Hollywood Actors Archives

Phyllis Kirk

Phyllis Kirk obituary in “The Independent”.

The actress Phyllis Kirk will always be associated with her role as the dark-haired heroine in the 3-D horror movie House of Wax (1953), pursued through the night streets by a mad sculptor, played by Vincent Price, and saved by a whisker from being dipped in hot wax. Ironically, it was a role she fought against playing. “I tried to turn it down, with the arrogance of a young actress who thinks she is going to rule the world – and doesn’t realise, while she’s bitching about House of Wax, that that will probably be the most memorable thing she does in the movie business!”

Although Kirk was in some other fine films, notably the nostalgic musical Two Weeks with Love (1950) and the distinguished film noir Crime Wave (1954), and she had a prolific career in television, for which she starred in the series The Thin Man, it is for House of Wax that she will be primarily remembered, along with her campaigning for civil rights .

Of Danish descent, she was born Phyllis Kirkegaard in 1929 in Syracuse, New York. After working as a waitress, shop assistant and model, she moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey, in her late teens to be able to study acting in New York City with the famed coach Sanford Meisner. She made her Broadway début, having shortened her last name to Kirk, in 1949 in a play that promised much.

Mrs OMalley And Mr Mallone : Original Cinema One Sheet Poster

My Name is Aquilon was a comedy by the French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont, which had been a hit in Paris. Adapted for the United States by Philip Barry, it co-starred Lilli Palmer with Aumont, who played a charming cad whose conquests included Kirk, as a French maid. Before it opened to hostile reviews, Aumont had acrimonious battles with Barry over the adaptation, and when Palmer was hailed as the best thing about the evening, Aumont stated that on opening night she had given an entirely different performance to the one they had been rehearsing for six weeks. The play ran for 31 performances, but Kirk’s performance was noted by a talent scout for Sam Goldwyn, and after her dispiriting introduction to Broadway, Kirk was glad to accept an offer to go to Hollywood.

She made her screen début in the Goldwyn drama Our Very Own (1950), playing the friend of a teenager (Ann Blyth, the film’s star) who is traumatised by the discovery that she is adopted. Although Blyth could do little with the main role (her exasperating character needed a good shaking), Kirk was very sympathetic as a girl who envies Blyth the love and support with which she has been raised (Kirk’s father is unable to find the time to attend her graduation). Goldwyn then sold Kirk’s contract to MGM, who gave her a less sympathetic role in the delightful musical Two Weeks With Love, as the haughty beauty at summer camp who patronises her younger friend (Jane Powell) and jealously tries to sabotage a budding romance between Powell and Latin lover Ricardo Montalban.

In 1952 Kirk moved to Warners, where, after small roles in About Face, The Iron Mistress and Stop, You’re Killing Me (all 1952), she was given the leading female role in House of Wax, playing the character created by Fay Wray in an earlier version of the tale, Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). “I was not interested in becoming the Fay Wray of my time,” Kirk told the historian Tom Weaver,

and I was told, “You’re under contract, and you’ll do what we ask you to do, unless you care to be suspended.” I also did not want to be in a film that was using a gimmick, which I thought 3-D was. I went on to have a lot of fun. Vincent Price was a divine man, and a divine actor, and director André de Toth was a remarkable, highly intelligent guy who was more appreciated in Europe than at home.

Kirk worked with de Toth in her next two films, a western co-starring Randolph Scott, Thunder Over the Plains (1953), and an exceptional film noir, Crime Wave, in which she was the wife of a former convict (Gene Nelson) who is hounded by a dogged, toothpick-chewing police detective (Sterling Hayden). The French director Bertrand Tavernier said that,

de Toth showed himself to be particularly inspired by the delightful Phyllis Kirk, a modest and under-rated actress whom he rewarded for

rescuing many inadequately written characters (as in Thunder Over the Plains) by giving her at last a role worthy of her in Crime Wave, where she is splendidly dignified and straightforward.

(Another French director, Jean-Pierre Melville, acknowledged that he loved Crime Wave enough to steal its ending for his own film noir Le Deuxième Souffle, 1966.) Among Crime Wave’s splendid supporting cast playing lowlifes who hold Kirk hostage was Charles Buchinsky (later Bronson), who had also menaced her in House of Wax. “Now there was a piece of work,” said Kirk.

I didn’t particularly like him, he was full of oats and swaggering around and being terribly macho – it may have to do with the fact that he wasn’t very tall. I got to know him better over the years, and began to like him much more as an actor.

Kirk then became one of those American stars used to boost British product, starring opposite John Bentley in River Beat (1954), a superior “B” movie and an impressive directorial début by Guy Green, who stated, “Phyllis Kirk was an up-and-coming actress who never became a major star, but she was a very bright, nice girl, whom I was lucky to have.” Kirk recalled,

My favourite story in London was to point out that the director of House of Wax had only one eye and couldn’t see in three dimensions. Everybody in London thought that was hilarious, but I’m sure nobody at Warner Brothers thought it hilarious that I was saying that.

Kirk was leading lady to Frank Sinatra in the western Johnny Concho (1956) and to Jerry Lewis in The Sad Sack (1957), but she was increasingly acting on television, with guest appearances on anthology drama shows such as Studio One, Schlitz Playhouse of the Stars and The Ford Television Theatre. “I wouldn’t trade my Hollywood experience for anything,” she said,

but TV taught me the most about acting. There were a couple of live television things that I loved doing. There was a series called Robert Montgomery Presents, and we did The Great Gatsby [1955] with Montgomery as Gatsby and I played Daisy Buchanan. I loved that, and I thought they did a wonderful job with it.

Kirk’s most famous role on television was her portrayal of Nora Charles in The Thin Man, a series that ran for three years (1957-59). Peter Lawford played her playboy-detective husband Nick in the show, based on the Dashiell Hammett novel and the MGM film series. Her last television role was in a 1970 episode of The FBI.

