James Mitchell had two distinct careers in the performing arts. Initially he was an acclaimed dancer in Broadway musicals and films including “Oklahoma” in 1955 and “Carousel” in 1956. In his later years he starred for many years(until his death) in the day time TV series “All My Children”. He died in 2010 at the age of 89.
Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:
There are legions of actors who are deeply grateful for the existence of long-running television soap operas. James Mitchell, who has died aged 89, was one of them. He enjoyed playing the wily patriarch Palmer Cortlandt in the popular US daytime soap All My Children from 1979 to 2008. It came at the right time in his career. At 59, his dancing days were over and his film acting had failed to catch fire.
The majority of loyal fans of All My Children were probably not aware that the debonair, grey-haired Mitchell, still svelte and handsome, had been a leading dancer for many years, particularly associated with the celebrated choreographer Agnes de Mille. According to De Mille, Mitchell had “probably the strongest arms in the business, and the adagio style developed by him and his partners has become since a valued addition to ballet vocabulary”.
Mitchell, whose parents emigrated from England, was born on a fruit farm in Sacramento, California. He was three years old when his mother left his father and returned to England with his two younger siblings. His farmer father, feeling unable to bring up his son alone, gave him up to foster parents. They were vaudevillians and Mitchell first appeared on stage as part of their act. Some years later his father, who had remarried, claimed him back. Mitchell was devastated. Life on a farm was not for him and he decided to get back on the stage as soon as he could.
At 17, Mitchell made for Los Angeles, where he studied at City College. At the same time, he was introduced to modern dance at the school of the famed teacher and choreographer Lester Horton. Mitchell soon joined Horton’s Dance Theatre of Los Angeles and was one of the Lester Horton Dancers who appeared in a few Hollywood musicals in the early 1940s. He was also featured in a South Sea Island dance duet with Bella Lewitzky in White Savage (1943), a camp piece of Technicolor exotica starring Maria Montez.
In 1944, Mitchell began his long partnership with De Mille when she cast him as a dancer in the Broadway musical Bloomer Girl starring Celeste Holm. He also appeared in the original Broadway productions of Brigadoon (1947) and Paint Your Wagon (1951), both choreographed by De Mille.
In the meantime, Mitchell was beginning to get non-dancing supporting roles in some good movies. In Raoul Walsh’s genuinely tragic western Colorado Territory (1949), he played outlaw Joel McCrea’s nasty cohort; again with McCrea, he was a young doctor in Jacques Tourneur’s Stars in My Crown (1950), and in two gripping Anthony Mann dramas, he was darkened and moustachioed as a Mexican migrant worker in Border Incident (1949), and darkened further as a Native American in Devil’s Doorway (1950).
Mitchell also shone in a few film musicals in which he could display his dancing skills. As bayou fisherman Mario Lanza’s friend in The Toast of New Orleans (1950), he has a spirited duet with Rita Moreno, and an erotic one with Cyd Charisse in an Arabian Nights number from Deep in My Heart (1954), a biopic of the American composer Sigmund Romberg. A year later, he was reunited with De Mille on the movie version of Oklahoma! for the 20-minute dream ballet.
Ironically, Mitchell did not dance in the best musical in which he appeared. In Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon (1953), he has the thankless role of Charisse’s manager, boyfriend and choreographer (an experience he disliked so much he refused to see the film) who is sniffy about his protege deserting the ballet for a Broadway musical. Not so Mitchell himself, who had leading roles in Carnival! (1961), as Marco the Magnificent, and Mack & Mabel (1974), as the movie director William Desmond Taylor.
From 1979, Mitchell settled into the role of Palmer Cortlandt, a man audiences loved to hate. “He adored playing mean,” explained the costume designer Albert Wolsky, Mitchell’s partner since they met on the film The Turning Point in 1977. Albert survives him.
• James Mitchell, actor and dancer; born 29 February 1920; died 22 January
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Yaphet Kotto was born in 1937 in New York. He rose to fame for his role in the first Roger Moore ‘James Bond’ “Live and Let Die” in 1973. His other movies include “The Liberation of L.B. Jones” and “The Running Man”. Yaphet Kotto died in 2021.
TCM overview:
A commanding presence in features and television since the early 1970s, Yaphet Kotto played physically powerful, often intimidating African-American men in such popular films as “Live and Let Die” (1973), “Blue Collar” (1978), “Alien” (1979) and “Midnight Run” (1988). He emerged from the New York stage in the early 1960s, working steadily in small but significant roles in features like “The Thomas Crown Affair” (1967) before moving up to supporting roles and leads in “Across 110th Street” (1971). His star-making turn came as the villainous Dr. Kananga in “Live and Let Die” (1973), which marked Roger Moore’s debut as James Bond and preceded a long run as a popular character actor in such major features as “Alien” (1979) and “Brubaker” (1980). Kotto was stranded in minor-league acting features for much of the 1980s, though he rebounded in the early 1990s as the formidable Lt. Al Giardello on the critically acclaimed “Homicide: Life on the Street” (NBC, 1993-2000). Throughout his long and varied career, Kotto’s performances were marked by an unerring sense of gravity, honesty and intelligence, which served him well in avoiding many of the career pitfalls suffered by African-American actors.
Born Nov. 15, 1939 in New York City, Yaphet Frederick Kotto was the son of Avraham Kotto, a businessman from Cameroon, and his wife Gladys, a nurse and army officer. Both of Kotto’s parents were Jewish, which contributed greatly to a rough childhood spent defending both his faith and his race. As a teenager, he wandered into a screening of “On the Waterfront” (1954) and became captivated by Marlon Brando’s performance. Kotto soon began studying at the Actors’ Mobile Studio and made his professional debut as a performer at 19 in a production of “Othello.” More stage roles preceded his first feature film appearance as an uncredited extra in the Rat Pack Western comedy “4 For Texas” (1963). The following year, he gave a supporting turn in Michael Roemer’s pioneering independent film “Nothing But a Man” (1964), a low-budget drama about contemporary black life produced outside of the studio system. Kotto soon returned to the stage, co-starring with Ossie Davis and Louis Gossett, Jr. in “The Zulu and the Zebra” in 1965 before replacing James Earl Jones in “The Great White Hope” (1969). Between plays, he turned up as a professional thief in “The Thomas Crown Affair” (1967) and a sympathetic bartender in “5 Card Stud” (1969) with Dean Martin and Robert Mitchum.
