Barry Fitzgerald

Tribute from “Irish Times” by Jessica Traynor in 2019.

Barry Fitzgerald was a man with a talent for creating conundrums for the good people at the Academy. Not only did he cause an upset by being nominated in both the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor categories for the role of Fr Fitzgibbon in Going My Way in 1944 (he won in the latter category), he also managed to decapitate his Oscar statuette with a golf club not long afterwards.

Fitzgerald’s win was the last time the same person would be nominated for two Oscars for these two categories – the Academy would change the rules the following year. After wartime metal shortages ceased and Oscar statuettes reverted from their temporary gold-sprayed plaster construction to their usual gold-plated bronze, it wouldn’t be so easy to decapitate them while practicing your swing. The reasons for the accident are probably best summed up by Fitzgerald’s own attitude to golf: “A golf course is nothing but a pool room moved outdoors”.

Fitzgerald was born William Joseph Shields in 1888 in Portobello. His family were Church of Ireland, and his father Adolphus was a compositor, a trade union organiser, and was instrumental in setting up the first Fabian Societybranch in Ireland. His wife Fanny (née Ungerland) was originally from Hamburg, and came to Ireland in search of a less restrictive society. The couple had seven children and education and culture were valued in the household. Shields attended Skerry’s College and joined the civil service in 1911.

Shields’s brother Arthur, younger than him by eight years, began taking acting classes in the Abbey in 1913, graduating to larger roles by 1914 when the Abbey’s first company were touring abroad. Bored with his civil service job but not yet ready to let go of the steady income – “It was an easy job, full of leisure” – Fitzgerald decided to try his hand at acting too. Small of stature and with excellent comic timing in contrast to Arthur’s taller physique, the brothers had different styles and were rarely in direct competition. Nevertheless, William decided to change his name to Barry Fitzgerald, which as in part to shield his moonlighting as an actor from his bosses at the Department of Industry and Commerce. He would maintain his day job alongside acting roles until 1929.

The highlight of Fitzgerald’s early acting career was his definitive Captain Jack Boyle, played opposite Sara Allgood’s Juno and FJ McCormick’s Joxer Daly in the 1924 debut of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. Interestingly, Arthur Shields played his son, Johnny Boyle, a suspension of disbelief that must have owed much to Fitzgerald’s skilled physical performance as the ageing, blowhard “captain”. Fitzgerald was a friend of O’Casey’s, and took up the role of Fluther Good in the premiere of The Plough and the Stars in 1926. It was a great success, but not without controversy. An Irish Times report of February 15th, 1926 records an incident where several young men (termed “gunboys” by the paper) turned up at Fitzgerald’s mother’s house, hoping to prevent him from performing: “They assured the old lady that no harm would come to her son, but they had their orders to keep him in a safe place until it was too late for him to appear on the Abbey stage”. Fitzgerald wasn’t living there at the time, and his mother and sisters refused to reveal his whereabouts. The play went ahead. But perhaps this incident is another clue as to the potential need for pseudonyms in the politically charged post-civil war atmosphere.

Fitzgerald’s friendship with O’Casey led him to England to take the role written for him in The Silver Tassie, rejected by the Abbey in 1929. He then starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s film version of Juno and the Paycock, shot in London in 1930. The 1930s took Fitzgerald to the United States on Abbey Theatre tours in 1932 and 1934, performing in O’Casey plays alongside Synge staples like Playboy of the Western World and The Shadow of the Glen, Abbey Director and playwright Lennox Robinson’s The Far-off Hills.

In 1936, he and Arthur starred in John Ford’s version of The Plough and the Stars. This launched Fitzgerald’s Hollywood career and roles followed in films such as Bringing Up Baby (1938), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and And Then There Were None (1945), alongside his Oscar-winning turn in 1944’s Going My Way. A long-term creative partnership between Fitzgerald and Ford often found Fitzgerald cast as the comic foil to larger-than-life stars such as John Wayne. He would play alongside Arthur in Hollywood too, in Ford’s beloved The Quiet Man. As a character actor, he was unsurpassed in his era, and while Arthur’s career waned in later life, Fitzgerald would continue to be sought after.

Fitzgerald was rather reticent in his personal life, and Arthur Shields described his brother as “a very shy little man […] uncomfortable in crowds, and really dreaded meeting new people, but he was not a recluse and did enjoy certain company, especially when the ‘old chat’ was good”. Fitzgerald was a bachelor all his life, sharing an apartment in Hollywood with his stand-in Angus D Taillon. Tailon died in 1953 and Fitzgerald returned to Dublin in 1959, where he died in 1961. On is death, his friend Sean O’Casey said: “I loved the man. That is the only appreciation I can give. He was one of the greatest comedians who ever went on stage”.

