Henry Fonda was born in Nebraska and began his career on the New York stage. He made his first film “The Faromer Take a Wife” in 1935 and over the years had many career highlights including “Trail of the Lonesome Pine”, “Jezebel”, “Fort Apache”, “The Wrong Man”, “Mr Roberts” , “Once Upon A Time in the West” ,”Wings of the Morning” and “The Lady Eve”, Towards the end of his career he received an Oscar for his performance in “On Golden Pond” opposite Katharine Hepburn and his daughter Jane Fonda.
“The Times” obituary :
Obituary
Mr Henry Fonda
Distinguished contribution to the American cinema
Henry Fonda, who died yesterday in Los Angeles at the age of 77, was one of America’s most distinguished screen actors. Though occasionally cast as the villain, his screen image was essentially heroic: he was the man of integrity, the voice of reason, the upholder of justice. He brought to his work an intelligence and a quiet emotional power that marks him off completely from the men of action like John Wayne. Even if they had done wrong, like Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, is characters were basically sympathetic, and were often victims in turn.
His harrowing portrayal of the innocent musician who is a victim of mistaken identity in Hitchcock‘s The Wrong Man saw this scapegoat theme pushed to the extreme; he was equally effective as the juror who manages to talk his eleven colleagues out of their prejudices in Twelve Angry Men. He was a tall, athletic slightly gauche figure — particularly in the early films — with a distinctive mid-western voice. Surprisingly, he had to wait until this year for a best actor Oscar.
Fonda was born in Grand Island, Nebraska, on May 16, 1905 and started his acting career with the Omaha Community Playhouse. He turned professional in 1928 and later joined the University Players Guild, where his colleagues included James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan (his first wife) and Joshua Logan. His first New York appearance was a walk-on in 1929 but he soon graduated to leading roles.
His big chance came with New Faces of 1934 and the following year his film debut in the screen version of another Broadway success, The Farmer Takes A Wife. He had the distinction of appearing in the first outdoor Technicolor film, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, and first British film in Technicolor, Wings of the Morning.
He progressed through Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once, playing a criminal on the ran, two pictures with Bette Davis, That Certain Woman and Jezebel, and the Western, Jesse James, to Young Mr Lincoln in 1939. Fonda’s portrayal of the early life of the great President not only consolidated his growing reputation but marked the beginning of an association with the director, John Ford, which was to embrace some of the best work of both men.
Fonda’s Tom Joad in Ford’s version of The Grapes of Wrath is one of the cinema’s great performances, though it was Jane Darwell as the mother of the tragic dustbowl victims who collected the Oscar. Fonda later played a serene Wyatt Earp in Ford’sMy Darling Clementine, the whisky priest in The Fugitive (Ford’s controversial attempt to translate Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory to the screen) and, somewhat against type, the Custer-like commander leading his men into massacre in Fort Apache.
But these were by no means the only peaks of Fonda’s career. He showed a considerable gift for comedy playing opposite Barbara Stanwyck in the Preston Sturges picture, The Lady Eve, and spoke up movingly but unavailingly against the lynch-mob in Wellman’s uncompromising Western, The Ox-Bow Incident. He served in the United States Navy in the Second World War, returning to make Clementine and a new version of the Jean Gabin classic, Le Jour se Leve.
Then in 1948, at the height of his fame, Fonda deliberately turned his back on Hollywood and returned to the New York stage. He was fortunate enough to have three hits in a row: Mister Roberts, about the crew of a wartime cargo ship, which ran for three years; Point of No Return; and The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. It was the film version of Mister Roberts that finally brought Fonda back to Hollywood after a gap of seven years, the director, John Ford, insisting that he should have the part rather than William Holden or Marlon Brando. Ironically, Fonda and Ford quarrelled so violently during the making of the film that they did not work together again.
Mister Roberts was such a success that Fonda’s film career resumed almost where it left off, though he had passed his fiftieth year and the engaging gaucheness of his youth was no longer an asset he could draw upon; instead he became the pillar of integrity. Though he was generally considered miscast, his performance as Pierre in the 1956 War and Peace was one of the best features of that epic, and there followed The Wrong Man, Twelve Angry Men (which Fonda produced) and two strong Westerns, The Tin Star and Warlock.
After this he returned once more to Broadway and his film appearances became less frequent and, on the whole, less distinguished. The highlights were perhaps his three political films of the early 1960s, Advise and Consent (as the Secretary of State), The Best Man (as the presidential candidate fighting a reactionary and unscrupulous opponent) and Fail Safe (as the President of the United States facing the ultimate nightmare of a nuclear war). The last film was unfortunate to be released in the wake of Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, which handled the same theme as black comedy, and Fonda’s powerful, yet low-key performance tended to be undervalued.
Fonda’s later work in the cinema was uneven and he seemed sometimes to have difficulty finding suitable parts. He played policemen in The Boston Strangler and Madigan and tried his hand, rather unsuccessfully, at comedy Westerns like Big Hand for a Little Lady, Firecreek and The Cheyenne Social Club (the last two with James Stewart, his friend from early stock company days). And for once in his career he went completely against the grain and played a total villain in the Italian-made Western,Once Upon a Time in the West. But competent though all these roles were, they left Fonda’s admirers yearning for the great days of the late 1930s and 1940s and it is likely that his fame will ultimately rest on his best films of this period.
In 1974 he was given a heart pacemaker but in the same year he embarked upon a punishing one-man show in the theatre, as the lawyer Clarence Darrow. The play ran successfully both on Broadway and at the Piccadilly Theatre in London. Fonda also continued to make films but none added to his reputation until he appeared with another veteran, Katherine Hepburn, in On Golden Pond, a sentimental piece about a retired professor and his family. He was a popular choice for the 1982 Oscar but he had been virtually bedridden since undergoing heart surgery the previous year and was not well enough to attend the ceremony.
So often a figure of repose on the screen, Fonda had a tempestuous private life. He was married five times and his second wife, Frances Brokaw — mother of his children, Jane and Peter — committed suicide. Jane and Peter became film stars in their own right and their political radicalism was at one time the cause of a rift with their father.
Ingrid Bergman won three Oscars, “Gaslight”, “Anastasia” and “Murder on the Orient Express. She began her career in her native Sweden and became a top Hollywood star in the 1940’s. At the heigth of her fame in 1949 she left Hollywood and made films in Italy. She returned to the U.S. in 1956 and resumed her international career. She died on her 67th birthday in London. Her most iconic role is as Ilsa Lund in “Casablanca” opposite Humphrey Bogart.
TCM Overview:
A highly popular actress known for her fresh, radiant beauty, Ingrid Bergman was a natural for virtuous roles but equally adept at playing notorious women. Either way, she had few peers when it came to expressing the subtleties of romantic tension. In 1933, fresh out of high school, she enrolled in the Royal Dramatic Theater and made her film debut the following year, soon becoming Sweden’s most promising young actress. Her breakthrough film was Gustaf Molander’s “Intermezzo” (1936), in which she played a pianist who has a love affair with a celebrated–and married–violinist. The film garnered the attention of American producer David O. Selznick, who invited her to Hollywood to do a remake. In 1939 she co-starred with Leslie Howard in that film, which the public loved, leading to a seven-year contract with Selznick
“New York Times” obituary:
Ingrid Bergman, the three-time Academy Award-winning actress who exemplified wholesome beauty and nobility to countless moviegoers, died of cancer Sunday at her home in London on her 67th birthday.
Miss Bergman had been ill for eight years. Despite this, she played two of her most demanding roles in this period, a concert pianist in Ingmar Bergman’s ”Autumn Sonata” and Golda Meir, the Israeli Prime Minister in ”A Woman Called Golda.” her last role.
Miss Bergman said in an interview earlier this year that she was determined not to let her illness prevent her from enjoying the remainder of her life.
”Cancer victims who don’t accept their fate, who don’t learn to live with it, will only destroy what little time they have left,” she said. Miss Bergman added that she had to push herself to play the role of Golda Meir: ”I honestly didn’t think I had it in me. But it has been a wonderful experience, as an actress and as a human being who is getting more out of life than expected.”
Lars Schmidt, a Swedish producer from whom Miss Bergman was divorced in 1975, was with her at the time of her death. Incandescent, the critics called Ingrid Bergman. Or radiant. Or luminous. They said her performances were sincere, natural. Sometimes a single adjective was not enough. One enraptured writer saw her as ”a breeze whipping over a Scandinavian peak.” Kenneth Tynan needed an essay before he distilled her quality down to a sort of electric transmission of ”I need you” that registered instantly upon yearning audiences.
At the heart of the Swedish star’s monumental box-office magnetism was the kind of rare beauty that Hollywood cameramen call ”bulletproof angles,” meaning it can be shot from any angle.
Her beauty was so remarkable that it sometimes seemed to overshadow her considerable acting talent. The expressive blue eyes, wide, fulllipped mouth, high cheekbones, soft chin and broad forehead projected a quality that combined vulnerability and courage; sensitivity and earthiness, and an unending flow of compassion.
It all seemed so natural that not until she was well into middle age, in Ingmar Bergman’s taxing ”Autumn Sonata” in 1978, did many of her fans fully realize the talent, work and intelligence that were behind the performances that won her three Academy Awards.
She was honored as best actress for her roles in ”Gaslight” in 1944 and ”Anastasia” in 1956, and as best supporting actress in ”Murder on the Orient Express” in 1974.
In temperament, Miss Bergman was different from most Hollywood superstars. She did not indulge in tantrums or engage in harangues with directors. If she had a question about a script, she asked it without fuss. She could be counted on to be letter perfect in her lines before she faced the camera. And during the intervals between scenes, her relaxing smile and hearty laugh were as unaffected as her low-heeled shoes, long walking stride and minimal makeup.
Yet this even-tempered and successful actress, who was apparently happily married, became involved in a scandal that rocked the movie industry, forced her to stay out of the United States for seven years and made her life as tempestuous as many of her roles. In a sense, she became a barometer of changing moral values in the United States.
In 1949 she fell in love with Roberto Rossellini, the Italian film director, and had a child by him before she could obtain a divorce from her husband, Dr. Peter Lindstrom, and marry the director.
Symbol of Moral Perfection
Before the scandal, millions of Americans had been moved by her performances in such box-office successes as ”Intermezzo,” ”For Whom the Bell Tolls,” ”Gaslight,” ”Spellbound,” ”The Bells of St. Mary’s,” ”Notorious” and ”Casablanca,” roles that had made her, somewhat to her annoyance, a symbol of moral perfection.
”I cannot understand,” she said, long before the scandal, ”why people think I’m pure and full of nobleness. Every human being has shades of bad and good.”
Suddenly, in 1949, the American public that had elevated her to the point of idolatry cast her down, vilified her and boycotted her films. She was even condemned on the floor of the United States Senate.
Then, seven years after she had fallen from grace in this country, she returned to gather new acclaim and honors for her acting, and she never again suffered any noticeable loss of favor as an actress or as a person. But she spent nearly all of her remaining working life in Europe, sometimes for American movie companies.
So complete was Miss Bergman’s victory that Senator Charles H. Percy, Republican of Illinois, entered into the Congressional Record, in 1972, an apology for the attack made on her 22 years earlier in the Senate by Edwin C. Johnson, Democrat of Colorado.
By this time Miss Bergman had already expressed publicly her feelings and philosophy. Upon her return to the United States in 1956, for the first time since her departure, she told a jammed airport press conference, in English, Swedish, German, French and Italian:
”I have had a wonderful life. I have never regretted what I did. I regret things I didn’t do. All my life I’ve done things at a moment’s notice. Those are the things I remember. I was given courage, a sense of adventure and a little bit of humor. I don’t think anyone has the right to intrude in your life, but they do. I would like people to separate the actress and the woman.”
