Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 36 of 126

Philips Holmes

IMDB entry:

A future in movies for this fair-haired, fresh-faced young adult of the 1930s was by no means certain at the time of his untimely death in a mid-air plane collision. Hints of the All-American leading man promise Phillips Holmes managed to convey during the early to mid decade, particularly in the film adaptation of Theodore Dreiser ‘s novel An American Tragedy (1931), had faded significantly. In the meantime he was maintaining with stage work and had just graduated from Air Ground School as an aircraftsman when he suddenly died at age 35 on August 12, 1942.

Phillips, his sister Madeline and their youngest brother, Ralph Holmes (pronounced “Rafe,” who later became an actor as well) came from ripe acting stock. Character actorTaylor Holmes was a well-established character player in vaudeville and on the stage and screen. He and actress wife Edna Phillips met during a production of “Hamlet” and first-born Phillips’ odd first name was bestowed upon him courtesy of his Canadian-born mother. The children were often shunted about to live with various relatives while their parents were on the road. Phillips attended many different schools growing up and graduated from Newman Prep School in New Jersey. He traveled to Europe for his college education, attending Cambridge University in England and (later) Grenoble University in France. His natural ability at athletics led to solid respect as a member of the rowing team during his college years. He eventually returned to the US and decided upon Princeton.

An inherent interest in acting (Princeton’s The Triangle Club) led to his stage debut in the Princeton Triangle Show “Napoleon Passes” at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1927. While at college he, by luck and via certain connections, also managed to make his film debut with Varsity (1928) and was offered a Paramount contract as a result. After a number of false starts, bit parts, bad pictures and a major bout with nervous exhaustion, Phillips began to score some early first impressions with juvenile leads in the films The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1929), Pointed Heels (1929), the Gary Cooper starrer Only the Brave (1930) and, more notably, The Devil’s Holiday (1930) and Stolen Heaven(1931), both opposite established star Nancy Carroll.

It all led to the role of his career in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1931) the ill-fated story of a wanderlust young man who falls hard for a beautiful socialite (Frances Dee) while trying to find a way to extricate himself from the clutches of a drab, maudlin girl from the wrong side of the tracks he had met earlier and impregnated (Sylvia Sidney). In the same part that would later establish Montgomery Clift as a archetypal tortured romantic in A Place in the Sun (1951), Holmes equipped himself admirably in a difficult role and was seemingly on his way to Hollywood stardom.

Firmly on the Paramount roster list, the handsome blue-eyed blond co-starred as both vulnerable, weak-willed gents and feistier men in comedy and melodrama, includingBroken Lullaby (1932) and Two Kinds of Women (1932). He then signed with MGM and appeared in more of the same standard filming — Night Court (1932), The Secret of Madame Blanche (1933) and Men Must Fight (1933). A huge chance for major attention turned bleak after being heavily promoted in the film Nana (1934) opposite beauteous Russian import Anna Sten. Touted as the “next Garbo”, the movie tanked badly with his performance cited as bland and wooden, and the equally stiff Ms. Sten lost all hope for stardom. Phillips provided a bit more dash and élan in Caravan (1934) opposite Loretta Young but it was not enough to turn his career around. From then on he freelanced both here and abroad in mostly “B” fodder that included the “Our Gang” feature-length misfireGeneral Spanky (1936) and the British programmers The Dominant Sex (1937) and (his swan song) Housemaster (1938), both with “tea rose” beauty Diana Churchill.

Phillps had to make do on stage at this point with his participation in such plays as “The Petrified Forest”, “Golden Boy”, “The Male Animal” and “The Philadelphia Story”. Along with his career decline, he suffered upsets in his personal life. A fractured romance with scandalized millionaire chanteuse Libby Holman led to her marrying brother Ralph on the rebound. That 1939 marriage fell apart within a few years and Ralph would subsequently commit suicide in his NY apartment from a barbiturate overdose in 1945, three years after Phillips’ death.

