Rick Jason was born in 1923 in New York City. In the early 50’s he was groomed as a leading man in Hollywood and starred opposite Linda Darnell in “This Is My Love” in 1954 and “Sombrero” with Pier Angeli. However in the 1960’s he had his biggest success with the hit US TV series “Combat” which ran from 1962 until 1967. He continued to act in TV and film until the 1980’s. He died in 2000.
IMDB entry:
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Loraine Wingham winghaml@mala.bc.ca
The only child of a stockbroker and well-to-do mother, Richard Jason described himself as “second-generation nouveau riche” and a born romantic. Friends say he was affable, charming, driven and a real Renaissance man. A good student, popular with classmates and teachers, Jason’s hellish behavior got him expelled from eight prep schools before he managed to graduate from Rhodes School.
His father bought him a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, but Rick sold the seat and enlisted in the Army Air Corps (1943-45). After the war he attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts on the GI Bill. While attending a New York play he was spotted by actor-director Hume Cronyn, who immediately cast him in “Now I Lay me Down to Sleep”. The role earned Rick a Theater World Award and a Hollywood contract with Columbia Pictures (he was offered contracts by four different studios).
For the first year he was under contract, a frustrated Jason did not work. Meanwhile, MGM was searching for an actor to replace the departed Fernando Lamas in Sombrero(1953). Jason, now released from Columbia, landed the role. This success led to The Saracen Blade (1954) and RKO’s This Is My Love (1954).
Twentieth Century-Fox then signed him for the male lead in The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (1956), after which he was signed to a multi-picture contract. His first project, an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s “The Wayward Bus” (The Wayward Bus (1957)), earned him critical acclaim; a string of strong performances, both in films and TV, followed. Rick was deluged by more than 30 offers for TV series. In 1960 he starred as suave insurance investigator Robin Scott inThe Case of the Dangerous Robin (1960).
The series ran 38 episodes and made Jason the first actor to use martial arts (karate) on TV. In September 1962 he exploded onto prime-time screens as the cool, calm and collected Lt. Gil Hanley in ABC’s hit seriesCombat! (1962), Five seasons and 152 episodes later, Jason was a household name. After “Combat!” Rick returned to theater. He also made films in Japan and Israel. In 1970 he took the lead in the 1970 pilot Prudence and the Chief (1970). His TV career remained strong, and in the ’70s and ’80s he appeared in Matt Houston (1982), Police Woman (1974), Murder, She Wrote (1984), Wonder Woman (1975), Fantasy Island(1977), Airwolf (1984) and Dallas (1978).
In 1973 he was a regular on the soap opera “Young and the Restless, The” (1973). After his retirement he kept busy doing voice-overs for commercials and ran the Wine Locker, a 4,000-square-foot facility used to store fine wines under optimal conditions. Sadly, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot in October 2000.
His obituary in the “Los Angeles Times” can be found here.
Cathleen Nesbitt hailed from Belfast where she attended Queen’s University. In 1911 she joined the Irish Players and performed with them in the U.S. in Synge’s “The Well of the Saints” and “The Playboy of the Western World”. She was the love of the poet Rupert Brooke who was to die in World War One. An interesting article on their releationship can be sourced on the Telegraph website here.
Over the next thirty years she made many British theatre and film appearances. In 1951 she was on Broadway with Audrey Hepburn in “Gigi” and made her first American film in 1953 which was “Three Coins in the Fountain”. In 1956 she was back on Broadway again in “My Fair Lady”.Her last film was in 1980 when she made “The Never Never Land” at the age of 92. She died two years later.
IMDB entry:
The Calendar by Edgar Wallace (1875-1932), 1929. Lady Panniford, played by Cathleen Nesbitt (1888-1982), left, and Garry Anson, played bu Owen Nares (1888-1943), right. The Play, vol. 55, no. 331, (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images) *** Local Caption ***Family Plot, lobbycard, (aka LA TRAMA), left top to bottom: Karen Black, Bruce Dern, Barbara Harris, Alfred Hitchcock, center from left: Cathleen Nesbitt, Barbara Harris, 1976. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Diminutive, genteel Cathleen Nesbitt was a grand dame of the theatre on both sides of the Atlantic in a career spanning seven decades. Among almost 300 roles on stage, she excelled at comic portrayals of sophisticated socialites and elegant mothers. Hollywood used her, whenever a gentler, sweeter version of Gladys Cooper was needed, yet someone still possessed of a subtly sarcastic wit and turn of phrase. Cathleen attended Queen’s University in Belfast and the Sorbonne in Paris. Encouraged by a friend of her father – none other than the legendary Sarah Bernhardt – to enter the acting profession, she was taken on by Victorian actress and drama teacher Rosina Filippi (1866-1930). Cathleen’s first appearance on stage was in 1910 at the Royalty Theatre in London. This was followed in November 1911 by her Broadway debut with the touring Abbey Theatre Players in ‘The Well of the Saints’.
From here on, and for the rest of her long life, she was never out of a job, demonstrating her range and versatility by playing anything from villainesses to being a much acclaimed Kate in Shakespeare’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, Perdita in ‘The Winter’s Tale’, Audrey Hepburn‘s grandaunt in ‘Gigi’, the Dowager Empress in ‘Anastasia’ and the gossipy ‘humorously animated’ Julia Shuttlethwaite of T.S. Eliot‘s ‘The Cocktail Party’. Her Mrs. Higgins in ‘My Fair Lady’, Brooks Atkinson described as played with ‘grace and elegance’, which also pretty much sums up Cathleen’s career in films.
Her first motion picture role was a lead in the drama The Faithful Heart (1922), adapted from an Irish play. She then absented herself from the screen for the next decade, resurfacing in supporting roles in British films, though rarely cast in worthy parts, possible exceptions being Man of Evil (1944) and Jassy (1947). Her strengths were rather better showcased during her sojourn in Hollywood, which began in 1952. In addition to prolific appearances in anthology television, she also appeared in several big budget films, most memorably as Cary Grant‘s perspicacous grandmother in An Affair to Remember (1957) and as gossipy Lady Matheson (alongside Gladys Cooper) in Separate Tables (1958). One of her last roles of note was as Julia Rainbird, who instigates the mystery in Alfred Hitchcock‘s final film, Family Plot (1976).
On the instigation of her friend Anita Loos, author of ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’, Cathleen wrote her memoirs, ‘A Little Love and Good Company’ in 1977. For her extraordinarily long career in the acting profession, she was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Honours List the following year. She retired just two years prior to her death in 1983 at the age of 93.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Her obituary in “The Los Angeles Times” can be accessed here.
