Rita Moreno has had an amazingly long career winninh an Oscar, Tony, Emmy and Grammy. She was born in 1931 in Puerto Rico. In 1951 she was featured in “The Toast of New Orleans” with Mario Lanza and “Singin in the Rain”. She was featured as one of the young lovers in “The King and I” in 1956. She played the fiery Anita in “Wst Side Story” in 1961. Other film roles “The Ritz”, “The Night of the Following Day”, “Carnal Knowledge” and “The Four Seasons”. On television she played the nun Sister Peter Marie from 1997 until 2003 in “Oz”. She published her autobiography
IMDB entry:
U.S. actress Rita Moreno has had a thriving acting career for the better part of six decades. Moreno, one of the very few (and very first) performers to win an Oscar, an Emmy, a Tony, and a Grammy, was born Rosita Dolores Alverío in Humacao, Puerto Rico on December eleventh, 1931. She moved to New York City in 1937 along with her mother, where she began a professional career before reaching adolescence. The eleven-year-old Rosita got her first movie experience dubbing Spanish-language versions of U.S. films. Less than a month before her fourteenth birthday on November eleventh, 1945, she made her Broadway debut in the play “Skydrift” at the Belasco Theatre, costarring withArthur Keegan and the young Eli Wallach. Although she would not appear again on Broadway for almost two decades, Rita Moreno, as she was billed in the play, had arrived professionally.
The cover of the March first, 1954 edition of “Life Magazine” featured a three-quarters, over-the-left-shoulder profile of the young Puerto Rican actress/entertainer with the provocative title “Rita Moreno: An Actresses’ Catalog of Sex and Innocence.” It was sex-pot time, a stereotype that would plague her throughout the decade. If not cast as a Hispanic pepper pot, she could rely on being cast as another “exotic”, such as her appearance on Father Knows Best (1954) as an exchange student from India. Because of a dearth of decent material, Moreno as an actress had to play roles in movies that she considered degrading. Among the better pictures she appeared in were the classic Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and The King and I (1956).
Filmmaker Robert Wise, who was chosen to codirect the movie version of the smash hit Broadway musical West Side Story (1961) (a retelling of Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet” with the warring Venetian clans the Montagues and Capulets reenvisioned as Irish/Polish and Puerto Rican adolescent street gangs, the Jets and the Sharks), cast Moreno as “Anita”, the Puerto Rican girlfriend of Sharks’ leader Bernardo, whose sister Maria is the piece’s Juliet.
However, despite her proven talent, roles commensurate with that talent were not forthcoming in the 1960s. The following decade would prove kinder, possibly as the beautiful Moreno had aged and could now be seen by film-makers, T.V. producers and casting directors as something other than the spit-fire/sex-pot that Hispanic women were supposed to conform to. Ironically, it was in two vastly diverging roles — that of a $100 hooker in director Mike Nichols brilliant realization of Jules Feiffer‘s acerbic look at male sexuality, Carnal Knowledge (1971) (1971) and that of Milly the Helper in the children’s T.V. show The Electric Company (1971) (1971) — that signaled a career renaissance.
During the seventies, Moreno won a 1972 Grammy Award for her contribution to “The Electric Company” soundtrack album, following it up three years later with a Tony Award as Best Featured Actress in a Musical for The Ritz (1976), a role she would reproduce on the Big Screen. She then won Emmy Awards for “The Muppet Show” and “The Rockford Files”.
Thereafter, she has continued to work steadily on screen (both large and small) and on-stage, solidifying her reputation as a national treasure, a status that was officially ratified with the award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush in June 2004.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Cattle Town, poster, US poster art, from left: Dennis Morgan, Rita Moreno, 1952. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)EL ALAMEIN, US poster, Scott Brady center left bottom right inset: Scott Brady, Rita Moreno, 1953 Courtesy Everett Collection ACHTUNG AUFNAHMEDATUM GESCHÄTZT PUBLICATIONxINxGERxSUIxAUTxONLY Copyright: xCourtesyxEverettxCollectionx MCDELAL EC0011st October 1955: Puerto Rican actress, dancer and singer Rita Moreno is featured for the cover of Picture Post magazine. Original Publication: Picture Post Cover – Vol 69 No 01 – pub. 1955. (Photo by IPC Magazines/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Shirley Knight is a lovelyactress of the 1960’s who had matured into a powerhouse character actress to-day. She was born in 1936 in Kansas. One of her first films was “Ice Palace” in 1960 with Richared Burton, Robert Ryan, Carolyn Jones and Ray Danton. She starred opposite Paul Newman in “Sweet Bird of Youth” and was one of “The Group” in 1966. Francis Ford Coppola directed her in “The Rain People” in 1969. She continues to appear regularly on television in shows such as “Law & Order”.
TCM Overview:
Kansas-born Shirley Knight originally intended to be an opera singer until she saw a touring company of “The Lark” starring Julie Harris and switched to acting. In 1957, she headed west to study at the Pasadena Playhouse where she made her stage debut the following year in “Look Back in Anger”. Knight was put under contract by Warner Bros. and the petite blonde earned critical acclaim and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination as an Oklahoman in love with a Jew in the screen adaptation of William Inge’s “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs” (1960). She picked up a second nod in the same category as Heavenly Finley, the woman seduced and abandoned by Chance Wayne, in “Sweet Bird of Youth” (1962). In “The Group” (1966), her character found seeming happiness with James Broderick while later that same year she delivered a strong turn as a sluttish white woman who confronts a young black male passenger in “The Dutchman”. After a strong turn as a pregnant woman who runs off with a football player in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Rain People” (1969), Knight moved to England with her second husband, British playwright John Hopkins and did not act on screen for five years, returning in “Juggernaut” (1974). Her subsequent film roles have generally cast her in maternal roles as in “Endless Love” (1981), “Stuart Saves His Family” (1995) and “As Good As It Gets” (1997).
While she found almost immediate success in films, Knight has a stated preference for stage work. Spurning an offer to play Ophelia to Richard Burton’s “Hamlet”, she opted to co-star with Geraldine Page and Kim Stanley in an Actors Studio production of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” (1964). She acquired a Tony as Featured Actress in a Play for her turn as a floozy in “Kennedy’s Children” (1975) and has appeared in several classics including twice playing Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire”, Lola in “Come Back, Little Sheba” and Amanda Wingfield in “The Glass Menagerie”. More recently, Knight returned to Broadway and netted a Tony nomination for her turn as a woman who refuses to accept that her son committed suicide in Horton Foote’s Pulitzer-winning “The Young Man From Atlanta” in 1997.
The small screen has also provided the actress with challenging roles. She made her first appearance in the medium in a live broadcast in 1959 and amassed numerous guest credits in the 60s and 70s. Knight co-starred opposite Jason Robards in a “Hallmark Hall of Fame” presentation of “The Country Girl” (NBC, 1974) and Alan Arkin in the above average CBS movie “The Defection of Simas Kudirka” (1978). She offered a strong turn and earned her first Emmy nomination as a concentration camp inmate in the acclaimed “Playing for Time” (CBS, 1980) before picking up the award for a guest appearance as the mother of Mel Harris’ Hope in a 1987 episode of ABC’s “thirtysomething”.
Knight had her first regular series role in the short-lived 1993 CBS drama “Angel Falls”. At the 1995 Emmy Awards, she picked up two statuettes, one for her guest appearance as the mother of a murder victim in an episode of “NYPD Blue” and the second as day care center owner Peggy Buckley who was accused of and tried for child molestation in the fact-based HBO drama “Indictment: The McMartin Trial”. Knight has continued to be a powerful presence in the medium, offering effective supporting turns in such made-for-television fare as “Stolen Memories: Secrets From the Rose Garden” (Family Channel, 1996), “Mary & Tim” (CBS, 1996) and “The Wedding” (ABC, 1998). She returned to regular series work cast as the mother of the titular “Maggie Winters” in the short-lived 1998 CBS sitcom starring Faith Ford. The actress’s schedule remained packed with continual roles in feature films–including “Angel Eyes” (2001), “The Salton Sea” (2002) and “The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” (2002).
Knight became a regular fixture on the small screen with guest appearances on such series as “Ally McBeal,” “ER,” “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” “Crossing Jordan,” and “Cold Case” and “House,” and in 2005 she began a recurring stint on “Desperate Housewives” as Phyllis Van De Kamp, the meddling mother-in-law of tightly wound Bree (Marcia Cross). The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Los Angeles Times obituary in April 2020.
Shirley Knight, the Kansas-born actress who was nominated for two Oscars early in her career and went on to play an astonishing variety of roles in movies, TV and the stage, has died. She was 83.
