Janis Carter was born in 1913 in Cleaveland, Ohio. She began her film career in 1941. Her films include “Night Editor” in 1946 and “Framed” the following. In 1951 she played opposite John Wayne in “Flying Leathernecks”. She died in 1994 aged 80.
“Independent” obituary by Tom Vallance:
Janis Dremann (Janis Carter), actress: born Cleveland, Ohio 10 October 1913; married first Carl Prager (marriage dissolved 1951), 1956 Julius Stulman; died Durham, North Carolina 30 July 1994.
A TALL, blonde beauty who could be glacially haughty or stylishly witty, Janis Carter was a welcome presence in films of the Forties, whether starring as duplicitous seductresses in ‘B’ thrillers or vamping the hero as the ‘other woman’ of major melodramas and comedies.
Her cool, high-toned composure, suggesting darker passions under the surface, made her an ideal film noir actress, and among her finer roles were those in William Castle’s Mark of the Whistler (1945), a doom-laden tale based on a Cornell Woolrich story, and Richard Wallace’s Framed (1947, called Paula in Britain), in which she used her seductive charms in a plot to have the innocent drifter Glenn Ford take the blame for murder and larceny. In Douglas Sirk’s Slightly French (1949), an amusing comedy which starred Dorothy Lamour as a honky-tonk performer being passed off as a Parisian belle, Carter displayed such flair as a wise-cracking socialite that it is a pity this aspect of her talent remained under-used.
Born Janis Dremann in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1913, she studied opera in New York but after failing an audition at the Metropolitan turned to the musical stage. She was a showgirl in two Cole Porter musicals, Dubarry was a Lady (1939) and Panama Hattie (1940), both produced by the composer Buddy DeSylva, who became a constant escort during this period. She also became a successful model, and when John Robert Powers formed his agency she was one of the original 10 Powers Girls.
Signed by Twentieth Century- Fox, she took the professional name Carter and made her film debut in Cadet Girl (1941), followed by six other ‘B’ movies. In Secret Agent of Japan (1942), released just four months after Pearl Harbor and advertised as ‘the first film to tell the inside story of the war’, she made a brief but telling impact as a sleekly gowned spy in a Shanghai nightclub passing secrets in her cigarette case to her fellow conspirator Lynn Bari. But Fox were grooming several young actresses, including Bari, and at the end of a year let Carter go. After small roles in MGM’s I Married an Angel (1942) and UA’s Lady of Burlesque (1943), she was signed by Columbia, where she played in farces (Miss Grant Takes Richmond, 1949, A Woman of Distinction, 1950), musicals (Swing Out the Blues, 1944), swashbucklers (The Fighting Guardsman, 1945) and romantic comedies (Together Again, 1944, One Way To Love, 1945), but primarily thrillers, including episodes of the studio’s Boston Blackie and Lone Wolf series. She also made notable appearances in two films in the superior, bleakly cynical ‘Whistler’ series, Henry Levin’s Night Editor (1946), in which she was a socialite having an illicit affair with a married man when they witness a murder, and I Love Trouble (1948), as a glamorous suspects being investigated by the private eye Franchot Tone.
In 1949 Carter moved to RKO, where she had an effective role seducing John Agar into embracing Communism in Howard Hughes’s contribution to the Cold War, I Married a Communist (later retitled Woman on Pier 13). She was a femme fatale again in My Forbidden Past (1951), but after colourless roles in a John Wayne war movie, Flying Leathernecks (1951), and two westerns, Santa Fe (1951) and The Half-Breed (1952), she gave up films. Ironically, it was in her last film that she sung solo for the only time in her film career. For two years she hosted a popular television quiz show, Feather Your Nest, and in 1955 was featured in a television version of Panama Hattie.
Her first marriage, to the composer-musician Carl Prager, had ended in 1951 and in 1956 she married the shipping and lumber tycoon Julius Stulman. The couple kept three homes – an apartment in North Carolina, a penthouse in New York, where Carter could be found during the opera season, and a magnificent condominium in Longboat Key, Florida, described by her friend the actress Ann Savage as ‘lush outside and luxe within’. She was a director of the Ringling Brothers Museum in Florida and was active on the boards of theatre and opera houses in the state.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
A poster for Nicholas Ray’s 1951 war film ‘Flying Leathernecks’, starring John Wayne (left), Robert Ryan and Janis Carter. (Photo by Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images)
Mie Hama was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1943. She made her film debut in 1960 and virtually her entire cinema career has been in Japanese movies. Her sole English speaking film was the James Bond “You Only Live Twice” with Sean Connery in 1967.
IMDB entry:
Mie Hama was born in Tokyo, Japan on November 20, 1943. She first started out working as a bus fare collector. While working, she was spotted by producer Tomoyuki Tanaka , and was soon employed at Toho Studios. She appeared in a bevy of drama and sci-fi films, including Kingu Kongu tai Gojira (1962), where she became the Giant Ape’s “Damsel in Distress.” She is probably best known in Western Cinema as Bond girl Kissy Suzuki, starring alongside actor Sean Connery in the 007 film You Only Live Twice (1967). That same year, King Kong Escapes (1967) was released, thus, she portrayed the spellbinding “Bond-girlish” villainess Madamn Piranha. Her extended wardrobe and enchanted bed chambers contributed to the film’s “James Bond-ish” atmosphere. In addition, Hama would sometimes be referred to as “Funny Face,” due to her appearances in Japan’s “Crazy Cats” movies.
She became one of the most popular actresses in Japan’s “Golden Age” of Cinema, but has done little acting when Japan’s cinema world experienced severe financial problems. However, she did return to appear in a few films in the 1970s and 1980s, and she is seen, most recently, working as an active environmentalist.
Lilia Skala was born in 1896 in Vienna, Austria. With World War Two looming in Europe, she and her husband and two children fled to the U.S. She made many appearances on television and made her film debut with “Call Me Madam” in 1953. Other films include “Lilies of the Field” with Sidney Poitier in 1963, “Ship of Fools” with Vivien Leigh and “Caprice” with Doris Day and Richard Harris. Lilia Skala died in 1994 at the age of 98.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Born and raised in Vienna, Austria, Lilia Skala would become a star on two continents. In pre-World War II Austria she starred in famed Max Reinhardt‘s stage troupe, and in post-war America she would become a notable matronly, award-worthy character star on Broadway and in films. Forced to flee her Nazi-occupied homeland with her Jewish husband and two young sons in the late 1930s, Lilia and her family managed to escape (at different times) to England. In 1939, practically penniless, they immigrated to the US, where she sought menial labor in New York’s garment district.
Lilia quickly learned English and worked her way back to an acting career, this time as a sweet, delightful, thick-accented Academy Award, Golden Globe and Emmy nominee. She broke through the Broadway barrier in 1941 with “Letters to Lucerne”, followed by a featured role in the musical “Call Me Madam” with Ethel Merman. In the 1950s she did an extensive tour in “The Diary of Anne Frank” as Mrs. Frank, and performed in a German-language production of Kurt Weill‘s “The Threepenny Opera.” Lilia became a familiar benevolent face on TV in several early soap operas, including Claudia: The Story of a Marriage (1952).
She won her widest claim to fame, however, as the elderly chapel-building Mother Superior opposite Sidney Poitier in Lilies of the Field (1963), for which she won both Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations. That led to more character actress work in films, most notably as the dog-carrying Jewish lady in the star-studded Ship of Fools(1965) and as Jennifer Beals‘ elderly German friend in Flashdance (1983). On TV she played Eva Gabor‘s Hungarian mother in Green Acres (1965) and earned an Emmy nomination for her work in the popular miniseries Eleanor and Franklin (1976)). Lilia died at the ripe old age of 98.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
David Shipman’s “Independent” obituary:
Lilia Skala was a remarkable woman, best known in Britain for a handful of movie appearances. Acting was not her original career, because her parents did not consider it respectable: she chose architecture, and as there were no facilities then fo r a woman to study the subject in her native Vienna, Lilia von Skalla (as she was born) trained at the University of Dresden – she subsequently became the first woman member of the Austrian Association of Engineers and Architects. When she married Erik S kala, however, he encouraged her to pursue an acting career; she joined the Max Reinhardt Repertory Theatre, playing throughout Germany and Austria with, among others, the great Albert Basserman.