“Slinky, sensational – was how Lauren Bacall came to the screen, along with the press releases as to ho her husky voice had been developed by making her shout across a canyon for six months. But she was not a joke at all. James Agate described her – she has cinema personality to burn and she burns both ends against an unusually little middle. Her personality is compounded of percolated Davis, Garbo, West, Dietrich, Harlow and Glenda Farrell, but more than enough of it is completely new to the screen. She had a javelin like vitality, a born dancer’s eloquence in movement, a fierce female shrewdness and a special sweet-sourness. With these faculities, plus a stone-crushing self-confidence and a trombone voice, she manages to get across the toughest girl a piously regenerate Hollywood has dreamed of in a long while. She does a wickedly good job of sizing up male prospects in a low bar, growls a louche song more suggestively than anyone in cinema has dared since Mae est” – David Shioman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International Stars” (1972).
Lauren Bacall will be forever associated with the films she made with her husband Humphrey Bogart. They made four films together and three of them “To Have and Have Not”, “The Big Sleep” and “Key Largo” are regarded as classics. Ms Bacall has many other fims to her credit including “Murder On the Orient Express” and “North West Frontier”. She died in 2014 at the age of 89..
Vernioca Horwell’s obituary in the Guardian”:
She was a nice Jewish girl brought up right by mother in two rooms on the wrong side of the tracks in Manhattan, her father long fled from their lives. She was so nervous in her first film role, at all of 19 years old, that her head shook; so she tilted her chin down to steady herself, and had to look up from under at the camera. She stood at the bedroom door of “a hotel in Martinique in the French West Indies” – the Warner Bros lot in Hollywood – looked up, and askedHumphrey Bogart for a match. And defined her life.
At that incendiary moment in 1944 when she made her screen debut in To Have and Have Not, Lauren Bacall, who has died aged 89, was still Betty Bacall, and had been recently Betty Perske, a stagestruck teenager whose poor family finances bought her a bare year at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (fellow pupil and first crush, Kirk Douglas), and whose fought-for early parts were in flops. She had to pay her way as an usherette and model, an unglam garment trade live dummy, until her photogenic potential was spotted by Diana Vreeland, fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Vreeland had an instinct for the face of the times, for a movie in a single still; and the shot that begat Bacall was a Bazaar cover, Betty besuited before a Red Cross office door. It’s lit noirishly, and she is acting independent – a frank, clever gal caught up in the war effort.
It was seen in Hollywood by David O Selznick, and Columbia pictures; both inquired after her. But the real connection was made by Nancy “Slim” Hawks, wife of the director Howard Hawks, who seems to have recognised in Betty’s stance a style much like her own, plus the physical substance of her husband’s dreams. She alerted Hawks, and Bacall was invited to travel by train across America on the 20th Century Limited to be screen-tested; Hawks offered her a personal contract. Bacall treated him as a surrogate father, and understood only later that he always wanted to be Svengali, making over a kid from nowhere into his desirable girl. His fantasy woman was sexually experienced and insolent; Hawks had hung out with Ernest Hemingway and company, who (as Slim complained after the marriage was over) wanted females who did not wimp out or whinge about the big game hunting, the hard drinking and harder bullshitting – but who were young enough not to be equals, so that they were never a threat.
Bacall sweated out months in Hollywood, showing off on demand as a protege at parties or sitting in her first car up a canyon bawling The Robe aloud by the hour to lower her voice – Hawks disliked women screeching; she bottomed out close in tone to a trombone. Two packs of cigarettes a day helped the baritone. At last Hawks developed a character for her, a near-tramp named “Slim”, in an approximate adaptation of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, starring Jack Warner’s alpha male, Bogart. The film was a wittier riff on Bogart’s previous smasheroo, Casablanca, and it was a hell of a way for a girl to sashay into movies.
Hawks’s creation became the fantasy of a generation when she growled at Bogart that he need do nothing but whistle – “You know how to whistle, don’t you? … You just put your lips together and blow.” If the lines had been delivered by a savvy contemporary of Bogart (say his Maltese Falcon co-star Mary Astor), and not a naive girl acting worldly, most men in the audience would have hid under the seat for a week. The critic James Agee thought Bacall provocative and preposterous, both a wolfwhistle and a belly laugh. He was wrong about her “stonecrushing confidence” (she had none and acquired little), but he did understand that she was a construct.
What had not been invented, though, what made the film hot, was the reactive chemistry between Bacall (renamed “Lauren”, a Hawks attempt at swank) and Bogart, then 44 and on his third marriage, to the drunk, slugging actor Mayo Methot. B & B called each other by their characters’ names, Steve and Slim, they joshed, they lit each other’s cigarettes in instinctive rapport, they fell in love, although whether with the reality of each other or with the parts they were playing no one will ever know. Long after, even she couldn’t say.
Hawks was jealous. He warned Bacall not to risk ending her career just as it began: the film was a big pop success. Since in Hollywood no therm of sexual heat can be wasted, he then cast Bacall and Bogart in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1946). The edgy ruefulness of that movie probably derived from their relationship during the shooting; Bogart wanted to marry his fresh start and also to behave like a gent towards Mayo; Bacall was obsessed with her adoring hero. They shared a private humour in their scripted exchanges – Bacall’s part bumped up on the suggestion of the sharp talent agent, Charlie Feldman – and their innuendo was wicked; no onscreen shag could show what Bacall suggested just by scratching her stockinged thigh. Yet you sense that nothing is sure between them. Bogart missed days on set, drunk, depressed: then he made up his mind. As his divorce crawled through, he sent her a wire: “Please fence me in Baby – the world’s too big out here and I don’t like it without you.” They married in 1945. Bacall walked willingly into his world – the pals of his generation, his continuing affair with his toupee-maker, his liquor consumption (high, but controlled), his refuge of a yacht, the Santana – as if her wedding vows had been those of the biblical Ruth: “Thy people shall be my people, and thy land” – well-staffed houses in the Hollywood Hills above Sunset Strip – “my land.
Hawks had been spot on about her career, as was the playwright Moss Hart, who told her: “You realise from here you have nowhere to go but down.” Those two films were the best she did. Without Bogart, in The Confidential Agent (1945), she seemed cold not cool, minus the zap of her Hawksian dames. She was cast with Bogart again in Dark Passage, and in John Huston’s Key Largo (1948), but in both she was sombre and self-effacing, having by degrees dwindled into wifely respectability. Bogart did not want her to be actor first and wife second – his own King Kong-like fantasy of a woman was that she should fit into a man’s pocket, to be displayed on the palm of his hand, expanded to full-size when desired, and contracted back on command.