Isabel Bigley was born in 1926 in the Bronx, New York. She originated the part of the Salvation Army member Sarah Brown in the 1951 production of the Broadway hit “Guys and Dolls”. She retired to rear her family in 1958 and lived for a time in London with her husband and six children. She died aged 80 in 2006.

Michael Freedland’s obituary in “The Guardian”:

The American singer and actor Isabel Bigley, who has died aged 78, will be remembered by British and US theatregoers for singing People Will Say We’re in Love in Oklahoma! and If I Were a Bell in Guys And Dolls.

Bigley was born in New York, the daughter of a salesman, and was educated at Walton high school in the Bronx before going to the Juilliard School of Music in 1944. Her Broadway debut was in the chorus of Oklahoma! in 1946. She followed the show to Drury Lane, where a brief period in the chorus led to the small part of Armina in 1947. She was so good that by the time the show closed in 1949, she was playing the female lead, Laurey, serenaded in The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.

News of her success got her a recommendation to Feuer and his partner, Ernie Martin, for Guys and Dolls. Bigley went on to be a sensation in the show, winning a Tony award in 1951. This was followed by a Theatre World award for the most promising newcomer. When she sang Sarah’s other hit, If I Were a Bell, critics remarked that that was how her voice sounded – like a bell. That same year, Bigley took part in the first television spectacular in colour. The show, Premiere, starred some of the most important American entertainment figures of the day.

When the Broadway production of Guys and Dolls ended in 1953, Rodgers and Hammerstein cast Bigley in the lead role of Jeannie in Me and Juliet, a show that ran for 358 performances. From then on, she concentrated on television, hosting the US version of the TV cabaret show Café Continental and appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show. She was a regular, too, on the Paul Whiteman, Eddie Fisher and Abbott and Costello shows, and was on the team of the American What’s My Line? She yearned to go back to the stage, but somehow the right part never cropped up at the right time.

In July 1953, Bigley married Lawrence Barnett, an important theatrical agency boss. Together, they endowed scholarships at Ohio State University and funded a biennial public policy symposium. Lawrence survives his wife, as do her four sons and two daughters.

· Isabel Bigley Barnett, actor and singer, born February 23 1928; died September 30 2006

The above article can be accessed online at the Guardian” here.

Paula Prentiss is a tall lanky comedy actor who graced American films of the 1960’s. She was born in 1938 in San Antonio, Texas. In 1960 she made her movie debut with her often film partner Jim Hutton in “Where the Boys Are”. She went on to star in “The Honeymoon Machine”, “The Horizontal Lieutenant” and “The World of Henry Orient” with Peter Sellers and Angela Lansbury. She and her husband Richard Benjamin had their own television series “He & She” from 1967 for a season.

TCM Overview:

A vivacious brunette comic player, Paula Prentiss began in lightweight, coquettish roles in the 1960s and shifted to more meaty dramatic fare in the 70s before curtailing her career in favor of raising a family. The daughter of an Italian immigrant and his wife, Prentiss graduated from the famed acting program at Northwestern University. Spotted by talent scouts, she was put under contract at MGM, where she was frequently partnered onscreen with Jim Hutton, beginning with her debut feature “Where the Boys Are” (1960). Having conquered the teen audience, Prentiss offered what many feel is her best performance as Rock Hudson’s overbearing girlfriend in Howard Hawks’ “Man’s Favorite Sport?” (1964) She continued to win the attention of adult moviegoers as Peter Sellers’ married conquest in “The World of Henry Orient” (1964) and as a stripper chasing Peter O’Toole in “What’s New Pussycat” (1965). She retired from features for five years, during which she co-starred with her husband Richard Benjamin in the CBS sitcom “He and She” (1967-68) as a scatterbrained social worker married to a cartoonist.

Prentiss resumed her film career as Elliot Gould’s wife in the dismal “Move” (1970). She fared better as the sexy Nurse Duckett in “Catch-22” (also 1970), directed by Mike Nichols. In “The Parallax View” (1974), Prentiss shone in the brief role of a TV reporter who feared for her life after witnessing a political assassination. The following year, her natural, down-to-earth style was most apparent when she uttered her introductory line concerning her family’s last name being “Marco. That’s upward mobility for Markowitz” in “The Stepford Wives” (1975).

