Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 27 of 109

William Smith

William Smith was born in 1933 in Missouri. A lifelong boldybuilder, the 6ft 2″ Smith has featured in over 300 film and television programmes. He is perhaps best know for his role as the evil ‘Falconetti’ in “Rich Man, Poor Man” mini-series in 1976 and the TV Western series “Laredo” from 1965 until 1967. His movies include “Darker Than Amber” with Rod Taylor in 1971, “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” and “Any Which Way You Can” with Clint Eastwood in 1980. He joined the cast of “Hawaii 5 0” for it’s last series in 1979. He is also known as the last Marlboro Man on cigarette advertisments.

William Smith. Wikipedia.

William Smith (born March 24, 1933) is an American actor who has appeared in almost three hundred feature films and television productions,^[1] with his best known role being the menacing Anthony Falconetti in the 1970s television mini-series Rich Man, Poor Man.

Smith is also known for films like Any Which Way You Can (1980), Conan The Barbarian (1982), Rumble Fish (1983), and Red Dawn(1984), as well as lead roles in several exploitation films during the 1970s.

Born in Columbia, Missouri, Smith began his acting career at the age of eight in 1942; he entered films as a child actor in such films as The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Song of Bernadette and Meet Me in St. Louis.

Smith served in the United States Air Force. He won the 200 pound (91 kg) arm-wrestling championship of the world multiple times and also won the United States Air Force weightlifting championship. A lifelong bodybuilder, Smith is a record holder for reverse-curling his own body weight. His trademark arms measured as much as 19½ inches. Smith held a 31-1 record as an amateur boxer.

During the Korean War he was a Russian Intercept Interrogator and flew secret ferret missions over the Russian SFSR. He had both CIAand NSA clearance and intended to enter a classified position with the U.S. government, but while he was working on his doctorate studies he landed an acting contract with MGM.

He was a regular on the 1961 ABC television series The Asphalt Jungle, portraying police Sergeant Danny Keller. One of his earliest leading roles was as Joe Riley, a Texas Ranger on the NBC western series Laredo (1965–1967). In 1967, Smith guest starred as Jude Bonner on James Arness‘s long-lived western Gunsmoke.

Smith was cast as John Richard Parker, brother of Cynthia Ann Parker, both taken hostage in Texas by the Comanche, in the 1969 episode “The Understanding” of the syndicated television series Death Valley Days, which was hosted by Robert Taylor. In the story line, Parker contracts the plague, is left for dead by his fellow Comanche warriors, and is rescued by his future Mexican wife, Yolanda (Emily Banks).^[2]

He played the outlaw turned temporary sheriff Hendry Brown in the 1969 episode “The Restless Man”. In that story line, Brown takes the job of sheriff to tame a lawless town, begins to court a young woman (again played by Emily Banks), but soon returns to his deadly outlaw ways in search of bigger thrills.^[3]

On Gunsmoke, Smith appeared in a 1972 episode, “Hostage!”; his character beats and rapes Amanda Blake‘s character Miss Kitty Russell and shoots her twice in the back. Smith has been described as the “greatest bad-guy character actor of our time”.

Smith joined the cast of the final season of Hawaii Five-O (as Detective James “Kimo” Carew, a new officer in the Five-O unit). He had previously appeared with Jack Lord in Lord’s prior series Stoney Burke. Smith starred in one episode each of the Adam West Batman TV series (in the episode “Minerva, Mayhem and Millionaires” as Adonis, one of the minions of the title guest villainess portrayed by Zsa Zsa Gabor), I Dream of Jeannie (in the episode “Operation: First Couple on the Moon” as Turk Parker), Kung Fu, and as The Treybor, a ruthless warlord, in the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century episode “Buck’s Duel to the Death”. Smith also made guest appearances opposite James Garner in the 1974 two-hour pilot for The Rockford Files (titled “Backlash of the Hunter” and also featuring Lindsay Wagner and Bill Mumy), and George Peppard in The A-Team (in two appearances as different characters, in the first season’s “Pros and Cons” and the fourth season’s “The A-Team Is Coming, The A-Team Is Coming”).

In the 1976 television miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man, he portrayed Anthony Falconetti, nemesis of the Jordache family, and reprised the role in the sequel Rich Man, Poor Man Book II. Other 1970s TV appearances included the Kolchak: The Night Stalker episode “The Energy Eater”, as an Indian medicine man who advises Kolchak, and an early Six Million Dollar Man episode “Survival of the Fittest” as Commander Maxwell. He also appeared in the 1979 miniseries The Rebels as John Waverly, and in an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard as Jason Steele, a bounty hunter hired by Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane to frame the Duke Boys into jail.

On the big screen, Smith became the star of several cult movies from the early seventies. Smith appeared as heavy Terry Bartell in Darker than Amber in 1970. Also that year, Smith was also featured in two biker flicks Nam’s Angels (originally released under the title “The Losers”) co-starring Bernie Hamilton and C.C. and Company with Ann-Margret, Joe Namath, Jennifer Billingsley and genre favorite Sid Haig, the latter of which was directed by Seymour Robbie and written by Ann-Margret’s husband, actor Roger Smith. He starred in 1972’s Grave of the Vampire as James Eastman (co-starring with Michael Pataki and Lyn Peters), and 1973’s Invasion of the Bee Girls (co-starring Victoria Vetri, Anitra Ford and Katie Saylor, written by Nicholas Meyer and directed by Denis Sanders), and 1975’s The Swinging Barmaids (starring Ms. Saylor, Bruce Watson and Laura Hippe, and directed by Gus Trikonis). In 1972 and 1975, respectively, he appeared in two popular Blaxploitation films, Hammer and the controversially titled Boss Nigger, both with Fred Williamson.

