Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 45 of 126

Lori Nelson

Lori Nelson was born in 1933 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She was under contract with Universal Studios in the 1950’s. Lori Nelson died in 2020 aged 87.

‘The Times’ obituary in 2020.

Lori Nelson in a 1958 promotional shot20TH CENTURY-FOX TELEVISION/GETTY IMAGES

“I played opposite Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, Jimmy Stewart, Dean Martin and Audie Murphy,” Lori Nelson once noted coolly. “But who’s the leading man everybody wants to ask me about? The Gill Man.”

The Gill Man was better known as the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The film of that name became a cult horror classic in 1954 and Nelson starred in its 3D sequel Revenge of the Creature the following year (along with, curiously enough, Clint Eastwood, who played a lab technician in his screen debut). Nelson, whose character is kidnapped by the amphibious being, told Tom Weaver, the author of Double Feature Creature Attack: “In the beginning I didn’t want to do Revenge of the Creature because I felt like it was almost a comedown for me. To do science fiction in those days was a step down, career-wise. You started with something like that — you didn’t want to build up to it. But then I found while making the movie that I really enjoyed it, and that it was above the average, a very high-calibre science fiction film.”

Not only did Revenge of the Creature ensure her place in horror movie history, it also gave her some thrilling experiences, including swimming in a tank containing sharks and stingrays. “Those fish get fed every hour, and unless they’re hungry, they’re not going to bother you.”

An only child, she was born Dixie Kay Nelson in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1933 to Loree (née Gutierrez), a stay-at-home mother, and Robert, a deputy sheriff. When she was five, the family moved to Los Angeles, where she was named Little Miss America in a nationwide contest, a title that launched her career as a model and actress. However, things stalled when she became ill with rheumatic fever and was bedridden for four years.

At the age of 17 she landed a seven-year contract with Universal, which invested in its new signing by providing drama coaching and dance lessons before the young actress was put to work. She made her debut in Anthony Mann’s compelling Technicolor western Bend of the River (1952), a vehicle for James Stewart. Her good notices were followed by similar plaudits for her performance as the wilful daughter of an estranged mother, Barbara Stanwyck, in the Douglas Sirk drama All I Desire. Unfortunately, however, most of the films in which she appeared were not in the same class as those two and, with her career failing to ignite, she decided to leave Universal after only four years. She told the press: “I learnt a lot there, and they were wonderful to me. But they just don’t make pictures about women there. I knew I wasn’t making progress so I asked for my release.”

After turning in a strong performance as the crippled girl to whom Jack Palance takes a shine in I Died a Thousand Times (1955), she lobbied, unsuccessfully, for more serious dramatic parts and even released photos of herself professionally made-up to look drab and unkempt in a vain attempt to convince the director of the Joan Crawford drama The Story of Esther Costello to cast her as a neglected deaf, dumb and blind girl.

“Hollywood is full of pretty young girls,” she explained. “You see them all around. It’s not too hard for a girl to make a splash on account of her looks. But if you expect to carve yourself a career in this town, you have to take one of two courses. One, you’ve got to go after the sexy build-up. But I don’t think I’m the Marilyn type. The other course is to make a name for yourself as an actress . . . But it’s so hard for a girl like me to break out of ingenue roles. I don’t mean that I want to play character women. But I’d like at least to play character ingenues.”

Lori Nelson in 1955GETTY IMAGES

One part which Nelson played only semi-convincingly was the girlfriend of Tab Hunter, the teen heart throb about whose sexuality rumours flew in Hollywood in the 1950s. The couple dated, but Hunter, who did not come out as gay until 2005, was seeing a man at the same time. Nelson, who was a regular in the gossip columns and a close friend of Debbie Reynolds, dated James Dean and was engaged to Burt Reynolds before she married the composer Johnny Mann in 1960. During the decade-long break from acting that followed, she had two children, Lori Susan and Jennifer. They survive her, along with her second husband, Joseph Reiner.

Nelson had become a TV star just before her first marriage, thanks to her top-billed role in the series How To Marry a Millionaire, a reworking of the hit 1953 movie. After she returned to work in the early 1970s, she focused on small-scale theatre work before switching her attention to running a beauty salon.

Dolores Gray was born in 1924 in Chicago. Dolores Gray was briefly signed with MGM, appearing in Kismet(1955) and It’s Always Fair Weather (1955). She died in New York in 2002..