Long considered a confirmed bachelor-girl, the strong-willed and independent Kirk had a long friendship with the mordant comic Mort Sahl, but later married the television producer Warren Bush, who died in 1992.

As a child, Kirk had battled with polio, and in the early Seventies, after a fall damaged her hip, she had trouble walking. During her film career, she had contributed interviews and articles to the newspaper of the American Civil Liberties Union, and as her acting career slowed, she devoted more time to political and social causes, gaining particular notoriety when she joined other celebrities, including Ray Bradbury and Norman Mailer, in campaigning against the death sentence of the convicted murderer Caryl Chessman. “I even visited Chessman several times in San Quentin until his execution in 1960,” Kirk said. “There’s no doubt he did some ghastly things, but he did not kill anybody. Also, I abhor capital punishment, always have and always will.”

Before her retirement in 1992, Kirk also worked in public relations and as a publicist for CBS News.

Tom Vallance

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

Sandra Dee obituary in “The Guardian” in 2005.

In the nostalgic musical Grease (1978), about growing up in a fantasised America of the 1950s, there is an appropriately evocative song called Look At Me, I’m Sandra Dee.

Pert, petite blonde Sandra Dee, who has died aged 62 of kidney disease, was the sweetheart of the teen set from the late 50s to the mid-60s. Born Alexandra Zuck, in New Jersey, she became a model while still at school and appeared in television commercials, which led her to Hollywood. (Many years later, she revealed that she had been the victim of a sexually abusive stepfather and a domineering mother, who pushed her into films).

Her screen debut, aged 14, was in Until They Sail (1957), followed by the title role in Vincente Minnelli’s The Reluctant Debutante (1958), based on the West End hit by William Douglas Home, in which the very American Dee played the very English Rex Harrison’s daughter.

This implausibility was explained in the script by a prior transatlantic misalliance on the part of Harrison’s Lord Broadbent. According to the producer, Dee was cast “for the sake of the US teenage public”. However, having been coached in diction and demeanour, she got through the part with surprising poise.

In 1959, the 5ft 5ins tall Dee was seen to embody the wholesome, all-American ideal in Gidget (a nickname meaning “girl midget”). Despite not measuring up to the bikinied girls on the beach, she is courted by the two grooviest surfers in town, Moondoggie (James Darren) and Kahoona (Cliff Robertson). The film set the tone for the “beach party” movies of the 1960s.

Most important for Dee was her contract, in 1959, with Universal Studios, where her image of a budding beauty was polished. First, there was Douglas Sirk’s ripe remake of Imitation Of Life (1959), in which Dee, feeling neglected by her glamorous acting mother (Lana Turner), falls in love with her mother’s boyfriend (John Gavin).

I’d Rather Be Rich, poster, top l-r: Sandra Dee, Robert Goulet, Sandra Dee, Andy Williams, Sandra Dee, bottom l-r: Maurice Chevalier, Hermione Gingold on poster art, 1964. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Then there was The Wild And The Innocent (1959), a western with 54-year-old Gilbert Roland and 35-year-old Audie Murphy panting after 17-year-old Dee.

Max Steiner’s insistent theme from A Summer Place (1959) had Dee and her blond male equivalent, Troy Donahue, making love to its strains on the Maine coast. The film came at the start of the sexually permissive era, and consists of Dee complaining about the “cast-iron girdle” her mother buys to hide her burgeoning curves.

In 1960, Dee met pop idol Bobby Darin in Portofino, Italy, while they were appearing together in Come September (1961), and they were married soon after. In the film, the couple represented the younger generation up against oldsters Rock Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida. Dee and Darin, now fan magazine favourites, co-starred as newly weds in If A Man Answers (1961).

Dee made a rather pale replacement for Debbie Reynolds in Tammy Tell Me True (1961) and Tammy And The Doctor (1963), but was well cast as the daughter of the American ambassador in love with the Russian ambassador’s son in Peter Ustinov’s Romanoff And Juliet (1961), and as conservative James Stewart’s rebellious daughter in Take Her, She’s Mine (1962).

After the breakup of her marriage to Darin in 1967, however, she found there was not much work for an ageing teenage star. She did get to play Rosalind Russell’s granddaughter in Rosie (1967), and appeared in The Dunwich Horror (1969), as a student lured away from college by a crazed Dean Stockwell, who attempts to sacrifice her to the devil. But then she turned to pills and alcohol, admitting she was drinking more than a quart of whisky a day as her weight fell to 80lbs. (She was anorexic for most of her life.)

Dee became a recluse in Los Angeles for some years, until encouraged to stop drinking by her son Dodd Darin, who, in 1994, wrote a book about his parents, Dream Lovers: The Magnificent Shattered Lives Of Bobby Darin And Sandra Dee. Kevin Spacey’s recent biopic of Darin, Beyond The Sea, with Kate Bosworth playing Dee, sparked a renewed interest in her life.

She is survived by her son.

· Sandra Dee (Alexandra Zuck), actor, born April 23 1942; died February 20 2005

Her Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan, please click here for online.

Geoffrey Horne. (Wikipedia)

Geoffrey Horne was born in 1933 and is an American actor, director, and acting coach at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. His screen credits include The Bridge on the River Kwai, Bonjour Tristesse, The Strange One, Two People, The Twilight Zone episode “The Gift” in 1962, and as Wade Norton in “The Guests” episode of The Outer Limits.

Horne was born in Buenos Aires of American parents (his father was a businessman in the oil trade). When he was five he went to live with his mother in Havana. Ten years later he was sent to “a little school in New England for troubled children,” in his words. He attended the University of California, where he decided to be an actor.

Horne moved to New York where he appeared in an off-Broadway flop, then began to get regular work on television, including an adaptation of Billy Budd. He also joined the Actor’s Studio.

Tempest, poster, (aka LA A, front to rear: Silvana Mangano, Geoffrey Horne, Van Heflin, 1958. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

In July 1956, Horne successfully auditioned for a small role in The Strange One (1957), whose cast was composed entirely Actors’ Studio alumni. The film was not a huge hit but was widely acclaimed; it was marked the film debut of Ben Gazzara and George Peppard.

