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”.
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.
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.
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
Faye Emerson was born in 1917 in Louisiana. She was a leading actress in film noir of the 1940’s. Her film debut was in 1941 in “Affectionately Yours”. Her major movies include “Between Two Worlds”, “The Mask of Dimitros” and “Nobody Lives Forever”. Her final movie was “A Face in the Crowd” in 1957. She died in 1983.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Synonymous with chic, the ever-fashionable Faye Emerson certainly qualified as one of the “first ladies” of TV glamor. Bedecked in sweeping, rather low-cut gowns and expensive, dangling jewelry, she was a highly poised and stylish presence on the small screen during its exciting “Golden Age”. An enduring presence throughout the 1950s, she could have lasted much longer in her field of work had she so desired.
Born in 1917 in Elizabeth, Louisiana, her father was both a rancher and court stenographer. The family subsequently lived in Texas and Illinois before settling in California. Her parents divorced after she entered her teens and she went to live with her mother (and new husband) in San Diego where she was subsequently placed in a convent boarding school. Following graduation from high school, she attended San Diego State College and grew interested in acting, performing in several Community Players productions. She made her stage debut with “Russet Mantle” in 1935.
At this juncture, Faye was probably better known as Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt, the fourth child of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, whom she married in 1944. Her husband was a war hero and author and the couple lived in the White House for a spell (FDR died in 1945). Faye abruptly abandoned the Hollywood scene after her marriage and the couple instead became major figures in the New York social scene. Sometime after the war Elliott and Faye entered the Soviet Union as journalists where they interviewed Joseph Stalin for a national publication.
With her movie career on the outs, the recently-transplanted New Yorker made her Broadway debut in “The Play’s the Thing” (1948), then entered the world of television where she truly found her niche. Managing to combine both beauty and brains, Faye was a sparkling actress of both drama and comedy and a stylish, Emmy-nominated personality who became an emcee on Paris Cavalcade of Fashions (1948); a hostess of her own show The Faye Emerson Show (1950); a moderator of Author Meets the Critics(1947); and a regular panelist on the game shows Masquerade Party (1952) and I’ve Got a Secret (1952). In addition she enjoyed time as a TV columnist, appeared on such covers as Look magazine, and was performed as guest host for other permanent TV headliners such as Garry Moore, Dave Garroway and even Edward R. Murrow on his “Person to Person” vehicle. All the while Faye continued to return sporadically to the stage and added to her array of Broadway credits such shows as “Parisenne” (1950), “Heavenly Twins (1955), “Protective Custody” (1956) and “Back to Methuselah” (1958), the last mentioned pairing her with Tyrone Power. Regional credits included “Goodbye, My Fancy”, “State of the Union”, “The Pleasure of His Company”, “Mary Stuart”, “Elizabeth the Queen” and “The Vinegar Tree”. One highlight was gracing the stage alongside such illustrious stage stars as Eva Le Gallienne, Viveca Lindfors and Basil Rathbone in the 1953 production of “An Evening with Will Shakespeare”.
Divorced from Roosevelt in 1950, her third (and final) marriage also would figure prominently in the public eye. She wed popular TV band leader Skitch Henderson shortly after her second divorce was final. The couple went on to co-host a 15-minute music show Faye and Skitch (1953) together. This union would last seven years.
Faye was a welcomed as a guest panelist on other game fun too such as “To Tell the Truth” and “What’s My Line?”. The actress, once dubbed the “Best-Dressed Woman on TV,” focused on traveling in the early part of the 1960s and never returned actively to Hollywood. For nearly two decades she lived completely out of the limelight in and around Europe, including Switzerland and Spain, returning to America very infrequently and only for business purposes. She died of stomach cancer in 1983 in Majorca, Spain.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Faye Emerson, circa 1945Faye Emerson, American film star & television personality at the time she made, Juke Girl attends to her toilet.