Erik Skala was Jewish, and they left for the United States at the time of the Anschluss, in 1938. Partly because of her strong accent she was not able to resume her career till cast as the housekeeper in Letters to Lucerne, on Broadway in 1941. After th a t she worked steadily, but without great eclat, till she played the Grand Duchess of Lichtenburg in Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam (1950), in which he spoofed President Truman’s decision to send the Washington hostess Perle Mesta as ambassador to as small European duchy. The Mesta role was played by Ethel Merman, who was joined by Skala for the movie version in 1953.
Skala did not make a mark in films till 1963, when she plays the headstrong German Mother Superior who encourages the handyman Sidney Poitier to build a chapel for her flock in Lilies of the Field. Ralph Nelson directed the picture, in which few Hollywood people had any faith: for that reason, Poitier worked for a percentage, and netted himself a fortune – and an Oscar. Skala won a Golden Globe and was Oscar-nominated, but earned only $1,000, the Actors Guild minimum fee, for her participation – because, as her son Peter explained, she was anxious not to appear greedy.
Thereafter she was much in demand, usually playing feisty elderly ladies of European origin – as, for instance, in the New York City Opera’s 1965 production of The Threepenny Opera, as Mrs Peachum, and as the old lady in Jewish Repertory Theatre’s 1986
m usical version of the Czech film The Shop on the High Street. She also played the landlady, Frau Schneider, in several productions of Cabaret; other appearances in stock include the role of Zsa Zsa Gabor’s mother in Forty Carats.
She appeared frequently on television, again playing a nun in Ironside (1967) with Raymond Burr, and its telefilm sequel, Split Second to an Epitaph. In movies, she played a bourgeois hausfrau in Stanley Kramer’s Ship of Fools (1965), from Katherine Ann Porter’s novel, and was directed by Ralph Nelson again in Charly (1968), in which she was a psychiatrist helping to rehabilitate the retarded protagonist, Cliff Robertson. She was a psychiatrist again, colleague of the heroine, Lindsay Crouse, in the first film both written and directed by David Mamet (who was then married to Ms Crouse), House of Games (1987).
Movie-goers may also remember her as the former dancer who trained Jennifer Beals in Adrian Lyne’s Flashdance (1983); and they are unlikely to forget her in one of the better Merchant-Ivory productions (before they were Merchant-Ivory), Roseland (1968). This was an episode film about the New York dance-hall, with Skala wonderfully propping up the last section, as an immigrant desperate to win the Peabody Contest while aware that her partner and would-be husband, David Thomas, is unlikely to help her to do so.
But her best screen work is in an unlikely screen venture,Richard Pearce’s Heartlands (1980), which was based on papers left by a widow who in 1910 advertised for a position as a housekeeper in Wyoming. Rip Torn played the dour, taciturn Scot who responds to the ad; Conchata Ferrell was the widow, strong and understanding but afraid that she had bitten off more than she could chew. Skala was her hardbitten neighbour, always ready with support and succour; and for learning to ride a horse in her mid-eighties she was entered into the Western Hall of Fame.
David Shipman Reute Lilia von Skalla, actress and architect: born Vienna 28 November 1896; married 1922 Erik Skala (deceased; two sons; marriage dissolved); died Bay Shore, Long Island 18 December 1994.
Jane Randolph was born in 1915 in Youngstown, Ohio. In 1942 she was given a contract with RKO Studios and made “Highways by Night”. She is best known for her roles ih the classics’ “Cat People” and “Curse of the Cat People” both which starred Simone Simon. She died in Switzerland in 2009.
“Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan:
Hollywood film star known for her role as Alice in Cat People
Ronald Bergan
Late at night, an attractive woman is walking home alone. The sound of her high heels echoes down the deserted, shadowy streets. She hears footsteps behind her. Terrified, she quickens her pace. A tree sways menacingly in the breeze. There is a sudden hissing noise. It is the sound of doors opening on a bus. The relieved woman hops on to it. This eerie sequence is from Jacques Tourneur’s classic noir Cat People (1942), and the woman was played by Jane Randolph, who has died aged 93.
Later in the film, Randolph goes for a swim in the indoor pool at her club. Again, she is alone. She hears what seems like the growling of some feline beast. She quickly dives into the pool and treads water. The light reflected from the surface of the pool causes unsettling patterns to creep along the walls. She screams for help. When she gets out of the pool, she discovers that her dressing gown has been torn to threads. What made these scenes so effective was the suggestion of horror rather than its depiction (a speciality of the producer Val Lewton), and the fact that Alice, played superbly by Randolph, is not a timid person, but an intelligent, level-headed, liberated woman. She is the audience’s surrogate – her screams are our screams. The blonde Randolph is the representative of normality, the antithesis of her nemesis, the mysterious, dark-haired cat-woman (Simone Simon). Inevitably, out of the 20 films Randolph made between 1941 and 1948, Cat People stands out. This was further stressed by her appearance in the Lewton-produced The Curse of the Cat People (1944), the quasi-sequel in which Randolph played the same character, now married and the mother of a young girl who has an invisible friend, the “ghost” of the cat-woman.
Born Jane Roemer in Youngstown, Ohio, to a steel-mill designer and his wife, she went to Hollywood in 1939 to study at the director Max Reinhardt’s school of acting. Two years later, aged 26, she was given a contract by Warner Bros, which sent her to its talent-grooming school, but gave her only bit parts in four movies. Randolph’s film career proper began in 1942 at RKO, for which she made five films, including Cat People.
In her first film for the studio, she landed the female lead as Marcia Brooks, the intrepid fashion reporter on the scent of a crime in The Falcon’s Brother (1942). The fourth in the enjoyable Falcon series, it was the last starring George Sanders, who was then replaced by his real-life lookalike, soundalike brother, Tom Conway. It was followed by The Falcon Strikes Back (1943), with Randolph as the same character but this time as Conway’s girlfriend, proving she could hold her own with both brothers. Around the same time, Randolph became the first pin-up for Yank, the weekly magazine of the US Army, and posed for one of two humans used for the ice-skating sequence in Bambi (1942). After leaving RKO, Randolph, as a freelance, found herself in several B pictures: supporting the Bowery Boys in In Fast Company (1946), Hopalong Cassidy in Fool’s Gold (1947), and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). The best of the bunch was Anthony Mann’s Railroaded! (1947), in which Randolph plays a sultry femme fatale, who gets caught up in a fight with pure Sheila Ryan. In 1948, Randolph retired from show business when she married the business- man Jaime del Amo. The couple spent much of their time in Spain. After her husband’s death, Randolph returned to Los Angeles and kept a home in Switzerland, where she died.
She is survived by her daughter, Cristina.
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
The Falcon’s Brother, poster, Jane Randolph, Tom Conway, George Sanders, 1942. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Eartha Kitt was born in South Carolina in 1927. She is forever remembered for the feline quality in her very distinctive voice. Her songs include “Old Fashioned Girl” and “Under the Bridges of Paris”. Her films include “New Faces of 1954” and “Anna Lucasta” in 1958. Eartha Kitt died in 2008 at the age of 81.
Adrian Jack’s “Guardian” obituary:
For six decades, the American entertainer Eartha Kitt, who has died aged 81 of colon cancer, was a showbusiness force of nature. At home, on stage and in the recording studio, and an effective performer on movie and television screens, she made an impact all the greater as an African-American woman breaking new ground.
Her official birth details were established in 1997, when she challenged a group of students to find the certificate that declared her to have been born Eartha Mae Keith in the town of North, South Carolina.
Her father, William Kitt, was a share-cropper in South Carolina and chose the Christian name, it is said, because Eartha was born the year of a good harvest. He left Eartha’s mother, Anna Mae Riley, less than two years later, and the destitute black-Cherokee woman persuaded black neighbours to take in Eartha and her younger half-sister Pearl. Pearl was black and pretty, but Eartha had bushy red hair, which she later dyed, and lighter skin; she was dubbed “that yella gal”.
