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.
Edmund Purdom was born in 1926 in Welwyn Garden City. In 1946 he joined the Northampton Repertory Company. In 1951 he came to the U.S. to appear on Broadway with Laurence Oliver and Vivien Leigh in “Anthony & Cleopatra”. He was spotted by a talent scout and brought to Hollywood and cast as one of the ship’s officers in “Titanic” by 20th Century Fox in 1952. He was then cast to replace Mario Lanza in “The Student Prince” opposite Ann Blyth. Lanz’s singing voice was used in the film. For a brief period Edmund Purdom was cast in big budget MGM films such as “The Prodigal” and “The Egyptian”. However by the mid 50’s his U.S. career seemed to be waning and he went to Italy where he made many films over the coming decades. He died in 2009 at the age of 82.
It was the sad fate of the actor Edmund Purdom, who has died aged 84, that the best known of his films, The Student Prince (1954), is remembered more for the star who wasn’t in it. After the temperamental tenor Mario Lanza was fired from the film, the non-singing unknown Purdom replaced him. Luckily for MGM, Lanza had recorded the songs for the CinemaScope production before shooting began. Thus his voice is heard bellowing incongruously out of the slender frame of Purdom.
Purdom’s reputation as a surrogate is underlined by the fact that he got his first chance of stardom when he replaced Marlon Brando in The Egyptian (1954) after Brando wisely cried off, preferring to play Napoleon in Desirée instead. In addition, Purdom was married to Linda Christian, better known as Tyrone Power’s first wife.
Purdom was born in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, the son of a London drama critic. After being educated by Jesuits at St Ignatius College and by Benedictines at Downside School, he made his acting debut in repertory in 1945, aged 21. Six years later, he appeared with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh on Broadway in alternating performances of Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra, playing respectively a Persian and Thyreus, the unfortunate messenger of Octavius Caesar who gets whipped for his pains.
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The roles gave Purdom an early taste for wearing togas and sandals as he was to do for a great deal of his career. One of his first film roles was in Joseph Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953) as Strato, the young servant of Brutus (James Mason), who holds the sword out for his master to run on to at the climax.
Purdom, with his ex-ballerina wife, Anita Phillips, had gone to Hollywood in 1952 to test for My Cousin Rachel, but Richard Burton got the part. “I was so broke,” Purdom recalled, “that I couldn’t afford to pay the doctor’s bill when my daughter was born. I had no money for bus fare. I had to walk from studio to studio looking for a job. Once we were evicted for not paying the rent.”
Then after two bit parts, he was cast in the title role in The Egyptian, the brilliant physician in the service of the Pharaoh in 18th-dynasty Egypt. Purdom’s striking dark good looks and dimpled cheeks made up for his rather wooden personality and inability to pronounce his ‘r’s, but not even Brando could have known how to react to dialogue such as: “You have bold eyes for the son of a cheesemaker.”
At MGM, Purdom was given a huge build-up by the studio for The Student Prince after Mario Lanza’s drugs-alcohol-weight problems got the better of him. Purdom made a handsome and likeable Prince Karl of Karlsburg in love with a barmaid (Ann Blyth) in the Heidelberg of 1894 in Sigmund Romberg’s rather dated operetta. Apart from the (mismatched) singing of Lanza, the film’s highlight for today’s audiences is a group of students interlocking arms and warbling: “Come boys, let’s all be gay boys.”
After Vincente Minnelli gave up his attempts to film, with Purdom and Pier Angeli, Green Mansions, WH Hudson’s South American fantasy novel Purdom went into another musical, Athena (1954). This told of an athletic vegetarian family, of which one of seven daughters, Jane Powell, falls for stuffy, meat-eating weakling Purdom, when she could have had Steve “Mr World” Reeves.
More significant was the fact that the Mexican-born beauty Christian, wife of Power, played his snooty fiancée. Christian had been at the same school as Purdom’s wife, and the Powers and the Purdoms became good friends, even going on holidays together. But sexual jealousy broke up the once cosy foursome and, in 1955, Christian divorced Power, citing mental cruelty. Purdom’s name was not mentioned in court. Meanwhile, his short-lived Hollywood stardom was, inevitably, ending. He was bearded to disguise his pretty-boy looks as a highwayman in Restoration England in The King’s Thief (1955), a rather pallid swashbuckler, but the nail in the coffin was The Prodigal (1955). This risible spectacle, based on the Old Testament parable, had Purdom as a young Hebrew leaving his rural life for the big city where he falls under the spell of a beautiful scantily clad pagan priestess (Lana Turner, a former lover of Power’s) who induces him to squander his money and betray his faith. A prodigal flop.
