Dane Clark

Independent obituary in 1998:

FEW ACTORS were more effective at portraying belligerent, chip- on-their-shoulder characters than Dane Clark. Small in stature, but tough and wiry, he was frequently compared to John Garfield, one of the top stars at the same studio, Warners, but Clark, though popular with cinemagoers in the Forties, never achieved similar stardom. His pugnacious rebels created less empathy than Garfield’s and sometimes (as in his overdrawn anarchic painter of A Stolen Life) upset a film’s balance in their ferocity.

The actor’s intensity was both his strength and his weakness. Though he graduated to leading roles at the studio, his best chance came when he was loaned to Republic to star in Frank Borzage’s Moonrise, a moody piece in which Clark was ideally cast as a hot-tempered outsider whose father was hanged for murder.

Born Bernard Zanville in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, he was a fine athlete and was given the opportunity to become a baseball player, but chose higher education instead. He received a BA from Cornell University and a law degree from St John’s University, New York, but the Depression limited his opportunities and he worked as a labourer, boxer and model before turning to writing for radio.

This led to acting, and he made his Broadway debut (as Bernard Zanville) in Friedrich Woolf’s Sailors of Catarro (1934), produced by the leftist Theatre Union. George Tobias (later also a contract player at Warners) was in the cast and he and Clark were among those arrested when some of the company joined Communist pickets demonstrating against Orbach’s department store. Though the matinee was cancelled, the actors were bailed out in time for the evening performance.

Clark was next in Panic (1935), which ran for only three performances but was described by one critic as “the outstanding critical failure of the year”. An anti-capitalist blank-verse tragedy that attempted to account for the national bank calamity of 1933 in terms of Greek drama, it is considered an important part of theatrical history for several reasons – it was the first play by the poet Archibald MacLeish, it starred the 19-year-old Orson Welles, its producers included John Houseman and Virgil Thomson, and the Greek-style chorus was choreographed by Martha Graham.

Clark then joined the socially conscious Group Theatre and acted in a highly praised Clifford Odets double-bill, the anti-Nazi Till The Day I Die and the radical Waiting for Lefty (1935), in which the auditorium was assumed to be the meeting hall for a group of taxi drivers at a union meeting, with the audience the potential strikers and actors spotted throughout the house to increase the feeling of audience participation.

Clark’s last 1935 show was the most successful, Sidney Kingley’s Dead End, about the deleterious effects of New York’s slums, which ran for two years. Clark then toured in several plays, including the Group Theatre’s biggest success, Odets’ Golden Boy, until being called to Hollywood in 1941 to act in promotional films being made by the US Army.

Bit parts in movies followed, including The Glass Key, Wake Island and Pride of the Yankees (all 1942), and at Warners the Bogart war film Action in the North Atlantic (1943).

Warners then offered him a contract, and with the new name of Dane Clark he was given a featured role in Destination Tokyo (1943), the first of two films he made with Garfield (who was also a graduate of the Group Theatre). The story of a submarine crew on combat duty featured Clark as Tin Can, most aggressive of the crew members.

Clark then settled into a run of girl-chasing “best buddy” roles, portraying the soldier friend of Dennis Morgan in The Very Thought of You (1944), Robert Hutton’s soldier pal in Hollywood Canteen (1944), and a wounded soldier who befriends a blinded marine (Garfield) at a military hospital in Pride of the Marines (1945). His role in the all-star Hollywood Canteen is remembered for the moment when he says to the girl with whom he is dancing, “You know, you’re a dead ringer for Joan Crawford.” When she replies, “Don’t look now, but I am Joan Crawford”, Clark promptly faints.

He began to tire of such typecasting, though, and had the first of several battles with the studio head Jack Warner for better roles and more pay. “They were always giving me lines like `You woman, you’,” he said later. “They had me as a teenage soldier back from the Pacific or some place. In The Very Thought of You I had to bark like a dog when I saw a girl. I ask you, how can you be subtle – how can you underplay when you’re making sounds like a dog?”

After A Stolen Life (1946), in which as a consistently bad- tempered painter he woos Bette Davis with the line, “Man eats woman and woman eats man; that’s basic”, he was given his first starring role in Her Kind of Man (1946), a half-hearted attempt by the studio to recapture the glory of their earlier gangster films, in which Clark, as a newspaper man, gets Janis Paige, a night-club singer, out of the clutches of the gangster Zachary Scott. Whiplash (1948) was similar, only this time Clark was a painter rescuing Alexis Smith from Scott.

Before this, Clark had his best role at Warners, as a bitter convict who escapes from a chain-gang and is sheltered by an introverted farm girl (Ida Lupino) in Deep Valley (1947). Because of a set builders’ strike at the studio, the whole film was made on location in Big Sur and Big Bear, California, and its director Jean Negulesco later recounted that the long period away from the studio led Clark and Lupino to have a passionate affair which, he said, ended as quickly as it began once the couple returned to their normal life style.

Clark was then borrowed by Republic for Moonrise (1948). The story of a social outcast on the run after an accidental killing was treated with lyrical romanticism, and the offbeat teaming of the grim Clark and ethereal Gail Russell as his girlfriend gave the film extra piquancy. Clark finished his Warner contract with two minor films, Barricade (1950), in which he beat Raymond Massey, a sadistic mine-owner, to death, and a mystery story, Backfire (1950).

The following year Clark came to England to star with Margaret Lockwood in Roy Baker’s comedy-thriller Highly Dangerous. In this fanciful tale of an entomologist (Lockwood) on a government spy assignment who is given a truth drug by the enemy under which she imagines herself as her favourite Dick Barton-like radio character and saves the day with the aid of an American reporter (Clark), the actor revealed an unexpectedly droll sense of humour. In 1954 he co-produced and starred in the story of the Harlem Globetrotters, Go Man Go.

A consistent performer on radio throughout his career, Clark was also a television pioneer, appearing in a Chevrolet Tele-Theatre episode in 1949. He went on to appear in dozens of television shows and starred in two series, Wire Service (1956-57) as a reporter, and Bold Venture (1957), which he described at the time as “about an adventure-bent skipper of a small Caribbean boat-for-hire. Eugene O’Neill this ain’t.”

Television movies in which he appeared included Say Goodbye, Maggie Cole (1975), the last film made by Susan Hayward, and from 1974 until 1978 he had a regular role on the series Police Story. Clark returned to Broadway in the Sixties as replacement lead in Tchin Tchin and A Thousand Clowns. Late in that decade his wife of many years, Margot Yoder, died, and in 1972 he married a young stockbroker, Geraldine Frank.

Bernard Zanville (Dane Clark), actor: born New York 18 February 1913; married first Margot Yoder (deceased), second 1972 Geraldine Frank; died Santa Monica, California 11 September 1998

New York Times obituary in 1998:

Dane Clark, the Brooklyn-born actor whose down-to-earth portrayals of tough but appealing soldiers, sailors and pilots in World War II films for Warner Brothers brought him stardom, died on Friday at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 85 and lived in Brentwood.

”That was the best break of my life, hooking up with the Warners,” Mr. Clark said in a 1946 interview. ”They don’t go much for the ‘pretty boy’ type there. An average-looking guy like me has a chance to get someplace, to portray people the way they really are, without any frills.

