Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 115 of 128

Eileen Heckart

Eileen Heckart was a wonderful astringent actress with a rapier wit. She enlivened every movie in which she was featured. She was born in 1919 in Columbus, Ohio. She was in her thirties before she made her first film in 1956, “Miracle in the Rain” with Jane Wyman and Van Johnson. She can be seen to marvellous effect in “Bus Stop”, “The Bad Seed”, “Heller in Pink Tights” as the mother of Margaret O’Brien, “Up the Down Staircase”, “No Way to Treat A Lady”, “Butterflies Are Free” and her final fim “The First Wive’s Club” as the mother of Diane Keaton. She died in 2002 at the age of 82.

“Telegraph” obituary:

EILEEN HECKART, who has died aged 82, was a character actress specialising in interfering mothers, overbearing career women and villainous dames. Lanky and thin with sharp, angular features, mournful eyes and a rasping, smoky voice, Eileen Heckart was regarded as one of Broadway’s most accomplished comediennes and starred in numerous major stage productions. She also distinguished herself in films, playing Rocky Graziano’s mother Mrs Barbarella in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), Marilyn Monroe’s waitress friend Vera in Bus Stop (1956) and Mrs Baker, the domineering and overprotective mother of the blind boy (played by Edward Albert) in Butterflies Are Free (1972), a role for which she won an Academy Award as best supporting actress. On television she appeared in the 1970s as Mary Richards’s brassy Aunt Flo Meredith, the globe-trotting international correspondent in the long-running sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

She was born Anna Eileen Heckart in Columbus, Ohio, on March 29 1919, the daughter of a building contractor. Her parents divorced when she was two and she was brought up by her grandparents. From Bexley High School, Columbus, she went on to Ohio State University, where she became active in drama groups and was advised to become an actress. She also contracted whooping cough, and it was this, she later claimed, rather than her chain smoking, which gave her her rasping voice. After graduation, Eileen Heckart moved to New York with just $142 in her pocket. She worked as a clerk in McCreery’s department store, took small parts in radio commercials, called time for badminton players at up-market hotels and studied acting at the American Theatre Wing. During the 1940s, she appeared in various touring productions and made her Broadway debut in 1943 as understudy and assistant stage manager in The Voice of the Turtles. She took her first Broadway role as Nell Bromley in Hilda Crane (1950), appeared with Uta Hagen in In Any Language (1952), and won critical acclaim for her portrayal of a love-starved schoolteacher in William Inge’s The Picnic (1953).

The following year she created the role of Mrs Daigle, the drunken, grief-stricken mother of a murdered boy in the stage version of The Bad Seed. She reprised the role in the film version of 1956, gaining an Academy nomination as best supporting actress. Earlier in 1956 she had made her film debut in Miracle in the Rain, in which she played Grace Ullman, Jane Wyman’s office confidante. The same year she appeared in Somebody Up There Likes Me and in Bus Stop. On stage she played Eddie’s wife Beatrice in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, and Agnes in his A Memory of Two Mondays, both in 1955. She earned a New York Drama Critics’ Award for her performance as Aunt Lottie Lacey in William Inge’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957) and the same year appeared in Eugene O’Neill’s one-act play Before Breakfast, to mark the opening of Congress Hall in West Berlin. In 1965, she was the disapproving mother in the Broadway production of Barefoot in the Park, and in 1969 created the stage role of the domineering mother in Butterflies Are Free, before repeating it in the film version that won her her Oscar.

On television she appeared in such early series as Kraft Suspense Theater and Philco Playhouse and in the 1960s appeared in programmes such as Gunsmoke and The FBI. She won television awards for her roles in Save Me a Place at Forest Lawn and the strangely entitled The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, both in 1966. As well as her role in The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77), she joined the cast of such American television series as Out of the Blue, Trauma Center, Partners in Crime and Murder One. Among many other memorable stage roles, Eileen Heckart was particularly praised for her portrayal of Eleanor Roosevelt in a touring one-woman show, Eleanor. Her depiction of the First Lady as intelligent and even slightly sexy earned her the role as Eleanor in the 1979 television mini-series Backstairs at the White House.

Eileen Heckart retired at the age of 81 after completing a triumphant run in an off-Broadway production of The Waverly Gallery. Her portrayal of Gladys, a spirited woman stricken with Alzheimer’s disease in Kenneth Lonergan’s autobiographical play, was a harrowing and authentic account of an individual’s decline into dementia and incoherence. In 2000 she was awarded a special Tony Award for Excellence in the Theatre. Although usually cast in eccentric character parts, Eileen Heckart always longed to play mainstream roles: “Just once,” she told an interviewer in 1958, “before I get too old, I’d like to play an attractive, normal, uncomplicated woman.” After all, she protested in 1989, “I am not one bit an eccentric. I’m always on time. I know my lines. And I’ve been everything but eccentric for a whole lot of years.”

Eileen Heckart married, in 1943, John Harrison Yankee, who died in 1995. They had three sons.

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

Claudette Colbert was delightfully deft at high comedy. She made a string of very good romantic comedies through the 1930’s, 40’s and into the 50’s. She also made some strring melodramas. She was born in 1903 in France. Her parents moved to the U.S. She began her career on Broadway but was soon California bound. She won a contract with Paramount Pictures. She made her debut in the silent movie “For the Love of Mike” in 1927. Her career highlights include “It Happened One Night”, “Sign of the Cross”, “Midnight”, “Boon Town”, “Palm Beach Story””Since You Went Away” and “The Egg and I”. Her last film was “Parrish” in 1961 with Troy Donahue. She returned to acting on television in “The Two Mrs Grenvilles” with Ann-Margret in 1987 and won a Golden Globe for her performance at the age of 84. She died in 1996 in Barbados at the age of 92.