After Purdom’s MGM contract was terminated, Christian found no shortage of millionaires to help keep him in the manner to which he was accustomed. But it was not until 1962 that they were married. The marriage lasted little more than a year.
By the end of the 1950s, like a number of stars for whom Hollywood work had dried up – including Reeves – Purdom went to Italy and into rubbishy costume melodramas such as Herod the Great (1959), The Cossacks, Salambo (both 1960), Suleiman the Conqueror and Nefertiti, Queen of the Nile (both 1961). This stream of Italian films was interrupted by some British television work and, in 1964, two films made in England, The Beauty Jungle, revealing the seedier side of beauty contests, and The Yellow Rolls-Royce. In the latter Rex Harrison, an English peer, finds his French wife (Jeanne Moreau) in the embrace of caddish Purdom in the vehicle of the title.
Then it was back to his home in Rome and a stream of eurotrash horror movies, such as Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks (1974). Purdom directed and starred as a police inspector in a British stalk-and-slash picture called Don’t Open Till Christmas (1984) which features a psychopath hunting down and killing streetcorner santas. Apparently he saw his mother murdered by a Father Christmas when he was a kid.
Purdom, who kept his looks and sense of humour into old age, is survived by his fourth wife, Vivienne, a photographer, and two daughters by Phillips.
• Edmund Purdom, actor, born 19 December 1924; died 1 January 2009
To view “The Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan of Edmund Purdom, also please click here.
Sal MineoSal MineoEscape From Zahrain, poster, US poster, bottom from left: Sal Mineo, Jack Warden, Yul Brynner, Madlyn Rhue, 1962. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)Original Cinema Quad Poster; Movie Poster; Film PosterOne Sheet; Movie Poster; Film Poster; Cinema Poster;
Sal Mineo was born in the Bronx in New York in 1939. As a child he acted on Broadway in”The Rose Tattoo” and “The King and I” with Yul Brynner. In 1955 he was terrific in “Rebel Without a Cause” with James Dean and Natalie Wood and the following year he played a young Mexican in “Giant”. Throughout the late 50’s and early 60’s he was a major played on film. Career highlights include “Exodus” and “The Gene Krupa Story”. His film career seemed to wane by the late 60’s and he turned to the stage and television. He was a victim of a savage attack and died as a result in California in 1976. A website dedicated to Sal Mineo can be accessed here.
Salvatore (Sal) Mineo Jr. was born to Josephine and Sal Sr. (a casket maker), who emigrated to the U.S. from Sicily. His siblings were Michael, Victor and Sarina. Sal was thrown out of parochial school and, by age eight, was a member of a street gang in a tough Bronx neighborhood. His mother enrolled him in dancing school and, after being arrested for robbery at age ten, he was given a choice of juvenile confinement or professional acting school.
Expanding his repertoire, Mineo returned to the theatre to direct and star in the play “Fortune and Men’s Eyes” with successful runs in both New York and Los Angeles. In the late 1960s and 1970s he continued to work steadily in supporting roles on TV and in film, including Dr. Milo in Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) and Harry O (1973). In 1975 he returned to the stage in the San Francisco hit production of “P.S. Your Cat Is Dead”. Preparing to open the play in Los Angeles in 1976 with Keir Dullea, he returned home from rehearsal the evening of February 12th when he was attacked and stabbed to death by a stranger. A drifter named Lionel Ray Williams was arrested for the crime and, after trial in 1979, convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the murder. Although taken away far too soon, the memory of Sal Mineo continues to live on through the large body of TV and film work that he left behind.
William Holden in 1956, according to ‘Picturegoer’ was ‘Dependable, sturdy, cornerstone of solid box-office winners. Likeable, man-in-the-street face and splendid physique, backed by consistent performances, rather than electrifying talent, mark his success. He said he did not enjoy acting for hich reason, said Billy Wilder, he was fond of Holden. He was never hammy. Wilder stated ‘ He is the ideal motion-picture actor. He is beyond acting.’
You never doubt or question what he is. James Stewart is a prime example of that sort of actor. So is Gary Cooper. There is no crap about them. Yes, but Stewart and Cooper retained their individuality as they aged. Having little to start with, Holden had only a certain weary integrity when his youthful charm had gone.” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International years”. (1972).
