Hollywood Actors

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Pat Boone

Pat Boone. TCM Overview.

Pat Boone
Pat Boone

Pat Boone was in the 1950’s nearly as popular a recording star as Elvis Presley.   He had a string of hits including “Love Letters in the Sand”, “Friendly Persuasion”, “Moody River”and “Ain’t that a Shame”.   He was also groomed by 20th Century Fox as a movie star.   He was born in 1934 in Jacksonville in Florida.   His first film came in 1957 with “Bernadine”.   He went on to make “April Love” with Shirley Jones, “Mardi Gras”, “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”, “State Fair” and “The Main Attraction”.   In 1963 he made “Never Put it in Writing” in Ireland.   He has continued to perform in concerts all over the U.S. and is still very popular.

TCM Overview:

Though frequently dismissed by critics and music cognoscenti as the ultimate whitebread performer, the undeniable fact remained that Pat Boone was one of the most successful pop music performers of the 20th century, with over 30 Top 40 hits to his name, as well as an actor, television host, philanthropist and businessman. The key to Boone’s appeal in the 1950s and early 1960s was his ability to translate R&B and rock songs by black artists into smooth, palatable pop for white audiences, including gently boppy takes on “Tutti Fruitti,” “I Almost Lost My Mind” and “Long Tall Sally.” Though his versions of the songs lacked the intensity and sexual heat of Elvis Presley’s material, both men found their fame from the same material, and though they took completely divergent paths in their careers, both could be ultimately credited for both legitimizing rock and roll for mass audiences and bringing attention to black artists in a period when mainstream radio refused to play their music. Boone’s time in the pop spotlight faded with the arrival of The Beatles, but he remained a fixture of Christian music and secular television for the next four decades. No matter what one thought of Boone, his music or his image, the sheer scope of his work as a singer and entertainer was impossible to deny.

Born Charles Eugene Boone in Jacksonville, FL on June 1, 1934, Pat Boone was the oldest of four children by parents Archie Boone, a contractor, and his wife Margaret, who was a registered nurse. Boone was raised primarily in Nashville, TN, where he moved with his family when he was two years old. After graduating from David Lipscomb High School in 1952, he married Shirley Foley, daughter of famed country star Red Foley, and attended David Lipscomb University before transferring to the University of North Texas and later Columbia University, from which he graduated magna cum laude in 1958. Though he was a devout Christian, he as also an avowed admirer of such crooners as Bing Crosby and Perry Como. However, he never considered pursuing music for a career; instead focusing on teaching high school. But after winning a talent contest while at North Texas, he began a long stint on such popular TV and radio talent programs as “The Ted Mack Amateur Hour” (DuMont/ABC/NBC/CBS, 1948-1954) and “The Arthur Godfrey Show” (CBS, 1949-1959).

Signed to a contract with the micro label Republic Records, he began his singing career in 1954 with the intent of following in the footsteps of Como. However, he was convinced by Randy Wood, owner of Dot Records, to record covers of songs by popular black artists, who at the time, could not get their material played on mainstream, white-owned radio stations. In 1955, Boone recorded a fairly sedate if poppy take on Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame.” The record shot to the top spot on the U.S. charts and established Boone – always impeccably dressed in tasteful clothes and a pair of spotless white bucks – as a worry-free artist for both teens and parents to enjoy. Over the next half-decade, Boone would record a handful of other R&B and rock hits including Little Richard’s “Tutti Fruitti” and “Long Tall Sally,” The Orioles’ “It’s Too Soon To Know,” and Ivory Joe Hunter’s venerable “I Almost Lost My Mind,” which became his second of many No. 1 hits. Though purists gritted their teeth over his sanitized versions, their popularity was a considerable benefit to the original artists. A famous story about Fats Domino recounted him flashing a massive ring to a concert audience and stating that the royalties from Boone’s cover had bought him the bauble, while Hunter enjoyed a career revival thanks to Boone. The covers also did much to legitimize rock and roll as a viable music genre during a period when it was considered an almost criminal action to play or listen to it.

In addition to his rock material, Boone also recorded dozens of ballads, romantic numbers and pop tracks, including “Love Letters in the Sand” and “April Love.” By the early 1960s, he had 38 Top 40 hits, and was the second most popular artist of the 1950s, with only Elvis Presley ahead of him in terms of sales and fandom. It was only natural that he would segue into a career in front of the camera, which he began in 1957 as the host of “The Pat Boone-Chevy Showroom” (ABC, 1957-1960), a good-natured variety show that began his long association with General Motors and its Chevrolet line.

At the time, he was only 23 – and still a student at Columbia – which made him the youngest person to ever host a weekly primetime variety series until Donny and Marie Osmond broke his record in 1976. The series remained at the top of the Nielsen charts throughout its network tenure before the Boone family moved to Los Angeles, bringing the show to an end.

That same year, he made his acting debut in “Bernadine” (1957), a harmless romantic comedy-musical that also featured Boone’s rendition of the title song. He would go on to play upstanding young men with the purest of intentions in several major films, including “April Love” (1957) and “State Fair” (1962), and held his own opposite James Mason in the science fiction epic, “Journey to the Center of the Earth” (1959).

However, Hollywood and Boone were never a perfect match; Boone refused to participate in romantic scenes, as he felt it would compromise his beliefs about marriage. That stance, when combined with his wholesome offscreen image, made it difficult for him to find substantive parts, despite his campaigns for serious roles like the lead in “The Sand Pebbles” (1962). Only a turn as a cold-hearted father who consigns his son to a draconian military academy on an episode of “Night Gallery” (NBC, 1970-72) broke his typecasting. He ended his film-acting career with a cameo as the angel at the cave where Christ was interred in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1967) and as pastor David Wilkerson, who helped reform wayward youth, in the film version of “The Cross and the Switchblade” (1970).

Despite the stalemate in Hollywood, Boone remained an exceptionally popular recording artist and guest star on television series and talk shows. He enjoyed countless Top 40 and 50 hits through 1962, including a massive No. 1 with 1961’s “Moody River,” and penned the lyrics to “The Exodus Song,” Ernest Gold’s emotional theme to the 1960 film “Exodus.”

Boone also found success as a writer, penning numerous self-help books for his young fans, including Twixt Twelve and Twenty (1958), which provided answers for teenage dilemmas.

His pop music career eventually became one of the many casualties of the British Invasion, so he moved successfully into gospel and country songs, while diversifying in a number of directions, including head of the Christian label Lamb and Lion Records, and spokesman for a wide variety of charities, including the March of Dimes and the Easter Seal telethon.

Boone was also the majority owner of the Oakland Oaks, an American Basketball Association team that won the 1969 ABA championship. An ardent supporter of Republican causes, Boone most notably supported Ronald Reagan’s campaign for governor of California in 1966 and 1970.

In the 1970s, Boone toured with his daughters Cheryl Lynn, Linda Lee, Laura Gene and Deborah Ann – the latter of whom later scored a substantial No. 1 pop hit with 1977’s “You Light Up My Life” before segueing into country and gospel.

Her father continued to record throughout the decade and into the 1980s, while adding television station owner and syndicated radio show host to his ever-expanding résumé. Eventually, he moved away from the music business altogether to concentrate on his business and charitable opportunities.

In 1997, Boone displayed a quirky sense of humor by releasing “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” a collection of hard rock and heavy metal tunes done in what could best be described as “Pat Boone style” – ear friendly big band orchestrations. Boone appeared on the American Music Awards that year bedecked in leather, which earned him a dismissal from the Trinity Broadcasting Network’s “Gospel America” program.

The 21st century found Boone reaping the rewards of his long and prolific career.,

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

 

Elaine Stewart

Elaine Stewart obituary in “The Guardian”.

“Guardian” obituary:

The seductive brunette Elaine Stewart, who has died aged 81, may have lacked that ineffable essence that makes up star quality, but she had enough allure to attract attention in several glossy Hollywood movies in the 1950s, both in leading parts and noteworthy supporting roles. Among the best of the latter were her brief though memorable appearances in two films directed by Vincente Minnelli.

She was both bad and beautiful in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) as Lila, a wannabe film star, hoping to make it by sleeping with Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas), the studio head. When told that Shields is a great man, Lila responds, “There are no great men, buster. There’s only men.” The scene which lingers most in the mind is when Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner), who has just triumphed in a Shields movie, leaves a party to be with him at his Hollywood mansion. While she is embracing Shields, Lila’s shadow looms over them. Then Georgia notices Lila at the top of the stairs, barefoot, wearing a slinky dress, a martini glass in hand. “I thought you said you were going to get rid of her quick,” says Lila. “The picture’s finished, Georgia. You’re business, I’m company.”

