Hollywood Actors
Katherine DeMille was born in Vancouver in 1911. She was the daughter of director Cecil DeMille. Her first movie was “Madam Satan” in 1930 and her other films included “Viva Villa”, “Ramona”, “Blockade” and “Dark Streets of Cairo”. She was married for many years to actor Anthony Quinn. She died in 1995.
Leigh Taylor-Young was born in 1945 in Washington D.C. She came to fame as part of the cast of the very popular television series “Peyton Place”. Film roles include “The Adverturers” in 1970, “The Horsemen” and “Solyent Greet”.
Gary Brumburgh’s:
Leigh Taylor-Young was born in Washington, DC, to a diplomat father and raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, the older sister of future actress Dey Young and writer/director Lance Young. She studied classical ballet and, following high school, attended Northwestern University where she initially majored in economics. She switched gears after developing an interest in theater and apprenticed as the youngest member of the distinguished Eaglesmere Summer Repertory Theatre. Leigh eventually moved to New York with designs on a professional career and studied under acting guru Sanford Meisnerat the Neighborhood Playhouse. Her major break came when she was cast in the already popular prime-time soap Peyton Place (1964). She played the mysterious Rachael Welles, whose character was brought in to provide clues to the disappearance of Allison MacKenzie’s (Mia Farrow, who had shocked ardent viewers by abruptly leaving the series). A mysterious girl herself, Leigh had a fetching figure, slightly offbeat beauty and a tendency to be cast as unsympathetic characters. She developed a bit of bad publicity when she walked off the weekly series after only one season and into the arms of the very popular–and very married–series’ star ‘Ryan O’Neal (I)’. The couple married in 1967 following his divorce from actress Joanna Moore and had one child, Patrick O’Neal, who later became an actor and married actress Rebecca De Mornay.
Leigh started off in films auspiciously as a “flower child” of the psychedelic 1960s. She earned a Golden Globe nomination for “Best Newcomer” when she played opposite Peter Sellers in the eccentric comedy I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968), but then appeared opposite her husband in The Big Bounce (1969), a kinky flop that landed with a big thud. She went on to appear in a cameo in her husband’s British-made movie The Games(1970), then her career sputtered again with a series of misguided features including the star-heavy but critically lambasted epic The Adventurers (1970); the kinky British filmThe Buttercup Chain (1970), which dealt with kissing cousins who don’t quite stop at kissing; the beautifully photographed but rather hollow action-adventure The Horsemen(1971) co-starring Omar Sharif; and the so-so romp The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight (1971), which is best remembered for starting Robert De Niro off and running in films. Leigh’s best known role came alongside Charlton Heston in the controversialSoylent Green (1973), although she was a bit overshadowed by the grisly topic material and the showy performances of co-stars Heston and Edward G. Robinson.
Following her divorce from O’Neal in 1973, Leigh made herself somewhat scarce while raising her young son. In 1978 she married agent/director Guy McElwaine, but that marriage would also end in divorce. In the 1980s she made a comeback of sorts as a mature–but still spicy–and taunting character actress. Although she took a back seat toAlbert Finney in the thriller Looker (1981) and to Glenn Close and Jeff Bridges in the whodunit Jagged Edge (1985), she found her best results back on TV again. She nabbed an Emmy award in 1994 for her vixenish supporting role on the acclaimed series dramaPicket Fences (1992). In addition, she performed in several plays, in the US, England and Scotland, including “The Beckett Plays,” “Knives” and “Sleeping Dogs.” More recently she appeared in her writer/director brother’s film Bliss (1997). These days Leigh plays a regular role on the daytime soap Passions (1999).
Leigh also found a fulfilling life off-camera. She became an ordained minister in the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, and her voice can be heard in the Search of Serenity series of audio meditations from The Course in Miracles trainings. She is also the grandmother of two granddaughters by her son Patrick O’Neal.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Jeremy Slate was born in Altantic City, New Jersey in 1926. His first film was “G.I. Blues” with Elvis Presley and Juliet Prowse in 1960. He went on to feature in “Girls, Girls, Girls” again with Presley, “Wives and Lovers” with Martha Hyer, “The Sons of Katie Elder” with John Wayne and Dean Martin and “True Grit” again with Wayne.