William Holden was born in 1918 in O’Fallon, Illinois. His first film role was “Golden Boy” with Barbara Stanwyck in 1939. His career was curtailed by World War Two in which he served with the United States Army Air Force. His career took off in a major way in 1950 when Billy Wilder cast him in “Sunset Boulevard” with Gloria Swanson. He had a string of box office successes including “Picnic”, “The Bridges of Toko-Ri”, “Stalag 17”, “Love Is a Many Splendoured Thing”. The above photograph is from “The Wolrd of Suzie Wong” which was started with France Nuyen (see seperate blog on Ms Nuyen). Ultimately the film was completed with Nancy Kwan. Holden did not age well and in his later films like “Network” he looks much older than his actual age. He died in 1981 at the age of 63.
TCM Biography:
ew Hollywood actors have conveyed spiritual and physical pain with the charismatic authority of William Holden. This scion of a wealthy family in the chemical business first registered in films as a clean-cut, affably handsome lead in the 1940s and he matured into more rough and tumble roles. Along the way his earnest qualities yielded to cynicism, perhaps most notably for writer-director Billy Wilder in “Sunset Boulevard” (1950) and in his Oscar-winning performance in “Stalag 17” (1953). Over the years, the rigors of life and drink re-sculpted his features into an expressive leather that gave testimony to the ravages of the moral ambiguity that had characterized many of his best roles. This quality may have been most eloquently expressed by his central performance as the desperado cowboy Pike in Sam Peckinpah’s violent autumnal Western classic, “The Wild Bunch” (1969).
Holden became a star with his first substantial feature role as the boxer-violinist in “Golden Boy” (1939), a part that cast him opposite screen siren Barbara Stanwyck, who would later become his mentor and life-long booster. Holden was soon getting cast in fairly innocuous roles: the boy-next-door; the quintessential All-American in such films as “Arizona” as the amiable lover of a determined corruption buster Jean Arthur; the idealistic small town hero in “Our Town”; a hell-raising Joe College in “Those Were the Days” (all 1940). He was pitted against Glenn Ford, rivaling for the affections of Claire Trevor, in “Texas” (1941), tried to heat up an ice-cool Dorothy Lamour in the musical “The Fleet’s In” (1942), and was a poor boy who gets married in “Meet The Stewarts” (1942).
Holden joined the Air Force, fought in WWII and returned to the screen with a more complex personality. He starred in several films which, though unremarkable, were box-office favorites (“Dear Ruth” 1947 and “Rachel and the Stranger” 1948) before being cast against type to play a psycho killer in the low-budget noir “The Dark Past” (1949). 1950 proved to be Holden’s watershed year: he starred in two career landmarks, “Born Yesterday” as Judy Holliday’s culture tutor-cum-lover, and Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard”, as Norma Desmond’s hack screenwriter gigolo. With the latter portrayal, Holden’s screen persona began to move into the gray areas that were further explored in later roles like that of the pessimistic POW suspected of being a Nazi informer in Wilder’s “Stalag 17” (1953), a role which garnered Holden a Best Actor Oscar. Wilder discovered and expertly exploited the dichotomy between the actor’s wholesome All-American appearance and his potential for conveying moral darkness. Holden went on to become a leading box-office star between 1954-58 and reigned as the top-grosser in 1956. Notable roles of this period included playing an ambitious company man in “Executive Suite”, a ne’er-do-well playboy in Wilder’s “Sabrina” (both 1954) and the drifter who breaks Kim Novak’s heart in “Picnic” (1956).
Holden remained active for nearly three more decades, showing up in a pivotal role in “The Bridge on the River Kwai” (1957). While many of his 60s credits were routine and worse (e.g. “Paris When It Sizzles” 1963), the decade also boasted some undeniable triumphs, including his portrayal of a double agent in the fine thriller “The Counterfeit Traitor” (1962) and a career highlight in Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” (1969). The 70s found Holden in a number of mediocre action and adventure vehicles (“Towering Inferno” 1974, “Ashanti” 1979, “The Earthling” 1980) as well as a few winners including the highly acclaimed “Network” (1976), as a conscientious TV executive, and Wilder’s sadly underrated “Fedora” (1978), as a producer trying to encourage a Garbo-esque star to come out of self-imposed retirement. Fairly late in his career, Holden made his TV debut, winning an Emmy for his work in the detective miniseries about the L.A. police department “The Blue Knights” (1973). His final film performance came in Blake Edwards’ caustically comic look at Hollywood, “S.O.B.” (1981).
