Jane Powell

MGM Singing Sweetheart was born in 1929 in Portland, Oregon. She made her movie debut in 1944 in “Song of the Open Road” and went on to make such hits as “Holiday in Mexico”, “Three Darling Daughters”, “A Date With Judy”, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” and “Deep in My Heart”. Was married to the late actor Dickie Moore.

TCM overview:

With a light-up-a-room smile, mesmerizing hazel eyes, and a trademark perky demeanor, Jane Powell incarnated the last gasp of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s era of feel-good musicals and the wholesome performers who inhabited these Technicolor extravaganzas. Powell emerged from a troubled childhood to find a spot in MGM’s stable of child stars, doing a string of plucky love-struck teen roles in B-musicals of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Wielding a powerful soprano voice, she would secure a place in the pantheon of classic musicals in the lead of the 1954 film adaptation of “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” Though her movie glory days lasted only a decade, she transitioned into television and eventually took her penchant for classic musicals on regional theatrical tours. Grossly insecure, she would cycle through a series of marriages and struggle with severe depression, belying her longtime public image. Yet she would remain active in stage and television productions late into her life. For a generation, however, Powell would forever embody the archetype of the all-American girl-next-door, remaining a symbol of the proverbial shinier, simpler good ole’ days.

She was born Suzanne Lorraine Burce on April 1, 1929, in Portland, OR, to Paul and Eileen Burce, an unhappy couple who saw in their precocious girl a chance to escape their modest means, seeing her as child-star heir apparent to Shirley Temple. They saved up to pay for dance lessons for Suzanne when she was only three, which three years later drew the attentions of a talent scout who convinced the family to move to Oakland, CA, ostensibly to be a mid-market stopover before conquering Hollywood. A promised project never materialized, the agent took a powder, and the Burces moved back to Portland – all of which was another setback exacerbating Eileen’s alcohol abuse. The actress later confessed in her 1988 autobiography that she felt exploited by her mother and learned to repress her negative feelings for fear of aggravating Eileen, even to the point that after she was molested by other youthful residents in the family’s apartment complex, the youngster said nothing so as not to upset her mother. Meanwhile, Suzanne added singing lessons to her regimen, earned appearances on local radio shows, and by age 11, had her own radio show on Portland radio station KOIN. When the U.S. entered World War II, she was selected Oregon’s “Victory Girl,” appearing across the state at war-bond drives.

In 1943, Suzanne won a spot on a radio talent show in Los Angeles. It led to a succession of radio appearances in the entertainment capital, including one on the popular Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy show, piquing the interest of Shirley Temple’s then-studio, MGM, which signed her to a contract. The Burces moved to L.A., where she attended the studio’s Little Red Schoolhouse, renowned for teaching its famed stable of child stars like Temple, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, but she won little work and initially felt isolated and depressed. Her first two films, in fact, would be loan-outs to United Artists. “Song of the Open Road” (1944) introduced the newly christened Jane Powell, playing a young teen star named Jane Powell who, fed up with her goody-two-shoes public image, makes a musical sojourn to the real world. She followed that with “Delightfully Dangerous” (1945), a standard girl-hoping-to-make-it-big flick. It was not until 1946 that MGM put her in an in-house production, “Holiday in Mexico,” an airy musical whose story basically served as padding between songs by Powell and her castmates. The film became a staging point for her; her onscreen romantic interest, a young Roddy McDowall, became a lifelong friend; producer Joe Pasternak became the shepherd of many of her projects; and the movie’s formula – show folk in fluffy, interchangeable plots enabling song-and-dance in scenic locations – would become the Powell stock-in-trade.

That very same template would manifest with a series of crowd-pleasers, including “Three Daring Daughters” (1948), “A Date with Judy” (1948), co-starring Elizabeth Taylor, “Luxury Liner” (1948), “Nancy Goes to Rio” (1950) and “Two Weeks With Love” (1950). Taylor would stand as Powell’s bridesmaid upon her marriage to ice-skater Geary Steffen the next year. Many of the songs off her chirpy, colorful B-pictures migrated onto Powell albums issued by Columbia Records, such as 1949’s A Date with Jane Powell. MGM moved her song-and-dance routine into the A-picture realm with “Royal Wedding” (1951) by pairing her with none other than Fred Astaire, with the two playing siblings in spite of Astaire being three decades her senior. Later in 1951, during the shooting of the seemingly literalist “Rich, Young and Pretty” (1951), she discovered she was pregnant by her first husband. She bore the first of her and Steffen’s two children, Geary (“G.A.”) Steffen III, with daughter Suzanne arriving the next year. She resumed playing to type as the disarming all-American ingénue in “Small Town Girl” (1953) and “Three Sailors and a Girl” (1953), during the making of which she began an affair with co-star Gene Nelson. They divorced their respective spouses, intending to wed, but Nelson backed out. Insecure about being alone, she married car dealer Patrick Nerney the following year, the union producing a daughter, Lindsey, two years later.

In 1954, Powell would snare her signature role as the Alpha-female in the phalanx of would-be wives in the Stanley Donen-directed Technicolor musical “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” opposite booming baritone and onscreen love interest Howard Keel. MGM returned her to more contemporary song-and-dance comedies in tandem with fellow sprite Debbie Reynolds in “Athena” (1954) and “Hit the Deck” (1955), yet when Louie B. Mayer, MGM’s longtime champion of musical treacle, departed the studio, Powell foresaw the genre’s imminent decline. She quit, she later discovered, not long before new studio chief Dore Schary had planned to cut her loose. The new free agent began turning up in guest appearances on television shows, such as “The Goodyear Theatre” (NBC, 1957-1960), “Alcoa Theatre” (NBC, 1957-1960) and “What’s My Line” (CBS, 1950-1967). She was drawn particularly to variety shows that could showcase her song-and-dance skills, such as Dinah Shore, Judy Garland, Red Skelton and Andy Williams’ eponymous showcases, and two big-ticket made-for-TV remakes of “Ruggles of Red Gap” (1957) and “Meet Me in St. Louis” (1959). She returned to the movies with a triumvirate of 1958 releases – two rare non-musical dramatic outings, playing Hedy Lamarr’s daughter in Lamarr’s final film, “The Female Animal” and a Polynesian girl-next-door in the low-budget Melville adaptation “Enchanted Island,” as well as a last light-hearted movie musical, “The Girl Most Likely.”

Powell continued voluminous TV guest-work through the 1960s, in addition to taking roles in touring and regional versions of Broadway plays, among them such staples as “South Pacific,” “The Sound of Music,” “Oklahoma!” “My Fair Lady,” “Carousel” – some of the productions reuniting her with Keel. By now her relationship with Nerney had floundered and they divorced in 1963. She married Jim Fitzgerald in 1965, who took over managing her career – poorly, by her later estimate. She did, however, make her Broadway debut in 1973 in “Irene,” replacing Debbie Reynolds in the title role of the plucky, blue-collar Irish woman wooed into New York high-society circles. By the mid-1970s, her relationship with Fitzgerald also deteriorated, as would her relationship with children G.A. and Suzanne – all of which led to a nervous breakdown. In 1974, Fitzgerald reportedly intervened in an attempted suicide by Powell. Though she convalesced for a time in a hospital, she did not receive psychiatric treatment until years later. Powell and Fitzgerald divorced the next year. By the end of the 1970s, she settled into a schedule of telefilms and guest appearances on TV staples of the time such as “Fantasy Island” (ABC, 1978-1984), “The Love Boat” (ABC, 1977-1986), and “Murder, She Wrote” (CBS, 1984-1996), eventually taking on a recurring role as the grandmother on the popular family sitcom “Growing Pains” (ABC, 1985-1992).

After another marriage that ended in 1981, she gave an interview to fellow ex-child star Dickie Moore, who was working on a book and the two began a relationship. She moved to New York in 1982, cohabitated with Moore and married him in 1988, the same year she published her confessional autobiography The Girl Next Door and How She Grew. Still spry by the late-1980s, she teamed up with the Arthritis Foundation to appear in the exercise video “Fight Back with Fitness,” specifically designed for senior citizens, In the early 1990s, she periodically stood in for actress Eileen Fulton in her long-running role on the soap “As The World Turns” (CBS, 1956-2010), and continued to add to her stage résumé with a stint in a New York production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella,” an East Coast run in the Anne Meara-penned play “After-Play,” and two 2000 productions, “Avow” and “70, Girls, 70.” In 2003, she took a featured role in the Showtime made-for-TV movie “The Sandy Bottom Orchestra,” and trod the boards again in Chicago and Washington, D.C. runs of Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Bounce.”

By Matthew Grimm

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Telegraph obituary of Jane Powell in September 2021.