Though her marriage to Mr. Rossellini fell apart less than two years later, she won custody of their three children Robertino, Isabella and Ingrid ; she never changed her attitude. And Miss Bergman continued to defend the films she made for him, though all were financial failures and received poor reviews in this country. The Rossellini debacles created a myth that before she worked for him she had only successes. Among her pre-Rossellini failures were ”Arch of Triumph,” ”Joan of Arc” and ”Under Capricorn,” all of which came immediately before she went to work for Mr. Rossellini.
It was Miss Bergman’s lifelong desire for artistic growth that drew her to Mr. Rossellini. She had been deeply moved by his films ”Open City” and ”Paisan,” which established him as a major force in neorealism. Money had never been enough for Miss Bergman. ”You don’t act for money,” she said. ”You do it because you love it, because you must.”
Even the Oscars she had won were not enough. On Broadway, her portrayal of Joan of Arc, in Maxwell Anderson’s ”Joan of Lorraine,” won her an Antoinette Perry award, the highest honor in the American theater. Audiences and critics could adore her love scenes with Humphrey Bogart in ”Casablanca” and with Cary Grant in ”Notorious.” But praise, too, was not enough.
”There is a kind of acting in the United States,” she said many years later, ”especially in the movies, where the personality remains the same in every part. I like changing as much as possible.”
This artistic need prompted her to write to Mr. Rossellini: ”I would make any sacrifice to appear in a film under your direction.” He leaped at the opportunity, rewrote a script he had intended for Anna Magnani, and went with Miss Bergman to the Italian island of Stromboli to make the film of that name.
While this movie was being made, she asked her husband for a divorce so she could marry Mr. Rossellini. He tried to block it, even after learning she was pregnant with the director’s child.
The first of her three children with the director was born, under a media siege, in Italy, seven days before she was remarried. Dr. Lindstrom, a neurosurgeon, won custody of their daughter, Pia, who subsequently became a well-known television reporter.
By 1957, she and Mr. Rossellini were separated, but before that Miss Bergman had begun a new phase in her career. She made ”Anastasia” for 20th Century-Fox and won her second Oscar in 1956, playing the mysterious woman who might or might not be the surviving daughter of Czar Nicholas II. She then won a television Emmy award for her performance of the tormented governess in a dramatization of Henry James’s ”The Turn of the Screw.” In 1958 she married Lars Schmidt, a successful Swedish theatrical producer.
Miss Bergman refused to be drawn into arguments about acting in movies, the theater and television. She enjoyed all three. In the movies, she said, one acted for one eye, the camera. In the theater, for a thousand eyes, the theater audience. Television was ”wonderful,” she said, allowing for the frenzied schedule.
Maturity strengthened her determination to be more selective in roles. This was one of the main reasons she returned to Broadway in 1967, after a 21-year absence, in the role of a mother disliked by her son in Eugene O’Neill’s ”More Stately Mansions.”
She had met the playwright in her Hollywood years, when, during a vacation from films, she played the prostitute in his ”Anna Christie” in theaters in New Jersey and on the West Coast. During another sabbatical from Hollywood, in 1940, she had made her Broadway stage debut as Julie in ”Liliom,” opposite Burgess Meredith.
Miss Bergman’s next growth period, which included stage performances of works by George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen and the role of the vengeful millionaire in the film version of ”The Visit,” was climaxed by the fulfillment of a 13-year effort to persuade Ingmar Bergman, the director, to let her work for him.
In his ”Autumn Sonata,” she gave what she considered her finest performance, as a middle-aged concert pianist who, during a brief visit to her married daughter, played by Liv Ullmann, engages in prolonged and tearful confrontations that reveal a complex and searing love-hate relationship. She was nominated for her fourth Oscar for this 1978 movie, and she said it might be her last role.
”I don’t want to go down and play little parts,” she said. ”This should be the end.” Miss Bergman always refused to play any part that required her to be nude or seminude. Although she was opposed to movie censorship, she considered nudity, particularly in love scenes, ugly, saying: ”Since the beginning of time, good theater has existed without nudity. Why change now?”
Miss Bergman was born in Stockholm on Aug. 29, 1915. Her mother, who was from Hamburg, Germany, died when Ingrid was three years old. As an only child, she learned to create imaginary friends. Her father, who had a camera shop, adored her and photographed her constantly, often in costume. He died when she was 13. She lived briefly with an unmarried aunt and then with an uncle and aunt who had five children.
At 17, although she was tall and somewhat ungainly – she was 5 feet 9 inches and weighed about 135 pounds – she auditioned successfully for the government-sponsored Royal Dramatic School.
Within seven years she was one of the leading movie stars in Sweden and had refused several offers from Hollywood. Finally, in 1939, at the age of 24, Miss Bergman agreed to do a film for David O. Selznick. It was ”Intermezzo,” with Leslie Howard. She returned to Sweden to her husband, who was then a dentist, and their daughter, Pia.
The film was so successful that Mr. Selznick, convinced he had found ”another Garbo,” persuaded her to return to Hollywood. Looking back on her career many years later, particularly on her feeling of youthful shyness and awkwardness, the actress said: ”I can do everything with ease on the stage, whereas in real life I feel too big and clumsy. So I didn’t choose acting. It chose me.” Miss Bergman is survived by her four children, who were reported to be flying to London yesterday for the funeral. The funeral will be ”a very quiet, family affair,” said Alfred Jackman, funeral director at Harrods, the London department store that is handling the arrangements. Mr. Jackman added, ”After cremation, her ashes may be taken back to Sweden.”
The Inn Of The Sixth Happiness, poster, US poster art, top from left: Ingrid Bergman, Curt Jurgens, Robert Donat, 1958. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Dorothy Malone obituary from “The Guardian” in 2018.
The Hollywood star Dorothy Malone, who has died aged 92, appeared in only a handful of works of distinction in a fairly lengthy career, however they are good enough to secure her place in film history. On those occasions when the role permitted, most notably in two flamboyant melodramas directed by Douglas Sirk, Written on the Wind (1956) and The Tarnished Angels (1957), Malone revealed what a talented performer she could be, one capable of projecting a potent blend of cynicism, sexuality and intelligence. However, she was probably most familiar to the general public as Constance MacKenzie in Peyton Place (1964-68), one of the first primetime TV soap operas.
In Written on the Wind, Malone played Marylee, an oil heiress, sister of an alcoholic playboy Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack). She’s in love with Kyle’s best friend Mitch (Rock Hudson), but he’s in love with Kyle’s pregnant wife Lucy (Lauren Bacall). Jealous, Marylee convinces Kyle that Lucy’s baby really belongs to Mitch. Her wild erotic dance to a loud mambo beat, intercut with scenes of her father’s fatal heart attack, is one of the great sequences of 1950s Hollywood melodrama. “It was a miracle that I got her to do the scene,” Sirk recalled. “She was very prudish … I even had to watch my language. If I said, ‘This scene needs more balls’, she’d walk off the set.” Malone, upstaging even Bacall, won the best supporting actress Oscar.
Sirk reunited Malone, Hudson and Stack for The Tarnished Angels, skilfully adapted from the William Faulkner novel Pylon. Stack played a daredevil pilot performing at air shows with Malone as his neglected parachutist wife. She is the film’s fulcrum – vulnerable, naïve and yet with a fierce sexuality – caught between her disillusioned husband and a run-down alcoholic journalist (Hudson). The latter reacts towards her with a mixture of lust and pity, bragging that he “sat up half the night discussing literature and life with a beautiful, half-naked blonde”.
Sincerely Yours, poster, Liberace, Dorothy Malone, Joanne Dru, 1955. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
She was born Dorothy Maloney in Chicago and brought up in Dallas, Texas, one of five children of Robert Maloney, an accountant, and his wife, Esther (nee Smith). She attended Ursuline Convent and Highland Park high school, both in Dallas. Following graduation, she studied at Southern Methodist University with the intention of becoming a nurse, but a role in a college play happened to catch the eye of an RKO talent scout and, aged 18, she was offered a Hollywood contract.Advertisement
The studio gave her nothing more than bit parts in eight movies for a year, so she switched to Warner Bros. Among Malone’s first films at Warners was Howard Hawks’s classic film noir The Big Sleep (1946) in which, despite appearing in a single sequence lasting a little over three minutes, she made a huge impact. The scene, which Hawks considered cutting because it was not indispensable to the complicated plot, was saved, according to the director, “just because the girl was so damn pretty”.
It involved the private eye Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart), on a case, popping into a bookshop run by Malone, to find out if she knows the suspicious owner of a rival bookshop across the road. She is bespectacled and wears her hair up – a Hollywood signifier of an intellectual – though she seems to be flirting with him. “You begin to interest me … vaguely,” she says. Marlowe starts to leave, but it is raining outside and when she says, “It’s coming down pretty hard out there,” something in her voice suggests she wants him to stay.
“You know, as it happens I have a bottle of pretty good rye in my pocket,” he says. “I’d a lot rather get wet in here.” She puts the closed sign on the door, lowers the shade, takes her glasses off and lets down her hair. “Looks like we’re closed for the rest of the afternoon,” she says. Audiences were left to make up their own minds about what happened next.
Unaccountably, what happened next in Malone’s career were parts that failed to exploit her subtle sensuality. She sang In the Still of the Night in the fanciful biopic of Cole Porter Night and Day (1946), and played “nice” girls in a string of film noirs and westerns, subverting her persona slightly in Raoul Walsh’s Colorado Territory (1949), the splendid western remake of his earlier gangster movie High Sierra. In it, Malone is the “good” girl who betrays her boyfriend, a wanted robber (Joel McCrea), in order to get the reward money.
Malone had a small but pivotal role as Kim Novak’s helpful neighbour in Richard Quine’s taut film noir Pushover (1954), before becoming a platinum blonde to play Doris Day’s sister in Young at Heart (1954), and the married woman with whom a soldier (Tab Hunter) has a fling while on leave in Walsh’s Battle Cry (1955). In contrast, Malone appeared to enjoy herself in one of her rare comedies, as a “lady cartoonist” in Frank Tashlin’s Artists and Models (1955), one of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’s better efforts.
After Written on the Wind and The Tarnished Angels, Malone’s career was on a new track with offers of more meaty roles such as those in two biopics: Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), in which she was convincingly unsympathetic as the first wife of the silent screen star Lon Chaney (James Cagney); and Too Much Too Soon (1958), riveting as Diana Barrymore, ruined by drink, drugs and bad relationships, and by being the daughter of the actor John Barrymore (Errol Flynn).
She followed these pictures with two intriguing multilayered psychological westerns, Edward Dmytryk’s Warlock (1959), in which Malone was Lily Dollar, arriving in the eponymous town, accusing the marshal (Henry Fonda) of murder; and Robert Aldrich’s The Late Sunset (1961), as the old flame of an outlaw (Kirk Douglas), not telling him soon enough that he is the father of her pretty teenage daughter (Carol Lynley).
Meanwhile, she had married Jacques Bergerac, Ginger Rogers’s ex-husband, in 1959. The stormy marriage lasted less than five years, with Malone winning custody of their two daughters, Mimi and Diane, after a bitter battle. After the divorce, her dynamic presence was felt mostly on the small screen, especially displaying her Sirkian credentials as a domineering mother in Peyton Place. However, after four years of much bickering with producers, she was written out of the show. She sued for breach of contract and eventually settled out of court.
After that she worked steadily in television, guest-starring in dozens of series, with occasional forays into films. Her last film role was as Hazel Dobkins, the family-murdering friend of Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) in Basic Instinct (1992).
Ms Malone married and divorced twice more. She is survived by her daughters, Mimi and Diane, six grandchildren, and her brother, Robert.
• Dorothy Malone (Dorothy Eloise Maloney), actor, born 30 January 1925; died 19 January 2018
Angela Lansbury was born in 1925 and is a British-American-Irish actress who has appeared in theatre, television, and film. Her career has spanned eight decades, much of it in the United States, and her work has attracted international acclaim.