Eventually, her aunt, Marnie Lue Riley, sent for her and gave her a home in the Puerto Rican-Italian part of Manhattan. Their relationship was difficult, but Eartha had piano lessons paid for as well as savings she knew of only later. She ran away several times, but once she achieved independence, Marnie became mother, and Eartha came to believe that she was really her biological mother.
Down south, Kitt had already impressed the local church congregation with her singing. At school in New York she won respect and popularity with her talent for reading aloud, and she was lucky enough to have teachers who were genuinely interested in her. She also went down well at the local Caribbean dances, where she picked up routines that were to stand her in good stead, not only as a professional entertainer, but also amusing her fellow-workers when she took factory jobs.
Just after her 16th birthday, she auditioned, more or less by accident, for the Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe, whose style was based on Afro-Caribbean folklore. She won a full scholarship to study ballet as well as Dunham’s own technique and her first appearance on Broadway was dancing in Blue Holiday with Ethel Waters and Avon Long. Dunham told “Kitty” she would never make a real dancer because her breasts were too large, but chose her for the troupe which toured the US, Mexico, South America and Europe; increasingly, Kitt took on solo roles, singing as well as dancing, and made her film debut, uncredited, in Casbah (1948).
When the Dunham company was in Paris, Kitt was offered her first nightclub engagement at Carroll’s, whose formidable lesbian owner Fred told the waitresses “this one must not be touched”. Kitt later claimed she had no act to speak of at that time, though she had been to the club and seen Juliette Greco’s show. Yet she quickly became a sensation, and when Carroll’s opened a new club, Le Perroquet, the café-au-lait performer was the main attraction, with songs in English, Spanish and French that she prepared with the help of the Cuban bandleader. Singing C’est Si Bon for the first time, she forgot the words and ad-libbed, with such success, she repeated her list of desirables, “mink coat, big Cadillac car” and so on, ever after.
Between the two club engagements, Kitt was cast by Orson Welles as Helen of Troy in his own version of the Faust story, Time Runs, sharing what limelight could be snatched from Welles himself with Michael McLiammoir and Hilton Edwards. If Welles thought her “the most exciting woman in the world”, Kitt later reflected, it was because they never went to bed together. He ate, she watched; he talked, she listened. She was always an admirer of Great Men, and went to considerable lengths to meet Albert Einstein and Jawaharlal Nehru.
After Le Perroquet, Kitt’s next night-club engagement was at the cosmopolitan Karavansari in Istanbul. There she learned a number of Turkish songs by ear, including Usku Dara, which she later recorded as her first single for RCA Victor. By the time she opened at La Vie En Rose in New York, she claimed to sing in seven languages.
Despite an inventive campaign of newspaper ads, which read “Learn to say ‘Eartha Kitt’ “, she was not a success, and her two-week contract was terminated after six days.
Whatever went wrong, La Vie En Rose’s loss was the Village Vanguard’s gain, and a short engagement at its sister club, The Blue Angel, was extended to 25 weeks. She was spotted by the producer of a long-established revue. For New Faces of 1952, she sang Monotonous while crawling catlike from one chaise-longue to the next. Thereafter, Kitt found it hard to do without at least one such piece of furniture, and for a Royal Variety Performance in the 1960s, she appeared on it through the stage trapdoor.
Kitt became the unquestioned star of New Faces and a film version followed in 1954. Meanwhile, she starred in Mrs Patterson, her first major Broadway success, and fell in love with Arthur Loew Junior, heir to a chain of cinemas. Feelings were mutual, but the affair never came to anything because his mother opposed it. In London, Kitt had appeared briefly at Churchill’s in the early 1950s, but she really arrived with her act at the Café de Paris, wearing an aquamarine silk satin dress designed by Pierre Balmain. Lord Snowdon photographed her.
The 1950s were the golden decade of Kitt’s record hits. After Usku Dara came Monotonous, I Want To Be Evil and Santa Baby, among others, which established the image of a teasing, self-mocking “sex kitten”. She recorded Just An Old-Fashioned Girl, the song that became her signature tune in Britain, in 1955, but Thursday’s Child and The Day That The Circus Left Town, recorded a short while later, said more about her as the wistful waif people thought weird.
There have been many attempts to describe her extraordinary voice. Kenneth Tynan got it wrong when he spoke of her vibrato, for she hardly used it. Although she cultivated a tremor for special effect, her pitch was remarkably clean, and she would bend it, very often sharp, with slow deliberation. She said she understood everything her voice could and couldn’t do. She played off a gritty chest register against a cooing falsetto, and as she savoured its sound, she would experiment with verbal distortions. Welles complained that she seemed to come from nowhere.
Kitt’s very distinctive style made it hard for her to develop her career and diversify. If she was not 100% herself, you felt cheated. Yet she never stopped trying.
Her films included St Louis Blues (with Nat King Cole) and Accused (1957), Anna Lucasta (with Sammy Davis Jr) and Mark Of The Hawk (1958), Saint Of Devil’s Island (1961), Synanon (1965) and Dragonard (with Oliver Reed, 1971).
Apart from many celebrity appearances on TV, she found one role tailormade as Catwoman in Batman (1967-68). She took further parts on Broadway, in Shinbone Alley (1957) and Timbuktu (1978), an all-black musical based on Kismet. In London she played Mrs Gracedew in Henry James’s The High Bid (1970) and the title role in Bunny (1972).
In 1988 her appearance in Sondheim’s Follies at London’s Shaftesbury theatre — she spent most of it elegantly posed in a long mink coat until she stopped the show with I’m Still Here — led the following year to her first one-woman show, Eartha Kitt in Concert. Prancing around with three toy boys, she was pretty well as lissome as ever, and even more over the top. In Manchester, she even tried panto, as the Genie of the Lamp in Aladdin.
Also in 1989 came her autobiography, I’m Still Here: Confessions of a Sex Kitten. It retells and updates her earlier memoirs, the first volume of which, Thursday’s Child, was published in 1957. I’m Still Here ends with Kitt’s struggle to come to terms with the marriage of her only daughter, Kitt, of whom she was fiercely possessive.
Her own marriage to Kitt’s father, Bill McDonald, in 1960 soon fizzled out. Kitt made no bones about the fact that the thing she needed most, after the love of her daughter, was the applause of an audience: I once saw her give everything she’d got to what was virtually an empty house, at the New Theatre, Oxford, one weekday matinee.
She looked like almost losing her American public after she upset Lady Bird Johnson by speaking her mind about the Vietnam war at a 1968 luncheon at the White House. The CIA described her as “a sadistic nymphomaniac”. America’s temporary loss was Britain’s gain, for Kitt spent more time here, touring variety clubs in the north of England.
At the opposite cultural extreme, she made two extraordinary concert appearances in London with Richard Rodney Bennett, as pianist and arranger, and the Nash Ensemble, singing songs by Kurt Weill, Cole Porter and other American standards.
Kitt’s occasional attempts to move with the times — she even dipped into disco funk — had qualified success. In 1984 she was back in the charts with Where Is My Man and I Love Men. She did not need to update herself, and a live recording of a concert she gave with jazz musicians in Wuppertal, Germany, in 1992 shows that she was best given a tight format – never better than in the immaculate arrangements of Henri René and his Orchestra in the early days. An album called I’m Still Here came out the same year as the book, and in 1993 Rollercoaster issued a five-disc compilation representing her entire repertoire to date.
Her work continued, notably in cabaret: in 2000 she provided the voice of Yzma for the Disney animation The Emperor’s New Groove; her appearance at the Cheltenham jazz festival last April saw her in yet another medium, the live performance on DVD; and she continued to perform until last October.
Her album Back in Business (1995) had made a bid for the universal by dressing up old favourites by Cole Porter, Rogers and Hart, Duke Ellington, and Kurt Weill, not to mention Henry Mancini’s Moon River, in highly produced, sumptuous jazz arrangements. One of the more straightforward is the classic of the 1930s depression, Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?, and here Kitt rings true with raw anger.
Eartha Mae Kitt (Keith), singer and entertainer, born 17 January 1927; died 25 December 2008
The above obituary can also be accessed online here.