With WWII now a harsh reality, both brothers enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force toward the end of 1941. While Ralph became a pilot officer, Phillips attended the Air Ground School at Winnipeg. Following graduation, he and six of his aircraftsmen classmates were transferred but the plane carrying the men en route to their new destination (Ottawa) collided with another in Ontario killing all aboard.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

George Peppard

David Shipman’s “Independent” obituary:

George Peppard, actor, director, producer: born Detroit 1 October 1928; six times married (two sons, one daughter); died Los Angeles 8 May 1994

BREAKFAST at Tiffany’s seemed a sophisticated piece when it came out in 1961, directed by Blake Edwards and written by George Axelrod from the novella by Truman Capote. The sexually ambiguous ‘I’ of the story, the struggling writer based on Capote himself, had become a full-blooded practising heterosexual – involved with a lady known only as ‘2E’ (played by Patricia Neal), who leaves him dollars 300 on the bedside table after their rendezvous. To the strains of ‘Moon River’, he gives her up for Holly Golightly, who is played by Audrey Hepburn.

George Peppard played the role, that of the all-American boy gone to seed who rediscovers Real Values when he finds True Love. Peppard himself had no difficulty in hinting at the decadence of the character, and indeed in his first film he had played a first-year student at a military academy which was a hotbed of perversion and corruption – The Strange One (1957), adapted from Calder Willingham’s novel End as a Man. Peppard played a victim, but there was a glint in the eye, a flick of the tongue, which suggested that he could not wait to be the next school bully. He continued to be promising in his next few films, and something more than that in Home from the Hill (1959), as the hero’s illegitimate brother, investing his scenes with warmth and humour.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s made Peppard a star, and he appeared in a number of important pictures over the next few years, eventually achieving billing over such names as James Mason, Sophia Loren and Alan Ladd. The titles included How the West was Won (1962), The Victors (1963) and Operation Crossbow (1965). In The Carpetbaggers (1964), he played an unscrupulous playboy modelled on Howard Hughes, as first written up by Harold Robbins in his bestseller of the same title. Peppard had his best screen chance in John Guillerman’s The Blue Max (1966), as an ambitious working-class member of a crack German officer corps, despised by his aristocratic colleagues and determined to prove, by fair means or foul, that he is better than any of them. It was his last major film, which is doubly curious because, like The Carpetbaggers, it was a very big movie at the box-office. With a couple of hits like these, an actor can coast for two or three years, but after Rough Night in Jericho (1967), a western with Jean Simmons and Dean Martin, Peppard was offered little of interest.

This was partly his own fault. In 1965 he was making Sands of the Kalahari for Cy Endfield and Stanley Baker, who expected it to rival the popularity of their earlier Zulu. Peppard walked out during filming, to be replaced by Stuart Whitman. The film not only failed, but the industry looked askance at Peppard, never trusting or liking any actor who causes shooting to begin all over again. With his cool, blond baby-face looks and a touch of menace, of meanness, he had established a screen persona as strong as any of the time. He might have been the Alan Ladd or the Richard Widmark of the Sixties: but the Sixties didn’t want a new Alan Ladd. Peppard began appearing in a series of action movies, predictably as a tough guy, but there were much tougher guys around – like Cagney, Bogart and Robinson, whose films had now become television staples.

John Guillerman, making his first two Hollywood films, cast Peppard in the thrillers New Face in Hell (1967) and House of Cards (1968). In the second of these he was an expatriate American caught up in the dirty tricks of the French political right, and in the first a down-at-heel private eye. Peppard’s private eye brought him an offer to play another, in a television series, Banacek. It ran from 1972 to 1974 and brought renewed acclaim to Peppard and several movie offers. He chose to play a busted cop who sets out to clear his name in Newman’s Law (1974). He himself produced, directed and starred in Five Days from Home (1978), playing another ex-lawman, one who this time has been convicted of the manslaughter of his wife’s lover; the film went direct to television.

