Debra Paget was a very popular movie star in Hollywood movies of the 1950’s. She also has the distinction of being the first of Elvis Presley’s leading ladies in 1956’s “Love Me Tender”. Her other films include “House of Strangers”, “The River’s Edge” and “The Ten Commandments”.
TCM overview:
A sexy yet invariably sympathetic and demure leading lady of the 1950s, Debra Paget was often cast in exotic roles, such as Native American or South Seas maiden princesses, in a series of fairly routine melodramas and Westerns of the period. A lovely brunette, she had a warm, pleasant and romantic screen image, though for much of her 15 years in the movies she was used for largely decorative purposes, as the obligatory ingenue, romantic partner or second lead.
Paget acquired brief acting experience on the stage while still in her early teens before being signed by 20th Century-Fox. She made a creditable film debut in director Robert Siodmak’s stunning film noir “Cry of the City” (1948) and Fox began building her up. “Broken Arrow” (1950) proved a big popular success: it made Jeff Chandler a star, moved Jimmy Stewart successfully into Westerns, and gave Paget her first prominent and typical role as Sonseeahray, all shot in the Technicolor which became standard for her. “Anne of the Indies” (1951), unfortunately, gave her another typical role: Louis Jourdan’s helpless wife, almost sold into slavery by lusty pirate Jean Peters. Paget did, however, do her level best as the princess who must save her people by jumping into an ever-demanding volcano in a lavish, enjoyably hokey remake of the standard Pacific island fable, “Bird of Paradise” (1951). She continued with Fox until the mid-50s, frequently teamed with either Robert Wagner (“Stars and Stripes Forever” 1952; “Prince Valiant” 1954) or Jeffrey Hunter (“Fourteen Hours” 1951; “Princess of the Nile” 1954). Paget sometimes played second fiddle to more established female stars such as Myrna Loy and Jeanne Crain (“Belles on Their Toes” 1952) or Susan Hayward (“Demetrius and the Gladiators” 1954), or did her best to look good in period garb as the sweep of historical spectacle took over, as with her lovely Cosette in the decent “Les Miserables” (1952).
After parting company from Fox, Paget continued playing such established types as Native Americans (“White Feather” 1955; “The Last Hunt” 1956) or suffering, devoted girlfriends in historical epics, perhaps most notably in Cecil B. DeMille’s remake of “The Ten Commandments” (1956). She formed an attractively sincere couple with Elvis Presley in “Love Me Tender” (1956), but the emphasis was clearly on the rock’n’roll newcomer. Paget eventually made a few films abroad, most notably Fritz Lang’s strange adventure saga “The Indian Tomb” (1960), and finished her Hollywood career with appearances in two stylish period horror offerings from American International Pictures, “Tales of Terror” (1962) and “The Haunted Palace” (1963).
Paget was married for four months to actor and singer David Street in 1958 and was later married to director Budd Boetticher for 22 days. Paget left the entertainment field in 1964 after marrying Louis C Kung, a Chinese-American nephew of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek who was successful in the oil industry.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Kurt Russell starred in one of my favourite movies “Escape from New York” in 1981. He began his career as a child actor and was featured in “It Happened At the World’s Fair” in 1962 with Elvis Presley. His other movies include “Swing Shift” with his partner Goldie Hawn and “Guns in the Heather” which was made in the West of Ireland for Walt Disney.
TCM overview:
After getting his start as a child star in several movies for Walt Disney Studios, actor Kurt Russell managed to shed his wholesome image to play some of cinema’s most notorious and hard-edged tough guys. Russell first broke the Disney mold with an acclaimed portrayal of the King in the made-for-television biopic, “Elvis” (ABC, 1979), which many hailed as one of the finest performances of his career. Having partnered with director John Carpenter, he next essayed one of his most enduring characters, Snake Plissken, the antihero of Carpenter’s cult classic “Escape from New York” (1981). Russell delivered another solid performance as memorable hard-case R.J. MacReady in Carpenter’s gory remake of “The Thing” (1982). While making the troubled romantic comedy, “Swing Shift” (1984), Russell became romantically involved with co-star Goldie Hawn, with whom he forged a lasting partnership that resembled a marriage, but without the actual legal certificate. He was even considered by Hawn’s two children from a previous marriage, actress Kate Kudston, and her brother, Oliver, to be – at least in spirit – their father. Meanwhile, Russell thrived throughout the 1980s with “Big Trouble in Little China” (1986) and “Tequila Sunrise” (1988), which carried over into the next decade with “Backdraft” (1991), “Captain Ron” (1992) and a dead-on portrayal of Wyatt Earp in “Tombstone” (1993). Following box office success with “Stargate” (1994) and “Executive Decision” (1996), Russell offered up his most engaging performance in the tense thriller “Breakdown” (1997). Though he later faltered with “3000 Miles to Graceland” (2001) and “Poseidon” (2006), Russell nonetheless remained one of the most engaging actors in Hollywood.
Born on March 17, 1951 in Springfield, MA, Russell was later raised in Thousand Oaks, CA by his mother, Louise, a dancer, and his father, Bing, a character actor best known for playing Deputy Clem Foster on “Bonanza” (NBC, 1959-1973). Growing up around the entertainment industry gave the young Russell an opportunity to appear onscreen himself. Russell made his first television appearance with a guest starring role on the short-lived sitcom “Our Man Higgins” (ABC, 1962-63) before turning to hour-long drama with an episode of “The Eleventh Hour” (NBC, 1962-64). In short order, Russell found himself starring in his own series, “The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters” (ABC, 1963-64), in which he played the titular role of a 12-year-old boy who depicts his experiences with his family and the hardships faced after settling California in 1849. Following the cancellation of that series, the young actor appeared as a guest star on shows like “The Virginian” (NBC, 1962-1971) and “Gilligan’s Island” (CBS, 1964-67), before making his feature debut in “Follow Me, Boys!” (1966), one of several pictures for Walt Disney made by Russell early in his career. He played a Boy Scout who befriends a traveling saxophonist (Fred McMurphy) settling down in his small Midwestern town.
Russell continued making films for Disney with a supporting role in “The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit” (1968), followed by a starring role in “The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes” (1970), in which he played Dexter Riley, a student whose brain becomes a virtual hard drive after a computer he was trying to fix is struck by lightning. He revived the same character, now turned college student, who invents an invisibility spray coveted by a gang of thieves in the pseudo-sequel, “Now You See Him, Now You Don’t” (1972). As he entered his twenties, Russell made his last pictures with Disney – “Charley and the Angel” (1973) and “Superdad” (1974), co-starring Bob Crane – before making his final Disney movie under contract with “The Strongest Man in the World” (1975), playing for the last time troublesome college student Dexter Riley. He began making the segue to more adult roles with two failed series, “The New Land” (ABC, 1974) and “The Quest” (NBC, 1976), and completely shedding his nice kid image with a chilling portrayal of mass-murderer Charles Whitman in the television movie, “The Deadly Tower” (NBC, 1975).
A few years later, Russell delivered a career-defining performance as the King of Rock and Roll in director John Carpenter’s television biopic, “Elvis” (ABC, 1979). Though low-budget and missing certain key details, Carpenter’s movie opened to huge ratings and earned Russell an Emmy Award nomination, whole touching off a fruitful collaboration between actor and director over the next decade. Russell also married co-star, Season Hubley, who played Priscilla Presley, after the couple displayed undeniable chemistry onscreen. On the big screen, he became a bankable adult Hollywood star, thanks to a fine performance as a fast-talking charmer in Robert Zemeckis’ raucous, under-appreciated comedy, “Used Cars” (1980). He experienced greater popular success by reuniting with Carpenter for the cult classic sci-fi actioner, “Escape From New York” (1981), playing eye-patched antihero, Snake Plissken, a former solider-turned-criminal in a dystopian future where Manhattan has been turned into a maximum security prison, who is backed into saving the President of the United States (Donald Pleasence) after Air Force One crash lands on the island. Made on a shoestring budget of $6 million, “Escape” earned over $50 million at the box office. It also ushered in a new career trajectory for Russell, who managed to shed his family-friendly image from the previous decade for good.
After voicing the adult hound dog Copper in “The Fox and the Hound” (1981) for his former employer, Walt Disney Studios, Russell reunited with Carpenter for “The Thing” (1982), a gory remake of Howard Hawks’ 1951 film about a 12-man rescue team that discovers a parasitic alien life form that had been buried beneath the Earth for 100,000 years. Though admired by some critics despite the film’s excesses of violence and gore, “The Thing” wound up being a box office failure. It did, however, live on as another cult classic, while adding on to Russell’s impressive array of big screen tough guys. He next co-starred in Mike Nichols’ somber biopic, “Silkwood” (1983), playing the lover of nuclear plant work, Karen Silkwood (Meryl Streep), whose mysterious car accident death after her groundbreaking investigation into plant safety led to a reexamination of nuclear energy. Meanwhile, Russell took a turn toward romantic comedy with a co-starring role opposite Goldie Hawn in “Swing Shift” (1984), in which he played a factory worker denied enlistment during World War II, who falls for a woman (Hawn) working the production line while her husband is off fighting in Europe. Though conventional onscreen, “Swing Shift” was noted for the behind-the-scenes battles between Hawn, who also served as producer, and director Jonathan Demme over the film’s tone. It also marked the beginning of a long-running companionship between Russell and Hawn; though they never married, the couple remained a steadfast couple for several decades while Russell was considered by Hawn’s children, Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson, to be their father, even though they were never legally adopted by him.
