Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 2 of 128

Jack Lemmon

Jack Lemmon was born in 1925 in Newton, Massachusetts. He has had one of the popular and prolific career that any Hollywood actor could wish for. He began by playing callow young men opposite such powerhouse ladies as Betty Grable and Judy Holliday. By the late 1950’s he had developed into a sterling comedic actor starring in such movies as “Some Like It Hot” with Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis in 1959 and “The Apartment” with Shirley MacLaine in 1960. He won two Oscars, for “Mr Roberts” in 1955 and “Save the Tiger” in 1973. He starred opposite some of the most iconic leading ladies of the 60’s and 70’s including Doris Day, Romy Schneider, Anne Bancroft and Jane Fonda. He died in 2001. His widow is the actress Felicia Farr.

Duncan Campbell’s obituary of Jack Lemmon in “The Guardian”:

The world of entertainment and millions of fans were yesterday mourning and paying tribute to Jack Lemmon, who died in a Los Angeles hospital following complications related to cancer. The star of Some Like It Hot, The Odd Couple and Missing, and the winner of two Oscars, was 76.

His wife, Felicia, his two children and his step-daughter were at his bedside when he died. He had been in and out of the University of Southern California/ Norris Cancer Clinic in Boyle Heights during the last few months as his condition deteriorated. He underwent surgery a month ago to remove an inflamed gall bladder. Although he died on Wednesday night, news of his death was not made public until early yesterday.

“He is one of the greatest actors in the history of the business,” said his publicist and longtime spokesman, Warren Cowen. “To say one word about him would be ‘beautiful.’ It’s an opinion that is shared by everybody who knew him.”

His death comes almost exactly a year after his old friend and partner in The Odd Couple, Walter Mathau, died of a heart attack. “Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon,” is how the director Billy Wilder once described him.

“What marks all the best work Lemmon has done are some trace elements of the man himself, some perceived truth that as clown or tragic figure, the persona within the character is likable, decent, intelligent, vulnerable, worth knowing; disorganised possibly, flawed almost certainly, but forever worth knowing,” was the assessment of the Los Angeles Times film writer, Charles Champlin.

In 1999, he performed in the television drama Tuesdays With Morrie, for which he won an Emmy and in which he had an opportunity through his role to reflect on death. He was already ill with cancer.

Enormous range

While he may be best remembered for his roles as the musician who had to dress in drag to escape the mob in Some Like It Hot, and as Felix Unger in The Odd Couple, Lemmon’s range was enormous. Whether playing the distraught father of a son missing during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile in the film Missing, or an alcoholic in The Days of Wine and Roses, or a speedy newspaper man in The Front Page, he managed to bring something different to the role.

Although regarded as one of the great comic actors in the history of film, five of his seven Oscar nominations were for roles in dramas rather than comedies.

Born in 1925 in a lift in a hospital in Newton, Massachusetts, legend had it that he had a case of jaundice which prompted a nurse to remark: “My, look at the little yellow Lemmon.” John Uhler Lemmon III was the son of the owner of a bakery who suffered from childhood illnesses and required 13 operations before he was 13.

After studying at Harvard and serving in the US navy as an ensign in the second world war, Lemmon embarked on an acting career first in the theatre in New York, then on radio, television and film, that spanned half a century. He even managed to resist pressure from the legendary studio boss, Harry Cohn, who wanted him to change his name lest critics and audiences should ever be tempted to describe the movies he appeared in as “lemons”. He won an academy award for the first time in 1956 for his part as Ensign Pulver in Mister Roberts, and again in 1973 for playing a compromised businessman in trouble with the mob in Save the Tiger.

Recently, he had been reflecting on his career. Explaining his roles in Missing, The Days of Wine and Roses and The China Syndrome, in which he played a nuclear power plant operator, he said: “I like a film that has a point of view.” He said that it was not necessary for him to agree with a point of view in order to play the part, but that films that made people think always attracted him. But he was philosophical about the movie business: “We all make bad films _ you misjudge. That happens more often than the hits. But I have been able to get films that have worked, not only at the box office, but critically and with the public, often enough so that I’m still around. I can still get wonderful parts, thank God… I am passionate about acting, I love it, respect it. It gets me.” He kept acting and getting parts until near the end.

While Lemmon said he had loved his career and felt privileged to have played so many different parts, he said that his career was always much less important to him than his family. He was married from 1950 to 1956 to the actress Cynthia Stone, and their son, Chris, was born in1954. In 1962, he married the actress Felicia Farr, and their daughter, Courtney, was born in 1966. His family said yesterday that his funeral would be private.

His two most rewarding film partnerships were with the director Billy Wilder, who directed Lemmon with Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Irma La Douce and The Front Page, and with Walter Mathau, with whom he starred in eight films.

The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online

William Reynolds

William Reynolds, who portrayed Special Agent Tom Colby for six seasons on the television series The F.B.I., died August 24 from non-Covid pneumonia complications, his son Eric Regnolds confirms. He was 90.

