Al Martino was one of the great American popular singers of the past sixty years. He was born in 1927 in Philadelphia. He has had numerous Top Ten hists including “”Here In My Heart”, “The Story of Tina”, “Spanish Eyes” and “Mary in the Morning”. He was featured in “The Godfather” in 1971 and “The Godfather 3. Al Martino died in 2009.
Michael Freedland’s obituary in “The Guardian”:
A million young girls believed Al Martino, who has died aged 82, had a place reserved for them when he sang the hit ballad Here in My Heart. He warbled I Love You Because and they had no doubt that he was making a personal statement for their ears only. Such was the power of an early 1950s pop star in a more innocent age when words and melody seemed to mean something.
Martino entered the Guinness Book of Records by having, in 1952, the first No 1 record in the newly launched UK singles chart. Here in My Heart remained at No 1 for nine weeks. He also had 34 “Hot 100” entries in the American hit parade between 1959 and 1977. I Love You Because and I Love You More and More Each Day were both in the Top 10. Hits were very much Martino’s business, most of them revealing the fact that he was in love with a mysterious girl.
There was a time when it seemed that Martino was destined to be the new Frank Sinatra, not least because he first enjoyed success at precisely the time that Sinatra’s career was at a low ebb. The Sinatra connection continued when, in 1972, Martino appeared in the Oscar-winning film The Godfather as Johnny Fontane, a nightclub singer and aspiring actor whose lagging career is given a helping hand by the mob. Fontane’s godfather, Don Vito Corleone (played by Marlon Brando), arranges for a horse’s head to be placed in the bed of a Hollywood mogul to ensure a movie role for his godson. Martino can be seen performing I Have But One Heart (O Marenariello) in the film’s opening wedding scene.
For years it was widely believed that Fontane was based on Sinatra, who, it was alleged, got his own big movie break in From Here to Eternity (1953) thanks to mafia intervention. However, research has disclosed that it was not Sinatra who brought in the mafia, but Martino’s near namesake, Dean Martin, another Italian-American singer enjoying his first hit records. Their voices were at times remarkably similar, except that Martino’s style was more full-throated than the laidback “Dino” approach. When Martino sang Spanish Eyes in 1965, another of his successful singles, he might easily have been mistaken for Martin, who was even at one time wrongly said to be Martino’s brother.
He was born Alfred Cini in Philadelphia. When he left school, he entered the family’s construction business, and in the evenings sang in clubs and bars near his home – a fairly conventional way for singers to get noticed. Like Sinatra, Martino won a contest – in his case, Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scout Show.
Mario Lanza, the operatic tenor who became a pop idol, was a friend of the family and persuaded the young Al to take up singing professionally. Martino recorded Here in My Heart for the BBS label, and it was distributed internationally by Capitol, with huge success.
His version of the Italian ballad Volare was big not only in the US, but in Italy too – a coals-to-Newcastle triumph of amazing proportions. The song reached the top of the charts across Europe in 1975.
In the glory days of the vinyl LP, Martino had a string of albums that sold extraordinarily well. In Britain, he was billed as “America’s answer to Val Doonican”, a compliment if ever there was one.
He is survived by his wife, Judi, son Alfred and daughter Allison.
• Alfred Cini (Al Martino), singer, born 7 October 1927; died 13 October 2009
• This article was amended on 15 October 2009. The original stated that Martino was born Alfred Cini Martino, that he recorded Here in My Heart for the Capitol record label, that his version of Volare was released in 1956, and that Bert Kaempfert wrote Spanish Eyes for him. This has been corrected.
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Terry Moore was born in 1929 in Los Angeles. Her first major film role was in 1949 in “Mighty Joe Young”. She wnt on to leading roles in such movies as “Come Back Little Sheba”, “King of the Khyber Rifles” and “Peyton Place”.
TCM overview:
Lively, full-figured lead of the post-WWII era, never a top star but one whose career, in retrospect, sums up much of 1950s attitudes about women, sexuality, and permissiveness. A photographer’s child model, Moore entered films in 1940 in “Maryland” and played small parts in a variety of films under first her real name, and then as Judy Ford and Jan Ford. At 19 she played a girl convinced that her horse was the reincarnation of a dead uncle in the odd comedy “The Return of October” (1948). She attracted more attention the following year, however, in another strange, but decidedly better, film about a woman and her pet, “Mighty Joe Young” (1949). For many buffs, the most indelible image of Moore’s career was of her born aloft by her bush-league King Kong, playing “Beautiful Dreamer” on a piano.
Although Moore began playing innocents, during her peak she often played boldly flirtatious ingenues, sometimes from the wrong side of the tracks, sometimes from “old money”, whose burgeoning sexuality often leads her into fast cars with reckless Romeos who had been drinking too much at the prom. Sometimes her gallery of teases and tramps was to the betterment of the picture: well-cast, she copped an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress as the downstairs neighbor in “Come Back, Little Sheba” (1952). Moore also did well in a typical role in the surprisingly good small-town expose, “Peyton Place” (1957) and in very restrained and appealing supporting work in “Daddy Long Legs” (1955). But too often Moore was exploited for her vivacity and figure; as she approached 30 the cheerleader roles didn’t suit her and, by the time of “Why Must I Die?” (1960), a revamp of the Susan Hayward hit “I Want to Live” (1958), she hadn’t been groomed to move into tough melodrama territory.
Moore did the next best thing, TV, starring in the well-done proto-“Dallas” Western soaper, “Empire” (1962-64) and later bringing a professional seasoning to occasional leads and supporting roles in minor features ranging from “Town Tamer” (1965) to “Hellhole” (1984). Part of the sensationalistic aspect of Moore’s persona had always been her private life: her three marriages and many beaus (including Henry Kissinger) had always been good tabloid material, and Moore again garnered attention when she wrote of her secret marriage to reclusive, eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. A woman of considerable drive, Moore ventured into cosmetics with a company called “Moore’s More”, appeared on the cover of a 1984 issue of Playboy and even formed a production company with partner Jerry Rivers, co-producing, acting in and co-writing the original story for the minor satire, “Beverly Hills Brats” (1989).
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
This photo of actress Terry Moore was taken by the Wikimedia Commons user Gazebo in 2015 and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For more information about this license, please visit on the Web or write to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042 USA.16th June 1956: American film and television actress Terry Moore is featured for the cover of Picture Post magazine. Original Publication: Picture Post Cover – Vol 71 No 11 – pub. 1956. (Photo by IPC Magazines/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Robert Forster, the handsome and omnipresent character actor who got a career resurgence and Oscar nomination for playing bail bondsman Max Cherry in Jackie Brown, died in October 2019. He was 78.
Publicist Kathie Berlin said Forster died of brain cancer following a brief illness. He was at home in Los Angeles, surrounded by family, including his four children and partner Denise Grayson.
Condolences poured in Friday night on social media. Bryan Cranston called Forster a “lovely man and a consummate actor” in a tweet. The two met on the 1980 film Alligator and then worked together again on the television show Breaking Bad and its spinoff film, El Camino, which launched Friday on Netflix.
“I never forgot how kind and generous he was to a young kid just starting out in Hollywood,” Cranston wrote.
His Jackie Brown co-star Samuel L. Jackson tweeted that Forster was “truly a class act/Actor!!”
