Charmian Carr was born Charmian Farnon on December 27, 1942. She got her name because, supposedly, her father liked the name after reading William Shakespeare‘s “Antony and Cleopatra”. Charmian was the name of one of Cleopatra’s maids. She was the second of three daughters. Her mother, Rita Oehmen, had been a vaudeville actress with her brother Eddy, and her father, Brian Farnon, was a musician. She remembers her childhood as very nice, because her older sister Shannon Farnon was always there to watch out for her and their younger sister, Darleen Carr. She moved from Chicago to California when she was 13 and her father left her mother a few years after that. The girls hardly saw their father after that.
She wanted to travel and to visit Europe, little knowing that a movie she would make would be partially shot in Europe. She worked as a doctor’s assistant for awhile until a friend of her mother’s asked her to audition for the part of “Liesl Von Trapp” in the movie, The Sound of Music (1965). Her fictional family became part of her real family and she considers Nicholas Hammond (who played her brother “Freidrich Von Trapp”) her real brother. After she made the movie, she spent much of the next several years promoting the movie around the world.
During a lull in the touring, she met and married Jay Brent and became the mother of two girls. She continued acting for a while, but decided that she wanted to stay home and raise her children. After her children were grown, she began a decorating company and met Michael Jackson, who became one of her clients. Other clients included members of her “Sound of Music” family, including Heather Menzies-Urich and her husband Robert Urich and Ernest Lehman.
She got divorced from Jay in 1991. In the late 1990s, she wrote a book about her life and her experiences being “Liesl” called “Forever Liesl”.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: CRR
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
The great Swedish film and stage actor Max von Sydow, who has died aged 90, will be remembered by different people for different roles: the title role in The Exorcist, Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told, and his Oscar-nominated part as the slave-driven Lasse in Pelle the Conqueror, but his passport to cinema heaven will be his many remarkable performances under the direction of Ingmar Bergman.
The tall, gaunt and imposing blond Von Sydow, pronounced Suedov, made his mark internationally in 1957 as the disillusioned 14th-century knight Antonius Block, in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.
Returning from the crusades to his plague-stricken country, he finds that he has lost his faith in God and can no longer pray. Suddenly, he is confronted by the personification of Death. Seeking more time on Earth, he challenges Death to a game of chess. Von Sydow’s portrayal of a man in spiritual turmoil demonstrated a maturity beyond his years and was to exemplify his solemn and dignified persona in further Bergman films, even extending to some of his less worthier enterprises.
Although it was the actor’s first film for Bergman, they had worked together at the Municipal theatre in Malmö on several plays and would continue to do so between films. From 1956 to 1958, for Bergman, Von Sydow played Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Peer in Peer Gynt, Alceste in The Misanthrope and Faust in Urfaust. In the same company were Gunnar Björnstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson and Gunnel Lindblom, who, with Von Sydow, were to become part of the Bergman repertory company of the screen.Advertisement
He was born Carl Adolf Von Sydow – later taking the name Max – to an academic family in Lund, southern Sweden. His father, Carl Wilhelm, was an ethnologist and professor of comparative folklore at the university of Lund; his mother, Maria Margareta (nee Rappe), was a school teacher.
He attended a Catholic school before doing his military service. From 1948 to 1951, Von Sydow attended the acting school at the Royal Dramatic theatre in Stockholm; while still a student there, he had small parts in two films directed by Alf Sjöberg, Only a Mother (1949) and Miss Julie (1951). After graduating, Von Sydow, who had married Christina Olin in 1951, joined the Municipal theatre in Helsingborg before moving to Malmö, which resulted in the significant meeting with Bergman.
Following The Seventh Seal, Von Sydow played in six sombre films in a row for Bergman; he was quite content to play supporting roles when asked. He had a small part in Wild Strawberries (1957), and was rather peripheral in Brink of Life (1957), as Eva Dahlbeck’s husband, waiting calmly for his wife to have a baby (which she loses), but was central in The Face (1958, later known as The Magician). As Vogler, a 19th-century mesmerist and magician, Von Sydow embodies admirably the part-charlatan, part-messiah character.
It was back to medieval Sweden in The Virgin Spring (1960), with Von Sydow as the vengeful father of a girl who has been raped and murdered. In Through a Glass Darkly (1961), he was the anguished husband of Harriet Andersson, watching his wife lapsing into insanity, and in Winter Light (1962), he was a man terrified of nuclear annihilation.
