Nancy Gates

“Wikipedia” entry:

The daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Virgil Gates,^[2] Nancy Gates was born in Dallas, Texas, Gates grew up in nearby Denton, and was described as “a child wonder.”A 1932 newspaper article about an Easter program at Robert E. Lee School noted, “Nancy Gates, presenting a soft-shoe number, will open the style show.” That same year, she had a part in the Denton Kiddie Revue.

In 1935,^[6] she appeared in the production “A Kiss for Cinderella,” which starred Brenda Marshall and a minstrel show that included Ann Sheridan, both of whom were from Denton. She was in show business before she finished high school, having her own radio program on WFAA in Dallas^[for two years while she was a student at Denton High School,^[from which she graduated. Musically oriented, Gates was featured as a singer in a 1942 concert by the North Texas Teachers College stage band.

Gates attended the University of Oklahoma for one year before getting married.

Gates entered acting at a young age, receiving a contract with RKO at the age of 15, which required court approval because of her status as a minor.^[Orson Welles screen-tested her for a role in the 1942 film The Magnificent Ambersons. Although she did not get the role, which went to Anne Baxter, the test paved the way for her future entry into film. That same year she had her first credited role, in The Great Gildersleeve. In 1943 she went on contract with RKO, her first film with them being Hitler’s Children that same year. She began receiving roles in mostly B-movies, many of which were westerns or sci-fi, eventually receiving lead roles as the heroine. In 1948 she starred opposite Eddie Dean in Check Your Guns, and in 1949 she played alongside Jim Bannon, Marin Sais, and Emmett Lynn in an episode of the Red Ryder serial, titled Roll, Thunder, Roll. She would star in several other films over the next ten years, especially in westerns like Comanche Station (1960), and in support roles, most notably in two Frank Sinatra films, Some Came Running and Suddenly.

In total Gates starred or co-starred in 34 films and serials. She retired from acting in 1969.

Suddenly, poster, from left: Nancy Gates, Frank Sinatra on poster art, 1954. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Nancy Gates. Obituary in “Daily Telegraph” in 2019.

Nancy Gates, who has died aged 93, was an actress who began her career on radio, hosting her own show in Dallas while still in her early teens.

Signed to RKO at the age of 15, she worked in melodramas and crime thrillers, and was often cast as the female lead in Westerns on film and on television.

Born in Dallas, Texas, on February 1 1926, Nancy Jane Gates attended Robert E Lee School, Denton, and was described by a local newspaper as “a child wonder”. At the age of four, she was named official sweetheart of the Texas College band.

In 1933 her mother enrolled her in the Denton Dance School, where she was given a solo as part of the Denton Kiddie Revue and had a feature role in the play A Kiss for Cinderella, followed by a minstrel show in which she and a fellow “Denton Kiddie”, the future femme fatale Ann Sheridan, also starred.

By the time she entered Denton High School, Nancy already had her own radio show.

After a brief spell at the University of Oklahoma she was offered a contract by RKO Pictures. She made her debut in the jungle action adventure, The Tuttles of Tahiti (1942), starring Charles Laughton.

That year Orson Welles tested her for Lucy Morgan in The Magnificent Ambersons, but felt she was a little immature for the role, which he gave to Anne Baxter; he gave Nancy Gates a bit part.

She had her first screen kiss in the 1942 comedy The Great Gildersleeve, after she asked the director Gordon Douglas to give her character more scope.

The following year she appeared in Hitler’s Children, Edward Dmytryk’s propaganda film about the Hitler Youth, and was teamed with Charles Laughton again for the Second World War drama This Land is Mine. She was also in the sequel Gildersleeve’s Bad Day.

There followed a run of B-movies, including the comedy Bride by Mistake and The Master Race, about a Nazi agent who infiltrates a recently liberated Belgian town and tries in vain to turn the inhabitants against the Allies.

By the mid-to-late 1940s, she had slipped down the cast list, though she was busy on radio, and in 1946-47 was in the soap opera Masquerade.

In 1948 she married William Hayes, a Hollywood lawyer and pilot, whom she met when she was a passenger on one of his flights. Away from RKO, Nancy Gates freelanced, taking small roles in such films as the Cecil B DeMille circus epic The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and the Joan Crawford drama Torch Song (1953).

By the middle of the 1950s she was concentrating more on television, though she did enjoy the distinction of shooting a ruthless killer played by Frank Sinatra in the 1954 noir thriller Suddenly. On the small screen there were parts in such shows as Maverick, Rawhide, Laramie, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Perry Mason.

In 1956 came perhaps her most memorable film, alongside Hugh Marlowe, the early sci-fi adventure World Without End, about a group of astronauts caught in a time warp who find themselves on a future planet Earth populated by mutants.

The same year she was in the crime drama Wetbacks, starring Lloyd Bridges, and the crime drama Death of a Scoundrel with George Sanders and Zsa Zsa Gabor, before being reunited two years later with Frank Sinatra in Some Came Running, co-starring Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine.