Jeremy Slate died in 2006 at the age of 80.
Obituary from “The Malibu Times”
Malibu actor Jeremy Slate died Sunday at USC University Hospital following complications from esophageal cancer surgery. He was 80.
Slate was born on Feb. 17, 1926 in Margate, N.J. He attended a military academy, joined the Navy at 16 and was 18 when he was involved in the invasion of Normandy.
Aboard a destroyer at Omaha Beach, Slate vowed if he survived the attack he would make his life a never-ending series of adventures.
He lived up to that promise as during his lifetime, Slate had a variety of careers and accomplishments.After the war, Slate graduated with honors from St. Lawrence University in Upstate New York.
He was president of the student body, editor of the college literary magazine, football player and backfield coach of the only undefeated freshman team in the school’s history.
A campus radio personality, during his senior year he married the queen of his fraternity’s ball. Chosen for the school’s Honor Society, he was a BMOC. After graduating, Slate became a professional radio sportscaster and disc jockey for CBS and ABC affiliates while beginning a family, which ultimately included three sons and two daughters.
For six years Slate worked for the public relations firm, W.R. Grace, as travel manager for its president, J. Peter Grace. He then joined the Grace Steamship Line and moved with his family to Lima, Peru. While living in South America he joined a professional theater group and became involved with the production of “The Rainmaker” at the Professional English Language Theatre in Lima. He was awarded the Tiahuanacothe, the Peruvian equivalent of the Tony Award, for his portrayal of the character, Starbuck. The next year, Slate was cast in a small but significant role on Broadway in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Look Homeward, Angel.” He did 254 performances.
Slate’s television career began in the 1950s with numerous guest-starring roles in popular shows such as “Gunsmoke,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “Perry Mason.” He has guest-starred on nearly 100 television shows and appeared in 20 feature films. During the early 1960s, Slate was a teen heartthrob as the star of the TV series “The Aquanauts.”
He also had an eight-year run as Chuck Wilson on the ABC soap opera “One Life to Live.” His final performance was on the NBC comedy “My Name is Earl.” Slate received critical acclaim for his portrayal of Sgt. Maj. Patrick O’Neill, a soft-spoken Canadian judo expert, in the 1968 film “The Devil’s Brigade,” a WW II saga starring William Holden and Cliff Robertson. Slate worked with some of the top people in Hollywood, including Elvis Presley, Frankie Avalon, Van Johnson and John Wayne.
Madeline Kahn is primarily known for her brilliant work in the films of Mel Brooks. She was born in 1942 in Boston. In 1970 she starred on Broawady in “Two by Two” with Danny Kaye. She played in 1972 Ryan O’Neal’s obnoxious girlfriend in “What’s Up Doc”. She excelled in “Blazing Saddles”, “Young Frankenstein” and “High Anxiety”. She sadly died in 1999 at the age of 57.
Tom Vallance’s obituary in “The Independent”:
Strikingly individual, with a nasal twang and distinctive way of pursing her lips, she was also an operatically-trained singer and started her career in musical comedy and revue. Mel Brooks once said, “She is one of the most talented people that ever lived. I mean, either in stand-up comedy, or acting, or whatever you want, you can’t beat Madeline Kahn.”
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1942, she studied classical music and drama at Hofstra University in New York and started her career as a vocal soloist in concerts and recitals. Setting her sights on Broadway, she made her New York debut in the chorus of a revival of Kiss Me Kate (1965) at City Centre, and later the same year she was one of six cast members in an intimate revue, Just For Openers, at the night-club Upstairs at the Downstairs.
