Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 9 of 128

Don De Fore

“Independent” obituary from 1993:

Don DeFore, actor: born Cedar Rapids, Iowa 25 August 1917; married 1940 Marion Holmes (one son, two daughters); died Santa Monica, California 22 December 1993.

DON DeFORE’s forte was playing the amiable goof; the smiling Good Guy who only seemed to get the girl in his low-budget movies.

DeFore studied law at Iowa University, but appearing in college shows drew him to acting, and he left to enrol at the Pasadena Playhouse. After graduating, he played bit parts in several films, then came upon Where Do We Go From Here?, a play about a group of college students trying desperately to save their fraternity house. He and his friends pooled their finances and put the play on in Los Angeles, where Oscar Hammerstein II saw it and took it to Broadway. It only ran two weeks, but DeFore’s performance led to his being cast as a young football player in James Thurber and Elliott Nugent’s hit play The Male Animal (1940). He returned to Hollywood to make We Go Fast (1941), and the screen version of The Male Animal (1942). America was now in the Second World War, and DeFore went into the army, but was invalided out after seven weeks. He played servicemen in The Human Comedy (1943), A Guy Named Joe (1943) and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944).

In 1945 Hal Wallis, who had produced The Male Animal for Warner Bros, left them and formed his own production company. He signed DeFore to a contract and cast him in the successful The Affairs of Susan (1945), a comedy in which DeFore vied for the affections of Joan Fontaine. (In You Came Along (1945) DeFore lost Lizabeth Scott to Robert Cummings. In the western Ramrod (1947), he was cast against type as a murderer, and was chillingly effective. He played the jealous businessman who hires Doris Day to spy on his wife in Romance on the High Seas (1948), and a singing soda-jerk in My Friend Irma (1949). He again broke away from typecasting in Dark City (1950), as a dupe who loses everything in a crooked poker game, then hangs himself. In 1952 he played an ex-football hero in She’s Working Her Way Through College.

DeFore’s easy-going personality brought him steady employment in television, particularly in the sitcoms The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952-58) and Hazel (1961- 63).

In the 1980s he acted in the film Carnauba (1981), served on President Ronald Reagan’s Peace Corps Advisory Council, and made television appearances in St Elsewhere and Murder She Wrote.

IMDB Entry:

Born Spangler Arlington Brugh, Robert Taylor began displaying a diversity of talents in his youth on the plains of Nebraska. At Beatrice High School, he was a standout track athlete, but also showed a talent for using his voice, winning several oratory awards. He was a musician and played the cello in the school orchestra. After graduating he thought of music as a vocation and started studying music at Doane College in Crete, Nebraska. In the early 1930s he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and study medicine. He enrolled at Pomona College but also joined the campus theater group and found himself in many lead roles because of his handsome features. He was inspired to go on to the Neely Dixon Dramatic School, but about a year after graduating from Pomona, he was spotted by an MGM talent scout and given a contract in 1934. That same year, he appeared in his first movie, on loan-out to Fox for a Will Rogers entry, Handy Andy (1934). He also did an MGM short, Buried Loot (1935), for its “Crime Does Not Pay” series, which provided good exposure. However, the next year he did even better by being cast as the lead, again on loan-out, this time to then struggling Universal Pictures, in Magnificent Obsession (1935) with Irene Dunne, the story of a happy-go-lucky party guy who inadvertently causes blindness to the young lady he wishes to impress and then becomes a doctor in order to cure her. The movie was a big hit, and Taylor had a taste of instant box-office stardom. Along with his good looks, Taylor already showed solid dramatic skill. However, critics viewed of him as a no-talent flash-in-the-pan getting by on his looks (a charge levied at his closest contemporary comparison, Tyrone Power over at Fox). He had to endure some brutal reviews through his first years in Hollywood, but they would soon fade away. In 1935 alone, he appeared in seven films, and by the end of the year, he was at the top of his form as a leading man and being offered substantial scripts. The next year he appeared with Greta Garbo in Camille (1936), and for the remainder of the decade MGM’s vehicles for him–not to mention a pantheon of top actresses–clicked with audiences. On a personal level, despite his impressive family background and education, Taylor would often strike those who met him as a mental lightweight. Intellectually inclined actress Luise Rainer was shocked when she struck up a conversation with him at a studio function in 1937 when, after asking him what his goals were, he sincerely replied that his most important goal was to accumulate “a wardrobe of ten fine custom-tailored suits.” That he usually comes across on screen as having a confident, commanding presence is more of a testimony to his acting talent than his actual personality. He held rigid right-wing political beliefs that he refused to question and, when confronted with an opposing viewpoint, would simply reject it outright. He rarely, if ever, felt the need to be introspective. Taylor simply felt blessed to be working behind the walls of MGM. His affection for the studio would blind him to the fact that boss Louis B. Mayer masterfully manipulated him for nearly two decades, keeping Taylor’s salary the lowest of any major Hollywood star. But this is also indicative of how much trust he placed in the hands of the studio’s leaders. Indeed, Taylor remained the quintessential MGM company man and would be rewarded by remaining employed there until the demise of the studio system in the late 1950s, outlasting its legend, Clark Gable. Though not quite considered treasures to be locked away in film vaults, Taylor’s films during the first five years of his career gave him the opportunity to explore a wide spectrum of romantic characters, playing young officers or doctors more than once. Some noticeable examples of the variety of roles he took over a year’s time were his chip-on-the-shoulder Lee Sheridan in A Yank at Oxford (1938), ladies’ man/boxer Tommy McCoy in The Crowd Roars (1938) and cynical southern gentleman Blake Cantrell in Stand Up and Fight (1939). Taylor would truly become a first-rate actor in the following decade. By the 1940s, he was playing edgier and somewhat darker characters, such as the title roles in Billy the Kid (1941) and smooth criminal Johnny Eager (1941). With the arrival of the war, Taylor was quick to make his contribution to the effort. As an actor, he made two memorable combat movies: Stand by for Action (1942) and the better known (and for the time, quite graphic) Bataan (1943). From 1943 to 1946, he was in the US Naval Air Corps as a lieutenant, instructing would-be pilots. He also found time to direct two flight instruction training films (1943) and other training films for the Navy. Rather didactic in his ultra-conservative political beliefs, he became involved in 1947 as a “friendly witness” for the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating “Communist subversion” in the film industry. Anyone who knew Taylor knew he was an arch conservative but doubted that he could articulate why. He publicly stated that his accepting a role in Song of Russia (1944) was bad judgment (in reality, it was against his nature to balk at any film assignment while at MGM) and that he considered the film “pro-Communist.” He also–rather unwittingly–fingered fellow actor Howard Da Silva as a disruptive force in the Screen Actors Guild. Although he didn’t explicitly accuse Da Silva of being a Communist, his charges of “disruption” had the same effect, and the veteran actor found himself blacklisted by the studios for many years. After the war and through the remainder of the decade, Taylor was getting action roles to match his healthy box office draw, but there were fewer of them being offered. He was aging, and though he had one of his best known roles as the faith-challenged Gen. Marcus Vinicius in the monster hit Quo Vadis (1951), he was now being seen more as a mature lead. MGM, now under the aegis of Dore Schary, made the decision to move a significant amount of production to England to cut costs and opted to film several big-budget costume epics there starring Taylor.