Nancy Gates retired in 1969 to spend more time with her family.

Her husband died in 1992 and she is survived by their twin daughters and two sons, who are both Hollywood producers.

“Guardian” obituary:

In the first three series of the television show Mission: Impossible (1966-69), Martin Landau, who has died aged 89, played the ace impersonator Rollin Hand, one of the specialists used by the Impossible Missions Force. Hand was described as a “man of a million faces”. Landau’s own face was instantly recognisable, with its haunted eyes, wide mouth and furrowed brow; even when he broke into a smile, he could seem to be frowning.

Landau was disguised beneath heavy makeup for his best known film role, as the horror actor Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood (1994), Tim Burton’s biopic of the cross-dressing director of trashy movies. Landau’s Lugosi is a tragicomic creation: his wife has left him, he is addicted to morphine and most of Hollywood thinks he is dead. “This business, this town,” he sighs, “it chews you up and then spits you out. I’m just an ex-bogeyman.”

Landau would have known where Lugosi was coming from. After Mission: Impossible, he had been largely typecast, appearing in genre fare with titles that would have shamed Wood himself (such as The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island, 1981).

But his career was rehabilitated by three films for quality directors: Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Ed Wood. All three earned Landau Oscar nominations for best supporting actor; the third resulted in victory (over Samuel L Jackson and Paul Scofield, among others). Lugosi was, he said in his speech, “the part of my life”.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Martin was the son of Jewish parents, Morris, an Austrian-born machinist who attempted a career as a singer, and his wife, Selma. After attending James Madison high school and Pratt Institute, he was employed from the age of 17 as a cartoonist on the Daily News. He worked on Billy Rose’s syndicated column Pitching Horseshoes and assisted Gus Edson on the comic strip The Gumps.

Although offered promotion at 22, he decided to leave the newspaper and concentrate on acting. He juggled a dozen roles in summer stock in New England and auditioned for the Actors Studio in New York: Landau and Steve McQueenwere the only two hopefuls admitted from a batch of 2,000 applicants in 1955. That year was overshadowed by the death in a road accident of Landau’s best friend, James Dean, whom he had met at a TV audition years before.

At the Actors Studio, Landau was taught by the best – Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, Harold Clurman – and began a relationship with a fellow student, Marilyn Monroe. They split up after several months; Landau found Monroe too complicated and was defeated by her frequent costume changes on their dates. When he became a teacher himself, Landau’s students included Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Huston and Harry Dean Stanton. With Mark Rydell, he later ran the Hollywood-based branch of the Actors Studio, set up in 1967.

After a handful of TV appearances, Landau broke into film when Alfred Hitchcock saw him on stage in Los Angeles in a touring production of Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night and cast him opposite Cary Grant in North By Northwest (1959). When Landau asked why he had been chosen for the role of James Mason’s right-hand man, Hitchcock replied: “Martin, you have a circus going on inside you.” Landau decided to make the character gay, adding an extra dimension to the relationship between boss and henchman.

He came to specialise in a particular type of unsettling, debonair heavy. In the epic Cleopatra (1963), Landau was General Rufio, hailing Rex Harrison’s Caesar and doing his dirty work (consulting the auguries, finding the rest of the decapitated Pompey) and later memorably pleading with a bathing Elizabeth Taylor from behind a screen. He had a considerable amount of screen time, yet claimed his best scenes were left on the cutting-room floor.Later came a part as the Jewish high priest Caiaphas in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) and horse operas big and small, including Nevada Smith (1966 ) with McQueen. In the comedy western The Hallelujah Trail (1965) he was a deadpan Sioux tribesman, Chief Walks-Stooped-Over, leading an attack on a wagon train in a fierce sandstorm.

Mission: Impossible brought him primetime exposure and an opportunity to work with his wife, the actor Barbara Bain, whom he had married in 1957. The pilot episode found Rollin Hand disguised as a dictator bent on nuclear destruction. After more than 70 episodes, three Emmy nominations and a Golden Globes award, Landau left the series after a contract dispute.

In They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (1970), he was a preacher caught up in a murder investigation undertaken by Sidney Poitier. The film gave him a fiery sermon, delivered with wild eyes and abundant sweat before a packed congregation.

He and Bain moved to Britain to star in the TV series Space: 1999 (1975-77), created by the husband-and-wife team of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. Landau was John Koenig, the commander of Moonbase Alpha, a character with integrity, humanity and authority. He was proud of how topical events were mirrored in the plots (one episode paralleled Henry Kissinger’s role in the Middle East) but he felt the series became increasingly silly.

