Hollywood Actors
Edd Byrnes is best known for his role as “Kookie” in the late 1950’s series “77 Sunset Strip” which he made with Efrem Zimbalsit Jnr and Roger Smith. He was born in 1933 in New York City. He had a Warners Brother’s contract and starred in “Darby’s Rangers” , “Marjorie Morningstar” and “Yellowstone Kelly”. In 1978 he starred with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John in “Grease” which restored his popularity. An interview on Youtube here. Edd Byrnes died in 2020.
Brian Roper was born in 1929 in Doncaster, Yorkshire. He made his film debut in 1947 in the British movie “Just William’s Luck”. He screen tested for the role of Dickon in 1949’s “The Secret Garden” with Margaret O’Brien and Dean Stockwell. He won the part and travelled to to Hollywood to make the movie. Although he was nearly twenty at the time, he made a convincing 13 year old. Although the film was a popular success and is now regarded as a classic, he returend to Britain and made films there throughout the 1950’s. He returned to Hollywood to work as a film agent and then went into sales training. He died in Livermore, California in 1994.
Wikipedia entry:
Roper played youthful parts during his career due to his young physique, which included his appearance as the animal-loving young boy “Dickon” with a pet fox in The Secret Garden (1949), starring Margaret O’Brien. The Secret Garden was prepared for MGM’s 25th anniversary as a film studio and was heavily promoted in 1949–50. Newspapers would claim his age as 14 at the time. He appeared this age but was actually five years older. Roper was noted for his reddish hair and some freckles.
Born in Doncaster, Roper left England at age 19 on American Overseas Airlines from London on 5 October 1948 via a Constellation plane (number N90922, Flagship Denmark) after his selection for The Secret Garden from more than 100 boys who were tested during a six-month search.
He arrived in Washington, D.C. in the United States on 6 October 1948,[note en route to MGM-British Studios in Culver City, California (now Sony Pictures Studios) who had paid for his trip. Work on the film began 4 October 1948 and lasted to late November, during a period of excitement regarding the appearance of a predawn bright long-tailed comet (1948 L, aka the Eclipse Comet of 1948) becoming visible. He lived in both Britain and California, depending on shooting locales, and acted for 24 years.
Following his acting career he went briefly into the film industry agency business. Roper married Barbara L. Eaton (aka Barbara L. Stafsudd), in Los Angeles when he was 38 years old, on 30 December 1967. Shortly after this marriage, Roper established the Roper School of Real Estate in 1968 in Hayward, California and served as its lecturer and instructor. He would go on to train new salespeople while serving as director of sales training for Red Carpet Realtors in Northern California.
John Kerr was a very interesting young lead actor in the mid to late 1950’s who seemed destined for a great cinema career. Surprisingly his career seemed to wane from the early 1960’s and he became a lawyer. His film performances are worth watching and his movies deserve reappraisal. He starred in “Tea and Sympathy” with Deborah Kerr (no relation) and “The Cobweb” with Richard Widmark. He is best known for playing Lt Cable in “South Pacific” opposite the exquisite France Nuyen as Liat. Sadly John Kerr passed away in February 2013 at the age of 81.
Brian Baxter’s obituary in “THe Guardian”:
The actor John Kerr, who has died aged 81, won a Tony award in his first starring role on the Broadway stage, as Tom in Tea and Sympathy in 1953, and subsequently appeared in the 1956 film version directed by Vincente Minnelli. Robert Anderson‘s play, in which a schoolboy “confesses” to his housemaster’s wife that he might be homosexual – only to be seduced out of the notion by the sympathetic listener – was considered so controversial that it was restricted to a “members only” theatrical run in London, and Minnelli’s film received an X certificate, despite modification, notably in the suggestion that the housemaster was gay.1!
Kerr starred as the boy, although by then he was in his 20s. Born in New York, son of the actors Geoffrey Kerr and June Walker, he had already graduated from Harvard, played in summer stock and made his Broadway debut in 1952 in Bernardine. He made a handsome hero and was superbly matched with Deborah Kerr (no relation) as she dispensed tea and largesse in equal measure. Although the movie was sanitised, the dialogue remained intelligent, the premise timely for the period and the acting exceptional under Minnelli’s elegant guidance.
The director had been responsible for Kerr’s memorable film debut the year before in The Cobweb. He was cast as a sensitive youngster, a suicidally inclined patient in a psychiatric clinic, who becomes the focus of a dispute between his sympathetic doctor (Richard Widmark) and the clinic’s manager (Lillian Gish). Kerr should, after such acclaim, have embarked on a major career. But he trod water in television dramas such as Playhouse 90 and movies including Gaby (1956, opposite Leslie Caron), a poor reworking of Waterloo Bridge, and The Vintage (1957), a preposterous thriller set in a French vineyard.
There was an upturn when he took the role of the tragic Lt Cable in the lavish – though stodgy – version of the musical South Pacific (1958). Although his voice was dubbed (by Bill Lee), he had the great number Younger Than Springtime to mime to and looked suitably dashing in his white uniform. The movie was a critical failure, but it gave Kerr a wider audience than Girl of the Night and The Crowded Sky (both 1960) and The Seven Women from Hell (1961).
He was temporarily rescued from the doldrums by Roger Corman’s flamboyantly gothic The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), in which he became the torture victim of an insane Vincent Price. That cult movie signalled Kerr’s exodus from the big screen and he moved permanently to television, playing stalwart establishment characters. He was presciently cast as an assistant district attorney in the TV series Arrest and Trial (1963-64) and given the top job as District Attorney John Fowler in Peyton Place (1965-66), moving on to an even steamier series, playing Duane Galloway in The Long, Hot Summer (1965). During this period he returned to his studies, graduating in law from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1969 and setting up a practice in California.
