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Donald Sutherland

Donald Sutherland was born in 1935 in Saint John’s New Brunswick, Canada. He has an impressive array of outstaning contribution to films especially in the 1970’s and continues to give sterling performances to-day. He trained for the stage on Britain and began his career in British movies. His movie debut came in 1963 in “The World Ten Times Over”. His other U.K. films include “Fanatic” with Tallulah Bankhead and “Sebastian” with Dirk Bogarde. His international breakthrough role came with “Mash” in 1970. This was followed by “Kelly’s Heroes”, “Alex in Wonderland”, “Don’t Look Now”, “The Day of the Locust”, “The Eagle Has Landed”, “Nothing Personal” and “Eye of the Needle”. he is the father of actor Kiefer Sutherland.

TCM Overview:

Perhaps one of the most prolific and widely recognized actors of his generation, Donald Sutherland made a career playing some of the most unusual and memorable characters in cinema history. Though best known for playing odd, off-beat roles, like a hippie tank commander in “Kelly’s Heroes” (1970), an anti-authoritarian surgeon in “M*A*S*H” (1970), a novice private investigator in “Klute” (1971) and a stoner college professor in “Animal House” (1978), Sutherland cut a wide swath of characters throughout his career, mainly in order to avoid being typecast as eccentric weirdos. Critical acclaim for several of his performances – especially “Ordinary People” (1980) and “JFK” (1991) – was abundant, but he rarely received any awards – a surprising revelation given the breadth and quality of his work. Nonetheless, Sutherland maintained a steady career despite a long lull in the mid-1980s, even expanding his horizons into series television with “Commander in Chief” (ABC, 2005-06) and “Dirty Sexy Money” (ABC, 2007-09); two projects that, although short-lived, earned him further critical raves. Boasting a career that spanned more than five decades and 150 productions, Sutherland established himself as one of the most prolific, inventive and respected actors ever to grace either screen.

Born on July 17, 1935 in St. John, New Brunswick, Canada, Sutherland was raised in neighboring Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. His father, Frederick, was a salesman and head of the local bus, gas and electric company, and his mother, Dorothy, was a mathematics teacher. When he was 14, Sutherland was heard on CKBW as the youngest news reader and disc jockey in Canada. After high school, he studied engineering at the University of Toronto, but he quickly made the switch to an English major and began acting in school productions, making his stage debut in “The Male Animal” in 1952. He graduated UT in 1956, then moved to England where he attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. He went immediately to work in provincial repertory companies, landing roles in several stage productions in London, including “August for the People.” Sutherland was performing in a West End production of “Spoon River Anthology” when he was offered his first film, the dual role of a soldier and a witch (who end up fighting each other at the end) in “Castle of the Living Dead” (1964).

A couple of years after his film debut, Sutherland had moved to the United States where he continued taking strides to advance his career. He made his first American screen appearance in “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), playing a one of 12 soldiers in military prison during World War II, who are sent on a dangerous mission that gives them the chance to regain their honor. After bit parts in “Sebastian” (1968) and “Oedipus the King” (1968), Sutherland landed meatier supporting roles in “Joanna” (1968) and “Interlude” (1968). Then, without really meaning to, Sutherland suddenly made a name for himself in Robert Altman’s Korean War satire “M*A*S*H” (1970), playing misfit surgeon Hawkeye Pearce, whose love of nurses and moonshine martinis were the only things keeping him and fellow surgeon Trapper John McIntyre (Elliott Gould) sane amidst the chaos of war. Because of the antiwar fervor of the late-1960s, early-1970s, “M*A*S*H” was one of the year’s biggest hits, both critically and financially, turning an unknown Sutherland into an overnight star.

Hot on the heels of “M*A*S*H,” Sutherland was seen in yet another war-themed comedy, “Kelly’s Heroes” (1970), playing one of his most notorious and ultimately beloved characters, Oddball, a Bohemian tank commander who joins forces with a ragtag group of Army soldiers (led by Telly Savalas and Clint Eastwood) on a mission 30 miles behind Nazi lines to steal a large cache of gold. He achieved his first substantial critical acclaim for an excellent performance as a rural private detective who follows the sordid life of a prostitute (Jane Fonda) while on the trail of a killer in “Klute” (1971). Throughout the decade, Sutherland, despite his best efforts, was in danger of being typecast as a stoned-out goofball or an off-the-wall freak, thanks in large part to his rather unconventional looks. Luckily, he had both the sense and the talent to transcend the problem. In “Johnny Got His Gun” (1971), Sutherland was Jesus Christ, while in “Steelyard Blues” (1973), he was a demolition driver released from prison after serving time for larceny, and who gathers a band of misfits together to restore an old World War II plane in which to fly away to live in a nonconformist world.

Despite having made his name with “M*A*S*H” and “Klute” – both critical successes – Sutherland managed to make his share of duds, like “Lady Ice” (1973) and “S*P*Y*S” (1974), a ridiculously dull espionage comedy that reunited him with Elliot Gould. He was rather one-note as an ambitious and wealthy Hollywood powerbroker in the otherwise worthy adaptation of John Schlesinger’s entertainment satire, “The Day of the Locust” (1975), before returning to the comfortable confines of World War II action in “The Eagle Had Landed” (1976), playing an English-hating Irishman who helps arrange a Nazi plot to kidnap Winston Churchill on British soil. After being cast as an everyman Casanova in “Il Casanova di Federico Fellini” (1976) and appearing briefly in the often uproarious spoof “Kentucky Fried Movie” (1977), Sutherland scored another landmark role, playing a pot smoking college professor who takes the girlfriend (Karen Allen) away from an irresponsible, but irrepressible fraternity leader (Tim Matheson) in “National Lampoon’s Animal House” (1978). Sutherland was once again memorable in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978), bringing forth a palpable paranoia as a Department of Health employee contending with an alien invasion of soul-possessing spores.

Sutherland forever obliterated being typecast with his subtle portrayal of an emotionally conflicted father in “Ordinary People” (1980), director Robert Redford’s extraordinary Oscar-winning look at a so-called perfect family. Though ultimately overlooked by the Academy Awards, Sutherland was exceptional as a family man dealing with the death of a child and the love for his wife (Mary Tyler Moore). Unfortunately, his critical success with “Ordinary People” failed to translate into other meaty roles; instead leading to the miserable satire “Gas” (1981) and the rather uninspired caper comedy “Crackers” (1984). Meanwhile, an ill-received stage performance as Humbert Humbert in Edward Albee’s “Lolita” in 1981 helped keep him off the stage for a good 18 years – critics savaged the play, forcing the production to be canceled after only 12 performances. Sutherland, on the other hand, was spared from most of the critical drubbing the play received. After a 15 year absence, he returned to the small screen to play Ethan Hawley, a grocery store clerk who dreams of buying back his store from corrupt local bankers, in “John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent” (CBS, 1983), one of the few highlights for Sutherland in the 1980s.

While he remained prolific throughout the decade, Sutherland was mired in career doldrums that made his earlier successes more out of focus with time. Unexceptional features like the uneven murder mystery “Ordeal by Innocence” (1984), the flat-out dull period epic “Revolution” (1985), and the ineptly unfunny espionage comedy “The Trouble With Spies” (1987) only helped give rise to the notion that Sutherland’s career was in trouble. He returned to more dramatic fare with “A Dry White Season” (1989), playing a South African schoolteacher ignorant of the horrors of apartheid and who turns radically against the system when his gardener’s son is viciously murdered. Once the 1990s rolled around, however, Sutherland suddenly found himself in better films. He had a small, but integral role in “JFK” (1991), playing the mysterious Mr. X, a former black ops officer who feeds vital background information to New Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner), the only person to bring a trial in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Despite being onscreen for only 15 minutes, Sutherland’s compelling performance made an indelible impression and remained one of the most remembered sequences in Oliver Stone’s exceptional film.

