Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 124 of 128

Deborah Kerr

Young Bess, poster, Stewart Granger, Deborah Kerr, Jean Simmons, Charles Laughton, 1953. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Deborak Kerr is rightly regarded as one of the most foremost of British actresses to reach true international stardom. Her CV of both British and U.S. films is extremely impressive. She was born in Glasgow in 1921. She originally trained as a ballet dancer with the Sadler Well’s Ballet Company. However she changed careers and in 1940 made her first film “Contraband” when she 19. She was soon in major roles in such films as “Major Barbara”, “Hatter’s Castle”, “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” and “Black Narcissus” in 1947. She then went to Hollywood and had to wait a few years before she obtained topflight roles. This was achieved with “From Here to Eternity” in 1953 and for the next eight years she gave some terrific performances e.g. “Tea and Sympathy”, “The King and I”, “An Affair to Remember”, “Seperate Tables” and “The Sundowners”. In the late 60’s her cinema career was waning and she returned with great success to the stage. She did though in the 80’s return to film with “The Assam Garden”. Sadly illness curtailed her later career and she died in 2007.

Her “Independent” obituary:

One of the few British actresses to become an internationally successful film star, in 1957 Deborah Kerr was named “The world’s most famous actress” by Photoplay magazine. She had had a highly successful career in British cinema before being poached by Hollywood. There she was regarded as little more than classy, patrician decoration before she famously shocked the town – and many of her admirers – with a steamy performance as the unfaithful wife of an army captain in From Here to Eternity (1953).

Her beach scene with Burt Lancaster, in which they make love as the raging surf envelops them, has become an iconic screen sequence, imitated and parodied as well as celebrated. Kerr’s accomplished skill and versatility resulted in six Oscar nominations (the most for any star in the Best Actress category who has not actually won).

Her many memorable performances included the bewitchingly determined Irish spy of I See a Dark Stranger (1946), the repressed nun of Black Narcissus (1947), the downtrodden sheep-drover’s wife in The Sundowners (1960) and the ambiguous governess in The Innocents (1961). Perhaps best of all she is remembered for her work in two perennial classics of romantic cinema, the musical The King and I (1956), and the tear-jerker supreme, An Affair to Remember (1957). “I adore not being me,” she once said. “I’m not very good at being me. That’s why I adore acting so much.”

The daughter of a civil engineer, she was born Deborah Jane Kerr-Trimmer in 1921 in Helensburgh, overlooking the Firth of Clyde. As a child, she studied dance at a drama school in Bristol run by her aunt, winning a scholarship to Ninette de Valois’s Sadler’s Wells ballet group, with whom she made her London stage début at the age of 17.

Watching the progress of her fellow pupils Margot Fonteyn and Beryl Grey convinced Kerr that she would never be a great ballerina, so she concentrated on developing her acting skills and in 1939 did walk-on roles in several Shakespearean productions at the open-air theatre in Regent’s Park. She was spotted there by the powerful film agent John Gliddon, who signed her to a five-year contract.

Michael Powell’s lively thriller Contraband (1940) would have marked her screen début, but her role was excised from the final print. “The film was full of restaurants and night-clubs,” Powell wrote, “in one of which was an adorable little cigarette girl, all lovely liquid eyes and nice long legs, who had a tiny scene with Conrad Veidt that ended up on the cutting room floor.” Kerr was acting with the Oxford Repertory Players when spotted while dining at the Mayfair Hotel by a producer, Gabriel Pascal. Kerr recalled,

He came over to me and said, “Sweet virgin, are you an actress?” I said, “Yes,” and he said, “Then take down your hair, you look like a tart!”

Publicising her as “The Botticelli Blonde”, Pascal cast her as a Salvation Army officer, Jenny Hill, in Major Barbara (1940), based on Bernard Shaw’s play and starring Wendy Hiller and Rex Harrison. Kerr’s Jenny was described by her biographer Eric Braun as “a signpost to the kind of part in which she would excel – moral fortitude concealed by a frail appearance”. Her impressive performance led to her being given the leading role of Sally Hardcastle in a screen adaptation (much delayed by British censors) of Walter Greenwood’s bleak story of the working-class, Love on the Dole (1941), directed by John Baxter. Kerr’s spirited yet touching performance as a girl who becomes the mistress of a wealthy bookie to escape poverty established that a major British star had arrived.

Leading roles in Penn of Pennsylvania (1941), Hatter’s Castle (1941) and The Day will Dawn (1942) followed, before the first of her film classics, Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). When Wendy Hiller, originally cast, became pregnant and had to drop out, Powell gave to Kerr the challenging assignment of the colonel’s ideal woman, who comes into his life in three separate incarnations over a 40-year period. Each incarnation was given individuality by her incisive playing. During the filming, she and Powell became lovers. “I realised,” said Powell, “that Deborah was both the ideal and the flesh-and-blood woman whom I had been searching for.” The film was controversial (Churchill thought it would ruin wartime morale, and the British army refused co-operation), but it proved an artistic and commercial triumph.

Powell had hoped to reunite Kerr and Roger Livesey, who had played Blimp, in his next film, A Canterbury Tale (1944), but Gabriel Pascal had sold her contract to MGM. According to Powell, his affair with Kerr ended when she made it clear to him that she would acccept an offer to go to Hollywood if one was made.

Her first film for MGM paired her with Robert Donat in the British production Perfect Strangers (1945), about a dull couple whose personalities are changed by their wartime experiences. Stewart Granger, who was filming Caesar and Cleopatra at the time, recounts in his autobiography Sparks Fly Upward (1981) that during this period Kerr (whom he described as “devastatingly beautiful”) seduced him in the back of a taxi. Whenever this was mentioned to Kerr by interviewers, she would smile wryly and reply, “What a gallant man!”