Michael Murphy was born in 1938 in Los Angeles. He has given excellent performances in such films as “Nashville” in 1975, “Manhattan”, “An Unmarried Woman” with Jill Clayburgh and “Away from Her” with Julie Christie .
TCM Overview:
A high school teacher turned character actor, Michael Murphy began his collaboration with famed director Robert Altman on an episode of the 1960s TV series “Combat”. He made the first of several appearances in Altman films in “Countdown” (1968). Among his other Altman credits are “M*A*S*H” and “Brewster McCloud” (both 1970), “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” (1971), “Nashville” (1975) and “Kansas City” (1996). In addition, Murphy portrayed a presidential candidate in Altman’s satire of politics “Tanner ’88” (HBO, 1988) and was the chief judge in Altman’s “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial” (CBS, 1988).Murphy specializes in playing angst-ridden urban types, typified by his roles as cheating husbands in Paul Mazursky’s “An Unmarried Woman” (1978) and Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” (1979). His other film roles include a journalist in Peter Weir’s “The Year of Living Dangerously” (1982), an ambassador in Oliver Stone’s “Salvador” (1986), a cop tracking a serial killer in Wes Craven’s “Shocker” (1989) and the mayor of Gotham City in Tim Burton’s “Batman Returns” (1992).
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Kim Hunter was born in 1922 in Detroit. In 1943 she starred in the film noir “The Seventh Victim”. In 1944 she was in England to make “A Canterbury Tale” and also made “A Matter of Life and Death” there in 1946. She won an Oscar for her performance as Stella opposite Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh in “A Streetcar Named Desire”. In 1967 she starred in “Planet of the Apes”. She died in 2002 aged 79.
Her obituary by Brian Baxter in “The Guardian”:
For a distinguished and versatile stage actor whose Oscar-winning screen career effectively began with the visionary A Matter Of Life And Death (1945), it might have proved galling to be popularly associated with Planet Of The Apes. But Kim Hunter, who has died aged 79, was far too intelligent to let the success of her masked performance as the sympathetic simian Dr Zira distract from the achievements of a 60-year career, which included long periods out of work because of her association with blacklisted film directors in America’s McCarthyite times.
Hunter made her Broadway debut in 1947, as the put-upon wife Stella in Tennessee Will- iams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. When Elia Kazan transferred his production into a mesmerising movie in 1951, she returned to the screen opposite Marlon Brando, and won an Oscar as best supporting actress.
Born in Detroit, where her mother was a concert pianist, she made her professional debut with a small theatre company in Miami. With a remarkable vocal range and physical grace, she gained experience in stock theatres, on tour and studying at the Actors’ Studio in New York.
At 21, she made an auspicious screen debut as an orphan in the 1943 horror film The Seventh Victim, a supremely elegant Val Lewton production, directed by Mark Robson. In the same year, she took sixth billing in Tender Comrade, the film that, years later, was cited by the house unAmerican activities committee as being communist-inspired. That accusation led to writer Dalton Trumbo and director Edward Dmytryk being blacklisted as two of the Hollywood 10; Hunter was, by implication, victimised and did not work in the cinema for three years because of her alleged leftwing sympathies.
But these, and other less notable early films, led to her role as June in the British classic A Matter Of Life And Death (1945), when Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger needed a “pretty, girl-next-door American” for their ambitious romantic fantasy.
Hunter’s substantial theatrical roles included Rosamund in As You Like It, Helen in Troilus And Cressida, and Karen in Lillian Hellman’s controversial The Childrens’ Hour. She twice played the greatest American poet, Emily Dickinson, first in Come Slowly, Eden and, in the 1970s, as The Belle Of Amherst. This one-woman show had been made famous by Julie Harris, who shared Hunter’s versatility, lilting tones and love of music and poetry.
Hunter’s other key stage performances included the formidable teacher in The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) and Big Mama in Williams’s Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. Her love of the classics had been kindled by an early success as Gwendolyn, in The Importance Of Being Earnest, and continued throughout her career to include a notable Mme Ranevskaya, in The Cherry Orchard, as well as appearances in Ghosts and Shaw’s Man And Superman and Major Barbara.
Her busy schedule, including lengthy tours, did not, however, curtail screen appearances, memorable among which was that of the selfish mother, blamed for her son’s alienation, in John Frankenheimer’s debut The Young Stranger (1957). Inevitably, there was also more routine work, such as Bermuda Affair and Money, Women And Guns (both 1958), although a notable exception was the social worker role in Robert Rossen’s hypnotic Lilith (1964).
Four years later, the first screen visit to Pierre Boule’s ape world proved a great hit. As Dr Zira, sympathetic to the captured astronaut (Charlton Heston), Hunter contributed much of the film’s wit and charm, though, sadly, the various sequels somewhat diluted the regard in which this cleverly sustained work is held.
Before her next outing as Zira, Hunter appeared in that quirky satire on contemporary American life, The Swimmer (1968), which was probably a welcome antidote to her increasing television work in Ellery Queen and Columbo movies, alongside such mini-series as Backstairs At The White House (1979) and FDR, The Last Year (1980).
Television kept her increasingly busy during the 1980s, though her film appearances included a star role opposite mad doctor Rod Steiger in The Kindred (1986). Rather more rewarding was a cameo role in Clint Eastwood’s underrated Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil (1997), a leisurely depiction of southern US corruption and perversity.
The following year provided a more substantial character as Rabbitzn, in A Price Above Rubies, an intriguing feminist assault on orthodox Jewish life in Brooklyn. This initiated a busy period for Hunter, including a documentary about the Ape movies and the lead in an affecting story of old age, Abilene, opposite Ernest Borgnine. Also in 1999, she appeared in Blue Moon and Out Of The Cold. A Smaller Place and Here’s To Life! (both 2000) found her still getting good reviews and, for the latter, a Genie award nomination for best performance in a leading role.
In 1975, she published Loose In The Kitchen, a book that celebrated her life and “great enthusiasm” for cookery. She spent six years on the council of the Actor’s Equity Association, and was active in the Screen Actors Guild and other organisations.
She is survived by her daughter Kathryn, from her first marriage, which ended in 1946, and her son Sean, from her 1951 marriage to Robert Emmett, who died two years ago.
Kim Hunter (Janet Cole), actor, born November 12 1922; died September 11 2002
The above obituary from the “Guardian” can also be accessed online here.
Mary Tyler Moore, Cloris Leachman & Valerie Harper
Mary Tyler Moore
Mary Tyler Moore TCM Overview:
An iconic modern woman who starred in two very different, but very successful sitcoms, actress Mary Tyler Moore also made an enormous contribution to television history as the producer of numerous acclaimed comedies and dramas of the 1970s and 1980s. Audiences first fell in love with Moore as a believable symbol of the smart, young, pants-wearing mom on “The Dick Van Dyke Show” (CBS, 1961-66) before she came to signify a new breed of independent, liberated professional woman on the Emmy-winning sitcom, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (CBS, 1970-77). In addition to her longstanding reputation for comedy, Moore delivered a powerful, Oscar-nominated performance in the 1980 feature “Ordinary People,” in addition to starring in over a dozen television movies. As co-founder of MTM Productions, Moore was integral to the success of top rated “Mary Tyler Moore” spin-offs “Rhoda” (CBS, 1974-78) and “Lou Grant” (CBS, 1977-82), as well as “The Bob Newhart Show” (CBS, 1972-78) and the police drama “Hill Street Blues” (NBC, 1981-87). Though her career slowed down in later years, Moore remained active in numerous charities and causes, particularly Type 1 diabetes, which she was diagnosed with early in her career. Because of her contributions to television, Moore remained a timeless icon whose influence with subsequent generations of female performers remained incalculable.
Born on Dec. 29, 1936, in Brooklyn, NY, Moore was raised in nearby Queens until the age of eight when the family moved to Los Angeles, Moore attended strict Catholic schools, but studied ballet with dreams of someday becoming a dancer. Fresh out of Immaculate Heart High School, she landed her first show business job as a singing and dancing elf named Happy Hotpoint, promoting kitchen appliances in television commercials. She married salesman Richard Meeker and hung up her elf costume when she became pregnant with her only child, Richard Jr., who was born only months after Moore’s own mother, Marjorie, gave birth to daughter Elizabeth. Moore resumed her career in 1959 when her legs and voice were featured in the role of a switchboard operator on the mystery series “Richard Diamond, Private Eye” (CBS-NBC, 1957-1960).
