Eva La Gallienne was born in London in 1899. Her father was the British poet Robert La Gallienne and her mother was a Danish journalist. She made her stage debut at the age of 15 on the London stage in “Monna Vanna”. In 1915 she went to New York and virtually all of her acting career was in the U.S. In 1921 she had a stunning success in Ferenc Molnar’s “Liliom”. She had many trumphs on Broadway and on the stage in the U.S. over the years. Her film appearances are few but choice. Of particular interest are “Prince of Players” with Richard Burton in 1955 and in 1980, “Resurrection” with Ellen Burstyn and Sam Sheperd. She guest starred on “St Elsewhere” with Brenda Vaccaro in 1984. Eva la Gallienne died in 1991 at the age of 92.
TCM Overview:
This legendary stage star won renown for her performances on Broadway, in productions by the repertory theater she founded, including “Liliom” (1921) and “The Swan” (1923). In the 1930s, she played the lead in “Peter Pan,” the White Queen in “Alice in Wonderland,” Juliet in “Romeo and Juliet,” and the lead in a summer production of “Hamlet” (1937) which she also staged.
In 1926, Le Gallienne founded a national repertory theater, the Civic Repertory Theater in New York, similar to England’s Old Vic, which presented the classics at popular prices ($1.50 top ticket price). She not only starred in the majority of productions, until the company folded in 1933 as a consequence of the Depression, but she also staged, translated and produced most of the plays. Le Gallienne then lectured at colleges and toured the country, returning to Broadway in “Uncle Harry” and “The Cherry Orchard.” In 1946, she organized the short-lived American Repertory Theater with Margaret Webster and Cheryl Crawford. Later stage triumphs included “Mary Stuart” in which she toured from 1957 to 1962 and “The Royal Family” (1976). Le Gallienne reprised her role (the matriarch of a theatrical family modeled on the Barrymores) in an acclaimed television production which earned her an Emmy. She also produced and starred in an acclaimed TV version of “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” (1958). Le Gallienne appeared in a handful of films, perhaps most memorably as Ellen Burstyn’s grandmother in “Resurrection” (1980), for which she received an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress.
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Legendary stage actress Eva Le Gallienne’s life began just as grandly as the daughter of poet Richard Le Gallienne. Sarah Bernhardt was her idol growing up and, at age 18, was brought to New York by her mother. Making her London debut with “Monna Vanna” in 1914, she proved a star in every sense of the word. She appeared on Broadway first in “Liliom” in 1921 and lastly at the Biltmore Theatre in 1981 with “To Grandmother’s House We Go,” which won her a Tony nomination at age 82. Noted for her extreme boldness and idealism, she became a director and muse for theatre’s top playwrights, a foremost translator of Henrik Ibsen, and a founder of the civic repertory movement in America. A respected stage coach, director, producer and manager over her six decades, Ms. Le Gallienne consciously devoted herself to the Art of the Theatre as opposed to the Show Business of Broadway and dedicated herself to upgrading the quality of the stage. She ran the Civic Repertory Theatre Company for 10 years (1926-1936), producing 37 plays during that time. She managed Broadway’s 1100-seat Civic Repertory Theatre (more popularly known as The 14th Street Theatre) at 107 14th Street from 1926-32, which was home to her company whose actors included herself, J. Edward Bromberg, Paul Leyssac,Florida Friebus, and Leona Roberts. Her gallery of theatre portrayals would include everything from Peter Pan to Hamlet. Sadly, she almost completely avoided film and TV during her lengthy career. However, toward the end of her life, she did appear in a marvelous 1977 stage version of “The Royal Family” on TV and rendered a quietly touching performance as Ellen Burstyn‘s grandmother in Resurrection (1980), for which she received an Oscar nomination.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Mary Peach is a South African-born British film and television actress who was born on October 20, 1934, in Durban, South Africa. She is known for her roles in films such as Cutthroat Island (1995), Scrooge (1970), and The Projected Man (1966). She has also appeared in numerous British films and television series over the years, including A Gathering of Eagles (1963) which was made in Hollywood opposite Rock Hudson and Rod Taylor and the BBC adaptation of The Three Musketeers (1966). Peach was married to film producer Thomas Clyde from 1961 until their divorce, and they had two children together. She later married screenwriter and director Jimmy Sangster in 1995, and remained married to him until his death in 2011. Peach was also considered for the role of Steed’s new assistant in The Avengers (1961) after Diana Rigg left the show
Madeleine Carroll was born in 1906 and was an English actress, popular both in Britain and America in the 1930s and 1940s. At the peak of her success she was the highest-paid actress in the world, earning $250,000 in 1938.
Carroll is remembered for her role in Alfred Hitchcock‘s The 39 Steps (1935). She is also noted for abandoning her acting career after the death of her sister Marguerite in the London Blitz, to devote herself to helping wounded servicemen and children displaced and maimed by the war.
Carroll was born at 32 Herbert Street (now number 44) in West Bromwich, Staffordshire, daughter of John Carroll, an Irish professor of languages from County Limerick, and Helene, his French wife. She graduated from the University of Birmingham, with a B.A. degree; while at university she appeared in some productions for the Birmingham University Dramatic Society. She was a French mistress at a girls’ school in Brighton for a year.
Carroll wanted to act and left teaching to look for roles. She got a job in the touring company of Seymour Hicks.
She made her stage debut with a touring company in The Lash. Widely recognised as one of the most beautiful women in films (she won a film beauty competition to start herself off in the business), Carroll’s aristocratic blonde allure and sophisticated style were first glimpsed by film audiences in The Guns of Loos in 1928.
Carroll had a big hit with I Was a Spy (1933), which won her an award as best actress of the year. It was directed by Victor Saville.
She played the title role in the play Little Catherine. Abruptly, she announced plans to retire from films to devote herself to a private life with her husband, the first of four.
Carroll attracted the attention of Alfred Hitchcock and in 1935 starred as one of the director’s earliest prototypical cool, glib, intelligent blondes in The 39 Steps. Based on the espionage novel by John Buchan, the film became a sensation and with it so did Carroll. Cited by The New York Times for a performance that was “charming and skillful”, Carroll became very much in demand. The success of the film made Hitchcock a star in Britain and the US, and established the quintessential English ‘Hitchcock blonde’ Carroll as the template for his succession of ice cold and elegant leading ladies.[13] Of Hitchcock heroines as exemplified by Carroll film critic Roger Ebert wrote:
The director wanted to re-team Carroll with her 39 Steps co-star Robert Donat the following year in Secret Agent, a spy thriller based on a work by W. Somerset Maugham. However, Donat’s recurring health problems intervened, resulting in a Carroll–John Gielgud pairing. In between the films she made a short drama The Story of Papworth (1935).
Ronald Colman and Madeleine Carroll in The Prisoner of Zenda, 1937
Poised for international stardom, Carroll was the first British beauty to be offered a major American film contract. She accepted a lucrative deal with Paramount Pictures and was cast opposite George Brent in The Case Against Mrs. Ames (1936).