After leaving the show, Landau drifted in disappointing material for 10 years. Then came Tucker: The Man and His Dream and a role to savour. Landau excelled as Abe, a financier who hustles up the money for an engineer, Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges), to create “the car of tomorrow, today”. Previously, Landau’s height had mostly been imposing. As Abe, he walked with a hunch, as if carrying the weight of his past. Always complaining, Abe is the antithesis of the exuberant Tucker – the same dynamic would exist between Landau and Johnny Depp’s characters in Ed Wood.

It was not a box-office hit, but Coppola’s film put Landau back on the map and he was rewarded with a rich and unusually large role in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Allen cast Landau as Judah Rosenthal, who intercepts a letter from his mistress to his wife and, after grappling with his conscience, sanctions his mobster brother to arrange a professional hit. Judah is an ophthalmologist who feels the “eyes of God” upon him; and Landau’s troubled gaze, upon hearing that his brother has taken care of the situation, is the film’s defining image. Offset by a comic plot involving Allen and Alan Alda, Landau’s performance is full of anxiety and panic. Unusually for an Allen film, Landau was shown the whole script before filming began (Allen’s actors often just see their section). He told Allen that viewers must be able to identify with Judah, and the character was adapted accordingly.

Another challenging part, as the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal in the TV movie Max and Helen (1990), earned him a phone call from Wiesenthal: “I have something to say to you. You were perfect.” After big-budget, bland choices, such as Sliver (1993) and Intersection (1994), Ed Wood gave Landau a dream role, if a daunting one.

“It’s a Hungarian morphine addict alcoholic who has mood swings,” he said. “That would be hard enough, but it has to be Bela Lugosi!” Ten years earlier, Landau had played Dracula on stage with the same script that had been used for Lugosi’s theatrical performance as Dracula of the 1920s. Not only did Landau learn a Hungarian accent for Ed Wood, but he spoke the dialogue as if trying to conceal his heavy accent – just as Lugosi had.

After playing Geppetto in a pair of Pinocchio films (1996, 1999) and appearing in the 1998 film of the TV series The X-Files, he took a role in the Capra-esque The Majestic (2001), set against the backdrop of Hollywood in the 50s. On TV, he was Abraham in an all-star biblical epic, In the Beginning (2000), and had recurring roles in Without a Trace and Entourage that brought him Emmy nominations. His greatest later project was the stop-motion animated film Frankenweenie (2012), which reunited him with Burton.

With a heavy accent, Landau was the voice of the sinister science teacher Mr Rzykruski, who terrifies his pupils and has shades of the actor’s knockout performance as Lugosi. In Remember (2015), he played an Auschwitz survivor who helps Christopher Plummer with his revenge mission to track down a former Nazi officer.

Landau and Bain divorced in 1993. He is survived by their daughters, Susan, a writer and producer, and Juliet, an actor.

• Martin Landau, actor, born 20 June 1928; died 15 July 2017

Frank Morrison Spillane (March 9, 1918 – July 17, 2006), better known as Mickey Spillane, was an American crime novelist, whose stories often feature his signature detective character, Mike Hammer. More than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally. Spillane was also an occasional actor, once even playing Hammer himself

Mickey Spillane obituary in The Guardian in 2006.

Pulp writer whose tales of tough guys and cute broads made him the bestselling novelist of the 20th century

John Sutherland

‘Women,” he claimed in later life, “liked the name Mickey.” Other accounts suggest that Michael was the middle name his Catholic father had him baptised under; Morrison was the name his Protestant mother put on his birth certificate. Few at his fraught christening would have foreseen the arrival of the 20th century’s bestselling novelist, Mickey Spillane, who has died aged 88.

His father, John Joseph Spillane, was an Irish-American bartender. Young Frank was brought up in the “very tough” neighbourhood of Elizabeth, New Jersey. Under the superintendence of his mother, Catherine, the Spillane home was less tough. He claimed to have read all Melville and Dumas before he was 11. After Erasmus Hall high school, Brooklyn, he went to Kansas State College (now Fort Hays State University), starred briefly on the football field and dropped out. In the de rigueur way, he kicked around in the depression 1930s, working for a while as a Long Island lifeguard – “women” liked that too.

In 1935 he began submitting work to “slick” (ie illustrated) magazines, “working my way down”, as he later recalled, “to the comic books: Captain Marvel, Captain America, Superman, Batman – you name it, I did them all.” It was, he thought, “a great training ground for writers. You couldn’t beat it.” Fast-order work would be Spillane’s speciality. I, the Jury (1947) was written in nine days. When the car containing his manuscript of The Body Lovers was stolen two decades later, he claimed to be only concerned about the loss of his wheels: “the missing manuscript just means another three days’ work.”

Spillane served in the US army airforce during the second world war, enlisting the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked in December 1941. By his own account, he flew fighter missions and taught cadets how to fly. In interviews he claimed two bullet wounds and a civilian knife scar sustained while working undercover with the FBI to break up a narcotics ring. On demobilisation he worked in Barnum and Bailey’s circus as a trampoline artist (the setting is used in his 1962 novel, The Girl Hunters) and claimed a professional proficiency with throwing knives. More profitably, he returned to writing.

