about me
Anyone who knows me is aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been building an autograph collection of my favourite actors’ signed photographs. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I enjoy. I have collected the photographs from the actors themselves, through contacts in the studios and through auctions. I now have over 2,000 photographs in the collection.
My Autograph Collection
I have separated my autograph collection into different categories, which you can see below. Feel free to browse whichever section interests you. Inside, I share not only the autographed photo in my possession, but also information about the actor, including their biography, photos and posters of their movies, and sometimes videos dedicated to them.
Whether you’re drawn to classic Hollywood icons, contemporary superstars, or character actors with a cult following, there’s something in my autograph collection for every movie enthusiast. If you enjoy my blog, don’t hesitate to leave a comment on one of my entries.
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Cecile Aubry was born in Paris in 1928. She achieved cinema fame with the film “Manon” in 1949. She starred opposite Tyrone Power in “The Black Rose”. She retired from acting early and became a very successful children’s writer. She died in 2010.
Her “Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan:
In 1950, in a blaze of typical Hollywood publicity, Cécile Aubry, who has died of lung cancer aged 81, was signed up by 20th Century-Fox to co-star with Tyrone Power and Orson Welles in Henry Hathaway’s The Black Rose. It was to be Aubry’s only American film, placing her among several French actresses who had short-lived Hollywood careers after the liberation of France in 1944. The petite, blue-eyed blonde with a seductive pout had appeared previously in only one film, playing the title role in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Manon (1949), which won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival. In this dark updating (to post-second world war Paris) of the Abbé Prévost’s 18th-century novel Manon Lescaut, the 20-year-old Aubry made an immediate and vivid impression. She managed to bring out the duality of the character – both femme fatale and femme enfant – making her a precursor to the sex-kitten Brigitte Bardot
Born Anne-José Madeleine Henriette Bénard into a wealthy family in Paris, she had an English governess and a personal dance teacher. In her late teens, she joined the celebrated acting school run by René Simon, where she was spotted by Clouzot. “To achieve what he wanted, Clouzot pushed the actors to the limit, especially the women,” Aubry said. “But he also declared that he needed to be in love with the leading women he directed. The shoot was very long and very difficult, seven months. Clouzot sacrificed everything and everyone to his creation.” Hathaway also had a reputation as a bully, but in The Black Rose he failed to get good performances from Power, as a 13th-century Saxon nobleman seeking his fortune in the far east, or from Welles, hamming it up hugely as a Mongol warlord, or from Aubry as a half-English, half-Arab captive (with a French accent!) whom Power rescues from Welles. According to the New York Herald Tribune of the day: “The heroine is portrayed by Cécile Aubry with a studied gamin intensity. She bedevils the handsome Englishman with arch gestures when he is in the greatest peril. In a nonsensical role, she pouts prettily and puts on a variety of oriental costumes.” This, more or less, sums up the reaction to Aubry’s irritating performance, and her Fox contract was not renewed.
During the shooting of The Black Rose in Morocco, she met Si Brahim El Glaoui, the oldest son of the pasha of Marrakech. They were married in secret because she thought that a marriage would harm her Hollywood career. On her return to France, Aubry starred in French and German versions of Bluebeard (1951), both directed by Christian-Jaque, with Pierre Brasseur and Hans Albers in the title role respectively. Aubry played Bluebeard’s seventh wife as a sexy teenager, even performing a silhouetted striptease that left little to the imagination. She appeared in a few forgotten movies in Italy and Spain, then retired from acting and lived in Morocco with her husband. After her divorce, she settled in France, where she became a director and writer of children’s television series.
The most notable of these was the hugely successful Belle et Sébastien. Adapted by Aubry from her own novel, it ran for 13 episodes in 1965, with two sequels broadcast in 1968 and 1970. The adventures of a young boy, Sébastien (played by her son, Mehdi El Glaoui), and his large white dog, Belle, in a small village in the Pyrenees, the series continues to be shown on television internationally to each new generation. A dubbed version was broadcast by the BBC from 1967 to 1968. Aubry is survived by Mehdi, who continued as an actor into adulthood.
• Cécile Aubry (Anne-José Madeleine Henriette Bénard), actor, writer and director, born 3 August 1928; died 19 July 2010
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Barbara White (11 December 1923 – 6 February 2013) was a British actress. She played several leading roles during a brief film career during the 1940s. She also appeared on stage in Lesley Storm‘s Great Day amongst others. She married the Irish actor Kieron Moore whom she acted with in The Voice Within (1946).
