Sam Shepard

Obituary: Sam Shepard

Playwright, actor, writer, drummer and haunter of Dublin late at night

FUSING BECKETT: Playwright Sam Shepard — a restless, roaming man of talents

2017.

I was very flattered when Sam Shepard asked a friend could he be introduced to me on Wexford Street one night some years back.

He was tall, handsome, taciturn, cowboy-esque and he was impressed by my sartorial choices and wanted to know where I was from. It was 2am, and I just finished hosting my karaoke night in the Village – a long-running event which attracted stragglers on rollovers, musicians, artists and some mad punters around town.

Patrick Bergin, The Darkness, Kiefer Sutherland, Ryan Tubridy, GreenDay and Daft Punk frequented it over the years. I insisted he come the following week and he did.

You wouldn’t think a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Oscar-nominated actor, author, and self-styled “rock ‘n’roll Jesus with the cowboy mouth” described as a “poet laureate of America’s emotional badlands,” who died peacefully in his home in Kentucky from complications related to Lou Gehrig’s disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, would be into karaoke, but he visited a few times during that period in early 2007 when he directed his play, Kicking a Dead Horse, with Stephen Rea in the Abbey.

It was an amazing time in Dublin -the Tiger was yet to eat itself, people were spilling onto the street each night talking loudly and he was immersed in it. He asked me to come to his play. I never did. What an idiot.

One night I brought him to a party after my gig. There were musicians sitting in a badly lit dive above a shop playing bluegrass at 3am – that was when musicians could still afford to live in town. I left after a while. He stayed behind. Sitting silently, without pretension, happy in the dinge and fag smoke, absorbed in the music.

When I read Shepard’s ‘Buddy’ Patti Smith’s beautifully articulated tribute to her friend and collaborator in The New Yorker after he died, last Saturday, aged 73, I reminisced about that night. She described, how, during a trip to Dublin in 2012 to receive an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Trinity College, the pair joined musicians in his favourite local pub, the Cobblestone. “As we playfully staggered across the bridge, he recited reams of Beckett off the top of his head,” she recalled.

It encapsulated everything beautiful and poetic about a disappearing Ireland that a middle-American man, who transversed the bridge between the prairies and the big city, and who had Beckett’s original writings hanging on his kitchen walls, would hold in his heart.

Jimmy Fay, who directed Shepard’s plays True West twice (once for the Lyric in Belfast, and once for the Abbey), Ages of the Moon and Curse of the Starving Class, also in the Abbey in 2011, described him as “generous, razor sharp, experimental, strange, iconic, Elvis-like”, while also being “utterly engaging, interested in people, an outdoors man, a great poet who always had to write”.

He could fuse Samuel Beckett and Little Richard. He could combine pop rock with existentialist angst. He was able to make really odd, strange, beautiful plays. He gave a voice to the drama of the heartland. He was a horseman, who raised thoroughbreds, and loved jazz and read Proust. He was gloriously paradoxical.

“He was an extraordinary artist with a brain bigger than anyone else around him,” Fay said. “And I was in awe of him.”

Born Samuel Shepard Rogers VII in Fort Sheridan, Illinois on November 5, 1943, the eldest of three children, his early years were nomadic. His father was a bomber pilot in World War II, so the family moved from one military base to another, taking in South Dakota, Guam and Florida before settling in an avocado ranch in Duarte, California.

His father’s experiences of war deeply affected him and he became an alcoholic, which later inspired Shepard’s finest semi-autobiographical plays featuring dysfunctionality and darkness.

After abandoning an agricultural degree, he arrived in New York in 1963, a counter-cultural cauldron with “a cowboy mouth with matinee-idol looks”, a mid-western drawl and vague aspirations to act, make music and write. After securing a job as a busboy at the Village Gate nightclub, he became part of the underground avant-garde movement.

His first Gestalt pieces, Cowboy and The Rock Garden, caused confusion and some uproar when they were first shown Off Off Broadway. New York, it seemed, wasn’t ready for such a raw injection of profane language and psychodrama.

He won OBIEs (Off-Broadway Theater Awards) for Chicago, Icarus Mother and Red Cross. In 1967, he wrote his first full length play, La Turista, an allegory on the Vietnam war about an American couple in Mexico and won his fourth OBIE. He won 13 in total.

His early science-fiction play, The Unseen Hand (1969), influenced Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show, while Operation Sidewinder featured a computerised snake, hopi Indians, black panthers, and his rock group, the Holy Modal Rounders, for which he played drums.

John Lahr, a former theatre critic at The Nation and the Village Voice, described it in The New Yorker. “He didn’t conform to the manners of the day; he’d lived a life outside the classroom and conventional book-learning. He was rogue energy with rock riffs. In his coded stories of family abuse and addiction, he brought to the stage a different idiom and a druggy, surreal lens,” Lahr wrote.