Mike Hammer. Stacy Keach som Mike Hammer.

Story-magazines were losing ground to paperback originals – pulp novels selling to the masses at 25 cents. Spillane duly turned out I, the Jury. It drew on the hard-boiled, private investigator tradition pioneered by Black Mask magazine in the 1930s, although the most famous product of that coterie, Raymond Chandler, disdained Spillane as a writing gorilla: “pulp writing at its worst was never as bad as this stuff”.

Spillane himself acknowledged the influence of only one crime writer, the now-obscure John Carroll Daly, creator of the private eye Race Williams. He flaunted his lack of authorial polish, claiming (mischievously) never to introduce characters with moustaches or who drank cognac because he could not spell the words. I, the Jury introduced the series hero Mike Hammer, whose tough-talking, woman-beating, whisky-swilling machismo answered the needs of the postwar “male action” market.

Estimates suggest global sales of around 200 million. By 1980, seven of the top 15 all-time bestselling fiction titles in America were by Spillane. “People like them,” he blandly explained.

Hammer is less a detective than an ultra-violent vigilante. I, the Jury lays down the formula. Mike’s marine “buddy” Jack, who lost an arm saving Hammer’s life in the Pacific, is sadistically murdered. Hammer sets out to avenge him, skirting the niceties of the law, vowing to his friend’s corpse: “I’m going to get the louse that killed you. He won’t sit in the [electric] chair. He won’t hang. He will die exactly as you died, with a .45 slug in the gut, just a little below the belly button.” So it goes – even though “he” turns out to be a gorgeous “she”. Spillane astutely exploited the market he had created with Hammer with Vengeance Is Mine (1950), My Gun Is Quick (1950), The Big Kill (1951) and Kiss Me, Deadly (1952). All hit the mark.

It is never clear how Spillane’s hero supports himself – or how he pays Velda, his faithful secretary with the “million-dollar legs”. Prodigious cocksman though he is, Hammer respects Velda too much to take sexual advantage of her, although she loves him madly. “Broads” and “hoods” are never in short supply. Hammer is always outnumbered by the criminal enemy: “There are ten thousand mugs that hate me … they hate me because if they mess with me I shoot their damn heads off.”

The climax of a Mike Hammer narrative invariably features sadistic execution. The most hilarious is in Vengeance is Mine, which ends with the line (just before she/he gets it in the gut) “Juno was a Man!”. The link was often made between Spillane and Joe McCarthy, and over the years Hammer’s victims were as likely to be “reds” as “hoods”. In One Lonely Night (1951), the hero mows down 40 communists with a machine-gun (originally there were 80, but the publishers “thought that was too gory”).

Spillane regarded himself as a super-patriot, and was so regarded by others. John Wayne gave him a Jaguar XK140 for his anti-communism and Ayn Rand (author of Atlas Shrugged) commended his prose style to her disciples. Spillane’s patriotism was, however, always tinged with a pessimistic, quasi-religious sense of doom, and in the early 1960s he predicted a race war in America.

The Hammer novels are written as spoken monologue and are stylistically direct. Spillane had great faith in the slam-bang opening, believing that “the first page sells the book”. He claimed never to read galleys or rewrite. He had, however, an odd compulsiveness about punctuation, and once insisted that 50,000 copies of Kiss Me, Deadly be pulped after the comma was left out of the title.

The Hammer novels enjoyed new leases of life in film, radio, comic-strip and television adaptation. I, the Jury was filmed twice (1953, 1982), as were other Hammer books. The only film that has any distinction is Robert Aldrich’s exaggeratedly noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Spillane disliked it – not least because of the missing comma. Possessed of ruggedly good looks, he himself played Hammer in the film of The Girl Hunters (1963), turning in a commendable performance. He also played cameo roles in other films.

There were two successful television series based on Mike Hammer, the first in the late 1950s and the second, 1984-87, starring Stacy Keach in a semi-noir, 1950s setting, with Spillane’s sex and violence carefully bleached out.

As an author of pulp, Spillane’s guiding principle was that “violence will outsell sex every time”, but combined they will outsell everything. As part of the promotion for his novels he adopted a Hammeresque persona, which was transparently an act. He once told a British interviewer, “I always say never hit a woman when you can kick her.” When asked, “Is that the treatment you give Mrs Spillane?”, he primly replied, “We’re talking about fiction.”

There were three Mrs Spillanes. With the first, Mary Ann Pearce, whom he married in 1945, he had two sons and two daughters. Then, in 1964, he divorced her and married Sherri Malinou, a model 24 years his junior, who had caught his eye when she featured on the cover of one of his books. He called the agency and asked them to send over the blonde with the beautiful butt: “they sent her over, and I never sent her back.” He used her (nude) on the cover of The Erection Set (1972).