The film was produced by Sam Spiegel who then cast Horne in a role in Bridge on the River Kwai in January 1957.

Spiegel also signed Horne to a long term contract – one film a year for five years. “I know Sam wouldn’t send me down the river,” said Horne. “He’s a man of great taste and talent. And the best of the independents to be linked up with, what with all the old-time studio executive types on the way out… I’m not sure I have what it takes to be a star… Time will tell.”

Otto Preminger borrowed him for a role in Bonjour Tristesse but he would make no further films with Spiegel. He then made Tempest in Yugoslavia.^[6]

A life member of the Actors Studio, Horne was almost cast as Bud Stamper in Splendor in the Grass by the film’s director, Studio co-founder Elia Kazan, but the role eventually went instead to Warren Beatty. Around the same time, Horne was also auditioned by Federico Fellini for the lead in La Dolce Vita, which ultimately went to Marcello Mastroianni.

In 1980, he appeared in a New York production of Richard III. In 1981, he joined the cast of Merrily We Roll Along, and became the oldest cast member. He appeared as Dr. Bird in The Caine Mutiny Court Martial produced by the Stamford Center for the Arts in 1983.

Luminous Frances Dee was a quiet, lovely presence in films in the 1930’s especially. She was born in 1909 in Los Angeles. She made an impact in 1931 in “An American Tragedy”. She went on to make “If I Were King”, “Little Women” and some films with her husband Joel McCrea. She retired from film in the mid 1950’s to concentrate on family life. Frances Dee died in 2004.

Her “Independent” obituary by Tom Vallance:

Frances Dee played leading lady to many of the top male stars of the Thirties and Forties, including Gary Cooper, Ronald Colman and John Wayne. Her roles ranged from Meg in Little Women to the haunted heroine of the cult Val Lewton production I Walked With a Zombie, and, though never quite a top-ranking star, she had a serene, wholesome appeal that made her a believable and sometimes touching heroine.

The critic James Agee said she was “one of the very few women in movies who had a face . . . and always used this translucent face with delicate and exciting talent”. A winsome brunette, whose suitors included the writer/director Joseph Mankiewicz, she was married for 57 years to one of her leading men, Joel McCrea.

The daughter of a civil engineer, she was born Jean Dee in Los Angeles, all reference books say in 1907, though her family aver it was 1909; and was educated at the University of Chicago, where her success in college plays prompted her to journey to Hollywood in the hope that the new sound era had created a need for performers who could handle dialogue:

When I dropped out to go to Hollywood, my father gave me an ultimatum. He told me that I had a year to find something more reliable in the picture business than extra work or else I had to come back.

As a contract player at Paramount, she was an extra in such films asWords and Music (1929), Follow Thru (1930), Manslaughter (1930) and Monte Carlo (1930). Then “almost a year to the day after my father’s ultimatum” she was spotted in the studio commissary by Maurice Chevalier. Lillian Roth, scheduled to play his leading lady inPlayboy of Paris (1930), which was about to start shooting, had been forced to drop out due to commitments in New York. Impressed by Dee’s fresh quality and beauty, Chevalier suggested that she be tested for the role.

Playboy of Paris, a musical remake of Max Linder’s silent comedy Le Petit Café (1920), featured Dee as a young girl who falls in love with a waiter (Chevalier) in her father’s café. When, having inherited a fortune, he samples the nocturnal delights of Paris, she jealously pursues him and gets into a cat-fight with his gold-digging girlfriend. The realisation that she is his true love leads to Chevalier’s rendition of the hit song “My Ideal”.

Dee then starred with Phillips Holmes and Sylvia Sidney in Josef von Sternberg’s An American Tragedy (1931), based on Theodore Dreiser’s novel. The story of a young social climber who murders his pregnant girlfriend when he falls in love with the socialite daughter of his employer, it proved too sordid for popular acceptance (and was banned in Britain), but Dee touchingly conveyed her hopeless love in the role of the socialite later played by Elizabeth Taylor in George Stevens’s 1951 version of the same story, A Place in the Sun.

Joseph Mankiewicz was one of the writers of June Moon (1931), adapted from the Broadway comedy by Ring Lardner and George S. Kaufman, in which Dee was the supportive girl-friend of a small-town simpleton (Jack Oakie) who travels to New York with aspirations to be a song lyricist. Mankiewicz began a romance with Dee, who also starred in This Reckless Age (1932), scripted by him, as the spoiled flapper daughter of self-sacrificing parents.

Making five or six films a year at this time, she starred in such vehicles as William Wellman’s Love is a Racket (1932), as a flighty actress loved by a reporter (Douglas Fairbanks Jnr), the omnibus film If I Had a Million (1932), as the wife of a condemned man ironically unable to save himself from the electric chair despite receiving a million dollars, King of the Jungle (1933), in which she falls in love with, and teaches English to, a primitive man (Buster Crabbe) raised by lions in Africa, and George Cukor’s version of Little Women (1933), in which she was sensible Meg to Katharine Hepburn’s Jo, Joan Bennett’s Amy and Jean Parker’s Beth.

Cukor later wanted Dee to play Melanie in Gone With the Wind, but the producer David O. Selznick overruled him, allegedly because he considered her too beautiful and liable to overshadow his Scarlett (Vivien Leigh).

One of Dee’s more notable roles was in a gangster movie, Rowland Brown’s Blood Money (1933), that was a lost film for nearly 40 years before resurfacing to be hailed as a 66-minute gem. Cast against type, Dee played a thrill-seeking rich girl, described by the actress herself as “a masochistic nymphomaniacal kleptomaniac”.

