Fernand Gravey was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1905. He made his first film (a silent) in 1913. He began his career in French and British films and then went to Hollywood in 1937. His most famous movie was “The Great Waltz” with Luise Rainer. He returned to France before the Nazi occupation. His later films included “La Ronde” with Simone Simon in 1950. He died in France in 1970.
One of director Alfred Machin’s favorite actresses was Fernande Dépernay of the Théâtre des Galeries. Dépernay was married to Georges Mertens, another of Machin’s regular actors. Their son, Fernand Mertens, born in 1904. He made his acting debut in ‘Saïda Makes Off with Manneken Pis’ and in 1914 played the role of little Kef in ‘A Tragedy in the Clouds’ alongside his parents. Much later, under the pseudonym Fernand Garvey, he went to become one of France’s most renowned actors.
Peter Cookson was born in 1913 in Oregon. He was most prolific on stage and in film in the 1940’s and 50’s. His films include “Fear” and “G.I. Honeymoon” in 1945. Starred in “Can Can” on Broadway in 1955. His wife was the actress Beatrice Straight. Peter Cookson died in 1990.
In 1967, Katharine Houghton had the lead role opposite Sidney Poitier in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”, where she played the daughter of Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn (her real life aunt). Surprisingly it did not lead to a major cinema career. Her last film appearance was in “The Last Airbender” in 2010. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1945 and attended Sarah Lawerence College. She has has had an extensive stage career.
IMDB entry:
Katharine Houghton was born on March 10, 1945, in Hartford, Connecticut, the daughter of Marion Hepburn Grant (Katharine Hepburn‘s younger sister) and Ellsworth Grant. Before going into the movies, she went to Sarah Lawrence College and majored in philosophy. Her debut in the movies was in 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) as “Joanna Drayton”. This movie also starred her aunt, Katharine Hepburn (with whom which she has had a close relationship), Spencer Tracy and Sidney Poitier. Since this time, she has starred in over fifty on and off Broadway and New England regional theater productions. She is also a playwright and amongst her credits are such productions as: “Best Kept Secret”, “Merlin”, “The Marry Month Of May”, “Mortal Friends”, “On The Shady Side”, “The Right Number”, “Phone Play” and her translation of Anouilh’s “Antigone”. She also presents lectures: “Katharine X Three”, “My Grandmother’s House Near The River” and “The Secret Life of Louisa May Alcott”.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Marcia <Ssspiceey@yahoo.com>
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Celia Kaye was born in 1942 in Jasper County, Missouri. She came to national fame in the U.S. for her part in the television series “The New Loretta Young Show” in 1961. Her movies include “Island of the Blue Dolphins” in 1964, “Wild Seed” with Michael Parks and “Fluffy” with Shirley Jones. She was featured in the iconic “Big Wednesday in 1978 which was directed by her then husband John Milius.”
“Wikipedia” entry:
Celia Kaye (born Celia Kay Burkholder on February 24, 1942) is an American former actress who appeared in a recurring role as Marnie Massey, daughter of the character Christine Massey played by Loretta Young, on the comedy-drama series, The New Loretta Young Show. The program aired for twenty-six weeks on CBS from 1962 to 1963. Most of Kaye’s work was on television between 1962 and 1974, with final credited film appearances ten years apart – in 1978 and 1988.[1]
Of German and Cherokee ancestry, Kaye was born in Carthage, near Joplin, Missouri to chemical engineer John W. Burkholder and his wife, Kathryn, who ran a private pre-school. When she was one year old, her family moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where her brother, Johnny, was born. She is a graduate of the now-defunct Henry C. Conrad High School near Wilmington as well as the Philadelphia Modeling and Charm School.[3] In high school, she was already interested in acting as a member of the National Thespian Society and performed in such school plays as Time Out for Ginger and Brigadoon. She listed her ambition at the time as “to be happy and successful.”
After high school, Kaye moved to California, where she won a scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse, from which she graduated in 1961. In 1962, a few months before The New Loretta Young Show premiered, Kaye made her television debut as the character “Julie Trenton” in the segment “The Traveler”, one of the last episodes filmed of the ABCwesternseries Tales of Wells Fargo, starring Dale Robertson. While working on The New Loretta Young Show, she continued her education, attending Los Angeles City College at night and studying modern jazz at Eugene Loring’s American School of Dance.