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
One of the screen’s great beauties, Anita Ekberg was born in Malmo, Sweden in 1931. She won thge ‘Miss Sweden’ contest in 1950 and went to the U.S, to compete in the ‘Miss Universe’ competition. Although she did not win the competition, she went on secure a movie contract. After a numberof small parts, she had a major role in “Artists and Models” in 1955 with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. She then had about ten years in major roles including “War and Peace”, “Back From Eternity” and her most famous film “La Dolca Vita” in 1960. She died in Rome in 2015.
GRonald Bergan & John Francis Lane’s obituary in “The Guardian”:
In Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), a tipsy blond starlet, wearing a black low-cut dress, wanders into the Trevi fountain in Rome. She tries to entice her escort to join her by calling “Marcello, Marcello” in seductive tones. The scene made the Swedish-born Anita Ekberg, who has died aged 83, a sex symbol par excellence. “She had the beauty of a young goddess,” Fellini said. “The luminous colour of her skin, her clear ice-blue eyes, golden hair and exuberance, joie de vivre made her into a grandiose creature, extraterrestrial and at the same time moving and irresistible.” Her co-star, Marcello Mastroianni, was initially less impressed: “She reminded me of a German soldier of the Wehrmacht who in a round-up asked me into a truck.” However, after a week of getting wet in the fountain and drying her frocks in the sunlight, Ekberg gained his respect and even affection.
The director Frank Tashlin once commented: “There’s nothing more hysterical to me than big-breasted women – like walking leaning towers.” Ekberg was a beautiful, tall, voluptuous leaning tower in Tashlin’s punningly titled Hollywood or Bust (1956). Later, in Le Tentazioni del Dottor Antonio (The Temptation of Dr Antonio), the Fellini episode from the omnibus film Boccaccio 70 (1962), she was the gigantic model who comes down from her billboard promoting milk to pursue a puritan who has campaigned against the advert.
Both Tashlin and Fellini had found a way of using the former Miss Sweden in erotic satire. She was born in the city of Malmö, on the south-western tip of Sweden, the sixth of eight children of August, a doctor, and his wife, Alvah. Having been crowned Miss Malmö and then Miss Sweden, Ekberg went to the US in the early 1950s for the Miss Universe contest and stayed to appear in a number of Hollywood films. These included The Golden Blade (1953), an Arabian Nights tale starring Rock Hudson, in which she played a handmaiden, and Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953).
Ekberg was asked to be merely decorative in a few further exotic adventure tales, such as Zarak (1956), in which Victor Mature portrayed an Afghan outlaw; and to be a stooge to Jerry Lewis in Artists and Models (1955) and Hollywood or Bust, and to Bob Hope in Paris Holiday (1958) and Call Me Bwana (1963). Her looks were used more effectively in King Vidor’s War and Peace (1956), in the role of Hélène, the adulterous wife of the besotted Pierre Bezukhov (Henry Fonda).
Larger dramatic roles followed in B-movies, including Screaming Mimi (1958), a bizarre psychological thriller in which she performs striptease numbers at a sleazy nightclub called El Madhouse, and gets attacked while taking a shower – two years before Psycho. In Valerie (1957), she appeared opposite Anthony Steel, whom she had married in 1956.
It was said that the career of Steel, one of Britain’s biggest movie stars in the 50s, was ruined when he married Ekberg and moved to Hollywood. There, he struggled to find much work and was often referred to by the tabloids as Mr Ekberg. Their stormy marriage ended in 1959. One of their public arguments, while being pursued by the paparazzi in Rome, was said to have inspired some scenes in La Dolce Vita.
After that film, Ekberg, never much of an actor, became a prisoner of her own image. She posed for Playboy, Bob Dylan named her in the song I Shall Be Free, and she appeared in a number of mediocre international productions including The Mongols (1961) and Four for Texas (1963), in which the director Robert Aldrich concentrated on Ekberg’s bust, especially as
After an unhappy second marriage, to the actor Rik Van Nutter, which lasted from 1963 to 1975, Ekberg drank heavily and gradually gained a great deal of weight. She lived alone in a grand villa in the country near Rome, guarded by two Dobermans. After a fire and a break-in at her house, she moved into a care home and in 2011 sought financial assistance from the Fellini Foundation.