Born William de Clercq Regnolds on December 9, 1931, in Los Angeles, he began his career under contract to Universal Pictures and had credits in Carrie (1952), as Laurence Olivier’s son, and The Son of Ali Baba, where he was Tony Curtis’ best friend. For 20th Century Fox, he portrayed Rommel’s son opposite James Mason in The Desert Fox

Following his military service in Japan during the Korean War, Reynolds co-starred in Cult of the Cobra (1955). In 1959, he starred as trumpeter Pete Kelly in the television series Pete Kelly’s Blues. In 1960-1961, he starred as air charter entrepreneur and adventurer Sandy Wade on the The Islanders, while also appearing as a World War II oﬃcer in Rod Serling’s acclaimed Twilight Zoneepisode “The Purple Testament”.

Other film credits include The Battle at Apache Pass, Francis Goes to West Point, The Mississippi Gambler, Gunsmoke, There’s Always Tomorrow, Away All Boatsand The Land Unknown. Television work included roles in Bronco, Wagon Train, The Roaring 20s, Cheyenne, Dragnet and Maverick.

After making guest appearances on the first two seasons of The FBI, Reynolds won the big break of his career, taking on the part of stalwart and heroic Agent Colby, opposite Efrem Zimbalist’s Inspector Erskine, for six seasons on the hit ABC series.

Reynolds quit Hollywood after his role on The F.B.I. and became a businessman. He was married for 42 years to actress Molly Sinclair, until her passing in 1992. The couple had two children, Carrie Regnolds Jones (Brian Jones) and Eric Regnolds (Nikki Camello), two grandchildren, Anthony Regnolds Jones and Nicholas Camello Regnolds, and one great grandchild, Gianni Camello Regnolds

Richard Allan

Richard Mann Allan (June 22, 1923 – September 6, 1999) was an American actor. He was best known for his appearances with Susan Hayward in With a Song in My Heart(1952), Ava Gardner in The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), and Marilyn Monroe in Niagara (1953). Richard Mann Allan was born on June 22, 1923, in Jacksonville, Illinois, as the youngest child and son of the four children of Edna Mann (1893–1973), a dietitian, and Robert Howard Allan (1895–1958), a farmer. He had two brothers, Edward and Robert Howard Allan Jr. (1922–2009), and a sister, Catherine Allan. Allan attended dancing class from the age of seven. In the late 1950s Allan played in various German productions.

Richard Allan died in Louisville, Kentucky, due to lung cancer at the age of 76. He was buried at Gillham Cemetery in 1999.

DICTIONARY OF IRISH BIOGRAPHY

Contributed by

Dolan, Anne

O’Sullivan, Maureen Paula (1911–98), actress, was born 17 May 1911 at Boyle, Co. Roscommon, one of the five children of Major Charles Joseph O’Sullivan of the Connaught Rangers, and his wife, Mary Lovatt (née Fraser). Educated briefly at a convent in Dublin, she also attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Roehampton in London. She completed her education at a convent in Boxmoor and at a finishing school in Paris.

Strikingly attractive, O’Sullivan was discovered in 1929 at the Dublin horse show ball by an American director, Frank Borzage, who was in Dublin casting actors for the film Song o’ my heart(1930), a musical starring John McCormack (qv). Signed by Twentieth Century Fox, she had minor roles in four more films before being dismissed by the studio in 1930. Following some films for independent studios, she signed for MGM in October 1931, embarking on her most famous role, of Jane to Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan in Tarzan the ape man (1932). Her second appearance as Jane, in Tarzan and his mate (1934), provoked an outcry from the Catholic Legion of Decency. Her provocative costumes were subsequently altered for later films such as Tarzan escapes (1936), Tarzan finds a son! (1939), and Tarzan’s secret treasure (1941). Throughout her career her supporting roles were generally superior to her more major parts, and she was critically acclaimed for her performances as Henrietta in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), Dora Splenlow in David Copperfield (1935), Kitty in Anna Karenina (1935), Judy Standish in A day at the races (1937), and Jane Bennett in Pride and prejudice(1940). During the war she appeared in war shorts and advertisements for the Canadian government and travelled to various American cities to promote British and Greek war relief. In 1941 she was honoured at the ninth naval district’s governor’s day. After her sixth Tarzan film, Tarzan’s New York adventure(1942), she retired from the cinema for four years, devoting her time instead to radio broadcasts and local charities.

O’Sullivan returned to the screen in 1948 in The big clock. In 1949 she formed an independent film company devoted to films of a family theme, and in the 1950s she began a career in television drama that lasted for forty years. She also wrote a series of short stories for children which were later broadcast on radio. Theatre roles predominated in the 1960s and 1970s, and were only briefly punctuated by a short and unsuccessful period as co-host of The today show in 1964. She made periodic returns to the cinema in the 1980s and was highly praised for her brief role in Woody Allen’s Hannah and her sisters (1986). Allen dismissed her from his film September in 1987 and courted her public displeasure five years later when he separated acrimoniously from her daughter Mia Farrow. Celebrated throughout her career by various catholic guilds, she was honoured at George Eastman House at the 1982 Festival of Artists. In 1983 she received an honorary doctorate from Sienna College and in 1988 she was honoured by a parade in her native Boyle. Altogether she appeared in over seventy feature films, and numerous television dramas.

She married on 12 September 1936 John Neville Villiers Farrow, an Australian film director and producer; she was his second wife. They had seven children, two of whom, Mia and Tisa, became actors. He died in January 1963, and she had an affair with the actor Robert Ryan in the late 1960s. On 22 August 1983 she married James E. Cushing, a building contractor. She died 22 June 1998 at Phoenix, Arizona.