With Walter Scott‘s Ivanhoe (1952), he was back (as once before in 1949) with the dazzling young Elizabeth Taylor pining for him as the exotic young Jewish woman Rebecca, effectively pulling off a role ideally suited for an actor a decade younger. With a great script and lots of action (forget about the mismatch of some matte backdrops!), the movie was a smash hit. He had a new look–rakish goatee and longer hair–that fit the youthful illusion. The movie did so well that MGM opted for a follow-up film based on the King Arthur legend, Knights of the Round Table (1953). It was not quite as good, but Taylor had the same look, and it worked. To his credit, Taylor continued to push for challenging roles in his dramatic output; the old “pretty face” stigma still seemed to drive him. He played an intriguing and most unlikely character in Devil’s Doorway (1950)–an American Indian (dark-stained skin with blue eyes!) who wins a Medal of Honor for heroism in the Civil War but comes home to his considerable land holdings to encounter the continued racial bigotry and envy of his white neighbors. It contained pushing-the-envelope dialog with many thought-provoking scenes dealing with the social plight of the Indian. Taylor did several noteworthy pictures after this film (e.g., the edgy Rogue Cop (1954)) and was even more swashbuckling in one of the lesser known of Sir Walter Scott’s romantic novels, Quentin Durward (1955), again successful in a younger-man role. Though his contract with MGM expired in 1958, he accepted a few more films into the 1960s. He put on some weight in his 50s, and the effects of heavy chain smoking began to affect his looks, but Taylor successfully alternated between starring film roles and television, albeit at a somewhat reduced pace. He founded his own production company, Robert Taylor Productions, in 1958 and moved comfortably into TV work. From 1959 to 1962, he was the star of the TV series The Detectives (1959), and when Ronald Reagan bowed out of TV’s popular western anthology Death Valley Days(1952) for a political career, Taylor took over as host and sometime actor (1966-1968) until his death from lung cancer at the age of only 57.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: William McPeak

Song Of Russia, poster, Susan Peters, Robert Taylor, 1944. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

William Benedict obituary in “The Independent” in 1999.

BILLY BENEDICT was once described as “one of the most prolific Hollywood bit players of all time”.

He enjoyed a lifelong career as a character actor, appearing in over 90 films and serials, and probably played more messenger boys, bellboys and newspaper vendors than any other actor, but will always be best remembered for his roles as “Skinny” in the East Side Kids series, and as “Whitey” in 24 of the subsequent Bowery Boys films. Though a peripheral member of the team, he made a distinctive impression with his white hair and perpetually befuddled, Stan Laurel-like expression. He led a more stable life than the star members of the team, Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall, and went on to play dozens of small roles in films and on television until his late seventies.

Benedict was the oldest member of the Bowery Boys team, having been born in 1917 in Haskell, Oklahoma. To pay for a high-school education, he had a succession of jobs during his youth – he worked in a Tulsa bank, sold newspapers in Denver, worked in a Kansas wheatfield, and was a plumber’s assistant in Portland, Oregon – but, after taking part in school plays and studying dancing, he determined on a show-business career.

Forced to leave school at 17 during the Depression, he hitchhiked to Los Angeles to try breaking into movies as a dancer, but instead his mousy features and blonde hair made it easier for him to find work as a juvenile. Signed to a contract by 20th Century-Fox, his first role, prophetically, was that of an office boy in $10 Raise (1935). His bucolic appearance also won him country bumpkin roles in such films as Henry King’s Way Down East (1935) and The Country Doctor (1936).

Tim Tyler’s Luck (1937) was the first of several serials in which Benedict was featured. In this popular jungle adventure he played the friend of young Tyler (Frankie Thomas) who is seeking his father in Africa and battling the notorious Spider Webb and his gang who travel in an armour-plated vehicle called a “jungle cruiser”.

Howard Hawks’ classic comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938) was Benedict’s 24th film, by which time he had become adept enough to make an impression when sharing a scene with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant – as Grant’s caddy, he is memorably mortified at the antics of Hepburn on the golf course. The same year he was cast by Universal as a character called “Trouble” in Little Tough Guys in Society, and made three more films in the studio’s “Little Tough Guy” series.

Now freelancing, he also had roles in the Mae West/W.C. Fields comedy My Little Chickadee (1940), as a shy country boy whose schoolroom is taken over by West, the Gene Autry western Melody Ranch (1940) and the Laurel and Hardy comedy Great Guns (1941). He had a rewarding role in the Republic serial The Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), as the sidekick of Billy Batson, the boy who turns into a superhero.