Prentiss curtailed her schedule for much of the late 70s into the early 90s to concentrate on child-rearing, although she accepted the occasional juicy role. In “The Black Marble” (1980), she was a cop romantically involved with her partner, played Jack Lemmon’s wife in Billy Wilder’s last feature “Buddy, Buddy” (1981) and acted opposite Benjamin in the horror spoof “Saturday the 14th” (1981). Her small screen credits include the TV-movies “Packin’ It In” (CBS, 1983) and “M.A.D.D.: Mothers Against Drunk Driving” (NBC, 1983). With her children grown and in college, she began to resume her career in earnest with guest appearances on “Murder, She Wrote” and “Burke’s Law”, an uncredited bit as a nasty nurse in the Benjamin-directed “Mrs. Winterbourne” (1996) and an L.A. stage role as a dying woman in “Angel’s Share” in 1997.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Judith Anderson was a commanding stage actress who acted on film on occasion. She was born in 1898 in Adelaide, South Australia. She made her stage debut at 15. She made her Broadway debut in 1922 in “On the Stairs”. Her best known work on celluloid is as Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper of Manderly in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic “Rebecca” in 1940. Other films included “The Furies”, “Laura” with Gene Tierney, “The Ten Commandments” in 1956, “Cinderfella” as the stepmother of Jerry Lewis and “A Man Called Horse” with Richard Harris. She died in Santa Barbbara at the age of 93 in 1992.

TCM Overview:
A leading Broadway star from the 1920s through the 50s, Judith Anderson was perhaps most famous for her savage, award-winning performance as “Medea” in 1947; as a formidable Lady Macbeth (opposite Laurence Olivier in London in 1937 and Maurice Evans on Broadway in 1941); and as an interpreter of the neurotic heroines of Eugene O’Neill (Nina in “Strange Interlude” in 1928 and Lavinia in “Mourning Becomes Electra” in 1932). Anderson made her film debut in 1933 and played the sinister housekeeper Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” seven years later. It was the first, and most memorable, in a series of malevolent character roles that exploited her severe features and commanding presence. Cast against type, Anderson made an effective Big Mama in Richard Brooks’ film adaptation of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1958). Late in her career she gained a new following as campy grande dame Minx Lockridge on the NBC TV soap opera, “Santa Barbara”.

Jack Warden was born in 1920 in Newark, New Jersey. He first achieved major public recognition as one of the jury members in the 1957 classic film “12 Angry Men” which starred Henry Fonda. His other films included “Brian’s Song”,”Shampoo”, “Heaven Can Wait” and “And Justice for All”. He died in 2006 aged 86.

Tom Vallance’s obituary in “The Independent”

The actor Jack Warden, whose accolades included an Emmy award and two Oscar nominations, was one of several notable talents who came from television to the movie screen in the late Fifties, along with such directors as John Frankenheimer and Sidney Lumet, and writers such as Paddy Chayevsky and Reginald Rose.

His first major screen roles were in three exceptional films of 1957, all adapted from television plays, including Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men, written by Rose, in which he made an indelible impression as the irascible, gruff-voiced juror number seven, a gum-chewing salesman who wants a quick verdict so that he can attend a baseball match. His other films that year were Martin Ritt’s Edge of the City, written by Robert Alan Aurthur, and Delbert Mann’s The Bachelor Party, by Chayevsky.

An intense actor with a tough exterior, Warden was memorable in both films – in the first as a corrupt and bigoted dockside union official who becomes homicidal when he clashes with an army deserter (John Cassavetes) and a rebellious black dock worker (Sidney Poitier), and in the second as a book-keeper who invites office pals to a party for a friend who is about to get married. Ageing and lonely, Warden’s character puts on a brave front until breaking down in a painfully real crying scene.

Warden was later to show that he could also get laughs and he won two Oscar nominations for humorous performances, for his role as a husband in Shampoo (1975) who is easily cuckolded by hairdresser Warren Beatty because he is convinced that all hairdressers are gay, and as a perpetually flustered football coach in Heaven Can Wait (1978) aware (though incredulous) that his former protégé has been reincarnated after a fatal accident. Though critics generally found the latter a heavy- handed remake of Alexander Hall’s delightful fantasy-comedy Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941), many singled out Warden’s hilarious performance as its saving virtue. “Warden’s done it all,” said his friend the actor Jack Ging. “He’s the kind of guy that Spencer Tracy used to play.”

Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1920, he was raised in Kentucky, where he attended the DuPont Manuel High School in Louisville. At the age of 17, he was expelled for frequent fighting. Becoming a professional welter-weight prize-fighter, he had 13 fights, calling himself Johnny Costello (adopting his mother’s maiden name), but he was not notably successful. In 1938, having worked as a night-club bouncer, tugboat deckhand and lifeguard, he joined the US Navy and spent three years in China with the Yangtze River Patrol.