She was then fatefully cast opposite Joel McCrea in an adaptation of the Broadway drama of possessive motherhood, The Silver Cord(1933). Directed by John Cromwell, the gripping tale featured Laura Hope Crews as the tenacious mother with two sons. A married one (McCrea) has a wife (Irene Dunne) who is strong enough to wrench him from his mother’s machinations (including a fake heart attack). The younger son (Eric Linden) is more susceptible to his mother’s tricks, and Dee was extremely touching as his fiancée who finds herself powerless in the struggle and is ultimately abandoned.

Before she started the film, Dee had been enjoying a long-term affair with Mankiewicz, and the couple had planned a summer wedding with a honeymoon tour of New England already mapped out. When Mankiewicz learned that Dee had become engaged to McCrea he was hospitalised with a partial nervous breakdown. Later he claimed that Dee was “the love of my life”, and friends said that the incident was to trigger the pattern that the director later followed of making sure that he was the first to end relationships (as he did with Judy Garland, Linda Darnell and others).

David O. Selznick stated that Dee told him McCrea had made her realise that her attraction to Mankiewicz was purely physical, while McCrea appealed to her intellectually. Married in October 1933, the couple settled on McCrea’s ranch in Ventura County, California. Their first of three sons, Jody (later to become an actor), was born the following year.

Dee’s other films included the lively Headline Shooter (1933), in which she was the girlfriend of an ambitious newspaper photographer, and John Cromwell’s Of Human Bondage (1934), in which she played the girl who finally wins Leslie Howard after his infatuation with a destructive waitress (Bette Davis) ends. She was top-billed in Finishing School (1934) as an unhappy rich girl, but the film was stolen by Ginger Rogers as the school’s prime rebel.

Rouben Mamoulian’s Becky Sharp (1936), based on Thackeray’sVanity Fair, was the first feature film in three-strip Technicolor. Miriam Hopkins played the eponymous gold-digger, with Dee as her friend Amelia Sedle. She had one of her most rewarding roles in William Wyler’s comedy The Gay Deception (1936), in which she played an office worker who wins a modest fortune in a lottery and splurges on a suite in a lavish New York hotel where she meets a prince (Francis Lederer) posing as a bellboy. She would always citeThe Gay Deception as her favourite film.

In Henry Hathaway’s popular seafaring tale Souls at Sea (1937), she starred alongside Gary Cooper and George Raft, and she co-starred with McCrea again in Frank Lloyd’s Wells Fargo (1937). In this ambitious history of the express company, McCrea played a loyal employee whose marriage breaks up when he and his wife (Dee) find themselves sympathising with opposite sides during the Civil War. In Lloyd’s If I Were King (1937), a romantic swashbuckler set in 15th-century France, Dee was the Queen’s lady-in-waiting who is wooed by the poet François Villon (Ronald Colman).

Around this time Dee, who now had two sons, decided to limit her films in order to give more time to her family. McCrea said, “There are four of us now. Frances has deliberately cut and maybe weakened her career.”

She worked with the director John Cromwell again on the anti-Nazi movie So Ends Our Night (1941) as the wife of an Austrian refugee (Fredric March). The critic Pauline Kael described a close-up of Dee’s face, as she sees but cannot speak to her fugitive husband, as comparable to that of Garbo at the end of Queen Christina.

I Walked With a Zombie (1943) was a B movie, but is regarded now as highly as any of Dee’s major films. Produced by Val Lewton and directed by Jacques Tourneur, it was a chillingly atmospheric tale of a nurse (Dee) who goes to the West Indies to look after a catatonic patient and encounters rampant voodooism. In the film’s most celebrated sequence, Dee takes her mute patient on a prolonged and haunting walk through the cane fields, punctuated with native chants and shadowy low-key photography, to attend a voodoo ceremony. “People think of I Walked With a Zombie as a scary film”, said Dee,

and it is. But it was also scary to be in it. When I first read the script I couldn’t imagine anyone ever liking the movie. Yet, thanks to Lewton and Tourneur, it turned out very well.

In 1946 Dee made her Broadway début in the drama The Secret Room, directed by Moss Hart, but it ran for only 21 performances. On screen she was one of the women exploited by the unscrupulous hero (George Sanders) in The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947), and she starred with McCrea for the final time in Four Faces West(1948), an unusually gentle western in which not a shot is fired.

She was a schoolteacher who comforts Barry Sullivan when he separates from his wife (Bette Davis) in Payment on Demand (1950), and had her last role in the family film Gypsy Colt (1954), a loose adaptation of Lassie, Come Home with the homesick animal a horse instead of a dog.

In 1955, the year her third son was born, she announced her retirement, and the McCreas were considered one of the happiest families in Hollywood until 1966, when they announced the startling news that they were separating. Dee proclaimed that she found ranch life unfulfilling, and McCrea actually filed for divorce, but the couple reconciled and their union endured until McCrea’s death in 1990.

Over the years, McCrea expanded his ranch and bought up tracts of land in California, Nevada and New Mexico that made the couple one of the wealthiest in California, but after his death some disastrous speculation reduced the fortune considerably.

In recent years, Dee occasionally attended film conventions and tributes, such as a month-long festival of her films held in Hawthorne, New Jersey, in 1999. She had also been collaborating on a biography with the writer Andy Wentink.

Tom Vallance’s “Independent” obituary can also be accessed here.

HAPPY LAND, Frances Dee, Don Ameche, Richard Crane, Ann Rutherford, 1943, TM and copyright 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved / Courtesy: Everett Collection. 20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection ACHTUNG AUFNAHMEDATUM GESCHÄTZT PUBLICATIONxINxGERxSUIxAUTxONLY Copyright: x20thCentFox/CourtesyxEverettxCollectionx MSDHALA FE001

Joel McCrea. TCM Overview.

Joel McCrea starred in many classic films of the Golden Era of Hollywood but for some reason he has never received due recognition. He was born in 1905 in California. While still at high school he started working as a stund double in silent features. In 1932 he starred with Dolores Del Rio in “Bird of Paradise”. Among the classics that McCrea starred in are “Union Pacific”, Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent”, “The More the Merrier”, “Sullivan’s Travels”, “The Palm Beach Story” and the terrific Western “Ride the High Country” which he made with Randolph Scott in 1962.