Her “Independent” obituary:

The epitome of chic sophistication, Claudette Colbert was as unique among Hollywood heroines as Dietrich or Garbo.

It is no accident, surely, that she flourished at that most European of studios, Paramount, home of Lubitsch and Chevalier, Mamoulian, Von Sternberg and Wilder. Her distinctive high-cheekboned beauty and the throaty individuality of her voice were complemented by superb comic timing and fine technical skill honed by an extensive apprenticeship in the theatre.

She could be warmly compassionate in romantic drama but was unsurpassable in sophisticated comedy. Many of her Thirties comedies with titles like I Met Him In Paris and She Married Her Boss are minor trifles elevated by her presence, and at least three of her comedies, It Happened One Night, Midnight and The Palm Beach Story are among Hollywood’s greatest ever. It is a mark of the respect in which she was held by film-makers that throughout her career sets were built and scenes directed in order to favour the left side of her face, since she was convinced that her right profile was unflattering.

After a long Hollywood career she returned with great success to the theatre, and was 82 years old when she last performed in London, starring with Rex Harrison in Frederick Lonsdale’s Aren’t We All?

Born Lily Claudette Chauchoin in Paris in 1903, she was seven when her family emigrated to New York. Though she did some acting in college, her primary interest was fashion design – later she was to become one of Hollywood’s best-dressed stars – and she was studying fashion when at 20 she so impressed the writer Anne Morrison at a party that she offered her a three-line role in her play The Wild Westcotts.

Over the next five years, she appeared in a succession of mostly short- lived shows, learning from experience and studying the actors she worked with. “Acting schools are all very well,” she said later, “but the way to learn acting is to act, observe others, learn from your betters, learn what not to do – and above, all, to keep working.” The actor Leslie Howard, with whom she had a brief relationship in 1924, encouraged her and persuaded his friend the producer Al Woods to put her under contract but, despite personally good notices, she did not get into a major hit until The Barker (1927) with Walter Huston and Norman Foster.

She and Foster, later a Hollywood actor and director, were married the following year during the play’s London run. Colbert’s first film, For the Love of Mike, made during The Barker’s Broadway run, was directed by Frank Capra but cheaply produced and provoked Colbert to state that films were “off my list permanently”. She was particularly concerned that silent cinema failed to utilise one of her major assets, her voice. The advent of talkies changed her attitude, and in 1929 she signed a Paramount contract.

Only two of her first 15 movies – The Big Pond (1930) and The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), both co-starring Maurice Chevalier – were better than mediocre, and she was grateful when Cecil B. De Mille asked her to play “the wickedest wo-man in the world”, Poppaea, wife of Nero, in The Sign of the Cross (1932). Her performance was acclaimed, while her bath in asses’ milk received immense publicity and has become a famous scene in Hollywood history.

Her career had slumped again when Columbia fortuitously offered her the role of a runaway heiress in It Happened One Night (1934) after Constance Bennett, Miriam Hopkins and Myrna Loy had turned it down. Colbert accepted the role only because it gave her the chance to work with Clark Gable, who had been forced by his studio, MGM, to do the film.

Neither star initially expected much of the low-budget comedy which won five Oscars. Colbert was in fact boarding a train for New York on the night of the ceremony when she was stopped and rushed back to accept her Best Actress award from Shirley Temple. “It did wonders for my image and my private morale,” she said later.

Two more big hits consolidated her status. She played the title role in De Mille’s lavish if largely inaccurate Cleopatra (1934), then elected to star at Universal in a trenchant study of racial intolerance, John Stahl’s Imitation of Life (1934), based on Fannie Hurst’s novel about a young widow who becomes a millionairess marketing the pancake recipe of her black friend (Louise Beavers). While the widow and her daughter move into society, the friend insists on keeping in the background, and when her light-skinned daughter, who faces exclusion and prejudice where her counterpart has privilege and opportunity, tries to pass for white and disowns her mother tragedy follows.

Colbert was now – in 1935 – named one of the top 10 money-making stars, a position she was to hold again in 1936 and 1947. Fred MacMurray had his first major role in her next film, The Gilded Lily (1935), and always credited Colbert for the help she gave him. “She was so patient with me,” he said, “and I learnt more from her about screen acting than I have ever picked up since.” (They were to make six more films together.) Charles Boyer, co-star of Colbert’s next film, Private Worlds (1935), and not yet fully conversant with the English language, would also acknowledge the support he received from the actress, who won a second Oscar nomination for her performance as a psychiatrist in this grim story of mental illness.

Colbert’s first marriage ended in 1935 while she was making Gregory LaCave’s She Married Her Boss. Her co-star Melvyn Douglas later said, “Foster seemed a nice guy, but rather on the slow and stodgy side for a dynamo of sensuality like Claudette.” The same year she married an ear, nose and throat doctor, Joel Pressman, who remained her husband until his death in 1968.

Colbert’s role in Frank Lloyd’s Under Two Flags (1936), based on Ouida’s tale of the Foreign Legion, was an unusual one for her, that of the tempestuous camp-follower “Cigarette” who sacrifices herself for love of a soldier (Ronald Colman). For the same director she starred in Maid of Salem (1937), an account of the 1692 witch-hunts in Massachusetts. (Sixteen years later the playwright Arthur Miller dealt with the same subject more effectively in The Crucible.)

Colbert never seemed entirely comfortable in period pieces, and both audiences and critics were happy when she returned to modern comedy with I Met Him In Paris and Tovarich (both 1937), in which she and Charles Boyer were impoverished Russian nobility working as maid and butler in a Parisian household.

Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), with a screenplay by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, based on a 1923 Gloria Swanson silent and directed by Ernst Lubitsch, was a disappointment. After a promising start in which Colbert meets Gary Cooper in a Riviera store where she is trying to buy pyjama bottoms while he is trying to purchase just the tops, it becomes contriv-ed and frantic rather than funny.

George Cukor’s Zaza (1939), in which Colbert sang several songs as a French music-hall star, was another failure, but preceded one of her greatest films, Midnight (1939), directed by Mitchell Leisen and brilliantly written by Brackett and Wilder. From the opening shot of Colbert discovered sleeping in a freight car wearing an evening gown and clutching her purse, this story of a stranded showgirl in Paris who gate-crashes a society soiree and gets involved in an increasingly complicated escapade when she is hired by a millionaire to lure a gigolo away from his wife, captivates with brittle wit, expert plotting and fine playing from a cast including John Barrymore and Mary Astor.

Colbert was basically miscast in John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), her first film in colour, as a farmer’s wife coping with rugged conditions and hostile Indians, and though Boom Town (1940) was one of her most popular films, due to its star-power of Gable, Colbert, Spencer Tracy and Hedy Lamarr, it was basically over-blown soap opera.

Set just after the Spanish Civil War, Leisen’s Arise My Love (1940) was the film the actress would cite as her own favourite and it has some splendidly romantic, dramatic and comic moments as Colbert, playing a reporter, pretends to be the wife of a condemned soldier of fortune (Ray Milland) to save him from a Spanish firing squad, then inevitably falls in love with him. Brackett and Wilder’s screenplay tried to keep pace with changing events in Europe (the story ends after the invasion of France) which resulted in some uneasy shifts of mood in an otherwise impressive work.

Better still was Henry King’s warmly charming piece of Americana Remember The Day (1941), in which Colbert gave a glowing performance as a school teacher who while visiting a now-famous former pupil recalls the past and her sweetheart who was killed in the First World War.

Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story (1942) is one of the screen’s greatest screwball comedies and contains the sequence Colbert later cited as her favourite comic scene. Having left her husband to find a millionaire to finance his inventions, she is climbing into a train’s upper berth when she steps on the face and glasses of a rich passenger (Rudy Vallee).

During the Second World War Colbert’s husband, Joel Pressman, became a navy lieutenant and she spent much time selling war bonds and working for the war effort. Two of her major films were effective wartime propaganda: So Proudly We Hail (1943), a tribute to the nurses in Bataan – though Colbert did not get along with her co-stars Paulette Goddard and Veronica Lake – and Since You Went Away (1944), the producer David O. Selznick’s ambitious three-hour tribute to the families at home.

Colbert considered hard before taking the role of the mother to two teenage girls, but it became one of her finest, most deeply felt performances, representing the women left to raise families while their husbands are at war. In one remarkably touching scene Colbert, who has taken a job at a munitions factory, converses with a refugee, now a naturalised American (Alla Nazimova). The director John Cromwell called Colbert “a great star at the height of her powers” and she received her third Academy Award nomination (losing to Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight).

This was to be the last occasion when a truly great performance and great film were to come together in her career – she unfortunately turned down Leisen’s offer to star in To Each His Own, feeling that its story of unwed motherhood was old-hat – Olivia de Havilland won an Oscar for the role. Later she was to withdraw from Capra’s State of the Union when he refused to meet her contractual demands that she finish work by 5pm each day, and lost the role of Margo Channing in All About Eve because of a back injury, a stroke of bad luck that she lamented for the rest of her career.

Instead she appeared in some mild comedies (Practically Yours, 1944, Without Reservations, 1946) and tepid dramas (Tomorrow is Forever, 1945, The Secret Heart, 1946). Tomorrow is Forever had in its favour some movingly intense scenes between Colbert and Orson Welles, while June Allyson, playing her first dramatic role in The Secret Heart, is another who later testified to Colbert’s generosity. “She sensed my insecurities,” wrote Allyson later, “and gave me the moral support and acting tips that made a world of difference.”

Colbert and Fred MacMurray had an enormous box-office hit with The Egg and I (1947) as a city couple trying to run a farm, but the slapstick (lots of falling about in the mud) was far from the sophistication Colbert purveyed so expertly. Jean Negulesco’s Three Came Home (1950) gave her a strong dramatic role as Agnes Newton Keith, a true-life American authoress captured when the Jap-anese invaded Borneo in 1941. Her scenes with Sessue Haya-kawa (as the cultured prison camp commander) were memorable in a gripping film which was too grim to be a major hit.

Colbert had appeared on radio regularly throughout her career, and in 1951 she made her television debut on The Jack Benny Show. Other appearances included The Royal Family of Broadway (1954), The Guardsman (1955) and Blithe Spirit (1956), with Noel Coward and Lauren Bacall.

In 1951 she also returned to the stage, with a tour of Noel Coward’s Island Fling (later known as South Sea Bubble). Though she and Coward were close friends, their temperaments clashed during this production, causing Coward to tell her “I’d wring your neck – if you had one.” She came to Britain to star with Jack Hawkins in The Planter’s Wife (Outpost in Malaya was its US title) based on the native terrorism being faced by rubber planters. The film was a big hit in this country.

The following year Colbert went to France to play a mistress of Louis XIV in Sacha Guitry’s Si Versailles m’etait conte, a lavish but empty pageant. She returned to Broadway in 1955, replacing Margaret Sullavan in Janus, then in 1958 starred in a new play, Leslie Stevens’s The Marriage- Go-Round. The New York Times stated, “The comedy skill of the chief actors is incomparable – they are Charles Boyer and Claudette Colbert, making something gay and iridescent out of something small and familiar.” The play was a hit and Colbert won a Tony nomination.