Knight died Wednesday at her daughter’s home in San Marcos, Texas, according to her daughter Kaitlin Hopkins.
Knight’s career carried her from Kansas to Hollywood and then to the New York theater and London and back to Hollywood. She was nominated for two Tonys, winning one. In recent years, she had a recurring role as Phyllis Van de Kamp (the mother-in-law of Marcia Cross’ character) in the long-running ABC show “Desperate Housewives,” gaining one of her many Emmy nominations.
Knight’s first Academy Award nomination for supporting actress came in just her second screen role, as an Oklahoman in love with a Jewish man in the 1960 film version of William Inge’s play “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs.”
She was nominated for a supporting actress Oscar two years later for her performance as the woman seduced and abandoned by Paul Newman in the 1962 film “Sweet Bird of Youth,” based on the Tennessee Williams play.
As success beckoned in 1960, she told columnist Hedda Hopper that she was struggling to keep on an even keel and continue bettering herself as an actress.
“So many actors, once they became famous, lose some beautiful inner thing, something they should try hard to keep,” she said. “They begin to think too highly of themselves and success.”
For a time, she lived in New York, where she studied with Lee Strasberg. She turned down an offer to play Ophelia to Richard Burton’s Hamlet, preferring to appear on Broadway in 1964 with Geraldine Page and Kim Stanley in Anton Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters,” directed by Strasberg.
Her beauty helped bring her roles in such films as “The Group” (1966), based on Mary McCarthy’s novel about the lives of a group of college girls, and “Dutchman” (1967), from Amiri Baraka’s explosive one-act play about a middle-class black man and a sexually provocative white woman. After playing a pregnant woman who runs off with a football player in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Rain People,” released in 1969, Knight wearied of the Hollywood routine, terming the studio bosses “blockheads.”
Knight moved to England with her second husband, British playwright John Hopkins, with whom she had a daughter, Sophie. (Her first husband was producer Gene Persoff, father of her older daughter, Kaitlin.)
Over the next few years, she raised her daughters and did needlework. But “I decided that acting is what I do best,” she said. The family moved back to the U.S. and Knight returned to films in “Beyond the Poseidon Adventure.” She also appeared in such films as “Endless Love” (as Brooke Shields’ mother), “As Good as It Gets” (as Helen Hunt’s mother) and “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.”
Meanwhile, she thrived onstage and in television. She won a Tony award in 1976 as featured actress in a play for “Kennedy’s Children.” Knight played, in the words of the New York Times review, “a very tart tart with an ambition of gold.”
She was nominated for another Tony in 1997 for best actress in Horton Foote’s “The Young Man From Atlanta.” As the Times put it, “The splendid Ms. Knight, who doesn’t waste a single fluttery gesture, brings an Ibsenesque weight to a woman frozen in the role of petulant, spoiled child bride.”
Knight became active in television starting in the 1950s and was nominated for Emmys eight times from 1981 to 2006. She won a guest actress Emmy in 1988 for playing Mel Harris’ mother in “Thirtysomething,” and then won two Emmys in the same year, 1995: for a supporting actress role in the TV drama “Indictment: The McMartin Trial” and for a guest actress role as a murder victim in “NYPD Blue.”
She was born Shirley Enola Knight on July 5, 1936, in the Kansas countryside, 10 miles from the town of Lyons. Her family was musical and she learned to sing, tap dance and play various instruments.
She was the first in her family to enter college, winning a scholarship to a church college in Enid, Okla., then moved to Wichita State University. She appeared in 32 plays in two years and did two seasons of summer stock.
She aimed to become an opera singer, then switched to acting when she saw Julie Harris in a touring company of “The Lark.” She traveled west to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. Warner Bros. signed her to a contract.
Knight is survived by her daughters, Kaitlin and Sophie C. Hopkins.
Norman Lloyd was born in 1914 in Jersey City. He was a memorable villian in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Saboteur” in 1942. He was also featured by Hitchcock in “Spellbound”. In the 1980’s he starred in the very popular medical drama “St. Elsewhere” which ran from 1983 to 1988.
TCM Overview:
One of the most respected figures in entertainment history, actor-producer-director Norman Lloyd’s résumé read like a roll call of 20th century icons. Among his collaborative partners and directors were Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Lewis Milestone and John Houseman; each of whom employed his crisp, professional screen and stage presence in such efforts as “Saboteur” (1942), “Spellbound” (1945), “A Walk in the Sun” (1945) and “Limelight” (1952). The Communist witch hunt of the 1950s briefly hampered Lloyd’s career, but Hitchcock brought him back into the limelight as the producer of his acclaimed anthology series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents (CBS/NBC, 1955-1962). Modern audiences best knew him as the sage Dr. Auschlander on “St. Elsewhere” (NBC, 1982-88), but his career was thriving long before it, and for decades after its cancellation. A legend in the film and television field, and one of the oldest working actors in show business history, Lloyd represented the pinnacle of accomplishment and endurance for generations of fans.
Born Nov. 8, 1914 in Jersey City, NJ, he moved with his family to Manhattan and then Brooklyn shortly after his birth. Though he showed considerable talent at tennis while a boy, his mother hoped that he would blossom into a child star, so she began enrolling him in acting classes. Several years on the amateur vaudeville circuit followed, but Lloyd did not truly embrace performing until a student in high school, where he participated in numerous plays. After graduating from college, Lloyd joined Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre in New York, which began a decade of appearances in off-Broadway and Broadway plays. In 1937, Lloyd was one of the original players in Orson Welles’ and John Houseman’s Mercury Theatre, as well as appeared as Cinna the Poet in its historic modern dress production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” The following year, his performance as Johnny Appleseed in “Everywhere I Roam” drew rave reviews. Lloyd’s onscreen debut came in “The Streets of New York” (NBC, 1939), an experimental televised play directed by Anthony Mann and starring Jennifer Jones and George Colouris. In 1940, he followed Welles to Los Angeles to appear in a film version of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” The project never got off the ground, but it did grant Lloyd a new home base in Hollywood.
John Houseman introduced Lloyd to Alfred Hitchcock, who was looking for an unknown actor to play a dastardly Nazi spy in his thriller “Saboteur” (1942). The film’s closing sequence, which pits hero Robert Cummings against Lloyd in a fight atop the Statue of Liberty before the latter plunges to his death, was among the most iconic scenes in Hitchcock’s career. The film also served as a beginning of a three-decade partnership and friendship between Lloyd and the director, who would subsequently cast him in “Spellbound” (1945) as a patient of psychiatrist Ingrid Bergman. Lloyd worked as a character actor for some of the most significant film directors of the 1940s and 1950s. He was a churlish henchman for J. Carrol Naish’s misguided farmer in Jean Renoir’s Oscar-nominated “The Southerner” (1945), then segued to the philosophical Army scout in Lewis Milestone’s “A Walk in the Sun” (1945), largely regarded as one of the best films about World War II combat. In 1951, he played Bodalink the choreographer in Charlie Chaplin’s last great film, “Limelight.” Lloyd and Chaplin later co-owned the film rights for Horace McCoy’s novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? which they hoped to make into a film after “Limelight.” Sadly, Chaplin became persona non grata in the United States due to his alleged Communist sympathies, which prevented them from making the film. It was eventually purchased by ABC, which produced a version directed by Sydney Pollack in 1969.
The specter of Communism loomed largely over Lloyd’s career in the early 1950s. Many of his significant collaborators suffered mightily at the hands of the government witch hunt, including Joseph Losey, who directed him in the 1951 remake of “M,” as well as John Garfield, his co-star in the thriller “He Ran All The Way” (1951), which marked the end of the actor’s career after being blacklisted along with its director, John Berry, and writers Dalton Trumbo and Hugo Butler. Lloyd himself found himself targeted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the early 1950s, just as he was segueing into directing for television. A frequent stage director at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, CA, Lloyd was approached by Jay Kantor at MCA about getting involved in the company’s initial launch into this new genre. He helmed episodes for several live theater productions, including the legendary “Omnibus” (ABC/CBS/NBC, 1952-1961) before reteaming with Hitchcock as his associate producer and occasional director for “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” (CBS/NBC, 1955-1962). Among his most memorable turns as director for the series were “Man from the South,” with Steve McQueen as a callous gambler who bet a depraved Peter Lorre that he could ignite his lighter 10 times in a row or lose a finger, and “The Jar,” based on a story by Ray Bradbury about a down-on-his-luck hillbilly (Pat Buttram) who bought a mysterious container that changed his life for the worse.