Kotto avoided many of the stereotypical roles offered to African-American actors during the 1970s, though he would admit in interviews that the paucity of quality projects required him to occasionally participate in Blaxploitation features like “Truck Turner” (1974) and “Friday Foster” (1975). But even in those films, he projected an innately masculine strength and confidence that elevated him above the material. Kotto found better showcases for those qualities in films like “The Liberation of L.B. Jones” (1970), as a young man who exacted terrible revenge on the white landowner who had beaten him, and “Across 110th Street” (1971), a gritty crime drama which pitted his young police lieutenant against Anthony Quinn’s aging lion of a police captain while pursuing crooks with stolen Mob money. During this period, Kotto also directed in “The Limit” (1972), a little-seen action-thriller about a motorcycle cop, played by Kotto, who took on a biker gang led by Ted Cassidy.
Kotto’s work for MGM on “Across 110th Street” led to his casting as Dr. Kananga, a Caribbean dictator who secretly operated a heroin business in the James Bond adventure “Live and Let Die” (1973). The international exposure afforded by the film led to more dramatic roles in high-profile projects including “Roots” (ABC, 1977) and Irvin Kershner’s “Raid on Entebbe” (NBC, 1977), an all-star TV movie based on Operation Entebbe, a raid carried out by Israeli special forces against Palestinian terrorists that had taken an Air France plane and its passengers hostage in Uganda. Kotto received an Emmy nomination for his performance as the charismatic but megalomaniacal Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. He soon returned to features, giving memorable performances as an autoworker who robbed his union headquarters in Paul Schrader’s “Blue Collar” (1978) and as an inmate who aided warden Robert Redford in reforming a troubled prison in “Brubaker” (1980). Kotto was also a standout in the ensemble cast for Ridley Scott’s science fiction classic “Alien” (1979) as Parker, the chief engineer on an ill-fated spaceship stalked by an aggressive extraterrestrial. Shortly after completing the film, Kotto was approached by director Irvin Kershner to play Lando Calrissian in “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980), but declined, citing fears that the character would result in his being typecast as a science fiction actor.
Kotto moved fluidly between features and television throughout the 1980s, earning critical acclaim as a former slave who led an uprising in “A House Divided: Denmark Vessey’s Rebellion” (PBS, 1982). But the quality of Kotto’s film projects went into decline as the decade wore on, with such genre pictures as “Warning Sign” (1986), “Eye of the Tiger” (1986) and the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle “The Running Man” (1987) relying more on his imposing physical presence than his acting abilities. He received a rare comic showcase as an FBI agent with a penchant for stealing cigarettes in “Midnight Run” (1988), with Robert DeNiro and Charles Grodin, but kept a low profile until 1993, when he was cast as Lt. Al Giardello on the critically acclaimed series “Homicide: Life on the Street.” A highly cultured, articulate man of Italian-American and African-American heritage, Giardello served as mentor for the detectives of the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide unit throughout the series’ seven-season run, as well as a reunion TV feature, “Homicide: The Movie” (NBC, 2000), which saw Giardello suffer a fatal shooting while running for mayor. Kotto was reportedly displeased by the lack of substantive storylines given to the character, and turned to penning scripts for several episodes, including a well-regarded 1997 story in which a murder suspect holed up in €a former African Revival Movement headquarters.
By Paul Gaita
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
‘ Guardian” obituary in 2021.
In the 1985 TV movie Badge of the Assassin, Yaphet Kotto, who has died aged 81, is told by Alex Rocco, playing an NYPD detective, that the only reason he has been assigned to the investigation of a black militant murder of two cops is because he is a black detective. As Rocco storms away, Kotto calls out to him: “Who told you I was a black detective?”
This could be a metaphor for Kotto’s career. His considerable acting talent was often subsumed by his appearance, almost the antithesis of what a Hollywood leading man, especially a black one, needed to be in that era. Tall and strongly built, Kotto was not a handsome Sidney Poitier, the breakthrough black actor of the 1960s. “I’m always called powerful, bulky or imposing … I think I have this image as a monster,” Kotto said, but his distinctive broad face, with sleepy eyes, quick smile and a slight lisp, was a character actor’s dream, a tool he manipulated through violence and sensitivity to bring subtleties to even the least subtle of roles.
He may be best remembered for doing just that in the James Bond film Live and Let Die (1973) – in which he played the African ruler Dr Kananga and his gangster alter ego, Mr Big, making subtlety even more difficult (“I was too afraid of coming off like Mantan Moreland,” he said, referring to the vaudevillian known for his exaggerated facial expressions) – and in Midnight Run (1988), as the FBI agent Alonzo Mosely, whose chase for his lost ID card drives the plot. His finest film was Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar (1978), a landmark study of both race and class in the US, which would have lost its power had Schrader cast matinee idols instead of Kotto, Harvey Keitel and Richard Pryor.
Kotto’s Bond role may have drawn on his Emmy-nominated performance as the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the TV movie Raid on Entebbe (1976), while his memorable Parker in Alien (1979) echoed Blue Collar when he and Harry Dean Stanton threaten to strike. Sadly, when Kotto became the first black actor to play Othello in a feature film, it was in Liz White’s little-seen 1980 version.Advertisementhttps://afb74697ca0eda81d327be34133576a3.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Kotto was born in New York City. His mother, Gladys Marie, was a nurse of Antiguan and Panamanian background; his father was, in Kotto’s telling, a businessman, Njoki Manga Bell, descended from Cameroonian royalty, who jumped ship in the US and changed his name to Avraham Kotto. His father adopted Judaism, as did his mother, a former Roman Catholic. From the age of three, after his parents divorced, Kotto was raised in the Bronx by his maternal grandparents, though he retained his Jewish identity.