When Peppard returned to that medium, it was as Hannibal, the grinning, cigar-chomping leader of The A-Team, an NBC series which ran from 1983 to 1986. Righting wrongs, correcting or uncovering injustices, the A-Team went about their work with rare good-humour and a considerable amount of violence, explosive if not bloody. They were very popular, particularly with children, but the show was expensive to produce and needed the injection of new ingredients to hold its audience; and the producers preferred to put it into syndication.

More recently, Peppard had returned to the stage, and was in London briefly in 1990 in the two-hand play Love Letters, opposite Elaine Stritch. In 1992 he embarked on a tour of The Lion in Winter with Susan Clark.

The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.

May Whitty

TCM overview:

Dame May Whitty was a delightful character actress of numerous first-class productions of the late 1930s and 1940s. Typically playing a distinguished aunt, mother, grandmother, or dowager, her presence brought an authentic English air to any film ( yes, even more so than Gladys Cooper ). Proud, gentle, kindly, and altogether charming, she was indeed the ideal symbol of British dignity.

Dame May Whitty was born on June 19, 1865 in Liverpool, England, the daughter of a newpaper journalist/editor. Her first encounter with the world of acting was in a stage production of The Mountain Sylph at the court theatre in Liverpool. She was sixteen years old and danced in the chorus. Within a year, she made her London stage debut and quickly became a seasoned performer. By the turn of the century she was well-known on both sides of the Atlantic.

In 1918, she was created a Dame Commander of the British Empire ( being only the third actress to recieve that honor at that time ) for her philantropic services to Britain. Always willing to serve a good cause, she displayed her selfless service again by helping out for the war effort during World War II and appeared in “Forever and a Day” and “Stage Door Canteen”, both made to boost morale and the sales of war bonds. Even upon her death, her will requested that rather then giving flowers at her funeral the money should be used to send CARE packages to England.

She was busy across the pond and on Broadway during the 1920s and 30s, and it was in 1932 that she was offered the co-starring role in Emlyn William’s new play, “Night Must Fall.” Reluctant at first to accept the role of the wheel-chair bound,chocolate-loving old lady who is beguiled by a psychopathic killer, it was to become one of her best performances. The show was a great success in England, and she reprised the role on Broadway and once again in 1937 for the MGM film of the same name opposite Robert Montgomery. At the tender age of 72 she made her Hollywood film debut. Not only was it a magnificent performance, but she was nominated for an Academy Award for it too! And thus began a wonderful career as a supporting actress in many fine productions for MGM and other studios.

She played the medium in “The Thirteenth Chair” ( MGM, 1937 ) and the next year starred in her most memorable role, that of charming old Miss Froy, an espionage agent who mysteriously disappears onboard a train while returning home to England, in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes”. In 1940, Dame May was asked if she thought of retiring, “Quit? Only the aged and infirm quit, and I am neither. So long as I can do my bit, I’ll keep right on doing it.”

In the early 1940s, she reached the peak of her film productivity and played in a number of fine films for MGM and other studios…in “Raffles” ( 1940 ) she played the Lady Kitty Melrose who’s diamonds are stolen by the renowned Amateur Cracksman; in “Suspicion” ( 1941 ) she played Joan Fontaine’s mother, and in “Mrs.Miniver” ( 1942 ) she was Lady Beldon, the perennial winner of the town’s annual rose competition, and grandmother to Teresa Wright. For a change from her more usual high-society roles, she played the down-to-earth Dolly ( her real-life husband Ben Webster played her spouse in the film ) in “Lassie Come Home”; she was the elderly villager of Penny Green in “If Winter Comes” ; and in “The White Cliffs of Dover” ( 1944 ) she played the lovable governess Nanny. “Gaslight” saw her returning to her prestigious roles, this time as Ingrid Bergman’s garrulous neighbor on Thorton Square. In the thriller “My Name is Julia Ross” she played the wealthy mother who tried to convince secretary Nina Foch that she was her son’s wife, and in “Green Dolphin Street” she was the wise Mother Superior to Donna Reed.

