Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 103 of 114

Jill Clayburgh

Jill Clayburgh was a terrific actress who had some wonderful performance on film in the late 70’s and early 80’s. She was born New York in 1944. After attending Sarah Lawerence College, she joined the Charles Street Repertory Theater in Boston. She acted on Broadway in musicals such as “The Rothchilds” and “Pippin”. Her breakthrough film role came with “Silver Streak” with Gene Wilder in 1976. She gave a heartbreaking performance in “An Unmarried Woman” with Alan Bates. She then starred with Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson in “Semi-Touch” and with Reynolds again and Candice Bergen in “Starting Over” in 1979. She went to Italy to make “La Luna” for Bernardo Bertolucci. As the 80’s progresses, her film roles become more intermittent. She married the playwright David Rabe and was rearing her family. In more recent years, she was very active on television and o the stage. In 2006 she was on Broadway in “Barefoot in the Park”. Jill Clayburgh died in 2010. The actress Lily Rabe is her daughter.

Ronald Bergan’s obituary of Jill Clayburgh in “The Independent”:

The actor Jill Clayburgh, who has died of leukaemia aged 66, was one of the brightest female stars of the 1970s, yet was somewhat forgotten in the decade that followed. “If they don’t give me good parts in movies, I’m just not going to do them. And there’s a time when they just move on to the next person,” Clayburgh said prophetically at the height of her fame in 1978. Perhaps conservative Hollywood did not really know how to cope with an independent-minded, intelligent performer who refused to be pigeonholed.

Born in Manhattan, New York, Clayburgh was the daughter of wealthy parents. Her father was the vice-president of two large companies and her mother was a secretary to the Broadway producer David Merrick. As a child, Clayburgh was inspired to become an actor when she saw Jean Arthur as Peter Pan on Broadway in 1950. She was educated in New York, at the exclusive, all-girl Brearley school and then at Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied religion, philosophy and literature.

She began acting as a student in summer stock and, after graduating, joined the Charles Street repertory theatre company in Boston, where she met another up-and-coming actor, Al Pacino, with whom she was to have a five-year relationship. The next step was New York, where she appeared in several off-Broadway productions.

She moved on to Broadway in the musicals The Rothschilds (1970) and Pippin (1972), and Tom Stoppard’s philosophical farce, Jumpers (1974). But it was film acting that really excited Clayburgh. “One of the things I like about the movies is the adventure of it,” she said. “I like going to different places and I like doing a different scene every day.”

In 1963, while still at Sarah Lawrence, Clayburgh had made her screen debut as the bride-to-be in The Wedding Party, co-directed by her fellow student Brian De Palma in 16mm and grainy monochrome. However the film was not released until six years later when Robert De Niro (credited, in his supporting role, as Robert Denero) had made his name.

It took Clayburgh much longer to become a recognisable face. She had an absurd role as a Jewish Marxist in the unfunny Portnoy’s Complaint (1972), and had little to do as Ryan O’Neal’s ex-wife in The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1973) and as the stripper murder-victim of George Segal in The Terminal Man (1974). Then she was unexpectedly cast as Carole Lombard opposite James Brolin’s Clark Gable in the stunningly banal Gable and Lombard (1976), from which only she emerged with any dignity.

Clayburgh had the kind of warmth and witty sophistication barely seen in Hollywood since Lombard and Jean Arthur. This was demonstrated in Silver Streak (1976), an entertaining throwback to 1930s comedy-thrillers, where she played the lady on a train who tangles with Gene Wilder; and in Semi-Tough (1977), as the beautiful free-thinking woman living in a platonic threesome with two American football players (Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson) until one of them makes a forward pass.

These carefree, liberated characters led the director Paul Mazursky to give Clayburgh the title role in An Unmarried Woman (1978). Here, in one film, she proved that she was equally adept at drama and comedy. As a woman making herself a new life after being deserted by her husband, she overcame many of the superficial aspects of the script thanks to her ability to show both strength and vulnerability. Her performance earned her the best actress award at Cannes and an Oscar nomination.

The following year, she was nominated for another Oscar, this time for Alan J Pakula’s Starting Over (1979), in which she played another unmarried woman, but with a different emphasis. Her character is a schoolteacher who, having been hurt by a relationship, keeps any emotional involvement at bay by remaining deliberately dowdy.

Clayburgh seized the chance to work with the director Bernardo Bertolucci in Italy on La Luna (1979), playing an internationally renowned singer who has an incestuous relationship with her spoiled teenage son. Clayburgh had all the strength and glamour required by this opaque, operatic film. However, in the 80s, she had a singular lack of success, despite luminous performances. She was splendid in It’s My Turn (1980), as a mathematics professor who has an affair with an ex-baseball player (Michael Douglas), and as the first female judge appointed to the US supreme court in First Monday in October (1981), alienating and then attracting her shabby liberal colleague (Walter Matthau).

She gave another excellent, yet unappreciated, portrayal in I’m Dancing As Fast As I Can (1982), as a pill-popping film-maker who goes cold turkey. It was adapted, from Barbara Gordon’s autobiographical book, by the Tony-award winning playwright David Rabe, whom Clayburgh had married in 1979.

