Harve Presnell obituary in “The Guardian” in 2009.
“Guardian” obituary:
The Hollywood musical has produced several powerful, handsome baritones, the best of them being Nelson Eddy, Howard Keel and Harve Presnell. Unfortunately, Presnell, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 75, came into the film musical when it was in a rather moribund state. However, he managed to sustain a singing career in stage musicals, where his rich operatic voice could be appreciated, and later, thanks to the Coen brothers’ Fargo (1996), he had a second coming as an imposing character actor on the big screen.
The dramatic strength and beauty of his voice can best be judged in his first film, The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964), in which he played a backwoods prospector who strikes it rich. The 6ft 4in Presnell had created the role of Johnny “Leadville” Brown in Meredith Willson’s musical on Broadway four years previously, opposite Tammy Grimes in the title role of his wife, who survives the sinking of the Titanic. The film version, in which Debbie Reynolds was his buoyant partner, allowed Presnell to open up his lungs and sing I’ll Never Say No and Colorado My Home against the CinemaScope background of Black Canyon National Park in Colorado. According to the Variety critic: “Harve Presnell … makes a generally auspicious screen debut … His fine, booming voice and physical stature make him a valuable commodity for Hollywood.” This was not to be. Presnell was to make only four more feature films during the next three decades, only two of them musicals.
The Unsinkable Molly Brown, poster, Debbie Reynolds (top left), Harve Presnell (right), 1964. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
He was born in Modesto, California. After graduating from Modesto high school, he studied voice at the University of Southern California, although he first went there on a sports scholarship. After university, he performed with the Roger Wagner Chorale and can be heard as soloist on their Christmas album Joy to the World, as well as on Folk Songs of the New World and Folk Songs of the Frontier. In 1960, he recorded the baritone part in Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy.
Willson had heard Presnell singing at a concert in Berlin and immediately suggested him for the part of Johnny Brown on Broadway. The Unsinkable Molly Brown ran for more than 500 performances, with Presnell gaining glowing reviews. After the successful film adaptation, Presnell, his hair dyed blond, was in the misguided swinging 60s version of George Gershwin’s Girl Crazy, retitled When the Girls Meet the Boys (1965), but he got to sing the evergreen Embraceable You. There were no songs in The Glory Guys (1965), a Cavalry vs Indians western that focused mainly on the rivalry between Captain Tom Tryon and scout Presnell over pretty Senta Berger. The two men have a semi-comic fight on a staircase, finally learning mutual respect. Although Presnell lost the girl, his performance won the most plaudits.
Presnell’s last screen musical was Joshua Logan’s elephantine Paint Your Wagon (1969), in which he was the only true singer: his virile rendition of They Call the Wind Maria shows up the inadequate warbling of Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood and Jean Seberg. After a low-budget horror movie, Blood Bath (1975), Presnell’s film career was on hold until 1996.
In the intervening years, Presnell starred in a number of musicals, including the doomed Gone With the Wind at Drury Lane in 1972, in which he had the dubious privilege of playing Rhett Butler, and a revival of Annie Get Your Gun (1977) in San Francisco opposite Reynolds, formerly his Molly Brown. But his biggest success was as Daddy Warbucks in the long-running Annie, in which he toured from 1979 to 1981, and then took over the role on Broadway for two years. He continued to play Warbucks in Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge, which folded during its Washington tryout, and in another version of the story off-Broadway called Annie Warbucks in 1993. Presnell calculated that he played Little Orphan Annie’s millionaire benefactor more than 2,000 times.
For Presnell, 1996 was an annus mirabilis; he appeared in no less than four feature films, and three television shows, including an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. Most significant was his role as Wade Gufstason in Joel and Ethan Coen’s film Fargo. Presnell, who had a dialogue coach to teach him the Minnesotan accent, played William H Macy’s despotic father-in-law. Now bald and with a considerable girth, Presnell was a long way from the handsome young singer of the early 60s. “He actually did a ‘dancin’ in the snow’ musical number but we cut it out for length,” joked Joel Coen.
His other movies of that year were Larger Than Life, The Whole Wide World and The Chamber, in all of which he used his commanding voice playing authoritarian figures. From then on, in marked contrast to the lean years, Presnell was never short of work, whether guest starring in TV series such as Dawson’s Creek (2001) and Andy Barker P.I. (2007), or appearing as General George Marshall in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), or as a congressman in his last film, Evan Almighty (2007).
Presnell is survived by his second wife, Veeva, and six children, three from each of his marriages.
• Harve (George Harvey) Presnell, actor and singer, born 14 September 1933; died 30 June 2009
Barbara Harris was born in Evanston, Illnois in 1935. She began her career on Broadway. She had a waifish pixie appeal in her initial films. Among her relatively few film credits are “A Thousand Clowns” with Jason Robards Jnr in 1965, “Who Is Harry Kellerman And Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Thinga About Me” with Dustin Hoffman, Robert Altman’s brilliant “Nashville” and Alfred Hitchcock’s final film “Family Plot” in 1976.