Her sequence in Brigadoon (1954) begins with a violent cut from the picturesque Scottish village in the Highlands to a bustling Manhattan bar where Stewart, as Gene Kelly’s Park Avenue fiancee, is chatting away about the wedding and shopping. Kelly, whose inner ear is listening to the music to which he had danced with a Scottish lass (Cyd Charisse), doesn’t hear a word the self-absorbed Stewart is saying. A stark contrast is created between the two women: the dream girl and the real thing. Ironically, unlike Kelly, Minnelli was pleased to get away from the feyness and painted scenery of the wilds of Scotland to revel in the noisy bar where the metropolitan Stewart is quite at home.

She was born Elsy Steinberg in New Jersey, one of five children of German-Jewish parents. After a few jobs, she was taken on in her late teens by the Conover modelling agency in New York, which worked with the leading magazines of the day. She was soon getting photo layouts, one of which caught the eye of producer Hal B Wallis at Paramount, who cast her as a sexy navy nurse in the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis comedy Sailor Beware (1952). Stewart made the most of her one scene when she brushes off a pass by Martin, who is told, “When it comes to sailors, she’s colder than a deep freeze.” However, a few minutes later she is seen, to Martin’s astonishment, to be kissing Lewis.

The sequence was enough to land her an MGM contract, and she was offered a few decorative bit parts, culminating in The Bad and the Beautiful. In 1953, she got leading roles opposite Mickey Rooney (A Slight Case of Larceny), Ralph Meeker (Code Two) and Richard Widmark (Take the High Ground!). She is touching in the last of these, her meatiest role, as a neurotic war widow who comes between army sergeants played by Widmark and Karl Malden.

In a very full year, Stewart was also seen losing her head as Anne Boleyn in Young Bess, and was the subject of a Life magazine cover story entitled Budding Starlet Visits the Folks in Jersey. Despite the fact that Stewart had passed the “budding starlet” phase, it was typical of the way she was often characterised.

In 1954, on loan from MGM, she starred in The Adventures of Hajji Baba, a piece of Hollywood exotica, playing, rather more erratically than erotically, an oriental princess being escorted across the desert by John Derek (in the title role) to marry a powerful prince. When told she is extremely innocent, the 24-year-old Stewart replies, “Whose fault is that? Here I am 17 and unwedded. My sisters and cousins were married at 14! I have wasted three years and I will waste no more!”

Having lost a role in The Opposite Sex (1956) to Joan Collins, Stewart left MGM to take on a two-picture deal with Universal, who changed her hair colour to quicksilver blonde. As she told a fan magazine, “To go with my hair, all my jewellery is silver. I have a new silver Mercedes to drive and a silver poodle named Clicquot. I use silver nail polish and eat off silver dishes. And I sleep in a silver bed.”

In the film noir The Tattered Dress (1957), Stewart is seen in the sensational credit sequence having her dress ripped by her lover, then driving home drunk to her jealous husband. The New York Times’s critic, Bosley Crowther, wrote that “Stewart is provocative enough … to distract an avowed misogynist.” She was a little more restrained in Night Passage (1957), in which she tries to stir up past longings in James Stewart on a mission for her wealthy husband. The best of her last few parts was as a treacherous gangster’s moll in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960), which she made after posing nude for Playboy magazine.

Stewart had a short marriage to the actor Bill Carter and, in 1964, married the television producer Merrill Heatter. She retired for a while to start a family, then made a comeback in the 1970s as a host on two TV gameshows, Gambit and High Rollers, on which her husband was executive producer.

Stewart is survived by Merrill and their son, Stewart, and daughter, Gabrielle.

• Elaine Stewart (Elsy Steinberg), actor; born 31 May 1930; died 27 June 2011

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

Harve Presnell

Harve Presnell obituary in “The Guardian” in 2009.

“Guardian” obituary:

The Hollywood musical has produced several powerful, handsome baritones, the best of them being Nelson Eddy, Howard Keel and Harve Presnell. Unfortunately, Presnell, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 75, came into the film musical when it was in a rather moribund state. However, he managed to sustain a singing career in stage musicals, where his rich operatic voice could be appreciated, and later, thanks to the Coen brothers’ Fargo (1996), he had a second coming as an imposing character actor on the big screen.

The dramatic strength and beauty of his voice can best be judged in his first film, The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964), in which he played a backwoods prospector who strikes it rich. The 6ft 4in Presnell had created the role of Johnny “Leadville” Brown in Meredith Willson’s musical on Broadway four years previously, opposite Tammy Grimes in the title role of his wife, who survives the sinking of the Titanic. The film version, in which Debbie Reynolds was his buoyant partner, allowed Presnell to open up his lungs and sing I’ll Never Say No and Colorado My Home against the CinemaScope background of Black Canyon National Park in Colorado. According to the Variety critic: “Harve Presnell … makes a generally auspicious screen debut … His fine, booming voice and physical stature make him a valuable commodity for Hollywood.” This was not to be. Presnell was to make only four more feature films during the next three decades, only two of them musicals.

He was born in Modesto, California. After graduating from Modesto high school, he studied voice at the University of Southern California, although he first went there on a sports scholarship. After university, he performed with the Roger Wagner Chorale and can be heard as soloist on their Christmas album Joy to the World, as well as on Folk Songs of the New World and Folk Songs of the Frontier. In 1960, he recorded the baritone part in Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy.

Willson had heard Presnell singing at a concert in Berlin and immediately suggested him for the part of Johnny Brown on Broadway. The Unsinkable Molly Brown ran for more than 500 performances, with Presnell gaining glowing reviews. After the successful film adaptation, Presnell, his hair dyed blond, was in the misguided swinging 60s version of George Gershwin’s Girl Crazy, retitled When the Girls Meet the Boys (1965), but he got to sing the evergreen Embraceable You. There were no songs in The Glory Guys (1965), a Cavalry vs Indians western that focused mainly on the rivalry between Captain Tom Tryon and scout Presnell over pretty Senta Berger. The two men have a semi-comic fight on a staircase, finally learning mutual respect. Although Presnell lost the girl, his performance won the most plaudits.

Presnell’s last screen musical was Joshua Logan’s elephantine Paint Your Wagon (1969), in which he was the only true singer: his virile rendition of They Call the Wind Maria shows up the inadequate warbling of Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood and Jean Seberg. After a low-budget horror movie, Blood Bath (1975), Presnell’s film career was on hold until 1996.

In the intervening years, Presnell starred in a number of musicals, including the doomed Gone With the Wind at Drury Lane in 1972, in which he had the dubious privilege of playing Rhett Butler, and a revival of Annie Get Your Gun (1977) in San Francisco opposite Reynolds, formerly his Molly Brown. But his biggest success was as Daddy Warbucks in the long-running Annie, in which he toured from 1979 to 1981, and then took over the role on Broadway for two years. He continued to play Warbucks in Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge, which folded during its Washington tryout, and in another version of the story off-Broadway called Annie Warbucks in 1993. Presnell calculated that he played Little Orphan Annie’s millionaire benefactor more than 2,000 times.

For Presnell, 1996 was an annus mirabilis; he appeared in no less than four feature films, and three television shows, including an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. Most significant was his role as Wade Gufstason in Joel and Ethan Coen’s film Fargo. Presnell, who had a dialogue coach to teach him the Minnesotan accent, played William H Macy’s despotic father-in-law. Now bald and with a considerable girth, Presnell was a long way from the handsome young singer of the early 60s. “He actually did a ‘dancin’ in the snow’ musical number but we cut it out for length,” joked Joel Coen.

His other movies of that year were Larger Than Life, The Whole Wide World and The Chamber, in all of which he used his commanding voice playing authoritarian figures. From then on, in marked contrast to the lean years, Presnell was never short of work, whether guest starring in TV series such as Dawson’s Creek (2001) and Andy Barker P.I. (2007), or appearing as General George Marshall in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), or as a congressman in his last film, Evan Almighty (2007).

Presnell is survived by his second wife, Veeva, and six children, three from each of his marriages.