Sadly her powerful performance as a lawyer defending a Palestinian in Costa-Gavras’s Hanna K (1983) was little seen, due to pressure from pro-Israeli groups, who deemed it “anti-Israeli” and managed to limit its circulation. Upset by the film’s reception, Clayburgh gave up cinema for three years, during which time she was busy bringing up her children and tending the garden of the family’s home in Mount Kisco, New York.

In 1984 she returned to Broadway in Noël Coward’s Design for Living, alongside Raul Julia and Frank Langella. Her return to cinema was unpropitious: in the silly whodunnit Where Are the Children? (1986) she was required to cry a lot. But she was amusing as a snooty New York journalist researching an article in the Louisiana bayou in Andrey Konchalovsky’s comedy-melodrama, Shy People (1987), which flopped. There followed a series of minor roles in best-forgotten movies. Parallel to her film career, she appeared regularly on television, including five episodes (from 1999 to 2001) of the legal comedy Ally McBeal, as Ally’s mother; and as the wealthy socialite Letitia Darling in all 23 episodes of Dirty Sexy Money (2007-09).

In her last Broadway performance, Clayburgh played the mother in a 2006 revival of Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park. The New York Times critic Ben Brantley praised her “winning way with dialogue that can make synthetic one-liners sound like filigree epigrams”.

She is survived by David, her children Michael and Lily (who is also an actor), her stepson, Jason, and her brother, James.

• Jill Clayburgh, actor, born 30 April 1944; died 5 November 2010

Te above obituary from the “Independent” can also be accessed on line here.

IMDB Entry:

Genteel, lady-like British actress who was a much respected theatrical star in the 1920’s and 30’s, both in her own country and in the United States. Born in Hove, Sussex, in March 1900, she took to the stage at the age of seventeen, as Ela Delahay in ‘Charley’s Aunt’. She played Peter Pan three years later and married the first of her actor husbands, Seymour Beard. By the mid-1920’s, Edna had become the toast of London for her performances in ‘Fallen Angel’ (with Tallulah Bankhead), and, a role she made her own, as Teresa (Tessa) Sanger, in ‘The Constant Nymph’ (opposite Noel Coward and, later,John Gielgud). With the part of Tessa, she also enjoyed a successful run on Broadway in 1926, which was followed by another Margaret Kennedy play, ‘Come With Me’. She married her co-star, Herbert Marshall after divorcing Beard in 1928.

Edna started in films as early as 1921, but made little headway until Michael and Mary(1931), in which she recreated her role from the London stage. She then co-starred again with husband Herbert Marshall in Faithful Hearts (1932), but neither of these films received much international exposure. Her only Hollywood film at this time was The Key(1934), which, though directed by Michael Curtiz, was ,alas, ‘low-key’ as far as critical plaudits or box office were concerned. She had smallish parts in other British films, South Riding (1938), and the original version of Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Man Who Knew Too Much(1934), as the mother of kidnapped Nova Pilbeam. Not until 1939, did a worthy motion picture role come her way in the shape of the forlorn wife, whom violinist Leslie Howarddeserts for Ingrid Bergman in Intermezzo: A Love Story (1939). Other noteworthy screen roles were her Catherine Apley in The Late George Apley (1947), and the housekeeper Martha of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) which the New York Times review of June 27 considered ‘by far the best performance’ in the picture. Edna’s film appearances were few and far between, and only a handful adequately showcased her talents as an actress, which are so abundantly evident from the body of her work in the theatre.

BFrom 1939 a U.S. resident and a nationalised citizen by the early 1950’s, Edna continued her frequent triumphant returns to the stage. Her most celebrated performances on Broadway were in Terence Rattigan‘s ‘The Browning Version’, as downtrodden housewife Millie Crocker-Harris, and ‘Harlequinade’ (1949), both co-starring Maurice Evans; and as the titular character ‘Jane’ (1952), a play adapted by S.N. Behrman from a W. Somerset Maugham short story. Brooks Atkinson described her performance as the timorous spinster as both ‘comic’ and ‘forceful’. In her last significant role on stage, she co-starred with Brian Aherne and Lynn Fontanne in the romantic comedy ‘Quadrille’ (1954-55), directed by Alfred Lunt and outfitted by Cecil Beaton, who also designed the costumes. Edna retired from acting in the early 1960’s and died in a clinic in Geneva, Switzerland in 1974.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Jill Ireland was born in London in 1936. Her flm debut was in 1955 in “Simon and Laura”. Her other films include “Carry on Nurse”, “Robbery Under Arms” and “Three Men in a Boat”. In the early 60’s she went to Hollywood with her then husband David McCallum. After her divorce, she married actor Charles Bronson and made many films with him including “The Mechanic”, “Hard Times”, “Breakout” and “Love and Bullets”. Jill Ireland died in Malibu in 1990.

TCM Overview{

Attractive blonde professional dancer turned actor who made her screen debut in 1955. Ireland has often been paired with actor/husband Charles Bronson and was formerly married to actor David McCallum. Late in life she attracted considerable attention and respect for her lengthy and courageous battle with breast cancer, as well as with her other personal and family misfortunes.