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Dabbling in practically every facet of the business during her over six-decade career — nightclubs, cabaret, radio, recordings, TV, film and Broadway — sultry, opulent, hard-looking singing star Dolores Gray, distinctive for her sharp, somewhat equine features, lived the high life for most of her time on earth. Born in Chicago in 1924, she began singing in Hollywood supper clubs at age 14 and eventually was discovered by Rudy Vallee, who made her a name on his radio show. From there the larger-than-life talent took to the stage, debuting on Broadway in 1944. In 1947, she gussied up London’s post-war theater district when she starred as Annie Oakley in “Annie Get Your Gun.” Lucky for her, Ethel Merman refused the tour and Dolores became the toast of the West End for over two years. She also attracted tabloid attention with her extravagant life style, outlandish clothes and ‘Auntie Mame’-like joie de vivre. Broadway musicals beckoned following her success abroad and the dusky alto returned to New York, earning raves in the short-lived “Carnival in Flanders” with John Raitt, which won her the Tony award, and “Destry Rides Again” co-starring pre-TV star Andy Griffith, which earned her a Tony nomination. MGM wanted in on the action and signed her. Dolores managed a few scene-grabbing second leads in It’s Always Fair Weather (1955) starring Gene Kelly,Kismet (1955) with Howard Keel and Ann Blyth, The Opposite Sex (1956), starring June Allyson and Joan Collins, which was a somewhat misguided musical version of the classic comedy “The Women,” and the chic non-musical Designing Woman (1957) with Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall. And then it was over for Dolores in movies. Hit by the decline of the musical film, she, trooper that she was, found work on TV variety, recorded for Capitol Records and remained a top-of-the-line cabaret act for decades to come. Despite her somewhat outré reputation, Dolores married only once — to California businessman and race horse owner Andrew Crevolin in 1967. Although the marriage lasted approximately 9 years. they never divorced. In fact, the couple never even formally separated as she was a devout Catholic. She and Andrew would remain close friends until his death in 1992. Dolores passed away a decade later in her Manhattan apartment of a heart attack at age 78 in 2002.

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

Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:

f one were to compile a list of entertainers who cheered up Britain in the austere years after the second world war, the American singer and actor Dolores Gray, who has died aged 78, would be among the top names. On June 7 1947, the colourful Irving Berlin musical Annie Get Your Gun burst onto the stage of the London Coliseum, with the ebullient Gray in the title role. The show ran for three years, the longest run in the theatre’s history, and Gray, in her first big success, became the toast of the town.She may not have had as singular a sound and personality as Ethel Merman, who created the part on Broadway, but her voice was almost as powerful and she was more attractive, both in looks and character. When her voice was compared to Merman’s, Gray explained, “Actually, my voice is fragile, but I know how to amplify it.”

During her stay in London, she took the opportunity to study at the Royal Academy of Art (Rada), and played Nell Gwynne at a performance in aid of the fund to rebuild the Rada theatre. She returned in 1958 to appear triumphantly at the London Palladium, where she was called upon to give her energetic renderings of Doin’ What Comes Naturally, You Can’t Get A Man With A Gun and I’ve Got The Sun In The Morning from Annie Get Your Gun.

Gray’s association with the west end continued in cabaret at the Talk of the Town in 1963, and as the monstrous stage-mother Rose in the Jule Styne-Stephen Sondheim musical Gypsy (another Merman creation) at the Piccadilly in 1973.

Later, as Carlotta Campion, in Sondheim’s Follies at the Shaftesbury in 1987, her legs as long and as shapely as ever, she belted out that hymn to show-biz durability, I’m Still Here, in a manner which nobody could deny. The lyrics catalogue all the events the former chorus girl has survived and the roles she has had to play: “First you’re another sloe-eyed vamp/ Then someone’s mother, then you’re camp.”

Gray’s own life and career was not as varied as Carlotta’s, but it had its share of ups and downs. She was born in Chicago, and after her parents divorced while she was still a child, her mother took her to Hollywood, taught her to sing and act, and encouraged her to perform in clubs in her mid-teens. It was not long before she was discovered by the crooner Rudy Vallee, who put her on his national radio show.