Sources

John J. Concannon and F. E. Cull (ed.), The Irish-American who’s who (1984), 655; Irish-American Magazine (Feb. 1989), 32–8; Connie J. Billips, Maureen O’Sullivan, a bio-bibliography (1990); Ir. Times, 24 June 1998; Daily Telegraph, 25 June 1998; The Independent, 25 June 1998; Times, 25 June 1998; Michael Glazier (ed.), The encyclopaedia of the Irish in America (1999), 757

The Independent obituary – THE DELICATELY beautiful, Irish-born actress Maureen O’Sullivan will be best remembered for two reasons – her performance as Jane in a string of Tarzan films opposite Johnny Weissmuller, and as the real-life mother of Mia Farrow. She memorably quipped, when told that Frank Sinatra was hoping to marry her daughter, “At his age, he should marry me!”

O’Sullivan’s own career was a long and distinguished one, including performances in such major Hollywood films as The Thin Man, Pride and Prejudice, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Anna Karenina, A Day at the Races, The Big Clock, and more recently Hannah and Her Sisters, in which she played mother to her daughter Mia.

Born in Boyle, Ireland, in 1911, O’Sullivan had had no acting training when she was noticed by the director Frank Borzage at a dinner-dance of Dublin’s International Horse Show. He had the waiter send her a note: “If you are interested in being in a film, come to my office tomorrow at 11am”, and subsequently he cast her as the daughter of tenor John McCormack in Song O’ My Heart (1930), which was being partly filmed in Erin before completion in Hollywood.

Though O’Sullivan’s inexperience was apparent, the film was a great success and the studio (Fox) gave the new actress a contract. Her next film was the futuristic musical, Just Imagine (1930), after which she was teamed with the studio’s top star Will Rogers in The Princess and the Plumber (1930). O’Sullivan later expressed dissatisfaction with her treatment by the studio, feeling that they used her as a threat to their top female star Janet Gaynor, who was on suspension for more money and a new contract. When Gaynor settled with the studio, O’Sullivan’s roles became smaller and the following year, her contract was terminated.

“I felt lonely, forsaken and unwanted,” she said later, but in 1932 she was signed to a contract by MGM and immediately cast as Jane in Tarzan, The Ape Man with the Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller as her co-star. In the Tarzan books, the heroine is Jane Porter of Baltimore, but MGM made her Jane Parker of London (O’Sullivan had been educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton, and her accent was totally convincing). The actress had not read any Tarzan books, and recalled that the author Edgar Rice Burroughs sent her copies of them. “He was a nice guy,” she said recently, “and thought Johnny and I were the perfect Tarzan and Jane, which is lovely.”

O’Sullivan, besides her attractiveness, brought a sense of humour plus an appealing blend of sophistication and innocence to the girl who teaches the jungle-bred hero how to speak, starting with “Tarzan . . . Jane” (not “Me Tarzan, you Jane” as commonly misquoted). The second of the series, Tarzan and His Mate (1934) is generally considered the best, matching the first in lyrical beauty and excelling it in excitement and dramatic impetus. “Everyone cared about the Tarzan pictures,” said O’Sullivan, “and we all gave of our best. They weren’t quickies – it often took a year to make one.”

What the critic DeWitt Bodeen called the “sweet paganism” of the first two films is missing from the later ones, partly because of pressures from moralist groups who objected to the scanty costumes, and in particularly a sequence in Tarzan and His Mate (later cut), in which Tarzan tugs on Jane’s garment as they dive into the water and when she surfaces part of her breast is exposed. “It started such a furore,” recalled O’Sullivan, “with thousands of women objecting to my costume.”

In subsequent films Jane’s costume was more substantial while Tarzan’s loin-cloth was lengthened. Tarzan Escapes was started in 1934, but was over two years in the making, mainly because its first cut was too frightening and violent (including a vampire bat sequence). One of the directors brought in to re-shoot the material was John Farrow, who fell in love with O’Sullivan. The couple had to wait for two years for a papal dispensation because of a previous divorce of Farrow’s, but their subsequent marriage lasted 27 years (until the director’s death in 1963) despite his heavy drinking and infidelities. The couple had seven children – three sons and four daughters, the eldest girl Maria growing up to become the actress Mia Farrow. Between the Tarzan films, MGM cast O’Sullivan as ingenue in over 40 films – leading roles in B pictures but usually supporting roles in major ones

She was the distraught daughter who asks investigator Nick Charles to locate her missing father in The Thin Man (1934), the first of the series and the start of a lifelong friendship between the actress and Myrna Loy (“I loved Maureen’s warm exuberance,” wrote Myrna Loy later). In The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), she was Henrietta, the romantically rebellious younger sister of Elizabeth Barrett, and in George Cukor’s classic film of David Copperfield (1935) she was Dora, David’s silly and ill-fated wife.