Jane Powell, sunny star of MGM musicals who had the role of a lifetime in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers – obituary

With blue eyes and a chirrupy singing voice, she danced with Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding and was viewed as the wholesome girl next doorByTelegraph Obituaries17 September 2021 • 1:29pm

Jane Powell, circa 1948 CREDIT: The Legacy Collection/Avalon

Jane Powell, who has died aged 92, was the singing star of more than a dozen MGM musicals in the Forties and Fifties, and best remembered as the girl who brought Howard Keel and his clan to heel in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954).

It was her only smash hit. Though she enjoyed star status from her earliest pictures, few were big attractions and they were often relegated to the second half of double bills. She was better known as a personality than for her films.

Petite, blonde, blue-eyed and with a relentlessly sunny disposition, Jane Powell could be sugary and cloying on screen. She hankered after meatier roles, but the studio boss Louis B Mayer always refused.

He was wiser than she knew. Although it seemed to her at the time that she was held back, there is no evidence that she could have played the parts she sought. Rather the reverse: her one stab at heavy drama, The Female Animal – made in 1958 after she had left MGM – required her to play a drunk scene. It was not well received.

A front-of-house or lobby card for the film in which she played Howard Keel’s bride CREDIT: LMPC via Getty Images

What she could do was sing. Her natural talent was spotted, encouraged and trained from childhood, resulting in a chirrupy soprano similar to but less fragile than that of her friend and studio colleague Kathryn Grayson. Grayson, who looked as exotic as an orchid, took risks on the exposed high notes and sometimes came a cropper, but audiences forgave her, even as they winced.

Powell on the other hand took no risks, staying comfortably within her vocal range. But it meant that there was never any excitement – or danger – when she sang. She was a mite predictable, and came to be viewed as the girl next door, or everybody’s kid sister. Film fans never lost their hearts to her – as, with all her vocal faults, they did to Kathryn Grayson.

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In private, Jane Powell’s life did not always run smoothly. She divorced one husband for cruelty for deserting her every weekend to pursue sporting activities, and another for extreme cruelty for never allowing her a moment to herself. He once silenced her at a dinner party, she recalled, by saying: “We’ve heard enough about you all evening; now let’s talk about me.”

As an interviewee, she could be naive: waxing lyrical to a reporter about her family’s fully stocked nuclear survival shelters (one at sea), she said the children were so excited that they could hardly wait.

Royal Wedding, 1951: Fred Astaire, Jane Powell, Peter Lawford CREDIT: FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty Images

The daughter of a baby-food salesman, she was born Suzanne Lorraine Burce on April 1 1929 in Portland, Oregon. (Her professional name was taken from the character she played in her first film, Song of the Open Road, in 1944.) At the age of seven, she was singing on a local children’s radio programme, but did not begin professional training until she was 11. Introduced to the manager of the radio station KOIN, she was given her own programme and supported the war effort at patriotic rallies, billed as Oregon’s Victory Girl.

After Grant High School in Portland, she accompanied her parents on a three-week holiday to California, where they entered her in a Los Angeles talent competition. She won, trilling an aria from Carmen, and was spotted by MGM talent scouts. Invited to the studio for an audition, she was, unusually, placed under contract without a screen test. She was only 15.

MGM put her under the wing of producer Joe Pasternak, who had made a star of another teenage canary, Deanna Durbin. In case she did not live up to the studio’s hopes, Jane was lent out for her first two films to United Artists. However, Song of the Open Road and Delightfully Dangerous (1945) amply fulfilled expectations and from then on, MGM kept her on a string.

Her first MGM feature was Holiday in Mexico (1946), in which she sang Ave Maria, followed by a string of minor musicals in which she was generally cast as a schoolgirl. These included Luxury Liner and A Date with Judy (both 1948), and Two Weeks with Love and Nancy Goes to Rio in 1950. The last was intended as the pilot for a series of films in which Nancy would also visit Rome and Paris. But box-office returns were disappointing and the sequels were cancelled.

It was a shaky start, broken in 1951 with Royal Wedding (shown in Britain as Wedding Bells). Jane Powell was not the first choice to be Fred Astaire’s singing and dancing partner. MGM would have preferred Judy Garland or June Allyson, but neither was available. Powell stepped into the breach, to play Fred’s sister, accompanying him to England to see “the” royal wedding (presumably Princess Elizabeth’s, though the film is not explicit).

Drying the dishes with Buster Keaton at the Hollywood Canteen, April 1944 CREDIT: AP

She was called on to dance a bit, too. Nobody would claim that she was one of Astaire’s best dancing partners, but she did well enough and the film earned a place in the record books for the longest song title ever heard in a musical: How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life?

This was the best film she had yet been offered, but she had to revert to three more ingénue roles in Rich, Young and Pretty (1951), Small Town Girl (1953) and Three Sailors and a Girl (1953) before landing the role of a lifetime in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). Once more she was not the automatic choice: MGM toyed with other singers before she won the part.

Based on Plutarch’s account of the rape of the Sabine women, this was the tale of seven rough-and-ready brothers who abduct their brides in the Wild West only to find, as in the Greek play Lysistrata, that conjugal rights are denied until they bathe and acquire some manners.

Jane Powell played Howard Keel’s bride, who organises the sex-ban and drills the boys into shape. A catchy score by Johnny Mercer and Gene de Paul gave everyone in the cast something memorable to sing. Powell’s numbers were the popular Spring, Spring, Spring and Going Courtin’.

Alas, this was the high-water mark of the MGM musical. As tastes changed, the studio began to phase out the genre with which it had come to be identified.

Powell featured in only three more musicals. Athena (1954) was a thin satire on health farms, in which she sang an aria from Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment; Hit the Deck (1955) was a film version of an old Broadway musical; and in Deep in My Heart (1955), a biopic of composer Sigmund Romberg, she made only a guest appearance singing a duet from Romberg’s Maytime with Vic Damone.

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Complaining that MGM had never allowed her to grow up, she did not renew her contract and struck out on her own, signing a three-picture deal with RKO. None was a success. The first was another feeble comedy, The Girl Most Likely (1957), followed by The Female Animal and Enchanted Island (1958), in which she was miscast as a native girl opposite Dana Andrews. It was to be her last film for 27 years.

Instead, like many ex-MGM musical stars, she switched to television, cabaret and the stage. On TV, she co-starred with Michael Redgrave in Ruggles of Red Gap in 1957 and two years later played the Judy Garland role in a remake of Meet Me in St Louis. In 1976, she also featured in a TV movie, Mayday at 40,000 Feet! which secured a cinema release in the UK.

Jane Powell with Fred Astaire in Stanley Donen’s Royal Wedding CREDIT: Mgm/Kobal/Shutterstock

In the theatre, she toured in productions of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, South Pacific and My Fair Lady and scored a personal triumph when she succeeded Debbie Reynolds in the title role of the hit musical revival Irene on Broadway in 1974. But her career petered out.

In 1975, she was cast with Dick Van Dyke in a feature-length cartoon of the children’s musical Tubby the Tuba; she contributed a cameo, singing at a political rally, to the Sissy Spacek movie Marie (1985), and her final television appearance was as a traumatised old lady in a 2002 episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

Jane Powell in 1986 CREDIT: AP Photo/Richard Drew

She made an aerobics video, Jane Powell’s Fight Back with Fitness, and in 1988 published her autobiography, The Girl Next Door … and How She Grew.

Jane Powell was married five times (and divorced four): first to ice skater Geary Steffen; second to stockbroker Patrick Nerney; third to agent James Fitzgerald; fourth to producer David Parlour; and fifth to the former child star Dickie Moore, who died in 2015. She is survived by a son and a daughter from her first marriage, and another daughter from her second.

Jane Powell, born April 1 1929, died September 16 2021

Larry Parks was born in 1914 in Kansas. he is best known for his performances as ‘Al Jolson in “The Jolson Story” in 1946 and “Jolson Sings Again”. His career was seriously derailed by the House of Un-American Activities Committee. He returned to films in John Huston’s “Freud” in 1962. He was married to actress Betty Garrett. He died in 1975.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

When amiable Columbia Pictures actor Larry Parks was entrusted the role of entertainerAl Jolson in the biopic The Jolson Story (1946), his career finally hit the big time. Within a few years, however, his bright new world crumbled courtesy of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Never-say-die Larry managed to continue his career in years to come – both here and abroad, on stage and in nightclubs – alongside steadfast wife Betty Garrett. His film career, however, literally came to a standstill and would never be the same again.

Samuel Klausman Lawrence Parks was born in Olathe, Kansas, on December 13, 1914, of German and Irish descent. As a child growing up in Joliet, Illinois, he was plagued by a variety of illnesses, including rheumatic fever, but persevered with physical exercise and sheer strength of will. Majoring in science at the University of Illinois, his plans to become a doctor dissolved when, to the dismay of his parents, he found a passionate sideline in college dramatics.