Lloyd worked primarily as a producer and director on television throughout the 1960s and 1970s, most notably on “The Name of the Game” (NBC, 1968-1971), an offbeat anthology series about the adventures of three publishing company employees, and the UK suspense anthology “Journey to the Unknown” (ITV, 1968-69) for Hammer Films. He also produced and/or directed several well-regarded television adaptations of great Broadway plays, including Lillian Hellman’s “Another Part of the Forest” (PBS, 1972) with Barry Sullivan and Andrew Prine, Clifford Odets’ “Awake and Sing!” (PBS, 1972) with Walter Matthau, and Bruce Jay Friedman’s “Steambath” (PBS, 1973) with Bill Bixby and Valerie Perrine; the latter earned Lloyd a 1974 Emmy nomination. His final efforts as producer and director came with “Tales of the Unexpected” (ITV, 1979-1983), which was largely based on the short stories of Roald Dahl.
As the stigma of the blacklist began to dissipate in the 1960s and 1970s, Lloyd began to resume his acting career. Guest roles on episodic television gave way to TV and theatrical feature turns, including “Audrey Rose” (1977) as a therapist who aided a little girl plagued by the reincarnated spirit of a dead child, and as the sympathetic owner of a radio station who backed his DJs during a protest over advertising in cinematographer John Alonzo’s sole directorial effort, “FM” (1978). In 1982, he took on the role that, for many television viewers, he would remain best known: that of Dr. Daniel Auschlander on “St. Elsewhere.” A kindly mentor to its large cast of doctors and interns, Auschlander suffered from metastatic liver cancer, and was expected to pass away soon after the first few seasons. However, intensive chemotherapy put his illness in remission and he remained a vital member of the show until its final episode, when he was felled by a massive stroke. However, the finale’s legendary twist – in which the entire show was revealed as the figment of an autistic boy’s imagination – revealed him as the boy’s grandfather.
Lloyd remained active in television and the occasional feature in the years after “St. Elsewhere.” He was the authoritarian head of the boys’ school who butted heads with freethinking teacher Robin Williams in “Dead Poets Society” (1989), and the senior partner at Daniel Day-Lewis’ law firm in Martin Scorsese’s “The Age of Innocence” (1993). He reunited with his “St. Elsewhere” producers for the short-lived series “Home Fires” (NBC, 1992), and he played Dr. Isaac Mentnor, a scientist who created a time travel device using the alien spacecraft that landed in Roswell, New Mexico, in “Seven Days” (UPN, 1998-2001). Notable guest turns included a recurring role on “The Practice” (ABC, 1997-2004) as Asher Silverman, a district attorney and practicing rabbi who challenged Dylan McDermott’s Bobby Donnelly on ethical issues. In 2000, he co-starred as the Secretary of Defense in a live TV remake of “Fail Safe” (CBS) that starred George Clooney, and in 2005 – well into his ninth decade – he received rave reviews as a former English professor, now a resident at a retirement home, who bonds with Cameron Diaz’s fading wild child over poetry in Curtis Hansen’s comedy-drama, “In Her Shoes.” In 2007, Lloyd’s storied career was the subject of a documentary, “Who Is Norman Lloyd,” a gentle valentine to the actor’s life and accomplishments, as well as his lengthy marriage to actress Peggy Lloyd, whom he wed in 1936. As he approached his 100th birthday, he was still performing, most notably in a 2010 episode of “Modern Family” (ABC, 2009- ).
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Imogene Coca was born in 1908 in Philadelphia. She is maninly known for her television performances especially “Your Show of Shows” in the early 1950’s. In 1963 she starred in the series “Grindl”. On film she was terrific in “National Lampoon Vacation” in 1983. Imogene Coca died in 2001 at the age of 92. She was married to the actor King Donovan.
“Independent” obituary:
Zany, saucer-eyed and elastic-faced, Imogene Coca was a diminutive comedienne and actress whose performances with Sid Caesar in the television series Your Show of Shows in the early Fifties have become the stuff of legend. Coca could satirise anyone, from housewife to society matron, movie star to opera diva or ballerina, and her clowning was an acknowledged inspiration for many that followed. Both Carol Burnett and Lily Tomlin have said that Coca was a strong influence on their work, Tomlin remarking some years ago, “I was so attracted to her comic striptease routine that I copied it stole it! when I was in college.”
Though she had success in night-clubs, movies and on Broadway, Coca will always be remembered for Your Show of Shows, which for over four years from 1950 dominated Saturday nights on American television. Blessed with a gifted team of writers including Mel Brooks, Neil Simon and Woody Allen, it is considered one of the classics of television’s “Golden Age”. Coca was steeped in show business from the moment she was born, but her climb to stardom was a long one. Her parents were José Fernandez Coca, a violinist and vaudeville bandleader, and Sadie Brady, a dancer who also performed in a magician’s act. An only child, she spent her childhood either in the theatres where her parents worked or in the tumultuous Philadelphia theatrical boarding house where they lived between engagements. She began piano lessons at the age of five, singing lessons at six and dancing lessons at seven. “I began on the stage as one of those horrible little children who sing with no voice,” she later recalled. She attended school in Atlantic City for a while, but by the age of 11 was performing in vaudeville doing tap, acrobatic and ballet dancing.
At 13 she was singing in a slinky black dress at a Pennsylvania night-club, and at 15 left Philadelphia for New York, where she danced in Jimmy Durante’s Silver City Club. She made her Broadway début as a chorus girl in the musical When You Smile(1925), which lasted for only 49 performances, and for the next nine years she played in virtually every form of show business musicals, revues, night-clubs and summer stock working mainly as a dancer. “I never thought of myself in comedy at all,” she said: I loved going to the theatre and seeing people wearing beautiful clothes come down the staircase and start to dance. I also wanted to play St Joan. On Broadway her winsome charm was displayed in such revues asGarrick Gaieties (1930), Shoot the Works (1931) and Flying Colors(1932). Her transition to comedy and pantomime came by accident when she was rehearsing in a cold theatre for New Faces of 1934. Lent an enormous coat to keep warm she began clowning around. She later recalled,
Along with three boys in the chorus, I was jumping up and down to keep warm. Then we found ourselves doing silly little steps when producer Leonard Stillman came in. He asked what we were doing, then said, “It looks funny; I’ll put it in the show.” We thought that was crazy, but it turned out to be a big hit. Stillman had her perform almost the entire show in the top-coat as a running gag, at one point having her saunter across the stage in it, carrying a small feather and announcing that she was doing her fan dance. Although Henry Fonda was another of the new talents in the show it had only a modest run, but Coca was hailed as a bright new comedy find and Stillman used her again in New Faces of 1936, in which she reprised her coat routine and also played a Cinderella who begs her fairy godmother to let her be a stripper. In the Thirties the summer camps where families vacationed in the mountain regions of the Catskills and Poconos were great training grounds for performers, and for several summers Coca worked on her comedy at such camps, where others developing their skills included Danny Kaye, Jerome Robbins, Carol Channing and the producer Max Leibman. When Leibman took some of the material that had been tried out at the camps and packaged it on Broadway as The Straw Hat Revue (1939), Kaye, Coca and Robbins were in the cast, with Coca stopping the show with a parody of Carmen Miranda, “Soused American Way”.
Though she had acquired a small following, her career proceeded in what she later termed “fits and starts” until Leibman, who had worked with both Coca and Sid Caesar in the Catskills, paired them in a television variety series, Admiral Broadway Revue(1949). Telecast live from a theatre in New York, it was a spectacular production with the dancers Marge and Gower Champion among its regulars plus top-name guests every week. Each show would have half a dozen comedy skits the opening programme concluded with a burlesque on opera, No No Rigoletto, in the style of the revue producer Billy Rose. The series lasted only six months, but Caesar and Coca returned the following year for Your Show of Shows, a similarly ambitious 90-minute weekly variety series which had a large corps of singers and dancers but was dominated by the comic genius of Caesar and Coca. They appeared in regular routines such as “History the Way She Ain’t” and as a hilariously mismatched married couple, “The Hickenloopers”, and satirised current films and television shows such as Shane (with Caesar a fearless gunfighter called “Strange”) and one of their best-remembered sketches, “From Here to Obscurity”, which concluded with the couple alone on a beach in their swimsuits, trying to make love as buckets of water splash into their faces. Finally he says, “There’s one thing I have to ask.” “Yes?” “Did you bring a towel?”
Coca’s musical training was an asset in her parodies of opera divas and prima ballerinas, such as her interpretation of a fiercely intense young Wagnerian. The mezzo-soprano Rise Stevens said, “You’re always deathly afraid the young singer will never make the last note. With Imogene, you’re always afraid she will.” Her dance spoofs, such as her pursuit of a prancing satyr inAfternoon of a Faun, were based on finely exaggerated professional movements rather than ungainly posturing. Her gifts for pantomime were extraordinary, and her face remarkably supple. In one sketch, she was a wife posing for her amateur photographer husband (Caesar) who could not quite satisfy himself about her expression. Poking and pushing, he kept rearranging her features, which froze where he put them. Finally he had her with one eye shut tight as the other followed him around the room like a searchlight.