She was a flirtatious relative of Anna (Greta Garbo) in Anna Karenina (1935) and in Tod Browning’s bizarre Devil Doll (1936) she was the daughter of a wrongly convicted banker who gets his revenge by reducing his enemies to the size of dolls. With Allan Jones, she provided the romantic element in A Day at the Races (1937, starring the Marx Brothers) – O’Sullivan played the owner of the sanatorium over which Dr Quackenbush (Groucho) is put in charge – and she came to England in 1938 to film A Yank at Oxford in which she vied with Vivien Leigh for Robert Taylor. (Leigh had been O’Sullivan’s best friend at Roehampton when they were girls). One of the film’s uncredited writers was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who reputedly developed a romantic admiration for the actress and built up her part.

O’Sullivan was unhappy, though, that she was primarily identified with the role of Jane, and asked the studio to release her from the Tarzan series. A script was written in which the couple would have a son (adopted to placate the censors), and Jane would be killed by a hostile tribe, but when word leaked out, public protest proved so great that the studio re-shot the ending of Tarzan Finds a Son (1939) and gave O’Sullivan a raise in salary.

She was given the role of Jane Bennett in Pride and Prejudice (1940) but this was her last major MGM film, and when her contract expired after Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942), O’Sullivan settled down to raise her large family. She returned to films in 1948 in her husband’s fine film noir The Big Clock, playing the wife of a magazine editor (Ray Milland), and followed this with another of Farrow’s films Where Danger Lives (1950) as a girlfriend of the doctor (Robert Mitchum).

In the mid-1950s she hosted a television show, Irish Heritage, but spent most of her time nursing Mia through a bout of polio. In 1958 her son Michael was killed in an aeroplane crash while taking flying lessons and in 1963 her husband died.

O’Sullivan had by then begun an active career in the theatre and in 1962 had opened in a hit comedy Never Too Late, receiving the best notices of her career as a middle-aged wife who becomes pregnant. Wrote Variety: “She looks great and handles light comedy with a warm, gracious flair.” She starred with the same leading man, Paul Ford, in the screen version (1965). She also starred in the Broadway version of the British comedy No Sex Please, We’re British (1973), gave an excellent performance in an all-star revival of Paul Osborn’s Morning At Seven (1983), and continued until a few years ago to be active in television.

O’Sullivan often professed a desire to remarry: “Children don’t take the place of a husband,” she said. “Many women – and I am one of them – need both.” In the late 1960s she fell in love with the actor Robert Ryan and it was thought that they would wed, but he then became ill and died in 1973, with O’Sullivan at his bedside. In 1983 she finally married again, to James E. Cushing, a building contractor.

A liberal, outspoken woman – when her two sons were arrested for possession of marijuana she commented that if youths want to indulge in activities it is their decision – she played mother to Mia in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), but Allen fired her from his film September (1987) and five years later, when his romance with her daughter broke up, she denounced him as a “desperate and evil man”. Over the years she came to appreciate the eternal appeal of the Tarzan films and their place in cinema history. “It’s nice to be immortal,” she stated, “and film has given us immortality.”

Maureen Paul O’Sullivan, actress: born Boyle, Co Roscommon, Ireland 17 May 1911; married 1936 John Farrow (died 1963; two sons, four daughters, and one son deceased) 1983 James E. Cushing; died Phoenix, Arizona 22 June 1998.

Joanna Pettet

Joanna Pettet was born in Westminster, London, England, daughter of Harold Nigel Egerton Salmon and Cecily J. Tremaine, who were married in Chelsea, London in 1940. Her father, a British Royal Air Force pilot, was killed in the Second World War in 1943.^[3]After the war, her mother remarried and settled in Montréal where young Joanna was adopted by her stepfather and assumed his surname of “Pettet”.

When Pettet was 16, she moved to New York City.

Pettet studied with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, as well as at the Lincoln Center, and made her debut, aged 19, on Broadwayin Take Her, She’s Mine (December 21, 1961-December 8, 1962). She also appeared on Broadway in The Chinese Prime Minister, and Poor Richard.

Beginning in 1964 with an episode of Route 66, she began making guest appearances in several US dramatic television series of the mid-sixties, including The Doctors, The Nurses, The Trials of O’Brien, The Fugitive, A Man Called Shenandoah, and Dr. Kildare.

In 1966, she was cast in writer/producer Sidney Buchman‘s 1966 adaptation of Mary McCarthy‘s novel The Group. The success of that film launched a film career that included roles in The Night of the Generals (1967), as Mata Bond in the James Bondspoof Casino Royale (1967), Peter Yates’s Robbery (1967) with Stanley Baker, Blue (1968) with Terence Stamp, and the Victorian period comedy The Best House in London (1969).

In the 1970s her feature film appearances became sporadic and included roles in the cult horror films Welcome to Arrow Beach(1974) and The Evil (1978). Pettet re-emerged as the star of over a dozen television movies, including The Weekend Nun (1972), Footsteps (1972), Pioneer Woman (1973), A Cry in the Wilderness (1974), The Desperate Miles (1975), The Hancocks (1976), Sex and the Married Woman (1977), Cry of the Innocent (1980) with Rod Taylor, and The Return of Frank Cannon (1980).

She guest-starred four times on the classic Rod Serling anthology series Night Gallery, appearing with her then-husband Alex Cord in the episode “Keep in Touch – We’ll Think of Something”. She starred in the NBC miniseries Captains and the Kings (1976), starred in the episode “You’re Not Alone” from the 1977 NBC anthology series Quinn Martin’s Tales of the Unexpected (known in the United Kingdom as Twist in the Tale),^{[citation needed]} was a guest on both Fantasy Island and The Love Boat (appearing three times on each series), and had a recurring role on Knots Landing in 1983 as Janet Baines, an LAPD homicide detective investigating the murder of singer Ciji Dunne (played by Lisa Hartman).