She made her last film in 1961, Delmer Daves’s Parrish, a turgid soap opera in which Colbert played the mother of Troy Donahue. She continued to make Broadway appearances, among them The Irregular Verb To Love (1963), The Kingfisher (1978) and A Talent For Murder (1981), then in 1984 returned to the London stage (for the first time since The Barker almost 60 years earlier) in Aren’t We All? Her charm and beauty again beguiled the critics and her professionalism allowed her to deal smoothly with the frequent fluffing by Harrison.

Over the last 30 years, she spent much of her time at the home she and her husband had bought long ago in Barbados, and she also had a flat in Paris and an apartment on the East Side of New York.

She remained active socially until recently, always elegantly dressed (one of her closest friends was the late Ginette Spanier, former directrice of the House of Balmain) and exuding bubbly effervescence. Asked what the key was to her ageless beauty, she replied: “Laughter – it’s the key to everything. To a day of gloom or despair, to happy work, to life.”

Tom Vallance

Lily Claudette Chauchoin (Claudette Colbert), actress: born Paris 13 September 1903; married 1928 Norman Foster (marriage dissolved 1935), 1935 Joel J. Pressman (died 1968); died Cobblers Cove, Barbados 30 July 1996.

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

Audrey Christie’s best known film roles are “Carousel” in 1956 as Mrs Mullen the carnival owner and “Splendour in the Grass” as the mother of Natalie Wood in 1961.

IMDB Entry:

Audrey Christie was born on June 27, 1912 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. She was an actress, known for Splendor in the Grass (1961), Carousel (1956) and Frankie and Johnny (1966). She died on December 19, 1989 in West Hollywood, California, USA. Broadway actress. Made very few films, but appeared in many television guest shots.Originated the role of “Miriam Aarons” in the Broadway production of Clare Boothe Luce‘s play, “The Women”; Paulette Goddard played the part later in the 1939 film, The Women (1939). Attended acting and dancing classes in Chicago and performed in vaudeville from the age of fifteen. Moved on to working in night clubs and on radio shows, before singing and dancing in musical comedies on the stage. Her screen appearances often tended to be in matronly, pompous or otherwise unsympathetic roles, as haughty socialites or strict mothers.

Bob Cummings was born in 1910 in Joplin, Missouri. In retrospect, he seems to me an underrated actor. He starred in two Hitchcock classics, “Saboteur” in 1942 and “Dial M For Murder” with Grace Kelly and Ray Milland in 1954. He had a hugly successful television series “Love That Bob” in the 1950’s. Bob Cummings died in 1990.

TCM Overview:

Amiable leading man who hit his peak in the early 1940s. Perennially youthful, Cummings started his film career in light comedies but proved his dramatic talents in the two Hitchcock films in which he starred: as the naive, innocent aircraft worker in “Saboteur” (1942) and “Dial M For Murder” (1954) as well as Sam Wood’s “King’s Row” (1942) and Martin Gabel’s “The Lost Moment” (1947).Although he appeared in dramatic roles in many of the anthology series of early TV and won an Emmy for his starring performance in Reginald Rose’s drama “12 Angry Men” (1954), Cummings was best known as the playboy photographer in his popular series “The Bob Cummings Show” (aka “Love That Bob”, 1955-59).

Heaven Only Knows, poster, (aka MONTANA MIKE), from left: Brian Donlevy, Marjorie Reynolds, Jorja Curtright, Robert Cummings (gun), 1947. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

New York Times obituary 1990.

Robert Cummings, an affable, ever-youthful actor who starred in scores of films and four television series, including the situation comedy “The Bob Cummings Show,” died on Sunday evening at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 82 years old and lived in Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley.

The actor’s death resulted from kidney failure and complications of pneumonia, said a hospital spokeswoman, Louella Benson. She said he also suffered from Parkinson’s disease and was admitted to the hospital two weeks ago.

The lean, clean-cut actor specialized in light comedy. Gallant and amused, or bumbling when required, he provided adept professional support for two generations of Hollywood sirens.

But he excelled in superior dramatic roles — as an innocent aircraft worker gulled by spies in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Saboteur” (1942), a stalwart youth in “King’s Row” (1942), an idealistic publisher in “The Lost Moment,” the 1947 Gothic romance, and a murderer’s nemesis in Hitchcock’s “Dial M for Murder” (1954). An Early TV Star

However, it was on television that he won his greatest public, particularly as a swinging photographer seeking out beautiful women in the first “Bob Cummings Show,” broadcast from 1955 to 1959, and later repeatedly shown in syndication under the title “Love That Bob.”

In “The New Bob Cummings Show,” from 1961 to 1962, the actor celebrated his enthusiasm for aviation as an adventurous and high-living charter pilot and amateur detective.

He won an Emmy Award for his 1954 portrayal of a conscientious juror in a murder case in the “Studio One” production of Reginald Rose’s “12 Angry Men,” in the role peformed by Henry Fonda in the 1957 film version. In 1988, Mr. Cummings recalled the award as pivotal because he had previously done many dramatic roles that audiences had forgotten, and after that he won better parts.

Also in television, he performed in many plays on the major anthology series and in two other sitcoms, as a real-estate salesman in “My Hero” from 1952 to 1953 and as a psychiatrist in “My Living Doll” from 1964 to 1965. A Series of Identities

The actor, whose original name was Charles Clarence Robert Orville Cummings, was born on June 9, 1908, in Joplin, Mo., according to major reference works, although he later gave the year as 1910. His mother was a minister, and his father was a physician who nurtured him with a high-protein diet and food supplements that he later credited for maintaining his youth and vigor.

As a youth he attended public schools in Joplin and spent a year each at Drury College in Springfield, Mo., the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He started a Broadway career in 1931, faking a British accent and using the name Blade Stanhope Conway, and he speedily won roles in several plays and the revues “Earl Carroll’s Vanities” and “The Ziegfeld Follies.”