Following a dozen guest appearances on shows like “77 Sunset Strip” (ABC, 1958-1964) and “Hawaiian Eye” (ABC, 1959-1963), Moore was cast as the young wife of a television comedy writer (Dick Van Dyke) on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” a semi-autobiographical sitcom created by Carl Reiner. While she was in the midst of divorcing her first husband off-screen, Moore brought a down-to-earth believability and maturity to her onscreen role and was crucial to the success of its often daring subject matter. With her standard wardrobe of Capri pants signaling an end to the era of the dress-and-apron clad June Cleaver, Moore became a symbol of the new era of modern mom, resonating strongly with audiences and earning Emmy Awards for her work in 1964 and 1965. The beloved star also won the heart of television executive Grant Tinker, whom she married in 1962. “The Dick Van Dyke Show” was still popular when producers decided to bow out gracefully after five seasons, at which time Moore returned to the stage opposite Richard Chamberlain in an ill-fated stage musical adaptation of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1966).
Moore stuck close to her first love of song and dance for the next few years, co-starring alongside Julie Andrews, Carol Channing and Beatrice Lillie in the lavish 1920s musical “Thoroughly Modern Millie” (1967), which she followed by playing a nun with a wandering eye for a handsome young doctor (Elvis Presley) in “Change of Habit” (1969). Later that year, she made her first television movie with “Run a Crooked Mile” (1969), which allowed viewers to see the serious dramatic side of her talent. Several years had passed before she was approached by CBS, and offered a deal to develop and star in her own sitcom. Moore and her husband wisely formed a production company, MTM, and inked a deal that would give ultimate creative control of the series to MTM productions.
Her company’s first project, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” chronicled the life of an independent thirty-ish professional female navigating a career, friendships and dating life. The show was the first to feature such an unprecedented “liberated” woman as the lead. Once again, Moore found herself at the forefront of the changing image of women on television with her role as an evening news producer and single woman who alluded to sex and birth control. As producer, Moore was key in assembling an outstanding writing staff and a supporting cast including Edward Asner as her gruff boss, Valerie Harper as her brash New Yorker best friend and Ted Knight as news station WJM’s dimwitted anchor. Moore was nominated for a Lead Actress Emmy every year during the show’s seven-year run, taking home wins in 1973, 1974 and 1976, while the show itself amassed over 29 awards.
In 1972, Moore and MTM productions launched their second series, “The Bob Newhart Show,” which carried MTM’s hallmark quality writing and acting and became another of television’s most respected programs. Meanwhile, Moore produced the first “Mary Tyler Moore” spin-off “Rhoda,” an Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning success based around the character’s best friend returning to New York. Another spinoff series, “Phyllis” (CBS, 1975-177), which was centered on Moore’s unlikable landlord (Cloris Leachman), was cancelled after its second season. Likewise, “The Tony Randall Show” (ABC/CBS, 1976-78), suffered the same fate and was axed after two seasons. Like Dick Van Dyke before her, Moore chose to end “Mary Tyler Moore” while on a high note. By the time the final episode aired in 1977, Moore was a beloved figure and winner of the People’s Choice Award for Favorite Female Television performer. Moore and MTM productions launched the spin-off “Lou Grant” the same year and enjoyed more critical success for the straight-ahead drama whose format allowed Grant (Edward Asner), a staffer of a Los Angeles newspaper, to explore social issues and current events.
As an actress known for comedy, Moore was anxious to explore her dramatic side, which she did with the TV-movie, “First You Cry” (CBS, 1978), earning an Emmy nomination for her portrayal of a reporter battling breast cancer. Meanwhile, Moore’s off-screen life took a tragic turn when she divorced from Tinker, while suffering the pain of losing her sister, Elizabeth, to a drug overdose, and her only son, Richard, to a self-inflicted gunshot wound. She continued to helm MTM ventures, which included the wildly popular “WKRP in Cincinnati” (CBS, 1978-1982), while exploring painful territory onstage in the hit Broadway play “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?” which earned her a Tony Award for playing a quadriplegic sculptor fighting to determine her own destiny. Further proving her range and distancing herself from her television persona was a riveting portrayal of a strained mother coping with the suicide of one son and the resulting suicide attempt of the other (Timothy Hutton) in Robert Redford’s “Ordinary People” (1980). She received an Oscar nomination and Golden Globe win for the heavy-hitting family drama. In 1981, MTM rolled out another successful dramatic series, “Hill Street Blues.”
Whether or not the combination of real-life and onscreen tragedy was to blame, Moore entered a rehabilitation program for alcohol addiction in 1982. She returned to the big screen in “Six Weeks” (1982), which again found her exploring the modern professional matriarch, but in a less successful melodrama. She delivered award-nominated performances in middle-aged television movie dramas “Heartsounds” (ABC, 1984) and “Finnegan Begin Again” (HBO, 1985), then attempted to revisit sitcom glory with “Mary” (CBS, 1985-86), a newspaper-set comedy that failed to score with audiences and was cancelled after 13 episodes. Moore had better success with a long run Broadway comedy, “Sweet Sue,” before offering an astonishing portrait of the first lady opposite Sam Waterston in “Gore Vidal’s Lincoln” (NBC, 1988). Another stab at Moore-centric sitcom, “Annie McGuire” (1988), lasted less than one season, which was followed in 1990 by Moore and ex-husband Tinker selling MTM Productions.
Following a string of TV films including “Stolen Babies” (Lifetime, 1993), where she earned an Emmy for playing a spinster trafficking in illegal adoptions, Moore returned to series television in a supporting role as a hard-driving newspaper editor in the short-lived drama, “New York News” (CBS, 1995). She had a delightfully funny supporting role as an adoptive parent of a grown child (Ben Stiller) searching for his birth parents in “Flirting with Disaster” (1996), then enjoyed a recurring role as Tea Leoni’s mother on Leoni’s sitcom “The Naked Truth” (NBC, 1995-98). In 2000, Moore reunited with Valerie Harper in the TV movie “Mary and Rhoda” (ABC), which depicted both actresses revisiting their classic characters Mary Richards and Rhoda Morgenstern – one a widow, the other a divorceé – as they rekindle their friendship in New York. The Moore-produced movie was a means to test the waters for an anticipated sitcom sequel, but a lack of humor and an overdose of maudlin sentiment failed to excite audiences.
Moore produced and starred in the true crime biopic “Like Mother, Like Son: The Strange Story of Sante and Kenny Kimes” (CBS, 2001), playing a con artist, thief and murder. Her chilling performance earned her a fresh round of critical accolades. She maintained her position as a sturdy television movie mainstay with films including “Miss Lettie and Me” (TNT, 2002), where she played a cantankerous elderly Southern woman, and “Blessings” (CBS, 2003), based on the Anna Quindlan novel about an abandoned baby found on an aged woman’s estate. She reunited with Dick Van Dyke and a large number of her former cast mates in the nostalgic “The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited” (TV Land, 2004), then faced off with Van Dyke in a PBS version of D.L. Coburn’s stage play “The Gin Game,” where the old co-stars showcased their old spark playing two residents of a nursing home whose gin rummy games bring out the best and worst in them.
Still happily working at the age of 70, Moore continued to appear annually in made-for-television movies, finding herself to be an increasingly popular sitcom guest star. In 2006, she enjoyed a hilarious recurring run as a high-strung TV host on “That 70’s Show” (Fox, 1998-2006). Two years later, she revisited the world of the working woman with a multi-episode arc on the fashion-set comedy, “Lipstick Jungle” (NBC, 2008-09 ). While focusing on her charity work, Moore found time to take the occasional acting job. In 2011, she reunited with old friend Betty White to make a guest appearance on the sitcom “Hot in Cleveland” (TV Land, 2010- ). That same year, Moore had surgery to remove a benign tumor from the lining tissue of her skull, a routine procedure from which she recovered quickly.