Following a starring turn opposite Mariel Hemingway in the psychological thriller, “The Mean Season” (1985), Russell teamed up again with John Carpenter for “Big Trouble in Little China” (1986), doing a hilarious John Wayne-like turn as a tough-guy truck driver who tries to save his friend’s fiancée (Suzee Pai) from an ancient sorcerer (James Hong) hiding beneath San Francisco’s Chinatown. He next played a former star high school quarterback-turned-garage owner coaxed back into reigniting an old gridiron rivalry by a teammate (Robin Williams) in “The Best of Times” (1986). In their first film as a famous Hollywood couple, Russell and Hawn starred in “Overboard” (1987), a screwball comedy about a snobby heiress (Hawn) with amnesia who is tricked by a disgruntled carpenter (Russell) into believe she is his wife and the mother of four rambunctious boys, leading her to a hectic life of cleaning and cooking. Though not a major success, the film enjoyed a hefty video rental life and became something of a guilty pleasure for fans of silly but charming romantic comedies. Russell followed up by playing a celebrity cop who falls for the same woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) as his life-long friend – a retired drug dealer (Mel Gibson) – in Robert Towne’s hit crime drama, “Tequila Sunrise” (1988).
Russell received some of his worst reviews of his career with his next feature, “Tango & Cash” (1989), a buddy action comedy which paired him opposite Sylvester Stallone, as both are set-up for a crime they did not commit by a notorious drug dealer (Jack Palance). Panned by critics, the movie also earned Russell the first Razzie award nomination of his career, thanks to a scene in which he dressed in drag. Russell rebounded quite well with his next film, director Ron Howard’s “Backdraft” (1991), playing a stalwart firefighter who is suspected of being an inside man during a series of arsons investigated by a dogged fire inspector (Robert De Niro). He next played the crusty, seafaring “Captain Ron” (1992), who takes the family of a beleaguered Chicago businessman (Martin Short) on a cruise from the Caribbean. Noted for its finely-tuned comic performance from Russell and numerous quotable lines, “Captain Ron” earned status as a yet another Russell cult hit. After a good turn as a husband terrorized by a crazed cop (Ray Liotta) in “Unlawful Entry” (1992), Russell delivered his most convincing performance then to date in “Tombstone” (1993), playing famed U.S. Marshal Wyatt Earp, whose involvement in the shootout at the O.K. Corral became the stuff of Old West legend.
Though the movie itself was successful with both critics and audiences, “Tombstone” was plagued with problems during production, especially when original director, Kevin Jarre, was fired for refusing to cut down an over-long script. Though the rest of the film was helmed by George P. Cosmatos, Russell had claimed – especially in later years – to have directed some scenes himself. He delivered another memorable tough-guy turn in “Stargate” (1994), an action sci-fi combo in which he played a suicidal colonel teamed up with a nerdy Egyptologist (James Spader) to explore another world reached by an ancient cosmic traveling device. Following a reprisal of sorts in voicing Elvis for a brief scene in “Forrest Gump” (1994), Russell starred in the political thriller “Executive Decision” (1996), in which he portrayed a military intelligence analyst who tries to save 400 passengers aboard a hijacked 747. After a good 15 years, Russell once again played futuristic antihero Snake Plissken in John Carpenter’s follow-up, “Escape from L.A.” (1996). Despite the hype surrounding the reprisal, the film failed to live up to expectations, while also having a poor run at the box office. Aside from his starring role, Russell also served as a producer and co-screenwriter.
Russell delivered a good performance in the surprisingly tense Hitchcockian thriller, “Breakdown” (1997), playing a desperate husband trying to find his wife (Kathleen Quinlan), who was mysteriously kidnapped after their jeep breaks down in the middle of the New Mexico desert. Following this compelling addition to his oeuvre, Russell began appearing in a string of disappointing films that pushed him further and further from the public’s consciousness after spending a better part of his career at the forefront of Hollywood’s most bankable stars. He starred in the critically panned box office flop, “Soldier” (1998), playing a genetically enhanced officer tasked with protecting an innocent civilian village in a distant galaxy from being destroyed. Following a small role as a court psychologist in the Cameron Crow misfire “Vanilla Sky” (2001), Russell made another questionable choice by starring opposite Kevin Costner in “3000 Miles to Graceland” (2001), a much-maligned caper movie in which Russell revisited his Elvis roots by dressing up as the King alongside his partner in crime (Costner) to pull off a heist at a Las Vegas casino.
In 2003, Russell co-starred in the emotionally charged, James Ellroy’s adaptation, “Dark Blue,” playing a streetwise, but corrupt police veteran in Los Angeles during the 1992 riots. Russell delivered a commanding performance in the controversial, gray-shaded role and carried the movie on his shoulders until the plot gave way to conventional thriller territory. He again had a strong turn in “Miracle” (2004) playing Herb Brooks, the real-life coach of the United States Olympic hockey team; the same Cinderella team that pulled off the unimaginable defeat of the dominating teams from the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. Russell, an avid hockey enthusiast himself, practically channeled the complicated Brooks and delivered another knockout performance. Russell’s next effort was not as winning, however, though he did deliver his trademark charm in the superhero spoof “Sky High” (2005), in which he played Captain Stronghold, a super-powered father who sends his non-powered son (Michael Angarano) to a secret academy for superhero offspring. He next had a turn in the family film “Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story” (2005), playing a once gifted horseman who is given a lame horse and takes the mare on a quest to win the Breeders Cup Classic, thanks to the unwavering determination of his young daughter (Dakota Fanning).
After turning in several fine, low-key performances, Russell tried to step back into the limelight with the larger-than-life remake, “Poseidon” (2006), playing a middle-aged father struggling to escape a capsized ocean liner with a ragtag group of passengers. But “Poseidon” sank at the box office, leaving Russell still attempting to recapture past box office glory. In a hat-tip to Snake Plissken and other onscreen bad-asses of films past, Russell was a sadistic stunt driver named Stuntman Mike in the Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez double bill “Grindhouse” (2007). A compilation of two 90-minute horror flicks from both directors, “Grindhouse” was a throwback to the days of bloody, sex-fueled, low-rent double features that played in seedy 42nd Street theaters in New York City. In Tarantino’s offering, a slasher-cum-road rage flick called “Death Proof,” Russell was a crazed killer who tries to mow down young women – including Rosario Dawson and Zoë Bell – in a black Chevy Nova. Though unsuccessful at the box office, “Grindhouse” – which included the Rodriguez portion, “Planet Terror,” and fake movie trailers – was embraced by a majority of critics.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Sam Elliott, Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer & Bill Paxton
Diana Dors was living demonstration that the British cannot make sex queens. In her heyday, sex on the British screen was mostly a matter of plastic macs and low necklines, but as real eroticism had little to do with either tarts or the amount of flesh exposed it can be said with certainty that she did not have much. She herself agreed, but she listened sufficiently to her advisors to let the ‘blonde bombshell’ tag get in the way of a real ability as a character actress. When she was young, she was very funny. She did a neat parody of the man-mad teenager, the nubile cousin who ogles the best man at the wedding breakfast, the office junior ready for a bit of slap and tickle behind the filing cupboard. She was the best thing about most of her early films.” – David Shipman – “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years” (1972)
Diana Dors was promoted as Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe. She did not have Monroe’s vulnerability but had instead a cheeky cheerfulness which was very appealing. Born in Swindon in 1932 she made her film debut in “The Shop at Sly Corner” in 1948. Her best movie was “Yield to the Night” in 1955 and she was Hollywood bound after that. Her films in Hollywood were not successful although she made a good thriller “The Unholy Wife” with Rod Steiger and Tom Tryon. By 1958 she was back in the U.K. and pursued her career on home territory thereafter. She matured into a terrific character actress and gave a wonderful performance in Joseph Losey’s “Steaming” in 1983 with Sarah Miles and Vanessa Redgrave. Sadly she died the following year aged only 52.
Diana Dors was born Diana Mary Fluck on October 23, 1931 in Swindon, Wiltshire, England. She and her mother both nearly died from the traumatic birth. Because of the trauma, her mother lavished on Diana anything and everything she wanted–clothes, toys and dance lessons were the order of the day. Diana’s love of films began when her mother took her to the local movies theaters. The actresses on the screen caught Diana’s attention and she said, herself, that from the age of three she wanted to be an actress. She was educated in the finest private schools, much to the chagrin of her father (apparently he thought private education was a waste of money). Physically, Diana grew up fast. At age 12, she looked and acted much older than what she was. Much of this was due to the actresses she studied on the silver screen and Diana trying to emulate them. She wanted nothing more than to go to the United States and Hollywood to have a chance to make her place in film history. After placing well in a local beauty contest, Diana was offered a role in a thespian group (she was 13).
On The Double, poster, US poster art, bottom left: Danny Kaye, top center: Diana Dors, bottom center: Dana Wynter, right: Dana Wynter, Danny Kaye, 1961. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
The following year, Diana enrolled at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts (LAMDA) to hone her acting skills. She was the youngest in her class. Her first fling at the camera was in Code of Scotland Yard (1947). She did not care that it was a small, uncredited role; she was on film and at age 16, that’s all that mattered. That was quickly followed by Dancing with Crime (1947), which consisted of nothing more than a walk-on role. Up until this time, Diana had pretended to be 17 years old (if producers had known her true age, they probably would not have let her test for the role). However, since she looked and acted older, this was no problem. Diana’s future dawned bright in 1948, and she appeared in no less than six films. Some were uncredited, but some had some meat to the roles. The best of the lot was the role of Charlotte in the classic Oliver Twist(1948). Throughout the 1950s, she appeared in more films and became more popular in Britain. Diana was a pleasant version of Marilyn Monroe, who had taken the United States by storm. Britain now had its own version.
Diana continued to play sexy sirens and kept seats in British theaters filled. She really came into her own as an actress. She was more than a woman who exuded her sexy side, she was a very fine actress as her films showed. As the 1960s turned into the 1970s, she began to play more mature roles with an effectiveness that was hard to match. Films such as Craze (1974), Every Afternoon (1974), The Amorous Milkman (1975) and Three for All (1975) helped fill out her resume. After filming Steaming (1985), Diana was diagnosed with cancer, which was too much for her to overcome. The British were saddened when word came of her death at age 52 on May 4, 1984 in Windsor, Berkshire, England.
