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 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.
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.
Donald Pleasence was one of the great character actors of film. He was born in 1919 in Nottinghamshire. After an extensive stage career he began making films in 1954 in the U.K. in “The Beachcomber”. His film highlights include “The Wind Cannot Read” in 1958, “The Great Escape” in 1963 and as the villian ‘Blofeld’ in the James Bond, “You Only Live Twice” in 1967. He made several movies in Hollywood including the thriller “Halloween” in 1978. He died in France in 1995.
Adam Benedick & Anthony Hayward’s “Independent” obituary:
Donald Pleasence, actor: born Worksop, Nottinghamshire 5 October 1919; OBE 1994; author of Scouse The Mouse 1977, Scouse in New York 1978; married 1940 Miriam Raymond (two daughters; marriage dissolved 1958), 1959 Josephine Crombie (two daughters; marriage dissolved 1970), 1970 Meira Shore (one daughter; marriage dissolved), 1989 Linda Woolam; died St Paul de Vence, France 2 February 1995.
The odd man out: master of low cunning and of sinister poise, a threat to anyone’s peace of mind, his own as often as not. He specialised in conspicuous self-effacement. And if his roles happened not to be sinister or self-effacing he made them so. His acting was decisive, distinct, disconcerting and dreadful in the sense that he filled with fascinated fear those who watched him. Both on stage, and off.
He was odd the first time I ever saw him nearly half a century ago in the golden days of the Arts Theatre. It was a play by Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis Clos, done into English as Vicious Circle and acted by Alec Guinness. Beatrix Lehmann, Betty Ann Davies. Peter Brook, in his twenties, directed. Pleasence was the watcher, the bell-hop, a sort of Buttons. A tiny part and supposedly self-effacing but of course unforgettable, like most of his theatrical acting. The knack of being glaringly off-centre rarely failed to catch the imagination even if the knackgrew a touch predictable.
Pleasence could be pleasant. After spells in rep at Birmingham and Bristol he was charming for example as the timorous North Country shoemaker Willie Mossop in Hobson’s Choice (1952) – again at the then invaluable Arts – and after tiny parts in London and New York with Olivier’s company in Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra had a play of his own, Ebb Tide (1952), acted at the Edinburgh Festival which was judged good enough to go to the Royal Court.
Pleasence went to Stratford-upon-Avon and turned up as Lepidus in the Redgrave-Ashcroft Antony and Cleopatra. He was the Dauphin to Dorothy Tutin’s Joan of Arc in another Brook production, Anouilh’s The Lark (1956); but the part that made him famous was the tramp in Pinter’s The Caretaker (1960), again at the Arts.
No one who saw him is likely to forget the cringing, whining wheedling, fearful and fearsome ambiguity of that tramp with his dreams of getting down to Sidcup. The cunning way in which he dealt with those two strange brothers in those seedy premises, andhis beady-eyed resolve to have things his way brought the play into sinister but comic focus.
Pleasence’s voice, at once incisive, rasping, calculated, cold, sounded like iron filings. When the play went to the West End and thence to Broadway he went with it. He had been perfect. He had made the oily, wily, anxious little character his own; and when the play was revived in 1990 there was no question that the actor who created the part should play it again. He did so superbly.
He loomed impressively in other West End plays. As Anouilh’s Poor Bitos (1967), solitary, self-pitying, eery, he sent shivers down most spines and as the Eichmann-type character in Robert Shaw’s The Man in The Glass Booth (1967, directed by Pinter) he went back to Broadway and won the London Variety Award for Stage Actor of the Year (1968).
Variety? Pleasence’s talents as an actor “did not that way tend”; but so what? His line was unrivalled in its nervy disclosure of fearful imaginings and private suffering, unrelieved solitude and sweaty suspicion. Small wonder if Pinter chose him againfor a double bill of his plays, The Basement and Tea Party in 1970 at the Duchess, where The Caretaker had thrived a decade earlier.
When however Pleasence had the misfortune to experience in Simon Gray’s Wise Child the kind of swift failure in which Broadway specialises – he played the transvestite role of Mrs Artminster created in London by Alec Guinness – he turned more and more totelevision and the cinema. He always dreaded being out of work.
Having settled for the screen, big or small, he might not have got the kicks which the theatre brought him (and us) but his nightmare of unemployment receded. His love of the stage had once or twice cost him dear. Had he not turned down a fortune from a film offer to play the title role in The Caretaker? Had he not gone on to film it for nothing when more Hollywood gold had beckoned?