After that, he played a vindictive sergeant in Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977) with an all-star cast headed by Burt Lancaster and Richard Widmark, a drag-racing legend in Fast Company (1979) also co-starring Claudia Jennings and John Saxon, the main character’s father in Conan the Barbarian (1982) with Arnold Schwarzenegger, bad guy Matt Diggs in The Frisco Kid (1979) opposite Gene Wilder and Harrison Ford, and Clint Eastwood‘s bare-knuckle nemesis Jack Wilson in 1980’s Any Which Way You Can (a sequel to 1978’s Every Which Way But Loose in which Smith did not appear), and also had a top villainous role of the Soviet commander in the hit 1984 theatrical film Red Dawn. In 1983, Smith appeared in two films from Francis Ford Coppola, in The Outsiders as a store clerk and in Rumble Fish as a police officer. In 1985, Smith landed the starring role of Brodie Hollister in the Disney mini-series Wildside, created by writer-producer Tom Greene, and another role as the bookmaker’s enforcer known as “Panama Hat” in director Richard Brooks‘s final movie, Fever Pitch (1985) opposite Ryan O’Neal.

William Smith died aged 88 in California in August 2021.

Robert Ginty was an American actor best known for his lead performance in the movie “The Exterminator” . He spent some time living in Dublin. He was born in 1948 and died in 2009.

His Independent obituary by Tom Vallance is as follows:

The actor Robert Ginty became a leading star of action movies after he played the title role in the low-budget hit The Exterminator (1980). For the next decade he was the cut-price equivalent of Schwarzenegger or Stallone, making violent thrillers that invariably went straight to video but built him a large following of action fans. Ginty was usually the hero, often a war veteran using his skills to clean up the city streets, or a mercenary fighting corruption in the far corners of the world (where hordes of extras could be hired cheaply for scenes of mayhem). He was a man of many talents, however, and later found favour as an activist for experiment in the arts, a champion of human rights, a writer, a theatre and opera director, curator, artist and photographer.

Born Robert Winthrop Ginty in 1948 in Brooklyn, New York, where his father worked as a construction engineer and his mother worked for the government, he was of Irish ancestry and a direct descendent of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, member of Parliament and disciple of Thomas Paine, who died in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Ginty’s first love was rock music, and at the age of 16 he was touring with bands, playing drums with Carlos Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and John Lee Hooker.

He was educated at Yale and the City College of New York, then studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, the Actor’s Studio, and with Robert Lewis at the Yale School of Drama. He starred in Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending and Eugene O’Neill’s More Stately Mansions at the Provincetown Playhouse, and at the New Hampshire Shakespeare Festival he played Hotspur in Henry IV, Part One and Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The producer Harold Prince saw these performances and hired him as both an assistant and actor for his Broadway productions of The Great John Brown (1972), Don Juan (1973) and The Government Inspector (1974). After returning to New Hampshire to star in Israel Horovitz’s one-act play The Indian Wants the Bronx, he moved to California, where he developed a reputation as a rugged player who could fill television roles that demanded physical action.

He was in episodes of Police Woman and The Rockford Files, and he had small roles in the films Bound for Glory (1976), and Two-Minute Warning (1976). His first notable role was in the TV series Baa Baa Black Sheep (1976-78), about the exploits of a Second World War flying ace and his squadron of misfits. Ginty was Lt. T. J. Wiley, one of what he later described as “a bunch of gung-ho young kid pilots”. The series prompted him to take up flying, a lifelong passion that culminated in his becoming in 2004 an honorary captain in the United States Navy’s Blue Angels.

Hal Ashby, director of Bound for Glory, then gave Ginty a strong supporting role in the powerful Vietnam war-drama Coming Home (1978), starring Jane Fonda. Ginty was the best friend of a marine (Bruce Dern) whose wife falls in love with a paraplegic while her husband is overseas.

Ginty next acted in the acclaimed television series The Paper Chase (1978-9), based on the movie about student life in a competitive law school. Ginty portrayed one of the students; another was played by Francine Tacker, who became the second of his three wives. Despite being hailed as the best new series of the year, The Paper Chase was cancelled after one season.

Ginty was on the verge, however, of his major breakthrough. He was cast in The Exterminator as a Vietnam veteran out for revenge on the gang who beat up his comrade. Deploying his most brutal combat skills, he battles the police and CIA as well as various criminals, at one point thrusting a villain through a meat grinder. Cheaply produced, the film made a huge profit, and though Ginty was billed third to Christopher George (as chief villain) and Samantha Eggar, he stole the film, and would often be billed afterwards as Robert “Exterminator” Ginty.

The image would carry him through a decade of low-budget, violent thrillers, shot in France, Italy, Mexico and Thailand, with such titles as Gold Raiders (1983), Maniac Killer, Programmed to Kill, Mission: Kill, Code Name Vengeance (all 1987), and Cop Target (1990). He also both starred in and produced Exterminator 2, an inevitable sequel to his biggest hit. He wrote and directed The Bounty Hunter (1989), and he also produced, directed and acted in Vietnam, Texas (1990), about a priest (Ginty) who discovers he fathered a son while on a tour of duty in Vietnam, though few priests would be as handy with a gun or their fists as Ginty proved to be. The film won him Best Director awards at the Houston International Film Festival and the Taormina Film Festival in Italy.