In 1945 she and Granger made an eight-week tour of theatres of war in Belgium, Holland and France starring in Patrick Hamilton’s thriller Gaslight. During the tour Granger introduced her to the Battle of Britain pilot Anthony Bartley, who became her first husband. Kerr’s next film was Launder and Gilliatt’s thriller I See a Dark Stranger (1946), in which she was Bridie Quilty, a high-spirited Irish lass. With Kerr and her co-players Trevor Howard and Raymond Huntley all making the most of the witty script, it was a delight.

MGM then loaned her to Powell to star in Black Narcissus (1947). He had initially thought of trying to lure Greta Garbo out of retirement to play the part of troubled Sister Superior, in charge of a group of nuns who try to establish a community from a dilapidated palace in a remote part of the high Himalayas (created entirely at Pinewood). Black Narcissus was a hit in the US as well as the UK, and Kerr won the New York Film Critics’ Award as Actress of the Year. MGM was now ready to launch her American career, and she departed for Hollywood with her husband.

Advertisements for her first film, The Hucksters (1948), proclaimed her as “Deborah Kerr (rhymes with star)” and her photograph was on the cover of Time magazine, tellingly set against a background of English roses. The screenwriter Luther Davis recalled, “The studio were rather in awe of Deborah, treating her like this great legitimate actress who’d deigned to join MGM.” The Hucksters, a satire on radio advertising, was a moderate success, but it was followed by If Winter Comes (1949), a clumsily told melodrama that received limited release.

Kerr had the meaty role of a wife who descends into alcoholism in the screen version of Robert Morley’s play Edward, My Son (1949), and her uncompromising performance won her an Oscar nomination, but the downbeat tale, co-starring Spencer Tracy, did not attract large audiences. Her next film, Please Believe Me (1949), was a minor comedy with Peter Lawford and, unhappy, she told the studio head Dore Schary that there was a story she would love to do, The African Queen.

He replied that the property was owned by Warners, but that he had another African tale, King Solomon’s Mines (1950). “The next thing I knew I was on location 25,000 miles into darkest Africa.” Co-starring Stewart Granger, the film was a great success, and was followed by another blockbuster, the big-budget epic Quo Vadis? (1951), to which she brought her best patrician nobility as Lygia, the Christian slave girl. She was stoic again in Richard Thorpe’s excellent remake of The Prisoner of Zenda (1952).

She was happy to play the small role of Portia in Julius Caesar (1953), but was then given the role of Catherine Parr in Young Bess (1953), in which both she and Stewart Granger played second fiddle to the performances of Jean Simmons (as Bess) and Charles Laughton (as Henry VIII). “I came over to act,” she said, “but it turned out all I had to do was to be high-minded, long-suffering, white-gloved and decorative.”

After asking for MGM to let her freelance between assignments, she was delighted when a new agent, Bert Allenberg, persuaded the Columbia chief Harry Cohn to cast her as Karen Holmes in From Here to Eternity when Joan Crawford, originally given the part, walked out after requesting her own cameraman. Under Fred Zinnemann’s direction, Kerr effectively conveyed the sad, quiet desperation of her character, an alcoholic nymphomaniac. Said Kerr, “I studied voice for three months to get rid of my accent and I changed my hair to blonde. I knew I could be sexy if I had to.”

A third Oscar nomination resulted, and she consolidated her new status with her début on the Broadway stage in Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy (1953), as Laura Reynolds, the schoolmaster’s wife who offers compassion to a troubled pupil suspected of homosexuality. In the controversial closing scene, she seduces the boy for his own good, and has one of the most famous closing lines in modern drama, “Years from now, when you talk about this – and you will – be kind.” The performance earned her two Donaldson Awards, (Best Actress and Best Début), the Variety Drama Critics’ Poll, and when she toured in the play she won Chicago’s Sarah Siddons Award.

She returned to the screen in Edward Dmytryk’s British-made The End of the Affair (1955), and followed this with one of her greatest triumphs, as Anna Leonowens, the governess who travels to Siam to teach the King’s many children, in The King and I, Walter Lang’s screen version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. Victorian determination sparked her spirited exchanges with the King (Yul Brynner), genteel warmth pervaded her scenes with the children, and the voice of Marni Nixon blended seamlessly with Kerr’s own recitative introductions to the songs, resulting in one of Hollywood’s finest dubbing achievements. Kerr was nominated for an Oscar, and Brynner won one for his forceful portrayal.

In 1957 Kerr was seen in the screen version of Tea and Sympathy. Although stylishly directed by Vincente Minnelli, the project inevitably suffered from the screen censorship of the time. Kerr’s Hollywood career was now at its peak. She starred with William Holden in The Proud and Profane (1956), Holden describing her as “the most no-problem star I ever worked with, and she has a salty sense of humour which surprises everyone”. She played a nun again, teamed with Robert Mitchum (“Such a wonderful actor”) in Heaven Knows, Mr Allison (1956), for which she received her fourth Oscar nomination, then starred with Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember (1957), one of her best-loved films. As a couple who fall in love during an ocean trip, and promise to meet in six months if they feel the same, Grant and Kerr merge a delightfully light bantering touch with suggestions of genuine passion.

The following year Kerr won her fifth Oscar nomination, for her depiction in Separate Tables of a dowdy spinster cowed by a domineering mother. It is one of the actress’s most debated performances, detractors finding it too studied, though few will deny the frisson of the moment when she finally defies her mother and consorts with the disgraced, phony major (David Niven, in another instance where Kerr’s co-star won a statuette but she did not). She had an entirely different role with Niven in Otto Preminger’s under-rated version of Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1958), playing the glamorous widow Anne, whom Niven’s daughter (Jean Seberg) sees as a threat to the life-style she enjoys with her father.