More typical bit roles came as an ice-cream seller in Confessions of Boston Blackie (1941), a telegram boy in Talk of the Town (1942), and a hotel doorman in Second Chorus (1942). Despite the brevity of some of these roles, Benedict would frequently make his presence felt – in William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), he was one of the townsfolk involved in the lynching of three innocent men, and has a telling, remorseful close- up at the film’s end.

Benedict’s first film with the East Side Kids was Clancy Street Boys (1943), after which he was a regular with the gang, usually as a member of their team but occasionally playing one of the antagonists – in Follow the Leader (1944) he is murdered. In the first film to feature the Bowery Boys, Live Wires (1946), Benedict created his regular role of Whitey and received featured billing beneath Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall and Bobby Jordan, and he stayed with the series until 1951 while still doing messenger and bellboy roles in such films as Road to Utopia (1945), Do You Love Me? (1946), The Kid from Brooklyn (1946) and The Hucksters (1947).

After he left the Bowery Boys series, Benedict became an assistant in making miniature sets for Hollywood films, but returned to acting occasionally – he was a bellboy in Leo McCarey’s comedy Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys! (1958) and a musician in Lover Come Back (1961). While making Hello, Dolly (1969), in which he played a newspaper vendor, he was married for the first time – to a girl named Dolly. Later films included The Sting (1973) and Farewell My Lovely (1975), and his television work included roles in Hill Street Blues, The Dukes of Hazzard and Gunsmoke.

He had recurring roles in the series Petticoat Junction (1963) and The Blue Knight (1975), and was featured in the mini-series The Moneychangers (1976) starring Kirk Douglas. More recently, he acted in television commercials. Once asked if he had any regrets, the actor confessed that he was sorry that, despite his long career and many parts, he had never been required to put his dancing skills to use.

William Benedict, actor: born Haskell, Oklahoma 16 April 1917; married; died Los Angeles 25 November 1999.

Robert Fuller

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Robert Fuller
Fuller in 1968
Born	Leonard Leroy Lee July 29, 1933 (age 90) Troy, New York, U.S.
Education	Key West High School
Occupation(s)	Actor, horse rancher
Years active	1952–2003
Known for	Emergency! Laramie Wagon Train The Hard Ride
Spouses	Patricia Lee Lyon (m. 1962; div. 1984) Jennifer Savidge (m. 2001)
Website	robertfuller.info/index.html

Robert Fuller (born Leonard Leroy Lee; July 29, 1933) is an American horse rancher and retired actor. He began his career on television, guest-starring primarily on Westernprograms, while appearing in several movies, including: The Brain from Planet Arous, Teenage Thunder (both in 1957), Return of the Seven (1966), Incident at Phantom Hill(1966), and The Hard Ride (1971). In his five decades of television, Fuller was known for his deep, raspy voice and was familiar to television viewers throughout the 1960s from his co-star roles on the popular 1960s Western series Laramie as Jess Harper and Wagon Train as Cooper Smith. He was also well known for his starring role as Dr. Kelly Brackett in the 1970s medical/action drama Emergency

Robert Reed

Victor McLaglan

Paula Raymond obituary in “The Guardian” in 2003.

Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary from 2003:

During Hollywood’s golden age, most of the large film studios kept a roster of attractive young women under contract to play the supporting wives and girlfriends of male leads, roles, in other words, that bigger stars would not take. One of them was Paula Raymond, who has died aged 79, and was mainly paid to stand around looking pretty as others carved out large pieces of the action.In 1950, however, MGM gave her the chance to co-star opposite Cary Grant in Crisis, and Robert Taylor in The Devil’s Doorway – and it looked as though Raymond, a striking brunette, might break into real stardom. Certainly in the former, the first feature by Richard Brooks, she is delightfully cool as she accompanies her brain surgeon husband (Grant) to a south American country, where the dictator (José Ferrer) needs an operation. Caught up in a revolution, the couple want to return to New York, where the chic Raymond would rather do some shopping.