Through the 1970s and 1980s, Pettet made appearances on the television series Harry O, Banacek, McCloud, Mannix, Police Woman, Knight Rider, Tales of the Unexpected (the UK series) and Murder, She Wrote. In 1984, she appeared as herself in a James Bond tribute episode of The Fall Guy with ex-Bond girls Britt Ekland and Lana Wood.

Her final role was in the 1990 thriller Terror in Paradise, after which she retired from acting, still in her 40s.

On 8 August 1969, Pettet had lunch at the home of actress Sharon Tate, hours before the crimes were committed at that residence by members of the Manson Family. This event is illustrated in the fictional/alternate-reality 2019 film Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood, in which Pettet is portrayed by Rumer Willis.

In 2003, actor Sir Alan Bates bequeathed Pettet £95,000 (equivalent to £189,712 in 2023) upon his death. The two had been friends for many years, and Pettet provided support and companionship during his final months after he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2002. Pettet was quoted as saying: “It was a very touching gesture because he had done everything while he was in hospital to make sure I would be looked after following his death.”

Pettet won a Theatre World Award for 1964–1965 for her work in Poor Richard

Michael Forrest

Six-foot-three and weighing in at a lean, mean 215, Michael Forest was a rugged-looking addition to the Roger Corman and Gene Corman’s list of leading men during their 1950s heyday. Between Corman films, he was a stage actor who worked in Shakespearean plays and other legitimate productions as classy as his real name (Gerald Michael Charlebois). Born in Harvey, North Dakota, he moved with his family at a very early age to Seattle, attended the University of Washington for a year and then made his way south to the sunnier campuses of San Jose State. Graduating with a B.A. in English and drama, Forest came to Hollywood in 1955 and started acting on TV and on stage at the Players Ring. In 1957, he began to study with veteran actor/acting teacher Jeff Corey, in whose classes Forest first encountered Roger Corman. Forest has also worked extensively on TV and European films.

TERESA WRIGHT OBITUARY IN “THE GUARDIAN”

Few actresses have had such a meteoric start to their Hollywood careers as the fetchingly unpretentious Teresa Wright. She won Oscar nominations for her first three films, a record still unequalled, and five of her first six movies, including are acknowledged classics.

Muriel Teresa Wright, actress: born New York 27 October 1918; married first 1942 Niven Busch (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1952), secondly 1959 and fourthly Robert Anderson (marriages dissolved), thirdly Carlos Pierre (marriage dissolved); died New Haven, Connecticut 6 March 2005.

However, she was to find herself both the beneficiary and the victim of the studio and contract system of the time. When the producer Sam Goldwyn signed her to a contract, she insisted on a famous clause stipulating that she would not have to “pose for photographers in a bathing suit”. She also avoided fan-magazine interviews and vetoed studio-concocted romances. She was given roles in prestigious productions guided by top directors, but her dislike of publicity, and time off for pregnancies, alienated Goldwyn, who terminated her contract, after which her screen image lost some of its lustre. Her later career was primarily on television and in the theatre, where she continued to win acclaim for her truthful and compassionate performances.

Born Muriel Teresa Wright in 1918 in New York City, she was the only child of an insurance agent and his wife, who separated soon after her birth. She was then raised by family in New York and New Jersey, and did not attend school until she was eight years old. After going on a trip to New York to see Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina, she took an interest in acting and played leading roles in school plays. A teacher helped her get a scholarship to the Wharf Theater in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she was an apprentice for two summers.

After graduating from Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, in 1938, she moved to New York, adopting the name Teresa Wright as there was already a Muriel Wright registered with Equity. In the autumn of 1938 she was given work on Broadway playing a small role and understudying Dorothy McGuire (who had succeeded Martha Scott) in the role of Emily in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. She did not get a chance to play Emily in New York, but played the part on tour in New England in the spring of 1939.

A spell in summer stock preceded her creating the role of Mary, theingénue in Life with Father (1939), the comedy by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse which holds the record as the longest-running straight play in American theatre history. Wright had been playing in the show for almost a year when Sam Goldwyn went to see it. He later recalled that, when he went to see her backstage,

Miss Wright was seated at her dressing table, and looked for all the world like a little girl experimenting with her mother’s cosmetics. I had discovered in her from the first sight, you might say, an unaffected genuineness and appeal.

He offered her a contract the same night, and immediately cast her as Alexandra, the daughter of the ruthless, grasping Regina Giddens, in the screen version of Lillian Hellman’s study of greed in the SouthThe Little Foxes (1941). The final confrontation between mother and daughter, when Alexandra rejects Regina’s offer of conciliation and accuses her of murdering her father, displayed Wright’s ability to reveal the moral strength latent in her character’s ingenuousness.

Superbly directed by William Wyler, with a brilliant central performance by Bette Davis and sterling support from many of the original cast, including Patricia Collinge, Dan Duryea and Charles Dingle, The Little Foxes won critical acclaim, with Wright getting a major share of attention. Variety reported,

Miss Wright is a newcomer to the screen, and is magnificent in a very difficult part. A less talented actress in her place could have ruined the picture.