In 1941 he joined the Merchant Marine, but when the US entered the Second World War he switched to the Army, serving as a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Division. He was due to take part in the Normandy landings in 1944, but just before D-Day he broke his leg during a night-time practice jump in England. It was during the ensuing long spell in hospital that he was given a copy of Clifford Odets’ play Waiting for Lefty, which prompted him to read more plays and instilled in him the ambition to be an actor. “That year in hospital was the turning point of my life,” he said later.

He returned to active duty to take part in the Battle of the Bulge, then, on his discharge at the war’s end he studied acting on the GI Bill. He spent more than a year with the Margo Jones repertory group in Dallas, then moved to New York, where he made his television début in 1948 with parts in the prestigious drama anthology series The Philco Television Playhouse and Studio One.

He made his screen début (the first of several bit roles) in a comedy starring Gary Cooper, You’re in the Navy Now (1951), in which two other unknowns, Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson, made their first film appearances. His first credited role was in the crime drama The Man with My Face (1951), starring Barry Nelson as an accountant who is the double of a gangster, and other early films included The Frogmen (1952) and From Here to Eternity (1953, as a corporal).

From 1953 he had a recurring role for three years in the television comedy series Mr Peepers. Later he became part of television history when he starred in the first episode filmed for the cult series The Twilight Zone (though it was not the first shown). Titled “The Lonely” (1959), it starred Warden as a convicted murderer imprisoned for life alone on an asteroid. Given a robotic companion, Alicia (Jean Marsh), by the sympathetic captain of a supply ship, he falls in love with the machine and when given a pardon he refuses to leave without her until it is dramatically proven that Alicia is not flesh and blood.

From 1967 to 1969 Warden starred in a crime series, NYPD, which was shot largely on location in New York City. In 1971 he won an Emmy Award as best supporting actor for his portrayal of the real-life football coach George Halas, of the Chicago Bears, in the tragic tale Brian’s Song.

Warden made his Broadway début in a revival of Golden Boy (1952) in which John Garfield reprised his original leading performance, and he also played small roles in the Arthur Miller double-bill A View From The Bridge/A Memory of Two Mondays (1955). His only musical was the Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick show The Body Beautiful (1958), but his most notable Broadway appearance came when he replaced Donald Pleasence as the star of Robert Shaw’s The Man in the Glass Booth (1969), directed by Harold Pinter.

After his breakthrough appearances in the 1957 movies, he was in constant demand for the sort of screen parts – cops, sports coaches, military men – that matched his gruff exterior, though many of his characters displayed a soft centre. He played military men in The Thin Red Line (1964) and Raid on Entebbe (1977), the brusque President in Being There (1978), a German doctor in Death on the Nile (1978), twin automobile salesmen – one good, one bad – in Used Cars (1980), Paul Newman’s law partner in The Verdict (1982), and he showed his comic flair as the senile, gun-carrying judge in the satiric . . . And Justice for All (1979), Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait and as a flustered theatre producer in Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway (1995).

In All The President’s Men (1976), Alan J. Pakula’s riveting account of the exposure of the Watergate scandal by the journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Warden played the Washington Post’s city editor, Harry M. Rosenfeld, who recalled that the actor spent some time watching him work, though he assured the editor that “I play a part – I don’t play you.” Rosenfeld described Warden as “a skilled performer and a splendid fellow who possessed a strong personality and yet seemed rather shy for an actor”.

Warden made over 100 movies, more recent ones including While You Were Sleeping (1995), Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead (1995), Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite (1995), Warren Beatty’s Bulworth (1998) and, his final film, a football comedy, The Replacements (2000), with Keanu Reeves and Gene Hackman.

Tom Vallance

The above obituary can also be accessed online here.

Muriel Angelus was born in 1909 in London of Scottish parents. Her first movie was the silent “The Ringer” in 1928. Up until 1935 she alternated between making films and appearing on the London stage. She then went to Broadway to appear in the hit show “The Boys from Syracuse” with Eddie Albert. She then went to Hollywood where she made such films as “The Light that Failed” with Ronald Colman and Ida Lupino “The Great McGinty” directed by the great Preston Sturges with Brian Donlevy. On her marriage in 1943 she retired from acting. Muriel Angelus died at the age of 95 in 2004.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

