Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 104 of 126

Dennis Weaver

Dennis Weaver was born in 1924 in Missouri. His first role on Broadway was as understudy in William Inge’s “Come Back Little Sheba” . In 1952 he got a contract with Universal studios and made his movie debut in “The Redhead from Wyoming” which starred Maureen O’Hara. He went on to make “Touch of Evil” with Charlton Heston and Orson Welles in 1958 and in 1967 in “Duel at Diable” a Western with James Garner, Sidney Poitier and Bill Travers. It is though on television that he achieved his greatest fame, in “Gunsmoke” as Chester Goode and as the title character in “McCloud” which began in 1970. He died in 2006 at the age of 81.

Anthony Hayward’s obituary of Dennis Weaver in “The Independent”:

Dennis Weaver was familiar in his Stetson to television viewers worldwide – first as the limping deputy sheriff, Chester Goode, to James Arness’s Matt Dillon in the classic western series Gunsmoke, then as the cowboy- lawman causing mayhem in the big city in McCloud. “McCloud was the kind of role I left Gunsmoke to get,” he said. “I wanted to be a leading man instead of a second banana.”

But the second banana was part of one of the biggest success stories in television’s so-called Golden Age. He played the sheriff’s number two during Gunsmoke’s early years (1955-64), speaking with a twang and always calling his 6ft 7in boss “Muster Dellon”.

The series, set in Dodge City during the late 19th century and styled as an “adult” western, but effectively a weekly morality play, began on radio and was given John Wayne’s seal of approval on screen when the film star – who turned down the lead role but recommended Arness – introduced the first episode. (In Britain, the programme was entitled Gun Law.) It continued until 1975, making it television’s longest-running western, but Weaver – whose performance won him an Emmy Best Supporting Actor award in 1959 – left halfway through, looking to be top banana himself.

He eventually resurfaced in McCloud (1970-77), as the law enforcer from Taos, New Mexico, despatched to New York to study policing methods in the Big Apple’s 27th Precinct. But, wearing a cowpoke hat, sheepskin jacket and boots, Deputy Marshal Sam McCloud went his own way and treated Manhattan like the Wild West.

Inspired by the 1968 Clint Eastwood film Coogan’s Bluff, the series had its tongue firmly in its cheek. McCloud was watched over by Police Chief Peter B. Clifford (J.D. Cannon), who was bemused as he watched his horse-riding subordinate bring rush-hour traffic to a halt on the streets of New York. Talking in a folksy, “down on the range” manner, McCloud brought with him from down south the catchphrase “There you go”.

Weaver was himself from south-west Missouri, born in 1924 in Joplin, where his father worked for the electric company and farmed 10 acres during the Depression. Weaver excelled as a track and field athlete, served in the US Navy during the Second World War, then graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a fine arts degree.

Although, in 1948, he came sixth in the United States’s decathon trials for the London Olympics, he opted for a stage career and studied at the Actors Studio, New York. After making his professional début as understudy for the role of a college athlete, Turk, in the Broadway production of Come Back, Little Sheba (Booth Theatre, 1950), he toured in that play with Shelley Winters and Sidney Blackmer, before gaining further stage experience in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire (as Stanley Kowalski), and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons.

On the recommendation of Winters, Universal signed Weaver to a film contract and he made his screen début in the western Horizons West (alongside Robert Ryan and Rock Hudson, 1952). Twenty pictures followed, many of them westerns, as well as five bit parts in the television police series Dragnet (1954-55), before Weaver landed the role of Chester Goode in Gunsmoke.

He then had moderate success in two family dramas, as a vet and horse trainer who adopts a Chinese orphan in Kentucky Jones (1964-65) and the park ranger, Tom Wedloe, in Gentle Ben (1967-69), featuring a friendly, 600lb black bear.

While he was taking off as McCloud, Weaver also made waves in an American television film that gained cinema screenings around the world. Directed by Steven Spielberg, Duel (1971) starred the actor as a salesman driving along California backroads who finds himself in a nightmare tussle with a menacing petrol tanker.

He never quite left his western background behind, starring in the television series Buck James (1987-88) as a Texas hospital doctor who has a passion for ranching and the patriarch, Henry Ritter, trying to save his ranch from financial ruin while offering a new life to an 18-year-old girl out of a teen detention centre in Wildfire (2005).

Weaver was President of the Screen Actors Guild, 1973-75, and donned his western gear for Great Western Bank commercials from 1982, a role he took over from John Wayne after “The Duke’s” death.

A keen environmentalist, he had his solar-powered, 8,500sq ft, 16-room Colorado home built out of 3,000 recycled tyres and 3,000 aluminium cans and called it his “Earthship”. He also founded the Institute of Ecolonomics to tackle both economic and environmental problems. Appropriately, when he reprised one of his most famous characters in the television film The Return of Sam McCloud (1989), the law enforcer had become a New Mexico senator fighting for new environmental laws.

Anthony Hayward

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

Betty Garde was born in 1905 in Philadelphia. She played Aunt Eller in the 1945 Broadway production of “Oaklahoma”. Her film roles were few but choice. In 1950 she was one of the inmates in “Caged”. She was also featured in “Call Northsie 777” and “Cry of the City”. Betty Garde died in 1989 at the age of 84.