Despite his new occupation, Kerr returned sporadically to acting, appearing in television series including The Young Lawyers, Columbo, The Streets of San Francisco, Police Story and The Invisible Man. He also enjoyed key roles in mini-series such as Washington: Behind Closed Doors (1977) and television movies including Incident on a Dark Street, in which he was again cast as a lawyer. He effectively retired from acting in the late 70s; although he could be glimpsed in the television movie The Park is Mine in 1986.
He is survived by his second wife, Barbara; a son, Michael, and two daughters, Rebecca and Jocelyn, from his first marriage; and seven grandchildren.
Ronald Bergan writes: In 1994, while researching a biography of Anthony Perkins, I interviewed John Kerr at his law office in Beverly Hills. He was 63 and grey-haired, but had kept his slim figure and his handsome, sensitive face.
Initially, Kerr and Perkins had parallel lives and careers. They both attended Miss Carden’s private school in New York. They both came from theatrical families – Perkins’s father, Osgood, was a well-known Broadway actor, and Kerr’s grandfather (Frederick Kerr), father and mother were all actors.
When Perkins and Kerr were in their early 20s, their paths crossed again. In July 1953, Perkins put himself up for the role of Tom Lee in Tea and Sympathy. Kerr was also up for the part. Perkins was confident that the play’s director Elia Kazan, who had acted with Osgood, would value him as his father’s son. Yet Anderson and Kazan opted for Kerr. “Jack Kerr had the quality we were looking for,” explained Anderson. “The very thing that had worked for Tony, particularly in the movies – a certain ‘differentness’ – we didn’t want at the outset for Tom Lee.”
Nevertheless, when the Broadway cast was changed a year later, Kerr told Kazan that he believed Perkins had the right qualities to replace him in the role. When Tea and Sympathy reopened starring Joan Fontaine and the unknown Perkins, Kerr was relieved. “My hunch was justified when I saw Tony. He was excellent,” Kerr remarked generously. “Tony played it with more humour than I did.”
But it was Kerr who was given the part for Minnelli’s bowdlerised screen version after the play closed in June 1955. A year later, the tables were turned. Kerr had wanted the part of Gary Cooper’s son in William Wyler’s Friendly Persuasion, but his agent advised against it. The film launched Perkins as a film star; while Kerr went on to appear in several stinkers.
Kerr also turned down the choice role of Charles Lindbergh in Billy Wilder’s The Spirit of St Louis, because, he explained, “the American hero was sympathetic to Nazi Germany”. He had no regrets, and seemed very relaxed and content in his choice of having given up acting for the law.
• John Grinham Kerr, actor and lawyer, born 15 November 1931; died 2 February 2013
To view “The Guardian” obituary of John Kerr, please click here
The Canadian-born actor Michael Sarrazin, who has died of cancer aged 70, was so visible in Hollywood movies from 1967 to 1977 that one may wonder what happened to his subsequent career. A facetious answer might be that he moved back to Canada and made Canadian movies. Another answer might be that his sensitive, gently rebellious, flower-child persona and his lanky, boyish looks, with his long hair and soulful eyes, were no longer appropriate to the roles he took as he got older.
However, during the decade of his stardom, Sarrazin seemed to fit the anti-hero ethos of the era, often playing rootless characters, typically in his most celebrated role as the ex-farmboy drifter in Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969).
Sarrazin, idealistically willing to let fate take a hand, is paired with an embittered Jane Fonda in a dance marathon that is supposed to be a microcosm of the Depression. It is Sarrazin who gets to speak the rhetorical question of the title after he helps Fonda commit suicide.
“You could have paid me a dollar a week to work on that film,” Sarrazin explained. “It hits you bolt upright. I still get really intense when I watch it. We stayed up around the clock for three or four days. Pollack said we should work until we showed signs of exhaustion.”
Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise when Universal refused to lend Sarrazin out for the Jon Voight part in John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy.
He was born Jacques Michel André Sarrazin in Quebec City, but was brought up in Montreal, where he went to eight different schools before dropping out. In fact, he was only interested in the few chances he got to act at school. While still in his teens, Sarrazin went to Toronto, where he soon got work as an actor.
After starring opposite Geneviève Bujold in a TV production of Romeo and Juliet, and appearing in two shorts for the National Film Board of Canada, in one of which he played a troubled youth who steals a motorcycle, he was offered a contract by Universal Studios, making him one of the last actors to come up through the old studio system.
Sarrazin’s first film for the studio was Gunfight in Abilene (1967), a drama set at the end of the American civil war, in which the teen idol Bobby Darin was miscast as a sheriff. Sarrazin made an impression as a young cowhand who gets whipped (shirtless) by a villainous hired gun.
This was followed in the same year by his first leading role, in the enjoyable comedy-drama The Flim-Flam Man as an army deserter, a corruptible innocent, taken on as a protege of a rural conman (George C Scott).
More contemporary was Sarrazin’s role in The Sweet Ride (1968) as a convincing beach bum in Malibu who tells his girlfriend Jacqueline Bisset that all he wants out of life is the surf and can only marry her when he has got the beatnik life out of his system. After making the sweet ride on his surf board, he walks away, leaving the board in the sand, having realised that there is more to life than escapism.
Thus began his 14-year relationship with Bisset in real life. They were to appear together in two further films: Believe in Me (1971), in which they are stoned most of the time, and as husband and wife in John Huston’s The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), with Paul Newman in the title role.
Newman had cast Sarrazin in Sometimes a Great Notion (first released in the UK as Never Give an Inch, 1970), the second of the five films he directed. Sarrazin has the most sympathetic role as the youngest of a family of lumberjacks who is the butt of his elders’ jokes on his hippy hairstyle and liberal views.
Among his other roles was in Robert Mulligan’s The Pursuit of Happiness (1971), as an anti-Vietnam war student who finds his hippy lifestyle put on trial rather than his accidental running over of an old lady in his car.