He sought recognition in Hollywood in 1934 and, learning that Southwestern characters were voguish, adopted a drawl and sought roles in the guise of Brice Hutchens of Texas. But he soon reclaimed his own name and began making about half a dozen movies a year. In World War II, he served as an Army flight instructor.

His more than 100 films included “So Red the Rose” (1935), “College Swing” (1938), “Three Smart Girls Grow Up” (1939), “The Devil and Miss Jones” (1941), “Princess O’Rourke” (1943), “Flesh and Fantasy” (1943), “You Came Along” (1945), “Sleep My Love” (1948), “The Petty Girl” (1950) and “The Carpetbaggers (1964).

Mr. Cummings wrote a book on nutrition, “Stay Young and Vital,” which was published in 1960.

Surviving are his fifth wife, Janie; three sons, Dr. Robert, Bob Jr., and Anthony; four daughters, Melinda Cameron, Patricia Goldhamer, Laurel and Michelle, and nine grandchildren

The Blue Veil, poster, US poster art, clockwise from left: Richard Carlson, Joan Blondell, Charles Laughton, Agnes Moorehead, Don Taylor, Audrey Totter, Cyril Cusack, Natalie Wood, Everett Sloane; center: Jane Wyman, 1951. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Audrey Totter was an extremely versatile actress in American films especially busy in the 1940’s and early 50’s. She was born in 1918 in Joliet, Illinois. She made her movie debut in 1945 in “Main Street After Dark”. She was especially adept as hard-boiled dames in film noir e.g. “The Lady in the Lake” in 1947, “The Unsuspected”,”The High Wall” and “Tension”. She died in 2013.

Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary on Audrey Totter.

I was kissed by Audrey Totter. At least, I share that experience with anybody who has seen Lady in the Lake (1947), when Totter plants her lips on the subjective camera, the surrogate for Robert Montgomery as Philip Marlowe. The film, directed by Montgomery, and based on the Raymond Chandler novel, was shot so that the whole story is seen literally through Marlowe’s eyes.

The role of the magazine editor Adrienne Fromsett, who hires the private eye to find the missing wife of her publisher, was a breakthrough for Totter, who has died aged 95. Previously, she had been in a dozen movies, her hair colour and accent varying so much from film to film that she dubbed herself “the feminine Lon Chaney of the MGM lot”.

Montgomery chose Totter for the part because of her versatility as a radio actor. He felt her familiarity with the radio microphone would stand her in good stead for coping with the subjective camera. Totter recalled: “In motion pictures, you are taught to ignore the existence of the camera, and here you had to treat the camera as another actor. I played to the microphone for years, so it was easy to play to the camera.”

Before making her film debut for MGM in 1944, Totter had worked in radio for six years. In her second film, she provided the sexy off-screen voice of the baser side of the schizophrenic killer Joan Alris Ellis (Phyllis Thaxter) in Bewitched (1945), based on a radio play.

Totter, whose father was Slovenian and whose mother was of Swedish descent, broke into radio after graduating from high school in Joliet, Illinois, the town where she was born. Her first screen appearance was in Main Street After Dark (1945), where her rather sullen, cold detachment – befitting for film noir heroines – was already apparent in her performance as a member of a family of pickpockets. In The Sailor Takes a Wife (1946), she played a vamp, with a black wig and a Hungarian accent, trying to tempt Robert Walker away from sweet June Allyson.

But she first made an impression, fleeting as her role was, as John Garfield’s waitress pickup in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946). “It’s a hot day and that’s a leather seat. And I’ve got on a thin skirt,” she murmurs.

Lady in the Lake was one of five films Totter made in 1947, in which she had roles ranging from Claude Rains’s niece in The Unsuspected, to a psychiatrist, her hair drawn back austerely, trying to help amnesiac Steven Kenet (Robert Taylor) in High Wall. Mainly, Totter played hardboiled dames, until showing a new tenderness in one of her best films, the downbeat boxing drama The Set-Up (1949), directed with gritty realism by Robert Wise. Totter portrayed the wife of an ageing boxer, Stoker Thompson (Robert Ryan), who cannot stand the punishment he keeps taking and anxiously wanders the streets instead of watching his last fight.

In the majority of her other films, Totter could have said, like Mae West: “When I’m good, I’m very good, but when I’m bad, I’m better.” In John Berry’s Tension (1949), she is Claire Quimby, who cheats on her husband (Richard Basehart), and gets him blamed for the murder of her boyfriend. She snarls at him: “If you haven’t got enough brains to agree with me, then keep your mouth shut.” In the same year, in Alias Nick Beal (aka The Contact Man), she is a woman recruited by the devil (Ray Milland) as a pawn in his campaign to win the soul of an incorruptible lawyer.

After six years under contract and having been loaned out to various studios, Totter was dropped by MGM in 1951, and was forced to go freelance, apart from a couple of years at Columbia. One of the films she made for the studio was the camp classic Women’s Prison (1955), in which she plays a prisoner who suffers from the sadism of the warden (Ida Lupino).

Having dated the actors Clark Gable, Cary Grant and John Payne, and the producer Ross Hunter, “until he realised he was gay”, in 1953 she married Dr Leo Fred, assistant dean of the school of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, and decided to live for her family and not her career.

Totter continued to add spice to several otherwise bland B-pictures in the 50s, and was kept busy on television during the 60s and 70s. Her roles included the feisty head nurse in the TV soap opera Medical Center (1972-76), shot at the old MGM studios, the scene of her noir triumphs in the 1940s.

Fred died in 1995. Totter is survived by their daughter, Mea.