A native of Rochester, New York, Forster quite literally stumbled into acting when in college, intending to be a lawyer, he followed a fellow female student he was trying to talk to into an auditorium where Bye Bye Birdie auditions were being held. He would be cast in that show, that fellow student would become his wife with whom he had three daughters, and it would start him on a new trajectory as an actor.
A role in the 1965 Broadway production Mrs Dally Has a Lover put him on the radar of Darryl Zanuck, who signed him to a studio contract. He would soon make his film debut in the 1967 John Huston film Reflections in a Golden Eye, which starred Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor.Advertisement
Forster would go on to star in Haskell Wexler’s documentary-style Chicago classic Medium Cool and the detective television series Banyon. It was an early high point that he would later say was the beginning of a “27-year slump”.
He worked consistently throughout the 1970s and 1980s in mostly forgettable B-movies — ultimately appearing in over 100 films, many out of necessity.
“I had four kids, I took any job I could get,” he said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune last year. “Every time it reached a lower level I thought I could tolerate, it dropped some more, and then some more. Near the end, I had no agent, no manager, no lawyer, no nothing. I was taking whatever fell through the cracks.”
It was Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 film Jackie Brown that put him back on the map. Tarantino created the role of Max Cherry with Forster in mind; the actor had unsuccessfully auditioned for a part in “Reservoir Dogs,” but the director promised not to forget him.
In an interview with Fandor last year, Forster recalled that when presented with the script for Jackie Brown, he told Tarantino, “I’m sure they’re not going to let you hire me.” Tarantino replied: “I hire anybody I want.”
“And that’s when I realised I was going to get another shot at a career,” Forster said. “He gave me a career back and the last 14 years have been fabulous.”
The performance opposite Pam Grier became one of the more heartwarming Hollywood comeback stories, earning him his first and only Academy award nomination. He ultimately lost the golden statuette to Robin Williams, who won that year for Good Will Hunting.
After Jackie Brown, he worked consistently and at a decidedly higher level than during the “slump”, appearing in films like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, Me, Myself and Irene, The Descendants, Olympus Has Fallen, and What They Had, and in television shows like Breaking Bad and the Twin Peaks revival. He said he loved trying out comedy as Tim Allen’s father in Last Man Standing.
He’ll also appear later this year in the Steven Spielberg-produced Apple+ series Amazing Stories.
Even in his down days, Forster always considered himself lucky. “You learn to take whatever jobs there are and make the best you can out of whatever you’ve got. And anyone in any walk of life, if they can figure that out, has a lot better finish than those who cannot stand to take a picture that doesn’t pay you as much or isn’t as good as the last one,” he told IndieWire in 2011. “Attitude is everything.”
Forster is survived by his four children, four grandchildren and Grayson, his partner of 16 years.
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Rex Allen was, after Roy Rogers, the most popular cowboy actor on film in the 1950’s. His movies were a staple diet for baby boomers at Saturday morning screenings. He was born in Wilcox, Arizona in 1920. His films include “Under Mexican Stars” in 1950, “Utah Wagon Train”, “Old Overland Trail” and “Down Laredo Way”. Rex Allen died in 1999.
Tom Vallance’s “Independent” obituary:
REX ALLEN was the last of the “singing cowboys”, a genre of western hero unique to the Hollywood cinema from the Thirties to the Fifties. The most famous were Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, and Allen carried on in their tradition after his film debut in The Arizona Cowboy in 1950. He made more than 30 films for Republic Studios, who had made stars of Autry and Rogers, and had a regular sidekick, played by Buddy Ebsen or Slim Pickens, in many of them.
He had a second career as narrator of a series of Walt Disney wildlife films in the Sixties, his affable manner and soft tones a perfect match for the stunning nature shots of the movies. He also toured live venues, billed as “The Arizona Cowboy” and partnered by his stallion, “Koko, the Wonder Horse”, and had a successful recording career.
One of the best western singers, Allen was one of the few western stars who actually was a cowboy, having been a ranch hand and a bronco rider on the rodeo circuit in his younger days. He also became a musician while in his teens, playing guitar and singing with his fiddle-playing father at local dances.
He was born in Willcox, Arizona, in 1921, and entered show business professionally when he won a state-wide talent contest in 1939, which led to a singing job on the radio. In 1946 he became a regular on the National Barn Dance, one of the top country-and-western radio shows in the country, and this led to a recording contract with Mercury and his own CBS radio show in Hollywood. Republic signed him in 1949, released his first film, The Arizona Cowboy, in 1950, and the following year Allen was the fifth biggest money- maker of western stars (after Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Tim Holt and Charles Starrett). From 1952 to 1954 he was third only to Rogers and Autry.
His trick pony, Koko the Wonder Horse, made his debut in Allen’s second film, The Hills of Oklahoma, and was to be in all his other films and later became an integral part of Allen’s touring live act, billed as “The Miracle Horse of the Movies”, until he died in 1968 at the age of 28.
Allen’s Republic films, 31 in five years, included Under Mexicali Stars (1950, the first in which he had Buddy Ebsen as a comic sidekick, and one of Allen’s best roles, as a singing Treasury agent who catches a gang of smugglers who are using a helicopter to get stolen gold across the border), Rodeo King and the Senorita (1951, a remake of an earlier John Wayne film, The Cowboy and the Lady, and one of Allen’s personal favourites), and Colorado Sundown (1952, with Slim Pickens replacing Ebsen).
Like many of Allen’s films, Colorado Sundown was directed by Republic’s veteran William Witney, one of the great serial directors noted for his energetic style. “Witney was my favourite director,” said Allen. “He could get more on the screen for a dollar than any director I’ve ever known.” That skill was put to good use on Down Laredo Way (1953), made with a noticeably lower budget than the earlier films and a sign that the genre was fading. Allen’s last western for Republic was The Phantom Stallion, made in 1954, the year the B western officially died.
Allen already had a thriving record career, his hit records for the Mercury label including Streets of Laredo (1947) and Crying in the Chapel (1953), and in 1958 he appeared in his first television series, Frontier Doctor. He also made personal appearances, did television commercials, and in 1961 was one of five stars who appeared on a rotating basis in the television show Five Star Jubilee, the others being Snooky Lanson, Tex Ritter, Jimmy Wakely and Carl Smith. (The show was never telecast in New York because of its primarily rural appeal.)
In 1962 Allen narrated Walt Disney’s live-action feature about the life of a wolf, The Legend of Lobo, “a tale of the old West told in story and song”, for which he also provided music with the Sons of the Pioneers, and his warm approach was greatly admired. The critic Bosley Crowther commented, “The theme and the drama, what little of the latter there is, is carried in the narration, which cheerily endows the wolf with a great deal more charm and character than is evidenced on the screen”, while the historian Leonard Maltin recently wrote: “Lobo’s biggest asset, aside from the always first-rate raw footage, is the soundtrack . . . Allen, a former cowboy star, became a Disney favourite in the 1960s, and with good reason. His friendly, easy-going approach to the script brings a great deal of life to any subject.”
Allen ultimately narrated more than 80 Disney films and television shows, including The Incredible Journey (1963) and Charlie the Lonesome Cougar (1967), and in 1973 narrated the Hanna-Barbera animated feature Charlotte’s Web. He also made guest appearances on television variety shows such as The Red Skelton Show.
In the 1970s, though retired from film and television, he still led an active life. He owned a 20-acre ranch, the Diamond X, in Malibu Canyon, and spent over half the year on personal appearance tours – after Koko died, he would be accompanied by Koko junior, a chocolate-coloured stallion with a honey mane exactly like his famous sire. (The original Koko is commemorated by a life-size statue looking down from the highest hill in the valley.)
