Sigrid GurieAlgiers, poster, Hedy Lamarr, Charles Boyer, Sigrid Gurie on window card, 1938. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Sigrid Gurie was born in Brooklyn in 1911. When she was a child her parents returned to their homeland of Norway where she was educated. She came to Hollywood in 1936. Two years later she was cast opposite Gary Cooper in “The Adventures of Marco Polo”. Her other films include “Algiers”, “Three Faces West” and in 1944 “Voice in the Wind”. Her last film was made in Norway in 1948. She died in Mexico City at the age of 58 in 1969. Webpage on Sigrid Gurie can be accessed here.
“Wikipedia” entry:
She was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Bjørulf Knutson Haukelid (1878–1944) and Sigrid Johanne Christophersen (1877–1969).Her father was a civil engineer who worked for the New York City Subway from 1902 to 1912. Since Sigrid Gurie and her twin brotherKnut Haukelid were born in America, the twins held dual Norwegian-American citizenship. In 1914 the family returned to Norway. Sigrid Gurie subsequently grew up in Oslo and was educated in Norway, Sweden, and Belgium.[ In 1935 Gurie married Thomas Stewart of California; she filed for divorce in 1938.[ Her brother became a noted member of the Norwegian resistance movementduring World War II.
In 1936, Gurie arrived in Hollywood. Film magnateSam Goldwyn reportedly took credit for discovering her, promoting his discovery as “the new Garbo” and billed her as “the siren of the fjords”. When the press discovered Gurie’s birth in Flatbush, Goldwyn then claimed “the greatest hoax in movie history.” She starred as Kokashin, daughter of Kublai Khan, in the 1938 production of The Adventures of Marco Polo, and went on to give worthwhile performances in such films as Algiers (1938), Three Faces West (1940) and Voice in the Wind (1944). She had a minor role in the classic Norwegian film Kampen om tungtvannet (1948). The movie was based principally on the book Skis Against the Atom which was written by her brother.
The above “Wikipedia” entry can also be accessed online here.
Richard Cromwell was born in Long Beach, California in 1910. He was one of the leading young men in films in Hollywood in the 1930’s. His film break through came at the age of twenty in “Tol’able David” in 1930.Among his other film credits are “This Day and Age”, “Life Begins at 40”, “Poppy”, “Storm over Bengal”, “The Lives of a Bengal Lancer”, “Jezebel” He stopped making films in the late 1940’s and established a ceramics business with great success. Richard Cromwell died in 1960.
An article on LA Frontiers.com:
“I became a movie actor so quickly it made my head swim.” —Richard CromwellHe was young. He was handsome. He was a movie star. He was gay. He was an artist. He died at age 50. He is forgotten today. And, oh yes, he was Angela Lansbury’s first husband.
Tol’able David, lobbycard, Joan Peers, Richard Cromwell, 1930. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Richard Cromwell was a beauty. He became a full-fledged movie star in 1930 at the age of 20 in the sound remake of the classicTol’able David. He was suddenly famous, even being invited to the White House to meet President Hoover. Good parts followed inEmma with Oscar winner Marie Dressler. In 1935, he had his biggest hit co-starring with Gary Cooper in Lives of a Bengal Lancer. Playing the weakling son of the commander, Cromwell was great, suffering torture at the hands of the infidels. Pauline Kael later wrote about the film, “Part of the picture’s romantic charge is its underlying homeoeroticism.” The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and was Cromwell’s favorite role.At the end of the decade, Richard Cromwell had a good role in Jezebel playing Henry Fonda’s younger brother. This great William Wyler study of a selfish Southern belle not only won Bette Davis her second Academy Award but beat Gone with the Wind to the screen. In 1939, Richard Cromwell had his last great part in John Ford’sYoung Mr. Lincoln playing the young man defended by Henry Fonda in this classic film. Cromwell also was on Broadway in the military drama So Proudly We Hail. His performance received raves: “a striking portrayal” and “astonishing characterization” from the New York press.
In various books Richard Cromwell is said to have carried on a discreet affair with Howard Hughes and was reported to be a frequent visitor at gay director George Cukor’s Sunday “boys only nights.” After serving two years in the Coast Guard, Richard Cromwell came home to find his career pretty much over.In 1945, Hollywood was shocked when a 35-year-old Richard Cromwell married a 19-year-old Angela Lansbury. The marriage only lasted six months, and later Lansbury wrote that it was “a mistake. … I was too young at 19. The marriage shouldn’t have happened.”
Richard Cromwell
According to several sources, Lansbury did not know that Richard Cromwell was gay. This was a bit bizarre, as she had just made her film debut and received her first Oscar nomination for George Cukor’s Gaslight. Apparently Cukor did not discuss his Sunday night pool parties on the set!
In a 2012 interview, Lansbury stated that she came home one day and found Cromwell’s note: “I’m sorry darling, I can’t go on.” She stated, “I knew how to act mature, but I wasn’t. … It was a terrible shock. I was devastated. But once I got over the shock, I said, ‘Alright, then I’m going to take charge of my life and see that I never hurt like this again.'” Lansbury and Cromwell did remain close friends for the rest of his short life.