She wanted to make him happy, to be Bogart’s Baby and to have Bogart’s babies. In 1947, she went to Washington with a well-intentioned but politically innocent group, including Bogart and John Huston, to protest against the anti-leftwing bullying of the House Un-American Activities Committee; five years later she campaigned for the unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, another father mentor. She bore Bogart’s children, Steve and Leslie, supplied antibiotics to sick location crews on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The African Queen, learned to sip Jack Daniel’s through a long evening. When the Hollywood rat pack (qualifications: nonconformity, drinking, laughing) was first formed in a private room at Romanoff’s, she was voted Den Mother, never out of humour.
Bacall was playing for real a high-grade version of the postwar homemaker bride, but she was not in many movies. Hawks sold her contract to Jack Warner, who suspended her 12 times for refusing poor roles; 50s models of women were rolling off a new production line. Class now meant the aloofness of Grace Kelly; sass meant the vulnerable trashiness of Marilyn Monroe. None of them were sensual as Bacall had been, or as direct, straight-talking and brave. What happened to the image of women after 1945 is summed up in the difference between Bacall unfazed by Bogart’s drunk sidekick in To Have and Have Not (who grudgingly admits “Lady, you’re all right”) and Bacall unamused as the mink-pursuer in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). And that was considered a good part. She bought out her contract, but all that expensive gesture purchased was a soapy role in Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956) through which, you hope hopelessly, she will take tormented Robert Stack out for a belt of bourbon; and another refrigerated career girl in Designing Woman (1957).
Warner Bros was planning in 1956 to team Bogart and Bacall again, in the love story of a military man and a journalist. Just perfect, only it never got made, because that was the year Bacall watched Bogart die from cancer of the oesophagus at the age of 57. In her 1978 autobiography, By Myself, she described his dissolution with the unflinching candour he would have expected of her: the odour of decay on his kiss, the old robe from Dark Passage she wore the night he died in the bed they had long shared, the sack in which his body was taken away to Forest Lawn crematorium.
She displayed a model of the Santana at the funeral – a spirit ship indeed – and sold the real boat. The role of the Widow Bogart, relict of a myth, was not the lifetime part she wanted, although the relative honour of his Hollywood meant more to her as decades passed. His death was the beginning of the bad times. Her comforting but uncomfortable affair with Frank Sinatra froze over: her second marriage, to the actor Jason Robards, produced her third child, Sam, but foundered because of his drinking, and maybe because she was growing into the maturity she had always implied.
The heroine she could have been onscreen was seen for the last time in an unpretentious British adventure, North West Frontier (1959): her governess, boarding a trainload of corpses to retrieve a live baby, has a warmth and strength still not often allowed women in the movies. And certainly not Bacall thereafter. “Film is not a woman’s medium,” she wrote: “If you weren’t the hottest kid in town, men stayed away from you.” She was a mere 42 when she took a cameo as a jaded California invalid in the noir-lite Harper (1966), and most of her subsequent film turns exhibited her as a matron – sometimes amiable (James Caan’s literary agent in Misery, 1990, John Wayne’s landlady in The Shootist, 1976), more often monstrous – a tragedienne disguised as a parvenu in Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Barbra Streisand’s mother – less of a dinosaur than the daughter – in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), for which she won a Golden Globe as best supporting actress. She needed the money; Bogart had bequeathed her custodianship of the legend but not megabucks, as the studio system never generated millions for its stars.
Real work satisfaction came more from her long-delayed Broadway career. George Axelrod constructed his 1959 comedy Goodbye Charlie around her; then she starred in Cactus Flower (1965), in the theatre where she had once ushered in white cuffs – although Ingrid Bergman stole her part in the movie. In 1970, she grabbed the Bette Davis role as an ageing diva of the Martini in Applause, a musical adaptation of All About Eve. It wasn’t much of a musical, but who gave a damn; she got the chance to be the Bacall she had always wanted to be – as Alistair Cooke wrote, as “fragile as a moose”. Her leading man, Len Cariou, was her lover for a while; she picked up a Tony award; a Life magazine cover showed a sexy woman laughing, arm flung up in triumph. The earned success was transient, although she won another Tony in an update of Katharine Hepburn‘s journalist role in a musical of the film Woman of the Year (1981).
Bacall kept on working, admitting that every job, especially on stage, reverted her to youthful nervousness. Harold Pinter directed her in the first London production of Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth (1985), and Terry Hands less successfully in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit at Chichester in 1995. As age broadened that 24-inch waist and chiselled face, she decisively restyled herself, with help from a trainer and the make-up artist Kevyn Aucoin, as a lioness in winter, her wavy mane tamed, the better to emphasis the graphic eyebrows, always her most distinctive feature, and gruff voice. A late magnificence was visible in Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter (1995), and in her awesome matriarchs in Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005), and Jonathan Glaser’s Birth (2004).
That worked-on voice retained its power to the last, especially for witches (voiceovers in Howl’s Moving Castle, 2004, and Scooby-Doo and the Goblin King, 2008), and for aged dames who were still trouble (The Forger, 2012). The most accurate casting was her turn as a Washington social grandee in Paul Schrader’s neo-noir The Walker (2007), demolishing Woody Harrelson’s gay escort with the line: “Memory is a very unreliable organ: it’s right up there with the penis.”
She herself went unescorted in age, unbothered about it, and was proprietorial about the definition of a movie “legend” after over 60 years in gainful employment: less than a couple of decades of stardom, she said, and you were just a beginner. In 2009 she received an honorary Oscar.
Lunching with her was an audience with the last empress of Byzantium, imperiousness interspersed with a really dirty laugh, perhaps the sound of her true self. Every online search sends you back to a picture of her at 19 giving The Look: “You know, Steve, you don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to do anything. You just have to whistle.”
She is survived by Steve, Leslie and Sam.
• Lauren Bacall (Betty Joan Perske), actor, born 16 September 1924; died 12 August 2014
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
A link to her biography on “The Jewish Virtual Library” can be accessed here.
Lee Remick Michael Sarrazin & Lee RemickLee Remick
Lee Remick
Lee Remick was a talented and very attractive American actress. She began her prolific film career in 1957 in “A Face in the Crowd” directed by Elia Kazan. Other notable films included “The Long Hot Summer”, “Experiment in Terror”, “The Days of Wine and Roses” and “Loot”. Lee Remick also made very many highly regarded television movies. She tragically died at the age of 55 from cancer in 1991. Interesting article on Lee Remick can be accessed here.
TCM Overview:
Radiant, honey-haired beauty who combined sensuality with gentility in performances of surprising depth. Once billed as “America’s answer to Brigitte Bardot,” Remick made her screen debut as the nubile majorette who seduces country TV star Andy Griffith in Elia Kazan’s powerful drama, “A Face in the Crowd” (1957). She played manipulators in “The Long Hot Summer” (1957) and “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959), and pathetic or victimized women in “Sanctuary” (1961) and “Days of Wine and Roses” (1962). Remick also demonstrated a flair for comedy in “A Severed Head” and “Loot” (both 1970).