”The only thing I want to do in films is to be Mr. Joe Average as well as I know how. Of course, anyone whose face appears often enough on the screen is bound to have bobby-soxers after him for autographs. But what I really get a kick out of is when cab drivers around New York lean out and yell ”Hi, Brooklyn’ when I walk by. They make me feel I’m putting it across O.K. when I try to be Joe Average.”

Mr. Clark made some 30 films, beginning with ”Sunday Punch” in 1942 and ending with ”Last Rites” in 1988. But he also appeared on Broadway and on the road in a variety of stage roles and performed frequently on television. But he never became as big a star as his friend John Garfield, who suggested he take up acting, or Humphrey Bogart, who, he said, gave him the name Dane Clark.

Mr. Clark’s early credits were under his real name, Bernard Zanville, and it was under that name in the role of a sailor named Johnnie Pulaski that he caught the attention of the critics in the 1943 Warners Brothers feature ”Action in the North Atlantic,” which paid tribute to the heroism of the merchant marine.

As Bernard Zanville, he appeared in films like ”The Glass Key,” ”Wake Island” and ”The Pride of the Yankees” in 1942, and as Dane Clark he portrayed a sailor aboard a submarine in ”Destination Tokyo” in 1944, a flier in ”God Is My Co-Pilot” in 1945 and a leatherneck in ”Pride of the Marines” that same year.

Among his other films were ”Hollywood Canteen” (1944), ”A Stolen Life” (1946), ”Whiplash” (1948), ”Fort Defiance” (1951), ”Never Trust a Gambler” (1951) and ”Outlaw’s Son” (1957). His co-stars were people like Bogart, Garfield, Cary Grant, Bette Davis and Raymond Massey.

Mr. Clark was especially proud of the 1954 film ”Go, Man, Go!,” in which he played Abe Saperstein, the founder of the trailblazing black basketball team the Harlem Globetrotters, because he regarded the film as a forerunner of others that decried racial discrimination and championed civil rights.

Mr. Clark, who was born in Brooklyn on Feb. 18, 1913, was a product of the Great Depression. As a graduate of Cornell University and St. John’s Law School in Brooklyn in the mid-1930’s, he said, he found that lawyers were having as hard a time as anyone else finding work. He drifted into boxing. At 5 foot 10, weighing 162 pounds, the hazel-eyed, brown-haired Mr. Clark soon concluded that he was outmatched and saw no sense in taking beatings. To earn a dollar, he said, he played baseball, labored at construction, worked as a salesman and then, as a sculptor’s model, fell in with what he called an arty set.

”They fascinated me at first,” he said. ”Then suddenly it struck me that their constant snobbish talk about the ‘theatah’ was a little on the phony side. I decided it give it a try myself, just to show them anyone could do it. Before I knew it, I was getting small parts on Broadway, then bigger ones. Then finally I got some good spots in ‘Dead End” and ‘Stage Door’ and finally took over the lead from Wally Ford in ‘Of Mice and Men.’ ” Before long, Mr. Clark decided to try his luck in Hollywood.

Mr. Clark’s first wife, Margot Yoder, a painter and sculptor, died in 1970. He is survived by his wife of 27 years, Geraldine.

”This is a very complex, wondrous business I’m in,” Mr. Clark once said as he reminisced. ”My kicks are my work. I’m miserable when I’m not working.

Dane Clark was born in 1912 in Brooklyn, New York. He signed a Warner Brothers contract in 1943 and established himself as a capable leading man of film noir and gritty thrillers. His films include “A Stolen Life” opposite Bette Davis in 1946, “Deep Valley” and “Moonrise” opposite Gail Russell. He died in 1998 at the age of 86.

TCM Overview:

Bernard Zanville was a hard-working young man in New York City struggling to finance his law degree, when he turned to acting on the advice of friend John Garfield. After appearing on stage for several years, including a stint starring alongside Garfield in the original cast of Clifford Odets’ “Waiting for Lefty” (1935), Zanville gave up his dreams of law school and relocated to Hollywood to pursue a movie career. Hooking up with Warner Bros., his name was changed to the more marquee friendly Dane Clark, allegedly by Humphrey Bogart who co-starred with the young actor in what was more or less his star-making performance as merchant marine Johnny Pulaski in 1943’s “Action in the North Atlantic”. That same year, Clark acted alongside Cary Grant and Garfield in “Destination Tokyo” and went on to convincingly play pugnacious soldiers in war-themed pictures for Warners like “God is My Co-Pilot” and “Pride of the Marines” (both 1945). Movies like “Her Kind of Man” (1946), “Deep Valley”, “Embraceable You” and “That Way With Women” (all 1947) featured Clark’s tough guy persona put to new use, now as the dangerous leading man, the misunderstood gangster type who gets involved with a nice girl and changes his ways.

Despite his undeniable talent and magnetism, Clark never took off as a star the way his friend John Garfield did, even after his scene-stealing turn in “Hollywood Canteen” (1944), a performance alongside such notables as Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Jack Benny. His prolific acting career included starring turns in dozens of films in the 40s and 50s, including a memorable portrayal of Abe Saperstein in “Go, Man, Go!” (1954), the story of the creation of basketball’s famous Harlem Globetrotters. Clark eventually left Hollywood to work on the stage and in features produced overseas. He worked for J Arthur Rank in London, appearing in 1950’s “Highly Dangerous” and 1952’s “The Gambler and the Lady”. In 1968, he starred in the Denmark/US co-production “Dage i Min Fars Hus/Days in My Father’s House”.

Clark returned to the stage after achieving film success, starring in many Broadway productions (e.g., “A Thousand Clowns” in which he replaced Jason Robards). He was also a frequent presence on the small screen, first appearing in several of the theater anthology programs that were popular in the medium’s early days. Clark made his series debut as legal aid lawyer Richard Adams in the NBC drama “Justice” (1954-56) and headlined the 1959 syndicated series “Bold Venture”. Throughout much of the 60s, 70s and 80s, Clark was a familiar face as a guest performer on shows as varied as “The Twilight Zone”, “I Spy”, “The Mod Squad” and “Murder, She Wrote”. He returned to series work as a police lieutenant in the CBS remake “The New Adventures of Perry Mason” (1973-74). Clark made his last film appearance in 1988’s “Last Rites” starring Tom Berenger. The veteran actor died in 1998, battling cancer.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

A Stolen Life, poster, Glenn Ford, Bette Davis, Dane Clark, 1946. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Telegraph obituary in August 2021.

Patricia Hitchcock is the actress daughter of Alfred Hitchcock. She was born in London in 1928. When her father went to Hollywood in 1939 to make “Rebecca”, she and her mother went with him. She was featured in such Hitchcock classics as “Stage Fright” in 1949, “”Strangers on a Train” and “Psycho”. She died in 2021 aged 93.

Patricia Hitchcock, the only child of the film director Alfred Hitchcock, who has died aged 93, was an accomplished actress in her own right, taking supporting roles in three of her father’s best-known films as well as appearing on television in episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

She made her screen debut as a jolly acting student called Chubby Bannister in her father’s Stage Fright (1950), because cast and crew were rehearsing at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where she was a student. She would also feature in the film as Jane Wyman’s double in a stunt involving a speeding car: “I drove right into the camera and had to stop at a plate-glass window.”

But she was best known for her role in Strangers on a Train (1951) as Barbara Morton, the inquisitive and chubbily bespectacled younger sister of Ann (Ruth Roman), the woman Guy Haines (Farley Granger) wants to marry, who witnesses the psychopathic Bruno (Robert Walker) attempting to strangle a woman at a cocktail party.