Richard Cromwell was also an accomplished artist, and his ceramics (especially masks of the stars) were extremely popular. His art deco wall paintings of Adam and Eve still grace the mezzanine of the Pantages Theater in Hollywood.Until his death in 1960 from liver cancer, Richard Cromwell was a respected artist and a popular social figure in the gay community. He was also slated for a film comeback. Cromwell’s artwork has lasted longer than his film career, but for those of us who love old movies and gay actors during their prime, there is no one cuter than Richard Cromwell in Jezebel or Young Mr. Lincolnor being tortured in Lives of a Bengal Lancer.
Richard Cromwell
In his great study of movie stars of the ’30s, author James Robert Parrish summed up the charm and persona of Richard Cromwell: “To the screen of the 1930s, Cromwell brought a refreshing vitality. … His histrionic energy could extend to an imaginative and persuasive recreation of the joys and torments of youth and adolescence.” And Leslie Halliwell in The Filmgoer’s Companion succinctly called Richard Cromwell “the gentle hero of early sound films.”
Robert Culp was born in 1930 in Oakland, California. He made his mark on television with the hit series “I Spy”. He hade a number of feature films including “Bob and Carol, Ted and Alice”, “Hannie Caulder” and “The Pelican Brief”. Robert Culp was at one time ,married to the exquisite actress France Nuyen. He died in 2010 at the age of 79.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Tall, slim and exceedingly good-looking American leading man Robert Culp, a former cartoonist in his teen years, appeared off-Broadway in the 1950s before settling into polished, clean-cut film leads and “other man” supports a decade later. Hitting the popular TV boards in the hip, racially ground-breaking espionage program I Spy (1965), he made a slick (but never smarmy), sardonic name for himself during his over five-decade career with his sly humor, casual banter and tongue-and-cheek sexiness. Though he had the requisite looks and smooth, manly appeal (not to mention acting talent) for superstardom, a cool but cynical and somewhat detached persona may have prevented him from attaining it full-out.
He was born Robert Martin Culp on August 16, 1930, in Oakland California. The son of attorney Crozie Culp and his wife, Bethel Collins, who was employed at a Berkeley chemical company, he offset his only-child loneliness by playacting in local theater productions. Culp also showed a talent for art while young and earned money as a cartoonist for Bay Area magazines and newspapers in high school, but the fascination with becoming an actor proved much stronger. He attended Berkeley High School and graduated in 1947. The athletically-inclined Culp dominated at track and field events and, as a result, earned athletic scholarships to six different universities. He selected the relatively minor College of the Pacific in Stockton, California primarily because of its active theater department. Transferring to various other colleges of higher learning (including San Francisco State in 1949), he never earned a degree. After performing in some theatre in the San Francisco area, he moved to Seattle and then New York in 1951.
Studying under famed teacher Herbert Berghof and supporting himself during this time teaching speech and phonetics, Bob eventually found work on the theatre scene, making his 1963 Broadway debut (as Robert M. Culp) in “The Prescott Proposals” with Katharine Cornell. He eventually returned to Broadway with “Diary of a Scoundrel” starring Blanche Yurka and Roddy McDowall in 1956 and with a strong role in “A Clearing in the Woods” (alongside Kim Stanley) a year later. He earned an off-Broadway Obie Award for his very fine work in “He Who Gets Slapped” in 1956, and also appeared in the plays “Daily Life” and “Easter”.
Gracing a few live-TV dramas during his New York days, he returned to his native California for his first major TV role. It was an auspicious one as post-Civil War Texas Ranger “Hoby Gilman” in the western series Trackdown (1957). He earned widespread attention in the series that based many of its stories from actual Texas Ranger files, and the show itself received the official approval not only of the Rangers themselves but by the State of Texas. The series led to a CBS spin-off of its own: Wanted: Dead or Alive(1958), which made a TV star out of Steve McQueen.
From there, Culp guested on a number of series dramas: Bonanza (1959), The Rifleman(1958), Rawhide (1959), The Detectives (1959), Ben Casey (1961), The Outer Limits(1963), Naked City (1958) and Combat! (1962). He also starred in the two-part Disney family-styled program “Sammy the Way Out Seal” (1962), which was subsequently released as a feature in Europe. He and Patricia Barry played the hapless parents of precocious Bill Mumy and Michael McGreevey whose “adopted” pet animal unleashes major chaos in their suburban neighborhood.
During this time, Bob began to seek lead and supporting work in films. Despite his co-starring with Cliff Robertson, Rod Taylor and the very perky Jane Fonda (as her straight-laced boyfriend) in the sparkling Broadway-based sexcapade Sunday in New York (1963); playing Robertson’s naval mate in the popular John F. Kennedy biopic PT 109 (1963); recreating the legendary “Wild Bill” Hickok in the western tale The Raiders (1963); and heading up the adventurous cast of the Ivan Tors‘ African yarn Rhino! (1964) (which included Harry Guardino and the very fetching British import Shirley Eaton), Culp wasn’t able to make a serious dent in the medium.