Alan Lake
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Denny Jackson (qv’s & corrections by A. Nonymous)
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
“Guardian” obituary from 1984:
Diana Dors, the actress who described herself as “the only sex symbol Britain has produced since Lady Godiva”, died in hospital in Windsor last night.
Miss Dors, 52, was admitted to hospital on Saturday after collapsing at home with severe stomach pains. She underwent surgery for an intestinal blockage, but her condition deteriorated yesterday. Her husband, Alan Lake, announced her death.
She had twice beaten cancer over the past two years, undergoing surgery for the removal of tumours in 1982 and last year. She had also survived a near fatal attack of meningitis.
Diana Dors, the daughter of a railway clerk, became Britain’s best paid actress by the age of 25. She married three times and had a glamorous career, but confessed that she never believed she was good-looking and longed for a quiet life.
Obituary
The young Diana Dors was very much a characteristic icon of the post-war austerity years. She managed to evince at once a pseudo-American allure and a reassuringly homegrown air of down-to-earth matiness.
Trained at stage school, she made her first film in 1946, when she was only 15. Blonde, ambiguously baby-faced, and (as the saying went) busty, she revealed a natural affinity with the screen. For the next several years, when the Rank Organisation was seeking to foster a Hollywood-style star system, she was kept busy not merely as a minor presence in an assortment of frequently indifferent films, but as an off-screen personality, thrust into the public eye, and into the tabloid press, at every opportunity.
By the early 1950s, she was being touted as Britain’s Marilyn Monroe and had progressed to starring roles. Although these were often only pneumatic stereotypes, occasional films revealed her as an actress of real potential, particularly Yield to the Night, in which she played a condemned murderess in a story modelled on the Ruth Ellis case.
Before long, Hollywood beckoned, but once there she appeared only in a handful of pictures. Matrimonial and financial problems mounted and by the 1960s her career had taken a downward turn.
But she rallied in adversity, unabashedly trading on her name by touring the British club circuit, and gradually re-establishing herself in the cinema as a player of character roles.
During the 1970s her private life remained periodically fraught and her health deteriorated. But she carried on gamely, appearing in occasional films and also on TV.
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
English movie actress Diana Dors on the cover of “Picturegoer” magazine, the National Film and Entertainment Weekly, published in London, circa December 1955. (Photo by Paul Popper/Popperfoto via Getty Images)
Barbara Parkins is a beautiful Canadian actress who made a major impact in the mid 1960’s as ‘Betty Anderson’ in the hit TV series “Peyton Place” with Dorothy Malone. She then starred with Sharon Tate and Patty Duke in “Valley of the Dolls”. Her other movies include “The Kremlin Letter” and “Puppet on a Chain”.
TCM overview:
A slim brunette leading lady of film and TV, Barbara Parkins made her feature debut in the crime drama “20,000 Eyes” (1961) but really came to public attention as the oft-married Betty Anderson on the popular primetime soap opera “Peyton Place” (ABC, 1964-69). In her second feature, the high profile but trashy “Valley of the Dolls” (1967), she was cast as an aspiring actress with roots in New England, a role that was not much of a stretch from her TV persona.
In its day, the film was widely dismissed by critics, but by the 1990s it enjoyed popularity as a camp classic. While never a major screen presence, Parkins acquitted herself in a handful of roles in horror films, including “Asylum” (1972) and particularly in the Canadian-made “Christina” (1974), which utilized her voluptuous beauty to good effect. She made her last feature appearance to date as a fashion designer in the misguided Australian romantic comedy “Breakfast in Paris” (1981).
The small screen was more hospitable to Parkins who delivered several respected turns in TV-movies and miniseries. She was quite effective as a traumatized victim of rape in “A Taste of Evil” (ABC, 1971). Parkins was Leonie Jerome, aunt of Winston Churchill, in the British series “Jennie” (shown in the USA on PBS in 1975), appeared as Martinique in the acclaimed NBC miniseries “Captains and Kings” (1976), played Anna Held in the NBC biography “Ziegfeld: The Man and His Women” (1978) and portrayed the Duchess of Windsor in the HBO movie “To Catch a King” (1984). She reprised her signature role of Betty in the NBC movie “Peyton Place: The Next Generation” (1985) and returned to series TV as part of the reenactment ensemble of “Scene of the Crime” (ABC, 1991-94). Parkins also guest-starred in episodes of “Murder, She Wrote” and “Picket Fences”.
The above TCM overview can be accessed online here.
IMDB entry: Barbara Parkins is best remembered as an icon of the Sixties who had starring roles in two of the era’s more notorious productions, Peyton Place (1964) and Valley of the Dolls(1967). After arriving in Hollywood as a teenager, Parkins soon began appearing on episodic television programs such as Wagon Train (1957) and Perry Mason (1957). She also appeared with George Burns as a dancer in his nightclub act. She was soon offered the pivotal role of “Betty Anderson” in what would become television’s first prime-time soap opera, Peyton Place (1964).
The show was an immediate success and turned Parkins, along with costars Ryan O’Neal and Mia Farrow into household names. Parkins was nominated for an Emmy Award as Best Actress and stayed with the series for its entire 5 year run. Her popularity was further solidified when, in 1967, she starred in the motion picture Valley of the Dolls (1967), which became a huge box office hit. She became close friends with her “Dolls” costar, Sharon Tate and traveled to London to be her bridesmaid when Tate married director Roman Polanski in 1968. Parkins fell in love with England, UK.
After Tate’s murder in 1969, Parkins decided to leave Hollywood and took up residence in London. There, she appeared on the BBC and starred in such international productions as Puppet on a Chain (1971), Christina (1974) and Shout at the Devil (1976).
Her career, however, was no longer the prime focus of her life. She married in the late 1970’s and lived in France for awhile. When her marriage ended, Parkins returned to the United States and gave Hollywood another try. She appeared in popular TV shows of the day such as The Love Boat (1977), 0077008, and Hotel (1983).
Parkins has made infrequent appearances since the late 1980’s although she did return to weekly television for a brief stint in the CBS-TV series Scene of the Crime (1991) which was filmed in the city she was born, Vancouver. In 1997, Parkins was the guest of honor at a 30th anniversary screening of Valley of the Dolls (1967) in San Francisco. During a question-and-answer segment with columnist Ted Casablanca, she announced to the sold-out audience that she planned to retire.
The following year, however, she appeared inScandalous Me: The Jacqueline Susann Story (1998), based on the life of Valley of the Dolls’ controversial author. Whether Parkins will resume her career full- time or really retire is unknown at this time.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: jkinoz@aol.co
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
John Travolta has built up a considerable dossier of quality films since his movie debut in the mid 1970’s. He achieved fame early at the age of 23 with “Saturday Night Fever” in 1978 followed the following year with “Grease”. Although he has had lulls he has time after time come back with terrific performances in such movies as “Blow Out”, “Face/Off” and of course “Pulp Fiction”.
TCM overview:
The rollercoaster career of Hollywood star John Travolta decisively discredited the old adage that there are no second acts. The New Jersey native first gained fame as a suave, dim-witted Brooklyn high school student on the sitcom “Welcome Back, Kotter” (ABC, 1975-79). Being in the right place in the right era, he became inextricably linked to pop culture trends, thanks to sensational starring roles in the disco drama “Saturday Night Fever” (1977) and the 1950s retro musical, “Grease” (1978). Travolta also had a hand in the country music revival of the early 1980s with his popular portrayal of a mechanical bull-riding oil rigger in “Urban Cowboy” (1980). Then for some reason, the biggest male movie star of the late-1970s languished throughout the next decade and beyond, his engaging talent virtually forgotten until a bold decision by Quentin Tarantino cast him in the cult mainstay “Pulp Fiction” (2004). Following the rousing response to Travolta’s darkly funny performance as a junkie hit man, he was overnight commanding millions of dollars for macho hits like “Get Shorty” (1995) and “Ladder 49” (2004) and becoming one-half of a celebrated Hollywood couple after marrying Kelly Preston. Critics raved when Travolta made a belated return to his musical roots in as a tubby Baltimore stage mom in the box-office smash “Hairspray” (2007). In fact, Travolta defined more than any other celebrity – save perhaps Cher and Frank Sinatra – the very idea that a so-called “has-been” could revive a career deemed long dead, coming back stronger than ever.
The youngest of six kids, John Joseph Travolta was born on Feb. 18, 1954, and raised in Englewood, NJ. In contrast to the round robin dinner table slapping of the “Saturday Night Fever” Manero family, Travolta’s home was a liberal, artistic haven, with his older siblings involved in local theater and his mother Helen’s solid background as a singer, actress, and drama teacher. Travolta wanted to be onstage from the start, and was fortunate to gain early exposure to theater, dance, and art films at home. His father Salvatore – co-owner of the family business Travolta Tire Exchange – had built a stage in the basement, but Travolta, nicknamed “Bone” because he was so skinny, hardly needed it, as he would perform for anyone, anywhere at the drop of a hat. His parents enrolled him in drama school in New York, where he learned the holy trinity of old-school entertainment: singing, acting and dancing. By the age of 12, he was appearing in local productions.
At 16, Travolta landed his first professional role in a summer stock production of “Bye Bye Birdie.” Following his junior year of high school, he dropped out to pursue entertainment, moving in with his sister Ann in Manhattan. He began building a resume with off-Broadway dramas and musicals, TV commercials, and even recorded a few pop singles for local record labels. In Hollywood, Travolta spent a couple of years trying to break into the business, but after a few guest spots on medical and cop dramas, returned to New York where he debuted on Broadway in “Grease.” He wasn’t Danny Zuko material yet, but while touring for nearly a year as a supporting player, he was determined that he would one day take the lead. Travolta landed on Broadway’s boards again in 1974 in the Tony-nominated musical “Over Here.” The same year, the budding pilot who had been squirreling away his acting money for flying lessons, finally earned his wings. Having grown up in the flight path of LaGuardia Airport, he was about the join the ranks of jet setters that used to pass overhead.