Her IMDB entry:

Betty Garde was a versatile actress, who began in show business after winning a playwriting competition at high school. Joining Actor’s Equity in 1922, she became a noted performer on stage in Boston and Philadelphia, eventually making her debut on Broadway in 1925. Betty, at least early in her profession, was particularly noted for her penchant for comedy, often receiving high praise from the critics. During the 1930’s and 40’s, she became a prolific radio actress, at the same time maintaining a busy career in the theatre. In addition to voice acting, she also produced and directed her own drama series on CBS, entitled “Another Chance”. She starred in and directed the soap opera “My Son and I” in 1939. Additionally, she featured on Eddie Cantor‘s show, in specials forOrson Welles and in the radio anthology series “Theater Guild on the Air”.

Her film and television roles became more frequent from the late 1940’s. She was effectively reprehensible as Wanda Skutnik, the key witness who sends innocent Richard Conte to jail in the gripping drama Call Northside 777 (1948). Another ‘tough’ role was her prison inmate Kitty Stark in Caged (1950), a minor film noir. Her most famous role was as Aunt Eller in the original Broadway production of “Oklahoma!” (1943). Among many guest-starring roles on the small screen, her stand-out performance has to be that of Lois Nettleton‘s overwrought landlady, Mrs. Bronson, in the seminal Twilight Zone(1959) episode ‘The Midnight Sun’.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Original Cinema Quad Poster – Movie Film Posters

Bebe Daniels was born in 1901 in Dallas, Texas. At the age of 10 she starred in the silent film “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”. In the 1920’s she was under contract to Paramount Studios. Her talkie pictures included “My Past” in 1931 and “42nd Street” in 1933. In 1935 she moved to London and rebuilt her career there with her husband Ben Lyon with considerable success. They had a very popular BBC radio series “Life With the Lyons” which later made the transition to television. She died in 1971. Ben Lyon was born in 1901 in Atlanta, Georgia. “Flaming Youth” in 1923 bright him to fame. “Hell’s Angels” in 1930 is his most popularly remembered role.

Ben Lyon’s IMDB entry:

Ben Lyon was your average boyish, easy-going, highly appealing film personality of the Depression-era 1930s. Although he never rose above second-tier stardom, he would enjoy enduring success both here and in England. Born Ben Lyon, Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia, the future singer/actor was the son of a pianist-turned-businessman and youngest of four. Raised in Baltimore, he started performing in amateur productions as a teen before earning marquee value on Broadway opposite such stars as Jeanne Eagels.

Hollywood took notice of the baby-faced charmer and soon Ben was ingratiating filmgoers opposite silent film’s most honored leading ladies. He appeared with Pola Negri in Lily of the Dust (1924), Gloria Swanson in Wages of Virtue (1924), Barbara La Marr in The White Moth (1924), Mary Astor in The Pace That Thrills (1925) and Claudette Colbert, in her only silent feature, in For the Love of Mike (1927). He advanced easily into talkies and was particularly noteworthy as the dashing hero in Howard Hughes‘ Hell’s Angels (1930), in which Ben actually piloted his own plane (Ben had trained as a pilot during WWI) and filmed some of the airborne scenes for Hughes himself. That same year was also a banner year for him in his personal life after marrying Paramount Pictures film star Bebe Daniels, with whom he had appeared in Alias French Gertie (1930).

As both of their movie careers started to decline, the talented twosome decided to work up a husband-and-wife music hall and vaudeville act. They took their show to England and became a hit at the London Palladium. At one point he served in the U.S. Army Air Force and rose to the rank of Lt. Colonel in charge of Special Services for the U.S. Air Corps in England. Soldiers, sailors and airmen (from 1939) listened to Ben and Bebe weekly on the air waves with their popular, long-running BBC broadcast “Hi, Gang!” The couple remained in England throughout WWII performing on stage and doing their valid part to entertain and honor the troops.

After a brief postwar stay in Hollywood in 1946, where Ben had taken an executive position with Fox, the couple returned to England and headlined another popular 1950s radio show, “Life with the Lyons,” which spawned two family-styled films that included children Barbara Lyon and Richard Lyon. In the early 1960s Bebe suffered multiple strokes and left the limelight, passing away in 1971. Ben remarried (to former actressMarian Nixon) and settled in the US, where he died in 1979 of a heart attack while on vacation.

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

Bebe Daniels’s IMDB entry:

Bebe Daniels already had toured as an actor by the age of four in a stage production of Richard III the US, she had her first leading role at the age of seven and started her film career shortly after this in movies for Imperial, Pathe and others. At 14 she was already a film veteran, and was enlisted by Hal Roach to star as Harold Lloyd‘s leading lady in his “Lonesome Luke” shorts distributed by Pathe. Lloyd fell hard for Bebe and seriously considered marrying her— but her drive to pursue a film career along with her sense of independence clashed with HL’s Victorian definition of a wife. The two eventually broke up but would remain lifelong friends. Bebe was sought out for stardom by Cecil B. DeMille, who literally pestered her into signing with Paramount. Unlike many actors, the arrival of sound posed no problem for her; she had a beautiful singing voice and became a major musical star, with such hits like Rio Rita (1929) and 42nd Street (1933). In 1930 she married Ben Lyon, with whom she went to England in the mid-30s, where she became a successful Westend stage star and with her husband, a famous radio team. Her movie career drifted away after the mid-30s.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Stephan Eichenberg <eichenbe@fak-cbg.tu-muenchen.de>