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Guardian OBITUARY in 1999
Few actresses suffered more beautifully on screen than Sylvia Sidney, who has died aged 88. Although her film career began with the coming of sound, she had many of the intense, vulnerable, waiflike qualities of great silent screen stars like Lillian Gish. Her petite figure, heart-shaped face and sad, saucer eyes made her the prototype of the downtrodden Depression heroine.
Sylvia Sidney, who once said she was “paid by the tear”, was born Sophia Kosow in the Bronx. Because she was a shy child, with a stammer, her Jewish immigrant father, Victor, and her Romanian-born mother, Rebecca, encouraged their daughter to take up acting. She trained at the Theatre Guild School with Rouben Mamoulian, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, changing her name to Sylvia Sidney when her mother married a dentist, Dr Sigmund Sidney
She made her professional debut at 16 in Washington, and had her first leading role in Crime, on Broadway, in 1927. It was while appearing in New York, in Bad Girl (1930), that she was spotted by Paramount boss BP Schulberg, who offered her a contract – and became her lover.
Sylvia was rushed into Mamoulian’s groundbreaking City Streets (1931) when Clara Bow, Schulberg’s earlier discovery, was having one of her nervous break downs. As a sensitive girl, who takes the blame for a murder her father has committed, Sidney immediately became a star. One of the key scenes is when she is visited by her young racketeer lover, Gary Cooper, who tries to embrace her through the wire mesh of her cell.
As a result Sidney became a victim of her victim persona, typecast throughout the 1930s. She was painfully poignant as the factory worker made pregnant by her social-climbing boyfriend in An American Tragedy, in Street Scene she was tenement-dweller Rose Moran, whose adulterous mother is shot by her father; in Ladies Of The Big House, she was back behind bars again, and in Merrily We Go To Hell, Fredric March’s drinking and womanising drives her to despair. Abandoned by Cary Grant’s Pinkerton, she was a delicately graceful Cio-Cio San in Madame Butterfly – after which performance condoms were referred to by the US servicemen in the Far East as “Sylvia Sidneys”.
Madame Butterfly was directed by the Russian-born Marion Gering, who made six of Sidney’s pictures, including Jennie Gerhardt (1932), in which she played another pathetic heroine ruined by poverty and pregnancy. At MGM, in Fritz Lang’s first American film, Fury (1936), Sidney was cast as Spencer Tracy’s supportive fiancée, helplessly witnessing a mob’s attempts to lynch him. Lang directed her again the following year as Henry Fonda’s faithful wife in You Only Live Once.
She also worked for Alfred Hitchcock in England in Sabotage (1936), in which she knifes her husband. In 1937, she made Dead End for William Wyler, playing the concerned sister of a juvenile delinquent. But good films and good directors failed to prevent her becoming fed up with her typecasting, and the lack of a chance to demonstrate her versatility as an actress in a different kind of role.
Ironically, Sylvia Sidney was a witty, warm and fun-loving woman. After leaving Schulberg, she was briefly married to the publisher Bennett A Cerf, who commented, “One should never legalise a hot romance.” Her second husband was the actor Luther Adler (with whom she had a son, who died in 1987), and then the producer Carleton W Alsop. She wrote The Sylvia Sidney Needlepoint Book and bred pug dogs.
By the early 1940s, she was devoting more time to the stage than films. “I never adjusted,” she remarked. “If I made a movie, they called me a stage actress. If I was in a play they called me a movie actress.” Touring in stock, she played Eliza Doolittle and Jane Eyre, while in the movies she was the fortune-teller smitten by Humphrey Bogart in The Wagons Roll At Night (1941), James Cagney’s Eurasian girlfriend in Blood In The Sun (1945) and Fantine in Les Miserables (1953).
She spent most of the 1960s in touring productions, notably in The Trojan Women, as Regina in The Little Foxes and Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. She played across America in Aunt Mame and created Mrs Kolowicz, a caricatural Jewish momma, in Carl Reiner’s Enter Laughing on Broadway.
After a 17-year hiatus away from films, in 1973 Sidney returned as Joanna Woodward’s mother in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams – a performance nominated for an Oscar. Damien: Omen II introduced her to a new generation of cinemagoers, after which she played in Wim Wenders’s Hammett (1982) and appeared as a ghost in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988).
