Dark-eyed British actress Barbara Steele had the perfect face for horror. Though the Rank Organization starlet had been imported to the United States by 20th Century Fox to play Elvis Presley’s love interest in “Flaming Star” (1960), Steele proved an ill-fit for the Hollywood cookie cutter and was replaced after a week of shooting. An actor’s strike drove Steele back to Europe, where her haunting beauty was used to good effect in a string of Gothic horror films, beginning with Mario Bava’s “Black Sunday” (1960). In the ensuing years, Steele skulked through such lurid chillers as “The Horrible Dr. Hichcock” (1962), “Castle of Blood” (1964) and “Terror-Creatures from Beyond the Grave” (1965), in which she brought sex appeal to characters of both pure and dark motives. Federico Fellini found a place for the slinky actress in his masterful “8-1/2” (1963) while German New Wave director Volker Schlöndorff offered Steele one of her better roles in “Young Törless” (1966), but the glut of cheap European fright flicks in which she found herself mired drove Steele back to North America. No longer an ingénue, she married a Hollywood screenwriter and cashed in on her cult credibility with meaty roles in Jonathan Demme’s “Caged Heat” (1974), David Cronenberg’s “Shivers” (1975) and Joe Dante’s “Piranha” (1978). Finding a measure of artistic satisfaction behind the camera, Steele won an Emmy as the producer of the 1988 miniseries “War and Remembrance” while learning to enjoy her lifetime association as horror cinema’s reigning scream queen.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
The entrancing and exotic-eyed “B”-level leading lady Jody Lawrance, whose 1950’s career was spotty at best, provided lovely diversion from the manly adventure movies she helped bring to the screen. Personal turmoil and studio conflicts, however, ultimately hurt her career and the remainder of her life was spent out of the limelight.
She was born Nona Josephine Goddard in Fort Worth, Texas, on October 19, 1930. Her childhood was troubled and disruptive. Parents Ervin S. (“Doc”) and Eleanor (née Roeck) Goddard divorced while Jody was a child. Ervin, nicknamed “Doc” although he was not one, was an amateur inventor and research engineer at the Adel Precision Products Company at one point. Moving to Caliornia, he eventually married Grace McGee in 1937. Jody subsequently migrated to California and lived with her father and stepmother in their Van Nuys bungalow. Marilyn Monroe (then Norma Jeane Baker) was a foster child of her stepmother Grace, who knew Norma Jeane’s mother when both worked for Columbia — Grace as a film librarian and and Gladys as a film cutter. Jody and Norma Jeane lived together briefly in 1941-1942.
Jody went on to attend Beverly Hills High School (studying under Benno Schneider and his wife) and the Hollywood Professional School. Excelling as a swimmer, Jody’s first shot was appearing in a water show operated by Larry Crosby, who was also a publicity manager for famous younger brother Bing Crosby.
The teenager was awarded her first on-camera professional part on the TV show “The Silver Theatre” in 1949. Because her real name, Nona Goddard, lacked glamor, she changed it to Jody (short for Josephine, her middle name) Lawrance (her maternal grandmother’s maiden name). Jody’s drama teacher Schneider managed to get her an introduction to Columbia. The studio took an immediate interest in the 19-year-old beauty and signed her to a 7-year contract at $250 per week.
Jody made four relatively strong films in 1951. She provided damsel-in-distress duty in her screen debut between up-and-coming screen hero John Derek and established villainAnthony Quinn in the spirited swashbuckler Mask of the Avenger (1951). This was followed by The Family Secret (1951) playing the altruistic fiancée to a murder suspect (again, John Derek. Things looked even more promising when she co-starred an exotic love interest to robust Burt Lancaster in the Eastern adventure yarn Ten Tall Men (1951). Her final film that year was a horror opus portraying the fiancée to Louis Hayward as theThe Son of Dr. Jekyll (1951).
She started the following year off with the adventure film The Brigand (1952) opposite handsome, sliver-eyed Anthony Dexter, better known for his captivating Valentino-like looks than for his acting ability. In 1953 career problems surfaced when the studio assigned Jody, who had now completed six film projects, to a lackluster role in one of its minor musicals, a poor man’s version of “On the Town” entitled All Ashore (1953) which starred sailors-on-leave Mickey Rooney, Dick Haymes and Ray McDonald. Peggy Ryan,Barbara Bates and Jody were cast as their the love interests. Set this time on California’s Catalina Island instead of New York, Jody balked at the assignment while citing a lack of confidence in her singing and dancing abilities. She ask the studio to replace her but Columbia refused and the actress begrudgingly filmed the movie. Her “difficulty” with the studio on this assignment ultimately led to a break of her contract. Feeling overlooked by the studio at the time, she supposedly did not regret her release too much.
On her own, however, the quality of Jody’s films declined markedly with her the “Poverty Row” independent film, the subpar and highly distorted biographical piece Captain John Smith and Pocahontas (1953) again starring Anthony Dexter. It was revealed that Jody suffered a frightening allergic reaction on the set after dying her lighter hair jet black for the role. Among many other problems, the 23-year old, blue-eyed actress was quite miscast in the role of the much younger Indian maiden. The released film was a dismal failure and Jody’s career suffered as a result.