Buddy Ebsen was born in 1908 in Illinois. In 1935 he was awarded an MGM< contract and made “Captain January” with Shirley Temple and “Broadway Melody of 1938”. He was cast at the tinsman in “The Wizard of Oz” but became ill and had to relinquish the part. He had two massive television sucesses, “The Beverly HillybilliesLike his most famous character – the hillbilly who found oil on his land – Buddy Ebsen, who has died of respiratory failure aged 95, finally struck it rich as the star of The Beverley Hillbillies. After three decades in show business, from 1962 to 1971 he delighted television viewers as the unkempt and unwilling billionaire Jed Clampett, the bane of all those who tried to take advantage of his naivety, dismissive of the lotus-eating life in Los Angeles and wanting to return to his shack in the Ozarks.

Ironically, he got the part when he was thinking of retiring from acting, at the age of 54. He had just appeared as Audrey Hepburn’s husband in Breakfast At Tiffany’s (1961), having made his name in the 1930s as a gangling eccentric dancer in a number of endearingly silly film musicals. He might also have been remembered as the Tin Man in the classic Judy Garland film of The Wizard Of Oz (1939), but for an accident that nearly killed him.

Ebsen was initially cast as the Scarecrow, alongside Ray Bolger’s Tin Man. He then good-naturedly accepted Bolger’s plea to switch roles, only to find that when the make-up people covered him with aluminium paint, it got into his lungs. Ten days into production, he recalled, “after dinner, I took a breath – and nothing happened.”

Ebsen was rushed to LA’s Good Samaritan hospital, while irate studio chiefs complained that a major picture was behind schedule. Unwilling to wait for him to recover, MGM replaced him with the far less talented Jack Haley, and allowed his contract to lapse.

Curiously for an actor who came to typify American hickdom, Ebsen was born the son of a Danish father and Latvian mother who spoke German as their home language. He trained in his father’s dance school in Belleville, Illinois, before forming a song-and-dance act with his sister Vilma and toured in vaudeville.

In 1928, he was part of the cowboy chorus in the Eddie Cantor hit show Whoopee, and went to other Broadway shows, often with Vilma. They reached the screen in Broadway Melody Of 1936 (1935), in which they did a sprightly rooftop number called Sing Before Breakfast, soon after which Vilma retired.

Ebsen’s leisurely hoofing, smooth singing and unsophisticated persona were seen at their best when he was dancing with Shirley Temple in Captain January (1936), romancing Frances Langford in Born To Dance (1936) and dueting with the 15-year-old Judy Garland in Broadway Melody Of 1938. He also provided light relief in The Girl Of The Golden West (1938), as Jeanette MacDonald’s donkey-riding friend who sings The West Ain’t Wild Anymore.

After MGM dropped him in 1939, Ebsen appeared in several B-pictures, before joining the US navy in 1943. Emerging as a lieutenant in 1945, he attempted to revive his screen career, though it was only rescued from the doldrums in Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett (1955), playing the hero’s sidekick George Russell, which, in 1956, spawned a television series.

That same year, Ebsen was superb as a grizzled, respected soldier in a platoon under siege in Attack!, Robert Aldrich’s hard-hitting depiction of the perfidious attitude of certain officers in the second world war.

From 1973 to 1980, he was seen on television as the soft-spoken, milk-drinking Barnaby Jones, a retired private detective who takes over the practice when his son is killed. According to Ebsen, “Barnaby Jones encouraged men not to give up at 65.”

This was followed in the 1980s with Matt Houston, another popular series in which he played the private-eye hero’s uncle, a retired investigator. His last screen appearance was a cameo in The Beverley Hillbillies (1994), a feature-film version of the television series which only proved that there was no substitute for the original Jed Clampett.

When not appearing in television westerns, Ebsen relaxed by sailing his 35ft catamaran, with which he won a number of races. He also painted in oils, and his romantic novel Kelly’s Quest (2001) was a big seller.

He had two daughters from his first marriage, and four daughters and a son from his second marriage. The children all survive him, as does his third wife, Dotti.

· Christian Rudolph ‘Buddy’ Ebsen, actor and dancer, born April 2 1908; died July 6 2003

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

” in the 1960’s and “Barnaby Jones” in the 1980’s. Buddy Ebsen died in 2003 at the age of 95.

His “Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan:

David Clennon was born in 1943 in Illinois. His first film was “Being There” in 1979. His other films include “The Thing”, “Missing”, “Sweet Dreams” and “Syriana”.

TCM Overview:

This lean, often bearded, character player of stage and screen since the 1970s gained some measure of celebrity as the cold, cunning Miles Dentrel on the acclaimed dramatic series “thirtysomething” (ABC). As the resident yuppie scum from 1989-1991, Clennon portrayed the calculating character who seemed to represent the fears and reservations of the show’s more sympathetic figures. That his prior stints as a TV regular–“Rafferty” (CBS, 1977), a medical drama and “Park Place” (CBS, 1981), a short-lived legal sitcom–had him playing a surgeon and an eager, idealistic legal aide lawyer, respectively, testify to Clennon’s versatility.