She made her Broadway debut in 1944, in the Cole Porter musical revue Seven Lively Arts – the starry company included Beatrice Lillie, Bert Lahr, Benny Goodman and Alicia Markova. The following year, she played the showgirl Bunny La Fleur in Are You With It? After her first London success, she failed to rescue the Broadway musical Carnival In Flanders, based on the Jacques Feyder film, but, although it ran for only six performances, the show earned Gray a 1954 Tony award and a successful film test at MGM, directed by Vincente Minnelli.

The four films she made for that studio were certainly enlivened by her dynamic singing and witty acting. In the Gene Kelly-Stanley Donen musical It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), she played a stunningly dressed television hostess who sings Thanks A Lot But No Thanks, while refusing gifts from wealthy chorus boys, and Music Is Better Than Words. She stood out among the oriental kitsch of Minnelli’s Kismet (1955) as Lalume, the wazir’s lustful wife, singing Not Since Ninevah and Rahadlakum.

The Opposite Sex (1956), the pallid musical remake of The Women, had Gray competing with Joan Collins, June Allyson, Ann Sheridan and Ann Miller. Her final – and best – film was as Gregory Peck’s old flame in Minnelli’s comedy Designing Woman (1957), which included a splendid scene of Gray tipping a plate of pasta onto Peck’s lap, and a production number, There’ll Be Some Changes Made, in which she delivers the song wonderfully unruffled while changing gowns in a rehearsal.

Back on Broadway in 1959, she had another hit as Frenchy (the part played on film by Marlene Dietrich) in the musical Destry Rides Again. Once, during a matinee, the stage curtain caught fire while she and Andy Griffith were performing Anyone Would Love You. As fireman and stagehands fought the flames backstage, the couple kept on singing more loudly than ever.

Gray’s marriage to Andrew Crevolin, a California property developer and racehorse owner, ended in divorce. She is survived by a stepdaughter.

· Dolores Gray, actor and singer, born June 7 1924; died June 26 2002

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

Misca Auer

Mischa Auer, who was born in Russia in 1905, was one of the great U.S. character actors in movies in the 1930’s and 40’s. Moving to hollywood in the late 1920s. He first appeared on film there in 1928. Auer went on to a long career playing in many of the era’s most well known films, receiving an Academy Award nomination in 1936. He later moved into television and acted in films again in France and Italy well into the 1960s. He died in 1967.

TCM overview:

The tall Russian-born Mischa Auer is perhaps best remembered for his hilarious, scene-stealing performance as Alice Brady’s gorilla-impersonating protege in the 1936 screwball classic “My Man Godfrey”, which brought him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination.

Born and raised in St Petersburg, Russia, Auer moved to the USA after his parents’ deaths. He began his career on the stage, working with Eva LeGallienne’s acting troupe and later touring the USA with other theatrical groups. While performing on stage in “Magda”, he was hired for his first screen role in “Something Always Happens” (1927) and spent the better part of the next decade relegated to playing “foreign” exotics in features like “The Unholy Garden” (1931) and “Sinister Hands” (1932) or playing small, inconsequential roles in support of some of the period’s biggest stars like the Barrymore siblings in “Rasputin and the Empress” and Greta Garbo in “Mata Hari” (both 1932).

After his breakthrough turn in “My Man Godfrey”, Auer continued to find plentiful work in Hollywood playing wildly humorous supporting roles, often as excitable middle-Europeans. He was genuinely funny in “You Can’t Take It With You” (1938) and “Destry Rides Again” (1939) and enlivened “Hellzapoppin'” (1941) and the whodunit “And Then There Were None” (1945). By the late 1940s, however, Auer relocated to Europe where he continued to work until his 1967 fatal heart attack.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Eddie Fisher was one of the most famous of the popular solo singers in the U.S. in the 1950’s. His hits included “Lady of Spain” and “On the Street Where You Live”. He was born in Philadelphia in 1928. He made some movies incuding “Bundle of Joy” opposite Debbie Reynolds, his first wife and “Butterfield 8” in 1960 opposite his second wife Elizabeth Taylor. His third wife was actress Connie Stevens. He died in 2010 at the age of 82. His popular songs include “Lady of Spain” and “On the Street Where You Live”.

Michael Freedland’s obituary in “The Guardian”:

Eddie Fisher, who has died aged 82 of complications from hip surgery, deserves to be remembered as one of the sweetest popular singers of the pre-rock’n’roll era, with 32 hits selling millions of copies. Instead, it was as one of the many husbands of Elizabeth Taylor that he etched himself a place in show business history. And further to that, “I came from the streets of Philadelphia to the White House – Harry Truman loved me, Ike loved me, Jack Kennedy and I shared drugs and women,” he later said of himself.