Finding almost no offers in 1954-1955 and in order to make ends meet, Jody took on employment as an ice cream shop waitress near the UCLA campus in Los Angeles. The story goes that one day one of her customers was her former co-star Burt Lancaster. He came to her aid by introducing her to his friend, director Michael Curtiz, who reignited her career with his minor film noir The Scarlet Hour (1956) which starred Tom Tryon and had Jody playing a second femme role behind Carol Ohmart, who was being built up as Paramount’s supposed answer to a difficult Marilyn Monroe at the time. Jody was promoted as one of the “Deb Stars of 1955” along with other hopefuls including Cathy Crosby, Anita Ekberg, Mara Corday, Marisa Pavan and Lori Nelson, among other lesser knowns.
Back on the boards again, Jody revived her look on screen as a blonde again. Things looked hopeful when Paramount Studios signed her to a contract, earning $300 a week. In the spiritual drama The Leather Saint (1956), she plays a platinum-blonde nightclub singer (and even sings a bit of “I’m in the Mood for Love” in the film) and temptress to (once again) John Derek whose Episcople minister agonizes over his decision to box for money in order help medically finance church/community projects for special needs children.
Things fell apart once more, however, when Paramount released her the following year. It seems that the studio was perturbed when, while promoting her to the public as a sexy single, Jody resisted the cheesecake angle and also secretly married Bruce Tilton (1930-2007), an airplane parts company executive, in Las Vegas on April 7, 1956. A daughter, Victoria, was born a year later.
She remained unproductive career-wise during this period of new marriage and more family. By April of 1958, however, the Tilton marriage had dissolved and a bitter custody suit ensued (in the end, Jody lost). While she returned to the screen, the pickings were slim. She landed minor parts in the Shirley Booth vehicle Hot Spell (1958) and Barry Sullivan film The Purple Gang (1959), and found isolated work on TV in such dramatic fare as “Perry Mason,” “The Loretta Young Show” and “The Rebel”. Her last screen role of any substance was the minor western Stagecoach to Dancers’ Rock (1962) starringMartin Landau.
Jody met second husband Robert Wolf Herre and they married in November of 1962. Two children, Robert Jr. and Abigail (“Chrissy”) were born from this relationship. Other than an isolated TV appearance on “The Red Skelton Show” in 1968, little was heard of Jody following this period until it was learned that she had died in Ojai, California on July 10, 1986, at age 55.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
For those filmgoers nostalgic for mainstream Hollywood movies of the 1960s, Edie Adams, who has died aged 81, was an indispensable element. The perky redhead (or sometimes blonde) appeared in supporting roles, enlivening 10 films, from 1960 to 1967.
Her best film was undoubtedly Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960), in which Adams made her big-screen debut as Miss Olsen, the secretary and discarded lover of the philandering JD Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray). At an office party, she “educates” Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), her boss’s current mistress, with delicious relish. “Before me, there was Miss Rossi in auditing, and after me there was Miss Koch in disability, and right before you, there was miss, um, oh what’s-her-name, on the 25th floor … oh, what a salesman! Always the last booth in the Chinese restaurant – and the same pitch about divorcing his wife – and in the end, you wind up with egg foo yong on your face.” The film won five Oscars.
Adams recalled: “I always had to laugh when everybody was talking about how hard it is to get into motion pictures. All I had to do was go out to dinner with Ernie [Kovacs, her actor husband] and Billy Wilder and his wife. Billy said to me right off, ‘I have a picture for you to shoot on Monday.’ You have to realise I’d already been on Broadway. I was kind of huffy about coming out to the big Wild West to do movies.”
Adams, who was born in Kingston, Philadelphia, as Elizabeth Edith Enke, studied opera at the Juilliard School in New York. She started off as a singer on television in Ernie in Kovacsland (later the Ernie Kovacs Show), and went on to become a hit in two Broadway musicals, Leonard Bernstein’s Wonderful Town (1953) and Johnny Mercer and Gene de Paul’s Li’l Abner (1956).
In the former show, she played Rosalind Russell’s naive sister Eileen and sang A Little Bit in Love, though she never sang in the movies. According to the New York Times, “Miss Adams moves through this elusive character with the greatest of ease, keeping it fresh and sweet and adding just enough worldliness to make it palatable.” In Li’l Abner, adapted from the comic strip, she won a Tony as Daisy Mae, wearing a low-cut polka dot blouse and the shortest of decorously torn skirts, and sang the touching romantic number, Namely You.
On screen, after The Apartment, Adams was vivacious in Lover Come Back (1961) as a chorus girl turned advertising model called Rebel Davis, one of lothario Rock Hudson’s conquests until Doris Day comes along. She had married the cigar-smoking, mustachioed comedian Kovacs in 1954. They made a great comedy team, both receiving nominations for Emmys for best performance in a comedy series in 1957. Adams wrote an autobiography, Sing a Pretty Song, in which she explained that “all those years with Ernie taught me how to hold my own in a roomful of comics”.
In 1962, Adams and Kovacs left a party at Milton Berle’s Los Angeles home in two different cars. The first skidded on the wet road and crashed, killing Kovacs. It was suggested that he was probably lighting one of his cigars when he lost control. After his death, it was discovered that he owed around $500,000 to the Internal Revenue Service in back taxes.
Refusing to file for bankruptcy, and declining the offer of a benefit concert offered by friends including Berle, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, Adams worked hard, managing to pay back the debt within five years. The work included dozens of television and theatre performances, touring and stock, including Sweet Bird of Youth, Hello, Dolly!, Annie Get Your Gun and a female version of The Odd Couple, as well as films.
In 1963, she had roles in four movies, the first as Sid Caesar’s wife in Stanley Kramer’s epic comedy of greed, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. There followed Call Me Bwana, in which Adams, as a CIA agent, vied with Anita Ekberg for Bob Hope’s affections. In Love With a Proper Stranger, she had a small but showy part as a classy dog-loving stripper who refuses to lend money to her ex-lover Steve McQueen to help his girlfriend (Natalie Wood) get an abortion.