The critic Judith Crist said, “The bright sextet perform with impeccable pace, grace and comedy”, and the show proved a fine showcase for Kahn. In one of the funniest sketches, she portrayed an obliging telephone operator for a company named “Dial-a-deviate”, which would be echoed years later in one of the most entertaining scenes in High Anxiety, in which she hears on the telephone somebody being strangled to death and mistakenly assumes that she is listening to a form of phone sex.
In Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1968, a revue which set out to introduce new stars to Broadway, Kahn and Robert Klein (who also went on to stardom) were singled out by critics as the best things in the show, and in 1970 Kahn was given a featured role in the Richard Rodgers-Martin Charnin musical Two By Two, which starred Danny Kaye as Noah. Rodgers wrote a soaring waltz solo, “The Golden Ram”, for Kahn which showcased her lilting operatic range.
Kahn’s first feature film was Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up Doc? (1972), the director’s frantic homage to screwball comedy in which she gave sterling support to Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal as O’Neal’s shrill girlfriend. Bogdanovich then cast her in his charming Depression-era comedy Paper Moon, in which she was Trixie Delight, a floozy who hitches a ride with a pair of confidence tricksters (Ryan O’Neal and his daughter Tatum).
Kahn’s funny and endearing performance was justly rewarded with an Oscar nomination, and on the strength of these roles she was cast as Agnes Gooch, the frump who blossoms and becomes pregnant, in the film version of the Broadway musical Mame, but she quickly clashed with its star Lucille Ball. Ball later complained that Kahn had already been offered Blazing Saddles and thus deliberately got herself fired, but the director Gene Saks told the historian Warren G. Harris,
During the first day of rehearsals, Ball turned on Madeline and started criticising her voice and walk. “Excuse me, Madeline,” she said, “but when are we going to see your interpretation of Gooch, dear.” Madeline grinned icily back at her, “You are seeing her, dear.” Lucy just said “Oh,” then asked if she could talk to me privately.
We went to my office and Lucy started to weep, saying “I swore I wasn’t going to cry.” She was so manipulative, so controlling, that she absolutely wouldn’t have Madeline, who was too young and too pretty. Lucy insisted that we replace her with the stage Gooch, Jane Connell, who by that time was probably 50 and really too old for the part.
Said Kahn herself later, “It was devastating. It didn’t turn out to be a tragedy – it cleared me to be available for Blazing Saddles – but it felt really bad at the time.” Blazing Saddles (1974), Mel Brooks’s hilarious and enormously successful pastiche of western movies, earned Kahn her second Oscar nomination in a row, and her portrayal of a saloon-singer, Lily von Shtupp, established her with audiences. A highlight of the film was Kahn’s devastating parody of Marlene Dietrich performing a risque ballad “I’m Tired” with barely controlled lust.
Kahn’s droll comedic touch, her gift for pastiche and quirky eccentricity were perfect for the Brooks style, and he used her in three more films, his parody of old horror movies, Young Frankenstein (1974), his homage to Hitchcock, High Anxiety (1977), and the later, less successful History of the World Part One (1981). Kahn worked with Bogdanovich again on his off-beat musical At Long Last Love (1975), in which her plaintive choruses of the title song and “I Loved Him (But He Didn’t Love Me)” were among the film’s most beguiling moments, and she had a leading role as a music- hall singer in Gene Wilder’s The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975).
Kahn’s first starring role on Broadway was in the play In The Boom Boom Room (1973), for which she received the first of three Tony nominations as Best Actress. In 1978 she was for the first time offered the leading role in a Broadway musical, an adaptation of the play Twentieth Century (best known for the film version with Carole Lombard and John Barrymore), about the tempestuous relationship between a flamboyant stage director and a temperamental star.
The producers considered asking Danny Kaye to play the director, but Kahn, having worked with him, vetoed the idea, and John Cullum was cast opposite her. With a score by Cy Coleman, Betty Comden and Adolph Green which adopted a comic-opera style to reflect the bravura personalities of its protagonists, On The Twentieth Century showcased Kahn’s vocal and comic talents perfectly, and was to win her a second Tony nomination, but it was a demanding role and there were warning signs when Kahn began missing rehearsals, leaving her understudy Judy Kaye to fill in.