But the marriage broke up and, in 1983, he married Jane Rodgers Johnson; he had two stepchildren, Britt and Lisa. From 1954 he lived with his successive families at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where he sailed, fished and resolutely did not play golf. He always dressed in black and white; as in the novels, he liked to keep things simple.

There were two long gaps in Spillane’s career. The first followed his conversion to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1952, which led to a 10-year hiatus in novel writing (although he was earning substantially from subsidiary rights over this period). He returned to form in 1961 with what is reckoned to be the best of the Hammer novels, The Deep.

From then until 1972 the novels came out with the old facility, and Spillane created a new series hero for the decade, Tiger Mann – launched with Day of the Guns (1964). Mann is a “secret agent” and witnesses to Spillane’s sense that his thunder had been stolen by James Bond. He claimed not to be worried by Ian Fleming – “he’s a gourmet” – but the reading public, fickle as ever, never returned in their once record-breaking droves. The non-series books, The Erection Set and The Last Cop Out (1973), were heavily hyped but comparative failures, as were the second-generation Hammer books, The Twisted Thing (1966), The Body Lovers (1967) and Survival Zero (1970). Post-Lady Chatterley and post-Last Exit to Brooklyn, Spillane had lost the power to shock.

There was another gap, between 1973 and 1989, during which Spillane again wrote no full-length fiction, though he did try his hand (as a dare with his publisher) at two, well-received children’s books, The Day the Sea Rolled Back (1979) and The Ship That Never Was (1982). During this period he was famous to the American television-watching public for his appearance in Miller Lite beer commercials (though he was reported not to be a heavy drinker).

By the time he returned to Hammer fiction with The Killing Man (1989), Spillane was in his 70s, as were what remained of his faithful readers. A suspicious number of reprints of the early novels were in large-type; the Guardian reviewer of The Killing Man (1990) was kind but dismissive.

Spillane hammered on with Black Alley (1996), although by now his bolt was clearly shot. He reportedly suffered a stroke in his later years. Over the last decades (to his disgust, one suspects) he received increasing critical respect for his contributions to the idiom of crime fiction, and for having played a pioneer’s role in the postwar paperback revolution. His wife and children survive him.

· Frank Morrison ‘Mickey’ Spillane, writer, born March 9 1918; died July 17 2006

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Lola Albright obituary in “The Guardian” in 2017.

Ronad Bergan’s obituary in 2017 in “The Guardian” :

When Lola Albright appeared in Alexander Singer’s independent movie A Cold Wind in August (1961), critics and audiences wondered where she had been all their lives. But Albright, who has died aged 92, had been in pictures for 14 years, having made little impact, before getting rave reviews for her rare starring role in this cultish low-budget black-and-white sleeper. Filmgoers might have found it hard to believe that Albright, playing a love-starved 30-something stripper who seduces a teenage boy, was the same rather bland actor who had appeared as the obligatory blonde in several minor westerns in the 50s.

Some might have remembered her as one of three women distracting a ruthless, over-ambitious prizefighter (Kirk Douglas) in Mark Robson’s Champion (1949). Albright played a married sculptor who falls for the boxer. “I don’t fall in love easily,” she tells him, “but I’m going to be serious about this.” Unhappily, the boxer is bought off by her rich husband. Champion was Albright’s first relatively substantial role after four decorative bit parts at MGM.

She was born in Akron, Ohio, to Marion (nee Harvey) and John Albright, both gospel singers. Lola sang in public from an early age and, after school, worked as a receptionist and secretary at radio stations, while modelling on the side, which brought her to Hollywood at the age of 23. Her role in Champion did not lead to better parts, though she co-starred with the fine character actor Jack Carson in the slapstick comedy The Good Humor Man (1950). She and Carson were married a couple of years later.

Some of the better films in which Albright was glimpsed were Tulsa (1949), starring Susan Hayward; Silver Whip (1953), in which she played the saloon singer girlfriend of a gunslinger(Dale Robertson); and The Tender Trap (1955), in which she was one of the many beauties trying to trap a happy-go-lucky bachelor (Frank Sinatra) into marriage. One of her few leading roles, in which she managed to keep a straight face, was as a schoolteacher, some of whose pupils turn to stone, in the silly sci-fi movie The Monolith Monsters (1957).

Much more rewarding were Albright’s TV appearances. In Peter Gunn (1958-61), she portrayed a sultry singer at a smoky jazz club, Mother’s, where her sophisticated gumshoe boyfriend (Craig Stevens) hangs out when he’s not tracking down villains. The series gave her a chance to sing jazz evergreens such as How High the Moon.

This was followed by her role in A Cold Wind in August, as a divorcee hoping to give up stripping, who makes a play for her caretaker’s 17-year-old son (Scott Marlowe). She is touched when he asks her to “go steady”. But what starts off as mere flirtatiousness becomes more serious, and leads to heartbreak when he leaves her for a girl nearer his own age.