Lansbury was born to Irish actress Moyna Macgill and English politician Edgar Lansbury, an upper-middle-class family in Regent’s Park, central London. To escape the Blitz, in 1940 she moved to the United States with her mother and two brothers, and studied acting in New York City. Proceeding to Hollywood in 1942, she signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and obtained her first film roles, in Gaslight (1944) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), earning her two Oscar nominations and a Golden Globe Award. She appeared in eleven further films for MGM, mostly in supporting roles, and after her contract ended in 1952 she began supplementing her cinematic work with theatrical appearances. Although largely seen as a B-list star during this period, her appearance in the film The Manchurian Candidate (1962) received widespread acclaim and is cited as being one of her finest performances. Moving into musical theatre, Lansbury finally gained stardom for playing the leading role in the Broadway musical Mame (1966), which earned her a range of awards.
Amid difficulties in her personal life, Lansbury moved from California to County Cork, Ireland in 1970, and continued with a variety of theatrical and cinematic appearances throughout that decade. These included leading roles in the stage musicals Gypsy, originating the role of Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd, and The King and I, as well as in the hit Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). Moving into television, she achieved worldwide fame as fictional writer and sleuth Jessica Fletcher in the American whodunitseries Murder, She Wrote, which ran for twelve seasons from 1984 until 1996, becoming one of the longest-running and most popular detective drama series in television history. Through Corymore Productions, a company that she co-owned with her husband Peter Shaw, Lansbury assumed ownership of the series and was its executive producer for the final four seasons. She also moved into voice work, thereby contributing to animated films such as Disney‘s Beauty and the Beast (1991). Since then, she has toured in a variety of international theatrical productions and continued to make occasional film appearances.
Lansbury was born to an upper middle class family on October 16, 1925. Although her birthplace has often been given as Poplar, East London, she has rejected this, asserting that while she had ancestral connections to Poplar, she was born in Regent’s Park, Central London. Her mother was Belfast-born actress Moyna Macgill (born Charlotte Lillian McIldowie), who regularly appeared on stage in the West End and who had also starred in several films. Her father was the wealthy English timber merchant and politician Edgar Lansbury, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and former mayor of the Metropolitan Borough of Poplar. Her paternal grandfather was the Labour Party leader and anti-war activist George Lansbury, a man whom she felt “awed” by and considered “a giant in my youth.” Angela had an older half sister, Isolde, who was the daughter of Moyna’s previous marriage to writer and director Reginald Denham. In January 1930, when Angela was four, her mother gave birth to twin boys, Bruce and Edgar, leading the Lansburys to move from their Poplar flat to a house in Mill Hill, North London; on weekends they would vacate to a rural farm in Berrick Salome, near Wallingford, Oxfordshire.[9]“I’m eternally grateful for the Irish side of me. That’s where I got my sense of comedy and whimsy. As for the English half–that’s my reserved side … But put me onstage, and the Irish comes out. The combination makes a good mix for acting.”
When Lansbury was nine, her father died from stomach cancer; she retreated into playing characters as a coping mechanism. In 2014, Lansbury described this event as “the defining moment of my life. Nothing before or since has affected me so deeply.” Facing financial difficulty, her mother became engaged to a Scottish colonel, Leckie Forbes, and moved into his house in Hampstead, with Lansbury receiving an education at South Hampstead High School from 1934 until 1939. She nevertheless considered herself largely self-educated, learning from books, theatre and cinema. She became a self-professed “complete movie maniac”, visiting the cinema regularly and imagining herself as certain characters. Keen on playing the piano, she briefly studied music at the Ritman School of Dancing, and in 1940 began studying acting at the Webber Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art in Kensington, West London, first appearing onstage as a lady-in-waiting in the school’s production of Maxwell Anderson‘s Mary of Scotland.
That year, Angela’s grandfather died, and with the onset of the Blitz, Macgill decided to take Angela, Bruce and Edgar to the United States; Isolde remained in Britain with her new husband, the actor Peter Ustinov. Macgill secured a job supervising sixty British children who were being evacuated to North America aboard the Duchess of Athol, arriving with them in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in mid-August. From there, she proceeded by train to New York City, where she was financially sponsored by a Wall Street businessman, Charles T. Smith, moving in with his family at their home at Mahopac, New York. Lansbury gained a scholarship from the American Theatre Wing allowing her to study at the Feagin School of Drama and Radio, where she appeared in performances of William Congreve‘s The Way of the World and Oscar Wilde‘s Lady Windermere’s Fan. She graduated in March 1942, by which time the family had moved to a flat in Morton Street, Greenwich Village.
Macgill secured work in a Canadian touring production of Tonight at 8.30, and was joined in Canada by her daughter, who gained her first theatrical job as a nightclub act at the Samovar Club, Montreal. Having gained the job by claiming to be 19 when she was 16, her act consisted of her singing songs by Noël Coward, and earned her $60 a week. She returned to New York City in August 1942, but her mother had moved to Hollywood, Los Angeles, in order to resurrect her cinematic career; Lansbury and her brothers followed. Moving into a bungalow in Laurel Canyon, both Lansbury and her mother obtained Christmas jobs at the Bullocks Wilshire department store in Los Angeles; Moyna was sacked for incompetence, leaving the family to subsist on Lansbury’s wages of $28 a week. Befriending a group of gay men, Lansbury became privy to the city’s underground gay scene, and with her mother, attended lectures by the spiritual guru Jiddu Krishnamurti; at one of these, she met Aldous Huxley.
At a party hosted by her mother, Lansbury met John van Druten, who had recently co-authored a script for Gaslight (1944), a mystery-thriller based on Patrick Hamilton‘s 1938 play, Gaslight. Set in VictorianLondon, the film was being directed by George Cukor, and starred Ingrid Bergman in the lead role of Paula Alquist, a woman being psychologically tormented by her husband. Van Druten suggested that Lansbury would be perfect for the role of Nancy Oliver, a conniving cockney maid; she was accepted for the part, although, since she was only 17, a social worker had to accompany her on the set. Obtaining an agent, Earl Kramer, she was signed to a seven-year contract with MGM, earning $500 a week and using her real name as her professional name. Upon release, Gaslight received mixed critical reviews, although Lansbury’s role was widely praised; the film earned six Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Supporting Actress for Lansbury.
Her next film appearance was as Edwina Brown, the older sister of Velvet Brown in National Velvet (1944); the film proved to be a major commercial hit, with Lansbury developing a lifelong friendship with co-star Elizabeth Taylor. Lansbury next starred in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), a cinematic adaptation of Oscar Wilde‘s 1890 novel of the same name, which was again set in Victorian London. Directed by Albert Lewin, Lansbury was cast as Sibyl Vane, a working class music hall singer who falls in love with the protagonist, Dorian Gray (Hurd Hatfield). Although the film was not a financial success, Lansbury’s performance once more drew praise, earning her a Golden Globe Award, and she was again nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Academy Awards, losing to Anne Revere, her co-star in National Velvet.
On September 27, 1945, Lansbury married Richard Cromwell, an artist and decorator whose acting career had come to a standstill. The marriage ended in less than a year when she filed for divorce on September 11, 1946, but they remained friends until his death. In December 1946, she was introduced to fellow English expatriate Peter Pullen Shaw at a party held by former co-star Hurd Hatfield in Ojai Valley. Shaw was an aspiring actor, also signed to MGM.
Following the success of Gaslight and The Picture of Dorian Gray, MGM cast Lansbury in eleven further films until her contract with the company ended in 1952. Keeping her among their B-list stars, MGM used her less than their similar-aged actresses; biographers Edelman and Kupferberg believed that the majority of these films were “mediocre”, doing little to further her career. This view was echoed by Cukor, who believed Lansbury had been “consistently miscast” by MGM. She was repeatedly made to portray older women, often villainous, and as a result became increasingly dissatisfied with working for MGM, commenting that “I kept wanting to play the Jean Arthur roles, and Mr Mayer kept casting me as a series of venal bitches.” The company themselves were suffering from the post-1948 slump in cinema sales, as a result slashing film budgets and cutting their number of staff.
In April 1953, her daughter Deirdre Angela Shaw was born. Shaw had a son by a previous marriage, David, and after gaining legal custody of the boy in 1953 he brought him to California to live with the family; with three children to raise, the Shaws moved to a larger house on San Vincente Boulevard in Santa Monica. However, Lansbury did not feel entirely comfortable in the Hollywood social scene, later asserting that as a result of her British roots, “in Hollywood, I always felt like a stranger in a strange land.” In 1959 the family moved to Malibu, settling into a house on the Pacific Coast Highway that had been designed by Aaron Green; there, she and Peter escaped the Hollywood scene, and were able to send their children to a local public school.
Unhappy with the roles she was being given by MGM, Lansbury instructed her manager, Harry Friedman of MCA Inc., to terminate her contract in 1952, in the same year that her son Anthony was born. Soon after the birth she joined the East Coast touring productions of two former-Broadway plays: Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse‘s Remains to be Seen and Louis Verneuil‘s Affairs of State. Biographer Margaret Bonanno later stated that at this point, Lansbury’s career had “hit an all-time low,”
Returning to cinema as a freelance actress, Lansbury found herself typecast as women older (sometimes far older) than herself in many films in which she appeared during this period. As she later stated, “Hollywood made me old before my time,” noting that in her twenties she was receiving fan mail from people who believed her to be in her forties. She obtained roles in the films A Life at Stake (1954), A Lawless Street (1955) and The Purple Mask (1955), later describing the last as “the worst movie I ever made.” She played Princess Gwendolyn in the comedy film The Court Jester (1956), before taking on the role of a wife who kills her husband in Please Murder Me (1956). From there she appeared as Minnie Littlejohn in The Long Hot Summer (1958), and as Mabel Claremont in The Reluctant Debutante (1958), which she filmed in Paris. Biographer Martin Gottfried said that it was these latter two cinematic appearances which restored Lansbury’s status as an “A-picture actress”. Throughout this period, she continued making appearances on television, starring in episodes of Revlon Mirror Theatre, Ford Theatre and The George Gobel Show, and became a regular on game show Pantomime Quiz.
In April 1957 she debuted on Broadway at the Henry Miller Theatre in Hotel Paradiso, a French burlesque set in Paris, directed by Peter Glenville. The play only ran for 15 weeks, although she earned good reviews for her role as “Marcel Cat”. She later stated that had she not appeared in the play, her “whole career would have fizzled out.” She followed this with an appearance in 1960s Broadway performance of A Taste of Honey at the Lyceum Theatre, directed by Tony Richardson and George Devine. Lansbury played Helen, the boorish, verbally abusive, otherwise absentee mother of Josephine (played by Joan Plowright, only four years Lansbury’s junior), remarking that she gained “a great deal of satisfaction” from the role. During the show’s run, Lansbury developed a friendship with Plowright, as well as with Plowright’s future husband, Laurence Olivier.
Lansbury first appeared in musical theatre in 1964 at the Majestic Theatre on Broadway.
Her rare sympathetic role as Mavis in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960) drew critical acclaim, as did her performances as sinister characters in All Fall Down (1962), as a manipulative, destructive mother, and the Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1962) as the scheming ideologue Mrs. Iselin. In the latter, she was cast for the role by John Frankenheimer based on her performance in All Fall Down. Lansbury was only three years older than actor Laurence Harvey who played her son in the film. She had agreed to appear in the film after reading the original novel, describing it as “one of the most exciting political books I ever read.” Biographers Edelman and Kupferberg considered this role “her enduring cinematic triumph,” while Gottfried stated that it was “the strongest, the most memorable and the best picture she ever made … she gives her finest film performance in it.” Lansbury received her third Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination for the film, and was bothered by the fact that she lost.