In Harry in Your Pocket (1973), he portrayed an apprentice to master pickpocket James Coburn, and in Peter Yates’s romantic comedy For Pete’s Sake (1974) he was Barbra Streisand’s impecunious cab-driving husband. At the same time, he was appearing on television, notably as a relatively handsome and articulate “Creature” in Frankenstein: The True Story (1973), co-adapted by Christopher Isherwood from Mary Shelley’s novel.
The majority of films Sarrazin made in the 1980s and 90s were Canadian productions, few of which rose above the mediocre.
An exception was La Florida (1993), a French-Canadian film produced by his brother Pierre Sarrazin, in which he played a lounge singer called Romeo Laflamme. “I asked Michael to act in French, which was difficult for him as he’d been so long in LA,” said Pierre, “but it all came back to him. After all, we’d grown up in east-end Montreal.”
Sarrazin’s final, brief, appearance will be in Walter Salles’s upcoming screen adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. He is survived by his two daughters, and his brother and sister.
Jeff Richards was an American baseball player who became an actor. he was born in 1924 in Portland, Oregon. His best known role was in “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” in 1954. His other films include “Many Rivers to Cross”, “Don’t Go Near the Water” and “Born Reckless”. Jeff Richards died in 1989. TCM Page on “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” can be viewed here.
“Wikipedia” entry:
He was born Richard Mansfield Taylor in Portland, Oregon. Taylor joined the United States Navy during World War II and served until 1946.
After the war was over, Richard Taylor played shortstop for the Portland Beavers for a year and then for the Salem Senators; however, his baseball career ended after he tore his ligament and was unable to play anymore. He then went to Hollywood to pursue a film career. He got a screen test at Metro-Goldwyn Mayer and the studio changed his name to Jeff Richards. The former baseball player started his acting career during the late 1940s with mostly bit parts, but in 1950 he played a strong role, displaying his baseball skills as Bob Langdon in Kill the Umpire and later as Dave Rothberg in Angels in the Outfield (1951).
He is best known for his role as Benjamin Pontipee in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). Following this performance, he tied with George Nader and Joe Adams for the Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer. Despite this, his acting career soon floundered. Richards was one of the male supporting roles amid an all-star cast of actresses in The Opposite Sex (1956). His leading roles came in several low-budget films, including the western The Marauders, the rodeo drama Born Reckless, the mad-scientist story Island of Lost Women and the underwater adventure The Secret of the Purple Reef, each of which had little or no impact.
In 1958, on television, Richards played the title role in the NBC western television series Jefferson Drum, the story of a crusading journalist, with Eugene Martin portraying his young son. The series was cancelled after twenty-six episodes aired over two seasons.[1] Richards guest-starred in numerous television series, including the role in 1961 of Jubal Evans in the episode “Incident of His Brother’s Keeper” of the CBS western Rawhide. His last role was in 1966 as Kallen in the film Waco.
He was married to Vickie Taylor and they had one child before they divorced. Jeff Richards died on July 28, 1989, aged 64 from unknown causes. He is buried at Riverside National Cemetery in Riverside, California.
Marlene Dietrich was born in Berlin in 1901. She began her career in German silent film and then won international acclaim as Lola-Lola in “The Blue Angel” with Emil Jannings. The popularity of the film led to offers from Hollywood and Dietrich went to the U.S. in 1930. She had a contract with Paramount Studios and her first Hollywood film was “Morocco” opposite Gary Cooper. Her most famous movies include “Shangai Express” with Anna May Wong, “The Garden of Allah” with Charles Boyer and “Knights Without Armour” with Robert Donat. In later life she had a very successful career as a concert performer. She had a late career movie success with “Witness for the Prosecution” with Tyrone Power. On retirement she went to live in Paris and became reclusive in her later years. Marlene Dietrich died in 1992 at the age of 90. Her website can be accessed here.
Celebrated for her roles in The Blue Angel and Destry Rides Again, she appeared in 50 films between 1923 and 1964. She was the last well-known survivor of the Kaiser’s Germany.
Her theme tunes – Falling in Love Again, Johnny, The Boys in the Back Room and Where Have All the Flowers Gone? – haunted generations; her rendering of Lilli Marlene became as popular as that of Lile Andersen which was the favourite of British and German troops in the Second World War.
Husky-voiced and fair-haired, with heavily-lidded eyes, she displayed a cool ‘don’t care’ expression of world-weary disillusion. In an age when stardom is transitory, she proved enduring.
Marlene Dietrich was a postmistress at dispensing her own dangerous blend of glamour and carried through life the aura of Berlin’s smoky decadence.
Blonde, Teutonic, with high-chiselled cheekbones, she mesmerised her audiences by innuendo, letting her vacant eyes drift over the room, pulling in her heavily magenta-ed lower lip, displaying all the artifice of languor.
Famed for playing prostitutes in films, her world was never one of convention. She yearned for all that was artificial.
As a singer she was a polished performer, alternatively lazy in mood and powerfully aggressive, almost paramilitary. Her delivery of Johnny was both breathy and erotic and she manipulated the microphone in a manner nothing less than sexual.
No one who saw her spectacular entrance down the winding staircase of London’s Café de Paris in the 1950s is ever likely to forget it. Sparkling from head to foot with no shortage of white mink, she did not so much descend as glide down like a serpent, disdainful, glamorous, a little threatening.
Far from modest, Dietrich relished a record of the applause at these performances. One evening she played this to Noël Coward, explaining: ‘This is where I turn to the right . . . Now I turn to the left.’ When the first side ended, she threatened to turn the record over. Coward erupted: ‘Marlene, cease at once this mental masturbation]’ Marlene Dietrich was born in Berlin on Dec 27, 1901, the younger daughter of a Prussian officer, Louis Dietrich, and his wife, Josephine Felsing, who came from a family of jewellers. She spent part of her childhood in Weimar.