Anthony Mann’s Devil’s Doorway, one of the first anti-racist westerns, had Robert Taylor as a native American, who believes that his people can live in peace and harmony with the whites – as his own romantic relationship with Paula Raymond suggests. A courageous film with a downbeat finale, it was, not surprisingly, a commercial failure, and Raymond’s memories of the production were dominated by her attempts to fend off the director’s sexual attentions.

Nevertheless, a year later, she was again cast in an Anthony Mann picture, The Tall Target, though, as she explained later, “This time he left me alone; he had learned his lesson.” Playing a southern belle in the movie, she is among a group of suspicious characters on a train where detective Dick Powell is trying to stop a possible assassination attempt on President Lincoln.

Born Paula Ramona Wright in San Francisco, Raymond studied ballet, voice, music and piano as a child. On a trip to Hollywood with her Irish-born mother at the age of 13, she made her screen debut in Keep Smiling (1938), as a bratty version of Shirley Temple, with her brown hair curled and dyed blond.

After attending Hollywood high school, she studied law in San Francisco, at the same time as appearing with various theatre groups. However, she gave up her acting ambitions when she hastily married Captain Floyd Patterson, while he was on leave from the war in the Pacific. Two years later, they divorced and, to support her young daughter Raeme (who predeceased her), Raymond returned to Hollywood to take bit parts under the name of Rae Patterson.

In 1947, she was signed by Columbia, where, as Paula Raymond, she spent two years appearing in B-movies, including a number of westerns such as Challenge Of The Range (1949), starring Charles Starrett. “The films I did at Columbia featured horses, dogs and children; forget the adults. I was just filling space,” she recalled.

She was a little more visible at MGM, mainly because the films were more prestigious. In 1949, she played David Wayne’s society girlfriend in the Katherine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy comedy Adam’s Rib (1949), before her two, rare leading roles in Crisis and Devil’s Doorway. In 1950, in the Esther Williams musical The Duchess Of Idaho, she was a secretary enamoured of her wealthy playboy boss John Lund, whom she saves from the advances of fortune hunters, and in Grounds For Marriage (also 1950), she was the snooty fiancée of divorcee Van Johnson, who was unfortunately still in love with his former wife, Kathryn Grayson.

After leaving MGM, Raymond appeared in the film for which she is pro-bably best remembered, the low budget, science-fiction cult classic, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953). As a palaeontologist who links several sea and beach disasters to a prehistoric creature on the loose as a result of an atomic test, she provided a little glamour and romance in a picture where the actors were secondary to Ray Harryhausen’s special effects.

Raymond did not have much to do as the wife of philandering cop Gig Young in The City That Never Sleeps (1953), nor as the wife of faithful policeman Gary Merrill in The Human Jungle (1954). But in the 1950s, she was hardly off the small screen in such television series as Perry Mason, 77 Sunset Strip, The Untouchables, Maverick and Wyatt Earp. In 1962, she was involved in a car crash that required extensive facial plastic surgery. Yet within a year, she was back at work.

Aside from television appearances, Raymond made a few movies in the 1960s, including two for cheapo director Al Adamson, Blood Of Dracula’s Castle (1967), in which she played the count’s wife, and a lurid western entitled Five Bloody Graves (1969), where she was the madame of a travelling brothel.

After retiring for some years, in 1977 she got a role in a daytime US soap-opera, Days Of Our Lives, but – ever accident-prone – she tripped over a telephone cord on her third day, broke her ankle and was written out of the show. She made her last screen appearance in a mindless thriller called Mind Twister (1993).

· Paula Raymond (Paula Ramona Wright), actor, born November 23 1924; died December 31 2003

Ronald Bergan’s Guardian obituary:

Anybody who has seen the original 1960 Broadway production of Lerner and Lowe’s Camelot or heard the album of the show will never forget the two showstopping numbers delivered by Robert Goulet, who has died while awaiting a lung transplant, aged 73. The handsome singer with the rich baritone voice makes his first entrance as Lancelot singing the self-mocking C’est Moi, but later he sings the hauntingly beautiful If Ever I Would Leave You.Unfortunately, in Joshua Logan’s 1967 movie version, Franco Nero was inexplicably cast and his singing voice dubbed, thus depriving future generations of enjoying Goulet’s standout performance.

