A tall, slender, highly attractive blonde, Canadian-born leading lady Rosemary Forsyth was born in Montreal. In the mid 1960s, she was groomed by Universal after a stretch as a model and a sprinkling of small time TV parts. The soft, demure beauty showed quite a bit of promise amid the rugged surroundings as the young ingénue or romantic co-star to a number of top male veterans. James Stewart in Shenandoah (1965), Charlton Heston inThe War Lord (1965), and both Dean Martin and Alain Delon in Texas Across the River(1966) all utilized her services in their respective film.
Married to actor Michael Tolan at the time, she suddenly took a leave of absence from filming to have a child. While the occasion, of course, was a joyous and fulfilling one, it managed to put a permanent damper on her career. She returned to filming with the so-so film Where It’s At (1969) starring Robert Drivas and the very mediocre Dick Van Dyke comedy vehicle Some Kind of a Nut (1969), never again reaching the peak prior to her maternity time off.
Rosemary showed up regularly on the small screen, however, in a slew of standard 70s TV-movies and episodic guest roles. On daytime, she took over the role of Laura Horton on Days of Our Lives (1965) from 1976-1980 and also had regular, albeit brief, parts onSanta Barbara (1984) and General Hospital (1963).
In recent years, she has popped up as more arch matrons on such popular shows as Monk (2002), NYPD Blue (1993), andWithout a Trace (2002). Divorced from Tolan, she later married again.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Yvette Mimieux’s career peak was during the 1960’s when she starred opposite such actors as Rod Taylor in “The Time Machine”, Charlton Heston in “Diamond Head”, George Hamilton in “Where the Boys Are” and “The Light in the Piazza”. In 1976 she made something of a comeback in the gritty thriller “Jackson County Jail” with Tommy Lee Jones. Her last film was “Lady Boss” in 1992. Article on Ms Mimieux on “Brian’s Drive-In Theater” here.
TCM Overview:
Statuesque Yvette Mimieux’s film career took off in 1960 with two major parts demonstrating her versatility. In George Pal’s version of “The Time Machine,” she compelled attention as Weena, a primitive cavewoman in a an apocalyptic future.
Later that year, her appearance as a happy-go-lucky teenager on vacation in the ash hit “Where The Boys Are” garnered her praise as much for her portrayal of a young woman struggling with sexual assault as for her bikini scenes.
For the rest of her career, Mimieux struggled to find equally compelling parts that would allow her to show off her dramatic talents as much as her body. While her role as an unjustly imprisoned woman in 1976’s exploitation movie “Jackson County Jail” briefly helped revive her big screen popularity, from the 1970s up to the time of her retirement Mimieux concentrated on TV movies, two of which included parts she wrote or conceived for herself.
As a remorseless assassin in 1974’s “Hit Lady” and a deranged stalker in 1984’s dark drama “Obsessive Love,” Mimieux finally had the chance to demonstrate her range. After her last appearance in the 1992 TV movie “Lady Boss,” Mimieux retired from acting, turning her attention to real estate.
Tom Tryon had a successful career in film when he decided to retire from movies and he became a very popular author of best-sellers. He was born in 1925 in Hartfort, Connecticut. His first film was “The Scarlet Hour”.
He was very effective opposite Diana Dors in “The Unholy Wife” in 1957. He starred in many Westerns including “Three Violent Men”, “Texas John Slaughter”, “The Glory Guys” and “Winchester 73”.
He also became identified with the cult classic “I Married a Monster from Outer Space”. In 1963 Otto Preminger surprisingly chose him to play the lead in the big-budget movie “The Cardinal”.
He also starred in Preminger’s “In Harm’s Way”. Preminger a difficult taskmaster made film making difficult for Tryon.
His interest in acting waned and he took up a new and extremely successful career as a writer. His books include “The Other”, “Harvest Home” and “Fedora”, all of which were subsequently filmed.
Tom Tryon died in 1991 in Los Angeles.Tall, ruggedly handsome leading man of the 1950s and 60s who after a 16-year career gave up acting in 1971 to write the best-selling novels “Crowned Heads” and “Harvest Home”
. After beginning in a stock theatre company as a set painter and assistant manager, and later becoming a production assistant with NBC-TV, the Yale-educated Tryon entered film in 1955 with “Scarlet Hour”.