In 1947 her husband of 55 years, Ben Webster, passed away. Dame May Whitty made the films “The Sign of the Ram” ( with Susan Peters ) and “The Return of October” that year but had to be replaced by Lucille Watson in “Julia Misbehaves” due to illness. On May 29, 1948 she died at the age of 82. Many of Hollywood’s British colony friends attended the funeral including C.Aubrey Smith, Edmund Gwenn, Herbert Marshall, Brian Aherne and Boris Karloff.

Her daughter Margaret was a famous actress herself as well as a notable stage producer and director and in 1969 she wrote an autobiography ( The Same Only Different ) covering both her and her mother’s careers.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Leonid Kinskey

Tom Vallance’s “Independent” obituary:

ONE OF Hollywood’s most distinctive character actors, often known as “The Mad Russian”, Leonid Kinskey was a lanky, shock-haired eccentric with a wrinkled brow and wide grin who specialised in comic continentals with fractured English and manic enthusiasm. Among his most memorable portrayals were the barman who effusively kisses Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, the gigolo who takes Betty Grable on the town in Down Argentine Way and one of the unworldly professors in Ball of Fire. Occasionally he would be cast in less genial roles, and was chillingly effective as the oily informer in Algiers and a snivelling coward in So Ends Our Night.

Though his countrymen often assumed that he was American (“When I played Russians in the movies they made me so exaggerated no real Russian would believe me”), Kinskey was actually born in St Petersburg in 1903. Sent out of Russia by his mother at 17 – “I belonged to a group of people that was not wanted after the Revolution” – he toured South America as a mime with the acclaimed Firebird Theatre, which specialised in bringing famous paintings to life through mime and dance.

When the company flopped in New York, Kinskey found himself stranded with no money or knowledge of English. He worked as a waiter in Manhattan then managed to get a role in a silent film, The Great Deception (1926), starring Aileen Pringle and Ben Lyon, but when most of his part was cut out he found work in Chicago running a theatre-restaurant with a Russian theme. After the stock market crash caused the restaurant to close, Al Jolson hired Kinskey to appear in the touring version of his show Wonder Bar.

While it was playing in Hollywood, Kinskey was spotted by the director Ernst Lubitsch, who signed him for a brief cameo as a Russian peasant in the exquisite comedy Trouble in Paradise (1932). It was an exaggerated portrayal of an agitated radical who repeatedly exclaims “Phooey” to socialite Kay Francis, who is reassured by her lover Herbert Marshall that “his phooey is less than his bite”, and it set the pattern for many of his later roles caricaturing foreigners, such as his delightfully eccentric composer in On Your Toes (1939).

His own favourite role was in the Bing Crosby musical Rhythm on the Range (1936) in which Kinskey bizarrely took part in introducing the song standard, “I’m An Old Cowhand”. Other films in which he featured include Duck Soup (1933), We Live Again (1934, another serious role as a murder victim), Les Miserables (1935), The Merry Widow (1935), 100 Men and a Girl (1937), The Great Waltz (1938), Flirting with Fate (1938), in which he and comic Joe F. Brown duetted on “Sweet Adeline”), That Night in Rio (1941) and Can’t Help Singing (1944), in which he was one of a pair of bumbling confidence tricksters attempting to swindle Deanna Durbin.

Kinskey was one of the last surviving members of the cast of the enduring classic Casablanca (1942). He claimed that Bogart got him the role of Sacha the bartender after the original actor Leon Mostovoy was fired for lacking the requisite humour. “We used to drink together, Bogart, Ralph Bellamy and myself at Mischa Auer’s house at least three times a week,” said Kinskey:

We were all good drinkers. Ralph Bellamy was a good-looking guy. We thought he was the one who was going to be a star. And I said to myself about Bogart, “He’s short, he speaks with a lisp. And he’s not a good- looking guy so what chance does he have?” When Bogart asked me to be in Casablanca, I knew I was replacing an actor who had been thought too heavy, speechwise, and they wanted something very light.