As his phase as an action star waned, he worked more frequently in television as both an actor and director. He appeared in seven episodes of Falcon Crest (1989-90) and such shows as Father Dowling Mysteries and Murder, She Wrote, and he directed episodes of Nash Bridges, Charmed and Tracker.

In 1994 Ginty responded to his heritage by becoming artistic director of the Irish Theatre Arts Center in Hollywood, whose goal is to sponsor stage, film and music projects dealing with the Irish experience, as well as allowing playwrights to hear their works read by actors in front of an audience. He lectured regularly at Trinity College, Dublin, and with film-makers Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan he founded the Director’s Guild of Ireland.

Ginty also became noted as a champion of experimental theatre. In 2004 he directed a hip-hop version of A Clockwork Orange in Toronto, and in 2005 at the Edinburgh Festival he directed Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, set in Iraq. As a stage director, Ginty favoured modern playwrights, staging revivals of Sam Shepherd’s True West, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia and David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross.

An exhibition of his paintings and photographs was presented at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2006. He was also a Unesco Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Global Market Place and a member of the International Centre for Human Rights. A staunch advocate of preserving classical American architecture, in 2005 he was appointed as ambassador for the Prince’s Trust by Prince Charles.

He and his family, who lived in Toronto for several years, were also patrons of several arts bodies, including the Royal Ontario Museum, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the National Ballet of Canada. When asked how he felt about his period as a top action hero, he replied that he had no regrets. “I’ve played a very violent repertory of movies, and what they’ve done for me is given me an economically viable career.”

Tom Vallance

Robert Winthrop Ginty, actor and director: born Brooklyn, New York 14 November 1948; three times married (one son); died Los Angeles, California 21 September 2009.

This obituary can be accessed also on line here.

Betsy Brantley was born in 1955 in North Carolina. She studied acting in London and made her movie debut in a major role opposite Sean Connery in “Five Days, One Summer” directed by Fred Zinneman in 1982. The film was not a success though. Her other movies include “Another Country” and “The Princess Bride”.

Barbara Bel Geddes is remembered today for her performance as’Miss Ellie’ in TV’s long-running “Dallas” which ran from 1978 until 1991. She did though star in some fine movies during the 1940’s and 1950’s such as “The Long Night” opposite Henry Fonda in 1947, “I Remember Mama” in 1948 and “Vertigo” opposite James Stewart and Kim Novak in 1958. She died in 2005.

“Guardian” obituary:

To viewers, all over the world, of the television series Dallas, Barbara Bel Geddes, who has died of cancer aged 82, was Miss Ellie, mother of the evil JR and his younger, wimpish brother Bobby. As the matriarch of the Ewing oil clan, she starred in that extraordinarily successful television series from its premiere in 1978.

When Jim Davis – the actor who portrayed Ellie’s ruthless husband Jock Ewing – died of cancer at 72 in 1981, scripts for Dallas were rewritten so that he was killed in a South American helicopter crash. Miss Ellie finally came into her own, copiously grieving for Jock, but now firmly at the centre of the hilariously complicated family intrigue.

In Dallas, Bel Geddes brilliantly portrayed the kind of mother one has always longed for, or had nightmares about. Without batting a tearful eye she automatically gave absolution to her children, husband and in-laws for their seemingly endless cycle of chicanery. The family was all; one felt she would have forgiven Hitler if only he had been a Texas Ewing.

Most Dallas fans had little idea Bel Geddes had a long stage and film career. Born in New York City, she was the daughter of the futuristic architect and stage designer Norman Geddes and an English teacher, Helen Belle Sneider. Educated at private schools, at 16 she was expelled from Putney School in Vermont for being a “disturbing influence” – she had apparently kissed a boy.

It was via her father that she got her first jobs in summer theatre in Connecticut in her teens and had her first walk-on in the comedy, Out Of The Frying Pan, in 1940. In 1945 she was chosen by the director Elia Kazan for the leading role in Deep Are The Roots, an interracial love story for which she won the New York Drama Critics Award as the outstanding young actress of the year.

It was around then that she told a journalist that she wanted to appear in the movies: her ambition, she said, was to work for directors like Kazan, Frank Capra, George Cukor or Alfred Hitchcock. She didn’t abandon Broadway but, in 1946 signed her first film contract, with RKO, which stipulated that she had to make only one movie a year; however, as she said later, she loved movies. She was very effective as the innocent waif in her first film, Anatole Litvak’s The Long Night (1947), a remake of Le Jour Se Lève in which Henry Fonda rescues her from the Svengali-like embrace of Vincent Price.

The following year she won an Academy Award nomination for playing Irene Dunn’s 17-year-old daughter in George Stevens’s I Remember Mama – Bel Geddes was 26 at the time. In 1948 she co-starred with Robert Mitchum in an impressive western, Blood On The Moon, directed by Robert Wise. Then Howard Hughes purchased RKO and dropped Bel Geddes, because, he decided, she wasn’t sexy enough.

She was deeply upset, and refocused on Broadway, while remaining in the movies. In 1949 she starred in Caught, directed by Max Ophuls, opposite James Mason, and distributed by MGM. The following year Kazan cast her as yet another worried nice girl in Panic In The Streets for Twentieth Century Fox.

In 1951 she appeared in Henry Hathaway’s thriller Fourteen Hours. That was her last film until Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). There she played James Stewart’s former fiancée, who witnesses his deranged pursuit of Kim Novak. Her work with the director extended to television’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In 1958 she played the wife who batters her husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb – and then eats it.