The above TCM overview can be also accessed online here.
Cloris Leachman TCM Overview:
With a career that spanned a staggering six decades on stage and screen, actress Cloris Leachman was one of primetime’s funniest comediennes and a favorite player in the classic film satires of Mel Brooks. A former beauty pageant winner who began her career on the Broadway stage, Leachman’s first high profile achievement was her Academy Award-winning performance in Peter Bogdanovich’s stark drama “The Last Picture Show” (1971). From there, the over-40 actress’ career kicked into high gear, with award-winning roles as the hilariously self-important Phyllis Lindstrom on the “Mary Tyler Moore Show” (CBS, 1970-77) and the subsequent spin-off, “Phyllis” (CBS, 1975-77). She forever held a place in film comedy history for her tightly wound, strangely accented characters in Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein” (1974) and “History of the World, Part 1” (1981) – a strength she introduced to a new generation of fans in the role of grandma Ida on Fox’s quirky “Malcolm in the Middle” (Fox, 2000-06). The octogenarian became the reality competition’s oldest contestant when she joined the cast of “Dancing with the Stars” (ABC, 2005- ) in 2008, then trotted on to the sitcom “Raising Hope” (Fox, 2010- ), as the semi-lucid grandmother “Maw Maw” Chance. With more than 40 years of film and television work under her belt, Leachman made it clear she was far from ready to retire, and had plenty more laughs to impart to appreciative fans of all ages.
Cloris Leachman was born on April 30, 1926, in Des Moines, IA where her father owned a lumber company. A self-admitted perfectionist as a child, Leachman made great strides towards her goal of acting with countless stage roles with the Des Moines Playhouse and appearances on local radio by the time she was a teenager. Her impressive achievements earned her a scholarship to the drama department at Northwestern University, where her classmates included future stars Charlton Heston, Patricia Neal and Charlotte Rae. While a student, Leachman entered the Miss Chicago beauty pageant and went on to place as a finalist in the 1946 Miss America competition. She bid college goodbye and used her $1,000 prize money to move to New York City, where she was invited by Elia Kazan to join the Actors Studio. Under their auspices, she made her TV debut as a recurring player on the drama series “Actors Studio” (ABC, 1948-49) and went on to appear in numerous live television dramas during the ‘Golden Age of Television’ in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Leachman also worked continuously on Broadway, playing Nellie Forbush in the original production of Rogers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific,” sharing the stage with Katherine Hepburn in “As You Like It,” and earning a Drama Desk nomination for “A Story for a Sunday Evening” in 1951.
While her acting career barreled ahead, Leachman married actor George Englund and together the young family headed to Hollywood. Englund launched a career as a film producer and director and Leachman made her film debut as the desperate woman found by the roadside in the opening sequence of Robert Aldrich’s landmark film noir “Kiss Me Deadly” (1955). Despite her beauty queen past, the actress was not considered a conventional Tinseltown leading lady, and her sharp features, Midwestern accent and incisive acting skills marked her for offbeat character parts. During the late 1950s, Leachman had a regular TV role playing Timmy’s wholesome, Midwestern mom on the series “Lassie” (CBS, 1954-1973) and was seen in countless guest spots on Westerns and live dramas while occasionally returning to Broadway. After nearly a decade of steady work on all the dramas and comedies of the day, including recurring characters on “Dr. Kildare” (NBC, 1961-66) and “77 Sunset Strip” (ABC, 1958-1964), Leachman made a memorable impression as a jittery lady of the evening in the Best Picture Oscar nominee “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969).
She followed up with big screen performances in a pair of scathing middle-America commentaries, “WUSA” (1970) and “The People Next Door” (1970), before a recurring role on the groundbreaking sitcom “Mary Tyler Moore” turned Leachman into a household name. The character-driven show, which starred Mary Tyler Moore as a thirty-something single professional and uniquely independent woman, featured Leachman as Mary’s on-site landlady – a self-absorbed busybody who fancied herself an intellectual and progressive woman. As Phyllis Lindstrom, Leachman unleashed a sparkling, multiple Emmy-nominated comedic talent. The following year, she affirmed her versatility with a heartbreaking turn as a lonely, neglected housewife who begins an affair with a high school senior in Peter Bogdanovich’s near-perfect adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s “The Last Picture Show.” The flinchingly honest portrayal earned the 45-year-old actress an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She went on to offer a string of award-winning performances on the small screen, beginning with “A Brand New Life” (ABC, 1973), where she played a middle-aged woman facing an unwanted pregnancy, and “The Migrants” (CBS, 1974), where she portrayed the matriarch of a family of fruit pickers.
Another Bogdanovich effort, “Daisy Miller” (1974) proved disappointing, but Leachman rebounded and became a member of Mel Brooks’ unofficial stock company with “Young Frankenstein” (1975) and her classic supporting turn as housekeeper Frau Blucher, known for frightening all horses within earshot. She enlivened the early Jonathan Demme mob effort “Crazy Mama” (1975) and finally landed her own TV series, the spin-off “Phyllis” (CBS, 1975-77), which found her now-widowed character moving to San Francisco with her teenage daughter and re-entering the work force. The show was cancelled after two seasons (and one Lead Actress Golden Globe Award) and the same year that “Mary Tyler Moore” left the airwaves. But Leachman remained an in-demand comic player, reteaming with Brooks’ to play skilled S&M dominatrix Nurse Diesel in the Hitchcock spoof “High Anxiety” (1977). She enjoyed character roles in madcap comedies like “The Muppet Movie” (1979) and “Herbie G s Bananas” (1980) and joined Brooks a third time to play an innkeeper in “History of the World, Part 1” (1981).
Following starring roles in several made-for-TV movies, Leachman returned to series television in “The Facts of Life” (NBC, 1979-1988) where she took over the “mentor” role vacated by former classmate Charlotte Rae for the show’s final two seasons. Beginning in 1989, Leachman began a decade of touring in a one-woman play written for her in which she portrayed American primitive painter Grandma Moses. On the big screen, she reprised her “Last Picture Show” role in the disappointing Bogdanovich sequel “Texasville” (1990) and seemed to be having fun stepping into Irene Ryan’s boots to play Granny Clampett in the feature version of “The Beverly Hillbillies” (1993). Not one to consider retirement, the 70-year-old actress spent nearly three years playing Parthy, the captain’s wife, in a touring production of “Show Boat” before returning to series grind as a feisty, lusty oldster in the CBS summer sitcom “Thanks” (1999). The very busy Leachman provided a character voice for the acclaimed animated feature “The Iron Giant” and supported Meryl Streep in “Music of the Heart” (1999).
A whole new generation of sitcom viewers was introduced to Leachman when she was cast as Ellen DeGeneres’ mother on the CBS sitcom “The Ellen Show” (2001-02) and began a recurring guest turn as the chain-smoking, tough-talking grandmother Ida on Fox’s “Malcolm in the Middle.” Her repeat performances throughout the series history earned Leachman annual Emmy nominations and delivered awards in 2002 and 2006, the same year she was also nominated for a supporting role in the HBO original drama movie, “Mrs. Harris” (HBO, 2005). Leachman continued to offer comedic big screen outings, taking on matronly roles in such films as “Alex & Emma” (2003) and “Bad Santa” (2003), where she played the half-dead grandmother of a portly misfit who rises only occasionally to make sandwiches. She received some of the best reviews of her career when she appeared as Tea Leoni’s alcoholic mother in writer-director James L. Brooks’ “Spanglish” (2004).