TV remained his best arena and gave him more lucrative offers, professionally. It rewarded him quite richly in 1965 with the debonair series lead “Kelly Robinson”, a jet-setting, pro-circuit tennis player who leads a double life as an international secret agent in I Spy (1965). Running three seasons, Culp co-starred with fellow secret agent Bill Cosby, who, as “Alexander Scott”, posed as Culp’s tennis trainer. The role was tailor-made for the suave, Ivy-League-looking actor. He looked effortlessly cool posing in sunglasses amid the posh continental settings and remained handsomely unflinching in the face of danger. It was the first U.S. prime-time network drama to feature an African-American actor in a full-out starring role and the relationship between the two meshed perfectly and charismatically on screen. Both were nominated for acting Emmys in all three of its seasons, with Cosby coming out the victor each time. Filmed on location in such cities as Hong Kong, Acapulco and Tokyo, Culp also wrote and directed certain episodes of the show He also met his third wife, the gorgeous Eurasian actress France Nuyen, while on the set. They married in 1967 but divorced three years later. At this stage, the actor already had four children (by second wife, sometime actress Nancy Ashe).
Following the series’ demise, Culp took on perhaps his most-famous and controversial film role as Natalie Wood‘s husband “Bob” in the titillating but ultimately teasing “flower power” era film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), with Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon as the other-half couple who examine the late 60s “free love” idea of wife-swapping. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards (two went to supporting actors Gould and Cannon). The movie did not reignite Culp’s popularity on the large screen, but it did lead to his rather strange pairing with buxom Raquel Welch in the violent-edged westernHannie Caulder (1971) and a reunion with his I Spy (1965) pal Cosby in the far-more entertaining Hickey & Boggs (1972), which reestablished their great tongue-in-cheek rapport as two weary-eyed private eyes. Culp also directed the film while his real-life wife, actress Sheila Sullivan, played his screen wife as well.
Bob returned to series TV as stern “CIA Chief Bill Maxwell”, whose job was to protect handsome Robert Redford lookalike William Katt, who starred as an ersatz The Greatest American Hero (1981). The show lasted three seasons. Other series guest spots, both comedic and dramatic, included Hotel (1983), Highway to Heaven (1984), The Golden Girls (1985) and an episode of his old buddy’s show The Cosby Show (1984). He was also a guest murderer in three of the “Columbo” episodes. Although he was relegated to appearing in such film fodder as Turk 182! (1985), Big Bad Mama II (1987) and Pucker Up and Bark Like a Dog (1989), the 1990s offered him one of his best film roles in years as the ill-fated President in the Denzel Washington/Julia Roberts political thriller The Pelican Brief (1993). A year later, he again reteamed with Cosby in the TV-movie I Spy Returns (1994).
Culp became very active in the 1960s Civil Rights movement and later became a prominent face in local civic causes, joining in a lawsuit to cease construction of an elephant exhibit at the Los Angeles Zoo and accusing officials there of mistreatment. In the long run, however, the construction was given the green light. Culp also married a fifth time to Candace Faulkner and, by her, had daughter Samantha Culp in 1982. Older sons Jason Culp (born 1961) and Joseph Culp (born 1963) became actors, while another son, Joshua Culp (born 1958), entered the visual effects field. Daughter Rachel, an outré clothing designer for rock stars, was born in 1964.
In later years, Culp could be seen occasionally as Ray Romano‘s father-in-law on the hugely popular Everybody Loves Raymond (1996). His last film, the family drama The Assignment (2010), was unreleased at the time of his death. On March 24, 2010, the 79-year-old Culp collapsed from an apparent heart attack while walking near the lower entrance to Runyon Canyon Park, a popular hiking area in the Hollywood Hills. Found by a hiker, Culp was transported to a nearby hospital where he died from the head injuries he sustained in the fall. Five grandchildren also survive.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Article on Robert Culp in “Tina Aumont’s Eyes” website:
With his lean frame and serious manner, handsome lead actor Robert Culp often played authority figures, both good and bad. He may not have made the big time, but he did have a run of interesting projects in the Seventies, and although he is best remembered for his television work, he did appear in some first-rate cult features.
Born in California on August 16th 1930, Culp made his screen debut in 1953 and after a clutch of television appearances he won the role of Texas Ranger Hoby Gilman, in the CBS western series ‘Trackdown’, which ran for 2 seasons from 1957 until 1959. Culp’s movie debut came in 1963 when he played Jane Fonda’s ex in the romantic comedy ‘Sunday in New York’, and the western ‘The Raiders’, as ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok. Culp would become a household name in 1965 when he took the role of secret agent Kelly Robinson in the popular series ‘I Spy’, which ran until 1968.
The following year Culp had a lead role when he played Natalie Wood’s husband in Paul Mazursky’s infidelity comedy ‘Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice’ (’69). A commercial hit it remains Robert’s best known performance. Another cult part came a couple of years later when he played bounty hunter Thomas Luther Price in the quirky Raquel Welch western ‘Hannie Caulder’ (’71). A violent and sometimes comical revenge flick, it contains perhaps my favourite Culp performance.