On Broadway she was in The Moon Is Blue (1951) and Graham Greene’s The Living Room (1954). In 1955 she played Maggie in Tennessee Williams’s Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, but she was rarely given a chance to explore this angry, sexual side of herself. Thus, Bel Geddes never quite outgrew ingenue roles – in one interpretation, Miss Ellie is only a cute teenager with developmental problems.

After Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, she was in Terence Rattigan’s The Sleeping Prince (1956) on Broadway and in 1959 played opposite Henry Fonda in Robert Anderson’s Silent Night, Holy Night. Her greatest commercial triumph on Broadway came two years later with Jean Kerr’s comedy Mary, Mary, which ran for 1,500 performances. In 1967 she starred in Edward Albee’s Everything In The Garden.

While Bel Geddes was often typecast as a chronic worrier over impending disaster, there was another quality buried deep inside her performances that was seldom allowed release: a certain maternal malice, a penchant for psychic murder while smiling through tears. In the suspenseful run-up to the climactic “who shot JR?” episode of Dallas, a surprising number of viewers predicted (wrongly) that Miss Ellie did it. They saw something in her that most directors preferred to ignore or sublimate.

After the 1950s, Bel Geddes’ movie roles had dwindled. In 1959 she featured as the wife of Red Nichols (Danny Kaye) in a biopic about the jazz cornet player, after which there were only a further four films. Indeed, she had retired from acting to tend for her sick husband Windsor Lewis, who died of cancer in 1972.

In resuming her career she had trouble finding parts until, in 1978, Dallas came along. In 1984 Bel Geddes had a heart attack, with the result that the role of Miss Ellie was taken over by Donna Reed. But, after six months Bel Geddes returned – Reed sued to keep the job – and remained in the role until a year before Dallas ended in 1991.

Bel Geddes also wrote and illustrated two children’s books.

Her first marriage, in 1944, was to Carl Schreur, an electrical engineer; they had a daughter, and divorced in 1951. She married Lewis, a Broadway director that year, and had a daughter. Her daughters survive her.

· Barbara Bel Geddes, actor, born October 31 1922; died August 8 2005

Her Guardian obituary can also be accessed here.

The Long Night, poster, US poster art, top, from left: Barbara Bel Geddes, Henry Fonda, 1947. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Jack Palance was born in 1920 in Pennsylvania to parents from the Ukraine. He understudied Marlon Brando on Broadway as ‘Stanley’ in “A Streetcar Named Desire”. He made his film debut in “Panic in the Streets” in 1950. He starred opposite Joan Crawford and Gloria Grahame in “Sudden Fear” in 1952 and was a brilliant villain opposite Alan Ladd in the classic Western “Shane” . He had a long career in film winning an Oscar in 1991 fir “City Slickers”. He died in 2008 at the age of 87.

Brian Baxter’s obituary in “The Guardian”:

It was George Stevens’s western Shane (1953) that established Jack Palance, who has died aged 87, in cinemagoers’ minds. Dressed in black, he was photographed from below, emphasising his domination of the farmers he had been hired to terrorise, or kill. That portrait of gunslinger Jack Wilson earned him a second Oscar nomination. The previous benchmark had been for Sudden Fear (1952), in which he played a murderous husband who is after the money and the life of millionairess Joan Crawford.

But it would be another four decades before Palance, with City Slickers (1991), would finally win an Oscar, as best supporting actor alongside Billy Crystal. In that film, he played Curly, an old trail boss who introduces four urbanites to the rugged life out west. The reward was as much for a career that took in more than 100 films as for that role. His acceptance speech proved a highlight of the evening. His series of one-armed push-ups dispelling any notion that he was a decrepit old-timer.

Palance was born in Lattimer Mines, Pennsylvania, the third son of Ukrainian immigrants. Like his father, he was a miner, but, by the end of the 1930s, Palance, tall and well-built was working as “Jack Brazzo”, a professional boxer. Other jobs included modelling, waiting, and working as a lifeguard. In 1942, he enrolled in the US army air corps, but a year later while training in Arizona his B24 Liberator bomber crashed and he suffered severe burns, which needed extensive plastic surgery.

Postwar, via the GI bill, Palance graduated in 1947 in drama from Stanford University, California, and almost immediately got parts on Broadway. In 1948 he began understudying for Anthony Quinn’s Stanley Kowalski in the touring production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and he then replaced Marlon Brando in the Broadway production of Streetcar, which brought him to the attention of director Elia Kazan.

He made his television debut in 1950 and his first films – as Walter Jack Palance. Kazan’s Panic in the Streets, in which Palance played Blackie, a bubonic plague carrier who is being pursued across New Orleans by the police, was followed by the war movie Halls of Montezuma. Then came came Sudden Fear, Shane, the Oscar nominations and a part in Arrowhead (1953) as an Apache.

There was plenty of TV work and in 1954 he played Attila the Hun in Sign of the Pagan (1954), one of Douglas Sirk’s lesser films. In 1955 he starred in I Died a Thousand Times – a remake of High Sierra, which had starred Humphrey Bogart. Palance enjoyed greater success in the Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956), winning an Emmy in the television version of Rod Serling’s boxing drama. In Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife (1955), the sometime leftist writer Clifford Odets’s attack on Hollywood, Palance starred as Charles Castle, a famous actor blackmailed by a vicious studio boss into signing a new contract. Palance and Rod Steiger battled it out at full volume. Aldrich then cast him in Attack! (1956) as a dedicated soldier, who realises that his cowardly commanding officer (Eddie Albert), is endangering his men. Palance brought force and integrity to the role.