Her IMDB entry:

Jill Ireland was an Anglo-American actress best-known for her appearance as “Leila Kalomi”, the only woman Mr. Spock ever loved (in the Star Trek (1966) episode, Star Trek: This Side of Paradise (1967)) and for her many supporting roles in the movies ofCharles Bronson, her second husband. She is also known for her battle with breast cancer, having written two books on her fight with the disease and serving as a spokesperson for the American Cancer Society.

She was born Jill Dorothy Ireland on April 24, 1936 in London, England, to a wine merchant and his wife, Dorothy, who was fated to outlive her daughter. Young Jill started her entertainment career as a dancer and made her credited screen debut, in 1955, inMichael Powell‘s Oh… Rosalinda!! (1955), after a bit part in another movie. Two years later, she married actor David McCallum, with whom she co-starred in the Stanley Bakeraction picture, Hell Drivers (1957). In the mid-1960s, they moved to the United States so McCallum could star as agent “Ilya Kuryakin” in the TV series, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.(1964). She got steady work on American TV and would co-star with her husband in five episode of the series in 1964, 1965 and 1967.

Ireland divorced McCallum, with whom she had three sons, in 1967. The following year, she married Charles Bronson, who was several years away from superstar status. They had first met when McCallum introduced them on the set of The Great Escape (1963). With Bronson, she had two children, a daughter born to the couple, and an adopted daughter.

They first co-starred together in the French movie, Rider on the Rain (1970) (“Rider on the Rain”), in 1970 (she had first played an uncredited bit part in his movie, Lola (1970), released that same year), a movie that made Bronson a major star in Europe. They starred in 13 more pictures in the next 17 years, a period during which Bronson rivaledClint Eastwood as the biggest movie star in the world in the early and mid-1970s before his star waned in the 1980s. Ireland only appeared in one TV episode, one TV-movie and one theatrical picture that didn’t star Bronson in that time.

She was diagnosed with cancer in her right breast in 1984 and underwent a mastectomy. She wrote about her battle with the disease and her advocacy for the the American Cancer Society led to the organization giving her its Courage Award. Ireland was presented with the award from President Ronald Reagan.

Jill Ireland died of breast cancer at her home in Malibu, California on May 18, 1990. She was 54 years old.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Eva La Gallienne was born in London in 1899. Her father was the British poet Robert La Gallienne and her mother was a Danish journalist. She made her stage debut at the age of 15 on the London stage in “Monna Vanna”. In 1915 she went to New York and virtually all of her acting career was in the U.S. In 1921 she had a stunning success in Ferenc Molnar’s “Liliom”. She had many trumphs on Broadway and on the stage in the U.S. over the years. Her film appearances are few but choice. Of particular interest are “Prince of Players” with Richard Burton in 1955 and in 1980, “Resurrection” with Ellen Burstyn and Sam Sheperd. She guest starred on “St Elsewhere” with Brenda Vaccaro in 1984. Eva la Gallienne died in 1991 at the age of 92.

TCM Overview:

This legendary stage star won renown for her performances on Broadway, in productions by the repertory theater she founded, including “Liliom” (1921) and “The Swan” (1923). In the 1930s, she played the lead in “Peter Pan,” the White Queen in “Alice in Wonderland,” Juliet in “Romeo and Juliet,” and the lead in a summer production of “Hamlet” (1937) which she also staged.

In 1926, Le Gallienne founded a national repertory theater, the Civic Repertory Theater in New York, similar to England’s Old Vic, which presented the classics at popular prices ($1.50 top ticket price). She not only starred in the majority of productions, until the company folded in 1933 as a consequence of the Depression, but she also staged, translated and produced most of the plays. Le Gallienne then lectured at colleges and toured the country, returning to Broadway in “Uncle Harry” and “The Cherry Orchard.” In 1946, she organized the short-lived American Repertory Theater with Margaret Webster and Cheryl Crawford. Later stage triumphs included “Mary Stuart” in which she toured from 1957 to 1962 and “The Royal Family” (1976). Le Gallienne reprised her role (the matriarch of a theatrical family modeled on the Barrymores) in an acclaimed television production which earned her an Emmy. She also produced and starred in an acclaimed TV version of “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” (1958). Le Gallienne appeared in a handful of films, perhaps most memorably as Ellen Burstyn’s grandmother in “Resurrection” (1980), for which she received an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress.

The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Legendary stage actress Eva Le Gallienne’s life began just as grandly as the daughter of poet Richard Le Gallienne. Sarah Bernhardt was her idol growing up and, at age 18, was brought to New York by her mother. Making her London debut with “Monna Vanna” in 1914, she proved a star in every sense of the word. She appeared on Broadway first in “Liliom” in 1921 and lastly at the Biltmore Theatre in 1981 with “To Grandmother’s House We Go,” which won her a Tony nomination at age 82. Noted for her extreme boldness and idealism, she became a director and muse for theatre’s top playwrights, a foremost translator of Henrik Ibsen, and a founder of the civic repertory movement in America. A respected stage coach, director, producer and manager over her six decades, Ms. Le Gallienne consciously devoted herself to the Art of the Theatre as opposed to the Show Business of Broadway and dedicated herself to upgrading the quality of the stage. She ran the Civic Repertory Theatre Company for 10 years (1926-1936), producing 37 plays during that time. She managed Broadway’s 1100-seat Civic Repertory Theatre (more popularly known as The 14th Street Theatre) at 107 14th Street from 1926-32, which was home to her company whose actors included herself, J. Edward Bromberg, Paul Leyssac,Florida Friebus, and Leona Roberts. Her gallery of theatre portrayals would include everything from Peter Pan to Hamlet. Sadly, she almost completely avoided film and TV during her lengthy career. However, toward the end of her life, she did appear in a marvelous 1977 stage version of “The Royal Family” on TV and rendered a quietly touching performance as Ellen Burstyn‘s grandmother in Resurrection (1980), for which she received an Oscar nomination.