He appeared in mostly forgettable fare including “I Married a Monster from Outer Space” (1958) (as a stone-faced alien), and as the title character in the 1958 Walt Disney TV series “Texas John Slaughter”. The height of his acting career was the starring role in Otto Preminger’s “The Cardinal” (1963). In 1971, Tryon wrote the highly popular, supernatural thriller “The Other”, which he adapted to the screen the following year, and then switched full time to his eventually more successful writing career.
His novel “Harvest Home” was made into a 1978 TV movie “The Dark Secret of Harvest Home”, and his “Crowned Heads” was adapted in part for the 1978 Billy Wilder film, “Fedora”.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
TCM Overview:
Blog on Tom Tryon:
It was Noel Coward’s partner, Gertrude Lawrence, who encouraged Tom to try acting. He made his Broadway debut in 1952 in the chorus of the musical “Wish You Were Here.” He also worked in television at the time, but as a production assistent. In 1955 he moved to California to try his hand at the movies, and the next year made his film debut in “The Scarlet Hour” (1956). Tom was cast in the title role of the Disney TV series “Texas John Slaughter” (1958) that made him something of a household name.
He appeared in several horror and science fiction films: “I Married a Monster from Outer Space” (1958) and “Moon Pilot” (1962) and in westerns: ‘Three Violent People’ (1956) and ‘Winchester ’73’ (1967). He was part of the all-star cast in ‘The Longest Day’ (1962), a film of the World War II generation, credited with saving 20th Century Fox Studios, after the disaster of ‘Cleopatra.” He considered his best role to be in ‘In Harm’s Way’(1965), which is also regarded as one of the better films about World War II.
While filming the title role in ‘The Cardinal’ (1962), Tom suffered from Otto Preminger’s Teutonic directing style and became physically ill. Nevertheless, Tom was nominated for a Golden Globe award in 1963. He appeared with Marilyn Monroe in her final film, “Something’s Got to Give” (1962), but the studio fired Monroe after three weeks, and the film was never finished. That experience, along with the “Cardinal” ordeal, left Tom wary of studio games and weary at waiting around for the phone to ring.
After viewing the film “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) Tom was inspired to write his own horror novel, and in 1971 Alfred Knopf published “The Other.” It became an instant bestseller and was turned into a movie in 1972, which Tom wrote and produced. Thereafter, despite occasional film and TV offers, Tom gave up acting to write fiction fulltime. This he did eight to ten hours a day, with pencil, on legal-sized yellow tablets. Years later, he graduated to an IBM Selectric.
The Other was followed by Lady (1975) which concerns the friendship between and eight-year-old boy and a mysterious widow in 1930s New England. His book Crowned Heads became an inspiration for the Billy Wilder film “Fedora” (1978), and a miniseries with Bette Davis was made from his novel Harvest Home (1978). All That Glitters (1986), a quintette of stories about thinly disguised Hollywood greats and near-greats followed. Night of the Moonbow (1989), tells of a boy driven to violence by the constant harassment he endures at a summer camp. Night Magic, about an urban street magician with wonderous powers, written shortly before his death in 1991, was posthumously published in 1995. The dust jackets and end papers of Tom’s books, about which he took unusual care, are excellent examples of his gifts as an artist and graphic designer, further testimony to the breadth of his talents. Blog can be accesssed online here.
Valentina Cortese was born in Milan in 1923. She made her movie debut in Italian films in 1940. When she made the British film based in the Dolomites entitled “The Glass Mountain”, she achieved international recogniton 1949. Hollywood came calling. She made three films there of which two “Thieve’s Highway” and “The House on Telegraph Hill” are fine examples of film noir. She was though unhappy in Hollywood and returned to European film making. Cortese was nominated for an Academy Award in 1973 for “Day for Night”. Her last film credit was in 1993..
TCM Overview:
European leading lady with dark hair and slightly sharp, Mediterranean features, in English language films from 1948 with “The Glass Mountain.” Cortese married “House on Telegraph Hill” (1951) co-star Richard Basehart in 1951 and enjoyed a prolific career in international cinema spanning over 50 years. She was especially notable as the older actress in Francois Truffaut’s affectionate, insightful, endlessly reflexive film about filmmaking, “Day for Night” (1973
Les Miserables, poster, (aka I MISERABILI), poster, Gino Cervi (top right), Valentina Cortese (center insert), 1948. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Valentina Cortese obituary in “The Guardian” in 2019.
When Ingrid Bergman received her Oscar as best supporting actress for Murder on the Orient Express (1974), she concluded her acceptance speech by saying: “Please forgive me, Valentina. I didn’t mean to.” She was referring to the vibrant Italian actor Valentina Cortese, who was nominated alongside her for her role in François Truffaut’s La Nuit Américaine (Day for Night, 1973).