After several years of anti-war activism during the Vietnam era, Clennon established himself Off-Broadway and in regional theater, racking up credits at the New York Shakespeare Festival, Long Wharf Theatre and the Actor’s Theater of Louisville. He entered films with bit parts in several noteworthy American films of 70s, including “The Paper Chase” (1973), “Bound for Glory” (1976), and “Coming Home” (1977), before landing the substantial supporting role of an ambitious attorney in “Being There” (1979). Clennon amassed additional feature credits, usually in supporting roles, in a wide variety of films. He was the tight-lipped US consul in Chile who cannot help Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek find John Shea in “Missing” (1982) and Meryl Streep’s seemingly passionless husband in “Falling in Love” (1984). He received more screen time than usual in Paul Schrader’s “Light Sleeper” (1992), as a drug dealing colleague of Susan Sarandon and Willem Dafoe. More recently, he portrayed a doctor in Allison Anders’ “Grace of My Heart” (1996).

The small screen has also offered a variety of opportunities for the actor. Clennon’s first appearance in a TV longform was a small role in “The Migrants” (CBS, 1974). He could be seen in the miniseries “Helter Skelter” (CBS, 1976) and alongside Henry Fonda in “Gideon’s Trumpet” (CBS, 1980). Clennon frequently found himself cast as professionals; an exception was his turn as the American general (and future president) William Henry Harrison in “Tecumseh: The Last Warrior” (CBS, 1995). Among his many guest appearances, the most notable was as a writer suffering with AIDS in an affecting episode of the HBO comedy “Dream On”, for which he won an Emmy in 1993. Clennon returned as a series regular on “Almost Perfect” (CBS, 1995-96), as a laid-back, bohemian writer for a TV cop show.

This TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

David Wayne was born in 1914 in Michigan. His first film was “Adam’s Rib” in 1949 with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. He went on to film “Portrait of Jeannie” with Jennifer Jones, “As Young As You Feel”, “We’re Not Married” and “How to Marry A Millionaire”. David Wayne died in 1995 aged 81.

“New York Times” obituary:

David Wayne, an actor who played widely divergent roles on Broadway, in television and in films for almost 50 years and who was the first recipient of a Tony Award for acting, died on Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 81.

The cause was lung cancer, said his daughter Melinda.

Mr. Wayne navigated his sprightly 5-foot-7-inch frame through a half-century of turbulent changes in American acting. He portrayed, and won acclaim for, performances ranging from the precocious ensign in the 1948 stage version of “Mr. Roberts” to the Mad Hatter in the 1960’s “Batman” series on television.

One of his most memorable performances was as a leprechaun in the 1947 stage version of “Finian’s Rainbow,” for which he was given the nation’s first Tony Award for acting.

It was not his only Tony. Seven years later, he received another for his role as Sakini, a man from Okinawa trying to meld cultures, in “The Teahouse of the August Moon.”

“David Wayne is an actor of more than one dimension,” wrote Brooks Atkinson in a 1956 New York Times review of Mr. Wayne’s performance as a character 20 years older than he was at the time, in “The Ponder Heart.” “He can depart from realism into imaginative characterizations,” Mr. Atkinson said.

Mr. Wayne, whose original name was Wayne McKeekan, was born on Jan. 30, 1914, in Traverse City, Mich. His father was an insurance executive. His mother died when he was 4 years old, and he was raised by close family friends.

After two years at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, he moved to Cleveland, taking work as a statistician. In 1936, he joined that city’s Shakespearean repertory company, a troupe that also gave such actors as Arthur Kennedy and Sam Wanamaker their theatrical starts.

He moved to New York City in 1938, won a minor role the next year in “The American Way,” and in 1941 married Jane Gordon, an actress. When World War II began he was rejected by the Army, but volunteered to serve as an ambulance driver in North Africa with the American Field Service.

Mr. Wayne resumed his stage career soon after the war ended and quickly won critical praise. His Broadway performances included major roles in such plays as Arthur Miller’s “Incident at Vichy” and Eugene O’Neill’s “Marco Millions.” He starred in the Broadway productions of “Say Darling” and “Send Me No Flowers” and received his third Tony nomination for “The Happy Time.”

He lived in Manhattan during the 1950’s and in Westport, Conn., in the 1960’s. Despite his belief that the stage was where an actor truly exercised his craft, his growing interest in film and television lured him and his family to Los Angeles in 1977.

His movie credits include roles in “Portrait of Jennie” and “Adam’s Rib” (1949), “Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie” (1952), “How to Marry a Millionaire” (1953), “The Tender Trap” (1955), “The Three Faces of Eve” (1957), “The Last Angry Man” (1959), “The Front Page” (1974), “The Apple Dumpling Gang” (1975), “The Andromeda Strain” (1971) and “The Survivalist” (1987).

His work on television included the starring role in the 1955 series “Norby,” a leading role in “The Good Life” (1971-72), the role of Inspector Richard Queen in “The Adventures of Ellery Queen” (1975-76), the part of Willard (Digger) Barnes in “Dallas” in 1978 and the role of Dr. Amos Weatherby in “House Calls” (1980-82). He was nominated for Emmy Awards for guest appearances in “Suspicion” and “Gunsmoke.”