Burton then cast her as the wheelchair-bound heroine of Mars Attacks (1997). With her stuffed cat for company in an old-age home, she sits listening to Slim Whitman’s Indian Love Call, the sound of which ultimately destroys the invading creatures. Whatever the merits of the film, it was heartening to see an actress celebrated for her interpretation of forlorn characters thoroughly enjoying herself on screen.
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Hollywood reporter obiturary in 2020
John Ericson, who starred alongside Anne Francis on TV’s Honey West and with Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock and with Angela Lansbury in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, has died. He was 93.
Ericson died Sunday of pneumonia in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he had been living since the mid-1990s, a family spokesman said.
Ericson appeared on Broadway in the original production 1951 of Stalag 17, directed by José Ferrer, and he made his film debut inTeresa (1951), directed by Fred Zinnemann. Three years later, he starred with Elizabeth Taylor in Rhapsody (1954).
Ericson played “Man Friday” Sam Bolt opposite Francis’ private eye title character and a pet ocelot named Bruce on ABC’s Honey West, produced by Aaron Spelling. The action show lasted just one 30-episode season (1965-66), but Francis’ karate kicks lived long afterward in reruns and in syndication.
He and Francis had played brother and sister in John Sturges’ classic Bad Day at Black Rock (1955).
Born Joseph Meibes on Sept. 25, 1926, in Düsseldorf, Germany, Ericson studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York in the same class as Grace Kelly, Jack Palance and Don Rickles.
He went on to portray the title bad guy in Pretty Boy Floyd (1960), and his credits also included Forty Guns (1957), starring Barbara Stanwyck, and Day of the Badman (1958), featuring Fred MacMurray.
On television before and after Honey West, Ericson showed up on Shirley Temple’s Storybook; Wagon Train; The Fugitive; Bonanza; Marcus Welby, M.D.; Police Woman; CHiPs; General Hospital; and many other shows.
Survivors include his wife, Karen, and daughter, Nicole
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KATY JURADO OBITUARY IN “THE GUARDIAN” IN 2002.
Katy Jurado who has died at the age of 78, was one of the Latina actors who hit Hollywood long before the contemporary generation, for whom, along with the likes of Dolores del Rio, she helped pave the way. Unlike Del Rio or Maria Felix, she was not a classic beauty, but her enormous eyes and body language quietly signalled powerful sexuality and a strength of character, the latter particularly significant in her US films.
Her family was extremely wealthy: indeed, generations before, they had owned the whole of what is now Texas. Come the Mexican revolution, they lost it, and, as Jurado remarked ironically: “My family is no longer very, very rich, but they still live that way.” Her father was a cattle rancher and owner of orange groves; her mother, a former opera singer who had retired from the stage to marry.
In 1943, to the dismay of her family Jurado was signed up to appear in Internado Para Señoritas, directed by Gilberto Martínez Solares, for which she won an Ariel (Mexico’s Oscars). There was then a spate of 13 films before she made her American debut, as the wife of Gilbert Roland in Bud Boetticher’s The Bullfighter And The Lady (1951), shot in Mexico.
Jurado appeared in three more Mexican movies, including a great performance in Luis Buñuel’s El Bruto (1952) – for which she won the top Mexican award – before going to Hollywood the same year to play in Fred Zinneman’s High Noon.
Reportedly not knowing any English, during the shoot of both her early US films she learnt her lines phonetically, had them explained in Spanish and “hoped for the best”. This seems difficult to believe, especially when you see her performance in High Noon, for which she was Oscar-nominated as best supporting actress, so it may have been a publicity stunt.
Whatever the truth, Jurado continued to make US films until the early 1960s, appearing in such productions as Arrowhead (1953), with Charlton Heston, and Broken Lance (1954), as Spencer Tracy’s Indian wife. She took over this role from Dolores del Rio, who was refused a work permit for having contributed to a cause considered communist in the US.AJurado won an Oscar for best supporting actress in Broken Lance, though, in some ways, it is difficult to see why. For most of the film, she does little except play sounding board for Tracy – although she does it well. She only comes into her own at the end, when her performance is short but emotionally powerful. She was heavily made-up to add to her years.