In that film, Cortese, who has died aged 96, played Severine, an ageing star who quaffs champagne while working, cannot find the right door to enter or exit, and blames her failure to remember her lines on the makeup girl. Cortese was already an established actor with the best part of her career behind her at the time of Truffaut’s inspirational casting. “A real character, extremely feminine and very funny,” he remarked of her at the time.
Born in Milan, to a single mother who left her in the care of a poor farming family, Cortese was sent to live with her maternal grandparents in Turin when she was six. She enrolled in the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome aged 15, and started in films shortly after – mainly costume dramas in which she played ingenue roles. It was only after the second world war that she was given a chance to reveal her acting talents, beginning with Marcello Pagliero’s neorealist drama Roma Città Libera (1946), in which she gave an expressive performance as a typist who, unable to pay her rent and facing eviction, becomes a prostitute.
In 1948 she starred as both Fantina and Cosetta in one of the many screen adaptations of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and played a concentration camp victim in L’Ebreo Errante (The Wandering Jew, 1948), an updated version of Eugène Sue’s novel.
These roles brought her to the attention of the British producers of The Glass Mountain (1949), a romantic drama set and shot in the Dolomites. Cortese played an Italian partisan who rescues an RAF pilot and composer, portrayed by Michael Denison.
So began her international career. She made several films in Hollywood billed as Valentina Cortesa, working for different studios and so retaining her freedom. The first and best of these was Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway (1949), in which she brought a whiff of neorealism to her role as a prostitute.
“You look like chipped glass,” says Richard Conte as the truck driver enticed to her room. “Soft hands,” he tells her. “Sharp nails,” she retorts. According to Variety, “Even in a cast as effortlessly talented as this, Cortese stands out. Jaggedly beautiful and yet possessed of a warm wit, she fluctuates from animal seduction to cosy repartee in the blink of an eye.”
In Black Magic (1949) – cast as the faithful Gypsy friend of Orson Welles, portraying Cagliostro, an 18th-century hypnotist, conjuror and charlatan – Cortese had to play second fiddle to the insipid Nancy Guild. In Malaya (1949), she was the obligatory love interest, playing alongside the smugglers Spencer Tracy and James Stewart.
On a short return to Italy, Cortese appeared in Géza von Radványi’s Donne Senza Nome (Women Without Names, 1950) as a pregnant Yugoslav widow incarcerated in a camp for displaced women after the end of the second world war. Back in Hollywood, in The House on Telegraph Hill (1951), a richly layered film noir directed by Robert Wise, she portrayed a survivor from a Nazi concentration camp who assumes the identity of a dead prisoner in order to enter the US. Vulnerable but inwardly strong, Cortese interacts superbly with Richard Basehart, playing a man trying to murder her for her estate. She and Basehart married soon after the film was completed.
Destined to play tragic roles for most of the 1950s, Cortese was a refugee in London in Thorold Dickinson’s Secret People (1952), plotting to kill a visiting dictator. Audrey Hepburn, in one of her first substantial roles, played her young ballerina sister.
Basehart and Cortese settled in Rome and appeared together in Avanzi di Galera (Jailbirds, 1954). While he led a peripatetic existence, working in different European countries, she appeared in prestigious productions such as Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954), as the doomed nobleman Rossano Brazzi’s caring sister.
By far the best of her films at this time was Michelangelo Antonioni’s Le Amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955), which involved the affairs of five haute-bourgeois women, with Cortese giving a sensitive and subtle performance as a ceramic artist, the most serious-minded and talented among them, married to an unsuccessful artist. As one of the women puts it to justify stealing her husband, “A woman with more talent than her man is unfortunate.”
In 1960, Basehart and Cortese divorced. He returned to the US, leaving her with custody of their son, Jackie. Cortese continued to appear, usually hamming it up, in a variety of European co-productions with international casts including one of Mario Bava’s tongue-in-cheek horror movies, La Ragazza Che Sapeva Troppo (The Evil Eye, 1963).
Cortese also had supporting roles in Bernhard Wicki’s The Visit (1964), Federico Fellini’s Giulietta degli Spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits, 1965), Robert Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Claire (1968), in which she portrayed a flashy costume designer, and Joseph Losey’s The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), as the spouse of Richard Burton in the title role.