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

Mary Peach

Mary Peach is a South African-born British film and television actress who was born on October 20, 1934, in Durban, South Africa. She is known for her roles in films such as Cutthroat Island (1995), Scrooge (1970), and The Projected Man (1966). She has also appeared in numerous British films and television series over the years, including A Gathering of Eagles (1963) which was made in Hollywood opposite Rock Hudson and Rod Taylor and the BBC adaptation of The Three Musketeers (1966). Peach was married to film producer Thomas Clyde from 1961 until their divorce, and they had two children together. She later married screenwriter and director Jimmy Sangster in 1995, and remained married to him until his death in 2011. Peach was also considered for the role of Steed’s new assistant in The Avengers (1961) after Diana Rigg left the show

Sara Allgood. IMDB.

Sara Allgood was one of Ireland’s greatest actresses. She was a member of the Abbey Theatre Players and the first person to play Pegeen Mike in “The Playboy of the Western World in 1904. She was born in 1879 in Dublin. Her sister was the actress Marie O’Neill, the love of John Millington Synge. Sara Allgood made her film debut in 1929 in a leading role in Alfred Hitchcocks “Blackmail” which was made in Britain. In 1940 she went to Hollywood where she became one of it’s most profilic character actresses. She was nominated for an Oscar for her peformance in John Ford’s “How Green Was My Valley” in 1941. Other films of note are “Lady Hamilton”, “Kitty”, “Cluny Brown”, “Between Two Worlds” and “The Spiral Staircase”. Sara Allgood died in 1950 at the age of 70.

Sara Allgood features extensively in Adrian Frazier’s “Hollywood Irish”.

“Short, rotund, apple-cheeked and extremely Irish, Sara Allgood joined Dublin’s Abbey Players in 1904 but it was nearly 40 years before she was asked to come to Hollywood. Once there she immediately made an impression as the strong and loving matriarch of the Welsh coal mining family in ‘How Green Was My Valley’. The role won her an Oscar nomination and led to a career as a busy character player. TheM majority of her work was at 20th Century Fox, where she performed in ‘Roxie Hart’ as a prison matron and ‘Jane Eyre’ as a kindly housekeeper, to name but two of her assignments.” – Barry Monush in “The Encyclopedia of Hollywood Film Actors” . (2003).

IMDB entry:

Dublin-born Sara Allgood started her acting career in her native country with the famed Abbey Theatre. From there she traveled to he English stage, where she played for many years before making her film debut in 1918. Her warm, open Irish face meant that she spent a lot of time playing Irish mothers, landladies, neighborhood gossips and the like, although she is best remembered for playing Mrs. Morgan, the mother of a family of Welsh miners, in How Green Was My Valley (1941), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Her sister Maire O’Neill was an actress in Ireland, and famed Irish poet William Butler Yeats was a family friend. Sara Allgood died of a heart attack shortly after making her last film, Sierra (1950).

– IMDb Mini Biography By: frankfob2@yahoo.com

UNSPECIFIED – JANUARY 01: (AUSTRALIA OUT) Photo of FILM POSTERS; Poster for Mother Wore Tights (Photo by GAB Archive/Redferns)

Allgood joined Inghinidhe na hÉireann (“Daughters of Ireland”), where she first began to study drama under the direction of Maud Gonne and William Fay. She began her acting career at the Abbey Theatre and was in the opening of the Irish National Theatre Society. Her first big role was in December 1904 at the opening of Lady Gregory‘s Spreading the News. By 1905 she was a full-time actress, touring England and North America.

In 1915 Allgood was cast as the lead in J. Hartley Manners‘ comedy Peg o’ My Heartwhich toured Australia and New Zealand in 1916. She married her leading man, Gerald Henson, in September 1916 in Melbourne. She played the lead role opposite her husband in J. A. Lipman‘s 1918 silent film Just Peggy, shot in Sydney. Her happiness was short lived. She gave birth to a daughter named Mary in January 1918, who died just a day later, then her husband died of the flu in the outbreak of 1918 in November of that same year. After her return to Ireland Allgood continued to perform at the Abbey Theatre. Her most memorable performance was in Seán O’Casey‘s Juno and the Paycock in 1923. She won acclaim in London when she played Bessie Burgess in O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars in 1926.

Allgood was frequently featured in early Hitchcock films, such as Blackmail (1929), Juno and the Paycock (1930), and Sabotage(1936). She also had a significant role in Storm in a Teacup (1937).

After many successful theatre tours of America she settled in Hollywood in 1940 to pursue an acting career. Allgood was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her role as Beth Morgan in the 1941 film How Green Was My Valley.