After the show opened she continued to miss performances for reasons which were never made clear. Five weeks into the run, when Kahn had missed nine performances, she was “invited to leave” and Kaye was given the role. Though Kahn had more Broadway roles, it is generally considered that her withdrawal hurt her chances of becoming a Broadway musical star and probably damaged her career. She returned to the screen in The Cheap Detective (1978), Neil Simon’s collection of gags based on such films as The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon – Kahn played the Mary Astor role in a pastiche of the latter movie – and she was one of the guest stars in The Muppet Movie (1979).
In 1983 Kahn had her own television show Oh Madeline, based on the British series Pig in the Middle, in which she was a bored housewife trying to put some zip into her life by sampling every trendy diversion that came along, but the show ran for only one season. Kahn also starred in several unsold pilot shows, and appeared with George C. Scott in the series Mr President (1987-88). In 1989 she starred with Edward Asner in a Broadway revival of Born Yesterday, with mixed reaction – inevitably her performance was compared to that of the role’s creator Judy Holliday.
But three years later Kahn had an unquestionable triumph with her performance of the ditsy matron Gorgeous Teitelbaum in Wendy Wasserstein’s play The Sisters Rosensweig, winning the Tony Award for a truly hilarious performance that will be talked about for years to come. The same year Kahn made a cameo appearance in Woody Allen’s Kafkaesque comedy Shadows and Fog, and more recently she had a role in Nixon (1995) and provided one of the voices for the hit cartoon A Bug’s Life (1998).
Since 1996 Kahn had been playing the role of Pauline, a neighbour, in the television series Cosby, and in August this year started to work on her fourth season with the show, but after taping four episodes she announced that she was taking a leave of absence.
At the beginning of November, she let people know her secret, announcing, “During the past year, I have been undergoing aggressive treatment for ovarian cancer. It is my hope that I might raise awareness of this awful disease and hasten the day that an effective test can be discovered to give women a fighting chance to catch this cancer at its earliest stage.” (Kahn’s close friend, the comedienne Gilda Radner, died of the same disease in 1989.) In October, Kahn had married her long-term beau, lawyer John Hansbury, who told The New York Times, “It took me a long time to persuade her to get married.”
In her last film, Judy Berlin, due to open in February and directed by Eric Mendelsohn, who won the best director’s award for the film at this year’s Sundance Festival, she plays a suburban housewife described by the director as “full of neurotic energy yet warm and loving”. He said, “Madeline Kahn really was one of those people who when you stood around her, she gave off this unbelievable glow.”
Tom Vallance
Madeline Kahn, actress: born Boston, Massachusetts 29 September 1942; married 1999 John Hansbury; died New York 3 December 1999.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
John Forsyth was well into his sixties when he acheived his greatest fame in the television series “Dynasty” as oil magnate Blake Carrington. He was born in 1918 in New Jersey. He served with the U.S. military in World War Two. In 1955 Alfred Hitchcock cast him opposite Shirley MacLaine in “The Trouble with Harry”. His other films of note are “Madame X” with Lana Turner and “And Justice for All” with Al Pacino. John Forsythe died in 2010 at the age of 92.
Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Gurdian”:
If the name of the American actor John Forsythe, who has died aged 92, is not immediately recognisable, then that of his character Blake Carrington – the tanned and handsome silver-haired billionaire oil magnate in the long-running television series Dynasty – certainly is. The show, known for its opulent atmosphere, lavish sets and costumes, and preoccupation with the problems of the wealthy, ran alongside Ronald Reagan’s years as US president, 1981-89. It made Forsythe internationally famous and rich. During the second year of the run, Forsythe remarked: “I can’t afford to bulge. Being a 64-year-old sex symbol is a hell of a weight to carry.”