Joel McCrea was married to the actress Frances Dee and they became very wealty after successful investing in land and property, Joel McCrea died in 1990. I hope some day he gets due recognition for his work in the movies.

To view article on Joel McCrea, please click here.

TCM Overview:

Likable, ruggedly handsome figure, a durable star who first made his name in adventures and melodramas of the 1930s. McCrea gave one of his finest performances in Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent” (1940) and brought an amiable, relaxed charm to his comic roles, especially when directed by Preston Sturges in “Sullivan’s Travels” (1941) and “The Palm Beach Story” (1942) and by George Stevens in “The More the Merrier” (1943).

THE MORE THE MERRIER, US poster art, Jean Arthur, 1943

His offhand yet sincere style also kept him much in demand as a lead in “women’s pictures” (as they were then called), and McCrea played romantically opposite female divas including Constance Bennett (“Rockabye” 1932), Irene Dunne (“The Silver Cord” 1933), Barbara Stanwyck (“Gambling Lady” 1934), Merle Oberon (“These Three” 1936) and Ginger Rogers (“Primrose Path” 1940)

Although McCrea had starred in a number of Westerns and action pictures in the 30s (e.g., Cecil B. DeMille’s “Union Pacific” 1939), beginning with William Wellman’s “Buffalo Bill” (1944), McCrea starred primarily in Westerns for the rest of his career.

His many horse operas, the best of which included “Colorado Territory” (1949), “Trooper Hook” (1957) and “Ride the High Country” (1962), mirrored his own frontier roots as well as his personal life. A passionate outdoorsman, he listed his occupation as “rancher” and his hobby as “acting.” McCrea was married to actress Frances Dee from 1933 until his death; their son Jody McCrea (b. 1934) appeared with him on his TV series “Wichita Town” (1959-60) and in the film “Cry Blood, Apache” (1970).

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Obituary in Los Angeles Times in 1990.

Joel McCrea, a real-life cowboy who became one of the best of Hollywood’s make-believe saddle heroes, died Saturday at the Motion Picture and Television Fund Hospital in Woodland Hills. He was 84.

Eileen Singer Brown, hospital supervisor, said McCrea died at 4:50 a.m. of pulmonary complications. She said he had been a patient a short time, and that his wife of 57 years, actress Frances Dee, had been constantly at his bedside.

McCrea’s last public appearance was Oct. 1 when he attended a Beverly Hills fund-raising dinner for Republican Sen. Pete Wilson, who is campaigning for governor. Paramount Pictures executive producer A.C. Lyles, a friend of McCrea’s for many years, said First Lady Barbara Bush went over to McCrea after her speech, put her hand in his hand, and said, “My hero.”

“He lit up,” Lyles said. “That summed up everybody’s feeling about Joel.”

Tall and taciturn, good-looking and good-humored, McCrea may have ranked just behind John Wayne as the most believable of Western heroes. During a career that spanned three decades, he made 86 motion pictures, starring in many of them.

Although best remembered for his cowboy roles, he was a versatile actor who handled frivolous light comedy and adventurous melodrama with the same skill he brought to Westerns. Some of his best-known films were Westerns such as “The Virginian,” “Union Pacific” and “Wells Fargo,” thrillers such as Alfred Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent,” and comedies such as Preston Sturges’ “Sullivan’s Travels.”

McCrea worked in at least three pictures with his wife, one of the most sought after leading ladies of the 1930s.

Gossip columnists often referred to their union as “an ideal Hollywood marriage,” and it was one of the few that proved to be just that. They were married in 1933, and were together until his death.

One of their three sons, Joel Dee, who is known as Jody, played the deputy in McCrea’s 1959-60 television series “Wichita Town.”

Off screen, McCrea was as low key and down to earth as he appeared before the cameras—a working rancher, a shrewd businessman and a public-spirited citizen active as a school board trustee in Ventura County.

McCrea was born Nov. 5, 1905, in South Pasadena, the son of a successful executive. His Western heritage was strong: His maternal grandfather, Major Albert Whipple, came to California during the Gold Rush in a covered wagon, and his paternal grandfather, Major John McCrea, was an Indian fighter and stagecoach driver.

Oddly, McCrea’s future wife was born only five blocks away from his South Pasadena home, but moved to Chicago at a very early age. They did not meet until both were starting their movie careers.

The McCrea family moved to Hollywood when Joel was 8 or 9 and he then came into contact with film figures—he delivered the Los Angeles Times to such moguls as Sam Goldwyn and Jesse Lasky, and stars such as William S. Hart and Wallace Reid.

“I learned a good deal about life—and Hollywood—back then,” McCrea reminisced many years later. “There were certain stars, supposed to be worth millions, who couldn’t dig up the 60 cents, which The Times cost then, at the end of the month.”

Possibly because of such experiences, the lanky, adventurous youngster was less star-struck than horse-struck. He loved and understood horses—and started hanging around the back lots of Hollywood, volunteering as a “horse-holder” for cowboy star Tom Mix and one of his newspaper customers, Hart.

McCrea first went before the cameras at age 12. Ruth Roland, a star of silent serials, was making a shoot-’em-up in the hills above Sunset Boulevard, and young Joel was again a horse-holder. A New York stage actor had been brought out to co-star with Roland.

“The guy could act all over the place,” McCrea recalled in an interview many years later. “But when they brought out the horses he was scared stiff. That’s how I got to ride his horse in a couple of shots. They dressed me up in buckskins and for two days’ work I was paid $5. Boy, that appealed to my Scotch blood. I forgot about wanting to be a cowboy and decided to be an actor.”

Not long afterward, he started working summers as a cowboy on the King Cattle Co. ranch in the Tehachapi Mountains. He loved to tell stories about the cowboy life.

“In rainy weather, I was sent to hoist mothering (pregnant) cows out of low places,” he remembered. “It rained like sixty. I found a cow that was bogged, and I roped her and pulled.”