Her father died in 1911 and her mother, who then married Eduard von Losch, a Grenadier colonel, played a big part in her life. She was brought up in the Germanic tradition of duty and discipline. The theatre was in her blood from the start; she worshipped Rilke, read Lagerlof and Hofmannsthal and knew Erich Kästner by heart.
She was keenly musical and learned the violin. From 1906 to 1918, she attended the Auguste Viktoria School for Girls in Berlin. At the end of the First World War, she was enrolled in the Berlin Hochschule fur Musik but stayed only for a few months.
The family soon fled to the country, where her stepfather died. In 1919, she entered the Weimar Konservatorium to study the violin. She hoped to become a professional violinist but a damaged wrist destroyed this hope.
In 1920, Marlene was back in Berlin. The next year she auditioned for the Max Reinhardt Drama School and played the widow in The Taming of the Shrew.
A string of minor parts followed. Marlene lived in virtual penury, worked in a glove factory and acted and danced. It was a depressing way of life.
In 1923, she played Lucie in The Tragedy of Love, on the set of which she met her husband, Rudi Sieber. It was by no means love at first sight but Marlene began by being in great awe of him. They married and had a daughter, Maria (born in 1925).
The marriage did not last. Sieber was overshadowed by Dietrich, who described him as a ‘very, very sensitive person’. She bought him a farm in California where he dwelt with his animals, a mistress (until she went mad), her blessing and her financial support; he died in 1976.
In the late 1920s, Dietrich acted and filmed in various productions in Berlin, including I Kiss Your Hand, Madame.
In 1930, she was discovered by the Viennese director, Josef von Sternberg, who detected in her the raw sexuality of a seductive vamp and brought her to fame in his film The Blue Angel. Von Sternberg transformed her from a rather brawny girl with the slight air of a female impersonator into a creature of glamour.
Even in The Blue Angel, as she sits on the barstool as the seductive temptress Lola-Lola, luring the salivating professor to his doom, her legs appear more well covered than is now considered fashionable. Von Sternberg recognised the conflict within her: ‘Her personality was one of extreme sophistication and of an almost childish simplicity,’ he wrote.
Originally Dietrich had been rejected for the part as ‘not at all bad from the rear but do we not also need a face?’ But then von Sternberg saw her by chance in the Georg Kaiser play ZweiKrawatten. She was gazing bored at the action on stage and he was drawn to her disdain and poise.
Despite her success, UFA did nor renew her contract and so she signed with Paramount and emigrated to Hollywood. There she made several memorable films for von Sternberg.
Morocco, in which she played a cabaret star in love with a French legionnaire (Gary Cooper), included a scene in which Dietrich, dressed as a man, plants an unchaste kiss on a girl’s mouth in a café. The film brought massive fame and Marlene contrasted the adulation she received off camera to the virtual martyrdom she endured under von Sternberg’s precise and relentless direction.
Dishonoured followed, in which she played an Austrian spy, who fixed her make-up in the reflection of an officer’s sabre and applied her lipstick while a German officer ranted at her. The firing squad then shot her dead.
She was described as a ‘vamp with brains and humour’ and was paid pounds 50,000.
Von Sternberg was harshly criticised in his later films for presenting Dietrich in a series of lavish films in which she was little more than a clothes-horse, bedecked in black lace, feathers and jewels – Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress and The Devil is a Woman.
These criticisms von Sternberg repudiated. Dietrich displayed a mixture of self-love and outward tenderness, her egoism and Germanic ruthlessness belied by a sweetly feminine mouth and high, serene forehead. In 1933, at von Sternberg’s suggestion, she played Lily Czepanek in Song of Songs for Reuben Mamoulian. Von Sternberg ended his association in 1935 (following which his career floundered).
He concluded: ‘When we first met, her pay was lower than that of a bricklayer and, had she remained where she was, she might have had to endure the fate of a Germany under Hitler.’ Whatever the pains of the association, it had been a rewarding one.
Dietrich’s association with von Sternberg was the subject of an analytic study, In the Realm of Pleasure, concerning von Sternberg, Dietrich and the ‘masochistic aesthetic’.
The author, Gaylyn Studlar, concluded: ‘Dietrich is frequently mentioned as an actress whose screen presence raises questions about women’s representation in Hollywood cinema. She has also acquired her own cult following of male and female, straight and gay admirers.
‘The diverse nature of this group suggests that many possible paths of pleasure can be charted across Dietrich as a signifying star image and across von Sternberg’s films as star vehicles.’
Kenneth Tynan also pursued this theme in a celebrated profile of the star: ‘She has sex but no particular gender. Her ways are mannish: the characters she played loved power and wore slacks and they never had headaches or hysterics. They were also quite undomesticated. Dietrich’s masculinity appeals to women and her sexuality to men.’
Inevitably, the arrival of Dietrich was seen in Hollywood as that of a blonde Venus in the vanguard of Garbo, the Sphinx. There was some similarity in the style of the films (Mata Hari then Dishonoured, Queen Christina in comparison to The Scarlet Empress).
It was generally accepted that if any rivalry existed, Garbo won without effort. A remarkable composite photograph by Steichen exists portraying Dietrich and Garbo together but, if they ever met, it was an unsatisfactory encounter.
At the behest of Mercedes de Acosta, with whom both were romantically linked, they made the wearing of slacks by females fashionable. In 1936, Dietrich starred opposite Cary Grant in Desire and then played in The Garden of Allah, Knight Without Armour and Angel. In 1939, came her energetic portrayal of Frenchy, the Wild West saloon keeper in Destry Rides Again.