Travolta flew to New Mexico to play a small part in the film “Devil’s Rain” (1975), and upon his return was met with a casting call for an ABC sitcom called “Welcome Back Kotter.” He proved to be a perfect choice to play Vinnie Barbarino, an inner-city remedial high school student, resident stud, and head of a clique of wiseass underachievers called The Sweathogs. His feathered-haired sex appeal – combined with his faux naiveté and occasionally outrageous physical comedy – made him the breakout star of the ensemble cast, with his likeness appearing on an avalanche of merchandising tie-ins. The music industry smelled a pop star in the making, handing the actor a series of bland ballads including “Let Her In,” which reached No. 20 on the Billboard charts. The well-rounded entertainer continued to explore his range, first as a taunting bully to wide-eyed Sissy Spacek in Brian DePalma’s teen telekinesis classic “Carrie” (1976). The same year he was memorable as an immune-deficient teen in ABC’s legendary telefilm, “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble” (1976). While filming the melodrama, Travolta began a romantic relationship with his onscreen mother, Diana Hyland, who was 18 years his senior and an unexpected choice for a young heartthrob who likely had his pick of young romantic partners.
With “Saturday Night Fever” (1977), John Travolta transitioned from TV and pop music personality to full-fledged movie star. The choice Bee Gees soundtrack and flashy dance sequences were enough to bring in audiences seeking a peek into the high-energy, indulgent world of a New York City disco. But it was Travolta’s flawless, Oscar-nominated portrayal of a 20-year-old paint store clerk beginning to outgrow his roots that resonated so universally and provided the film’s depth. Tony Manero was the king of his local Brooklyn disco, but an emerging understanding of his dead-end life began to crumble his foundation, his desire for something better embodied by a love interest who knew firsthand of the promised land just across the river in Manhattan. The film worked on every level and quickly became a favorite of audiences and critics alike – not to mention how it fueled the dying embers of the fading disco trend with a best-selling but over-played soundtrack.
During shooting of “Fever,” Travolta was dealt a heavy card when the love of his life, Diana Hyland, now a cast member of “Eight is Enough” (ABC, 1977-1981) as mother of the large clan, died of cancer, reportedly in Travolta’s arms. Despite knowing she was fatally ill, she had been the one person who had insisted he take on the role of Manero. He suffered an equal blow in 1978 with the loss of his influential and supportive mother. Coming off such an intense double-dose of grief, the 22-year-old soldiered ahead with another career-defining role in the 1950s high school musical “Grease” (1978). The production was a bold undertaking for all involved, as American cinema was just coming off a run of character-based dramas and had not seen a big-screen musical in a decade. Travolta took the risk, finally realizing his early dream of playing greaser bad boy Danny Zuko, and wooing the proper Sandy Olsson (Olivia Newton-John). The film was admittedly less substantive than “Saturday Night Fever,” but Travolta’s singing, dancing and dimpled charm cemented him as a bona fide movie star. “Grease” received five Golden Globe nominations and became Hollywood’s highest-grossing film musical of all time, with Travolta scoring his first major hit single with the film’s best-selling soundtrack, his duet with Newton-John, “You’re the One that I Want.”
Travolta continued to prove his talent as an icon of specific cultural movements in the well-received “Urban Cowboy” (1980), which chronicled a macho Texas refinery worker with a tumultuous young marriage and a mean competitive streak on his local honkytonk’s mechanical bull. The film spawned another hit soundtrack and jump-started a revival of country music and its accompanying cowboy hats and boots. Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out” (1981) offered Travolta one of his most complex roles yet – a dedicated film sound recordist who accidentally records a political assassination. Though the result was a richly shaded portrait of the hack artist as fallen idealist, “Blow Out” stalled at the box office, as did a pumped-up Travolta in “Staying Alive” (1983), the laughable Sylvester Stallone-directed sequel to “Saturday Night Fever.” In this version, Manero had moved to conquer Broadway, starring in an over-the-top, Hell-inspired production called “Satan’s Alley,” while at the same time, trying to woo two lady dancers at the same time, good girl (Cynthia Rhodes) and the diva star (Finola Hughes). In fact, the only memorable aspect of the movie, was the lead song, “Far From Over,” sung by Stallone’s brother, Frank.
After being the most popular film star of the 1970s, the versatile actor subsequently languished for nearly a decade in mostly forgettable, unpopular films. He could not, as the cliché goes, even get arrested in Hollywood. His most notable work during this phase was the horrible work-out film “Perfect” (1985) co-starring an equally scantily clad Jamie Lee Curtis. Better was the 1987 ABC-TV special, Harold Pinter’s “The Dumb Waiter,” a one-act, two-character play directed by Robert Altman, in which Travolta played a Cockney hit man. It was not until the 1989 sleeper hit “Look Who’s Talking,” that Travolta would become associated with a major box-office success, along with his Scientology buddy, Kirstie Alley. This romantic comedy featured the then popular gimmick of presenting a baby’s thoughts in voiceover (Bruce Willis) and generated two more gigs for the former superstar: “Look Who’s Talking Too” (1990) and “Look Who’s Talking Now” (1993).
During this period, Travolta met actress Kelly Preston and the pair married in 1991 in a Scientology ceremony that was later determined to be not legally binding, necessitating an additional ceremony. Travolta had been active with the church since a chance reading of its tome Dianetics in 1975, crediting his instant rise to success afterwards to its teachings. The couple had a son, Jett, in 1992, the same year that Travolta wrote and illustrated an airplane-themed children’s book called Propeller One-Way Night Coach. At that time in his career, Preston was the bigger name in film. He literally was a has-been at the age 40.
But then 1994 arrived. And with that year, Travolta’s career and street cred sprang back to life with Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” (1994). In the filmmaker’s jarringly funny and violent non-linear crime spree, Travolta was relatively heavy-set, long-haired and wearing earrings; his Vincent Vega being a strangely sympathetic hit man with a heroin habit and a disconcertingly innocent view of the world. Tarantino’s inventive style was highly-praised and the film’s influence on the independent film genre assured that Travolta would again be forever associated with a memorable moment in pop culture history. Overnight, the resuscitated star found himself deluged with scripts and deals, offering him the biggest paydays to date of his estimable career, as well as a second Oscar nomination for Best Actor. Travolta would in fact give props to Tarantino for giving rebirth to his career.
Older and wiser than his first time atop the A-list, Travolta was able to parlay his “Pulp Fiction” success into even greater stardom than he had known in his prime. He worked non-stop, taking advantage of film opportunities like Barry Sonnenfeld’s popular adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s “Get Shorty” (1995), in which he garnered acclaim for his portrayal of Chili Palmer, the ultra-cool hit man who becomes entranced by Hollywood. In “White Man’s Burden” (1995), Travolta starred with Harry Belafonte in an ambitious film about discrimination that won mixed critical notices and little audience support. He followed with John Woo’s action-adventure thriller “Broken Arrow” (1996), in which he played a pilot who masterminds an extortion plot against the U.S. government.
Off-screen, Travolta was by now a licensed pilot for a variety of classes of aircraft and kept a personal fleet of planes at his home in Florida. In 1996, he reportedly received an $8 million fee for “Phenomenon,” in which he played a man who develops superior abilities after being struck by a white light. The press virtually overlooked this indiscretion, and studios continued to line up for his services. In his spare time, Travolta continued to fly the friendly skies, eventually earning his shot at flying jumbo jets. The $8 million fee was a bargain compared to what Travolta was soon earning. He finished 1996 as a fallen angel in Nora Ephron’s “Michael,” before unleashing a juggernaut line-up in 1997-98. He was again paired with John Woo for “Face/Off,” a lyrical thriller about identity exchange that wove together sadistic cruelty and grotesque sentimentality with breathtaking assurance. Although most critics despaired over Costa-Gavras’ “Mad City” (1997) and panned Travolta’s singularly stupid character, he found himself on surer ground in Nick Cassavetes’ romantic drama, “She’s So Lovely” (1997), which matched him with far better results opposite Sean Penn and Robin Wright Penn and afforded him a role of some nuance. He received $20 million to portray Governor Jack Stanton, a thinly veiled adaptation of then-President Bill Clinton, in Mike Nichols’ “Primary Colors” (1998). He also squeezed in performances as an attorney battling powerful corporations on behalf of toxic poisoning victims in “A Civil Action” and was part of a star-studded cast including Sean Penn, John Cusack, Gary Oldman and George Clooney in Terrence Malick’s war picture, “The Thin Red Line” (1998).
After appearing in the unsuccessful and highly ridiculed apocalyptic alien movie written by Ron L. Hubbard, “Battlefield Earth” (2000) which he also produced – and which many perceived as a vanity project and payback to Scientology – Travolta and Preston gave birth to a daughter Ella and redeemed his film career as another top-notch bad guy in the otherwise routine action thriller, “Swordfish” (2001). Unfortunately, the forgettable film was more notable for Halle Berry’s nude scene than for anything else. With the routine thriller “Basic” (2003), Travolta played a DEA agent investigating a mysterious disappearance. His subsequent role as the villainous money-launder Howard Saint in the comic book superhero adaptation “The Punisher” (2004) was a step in the right direction performance-wise, walking a fine line between a realistic performance and moments of high camp, but the film itself was not overwhelming.
Travolta delivered a strong performance in his follow-up, “Ladder 49” (2004), playing a veteran firefighter who tries to impart practical wisdom to a promising up-and-comer (Joaquin Phoenix). Although the part was not entirely suited to Travolta’s strengths, the actor made the most of the supporting role. He easily slipped back into character as Chili Palmer for the entertaining sequel “Be Cool” (2005), in which Chili segues from the movie biz into the music industry. After an unusual two-year hiatus from the big screen – he had been working incessantly since “Pulp Fiction” – Travolta emerged in “Wild Hogs” (2007), a wildly successful road comedy about four middle-aged men (Travolta, Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence and William H. Macy) who set out to prove their manhood with a freewheeling, cross-country motorcycle trip. Despite a bevy of bad reviews, “Wild Hogs” reaped a box office whirlwind, but with the musical “Hairspray” (2007), critics and audiences alike were in agreement that Travolta was still the real deal.