Robert is also remembered fondly for his appearances in three ‘Columbo’ mysteries from 1971, 72 & 73, each time playing the ‘special guest murderer’. He did appear in another episode in 1990, but this time he was the father of a murderer and not the culprit himself. In 1972 Culp directed himself in the rather bleak detective flick ‘Hickey & Boggs’. Playing a private eye in search of a missing girl, it saw him reunited with his ‘I Spy’ co-star Bill Cosby. After making the bizarre horror ‘A Name for Evil’ (’73) with Samantha Eggar, Culp co-starred with Eli Wallach in the excellent TV movie ‘A Cold Night’s Death’ (’73), an atmospheric chiller with a neat twist ending.
1976 was a good year for Robert, with appearances in some interesting and entertaining projects. There was the Lee Marvin sleeper ‘The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday’, Bob Clark’s interesting drama ‘Breaking Point’, with Bo Svenson, and the pretty good thriller ‘Sky Riders’, playing an industrialist whose wife (Susannah York) and children are kidnapped by terrorists, and it’s up to York’s ex-husband James Coburn to rescue them. A small role in another James Coburn film followed with Joseph Sargent’s entertaining science-fiction drama ‘Goldengirl’ (’79), which had Susan Anton as a hormone injected Olympic hopeful.
Robert fell out of fashion in the 1980’s and so concentrated largely on television work. From 1981 until 1983 he played FBI Agent Bill Maxwell in the series ‘The Greatest American Hero’, which had William Katt as a schoolteacher turned superhero. A return to movies came in 1987 when he co-starred with Angie Dickinson in the exploitation sequel ‘Big Bad Mama II’. A video rental favourite followed with the Michael Biehn sci-fi thriller ‘Timebomb’ (’91), a watchable actioner with a good supporting cast. Robert’s later jobs included much voice-over work including some for popular video games, although he did have a good recurring role in the TV hit ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’. Culp’s final appearance came in the 2010 Adam Baldwin feature ‘The Assignment’, a decent coming-of-age drama with an air of mystery.
Married five times, Robert Culp died in California on March 24th 2010, aged 79. A reliable and very talented actor, he always took his roles seriously no matter how big or small the part. He lent gravitas to some lesser films and worked well in both comedy and drama. The mark of a true professional.
Favourite Movie: Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice Favourite Performance: Hannie Caulder
The above article can also be accessed onliue here.
Perry King was born in 1948 in Ohio. He made his film debut in 1972 in “Slaughterhouse -Five”. Two years later he garnered critical acclaim for his performance with Sylvester Stalloine in “The Lords of Flatbush”. His other credits on film including “The Possession of Joel Delaney” with Shirley MacLaine, “Mandingo”, “Andy Warhol’s Bad”, “The Choirboys” and more recently “The Day After Tomorrow. He has appeared in most of the major popular television programmes over the past thirty years.
TCM Overview:
With his handsome, square-jawed blond looks and patrician bearing, Perry King quickly landed leading roles in films and TV in the 1970s and 80s.
Original Cinema Quad Poster; Movie Poster; Film Poster
As he aged, he gracefully made the transition to character roles, generally cast as villains or father figures. The grandson of famed book editor Maxwell Perkins, King attended prep school, earned an Ivy League education at Yale and received his acting training under John Houseman at Juilliard.
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
After debuting on stage in the replacement cast of the Tony-winning drama “Child’s Play” in 1971, he quickly landed supporting roles in two 1972 features: “Slaughterhouse-Five” cast him as the son of the main character while he was Shirley MacLaine’s troubled younger brother in “The Possession of Joel Delaney.”
After creating a strong impression as the leather-jacketed suitor of Susan Blakely in “The Lords of Flatbush” (1974), he pursued a different career path from his co-stars Sylvester Stallone and Henry Winkler, spending most of the 70s and 80s as the romantic lead in countless TV-movies and miniseries like “Captains and the Kings” (NBC, 1976) and “The Last Convertible” (NBC, 1979). He eventually earned semi-stardom as co-star (with Joe Penney) of the adventure series “Riptide” (NBC, 1984-86).
It must have been galling for the actor John Gavin, who has died aged 86, to have often been called “the poor man’s Rock Hudson”, but comparisons between the two actors were inevitable. Both were tall, dark, well built and handsome romantic leads. Both starred in glossy Ross Hunter productions during the 1950s and 60s, at the peaks of their careers. Moreover, both actors were favourites of the director Douglas Sirk, who gave them some of their finest roles. But Gavin could also claim to have worked with Alfred Hitchcock(in Psycho) and Stanley Kubrick (in Spartacus), which Hudson never did.
Both these films came out in 1960, when Gavin was at the height of his fame. In Spartacus, he played a muscular, youthful Julius Caesar, wary of opposition. In Psycho, he was Sam Loomis, boyfriend of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), and in the film’s voyeuristic opening sequence was seen bare-chested with Leigh in her underwear on the bed in a cheap hotel room, in one of the sexiest scenes Gavin ever played.
He later appears at the Bates motel, a virile character in vast contrast to Anthony Perkins’s twisted Norman Bates. Hitchcock is said to have referred to Gavin as “the stiff” for his rather placid approach to acting.