• Harve (George Harvey) Presnell, actor and singer, born 14 September 1933; died 30 June 2009

Barbara Harris
Barbara Harris
Barbara Harris

Barbara Harris was born in Evanston, Illnois in 1935.   She began her career on Broadway.   She had a waifish pixie appeal in her initial films.   Among her relatively few film credits are “A Thousand Clowns” with Jason Robards Jnr in 1965,  “Who Is Harry Kellerman And Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Thinga About Me” with Dustin Hoffman, Robert Altman’s brilliant “Nashville” and Alfred Hitchcock’s final film “Family Plot” in 1976.

TCM Overview:

This charming stage-trained comedy specialist had an intermittent but once beguiling screen career dating back to the mid-1960s. Long a critic’s darling, Harris convinces as scatterbrained characters with endearing child-like qualities. This aptitude made her, for a time, something of a thinking man’s Goldie Hawn. Harris made her film debut as social worker Sandra Markowitz (her real name) in the feature version of Herb Gardner’s play “A Thousand Clowns” (1966). Her performances often garnered far better notices than the films that framed them. Harris’ reprisal of her off-Broadway role as what VARIETY called a “nymphet chippie” in “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad” (1967) was deemed the film’s only saving grace in some circles. As a late arriving love interest of discontented rock star Dustin Hoffman in “Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?” (1971), Harris fared better than the star and received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her efforts. British culture mag TIME OUT deemed the “delightful” Harris “wasted” as the married old flame of lecherous film producer Walter Matthau in a segment of Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite” (1971), but she fared well opposite a cranky Jack Lemmon in the James Thurber-inspired “The War Between Men and Women” (1972).

The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.

A founding member of Chicago’s celebrated Second City Players in 1960, Harris came with them to appear in “From Second City” on the NY stage. Moving to NYC she established a positive reputation on and off-Broadway before alternating between stage and screen. Harris racked up three Tony nominations, including one for her delightful turn as the daffy heroine of “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever” (1966). She won the 1967 Best Actress in a Musical Play Tony for “The Apple Tree,” in which she played multiple roles opposite Alan Alda and Larry Blyden. Two of her most noteworthy feature credits were in memorable 70s films from divergent auteurs Robert Altman and Alfred Hitchcock: in “Nashville” (1975), Harris was Albuquerque, a housewife whose dream of becoming a country-Western singing star seemingly comes true after an unexpected tragedy; in “Family Plot” (1976), she was a phony but basically benign psychic. Hollywood was less kind for the remainder of the decade.

Harris struggled gamely in the Disney comedies “Freaky Friday” (1976) and “The North Avenue Irregulars” (1979) and won some excellent notices as the frustrated wife of a senator (Alan Alda) in “The Seduction of Joe Tynan” (1979) but by then her star had decisively fallen.

Harris all but disappeared in the 80s, surfacing briefly in Hal Ashby’s disastrous “Second-Hand Hearts” (1980), where even her performance was savaged by reviewers; a bit as Kathleen Turner’s mom in Francis Coppola’s time-traveling “Peggy Sue Got Married” (1986); and a small part as a wealthy traveler conned by a scheming Michael Caine in the comedy “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” (1988). Harris should not be confused with the young character actor of 80s film and TV with the same name.

Lana Turner
Lana Turner

Lana Turner was one of the giants of  the Golden Age of Hollywood.   She was born in 1921 in Wallace, Idaho.   Her movie debut came in 1937 in a small but telling part in “They Won’f Forget”.   By 1941 she in such leading roles as “Johnny Eager” and “Ziegfeld Girl”.   Her films include “Green Dolphin Street”, “The Bad and the Beautiful”,

TCM Overview:

In her reign as a movie goddess of the 1940s and early 1950s, Lana Turner came to crystallize the opulent heights to which show business could usher a small-town girl, as well as its darkest, most tragic and narcissistic depths. In her years as a top box office draw, she and longtime studio MGM forged her statuesque form into any number of pop cultural effigies: the stuff of both starry-eyed legend and tabloid-feeding frenzies; of coquettish sensuality to the G.I.’s of World War II; and later of smoldering elegance, a bedazzling glamour girl and the archetypal, scheming femme fatale. Her apocryphal “discovery” at Schwab’s Drug Store made her a textbook example of sun-drenched Hollywood dream-making, even as she would become a queen of the darkling plane of film noir as a sultry human pressure cooker erupting with lust and malice in her most fondly recalled film, “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1946). But more visceral, real-life noir would shadow her through a rollercoaster journey of ill-considered and scandalous marriages and relationships, a legacy most ignominiously highlighted by a violent mobster bleeding to death in her home, leading to a tearful testimony in court that the press would snarkily call “her greatest performance.”

A linchpin in a American Dream myth the Hollywood studios liked to shill in those days, the story went that Billy Wilkerson, publisher of the influential trade paper The Hollywood Reporter, “discovered” Judy Turner sipping a soda at Schwab’s Drug Store, the Sunset Boulevard establishment whose lunch counter had become a hangout for showbiz insiders. In truth, Judy had skipped out of school to sneak a cigarette, and did so just across the street from Hollywood High at the Top Hat Café (or, alternatively, the nearby Currie’s Ice Cream Parlor). Wilkerson, sitting across from her at a U-shaped counter and indeed stunned by her beauty, asked the counterman who she was and if she would consent to talk to him. Turner demurred, until the counterman vouched for Wilkerson, who asked what would become a “player” cliché thereafter, “How would you like to be in the movies?” Turner famously replied that she would have to ask her mother, and Wilkerson left her with his business card. Judy kept the card to herself for a couple days, reticent to tell her mother she had talked to a stranger, but when she did, they learned Wilkerson was one of the most powerful men in town. Mildred called him immediately.

Wilkerson wound up fast-tracking Turner to the talent agency of Zeppo Marx, of the famed Marx Brothers, and from there to Warner Bros. casting honcho Solly Biano, who brought her almost immediately to director Mervyn LeRoy, then prepping a film calling for someone of her type. Still naive to Hollywood politesse, Turner showed up in an anything-but-glamorous cotton dress, her hair rumpled, which actually wowed LeRoy. She got the small but pivotal part as the sweet, virginal college student murdered in a Southern city in “They Won’t Forget” (1937). LeRoy even helped her brainstorm a new glamorous marquee name, Lana Turner. The whirlwind did not stop there; in her brief appearance lithely walking down a street, her form-fitting wool sweater over her curvaceous upper torso seeded her reputation among slavering new fans as “the Sweater Girl,” which also came to describe a genre of pin-up model. Wilkerson’s publication did its part to highlight the new arrival, noting in its review of Turner’s “vivid beauty, personality and charm.”

Her early roles actually were more notable for off-set foibles than for the actress realizing her deeper talents as of yet. In the Gary Cooper vehicle “The Adventures of Marco Polo” (1938), Turner played an Asian maid, a make-up effect supplemented by shaving off her eyebrows; they never grew back, forcing her to draw on false eyebrows the rest of her life. The next year, she scored the lead in a fluffy MGM B-comedy, “The Dancing Co-Ed” (1939), where she had the mixed fortune of working with one of the most popular musical artists of the time, big bandleader and notorious ladies man, Artie Shaw. Though Shaw considered motion pictures beneath him, he took notice of the 17-year-old castmember and asked her to dinner. She agreed to lunch, but remained unimpressed, thinking him “one of the most egotistical people I’ve ever met.” She had begun seeing lawyer and fellow womanizer Greg Bautzer, but by February 1940, Bautzer had thrown her over for the considerably older Joan Crawford. Still angry with Bautzer, the ever impulsive Turner accepted a date with Shaw and eloped with him that night to Las Vegas, NV. But the marriage quickly soured, as the notoriously headstrong Shaw became abusive, demanding she assume workaday household duties impossible with her studio schedule. In September, they divorced, with Bautzer stepping in to do the legal legwork. Turner later admitted she had become pregnant by Shaw but had had an abortion, then illegal but often enabled by the studios in their efforts to insulate their contract talent from scandal.

But the next year would see an upturn for Turner, with her breakthrough role in “Ziegfeld Girl” (1941). The lavish MGM A-picture, combining elements of Flo Ziegfeld’s famed live variety shows with behind-the-scenes drama and turmoil, had originally scripted Turner’s as a minor role among a cast that included Judy Garland, Jimmy Stewart and Hedy Lamarr. But someone had bigger plans for her: her character expanded as the shooting progressed, becoming the movie’s central arc, as she rises from driven material girl to star, loses her soul and hits the booze to fill the hole her material excesses and facile suitors can not. It-girl status, especially for one so young and vivacious, also made her a lightning rod in multiple senses. It drew her roles opposite Clark Gable, the studio’s top male draw, with whom she co-starred in “Honky Tonk” (1941) and “Somewhere I’ll Find You” (1942); the former notable for displaying Turner’s physical charms in revealing boudoir-wear, for which The New York Times’ review noted she was “not only beautifully but ruggedly constructed.”