It ushered in two decades where, despite working prolifically in American television and films, Palance found most of his employment abroad – mainly in Italy, often working in sword-and-sandal epics and westerns, or occasionally for American directors shooting abroad. The latter included Richard Fleischer’s Barabbas (1962) and the superior suspense western, The Professionals (1966), with Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin. But among other material in that decade was Le Mépris (Contempt 1963) Jean Luc Godard’s swipe at movie moguls which starred Brigitte Bardot and Palance, and also featured Fritz Lang – as himself. There was also Torture Garden (1967), a British horror flick. A decent western, Monte Walsh, followed in 1970.

A stream of European films in the 1970s was interrupted by Palance’s moving portrayal of the Count in a television version of Dracula and the prestigious, if dull, Oklahoma Crude (both 1973). By the beginning of the 1980s he was moving into an extended break to concentrate on his Californian cattle ranch.

But then, in 1988 he made a spectacular return in the lively western Young Guns and the German director Percy Adlon’s cult comedy Bagdad Cafe. In the latter he played an oddball painter dressed in snakeskin boots. In 1989 he returned triumphantly to the big time as Carl Grissom in Batman, the first and best of the revived series. After that he worked with Andrei Konchalovsky as a gun-runner in the action movie Tango and Cash and had a couple of outings in sword-and-sorcery movies. Then came the plum part in City Slickers.

For the rest of the decade he remained busy in television movies. He took on a series of classic parts – Scrooge in Ebenezer (1997) and Long John Silver in yet another version of Treasure Island (1999).

He made four screen appearances in the 21st century – and his sixth decade in the movies. The last was on TV, in Back When We Were Grownups (2004).

From the late 1950s Palance had been an amateur artist and in 1996 he wrote and illustrated the prose poem Forest of Love: A Love Story in Blank Verse.

His marriage to Virginia Baker in 1949 ended in divorce in 1966. They had three children, Brooke, Holly, and Cody, who predeceased him. In 1987 he married Elaine Rogers, but that marriage also ended in divorce.

· Jack Palance (Vladimir Palahniuk), actor, born February 18 1919; died November 10 2006

His obituary can be seen in “The Guardian” here.

Alan Badel was born in 1923 in Manchester. He first came to attention for his performance as ‘Romeo’ opposite Claire Bloom in “Romeo and Juliet” at the Old Vic in 1950. He had a major stage career and also gave terrific performances on television in “Bill Brand” and “The Woman in White”. Surprisingly he did not become a major movie star despite getting a lead role in Hollywood in 1953 opposite Rita Hayworth in “Salome”. His other films include “Magic Fire” and “This Sporting Life”. He died at the age of 58. His daughter is the actress Sarah Badel.

“Wikipedia” entry:

He was an English stage actor who also appeared frequently in the cinema, radio and television and was noted for his richly textured voice which was once described as “the sound of tears”.

Badel was born in Rusholme, Manchester and educated at Burnage High School. He fought with the French Resistance during theSecond World War.

In his early career, he played leading parts, including Romeo and Hamlet, with the Old Vic and Stratford companies

Badel’s most notable early screen role was as John the Baptist in the Rita Hayworth version of Salome (1953), a version in which the story was altered to make Salome a Christian convert who dances for Herod in order to save John rather than have him condemned to death.

Badel portrayed Richard Wagner in Magic Fire (1955), a biopic about the composer, and Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg in theParamount film Nijinsky (1980).

He also played the role of Karl Denny, the impresario, in the film Bitter Harvest (1963) based on the novel 20,000 Streets Under the Sky by the author and playwright Patrick Hamilton. In the film he engages a young Welsh girl called Jennie Jones who, under his control, becomes a high class prostitute who commits suicide. The film starred Janet Munro in the lead part of Jennie Jones.

The film also starred a number of character actors who went on the make numerous film and television roles, namely, John Stride, William Lucas, Norman Bird, Allan Cuthbertson, Anne Cunningham and Francis Matthews. The landlady of John Stride’s character, Joe, was played by Thora Hird who received no opening or closing credit in the film.

Also in 1963 he played opposite Vivien Merchant in the TV production of Harold Pinter‘s play The Lover.

He also played the French Interior Minister in The Day of the Jackal (1973), a political thriller about the attempted assassination of President Charles de Gaulle. Badel also played the villainous sunglasses-wearing Najim Beshraavi in Arabesque (1966) with Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren. One of Badel’s most noted roles was that of Edmond Dantès in the 1964 BBC television adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, which also starred Michael Gough. He appeared in television adaptations of The Moonstoneand The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.^{[citation needed]}

Badel married the actress Yvonne Owen in 1942 and they remained married until his sudden death in Chichester, aged 58. Their daughter Sarah Badel is an actress

Stanley Holloway had a very long career both as a music hall entertainer and then a popular character in British films of the 1940’s. In 1956 he had a major success on Broadway as ‘Alfred Doolittle” in “My Fair Lady” and repeated his rle in the 1964 film.. His last movie was “Journey Into Fear” in 1976. He died in 1982 at the age of 92.

“New York Times” obituary:

Stanley Holloway, the actor who gained wide recognition for his portrayal of Eliza Doolittle’s father in the original Broadway and London productions of ”My Fair Lady,” died today in the Nightingale nursing home in Littlehampton, Sussex. He was 91 years old.