She followed this with a performance as Sybil Logan in In the Cool of the Day (1963) before appearing as wealthy Isabel Boyd in The World of Henry Orient (1964) and the widow Phyllis in Dear Heart (1964). Her first appearance in a theatrical musical was the short-lived Anyone Can Whistle, written by Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim. An experimental work, it opened at the Majestic Theatre on Broadway in April 1964, but was critically panned and closed after nine performances. Lansbury had played the role of crooked mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper, and although she loved Sondheim’s score she faced personal differences with Laurents and was glad when the show closed. She appeared in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), a cinematic biopic of Jesus, but was cut almost entirely from the final edit. She followed this with an appearance as Mama Jean Bello in Harlow (1965), as Lady Blystone in The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965), and as Gloria in Mister Buddwing (1966). Despite her well-received performances in a number of films, “celluloid superstardom” evaded her, and she became increasingly dissatisfied with these minor roles, feeling that none allowed her to explore her potential as an actress.
In 1966, Lansbury took on the title role of Mame Dennis in the musical Mame, Jerry Herman‘s musical adaptation of the novel Auntie Mame. The director’s first choice for the role had been Rosalind Russell, who played Mame in the non-musical film adaptation Auntie Mame, but she had declined. Lansbury actively sought the role in the hope that it would mark a change in her career. When she was chosen, it came as a surprise to theatre critics, who believed that it would go to a better-known actress; Lansbury was forty-one years old, and it was her first starring role. Mame Dennis was a glamorous character, with over twenty costume changes throughout the play, and Lansbury’s role involved ten songs and dance routines which she trained extensively for. First appearing in Philadelphia and then Boston, Mame opened at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway in May 1966. Auntie Mame was already popular among the gay community, and Mame gained Lansbury a cult gay following, something that she later attributed to the fact that Mame Dennis was “every gay person’s idea of glamour … Everything about Mame coincided with every young man’s idea of beauty and glory and it was lovely.”I was a wife and a mother, and I was completely fulfilled. But my husband recognised the signals in me which said ‘I’ve been doing enough gardening, I’ve cooked enough good dinners, I’ve sat around the house and mooned about what more interior decoration I can get my fingers into.’ It’s a curious thing with actors and actresses, but suddenly the alarm goes off. My husband is a very sensitive person to my moods and he recognised the fact that I had to get on with something. Mame came along out of the blue just at this time. Now isn’t that a miracle?”
Reviews of Lansbury’s performance were overwhelmingly positive. In The New York Times, Stanley Kauffmann wrote: “Miss Lansbury is a singing-dancing actress, not a singer or dancer who also acts … In this marathon role she has wit, poise, warmth and a very taking coolth.” The role resulted in Lansbury receiving her first Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical. Lansbury’s later biographer Margaret Bonanno claimed that Mame made Lansbury a “superstar”, with the actress herself commenting on her success by stating that “Everyone loves you, everyone loves the success, and enjoys it as much as you do. And it lasts as long as you are on that stage and as long as you keep coming out of that stage door.”
The stardom achieved through Mame allowed Lansbury to make further appearances on television, such as on Perry Como‘s Thanksgiving Special in November 1966. Her fame also allowed her to engage in a variety of high-profile charitable endeavors, for instance appearing as the guest of honor at the 1967 March of Dimes annual benefit luncheon. She was invited to star in a musical performance for the 1968 Academy Awards ceremony, and co-hosted that year’s Tony Awards with former brother-in-law Peter Ustinov.[82] That year, Harvard University‘s Hasty Pudding Club elected her “Woman of the Year”. When the film adaptation of Mame was put into production, Lansbury hoped to be offered the part, but it instead went to Lucille Ball, an established box-office success. Lansbury considered this to be “one of my bitterest disappointments”.
Lansbury followed the success of Mame with a performance as Countess Aurelia, the 75-year-old Parisian eccentric in Dear World, a musical adaptation of Jean Giraudoux‘s The Madwoman of Chaillot. The show opened at Broadway’s Mark Hellinger Theatre in February 1969, but Lansbury found it a “pretty depressing” experience. Reviews of her performance were positive, and she was awarded her second Tony Award on the basis of it. Reviews of the show more generally were critical, however, and it ended after 132 performances. She followed this with an appearance in the title role of the musical Prettybelle, which was based upon Jean Arnold’s The Rape of Prettybelle. Set in the Deep South, it dealt with issues of racism, with Lansbury as a town mayor. A controversial play, it opened in Boston but received poor reviews, being cancelled before it reached Broadway.
In the 1970s, Lansbury declined several cinematic roles, including the lead in The Killing of Sister George and the role of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Instead, she accepted the role of the Countess von Ornstein, an aging German aristocrat who falls in love with a younger man, in Something for Everyone (1970), for which she filmed on location in Hohenschwangen, Bavaria. That same year she appeared as the middle-aged English witch Eglantine Price in the Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks; this was her first lead in a screen musical, and led to her publicising the film on television programmes like the David Frost Show. She later noted that as a big commercial hit, this film “secured an enormous audience for me”. 1970 was a traumatic year for the Lansbury family, as Peter underwent a hip and in September the family’s Malibu home was destroyed in a brush fire. They then purchased Knockmourne Glebe, a farmhouse constructed in the 1820s which was located near the village of Conna in rural County Cork, and Anthony subsequently enrolled in the Webber-Douglas School, his mother’s alma mater, and became a professional actor, before moving into television directing. Lansbury and her husband did not return to California, instead dividing their time between County Cork and New York City. “[In Ireland, our gardener] had no idea who I was. Nobody there did. I was just Mrs. Shaw, which suited me down to the ground. I had absolute anonymity in those days, which was wonderful.”
In 1972, Lansbury returned to London’s West End to perform in the Royal Shakespeare Company‘s theatrical production of Edward Albee‘s All Over at the Aldwych Theatre. She portrayed the mistress of a dying New England millionaire, and although the play’s reviews were mixed, Lansbury’s acting was widely praised. This was followed by her reluctant involvement in a revival of Mame, which was then touring the United States, after which she returned to the West End to play the character of Rose in the musical Gypsy. She had initially turned down the role, not wishing to be in the shadow of Ethel Merman, who had portrayed the character in the original Broadway production, but eventually accepted it; when the show started in May 1973, she earned a standing ovation and rave reviews.[101] Settling into a Belgravia flat, she was soon in demand among London society, having dinners held in her honour. Following the culmination of the London run, in 1974 Gypsy went on a tour of the U.S., and in Chicago Lansbury was awarded the Sarah Siddons Award for her performance. The show eventually reached Broadway, where it ran until January 1975; a critical success, it earned Lansbury her third Tony Award. After several months’ break, Gypsy then toured throughout the country again in the summer of 1975.
Desiring to move on from musicals, Lansbury decided that she wanted to appear in a production of one of William Shakespeare‘s plays. She obtained the role of Gertrude in the National Theatre Company‘s production of Hamlet, staged at the Old Vic. Angela received the news that in November 1975 her mother had died in California; Lansbury had her mother’s body cremated and the ashes scattered near her own County Cork home. Her next theatrical appearance was in two one-act plays by Edward Albee, Counting the Ways and Listening, performed side by side at the Hartford Stage Company in Connecticut. Reviews of the production were mixed, although Lansbury was again singled out for praise. This was followed by another revival tour of Gypsy.
In April 1978, Lansbury appeared in 24 performances of a revival of The King and I musical staged at Broadway’s Uris Theatre; Lansbury played the role of Mrs Anna, replacing Constance Towers, who was on a short break. Her first cinematic role in seven years was as novelist and murder victim Salome Otterbourne in Death on the Nile (1978), an adaptation of Agatha Christie‘s 1937 novel of the same name that was filmed in both London and Egypt. In the film Lansbury starred alongside Ustinov and Bette Davis, who became a close friend. The role earned Lansbury the National Board of Review award for Best Supporting Actress of 1978.
In 1982, she took on the role of an upper middle class housewife who champions workers’ rights in A Little Family Business, a farce set in Baltimore in which her son Anthony also starred. It debuted at Los Angeles’ Ahmanson Theatre before heading on to Broadway’s Martin Beck Theatre. That year, Lansbury was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame, and the following year appeared in a Mame revival at Broadway’s Gershwin Theatre. Although Lansbury was praised, the show was a commercial flop, with Lansbury noting that “I realised that it’s not a show of today. It’s a period piece.”A small number of people have seen me on the stage. [Television] is a chance for me to play to a vast U.S. public, and I think that’s a chance you don’t pass up … I’m interested in reaching everybody. I don’t want to reach just the people who can pay forty-five or fifty dollars for a [theatre] seat.”
In March 1979, Lansbury first appeared as Nellie Lovett in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, a Stephen Sondheimmusical directed by Harold Prince. Opening at the Uris Theatre, she starred alongside Len Cariou as Sweeney Todd, the murderous barber in 19th century London. After being offered the role, she jumped on the opportunity due to the involvement of Sondheim in the project; she commented that she loved “the extraordinary wit and intelligence of his lyrics.” She remained in the role for fourteen months before being replaced by Dorothy Loudon; the musical received mixed critical reviews, although it earned Lansbury her fourth Tony Award and After Dark magazine’s Ruby Award for Broadway Performer of the Year. She returned to the role in October 1980 for a ten-month tour of six U.S. cities, with George Hearn playing the title character; the production was also filmed and broadcast on the Entertainment Channel.
Working prolifically in cinema, in 1979 Lansbury appeared as Miss Froy in The Lady Vanishes, a remake of Alfred Hitchcock‘s famous 1938 film. The following year she appeared in The Mirror Crack’d, another film based on an Agatha Christie novel, this time as Miss Marple, a sleuth in 1950s Kent. Lansbury hoped to get away from the depiction of the role made famous by Margaret Rutherford, instead returning to Christie’s description of the character; in this she created a precursor to her later role of Jessica Fletcher. She was signed to appear in two sequels as Miss Marple, but these were never made. Lansbury’s next film was the animated The Last Unicorn(1982), for which she provided the voice of the witch Mommy Fortuna.
Returning to musical cinema, she starred as Ruth in The Pirates of Penzance (1983), a film based on Gilbert and Sullivan‘s comic opera of the same name, and while filming it in London sang on a recording of The Beggar’s Opera. This was followed by an appearance as the grandmother in Gothic fantasy film The Company of Wolves (1984). Lansbury had also begun work for television, appearing in a 1982 television film with Bette Davis titled Little Gloria… Happy at Last. She followed this with an appearance in CBS‘s The Gift of Love: A Christmas Story (1983), later describing it as “the most unsophisticated thing you can imagine”. A BBC television film followed, A Talent for Murder (1984), in which she played a wheelchair-bound mystery writer; although describing it as “a rush job”, she agreed to do it in order to work with co-star Laurence Olivier. Two further miniseries featuring Lansbury appeared in 1984: Lace and The First Olympics: Athens 1896.
In 1983, Lansbury was offered 2 main television roles, one in a sitcom and the other in a detective series. Unable to do both, she chose to do the detective series despite the fact her agents had advised her to accept the sitcom. The series, Murder, She Wrote, centered on the character of Jessica Fletcher, a retired school teacher from the fictional town of Cabot Cove, Maine, who became a successful detective novelist after her husband’s death, also solving murders encountered during her travels. Lansbury described the character as “an American Miss Marple“. The series was created by Peter S. Fischer, Richard Levinson, and William Link, who had earlier had success with Columbo, and the role of Jessica Fletcher had been first offered to Jean Stapleton, who declined the role, as did Doris Day. The pilot episode, “The Murder of Sherlock Holmes,” premiered on CBS on September 30, 1984, with the rest of the first season airing on Sundays from 8 to 9 p.m. Although critical reviews were mixed, it proved highly popular, with the pilot having a Nielsen rating of 18.9 and the first season being rated top in its time slot. Designed as inoffensive family viewing, despite its topic the show eschewed depicting violence or gore, following the “whodunit” format rather than those of most contemporary U.S. crime shows; Lansbury herself commented that “best of all, there’s no violence. I hate violence.”