After a series of high-profile, but ultimately forgettable roles in “Backdraft” (1991), “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (1992) and “Outbreak” (1995), Sutherland received rare award recognition for his performance in “Citizen X” (HB0, 1995), an exceptional thriller about an eight-year investigation by an obsessed Russian detective (Stephen Rea) into the serial killings of 52 women and children. Sutherland received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or Special for his portrayal of Colonel Fetisov, the investigator’s supportive boss who helps him fight the bureaucracy of the Soviet state. Building off that success, he was superb as the law school professor and mentor of a novice lawyer (Matthew McConaughey) in “A Time to Kill” (1996), then gave an understated and overlooked performance as famed track coach Bill Bowerman in “Without Limits” (1998), an engaging look at the ill-fated track star, Steve Prefontaine (Billy Crudup). Sutherland rounded out the millennium with more underwhelming projects, including the mediocre features “Fallen” (1998) and “Virus” (1999), and the above average made-for-television movie, “Behind the Mask” (CBS, 1999), in which he played a doctor who forms a father-son relationship with a mentally-challenged man (Matthew Fox).

Alongside charismatic turns as a sex-minded, over-the-hill astronaut in Clint Eastwood’s amusing “Space Cowboys” (2000), and as William H. Macy’s hit man father in “Panic” (2000), Sutherland occasionally slummed his way through routine big screen thrillers, including the easily dismissed Wesley Snipes action thriller, “The Art of War” (2000). He continued finding compelling roles on television, however, namely as a small time hood looking to make a big score in “The Big Heist” (2001), and as Clark Clifford, political advisor to Lyndon Johnson, in John Frankenheimer’s acclaimed “Path to War” (HBO, 2002). In 2003, Sutherland enjoyed a renaissance on the big screen, delivering a charming performance as the mentor to a professional thief (Mark Wahlberg) in the hit remake “The Italian Job” (2003), and as Nicole Kidman’s doting Southern dad in “Cold Mountain” (2003). In “Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot” (TNT, 2004), he played a sinister old man who deals in antiques and has taken residence in a haunted mansion on a hill. Though not as frightening as the original made-for-television version, this new rendition nonetheless delivered plenty of chills. Sutherland continued the horror trend with yet another version of “Frankenstein” (Hallmark, 2004), though this particular version remained faithful to Mary Shelley’s original novel.

Taking a different turn on the small screen, he appeared as a regular in his first scripted series, “Commander In Chief” (ABC, 2005-06), a political drama about a female vice president (Geena Davis) who assumes the presidency after the death of her predecessor. Sutherland played the right-wing Speaker of the House and next in line for the job, who tries to convince the vice president to step aside so he can grab hold the reigns of power. He then earned his second Emmy award nomination in a supporting role in the miniseries, “Human Trafficking” (Lifetime, 2005), starring Robert Carlyle and Mira Sorvino, before playing the Bennett family patriarch in the lively adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” (2005). While Sutherland maintained a steady supporting presence on the big screen, his fate on “Commander in Chief” suddenly became uncertain in early 2006. Though critically acclaimed, the show steadily lost its audience over the course of its first and only season because of faulty scheduling and a revolving door of showrunners who continually changed the series’ tone and direction.

By May 2006, when ABC pulled the series from the lineup for the all-important sweeps, Sutherland expressed deep disappointment with the show’s inevitable cancellation and the diminishing of his character into a cartoonish villain through clever editing. Despite a nomination for Best Supporting Actor at the 2006 Golden Globe Awards, Sutherland was not seen playing Speaker of the House the next fall. Meanwhile, Sutherland had a small and rather clandestine role as a mysterious colonel who keeps a watchful eye on an international arms dealer (Nicolas Cage) on the verge of a breakdown in the under-appreciated “Lord of War” (2005). After appearing as part of the ensemble cast in “American Gun” (2005), a series of interwoven stories commenting on the proliferation of guns in America and their impact on society, Sutherland played the patriarch of an early-19th century family terrorized by an evil spirit in “An American Haunting” (2006).

After a co-starring role in “Reign Over Me” (2007), a compelling drama about two former college roommates (Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler) coping with life after 9/11, Sutherland played a billionaire with a mega-yacht who is convinced by a good-natured surf bum (Matthew McConaughey) to join him on a treasure hunt for several chests of gold in “Fool’s Gold” (2008). Back on television, he was delightful as the patriarch of a wealthy, but dysfunctional Manhattan family whose secrets are protected by an idealistic young lawyer (Peter Krause) in “Dirty Sexy Money” (ABC, 2007-09). Sutherland earned plenty of critical kudos and a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television. Sutherland went from ultra-modern New York to 12th century England when he portrayed the doomed Bartholomew, Earl of Shiring, in the miniseries adaptation of Ken Follett’s epic novel “The Pillars of the Earth” (Starz, 2010). The following year, he lent big screen support to “The Mechanic” (2011), a remake of the Charles Bronson thriller starring Jason Statham, and the Roman centurion adventure tale “The Eagle” (2011), starring Channing Tatum. Sutherland once again played the villain, this time portraying President Coriolanus Snow in “The Hunger Games” (2012), the autocratic leader of a futuristic America where adolescents are forced into a life-or-death competition as entertainment for the masses.

This TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

guardian obituary

Donald Sutherland, who has died aged 88, brought his disturbing and unconventional presence to bear in scores of films after his breakthrough role of Hawkeye Pierce, the army surgeon in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970), one of the key American films of its period. It marked Sutherland out as an iconoclastic figure of the 60s generation, but he matured into an actor who made a speciality of portraying taciturn, self-doubting characters. This was best illustrated in his portrayal of the tormented parent of a drowned girl, seeking solace in a wintry Venice, in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), and of the weak, nervous, concerned father of a guilt-ridden teenage boy (Timothy Hutton) in Robert Redford’s Ordinary People (1980).

Although Sutherland appeared in the statutory number of stinkers that are many a film actor’s lot, he was always watchable. His career resembled a man walking a tightrope between undemanding parts in potboilers and those in which he was able to take risks, such as the title role in Federico Fellini’s Casanova (1976)

Curiously, it was Sutherland’s ears that first got him noticed, in Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967). During the shoot, according to Sutherland, “Clint Walker sticks up his hand and says, ‘Mr Aldrich, as a representative of the Native American people, I don’t think it’s appropriate to do this stupid scene where I have to pretend to be a general.’ Aldrich turns and points to me and says, ‘You with the big ears. You do it’ … It changed my life.” In other words, it led to M*A*S*H and stardom.

Sutherland and his M*A*S*H co-star Elliott Gould were at odds with Altman because they did not think the director knew what he was doing due to his unorthodox methods. In the early days, Sutherland was known to have confrontations with his directors. “What I was trying to do all the time was to impose my thinking,” he remarked some years later. “Now I contribute. I offer. I don’t put my foot down.”

Sutherland, who was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, was a sickly child who battled rheumatic fever, hepatitis and polio. He spent most of his teenage years in Nova Scotia where his father, Frederick, ran a local gas, electricity and bus company; his mother, Dorothy (nee McNichol), was a maths teacher. He attended Bridgewater high school, then graduated from Victoria College, part of the University of Toronto, with a double major in engineering and drama. As a result of a highly praised performance in a college production of James Thurber’s and Elliott Nugent’s The Male Animal, he dropped the idea of becoming an engineer and decided to pursue acting

With this in mind, he left Canada for the UK in 1957 to study at Lamda (the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art), where he was considered too tall and ungainly to get anywhere. However, he gained a year’s work as a stage actor with the Perth repertory company, and appeared in TV series such as The Saint and The Avengers. He was Fortinbras in a 1964 BBC production of Hamlet, shot at Elsinore castle and starring Christopher Plummer. He also appeared at the Criterion theatre in the West End in The Gimmick in 1962.

