graduate,” was a polite young fellow with excellent grades and a well-pressed jacket and tie? As the wicked parody of Benjamin Braddock, in Mad magazine, put it, to Nichols’s bemusement and delight: “Mom, how come I’m Jewish and you and Dad aren’t?”
That is one of many tales retold in “Pictures from a Revolution,” Mark Harris’s delectable book on the Oscar-nominated pictures of 1967. One of them was “The Graduate,” and addicts of counterfactual history will lap up Harris’s disclosure that Nichols’s early choices, for the roles of Mr. and Mrs. Robinson, were Ronald Reagan and Doris Day. How much would you have paid to see that movie? (“Calamity Jane, are you trying to seduce me?” ) The only surprise is that Nichols failed to snag them. His eye for casting never dimmed, and actors swarmed to him, as if unbidden. Meryl Streep was there for “Silkwood” (1983), “Heartburn” (1986), and “Postcards from the Edge” (1988). Later, in the same vein, though on a smaller screen, Nichols turned to Emma Thompson, for “Primary Colors” (1998), “Wit” (2001), and “Angels in America” (2003). We should expect no less, from a guy whose climb to fame began in the company of Elaine May. Their duologues stand up astoundingly well, even now, and the equality and fraternity of their act, as they strop their eager wits on one another, has grown more touching with age. If anything, by a hair’s breadth, she has the edge.
Credits:
[url]http://ibdb.com/person.php?id=7767[/url]
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001566/[/url]
With Elaine May
[url]http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/11/christopher-lee-dies-at-the-age-of-93-dracula[/url]
Sir Christopher Lee, known as the master of horror, has died at the age of 93 after being hospitalised for respiratory problems and heart failure.
The veteran actor, immortalised in films from Dracula to The Wicker Man, and via James Bond villainy to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, died at 8.30am on Sunday morning at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London.
(SNIP)
The actor was knighted in 2009 for services to drama and charity, and was awarded the Bafta fellowship in 2011.
IMDB credits:
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000489/[/url]
[url]http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/06/11/413674728/ron-moody-who-delighted-audiences-as-fagin-in-oliver-dies[/url]
Ronald Moodnick was born in North London. His parents were of Russian-Jewish descent. Moody attended the London School of Economics but cherished his hobby appearing in musical revues. Had he not become a professional actor, Moody once said, he would've been an accountant.
Throughout his career, Moody played a variety of parts on stage and screen: Captain Hook in Peter Pan; an actor/manager in the Miss Marple movie Murder Most Foul. He was the greedy count Ippolit Vorobyaninov in Mel Brooks' comedy Twelve Chairs. He had numerous guest appearances on such TV shows as The Avengers and EastEnders. One of his big regrets, he often said, was turning down the chance to play the lead in Doctor Who.
Moody once told NPR he was raised on American musicals from the 1930s. "When I was young, they [Americans] were the great masters of the musical," Moody said in a 1988 interview. "I'll never forget seeing Guys and Dolls over and over. I used to sit up in the coliseum watching this magnificent musical. Brilliant."
A notorious improviser, Moody had a reputation for changing up lines to get bigger laughs during the London stage version of Oliver! — something his fellow actors apparently didn't like much. In a 2006 interview with the Wales on Sunday newspaper, Moody defended himself, saying, "I grew up with music hall and revue and was used to filling in the little gaps here and there to get bigger audience reaction." He added that there are two kinds of actors: "The anarchist to whom the theatre is a playground and the neurotic to whom it's a cage."
IMDB credits:
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0600531/[/url]
She appeared as part of a love triangle in the film Passione d'Amore, which was later reconceived as the musical Passion.
New York Times obituary:
[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/movies/laura-antonelli-leading-italian-actress-dies-at-73.html?_r=0[/url]
IMDB credits:
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000773/[/url]
Dickie Moore, who gained fame in the Our Gang series, was one of the few surviving actors who'd worked in the silent era. For all that I grew up watching him in the Little Rascals shorts on WPIX, I never really knew him by name the way I did other child actors of the era. As a result, the obituary was full of jaw-dropping revelations.