Playing a role originated by famed drag queen Divine in the original John Waters film, Travolta was outrageously entertaining as Edna Turnblad, the 1960s working-class Baltimore mom of wannabe TV dance star Tracy Turnblad (Nikki Bosky). The role necessitated an agonizing amount of prosthetics and makeup to transform Travolta into a Hefty Hideaway spokes model, but the veteran stage star still danced his way into a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor. The summer blockbuster went on to become the third top grossing musical of all time, with “Grease” still holding strong in first position. Meanwhile, Travolta made a rare foray into animated features, voicing the lead character in the popular and acclaimed “Bolt” (2008), a family adventure about a famous television dog who discovers that his fictional powers are of no use when he goes on a real-life cross-country journey to reunite with his co-star (voiced by Miley Cyrus). Travolta earned a Golden Globe nomination for performing the song “I Thought I Lost You,” however his latest professional achievement was overshadowed by personal tragedy when Jett died after suffering a seizure while on vacation with the family in the Bahamas. Travolta and Preston had in the past stated that the 16-year-old suffered from Kawasaki syndrome, an inflammation of the blood vessels possibly brought on by environmental toxins. A huge public outpouring of sympathy followed, with Travolta and Preston finally confirming in public that their son had autism and suffered from regular seizures. Meanwhile, Travolta sued two Bahamians he claimed had tried to extort him and his wife for $25 million in connection to their son’s death, though in the end the judge ruled the case a mistrial and Travolta declined to pursue it further.
Travolta returned to theaters in the summer of 2009 in a rare villainous turn as the mastermind of a subway hijacking in “The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3” (2009), Tony Scott’s remake of the classic 1974 thriller adapted from Morton Freedgood’s novel. Despite the star power of Travolta and Denzel Washington as the transit dispatcher trying to stop his destructive plan, the big budget film brought in disappointing box office returns. The versatile star opted for a family comedy for his next outing, starring opposite Robin Williams as a pair of business partners entrusted with the care of infant twins in “Old Dogs” (2009). Following that critically maligned comedy, Travolta returned to playing harder-edged characters in “From Paris with Love” (2010), where he portrayed a crazed special agent who partners with a low-level CIA operative (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) to stop a terrorist bombing plot.
Doris Day, who has died aged 97, was a singer who came out of the big-band boom of the 1940s to become one of Hollywood’s top box-office stars throughout the 50s and 60s. She had a honey voice, short, buttercup-coloured hair, a sunny smile – and as many scruples as freckles. If Marilyn Monroe was the “girl downtown” at 20th Century Fox, Day was the archetypal “girl next door” at Warners.
Day was first seen as a spunky but naive showgirl in more than a dozen candyfloss Warner Bros musicals between 1948 and 1955. Then, from 1959 until her retirement from the big screen in 1968, she became a sophisticated urban woman defending her honour and independence in a series of glossy, sex-battle romantic comedies for Universal Studios.
During this crowning period of her film career, she showed a real flair for comedy. Wearing dotty hats and stylish Jean Louis gowns, she played a series of women determined not to sacrifice their independence for the sake of a man or, at least, without a fight. This was best displayed in the three entertaining romantic comedies she made opposite Rock Hudson: Pillow Talk (1959), which earned her an Oscar nomination as best actress), Lover Come Back (1961) and Send Me No Flowers (1964), in which the pair were rivals-cum-lovers, she a decent working girl, he an amorous rogue. At one stage in Lover Come Back, someone compares Hudson to a bad cold. Day replies: “There are two ways to handle a cold. You can fight it or you can give in and go to bed with it.”
Day played variations of the same character in That Touch of Mink (1962), with Cary Grant; Move Over, Darling and The Thrill of It All (both 1963), with James Garner; and Do Not Disturb (1965) and The Glass Bottom Boat (1966), with Rod Taylor, but none of these later leading men provided the chemistry she had had with Hudson.
Of her film persona in the 60s, the critics Jane Clarke and Diana Simmonds wrote that Day “confronts the male and forces him to modify his attitudes and behaviour. Moreover, saying no to manipulative sexual situations is not the same as clinging to one’s virginity.”
Day might have lived a charmed existence in many of her movies, but her life was not all sunshine and roses. She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, of German ancestry and when she was eight years old, her parents – William Kappelhoff, a music teacher, and Alma (nee Welz) – split up. When Doris was 15, her promising career as a dancer was halted by a car accident. She had a lengthy recovery, during which her mother encouraged her to start singing after hearing her daughter joining in with singers including Ella Fitzgerald on the radio. “There was a quality to Ella’s voice that fascinated me, and I’d sing along with her, trying to catch the subtle ways she shaded her voice, the casual yet clean way she sang the words,” Day recalled.
She began a career as a vocalist with Barney Rapp’s band in 1939. It was Rapp who got her to change her name to Doris Day after hearing her sing Day After Day. Initially, she thought the name sounded “phoney”, but she gradually accepted that Kappelhoff was a little too long for the marquee outside the theatre.
While on the road with the band in 1941, aged 19, she married the trombonist Al Jorden, with whom she had a son, Terry. Jorden turned out to be a jealous wife-beater. They divorced in 1943. At the same time, Day was making an impression with Les Brown and His Band of Renown. In 1945, she had a hit with their recording of Sentimental Journey, which coincided with the end of the second world war in Europe and became an unofficial homecoming theme for many veterans.
After a second unhappy marriage, to the saxophonist George Weidler, ended in divorce in 1949, luck was on her side when Betty Hutton got pregnant just before the shooting of Romance on the High Seas (1948) at Warners. Day was given top billing in her first feature by the film’s producer-director, Michael Curtiz, after she delivered an emotional version of George and Ira Gershwin’s Embraceable You at the audition. Impressed by her voice and wholesome good looks, Curtiz signed her to a film contract, although she had never acted before.
Day’s debut movie, which had her singing five songs, including the Oscar-nominated It’s Magic (the film’s title in the UK), was the first of a series of lightweight Warners musicals tailored for her, for which her singing was the raison d’être. Most of her numbers were performed in nightclubs or in stage shows; they seldom advanced the plot, although they sometimes reflected the state of mind of the innocent character she was playing.
The freshness and vitality of her singing and personality blew the cobwebs off the plots of My Dream Is Yours (1949), Tea for Two (1950), Lullaby of Broadway (1951), I’ll See You in My Dreams (1951) and April in Paris (1952), all named after the hit songs featured in the films. Far better were two charming, small-town period idylls, co-starring the clean-cut, handsome baritone Gordon MacRae: On Moonlight Bay (1951) and By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1953). Her pairing with Frank Sinatra in Young at Heart (1954) was more interesting as he was all scowls, she all smiles. It was a period during which she was voted by servicemen in Korea as “the girl we would most like to take a slow boat back to the States with.
Day also handled a few dramatic roles with ease. She was the long-suffering girlfriend of a trumpeter (Kirk Douglas) in Young Man With a Horn (1950); Ginger Rogers’s sister in Storm Warning (1951), about a Ku Klux Klan murder; and wife of a baseball player (Ronald Reagan) in The Winning Team (1952), in which she laid on her charm thickly to compensate for his lack of it. (She and Reagan became friends and political allies.)
In 1951, Day married Marty Melcher, former talent scout and road manager of the Andrews Sisters. The couple formed a joint company, Arwin Productions, in 1952, which produced most of her films. The following year, Day gave one of her gutsiest performances as the wild west heroine Calamity Jane, touchingly warbling the Oscar-winning hit song Secret Love while leaning against a tree, then on horseback and at the top of the hill at the top of her voice. Wearing buckskins and toting a gun, she only emerged at the end from the chrysalis of tomboyhood into a butterfly of femininity in order to charm her “secret love”, Wild Bill Hickok (Howard Keel).
In contrast, looking more glamorous than ever, Day sang more than a dozen ballads (scored by Percy Faith) as the 20s torch singer Ruth Etting in Love Me Or Leave Me (1955), her first film for MGM. It was a musical worthy of her acting talents in which she matched James Cagney – as the abusive bootlegger gangster Moe “the Gimp” Snyder – blow-for-blow, line-for-line, drawing on her life experiences with men. The part was intended for Ava Gardner, but Gardner refused to have her singing dubbed. Etting, while obviously pleased with Day’s performance, denied she had ever been a dance-hall hostess as portrayed in the film, but acknowledged that it was a way of supplying context to the poignant song Ten Cents a Dance. After the film was released, Day was deluged with mail from fans attacking her, a Christian Scientist, for playing a woman who smoked, drank and wore scanty costumes.
Back at Warners, Day appeared in one of her liveliest musicals, The Pajama Game (1957), adapted from the Broadway show by George Abbott and Stanley Donen. Once again revealing more spice than sugar, she played “Babe” Williams, the dynamic head of the Union Grievance Committee of the Sleep-Tite Pajama Factory who falls for the foreman, despite belting out I’m Not at All in Love.
Day then had the “nerve-racking” experience of working for Alfred Hitchcock opposite James Stewart in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). “For each of my scenes there were dozens of takes, without Hitchcock saying one word,” Day remembered. “I said, ‘Mr Hitchcock what am I doing wrong?’ ‘If you weren’t doing it right, I’d tell you,’ he said.” Actually, all she had to do was look anxious for most of the time, and sing the Oscar-winning Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be) at a crucial moment in the film.