Goulet, whom Variety magazine described as “having the looks and the speaking and singing voice of the ideal Lancelot,” seemed assured of a bright future in the musical genre. Judy Garland described him as a living 8 x 10 glossy. Alas, at the time of Camelot, the sort of musical that required Goulet’s kind of powerful modulated singing was on the wane.

Camelot was the high point of his career, but he won a Tony for best actor in a musical as the paterfamilias in Kander and Ebb’s The Happy Time (1968) and, in three television productions, played Tommy Albright in Brigadoon (1966), Billy Bigelow in Carousel (1967) and Fred Graham/Petruchio in Kiss Me Kate (1968), opposite his second wife Carol Lawrence, who had played Maria in the original Broadway production of West Side Story. Around the same period, Goulet started to appear in films, mainly 1960s Hollywood farces such as Honeymoon Hotel and I’d Rather Be Rich (both 1964), after having lent his voice to the feline character of Jaune Tom, “the best mouse catcher in all of Paris”, wooing Mewsette (voiced by Judy Garland) in Gay Purr-ee (1962).

Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Goulet was the son of a textile mill guard and fine amateur singer of French-Canadian extraction. After his father died, when Robert was in his teens, the family moved to Alberta, eventually settling on his grandfather’s farm 200 miles north of Edmonton. At 16, Goulet was singing with the Edmonton Symphony. His performance in Handel’s Messiah earned him a scholarship to the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto.

It wasn’t long before he was appearing in Showtime, Canada’s leading television variety programme, when he was dubbed “Canada’s first matinee idol”. After three years, he left for New York. A theatrical agent recommended him to the librettist Alan Jay Lerner, and composer Frederick Loewe for, Camelot.

Goulet recorded more than 50 albums, made frequent TV appearances and, in 1982, was named Las Vegas entertainer of the year. His rather old-fashioned cabaret show led to him parodying himself as the consummate lounge singer in Louis Malle’s Atlantic City (1980). “If you can’t laugh at yourself, you’re a fool,” Goulet remarked.

He later took himself off in an episode of The Simpsons, arriving at Bart’s treehouse casino:

Goulet: “Are you sure this is the casino? Mr Burns’ casino? I think I should call my manager …”

Nelson: “Your manager says for you to shut up!”

Goulet: “Vera said that?”

Vera was Vera Novak, a Yugoslavian-born writer and artist who became Goulet’s business manager and whom he married in 1982, immediately after his divorce from Lawrence. In her 1990 memoir Carol Lawrence: the Backstage Story, she described Goulet as having a quick temper, mood swings and a drink problem. Goulet’s comment on the book was: “She was terribly angry because when I left I didn’t leave her for another woman.” Of his drinking: “I never was a run-down-in-the-gutter alcoholic. I never missed a performance.”

Goulet returned to Broadway a few times, playing King Arthur in a 1993 revival of Camelot, and took over one of the leads in La Cage aux Folles in 2005. His last performance was in the one-man show A Man and his Music, in September in Syracuse, New York.

He is survived by a daughter from his first marriage and two sons by Lawrence.

· Robert Gerard Goulet, singer and actor, born November 26 1933; died October 30 2007

“Independent” obituary from 2012:

The American actor James Farentino was endowed with the dashing good looks that should have made him a Hollywood leading man, but he might be remembered more for the women in his life than his screen roles. Four times married, he was also close to being four times divorced. At various times, he and his final wife, Stella, started legal action to end the marriage on the grounds of “irreconcilable differences”, only to withdraw the petitions.