The Best Man (1964) saw her as the wife of ambitious politician Cliff Robertson. Adams’s last feature film, apart from a role in the misnamed Boxoffice (1982), was as a has-been movie star hoping to inherit Rex Harrison’s money in The Honeypot (1966), Joseph Mankiewicz’s updated version of Ben Jonson’s Volpone.
In the US, she was most famous for a series of TV commercials for Muriel cigars that lasted almost 20 years, from the late 50s. Wearing the slinkiest of dresses and the highest of heels, she caressed giant cigars while dancing, and giving a come-hither wink, before whispering the slogan, “Why don’t you pick one up and smoke it some time?”, a sly allusion to Mae West’s celebrated “come up and see me” invitation.
In 1982, tragedy struck again, when her daughter, Mia Kovacs, was killed in a car accident, also in Los Angeles. Adams, who married twice more, to the photographer Marty Mills and the jazz trumpeter Pete Candoli, is survived by her son, Joshua Mills.
• Edie Adams (Elizabeth Edith Enke), actor and singer, born April 16 1927; died October 15 2008
The Above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Vietnam War veteran awarded the National Defense Medal and Vietnam Service Medal, and won the George Washington Honor Medal, from the Freedom Foundation. Attended Newport Harbor High School, San Diego City College, Cypress Junior College, Chapman College, and LA Valley College. Paul won the LA Diamond Belt, Welterweight Division, the Southern Pacific AAU Boxing Championship in 1972. Won two Golden Globes. Starred in “American Graffiti”.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous
TCM Overview:
A beefy, laconic leading man of the 1970s, Le Mat is best known for his performances in George Lucas’ “American Graffiti” (1973) and especially as Melvin Dummar, an aimless blue-collar worker who enjoys a fortunate encounter with millionaire Howard Hughes, in Jonathan Demme’s engaging, off-beat “Melvin and Howard” (1980). He has also worked frequently in TV, notably as Farrah Fawcett’s abusive husband in “The Burning Bed” (NBC, 1984) and as newspaperman Josiah Peale on the syndicated series “Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years” (1994-96).
Faith Domergue obituary in “The Independent” in 1999.
Tom Vallance’s obituary of Faith Domergue in May 1999’s “Independent”: MAGNATE Howard Hughes promoted the careers of several film actresses both before and during his tenure as head of RKO Studios, but the two stars in whom he invested most time and money were Jane Russell, who made it to the top, and Faith Domergue, who didn’t. ±§
Hughes nurtured the career of the sultry, dark-haired beauty Domergue for seven years, starting when she was only 16 years old. The first film in which she starred, Vendetta, is one of Hollywood’s legendary disasters, finally released in 1950 four years after starting production, having gone through five directors, including such illustrious names as Preston Sturges and Max Ophuls. The same year that Vendetta opened to damning notices and an indifferent public, Where Danger Lives, in which Domergue co-starred with Robert Mitchum, also did poor business, and Hughes lost interest in his protege.
The exotic actress eventually achieved a fame of sorts, becoming a cult favourite for her roles in science-fiction movies such as It Came From Beneath the Sea, Cult of the Cobra and one of the most notable Fifties sci-fi films, This Island Earth.
Born in New Orleans in 1925, she was the adopted daughter of Annabelle Quimet and Leo Domergue. In the early Thirties the family moved to California, where Domergue attended Beverly Hills Catholic School and St Monica’s Convent School. Shortly after leaving school in 1942, she attended a party aboard Howard Hughes’s yacht, and so impressed him with her striking looks that he signed her to a long-term contract. Over three years of voice, diction and drama lessons followed before he considered her ready for the camera.
After a small one-scene role in Young Widow (1946) starring Jane Russell, Hughes cast her in the leading role in Vendetta. Domergue told Filmfax magazine in 1997,
Howard had formed a company with Preston Sturges called California Pictures and Preston had an idea to do what was then called Colomba (based on the novel by Prosper Merimee). He told Howard that he wanted to do a film with his girlfriend Frances Ramsden and Harold Lloyd called The Sin of
Harold Diddlebock [later retitled Mad Wednesday] and, if Howard would allow Preston to produce and direct that, then Preston would produce Colomba with me. He told Howard, “I will make a star of Faith”, which of course is what Howard wanted to hear.
Sturges chose Max Ophuls to direct Colomba and worked with him on the script, but when shooting started Sturges decided to take over the direction. According to Domergue,
Max would be allowed to say “Action!” and that was it – he was not allowed to say “Cut” or instruct any of the actors. Just before we started shooting Howard had been piloting his plane and had crashed into a house and remained between life and death for weeks, so now Sturges had total control of the company and at this point he lost his bearing. So much hubris came into his actions, this arrogant pride. Actor Nigel Bruce became short- tempered and my leading man George Dolenz wanted to leave. The whole picture was supposed to be for my benefit and here it was all going down the drain.
When Hughes became aware of the situation, the company was dissolved and Sturges and Ophuls dismissed. Stuart Heisler was hired, primarily to shoot close-ups, before the film was temporarily abandoned. Two years later Hughes, having taken over RKO, shot more footage for the film (now retitled Vendetta), then hired Mel Ferrer (who received sole screen credit as director) to shoot six weeks of retakes. In 1947 Domergue had married the director Hugo Fregonese, and on completion of the film went with him to his native Argentina:
The Vendetta experience was still on my mind – all that time and money wasted. By the time it was all over, I had no drive left, and, to be perfectly frank, I lost my first child because of Vendetta. I had a miscarriage and this was heartbreaking.