He began appearing in touring shows, then made the big move to New York, finding initial employment as an usher at Carnegie Hall and a tour guide at Radio City. Following a number of summer stock shows, he made an inauspicious 1937 Broadway debut with a minor role in the Group Theatre’s presentation of “Golden Boy”. Developing a close-knit relationship with the Group, he was just beginning to build up his resumé in such Broadway outings as “All the Living”, “My Heart’s in the Highlands” and “Pure in Heart” when he had to return to his Illinois home following the death of his father.

He toiled for a time in Chicago as a Pullman inspector on the New York Central Railroad until the possibility of a film role had him re-setting his acting sights on Los Angeles. Although the film deal fell through, Larry stayed in L.A. and somehow made ends meet working construction. Columbia expressed interest in the fledgling actor and signed him up in 1941 after a favorable screen test. He stayed for nine years. His buildup was slow-moving, taking his first small step with a minor role in Mystery Ship (1941). Time, however, did not increase the tempo or quality of his movies. Either he was oddly cast, such as his role as an Indian opposite exotic Yvonne De Carlo in The Deerslayer (1943), or completely dismissed, as co-star of such obscurities as The Black Parachute (1944),Sergeant Mike (1944) or She’s a Sweetheart (1944).

His association with the Group Theatre back in New York led to a chance introduction to musical actress Betty Garrett and the couple married in 1944. Larry had settled by this time in Hollywood but Betty was a hot item on Broadway. MGM finally offered her a contract and she relocated to Los Angeles to join her husband. The couple eventually had two children, one of whom, Andrew Parks, became a fine actor in his own right. Their other son, Garrett Parks, served as composer for the film Diamond Men (2000).

Larry scored an Oscar nomination playing Jolson (which was originally offered to bothJames Cagney and Danny Thomas), and hoped for equally challenging roles. His hopes were dashed as the studio instead continued casting him haphazardly in mild-mannered comedies and swashbuckling adventures. Other than the box-office sequel Jolson Sings Again (1949), most of Larry’s films were hardly worthy of his obvious talent. To compensate somewhat, he managed to find a creative outlet in summer stock, and both he and Betty put together a successful vaudeville act with one tour ending up playing London’s Palladium.

Following the completion of Love Is Better Than Ever (1952) with Elizabeth Taylor, the political scandal erupted and erased all of his chances to do film. One of many casualties of Hollywood “blacklisting”, he was forced to end his association with Columbia, and he and Betty, whose own career was damaged, traveled to Europe to find work.

He found some TV parts after the controversy died down, and Betty and Larry were a delightful replacement for Judy Holliday and Sydney Chaplin on Broadway in “Bells Are Ringing”. During the many meager times, he concentrated on becoming a successful businessman, including building apartment complexes. He made only two more films, last playing a doctor in the Montgomery Clift starrer Freud (1962). By the time he died of a heart attack on April 13, 1975, at age 60, Larry had long faded from view. Betty, however, managed to revitalize her career on TV sitcoms with regular roles on All in the Family (1971), Laverne & Shirley (1976), and roles on numerous other TV series before passing on February 12, 2011.

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

Elizabeth McGovern is best known known for her major role as ‘Lady Cora’ in TV’s “Downton Abbey”. She has however had a very respectable film career also. She made her first impact on film in 1980 in Robert Redford’s “Ordinary People”. Her other films include “Ragtime”, “Once Upon A Time in America” and “The Handmaid’s Tale”. Born in Illinois, she is now a resident in Britain.

TCM overview:

A stage-trained actress with a vulnerable, vibrant screen presence, Elizabeth McGovern made her film debut as the sympathetic girlfriend to Timothy Hutton in the Oscar-winning “Ordinary People” (1980), and followed it up with an Oscar- and Golden Globe-nominated turn as chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit in Milos Forman’s “Ragtime” (1981). She was memorably paired with Robert De Niro in “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984) and Kevin Bacon in “She’s Having a Baby,” (1988), as well as impressed as a lesbian rebel in the dystopia-set “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1990) and in the unusual romantic comedy “The Favor” (1994). She moved to Great Britain to marry English producer-director Simon Curtis in 1992 but returned to the States for work, appearing in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s “Wings of Courage” (1995), various theatrical productions, and starring with Hank Azaria on her own sitcom, “If Not for You” (CBS, 1995). The actress took supporting roles in a string of highly acclaimed, literary-inspired projects, including the Oscar-nominated “The Wings of the Dove” (1997) and “The House of Mirth” (2000). She landed big screen roles as mothers to the heroes of “Kick-Ass” (2010) and “Clash of the Titans” (2010) but dazzled critics on the small screen with her masterful portrayal of the Countess of Grantham on the international smash “Dowtown Abbey” (ITV, 2010). A fascinating talent, Elizabeth McGovern brought a unique intelligence and beauty to her roles that only deepened and improved with age.

Born July 18, 1961 in Evanston, IL, Elizabeth McGovern moved with her family to Los Angeles when her father was hired at UCLA as a professor. Growing up, she appeared in many theatrical productions and was spotted by an agent in a performance of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.” Determined to hone her craft, McGovern began her formal training at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco before transferring to Juilliard. She dropped out, however, when she earned her first film role, as Jeannine, the supportive girlfriend of the suicidal Conrad (Timothy Hutton) in the Oscar-winning “Ordinary People” (1980). McGovern’s luminous beauty and vivid intelligence helped her stand out on screen, and she followed up her initial success with a stunning turn as Evelyn Nesbit in Milos Forman’s adaptation of “Ragtime” (1981). Playing a willowy chorus girl sexually and emotionally enmeshed in a murder, McGovern earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination as well as a Golden Globe nomination.

Established as a fascinating new talent, McGovern played the object of Robert De Niro’s obsession in Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984) and soldier Sean Penn’s sweetheart in “Racing with the Moon” (1984), with the latter onscreen romance becoming a brief, real-life engagement. Mainstream audiences were more familiar with McGovern’s work as Kevin Bacon’s pregnant wife in John Hughes’s “She’s Having a Baby” (1988). She stood out in the chilling film adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1990), with an earthy performance as a lesbian rebelling against a futuristic, misogynistic society, but all too often delivered memorable turns in underperforming or lower-profile projects. She took supporting roles in the 1950s-set comedy “Tune in Tomorrow ” (1990) and Steven Soderbergh’s Depression-era drama “King of the Hill” (1993). McGovern nabbed a bigger role opposite Harley Jane Kozak, Bill Pullman and a young Brad Pitt in the romantic dramedy “The Favor” (1994), but it failed to achieve its hoped-for sleeper hit status.

Part of the reason for the slowing of McGovern’s mainstream professional momentum was her move to England in 1992 after she married producer-director Simon Curtis, but she continued to work in a variety of interesting projects, including the groundbreaking “Wings of Courage” (1995), Jean-Jacques Annaud’s period adventure and the first dramatic film shot in the IMAX 3-D format. Showing her flair for comedy, McGovern charmed opposite Hank Azaria as a pair of accident-prone but destined-for-each-other co-workers in the short-lived romantic comedy sitcom “If Not for You” (CBS, 1995) and guested as a mysterious woman who repeatedly crosses paths with a jewel thief in and out of his dreams in an especially memorable episode of “Tales from the Crypt” (HBO, 1989-1996). Supplementing all of her screen work, McGovern continued to grace the stage in various productions, including “Painting Churches,” “A Map of the World” and a Central Park performance of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”

She notched an acclaimed supporting role opposite Helena Bonham Carter in the Oscar-nominated Henry James adaptation of “The Wings of the Dove” (1997) and delighted as Richard E. Grant’s wife in the TV series version of the classic “The Scarlet Pimpernel” (BBC, 1999-2000). Enjoying a lower-profile stardom but high-quality roles in challenging projects, McGovern essayed well-received supporting roles in the Edith Wharton adaptation opposite Gillian Anderson in “The House of Mirth” (2000) and the Martha Coolidge comedy “The Flamingo Rising” (CBS, 2001). She booked a series regular role on the David E. Kelley dramedy “The Brotherhood of Poland, New Hampshire” (CBS, 2003) and the lead role on the aggressively quirky fantasy series “Three Moons Over Milford” (ABC Family, 2006). Active in the U.K. entertainment industry, the actress played Ellen Doubleday, a love interest of the famed author Daphne Du Maurier in “Daphne” (BBC Two, 2007), as well as appearing as an American expatriate actress in the semi-autobiographical, three-part comedy series “Freezing” (BBC, 2007-08) opposite Hugh Bonneville.