Mr. Wayne’s wife died in 1993. He is survived by his twin daughters, Susan Kearney and Melinda, both of Thousand Oaks, Calif., and two grandchildren.

Brock Peters was born in 1927 in New York City.His movie debut was in 1954 in “Carmen Jones”. 1962 was a major year with two terrific performances, Tom Robinson in “To Kill A Mockingbird” and John in “The L Shaped Room” which was made in Britain. Other films include “Major Dundee””The Pawnbroker”, “The Incident” and “Two-Minute Warning”. He died in 2005.

Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:

Brock Peters, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 78, emerged at the time when black actors were beginning to get more assertive and dominant roles in Hollywood movies. Yet, he made his name and is most remembered for the pivotal but passive character of Tom Robinson, the man accused of raping a white girl that liberal lawyer Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) defends in court in Robert Mulligan’s To Kill A Mockingbird (1962).

A few years ago, Peters related how he got the part. “I found myself the last of two people being considered for this role. And I was really worried because my competition was one of our finest actors: James Earl Jones. My agent called me and said we have a meeting for you to talk with the producers, the director and all those concerned, and after this meeting a decision will be made. Well, of course, I was scared out of my wits. I went into the meeting and I tried not to appear frightened but I wanted to look cool and calm and still suggest the character of Tom Robinson, and do that dressed in a suit.”

Peters went on to describe how as Tom Robinson, he cried on cue. “From day one I had to arrive at a point where I burst into tears, could not contain them, had to try to stifle them, and that’s not easy to do. Once we were on track I needed to go only to the places of pain, remembered pain, experienced pain and the tears would come, really at will.”

Born of African and West Indian parentage as George Fisher in Harlem, New York, he aimed for a showbusiness career from the age of 10. A product of New York’s Music and Arts High School, he made his stage debut at the age of 15 playing one of the children in Catfish Row in a 1943 Broadway revival of Gershwin’s Porgy And Bess, a work in which he was to appear again later on stage and on film.

He continued training for the stage while working as a hospital orderly and shipping clerk. Once, out of despair, he decided to take up physical education studies; until a break came when the 21-year-old was offered a role in a touring company of Porgy And Bess in 1949. He made his television debut in 1953 as a winner on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts show, and the following year he was cast by the director Otto Preminger in the screen version of Carmen Jones, as the brutal Sergeant Brown. He also used his rich baritone to dub the singing voice of the actor Roy Glenn for the number Whizzin’ Away Along De Track.

He initially clashed with the autocratic director. “One day he chewed me out in front of a lot of people,” said Peters. “I lost my temper and I went for him. Later I discovered he was a charming social personality and very warm, and I was surprised to learn that he was a life member of the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).”

In 1959, Peters was in Preminger’s screen version of Porgy And Bess in which he played Crown, Bess’s former lover who runs away after killing a man, meets her again during a picnic and tries to rape her after singing the duet What You Want Wid Bess? with Dorothy Dandridge (dubbed by Adele Addison).

Peters was 6ft 3ins, with a powerful voice, piercing eyes and flaring nostrils, and was once described by the Los Angeles Times as a “geyser of an actor who never errs on the side of restraint”. He found himself playing dozens of villains. “It was almost disastrous,” he explained. “Producers didn’t want to see me. They had liked my performances but couldn’t see me as anything but a heavy.”

In the meantime, on stage, Peters appeared less menacingly in three short-lived shows, Mister Johnson (1956) and the musicals The Body Beautiful (1958) and Kwamina (1961) before getting the role in To Kill A Mockingbird, in which he was seen as a gentle janitor.

This led to sympathetic roles in two British films in 1963, Bryan Forbes’s The L-Shaped Room, where he was a gay jazz trumpeter whose best friend falls in love with a pregnant French girl (Leslie Caron), and in the Boulting brothers’ Heavens Above! in which he was a Christian dustman who is appointed churchwarden by the idealistic priest Peter Sellers, much to the consternation of the congregation.

Back in the US he returned as a ghetto gangster in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1965), unusual at the time because black actors seldom played such unsympathetic roles. This was followed by Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, as the leader of a troop of black soldiers. In The Incident (1967), he and Ruby Dee were the only black passengers on a subway train terrorised by two teenagers. In 1970, he had one of his few opportunities to play a leading role in The McMasters, a western in which he was an former slave who inherits property. Back on stage, Peters was nominated for a Tony for his performance as Reverend Stephen Kumalo, the priest in apartheid South Africa in the 1972 revival of the Kurt Weill-Maxwell Anderson musical Lost In The Stars, adapted from the Alan Paton novel, Cry, The Beloved Country. (It was a role he recreated in the film version the following year.)

Peters was kept busy in television series such as Roots: The Next Generations (1979) and The Young and The Restless (1982-1989) to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1997 and 1998). He also starred in two feature film spinoffs, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) as a Starfleet admiral whose disapproval of a Klingon peace treaty leads him to take action.

Peters, a widower, is survived by his companion, Marilyn Darby, and his daughter.