After a small role as a school nurse with X-ray vision in the family superhero comedy “Sky High” (2005), Leachman appeared in Peter Segal’s weak remake of the classic 1974 Burt Reynolds film “The Longest Yard” (2005) and delivered a hilarious turn in the popular franchise “Scary Movie 4” (2006). In 2008, Leachman began a national tour of her one-woman autobiographical stage show “Cloris!” and appeared as part of the outstanding ensemble cast of the chick flick “The Women” (2008). She supported her latest efforts by joining the fall season of “Dancing with the Stars” (ABC, 2005- ) where at age 82, she became the oldest contestant in the show’s history. She next landed a supporting role on the irreverent hit comedy “Raising Hope” (Fox, 2010- ), playing the Alzheimer’s-afflicted great-grandmother of a 23-year-old new father (Lucas Neff) who is utterly clueless about raising his infant daughter. Leachman was one of several highlights on the show and earned herself an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Valerie Harper TCM Overview:
Perhaps no other actress evoked the edgy, freewheeling spirit of 1970s television than Emmy-winning actress Valerie Harper, whose star-making turn as the brassy, bold Rhoda Morgenstern on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (CBS, 1970-77) and its spin-off “Rhoda” (CBS, 1974-78) remained one of the most adulated performances in TV history. Harper began her career as a Broadway showgirl, making a name for herself in such high-profile productions as “Destry Rides Again” (1959) and “Wildcat” (1960), but it was on the small screen where she rose to fame. Harper won over audiences as Moore’s wisecracking, headscarf-sporting best friend on the acclaimed series “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” a scene-stealing role she later reprised on her own sitcom “Rhoda.” In 1974, she broke into film, playing Alan Arkin’s wife in the comedy “Freebie and the Bean.” In 1987, TV would become the bane of Harper’s existence when she was fired from her popular sitcom “Valerie” (NBC, 1986-87), sparking an ensuing legal battle that threatened to derail Harper’s career. In 1988, the comedienne emerged victorious, winning the landmark lawsuit. Harper continued acting over the next several decades, entertaining audiences with her brash, irreverent wit. Beloved for playing strong characters, Harper was even more resilient when it came to her personal life. Within a short window of time, she bravely battled both lung and brain cancer, with the latter being diagnosed as fatal in 2013. The news devastated millions, while Harper remained as courageous and inspirational as ever in the face of adversity.
Valerie Harper was born on Aug. 22, 1939 in Suffern, Rockland County, NY, to Iva McConnell, a Canadian-born nurse, and Howard Donald Harper, a lighting salesman whose itinerant career often uprooted the family. By the time she entered high school, Harper had lived in New Jersey, Southern California, Michigan and Oregon. Inspired by the 1948 film “The Red Shoes,” Harper dreamt of becoming a dancer from a very young age. When her family packed up their Jersey City digs and moved back to Oregon, Harper opted to stay behind in New York City where she began to train in ballet. While a student at Manhattan’s Young Professionals School, 16-year-old Harper auditioned and earned a coveted spot as a chorus girl in the Radio City Corps de Ballet. Following graduation, she enrolled at Hunter College and the New School for Social Research, where she dabbled in the liberal arts, taking courses in French and philosophy. But Harper’s main passion was performance and she gradually segued into acting, landing a plum bit part in the 1956 Broadway musical ‘L’il Abner,” choreographed by Michael Kidd. Impressed with her skills, he would go on to cast Harper in a string of hit shows on the Great White Way, including “Destry Rides Again” with Andy Griffith, “Wildcat” with Lucille Ball, and “Subways are for Sleeping” (1961), starring Orson Bean. Moving into screen work, Harper’s first film role was in director Melvin Frank’s 1959 feature adaptation of “L’il Abner.”
In the early 1960s, Harper continued to hone her craft as an actress, studying drama under Viola Spolin, the legendary improvisational instructor whose son, Paul Sills, co-founded Chicago’s The Second City. Impressed by Harper’s raw comedic talent, Sills invited the budding thespian to join the theater company, where she met comic actor Richard Schaal, whom she married in 1964. In 1967, Harper returned to Broadway with roles in Carl Reiner’s “Something Different” and Sills’ production of Ovid’s “Metamorphosis” (1970). That same year, with little television experience, save for a few uncredited extra appearances, Harper was cast as Rhoda Morgenstern, the charismatic, tough-talking Jewish neighbor from the Bronx on the hit sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” a role that would earn Harper three consecutive Emmy Awards (1971-73) for Outstanding Supporting Actress and catapult her to international stardom alongside the rest of the ensemble cast. In 1974, CBS gave their new headscarf-sporting golden girl her own spin-off series, the top-rated “Rhoda,” for which she would win the 1975 Emmy and a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy Series, as well as Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Woman of the Year award. An immediate hit, the spin-off followed Harper’s beloved character as she moves back in with her overbearing, overprotective parents (Nancy Walker and Harold Gould) who live in the Bronx. “Rhoda” not only showcased Harper’s character as more than TV sidekick, it also broke small-screen records. The hour-long wedding special between Rhoda and Joe Gerard (David Groh) was the highest-rated TV episode of the 1970s – a record broken by ABC miniseries “Roots” in 1977 – and featured guest appearances from Harper’s former co-stars, including Moore and Ed Asner.
At the same time her own sitcom was taking off, Harper further charmed on the big screen with her on-point rendering of a Puerto Rican housewife in “Freebie and the Bean,” a memorable action caper co-starring James Caan and Alan Arkin. For her work in the movie, Harper received a Golden Globe nomination for Most Promising Newcomer – Female – which was ironic, considering she had been stealing scenes from Moore for years. Around this same time, she became actively involved with The Hunger Project, a philanthropic organization committed to ending world hunger, an affiliation that would continue throughout Harper’s life. When “Rhoda” went off the air in 1978, Harper divorced Schaal that same year, bring to an end two significant chapters in her life. She continued to act frequently, stacking up a list of credits both in television and film, including a supporting role in Neil Simons’s 1979 comedy “Chapter Two,” for which she received a Golden Globe nomination; “The Last Married Couple in America” (1980), opposite Natalie Wood and George Segal; the TV movie “The Shadow Box” (ABC, 1980), directed by Paul Newman and starring Joanne Woodward and Christopher Plummer; and the hit sex comedy “Blame it on Rio” (1984), with Michael Caine and Demi Moore.
In 1986, Harper returned to the small screen as the star of NBC’s “Valerie,” a family-friendly sitcom on which she plays a housewife whose husband’s career as an airplane pilot often took him out of town, leaving Harper to raise their three sons – the eldest played by then-child star Jason Bateman – on her own. The following year, Harper married second husband Tony Cacciotti, her longtime manager and an executive producer on “Valerie.” Two seasons into its critically well-received run, Harper was abruptly fired for alleged on-set misconduct in August 1987. Harper and Cacciotti had reportedly been feuding with the network and producers over a salary increase and failed to show up to set for three consecutive episodes. Harper was let go from her namesake show and her character was unceremoniously killed off in a car accident – a radical move that shocked fans and the industry. She was promptly replaced by Tony Award-nominated actress Sandy Duncan of “Peter Pan” fame, with the series also being renamed “Valerie’s Family.” Subsequently, Harper sued Lorimar Telepictures and NBC for breach of contract and for its continued use of her name in the show’s title. Lorimar accused Harper of trying to wrestle control of “Valerie” and demanding more money. Producers deemed her difficult to work with, attributing her behavior to festering jealously over Bateman’s burgeoning heartthrob status – rumors Harper consistently debunked.
In the months that followed, Harper and Cacciotti became entangled in one of the most acrimonious courtroom battles in the history of American television production. As the lawsuit raged on, Harper and Cacciotti tried to focus on their family life by adopting a daughter. In 1988, at the end of her namesake sitcom’s successful third season, Harper won her case against Lorimar and was awarded $1.4 million in damages plus a percentage of the show’s profits. Meanwhile, the series was renamed “The Hogan Family” and ran for six more seasons – due mainly to the appeal of the scene-stealing Bateman. Harper spent the next several years bouncing back from the maelstrom of negative press and attempting to revive her once illustrious TV career, efforts that never fully materialized in the way they had in the 1970s. While she starred in several TV movies, including “Drop-Out Mother” (1988) with Carol Kane, and “Stolen – One Husband” (1990), a comedy co-starring Elliot Gould and Brenda Vaccaro, Harper failed to attach herself to a star vehicle with any sort of network staying power. In 1990, she joined the cast of “City” (CBS), a poorly reviewed, short-lived series created by future Academy Award-winning filmmaker Paul Haggis. In 1995, she landed a leading role on CBS’ “The Office” (not to be confused with the NBC sitcom of the same name that ran from 2005-2013), an insipid workplace comedy that was cancelled after just two months.