Kotto’s life changed at 16 when he saw Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. He “knew from that moment I wanted to be an actor”. He enrolled in a local theatre school and made his stage debut as Othello at 19. His first film role was uncredited in Four for Texas (1963); his first credit came in the 1964 civil rights drama Nothing But a Man, starring Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln and Julius Harris, who 24 years later played Kotto’s henchman Tee Hee in Live and Let Die.
But he concentrated on the stage: in 1965 he played on Broadway in The Zulu and the Zayda, and the actor Judy Holliday became his mentor, which led to his understudying and then replacing James Earl Jones in The Great White Hope. Kotto drew critical praise for his portrayal of the boxer Jack Jefferson (based on Jack Johnson).
After Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, Kotto released a record, Have You Ever Seen the Blues, reading his own words over what Billboard called “an infectious dance beat”. His film career expanded and in 1972 he played the title role in Larry Cohen’s Bone, a black comedy American B-movie take on Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning. He was Anthony Quinn’s police foil in Across 110th Street, and played the villain Harvard Blue in Jonathan Kaplan’s Truck Turner, with Isaac Hayes as the eponymous Shaft manqué.
By the 1980s his jobbing work was interspersed with occasional meatier roles, as in Peter Hyams’ The Star Chamber (1983) and alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Running Man (1987), but he turned down a part in the civil war drama Glory (1989), saying the movie was about the white man commanding a regiment of black soldiers. “Do you see me taking orders like that?” he asked, though Denzel Washington won an Oscar rebelling against orders in the film. He also turned down Billy Dee Williams’ Star Wars role as Lando Calrissian and Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
But his career revived with one of his greatest roles. In the longrunning (1993-99) TV series Homicide: Life on the Street, he played the shift commander Lt Al Giardello, whose background, described by the show’s creator, David Simon, as “the unlikeliest Sicilian”, was never explained, simply taken for granted. After a Homicide movie in 2000, Kotto’s only other film role was reprising his Midnight Run character in the aptly titled Witless Protection (2008).
By that time Kotto had moved to Manila with his Filipino third wife, Tessie Sinahon, with whom he ran an artists’ retreat in southern Leyte. Both earlier marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by Tessie, by a daughter, Natasha, and two sons, Fred and Robert, from his first marriage, to Rita Ingrid Dittman, and three daughters, Sarada, Mirabai and Salina, from his second, to Antoinette Pettyjohn.
Yaphet Frederick Kotto, actor, born 15 November 1939; died 15 March 2021
Richard Anderson was born in 1926 in New Jersey. He made his movie debut in 1950 in “The Magnificent Yankee”. In the 1950’s he starred in “Forbidden Planet” and “The Long Hot Summer”. In the 1970’s he starred in the hit TV series “The Six Million Dollar Man” and “The Bionic Woman”.
TCM overview:
A staple on episodic television since the early 1960s, actor and producer Richard Anderson hit his stride in the mid-1970s as the authoritative if sartorially challenged Oscar Goldman, boss to both “The Six Million Dollar Man” (ABC, 1974-78) and “The Bionic Woman” (ABC, 1976-77; NBC, 1977-78). The role was among the high points in a long career that encompassed such varied films as the sci-fi classic “Forbidden Planet” (1956), Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory” (1957) and the Paul Newman classic “The Long Hot Summer” (1958), as well as countless television shows and movies. His bionic-related projects, however, retained a fan base for decades after their departure from the airwaves, ensuring him an enduring popularity among television viewers – particularly for the 1970s-born generation – for years to come.
Born in Long Branch, NJ on Aug. 8, 1926, Richard Norman Anderson relocated to Los Angeles at the age of 10 with his parents, Harry and Olga Anderson, and his brother, Robert. Legendary screen actor Gary Cooper had inspired him at an early age, and influenced his decision to become an actor. School productions provided his first performance outlet, but World War II interrupted. Like millions of young men at that time, Anderson served a stint in the U.S. Army. After his discharge, he returned to Los Angeles to study at the Actors’ Laboratory, which preceded a season of summer stock in nearby Laguna Beach and Santa Barbara.
By the late 1940s, Anderson was making appearances in features. The 1947 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s “The Pearl” was among his first screen roles, as was an uncredited turn as a wounded airman in “Twelve O’Clock High” (1949). After displaying his talents on a screen test-style TV series called “Lights! Camera! Action!” (NBC, 1950), he was offered a screen test and a contract at MGM. He chose a scene from the Gary Cooper picture “The Cowboy and the Lady” (1938) for his audition, and from all accounts, nailed it. By 1951, he was appearing in no less than 10 films a year; largely in minor or supporting roles. Among his most notable turns during this period was as the ill-fated friend of Stewart Granger’s “Scaramouche” (1952), whose death sets in motion a plan of revenge against Mel Ferrer’s cruel Marquis. Anderson also met an untimely end at the hands – or claws – of the “Id” monster in the science fiction classic, “Forbidden Planet” (1956), but survived the hype surrounding “The Search for Bridey Murphy” (1956), a low-budget attempt to cash in on a popular book about reincarnation.
In 1957, Anderson asked to be released from his contract. It proved to be the right move for the up-and-comer, as he began landing parts in major features like Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory” (1957), for which he played the French prosecuting officer; Martin Ritt’s “The Long, Hot Summer” (1958), in which he was cast as Joanne Woodward’s weak-willed boyfriend, and “Compulsion” (1959), starring as the brother of accused murderer Dean Stockwell. There were also a few B-pictures like “Curse of the Faceless Man” (1958), which afforded him a rare lead in its tale of a Pompeii victim that returns to life. Anderson’s television output also increased during this period. He had a recurring role on the Disney series “Zorro” (ABC, 1957-59), appearing as a suitor to the masked hero’s love interest, and in 1961, landed his first regular role on a series as a small town lawyer on “Bus Stop” (ABC, 1961-62). That show’s producer, Roy Huggins, would remember Anderson two years later for his drama “The Fugitive” (ABC, 1963-67), and cast him in several roles throughout its tenure on TV, including that of Richard Kimball’s (David Janssen) brother-in-law, Leonard Taft, in the two-part series finale. Anderson also played homicide investigator Lt. Steve Drumm, who took over for Ray Collins’ Lt. Arthur Tragg on the courtroom staple, “Perry Mason” (CBS, 1957-1966).