He was born in Los Angeles as Juan Vincent Apablasa. His father, Juan Vincent Sr, was of Chilean descent and his mother, Delia Diana Pablos, a Mexican-born aristocrat. When Juan was two, his parents divorced and his mother married Herald Ray Golenor, who adopted Juan and changed his name to John. After attending Catholic schools in California, he studied at Stanford University, and then served in the US navy as an intelligence officer during the Korean war.
With this experience, he was made an adviser on the second world war film Battle Stations (1955), and Bryan Foy, its producer, encouraged him to take a screen test, although he had never previously considered acting. He was given a contract by Universal, which already had Hudson and George Nader, similar types, on their roster of stars. In 1956, billed as John Gilmore, he appeared in a Rory Calhoun western, Raw Edge, then, under the name John Golenor, as a small-time criminal in the prison drama Behind the High Wall. He was tough and unshaven (a rare sight in his clean-cut career) as a trigger-happy gunman in the western Quantez (1957), by now credited as John Gavin.
Sirk’s downbeat anti-war drama A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), based on the book by Erich Maria Remarque and set on the Eastern Front and in Nazi Germany, was Gavin’s breakthrough to stardom. Universal decided to cast two relative unknowns, Gavin and the Swiss actor Liselotte Pulver, in the leads, as a young German officer and his lover. Sirk, who had wanted Paul Newman originally, came to admire Gavin. “He was fresh, good looking, not pretty though, earnest,” the director explained. “And he had this little dilettante quality I figured would be quite the thing for the lead in this picture.”
Sirk cast him again in the superior melodrama Imitation of Life (1959) as the love interest of a glamorous film and stage star, Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), and also the object of desire of her teenage daughter (Sandra Dee). Gavin is effective in a pivotal role as a photographer expressing his patriarchal attitude to Lora’s desire for fame, asking her vainly to give up her acting career: “I want to give you a home, take care of you, what you’re after isn’t real.”
In 1960, Gavin appeared in four major pictures, most notably Psycho and Spartacus. He also played an American businessman opposite Sophia Lorenin A Breath of Scandal, a frothy romance. To wind up the year, the seemingly straight-as-a-die Gavin was seen in Midnight Lace comforting a distraught Doris Day, who had received death threats in a foggy London.
Gavin was cast with Dee again in two films the following year – Romanoff and Juliet, Peter Ustinov’s cold war satire, and Tammy Tell Me True, as a hunky speech professor. It was back to melodrama with the glossy Back Street (1961), in which Gavin, ideal as a soap opera cut-out hero, is an unhappily married man in love with a fashion designer (Susan Hayward). At the same time, although he had often been criticised for resembling a model in an upmarket men’s magazine, he began advertising Arrow shirts.
In Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), an amusing pastiche of the 1920s starring Julie Andrews, Gavin spoofed his own persona, as Millie’s self-absorbed boss. In 1971, he was signed to play James Bond in Diamonds are Forever after George Lazenby left the role, although Sean Connery was eventually tempted back with a highly lucrative offer.
After guest appearances in TV shows and starring roles in two series, Destry (1964) and Convoy (1965), in 1973 Gavin danced and sang on Broadway in the musical Seesaw. During its run he told an interviewer: “I used to play one-dimensional people. But looking backwards my work has been varied. Some people have said rich.”
In 1981 Gavin, a Republican, accepted the post of US ambassador to Mexico and served until 1986.
He is survived by his second wife, the actor Constance Towers, whom he married in 1974, and by two daughters, Cristina and Maria, from his first marriage, to the actor Cicely Evans, which ended in divorce.
• John Gavin (Juan Vincent Apablasa), actor and diplomat, born 8 April 1931; died 9 February 2018
Millie Perkins was a very pretty model who won a starring part in her very first film. She was born in New Jersey in 1938. She began her career as a model and in her teens was featured on many magazine covers. She auditioned for and won the lead in the 1959 production of “The Diary of Anne Frank” directed by George Stevens. She acted opposite Elvis Presley in “Wild in the Country” and made a few independent movies with Jack Nicholson before he hit the big time. In the late 60’s she retired from the screen to raise her family. She returned to films in the 80’s somewhat more mature but as warm and wining as ever. She continues to play choice character parts such as playing Andy garcia’s mother in “Lost City”. She recently attended a retrospective showing of “The Diary of Anne Frank” with co-star Diane Baker and this can currently be viewed on utube.
TCM Overview:
She won one of the most coveted roles in Hollywood history–Anne Frank, the Jewish teen who still affirms the human spirit while hiding from the Nazis–in George Stevens’ “The Diary of Anne Frank” (1959). Yet the almost fragile, seemingly eternal dark-haired ingenue Millie Perkins failed to ignite with the audience to become a big movie star, partly because she projected an ordinary quality. There was so sense of urgency or recognition of the inherent dangers. After finding steady work in the 1960s, she seemed to disappear in the 70s, only to renew her career as a strong supporting player in the 80s and 90s.