She also had memorable roles in the 1941 retelling of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, It Happened in Flatbush (1942), Jane Eyre (1943), The Lodger (1944), The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), The Spiral Staircase (1946), The Fabulous Dorseys (1947), and the original Cheaper by the Dozen (1950).

Allgood became a United States citizen in 1945 and died of a heart attack in 1950 in Woodland Hills, California.

Dictionary of Irish Biography:

Contributed by

Lunney, Linde

Allgood, Sara (1883–1950), actress, was born 31 October 1883 in Dublin, daughter of George Allgood and Margaret Allgood (née Harold). Her father was a protestant printing compositor, son of an English army officer; her mother’s family were catholic, owners of a junk shop. There were four sons and four daughters. After her father’s death Sara was apprenticed to an upholsterer, and joined Inghinidhe na hÉireann, a group of revolutionary women founded by Maud Gonne MacBride (qv). She took part in amateur dramatics and was a founder member of the Irish National Theatre Society. Her first appearances (1904), while still in her daytime job, were in ‘The king’s threshold’ by W. B.Yeats(qv) and ‘Riders to the sea’ by J. M. Synge (qv). She stayed with the group which became the Abbey Theatre, and after successful appearances in the first Abbey play, Lady Gregory‘s ‘Spreading the news’, she became a professional actress (1905).

After disputes within the company Sara Allgood’s main rivals, Maire Quinn and Máire Ní Shiubhlaigh (qv), resigned and she was able to play some of the most important roles in the Abbey’s repertoire. It was claimed that she could, at short notice, perform sixty-five parts, including Deirdre in Yeats’s play of that name; she was Widow Quin in the first production of Synge’s ‘Playboy of the western world’ (1907). She was especially celebrated in tragedy, but in 1915 she played the heroine in an Irish-American romantic comedy, ‘Peg o’ my heart’ by John H. Manners, produced by a touring company in Australia. It proved very popular. Her stay in Australia was protracted until 1920, partly because she had married (September 1916) her leading man Gerald Henson, and the death (January 1918) of their only child Mary, shortly after her birth, was followed by Henson’s death in the devastating ’flu epidemic (November 1918).

The Abbey Theatre’s difficulties during the civil war were not resolved until the great success of ‘The shadow of a gunman’ and ‘Juno and the paycock’ by Sean O’Casey (qv). Allgood gave the finest performances of her life as Juno (1924) and as Bessy Burgess in ‘The plough and the stars’ (1926). Successful London productions and American tours of these plays followed, and she was very successful in London in James Bridie’s ‘Storm in a teacup’ (1936). From 1929 she increasingly relied on film work – she appeared in over forty films – and, living in Hollywood, California, took American citizenship (1945). She was nominated for an Academy Award as best supporting actress for her part in How green was my valley (1941); she was, however, only offered small parts (generally Irish characters) which did not make full use of her abilities. Her last years in Hollywood were spent in disappointment and poverty. She died 13 September 1950 of a heart attack in Woodland Hills, California. Her sister Molly (Mary) was a successful actress as Máire O’Neill (qv).

Sources

Times, 15 Sept. 1950; Who was who in the theatre 1912–1976, i: A–C(1978); Elizabeth Coxhead, Daughters of Erin: five women of the Irish renascence (1979); Phyllis Hartnoll (ed.), The Oxford companion to the theatre (1983); Evelyn M. Truitt, Who was who on screen (1983); E. H. Mikhail (ed.), The Abbey Theatre: interviews and recollections (1988)

“Ben Gazzara is probably best known for his work in two television series – “Arrest and Trial” and “Run for Your Life” – which is ironic, because he does TV only for the money. He cares enough about films (or did) that in 1956 he turned down one of the leads in King Vidor’s “War and Peace” because he did not want to be merely part of a spectacle. He was then one of the cinema’s most promising new stars – and to date that promise has beeen largely unfulfilled. he is a sympathetic actor – but at that time he gave of the definitive great performances of evil” – David Shipman – “The Great Movie Stars- The International Years” (1972).

Ben Gazzara was born in 1930 in New York City. His parents were from Italy. He won early acclain on Broadway for is performance as Brick in “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof”. His film debut came in 1956 in “The Strange One”. He has some very impressive films to his credit, “Anatomy of a Murder” in 1959, “The Young Doctors”, “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” and “Opening Night” directed by his friend John Cassavettes. In 1985 he starred in “An Early Frost”, one of the first dramas to deal with AIDS, starring with Aidan Quinn, Gena Rowlands and Sylvia Sidney. Ben Gazzara died in February 2012.

His “Guardian” obituary by Brian Baxter:

Few screen debuts have equalled the searing malevolence of Ben Gazzara’s Iago-inspired Jocko De Paris in The Strange One (1957). The role, which he had created on stage, became forever associated with this intense graduate of New York’s method school of acting.

Gazzara, who has died aged 81 of pancreatic cancer, continued his stage career in modern classics including Epitaph for George Dillon and as the humiliated and vengeful George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He also achieved popular acclaim through television series – notably Run for Your Life (1965-68) – and in movies for his friend John Cassavetes and other directors including Otto Preminger, Peter Bogdanovich, David Mamet, Todd Solondz and the Coen brothers.