Mr. Holloway, who established himself early as a song-and-dance man, comedian and actor, was once asked to look back over his life from his first job as an office boy in Billingsgate Market, where he learned the Cockney that served him well in ”My Fair Lady,” and choose a turning point.

”That must have been 1954,” he said, ”when absolutely out of the blue I was asked by the Royal Shakespeare Company to tour America with them, playing Bottom in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ From that American tour came the part of Alfred Doolittle in ‘My Fair Lady’ and from then on, well, just let’s say I was able to pick and choose my parts and that was very pleasant at my age.”

Mr. Holloway shared the stage in both the original Broadway and London productions with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. He also appeared in the film version. In Vaudeville in Teens

Born on Oct. 1, 1890, in London, the son of a law clerk, he had a typically strict Victorian education and was delighted when his school shut down when he was 12 and he was able to go to work in the fish market.

By 14 he was soloist in a choir and, still in his teens, in vaudeville entertainments at seaside resorts. His ambition then was to sing in opera, and he saved all the money he could to that end. By 1913 he had enough in the bank to take lessons in Milan, Italy, but after a few months the outbreak of World War I sent him back to Britain, where he enlisted as a private in the infantry. At the end of the war, he was a lieutenant. f In 1920, Mr. Holloway and nine other young performers wrote and played in a revue, ”The Co-Optimists.” It ran for six years. Mr. Holloway began in films in 1921 and was a featured player in the British comedies ”The Lavender Hill Mob,” ”Passport to Pimlico” and ”The Titfield Thunderbolt.”

But after World War II, he was also offered more serious roles, such as first gravedigger in ”Hamlet” – a role he repeated in the 1948 film with Laurence Olivier. Played Bottom at the Met

His appearance as Bottom at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1954 was his New York debut. His next appearance on the New York stage, at the Mark Hellinger Theater on March 15, 1956, came as Alfred Doolittle. a role for which he won critical acclaim.

He left the American production the following year to open with the other principals in the London production at the Drury Lane Theater April 30, 1958.

Mr. Holloway was involved in all aspects of his craft. He first performed on television in the 1930’s when it was still experimental, and in 1960, he played Poo-Bah in ”The Miikado” for NBC-TV, a program in which Groucho Marx also starred.

His own ABC-TV series, ”Our Man Higgins,” in which he played an English butler, had its premiere in October 1962 to good reviews for the star and criticism for the scripts.

In recent years he made guest appearances only, although he appeared in a television film, ”Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” in 1973 and contended he was always ready for work.

One of his last assignments on a stage was at the Royal Command Performance of 1980 in which as the oldest member of the company – he had celebrated his 90th birthday a few weeks earlier -he introduced the youngest, a ventriloquist. He was still in good health for his years then.

The above “New York Times” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Irene Worth was a higly respected stage actress who did star in a few films. She was born in 1916 in the U.S. She began her acting career on Broadway and then in 1944 moved to London. Her career was concentrated on the stage in the UK. Her few movies include “The Scapegoat” with Alec Guinness and Bette Davis in 1959, “Nicholas and Alexandra” in 1971 and “Lost In Yonkers” in 1993. She died in 2002.

Eric Shorter’s obituary in “The Guardian”:

Irene Worth, who has died aged 85, was an actor of a quality that no self-respecting playgoer would voluntarily miss, in anything. Original and intelligent, she played havoc with an old critical rule that to think too hard is to be lost.

Her Goneril, to Paul Scofield’s King Lear, in the 1962 Peter Brook production at the Aldwych theatre, London, established her importance once and for all. She somehow turned her every move and murmur into an erotic signal, even towards the servants. At the same time, she tilted the tragedy’s sympathy away from the tetchy old monarch – because her Goneril became the daughter who had once loved him.

Worth was happiest in the avant-garde, or at a run-through in a gloomy rehearsal hall – “Why should we suddenly have to be perfect on the first night?” She relished improvisation, and preferred the experimental. There had been, in 1953, Tyrone Guthrie’s All’s Well That Ends Well and Richard III in a tent at Stratford, Ontario, where “the rain poured down, and there were no critics, and the people came, and it was all very basic – but they loved it”.

Anything unexpected or unpredictable attracted Worth more than the West End’s “horrendous banality”. But although she flourished in French farce and Italian tragedy, Shakespearean comedy or American sex drama, she could also do so in Coward and Shaw, in whose Heartbreak House she gave a definitive performance as Hesione Hushabye, at Chichester in 1967.

A year earlier, with Lilli Palmer and Noel Coward in Coward’s Suite In Three Keys, Worth won an Evening Standard award – as if to prove herself in drawing rooms – but she was glad to get back to Brook’s bleak version of Seneca’s Oedipus, at the Old Vic in 1968. Worth was Jocasta and John Gielgud Oedipus. In Iran in 1972, again with Brook, she played in Ted Hughes’ Orghast, which tried out nothing less than a new language.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Worth took an education degree at the University of California, and spent five years teaching before deciding to act professionally. She made her first appearance in 1942, in Escape Me Never, touring with Elizabeth Bergner, learning to hold the stage – so Bergner said – by listening to the other actors and playing to them, instead of to the audience. Having debuted on Broadway the following year, in The Two Mrs Carrolls, she studied at Elsie Fogerty’s famous Central school in London for six months in 1944-45.