When invited to celebrate the 40th anniversary of La Dolce Vita she declined, but in 2009 agreed to appear in a BBC documentary. Previously, Fellini visited her in his film Intervista (Interview, 1987), in which there is a moving reunion between Mastroianni and Ekberg, who nostalgically watch their key scene from La Dolce Vita together. Ronald Bergan
John Francis Lane writes: WhenFederico Fellini asked me to play one of the reporters milling around at the news conference of the movie star played by Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita, I suspected he only vaguely remembered what I’d told him of my experience as a real reporter at her wedding to Anthony Steel.
At the time of the wedding, I was Rome stringer for the British newspaper the News Chronicle. It could not afford to send its showbiz columnist to Florence so I went instead. The wedding, at the Palazzo Vecchio, was attended by 50 members of the press. When we got back to the hotel, the luminaries rushed to their rooms to write their gilded prose, while I, knowing how unreliable the Italian phones were, thought it a good idea to ask the telephonist if there were problems getting through to London. She offered me a line immediately.
What to do? I took a chance. Laboriously I started adlibbing the article, following my first instinct which had been to send it all up. I had only the pay-off in my head: “The next morning they will be back on the real film set.” I came out of the booth sweating and trembling, and, as I stumbled towards the bar, who should suddenly appear but Ekberg, still in that fabulous white dress with one bare shoulder that I had just ridiculed. Seeing me, the only one of her “wedding guests” around, she beckoned me to join her for a glass of champagne.
What had I done? I had dared to make fun of a goddess. It was the end of my hopes of becoming a foreign correspondent. I sipped my champagne and gulped desperately as I saw my illustrious colleagues fighting to get a line to London for what would certainly be their rapturous accounts of the fairytale we had been privileged to witness.
When I next saw Ekberg, on the set of La Dolce Vita, she was more concerned that Fellini might be sending her up. Of course he was, yet I heard him console her affectionately: “But Anitona, how could I? You are meant to be Ava Gardner!” Her marriage was brief, but thanks to Fellini, the Nordic goddess became immortal.
• Kerstin Anita Marianne Ekberg, actor, born 29 September 1931; died 11 January 2015
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
“Movies Unlimited” article:
It’s one of the most iconic scenes in Italian cinema: a voluptuous woman in a clinging, strapless black dress wading into Rome’s famed Trevi Fountain. The actress chosen to take this memorable dip in Federico Fellini’s 1960 film La Dolce Vita wasn’t Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Virna Lisi or another native beauty, however. It was stunning Swedish blonde Anita Ekberg, who was one of the screen’s leading sex symbols in the 1950s and ’60s and who passed away this past weekend in Rome at the age of 83.
Born Kirsten Anita Marianne Ekberg in the southern coastal town of Malmo in September of 1931, the sixth of eight children, Ekberg started modeling as a teen and in 1950 won the Miss Sweden beauty contest. Although she failed to take the Miss Universe crown the following year, Anita was awarded a contract with Universal Pictures. Her screen debut was an uncredited role in the 1953 Tyrone Power western The Mississippi Gambler (Power was also the first of several leading men–some married–she would be romantically linked with), and while with Universal she would be used as attractive “window dressing” in such 1953 films as Abbott and Costello Go to Mars and The Golden Blade, with Rock Hudson. After playing a Chinese villager (!) in the John Wayne adventure Blood Alley (1955), she appeared with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in two of the duo’s final picturestogether, 1955’s Artists and Models and Hollywood or Bust (as an exaggerated version of herself) the following year.