Continuing to work in literary-themed projects, she played Lucy Honeychurch’s free-spirited mother in the TV adaptation of “A Room with a View” (ITV, 2007) and returned to the U.S. to play a teacher hiding secrets in an episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” (NBC, 1999- ). She guested in an episode of “Agatha Christie’s Poirot” (ITV, 1989- ) and earned two small but memorable roles as doomed mothers to an unlikely superhero in “Kick-Ass” (2010), as well to Perseus (Sam Worthington) in the remake of “Clash of the Titans” (2010). It would be back on television, however, where McGovern would once again dazzle critics and audiences alike as the good-natured but long-suffering Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham, on the international smash “Downton Abbey” (ITV, 2010- ). Presided over by the prickly dowager Dame Maggie Smith, the series told the sprawling tale of a British country estate and the legal complications of its inheritance after the death of its male heirs on the Titanic. A fascinating panorama of upstairs and downstairs life in a dying class and service system, the series was rapturously received, with McGovern earning an Emmy nomination for her masterful portrayal.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Julie Newmar was born in 1933 in Los Angeles. She had a small role in “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” in 1954 and the had to wait 5 years until she had another movie role in “L’il Abner”. She starred in 1961 in “The Marriage Go-Round” with James Mason and achieved cult status with her role as ‘Catwoman’ in the ‘Batman’ series in the mid 1960’s.

TCM overview:

hough she earned a Tony for a turn on Broadway in 1961’s “The Marriage-Go-Round,” actress Julie Newmar’s career was largely defined by her recurring role as the slinky Catwoman on the iconic 1960s cult series, “Batman” (ABC, 1966-68). Prior to her appearances in the role, she had been a staple of Hollywood musicals and stage productions, including “Li’l Abner” (1959), but her seductive turn as Catwoman – and, most notably, her form-fitting suit, which she designed herself – made her the object of many young male viewer’s ardor. Newmar never quite achieved the same degree of fame after “Batman,” though she did become a savvy real estate investor in the 1980s. However, Catwoman remained her bread and butter well into her later years, a position that she appeared to embrace whole-heartedly.

Born Julia Chalene Newmeyer in Los Angeles on Aug. 16, 1933 she was the eldest of three children by Don Newmayer, a former professional football player for the Los Angeles Buccaneers in the 1920s and later the head of the Physical Education Department at Los Angeles City College, and his wife, Helen. From an early age, Newmar took after her mother’s former profession – a dancer for the Ziegfield Follies – and studied dance and classical ballet as well as piano. She graduated from high school at the age of 15 and traveled throughout Europe with her family before returning to the United States. Once back home, she studied piano, philosophy and French at UCLA while performing ballet with the Los Angeles Opera.

In 1952, Newmar made her screen debut as a chorus girl in the lightweight musical “She’s Working Her Way Through College.” It led to a string of mostly uncredited turns as a dancer in features, including the Fred Astaire musical “The Band Wagon” (1953). Tall and statuesque in build, she was frequently cast for her physical attributes in addition to her dancing skills, as evidenced by her turn in full body gold paint for “Serpent of the Nile” (1953). After earning her first billed screen credit as one of the “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” (1954), Newmar lit out for New York to try her hand on Broadway, where she made her debut in 1955’s “Silk Stockings” opposite Don Ameche. The following year, she won acclaim as the aptly named Stupefyin’ Jones in “Li’l Abner,” which, along with numerous pin-ups and magazine layouts, helped to cement her status as one of the decade’s most admired sex symbols.

Newmar returned to Hollywood in 1957, where she reprised her turn as Stupefyin’ Jones in the film version of “Li’l Abner” (1959) while making various television appearances, most of which could be categorized by her turn as “Stacked” Suzie on “The Phil Silvers Show” (CBS, 1955-59). In 1961, she made a triumphant return to Broadway as a sexually supercharged exchange student in “The Marriage-Go-Round,” which earned her a Tony for Featured Dramatic Actress. That same year, she reprised her role in the film version of the play, which starred James Mason and Susan Hayward. Television soon beckoned, and she became a regular on episodic series, most notably as a devilish temptress (named Miss Devlin, no less) who offered Albert Salmi a chance to relive his past in “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville,” a 1963 episode of “The Twilight Zone” (CBS, 1959-1964). The following year, she won her first series lead in “My Living Doll” (CBS, 1964), which cast her as a female android who was instructed in how to be a proper woman by her caretaker (Bob Cummings). Most of his suggestions hinged on domestic duties like cooking and cleaning, which branded the series as one of the most sexist projects ever released on television, and helped to spell its quick demise.

In 1966, she was approached by the producers of “Batman” to play one of the Caped Crusader’s most enduring enemies, Catwoman. However, Newmar had never heard of the character, and only took the role at the urging of her brother, future epidemiologist John Newmeyer, Ph.D, who was a fan of the series. Newmar designed her own Catwoman costume, a form-fitting bodysuit that emphasized her hourglass figure by placing the belt around her hips instead of her waist. The suit eventually found its way to the permanent collection at the Smithsonian Institute. Newmar soon became one of the most popular villainesses on “Batman,” and her appearances, which were charged with sexual tension between her and star Adam West, soon became favorites of the show’s predominately male viewership. Newmar was soon in demand for stage and television appearances, many of which prevented her from meeting the show’s production demands. She was subsequently replaced by actress Lee Merriweather in the 1966 “Batman” feature film, and later by actress-singer Eartha Kitt in the show’s third and final season.

Despite the popularity of “Batman,” the show did little to advance Newmar’s career. She maintained a steady schedule of television appearances, including an appearance as a pregnant alien princess in “Friday’s Child,” a 1967 episode of “Star Trek” (NBC, 1966-69) that endeared her to an entirely different but no less dedicated fan base. There were occasional film roles, like Omar Sharif’s feisty Native American lover in the cult Western “Mackenna’s Gold” (1969), but for the most part, she remained a staple of episodic television, playing the same seductive roles she had landed a decade prior. She also returned to the stage on numerous occasions, most notably opposite Joel Grey in the national tour of “Stop the World – I Want to Get Off.” In 1968, she appeared in a pictorial layout for Playboy, much to the delight of her considerable male fanbase.

In the 1970s, Newmar stepped into entrepreneurship, designing her own line of pantyhose and brassieres that emphasized women’s curves. She later returned to UCLA to study real estate, and became a major investor in Los Angeles properties, most notably in the areas near Melrose and Fairfax avenues. She was later credited as one of the primary forces that helped to elevate that area to one of the prime neighborhoods and retail locations in the city. The following decade saw Newmar working frequently in episodic television, as well as numerous low-budget features, including the crude science fiction film “Evils of the Night” (1985) opposite another sexy TV icon, Tina Louise, and John Derek’s head-spinning “Ghosts Can’t Do It” (1990). Despite the questionable quality of these efforts, her fanbase remained remarkably strong, and Newmar earned new champions in fashion designer Thierry Mugler, whose own work drew inspiration from her Catwoman suit. He later made her one of his regular runway models in the 1990s, and directed her in the music video for George Michael’s “Too Funky” (1992). She was also feted by the 1995 feature “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar,” which starred Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo as drag queens on a road trip to Los Angeles who are inspired by an autographed photo of the actress that bore the film’s title. Newmar also appeared as herself in a cameo at the picture’s conclusion.

Convention appearances and her real estate investments kept Newmar busy well into the new millennium.

If you love 1980’s movies, you have to love Kathleen Turner. She was terrific in “Body Heat”. I love when she says to William Hurt in her husky voice “Your somewhat dim, I like that in a man”. She was excellent too in “Peggy Sue Got Married”, “Romancing the Stone” and “”Prizzi’s Honour”.

TCM overview:

A leading lady of 1980s cinema, Kathleen Turner earned comparisons to 1940s femme fatales like Barbara Stanwyck for sensuous, aggressive roles in “Body Heat” (1981), “Prizzi’s Honor” (1985) and “The War of the Roses” (1989). When the smoky-voiced actress was not manipulating male characters with her on-screen sultry ways, she proved to be quite a comedienne, as well, volleying quips with Michael Douglas in the jungle adventure film “Romancing the Stone” (1984) and inhabiting an 18-year-old body in “Peggy Sue Got Married” (1986). She received a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis in the early 1990s, and that – along with the pained actress’ heavy drinking and over-40 status – meant her screen appearances were reduced to character roles as moms and comic villains – something she still pulled off with panache. After acclaimed theatrical runs in “The Graduate” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” on the New York and London stages, the fiery actress regained her esteemed reputation and settled into a comfortable real-life role as a supporting film player, theater director and acting teacher.