On radio, Carroll was a participant in The Circle (1939) on NBC, discussing “current events, literature and drama” each week. In 1944, she was the host of This Is the Story, an anthology series dramatising famous novels on the Mutual Broadcasting System. At the tail end of radio’s golden age, Carroll starred in the NBC soap opera The Affairs of Dr. Gentry (1957-59). She also was one of a group of four stars who rotated in taking the lead in each week’s episode of The NBC Radio Theater (1959).
Carroll returned to Britain after the war. She was in White Cradle Inn (1947). She went back to the US and was reunited with MacMurray for An Innocent Affair (1948). Her last film was The Fan (1949).
A commemorative monument and plaques were unveiled in her birthplace, West Bromwich, to mark the centenary of her birth. Her story is one of rare courage and dedication when at the height of her success she gave up her acting career during World War II to work in the line of fire on troop trains for the Red Cross in Italy after her sister was killed by a German air raid – for which she was awarded the American Medal of Freedom. She was also awarded the Legion of Honour by France for her tireless work in fostering relations postwar amity between France and the United States.
Sara Allgood was one of Ireland’s greatest actresses. She was a member of the Abbey Theatre Players and the first person to play Pegeen Mike in “The Playboy of the Western World in 1904. She was born in 1879 in Dublin. Her sister was the actress Marie O’Neill, the love of John Millington Synge. Sara Allgood made her film debut in 1929 in a leading role in Alfred Hitchcocks “Blackmail” which was made in Britain. In 1940 she went to Hollywood where she became one of it’s most profilic character actresses. She was nominated for an Oscar for her peformance in John Ford’s “How Green Was My Valley” in 1941. Other films of note are “Lady Hamilton”, “Kitty”, “Cluny Brown”, “Between Two Worlds” and “The Spiral Staircase”. Sara Allgood died in 1950 at the age of 70.
Sara Allgood features extensively in Adrian Frazier’s “Hollywood Irish”.
“Short, rotund, apple-cheeked and extremely Irish, Sara Allgood joined Dublin’s Abbey Players in 1904 but it was nearly 40 years before she was asked to come to Hollywood. Once there she immediately made an impression as the strong and loving matriarch of the Welsh coal mining family in ‘How Green Was My Valley’. The role won her an Oscar nomination and led to a career as a busy character player. TheM majority of her work was at 20th Century Fox, where she performed in ‘Roxie Hart’ as a prison matron and ‘Jane Eyre’ as a kindly housekeeper, to name but two of her assignments.” – Barry Monush in “The Encyclopedia of Hollywood Film Actors” . (2003).
IMDB entry:
Dublin-born Sara Allgood started her acting career in her native country with the famed Abbey Theatre. From there she traveled to he English stage, where she played for many years before making her film debut in 1918. Her warm, open Irish face meant that she spent a lot of time playing Irish mothers, landladies, neighborhood gossips and the like, although she is best remembered for playing Mrs. Morgan, the mother of a family of Welsh miners, in How Green Was My Valley (1941), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Her sister Maire O’Neill was an actress in Ireland, and famed Irish poet William Butler Yeats was a family friend. Sara Allgood died of a heart attack shortly after making her last film, Sierra (1950).
– IMDb Mini Biography By: frankfob2@yahoo.com
UNSPECIFIED – JANUARY 01: (AUSTRALIA OUT) Photo of FILM POSTERS; Poster for Mother Wore Tights (Photo by GAB Archive/Redferns)
In 1915 Allgood was cast as the lead in J. Hartley Manners‘ comedy Peg o’ My Heartwhich toured Australia and New Zealand in 1916. She married her leading man, Gerald Henson, in September 1916 in Melbourne. She played the lead role opposite her husband in J. A. Lipman‘s 1918 silent film Just Peggy, shot in Sydney. Her happiness was short lived. She gave birth to a daughter named Mary in January 1918, who died just a day later, then her husband died of the flu in the outbreak of 1918 in November of that same year. After her return to Ireland Allgood continued to perform at the Abbey Theatre. Her most memorable performance was in Seán O’Casey‘s Juno and the Paycock in 1923. She won acclaim in London when she played Bessie Burgess in O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars in 1926.
After many successful theatre tours of America she settled in Hollywood in 1940 to pursue an acting career. Allgood was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her role as Beth Morgan in the 1941 film How Green Was My Valley.
Allgood, Sara (1883–1950), actress, was born 31 October 1883 in Dublin, daughter of George Allgood and Margaret Allgood (née Harold). Her father was a protestant printing compositor, son of an English army officer; her mother’s family were catholic, owners of a junk shop. There were four sons and four daughters. After her father’s death Sara was apprenticed to an upholsterer, and joined Inghinidhe na hÉireann, a group of revolutionary women founded by Maud Gonne MacBride (qv). She took part in amateur dramatics and was a founder member of the Irish National Theatre Society. Her first appearances (1904), while still in her daytime job, were in ‘The king’s threshold’ by W. B.Yeats(qv) and ‘Riders to the sea’ by J. M. Synge (qv). She stayed with the group which became the Abbey Theatre, and after successful appearances in the first Abbey play, Lady Gregory‘s ‘Spreading the news’, she became a professional actress (1905).
After disputes within the company Sara Allgood’s main rivals, Maire Quinn and Máire Ní Shiubhlaigh (qv), resigned and she was able to play some of the most important roles in the Abbey’s repertoire. It was claimed that she could, at short notice, perform sixty-five parts, including Deirdre in Yeats’s play of that name; she was Widow Quin in the first production of Synge’s ‘Playboy of the western world’ (1907). She was especially celebrated in tragedy, but in 1915 she played the heroine in an Irish-American romantic comedy, ‘Peg o’ my heart’ by John H. Manners, produced by a touring company in Australia. It proved very popular. Her stay in Australia was protracted until 1920, partly because she had married (September 1916) her leading man Gerald Henson, and the death (January 1918) of their only child Mary, shortly after her birth, was followed by Henson’s death in the devastating ’flu epidemic (November 1918).
The Abbey Theatre’s difficulties during the civil war were not resolved until the great success of ‘The shadow of a gunman’ and ‘Juno and the paycock’ by Sean O’Casey (qv). Allgood gave the finest performances of her life as Juno (1924) and as Bessy Burgess in ‘The plough and the stars’ (1926). Successful London productions and American tours of these plays followed, and she was very successful in London in James Bridie’s ‘Storm in a teacup’ (1936). From 1929 she increasingly relied on film work – she appeared in over forty films – and, living in Hollywood, California, took American citizenship (1945). She was nominated for an Academy Award as best supporting actress for her part in How green was my valley (1941); she was, however, only offered small parts (generally Irish characters) which did not make full use of her abilities. Her last years in Hollywood were spent in disappointment and poverty. She died 13 September 1950 of a heart attack in Woodland Hills, California. Her sister Molly (Mary) was a successful actress as Máire O’Neill (qv).
Sources
Times, 15 Sept. 1950; Who was who in the theatre 1912–1976, i: A–C(1978); Elizabeth Coxhead, Daughters of Erin: five women of the Irish renascence (1979); Phyllis Hartnoll (ed.), The Oxford companion to the theatre (1983); Evelyn M. Truitt, Who was who on screen (1983); E. H. Mikhail (ed.), The Abbey Theatre: interviews and recollections (1988)
In the early 1950s the prevailing image of Maureen O’Hara, who has died aged 95, was one of a feisty heroine, red hair blazing, who was more than a match for her male co-stars. Big John “Duke” Wayne, whom she partnered in five films, said of her: “I’ve had many male friends in my life except for one, O’Hara; and she’s a great guy.”