In 1959 he married Lois Hardwick; they divorced in 1966. Then he married the film producer Shirley Douglas, with whom he had twins, Kiefer and Rachel; they divorced in 1971. Kiefer, who grew up to become a celebrated actor, was named after the producer-writer Warren Kiefer, who put Sutherland in an Italian-made Gothic horror film, The Castle of the Living Dead (1964). Christopher Lee played a necrophile count, while Sutherland doubled as a dim-witted police sergeant and, in drag and heavy makeup, as a witch.

In an earlier era, the gawky Sutherland might not have achieved the stardom that followed the anarchic M*A*S*H, but Hollywood at the time was open for stars with unconventional looks, and Sutherland was much in demand for eccentric roles throughout the 70s.

He was impressive as a moviemaker with “director’s block” in Paul Mazursky’s messy but interesting Alex in Wonderland (1970), which contains a prescient dream sequence in which his titular character meets Fellini. In the same year, Sutherland played a Catholic priest and the object of Geneviève Bujold’s erotic gaze in Act of the Heart; he was the appropriately named Sergeant Oddball, an anachronistic hippy tank commander, in the second world war action-comedy Kelly’s Heroes; and he and Gene Wilderwere two pairs of twins in 18th-century France in the broad comedy Start the Revolution Without Me.

Sutherland was at his most laconic, sometimes verging on the soporific, in the title role of Alan J Pakula’s Klute (1971), as a voyeuristic ex-policeman investigating the disappearance of a friend and getting deeply involved with a prostitute, played by Jane Fonda.

Sutherland and Fonda were teamed up again as a couple of misfits in the caper comedy Steelyard Blues (1973). It initially had a limited distribution due mainly to their participation together in the anti-Vietnam war troop show FTA (Fuck the Army), which Sutherland co-directed, co-scripted and co-produced.

Sutherland always made his political views known, although they surfaced only occasionally in his films. In among the many mainstream comedies and thrillers was Roeg’s supernatural drama Don’t Look Now, in which Sutherland and Julie Christie are superb as a couple grieving their dead daughter. Despite the dark subject matter, the film was notable for containing “one of the sexiest love scenes in film history”, according to Scott Tobias in the Guardian, the frank depiction of their love-making coming “like a desert flower poking through concrete”. The actor so admired Roeg that he named another son after him, one of his three sons with the French-Canadian actor Francine Racette, whom he married in 1972

John Schlesinger’s rambling version of The Day of the Locust (1975) saw Sutherland as a sexually repressed character – called Homer Simpson – who tramples a woman to death in an act of uncontrolled rage. Perhaps Bernardo Bertolucci had that in mind when he cast Sutherland in 1900 (Novecento, 1976), in which he is a broadly caricatured fascist thug who shows his sadism by smashing a cat’s head against a post and bashing a young boy’s brains out. “And I turned down Deliverance and Straw Dogs because of the violence!” Sutherland recalled.

Donald Sutherland was an irreplaceable aristocrat of cinema

Peter Bradshaw

In Fellini’s Casanova, the second of his two bizarre Italian excursions in 1976, Sutherland calculates seduction under his heavily made-up features. The performance, as stylised as it is, still reveals the suffering soul within the sex machine.

In 1978 he appeared in Claude Chabrol’s Blood Relatives, a made-in-Canada murder mystery with Sutherland playing a Montreal cop investigating the murder of a young woman. More commercial was The Eagle Has Landed (1976), with Sutherland, attempting an Irish accent, as an IRA member supporting the Germans during the second world war, and as a chilling Nazi in Eye of the Needle (1981). Meanwhile, he was the hero of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), who resists the insidious alien menace until the film’s devastating final shot.

In 1981 Sutherland returned to the stage, as Humbert Humbert in a highly anticipated version of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, adapted by Edward Albee. It turned out to be a huge flop, running only 12 performances on Broadway. Both Sutherland and Albee played the blame game. “The second act is flawed,” Sutherland said. “Albee was supposed to have rethought it, but he never did.” Albee told reporters that he had scuttled some of his best scenes because they were “too difficult” for Sutherland because “he hasn’t been on stage for 17 years”.

Continuing his film career, Sutherland played a complex and sadistic British officer in Hugh Hudson’s Revolution (1985), and in A Dry White Season (1989) he took the role of an Afrikaner schoolteacher beginning to understand the brutal realities of apartheid. In Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), he held the screen with an extended monologue as he spilled the conspiracy beans to Kevin Costner’s district attorney hero Jim Garrison.

After having made contact with young audiences in the 70s with offbeat appearances in gross-out pictures The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977) and National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), the latter as a pot-smoking professor, he was cast as an unconvincing bearded stranger in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992).

On a more adult level were Six Degrees of Separation (1993), in which he played an unfulfilled art dealer; A Time to Kill (1996), as an alcoholic lawyer (alongside Kiefer); Without Limits (1998), as an enthusiastic athletics coach; and Space Cowboys (2000), as an elderly pilot. By this time, he was gradually moving into grey-haired character roles, one of the best being his amiable Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (2005).

The Jane Austen novel was also featured in the television series Great Books (1993-2000), to which Sutherland lent his soothing voice as narrator. Other series in which he shone as quasi baddies were Commander in Chief (2005) – as the sexist Republican speaker of the house opposed to the new president (Geena Davis) – and Dirty Sexy Money (2007-09), in which he played a powerful patriarch of a wealthy family

Sutherland continued to be active well into his 80s, his long grey hair and beard signifying sagacity, whether as a contract killer in The Mechanic, a Roman hero in The Eagle, a nutty retired poetry professor in Man on the Train (all 2011), or a quirky bounty hunter in the western Dawn Rider (2012), bringing more depth to the characters than they deserved. As President Coriolanus Snow, the autocratic ruler of the dystopian country of Panem in The Hunger Games (2012), Sutherland was discovered by a new generation; he went on to reprise the role in three further films in that franchise, beginning with The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013).

He played artists in two art-world thrillers by Italian directors: in Giuseppe Tornatore’s Deception, AKA The Best Offer (2013), he was a would-be painter helping to execute multimillion-dollar scams, while in Giuseppe Capotondi’s The Burnt Orange Heresy (2019) he was on the other side of the heist as a reclusive genius targeted by a wealthy and unscrupulous dealer (Mick Jagger).

Aside from James Gray’s science-fiction drama Ad Astra (also 2019), in which he co-starred with Brad Pitt, Sutherland’s best late work was all for television. In Danny Boyle’s mini-series Trust (2018), which covered the same real-life events as Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, he played J Paul Getty, the oil tycoon whose grandson is kidnapped; while in The Undoing (2020), he was the father of a psychologist (Nicole Kidman), reluctantly putting up bail when her husband (Hugh Grant) is arrested for murder.

For the latter role Sutherland was in the running for a Golden Globe, having received an honorary Oscar in 2017, eight years after Leigh Singer in this newspaper named him as one of the 10 best actors never to have been nominated. “Is it because he’s Canadian?” asked the writer. No matter: Sutherland graced a Canada Post commemorative stamp in 2023.

He is survived by Francine and his children, Kiefer, Rachel, Rossif, Angus and Roeg, and by four grandchildren.

Donald McNichol Sutherland, actor; born 17 July 1935; died 20 June 2024

Ellen Corby is best known for her role as the grandmother in the long running television show “The Waltons”. She has also had a lenghty career as a character actress. She was born in 1911 in Racine, Wisconsin. Her movie debut came in “Rafter Romance” in 1933. Among her many supporting parts are films such as “The Spiral Staircase” in 1945, “Till the End of Time”, “It’s A Wonderful Life”, “I Remember Mama”, “Little Women” and “Madame Bovary” in 1949. Ellen Corby was in “The Waltons” from 1971 until 1980 returning to the show after suffering a stroke. She also starred in some Walton movies, the last been “A Walton Easter” in 1997. Ellen Corby died in 1999 at the age of 87.