With his earnest demeanour, Forsythe, as the patriarch plagued by a scheming ex-wife (Joan Collins), a bisexual son, and other tribulations ranging from murder and greed to lust and incest, held the series together while attempting to do the same with the Denver family. Unlike Larry Hagman’s JR, his counterpart in Dallas, Forsythe as Blake exuded suavity and upper-class elegance. In fact, it was a persona he had perfected for many years on television.
Forsythe may have had a famous face, but his voice alone became equally well-known in a previous popular TV series, Charlie’s Angels (1976-81), in which he played the unseen Charlie Townsend, who directed his young women’s crimefighting operations over a speaker- phone. Because Forsythe recorded his lines in an audio studio and was never on set, he rarely met any of his co-stars. Some years later, he bumped into Farrah Fawcett-Majors at the tennis courts. “I was coming off the court when she came up to me and said, ‘Charlie! I finally met Charlie!'” Forsythe recalled.
Forsythe was offered the Charlie role in a panicky late-night phone call from producer Aaron Spelling after the original choice, Gig Young, showed up too drunk to read his lines. “I didn’t even take my pyjamas off – I just put on my topcoat and drove over to Fox. When it was finished, Aaron said, ‘That’s perfect.’ And I went home and went back to bed.”
Born John Lincoln Freund in Penns Grove, New Jersey, Forsythe determined to become an actor despite the opposition of his Wall Street businessman father. From Abraham Lincoln high school, Brooklyn, he went to the University of North Carolina. There he excelled in dramatics as well as at baseball, and his first job was as a radio broadcaster with the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 1943, while serving in the US army air corps, Forsythe made his Broadway debut in Moss Hart’s production of Winged Victory, among many other future stars. That same year, he was brought to Hollywood by Warner Bros, where he was immediately cast in the small role of Sparks in the submarine drama Destination Tokyo, starring Cary Grant.
However, he did not return to the big screen for another nine years, and even then his film appearances were only sporadic. Instead, Forsythe concentrated on television and the stage. In 1947, he took over from Arthur Kennedy as the disillusioned son in Arthur Miller’s first produced play, All My Sons, on Broadway, and then replaced Henry Fonda in the title role of the long-running naval comedy-drama Mister Roberts in 1950, sounding uncannily like his predecessor.
In 1953, he created the role of the well-meaning Captain Fisby in John Patrick’s The Teahouse of the August Moon. The character (played by Glenn Ford in the movie), who attempts to bring American-style democracy to the natives of Okinawa, was portrayed by Forsythe with a splendid mixture of ingenuousness and self-righteousness. In between his two stage hits, Forsythe made dour appearances in a few films, notably Robert Wise’s The Captive City (1952), in which he was a small-town newspaper editor fighting widespread corruption; and John Sturges’s Escape from Fort Bravo (1953), where, as a Confederate prisoner, he is conveniently killed by Indians at the end to allow William Holden to get his girl (Eleanor Parker). In fact, Forsythe, a rather wooden film actor, was a sub-Holden type.
Nonetheless, Alfred Hitchcock must have liked him, because he cast him in two of his films: the black comedy The Trouble With Harry (1955) had three people each believing they had killed a man, one of them being Forsythe as a painter; and Topaz (1969), where he is convincingly dull as a CIA man. In The Happy Ending (1969), Jean Simmons, while watching Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, comments to Forsythe, as her boring commuter husband, “They’re more alive than we are.” There is no truer line in the picture.
Television suited his personality much better, as he proved in the series Bachelor Father (1957-62). As playboy Hollywood attorney Bentley Gregg, responsible for raising his orphaned niece, he gained stardom. This led to The John Forsythe Show (1965-66), in which he played father to his own real daughters, Brooke and Page Forsythe, by his second wife, Julie Warren, whom he had married in 1943; by his first marriage, to Parker McCormick (1938-40), he had a son, Dall. Other sitcoms in which Forsythe starred were Rome With Love (1969-71) and the political satire The Powers That Be (1992-93).