It was a reputation that he did not need. Numbers such as I’m Walking Behind You, Wish You Were Here and Oh, My Pa-Pa got young women screaming and music aficionados admiring the sheer strength and beauty of his voice – a most unusual combination. Yet when his love for his wife Debbie Reynolds turned sour and he switched his loyalties to Taylor, fame took on an entirely different complexion.

Fisher was born in Philadelphia, the fourth of seven children of Russian-Jewish immigrants who worked in tailoring sweatshops and lived in a slum. He was shy as a child, but not for long. And he realised from an early age that he had a remarkably strong voice. “I couldn’t have been more than three or four years old. I opened my mouth and this beautiful sound came out.”

Fisher began his singing career in traditional fashion in the local synagogue choir, but secular music appealed more, and although he sang for services on Friday nights and Saturday mornings, on other evenings of the week he was taking part in amateur theatrical shows. He sang with local bands while still at high school, and at the age of 18 he was already performing with Buddy Morrow and Charlie Ventura.

He then took another traditional route – working in the Catskill mountains, the holiday resort much favoured by Jewish New Yorkers. It was the area known as the Borscht Belt, because of the emphasis on beetroot soup and sour cream, although that was never as important as the entertainers.

The Borscht Belt was the nursery of outstanding Jewish entertainers: Danny Kaye, Mel Brooks, Jerry Lewis and Eddie Cantor all made huge impacts at Belt hotels. Cantor’s role there was more as a talent scout than as a performer, and it was at Grossinger’s hotel that he first heard Fisher sing in 1949. He invited him on to the Eddie Cantor Show on radio, which proved highly popular with his audiences, and in 1950 Fisher had his first hit, Thinking of You.

The following year he joined the US army, further boosting his popularity by entertaining troops in Korea in 1952-53. He continued to make records during this time, helped by a publicity campaign featuring himself in uniform. His successes with I’m Walking Behind You and Oh, My Pa-Pa were followed by I Need You Now, Downhearted and, most significantly, (You Gotta Have) Heart (1954), the big hit from the show Damn Yankees. In 1955 there was Dungaree Doll and Everybody’s Got a Home But Me, and in 1956 Cindy, Oh Cindy. But it took until 1961, with a version of Tonight, from West Side Story, and 1966, with Games That Lovers Play, for him to return to the charts in a limited way.

“I was too busy making hit records to be concerned about the music,” he said. Frank Sinatra, Perry Como and Tony Bennett cared about “songs that meant something. I didn’t.” But his songs meant something to his private life. Another Fisher hit in 1956 had been Irving Berlin’s A Man Chases a Girl (Until She Catches Him). That particular record was notable for one other, uncredited, performance. The refrain “until she catches him” was recited by Reynolds who, four years earlier, had proved to be a favourite girl-next-door in the film Singin’ in the Rain.

They married in 1955, soon after the record was pressed, although Fisher would say he never really loved her enough to marry. He claimed to have had affairs with Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Mia Farrow and Bette Davis among others. Yet for a time, he and Reynolds seemed to be the ideal couple, loved by fans and the famous alike.

Their closest friends were Elizabeth Taylor and her film producer husband, Mike Todd. When Todd was killed in an air crash, Fisher took it upon himself to console his widow. He and Reynolds divorced, and Fisher and Taylor married in a Jewish religious ceremony in 1959. The marriage did not last. In 1960 Taylor met Richard Burton while making Cleopatra, and in 1964 divorced Fisher.

Three years later he married the actor and singer Connie Stevens. They, too, divorced after a couple of years. His marriage to Terry Richard in 1975 lasted 10 months, but his fifth marriage, to a Chinese-born businesswoman, Betty Lin, in 1993, was the longest, ending with her death in 2001.

Fisher was frustrated that the scale of his early success as a singer was frequently overlooked. In his autobiography, Been There, Done That (1999), he reminded people that he had had more consecutive hits than the Beatles or Elvis Presley and that at one time, he had 65,000 separate fan clubs. In the mid-1950s, he was earning $1m a year.

Fisher had a short, unimpressive film career. The most notable role was playing opposite Taylor in her Oscar-winning movie, Butterfield 8 (1960). He had also appeared opposite Reynolds in Bundle of Joy (1956).