The memories are vague when it comes to recalling this London-born leading lady, but Muriel Angelus did have her moments. She managed to appear in a few classic Broadway musical shows and Hollywood films before her early retirement in the mid-1940s. Of Scottish parentage, the former Muriel Findlay developed a sweet-voiced soprano at an early age. She made her singing debut at 12, eventually changing her name and becoming a popular music hall performer. She entered films toward the end of the silent era with The Ringer (1928), the first of three movie versions of the Edgar Wallace play. Her second film Sailor Don’t Care (1928) was important only in that she met her first husband, Scots-born actor John Stuart. Her part was excised from the film. Though in her first sound picture Night Birds (1930), she got to sing a number, most of her films did not usurp her musical talents. The sweet-natured actress who played both ingenues and ‘other woman’ roles co-starred with husband Stuart in No Exit (1930), Eve’s Fall (1930) and Hindle Wakes (1931), and appeared with British star Monty Banks in some of his farcical comedies, including My Wife’s Family (1932) and So You Won’t Talk (1935). Muriel received a career lift with the glossy musical London hit “Balalaika” and a chain of events happened with its success. It led to her securing the pivotal role of Adriana in “The Boys From Syracuse” and, in turn, a contract with Paramount Pictures. Divorced from Stuart by this time, Muriel settled in Hollywood and made her best films while there. She was touching as girlfriend to blind painter Ronald Colman in The Light That Failed (1939), a second remake of the Rudyard Kipling novel, and appeared to great advantage in Preston Sturges’ classic satire The Great McGinty (1940) as _Brian Donlevy_’s secretary. After scoring another long-running Broadway hit with “Early To Bed” in 1943, Muriel met Radio City Music Hall orchestra conductor Paul Lavalle while appearing on radio in New York and married him in 1946. She retired to raise a family in New England. They had a daughter, Suzanne, who later worked for NBC. Muriel pretty much stayed out of the limelight for the remainder of her life. She died at 95 in a Virginia nursing home in 2004, some seven years after her husband’s death.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

Guardian obituary 2004

Muriel Angelus

British actor who starred in films and stage musicals, memorably singing Falling In Love With LoveRonald BerganThu 2 Sep 2004 01.36 BST

One of Rodgers and Hart’s greatest hits, Falling In Love With Love, was first sung in the 1938 Broadway production of The Boys From Syracuse by Muriel Angelus, who has died aged 95. The New York Times critic thought her portrayal of Adriana in this musical adaptation of The Comedy Of Errors “a monument to precariously controlled wifely patience”, and that she sang “with exquisite sweetness”. Unfortunately, her sweetly exquisite soprano voice was heard too seldom in a career that began at the age of 12 and ended at 33.

Born in London of Scottish parents, the blonde Muriel Angelus Findlay began singing in music halls before entering films in 1928 in the silent The Ringer, the first of three versions of the Edgar Wallace play. A year later, she was in Germany for Maskottchen, based on an operetta by Walter Bromme, in which she played “the other woman”. If the producers had waited a few months for sound, they could have included the songs.Advertisementhttps://38e84c381af680794f0905d392a93a04.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

In her first talkie, Night Birds (1930), she got to sing a number in a West End revue, in which a detective, on the trail of her fugitive boyfriend, disguises himself as a chorus boy. More serious was Hindle Wakes (1931), the first sound version of Stanley Houghton’s 1912 play, where Angelus portrayed Beatrice Farrar, the respectable fiancee of Alan Jeffcote, a Lancashire mill-owner’s son, who refuses to go away with him for a naughty weekend. Instead, he takes a mill girl, only to return to Beatrice after the girl remembers her “place”. Jeffcote was played by the Scottish-born actor John Stuart, whom Angelus married during the shooting of the film.

They then appeared together in Let’s Love And Laugh (1931), an inconsequential comedy-drama in which she was the daughter of a publisher, and he an aspiring writer. She then embarked on several farcical comedies, some directed and starring Monty Banks (Mario Bianchi), the husband of Gracie Fields, with titles such as My Wife’s Family (1932), So You Won’t Talk (1935), and Blind Spot (1932), in which she played an amnesiac, a melodrama Angelus would have wanted to forget.

· Muriel Angelus, actor, born March 10 1909; died August 22 2004

The Way Of All Flesh, poster, l-r: Muriel Angelus, Akim Tamiroff, Gladys George on poster art, 1940. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

In 1936, she starred in the Eric Maschwitz stage musical Balalaika at the Adelphi Theatre in London. Angelus was ravishing as Lydia, a ballet dancer and singer, who falls in love in Paris with an exiled Russian prince after the Bolshevik Revolution. It was the sort of thing that went down very well in the West End in the 1930s, and it ran for over a year. It led to Angelus being offered the role of Adriana in The Boys From Syracuse, and a contract with Paramount, for whom she made four prestigious films.

