Hollywood Actors

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Zachary Scott

Handsome, slender, often mustachioed actor, who, after making his mark on the stage, made an auspicious film debut in the title role of “The Mask of Dimitrios” in 1944. Scott contributed a memorable turn as a sharecropper in Jean Renoir’s finest American work, “The Southerner” (1945), and went on to play a variety of unctuous cads and scoundrels (with an occasional sympathetic variation) through the 1950s and early 60s. One of his best remembered performances was as the seductive, snaky socialite who marries the ultimate upwardly mobile mom, “Mildred Pierce” (1945). He was married to actress Ruth Ford.   Sadly Zachary Scott passed away aged 51 in 1965.

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Miiko Taka

Miiko Taka (高美以子, Taka Miiko) (born Miiko Shikata  July 24, 1925 – January 2023) was an American actress. She is best known for co-starring with Marlon Brandoas Hana-ogi in the 1957 movie Sayonara. She also worked with James Garner, Bob Hope, Cary Grant, and Toshirō Mifune (whom she also worked alongside of in the 1980 television miniseries, Shõgun). 

Taka was born in Seattle, Washington. She grew up in Los Angeles, California.  Taka married Japanese-American actor Dale Ishimoto in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1944, and they had one son, Greg Shikata, who works in the film industry, and one daughter. They divorced in 1958.  Taka’s death, at the age of 97, was announced by her grandson on January 4, 2023.
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Yoko Tani

YOKO TANI (WIKIPEDIA)

 Diminutive, graceful, porcelain pretty Japanese actress Yoko Tani was born and raised in France and was making a living as a Parisienne dancer when opportunities for film came her way in the mid-1950s. 

Appearing in a number of minor Eurasian parts in such French films as Women Without Shame (1954) [Nights of Shame], Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1954) [Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves], and Mannequins of Paris (1956) [Mannequins of Paris], she was also featured in a couple of Japanese productions before branching out internationally.

The cameras displayed a lovely, quiet beauty in the 1950s and she was absolutely beguiling opposite Dirk Bogarde in the “Sayonara”-like WW2 film The Wind Cannot Read(1958) with Bogarde portraying a British POW in a Japanese camp who flees in order to locate his ill wife [Ms. Tani] who initially was his language teacher.

She also was quite appealing in another film that dealt with turbulent ethnic themes. The Italian/French/British co-production of The Savage Innocents (1960) co-starred Tani as the wife of Eskimo Anthony Quinn in a culture clash between Eskimos and Canadians that leads to murder. While fetching to the eye, the actress was rather modest in talent and was soon relegated to “B” and “C” level movies. 

In the 1960s she became a customary player of meek princess-in-distress types in such costumed adventures as Marco Polo(1962), Maciste at the Court of the Great Khan (1961) [Maciste at the Court of the Great Khan] and Tartar Invasion (1961) [The Tartar Invasion], which co-starred her one-time husband, French actor Roland Lesaffre.

She was under-utilized in Hollywood as well in her few attempts. Minor supporting roles in My Geisha (1962) and Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed? (1963) left her deep in the shadows of leading ladies Shirley MacLaine and Elizabeth Montgomery, respectively. 

Left to playing a dribbling of femme leads in such lowgrade spy intrigue and sci-fi, she was little seen after the late 1960s. W

In later years she enjoyed painting and was devoted to her religion and her dog that she named “Toto”. Yoko Tani died in her native Paris of cancer at the age of 67.

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

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Jennifer Jones

The guardian obituary in 2009

On the day of her 25th birthday, 2 March 1944, a fresh-faced, hitherto unknown performer stepped on to the stage of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, in Los Angeles, to receive her best actress Oscar for her performance in the title role of The Song of Bernadette. It was officially the debut of Jennifer Jones, who has died aged 90. She had appeared four years earlier under her real name of Phyllis Isley, but only in a Dick Tracy serial and a B-western. (Actually, she had been born Phylis, but had added an “l”.)

Ingrid Bergman, nominated for her performance in For Whom the Bell Tolls, said of The Song of Bernadette: “I cried all the way through, because Jennifer was so moving and because I realised I had lost the award.” Jones, who had been discovered by the producer David O Selznick four years previously, had been given no publicity build-up, had been prevented from granting interviews and also, because of the nature of the role, kept out of the gossip columns. As a result, her presence on screen as the French girl who, in 1858, saw a vision of the Virgin Mary and discovered a healing spring at Lourdes, came as a refreshing surprise. “While she received extensive training, I would not let her come to Hollywood until she was ready,” explained Selznick. “I refused to launch her until exactly the right role came along

After a six-month search, 20th Century Fox had narrowed the list of young women to play Bernadette down to six. They were each asked by the director Henry King to imagine that the stick he was holding was a vision. “Only Jennifer saw a vision,” King later remarked. Wearing a simple peasant’s dress and a minimum of makeup, she gave a pleasantly natural performance, credibly maturing from the age of 14 to the nun and eventual saint. It might have helped that the Oklahoma-born Jones had attended a Catholic school as a child. Her father owned a few theatres and ran a vaudeville tent show, with which the young Phylis toured and performed occasionally. While attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, she met another aspiring actor, Robert Walker. They married in 1939 and headed for Hollywood.

In 1941, when she was auditioning at Fox for the title role in Claudia (given to Dorothy McGuire), Selznick saw her, put her under contract, changed her name and groomed her rigorously for stardom. From then on, much of Selznick’s activity as a producer was devoted to providing her with suitable roles.

After The Song of Bernadette, he cast her opposite her husband as the girl in love with a young soldier in Since You Went Away (1944), the weepiest, longest and biggest hit about the home front during the second world war. Her role grew with each rewrite of the script by Selznick, and he was still playing the same game almost 20 years later on their last film together, Tender Is the Night. According to King: “David lost all judgment. He always thought that the more there was of Jennifer, the better the film would be

By the time Since You Went Away, for which she was Oscar-nominated, was released, Jones had broken up with Walker and embarked on a relationship with the married Selznick. Walker, a gifted actor, died prematurely in 1951, a victim of depression, drink and sedatives. She had two sons by Walker, both of whom became actors. Meanwhile, Jones was suitably fey as an amnesiac in Love Letters (1945), which earned her another Oscar nomination, and otherworldly in Portrait of Jennie (1949), two poetic dramas directed by William Dieterle, both co-starring Joseph Cotten.

Jones, the embodiment of feminine innocence, seemed an unlikely candidate for eroticising. But if she had not played a number of dark, tempestuous femmes fatales – worlds apart from Bernadette – her career would have been much less interesting. The first was a wild and sexy mixed-race girl, Pearl Chavez, in King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1947), a demented, delirious western, the peak of Hollywood high romanticism. The operatic climax, when Jones and Gregory Peck die in a final embrace after shooting each other, earned the film the nickname of Lust in the Dust. Sex in the Swamps would be an apt description of Ruby Gentry (1952), in which Vidor was again able to bring out the passion in Jones. Thwarted by the man she loves (Charlton Heston), she finally watches him die face downwards in the mud.

Previously, she had portrayed Madame Bovary (1949) in Vincente Minnelli’s glossy version of the Flaubert novel. Considering that Selznick was breathing down Minnelli’s neck throughout the shoot, at one stage accusing the director of sabotaging the “unique loveliness” of the star, Jones emerged with beauty, poise and vivacity, bringing, as one critic remarked, “an almost manic voluptuousness to the part”

However, although Jones had a certain childlike charm as an untamed half-Gypsy Shropshire lass in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Gone to Earth (1950), she lacked the passion she displayed in the Vidor movies. Now her husband, Selznick was as much of a nuisance as ever, cutting 29 minutes from the film, getting directors (including Vidor) to reshoot nearly a third of it in Hollywood, and changing its title to The Wild Heart for the US release. At this stage, Jones, whose career was entirely controlled by Selznick, had fits of depression and attempted suicide with sleeping pills several times. (Her last attempt was in 1967, after Selznick’s death.)

Nevertheless, she was able to radiate in William Wyler’s Carrie (1952), opposite Laurence Olivier, and especially in Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955) as the Eurasian doctor in love with an American correspondent, William Holden, in a splendid CinemaScope Hong Kong. She was a touching Elizabeth Barrett in the otherwise clunking The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1957), but seemed to have more fun than ever as a blonde mythomaniac in John Huston’s Beat the Devil (1953). Her only other comedy was Ernst Lubitsch’s Cluny Brown (1946), in which she was charming as a cockney maid, despite the wobbly accent

There were a few miscalculations: Vittorio De Sica’s gloomy Indiscretion of an American Wife (1954), and she was allowed to overact as the doomed nurse Catherine Barkley in the overblown and dull third version of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1957). It was Selznick’s last production, but it did not stop him trying to ruin another modern American classic, Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1962), in which the 43-year-old Jones attempted to play the young neurotic playgirl Nicole Diver.