She partnered Brynner again in the cold war thriller The Journey (1958), co-written by Peter Viertel, who was to become her second husband. She played the columnist Sheilah Graham in Beloved Infidel (1959), based on Graham’s account of her tempestuous love affair with the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, but the film was diluted when Gregory Peck agreed to play Fitzgerald only on condition that the first part of the script, dealing with Graham’s fascinating rise to fame, was excised.

In 1960 Kerr submerged completely any trace of her patrician persona with an immensely moving depiction of a downtrodden sheep-drover’s wife in Fred Zinnemann’s The Sundowners. It features one of the most memorable moments in Kerr’s career, as her weatherbeaten Ida, sitting on a station platform, sees an elegant woman adjusting her make-up in a train compartment, and the ladies’ eyes meet in mutual rapport.

It is the performance which many think should at last have won her the Oscar – it was the year Elizabeth Taylor won for Butterfield 8. “I should have won that year,” she told the writer Christopher Frayling, “I should’ve!” It is an undoubted miscarriage of justice that Kerr was not made a Dame, though she was appointed CBE in 1997. She won the New York Critics’ Awards for her performances in Heaven Knows, Mr Allison and Separate Tables, was given a British Film Institute Fellowship in 1986, and received a Bafta Special Award in 1991.

In 1961 Kerr made Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, arguably (with Robert Wise’s The Haunting) one of the two best ghost stories of the Sixties. She was superb as the enigmatic governess who comes to believe that her two charges are possessed by an evil spirit in this superb transcription of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. Although she was fine as the mysterious Miss Madrigal, a governess with a criminal past, in The Chalk Garden (1963), and particularly as the kind and gentle artist in The Night of the Iguana (1964), based on Tennessee Williams’s play, a string of second-rate movies caused her career to dim in the mid-Sixties.

Marriage on the Rocks (1965), Eye of the Devil (1966), in which she replaced Kim Novak, Casino Royale (1967) and Prudence and the Pill (1968) were all poorly received, and John Frankenheimer’s The Gypsy Moths (1969) pleased critics more than audiences. It was her last film for 13 years, Kerr announcing her retirement from films and stating afterwards, “I didn’t want to do disaster movies, ending up in an airplane at the bottom of the sea.”

She returned to the theatre in 1972, recreating her role in Separate Tables in a one-performance Midnight Matinee in honour of Sir Terence Rattigan. Later that year she had a personal success in a West End production of The Day After the Fair, an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s short story “On the Western Circuit”. The following year she toured the United States and Canada in the same play. In 1975 she starred on Broadway in Edward Albee’s short-lived Seascape, and in London she played the title role in Shaw’s Candida (1977). She returned to film in a television movie of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution (1982).

She was honoured by the Cannes Film Festival in 1984, and the following year she made her last feature film, The Assam Garden. In a revival of Emlyn Williams’s The Corn is Green (1985), she portrayed the admirable school-teacher Miss Moffat who recognises the talent in one of her miner pupils, but the run was marred by apparent nerves and fluffing of lines. On television she had particular success with the mini-series A Woman of Substance (1983), sharing with Jenny Seagrove the role of the founder of a department store dynasty.

In 1994 Kerr was finally awarded an honorary Oscar. Elia Kazan, who directed her on stage in Tea and Sympathy and on screen in The Arrangement (1968), said,

Deborah Kerr is a great lady. Let that stand by itself. She is also a fine actress, a joy to work with, devoted, understanding and gifted with a sense of humour. She is outstandingly fair to her fellow performers. She is regally handsome. That’s enough. If I say any more it might embarrass her or swell her head. And I wouldn’t want that.

Tom Vallance

This obituary can also be accessed on-line here.

“Cornel Wilde became a competent producer/director/actor, but for years he was a sort of male Maureen O’Hara, confined to medium-budget swashbucklers and action melodramas. Like her, his acting career was at it’s peak in the 40s but unlike her, his charm was limited. Ditto his acting ability. In his marshmallow period, this hardly mattered but in the harsher days of the 50s he had to struggle. It is much to his credit that he staved off oblivion by becoming a director” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years” (1972).

Cornel Wilde was born in 1912 in Hungary. The family moved to New York and he attended college in the city. Laurence Oliver cast him in 1940 in his production of “Romeo and Juliet” with Vivien Leigh. Wilde played the role of Tybalt. He was offered a Hollywood contract. He played many small roles until in 1945 he was cast as Chopin in “A Song to Remember” with Merle Oberon as George Sand. The film was a huge success and Wilde went on to make “Road House”, “The Greatest Show on Earth”, “Leave Her to Heaven” and “Shockproof” among others. Cornel Wilde died in 1989 at the age of 77.

His obituary in “The Los Angeles Times”:

Cornel Wilde, whose athletic abilities first brought him to Hollywood and whose elegant physique, good looks and dramatic talent kept him there for nearly 50 years, died in Los Angeles early Monday.

Wilde, whose film portrayals ranged from the romantic composer Frederic Chopin in “A Song to Remember” (for which he received an Academy Award nomination) to a hunter being tracked down by bloodthirsty African tribesmen in “The Naked Prey,” which he also directed, was 74. Wilde, who was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Sept. 2 suffering from leukemia, died shortly after midnight, said hospital spokeswoman Paula Correia. His son, Cornel Wilde Jr., and daughter, Wendy, were at his side.

During his long and varied career, which spanned the years 1940 to 1987, the aristocratic actor, writer and director was involved in more than 50 movies. “I realized long ago that I could not depend on luck to bring me success,” Wilde once said. “I worked hard, extra hard to improve my chance by increasing my abilities and my experience. It was my goal to accomplish, in my life, something of value and to do it with self-respect and integrity.”