Holden died from an accidental fall in his apartment in 1981.
Jody McCrea was born in 1934 in Roswell, New Mexico. He was the eldest son of actors Frances Dee and Joel McCrea. He had a striking resemblance to his father. He made his television debut in a series with is father called “Wichita Town” in 1959. His films include “The Young Land” and “Law of the Lawless”. In the sixties he achieved culd following for his roles in some Beach movies. In 1968 he starred in a biker movie “The Glory Stompers”. His last film was in 1970, “Cry Blood Apache”. He retired and became a rancher like his father previously had done. Jody McCrea died in 2009 at the age of 74.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Just as strapping (6′ 3″) and amiably handsome as his actor/father, Joel McCrea, Jody was born Joel Dee McCrea on September 6, 1934 in Los Angeles, California, and bore a strong resemblance to his famous namesake. The oldest of three children, his mother was actress Frances Dee and his two younger brothers are David McCrea and Peter McCrea. Jody had little interest in the entertainment field until his early 20s when he began appearing in minor film roles. Making his unbilled debut in Lucy Gallant (1955), he was afforded the opportunity of first working with his dad in the films The First Texan(1956) and Trooper Hook (1957). He moved up to co-star status in the short-lived TV western series Wichita Town (1959), which again starred his dad.
From there, he found employment in other western and action films including Lafayette Escadrille (1958), All Hands on Deck (1961), The Broken Land (1962) and Young Guns of Texas (1962). However, he is most fondly remembered for his recurring comic role as the dim-eyed, carefree lug “Deadhead” (later named “Bonehead”) in a number of the frivolous “Beach Party” flicks, starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, which were released by American International Pictures between the years 1963 and 1965. As a trivia note, Jody was the only cast member other than Robert Cummings who could really surf.
Jody appeared on TV over the years as well and kept his genial personality an attractive trademark. Although he secured a footing in the business, McCrea found it difficult to escape the shadow of his father, especially in western drama, but comedy served as a welcome individualistic approach. Nevertheless, outside of performing occasionally in community theater over the next few years, McCrea decided to retire from acting altogether in 1970 after appearing in and producing the film Cry Blood, Apache (1970). For the remaining decades, he became a cattle rancher in New Mexico. His wife of 20 years, Dusty McCrea (aka Dusty Iron Wing), who appeared as the Indian “Dancing Moon” in the film Windwalker (1980), died of complications from diabetes in 1996. Jody passed away in 2009 of cardiac arrest at his Roswell ranch.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.n
Jody McCrea’s “Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan:
The actor Joel McCrea and his son Jody were both tall (6ft 3in), well-built and ruggedly handsome. But Jody, who has died of a heart attack aged 74, found it difficult to fill his famous father’s shoes. Joel McCrea had a long and varied acting career, working with many of Hollywood’s leading directors. Jody’s career, during which he made many westerns in the shadow of his father, was more limited, though he came into his own in six of the seven Beach Party movies in the 1960s.
Almost all of the series, made for the youth market, starred Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, with slow-drawling McCrea in the supporting cast and ancient Hollywood stars on their last legs as guest stars. The plots usually involved a group of young, scantily clad surfers defending their right to continue their love-ins and gyrations to surf music without interference from killjoy “squares”.
McCrea played a character variously called Deadhead, Big Lunk and Bonehead, who could always be counted on to say something idiotic, much to the despair of his comparatively brighter companions. “It took me four pictures to figure it out. The kids liked Deadhead because they felt superior to me, to him,” McCrea said many years later.
Jody was born and brought up in Los Angeles, where he was surrounded by showbusiness friends of his father and mother, Frances Dee, a star in the 1930s and 40s, who met Joel on the film The Silver Cord (1933). His ambition was to become a rancher like his father, rather than follow him into films. Nevertheless, he studied drama at the University of California, in Los Angeles, before making his official screen debut as a soldier in The First Texan (1956), starring Joel as Sam Houston. Two more westerns with his father followed, Trooper Hook and Gunsight Ridge (both 1957), in which he was hardly noticeable.