The great director John Ford, with whom she also worked so often, referred to her as “a man’s kind of woman”.
In The Quiet Man (1952), Ford’s Irish pastoral-romantic-comedy, the blue-bloused, scarlet-skirted, bare-footed O’Hara, as Mary Kate Danaher, is first seen by Wayne as she tends her sheep. “Hey, is that real?” he asks. “She couldn’t be.”
At their second meeting Wayne tries to kiss her, and she tries to sock him. “Watch that scene, and you’ll see Duke put his hand up,” O’Hara once said. “He deflects my blow because he knew me so well. He knew I was for real. I was hitting him.”
Wayne’s defensive action had unintended consequences. “The pain went up under my armpit,” she said. “[Afterwards] Duke came up to me and said, ‘godammit, you nearly knocked my head off. Let me see your hand.’ Each finger was like a sausage [and] they sent me to hospital.”
Ford declared O’Hara to be “the best bloody actress in Hollywood”. She certainly was not that, but Ford, who had Irish roots, brought out her warmth and “Irishness,” and she became an important element in his repertory company.
Their relationship was never easy, but O’Hara loved the results of working with him. “So many films we made crying in our heart as we went to work every day,” O’Hara recalled, “but a great role in a great movie with somebody like John Ford was never difficult. That was heaven, even though you wanted to kill him.”
O’Hara was born Maureen FitzSimons, the second of six children, in a suburb of Dublin. Her mother was an accomplished contralto, and her father, a businessman, part-owned Shamrock Rovers football team. “We grew up on sport and music. All the great singers that would come to visit Dublin would come to our house for a musical evening,” she said. “We six kids, we used to sit at the top of the stairs and listen.”
Maureen was torn between wanting to be an opera singer or a football player. In the end she settled for acting, having been accepted by Dublin’s Abbey theatre at the age of 14. Three years later, during her theatrical training at the Abbey, she received a request to travel to London for a screen test at Elstree studios. As a result she landed two bit parts but, more significantly, she impressed the actor Charles Laughton, who could not forget her “hauntingly beautiful eyes”. Laughton and the producer Erich Pommer, the co-founders of Mayflower Productions, offered her a seven-year contract, and changed her name to O’Hara. Her first role was as a naive orphan girl involved with Cornish smugglers in Alfred Hitchcock’s corny Jamaica Inn (1939), opposite Laughton as the lip-smacking squire. On the set of that film she met the English film producer George Brown, whom she married that year at the age of 19. The marriage ended in divorce only two years later.
In 1939 Laughton also persuaded RKO studios to cast O’Hara as the Gypsy girl Esmeralda to his Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. She gave both a sensual and touching portrayal, which immediately established her as a Hollywood star. Her career from then on was divided between colourful escapist entertainments and more serious black-and-white efforts.
Among the former were piratical and exotic adventure yarns such as The Black Swan (1942), The Spanish Main (1945), Sinbad the Sailor (1947), Bagdad (1949) and Tripoli (1950), the latter directed by Will Price, whom O’Hara married soon afterwards. In most of these films she was rescued from the villain by the hero, though the villain often seemed more in need of rescuing from her. O’Hara’s spirited character stretched the limits of Hollywood’s macho conventions. Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) has been championed by feminists because of the final scene when O’Hara, as a chorus girl, having submitted unwillingly to the role forced upon her, berates the audience of leering males. However, despite her celebrated monologue, which she delivers with passion, she eventually gives up her dreams of becoming a ballet dancer in favour of marriage.
In 1941, O’Hara played her first part for Ford in How Green Was My Valley, set in a Welsh mining town, in which her Irish accent, Donald Crisp’s Scottish and Walter Pidgeon’s American served for a Welsh accent. As Angharad Morgan, O’Hara has mostly to look beautifully lovelorn during her abortive romance with the pipe-smoking preacher Pidgeon, but has a fine scene with him in which she defends a single mother from attack. “What do the deacons know about it? What do you know about what could happen to a poor girl when she loves a man so much that even to lose sight of him for a moment is torture!”
O’Hara was often an exemplar of noble and defiant womanhood, not least in Jean Renoir’s This Land Is Mine (1943). In it, she was reunited with Laughton, who plays a mother-dominated schoolteacher secretly in love with O’Hara, a colleague who is working for the wartime resistance.
Now a resident star at 20th Century-Fox, O’Hara proved the perfect middle-class wife in Sentimental Journey (1946), Miracle on 34th Street (1947) and Sitting Pretty (1948). But she was her tempestuous self again as a Southern belle in the period piece The Foxes of Harrow (1947), and in Rio Grande (1950), the last of Ford’s cavalry trilogy, in which she played the estranged Confederate wife of a Yankee colonel (Wayne), fighting over their son.
O’Hara played quite a few estranged wives, providing her with the opportunity to be sassy; battling over her twin daughters with Brian Keith in The Parent Trap (1961), and again with Wayne in McLintock! (1963), the latter containing a rerun of the taming-of-the-shrew theme from The Quiet Man, with Duke giving her a spanking in the distinctly non-feminist finale.
The last film she made for Ford was The Wings of Eagles (1957), in which she played the long-suffering wife of a war hero pilot (Wayne). Eleven years later the divorced O’Hara, with a grown-up daughter, married Charles Blair, a famous aviator.
She retired from films a few years later to live in the Virgin Islands and run a commuter sea plane service, Antilles Airboats, with her husband. “I got to live the adventures I’d only acted out on the Fox and Universal lots,” she said. However Blair was killed in a plane crash in 1978. She then became head of the company, the first woman president of a scheduled airline in the US.
Fortunately she was coaxed out of her 20-year retirement in 1991 to appear as John Candy’s domineering Catholic mother in Only the Lonely – she acted everyone else off the screen, a reminder of just how much the cinema had missed her. After that she appeared in three TV movies, including The Last Dance (2000), in which she played a retired teacher.
In 2005 she moved back to Ireland, settling in her house on a 35-acre estate, Lugdine Park, in west Cork, which she had bought with Blair in 1970. In 2012 she returned to the US to be closer to her family as her health declined.
Although O’Hara was never nominated for an Oscar, she received an honorary Academy award in 2014 in acknowledgment of a lifetime of performances that “glowed with passion, warmth and strength”.
She is survived by her daughter, Bronwyn, from her marriage to Price, and by a grandson and two great-grandchildren.
Maureen O’Hara, actor, born 17 August 1920, died 25 October 2015
“Ben Gazzara is probably best known for his work in two television series – “Arrest and Trial” and “Run for Your Life” – which is ironic, because he does TV only for the money. He cares enough about films (or did) that in 1956 he turned down one of the leads in King Vidor’s “War and Peace” because he did not want to be merely part of a spectacle. He was then one of the cinema’s most promising new stars – and to date that promise has beeen largely unfulfilled. he is a sympathetic actor – but at that time he gave of the definitive great performances of evil” – David Shipman – “The Great Movie Stars- The International Years” (1972).