Coca later said that she and Caesar never saw each other socially, but performed with exactly the same rhythm when the camera was on: Two people couldn’t be less alike than Sid and myself. But we kind of know what the other one’s going to do. We pick up each other’s vibes, and we find the same things funny. In 1951 they both won Emmy Awards as the best actor and actress on television. Carl Reiner and Howard Morris later joined the show and became important members of the comedy team, performing with Caesar and Coca a routine in which the four are mechanical figures on a Bavarian clock who go increasingly haywire as each hour strikes. The show ended in 1954 with a tearful recap of the best sketches from the previous four years, and even the president of NBC turned up to thank everyone and wish them well.
Neither Caesar nor Coca ever quite recaptured that magic, either separately or together. Coca was given her own television series, which lasted only one season, but in 1956 she successfully took over from Claudette Colbert in the Broadway comedy Janus. In 1958 she accompanied Caesar to England to do a series of playlets for the BBC, and she starred in touring versions of several musicals including Wonderful Town, Once Upon a Mattress andBells are Ringing. In 1967 The Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris Special reunited the former team and won an Emmy as outstanding variety special.
Coca’s first film was Bashful Ballerina (1937) and later films included Under the Yum Yum Tree (1963), in which she was a nosy housekeeper to a lecherous landlord, Jack Lemmon, and National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), as Aunt Edna. In 1978 she won a Tony nomination for her portrayal of a religious fanatic in the Broadway musical On the Twentieth Century,Tom Vallance a part that had been turned down by Mildred Natwick because it was “too risqué“.
A shy person offstage, Coca was an animal lover who once, while on holiday in California, bought a crippled duck and brought it back to live on her penthouse terrace in Manhattan. In 1935 she married Robert Burton, who arranged music for many of her sketches. He died in 1955 and five years later Coca married the actor King Donovan, with whom she appeared in in such plays asThe Fourposter and The Prisoner of Second Avenue. He died in 1987.
In 1991 Coca and Caesar recreated some old sketches in a stage show, Together Again, which they took across the United States to a warm response. Coca said:
Married people still have silly arguments, Hollywood still turns out silly movies, ballet dancers still do silly things on stage. So in some ways not much has changed.
Tom Vallance
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
She was born in Montreal, Quebec, the daughter of Laurette (née Cavanagh), a maid, and Joseph Firmin Bujold, a bus driver. She is of French Canadian descent, with distant Irish ancestry.
Bujold received a strict convent education for twelve years, which she disliked. She was expelled from the convent for reportedly reading Fanny by Marcel Pagnol. She entered the Montreal Conservatory of Dramatic Art,[5][6] where she was trained in the classics of French theatre.
Two months before she was to graduate she made her stage debut as Rosine in Le Barbier de Séville in 1961 with Theâtre de Gesù. She quit the school and was rarely out of work, being in demand for radio, stage, TV and film. Bujold made her TV debut with Le square (1963), a 60-minute TV film based on a play by Marguerite Duras, co-starring Georges Groulx. She was in episodes of Jeudi-théâtre (“Atout… Meurtre”) and Les belles histoires des pays d’en haut (“La terre de Bidou”) and guest starred on Ti-Jean caribou. Her Canadian feature film debut was in Amanita Pestilens (1963). She was then in an international co production La fleur de l’âge, ou Les adolescentes (1964) and had a lead role in La terre à boire(1964), the first Quebec feature to be privately financed. Bujold starred in two 30 minute shorts, La fin des étés (1964) and Geneviève (1964). She toured Canada performing plays also worked steadily in radio and was voted actress of the year in Montreal.
In 1965, she toured Russia and France with the company of the Théâtre du Rideau Vert. While in Paris, Bujold was in a play A House… and a Day when she was seen by renowned French director Alain Resnais. He selected her for a role in his film The War Is Over, opposite Yves Montand and Ingrid Thulin. She returned home briefly to appear in “Romeo and Jeannette” by Jean Anouilh alongside Michael Sarrazin, for a Canadian TV show Festival. Also for that show she did productions of The Murderer and A Doll’s House.
She stayed in France to make two more films: Philippe de Broca‘s King of Hearts (1966), with Alan Bates, and Louis Malle‘s The Thief of Paris (1967), with Jean-Paul Belmondo. Bujold won the Prix Suzanne as the Discovery of the Year and Elle magazine called her The Girl of the Day. Despite having established herself in France, however, she returned to Canada.
Upon her return to Canada, Bujold married film director Paul Almond in 1967. He directed her in “The Puppet Caravan” for Festival in 1967. She appeared in Michel Brault‘s film Between Salt and Sweet Water (1967), then went to New York to play the title role in a production of Saint Joan (1967) for Hallmark Hall of Fame on American TV. Although she said she preferred film most and television least out of all the mediums, she received great acclaim for this including an Emmy nomination.
In Canada she starred in Isabel (1968), written and directed by Almond. It was one of the first Canadian films to be picked up for distribution by a major Hollywood studio.
Back in Canada, she did a second feature with her husband, The Act of the Heart (1970), co starring Donald Sutherland, which earned her a Best Actress at the Canadian Film Awards. She wrote and starred in a short film, Marie-Christine (1970), directed by Claude Jutra. Wallis and Universal wanted Bujold to star in Mary, Queen of Scots (1971) but she refused so they sued her for $450,000.
She settled the lawsuit with Universal, agreeing to a three-picture film contract starting with Earthquake (1974), starring with Charlton Heston. In 1973, after her marriage to Paul Almond ended, she relocated to Los Angeles.
Bujold went to France to make Incorrigible (1975) with de Broca and Belmondo. For Hallmark Hall of Fame and the BBC she appeared in Caesar and Cleopatra (1975) alongside Alec Guinness.
At Universal Studios, she was the lead in Swashbuckler (1976) alongside Robert Shaw. In an interview she said, “Robert Shaw is a man worth knowing.”[17]
Bujold returned to Canada to play a key role in the Sherlock Holmes film Murder by Decree (1979), which won her a Best Supporting Actress Award at the Canadian Film Awards.
Bujold starred in Choose Me (1984), directed and written by Alan Rudolph. She promptly made two more films for Rudolph: Trouble in Mind (1985) and The Moderns (1988), the latter set in Paris in the 1920s. She was part of his informal company of actors that he repeatedly used in his films, including Keith Carradine.
After a long absence from Quebec, she returned to appear in two more films by Michel Brault: The Paper Wedding (1989), and My Friend Max (1994). In between she went to France to make Rue du Bac (1991), and did another film with Almond, The Dance Goes On (1991), the latter featuring their son, Matthew (born in 1968). She had support roles in Oh, What a Night (1993), and An Ambush of Ghosts (1993).
In 1994, Bujold was chosen to play Captain Elizabeth Janeway (subsequently renamed Kathryn Janeway),[20] lead character in the ensemble cast of the American television series Star Trek: Voyager. However, she left the project after just two days of filming, because of the demanding work schedule. Kate Mulgrew was subsequently cast in the role.
Bujold was in Dead Innocent (1997) and was in a short Matisse & Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry (2001).
Bujold was back in Quebec to star in Chaos and Desire (2002), directed by Manon Briand. That year she said “I like doing studio films, independent films. I want to step up to the plate and do it. The role doesn’t have to be long, but it has to be essential to the film. And it’s got to be truthful to me. I defend my characters. They’re like my babies.”
In 2012, Bujold played a woman battling dementia in the sleeper romantic drama Still Mine. Stephen Holden of The New York Times commented: “Ms. Bujold imbues Irene with a starchy tenacity and a sharp sense of humor”, while The Washington Post called her performance “superb” and “remarkably detailed”.
FEW ACTORS were more effective at portraying belligerent, chip- on-their-shoulder characters than Dane Clark. Small in stature, but tough and wiry, he was frequently compared to John Garfield, one of the top stars at the same studio, Warners, but Clark, though popular with cinemagoers in the Forties, never achieved similar stardom. His pugnacious rebels created less empathy than Garfield’s and sometimes (as in his overdrawn anarchic painter of A Stolen Life) upset a film’s balance in their ferocity.
The actor’s intensity was both his strength and his weakness. Though he graduated to leading roles at the studio, his best chance came when he was loaned to Republic to star in Frank Borzage’s Moonrise, a moody piece in which Clark was ideally cast as a hot-tempered outsider whose father was hanged for murder.