Kaye considers her association with Loretta Young “a very lucky first experience in show business … She was absolutely amazing. … She was just so warm and so inclusive of everyone that my ‘awestruck’ situation went away immediately….This woman walked in and it was her set. And it was her game, and her show, and it’s like she had it all together and everybody just seemed to fall into place. She was in charge of everything without being harsh about it or bossy.”
When The New Loretta Young Show ended, Kaye appeared twice, once as a character with her own name of “Celia”, in the long-running ABC sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.[1] On December 6, 1964, six months after the premiere of Island of the Blue Dolphins, Kaye was cast as “Ann Shelby” opposite Dwayne Hickman in his title guest-starring role of the episode “The Clay Shelby Story” of ABC’s Wagon Train. Other guest stars in the segment were Richard Carlson and Mort Mills, who were cast as military officers.
In 1965, Kaye played Daphne in the film Wild Seed, opposite Michael Parks. That same year she was “Sally Brighton” in the film Fluffy, starring Shirley Jones. In 1967, she played “Melissa Neal” on ABC’s The Green Hornet in a two-part episode entitled “Corpse of the Year.” That same year, she portrayed a character “Emily” in the episode “Decision at Sundown” of the second Dale Robertson series, The Iron Horse, a fictional account of a railroad moving into the American West. Other television appearances were in 1970 in the ABC series, The Young Lawyers, starring Lee J. Cobb, and in 1973 in Adam’s Rib, starring Ken Howard and Blythe Danner. Kaye’s last television role was in 1974 as Willa Sweeney in “Hundred Mile Walk” of NBC‘s Little House on the Prairie.
Kaye’s last film roles were in the coming of age picture Big Wednesday (1978) opposite Sam Melville, and the horror story, Vampire at Midnight, also known as Murder at Midnight(1988) as “Sandra.”
Kaye has a child, Amanda Milius, from her 1978 marriage to director and screenwriter John Milius, who directed Big Wednesday.
The above “Wikipedia” entry can also be accessed online here.
Although Christopher Reeve will forever be remembered for his Superman movies, he did make some other very fine movies. He was born in 1952 in New York City. He made his film debut in “Gray Lady Down” which starred Charleton Heston in 1978. Later on that year, “Superman;The Movie” was released. His other movies of note ionclude the period drama “Somewhere in Time” with Jane Seymour, “The Bostonians” with Vanessa Redgrave and “Remains of the Day” with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. Sadly his horseriding accident in 1995 curtailed his career. Afterwards he did make an occasional film. He died in 2004.
Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:
It is a tragic irony that, in his life and death, Christopher Reeve, who has died of heart failure aged 52, has been renowned for two roles: Superman, the supreme physical specimen, and a man paralysed from the neck down. Unfortunately, the second role was all too real.
In 1995 Reeve, a keen rider, broke his neck when he was thrown from his horse during an equestrian competition in Virginia. But, after some years of therapy, despite pessimistic prognoses, he was determined to walk again, and became a symbol of hope for quadriplegics. “I refuse to allow a disability to determine how I live my life. I don’t mean to be reckless, but setting a goal that seems a bit daunting actually is very helpful toward recovery,” Reeve said.
In 2000, Reeve was able to move his index finger and breathe for longer and longer periods without a respirator. He also regained sensation in other parts of his body. Reeve dedicated much of his time and almost all of his energy lobbying US Congress for better insurance protection against catastrophic injury and giving support to stem cell research. Coincidentally, Senator John Kerry, in Friday’s debate with George Bush, said that he believed embryonic stem cell research should be expanded, saying it would be the best way to give Reeve (an active Democrat) and others like him the chance to walk again.
However, it would be a pity if this heroic and heartrending situation should obscure some of his many achievements in his acting career, cut short in such a cruel manner. After all, Reeve appeared in a total of 17 feature films, a dozen TV movies, and about 150 plays.