Born in Passaic, New Jersey, the daughter of a sea captain, Perkins was a junior model and cover girl before winning the Anne Frank role. Her second film was “Wild in the Country” (1961) opposite Elvis Presley; it was de rigueur for every ingenue at the time to play opposite Elvis. (In a twist of fate, Perkins would later portray Gladys Presley, Elvis’ mother, in the short-lived 1990 ABC TV series, “Elvis”). She continued her leading lady career in such efforts as “Ensign Pulver” (1964) and even was alongside Jack Nicholson during the Roger Corman period in “Ride in the Whirlwind” (1965), which Nicholson also wrote and co-produced. But by “Wild in the Streets” (1968), it was apparent Perkins’ screen career was faltering. After her marriage to writer-director Robert Thom, Perkins seemingly retired, appearing only sporadically in film and on TV. It was not she was cast as Jon Voight’s ex-wife in “Table For Five” (1983), that Perkins re-emerged. She had retained her delicate, porcelain features–her face had hardly–but her body was sturdier, and she now projected far more personal power and strength. Now relegated to supporting parts, she played Sean Penn’s mother in “At Close Range” (1986), Charlie Sheen’s mom in “Wall Street” (1987) and the parent of murder victims in “The Chamber” (1996).
On the small screen, Perkins first appeared on TV in 1960 on a Bob Hope special, and made her episodic debut on an episode of “Wagon Train” the following year. When she resumed her career in the 80s, she worked with some regularity in character roles. Perkins played a rape victim in “A Gun in the House” (CBS, 1981) and went on to a number of portrayals as wives, married to drunk driver Don Murray in “License of Kill” (1984, CBS) and Ed Asner’s ailing Norman Cousins in “Anatomy of an Illness” (1984, CBS). Even in her first regular series role, she was typecast, playing the estranged spouse of William Devane on the CBS primetime soap “Knots Landing” during the 1983-84 season. Moving into maternal roles, she was cast as the penultimate mother, the Virgin Mary, in the NBC miniseries “A.D.” (1985) and was the parent of the young Patty Duke in 1990 biopic “Call Me Anna” (ABC). Six years later, she appeared alongside Duke as an Amish woman in “Harvest of Fire” (1996, CBS).
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
Johnny Weissmuller will forever be remembered as the greatest film Tarzan of all. He was born in 1904 in Austria. He arrived with his parents in the U.S. the following year. At the age of ine he contracted polio and his doctors advised swimming as a form of therapy. He became so proficint at the sport that by his teens he had achieved a degree of fame as a sports athlete. He competed and won gold medals for swimming at the 1924 Paris and 1928 Amsterdam Olympic Games. In all he won five medals. He signed a contract with MGM to make the Tarzan films in 1932. The first film was “Tarzan the Ape Man” which featured Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane. It is generally recogn ised that they were the test of the many whoo played the roles. They made six Tarzan films together finishing with “Tarzan’s New York Adventure” in 1942. O’Sullivan left to rear her family and Weissmuller continued the films with Brenda Joyce as the new Jane. He also made a series Jungle Jim films. Johnny Weissmuller died in Mexico in 1984 at the age of 79.
His mini biography by Ed Stephen:
Johnny Weissmuller was born in Timisoara, Romania, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, though he would later claim to have been born in Windber, Pennsylvania, probably to ensure his eligibility to compete as part of the US Olympic team.
A sickly child, he took up swimming on the advice of a doctor. He grew to be a 6′ 3″, 190-pound champion athlete – undefeated winner of five Olympic gold medals, 67 world and 52 national titles, holder of every freestyle record from 100 yards to the half-mile. In his first picture, Glorifying the American Girl (1929), he appeared as an Adonis clad only in a fig leaf. After great success with a jungle movie, MGM head Louis B. Mayer, via Irving Thalberg, optioned two of Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ Tarzan stories. Cyril Hume, working on the adaptation of Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), noticed Weissmuller swimming in the pool at his hotel and suggested him for the part of Tarzan. Weissmuller was under contract to BVD to model underwear and swimsuits; MGM got him released by agreeing to pose many of its female stars in BVD swimsuits. The studio billed him as “the only man in Hollywood who’s natural in the flesh and can act without clothes”. The film was an immediate box-office and critical hit. Seeing that he was wildly popular with girls, the studio told him to divorce his wife and paid her $10,000 to agree to it. After 1942, however, MGM had used up its options; it dropped the Tarzan series and Weissmuller, too. He then moved to RKO and made six more Tarzans. After that he made 16 Jungle Jim (1948) programmers for Columbia. He retired from movies to run private business in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Ed Stephan <stephan@cc.wwu.edu>
This IMDB entry can also be accessed on lone here.
“Handsome and brawny, Rod Taylor has nevertheless played comedy with some finesse and drama with considerable sensitivity, but he seems less to want to act than to blaze away as the beefy, breezy hero of what “Variety” called ‘middle-budget action pictures. While the fan magazines refer to him as a ‘Tough Guy’, critics call him ‘underrated’. The public likes him. He says he waits for parts that interest him, then adds that he has little patience with stars who sits around demanding the earth in exchange for their services. If I get the rate for the job, I’m satisfied’. Perhaps this is what has kept him from reaching that area here all the best parts are offered around” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years” (1972).