Born Bernard Zanville in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, he was a fine athlete and was given the opportunity to become a baseball player, but chose higher education instead. He received a BA from Cornell University and a law degree from St John’s University, New York, but the Depression limited his opportunities and he worked as a labourer, boxer and model before turning to writing for radio.
This led to acting, and he made his Broadway debut (as Bernard Zanville) in Friedrich Woolf’s Sailors of Catarro (1934), produced by the leftist Theatre Union. George Tobias (later also a contract player at Warners) was in the cast and he and Clark were among those arrested when some of the company joined Communist pickets demonstrating against Orbach’s department store. Though the matinee was cancelled, the actors were bailed out in time for the evening performance.
Clark was next in Panic (1935), which ran for only three performances but was described by one critic as “the outstanding critical failure of the year”. An anti-capitalist blank-verse tragedy that attempted to account for the national bank calamity of 1933 in terms of Greek drama, it is considered an important part of theatrical history for several reasons – it was the first play by the poet Archibald MacLeish, it starred the 19-year-old Orson Welles, its producers included John Houseman and Virgil Thomson, and the Greek-style chorus was choreographed by Martha Graham.
Clark then joined the socially conscious Group Theatre and acted in a highly praised Clifford Odets double-bill, the anti-Nazi Till The Day I Die and the radical Waiting for Lefty (1935), in which the auditorium was assumed to be the meeting hall for a group of taxi drivers at a union meeting, with the audience the potential strikers and actors spotted throughout the house to increase the feeling of audience participation.
Clark’s last 1935 show was the most successful, Sidney Kingley’s Dead End, about the deleterious effects of New York’s slums, which ran for two years. Clark then toured in several plays, including the Group Theatre’s biggest success, Odets’ Golden Boy, until being called to Hollywood in 1941 to act in promotional films being made by the US Army.
Bit parts in movies followed, including The Glass Key, Wake Island and Pride of the Yankees (all 1942), and at Warners the Bogart war film Action in the North Atlantic (1943).
Warners then offered him a contract, and with the new name of Dane Clark he was given a featured role in Destination Tokyo (1943), the first of two films he made with Garfield (who was also a graduate of the Group Theatre). The story of a submarine crew on combat duty featured Clark as Tin Can, most aggressive of the crew members.
Clark then settled into a run of girl-chasing “best buddy” roles, portraying the soldier friend of Dennis Morgan in The Very Thought of You (1944), Robert Hutton’s soldier pal in Hollywood Canteen (1944), and a wounded soldier who befriends a blinded marine (Garfield) at a military hospital in Pride of the Marines (1945). His role in the all-star Hollywood Canteen is remembered for the moment when he says to the girl with whom he is dancing, “You know, you’re a dead ringer for Joan Crawford.” When she replies, “Don’t look now, but I am Joan Crawford”, Clark promptly faints.
He began to tire of such typecasting, though, and had the first of several battles with the studio head Jack Warner for better roles and more pay. “They were always giving me lines like `You woman, you’,” he said later. “They had me as a teenage soldier back from the Pacific or some place. In The Very Thought of You I had to bark like a dog when I saw a girl. I ask you, how can you be subtle – how can you underplay when you’re making sounds like a dog?”
After A Stolen Life (1946), in which as a consistently bad- tempered painter he woos Bette Davis with the line, “Man eats woman and woman eats man; that’s basic”, he was given his first starring role in Her Kind of Man (1946), a half-hearted attempt by the studio to recapture the glory of their earlier gangster films, in which Clark, as a newspaper man, gets Janis Paige, a night-club singer, out of the clutches of the gangster Zachary Scott. Whiplash (1948) was similar, only this time Clark was a painter rescuing Alexis Smith from Scott.
Before this, Clark had his best role at Warners, as a bitter convict who escapes from a chain-gang and is sheltered by an introverted farm girl (Ida Lupino) in Deep Valley (1947). Because of a set builders’ strike at the studio, the whole film was made on location in Big Sur and Big Bear, California, and its director Jean Negulesco later recounted that the long period away from the studio led Clark and Lupino to have a passionate affair which, he said, ended as quickly as it began once the couple returned to their normal life style.
Clark was then borrowed by Republic for Moonrise (1948). The story of a social outcast on the run after an accidental killing was treated with lyrical romanticism, and the offbeat teaming of the grim Clark and ethereal Gail Russell as his girlfriend gave the film extra piquancy. Clark finished his Warner contract with two minor films, Barricade (1950), in which he beat Raymond Massey, a sadistic mine-owner, to death, and a mystery story, Backfire (1950).
The following year Clark came to England to star with Margaret Lockwood in Roy Baker’s comedy-thriller Highly Dangerous. In this fanciful tale of an entomologist (Lockwood) on a government spy assignment who is given a truth drug by the enemy under which she imagines herself as her favourite Dick Barton-like radio character and saves the day with the aid of an American reporter (Clark), the actor revealed an unexpectedly droll sense of humour. In 1954 he co-produced and starred in the story of the Harlem Globetrotters, Go Man Go.
A consistent performer on radio throughout his career, Clark was also a television pioneer, appearing in a Chevrolet Tele-Theatre episode in 1949. He went on to appear in dozens of television shows and starred in two series, Wire Service (1956-57) as a reporter, and Bold Venture (1957), which he described at the time as “about an adventure-bent skipper of a small Caribbean boat-for-hire. Eugene O’Neill this ain’t.”
Television movies in which he appeared included Say Goodbye, Maggie Cole (1975), the last film made by Susan Hayward, and from 1974 until 1978 he had a regular role on the series Police Story. Clark returned to Broadway in the Sixties as replacement lead in Tchin Tchin and A Thousand Clowns. Late in that decade his wife of many years, Margot Yoder, died, and in 1972 he married a young stockbroker, Geraldine Frank.
Bernard Zanville (Dane Clark), actor: born New York 18 February 1913; married first Margot Yoder (deceased), second 1972 Geraldine Frank; died Santa Monica, California 11 September 1998
New York Times obituary in 1998:
Dane Clark, the Brooklyn-born actor whose down-to-earth portrayals of tough but appealing soldiers, sailors and pilots in World War II films for Warner Brothers brought him stardom, died on Friday at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 85 and lived in Brentwood.
”That was the best break of my life, hooking up with the Warners,” Mr. Clark said in a 1946 interview. ”They don’t go much for the ‘pretty boy’ type there. An average-looking guy like me has a chance to get someplace, to portray people the way they really are, without any frills.
”The only thing I want to do in films is to be Mr. Joe Average as well as I know how. Of course, anyone whose face appears often enough on the screen is bound to have bobby-soxers after him for autographs. But what I really get a kick out of is when cab drivers around New York lean out and yell ”Hi, Brooklyn’ when I walk by. They make me feel I’m putting it across O.K. when I try to be Joe Average.”
Mr. Clark made some 30 films, beginning with ”Sunday Punch” in 1942 and ending with ”Last Rites” in 1988. But he also appeared on Broadway and on the road in a variety of stage roles and performed frequently on television. But he never became as big a star as his friend John Garfield, who suggested he take up acting, or Humphrey Bogart, who, he said, gave him the name Dane Clark.
Mr. Clark’s early credits were under his real name, Bernard Zanville, and it was under that name in the role of a sailor named Johnnie Pulaski that he caught the attention of the critics in the 1943 Warners Brothers feature ”Action in the North Atlantic,” which paid tribute to the heroism of the merchant marine.
As Bernard Zanville, he appeared in films like ”The Glass Key,” ”Wake Island” and ”The Pride of the Yankees” in 1942, and as Dane Clark he portrayed a sailor aboard a submarine in ”Destination Tokyo” in 1944, a flier in ”God Is My Co-Pilot” in 1945 and a leatherneck in ”Pride of the Marines” that same year.
Among his other films were ”Hollywood Canteen” (1944), ”A Stolen Life” (1946), ”Whiplash” (1948), ”Fort Defiance” (1951), ”Never Trust a Gambler” (1951) and ”Outlaw’s Son” (1957). His co-stars were people like Bogart, Garfield, Cary Grant, Bette Davis and Raymond Massey.
Mr. Clark was especially proud of the 1954 film ”Go, Man, Go!,” in which he played Abe Saperstein, the founder of the trailblazing black basketball team the Harlem Globetrotters, because he regarded the film as a forerunner of others that decried racial discrimination and championed civil rights.