In 1979 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his play Buried Child, which was part of a quintet of family tragedies including Curse of the Starving Glass, (1977), and True West (1980), which depicted the rivalry between two estranged brothers, later to be played by actors including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Gary Sinese and John Malkovich. Fool For Love (1983) and A Lie of the Mind, (1985) established him as one of the visionaries of US theatre. By the age of 40, he had become the second most widely performed US playwright after Tennessee Williams.

When Curse of the Starving Class was performed in The Abbey theatre, in 2011, Shepard became the Abbey’s most frequently staged playwright. Joe Hanley, who played the role of the explosive alcoholic father Weston in the semi-autobiographical play, said of Shepard: “He was the last of the great American writers. A theatrical and gifted man without ego.”

At the time his playwriting was beginning to peak, with predictable oddity he became a romantic movie lead in movies such as Baby Boom. “The shift was so unexpected that many of his fans in the theatre thought it had to be somebody else when his name appeared with Richard Gere and Brooke Adams in Days of Heaven, but his on-screen magnetism was powerful enough to match, if not overpower Gere’s own,” film critic Gene Seymour said.

In 1983, Shepard was nominated for an academy award for Best Supporting Actor as his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff. He also starred in Steel Magnolias, Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, Frances with his partner-to-be Jessica Lange, The Notebook, Black Hawk Down, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and The Pelican Brief, with Julia Roberts amongst others. Recently, he starred as in Bloodline on Netflix.

Despite his many acting credentials, Shepard humbly insisted that his performances were ‘hit and miss’.

In February of this year, his book, The One Inside – a collection of short stories – was hailed by actor Ed Harris. “The most intimate thing he wrote. Read that and it’s like you’re holding the essence of Sam in your hands,” he said in an obituary in the Guardian. “Exploring his characters is like a bottomless pit. We just did 125 performances of Buried Child in London and we’re still discovering things about these people at the end of the run.”

Shepard was constantly working on something. Once one thing finished, he would move onto the next, be it a poem or a screenplay, but he also had a great impulse to hit the open road, as his ex-lover Patti Smith wrote in her evocative piece: “Sam liked being on the move. He’d throw a fishing rod or an old acoustic guitar in the back seat of his truck, maybe take a dog, but for sure a notebook, and a pen, and a pile of books.”

Unlike modern stars, who court attention, Shepard was very private. He didn’t like flying or the internet, used a typewriter and liked to roam the streets freely.

He married actress O-Lan Jones with whom he had a son, Jesse Mojo Shepard, in 1969. He met Jessica Lange while making the movie Frances in 1982. They were together for almost 30 years until 2009. They had two children, Hannah Jane and Samuel Walker. All three of his children were with him when he passed away.

He was cowboy, a badass and an enigma, who, according to Lange, wasn’t easy going. “But no man I’ve ever met compares to Sam in terms of maleness,” she said. She was probably wrong though.

She probably meant to say that no one ever compares to Sam

IMDB entry:

As the eldest son of a US Army officer (and WWII bomber pilot), Sam Shepard spent his early childhood moving from base to base around the US until finally settling in Duarte, California. While at high school he began acting and writing and worked as a ranch hand in Chino. He graduated high school in 1961 and then spent a year studying agriculture at Mount San Antonio Junior College, intending to become a vet.

In 1962, though, a touring theater company, the Bishop’s Company Repertory Players, visited the town and he joined up and left home to tour with them. He spent nearly two years with the company and eventually settled in New York where he began writing plays, first performing with an obscure off-off-Broadway group but eventually gaining recognition for his writing and winning prestigious OBIE awards (Off-Broadway ) three years running.

He flirted with the world of rock, playing drums for the Holy Modal Rounders, then moved to London in 1971 where he continued writing.

Back in the US by 1974, he became playwright in residence at San Francisco’s Magic Theater and continued to work as an increasingly well respected playwright throughout the 1970s and into the ’80s.

Throughout this time he had been dabbling with Hollywood having, most notably in the early days, worked as one of the writers on _”Zabriski Point” (1970)_, but it was his role as Chuck Yeager in 1983’s The Right Stuff (1983) that brought him fully to the attention of the wider, non-theater audience.

Since then he has continued to write, act and direct, both on screen and in the theater.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous

Let’s Face It, poster, US poster, Betty Hutton, Bob Hope, 1943. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Betty Hutton’s “Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan:

Among the frenetic, ear-splitting female vocalists of the 1940s, the most popular was the blonde bombshell Betty Hutton, who has died aged 86. She worked almost exclusively at Paramount, for whom she knocked herself out in explosive numbers in such musicals as The Fleet’s In (1942) and The Stork Club (1945). She also remained very much herself as Texas Guinan, a 1920s nightclub hostess in Incendiary Blonde (1945); silent screen queen Pearl White in The Perils of Pauline (1947) and vaudeville star Blossom Seely in Somebody Loves Me (1952), all rags-to-riches Technicolor biopics. But her greatest triumph came in MGM’s Annie Get Your Gun (1950), also based on a real person, Annie Oakley.