One of his children, Rex Allen Jnr, followed him into show business, and had a successful career as a Nashville recording artist.
Tom Vallance
Rex Allen, actor: born Willcox, Arizona 31 December 1921; married (three sons); died Tucson, Arizona 17 December 1999.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Tito Guizar was born in 1908 in Guadalajara, Mexico. He trained as an opera singer and performed in Carnegie Hall in New York. His films include “Tropoc Holiday” in 1938, “Brazil” and “The Gay Ranchero” in 1948. He died in 1999 in San Antonio, Texas.
IMDB entry:
Federico Arturo Guízar Tolentino was born on April 8, 1908, in Guadalajara, Mexico. Over the objections of his father, he trained early as a singer and, as such, was sent to New York in 1929 to record the songs of Agustín Lara. While there he had a radio show, “Tito Guízar y su Guitar”, and studied opera. In 1932 he married another Mexican singer, Carmen Noriega. He performed both operatic and Mexican cowboy songs at Carnegie Hall. His 1936 movie Out on the Big Ranch (1936) launched the singing cowboy film in Mexico and succeeded as well in the United States. From there he went to Hollywood, playing with such stars as Roy Rogers, Dorothy Lamour and Mae West. He continued playing series parts in Mexican television well into the 1990s. Tito Guízar died at age 91, survived by a son, two daughters and five grandchildren.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: A. Nonymous
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Richard Hylton was born in Oklaholma in 1920. He made his film debut in “Lost Boundaries” in 1949. His film credits include “Halls of Montezuma”, “The Secret of Convict Lake” and “Fixed Bayonets”. He died in 1962.
Maureen Stapleton was born in 1925 in Troy, New York. She made her stage debut in 1946 with Burgess Meredith in “The Playboy of the Western World”. She established herself on stage in the works of Tennessee Williams and William Inge. She made her film debut in 1958 in “Lonelyhearts” with Montgomery Clift and Dolores Hart. She other films include “”Bye Bye Birdie”, “Airport” and “Interiors”. She won the Oscar for her performance in “Reds” in 1981. She died in 2003.
Tom Vallance’s obituary in “The Independent”:
The actress Maureen Stapleton was a versatile, much-feted actress and winner of all three major awards – the Tony, the Emmy and the Oscar. Her film appearances were infrequent, but brought her four Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress, the fourth, for her superb incarnation of the anarchist Emma Goldman in Reds (1981), winning her the award.
Equally convincing whether playing tough or vulnerable, straight or comic, she was particularly noted as an exponent of Tennessee Williams’s characters. In the theatre she created the heroines of The Rose Tattoo and Orpheus Descending, and acted in works by Neil Simon and Lillian Hellman. Simon’s play The Gingerbread Lady, in which she starred, is generally considered to be based on the tempestuous life of Stapleton herself.
Born to staunch Irish Catholics in 1925 in Troy, New York, Stapleton had an alcoholic father who left home when she was a child. She later said that a love of movies and film magazines helped her overcome poverty and low self-esteem. After graduating from high school in 1942, she worked as a clerk for a year before setting off for New York to pursue an acting career.
Following studies at the Herbert Berghof Acting School, she made her Broadway début after telephoning the producer Guthrie McLintock and asking him who was to play Pegeen Mike in his production of The Playboy of the Western World. McLintock cast her as a village girl and to understudy Pegeen, and she actually played the role for the last week of the run.
McLintock and his wife Katharine Cornell took her into their company, and she then became a charter member of the Actors’ Studio. In 1948 she played Masha in a Studio performance of The Seagull and made her television début in the drama Night Club.
In 1951 Stapleton achieved stardom with her performance as the earthy Sicilian widow in The Rose Tattoo. Williams had written the role for Anna Magnani, who felt her English was not good enough to sustain such an intensive stage role. “It was I who found Maureen Stapleton for the part,” the author wrote later. “She was a very young girl at the time but nevertheless I thought she was so brilliant in characterisation that the obstacle of her youth would be overcome.” Stapleton won the Tony as Best Actress and was forever identified with the play, taking the role of Serafina again in revivals in 1966 and 1973.
She also played Flora, the simple-minded young wife in Williams’s 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1955), later filmed as Baby Doll with Carroll Baker as Flora, and she created the role of the passionate shopkeeper Lady Torrance in Orpheus Descending (1957). Magnani played the role on screen opposite Marlon Brando, though Stapleton appeared in the film version in another role. She also triumphed in a revival of Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1965).
In 1960 Stapleton appeared in a big hit, Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic, playing one of two sisters who devote their lives to their brother. Both Stapleton and Anne Revere, who played her sister, were nominated for Tony Awards, with Revere winning.
Neil Simon’s hit comedy Plaza Suite (1968) consisted of three playlets set in the same hotel; it gave Stapleton and George C. Scott the opportunity to play three different couples and prompted the critic Martin Gottfried to comment, “It proved to me for the first time that an Actors Studio-trained actor can play comedy.” Stapleton repeated one of the roles in the film version, which cast three separate actresses in the stories.
In 1971 she won another Tony Award starring in Simon’s The Gingerbread Lady, playing Evy Meara, an alcoholic singer who returns from a drying-out session and attempts to rid herself of her abusive young lover. The character was largely considered to be an amalgam by Simon of Judy Garland and Stapleton herself, which the actress disputed in her autobiography, A Hell of a Life (1995). Stapleton frankly confessed, though, to a tumultuous love life which encompassed many impetuous, ill-fated affairs (including one with the stage director George Abbott that started when he was 81 and she was 43) and two failed marriages.
Stapleton’s sporadic screen career began with her harrowing portrayal of an unscrupulous nymphomaniac in Miss Lonelyhearts (1958), her performance winning an Oscar nomination. She worked with the director Sidney Lumet on adaptations of Williams’s The Fugitive Kind (1960) and Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (1962), then had her first screen comedy role in the musical Bye Bye Birdie (1963).
Her second Oscar nomination was for her long-suffering Inez Guerrero, whose mentally unstable husband (Van Heflin) takes a bomb on a flight to Rome so that his wife can get his travel insurance, in George Seaton’s box-office hit Airport (1970). Woody Allen’s first dramatic film, Interiors (1978) brought a third nomination, and she finally won the award for Warren Beatty’s Reds, based on the life of the liberal activist and journalist John Reed.
Her other films included Cocoon (1985, as one of the elderly folk who discover a means of rejuvenation) and The Money Pit (1986, as a zany real-estate crook). On television, she won an Emmy Award for her performance in Truman Capote’s Among the Paths to Eden (1967).
Celebrated by her colleagues not only for her talent, but her wit, loyalty and warmth, she was described by Tennessee Williams as “self-destructive” but “an absolute genius and one of the total innocents of the world”.
Tom Vallance
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Shirley MacLaine has had a long and varied career. She was born in Virginia in 1934. She made her film debut for Alfred Hitchcock in 1955 in The Trouble With Harry”. Among her films are “Around the World in 80 Days”, “Ask Any Girl”, “Some Came Running”, “The Apartment”, “Irma La Douce”, “Sweet Charity”£, “Can Can”, “Terms of Endearment” and “Steel Magnolias”.