He was more visible in William Wellman’s Lafayette Escadrille as a young first world war flying ace in a team with Tab Hunter and Clint Eastwood, and as a bully in the heated, small-town drama The Restless Years (both 1958). On television, he played deputy to his father’s town marshal in Wichita Town (1959). It lasted for only four episodes. Thereafter, he started making a career for himself, helped by his father’s semi-retirement. But inter-generational comparisons were unavoidable, especially in Young Guns of Texas (1962), which had the gimmick of casting Jody McCrea with two other Hollywood juniors who failed to make a mark on acting, James Mitchum (son of Robert) and Alana Ladd (daughter of Alan).
Then Beach Party (1963) came to the rescue. Directed by William Asher, it concerned an anthropology professor, Robert Cummings, studying the “mating habits” of the teenage denizens of Malibu beach. In the next two years, there followed Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Pajama Party, Beach Blanket Bingo and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.
Though his dimwitted beach bum character was gradually given some love scenes, McCrea was pleased to abandon the series’ typecasting by making two biker pictures, The Girls from Thunder Strip (1966) and The Glory Stompers (1968), the latter featuring him and Dennis Hopper as heads of rival motorcycle gangs.
His final film was the substandard western Cry Blood, Apache (1970), in which his father played a cameo. He retired from acting the same year, when he married Dusty Iron Wing, a Native American woman. The couple ran a cattle and elk ranch in Hondo, New Mexico. She died in 1996. McCrea is survived by his two younger brothers, David and Peter, and two stepchildren.
• Jody (Joel Dee) McCrea, actor, born 6 September 1934; died 4 April 2009
For “The Guardian” Obituary on Jody McCrea, please also click here.
Michael Pate was born in 1920 in Sydney, Australia. He began his career on radio. In World War Two he served in the Australian Army in the South Pacific. At war’s end he resumed his career on radio gradually turining to acting. In 1950 he made “Bitter Springs” with Chips Rafferty. That same year he went to Hollywood where he began a profilic career in U.S. movies. Among his many film credits are “Thunder on the Hill”, “Brainstorm” and “The Singing Nun”. By 1979 he was back in Australia where he directed the young Mel Gibson in “Tim” with Piper Laurie. He died in 2008.
His “Guardian” obituary:
The Australian actor Michael Pate, who has died aged 88, had a successful Hollywood career, appearing in more than 50 films and numerous TV series. Black-haired and thick-set, he was often cast as a Native American in westerns. Later, resuming his career in his homeland, he also ventured behind the camera.
He was born in Drummoyne, a suburb of Sydney, and attended Fort Street high school. Although he had hoped to become a college lecturer, and had begun writing short stories, he left school to become an accountant.
His career in the entertainment industry began when, aged 18, he was selected, “out of the blue”, as he put it, by the Australian Broadcasting Commission to take part in a radio series in which young people interviewed visiting celebrities. Pate spoke to HG Wells, Yehudi Menuhin and Sir Malcolm Sargent. He acted in radio plays and made his stage debut in 1940. During second world war army service in the south Pacific, he continued to act, his colleagues including Tony Hancock’s future sidekick Bill Kerr.
Pate’s film debut was several bit parts in an epic war film, Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940); he played two Arabs and one Sikh. His first significant role was as the eldest son in Sons of Matthew (1949), a family saga. The first of his many police parts was in Bitter Springs (1950), made by Ealing Studios’ Australian unit.
On stage, he had played a servant in Bonaventure, a melodrama set in Britain. On hearing that a film version was being made in Hollywood, he wrote letters asking for the chance to reprise his role, in Thunder on the Hill (1951), directed by Douglas Sirk. His decision to stay in Hollywood may have been influenced by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, which viewed him with suspicion and had him closely watched.
He supported John Wayne in Hondo (1953), as an Indian chief, and in McLintock! (1963). The former led to a TV series in 1967 in which Pate reprised his role. Exceptions to the B-movie rule were Joseph L Mankiewicz’s film of Julius Caesar (1953), and Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee (1965). The odd western horror Curse of the Undead (1959) combined his two most prevalent genres.
He was even busier on television, in Maverick, Tales of Wells Fargo, The Rifleman, Gunsmoke and five episodes of Rawhide, one of which he also wrote. Keeping pace as westerns were replaced by spy and fantasy series, he was a henchman in Batman (1966), but in The Man from Uncle (1966) and Mission Impossible (1967), he was cast as an Arab and South American general, respectively.
In 1954, CBS presented the first screen version of Casino Royale, with Barry Nelson as an Americanised James Bond. Reversing the transatlantic process, Bond’s CIA contact Felix Leiter became the British agent Clarence Leiter – Pate, with a plummy accent and tuxedo.