Pat Hitchcock with her father on set in 1950 during filming of Strangers on a Train based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith CREDIT: Alamy

Favourable reviews might have marked the beginning of a career as a character actress. But within a year she had met her husband, Joseph O’Connell, and married him, and a year after that had the first of three children. Though she had a small role in Psycho (1960) as the office worker who offers to share her tranquillisers with Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane, she gave up thoughts of a serious acting career to devote herself to her family.

Alfred Hitchcock, reflecting years later on his daughter’s marriage in 1952, said that he and his wife Alma had been “relieved, in a way” when Pat decided that “being a mother of sticky-fingered children required all her creative attention.”

Pat Hitchcock had a small role in the film as a witness in spectacles CREDIT: Moviepix/Getty

After her father’s death in 1980, the job of upholding his memory and protecting his reputation largely fell to Pat. She also co-authored a biography of her mother, Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man (2003), in which she maintained that her father would never have achieved such acclaim without the contribution of his wife of 54 years and mostly silent professional partner.

Patricia Alma Hitchcock was born in London on July 7 1928. Her mother, Alma Reville, had been a respected film editor, first at Twickenham Studios, and then at Islington Studios, where in 1923 she met Hitchcock, then little more than a script assistant. They had married in 1926.

Pat would relate that her father was so stricken by anxiety when her mother went into labour that he immediately left their Cromwell Road flat to go for a long walk, explaining afterwards: “Consider my suffering. I nearly died of the suspense.”

She attributed her early interest in acting to being brought on the set by her father if she remained very quiet: “I have a picture of me, with Margaret Lockwood and my dog, on The Lady Vanishes. I was absolutely fascinated.”

When she was eight, she was dispatched to boarding school, where she played Rumpelstiltskin: “It never occurred to me that I’d do anything else but act.”

The family moved to Los Angeles in 1939 when Pat was 10, but she recalled that she was brought up as an English child: “I knew what was expected, and I pretty much always did it. You didn’t speak unless spoken to, but it didn’t bother me or have any repercussions. I didn’t know anything else.”

She was very close to her father, who would take her out every Saturday, shopping and to lunch, and to (Catholic) church every Sunday. She attributed her lifelong religious faith to him.

She played teenage leads in two short-run Broadway plays, Solitaire (1942), and Violet (1944), the latter written and directed by Whitfield Cook, whom Hitchcock would later engage as a screenwriter on both Stage Fright and Strangers on a Train.

When she was 18 Pat was sent back to England to train at Rada, where her contemporaries included Lionel Jeffries and Dorothy Tutin, and in 1950 played a palace maid in the Jean Negulesco drama The Mudlark (1950), starring Irene Dunne and Alec Guinness.

Back in the US, she had an uncredited part in Cecil B DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956). She also appeared in television productions and was cast in episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “whenever they needed a maid with an English accent”, as she put it.

She felt, however, that being Hitchcock’s daughter had been a “minus” in her career. “I wish he had believed in nepotism,” she told an interviewer. “I’d have worked a lot more. But he never had anyone in his pictures unless he believed they were right for the part. He never fit a story to a star, or to an actor. Often I tried to hint to his assistant, but I never got very far. She’d bring my name up, he’d say, ‘She isn’t right for it’, and that would be the end of that.”

Pat Hitchcock described her father as “very quiet. Incredible sense of humour. Very loving. He put his family first before everything else, and we led a very quiet life.”

Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell (daughter of Alfred) speaking to fans of Alfred Hitchcock during a DVD signing in Hollywood, 2005 — Patricia Hitchcock O’Connell (daughter of Alfred) speaking to fans of Alfred Hitchcock during a DVD signing in Hollywood, 2005 CREDIT: Matthew Simmons/Getty Images

On Alma’s death in 1982, two years after her husband, Pat and her family inherited her father’s estate.

She was angered by later suggestions that Hitchcock had been a sadistic and manipulative director who tried to control his leading ladies in real life and made sexual overtures toward some of them. “I know a lot of people insist that my father must have had a dark imagination,” she said. “Well, he did not. He was a brilliant film-maker and he knew how to tell a story, that’s all.”.

Yet even by her account the director had a bizarre sense of humour. When she was a child, he would creep into her bedroom late at night and paint a clown’s face on her sleeping features so that she would be surprised when she woke up and looked in the mirror. Returning from a wartime visit to England, he brought back an empty incendiary bomb as a present for his young daughter.

If she did have a criticism (though she denied it was any such thing) it was that he was content that her mother was never given the credit that Pat believed was her due.

Alfred Hitchcock with his wife Alma Reville and their daughter Pat Hitchcock aboard the Queen Mary at Southampton, before departure to America in March 1939 CREDIT: AFP/GettyImages

Alma was credited with screenplay or continuity work on almost half of Hitchcock’s films until 1950, and she continued her role as collaborator for 25 years after that, advising Hitchcock on “script material, casting and all aspects of the production” and working with other directors. But during the period of her husband’s most sustained creative activity, 1951-1960, Alma’s name disappeared.

Among other things Pat claimed that her mother had saved Psycho from an embarrassing faux pas after noticing, at a screening, that Janet Leigh was still breathing after having been killed off in the shower.

In later life Pat Hitchcock did volunteer work with a cystic fibrosis charity, her eldest granddaughter having been diagnosed with the disease

Her husband Joseph O’Connell, who was in the transportation business, died in 1994. She is survived by their three daughters

Patricia Hitchcock. Wikipedia.

Pat Hitchcock was born in 1928 and is an English actress and producer. She is the only child of English director Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville, and had small roles in several of his films, starting with Stage Fright (1950).

Hitchcock was born in London in 1928, the only child of film director Alfred Hitchcock and film editor Alma Reville. The family moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1939. Once there, Hitchcock’s father soon made his mark in Hollywood.

As a child, Hitchcock knew she wanted to be an actress. In the early 1940s, she began acting on the stage and doing summer stock. Her father helped her gain a role in the Broadway production of Solitaire (1942). She also played the title role in the Broadway play Violet (1944).

After graduating from Marymount High School in Los Angeles in 1947, she attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and also appeared on the London stage.

In early 1949, her parents arrived in London to make Stage Fright, Hitchcock’s first British-made feature film since emigrating to Hollywood. Pat did not know she would have a walk-on part in the film until her parents arrived. Because she bore a resemblance to the star, Jane Wyman, her father asked if she would mind also doubling for Wyman in the scenes that required “danger driving”.

She had small roles in three of her father’s films: Stage Fright (1950), in which she played a jolly acting student named Chubby Bannister, one of Wyman’s school chums; Strangers on a Train (1951), playing Barbara Morton, sister of Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), Guy Haines’s (Farley Granger) lover; and Psycho (1960), playing Janet Leigh‘s character’s plain-Jane office mate, Caroline, who generously offers to share tranquilizers that her mother gave her for her wedding night.

Patricia had a small uncredited role as an extra in her father’s 1936 Sabotage. She and her mother, Alma Reville, are in the crowd waiting for, then watching, the Lord Mayor’s Show parade.

Hitchcock also worked for Jean Negulesco on The Mudlark (1950), which starred Irene Dunne and Alec Guinness, playing a palace maid, and she had a bit-part in DeMille‘s The Ten Commandments (1956).