Rod Taylor has enlivened many adventure films and is one of my favourite actors. He was born in Sydney, Australia in 1930. He began his career there on radio and in film. In 1954 he went to Hollywood and soon began appearing in supproting parts in such films as “Giant” and “The Catered Affair”. In 1960 he had his own series on U.S. television “Hong Kong” and had also the lead in the classic “The Time Machine”. In 1962 Alfred Hitchcok cast him in “The Birds” with Tippi Hedren and Suzanne Pleshette. In the 1960’s he was at the height of his fame with films such as “Sunday in New York” with Jane Fonda. “Fate is the Hunter”, “Young Cassidy” with Maggie Smith and Julie Christie and “Hotel” with Merle Oberon. In 1970 he starred in an excellent TV series “Bearcats”. He has continued working regularly over the years but he is under appreciated and his career is ready for reevaluation. It was great to see Quentin Tarentino cast him in “Inglorious Bastards” as Winston Churchill. Sadly he passed away in 2015. To view the Rod Taylor website, please click here.
“Daily Telegraph” obituary:
Rod Taylor, who has died aged 84, was an early pioneer in what would much later become a flood of talented actors from Australia taking on leading roles in Hollywood.
By the time Alfred Hitchcock cast him opposite Tippi Hedren in The Birds (1963), Taylor had long cast off his Aussie vowels for an American twang as he played a ruggedly handsome hero convincingly menaced, along with the rest of the human cast, by a homicidal avian horde.
It was the sort of role that would have been played in Hitchcock’s earlier films by Cary Grant or James Stewart; but the director admitted that because of the necessarily inflated special effects budget he could not on this occasion afford a bigger star. The screenwriter on the film, Evan Hunter, amusingly described Taylor’s performance as “so full of machismo, you’d expect him to have a steer thrown over his shoulder”.
Not that Taylor was exactly a stranger to Hollywood when Hitchcock picked him for what will probably remain the actor’s most enduring credit across a long career in film and on television. Three years earlier he had played H G Wells’s intrepid time-traveller in The Time Machine (1960) – a film remade more than 40 years later with Guy Pearce. It was the first of many leading roles which had clearly beckoned ever since Taylor had first been signed to the traditional seven-year “slave” contract by MGM in 1956.
As a result of that contract he was given small roles in some extremely high-profile studio productions such as Giant (1956), Raintree County (1957) and Separate Tables (1958). But with star-laden casts that included the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Rock Hudson, David Niven, Wendy Hiller and Deborah Kerr, his “supporting” contributions were effectively invisible. However, after The Time Machine and The Birds, as well as a warm-hearted “voice” performance as Pongo in Disney’s animated canine classic One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), Taylor was to become swiftly translated to “above the title” status.
The son of a steel contractor and a children’s book writer, Rodney Sturt Taylor was born in Sydney on January 11 1930 and attended Parramatta High School and East Sydney Technical and Fine Arts College. He trained first as a commercial artist before deciding on a career as an actor after seeing various productions, notably Richard III, during Sir Laurence Olivier’s trailblazing Old Vic tour of Australia in 1948.
Work in radio – he played both the intrepid British air ace Douglas Bader in an adaptation of Reach for the Sky and Tarzan – and on stage followed. He then landed his first film roles, as an American in the people-smuggling thriller King of the Coral Sea (1954), and, in the same year, portraying Israel Hands in Long John Silver, a sequel to Treasure Island, the film that had launched a thousand impressions of the peg-legged, be-parroted pirate played by eye-rolling Robert Newton.
It was, however, Taylor’s prowess on the airwaves that led him to quit his native Australia in the 1950s, after winning a radio talent contest. Part of the prize was an air ticket to Los Angeles and London. Taylor stopped off in LA on the first leg – and never really left.
Once he had cemented his stardom in Hollywood, his roles – mostly of the virile, action-man variety – came thick and fast, notably in three films directed by Jack Cardiff, the British film-maker better known for his great cinematography. There was Young Cassidy (1965), as the aspiring Irish playwright Sean O’Casey; The Liquidator (1966), one of the earliest and best of the James Bond spoofs; and The Mercenaries (1968), a bloodily violent adaptation of Wilbur Smith’s Congo-set bestseller, Dark of the Sun, with Taylor as a hard-nosed but well-meaning major caught up in the heart of darkness.
Later in his career Taylor occasionally returned to Australia to make home-grown films such as The Picture Show Man (1977), as a travelling projectionist in the pre-talkies 1920s, and Welcome to Woop Woop (1997), chewing up the scenery as a foul-mouthed, small-town tyrant in the Outback. In these Taylor was able, unusually, to play in his native accent.
He had grabbed that rare opportunity with both hands in Anthony Asquith’s comedy-drama The V.I.P.s (1963), opposite Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Louis Jordan and Margaret Rutherford, as an Australian tycoon giving his secretly adoring assistant Maggie Smith, in a scene-stealing early screen role, a hard time as he tries to seal a last-minute deal.
Urged out of retirement by Quentin Tarantino in 2009, his final showy cameo was, almost unrecognisably, as a cigar-smoking Winston Churchill in Tarantino’s revisionist Second World War thriller romp Inglourious Basterds.
Taylor was thrice married. He is survived by a daughter from his second marriage, Felicia, a reporter for CNN, and by his third wife, Carol, whom he married in 1980.