Hutton’s life could be the subject of one of her Hollywood biopics, but with more pathos than most. She was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, the daughter of a railway worker, Lum Thornburg, who abandoned his wife and daughters (four-year-old Marion and two-year-old Betty) in 1923. In order to support them, their mother opened a speakeasy in their home, where Betty sang for the customers. The police kept the family on the move, and eventually they ended up destitute in Detroit. There, young Betty sang in bars for a few dollars to keep her mother in drink.

At 13, she started singing with big bands, her big break coming with Vincent Lopez and his Orchestra. On stage, she had changed her name from Elizabeth Thornburg to Betty Darling, but soon took on the name of Hutton, as did her sister, who went on to sing with Glenn Miller. In 1939, Variety encapsulated Betty’s persona thus: “Miss Hutton is a petite and somewhat unusual type who puts great poundage into her singing, screwing her face up into poses at times that are very different and effective. Even if vocally she’s far from the doors of the Met, [she] employs slightly wild, rowdy techniques that really sell her songs.”

The following year Hutton landed a role in the Broadway revue Two for the Show, and was introduced to producer Buddy DeSylva, who signed her for the part of the dizzy maid Florrie in his musical Panama Hattie, in which she made a hit. When DeSylva took over the production reins at Paramount studios in late 1941, he got her a contract and a leading role in The Fleet’s In. Co-starred with her antithesis, Dorothy Lamour – dark, sultry and languorous – Hutton sang the two best numbers in the movie, Build a Better Mousetrap and Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry.

In 1942, she became one of the first artists to sign with the newly formed Capitol Records. Over the years, she recorded several hits for the label, but soon became unhappy with the company because every song they gave her was from one of her films. What she wanted was a broader range of tunes, including more romantic numbers.

In her movies, Hutton was mostly called upon to throw herself about in numbers like Murder He Says (in Happy Go Lucky, 1943). That same year, however, she had one of her few straight roles, in Preston Sturges’ The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek as a woman who cannot recall the father of her sextuplets. In this sharp satire on American motherhood and small-town values, she turned herself, according to the Herald Tribune, from “a bumptious hoyden into a sweet and amusing comic actress”.

Hutton was teamed up again with Lamour in And the Angels Sing (1944), and played two sisters after Bing Crosby in Here Come the Waves (1944). She continued to make similar toned musicals for Paramount throughout the 1940s, until MGM borrowed her for Annie Get Your Gun after Judy Garland was suspended for unprofessional behaviour. “Frankly, I knew a lot of people didn’t want me to play Annie,” Hutton remarked, knowing she had gained a reputation for being too egotistic. Her co-star Howard Keel admitted finding her too impetuous and demanding, but Betty gave one of her best ever screen performances as the sharp-shooting girl who realised she “can’t get a man with a gun”.

She returned to Paramount with Let’s Dance (1950), opposite Fred Astaire. Her rough comedy clashed with Astaire’s smooth sophistication, but Fred said, “Working with Betty Hutton keeps anybody moving. She’s so talented and conscientious that if you don’t watch yourself you feel you’re standing still and letting her do all the work.” Hutton then played the trapeze artist in Cecil B DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), torn between fellow artiste Cornel Wilde and circus manager Charlton Heston.

She left Paramount shortly afterwards, when the studio refused her demand that her second husband, choreographer Charles O’Curran, direct all her movies. She made only one more film, Spring Reunion (1957), in which she was more subdued than her usual raucous self.

In 1967, Hutton was signed to star in Red Tomahawk, a low-budget Paramount western with her Annie Get Your Gun screen partner, Keel. But soon after starting work, she was fired and replaced by Joan Caulfield. After that, her emotional state began to deteriorate; her fourth marriage ended, and her mother died.

In June 1967, in spite of having made enormous salaries in the past, Hutton declared bankruptcy, listing debts of $150,000. There followed years of drug abuse and alcoholism. A falling out with her children and a suicide attempt eventually resulted in a nervous breakdown. In an interview at the time, she said: “I’m so mixed-up and blue. I just can’t take any more setbacks … I don’t even have many friends any more because I backed away from them. I think things are going to go right for me again. I’m not old. I’m old enough, but I photograph young, thank God, and I still get fan mail. I don’t know where it’s all going to lead.”

It led to Hutton befriending Father Peter Maguire, a priest at St Anthony’s parish in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. With his help, she regained her strength and began working as a rectory cook and housekeeper, leaving only once in five years to undergo treatment in a mental hospital. She returned to the rectory in 1975, when Maguire helped her enrol in Salve Regina University, Rhode Island, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1986 and, two years later, an MA. In the 1980s, she worked as a hostess at a Connecticut sports centre, where she still displayed remnants of the bouncy personality that had cheered up filmgoers in dark times. The four times married and divorced Hutton, who returned to California after Maguire’s death in 1996, is survived by three daughters.