TCM Overview:
This charming stage-trained comedy specialist had an intermittent but once beguiling screen career dating back to the mid-1960s. Long a critic’s darling, Harris convinces as scatterbrained characters with endearing child-like qualities. This aptitude made her, for a time, something of a thinking man’s Goldie Hawn. Harris made her film debut as social worker Sandra Markowitz (her real name) in the feature version of Herb Gardner’s play “A Thousand Clowns” (1966). Her performances often garnered far better notices than the films that framed them. Harris’ reprisal of her off-Broadway role as what VARIETY called a “nymphet chippie” in “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad” (1967) was deemed the film’s only saving grace in some circles. As a late arriving love interest of discontented rock star Dustin Hoffman in “Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?” (1971), Harris fared better than the star and received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her efforts. British culture mag TIME OUT deemed the “delightful” Harris “wasted” as the married old flame of lecherous film producer Walter Matthau in a segment of Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite” (1971), but she fared well opposite a cranky Jack Lemmon in the James Thurber-inspired “The War Between Men and Women” (1972).
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
A founding member of Chicago’s celebrated Second City Players in 1960, Harris came with them to appear in “From Second City” on the NY stage. Moving to NYC she established a positive reputation on and off-Broadway before alternating between stage and screen. Harris racked up three Tony nominations, including one for her delightful turn as the daffy heroine of “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever” (1966). She won the 1967 Best Actress in a Musical Play Tony for “The Apple Tree,” in which she played multiple roles opposite Alan Alda and Larry Blyden. Two of her most noteworthy feature credits were in memorable 70s films from divergent auteurs Robert Altman and Alfred Hitchcock: in “Nashville” (1975), Harris was Albuquerque, a housewife whose dream of becoming a country-Western singing star seemingly comes true after an unexpected tragedy; in “Family Plot” (1976), she was a phony but basically benign psychic. Hollywood was less kind for the remainder of the decade.
Harris struggled gamely in the Disney comedies “Freaky Friday” (1976) and “The North Avenue Irregulars” (1979) and won some excellent notices as the frustrated wife of a senator (Alan Alda) in “The Seduction of Joe Tynan” (1979) but by then her star had decisively fallen.
Harris all but disappeared in the 80s, surfacing briefly in Hal Ashby’s disastrous “Second-Hand Hearts” (1980), where even her performance was savaged by reviewers; a bit as Kathleen Turner’s mom in Francis Coppola’s time-traveling “Peggy Sue Got Married” (1986); and a small part as a wealthy traveler conned by a scheming Michael Caine in the comedy “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” (1988). Harris should not be confused with the young character actor of 80s film and TV with the same name.
James Brolin was born in 1940 in Los Angeles. His television debut came in 1961 in an episode of “Bus Stop”. In 1963 he had a small part in the James Stewart film “Take Her, She’s Mine” followed two years later by “Dear Brigitte” which starred Stewart again and Glynis Johns and Fabian. In 1969 he had significant success with the television series “Marcus Welby M.D.” which ran until 1976 and also starred Robert Young. He then starred in some big budget films incuding “Gable and Lombard” with Jill Clayburgh in 1976, “Capricorn One” and “The Amityville Horror” in 1979. He had another television success with “Hotel” from 1983 until 1988. James Brolin had a recurring role in “The West Wing”. He is the father of actor Josh Brolin and husband of Barbra Streisand. Interview with “Huffington Post” here.
“Quinlan’s Movie Stars”: Tall, dark-haired (now gray) American leading man reminscent of Clint Walker. He had trouble getting decent roles in Hollywood until television fame as a junior partner in “Marcus Welby”. His cinema portrait of Clark Gable was not a success and after a couple of box-office hits in the late 1970s he was relegated to tough heroes of minor action films.
TCM Overview:
As the son of James Brolin, stepson of Barbra Streisand and husband of Diane Lane, actor Josh Brolin forged his career in the shadow of three formidable talents. In fact, ever since his debut in “The Goonies” (1985), Brolin languished for years in roles that were well below his station. Adding to his self-determined persona was an ability to get into occasional trouble , whether it was being mauled by a mountain lion, crashing his motorcycle weeks before shooting a major film, or making headlines with an arrest for a domestic dispute Brolin had a knack for generating publicity in interesting ways. Meanwhile, he worked steadily throughout his career, though he suffered a string of mediocre movies that included “The Road Killers” (1994), “The Mod Squad” (1999) and “Hollow Man” (2000). But he began to step away from such lowbrow fare with a turn in Woody Allen’s serio-comedy “Melinda and Melinda” (2005) and eventually broke free with his acclaimed performance in the Oscar-winning “No Country for Old Men” (2007). He played a crooked cop in “American Gangster” (2007), the bumbling President of the United States in “W.” (2008), and San Francisco politician and assassin Dan White in “Milk” (2008). Though he stumbled a bit as the lead in “Jonah Hex” (2010), Brolin rebounded with “True Grit” (2010), proving that his transformation into a highly sought after leading man was no fluke.