During the war years, MGM issued Turner’s pin-ups to remind G.I.’s the world over what they were fighting for, and she did her part by touring on behalf of the government’s “Buy War Bonds” campaign, offering a kiss to any man who bought bonds worth $50,000 or more. But every highlight seemed to cast a dark shadow for Turner. In LeRoy’s dark gangster thriller “Johnny Eager” (1942), her chemistry with leading man Robert Taylor essayed off camera, which may have prompted his real-life wife Barbara Stanwyck to attempt suicide and, at very least, led to Stanwyck refusing to speak to Turner for the rest of her life. In an effort to settle herself down, Turner married restaurateur Steve Crane in 1942, only to bumble into a bigamy dust-up the next year. Not long after the studio’s announcement that Turner was pregnant by Crane – she made the bubbly comedy “Slightly Dangerous” (1943) while in her first trimester – his previous wife cropped up to point out that their split was sealed by an “interlocutory decree,” meaning he had to wait a year before the divorce was final. Turner accused the woman of timing her move to blackmail the couple, ended up paying her hush money and secured an annulment. She and Crane separated, but the studio, and its potent publicity department feared the future box office potential of an unwed mother. Under MGM pressure, and with Crane suicidal, she agreed to remarry later in 1943 to give their newborn, Cheryl, a stable home. It would only last until August 1944.

Even as her personal life remained stormy, her career began picking up steam. MGM re-upped her contract, paying her $4,000 a week starting in 1945, and, after biding her talents in series of humdrum projects, the studio brought in the script that gave her the chance to spread her wings artistically. Based on James M. Cain’s dark novel, “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1946) would emblazon the newly platinum blonde as the femme fatale’s femme fatale. She played Cora, the unsatisfied wife of the owner of a roadside diner, who strikes up a fervent affair with a drifter (John Garfield), then a scheme by which the two will murder her husband. Even after significant dilution from the novel, the torrid on-screen relationship caused MGM execs such concern over the carnal heat between the stars that they directed the wardrobe department to dress her entirely in white outfits. The juxtaposition of this to the dark tenor of Cora’s desires and machinations had the opposite effect, and the movie opened to both critical laud and big box-offices receipts. Before “Postman,” Turner was a movie star, but after, critics welcomed her into rarified air. “One of the astonishing excellences of this picture is the performance to which Lana Turner has been inspired,” the New York World-Telegram raved. “[I]f it is possible not to be dazzled by that baby beauty and pile of taffy hair, you may agree that she is now beginning to roll in the annual actress’ sweepstakes.”

As she shot her next project, the period melodrama “Green Dolphin Street” (1947), Turner began a relationship with someone she would later consider the love of her life, leading man Tyrone Power – another headache for MGM spinmeisters, as Power was married. The coupling lasted a year and a half – with powerful Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper often taking snide shots at them. In early 1947, Turner found herself pregnant again, compounding the potential scandal until she had another abortion. Once Power finally obtained a divorce in 1948, he had struck up another relationship with actress Linda Christian and dumped Turner to marry her. Crushed, Turner’s sometime dalliance with young crooner Frank Sinatra briefly blossomed into an affair, hardly a relief to MGM management because Sinatra was himself married. Privately, however, Sinatra promised Turner to divorce his wife and they even began wedding plans, according to the memoir of one of Turner’s best friends in the trade, Ava Gardner, until either Sinatra, MGM management or a combination of both ended it. Turner, in turn, grudgingly acceded to dating a new suitor, thrice- and still-married millionaire gadabout Henry (“Bob”) Topping, Jr., an heir of the family who had founded the American Sheet and Tin Plate Co. (later to become a part of U.S. Steel). Though she admittedly felt no spark with him, one night at a swank hotspot, he dropped a diamond ring into her martini and she married him as soon as he had secured a divorce from his current wife.

More ardor awaited her professionally, as well. She reunited with Gable and director LeRoy in “Homecoming” (1948) to give an impressive performance against type, starring as an unflappable, outspoken frontline nurse during World War I. In October 1948, she made her debut in Technicolor in the dazzling epic “The Three Musketeers” (1948), which framed her in the rich 17th century finery to stunning effect. She had originally bridled at the assignment for its heavy costuming elements so thus was briefly suspended by MGM, but her simmering turn as a villainess dropped jaws. The New York Times wagged. “Completely fantastic . . . is Miss Turner as the villainess, the ambitious Lady de Winter who d s the boudoir business for the boss. Loaded with blond hair and jewels, with twelve-gallon hats and ostrich plumes, and poured into her satin dresses with a good bit of Turner to spare, she walks through the palaces and salons with the air of a company-mannered Mae West.” After that last hurrah, however, the Sweater Girl’s career would falter and her psyche would enter a tailspin.

The Turner/Topping marriage would last longer than her previous unions, but it would not stem Turner’s private turmoil. Topping squandered his fortune on bad investments and gambling, even as Turner suffered two miscarriages, owing to an inherited genetic condition called RH incompatibility. The studio, meanwhile, turned a cold shoulder to her when she balked at doing more costumers. She returned to the screen in the soap operatic “A Life of Her Own” (1950), which became her first top-billed feature to be considered a box-office flop. Her next Technicolor outing did even worse – a lavish musical comedy that paired her with opera star Enzio Pinza, “Mr. Imperium” (1951), with Turner’s contribution to the musical aspect overdubbed. Depressed in the wake of the failure and now separated from Topping, she reached an emotional nadir, seeing her career as “a hollow success; a tissue of fantasies on film,” and began mulling a fatal sanction. She attempted suicide in September by slitting her wrists. Her death was prevented by her business manager Benton Cole, who broke down her bathroom door and got her to the hospital. Cole and MGM covered up the incident by telling the press Turner had accidentally fallen through the shower door.

When she recovered, MGM put her back to work in a remake of “The Merry Widow” (1952), another opulent musical extravaganza requiring voice dubbing for her songs. When she and co-star Fernando Lamas tumbled into a real relationship, MGM’s publicity department made hay out of it. It proved such a potent combination that the studio began plotting another on-screen coupling, even as Turner went to work on “The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952), a sensationalized yarn promising to “expose” the unseemly inner workings of the industry – but she could little escape those herself. At a party thrown by William Randolph Hearst’s wife Marion Davies, Hollywood’s then-reigning “Tarzan,” Lex Barker, asked her to dance, and she acceded, stirring Lamas into a jealous rage. As she recounted it, when Barker escorted her back to the table, Lamas grumbled, “Why don’t you just take her out to the bushes and f*ck her.” After the proverbial scene, she demanded Lamas take her home, where an argument heated into a physical fight. A week later, when wardrobe fittings were to begin for “Latin Lovers” (1953), the still-bruised Turner brought the conflict to the attention of MGM exec Benny Thau, who immediately axed Lamas from the picture, replacing him with Ricardo Montalban. She finalized her divorce from Topping in December, in time for the big-ticket premiere of “The Bad and the Beautiful.” In the dark, sometimes overwrought melodrama, Turner played a boozy scion of a movie star family living in its shadow, who redeems herself as reinvented by conniving producer and lover Kirk Douglas, becoming a great actress, only to be dumped by Douglas for a younger up-and-comer. The movie hit big, earning six Oscar nominations and winning five, though Turner was spurned by the Academy for her role.

It would be the high watermark of her MGM years, as Mayer stepped aside for a new studio boss, Dore Schary, who thought little of Turner’s work and, some said, hoped to unchain the studio from her hefty contract. In the wake of the turnover, she took another regrettable leap into matrimony with Barker. Her whirligig game of romantic musical chairs did not go unremarked upon by her media nemesis, Hedda Hopper, who wrote in 1953 that, to Turner, “men are like new dresses, to be donned and doffed at her pleasure. Seeing a fellow that attracts her, she’s like a child looking at a new doll.” Turner and Barker wed in September 1953 and, dodging her nagging back-tax problem with the IRS, they took an extended European honeymoon on which she made two pictures, “The Flame and Flesh” (1954) in Italy and “Betrayed” (1954) in Holland; the latter her last film with Gable. Most notable of her remaining MGM films was a swords-and-sandals flick “The Prodigal” (1955), famous for seeing her bedecked in her most revealing costumes to date – a pagan “high priestess” role allowed wardrobe’s creativity to run wild – and for its becoming one of the most ambitious box-office flops of the decade. After a last respectable period costumer, “Diane” (1956), her home studio cut her loose, to her great relief.