Other films included Trapeze (1956), with Burt Lancaster, and One-Eyed Jacks (1959), with Marlon Brando, before she returned to make films in Mexico. Her later US work included Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid (1973), John Huston’s Under The Volcano (1984) and Stephen Frears’s Hi-Lo Country (1998), in which her appearance lasted hardly longer than her name on the credits, although her presence was as immediate and powerful as ever
She made guest appearances in US television series such as Alias Smith And Jones and The Virginian, continued to work in Mexico, and appeared consistently on Mexican television from the 1970s. She won many awards at home, and is the only Mexican woman to have received the keys to New York City, in 1954.
But film was not Jurado’s only profession: she wrote features, film reviews and, as an authority on bullfighting, for Mexican newspapers. She was also a radio commentator.
She was married at a young age to Victor Velasquez, the Mexican film actor and writer, by whom she had a son and a daughter; in 1959 she married the actor Ernest Borgnine, from whom she was divorced after five years.
· Maria Cristina Estella Marcela Jurado García, actor and writer, born January 16 1924; died July 5 2002
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Guardian obituary in 2007
Although there had been a number of leading Asian actors in the US before Miyoshi Umeki, who has died aged 78, she was the first to win an Oscar and to make an impact in films, on stage and on television.
Umeki’s Academy award was for best supporting actress in the 1957 movie Sayonara, as a Japanese woman who marries an American soldier, played by Red Buttons, who won the best supporting actor category. The US military does everything it can to break up the marriage, finally forcing the couple to commit suicide rather than face being separated by his transfer.
The 5ft 1in tall Umeki gave such a tender performance that she overcame the submissive nature of the role. Likewise, her personality, wit and charming singing overrode much of the patronising attitude of the Rogers and Hammerstein Broadway musical Flower Drum Song (1958), in which she appeared on both stage and screen.
According to Time magazine, which featured Umeki and her co-star Pat Suzuki on the cover: “When Miyoshi Umeki glides on stage to star in her first Broadway show, her first four words capture the house. The warmth of her art works a kind of tranquil magic, and the whole theatre relaxes.”
Born in the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, Umeki was the youngest of nine children, whose father owned a successful iron factory. She was first exposed to US popular music as a teenager by a group of GIs who befriended her family shortly after VJ day in August 1945. While listening to Armed Forces Radio, she started to sing by imitating Dinah Shore, Peggy Lee and Doris Day, learning the words of the songs phonetically. She soon found her own voice, singing on Japanese radio and television, and recording for RCA Japan under the name of Nancy Umeki.
Two years after appearing in one Japanese film, a musical called Seishun Jazu Musume (Youthful Jazz Daughter, 1953), she went to the US to play the nightclub circuit. Her appearance on the Arthur Godfrey and Friends TV show on television in 1955 was noticed by a Warner Bros casting agent, who got her to make a screen test for Joshua Logan, the director of Sayonara.
Like many Oscar winners before and after her, Umeki was almost lost for words at the awards ceremony. She could only say: “I wish somebody would help me right now. I didn’t expect it and have nothing in my mind. Except I want to thank you and you and you and all American people.”
Umeki and a few other Japanese actors had begun to profit from America’s rapprochement with its erstwhile enemy, and such Japanese films as Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) were beginning to be more widely shown, although there was still a long way to go to overcome stereotyping.
Flower Drum Song, directed by Gene Kelly and featuring a mostly Asian cast, had the Japanese Umeki playing an illegal Chinese immigrant just arrived in San Francisco for an arranged marriage – Broadway and Hollywood seldom bothered to make ethnic distinctions. Her two solo numbers, A Hundred Million Miracles and I’m Going To Like It Here, were sweetly sung both on stage and in the 1961 film version, but the character was not much of an advance from the days of Anna May Wong.
Umeki’s other Hollywood movies, all feeble attempts to dispute that “never the twain shall meet”, were Cry For Happy (1961), in which she played one of four geisha girls – all smiles and gestures – entertaining four American naval photographers on leave in Tokyo; The Horizontal Lieutenant (1962) – smiling and inscrutable while watching Jim Hutton’s antics as an American serviceman on a Pacific island; and A Girl Named Tamiko (1962), in which she was living with British antique dealer Michael Wilding.