In between clowning with Dean and Jerry, Anita got several chances to display her dramatic potential. She was cast in Paramount’s lavish adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace in the role of Helene, ambitious wife of Count Bezukhov (Henry Fonda); as one a group of plane crash survivors lost in the South American jungle in RKO’s Back from Eternity, with Robert Ryan and Rod Steiger; and as a criminal’s duplicitous girlfriend in the “B” drama Man in the Vault. 1956 also saw her earn a Golden Globe Award (a share of one, at least: she tied with fellow starlets Victoria Shaw and Dana Wynter) for Most Promising Newcomer. Other late ’50s Ekberg efforts included a pair of films with Victor Mature, the costume adventure Zarak (1956) and a drug-smuggling thriller, Pickup Alley (1957); Valerie (also ’57), an offbeat psychological drama set in the Old West which co-starred her then-husband, Anthony Steel; the Bob Hope comedy Paris Holiday (1958); and the decidedly off-the-wall Screaming Mimi (also ’58), a burlesque-themed noir thriller with Anita as an asylum escapee who becomes an exotic dancer under the tutelage of stripshow legend Gypsy Rose Lee.
1960 would bring Ekberg the role for which she would be most be remembered, as the glamorous actress who catches the eye of gossip magazine writer Marcello Mastroianni during his pleasure-seeking excursion through the streets of Rome, in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Incidentally, the pair’s late-night romp through the Trevi Fountain didn’t bother the Scandinavian beauty, who stood in the unheated water for hours during the winter shoot, one bit. Co-star Mastroianni, on the other hand, needed a wetsuit under his clothes–and a bottle of vodka–to get through the scene. Things were considerably hotter years later, though, when Anita told the New York Times, “They would like to keep up the story that Fellini made me famous, Fellini discovered me,” and claimed that in fact it was her aquatic romp that put the director on the map. Such feelings didn’t stop her from working with Fellini again in Boccaccio ’70 (1962), The Clowns (1970), and Intervista (1987), which also reunited her with Mastroianni.
Once she came back to Hollywood, Anita found quality roles harder to come by. She was nearly tapped to be the first “Bond Girl,” Honey Ryder, in 1962’s Dr. No before the filmmakers ultimately went with Ursula Andress. She reunited with Bob Hope (who once quipped that her parents “won the Nobel Prize for architecture”) in 1963 for Call Me B’wana, and later that year co-starred with Andress, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and The Three Stooges in the frontier comedy 4 for Texas. Ekberg proved to be a charming distraction for Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (Tony Randall) in the light-hearted 1965 whodunit The Alphabet Murders, based on an Agatha Christie novel, and she went to the moon as a Russian cosmonaut in the Jerry Lewis outer space romp Way…Way Out in 1966. By decade’s end, however, she was down to making European horror films like 1969’s Fangs of the Living Dead.
The 1970s and ’80s would find Ekberg cast in such exploitation efforts as the Euro-western The Deadly Trackers (1974); the title role in the convent-set shocker Killer Nun (1978); the made-for-TV adventure Gold of the Amazon Women (1979); a distaff 007 spoof, S.H.E: Security Hazards Expert (1980); and Cicciabomba (1982), an Italian dark comedy about a once-fat girl who turns into a bombshell and seeks revenge on her former tormentors. In response to audience comments about her own weight gain since her days as a ’50s starlet, the always outspoken Anita said, “I’m very much bigger than I was…so what? It’s not really fatness, it’s development.”
By the early ’90s Ekberg was semi-retired and living full-time in Italy. Her final big-screen turn came in 1999’s The Red Dwarf, a Belgian/Italian oddity in which she played a middle-aged opera diva who has an affair with a diminutive legal office clerk. Beset by financial and health problems in recent years (A 2009 report said she was “destitute” and that she lost her home to fire while hospitalized for a broken thigh), she had been using a wheelchair since a pet Great Dane broke her hip in 2011. Married and divorced twice with no children, the beauty queen-turned-movie goddess told an Italian newspaper in an 80th birthday interview that, while she was lonely, she had “no regrets” about her life. “I have loved, cried, been mad with happiness. I have won and I have lost.” Anita Ekberg may not have always lived “the sweet life,” but she had a full one, and moviegoers are the better for her sharing it with them.