“Hollywood, in the fallow 60s, was suddenly blessed with a group of talented ladies in their middle years, actresses who literally bridged the gap between the new ingenues and the older stars like Davis and Hepburn. Most of them had made their reputations in the theatre and were just as experienced in TV – Geraldine page, Julie Harris, Kim Stanley(though the last has made only a few films because she dislikes the medium). But not all: Anne Bancroft like Patricia Neal, was a Hollywood failure who went aay and returned a star” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International years”. (1972) “A blueprint example of a terrific actress who was practically discarded by the studio system. Anne Bancroft managed to pull a complete about face , rising above the doldrums of her early career to become one of the most respected performers in the business” – Barry Monush in “The Encyclopedia of Hollywood Film Actors” (2003).
Anne Bancroft was born in 1931 in New York City. She made her film debut in “Don’t Bother to Knock” with Richard Widmark and Marilyn Monroe. In the 1950’s she starred in a few glamour parts and after some years returned to Broadway. She won huge acclaim for her performance as Annie Sullivan in “The Miracle Worker”. She repeated the role on film in 1962 and won an Academy Award. She resumed her film career and starred in “The Pumpkin Eater”, ” 7 Women”, “The Graduate” and “To Be or Not to Be” with her husband Mel Brooks. Anne Bancroft died in 2005.
Brian Baxter’s “Guardian” obituary:
After a youthful flirtation with television, a near-disastrous relationship with Hollywood and a failed marriage, the actor Anne Bancroft, who has died aged 73, fled the west coast and returned home to New York. It was 1959 and in her own words “life was a shambles … I was terribly immature. I was going steadily downhill in terms of self-respect and dignity”. She needed to reclaim her life and career.
Happily, it worked and within three years she had won Tonys for her Broadway roles in Two for the Seesaw and as Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker. When the latter was transferred to the screen by its author William Gibson and director Arthur Penn, she again took the demanding role of Helen Keller’s teacher, winning the best actress Oscar in 1963.
This success relaunched her career, leading to prestige roles in the theatre including Mother Courage, Sister Jeanne in The Devils and Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes. There were film roles too, in The Pumpkin Eater (1964) and, most famously, as the seductive Mrs Robinson in the modish and popular The Graduate (1967). This movie, in which Dustin Hoffman made his screen debut, became so closely associated with Bancroft as a 1960s archetype that it somewhat obscured her subsequent career.
She was also famously married to the Jewish actor-director Mel Brooks whose mother, told that he was going to marry an Italian-American Catholic, replied “bring the girl over, I’ll be in the kitchen – with my head in the oven”. Despite these and other comments about a mis-match, the marriage proved one of the most stable in show business. It was also creative, and Brooks served as executive producer on movies in which Bancroft excelled, including The Elephant Man (1980) and the two-hander 84 Charing Cross Road (1986). These and other films made for his own company redeemed his often frantic comedies, three of which involved Bancroft. In Silent Movie (1976) she – among other stars – glamorously played herself as a highlight of the film. Sadly, she was less well served when co-starring opposite Brooks in his lumpen remake of the Ernst Lubitsch classic To Be or Not to Be (1983) and by her cameo appearance in his dire spoof Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995).
Bancroft was born in the Bronx to a working class family. It was the height of the depression, but even when her father became unemployed in the late 1930s, Anna was allowed tap dancing lessons, then enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Her graduation piece was seen by the actress Frances Fuller, who recommended the 18 year old for television work. Bancroft debuted as Anne Marno in The Torrents of Spring and when a popular radio show The Goldbergs transferred to television she became a member of the TV family, working steadily for two years.
Having helped a fellow actor with a screen test, it was Bancroft who got the call from 20th Century Fox offering a $20,000-a-year contract. It was to prove a mixed blessing. Under her new name Anne Bancroft she made her movie debut in Don’t Bother to Knock, made in 1952 but held up for a year. Within five years she made 15 films, as various as Demetrius and the Gladiators, a baseball movie The Kid from Left Field and Gorilla at Large (1954). There were several routine westerns, modest thrillers including Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall, plus the dismal The Girl in Black Silk Stockings (1957). By this time she admitted to over indulging in alcohol and being unhappily married to someone “who calls himself an actor but whose real occupation is playing a rich boy”. She was also in psychoanalysis.