Still, his re-creation of his original role on stage five years ago in a revival of The Caretaker showed that at 70 he had lost none of that indefinably eery power to give us the shivers with a blue-eyed stare. Had it come from art alone or from his wartime experiences?
Having registered as a conscientious objector, he joined the RAF when he saw how fellow-pacifists regarded without apparent emotion or guilt the Nazi bombing of London; and as a member of a bomber’s crew he flew 60 missions over Germany before being shotdown and imprisoned.
Adam Benedick Well-known as a star of the cinema screen, giving menacing performances in the title role of Dr Crippen (1962) and as the psychiatrist Sam Loomis in the Halloween series of supernatural chillers, Donald Pleasance also brought his sinister looks to television in a variety of productions, from a controversial Fifties version of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to appearances in Armchair Mystery Theatre and The Falklands Factor, writes Anthony Hayward. His piercing, psychotic stare, hushed voiceand bald head were his trademarks, in almost 200 films and as many television programmes over half a century.
Born in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, the son of a station master, Pleasance followed his father into the railways on leaving school by becoming clerk-in-charge at Swinton station, in south Yorkshire, but his ambition was to be an actor. When the chance came, with Jersey Rep in 1939, he started as an assistant stage manager, before making his debut as Hareton in Wuthering Heights. His first London stage appearance was as Valentine in Twelfth Night, three years later.
Shortly afterwards, he joined the RAF for war service as a radio operator and, after being shot down, was a prisoner-of-war from 1944 until 1946, when he returned to the theatre. After his successful stage work with Laurence Olivier in New York and at the Royal Court, London, and Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, Pleasence made his name as a film actor.
He made his big-screen debut as Tromp in the 1954 picture The Beachcomber and followed it with such notable films as Look Back in Anger (1959), The Flesh and the Fiends (1960, as a 19th-century grave-robber), Spare the Rod (1961, as an embittered headmaster with a penchant for corporal punishment), Dr Crippen (which established him as a brilliant player of evil roles), The Great Escape (1963, as Blythe, the forger of visas and other documents) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).
However, his prolific screen appearances – which in some years meant he starred in half-a-dozen pictures – were not all successful. “I make films for money,” he once said. “I never, ever watch them.” In the James Bond feature You Only Live Twice (1967),he played the badly scarred, wonky-eyed arch-villain Ernest Blofeld, the evil boss of SPECTRE, although he was subsequently considered not ideal for the role and replace by Telly Savalas and Charles Gray, who dispensed with the facial disfigurement.
Pleasence was back on top form in Henry VIII and his Six Wives (1972), in the role of Thomas Cromwell, gleefully weeding out opponents to the King’s divorce. He appeared alongside Michael Caine in both Kidnapped (1971, playing the niggardly Uncle Ebenezer in the Robert Louis Stevenson classic) and the spy thriller The Black Windmill (1974, as the twitchy paymaster). Pleasence was given a new lease of life as Dr Sam Loomis, the psychiatrist haunted by evil, in the Halloween series of supernatural horror films, starting in 1978, and later appeared in Woody Allen’s Shadows and Fog (1991).
Although his television appearances were infrequent after he gained film stardom, they were many and usually made their mark. He made his debut as early as 1946, in I Want to Be A Doctor, and eight years later won acclaim for his performances in the BBC’s 1984, alongside Peter Cushing. The adaptation, by Nigel Kneale, author of the Quatermass Experiment, caused an outcry among viewers because it was screened on a Sunday evening, a time when they were used to enjoying more sedate dramas.
Later Pleasence became known as the presenter and producer of Armchair Mystery Theatre for several years (starting in 1960), also acting in some episodes. He went on to perform on American and Canadian television. appearing in episodes of The Twilight Zone, Orson Welles’s Great Mysteries and Columbo. He also appeared in Centennial (1978-79), as Samuel Purchase in the series based on James Michener’s epic novel, Dennis Potter’s Blade on the Feather (1980), as an ageing Establishment figure suddenly exposed as a homosexual and Soviet spy – in the wake of the Anthony Blunt scandal – The Barchester Chronicles (1982), in which he gave a touching performance as the Rev Septimus Harding in a seven-part adaptation of Trollope, The Falkland s Factor (1983), DonShaw’s controversial Play for Today that featured him as Dr Samuel Johnson, who opposed a Falklands war in 1770 when the Spanish attempted to invade the islands and oust the British.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Russell Todd was born in 1958 in Albany, New York. He made his movie debut in 1980 in “He Knows You’re Alone”. Other movies include “Friday the 13th part Two” and “Chopping Mall”. Now retired from acting, his last movie was in 1996.