The above “Movies Unlimited” article can also be accessed online here.
14th January 1956: Swedish actress Anita Ekberg (1931 – 2015) is featured for the cover of Picture Post magazine. Original Publication: Picture Post Cover – Vol 70 No 02 – pub. 1956. (Photo by John Chillingworth/IPC Magazines/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
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.
Bobby Sherman was born in 1943 in Santa Monica, California. He starred in the TV series “Here Comes the Bride” in 1968 and 1969 and then “Getting Together” in 1971 and 1972. He had a number of Top Ten Hits including “Julie, Do You Love Me”.
Bobby was promoted to Captain on the Los Angeles Police Department, where he taught CPR and life saving techniques to incoming academy recruits. For a few years, he was also one of the members of the Teen Idol Tour, which also included Peter Noone, Davy Jonesand, then later, Micky Dolenz replacing Jones. Bobby is the father of two grown sons, both of them following their famous father into the music industry.
Collin Wilcox was born in 1935 in Ohio. She was a staple guest star of the major U.S. TV series of the 1960’s and 70’s. including “The Twilight Zone” and “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour” among many others. On film, her best remembered performance is from 1962 in “To Kill A Mockingbird” with Gregory Peck. She died in 2009.
Collin Wilcox, who portrayed a young white woman who falsely accuses a black man of rape in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and went on to appear in numerous TV shows and films like ‘Jaws 2,’ died at her home in North Carolina last week. She was 74. Her husband, Scott Paxton, said the actress died on Oct. 14 of brain cancer, the New York Times reports.
As the character Mayella Violet Ewell, who accused Brock Peters’ character of rape, she delivers a court speech that stands out as one of the most memorable scenes in ‘Mockingbird.’ While being cross-examined by Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch, she tearfully responds:
“I got something to say, and then I ain’t gonna say no more. He took advantage of me! And if you fine, fancy, damn … ain’t gonna do nothin’ about it, then you’re just a bunch a’ lousy yella stinkin’ cowards … the … the whole bunch of ya. And your fancy airs don’t come to nothin’. Your manners and your “Miss Mayella,” it don’t come to nothin’ Mr. Finch!” ‘Mockingbird’ was her major-film debut and she later appeared on TV show such as ‘The Twilight Zone,’ ‘The Untouchables’ and ‘Gunsmoke.’
She appeared in several more films, including ‘Catch-22’ and the ‘Jaws’ sequel, before moving back to her native North Carolina where she and her husband founded a children’s arts center.
In addition to her husband, Paxton is survived by her children, Kimberley and Michael.
New York Times obituary in 2009.
Collin Wilcox, Actress in ‘Mockingbird’, Dies at 74
Collin Wilcox, a ubiquitous actress whose face was familiar to television viewers in the 1960s and afterward for her guest appearances on shows like “The Untouchables,” “The Twilight Zone,” “The Defenders” and “Gunsmoke,” died on Oct. 14 at her home in Highlands, N.C. She was 74.
The cause was brain cancer, her husband, Scott Paxton, said.
A fresh-faced Southerner, Ms. Wilcox was also billed over the years as Collin Wilcox-Horne and Collin Wilcox-Paxton. Besides working actively in television, she appeared in Hollywood films and several Broadway plays.
Her best-known film role was as Mayella Ewell, the young white woman who falsely accuses a black man (played by Brock Peters) of rape in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the 1962 adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel. Ms. Wilcox’s tearful testimony on the witness stand as Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch cross-examines her is widely considered one of the movie’s most memorable scenes.
Ms. Wilcox made her Broadway debut in 1958 in “The Day the Money Stopped,” a drama by Maxwell Anderson and Brendan Gill. Though the play closed after four performances, she won the Clarence Derwent Award from the Actors’ Equity Association as the year’s most promising female performer.
Collin Wilcox was born on Feb. 4, 1935, in Cincinnati and moved with her family to Highlands as a baby. In the late 1930s her parents helped found a local theater company, the Highlands Community Theater, where she got her first stage experience.