· Brock Peters, actor; born July 2 1927; died August 23 2005

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

A poster for Otto Preminger’s 1959 drama ‘Porgy and Bess’ starring Dorothy Dandridge and Brock Peters. (Photo by Movie Poster Image Art/Getty Images)

Vic Damone. TCM Overview

Vic Damone has had world wide success as a popular singer. In the 1950’s he made several movie musicals with MGM. He was born in 1928 in Brooklyn of Italian parents. By the late 1940’s he was well established as a singer. His first movie was “Rich, Young and Pretty” with Jane Powell followed by “Athena” also with Powell and Edmund Purdom and Steve Reeves. He also made “Hit the Deck”, “Deep in My Heart” and “Kismit” with Ann Blyth. In 1960 he had a dramatic role in “Hell to Eternity” with Jeffrey Hunter, Patricia Owens and Miiko Taka.

TCM Overview:

No less a figure than Frank Sinatra once proclaimed singer Vic Damone as possessing the “best pipes in the business,” which he parlayed into a popular recording career in the late 1940s and 1950s with such hits as “You’re Breaking My Heart,” “Again” and “My Heart Cries for You,” among many other lush romantic ballads. Damone also enjoyed a secondary career as an actor, largely as lovestruck youth in such Hollywood musicals as “Deep in My Heart” (1954) and “Kismet” (1955). Like many pop crooners, Damone was unmoored by the rise of rock-n-roll in the early 1960s, though he segued successfully into the casino circuit in the 1970s, where he remained active and in fine voice until his retirement following a stroke in 2001. Though never a cultural institution like Sinatra or Nat “King” Cole, Vic Damone’s rich baritone provided him with a slew of hits in the 1950s and a career on stage that compared with and even outlasted many of his contemporaries.

Born Vito Rocco Farinola on June 12, 1928 in Brooklyn, NY, Vic Damone was one of five children and the only son of electrician Rocco Farinola and his wife, Mamie Damone, both of whom were immigrants who hailed from Sicily. Music was an important component of Damone’s life from an early age; his mother taught piano, while his father played guitar. However, he drew his greatest inspiration from Frank Sinatra, whose meteoric rise to pop stardom inspired the younger man to take singing lessons. These were cut short when his father suffered a serious injury in a work accident, prompting Damone to drop out of school and work as an usher and elevator operator at the Paramount Theater in Manhattan. While bringing Perry Como to his dressing room following a performance at the theater, Damone asked the singer if he would hear him sing in order to judge if he had talent. His rendition of “There Must Be a Way” impressed Como, who referred Damone to a local bandleader. After adopting the stage moniker of Vic Damone, he made his professional debut as a singer in early 1947 with a performance on WHN radio in New York shortly before capturing first place on “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” in April of that year. This in turn led to regular appearances on the Godfrey show, where he met Milton Berle. The comic helped to broker a contract for Damone to perform at the La Martinique and Aquarium nightclubs, which afforded him major exposure. By the summer of 1947, Damone had signed with Mercury Records, which released his debut single, “I Have But One Heart.” The record reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100, as did its immediate follow-up, “You Do.”

Damone was soon hosting his own radio program, Saturday Night Serenade, while playing live dates at major New York theaters such as the Copa and even his previous employers, the Paramount. In 1948, he scored four Top 30 singles, including a duet with Patti Page on “Say Something Sweet to Your Sweetheart,” before returning to the Top 10 with the million-seller “Again” in 1949. His next release that year, “You’re Breaking My Heart,” became his first and only single to top the pop charts, though he would visit the Top 10 on several occasions in the late ’40s and early ’50s, most notably with a 1950 cover of “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” an Israeli folk song adapted by the Weavers, and “My Heart Cries for You,” which reached No. 4 in 1950. That same year, he signed a film contract with MGM, which led to his screen debut as an amorous Frenchman in pursuit of Jane Powell in “Rich, Young and Pretty” (1951). After scoring one more Top 5 hit with “My Truly Truly Fair” in 1951, Damone was inducted into the Army, where he served until 1953. Mercury kept him in the spotlight during this period by releasing a steady string of material recorded by Damone prior to his tour of duty, including the Top 10 hits “Here in My Heart” (1952) and “April in Portugal” and “Ebb Tide,” both in 1953.

Upon his return from military service, Damone resumed his film career, enjoying featured or co-starring roles in major musical productions like “Hit the Deck” (1955) and the screen adaptation of “Kismet” (1955). His singing career, however, entered the doldrums, prompting him to leave Mercury for Columbia in 1956. That year, Damone would score a No. 4 hit with “On the Street Where You Live,” from the musical “My Fair Lady,” but the single would prove his final visit to the Top 10 pop charts. Though his albums performed well, Damone had lost his ground on the singles chart to the growing rock-n-roll movement, and by 1961, he had left Columbia for Capitol. The label attempted to groom Damone into a mature balladeer with 1962’s Linger Awhile with Vic Damone (1962), which, like its five follow-ups, earned him critical acclaim but few record sales. From 1962 to 1963, he hosted an NBC variety series called “The Lively Ones,” which featured an impressive array of jazz and folk performers.

Marisa Pavan, Pier Angeli and Vic Damone.