Umeki found rather more rewarding work on television, especially in 66 episodes, between 1969 and 1972, of The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. The show centered around Bill Bixby as a youngish widower whose freckled-faced, six-year-old son, Eddie (Brandon Cruz), tries to manipulate his father into getting a new wife. Umeki played the sage Japanese housekeeper, Mrs Livingston, always called by her last name, while she calls her boss “Mr Eddie’s father”.
After the show ended its run, Umeki retired from show business and moved to a small town in the Missouri Ozarks. She is survived by the son of her second marriage, to the sometime producer and director Randall Hood.
· Miyoshi Umeki, actor, born May 8 1929; died August 28 2007
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New York Times obituary in 1981.
Gloria Grahame, the actress best known for her screen portrayals of sulking and occasionally wisecracking blondes, died Monday night of cancer at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan. She was 55 years old.
Miss Grahame, who had been in London rehearsing a play, died three hours after arriving here aboard a commercial flight. Dr. William R. Grace, who had treated her in New York since late spring, said Miss Grahame slipped into shock aboard the flight. Dr. Grace was notified that the pilot had radioed that, according to physicians aboard the plane, Miss Grahame’s death was ”imminent.”
Dr. Grace said that breast cancer was diagnosed five years ago, but that Miss Grahame ”at no time was interested in pursuing aggressive therapy for it.” The procedure that Dr. Grace offered involved the removal of a body fluid to make his patient more comfortable.
”She attempted to have the same procedure done in London,” said Dr. Grace. ”An infection developed as a result of the procedure.” Dr. Grace said that Miss Grahame had left the London hospital ”either against medical advice or she was discharged.” Miss Grahame called her children in this country to help her return to New York, where treatment had been successful.
It was on the flight to New York that shock resulting from the infection set in and ”when she got to the emergency room, she was nearly dead,” Dr. Grace said. Appeared in 30 Films
During her long Hollywood career, Miss Grahame appeared in more than 30 films, usually in a supporting role. She won an Academy Award in 1952 for her supporting role in ”The Bad and the Beautiful,” the story of a Hollywood producer who turns out to be a heel.
She was also noted for her role in ”It’s a Wonderful Life,” a 1947 film directed by Frank Capra, and ”The Big Heat,” a 1953 police melodrama in which Lee Marvin, playing a cretin-faced gangster, flings scalding coffee into her eyes and pouting face.
Miss Grahame was born in Pasadena, Calif., on Nov. 28, 1925, as Gloria Hallward. She was the daughter of a British actress, Jean Hallward, who had played Shakespearean and other classical roles on the British stage. Miss Grahame made her debut as an actress in Chicago soon after her graduation from high school.
She soon went to Broadway, where she was hired as an understudy in Thornton Wilder’s ”The Skin of Our Teeth,” and began getting substantial roles in other plays. In 1944 she went to Hollywood, where she made her debut in ”Blond Fever” (1944). Nominated for ‘Crossfire’.
She was nominated for an Academy Award for supporting actress in 1947 for ”Crossfire,” and during the next eight years had prominent roles in a series of films, including ”The Greatest Show on Earth” (1952) and ”Oklahoma!” (1955).
During the late 1950’s her roles declined, as she devoted herself to raising her children. In the 1970’s she made occassional appearances in films. She also played parts on television and the stage, including a role in ”The Man Who Came to Dinner” at the New Darien Dinner Theater in 1977.
She later played a neurotic mother in ”Head Over Heels” (1979), and a comic character in ”Melvin and Howard” (1980). Miss Graham was married four times
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Jan Sterling, who has died aged 82, made her name playing hard-bitten blonde floozies, but beneath the surface she always betrayed a certain fragility. Although Sterling had no qualms about posing for cheesecake photographs, there was a reticence about her personality; nor was she a conventional beauty, one of her eyes being higher than the other, and she had a rather elongated, melancholy face. For one role, she shaved off her eyebrows, which never grew back, so she was required to pencil them in for the rest of her career.
By far her best role was in Billy Wilder’s sardonic Ace In The Hole (1951), in which she was the sluttish, opportunistic wife of a man trapped in a cave, a situation ruthlessly exploited by sensation-seeking journalist Kirk Douglas. When asked to pose for a news photo praying for her husband’s safety, she replies: “I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.” But she recognises Douglas as even more unscrupulous than she. “I’ve met some hardboiled eggs in my time, but you – you’re 20 minutes,” Sterling comments wryly
At the time, Sterling was one of Paramount’s resident broads, playing sharp-tongued gangsters’ molls in both Union Station (1950) and Appointment With Danger (1951). In fact, her film career began (excepting a walk-on in Tycoon, 1947, credited as Jane Darien) in Warners’ Johnny Belinda (1948) as the town tramp, married to the rapist of a deaf-mute girl.