· Betty June Hutton (Thornburg), actor, born February 26 1921; died March 11 2007

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

Louis Hayward

TCM Overview:

Suavely handsome, often tongue-in-cheek leading man of the 1930s and 40s who began his career with a provincial theater company in England. Hayward came to Hollywood in the mid-30s and quickly established a second-rank level of stardom which lasted until the mid-50s. He more than held his own in a wide variety of films; his light touch with cynical, witty banter suited him well in drawing room comedies and romantic dramas (“The Flame Within” 1935, “The Rage of Paris” 1938, “Dance Girl Dance” 1940), but he regularly appeared in detective films and adventures as well. Often cast as somewhat roguish playboys, Hayward played the leading role in Rene Clair’s sterling adaptation of Agatha Christie’s mystery “And Then There Were None” (1945) and was fine in dual roles James Whale’s stylish version of “The Man in the Iron Mask” (1939).

The latter film prefigured the later contours of Hayward’s film career, as his athletic, romantic dash led him to be cast in many medium-budgeted swashbucklers, four of which (including “Fortunes of Captain Blood” 1950 and “The Lady in the Iron Mask” 1952, recalling his earlier triumph) teamed him with Patricia Medina. Hayward was married for a time to Ida Lupino, with whom he co-starred in the Gothic melodrama “Ladies in Retirement” (1941).

Los Angeles Times obituary in 1985:

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Louis Hayward, whose debonair charm and athletic good looks made him one of Hollywood’s most successful swashbuckling heroes of the 1930s and ‘40s, died Thursday at Desert Hospital in Palm Springs.

He was 75 and had spent the last year of his life in a battle against cancer, which he attributed to having smoked three packs of cigarettes a day for more than half a century.

A lifelong performer (“I did a Charlie Chaplin imitation for my mother when I was 6 and never really got over it,” he told friends), Hayward scored his first major screen success with the 1939 film, “The Man in the Iron Mask,” and spent the next decade starring in such adventure films as “The Son of Monte Cristo,” “The Saint in New York,” “The Black Arrow” and “Fortunes of Captain Blood.”

“I also did rather creditable acting jobs as the rotten seed in ‘My Son, My Son,’ and the villainous charmer in ‘Ladies in Retirement,’ ” he said ruefully. “But nobody really cared. They just handed me another sword and doublet and said ‘Smile!’ ”

Born March 19, 1909, in Johannesburg, South Africa, a few weeks after his mining engineer father was killed in an accident, Hayward was taken first to England and then to France, where he attended a number of schools under his real name, Seafield Grant.

He received early training in legitimate theater, appeared for a time with a touring company playing the provinces in England and then took over a small nightclub in London.

“Which is where my career really began,” he said. “Noel Coward came in one night; I managed to talk to him for a time and wound up wriggling into a small part in a West End company doing ‘Dracula.’ ”

He followed with roles in “The Vinegar Tree,” “Another Language” and “Conversation Piece” before going to New York, where a chance acquaintance with Alfred Lunt led to a role in the Broadway play, “Point Valaine,” for which he won the 1934 New York Critics Award.

His first Hollywood efforts in “The Flame Within” and “A Feather in Her Hat” were moderately successful, moderately well-received and almost instantly forgotten.

But then came the 1936 role of Denis Moore in “Anthony Adverse,” and studio officials began talking about stardom.

The dual role of Louis XIV and Philippe in “The Man in the Iron Mask” established Hayward as a swashbuckler and was followed by major roles in “And Then There Were None,” “The Duke of West Point” and similar vehicles.

Hayward, who had become a naturalized U.S. citizen the day before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, served three years in the Marine Corps during World War II, winning the Bronze Star for filming the battle of Tarawa under fire.

Formed Own Company

Returning to films after the war, he formed his own film company and was one of the first stars to demand and get a percentage of the profits from his pictures, which included “Repeat Performance,” “The Son of Dr. Jekyll,” “Lady in the Iron Mask,” “The Saint’s Girl Friday,” “Duffy of San Quentin” and “The Lone Wolf,” which he subsequently turned into a television series, playing the starring role in 78 episodes in the 1960s.

Hayward left Hollywood in the late 1950s to appear in a British television series, “The Pursuers,” returning for television appearances in “Studio One” and “Climax” anthology shows and returning to the stage as King Arthur, opposite Kathryn Grayson, in a Los Angeles Civic Light Opera production of “Camelot” in 1963.

His first two marriages, to actress Ida Lupino and to socialite Margaret Morrow, ended in divorce.

Hayward, who had lived in Palm Springs for the last 15 years, is survived by his wife, June, and a son, Dana. At his request, a family spokesman said, no funeral was planned.

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The “Guardian” obituary from 2003:

Vera Zorina, who has died aged 86, began her career as a dancer, but branched out into many forms of musical theatre.

Born Eva Brigitta Hartwig, in Berlin, she made her debut at the age of 14 as the First Fairy in Max Reinhardt’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1930, and worked for him again the following year in Offenbach’s Tales Of Hoffmann. She then moved to London, where she studied with Marie Rambert and Nicholas Legat.