Day remained one of the top box-office stars, male or female, in the US throughout the 60s. She was also one of the highest-paid. However, in her late films The Ballad of Josie (1967), Caprice (1967) and, finally, With Six You Get Eggroll (1968), she failed to find roles that suited her age. It seems a pity that she refused Mike Nichols’s offer to play the seductive Mrs Robinson in The Graduate (1967), a plum role that went to Anne Bancroft. Day wrote: “I could not see myself rolling around in the sheets with a young man half my age whom I’d seduced. I realised it was an effective part, but it offended my sense of values.”
When Melcher died in 1968, it was revealed that he had squandered and embezzled most of Day’s money. After recovering from a nervous breakdown, she reluctantly hosted the Doris Day Show on TV for four years, a series that Melcher had contracted her to do without her knowledge. In 1974, she was awarded $22m in damages from the lawyer who had helped Melcher in the mismanagement of her business.
“Animals have never disappointed me,” Day once proclaimed. For decades after her retirement she devoted herself to animal welfare, founding various organisations including the Doris Day Animal Foundation. At her home in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, she kept many dogs and cats, some of them former strays. Her fourth husband, Barry Comden, whom she married in 1976, complained that the main reason the marriage broke up in 1981 was because she cared for her animals more than him.
In 2011, Day released My Heart, a compilation of previously unreleased recordings. It was her first new album to be released in nearly two decades, and became a bestseller, proving her enduring popularity.
James Darren, Deborah Walley, James CallanJames Darren
James Darren was born in 1936 in Philadelphia. He had a career as a pop singer in the late 1950’s and made his movie debut in “Rumble on the Docks” in 1956. His other movies include “The Brothers Ricco”, “Gidget”, “Let No Man Write My Epitaph,””The Lively Set”, “Diamond Head and “The Guns of Navarone”
TCM overview:
Born Jimmy Ercolini and raised on 10th Street between Ritner and Porter in the same South Philadelphia neighborhood that produced Fabian, Bobby Rydell and Frankie Avalon, James Darren grew into a tall, dark and handsome Italian heartthrob who would also enjoy a run as a teenage singing sensation. While studying acting with Stella Adler in NYC, a chance meeting with Columbia Pictures eastern talent scout Joyce Selznick opened the door to a screen career, and he joined the studio’s stable of fine young actors, delivering a standout performance in his feature debut as the juvenile gang leader and star of “Rumble on the Docks” (1956). Darren continued to impress in subsequent outings but really came into his own as Jeff ‘Moondoggie’ Matthews opposite Sandra Dee’s “Gidget” (1959). Especially effective as the young man torn between the carefree surfing life and the responsibilities of growing up, he also displayed a pleasant singing voice on the film’s title song and the even better “The Next Best Thing to Love”, launching a recording career that boasted five Top 10 singles during the early 60s, including the Grammy-nominated “Goodbye Cruel World” (1961), which peaked at Number Three.
Darren reprised his “Gidget” persona twice, contributing his ingratiating talent to “Gidget Goes Hawaiian” (1961) and “Gidget Goes to Rome” (1963), both a little lackluster compared to the original. Still, in some filmgoers’ minds, he was forever established as Moondoggie, despite his acclaimed work as best friend Eddie Sirota in “The Gene Krupa Story” (1959), as the slum kid who perseveres to become a concert pianist in “Let No Man Write My Epitaph” (1960), and as an underutilized member of the all-star gang of saboteurs in J Lee Thompson’s “The Guns of Navarone” (1961). Still, compared with his Philadelphian brethren Fabian, Rydell and Avalon, who all took their cracks in teen movies, Darren exhibited more staying power, segueing to a successful career as a TV actor after his pop-star status waned. His first role as a series regular came as time-traveling scientist Tony Newman in the ABC series “Time Tunnel” (1966-67), and he later spent three seasons as veteran patrolman Jim Corrigan, partnered with Heather Locklear’s Stacy Sheridan, on “T.J. Hooker” (ABC, 1983-85; CBS, 1985-86). When Darren made his directing debut with an episode near the end of that show’s final season, people liked what they saw, and he started to receive offers to direct for other series.
Darren began working exclusively behind the scenes, helming episodes of “Hunter” and “Stingray” (both NBC) and “Werewolf” (Fox), among others. “I figured this [directing] was a good way to stay in the business, and I didn’t have to worry about how I looked. I didn’t have to shave every morning. I would get up, shower, comb my hair back, put on a baseball cap and go to work.” (CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, September 27, 1999) He reteamed with Locklear, directing episodes of Fox’s “Melrose Place” from 1995-97, and eventually acted opposite her as the sleazy Tony Marlin during that show’s final season (1998-99), but only after creating the part of Vic Fontaine in the syndicated “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”. Calling his holographic Las Vegas lounge singer a “combination of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and myself,” Darren appeared in ten episodes (including the series finale) and revitalized his singing career. Never considered much of a pop-rock vocalist in his heyday, he released his 13th album, “This One’s From the Heart” (1999), which featured songs he had performed on the series, and garnered his first real critical acclaim as a crooner, having finally found himself in the idiom of Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Sammy Cahn and the like.
The above TCM overview can now be accessed online here.
The Guardian Obituary in 2024
. Landing a movie role that had been earmarked for Elvis Presley; being spoofed on The Flintstones; mobbed regularly by teenage girls – all proof that the singer and actor James Darren, who has died aged 84, was briefly a pop-culture phenomenon.
He first made his mark in a “beach party” movie – the archaic genre that showed teenagers frolicking in the sand to pop music for 90 minutes or so, with a perfunctory light-hearted or romantic narrative attached. The craze, which lasted for much of the 1960s, is generally agreed to have begun with Gidget (1959), starring Sandra Dee as Francine, a Malibu teenager who shows minimal interest in boys until she is rescued from the ocean by the surfer Moondoggie. She then falls in with his beach buddies (who nickname her “Gidget”, a combination of “girl” and “midget”) while falling in love with him
Played by the cherubic, clean-cut Darren, Moondoggie – real name Jeffrey Matthews – gazes into her eyes and croons: “There’s no such thing as the next best thing to love.”
Columbia marketed the film as a celebration of “the beach generation” and boasted that it showed teenagers could be “delightfully juvenile without being delinquent”. Rebel Without a Cause this was not.
The part had been offered to Presley, but he was busy with his military service. Darren, the epitome of wholesome, puppyish charm, dispelled all thoughts of the King as soon as he appeared on screen. As well as boosting him as an actor, the film launched his singing career as part of the Colpix Records stable, which also included a pre-Monkees Davy Jones.
Darren had been singing since his early teens – “Doing three or four weddings or bar mitzvahs a week” – in Philadelphia before, as he told the Baltimore Sun in 1983, moving on to “places with a stripper and a saxophonist on the bill”. He was professionally unproved, however, and the studio initially considered having him lip-sync to a recording
Among his post-Gidget hits was the infectious Goodbye Cruel World. With its jaunty circus-style refrain, it became a top three Billboard single in 1961 and was recently featured in Steven Spielberg’s nostalgic drama The Fabelmans(2022).
One newspaper sighed over Darren’s “mile-high pompadour and dreamy eyes”. Fans chased him in the street, even yanking him out of a San Francisco studio in one instance. “They broke down the plate glass window and pulled me out on the sidewalk,” he claimed. “They started to rip my clothes off … I remember lying there out on the street on my back and looking up at all those faces in the sky, a whole ring of ’em around me. And you know what? I loved it. Loved it!”
In 1964, he provided the singing voice for Yogi Bear in Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear! A year later, he was the inspiration for the pop star Jimmy Darrock in an episode of The Flintstones, where his animated alter-ego is shown performing Wax Up Your Boards to the adoring cries of female fans. Listening to the radio, Wilma and Betty nod their heads approvingly while Fred and Barney are unimpressed. Informed that Jimmy’s surfing anthem is the most popular song in the country, Fred splutters: “Song? I thought we were tuned in to the mating call of the brontosaurus.”
Darren made two further Gidget films, playing opposite a different female lead in each one. In Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961), Dee was replaced by Deborah Walley, while Cindy Carol took the title role in Gidget Goes to Rome (1963). He later described both sequels, as well as another of his beach party movies, For Those Who Think Young (1964), as “dreadful”.
Fortunately, he had other irons in the fire, and talent to burn. He had already impressed in Drum Crazy (1959), aka The Gene Krupa Story, a biopic of the pioneering jazz drummer played by Sal Mineo. In what the critic Tim Lucas called “possibly [a] career-best performance” which “very nearly steals the film”, Darren played Krupa’s best friend and bandmate, the fictional trumpeter Eddie Sirota, and gets to sing Let There Be Love.
He was back on the brass in Venus in Furs (1969), aka Paroxismus, albeit with more gruesome results. Finding a trumpet buried on a beach, he begins playing it, seemingly summoning the corpse of a woman who was murdered at an orgy. The film ends with the trumpeter finding his own corpse – “It’s me! I’ve been dead all the time!” – though the New York Times noted that this conclusion “does not really clarify the plot
He was born in Philadelphia, to William Ercolani, an electrician-turned-tailor, and Virginia (nee Lipiano), and educated at Epiphany of Our Lord parish school. He went to Hollywood in 1954 “to get discovered” and later studied acting in New York under Stella Adler. Changing his surname to Darren after the Kaiser-Darrin sports car, he reasoned that Ercolani was not merely unmemorable but “too long for a marquee”. He was put under a seven-year contract to Columbia after meeting and impressing Joyce Selznick, niece of the producer David O Selznick.
He made his film debut as a teenage gang leader in Rumble on the Docks (1956). In the wake of his success in Gidget, he starred in All the Young Men, with Sidney Poitier in charge of an all-white platoon during the Korean war; Let No Man Write My Epitaph (both 1960), in which Darren played the son of a murderer who died in the electric chair; and the popular wartime adventure The Guns of Navarone (1961) with Gregory Peck.