This classic included Dietrich’s spirited wrestling with James Stewart, and she gave tongue to the evocative song The Boys in the Back Room, while bestriding the bar.
In the early years of the Second World War, there were more films for more directors. Meanwhile, in Germany Hitler destroyed all but one copy of The Blue Angel and went to great lengths to try to lure Dietrich to his cause.
But in 1943 she assumed the honorary rank of Colonel in the American Army and made radio broadcasts and personal appearances on behalf of the American war effort. In 1944, she joined the United States Overseas Tour and paid extensive visits to the Allied troops in Europe.
Dressed in an elegant version of military uniform, her blonde hair as flowing and feminine as ever, her mission was to boost morale, to entertain and to encourage Allied victory. There is film footage of Dietrich greeting the Fifth Army with a jaunty ‘Hello, Boys]’ and congratulating them on their singing.
Jean-Pierre Aumont was a fellow actor she met in wartime Italy and who was destined to become a lifelong friend. He summed up her role: ‘In the eyes of the Germans, she is a renegade who serves against them on behalf of the American Army. They wouldn’t hesitate to shoot her.
‘Under the veneer of her legendary image, Marlene Dietrich is a strong and courageous woman. There are no tears. No panic. In deciding to go sing on the field of battle, she knew the risks she was taking and assumed them courageously, without bragging and without regrets.’
Dietrich’s line was that her former countrymen had fallen under the tyranny of Hitler and that this evil must be removed. Jean Cocteau was sad that in the early post-war years she never sang Falling in Love Again in the original German in fear of being associated with the Germany of 1940.
Of her war-work, she said: ‘This is the only important work I’ve ever done.’
The elder sister Dietrich never mentioned (Elisabeth) was incarcerated in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany and her mother died in 1945. Marlene returned to America after the cessation of fire. She was awarded the Legion of Honour and the American Medal of Freedom.
Dietrich made many further films, including Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair, Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, and Witness for the Prosecution for Wilder. In this she played two roles, one a Cockney, her unlikely accent coaxed by a despairing Noël Coward.
She also appeared in Touch of Evil for Orson Welles and Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg opposite Spencer Tracy. In 1956, she contributed a memorable cameo to Mike Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days, perched on a stool Destry-style.
Dietrich also ran her own radio spy series, Café Istanbul, on America’s ABC Network. But it was as a singer that her later career blossomed.
By now in her early 50s, she began by compèring a Madison Square benefit arranged by her daughter. Out of a wish not to sit on an elephant, she took the role of ringmaster in top hat, tailcoat and tights. This white tie look was to be a lasting trademark.
Dietrich made her debut at the Sahara, Las Vegas, in 1953 and the next year took London by storm at the Café de Paris. She was always glamorously dressed and accompanied by an orchestra of 22 men.
Thereafter she made long tours all over the world, invariably accompanied by Burt Bacharach. Though she relied heavily on Bacharach, whom she described as her ‘arranger, accompanist and conductor’, she was always her own agent.
In 1960, Dietrich made a controversial return to Germany where she was greeted by a bomb on one side and Willy Brandt on the other. She toured Israel the same year and visited Russia in 1964.
In 1967, she made her debut on Broadway. Dietrich’s one-woman show carried on until the late 1970s when accidents recurred with startling frequency.
She broke so many bones that comedians used to mimic her, singing ‘Falling off stage again . . .’ Finally, she broke her thigh in Sydney in 1976 and gave up.
As Dietrich grew older, she seemed to defy the passing years. Cecil Beaton watched her 1973 Drury Lane performance on the television and dissected her ruthlessly: ‘Somehow she has evolved an agelessness.
‘The camera picked up aged hands, a lined neck and the surgeon had not be able to cut away some little folds that formed at the corners of her mouth.
He had, however, sewn up her mouth to be so tight that her days of laughing are over . . .’
Beaton admired her dress, her ‘huge, canary yellow wig’ and her showmanship: ‘She has become a mechanical doll, a life-size mannequin. The doll can show surprise, it can walk, it can swish into place the train of its white fur coat. The audience applauds each movement, each gesture, the doll smiles incredulously – can it really be for me that you applaud? ‘Again a very simple gesture – maybe the hands flap – and again the applause, and not just from old people who remembered her tawdry films but the young find her sexy.
She is louche and not averse to giving a slight wink, yet somehow avoids vulgarity.
‘Marlene is certainly a great star, not without talent, but with a genius for believing in her self-fabricated beauty, for knowing that she is the most alluring fantastic idol, an out-of-this-world goddess or mythological animal, a sacred unicorn.’
Beaton attributed her success entirely to perseverance and an ability to magnetise audiences into believing she was a phenomenon, just as she has mesmerised herself into believing in her own beauty. An experienced critic of such creatures, Beaton could find no chink in her armour.
Despite himself, he sat enraptured. He almost concluded that she was ‘a virtuoso in the art of legerdemain’ but then he wrote: ‘ ‘You know me,’ Marlene is fond of saying. Nobody does because she’s a real phoney. She’s a liar, an egomaniac, a bore.’
It was to the music of Falling in Love Again that Dietrich bade the world a spirited farewell in Paris: ‘Je dois vous dire adieu, parce que c’est fini.’
Sparkling in sequins and surrounded by flowers, she glided off stage, bowing low, clenching and unclenching her hands as though casting a spell over the audience, returning for more applause and, finally, clinging to the curtain.
At length, she disappeared behind it by degrees with a parting wave to the besotted audience.
Her last film appearance was in 1978 as the glamorously veiled Baroness von Semering in Just a Gigolo with David Bowie, in which she intoned the title song. She was still high cheekboned but the power had gone from her voice.
The myth of Marlene lived on and the rumours of her loves – with Jean Gabin, Ernest Hemingway and others – were long discussed. She moved between her apartment in the Avenue Montaigne and a flat at 993 Park Avenue. In her ABC book, she declared: ‘A man at the sink, a woman’s apron tied around his waist, is the most miserable sight on earth.’