In 1933, Anton Dolin spotted her and cast her opposite him in Ballerina, a play with ballet interludes. Her name was changed to Vera Zorina (in private she remained Brigitta) when she was invited to join Colonel de Basil’s Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo in 1934.

Léonide Massine cast her in leading roles in several of his ballets, including La Boutique Fantasque, Le Beau Danube and Les Presages. She also danced in Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Noces, which de Basil briefly revived. Although Massine was married at the time to another dancer, Evgenia Delarova, Zorina became his lover, a fact of which she made no secret in her autobiography Zorina (1986).

In 1936, she left de Basil to star in the London production of the Rodgers and Hart musical, On Your Toes. A hit in New York, where it starred George Balanchine’s first wife, Tamara Geva, and Ray Bolger, the show was an artistic if not a commercial success in London. She also appeared in London in Balanchine’s Slaughter On Tenth Avenue, in which the hoofer hero (Jack Whiting) danced a pas de deux with the dead striptease dancer (Zorina).

Balanchine did not go to London to supervise his choreography, but Zorina was soon to work with him when Samuel Goldwyn brought her to Hollywood to appear in his film The Goldwyn Follies, for which Balanchine had been engaged to stage the ballets. The most notable was the Water Nymph ballet, in which Zorina rose from a pool in a gold lamé tunic.

This began a long professional and personal association with Balanchine. Soon after finishing the movie in 1938, Zorina was featured on Broadway in another Rodgers and Hart musical, I Married An Angel, with ballets by the choreographer. By the time The Goldwyn Follies was released, she and Balanchine were married. The following year she appeared in the film version of On Your Toes. On Broadway in 1940, she starred in the Irving Berlin musical Lousiana Purchase, again with ballets by Balanchine. (The film version of 1941 was essentially a record of the stage show and included his Mardi Gras ballet, without screen credit.)

Zorina also had aspirations as a dramatic actress but, cast opposite Gary Cooper in the film of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls, she was replaced after a few days’ filming by Ingrid Bergman. This put paid to Zorina’s ambitions and effectively to her film career.

She made a brief return to ballet in 1943, as a guest artist with (American) Ballet Theatre, where Balanchine cast her as Terpsichore in a revival of his Apollo. But it seemed that the ballet public was not prepared to accept her as a serious ballerina, and she returned to the Broadway stage in 1944 in another Balanchine musical, Dream With Music. When she played Ariel in The Tempest the following year, he arranged her movements, though without credit.

B y this time their association was only professional, and in 1946 they were divorced. Zorina then married Goddard Lieberson, later president of Columbia (CBS) Records. But in 1954 there was yet another production of On Your Toes on Broadway, this time under Balanchine’s personal supervision, and Zorina starred again as the temperamental Russian ballerina, 14 years after playing the part in the West End.

Always a glamorous, cultivated woman, Zorina was entirely at home in the New York intellectual and artistic circles in which both her husbands moved. In later years, she enjoyed considerable success as a narrator in such works as Arthur Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc Au Bûcher and Claude Debussy’s Le Martyre De Saint-Sebastien. She worked again with Balanchine when she recited André Gide’s text for Perséphone in the New York City Ballet’s 1982 Stravinsky Festival.

Zorina also directed operas for the Santa Fe Opera, New York City Opera and the Norwegian Opera.

She is survived by her third husband, Paul Wolfe, a harpsichordist, and her son Peter Lieberson, the com poser. Another son by her marriage to Goddard Lieberson predeceased her.

· Vera Zorina (Eva Brigitta Hartwig), dancer, born January 2 1917; died April 9 2003

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Practically born with ballet slippers on, the dark, lithe and exotic Vera Zorina had memorable careers with the Ballet Russe and, to a lesser degree, Hollywood. Born in Berlin, her father Fritz was German and mother Billie Hartwig Norwegian. She took to ballet at age 2 (she used to take them to bed with her) and by age 4 was performing. She received her education at the Lyceum for Girls in Berlin but was trained in dance by Olga Preobrajenska and Nicholas Legat, the latter teaching Anna Pavlova and Nijinsky at one time.

The dancing prodigy was presented to Max Reinhardt at age 12 and he in turn cast her in his “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1929) and “Tales of Hoffman” (1931). A performance at London’s Gaiety Theatre led to her entrance into the company of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1933. She was encouraged to change her stage name to something Russian and exotic in style and she chose “Vera Zorina” for its authenticity and simplicity from a long list of names. She also learned Russian in the process to feel closer to her dancing compatriots. She stayed with the renowned ballet company for three years appearing everywhere from Covent Garden in London to the Metropolitan Opersa House in New York.