It gave a new impulse to her film career, leading to parts in Kid Galahad (1962), in which she is the hard-boiled long-time girlfriend of a cynical boxing manager (Gig Young), who takes on a reluctant fighter (Elvis Presley), and René Clément’s bizarre Joy House (1964), in which she is a wealthy widow with a passion for handing out meals to the poor, assisted by her cousin (Jane Fonda). Best of all was her poignant portrayal of the alcoholic cocktail waitress mother of an adolescent (Tuesday Weld) in George Axelrod’s Lord Love a Duck (1966), which won her the Silver Bear at the Berlin film festival.

Around the same time, she replaced Dorothy Malone, who had to undergo emergency surgery, as Constance Mackenzie on the prime-time TV soap opera Peyton Place (1965-66), which Albright called “one of the biggest challenges of my theatrical career”. Although she gave up her feature-film career in 1968, after the prurient The Impossible Years as the despairing wife of a befuddled husband (David Niven), parents of rock’n’rolling teens, she continued to appear regularly on TV until 1984.

Albright was married and divorced three times.

Albright obituary in “The Guardian” in 2017.

Ronad Bergan’s obituary in 2017 in “The Guardian” :

Albright was married and divorced three times.

Barry Brown (April 19, 1951 – June 25, 1978) was an American author, playwright and actor who performed on stage and in television dramas and feature films, notably as Frederick Winterbourne in Peter Bogdanovich‘s Daisy Miller (1974), adapted from the classic Henry James novella (1878). Bogdanovich praised Brown’s contribution to the film, describing him as “the only American actor you can believe ever read a book.”

Born Barry Brown in San Jose, California, he was the eldest child of Donald Bernard Brown and Vivian Brown (née Agrillo). His sister was the actress Marilyn Brown, who committed suicide in 1997 at the age of 44. His brother is the novelist James Brown (Final Performance, Hot Wire), who etched an intimate portrait of their dysfunctional family in his acclaimed memoir, The Los Angeles Diaries, published by HarperCollins in 2003.

Brown began his acting career as a child of five and took part in many television and live performances. He appeared withVan Johnson in a stage production of The Music Man at the age of ten.

Brown was 19 when he made his first major screen appearance in Halls of Anger (1970), followed by The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972) and his breakthrough role as the American Civil War draft dodger Drew Dixon in Robert Benton‘s critically acclaimed Bad Company (1972), co-starring with Jeff Bridges. The publicity and promotion for this film was capped by an article in Esquire introducing filmgoers to the “dashing, brooding Brown” in color photographs by Chris von Wangenheim, along with a text mention of Brown’s obituary collection focusing on little-known and forgotten Hollywood personalities.

After playing opposite Cybill Shepherd in Daisy Miller, Brown concentrated on television throughout the 1970s, including the TV movie The Disappearance of Aimee(1976), about evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, and numerous TV episodes. His final features were the crime drama The Ultimate Thrill (1974) and Joe Dante‘sPiranha (1978).

An authority on actors and film history, Brown was a contributor to Scream Queens: Heroines of the Horrors by Calvin Beck and Bhob Stewart. Published by Macmillan in 1978, the book features illustrated biographical profiles of 29 fantasy film actresses and directors. Brown did a similar survey, the unpublished Unsung Heroes of the Horrors, covering the lives of some lesser known Hollywood talents, and he also contributed to various magazines, including Films in Review and Castle of Frankenstein. The book Who Was Who on Screen Third Edition, by Evelyn Mack Truett was dedicated to Brown, whom she credited with giving data support for the previous edition.

Brown’s marriage to Jennie Vlahos on March 4, 1972 ended in divorce May 1972. In June 1978, Brown committed suicide at his home in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, California.

Nancy Kulp (August 28, 1921 – February 3, 1991) was an American character actress best known as Miss Jane Hathaway on the popular CBS television series The Beverly Hillbillies. Also was featured in :The Parent Trap” with Hayley Mills in 1961.

A wide-ranging character actor with Broadway experience, Bissell entered films in 1943 with “Holy Matrimony” and went on to appear in over 80 more. specializing as ineffectual types and high-strung professionals. He is perhaps best remembered for his role as the scientist who turned Michael Landon into a wolfman in “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” (1957).

TCM Overview:

When Brandon De Wilde died in a motorcycle accident in July 1972 he was only 30 years old but in that short lifetime he had starred in several films now considered classics, been nominated for an Academy Award®, won a Golden Globe, been the first child actor to win a Donaldson Award (for his theatrical debut at the age of seven), had his own television series, hung out with The Beatles, Gram Parsons and Jim Morrison, was the father of a young son and had been divorced twice.

