Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 69 of 128

Arthur Shields

Arthur Shields was born in 1896 in Dublin and is the younger brother of Barry Fitzgerald. Like his sibling, he came a player with the famous Abbey Theatre and travelled with them on tour to the U.S. and in 1936 went to Hollywood to work for John Ford in “The Plough and the Stars”. He remained there and was featured in scores of movies including “How Green Was My Valley” in 1941, “The Keys of the Kingdom” and “National Velvet”. He died in 1970 in Santa Barbara.

Arthur Shields features extensively in Adrian Frazier in “Hollywood Irish”.

IMDB entry:
Though not as well known as his nearly decade-older brother Barry Fitzgerald, Shields was a talented actor with well over twice the film roles in his career. Fitzgerald was already a well established player at the renowned Dublin Abbey Theater when Shields, also bitten by the acting bug, joined in 1914. He performed but was also out front directing plays. Already he had dabbled in the new medium of Irish film (1910) with two notable examples (1918). There was more to the seemingly mild-mannered Shields than met the eye. His family was Protestant Nationalist and he himself fought in the Easter Uprising of 1916. And he was in fact captured and imprisoned in a camp in North Wales. Late in 1918 he came to America and first helped bring Irish comedy and drama to Broadway. He would continue to appear on Broadway for some 24 plays until 1941, especially reviving two Abbey Theater favorites from the hand of Sean O’Casey, “The Plow and the Stars” and “Juno and the Peacock”, the latter being produced and staged by him in 1940. Still not settled, Shields was back in Dublin through most of the 1920s but returned to Broadway almost full time in 1932 moving through the repertory of Irish plays. When John Ford finally convinced his brother – and some other Abbey players — to come to Hollywood to do the 1935 film version of Juno and the Peacock, Broadway veteran Shields was asked to take the pivotal part of Padraic (Patrick) Pearse, perhaps the most important leader of the Easter Rising.

By early 1939 he was finished with his concentration on Broadway and found Ford eager to offer him a part in his Revolutionary period adventure Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) as the matter-of-fact pioneer minister with a good shooting eye-Reverence Rosenkrantz. Ministers, reverends, priests, and other assorted clerics would be a Shields staple throughout his career – and he always managed to breath an individual humanity into each and every one. From then on through the 1940s he was in demand as character actor

and not just Irish roles as Fitzgerald with his gravelly, prominent

brogue, found himself. Along with the aforementioned men of the cloth, Shields was provided a steady offering of the gamut of Hollywood’s character storehouse-Irish and otherwise. And among them were parts for some of Ford’s most memorable films: How Green Was My Valley (1941) and especially The Quiet Man (1952). Here again, he was a cleric but a uniquely sympathetic one-the lone Protestant Reverend Dr. Playfair-who John Wayne affectionately calls “Padre” in the vastly Catholic village of the film. He alone knows the former identity of Wayne and convinces the latter of his final struggle to go on with his new life in Ireland. Enough said – with a wonderful cast of Ford stalwarts and native Irish (including Fizgerald), this was Ford’s long awaited crowning achievement.

Though Shields was taking on the occasional film through the 1950s, most of his time was going to television. Along with TV playhouse roles he became a most familiar face of episodic TV with a variety of roles (even the old Mickey Mouse Club Hardy Boy Adventures), especially in the ever-popular TV Western genera. Aside from his numerous appearances in plays throughout his career, all told Arthur Shields screen appearances approached nearly 100 memorable acting endeavors.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: William McPeak

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Jean Peters was a very attractive brunette actress under contract with 20th Century Fox in the late 1940’s and early 50’s. She retired early on her marriage to Howard Hughes. She starred opposite some of the most popular leading men of the time including Tyrone Power, Jeffrer Hunter, Joseph Cotten, Robert Wagner, Marlon Brando and Rossano Brazzi. Her credits include “Captain from Castile” in 1947, “Pickup on South Street” in 1951, “Viva Zapata” and “Three Coins in the Fountain”.er acting career on her divorce from Hughes. She died in 2000.