Selznick’s death in 1965 left Jones utterly bereft, in debt, and with a young daughter, Mary Jennifer, to bring up. (Mary Jennifer killed herself in 1976.) Jones made only a few films afterwards; these included Cult of the Damned (1969), in which she played a former blue-movie star, and she was among the many stars trapped in The Towering Inferno (1974). In 1971, she married the millionaire industrialist art collector Norton Simon, helping him with his business until his death. She then took over the presidency of her late husband’s Pasadena Art Museum. Jones had finally become her own person.

She is survived by her son, Robert Walker Jr.

• Jennifer Jones (Phylis Isley), actor, born 2 March 1919; died 17 December 2009

 

GUARDIAN ARTICLE IN 2009 BY DAVID THOMPSON:

Mrs Simon, Mrs Selznick, Mrs Walker, Phylis Isley, Jennifer Jones – all of those names were offered her, like landlines in the storm, and she gazed on all of them with insufficient belief or conviction. There was a time, in the 80s and the 90s, when I did everything I could to get Jennifer Jones to speak to me, or just to see me so that she might decide she could speak to me. And all the time I was asking her, or her lawyers, I had another Mrs Selznick crowing in my ear in her best Pierre Hotel witch act, “She doesn’t have anything to say. She won’t remember. She doesn’t care to remember.”

Well, she’s dead now, at 90. Gore Vidal told me maybe 10 years ago how he’d recently had dinner with Jennifer Jones and complimented her on … her looks? Her cooking? Her jokes? Never mind now. But she did tell him that she was actually three years older than her official age. So was she 93 or 90? What’s the difference if you hardly recognise anyone any longer and if you prefer not to talk to the biographer of the husband who named you Jennifer Jones, who got you your Oscar and turned your life into such a melodrama?

There was always argument as to whether Jennifer Jones knew what was happening to her, or if she just followed along in a daze, like an actor playing a part? No one thought she was strong enough to last. She worried, she agonised, she fluctuated all the time, frantically changing her dresses before she appeared at her own party, and attempting suicide several times in her Selznick years. There were those who said that David O had only taken up with her as a brief romance, but then he’d seen her fall for him and he heard her say she might kill herself if he dropped her. So in her DOS years she seemed helplessly driven on in his slipstream, trying to prove his point that she was a great actress and greater than Vivien Leigh, Joan Fontaine or Ingrid Bergman, the ones he’d given up on so that he could concentrate on making Jennifer Jones a legend.

Selznick had noticed her one day – the alert face in an open doorway – early in 1941. She was Phyllis Isley Walker then, married to the young actor Robert Walker and the mother of two boys by him. She had been brought into the Selznick office by Kay Brown, the aide who also found Gone With the Wind, Rebecca and Ingrid Bergman for him. And Selznick could not forget the pretty, anxious face. He hired her. He invented her new name. And he built her career, beginning with the lead in The Song of Bernadette for which she got the Oscar. There was an affair, not necessarily worse than his other affairs, or better. But his wife, Irene, the first Mrs Selznick and the witch at the Pierre, told him to give up Jennifer or his gambling. One or the other.

And he couldn’t make up his mind. So Irene walked out and went to New York to produce A Streetcar Named Desire on the stage and Selznick had four years deciding whether to marry Jennifer. But her marriage to Robert Walker was over as she made Since You Went Away, Love Letters, Duel in the Sun and Portrait of Jennie. That’s when her suicide attempts began. That’s when she posed for endless stills sessions to establish her great beauty – and in David’s eyes it was never quite there.

They were not good for each other. David controlled Jennifer’s career – he kept her out of Laura and put her in A Farewell to Arms and Tender Is the Night. She was a movie star and she had her moments. Away from David’s direct control, she was very touching in Wyler’s Carrie (with Laurence Olivier) and she had a big hit in Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (with William Holden).

Jennifer and David had a daughter, Mary Jennifer. As his career dwindled away, he played dress-up games with her while Jennifer travelled and had affairs, with doctors and Indian gurus. She was not close to her daughter. Then David died in 1965 (he was only 63), and 11 years later Mary Jennifer killed herself – it was a Mother’s Day gift. By then Jennifer had married Norton Simon, the millionaire and art collector, a very powerful man. Until he was stricken with illness, and so in time she buried him, too, and took over some of the authority at his museum in Pasadena. She was very rich but she never talked publicly and never gave any hint of disproving Irene’s admittedly prejudiced barking about not caring to remember. Robert Walker had died badly, too, in 1951, drunk and disturbed, despite his late success as Bruno Anthony in Strangers On a Train. It was widely believed that he had never recovered from being dropped by Jennifer.

I wanted to ask her unaskable questions – such as when David first seduced her, and what he promised her. But she declined to sit through the pain of having to say, “I really don’t remember”, though her lawyer warned me that she would be waiting for my book when it came, ready to sue. She never did sue, and never said a word about the book. I doubt she read it, or had it read to her. I think she had come to the conclusion that history was like one of her poorer movies: nobody assumed it was meant to be believed.

Last week was the 70th anniversary of the opening of Gone With the Wind on 15 December 1939, in Atlanta. David Selznick’s great film played last week on TCM and it looked pretty good still. Its bounty does not diminish, and that music and that colour now remind us all of our past. Irene died in 1990, in her own exact and decisive way: she made a few advisory calls to friends (“Don’t let’s discuss it”) and then she was gone. Suicide? There needs to be another word for the firmness of her act and the way in which she believed she remembered everything still as it had happened.

Anyway, for those years I used to dream sometimes of being shown in to see Jennifer Jones in some immense Pasadena salon, asking her timid, polite questions, working my way up to the big ones. And getting tired of the sweet, blank look on her face. As Irene had warned me, it was a time when – like it or not – I had had to be a member of the complicated Selznick family. I liked it and I remember the feeling that lingered of Los Angeles being still run by a few dysfunctional families

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John Derek

JOHN DEREK OBITUARY IN “THE INDEPENDENT” IN 1998.

John Derek was an American actor who began his career as a ‘pretty boy’ but quickly developed into a good solid actor with a legacy of fine performances.   He was born in 1926 in Hollywood.   He had his first major role in “Knock on Any Door” with Humphrey Bpgart in 1949.   The same year he played Broderick Crawford’s wayward son in “All the King’s Men”.   His other notable films include “The Hoodlum Saint”, “The Ten Commandments” and “Exodus”.   Married four times, three of his wives were famous actresses., Ursula Andress, Linda Evans and Bo Derek.   John Derek died in 1998.

Tom Vallance’s obituary on John Derek in “The Independent”:WITH HIS dark, wavy hair and clean-cut handsomeness, John Derek became a favourite film star of teenagers in the early Fifties, but never fulfilled the promise as an actor that his early performances in such films as Knock on Any Door and All the King’s Men suggested. He eventually concentrated on photography and film production, and became best known as the husband and Svengali-like manager of Bo Derek.26, he had a film-oriented background, his father being the silent film-maker Lawrence Harris and his mother a minor film actress, Dolores Johnson. The producer David Selznick put him under contract as a teenager, and gave him small roles (billed as Derek Harris) in the Selznick productions Since You Went Away (1944, as a boyfriend of Shirley Temple) and I’ll Be Seeing You (1945, as a sailor

After war service, he was cast in the important role of a young man prompted by social conditions to turn to a life of violent crime in Nicholas Ray’s Knock on Any Door (1949). Produced by Humphrey Bogart’s Santana company, it starred Bogart as a lawyer who defends a boy on a murder charge, and though unsuccessful (Derek is sentenced to death), makes a strong plea for the erosion of the social injustices which cause such delinquency.

As a hardened youth, whose dictum is to “live fast, die young and make a good-looking corpse”, Derek made a favourable impression and was immediately cast in Robert Rossen’s All The King’s Men (1949) as the disillusioned adopted son of an initially honest politician corrupted by power. Derek’s sincere performance in the Oscar-winning film was critically praised, but Santana, having brought Dorothy Hughes’ book In A Lonely Place as a vehicle for Derek, instead converted the hero to an older man so that Bogart could do it.

Had Derek starred in this Nicholas Ray masterpiece his career might have progressed differently. Instead, capitalising on his popularity with the young, Columbia, who had acquired his contract, starred him in several popular but routine swashbucklers including Rogues of Sherwood Forest (1950, as the son of Robin Hood), Mask of the Avenger (1950), Prince of Pirates (1952) and The Adventures of Hajji Baba (1954).

David Miller’s Saturday’s Hero (1951) was a good expose of colleagues who promote sport over study, with Derek in fine form as a student who discovers his esteem vanishes when an injury curtails his prowess on the football field. Nicholas Ray used him again to star with James Cagney in the western Run For Cover (1955), but the director Fred Zinnemann refused to consider the studio’s request that he cast Derek in the prime role of Prewett in From Here To Eternity (1954), stating that either Montgomery Clift played it or he would not direct.