No stint in repertory followed. Worth found regular work at outlying London theatres and was critically acclaimed for her incisive style, emotional force and sharply comic – and powerfully tragic – sense.

During the next half century, she played mainly in London, but sometimes on Broadway or at the Canadian Stratford, rarely drawing a discouraging notice. It was as the doomed “other woman” Celia Coplestone, to Alec Guinness’s psychiatrist in TS Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, that she returned to New York in 1950. A year later, in Othello at the Old Vic, she was perhaps the most heart-rending Desdemona of her generation.

After an orthodox West End run in NC Hunter’s A Day By The Sea (1953), she joined the Midland Theatre Company in Coventry for Ugo Betti’s The Queen And The Rebels. Her transformation from “a rejected slut cowering at her lover’s feet into a redemption of regal poise” ensured a transfer to London, where Kenneth Tynan wrote of her technique: “It is grandiose, heartfelt, marvellously controlled, clear as crystal and totally unmoving.” But the audience exploded with cheers.

As if to demonstrate her range, Worth then joined Alec Guinness in Feydeau’s Hotel Paradiso (1956), jamming a top hat over her chin as an adulterous Parisian wife. As Schiller’s Mary Stuart (1958), her deep, rich, plummy voice reflected that unhappy woman’s pride, sensuality – and joie de vivre.

A host of other performances stick in the mind: the giggly Portia, in The Merchant Of Venice (1953); the enigmatic seductress in the title role of Edward Albee’s Tiny Alice (New York 1964, London 1970). Her Princess Kosmonopolis, in Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird Of Youth (1975), gained a Tony award, and on Broadway she also played Winnie, in Beckett’s Happy Days (1979).

Worth loved sharing the spoken word with an audience “before television gobbles it up”, yet she did award-winning work on TV in Britain, the US and Canada, and on film from the early 1950s into the 1990s. The latter ranged from Orders To Kill (1957) to A Piece Of Cake (1997).

She was revered. At the National in her 70s, when she felt dissatisfied with her delivery, she stopped, apologised, and said she would start again. Her stage authority permitted it. She went on acting into her 80s with that authority and intellectual assurance that had climaxed as Volumnia, to Ian McKellen’s Coriolanus (National, 1984), and as Hedda Gabler, at Stratford, Ontario (1970).

London saw her as an old pupil of Matisse, in David Hare’s The Bay at Nice (National, 1987) and in Chère Maître (Almeida, 1996), compiled by Peter Eyre from the letters of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert.

She rated herself “very much the homemaker”, but marriage and children were out of the question. “It would have been impossible to have been a good actress, a good mother and a good wife.”

She was made an honorary CBE in 1975.

· Peter Eyre writes: When Irene Worth walked into my dressing room at the Mermaid theatre in 1967, after a performance of Robert Lowell’s Benito Cereno, in which I played the title role, she looked at me, wagged her finger almost in admonishment, and said, “Difficult part. Good performance.”

How could I know then that my working life as an actor would be so tied up with her? Not long after that, I played her son in The Seagull, at Chichester, where I learnt that she was a unique actor of her generation in her ability to recreate her performance every night, as if for the first time.

One day before a performance, she said to me, “Do you like improvising? Let’s improvise,” – and that night, in the scene where Konstantin and Madam Arkadina berate each other, Irene covered the stage with a range of new movements and readings of the text, as if possessed. It was thrilling.

Acting with Irene was like jamming with a great jazz musician. She knew the tune and the rhythm, but one never knew what was going to happen. It was as if, when she performed, she was a deep sea diver, diving into the subtext and inner life of a piece. On the nights it worked, it was difficult for me to say my lines. I wanted to stand and shout, “Bravo. You’re a genius!”

She was a great artist, and an extraordinarily warm and humorous personality. In Melbourne, in the middle of rehearsal, she suddenly said, “Have you ever seen a kangaroo? I saw one yesterday. He was eating a piece of cake, and playing with himself at the same time.” Irene, aged 80, leapt and hopped across the room. She was the kangaroo; she was improvising.

· Irene Worth, actor, born June 23 1916; died March 10 2002

Her Guardian obituary can be accessed here.

Obituary from the Independent Newspaper in the UK.

A reliable leading lady of Forties cinema, the fresh-faced and demure Laraine Day acted opposite such stars as Cary Grant and Robert Mitchum, and starred in the fine Hitchcock thriller Foreign Correspondent (1940), but she was most identified with the role of Nurse Mary Lamont, the hero’s sweetheart in seven of the popular Dr Kildare films. When her character was killed off, it created a furore similar to that aroused today by such drastic departures in the most popular television soap operas.

But she could also portray hidden anguish, such as her destructive psychotic in the disturbing film noir The Locket (1946). Though a contract player at MGM for nearly a decade, she was taken for granted by her studio – one executive memorably described her as “attractively ordinary” – and found her best roles when on loan-out to other studios.

Christened La Raine Johnson, she and her twin brother Lamar were born in Roosevelt, Utah, to a prominent Mormon family, in 1917. Her great-grandfather Charles C. Rich had been one of the pioneers who crossed the plains to establish the Mormon church. Laraine was later to reveal that she never smoked, and she never drank alcohol, tea or coffee. Her father was a grain dealer and government interpreter for the Ute Indian tribe.

When she was six, her family moved to Long Beach, California, where she later trained at the Long Beach Players’ Guild under Elias Day (whose surname she later took) along with another aspiring actor, Robert Mitchum. Spotted by a talent scout, she was given a minor role, billed as Lorraine Hayes, in the crime drama Tough to Handle (1937), starring Frankie Darro, followed by several B westerns plus a small role (four lines) in a soda-fountain scene in King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937).