TCM Overview|:
Broadway hoofer, dramatic talent, spiritual eccentric, activist, Oscar winner… Over the course of a varied and distinguished career, actress Shirley MacLaine earned these titles many times over. A former ballerina hopeful-turned-chorus girl, she rose to fame in the early 1950s after Hollywood producers noticed her in Broadway’s “Pajama Game.” She made the transition to features in a series of roles that emphasized her quirkiness and heartbreaking vulnerability, most notably in “Some Came Running” (1960), “The Apartment” (1960) and “Irma La Douce” (1963). The redheaded pixie dropped out of features in the late 1960s – watching her brother Warren Beatty rise to fame at that time -but reemerged in the late 1970s with several acclaimed performances in such films as “The Turning Point” (1977), “Being There” (1979) and “Terms of Endearment” (1983), the latter of which brought her a long-overdue Oscar for Best Actress. She remained a vital presence in efforts like “Steel Magnolias” (1989), “Postcards from the Edge” (1990) and “Guarding Tess” (1994), while extolling alternative beliefs in reincarnation and extraterrestrials that occasionally earned derision from pundits. Well into her seventies, the actress continued to command attention in acclaimed projects, ranging from the biopic “Coco Chanel” (Lifetime, 2008) to the black comedy “Bernie” (2012). Not that the validation was necessary, but an AFI Life Achievement Award merely punctuated the fact that MacLaine remained among the most gifted of Hollywood and stage performers for over 40 years – a distinction that she continued to earn well into the new millennium.
Born Shirley MacLaine Beaty on April 24, 1934, she was the daughter of teachers Ira Owen Beaty and Kathrine Corrine MacLean, who also raised a son, Warren, later a major Hollywood talent in his own right. MacLaine was born in Richmond, VA, but the family moved to several locations in the state throughout her childhood before settling in Waverly. MacLaine’s most fervent desire was to become a dancer, which she had begun to train for at the age of two; by four, she had made her public debut and would appear on the professional stage just eight years later. So great was her desire to dance that while warming up before a performance of “Cinderella,” she snapped her ankle. Not wishing to bow out, she bound her feet and went through with the production, after which she was dispatched in an ambulance. Eventually, the rigors of ballet proved too great for MacLaine to pursue in earnest, so she shifted her attention to acting. Just one summer shy of high school graduation, she lit out for New York in 1950 to audition for musicals and landed a part in the chorus for a revival of “Oklahoma!” She went back to Virginia to earn her diploma, after which she returned to the Great White Way to seek her fortune. Billed as Shirley MacLaine, she worked as a model while auditioning for musicals, eventually serving as Carol Haney’s understudy in the Broadway production of “The Pajama Game.”
In 1952, MacLaine had her big break in an amusingly showbiz way; Haney, who had garnered a reputation for never missing a performance, broke her ankle before curtain call. MacLaine was called in to replace her. The debut was a rough one, but MacLaine held her own. Three months later, Haney was again forced to miss a show, and MacLaine – now more familiar with the intricacies of the part – stepped in again. This time, director-producer Hal B. Wallis was in the audience and was charmed by her boundless energy. The veteran showman signed her to a five-year contract at Warner Bros., which commenced with “The Trouble with Harry” (1955) for no less than legendary director, Alfred Hitchcock. Though not one of the great filmmaker’s biggest hits, the black comedy helped to establish MacLaine’s screen persona: bubbly, irreverent and unquestionably alluring. She later belied that perception by showing a feistier side while engaging in and winning a highly publicized contract dispute with Wallis. She soon balanced light features like “Artists and Models” (1955) and “Around the World in Eighty Days” (1956) with more dramatic fare, which proved her to be among the more versatile actresses of the period. Most notable among the latter was “Some Came Running” (1960), in which she captivated as a small-town girl who overcomes her bad reputation in an attempt to find true love with Frank Sinatra’s cynical war vet. Critics and audiences responded favorably to the turn, which netted MacLaine Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations. Her participation in the film, which co-starred Dean Martin, made her an unofficial member – some said, sole female mascot – of Sinatra’s Rat Pack, an allegiance that was solidified with her uncredited cameo as a tipsy woman in the group’s iconic heist film, “Ocean’s Eleven” (1960).
MacLaine hit her stride in movies during the early 1960s, where she divided her time equally between straight drama, light comedies, and her roots in musical theater. She received perhaps her best early showcase as the vulnerable young elevator operator who beguiles Jack Lemmon’s salary man in Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” (1960). Her performance, alternately winning and heartbreaking, earned her a second Oscar nod and wins from BAFTA and the Golden Globes. She played variations on that role in “Two for the Seesaw” (1962) with Robert Mitchum, “The Yellow Rolls-Royce” (1964) as a moll for gangster George C. Scott, and “What a Way to Go” (1964), as the seemingly “cursed” widow of Dean Martin, Dick Van Dyke, Paul Newman and Robert Mitchum, among others. She also reunited with Wilder to once again entice Jack Lemmon as the French prostitute “Irma La Douce” (1963), which brought her a third Academy Award nomination and second Golden Globe. However, by the mid-1960s, MacLaine’s career seemed to be in a rut. Musicals had faded as a money-making genre for studios, and executives seemed to have little idea of how to cast MacLaine as anything but the offbeat romantic lead in such largely unremarkable efforts as “Gambit” (1966) and “Woman Times Seven” (1967), in which director Vittorio De Sica had her tackle seven different roles. She continued to land Golden Globe nominations for her work, but the projects were simply not up to the standards of her past projects. She managed to land one final musical with 1969’s “Sweet Charity” for director Bob Fosse. The project turned out to be a miserable failure, though it did leave MacLaine with a signature song, “If They Could See Me Now,” which would later become a highlight of her singing engagements and TV specials.
MacLaine was largely off the screen for much of the late 1960s and early 1970s, preferring instead to work in other capacities. She was frequently on television during the decade, both as the star of her own short-lived sitcom “Shirley’s World” (ABC, 1971-72) and as the star of several well-received TV specials that highlighted her song and dance talents, beginning with 1974’s Emmy-winning “Shirley MacLaine: If They Could See Me Now” for CBS. MacLaine also defied her “kooky” screen persona by becoming deeply involved in politics; first as a delegate from California for Robert F. Kennedy and later, as a campaigner for George McGovern in 1972. The following year, MacLaine toured mainland China and recounted her experiences in a book, You Can Get There from Here, as well as in a documentary, “The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir” (1975), which earned her an Oscar nomination (shared with Claudia Weill) for Best Documentary. MacLaine also penned the first of several candid memoirs, Don’t Fall Off the Mountain in 1973, and mounted an impressive return to Broadway with a one-woman show, “Gypsy in My Soul” in 1976.
Her feature film career began to rebuild itself in the mid-1970s with an Oscar-nominated turn as a former ballerina who locks horns with a longtime competitor (Anne Bancroft) in “The Turning Point” (1977). She matched this success with a sexually charged turn as the long-neglected wife of a powerful businessman who attempts to find relief from Peter Sellers’ kindly gardener in Hal Ashby’s “Being There” (1979). Both films helped to put an older but no less spunky MacLaine back on the Hollywood map. But her greatest screen triumph would come four years later with James Brooks’ “Terms of Endearment” (1983). MacLaine unleashed the full brunt of her dramatic talents as the high-maintenance Aurora Greenway, who puts aside her differences with daughter Emma (Debra Winger) to care for her while she endures a terminal illness. The performance was hard-fought; MacLaine quit the production midway through, only to return for its completion, and reports from the set detailed numerous squabbles between the veteran actress and up-and-comer Winger, but it ultimately yielded her an Oscar which she famously won over her onscreen daughter.