Cecil B. De Mille cast him in the important role of Joshua in The Ten Commandments (1956) when Cornel Wilde turned the part down, and he had a good role in Otto Preminger’s epic of the founding of Palestine, Exodus (1960), but most of his other roles were in minor films and, after spending a season in the television series Frontier Circus (1961), he decided to develop his increasing interest in still photography and film production.

The actress Ursula Andress had become his second wife (his first was the starlet Patti Behrs), and in 1964 he co-produced Nightmare in the Sun, an exploitation movie starring Andress and directed by the former actor Marc Lawrence who made the film in 15 days. “Derek promised to allow his wife Ursula to do a nude scene with Aldo Ray,” Lawrence later wrote, “but the day before shooting he changed his mind. Years later he did a nude layout of Ursula for Playboy and got $15,000 for his art.”

The following year Derek himself directed Andress in Once Before I Die, a war story about a bunch of soldiers (including Derek) and a lone woman trying to survive in the Philippines – slow-moving and self-consciously photographed, it was given a limited release

Derek’s marriage to Andress ended when she embarked on an affair with the French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, and he next married the actress Linda Evans, who starred in another little-seen movie directed and photographed by Derek, Childish Things (1969).

In 1972, Derek fell in love with Mary Cathleen Collins, a 16-year-old Californian (younger than his son and daughter) who was acting in a film he was directing in Greece, Fantasies. To avoid legal complications, he took her to Germany and as soon as she turned 18 he divorced Evans to marry her, also taking charge of her career.

As Bo Derek, she became famous starring with Julie Andrews and Dudley Moore in Blake Edwards’s 10 (Bo epitomising in the film the ultimate score that a woman could achieve for desirability), starting a new fashion craze with her cornrow hairstyle. The guidance she accepted afterwards from her husband is generally considered to have harmed her career.

He directed and photographed her in Tarzan, The Ape Man (1981), one of the most ridiculed of films, and followed this with two which are often described as little more then soft-core home movies, Bolero (1984) and Ghosts Can’t Do It (1990). Their sex scenes frequently provoked fits of laughter from audiences.

The marriage survived the derision that greeted their films, despite some alleged discord between after Derek told chat-show hostess Barbara Walters on television, when quizzed about his glamorous wives, that he liked at a certain point to trade his companions for newer models. Very wealthy, the couple lived on a ranch and were considered reclusive. “I have very few friends,” said Derek some years ago, “and almost no acquaintances”.

Derek Harris (John Derek), actor and film director: born Hollywood, California 12 August 1926; married first Patti Behrs (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved), second Ursula Andress (marriage dissolved), third Linda Evans (marriage dissolved), fourth Mary Cathleen Collins; died Santa Maria, California 22 May 1998.
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Suzy Parker

SUZY PARKER OBITUARY IN “THE DAILY TELEGRAPH” IN 2003.

Suzy Parker who died on Saturday aged 69, was once said to be the highest-paid model in the world, earning more than £30,000 a year in the 1950s; she later embarked on a brief career as an actress in Hollywood.

Blessed with excellent bone structure, copper-coloured hair and seaweed-green eyes, Suzy Parker enchanted the great names of fashion in the 1950s. Christian Dior called her the most beautiful model in the world; she became the “signature” face for Coco Chanel and was photographed by Richard Avedon and Milton H Greene.

She was born Cecilia Anne Renee Parker on October 28 1933. Her elder sister was the model Dorian Leigh, who had been a magazine “cover girl” since the 1940s; and it was she who introduced the future Suzy Parker to modelling when she was a girl of only 14, taking her to see the modelling agent Eileen Ford. The agent’s initial impression was not favourable: she insisted that the teenager was, at 5 ft 9 ins, too tall to be a successful model

But Diana Vreeland, the fashion editor at Harpers Bazaar for 25 years and editor-in-chief of Vogue, disagreed; the influential arbiter of style and elegance immediately offered to use the 14 year old in fashion shoots. Suzy Parker soon became one of the most recognisable faces of the 1950s, and a forerunner of today’s “supermodels”.

It was perhaps inevitable that she should turn to Hollywood, and in 1957 Suzy Parker made her film debut in the musical Funny Face, which starred Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn – Hepburn was to become a good friend. Suzy Parker danced in a number called Think Pink, a send-up of editors such as Diana Vreeland

Further films followed. Also in 1957, Suzy Parker appeared opposite Cary Grant in Kiss Them for Me; the next year she was seen in Ten North Frederick, starring Gary Cooper. She appeared in The Best of Everything (1959); Circle of Deception (1961); The Interns (1962); andChamber of Horrors (1966).

There were also roles on the television screen, including parts in Tarzanand The Twilight Zone – in one episode of The Twilight Zone in 1963, entitled “Number Twelve Looks Just Like You”, she played six different characters.

In the film Circle of Deception, a spy thriller, she found herself playing opposite Bradford Dillman. They fell in love, and in 1963 they were married on board an ocean liner by the ship’s master. Five years later, she and Dillman abandoned the glamour of Hollywood for a more down-to-earth existence at Montecito, California. For the remainder of her life, the woman who had been one of the world’s most famous models shunned the limelight, preferring to be known as Suzy Parker Dillman.

Suzy Parker’s marital status, before her union with Dillman, had been somewhat mysterious. In 1958 she had broken both her arms, and her father had been killed, when the car in which they were travelling collided with a goods train at Saint Augustine, Florida

then emerged that Suzy Parker had been secretly married, since 1955, to a French journalist and novelist called Pierre La Salle. It did not last, however, Suzy Parker telling one interviewer: “Being married to a Frenchman is interesting – you hardly ever see your husband.” They divorced in 1961.

It also emerged that, at 17, Suzy Parker had eloped from high school to marry a childhood sweetheart, Charles Staton, apparently to escape going to college.

She is survived by Bradford Dillman, four children and two stepchildren

Tribute to Suzy Parker by Mike McCrann in “LA Frontiers”:
The days of the “supermodel” have pretty much disappeared. Today we have celebrities hawking everything from watches to perfumes. The models used in today’s high-fashion ads are mostly anonymous girls with little or no personality.

In the old days, there were legendary models like Jean Shrimpton, Twiggy, Cheryl Tiegs, etc. But there was one beauty who transcended all the rest. Her name was Suzy Parker, and she ruled the ’50s as the most gorgeous icon of them all. Suzy Parker also became a movie star—very briefly—before retiring to Santa Barbara with her last husband, actor Bradford Dillman.

Suzy Parker’s older sister was another famous model, Dorian Leigh. Leigh was pretty famous too, but I must say I can’t figure out why, looking at her photos. But kid sister Suzy (born Cecilia Ann Parker in 1932) came to New York to visit Dorian, and this led to the Ford Modeling Agency signing the young beauty to a contract.

Suddenly the 5’10” carrot red head was as famous as any beauty of her day. She was The Revlon Girl. Her face was on every magazine in the world. Suzy became legendary photographer Richard Avedon’s muse. (Years later, Parker said “The only joy I ever got out of modeling was working with Dick Avedon.”) Suzy Parker became the highest paid model in the world, earning over $100,000 a year—a fortune in those days.

Suzy Parker went to Hollywood hoping to become a movie star. Her first film was Kiss Them For Me with Cary Grant and the buxom Jayne Manfield. The movie was pretty bad, and Suzy was upstaged by Jayne’s two assets. A good supporting role followed in Ten North Frederick, where she played the young girl who falls in love with married man Gary Cooper. Parker was lovely in this part, and the last scene in the movie is a great wedding scene when Cooper’s daughter happily realizes that Suzy is the girl that had brought her father the only happiness at the end of his life.

Finally, in 1959, Suzy Parker got the one great role of her career in the fabulous melodrama The Best of Everything. This study of career girls in New York (from the novel by Rona Jaffee) is a cult classic. With Hope Lange, Diane Baker and Joan Crawford, The Best of Everything gives the most glamourous role to Parker. She plays gorgeous Gregg Adams, an aspiring actress who runs around New York in sexy gowns and dark glasses. Greg is wildly in love with Louis Jordan, and most of her scenes are with him and Joan Crawford. When Jordan dumps Greg, she goes off the deep end, spying on him, going through his trash and finally tumbling from his fire escape. Suzy Parker was so gorgeous that she stole the film from her more experienced co-stars.

Superstardom was predicted for Suzy Parker, but life has a funny way of not following the script. After two divorces, plus the death of her father in a car accident (with Suzy also injured), Suzy Parker had enough of fame and empty adulation. She had met actor Bradford Dillman (Compulsion, The Way We Were) while co-starring in 1960’s Circle of Deception. Parker married Dillman and retired. She had four children (three with Dillman) and apparently was quite happy just being a mother. Bad health plagued the former super model, and she died in 2003 at age 70.