Von Sydow refused offers of work outside Sweden, even the title role in the first James Bond movie, Dr No (1962), though two decades later he played the evil genius Blofeld to Sean Connery’s Bond in Never Say Never Again, 1983. He finally gave in when George Stevens begged him to play Jesus in his 225-minute epic The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). However, despite Von Sydow’s charisma, the epic turned out to be Jesus Christ Superbore.
His next two Hollywood movies were not much better: The Reward (1965), in which he was an impoverished crop-dusting pilot trapped in the Mexican desert, and Hawaii (1966), as an unbending and arrogant missionary who makes no effort to understand the islanders. Von Sydow’s two sons played his son in the film, aged seven (Henrik), and 12 (Clas). The scheming German aristocrat in The Quiller Memorandum (1966) was the first of many bad Germans he would play well.
Complex roles in four films for Bergman temporarily stopped the rot: as an artist subject to terrible nightmares and hallucinations in Hour of the Wolf (1968); as a big, gangling innocent forced to face reality in Shame (1968), a powerful parable in which he was allowed to improvise some of his dialogue for the first time; as a man whose peaceful seclusion is disturbed by a woman recovering from the car accident that killed her husband and son (Liv Ullmann), as well as a warring couple and a homicidal maniac in The Passion of Anna (1969); and as the cold cuckolded doctor husband of Bibi Andersson in The Touch (1971), Bergman’s first English-language film.
Von Sydow and Ullmann suffered beautifully as poor Swedish peasants trying to survive in 19th-century Minnesota in Jan Troell’s diptych, The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972). It was almost inevitable that Von Sydow should be cast as the Jesuit priest, Father Merrin, in William Friedkin’s pretentious shocker The Exorcist (1973) after having gone through so many metaphysical crises in Bergman films. His craggy features haunt the film and its shoddy sequel The Exorcist II – The Heretic (1977).
On the whole, his films tended to oscillate between the serious and the silly. Among the former were Steppenwolf (1974), in which he played Hermann Hesse’s alter ego Harry Haller, a disillusioned man going on a spiritual journey; Duet for One (1986), in which he was the callous, death-fearing psychoanalyst; and Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), where he was a prickly, antisocial artist. Allen has said that the only two actors he directed of whom he found himself in awe were Von Sydow and Geraldine Page.
On the more ridiculous side were his Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon (1980), and King Osric in Conan the Barbarian (1982), through which he managed to keep a straight face – and there was no straighter face in films than Von Sydow’s.
He felt much more in his element in Bille August’s Pelle the Conqueror (1987), which won the best foreign film Oscar. Von Sydow elegantly captured the simple grandeur of an illiterate widowed farmer who leaves a poverty-stricken Sweden for a Danish island with his nine-year-old son, to find himself almost a slave on a farm.
Von Sydow reconnected with Bergman when he played the latter’s maternal grandfather in The Best Intentions (1992), directed by August from Bergman’s autobiographical script.
However, his portrayal of the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun in the biopic Hamsun (1996), directed by Troell, was far too sympathetic for a man who tried to rationalise his admiration for Hitler.
“Why me?” was Von Sydow’s reaction to the director Jonathan Miller, after he had been cast as Prospero in The Tempest at the Old Vic, in 1988. “Do you have to cross the river to fetch water when you have so many wonderful actors in England?” But Miller was justified in his choice because Von Sydow brought the aura of the Bergman films to the role as well as authority and warmth.
In 1988, he directed Katinka, a simple tale about a woman stifled by a loveless marriage, which made little impact. Von Sydow was glad to have made it, but said that he would never direct again. He continued to alternate between mainstream Hollywood (he was in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, 2002), and more challenging material such as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), mostly in small scene-stealing roles.
He was a sinister German doctor in Martin Scorsese’s psychological thriller Shutter Island (2010); a mysterious mute in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011), for which he received his second Oscar nomination; Lor San Tekka in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015); and the Three-Eyed Raven in the sixth season of Game of Thrones (2016). His last film role came in Thomas Vinterberg’s Kursk (2018).
He and Olin divorced in 1979; in 1997 he married the French film-maker Catherine Brelet, and they settled in Paris (Von Sydow became a French citizen in 2002). He is survived by Brelet and their sons, Cédric and Yvan, and by Henrik and Clas, the sons of his first marriage.