Damone again changed labels in 1965, moving to Warner Bros., where he earned a Top 30 hit with “You Were Only Fooling.” It also reached No. 8 on the adult contemporary charts, where he would consistently place in the Top 40 for the next half-decade, until earning his final U.S. chart hit with “To Make a Big Man Cry,” which reached No. 31 on the adult contemporary charts in 1969. Damone’s finances took a downward turn in the early 1970s, forcing him to declare bankruptcy. But after staging a major concert in Las Vegas in 1971, he became a staple of the casino and nightclub circuit, which returned him to solvency. Damone soon became such a popular figure in this arena that he expanded his touring to the United Kingdom, where he was received warmly by audiences. Damone’s popularity overseas prompted him to return to recording, issuing several albums through RCA between 1992 and 1995. He remained active until 2000, when a minor stroke brought his stage career to a close with a farewell concert in Palm Beach, FL. In 2009, he penned his autobiography, Singing Was the Easy Part, shortly before breaking his retirement with a special one-off performance in 2011.

By Paul Gaita

This TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Betsy Palmer has had two distinct careers on film. In the 1950’s she was a very pretty female lead and then in the eighties she became associated with horror movies through her starring role in “Nightmare on Elm Street”. She was born in 1926 in Indiana. She made her film debut in “Mr Roberts” in 1955 with Jack Lemmon. She went on to make “Queen Bee” with Joan Crawford, “The True Story of Lynn Stuart” with Jack Lord and “The Tin Star” with Henry Fonda and Anthony Perkins. She died at the age of 88 in May 2015.

IMDB entry:

Betsy Palmer was born Pamela Betsy Hrunek on November 1, 1926 in East Chicago, Indiana. She is probably best known for playing Jason Voorhees’ mother in the horror filmFriday the 13th (1980), but her career as an actress began many years before. Palmer was encouraged to play a young female officer co-starring with Jack Lemmon in Mister Roberts (1955) and in another war film the same year, The Long Gray Line (1955). Throughout the late 1950s, Palmer was recognized as a news reporter on Today (1952) on NBC, then became largely involved in television; from then on she remained in made-for-TV films and notable guest appearances, and then appearing in the horror film Friday the 13th (1980), but continued on with television. Her film The Fear: Resurrection (1999) did not make much impact. Palmer today often spends her time between her home in New York City and Sedona, Arizona. She apparently was offered the role of Jason Voorhees’ mother in Jason X (2001), but turned it down and said to use her original footage from Friday the 13th (1980).

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

“Movies Unlimited” article:

As performers from Fay Wray to Anthony Perkins to Mark Hamillfound out, playing a memorable character in a horror or science fiction film early in your career often comes with the risk of being typecast in that role and finding your professional trajectory changed, not always for the better. For actress Betsy Palmer, who died this past weekend at 88, however, the part that brought her cult acclaim to a generation of “slasher film” fans arrived after she was already a 30-year veteran of the stage, screen and television…but it took the need to buy a new car to convince her to “take a stab” at it.

Born Patricia Betsy Hrunek in East Chicago, Indiana, in 1926, she studied theater at DePaul University and, after graduation, set out to make a name for herself on Broadway. She was only in New York for about a week when, at a party at the apartment of fellow actor (and future Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C. regular) Frank Sutton, Betsy was tapped to appear in an early, 15-minute TV soap opera, Meet Susan. Along with stage roles in South Pacific and Maggie, Palmer found steady work on the small screen, appearing in such shows as Inner Sanctum, Studio One, and Playhouse 90. She was also a regular panelist on the original, prime time version of I’ve Got a Secret from 1958 until its 1967 ending, and appeared as herself on the game show in the 1959 Doris Day comedy It Happened to Jane.

Betsy’s big-screen debut came in a 1955 “B” sea thriller, Death Tide, but that same year she appeared in key roles in two movies directed (at least partly) by John Ford: as the head Army nurse who becomes a target for womanizing ensign Jack Lemmon in the classic WWII drama Mister Roberts, and as the wife (and, later, mother) of West Point cadets under the mentorship of Tyrone Power in The Long Gray Line. 1955 also saw Palmer lock horns with manipulative sister-in-law Joan Crawford in the campy melodrama Queen Bee.

The late 1950s and early ’60s would find Palmer working alongside Henry Fonda and Anthony Perkins in the frontier tale The Tin Star (1957) and Paul Muni and David Wayne in the powerful social drama The Last Angry Man (1959), but over the next two decades she would devote most of her acting time to the stage, with occasional TV turns (Love, American Style, CHiPs, The Love Boat, among others), and spend her home life raising her daughter.

It was when her Mercedes died along a Connecticut highway, however, that the actress decided to take a $10,000 offer to appear in a 1980 horror film that introduced her to a new audience. As Pamela Voorhees, the vengeance-seeking mother of Camp Crystal Lake “drowning victim” Jason Voorhees, in director Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13th, Betsy was able to play against her “good girl” image as (35-year-old Spoiler Alert!) a deranged killer. “I was always trying to prove that I wasn’t the girl next door,” she later stated in the documentary Return to Crystal Lake.

Throughout the ’80s and ’90s Palmer kept up her TV (a recurring role on Knot’s Landing, the telemovie Goddess of Love) and stage (Cactus Flower, Same Time Next Year) work, with the odd film turn here and there, the last in 2007. A chance to reprise her role as Mrs. Voorhees in the 2003 monster mash-up Freddy vs. Jason didn’t come to pass, through…either because the part as offered or the paycheck was too small (the price of cars had gone up since 1980, after all). And while she was at first cool to Friday the 13th’s overwhelming popularity (“Nobody is going to see this thing!” was her initial reaction to the low-budget shocker), Palmer later came to embrace her place in the “slasher movie” pantheon, greeting fans and signing autographs at horror/sci-fi conventions.