Lansbury was defensive about Jessica Fletcher, having creative input over the character’s costumes, makeup and hair, and rejecting pressure from network executives to put her in a relationship, believing that the character should remain a strong single female. When she believed that a scriptwriter had made Jessica do or say things that did not fit with the character’s personality, Lansbury ensured that the script was changed. She saw Jessica as a role model for older female viewers, praising her “enormous, universal appeal – that was an accomplishment I never expected in my entire life.” Lansbury biographers Rob Edelman and Audrey E. Kupferberg described the series as “a television landmark” in the U.S. for having an older female character as the protagonist, thereby paving the way for later series like The Golden Girls. Lansbury herself noted that “I think it’s the first time a show has really been aimed at the middle aged audience,” and although it was most popular among senior citizens, it gradually gained a younger audience. By 1991, one third of viewers were under age 50. It gained continually high ratings throughout most of its run, outdoing rivals in its time slot such as Steven Spielberg‘s Amazing Stories on NBC. In February 1987, a spin-off was produced, The Law & Harry McGraw, although it was short-lived. ‘I know why [Murder, She Wrote was a success]. There was never any blood, never any violence. And there was always a satisfying conclusion to a whodunit. The jigsaw was complete. And I loved Jessica’s everywoman character. I think that’s what made her so acceptable to an across-the-board audience.”
As the show went on, Lansbury assumed a larger role behind the scenes. In 1989, her own company, Corymore Productions, began co-producing the show with Universal. Nevertheless, she began to tire of the series, and in particular the long working hours, stating that the 1990–91 season would be the show’s last. She changed her mind after being appointed executive producer for the 1992–93 season, something that she felt “made it far more interesting to me.”For the 8th season, the show’s setting moved to New York City, where Jessica had taken a job teaching criminology at Manhattan University. The move was an attempt to attract younger viewers and was encouraged by Lansbury. Having become a “Sunday-night institution” in the U.S., the show’s ratings improved during the early 1990s, becoming a Top Five programme. However, CBS executives, hoping to gain a larger audience, moved it to Thursdays at 8pm, opposite NBC’s new sitcom, Friends. Lansbury was angry at the move, believing that it ignored the show’s core audience. The final episode of the series aired in May 1996, and ended with Lansbury voicing a “Goodbye from Jessica” message at the end.[148] Tom Shales wrote in The Washington Post, “The title of the show’s last episode, “Death by Demographics,” is in itself something of a protest. ‘Murder, She Wrote’ is partly a victim of commercial television’s mad youth mania.” At the time it tied the original Hawaii Five-O as the longest-running detective drama series in television history, and the role would prove to be the most successful and prominent of Lansbury’s career. Lansbury initially had plans for a Murder She Wrote television film that would be a musical with a score composed by Jerry Herman. While this project didn’t materialise, it was transformed into Mrs Santa Claus – in which Lansbury played Santa Claus‘ wife – which proved to be a ratings hit.
Throughout the run of Murder, She Wrote, Lansbury had continued making appearances in other television films, miniseries and cinema. In 1986, she co-hosted the New York Philharmonic‘s televised tribute to the centenary of the Statue of Liberty with Kirk Douglas. In 1986 she appeared as the protagonist’s mother in Rage of Angels: The Story Continues, and in 1988 portrayed Nan Moore – the mother of a victim of the real-life Korean Air Lines Flight 007 plane crash – in Shootdown; being a mother herself, she had been “enormously touched by the incident.” 1989 saw her featured in The Shell Seekers as an Englishwoman recuperating from a heart attack, and in 1990 she starred in The Love She Sought as an American school teacher who falls in love with a Catholic priest while visiting Ireland; Lansbury thought it “a marvelous woman’s story.”nShe next starred as the Cockney Mrs Harris in a film adaptation of the novel Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Paris, which was directed by her son and executive produced by her stepson. Her highest profile cinematic role since The Manchurian Candidate was as the voice of the singing teapot Mrs. Potts in the 1991 Disney animation Beauty and the Beast, an appearance that she considered to be a gift to her 3 grandchildren. Lansbury performed the title song to the film, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song and Grammy Award for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media.
Lansbury’s Murder, She Wrote fame resulted in her being employed to appear in advertisements and infomercials for Bufferin, MasterCard and the Beatrix Potter Company. In 1988, she released a video titled Angela Lansbury’s Positive Moves: My Personal Plan for Fitness and Well-Being, in which she outlined her personal exercise routine, and in 1990 published a book with the same title co-written with Mimi Avins, which she dedicated to her mother. As a result of her work she was appointed a CBE by the British government, given to her in a ceremony by the Prince of Wales at the British consulate in Los Angeles. While living most of the year in California, Lansbury spent Christmases and summers at Corymore House, her farmhouse overlooking the Atlantic Ocean at Ballywilliam, near Churchtown South, County Cork, which she had had specially built as a family home in 1991.
Actress Angela Lansbury clad in costume for role in the movie “The Court Jester,” eating a hamburger w. actor Basil Rathbone while sitting at lunch in large Paramount Studio commissary during a day of filming.
Following the end of Murder, She Wrote, Lansbury returned to the theatre. Although cast in the lead role in the 2001 Kander and Ebbmusical The Visit, she withdrew before it opened due to her husband’s deteriorating health. Peter died in January 2003 of congestive heart failure at the couple’s Brentwood, California home. Lansbury felt that after this event she would not take on any more major acting roles, and that instead might make a few cameo appearances but nothing more. Wanting to spend more time in New York City, in 2006 she purchased a $2 million condominium in Manhattan, and in a 2014 interview noted that she also had homes in Ireland and Los Angeles.
She made an appearance in a Season 6 episode of the television show Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, for which she was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2005. She starred in the 2005 film Nanny McPheeas Aunt Adelaide, commenting that it was “such fun to play a baddie!” and later informing an interviewer that working on Nanny McPhee “pulled me out of the abyss” after the loss of her husband. She then appeared in the 2011 film Mr. Popper’s Penguins, opposite Jim Carrey. Lansbury returned to Broadway after a 23-year absence in Deuce, a play by Terrence McNally that opened at the Music Box Theatre in May 2007 for a limited run of eighteen weeks. Lansbury received a Tony Award nomination for Best Leading Actress in a Play for her role.
Actress Angela Lansbury sitting on a chair, United States, 1946.
In March 2009 she returned to Broadway for a revival of Blithe Spirit at the Shubert Theatre, where she took on the role of Madame Arcati. Discussing the character, she stated: “I love her. She’s completely off-the-wall but utterly secure in her own convictions.” This appearance earned her the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play; this was her fifth Tony Award, tying her with the previous record holder for the number of Tony Awards, Julie Harris, albeit all of Harris’ Tonys were for Best Leading Actress. From December 2009 to June 2010, Lansbury then starred as Madame Armfeldt alongside Catherine Zeta-Jones in the first Broadway revival of A Little Night Music, held at the Walter Kerr Theatre. The role earned her a seventh Tony Award nomination, while in May 2010, she was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from Manhattan School of Music.
From April to July 2012, Lansbury starred as women’s rights advocate Sue-Ellen Gamadge in the Broadway revival of Gore Vidal‘s The Best Man at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre. From February to June 2013, Lansbury starred alongside James Earl Jones in an Australian tour of Driving Miss Daisy. In November 2013, she received an Academy Honorary Award for her lifetime achievement at the Governors Awards. From March to June 2014, Lansbury reprised her performance as Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit at the Gielgud Theatre in London’s West End, her first London stage appearance in nearly 40 years. While in London, she made an appearance at the Angela Lansbury Film Festival in Poplar, a screening of some of her most popular films organised by Poplar Film. From December 2014 to March 2015 she joined the tour of Blithe Spirit across North America.
In April 2015, aged 89, she received her first Olivier Award as Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Arcati, and in November 2015 was awarded the Oscar Hammerstein Award for Lifetime Achievement in Musical Theatre.
On June 2, 2016, it was officially announced that Lansbury would return to Broadway in the 2017–18 season in a revival of Enid Bagnold‘s 1955 play The Chalk Garden. The play was produced by Scott Rudin at a theatre to-be-announced. However, in an interview published on September 20, 2016, Lansbury stated that she will not be performing in The Chalk Garden, stating, in part: “At my time of life, I’ve decided that I want to be with family more and being alone in New York doing a play requires an extraordinary amount of time left alone.”
Lansbury describes herself as “an amalgam of British, Irish and American” although throughout her life she has spoken with an English accent. She holds Irish citizenship. Biographer Martin Gottfried characterized her as “Meticulous. Cautious. Self-editing. Deliberate. It is what the British call reserved,”adding that she was “as concerned, as sensitive, and as sympathetic as anyone might want in a friend.”Also noting that she had “a profound sense of privacy,”he added that she disliked attempts at flattery.
As a young actress, Lansbury was a self-professed homebody, commenting that “I love the world of housekeeping.” She preferred spending quiet evenings inside with friends to the Hollywood night life. Her hobbies at the time included reading, horse riding, playing tennis, cooking and playing the piano, also having a keen interest in gardening. In 2014, it was reported that she continued to enjoy gardening, and also enjoyed doing crosswords. She has cited F. Scott Fitzgerald as her favorite author, and cited Roseanne and Seinfeld as being among her favorite television shows. Lansbury was an avid letter writer, doing so by hand and making copies of all her correspondences. At Howard Gotlieb’s request, Lansbury’s papers are housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.
Actress Angela Lansbury in the film The Harvey Girls
She is a supporter of the United States Democratic Party, describing herself as “Democrat from the ground up,” and the British Labour Party.Throughout her career, Lansbury supported a variety of charities, particularly those such as Abused Wives in Crisis that combated domestic abuse and those who worked toward rehabilitating drug users. In the 1980s, she began to support a number of charities engaged in the fight against HIV/AIDS. During the 1990s, she began to suffer from arthritis,in May 1994 had hip replacement surgery, and in 2005 had knee replacement surgery.
A 2007 interviewer for The New York Times described her as “one of the few actors it makes sense to call beloved,” noting that a 1994 article in People magazine awarded her a perfect score on its “lovability index.” The New Statesman noted that she “has the kind of pulling power many younger and more ubiquitous actors can only dream of, while an article in The Independent has suggested that she could be considered Britain’s most successful actress. She is a gay icon, and has asserted that she is “very proud of the fact,” attributing her popularity among the LGBT community to her performance in Mame.
Actress Angela Lansbury in the film The Harvey Girls
Three-time Oscar-nominated actress best known for playing Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote
Tuesday October 11 2022, 9.15pm BST, The Times
That Angela Lansbury’s most celebrated role came so late in her long career, playing the neat and elderly Jessica Fletcher, was perhaps no surprise.
“For those women who were known for their beauty, it is darn difficult,” she said of the ageist casting from which many of her fellow female actors suffered. “But I was playing older parts when I was terribly young because I wasn’t a big-screen beauty.”
In her twenties Lansbury was regularly cast to play women in their forties. In her forties she played the 75-year-old Countess Aurelia in the Broadway musical Dear World.
Directors seemed to regard her as an archetypal maternal figure. She was Elvis Presley’s mother in Blue Hawaii, even though she was only nine years older than the singer. In The Manchurian Candidate (1962), rated by many as her finest film role and one that led to her third Oscar nomination, she played Laurence Harvey’s mother, although they were almost the same age. On Broadway she played a blowsy mother to her contemporary Joan Plowright in A Taste of Honey.
Maturity became her and from childhood she had felt a precocity beyond her years. She claimed to have become “an old lady at ten” after the death of her father and was forced “to grow up instantly” as she helped her mother to bring up younger twin brothers during the Depression and then the Blitz.