• Audrey Totter, actor, born 20 December 1917; died 12 December 2013

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

• Audrey Totter, actor, born 20 December 1917; died 12 December 2013. Her Guardian obituary can be accessed here.

Charles Herbert was born in 1948 in Culver City, California. He was a brilliant child actor of the 1950’s. His screen debut came in 1954 with “The Long Long Trailer” with Lucille Ball. He went on to make 20 feature films , career highlights being “The View from Pompey’s Head” with Dana Wynter in 1955, “The Fly” with Vincent Price and Patricia Owens in 1958 and “Houseboat” with Cary Grant and Sophia Loren. He died in 2015.

“Telegraph” obituary:

Charles Herbert, who has died of a heart attack aged 66, was a tousle-haired, all-American child star whose life slipped into a spiral of drug abuse after the demise of his career.

Herbert, heavy-browed with an enquiring face, spent little time at school, and made his screen debut at four. He appeared in dozens of films, often in the horror-sci-fi genre, including The Fly (1958), featuring Vincent Price, about an atomic scientist (Al Hedison) experimenting with a teleportation device who accidentally turns himself into a human insect. Herbert played his son, Philippe.

The same year he appeared in the romantic comedy Houseboat, as one of the three children of Cary Grant, a widower who meets a beautiful Italian (Sophia Loren) and moves into a leaky boat with her and his family; in one scene Sophia Loren spins the youngster around a dance floor to the accompaniment of That’s Amore. Herbert featured in numerous television serials as well as films, among them The Twilight Zone, Rawhide, Wagon Train and The Fugitive. In The Miracle Hour (1956), an episode of Science Fiction Theatre, he gave a touching performance as Tommy Parker, a blind boy whose stepfather (Dick Foran) will stop at nothing in his search for a cure.

Charles Herbert (in the dark shirt next to Sophia Loren) in Houseboat Photo: Alamy

By the mid-1960s, however, the telephone had stopped ringing. Herbert found himself, at 21, as another washed-up child actor. “I suffered the curse that inflicts every child star,” he said later. “I grew up. Some, like Shirley Temple, survived. For every Shirley there were a dozen who didn’t.”

Charles Herbert Saperstein was born in the shadow of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Culver City, California, on December 23 1948. His 40-year-old father was an invalid with a heart ailment; his mother, also 40, was his father’s carer. Charles was the family breadwinner by the age of five.

He entered show business when, aged four, he was going shopping on a bus with his mother, and was spotted by a casting agent.

Herbert made his debut in a weekly television show called Half Pint Panel (1952) and soon after that was selected for The Long, Long Trailer (1954), a comedy vehicle for Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. Unfortunately, Herbert’s scenes ended up on the cutting-room floor.

His first proper role was in Secret Interlude (1955), followed by Ransom! (1956) with Glenn Ford and Donna Reed (on whose television show Herbert later became a regular), and The Tattered Dress (1957). The film that launched him as a star was the sci-fi chiller The Colossus of New York (1957), and in director William Castle’s 13 Ghosts (1960) he was given star billing alongside adult stars such as Margaret Hamilton and Rosemary DeCamp. In Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960) he was one of Doris Day’s amusing children, although he later claimed that the star had said only three words to him during filming. He spoke warmly, in contrast, about Sophia Loren and Vincent Price.

Herbert said he was “petrified” when filming his best-known role in The Fly. To elicit the most convincing reaction when the camera was rolling, the director kept Herbert away from the set, and when the boy was first shown the grotesque “fly” head, long after everybody else, he “felt physically sick”.

Herbert gave up acting in 1968, and discovered he was in penury. He once explained that he had spent 39 years of his life “on drugs”. But in later years he shook off his addictions and settled in Las Vegas, where he was happy to hear from sci-fi fans and attend film conventions.

He was unmarried.

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

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Charles Herbert was a mildly popular 1950s child actor with a trademark sulky puss and thick, furrowed eyebrows, who was known for his inquisitive kid besieged by alien beings, including a robot, human fly and several house-haunting ghosts. He racked up over 20 films, 50 TV shows and a number of commercials during his youthful reign. He was born Charles Herbert Saperstein to non-professionals on December 23, 1948, in the Los Angeles area. Noticed by a Hollywood talent agent while riding a bus with his mother, Charles began his career at age 4 on a 1952 TV show entitled “Half Pint Panel”.

Elsewhere on TV, he showed up regularly on series fronted by such stars as Robert Cummings and Gale Storm. This period was marked by amazingly high-profiled performances such as his blind child on the Science Fiction Theatre (1955) episode,Science Fiction Theatre: The Miracle Hour (1956). On the feature film front, Charles made an inauspicious debut in the Lucille Ball/Desi Arnaz comedy, The Long, Long Trailer(1953). Although director Vincente Minnelli had handpicked him for the role, his part was completely deleted from the movie. Other tyke roles turned out more positively and in a variety of genres, including the film noir pieces, The Night Holds Terror (1955) and The Tattered Dress (1957), the dramas, Ransom! (1956) and No Down Payment (1957), and the comedies, Houseboat (1958) and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960). His most recognized genre, however, was sci-fi, and he appeared in a number of films that are now considered classics of that genre. He started off in a bit part as a boy playing tug-of-war with a dead sailor’s cap in The Monster That Challenged the World (1957). Up front and center, he came into his own playing the young son of dead scientific genius Ross Martin, whose brilliant brain is transplanted into what becomes the robot-like The Colossus of New York (1958). He loses another dad (David Hedison) to a botched experiment in The Fly (1958), also starring iconic master of macabre Vincent Price. Lastly, Charles headed up the cast in the somewhat eerie but rather dull and tame William Castle spookfest, 13 Ghosts (1960). Castle handpicked Charles for the child role and even offered the busy young actor top-billing over the likes of Donald Woods, Rosemary DeCamp, Jo Morrow,Martin Milner and Margaret Hamilton if he would appear in his movie. In this haunted house setting, Castle’s trademark gimmick had audiences using 3-D glasses in order to see the ghostly apparitions.