Whether he wanted it to or not, television eventually came to dominate Anderson’s resume, though there were still plenty of features in the 1960s, including John Frankenheimer’s alarming “Seconds” (1966), where he played one of the plastic surgeons who turn an aged Rock Hudson into an Adonis, and “Tora! Tora! Tora!” (1970), in which his Captain John Earle makes the fatal mistake of ignoring early signs of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II. Anderson’s natural gravitas made him a sought-after spokesman for various companies and organizations for several decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, Anderson was the “Shell Answer Man,” the corporate spokesperson for the Shell Oil Company in a series of television commercials. Later, he was the face of the Kiplinger Newsletter and spokesperson for the National Fragile X Foundation, which benefitted gene research to combat mental impairment in children.
Anderson was exceptionally busy in the years leading up to his most memorable role – there were numerous TV movies, including a turn as a centuries-old physician with a homicidal bent in “The Night Strangler” (ABC, 1973) – the sequel to the phenomenally popular “Night Stalker” (ABC, 1972) – and a recurring role as a police chief in the Burt Reynolds detective series, “Dan August” (ABC, 1970-71). In 1972, Martin Caidin’s science fiction-espionage novel,Cyborg, was adapted into a TV movie for ABC called “The Six Million Dollar Man.” The role of Oscar Goldman, adviser to astronaut-turned-bionic-super agent Steve Austin (Lee Majors) was originally played by Darren McGavin, but following the success of the TV movie, Anderson was brought into play the role in two subsequent ABC TV features – 1973’s “Wine, Women and War” and “Solid Gold Kidnapping” – and eventually, the “Six Million Dollar Man” TV series. Anderson’s Goldman was both boss and friend to Austin, who on more than one occasion risked life and bionic limb to rescue his OSI (Office of Scientific Intelligence) chief. And it was Anderson’s voice that intoned the famous phrase recycled by pop culture enthusiasts for decades after: “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.”
In 1975, a “Six Million Dollar Man” spin-off was built around the character of Jaime Sommers, Steve Austin’s girlfriend, who is given bionic abilities after suffering a terrible parachuting accident. Sommers later becomes an OSI agent like her boyfriend, and Anderson’s Oscar Goldman became her advisor as well on the equally popular series, “The Bionic Woman.” The double duty made him one of the few actors in television history to play the same role on two different television series for two separate networks. Both series were sizable hits during their relatively brief network runs, leaving the actor part of a much-loved childhood memory for a generation of children who grew up in the early 1970s amassing “Six Million Dollar Man” lunchboxes, toys, T-shirts and bedspreads – all of them embossed not only with Majors’ likeness, but Anderson’s as well. He would go on to reprise the role in three TV movie reunions – “The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman” (NBC, 1987), “Bionic Showdown: The Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman” (NBC, 1989) – which featured Sandra Bullock in one of her earliest screen appearances – and the supremely campy “Bionic Ever After?” (CBS, 1994), which saw Goldman giving Jaime away at her wedding to Steve Austin. Anderson also served as co-producer on the last two projects.
Following the end of the bionic series’ television runs, Anderson returned to regular appearances in TV movies and on episodic programs. Among the highlights were the highly regarded suspense thriller, “Murder by Natural Causes” (CBS, 1979), and a turn as President Lyndon B. Johnson in “Hoover vs. the Kennedys: The Second Civil War” (1987). He also returned to series work on several occasions, including the very Oscar Goldman-like Henry Towler, who oversees photographer Jennifer O’Neill and the late model-turned-actor Jon-Erik Hexum’s international capers on “Cover Up” (CBS, 1984-86), and a recurring stint as conservative senator Buck Fallmont on “Dynasty” (ABC, 1981-89). In the 1990s, Anderson’s distinctive voice could be heard in a wide variety of projects, including the narration for “Kung Fu: The Legend Continues” (TNT, 1993-97).
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Angela Greene was born in Dublin in 1921 and was was an Irish actress.
Before becoming an actress, Greene was a model for the John Robert Powersagency.
Born as Angela Catherine Williams, she was the only daughter of Margaret and Joseph Williams. At the age of six, she was adopted by her uncle Eddie Greene, Margaret’s brother, and moved to Flushing, Queens.
Chris Mitchum is the son of actor Robert Mitchum. He was born in 1943 in Los Angeles. He was a popular actor in the 1970’s and his movies include “Chisum”, “Rio Lobo” and “Big Jake” all with John Wayne.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Christopher Mitchum is the second son of actor Robert Mitchum destined, like older brother James Mitchum, to follow in the footsteps of his famous dad. Chris grew up avoiding the limelight and was educated at the University of Pennsylvania (1962-1966), attending Dublin’s Trinity College as part of his Junior Year Abroad program. He attained a BA at the University of Arizona before developing a serious interest in filmmaking. He began as an extra while at the University of Arizona working in westerns at Old Tucson (1966-1967). That led to to acting jobs on the TV shows Dundee and the Culhane (1967) starring Britisher John Mills and The Danny Thomas Hour (1967), which featured Sammy Davis Jr.. Chris worked as a “gofer” in two of his father’s westerns in 1969 before receiving his big acting break. He auditioned for John Wayne and won a small role in the western Chisum (1970) as Billy the Kid’s sidekick. Duke introduced him to directorHoward Hawks, who screen-tested Chris and gave him a starring roles in Hawks’ last film,Rio Lobo (1970). Chris saddled up one more time with the Duke in Big Jake (1971) before striking out on his own. With such a strong foundation now formed and fully equipped with his father’s laid-back good looks and adventurous nature, Chris proved to be an assured action lead. After a long dry spell, however, he was told by the casting director of Steelyard Blues (1973) that she could not interview him because he had worked with Wayne. In those highly political times, Chris’ career took a downturn and he went to Europe to find work. The films he found, however, were of a lesser grade and quite violent in comparison to his father’s sturdy work, with such obvious titles as Death Feud(1987), SFX Retaliator (1987), Aftershock (1990), Striking Point (1995) and Lycanthrope(1999). He was popular in such foreign market as Spain, Hong Kong, Indonesia and the Phillipines, however, so he continued to churn out product there including Master Samurai(1974), Chinese Commandos (1975), American Commandos (1986) and Final Score(1986). Chris actually prefers writing these days and co-penned the screenplay for Angel of Fury (1992). After a noticeable absence, he filmed a role recently in son Bentley Mitchum‘s horror yarn The Ritual (2009). Chris’ son, who also produced, wrote and directed, is part of a third generation of acting Mitchums, which includes older daughterCarrie Mitchum.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Ann Richards was born in Sydney, Australia in 1917. She began her movie career in Australian films. In 1942 she left for Hollywood and succeeded in obtaining a contract with MGM. Her first major role was as Jennifer Jone’s friend in “Love Letters”. She starred opposite Robert Young in “The Searching Wind” and supported Burt Lancaster and Barbara Stanwyck in “Sorry Wrong Number”. She retired from acting in 1952. In later years she wrote poetry which were published in several volumes. Ann Richards died in California in 2006.