• Max von Sydow (Carl Adolf von Sydow), actor; born 10 April 1929; died 8 March 2020
While it was not surprising to see Royal Shakespeare Company player Olivia Williams in screen productions based on the works and life of Jane Austen, it was a pleasant surprise that the actress was able to avoid the costume drama typecasting of so many of her classically trained British peers. She was perhaps a bit too often cast as quietly suffering stiff-upper lippers, but able to carry off the “sensitive beauty” with humor, strength or wilting melodrama as called for. Williams worked in Hollywood as a supporting player in big budget studio films like “The Sixth Sense” (1999), but also split her time between American and British independent films. She showcased an accessibility and wicked wit in comedies like “Rushmore” (1998) and “Lucky Break” (2001) and uncommon depth in “The Heart of Me” (2002), proving an adept supporting player whose luminous beauty was backed by a fierce intellectualism.
Kabir Bedi is an internationally acclaimed Indian actor. He has acted in over 60 Bollywood films and has hits like “Khoon Bhari Maang”, “Kurbaan” and “Main Hoon Na”. He is well-recognized for his role of Emperor Shah Jahan in “Taj Mahal: An Eternal Love Story”.
Popularly recognized in the West for his role as a villainous ‘Gobinda’ in the James Bond film, “Octopussy”, Kabir also played a pivotal role in the Columbia Pictures’ “The Beast of War”, a film on the Russian war in Afghanistan. He is best known in Europe for playing a Pirate in “Sandokan”, a popular TV mini- series. He also starred in “The Bold and the Beautiful”, the second most watched television show in the world. Kabir Bedi has been on air on Indian TV with his no.1 show on India’s war history on the country’s no.1 news channel garnering over 30 million viewers.
Kabir Bedi with his deep voice, rare wit and strong persona is known to have hosted a bevy of events, awards shows and corporate shows in India. Recently, he hosted an event for the Government of Madhya Pradesh to mark the thousandth year of the incarnation of the King of Malwa Raja Bhoj.
Lately, Kabir has also been associated with corporate shows for renowned brands like Serco, Godfrey Phillips and Business India.
Kabir has just finished working on a Tamil film titled “Aravaan”, directed by Vasanthabalan. He is currently touring Canada and North America with a theatre play. ‘Taj’ written by Canada’s renowned playwright John Murell. The play was commissioned by the Luminato Festival.
Evelyn KeyesAnn Rutherford & Evelyn KeyesSons Of The Legion, poster, l-r: Tim Holt, Evelyn Keyes, Billy Lee, Billy Cook, Donald O’Connor, 1938. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)Top Of The World, poster, US poster art, from bottom left: Dale Roberston, Evelyn Keyes, Frank Lovejoy, 1955. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)Smugglers Island, poster, US poster art, Jeff Chandler, Evelyn Keyes, 1951. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Evelyn Keyes obituary from “The Guardian” in 2008.
Evelyn Keyes, who has died aged 91, entitled her 1977 autobiography, Scarlett O’Hara’s Younger Sister. But there was more to Keyes than her role of Suellen O’Hara in Gone With the Wind (1939). Her memoirs, subtitled My Lively Life in and Out of Hollywood, were more about her marriages, sexual liaisons and abortions than about her film career.
In 1940, after two years of marriage, her depressive first husband, Barton Bainbridge, shot himself. Her second marriage, to Columbia director Charles Vidor, lasted two years from 1943 before she left him to marry John Huston in 1946. From 1953, she lived with producer Mike Todd, and became jazzman Artie Shaw’s eighth wife in 1957. They separated in the 1970s, and divorced in 1985. After his death in 2004, she sued his estate and was awarded $1.42m.
The most interesting period of her career was in film noir. When told that she had become a film noir icon, she laughed: “It seems that I had a whole career I didn’t even know about!” Once past ingenue, the redhead showed a dark side in dramas in which her morality is altered by confrontations with sex and cupidity. As a showgirl in Robert Rossen’s debut, Johnny O’Clock (1947), she is drawn into a shadowy world in pursuit of the murderer of her sister.
Keyes was literally a femme fatale in the title role of The Killer That Stalked New York (1950). As a jewel smuggler on the run, carrying the smallpox virus, she moves effectively from cool confidence to desperation. In classic noir fashion, she tracks down her husband for one last embrace so she can infect him as a punishment for his infidelity.
The Prowler (1951), Joseph Losey’s tense thriller, had Keyes as a lonely, sexually-frustrated wife who has an affair with a cop (Van Heflin). After the cop shoots her sterile husband, making it seem as if he were a prowler, the two benighted lovers are locked in an atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia.
In 1953, 99 River Street had her shifting between femme fatale and girl-next-door without stretching credibility. She plays an actor playing the part of a murderer, but gets involved in a real one.