Most of the supermodels of the ’50s and ’60s are names attached to bygone eras—faded magazine covers and advertisements. But Suzy Parker’s glorious beauty and talent are permanently on display in the few films she made. If you want to see gorgeous Suzy at the peak of her radiance, rent or buy The Best of Everything. The film is a campy time capsule of its era, but Suzy Parker is the real deal. You cannot take your eyes off her when she is on screen. Model or actress, Suzy Parker was a goddess

NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARY IN 2003.

Suzy Parker, the willowy, red-headed beauty whose elegant poses on scores of magazine covers defined glamour in the 1950’s and paved the way for the supermodels to follow, died on Saturday at her home in Montecito, Calif. She was 69.

Her husband, the actor Bradford Dillman, said she had suffered from a number of serious ailments over the last six years.

In the period just after World War II, models were becoming celebrities. Fashion’s influence was inexorably expanding from high society to society at large, and Suzy Parker, along with other models like Dovima and Lisa Fonssagrives, signified a postwar world of stylish promise for all. When Miss Parker posed in one of fashion’s first bikini shots, America noticed.

Miss Parker was the first model to make more than $100 an hour and $100,000 a year, said Eileen Ford, the doyenne of modeling agents. She also worked as a professional photographer and editor, and she appeared in lead roles in movies with Cary Grant and Gary Cooper.

Ms. Ford said she was simply staggered when the famed model Dorian Leigh, Miss Parker’s oldest sister, introduced her to Suzy, then 15.

”She was the most beautiful creature you can imagine,” Ms. Ford said. ”She was everybody’s everything.”

Miss Parker’s trademark in photographs and later on the movie screen was icy sophistication, often likened to that of Grace Kelly, but in person she exuded a girl-next-door prettiness and a sort of wacky loquaciousness. Audrey Hepburn’s role in ”Funny Face,” as a fast-talking beatnik who somewhat unwillingly becomes a world-famous model, was inspired by her, and she made a cameo appearance in the film, her first movie role.

Miss Parker adored slouch hats of the sort favored by Garbo and collected Coco Chanel’s classic designs for herself. Richard Avedon, the photographer, called her ”my most challenging and complicated of muses.”

Cecilia Ann Renee Parker was born in San Antonio on Oct. 28, 1933. While still in high school in Jacksonville, Fla., she modeled in the summers for Ford Models, and after graduation went to work full time for the agency. In a silent profession Miss Parker was outspoken.

”Suzy Parker didn’t stop talking when I first tried to take her picture,” Horst, the photographer, said. ”I said, ‘You keep talking,’ and I left. When she got into the movies, I joked that maybe she would do for the movies what she would never do for me — hold still.”

She publicly condemned drinking and smoking and said marriage killed romance. The New York Daily News reported her lecturing a French economist about the French economy. She said she talked too much for most men.

Her often-quoted remark that she could love a man more when she was not married to him exploded in headlines when it turned out she was secretly married.

That marriage, to Pierre de la Salle in 1958, was actually her second; she had been briefly married to a high school sweetheart. She and Mr. de la Salle, from whom she was later divorced, had a daughter, Georgia, of Paris, who survives her.

In 1963 she married Mr. Dillman, who survives her, along with their daughter, Dinah Kaufman of Irvine, Calif.; their sons Charles, of Los Angeles, and Christopher, of Encinitas, Calif.; and four grandchildren.

Her sisters Dorian Leigh of Paris and Florian Boice of Annapolis, Md., also survive her.

Miss Parker said she looked in the mirror each day and thanked God for her cheekbones. But she insisted that she modeled only for money and had other professional ambitions. In the mid-1950’s she temporarily abandoned being a cover girl for several years to be a photographer herself, apprenticing with Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris and working for the French edition of Vogue.

It was through Mr. Avedon that Miss Parker parlayed her modeling fame into a movie career. As visual consultant in the movie ”Funny Face,” Mr. Avedon selected her for a brief but conspicuous appearance. Written by Leonard Gershe and directed by Stanley Donen, the 1957 film depicted a high-fashion photographer not unlike Mr. Avedon, played by Fred Astaire. Miss Parker was the inspiration for Audrey Hepburn’s character in the film, a somewhat kooky intellectual and free spirit.

Hepburn, in turn, became such a cheerleader that Miss Parker called the actress her ”Hollywood press agent.”

Miss Parker was cast opposite Cary Grant in ”Kiss Them for Me” in 1957, getting bad reviews. She appeared with Gary Cooper the next year in ”Ten North Frederick.” This time, Bosley Crowther in The New York Times said she underplayed her part ”neatly.”

She appeared in 1959 in ”The Best of Everything,” based on Rona Jaffe’s novel. In 1961 she played opposite Mr. Dillman in ”A Circle of Deception.” They wed in 1963.

Miss Parker was in several more movies and became a sought-after television guest in the 1960’s. Her most famous television appearance was in a 1963 episode of ”Twilight Zone” in which she played six different parts.

She retired from acting in the mid-1960’s and moved with Mr. Dillman to the Santa Barbara area.

In his book ”Cover Girls and Supermodels, 1945-1965” (Marion Boyars, 1996), the French journalist Jean-Noël Liaut said Miss Parker had escaped the unhappy outcomes of other stellar models.

He wrote, ”She became a perfect housewife, even to the extent of baking her own bread

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Betta St. John

THE TIMES OBITUARY IN 2023:

BETTA ST JOHN OBITUARY

Actress of stage and screen who starred alongside Cary Grant in the MGM romcom Dream Wife

Saturday July 15 2023, 12.01am BST, The Times

 

 

St John and Cary Grant in the 1953 film Dream Wife. Deborah Kerr also starred
St John and Cary Grant in the 1953 film Dream Wife. Deborah Kerr also starred.

 

A Hollywood debut at ten years old alongside Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart in the classic 1939 western Destry Rides Again was undoubtedly a fine start for Betta St John’s film career.

Yet had it not been for a family holiday, her introduction to filmgoers could have been even more memorable. Shortly before she was cast in Destry Rides Again to sing the cowboy song Little Joe The Wrangler, she was offered a part as one of the Munchkins in The Wizard Of Oz.

However, her parents owned a cabin in the picturesque Morongo Valley on the edge of California’s Mojave desert and had arranged a trip there. The dates of the holiday clashed with filming and so St John was unable to join Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion on the set of a film that in 2022 was ranked second by Variety magazine in its list of the 100 greatest movies of all time.

Like her contemporaries Judy Garland and Shirley Temple, St John was a member of the Meglin Kiddies, the troupe of child actors and dancers established by the former Ziegfeld girl Ethel Meglin. The school became the first call for Hollywood studios looking for youthful talent and, by the time she was eight years old, St John had already been issued with a social security number.

Her first film and in particular her encounter with Dietrich left a lasting impression that reinforced her determination to be an actress.

“I was taken to meet her for her approval and was extremely nervous,” St John remembered more than half a century later. “She was wearing her dance hall outfit and had gold glitter in her hair. My eyes nearly popped out. I’d never seen anyone dressed like that and as a ten-year-old I thought she was simply marvellous.”

There were further films as a Meglin Kiddie, including playing an orphan in the 1943 adaptation of Jane Eyre starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine and another orphan in Lydia (1941), starring Merle Oberon. Yet after her screen debut she had to wait another 14 years for what she called her “first grown-up movie part”, when she played a sultry Middle Eastern princess in 1953’s Dream Wife in a ménage à trois with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr

By then she had made her name on the stage playing the innocent island girl Liat in the original Broadway cast of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific. She reprised the role when the musical transferred in 1951 to London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane, where King George VI and the future Queen Elizabeth II saw the production.

When she was cast in Dream Wife, the film’s trailer billed her as “the screen’s new dream girl . . . the ‘Happy Talk’ girl of the stage hit South Pacific”. In both roles the make-up department gave her eyes an Oriental look. “Showbusiness won’t let me open my eyes,” she joked in the language of the time

When she was cast in Dream Wife, the film’s trailer billed her as “the screen’s new dream girl . . . the ‘Happy Talk’ girl of the stage hit South Pacific”. In both roles the make-up department gave her eyes an Oriental look. “Showbusiness won’t let me open my eyes,” she joked in the language of the time.

Over the next 18 months she made six more films, including All the Brothers Were Valiant, filmed in Jamaica opposite Stewart Granger, and in the biblical epic The Robe, in which she played Miriam opposite Richard Burton as the Roman tribune in charge of the Crucifixion. Burton left as big an impression on her as Dietrich had done. She described him admiringly as “a legit actor” and felt he was “only in Hollywood for the money

She also played Princess Johanna in the 1954 screen adaptation of The Student Prince, singing opposite Mario Lanza, although his voice was overdubbed and he did not appear in the film. She cited it as her favourite among the films she made in adulthood, which also included two Tarzan films in which she played Jane-type roles opposite Gordon Scott as the king of the jungle.

Yet like Shirley Temple, who retired from making movies at the age of 22, St John decided that her career as an adult actor would be brief. Her final screen role came alongside Christopher Lee in the 1960 supernatural horror film The City Of The Dead.