After briefly renaming herself Laraine Johnson for two westerns with George O’Brien, she was signed by MGM, took the name Laraine Day, and was given small roles in Sergeant Madden (1939), starring Wallace Beery, and I Take This Woman (1939), the Spencer Tracy-Hedy Lamarr romantic drama that had such a convoluted history (four directors and endless alterations) that it was joked that it should have been called I Re-Take This Woman. Day later said that the studio head, Louis B. Mayer, wanted another contract player, Lana Turner, for the role, and that his resentment affected her career. “MGM never really gave me a break. They loaned me out for leading roles, but cast me in programme pictures.”

Calling Dr Kildare (1939), in which she played Mary Lamont, a nurse who becomes involved in a murder case with Dr Kildare (Lew Ayres), was the second of the studio’s series featuring the young doctor and his gruff mentor Dr Gillespie (Lionel Barrymore), and Day remained as Kildare’s love interest for six more films until, in Dr Kildare’s Wedding Day (1941), Mary was fatally struck by a truck on the day she was to wed the doctor.

Other MGM films included Tarzan Finds a Son (1939), in which a baby survives a plane crash that kills his mother (Day) and is discovered by Tarzan, and And One Was Beautiful (1940), in which she was one of two sisters in love with the same man. She had better roles on loan-out in Charles Vidor’s My Son, My Son (1940) and in her greatest film, Alfred Hitchcock’s tale of espionage and murder Foreign Correspondent.

Remembered for such set pieces as the assassination midst a sea of umbrellas, the fight in a windmill and a frighteningly effective plane crash into the ocean, the film featured Day as a woman who helps a reporter, Joel McCrea, uncover a spy ring, not knowing that it is led by her father. “Hitchcock was a character,” she recalled.

In one particularly scary scene I had to sneak down a dark corridor. When I got to the end there was Mr Hitchcock, sticking out his tongue and flapping his hands in the back of his ears. I didn’t dare laugh, because the cameras were turning. But he certainly eliminated any tension I felt.

At MGM, she was the wise-cracking pal of a newspaperman, Edward G. Robinson, in Unholy Partners (1941) then was awarded top billing as a show girl accused of murder in The Trial of Mary Dugan (1941), a remake of a 1929 Norma Shearer vehicle, but censorship restrictions diluted the story’s power and it paled beside the original. She was oddly cast as the wife of Herbert Marshall, who was noticeably many years her senior, in the Shirley Temple vehicle Kathleen (1941), but effectively played a woman who agrees to adopt a war orphan (Margaret O’Brien) in the popular drama Journey for Margaret (1942).

A Yank on the Burma Road and Fingers at the Window (both 1942) preceded two prestigious loan-outs, firstly to RKO for Mr Lucky (1943), in which she reforms a playboy gambler, Cary Grant, who plans to appropriate money she has raised for the war effort. “Cary would arrive on the set and everybody’s morale immediately lifted,” she said.

The crew were crazy about him and so was I. But, curiously, I never felt the male-female chemistry that you sometimes experience on a set. I could have been talking to my best girl-friend.

Day than went to Paramount for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Story of Dr Wassell (1944), starring Gary Cooper as the heroic real-life physician.

Gary turned out to be the surprise of my young life. He was so convincing with his stuttering, stammering awkward little boy manners. When the action called for Dr Wassell to kiss me, I got all set for a bashful boy kiss. Well, it was like holding a hand grenade and not being able to get rid of it! I was left breathless.

At MGM, Day was surprisingly effective as a tough, by-the-book WAC officer who conflicts with a former playgirl Lana Turner in Keep Your Powder Dry (1945). “I didn’t want to do it, but they said if I did it they would give me Undercurrent with Robert Taylor,” she said. “Then they gave Undercurrent to Katharine Hepburn, so I left MGM.”

Day’s next film was to be her personal favourite, John Brahm’s moody, haunting melodrama The Locket (1946), which also featured her old friend Robert Mitchum.

My character was the greatest challenge I ever had – a destructive young woman who’s a kleptomaniac. The form of the film – flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks – was criticised by some reviewers of the time as too confusing. Today, though, its style is highly regarded by film historians. . . Many movie fans seem to remember me best from the Dr Kildare series but, first and foremost, I remember The Locket.

Day was leading lady to John Wayne in the sprawling drama Tycoon (1947), and starred opposite Kirk Douglas in My Dear Secretary (1948), but after I Married a Communist (1949, called The Woman on Pier 13 in the UK), she virtually retired, returning to the screen when John Wayne, producer and star of William Wellman’s hit suspense movie The High and the Mighty (1954), asked her to play an unhappily married woman who is contemplating divorce but reconciles with her husband (John Howard) when the aeroplane on which they are travelling seems headed for disaster. Though Day was competent, she was overshadowed by the Oscar-nominated performances of Claire Trevor and Jan Sterling.

Day’s second marriage, in 1947, was to Leo Durocher, manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers and later of the New York Giants. She took such an active interest in her volatile husband’s career that she became known as “The First Lady of Baseball”, hosting a radio sports programme and in 1953 writing a book, Day with the Giants.

In 1971 she wrote another book, The America We Love, and she devoted much of her time in later years to the Mormon church. Day’s third husband was a television producer, and she continued to act occasionally on television, her last appearance being a Murder, She Wrote episode in 1986.

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