As well as appearing in ten episodes of her father’s half-hour television programme, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Hitchcock worked on a few others, including Playhouse 90, which was live, directed by John Frankenheimer. Acting for her father, however, remained the high point of her acting career, which she interrupted to bring up her children. (Hitchcock has a small joke with her first appearance on his show – after saying good night and exiting the screen, he sticks his head back into the picture and remarks: “I thought the little leading lady was rather good, didn’t you?”)

She also served as executive producer of the documentary The Man on Lincoln’s Nose (2000), which is about Robert F. Boyle and his contribution to films.

She married Joseph E. O’Connell, Jr., 17 January 1952, at Our Lady Chapel in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York. They decided to have their wedding there because Hitchcock had many friends on the East Coast and O’Connell had relatives in Boston. They had three daughters, Mary Alma Stone (born 17 April 1953), Teresa “Tere” Carrubba (born 2 July 1954), and Kathleen “Katie” Fiala (born 27 February 1959). Joe died in 1994.She currently lives in Solvang, California.

For several years, she was the family representative on the staff of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. She supplied family photos and wrote the foreword of the book Footsteps in the Fog: Alfred Hitchcock’s San Francisco by Jeff Kraft and Aaron Leventhal, which was published in 2002. In 2003, she published Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man, co-written with Laurent Bouzereau.

The Sun Comes Up, poster, US poster, from top: Lloyd Nolan, Jeanette MacDonald, Claude Jarman Jr, Lassie, 1949. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Lloyd Nolan was a very popular actor in U.S. films of the 1930’s who became a wonderful character actor from the 1950’s right through to the 1980’s. He was born in 1902 in San Francisco. “G Men” in 1935 was his first movie.Other films of note include “House on 92nd Street”, “Bataan”, “Peyton Place”, “Susan Slade” with Troy Donahue and Connie Stevens and “Woody Allen’s “Hannah and her Sisters” with Maureen O’Sullivan. On television in 1968 he starred with Diahann Carroll in “Julia”. Lloyd Nolan died in 1985.

IMDB entry:

It would no doubt be a real shock to most people to discover that the rich baritone Bronx-like accent of great veteran character actor Lloyd Nolan was a product of the San Francisco streets–not the urban jungle of New York City. Nolan was born in the City by the Bay, and his father, James Nolan, was a successful shoe manufacturer of hard-working Irish stock. Lloyd caught the acting bug while at Santa Clara College (at the time, a junior college). He gained as much theatre experience as he could, attaining his AA in the process. Though he continued on to Stanford, he was still focused on acting and soon flunked out of that school, preferring to focus his attention on acting opportunities rather than studies. Forsaking his father and the family shoe business, Nolan went to sea on a freighter, which soon burned, and then headed south to Hollywood.

He continued to hone his acting skills by first taking up residence at the Pasadena Playhouse (1927). With his father’s passing he was able to sustain himself on a small inheritance. Continuing at PP and elsewhere in stock for two years, he headed east to Broadway, where he landed a role in a musical revue, “Cape Cod Follies”, in late 1929. He continued with two other similar roles through 1932 before breaking out with an acclaimed performance as less-than-wholesome small-town dentist Biff Grimes in the original hit play “One Sunday Afternoon” (1933). He would stay on for two more plays until mid-1934, when he headed back to Hollywood with heightened expectations of success in the movies. His voice and that rock-solid but somehow sympathetic face made Nolan someone with whom audiences could immediately identify, and ahead were over 150 screen appearances. Nolan didn’t waste any time; he signed with Paramount and had five roles in 1935, getting the lead role in two and working with up-and-coming James Cagney and George Raft. In the next five years Nolan settled into his niche as a solid and versatile player in whatever he did. His genre was more “B”, and he could play good guys and heavies with equal skill. The production values on some B-level efforts were every bit as good as those of “A” pictures. Everybody starting out did at least a few “B” pictures, and Nolan was doing quality work, even in pictures that are little-known–if known at all–today, pictures like King of Gamblers (1937) with Claire Trevor and King of Alcatraz (1938). He was a mainstay at Paramount until 1940, competing with Warner Brothers in that studio’s popular gangster films. Unlike better known Cagney andHumphrey Bogart across town, Nolan’s bad and not-so-bad guys often had more depth, and again it was that face along with his verve and that distinctive voice that helped to bring it out.

The 1940s saw Nolan moving around within the studio system. He was taking on more familiar roles, such as private detective, government agent or police detective–tough and hardboiled but sympathetic and understanding at the same time–and World War II action heroes. He landed the role of “Mike Shayne” in the private-eye series from 20th Century-Fox–seven of them between 1940 and 1942. Nolan showed a surprising flair for comedy in this series, with a continuing stream of wisecracks along with the fisticuffs. The Shayne series was well received by both critics and audiences, but Nolan is best known during that period as one of the familiar faces of World War II action films. The first is, at least to this observer, the best, but probably least known–Manila Calling(1942). It was a part of Hollywood’s concerted effort to boost civilian morale during the war, with the subject being the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, its conquest and liberation, as center stage in the War in the Pacific. Most films dealt with both retreat and return later in the war years; this 1942 film was perhaps the first to deal with the beginning and hope for the future. Nolan is his usual reliable, get-things-done professional here, an ace communications technician trying to keep the radio airways open amid the onslaught of Japanese invaders. Of all the flag-waving messages given in so many WWII films, none is as stirring as Nolan’s, who by the way gets the girl, Carole Landis. It’s she who stays behind with him while the rest of the radio team escapes with bombs falling. Microphone in hand and in his best hardboiled monotone, Nolan spits out: “Manila calling, Manila calling – and I ain’t no Jap!” Significantly, Nolan appeared in several other films dealing with the struggle in the Pacific, turning in a particularly strong performance in Bataan (1943).

By 1950 Nolan was ready for television (nearly half of his career roles would tally on that side of the ledger). In addition to his series work, television in the 1950s also played a lot of Nolan’s action films from the 1930s and 1940s, earning him a whole new generation of fans–kids who would sit for hours in front of the TV, watching not only current shows but “old” movies. Nolan appeared in many different genres on television, and he could be seen in everything from distinguished dramatic productions to variety and game shows, in addition to having his own series, including Martin Kane (1949) andSpecial Agent 7 (1958).

After having been away from Broadway for nearly 20 years, Nolan returned in early 1954 in the original production of the hit play “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial”, in the pivotal role of the paranoid Captain Queeg. He spent a year in this production, to great critical acclaim. He repeated the role on television in a Ford Star Jubilee (1955) production in 1955. His TV roles kept him busy. It must have been fun for him when, at nearly 60 years of age, he played notorious Chicago gangster George Moran, aka “Bugs” Moran–who in real life was much younger than Nolan was at the time–on the popular The Untouchables(1959), as well as appearing in five continuing episodes of the extremely popular 77 Sunset Strip (1958) series, and he appeared in other crime dramas playing, in one form or another, the kinds of roles he played on the big screen in the 1930s and 1940s.

In the 1970s, when cameo roles by older stars were becoming a popular means of luring people back to the theaters, Nolan was happy to oblige in box-office hits like Ice Station Zebra (1968), Airport (1970) and Earthquake (1974). When the same circumstances spread to episodic TV, Nolan was only too happy to be on hand. Most older actors–even those with good reputations–have a tendency to be a bit difficult, but Nolan was such a professional. His joy at still being able to work at the craft he loved was profound, almost childlike in enthusiasm. He never complained or claimed special privilege.