He was a time-travelling scientist in the short-lived TV series The Time Tunnel (1966-67), produced by Irwin Allen, and continued acting on television throughout the 1970s, popping up as a guest star on Hawaii Five-O, Fantasy Island and Charlie’s Angels. But his career had already branched off into cabaret after he met Buddy Hackett in 1970 and formed a comedy-and-music partnership with him. In the late 70s and 80s, Darren was a fixture on the cabaret circuit, with residencies in Atlantic City and Las Vegas. “I hit the nightclubs and never looked back,” he said.
In 1982, he was cast as a good-natured cop in the prime-time series TJ Hooker, starring William Shatner and Heather Locklear, and stayed with the show for four years. After taking the reins on one episode, he developed an appetite for directing, and amassed credits on shows including The A-Team, Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place.
Memorable later acting roles included a wry turn as the lounge singer Vic Fontaine, who appears as a hologram in Star Trek Deep Space Nine
Darren broke a 16-year hiatus from acting for what was to be his final movie, Lucky (2017), in which he starred opposite Harry Dean Stanton. As a reformed scallywag (described by this paper as a “Christopher Walken soundalike smoothie”), he made a strong showing, and Variety predicted a possible career renaissance: “If the right people see Lucky, it could do for Darren what Jackie Brown did for Robert Forster.”
The right people clearly were not paying attention. But Gidget was enough. Asked in 1983 whether he still watched his old movies on television, Darren said: “Not if I’ve eaten.”
He is survived by his wife, the actor Evy Norlund, whom he married in 1960, and their sons, Christian and Anthony, as well as by another son, the television reporter Jim Moret, from his first marriage, to Gloria Terlitsky, which ended in divorce in 1958.
Balin was born in Brooklyn, New York to Jewish parents. Her father, Sam Rosenberg, was a dancer, singer and comedian who worked the Borscht Belt. He later quit show business to join his family’s furrier business.
Balin graduated from high school at age 15 after having spent five years at a boarding school in Pennsylvania.
Balin did summer stock, which led to roles on Broadway. She first starred on Broadway in Compulsion, portraying Ruth. In 1959, she had the role of Alice Black in the comedy A Majority of One.
In 1966, Balin toured Vietnam with the USO on the first of many trips to the war-torn region. In 1975, she aided in the evacuation of orphans during the fall of Saigon. Eventually, she adopted three of these orphaned children. In 1980, she played herself in a made-for-television movie based on her experiences, The Children of An Lac.
While working on The Children of An Lac, she became acquainted with Christy Marx who, at the time, worked as a producer’s liaison for various television programs. According to Marx, she used Balin’s story as a basis for a character in the animated show Jem when she became a writer. The character of Ba Nee is based on Balin’s adopted daughter, Ba-Nhi. Ba Nee’s obsession with and struggle to find her birth father are the focus of several episodes of Jem.
Ina Balin, died on June 20, 1990 at Yale–New Haven Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut, aged 52, from complications of chronic lung disease, including pulmonary hypertension (high blood pressure of the lungs). She had been at the hospital awaiting a lung transplant.
A single mother, she was survived by her father, Sam Rosenberg; her three adopted children: Nguyet Baty, Ba-Nhi Mai, and Kim Thuy; a brother, Richard Balin; and two grandchildren. Ba-Nhi Mai and Kim Thuy were raised by Hollywood talent agent Ted Ashley and his wife Page (née Cuddy).
In 1959, Balin won the Theatre World Award for her performance in the Broadway comedy, A Majority of One.
Anne Francis, who has died of complications of pancreatic cancer aged 80, is now best remembered mainly due to the lyrics “Anne Francis stars in Forbidden Planet \ Oh-oh at the late night, double-feature, picture show”, which were sung over the opening credits of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), and for the cult science-fiction movie to which they refer, Forbidden Planet (1956). The only woman in the cast of Forbidden Planet, Francis had a sprightly charm and a wide-eyed child-like innocence as Altaira, the space-age Miranda in the transposition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest to a distant planet.
The mini-skirted teenaged daughter of the exiled Dr Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) has never seen any man except her father until a group of US astronauts, led by Commander John J Adams (Leslie Nielsen), arrive. While never exactly exclaiming “O brave new world that has such people in it!”, she expresses it with her eyes and is quite curious and happy to learn about man-woman relationships, and the art of kissing, from the new arrivals. Warned by her father to avoid contact with the earthmen, she beams up Robby the Robot (Ariel). “Robby, I must have a new dress, right away,” she tells the android. “Again?” he responds. “Oh, but this one must be different! Absolutely nothing must show – below, above or through.” “Radiation-proof?” “No, just eye-proof will do.”
The curvaceous, blonde, 5ft 8in Francis, with a becoming little mole next to her mouth, was never eye-proof, especially during the films of the 1950s that launched her career proper and sealed her fame. Born in Ossining, New York, she came to public notice in her childhood. “I didn’t come from a show-business family; neither of my parents were involved in it,” she said in 1997. “Actually, someone said to my mom that they thought I’d make a good child model, so she took me up to the John Robert Powers modelling agency, which was the top one in New York City at that time. We were sitting in the outer office with a lot of other folks and Mr Powers himself came out of his office door, looked around the corner, pointed at me, and said, ‘I’ll take that one!’ And that’s how it all started, when I was just six years old.”
The Rack, poster, Paul Newman, Anne Francis, 1956. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
She started performing on children’s radio and then moved on to Broadway, aged 11. Billed as Anne Bracken, she played alongside Gertrude Lawrence and Danny Kaye in the Kurt Weill musical Lady in the Dark (1941). There followed several radio soap operas before she signed a one-year contract with MGM. However, the studio only gave her bit parts in three films. It was not until 1950 that she was given her first chance to act on screen, in the United Artists production So Young, So Bad. Although the latter half of the title was also applicable to the latter half of this tale of delinquent girls in an authoritarian reform school, Francis was excellent as an abused teenage mother, lusting after the humane doctor (Paul Henreid).
The role brought her to the attention of the studio boss Darryl F Zanuck, who signed Francis to a 20th Century-Fox contract. Among the five films she made for Fox were two lightweight pictures in which she played the daughter of prissy Clifton Webb, Elopement (1951) and Dreamboat (1952), before being allowed more maturity and period dress as a landowner in 19th-century Haiti in the title role of Lydia Bailey (1952).
But it was on her return to MGM that she co-starred in a range of good movies with a range of good parts, belying her reputation, derived from Forbidden Planet, of an innocent, doll-like performer. In Rogue Cop (1954), she plays the drunken discarded moll of a gangster (George Raft). In John Sturges’s superb Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) – where she was, as in Forbidden Planet, the only woman in the cast – she takes the role of a seemingly tough garage owner in jeans, who doesn’t want to help John J Macreedy (Spencer Tracy) discover the secret of her town where “somethin’ kind of bad happened”, and who meets a tragic end.
Francis was also involved in the then sensational, now dated, juvenile delinquent school drama, Blackboard Jungle (1955). She played the pregnant wife of a dedicated teacher (Glenn Ford), who is the victim of threatening notes and phone calls from a depraved student. It was a strong performance among many, though the film is best remembered for being the first with a rock’n’roll soundtrack, by Bill Haley and the Comets. She was even more impressive as Paul Newman’s war-widow sister-in-law in The Rack (1956), and in The Hired Gun (1957), she is sentenced to hang – unusually, for a woman in a western – for the murder of her husband.
It was not long, however, before she “disappeared” for many years into television, only to emerge spasmodically on to the big screen to remind audiences that she was still around. “I had reached the end of my rope as a contract player at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. They were always looking for a new face, so I thought, forget it, I want to go back and do television. In those days, that was the death knell for an actor. You worked television, you didn’t do film. Of course, they cross over all the time today.”
Among the films in which she starred was Girl of the Night (1960), a bold (for the time) and gritty film noir in which she portrayed a high-priced prostitute, exploited by her madam and pimp, until she finds help in psychotherapy. “It is the one film I’m most proud of,” Francis stated. “I was going through analysis at the same time and I was playing going through analysis on that film. It was quite a workout, and it really beat me up.”
Francis had her own TV series, Honey West (1965-66), in which she shone as a sexy and liberated detective, aided by John Ericson (who had played her weak brother in Bad Day at Black Rock). The role won her a Golden Globe and she was also nominated for an Emmy. For the next three decades there followed scores of television guest spots, including four episodes of Dallas in the early 1980s.
In 1982, Francis wrote a book entitled Voices from Home: An Inner Journey, which was about her belief in mysticism and psychic phenomena. In 2007, she was diagnosed with lung cancer, and immediately underwent chemotherapy and had surgery to remove part of her right lung. Francis, who was married and divorced twice, is survived by two daughters, Maggie and Jane.
Anne Francis – ‘Time’ magazine appreciation.
ee androids fighting Brad and Janet / Anne Francis stars in Forbidden Planet / Uh-uh-uh-uh, oh-oh — At the late night, double feature, picture show. — “Science Fiction Double Feature,” a song from Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show
The poster artwork for Forbidden Planet — MGM’s 1956 reworking of Shakespeare’s The Tempest into a science-fiction parable of ego vs. id — showed a fearsome cyborg holding a sleeping blond in a diaphanous gown that highlighted her gaudy curves. The blond was Anne Francis, the machine was Robby the Robot, and the poster had nothing to do with the movie: Robby was a gentleman scholar among automatons, a protector of Francis’s character Altaira, not a menace to her. But that image may be the one that sprang to the minds of moviegoers this week, when the actress’s death was announced. Francis died Sunday, Jan. 2, of pancreatic cancer at a rest home in Santa Barbara, Calif. She was 80.
A lifelong trouper in radio, TV, theater and films, Francis is best known for a flurry of mid-’50s MGM features, for a couple of indelible episodes of The Twilight Zone and for her one-season TV sleuth series Honey West in 1965-66. In her admirers’ memories, she conjures up a description that her co-star William Lundigan enunciated in their 1951 comedy Elopement: “Tall, blond, willowy, sort of ripples when she walks… She’s got those Minnie Mouse eyes, turns ‘em on you like a pair of headlights. Her voice is soft and husky — kind of makes you feel as though your back is being scratched.” (See NewsFeed’s tribute to Anne Francis.)