In contrast, in real life, Sterling was extremely refined, having been born Jan Sterling Adriance into a socially prominent and wealthy New York family. After being educated in private schools, she studied acting at Fay Compton’s drama school in London. She made her Broadway debut in 1938, aged 15, as an English schoolgirl in Ian Hay’s Bachelor Born.
There followed other roles in British plays such as JB Priestley’s When We Were Married (1939), and she played the stage-struck ingénue in Noel Coward’s Present Laughter (1946). But the part that led to her Hollywood contract was that of dumb blonde Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday (1949), having taken over from Judy Holliday. Her co-star was Paul Douglas, whom she married the same year. (Sterling had divorced British actor Jack Merivale.)
In films, Sterling was seen as a tough jail bird in Caged (1950) and Woman’s Prison (1954), and as the witty guardian of a cat that has inherited $30 million in Rhubarb (1951). In Flesh And Fury (1952), she’s a gold digging, night-club singer who latches on to boxer Tony Curtis, before he dumps her for a nice girl.
In 1954, Sterling was Oscar-nominated for best supporting actress in The High And The Mighty as a touching mail-order bride with a questionable past, one of the passengers on a threatened plane. The following year, Sterling, as a jealous killer, competed ably with Joan Crawford in Female On The Beach, and was superb as Robert Mitchum’s estranged, saloon-owner wife in the western Man With The Gun, trying to hide her fears for his safety. In The Harder They Fall (1956), she was again a concerned wife, this time of sports columnist Humphrey Bogart (in his last film), worried about his involvement with a crooked syndicate.
The year before, Sterling and Douglas had gone to England, he to make Joe Macbeth and she to co-star with Edmond O’Brien as the lovers defying Big Brother in the first screen adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. The original version ends with O’Brien and Sterling being shot, while for the US release, they reform and become loyal to Big Brother!
At the time, Sterling was several months pregnant, while her husband was fighting a losing battle against alcoholism. Her film roles deteriorated, apart from her sympathetic portrayal of a longshoreman’s widow in Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (1957). After Douglas died of a heart attack, aged 52, in 1959, Sterling took a few years off.
She then returned to the stage, notably in The Front Page (1970) and Come Back, Little Sheba (1974), as the wife of an alcoholic.
On television, Sterling played Mrs Herbert Hoover in the mini-series Backstairs At The White House (1976). In the late 1970s, Sterling settled in London, where she had a long-lasting liaison with director Sam Wanamaker.
Her son, Adams Douglas, died three months ago.
· Jan Sterling, actor, born April 3 1921; died March 26 2004
The Guardian obituary by Ronald Bergan.
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Sandra Dee obituary in “The Guardian” in 2005.
In the nostalgic musical Grease (1978), about growing up in a fantasised America of the 1950s, there is an appropriately evocative song called Look At Me, I’m Sandra Dee.
Pert, petite blonde Sandra Dee, who has died aged 62 of kidney disease, was the sweetheart of the teen set from the late 50s to the mid-60s. Born Alexandra Zuck, in New Jersey, she became a model while still at school and appeared in television commercials, which led her to Hollywood. (Many years later, she revealed that she had been the victim of a sexually abusive stepfather and a domineering mother, who pushed her into films).
Her screen debut, aged 14, was in Until They Sail (1957), followed by the title role in Vincente Minnelli’s The Reluctant Debutante (1958), based on the West End hit by William Douglas Home, in which the very American Dee played the very English Rex Harrison’s daughter.
This implausibility was explained in the script by a prior transatlantic misalliance on the part of Harrison’s Lord Broadbent. According to the producer, Dee was cast “for the sake of the US teenage public”. However, having been coached in diction and demeanour, she got through the part with surprising poise.
In 1959, the 5ft 5ins tall Dee was seen to embody the wholesome, all-American ideal in Gidget (a nickname meaning “girl midget”). Despite not measuring up to the bikinied girls on the beach, she is courted by the two grooviest surfers in town, Moondoggie (James Darren) and Kahoona (Cliff Robertson). The film set the tone for the “beach party” movies of the 1960s.