Domergue returned to Hollywood when Hughes offered her an RKO contract and the lead in John Farrow’s film noir Where Danger Lives, in which Domergue was a psychotic who lets a doctor (Robert Mitchum) believe he killed her husband when in fact she has smothered him herself. “Robert Mitchum was wonderful,” commented Domergue.
There was a scene where I was to get hysterical and it was difficult for me. After we shot the scene, Robert said to me, “I like you. You don’t know what you’re doing, but you’re in there doing
it with all your heart!” There was an enormous publicity campaign for me after I finished the film. I was on practically every cover of every magazine – 15 pages in Pageant, four pages in Life, the cover of Look – you name it.
Then, with both my films about to open in New York, I told the studio I couldn’t go there because I was tired, angry and pregnant again. Howard phoned me and told me there was a lot of money tied up in the campaign. When I told him I was going to have a baby he said, “OK, goodbye Faith”, and that was the last time I ever heard his voice.
Where Danger Lives opened to lukewarm response, followed by the heavily panned Vendetta, a wordy and turgid melodrama of Corsican vengeance. “It is not a good film,” confessed Domergue,
but we all were quite good. Unfortunately all of the performances that Max and I worked on were out the window. What you see in the final version is bits and pieces of everything – but nothing of what Preston shot at all except a couple of long shots.
Domergue was in three minor movies – Don Siegel’s Duel at Silver Creek (1952), Lloyd Bacon’s The Great Sioux Massacre (1953) and Stuart Heisler’s This is My Love (1954) – and travelled extensively with Fregonese, by whom she had two children, before her most significant year in pictures, 1955, when she starred in This Island Earth, It Came From Beneath the Sea and Cult of the Cobra as well as the western Santa Fe Passage (“I don’t think I had one day off in the whole of 1955!”).
Considered one of the more intelligent science-fiction tales, Joseph Newman’s This Island Earth (partly directed by Jack Arnold when Newman fell ill) featured Domergue as a scientist shanghaied with her colleagues to the alien planet Metaluna to help defend it from invasion. “It has attained more popularity than anything else I’ve done,” said the actress, “though such films are really for the technicians – actors take second place to them and the sets.”
Metaluna was constructed on Universal’s old Phantom of the Opera stage, said to be the biggest in the world, while the film’s giant mutant (which grapples with Domergue on the platform of the spaceship near the film’s climax) showed the make-up expert Bud Westmore and his team at their most imaginative. The film also benefited from being one of the last shot in the three-strip Technicolor process.
Domergue was a scientist again in Robert Gordon’s It Came From Beneath the Sea, helping to destroy a giant octopus (created by Ray Harryhausen, who cut costs by giving his monster six arms instead of eight) which invades San Francisco.
After Santa Fe Passage (“with a wonderful director named William Witney who was the best director I’ve ever worked with”), Domergue was asked to take over the lead in Cult of the Cobra. Universal had started the film with the actress Mari Blanchard but were unhappy with the footage and replaced her with Domergue, who later said, “That film was not a fond memory for me. My marriage to Hugo was breaking up – he was in Europe and I was in Hollywood.” The bizarre tale cast Domergue as leader of an Asiatic cult of snake-worshippers, able to transform themselves into snakes at will. When six GIs photograph a secret ceremony she puts a fatal curse on them, and they are then killed by the exotic snake-lady.
Having divorced Fregonese, Domergue then made three films in England, Ken Hughes’s taut Timeslip (1955), Vernon Sewell’s B-movie thriller Soho Incident (1956) in which she headed a gang of racketeers, and a disappointing crime film, Man in the Shadow (1957). “This period of my life became an active time,” she said, “because I was a single mother with children to support.” Domergue was now living in London and Rome, and in 1966 married the agent Paolo Cossa, subsequently making several Italian films including Una Sull’Altra (1969) with John Ireland and Elsa Martinelli and L’Amore Breve (1970) with Joan Collins. “I had 30 wonderful and cherished years with Paolo,” she said recently, “and I miss him dearly.”
In 1972, a New York publisher announced that he would issue a book by Domergue called My Life with Howard Hughes, stating in Variety that “this will be the first time one of his ladies really talked about the intimate relationship she had”. The book never appeared, and Domergue said two years ago:
I don’t talk much about Howard Hughes. I think it quite sad that it’s the negative side of someone’s life that is so interesting to the public and not the fact that he was one of the great contributors to aeronautics in this country since the beginning of the century. All my memories of Howard are good ones.