Tom Vallance’s obituary of Ellen Corby in “The Independent”:

THE DIMINUTIVE character actress Ellen Corby had contributed distinctive supporting performances to over 60 films before she became a household name with her portrayal of the tart-tongued grandmother in the television series The Waltons, for which she won three Emmy Awards. She was a regular on that series for eight years until a stroke curtailed her appearances. Earlier she had been an Academy Award nominee for her role of a lovelorn spinster in I Remember Mama (1947).

Of Scandinavian origin, she was born Ellen Hansen in Racine, Wisconsin in 1913 and started to work in the film industry as a continuity girl in 1934. After 12 years she switched to acting and made her screen debut in Henry Hathaway’s film noir The Dark Corner (1946), with a telling bit part as a cleaning woman who finds a dead body.

It was the first of many roles for the dark-haired, thin-lipped actress as servants, spinsters or gossipy neighbours in films including Cornered (1946), It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), The Spiral Staircase (1946) and Forever Amber (1947). Her finest screen role was in I Remember Mama (1947), George Stevens’s beguiling transcription of Kathryn Forbes’ novelised reminiscences of growing up as a part of a Norwegian family in San Francisco.

Corby was immensely touching as homely middle-aged Aunt Katrin who falls in love with the local undertaker (Edgar Bergen) and is fearful of her family’s scorn (“If they laugh at me I yump in the river”). Nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress, she had stiff competition (Barbara Bel Geddes in the same film, Jean Simmons in Hamlet, Agnes Moorehead in Johnny Belinda, and Claire Trevor, who won the award for her role in Key Largo).

Subsequent roles included that of a midwife delivering Emma Bovary’s child in Vincente Minnelli’s Madame Bovary and a prominent role in John Cromwell’s stark depiction of life in a women’s prison, Caged (1950). Corby provided welcome light relief in the film as the scatterbrained killer of her abusive husband (“Who is this Pearl Harbor?”).

In Allan Dwan’s torrid thriller Slightly Scarlet (1957) she was maidservant to red-headed sisters Rhonda Fleming and Arlene Dahl, and in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) she was part of the film’s most contentious sequence, as the boarding-house receptionist who denies to the hero James Stewart that her tenant (Kim Novak) has been in the house that day though Stewart has seen her enter the building and appear at the window (the sequence is never explained).

Corby appeared frequently as a guest star on television series, and was in so many western shows (including Wagon Train, The Virginian and Rifleman) that she was awarded the Golden Boot Award by the Motion Picture and Television Fund in 1989. She had her first regular role in a television series as Martha the family maid in Please Don’t Eat The Daisies, based on Jean Kerr’s book about an unusual suburban family.

The show ran for two years (1965-67), but it was The Waltons, first transmitted in 1972, which was to prove the greatest success of Corby’s career. Based on Earl Hamner Jr’s reminiscences of his childhood during the Depression years in the South, and set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of rural Jefferson County, Virginia, it was considered the most wholesome of television programmes with moralistic homilies a-plenty. To the surprise of many, it proved an enormous hit and vanquished its main competition, The Flip Wilson Show, then one of the most popular on television.

The warm family drama, seen through the eyes of the eldest son John Boy, who wanted to be a novelist, was reputedly not a big hit in the large cities, but was loved by middle and rural America as well as in many other countries, including Britain. For her role as acerbic Esther (Grandma) Walton, Corby won the Emmy Award as Best Supporting Actress in a Drama three times (in 1973, 1975 and 1976).

When she suffered a stroke in 1977 (the season in which the Waltons moved out of the Depression and into the Second World War), her character was written out of the series with an illness, and Corby was seen only in the season’s final episode, when Grandma came home to Walton’s Mountain though partly incapacitated (it was one of the most the show’s most sentimentally affecting segments). It was Ellen Corby’s last appearance on the series, which finished in 1981, but she returned to play Grandma again in three television movies based on the show, A Day of Thanks on Walton’s Mountain (1982), A Wedding on Walton’s Mountain (1983) and A Walton’s Easter (1997).

Ellen Hansen (Ellen Corby), actress: born Racine, Wisconsin 3 June 1913; died Los Angeles 14 April 1999.

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

I Remember Mama, lobbycard, from left, Philip Dorn, Ellen Corby, Irene Dunne, 1948. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Constance Towers. IMDB

This elegant singer/actress initially had designs on becoming an opera singer. Born in Montana on May 20, 1933, and christened Constance Mary Towers, she appeared on radio as a child singer. Her family moved to New York where she subsequently studied at the Julliard School of Music and the American Academy of the Dramatic Arts (AADA). A chance casting in a summer production of “Carousel” led her away from her operatic aspirations and into the musical theater arena. Before she settled into this, however, she gained early exposure on the chic nightclub circuit and fostered an attempt at stardom via films. She co-starred with Frankie Laine playing a school teacher in the modest movie musicalBring Your Smile Along (1955), and appeared in exceptionally strong ingénue roles in the movie dramas The Horse Soldiers (1959) starring John Wayne and Sergeant Rutledge(1960) opposite Jeffrey Hunter. Director Samuel Fuller cast her against type in some of his highly offbeat dramas in the early 1960s. She played a stripper girlfriend in Shock Corridor (1963) and in The Naked Kiss (1964) gave a no-holds-barred performance as a former prostitute trying to clean up her act. Films, however, were few and far between.

By this time she was starting to settle in as a pristine musical leading lady. After a 1960 performance as missionary Sarah in “Guys and Dolls,” Constance made her Broadway debut in the title role of “Anya” (1965), in which she played the title role of the Russian princess Anastasia. Heralded performances in “Carousel” (1966) and “The Sound of Music” (1967), in which she won the Outer Critic’s Circle Award as Maria, not to mention a Broadway revival of “The King and I” opposite Yul Brynner truly put her on the musical map.

The Horse Soldiers, poster, l-r: John Wayne, Constance Towers, William Holden on poster art, 1959. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Her run with Brynner lasted nearly 800 performances. She had earlier played the school teacher Anna off-Broadway opposite Michael Kermoyan in 1972. Other sterling stage appearances included “Kiss Me Kate,” “42nd Street,” “Oklahoma!,” “Camelot” and “Mame.” She also starred in the musical “Ari,” an adaptation of the Leon Uris novel “Exodus.”

TV proved a sturdy medium as well. In her early days, she made singing appearances onEd Sullivan‘s The Ed Sullivan Show (1948) and, in dramatic roles, was a frequent glamorous suspect on Perry Mason (1957). As she matured, her sharp, glacial, strikingly handsome features also worked very well for her in unsympathetic aristocratic roles on daytime. Winning regular spots on Love Is a Many Splendored Thing (1967), The Young and the Restless (1973) and Sunset Beach (1997), she did her most consistent work onCapitol (1982), in which she played Clarissa McCandless for five seasons. She is currently courting favor with audiences and stealing scenes on a regular basis on General Hospital(1963), in which she plays, at age 72, the inherently wicked Helena Cassadine, a role originated by the legendary Elizabeth Taylor. Recent films have included The Next Karate Kid (1994), The Relic (1997) and A Perfect Murder (1998) starring Michael Douglas andGwyneth Paltrow, in which she played Paltrow’s mother. Constance also enjoyed a resurgence on prime-time TV with a sprinkling of guest parts on L.A. Law (1986),Designing Women (1986), The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine(1993), “Caroline in the City,” Frasier (1993), Baywatch (1989), and Providence (1999). She received an Emmy nomination for her role in the single episode drama special on CBS Daytime 90 (1974) entitled “Once in Her Life.”

Constance has been married since 1974 to one-time actor and former Mexican ambassador John Gavin. It was the second marriage for both. The handsome couple have two children: Cristina and Maria Gavin. Constance also has two children, Michael and Maureen McGrath, from her prior marriage to Panamanian businessman Eugene McGrath. As a result of her current husband’s civic work, she became actively involved in a multitude of charities. “Project Connie” not only offered aid to those in need of medical and rehabilitation assistance after the Mexican earthquake of 1985, it has served as an adoption placement agency to hundreds of children from Mexico to El Salvador. She has also involved herself with the Children’s Bureau of California, the National Health Foundation, and the Red Cross and the Blue Ribbon of Los Angeles.