He made one of the first films ever dealing with environmental pollution (“No Blade of Grass” in 1970) and portrayed Revolutionary War spies, Omar Khayam, Constantine the Great, Robin Hood’s son and aesthetic protagonists ranging from the consumptive Chopin to the eccentric Lord Byron. He moved from studio to studio in quest of satisfying roles and from in front of the camera to behind it when he couldn’t find producers and directors who agreed with his point of view.

“Acting is not just ‘another day, another dollar,’ ” he told columnist Hedda Hopper as long ago as 1954. “If I hate a script or think it’s foolish or in bad taste, I’m miserable.”

A linguist with a command of Hungarian, French, German, Italian and Russian, he was born in New York City to Hungarian-Czech parents but spent much of his formative years in Europe, where he became interested in fencing.

After his Hungarian father, who traveled Europe for a cosmetics firm, finally settled in the United States in 1932, Cornelius Louis Wilde studied at City College of New York, intending to become a physician. In 1935, he won a scholarship to Columbia University, where he hoped to study surgery but instead abandoned his classes after appearances in several stock theater companies whetted his interest in things dramatic. He also gave up his membership on the U.S. fencing team that was headed to the 1936 Berlin Olympics; yet it was his skill with a foil that would eventually lead him to Broadway and then to motion pictures.

After several modest stage productions in New York and on the road, he was hired as a fencing instructor and featured player (Tybalt) in the Laurence Olivier-Vivien Leigh stage production of “Romeo and Juliet.” Because of the stars’ movie commitments, some of the play’s rehearsals were held in Hollywood and Wilde was offered, and accepted, a Warner Bros. contract. Originally he was cast as a heavy or lead in B pictures, but his dark good looks and a change in studios (to 20th Century Fox) earned him feature parts in such pictures as “Lady With Red Hair” in 1940 and “High Sierra,” in 1941, where he played an apprentice hoodlum to Humphrey Bogart.

But it was as Chopin opposite Merle Oberon as George Sand that Wilde broke out of the pack. “When ‘A Song to Remember’ came along (1944), I begged for a test,” he told Hopper. “The powers that be wouldn’t consider it. ‘You’re too healthy’ (to play a tubercular musician).” Finally after three months of testing what Wilde described as “every other actor” in town, he was given the role and received an Oscar nomination. (One critic later said he grew paler and wanner with each reel while fingering an impressive sound track on a mute piano. The pianist off screen was Jose Iturbi.) But the success proved a Pyrrhic victory, for afterward producers came to consider him fit only for costume dramas.

He stayed in costume for “The Bandit of Sherwood Forest” and “Forever Amber,” appeared in such melodramas as “Roadhouse,” and “The Walls of Jericho” and then made the Big Top classic “The Greatest Show on Earth” for Cecil B. Demille in 1952. But the roles had taken on what seemed to Wilde to be a certain unsettling sameness, and he abandoned what was at the time a $150,000-a-picture career to become a writer-producer-director. He formed, with his second wife actress Jean Wallace (they had performed together in “Star of India”), Theodora Productions, and in they 1955 produced “Storm Fear.” The other pictures he starred in, produced or directed included “The Big Combo,” “The Devil’s Hairpin,” “Maracaibo,” “Sword of Lancelot,” “Beach Red” and “The Naked Prey,” in which he spent most of the 94-minute film wearing a loincloth and brandishing a spear as savages pursued him as they would a lion.

Despite the plot’s naivete, it was nominated for an Oscar for its script.

The “Los Angeles” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Original Cinema Quad Poster; Movie Poster; Film Poster

Treasure Of The Golden Condor, poster, poster art, top l-r: Cornel Wilde, Constance Smith, 1953. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

His website. Fabian was one of the Philadelphia singers who burst onto the scene in the late 50’s and went to Hollywood to make movies. Frankie Avalon was the other. Fabian was born 1943. His real name is Fabio Forte and his father was a policeman. In the late 50’s he had a string of hits and won a contract with 20th Century Fox. His first film was “Hound Dog Man” in 1959 directed by Don Siegal. He went on to make “North to Alaska” where he cast improbably as the brother of the much older and very British Stewart Granger. John Wayne and Capucine also starred in this highly entertaing movie. Fabian went on to make “The Longest Day”, “Ride the Wild Surf” with Tab Hunter and in 1965 “Dear Brigitte” with James Stewart and Glynis Johns. He began then to concentrate on television but in 1970 was in a very good gangster movie “A Bullet for Pretty Boy” with Jocelyn Lane. Fabian still preforms in concert in the U.S.

North To Alaska, poster, Fabian, Stewart Granger, John Wayne, Ernie Kovacs, Capucine, 1960. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Gary Lockwood was born in Van Nuys, California in 1937. He made is film acting debut in a bit part in the Western “Warlock” in 1959 with Richard Widmark and Dorothy Malone. In 1961 he, Brett Halsey and Barry Coe starred in the TV series “Follow the Sun”. He made two films with Elvis Presley, “Wild in the Country” in 1962 and the following year “It Happened at the World’s Fair”. He is perhaps best known for his role as Dr Frank Poole in “2001: A Space Oddity” in 1968. Interview with Gary Lockwood & Sally Kellerman here.

Mildred Dunnock. TCM Overview.