That was the measure of the man–what had been and what would continue to be. Unconventional in a natural sort of way was the norm for Lloyd Nolan. Call it keeping to one’s dignity. He kept no Hollywood secrets, as was the fashion. He was very open about his autistic son. Into the 1980s and entering his 80s, Nolan still deftly handled a few final TV and screen roles, though his noted memory for lines began to fade and cue cards became necessary. He was inspired in his final film role as a retired actor, husband of showy, boozy has-been Maureen O’Sullivan and three individualistic daughters in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). It’s a great role, and probably the most even and satisfying film effort of director Woody Allen.

Nolan’s last role was a Murder, She Wrote (1984) TV episode with old friend Angela Lansbury. He still had not revealed his final secret–he was dying with lung cancer–which by then revealed itself just the same. Ravaged as he was by the disease, Lloyd Nolan–with the help of his friends and well-wishers–successfully wrapped his 156th professional acting performance before his passing. His was a life of quality commitment. Character and integrity–things increasingly rare in Hollywood–described Lloyd Nolan, plain and simple.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: William McPeak (qv’s & corrections by A. Nonymous)

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Spouse (2)

Ralph Meeker was born in Minnesota in 1920. He won many awards on Broadyway for his lead performance in William Inge’s “Picnic” in 1954. He did not though go on to make the film. His part was played by Paul Newman who was understudy for him on Broadway. In 1955 Ralph Meeker starred as Mike Hammer in the film noir “Kiss Me Deadly”. His other films include “Paths of Glory” and “The Dirty Dozen”. Ralph Meeker died in 1988.

IMDB entry:

Burly American character actor Ralph Meeker first acted on stage at his Alma mater, Northwestern University, alongside other budding performers Charlton Heston andPatricia Neal. He graduated as a music major, because his dean had discouraged him from pursuing a theatrical career. Ignoring that advice, Meeker nevertheless moved to New York to study method acting and performing in local stock companies. After being injured during a brief wartime stint with the navy and consequently discharged from active duty, Meeker went overseas to play his part in entertaining the troops as a member of the USO. He finally ‘arrived’ on Broadway in 1945 and was given small roles in two plays produced by ‘Jose Ferrer (I)’, making his debut in “Strange Fruit”. He was still relatively unknown in 1947 when he replaced Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire” two years later, giving a commanding and critically acclaimed performance. After playing Kowalski in the touring company of ‘Streetcar’, Meeker was further noticed for his part in the original production of “Mister Roberts” . As a result, he had several European motion picture offers and selected to play the role of an army sergeant in Teresa (1951), co-starring Pier Angeli. That same year, he was in another continental drama, shot on location in Switzerland, Four in a Jeep (1951). After a two-year sojourn at MGM, Meeker returned to Broadway to star as the swaggering, likeable, larger-than-life rogue Hal Carter, in William Inge‘s play “Picnic” on Broadway. His performance was not only highly praised by reviewers like Brooks Atkinson, but also won him the New York Critics Circle Award. In later years, Meeker claimed to have spurned Columbia’s offer of reprising his role on screen because he disdained being shackled by a studio contract. In any case, the prize role went to William Holden and Meeker was consigned (with the odd exception) to playing hard- nosed guys on either side of the law – or bullies with a yellow streak – as a supporting actor over the next thirty years. He did, however, leave his mark with several top-notch performances.

One of his best early screen roles was that of the disgraced ex-Union officer Roy Anderson in Anthony Mann‘s brilliant revenge western The Naked Spur (1953). As one of four men stripped of humanity by greed and hatred (the others were James Stewart,Robert Ryan and Millard Mitchell), Ralph Meeker gave a convincing portrayal of a cynical and callous opportunist.

Meeker’s defining role was that of Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly (1955). The film was unusual, in that Hammer was played, unlike any private detectives of previous films noir, as a basically unsavoury character – one of the first of the anti-heroes which began to appear in films of the 1960’s. Under the direction of Robert Aldrich, Meeker’s characterisation as Mike Hammer effectively contrasted a smooth, handsome facade with an undercurrent of arrogance, unmitigated ruthlessness and greed. When the film was released, it ran into censorship trouble, the Kefauver Commission labelling it the Number One Menace to American Youth for 1955. While “Kiss Me Deadly” acquired a cult following over the years, it certainly failed to advance the career of Ralph Meeker.

He did, however, manage to get second billing for the part of Corporal Paris, one of three World War I French infantry men randomly selected for execution (because their regiment had refused a suicidal mission), in Stanley Kubrick‘s harrowing anti-war drama Paths of Glory (1957). He gave another finely etched performance through his character’s gradual deterioration from swaggering bravado to abject fear. Also that year, Meeker played a snarling, Indian-hating Yankee officer in Run of the Arrow (1957) and co-starred as Jane Russells unlikely kidnapper in the failed Norman Taurog comedy The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown (1957).

In between numerous television appearances during the 1960’s, Meeker returned to the stage as member of the Lincoln Centre Repertory Theatre, where he was reunited withElia Kazan (who had directed him in ‘Streetcar’) to act in Arthur Miller‘s play “After the Fall” (1964-65). He also worked with Robert Aldrich again, playing George ‘Bugs’ Moran (who Meeker allegedly resembled), the Chicago mobster whose gang was wiped out by ‘Al Capone (I)’ in The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967).

After the decline of the studio system, Meeker found much gainful employment in television and even had his own syndicated series, Not for Hire (1959), playing a tough Honolulu investigator. However, the show came up against the similarly themedHawaiian Eye (1959) and only ran to 39 episodes. Meeker then guest-starred on numerous other shows and had noteworthy roles as, among others, a boorish tycoon who discovers a prehistoric amphibious creature in The Outer Limits (1963) episode “The Tourist Attraction”; an ex-cop turned derelict in Ironside (1967) (‘Price Tag: Death Details’); and FBI agent Bernie Jenks in the TV pilot of The Night Stalker (1972). Add to that a gallery of snarling or harassed law enforcers from The Girl on the Late, Late Show(1974) to Brannigan (1975) and episodes of Harry O (1973), The Rookies (1972) andPolice Story (1973). Ralph Meeker remained a much- in-demand character actor until his death of a heart attack in August 1988.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Ralph Meeker Actress Actor Film Barbara Stanwyck

Somebody Loves Me, poster, from left: Betty Hutton, Ralph Meeker, 1952. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Richard Wyler (also known as Richard Stapley) was born in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex in 1923. He began his career on the London sstage but in the late 1940’s he went to Hollywood with a Hollywood contract. He was featured in “The Three Musketeers” in 1948, “Little Women” “King of the Khyber Rifles” with Tyrone Power and “D-Day 6th of June” with Robert Taylor and Dana Wynter. Richard Wyler died in 2010 at the age of 86.

His “Independent” obituary:

Richard Stapley belonged to a generation of movie actors who plied their trade during the halcyon days of Hollywood – when stars were great and dalliances were discreet. Although predominantly an actor, he had polymath qualities ranging from writer and motorcycle racer to courier.

lamorous world of Hollywood. Born on 20 June 1923 in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, he was the son of a bank manager. He grew up in Brighton and from an early age fell in love with the silver screen. Stapley attended Varndean College in Brighton; one of his contemporaries there was Paul Scofield, with whom he remained friends.