She was only 30 years old and acknowledged it was not the most distinguished way to end her career. “That was sort of an embarrassment because I didn’t like horror movies,” she admitted. “But I’m glad I did it because apparently it has become a cult film.”

There were no regrets about her early retirement. “I thought my career was long enough and I didn’t feel I was giving up very much,” she said. “I wanted to stay home and raise the children and my family was much more important to me. Very few actors can keep a family and marriage together, with a good career going too.”

She enjoyed a 40-year-marriage to the English actor and singer Peter Grant. They met when he was cast as the young Marine officer Lieutenant Cable in the London production of South Pacific and she called him her “leading man” until his death in 1992. She is survived by their three children, Roger Grant, a London-based television producer, and daughters Deanna and Karen

She was born Betty Jean Striegler in 1929 in Hawthorne, California, the daughter of May and George Striegler, an electrician. Her mother put her in theatrical school at the age of seven, where she learnt “dancing, singing and all the bits you do at an early age”.

In her childhood films she appeared as Betty Striegler, the change of name coming after the New York Theater Guild was scouting in Los Angeles for the Broadway openings of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals Oklahoma! and Carousel.

“Whatever I did obviously impressed them because they asked if I would go to New York, where they would put me into whichever one opened first,” she remembered. “There I was, with the choice of ‘Do you want to go back to school, or do you want to go to New York?’ ”

She made her Broadway debut in the chorus line of Carousel on her 16th birthday. “No critic will bother to spell Striegler,” Richard Rodgers told her. “So let’s call you St John.”

Although she lived most of her life in America and kept her main home in Banning, near the Morongo Valley, where her family’s holiday had prevented her appearing in The Wizard Of Oz, she was also a great Anglophile, with a second home in London

For many years she spent summers in Britain, where she loved to hike the coastal paths, and she moved across the Atlantic permanently in 2018, spending her final days in Brighton.

Betta St John, actress, was born on November 26, 1929. She died on June 23, 2023, aged 93

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Audrey Dalton

Quad city times article by laura wagner in nov 2023

Audrey Dalton was born in Glasnevin, Dublin, Ireland, on January 21, 1934, the third of five children of Emmet Dalton and Alice Shannon; she was preceded by Emmet Michael and Sybil, and followed by Richard and Nuala. Emmet Dalton (1898-1978) led an eventful life: During the First World War, he fought in the British Army with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, rising from a commissioned second lieutenant when he joined up, to captain. Awarded the Military Cross, he was often referred to as “The Boy Hero of Ginchy.” He was a major general in the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Republican Army in the Irish Civil War. Dalton was also a good friend of Irish revolutionary Michael Collins, and was with him in 1922 when Collins was ambushed and killed in Cork. (Read more about him in the 2016 book Emmet Dalton: Somme Soldier, Irish General, Film Pioneer by Sean Boyne.)

Audrey’s interest in acting started early: “I was probably five years old [laughs]—I just allllways wanted to be an actress, as long as I can remember. Probably from just being in theaters. Irish people generally are more theater-going than in a lot of places. I wanted it right from the beginning. I did the usual, school plays. I attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart School and while there played Antigone in one of the school plays when I was 13!”

Emmet Dalton moved to London in 1941 and became a sales agent for Paramount Pictures. In 1947, he became Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn’s personal representative in Britain. In December 1949, the rest of his family joined him in London, and Audrey finished high school there.

 

At 17, Audrey auditioned at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). “They didn’t accept anyone ’til 18, so I had a few months in a preparatory academy that they ran. I was at the Royal Academy until I came to the U.S., which was a little under two years later.”

 

In 1952, Dalton was appearing in a RADA play when a Paramount executive in London saw her and asked her to screen-test for an upcoming Hollywood movie, The Girls of Pleasure Island. Dalton and two other aspiring British actresses, Joan Elan and Dorothy Bromiley, landed Pleasure Island’s three ingénue leads. (“The Irish papers kicked up quite a fuss over my selection as a typical English girl,” Audrey told columnist Florabel Muir.) In March ’52, the ladies left London and, after a few days’ stopover in New York City, continued on to California, where Girls of Pleasure Islandfilming began in late May. The movie was based on William Maier’s 1949 novel Pleasure Island (a fictional South Pacific island), adapted and directed by F. Hugh Herbert. After 20 days of shooting, Herbert fell ill and was hospitalized. First assistant director Alvin Ganzer finished the film and received a co-director credit

Dalton, Elan and Bromiley play the naïve, sheltered teenage daughters of the island’s British administrator Leo Genn. They get their first glimpse of young men when 1500 Marines arrive to build an airstrip. These men haven’t seen a woman in 18 months, and hilarity ensues. Dalton, who “bestows her gentleness” (East Kent Gazette) on lieutenant Don Taylor, comes across well, especially in a quiet, sweet scene with Genn, talking about how much they both love the island. Jimmie Fidler predicted in his column that Dalton was “headed for the top rung in movie fame. She has beauty, and what’s equally as important, acting ability.”

 

Paramount went all-out publicizing the trio (called “New Paramount Personalities” during the end credits), and they became a Life magazine cover story (July 28, 1952): Inside, was a photographic essay by John Engstead, with the gals demonstrating “first an English conception of what American girls are like—sultry, giggling, fervidly leave-taking, jitterbugging; then America’s conception of English girls—demure, tea-drinking, shuddering at the idea of a goodnight kiss, dancing with straight backs at a good yard’s distance from their escorts.” Life quoted an unnamed Paramount editor who remarked, “The Bromiley dame is a pixie, Dalton is ladylike, but the third one is hard to dig.” The three girls and a pair of Pleasure Island actors, Don Taylor and Richard Shannon, were scheduled to go to Korea to entertain U.S. troops in battle zones and hospitals, but at the last minute Bromiley got appendicitis and couldn’t travel. Paramount substituted one of their “Golden Circle” contract players, Kathryn Grant, to take her place

Dalton told Tom Weaver, “Kathryn Grant was fine, and fit in well. That Korea trip was an incredible experience. Flights were long in those days before jets: We flew from Burbank to Travis Air Force Base [in Solano County, California] at night and the next morning we flew to Wake Island or Guam, I can’t remember which, for refueling. The next day we took off for Tokyo, where we stayed at the famous Imperial Hotel, Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘earthquake-proof’ hotel. A couple of days there and then on to Seoul. All our travel was on MATS [Military Air Transport Service] planes—backs against the sides of the plane and small, upright seats.

“In South Korea, we traveled from one base to another every day in an Army truck—always in a convoy of other trucks. The Army treated us so well, serving us their best food. Each night, The Girls of Pleasure Island was shown to a huge audience. After the film, we three girls put on a short skit wearing our beautiful Edith Head ballgowns. The rain was pretty much constant, so as we walked from the truck to the room where the film had been shown, we thought it was funny as we slipped around holding those tulle creations out of the mud and puddles. Inside, we’d sit on the edge of the stage and chat with the guys. Paramount had arranged for us to take a note from anyone who wanted us to send a message home for them. The studio collected the names and addresses and mailed the messages home.

When we were close to the border, Don Taylor and I were flown in the general’s bubble helicopter up to the front where the fighting was actually going on. The two of us were greeted like you can’t imagine and just talked and posed for pictures with the guys. This whole experience is something I will never forget.”

Dalton was the only one of the three girls to continue with a long-term Paramount contract. “Serenely beautiful, dark-haired, with gray-green eyes, she is 18, intelligent and Irish. Looks like a winner,” wrote Photoplay. Her first assignment was a loan-out to 20th Century-Fox for My Cousin Rachel (1952), an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s then-new Gothic novel, with Olivia de Havilland in the title role and Richard Burton making his American film bow. Director Henry Koster told Louella Parsons that he requested Dalton because “I saw her on the screen and I think she has great possibilities as a coming actress.” The young master of a mansion on England’s Cornish coast, Philip Ashley (Burton) tortures himself over his enigmatic cousin Rachel (he can’t decide whether she murdered his beloved guardian or not). The Boston Globe wrote that Dalton gave a “sweet and warm characterization as the girl who wishes Philip would love her instead of Rachel….” In one scene with Burton, Audrey displays gutsy resolve, as she confronts him about his hopeless fixation on de Havilland

Dalton said of her second movie job, “I was working at a different studio and with a director, Henry Koster, I didn’t know—I don’t recall if I’d ever even met him. To my astonishment, he greeted me as a professional, something I wasn’t sure of myself, and we dove right into the scene being shot, effortlessly. He spoke quietly to me about that first scene, and others that followed during the filming, with a rehearsal run-through and off we went. He accepted my interpretation and our work together on the film went smoothly from there on. He came across to me as being confident, deeply involved and knowledgeable about his work. Henry Koster was probably the quietest and most low-key director I ever worked with.