Ben Gazzara was born in 1930 in New York City. His parents were from Italy. He won early acclain on Broadway for is performance as Brick in “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof”. His film debut came in 1956 in “The Strange One”. He has some very impressive films to his credit, “Anatomy of a Murder” in 1959, “The Young Doctors”, “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” and “Opening Night” directed by his friend John Cassavettes. In 1985 he starred in “An Early Frost”, one of the first dramas to deal with AIDS, starring with Aidan Quinn, Gena Rowlands and Sylvia Sidney. Ben Gazzara died in February 2012.
His “Guardian” obituary by Brian Baxter:
Few screen debuts have equalled the searing malevolence of Ben Gazzara’s Iago-inspired Jocko De Paris in The Strange One (1957). The role, which he had created on stage, became forever associated with this intense graduate of New York’s method school of acting.
Gazzara, who has died aged 81 of pancreatic cancer, continued his stage career in modern classics including Epitaph for George Dillon and as the humiliated and vengeful George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He also achieved popular acclaim through television series – notably Run for Your Life (1965-68) – and in movies for his friend John Cassavetes and other directors including Otto Preminger, Peter Bogdanovich, David Mamet, Todd Solondz and the Coen brothers.
Gazzara was born to Sicilian immigrants and grew up on Manhattan’s lower east side. He began acting at the Madison Square Boys Club and made a teenage debut in a TV dramatisation of a short play by Tennessee Williams. After gaining a scholarship to Erwin Piscator’s drama workshop, he eventually moved to the equally legendary Actors Studio headed by Lee Strasberg.
His stage debut came in Pennsylvania and then on tour, in Jezebel’s Husband, but his career took off when – aged 23 – he created Jocko in Calder Willingham’s adaptation of his own novel End As a Man. When a revised version of the play transferred to the Vanderbilt theatre in 1953, giving Gazzara his Broadway debut, he received the New York critics’ award as most promising young actor.
Its director, Jack Garfein, an assistant to Elia Kazan, took four years to get the movie version financed, and in the interim Gazzara gained more Broadway experience as the original Brick in Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and as the drug-addicted Johnny in A Hatful of Rain, where his darkly handsome features and forceful acting were distinct assets.
Although The Strange One looked overly theatrical, Gazzara’s pared-down performance survived the lumpen direction, revealing a natural screen presence. The sombre work about a duplicitous cadet leader, who manipulates an army camp in the deep south, was not a popular success and Gazzara returned to the stage until cast as the equally venal, though more enigmatic, soldier Lieutenant Manion in Preminger’s courtroom masterpiece Anatomy of a Murder (1959).
These movies were hard acts to follow and Gazzara, who spoke Italian before he learned English, returned to his roots to star opposite Anna Magnani in The Passionate Thief (1960). It was the start of a lifetime affair with Italy, where he was to work and live for many months each year and where he eventually bought a villa in Umbria.
The following year Gazzara married Janice Rule – having divorced his first wife, Louise Erickson, in 1957 – and took the role of the idealistic pathologist in The Young Doctors. He then co-starred opposite David Niven in The Captive City, a lacklustre war movie set in Athens. A challenging role as the convicted murderer turned painter John Resko better reflected Gazzara’s ambitions, but Convicts Four was not a hit and he moved into television, first as the detective in Arrest and Trial and then as the dying Paul Bryan in Run for Your Life.
Filming in Czechoslovakia of the second world war story of The Bridge at Remagen was overtaken by the real-life Soviet invasion of August 1968. An escaping waitress hid behind the legs of Gazzara and Robert Vaughn as she crouched on the floor of their car when it crossed the border.
Gazzara was one of several stars coaxed into a cameo role in If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969). Fortuitously, another was Cassavetes and, after working on the liberal documentary King: A Filmed Record … Montgomery to Memphis, Gazzara joined Peter Falk and Cassavetes as the eponymous Husbands (also 1970) in the latter’s improvised study of marital discord.
Gazzara played the murderous stripclub owner Cosmo Vitelli in Cassavetes’s edgy thriller The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), and a year later Manny Victor in the director’s masterpiece, Opening Night. After Cassavetes’s untimely death in 1989, Gazzara appeared in several documentaries about his friend, notably Anything for John (1993), which reflected the admiration felt by his peers for that maverick film-maker.
Gazzara had established a willingness to work outside the commercial mainstream, specialising in anti-social characters including a plumply brutish Al Capone in Capone (1975), but his career wavered between quality and dross, film and television, and work in the US, Italy and a few other countries, notching up more than 80 movies in the years following his initial collaboration with Cassavetes.
These included the free-spirited Saint Jack (1979) in Peter Bogdanovich’s elegant rendition of Paul Theroux’s novel and – two years later, also for Bogdanovich – a co-starring role opposite Audrey Hepburn in They All Laughed, an underrated but commercially disastrous variation on love’s roundabout.
Following a second divorce, Gazzara worked for a decade in Italy, returning to the US only for lucrative TV movies, including A Question of Honour (1982), A Letter to Three Wives and the Aids drama An Early Frost (both 1985), as well as the film Road House (1989).
In Europe he portrayed the disillusioned poet Charles Bukowski in Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981), was a professor in Il Camorrista (1985) and a less amiable don in Don Bosco (1988). Although he had directed episodes of Columbo for Falk, he graduated to the big screen only in 1990 with the little-seen Beyond the Ocean, shot in Bali.
Soon after that Italian-financed movie he again concentrated on work in America, averaging five films or TV movies each year, while dividing his time between homes in Umbria, New York City and Sag Harbor, New York state. Highlights of this busy period included Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner (1997), where he played the mysterious Mr Klein; cult success Buffalo 66; the black comedy The Big Lebowski; and the controversial Happiness (all 1998). He was well cast as a gang leader in Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam and moved to the other side of the fence as a smooth lawyer in the glossy The Thomas Crown Affair (both 1999).
Dozens of other films were routine and he freely admitted that “these days I turn nothing down in order to maintain a comfortable and happy life with my third and last wife”. He had married the German-born Elke Krivat in 1982.
Despite debilitating treatment for throat cancer, in 1999 he published an autobiography and worked steadily for the next decade, notching up more than 30 credits, from television series to leading roles in features, many made in Europe, often in his beloved Italy. There he worked in TV, was on location in Calabria for Secret Heart (2003), in Umbria for a brilliant cameo in Christopher Roth (2010) and moved to Spain for Schubert (2005) and to Belgium for Chez Gino (2011). In 2008 he took the name role in Looking for Palladin, about a former Hollywood star who hides from fame in Guatemala.
He enjoyed his role as the Vatican’s banker in Holy Money (2009), but most rewarding of the many films were a short, Eve (2008), cleverly directed by Natalie Portman, with Lauren Bacall, and the two films with Gena Rowlands, echoing their Cassavetes days. He took a supporting cameo to her lead in the superior television movie Hysterical Blindness (2002), and four years later they played a two-hander as part of the portmanteau film Paris, Je t’aime, in a bittersweet episode where, as in later works, a recent stroke had affected his speech, though never his courage or professionalism.