A globe-trotter from birth, Kathleen Turner was born June 19, 1954; the child of a foreign service diplomat father. Turner lived in Cuba and Venezuela, among other places, and began to take an interest in acting while living in London and seeing top British performers on the West End stage. She studied at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama, in addition to classwork at American High School, and when the multi-lingual teen returned to the States, she went on to earn a Theater degree from the University of Maryland. She moved to New York City to pursue an acting career and landed an agent within a month of her 1977 arrival. Work off-Broadway led to her role as social-climbing Nola Dancy Aldrich on the NBC daytime drama “The Doctors” (NBC, 1963-1982). She also debuted on Broadway in “Gemini” in 1978. In 1981, she experienced overnight stardom with her feature debut as the cunning temptress who cons lawyer William Hurt into murdering her wealthy husband in “Body Heat” (1981), a contemporary film noir from Lawrence Kasdan. For her unforgettable performance, critics likened her to Golden Era greats like Stanwyck, Lauren Bacall and Ava Gardner. Proud of the comparisons, Turner capitalized on her femme fatale reputation in sensuous, aggressive roles like Steve Martin’s gold-digging wife in Carl Reiner’s “The Man with Two Brains” (1982), a businesswoman-turned-prostitute in Ken Russell’s “Crimes of Passion” (1984), and the cold-hearted hit-woman in John Huston’s Mafia comedy, “Prizzi’s Honor” (1985).

Turner also proved a likable comedienne in the popular old-fashioned adventure “Romancing the Stone” (1984), in which Turner was cast in the more sympathetic role of a romance novelist who can not find love, only to meet Michael Douglas’ professional adventurer who sweeps her off her feet. The box office success triggered the 1985 sequel “Jewel of the Nile,” but it took a $25 million lawsuit on the part of the studio to make Turner honor her contract for what she perceived was a vastly inferior script compared with the original. In 1986, Turner starred in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Peggy Sue Got Married” (1986) and earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her tour de force performance as a mature woman inhabiting the body of her teenage self. Absolutely believable as a 42-year-old in a 17-year-old body (she was 32 at the time), she captured youthful insouciance through her altered speech and body movements and was the best thing about the sentimental picture. After the psychological thriller “Julia and Julia” (1987) cast her as a woman caught between a happily married existence with Gabriel Byrne and a dangerous affair with Sting, Turner teamed up with Douglas again in Danny De Vito’s darkly comic study of marital breakdown, “The War of the Roses” (1989).

Perfectly cast to voice sexy cartoon character Jessica Rabbit in the ‘toon noir “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (1988), Turner scored a second time that year when she reteamed with Hurt and Kasdan for “The Accidental Tourist,” playing Hurt’s emotionally distant spouse. Though Geena Davis stole the show and took home a Best Supporting Actress Oscar as the new love interest for Hurt, Turner gave a compelling and sympathetic portrayal of a woman deeply scarred by the death of her 12-year-old son. Turner turned in a much-applauded and Tony-nominated portrayal of Maggie in a Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” in 1990, but the new decade did not bode well for the maturing actress’ box office clout. The detective film “V.I. Warshawski” (1991), the small-scale medical drama “House of Cards” (1993), and the “Thin Man” wannabe “Undercover Blues” (1993) all failed with critics and the public. Filmmaker John Waters, with his knack for sending up actors’ established personas, gave Turner a break from the forgettable with “Serial Mom” (1994), in which she played a modern-day homemaker with the looks of June Cleaver and the heart of Charles Manson. Turner at once frightened and delighted audiences, but nothing she did seemed to fully re-ignite her feature career, which began to suffer in part by a diagnosis of arthritis and the actress’ increasing dependence on alcohol to manage the pain.

Both conditions made Turner less desirable to cast, and she turned to the small screen. Her experience at the helm of “Leslie’s Folly” (1994), part of Showtime’s “Directed By” series, did not earn her subsequent directorial work, and she produced and starred in her network TV-movie debut, “Friends at Last” (CBS, 1995), showing that she was more than willing to be unglamorous in her new life as a character actress. This was never more obvious than taking the role of Chandler Bing’s (Matthew Perry) drag queen father in a number of episodes of the popular sitcom, “Friends” (NBC, 1994-2004). With her unmistakably sophisticated voice, she also became a frequent narrator and host of TV documentaries. One of the 1980s leading actresses was now relegated to supporting roles and comic villains on the big screen throughout the 1990s, with appearances as the stepmother in “Moonlight and Valentino” (1995), the wicked fairy in 1997’s “A Simple Wish,” and a nefarious scientist obsessing over “Baby Geniuses” (1999).

Turner returned to the stage, insisting that the best women’s roles could be found there. She portrayed an incestuous mother in Jean Cocteau’s “Indiscretions” on Broadway and later ventured to London to act in “Our Betters” and perform a one-woman show about silent film actress Tallulah Bankhead – someone whose throaty voice was reminiscent of her own. After appearing as a TV anchorwoman in TNT’s satirical “Legalese” (1998), Turner was excellent in her understated turn as the rigid, dowdy mother of five in Sophia Coppola’s feature directing debut, “The Virgin Suicides” (2000).

She returned to the British stage as famed elder seductress Mrs. Robinson in a theatrical adaptation of “The Graduate” (2000), and after reprising the role in a 2002 run on Broadway, the 48-year-old actress checked into a rehab facility for alcohol treatment. A commitment to sobriety plus new developments in arthritis medication that significantly eased the actress’ constant pain facilitated Turner’s return to Broadway in 2005, where she was cast in one of the most demanding roles in American theater, Martha in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” She was nominated for a Tony Award for her electric performance and followed the production to London, where she again wowed audiences and critics. Turner maintained her strong standing, lending her voice to the animated film “Monster House” (2006) and debuting as a theatrical director with the off-Broadway production of “Crimes of the Heart.” She was tapped by New York University to teach acting and released the memoir Send Yourself Roses, which offered some insight into her career, her history of alcoholism, and her struggles with arthritis. In 2008, Turner was well-cast to play a drill instructor-like dog trainer in the film adaptation of John Grogan’s bestseller about a rambunctious dog and the family who loves him in “Marley & Me.”

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Robert Hays

Robert Hays was born in 1947 in Maryland. He is best remembered for his role in “Airplane” in 1980.

TCM overview:

An earnest, boyishly handsome actor, Robert Hays has often adopted an amusing deadpan expression as well-meaning but clueless romantic leads caught up in farcical situations. A “Marine brat”, Hays grew up in Turkey, India and England before graduating from high school in Nebraska. Attending college in San Diego, he caught the theater bug after studying acting for a semester and promptly joined the Actor’s Guild at the Old Globe Theater. Hays stayed with the company for five years, performing in plays ranging from “Richard III” to “The Glass Menagerie” to “Say Who You Are”, winning the Globe’s Atlas award for the latter.

Hays made his TV debut guesting on ABC’s detective series “Harry O” and began appearing on TV-movies soon thereafter. A first series, “The Young Pioneers” (ABC, 1978), with Hays as the eponymous couple’s neighbor, fizzled after three episodes, but he had more luck with “Angie” (ABC, 1979-80). As clean-cut Brad Benson, Hays played a wealthy young doctor who dealt with sitcom adventures after marrying a poor waitress (Donna Pescow). The show was never a huge hit, but it got Hays noticed, and he made a successful debut in features with the hilarious disaster spoof, “Airplane!” (1980). As Ted Striker (a role he reprised for the 1982 sequel) he was quite funny as the goofy yet stalwart former pilot who must try to land an endangered plane.

Hays’ wide-eyed, middle-America good looks suggested promise in films, but the unpopular “Take This Job and Shove It” (1981), based on the hit song, failed to consolidate his fame. Subsequent features were minor farces all cut from the same cloth. In “Trenchcoat” (1982) and “Fifty/Fifty” (1991), he played bumbling spies, while “Honeymoon Academy” (1990) had him married to a spy caught up in work during their honeymoon. “Scandalous” (1984), meanwhile, put Hays in comic suspense once more as a reporter charged with murder. He later did direct-to-video releases like “No Dessert Dad, Till You Mow the Lawn” and “Raw Justice” (both 1994).

The likable Hays, a highly recognizable TV face, kept busy in the comic TV-movies “The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything” (syndicated, 1980) and “Murder by the Book” (NBC, 1987). “Running Against Time” (USA, 1990) found a feckless, time-traveling Hays trying to prevent JFK’s assassination, and he also had his hands full with “Deadly Invasion: The Killer Bee Nightmare” (Fox, 1995). Often cast in roles calling for him to react as much as act, he proved a good choice for a TV version of “Mr. Roberts” (NBC, 1984) and did his charming professional best by such short-lived TV series as “Starman” (ABC, 1986-87), “FM” (NBC, 1989-90) and “Cutters” (CBS, 1993). Hays had a rare opportunity to display his underused dramatic ability as Victoria Principal’s abusive husband in “The Abduction” (Lifetime, 1996).