After a pause to let his drawl catch up with his anecdote, he went on: “The cayuse I rode wasn’t too well broken—he decided to turn around, fast, four times. One end of the rope was wound around the cow’s horns, the other tied to my saddle-horn. I was in the middle. After almost being cut in two, I freed myself.”

It was then, he said, that he came up with a practical solution. “A horse, I figured, gets up by raising his front legs first. A cow the opposite. Knee-deep in mud, I got down behind the cow. I bent over, put the cow’s tail around my neck, gripped it with both hands and raised up with all the strength I could manage. It worked.”

No one but a real cowboy could tell such a story.

He graduated from Hollywood High School and enrolled at Pomona College. It was there that he began acting in amateur roles.

McCrea decided that he liked the acting life and after college graduation in 1928 began haunting the studios and picking up occasional work as an extra.

His first feature role came in 1929 in “The Jazz Age,” and in the same year he played in “So This Is College,” “Dynamite,” and “The Silver Horde.” He began winning star roles the next year.

Ironically, considering his authentic cowboy background and rugged physique, many of his early roles were as the effete, snooty rich kid.

Critics consider that his career peaked in the 1940s with “Foreign Correspondent,” “Sullivan’s Travels,” and “The Palm Beach Story.”

The general public undoubtedly remembers him best in big-budget Western epics because his open, honest face, easy-going manner and relaxed seat on a horse combined to make him more at home on the range than almost any other actor.

As producer Harry Sherman once put it: “Joel is the greatest natural Western star since the old days of Tom Mix and William S. Hart. He has an authentic background, and he is one of the finest natural horsemen I’ve ever seen. . . . Just a guy who knows how to sit on a horse with grace and authority.”

Or, as an admiring columnist expressed it: “A horse to him was like a sonnet to Keats.”

Real cowboys verified the judgment of these Hollywood types by electing McCrea to the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City in 1958.

McCrea’s poetic way with a horse and gritty Western look were perhaps most evident in Sam Peckinpah’s 1962 film “Ride the High Country,” in which he and Randolph Scott co-starred as a pair of over-the-hill lawmen transporting gold to a bank.

McCrea was reputed to be one of the wisest investors and wealthiest actors of his era, although he sometimes joked about his business acumen.

“My first business deal was with my mother,” he once recounted. “I invested in chickens. I sold the eggs to my mother. Then (after she had cooked them) I ate the eggs. That’s an ideal bargain.”

McCrea attributed his financial success largely to the late Times columnist Harry Carr and the late actor-humorist Will Rogers.

Early in his career, when McCrea had a reputation as something of a playboy, Carr wrote privately to the star: “Don’t let yourself slip into a state of mind where you believe that these little screen games of pretend are life. . . . Take all the easy money and save it. Accept what you find in Hollywood that is good and valuable and turn your back on the rest.”

McCrea said that he always tried to act on Carr’s advice. On the advice of Rogers, McCrea invested his Hollywood earnings in a 1,000-acre working cattle ranch near Camarillo in Ventura County. He added to it over the years until he owned 3,000 acres of prime ranchland, which later became prime residential land. At one time, his ranch was producing 200,000 pounds of beef annually. McCrea was active in its management and in riding, roping and branding.

In 1959, according to news reports, he sold 540 acres for $1.2 million, and four years later sold another 1,000 acres for $3 million. He lived on part of his original spread near Camarillo, and had another large ranch near Palos Verdes and two more in New Mexico.

McCrea served as president of the local school board, chaired the fund-raising committee for the Camarillo Boys Club and donated $35,000 toward a new clubhouse. He also made substantial gifts to local colleges and the Tri-Valley YMCA.

In addition to his wife and son Jody, now a rancher in New Mexico, he is survived by two other sons, David, also a rancher in New Mexico, and Peter, a real estate developer in Los Angeles.

Funeral services in Westlake will be private. The family has asked that any memorial contributions be made to the Conejo Valley YMCA, Camarillo Boys and Girls Club, or Motion Picture and Television Fund

Grant Williams is best rememberd for his lead performance in the cult science-fiction classic “The Incredible Shrinking Man” which was released in 1957. He was born in 1931 in New York City and began acting as a student with the Actor’s Studio.

His other films of interest was “Four Girls in Town”, “Written on the Wind” and “Susan Slade”. Grant Williams died in 1985 aged 53. To view article on Grant William’s career, please click here.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will host a month-long series of screenings of classic horror films with “Universal’s Legacy of Horror” in October. The series is part of the studio’s year-long 100th anniversary celebration engaging Universal’s fans and all movie lovers in the art of moviemaking. Pictured: THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, 1957.

Dewey Martin (Wikipedia)

Dewey Martin was born in 1923 in Texas. He made his feature film debut in “Knock on any Door” in 1949. He made a definite impact in 1953 in “The Big Sky” with Kirk Douglas.

Other films of note are “The Land of Pharaohs” and “The Desperate Hours”. In the 1960’s he starred in most of the great television series including “The Twilight Zone” and “The Outer Limits”.

The Desperate Hours, poster, (aka ORE DISPERATE), l-r: Arthur Kennedy, Humphrey Bogart, Dewey Martin on Italian poster art, 1955. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

TCM Overview:

Dewey Martin was an actor with a strong presence in film throughout his Hollywood career.

In his early acting career, Martin appeared in such films as the Humphrey Bogart drama “Knock on Any Door” (1949), “The Golden Gloves Story” (1950) and the Kenneth Tobey horror feature “The Thing” (1951).

He also appeared in the adventure “Flame of Araby” (1952) with Maureen O’Hara, “The Big Sky” (1952) and the Van Johnson dramatic adaptation “Men of the Fighting Lady” (1954).

His passion for acting continued to his roles in projects like “Tennessee Champ” (1954) with Shelley Winters, “Prisoner of War” (1954) and “Land of the Pharaohs” (1955).