In 1968 he returned to Australia to produce Age of Consent (1969); he had wanted to film Norman Lindsay’s novel for years. He went on to star as a detective in Matlock Police (1971-75), winning a best actor award from the Television Society of Australia in 1972.
For the cinema, Pate wrote and produced The Mango Tree (1977), a nostalgic drama with his son, Christopher, in the lead. Tim (1979), which Pate directed, produced and adapted from Colleen McCullough’s novel, starred a young Mel Gibson. With Christopher, he toured with the play Mass Appeal in the mid-1980s, which concluded at the Sydney Opera House.
In 2000, he was presented with a special award from the Film Critics’ Circle of Australia and retired from acting the following year. However, until he was admitted to hospital, he continued working on a script, which Christopher hopes to complete.
Pate is survived by his wife Felippa and Christopher.
• Michael Pate (Edward John Pate), actor, writer, producer and director, born February 26 1920; died September 1 2008 His “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed here.
Rock Hudson was one of the most popular movie stars of the 1950’s and early 1960’s. He was born Roy Fitzgerald in 1925 in Illinois. He made his featur film debut in 1948’s military drama “Fighter Squadron”. He came to international fame opposite Jane Wyman in “Magnificent Obsession” in 1954. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 1956 for her performance in “Giant” with Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean. He made three very popular films with Doris Day including “Pillow Talk” and two with Gina Lollobrigida. In the early seventies, his film career was on the wane and he went into television with the very popular series “McMillan and Wife”. He died in 1985 aged 59. His IMDB biography can be accessed here.
TCM Overview:
With his urbane charm, dashing good looks, and virile masculinity, Rock Hudson epitomized Hollywood’s classic matinee idol image – used to great effect in many a romantic comedy in which he was often paired with the equally magnetic Doris Day. One of the most popular movie stars of his time, Hudson’s screen career spanned five decades and was a shining example of Hollywood’s classical “star system”-style career promotion – his early success coming as the result of careful cultivation and nurturing by major movie studios. While generally underappreciated for his skills as an actor, Hudson nevertheless showed unexpected glimmers of brilliance, as he did in George Stevens’ 1956 epic, “Giant” for which he received an Academy Award nomination. Known for his easy-going demeanor off-screen, Hudson was well-liked by colleagues and seemed to enjoy a rich and happy life in the public eye. In truth, however, Hudson endured a deeply troubled private life, living a lie for the sake of his career – including going along with a studio-arranged marriage. Manufactured to be Hollywood’s ultimate ladies man, Rock Hudson was, in reality, a lifelong homosexual. Tragically, he would become a cautionary tale as well. After contracting the HIV virus and dying of AIDS in 1985 – his private life now thrust public for the world to see – Hudson would become the first major Hollywood casualty of the misunderstood and widely feared disease. But he would not die in vain. His death not only opened people’s eyes to the disease itself, it inspired his good friend and onetime co-star Elizabeth Taylor to begin her decades-long role as a prominent AIDS activist, raising millions in the fight against the deadly disease that had robbed her friend of his golden years.
Born Leroy (Roy) Harold Scherer, Jr. on Nov. 17, 1925, in Winnetka, IL, the future movie idol was the son of a hard-drinking auto mechanic, Roy, Sr. and a telephone operator named Katherine Wood. In 1930, at the height of the Great Depression, like many distraught dads of that time, Hudson’s father abandoned the family. Fortunately, a year later, his mother remarried a man by the name of Wallace Fitzgerald, who adopted Roy, Jr. and gave him his last name. A poor student growing up, Hudson narrowly graduated from Winnetka’s New Trier High School – the same alma mater as Ann-Margret and Charlton Heston – in the early 1940’s. Far more enamored of movies than his school work, Hudson got a job as an usher at a local movie theater, where he developed a passion for acting. Eager to get started, Hudson tried out for roles in school plays but was rejected for never knowing his lines.