Gazzara is survived by Elke; his daughter, Elizabeth, from his second marriage; and his brother, Anthony.
• Ben Gazzara (Biagio Anthony Gazzara), actor, born 28 August 1930; died 3 February 2012
The above “Guardian” obituary can be accessed online here.
Cyd Charisse was one of the greatest female dencers ever to grace the screen. She was born in Amarillo, Texas in 1922. She won a contract with MGM and dances with Fred Astaire in “Ziegfeld Follies” in 1944. She starred in some of the best MGM musicals of the 1950’s including “Singing in the Rain”, “The Band Wagon”, “Silk Stockings”, “Brigadoon” and “It’s Always Fair Weather”. She was long married to singer Tony Martin. Cyd Charisse died in 2008 at the age of 86.
Her “Guardian” obituary:
The camera seems to track forever along a pair of crossed female legs, extending almost beyond the frame. It moves up to reveal a femme fatale with a Louise Brooks hairdo, wearing a flapper-style emerald green dress and holding a mile-long cigarette holder. She is teasing Gene Kelly by balancing his straw hat on the end of her foot. It was in the Broadway Melody Ballet from Singin’ in the Rain (1952) that the beautiful, long-limbed, sexually dynamic dancer Cyd Charisse, who has died following a heart attack aged 87, first made an impact. Later in the ballet she is seen as a warm and inviting vision, her long white veil blowing in the wind. In a few minutes, Charisse’s film persona is encapsulated – at first cold and aloof, later melted by the love of the right man.
In Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon (1953), she is the supercilious ballet dancer to Fred Astaire’s hoofer until they dance together sublimely to Dancing in the Dark. In the same movie, The Girl Hunt Ballet featured two faces of Charisse, dark-haired and tough, or blonde and vulnerable. As Astaire says in the pastiche private-eye narration: “She came to me in sections. She had more curves than a scenic railway.” In Silk Stockings (1957), she is the stern Russian commissar who gives in to Astaire’s American charms, and in It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), she is haughty and patronising to gambler Kelly until he corrects her Shakespeare.
Charisse (her brother called her Sid when trying to say sister) was born Tula Ellice Finklea in Amarillo, Texas. Her mother was a ballet fan who made her daughter take lessons from the age of eight. While still in her teens, she joined Colonel de Basil’s Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo and worked with David Lichine and Leonid Massine, using the names Felia Sidorova and Maria Istomina. In 1939, she married her former dance instructor, Nico Charisse, during a tour of Europe. On their return, they opened a dancing school together in Hollywood.
In 1943, Lichine asked her to appear in her first movie as a ballet dancer in Something to Shout About, in which she is credited as Lily Norwood. The same year, she appeared as a Bolshoi dancer in Mission to Moscow. This led to her signing a seven-year contract with MGM, for whom she made the majority of her movies.
With little hint of the sexiness that characterised her appearances just a few years later, Charisse was first seen smiling prettily and pirouetting through a number of dance cameos in Ziegfeld Follies (1946) – in the opening number, Meet the Ladies, with Astaire – and in Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), dancing with Gower Champion to Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. Crooner Tony Martin also appeared in the latter, whom Charisse would marry two years later. She had her first speaking role in The Harvey Girls (1946), in which she performed a charming number, It’s a Great Big World, with Judy Garland and Virginia O’Brien, all wearing nightdresses.
Because of what MGM considered her Latin looks, Charisse was paired with Mexican-born Ricardo Montalban in five films, notably supporting swimming star Esther Williams in Fiesta (1947) and On an Island With You (1948), in which they performed vigorous Mexican dances. They also enlivened the lame Frank Sinatra vehicle The Kissing Bandit (1948) with the excitingly-staged Dance of Fury, which was added after the film’s completion.
Charisse’s classical ballet training was to the fore in The Unfinished Dance (1947), choreographed by Lichine, in which vicious child Margaret O’Brien has a crush on her and plans to advance her idol’s career as a prima ballerina by causing an accident to her rival.
After Singin’ in the Rain, Charisse was given co-star billing for the first time in The Band Wagon. Her first pas de deux with Astaire, in the nocturnal setting of Central Park, recalls the best of the Astaire-Ginger Rogers duets. However, although she regarded Astaire as the “most perfect gentleman I have ever known”, he later recalled that of all his dance partners, she was the heaviest, and he came to dread the lifts.
Yet their second pairing in Silk Stockings worked like a dream. In the number Paris Loves Lovers, they blissfully glide to “the urge to merge with the splurge of the spring”, as Cole Porter’s lyrics put it. Even as the caricature Soviet commissar, Charisse, with severe hairstyle and little makeup, and in a relatively drab dress, hots up the cold war in The Red Blues. In a solo dance in her Paris hotel, she strips off her heavy, green velvet dress and black woollen stockings, dons silk and satin underwear, silver high-heel shoes, diamond earrings and a frivolous Paris hat. Clothes have transformed her into the incarnation of capitalist glamour.
Macho Kelly meets his match in Charisse in It’s Always Fair Weather, when he complains that she takes away his “male initiative” by being able to recite the names of all the heavyweight boxing champions. She also shows some nifty footwork in a boxing ring dance while being praised by a chorus of pugilists who sing Baby You Knock Me Out. In contrast, in Minnelli’s Brigadoon (1954), she was the lovely Scots lass “waiting for my dearie”, who comes in the shape of American tourist Kelly, romancing her as they dance through The Heather on the Hill. Charisse, who made a good shot at a Scottish accent, always had her songs dubbed.
With the decline of the musical, she took on a number of straight, dramatic parts such as in Twilight for the Gods (1958), an action picture with Rock Hudson; Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) as Kirk Douglas’s promiscuous ex-wife; and in Party Girl (1958), where she at least had a chance to dance in a leopardskin dress. But as her body was far more eloquent than her voice or face, she began to appear rarely on the big screen, although she continued to play several roles in TV series.
In 1976, she teamed up with Martin in a series of nightclub revues, and the couple wrote a dual autobiography called The Two of Us. Charisse’s belated Broadway debut was in 1992 in the musical Grand Hotel, when she played another role made famous by Garbo, an ageing ballerina in 1920s Berlin. In 1996 she went into business, marketing Arctic Spray, a formula she developed with a chemist after trying unsuccessfully to find a product to ease her mother’s arthritis pain.
She is survived by Martin and their son, and a son by her first marriage.
· Cyd Charisse (Tula Ellice Finklea), dancer and actor, born March 8 1921; died June 17 2008
The above “Guardian” obituary can be accessed online here.
George Winslow was a child actor who was born in Los Angeles in 1946. He made his debut in 1952 in “Room For One More”. His films include two with Marilyn Monroe, “Monkey Business” and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”. His other films include “The Rocket Man” and “Artists and Models” with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. He died in 2015.
“Telegraph” obituary:
George Winslow has died aged 69, was a Hollywood child actor with a dead-pan stare and “Buster Brown” haircut who appeared in several feature films of the 1950s, most notably Gentleman Prefer Blondes (1953), in which he played Marilyn Monroe’s precocious young admirer.