The first was William Wellman’s The Light That Failed (1939), the second remake of the Rudyard Kipling novel, which tells of the desperate attempt of a painter (Ronald Colman) to finish his greatest painting – of a prostitute (Ida Lupino) – before he goes blind. In a moving scene, Angelus, as the now blind artist’s girlfriend, has to hide the fact from him that the painting has been slashed by the prostitute in a jealous rage.

Of the three last films she made, all in 1940 – Safari, a studio-bound jungle melodrama with Douglas Fairbanks Jr as “the best hunter in West Africa”; The Way Of All Flesh, in which Angelus was a thieving adventuress; and The Great McGinty – the last is by far the most memorable. In this, Preston Sturges’ first feature, about a tramp (Brian Donlevy) who becomes state governor by craft and graft, Angelus played his secretary, offering to become his public wife for the sake of the “women’s vote”. Angelus triumphs as the sole character with half a conscience in one of Hollywood’s best satires.

After another success in a Broadway musical, Early To Bed (1943-44), as the madame of a bordello in pre-war Martinique, which people, for reasons known only to the librettist, keep mistaking for a girls’ school, Angelus left show business. In 1946, long divorced from Stuart, she married Paul Lavelle, the conductor of the Radio City Music Hall orchestra.

Fifteen years later, Lavelle and Angelus recorded Tribute To Rodgers And Hammerstein, in which, naturally, she sung Falling In Love With Love. She is survived by her daughter from her second marriage.

Harold Russell was born in Nova Scotia, Canada in 1914. He moved with his family to the U.S. in 1933. He served in the Army in World War Two and lost both of his hands in conflict. William Wyler cast him in a film about returning soldiers “The Best Year of Our Lives” in 1946 and he won an Oscar for his affecting performance opposite Cathy O’Donnell. His only other film was “Inside Moves” in 1980. He died in 2002 at the age of 88.

His “Guardian” obituary:

Brave actor whose artificial hands helped him win two Oscars

Ronald Bergan

Wednesday 6 February 2002 02.46 GMT

The ironic title of William Wyler’s multiple Oscar-winning film, The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946), refers to the fact that many servicemen had “the best years of their lives” in wartime. The picture focused on three second world war veterans returning to civilian life with severe disabilities. One of them, Homer Parrish, a young sailor, has had both hands, lost in combat, replaced with articulated hooks. The fact that Homer was played by Harold Russell, whose own hands were amputated after a wartime injury – and replaced with steel hooks – added to the poignancy of the performance.

As Homer, the boyish-looking Russell, who has died aged 88, revealed remarkable dexterity – he lifts a cigarette from a pack with his prosthetics, strikes a match and lights his companions’ cigarettes. “Boy, you ought to see me open a bottle of beer,” he boasts.

But he expresses fear and uncertainty about returning to his girlfriend. “I can dial telephones, I can drive a car, I can even put nickels in the jukebox. But Wilma’s only a kid. She’s never seen anything like these hooks.” As his friend remarks, “The navy couldn’t train him to put his arms around his girl to stroke her hair.”

In the justly celebrated sequence of Homer’s homecoming, he stands with his hands by his sides as Wilma hugs him. After overcoming many obstacles, the couple get married; she clasping his right hook during the ceremony, he skillfully sliding the ring onto her finger.

The role won Russell two Oscars, one for best supporting actor and a special second for “bringing aid and comfort to disabled veterans through the medium of motion pictures”, making him the only person in academy history to win two awards for the same role. In August 1992, he created controversy by auctioning the best supporting actor statuette for $60,500 to an anonymous buyer, claiming that he needed the money for his wife’s medical bills. In response to criticism, he said: “My wife’s health is much more important than sentimental reasons.”

Russell, who was born in Nova Scotia, but moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, was working in a food market when Pearl Harbour was bombed. “I made a rush to the recruiting office, not out of patriotism but because I thought of myself a failure,” he explained in his autobiography, Victory In My Hands (1949). He became a demolition expert, and it was while teaching recruits that a defective fuse detonated TNT that he was holding. After choosing steel hooks rather than plastic hands, he became so adept at using them that he featured in a US army training film, Diary Of A Sergeant, made for soldiers who had lost both hands.

Wyler saw the film and, although Russell had no lines, cast him in The Best Years of Our Lives. Russell, who was then attending business school at Boston University, got $250 a week, and $100 a week for living expenses. After the movie became a box-office hit, the producer Sam Goldwyn gave him a weekly bonus of $120 for a year, asking that he make promotional tours. On Wyler’s advice, he then went back to college, “because there wasn’t much call for a guy with no hands in the motion picture industry”.