Robert Redford(born August 18, 1936),[ is an American actor, film director, producer, businessman, environmentalist, philanthropist, and founder of theSundance Film Festival. He has received two Oscars: one in 1981 for directing Ordinary People, and one for Lifetime Achievement in 2002. In 2010 he was awarded French Knighthood in the Legion d’Honneur. At the height of Redford’s fame in the late 1960s to 1980s, he was often described as one of the world’s most attractive men and remains one of the most popular movie stars.
TCM overview:
Robert Redford’s all-American blond good looks and subtle, sardonic sense of humor made him one of the most popular leading men of the late 1960s into the 1970s in features like “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969), “The Sting” (1973) and “All the President’s Men” (1976). Along with his peers Warren Beatty and Paul Newman, he was one of the rare movie icons who could balance being both a respected actor as well as undeniable sex symbol – seen most effectively with his heartfelt turn in “The Way We Were” (1973) – a timeless romance which caused many a female heart to flutter through the years. Growing into his age gracefully, he branched out, wisely parlaying his acting fame into an Oscar-winning career as a director, and becoming a patron saint of sorts to independent filmmakers by establishing the Sundance Film Festival and Sundance Institute, as well as numerous critically acclaimed projects that supported original moviemaking outside the Hollywood system.
Redford’s early years showed a distinct rebellious streak that carried well into adulthood. The son of a Standard Oil accountant, Charles Robert Redford, born Aug. 18, 1936, lost his mother while still in his teens, which spurred a rash of adolescent misdemeanors, as well as the loss of a baseball scholarship to the University of Colorado due to alcohol-related infractions. He departed the school in 1957 to attend the Pratt Institute of Art before taking a tour of Europe to explore his painterly side. He returned to the States and promptly decided on a career in acting, which he studied at the acclaimed American Academy of Dramatic Arts. In 1958, Redford married Lola Van Wagenen, with whom he had four children between 1959 and 1970 (the first, Scott, died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in 1959).
Redford’s tall frame and physical appeal made him a natural for television and theater producers looking for upstanding young men, so he found himself working regularly on quality shows like “Playhouse 90” (CBS, 1956-1961), in which he appeared in the series’ finale episode, Rod Serling’s “In the Presence of Mine Enemies;” Sidney Lumet’s TV presentation of “The Iceman Cometh” (1960) with Jason Robards; as well as quick paychecks like the game show “Play Your Hunch” (NBC, 1960-1962). He also worked extensively on stage during this period, with his Broadway debut coming in 1959’s “Tall Story” (he also had an uncredited role in the 1960 film version) and he eventually worked his way up to major productions like Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park” in 1963.
An Emmy nod for an episode of “Alcoa Premiere” (NBC, 1961-63) preceded his first substantial film role in “War Hunt” (1962), a Korean War drama about a psychotic soldier (John Saxon) in an Army platoon. Also making his debut in the project was future filmmaker Sydney Pollack, a longtime friend of Redford’s and his director on several projects, including “Jeremiah Johnson” (1972) and “The Way We Were.” More television followed – including three stints on “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” (NBC, 1955-1965); “The Twilight Zone” (CBS, 1959-1964) in a memorable turn as the Angel of Death; and “The Defenders” (CBS, 1961-65) – but he graduated to regular film work after his success in “Barefoot in the Park.” What followed was a string of roles in solid if unremarkable features that played up Redford’s looks rather than his talent. He was a ’30s-era movie star and closeted homosexual in “Inside Daisy Clover” (1965); a Southern prison escapee targeted by a conflicted sheriff (Marlon Brando) in Arthur Penn’s “The Chase” (1966); and a railway representative who falls for a flirtatious Natalie Wood in “This Property Is Condemned” (1966), with Francis Ford Coppola adapting the Tennessee Williams play for director Sydney Pollack.
Sensing that his career was heading into stagnant waters, Redford decided to pass on projects like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966) and “The Graduate” (1967) – both of which would have perpetuated his streak of bland leading men; Redford was holding out for something more substantial. His deliverance came in the form of George Roy Hill’s Western adventure, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969), which partnered him with Paul Newman as the rowdy title outlaws. Redford was not favored for the role by 20th Century Fox, but Hill was adamant about him in the role of the Sundance Kid. The result was a blockbuster hit and a multiple Oscar winner, as well as the second act of Redford’s career. His turn as the breezy, death-defying Kid redefined his screen persona, and gave him a name on which to hang many of his future endeavors.