As for pouting, she wrote: ‘I hate it but men fall for it, so go on and pout.’
Dietrich was not only a star. She was a nurse to many friends, a cook to her grandchildren and, in reality, there was much about her that was hausfrau-ish. Kenneth Tynan described her as ‘a small eater, sticking to steaks and greenery but a great devourer of applause’.
She was the author of an unforthcoming book of memoirs, in which she finally rejected the world: ‘What remains is solitude.’
In the years of her retirement, there were rumours that Dietrich was drinking or in a home. Ginette Spanier, the directrice of Balmain, suggested that she dine in a neighbouring restaurant and that they have a tame photographer on hand to record her evening out to show that all was well.
Spanier worried that Dietrich might not be equal to the challenge but, on the night in question, the Teuton emerged from her building as glamorous as ever. When the photographer approached, she pushed Spanier firmly out of the picture to ensure she was portrayed alone.
Every time the world thought they had heard the last of her, she was either photographed at an airport or issued a curious statement to the press.
Then, in 1984, she agreed to make a documentary film with Maximillian Schell (her co-star in Judgment at Nuremberg), without appearing on camera, her voice overriding the visual images in a mixture of German and English, ‘three days this and three days that,’ as she put it.
In that film, she was dismissive of many of her old films, judging them ‘kitsch’; she rejected women’s lib as ‘penis envy’; maintained that women’s brains weighed only half a man’s and declared: ‘Well, I’m patient and I’m disciplined and I’m good.’
In extreme old age, she remained in her Paris apartment and many friends from the past were bitter when their telephone calls were answered by Dietrich pretending to be the maid.
Jean-Pierre Aumont was a favoured friend, who submitted to many hours of telephone conversation, and occasionally took her out to tea at the Plaza Athenee opposite her apartment.
She rose at six, could sometimes be seen early in the morning, draped in Indian shawls, walking a tiny dog, accompanied by a minder. But officially she was never seen and, after Garbo’s death, became the world’s most celebrated recluse, existing on a diet of champagne, autographs, reading and the telephone.
Yet the lingering image must forever be her descent of the Café de Paris staircase, the club specially adorned with cloth of gold on the walls and purple marmosets swinging on the chandeliers and Noël Coward intoning his gracious, if clipped, introduction: Though we might all enjoy Seeing Helen of Troy As a gay cabaret entertainer, I doubt that she could Be one quarter as good As our lovely, legendary Marlene
James Olson was born in 1930 in Evanston, Illinois. He is a graduate of Northwestern University. His first film was “The Strange One” with Ben Gazzara in 1957. He us especially remembered for his performance opposite Joanne Woodward in “Rachel, Rachel”. His last TV performance was in a 1990 episode of “Murder She Wrote”.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
He was a Chicago-based stage actor by the time he began his film career in the forgettable action drama The Sharkfighters (1956).
A reedy, sensitive-looking blond, James Olson showed an understated power in his performances that often received critical applause, but also a taciturn personality that kept audiences at bay.
His performance as Joanne Woodward’s suitor in Rachel, Rachel (1968) gained him the best reviews of his career and it seemed he had finally earned his stripes, but despite impressive parts in The Andromeda Strain (1971) and Ragtime (1981), not to mention the TV-movies The Family Nobody Wanted (1975) and “The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer (1977), he never made a name for himself.
A durable talent, he remained a reliable presence for years with TV guest spots, but by the 1990s he had all but disappeared.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
James Olson died in 2022.
Olson was born in Evanston, Illinois, and graduated from Northwestern, where he first joined the theater. He is survived by two nieces, a nephew, and three grandnephews.
TheWrapUp
Venetia Stevenson was born in 1938 in London. SShe is the daughter of actress Anna Lee and film director Robert Stevenson. When a child she moved to Hollywood with her parents who worked in U.S. movies. She made her stage debut with her mother in 1955 in “Liliom”. In the late 1850’s she began acting on film. Her films include “The Day of the Outlaw” and “Dasrby’s Rangers”. She retired from acting in movies after her marriage to Don Everly, one of The Everly Brothers. Their son is the country singer Edan Everly.
Sultry, glamorous blonde Venetia Stevenson was a British-born starlet of late 1950s Hollywood whose face was her initial fortune. A shapely, lush-lipped knockout, the camera simply adored her and, in her early years, she dotted the covers of several magazines. Her acting talent, however, never measured up and, within a few years, she willingly retired.
Born in London on March 10, 1938, Venetia came from strong entertainment stock. Her mother, actress Anna Lee, was a well-known co-star of the British cinema, and her father, director Robert Stevenson, was well-respected for his directing of such classy Grade “A” motion pictures as Nine Days a Queen (1936), King Solomon’s Mines (1937),Back Street (1941) and Jane Eyre (1943). Just prior to the beginning of WWII in Europe, the family moved to Hollywood. By 1944, her parents had divorced and Venetia, eventually, decided to live with her father and new stepmother.
Venetia’s photogenic beauty was apparent from the start. As part of the youthful Hollywood scene, she was quickly discovered and moved with ease into junior modeling work. This, plus her parents’ obvious connections, led to a natural progression into acting. Self-admittedly, she was never a confidant actress. Making her TV debut playing a corpse on Matinee Theatre (1955), she also appeared with her mother and the husband/wife team of Fernando Lamas and Arlene Dahl in a 1955 Arizona stage production of “Liliom”, in order to gain experience. Signed with RKO, Venetia took acting lessons and posed for publicity stills but she made little progress there. Warner Bros. eventually took her on and she made several guest appearances on TV, including that ofRicky Nelson‘s girlfriend on the popular series, The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet (1952). Other WB series work included roles on Cheyenne (1955) and 77 Sunset Strip (1958).