Again, timing proved to be on Vera’s side when she won a lead role in the London company of “On Your Toes” in 1937 and was spotted by movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn, who signed her to a movie contract. The build-up was considerable and she made her official debut with the musical The Goldwyn Follies (1938). That same year she increased her visibility ten-fold by marrying noted choreographer/director George Balanchine. She followed her film debut successfully recreating her role in the movie version of On Your Toes (1939) and then played the role of a faux countess in the comedy crime caper I Was an Adventuress (1940). She impressed on Broadway with “I Married an Angel” and even more so in the 1940 musical “Louisiana Purchase” before returning to Hollywood once again to perform in the movie version of Louisiana Purchase (1941) opposite Bob Hope. She was cast as Maria in what could have been the beginning of a dramatic career in the Oscar-winning For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), but was abruptly replaced after only two weeks of shooting by Ingrid Bergman, an action that proved detrimental to her movie career. When the sudden surge of film offers began to wane after the releases of Follow the Boys (1944) with George Raft and Lover Come Back (1946) co-starring Lucille Balland George Brent, she bade Hollywood a prompt goodbye.

Following her divorce from Ballanchine in 1946, she married Goddard Lieberson, president of Columiba Records and a social whirlwind ensued. The prominent couple went on to have two sons, Peter and Jonathan. In later years her lilting accent was used for narrations (in several different languages, including English, German and French) on several records and in tandem with numerous classical symphony orchestras and opera houses. She also directed a production of “Herod” for Norwegian TV. Vera was active with the Lincoln Center as an adviser and director and for several seasons directed operas at the Santa Fe Opera Company in New Mexico. She died in Santa Fe of a cerebral hemorrhage in 2003, predeceased by her second husband and son Jonathan.

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

Glenn Anders

IMDB entry:

Glenn Anders was born September 1, 1889 in Los Angeles, California. He attended the Wallace dramatic school in California and began a career as a performer in vaudeville on the Orpheum circuit. He arrived in New York in 1919 and attended Columbia University from 1919 until 1921. He made his Broadway debut in 1919 in a play entitled Just Around the Corner. Mr. Anders had a very long and distinguished career on Broadway and during his career appeared in three Pulitzer Prize winning plays. Those plays were: Hell Bent for Heaven (1924) written by Hatcher Hughes; They Knew What They Wanted (1924) written by Sidney Howard and Strange Interlude (1928) written by Eugene O’Neill. Most of his career was spent on stage but he also had some noteworthy film appearances. He made approximately eight movies from 1925 to 1951. His most memorable film role was that of Grisby the lawyer in Lady from Shanghai, The (1948) starring Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. After retiring from the stage he resided for several years in Mexico. He returned to the United States to reside at the Actor’s Fund Home in Englewood, New Jersey. He resided at the Actor’s Fund Home until his death in 1981 at the age of 92.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gregory Riley

Ann B. Davis

“The Guardian” obituary:

Comic actor Ann B Davis, who played the devoted housekeeper Alice on the television sitcom The Brady Bunch and won two Emmy awards as the forever-single secretary Schultzy on The Bob Cummings Show, died on Sunday, aged 88. Her agent Robert Malcolm told NBC that she fell in the bathroom and hit her head, and died around 8.30 on Sunday morning at a hospital in San Antonio, Texas. Bexar County, Texas, medical examiner’s investigator Sara Horne says no cause of death is available and that an autopsy is planned Monday. Bishop Bill Frey, a longtime friend of Davis, says she suffered a fall Saturday at her San Antonio home and never recovered.

Davis’ character helped keep a large, blended family functioning on The Brady Bunch by offering advice and wisecracks to busy parents and frantic kids, or simply by making meatloaf for eight. She was known for her light blue housekeeper’s uniform with a white apron. Behind the scenes, Davis provided a model of acting professionalism to the show’s six child actors, who on occasion were driven more by hormones and mischief than reason. The Brady Bunch was among the first US television shows to focus on a non-traditional family. Robert Reed’s character, architect Mike Brady, was a widowed father of three boys. Florence Henderson’s character Carol Brady was a single mother – the show was vague as to why – who had three daughters. They get married in the first episode in September 1969 The series made its debut amid cultural tumult in the United States but remained invariably cheery and avoided controversy during its five seasons on the ABC network. It ran during a TV era populated by caustic sitcoms like All in the Family, Maude and Sanford and Son.

In 1994, Davis wrote of the wholesome The Brady Bunch: “Wouldn’t we all love to have belonged to a perfect family, with brothers and sisters to lean on and where every problem is solved in 23-1/2 minutes?” After the cancellation of the original series in 1974, she appeared on later incarnations of the show, including The Brady Bunch Variety Hour (1976-1977), The Brady Brides (1981), A Very Brady Christmas (1988) and The Bradys (1990). She also made a cameo appearance in The Brady Bunch Movie, a successful 1995 big-screen spoof of the series. She wrote Alice’s Brady Bunch Cookbook in 1994. Davis already was a well-known TV actor when she landed the Brady Bunch role of Alice Nelson. She thrived as Charmaine ‘Schultzy’ Schultz on The Bob Cummings Show, which ran from 1955 to 1959. Her character was a single secretary who had a crush on her boss – a bachelor photographer played by Cummings. She won Emmy awards for her role in 1958 and 1959 and was also nominated in 1956 and 1957. Davis received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 following the success of the series.