He had another leading role in the fantasy adventure, The Boy and the Pirates (1960), then film offers for Charles completely stopped. Growing into that typically awkward teen period, he was forced to subsist on whatever episodic roles he could muster up, including bits on Wagon Train (1957), Rawhide (1959), The Fugitive (1963), Family Affair (1966) and My Three Sons (1960). By the end of the 1960s, however, Charles was completely finished in Hollywood, having lost the essential adorableness that most tyke stars originally possessed. Unable to transition into adult roles, his personal life went downhill as well. With no formal education or training to do anything else and with no career earnings saved, he led a reckless, wanderlust life and turned to drugs. Never married, it took him nearly 40 years (clean and sober since October, 2005) to turn his life around. During good times and bad, however, he has appeared from time to time at sci-fi film festivals.

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

Valerie French was born in London in 1928. Her first film was the Italian “Maddalena” in 1954. She subsequently went to Hollywood and made films such as “Jubal” opposite Glenn Ford in and “Decision at undown” with Randolph Scott. Her last major film was “Shalako” with Sean Connery. Brigitte Bardot, Stephen Boyd and Honor Blackman. Valerie French died in 1990 at the age of 62 in New York.

“New York Times” obituary:

Valerie French, who began her career as a much-publicized starlet for Columbia Pictures and became a screen, stage and television actress who specialized in playing a diverse collection of English characters, died Saturday at her home in Manhattan. She was 59 years old. She died of leukemia, said a friend, Tom Seligson, a television producer. Miss French was born in London and spent her early childhood in Spain, returning to England to attend Malvern Girls’ College in Worcestershire and then join the BBC drama department.

After several years in television production, she joined the Theater Royal Repertory Company in Windsor, where she played small parts. After a screen test and a role in the film “The Constant Husband” in 1955, she went to Hollywood and became a contract actress with Columbia Pictures. She starred opposite Glenn Ford and Rod Steiger in “Jubal” (1956) and with Lee J. Cobb in “The Garment Jungle” (1957). On Broadway she acted in “Inadmissible Evidence” (1965) and “Help Stamp Out Marriage!” (1966). In “The Mother Lover,” at the Booth Theater in 1969, she caused something of a sensation by appearing onstage nude with her back to the audience.

Miss French starred Off Broadway in Harold Pinter’s “Tea Party” and “The Basement” in 1968, in a 1980 revival of Noel Coward’s “Fallen Angels,” and as the mother, Helen, in a production of “A Taste of Honey” in 1981. Her television credits include roles in “Have Gun, Will Travel,” “The Prisoner,” “The Nurses,” “Edge of Night” and “Brighter Day.”

Miss French was twice married and twice divorced. In a 1981 interview she said that she and her second husband, the actor Thayer David, had been planning to remarry when he died in 1978.There are no immediate survivors.

Her obituary in “The New York Times” can also be accessed here.

The 27th Day, poster, US poster, Valerie French (bathing suit), 1957. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Chuck Connors was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1921. He was a professional basketball and baseball player. His first film was “Pat and Mike” in 1952 and his movie highlights include “Good Morning Miss Dove” with Jennifer Jones in 1955, “The Big Country” and “Move Over Darling” with Doris Day. He had success on televsion in the series “Rifleman” and “Arrst and Trial”. Chuck Connors died in 1992 at the age of 71.

His IMDB entry:

Born to immigrant parents from the Dominion of Newfoundland (now part of Canada) Chuck Connors and his two-years-younger sister, Gloria, grew up in a working-class section of the west side of Brooklyn, New York, where their father worked the local docks as a longshoreman.

Chuck’s natural athletic prowess earned him a scholarship to Adelphi Academy, a private high school, and then to Seton Hall, a Catholic college in South Orange, New Jersey. Leaving Seton Hall after two years, on October 20, 1942, he joined the army, listing his occupation as a ski instructor. After enlistment in the infantry at Fort Knox, he later served mostly as a tank-warfare instructor at Camp Campbell, Kentucky, and then finally at West Point. Following his discharge early in 1946, he resumed his athletic pursuits. He played center for the Boston Celtics in the 1946-47 season but left early for spring training with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Baseball had always been his first love, and for the next several years he knocked about the minor leagues in such places as Rochester (NY), Norfolk (VA), Newark (NJ), Newport News (VA), Mobile (AL) and Montreal, Canada (while in Montreal he met Elizabeth Riddell, whom he married in October 1948. They had four sons during their 13-year marriage). He finally reached his goal, playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, in May 1949, but after just five weeks and one at-bat he returned to Montreal. After a brief stint with the Chicago Cubs in 1951, during which he hit two home runs, Chuck wound up with the Cubs’ Triple-A farm team, the L.A. Angels, in 1952. A baseball fan who was also a casting director for MGM spotted Chuck and recommended him for a part in the Spencer Tracy–Katharine Hepburn comedy Pat and Mike (1952). Originally cast to play a prizefighter, but that role went instead to Aldo Ray. Chuck was cast as a captain in the state police. He now abandoned his athletic hopes and devoted full time to his acting career, which often emphasized his muscular 6’6″ physique.

During the next several years he made 20 movies, culminating in a key role in William Wyler‘s 1958 western The Big Country (1958). Also appearing in many television series, he finally hit the big time in 1958 with The Rifleman (1958), which began its highly successful five-year run on ABC. Other television series followed, as did a number of movies which, though mostly minor, allowed Chuck to display his range as both a stalwart “good guy” and a menacing “heavy”.