Tom Vallance’s “Independent” obituary:
The Australian actress Ann Richards made a vivid impression in several Hollywood films of the Forties, and might have had a longer screen career had she not suffered some bad luck. The film that should have made her a star, King Vidor’s epic piece of Americana An American Romance, was a major flop, and a second chance of stardom was blighted when a bigger star suddenly became available.
She had notable roles in such films as The Searching Wind and Sorry, Wrong Number, but her most memorable role was a supporting one, that of the enigmatic Dilly in William Dieterle’s enormously popular melodrama Love Letters. Soft-spoken and sincere, she was at her best when conveying depths of wisdom, with a suggestion of passion stoically controlled.
Born Shirley Ann Richards in Sydney, Australia, in 1917, to an American father and New Zealander mother, she acted on stage before becoming a star in the films of the noted producer-director Ken Hall, including It Isn’t Done (1937), Tall Timber (1938), Dad and Dave Come to Town (1939) and Come Up Smiling (1940). She went to Hollywood in 1941 (“on the first ship after Pearl Harbor – the attack was on December 7th 1941, and we left on December 11th”).
Hall had sent a reel of her best scenes to the Hollywood writer Carl Dudley, but the can of film was lost. Richards recalled,
At the time MGM was preparing a short subject called The Woman in the House, about an Englishwoman who becomes a recluse, ageing 40 years. They felt no one under contract could play this role, and of course by then everyone knew my sad story – how I’d sailed across Japanese- infested waters, lost the film Ken Hall had put together for me. All I had was my scrapbook to prove that I had been an Australian movie star.
She won the role, her performance resulting in a contract with MGM and the part of Ronald Colman’s cousin in Random Harvest (1942). “I loved MGM – except for the waiting – there were long periods when I wasn’t being used.” Small roles in Dr Gillespie’s New Assistant (1942) and Three Hearts for Julia (1943, as a cellist) preceded what should have been her breakthrough movie.
Back in 1925 MGM’s production chief Irving Thalberg had given the director King Vidor a choice of subjects. Vidor replied that he favoured three: war, wheat and steel. Thalberg chose war, and the result was the silent classic The Big Parade (1926). Later in Vidor’s career came wheat – Our Daily Bread (1934), another classic – but his epic on steel was to have a bumpy history.
The saga of a poor Czech immigrant who becomes rich and prosperous over the years, An American Romance (1944) was to star Spencer Tracy, but, when he became unavailable, Vidor accepted Brian Donlevy, and later rued his decision not to wait for Tracy, since Donlevy, though a fine actor, did not have the charisma necessary for such an important and symbolic role. Ann Richards was cast as his Irish wife, and though she too was fine the ambitious film was overlong (151 minutes even after some drastic cutting by the studio) and won praise only for its Technicolor shots of furnaces, factories and fields. “They made a mess of it,” said Richards, “cutting out a lot of the personal story and leaving too much of the steel-plant footage.”
After its release, Vidor left MGM never to return, and Richards also departed after promised roles in Gaslight and The Picture of Dorian Gray were not given to her. She accepted the offer of a contract from the producer Hal Wallis, who announced that she would be starring opposite Barry Sullivan in the romantic thriller, Love Letters (1945). The powerful producer David O. Selznick then made one of his manipulative deals, persuading Wallis to use two stars he had under contract, Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten.
Sullivan was out, and Richards was instead given the role of Jones’s best friend, Dilly. She was given excellent billing (a solo title card) and her character figures prominently in the first half of the film, in which she handles with subtle flair some of the movie’s most intriguing dialogue (by Ayn Rand). First seen giving a party at her Bloomsbury flat, she introduces Cotten to Jones (an amnesiac known only by the name “Singleton”). When Cotten wakes after drinking too much and talking excessively, he is told by Richards to contact her later:
Remember my name . . . and I want you to remember this evening, how I listened when you weren’t aware of it. Turn it over in your mind, and remember particularly how mysterious I was.
Cotton, bemused, replies, “Anybody would think a murder had been committed”, and she responds, “It has.”
Aided by William Dieterle’s moody direction and Victor Young’s haunting theme tune (which became a pop hit), the film was an enormous success. Jones won an Oscar nomination for her performance, but Richards commented years later,
Perhaps things worked out for the best, because I think Dilly was a more human, sympathetic character and remained my late husband’s favourite of my screen performances.
Richards then starred with Sylvia Sidney and Robert Young in another Wallis production, The Searching Wind (1946), also directed by Dieterle but less successfully. Adapted by Lillian Hellman from her Broadway play, its anti-war story was told through the lives of a radical journalist (Sidney), a career diplomat (Young) who constantly sits on the fence and supports Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement efforts, and his socialite wife (Richards), who accepts Young’s ongoing affair with Sidney, and whose son is maimed in the Second World War.