As if by karma, she would earn her much-sought respect for her very next role, as 20th Century Fox came calling for a picture called “Peyton Place” (1957), which would assuage her yen for a simple, unglamorous dramatic part. But both before and after she made her memorable mark as beleaguered Constance MacKenzie, real life intruded, calling into question her own qualifications for motherhood. Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, bided much of her early childhood in the care of her grandmother Mildred and in boarding schools, which afforded Lana the freedom to maintain her hobnobbing, club-hopping and paparazzi-posing regimen. Turner’s negligence towards her daughter had predictably not yielded a healthy relationship. Once, while at one of the exclusive boarding schools she attended in her youth, she had balked at standard routine of writing home to one’s parents, and a teacher told her she would get no dinner that night unless she wrote her mother. “Dear Mother,” she began the missive, “this is not a letter, this is a meal ticket . . .” Just 13 in 1957, Crane already showed she had inherited her mother’s beauty, but she harbored a horrific secret. In the spring of that year, she told her grandmother that her stepfather, Barker, had periodically raped and molested her since she was 10. Mildred called her daughter over to her house and had Cheryl tell the story, and, as Crane later told it, Lana went home, found Barker sleeping, took a gun from a bedside table and held it to his head. He awoke, and she simply said, “Get out.” According to Crane’s retelling of her mother’s account, Barker immediately protested that Cheryl had lied to her, but Turner had not mentioned her daughter. Their divorce became official in July.

But Turner’s disastrous romantic inclinations and their affects on her troubled daughter, hardly ended there. On the rebound again, Turner took up with an admirer who had been pursuing her via gifts of flowers and music for a year or more – a proverbially tall, dark, handsome gift-shop manager named John Steele. While Steele and Turner dated, and as she spent much of that summer working on “Peyton Place,” he also took a paternal interest in Crane, giving her a horse and riding with her, even suggesting at one point that Turner send her away to board with his family in Woodstock, IL, to get the troubled teen into a more wholesome environment. When the relationship became public, friends intervened and told Lana who he really was – Johnny Stompanato, a smalltime hood and sometime bodyguard in the employ of L.A. mob boss, Mickey Cohen. At first, Turner recalled, she found herself titillated by the “forbidden fruit” aspect of the gangster connection, but Stompanato’s darker side would soon muddle that. He became discomfited at her refusal to be seen with him in public and, in October, she went to England to film “Another Time, Another Place” with a new leading man, strapping Scot Sean Connery, hoping to put some distance between her and Johnny “Stomp.” But she grew lonely in London, kept in touch with him with some overwrought love letters, and he soon flew to join her. Their reunion began amicably, but after a time, he insisted on coming to the studio over her objections and, when he heard a rumor of an affair between Turner and Connery, confronted Connery, pulled a pistol and menacingly warned him off. Connery, the story g s, snatched the gun away, decked Stompanato and personally kicked him off the set. Back in their hotel, Turner and Stompanato’s feuding escalated until he choked her severely enough that she found it difficult to speak for a few days, disrupting the production schedule. Turner responded by getting word to authorities that he had entered the U.K. under a passport falsely identifying him as John Steele, and Stompanato was deported.

Meanwhile, “Peyton Place” opened big in December. A standout in the ensemble melodrama, Turner became something wholly different; a frumpy, repressed woman in a repressed New England town riddled with secrets of avarice and amor. Turner’s climactic courtroom testimony, as she realizes that her attempts to keep reign on her teenaged daughter are only enabling the antisocial cycle, cinched her an Oscar nomination. She would learn about it, however, amid the resumption of her own nightmare. Instead of returning to L.A. after “Another Time” wrapped in early January, she decided to take a secret vacation in Acapulco. By some accounts, the conflicted Turner relented and invited Stompanato; by another, he used his mob connections to obtain her itinerary and stalked her to Mexico. Either way, their quarrels resumed there. He now began to threaten her, her mother and Cheryl if Turner dared leave him. At one point, she claimed, he even pulled a gun on her. When the news of her nomination by the Academy came, they returned to Los Angeles, where the press, Mildred and Cheryl awaited them. A wire photo taken of them at the homecoming only exacerbated matters when it circulated with the caption, “Lana Turner Returns with Mob Figure.” A conflicted Turner incomprehensibly continued to abide his company, even while deflecting his marriage proposals. She further enraged him by refusing to let him escort her to the Academy Awards gala on March 26. After the event, at which she lost to Joanne Woodward for her performance in “The Three Faces of Eve” (1957), she returned to the Bel Air Hotel to find him in a rage over being left out, and, according to her account, he beat her brutally. A week later, “the happening,” as she would later codify it, happened.

Johnny Stomp met his end on the night of April 4, 1958, Good Friday. With Cheryl, now 14, staying with Turner at the North Bedford house during her school’s Easter break, her mother told her, “This is it. I’m going to get rid of him. You stay in your room.” Crane tried to do homework, but she could not concentrate with the argument coming from her mother’s room. Crane went to the door and overheard Stompanato promising to menace Turner’s entire family, “making threats that he was going to cut her face, that he [was] going to kill my grandmother,” Crane recalled to Larry King in 2001. Crane ran down to the kitchen, found a carving knife and dashed back upstairs, calling to her mother to open the door. When Turner opened the door, Crane saw Stompanato behind her mother with his arm upraised, still shouting. Crane moved past her mother and thrust the knife into his abdomen. He collapsed. Turner, aghast, called her mother, who picked up their physician and rushed him over to the mansion. But it was too late. Cheryl had cut Stompanato’s aorta and he bled out. The doctor advised Turner call well-known defense lawyer-to-the-stars, Jerry Geisler, who contacted police. Beverly Hills police chief Clinton Anderson arrived to question Turner personally and said her first words to him were, “Can I take the blame for this horrible thing?”

The next morning and days after, newspapers ran crime scene photos of the dead Stompanato on front pages. Crane was kept in the county’s Juvenile Hall until a coroner’s inquest had ruled on the case. Mickey Cohen, who paid for Stompanato’s body to be shipped back to Illinois and for the subsequent funeral, publicly demanded murder charges against both Turner and Crane and, to embarrass them, released Turner’s sometimes steamy letters to the dead man to the press. The inquest convened a week later, media tumult engulfing it, with 120 seats of the 160 in the assigned courtroom claimed by the media, with ABC and CBS radio broadcasting live. Turner’s 62-minute testimony, interrupted periodically with bouts of sobbing, recounted the events and also delved into the abusive relationship with Stompanato – the violence she suffered and why she stayed with him to the point where circumstances so escalated. “Mr. Stompanato grabbed my arm, shook me,” she testified. “[He] said, as he told me before, no matter what I did or how I tried to get away he would never let me.” At a recess, surrounded by the press, she nearly fainted. At the conclusion of the inquest, the jury took less than a half hour to decide Stompanato’s death a justifiable homicide; that Crane had acted out of justifiable fear for her and her mother’s life. Though the verdict of a coroner’s inquest was not the final word on any case, it convinced the district attorney not to pursue charges against Crane. Mickey Cohen expressed outrage at the decision and Turner feared mob reprisals. Stompanato’s family in Illinois brought wrongful death suit, seeking $750,000 in damages from Turner and Steve Crane. Turner settled it for $20,000 in 1962. The DA did convene an inquiry to determine whether Turner was a fit mother, and Crane wound up tabbed a “ward of the court” and placed in the care of her grandmother.

As much as institutional Hollywood had already given Turner a pass on the sordid relationship and its violent end, the press proved less forgiving toward her as a mother. Hopper, echoing much of the media verdict – if more pointedly – called her “a hedonist without subtlety preoccupied with her design for living,” and declared that “Cheryl isn’t the juvenile delinquent; Lana is.” Crane’s difficulties did not end there. She became, as she later admitted, a “wild kid,” getting caught speeding, ending up in a reformatory, which she attempted to escape twice, landing in a mental institution and attempting suicide twice, all before she was 21. She began rebuilding her life with her father, helping to manage his restaurant, and eventually went into real estate.