In the cinema, he was seen as establishment figures: in Kitten With a Whip (1964) he was a politician being blackmailed by delinquent Ann-Margret; he was a politician again, married to Lana Turner, in the fifth remake of the melodrama Madame X (1966). In Cold Blood (1967) had him as an investigator of the bloody murders, and in And Justice For All (1979), he played a judge. One of his last big screen portrayals was as the modern-day equivalent of Marley’s Ghost in Scrooged (1988).
After Julie died of cancer in 1994, Forsythe, renowned as a “nice guy” in the industry, went into semi-retirement, devoting much of his time to the United Nations Association, the American National Theatre and Academy, and the American Cancer Society. He is survived by his three children and his third wife, Nicole Carter, whom he married in 2002.
• John Forsythe (John Lincoln Freund), actor, born 29 January 1918; died 1 April 2010
The above obituary from the “Guardian” can also be accessed online here.
Her “Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan:
The actress Marie Windsor, who has died aged 80, played characters like the one summed up in Richard Fleischer’s film noir The Narrow Margin (1952): “She’s a dish. A 60-cent special: cheap, flashy, strictly poison under the gravy.”
In the movie, she is a hard-boiled gangster’s widow due to testify at a hearing. The detective assigned to escort her to the trial despises her. “You make me sick to my stomach,” he tells her. “Oh well,” she growls, “use your own sink.” As it turns out, Windsor is really a police decoy, thus creating sympathy in retrospect.
There could be little such sympathy for her character in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956). “I know you like a book, you little tramp,” says Sterling Hayden. “You’d sell out your own mother for a piece of fudge.” Windsor played the wanton Sherry Peatty, whose husband George (Elisha Cook Jr) works as cashier at the racetrack, where Hayden’s gang have prepared a heist. Everything goes like clockwork, until she spills the beans to her gangster lover. Mortally wounded, snivelling George declares his love for his sexy wife before shooting her.
The Narrow Margin and The Killing were two of the best of the scores of movies Windsor made from the early 1940s to the late 1970s, mostly in supporting roles, many as seductresses. “A lot of things hampered my career,” she once said. “I never had a classic face. One of my casting directors at Paramount said, ‘Her eyes are too big and she has a bad mouth.’
“At five foot nine, I was too tall for most leading men. There were only two stars who didn’t mind that I was taller than them – George Raft and John Garfield. Raft told me how to walk with him in a scene: we’d start off in a long shot normal, and about the time we got together in a close-up, I’d be bending my knees so I’d be shorter. I had to do a tango with Raft and I learned to dance in ballet shoes with my knees bent.” The film was Outpost In Morocco (1949), with Windsor incongruously cast as an Arab princess in love with her emir father’s enemy, Legionnaire Raft.
The year before, in Abraham Polonsky’s Force Of Evil, Windsor was a racketeer’s sultry wife who uses her brazen sexuality to lead the hero, John Garfield, astray. This dark and brooding film set Windsor on the femme fatale route. She had served a long apprenticeship. Force Of Evil was her 20th movie, but the first in which she got featured billing.
Born in Marysvale, Utah, Windsor took dancing and dramatic lessons at school, and at Brigham Young University appeared in “upper-class plays”. Aged 20, she won a trip to Hollywood as Miss Utah. There, she contacted Maria Ouspenskaya, formerly of the Moscow Art Theatre, who accepted her as a student.
She made her movie debut in the Frances Langford musical featurette All-American Co-Ed (1941) and was seen briefly in a number of films – one of two girls on a double date with Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe in Call Out The Marines (1942), and as a nurse in Smart Alecks (1942).
In New York, she did more than 400 radio shows, and appeared on stage as a villainess in Follow The Girls, where she was spotted and signed by an MGM talent scout. Among her brief MGM parts were “a rich bitch” in a nightclub in Song Of The Thin Man (1947), and as the conniving lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne (Angela Lansbury) in The Three Musketeers (1948).