Wright and Collinge were both nominated for the supporting-actress Oscar. When Wyler moved to MGM to make Mrs Miniver (1942), he personally asked Goldwyn to loan Wright to play the neighbour who marries Mrs Miniver’s son. Her spunk and tenacity were never displayed more appealingly than here, and she was again nominated for a supporting-actress Oscar.

Returning to Goldwyn, she was given her first starring role, in Sam Wood’s Pride of the Yankees (1942), the screen biography of one of the greatest baseball players, Lou Gehrig, first baseman of the New York Yankees, who died at the age of 37 from a form of motor neurone disease now known by his name. Realising that despite the sporting background he would need to lure a mass audience (with women in 1942 making up the majority of the customers), Goldwyn had the film concentrate on the love affair and marriage of Gehrig and a Chicago socialite, Eleanor Twitchell (sensitively played by Wright). He added a dance display by the team of Veloz and Yolanda in a stunning night-club set, and he even paid Irving Berlin $15,000 to use his song, “Always”, which had been the favourite of Gehrig and his wife. Gary Cooper was perfectly cast as the unassuming sportsman.

Released in the same year as Mrs Miniver, the film won Wright another Oscar nomination, as Best Actress. She lost that award to Mrs Miniver herself (Greer Garson) but won the supporting award. (Only nine other players have been nominated in both categories the same year – the latest being Jamie Foxx this year.)

In 1942 Wright married Goldwyn’s scriptwriter and story editor Niven Busch. Goldwyn wanted her to star in his next film, a propaganda piece in praise of America’s Russian allies, The North Star. It was a small role compared with that in Pride of the Yankees, and just a few days before filming she announced she was pregnant. The producer quickly borrowed Anne Baxter from Fox, but later voiced the suspicion that Busch had timed it to prevent Wright’s playing such a small part.

She returned to the screen with a much more important role, when Thornton Wilder suggested to Alfred Hitchcock that he borrow her from Goldwyn to star in Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Given first billing over Joseph Cotten, she played the small-town girl whose beloved uncle (Cotten) turns out to be a serial killer. Hitchcock’s personal favourite of his films, it depicts cosy small-town family life disrupted by the presence of evil, and Wright is compelling as her idealistic view of her uncle is chillingly eroded. According to Hitchcock’s biographer Donald Spoto,

Hitchcock respected Teresa Wright, especially her thorough preparation and quiet professionalism, and their mutual admiration society lasted until his death.

Wright then played in her first routine film, when reunited with Gary Cooper and director Sam Wood for a tepid comedy, Casanova Brown(1944). Her husband Niven Busch wrote Duel in the Sun as a vehicle for her, hoping the part of the torrid half-breed Pearl Chavez would prove a rewarding change of image, but the role in the Selznick production went to Jennifer Jones.

Awaiting Wright, though, was a screen masterpiece, William Wyler’sThe Best Years of Our Lives (1946), adapted from MacKinlay Kantor’s blank-verse novel Glory for Me (1945), the tale of three men returning from the war to civilian life. As the girl who falls in love with a man who has returned to a wife he wed three weeks before going overseas and who has been unfaithful, she welcomed the opportunity to play the role of a “homewrecker”, as she called it, though the character is basically sympathetic.

When interviewed for the film’s first DVD release, Wright revealed that she had had one serious disagreement with Wyler over a scene in which she berates her parents for their objections to her behaviour, stating that they have “forgotten how it feels to be in love”. “God, how I hated that scene,” she said:

How can this intelligent young woman say that to these beautiful people? She can see what they mean to each other. Willy couldn’t disagree. He said, “It’s true. The only thing is, if you don’t do it we don’t have the next scene.” It finally came down to, like it or not, this is what brings on the beautiful next scene between Myrna Loy and Fredric March.

The Best Year of Our Lives grossed $10m, second only to Gone with the Wind at the time, and remains a film landmark. Wright was then set to star in The Bishop’s Wife, with Cary Grant and David Niven as her leading men, but after all her costumes had been made she found she was pregnant again. “Goldwyn never forgave me for that,” she later said

On loan, she starred opposite Robert Mitchum in the moody, Freudian western Pursued (1947), written by her husband. She returned to star with Niven, Farley Granger and Evelyn Keyes inEnchantment (1948), a story of two generations of lovers in parallel romances. Newsweek commented, “Miss Wright, one of the screen’s finest, glows as the Cinderella who captivated three men”, and The New York Times said, “Teresa Wright plays with that breathless, bright-eyed rapture which she so remarkably commands”, but the wistful, predominantly sad story did not find favour with audiences.

Wright was next to have played the title role in Roseanna McCoy opposide Granger, but illness forced her withdrawal. Goldwyn then terminated her contract, citing her unwillingness to do publicity forEnchantment, and she never worked for him again.

At the time, Wright issued a statement declaring that she looked forward to working for other producers who would probably pay her less but would also treat her with more respect. In 1969, she told theNew York Post with wry awareness, “I was going to be Joan of Arc, and all I proved was that I was an actress who would work for less money.”