Cinematic fallout from “the happening” took on the distinct flavor of schadenfreude. The receipts for “Peyton Place” – still playing, with its ominously portentous courtroom scene – boomed again, and Paramount rushed “Another Time, Another Place” out for an early release. Turner attempted to rebound from the tragedy with another role that seemed close-to-home. Universal was remaking the tearjerker “Imitation of Life” (1959), and producer Ross Hunter cast her as a struggling actress who sacrifices her parental responsibilities in her drive to make it big, compromising her relationship with her rebellious teenage daughter (Sandra Dee). With the studio on the rocks at the time, it could muster only $250,000 for the budget, and Turner, in lieu of her usual pay, accepted a percentage of the film’s profits. It became the studio’s top grosser for the year, wracking up $50 million in revenues, salvaging the studio and earning Turner personally $2 million. Hunter brought her back the next year for “Portrait in Black,” a dark potboiler casting her as a scheming, cuckolding murderess, perhaps intended to revive her steam from “Postman” but unable to generate the same intensity, much less chemistry between her and co-star Anthony Quinn.

She found real chemistry, however, with Fred May, a wealthy rancher and member of the family that owned the May Co. department store chain, whom she made her 5th husband in November, seeking stability outside of Hollywood circles. It was not to be, they divorced in 1962, even as her films began to reflect her romantic success. In 1965, she married again, wedding the much younger Robert Eaton, and the next year appeared in her last real cinematic gem, “Madame X” (1966), again for Ross Hunter. Turner played the unsatisfied wife of a diplomat (John Forsyth) who starts an affair with a socialite (Ricardo Montalban), who is accidentally killed while she is with him. Under pressure from her domineering mother-in-law, she fakes her own death, flees the country to avoid a scandal that might sabotage her husband’s career, and spirals into a sordid life of alcohol abuse, prostitution and crime. Her character’s trial, and its creeping revelations of her true identity and even relationship to her defense attorney, evokes a riveting performance out of Turner, a symbolic, if not final, exclamation point on her career.

She divorced Eaton in 1969 after returning from entertaining U.S. troops in Vietnam and discovering preponderant evidence of his infidelities. She tried her hand at series television on would be a short-lived show, “The Survivors” (ABC, 1969-70), and, true to her lifelong insecurities, she was swept off her feet yet again by the oddest duck in her long roster of husbands, a lounge hypnotist, Ronald Pellar, stage-name Ronald Dante, whom she had met on the rebound in a nightclub. They married in May and, in late October, he simply disappeared out of her life. She wrote him a check for $35,000 for an investment, and a few days later, after Turner had given a speech at a San Francisco charity – and done so drunk, Pellar later claimed – he told her he was going out to get sandwiches and she never saw him again. In 1974, Pellar was later convicted of attempted murder in Tucson, AZ, for trying to contract a hit on a rival hypnotist, for which he served three and a half years in prison. Turner didn’t secure a divorce from Pellar until 1972.

In the meantime, she had done her first theater work in “Forty Carats” on Broadway, before touring with the production. She returned to TV periodically, landing some guest shots on “The Love Boat” (ABC,1977-1984) and most famously, playing a conniving matron in combat with the show’s star, Jane Wyman, in the nighttime soap opera “Falcon Crest” (CBS, 1981-90) during its 1982-83 season. The latter coincided with the publication of her autobiography, Lana: The Lady, The Legend, The Truth, as well as an homage to her by her late-career manager Taylor Pero, Always Lana. In 1988, Cheryl Crane published her own memoir, Detour, in which she claimed she had reconciled with her mother in 1981 and established a friendship at long last.

The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.

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James Brolin
James Brolin
James Brolin

James Brolin was born in 1940 in Los Angeles.   His television debut came in 1961 in an episode of “Bus Stop”.   In 1963 he had a small part in the James Stewart film “Take Her, She’s Mine”   followed two years later by “Dear Brigitte” which starred Stewart again and Glynis Johns and Fabian.   In 1969 he had significant success with the television series “Marcus Welby M.D.” which ran until 1976 and also starred Robert Young.   He then starred in some big budget films incuding “Gable and Lombard” with Jill Clayburgh in 1976, “Capricorn One” and “The Amityville Horror” in 1979.   He had another television success with “Hotel” from 1983 until 1988.   James Brolin had a recurring role in “The West Wing”.   He is the father of actor Josh Brolin and husband of Barbra Streisand.   Interview with “Huffington Post” here.

“Quinlan’s Movie Stars”:
Tall, dark-haired (now gray) American leading man reminscent of Clint Walker.   He had trouble getting decent roles in Hollywood until television fame as a junior partner in “Marcus Welby”.   His cinema portrait of Clark Gable was not a success and after a couple of box-office hits in the late 1970s he was relegated to tough heroes of minor action films.

TCM Overview:

As the son of James Brolin, stepson of Barbra Streisand and husband of Diane Lane, actor Josh Brolin forged his career in the shadow of three formidable talents. In fact, ever since his debut in “The Goonies” (1985), Brolin languished for years in roles that were well below his station. Adding to his self-determined persona was an ability to get into occasional trouble , whether it was being mauled by a mountain lion, crashing his motorcycle weeks before shooting a major film, or making headlines with an arrest for a domestic dispute  Brolin had a knack for generating publicity in interesting ways. Meanwhile, he worked steadily throughout his career, though he suffered a string of mediocre movies that included “The Road Killers” (1994), “The Mod Squad” (1999) and “Hollow Man” (2000). But he began to step away from such lowbrow fare with a turn in Woody Allen’s serio-comedy “Melinda and Melinda” (2005) and eventually broke free with his acclaimed performance in the Oscar-winning “No Country for Old Men” (2007). He played a crooked cop in “American Gangster” (2007), the bumbling President of the United States in “W.” (2008), and San Francisco politician and assassin Dan White in “Milk” (2008). Though he stumbled a bit as the lead in “Jonah Hex” (2010), Brolin rebounded with “True Grit” (2010), proving that his transformation into a highly sought after leading man was no fluke.

Anne Bancroft
Anne Bancroft
Anne Bancroft

“Hollywood, in the fallow 60s, was suddenly blessed with a group of talented ladies in their middle years, actresses who literally bridged the gap between the new ingenues and the older stars like Davis and Hepburn.   Most of them had made their reputations in the theatre and were just as experienced in TV – Geraldine page, Julie Harris, Kim Stanley(though the last has made only a few films because she dislikes the medium).   But not all: Anne Bancroft like Patricia Neal, was a Hollywood failure who went aay and returned a star” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International years”. (1972)   “A blueprint example of a terrific actress who was practically discarded by the studio system.   Anne Bancroft managed to pull a complete about face , rising above the doldrums of her early career to become one of the most respected performers in the business” – Barry Monush in “The Encyclopedia of Hollywood Film Actors” (2003).

Anne Bancroft was born in 1931 in New York City.   She made her film debut in “Don’t Bother to Knock” with Richard Widmark and Marilyn Monroe.   In the 1950’s she starred in a few glamour parts and after some years returned to Broadway.   She won huge acclaim for her performance as Annie Sullivan in “The Miracle Worker”.   She repeated the role on film in 1962 and won an Academy Award.   She resumed her film career and starred in “The Pumpkin Eater”, ” 7 Women”,  “The Graduate” and “To Be or Not to Be” with her husband Mel Brooks.   Anne Bancroft died in 2005.

Brian Baxter’s “Guardian” obituary:

After a youthful flirtation with television, a near-disastrous relationship with Hollywood and a failed marriage, the actor Anne Bancroft, who has died aged 73, fled the west coast and returned home to New York. It was 1959 and in her own words “life was a shambles … I was terribly immature. I was going steadily downhill in terms of self-respect and dignity”. She needed to reclaim her life and career.

Happily, it worked and within three years she had won Tonys for her Broadway roles in Two for the Seesaw and as Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker. When the latter was transferred to the screen by its author William Gibson and director Arthur Penn, she again took the demanding role of Helen Keller’s teacher, winning the best actress Oscar in 1963.

This success relaunched her career, leading to prestige roles in the theatre including Mother Courage, Sister Jeanne in The Devils and Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes. There were film roles too, in The Pumpkin Eater (1964) and, most famously, as the seductive Mrs Robinson in the modish and popular The Graduate (1967). This movie, in which Dustin Hoffman made his screen debut, became so closely associated with Bancroft as a 1960s archetype that it somewhat obscured her subsequent career.