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

TCM overview:

Elizabeth Ashley. IMDB.

Elizabeth Ashley was born in 1939 in Florida but raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She won critical acclaim on Broadway for “Take Her, She’s Mine” and “Barefoot in the Park” but did not appear in the roles in the movies. The roles were played by Sandra Dee and Jane Fonda. In 1964 she made her film debut in a major role in “The Carpetbaggers” with George Peppard, Carroll Baker and Alan Ladd. She had leading roles in “The Third Day”, “Ship of Fools” and “Coma”.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

ove her or not, award-winning actress Elizabeth Ashley can always be counted on to give her all. Grand in style, exotic in looks, divinely outgoing in personality and an engaging interpreter of Tennessee Williams‘ florid Southern-belles on stage, she was born Elizabeth Ann Cole on August 30, 1939, in Ocala, Florida. The daughter of Arthur Kingman and Lucille (Ayer) Cole, the family moved to Louisiana where Elizabeth graduated from Louisiana State University Laboratory School (University High) in Baton Rouge in 1957.

The liberal-minded Elizabeth immediately embarked upon an acting career following her education and relocated to New York. Briefly using her real name, her big, breakthrough year occurred in 1959 when she made her off-Broadway debut with “Dirty Hands”, played “Esmeralda” in the Neighborhood Playhouse production of “Camino Real” and took on Broadway with Dore Schary‘s “The Highest Tree”. Now using the marquee name of Elizabeth Ashley, the 1960s proved to be even better, taking her to trophy-winning heights. After understudying the lead roles in Broadway’s “Roman Candle” and “Mary, Mary”, she won the role of “Mollie” in the delightful comedy “Take Her, She’s Mine” and won both the “supporting actress” Tony and Theatre World Awards for it. Neil Simon was quite taken by the new star and created especially for her the role of “Corie Bratter” in 1963’s “Barefoot in the Park” opposite ‘Robert Redford’. She received another Tony nomination, this time for “Best Actress”. In addition to these theatrical pinnacles, Elizabeth also found happiness in her private life when she met and married (in 1962) actor James Farentino, who was also on his way up. This happiness, however, was short-lived…the marriage lasted only three years. The attention she earned from Broadway led directly to film offers and she made a highly emotive debut in Harold Robbins glossy soaper The Carpetbaggers (1964), headlining handsome George Peppard. The critics trashed the movie but Elizabeth sailed ahead…temporarily.

EVENING SHADE, Elizabeth Ashley, Hal Holbrook, Burt Reynolds, Marilu Henner, Charles Durning Ossie Davis, 1990-94, (c)CBS Television

Following intense roles in the superb all-star film epic Ship of Fools (1965) and the psychological crime drama The Third Day (1965), which again starred Peppard, the still-married Elizabeth divorced her husband and wed Peppard in 1966, taking a hiatus to focus on domestic life. The couple went on to have son Christian Peppard (born 1968), who would later become a writer.

The Peppard-Ashley marriage was a volatile one, however, and the twosome ultimately divorced in 1972. Wasting no time, Elizabeth returned to the stage and also went out for TV roles. Abandoning a film career that had just gotten out of the starting gate proved detrimental and she never did recapture the momentum she once had. Broadway, however, was a different story. The dusky-toned actress pulled out all the stops as “Maggie the Cat” in Tennessee Williamss “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1974) co-starring Keir Dullea and as “Sabina” in Thornton Wilder‘s “The Skin of Our Teeth” the following year, and she was back on top. Other heralded work on the live stage would include “Caesar and Cleopatra” opposite Rex Harrison, “Vanities” and, notably, “Agnes of God”, for which she received the Albert Einstein Award for “excellence in the performing arts”.

Following “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” for which she won a third Tony nomination, Elizabeth struck up a close friendship with author Williams. Over time, she would play and come to define three of his (and the theater’s) finest female roles: “Mrs. Venable” in “Suddenly, Last Summer” (1995), “Alexandra Del Lago” in “Sweet Bird of Youth (1998) and “Amanda Wingfield” in “The Glass Menagerie (2001). In addition, she also appeared in Williams’ “Eight by Tenn” (a series of his one-act plays), “Out Cry”, “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore” and “The Red Devil Battery Sign”. In 2005, 31 years after playing “Maggie”, she was again a success in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, this time as “Big Mama”.

Elizabeth went on to sink her teeth into a number of other famous plays as well, all peppered with her inimitable trademark flourish: “Martha” in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”, “Isadora Duncan” in “When She Danced”, Maria Callas in “Master Class” and the scheming “Regina” in “The Little Foxes”, to name a few. On 90s TV, she found daytime soaps to her liking with eye-catching parts on Another World (1964) and All My Children(1970). She also appeared in the ensemble cast of Burt Reynolds‘ series Evening Shade(1990). Occasional serious film supports in Rancho Deluxe (1975) and Coma (1978) were often intertwined with campier, over-the-top ones such as her psychotic lesbian inWindows (1980).

Overcoming a series of tragic, personal setbacks — a third divorce, a boating accident, a NY apartment fire and a rape incident — the still-lovely Elizabeth continues to demonstrate her mettle and maintain a busy acting schedule on stage (“Enchanted April”, “Ann & Debbie”), film (Happiness (1998), The Cake Eaters (2007)) and TV. Elsewhere, her memoir “Actress: Postcards from the Road” (1978) became a best seller. She was also a founding member of the Board of Directors of the American Film Institute while serving on the first National Council of the Arts during the administrations of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and has also served on the President’s Committee for the Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Awards.

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

TCM overview:

A gifted, spirited Broadway lead of the early 1960s (“Take Her She’s Mine” 1961, “Barefoot in the Park” 1963), Elizabeth Ashley has also proven popular on talk shows where she has become a quick-talking raconteur with the edge of someone fraught, wrought and distraught.

Ashley spent more than two decades as a Broadway star before becoming known to TV audiences playing the eccentric Aunt Frieda on “Evening Shade” (CBS, 1990-94). While still a teen-ager when she made her Broadway debut in 1959 in “The Highest Tree”, she was a mere 22 when she won a Tony for “Take Her, She’s Mine”. A nervous breakdown, about which she later wrote in her book, “Postcards From the Road” (1978), almost derailed her career, but she bounced back, starring on Broadway as the idealistic young bride to Robert Redford’s slightly stuffy groom in Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park” and has since gone on to shine as Maggie in the 1974 revival of Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, the chain-smoking psychiatrist in “Agnes of God” and in revivals of “The Skin of Our Teeth” and “Caesar and Cleopatra”. In 1995, she returned once again to Broadway (and Williams) portraying Violet Venable in “Suddenly Last Summer”.

Ashley made her screen debut in “The Carpetbaggers” (1964), as the second of the women George Peppard loves and leaves on his way up the ladder. (They subsequently married after meeting on the film). In “Ship of Fools” (1965), she was a young married woman taking guidance from Vivien Leigh. Subsequent roles have been sporadic and decidedly supporting, including “The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday” (1976), “Paternity” (1981), and even “Dragnet” (1987).

Ashley first appeared on TV in a 1960 episode of “The Dupont Show of the Month” and appeared in numerous episodics during the decade, as well as doing celebrity player turns on such game shows as “Password”. She even guest hosted NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” in 1982. Ashley made her TV-movie debut “Harpy” (CBS, 1971) and has occasionally participated in the genre. She also appeared on the NBC soap opera “Another World” for a short period in 1990, but her most extensive TV work was the four seasons she was a member of the ensemble of “Evening Shade”, alongside her “Paternity” co-star Burt Reynolds. In 1996, she was cast as the eccentric romantic novelist with whom Brooke Shield must contend on the NBC sitcom pilot “Suddenly Susan”. It was later announced, however, that the show would be completely overhauled and taken in a new direction, and Ashley’s character was dropped.

RThe above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Elizabeth Hartman.