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Benita Humewas born in 1906 in London. She made her film debut in the U.K. in 1925 in “The Happy Ending”. By the mid 1930’s she was in Hollywood and made such movies as “Tarzan Escapes” and “Rainbow On the River”. She was married to the actors Ropnald Colman and George Sanders. She died in 1967.

IMDB entry:

Benita Hume was born on October 14, 1906 in London, England as Benita Humm. She was an actress, known for Tarzan Escapes (1936), The Private Life of Don Juan (1934) and Suzy (1936). She died on November 1, 1967 in Egerton, England. Her first Broadway play was Ivor Novello’s “Symphony in Two Flats” in 1930She started out as a pianist but pursued acting because she wanted “excitement”Portrayed Victoria Hall on NBC Radio’s “The Halls of Ivy” (1950-1952) with her husband Ronald Colman. Daughter, Juliet, born 1944 Trained at RADA; first stage appearance in 1924. With Ronald Colman was part owner of the San Ysidro resort in Santa Barbara, California. Brunette leading lady, on stage in London from the age of seventeen. On the other side of the Atlantic, she played a series of well-coiffed English ladies in RKO and MGM films of the 1930’s, but never quite made the grade as a star. She eventually quit acting for the role of a leading socialite, as wife first to Ronald Colman then George Sanders.

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:

Dennis Hopper, who has died of cancer aged 74, was one of Hollywood’s great modern outlaws. His persona, on and off the screen, signified the lost idealism of the 1960s. There were stages in Hopper’s career when he was deemed unemployable because of his reputation as a hell-raiser and his substance abuse. However, he made spectacular comebacks and managed to kick his dependence on alcohol and cocaine.

Born in Dodge City, Kansas, Hopper, whose father was a post-office manager and mother a lifeguard instructor, expressed an interest in painting and acting at a young age. While still in his teens, he appeared in repertory at Pasadena Playhouse, California, and studied acting with Dorothy McGuire and John Swope at the Old Globe theatre, San Diego.

The year of his 19th birthday, 1955, was extraordinary. Not only did Hopper have substantial parts in three television dramas, but he was cast in supporting roles in James Dean‘s last two films: Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant (released in 1956). The two actors became friends over the few months before Dean, whom Hopper idolised, was killed in a car accident aged 24.

In Rebel Without a Cause, Hopper is the youngest and slightest member of the juvenile delinquent gang that provokes Dean. In Giant, he gave a sensitive performance as the son of Texan oil millionaire Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor; he marries a Mexican girl and wants to “go north” to become a doctor – decisions against his father’s wishes. Although Hopper appeared only briefly with Dean in both movies, the latter had a huge influence on him.

Hopper brought some moody Method mannerisms to bear on his following roles, mostly as callow, trigger-happy villains in westerns, such as Billy Clanton in Gunfight at the OK Corral (1956) – “I don’t know why I get into gunfights. I guess sometimes I just get lonely” – and From Hell to Texas (1958), on which he got into a confrontation with director Henry Hathaway, refusing to take direction for several days. He was also a grumpy, childish Napoleon in the infamous, star-studded The Story of Mankind (1957) and the leader of a street gang, dubbed “Cowboy”, in Key Witness (1960).

In the 1960s, Hopper, who alienated several veteran directors and producers, was pronounced difficult, argumentative and violently temperamental. However, he continued to get work, mostly in minor baddie roles, in major films including Cool Hand Luke (1963), The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) and True Grit (1969). He also turned up in the weird space vampire film Queen of Blood (1966), in which he played a clean-cut astronaut who has the blood sucked out of him. The executive producer on the film was Roger Corman, who had just begun his cycle of dope and biker movies, and cast Hopper with Peter Fonda in the seminal acid flick The Trip (1967). The duo together conceived, wrote, with Terry Southern, raised the finance for, and starred in the alienated- youth road movie Easy Rider (1969), with Hopper directing.

Made for $400,000, the film’s combination of drugs, rock music, violence, a counter-culture stance and motorcycles as ultimate freedom machines caught the imagination of the young, made pop icons of Hopper and Fonda on their bikes and took over $16m at the box office. This rose to more than $60m worldwide in the next three years. It also brought Hopper, Fonda and Southern a best screenplay Oscar nomination. Easy Rider, which led to a stream of tacky, imitative pictures with equally loud rock soundtracks, retains legendary status in Hollywood lore, although these self-pitying “flower children” of the 60s now seem as dated as the “bright young things” of the 1920s.

Hopper, meanwhile, was out of control. His eight-year marriage to Brooke Hayward, the daughter of actor Margaret Sullavan, had ended in divorce. In 1970, he married Michelle Phillips, of the Mamas & the Papas, but it lasted eight days. (“The first seven days were pretty good,” Hopper once commented.) In the same year, a raving, naked, drug-fuelled Hopper was arrested while running around Los Alamos, New Mexico.

In 1971, following the success of Easy Rider, Hopper was bankrolled by Universal with $850,000 and given total creative control to make whatever kind of movie he wished. He decamped to Peru with a cast and crew for a self-penned, directed and edited meta-monstrosity, The Last Movie (1971). Starring Hopper as a stuntman with a Christ complex on the set of a western being directed by Samuel Fuller, the film, made for the stoned by the stoned, was stoned by the critics.

Before the film’s limited release, Hopper wrote and appeared in an autobiographical documentary, The American Dreamer (1971), which showed him editing The Last Movie at his home in Taos, New Mexico, spouting hippy philosophy, taking baths with women and shooting guns. This sealed his reputation as the most flipped-out man in the movies, and he spent the next 15 years in foreign films, personal projects, and low-budget arthouse or exploitation movies.

The quality of these veered wildly, but Hopper turned in one of his most memorable performances as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley character, who has the enigmatic, homicidal title role in Wim Wenders’s The American Friend (1977). High on drugs, he improvised much of his part of the photojournalist buzzing around Marlon Brando in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979).

In 1980, Hopper directed his third feature, Out of the Blue, an effective piece of post-hippy American gothic, about a family well outside the mainstream. It focuses on a 15-year-old punk girl (Linda Manz) trying to survive in a world of drunks (Hopper plays an alcoholic father), drug addicts and rapists. Made in Canada, the picture was well received when it was released three years later, assisting Hopper’s reintegration into Hollywood.

In 1983, Hopper entered a drug rehabilitation programme. By then, according to Peter Biskind’s book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, his cocaine intake had reached three grams a day, complemented by 30 beers, marijuana and Cuba Libres. After emerging relatively clean from the programme, he played another alcoholic father – this time to Matt Dillon – in Coppola’s Rumble Fish (1983), now a commanding elder statesman amid the brat-pack cast.

Hopper’s comeback was consecrated in 1986, with his astonishing portrayal of a psychopathic kidnapper in David Lynch‘s Blue Velvet. His performance, in which he inhales an unspecified gas and screams “Mommy” at Isabella Rossellini during bizarre sex scenes, became as much a conversation piece as the film itself. This role as a crazed, drug-dealing sadist was followed with an antithetically subdued and touching performance as an ashamed dad seeking redemption in Hoosiers in the same year. Hopper, who seemed to draw on his down-and-out years, was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar.

Hopper appeared in three further films in 1986 – ranging from a leftwing media terrorist in Riders of the Storm to a mad ex-biker with his own strangely moral code in River’s Edge, and the former Texas Ranger who wants revenge for the chainsaw death of his brother in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. He continued to be extremely busy in the following year, playing a Texan tycoon bumped off by his wife in Black Widow and Molly Ringwald’s father in The Pick-up Artist.

In 1988, Hopper directed Robert Duvall and Sean Penn in a violently realistic cops-versus-street gangs drama, Colors, released to a debate as to whether the film reflected or exacerbated gang conflicts in Los Angeles. A worse fate met his next directorial effort, Catchfire (1989), in which he starred with Jodie Foster as, respectively, kidnapper and responsive victim. Released in an edited version of which he did not approve, the film, at Hopper’s insistence, was attributed to Alan Smithee (the pseudonym for directors preferring to remain anonymous).

In Flashback (1990), as an erstwhile 60s radical activist gone underground, Hopper seems to be playing his own legend, drawing inspiration from his earlier characters. At one stage, he remarks, “It takes more than going down to your local video store and renting Easy Rider to become a rebel.”

This led to similarly offbeat performances, many of them variations on the smiling, charming, cold-blooded killer with a screw loose. He stood out in supporting roles in True Romance (1993) and the box-office smash Speed (1994), and his blackly humorous edge almost redeemed some of the mediocre thrillers he appeared in throughout the 90s, though little saved Chasers (1994), a leaden naval comedy, the seventh and last of the features he directed. In 2008, Hopper appeared in the TV series Crash, the spin-off from the Paul Haggis 2004 film, as a verbose, eccentric, down-on-his-luck music producer. Hopper proudly stated that it was the craziest character he had ever played.