The bruised face of Jean Peters, with a sticking plaster as strategically placed as a beauty patch, was a striking film image of the 1950s; from Sam Fuller’s 1953 A-quality B-movie, Pickup on South Street, in which Peters played an innocent (almost) courier for a commie spy, romanced by Richard Widmark’s pickpocket. Tough movie, savvy dame.That part, and her tailored costumes for Rossano Brazzi in Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), were about the best roles that Peters, who has died aged 73, took on in her screen career: one that lasted from 1947 to 1955 and included the westerns Apache (1954) and Broken Lance (1954).Peters gatecrashed the movie business at 20 after winning a Miss Ohio State University popularity contest. Among its prizes was a 20th Century Fox screen test. Her mother drove her from Canton, Ohio to Los Angeles, where Peters was offered a seven-year contract and the female lead in Captain From Castile (1947), an epic filmed in remotest Mexico. Peters looked terrific, in accord with the period’s preference for spirited females. In Anne of the Indies (1951), it was she who did the swashing as a woman pirate, self-possessed far beyond her years.Peters seemed not to take Hollywood seriously. She avoided lunch in the commissary (she picnicked with hair and makeup assistants on the floor of the set instead) and went along with the studio publicity presentation of herself as a bejeansed farm girl: “Back home I still have three dogs, 18 cats, a goat named Josephine and a lamb called Ali Baba.”This unseriousness might also explain her relationship with the eccentric billionaire, Howard Hughes, who first noticed her at a Santa Catalina Island Fourth of July party in 1946, where her date was the war-hero actor, Audie Murphy. By the next year she had ditched Murphy (so angering him that he tried to bribe Hughes’s guards for an opportunity to take a shot at the man), and resided in a Westwood house which Hughes provided.

It was rumoured – falsely – that the couple married under the stars on Mulholland Drive; though they did see each other at least weekly for movies in his screening rooms (he owned RKO studios). While Hughes publicly dated better-known movie glamour, Peters passed on night life and arrived on set on time – “punctual Pete” – for, among other films, Viva Zapata! (1952), again almost combusting as a fake Latina, and Niagara (1953) as a dignified newlywed up against Marilyn Monroe’s wiggling.

Accounts vary, but either on a plane from Rome where she filmed Three Coins, or because of an airport luggage switch, in 1953 she met a Texas oil man, Lockheed plane executive and possible CIA employee, Stuart Cramer III. Though Hughes was also seeing Susan Hayward and Merry Anderson, he was displeased when newspaper gossip Louella Parsons phoned to get his reaction to the Peters-Cramer engagement. Their marriage in 1954 lasted 33 days before a separation, possibly expedited by the pryings of a private eye hired by Hughes.

Whether because of these matrimonial worries, or her drinking problem (Hughes ordered the Beverly Hills Hotel to serve her no liquor but a half-bottle of champagne on her birthday), Peters was distracted enough to accidentally burn herself with a branding iron on the set of Broken Lance, and to have a fling with co-star Robert Wagner. She made only one film after that, the sombre biopic A Man Called Peter (1955), then endured studio suspension for refusing films and loan-outs.

Peters finally married Hughes in 1957 in Tonopeh, Nevada, under the name Marian Evans (his alias was GA Johnson), followed much later by a properly monikered ceremony on his yacht off Miami Beach.

Hughes expected his staff to be on 24-hour call, and Peters soon found he demanded the same from his wife: she wasn’t even allowed out shopping. Their later cohabitations were tense because of his bizarre hangups (he hated her smoking or using a vacuum cleaner).

Finally they arranged parallel lives. Peters was guarded in a phony French chateau on a Bel Air hilltop, while Hughes remained depressed and dependent on weird aides in his sanitary redoubt above a Las Vegas casino. He proposed reconciliation in 1966, but couldn’t cope with even her vestigial normality: Peters sued for divorce. In return for a $70,000-a-year settlement, granted in 1971, she promised not to return to the movies while he lived, or to discuss their private life.

Not long before his death in 1976, Peters received a last letter from Hughes telling her that he had always loved her. By then, she had remarried 20th Century Fox vice-president Stanley Hough.

After Hughes’s death, she appeared in a few television productions (notably a public broadcasting version of Winesburg, Ohio) and did an old star’s ritual guesting on TV series. She returned to university, too, completing the BA that had been interrupted by 30 years of fame and secrecy. She intended to teach, but never did.

• Jean Peters, movie actress, born October 15 1926; died October 13 2000

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

Small Spanish film poster for the 1952 Oscar winning 20th Century Fox production, Viva Zapata. The movie, directed by Elia Kazan, with a screenplay by John Steinbeck, starred Marlon Brando, Jean Peters and Anthony Quinn. (Photo by Michael Nicholson/Corbis via Getty Images)

Kate Price was an Irish actress who appeared in U.S. films in the first half of the 20th century. She was born Katherine Duffy in Cork in 1872. She began featuring in silent films in 1910 and had an extensive career.In the 1930’s she still appeared on film but often in small and sometimes uncredited roles. Her later movies inluded “Have A Heart” in 1934, “West Point of the Air” andin 1937, “Easy Living” her final film. She died in 1943 in Los Angeles.

Michael Strong was born in 1918 in New York. He was featured in “Point Blank” in 1967 and “Patton” amongst others. He died in 1980.