Winslow, whose real name was George Wentzlaff and who acquired the nickname “Foghorn” owing to a deep voice which belied his youthful appearance, was seven when he played the part of the pint-sized millionaire Henry Spofford III in Howard Hawks’s perennially popular musical comedy. In one of the funniest scenes in the film Marilyn Monroe, as the gold-digging blonde bombshell Lorelei Lee, is seen trying to squeeze her capacious behind through a porthole, assisted by Winslow, who explains there are two reasons why he has agreed to help: “The first is, I’m too young to be sent to jail. The second is, you’ve got a lot of animal magnetism.’’
In reality, Winslow recalled that of the two leading actresses in the film, he preferred Marilyn’s co-star, Jane Russell, who was willing to play with him when he got bored during shooting. By the age of 12 Winslow’s voice had broken – upwards – and his Hollywood career was over.
He was born on May 3 1946 in Los Angeles, and made his first public appearance aged six on Art Linkletter’s People are Funny radio show, where his bass voice and comic timing made him a hit with listeners. Spotted by Cary Grant, he made his film debut in 1952, co-starring with Grant and Betsy Drake in Norman Taurog’s Room for One More, about a couple with three children who foster two troubled orphans, one played by Winslow.
He appeared with Grant again later the same year as “Little Indian” in Howard Hawks’s Monkey Business (co-starring Ginger Rogers and Marilyn Monroe), and went on to win his only starring role as Gus Jennings, Richard Widmark’s brattish son in Robert Parrish’s My Pal Gus (1952), which won him a Critic’s Award.
After Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, he co-starred in Henry Levin’s Mister Scoutmaster (1953) as a boy scout from the wrong side of the tracks who enjoys verbal jousts with the snobbish television star turned scoutmaster (Clifton Webb), and in Oscar Rudolph’s low-budget comedy The Rocket Man (1954), Winslow played a boy with a ray gun that compels anyone caught in its beam to tell the truth. That and later films such as Artists and Models (1955), An Affair to Remember (1957), and Rock, Pretty Baby (1956) only proved that the appeal of the cute little boy with the big voice was beginning to fade. After making his last screen appearance in Charles F Haas’s Western, Wild Heritage (1958), George Winslow retired from show business, re-adopted his birth name and vanished into anonymity.
After leaving school, he moved to Oregon, where he attended Lewis & Clark College. He served in the Navy during the Vietnam war, then returned to California, where he worked for the US postal service in Sonoma County until his retirement .
He never married, but shared his home with approximately 25 cats.
Debbie Reynolds was born in El Paso, Texas in 1932. Her family moved to California and she began her show business career as a teenager. Her first film was “June Bride” in 1948. She became a very popular MGM contract player during the 1950’s and scored a big success with “Singing In the Rain” with Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor. She went on to make “Tammy and the Batchelor” in 1957, “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” in 1964 among many others. She is the mother of Carrie Fisher from her marriage to Eddie Fisher. She died in December 2016, just a day after the death of her daughter actress Carrie Fisher.
“Guardian” obituary:
When Debbie Reynolds, wearing a skimpy pink flapper’s dress, burst out of an enormous cake at a Hollywood party in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), she simultaneously burst into screen stardom. In fact, it was the sixth film appearance of Reynolds, who has died aged 84, but her first starring role. The casting of the inexperienced 19-year-old was a risk taken by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, the co-directors of the classic MGM musical about the early days of talkies. The gamble paid off, but not without some sweat and strain.
“There were times when Debbie was more interested in playing the French horn somewhere in the San Fernando Valley or attending a Girl Scout meeting,” Kelly recalled. “She didn’t realise she was a movie star all of a sudden.” Reynolds herself admitted later: “I was so confused. It seemed dumb to me … reporting to the studio at 6am, six days a week and shooting till midnight. I didn’t know anything about show business. “I learned a lot from Gene,” she added. “He is a perfectionist and a disciplinarian – the most exacting director I’ve ever worked for … Every so often, he would yell at me and make me cry. But it took a lot of patience for him to work with someone who had never danced before. It’s amazing that I could keep up with him and Donald O’Connor. This little girl from Burbank sure had a lot of spirit.”
Daughter of Maxene (nee Harmon) and Ray Reynolds, she was born Mary Frances Reynolds in El Paso, Texas. Her father was a railroad mechanic and carpenter, who lost his job at the height of the Great Depression. After living from hand to mouth for a while, the family moved to Burbank, California when her father got a job with the Southern Pacific railroad. While at high school, Reynolds entered and won the Miss Burbank beauty contest. One of the requirements was “talent”, which she fulfilled by lip-syncing to a record of Betty Hutton singing I’m a Square in the Social Circle, which earned her a Warner Bros contract. (It was Jack Warner who gave her the name of Debbie.) But after a bit part in the Bette Davis comedy June Bride (1948), and playing June Haver’s bubbly young sister in The Daughter of Rosie O’Grady (1950), she took up a contract with MGM, where she flourished, on and off, throughout the 50s and early 60s.
Prior to Singin’ in the Rain, Reynolds was noticed, in what amounted to a cameo, lip-syncing I Wanna Be Loved By You to the singer Helen Kane’s voice in Three Little Words (1950). In Two Weeks with Love (1950), as a younger sister again, this time Jane Powell’s, the cute 5 ft 2in Reynolds stopped the show with the 6ft 3in Carleton Carpenter in two numbers: Abba Dabba Honeymoon and Row, Row, Row, with her nifty tap dancing belying her statements of never having danced before Singin’ in the Rain.
Reynolds’s lively opening Charleston number in her breakthrough film has her singing and dancing All I Do Is Dream of You with a dozen other chorus girls; she keeps up brilliantly with Kelly and O’Connor in the cheery matinal greeting Good Mornin’, danced and sung around a living room – even though during some of the more challenging steps, she stands by and lets the two men dance around her – and she is touching in the lyrical duet You Were Meant For Me with Kelly, who switches on coloured lights and a gentle wind machine on a sound stage to create a make-believe atmosphere.
In the plot, a silent screen star, Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen, unforgettable), has a risibly squeaky voice for sound movies and, unknown to the public, is dubbed by Kathy Selden (Reynolds). In reality, however, Debbie’s singing voice was dubbed by the uncredited Betty Noyes, and Hagen herself provided the speaking voice for Debbie, dubbing her on screen because Reynolds was then handicapped by what Donen called “that terrible western noise”.
An effervescent Reynolds went on to star in a series of charming youthful musicals, this time using her own pleasant singing voice. I Love Melvin (1953) was one of the best, with Reynolds paired again with O’Connor. The film opens with A Lady Loves, a musical dream sequence in which Debbie sees herself as a big movie star courted by Robert Taylor. This gives her a chance to be classy, in a tongue-in-cheek manner. Later she features in a witty acrobatic number entitled Saturday Afternoon Before the Game in which she is dressed as a ball being tossed around by a football team.