Some of the goodwill and buzz generated by the Academy Award win was deflated by the release of MacLaine’s memoir Out on a Limb (1983). The bestseller detailed her ongoing fascination with spirituality, including out-of-body experiences and multiple reincarnations. The decidedly unusual subject matter helped to brand MacLaine as a bit of an eccentric, a label she handled with remarkable good humor, as noted by her appearance as an afterlife version of herself in Albert Brooks’ comedy “Defending Your Life” (1991). MacLaine was off the big screen for about four years after the release of Out on a Limb, during which she appeared as herself in an Emmy-nominated TV adaptation of the book for ABC in 1987. She also penned three similarly-themed follow-ups, Dancing in the Light (1986), It’s All in the Playing (1987) and Going Within (1989); even releasing her own spiritual workout video, “Shirley MacLaine’s Inner Workout” in 1989. She also played to adoring crowds in her second one-woman show on Broadway, “Shirley MacLaine on Broadway,” in 1984.
MacLaine returned to movies with a vengeance in the late 1980s, starting with her Golden Globe win as an eccentric piano teacher in John Schlesinger’s “Madame Sousatzska” (1988). She essayed numerous formidable matrons during this period, most notably Ouiser Boudreaux in the all-star adaptation of “Steel Magnolias” (1989), and a thinly veiled version of Debbie Reynolds in Mike Nichols’ adaptation of Carrie Fisher’s “Postcards from the Edge” (1990), both of which earned BAFTA nominations. Less acclaimed, but no less well played, were Golden Globe-nominated turns as a Jewish mother in “Used People” (1992) and as a flinty First Lady in “Guarding Tess” (1994). MacLaine also returned to Aurora Greenway for “The Evening Star” (1997), the long-awaited sequel to “Terms of Endearment,” but the results paled by comparison to its predecessor, largely due to the absence of Debra Winger and their unique onscreen rapport. In 1998, her considerable body of work in film, television and stage was honored by the Academy with the Cecil B. DeMille Award. MacLaine’s busy schedule in the late 1990s and early 2000s included several returns to made-for-TV efforts; among the most high-profile of these was the Carrie Fisher-penned “These Old Broads” (ABC, 2001), which pitted her against the equally iconic lineup of Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds and Joan Collins. MacLaine also tackled makeup maven Mary Kay Ash in “The Battle of Mary Kay” (CBS, 2002) and lent her star power to a supporting role in Joseph Sargeant’s “Salem Witch Trials” (CBS, 2003). She also made her solo directorial debut with “Bruno” (2000), an unusual indie drama about a young boy with a taste for cross-dressing.
As she approached her seventh decade, MacLaine’s rarefied talents remained in demand for features, and she was showcased in a trio of high-profile supporting performances in 2005. She offered a deliciously arch Endora to rival even Agnes Moorhead’s original in Nora Ephron’s big-screen version of “Bewitched,” then dropped the glam to play the sympathetic grandmother to rival sisters Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette in Curtis Hanson’s “In Her Shoes.” Her comic skills were also given a workout as Jennifer Aniston’s grandmother, who may have been the inspiration for Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate” (1967), in Rob Reiner’s “Rumor Has It.” MacLaine received strong notices for each picture, earning her umpteenth Golden Globe nomination for “In Her Sh s.” She then starred in “Coco Chanel” (Lifetime, 2008), delivering an icy turn as the notorious French fashion maven, which earned her yet another Golden Globe nomination; this time in the Best Actress in a miniseries or movie category. She also earned an Emmy Award nomination for the role in 2009. In her personal life, she continued to explore her spiritual interests in a flurry of books throughout the new millennium, including Out on a Leash: Exploring the Nature of Reality and Love (2003) and Sage-ing While Age-ing(2007).
Showing absolutely no signs of slowing down, MacLaine co-starred with Barbara Hershey in “Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning” (CTV, 2008), the fourth entry in the film series based on the characters of Lucy Maud Montgomery, in which an adult Anne (Hershey) recalls her childhood in the days before she arrived at the iconic Prince Edward Island farm. Two years later, she returned to theater screens as part of the ensemble cast of director Garry Marshall’s romantic comedy “Valentine’s Day” (2010) as a wife struggling with a secret she had kept from her husband (Héctor Elizondo) for many years. After another two-year respite, she co-starred with Jack Black in Richard Linklater’s based-on-fact dark comedy “Bernie” (2012), in which she played a lonely, bitter widow whose intense relationship with a younger, well-liked local mortician (Black) takes a deadly turn. In June of that year, MacLaine was honored with the 40th American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in a ceremony that was later broadcast on the TV Land cable network. Rather than rest on her laurels, MacLaine further demonstrated her artistic vitality when she joined the cast of the critically-acclaimed British period drama “Downton Abbey” (PBS, 2010- ) as Martha Levinson, the widowed American mother of Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern).
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Robert Evans is a reknowned film producer in Hollywood. However in the 1950’s he had a career as a movie actor. He made his debut in 1957 in “The Sun Also Rises” with Tyrone Power and Ava Gardner. His other films include “Man of A Thousand Faces” with James Cagney and Dorothy Malone and then as part of an all star cast in “The Best of Everything” which aso starred Joan Crawford, Stephen Boyd, Brett Halsey, Suzy Parker and Diane Baker. His most famou acting role was in “The Fiend Who Walked the West” with Dolores Michaels.
TCM Overview:
Perhaps one of the most notorious personages ever to grace motion pictures, producer and former Paramount Pictures studio head Robert Evans blazed a trail through Hollywood that left behind numerous fractured marriages, countless heartbroken starlets, several friends-turned-enemies, and a career brimming with some of the best movies ever made. After receiving his start as an actor in movies like “The Sun Also Rises” (1957) and “The Best of Everything” (1959), Evans turned to producing in the late-1960s, which quickly led to becoming a powerful executive at the struggling Paramount Pictures. Almost immediately, Evans had a profound effect on the studio’s bottom line, churning out hits like “Barefoot in the Park” (1967), “The Odd Couple” (1968) and “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968). In the following decade, he steadied Paramount’s fortunes with huge hits like “Love Story” (1970) and “The Godfather” (1972), before leaving the studio to branch out on his own as a producer with “Chinatown” (1974).
Following up with “Marathon Man” (1976) and “Black Sunday” (1977), Evans seemed impervious to failure. But in 1980, following a cocaine bust and the ridicule endured from producing “Popeye” (1980), Evans hit a career slump that ended with him broke and ostracized from Hollywood. The final straw was “The Cotton Club” (1984), a huge flop that was mired in production excesses that also included the murder of a financier, for which Evans was briefly implicated. Sinking further into debt, depression and cocaine addiction, Evans languished in obscurity for the remainder of the decade. He reemerged with the misfire “Chinatown” sequel, “The Two Jakes” (1990), and spent the rest of the 1990s making critical and financial disasters like “Sliver” (1993), “Jade” (1995) and “The Saint” (1997). He earned a degree of cult status following the self-narrated documentary “The Kid Stays in the Picture” (2002), which introduced Evans to a new generation while reminding older crowds just how integral he had been to one of cinema’s most vibrant eras.