Chuck Connors died at age 71 of lung cancer and pneumonia on November 10, 1992 in Los Angeles, California. He is buried in San Fernando Mission Cemetery with his tombstone carrying a photo of Connors as Lucas McCain in “The Rifleman” as well as logos from the three professional sports teams he played for: the Dodgers, Cubs and Celtics.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: dinky-4 of Minneapolis (qv’s & corrections by A. Nonymous)

The above IMDB entry can be accessed online here.

Barbara Loden was born in 1932 in Marion, North Carolina. Her films include “Splendour in the Grass” in 1961 which was directed by her husband Elia Kazan. She directed the film “Wanda” in 1970.Barbara Loden died in 1980 at the age of 48.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

A one-time pin-up beauty and magazine story model, Barbara Loden studied acting in New York in the early 50s and was on the Broadway boards within the decade. She was discovered for films by legendary producer/director Elia Kazan who was impressed with what she did in a small role as Montgomery Clift‘s secretary in Wild River (1960). He moved her up to feature status with her next role as Warren Beatty‘s wanton sister in his classic Splendor in the Grass (1961). As Kazan’s protégé, she appeared as part of Kazan’s stage company in the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater’s production of After the Fall, winning the Tony and Outer Critic’s Circle awards for that dazzling performance. An oddly entrancing, delicate blonde beauty possessed with a Marilyn Monroe-like vulnerability, she impressed in two of his other stage productions as well – But For Whom Charlie and The Changeling . After appearing in the failed movie Fade-In (1968) with Burt Reynolds, she married Kazan and went into semi-retirement. Barbara wrote, directed and starred, however, in a bold independent film entitled Wanda (1970) and became an unexpected art house darling, distinguishing herself as one of the few woman directors whose work was theatrically-released during the period. She won praise in all three departments, nabbing the Venice Film Festival’s International Critics Prize. Supposedly discouraged by a doubting, perhaps even resentful Kazan, Barbara never followed up on this success. She expressed interest and was in the midst of putting together another film, based on the novella The Awakening by Kate Chopin, when she learned in 1978 she had breast cancer. Barbara died two and a half years later, at age 48, after the cancer spread to her liver – before the project ever came to fruition. The Hollywood industry lost a burgeoning talent who just might have opened doors for other women directors had she been given the time.

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

Article on Barbara Loden in “Tina Aumont’s Eyes” website:

Remembered mainly as the second wife of legendary director Elia Kazan, former pin-up and model; Barbara Loden, would later become an award-winning actress of stage and screen, and the first female director to write, direct and star in their own movie.

Born on July 8th, 1932, Barbara began in television, appearing as a scantily clad sidekick on ‘The Ernie Kovacs Show’ in 1956. Around this time Loden met and married promoter Laurence Joachim, with whom she had a son. Studying acting in New York, it wasn’t long before she was spotted by one of the most acclaimed producer/directors of the day; Elia Kazan, quickly becoming his protégé.

In 1960 Barbara had a small role as a secretary in Kazan’s interesting drama ‘Wild River’, then a slightly bigger part, as Warren Beatty’s reckless sister, in his next feature; ‘Splendor in the Grass’ (’61). On stage, Loden received a Tony award for her excellent portrayal of Maggie, in Arthur Miller’s ‘After the Fall’, again directed by Kazan. A very personal project by playwright Miller, ‘After the Fall’ was based on his failed marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Loden was magnificent in the part and showed enormous range, fully encapsulating this troubled and complicated character.

In what was to be her biggest screen role to date, Barbara was later cast as Burt Lancaster’s ex-wife; Shirley Abbott, in the superb drama ‘The Swimmer’ (’68). Unfortunately, a dispute between the film’s producer Sam Spiegel and director Frank Perry, coupled with rumours of Lancaster feeling overshadowed by her performance, resulted in her scenes being re-shot with Broadway actress Janice Rule. This unhappy experience may have led to Barbara wanting to take full control of her work, and to do things her own way. Now separated from her husband, Loden married Kazan in 1968 and, while in semi-retirement, began working on her own material.

In 1970 and armed with a small budget, Loden made her own independent movie, the semi- autobiographical drama ‘Wanda’. Shot in grainy colour, it’s an absorbing study of an unpredictable, emotionally scarred woman. Set in the coal mining region of Pennsylvania, it tells the story of an abused woman, who leaves her unhappy family life and runs away with a petty criminal who’s planning a bank robbery. Largely improvisational in tone, it’s a very good, if seldom seen movie that sustains to this day, due mainly to Barbara’s remarkable and moving performance. Sadly, success at the Venice and Cannes film festivals did little to boost Loden’s career, and her relationship with Kazan also suffered greatly at the time.

Unable to capitalise on her earlier success, Barbara only made a couple of more features; two shorts in 1975. In 1978, having finally found the source material for another film; ‘The Awakening’, based on Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel, Loden learned that she had breast cancer, and the project was abandoned. Sadly, the cancer spread to her liver, and two years later, aged 48, Barbara died on September 5th, 1980. A sexy, natural actress, Barbara was unfortunately overlooked by many in the industry, who strangely ignored instead of embrace her. Hopefully, with a positive re-appraisal of ‘Wanda’ in the last few years, Barbara Loden just may have finally left a lasting legacy for other women harbouring dreams of making movies.

Favourite Movie: ‘Wild River’
Favourite Performance: ‘Wanda’

The above article can also be accessed online here.

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Eileen Heckart

Claudette Colbert

Audrey Christie

Bob Cummings

New York Times obituary 1990.

Audrey Totter

Charles Herbert

Valerie French

Chuck Connors

Barbara Loden

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