IMDB entry:

While never one of the big names on screen, Michael Strong was one of those excellent method actors who were often compelling to watch. Unsurprisingly, many of Michael’s screen characters were typical New Yorkers, whether they be cops or thugs, and he imbued them with an edgy ‘in-your-face’ intensity that was all his own. He was already an established stage actor, both on and off-Broadway, with an extensive resume to his name long before transferring his talents to the screen. A graduate of the Actor’s Studio, he was also part of the original crew of the Lincoln Center Repertory Company, performing in key plays by Arthur Miller, S.N. Behrman and Eugene O’Neill. Usually assigned to playing military types or proletarian firebrands, Michael eventually came to note as a young burglar in “Detective Story”, written and staged on Broadway by Sidney Kingsley in 1949. Director William Wyler subsequently brought him to Hollywood to recreate his role for the 1951 motion picture.

A couple of other good roles Michael later enacted for the big screen were his smarmy used-car salesman Stegman in the thriller Point Blank (1967) and Brigadier General Hobart Carver in the Oscar-winning war drama Patton (1970). For the most part, however, television became Michael’s most prolific medium. His furtive looks and nervous demeanor often suggested that his characters had something to hide – and most of them did, particularly those Eastern bloc spy types with names like Malkov and Petrovich. He was at home in just about every major police series of the period, equally adept at NYPD sergeants and contract assassins. Fans of Star Trek (1966) will also remember Michael as the unhinged Dr. Roger Korby who had his consciousness transferred into an android body in the episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”. As tough as some of his characters, Michael continued to act right up until the end.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Nick Long was born in 1906 in Long Island. His movies include “Broadway Melody of 1936”. He died in 1949.

Randy Stuart was born in 1924 in Kansas. She is best known for her role in the cult classic of 1957, “The Incredibale Shrinking Man” with Grant Williams. She had an extensive career on American television. She died in 1996.

Tom Weaver’s IMDB entry:
The daughter of husband-and-wife vaudevillians, Randy Stuart was born in southeastern Iola, Kansas and traveled throughout the South and Midwest with her itinerant parents before making her own stage debut with them at the ripe old age of three. The family eventually settled in California where Randy attended college, acted in school plays and caught the eye of Hollywood talent scouts; she enacted a scene from the play “The Women” in a screen test which impressed 20th Century-Fox executives enough to put her under contract. She made her film debut with an uncredited part in The Foxes of Harrow(1947) starring Maureen O’Hara and Rex Harrison.

In 1950, the blonde, smoky-voiced actress made a brief impression as the calculating telephone roommate of Eve Harrington (played by Anne Baxter) in the classic backstage film All About Eve (1950). She then moved up front and center as the distaff part of a husband-and-wife spy team in Biff Baker, U.S.A. (1952) which also starred Alan Hale Jr.. Randy later was given her best-remembered role in the cult sci-fier The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) as Louise Carey, the concerned wife of tiny Scott Carey, played byGrant Williams.

The next year she was cast as Nancy Dawson in the western film Man from God’s Country(1958) opposite George Montgomery which was followed by a guest-star appearance in Montgomery’s short-lived television western television series Cimarron City (1958). She also had a one-season (1959-60) regular role on the western series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955).

After this she would remain focused on 60s’ TV, wherein she sporadically appeared in a number of popular series, mostly crime dramas and westerns, such as “Bonanza,” “Maverick,” “Peter Gunn,” “Cheyenne” and “77 Sunset Strip.” Retiring by the mid 60s, she was spotted only a couple of times after that. In the series “Dragnet” she appeared a couple of times as co-star Harry Morgan‘s wife) and she made a single appearance in a mid 70s “Marcus Welby” episode. She died in 1996 at age 71.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Tom Weaver <TomWeavr@aol.com>

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Doe Avedon obituary in “The Guardian”.

Doe Avedon born in 1925 in Old Westbury, New York. She was married at one time to the photographer Richard Avedon and inspired Stanley Donen to model the Audrey Hepburn character in “Funny Face” on Avedon in 1957. Doe Avedon starred opposite John Wayne in “The High and the Mighty” in 1954 and with Jose Ferrer in “Deep in My Heart”. She was long married to director Don Siegel. She died in 2011.

Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:

In 1944, the 21-year-old Richard Avedon, just starting out as a professional photographer after leaving the US merchant marine, walked into a bank in Manhattan, New York, and saw a 19-year-old clerk called Dorcas Nowell. It was love at first sight. He called her Doe because of her deer-like eyes, and they soon married. Doe Avedon, who has died aged 86, was the first muse of the man who was to become America’s leading fashion and portrait photographer.

Richard Avedon, who had begun to get work as a photographer for the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar, made his wife into a top model, against her own inclinations. Although Doe gradually backed out of the limelight as a model – one of the last photos Richard took of her was posing in a fur-lined Christian Dior coat and hat at the Gare du Nord in Paris in 1947 – she began a nine-year long acting career on Broadway, on tele vision and in movies after their divorce in 1949. “I would have crawled to the Bronx on my knees to bring Doe back,” Avedon remarked in 1993.