Remick began her career on stage and TV in the 1950s and continued to appear in both media through the late 1980s. She received a Tony nomination for her most famous Broadway role, as the blind woman menaced by three criminals in Frederick Knott’s 1966 thriller “Wait Until Dark”. Her sophisticated elegance made her well suited for Stephen Sondheim musicals: she starred on Broadway in his short-lived “Anyone Can Whistle” (1964); as the sassy former showgirl Phyllis in a concert version of “Follies” (PBS, 1986); and as the glamorous actress Desiree in a 1991 Los Angeles production of his “A Little Night Music”, from which she withdrew due to a relapse of cancer.
Beginning in the 70s, Remick worked increasingly in TV, becoming the queen of reality-based TV-movies and miniseries. She gave memorable performances as Jennie Jerome in “Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill” (1975); as Kay Summersby in “Ike: The War Years” (1979); as Margaret Sullavan in “Haywire” (1980); and as the scheming socialite Frances Bradshaw Schreuder in “Nutcracker: Money, Madness, and Murder” (1987).
Anatomy Of A Murder, poster, US poster, Lee Remick, 1959. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)Original Cinema Quad Poster – Movie Film Posters
Article on Lee Remick in “Tina Aumont’s Eyes” website:
Beautiful and extremely talented, Lee Remick took a career path that mixed big budget Hollywood fare, with smaller biographical television dramas, and noted Broadway productions.
Born on December 14th 1935, Lee took to the stage while still in her teens, and soon caught the eye of some of the most notable directors of the day. One such director was Elia Kazan, who gave Remick a small part as a majorette in the cult showbiz saga ‘A Face in the Crowd’ (1957). She then had a prominent part as a rape victim in Otto Preminger’s 1959 courtroom drama ‘Anatomy of a Murder’. Kazan cast Lee again for ‘Wild River’, as a widow falling for Montgomery Clift’s young optimist. Although the movie was a rare failure for Kazan, it would remain Lee’s personal favourite.
Remick made two films in 1962 for Blake Edwards, the suspense thriller ‘Experiment in Terror’ with Glenn Ford, and the alcoholic drama ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ with Jack Lemmon, which saw Lee Oscar-nominated for the first and only time.
1965 saw Lee as a doting wife to Steve McQueen’s convict on parole, in ‘Baby the Rain Must Fall’, and then very enjoyable as a temperance leader in John Sturge’s comedy western ‘The Hallelujah Trail’, taming Burt Lancaster’s stuffy colonel. After spending a year on Broadway in ‘Wait Until Dark’, Remick was given a good part in Jack Smight’s cult favourite; ‘No Way To Treat A Lady’ (1968), as the swinging girlfriend of George Segal’s straight-laced cop, who is on the trail of a serial killer, played brilliantly by Rod Steiger.
Divorced from her first husband in 1968, Lee met and married British producer Kip Gowans in 1970. She moved to England at this time and starred in a couple of cult pictures. The first was ‘Loot’, based on Joe Orton’s hit play, starring opposite Richard Attenborough, and then the very good black comedy ‘A Severed Head’, again with Attenborough, along with Ian Holm and Claire Bloom.
For British television, Lee starred in the widely acclaimed 1974 mini-series ‘Jennie’, as Winston Churchill’s American born mother. A terrific performance which won her both an Emmy and Golden Globe. After re-teaming with Rod Steiger for the seldom seen 1975 IRA drama ‘Hennessy’, Remick had her biggest hit with the worldwide smash ‘The Omen’, playing demonic Damien’s adoptive mother. A couple of thrillers followed; 1977’s spy flick ‘Telefon’, with Charles Bronson, and ‘The Medusa Touch’ (1978), as Richard Burton’s psychiatrist.
Remick had a very good costume role in Merchant-Ivory’s sumptuous drama ‘The Europeans’ (1979), as an American-born baroness. Around this time Lee moved back to California with her husband, as decent parts were becoming scarce. In 1980 Lee portrayed troubled Forties actress Margaret Sullivan, in the TV movie ‘Haywire’ with Jason Robards. She was Jack Lemmon’s wife again in Bob Clark’s sentimental comedy ‘Tribute’, which featured an excellent performance from Lemmon.
A handful of TV movies followed, including a poor 1982 remake of the classic Bette Davis potboiler ‘The Letter’. In 1986 Lee co-starred in the Australian wartime drama ‘Emma’s War’, and then played a nurse in the decent 1988 true movie ‘Jesse’. Lee’s final role of note was in the 1989 true life drama ‘A Bridge to Silence’, as Marlee Matlin’s domineering mother.
Married twice, with 2 children, Lee Remick sadly died of kidney cancer on July 2, 1991, at her home in Los Angeles, she was only 55.
A hardworking, accomplished actress, Lee Remick was far more than a screen beauty. She was passionate about her craft and, on stage, screen and television, it more than showed.
Favourite Movie: No Way To Treat A Lady Favourite Performance: Wild River
The above article can also be accessed online here.
“New York Times” obituary:
Lee Remick, the elegant actress who illumined dozens of films and many stage and television plays, died yesterday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 55 years old.
The actress died of cancer after fighting the disease for two years, a spokesman for the family said. In one of her last public appearances, a star was dedicated in her honor in April on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Ms. Remick, an uncommonly versatile performer, portrayed characters as disparate as a seductive cheerleader and a tormented alcoholic, along with such historical figures as Lady Randolph Churchill and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Once billed as “America’s answer to Brigitte Bardot,” she was as much admired for her acting abilities as for her bubbly attractiveness. Writing in The New York Times of her performance in the 1980 television movie “The Women’s Room,” John J. O’Connor said, “Lee Remick proves once again she is an uncommonly gifted actress whose somewhat fragile, almost stereotyped good looks tend to distract one from that fact.”
Ms. Remick, who was born in Quincy, Mass., studied dance as a child and won her first acting job at age 16 with a summer-stock company on nearby Cape Cod. This led to a part in a short-lived Broadway comedy, “Be Your Age,” in 1953, several more summer-theater appearances and a string of television roles on “Philco Playhouse,” “Hallmark Hall of Fame,” “Playhouse
decision. I chucked school, told my parents and then slept for 10 days.”
After the director Elia Kazan cast Ms. Remick as a seductive cheerleader in his 1957 film, “A Face in the Crowd,” she gave highly praised performances in Martin Ritt’s “Long Hot Summer” (1958), Otto Preminger’s “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959) and Mr. Kazan’s “Wild River” (1960). Her portrait of a happily married housewife turned alcoholic in Blake Edwards’s “Days of Wine and Roses” (1963) brought her an Academy Award nomination. Subsequent film roles included “Baby the Rain Must Fall” (1965), “Loot” (1972), “Sometimes a Great Notion” (1972) and “The Europeans” (1979).