In a memorable scene Kinskey as Sacha is so moved by Bogart’s arranging a passport for a young couple desperate to leave that he kisses Bogart on both cheeks as he exclaims, “Boss, you did a wonderful thing” to which Bogart responds, “Get away from me!”

Kinskey appeared in over 70 films. He supplemented his income by writing articles and short stories for Russian publications. During the Second World War he worked with the Soviets in choosing Hollywood movies for showing in the USSR. A television show he did in 1948 called The Spotlight Club is allegedly the first situation comedy ever on television.

Kinskey was also a regular on Jackie Cooper’s television series The People’s Choice in the Fifties, and made appearances on the shows of Ann Sothern, Spike Jones and others, but he refused to do commercials. A man of strong principles, he was featured in the pilot of Hogan’s Heroes, a comedy series about the Second World War, but declined to sign for the series, stating, “The premise was to me both false and offensive. Nazis were seldom dumb and never funny.”

Kinskey married his late wife Iphigenia Castiglioni four times. “It started in Mexico City,” said Kinskey, “and then over 20 years of our happy marriage we celebrated every five years by taking a new marriage licence in a different country.” Castiglioni, a Viennese beauty who died in 1963, was also in movies – she played Empress Eugenie in both The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) and Maytime (1937) and was the Bird Woman in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954).

When movie roles dried up (his last was in Glory, 1956), Kinskey wrote and directed industrial films for major corporations. “To dramatise a machine or product requires a great deal more ingenuity to keep it going than a well-written scene played by able actors,” he stated. The man whom columnist Louella Parsons once called “the maddest Russian on land or sea” also frequently travelled to Palm Springs to visit old friends from Hollywood’s Russian colony.

Tom Vallance

Leonid Kinskey, actor: born St Petersburg, Russia 18 April 1903; married three times, first Iphigenia Castiglioni (died 1963), third Tina York; died Fountain Hills, Arizona 8 September 1998.

The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Molly Bee

Molly Bee’s obituary in “The Los Angeles Times” in 2009.

VALERIE J. NELSON

Entertainment Television Death Family Obituaries

Molly Bee, a country singer popular in the 1950s and 1960s who was a teenage star on television’s “Hometown Jamboree” and “The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show,” has died. She was 69.

FOR THE RECORD: Molly Bee obituary: The obituary of country singer Molly Bee in the Feb. 11 California section said the show “Hometown Jamboree” aired on KTLA-TV Channel 5 from the late 1940s to 1960. “Hometown Jamboree” aired on Channel 13, then KLAC-TV, from 1949 through 1954 and KTLA from 1955 to 1956. The article also said she spent her early years in Beltbuckle, Tenn. The town is Bell Buckle.

Bee, who lived in Carlsbad, Calif., died Saturday of complications related to a stroke at Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside, said Michael Allen, her son. At 10, she sang “Lovesick Blues” for country singer Rex Allen and soon debuted on his radio show. Within two years, she was a regular on “Hometown Jamboree,” a Los Angeles-based show run by Cliffie Stone, who helped popularize country music in California. First broadcast on radio, “Jamboree” aired on KTLA-TV Channel 5 from the late 1940s to 1960. The show gave a big break to many young singers, including Tommy Sands, who became a teen idol and dated Bee in the 1950s. “She had a great voice and a wonderful stage personality,” Sands told The Times on Monday. “She was a sweet person, just terrific.” When she was 13, Bee signed with Capitol Records and had her first major recording success with “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” in 1952. The next year, she recorded a duet with Ford, “Don’t Start Courtin’ in a Hot Rod Ford.” In 1954, Bee left the children’s TV program “The Pinky Lee Show” to join Ford’s daytime variety show.

Before their performance of “Dim Lights Thick Smoke,” Ford teased her about the pigtails she once wore and praised her “silver bell voice.” He then coaxed her to yodel, a skill she had honed on the Beltbuckle, Tenn., farm where she spent her early years.