There followed The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, Give a Girl a Break (both 1953), Susan Slept Here, Athena (both 1954), Hit the Deck and The Tender Trap (both 1955). In the latter, a romantic comedy, Frank Sinatra is a confirmed bachelor and Reynolds is determined to trap him into marriage. In the same year, 23-year-old Reynolds married the 27-year-old crooner Eddie Fisher. They became the darlings of the fan magazines, and co-starred in Bundle of Joy (1956), a feeble musical remake of the 1939 Ginger Rogers-David Niven comedy, which capitalised on their personalities as a happy young couple and the rumours of her pregnancy. (Reynolds gave birth to a daughter, Carrie, in October 1956.)
Meanwhile with the film musical in a moribund state, Reynolds showed that she could get by in straight acting roles, the first proof being in The Catered Affair (1956), a slice of Hollywood realism, with Reynolds as the daughter of working-class parents (Bette Davis and Ernest Borgnine). This failed at the box office, unlike Tammy and the Bachelor (1957), which was one of Reynolds’s greatest successes, the theme song of which (“I hear the cottonwoods whisp’rin’ above, Tammy! Tammy! Tammy’s in love!”) remained high in the hit parade for months. This entertaining piece of whimsy gave Reynolds, as a backwoods girl in love with a wealthy man (Leslie Nielsen), what was an archetypal role – a naive girl thrust into a sophisticated world … and triumphing.
In 1957, Eddie and Debbie were best man and matron of honour at the wedding in Acapulco of Fisher’s lifelong friend the impresario Mike Todd to Elizabeth Taylor. A little over a year later, Todd was killed in a plane crash, and Taylor sought solace in Fisher’s arms, causing a huge Hollywood scandal. Taylor, who had been cast as the Grieving Widow, now found herself in the role of the Vamp, while Reynolds was widely and sympathetically portrayed as the Wronged Woman. However, the outraged moralistic public was unaware that the Fisher-Reynolds marriage was already in tatters, although they continued to play America’s sweethearts in public, mainly because Debbie was pregnant with their son Todd (named after Mike) and they were worried that divorce would damage their popularity ratings. But divorce was inevitable and, on 12 May 1959, Taylor, who had converted to Judaism when she married Todd, married Fisher at a synagogue in Las Vegas.
Despite being the divorced mother of two small children, Reynolds was never more active. In 1959, she was among the top 10 Hollywood box-office stars and appeared four movies that year: The Mating Game, Say One for Me, The Gazebo and It Started With a Kiss. None were world-beaters, but they got by on her effortless charm.
In November 1960, Reynolds married the millionaire shoe-store magnate Harry Karl, and pursued her career with added vigour, though her roles hardly varied, whether she was playing Fred Astaire’s nubile daughter in The Pleasure of His Company or a feisty young widow with two children in The Second Time Around (both 1961) or a pioneer woman in the sprawling Cinerama western How the West Was Won (1962), in which she is the only character who makes it through from the first reel to the last, ageing from 16 to 90.
In The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964), for which she was Oscar-nominated, Reynolds throws herself around energetically in the title role of the backwoods girl (shades of Tammy, but with added robustness) who enters high society and survives the Titanic, displaying everything she had learned from past musicals, especially in the dance numbers Belly Up to the Bar, Boys and I Ain’t Down Yet.
After playing a man resurrected as a woman in the tiresome Goodbye Charlie (1964), and the title role in The Singing Nun (1966), the mawkish biopic of the guitar-strumming Belgian nun who composed the hit song Dominique, she finally managed to bid farewell to her ingenue “tomboy” persona and portray a mature adult in Divorce American Style (1967). A rare Hollywood comedy with teeth, it cast Reynolds and Dick Van Dyke against type as a squabbling couple, who utter not a word as they prepare for bed in the best sequence. “That was a really hard part to get,” Reynolds commented. “The producer didn’t want me. He didn’t think I could play an ordinary married woman. I think he thought I had to be all ‘diva’d up’ and in a musical.”
When Reynolds, now in her mid-30s, saw her film career gradually slowing to a virtual halt, she reinvented herself as a cabaret performer, appearing most frequently on stage in Las Vegas. Reynolds also shifted her attention to US television starting with 18 episodes of The Debbie Reynolds Show (1969-70), a sitcom resembling I Love Lucy, in which she played a suburban housewife with ambitions to become a newspaper reporter. She continued to appear regularly on TV for the next four decades. What’s the Matter With Helen? (1971), a campy murder tale set in 1930s Hollywood in which Reynolds and Shelley Winters run a school for budding Shirley Temples, would be her last feature film for 20 years.
By the early 1970s, her marriage to Karl was heading for the rocks, mainly because of his infidelities but also because he had gambled away both their fortunes. Luckily, Reynolds was still bankable and, immediately after her divorce in 1973, she made her Broadway debut in a revival of the 1919 musical hit Irene. The show, which ran for 18 months, gained Reynolds a Tony nomination, and was the first of several stage musicals she would appear in over the years: Annie Get Your Gun, The Unsinkable Molly Brown and Woman of the Year among them.Reynolds returned to the big screen in the 90s, where she showed that she had lost none of her comic timing playing a number of sweet-voiced monster mums, having maintained her doll-like looks. These included Albert Brooks’s Mother (1996), her first leading film role for 27 years, In & Out (1997) and Zack and Reba (1998), as well as appearing in 10 episodes of Will and Grace on TV, portraying Grace’s mother, a would-be star whose propensity for breaking out into show tunes and impressions dismays her daughter. Reynolds was also known as Princess Leia’s mother, after Carrie Fisher found fame in the Star Wars movies Aside from performing, Reynolds had many other interests. In 1991, she bought a hotel and casino in Las Vegas, where she displayed part of her extensive collection of vintage Hollywood props, sets and costumes. But after her marriage to the real-estate developer Richard Hamlett ended in 1996, she was forced to declare bankruptcy the following year. She later reopened her museum in Hollywood. Reynolds was also an indefatigable fund-raiser for The Thalians (a charitable organisation that provides mental health services from pediatrics to geriatrics in Los Angeles).
Carrie Fisher died the day before her mother, after a suspected heart attack on a flight from London to Los Angeles. Reynolds is survived by her son, Todd.
Debbie Reynolds (Mary Frances Reynolds), actor and singer, born 1 April 1932; died 28 December 2016
TCM Overview:
Entertainer Debbie Reynolds embodied the cheerful bounce and youthful innocence of the post World War II era, buoying the genre’s goodnatured hokum with her sincere charm and energy. One of a long line of girls-next-door like Doris Day and June Allyson, Reynolds was never as sultry as Day could be, and was more of a showbiz cheerleader and less of a tomboy than either. In her most successful films like “Tammy and the Bachelor” (1957) and “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952), she was often cast as a sincere young adult in the throes of puppy love – never the virgin chased by rogues like Day or the placid housewife like Allyson. Her squeaky clean image came in handy when, in the biggest Hollywood scandal of the 1950s, her then-husband, crooner Eddie Fisher, left her and their two children, Carrie and Todd, for sultry screen goddess, Elizabeth Taylor. Not surprisingly, the public was more than on Reynolds’ side as the jilted wife. Once that furor died down, Reynolds was left to reinvent herself. In the late 1960s, when new sexual mores suddenly rendered the docile suburban female image a thing of the past, Reynolds shifted her focus to nightclub and theatrical stages. She was absent from the big screen for decades but settled into a comfortable presence in the American fabric by returning to film in the 1990s with funny mom roles in films like “Mother” (1996) and “In and Out” (1997) and hysterical guest appearances as the over-the-top mother of Grace Adler (Debra Messing) on “Will & Grace” (NBC, 1998-2006). Reynolds brought both self-mocking and nostalgia to these and other well-received comedic outings, using her persona as a perennially perky throwback to mine genuine laughs well into her 70s.