Dorcas Marie Nowell was born on Long Island, in New York state, where her widower father was butler to a wealthy lawyer. When she was orphaned aged 12, she was brought up by the family of her father’s employer. As soon as she could, the young woman, who had little education but was an avid reader, started work in New York in various offices and eventually the bank where she met her future husband.

Calling herself Betty Harper, and newly divorced, she first appeared in a small part in Jigsaw (1949), a standard gangster movie with pretensions to social significance. In the same year, she made her debut on Broadway in The Young and Fair, written by N Richard Nash, for which she won the Theatre World award for best performer. This was followed almost immediately by another play, My Name is Aquilon, based on a French play by Jean-Pierre Aumont, with whom she co-starred. In a live television broadcast of What Makes Sammy Run? (1949), Paddy Chayefsky’s adaptation from Budd Schulberg’s novel, Avedon was the calculating wife of the eponymous hero (José Ferrer).

Despite these initial successes, Avedon left acting for five years on her marriage to Don Mathews, a fellow actor whom she met during a national tour of Diamond Lil, written by and starring Mae West. After Mathews was killed in a car accident, Avedon returned to acting in 1954 with significant roles in two blockbuster movies.

In Deep in My Heart, Stanley Donen’s lavish biopic of the American composer Sigmund Romberg (José Ferrer), Avedon was somewhat lost among all the numbers performed by many of MGM’s roster of big stars. Nevertheless, she was delicate and decorative as Mrs Romberg, her husband’s inspiration. “What in the name of heaven you want me for, I don’t know,” she says to him. “I’ve no talent, no music or poetry in me.” Romberg replies, “None. Only the look of you and the spirit of you and your hand in mine.”

In William Wellman’s The High and the Mighty, the prototype of the Airport disaster movies of the 70s, Avedon is a flight attendant from heaven, keeping her cool while everyone else is flipping out. On television, Avedon was prominent in nine episodes of the newspaper drama series Big Town (1955-56) and on the big screen in Byron Haskin’s The Boss (1956), an efficiently directed film noir written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, in which she is an attractive schoolteacher who rejects the marriage proposal of John Payne as a corrupt politician.

After her marriage to the director Don Siegel in 1957, Avedon retired to bring up their four children. About 10 years previously, the screenwriter Leonard Gershe, a friend of the Avedons, had written the book for a stage musical called Wedding Day about a famous fashion photographer who had made his wife into a top model, although she had no interest in such a career. However, it remained on the shelf until Gershe adapted it as the screenplay for the film musical Funny Face (1957), directed by Donen, with Richard Avedon credited as special visual consultant. Fred Astaire played the photographer “Dick Avery” who transforms a young, beatnik salesgirl (Audrey Hepburn) into a high-class model. Very few reviewers and audiences, then as now, made the connection between the film and Doe’s true story. She returned to the screen briefly, over two decades later, in John Cassavetes’ Love Streams (1984), having divorced Siegel.

Avedon is survived by her partner, the actor Michael Liscio; her two daughters, Anney and Kit; and two sons, Nowell and Jack.

• Doe Avedon (Dorcas Marie Nowell), model and actor, born 7 April 1925; died 18 December 2011

Her “Guardian” obituary can be accessed here.

Delphi Lawrence

Delphi Lawrence was born in 1926 in Herfordshire. She made many films in England during the 1950’s including “The Feminine Touch” with Belinda Lee in 1956, “Just My Luck” with Norman Wisdom and “Son of Robin Hood”. In the 1960’s she went to Hollywood and made such movies as “The Last Challenge” with Glenn Ford and Angie Dickinson in 1967. She died in New York in 2002.

IMDB entry:

Delphi Lawrence was born on March 23, 1932 in Hertfordshire, England. She was an actress, known for Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), Murder on Approval (1955) and Element of Doubt (1961). She died on April 11, 2002 in Northport, Long Island, New York, US In the film Wild for Kicks (1960), despite having several lines of dialogue and performing a task crucial to the plot, both her name and that of her character, Greta, are missing from the film’s closing credits! She was nominated for a 1974 Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Actress in a Principal Role for her performance in “Separate Tables”, at the Ivanhoe Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Anglo-Hungarian leading lady of British B-films in the 1950’s and 60’s. Initially trained as a concert pianist.

Hampton Fancher is a Hollywood producer and screenwriter who had a brief career as an actor mainly in the early 1960’s. He was born in 1938 in Los Angeles. Among his screen credits are “Parrish” with Troy Donahue in 1961 and “Rome Adventure” with Donahue again, Suzanne Pleshette and Angie Dickinson.

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Arthur Shields

Jean Peters

Kate Price

Michael Strong

Nick Long

Randy Stuart

Doe Avedon

Doe Avedon obituary in “The Guardian”.

Delphi Lawrence

Hampton Fancher

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