Stapley remembered spending a lot of time at Varndean practising his autograph; destiny would make him a movie actor. However, he did also have a love of writing which would endure throughout his career; he had his first novel published at the age of 17.

After serving in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, Stapley got into repertory theatre and decided at an early age that if he was going to make it in movies he would have to go to the US. Slim, charming, and graced with diamond blue eyes and a deep, educated English accent, Stapley soon caught the eye of the movie-makers – and a number of actresses as well.

Gloria Swanson rented a temporary house in Palm Springs which she shared with Stapley while she was filming the musical Sunset Blvd (1950). Whether it was a practical arrangement or something more was not revealed by Stapley when he reminisced about his days in Hollywood.

The movie breaks soon came, including in 1948 The Three Musketeers, starring Gene Kelly and Lana Turner, Little Women, where he starred alongside Elizabeth Taylor, King of the Khyber Rifles, appearing with Tyrone Power, and the 1956 film D-Day the Sixth of June, playing David Archer alongside Richard Todd and Robert Taylor. Stapley had an uncredited role in Breakfast at Tiffany’s; another small part was in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1972 film Frenzy.

The early 1960s saw him in the TV series Man from Interpol, playing Agent Anthony Smith; for this role he adopted the name Richard Wyler. Some of the scripts for Man from Interpol were penned by Brian Clemens, later the doyen of The Avengers and The Professionals. Man from Interpol ran for 39 episodes between 1960 and 1961; after it ended, Stapley never quite made it back to Hollywood films.

He starred in a number of European films, including El Precio de un Hombre, playing bounty hunter Luke Chilson. He also starred with Jack Palance in The Barbarians, and then in 1969 The Seven Secrets of Sumuru (aka The Girl from Rio) alongside Shirley Eaton and George Sanders. In 1970, Stapley co-starred with Bette Davis and Michael Redgrave in Connecting Rooms.

A follow-up series to Man from Interpol did not follow. Around the same time as he was filming that programme, Stapley had auditioned for the TV series of Ivanhoe, the part of which went to his comrade Sir Roger Moore. Stapley regaled the story of being driven by Roger Moore in his Rolls Royce. Stapley asked Moore what would have happened if he had got the part of Ivanhoe instead – and Moore responded by saying, “You’d be driving this Rolls Royce instead of me… “

Stapley had a steady stream of character parts in many of the mainstream TV series of the 1960s and 1970s, including The Baron, Z Cars, The Saint and Return of the Saint. His work also included appearing in a number of the legendary Imperial Leather soap TV adverts, exuding a sybaritic lifestyle and attaining what can only be described as a lifetime achievement of sharing a bath (on set) with his co-star, namely one Joanna Lumley.

If acting was a love, motorcycles were Stapley’s passion and it is no surprise that he counted among his friends the stunt rider from The Great Escape responsible for the death-defying jump made by Steve McQueen. Stapley himself partook in motorcycle stunts, although one went horrendously wrong and he severely broke his leg – but determined to ride again, he made an ultra-quick recovery.

Stapley rode motorcycles in professional races, including dices with the likes of Mike Hawthorn. He wrote a regular column for Motor Cycling magazine, Richard Wyler’s Coffee Bar Column, recounting tales of his acting exploits or thrills on the race track. He received praise from the Metropolitan Police for dissuading young motorcyclists at the famous Ace Café on London’s North Circular Road from indulging in the potentially lethal dare of “dropping the coin right into the slot” and racing to a given point and back before the record on the jukebox finished.

During the 1960s he also opened one of the first coffee bars near Streatham Ice Rink in south London.

Stapley, using his nom de plume, Richard Wyler, had his own dispatch riders company in London and used his race-track experience on one occasion to get a very important package from central London to Northolt Airfield through heavy traffic in about 30 minutes.

His acting career on slow burn, he tended to write. His work included a novel called Naked Legacy, co-written with Lester Cook III and published in 2004. The story tells of a young man inheriting a manuscript from the father he never knew, which then sends him on a voyage of discovery. He devoted much of his remaining days to working on film scripts that he was determined to see come to fruition, including Tomorrow Has Been Cancelled. Stapley was also completing his autobiography, To Slip and Fall in L.A.

Some unfortunate business deals meant that Stapley’s finances were not good and the last decade of his life was dependant on the generosity of acquaintances.

Stapley had enthusiasm and talent to spare, but the constant money worries and failing health at times shadowed the charming and heroic side of his character. He was married to Elizabeth Wyler; the two were estranged, but never divorced. He has one surviving sister.

The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Frances Sternhagen

Frances Sternhagen was born in 1930 in Washington D.C. She has won two Tony awards for her acting on Broadway, in 1974 for “The Good Doctor” and in 1995 for “The Heiress”. She made her film debut in 1967 in “Up the Down Staircase” with Sandy Dennis. Her other films include “The Hospital” in 1972, “Fedora”, “Two People” and opposite Sean Connery in “Outland”. On television she was featured in “Cheers” as the mother of postman Cliff.

TCM Overview:

A respected stage-trained supporting and leading player, Sternhagen made her film debut in “Up the Down Staircase” (1967). She subsequently appeared in a wide range of supporting roles, usually as either prim, slightly disapproving characters as well as warmly maternal women. Sternhagen’s credits include the classic “The Hospital” (1971), “Two People” (1973) and Billy Wilder’s “Fedora” (1978).

She won attention for her portrayal as Burt Reynolds’ relative under whose auspices he meets his new love in Alan J. Pakula’s “Starting Over” (1979) and nearly stole the sci-fi thriller “Outland” (1981), providing comic relief and support to marshal Sean Connery. Sternhagen portrayed a prissy co-worker of Michael J. Fox in “Bright Lights, Big City” (1988), Farrah Fawcett’s mother in Pakula’s “See You in the Morning” (1989), Richard Farnsworth’s wife in “Misery” (1990) and John Lithgow’s psychiatrist in “Raising Cain” (1992).

CHEERS — Pictured: (l-r) Paul Willson as Paul, Frances Sternhagen as Esther Clavin, John Ratzenberger as Cliff Clavin, George Wendt as Norm Peterson — Photo by: NBCU Photo Bank

Sternhagen is a familiar face to TV viewers. She is probably best-known for her recurring role as the mother to mailman Cliff Clavin (John Ratzenberger) on the NBC comedy “Cheers”. Sternhagen began appearing on the small screen in the 1950s and spent the better part of the late 60s and early 70s in a variety of roles on daytime soaps (“Love of Life”, “The Doctors”, “The Secret Storm” and “Another World”). In primetime, she has played regular supporting roles in everything from sitcoms (“Under One Roof”) to drama (“Stephen King’s Golden Years”).

Sternhagen also has extensive stage credits in everything from classic plays to musical comedies. She has received two Tony Awards for Best Supporting Actress in a Play for Neil Simon’s “The Good Doctor” (1974), based on Chekhov works to a revival of “The Heiress” (1995), based on the Henry James’ novella. Sternhagen was married to actor Thomas A. Carlin from 1956 until his death in 1991.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

The Guardian obituary in 2023:

Frances Sternhagen obituary

Award-winning stage, film and TV actor who had memorable roles as meddling mothers in Cheers and Sex and the City

Ryan GilbeyMon 4 Dec 2023 17.32 CET

With her shrewd blue eyes and twitching dormouse nose, the actor Frances Sternhagen, who has died aged 93, could turn on a dime between consoling warmth and implacable frostiness. She was a multiple Emmy nominee for her guest appearances as two comically meddling mothers. In Sex and the City, between 2000 and 2002, she played Bunny, who can manipulate her pampered son, Trey (Kyle MacLachlan), into doing her bidding simply by squeezing his wrist.