She chose her roles with care. “After ‘Anatomy,’ in which I played a kind of tramp, for instance, I could have followed up with more of the same,” she told an interviewer. “Reinforcing my ‘image’ by becoming a sex symbol would have been one way to be more strongly identified as a star, but I had no interest in doing that. I can’t be something I’m not.”
Ms. Remick’s most successful Broadway performance was in Frederick Knott’s 1966 thriller, “Wait Until Dark,” about a blind woman at the mercy of three criminals. Her other stage credits included “Anyone Can Whistle,” the 1964 musical by Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim, and a Boston production of John Pielmeier’s play “Agnes of God” in 1982.
Ms. Remick was a frequent star in television mini-series in the 1970’s and 80’s. She played the title role in “Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill” (1975) and also starred in “Ike” (1979), “Haywire” (1980), “Toughlove” (1985) and “Nutcracker: Money, Madness, Murder” (1987).
Reviewing Ms. Remick’s performance in “Nutcracker,” a 1987 NBC mini-series in which she played a woman who manipulates her son into committing murder, Mr. O’Connor wrote in The New York Times: “If she had been born with Bette Davis eyes or Katharine Hepburn cheekbones, she might long ago have been recognized as one of this country’s most outstanding dramatic actresses.” Of Preparation and Humility
Ms. Remick was known to prepare intensively for her roles, attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous for her work in “Days of Wine and Roses” and spending a month of blindfolded mornings at New York’s Lighthouse for the Blind before starring in “Wait Until Dark.”
“I’m really a housewife who is incidentally an actress,” Ms. Remick told an interviewer. On another occasion she said: “People tell me that I have a special quality in films, but if I do I take no intellectual credit for it. It’s pure instinct. I think I’ve held on to certain qualities within myself which have been strong.”
Ms. Remick’s marriage to William A. Colleran, a producer and director, ended in divorce in 1969. Her survivors include her husband of 21 years, Kip Gowans, a producer; a daughter, Kate Colleran Sullivan; a son, Matthew Remick Colleran; two stepdaughters, Justine Gowans Solly and Nicola Gowans, and her mother, Pat Packard.
The above “New York Times” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Margaret Leighton died yesterday at the age of 53. She was an actress as intelligent as she was beautiful. From her youth she had rare poise and period sense qualities evident in her final part, a Compton Burnett dowager in last year’s stage version of “A Family and a Fortune.”
Born in Worcestershire on February 26, 1922, and educated at Birmingham, she was one of Sir Barry Jackson’s Repertory Theatre discoveries. In 1938, as a tall, glowingly fair girl of 16, she began by scrubbing the stage and doing the work of a junior ASM. Early in the war she toured with Basil Langton’s company; but it was at the Repertory, especially between 1942 and 1944, that in such parts as Katharina, Rosalind, Barrie’s Lady Babbie, and the step-daughter in Six Characters”, she made the great regional reputation, justified during three years in London with the Old Vic. During the first three years, 1944-47, of the company’s famous stay at the New Theatre, she acted, among much else, Raina in “Arms and the Man”, Yelena in “Uncle Vanya”, Roxane in “Cyrano de Bergerac”, and a Regan, to Olivier’s Lear.
Always she was far more than decorative. She had a cutting truth, and her repetory training (though she never entirely lost her nervousness) prepared her for anything. From the Vic company she went to to a trio of parts in the Criterion revival of Bridie’s “A Sleeping Clergyman” (1947), welcoming the chance to act with Robert Donat: later she was with him in the film version of “The Winslow Boy”, her introduction to the work of Terence Rattigan.
She was Celia in the London production of “The Cocktail Party” (1950) and 12 months later appeared as Masha in a revival of “Three Sisters” for Festival of Britain year. In 1952, as Stratford upon Avon’s leading lady again, it was said, as the toast of the Midlands, she was Lady Macbeth, a Rosalind of jetting raillery and an Ariel described by a critic as a silver arrow.
Afterwards, though she remained among the first half dozen of English actresses, she never found the sustained full-scale triumph (long runs aside) for which one had hoped. Certainly there were long runs. After a few months as Orinthia to Noel Coward’s Magnus in the Haymarket revival of “The Apple Cart” (1953) and another Eliot heroine, Lucasta in “The Confidential Clerk”, she had nearly four years, in London and on Broadway, as two amply contrasted characters in the double bill of Terence Rattigan’s “Separate Tables”. Her Rose, a former Midland girl, in his “Variations on a Theme” (Globe, London, 1958) had to be less satisfying. She acted a gleaming Beatrice to Sir John Gielgud’s Benedick in New York (September, 1959). Then, after two more London parts – the second of them Ellida in “The Lady From the Sea” (1961) – she spent five years in New York where she won the Antoinette Perry Award for the best actress of 1961-62, as Hannah in Tennessee Williams’s “The Night of the Iguana”. She was also in Enid Bagnold’s “The Chinese Prime Minister” when the dramatist spoke of her as “an extraordinary and shining woman, made of moonshine and talent and deep self-distrust, astonished at success.”
Her return to London (1967) was in an undemanding play “Cactus Flower”. Within two years at the Chichester Festival, she reached the part many thought she should play, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra (to the Antony of Sir John Clements), royal in her aspect but never theatrically voluptuous. But the Festival period was brief. And of her three later parts, two were at Chichester, Mrs Malaprop in “The Rivals” and Elena in “Reunion in Vienna” (also for a short time in London). Finally there was the dowager she acted with such sharp assurance in “A Family and a Fortune” (Apollo, 1975). These were all performances, varying in scope, and of much style and vigour in execution, but without the transcendent quality we knew Margaret Leighton could achieve. We hoped she might again. It is too late now;but she is remembered, as “Maggie”, in and out of the theatre, with deep affection.
Margaret Leighton acted in several films besides “The Winslow Boy”. She received a Best Supporting Actress Award for her performance in “The Go-Between” in 1971, and her other credits included “The Loved One” (1965), “Lady Caroline Lamb” (1972), and “Bequest to the Nation” (1973). She was married three times – to Max Reinhardt, to Laurence Harvey, and lastly to Michael Wilding. The above “Times” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Pier Angeli was born in 1932 and was an Italian-born television and film actress. Her American cinematographic debut was in the starring role of the 1951 film Teresa, for which she won a Golden Globe Award for Young Star of the Year – Actress. She had one son with Vic Damone, her first husband, and another son with Armando Trovajoli, her second husband. Her twin sister is the actress Marisa Pavan.