Her Oscar nomination for Day for Night did nothing to improve her roles or the pictures she appeared in subsequently. Many were real turkeys, such as the disaster movie When Time Ran Out (1980). Her last role was as Mother Superior in Franco Zeffirelli’s inferior tearjerker Sparrow (1993).
In 2012 she published her autobiography, Quanti Sono i Domani Passati, from which Francesco Patierno made a documentary, Diva! (2017) – with eight actors portraying her at different stages of her life.
Jackie died in 2015. Ronald Bergan
John Francis Lane writes: Among the many films in which Valentina Cortese starred during the wartime years was Quarta Pagina (1942), on which she first met the upcoming scriptwriter Federico Fellini, an “engaging, intelligent young man who scribbled the day’s dialogue on bits of paper”. It was through Cortese that Fellini cast Richard Basehart as the tightrope-walking Fool in his classic film La Strada (1954).
One of Cortese’s liveliest roles came in Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits, in which she appeared in the grotesque seance scene as one of the exotic friends of the eponymous medium; her character was called Valentina.
Cortese enjoyed considerable success on stage as well as on screen. Her professional and private relationship with the theatre and opera director Giorgio Strehler resulted in some of her greatest performances – and much heartache. For him she played in Chekhov, Shakespeare, Brecht and, most memorably, Pirandello’s unfinished The Mountain Giants, as the enigmatic actor-countess whose company never gets to perform.
She became a cult figure for addicts everywhere of high camp. Her fans in Italy even adored her in the short-lived Roman run, in 1973, of Luchino Visconti’s travesty of Harold Pinter’s Old Times. Cortese was encouraged by the ailing director to make explicit the lesbian relationship only subtly hinted at in Pinter’s original.
Though she only gets a brief mention in Zeffirelli’s autobiography – he recalls her terror of earthquakes while they were filming Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972) in Umbria – Cortese was for many years a grande dame at the Zeffirelli court. On the opening night of his production of Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart in 1983, she seemed eager to replay her famous Truffaut role and forgot her lines.
• Valentina Cortese, actor, born 1 January 1923; died 10 July 2019
Peter Ibbetson, poster, Gary Cooper, Ann Harding, 1935. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Ann Harding was a beautiful elegant blonde actress whose career in film was at it’s peak in the 1930’s. Later in the 50’s and 60’s she resumed film making as a character actress. She was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1903. She made her film debut in 1929 opposite Fredric March in “Paris Bound”. She was nominated for an Academy Award for “Holiday” in in 1931. She starred Gary Cooper in “Peter Ibbetson”. She did not make any movies between 1937 and 1942 .
TCM overview:
Established Broadway lead who landed a contract in 1929 with Pathe (very soon thereafter part of RKO) and starred in a series of soap operas through the mid-1930s, most typically as suffering heroines who must make noble sacrifices for the men they love. With her ash-blonde hair usually swept back into a bun, the patrician Harding brought a gentle, serene strength to such worthy star vehicles as “When Ladies Meet” (1933) and “The Life of Vergie Winters” (1934) but fared less well in such awkward efforts as “Devotion” (1931) and “Enchanted April” (1935). Ideal for the philosophical sophistication of playwright Phillip Barry, Harding shone in fine adaptations of two of Barry’s best comedy-drama talkfests: “Holiday” (1930), for which she received an Oscar nomination as Best Actress, and “The Animal Kingdom” (1932). Two of her best films came late in her reign as a star: the haunting, almost surreal love story “Peter Ibbetson” (1935, opposite Gary Cooper) and the taut suspense melodrama “Love from a Stranger” (1937, with Basil Rathbone).
Harding’s boxoffice power declined sharply after 1935 partly as a result of her typecasting in virtuous roles and she retired two years later after marrying symphony conductor Werner Janssen. In 1942, however, she returned to the screen in the enjoyable mystery “Eyes in the Night”, and subsequently kept intermittently busy in a series of maternal character roles through the mid 50s. Her best part during this time was as the wife of Oliver Wendell Holmes (played by Louis Calhern) in “The Magnificent Yankee” (1950), but the gracefully maturing Harding also played notable roles in “Those Endearing Young Charms” (1945) and “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” (1955).
Interesting interview with Harding’s biographer Scott O’Brien here.
Richard Jaeckel obituary in “The Independent” in 2011.