Mildred Dunnock seemed to be very quiet almost birdlike in her characterisations. She could at times be very moving as in her performance as Elvis Presley’s mother in “Love Me Tender” and as Mother Christophre the strict but kindly nun in chagre of the novices in “The Nun’s Story”. She was born in 1901 in Baltimore. She made her film debut in 1945 repeating her stage role in “The Corn is Green”. Her other films include “Peyton Place”, “Baby Doll” and the woman in a wheelchair who is pushec down the stairs by the giggling psychopath Richard Widmark in the classic film noir “Kiss of Death”. Mildred Dunnock died in 1991 at the ago of 90. Her obituary in the “New York Times” can be accessed here.

TCM Overview:

When Mildred Dunnock quietly demanded that “Attention must be paid” to Willy Loman in the 1949 Broadway premiere of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” opposite Lee J. Cobb, her indelible performance as Linda Loman became the embodiment of Miller’s idealized mother figure: loving, supportive mother and wife and the family’s moral balast. She repeated her landmark performance in the disappointing 1951 Laslo Benedek film opposite Fredric March (winning her first Oscar nomination) and again opposite Cobb in the brilliant 1966 TV adaptation (directed by Alex Segal) and for the Caedmon recording in the 1960s.

Formerly a schoolteacher, Dunnock made her stage debut in 1932 and won acclaim on Broadway in 1940 as a Welsh teacher in Emlyn Williams’ autobiographical drama “The Corn Is Green”, a role she reprised in her film debut in 1945. Although she is memorable in the brief role as the wheelchair bound victim whom Richard Widmark pushes down the stairs in “Kiss of Death” (1948), Dunnock gave her finest performances as seemingly genteel spinster types who display surprising inner strength and sympathy.

Dunnock studied acting with Actors Studio founders Lee Strasberg, Robert Lewis and Elia Kazan and after directing her in “Death of a Saleman”, Kazan repeatedly cast her as a figure of quiet moral authority in such films as “Viva Zapata!” (1952) and as Aunt Rose Comfort in Tennessee Williams’ “Baby Doll” (1956) for which she received her second supporting actress Oscar nomination.

Evidently a favorite actress of Williams as well as Kazan, she continued her association with the playwright on Broadway, creating the role of Big Mama in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1955), appearing in “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore” (1963) and starring in a 1966 regional revival of “The Glass Menagerie”. She was also featured as Aunt Nonnie in Richard Brooks’ 1962 film adaptation of “Sweet Bird of Youth”.

Although she didn’t begin acting professionally until she was in her 30s, Dunnock maintained an active career as a superb, understated character actress on stage, screen and TV. Her other notable films include Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Trouble With Harry” (1955), “Love Me Tender” (1956), “Peyton Place” (1957), “Butterfield 8” (1960) and John Ford’s last feature “Seven Women” (1966).

Algiers, poster, Hedy Lamarr, Charles Boyer, Sigrid Gurie on window card, 1938. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Sigrid Gurie was born in Brooklyn in 1911. When she was a child her parents returned to their homeland of Norway where she was educated. She came to Hollywood in 1936. Two years later she was cast opposite Gary Cooper in “The Adventures of Marco Polo”. Her other films include “Algiers”, “Three Faces West” and in 1944 “Voice in the Wind”. Her last film was made in Norway in 1948. She died in Mexico City at the age of 58 in 1969. Webpage on Sigrid Gurie can be accessed here.

“Wikipedia” entry:

She was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Bjørulf Knutson Haukelid (1878–1944) and Sigrid Johanne Christophersen (1877–1969).Her father was a civil engineer who worked for the New York City Subway from 1902 to 1912. Since Sigrid Gurie and her twin brotherKnut Haukelid were born in America, the twins held dual Norwegian-American citizenship. In 1914 the family returned to Norway. Sigrid Gurie subsequently grew up in Oslo and was educated in Norway, Sweden, and Belgium.^[In 1935 Gurie married Thomas Stewart of California; she filed for divorce in 1938.^[Her brother became a noted member of the Norwegian resistance movementduring World War II.

In 1936, Gurie arrived in Hollywood. Film magnate Sam Goldwyn reportedly took credit for discovering her, promoting his discovery as “the new Garbo” and billed her as “the siren of the fjords”. When the press discovered Gurie’s birth in Flatbush, Goldwyn then claimed “the greatest hoax in movie history.” She starred as Kokashin, daughter of Kublai Khan, in the 1938 production of The Adventures of Marco Polo, and went on to give worthwhile performances in such films as Algiers (1938), Three Faces West (1940) and Voice in the Wind (1944). She had a minor role in the classic Norwegian film Kampen om tungtvannet (1948). The movie was based principally on the book Skis Against the Atom which was written by her brother.

The above “Wikipedia” entry can also be accessed online here.

Richard Cromwell.

Richard Cromwell was born in Long Beach, California in 1910. He was one of the leading young men in films in Hollywood in the 1930’s. His film break through came at the age of twenty in “Tol’able David” in 1930.Among his other film credits are “This Day and Age”, “Life Begins at 40”, “Poppy”, “Storm over Bengal”, “The Lives of a Bengal Lancer”, “Jezebel” He stopped making films in the late 1940’s and established a ceramics business with great success. Richard Cromwell died in 1960.

An article on LA Frontiers.com:

“I became a movie actor so quickly it made my head swim.” —Richard CromwellHe was young. He was handsome. He was a movie star. He was gay. He was an artist. He died at age 50. He is forgotten today. And, oh yes, he was Angela Lansbury’s first husband.