Film continued to be his passion as he played roles in “The Longest Day” (1962), “Flight to Fury” (1966) and “Seven Alone” (1974).

He also worked in television during these years, including a part on “The Twilight Zone” (CBS, 1959-1964).

Additionally, he appeared on the television special “Man of Fear” (CBS, 1957-58).

Martin more recently worked on “We Got it Made (Syndicated)” (1987-88

Dewey Martin died in 2018 aged 94.

Article on Dewey Martin here.

John Drew Barrymore obituary in “People” magazine.

Sporadic actor John Drew Barrymore, perhaps best known as the absentee father of Drew Barrymore, died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 72.

No cause or details of his passing were released.

In a statement issued by her publicist, Drew, 29, said: “He was a cool cat. Please smile when you think of him.”

John Drew Barrymore’s parents were actress Dolores Costello and the fabled John Barrymore, who was part of a stage and screen dynasty that included brother Lionel Barrymore and sister Ethel Barrymore.

Drew’s grandfather was the colorful Barrymore – as famous for his magnificent profile as he was for his boozing. He died of pneumonia and cirrhosis of the liver in 1942, though, by then, he had been divorced from Costello since 1935, when their son was barely 3. John Drew, sometimes known as John Jr., claimed he saw his father only once.

In the ’50s, John Drew, already battling well-publicized liquor and drug problems, appeared in such movies as The Sundowners, High Lonesome, Quebec, The Big Night, Thunderbirds andWhile the City Sleeps.

He frequently dropped out of projects, however, or arrived on the set late and unprepared. There were also problems with drunken driving and domestic violence. “I’m not a nice, clean-cut American kid at all,” he told the Associated Press in 1962, by which time he had left Hollywood to make movies in Europe. “I’m just a human being. Those things just happen.”

Drew Barrymore was his daughter by his third wife, Ildiko Jaid Barrymore. He is also survived by John D. Barrymore, a son by his first wife, actress Cara Williams (the 1960 sitcom Pete and Gladys). Barrymore’s second wife was Gaby Palazzolo. All three unions ended in divorce.

Susan Peters. IMDB.

Susan Peters was born in 1921 in Spokane, Washington. She was signed to a contract with MGM and was featured in a good role in “Random Harvest” with Ronald Coleman and Greer Garson. She was nominated for an Oscar for her performance. Other roles included “Song of Russia” and “Keep Your Powder Dry”. In 1945 she suffered spinal injuries while duck hunting, when a gun went off and a bullet lodged in her spinal cord. She was confined to a wheelchair which had a limiting effect on her career. Her last major film role was in “Sign of the Ram” in 1948. She starred in a TV series, “Miss Susan” in 1951 but died the following year, aged only 31.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

War-era MGM had a lovely, luminous star in the making with Susan Peters. She possessed a creative talent and innate sensitivity that would surely have reigned as a leading Hollywood player for years to come had not a tragic and cruel twist of fate taken everything away from her.

She was born Suzanne Carnahan in Spokane, Washington on July 3, 1921, the eldest of two children. Her father, Robert, a construction engineer, was killed in an automobile accident in 1928, and the remaining family relocated to Los Angeles to live with Susan’s grandmother. Attending various schools growing up, she excelled in athletics and studied drama in her senior year at Hollywood High School where she was spotted by a talent scout. Following graduation, she found an agent and enrolled at Max Reinhardt‘s School of Dramatic Arts. While performing in a showcase, she was spotted by a Warner Bros. casting agent, tested and signed to the studio in 1940.

Making her debut as an extra Susan and God (1940), she saw little progress and eventually became frustrated at the many bit parts thrown her way. Billed by her given name Suzanne Carnahan (known for possessing a zesty stubborn streak, she had refused to use the studio’s made-up stage name of Sharon O’Keefe), Susan was barely given a line in many of her early movies. She did test for a lead role in Kings Row (1942) but lost out to Betty Field. Susan’s first big break came with the Humphrey Bogart potboiler The Big Shot (1942), where she was fourth-billed and had the second female lead. Dropped by Warners, MGM picked up her contract and adopted a new stage name for her, Susan Peters. In the Marjorie Main vehicle Tish (1942), Susan earned a co-starring part and met actor Richard Quine on the set. Quine played her husband in the film. The couple also appeared together in the film Dr. Gillespie’s New Assistant (1942), and married in real life in November of 1943.

Susan won the role of Ronald Colman‘s sister’s teenager stepdaughter (and a potential love interest of the Colman character) in the profoundly moving film Random Harvest(1942) and earned an Academy Award nomination for “Best Supporting Actress” for her efforts. Her potential in that film was quickly discovered and she continued to offer fine work in lesser movies such as the WWII spy tale Assignment in Brittany (1943), the slight comedy Young Ideas (1943) and the romantic war drama Song of Russia (1944), in which she touchingly played Nadya, a young Soviet pianist who falls for Robert Taylor. For these performances, Susan was named “Star of Tomorrow” along with Van Johnsonand others.

Then tragedy struck a little more than a year after her wedding day. While on a 1945 New Year’s Day duck-hunting trip in the San Diego area with her husband and friends, one of the hunting rifles accidentally discharged when Susan went to retrieve it. The bullet lodged in her spine. Permanently paralyzed from the waist down, MGM paid for her bills but was eventually forced to settle her contract. Susan valiantly forged on with frequent work on radio. In 1946 Susan and Richard happily adopted a son, Timothy Richard, but two years later she divorced Quine — some say she felt she was too much of a burden.

Appearing with Lana Turner as a demure soldier’s wife in Keep Your Powder Dry (1945), which was filmed before but released a year after her accident, Susan made a film “comeback” with The Sign of the Ram (1948), the melodramatic tale of an embittered, manipulative, wheelchair-bound woman who tries to destroy the happiness of all around her, but audiences were not all that receptive. She also turned to the stage with tours of “The Glass Menagerie,” in which she played the crippled daughter Laura from a wheelchair (with permission from playwright Tennessee Williams), and “The Barretts of Wimpole Street” opposite Tom Poston, wherein she performed the role of poet and chronic invalid Elizabeth Barrett Browning entirely from a couch.