Most important for Dee was her contract, in 1959, with Universal Studios, where her image of a budding beauty was polished. First, there was Douglas Sirk’s ripe remake of Imitation Of Life (1959), in which Dee, feeling neglected by her glamorous acting mother (Lana Turner), falls in love with her mother’s boyfriend (John Gavin
Then there was The Wild And The Innocent (1959), a western with 54-year-old Gilbert Roland and 35-year-old Audie Murphy panting after 17-year-old Dee.
Max Steiner’s insistent theme from A Summer Place (1959) had Dee and her blond male equivalent, Troy Donahue, making love to its strains on the Maine coast. The film came at the start of the sexually permissive era, and consists of Dee complaining about the “cast-iron girdle” her mother buys to hide her burgeoning curves.
In 1960, Dee met pop idol Bobby Darin in Portofino, Italy, while they were appearing together in Come September (1961), and they were married soon after. In the film, the couple represented the younger generation up against oldsters Rock Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida. Dee and Darin, now fan magazine favourites, co-starred as newly weds in If A Man Answers (1961).
Dee made a rather pale replacement for Debbie Reynolds in Tammy Tell Me True (1961) and Tammy And The Doctor (1963), but was well cast as the daughter of the American ambassador in love with the Russian ambassador’s son in Peter Ustinov’s Romanoff And Juliet (1961), and as conservative James Stewart’s rebellious daughter in Take Her, She’s Mine (1962).
After the breakup of her marriage to Darin in 1967, however, she found there was not much work for an ageing teenage star. She did get to play Rosalind Russell’s granddaughter in Rosie (1967), and appeared in The Dunwich Horror (1969), as a student lured away from college by a crazed Dean Stockwell, who attempts to sacrifice her to the devil. But then she turned to pills and alcohol, admitting she was drinking more than a quart of whisky a day as her weight fell to 80lbs. (She was anorexic for most of her life.)
Dee became a recluse in Los Angeles for some years, until encouraged to stop drinking by her son Dodd Darin, who, in 1994, wrote a book about his parents, Dream Lovers: The Magnificent Shattered Lives Of Bobby Darin And Sandra Dee. Kevin Spacey’s recent biopic of Darin, Beyond The Sea, with Kate Bosworth playing Dee, sparked a renewed interest in her life.
She is survived by her son.
· Sandra Dee (Alexandra Zuck), actor, born April 23 1942; died February 20 2005
Her Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan, please click here for online.
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Los angeles times obituary in 1991
Lee Remick, the alluring actress who gained fame as the haunting alcoholic in “The Days of Wine and Roses,” died Tuesday at her Brentwood home of cancer.
The versatile performer—known for her talent in blending the innocence of youth and the sensuality of womanhood—was 55.
Tumors had been found on her kidneys and lungs in 1989 after she fell ill while making a film in France.
“This has been a slow slide and it finally came about,” her publicist Dick Winters said. He added that Miss Remick had undergone only physical therapy to cope with the cancer in recent months.
Relatives were at her bedside when she died, Winters said.
In her final public appearances, a very frail Miss Remick received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on April 29. A week later, she again appeared pale and weary when she was honored by the Winston Churchill Society in a ceremony at the Queen Mary in Long Beach. She had played Churchill’s mother in a TV special.
Her diversity was evident throughout what proved a lengthy career for a woman who died so young. From her Broadway stage debut in 1953 to her final appearance in “Love Letters” at the Canon Theater in Beverly Hills last summer, her characters covered a wide range.
Besides playing the dipsomaniac mate of Jack Lemmon in the 1962 “Wine and Roses,” which brought her an Academy Award nomination, she was a nervous wreck in “The Women’s Room,” a tough piano coach in “The Competition,” a nymphomaniac in “The Detective” and a rape victim in the remake of “The Letter.”
Most recently, Miss Remick starred as the indifferent mother to Marlee Matlin in the 1989 television movie “A Bridge to Silence.”
The actress appeared in 28 motion pictures, including “A Face in the Crowd,” “The Long Hot Summer,” “Experiment in Terror,” “Wild River,” “Sanctuary,” “The Wheeler Dealers,” “Travelin’ Lady,” “Anatomy of a Murder,” “Tribute” and “The Omen.”