“Burton and de Havilland appeared to get along well when they were working, but off-camera on the set she retired to her dressing room and he stayed on the set, yakking away to the crew and with [English actor] Ronald Squire, who had become a great friend. The two of them spent their time reminiscing about work and other actors in London, laughing uproariously and shooing me away when they felt the story they were telling was too risqué for my young ears (I was 18). My scenes with Burton were magic for me, he was never condescending and I always felt at ease. The scenes practically played themselves. I knew of his reputation as a serious and dedicated actor and couldn’t believe my good fortune to be working with him.

Working with Burton and de Havilland in our scenes together was different. The atmosphere was a little uptight as the quiet de Havilland made clear the scene was hers, as she measured up to Burton. They were so different from each other. He was all noise and banter, fun and bluster, and oh, that voice! I was so impressed to be working with him on his first Hollywood film and he seemed to know how shy and overwhelmed I was. He went out of his way to try to draw me out and talk to me when we weren’t shooting.

“De Havilland was always courteous to me and professional and I continued to be in awe of her. She had such control of her work and never displayed any nervousness. The crew’s respect for her apparent.

“My Cousin Rachel was also the first of many times in my career where I had to ride a horse, and sidesaddle at that. I don’t think my fear showed! In spite of all the Westerns I did later, I continued to be very wary and scared around horses.”

Reporters were struck by Audrey’s resemblance to Joan Bennett, and some readers wrote to movie magazines asking if she was Bennett’s daughter. This caused further confusion when Bennett’s real-life daughter, Melinda Markey, had a small part in Dalton’s next.

Later in 1952, Dalton was loaned out again to Fox to play Annette, daughter of Richard and Julia Sturges (Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck), in Titanic (she beat out Terry Moore and Margaret O’Brien for the role). Based on one of the major news events of the 20th century, the sinking of the British luxury liner, director Jean Negulesco’s film bases a lot of its Oscar-winning story (pre-iceberg) on the wealthy Sturges family: Richard and Julia’s marriage is in trouble, and Annette falls for another passenger, handsome young college student Gifford Rogers (Robert Wagner). But the latter couple’s romance is “suddenly split asunder” (Spokane Chronicle) when the “unsinkable” Titanic fails to live up to its hype and, as the closing narrator puts it, “passes from the British Registry.” Regarding her on-screen parents, Dalton told journalist Nick Thomas in a 2016 interview that Webb “was very funny with a sharp wit,” and Stanwyck “a dream—the ultimate pro, always prepared and ready to help.”

There is a certain similarity, Dalton noted, between the fictional characters in her Titanic and the 1997 megahit directed by James Cameron: “The family that was ‘dysfunctional,’ so to speak, the love affair with the young man and so on. Even the opening sequence of the family arriving at the boat, the flurry of the passengers and everything, was just so similar to the beginning of [the 1953] Titanic. …I thought the dialogue in the new one was just inane. But it’s a fascinating picture, no question. And what a success! Of course, now people say about me, ‘She was in the original Titanic,’ and I have to stress the in, not the on!” she laughs.

On January 1, 1953, teenage Audrey and UCLA student James Brown, 22, wed in Los Altos, California. They kept the marriage a secret until that May. Brown later became an assistant director.

Finally making a second movie for her home studio Paramount, Dalton joined the cast of the Bob Hope comedy Casanova’s Big Night (1954). “Joan [Fontaine] was very effervescent and a great match for Bob Hope. They just traded barbs all the time and laughed and joked,” Audrey told interviewer Rick Armstrong in 2016. “It was fun. On the set, he always had the same group of small-part players with him. He knew all these people and would make sure that they were included somewhere in his movie so they always had a job. He took care of people. He was very, very sweet. In fact, when I first came [to Hollywood], I was 18 and on my own. He had a son and a daughter, who were a little younger than me by a couple of years. On Sunday evenings, he would sometimes take me to dinner with his wife. They would come pick me up and take me to dinner because they figured I needed a little looking after. He and Dolores were kindness itself.”

Casanova’s Big Night is one of Hope’s funniest films. Dalton has little to do except look gorgeous playing the lady that Hope, masquerading as the great lover Casanova, has been paid to romance, to test her virtue as her marriage to Robert Hutton looms. She wore a dress made of genuine Honiton lace that belonged to one of the last czarinas, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. “The dress cost over $1000 and weighed 56 pounds! And I’m presuming the $1000 was what Paramount paid when they purchased it for their wardrobe department,” Dalton said. “Studios had huge wardrobe collections in those days.”

 

In October 1953, Dalton and Richard Allan (from 1953’s Niagara) won first place for Best Newcomers in Photoplay’s “Choose Your Stars” awards. The ceremony took place at the Rodeo Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel, with Barbara Stanwyck acting as emcee. According to Dalton, she was “very pregnant” at the event; and that same month, she gave birth to her first child, daughter Tara—just weeks after the filming of Casanova’s Big Night! Apparently, most people involved with the production had no idea of her condition. (Dalton points out: “The costumes helped.”)

“Why should people know?” she remarked at the time. “The wardrobe people knew, but nobody else did until I told them.” A few months later, she reflected on her career for interviewer Philip K. Scheuer: “More has happened to me in the past two years than I’d ever dreamed possible. …I have made four pictures, toured Korea and the United States, married and had a baby.

“I had wanted to act on the stage and was very determined never to do films. It’s amazing what happens when you’re offered a film contract!” Dalton today says that at that time, she liked the fact that she could work for perhaps a week on a TV episode, perhaps four weeks on a film, “and then be off for a while to take care of and have time with my family. This is why I never did a TV series and why after I had children I did not go away on location—except maybe to London or Dublin, where I had family.”

After leaving Paramount, Dalton’s first film as a freelancer began shooting in early June ’54: She was leading lady to Alan Ladd in the Western Drum Beat (1954), made by Warner Bros. and Ladd’s company Jaguar Productions. Delmer Daves wrote and directed the story of renegade Modocs threatening to break a peace treaty in the Oregon-California territory. Location shooting took place in Sedona, Arizona, where the cast “sweat[ed] it out in the 115-degree heat” (Star Press). Miami Daily News reviewer Herb Kelly ribbed Ladd, claiming he “shows some real tenderness in his love scenes with Audrey Dalton. Instead of the robot-like smooching he usually does, he’s more hep … especially in a night scene in the woods with Miss Dalton.” As an Eastern girl smitten with Ladd, Dalton gave her customary lady-like portrayal; Marisa Pavan, as an Indian girl also in love with Ladd, has a more colorful and active role in the proceedings.

In 2016, Dalton remembered Ladd as “wonderful to work with—very professional. He was very quiet off the set, very much a gentleman. I knew his family in Los Angeles. My father had known Alan because they were both into racehorses. When I came here [to California], Alan was asked to keep an eye on me. He took me into his family. He had a daughter who was a student at UCLA and she and I became good friends. We’re still friends.”

She was signed by MGM for The Prodigal, a $5,000,000 “wannabe epic” based on the Bible story of the Prodigal Son; it was adapted by Samuel James Larsen, a cerebral palsy sufferer who lived in a hospital and typed with a pencil in his mouth. Lana Turner starred as the temptress Samarra and Edmund Purdom played the title role, with Dalton as Purdom’s shy betrothed. Modern Screen summed this one up pretty well: “Wait till you dig Lana in those bugle beads! She is a real-life goddess for whom young men willingly dive into a pit of fire. And when Edmund Purdom spots her, he says goodbye Poppa (Walter Hampden) farewell Ruth (Audrey Dalton) hail Samarra (that’s Lana) I’m your slave.” Unfortunately, the movie gave Audrey very little to do.

Right after The Prodigal wrapped, Dalton went to England for writer-director Ken Hughes’ Confession (1955), a “punchy” (Banbury Guardian) crime thriller involving a bank heist, murder in a confessional, and a family torn apart by a more modern Prodigal Son (Sydney Chaplin). Dalton makes a good showing as Chaplin’s “charming and ingratiating sister” (Kinematograph Weekly) whose slow realization that he’s a crook and murderer causes her much anguish (or, as the Birmingham Daily Gazette says, she “goes all broody”). Confession, called The Deadliest Sin in the U.S., was a “money-spinner overseas” (Kinematograph Weekly), doing smash box office. Dalton followed this with the John Payne Korean War movie Hold Back the Night (1956): In flashbacks, she’s seen as Kitty, a Melbourne girl to whom Payne is attracted out of loneliness (and vice versa). She only had a couple of scenes, but even in her limited screen time, she gives a moving performance as she tells Payne about her husband (she’s unsure whether he is dead or a prisoner of war). “Because John Payne wanted me to play Kitty, I was paid very well indeed for a small part,” Audrey recalled. “Never knew why. Never met him before or since!”

In May 1956, Dalton appeared in her first TV drama, The 20th Century-Fox Hour’s “The Empty Room,” as Carey, a girl determined to prevent the reunion of her father (Patric Knowles) and mother (Virginia Field), who ran out on him many years before. An unimpressed Variety reviewer re-dubbed it “Stella-Dallas-on-the-Thames” and had no use for any of the characters, including Dalton’s “babbling, idiotic” Carey.