[url]http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-dickie-moore-20150912-story.html[/url]
Born John Richard Moore Jr. on Sept 12, 1925, in Los Angeles, he was known for his big brown eyes, mop of dark hair and cherubic face. Even as a baby, his looks got him a job — a casting director spotted him at 11 months and wanted him for a scene in the film "The Beloved Rogue" starring John Barrymore.
(SNIP)
Moore quickly became a steadily working actor. By the time he was in the "Our Gang" short "Hook and Ladder" (1932), he had appeared in more than 30 features and shorts.
(SNIP)
Even while appearing in the shorts, Moore was getting feature exposure, most prominently in Josef von Sternberg's "Blonde Venus" (1932) in which he played the son of Marlene Dietrich, and "So Big!" (1932) starring Barbara Stanwyck, one of his favorites to work with.
"Affectionate and demonstrative, she was easy to understand," he wrote in his book. "She was a direct and gracious woman, who seemed extremely interested in whatever interested me."
Have a look at his IMDB credits below. For me, there were a number of surprises.
[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0601129/[/url]
January 26, 2016
Though his classic film resume is short, it contains one very memorable role: Tessio in The Godfather. The scene in which he realizes his murder is imminent is one for the ages. No one could have done it better.
There have been a number of notables we've lost over the last couple of months, and I am going to begin with the most recent one, Patty Duke.
[url]http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-patty-duke-20160330-story.html[/url]
Patty Duke came to fame as a teenager, combining both a masterful talent for dramatic acting with a sunny, all-American image that enchanted both TV and film audiences. But her admirers had no clue about the much-uglied reality of Duke's childhood, marred by nightmarish abuse and exploitation. Overcoming her troubles in her adult years, Duke became an outspoken advocate for mental health causes.
Duke, who won an Oscar at age 16 for her portrayal of Helen Keller in "The Miracle Worker" but was more known for her bouncy 1960s TV sitcom "The Patty Duke Show," died Tuesday at age 69 at a hospital in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho
(SNIP)
It wasn't until 1982 that a psychiatrist diagnosed Duke with bipolar disorder, then known as manic depression. With a combination of medication and therapy, the actress was eventually able to reach equilibrium. In 1988, she revealed her long battle with mental illness and the harrowing abuse she'd suffered as a child in her autobiography, "Call Me Anna," written with Times film critic Kenneth Turan. The book, which became a bestseller and was made into a 1990 TV movie for ABC (in which Duke also starred), is widely credited with helping to remove the stigma attached to mental illness.
(SNIP)
Duke's struggles with mental illness did little to dampen her popularity within the industry. She served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1985 to 1988, the second female president of the union.
January 26th, 2017
Born Krekor Ohanian in Fresno, Calif., on Aug. 15, 1925, Connors served in the Army Air Force during World War II, then came to Westwood on a basketball scholarship. While aiming for law school, he developed a passion for acting and appeared in several plays. He was encouraged by Oscar-winning writer-director William Wellman (A Star Is Born), who spotted him while he played for the Bruins.
Connors got his professional start in 1952 in an RKO release, Sudden Fear, as Touch Connors (Touch had been his nickname at UCLA). He continued in small roles for a number of years, with turns in Island in the Sky (1953), starring John Wayne, and as a herder in The Ten Commandments (1956) with Charlton Heston.
He changed his name to Mike Connors in 1958 and appeared in such movies as Live Fast, Die Young (1958) and Situation Hopeless … But Not Serious (1965), which starred Alec Guinness. He landed one of his best early movie roles in the 1966 remake of Stagecoach, playing the cardsharp.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/mike-connors-dead-star-mannix-was-91-969213
He made his TV debut in 1954 with a role on Ford Theatre and continued with numerous small roles while gaining recognition as a heavy in such Westerns as Gunsmoke, Maverick, Wagon Train and Cimarron City.
Connors is best remembered, however, for his TV series Mannix, which ran for eight seasons (from September 1967 until April 1975) on CBS.
The Guardian's obituary:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/oct/19/danielle-darrieux-obituary
There are few actors who embodied many people’s idea of a French woman of the world more than Danielle Darrieux, who has died aged 100. Starting as an ingenue in the 1930s, she grew into a sophisticate in the 40s and 50s, and retained a dignified and magical presence in films into the new century.