After Force Of Evil, Windsor was more visible, especially in westerns. In Dakota Lil (1950), she was, by turns, hard-boiled and sympathetic, as a cabaret singer whose sideline is counterfeiting; in Frenchie (1950), she lusts after Joel McCrea. In Little Big Horn (1951), she is cavalry commander Lloyd Bridges’s lonely wife, in love with cavalryman John Ireland, and in the Randolph Scott western, Bounty Hunter (1954), she is an engagingly crooked saloon keeper.
But there were also tacky movies: Cat Women Of The Moon (1953), in which she led telepathic lunar women in black tights; Abbott And Costello Meet The Mummy (1955), as a campy crook called Madame Rontru; Swamp Women (1956), about female convicts in Louisiana, and as Josephine to Dennis Hopper’s Napoleon in The Story Of Mankind (1957).
In the 1960s, and 1970s, she guested on more than 200 TV shows, as well as continuing in movies, as an ageing vamp. Despite being crippled with arthritis in her later years, Windsor, politically on the right, was active in the Screen Actors Guild and the Motion Picture and Television Fund.
She divorced bandleader Ted Steele, and is survived by her second husband, estate agent Jack Hupp, whom she married in 1954, and their son.
• Marie Windsor (Emily Marie Bertelsen), actress, born December 11 1919; died December 10 2000. Her “Guardian” obituary can be accessed online here.
Jackie “Butch” Jenkins was born in 1937 in Los Angeles. He came to prominence when he was cast as Mickey Rooney’s kid brother in the terrific “Human Comedy” in 1941. He starred with Margaret O’Brien in “Our Vines Have Tender Grapes” and his final film was “Big City” in 1948. He died in 2001 aged 63
.In 1970: “I have never regretted leaving the picture business and am very grateful to my mother for taking me away from it. I enjoyed the first few years of acting in movies but I certainly don’t miss it. In fact, when I’ve had offers to return a few times, I wasn’t even tempted. There may be a better way to live than on a lake with a couple of cows, a wife, and children but being a movie star is not one
Jenkins retired from acting at the age of eleven, after he developed a stutter,[4] and as an adult recalled his film career fondly and without regret. He did state, however, that he had not particularly enjoyed acting and had never expected to make a career of it.[citation needed]
Later described as a “businessman-outdoorsman”, Jenkins established a successful career away from Hollywood and lived for many years in Dallas, Texas, before moving to North Carolina in the late 1970s,[5] where he built a home “on the side of a steep mountain”, where he resided with his third wife, Gloria.[5]
On August 14, 2001, he died at age 63 in Asheville, North Carolina.[6] Upon his death, he was cremated and his ashes returned to his family.
Eugenie Leontovich was born in 1900 in Moscow. Her entire career though was in the U.S. Her frst film was “Four Sons” in 1940. Her best known role was as the Maharani in “The Rains of Ranchipur” in 1955. She died in 1993.
TCM Overview:
Eugenie Leontovich was born on March 21, 1900 in Moscow, Russian Empire [now Russia]. She was an actress, known for Homicidal (1961), The Rains of Ranchipur (1955) and The World in His Arms (1952). She was married to Gregory Ratoff and Paul A. Sokolov. She died on April 3, 1993 in New York City, New York, USA.
Sally Forrest was born in 1928 in San Diego, California. Her first film was in 1946 in “Till the Clouds Roll By”. She went on to make “Dancing in the Dark”, “Mystery Street” and “While the City Sleeps” in 1956.