Born on June 29, 1930 in New York City, Evans grew up in a comfortable home headed by his father, Archie Shapera, a dentists, and his mother, Florence, a homemaker. As a child, Evans performed on numerous radio shows – some 300 all told – including “Archie Andrews” (NBC, 1943-1953), “The Aldrich Family” (NBC/CBS, 1939-1953) and “Gang Busters” (NBC/CBS, 1935-1957). Following his television debut on “Elizabeth and Essex” (1947), he went into business with his brother, Charles, and his partner, Joseph Picone, with the fashion company Evans-Picone, for which he did their promotional work. Moving to Hollywood some years later, Evans was lounging poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he was spotted by Golden Age actress, Norma Shearer, who thought him to be a dead-ringer for her deceased husband, Irving G. Thalberg, which happened to be a role in the biopic of actor Lon Chaney, “Man of a Thousand Faces” (1957). Shearer successfully lobbied for Evans to get the part, which wound up becoming his feature debut. Evans went on to appear as Pedro Romero in an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” (1957), despite objections raised by star Ava Gardner and even the author himself.
Continuing his attempt to make it as an actor, Evans enlisted the help of famed acting coach, Stella Adler, for the audition for a supporting role in the relationship melodrama “The Best of Everything” (1959), which helped him land the part. Despite managing to make strides on screen, Evans remained largely dissatisfied with his career. He decided instead to move into producing by joining 20th Century Fox, where he set up “The Detective” (1968) with Frank Sinatra starring as a tough cop is sent to investigate the murder of a department store magnate’s son. Featuring a strong performance from Sinatra, the gritty crime thriller became one of the biggest box office successes of the year. He left Fox to take a studio executive job at Paramount Pictures in 1966, where he served as the Vice President of Production and almost immediately began to turn the ailing studio’s fortunes around, despite his lack of experience. Evans had his first hit with the winning romantic comedy, “Barefoot in the Park” (1967), which starred Robert Redford and Jane Fonda as a pair of newlyweds adjusting to their new lives together. Staying with Neil Simon’s source material, Evans produced another hit with “The Odd Couple” (1968), which pitted Walter Mathau and Jack Lemmon as polar opposite roommates living together in Manhattan.
Evans’ power at Paramount only grew when he steered “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) to the big screen, director Roman Polanski’s disturbing horror movie about a young wife and mother (Mia Farrow) who grows to realize that her soon-to-be child is not of this world. His unbelievable run continued with the easygoing crime caper, “The Italian Job” (1969), starring Michael Caine, and the charming Western “True Grit” (1969), which starred John Wayne in his only Oscar-winning role. He had his biggest hit with his next film, “Love Story” (1970), which starred Ryan O’Neal and Evans’ real-life wife Ali McGraw as a pair of mismatched lovers who manage to stick together despite the objections of his father (Ray Milland), only to suffer tragic consequences. Though critics were divided, “Love Story” was a big success with audiences, as the picture became the highest-grossing movie made by Paramount up to that point. The film also earned seven Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture. Meanwhile, Evans and McGraw – who happened to be his third wife at this point – had son Josh Evan in 1971.
Also that year, having almost singlehandedly pulling Paramount back from the brink, Evans was given the reigns of the entire studio and named top dog as Executive Vice-President in charge of worldwide production at the studio. He next proceeded to steer “The Godfather” (1972) through production, a process that began as far back as 1968, when a then-unknown author named Mario Puzo brought pages from his unpublished manuscript, Mafia, to Evans in hopes of securing a payday to cover what he owed to bookies. At least that was how Evans claimed the story went. Others connected to the movie claimed it was brought to Paramount through other channels. Regardless of how the manuscript ended up at the studio, there was no doubt that Evans was integral to getting the picture made. In order to make an authentic film about the Italian Mafia, Evans insisted on an Italian-American director. After finally settling for Francis Ford Coppola when most other bigger names had passed on the project, Evans and his new director clashed mightily over which actors to cast. With Coppola championing Al Pacino as Michael Corleone and Marlon Brando as Don Corleone, Evans was pushing for the likes of Warren Beatty and Danny Thomas for Vito, telling Coppola, “A runt will not play Michael.” (Vanity Fair, March 2009). Coppola ultimately won the battle.
Through the course of production, Evans and his producers were plotting to fire Coppola, due to cost overruns and an inability to stay on schedule. Because of his numerous tangles with the director throughout the production – already proving difficult due to death threats from actual mobsters before producer Albert Ruddy smoothed things over – Evans cemented his reputation for being antagonistic towards filmmakers. Regardless of the great difficulty in getting the film made, “The Godfather” proved to be the massive hit Paramount was looking for. The crime saga depicting the decline of an older generation of mobsters in favor of the new was also a big hit with critics, winning three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Throughout the years, Evans became known for personally coveting credit for the success of the film created under his watch, although the extent and merits of his contributions were routinely debated. Meanwhile, Evans and wife Ali McGraw divorced in 1972 after she fell for her co-star, Steven McQueen, in “The Getaway” (1972). Evans later attributed his near-obsession with seeing “The Godfather” through to completion as the straw that broke the camel’s back. He soon followed up with “Serpico” (1973), director Sidney Lumet’s gritty crime drama about rookie police officer Frank Serpico (Al Pacino), whose attempts to shed light on a corrupt system leads to his ultimate downfall. The film went on to became yet another 1970s classic that the high-flying Evans could count as his own.
Evans next steered the financially successful, but critically underappreciated adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic novel, “The Great Gatsby” (1974), which starred Robert Redford as the self-made Gatsby, Mia Farrow as the superficial Daisy Buchanan, and Sam Waterston as the naïve Nick Carraway. Working again with the excitable Coppola, Evans helped shepherd “The Godfather, Part II” (1974) and “The Conversation” (1974) to the big screen. Both were hits, both were critically hailed, and both became staples of 1970s cinema. But it was “The Godfather, Part II” which earned the greatest distinction after winning six Academy Awards, including one for Best Picture. Evans left the studio top spot and became an independent producer in 1974, a highly successful stint that started with producing director Roman Polanski’s classic neo-noir “Chinatown” (1974), a lush, cynical and serpentine neo-noir set in 1930s Los Angeles. The film starred Evans’ close friend, Jack Nicholson, who portrayed Jake Gittes, a dogged private eye whose search for the murderer of a water department official pulls him into a much darker and more sordid scandal involving the official’s wife (Faye Dunaway) and her despicable father (John Houston). After receiving 11 Academy Award nominations, “Chinatown” only took home one for Robert Towne’s Best Original Screenplay. Nonetheless, the film was considered to be one of the best ones made in that period, while Towne’s script was held up as being the best ever written.
Evans continued his unparalleled run with the John Schlesinger thriller “Marathon Man” (1976), starring another longtime pal, Dustin Hoffman, who later had a falling out with the producer over his undeniable impersonation of Evans with his character in “Wag the Dog” (1997). He moved on to produce John Frankenheimer’s popular thriller “Black Sunday” (1977), which featured a stunning climactic scene involving a blimp at the Super Bowl, and the rather underwhelming romantic drama, “Players” (1979), which starred ex-wife Ali McGraw – a film he made while in the midst of a divorce with another wife, former Miss America Phyllis George. Evans entered the next decade on a high note with the country-themed hit “Urban Cowboy” (1980), which capitalized on the then massive popularity of its star, John Travolta, while generating a soundtrack some claimed help propel interest in the pop-country phenomenon that soon followed. But cracks began to appear in Evans’ seemingly impervious façade when he produced director Robert Altman’s unsuccessful and highly-ridiculed take on “Popeye” (1980), starring Robin Williams as the big-armed sailor who is fond of his spinach. Also that year, Evans ran into legal trouble when he was arrested and later convicted on a misdemeanor cocaine charge. Sentenced to probation, he was given the chance to wipe the slate clean with an anti-drug film called “Get High on Yourself” (1981), which he financed with his own money and cast with several famous actor friends.