Two years earlier, the film version of Hellman’s earlier anti-Fascism play Watch on the Rhine had found a large audience, but in 1946 few were interested in a talky tract, fascinating though much of it was, and the film flopped. Richards said,
I met two extraordinarily interesting women on Love Letters and The Searching Wind, the novelist Ayn Rand, and Lillian Hellman. I remember a conversation I had with Miss Rand. I mentioned that my mother in Australia was not well and that I might have to take a sabbatical from my career to go and bring her back to America with me. Miss Rand insisted (and I can still see this little woman’s black eyes flashing), “You owe absolutely nothing to anybody! You must not consider doing this thing.” I thought this was rather cruel and said, “But you must help people, especially those dear to you.” And she replied, “You must take care of yourself rather than do anything for anybody else!”. . . Miss Hellman was easier to comprehend: she wouldn’t throw out edicts. Politically, the two were at opposite poles: Miss Rand was super-conservative and Miss Hellman was very liberal.
Hal Wallis next loaned Richards to RKO to be Randolph Scott’s leading lady in the enjoyable western Badman’s Territory (1946), and she was also loaned out for a trivial comedy, Lost Honeymoon (1947), and a thriller, Love from a Stranger (1947), based on an Agatha Christie story about a lottery winner who marries a Bluebeard-type fortune hunter. Sylvia Sidney was the heroine, with Richards her best friend. Her final role for Wallis was also that of a best friend – to Barbara Stanwyck in the taut thriller based on the famous radio play Sorry, Wrong Number (1948).
In 1947 Richards returned to the stage – the previous year Gregory Peck and Dorothy McGuire had formed the Actors’ Company, to enable film players, unable to take the time to appear on Broadway, to perform in revivals of hit shows at a small playhouse in La Jolla, a Californian beach community. Richards starred with McGuire and John Hoyt in a production of Noël Coward’s Tonight at 8:30 that won considerable praise.
Two years later Richards married Edmond Angelo, who produced and directed her last American movie, Breakdown (1952), an ineffectual film noir. Angelo left show business to become a space engineer with a California firm, and the couple, who had three children, maintained a large house in Los Angeles and a mountain house near Big Bear.
Richards wrote a volume of poems, The Grieving Senses (1971), and a verse play, Helen of Troy, which she and her husband occasionally presented at college campuses. She appeared as herself (billed as Shirley Ann Richards) in a documentary about women in the Australian film industry, Don’t Call Me Girlie (1984), and occasionally on television, but otherwise limited her performing to giving readings of poetry, mainly at schools.
Tom Vallance
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Milo O’SheaMilo O’Shea, Pat Boone & Fidelma Murphy
Milo O’Shea
Milo O’Shea obituary in “The Guardian” in 2013.
Great Irish character actor who starred as Leopold Bloom in Joseph Strick’s adapatation of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and as ‘Friar Laurence’ in the 1968 film version of “Romeo and Juliet”. He also starred with Paul Newman, James Mason and Charlotte Rampling in “The Verdict”. He moved to the U.S. and died in New York in 2013.
Michael Coveney’s obituary in “The Guardian”:
For a performer of such fame and versatility, the distinguished Irish character actor Milo O’Shea, who has died aged 86, is not associated with any role in particular, or indeed any clutch of them. He was chiefly associated with his own expressive dark eyes, bushy eyebrows, outstanding mimetic talents and distinctive Dublin brogue.
His impish presence irradiated countless fine movies – including Joseph Strick‘s Ulysses (1967), Roger Vadim‘s Barbarella (1968) and Sidney Lumet‘s The Verdict (1982) – and many top-drawer American television series, from Cheers, The Golden Girls and Frasier, right through to The West Wing (2003-04), in which he played the chief justice Roy Ashland.
He had settled in New York in 1976 with his second wife, Kitty Sullivan, in order to be equidistant from his own main bases of operation, Hollywood and London. The couple maintained a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park by the Dakota building, and formed a spontaneous welcoming committee for any Irish actors or plays turning up on Broadway.
Although he had worked for Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir at the Gate theatre in Dublin, and returned there in 1996 to appear in a revival of Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys opposite his great friendDavid Kelly, his Irish theatre connections belonged to the city of his youth, and he preferred it that way.
His father was a singer and his mother a ballet teacher, so it was inevitable, perhaps, that Milo gravitated towards the stage. He was just 12 when he appeared in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra at the Gate. He completed his education with the Christian Brothers at the Synge Street school (where the actor Donal Donnelly was a classmate) and took a degree in music and drama at the Guildhall School in London; he remained a superb pianist all his life and could – and usually did – sit down at the keyboard and play more or less anything.
He made a London debut in 1949 as a pantry boy in Molly Farrell and John Perry’s Treasure Hunt at the Apollo, appearing in John Gielgud‘s production of the jewellery-theft potboiler alongside Sybil Thorndike, Marie Lohr and Alan Webb. When Queen Mary came backstage, she asked O’Shea where the gems had gone. “Don’t tell her,” whispered Thorndike, “or she won’t come back after the interval.”
Back in Dublin, he appeared in revues at the 37 Theatre Club on Lower O’Connell Street and was part of a group including Maureen Toal, whom he married in 1952, Norman Rodway and Godfrey Quigley at the Globe, as well as appearing at the Pike. He toured America with Louis D’Alton’s company and played a season at Lucille Lortel’s White Barn theatre in Westport, Connecticut.
The 1960s started inauspiciously with a brief run at the Adelphi in London in Mary Rodgers’s Once Upon a Mattress, which lasted just 38 performances. But Brendan Behan had seen and loved Fergus Linehan’s musical Glory Be! and recommended it to Joan Littlewood, who presented it for a season at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in 1961. O’Shea was a hit, leading a cast of young Dublin actors including Kelly and Rosaleen Linehan. Some critics mistook youthful buoyancy for amateurism and likened the show to Salad Days, suggesting it be renamed “Mayonnaise”.