Born in Texas, at 18 Keyes was talent spotted while dancing in a nightclub, and put under personal contract to Cecil B DeMille. However, she was merely asked to be passive and pretty in The Buccaneer (1938) and Union Pacific (1939) until, freed from her Paramount contract, David O Selznick asked her to play the selfish and weak Suellen, whose beau her elder sister Scarlett marries in Gone With the Wind. Apparently Keyes outran Selznick when he chased her around his office at their first meeting, but he cast her anyway.
In 1940, she signed a Columbia contract and began getting bigger and better roles such as mad scientist Boris Karloff’s daughter in Before I Hang (1940), and the blind girl whom disfigured gangster Peter Lorre loves in The Face Behind the Mask (1941). During the shooting, Keyes had to cope with Lorre’s dependency on drugs and alcohol.
Keyes is radiant in Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941) as the woman in love with Robert Montgomery, who reincarnates into the body of the businessman who ruined her father. Another huge success was The Jolson Story (1946), in which she played Al Jolson’s first wife.
While Harry Cohn, Columbia’s big boss, was polishing Rita Hayworth’s star image, Keyes languished in run-of-the mill comedies and westerns mainly opposite Glenn Ford, such as The Adventures of Martin Eden and The Desperadoes (both 1943). In 1949, she turned freelance, making a few interesting films, including Mrs Mike (1949), as a Boston girl who gives up everything to face the hardships of life in northern Canada to be with her Mountie husband (Dick Powell); and Shoot First (1953), a murky espionage tale filmed in a Dorset countryside crawling with spies.
Her final film, before retiring in 1956, was as Tom Ewell’s absent wife in Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1955). Keyes later returned to the screen in a couple of gothic melodramas directed by Larry Cohen: A Return to Salem’s Lot (1987) and Wicked Stepmother (1989).
A self-described “flaming liberal” who was once a “mush-minded bigot”, the plain-speaking Keyes explained that having an abortion just before filming Gone With the Wind, left her unable to have children.
· Evelyn Keyes, actor, born November 20 1916; died July 4 2008
The abpve “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
John Buckmaster was born on July 18, 1915 in Frinton-On-Sea, Essex, England as John Rodney Buckmaster. He is known for his work on Sherlock Holmes (1954), Sample People(2000) and The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse (1948). He died in 1983 in London, England. He was the son of Gladys Cooper.
Jean Wallace, a screen actress who had feature parts in a dozen Hollywood productions and was married to two stars, Franchot Tone and Cornel Wilde, died of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage Wednesday at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 66 years old.1
Among Miss Wallace’s films, most of which were made in the 1940’s and 1950’s, were ”You Can’t Ration Love,” ”Song of India,” ”Maracaibo” and ”Lancelot and Guinevere.”
Miss Wallace, born Jean Walasek in Chicago, was a fashion model in her teens and went to Hollywood to get into pictures.
Rescued by Paramount
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer gave her a part in a Hedy Lamarr feature, ”Ziegfeld Girl,” but dropped her upon learning that she was not 19 years old, as she had said she was, but 17, which meant that under state law she could work only four hours a day and had to have a tutor.
Paramount gave her a six-month contract, complete with tutor. She was given a bit part in the 1941 musical ”Louisiana Purchase.” By then she had become a protegee of Franchot Tone, who at 36 was twice her age, and in October 1941 she and the actor eloped to Yuma, Ariz., and were married.
The marriage lasted seven years, during which the couple had two sons, whose custody was awarded to Mr. Tone when they were divorced.
In 1949, after a visit with the chldren, Miss Wallace stabbed herself in the abdomen with a kitchen knife, but quickly recovered.
Early in 1950 she was married to James Randall, a soldier she had met while on a hospital tour. The marriage was annulled after five months. She married Cornel Wilde in 1951 and appeared in several movies made by Theodora Productions, a company she and Mr. Wilde created. They were divorced in 1981.
Miss Wallace is survived by three sons, Pascal Tone of Hamilton, Mass.; Thomas Tone of Ottawa, and Cornel Wallace Wilde of Beverly Hills, a brother, John Wallace of Los Angeles, a sister, Karol Crawford of Los Angeles, and three grandchildren.
The abpve “New York Times” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Oweb Moore was born in Fordstown Crossroads, County Meath, Ireland, and along with his brothers Tom, Matt, and Joe (1895–1926), and sister Mary (1890–1919), he emigrated to the United States as a steerage passenger on board the S.S. Anchoria and was inspected on Ellis Island in May 1896. All went on to successful careers in motion pictures in Hollywood, California. He died in 1939 in Beverly Hills, California at the age of 52.