Elizabeth Hartman was born in 1943 in Youngstown, Ohio. She made a splendid movie debut in “A Patch of Blue” with Sidney Poitier and Shelley Winters. She went on make “The Group” with a bevy of marvellous actresses including Jessica Walter, Candice Bergen, Joan Hackett and Shirley Knight. In 1971 she gave a terrific performance in Don Siegel’s superb “The Beguiled” with Clint Eastwood and Geraldine Page. Elizabeth Hartman sadly passed away in 1987 in Pittsburgh.

Article on Elizabeth Hartman by Robert Temple can be accessed here.

Article in the “Los Angeles Times” by SANDRA HANSEN KONTE

PITTSBURGH — I can’t wait until I’m 45 and get all those great parts. –Elizabeth Hartman, in a 1971 interview.

The first reports of 43-year-old Elizabeth Hartman’s June 10 suicide here were sketchy. Homicide detectives weren’t sure just who the slight woman was who had thrown herself from the fifth-story window of her efficiency apartment. A handful of neighbors volunteered what they knew. She was an unemployed actress, they thought, who had starred long ago in some movie with Sidney Poitier.

She would have hated that description. Even though she was subsisting on disability insurance, Social Security benefits and family handouts, even though her days were spent with various psychiatrists or wandering through the Carnegie Art Museum or merely sitting, listening to records, when somebody asked Hartman what she did, she replied, “I’m a film actress.”

Some of her therapists thought that this was another of her fantasies. But she was.

In 1965, at age 21, she was nominated for a best-actress Academy Award in her movie debut as a blind girl in “A Patch of Blue” (but lost to Julie Christie in “Darling”). She won a Golden Globe Award for most promising female newcomer. She was voted one of 1966’s Stars of Tomorrow by the American Film Exhibitors. Columnist Hedda Hopper predicted glowingly that “those who watch her at work tell me she can’t miss.”

Biff Hartman (her nickname originated from her sister’s childhood inability to pronounce \o7 Elizabeth\f7 ) of Youngstown, Ohio, had gone West and taken on the city that had been the object of so many of her childhood dreams.

And, in her own words, the city had won.

“All actresses are probably very paranoiac,” she once said in an interview with the New York Times, “and never accept the fact they’re good. You keep thinking: ‘Nobody wants me, I can’t get a job.’ That initial success beat me down. It spiraled me to a position where I didn’t belong. I was not ready for that.”

After she died, once co-star Poitier issued the following statement: “It saddens me to think she’s no longer with us. She was a wonderful actress and a truly gentle person. We have lost a distinguished artist.”

(Another “Patch of Blue” co-star, Shelley Winters, declined comment. Her spokesperson at International Creative Management offered, “She’s busy. She was asked to appear in a documentary about Marilyn Monroe and she turned that down, too.”)

(Calls by Calendar to the Warners Bros. representative for Clint Eastwood, who starred with Hartman in “The Beguilded,” were not returned.)

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette magazine editor George Anderson had a harder edge: “I think hers was a tragic American career that peaks at the beginning and has no follow-up. It’s a common Hollywood story.”

The headline in another Pittsburgh paper summed it up. “Failing Career/Mental Problems Blamed in Actress Suicide Here.”

Those closest to Hartman get angry when it is suggested that it was just her faltering movie career that propelled her out that window. “There’s so much more to it,” says her sister, Janet Shoop. “That’s what’s so hard for people to understand about mental illness. It’s not always outward. Hartman desperately wanted to resume her career. But, in the end, it was just too difficult for her to do so.”

Zohra Lampert was born in 1937 in New York City. She acted on the Boradway stage before making her film debut in a small role in 1959 in “Odds Against Tomorrow” which starred Harry Belafonte and Gloria Grahame. She had a small but telling role in Elia Kazan’s “Splendour in the Grass” with Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood. In 1971 she had the lead role in the cult thriller “Let’s Scare Jessica to Death”.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Solemn, Middle Eastern-looking Zohra Lampert had a touching, understated quality to her talent that should have gone further in the film business than it did. Somehow she never got the bigger breaks necessary for top-flight stardom. Still and all, this comely actress with soft, vulnerable features managed to contribute a number of genuinely affecting performances, particularly on TV. Born in New York City, the daughter of Russian-born hardware store owners, Lampert attended Manhattan’s High School of Music and Art and later graduated from the University of Chicago. After a stint with the Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre, she made an impressive mark on Broadway with Tony-nominated performances in “Look We’ve Come Through” in 1961 and “Mother Courage and Her Children” in 1963. Films also came her way in the early ’60s and she scored well for her humble, deeply stirring performance as Ernest Borgnine‘s Italian wife in the minor crime story Pay or Die (1960), and stole a touching scene from Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty as Beatty’s careworn spouse in Splendor in the Grass (1961). Those two performances alone should have lifted her to the heights of a star, but strangely they didn’t. Lampert was deemed a chameleon-like actress who didn’t quite fit into the Hollywood structure as a personality type. Instead she moved into a few noticeable supporting film roles along with an occasional low-budget lead, her best being the cult chiller Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971). By the ’70s, she was performing primarily on the small screen in character roles and was earning Emmy-winning notice for her endeavors. In later years, she found some really quirky ladies to inhabit, but has since been seen less and less.

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

Barbara Hale obituary in “The Guardian” in 2017.

In the hugely successful US television series Perry Mason (1957-66), Barbara Hale, who has died aged 94, played Della Street, Mason’s secretary. She reprised the role in 29 TV movies between 1985 and 1995. Della’s indefatigable calm and poise established her as a partner to the LA lawyer Mason (Raymond Burr) and his investigator, Paul Drake (William Hopper). Although Hale’s all-American girl-next-door looks had seen her cast typically as supportive wives in her film career, in Perry Mason she was a single career woman, who out-bantered Drake’s flirtatious advances in almost every episode. “When we started it was the beginning of women not working at home,” she said. “I liked it that she was not married.”

The series was a triumph of casting. William Talman, as the always-losing district attorney Hamilton Burger, and Ray Collins, as the police detective Arthur Tragg, were great character actors. Mason’s creator, Erle Stanley Gardner, reportedly leaped from his chair during test screenings for Burr, a classic film noir heavy, shouting “that’s Perry Mason”. Although publicists tried to promote the idea of a romance between Burr and Hale, in reality he lived with a man, though he and Hale became devoted friends, with a common love of horticulture. Burr bred orchids, and named one after his co-star.

Hale’s role in Perry Mason was not big in terms of screen time – she joked that she basically had six scenes and costume changes to denote the changing of days – but its impact was strong enough for her to win an Emmy in 1959 as best supporting actress.

Her path to Hollywood was a highly publicised Cinderella story. Daughter of Willa (nee Calvin) and Luther Hale, she was born in DeKalb, Illinois, and grew up in nearby Rockford, where her father was a landscape gardener. She was 19 and studying at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art when she was spotted by a modelling agent. The agent sent photos to the RKO movie studio, which summoned Hale to Los Angeles. She was sitting in a casting director’s office when a phone call came asking for a starlet to replace one who had fallen ill. Hale was sent to the set of Gildersleeve’s Bad Day (1943) and made her film debut. Although studio publicity trumpeted her instant stardom, in reality she had but a single line, and went unmentioned in the credits.

But she landed a contract at RKO, and got her first screen credit in the Frank Sinatra movie Higher and Higher (1943). Her first starring role came opposite Robert Young in a gambling comedy, Lady Luck (1946). At RKO, she met the actor Bill Williams (born Wilhelm Katt), and after making West of the Pecos (1945) together, in which Hale starred with Robert Mitchum, they married. Williams would go on to star on television as Kit Carson in a successful western series. Hale, a more talented actor, was trapped in lesser studio parts until she too found success on the smaller screen.