Mr. Clark, who was born in Brooklyn on Feb. 18, 1913, was a product of the Great Depression. As a graduate of Cornell University and St. John’s Law School in Brooklyn in the mid-1930’s, he said, he found that lawyers were having as hard a time as anyone else finding work. He drifted into boxing. At 5 foot 10, weighing 162 pounds, the hazel-eyed, brown-haired Mr. Clark soon concluded that he was outmatched and saw no sense in taking beatings. To earn a dollar, he said, he played baseball, labored at construction, worked as a salesman and then, as a sculptor’s model, fell in with what he called an arty set.
”They fascinated me at first,” he said. ”Then suddenly it struck me that their constant snobbish talk about the ‘theatah’ was a little on the phony side. I decided it give it a try myself, just to show them anyone could do it. Before I knew it, I was getting small parts on Broadway, then bigger ones. Then finally I got some good spots in ‘Dead End” and ‘Stage Door’ and finally took over the lead from Wally Ford in ‘Of Mice and Men.’ ” Before long, Mr. Clark decided to try his luck in Hollywood.
Mr. Clark’s first wife, Margot Yoder, a painter and sculptor, died in 1970. He is survived by his wife of 27 years, Geraldine.
”This is a very complex, wondrous business I’m in,” Mr. Clark once said as he reminisced. ”My kicks are my work. I’m miserable when I’m not working.
Dane Clark was born in 1912 in Brooklyn, New York. He signed a Warner Brothers contract in 1943 and established himself as a capable leading man of film noir and gritty thrillers. His films include “A Stolen Life” opposite Bette Davis in 1946, “Deep Valley” and “Moonrise” opposite Gail Russell. He died in 1998 at the age of 86.
TCM Overview:
Bernard Zanville was a hard-working young man in New York City struggling to finance his law degree, when he turned to acting on the advice of friend John Garfield. After appearing on stage for several years, including a stint starring alongside Garfield in the original cast of Clifford Odets’ “Waiting for Lefty” (1935), Zanville gave up his dreams of law school and relocated to Hollywood to pursue a movie career. Hooking up with Warner Bros., his name was changed to the more marquee friendly Dane Clark, allegedly by Humphrey Bogart who co-starred with the young actor in what was more or less his star-making performance as merchant marine Johnny Pulaski in 1943’s “Action in the North Atlantic”. That same year, Clark acted alongside Cary Grant and Garfield in “Destination Tokyo” and went on to convincingly play pugnacious soldiers in war-themed pictures for Warners like “God is My Co-Pilot” and “Pride of the Marines” (both 1945). Movies like “Her Kind of Man” (1946), “Deep Valley”, “Embraceable You” and “That Way With Women” (all 1947) featured Clark’s tough guy persona put to new use, now as the dangerous leading man, the misunderstood gangster type who gets involved with a nice girl and changes his ways.
Despite his undeniable talent and magnetism, Clark never took off as a star the way his friend John Garfield did, even after his scene-stealing turn in “Hollywood Canteen” (1944), a performance alongside such notables as Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Jack Benny. His prolific acting career included starring turns in dozens of films in the 40s and 50s, including a memorable portrayal of Abe Saperstein in “Go, Man, Go!” (1954), the story of the creation of basketball’s famous Harlem Globetrotters. Clark eventually left Hollywood to work on the stage and in features produced overseas. He worked for J Arthur Rank in London, appearing in 1950’s “Highly Dangerous” and 1952’s “The Gambler and the Lady”. In 1968, he starred in the Denmark/US co-production “Dage i Min Fars Hus/Days in My Father’s House”.
Clark returned to the stage after achieving film success, starring in many Broadway productions (e.g., “A Thousand Clowns” in which he replaced Jason Robards). He was also a frequent presence on the small screen, first appearing in several of the theater anthology programs that were popular in the medium’s early days. Clark made his series debut as legal aid lawyer Richard Adams in the NBC drama “Justice” (1954-56) and headlined the 1959 syndicated series “Bold Venture”. Throughout much of the 60s, 70s and 80s, Clark was a familiar face as a guest performer on shows as varied as “The Twilight Zone”, “I Spy”, “The Mod Squad” and “Murder, She Wrote”. He returned to series work as a police lieutenant in the CBS remake “The New Adventures of Perry Mason” (1973-74). Clark made his last film appearance in 1988’s “Last Rites” starring Tom Berenger. The veteran actor died in 1998, battling cancer.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
A Stolen Life, poster, Glenn Ford, Bette Davis, Dane Clark, 1946. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERABlackout, poster, (aka MURDER BY PROXY), Dane Clark (gun), 1954. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Patricia Hitchcock is the actress daughter of Alfred Hitchcock. She was born in London in 1928. When her father went to Hollywood in 1939 to make “Rebecca”, she and her mother went with him. She was featured in such Hitchcock classics as “Stage Fright” in 1949, “”Strangers on a Train” and “Psycho”. She died in 2021 aged 93.
Patricia Hitchcock, the only child of the film director Alfred Hitchcock, who has died aged 93, was an accomplished actress in her own right, taking supporting roles in three of her father’s best-known films as well as appearing on television in episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
She made her screen debut as a jolly acting student called Chubby Bannister in her father’s Stage Fright (1950), because cast and crew were rehearsing at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where she was a student. She would also feature in the film as Jane Wyman’s double in a stunt involving a speeding car: “I drove right into the camera and had to stop at a plate-glass window.”
But she was best known for her role in Strangers on a Train (1951) as Barbara Morton, the inquisitive and chubbily bespectacled younger sister of Ann (Ruth Roman), the woman Guy Haines (Farley Granger) wants to marry, who witnesses the psychopathic Bruno (Robert Walker) attempting to strangle a woman at a cocktail party.
Pat Hitchcock with her father on set in 1950 during filming of Strangers on a Train based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith CREDIT: Alamy
Favourable reviews might have marked the beginning of a career as a character actress. But within a year she had met her husband, Joseph O’Connell, and married him, and a year after that had the first of three children. Though she had a small role in Psycho (1960) as the office worker who offers to share her tranquillisers with Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane, she gave up thoughts of a serious acting career to devote herself to her family.
Alfred Hitchcock, reflecting years later on his daughter’s marriage in 1952, said that he and his wife Alma had been “relieved, in a way” when Pat decided that “being a mother of sticky-fingered children required all her creative attention.”
Pat Hitchcock had a small role in the film as a witness in spectacles CREDIT: Moviepix/Getty
After her father’s death in 1980, the job of upholding his memory and protecting his reputation largely fell to Pat. She also co-authored a biography of her mother, Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man (2003), in which she maintained that her father would never have achieved such acclaim without the contribution of his wife of 54 years and mostly silent professional partner.
Patricia Alma Hitchcock was born in London on July 7 1928. Her mother, Alma Reville, had been a respected film editor, first at Twickenham Studios, and then at Islington Studios, where in 1923 she met Hitchcock, then little more than a script assistant. They had married in 1926.
Pat would relate that her father was so stricken by anxiety when her mother went into labour that he immediately left their Cromwell Road flat to go for a long walk, explaining afterwards: “Consider my suffering. I nearly died of the suspense.”
She attributed her early interest in acting to being brought on the set by her father if she remained very quiet: “I have a picture of me, with Margaret Lockwood and my dog, on The Lady Vanishes. I was absolutely fascinated.”
When she was eight, she was dispatched to boarding school, where she played Rumpelstiltskin: “It never occurred to me that I’d do anything else but act.”
The family moved to Los Angeles in 1939 when Pat was 10, but she recalled that she was brought up as an English child: “I knew what was expected, and I pretty much always did it. You didn’t speak unless spoken to, but it didn’t bother me or have any repercussions. I didn’t know anything else.”
She was very close to her father, who would take her out every Saturday, shopping and to lunch, and to (Catholic) church every Sunday. She attributed her lifelong religious faith to him.
She played teenage leads in two short-run Broadway plays, Solitaire (1942), and Violet (1944), the latter written and directed by Whitfield Cook, whom Hitchcock would later engage as a screenwriter on both Stage Fright and Strangers on a Train.
When she was 18 Pat was sent back to England to train at Rada, where her contemporaries included Lionel Jeffries and Dorothy Tutin, and in 1950 played a palace maid in the Jean Negulesco drama The Mudlark (1950), starring Irene Dunne and Alec Guinness.
Back in the US, she had an uncredited part in Cecil B DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956). She also appeared in television productions and was cast in episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “whenever they needed a maid with an English accent”, as she put it.
She felt, however, that being Hitchcock’s daughter had been a “minus” in her career. “I wish he had believed in nepotism,” she told an interviewer. “I’d have worked a lot more. But he never had anyone in his pictures unless he believed they were right for the part. He never fit a story to a star, or to an actor. Often I tried to hint to his assistant, but I never got very far. She’d bring my name up, he’d say, ‘She isn’t right for it’, and that would be the end of that.”