After graduating, Russell started a public relations business, but spent most of his time campaigning for the disabled, his main message being, “It’s not what you lost, but what you have left and how you use it.” He would joke that he could pick up anything with his hands except “a dinner cheque”.

In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Russell as vice chairman of the presidential committee on employment of disabled people. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson made him chairman, and Richard Nixon reappointed him. He briefly returned to acting, in Inside Moves (1980), about disabled people who meet in a bar to help each other, and in Dogtown (1997), where he played a cigar-store owner and war veteran. He also appeared in the Vietnam war television series, China Beach.

He is survived by a son and a daughter.

· Harold Russell, actor and campaigner, born January 14 1914; died January 29 2002

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

Mary Ann Mobley was born in 1939 in Mississippi. She was Miss America of 1959. She starred opposite Elvis Presley in two movies in 1965, “Girl Happy” and “Harum Scarum”. Gay Collins was born in 1938 in Venice, California. His film debut was in 1962 in “The Pigeon that took Rome” with Charlton Heston and Elsa Martinelli. His other films include “Angel in my Pocket” and “Killer Fish”. He and Mary Ann Mobley had been married since 1967. He died in 2012 aged 74.

“MailOnline” obituary:

Legendary TV actor and presenter, Gary Collins, has died.

The star passed away in the early hours of Saturday morning at the age of 74, and his death was said to be from natural causes.

The tragedy took place just before 1am at Biloxi Regional Medical Center in the American state of Missouri, according Harrison County Coroner Gary Hargrove.

He married former Miss America Mary Ann Mobley in 1967 and the couple – who separated last year although remained wedded – had one child together, Mary Clancy Collins, Senior Vice President of Development for MGM Television.

He was previously married to Susan Peterson with whom he had two other children, Guy William Collins and Melissa ‘Mimi’ Collins.

The master of ceremonies for the Miss America Pageant from 1985-1989 is also known for having appeared on episodes of programmes such as Fantasy Island, Charlie’s Angels, Alice, The Love Boat and Police Story.

Collins also hosted the talk show Hour Magazine from 1980-1988.

IMDB entry on Mary Ann Mobley:

Born on February 17, 1939 in Biloxi, Mississippi, Mary Ann Mobley is one of the few Miss Americas to have true success as an actress or television personality (the others areBarnaby Jones (1973) beauty Lee Meriwether, television hostess Phyllis George, Consumer advocate/game show panelist Bess Myerson and Eraser (1996) heroineVanessa Williams). After serving as Miss America 1959, Mobley soon became a sought-after guest star in episodic television of the 1960s, appearing on many hit series of that era – Perry Mason (1957), Mission: Impossible (1966), The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964),The Virginian (1962), to name a few. Her most important contribution to 1960s popular culture, though, was appearing opposite Elvis Presley in two films – Harum Scarum (1965) and Girl Happy (1965). Her success in film led to a 1965 Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer, an award she shared with Mia Farrow and Celia Milius. She also starred in a number of other B-movies of the 1960s, such as Get Yourself a College Girl (1964) andFor Singles Only (1968).

Her television and film output decreased in the 1970s as she raised her daughter, Clancy Collins White, with her husband, Gary Collins. During that decade, her television appearances were mostly guest roles on series such as the iconic series Love, American Style (1969), Fantasy Island (1977), The Love Boat (1977) and the game show Match Game 73 (1973), on which she was a frequent panelist alongside such other famous wiseacres as Betty White, Brett Somers, Patti Deutsch and Charles Nelson Reilly. She and Collins also appeared a number of times performing death-defying high-wire acts and other athletic, outrageous stunts on the annual television event Circus of the Stars(1977).

In the 1980s, she starred as stepmother “Maggie McKinney” in the final season ofDiff’rent Strokes (1978), appeared in a recurring role as alcoholism counselor “Dr. Beth Everdene” on the prime-time soap opera Falcon Crest (1981) and continued to pop-up as a guest star on series like Hotel (1983) and Matt Houston (1982) and game shows likeThe Hollywood Squares (1965) and Body Language (1984). She also acted as her husband’s frequent guest co-host on his successful talk shows Hour Magazine (1980) andThe Home Show (1988), as well as on installments of the Miss America Pageant. In the 1990s, she made guest appearances on the sitcoms Designing Women (1986), Hearts Afire (1992), Hardball (1994) and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (1996). She and Collins were also hosts of an oft-run late 1990s television infomercial for “SelectComfort”, a specialty bed product. Also during the 1990s, she toured in the popular play, “Love Letters”, with her husband, and performed a cabaret act at the Cinegrill in Hollywood.