Tol’able David, lobbycard, Joan Peers, Richard Cromwell, 1930. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Richard Cromwell was a beauty. He became a full-fledged movie star in 1930 at the age of 20 in the sound remake of the classicTol’able David. He was suddenly famous, even being invited to the White House to meet President Hoover. Good parts followed inEmma with Oscar winner Marie Dressler. In 1935, he had his biggest hit co-starring with Gary Cooper in Lives of a Bengal Lancer. Playing the weakling son of the commander, Cromwell was great, suffering torture at the hands of the infidels. Pauline Kael later wrote about the film, “Part of the picture’s romantic charge is its underlying homeoeroticism.” The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and was Cromwell’s favorite role.At the end of the decade, Richard Cromwell had a good role in Jezebel playing Henry Fonda’s younger brother. This great William Wyler study of a selfish Southern belle not only won Bette Davis her second Academy Award but beat Gone with the Wind to the screen. In 1939, Richard Cromwell had his last great part in John Ford’sYoung Mr. Lincoln playing the young man defended by Henry Fonda in this classic film. Cromwell also was on Broadway in the military drama So Proudly We Hail. His performance received raves: “a striking portrayal” and “astonishing characterization” from the New York press.

In various books Richard Cromwell is said to have carried on a discreet affair with Howard Hughes and was reported to be a frequent visitor at gay director George Cukor’s Sunday “boys only nights.” After serving two years in the Coast Guard, Richard Cromwell came home to find his career pretty much over.In 1945, Hollywood was shocked when a 35-year-old Richard Cromwell married a 19-year-old Angela Lansbury. The marriage only lasted six months, and later Lansbury wrote that it was “a mistake. … I was too young at 19. The marriage shouldn’t have happened.”

According to several sources, Lansbury did not know that Richard Cromwell was gay. This was a bit bizarre, as she had just made her film debut and received her first Oscar nomination for George Cukor’s Gaslight. Apparently Cukor did not discuss his Sunday night pool parties on the set!

In a 2012 interview, Lansbury stated that she came home one day and found Cromwell’s note: “I’m sorry darling, I can’t go on.” She stated, “I knew how to act mature, but I wasn’t. … It was a terrible shock. I was devastated. But once I got over the shock, I said, ‘Alright, then I’m going to take charge of my life and see that I never hurt like this again.'” Lansbury and Cromwell did remain close friends for the rest of his short life.

Richard Cromwell was also an accomplished artist, and his ceramics (especially masks of the stars) were extremely popular. His art deco wall paintings of Adam and Eve still grace the mezzanine of the Pantages Theater in Hollywood.Until his death in 1960 from liver cancer, Richard Cromwell was a respected artist and a popular social figure in the gay community. He was also slated for a film comeback. Cromwell’s artwork has lasted longer than his film career, but for those of us who love old movies and gay actors during their prime, there is no one cuter than Richard Cromwell in Jezebel or Young Mr. Lincolnor being tortured in Lives of a Bengal Lancer.

In his great study of movie stars of the ’30s, author James Robert Parrish summed up the charm and persona of Richard Cromwell: “To the screen of the 1930s, Cromwell brought a refreshing vitality. … His histrionic energy could extend to an imaginative and persuasive recreation of the joys and torments of youth and adolescence.” And Leslie Halliwell in The Filmgoer’s Companion succinctly called Richard Cromwell “the gentle hero of early sound films.”

The article can also be accessed online here.

Robert Culp was born in 1930 in Oakland, California. He made his mark on television with the hit series “I Spy”. He hade a number of feature films including “Bob and Carol, Ted and Alice”, “Hannie Caulder” and “The Pelican Brief”. Robert Culp was at one time ,married to the exquisite actress France Nuyen. He died in 2010 at the age of 79.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Tall, slim and exceedingly good-looking American leading man Robert Culp, a former cartoonist in his teen years, appeared off-Broadway in the 1950s before settling into polished, clean-cut film leads and “other man” supports a decade later. Hitting the popular TV boards in the hip, racially ground-breaking espionage program I Spy (1965), he made a slick (but never smarmy), sardonic name for himself during his over five-decade career with his sly humor, casual banter and tongue-and-cheek sexiness. Though he had the requisite looks and smooth, manly appeal (not to mention acting talent) for superstardom, a cool but cynical and somewhat detached persona may have prevented him from attaining it full-out.

He was born Robert Martin Culp on August 16, 1930, in Oakland California. The son of attorney Crozie Culp and his wife, Bethel Collins, who was employed at a Berkeley chemical company, he offset his only-child loneliness by playacting in local theater productions. Culp also showed a talent for art while young and earned money as a cartoonist for Bay Area magazines and newspapers in high school, but the fascination with becoming an actor proved much stronger. He attended Berkeley High School and graduated in 1947. The athletically-inclined Culp dominated at track and field events and, as a result, earned athletic scholarships to six different universities. He selected the relatively minor College of the Pacific in Stockton, California primarily because of its active theater department. Transferring to various other colleges of higher learning (including San Francisco State in 1949), he never earned a degree. After performing in some theatre in the San Francisco area, he moved to Seattle and then New York in 1951.

Studying under famed teacher Herbert Berghof and supporting himself during this time teaching speech and phonetics, Bob eventually found work on the theatre scene, making his 1963 Broadway debut (as Robert M. Culp) in “The Prescott Proposals” with Katharine Cornell. He eventually returned to Broadway with “Diary of a Scoundrel” starring Blanche Yurka and Roddy McDowall in 1956 and with a strong role in “A Clearing in the Woods” (alongside Kim Stanley) a year later. He earned an off-Broadway Obie Award for his very fine work in “He Who Gets Slapped” in 1956, and also appeared in the plays “Daily Life” and “Easter”.

Gracing a few live-TV dramas during his New York days, he returned to his native California for his first major TV role. It was an auspicious one as post-Civil War Texas Ranger “Hoby Gilman” in the western series Trackdown (1957). He earned widespread attention in the series that based many of its stories from actual Texas Ranger files, and the show itself received the official approval not only of the Rangers themselves but by the State of Texas. The series led to a CBS spin-off of its own: Wanted: Dead or Alive(1958), which made a TV star out of Steve McQueen.