Rod Taylor, born January 11 1930, died January 7 2015
His IMDB mini biography:
Suave and handsome Australian actor who came to Hollywood in the 1950s, and built himself up from a supporting actor into taking the lead in several well-remembered movies. Arguably his most fondly remembered role was that as George (Herbert George Wells), the inventor, in George Pal‘s spectacular The Time Machine (1960). As the movie finished with George, and his best friend Filby Alan Young seemingly parting forever, both actors were brought back together in 1993 to film a 30 minute epilogue to the original movie! Taylor’s virile, matinée idol looks also assisted him in scoring the lead of Mitch Brenner in Alfred Hitchcock‘s creepy thriller The Birds (1963), the role of Jane Fonda‘s love interest in Sunday in New York (1963), the title role in John Ford‘s biopic of Irish playwright Sean O’Casey in Young Cassidy (1965), and a co-starring role in The Train Robbers (1973) with John Wayne. Taylor also appeared as Bette Davis future son-in-law in the well-received film The Catered Affair (1956). He also gave a sterling performance as the German-American Nazi Major trying to fool James Garner in 36 Hours(1965). Later Taylor made many westerns and action movies during the 1960s and 1970s; however, none of them were much better than “B pictures” and failed to push his star to the next level. Aditionally, Taylor was cast as the lead in several TV series including Bearcats! (1971), Masquerade (1983), and Outlaws (1986); however, none of them truly ignited viewer interest, and they were canceled after only one or two seasons. Most fans would agree that Rod Taylor’s last great role was in the wonderful Australian film The Picture Show Man (1977), about a traveling side show bringing “moving pictures” to remote towns in the Australian outback.
ALEXIS SMITH was an aloof, glacial beauty who was typecast as such. She was soignee, smart, sophisticated, hair swept up (it was a shock to see it falling around her shoulders), with diamante-encrusted collars. She was a leading star who never engaged much popular attention – how could she, in those roles? – or excited the critics. She was a Warner Bros workhorse.
In the Thirties, Warners was fuelled by the star-power of James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart came up about the same time, at the end of the decade, which startled Jack L. Warner, because they had both been under contract for a long while. Also, because they were rebellious, he never liked or understood either of them, but he felt it safer to go with Bette than with Bogey. Basically, Warners stopped making pictures for men (Cagney and Robinson had both left) and the roles that Davis turned down could be taken by Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Ann Sheridan or Ida Lupino. These were all strong women. So was Alexis Smith, but she was last in the pecking order.
Any Number Can Play, poster, US poster art, from left: Alexis Smith, Clark Gable, Audrey Totter, 1949. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
She first made an impact, if a mild one, as the society lady who goaded and taunted Errol Flynn throughout Gentleman Jim (1942), a romanticised life of the prize-fighter James Corbett. In The Constant Nymph (1943), stinking-rich again, she prevented the artless Charles Boyer from realising that he really loves the naive Joan Fontaine.
In Rhapsody in Blue (1945) she was a slinky Manhattanite who confused George Gershwin (Robert Alda) no end when he had troubles as to whether he should be writing concerti or Broadway songs; in Night and Day (1946) she reprised the role, in a way, as Mrs Cole Porter, incessantly fed-up because Cole (Cary Grant) cannot stop burning the midnight oil. She was Marian Halcombe in the surprisingly effective version of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1948).
Like all the best stars, there was no one else quite like her, but she did not ‘give’ very much. Her haughtiness should have contrasted well with the cynicism of Bogart – Conflict (1945), The Two Mrs Carrolls (1947) – or the devil-may-care Flynn – San Antonio (1945), Montana (1950) – but you merely admired her coiffure and tailoring. She was loaned to MGM to star opposite Clark Gable in Any Number Can Play and, her Warner contract finished, she went to Paramount to play the stuffy fiancee Bing Crosby drops for a bubbly Jane Wyman in Frank Capra’s Here Comes the Groom (1951).
In the decade that followed she played occasional second leads, returning to Warners to support Paul Newman in The Young Philadelphians (1959). This was Alexis Smith? Stunning as ever – but playing with a warmth never even hinted at before.
She retired, happily married to Craig Stevens, an erstwhile star of ‘B’ movies, but she returned to show business in Stephen Sondheim’s Follies in 1971. This was Alexis Smith? This scintillating redhead, kicking her legs up and having a ball?
She had auditioned for the role, one of the show-business has-beens which comprised most of the cast, and it reflected her rather aristocratic past: but she broke out, revealing glee, radiance, a joie de vivre. She sent her old self up, gloriously, and got a Tony award, the New York Critics’ award and a Time cover.
She played Kirk Douglas’s wife in Jacqueline Susann’s Once Is Not Enough (1974), ‘the world’s fifth richest woman’ and a lesbian. Four years later she played a blue-blooded horse breeder in Martin Ritt’s pleasing Casey’s Shadow, starring Walter Matthau, with more style and warmth than she showed in all her Warner Bros movies put together.
These two qualities were wonderfully in evidence when she sang ‘Nobody’s Chasing Me’ in the tribute to Cole Porter in London two years ago.