After “Sundance,” Redford embarked on a personal crusade to participate in projects that emphasized quality over concept and star power. His efforts to this end, while not always successful at the box office, were a remarkable string of mature and involving dramas, including “Downhill Racer” (1969), with Redford as an egotistical skier who clashes with coach Gene Hackman (Redford also served as executive producer); “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here” (1969), with Redford as a sheriff on the trail of Indian Robert Blake, who has killed his white lover’s father; and “Little Fauss and Big Halsey” (1970), with Redford and Michael J. Pollard as motorcycle racers. “The Hot Rock” (1972) was a breezy comedy based on a Donald Westlake novel, with Redford leading an inept team of jewel thieves, but it failed to score with audiences. More successful was “Jeremiah Johnson,” a fact-based Western for Sydney Pollack about a vengeful mountain man (Redford) hunting the Indian tribe that butchered his family, and “The Candidate” (1972), a darkly comic political satire about a lawyer (Redford) corralled into running for a senatorial seat by a savvy campaign expert (Peter Boyle). In each case, Redford stepped as far away from his previous Hollywood image as possible, succeeding in winning both critical and moviegoer praise for these risky moves.
The banner year 1973 marked the beginning of Redford’s reign as Hollywood’s top audience draw with back-to-back blockbusters. “The Way We Were” reunited him with Pollack for a tear-jerking period romance between WASPy collegian Redford and a political activist (Barbra Streisand). The film yielded a massive chart hit with Streisand’s theme song, and set a new standard for Hollywood romances to follow. Redford then paired again with Hill and Newman for “The Sting,” a sparkling caper comedy about two con men who aspire to fleece a mob boss (Robert Shaw). The picture, which touched off a modest revival of the music of jazz era composer Scott Joplin, pulled in $160 million at the box office and gave Redford his sole Oscar nomination for acting.
After a slight stumble as Jay Gatsby in Jack Clayton’s flawed “The Great Gatsby” (1974) and as a barnstorming trick pilot in George Roy Hill’s “The Great Waldo Pepper” (1975), Redford enjoyed a second two-fer of hits with “Three Days of the Condor” (1975) and “All the President’s Men” (1976). The former was a tense spy thriller from Sydney Pollack about a CIA operative (Redford) on the run from his own agency, while the latter was a superior political drama based on the investigation of The Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and Bob Woodward (Redford) into the Watergate break-in, which eventually lead to the ousting of President Richard Nixon. The film earned several Academy Awards and yielded a substantial hit for Redford’s production company, Wildwood films, which helped bring the picture to the screen. After a supporting role in Richard Attenborough’s massive, all-star World War II drama “A Bridge Too Far” (1977), Redford ended the 1970s on a high note with Sydney Pollack’s “The Electric Horseman” (1979), an engaging hit about a failed rodeo champion searching for dignity.
Redford made his directorial debut in 1980 with “Ordinary People,” a gripping drama about a family struggling to come to grips with their son’s depression and guilt over the death of a sibling. Redford drew remarkable performances from his cast, especially Mary Tyler Moore as a brittle grieving mother, and earned an Oscar for Best Director. The following year, he founded The Sundance Institute, a non-profit organization built to assist aspiring filmmakers and theater artists in developing their talent. Located in Park City, UT, near where he had maintained a home since the early ’60s, Redford soon expanded the institute’s influence to the Utah/U.S. Film Festival, which was transformed into the Sundance Film Festival in 1985 and became one of the leading film events for independent filmmakers in America. Years later, a cable channel and chain of theaters – all bearing the Sundance brand – were launched in 1996 and 2005, respectively.
Redford continued to act throughout the 1980s, though the quality of his pictures waxed and waned throughout the decade. Hits included “Brubaker” (1980), a tough drama about a prison warden who impersonates an inmate to investigate the conditions in his own facility; Barry Levinson’s entrancing baseball fantasy “The Natural” (1984), with Redford as a former golden boy player who returns to the majors to give hope to a struggling team; and Sydney Pollack’s sweeping, Oscar-winning period romance “Out of Africa” (1985), with Redford as a big-game hunter in Africa who romances Danish author Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep). Less successful were Ivan Reitman’s comedy “Legal Eagles” (1985), which floundered at the box office and arrived on syndicated television with a completely different ending, and Redford’s sophomore directorial effort, “The Milagro Beanfield War” (1988), which earned mixed reviews and middling box office returns. Redford also divorced his wife in 1985 and courted several notable women, including his “Milagro” star Sonia Braga, before settling into a long term relationship with German artist Sibylle Szaggars in 1996.