In addition to Lemmon, her leading men included Andy Griffith, Paul Newman, Orson Welles, James Stewart, George C. Scott, Montgomery Clift, Gregory Peck, Burt Lancaster, Steve McQueen and Frank Sinatra.
They remembered her with fond admiration:
Lemmon said: “Knowing and working with Lee will always remain one of the most joyous experiences of my life. She was precious, and certainly the embodiment of grace.”
Peck, who played Miss Remick’s husband in the 1976 movie “The Omen,” said the actress possessed “a rare quality, which I would call a depth of womanliness. She played her on- and off-screen roles with an open heart, an open mind, keen intelligence and honest emotion.
“She made all of her leading men look good,” Peck said. “I will never forget this clear-eyed Yankee girl.”
Charles Bronson starred as a Soviet agent opposite Miss Remick in the 1977 espionage thriller “Telefon.”
“I am so sorry she is gone. She was a beautiful, warm and giving individual as well as a very unselfish and professional actress.”
Actress Angela Lansbury, who starred with Miss Remick in “Anyone Can Whistle,” an early but short-lived Stephen Sondheim musical, said she “was such a brave and extraordinarily positive-thinking person. She never gave into the cancer for one second.”
Unlike many of her peers, Miss Remick moved frequently between motion pictures and television.
“I just look for the stuff that interests me. And I don’t like to repeat,” she said in a 1988 interview with the Associated Press. “That’s the nature of the biz. Once you’ve done something well, they think, ‘Ah, that’s what she does,’ and they keep sending you the same script over and over again.”
She said at the time that she was doing television roles because “I haven’t been offered anything in a feature in a few years that has come close to giving me that kind of fertile ground to play with.”
She was particularly proud of “playing a lot of real people on TV,” she said in a 1987 interview.
Besides Churchill’s mother, in “Jenny, Lady Randolph Churchill” for which she was nominated for an Emmy and Golden Globe Award, she was a former First Lady in “Eleanor—in Her Own Words: A Tribute to Eleanor Roosevelt.” In “Nutcracker: Money, Madness and Murder,” Miss Remick starred as Frances Bradshaw Schreuder, the socialite who was convicted of persuading her 17-year-old son to kill her father. And she was British driver Kay Summersby, who was linked romantically to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, in “Ike, the War Years.”
Miss Remick was born in Boston. Her father was a department store owner and her mother was an actress. She told The Times’ Charles Champlin last year that she had intended to be a dancer but “I wouldn’t have been that good.” She credited the training and discipline of dance, however, with much of her acting successes.
She was attending Miss Hewitt’s School and studying dramatics when someone—she didn’t remember who—encouraged her to try out for a Broadway play called “Act Your Age.” She added two years to her age, which got her a job but didn’t help the play, which bombed.
She did summer stock with Rudy Vallee and in 1953 returned to New York to enroll in Barnard College. But by then the theater had captured her and she began to appear in such early television dramas as “Playhouse 90,” which originally produced “The Days of Wine and Roses,” “Philco Playhouse” and “Robert Montgomery Presents.”
Elia Kazan saw her in a TV play called “All Expenses Paid” and asked her to be Betty Lou, the predatory cheerleader in his acclaimed movie “A Face in the Crowd.”
She was just 22.
Her performance in the 1966 Broadway play “Wait Until Dark” brought her a Tony Award nomination. In 1974, she was cast in a London production of “Bus Stop.”
After her marriage to British producer Kip Gowans in 1970, she lived for many years in London but sold that home and moved to Brentwood to be closer to her film roles.
She was almost shy and retiring in person, and somewhat mystified by her fame.
She liked to tell of the time a woman was walking back and forth near her as she was eating lunch. Finally the obvious fan got up her nerve and came to Miss Remick’s table.
“You’re Lee Remick aren’t you?”
“Yes,” was the response.
“I thought so,” said the fan with obvious satisfaction. “You look so much like her and she’s so pretty.”
“It was almost mystical,” Miss Remick said later. “Then I realized that she was separating the me she saw on the screen from the me she was seeing in person.”
Besides her husband, Miss Remick is survived by her daughter, Kate Colleran Sullivan, and her son, Matthew Remick Colleran, from a previous marriage to TV director William Colleran. Other survivors include her mother, Pat Packard, and stepdaughters Justine Gowans Solly and Nicola Gowans.
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Sites of Interest
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