She was also famously married to the Jewish actor-director Mel Brooks whose mother, told that he was going to marry an Italian-American Catholic, replied “bring the girl over, I’ll be in the kitchen – with my head in the oven”. Despite these and other comments about a mis-match, the marriage proved one of the most stable in show business. It was also creative, and Brooks served as executive producer on movies in which Bancroft excelled, including The Elephant Man (1980) and the two-hander 84 Charing Cross Road (1986). These and other films made for his own company redeemed his often frantic comedies, three of which involved Bancroft. In Silent Movie (1976) she – among other stars – glamorously played herself as a highlight of the film. Sadly, she was less well served when co-starring opposite Brooks in his lumpen remake of the Ernst Lubitsch classic To Be or Not to Be (1983) and by her cameo appearance in his dire spoof Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995).

Bancroft was born in the Bronx to a working class family. It was the height of the depression, but even when her father became unemployed in the late 1930s, Anna was allowed tap dancing lessons, then enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Her graduation piece was seen by the actress Frances Fuller, who recommended the 18 year old for television work. Bancroft debuted as Anne Marno in The Torrents of Spring and when a popular radio show The Goldbergs transferred to television she became a member of the TV family, working steadily for two years.

Having helped a fellow actor with a screen test, it was Bancroft who got the call from 20th Century Fox offering a $20,000-a-year contract. It was to prove a mixed blessing. Under her new name Anne Bancroft she made her movie debut in Don’t Bother to Knock, made in 1952 but held up for a year. Within five years she made 15 films, as various as Demetrius and the Gladiators, a baseball movie The Kid from Left Field and Gorilla at Large (1954). There were several routine westerns, modest thrillers including Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall, plus the dismal The Girl in Black Silk Stockings (1957). By this time she admitted to over indulging in alcohol and being unhappily married to someone “who calls himself an actor but whose real occupation is playing a rich boy”. She was also in psychoanalysis.

The road back involved work with a vocal coach, regular attendance at The Actors Studio and study with Herbert Berghof. Plus three sessions a week with her therapist. Then came a triumphant return to acting, playing first opposite a difficult Henry Fonda, followed by the explosive and physically demanding role in The Miracle Worker. When the film version was announced, the backers wanted either Elizabeth Taylor or Audrey Hepburn, but Penn refused and budgeted it at only $500,000, shooting in New Jersey. At 31 Bancroft became an Oscar winner and in the words of one critic, “she left Hollywood a failure and returned a star”.

Her subsequent career was far from conventional. Her intelligence and fierce independence ensured that she never conformed to movie stardom. Working at her own pace and inclination, she turned down Funny Girl, which subsequently made Barbra Streisand famous. She played Mother Courage on stage and waited two years for a new film that was shot in Britain.

Harold Pinter adapted the Pumpkin Eater from Penelope Mortimer’s novel depicting the disintegration of a marriage. The rather cold, over-stylised direction by Jack Clayton could not obscure the riveting central performances by James Mason and Bancroft. Her harrowing portrayal as the distressed wife won her the 1964 best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival, a Bafta film award and the second of her five Oscar nominations.

In 1966 she took the lead in John Ford’s last movie, 7 Women. It was a curiosity that failed commercially. The same fate did not await The Graduate. The rapacious Mrs Robinson gained her another Oscar nomination and the third of her seven Bafta nominations as best actress.

It was also a commercial success and she and director Mike Nichols worked together again on The Little Foxes. Then Bancroft, who had married Brooks in 1964, took extended time off from work, giving birth to their son Maximilian in 1968.

She returned to the screen in 1972, playing Jenny Churchill in Young Winston, prompting Richard Attenborough to describe her as “the greatest actress of her generation”. Two years later she starred in the Neil Simon comedy, The Prisoner of Second Avenue – a welcome return to comedy where she was perfectly cast opposite the frenetic Jack Lemmon.

Her seesaw career took a downturn with the dull The Hindenburg (1975), in which she played a Countess, and hit rock bottom with the garish revenge thriller Lipstick (1976). She was, more happily, herself in Silent Movie and as Mary Magdalene in Franco Zeffirelli’s mini-series Jesus of Nazareth. Her luck improved when Audrey Hepburn declined the role of the prima ballerina in The Turning Point (1977), giving Bancroft a substantial role as the bitchy rival to Shirley Maclaine.

After another long career gap, she returned to the screen with Fatso (1980), which she also wrote and directed. It was little shown and she was grateful for the tellingly elegant role of Mrs Kendal in The Elephant Man. This was her second film with Anthony Hopkins and they were reunited – albeit from opposite sides of the Atlantic – for the rather less distinguished 84 Charing Cross Road (1986).

She was busy on the screen during the 1980s, working little in the theatre after a disappointing response to Golda, another play by William Gibson. There were substantial roles in Garbo Talks (1984) and as the Mother Superior in Agnes of God (1985). She was an altogether different Ma in Torch Song Trilogy (1988), where an over-the -top performance was a mixed blessing in a high camp version of a theatrical success.

There was a touch of Mrs Robinson in her flirtatious role in the comedy You’re a Fool Bert Rigby and in her mellower Kate Jerome in the television version of Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound (1991). Throughout that decade she broke her tradition of long absences between movie roles, notching up a couple of appearances – often in character parts – each year. Amidst Hollywood’s welter of juvenile, special effects-led films her warmth, intelligence and stylish presence became somewhat sidelined. She took the title role in the TV drama Mrs Cage and had a fun time in the oddball comedy Honeymoon in Vegas (both 1992). There were fraught moments in the thrillers Malice and a remake of Luc Besson’s Nikita re-titled Assassin. In this she played the role originally created by Jeanne Moreau, an actress of similar sophistication. She was wasted as a doctor in Mr Jones, which director Mike Figgis disowned after studio interference.

There were further television dramas, The Mother (1994), Homecoming (1996) and most potent of all Deep in My Heart (1999) for which she received an Emmy as best supporting actress. There was a nonsensical desire on the part of directors to cast her years above her attractive self: she played a centenarian in The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and a great aunt in the worthily dull How to Make an American Quilt.

Among her gallery of elderly grotesques none was more triumphant than the terrifying Mrs Dinsmoor in the stylish updating of Great Expectation (1998). There were few such lush movies to be had, but she made a feisty, inherently corrupt senator in GI Jane and was ideally cast voicing the Queen in the animated hit Antz.

There were also documentaries to narrate and the inevitable personal appearances saluting husband Brooks and co-star Dustin Hoffman or indeed the whole history of American cinema in the AFI’s 100 Years, 100 Movies.

Bancroft could always be relied on to add a touch of class to movies – especially if they had literary, religious or social themes and she kept busy with Up at the Villa, the factually-based Haven and Edward Norton’s directorial debut Keeping the Faith. Some lighter relief came with the smart comedy Heartbreakers (2001), where she was played dual roles in a story about mother and daughter con artists who relieve widowers of their wealth. She played the third side of the triangle, belatedly revealed as one of the tricksters.

It was a reminder of her comedic talent – something that had been rewarded by a lifetime achievement in the 1996 American Comedy Awards, but which Hollywood had not sufficiently recognised during her long career. Perhaps one comedian in the Bancroft-Brooks household was considered enough.

· Anne Bancroft, actor, born Anna Marina Louisa Italiano, September 17 1931; died June 6 2005

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

Anna Kashfi obituary in “The Telegraph” in 1980

It was thought that Anna Kashfi was from India but she was in fact born Joan O’Callaghan in 1934 in Cardiff in Wales.   Her entire career was in movies and television shows in Hollywood.   Her major films were “The Mountain” in 1955 with Spence Tracy and Robert Wagner, “Cowboy” with Jack Lemmon and Glenn Ford and “Battle Hymn” with Rock Hudson and Martha Hyer.   Her career seemed to stall after her short lived marriage to Marlon Brando.   She died in 2015 at tyhe age of 80.

Her obituary in the ” Telegraph”:

Anna Kashfi, who has died aged 80, was an actress of exotic appearance who was the first wife of Marlon Brando, and the mother of his first child, Christian; she played “foreigners” in several Hollywood films of the 1950s.   Her origins were never clarified beyond doubt: when she was thrust into the spotlight there were suggestions that she had invented her Indian ancestry, with one newspaper offering the theory that she browned her skin by bathing in coffee.   She insisted that she was Indian, the daughter of Devi Kashfi, an architect, and a woman called Selma Ghose. But the day after she married Marlon Brando in late 1957 – she wore a sari for the ceremony – one William O’Callaghan from Cardiff and his wife Phoebe emerged claiming to be her parents. Her real name, they said, was not Anna Kashfi but Joan O’Callaghan.   The truth may be that, as the actress explained in her memoirs, she was the result of an “unregistered alliance” and was subsequently adopted by O’Callaghan.