Her best RKO parts came working with child actors, Dean Stockwell in Joseph Losey’s The Boy With Green Hair (1948) and Bobby Driscoll in Ted Tetzlaff’s noirish The Window (1949), her penultimate RKO release. She moved to Columbia, where she generally played adoring wives and steadfast girlfriends. Her light touch saw her cast with James Stewart and James Cagney, and opposite Robert Cummings in the early Frank Tashlin comedy The First Time (1952).

She had the title role in Lorna Doone (1951) but became a feature in low-budget but interesting Columbia westerns, including André de Toth’s remake of Sahara, Last of the Comanches (1953) and Joseph H Lewis’s 7th Cavalry (1956), her last Columbia picture. She then worked in episodic television such as Playhouse 90, and made The Oklahoman (1957) with Joel McCrea, and an interesting picture about a manufactured western movie star, Slim Carter (1957), alongside both her husband and Hopper. Ironically, in her last feature film before Perry Mason, Desert Hell, she played the unfaithful wife of a Foreign Legion commander.

When CBS cancelled Perry Mason, Hale reverted to episodic television, including a spot on Burr’s successful police series Ironside and regular roles in Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. She had a telling part in the original “disaster movie”, Airport (1970), and in 1975 she played the lead opposite Steve Brodie in the unforgettable disaster of a film The Giant Spider Invasion.

When, in 1985, NBC produced a TV movie, Perry Mason Returns, Hale was back as Della, and her son, William Katt, was cast as Paul Drake Jr, replacing Hopper, who had died in 1970. It was so successful that NBC produced 25 more movies before Burr’s death in 1993, and three more starring Hal Holbrook, cast not as Mason but as Wild Bill McKenzie. The last of the three, in 1995, was Hale’s final acting appearance.

Bill Williams died in 1992. Hale is survived by her son, and two daughters, Judy and Juanita.

• Barbara Hale, actor, born 18 April 1922; died 26 January 2017

Original Cinema 1-Sheet Poster – Movie Film Posters

Richard Davalos obituary in “The Herald” in 2016

RICHARD Davalos, who has died aged 85, was one of two unknown young actors chosen by director Elia Kazan to play the brothers Cal and Aron Trask in his 1955 film of John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden, a retelling of the biblical story of Cain and Abel in present-day California.

For Davalos the role of the dutiful son Aron marked the start of a film career that lasted more than 50 years and included appearances in Cool Hand Luke (1967), with Paul Newman, and Kelly’s Heroes (1970), with Clint Eastwood, although he never found another role to match it and gradually slipped into obscurity.

Although Dean told the press that he was in love with the actress Pier Angeli, a scene which was later cut from the film, involving a tussle between the two brothers, is said to have been removed because it was too homoerotic.

Meanwhile his co-star made only two more feature films and was dead in a car crash within a year of East of Eden coming out… But it was the death of an actor and the birth of a legend, for it was Davalos’s co-star James Dean who was destined to become the Hollywood icon.

The two young men were the talk of the town even before East of Eden opened. The word was out – this was a new kind of star, with the legendary gossip columnist Hedda Hopper reporting seeing them lounging around in a restaurant, playing with the cutlery and sticking their feet on the seats.

She reckoned they were like “a couple of Roman soldiers resting up from the wars,” and she lamented the death of glamour in Hollywood.

James Dean, as the son desperate for his father’s love, but seemingly unable to do anything right, was a new type of anguished, insecure anti-hero, for a new post-war world.

And his character and performance overshadowed Davalos’s characterisation – notwithstanding Aron’s final mental collapse after Cal spitefully reveals that their mother is a whore. Ultimately it was James Dean’s film and Davalos was destined to be the actor who played the “good” brother, perhaps even the boring brother, in James Dean’s debut film.

Davalos was born in New York City in 1930, into a family with Spanish and Finnish antecedents. He began his screen career in television in the early 1950s. But before East of Eden his experience of the film industry consisted of showing people to their seats while working as a cinema usher.

He and Dean did a screen test together for East of Eden. It survives and can be found on line, with two actors delivering beautifully nuanced performances in a scene that is both powerful and delicate. Paul Newman also did tests and was considered for both roles.

Kazan made arrangements for Davalos and Dean to share rooms in Burbank, near the studios, hoping that Davalos might provide some sort of role model for Dean off-screen too, as Dean’s appetite for late nights on the town in search of drink, drugs and sex were causing some alarm.

Davalos liked Dean and he readily acknowledged the power of his acting. “Just being in a scene with him could be an unnerving experience,” he said. “He had an instinct to disturb.” After one scene in which Cal hits Aron, Davalos felt so traumatised that he cried for several hours.

However, Davalos found Dean impossible to live with, because of his mood swings, slovenly personal habits and, it was later suggested, Dean’s sexual attraction to him. When they returned from location shooting it was to separate apartments.

On Broadway, Davalos won a Theatre World award for his performance in the Arthur Miller double bill A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays in 1956, he had a starring role in the Civil War television drama series The Americans in 1961, he was one of Paul Newman’s convict co-stars in Cool Hand Luke in 1967 and he played the barber Mr Crosetti in Something Wicked This Way Comes in 1983.

He also made guest appearances in numerous popular television series, though he never again found a part as significant as that of Aron in his first film. And he told one interviewer: “I’ve done films, TV, plays, directed and taught acting, but I’ve never liked being an actor.”

However he did reach a new and completely different audience when his picture was used on the cover of The Smiths album Strangeways, Here We Come (1987) and pictures of him were subsequently used on compilation albums.

Davalos said he was “flattered” and revealed he met Morrissey met at one of The Smiths’ gigs in California, but that he never really got to the bottom of why he used his pictures.

It is believed Davalos was married twice. He is survived by two daughters, Elyssa Davalos, an actress, and Dominique Davalos, an actress, singer and rock musician, who now works in real estate in Texas. The actress Alexa Davalos, star of The Man in the High Castle, is Elyssa’s daughter and his granddaughter.

‘Daily Telegraph” obituary in 2016.

Richard Davalos, who has died aged 85, was a Hollywood actor best known for his role as Raymond Massey’s dutiful son Aaron Task in East of Eden (1955) starring James Dean; in the 1980s he achieved cult status when Morrissey, lead singer of the Smiths, told a friend, “East of Eden is such a wonderful film. It is my ambition to track down and interview Richard Davalos.”

Although it is not known whether Morrissey did contact the actor, a photograph of Davalos, taken during the filming of East of Eden, featured on the cover of the Smiths’ final album Strangeways, Here We Come (1987).

Richard Davalos was born on November 5 1930 in the Bronx, New York City, to Finnish and Spanish parents. Having decided to become an actor, he started out in 1953 in early television with a role in the series Goodyear Playhouse, and in 1955 won a role on stage in the one-act Broadway drama A Memory of Two Mondays, by Arthur Miller.

It was presented in tandem with another play by the author, a one-act version of A View from the Bridge, and in 1956 Davalos won the Theatre World Award for his performances in both plays.

It was Elia Kazan, who was preparing an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden to star James Dean, who lured him to Hollywood, where he arranged for Davalos and Dean to share an apartment above a pharmacy across the street from the Warner Bros studios. Kazan apparently hoped that Davalos’s presence would help keep Dean out of trouble and dissuade him from indulging in the sort of after-hours antics that had been attracting unfavourable attention in the press.

Richard Davalos (standing), James Dean and Julie Harris in East of Eden CREDIT: REX FEATURES

Davalos had not been the first choice to play Aaron Task. Paul Newman was originally given a screen test with Dean (who had been cast as Cal, Aaron’s ne’er-do-well younger brother), but as the actress Lois Smith (who played Anne in the film) observed, “Dean and Newman together – that would have been too much. How would theatre managers have handled the mobs of screaming, adoring, hormonal girls?”

Davalos was not happy about sharing with Dean, whose slovenly personal habits disgusted him and who, he later suggested, had a crush on him.