She played the novelist and amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote until she was in her seventies and when the show ended, she carried on working for another two decades.
Over a dozen years she appeared in 264 episodes of Murder, She Wrote and was reportedly paid more than $200,000 an episode, with 28 million people tuning in to watch it each week from 1984 until 1996. She called the character “as close to myself” as any she played. Something of a bluestocking in real life, she attributed her longevity to an unadventurous youth and carefully frugal lifestyle. “I take a lot of vitamins, get enough sleep and don’t drink apart from a glass of wine occasionally,” she said. “I am boringly good.”
She was by all accounts a lovely person. When in Cork she shopped locally, fitted right in and was part of the community where she spent a lot of summers and Christmases.
Mexico’s premier actress, Dolores Del Rio had a very long and successful career both in Hollywood and in her hone country. She made her screen debut in silent films in 1925 in the film “Joanna” and was still making fims in the 1960’s. Among her later films was Elvis Presley’s “Flaming Star” and John Ford’s Western elegy “Cheyanne Autumn”.She is widely regarded as one of the most beautiful women in cinema. She died in 1983
TCM Overview:
Easily one of the most beautiful women of her era and one of the most gorgeous people ever to make it to the ranks of film stardom. Del Rio’s career in the 1920s and 30s unfortunately suffered from too many exotic, two-dimensional roles designed with Hollywood’s cliched ideas of ethnic minorities in mind.
Dolores Del Rio
Her best-remembered film from this period is “Flying Down to Rio” (1933), which partnered Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers for the first time. One of her more interesting parts was her last American lead, in “Journey Into Fear” (1942), set up by and co-starring Del Rio’s then paramour, Orson Welles.
It took a return to the stage and screen in her native Mexico (where she won that country’s equivalent of a Best Actress Oscar four times and was lauded as “the first lady of Mexican theater”) and later Hollywood character parts (e.g., in John Ford’s “The Fugitive” 1947 and his “Cheyenne Autumn” 1964) for her talent to be fully displayed.
Interesting article on Ms Del Rio in the “Huffington Post” can be found here.
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Red Dance, poster, Dolores Del Rio, 1928. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
New York Times obituary in 1983:
Dolores Del Rio, an actress of remarkable beauty who became a film star in Hollywood and in her native Mexico, died Monday at her home in Newport Beach, Calif. She was 77 years old and had been in failing health.
During the days of silent films, Miss Del Rio’s face, elegant and expressive, made her one of Hollywood’s important actresses and one of its first Latin stars.
Her first big movie was ”What Price Glory,” the landmark film directed by Raoul Walsh in 1926, in which she portrayed a French peasant. Her first starring role was a portrayal of a Russian girl in ”Resurrection” in 1927. Her next starring role came in 1928 in ”Ramona,” the tragic story of a beauty of Spanish and Indian extraction.
Of ”Ramona,” Mordaunt Hall wrote in The New York Times: ”Miss Del Rio’s interpretation of Romona is an achievment. Not once does she overact, and yet she is perceived weeping and almost hysterical. She is most careful in all the moods of the character. Her beauty is another point in her favor.” Not a Spanish Actress
In Miss Del Rio’s first appearance on film, in ”Joanna” in 1925, she was billed as a ”Spanish actress,” a label that was changed to ”Mexican” only at her insistence.
The director Edwin Carewe, who discovered her, said that he wanted to avoid her being typecast. But ultimately, her career in the United States suffered because producers invariably cast her in ethnic and exotic roles. During the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, there was a spate of such films that included ”Girl of the Rio,” ”Revenge,” ”Bird of Paradise” and ”Loves of Carmen.’
Of her role in ”Carmen,” Mordaunt Hall wrote: ”The alluring Miss Del Rio, with her bright eyes, pretty lips and lithe figure, gives a decidedly unrestrained portrait of the faithless creature.”
With the advent of talking pictures, Miss Del Rio’s Latin accent hemmed her into such roles even more, although she was able to sustain an acceptable level of popularity in Hollywood through the early 1940’s. Returned to Mexico
In 1933, she introduced the two-piece swimsuit in ”Flying Down to Rio,” in which Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers teamed up for the first time. In the movie, Miss Del Rio and Mr. Astaire danced, in a memorable scene, to ” Orchids In the Moonlight.” In 1934, in ”Wonder Bar,” Al Jolson and Dick Powell competed for her affections. That same year she played the title role in ”Madame Du Barry,” the fetching mistress of Louis XV.
In 1943, after tiring of her glamour-girl image in Hollywood, Miss Del Rio returned to Mexico, where she enjoyed a much more rewarding career on screen and stage, and helped establish the Mexican film industry.
”Maria Candelaria,” the film of which she was said to be proudest, was one of the earliest serious movies made in Mexico. The Spanish-language film won the best picture award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1946. In it, she played an Indian peasant woman who is stoned to death by villagers because they believe she has modeled for a famous nude painting, though actually, she modeled only for the face. The film was directed by Emilio Fernandez.
One of her best-known roles was in the John Ford film ”The Fugitive,” made in Mexico in 1947. In it, she played an unwed Indian mother who aided a fugitive priest, played by Henry Fonda.
In the 1960’s, she returned to Hollywood to star in ”Flaming Star,” ”Cheyenne Autumn” and ”The Children of Sanchez,” an American-Mexican production. Daughter of a Banker
Miss Del Rio was born Lolita Dolores Martinez Asunsolo Lopez Negrette, the daughter of a banker. She was educated in a convent school?
In 1925, Mr. Carewe saw her at a dance in Mexico City and suggested that she had a future in movies. She was married three times, the first time at age 15 to Jaime Del Rio. The marriage ended before her career in Hollywood began. Her marriage in 1930 to the director Cedric Gibbons ended in divorce 11 years later, and she married Lewis Riley, a producer, who was with her when she died
Glenn Ford’s career is in definite need of reappraisal. He appeared in many quality movies throughout his years making movies. He starred in many different genre of film. His roles in two film noirs “The Big Heat” and “Of Human Desire” contain depths of complexity and ambiguity. In both his leading lady was the great Gloria Grahame. He made Westerns such as “Jubal” and comedy e.g. “Don’t Go Near the Water”. He died in 2006 at the age of 90. A biography on Glenn Ford was published in 2012.
“Guardian” obituary:
The hairstyles signposted Glenn Ford’s long and active career; from the full and wavy to the sleek, dark gigolo look, to the short back and sides, to a severe crewcut that gradually shrivelled like dry grass on the prairie. His face, that began boyish in prewar B films, hovered somewhere between the rugged handsomeness of William Holden and Tom Ewell’s Thurberesque one, allowing him to be extremely dour in films noirs or to display the righteous nobility of a lone western hero, while also being able to play perplexed characters in comedies.
For Ford, who has died aged 90, was a versatile Hollywood star able to shift genres while retaining his sincere screen persona. Although his realistic speech and timing seemed to owe something to the Method – he often had a mumbled and hesitant delivery – the closest he ever came to the Actors’ Studio was as Marlon Brando’s co-star in The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956).
Born in Quebec of Welsh descent, he was the son of a railroad executive and mill owner, the nephew of Sir John MacDonald, a former prime minister of Canada. Another Ford kinsman was Martin Van Buren, the eighth president of the United States. Ford had tried a variety of jobs, becoming interested in the theatre, and was acting on stage in California when he was signed to a contract with Columbia Pictures in 1939.
At the beginning of his career he was in a number of undistinguished B pictures – an exception being John Cromwell’s anti-Nazi drama So Ends Our Night (1941) – but the films improved and Ford stayed with the studio until the mid-1950s. This period was interrupted by war service in the US marines, part of his activities consisting in the training of French Resistance fighters. (He later became a commander in the US naval reserves and served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968.)
Matured from his war experiences, Ford, and millions of hot-blooded men all over the world, lusted after gorgeous Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946), as she peeled off her long black gloves in a symbolic striptease while singing Put the Blame on Mame. The sexual chemistry between the two stars was so strong on the set that Columbia mogul Harry Cohn, who considered Hayworth his private property, had microphones hidden in her dressing room in case she started an affair with her leading man. But they quickly found the mics and teased the eavesdropping boss with risqué conversations.
At the time, Ford was married to leggy, toothy dancer Eleanor Powell, who retired from the screen to become plain Mrs Glenn Ford in 1943. (They divorced in 1959.) Yet Cohn paired Hayworth and Ford again in the listless and Bizet-less The Loves of Carmen (1948), in which Rita was a sexy Gypsy to Ford’s stiff Don José, and also in Affair in Trinidad (1952), another exotic melodrama.
Among Ford’s best films at Columbia were the two he made for Fritz Lang. In The Big Heat (1953), the audience is made to discover and experience the events subjectively as Ford’s cop does, while he mercilessly conducts a retributive investigation into the death of his wife in a car bomb explosion. Ford’s achievement was in the creation of a cold and calculating yet sympathetic character, who permits himself some warmth on the death of the pathetic gangster’s moll (Gloria Grahame).
In the same team’s Human Desire (1954), an updating of Zola’s La Bête Humaine, already filmed by Jean Renoir in 1938, Ford’s steely passivity allowed the other performances to bounce off him effectively.
In 1955, he gained a crewcut and went over to MGM, where he made an immediate impact in The Blackboard Jungle as a novice New York schoolteacher confronted with a class of hooligans. It was also the film which effectively launched Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock on the world. Ford’s pipe-smoking intensity suited the liberal worthiness of the picture, as did his lawyer defending a Mexican boy accused of rape and murder in Trial, of the same year.
Ford then switched successfully to comedy as the affable, ineffectual occupation army officer Fishy in The Teahouse of the August Moon, trying to bring American-style democracy to Okinawa, but who goes native himself, and the bumbling navy PR man trying to do likewise on a South Pacific island in Don’t Go Near the Water (1957).
At the same time, Ford made three Delmer Davies westerns. There was the brooding Jubal (1956), in which he inspires the Othello-like jealousy of Ernest Borgnine; 3.10 to Yuma (1957), in one of his rare villain parts, and Cowboy (1958), as Jack Lemmon’s tough, drunken partner.
At his busiest in the 1950s and 1960s, Ford moved smoothly from the serious rodeo drama The Violent Men (1955) and the horse opera The Fastest Gun Alive (1956) to the biopic operatics of Interrupted Melody (1955) as the husband of a Wagnerian soprano stricken with polio, to the comedy western The Sheepman (1958) opposite Shirley Maclaine. He good-humouredly played Damon Runyon’s bootlegger Dave the Dude in Frank Capra’s farewell film, A Pocketful of Miracles (1961). However, in his autobiography, Capra petulantly blamed Ford for the heavy-handed production’s failure.
There followed two movies by Vincente Minnelli. The first was The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962), in which he was unhappily cast in Rudolph Valentino’s old role, but he exuded charm in the title role of The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1963) looking for a mother for the then nine-year-old future director Ron Howard.
In the 1970s, Ford was more occupied as the hero of the series Cade’s County on TV than on the big screen, but nevertheless he cropped up from time to time to walk down a dusty street with spurs jangling in minor westerns and cameos in TV series and war pictures. One of his last feature film appearances was as Pa Kent in Superman (1978), the muscle-bound hero’s adopted father. The critic Pauline Kael thought it inspired casting because Ford’s resources as an actor had contracted to the point where he had become a comic-book version of the good American.
Ford, who was married and divorced four times, is survived by his son by Eleanor Powell.
· Glenn (Gwyllyn Samuel Newton) Ford, actor, born May 1 1916; died August 30 2006
His obituary by Ronald Bergan in “The Guardian” can also be accessed online here.
Yul Brynner can claim two iconic roles to his credit. He will forever be associated with the musical “The King and I” where he played King Mongkut of Siam. He first played the role on Broadway in the early 1950’s and won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the film in 1956. His other celluloid image is as Chris Larabee Adams in the hugely popular “The Magnificent Seven”. For trivia fans, can you name the other six actors who formed the magnificent seven without checking on the internet.