Gazzara was born to Sicilian immigrants and grew up on Manhattan’s lower east side. He began acting at the Madison Square Boys Club and made a teenage debut in a TV dramatisation of a short play by Tennessee Williams. After gaining a scholarship to Erwin Piscator’s drama workshop, he eventually moved to the equally legendary Actors Studio headed by Lee Strasberg.

His stage debut came in Pennsylvania and then on tour, in Jezebel’s Husband, but his career took off when – aged 23 – he created Jocko in Calder Willingham’s adaptation of his own novel End As a Man. When a revised version of the play transferred to the Vanderbilt theatre in 1953, giving Gazzara his Broadway debut, he received the New York critics’ award as most promising young actor.

Its director, Jack Garfein, an assistant to Elia Kazan, took four years to get the movie version financed, and in the interim Gazzara gained more Broadway experience as the original Brick in Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and as the drug-addicted Johnny in A Hatful of Rain, where his darkly handsome features and forceful acting were distinct assets.

Although The Strange One looked overly theatrical, Gazzara’s pared-down performance survived the lumpen direction, revealing a natural screen presence. The sombre work about a duplicitous cadet leader, who manipulates an army camp in the deep south, was not a popular success and Gazzara returned to the stage until cast as the equally venal, though more enigmatic, soldier Lieutenant Manion in Preminger’s courtroom masterpiece Anatomy of a Murder (1959).

These movies were hard acts to follow and Gazzara, who spoke Italian before he learned English, returned to his roots to star opposite Anna Magnani in The Passionate Thief (1960). It was the start of a lifetime affair with Italy, where he was to work and live for many months each year and where he eventually bought a villa in Umbria.

The following year Gazzara married Janice Rule – having divorced his first wife, Louise Erickson, in 1957 – and took the role of the idealistic pathologist in The Young Doctors. He then co-starred opposite David Niven in The Captive City, a lacklustre war movie set in Athens. A challenging role as the convicted murderer turned painter John Resko better reflected Gazzara’s ambitions, but Convicts Four was not a hit and he moved into television, first as the detective in Arrest and Trial and then as the dying Paul Bryan in Run for Your Life.

Filming in Czechoslovakia of the second world war story of The Bridge at Remagen was overtaken by the real-life Soviet invasion of August 1968. An escaping waitress hid behind the legs of Gazzara and Robert Vaughn as she crouched on the floor of their car when it crossed the border.

Gazzara was one of several stars coaxed into a cameo role in If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969). Fortuitously, another was Cassavetes and, after working on the liberal documentary King: A Filmed Record … Montgomery to Memphis, Gazzara joined Peter Falk and Cassavetes as the eponymous Husbands (also 1970) in the latter’s improvised study of marital discord.

Gazzara played the murderous stripclub owner Cosmo Vitelli in Cassavetes’s edgy thriller The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), and a year later Manny Victor in the director’s masterpiece, Opening Night. After Cassavetes’s untimely death in 1989, Gazzara appeared in several documentaries about his friend, notably Anything for John (1993), which reflected the admiration felt by his peers for that maverick film-maker.

Gazzara had established a willingness to work outside the commercial mainstream, specialising in anti-social characters including a plumply brutish Al Capone in Capone (1975), but his career wavered between quality and dross, film and television, and work in the US, Italy and a few other countries, notching up more than 80 movies in the years following his initial collaboration with Cassavetes.

These included the free-spirited Saint Jack (1979) in Peter Bogdanovich’s elegant rendition of Paul Theroux’s novel and – two years later, also for Bogdanovich – a co-starring role opposite Audrey Hepburn in They All Laughed, an underrated but commercially disastrous variation on love’s roundabout.

Following a second divorce, Gazzara worked for a decade in Italy, returning to the US only for lucrative TV movies, including A Question of Honour (1982), A Letter to Three Wives and the Aids drama An Early Frost (both 1985), as well as the film Road House (1989).

In Europe he portrayed the disillusioned poet Charles Bukowski in Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981), was a professor in Il Camorrista (1985) and a less amiable don in Don Bosco (1988). Although he had directed episodes of Columbo for Falk, he graduated to the big screen only in 1990 with the little-seen Beyond the Ocean, shot in Bali.

Soon after that Italian-financed movie he again concentrated on work in America, averaging five films or TV movies each year, while dividing his time between homes in Umbria, New York City and Sag Harbor, New York state. Highlights of this busy period included Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner (1997), where he played the mysterious Mr Klein; cult success Buffalo 66; the black comedy The Big Lebowski; and the controversial Happiness (all 1998). He was well cast as a gang leader in Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam and moved to the other side of the fence as a smooth lawyer in the glossy The Thomas Crown Affair (both 1999).

Dozens of other films were routine and he freely admitted that “these days I turn nothing down in order to maintain a comfortable and happy life with my third and last wife”. He had married the German-born Elke Krivat in 1982.