Fisher remained out of the public eye for almost 20 years, and a comeback of sorts in 1983 did not succeed in relaunching his career. At the same time, he issued an album of new songs, After All (1984), which received some critical approval.

He is survived by four children: his daughter Carrie, who came to fame as Princess Leia in the first three Star Wars films, and a son, Todd, from his marriage to Reynolds; and two daughters, Joely and Tricia, from his marriage to Stevens.

• Eddie (Edwin John) Fisher, singer and actor, born 10 August 1928; died 22 September 2010

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

Angela Clarke

Wikipedia entry:

(born August 14, 1909 – December 16, 2010) was an American stage, television and film actress. Clarke appeared in over thirty films throughout her forty-year career, usually in bit parts or in background roles, uncredited. Films in which she made a large impression included The Seven Little Foys, where she played a large supporting role as Bob Hope‘s disapproving sister-in-law, House of Wax,^[1] A Double Life,^[2] The Gunfighter^[3] and The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima.Angela Clarke, despite entering the film business in her early forties (in 1949’s The Undercover Man), cornered the market for grey-haired, matriarchal motherly-types (such as her role as Mama Caruso in The Great Caruso).^[5] Clarke died, aged 101, in Moorpark, California.

Rod McKuen is an American poet, songwriter, composer, and singer.He was born in 1933 in Oakland, California. He was one of the best-selling poets in the United States during the late 1960s. RodMcKuen produced a wide range of recordings, which included popular music, spoken word poetry, film soundtracks, and classical music. He earned two Oscar nominations including his music for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”and one Pulitzer nomination for his serious music compositions. McKuen’s translations a of the songs of Jacques Brel were instrumental in bringing the Belgian songwriter to prominence in the English-speaking world. His poetry dealt with themes of love, the natural world, and spirituality, and his thirty books of poetry sold millions of copies. He has also acted in some Hollywood films e.g. “Summer Love” in 1957. He died in January 2015.

“Guardian” obituary by Michael Carlson>

Rod McKuen, who has died aged 81, was, at his peak, a cultural phenomenon whose massive success as a songwriter and singer saw him become America’s most popular poet, dubbed The King of Kitsch by Newsweek magazine.

His books of poetry were found both on middle American coffee tables and in the bedrooms of adolescents, reflecting their combination of dreamy romantic loneliness and uplifting platitudes. It was no coincidence that one of McKuen’s biggest hits was the title song for the animated Peanuts film A Boy Named Charlie Brown, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. A shrewd judge of passing styles and a hardworking promoter of his own work, McKuen produced 30 collections of poems and around 200 recordings of easy-listening music that sold in the millions. But it was his songwriting, covered by artists as varied as Frank Sinatra and Madonna, Dolly Parton and Chet Baker, Johnny Cash and Barbra Streisand, that made his fortune.

McKuen was born in a charity hospital in Oakland, California; his mother had been abandoned by his father. His stepfather beat him regularly and he was sexually abused by relatives, which was even more damaging. “Physical injuries on the outside heal,” he said, “but those scars have never healed and I expect they never will.”

He ran away from home at 11, drifting through a series of later-romanticised labouring jobs. By the age of 15 he was back in San Francisco with a late-night radio show. After army service in Korea, he returned to San Francisco and began singing in clubs and with Lionel Hampton’s band. He had a brief spell as a contract player at Universal Studios, read poetry with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and in 1959 recorded his first album, Beatsville, speaking poems with jazzy music behind. The cover photo might be seen as symbolic of his career and life: a black-haired woman looks at the camera while McKuen stares morosely into his wine glass.

“I tried to be a good beatnik, but it’s hard,” he said. McKuen moved to New York – and pop music. The Mummy, a single recorded with Bob McFadden under the pseudonym Dor, was a top 40 hit in 1959; another novelty song, Oliver Twist, recorded under his own name, charted in 1961. On tour promoting the song, McKuen shattered his voice, turning it from syrupy tenor to deep rasp.

Frustrated, he moved to Paris, where his career path was changed by his friendship with Jacques Brel. McKuen began translating Brel’s songs into English. Ne Me Quitte Pas became If You Go Away and was a hit for Damita Jo in 1966, while Les Biches became The Women for the country-singerGlenn Yarbrough. Yarbrough also used McKuen’s poem Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows for a song, and McKuen then rushed to publish his first popular poetry collection by that name.