His obituary in “Los Angeles Times:
Yul Brynner, who with shaved head and regally haughty presence played and replayed the starring role in “The King and I” for more than 30 years, died early today in a New York Hospital. He was 65.
With him when he died at 1 a.m. at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center were his wife, Kathy Lee, and his four children, said Josh Ellis, the actor’s spokesman.
“He died of multiple complications that came as a result of what was originally cancer,” Ellis said. “He faced death with a dignity and strength that astounded his doctors. He fought like a lion.”
“He was a remarkable person,” Charlton Heston, who starred with Brynner in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 movie epic “The Ten Commandments,” told the Associated Press. “His work in ‘King and I’ was beyond compare. He was a very special talent. I’m very sorry to hear of his death.”
FOR THE RECORD – Yul Brynner: The obituary of actor Yul Brynner in the Oct. 10, 1985, Section A reported his birth date as July 11, 1917. According to public records, he was born July 11, 1920.
Though there were other Broadway and movie roles for Brynner, it is doubtful that any successful actor of his time had been so associated with a single character as was Brynner with the arrogant, bombastic King of Siam.
None of Brynner’s other parts were nearly as memorable as the king. If he became typecast, it was something Brynner didn’t seem to mind. For one thing, there were certain physical limitations that kept him from a wider variety of parts.
“I would have liked to play Henry Higgins (in ‘My Fair Lady’),” he told a Times interviewer a decade ago, “but I couldn’t because of my accent and looks. Unless I did it with an Outer Mongolian touring company.”
For another, the money from the play, the movie, and the seemingly countless touring companies of the play made him a millionaire.
Born Taidje Khan on July 11, 1917, on the island of Sakhalin off northern Japan, Brynner was the son of a Mongolian mining engineer and a Gypsy mother who died at his birth. His father was born in Switzerland and later secured Swiss citizenship and changed the family name to Brynner.
For the first eight years of his life, young Yul lived in China, and then was sent by his father to live with his maternal grandmother in Paris, but she died soon afterward. He attended a Paris school for a time, but dropped out at the age of 13 and joined a Gypsy troupe as a traveling minstrel.
He worked as an acrobat in a French circus for three years, performing on the high trapeze. But after a bad injury, Brynner turned from the circus to the stage.
It was acting that brought Brynner to America, touring in a struggling Shakespearean troupe on college campuses. He added English and some Russian (learned from other actors) to his collection of languages that included French, Japanese and Hungarian while playing small parts and driving the troupe’s bus–all for $25 a week.
In February, 1946, he made his debut on Broadway, playing an Oriental prince opposite Mary Martin in “Lute Song.” After 142 performances, Brynner took the show on tour.
But Brynner had doubts about his ultimate success as an actor. Years later, he remembered one night on stage–long before “The King and I”–when an outraged theatergoer hit him with a shoe. “And it was a perfectly serviceable shoe,” he said. “The man must have really hated me.”
Brynner returned to New York in 1948, putting aside his stage acting ambitions and settling comfortably into the role of actor, director and producer in the fledgling television industry, ultimately directing episodes of “Studio One,” one of the more successful live, anthology television shows of the 1950s.
But Brynner fell in love with the script of “The King and I” when Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein offered him the role. Hammerstein had seen Brynner in “Lute Song,” thought well of him and was influenced by Martin’s recommendation.
Yul Brynner
The musical story of the imperious Thai king and the proper British teacher, Anna Leonowens, who went to Siam in the 1860s to instruct the king’s huge flock of offspring and then had to acclimate herself to his court habits of polygamy and bowing at ground-level, had a rocky start when it opened out of town in New Haven, Conn., in February, 1951.
“It was a disaster,” Brynner said in 1981. “It was almost five hours long. There was nothing but conflict between Anna and the King. . . . Rogers and Hammerstein understood immediately that unless there was an underlying fascination (between the two characters), then there really couldn’t be a fascinating show.”
With the book cut and sweetened, as well as a couple of new songs added (“Shall We Dance” and “Getting to Know You”) the show, starring Gertrude Lawrence and Brynner, opened in New York at the St. James Theater on March 29, 1951. It was a first-night hit.
“Richard Rodgers told me, ‘You opened. You have a hit. Now freeze it,’ ” he said in late 1984, just before opening in yet another Broadway revival of the show.
The above “Los Angeles Times” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Geraldine Fitzgerald started her career with the Gate theatre in the 1930’s in Dublin. She was soon starring in such British films as “The Mill on the Floss”. By 1938 she was in Hollywood. Her first two films !Wuthering Heights” with Laurence Oliver and “Dark Victory” with Bette Davis both released the following year are now regarded as classics. Unfortunately she turned town the role of Brigidet O’Shaugnessy opposite Humphrey Bogart in “The Maltese Falcon” and her cinema career as a leading lady never recovered.
Geraldine Fitzgerald went to Broadway and developed into a consummate theatre actress. In the 1960’s she returned to Hollywood and became a very powerful character actress. Her son by her first marriage is the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Her second marriage was to Stuart Scheftel the grandson o the founder of Macys Department Store in New York. Geraldine Fitzgerald died in 2005 after a long battle with Alzhelhimer’s disease at the age of 91. Her performances are always intriguing and worth seeking out. She is of course, heavily featured in her son director Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s autobiography “Luck and Circumstance”.
The great Tennessee Williams made these comments about Geraldine Fitzgerald in an interview he gave in 1982 in New Orleans :
There was such a richness of character in those movies–all those fascinating character actors. I fell in love with Geraldine Fitzgerald in Dark Victory and Wuthering Heights. So much intelligence in every move, and so much detail. Her acting is like a knife in that it is so sharp and gleaming and capable of cutting all that is extraneous. I can’t think of a time in those films–and in all the work I’ve seen her do since–when there was even an ounce of superfluous detail: She sticks that knife–that dagger–of talent right into the heart of whatever part she’s playing. And then she’s done.
“Hollywood Players:The Forties” by James Robert Parish:
Geraldine Fitzgerald was singularly fortunate in her first two American made films. She made an auspicious Hollywood debut as Isabella Linton the desperate girl who made a fool of herself over the Heathcliffe of Laurence Oliver in William Wyler’s unforgetable “Wuthering Heights” in 1939. She was Oscar nominated for her performance but lost out to Hattie McDaniel for :Gone with the Wind”. Her two 1939 American features were very distinguished productions and no young actress could have had a more successful beginning to her film career. However Geraldine never became a goddess of the silver screen as expected. One of the reasons for this is that she fought the studio system before she was in a position to do so. While under contract to Warner Brothers she felt she was been exploited and turned down many roles which resulted in her been suspended a number of times. This type of action had worked for Bette Davis, a good friend of Geraldines, but Ms Davis was already an important money earner for the studio and Geraldine was not. As Geraldine told columnist Rex Reed “Humphrey Bogart always told me, movies were like a slot machine. If you played long enough, you would eventually hit the jackpot. which he did with the “Maltese Falcon”. But I was a fool. I stuck to my Irish logic instead. Instead of saying yes to everything, I fought Jack Warner for better parts and I finally lost.
TCM Overview:
A dark-haired classic beauty from the Dublin stage, Geraldine Fitzgerald had appeared in several British films before making her Broadway debut in the 1938 Mercury Theater production of George Bernard Shaw’s “Heartbreak House” and her Hollywood debut in “Dark Victory” (1939). She is perhaps best remembered for her splendid, Oscar-nominated supporting performance as Isabella, poignantly suffering the pangs of unrequited love, in William Wyler’s adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” (1939). Off to a fine start in Hollywood, Fitzgerald played strong-willed women throughout the 1940s. Among her notable performances was as one of the eponymous characters in the highly intriguing “Three Strangers” (1946), in which she more than held her own opposite Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. After being put on suspension for protesting too many dull studio-chosen roles, though, Fitzgerald found that by the end of the decade her screen career had virtually petered out.
Geraldine Fitzgerald career slowed down somewhat during the 1950s and 60s, but she did TV and stage work, and made intermittent film appearances. She did fine work, for example, as the wife of a straying man (Gary Cooper) in “Ten North Frederick” (1958). In the 1970s, Fitzgerald made a triumphant return to the stage as an actress (in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” 1971), director (“Mass Appeal” 1980, for which she received a Tony nomination) and street performer (with her Everyman Street Theatre). She was memorable in a brief turn as Dudley Moore’s wise grandmother in “Arthur” (1981) and also appeared in its inevitable, though inferior sequel, “Arthur 2: On the Rocks” (1988).
In 1988, she received an Emmy nomination for a guest spot as an elderly woman contemplating suicide on the long-running sitcom, “The Golden Girls”. Her son is director Michael Lindsay-Hogg.”Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan.When Geraldine Fitzgerald, who has died aged 91, directed her Tony-nominated production of Mass Appeal on Broadway in 1981, she explained: “I was forgotten, so I had nothing to live up to. It was the best thing in the circumstances. I could start at the bottom learning the new craft of directing.” It was a modest statement from someone remembered by film fans as a 1940s Hollywood star, and by playgoers for some classical performances in the 1970s.Born in Dublin, the daughter of a prominent lawyer – his firm, E&T Fitzgerald, was mentioned in James Joyce’s Ulysses – Geraldine was educated at a convent school.
Gifted in drawing, she persuaded her parents to enrol her at Dublin School of Art, whose head suggested marriage as the next step. Her shocked response was to take up acting, so she went to her aunt, Shelagh Richards, whom she had seen perform at the Abbey theatre, for coaching.Geraldine Fitzgerald began her acting career at the Gate theatre in 1932, where she met another aspiring beginner, the 17-year-old Orson Welles. He was infatuated by the fiery, auburn-haired beauty, six months his senior, and would later have a brief affair with her. She also bewitched Patrick Hamilton, who used her as the basis for the character of Neta in his 1941 novel, Hangover Square.
In 1934, Fitzgerald began acting in low-budget British films, notably Turn Of The Tide, about two feuding fishing families. In 1936, she married Edward Lindsay-Hogg, a horse breeder, and after she appeared as an effective Maggie Tulliver in The Mill On The Floss (1937), they moved to New York.
There, Welles gave Fitzgerald her American start, as Ellie Dunn in George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House, with the 22-year-old Welles playing the octogenarian Captain Shotover, and a young Vincent Price as Hector Hushabye. The New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson found her showing nothing more than an ability to memorise lines; the producer, John Houseman, accused Welles of directing her with more indulgence than the rest of the cast.
Despite this, Geraldine Fitzgerald was offered the role of Isabella, to be seduced and abandoned by Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff in William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (1939), for which she was nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actress. On the strength of a sensitive performance, she got a contract with Warner Bros, for whom her first film was the classic weepy, Dark Victory (1939), in which she was touching as the devoted friend of dying Bette Davis.y
But Warner Bros failed to utilise Fitzgerald’s undoubted talent, casting her instead as second female leads, notably again with Davis in Watch On The Rhine (1943), to which she brought beauty and conviction as Countess Marthe de Brancovis, the unhappy wife of Nazi agent George Coulouris.
On loan to other studios, she was an upstanding US president’s wife in the biopic Wilson (1944), her first col-our film; the jealous spinster sister of George Sanders in Uncle Harry (1945), on trial for the murder of his fiancée; and calm and intense as Alan Ladd’s fellow spy in occupied France in OSS (1946).
Her last two films for Warner Bros, both directed by Jean Negulesco, were Three Strangers (1945), in which she shared a sweepstake ticket with Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, and Nobody Lives Forever (1946), playing a rich widow swindled out of a fortune by John Garfield. Yet even these leading parts did not bring her satisfaction, and her film career faded as she lost her battle with the studio bosses for more suitable roles.