Oblivious to boundaries, Bunny enters his apartment late at night to smear Vicks VapoRub on his chest; his wife, Charlotte (Kristin Davis), who is sleeping beside him, wakes up and joins in. “It is both sick and erotic, and Franny was up for it,” said the show’s executive producer, Michael Patrick King. “It’s always more fun to be obnoxious,” said Sternhagen.

She made seven appearances between 1986 and 1993 in the sitcom Cheers, set in a Boston bar. She played Esther Clavin, the mother of one of the regular patrons, the droning postal worker Cliff (John Ratzenberger). In an episode from the fifth season entitled Money Dearest, Cliff brokers a romance between Esther and an ageing millionaire who has no family to inherit his wealth.

When he dies, the formerly reserved Esther breaks down sobbing in Cliff’s arms, only for him to lose patience despite having initially encouraged her outpouring. “You know, there’s a fine line between expressing your feelings and blubbering,” he mutters.

In Esther’s final episode, at the end of the 11th season, Cliff installs her in a retirement home before changing his mind when he claps eyes on the bill.

She also played the regal grandmother of Dr John Carter (Noah Wyle) on ER between 1997 and 2003, and the mother of the deputy police chief played by Kyra Sedgwick on The Closer (2006-12). “I was big on playing mothers,” she said. “Been playing them since I was five.”

Frances Sternhagen as Esther Clavin, with the talkshow host Johnny Carson, in a 1992 episode of the TV sitcom Cheers. Photograph: NBC/Getty Images

It was theatre, though, that was Sternhagen’s great passion. She won her first Tony award in 1974 for The Good Doctor, Neil Simon’s comedy based on stories by Chekhov, in which 27 roles were shared between her and four co-stars, including Christopher Plummer and Marsha Mason. Her second Tony came in 1995 for playing the widowed Aunt Penniman in The Heiress, adapted from Henry James’s Washington Square. The New York Times called her performance “infinitely sad.”

She also played the female leads in two stage dramas which were later turned into successful films. In 1979, she originated the part of Ethel Thayer, the devoted wife enjoying her umpteenth summer with her ailing husband at their holiday home, in On Golden Pond. Sternhagen had just turned 49 when the show opened, making her around 20 years younger than Ethel.

Ageing up was also required in 1988 when she took over from Dana Ivey in Driving Miss Daisy. As the retired teacher who develops an unlikely friendship with her African-American chauffeur, Sternhagen, then 58, was required to embody the title character from her early seventies into her late nineties. In both plays, the actor’s sharply glinting intelligence, which was palpable in even her softest characters, added steel to material that could tend toward the lachrymose.

Frances Sternhagen in a scene from the 1981 film Outland. Photograph: PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy

When On Golden Pond and Driving Miss Daisy were adapted for cinema, she was sanguine about being replaced respectively by Katharine Hepburn and Jessica Tandy, both of whom went on to win Oscars for those performances. “Making a movie is an expensive proposition,” she reasoned in 1992. “If they can get Katharine Hepburn, they’re going to take Katharine Hepburn. It hurts a little, but I’ve gotten used to it really.”

She recalled being introduced to Hepburn backstage during the run of On Golden Pond. “She told us how much she liked our performances. And we knew that she was brought in to see the show to see whether she wanted to do the movie.”

Sternhagen still got her share of film work. She played the servant of a reclusive film star in Billy Wilder’s elegiac Fedora (1978), and a woman helping to set up her newly single brother-in-law (Burt Reynolds) on a blind date in the romantic comedy Starting Over (1979). In Outland (1981), which relocated the plot of the western High Noon to one of Jupiter’s moons, she was the doctor who becomes the only ally of the hero (Sean Connery in the Gary Cooper role) as he awaits the assassins sent to kill him.

In Rob Reiner’s Misery (1990), adapted from Stephen King’s novel about a psychotic fan (Kathy Bates) terrorising her favourite novelist (James Caan), Sternhagen and Richard Farnsworth were delightful as an easy-going sheriff and his fondly teasing wife. Their miniature sketch of marital harmony offset the dysfunctional central relationship, providing valuable relief from its hothouse claustrophobia.

In another King adaptation, The Mist (2007), she was a teacher who opts to die in a suicide pact rather than be left to the mercy of monsters. In Julie & Julia (2009), Sternhagen played Irma Rombauer, writer of The Joy of Cooking, who disabuses the budding author and chef Julia Childs (Meryl Streep) of the notion that her career has been a piece of cake.

Frances Sternhagen at the premiere of the film Julie & Julia in New York, 2009. Photograph: Peter Kramer/AP

Sternhagen was born in Washington, DC, to John Sternhagen, a tax court judge, and Gertrude (nee Hussey), a former nurse who later became a volunteer community worker. She was educated at the Potomac and Madeira preparatory schools in McLean, Virginia, and at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She majored in history until her professor nudged her towards drama after seeing her silence a campus dining hall with a speech from Richard II.

After graduating in 1951, she taught drama at Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts. “I always acted, but I didn’t have the nerve to go into the theatre until I had taught for a year,” she said in 1981. “I thought I would try it, see if I liked it, and then get out. But you never get out. It’s an addiction.”

She took acting classes at Catholic University, Washington, where she met her future husband, the actor Thomas Carlin, with whom she went on to have six children.

She made her New York debut in 1955 in Jean Anouilh’s play Thieves’ Carnival, and her Broadway debut the same year in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. Her final Broadway performance was 50 years later in Edward Albee’s Seascape, while her last stage role was opposite Edie Falco in The Madrid in 2013.

Her final movie was Reiner’s comedy And So It Goes (2014) with Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton. The difference between the two art forms was simple, she said. “You don’t use your face as much in film. It has to come through your eyes.”

In 1973, she said: “I think of myself as a character actor. Character actors like to put on faces and find out what makes oddballs come alive.” Stardom was of no interest to her. “All I really want is to be able to work in good material with good people.” She got her wish.

Thomas died in 1991. She is survived by her children, Paul, Amanda, Tony, Peter, John and Sarah, nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Frances Sternhagen, actor, born 13 January 1930; died 27 November 2023

Peter Donat was born in 1928 in Nova Scotia, Canada. He is a nephew of British actor Robert Donat. His films include “The Godfather Part Two” in 1974, “The Hindenburg”, “The China Syndrome” and “Babe”. He has guest starred in virtually all of the major television series in the U.S.

IMDB entry:

The Cando-American actor Peter Donat had a 50-year-long career in TV, motion pictures and theater. So respected was Donat, that Francis Ford Coppola considered casting him in the role of Tom Hagen in The Godfather (1972) that went to Robert Duvall.

The nephew of Oscar-winning actor Robert Donat, Peter was born Pierre Collingwood Donat on January 20, 1928 in Kentville, Nova Scotia. His father, landscape gardener Philip Donat, was Anglo-Canadian while his Marie (née Bardet) was French-Canadian.