Despite his radical persona, Hopper was a paid-up Republican, though he voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 election. In that year, he appeared in An American Carol, a flabby, liberal-bashing comedy starring rightwing actors such as Jon Voight, Kelsey Grammer and James Woods.

Hopper, who played an art dealer in the 1996 film Basquiat, was also an accomplished painter and sculptor, and a well-connected player on the American art scene. He was a skilled photographer whose subjects included Martin Luther King; fellow artists Ed Ruscha, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg; and co-stars including Paul Newman and John Wayne. In 2007, he presented the Turner prize at Tate Liverpool.

He was married five times and is survived by four children: a daughter by Brooke Hayward; a daughter by Daria Halprin (the female lead in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point); a son by Katherine LaNasa; and a daughter by Victoria Duffy, his widow.

• Dennis Lee Hopper, actor, photographer and painter, born 17 May 1936; died 29 May 2010

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

Janet Leigh is one of the key players from the Golden Age of Hollywood. She h as a good number of classic movies to her credit including “Little Women” in 1949, “If Winter Comes”, “Houdini”, “The Vikings”, “The Manchurian Candidate” in 1962 and “The Fog” in 1980. She was for a long time married to Tony Curtis and is the mother of screen icon Jamie Lee Curtis. She died in 2004.

Tom Vallance’s “Independent” obituary:

Jeanette Helen Morrison (Janet Leigh), actress: born Merced, California 6 July 1927; married 1942 John Carlyle (marriage dissolved), 1946 Stanley Reames (marriage dissolved 1948), 1951 Tony Curtis (two daughters; marriage dissolved 1962), 1962 Robert Brandt; died Beverly Hills, California 3 October 2004.

Janet Leigh played arguably the most famous screen murder victim in history. As Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock’sPsycho, she was the embezzler who, just after having a change of heart, is gruesomely knifed to death in her shower.

The scene, besides being genuinely shocking, has become one of the most analysed sequences on film, and the actress gave countless interviews regarding its filming and her personal attitude towards her role. At the time of the film’s making, she was its biggest star, and part of the scene’s impact was the audacious removal of her character only half an hour into the film.

Though few audiences now come to the film unaware of the ploy,Psycho is a great enough movie for the knowledge to have no effect on its impact. However, it is not the only masterpiece in which Leigh appeared. Her impressive career included such fine works as George Sidney’s Scaramouche, Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate. She was also one of the most beautiful ingénues of her time, had a marriage to the actor Tony Curtis that made them favourites of the fan magazines for several years, and was the mother of the actresses Jamie Lee Curtis and Kelly Curtis.

Born Jeanette Helen Morrison in Merced, California, in 1927, she was the only child of a sales clerk, Fred Morrison, and his wife Helen, who was of Scandinavian descent. Her childhood was unsettled, as her parents frequently moved from town to town. Leigh owed her discovery to the former MGM star Norma Shearer. In 1946, Leigh’s parents had taken jobs at the Sugar Bowl Ski Lodge in Soda Springs, California, where her father worked as a receptionist and her mother in the dining room. Shearer, on holiday with her husband, spotted Leigh’s photograph on her father’s desk and, taken with her fresh-faced beauty, asked for a copy to show friends in Hollywood.

Though retired, Shearer was influential and owned a large share of MGM stock. The result was a screen test. Leigh was still a student at the College of the Pacific, majoring in music (though already married to her second husband), when signed by MGM in 1947. “We were living over my aunt’s garage and the money was welcome,” she later said.

She had no acting experience, but her pretty looks and bright-eyed wholesomeness made her a pleasing ingénue, though one columnist wrote of an early performance, “She is over-eager, over-nice, over-everything.” The studio renamed her Janet Leigh, and, after some preparation with drama coach Lillian Burns, she tested successfully for the female lead opposite Van Johnson in the rustic drama The Romance of Rosy Ridge (1947).

Leigh recalled,

An established actress on the lot, Beverly Tyler, had practically been cast, but later I heard that Louis B. Mayer felt she was a little too sophisticated to play a farm girl. They wanted a more naïve type, and they sure got her.

She played another country girl in The Hills of Home (1948), starring the collie Lassie, and then a hapless young girl who becomes pregnant and commits suicide in an inane soap opera, If Winter Comes (1948). The critic James Agee labelled the film “pretty awful”, but praised “an overdone, but promising performance by Janet Leigh”.

Leigh was then cast in Words and Music (1948), a biography of the composers Rodgers and Hart. Richard Rodgers, who loathed the film’s inaccuracies, later said,

The only good thing about that picture was that they had Janet Leigh play my wife. I found that highly acceptable.

Leigh found the film exciting for the chance to work with Judy Garland. “I actually had a scene with her, which gave me goose bumps.”

In Fred Zinnemann’s bleak film noir Act of Violence (1949), she had her most demanding role to date as a housewife whose husband, a former prison-camp informer, is stalked by a vengeful survivor. She then made a perfect Meg March in Mervyn LeRoy’s loving transcription of Little Women (1949), a perennial favourite. “The picture has such wonderful warmth,” she said:

It kind of brings you back to the values we all had as children. June Allyson, Elizabeth Taylor, Margaret O’Brien and myself really did assume the aura of four sisters and had a ball. We cracked up all the time. Mr LeRoy was great – he put up with us and still turned out one of the most beautiful films I was in.

A less successful literary adaptation, of The Forsyte Saga, retitledThat Forsyte Woman (1949), cast her as the trusting June Forsyte who loses her architect lover (Robert Young) to her aunt, Irene (Greer Garson).

Leigh’s charms meanwhile had attracted the attentions of the millionaire producer Howard Hughes:

I was at Mr Mayer’s house one evening and was introduced to this tall, taciturn, thin man with a moustache. It was Howard Hughes, who had just bought RKO studios. As the evening wore on, I realised that he was being overly attentive, which I really did not appreciate. He was twice my age and, besides, I was dating someone else. He made me uncomfortable. Subsequently, I got to know him better, which made me even more nervous about him.

Leigh, who later stated that her parents frequently bickered throughout their lifetime, had married first at the age of 15, when she eloped with a 19-year-old named John Carlyle, but the marriage was annulled four months later. In 1946 she married Stanley Reames, a sailor and aspiring bandleader who hoped to break into the big band league when he journeyed with Leigh to Los Angeles. It was a time when the big-band era was coming to an end and he had little success. In 1948 he and Leigh were divorced, after which Leigh entered into a long relationship with the actor Barry Nelson.

In 1949 Howard Hughes and MGM agreed to a loan-out deal by which Leigh appeared in three RKO films. The first was a bright, romantic comedy, Holiday Affair (1949) co-starring Robert Mitchum, in which Leigh played a “comparison shopper”, who buys goods to compare their prices and value with those of the store that employs her.

Josef von Sternberg (“an unbearable dictator”) directed her second RKO movie, Jet Pilot, in which she played a jet-flying Russian spy converted to “the American way” by John Wayne (as an air-force colonel). It started shooting in December 1949, but was not released until 1957 because of the aviation enthusiast Hughes’s attempts to keep up to date with aircraft developments.

Her last RKO movie was a musical, Two Tickets to Broadway (1951), in which Leigh sang and danced with flair as a college graduate who joins two chorus girls (Ann Miller and Gloria DeHaven) in their search for stardom. Unusually for its time, the film featured television as its background rather than the theatre or movies. Hughes kept the film in production for several months ordering retakes in his search for perfection, though some averred that he simply liked to watch Leigh at work. “His pursuit continued,” said Leigh, “but he never caught me. Tony Curtis, a rising young actor at Universal, did.”

Leigh and Curtis met at a Hollywood party in 1950, and Curtis later recorded his reaction:

Her face was exquisite – and those beautiful bosoms and tiny waist. It just devastated me to look at this woman.

The pair eloped to Greenwich, Connecticut, in June 1951. They made an attractive young couple and were heavily featured in the fan magazines of the day. “There was no bigger pair,” wrote Curtis:

No other husband-and-wife team came close to us until Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, but that was 10 years later. They did it through scandal. We did it through the movies and people’s affection.

At MGM, Leigh continued to play undemanding ingénue roles, in some major films such as a superb version of Rafael Sabatini’s swashbuckler Scaramouche (1951), and Anthony Mann’s gripping western The Naked Spur (1953), and in such inconsequential comedies as Stanley Donen’s Fearless Fagan (1952) and Eddie Buzell’s Confidentially Connie (1953). At Universal, a weak musical with Donald O’Connor, Walkin’ My Baby Back Home (1953) wasted the talents of both its stars, with Leigh’s singing voice inappropriately dubbed by Paula Kelly.