Mary Frances Reynolds was born in El Paso, TX, on April 1, 1932. Her railroad worker father moved the family to Southern California when Reynolds was young, and growing up in Burbank, Reynolds performed with the town symphony and was active in school plays. When she was 16, she was crowned Miss Burbank in a beauty contest and subsequently MGM and Warner Bros. courted her for a movie contract. The latter won out, but Reynolds mostly treaded water there for two years, playing only a modest part in “The Daughter of Rosie O’Grady” (1950). She moved to MGM in 1950 and made an instant impression in small roles in her first two films, impersonating 1920s “boop-oop-a-doop” singer Helen Kane in the biopic “Three Little Words” (195) and teaming with equally cute boy-next-door Carleton Carpenter in “Two Weeks with Love” (1950), which included a high-speed rendition of the novelty song “Aba Daba Honeymoon” that hit No. 3 on the Billboard charts. The studio and directors Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen responded by casting her in a leading role, complete with star billing, in the brilliant musical, “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952). Her pleasant alto sold several old-time song standards and Reynolds, not a trained hoofer, literally danced her feet raw to keep up buoyantly onscreen with Kelly and Donald O’Connor. Best of all, her acting conveyed the sincerity of the aspiring neophyte that was both the role and the performer. Just like her role in “Singin’ in the Rain,” a star was born.
During her tenure at MGM, Reynolds performed primarily in musicals; none of which approached the landmark status of her first big success. The underrated “Give a Girl a Break” (1953) was full of ideas and energy, but as was typical of MGM and the studio system, “Athena” (1954) and “Hit the Deck” (1955) were too formulaic. The lively and playful comedienne overdid the teen boisterousness in “Susan Slept Here” (1954) but had a more successful foray into romantic comedy with “The Tender Trap” (1955). A standout was her most sober film of the period – one of only two or three dramas she ever acted in – “A Catered Affair” (1956), where Reynolds provided tender and quietly touching work that her sis-boom-ba roles rarely called upon. As the studio system disintegrated, Reynolds turned to freelancing, enjoying a big hit with “Tammy and the Bachelor” (1957), whose theme song, the highly sentimental but equally memorable “Tammy,” gave Reynolds a second smash hit single (five weeks at No. 1). The film also marked one of the occasional “country girl” roles which she would also play in “The Mating Game” (1958). Reynolds had begun appearing on TV by this time, and was a semi-regular on “The Eddie Fisher Show” (NBC, 1953-57), starring the popular crooner Reynolds had wed in 1955. Together, Reynolds and Fisher were second only to Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh as “America’s Sweethearts.”
The first of several unsuccessful marriages showed its sour side in 1958, when Fisher announced that he was leaving Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor, the widow of his recently deceased best friend, producer Mike Todd, who had perished in a plane crash. The attendant public sympathy for Reynolds – now a single mother of two – meshed well with her wholesome screen persona, which had fully matured by the time of “This Happy Feeling” (1958). At the time of the scandal of all scandals, Reynolds ranked as one of the top ten box office stars in both 1959 and 1960. In 1962, she joined the all-star cast of the Oscar-nominated epic “How the West Was Won” and two years later starred in the screen adaptation of the aptly titled musical, “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” (1964), one of her best vehicles, and one which earned her a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Raising her two children, future director Todd Fisher and future actress and author Carrie Fisher, kept Reynolds busy; her screen career, which relied to some extent on her youthful, girlish qualities, slowly began to decline. Worse, the new frankness in films began to date her image. When she finally did try a Doris Day-style sex farce with “Divorce American Style” (1967) and “How Sweet It Is” (1968), even that vogue was waning. A few TV spots and a first try at a series, “The Debbie Reynolds Show/Debbie” (NBC, 1969-1970) did little to stem the tide. Her last feature acting for over 20 years, though, was striking. “What’s the Matter with Helen?” (1971), a late entry in the often unpleasant “aging female star” horror subgenre, was redeemed by a very offbeat story, Curtis Harrington’s directorial flair, and fine acting.
Effectively out of films before age 40, Reynolds enjoyed smash success on Broadway with a revival of the old musical chestnut “Irene” in 1973, played the London Palladium in a 1975 revue, and polished to a lively sparkle the nightclub talent she had first tested earlier in her career. Live performing kept Reynolds busiest for the next 20 years, though she occasionally surfaced in a the recurring role of the title character’s acerbic mother on the sitcom “Alice” (CBS, 1976-1985) and did likewise on “Jennifer Slept Here” (NBC, 1983-84). She tried her hand at helming another series with the unsuccessful “Aloha Paradise” (ABC, 1981), a “Fantasy Island/Love Boat” rip-off with Reynolds as a female Ricardo Montalban, and enjoyed a feisty role as a woman cop teamed with her son in the TV movie, “Sadie and Son” (CBS, 1987). She also basked in the boom of nostalgia for her studio heyday when she purchased a Las Vegas hotel and casino and added a Hollywood Movie Museum packed with the memorabilia she had been collecting for decades. The largest collection of its kind in the world, Reynolds’ memorabilia included over 40,000 costumes including Dorothy’s ruby slippers and the white dress Marilyn Monroe wore in her infamous 1952 LIFE magazine photo spread. Ever the hard worker, Reynolds performed constantly at her own hotel’s nightclub to make the enterprise fly, and her love of the work and her finely honed presence kept her venture afloat.
After being known for decades as “the mother of Princess Leia” after daughter Carrie struck iconic status with her role in “Star Wars” (1977), Reynolds blithely withstood gossip surrounding her daughter’s 1987 novel, Postcards from the Edge when wags assumed it was actually about their actual relationship. Even Mike Nichols’ 1990 film version made the mother into something of a attention-craving gorgon. Fisher always said it was an homage to her mother, not an exact portrait of their sometimes strained relationship. The ensuing decade saw Reynolds own return to the big screen, first in Oliver Stone’s “Heaven and Earth” (1993). Her renaissance really began when, at her daughter’s suggestion, Albert Brooks cast Reynolds in the title role of his critically acclaimed “Mother” (1996). Reynolds received raves for her rich characterization of a sunny and loving but subtly disapproving and forbidding parent. The widespread attention she received helped pave the way for her casting as Kevin Kline’s mother in “In and Out” (1997). The following year, she starred as a magical matriarch in the Disney Channel Original Movie “Halloweentown” (1998) and went on to make regular guest appearances on the hit sitcom “Will & Grace” as Grace’s highly critical entertainer mother. She worked steadily as a voice actor in family fare, including “The Rugrats” (Nickelodeon, 1991-2004) and “Kim Possible” (Disney Channel, 2002-07) and well past the normal retirement age, Reynolds maintained a busy stage schedule as a song and dance gal on the casino and resort circuit.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