Despite debilitating treatment for throat cancer, in 1999 he published an autobiography and worked steadily for the next decade, notching up more than 30 credits, from television series to leading roles in features, many made in Europe, often in his beloved Italy. There he worked in TV, was on location in Calabria for Secret Heart (2003), in Umbria for a brilliant cameo in Christopher Roth (2010) and moved to Spain for Schubert (2005) and to Belgium for Chez Gino (2011). In 2008 he took the name role in Looking for Palladin, about a former Hollywood star who hides from fame in Guatemala.

He enjoyed his role as the Vatican’s banker in Holy Money (2009), but most rewarding of the many films were a short, Eve (2008), cleverly directed by Natalie Portman, with Lauren Bacall, and the two films with Gena Rowlands, echoing their Cassavetes days. He took a supporting cameo to her lead in the superior television movie Hysterical Blindness (2002), and four years later they played a two-hander as part of the portmanteau film Paris, Je t’aime, in a bittersweet episode where, as in later works, a recent stroke had affected his speech, though never his courage or professionalism.

Gazzara is survived by Elke; his daughter, Elizabeth, from his second marriage; and his brother, Anthony.

• Ben Gazzara (Biagio Anthony Gazzara), actor, born 28 August 1930; died 3 February 2012

The above “Guardian” obituary can be accessed online here.

Cyd Charisse was one of the greatest female dencers ever to grace the screen. She was born in Amarillo, Texas in 1922. She won a contract with MGM and dances with Fred Astaire in “Ziegfeld Follies” in 1944. She starred in some of the best MGM musicals of the 1950’s including “Singing in the Rain”, “The Band Wagon”, “Silk Stockings”, “Brigadoon” and “It’s Always Fair Weather”. She was long married to singer Tony Martin. Cyd Charisse died in 2008 at the age of 86.

Her “Guardian” obituary:

The camera seems to track forever along a pair of crossed female legs, extending almost beyond the frame. It moves up to reveal a femme fatale with a Louise Brooks hairdo, wearing a flapper-style emerald green dress and holding a mile-long cigarette holder. She is teasing Gene Kelly by balancing his straw hat on the end of her foot. It was in the Broadway Melody Ballet from Singin’ in the Rain (1952) that the beautiful, long-limbed, sexually dynamic dancer Cyd Charisse, who has died following a heart attack aged 87, first made an impact. Later in the ballet she is seen as a warm and inviting vision, her long white veil blowing in the wind. In a few minutes, Charisse’s film persona is encapsulated – at first cold and aloof, later melted by the love of the right man.

In Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon (1953), she is the supercilious ballet dancer to Fred Astaire’s hoofer until they dance together sublimely to Dancing in the Dark. In the same movie, The Girl Hunt Ballet featured two faces of Charisse, dark-haired and tough, or blonde and vulnerable. As Astaire says in the pastiche private-eye narration: “She came to me in sections. She had more curves than a scenic railway.” In Silk Stockings (1957), she is the stern Russian commissar who gives in to Astaire’s American charms, and in It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), she is haughty and patronising to gambler Kelly until he corrects her Shakespeare.

Charisse (her brother called her Sid when trying to say sister) was born Tula Ellice Finklea in Amarillo, Texas. Her mother was a ballet fan who made her daughter take lessons from the age of eight. While still in her teens, she joined Colonel de Basil’s Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo and worked with David Lichine and Leonid Massine, using the names Felia Sidorova and Maria Istomina. In 1939, she married her former dance instructor, Nico Charisse, during a tour of Europe. On their return, they opened a dancing school together in Hollywood.

In 1943, Lichine asked her to appear in her first movie as a ballet dancer in Something to Shout About, in which she is credited as Lily Norwood. The same year, she appeared as a Bolshoi dancer in Mission to Moscow. This led to her signing a seven-year contract with MGM, for whom she made the majority of her movies.

With little hint of the sexiness that characterised her appearances just a few years later, Charisse was first seen smiling prettily and pirouetting through a number of dance cameos in Ziegfeld Follies (1946) – in the opening number, Meet the Ladies, with Astaire – and in Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), dancing with Gower Champion to Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. Crooner Tony Martin also appeared in the latter, whom Charisse would marry two years later. She had her first speaking role in The Harvey Girls (1946), in which she performed a charming number, It’s a Great Big World, with Judy Garland and Virginia O’Brien, all wearing nightdresses.

Because of what MGM considered her Latin looks, Charisse was paired with Mexican-born Ricardo Montalban in five films, notably supporting swimming star Esther Williams in Fiesta (1947) and On an Island With You (1948), in which they performed vigorous Mexican dances. They also enlivened the lame Frank Sinatra vehicle The Kissing Bandit (1948) with the excitingly-staged Dance of Fury, which was added after the film’s completion.

Charisse’s classical ballet training was to the fore in The Unfinished Dance (1947), choreographed by Lichine, in which vicious child Margaret O’Brien has a crush on her and plans to advance her idol’s career as a prima ballerina by causing an accident to her rival.

After Singin’ in the Rain, Charisse was given co-star billing for the first time in The Band Wagon. Her first pas de deux with Astaire, in the nocturnal setting of Central Park, recalls the best of the Astaire-Ginger Rogers duets. However, although she regarded Astaire as the “most perfect gentleman I have ever known”, he later recalled that of all his dance partners, she was the heaviest, and he came to dread the lifts.