The road back involved work with a vocal coach, regular attendance at The Actors Studio and study with Herbert Berghof. Plus three sessions a week with her therapist. Then came a triumphant return to acting, playing first opposite a difficult Henry Fonda, followed by the explosive and physically demanding role in The Miracle Worker. When the film version was announced, the backers wanted either Elizabeth Taylor or Audrey Hepburn, but Penn refused and budgeted it at only $500,000, shooting in New Jersey. At 31 Bancroft became an Oscar winner and in the words of one critic, “she left Hollywood a failure and returned a star”.
Her subsequent career was far from conventional. Her intelligence and fierce independence ensured that she never conformed to movie stardom. Working at her own pace and inclination, she turned down Funny Girl, which subsequently made Barbra Streisand famous. She played Mother Courage on stage and waited two years for a new film that was shot in Britain.
Harold Pinter adapted the Pumpkin Eater from Penelope Mortimer’s novel depicting the disintegration of a marriage. The rather cold, over-stylised direction by Jack Clayton could not obscure the riveting central performances by James Mason and Bancroft. Her harrowing portrayal as the distressed wife won her the 1964 best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival, a Bafta film award and the second of her five Oscar nominations.
In 1966 she took the lead in John Ford’s last movie, 7 Women. It was a curiosity that failed commercially. The same fate did not await The Graduate. The rapacious Mrs Robinson gained her another Oscar nomination and the third of her seven Bafta nominations as best actress.
It was also a commercial success and she and director Mike Nichols worked together again on The Little Foxes. Then Bancroft, who had married Brooks in 1964, took extended time off from work, giving birth to their son Maximilian in 1968.
She returned to the screen in 1972, playing Jenny Churchill in Young Winston, prompting Richard Attenborough to describe her as “the greatest actress of her generation”. Two years later she starred in the Neil Simon comedy, The Prisoner of Second Avenue – a welcome return to comedy where she was perfectly cast opposite the frenetic Jack Lemmon.
Her seesaw career took a downturn with the dull The Hindenburg (1975), in which she played a Countess, and hit rock bottom with the garish revenge thriller Lipstick (1976). She was, more happily, herself in Silent Movie and as Mary Magdalene in Franco Zeffirelli’s mini-series Jesus of Nazareth. Her luck improved when Audrey Hepburn declined the role of the prima ballerina in The Turning Point (1977), giving Bancroft a substantial role as the bitchy rival to Shirley Maclaine.
After another long career gap, she returned to the screen with Fatso (1980), which she also wrote and directed. It was little shown and she was grateful for the tellingly elegant role of Mrs Kendal in The Elephant Man. This was her second film with Anthony Hopkins and they were reunited – albeit from opposite sides of the Atlantic – for the rather less distinguished 84 Charing Cross Road (1986).
She was busy on the screen during the 1980s, working little in the theatre after a disappointing response to Golda, another play by William Gibson. There were substantial roles in Garbo Talks (1984) and as the Mother Superior in Agnes of God (1985). She was an altogether different Ma in Torch Song Trilogy (1988), where an over-the -top performance was a mixed blessing in a high camp version of a theatrical success.
There was a touch of Mrs Robinson in her flirtatious role in the comedy You’re a Fool Bert Rigby and in her mellower Kate Jerome in the television version of Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound (1991). Throughout that decade she broke her tradition of long absences between movie roles, notching up a couple of appearances – often in character parts – each year. Amidst Hollywood’s welter of juvenile, special effects-led films her warmth, intelligence and stylish presence became somewhat sidelined. She took the title role in the TV drama Mrs Cage and had a fun time in the oddball comedy Honeymoon in Vegas (both 1992). There were fraught moments in the thrillers Malice and a remake of Luc Besson’s Nikita re-titled Assassin. In this she played the role originally created by Jeanne Moreau, an actress of similar sophistication. She was wasted as a doctor in Mr Jones, which director Mike Figgis disowned after studio interference.
There were further television dramas, The Mother (1994), Homecoming (1996) and most potent of all Deep in My Heart (1999) for which she received an Emmy as best supporting actress. There was a nonsensical desire on the part of directors to cast her years above her attractive self: she played a centenarian in The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and a great aunt in the worthily dull How to Make an American Quilt.
Among her gallery of elderly grotesques none was more triumphant than the terrifying Mrs Dinsmoor in the stylish updating of Great Expectation (1998). There were few such lush movies to be had, but she made a feisty, inherently corrupt senator in GI Jane and was ideally cast voicing the Queen in the animated hit Antz.
There were also documentaries to narrate and the inevitable personal appearances saluting husband Brooks and co-star Dustin Hoffman or indeed the whole history of American cinema in the AFI’s 100 Years, 100 Movies.