Richard Jaeckel was born in 1926 in Long Beach, New York. His first two films were celebrated war films, “Battleground” and “Sands of Imo Jima”. Among his other films are “Come Back Little Sheba”, “The Dirty Dozen” and “Flaming Star”. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his acting in “Sometimes A Great Notion” for his beautiful performance as a member of a logging family in Oregon. Richard Jaeckel died in 1997
His obituary in “The Independent”:Blond, blue-eyed and stocky, the baby-faced Richard Jaeckel was a prolific character actor who specialised in ebullient, pugnacious youths, notably in war films and westerns.
Seemingly ageless, when he played the devious outlaw who tries to out- gun John Wayne in Chisum in 1970 he seemed little older than as the over- confident youngster who attempted to out-draw Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter 20 years earlier. An actor popular with the public and within the profession, Jaeckel was rarely out of work in a 54-year career. Nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role in Sometimes a Great Notion (1971), he more recently had a recurring role in the television series Baywatch.
Born in Long Beach, New York, in 1926, he was working in the 20th Century- Fox mailroom when, in story-book fashion, he was selected to play a featured role in the studio’s major war movie Guadalcanal Diary (1943). As an inexperienced teenage marine (nicknamed “Chicken”) who distinguishes himself in battle, Jaeckel made a strong impression in this popular adaptation of Richard Tregaskis’ book (“Richard Jaeckel scores as a downy-faced juvenile,” said Variety). He played another serviceman, this time a young pilot on an aircraft carrier, in Henry Hathaway’s fine account of events leading to the Battle of Midway, Wing and a Prayer (1944), before spending four years in the US Navy.
Returning to Hollywood in 1948, he settled into steady employment in tough roles, as a delinquent in City Across the River (1949), soldiers in Sands of Iwo Jima and Battleground (both 1949) and cowboys in Wyoming Mail and The Gunfighter (both 1950). In the latter, Henry King’s classic study of a notorious gunfighter’s futile attempt to discard his reputation and settle down, Jaeckel had one of his most memorable vignettes as the cocky youngster who sets off a tragic chain of events when, determined to prove himself faster with the gun than Johnny Ringo (Gregory Peck), he misguidedly provokes the gunfighter into a duel.
In Daniel Mann’s Come Back, Little Sheba (1952), he had a prime role as a college boy with sex on his mind who flirts agressively with the nubile Terry Moore and invokes the jealousy of her landlord (Burt Lancaster). At this time he seemed on the verge of stardom, but his stature and boyish appearance worked against him and he settled into a career of prominent but secondary roles in such action fare as Apache Ambush (1955), Cowboy (1955) and The Naked and the Dead (1958).
Two of the his finest films during this period were Robert Aldrich’s uncompromising picture of corruption and incompetence within the military, Attack! (1956), in which Jaeckel was a private under the command of a cowardly captain, and Delmer Daves’ taut western 3:10 to Yuma (1957), in which Jaeckel was an outlaw determined to rescue a captured gang-leader (Glenn Ford) before he can be transported by train to the big city and justice.
In 1967 Jaeckel played the no-nonsense sergeant who helps convert a motley bunch of military criminals into a viable fighting force in Aldrich’s violent and enormously successful The Dirty Dozen, the biggest-grossing film of the year. Jaeckel’s Sergeant Howren was one of the few characters to survive the film, and he recreated the role in the sequel made for television, The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission (1985).
In the generally disappointing Sometimes a Great Notion (1971, released in the UK as Never Give an Inch), directed by Paul Newman and based on Ken Kesey’s novel about a family of loggers in Oregon, Jaeckel featured in one of the screen’s most memorable and harrowing death scenes. Pinned underwater by a fallen tree, he slowly drowns as Newman desperately tries to free him. Despite the starry cast of Newman, Henry Fonda and Lee Remick, it was Jaeckel whose performance was unanimously lauded as the best thing in the film and he was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor.
Further film roles included Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1978), Starman (1985) and Delta Force 2 (1990), but Jaeckel’s later work was primarily in television. He starred in the series Frontier Circus (1961) with John Derek and Chill Wills, and as guest star on countless shows, including Bonanza, Wagon Train, Perry Mason, Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel and Mission Impossible. In the mid-Eighties he had a role as Lt Quirk in the series Spenser: For Hire, and in 1991 and 1992, at last beginning to look his age, he played in Baywatch as Lt Ben Edwards, the grizzled veteran who co-ordinates rescue activity.
Richard Jaeckel, actor: born Long Beach, New York 10 October 1926; married (two sons); died Woodland Hills, California 14 June 1997.
His “Independent” obituary can also be accessed here.