Pat Hitchcock described her father as “very quiet. Incredible sense of humour. Very loving. He put his family first before everything else, and we led a very quiet life.”
Patricia Hitchcock O’Connell (daughter of Alfred) speaking to fans of Alfred Hitchcock during a DVD signing in Hollywood, 2005 CREDIT: Matthew Simmons/Getty Images
On Alma’s death in 1982, two years after her husband, Pat and her family inherited her father’s estate.
She was angered by later suggestions that Hitchcock had been a sadistic and manipulative director who tried to control his leading ladies in real life and made sexual overtures toward some of them. “I know a lot of people insist that my father must have had a dark imagination,” she said. “Well, he did not. He was a brilliant film-maker and he knew how to tell a story, that’s all.”.
Yet even by her account the director had a bizarre sense of humour. When she was a child, he would creep into her bedroom late at night and paint a clown’s face on her sleeping features so that she would be surprised when she woke up and looked in the mirror. Returning from a wartime visit to England, he brought back an empty incendiary bomb as a present for his young daughter.
If she did have a criticism (though she denied it was any such thing) it was that he was content that her mother was never given the credit that Pat believed was her due.
Alfred Hitchcock with his wife Alma Reville and their daughter Pat Hitchcock aboard the Queen Mary at Southampton, before departure to America in March 1939 CREDIT: AFP/GettyImages
Alma was credited with screenplay or continuity work on almost half of Hitchcock’s films until 1950, and she continued her role as collaborator for 25 years after that, advising Hitchcock on “script material, casting and all aspects of the production” and working with other directors. But during the period of her husband’s most sustained creative activity, 1951-1960, Alma’s name disappeared.
Among other things Pat claimed that her mother had saved Psycho from an embarrassing faux pas after noticing, at a screening, that Janet Leigh was still breathing after having been killed off in the shower.
In later life Pat Hitchcock did volunteer work with a cystic fibrosis charity, her eldest granddaughter having been diagnosed with the disease
Her husband Joseph O’Connell, who was in the transportation business, died in 1994. She is survived by their three daughters
Patricia Hitchcock. Wikipedia.
Pat Hitchcock was born in 1928 and is an English actress and producer. She is the only child of English director Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville, and had small roles in several of his films, starting with Stage Fright (1950).
Patricia Hitchcock
Hitchcock was born in London in 1928, the only child of film director Alfred Hitchcock and film editor Alma Reville. The family moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1939. Once there, Hitchcock’s father soon made his mark in Hollywood.
As a child, Hitchcock knew she wanted to be an actress. In the early 1940s, she began acting on the stage and doing summer stock. Her father helped her gain a role in the Broadway production of Solitaire (1942). She also played the title role in the Broadway play Violet (1944).
In early 1949, her parents arrived in London to make Stage Fright, Hitchcock’s first British-made feature film since emigrating to Hollywood. Pat did not know she would have a walk-on part in the film until her parents arrived. Because she bore a resemblance to the star, Jane Wyman, her father asked if she would mind also doubling for Wyman in the scenes that required “danger driving”.
She had small roles in three of her father’s films: Stage Fright (1950), in which she played a jolly acting student named Chubby Bannister, one of Wyman’s school chums; Strangers on a Train (1951), playing Barbara Morton, sister of Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), Guy Haines’s (Farley Granger) lover; and Psycho (1960), playing Janet Leigh‘s character’s plain-Jane office mate, Caroline, who generously offers to share tranquilizers that her mother gave her for her wedding night.
Patricia had a small uncredited role as an extra in her father’s 1936 Sabotage. She and her mother, Alma Reville, are in the crowd waiting for, then watching, the Lord Mayor’s Show parade.
As well as appearing in ten episodes of her father’s half-hour television programme, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Hitchcock worked on a few others, including Playhouse 90, which was live, directed by John Frankenheimer. Acting for her father, however, remained the high point of her acting career, which she interrupted to bring up her children. (Hitchcock has a small joke with her first appearance on his show – after saying good night and exiting the screen, he sticks his head back into the picture and remarks: “I thought the little leading lady was rather good, didn’t you?”)
She married Joseph E. O’Connell, Jr., 17 January 1952, at Our Lady Chapel in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York. They decided to have their wedding there because Hitchcock had many friends on the East Coast and O’Connell had relatives in Boston. They had three daughters, Mary Alma Stone (born 17 April 1953), Teresa “Tere” Carrubba (born 2 July 1954), and Kathleen “Katie” Fiala (born 27 February 1959). Joe died in 1994.She currently lives in Solvang, California.
For several years, she was the family representative on the staff of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. She supplied family photos and wrote the foreword of the book Footsteps in the Fog: Alfred Hitchcock’s San Francisco by Jeff Kraft and Aaron Leventhal, which was published in 2002. In 2003, she published Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man, co-written with Laurent Bouzereau.
Lloyd NolanThe Sun Comes Up, poster, US poster, from top: Lloyd Nolan, Jeanette MacDonald, Claude Jarman Jr, Lassie, 1949. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Lloyd Nolan was a very popular actor in U.S. films of the 1930’s who became a wonderful character actor from the 1950’s right through to the 1980’s. He was born in 1902 in San Francisco. “G Men” in 1935 was his first movie.Other films of note include “House on 92nd Street”, “Bataan”, “Peyton Place”, “Susan Slade” with Troy Donahue and Connie Stevens and “Woody Allen’s “Hannah and her Sisters” with Maureen O’Sullivan. On television in 1968 he starred with Diahann Carroll in “Julia”. Lloyd Nolan died in 1985.
IMDB entry:
It would no doubt be a real shock to most people to discover that the rich baritone Bronx-like accent of great veteran character actor Lloyd Nolan was a product of the San Francisco streets–not the urban jungle of New York City. Nolan was born in the City by the Bay, and his father, James Nolan, was a successful shoe manufacturer of hard-working Irish stock. Lloyd caught the acting bug while at Santa Clara College (at the time, a junior college). He gained as much theatre experience as he could, attaining his AA in the process. Though he continued on to Stanford, he was still focused on acting and soon flunked out of that school, preferring to focus his attention on acting opportunities rather than studies. Forsaking his father and the family shoe business, Nolan went to sea on a freighter, which soon burned, and then headed south to Hollywood.
He continued to hone his acting skills by first taking up residence at the Pasadena Playhouse (1927). With his father’s passing he was able to sustain himself on a small inheritance. Continuing at PP and elsewhere in stock for two years, he headed east to Broadway, where he landed a role in a musical revue, “Cape Cod Follies”, in late 1929. He continued with two other similar roles through 1932 before breaking out with an acclaimed performance as less-than-wholesome small-town dentist Biff Grimes in the original hit play “One Sunday Afternoon” (1933). He would stay on for two more plays until mid-1934, when he headed back to Hollywood with heightened expectations of success in the movies. His voice and that rock-solid but somehow sympathetic face made Nolan someone with whom audiences could immediately identify, and ahead were over 150 screen appearances. Nolan didn’t waste any time; he signed with Paramount and had five roles in 1935, getting the lead role in two and working with up-and-coming James Cagney and George Raft. In the next five years Nolan settled into his niche as a solid and versatile player in whatever he did. His genre was more “B”, and he could play good guys and heavies with equal skill. The production values on some B-level efforts were every bit as good as those of “A” pictures. Everybody starting out did at least a few “B” pictures, and Nolan was doing quality work, even in pictures that are little-known–if known at all–today, pictures like King of Gamblers (1937) with Claire Trevor and King of Alcatraz (1938). He was a mainstay at Paramount until 1940, competing with Warner Brothers in that studio’s popular gangster films. Unlike better known Cagney andHumphrey Bogart across town, Nolan’s bad and not-so-bad guys often had more depth, and again it was that face along with his verve and that distinctive voice that helped to bring it out.
The 1940s saw Nolan moving around within the studio system. He was taking on more familiar roles, such as private detective, government agent or police detective–tough and hardboiled but sympathetic and understanding at the same time–and World War II action heroes. He landed the role of “Mike Shayne” in the private-eye series from 20th Century-Fox–seven of them between 1940 and 1942. Nolan showed a surprising flair for comedy in this series, with a continuing stream of wisecracks along with the fisticuffs. The Shayne series was well received by both critics and audiences, but Nolan is best known during that period as one of the familiar faces of World War II action films. The first is, at least to this observer, the best, but probably least known–Manila Calling(1942). It was a part of Hollywood’s concerted effort to boost civilian morale during the war, with the subject being the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, its conquest and liberation, as center stage in the War in the Pacific. Most films dealt with both retreat and return later in the war years; this 1942 film was perhaps the first to deal with the beginning and hope for the future. Nolan is his usual reliable, get-things-done professional here, an ace communications technician trying to keep the radio airways open amid the onslaught of Japanese invaders. Of all the flag-waving messages given in so many WWII films, none is as stirring as Nolan’s, who by the way gets the girl, Carole Landis. It’s she who stays behind with him while the rest of the radio team escapes with bombs falling. Microphone in hand and in his best hardboiled monotone, Nolan spits out: “Manila calling, Manila calling – and I ain’t no Jap!” Significantly, Nolan appeared in several other films dealing with the struggle in the Pacific, turning in a particularly strong performance in Bataan (1943).