Faith Domergue, actress: born New Orleans 16 June 1925; married first Ted Stauffer (marriage dissolved), 1947 Hugo Fregonese (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1955), 1966 Paolo Cossa (deceased); died Santa Barbara, California 4 April 1999.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
American actor who had early success as a sunny juvenile, but whose career declined following World War II, in which he was a highly-decorated hero. A native of Los Angeles, Morris played football at Los Angeles Junior College, then worked as a forest ranger. Returning to school, he studied acting at Los Angeles Junior College and at the acclaimed Pasadena Playhouse. A Warner Bros. talent scout spotted him at the Playhouse and he signed with the studio in 1936. Blond and open-faced, he was a perfect type for boy-next-door parts and within a year had made a success in the title role of Kid Galahad(1937). While filming Flight Angels (1940), Morris became interested in flying and became a pilot. With war in the wind, he joined the Naval Reserve and became a Navy flier in 1942, leaving his film career behind for the duration of the war. Assigned to the carrier Essex in the Pacific, Morris shot down seven Japanese planes and contributed to the sinking of five ships. He was awarded four Distinguished Flying Crosses and two Air Medals. Following the war, Morris returned to films, but his nearly four-year absence had cost him his burgeoning stardom. He continued to topline movies, but the pictures, for the most part, sank in quality. Losing his boyish looks but not demeanor, Morris spent most of the Fifties in low-budget Westerns. A wonderful performance as a weakling in Stanley Kubrick‘s Paths of Glory (1957) might have given impetus to a new career as a character actor, had Morris lived. However, he suffered a massive heart attack while visiting aboard the aircraft carrier Bon Homme Richard in San Francisco Bay and was pronounced dead after being transported to Oakland Naval Hospital in Oakland, California. He was 45. His last film was not released until two years after his death.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Jim Beaver <jumblejim@prodigy.net>
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
“Movies Unlimited” article:
He can be seen playing alongside Bette Davis as a boxer in Kid Galahad (1937) or a cadet running amok at the Virginia Military Institute in Brother Rat (1938). Wayne Morris may not be a name you’re familiar with, but you have most likely seen the husky, affable blond in Warner Brothers 1930s and ’40s films. But you may not be familiar with Morris’ wartime record. We frequently hear about Hollywood actors such as James Stewart, Clark Gable and Mickey Rooney who enlisted and were decorated for their bravery during World War II. However, Morris is rarely recognized for his service and was one of World War II’s first flying aces.
His interest in flying started in Hollywood. While filming Flying Angles (1940) with Jane Wyman and Dennis Morgan, Morris learned how to pilot a plane. Once World War II began, Morris joined the Naval Reserve and became a Naval flier in 1942 on the U.S.S. Essex. He put his career on hold to fight. The same year he was married to Olympic swimmer Patricia O’Rourke.
“Every time they showed a picture aboard the Essex, I was scared to death it would be one of mine,” Morris said. “That’s something I could never have lived down.”
Morris flew 57 missions–while some actors only flew 20 or less–and made seven kills, which qualified him as an ace. He also helped sink five enemy ships. He originally was told he was too big to fly fighter planes until he went to his uncle-in-law, Cdr. David McCampbell who wrote a letter allowing him to fly the VF-15, according to “McCampbell’s Heroes: the Story of the U.S. Navy’s Most Celebrated Carrier Fighter of the Pacific” by Edwin P. Hoyt. Three of his planes were so badly damaged by enemy fire that they were deemed unfit to fly and were dumped in the ocean, according to IMDB.
“As to what a fellow thinks when he’s scared, I guess it’s the same with anyone. You get fleeting glimpses in your mind of your home, your wife, the baby you want to see,” Morris said. “You see so clearly all the mistakes you made. You want another chance to correct those mistakes. You wonder how you could have attached so much importance to ridiculous, meaningless things in your life. But before you get to thinking too much, you’re off into action and everything else is forgotten.”
For his duty, Morris was honored with four Distinguished Flying Crosses and two Air Medals. When he returned to Hollywood after four year at war, his once promising career floundered and Warner Brothers did not allow him to act for a year. Morris’s most notable post-war films include The Voice of the Turtle, John Loves Mary and Paths of Glory. His career ended with several B-westerns.
At the age of 45, Morris passed away in 1959 from a massive heart attack. But his service to his country was not forgotten. Morris is buried in Arlington Cemetery and was given full military honors at his funeral.
Though I am thankful for all men and women who serve our country, I wanted to recognize Wayne Morris. For years I saw Wayne in films and knew nothing about him except that I liked him. He is one of those character actors that can make a movie special. Morris seemed like a regular guy. Before he started out in Hollywood, he played football at Los Angeles Junior College and worked as a forest ranger. After I researched him and discovered his war record, I wanted to honor his service and his work in films.
Thank you to Wayne Morris and men and women in the military for serving our country.
Jessica Pickens is the writer for Comet Over Hollywood Blog. The blog explores everything from classic actressbeauty tips to celebrities from the Carolinas. Outside of blogging, Jessica is a reporter at The Shelby Star in Shelby, N.C. You can visit her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter @HollywoodComet.
The above “Movies Unlimited” article can also be accessed online here.
Henry Silva was born on September 15, 1928 in Brooklyn, New York City. He quit public school to attend drama classes at age 13, supporting himself as a dishwasher in a Manhattan hotel. By 1955, Silva had moved up from dishwasher to waiter, and felt ready to audition for the Actors Studio. He was one of five students chosen out of more than 2500 applicants. When the Actors Studio staged Michael V. Gazzo‘s play “A Hatful of Rain” as a classroom project, it proved so successful it came to Broadway–with studentsBen Gazzara, Shelley Winters, Harry Guardino, Anthony Franciosa and, of course, Silva in key roles. Called to Hollywood, he played a succession of heavies in films, including The Bravados (1958), Green Mansions (1959), Ocean’s 11 (1960), The Manchurian Candidate(1962) and Johnny Cool (1963).
An Italian producer made Henry an offer he could not refuse–to star as a hero for a change–and he moved his family overseas. Silva’s turning-point picture was a spaghetti western, The Hills Run Red (1966), which made him a hot box office commodity in Spain, Italy, Germany and France. His popularity was enhanced by a gift for languages. He speaks Italian and Spanish fluently and has a flair for the kind of gritty, realistic roles that also catapulted Charles Bronson to European stardom. Returning to the United States, he co-starred with Frank Sinatra in the film Contract on Cherry Street (1977), then signed on as Buck Rogers’ evil adversary Kane in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century(1979) and the television series of the same name. Silva now calls the San Fernando Valley home, but makes continual film forays back to Europe’s production centers. A dedicated jogger, he puts in five miles a day “to keep in shape and relieve tension”.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: A. Nonymous
New York Times obituary in 2022:
Henry Silva, Actor Who Specialized in Menace, Dies at 95
He was forever cast as a thug, a hit man or some other nefarious character. But he took pride in his ability to play each bad guy differently.