Ms. Wilcox studied at the University of Tennessee, what was then the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago and the Actors Studio in New York. In Chicago she performed with the Compass Players, an improvisational group that was a forerunner of the Second City theater troupe.
On television Ms. Wilcox came to wide attention in 1958, when she starred in a live television production of “The Member of the Wedding.” (An adaptation of Carson McCullers’s novel, it was directed by Robert Mulligan, who later directed “To Kill a Mockingbird.”) To land the role of Frankie, the story’s preadolescent heroine, Ms. Wilcox, then in her early 20s, appeared at the audition with her hair shorn, her breasts bound with dishtowels and her face dotted with “freckles” of iodine.
One of her television performances that continues to be seen today in reruns was in a 1964 episode of “The Twilight Zone,” titled “Number 12 Looks Just Like You.” Ms. Wilcox played a plain-looking 19-year-old woman in a society of the future who resists a ritual “transformation” procedure to make her physically beautiful (she can choose from among standard models) and give her a longer life.
Ms. Wilcox’s first marriage, to Walter Beakel, ended in divorce, as did her second, to Geoffrey Horne. She is survived by her third husband, Mr. Paxton, whom she married in 1979; three children, Kimberly Horne, Michael G. Paxton and William Horne; and three grandchildren.
Her other television appearances include guest roles on “Dr. Kildare,” “The Fugitive,” “Ironside,” “The Waltons” and “Little House on the Prairie.”
Among Ms. Wilcox’s other films are “Catch-22” (1970), “Jaws 2” (1978), “Marie” (1985) and the TV movie “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” broadcast on CBS in 1974
Jim Kelly was a great martial artist who made movies in the 1970’s. He died in 2013 at the age of 67. Here is his Guardian obituary.
The martial artist and actor Jim Kelly, best known for his nonchalant turn in the Bruce Lee film Enter the Dragon, has died at the age of 67. Kelly was picked to star in the martial arts classic two years later. He plays the arrogant, insouciant Williams, who competes alongside Lee in a sinister competition organised by the mysterious Mr Han on a James Bond-style island. Kelly’s impressive afro, sideburns and good looks made him the perfect choice for a film shot at the height of blaxploitation.
Kelly has since become a huge cult figure, though his acting career never quite took off despite a good deal of success in similar 1970s fare. Appearances in films such as Black Belt Jones, Three the Hard Way (both 1974) and Black Samurai usually played on the novelty of an African American who practices martial arts. He was little seen on the big screen after 1982’s late-era blaxploitation martial arts effort One Down, Two to Go, and later pursued a career in tennis.
“It was one of the best experiences in my life,” Kelly told salon.com in 2010 when asked whether he enjoyed his time on Enter the Dragon. “Bruce was just incredible, absolutely fantastic. I learned so much from working with him. I probably enjoyed working with Bruce more than anyone else I’d ever worked with in movies because we were both martial artists. And he was a great, great martial artist. It was very good.”
In a separate interview with the LA Times the same year, Kelly said he had “never left the movie business”, adding: “It’s just that after a certain point, I didn’t get the type of projects that I wanted to do. I still get at least three scripts per year, but most of them don’t put forth a positive image. There’s nothing I really want to do, so I don’t do it. If it happens, it happens, but if not, I’m happy with what I’ve accomplished.”
Kelly died on Saturday at his home in San Diego and had been suffering from cancer, according to his ex-wife Marilyn Dishman, who broke the news on Facebook. “Yesterday, June 29, 2013, James Milton Kelly, better known as Jim Kelly, the karate expert, actor, my first husband and Sabrena Kelly-Lewis’s biological father died,” she wrote in a note.
Kelly’s best-remembered line in Enter the Dragon is probably the one where he is challenged by Shih Kien’s villainous Han to prepare himself for inevitable defeat. “I don’t waste my time with it,” sneers Williams. “When it comes I won’t even notice … I’ll be too busy looking good.“