The above “Movies Unlimited” article can also be accessed online here.

New York Times obituary in June 2015:

Betsy Palmer, 88, Dies; From TV Panelist to ‘Friday the 13th’ Villainess

By Bruce Weber

June 1, 2015

Betsy Palmer, an actress bound to be remembered by different generations for different career incarnations — as a performer on live television, as a panelist on game shows and as one of Hollywood’s more bloodthirsty villainesses — died on Friday in hospice care near her home in Danbury, Conn. She was 88.

Her death was announced by her manager, Brad Lemack.

Ms. Palmer began her career in the early 1950s and was cast frequently on anthology drama series, some of them live. Outgoing, friendly, she was known, in the parlance of the era, as a girl-next-door type.

She was also tall and shapely — Newsweek magazine described her in 1958 as a “sugar-cookie blonde” — all of which made her a natural for other types of live programming that flourished in the 1950s and ’60s. For a time she appeared regularly on the “Today” show during its first decade, alongside Dave Garroway, the host.

“Women’s news is provided by Betsy Palmer, one of television’s most photogenic and intelligent performers,” John P. Shanley wrote in 1958 in an assessment of the show in The New York Times.

Baby boomers grew familiar with Ms. Palmer for her nearly 200 appearances on “I’ve Got a Secret,” a long-running game show, hosted by Garry Moore, in which four panelists peppered guests with questions in order to determine a hidden peculiarity about them. (One pair of guests, for instance, claimed to be the world watermelon seed spitting champions.) Ms. Palmer’s colleagues often included Bess Myerson, Henry Morgan and Bill Cullen.

A later generation, however, knows Ms. Palmer better (or perhaps only) as, in her words, “queen of the slashers,” for her appearance as the insanely murderous Mrs. Voorhees, the camp cook bent on bloodily eliminating a roster of teenage counselors, in the 1980 horror film “Friday the 13th,” which has spawned myriad sequels and become one of Hollywood’s most profitable franchises. (As Mrs. Voorhees, Ms. Palmer gets her head cut off with a machete at the end of the film, though she does appear in flashback in at least one of the sequels.)

As she often told the story, Ms. Palmer took the part only because she needed $10,000 to buy a new car, a Volkswagen Scirocco.

“So the script came and I read it, and I said, ‘What a piece of … ’ ” Ms. Palmer recalled in a 2003 documentary, “Return to Crystal Lake: Making Friday the 13th,” discreetly not finishing her sentence. “And I said, ‘Nobody is ever going to see this. It will come and it will go. And I’ll have my Scirocco.’ ”

Patricia Betsy Hrunek was born in East Chicago, Ind., on Nov. 1, 1926. Her father, Rudolph, was a chemist. Her mother, Marie, started and operated the East Chicago School of Business, which Betsy briefly attended before studying drama at DePaul University in Chicago.

She started acting in summer stock and, according to an NBC biography of her in 1957, appeared in a show outside Chicago with the actress and comedian Imogene Coca, who encouraged her to move to New York. There, in addition to her work on television dramas, she did commercials and appeared on game shows, including “Masquerade Party,” in which a panel of celebrities tried to discern the identity of another celebrity who appeared in disguise.

She had a few small parts in movies, including as a nurse in “Mister Roberts” (1955), the hit comedy-drama about life on a Navy ship during World War II with Henry Fonda and Jack Lemmon (who won an Oscar). She played the female lead in a western that starred Fonda, “The Tin Star” (1957).

She also appeared on Broadway in two short-lived comedies: “The Grand Prize” (1955), with Tom Poston and June Lockhart, and “Affair of Honor” (1956), which The Times’s critic, Brooks Atkinson, described as (through no fault of the actors, he pointed out) “dull and odious.”

Ms. Palmer’s marriage to Vincent J. Merendino, an obstetrician, ended in divorce. Her survivors include their daughter, Melissa Merendino.

In 1969 Ms. Palmer replaced Virginia Graham as host of the syndicated talk show “Girl Talk.” Her later credits on television include a recurring role on the prime-time soap opera “Knots Landing” and guest appearances on “Murder, She Wrote,” “Charles in Charge,” “The Love Boat” and “Just Shoot Me!” In the 1960s and the 1970s, she also returned to Broadway as part of replacement casts in “Cactus Flower” and “Same Time, Next Year” and as a star of the Tennessee Williams drama “The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.” For many, if not most, however, it is Mrs. Voorhees and “Friday the 13th” that linger.

“I dismissed it for many, many years, and wouldn’t ’fess up to it at all,” she said in the documentary. “And then it just became such a big thing where everybody seemed to enjoy it so much. I thought, ‘Well, all right, I’m comfortable about it now.’ It’s almost like a badge of honor, in a way. It has become that.

“I’m the queen of the slashers, you know. What am I going to do?”

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

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Bebe Daniels & Ben Lyon

Buddy Ebsen

David Clennon

David Wayne

Brock Peters

Vic Damone

Vic Damone. TCM Overview

Betsy Palmer

New York Times obituary in June 2015:

Betsy Palmer, 88, Dies; From TV Panelist to ‘Friday the 13th’ Villainess

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