After a brief tour of duty in the U.S. Navy as an airplane mechanic during World War II, Hudson moved to Los Angeles. Determined as ever to make it in show business, Hudson applied to the University of Southern California’s drama program, but was disqualified due to poor grades. To make ends meet, Hudson found a job as a delivery truck driver, but spent most of his working hours idling outside of studio gates, passing out his headshots. Hardly the way to go about breaking into show biz, to be sure – but in this case, persistence paid off. In 1948, the handsome young Hudson caught the eye of powerful Hollywood talent scout, Henry Willson. The rest, as they say, was history. According to author Robert Barrios’s 2002 best-seller Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall, the openly homosexual Willson almost single-handedly launched Hollywood’s highly profitable “beefcake craze” of the 1950’s, thanks to his knack for discovering and renaming young actors “whose visual appeal transcended any lack of ability.” Among Willson’s other discoveries were such nobodies-turned-Hollywood-golden-boys Arthur Gelien (a.k.a. Tab Hunter), Merle Johnson, Jr. (better known as Troy Donahue), and Bob Mosely (a.k.a. Guy Madison). According to Hollywood folklore, Willson changed Roy Fitzgerald’s name to the more masculine sounding “Rock Hudson” by combining the Rock of Gibraltar and the Hudson River.
In preparation for his first film role in Raoul Walsh’s “Fighter Squadron,” the newly re-christened Hudson got caps put on his teeth and received intensive coaching in acting, singing, dancing, fencing and horseback riding. Still, according to legend, it took no less than 38 takes for Hudson to successfully deliver his one line. Nonetheless, as a contract player for a major Hollywood studio, Hudson enjoyed a degree of job security that would disappear along with the studio system decades later. Cared for and jealously protected as a valuable studio asset, Hudson was literally groomed for leading man status. Studio P.R. flacks used their pull to push magazine publishers into plastering Hudson’s handsome mug across the covers of countless film magazines. At 29, Hudson earned his first professional recognition for his role as a bad boy redeemed in the mawkish romance “Magnificent Obsession” (1954) starring Jane Wyman. Hailed by Modern Screen Magazine as one of the best films of the year, the magazine also named Hudson the year’s “most popular actor.”
As Hudson’s marquee value increased, however, so too did the pressure to hide his homosexuality. In 1955, as a pre-emptive measure, Henry Willson arranged a marriage of convenience between Hudson and his (Willson’s) secretary, Phyllis Gates. Much to his credit, according to Hudson biographer, Sara Davidson, the actor made an earnest go at trying to make the sham marriage work. Unfortunately, the effort failed and the two subsequently divorced in 1958. In the meantime, however, with Hudson’s heterosexuality firmly established in the public eye, his acting career soared to new heights. A year after his highly publicized nuptials, Hudson landed his biggest payday to date – $100,000 to star in “Giant”(1956), director George Steven’s sprawling three and a half hour epic based on Edna Ferber’s novel. Cast opposite two of Hollywood’s other top rising young stars, Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean, Hudson delivered a powerful performance as Texas rancher, Bick Benedict. As a result of their searing performances, both Hudson and Dean were nominated for Best Actor Oscars at the 1957 Academy Awards.
Hudson closed out the decade with strong performances in a string of merely adequate vehicles. Two notable exceptions were director Richard Brook’s sublime interracial drama, “Something of Value” (1957) and the overly long, but nevertheless effective adaptation of “A Farewell to Arms” (1957), based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway. In the late ’50’s,
Hudson’s career took another huge leap forward when he was cast opposite Doris Day in a string of light bedroom comedies – starting with 1958’s “Pillow Talk.” Audiences enjoyed the delightful chemistry between Hudson and Day so much that the pair reunited for two more outings, “Lover Come Back” (1961) and “Send Me No Flowers” (1964) – all big at the box office.
As he approached middle age, Hudson’s career began slowing down. Losing out on choice roles to younger men must have surely been a blow to his ego. Nevertheless, the actor continued churning films out at a steady pace.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Hudson’s best work of the period came in a film where he played a character forcibly confronted with his own mortality and the grim realities of age in John Frankenheimer’s engrossing science-fiction/fantasy thriller, “Seconds” (1966). In it, Hudson gave a first-rate performance as a middle-aged man who is given a younger body, only to discover too late that he has made a Faustian bargain that has robbed him of both his sanity and his trust in humankind.
Still, roles like the one in “Seconds” were increasingly far and few between. Lured by the financial incentives and displeased with the feature scripts he was receiving, Hudson reluctantly agreed to do television. One of TV’s last major matinee holdouts, Hudson still commanded enough clout to at least get first choice of projects. In 1971, Hudson signed on to do a 90-minute made-for-TV movie of the week called “Once Upon a Dead Man” (NBC, 1971). A light mystery in the vein of 1934’s “The Thin Man,” “Once Upon a Dead Man” would eventually serve as a backdoor pilot for the highly successful series “McMillan and Wife” (NBC, 1971-77). Modeled after the comic adventures of husband-and-wife sleuthing team Nick and Nora Charles, “McMillan and Wife” starred Hudson as San Francisco Police Commissioner Stewart McMillan and pretty newcomer Susan Saint James as his flighty (but sporadically helpful) wife, Sally.