She and Curtis then made a film together, Houdini (1953), a biography of the famous escapologist, directed by George Marshall. Reviews were mixed, but the chemistry of the stars was acknowledged (“Paired, they are a harmonious, ingratiating team,” said Daily Variety), and audiences flocked to see the young couple in their first co-starring feature. It was quickly followed by another, The Black Shield of Falworth (1954), an undemanding swashbuckler.

With her marriage to Curtis, Leigh had acquired a sexier and more mature image, and better roles were coming her way. Rogue Cop(1954), the last film under her MGM contract, was a gritty thriller with Robert Taylor and George Raft, and Pete Kelly’s Blues (1955) was a flawed but fascinating attempt to reconstruct the jazz world of the 1920s.

In My Sister Eileen (1955), a musical version of the hit play first filmed by Columbia in 1943, she was cast as Eileen, the prettier of two sisters who leave their small-town home to try their luck in New York City. The film had been intended as a vehicle for Judy Holliday, who was to play the other sister, Ruth, but she had seen Rosalind Russell play the role in the Broadway musical Wonderful Town, based on the same play. Wary of following in Russell’s footsteps, she turned the film down when the studio refused to pay for the rights to the Broadway score by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

When Holliday was replaced by Betty Garrett, not as big a star at the time, the subsidiary romance between Leigh and Bob Fosse was built up, giving Leigh some charming song-and-dance moments with both Garrett and Fosse (with whom she had a brief affair). With tuneful songs by Jule Styne and Leo Robin, fine performances by Garrett, Leigh and upcoming Jack Lemmon, and outstanding dancing by Fosse and Tommy Rall, My Sister Eileen proved to be one of the best musicals of the Fifties.

Leigh was next asked by Richard Rodgers to audition for the forthcoming Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musical Pipe Dream. Offered the role, she first accepted, then turned it down when Curtis pointed out that it would mean being separated from him for at least six months. (Judy Tyler played the part in what became one the composing team’s less successful ventures.)

Leigh’s next film was to be one of her most memorable, Orson Welles’s baroque thriller Touch of Evil (1956). Leigh was initially puzzled when she received a telegram from Welles stating how delighted he was that they were to be working together. She knew nothing about the project, but Welles had correctly surmised that she would be so pleased at the idea of being directed by him that he would get her at a lower price than if he had to negotiate with her agent first.

She thought she had lost the role, though, when she broke her arm shooting a television movie just before filming was to start. At first Welles considered having her character, a young newly wed, sport a broken arm throughout the film, but he changed his mind and managed to shoot in ingenious ways that concealed the injury:

I did the entire movie with a broken arm and no one knew. During the motel sequence and less-clothed scenes, the doctor sawed the cast in half lengthwise. We would take it off, do the shot, and strap it back on again.

Leigh found Welles’s acceptance of improvisation fascinating, and entirely different to her later experience with the meticulously prepared Hitchcock. “With Mr Hitchcock the film is over for him before he even begins shooting.”

The renowned opening scene of Touch of Evil, a continuous shot of several minutes, started with a time bomb being planted in a car, then panned to a drunken man and a blonde leaving a café and getting into the car to drive towards the border. Leigh wrote,

The shot included Chuck [Charlton Heston] and me approaching the checkpoint, waited through our exchanges with the official and the passing through of the drunken man and his bimbo, lingered while we kissed, and zoomed to the convertible and the explosion in the distance. The technical prowess needed for this was beyond my comprehension.

The offbeat film about a corrupt cop and a honeymooning Mexican lawyer (Charlton Heston) who exposes him proved too non-linear for the studio, who later ordered retakes by another director. “Both Chuck and I resented changing it and bastardising it,” said Leigh, “because what we did made it almost normal.” Leigh later stated,

The release of Touch of Evil was disappointing. But it warms the cockles of my heart to at least know that it now is considered a cult classic and honours Orson Welles.

(The film has since been restored to a version approximating Welles’s original cut.)

In 1956 Leigh gave birth to her first daughter, Kelly Lee Curtis, then she returned to the screen as an English princess, Morgana, in the impressive epic The Vikings (1957), directed by Richard Fleischer and co-starring Kirk Douglas and Curtis. After giving birth to a second daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, in 1958, Janet and Tony then starred in an amusing lightweight comedy, The Perfect Furlough (1959), directed by their good friend Blake Edwards, and followed it with another farce, Who Was That Lady? (1960).

Columnists sometimes pondered whether Leigh was sacrificing her career to her marriage, making inconsequential movies with her husband, who in between was acting in such prestigious films asSweet Smell of Success, The Defiant Ones, Some Like It Hot andSpartacus. But in 1960 Leigh was given a great role and the one for which she will be best remembered, that of Marion Crane in Psycho.

The early sequences of the film, depicting Marion’s stealing of the money, her encounter with a patrolman, her increasingly ominous night drive through the rain, her discovery of the remote Bates Motel and her equivocal conversations with the proprietor, display both director and star at their best. Of the famous shower scene, Leigh wrote,

The brilliant artist Saul Bass did a thorough storyboard for the shower-scene montage. Hitchcock diligently adhered to Bass’s blueprint. The combined endowments of these two gave us a course in fantasy . . . I believe that class of film-making was more effective than the current standard. The censorship obliged creators to find a way to show, without showing, thus giving the viewers liberal range for their imaginations.

Regarding consistent rumours (and Hitchcock’s own statement) that a model was used, Leigh insisted that only the scene where Perkins puts the body in a sheet and drags it to the car utilised a model. “Hitch told me there was no reason to subject me to the discomfort since it was a distant high angle anyway.”

Leigh won an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress for her performance, but lost to Shirley Jones in Elmer Gantry. In her autobiography, There Really Was a Hollywood (1984), Leigh mentions that Psycho was “an enormous commercial success, but oddly not critically acclaimed in the beginning”. She then adds, “And, for the record, no, I do not take showers.”

The Leigh-Curtis marriage had long been the subject of rumours that the couple fought a lot, even on the sets of their films, and in 1957 Curtis took the advice of Blake Edwards and entered analysis. In 1961 Leigh holidayed without him on the Riviera, but had to return to Los Angeles when her father committed suicide in his real estate office. Although he was having financial problems, he left a note blaming marital difficulties, plus a personal, vitriolic note for his wife, which relatives managed to keep from her.

In March the following year Curtis and Leigh separated legally, and a few days later Leigh was found in a coma on the floor of a hotel bathroom in New York, with an accidental pill overdose blamed. The couple’s California divorce became final in July 1963, but Leigh obtained a quickie divorce in Mexico in September 1962, so that she could marry Robert Brandt, a stockbroker. She kept the children, and Curtis wrote in 1993,

Those girls turned out wonderfully, and Janet deserves most of the credit for that . . . She’s a very fine and very gentle and very sensitive woman, and I admire her.

Leigh gave one of her most accomplished performances in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), that of the enigmatic Rosie, who meets a troubled serviceman (Frank Sinatra) during a train journey and falls in love with him in the course of a cryptic conversation:

Rosie was one of my most difficult roles, not in length, but in content. The character was plunked down in the middle of the script, with no apparent connection to anyone, transmitting non sequiturs while sending meaningful rays through her eyes.

A brilliant study of brainwashing and political chicanery, The Manchurian Candidate, in the famous words of George Axelrod, who adapted Richard Condon’s novel, “went from failure to classic without ever passing through success”.

Leigh played another Rosie in the musical Bye Bye Birdie (1963). In the original Broadway show that part had been the leading one, played by Chita Rivera, but the film was heavily adapted to showcase the studio’s new contractee (and protégée of the director George Sidney) Ann-Margret.

After she appeared in the comedy Wives and Lovers (1963) with her old pal Van Johnson, Leigh’s screen roles became more sporadic, though her fine performance as the ex-wife of private eye Paul Newman in the thriller Harper (1966) was lauded as one of the best things in the film.

She made her Broadway début starring with Jack Cassidy in Bob Barry’s thriller Murder Among Friends (1975) and she worked regularly on television. In 1966 she appeared in two episodes of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. which were released in Europe as a feature film, The Spy in the Green Hat. She was a guest star on such series as Love Boat and Murder, She Wrote, and in 1975 she starred in an unsettling Columbo episode entitled “Forgotten Lady”, in which she played an ageing, reclusive movie star constantly watching one of her old films – clips from Walkin’ My Baby Back Home. She appeared with her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis in John Carpenter’s ghost story The Fog (1980), and more recently had a supporting role in Steve Miner’s Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998), which starred Jamie in the role she had created in the original Halloween(1978).

A lifelong Democrat, Leigh was an active political campaigner in the 1960s, particularly for Adlai Stevenson and then the Kennedys, with whom she became good friends. In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson asked her to be ambassador to Finland, but she felt it was too early in her marriage to contemplate separation. For years she worked tirelessly for the charity Share (Share Happiness and Reap Endlessly).

Tom Vallance

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