Andre Brandon De Wilde was born into a theatrical family on April 9, 1942 in Brooklyn and spent his early life in Baldwin, Long Island. His father Frederick A. “Fritz” De Wilde was an actor and a Broadway stage manager and his mother Eugenia was a part-time actress on Broadway. Despite his surroundings Brandon did not show any interest in acting until 1949 when a friend of his father was casting a play by Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding and was looking for a young boy and thought Brandon might be good. As Virginia Spencer Carr wrote in her book Understanding Carson McCullers, “[Ethel] Waters and Julie Harris had been signed for the principal roles, and every part was cast except for the role of John Henry West, which was assigned, finally, to five year old [sic] Brandon De Wilde, who had never acted before and could not read. The child’s father, Fritz De Wilde (who was cast as Jarvis Addams, the bride-groom) read the entire play aloud to him to help him learn his lines and in the process, young Brandon learned the lines of everyone else as well, much to the chagrin of Waters, whom he prompted regularly until she told him, ‘Now honey, I don’t want you to bother me anymore.'”

De Wilde was a natural and received critical acclaim for his performance from no less an authority than the legendary actor John Gielgud, who wrote in a letter to a friend, “I saw an excellent play yesterday Member of the Wedding […] The little boy from next door [Brandon De Wilde] a child of eight, gives a wonderful performance and serves as an almost silent chorus, representing the youngest generation. He is on the stage playing all through the hysterical scenes of the young girl, sometimes vaguely aware of what it all means, sometimes just bored and longing for notice, and sometimes just thinking to himself all done with extraordinary subtlety and emphasis.”

Having received the Donaldson Award for his performance, he was signed by director Fred Zinnemann to reprise his role in the film adaptation of The Member of the Wedding in 1952, for which he was awarded a Special Golden Globe Award for Best Juvenile Actor.

His next role would be his most famous, as the tow-headed boy Joey Starrett who worships gunman Alan Ladd in George Stevens’ classic Western Shane (1953). He filmed it in the summer and fall of 1951, but the film was not released for two years due to extensive editing. De Wilde’s immortal line at the end of the film, “Shane! Shane! Come back!” was voted as number 47 of the AFI’S 100 Best Movie Quotes and it ranked number 69 of the Best Movie Quotes by Premiere Magazine earlier in 2007. His performance earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor (he lost to Frank Sinatra for From Here to Eternity) and the praise of critics like The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther who wrote, “Mr. Ladd, though slightly swashbuckling as a gunfighter wishing to retire, does well enough by the character, and Jean Arthur is good as the homesteader’s wife…But it is Master De Wilde with his bright face, his clear voice and his resolute boyish ways who steals the affections of the audience and clinches Shane as a most unusual film.”

The attention from Shane won De Wilde his own television series for ABC entitled Jamie in which he played an orphan living with his aunt. The show only ran during the 1952-1953 season due to a contractual dispute. He would spend the next six years appearing on television on programs such as Climax!, The Screen Director’s Playhouse, The Alcoa Theater and The United States Steel Hour. At the age of 17 in 1959, he appeared in a controversial drama entitled Blue Denim co-starring Carol Lynley. In it, De Wilde’s character gets Lynley pregnant and the two try to find an abortionist.

De Wilde spent three more years in television on shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Wagon Train before making All Fall Down (1962) in which he plays the younger brother of Warren Beatty and the following year he made Hud with Paul Newman, Melvyn Douglas, and Patricia Neal. Although his character was only 16, De Wilde was actually 20 during the filming of Hud. He was the only one of the principal actors not to be nominated for an Academy Award, but on Oscar® night, De Wilde accepted the Best Supporting Actor Award for Melvin Douglas who was unable to attend.

By 1965, when he appeared in his last major film opposite John Wayne – the WWII drama In Harm’s Way – De Wilde had become part of a hard-living, drug-taking Hollywood group including Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. During this time, he had become interested in launching a music career. De Wilde was in the Bahamas in February 1965 at the same time The Beatles were filming Help! and hung out with the band, who got stoned on the pot De Wilde provided. Paul McCartney remembered De Wilde as “a nice guy who was fascinated by what we did. A sort of Brat Pack actor. We chatted endlessly, and I seem to remember writing [the song] “Wait” in front of him and him being interested to see it written.” This interest led De Wilde to become friends with up and coming musician Gram Parsons in New York and the two would sing harmony together. Parson’s friend and fellow musician John Nuese said that De Wilde sang better with Parsons than anyone except Emmylou Harris. De Wilde brought Parsons and his band into the studio at RCA to record some tracks but the project never materialized.