The outstanding examples of her art were the three films Darrieux made with the German-born Max Ophüls when she was in her 30s. In La Ronde (1950), she played the married woman who is seduced by a student (Daniel Gélin). The second and best of the three adapted tales by Guy de Maupassant in Le Plaisir (House of Pleasure, 1952) is La Maison Tellier, in which Darrieux played one of a group of prostitutes paying an annual holiday visit to the country. But it was the title role of Madame de ... (1953, released in English as The Earrings of Madame de …) that gave her even more of a chance to shine as a fickle socialite who sells her earrings to pay off a debt, unbeknown to her husband (Charles Boyer).
Her IMDB page:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0201638/?ref_=fn_nm_nm_1
(CNN)
Broadway and television actress Rose Marie, best known for her role as Sally Rogers on "The Dick Van Dyke Show," died Thursday (Dec 28, 2017), her publicist said, citing her family. She was 94.
Born Rose Marie Mazetta on August 15, 1923, in New York, she began performing at age 3 by winning an amateur contest that took her to Atlantic City, New Jersey. She soon began performing on network radio.
SNIP
Rose Marie starred as Baby Rose Marie in several of the earliest talking films, according to The National Museum of American History. She donated several personal items to the museum, including her trademark black hair bow and shoes from her radio days.
One of those early films was 1933's "International House" with W.C. Fields, Cab Calloway and Bela Lugosi, according to IMDb.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/28/entertainment/rose-marie-dies/index.html
Carl Reiner (via Twitter): "There's never been a more engaging & multi-talented performer. In a span of 90 years, since she was four, dear Rosie performed on radio, in vaudeville, night clubs, films, TV, & Vegas & always had audiences clamoring for "more!!"
Incredible career and great talent.
You may not know the name but you definitely know the work. What an amazing career—from Casablanca to J. Edgar. What an amazing influence on our collective imaginations.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/bill-gold-designer-of-movie-posters-that-helped-shape-hollywoods-mystique-dies-at-97/2018/05/28/ad8f532e-6038-11e8-9ee3-49d6d4814c4c_story.html?utm_term=.92dc3ed30cf6
From the above:
Although Mr. Gold worked mostly in New York, his artistry throughout a seven-decade career helped shape the mystique of Hollywood. The first poster he designed, after joining the Warner Bros. art department, was for “Yankee Doodle Dandy” (1942), starring James Cagney. His second job was “Casablanca.”
Mr. Gold later worked on many of Clint Eastwood’s projects and came out of retirement in 2011 to produce the poster for “J. Edgar,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio as FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
“The first image you have of many of your favorite films,” Eastwood wrote in the introduction to a 2010 collection of Mr. Gold’s posters, “is probably a Bill Gold creation.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/05/bill-gold-movie-posters
http://billgold.net/
Mary Carlisle, a Hollywood actress who enjoyed popularity in the 1930s as a wholesome ingenue in musical comedies opposite singer Bing Crosby, died Aug. 1 at a retirement community for actors in the Woodland Hills section of Los Angeles.
Her son, James Blakeley III, confirmed the death but did not provide an immediate cause. She was believed to be 104 but never confirmed her real age, even to her family. As a centenarian, she was known to tell visitors that her true age was “none of your business.”
With her blond hair, blue eyes and alabaster skin, Ms. Carlisle had the delicate beauty of an all-American porcelain doll. “This girl has the most angelic face I ever saw,” Universal studio production chief Carl Laemmle Jr. reportedly declared upon spotting the unknown Ms. Carlisle at the company’s canteen. “I’ve got to make a test of her right away.”
Ms. Carlisle appeared in more than 60 films in a career that lasted about a dozen years. Much to her dismay, she was typecast as the perpetual innocent, a decorative virgin.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/local/obituaries/mary-carlisle-a-perpetual-ingenue-in-dozens-of-1930s-films-dies-at-104/2018/08/01/6c875ea6-95b9-11e8-a679-b09212fb69c2_story.html?noredirect=on
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