Bancroft could always be relied on to add a touch of class to movies – especially if they had literary, religious or social themes and she kept busy with Up at the Villa, the factually-based Haven and Edward Norton’s directorial debut Keeping the Faith. Some lighter relief came with the smart comedy Heartbreakers (2001), where she was played dual roles in a story about mother and daughter con artists who relieve widowers of their wealth. She played the third side of the triangle, belatedly revealed as one of the tricksters.
It was a reminder of her comedic talent – something that had been rewarded by a lifetime achievement in the 1996 American Comedy Awards, but which Hollywood had not sufficiently recognised during her long career. Perhaps one comedian in the Bancroft-Brooks household was considered enough.
· Anne Bancroft, actor, born Anna Marina Louisa Italiano, September 17 1931; died June 6 2005
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
It was thought that Anna Kashfi was from India but she was in fact born Joan O’Callaghan in 1934 in Cardiff in Wales. Her entire career was in movies and television shows in Hollywood. Her major films were “The Mountain” in 1955 with Spence Tracy and Robert Wagner, “Cowboy” with Jack Lemmon and Glenn Ford and “Battle Hymn” with Rock Hudson and Martha Hyer. Her career seemed to stall after her short lived marriage to Marlon Brando. She died in 2015 at tyhe age of 80.
Her obituary in the ” Telegraph”:
Anna Kashfi, who has died aged 80, was an actress of exotic appearance who was the first wife of Marlon Brando, and the mother of his first child, Christian; she played “foreigners” in several Hollywood films of the 1950s. Her origins were never clarified beyond doubt: when she was thrust into the spotlight there were suggestions that she had invented her Indian ancestry, with one newspaper offering the theory that she browned her skin by bathing in coffee. She insisted that she was Indian, the daughter of Devi Kashfi, an architect, and a woman called Selma Ghose. But the day after she married Marlon Brando in late 1957 – she wore a sari for the ceremony – one William O’Callaghan from Cardiff and his wife Phoebe emerged claiming to be her parents. Her real name, they said, was not Anna Kashfi but Joan O’Callaghan. The truth may be that, as the actress explained in her memoirs, she was the result of an “unregistered alliance” and was subsequently adopted by O’Callaghan.
Her films included, most notably, her debut The Mountain (1956), a thriller starring Spencer Tracy in which she played a Hindu woman who survives an aeroplane crash in the French Alps. Edward Dmytryk, the director, told reporters at the time that he was aware of Anna Kashfi’s “real” name, but assumed she was Anglo-Indian. It was during production that she met Marlon Brando in the Paramount studio commissary. Recalling the meeting years later, the actress wrote: “The face, with an incipient heaviness about the jawline, reflected a wistfulness, an open sensuality, and an ineffable indifference.” She was pregnant by the time she married the star and they were divorced within two years. Their relationship had been violent and tempestuous while they were together – Anna Kashfi was reported to have thrown a tricycle at Brando – and it remained difficult. For 15 years a painful dispute rumbled on over custody of their son Christian, whom Anna Kashfi preferred to call by his second name Devi. During legal proceedings it was claimed that she had been emotionally unstable and at times reliant on alcohol and barbiturates. Christian was also troubled: he dropped out of school, failed to make a career out of acting, and was sent to prison after shooting dead the boyfriend of his half-sister Cheyenne. He died at the age of 49 of pneumonia.
Anna Kashfi was born Joan O’Callaghan on September 30 1934 in Darjeeling, where her father was a traffic superintendent on Indian state railways; she was brought up there until she was 13, when the family moved to Cardiff, where William O’Callaghan worked in a factory producing steel. Anna attended St Joseph’s Convent School then the Cardiff School of Art. Early on she had jobs in a butcher’s shop in the city and in an ice cream parlour at Porthcawl. She soon started modelling and in 1952 was spotted by an MGM talent scout. Her flourishing as an actress was brief. After The Mountain she played a Korean woman in Battle Hymn (1957), opposite Rock Hudson as a Christian minister turned fighter pilot; then the daughter of an over-protective Mexican cattle baron whom Jack Lemmon has fallen for in Cowboy (1958); the next year she had a small part in Night of the Quarter Moon. Anna Kashfi published a “tell-all” memoir, Brando for Breakfast, in 1979.
Latterly she lived in California and then in Washington state. In 1974 she married James Hannaford, a salesman. He died in 1986.
The above “Telegraph” obituary can also be accessed online here.