Mary Ann and other “Match Game”/”Hollywood Squares” regulars of the 1970s and 1980s (such as Charo, Nipsey Russell, Paul Lynde and Jo Anne Worley) were riotously spoofed on Saturday Night Live (1975) in a 2002 game show sketch called “Super Buzzers” withTina Fey playing Mary Ann. Mary Ann and her husband soon got a chance to demonstrate their own good humor, appearing as themselves in a satiric infomercial parody on the Showtime series Dead Like Me (2003) in 2003 (the fake infomercial was for a no-effort bodytoning contraption – which spontaneously com-busts!).

– IMDb Mini Biography By: blackie-

June Haver was born in 1926 in Rock Island, Illinois. She made her movie debut in the delightful “Home in Indiana” in 1944. Her other films included “When Irish Eyes are Smiling”, “The Dolly Sisters” with Betty Grable and “Look for the Silver Lining”. Disillusioned with Hollywood in 1953 she entered a convent intending to become a nun. However she left after some months. She did not return to acting but after a few years she married actor Fred MacMurray. She died in 2005.

“Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan:

Oh, You Beautiful Doll was the pre-feminist song and film title that best described the pretty, dimpled, petite (5ft 2in) blonde June Haver, who has died aged 79. Haver was in the long line of 20th Century Fox blondes: she had a pleasant singing voice and could keep up with the fancy steps of Gene Nelson, Dan Dailey and Ray Bolger. At one time, she was dubbed “Hollywood’s sweetest star”, and was known to be of such a sunny disposition that her friends asked her to “cheer down” on occasions.

She was also perfectly in tune with the rather bland, escapist, Technicolor 1940s Fox musicals. There was much more drama in her life than in any of her films.

Born Beverly Jean Stovenour in Rock Island, Illinois, she took “Haver” from her stepfather. Her typical stage mother had her performing at six. Five years later she had her own radio show, at 13 she was singing with big bands.

After moving to California with her mother, Haver debuted in four musical shorts at Universal, one of which, Trumpet Serenade (1942) was with the Tommy Dorsey orchestra. Then Fox offered her a contract. Her first feature appearance was as a hat-check girl in Busby Berkeley’s kitschy Alice Faye musical The Gang’s All Here (1943). She was then cast with two other newcomers, Jeanne Crain and Lon McCallister (obituary, July 9) in Home In Indiana (1944), losing out to Jeanne for Lon’s affections, though he seemed more interested in horses than girls.

Unable to coax Alice Faye out of retirement, Fox gave Haver, only 19, the role of Betty Grable’s younger sister in The Dolly Sisters (1945), a fictionalised account of the turn-of-the-century vaudeville siblings. Although the original duo were brunettes, Fox offered the public two blondes for the price of one. Less brassy than Grable, who uncharacteristically clashed offscreen with her younger rival, Haver went on to replay the Grable roles of a few years earlier such as The Daughter Of Rosie O’Grady (1950), a semi-sequel to Sweet Rosie O’Grady (1943).

Haver also starred in several fanciful biopics, including Irish Eyes Are Smiling (1944), I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now (1946) and Oh, You Beautiful Doll (1949), and as Broadway star Marilyn Miller in Look For The Silver Lining (1949), at Warner Bros. In all of them, she was as enchanting as the material allowed.

In 1947 Haver married trumpeter Jimmy Zito, whom she had met when he was in Ted Fio Rio’s band seven years earlier. She later called the marriage “the biggest mistake of my life”, and they separated after three months, getting divorced the following year. It was particularly traumatic as she had recently converted to Catholicism. But she picked up her film career, continuing into the 1950s with I’ll Get By (1950) and The Girl Next Door (1953), two other apt Haver titles.

After her divorce, Haver planned to marry a dentist, John Duzik, but he died of haemophilia. A few years later, she announced she was retiring – to become a nun. This decision coincided with the more explicit scripts coming into Hollywood, as well as her poor romantic luck. She was a novice at Sisters of Charity convent in Kansas for just seven months, citing “health reasons” as she quit, to take up interior decoration.

In 1954, she met the recently widowed Fred MacMurray, with whom she had appeared in Where Do We Go From Here? 10 years earlier. They married and adopted twin girls, who survive her. The marriage lasted until MacMurray’s death in 1991.

· June Haver (Beverly Jean Stovenour), actor, born June 10 1926; died July 4 2005

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