Born Mollie Gene Beachboard on Aug. 18, 1939, in Oklahoma City, she moved to Tucson in the 1940s and to Los Angeles when she was 11. She graduated from Hollywood Professional High School. As her career took off, Bee appeared on a number of TV variety shows and had more hit singles, including “Young Romance,” “Don’t Look Back” and “5 Points of a Star.” In the 1960s, she turned toward acting, appearing in several stage musicals and films but once said she was “too shy” to embrace acting. Her films included “Chartroose Caboose” (1960) and “The Young Swingers” (1963). Bee regularly headlined in the 1960s at major Las Vegas showrooms and briefly toured with Bob Hope’s USO troupe. She struggled with drug addiction and took several years away from performing to rebuild her life, biographical sources said. “I’ve done it all and lived to tell about it,” Bee once said. “Mine has been like six lifetimes rolled into one.”

Married at least five times, she called herself “the Zsa Zsa Gabor of the country music set.” Her marriage to country singer Ira Allen lasted 10 years. Through her children, she found equilibrium, she said in 1975 in Country Song Roundup magazine. Bee reconnected with Stone, made two more albums and often toured with her two daughters in tow. Eventually, she moved to Oceanside with her family in 1986 and regularly performed in the early 1990s at a local restaurant and nightclub she ran called Molly Bee’s. Most recently, she used the name Molly Muncy offstage.

In addition to her son Michael of Napa, Calif., Bee is survived by daughters Lia Genn of Winchester, Calif., and Bobbi Carey of Oceanside; brother Robert Beachboard of Escondido; and four grandchildren.

The above “Los Angeles Times” obituary can also be accessed online here.

A celebration of Bee’s life will be held at 3 p.m. Monday at El Camino Memorial Chapel, 340 Melrose Ave., Encinitas.

Instead of flowers, the family suggests donating to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital,www.stjude.org.

valerie.nelson@latimes.com

Hilda Plowright

Hilda Plowright was born on November 29, 1890 in Swaffham, Norfolk, England. She was an actress, known for Summer Magic (1963), 36 Hours (1965) and Partners of the Plains(1938). She died on October 9, 1973 in San Diego, California, USA.

Michelle O’Donnell’s obituary in 2005 in “The New York Times”:

John Fiedler, who played character roles in celebrated dramas on Broadway and in Hollywood but gained lasting fame among young audiences as the voice of Piglet in Walt Disney’s Winnie-the-Pooh films, died on Saturday. He was 80.

His death was confirmed by his brother, James.

Mr. Fiedler had appeared in the Broadway production of “A Raisin in the Sun” and had played a juror on film in the drama “Twelve Angry Men” when, in the 1960’s, his voice earned him the role of Piglet, the kind-hearted worrier who is Winnie-the-Pooh’s best friend.

“Walt Disney heard it on a program and said, ‘That’s Piglet,’ ” James Fiedler recalled.

John Fiedler’s natural speaking voice was higher than most men’s, his brother said, but he still had to raise it considerably to achieve the high-pitch of the little pink pig. Mr. Fiedler continued to play this part in later life, most recently this year in “Pooh’s Heffalump Movie”; last year, he did “Winnie-the-Pooh: Springtime with Roo,” and in 2003, “Piglet’s Big Movie.”

John Donald Fiedler was born Feb. 3, 1925 in Platteville, a small town in southwestern Wisconsin, and was the oldest of three children born to Donald and Margaret Fiedler. When he was 5, his father, a salesman, moved the family to Shorewood, a suburb of Milwaukee.

There, John’s love of acting bloomed, his brother said. He staged productions in the family’s garage and cast them with neighborhood children.

He graduated from Shorewood High School in 1943 and enlisted in the United States Navy, serving stateside until World War II’s end. He made his way to New York City the following year, his brother said, and joined the Neighborhood Playhouse.