Venetia made her film entrance with a decorous, second-lead femme role in the WB war picture Darby’s Rangers (1958), starring James Garner, Peter Brown and Edd Byrnes. As part of the Hollywood dating swirl, there were obvious set-ups with such big stars as Tab Hunter, Anthony Perkins and, even, Elvis Presley. Such a set-up led to a 1956 marriage to up-and-coming actor/dancer Russ Tamblyn, but the bloom quickly fell off the rose and the couple divorced a year later.
For the most part. Venetia was cast as a beautiful distraction in action-adventure and crime movies. Her handful of hunky movie co-stars included Jeff Richards and Guy Madison. Such routine roles in Day of the Outlaw (1959), Island of Lost Women (1959),Studs Lonigan (1960), Seven Ways from Sundown (1960), The City of the Dead (1960), which was made in her native England and released here as “Horror Hotel”, and The Sergeant Was a Lady (1961), her last, did little to boost her feelings of adequacy or her Hollywood ranking. Mother Anna Lee, who found renewed recognition as a daytime soap doyenne (“Lila Quartermaine” on General Hospital (1963)), appeared in support of her daughter in two films: Jet Over the Atlantic (1959) and The Big Night (1960). Divorced from Tamblyn, Venetia married one of The Everly Brothers, Don Everly, of “Wake Up, Little Susie” fame, in 1962. At this point, she had no qualms about retiring from the ever-competitive acting world and did so. The couple went on to have two daughters and a son. Stacy Everly and Erin Everly both dabbled in acting, and son Edan Everly delved into music as both a singer and guitarist. He also teaches music and produces/writes for other artists.
In later years, Venetia became a script reader for Burt Reynolds‘s production company and, subsequently, became vice-president of Cinema Group, a production company that made several films in the 1980s. Since her 1970 divorce from Everly, the still-beautiful lady, who enjoys horseback riding, has not remarried.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Published November 23, 2022 8:00am EST
By Stephanie Nolasco | Fox News
Author Billy Stanley spoke to Fox News Digital about how Elvis Presley, a ‘proud patriot,’ never lost his faith in God.
Whenever Venetia Stevenson walked into a room, every man would turn his head and gawk, including Elvis Presley.
The actress and model, who was once labeled “the most photogenic girl in the world,” died in September at age 84. Tab Hunter’s longtime partner Allan Glaser confirmed to Fox News Digital that he’s producing a film about Hunter’s life in which Stevenson is prominently featured.
Her sister Caroline Stevenson spoke to Fox News Digital about how her “idol” captivated some of Hollywood’s sought-after leading men, including the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Venetia Stevenson poses with Elvis Presley at his home in Memphis. (Getty Images)
“Elvis Presley was one of the most polite, wonderful, genuine kind men she’s ever met,” said Caroline. “Of course, me being a teenager, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, is Venetia going to marry Elvis?’”
Stevenson, the daughter of “General Hospital” star Anna Lee and “Mary Poppins” director Robert Stevenson, became romantically linked to the singer in the late ‘50s. She visited him in Memphis, Tennessee, and the pair were photographed attending a screening of Presley’s 1957 film “Loving You.”
“He couldn’t have been nicer,” said Caroline. “She did go and stay with him. I know they stayed in separate bedrooms because she made it very clear that’s how she wanted it. He respected that. And she thought he was just wonderful. But nothing ever evolved beyond that. Can’t imagine why. I mean, we were all doing flip-flops whenever he walked into a room.”
“I remember he was so down-to-earth,” she continued. “He came to this little restaurant and ordered a hamburger. The waitress was just swooning. And here he is saying, ‘This food is delicious. But you’ve got to make this lettuce smaller. You’ve gotta chop it up. Chop this lettuce up, or it just falls off the hamburger.’ Meanwhile, the waitress is just fainting almost on the floor.”
Joanna Venetia Invicta Stevenson was born in 1938. It was around this time her father signed a contract with producer David O. Selznick, and the family traveled from London to Hollywood. At 14, Stevenson was scouted by photographer Peter Gowland on a beach in Malibu, California. Her photos soon appeared in numerous magazines, including Esquire.
In 1956, Stevenson was signed by RKO Radio Pictures. She and Bond girl Ursula Andresseven took tap-dancing lessons together. She then signed a contract with Warner Bros. Then, Popular Photography magazine named her “the most photogenic girl in the world” out of 4,000 contestants in its 1957 issue. She accepted the award on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Venetia Stevenson alongside a young Burt Reynolds, circa 1960. (CBS via Getty Images)
“I remember I was in Grand Central Station [in New York City] and I looked at the magazine stand,” Caroline recalled. “One time, I counted 46 magazine covers with my sister. She’s a chameleon. She could be Marilyn Monroe. She could be Ingrid Bergman. She could be whoever the photographer wanted her to be.
“She just had this incredible ability to make herself look completely different in each photo. Some people thought she was a little distant or reclusive. The truth is, I felt Venetia was always a little shy. And I guess some people mistook that for coldness. She had a great sense of humor. I never knew her to speak unkindly about anyone.”
As a movie star, Stevenson dated “all kinds of people,” Caroline shared. She acted as a confidant for Hunter, a Hollywood heartthrob who was closeted at the time, and “Psycho” star Anthony Perkins. Hunter was allegedly one of Perkins’ first lovers, Entertainment Weekly reported. In the 2015 documentary “Tab Hunter Confidential,” Stevenson said she served as “a beard” when she was photographed around town with the two actors.
“I remember I got to stay at her apartment one time,” Caroline recalled. “She would get a lot of phone calls, and I was able to mimic her voice. I would have about seven- to 10-minute conversations with all sorts of people who wanted to be with her. I remember there was this man who was in charge of Warner Bros. at the time, and he really wanted to date Venetia. I just had this wonderful conversation with him, mostly yes and no, but quite a lot of nos.”