She was born in 1926 in Schenectady, New York, with a twin sister named Harriet. In the 1970s, she stepped away from show business to join a religious community, occasionally returning for roles in the various Brady Bunch projects. She never married.

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

Esther Williams was one of the major MGM movie stars of the 1940’s and 50’s mainly associated with her swimming musicals.

Her Guardian obituary by Ronald Bergan :

Esther Williams, “Hollywood’s Mermaid”, who has died aged 91, swam her way through more than a dozen splashy MGM musicals in the 1940s and early 50s. While smiling at the camera, she was able to do a combination of crawl, breast and backstroke, and was forever blowing bubbles under water, seemingly having an inexhaustible supply of air.

Like the starlets Lana Turner, Kathryn Grayson and Donna Reed before her, she started out for MGM in a Hardy Family picture, Andy Hardy’s Double Life (1942) – though one that allowed her to swim with Mickey Rooney. After being billed 19th in A Guy Named Joe (1943), she shot to stardom in her third film, Bathing Beauty (1944).

It started out as an average Red Skelton vehicle, first called Mr Co-Ed, then Sing and Swim, but Esther’s superb figure and pretty features were heightened by Technicolor to such an extent that her part was built up and the title changed. A special 90-foot square, 20-foot deep pool was built at Stage 30 on the MGM lot, complete with hydraulic lifts, hidden air hoses and special camera cranes for overhead shots.

“No one had ever done a swimming movie before,” she explained, “so we just made it up as we went along. I ad-libbed all my own underwater movements.” Williams played a swimming instructor at a women’s college and the picture ended with a spectacular water-ballet set to the Blue Danube waltz, with alternate jets of water and flame bursting from the pool. Variety magazine said that William was “pulled to stardom by her swimsuit straps”.

The movie was a bigger hit than anyone had anticipated, and MGM spent the following decade hiring writers to invent scripts which allowed Esther to get wet. She would later remark: “My pictures were put together out of scraps they found in the producer’s wastebasket. All they ever did for me at MGM was to change my leading men and the water in the pool.” Actually her films were bubbly entertainments and the aquaballets (the most spectacular being staged by Busby Berkeley) were often breathtaking in their scope.

On An Island With You (1948) and Pagan Love Song (1950) were both set on South Sea islands, giving Williams ample opportunity to strip down to her stylish swim suits and take the plunge. She was a bathing suit designer in Neptune’s Daughter (1949), keen to demonstrate her creations herself, and is the last woman to give into the blandishments of a handsome polo player (Ricardo Montalban) who sings to her, Baby, It’s Cold Outside.

Most of the time in Dangerous When Wet (1953), co-starring her future husband Fernando Lamas, was taken up by her preparations to swim the English Channel. The best moment is a dream sequence in which Williams anticipates a crossing with the cartoon characters Tom and Jerry, while trying to avoid an octopus in a beret who gropes her with six extra hands.

However, she did not give in to groping very easily on screen: “My movies made it clear it’s all right to be strong and feminine at the same time,” she claimed.

In Fiesta (1947), Williams struck a blow for senoritas’ lib by proving herself the equal of any male matador, while in Take Me Out To The Ball Game (in Britain, Everyone’s Cheering, 1949), she played the owner-manager of a baseball team, whose initial interest in Gene Kelly lies in his ability to play ball. Inevitably, she thaws (after a swim) and falls for his rather blatant charms.

Williams portrayed Annette Kellerman, the Australian swimming champion who introduced the world to the one-piece bathing suit – as opposed to a combination of dress and pantaloons – in Million Dollar Mermaid (1952). The high spot of the film was Berkeley’s elaborately staged aquatic production number in which Esther rises like Aphrodite from the water surrounded by nymphs, and dives from a tremendous height into the centre of a kaleidoscopic pattern formed by swimmers. Although Williams did all her own swimming, she often had a stand-in for the more dangerous stunts.

She made an even bigger splash in the water-skiing ballet that ends Easy To Love (1953), one of Berkeley’s last and most spectacular sequences. Filmed on location at Cypress Gardens, Florida, it has over 30 waterskiers towed in arrowhead formation with Williams at the tip. They jump and slalom around the beautiful amphibian before she seizes a trapeze dangled from a helicopter, rises to the height of 500 feet, and dives into the pleasure-garden lagoon.

After the expensive belly-flop of Jupiter’s Darling (1955), a Roman romp in which Esther as Amytis prevents Hannibal (Howard Keel) from sacking Rome, MGM, for whom she had grossed over $80m, sacked her without even a goodbye or a thank you.