It happens that Lundigan is talking about another woman, but the attributes fit Francis, who was only 20 during theElopement shoot. She was tall (5ft.-8in.), a seemingly natural blond, with large, lasering blue eyes and an expressive alto voice. Francis also had a forehead so high and smooth that she could have been one of the Metalunans from another ’50s space epic, This Island Earth. The actress’s signature feature — a mole just to the right of her lips — was so distinctive, it was written into the Elopement script. “What’s that?” asks her groom-to-be Lundigan. “It’s a mole,” she replies. “I was born with it. Don’t you like it?” He smiles and whispers, “I like everything you were born with.”
She was born Sept. 16, 1930, with that mole and a work ethic that never quit. The daughter of Philip Marvak, a businessman, and his wife Edith, Anne was a photographer’s model by her fifth birthday. (Pictures from the breadth of her career can be seen on annefrancis.net, the website she maintained until shortly before her death.) She was on television when it was just a gadget, appearing in CBS-TV’s first color tests before World War II. At 10 or 11 she was on Broadway with Gertrude Lawrence in Lady in the Dark and spent her teens in countless radio soaps, including Portia Faces Life and When a Girl Marries, where her child’s voice matured into its permanent, woman timbre. In 1948, when she was 17, she got bit roles in the MGM musical Summer Holiday and David O. Selznick’s Portrait of Jennie. She was back in New York, working on TV’s proto-thriller series Suspense in 1949, when Hollywood casting directors noticed that this reliable young actress was also a knockout.
There’s no doubting Francis’s worthiness as a pinup. Yet what came across, in her two-decade movie and TV prime, was not sultry ostentation but a preternatural poise and a questioning intelligence. Her beauty cloaked her brains without obscuring them. In one sense, she was a blend of Hollywood’s two most popular female types in the ’50s: the bombshell blonds Monroe and Mansfield — an adolescent’s notion of squeaky-voiced sexuality — and smart, slim vixens like Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly. You’d think someone would have seen Francis as the golden mean between these extremes, yet the studios that employed her (Fox from 1951 to 1954, then MGM for the next three years) had trouble deciding what to do with her.
Their frequent solution: cast her as a gorgeous bookworm, whose closest relationships are with father figures. That prim, stern comedy star Clifton Webb played her doting dad in two films: Elopement, with Francis as a prodigy of architectural design, andDreamboat (1952), where her character is a literary scholar in horn-rimmed glasses and a trim gabardine suit; she’s writing her college thesis on the contention that Homer was not the sole author ofThe Iliad and The Odyssey because “No one man could write so much trash.” In Forbidden Planet she is the science-loving daughter of the planet’s only adult human, Walter Pidgeon; and in The Rack she is Pidgeon’s daughter-in-law, trying to help young Paul Newman through a wartime charge of aiding the enemy. In these roles, her hair was always pulled back, in an implicit dare for any man to let it down and unleash the beast. That was the goal of Francis’s young male co-stars: the thawing of an ice goddess.
The women Francis played usually saw men as curious subjects for further research. She treats her first kiss with Jeffrey Hunter in Dreamboat as an alien-earthling encounter, peculiar but pleasing. In her best-known role as Altaira, isolated on the Forbidden Planet after catastrophes have wiped out her mother and the rest of the colony, has grown up with only her father and a deer and a tiger she treats a pets. When she spots her first male humans — astronauts from Earth — she says, “I so terribly wanted to meet a young man, and now three of them at once!” When she invites spaceship commander Leslie Nielsen to join her for a swim in the pool, he notes regretfully that he didn’t bring his bathing suit. “What’s a bathing suit?,” she asks. Teetering toward camp, the movie is played seriously by the whole cast. And no one had a tougher challenge than Francis, since she’s wearing either various forms of a 23rd-century cheerleader tunic, or nothing.
In these busy years she played opposite some of Old and New Hollywood’s top leading men: Newman, Dick Powell in Susan Slept Here (as a vamp who morphs into a spider-woman during the film’s comic ballet sequence), Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Bad Rock (as the only woman in a threatening town) and Glenn Ford in The Blackboard Jungle(as Ford’s ailing, pregnant, jealous wife). She appeared with Ford again in the 1957 Navy comedy Don’t Go Near the Water, with Earl Holliman stealing her from wolf-man Jeff Richards, just as Nielsen had from Warren Stevens inForbidden Planet. That comedy, which demoted her to second female lead, ended her MGM contract and, oddly, cued a three-year absence from major film and TV work when Francis was still in her 20s — and at the presumed peak of her appeal.
Movies were increasingly a man’s preserve; women who wanted meaty roles often went into TV drama, where the pay was less and the shooting schedules brisk but the rewards of fully imagined and realized characters greater. In his first season of The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling gave her one such juicy part in the episode “The After Hours.” She played Marsha White, a young woman shopping in a department store for a gift, a golden thimble, for her mother. But an elevator operator takes her to the store’s ninth floor, deserted except for an insulting sales girl and, in the showcases, just one object: her thimble. Locked in overnight, she comes to realize her strange destiny. A gloss on the Philip K. Dick theme of the android who dreams he’s human, “The After Hours” focuses every scene on Francis, monitoring her face for clues, as bafflement escalates into rage and then settles into acceptance. It’s a splendid use of Francis’s persona: at once friendly and doll-like, human and otherworldly.
In 1960 she took the starring role in Girl in the Night, an indie-style drama about a lonely call girl misused by her madam (Kay Medford). Francis thought this was her best film work, and the film is remembered warmly but fuzzily; it is not available on DVD. She did lots more TV, including her second Twilight Zone: the ultra-weird “Jess-Belle,” Earl Hamner, Jr.’s folk-horror tale about a mountain girl so desperate for another woman’s man that she makes a pact with a witch and turns into a leopard. That was 1963, and two years later Francis got a shot at starring in her own TV action drama, Honey West.
The first hour-long series named for its female character, Honey West was based on Skip and Gloria Fickling’s pulp-novel series about a woman who took over her late father’s detective business. Mixing clichés from private-eye and international espionage stories, then flipping the gender, Honey was a Bond babe — Jane Bond — put in charge of the franchise, and comfortable with the power it gave her. She bested bad men with her karate skills, navigated hairpin turns on high-speed chases in her top-down sports car and, just as important, displayed the business-running executive skills only men of the era were supposed to possess. Honey had a hunky male assistant, Sam Bolt (John Ericson), but he was there mainly as eye candy for the women in the audience. The men had Francis’ efficient allure, her newly fluffy blond hair and, of course, her facial mole, which was featured so prominently in the opening-credit sequence you’d think it was the co-star.
Aaron Spelling, the show’s executive producer, was no militant feminist; 11 years later he would multiply Honey by three, give this trio the sort of patriarchal boss Honey never needed, and call it Charlie’s Angels. As the overseer of Honey West, Spelling made sure sensuality took precedence over suspense. A smarty-pants sex object, Honey wore earrings she could toss like darts to emit tear gas. She often sported tights that looked as if they’d been borrowed from Diana Rigg in The Avengers. Once she went undercover in a showgirl outfit with tiger stripes, which was appropriate for this feral beauty, since her character also kept a pet ocelot named Bruce (a cousin to Francis’s tiger playmate in Forbidden Planet and to the leopard she morphed into on (The Twilight Zone). All this animal attraction should have kept the show running for years, but it was canceled after one 30-episode season.
Truth to tell, that was about it for the iconic phase of Anne Francis’s celebrity. She was 35 when Honey West went south, and the actress who entered show business as a child would keep working for another 35 years. In the 1968 musical Funny Girl she was billed a generous fourth but virtually invisible, except when Barbra Streisand disses her at the start of the first act’s climactic (and climatic) number “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” Thereafter, Francis had no big roles in big movies, instead becoming one of those aging performers of medium wattage who stay employed by joining the perennial bus-and-truck company of TV series guest stars. Webb, as her stuffy father in Dreamboat, had sneered at television as a phenomenon that “encourages people who dwell under the same roof to ignore each other completely.” But for Francis it was a meal ticket that she cashed in for 60 years, from those early color tests in 1940 until her retirement in 2000.
In her post-Honey decades, Francis guested on a few comedy series — The Drew Carey Show and, as Bea Arthur’s college roommate, on The Golden Girls — but concentrated on the hour-long dramas. She graced The Fugitive, Mission: Impossible, Gunsmoke, Columbo, Kung Fu, Barnaby Jones, Police Woman, Dallas (in a recurring role),Jake and the Fat Man, Murder, She Wrote and such Spelling confections as S.W.A.T., The Love Boat, Vega$, Fantasy Island (four times) and, it’s only fair, Charlie’s Angels. All in all, in the second half of her career, she racked up credits in more than 100 films and TV shows. Could that be a record for most series as a guest star? Hard to say, but the gal kept gamely at her craft.
She married twice, both times for three years: at 21 to director Bamlett Price, Jr., and at 29 to Dr. Robert Abeloff; they had a daughter, Jane. After the dissolution of her second marriage in 1964, Francis was on her own. In 1970, she became the first single woman in California to be allowed to adopt a child — a girl named Maggie. Francis wrote a self-help book in 1982 and lent her support to many charities, including Direct Relief, which sends medical supplies to victims of civil unrest, and Angel View, for the physically challenged. She promoted these causes on annefrancis.net, which currently carries this message from 2009: “Dear Friends, Due to health issues, I’m unable to process my fan mail in a timely manner…. For those of you who’ve previously sent me fan mail and autograph requests, I’ll try to process them when I am able to do so.”
Even though she had retired 10 years earlier, survived lung cancer in 2004, and was ailing from the pancreatic cancer that finally felled her, the brainy, beautiful blond from the Forbidden Planet never stopped working, never ceased doing what she did best: being Anne Francis.
For this affectionate tribute to Anne France by “Time” Magazine, please also click