Susan Kohner had a brief cinema career before retiring on her marraige to fashion designer John Weitz. She was born in Los Angeles in 1936, the daughter of Mexican actress Lupita Tovar and film agent Paul Kohner. Her first film was the Audie Murphy vehicle “To Hell and Back” in 1955. In 1959 she was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in “Imitation of Life”. Her last film was “Freud : the Secret Passion” with Montgomery Clift in 1962. Her two sons are the film directors Chris and Paul Weitz Interview with Susan Kohner and Juanita Moore with Foster Hirsch can be viewed here.
TCM Overview
The award-winning daughter of agent Paul Kohner and Mexican actress Lupita Tovar, Susan Kohner delivered well-received performances in a handful of films in the 1950s and early 60s before retiring from acting after her 1964 marriage to fashion designer John Weitz.
The petite, dark-haired, exotic beauty worked onstage in productions ranging from Tennessee Williams’ “The Rose Tattoo” to William Inge’s “Bus Stop”. Kohner first won acclaim on screen as an Italian girl briefly romanced by WWII hero Audie Murphy in the biopic “To Hell and Back” (1955).
Freud, poster, (aka : THE SECRET PASSION), US poster art, from left: Montgomery Clift, Susannah York, Susan Kohner, Maria Perschy, 1962. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
She scored as a half-breed making an ill-fated journey across Apache territory in the Western “The Last Wagon” (1956) and won praise as a plain-looking neighborhood girl romanced by juvenile delinquent Sal Mineo in “Dino” (1957). 1959 proved to be a banner year for the young player. Kohner earned an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress for her turn as Juanita Moore’s willful daughter in Douglas Sirk’s remake of “Imitation of Life”.
She was an Arab princess in love with John Saxon in the Biblical epic “The Big Fisherman” and showed skill as the woman in the life of a jazz musician in “The Gene Krupa Story”, again reteamed with Sal Mineo as Krupa. Her next two features “All the Fine Young Cannibals” (1960) and “By Love Possessed” (1961) found her cast a George Hamilton’s love interest and are among her least successful screen portrayals. Her final screen appearance was as Montgomery Clift’s wife in “Freud”, John Huston’s 1962 biopic.
The TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
Nobu MCarthy was born Nobu Atsumi in Canada in 1934 of Japanese parents. She was raised in Japan and in 1955 married U.S. serviceman David McCarthy and moved with him to the U.S.A. She made her film debut in 1958 in “The Geisha Boy” with Jerry Lewis. She had the female lead in “Walk Like a Dragon” and “Five Gates to Hell”. She appeared in many of the major television series of the 60’s and 70’s. She became a member of the East West Players a Los Angeles based theatre group. Nobu McCarthy died in Brazil in 2002 while on location for a film.
Her obituary in “Backs
Nobu McCarthy, a Hollywood starlet who later became artistic director of the pioneering theater company East West Players, has died. She was 67. McCarthy died Saturday after being stricken on the set of a movie that she was working on in Londrina, Brazil. She had just returned to work after recovering from pneumonia and was stricken with what doctors diagnosed as an aneurysm in her aorta, said Tamlyn Tomita, an actress also in the cast.The movie “Gaijin II,” about several generations of Japanese immigrants in Brazil, suspended production following McCarthy’s death.
McCarthy was born as Nobu Atsumi in Ottawa, Canada, where her father was a private secretary to the Japanese ambassador. She was brought to Japan as a baby and later trained in ballet and sang with choral groups on stage and radio. She became a successful model and was named Miss Tokyo in the competition leading up to the Miss Universe pageant. She married U.S. Army Sgt. David McCarthy in 1955 despite the objections of her parents. An agent spotted her in Little Tokyo and she was sent to an audition at Paramount Pictures that landed her a role in the Jerry Lewis comedy “The Geisha Boy” in 1958. During her busiest period in Hollywood in the late 1950s and early 1960s, McCarthy appeared in “The Hunters,” “Wake Me When It’s Over” and “Walk Like a Dragon.”
Original Cinema Belgian Poster – Movie Film Posters
McCarthy withdrew from acting in the late 1960s, but after a divorce in 1970 she revived her career via East West Players by joining the company in 1971 and playing a number of roles on its small stage. East West Players, the country’s first Asian American theater company, was founded in 1965 by Mako and others. “We all liked her,” said Mako, the group’s founding artistic director. “She became a very steady actress, although she had arthritis that sometimes made her move in a way that looked older than she was.”