Hudson’s career hit a low in the early 1980’s. With his years of heavy smoking and drinking beginning to take its toll on his health, Hudson could no longer play leading man roles. His last high-profile gig was as the star of the short-lived series, “The Devlin Connection” (NBC, 1982), about a reluctant father-and-son detective team. Premiering as a mid-season replacement in the winter of 1982, “The Devlin Connection” started out strong in the ratings; only to have its momentum interrupted when Hudson suffered a massive heart attack during filming. As Hudson recovered from quintuple heart bypass surgery, production on “Devlin” shut down for nearly a year. While Hudson bounced back, the long delay proved fatal to the health of the show. By the time it returned to the airwaves, viewers had lost interest. The show’s final episode aired on Christmas Day, 1982.
Over the next two years, Hudson’s health continued to deteriorate. At first, this was attributed to the star’s lingering heart problems, but before long, other whispers and rumors began to spread. In 1985, Hudson signed on to play his last major role as Daniel Reece, the love interest of Linda Evans’ character, Krystal Carrington, on the hit primetime drama, “Dynasty” (ABC, 1981-89). Although the role of Reece was originally conceived to become a major character, Hudson’s rapidly declining health dictated that the storyline be revised. When producers noticed Hudson looking increasingly frail and steadily losing weight over the course of the season, they began to worry and kept their fingers crossed. The final straw came, though, when Hudson’s speech started to become affected, preventing him from delivering his lines. Left with no other option, the Daniel Reece character was written out after 14 episodes. Though Hudson kept it a secret, in reality, the actor was aware of the severity of his condition, having been diagnosed with AIDS in June of 1984.
After months of seclusion, Hudson resurfaced in July of 1985 to join his old friend and co-star, Doris Day, for the launch of her new cable show, “Doris Day’s Best Friends” (CBN, 1985-86). In his final public appearance, a skeletally gaunt and incoherent Hudson confirmed the awful truth – he was knocking at death’s door. The shocking image of the once robust dreamboat withering away to nothingness was broadcast again all over the national news shows that night and for weeks to come. But at the end of the day, it was Doris Day’s devastated stunned silence that seemed to sum it up best.
No longer able to deny the obvious, Hudson and his doctors released a statement shortly after his appearance, stating that the actor had terminal liver cancer. A week later, however, Hudson came clean and publicly confirmed that he was dying of AIDS.
How the actor contracted the deadly disease was unclear, but Hudson speculated that he may have contracted the HIV virus from infected blood he had received as part of his numerous heart bypass procedures (At the time of his operation, blood was not tested for the then-unknown HIV antibody). Hudson died on Oct. 2, 1985 of complications from AIDS. As per his instructions, he was cremated and his ashes buried at sea.
By this point, the question of whether or not Hudson was secretly gay seemed all but moot; most of his colleagues knew and it had long been an open secret in Hollywood’s gay underground.
Nevertheless, the details of Hudson’s lifestyle became startlingly public following the funeral when Hudson’s longtime partner, Marc Christian, sued the actor’s estate on grounds of “intentional infliction of emotional distress.” Although he himself tested negative for the disease, according to Christian, Hudson continued having sex with him for a year after he had been diagnosed. In 1991, Christian reached a settlement with Hudson’s estate.
As the first high-profile Hollywood celebrity to die from AIDS, Hudson’s greatest legacy may have come in death. Casually dismissed for far too long as just a “gay disease” by the public, AIDS research had traditionally held a low priority among the medical establishment. After Hudson put a recognizable face on the disease, however, public awareness of AIDS increased dramatically.
Hudson’s death also galvanized the Hollywood community for the first time to take a stance against the plight, helping to raise money and erase some of the stigma attached with the disease – typified best by his good friend Elizabeth Taylor’s activism, done in honor of her doomed friend. Had it not been for Hudson, it is unknown when, if ever, Hollywood would have come around to embrace this tradition of compassion and awareness regarding AIDS.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Actors Rock Hudson and Juliet Prowse on stage, in the musical ‘I Do, I Do’, at the Phoenix Theatre, London, January 17th 1976. (Photo by Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