From there, Culp guested on a number of series dramas: Bonanza (1959), The Rifleman(1958), Rawhide (1959), The Detectives (1959), Ben Casey (1961), The Outer Limits(1963), Naked City (1958) and Combat! (1962). He also starred in the two-part Disney family-styled program “Sammy the Way Out Seal” (1962), which was subsequently released as a feature in Europe. He and Patricia Barry played the hapless parents of precocious Bill Mumy and Michael McGreevey whose “adopted” pet animal unleashes major chaos in their suburban neighborhood.

During this time, Bob began to seek lead and supporting work in films. Despite his co-starring with Cliff Robertson, Rod Taylor and the very perky Jane Fonda (as her straight-laced boyfriend) in the sparkling Broadway-based sexcapade Sunday in New York (1963); playing Robertson’s naval mate in the popular John F. Kennedy biopic PT 109 (1963); recreating the legendary “Wild Bill” Hickok in the western tale The Raiders (1963); and heading up the adventurous cast of the Ivan Tors‘ African yarn Rhino! (1964) (which included Harry Guardino and the very fetching British import Shirley Eaton), Culp wasn’t able to make a serious dent in the medium.

TV remained his best arena and gave him more lucrative offers, professionally. It rewarded him quite richly in 1965 with the debonair series lead “Kelly Robinson”, a jet-setting, pro-circuit tennis player who leads a double life as an international secret agent in I Spy (1965). Running three seasons, Culp co-starred with fellow secret agent Bill Cosby, who, as “Alexander Scott”, posed as Culp’s tennis trainer. The role was tailor-made for the suave, Ivy-League-looking actor. He looked effortlessly cool posing in sunglasses amid the posh continental settings and remained handsomely unflinching in the face of danger. It was the first U.S. prime-time network drama to feature an African-American actor in a full-out starring role and the relationship between the two meshed perfectly and charismatically on screen. Both were nominated for acting Emmys in all three of its seasons, with Cosby coming out the victor each time. Filmed on location in such cities as Hong Kong, Acapulco and Tokyo, Culp also wrote and directed certain episodes of the show He also met his third wife, the gorgeous Eurasian actress France Nuyen, while on the set. They married in 1967 but divorced three years later. At this stage, the actor already had four children (by second wife, sometime actress Nancy Ashe).

Following the series’ demise, Culp took on perhaps his most-famous and controversial film role as Natalie Wood‘s husband “Bob” in the titillating but ultimately teasing “flower power” era film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), with Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon as the other-half couple who examine the late 60s “free love” idea of wife-swapping. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards (two went to supporting actors Gould and Cannon). The movie did not reignite Culp’s popularity on the large screen, but it did lead to his rather strange pairing with buxom Raquel Welch in the violent-edged westernHannie Caulder (1971) and a reunion with his I Spy (1965) pal Cosby in the far-more entertaining Hickey & Boggs (1972), which reestablished their great tongue-in-cheek rapport as two weary-eyed private eyes. Culp also directed the film while his real-life wife, actress Sheila Sullivan, played his screen wife as well.

The late 1970s produced a flood of routine mini-movies and B-pictures, the latter including Inside Out (1975), Sky Riders (1976), Breaking Point (1976), The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday (1976), Flood! (1976), Goldengirl (1979) and Hot Rod (1979). While he remained a sturdy and standard presence in such mini-movies as Houston, We’ve Got a Problem (1974), Spectre (1977) and Calendar Girl Murders (1984), his better TV-movie roles were in A Cold Night’s Death (1973), Outrage (1973), A Cry for Help (1975) and as “Lyle Pettyjohn” in the acclaimed mini-series sequel Roots: The Next Generations (1979).

Bob returned to series TV as stern “CIA Chief Bill Maxwell”, whose job was to protect handsome Robert Redford lookalike William Katt, who starred as an ersatz The Greatest American Hero (1981). The show lasted three seasons. Other series guest spots, both comedic and dramatic, included Hotel (1983), Highway to Heaven (1984), The Golden Girls (1985) and an episode of his old buddy’s show The Cosby Show (1984). He was also a guest murderer in three of the “Columbo” episodes. Although he was relegated to appearing in such film fodder as Turk 182! (1985), Big Bad Mama II (1987) and Pucker Up and Bark Like a Dog (1989), the 1990s offered him one of his best film roles in years as the ill-fated President in the Denzel Washington/Julia Roberts political thriller The Pelican Brief (1993). A year later, he again reteamed with Cosby in the TV-movie I Spy Returns (1994).

Culp became very active in the 1960s Civil Rights movement and later became a prominent face in local civic causes, joining in a lawsuit to cease construction of an elephant exhibit at the Los Angeles Zoo and accusing officials there of mistreatment. In the long run, however, the construction was given the green light. Culp also married a fifth time to Candace Faulkner and, by her, had daughter Samantha Culp in 1982. Older sons Jason Culp (born 1961) and Joseph Culp (born 1963) became actors, while another son, Joshua Culp (born 1958), entered the visual effects field. Daughter Rachel, an outré clothing designer for rock stars, was born in 1964.

In later years, Culp could be seen occasionally as Ray Romano‘s father-in-law on the hugely popular Everybody Loves Raymond (1996). His last film, the family drama The Assignment (2010), was unreleased at the time of his death. On March 24, 2010, the 79-year-old Culp collapsed from an apparent heart attack while walking near the lower entrance to Runyon Canyon Park, a popular hiking area in the Hollywood Hills. Found by a hiker, Culp was transported to a nearby hospital where he died from the head injuries he sustained in the fall. Five grandchildren also survive.