Two more poetry collections, Listen to the Warm (1967) and Lonesome Cities (1968) followed quickly; a recording of the latter won a Grammy for best spoken-word album of 1968. His music exploded in popularity too; he had nine records in Billboard’s Hot 200 over the next three years, including six collaborations with the arranger Anita Kerr and The San Sebastian Strings, starting with The Sea. Sinatra admired McKuen’s material so deeply that he commissioned him to write an entire album. A Man Alone (1969) included the hit Love’s Been Good to Me, whose ironic self-pity perfectly suited Sinatra.

That year McKuen sold out Carnegie Hall for a 36th birthday concert and received an Oscar nomination for the song Jean, which he sang over the closing credits of the 1969 film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Released as a single, it did not sell, but soon afterwards, recorded by the American singer Oliver, it was No 2 in the US charts. In 1974 Terry Jacks’s cover of Seasons in The Sun, McKuen’s version of Brel’s Le Moribond, became a huge worldwide hit.

McKuen’s orchestral piece, The City: Suite for Narrator and Orchestra, with echoes of Aaron Copland, was nominated for a Pulitzer prize, a serious counterpoint to his pop music, which switched outward styles, from singer-songwriter pop to psychedelia, culminating in the album McKuen Country (1976), for which he posed, bearded, in denim and checked shirt. He was touring 280 days a year, but found time to write a memoir, Finding My Father (1976), about his search for the father who abandoned him and the painful upbringing that followed. The book influenced debate on the rights of adopted children to learn about their biological parents. Ironically, although McKuen fathered two sons during his stay in Paris, he left them, admitting that his career was more important.

When Brel died in 1978, McKuen said he locked himself in his bedroom “and drank for two weeks”. By 1981 he was exhausted and suffering from clinical depression, so he retired from touring. He lived in a massive Beverley Hills mansion remodelled by his half-brother, Edward Habib; they shared it with a collection of 500,000 records. Apart from occasional appearances, McKuen then did voiceovers, including for the animated film The Little Mermaid and the television series The Critic. In 2001 he published a new collection of poetry, A Safe Place to Land, coincidentally just as Madonna used his song Why I Follow the Tiger in her single Drowned World/Substitute for Love, for which McKuen and Kerr shared a writing credit. “I think Madonna’s lyric is terrific and, by the way, so are the royalties,” he said.

One of his most famous lines was that “it doesn’t matter who you love, or how you love, but that you love”.

• Rodney Marvin McKuen, songwriter, poet and singer, born 29 April 1933; died 29 January 2015

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

Peggy Ann Garner

Peggy Ann Garner was a brilliant child actress of Hollywood movies of the 1940’s. She is especially remembered as the child “Jane Eyre” in 1944 and as the lead in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”. She made a few movies as an adult including “The Black Widow” in 1954. She died in 1984 at the age of 52.

Dinah Shore

Dinah Shore was one of America’s most popular singers during the 1940’s and 50’s. In the 1970’s she was a very famous TVhost. She did too make some movies such as “Up In Arms” in 1944 opposite Danny Kaye and “Follow the Boys”. She was born in 1916 in Tennessee and died in Beverly Hills in 1998.

Dick Vosburgh’s “Independent” obituary:

A SINGER who lights a fire by rubbing two notes together’. Thus was the 23-year-old Dinah Shore introduced on The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street, a 1940 radio show. The sultry-voiced newcomer from Tennessee went on to become one of the United States’ most enduringly popular recording stars and television personalities.

Her professional singing career began in 1938 at WNEW, a New York radio station, where she sang for nothing. Like Frank Sinatra, who was also singing there gratis, she stepped in whenever an appropriate musical ‘filler’ was needed. Unlike Sinatra (and her rivals Peggy Lee, Doris Day and Ella Fitzgerald), Shore didn’t graduate from a big band; she was turned down by Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and Woody Herman, but made her recording debut in 1939, singing with Xavier Cugat’s orchestra. (On the label she was billed as ‘Dinah Shaw’.) Next came her Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street appearances, after which Eddie Cantor signed her for his radio series. Shore was Jewish, and found ideal material in ‘Yes, My Darling Daughter’, adapted from a Yiddish folk song. Introduced on Cantor’s show, it became her first best-

selling record. The first of her nine million-sellers was ‘Blues in the Night’ (1941).