Most of De Wilde’s remaining work would be television guest appearances. He once spoke about his career to author Linda Ashcroft at a party they attended with Jim Morrison. Ashcroft later wrote that she “listened to him talk about having given most of his life to acting, which sounded so strange from such a young man. He was about Jim [Morrison’s] age, though he looked younger. He spoke of giving up movies until he could come back as a forty-year-old character actor. All that had been in his favour as a child, his being small for his age and a bit too pretty, had worked against him as an adult. […]”

LOVE, AMERICAN STYLE – “Love and the Bachelor” – Airdate on December 22, 1969. (Photo by ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images) BRANDON DE WILDE

Sadly De Wilde’s life was cut short by a driving accident. On July 6, 1972, he was in Denver, Colorado appearing onstage in the play Butterflies Are Free. That night while on his way to the theater, he was killed when his motorcycle ran into a truck. His good friend Gram Parsons was so affected by his death that he and Emmylou Harris wrote the song In My Hour of Darkness about De Wilde,

Once I knew a young man
Went driving through the night
Miles and miles without a word
With just his high-beam lights
Who’d have ever thought they’d build such
a deadly Denver bend
To be so strong, to take as long as
it would till the end

by Lorraine LoBianco

IMDB Entry:

Award-winning Canadian actress Susan Clark, born on March 8, 1940, took up acting at an early age (12) in her hometown of Sarnia, Ontario. Her family moved to Toronto around that period of time and she joined the Toronto Children’s Players Theatre. Her first professional curtain call took place on the musical stage in a 1955 production of “Silk Stockings” which starred veteran actor Don Ameche.

The “acting bug” bit hard and a very determined Susan pressed her family to allow her to study at London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. She gained valuable experience in repertory, making her London debut in “Poor Bitos” in the early 1960s. She even got a taste of on-camera work when she won multiple roles on a 1965 episode ofThe Benny Hill Show (1957). Returning to Canada, however, due to the illness of her father, she subsequently decided to trek, instead, to Los Angeles to continue her professional career. In search of on-camera work, she attracted notice in some guest roles on TV and this eventually led to a Universal contract. The ten-year contract was one of the last of its kind as Hollywood was witnessing the demise of the studio contract system.

After gaining some exposure on episodes of The Virginian (1962) and Run for Your Life(1965), Susan’s first screen assignment for Universal was as the second female lead in the soap-styled drama Banning (1967) starring Robert Wagner, in one of his typical jet-setting playboy parts, and the scintillating Jill St. John, who would wed her “Banning” leading man two decades later. From there, Susan only grew in stature. Playing the second female lead again in the critically-praised crimer Madigan (1968) starring Richard Widmark and Inger Stevens, she finally earned top female billing opposite Clint Eastwoodin Coogan’s Bluff (1968) playing a sexy parole officer and enjoying romantic clinches with the up-and-coming film icon on film.

Tall and willowy with incandescent blue eyes, Susan continued to impress on celluloid with roles in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), Valdez Is Coming (1971) and, in particular,Skin Game (1971). It was 70s TV-movies, however, that would take full advantage of Susan’s vibrant, intelligent acting talents. First came the tender-hearted mini-movieSomething for a Lonely Man (1968). While a vehicle for Bonanza’s Dan Blocker, co-star Susan made a strong, spunky impression as his small-town romantic interest. This was followed by choice roles in The Challengers (1970) and The Astronaut (1972).

1975 was a banner year for Susan who not only provided a couple of excellent scenes asGene Hackman‘s wife in the film-noir Night Moves (1975) but, made a resounding, Emmy-winning impression on TV audiences as feminist track-and-field Olympian-turned-golf starBabe Didrikson Zaharias, who is later felled by cancer, in the TV mini-bio Babe (1975). This was a pronounced victory for Susan both professionally and personally for it was on this set that she met her second husband, co-star Alex Karras, who played Babe’s spouse George. Susan was in immediate demand and was quickly cast as another feisty, ill-fated heroine, this time in the form of famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart (1976). Predictably, Susan was wonderful and earned a second Emmy nomination for her efforts (she didn’t win).

She and Karras (who had a child, Katie, in 1980) went on to jointly act in and/or produce various film and TV projects, including the TV movies Jimmy B. & André (1980), and Maid in America (1982), and the films Nobody’s Perfekt (1981) and Porky’s (1981). This culminated in their biggest collaborative effort with the sitcom series Webster (1983) wherein both were unmercifully upstaged by the hopelessly cute antics of its tyke starEmmanuel Lewis. While the series hardly tested the couple’s acting mettle and the plot was pretty much a “Diff’rent Strokes” rehash, the show proved quite popular on its own and put Clark and Karras firmly on the TV map between 1983 to 1988. Susan, herself, earned a Golden Globe nomination for “Best Actress in a Comedy Series”.

Following the sitcom’ demise, Susan relinquished the limelight a bit and found contentment on the local Southern California stage. Relishing acting challenges in such wide-ranging plays as “Meetin’s on the Porch” (1990) with Patty Duke and Carrie Snodgress, “Afterplay” (1998), “Bicoastal Women” (2003) and “The Importance of Being Earnest” (2004) (as Lady Bracknell), she eventually became a dedicated member of the Rubicon Theater Company in Los Angeles, gracing such plays there as “The Glass Menagerie”, “Dancing at Lughnasa”, “The Devil’s Disciple” and, most recently, “A Delicate Balance”.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net