It was disappointing, but Geraldine Fitzgerald hardly needed the money, having divorced Lindsay-Hogg in 1946 and married Stuart Scheftel, the businessman and grandson of the founder of Macy’s department store.
In 1955, she returned to the theatre, taking up again with Shaw, as Jennifer Dubedat in The Doctor’s Dilemma, and Welles, who cast her as Goneril to his King Lear in his ill-received production at the New York City Center. In 1961, she appeared off-Broadway in William Saroyan’s one-woman play, The Cave Dwellers, under the direction of her 21-year-old son, Michael Lindsay-Hogg.
She worked only spasmodically in the 1960s, her few films including Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1965) and Paul Newman’s Rachel (1968), in which she played a revivalist preacher. But, in 1971, she made a triumphant comeback off-Broadway as Mary Tyrone, the drug-addicted mother in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, winning a New York Critics’ award.
Geraldine Fitzgerald continued to be very active in the 1970s and 80s, making an impression on stage as Aline Solness in Ibsen’s The Master Builder, and as Amanda Winfield in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, as well as singing Irish folk songs in a one-woman cabaret show. Her screen performances included a moving old lady in Harry And Tonto (1974); a love scene with Gérard Depardieu in Bye Bye Monkey (1978); the role of a billionaire matriarch in Arthur (1981) and Arthur 2: On The Rocks (1988); a clairvoyant in Poltergeist II (1986); and the presidential matriarch Rose Kennedy on television in 1983.
During the run of Fitzgerald’s Mass Appeal, Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s production of Agnes Of God opened, making it the first time that two directors, mother and son, had separate plays running on Broadway at the same time.
Scheftel died in 1994; their daughter Susan survives her, along with Michael.
Brian McFarlane’s entry in “Encyclopedia of British Film”:
One of the most beautiful women in British films of the 1930s, she was an archtypical Irish redhead with green eyes, perfect features and a slightly husky voice, along with an incisive acting talent, what was British cinema to do witl all of this? The answer, is sadly very little. Oly the “Mill on the Floss” in 1937 as afindvivid ‘Maggie Tullivar’ challendged her.
After that, she was whisked off to Hollywood to play ‘Isabella’ in “Wuthering Heights” in which she alone looked like she had read the book. She had interesting roles in the US like in “Wilson” but always looked too intelligent for major stardom. Filmed in England only twice more, as the tippling adulteress in “So Evil, My Love” and the suspected companion of “The Late Edwina Black” in 1951. She became a potent stage actress in the US.
Geraldine Fitzgerald, a feisty, gravel-voiced Dublin redhead who drew instant acclaim in her first Hollywood films, including a 1939 Oscar nomination for “Wuthering Heights,” before carving out a long, varied career in films, television, cabaret and theater, died on Sunday afternoon at her home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She was 91.
She had Alzheimer’s disease for more than a decade and was essentially incapacitated in recent years, leading to a respiratory infection that finally killed her, said her daughter, Susan Scheftel, a clinical psychologist in New York.
Ms. Fitzgerald appeared on the New York stage and as a highly coveted character actress in dozens of Hollywood films, including “Watch on the Rhine” in 1943, “Ten North Frederick” in 1958, “The Pawnbroker” in 1964, “Harry and Tonto” in 1974 and “Arthur” in 1981. But she may have been best known in New York for what many critics considered one of the definitive Mary Tyrones, opposite Robert Ryan, in a 1971 revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”
Witty and intelligent, she was also notoriously combative and blamed herself for sabotaging her early Hollywood success by battling with studio executives over roles. “My mother was just way too feisty to be in bondage to the Warner Brothers,” Ms. Scheftel said.
Born in 1913, the daughter of a Dublin solicitor, Geraldine Fitzgerald was drawn into the legendary Gate Theater by her aunt, Shelagh Richards, one of its stars. Ms. Fitzgerald performed there alongside James Mason and Orson Welles. She married Edward Lindsay-Hogg, an Irish aristocrat, and after a stint at art school in England she moved to New York in 1938 to further her husband’s songwriting ambitions.
Money grew tight, and she noted that her old friend Welles was directing something called the Mercury Theater. She called and he hired her for a role in “Heartbreak House.”
Norman Lloyd, a longtime friend and founding member of the Mercury Theater, described the effect she had. “She was a staggeringly beautiful girl with the most delightful speech, a slight Irish tinge, not a thick brogue, and this glorious red hair,” he said.
Hal Wallis, a major Hollywood producer, saw her in Shaw’s “Heartbreak House” and signed her to a Warner Brothers contract. She was told to play best friend to the dying Bette Davis in “Dark Victory” (1939), and her performance persuaded Samuel Goldwyn to cast her as the tragic Isabella Linton in “Wuthering Heights.”
In the 1940’s she mingled with Hollywood’s intellectual elite, counting among her friends Laurence Olivier, Charlie Chaplin, Davis, Welles and the screenwriter Charles Lederer.
When World War II separated Ms. Fitzgerald from her husband, then back in England, she stayed in Los Angeles with their son, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, later to become an acclaimed film, television and Broadway director. Her first marriage ended in 1946.
By then, she had worked her way up to leading roles. A performance as Woodrow Wilson’s wife, Edith, in “Wilson” (1944) earned her a glamorous photo on the cover of Life magazine. It also attracted the attention of Stuart Scheftel, the grandson of Isador Straus, the co-owner of the R.H. Macy Co. who went down with the Titanic. Scheftel asked a friend to introduce them, and they were married in 1946.
They moved to New York and joined the rarefied circles in which the city’s cultural and political worlds mingled. The couple stayed together until his death in 1994.
She continued to work steadily and in the 1960’s formed the Everyman Street Theater, which ventured into the city’s poorest neighborhoods to recruit and train street performers. This led to an interest in directing, and she staged several productions, including all-black productions of O’Neill classics. In 1982, she received her only Tony nomination, as a director, for “Mass Appeal.” Among the directors she aced out of a nomination that year was her son, who staged “Agnes of God” a couple of blocks away. He survives her, along with Ms. Scheftel, two grandchildren and one step-grandchild.
In the 1970’s, after a small role in “Rachel, Rachel” required her to sing on camera, the unpleasant results caused her to take voice lessons. Thus she began yet another career, as a cabaret artist. Her show “Streetsongs” was a nightclub hit and appeared three times in Broadway theaters over the years.
When young actresses went to her for advice, she remembered her own regrets about having looked down her nose at early Hollywood offers. “Her advice to young actresses was to always say yes,” Ms. Scheftel said. “She had learned that the hard way by saying no all the time. So she would tell them, when offered work, always say yes
Milo O’Shea, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Michael O’Keefe Opening Night of ‘MASS APPEAL’ at the Booth Theatre in New York City on 11/12/1981 (Photo by Walter McBride/Corbis via Getty Images)Milo O’Shea, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Michael O’Keefe Opening Night of ‘MASS APPEAL’ at the Booth Theatre in New York City on 11/12/1981 (Photo by Walter McBride/Corbis via Getty Images)
Almost two decades before Brigitte Bardot, the epithet “sex kitten” could have been applied even more appropriately to Simone Simon, who has died aged 94.
Jean Renoir described the character Simon played in La Bête Humaine (1938) thus: “Severine is not a vamp. She’s a cat, a real cat, with a silky coat that begs to be caressed, a short little snout, a big, slightly beseeching mouth and eyes full of promises.” To add to the analogy, Simon is first seen in the film at a window, gently stroking a white kitten.
But her most famous role was in Cat People (1942) as Irene, a Serbian-born fashion artist living in New York, who is haunted by the fear that she is descended from a race of cat-women who turn into panthers when sexually aroused. “Kiss me or claw me!” read the ads.
Simone Simon, the daughter of a French engineer and an Italian mother, was born in Béthune and brought up in Marseilles. At 19, she went to Paris, where she worked briefly as a fashion designer, a model and cabaret singer, before making her screen debut as a singer in Le Chanteur Inconnu (1931). It was her fourth film, Lac Aux Dames (1934), directed by Marc Allégret, that made her a star. In the Colette screenplay, Simon is a mysterious child of nature called Puck, who entrances Jean-Pierre Aumont, the swimming instructor at a mountain lake resort.
It led to a contract with 20th Century Fox, who exploited her child-woman sensuality. In her Hollywood debut, Girls’ Dormitory (1936) she played a student at an Alpine finishing school who falls for Herbert Marshall, the headmaster, even though he is old enough to be her father. At the end of this Lolita-esque tale, Simon (actually 25) steps aside for an older woman.
In the redundant remake of the Janet Gaynor-Charles Farrell silent melodrama Seventh Heaven, Simon is a woman with a shady reputation, whom Parisian sewer-worker James Stewart has given shelter in his slum apartment. “Diane, don’t ever leave me, or like a candle, I’ll go out,” he says. This was followed by Love And Hisses (1937), in which she actually sang the Bell Song from Delibes’ Lakmé in what the New York Times described as “a thin, inexpressive little voice”. She then took the title role in a bit of fluff called Josette (1938), being fought over by Don Ameche and Robert Young.
No wonder she found herself in conflict with Fox, both over the material and her salary, and she arrived back in France on August 8 1938, 10 days before shooting began there on La Bête Humaine. For the role of Severine, who persuades her lover Lantier (Jean Gabin) to murder her husband, the producers originally suggested Gina Manès, then pushing 43, who had played various femme fatale roles. Renoir refused vehemently: “I claimed, and still claim, that vamps have to be played by women with innocent faces. Women with innocent faces are the most dangerous ones! Also, you don’t expect it, so there is an element of surprise! I insisted we use Simone Simon, which we did, and I don’t think we were sorry.” (Curiously, Manès was seriously injured by a tiger in a circus in 1942, when Simon was filming Cat People.)
Following the glowing reviews Simon received for her performance – a teasing mixture of innocence, perversity and sensuality – she asked for 800,000 francs on Renoir’s next film, La Règle Du Jeu, almost one third of the projected budget, much more than the producers were willing to pay. She was offered a better deal by RKO in Hollywood, returning to play, literally, a vixen from hell in the Faustian All That Money Can Buy (1942). Then came Cat People, in which she portrayed, with sensitivity and restraint, a tortured creature, as terrifying to herself as others.
Although RKO advertised The Curse Of The Cat People (1944) with the legend “The Beast Woman Haunts The Night Anew!”, it was not strictly speaking a horror film. In it, Simon again played Irene, now seemingly back from the dead to become an adviser and friend to the lonely six-year-old daughter of her ex-husband. Only seen by the little girl, she drifts through the film in an ethereal manner.
Simon’s last American film was Mademoiselle Fifi (1944), a hymn to French resistance, though set during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Based on Maupassant’s Boule De Suif, the title role was in fact, the nickname given to a sadistic Prussian officer occupying a small French village, and Simon is the laundress with whom he meets retribution.
The war over, Simon returned to Europe, playing a mercenary showgirl in the British-made Temptation Harbour (1947), and the chambermaid in Max Ophuls’ La Ronde (1950), who, after being seduced by a soldier, seduces a student.
Jacqueline Audrey’s Olivia (1951) was full of hothouse emotions and lesbian undertones with Simon and Edwige Feuillère as sisters who run a girls’ boarding school, dividing the establishment into two factions.
For Ophuls again, she appeared in another Maupassant tale, Le Plaisir (1952), as the model and mistress of an artist whom she forces to marry her out of sympathy when she cripples herself attempting suicide. Simon retired after The Extra Day (1956), a British picture in which she played a French film star.
A few years ago, during the making of the Omnibus TV documentary on Jean Renoir, Simone Simon was asked for an interview. She refused, saying that she did not want to appear on camera as she was “a very old woman”. Perhaps it was a wise decision, as she has left us with a vision of a lovely, young woman.
· Simone Simon, actor, born April 23 1910; died February 22 2005.
Her Guardian obituary can also be accessed on line here.