Christopher Reeve was born in New York into an intellectual family; his father FD Reeve is a noted novelist, poet, and scholar of Russian literature; his mother, the journalist Barbara Johnson. During his childhood, Christopher was exposed to a stimulating intellectual environment that included Sunday dinners with the poets Robert Frost and Robert Penn Warren, and politician and academic Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The atmosphere was such that his father was disappointed to learn that the role of Superman that his son had been offered was not one in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman as he had thought.
Christopher attended the exclusive Princeton Day School, where he started acting in plays. “While I was growing up,” Reeve recalled, “I never once asked myself: ‘Who am I?’ or ‘What am I doing?’ Right from the beginning, the theatre was like home to me. It seemed to be what I did best. I never doubted that I belonged in it.” After graduating from high school, Reeve toured the country as Celeste Holm’s leading man in The Irregular Verb To Love.
While at Cornell University, he majored in music theory and English, and spent time studying theatre in Britain and France. In London, he worked at the Old Vic. “I was a glorified errand boy, but it was a very exciting time there. I helped by teaching the British actors to speak with an American accent. Then I went to Paris to work with the Comedie Francaise.”
In lieu of his final year at Cornell, Reeve was one of two students (Robin Williams was the other) who were accepted at New York’s Juilliard School of Performing Arts. There he studied under the celebrated John Houseman. At the same time, he supported himself with a role in the long-running television soap, Love Of Life. Reeve’s almost unreal handsome looks and athletic, six-foot-four frame made him perfect material for a soap-opera hero, as later for a comic-book one. In the meantime, he won a coveted role of Katharine Hepburn’s grandson in Enid Bagnold’s A Matter Of Gravity on Broadway in 1976, of which Reeve commented: “I had the privilege of spending nine months working with one of the masters of the craft.” In the same year, Reeve got a small part in Gray Lady Down, a submarine adventure film.
While appearing in an off-Broadway production, Reeve successfully screen-tested for the 1978 movie Superman. It was the most inspired casting of an unknown in a series since Sean Connery’s James Bond. Reeve portrayed Superman as “somebody that, you know, you can invite home for dinner … What makes Superman a hero is not that he has power, but that he has the wisdom and the maturity to use the power wisely. From an acting point of view, that’s how I approached the part.” Of playing Clark Kent, Reeve reckoned that “there must be some difference stylistically between Clark and Superman. Otherwise you just have a pair of glasses standing in for a character.” Reeve, though he played the two roles straight without any sign of camp, revealed a deft Cary Grant-inspired comic timing.
Unfortunately, the three sequels were a matter of diminishing returns and, after Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (1987), Reeve, determined to ‘escape the cape’, explained: “Look, I’ve flown, I’ve become evil, loved, stopped and turned the world backward, I’ve faced my peers, I’ve befriended children and small animals and I’ve rescued cats from trees. What else is there left for Superman to do that hasn’t been done?”
Away from the man of steel, Reeve portrayed a wide range of roles. His films included the love fantasy, Somewhere In Time (1980); the thriller Deathtrap (1982); Monsignor (1982), in which he again wore a cape in the title role; and two archetypal Merchant-Ivory period pieces, The Bostonians (1984) and The Remains Of The Day (1993). He also showed his ability at farce in Switching Channels (1988) and Noises Off (1992). Further proof of his versatility came on stage in The Aspern Papers in London with Vanessa Redgrave and Dame Wendy Hiller; Beaumarchais’ The Marriage Of Figaro in New York, and Tennessee Williams’s Summer And Smoke in Los Angeles, as well as touring in Love Letters.
Before the near-fatal accident, Reeve seemed to have everything. He was an accomplished pianist and a superb athlete. He earned his pilot’s licence in his early 20s and twice flew solo across the Atlantic in a small plane. He also flew gliders and was an expert sailor, scuba diver and skier. But horses were his great passion.
In 1998, Reeve returned to acting in a remarkable TV movie update of the Hitchcock thriller Rear Window, in which a man confined to a wheelchair spies on people in a neighbouring apartment.