IMDB entry here:
Sally’s parents were both amateur ballroom dancers, so it was no surprise when Sally developed an interest in dancing. She entered dance classes by the first grade and was signed by MGM upon her graduation from high school. In 1945, she moved with her parents to Hollywood, where Sally worked on the dances used in the films Till the Clouds Roll By (1946) and The Kissing Bandit (1948). Soon unemployed, she worked in small roles until she teamed with Ida Lupino, who was producing and directing small films at the time, and Sally was cast in the lead role of Not Wanted (1949). The picture was a critical and commercial success, and Sally also received critical acclaim for her role. After appearing in a few more Lupino movies, including Never Fear (1949), Sally returned to MGM, where she was cast in movies with stars such as Boris Karloff and Red Skelton. When her husband, Milo O. Frank Jr., moved to New York, she went with him. There, she worked in summer stock and on Broadway in the stage play “The Seven Year Itch”. Sally appeared in only a couple of movies after that, but she again worked with Ida Lupino inWhile the City Sleeps (1956). She died in 2015.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Tony Fontana <tony.fontana@spacebbs.com>
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
“Guardian” obituary:
Sally Forrest, who has died of cancer aged 86, was a pretty blonde movie ingénue who played “nice girls”, reserving her sexiness for her vivacious and versatile dancing. Moreover, had it not been for Ida Lupino, she would not have had the chance to demonstrate her acting skills. Lupino, one of the few female directors who were around in the 1950s, plucked Forrest from the obscurity of the chorus to star in three of her low budget dramas.
Born in San Diego, California, as Katherine Feeney, the daughter of ballroom dancers, Forrest started dancing at a young age. When the family moved to Los Angeles, MGM signed her as an assistant choreographer and dancer (often uncredited) in several musicals, including Easter Parade (1948) with Fred Astaire.
Lupino, who was producing and writing Not Wanted (1949), cast Forrest, who resembled her, in the lead as a young woman who has a baby out of wedlock, gives it up for adoption and then regrets it. A bold subject for the time, it postulates the primacy of motherhood. (It was to have been directed by Elmer Clifton, but he suffered a heart attack and died a short while into filming. Although Lupino completed the film, she allowed Clifton the director’s credit.)
Forrest proved herself adept in the emotionally wrought role, the sort that had made Lupino’s name as an actor. In Never Fear (1949), Forrest was again put through the wringer as a promising dancer who finds out she has contracted polio. Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951), a surprisingly non-feminist picture, featured Forrest as a tennis champion driven on by her domineering mother (Claire Trevor), when all she wants is a home, a husband and a child. It was one of six films in which Forrest appeared in 1951, while decorating the covers of movie fan magazines, and marrying the agent Milo Frank. In Vengeance Valley, opposite Burt Lancaster, she again played an unwed mother, the father being the baddie Robert Walker.
She was the comedian Red Skelton’s sweetheart in Excuse My Dust in which, although set in 1895, Forrest performs an anachronistic swing dance number, Desire by the Docks. In The Strip (as in Sunset), she has another splendid dance routine, accompanied by Louis Armstrong in a nightclub, to the delight of Mickey Rooney. In The Strange Door, she was an endangered beauty in an old dark house inhabited by Boris Karloff and Charles Laughton.
Forrest then spent more than a year on Broadway as “The Girl” in George Axelrod’s play The Seven Year Itch (the role portrayed by Marilyn Monroe in the 1955 film), before returning to films in the Howard Hughes production Son of Sinbad (1955). In this Technicolor Arabian Nights bit of entertaining nonsense, Forrest, in an extremely scanty costume, as a member of a harem, does an exotic, erotic dance, her ponytail bobbing, before falling into the arms of Dale Robertsonin the title role. (The number was clipped by the censors in the US.)
Her final film, Fritz Lang’s film noir While the City Sleeps (1956), was one of her best. In this searing exposé of the media, Forrest plays the fiancee of a newspaperman (Dana Andrews), who happily acts as “bait” for a serial sex killer.
After a few guest-starring roles on tele-vision, such as Rawhide, Forrest retired until, in 1984, then in her 60s, she was seen tapping away in a production of the musical No, No Nanette in her hometown of San Diego.
Her husband died in 2004.
• Sally Forrest (Katherine Feeney), actor and dancer, born 28 May 1928; died 15 March 2015
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Anyone who knows me are aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been collecting signed photographs of my favourite actors. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I like.