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

Article on Robert Culp in “Tina Aumont’s Eyes” website:

With his lean frame and serious manner, handsome lead actor Robert Culp often played authority figures, both good and bad. He may not have made the big time, but he did have a run of interesting projects in the Seventies, and although he is best remembered for his television work, he did appear in some first-rate cult features.

Born in California on August 16th 1930, Culp made his screen debut in 1953 and after a clutch of television appearances he won the role of Texas Ranger Hoby Gilman, in the CBS western series ‘Trackdown’, which ran for 2 seasons from 1957 until 1959. Culp’s movie debut came in 1963 when he played Jane Fonda’s ex in the romantic comedy ‘Sunday in New York’, and the western ‘The Raiders’, as ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok. Culp would become a household name in 1965 when he took the role of secret agent Kelly Robinson in the popular series ‘I Spy’, which ran until 1968.

The following year Culp had a lead role when he played Natalie Wood’s husband in Paul Mazursky’s infidelity comedy ‘Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice’ (’69). A commercial hit it remains Robert’s best known performance. Another cult part came a couple of years later when he played bounty hunter Thomas Luther Price in the quirky Raquel Welch western ‘Hannie Caulder’ (’71). A violent and sometimes comical revenge flick, it contains perhaps my favourite Culp performance.

Robert is also remembered fondly for his appearances in three ‘Columbo’ mysteries from 1971, 72 & 73, each time playing the ‘special guest murderer’. He did appear in another episode in 1990, but this time he was the father of a murderer and not the culprit himself. In 1972 Culp directed himself in the rather bleak detective flick ‘Hickey & Boggs’. Playing a private eye in search of a missing girl, it saw him reunited with his ‘I Spy’ co-star Bill Cosby. After making the bizarre horror ‘A Name for Evil’ (’73) with Samantha Eggar, Culp co-starred with Eli Wallach in the excellent TV movie ‘A Cold Night’s Death’ (’73), an atmospheric chiller with a neat twist ending.

1976 was a good year for Robert, with appearances in some interesting and entertaining projects. There was the Lee Marvin sleeper ‘The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday’, Bob Clark’s interesting drama ‘Breaking Point’, with Bo Svenson, and the pretty good thriller ‘Sky Riders’, playing an industrialist whose wife (Susannah York) and children are kidnapped by terrorists, and it’s up to York’s ex-husband James Coburn to rescue them. A small role in another James Coburn film followed with Joseph Sargent’s entertaining science-fiction drama ‘Goldengirl’ (’79), which had Susan Anton as a hormone injected Olympic hopeful.

Robert fell out of fashion in the 1980’s and so concentrated largely on television work. From 1981 until 1983 he played FBI Agent Bill Maxwell in the series ‘The Greatest American Hero’, which had William Katt as a schoolteacher turned superhero. A return to movies came in 1987 when he co-starred with Angie Dickinson in the exploitation sequel ‘Big Bad Mama II’. A video rental favourite followed with the Michael Biehn sci-fi thriller ‘Timebomb’ (’91), a watchable actioner with a good supporting cast. Robert’s later jobs included much voice-over work including some for popular video games, although he did have a good recurring role in the TV hit ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’. Culp’s final appearance came in the 2010 Adam Baldwin feature ‘The Assignment’, a decent coming-of-age drama with an air of mystery.

Married five times, Robert Culp died in California on March 24th 2010, aged 79. A reliable and very talented actor, he always took his roles seriously no matter how big or small the part. He lent gravitas to some lesser films and worked well in both comedy and drama. The mark of a true professional.

Favourite Movie: Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
Favourite Performance: Hannie Caulder

The above article can also be accessed onliue here.

Perry King. TCM Overview.

Perry King was born in 1948 in Ohio. He made his film debut in 1972 in “Slaughterhouse -Five”. Two years later he garnered critical acclaim for his performance with Sylvester Stalloine in “The Lords of Flatbush”. His other credits on film including “The Possession of Joel Delaney” with Shirley MacLaine, “Mandingo”, “Andy Warhol’s Bad”, “The Choirboys” and more recently “The Day After Tomorrow. He has appeared in most of the major popular television programmes over the past thirty years.

TCM Overview:

With his handsome, square-jawed blond looks and patrician bearing, Perry King quickly landed leading roles in films and TV in the 1970s and 80s.

As he aged, he gracefully made the transition to character roles, generally cast as villains or father figures. The grandson of famed book editor Maxwell Perkins, King attended prep school, earned an Ivy League education at Yale and received his acting training under John Houseman at Juilliard.

The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.

After debuting on stage in the replacement cast of the Tony-winning drama “Child’s Play” in 1971, he quickly landed supporting roles in two 1972 features: “Slaughterhouse-Five” cast him as the son of the main character while he was Shirley MacLaine’s troubled younger brother in “The Possession of Joel Delaney.”

After creating a strong impression as the leather-jacketed suitor of Susan Blakely in “The Lords of Flatbush” (1974), he pursued a different career path from his co-stars Sylvester Stallone and Henry Winkler, spending most of the 70s and 80s as the romantic lead in countless TV-movies and miniseries like “Captains and the Kings” (NBC, 1976) and “The Last Convertible” (NBC, 1979). He eventually earned semi-stardom as co-star (with Joe Penney) of the adventure series “Riptide” (NBC, 1984-86).

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Deborah Kerr

Cornel Wilde

Fabian

Gary Lockwood

Mildred Dunnock

Mildred Dunnock. TCM Overview.

Sigrid Gurie

Richard Cromwell

Richard Cromwell.

Robert Culp

Perry King

Perry King. TCM Overview.

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