Her films included, most notably, her debut The Mountain (1956), a thriller starring Spencer Tracy in which she played a Hindu woman who survives an aeroplane crash in the French Alps. Edward Dmytryk, the director, told reporters at the time that he was aware of Anna Kashfi’s “real” name, but assumed she was Anglo-Indian.   It was during production that she met Marlon Brando in the Paramount studio commissary. Recalling the meeting years later, the actress wrote: “The face, with an incipient heaviness about the jawline, reflected a wistfulness, an open sensuality, and an ineffable indifference.” She was pregnant by the time she married the star and they were divorced within two years. Their relationship had been violent and tempestuous while they were together – Anna Kashfi was reported to have thrown a tricycle at Brando – and it remained difficult.   For 15 years a painful dispute rumbled on over custody of their son Christian, whom Anna Kashfi preferred to call by his second name Devi. During legal proceedings it was claimed that she had been emotionally unstable and at times reliant on alcohol and barbiturates.    Christian was also troubled: he dropped out of school, failed to make a career out of acting, and was sent to prison after shooting dead the boyfriend of his half-sister Cheyenne. He died at the age of 49 of pneumonia.

Anna Kashfi was born Joan O’Callaghan on September 30 1934 in Darjeeling, where her father was a traffic superintendent on Indian state railways; she was brought up there until she was 13, when the family moved to Cardiff, where William O’Callaghan worked in a factory producing steel. Anna attended St Joseph’s Convent School then the Cardiff School of Art. Early on she had jobs in a butcher’s shop in the city and in an ice cream parlour at Porthcawl. She soon started modelling and in 1952 was spotted by an MGM talent scout.   Her flourishing as an actress was brief. After The Mountain she played a Korean woman in Battle Hymn (1957), opposite Rock Hudson as a Christian minister turned fighter pilot; then the daughter of an over-protective Mexican cattle baron whom Jack Lemmon has fallen for in Cowboy (1958); the next year she had a small part in Night of the Quarter Moon.   Anna Kashfi published a “tell-all” memoir, Brando for Breakfast, in 1979.

Latterly she lived in California and then in Washington state. In 1974 she married James Hannaford, a salesman. He died in 1986.

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

IMDB mini biography:

Anna Kashfi has appeared in a number of films including The Mountain (1956) (withSpencer Tracy) and Battle Hymn (1957) (with Rock Hudson) but is best known for beingMarlon Brando‘s first wife. Kashfi is often thought of as being Indian but is, in fact, the daughter of a Welsh factory worker, William Callaghan, and simply reinvented herself to increase her screen appeal. She met Brando in 1955 in the Paramount commissary and after an on-off relationship (mainly due to Brando’s relentless womanizing) married him in 1957. (Brando claimed that he married her only because she had become pregnant.) She gave birth in May 1958 to their son, Christian, who became notorious in 1990 for shooting dead Dag Drollet, a crime that earned him a ten-year jail sentence. Kashfi divorced Brando in 1959.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Charles Lee < charleslee@tinyworld.co.uk

Barry Sullivan
Barry Sullivan
Barry Sullivan

Barry Sullivan has starred in over 100 movies in a wide variety of film genre – Westerns, film noir, war movies and melodramas.   He was born in 1912 in New York City.   He was a very good football player and came into film in 1936 with a short “Strike You’r Out”.   His major films include “Suspense” in 1946. “The Gangster”,”Bad Men of Tombstone”, “The Great Gatsby” and “Strategic Air Command”.   Barry Sullivan died in 1994.

David Shipman’s “Independent” obituary of Barry Sullivan:

Patrick Barry (Barry Sullivan), actor: born New York City 29 August 1912; married three times (one son, two daughters); died Los Angeles 6 June 1994.

BARRY SULLIVAN redefined the term ‘leading man’, being neither a genuine star, although billed above the title, nor a character actor, since he was seldom called upon to play anyone but himself – nice and reliable, the old standby. There were many others of his generation competing for the same roles – Wendell Corey, with his somewhat charming gloom, the cynical but easygoing Van Heflin, the acquiescent but dangerous Robert Ryan.

Many cinemagoers found the Sullivans and Ryans more rewarding than the bona fide box-office champs but, like them, they could be counted upon when it came to facing up to the great ladies of the screen. Ryan, Corey and Heflin all gave Barbara Stanwyck a run for her money, but Sullivan did no more than hold his own with her. When he threatens her in The Maverick Queen (1956) she taunts him, ‘I did what I had to do to get to the top,’ and he’s soon eating out of her hand, the two of them confronting Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Married to her in Jeopardy (1953), he spends the film trapped under a derelict jetty as the tide rises, while she grapples with some weirdos who would rather occupy themselves menacing her.

When faced with Stanwyck’s two contemporaries who also specialised in playing strong, rampaging women – Bette Davis and Joan Crawford – Sullivan stood his ground. Lesser men would have buckled under. Sullivan’s first real starring role was as a corporation attorney, the husband trying to dump Davis in Payment on Demand (1951): she fights back, but even before she realises that it is all her doing we know he is never going to win. Married to Crawford (‘Any man’s my man because I want him to be’) in Queen Bee (1955), he is not the only member of the cast who wants to murder her; but her death at the end is not entirely his fault.

Sullivan was the husband of the equally splendiferous Loretta Young in Cause for Alarm (1950), his strongest study in villainy, so insanely jealous of her that he sets her up for a murder rap; and he was an ambitious Hollywood director, wanting to make Lana Turner’s next movie, in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).

There were quieter times: psychoanalysing Ginger Rogers in Lady in the Dark (1944), his third feature after seven years of supporting roles on the Broadway stage; engaged to his factory-owner boss, played by Young, in And Now Tomorrow; engaged again in a remake of the old farce Getting Gertie’s Garter (1945), this time to Marie McDonald, who wants that eponymous article back before he finds out about it; The Great Gatsby (1949), probably the best (the first is lost) of the three film versions, as Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband; and A Life of her Own (1950), as a playboy ill-treating Ann Dvorak, the pathetic friend of the heroine, played by Turner.

This last was made for MGM, to whom Sullivan had moved after five years with Paramount; but MGM weren’t quite certain what to do with him either. The Three Guys Named Mike (1951) were Van Johnson, Howard Keel and Sullivan, all competing for Jane Wyman. Although it is Keel’s film by sheer dint of personality, it is obvious that Johnson will get Wyman. Sullivan, as an advertising executive, got nowhere with the film or the girl, but MGM looked more kindly upon him after watching him trade insults with Davis in Payment on Demand, on loan to RKO. He returned to RKO to support another of the screen’s great ladies, Claudette Colbert, in Texas Lady (1955) – and support in every sense, as fellow-gambler, lover and henchman. Westerns then were one of the last refuges of fading stars, and Sullivan made several in the late Fifties, including another with Stanwyck, Forty Guns (1957).

Sullivan’s debut on television (in 1955) was prestigious, when he and Lloyd Nolan repeated their Broadway performances in the Pulitzer prize-winning The ‘Caine’ Mutiny Court Martial, adapted by Herman Wouk from his own best- selling novel. He appeared regularly on the small screen, including several series, A Man Called X (1955-56), Harbourmaster (1957), The Tall Man (1960-61) and The Road West (1966). He continued to be seen in movies for the cinema, looking increasingly distinguished, even as most of them were going in the other direction. He invariably played diplomats, politicians or senior officers – always with discretion and candour, but often with too little screen time to make his presence felt. One exception was Earthquake (1974), in which he plays the head of the seismological institute who refuses to believe the warnings of his assistant.

His last considerable movie role was in 1961, with another of the leading female stars of that period, Olivia de Havilland, in The Light in the Piazza. She played the mother of  Yvette Mimieux, whom she was hoping to marry to a wealthy young Italian (George Hamilton). Sullivan played her husband, breezing into the film halfway through, determined that they shouldn’t leave their hotel room until they had enjoyed themselves. It was rare for movies to imply that hotel rooms were used for such purposes; and unique to suggest that middle-aged people ever did such things in the first place