(l-r) Richard Davalos, James Dean, Julie Harris in East of Eden CREDIT: REX FEATURES

It was Dean who grabbed audiences’ attention, though many critics thought that Davalos had the edge as an actor. Dean’s premature death in 1955 elevated the film, and Dean, to cult status, but Davalos was unable to hitch a lift on the dead star’s coat-tails. After East of Eden, Davalos’s film career faltered. His other credits included The Sea Chase (1955), with John Wayne and Lana Turner, the film-noir thriller I Died a Thousand Times (1955), with Jack Palance and Shelley Winters, and the Alan Ladd and Sidney Poitier Korean War vehicle All the Young Men (1960).

He gave solid performances as Blind Dick in Cool Hand Luke (1967), and as Rick Bowman, a street punk who winds up in jail after a street car race goes wrong in Pit Stop (1969). In Kelly’s Heroes (1970) he was Private Gutowski.

His television credits included Bonanza; Rawhide; Perry Mason; The Rockford Files and Hawaii Five-O. He also appeared in some mostly forgettable straight-to-video releases. His final role was as Don Lazzaro in Ninja Cheerleaders (2008).

By his marriage to the dancer Ellen van der Hoeven he had two daughters.

Richard Davalos, born November 5 1930, died March 8 2016

It is surprising that Richard Davalos did not become a major movie star. He gave a brilliant performance as James Dean’s brother in “East of Eden” in 1955. He was born in 1935 in New York City. This film was his movie debut. He followed this with “The Sea Chase” with Lana Turner, John Wayne and Tab Hunter. Other films include “Cool Hand Luke” with Paul Newman, “Kelly’s Hero’s” with Clint Eastwood and “Something Wicked This Way Comes”. He died in 2016.

Davalos is the father of actress Elyssa Davalos and musician Dominique Davalos, and grandfather of actress Alexa Davalos (The Chronicles of Riddick). An image of Davalos appears on the covers of The Smiths‘ albums Strangeways, Here We Come, Best…I, and …Best II.

Geraldine Brooks IMDB

Geraldine Brooks was a lovely talented actress who landed a starring role in her first movie. She was born in 1925 in New York City to Dutch parents. She acted for a time on Broadway and then in 1947 went to Hollywood to film for Warner Brothers “Cry Wolf” with Errol Flynn and Barbara Stanwyck. She hel her ground against Joan Crawford in “Possessed” and w ent on to make “Embracable You”, “Challenge to Lassie” and “Johnny Tiger” with Robert Taylor in 1966. She was married to author and playwright Budd Schulburg. Geraldine Brooks died in 1977 at the early age of 52.

“Hollywood Players : The Forties” by James Robert Parish:

In the flood of new faces at 1940s Warner Brothers there were among others, Dorothy Malone, Joan Leslie, Martha Vickers, Janis Paige, Andrea King, Faye Emerson, Joan Lorring, Geraldine Brooks and Lauren Bacall. Unquestionably Miss Bacall had such a unique screen charisma that she would have surfaced without even the studio support of husband Humphrey Bogart. But how does one account for the non-emergence of Geraldine Brooks, a petite 5ft 2″ blue-eyed brown-haired beauty. She displayed a particularly radiant smile and even more importantly demonstrated such a marvelous ability at powerhouse acting. Had she checked in to the Burbank studio earlier in the 1940s she might just have won the coveted role of Veda in “Mildred Pierce”, taking it away from Ann Blyth and established herself as the talented lady she was. Instead Geraldine was cast by the post-World War Two Warners into conventional roles, publicised as just another starlet, subject to over-makeup for the camera, and then dumped by the company in their recession shuffle. It has remained for television to provide her with recurring showcases to exhibit her persistent clear beauty and her know for adding dimension to emotionally framatic roles.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

A resolute, blue-eyed brunette with attractive, slightly pinched features, Geraldine Brooks was born to a Dutch couple on October 29, 1925, in New York City. Her parents had a theater-based background — father, James Stroock, owned a top costume company and mother, Bianca, was a costume designer and stylist. In dance shoes from age 2, her closer relatives were also extensively involved in theater — one aunt being a former Ziegfeld Follies girl and another a contralto with the Metropolitan Opera. Growing up surrounding by these theatrical types, it was only natural that it rubbed off on her. She attended the Hunter Modeling School as a young teen and graduated from Julia Richman High School in 1942 as president of her drama club. Older sister, Gloria Stroock, also became an actress, primarily on TV.

In New York, Geraldine studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Art and the Neighborhood Playhouse before apprenticing in summer stock productions. In a pre-Broadway tryout of “Follow the Girls” in 1944, Geraldine subsequently went with the show to Broadway in May of that same year and enjoyed a nine-month run. Following her role as “Perdita” in “A Winter’s Tale” at the Theatre Guild, she was signed by Warner Bros. and made her film debut promisingly as a second femme lead in the mystery thrillerCry Wolf (1947) starring Barbara Stanwyck and Errol Flynn. At this time, she shunned her odd-sounding last name of “Stroock” in favor of the more complementary marquee name of “Brooks”, which was the name of her father’s costume company. Playing Flynn’s cool, conniving niece who gives trouble to Stanwyck, she gave added suspense to the film. In her second movie, Possessed (1947), she is again at odds with another powerhouse star, this time Joan Crawford, but shows more sensitivity against the manic Crawford character in this film-noir chiller.

Geraldine moved to dramatic lead status with Embraceable You (1948) opposite Dane Clark, and played daughter to real wife-and-husband team Fredric March and Florence Eldridge in An Act of Murder (1948), a drama that dealt with the topic of euthanasia. Less impressive was the standard Warner Bros. “B” western The Younger Brothers (1949) and her MGM loanout appearance in Challenge to Lassie (1949). Floundering a bit at this time and failing to strike a star-making chord with audiences, she attempted a few continental film assignments, one in which she played Anna Magnani‘s younger sister, but grew quickly disillusioned there as well and returned to America.

Focusing instead on stage and TV, including a Broadway stint in “Time of the Cuckoo” starring Tony-winning Shirley Booth, Geraldine eventually went back to studying acting again. In 1956, she became a member of the Actor’s Studio and became a strong exponent of its method style. Despite this renewed, enlightening acting technique, her film career found no momentum at all. In fact, she appeared in only two films in the oncoming years as brittle, harder-core ladies in Street of Sinners (1957) and Johnny Tiger(1966). Her greater notices were to be found guesting on various popular TV series. Particularly noteworthy were her roles on Perry Mason (1957), The Defenders (1961), Bus Stop (1961) (for which she earned an Emmy nomination), the pilot of Ironside (1967) and the last final climactic episode of The Fugitive (1963). A regular as Dan Dailey‘s secretary on the mildly received Faraday and Company (1973), she also appeared in the 70s episodes of Kung Fu (1972), Cannon (1971), Barnaby Jones (1973) and McMillan & Wife(1971), the last in which sister, Gloria Stroock, had a recurring role as Rock Hudson‘s secretary.

Geraldine’s later theater included her Tony-nominated role in “Brightower” (1970) (despite it closing after only one performance) on Broadway and as wife “Golde” in the musical “Fiddler on the Roof”. Her final movie part came in the rather ho-hum crimer Mr. Ricco (1975) alongside Dean Martin. A short-lived series regular as the matriarch of The Dumplings (1976), a rare comedic venture for her, and a stage production of Jules Feiffer‘s “Hold Me!” in 1977 capped her capable but somewhat unsatisfying career. She deserved much better attention than she got, especially in films. Divorced from TV writerHerbert Sargent after only three years (1958-1961), she married author Budd Schulberg(best known for his screenplay of On the Waterfront (1954)), in 1964. The couple moved to Los Angeles and opened a writers’ workshop together for the underprivileged. She also collaborated with Schulberg on the book Swan Watch (1975), a study on the elegant birds in which she also took photographs. In addition, she wrote poetry for children although she herself never had any. Sadly, Geraldine died in 1977 at age 51 of a heart attack while battling cancer, thus depriving the entertainment industry of a valuable talent. She was survived by her husband, mother and sister.

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