Born in Los Angeles, Esther was the fifth and last child of a pyschologist mother, Bula, and a signwriter father, Lou. She grew up swimming in local pools and surfing. By 16, she was a member of the Los Angeles Athletic Club swimming team and had won three national championships in both the breaststroke and freestyle. A year later, she was on the 1940 US Olympic team headed for Tokyo when the second world war intervened, cancelling the Games along with her hopes for international fame.

However, the showman Billy Rose noticed a photo of her, and starred her as Aquabelle opposite the Olympian and screen Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller as Aquadonis in his San Francisco Aquacade review. MGM scouts saw her in the show, and signed her to a contract.

Once her time at MGM had come to a close, the former prima ballerina of the water then tried her hand at dramatic roles at Universal, including The Unguarded Moment (1956) as a schoolteacher sexually attacked by one of her pupils. Her final movie appearance came in Fuente Magica (The Magic Fountain, 1963) directed by Lamas, whom she married in 1969.

Her first marriage, in 1940, had been to Leonard Kovner, and her second, in 1945, to the radio singer Ben Gage. Both ended in divorce. She and Gage had three children, whom she taught to swim soon after birth.

In September 1976, she sued MGM for $1m, claiming they had no legal right to utilise sequences from her films in That’s Entertainment (1974) without consulting her about it or offering to share profits. The matter was settled out of court.

Lamas died in 1982, and six years later Williams married a professor of French literature, Edward Bell. Together they made profitable businesses of Esther Williams Swimming Pools and the Esther Williams Collection, one of America’s most recognised swimwear brands.

Though denied an Olympic appearance herself, Williams helped to inspire the development of synchronised swimming, an Oympic discipline since 1984. She was at those Games, in Los Angeles, to commentate on the event for television. Her rather fanciful autobiography, inevitably titled The Million Dollar Mermaid, appeared in 1999.

She is survived by Edward, a daughter, Susan, and a son, Benjamin.

• Esther Jane Williams, swimmer and actor, born 8 August 1921; died 6 June 2013

Her Guardian obituary can be accessed on-line here.

Elizabeth Franz

IMDB entry:

Elizabeth Franz was born on June 18, 1941 in Akron, Ohio, USA as Elizabeth Frankovich. She is an actress, known for Another World (1964), Christmas with the Kranks (2004) andSabrina (1995). She was previously married to Edward Binns.

Won Broadway’s 1999 Tony Award as Best Actress (Featured Role – Play) for a revival ofArthur Miller‘s “Death of a Salesman.” Was also nominated two other times in the same category: in 1983 for “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and in 2002 for a revival of “Morning’s at Seven.”Plaintive, reedy-framed, award-winning stage actress (“Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You” – Obie, 1980) who took her towering, Tony-winning portrayal of Linda Loman in “Death of a Salesman” to TV in 2000 and earned an Emmy nomination. Raised in Akron, Ohio, she saw the Loretta Young film The Bishop’s Wife (1947) when she was young and decided then to become an actress. Worked as a secretary after graduating from high school in order to earn enough money to enroll in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in NYC. Husband Edward Binns was 25 years her senior. They married in 1983. He died seven years later. She was awarded the 1999 Joseph Jefferson Award for Actress in a Supporting Role in a Play for “Death of a Salesman” at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. National Theatre, London, making her UK stage debut in a major revival of “Buried Child” by Sam Shepard. [September 2004] On Broadway in “Mornings at Seven”

Trini Lopez

IMDB entry:

Trini Lopez is a American singer and actor who had 16 Top 40 songs on the charts from 1963 through 1968. He was born Trinidad López III in the Little Mexico neighborhood Dallas, Texas on May 15, 1937. He started performing with his own band when he was 15 years old and caught the eye of rock and roll legend Buddy Holly, who recommended him to a music producer who signed Lopez and his band, “The Big Beats”, to Columbia Records.

Lopez eventually quit “The Big Beats” to go solo, but none of the singles he cut made the charts. He moved to Los Angeles to audition as a vocalist for Holly’s old band “The Crickets”, but didn’t get the job. Performing in night clubs, he was discovered by Frank Sinatra, who signed Lopez to his label, Reprise Records.

His cover of “If I Had a Hammer” from his first album, which was released in 1963, made it to #3 on the charts, eventually earning a gold disc with sales exceeding one million copies. His other big hits were “Lemon Tree” and “I’m Comin’ Home, Cindy”, both of which made it to #2 on the Easy Listening chart, and “Michael”, “Gonna Get Along Without Ya Now” and “The Bramble Bush”, which made it to $7, #6 and #4, respectively.

Trini Lopez was inducted into the International Latin Music Hall of Fame in 2003.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Sam Shepard

Obituary: Sam Shepard

Playwright, actor, writer, drummer and haunter of Dublin late at night

Betty Hutton

Louis Hayward

Los Angeles Times obituary in 1985:

Vera Zorina

Glenn Anders

Ann B. Davis

Esther Williams

Elizabeth Franz

Trini Lopez

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