Henry Silva, who for decades was high on the call list of any Hollywood casting director in search of a particularly menacing villain, died on Wednesday in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 95.
His son Scott Silva confirmed the death, at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital.
Mr. Silva appeared in more than 130 movies and television shows, scowling through many of them as a thug, a hit man or some other nefarious character. He was an assassin sent by a mob boss to wreak vengeance in “Johnny Cool” in 1963. He was a drug addict with a tendency to shoot people in the 1981 Burt Reynolds movie “Sharky’s Machine.” He was a corrupt C.I.A. operative in “Above the Law,” a 1988 film starring Steven Seagal.
He was even reprehensible as a cartoon: He voiced the supervillain Bane in animated TV shows involving both Batman and Superman.
Yet Mr. Silva was a serious actor, with training at the Actors Studio in New York and appearances on Broadway and in well-regarded movies like “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962). He prided himself on not letting the typecasting make him lazy.
“I see a lot of actors who play heavies, but they always play the same heavies,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 2000. “I have a seven-minute reel of clips from my movies, and none of the guys are the same. I don’t always go to the same place, because that would be boring.”
Henry Silva was born on Sept. 23, 1926 (not, as most sources have it, in 1928), in Brooklyn. He grew up in Spanish Harlem, raised by his mother, Angelina Martinez, after his father, Jesus Silva, left when Henry was young.
“It was the kind of place,” he told Knight Ridder in 1985, “where if you lived on one block and you wanted to go a few blocks away, you had to take a couple of guys with you, or else you would get your ass kicked. I mean, that’s the only way to put it; I can’t say that you would get ‘beat up.’”
“So you were always tense, and you were always on guard,” he continued. “You were never relaxed.” He said he often tapped into those memories when playing characters who were full of jittery, bottled-up anger.
By the time he was 8 he had determined that he wanted to be an actor; he said that the Andy Hardy movies of Mickey Rooney, with their idyllic small-town life so different from his own, were an inspiration of sorts. He left school at 13 and worked odd jobs. Years later, he would sometimes be complimented by real gangsters.
“They say, ‘My God, where did you learn how to play us?’” Mr. Silva told The Chicago Sun-Times in 2000. “I say, ‘I lived with “us.” I grew up with “us” in New York.’ I used to know the guys who used to run the whole areas, the prostitution rings. I used to shine their shoes.”
His mother hoped he would become a postal carrier, but instead he tried the acting life. He occasionally landed a bit part, including one on Broadway in the Tennessee Williams flop “Camino Real,” which ran for two months in 1953.
In 1955 Mr. Silva was one of hundreds who auditioned for the Actors Studio, then being run by Lee Strasberg. He was one of five selected for membership.
He was soon part of the cast when the group staged “A Hatful of Rain,” Michael V. Gazzo’s play about a morphine addict named Johnny Pope (played by Ben Gazzara). The play was picked up for a Broadway run and opened in November of that year with a cast that also included Shelley Winters and Anthony Franciosa.
Mr. Silva earned good notices for his portrayal in the production of, yes, a bad guy: a drug pusher known as Mother. He reprised the role in the 1957 film version.
“A Hatful of Rain” would be Mr. Silva’s last Broadway appearance, but television and film offers were beginning to pile up. In the late 1950s he appeared on TV series like “Suspicion” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and in movies, including “The Tall T” (1957), with Randolph Scott, and “The Law and Jake Wade” (1958), with Robert Taylor.
The roles were big enough to catch the attention of one particularly influential person.
“One day, many years ago,” he recalled in 2000, “I was driving down Sunset Boulevard in the first car I ever owned, a Chevy convertible. I pulled up at a stoplight and heard someone say, ‘Henry, I like you in movies.’”
It was Frank Sinatra, who invited Mr. Silva to visit him on the set of “Some Came Running.” When Mr. Silva showed up, Sinatra recruited him to be in a film with him — the original “Ocean’s Eleven” (1960). Mr. Silva played one of the gang that Danny Ocean (Sinatra) brought together for a spectacular multi-casino robbery scheme. Forty-one years later, Mr. Silva would record his last movie credit by appearing in a small part in Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s Eleven” remake.
Mr. Silva became a secondary member of the Rat Pack, a circle of Sinatra pals that also included Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr. and Joey Bishop (all of whom were also in “Ocean’s Eleven”), and he would appear in two more movies with Sinatra in 1962, “Sergeants 3” and “The Manchurian Candidate.” Both demonstrated a quality that served Mr. Silva well for years: At least by the standards of the day, he could pass as a variety of races and nationalities.
He described himself as being of Italian and Hispanic descent, but in “The Manchurian Candidate” he played a Korean heavy who engages in a memorable karate fight with Sinatra’s character. In “Sergeants 3” he was an American Indian, and not for the last time; he played a number of Indians, including one in a 1965 episode of the TV series “Daniel Boone.” In the 1982 comedy “Wrong Is Right” he was a Middle Eastern fanatic.
Some roles, though, reflected his actual heritage. He played a number of Hispanic characters of various nationalities. In “Johnny Cool,” one of his few leading roles (he played the title character), he was Sicilian.