IMDB mini biography:
Anna Kashfi has appeared in a number of films including The Mountain (1956) (withSpencer Tracy) and Battle Hymn (1957) (with Rock Hudson) but is best known for beingMarlon Brando‘s first wife. Kashfi is often thought of as being Indian but is, in fact, the daughter of a Welsh factory worker, William Callaghan, and simply reinvented herself to increase her screen appeal. She met Brando in 1955 in the Paramount commissary and after an on-off relationship (mainly due to Brando’s relentless womanizing) married him in 1957. (Brando claimed that he married her only because she had become pregnant.) She gave birth in May 1958 to their son, Christian, who became notorious in 1990 for shooting dead Dag Drollet, a crime that earned him a ten-year jail sentence. Kashfi divorced Brando in 1959.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Charles Lee < charleslee@tinyworld.co.uk
Barry Sullivan has starred in over 100 movies in a wide variety of film genre – Westerns, film noir, war movies and melodramas. He was born in 1912 in New York City. He was a very good football player and came into film in 1936 with a short “Strike You’r Out”. His major films include “Suspense” in 1946. “The Gangster”,”Bad Men of Tombstone”, “The Great Gatsby” and “Strategic Air Command”. Barry Sullivan died in 1994.
David Shipman’s “Independent” obituary of Barry Sullivan:
Patrick Barry (Barry Sullivan), actor: born New York City 29 August 1912; married three times (one son, two daughters); died Los Angeles 6 June 1994.
BARRY SULLIVAN redefined the term ‘leading man’, being neither a genuine star, although billed above the title, nor a character actor, since he was seldom called upon to play anyone but himself – nice and reliable, the old standby. There were many others of his generation competing for the same roles – Wendell Corey, with his somewhat charming gloom, the cynical but easygoing Van Heflin, the acquiescent but dangerous Robert Ryan.
Many cinemagoers found the Sullivans and Ryans more rewarding than the bona fide box-office champs but, like them, they could be counted upon when it came to facing up to the great ladies of the screen. Ryan, Corey and Heflin all gave Barbara Stanwyck a run for her money, but Sullivan did no more than hold his own with her. When he threatens her in The Maverick Queen (1956) she taunts him, ‘I did what I had to do to get to the top,’ and he’s soon eating out of her hand, the two of them confronting Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Married to her in Jeopardy (1953), he spends the film trapped under a derelict jetty as the tide rises, while she grapples with some weirdos who would rather occupy themselves menacing her.
When faced with Stanwyck’s two contemporaries who also specialised in playing strong, rampaging women – Bette Davis and Joan Crawford – Sullivan stood his ground. Lesser men would have buckled under. Sullivan’s first real starring role was as a corporation attorney, the husband trying to dump Davis in Payment on Demand (1951): she fights back, but even before she realises that it is all her doing we know he is never going to win. Married to Crawford (‘Any man’s my man because I want him to be’) in Queen Bee (1955), he is not the only member of the cast who wants to murder her; but her death at the end is not entirely his fault.
Sullivan was the husband of the equally splendiferous Loretta Young in Cause for Alarm (1950), his strongest study in villainy, so insanely jealous of her that he sets her up for a murder rap; and he was an ambitious Hollywood director, wanting to make Lana Turner’s next movie, in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).
There were quieter times: psychoanalysing Ginger Rogers in Lady in the Dark (1944), his third feature after seven years of supporting roles on the Broadway stage; engaged to his factory-owner boss, played by Young, in And Now Tomorrow; engaged again in a remake of the old farce Getting Gertie’s Garter (1945), this time to Marie McDonald, who wants that eponymous article back before he finds out about it; The Great Gatsby (1949), probably the best (the first is lost) of the three film versions, as Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband; and A Life of her Own (1950), as a playboy ill-treating Ann Dvorak, the pathetic friend of the heroine, played by Turner.
This last was made for MGM, to whom Sullivan had moved after five years with Paramount; but MGM weren’t quite certain what to do with him either. The Three Guys Named Mike (1951) were Van Johnson, Howard Keel and Sullivan, all competing for Jane Wyman. Although it is Keel’s film by sheer dint of personality, it is obvious that Johnson will get Wyman. Sullivan, as an advertising executive, got nowhere with the film or the girl, but MGM looked more kindly upon him after watching him trade insults with Davis in Payment on Demand, on loan to RKO. He returned to RKO to support another of the screen’s great ladies, Claudette Colbert, in Texas Lady (1955) – and support in every sense, as fellow-gambler, lover and henchman. Westerns then were one of the last refuges of fading stars, and Sullivan made several in the late Fifties, including another with Stanwyck, Forty Guns (1957).
Sullivan’s debut on television (in 1955) was prestigious, when he and Lloyd Nolan repeated their Broadway performances in the Pulitzer prize-winning The ‘Caine’ Mutiny Court Martial, adapted by Herman Wouk from his own best- selling novel. He appeared regularly on the small screen, including several series, A Man Called X (1955-56), Harbourmaster (1957), The Tall Man (1960-61) and The Road West (1966). He continued to be seen in movies for the cinema, looking increasingly distinguished, even as most of them were going in the other direction. He invariably played diplomats, politicians or senior officers – always with discretion and candour, but often with too little screen time to make his presence felt. One exception was Earthquake (1974), in which he plays the head of the seismological institute who refuses to believe the warnings of his assistant.