In March of 1951 she portrayed an Ironside-like lawyer in the TV series Martinsville, U.S.A. (1951) but the show ran for less than one season, folding in December of that year. After this, the increasingly frail actress, who was constantly racked with pain, went into virtual seclusion. Suffering from acute depression and plagued by kidney problems and pneumonia, she finally lost her will to live and died at the age of 31 on October 23, 1952, of kidney failure and starvation, prompted by a developing eating disorder (anorexia nervosa). It was a profoundly sad and most unfortunate end to such a beautiful, courageous spirit and promising talent.

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

TCM overview:

A lovely and promising actress who worked her way up the ranks at MGM, Susan Peters’ career was cut short by one of the worst tragedies to affect the Hollywood acting community during the 1940s. After an unpromising start, the Spokane native had her first substantial part in the MGM film “Tish” (1942) and soon became a regular player for the studio. Her most famous credit was the celebrated drama “Random Harvest” (1942), where Peters impressed greatly in a supporting capacity. With an Oscar nomination now on her résumé, she demonstrated further promise in such productions as “Song of Russia” (1944), in which she essayed the female lead role opposite Robert Taylor. In a tragic turn of events, Peters was crippled in a hunting accident, but within a few months, she had resumed acting via radio assignments and was determined to move forward. Her movie days were over after only one more picture, but Peters earned praise for stage performances in travelling revivals of “The Glass Menagerie” and “The Barretts of Wimpole Street,” and she also headlined her own television series for a time. Unfortunately, the strain of dealing with her condition caused Peters to plunge into depression and anorexia nervosa, both of which sapped her will to live and contributed to her premature death at age 31. Although the final years of her life were heartbreaking, Peters displayed considerable courage and the praise for her acting, both before and after the tragedy, was well-deserved.

Susan Peters was born Suzanne Carnahan on July 3, 1921 in Spokane, WA, but her formative years were spent predominantly in Portland, OR and Los Angeles. She gained her first acting experience in plays at Hollywood High and came to the attention of Lee Sholem, a talent scout and future B-movie director. After acting classes and further stage work, Peters was offered a contract with Warner Brothers. Her first film appearance came with an uncredited bit in the Joan Crawford vehicle “Susan and God” (1940) and she graduated to more screen time and actual billing in the Errol Flynn/Olivia DeHavilland Western “Santa Fe Trail” (1940). After a few more virtually anonymous turns, Peters began to receive bigger opportunities, first in such B-pictures as “Scattergood Pulls the Strings” (1941) and “Three Sons o’ Guns” (1941), and then somewhat more promising fare, like the Humphrey Bogart crime drama “The Big Shot” (1942).

However, it soon became clear that Warner was not interested in doing much with Peters and the studio opted not to renew her contract. Fortunately, she had come to the attention of MGM, which cast Peters in the Marjorie Main dramedy “Tish” (1942). The fitfully entertaining production came and went without much notice, but proved important for Peters: she fell in love with co-star Richard Quine and the pair married the following year. “Tish” had also provided Peters with her first part of any real substance and, impressed with the results, MGM offered her a contract. It was soon decided that she would be the best choice for a role in their romantic drama “Random Harvest” (1942) and it was that film that finally brought Peters notoriety. Cast as the step niece of Ronald Colman Peters’ poignant performance earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Now busy at Metro, Peters’ career followed the usual path for a young contract player on the way up. She was utilized in the franchise entry “Andy Hardy’s Double Life” (1942), as well as B-movies like “Assignment in Brittany” (1943) and “Young Ideas” (1943). Peters was also the female lead of the more prominent production “Song of Russia” (1944), which gained unwanted attention a few years later when it ran afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee for its pro-Russia sympathies. Sadly, Peters’ life changed forever on Jan. 1, 1945. While out on a family hunting excursion, she picked a rifle up off the ground only to have it discharge and lodge a bullet in her spine. The accident left Peters completely paralyzed from the waist down. After a month in hospital, she recovered enough to be discharged. Peters’ last effort prior to the accident, the Lana Turner “gals in uniform” war drama “Keep Your Powder Dry” (1945), was released in the months that followed and while MGM had been paying her medical bills, Peters asked to be released from her contract.

To her considerable credit, Peters determined that she would not let the condition limit her. After spending some of her initial recovery time writing, she was back working that September in a radio staging of “Seventh Heaven” opposite Van Johnson. She was also able to soon maneuver around effectively in her home and in a specially designed car with hand controls which allowed Peters to drive. In a further extension of her resolve to lead a regular life, Peters also decided to become a mother. In 1946, she and Quine adopted boy whom they named Timothy. Peters also returned to movie screens as the star of “Sign of the Ram” (1948), where she played a wheelchair-bound woman who uses her paralysis as a way of manipulating family members. Unfortunately, it was not a success and no more film offers were forthcoming. During this time, she and Quine also divorced. This was done at Peters’ request, in an apparent attempt to release him from any obligation to care for her.

Peters next turned her attentions to the stage and received good notices for revivals of “The Glass Menagerie” and “The Barretts of Wimpole Street.” In both cases, Peters proved up to the challenge and continued her work in each when they went on tour. Television also offered Peters a new opportunity with the daytime series “Miss Susan” (NBC, 1951). Staged live in Philadelphia, the 15-minute legal serial starred the actress as an Ohio attorney who continues on with her obligations, despite having been disabled in a car accident. However, after production of “Miss Susan” came to an end, Peters sank into a deep depression and spent time in a sanitarium. Although she regained her health sufficiently to do some more stage acting, Peters’ remaining years were spent in a downward spiral of psychological problems and anorexia nervosa. Those conditions, coupled with pneumonia and kidney issues, brought about her passing on Oct. 23, 1952. Peters was posthumously awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.

By John Charles