Before his last marriage he had a five-year relationship with Tina Sinatra, daughter of the legendary crooner Frank. In 1994, after it had ended, he was put on probation and ordered to undergo counselling for stalking her, making harassing phone calls and violating a restraining order. Three years earlier, he had made headlines when he was arrested by police who intercepted a package of cocaine being sent to his Canadian hotel room while he was shooting the television film Miles from Nowhere. Then,in 2010, he was arrested for misdemeanour battery after allegedly trying to remove a man physically from his Hollywood home.

These torrid off-screen antics overshadowed Farentino’s acting career and gradually saw it dry up. Before the rot set in, his face was known to worldwide television audiences as Dr Nick Toscanni (1981-82) in the glossy soap Dynasty. In trying to exact revenge on Blake Carrington (John Forsythe) for his role in the death of Nick’s brother, the psychiatrist flirted with the oil tycoon’s wife, Krystle, and bedded his married daughter, Fallon. Later, the actor was seen in a cameo role as Ray Ross, the estranged father reunited with Dr Doug Ross (George Clooney), in several 1996 episodes of the medical series ER.

Farentino was born in New York in 1938, where his father was a clothing designer. He dropped out of high school and took various jobs before training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. His stage début came on Broadway with the role of Pedro in The Night of the Iguana (Royale Theatre, 1961-62). He returned to Broadway in revivals of A Streetcar Named Desire (as Stanley Kowalski, Vivian Beaumont Theatre, 1973) and Death of a Salesman (as Biff, Circle in the Square Theatre, 1975).

However, he made his biggest impression on television, first taking one-off character roles in series such as Naked City (1962), The Defenders (1963), Ben Casey (1965) and The Fugitive (1967). Then he was signed up as one of the last contract performers at Universal Studios. He popped up in The Virginian (two roles, 1966, 1970), A Man Called Ironside (1967) and many other programmes, before spending three years as Neil Darrell, one of the trio of lawyers, in The Bold Ones (1969-72). He followed it by playing the globe-trotting private eye Jefferson Keyes in the short-lived Cool Million (1972-73).

Farentino was nominated for aSupporting Actor Emmy for his portrayal of Simon Peter in the epic Anglo-Italian series Jesus of Nazareth (1977). Four years later, he acted Juan Peron in the television film Evita Peron, with Faye Dunaway miscast as the heroine. Then came another starring role, Frank Chaney – alongside a hi-tech policehelicopter – in the crime drama Blue Thunder (1984), but the series was axed after a rival drama, Airwolf, took off to greater heights.

Farentino acted the managing editor Frank DeMarco in Mary (1985-86), but the star, Mary Tyler Moore, asked for the Chicago newspaper sitcom to be taken off after only 13 episodes. His next sitcom co-star, in Julie (1992), was Julie Andrews, who played an actress leaving the bright lights of Broadway for Iowa to marry a vet, but that series was also short-lived.

As television appearances became rarer, Farentino had a short run in the soap Melrose Place as Mr Beck, a shady character seen holding Amanda Woodward (Heather Locklear) hostage in a desolate cabin and demanding a multi-million-dollar ransom.

Most of the films in which the actor appeared were totally forgettable, although he won a Golden Globe as Most Promising Newcomer for his role in the comedy The Pad and How to Use It (1966) as Ted, who gives his friend Bob (Brian Bedford) moral support on a first date but ends up with the young woman, Doreen (Julie Sommars), himself. Later, Farentino was seen alongside Kirk Douglas and Martin Sheen in the time-travel fantasy The Final Countdown (1980).

He had only one screen role in his last 10 years, in the 2006 TV film Drive. “I’ve got a resumé that could choke a horse,” he said, curiously, in 2003. “I’m impressed by it. Producers who are casting people, they’re all in their 20s now. You show it to somebody in the motion picture industry or television, they don’t know and they don’t care.”

James Ferrantino (James Farentino), actor: born New York 24 February 1938; married 1962 Elizabeth Ashley (marriage dissolved 1965), 1966 Michele Lee Dusick (one son; marriage dissolved 1982), 1985 Deborah Mullowney (marriage dissolved 1988), 1994 Stella Torres (one son); died Los Angeles 24 January 2012.