In 1954, he landed the part of Medvedenko in “The Sea Gull” starring Montgomery Clift and Judith Evelyn Off Broadway at the Phoenix Theater. That was followed by the Broadway productions of “A Raisin in the Sun” with Sidney Poitier and “The Odd Couple” starring Walter Matthau and Art Carney. Many of his characters had meek demeanors that were belied by a tough, even mean streak.

He landed character parts in movies, including “True Grit” with John Wayne and “A Touch of Mink” with Cary Grant. In addition, he played parts on television series, including “Star Trek” and “The Bob Newhart Show,” in which he was Mr. Peterson, the bashful patient who was always henpecked by his wife.

Mr. Fiedler said that his brother approached the part of Piglet with as much enthusiasm as his other roles, as it was simply a chance to act.

In addition to his brother, who lives in Madison, Wis., Mr. Fiedler is survived by a sister, Mary Dean of Milwaukee, and numerous nieces and nephews.

Correction: Monday, June 27:

An obituary yesterday about John Fiedler, an actor who was the voice of Piglet in Disney’s Winnie-the-Pooh films, misstated the title of another movie in which he appeared. It was “That Touch of Mink,” not “A Touch

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

Nancy Guild

Tom Vallance’s obituary in “The Independent”:

THE IMPACT of Lauren Bacall on the cinema of the Forties was such that several young actresses were styled by rival studios to approximate the Bacall personality. The most successful was Lizabeth Scott at Paramount, but, though 20th Century-Fox’s answer, Nancy Guild, made only a handful of films before retirement and made comparatively little impact, she acquired a number of admirers and is fondly remembered by filmgoers of the time for her insouciant charm. Ironically, it was actually her resemblance to one of Fox’s own top stars, Gene Tierney, that first attracted the attention of the studio head, Darryl F. Zanuck.

Born in Hollywood, Los Angeles, in 1925, Guild was a student at the University of Arizona with no previous acting experience when Zanuck saw her photograph on the cover of Life magazine (part of a layout on campus fashions) and decided to sign her to a contract. After a considerable period of training and publicity, she was given a leading role in Somewhere in the Night (1946), an intriguing thriller directed and co-written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

It was his second film as a director, and Guild later recalled the close collaboration between the director and his editor James Clark. “Joe was smart enough to know that he didn’t know enough about editing. He had Clark on the set every day to pick his [Clark’s] brains, and he really listened.”

Somewhere in the Night was part of the film noir cycle popular at the time, its amnesiac hero journeying through the seedier parts of Los Angeles in his quest to discover his identity and his possible link with a murder. Guild played a night-club singer who aids the hero in his quest and falls in love with him. She said later that Mankiewicz had lunch with her every day throughout the shooting and drew from her every detail of her life story, which he would use when preparing her for difficult scenes. “I never would have stayed in the picture if it hadn’t been for Joe,” she said, “because he really fed me every line.”

Mankiewicz was a notorious ladies’ man who had already had affairs with the Fox girls Linda Darnell and Gene Tierney, but Guild said that although she had a “wild, mad crush on him” their relationship was platonic:

He kissed me once, but there was nothing sexual about our relationship. He treated me like an intelligent woman instead of someone who was predominantly attractive. I think maybe he required attention from a younger woman with whom he could be professorial and pedantic. He asked me out a number of times, but I said “What about your wife?”

Guild was less enthusiastic about her leading man, John Hodiak, whom she found “very cold”, and the lack of chemistry between the two leads worked to the film’s detriment.

Fox centred much of the film’s advertising around their new star: “Meet that Guild girl – she rhymes with wild!” was their slogan. Variety commented: “There’s no quarrel with her performance as a newcomer but it carbon-copies too many other film lookers to stand out individually.”