During the 1960s and until 1970, Angeli lived and worked in Britain and Europe, and was often screen-credited under her birth name, Anna Maria Pierangeli. Her performance in The Angry Silence (1960) was nominated for a Best Foreign Actress BAFTA, and she was reunited with Stewart Granger for Sodom and Gomorrah (1963), in which she played Lot’s wife. She had a brief role in the war epic Battle of the Bulge (1965). 1968 found Angeli in Israel, top billed in Every Bastard a King, about events during that nation’s recent war.
According to Kirk Douglas‘ autobiography, he and Angeli were engaged in the 1950s after meeting on the set of the film The Story of Three Loves (1953). Angeli also had a brief romantic relationship with James Dean. She broke it off because her mother was not happy with their relationship as he was not Catholic.
Angeli was married to singer and actor Vic Damone from 1954 to 1958. During their marriage, they appeared as guests on the June 17, 1956 episode of What’s My Line?. Their divorce was followed by highly publicized court battles for the custody of their only child, son Perry (1955–2014).
Angeli next married Italian composer Armando Trovajoli in 1962. She had another son, Howard, in 1963. She and Trovajoli were separated in 1969.
In 1971, at the age of 39, Angeli was found dead of a barbiturate overdose at her home in Beverly Hills. She is interred in the Cimetière des Bulvis in Rueil-Malmaison, Hauts-de-Seine, France.
Marisa Pavan was born in Sardinia in 1932 and is the twin sister of the actress Pier Angeli. Pavan’s breaktrough role came in 1955 as the daughter of Anna Magnani in “The Rose Tattoo” based on the play by Tennessee Williams.
Pavan was nominated foran Oscar for her performance. She was married to the late French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont.
TCM Overview:
The twin sister of actress Pier Angeli, Marisa Pavan was generally cast in gentle roles during her brief career as a leading lady of 1950s films. The attractive, Italian-born brunette made her motion picture debut in John Ford’s 1952 remake of “What Price Glory?”, playing a sweet village girl, and followed as a doomed Native American in love with Indian fighter Alan Ladd in Delmar Daves’ “Drum Beat” (1954).
Pavan won a Golden Globe Award and earned an Oscar nomination for her performance as the sensitive teenaged daughter of the formidable Anna Magnani in “The Rose Tattoo” (1955).
She held her own in the costume epic “Diane” (also 1955), in which she competed with Lana Turner for the affections of Roger Moore.
In Nunnally Johnson’s “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit” (1956), Pavan brought warmth and believability to her role as the war-time love of Gregory Peck.
After appearing opposite Tony Curtis in the taut mystery “The Midnight Story” (1957) and two more costume epics, “John Paul Jones” and “Solomon and Sheba” (1959), the actress retired from the big screen for more than a decade.
A mini-biography on Marisa Pavan can be viewed on the TCM website here.
Marisa Pavan died at her home in France in 2023 at the age of 91.
The Hollywood Reporter obituary in 2023:
Maria Luisa Pierangeli and her sister (birth name Anna Maria Pierangeli, who was older by a few minutes) were born on June 19, 1932, in Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy. Their father, Luigi, was an architect and construction engineer, and their mother, Enrica, was a homemaker who once dreamed of being an actress.
“My mother adored Shirley Temple and took us to see all her movies,” Pavan said in Jane Allen’s 2002 book, Pier Angeli: A Fragile Life. “She even dressed us like Shirley Temple, hence the big bows in our hair.”
The family moved to Rome in the mid-1930s and was threatened when the Nazis occupied the city.
When she was 16, Anna was strolling along the Via Veneto on the way home from art school when she was discovered by Vittorio De Sica, and she portrayed a teenager on the verge of a sexual awakening opposite him in Tomorrow Is Too Late (1950). That brought her to the attention of MGM, which cast her in Teresa (1951), signed her to a seven-year contract and gave her the stage name Pier Angeli.
Angeli and her sister then moved to Los Angeles, and Maria, with no acting experience, was signed by Fox. Newly christened Marisa Pavan, she made her big-screen debut as a French girl in John Ford’s World War I-set What Price Glory (1952), starring James Cagney and Dan Dailey.
Pavan then appeared in 1954 in the film noir Down Three Dark Streetsand in the Western Drum Beat, starring Broderick Crawford and Alan Ladd, respectively, before she broke out in The Rose Tattoo.
Pavan also co-starred in a pair of epic adventures released in 1959, playing Robert Stack’s love interest in John Farrow’s John Paul Jones(1959) and the servant Abishag in King Vidor’s Solomon and Sheba(1959). In the latter, she worked alongside Yul Brynner, who joined the film in Spain after the sudden death of Tyrone Power.
Pavan worked mainly in television after that, with stints on such shows as The United States Steel Hour, Naked City, 77 Sunset Strip, Combat!, The F.B.I., Wonder Woman, Hawaii Five-O and The Rockford Files.
Marisa Pavan and Tony Curtis on the set of 1957’s ‘The Midnight Story’ COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION
In 1976, she appeared as Kirk Douglas‘ mentally ill wife in the Arthur Hailey NBC miniseries The Moneychangers, and she played Chantal Dubujak, mother of crime lord Max DuBujak (Daniel Pilon), in 1985 on the ABC soap opera Ryan’s Hope.
Angeli, who dated James Dean before she married singer Vic Damone and portrayed the wife of champion boxer Rocky Marciano (played by Paul Newman) in 1956’s Somebody Up There Likes Me, died in 1971 at age 39 of a barbiturate overdose at a Beverly Hills apartment. It was never firmly established whether she died by suicide or suffered a reaction to prescribed medication.
Pavan was married to French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont (her castmate in John Paul Jones) from 1956 until his 2001 death. Survivors include her sons, Jean-Claude (a cinematographer) and Patrick, and her younger sister, Patrizia Pierangeli, also an actress
Michael York garnered very favourable reviews for his first three major films in the 1960’s. They were Joseph Losey’s “Accident” and Franco Zefferelli’s “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Romeo and Juliet”. After the success of the film “Cabreet” with Liza Minnelli, he went to Hollywood. Although he makes films all over the world, he is now based in the USA. He recently received recognition with younger audiences with his participation in the Austin Powers film where he plays Basil Exposition.
A classically trained British actor who honed his craft on the stage, Michael York made a smooth transition to the screen with several noted Shakespearean performances in films made by Italian director Franco Zeffirelli. Though not a leading performer, York delivered strong turns as Lucentino in “The Taming of the Shrew” (1967) and Tybalt in “Romeo and Juliet” (1968), before he played more seductively charming men in “Something for Everyone” (1970) and “Cabaret” (1972). While starring as D’Artagnan in “The Three Musketeers” (1973) and Logan in the sci-fi cult classic “Logan’s Run” (1976), he also turned to television to play Pip in “Great Expectations” (NBC, 1974) and John the Baptist in the epic miniseries “Jesus of Nazareth” (NBC, 1977).