He also went to Italy for a time in the 1970s to make crime films when that genre was the rage among Italian directors, a stretch of his career he apparently enjoyed.
“If they didn’t pay me, I wouldn’t care, because it was so joyous,” he said in Mike Malloy’s 2012 documentary “Eurocrime! The Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the ’70s.”
Mr. Silva’s marriage to Ruth Earl in 1966 ended in divorce in 1987. His previous marriages, to Cindy Conroy and Mary Ramus, also ended in divorce. Besides his son Scott, he is survived by another son, Michael.
Mr. Silva had an explanation for his ability to play sinister characters decade after decade.
“I think the reason that I haven’t disappeared,” he said in 1985, “is that the heavies I play are all leaders. I never play a wishy-washy anything. They’re interesting roles, because when you leave the theater, you remember these kinds of guys
John Dall was born John Dall Thompson (some sources state John Jenner Thompson) on May 26, 1918. He made his Broadway debut in Norman Krasna‘s comedy “Dear Ruth,” directed by Moss Hart, in 1944. The show was a hit, running for over a year and a half and 680 performances.
He next appeared on Broadway in Jean-Paul Sartre‘s “Red Gloves” in 1948. The show ran for 113 performances. Dall’s penultimate stint on Broadway, in the 1950 revival of “The Heiress”, was a flop, closing after 16 performances. He had the role of the callow fortune hunter Morris Townsend, played so memorably by Montgomery Clift in William Wyler‘s 1949 movie version, The Heiress (1949).
Dall received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for The Corn Is Green (1945), his first movie. He reached the height of his movie career in 1948, playing one of the two students modeled after the 1920s’ thrill killers Leopold & Loeb in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rope(1948). Unfortunately for Dall, “Rope” was a flop. The other role for which he is best remembered, the firearms fetishist in Gun Crazy (1950) (better known by its reissue title, “Gun Crazy,” the name of the short story the movie was based on), earned him a place in the film noir pantheon. It was a B-movie and, like “Rope,” also flopped. The only prominent film he appeared in subsequently was Stanley Kubrick–Kirk Douglas‘ Spartacus(1960) in 1960, which–like “Gun Crazy”–was scripted by Dalton Trumbo, the most famous member of the Hollywood 10.
Dall, whose career started out so promisingly in the 1940s, getting an Oscar nod for his movie debut, never gained any traction. He appeared in only eight movies from 1945 to 1961, though he did many TV acting gigs. He died in 1971, reportedly of a heart attack but possibly from complications from a punctured lung.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
She was born Edna May Nutter, a child of solid New England stock, on 9th November 1883 in Malden, Massachusetts. The daughter of Ida May and Charles Edward Nutter, Edna was a descendant of the 6th American president John Quincy Adams. Miss Oliver took an early interest in the stage, and she would quit school at the age of 14 to pursue her ambitions in the theater.
Despite abandoning traditional schooling, Edna continued to study the performing arts, including speech and piano. One of her first jobs was as pianist with an all female orchestra which toured America around the turn of the century. By 1917 she had achieved success on Broadway in the hit play “Oh, Boy”. By 1923 she had appeared in her first film. . Edna May Oliver seems to have been born to play the classics of American and British literature. Some of her most memorable film roles were in adaptations of works of Charles Dickens. Although some have described her as plain or “horse faced”, Edna May Oliver’s comedic talents lent a beautiful droll warmth to her characters. She was usually called upon to play less glamorous roles such as a spinsters, but she played them with such soul, wit, and depth that to this day she remains one of the best loved of Hollywood’s character actresses. A fine example of her comedic talent can be found inLaugh and Get Rich (1931). Here we find her playing a role almost autobiographical in nature, that of a proud woman with Boston roots who has married “down”. As the plot unwinds, she is invited to a society gala despite her modest circumstances. At the gala she becomes tipsy. With a frolicsome air Edna May seems to use the role to gently mock her real self. Her slightly drunk character seizes upon a bit of flattery, and alluding to her old New England family, proudly proclaims to each who will listen, “I am a Cranston. That explains everything!”. In real life, Edna May Oliver was a Nutter, and perhaps that explains everything. Edna May Oliver married stock broker David Pratt in 1928, but the marriage ended in divorce five years later. In 1939 she received an Oscar nomination for her supporting role as Widow McKlennar in the picture Drums Along the Mohawk (1939). That was to be one of her last films. Miss Oliver was struck ill in August of 1942. Although she seemed to recover briefly, she was re-admitted to Los Angeles’s Cedars of Lebanon hospital in October Her dear friend actress Virginia Hammond flew out from New York to stay by her bedside. Edna May Oliver died on her 59th birthday, 9th November 1942.Virginia Hammond was with her and said, “She died without ever being aware of the gravity of her condition. She just went peacefully asleep.”
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Thomas McWilliams <tgm@netcom.com>
The abve IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
“Movies Unlimited” article:
Oh yes, I’m grateful in a way for this face, now that I’ve gotten used to it. I know it’s brought me this success. I know it’s given me the chance to make and save enough money so I won’t spend the end of my days in an old ladies’ home somewhere. But all the same I’m a woman, and what woman doesn’t long to be beautiful?” Well, her visage may not have been the kind that made the covers of movie fan magazines, but filmgoers in the 1930s looked forward to the on-screen appearances of Edna May Oliver, the dour-faced performer whose grand dame attitude served her equally well in dozens of comedic and dramatic turns, usually as a spinster or sarcastic busybody.