By the end of the decade, O’Shea was fully established on Broadway, winning a 1968 Tony nomination as one of Charles Dyer’s two gay hairdressers in Staircase (the other one was Eli Wallach) and appearing opposite Angela Lansbury as the sewerman in Jerry Herman’s Dear World in the following season.
Around the same time, two major movie performances, following Strick’s admirable but unsatisfactory Ulysses (O’Shea was Leopold Bloom), confirmed his status: as the mad scientist Durand Durand (inspirational name for Simon Le Bon’s pop group Duran Duran), he was seen gibbering ecstatically as he tried to destroy Jane Fonda’s Barbarella with simulated lust waves in his Excessive Machine; and as Friar Laurence in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968) he brought brief hope and humour to the carnally doomed coupling of Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey.
And in 1969 he struck sitcom gold in the BBC’s Me Mammy, scripted by Hugh Leonard, in which he played bachelor Bunjy Kennefick, a West End executive with a luxury flat in Regent’s Park and a mountainous mum, played by Anna Manahan, with her apron strings tied round his neck. The show ran for three series to 1971, and O’Shea was now a household face on both sides of the Atlantic.
After the move to Manhattan, he appeared on Broadway as Eddie Waters, the failed old comedian, in Mike Nichols’s production of Trevor Griffiths’s Comedians; as James Cregan in Eugene O’Neill’s extraordinary A Touch of the Poet, with Jason Robards and Geraldine Fitzgerald; and as Alfred Doolittle in a 1981 revival of My Fair Lady, once again starring Rex Harrison.
But he won his second Tony nomination for his luxury-lifestyle-loving Catholic priest, Father Tim Farley, in Bill C Davis’s debut Broadway play, Mass Appeal in 1982. The critic Frank Rich applauded his comic mischievousness and timing, and noted how the mask slipped on the sham of a life of this lost alcoholic soul who was inducting a rebellious young seminarian; the play was finally about secular and religious love, not the Catholic church at all.
Unfortunately, O’Shea did not return to London with Mass Appeal, but with Gerald Moon’s Corpse! at the Apollo in 1984. He played an Irish war veteran trapped in a basement with Keith Baxter; Baxter was playing a pair of effete twins who each wanted to kill the other (without success, alas). The play was as moribund as its title.
O’Shea will survive, though, whenever we catch a glimpse of him in Silvio Narizzano‘s odd version of Joe Orton’s Loot (1970), or as yet another priest in Neil Jordan’s weird and wonderful The Butcher Boy (1997), or as an incredulous inspector in Douglas Hickox’s critic-baiting Theatre of Blood (1973), or holding the ring between Paul Newman and James Mason, his hair slightly longer than usual, as the trial judge in The Verdict (1982).
His last stage appearance was a homecoming of sorts as Fluther Good in Sean O’Casey’s tremendous tenement tragedy The Plough and the Stars 12 years ago at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, directed by Joe Dowling, with Linehan as Bessie Burgess.
He is survived by Kitty and by his two sons, Colm and Steven, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce in 1974.
• Milo O’Shea, actor, born 2 June 1926; died 2 April 2013
The great director John Huston is part of a dynasty which includes his father the actor Walter Huston and his daughter Anjelica Huston. John Huston was born in 1906 in the U.S. b ut became an Irish citizen in 1964, having lived in St. Clerins in Co Galway since the early 1950’s. His major directorial assignments include “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”, “Beat the Devil”, “Moulin Rouge”, “The Man Who Would be King” and “The Dead”. He has also acted in such films as “The Cardinal” and “Chinatown”.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry: An eccentric rebel of epic proportions, this Hollywood titan reigned supreme as director, screenwriter and character actor in a career that endured over five decades. The ten-time Oscar-nominated legend was born John Marcellus Huston in Nevada, Missouri, on August 5, 1906. His ancestry included English, Scottish, and Scots-Irish. The age-old story goes that the small town of his birth was won by John’s grandfather in a poker game. John’s father was the equally magnanimous character actor Walter Huston, and his mother, Rhea Gore, was a newspaperwoman who traveled around the country looking for stories. The only child of the couple, John began performing on stage with his vaudevillian father at age 3. Upon his parents’ divorce at age 7, the young boy would take turns traveling around the vaudeville circuit with his father and the country with his mother on reporting excursions. A frail and sickly child, he was once placed in a sanitarium due to both an enlarged heart and kidney ailment. Making a miraculous recovery, he quit school at age 14 to become a full-fledged boxer and eventually won the Amateur Lightweight Boxing Championship of California, winning 22 of 25 bouts. His trademark broken nose was the result of that robust activity.
John married his high school sweetheart, Dorothy Harvey, and also took his first professional stage bow with a leading role off-Broadway entitled “The Triumph of the Egg.” He made his Broadway debut that same year with “Ruint” on April 7, 1925, and followed that with another Broadway show “Adam Solitaire” the following November. John soon grew restless with the confines of both his marriage and acting and abandoned both, taking a sojourn to Mexico where he became an officer in the cavalry and expert horseman while writing plays on the sly. Trying to control his wanderlust urges, he subsequently returned to America and attempted newspaper and magazine reporting work in New York by submitting short stories. He was even hired at one point by mogulSamuel Goldwyn Jr. as a screenwriter, but again he grew restless. During this time he also appeared unbilled in a few obligatory films. By 1932 John was on the move again and left for London and Paris where he studied painting and sketching. The promising artist became a homeless beggar during one harrowing point.