In the following decade, York joined the cast of “Knot’s Landing” (CBS, 1979-1993), while stepping back into guest starring spots on shows like “Babylon 5” (TNT, 1993-98) and “Sliders” (Fox, 1995-99). Though he made fewer appearances on the big screen later in his career, York was quite memorable as the affable Basil Exposition in the “Austin Power” series, starring Mike Myers. As he continued forward, York diversified his talents to include voice work for both animated projects and a host of audiobooks, which served to underscore the wide breadth of the actor’s talents.
Born on March 27, 1942 in Fulmer, Buckinghamshire, England, York was raised in the London suburb of Burgess Hill by his father, Joseph Johnson, an ex-army officer-turned-executive for Marks and Spencer department stores, and his mother, Florence, a musician. While receiving his education at Bromley Grammar School for Boys, he began his acting career as a teenager in a production of “The Yellow Jacket” (1956). Three years later, York made his West End debut with a one-line role in a staging of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” He continued to study acting at Oxford University, where he was a member of the Dramatic Society, and spent his summers working with Michael Croft’s Youth Theatre while touring Italy in a production of “Julius Caesar.”
From there, he joined the Dundee Repertory Theatre in Scotland, where he played Sergius in “Arms and the Man” (1964) and first adopted the name Michael York. That same year, he graduated from Oxford and was invited to join England’s National Theatre, which led him to be immediately cast by Italian director Franco Zeffirelli in his production of “Much Ado About Nothing” (1965).
With his stage career taking off, York took the logical next stepping of making his screen debut as Young Jolyon in the acclaimed and fondly remembered drama series “The Forsyte Saga” (BBC, 1966). A year later, Michael York made his feature debut as Lucentino in Zeffirelli’s film, “The Taming of the Shrew” (1967), starring the tumultuous Elizabeth Taylor and her on-again/off-again husband Richard Burton. Now a bona fide movie actor, York scored again as Tybalt in Zeffirelli’s next Shakespearean screen adaptation “Romeo and Juliet” (1968).
Later that same year, York married his sweetheart, Patricia, an American photographer, whom he met while filming “Smashing Time” (1969) when she was assigned to photograph the star. The couple remained husband and wife well into the next century. Meanwhile, York went on to effectively portray a variety of well-bred, charming men like the manipulative bisexual of “Something for Everyone” (1970) and the adventurous expatriate in Bob Fosse’s Academy Award-winning “Cabaret” (1972), opposite Liza Minnelli.
From there, his role as D’Artagnan in Richard Lester’s romping version of “The Three Musketeers” (1973) and as Logan in the cult sci-fi classic “Logan’s Run” (1976) cemented York’s cinematic stardom on both sides of the pond. He played opposite Burt Lancaster in the critically panned adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “The Island of Dr. Moreau” (1977) and he even played himself in Billy Wilder’s old fashioned missive on Hollywood, “Fedora” (1977). A series of well-received landmark TV miniseries followed, including roles as the Charles Dickens’ hero Pip in “Great Expectations” (NBC, 1974) and a reteaming with his illustrious mentor Zeffirelli in “Jesus of Nazareth” (NBC, 1977), where he played John the Baptist to Robert Powell’s titular Jesus. York returned to his theatrical roots in the 1979 Broadway production of “Bent,” where he succeeded Richard Gere in the lead role of Max, a homosexual concentration camp inmate who pretends to be Jewish. That same year he produced his first movie, a slow-moving adaptation of Erskine Childer’s prototypical spy thriller, “The Riddle of the Sands” (1979).
Heading into the 1980s, Michael York attempted his first stage musical, “The Little Prince,” which failed miserably during its Broadway previews and led to his decision to return to the comfort of the small screen. York proved he could still be a dashing and stalwart swashbuckler in “The Master of Ballantrae” (CBS, 1984) and earned a Daytime Emmy nomination for the ABC Afterschool Special, “Are You My Mother?” He next joined the cast of the long-running primetime serial “Knot’s Landing” (CBS, 1979-1993) for the 1987-88 season, playing the love interest to Donna Mills. In the 1990s, York continued to work on the small screen with episodes of popular shows like “Babylon 5” (TNT, 1993-98) and the time travel adventure “Sliders” (Fox, 1995-99), while tackling prominent roles in TV movies like “Not of This Earth” (Showtime, 1995), “Dark Planet” (Syfy, 1997), “The Ripper” (Starz, 1997) and “A Knight in Camelot” (1998). Of course, York continued making big screen appearances, playing the prime and proper head of British intelligence, Basil Exposition, in the Mike Myers franchise “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery” (1997), a role he reprised in “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me” (1999) and “Austin Powers: Goldmember” (2002).
Finding a new audience, York played media mogul Stone Alexander in the religious-themed “The Omega Code” (1999) and its sequel “Megiddo: Omega Code 2” (2001) – two films that were not theatrical blockbusters, but nevertheless performed extremely well in their niche market. Meanwhile, York’s highly distinctive voice made him perfect for recording audio books, in which he was credited with over 70 productions, such as The Book of Psalms, Carl Jung’sMemories, Dreams, Reflections, Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat, and his own children’s book, The Magic Paw Paw.
Of course, York also voiced numerous characters on screen, from Murdstone in “Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield” (NBC, 1993), King Sarastro in “The Magic Flute” (ABC, 1994) and Kanto on “Superman” (ABC, 1996-99) to The King in “A Monkey’s Tale” (2001) and Prime #1 in “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” (2009).
In live action, he appeared in episodes of “The Gilmore Girls” (The WB, 2000-07) and “How I Met Your Mother” (CBS, 2005- ), before joining Rutger Hauer and Charlotte Rampling for the Polish-made religious drama “The Mill and the Cross” (2011). The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Peggy Cummins was educated in Dublin but then left for London where she acted on stage and had some minor roles in British films. She was brough to Hollyood to make the film “Forever Amber”in 1945. However she photographed very young and innocent for the part and was replaced by Linda Darnell. Nevertheless she made several films in the U.S.. In 1949 she made “Gun Crazy” which is one of the absolute film noirs and has acheived cult status. The following year she returned to England and resmed her career in British films. She made two further excellent films, “Night of the Demon” with Dana Andrews and “Hell Drivers” with Stanley Baker. She retired from the screen in 1961 and from television in an episode of “The Human Jungle” in 1965.