East West Players went through a turbulent period in 1989 and Mako resigned under pressure from the board. McCarthy was selected as his replacement and served as artistic director until 1993. “She brought her calming influence to the group, broadened the outreach, and brought a sense of balance and stability,” said George Takei, best known for his role as Sulu in “Star Trek.” Later credits for McCarthy included the landmark TV movie “Farewell to Manzanar” in 1976 and the films “Karate Kid II” in 1986 and “Pacific Heights” in 1990. McCarthy and her second husband, the late William Cuthbert, received a lifetime achievement award from East West in 1996. McCarthy is survived by two children from her first marriage and three brothers.
Peter Finch said once: ‘I’ve been lucky. My agent might have hoped that I’d be a bigger name – as they call it – in America but I’m very happy. I like what I do and I choose what I do’. He did not always choose wisely. He was marked for the heights of stardom when he made his forst film in Britain but for a while the real peaks eluded him – too many bad films and kiss of death, a long-term Rank contract.
In the right material he always looked good. He had a good actor’s voice and stance, a touch of arrogance, a touch of humour, some warmth, leading man’s looks and the same sort of gritty dependability that characterized the malestars of Hollywood’s golden age” – David Shipman’s “The Great Movie Stars- The International years”. (1972)
He won for his performance in “Network” in 1976. Peter Finch was born in London in 1916. He went to live in Australia when he was ten years of age. He made his first film in Australia in 1938, The film was entitled “Dad and Dave Come to Town”.
When Laurence Oliver and Vivien Leigh were touring that country with the Old Vic in 1948 they met Peter Finch and he was offered a role by Oliver in the play “Daphne Laureola” in London which he accepted.He made the film “The Miniver Story” in England and then went to Hollywood to make “Elephant Walk” with Elizabeth Taylor and Dana Andrews. Over the next few years he made many fine films including “A Town Like Alice”, “The Nun’s Story”, “The Girl With Green Eyes”, “No Love for Johnny” and “Far From the Madding Crowd”. He was enjoying the huge revival of his career when he died from a heart attack in 1977 at the age of sixty. Peter Finch was the first actor to win a Academy Award for Best Actor after his death
TCM Overview:
The Trials Of Oscar Wilde, poster, US poster art, Peter Finch, 1960. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)Josephine And Men, poster, top from left: Glynis Johns and Peter Finch, Donald Sinden, Jack Buchanan, poster, 1955. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
A former vaudeville performer and popular radio actor in Australia, Peter Finch transitioned to film in his native England, where he rose from supporting actor to leading man in a number of emotionally charged dramas. While he delivered more than a few notable performances in his four-decade career, Finch was forever identified as the raving mad prophet Howard Beale in “Network” (1976), whose line “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” remained one of the most identifiable in all of cinema history. After supporting roles in several British-made films, he made the Hollywood transition with “The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men” (1952) and starred opposite Elizabeth Taylor in “Elephant” (1954).
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Finch went back and forth between films made in Hollywood and England, earning award nominations along the way for his performances in “The Nun’s Story” (1959), “The Trials of Oscar Wilde” (1960) and “No Love for Johnnie” (1961). Some time passed before Finch delivered another noteworthy performance, this time earning acclaim for his sympathetic and non-clichéd turn as a gay man in “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1971).
A few years later, he captured attention as the raving maniac Beale in “Network,” only to die from a heart attack two months before winning his one and only Academy Award, making him the first actor to win a posthumous Oscar.
Born on Sept. 28, 1916 in London, England, Finch was raised by his father, George, a research chemist from Australia who moved to England prior to World War I, and his mother, Alicia. His parents divorced when he was just two years old, leading to his father being given custody.
Decades later, Finch discovered that George was not his biological father and that his mother had carried on with an army officer named Wentworth Edward Dallas Campbell, leading to his parents’ divorce. After living for a time with his paternal grandmother in France, the 10-year-old was sent to live with his great uncle in Sydney, Australia.
After graduating from North Sydney Intermediate High School, Finch worked as a waiter, an apprentice on a sheep farm, and a copy boy for the Sydney Sun, but soon felt the pull of stage acting. He began appearing in sideshows and vaudeville, even serving as a stooge for American comedian Bert le Blanc before touring Australia with George Sorlie’s traveling company.