Fortunately, Harper’s love affair with the stage never died, and she continued to act in off-Broadway and regional theater productions, including a 1995 run in “Death Defying Acts,” a series of three short plays penned by Elaine May, Woody Allen and David Mamet. Throughout the 1990s and into the millennium, Harper made special guest appearances on “Melrose Place” (Fox, 1992-99), “That ’70s Show” (Fox, 1998-2006) and “Sex and the City” (HBO, 1998-2004). In 2000, Harper and Mary Tyler Moore reunited in the ABC TV movie “Mary and Rhoda,” where they reprised their iconic TV characters. In 2007, Harper continued to demonstrate her broad range as an actress, fielding rave reviews for her portrayal of Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in the national tour of the one-woman show “Golda’s Balcony” and earned a Tony nomination in 2010 for her riveting turn as flamboyant film star Tallulah Bankhead in the Broadway play “Looped.” The following year, Harper guest starred on the ABC series “Desperate Housewives” (ABC, 2004-2012) as the aunt of Teri Hatcher and filmed the TV movie “Fixing Pete” (Hallmark Channel). The vivacious actress’ health declined after battling lung cancer in 2009 and she underwent surgery to remove a tumor on her top right lobe. Sadly, in March 2013, Harper announced through People magazine that she had been diagnosed with Leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, a rare and terminal form of brain cancer, and was told by doctors that she had only three months to live.
By Malina Saval
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Jessica Walter was born in 1941 in Broklyn, New York. She was one of “The Group” in 1966 and went on to star in “Grand Priz” with James Garner and Yves Montand and “Number One” with Charlton Heston. She gave a powerful performance with Clint Eastwood in “Play Misty for Me” in 1971. Most recently she has starred in the cult TV series “Arrested Development”. She was married to Ron Liebman. Sadly Jessica Walter died in 2021 aged 80.
‘Daily Telegraph’ obituary by Ed Power in 2021.
On May 23 2018 the New York Times released an audio recording of a 77-year-old woman sobbing. The tears were those of Jessica Walter, the Hollywood character actress who passed away this week. She was participating in a group interview promoting a new Netflix season of cult comedy Arrested Development. And even before breaking down, the encounter was not going well.
On screen Walter had always cut a self-assured, imperious, almost haughty figure. That was the image she presented in her first major feature, Sidney Lumet’s 1966 adaptation of the proto-Sex in the City Manhattan debutante novel, The Group. And, decades later, it was the persona she riffed on as Lucille Bluth, the crouching tiger, hissing matriarch of Arrested Development’s ghastly Bluth clan.
Yet in real life Walter could not have been further removed from Lucille, the mother from hell with vinegar in her blood. She was friendly, thoughtful – and sensitive. But then who wouldn’t be sensitive if the men seated either side had suddenly turned on you, as happened to Walter in full view of the New York Times.
The blame for this lay with Jeffrey Tambor. In many ways he was the opposite of Walter in that he came across as a hoot playing Lucille’s roguish husband George Bluth Sr. But off camera he could be combative and even obnoxious. Shooting the final season of Arrested Development, he had reduced Walter to tears after she stumbled over a line of dialogue added at the last minute.
And then she was humiliated all over again as the screaming incident – to which Tambor had confessed in a previous interview with the Hollywood Reporter – was brought up by the journalist. The issue wasn’t so much how the situation was handled by Tambor but by his co-stars, most unforgivably Jason Bateman, who played smug Bluth scion Michael.
“Difficult” people are part of the business, said Bateman. Behaving in an “atypical” manner was part of the actorly “process”. “Not to belittle it,” he said, and then proceeded to belittle Tambor’s behaviour towards Walter. In the background, as the tape rolled, Walter cried. “In like almost 60 years of working, I’ve never had anybody yell at me like that on a set,” she said between tears.
Bateman apologised on social media the next day after a promotional trip to Europe was hastily scrapped. His career survived. Arrested Development was, however, permanently tarred and the new season went up in flames like a frozen banana stand set alight.
“You try to sweep things under the rug, and it doesn’t really work. I got very emotional about it because it had really hurt me,” Walter told Elle magazine shortly afterwards.
She didn’t regret how things had played out, she added. Walter was glad the world saw how she, a veteran woman in Hollywood, had been treated – and what it said about how woman had always been treated.
“My daughter called and she said, ‘Oh Mom, you’re trending!’ I said, ‘What does that mean?’ I thought it was a fashion thing! Then she explained what it meant, and I was quite overwhelmed by the outpouring of support, that people understood. Especially women in the business, and the women in all kinds of areas of work, that just suck it up even though it hurts, you know?”
It was the perfect mic drop from Walter, whose entire career was characterised by a determination to steer her own course. That was made equally clear by her other big late-career role of toxic mother Malory Archer in animated spy spoof Archer.
Malory, mother of bungling 007 clone Sterling Archer, was written with a “Jessica Walter type” in mind – but the producers never imagined the real Walter would agree to do it. However, the script got to her and she said “yes” right away.
There were differences between Lucille and Malory – Lucille would never shoot someone – but they were ultimately cut from the same cloth, she said. “They both love their children. Malory loves Sterling. Lucille loved most of her children.”
Little could Walter have imagined she would spend her later years starring in cult comedies. Born in New York, the daughter of a symphony orchestra musician, she got her start in Broadway musicals, including Neil Simon’s Rumours.
Television followed with small parts in shows such as The Fugitive and Flipper. On her first day on the Flipper set, she had watched as the crew discovered one of the dolphins who starred in the series frozen to death in a container. It could almost have been a gag from Arrested Development taken to gristly extremes.
Hollywood beckoned with Lumet’s The Group in 1966. Her character, Libby MacAusland, was classic Walter – outwardly sophisticated with an air of drop-dead cool yet vulnerable on the inside. And then came her break-out opposite Clint Eastwood in Play Misty for Me in 1971.
Eastwood had already cast another actress when Walter arrived for an audition. “He called me in,” said Walter. “No audition. We had a talk, and he offered me a carrot juice.” And with that, the role was hers.
Play Misty for Me was a forerunner of the “bunny boiler” genre later made famous by Fatal Attraction. Walter played a stalker who turns violent against a radio DJ (Eastwood) after he declines to continue their relationship. Introduced to Walter’s TV executive daughter years later, Eastwood would joke that he had thrown her mother “off a cliff” at the end of the film.
She was not a creature of Hollywood. Her discomfort with Tinseltown may, of course, have had something to do with the fact that she had arrived shortly before the murder of Sharon Tate. “Just in time for the Manson killings,” she said. “I was living in Coldwater Canyon. I was a nervous wreck. We got a German Shepherd, we were so scared.”
Walter did not go on to have a glamorous A-lister career. She seemed fine with that. Coming from a theatre background, she was glad simply to be working.
And she was up for anything. At one point in the mid-Seventies, she found herself co-hosting Good Morning America, where she booked her old director Lumet as a guest (he was promoting Dog Day Afternoon).
She continued to work through the decades that followed. There were guest parts on Columbo, Trapper John MD and Mannex. And she had her own TV vehicle in Amy Prentiss, a quickly canned Ironside spin-off in which she played a detective appeared opposite William Shatner. It aired for just three episodes – enough for Walter to win an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series.
But it was Arrested Development that made her an icon. Or at least it would over time. The show was almost too quirky for its own good when it debuted on Fox in 2003. With ratings disastrous, it was canceled after three seasons. Years later, it would receive a second life on Netflix, and its reputation would grow and grow. It is today considered among the most influential comedies of the decade.
The stroke of genius of creator Michael Hurwitz was to make every one of the Bluth family completely unsympathetic in their own unique way. As Lucille, Walter was cruel, funny and narcissistic – and not even in the top three of the least-likeable Bluths. Arrested Development made her famous and, despite the 2018 Tambor controversy, the show’s influence lives on. As will Walter’s reputation as a character actor of rare poise and steeliness, and with a gift for comedy as sharp as a freshly cut diamond.