With science fiction and horror pictures all the rage, Dalton signed on to make The Monster That Challenged the World (1957) with Tim Holt. “It was presented to me at a time when I wasn’t working. And I always like to work! I was never discriminating with a capital D. I just wanted to work, I enjoyed working. I’ve always felt with those science fiction things that just that one little nugget of ‘well, it could be true’ kind of gets you [laughs]! So, it was fun.” Monster was based on just that kind of true-life “nugget”: A Mojave Desert lake bed, dry for decades, had recently flooded, hatching as many as 4,000,000 long-buried eggs, and soon the newly formed lake was teeming with fresh-water shrimp. Monster’s screenplay made the eggs prehistoric, and the late-blooming mollusks inside grow to the size of small trucks and terrorize California’s Salton Sea area. Dalton, playing a scientist’s secretary at a Navy base, has a dramatic scene in which she emotionally unloads on hero Holt about the recent death of her pilot husband.

Dalton had started at the top, acting with such stars as Olivia de Havilland, Richard Burton, Barbara Stanwyck and Alan Ladd. Asked by Tom Weaver if she felt Monsterwas a step down, she replied, “Of course it was. But I was also just pregnant, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to work much longer—in those days, once you were pregnant, you couldn’t work. So I thought, ‘Well, let me get another one under my belt while I can!’”

At the end of ’56, she appeared in an episode of Lux Video Theatre, “Michael and Mary,” with Patric Knowles (this time as her husband). Audrey did not return to acting until the following summer and fall, when she did two more Lux Video Theatres (“Barren Harvest” and “Judge Not”), two Bob Cummings Shows (“Bob Hires a Maid” and “Bob the Gunslinger”) and a Men of Annapolis (“Look Alike”).

In between, she filmed two 1958 movies, Thundering Jets and Separate Tables. The former, shot on location at Edwards Air Force Base, had her as secretary Susan, girlfriend of USAF Flight Test School captain Rex Reason. Resentful and “broody” over being assigned as an instructor for novice test pilots, Reason makes everyone’s life miserable, Dalton included. Dalton was ostensibly Reason’s leading lady, but it’s her scenes with the charming Buck Class (as Major Mike Geron) that sparkle. She had a smaller part in director Delbert Mann’s dramatic Separate Tables, based on two Terence Rattigan one-act plays and set in an English hotel. But what a movie and cast to be a part of! The stars were Deborah Kerr, Rita Hayworth, Burt Lancaster and Gladys Cooper, plus David Niven and Wendy Hiller, both of whom won Oscars for their performances in this Best Picture nominee. Dalton, portraying Rod Taylor’s love interest, is not really involved in the main storyline of Niven’s revelation that he has exaggerated his military career, and does shameful things in the darkness of theaters.

In 1958, Dalton’s small-screen credits included two Wagon Trains (“The John Wilbot Story” and “The Liam Fitzmorgan Story”), The Millionaire (“Millionaire Ellen Curry”), Bat Masterson (“The Treasure of Worry Hill”) and Man with a Camera (“Two Strings of Pearls”). Her next film, the post–Civil War Western Lone Texan (1959), starred Willard Parker as Clint Banister, who returns to his Texas hometown and is considered a turncoat because he served in the Union Army. He finds the town overrun by lawlessness—overseen by his own brother, Greg (Grant Williams). Dalton has one of her best roles as a feisty gal who doesn’t know how she feels about Clint’s return. Her part is more energetic than usual as she stands up to the bad guys, slaps them and fights one of them off when he attempts to rape her. When her father is gunned down, Dalton takes matters (and a pistol) into her own hands and confronts his killer.

Back in the old sod, Ardmore Studios in Bray, County Wicklow, Ireland, opened in April 1958, founded by Audrey’s father Emmet Dalton; Emmet and Louis Elliman then became its managing directors. Among the movies shot or partially shot at Ardmore: Shake Hands with the Devil (1959), Dementia 13 (1963), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), The Lion in Winter (1968)—and the Audrey Dalton–starring This Other Eden (1959). Produced by Emmet, the movie tells of a statue of a local IRA hero, Jack Carberry, being erected in the Irish village of Ballymorgan. The residents pretend Carberry was a saint, but know differently. Conor Heaphy (Norman Rodway), who wants to become a priest, learns that he is Carberry’s illegitimate son and, angered by the hypocritical lies told about Carberry, blows up the statue. Audrey plays his friend Maire McRoarty, who is the object of Crispin Brown’s (Leslie Phillips) affection. Nine days of location shooting took place in the County Wicklow and Dublin areas.

“The idea behind it was to showcase the Abbey Players,” Audrey told interviewer Jim Rosin. “[My father] wanted to make a film of the play This Other Eden and he asked if I would star in it. So I went back and co-starred with Leslie Phillips, Milo O’Shea and members of the Abbey Players. Much of the crew that worked on the film were Irish who had been doing films in England. They were delighted to return home. So was I. It was a wonderful experience. I brought my three children and was able to visit with family and friends.”

As for Ardmore Studios, Audrey told Tom Weaver, “I know it went through hard times a couple of times. In Britain, J. Arthur Rank had a monopoly on distribution, Rank owned all the British theaters and would only release his own productions. Other producers could make films but then have no theaters to release them to. The fight went on for years. Rank eventually lost the fight, but too late for my dad.”

Dalton finished off 1959 with guest shots on Disneyland (“The Griswold Murder”), Wagon Train (“The Jose Maria Moran Story”) and Bat Masterson (“To the Manner Born”). Her TV activity picked up in the early 1960s as she guested on King of Diamonds (an episode partially shot in Paris and London), Dante, The Aquanauts, The Tab Hunter Show, Acapulco, National Velvet, Lock Up, Michael Shayne, Bringing Up Buddy, Whispering Smith, The Investigators, Perry Mason, Checkmate, Bonanza (one of her favorites, as she played a bad girl), Kraft Mystery Theater (as a secretary who schemes with her boss Louis Hayward to kill his wife, Signe Hasso—who is plotting to kill him!), Ripcord, Gunsmoke, Death Valley Days, Wide Country, The Dakotas, Temple Houston, Dr. Kildare and I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster. During this TV whirlwind, Dalton was seen frequently on Wagon Train—six episodes between 1958 and 1964.

“I used to do one every season, and one season they even squeezed me into two. There was that [rule] that you couldn’t do two in the same season, because people were going to confuse you with your other role. Ward Bond liked me—I mean, in the nicest way. It was because I was Irish. He had this thing about Ireland.

“Thriller was the same thing as Wagon Train, I kept getting invited back. When they liked you on a series, you’d get invited back. It was like a stock company, and every year you’d come back. Alan Caillou, Abraham Sofaer, a whole bunch of people would keep showing up on Thriller, and you’d renew acquaintance and get to work together again.”

Dalton recalled the Boris Karloff-hosted horror anthology series Thriller as “a great show” that provided her with some of her best parts. Her first, Season 1’s “The Prediction,” was also Karloff’s first as a cast member in the story itself; he was a stage mentalist who suddenly does have second sight, she was his daughter. Just ten episodes later, in “Hay-Fork and Bill-Hook,” she was the one with second sight: Playing the wife of a Scotland Yard detective, she has inexplicable “visions” in a Welsh village steeped in witchcraft. In Season 2, Dalton excelled at cold-bloodedness in “The Hollow Watcher,” a one-of-a-kind mix of murder drama, sexual tension and backwoods horror, set in a North Carolina hamlet whose folklore includes an avenging, demon-possessed scarecrow. Dalton, the Irish mail order bride of a local yokel (Warren Oates), is actually a money-mad colleen partnered with her real husband (Sean McClory) on a globe-trotting murder tour. Dalton recalled, “Oooh, that was grand! That was a little ‘different’ part for me, too, which was nice. Now and then I played [meanies] … but they were the exception. I was always the nice girl, the ingénue—which was fine, which was…the way I was [laughs]! So it was fun to have something with a little more meat to it, and to be given free rein. [Director William Claxton] let me run with it, which was fun. That hadn’t happened before.”

As if three Thrillers in 15 months wasn’t enough to please the Monster Kids in her fanbase, Dalton also joined the cast of the fright flick Mr. Sardonicus (1961). Nineteenth-century Europe was the backdrop for this bleak horror tale, with Guy Rolfe as a farmer without a farthing, reduced to digging up his father’s coffin to retrieve a winning lottery ticket accidentally buried within. The sight of Dad’s skeletal face is so shocking that the farmer’s own face takes on the same lip-less, toothy grin. Now wealthy enough to re-dub himself “Baron Sardonicus,” he forces Dalton to marry him in order to compel her former beau, London physician Ronald Lewis, to find a medical means of restoring his good looks. Horror producer-showman-huckster William Castle’s gimmick for this production: Just minutes from the end, Castle (playing himself) asks audience members if Sardonicus should receive mercy or no mercy. This of course gave viewers the idea that the theater projectionist had two different finales and would then project the chosen one; but Castle knew that every audience would vote to give Sardonicus the works, and therefore a “mercy” ending was never filmed!