In 1943 she married the actor George Montgomery, then serving in the US Army. They had met at the Hollywood Canteen, where Shore sang regularly. Throughout the war she entertained servicemen all over the world. ‘There’s nothing to compare with the enthusiasm of those GIs,’ she told me in a radio interview. ‘You don’t find that much applause lying around loose for the rest of your life]’

In 1946, shortly after signing with Columbia Records, she was given the novelty number ‘Shoo-Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy’ to record. She found the song ludicrous, especially as shoo-fly pie is a southern dessert and apple pan dowdy a New England one. To her amazement, the record sold 40,000 copies, and was swiftly followed by three million-sellers: ‘The Gypsy’, ‘Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly’ and ‘For Sentimental Reasons’. Billboard proclaimed her Top Female Vocalist of 1946.

Shore’s film career had begun with Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943), in which she played herself. No more demanding were her roles in Follow the Boys and Belle of the Yukon (both 1944). She got to clown a little and sing ‘Tess’s Torch Song’ and ‘Now I Know’ in Danny Kaye’s first film, Up in Arms (also 1944), and never photographed better than in the fictionalised Jerome Kern biopic Till the Clouds Roll By (1946). She lent her voice to two Disney cartoon features, Make Mine Music (1946) and Fun and Fancy Free (1947). Her best screen performance was in Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick (1951), but that musical was so disastrous that she didn’t film again for 26 years.

She hardly needed to; 1951 was also the year she entered television. Variety wrote that she had ‘a charm and ease that established her right off as one of TV’s standout personalities’. A minority view was expressed by Oscar Levant, who found her too effusive. ‘My doctor won’t let me watch Dinah,’ he claimed. ‘I’m a diabetic.’

Her television success (she won 10 Emmy Awards in all) caused a career clash with George Montgomery, and they were divorced in 1962. In 1963 Shore married a building contractor, but the marriage was over by 1964. She retired for five years to devote herself to two children from her first marriage, returning to television in 1970 as a talk show hostess in Dinah’s Place. One of her guests was Burt Reynolds, with whom she began a long, tabloid-titillating relationship.

She was seen again on the cinema screen in the George Burns comedy Oh God] (1977) and in Robert Altman’s HEALTH (1979). From 1989 to 1991 she presented the talk show Conversation with Dinah.

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

Sebastian Stan was born in Romania in 1983. When he was twelve he moved to the U.S. His movies include “The Covenant” and “Black Swan”. On television he stars in “Once Upon A Time”. In the Spring of 2013 he starred on Broadway in “Picnic”

TCM overview:

.Some actors are blessed with good looks, and Sebastian Stan was definitely one of those. However, across numerous roles over his career, which began in the early 2000s, he also showed tremendous emotional and physical range, making him more than just a pretty face. He showed poise in his varied roles, whether kicking back with Captain America and Black Widow, dealing with the drama of privileged teenagers, or bringing The Mad Hatter to modern times. Born in Romania in 1982, Stan lived there with his mother until they moved to New York in 1994. He was taken by the stage at a young age, appearing in numerous school productions before eventually attending Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts for acting. While still attending school, Stan got his professional start on “Law & Order” (NBC 1990-2010) in 2003. He also appeared in a few independent films, most notably “Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding” (2004) and “Red Doors” (2005). Graduating from Rutgers, he almost immediately filmed the drama “The Architect” (2006) and the supernatural thriller “The Covenant” (2006). His first breakthrough came with a recurring role on the teen drama “Gossip Girl” (CW 2007-2012), followed by a small role in Jonathan Demme’s family drama “Rachel Getting Married” (2008). He then joined the cast of the short-lived alternate-reality drama “Kings” (NBC 2009). The disappointment of that series’ swift cancellation was tempered by key supporting roles in the critically-acclaimed drama “Black Swan” (2010) and the cult-favorite comedy “Hot Tub Time Machine” (2010). After he appeared as Captain America’s sidekick Bucky Barnes in “Captain America: The First Avenger” (2011), Stan co-starred in the Washington D.C.-based miniseries “Political Animals” (USA 2012) and the film “Gone” (2012). He also appeared as The Mad Hatter in several episodes of the fantasy “Once Upon a Time” (ABC 2011- ) before reprising his role as Bucky in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” (2014).

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

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‘The Times’ obituary in 2020.

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Sebastian Stan

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