Returning again to America in 1933, he played the title role in a production of “Abraham Lincoln,” only a few years after father Walter portrayed the part on film for D.W. Griffith. John made a new resolve to hone in on his obvious writing skills and began collaborating on a few scripts for Warner Brothers. He also married again. Warners was so impressed with his talents that he was signed on as both screenwriter and director for the Dashiell Hammett mystery yarn The Maltese Falcon (1941). The movie classic made a superstar out of Humphrey Bogart and is considered by critics and audiences alike— 65 years after the fact— to be the greatest detective film ever made. In the meantime John wrote/staged a couple of Broadway plays, and in the aftermath of his mammoth screen success directed bad-girl ‘Bette Davis (I)’ and good girl Olivia de Havilland in the film melodrama In This Our Life (1942), and three of his “Falcon” stars (Bogart, Mary Astorand Sydney Greenstreet) in the romantic war picture Across the Pacific (1942). During WWII John served as a Signal Corps lieutenant and went on to helm a number of film documentaries for the U.S. government including the controversial Let There Be Light(1946), which father Walter narrated. The end of WWII also saw the end of his second marriage. He married third wife Evelyn Keyes, of “Gone With the Wind” fame, in 1946 but it too lasted a relatively short time. That same year the impulsive and always unpredictable Huston directed Jean-Paul Sartre‘s experimental play “No Exit” on Broadway. The show was a box-office bust (running less than a month) but nevertheless earned the New York Drama Critics Award as “best foreign play.”
Hollywood glory came to him again in association with Bogart and Warner Brothers’. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), a classic tale of gold, greed and man’s inhumanity to man set in Mexico, won John Oscars for both director and screenplay and his father nabbed the “Best Supporting Actor” trophy. John can be glimpsed at the beginning of the movie in a cameo playing a tourist, but he wouldn’t act again on film for a decade and a half. With the momentum in his favor, John hung around in Hollywood this time to write and/or direct some of the finest American cinema made including Key Largo (1948) andThe African Queen (1951) (both with Bogart), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951) and Moulin Rouge (1952). Later films, including Moby Dick (1956), The Unforgiven (1960), The Misfits (1961), Freud (1962), The Night of the Iguana (1964) andThe Bible: In the Beginning… (1966) were, for the most part, well-regarded but certainly not close to the level of his earlier revered work. He also experimented behind-the-camera with color effects and approached topics that most others would not even broach, including homosexuality and psychoanalysis.
An ardent supporter of human rights, he, along with director William Wyler and others, dared to form the Committee for the First Amendment in 1947, which strove to undermine the House Un-American Activities Committee. Disgusted by the Hollywood blacklisting that was killing the careers of many talented folk, he moved to St. Clerans in Ireland and became a citizen there along with his fourth wife, ballet dancer Enrica (Ricki) Soma. The couple had two children, including daughter Anjelica Huston who went on to have an enviable Hollywood career of her own. Huston and wife Ricki split after a son (director Danny Huston) was born to another actress in 1962. They did not divorce, however, and remained estranged until her sudden death in 1969 in a car accident. John subsequently adopted his late wife’s child from another union. The ever-impulsive Huston would move yet again to Mexico where he married (1972) and divorced (1977) his fifth and final wife, Celeste Shane.
Huston returned to acting auspiciously with a major role in Otto Preminger‘s epic film The Cardinal (1963) for which Huston received an Oscar nomination at age 57. From that time forward, he would be glimpsed here and there in a number of colorful, baggy-eyed character roles in both good and bad (some positively abysmal) films that, at the very least, helped finance his passion projects. The former list included outstanding roles inChinatown (1974) and The Wind and the Lion (1975), while the latter comprised of hammy parts in such awful drek as Candy (1968) and Myra Breckinridge (1970).
Directing daughter Angelica in her inauspicious movie debut, the thoroughly mediocre A Walk with Love and Death (1969), John made up for it 15 years later by directing her to Oscar glory in the mob tale Prizzi’s Honor (1985). In the 1970s Huston resurged as a director of quality films with Fat City (1972), The Man Who Would Be King (1975) andWise Blood (1979). He ended his career on a high note with Under the Volcano (1984), the afore-mentioned Prizzi’s Honor (1985) and The Dead (1987). His only certifiable misfire during that era was the elephantine musical version of Annie (1982), though it later became somewhat of a cult favorite among children.
Huston lived the macho, outdoors life, unencumbered by convention or restrictions, and is often compared in style or flamboyancy to an Ernest Hemingway or Orson Welles. He was, in fact, the source of inspiration for Clint Eastwood in the helming of the film White Hunter Black Heart (1990) which chronicled the making of “The African Queen.” Illness robbed Huston of a good portion of his twilight years with chronic emphysema the main culprit. As always, however, he continued to work tirelessly while hooked up to an oxygen machine if need be. At the end, the living legend was shooting an acting cameo in the film Mr. North (1988) for his son Danny, making his directorial bow at the time. John became seriously ill with pneumonia and died while on location at the age of 81. This maverick of a man’s man who was once called “the eccentric’s eccentric” by Paul Newman, left an incredibly rich legacy of work to be enjoyed by film lovers for centuries to come.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
The beautiful Ms Sparv was a popular leading in movies of the 1960’s. She was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1943. She played opposite James Coburn in “Dead Heat on a Merry |Go-Round” in 1966. She starred opposite Hayley Mills in “The Trouble With Angels” and Robert Redford in “Downhill Racer”. She is now retired from acting.
TCM Overview:
Camilla Sparv was an accomplished actress who led an impressive career, primarily on the big screen. Early on in her acting career, Sparv landed roles in various films, including “Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round” (1966), “Murderers’ Row” (1966) with Dean Martin and the comedy adaptation “The Trouble With Angels” (1966) with Rosalind Russell. She also appeared in “Assignment K” (1968) and the Robert Redford dramatic adaptation “Downhill Racer” (1969). She continued to act in productions like “MacKenna’s Gold” (1969) with Gregory Peck, the dramatic biopic “The Greek Tycoon” (1978) with Anthony Quinn and “Winter Kills” (1979). Her work around this time also included a part on the TV movie “Never Con a Killer” (ABC, 1976-77). Toward the end of her career, she tackled roles in “Caboblanco” (1981) and the Chuck Wagner action picture “America 3000” (1986). She also had a part in the TV miniseries “Jacqueline Susann’s “Valley of the Dolls 1981″” (1981-82). Sparv more recently appeared in “The Naked Truth” (Cinemax, 1992-93). Sparv was married to Robert Evans.
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