It was with Sorlie’s troupe that gained Finch notice with a producer from the Australian Broadcasting Commission, who served as his mentor and cast him in a children’s radio series. At the time, he also made his feature debut in “Dad and Dave Come to Town” (1938), which led to a more substantial part in the crime drama “Mr. Chedworth Steps Out” (1939). But with the world on the brink of war, Finch’s acting career was put on hold in order for him to enlist in the Australian army in 1941.
He served for a time in the Middle East and participated in the Bombing of Darwin as an anti-aircraft gunner, though he did continue to perform by appearing in the wartime propaganda film “The Rats of Tobruk” (1944), and directing plays for tours of army bases and hospitals. Following his discharge with the rank of sergeant in 1945, Finch established himself as one of Australia’s premiere radio actors and went on to co-found the Mercury Theatre Company with fellow actors Allan Ashbolt, Sydney John Kay, Colin Scrimgeour and John Wiltshire.
Named after Orson Welles’ own company, the Mercury put on a number of notable plays, including “The Imaginary Invalid” (1948), which starred Finch and attracted the attention of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, who later invited the actor to London. He returned to films with supporting roles in British productions like “Train of Events” (1949), “Eureka Stockade” (1949) and “The Wooden Horse” (1950), before making the turn toward Hollywood films.
He played the Sheriff of Nottingham in “The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men” (1952) and starred opposite Elizabeth Taylor – who took over for an ailing Vivian Leigh – in the rather disappointing melodrama “Elephant Walk” (1954). His career took off as he approached middle age in the mid-1950s with films including the charming romantic comedy “Simon and Laura” (1955), “The Dark Avenger” (1955) co-starring Errol Flynn, and the somber war drama “A Town Like Alice” (1956). In “Robbery Under Arms” (1957), he played famed cattle thief Captain Starlight, while he earned critical acclaim and a BAFTA nomination for his turn as a crusty surgeon working with an attractive nun (Audrey Hepburn) in the Belgian Congo in “The Nun’s Story” (1959).
Finch was somewhat less busy during the 1960s, but early in the decade he delivered to acclaimed, award-winning performances, playing the title roles in the biopic “The Trials of Oscar Wilde” (1960) and the Parliament-set drama “No Love for Johnnie” (1961). Both roles earned him BAFTA Awards for Best Actor. He next starred opposite Jane Fonda and Angela Lansbury in the drama about marriage and infidelity, “In the Cool of the Day” (1963), before playing the third husband of a restless Anne Bancroft in the domestic drama “The Pumpkin Eater” (1964).
After starring in another relationship drama, “Girl With Green Eyes” (1964), Finch had a supporting role as a captain in the action yarn “The Flight of the Phoenix” (1965), starring James Stewart, and settled into a series of smaller films like “Judith” (1966), “Far from the Maddening Crowd” (1966), “The Legend of Lylah Clare” (1968) and “The Red Tent” (1969). He went on to deliver a powerful performance as a homosexual doctor engaged in a love triangle with Murray Head and Glenda Jackson in “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1971), a revolutionary drama for its frank and rather sympathetic perspective on homosexuality. His performance as the well-adjusted doctor seeking escape from his repressed upbringing earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
After his Oscar-worthy performance in “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” Finch starred in a string of mediocre films like “Shattered” (1972), a psychological drama about the disintegration of a man’s life due to alcohol and a bad marriage, and “Lost Horizon” (1973), a disastrous remake of Frank Capra’s 1937 original of the same name. After playing real-life Cardinal Azzolino in “The Abdication” (1974), Finch played the one character that he would forever be indentified with, TV news anchor Howard Beale, the Mad Prophet of the Airwaves whose mental breakdown on live television leads to a ratings bonanza for a struggling upstart station in Sydney Lumet’s searing satire, “Network” (1976). Also starring William Holden, Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall, the film was a major critical and commercial hit, and received 10 Academy Award nominations. But just two months before the Oscar ceremony, on Jan. 15, 1977, Finch suffered a fatal heart in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he was waiting to meet Lumet for breakfast. He was rushed to the UCLA Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead hours later. Finch was 60 years old. At the ceremony, he won the Oscar for Best Actor, which was accepted by “Network” writer Paddy Chayefsky and Finch’s third wife, Eletha Barrett. Soon after, he was posthumously nominated for an Emmy Award for his performance as Yitzhak Rabin in the television movie, “Raid on Entebbe” (NBC, 1977), which aired days before he died and was the last time Finch was seen on screen.
By Shawn DwyerThe above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Blog on Peter Finch in “Pop Matters” can be accessed here.