By 1950 Nolan was ready for television (nearly half of his career roles would tally on that side of the ledger). In addition to his series work, television in the 1950s also played a lot of Nolan’s action films from the 1930s and 1940s, earning him a whole new generation of fans–kids who would sit for hours in front of the TV, watching not only current shows but “old” movies. Nolan appeared in many different genres on television, and he could be seen in everything from distinguished dramatic productions to variety and game shows, in addition to having his own series, including Martin Kane (1949) andSpecial Agent 7 (1958).
After having been away from Broadway for nearly 20 years, Nolan returned in early 1954 in the original production of the hit play “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial”, in the pivotal role of the paranoid Captain Queeg. He spent a year in this production, to great critical acclaim. He repeated the role on television in a Ford Star Jubilee (1955) production in 1955. His TV roles kept him busy. It must have been fun for him when, at nearly 60 years of age, he played notorious Chicago gangster George Moran, aka “Bugs” Moran–who in real life was much younger than Nolan was at the time–on the popular The Untouchables(1959), as well as appearing in five continuing episodes of the extremely popular 77 Sunset Strip (1958) series, and he appeared in other crime dramas playing, in one form or another, the kinds of roles he played on the big screen in the 1930s and 1940s.
In the 1970s, when cameo roles by older stars were becoming a popular means of luring people back to the theaters, Nolan was happy to oblige in box-office hits like Ice Station Zebra (1968), Airport (1970) and Earthquake (1974). When the same circumstances spread to episodic TV, Nolan was only too happy to be on hand. Most older actors–even those with good reputations–have a tendency to be a bit difficult, but Nolan was such a professional. His joy at still being able to work at the craft he loved was profound, almost childlike in enthusiasm. He never complained or claimed special privilege.
That was the measure of the man–what had been and what would continue to be. Unconventional in a natural sort of way was the norm for Lloyd Nolan. Call it keeping to one’s dignity. He kept no Hollywood secrets, as was the fashion. He was very open about his autistic son. Into the 1980s and entering his 80s, Nolan still deftly handled a few final TV and screen roles, though his noted memory for lines began to fade and cue cards became necessary. He was inspired in his final film role as a retired actor, husband of showy, boozy has-been Maureen O’Sullivan and three individualistic daughters in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). It’s a great role, and probably the most even and satisfying film effort of director Woody Allen.
Nolan’s last role was a Murder, She Wrote (1984) TV episode with old friend Angela Lansbury. He still had not revealed his final secret–he was dying with lung cancer–which by then revealed itself just the same. Ravaged as he was by the disease, Lloyd Nolan–with the help of his friends and well-wishers–successfully wrapped his 156th professional acting performance before his passing. His was a life of quality commitment. Character and integrity–things increasingly rare in Hollywood–described Lloyd Nolan, plain and simple.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: William McPeak (qv’s & corrections by A. Nonymous)
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Ralph Meeker was born in Minnesota in 1920. He won many awards on Broadyway for his lead performance in William Inge’s “Picnic” in 1954. He did not though go on to make the film. His part was played by Paul Newman who was understudy for him on Broadway. In 1955 Ralph Meeker starred as Mike Hammer in the film noir “Kiss Me Deadly”. His other films include “Paths of Glory” and “The Dirty Dozen”. Ralph Meeker died in 1988.
IMDB entry:
Burly American character actor Ralph Meeker first acted on stage at his Alma mater, Northwestern University, alongside other budding performers Charlton Heston andPatricia Neal. He graduated as a music major, because his dean had discouraged him from pursuing a theatrical career. Ignoring that advice, Meeker nevertheless moved to New York to study method acting and performing in local stock companies. After being injured during a brief wartime stint with the navy and consequently discharged from active duty, Meeker went overseas to play his part in entertaining the troops as a member of the USO. He finally ‘arrived’ on Broadway in 1945 and was given small roles in two plays produced by ‘Jose Ferrer (I)’, making his debut in “Strange Fruit”. He was still relatively unknown in 1947 when he replaced Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire” two years later, giving a commanding and critically acclaimed performance. After playing Kowalski in the touring company of ‘Streetcar’, Meeker was further noticed for his part in the original production of “Mister Roberts” . As a result, he had several European motion picture offers and selected to play the role of an army sergeant in Teresa (1951), co-starring Pier Angeli. That same year, he was in another continental drama, shot on location in Switzerland, Four in a Jeep (1951). After a two-year sojourn at MGM, Meeker returned to Broadway to star as the swaggering, likeable, larger-than-life rogue Hal Carter, in William Inge‘s play “Picnic” on Broadway. His performance was not only highly praised by reviewers like Brooks Atkinson, but also won him the New York Critics Circle Award. In later years, Meeker claimed to have spurned Columbia’s offer of reprising his role on screen because he disdained being shackled by a studio contract. In any case, the prize role went to William Holden and Meeker was consigned (with the odd exception) to playing hard- nosed guys on either side of the law – or bullies with a yellow streak – as a supporting actor over the next thirty years. He did, however, leave his mark with several top-notch performances.
One of his best early screen roles was that of the disgraced ex-Union officer Roy Anderson in Anthony Mann‘s brilliant revenge western The Naked Spur (1953). As one of four men stripped of humanity by greed and hatred (the others were James Stewart,Robert Ryan and Millard Mitchell), Ralph Meeker gave a convincing portrayal of a cynical and callous opportunist.
Meeker’s defining role was that of Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly (1955). The film was unusual, in that Hammer was played, unlike any private detectives of previous films noir, as a basically unsavoury character – one of the first of the anti-heroes which began to appear in films of the 1960’s. Under the direction of Robert Aldrich, Meeker’s characterisation as Mike Hammer effectively contrasted a smooth, handsome facade with an undercurrent of arrogance, unmitigated ruthlessness and greed. When the film was released, it ran into censorship trouble, the Kefauver Commission labelling it the Number One Menace to American Youth for 1955. While “Kiss Me Deadly” acquired a cult following over the years, it certainly failed to advance the career of Ralph Meeker.
He did, however, manage to get second billing for the part of Corporal Paris, one of three World War I French infantry men randomly selected for execution (because their regiment had refused a suicidal mission), in Stanley Kubrick‘s harrowing anti-war drama Paths of Glory (1957). He gave another finely etched performance through his character’s gradual deterioration from swaggering bravado to abject fear. Also that year, Meeker played a snarling, Indian-hating Yankee officer in Run of the Arrow (1957) and co-starred as Jane Russells unlikely kidnapper in the failed Norman Taurog comedy The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown (1957).
In between numerous television appearances during the 1960’s, Meeker returned to the stage as member of the Lincoln Centre Repertory Theatre, where he was reunited withElia Kazan (who had directed him in ‘Streetcar’) to act in Arthur Miller‘s play “After the Fall” (1964-65). He also worked with Robert Aldrich again, playing George ‘Bugs’ Moran (who Meeker allegedly resembled), the Chicago mobster whose gang was wiped out by ‘Al Capone (I)’ in The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967).
After the decline of the studio system, Meeker found much gainful employment in television and even had his own syndicated series, Not for Hire (1959), playing a tough Honolulu investigator. However, the show came up against the similarly themedHawaiian Eye (1959) and only ran to 39 episodes. Meeker then guest-starred on numerous other shows and had noteworthy roles as, among others, a boorish tycoon who discovers a prehistoric amphibious creature in The Outer Limits (1963) episode “The Tourist Attraction”; an ex-cop turned derelict in Ironside (1967) (‘Price Tag: Death Details’); and FBI agent Bernie Jenks in the TV pilot of The Night Stalker (1972). Add to that a gallery of snarling or harassed law enforcers from The Girl on the Late, Late Show(1974) to Brannigan (1975) and episodes of Harry O (1973), The Rookies (1972) andPolice Story (1973). Ralph Meeker remained a much- in-demand character actor until his death of a heart attack in August 1988.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Ralph Meeker Actress Actor Film Barbara StanwyckSomebody Loves Me, poster, from left: Betty Hutton, Ralph Meeker, 1952. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