Russ Tamblyn and Venetia Stevenson were married from 1956-57. (Archive Photos/Getty Images)
Stevenson said “I do” to “West Side Story” actor Russ Tamblyn on Valentine’s Day 1956. However, the relationship was short-lived, and the pair called it quits in 1957. It was at “The Ed Sullivan Show” where she met Don Everly of The Everly Brothers. They were married from 1962-70.
Stevenson and Everly had three children, including actress Erin Everly. Erin married Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose in 1990. According to reports, it was Erin who inspired the band’s hit song, “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” Their marriage was annulled in 1991.
Despite having a life of glitz and glamour, Stevenson quit acting after marrying Everly.
Phil Everly, left, congratulates brother Don Everly, who married screen star Venetia Stevenson. Everly and Stevenson were married from 1962-70. (Getty Images)
“She would not mind me saying this, but my sister Venetia was not a good actress,” Caroline chuckled. “She would be the first to tell you that. She didn’t like acting. But she was under contract and when you are, it doesn’t matter whether you like acting or not. That’s just what you do. She got out as soon as her contract was done. And she was happy to get out at the time. The [studio] had its stable of celebrities. And there was so much more she wanted to do.”
Stevenson went on to serve as a script reader for Burt Reynolds’ production company. She also became a vice president at the production company Cinema Group and a manager who represented director Renny Harlan.
“I’ve never really known anything but Hollywood,” Stevenson once said. “I don’t think I could relate to a physician or an accountant. What would we talk about? I guess, when I really stop and think about it, I have lived a very narrow existence because movies are all I know.”
Tab Hunter’s longtime partner Allan Glaser confirmed to Fox News Digital he’s producing a film about the actor’s life in which Stevenson is prominently featured. Hunter died in 2018 at age 86. (Earl Leaf/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Fighting back tears, Caroline said it was difficult watching her sister battle Parkinson’s disease shortly before her death.
“I pray for her all the time that she’s really found happiness because she had Parkinson’s in the end,” said Caroline. “And I know how hard it was for her having been so beautiful. Parkinson’s is so cruel to your body, your everything. I wish I could have given her more comfort. I still feel her loss very much.”
Stevenson’s brother, actor Jeffrey Byron, confirmed to Fox News Digital that the star died at a health care center in Atlanta.
Venetia Stevenson quit acting after marrying Don Everly, but she found herself busy pursuing new, surprising roles behind the camera. (Universal Pictures/Film Favorites/Getty Images)
“My sister was resilient in this industry,” he said. “She took life as it came to her. And when things maybe didn’t go quite her way, she was able to turn it around and find new adventures and succeed in those adventures.”
“She had an amazing life,” added Caroline. “I really idolized her. With everything that she accomplished, I’m just so happy that she was my sister.”
Stevenson is survived by Byron, Caroline and her daughter Erin, as well as another daughter, Stacy; a son, Edan; a brother, Steve; and four grandchildren
Ronald Bergan” “Guardian” obituary:
In the 1940s, it seemed every Hollywood horse-racing yarn – such as Home In Indiana (1944) and The Story Of Seabiscuit (1949) – starred Lon McCallister, who has died aged 82. He also appeared in bucolic romances in which animals featured prominently: Thunder In The Valley (1947) – boy falls for sheepdog – and The Big Cat (1949) – boy rescues community from mountain lion.
The “boy” McCallister was over 20 at the time, although cherubic looks and small stature allowed him to play adolescents almost until his retirement from acting in 1953 at the age of 30. “Being a movie star was great,” McCallister said in a 1992 interview “but I wanted to be myself, to go where I pleased without causing a traffic jam. “
He was the son of a real estate broker, born in Los Angeles. After taking singing and dancing lessons, he had dozens of bit parts in the seven years after his 13th birthday. One of the first was in George Cukor’s Romeo And Juliet (1936), where he was seen in close-up in the first scene, during the fight between the Capulets and the Montagues.
Cukor described McCallister as “the perfect choirboy”, and later cast him as a pilot in the morale-boosting Winged Victory (1944). Cukor held Sunday salons for his gay friends at his west Hollywood home. McAllister was among the up-and-coming stars invited.
McCallister’s first real break came in Stage Door Canteen (1943), as the shy recruit called California, who gets the chance to act the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet with Katherine Cornell as a great lady of the theatre. He was a hit with bobby-soxers, and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper called him “the cutest boy the movies have hauled up out of obscurity since Mickey Rooney”.
After war service, McCallister landed a 20th Century-Fox contract. In Home In Indiana, he trains a blind filly with his “whispering hands” to win a big trotting race; he also drives the rig. In The Story Of Seabiscuit, he played the jockey of America’s most famous racehorse with 23-year-old has-been Shirley Temple as the human love interest. McCallister also trained a horse to win the big race in The Boy From Indiana (1950). Two mules were his preoccupation in Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (1948), the film in which Marilyn Monroe made a fleeting debut.
One of the few chances McCallister had away from this Technicolored fare was in Delmer Daves’s The Red House (1947). He and Allene Roberts played inquisitive teenagers who find out a secret hidden for years by dour farmer Edward G Robinson.
McCallister’s last film was a low-budget Korean war picture, Combat Squad (1953) after which he decided to go into real estate speculation in Malibu, California. He lived for 10 years with an actor and fellow Fox contractee William Eythe, with whom he produced travel films until Eythe’s death at the age of 39. McCallister is survived by a brother and a sister.
· Lon (Herbert Alonzo) McCallister, actor, born April 17 1923; died June 11 2005
His “Guardian” obituary can be accessed here.
Anyone who knows me are aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been collecting signed photographs of my favourite actors. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I like.