Regardless of his public condemnation of drugs, Evans continued his habit unabated. In 1983, he became embroiled in further scandal while in the middle of making the period gangster piece, “The Cotton Club” (1984) with Francis Ford Coppola, when his business partner on the project, Roy Radin, was found murdered. Right from the start, “The Cotton Club” appeared doomed to failure. Initially, Evans wanted to direct the film himself, but decided not to and brought in a hopelessly broke Coppola in at the eleventh hour. Having spent some $13 million before Coppola even appeared, Evans resorted to finding money any way he could, including from notorious Saudi Arabian arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, who was later complicit in the Iran-contra scandal. The budget ballooned to almost $50 million – a fortune at the time – while Evans became briefly implicated in Radin’s slaying (In 1991, cocaine dealer Karen Greenberger and three bodyguards were convicted of the crime). The film released to lackluster box office totals, throwing Evans into deep despair, which became exacerbated due to giving trial testimony and the fact that he was now flat broke.
Following an extended hiatus, Evans returned to active producing and corralled Nicholson to direct and star in the inferior, but interesting “Chinatown” sequel, “The Two Jakes” (1990), which failed to capture the attention of anyone at the time and fared poorly at the box office. He moved on to the Sharon Stone erotic thriller, “Sliver” (1993), which was nearly universally panned by critics while performing fairly well in theaters. Evans continued making critically maligned flops with “Jade” (1995), an erotic thriller from the juvenile mind of Joe Eszterhas that starred David Caruso as an assistant D.A. drawn into a murder case involving a sultry psychologist (Linda Fiorentino) and her prominent attorney husband (Chazz Palminteri). Though he received some critical kudos for the comic strip adaptation of “The Phantom” (1996), they were not enough to boost ticket sales. Critics lashed out at his next project, “The Saint” (1997), which starred Val Kilmer as amateur detective, Simon Templar, a character featured in a long-running book series that was previously turned into films, a radio show and even a successful British television series. Unable to rekindle his magic from the 1970s, Evans struck out again with a rather limp remake of the comedy classic, “The Out-of-Towners” (1999), starring Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn.
Though fallen out of prominence for some time, Evans’ illustrious career again came to the forefront with the documentary “The Kid Stays in the Picture” (2002). Based on the producer’s life as told in his revealing 1994 autobiography and narrated by Evans himself, the documentary pulled no punches in detailing his outlandish adventures in show business. The title referred to his near-firing from his role in “The Sun Also Rises,” a job that was saved by studio head, Darryl Zanuck, who watched Evans’ first take and made a portentous decree: “The kid stays in the picture.” The book itself was already a hit with Hollywood insiders, particularly the audio version that was narrated by Evans himself. The project came about when rising documentarian team Brett Morgen and Nanette Berstein worked with Evans – who was in the midst of recuperating from a debilitating stroke – in capturing the producer’s chaotic, but always fascinating life on film. Kaleidoscopic, mesmerizing, and entirely subjective, “The Kid Stays in the Picture” was roundly praised by critics, while opening a re-exploration into his works and creating an air of pseudo-celebrity that could only be best described as the Cult of Evans.
The popularity of the film even led Evans and Morgen to develop the animated series, “Kid Notorious” (Comedy Central, 2003-04), which adapted anecdotes from his life into wild cartoon exploits that mixed “South Park”-style scatological gags with snarky, knowing Hollywood insider humor. He also returned to the producing game with the romantic comedy “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” (2003), a minor hit that proved star Kate Hudson’s box office appeal in lightweight fare. Ever the lothario, Evans married in 2002 for a sixth time to Leslie Ann Woodward, a union that was dissolved after a mere eight months, though it was nothing compared to his nine-day marriage to previous wife, actress Catherine Oxenberg, in 1998. Evans next produced and appeared in the documentary “The Last Mogul” (2005), which detailed the life and career of former talent agent and studio executive, Lew Wasserman. Meanwhile, Evans appeared in spirit on the popular Hollywood series “Entourage” (HBO, 2004- ), in the form of Bob Ryan (Martin Landau), a legendary film producer fallen on hard times who is looking to make a comeback. Though initially offered to play the role himself, Evans bowed out, but graciously offered his Beverly Hills mansion as a location.
The TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Robert Evans obituary in “The Guardian” in 2019.
Robert Evans, who has died aged 89, was an extravagant film producer whose exciting, glamorous and sometimes grotesque life threatened frequently to overshadow the movies he made. As head of production at Paramount Pictures in the late 1960s and early 70s, the former actor was responsible for reviving the fortunes of that moribund studio by overseeing hits such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Love Story (1970), The Godfather (1972) and Chinatown (1974).
There was no shortage of stories to feed Evans’s larger-than-life image. He cherished and bragged about his friendships with Henry Kissinger, Warren Beatty and Ted Kennedy. He lived in a 16-room Regency house in Beverly Hills and dispatched bottles of Dom Perignon as quickly as he got through sexual partners.
According to Peter Biskind’s 1998 account of 70s Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a housekeeper would bring Evans breakfast in bed each morning accompanied by a piece of paper on which she had written the name of whichever woman happened to be lying beside him. He was married seven times, most famously in 1969 to Ali MacGraw, the star of Love Story, who left him four years later for Steve McQueen. One marriage, to the actor Catherine Oxenberg, lasted for only 12 days.
This life of excess, including an addiction to cocaine, eventually ruined Evans’s career: he went from being worth $11m in 1979 to having $37 to his name 10 years later. In 1980, he was given a suspended prison sentence for cocaine trafficking. As part of his plea bargain, he agreed to make an anti-drugs public information message.
What started as a commercial became a week of star-studded TV specials instigated by Evans. He ploughed $400,000 of his own money into the campaign, which included the tuneless, anodyne celebrity singalong Get High on Yourself. He later admitted that he was still taking cocaine while this media blitz was under way.
Robert Evans studying a script by the pool at his home in Beverly Hills, California, 1968. Photograph: Alfred Eisenstaedt/The Life Picture Collection via Getty Images
He had always idolised and fraternised with gangsters (he was close friends with the mob lawyer and Hollywood “fixer” Sidney Korshak). In 1983, Evans’s life spilled over from the showbusiness pages to the crime ones when he became a suspect in the murder of the producer and promoter Ray Radin, who was involved with him in a co-financing deal on the expensive flop The Cotton Club (1984).
Evans got his producing career temporarily back on track in the mid-90s, even returning to a deal at Paramount, but suffered a series of strokes in 1998 which restricted dramatically his mobility.
Even this setback could not keep him down, and he returned to the limelight in 2003 to narrate a popular documentary about himself, The Kid Stays in the Picture, which shared its title with his own bestselling 1994 autobiography.
Those words had first come from the mouth of the producer Darryl F Zanuck, who had cast Evans as the bullfighter Pedro Romero in a 1957 adaptation of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Ten days before shooting started, Zanuck received a signed petition from the rest of the cast, including Ava Gardnerand Tyrone Power, asking him to remove Evans from the film. It read: “With Robert Evans playing Pedro Romero, The Sun Also Rises will be a disaster.” Zanuck arrived on set and told the assembled cast and crew: “The kid stays in the picture. And anybody who doesn’t like it can quit!”
Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, 1974. Robert Evans promised each of them either an Oscar nomination for their work on the movie or a luxury car. Photograph: Paramount/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock
Evans credited that moment with teaching him to stick to his guns when he became a producer. Of course, we only have his word for what happened, and the autobiography is knowingly hyperbolic, written in the hard-boiled, cornball slang of a dime-store detective novel. When he and MacGraw split, for example, he reports Kissinger telling him: “If I can negotiate with the North Vietnamese, I think I can smooth the way with Ali.” To which Evans replies: “Henry, you know countries, you don’t know women. When it’s over, it’s over.”Advertisement
Some of the book’s stories were later contested, including Evans’s claim that he helped Mario Puzo in 1968 with the “rumpled pages” that eventually became The Godfather. (Puzo claimed not to have met at Evans at that stage.) But then Evans usually had the monopoly on telling his own story. When asked for a comment on him, the Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne replied: “Why? Why bother? Bob says it all himself.”
He was born Robert J Shapera in New York City – “the J sounding good but standing for nothing I knew of”. His father, Archie Shapera, was a dentist who had a clinic in Harlem, while his mother, Florence, raised Robert and his brother, Charles, and sister, Alice; it was wealth from Florence’s family that accounted for Evans’s privileged upbringing on the city’s Upper West Side.
He was educated at Joan of Arc junior high school, the Bronx high school of science and Haaren high school, and was auditioning for acting roles from the age of 12. (He claimed to have had more than 300 parts on radio as a child.) He put this career on hold and became a disc jockey, a clothing model and a salesman. At 20, he started a successful women’s fashion business, Evan Picone, with his brother.
Robert Evans in Rome in 1971 with Ali MacGraw, the star of Love Story, who was the third of his seven wives. Photograph: Bettmann Archive
But acting beckoned him back unexpectedly, when he was approached at a hotel swimming pool by Norma Shearer, who asked him to play her late husband, Irving J Thalberg, in the film Man of a Thousand Faces (1957). He accepted and she coached him obsessively on every aspect of his performance. He also starred in The Fiend Who Walked the West (1958) and The Best of Everything (1959), before his confidence took a knock when he lost out to Warren Beatty for the male lead in The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (1961).Advertisement
He went back to fashion and made a fortune when Revlon bought his business. He used the windfall to pursue an ambition to become a producer, paying a friend, George Weiser, who worked at Publishers Weekly, to tip him off about any hot literary properties that were about to hit the shelves. Evans had his first decisive success in that field when he snapped up Roderick Thorp’s novel The Detective, which was adapted by 20th Century Fox into a film starring Frank Sinatra. The terms of the option stated that whichever studio bought the rights had to buy Evans as producer also.
He quickly came to the attention of Charles Bludhorn, the head of Paramount’s parent company, Gulf + Western. Evans maintained in his autobiography that Bludhorn had decided to hire him as head of production after reading a New York Times article about him by Peter Bart, though it came to light much later that Bart’s piece had been only a tiny factor in the decision.
In fact, it was Greg Bautzer, Evans’s powerful lawyer, known as “the Kingmaker”, who had convinced Bludhorn to appoint him. “Bobby was a charming guy,” said Albert S Ruddy, one of the producers of The Godfather. “He looked good, with a great tan, and he was down at the Racquet Club all the time hanging around with Greg. [Bautzer] gave Bludhorn a line of bullshit about how this kid knew everyone in Hollywood.”
The industry reacted scornfully to the appointment of Evans, but he silenced the naysayers by turning Paramount’s fortunes around. It was true that he made many bad calls on The Godfather. He was vehemently opposed to the casting of Al Pacino and to the use of Nino Rota’s score. Viewing dailies of Marlon Brando mumbling in the title role, he fumed: “What the fuck’s going on? Are we going to put subtitles on this movie?”
But he helped save the film after the director Francis Ford Coppola turned in an early cut described by Evans as “a long, bad trailer for a really good film”. Though the studio had stipulated a running time of scarcely more than two hours, Evans encouraged the director to make it longer: “I remember lots of wonderful things you shot. They’re not there. Put ’em back.” Bart, whom Evans had hired as his righthand man, observed that “a superbly shot but ineptly put-together film was transformed into a masterpiece”.
Robert Evans on set with with the actor John Wayne in 1969. Photograph: Alfred Eisenstaedt/The Life Picture Collection via Getty Images
Evans showed just as much commitment in making Chinatown. Bludhorn allowed him to co-produce the movie independently while also remaining in his post at the studio, as a sweetener for the prosperity he had brought to Paramount.Advertisement
Though Towne’s neo-noir script was initially incomprehensible, Evans stuck by it in the face of industry advice to the contrary and assigned Roman Polanski to help knock it into shape. The production was stormy. Polanski locked horns on set with the actor Faye Dunaway, and Evans only brokered peace by promising each of them either an Oscar nod for their work on the movie or a luxury car. (Both were nominated.) A Chinatown sequel, The Two Jakes, was almost made in 1985 with Evans in one of the lead roles, until it became obvious that he was not up to the job. It was eventually made in 1990, with Evans producing.
After Chinatown, Evans left Paramount to independently produce such films as Marathon Man (1976), Black Sunday (1977) and Popeye (1980). His career plummeted following the controversy surrounding The Cotton Club (also directed by Coppola).
During the 90s, he produced a handful of movies, including two, Sliver (1993) and Jade (1995), written by the Basic Instinct screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. The lean years, which included a spell in a psychiatric institution, had done nothing to humble Evans or to temper his vulgarity: to show his high regard for Eszterhas’s work, he paid a woman to visit the writer with a note of congratulation concealed in what Eszterhas described as “a certain intimate body part”. It read: “Best first draft I’ve ever read. Love, Evans.”
Evans was nothing if not vain. He professed to be furious when the actor Dustin Hoffman used him as the basis for his portrayal of a crass producer in the Hollywood satire Wag the Dog (1997), though Evans had already inspired another such character, played by Robert Vaughn, in the comedy S.O.B. (1981).
But on those occasions when he facilitated or came into contact with great material, Evans’s determination resulted in some of the most unambiguously brilliant American films of all time. Despite his bluster and brazenness, he had his charms. “Bob was unpretentious and usually said or seemed to say exactly what he thought,” noted Puzo. “He said it the way children tell truths, with a certain innocence that made the harshest criticism or disagreement inoffensive.”
In 2013, Evans published a second volume of memoirs, The Fat Lady Sang. In 2017, the theatre company Complicite mounted a stage adaptation of The Kid Stays in the Picture at the Royal Court in London, with Danny Huston (son of the director – and Chinatown villain – John Huston) as Evans. On the occasion of that production, Evans gave the Guardian his verdict on modern Hollywood. “I’m not into machines. I’m not into Mars. I like feelings. How does it feel? That, to me, is the turn-on. And story. If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the screen, or anywhere else.” Reflecting on his life he said: “I like myself. For not selling out. There are people who have bigger homes, bigger boats. I don’t care about that. No one has bigger dreams.”
He is survived by Joshua, his son from his marriage to MacGraw, and a grandson.
• Robert Evans, film producer and actor, born 29 June 1930; died 26 October 2019