Yet their second pairing in Silk Stockings worked like a dream. In the number Paris Loves Lovers, they blissfully glide to “the urge to merge with the splurge of the spring”, as Cole Porter’s lyrics put it. Even as the caricature Soviet commissar, Charisse, with severe hairstyle and little makeup, and in a relatively drab dress, hots up the cold war in The Red Blues. In a solo dance in her Paris hotel, she strips off her heavy, green velvet dress and black woollen stockings, dons silk and satin underwear, silver high-heel shoes, diamond earrings and a frivolous Paris hat. Clothes have transformed her into the incarnation of capitalist glamour.

Macho Kelly meets his match in Charisse in It’s Always Fair Weather, when he complains that she takes away his “male initiative” by being able to recite the names of all the heavyweight boxing champions. She also shows some nifty footwork in a boxing ring dance while being praised by a chorus of pugilists who sing Baby You Knock Me Out. In contrast, in Minnelli’s Brigadoon (1954), she was the lovely Scots lass “waiting for my dearie”, who comes in the shape of American tourist Kelly, romancing her as they dance through The Heather on the Hill. Charisse, who made a good shot at a Scottish accent, always had her songs dubbed.

With the decline of the musical, she took on a number of straight, dramatic parts such as in Twilight for the Gods (1958), an action picture with Rock Hudson; Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) as Kirk Douglas’s promiscuous ex-wife; and in Party Girl (1958), where she at least had a chance to dance in a leopardskin dress. But as her body was far more eloquent than her voice or face, she began to appear rarely on the big screen, although she continued to play several roles in TV series.

In 1976, she teamed up with Martin in a series of nightclub revues, and the couple wrote a dual autobiography called The Two of Us. Charisse’s belated Broadway debut was in 1992 in the musical Grand Hotel, when she played another role made famous by Garbo, an ageing ballerina in 1920s Berlin. In 1996 she went into business, marketing Arctic Spray, a formula she developed with a chemist after trying unsuccessfully to find a product to ease her mother’s arthritis pain.

She is survived by Martin and their son, and a son by her first marriage.

· Cyd Charisse (Tula Ellice Finklea), dancer and actor, born March 8 1921; died June 17 2008

The above “Guardian” obituary can be accessed online here.

George Winslow was a child actor who was born in Los Angeles in 1946. He made his debut in 1952 in “Room For One More”. His films include two with Marilyn Monroe, “Monkey Business” and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”. His other films include “The Rocket Man” and “Artists and Models” with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. He died in 2015.

“Telegraph” obituary:

George Winslow has died aged 69, was a Hollywood child actor with a dead-pan stare and “Buster Brown” haircut who appeared in several feature films of the 1950s, most notably Gentleman Prefer Blondes (1953), in which he played Marilyn Monroe’s precocious young admirer.

Winslow, whose real name was George Wentzlaff and who acquired the nickname “Foghorn” owing to a deep voice which belied his youthful appearance, was seven when he played the part of the pint-sized millionaire Henry Spofford III in Howard Hawks’s perennially popular musical comedy. In one of the funniest scenes in the film Marilyn Monroe, as the gold-digging blonde bombshell Lorelei Lee, is seen trying to squeeze her capacious behind through a porthole, assisted by Winslow, who explains there are two reasons why he has agreed to help: “The first is, I’m too young to be sent to jail. The second is, you’ve got a lot of animal magnetism.’’

In reality, Winslow recalled that of the two leading actresses in the film, he preferred Marilyn’s co-star, Jane Russell, who was willing to play with him when he got bored during shooting. By the age of 12 Winslow’s voice had broken – upwards – and his Hollywood career was over.

He was born on May 3 1946 in Los Angeles, and made his first public appearance aged six on Art Linkletter’s People are Funny radio show, where his bass voice and comic timing made him a hit with listeners. Spotted by Cary Grant, he made his film debut in 1952, co-starring with Grant and Betsy Drake in Norman Taurog’s Room for One More, about a couple with three children who foster two troubled orphans, one played by Winslow.

He appeared with Grant again later the same year as “Little Indian” in Howard Hawks’s Monkey Business (co-starring Ginger Rogers and Marilyn Monroe), and went on to win his only starring role as Gus Jennings, Richard Widmark’s brattish son in Robert Parrish’s My Pal Gus (1952), which won him a Critic’s Award.

After Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, he co-starred in Henry Levin’s Mister Scoutmaster (1953) as a boy scout from the wrong side of the tracks who enjoys verbal jousts with the snobbish television star turned scoutmaster (Clifton Webb), and in Oscar Rudolph’s low-budget comedy The Rocket Man (1954), Winslow played a boy with a ray gun that compels anyone caught in its beam to tell the truth. That and later films such as Artists and Models (1955), An Affair to Remember (1957), and Rock, Pretty Baby (1956) only proved that the appeal of the cute little boy with the big voice was beginning to fade. After making his last screen appearance in Charles F Haas’s Western, Wild Heritage (1958), George Winslow retired from show business, re-adopted his birth name and vanished into anonymity.

After leaving school, he moved to Oregon, where he attended Lewis & Clark College. He served in the Navy during the Vietnam war, then returned to California, where he worked for the US postal service in Sonoma County until his retirement .

He never married, but shared his home with approximately 25 cats.