That haughty New England demeanor came naturally to the actress, born Edna May Nutter in Malden, Massachusetts in 1883 (she was a descendant on her father’s side of U.S. president John Quincy Adams). It was, perhaps, her father’s desire that she be a singer that inspired the young Edna to become a performer, but his death when she was 14 put any such plans on hold, and she left school to work for a dressmaker. Two years later, an uncle helped her land a position with an outdoor light opera troupe.
Oliver had her indoor stage debut in a 1911 Boston stock company production of Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, and in 1916 she made the move to New York. The first Broadway part, in a drama entitled The Master, required her to pay for her own costumes (her sewing experience must have come in handy!) and left her with, as she put it, “about two cents a week.” Edna received good notices–and a bigger salary–as Aunt Penelope in the 1917 Jerome Kern musical/comedy Oh, Boy!, but bigger things came in 1923. That year she got her first film role, as the heroine’s mother in the melodrama Wife in Name Only, and on Broadway she played a servant in the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Icebound (she’d appear in the movie version in 1924). Over the next several years Edna was seen in various stage shows (including 1925’s The Cradle Snatchers, with Mary Boland and a young Humphrey Bogart, and the original 1927 production of Kern’s and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat) and she worked in silent films at Paramount’s Astoria, New York studio. She also found the time to get married to stockbroker David Pratt in 1928, although the couple would separate shortly thereafter and divorce in 1933.
Movie audiences first got to hear Edna’s distinctive voice in the 1929 Clara Bow comedy The Saturday Night Kid, and the following year Oliver made Hollywood her permanent home when she signed a contract with RKO. She would serve as a Margaret Dumont-style authority figure to that studio’s reigning kings of comedy,Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, in three films: Half Shot at Sunrise (1930), Cracked Nuts (1931) and Hold ‘Em Jail (1932). In between she appeared in 1931’s Best Picture Academy Award-winner, the frontier saga Cimarron, as a very prim schoolteacher; was top-billed alongside “Woo Woo!” funnyman Hugh Herbert in Laugh and Get Rich that same year; and in 1932 ran roughshod on her fellow jurors as she tried to prove an ex-showgirl innocent of murdering her wealthy husband in the courtroom comedy Ladies of the Jury.
It may have been the Ladies of the Jury role that led RKO to headline Oliver as author Stuart Palmer’s New York teacher-turned-amateur sleuth, Miss Hildegarde Withers, in a series of light-hearted whodunits, beginning with 1932’s Penguin Pool Murder. When a field trip to the aquarium with her racially-mixed class of grade schoolers leads to the discovery of a stockbroker’s corpse in the title exhibit, the umbrella-wielding, tart-tongued Withers (“I’m a schoolteacher, and I might have done wonders with you if I’d caught you young enough.”) ingratiates herself with Police Inspector Piper (James Gleason) as she horns in on his investigation. The banter between Oliver and Gleason so delighted moviegoers that the studio re-teamed them for two more Withers mysteries: 1934’s Murder on the Blackboard, set in the heroine’s own school, and 1935’s Murder on a Honeymoon, which found Hildegarde vacationing on Catalina Island (Say, just how much did schoolteachers make during the Depression?). After Edna left RKO for MGM, the series continued with Helen Broderick, then ZaSu Pitts, playing Withers, but neither actress caught on with the public in the role.
Her aristocratic mien and knack for shifting from comical to serious in an instant made Oliver an indispensable part of many studios’ literary adaptations. She was memorable as Aunt March opposite Katharine Hepburn and Joan Bennett in RKO’s 1933 version of Little Women, and later that year played the Red Queen in Paramount’s lavish, all-star rendition of Alice in Wonderland. As stern-hearted Aunt Betsey, Edna came to love nephew David Copperfield (Freddie Bartholomew) in the 1935 MGM movie of the Dickens novel, and she co-starred as the fiercely loyal Miss Pross alongside Ronald Colman and Elizabeth Allan in another Metro Dickens filming from 1935, A Tale of Two Cities. 1936 found Oliver going Shakespearean, playing Norma Shearer’s devoted nurse in Romeo and Juliet, and one of her final roles was as Lady Catherine de Bourgh in 1940’s Pride and Prejudice.
Along the way she also gave fine support to such stars as Joan Crawford (No More Ladies in 1936), Clark Gable (1937’s Parnell), Nelson Eddy (Rosalie, also 1937), and even Shirley Temple (1938’s Little Miss Broadway), who–like Bartholomew–was able to melt her icy exterior. It was as the feisty Widow McKlennar–opposite Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert in director John Ford’s 1939 Revolutionary War epic Drums Along the Mohawk–that Oliver received her first and only Academy Award nomination, but she would lose the Best Supporting Actress statue that year to Gone with the Wind’s Hattie McDaniel. And Edna’s unmistakable inflection and (to be charitable) bottom-heavy build made her a favorite for animators from the Disney and Warner studios to put in their cartoons, including Mickey’s Polo Team (1936) and Porky’s Road Race (1937).
Oliver’s final film work was for producer Alexander Korda in the 1941 drama Lydia, in which she played the hypochondriac grandmother (“The NERVE of him, telling me my liver is perfect!,” she says of a doctor) of title heroine Merle Oberon. Ironically, the actress would develop an intestinal disorder that worsened over the next year, and would claim Oliver on her 59th birthday in November of 1942. One can almost hear Edna at the pearly gates, saying to St. Peter in her haughtiest and most indignant tone, “Take me on my birthday? The NERVE!”
The above “Movies Unlimited” article can also be accessed online here.