She took a sixth of her former salary for her starring role in Fred Zinnemann’s The Men (1950), but her co-star was Marlon Brando, making his screen début, and the film was a worthy piece about paraplegics. Wright once again conveyed grit, shining as the steadfast girlfriend who, when Brando rejects her because of his condition, proposes to him.

Niven Busch both wrote and produced her next film, John Sturges’sThe Capture (1950), an interesting if second-grade western co-starring Lew Ayres, but too many of her subsequent films were minor potboilers like California Conquest (1950), though Wright herself was invariably praised

Wright returned to the stage in the 1950s and in 1959 she married the author of Tea and Sympathy, Robert Anderson, having divorced Busch in 1952. In 1968 she starred in Anderson’s play I Never Sang for My Father. (The couple divorced in the early 1970s but, after Wright’s brief marriage to the actor Carlos Pierre, they remarried and divorced again, though remaining good friends. She won particular acclaim for her performance on Broadway as Linda Loman opposite George C. Scott in a revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman(1975). In 1980 she was part of a superb ensemble, including Maureen O’Sullivan, Gary Merrill and Nancy Marchand, in a beautiful revival of Paul Osborne’s Morning’s at Seven. In 1991 she co-starred in another of Osborne’s plays, On Borrowed Time, with George C. Scott and Nathan Lane.

Her prolific television work included three Emmy-nominated performances. Later films included Roseland (1977), Somewhere in Time (1980) and the role of Miss Birdie, Matt Damon’s eccentric aunt in Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of John Grisham’s The Rainmaker (1997).

For the last 10 years she lived quietly in New England, appearing occasionally at film forums and festivals and at events associated with the New York Yankees.

In 1996 she talked about Hitchcock at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and two years ago she was seen on the Academy Awards show, in a segment honouring previous Oscar-winners.

Tom Vallance

Gary Brumburgh’s entry

PHYLLIS CALVERT OBITUARY IN “THE GUARDIAN” IN 2002

Phyllis Calvert was one of the Gainsborough ladies who were the leading lights of 40’s cinema in Britain. Margaret Lockwood was the leading light followed coosely in popularity bu Phyllis Calvert and then Patricia Roc and Jean Kent. Ms Calvert was born in Chelsea, London in 1915. She made her London stage debut in “A Woman’s Privilege” in 1939. Her breakthrough role on film came with “The Man in Gray” in 1943. Other film highlights include”2,000 Women”, “Fanny by Gaslight”, “Madonna of the Seven Moons” and “The Magic Bow”. She made three films in Hollywood including “Appointment With Danger” in 1951 with Alan Ladd where she played a nun who witnesses a murder. In 1952 she received widespread critical acclaim for “Mandy”. She continued working well into her eighties. Phyllis Calvert died in 2002 at the age of 87

Eric Shotter’s obituary in “The Guardian” :

Phyllis Calvert, who has died aged 87, made her way to the top of British cinema in the 1940s through niceness. As a well-bred, Kensington-accented cornerstone of Gainsborough costume epics, she vied with Margaret Lockwood at the box office.

Regency romps, they were known as. Utter nonsense, with heart-throbs like Stewart Granger and James Mason served up with grace and charm, was quintessential to Calvert’s artistic durability – but to keep it up, without growing dull, required a determined personality and an exceptional talent. It saw her through a long and respectable career in films, plays and television.

The only great dramatic part that ever came Calvert’s way was Madame Ranevskya in The Cherry Orchard, for the Oxford Playhouse on tour in 1971. Yet, within her permitted range, was a talent which served writers from Terence Rattigan (Flare Path, 1942), JM Barrie (Peter Pan, 1947), Roger MacDougall (Escapade, 1953) and Graham Greene (The Complaisant Lover, 1959), to Noel Coward (Present Laughter, 1965, Blithe Spirit, 1971, Hay Fever, 1973), William Douglas Home (The Reluctant Debutante, 1975), Edward Albee (All Over, 1973), Denis Cannan (Dear Daddy, 1976) and Rodney Ackland (Before The Party, 1980).

Whether as bored wives realising how much their boring husbands need them, long-suffering matriarchs tied to bombastic pacifists or in flight from their rowdy families, or just het up because cook had handed in her notice, Calvert’s galère of gracious British womanhood was hard to take your eyes off. Her sense of comedy never failed her in its dry, sarcastic discipline, and there was always that expressive lower lip, with which she stirred our feelings in the feeblest part

child dancer until an injury forced her to switch to acting, she was born Phyllis Bickle in London, and educated at the Margaret Morris school of dancing and the Institut Français. She first appeared on the stage aged 10, at the Lyric, Hammersmith, with Ellen Terry in Walter de la Mare’s Crossings (1925). She got her chance in films at 12 and, during six or seven prewar years in weekly rep, made a few forgotten talkies.

In Max Catto’s Punch Without Judy (1939), she met her future husband, Peter Murray Hill, better known later as a publisher. With him as Hook, she also acted Peter Pan in the annual Scala revival of 1947. The golden wartime days at Gainsborough studios, with James Mason or Stewart Granger dancing attendance in such epics as The Man In Grey (1943), Fanny By Gaslight (1944), Madonna Of The Seven Moons (1944) and They Were Sisters (1945) had long gone; though she regularly went on making films of even more variable quality for another quarter of a century.