Reeve is survived by three children, a son and daughter from his long relationship with modelling executive Gae Exton, and a son with Dana Morosini, whom he married in 1992. Reeve’s parents are still alive.
Ë Christopher Reeve, actor, born September 25 1952; died October 10 2004
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Born at the tail end of the Second World War in 1944, Bronwyn took her mother’s original maiden name “Fitzsimons” and spent the early years of her life in Los Angeles.
In 1953 her mother divorced her father William Houston Price, the American film director. Reportedly the marriage had been on the rocks for years but O’Hara was mindful of the church’s teachings on divorce.
Bronwyn Fitzsimons
She followed her parents into the tough and glamorous world of Hollywood but found that she was never able to escape from her mother’s shadow. She was cast in films “Spencer’s Mountain” and “The Ravagers”. She also starred in a number of TV roles.
In 1968 she married and two years later she gave birth to a son, Conor, who would also follow her into the film industry.
In her 40s she was involved in a car accident that plagued her with pain for many years to come.
Her mother purchased a home in Glengarriff, Cork in 1970 and as the years wore on the pair began to spend increasingly lengthy amounts of time there. The five bedroom property had 35 acres of grounds attached to it and Bronwyn made a number of friends in the local area – even running a small cafe in the town for a while.
In October 2014 her mother announced she was saying goodbye to Ireland and moving to Idaho where her Conor and his two children had made a life for themselves. It was the beginning of the end for the O’Hara/Fitzsimons clan’s association with West Cork and Maureen passed away the following October.
In May 2016 – barely seven months since her mother’s death – Bronwyn was found dead at the Glengarriff house at the age of 71.
James Cahill was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1941.His films include “Will There Really Be A Morning” in 1983 and “Seize the Day” in 1986. He died in 1991.
Robert Middleton was born in 1911 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was a popular character actor in Hollywood movies of the 1950’s. His considerable acting skills can be seen in such films as “The Desperate Hours” in 1955 with Humphrey Bogart, “Friendly Persuasion” with Gary Cooper and Geraldine Fitzgerald and “The Tarnished Angels” with Dorothy Malone. He died in 1977.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Despite the fact that hefty, beetle-browed character actor Robert Middleton (born Samuel G. Messer) was known for most of his career as a mop-faced villain capable of the most vicious and contemptible of crimes, the man himself was quite a happy and hearty gent who loved to play practical jokes, particularly on his family. Robert was educated at the University of Cincinnati and the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he studied music. His deep, mellifluous voice earned him steady work as a radio announcer which, in turn, sparked his interest in acting.
In the early 1950s Middleton made it to Broadway, appearing in “Ondine.” This in turn led to films and TV, where he solidified his evil image in such strong fare as The Desperate Hours (1955) as a sadistic killer, The Court Jester (1955) as a grim and determined knight who jousts with Danny Kaye in the famous “pellet with the poison” sequence, and as a sinister politician in The Lincoln Conspiracy (1977). Betwixt and between were an array of brutish mountain daddies, corrupt, cigar-chomping town bosses and lynch mob leaders. Occasionally he showed a bit of levity, as in his recurring role as Jackie Gleason‘s boss on The Honeymooners (1955) sketches. Middleton died of congestive heart failure in Hollywood at the age of 66.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Hank Worden was born in 1901 in Iowa and reared in Montana. A stalwart of cowboy movies he made his film debut in “Barbary Coast” in 1935. Other films of note include “Red River”, “The Big Sky”, “Man from Texas” and “The Big Wedensday” in 1978. At the age of ninty, he was featured in the TV series “Twin Peaks”. He passed away in 1991.
TCM overview:
Rodeo worker who, along with roommate Tex Ritter, was chosen to play a cowhand in Broadway’s “Green Grow the Lilacs” in 1930. Worden later broke into films in Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Plainsman” (1937) and appeared in over 100 movies during the next half-century. Typically cast in westerns, Worden ambled his way through a host of colorful supporting roles, including four for director John Ford. Although Worden played a memorable recurring cameo in David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” series shortly before his death, buffs are more likely to cherish his unforgettably addled Old Mose (“Thank you kindly”) in Ford’s masterful Western “The Searchers” (1956).
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