His last considerable movie role was in 1961, with another of the leading female stars of that period, Olivia de Havilland, in The Light in the Piazza. She played the mother of Yvette Mimieux, whom she was hoping to marry to a wealthy young Italian (George Hamilton). Sullivan played her husband, breezing into the film halfway through, determined that they shouldn’t leave their hotel room until they had enjoyed themselves. It was rare for movies to imply that hotel rooms were used for such purposes; and unique to suggest that middle-aged people ever did such things in the first place
Kitty Kallen was born in 1921 in Philadelphia. She was one of the top vocalists during the big band era and sang with the Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey orchestras. Her biggest top ten hit in the 1950’s was “Little Things Mean A Lot”. Her films include “The Second Greatest Sex” in 1955 with George Nader and Jeanne Crain. “Wikipedia” link here.
Anna Sten was hailed as a successor to Greta Garbo. It did not happen but she was a good actress and her Hollywood films are worth checking out. She was born in the Ukraine in 1908. She made some German silent films and made a smoth transition to sound with 1931’s “Trapeze” and “The Brothers Karamazov” which were seen by the U.S. producer Samuel Goldwyn. He brought Ms Sten to Hollywood where she made 1934 “We Live Again” with Fredric March and “The Wedding Night” opposite Gary Cooper.When the movies did not prove successful at the box office, Goldwyn cancelled her contract. She continued to make films throught the 1940’s but often in supporting roles. Her husband was a very successful American producer Eugene Frenke. Anna Sten died in New York in 1993 at the age of 84.
Her “Independent” obituary:
GARBO] DIETRICH] STEN] It doesn’t have the same ring to it, but if their pre-Hollywood work is considered, Anna Sten leaves the others at the starting gate (Garbo with admittedly only two films). In Hollywood it was a different matter. Imported on the strength of the success of the other two, Sten was reasonably expected to outshine both: but she became the outstanding, the most publicised of all those who didn’t make it. ‘Goldwyn’s folly’ she was called, after he had spent over dollars 5m on failing to make her a star.
She became famous in her native Soviet Union in the lead of Boris Barnet’s near-perfect comedy The Girl with the Hatbox (1927), as a naive country girl being either misunderstood or wooed by some of Moscow’s most colourful young men. One of these was the great screen villain Vladimir Fogel, and she ran foul of him again in the grim The Yellow Ticket (1928), directed by Fedor Ozep, whom she married. Again she was the girl from the steppes, Fogel the wealthy bourgeois Muscovite whose children she was looking after, and her refusal to play footsy finds her eventually working the streets.
Of her half-dozen Russian films, this became the most renowned throughout Europe, and Ozep took her to Germany to play Grushenka in his version of Dostoevsky, Der Morder Dimitri Karamasoff (1931). It may still be the best screen transcription of that writer, with Fritz Kortner on magnificent form as Dimitri, and Sten as the trollop who causes his downfall. This was one of the screen’s cliche roles, but Sten, part Marilyn Monroe, part Nancy Carroll, seemed never to have seen any previous screen vamp – let alone studied them.
Word from Europe was that Sten could out-Garbo Garbo, so Goldwyn was mindful to have her under contract. It was not perhaps a mistake on his part to publicise Sten as the new Garbo, since such was the fate of most of the other (female) European imports – though few of these remained residents of LA for long. It was an error to announce that her grooming would be in the hands of Dietrich’s mentor Josef von Sternberg, when neither he nor the equally autocratic Goldwyn ever took kindly to any ideas but his own. It was also foolish to spend two whole years with a constant barrage of publicity emerging about ‘tests’, plus the amounts being spent to turn Sten into a Hollywood ‘personality’, and on the search to find the vehicle to launch her.
It went without saying that puritan America was titillated by this formula: Old Europe plus beauty equals sin and temptation, and it was Zola’s whore, Nana, who became Sten’s first transatlantic incarnation – though not without a record number of tribulations. The first version, directed by George Fitzmaurice, was scrapped, and it was entirely remade by Dorothy Arzner. Goldwyn booked Radio City Music Hall for two almost unprecedented weeks (King Kong was another matter) – this was 1934 – and the suspense engendered among moviegoers, which meant just about everybody, was ended: it wasn’t that Sten wasn’t any good, but that she wasn’t very good. Acting in English, she was just another arch and accented seductress; and Zola’s great original had become merely another pot-bouille of the sins available to those who frequented the boulevards.