Peggy Cummin’s obituary in “The Guardian” by Michael Freedland in 2018:
The British actor Peggy Cummins, who has died aged 92, was discovered by the Hollywood mogul Darryl F Zanuck when she was a teenager and almost immediately given the lead in his big film of the age, Forever Amber, based on the historical romance by Kathleen Winsor. In 1946 she began filming the part of Amber St Clare, a young beauty making her way in 17th-century England, shooting opposite Vincent Price as Almsbury. Hundreds of stills were shot of her in period costume. But then the director was sacked, filming started all over again – and Cummins was replaced (as was Price).
A career that had promised so much for Cummins was reduced to small parts in big films and big parts in small pictures. Among these, her best known performance was in Gun Crazy (1950), directed by Joseph H Lewis, a film about a gun-toting couple, Annie Laurie Starr (Cummins) and Bart Tare (John Dall), on the run – he wants to go straight, she pushes him further in to a life of crime. Based on a short story by MacKinlay Kantor, and with a script co-written in secret by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, it went on to become a revered B-movie film noir, cited as an inspiration for Nouvelle Vague directors and deemed an important forerunner of Bonnie and Clyde. “Until Gun Crazy I’d played pretty blonde types, so I loved the idea of this character,” Cummins said. “This was a meaty part I’d been hoping fo.
Daughter of a mother who did a little acting and a father who was a newspaper editor, Cummins was born in Prestatyn, north Wales, but spent her childhood in Dublin, where she had dancing lessons at the Abbey School of Ballet.
She made her first stage appearances as a child, often playing young boys, at the Gate theatre in Dublin. She did well enough to be invited at the age of 13 to London, where she landed a role in the 1938 revue Let’s Pretend.
She was a big hit and film producers queued up to offer her roles. The first, in 1940, when she was 15, was a part in a British drama set in Ireland, Dr O’Dowd, which was followed in 1944 by Her Man Gilbey (also known as English Without Tears). But the part that seemed to herald a remarkable career was the lead in the West End version of an American play, Junior Miss, in 1943. Zanuck, who had come to London to study British war propaganda, was in the audience and asked her: “How would you like to go to Hollywood?”The search for an Amber had begun to resemble the quest for a Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. Whether Zanuck immediately had Cummins in mind for the part, no one could afterwards be sure. It was announced first that she would appear with Charles Boyer and Jennifer Jones in Cluny Brown (in a role that was eventually taken by Helen Walker). There were appearances in The Late George Apley and Moss Rose, both released in 1947 and neither a really important movie. By then, Zanuck had decided that Cummins was the Amber he was looking for.
The part was racy, and low-cut dresses had already been designed. The costume department took one look at Cummins, decided these would not do at all, and scrapped them at great cost. This was just the first problem. Halfway through production, Zanuck saw the rushes and decided that the director, John Stahl, had to go. He was replaced by the autocratic Otto Preminger, who decided to start again from scratch – his first decision was to sack Cummins. The early stages of the film itself, he said, looked “hopelessly old-fashioned”. As for Cummins, he declared: “She’s not up to it. She is amateurish and looks too young.” The polite explanation given to the public was that she did not have “costume experience”.
The critic Dilys Powell commented: “The fact is that in its present stage of development, Hollywood simply doesn’t want the beautiful, grave, classical actor, any more than it wants natural vivacity, and that individual dual charm, the young talented actress with a notion to use her talent.”
The disappointment for Cummins, replaced by the US actor Linda Darnell, was palpable: “Maybe I wasn’t the right kind of sexy,” she told Barbara Roisman Cooper for the book Great Britons of Stage and Screen in Conversation (2015). “Maybe I was too young. Maybe I wasn’t voluptuous enough.
I don’t know if there’s even anybody alive today who knows the real story. If I had begun in Hollywood with Cluny Brown I think my career would have been very different.” She went on making films, but everything after that seemed like an anticlimax.
Escape (1948), in which she appeared opposite Rex Harrison, received moderate reviews and every now and again pops up at film festivals. One of her best films was My Daughter Joy (also known as Operation X, 1950), with Edward G Robinson as a millionaire businessman who spoils his young daughter (Cummins). Gun Crazy was her last film in the US.
Later, Cummins returned to Britain and made a well received comedy, To Dorothy a Son (1954), which starred Shelley Winters as a US divorcee trying to prevent her ex from starting a new family. Hell Drivers (1957) was notable not for Cummins’s participation but for an early appearance by Sean Connery.
The horror film Night of the Demon (1957), directed by Jacques Tourneur and adapted from an MR James story, starred Cummins as Joanna, inquisitive niece of a professor (Maurice Denham) who dies in mysterious circumstances being investigated by Dr John Holden (Dana Andrews). She ended her film career in a Pinewood romp, In the Doghouse (1962), about the life of a London vet, Jimmy Fox-Upton (Leslie Phillips) – Cummins played half of a woman-and-chimp act.
In 1950 she had married the businessman Derek Dunnett, and together they ran a sheep farm in East Sussex. Cummins continued to make occasional stage and TV appearances, and was a regular at film screenings and conventions.
Derek died in 2000. She is survived by their son and daughter.
• Peggy Cummins, actor, born 18 December 1925; died 29 December 2017 Topics
IMDB entry:
Peggy Cummins was born on December 18, 1925 in Prestatyn, Denbighshire, Wales as Augusta Margaret Diane Fuller. She is an actress, known for Gun Crazy (1950), Curse of the Demon (1957) and Green Grass of Wyoming (1948). She was married to Derek Dunnett until his death and has two children.Her two best known films are known by alternate titles: Gun Crazy (1950) (aka “Gun Crazy”) and Curse of the Demon (1957) (aka “Curse of the Demon”).On June 14th, 2006 she appeared as guest of honour at a special screening of Curse of the Demon (1957) in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, UK. Looking slim and elegant and nowhere near her age, Peggy answered some questions from the audience before viewing the film for the first time.She went to America for the role of Amber in Forever Amber (1947), but production was suspended after a month for script work, during which time it was decided that she wasn’t well known enough to play the lead. She was replaced by Linda Darnell. Brian McFarlane’s entry in “Encyclopedia of British Film”:In films as a teenager, Cummins is now most famous for two American roles, one she was imported to play but in the event, did not “Forever Amber”and the other as a widly sensual young tearaway in “Gun Crazy” in 1949, a classic film noir. Nothing else in her career can touch this. She could have used some of it’s tough sexiness in “Hell Drivers” in 1957 an otherwise admirable British noir. She is though, always acceptable company in mild comedies like “English Without Tears” in 1943, the glamour arm of a con-team “Always A Bride” and “The Captain’s Table” made in 1958 when she still looked 18.
For interview in Hollywood in 2012, please click here.