One of the best of the bunch was probably Mandy (1952), in which Calvert got all our tear-ducts going as the mother of the deaf-and-dumb heroine.

Her work on stage and television – especially as a woman’s page writer in the series Kate, and plays like Death Of A Heart (1985) and Across The Lake (1988) – stood her in better stead because it had the backing of years in rep. It gave her a technique of little use before the camera, but invaluable on stage.

As a parent-turned-novelist in Felicity Doulkas’s It’s Never Too Late (1954), Calvert took over from Celia Johnson. As the Countess in Anouilh’s The Rehearsal (1961), she superciliously condoned her husband’s affair with Maggie Smith’s young Lucile; and, as Mrs Arbuthnot in Wilde’s A Woman Of No Importance (1967), she showed how beans could be spilled with style.

It was, however, as Queen Mary – in succession to Wendy Hiller – that her stage authority rose exquisitely to the social occasion in Royce Ryton’s Crown Matrimonial (1973). Struggling – first, as a mother through the constraints of court behaviour, and, second, as an actor through her natural niceness – to speak to her son, Edward VIII (Peter Barkworth), she brought emotional eloquence to the task of reproaching him for putting personal happiness before the monarchy.

She made her final stage appearance at the Chichester festival in 1989, in Henry James’s The Heiress, when she was 74, and came out of retirement to appear in her last film, Mrs Dalloway, in 1997.

The only other times I recall Calvert risking loss of sympathy for an apparent lapse of taste, grace or charm was at the Lyric in 1963, and at the Duke of York’s in 1964. In the first, as Marius Goring’s wife in Ronald Duncan’s Ménage à Trois, she condoned his misconduct – as long as it took place off the premises, herself departing as a lesbian with his mistress as the curtain fell. Then, as the cold, insensitive stepmother in James Saunders’s A Scent Of Flowers, she left no trace of “the rose that sings”. Was it purely coincidental that neither show ran?

Peter Murray Hill died in 1957. Calvert is survived by her son and a daughter.

· Phyllis Calvert, actor, born February 18 1915; died October 8 2002

France Nuyen

France Nuyen (born France Nguyễn Vân Nga on 31 July 1939) is a French-American actress, model, and psychological counselor. She is known to film audiences for playing romantic leads in South Pacific (1958), Satan Never Sleeps (1962), and A Girl Named Tamiko (also 1962), and for playing Ying-Ying St. Clair in The Joy Luck Club (1993). She also originated the title role in the Broadway play The World of Suzie Wong, based on the novel of the same name. She is a Theatre World Award winner and Golden Globe Award nominee.

France Nuyen was born in Marseille. Her mother was French and during World War II, her mother and grandfather were persecuted by the Nazis for being Roma.

Nuyen was raised in Marseille by a cousin she calls “an Orchidaceae raiser who was the only person who gave a damn about me.” Having left school at the age of 11, she began studying art and became an artist’s model

In 1955, while working as a seamstress, Nuyen was discovered on the beach by Lifephotographer Philippe Halsman. She was featured on the cover of 6 October 1958 issue of Life

France Nuyen became a motion picture actress in 1958. In her first role, she appeared as Liat, daughter of Bloody Mary (played by Juanita Hall) in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific.

In 1978 France Nuyen guest-starred with Peter Falk and Louis Jourdan in the Columbo episode “Murder Under Glass“. In 1986 she joined the cast of St. Elsewhere as Dr. Paulette Kiem, remaining until the series ended in 1988.

Ms Nuyen appeared in several films including The Last Time I Saw Archie (1961) Satan Never Sleeps (1962), A Girl Named Tamiko(1962), Diamond Head (1963), Dimension 5 (1966), Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), The Joy Luck Club (1993) and The American Standards (2008).

France Nuyen worked several times with actor William Shatner. At age 19, she was cast in Shatner’s 1958 Broadway play The World of Suzie Wong. The play ran for more than 500 performances and was quite financially successful. Both Nuyen and Shatner later collected notable accolades for their work on the show, at the 1959 Theatre World Awards.

Ms Nuyen worked again with Shatner across three US television projects, starting with “Elaan of Troyius“, a 1968 third season episode of the original Star Trek in which Nuyen was the title character. She would later appear with Shatner in the 1973 made for TV movie The Horror at 37,000 Feet, and afterward in a 1974 episode of the Kung Fu.

France Nuyen was married to Thomas Gaspar Morell, a psychiatrist from New York, by whom she has a daughter, Fleur, who resides in Canada and works as a film make-up artist. She met her second husband, Robert Culp, while appearing in four episodes of his television series I Spy. They married in 1967, but divorced three years later. In 1986, Nuyen earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology and began a second career as a counselor for abused women, children and women in prison. She received a Woman of the Year award in 1989 for her psychology work. In the Life cover story on Nuyen, she is quoted as saying a proverb she also repeated in character as a spy in the I Spy episode “Magic Mirror”: “I am Chinese. I am a stone. I go where I am kicked.”

She resides in California.

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Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

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DICTIONARY OF IRISH BIOGRAPHY

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Michael Forrest

Teresa Wright

TERESA WRIGHT OBITUARY IN “THE GUARDIAN”

Phyllis Calvert

PHYLLIS CALVERT OBITUARY IN “THE GUARDIAN” IN 2002

France Nuyen

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