Goldwyn quickly rallied, returning Sten to Russia for a version of Tolstoy’s Resurrection, now entitled We Live Again (1934), directed by Rouben Mamoulian. Fredric March played the Prince who lives an idyll with his peasant sweetheart and has his way with her, later, after learning the ways of the Imperial court. He repents after she has lost the baby and slipped far, far along the primrose path. This adaptation made Tolstoy irredeemably coy and was avoided by cinemagoers who had already had two chances to see Hollywood versions of this tale during the previous seven years.
Goldwyn tried again, and again with a notable director, King Vidor, The Wedding Night (1935). Sten became a Polish Connecticut peasant girl who attracts the discontented city writer Gary Cooper
Three Russian Girls, poster, from top, left, Anna Sten, Mimi Forsythe, Kathy Frye; right inset, Kent Smith, Anna Sten, 1943. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
When The Wedding Night became one of the few Cooper films to lose money Goldwyn was forced, finally, to see the writing on the wall. In letting Sten go he was relieved, at least, of the constant battles with her and her second husband, Eugene Frenke, over the publicity. Frenke took her to Britain for A Woman Alone (1936), which Ozep directed. Little was heard of it and less of Sten, till Hollywood’s enthusiasm for Russia’s war effort brought a few offers in films extolling the same. A handful of other movies followed, and in the Fifties she attempted to revive her career by studying at the Actors’ Studio. This led to the tour of Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, as Jenny, following its first presentation in New York, when Louis Armstrong’s record of ‘Mac the Knife’ did no harm at all. Sten found greater success with a new career – as a painter, exhibiting several times in New York.
She was one of cinema’s great enigmas. Most of the movies and people whom Goldwyn believed in are among the most disposable artefacts of Hollywood’s past. The exceptions – Cooper, Ronald Colman, William Wyler – worked with him under duress, for high salaries or/and brooking no interference. To read about Sten and Goldwyn or see the films she made for him is to be reminded of the inanities of an era long gone: but those of her dozen European films that I have seen might have been made yesterday.
The avove “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Ella Logan was born in 1913 in Glasgow. She made her West End debut in 1930 with the play “Darling I Love You”. In the mid 1930’s she emigrated to the U.S. and in Hollywood she made “Flying Hostess” in 1936, “52nd Street” and “The Goldwyn Follies” in 1938. During World War Two she entertained the troops in Europe and Africa. In 1947 she had a hufe success o Broadway as Sharon in “Finian’s Rainbow”. It was her final Broaway show. In the 1950’s she starred on television and inconcert and supper clubs. She died in 1969 at the age of 56. Her niece is the actress/singer Annie Ross.
Article in “The Scotsman”:
THE singer and entertainer Georgina Allan made her stage debut as a toddler, when she performed songs made famous by Sir Harry Lauder in music halls across Scotland. Briefly known as “Daisy Mars” and, by her late teens, as “Ella Logan”, this daughter of a spirit salesman and a warehouse worker was singing with London’s top dance bands, broadcasting on the BBC, and starring in West End revues. In the early 1930s she toured Europe – once apparently singing for a Cologne audience that included Hitler and several senior Nazis – before moving to the US where she is believed to have married for the first time. There she recorded with jazz greats including Benny Goodman. By the late 1930s, her exuberant swing recordings of traditional Scottish songs earned her the names “The Swinging Scots Lassie” and “The Loch Lomond Lass” when she topped the bill in nightclub revues. From 1935, she was based in Hollywood. Just before she left New York, her sister Mary Dalziel Short (May) (190169), and her family visited from Glasgow. May Allan and her husband, Jack Short, had a music hall act as The Logan Family, featuring their five children, including James Short (actor and comedian Jimmy Logan, 19282001) and Annabelle Short (the jazz singer Annie Ross, born 1930).
Article on Ella Logan on “Masterworks Broadway” website can be accessed here.
They believed that Annabelle could be the next Shirley Temple, and left the five-year-old in her aunt’s care in Hollywood, where Ella Logan was trying to forge a movie career. Between 1936 and 1938 she had minor roles in five films: Flying Hostess (1936), Top of the Town (1937), Woman Chases Man (1937), 52nd Street (1937) and The Goldwyn Follies (1938), in which she introduced two of George Gershwin’s last songs. In 1941, Ella Logan married the screenwriter and producer Fred Finkelhoffe, a marriage that raised her status in Hollywood society. After the Second World War, during which she entertained American forces in Italy and in Britain, she enjoyed her greatest triumph playing Sharon, a part written specially for her, in the original 1947 Broadway production of the musical Finian’s Rainbow.
Divorced in 1954, she was subsequently romantically linked to several well-known bachelors, including former New York City mayor William O’Dwyer. During the 1950s she worked occasionally on television. In 1955, she returned to Scotland for a high-profile run at the Glasgow Empire and, the following year, she visited Glasgow to perform in jazz legend Louis Armstrong’s show