“Every time my acting career seems to be on the way up, I have another baby,” Dalton remarked in 1962. By this time, she had four, Tara (born 1953), Victoria (1955), James (1957) and Richard (1959). In her 2016 interview with Nick Thomas, she said with a chuckle, “What’s interesting is that many websites today have given me a fifth child! He even has a birth date and a name—Adrian. Needless to say, my children have made great fun of it and ask why I never told them about their lost brother!”

Dalton made her last two films in the mid–1960s. For Kitten with a Whip (1964), she phoned in her performance—literally! In her one scene, she phones her husband (John Forsythe) at their home and tells him she will return the next day, unaware that he has entangled himself with bad girl Ann-Margret.

Much better was the Western The Bounty Killer (1965). Filmed in only ten days on a low budget, it featured a wonderfully warm-hearted Dalton as saloon girl Carole Ridgeway—who sings “Go Away Old Man and Leave Me Alone,” dubbed by Harlene Stein. (Dalton wants Bounty Killer fans to know that she was directed to pretend-sing it at an “agonizingly slow pace”!) She falls for the naïve Willie Duggan (Dan Duryea) and they plan a future together. But, when Willie’s friend (Fuzzy Knight) is slain, the lust for vengeance makes Willie a killer. The Bounty Killer received notice for the small role played by Western pioneer G.M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson (his last film), but for Dalton fans it contains one of her most heartfelt performances. Audrey recalled with a laugh that producer Alex Gordon “made me feel like a star—even though I was over the hill by the time I did that.”

Then, it was back to TV in episodes of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Laredo, The Big Valley, Insight, The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., Dragnet 1967 and Family Affair plus the telefilm Me and Benjy (1967). She remembered her Wild Wild West (“The Night of the Golden Cobra,” in which she plays maharajah Boris Karloff’s daughter) as “great because I got to walk two cheetahs on a leash! That was fun, and so were the exotic costumes.” She ended her acting career with a trio of Police Woman episodes in 1974, 1975 and ’78.

After 24 years together, Audrey and James Brown divorced in July 1977. On July 20, 1979, she wed an aerospace engineer, and that union continues to this day. She is popular as a guest at nostalgia conventions and autograph shows. Asked why she drifted away from acting, Dalton replied, “It sort of drifted away from me. It happens. You have to really have staying power, and I didn’t, I guess. I was involved with family, and I just let it drift. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t. But I did. One goes on.”

As for life today (2021), she enthuses, “I love being on the ocean and have sailed for over 50 years. Racing boats with my husband is one of my great pleasures. I have been so fortunate, all my life, to be able to continue on. Wherever ‘on’ takes me

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Virginia Mayo

Virginia Mayo obituary in “The Guardian” in 2005.

Virginia Mayo who has died aged 84, was the picture of All-American blonde prettiness, despite a slight squint. She was Danny Kaye’s dream girl in four Samuel Goldwyn Technicolored musicals in the 1940s, and, at Warners in the 1950s, she starred in tepid but tuneful trivia, in which she entertained in a limited but decorative way. Her dancing was unmemorable and her singing always dubbed.

However, there was more to Mayo than met the eye. When given the chance to act, she was superb, as in two of Raoul Walsh’s best films, the gangster drama White Heat, and the western Colorado Territory (both 1949). In that year, six of her films were released, and she continued to be a popular star for a further 10 years in a variety of genres. Perhaps She’s Working Her Way Through College (1952), in which Mayo plays Hot Garters Gertie, a burlesque star with ambitions to be a serious actress, who enrols in a drama course, was somewhat autobiographical.

She was born Virginia Clara Jones in St Louis, Missouri. One of her ancestors fought in the American Revolution and later founded the city of East St Louis, Illinois. Her aunt, sister to Virginia’s journalist father, ran a dance studio, where Virginia took lessons from the age of six.

· Virginia Mayo (Virginia Clara Jones), actor, born November 30 1920; died January 17 2005

After graduating from high school in 1937, she became a member of the corps-de-ballet of the St Louis Municipal Opera. She then became a show girl in a Broadway revue, where she was spotted by an MGM talent scout.

David O Selznick gave her a screen test, but decided not to sign her up. Goldwyn saw her potential, making her one of his Goldwyn Girls, as well as immediately giving her a small speaking part in Jack London (1943), which starred the uncharismatic Michael O’Shea in the title role. O’Shea and Mayo were married four years later, the marriage lasting until his death in 1973. (Their daughter, Mary, survives her.)

Mayo soon graduated from the ranks of the Goldwyn Girls to be Bob Hope’s co-star in The Princess And The Pirate (1944), in which she looked ravishing in colour and had good comic timing. At the end, Hope loses Mayo to Crosby, who appears in a cameo for a few seconds. “How do you like that!” responded Hope, “I knock myself out for nine reels and some bit player from Paramount comes over and gets the girl. That’s the last film I do for Goldwyn.” So it was

 

Goldwyn then cast his two favourites, Mayo and Danny Kaye, in Wonder Man (1944), in which she was a sweet librarian to his bookworm with a gangster twin brother. In The Kid From Brooklyn (1946), cream puff milkman Kaye wins Mayo and the middleweight boxing championship of the world. She appears in Kaye’s daydreams in The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty (1947), and, later in Mitty’s life, in need of rescuing from evil Boris Karloff. By that time, “leggy Mayo with her voluptuous body and creamy skin” was part of many male filmgoers’ fantasies. According to the Sultan of Morocco, Mayo was “tangible proof for the existence of God”.

So it was brilliant casting against type when she took the role of Dana Andrews’s unsympathetic, sluttish wife in William Wyler’s multiple Oscar-winner, The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946), about returning war veterans.

Mayo then brought her new veritas to the role of the sensuous saloon singer on the run with escaped convict Joel McCrea in Raoul Walsh’s Colorado Territory, an intense tale of doomed love. The ending, as the lovers choose to die together in the barren rockscape, is one of the great western climaxes.

 

Walsh again got the best out of her in White Heat, a classic gangster movie, in which she was the flighty wife of psychopath James Cagney, competing with his mother for his affection. In 1950 she danced gleefully with Cagney in The West Point Story. She was also a spirited heroine in period pieces, opposite Burt Lancaster in The Flame And The Arrow (1950), Gregory Peck in Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951), and Alan Ladd in The Iron Mistress (1952).

She could do little to enliven King Richard And The Crusades (1954), in which, as Lady Edith, she has the line: “Fight, fight, fight! That’s all you think of, Dick Plantagenet!”; nor The Silver Chalice (1955), where she dallies with Paul Newman in his film debut; nor as Cleopatra in The Story Of Mankind (1957), possibly the most foolish film of the decade.

From the mid-1950s, Mayo was at her best in westerns, often assertive until she changed her tight-fitting riding breeches for something more feminine. Walsh allowed her, as a rustler’s daughter, to be more than a match for Kirk Douglas in Along The Great Divide (1951). In Devil’s Canyon (1953), she was a provocatively dressed woman among 500 men in a prison compound. Mayo’s last good horse opera was Westbound (1959), starring Randolph Scott, tightly directed by Budd Boetticher

 

Walsh again got the best out of her in White Heat, a classic gangster movie, in which she was the flighty wife of psychopath James Cagney, competing with his mother for his affection. In 1950 she danced gleefully with Cagney in The West Point Story. She was also a spirited heroine in period pieces, opposite Burt Lancaster in The Flame And The Arrow (1950), Gregory Peck in Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951), and Alan Ladd in The Iron Mistress (1952).

She could do little to enliven King Richard And The Crusades (1954), in which, as Lady Edith, she has the line: “Fight, fight, fight! That’s all you think of, Dick Plantagenet!”; nor The Silver Chalice (1955), where she dallies with Paul Newman in his film debut; nor as Cleopatra in The Story Of Mankind (1957), possibly the most foolish film of the decade.

From the mid-1950s, Mayo was at her best in westerns, often assertive until she changed her tight-fitting riding breeches for something more feminine. Walsh allowed her, as a rustler’s daughter, to be more than a match for Kirk Douglas in Along The Great Divide (1951). In Devil’s Canyon (1953), she was a provocatively dressed woman among 500 men in a prison compound. Mayo’s last good horse opera was Westbound (1959), starring Randolph Scott, tightly directed by Budd Boetticher

 

Mayo had been retired for over a decade when she was tempted to return to the screen in a horror picture, French Quarter (1978). She made another, Evil Spirits (1991). The glamour girl, who had not aged much, thanks to plastic surgery, substantiated the idea that blondes have more fun.   –  Guardian newspaper

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ABOUT ME

Anyone who knows me are aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been collecting signed photographs of my favourite actors. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I like.

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