Guild was next cast in John Brahm’s The Brasher Doubloon (1947), an underrated adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s thriller The High Window. It had the misfortune to be released after two superb Chandler adaptations, Edward Dmytryk’s Farewell My Lovely (1944) with Dick Powell and Claire Trevor, and Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946) with Bogart and Bacall, and the two leads, Guild and George Montgomery, were considered a bland couple in comparison. Though Montgomery was too boyish as the private detective Philip Marlowe, Guild was effective as the strangely neurotic secretary to a wealthy widow (Florence Bates) who hires Marlowe to find a missing gold coin.

The Brasher Doubloon was a taut, atmospheric thriller with typically low-key noir photography, some fine supporting performances, notably those of Bates and Fritz Kortner, and a gripping plot, but its modest reception tempered the studio’s enthusiasm for their new discovery. After casting her as the girlfriend of an ex-vaudevillian’s son (Dan Dailey) in the nostalgic Give My Regards to Broadway (1948), Fox terminated Guild’s contract.

At United Artists, she played Marie Antoinette in Gregory Ratoff’s Black Magic (1949), dominated by Orson Welles’s grandiloquent performance as the 18th-century villain Cagliostro, and, after three inconsequential roles at Universal, in Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951), Little Egypt (1951) and Francis Covers the Big Town (1953), she retired from the screen.

In the mid-Forties she had been briefly married to the actor Charles Russell, by whom she had a daughter, and in 1950 she married the Broadway producer Ernest Martin (who co-produced Guys and Dolls, Can Can and Cabaret), a union that lasted for 25 years. The couple had a luxurious apartment in New York and a house in the South of France, and, when not travelling or gardening, Guild served on the Board of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre and worked with patients there. She and Martin, who had two daughters, were divorced in 1975, and Guild married John Bryson, a photojournalist, in 1978. They divorced in 1995.

Guild made a brief Hollywood comeback in 1971 when Otto Preminger, whom she had known since her Fox days, asked her to do a cameo as a magazine editor in his witty black comedy Such Good Friends, and shortly afterwards when her marriage to Martin was breaking up she expressed the hope, sadly unrealised, to reactivate her career, telling an interviewer:

I want to go back to work, and it’s really quite remarkable because when I worked before, the only thing I liked about my work was lunch. Now I love the camaraderie of just working. If I could do something other than acting I would. But acting is the only thing I ever made any money at, so I’m trying that first. And you know something? Now that I’m older, I like acting.

Nancy Guild, actress: born Hollywood, California 11 October 1925; married Charles Russell (one daughter; marriage dissolved), 1950 Ernest Martin (two daughters; marriage dissolved 1975), 1978 John Bryson (marriage dissolved 1995); died East Hampton, New York 24 August 1999.

Lauri Peters

“Wikipedia” entry:

Lauri Peters (born Patricia Peterson, July 2, 1943) is an American actress, dancer, singer, drama teacher and author.

Peters created the role of Liesl Von Trapp in the original 1959 Broadway production of The Sound of Music. She received a Tony Award nomination for Best Supporting or Featured Actress in a Musical, which she shared with her sibling castmates. She was married to actor Jon Voight (1962–67), whom she met when he joined the cast as Nazi messenger boy Rolfe, with whom Liesl has a song (“Sixteen Going on Seventeen”) and a mutual attraction. She can be heard on the show’s cast album, which has sold more than three million copies in the U.S.

Her film roles found her romantically involved with teen idol singers Fabian and Cliff Richard, and acting alongside James Stewart andSidney Poitier.

She also appeared as Moll in the Howard Da Silva directed revival of Marc Blitztein‘s The Cradle Will Rock. She appeared on popular television shows of the 1960s and ’70s, including Gunsmoke, but worked primarily in the theater, on Broadway and off, and in touring companies.

With noted acting teacher Sanford Meisner, Peters founded the Meisner Extension at NYU in 1993, where she was Artistic Director and Master Teacher. Teaching the technique away from Manhattan, she has written a book on Meisner.

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Philips Holmes

George Peppard

May Whitty

Leonid Kinskey

Molly Bee

Hilda Plowright

John Fiedler

Nancy Guild

Lauri Peters

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