The 1990s saw Redford balancing acting with behind-the-camera work on a regular basis, as well as maintaining his growing Sundance empire. “Havana” (1990) was a failed period drama, with Redford as an American gambler who is drawn into the Cuban revolution of 1960, while “Sneakers” (1992) was an entertaining comedy/drama with Redford as the leader of a team of rogue security operatives – including Sidney Poitier, Ben Kingsley, River Phoenix and Dan Aykroyd – who tangle with nefarious government types. “Indecent Proposal” (1993) was perhaps the most dreadful film on Redford’s CV – directed by Adrian Lyne, it was exploitation tricked out as a concept movie, with Redford as an amoral millionaire who offers a money-strapped couple (Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson) a fortune if he can sleep with the wife for one night. “Up Close and Personal” (1996) was a glossy and fictionalized take on the life of news reporter Jessica Savitch with a script by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. The former film made a mint; the latter film was memorable only for spawning the Celine Dion soundtrack single, “Because I loved You” – certainly not for any chemistry or lack thereof between the veteran Redford and the much younger Michelle Pfeiffer.
Redford’s efforts as director and producer during this period were more rewarding to audiences and to his own career. Redford directed, produced, and narrated, “A River Runs Through It” (1992) a moving period drama about two young men (Brad Pitt and Craig Sheffer) coming of age during the first World War and Great Depression. Exceptionally well performed by its cast, it earned an Oscar for Best Cinematography, as well as a director nomination for Redford. He followed this with “Quiz Show” (1994), a fascinating drama about the participants in the infamous cheating scandal that rocked the TV game show boom of the 1950s. Though the film struggled to find a substantial audience, it was lauded for its dramatic quality and received four Oscar nominations, including Best Director for Redford and Best Adapted screenplay for Paul Attanasio. And 1998’s “The Horse Whisperer” marked the first time Redford directed, produced and starred in the same picture. The film, about a horse trainer (Redford) who helps a young rider (Scarlett Johansson) recover from a traumatic injury, received mixed reviews but scored major ticket sales. Redford also served as producer for numerous independent features during the 1990s, including Michael Apted’s documentary “Incident at Oglala” (1992), which he also narrated; Edward Burns’ “She’s the One” (1996); the HBO Native American series “Grand Avenue” (1996); and “Slums of Beverly Hills” (1998). The ’90s also saw him bring home a flurry of awards, including the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1994 and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild in 1996.
Redford’s next directorial effort, “The Legend of Bagger Vance” (2000), starred Will Smith as a mystical golf caddy who aides a struggling duffer (Matt Damon) to recover his game and his self-confidence. The film performed well at the box office, due mainly to its two leads’ star appeal, but received middling reviews. Redford himself made sporadic film appearances in Tony Scott’s action hit “Spy Game” (2001) and “The Last Castle” (2001) – the latter of which tanked despite the presence of James Gandolfini and Mark Ruffalo. More successful was “The Motorcycle Diaries” (2004), which Redford produced, as well as several TV-movie adaptations of Tony Hillerman’s Native American mysteries – including “Skinwalkers” (2002), “Coyote Waits” (2003), and “A Thief of Time” (2004), which aired on PBS. For his numerous contributions to independent cinema, Redford was given an honorary Oscar in 2002. In 2005, Redford was honored alongside Tony Bennett, actress Julie Harris, and Tina Turner by the Kennedy Center.
Redford’s turns as a leading man continued into the 21st century, though they became harder to find. The well-received thriller “The Clearing” (2004) barely saw a theatrical release, and while Lasse Hallstrom’s “An Unfinished Life” gave Redford a plum role as a cantankerous rancher who is forced to reconcile with his daughter-in-law (Jennifer Lopez), the film vanished at the box office due to the restructuring of its distributor, Miramax. He later lent his gravelly tones to the horse Ike in the live-action/CGI remake of “Charlotte’s Web” (2006) and returned to directing with the politically-charged drama “Lions for Lambs” (2007), co-starring Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise (who also produced under his new shingle at United Artists). The picture opened to moderate business and less-than-enthusiastic reviews. Redford worked both sides of the camera in the sociopolitical drama “The Company You Keep” (2013), directing a script by Lem Dobbs (“The Limey”) and starring as a former member of a 1960s radical group in hiding whose new identity is threatened with exposure by a young investigative journalist (Shia LeBeouf). He followed that with the claustrophobic “All Is Lost” (2013), in which he played an unnamed man whose solo ocean voyage becomes a fight for survival.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