In 1950, the 22-year-old Donat moved to the United States to study drama at Yale. (He is a naturalized U.S. citizen.) Donat frequently returned to Canada for acting work, appearing in the lead in a 1961 production of Donald Jack‘s play “The Canvas Barricade” at the Stratford Festival. He was also in the Canadian TV serial Moment of Truth (1964), which was broadcast on a commercial TV in the States.

Peter Donat was married for 16 years to Emmy-winner Michael Learned. The couple, who divorced in 1972, had three children. when they divorced. They have three children – Caleb, Christopher and Lucas.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: v

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Mary Wickes was a wonderful American character actress. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1910. She first came to screen attention in 1942 in “Now Voyager” with Bette Davis. Her other films include “JUne Bride”, “Anna Lucasta”, “By the Light of the Silvery Moon”, “Good Morning Miss Dove” and “Fate Is the Hunter”. In her eighties she gave sterling performanes in “Postcards from the Edge”, “Sister Act” and “Little Women” with Susan Sarandon. She died in 1995 in Los Angeles. A new biography of Ms Wickes is published in 2013.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

From the grand old school of wisecracking, loud and lanky Mary Wickes had few peers while forging a career as a salty scene-stealer. Her abrupt, tell-it-like-it-is demeanor made her a consistent audience favorite on every medium for over six decades. She was particularly adroit in film parts that chided the super rich or exceptionally pious, and was a major chastiser in generation-gap comedies. TV holds a vault full of not-to-be-missed vignettes where she served as a brusque foil to many a top TV comic star. Case in point: who could possibly forget her merciless ballet taskmaster, Madame Lamond, puttingLucille Ball through her rigorous paces at the ballet bar in a classic I Love Lucy (1951) episode?

Unlike the working-class characters she embraced, this veteran character comedienne was actually born Mary Isabella Wickenhauser on June 13, 1910, in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of a well-to-do banker. Of Irish and German heritage, she grew into a society débutante following high school and graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a degree in political science. She forsook a law career, however, after being encouraged by a college professor to try theater, and she made her debut doing summer stock in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The rest, as they say, is history.

Prodded on by the encouragement of stage legend Ina Claire whom she met doing summer theater, Mary transported herself to New York where she quickly earned a walk-on part in the Broadway play “The Farmer Takes a Wife” starring Henry Fonda in 1934. In the show she also understudied The Wizard of Oz (1939)’s “Wicked Witch” Margaret Hamilton, and earned excellent reviews when she went on in the part. Plain and hawkish in looks while noticeably tall and gawky in build, Mary was certainly smart enough to see that comedy would become her career path and she enjoyed showing off in roles playing much older than she was. New York stage work continued to pour in, and she garnered roles in “Spring Dance” (1936), “Stage Door” (1936), “Hitch Your Wagon” (1937), “Father Malachy’s Miracle (1937) and, in an unusual bit of casting, Orson Welles‘ Mercury Theatre production of “Danton’s Death.” All the while she kept fine-tuning her acting craft in summer stock.

A series of critically panned plays followed until a huge door opened for her in the form of Miss Preen, the beleaguered nurse to an acid-tongued, wheelchair-bound radio star (played by the hilarious Monty Woolley) in the George S. Kaufman/Moss Hart comedy “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” Oddly enough, for once, it was Mary doing the cowering. The play was the toast of Broadway for two wacky years and she went on tour with it as well. She also become a Kaufman favorite.

Hollywood took notice as well, and when Warner Bros. decided to film the play, it allowed both Mary and Woolley to recreate their classic roles. The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942), which co-starred Bette Davis and Ann Sheridan, was a grand film hit and Mary was now officially on board in Hollywood, given plenty of chances to freelance. At Warners she lightened up the proceedings a bit in the Bette Davis tearjerker Now, Voyager (1942) as the nurse to Gladys Cooper. Elsewhere she traded quips with Lou Costello as a murder suspect in the amusing whodunit Who Done It? (1942); played a WAC in Private Buckaroo (1942) with The Andrews Sisters; and dished out her patented smart-alecky services in both Happy Land (1943) and My Kingdom for a Cook (1943).

Mary returned to Broadway for a few seasons, often for Kaufman, and did some radio work as well, but returned to Hollywood and played yet another nurse in The Decision of Christopher Blake (1948), a part written especially for her. She appeared with ‘Bette Davis (I)’ for a third time in June Bride (1948), finding some fine moments playing a magazine editor. Mary went on to perform yeoman work in On Moonlight Bay (1951) and its sequel, By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1953); I’ll See You in My Dreams (1951);White Christmas (1954) and The Music Man (1962), the last as one of the “Pick-A-Little, Talk-A-Little” housewives of River City.

Television roles also began filtering in for Mary as she continued to put her cryptic comedy spin on her harried housekeepers, teachers, servants and other working commoner types. Mary played second banana to a queue of comedy’s best known legends in the 1950s and 1960s, notably Lucille Ball (who was a long-time neighbor and pal off-screen), Danny Thomas, Red Skelton, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Jimmy Durante, Peter Lind Hayes and Gertrude Berg. Her stellar work with Ms. Berg on the series The Gertrude Berg Show (1961) garnered Mary an Emmy nomination. Among babyboomers, she is probably best remembered as Miss Cathcart in Dennis the Menace (1959).

In later years Mary’s gangly figure filled out a bit as she continued to appear here and there on the small screen in both guest star and series’ regular parts. Later in life she enjoyed a bit of a resurgence. Recalled earlier for her Sister Clarissa in the madcap comedy films The Trouble with Angels (1966) and its sequel, Where Angels Go Trouble Follows! (1968), both with Rosalind Russell, Mary donned the habit once again decades later as crabby musical director Sister Mary Lazarus in the box-office smash Sister Act(1992) and its sequel, Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993). She also churned out a few roles as cranky, matter-of-fact relatives in both Postcards from the Edge (1990) as Meryl Streep‘s grandmother and ‘Shirley Maclaine”s mother, and in Little Women (1994) as Aunt March opposite Winona Ryder Jo. True to form, one of her last roles was voicing a gargoyle in the animated The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), which was released after her death.

The never-married Los Angeles-based performer died in October of 1995 after entering the hospital with respiratory problems. While a patient there, Mary suffered a broken hip from an accidental fall and complications quickly set in following surgery. She was 85 years young. When it came to deadpan comedy, Mary was certainly no second banana. She was a truly a star.

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

Peter Allen was born in 1944 in Tenterfield, New South Wales, Australia. He was a terrific singer and songwriter whose career was based mostly in the U.S. He did feature in some films including “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band” in 1978 and “The Pirates of Penzance” in 1982. Peter Allen died in 1992 in San Diego, California at the age of 46.

Australian Dictionary of Irish Biography by Michelle Arrow:

Peter Allen (1944–1992), singer, songwriter, and entertainer, was born Peter Richard Woolnough on 10 February 1944 at Tenterfield, New South Wales, elder of two children of New South Wales-born parents Richard John Woolnough, soldier and grocer, and his wife Marion Bryden, née Davidson. His grandfather, George Woolnough, was a saddle maker, whom he later immortalised in the song ‘Tenterfield Saddler’ (1972). Raised in Armidale, Peter’s performing career began when he was eleven, playing the piano in the ladies’ lounge of the New England Hotel. Educated at Armidale High School, he left school after his violent and alcoholic father committed suicide in November 1958, and moved to Lismore with his mother and sister. In 1959 he went to Surfers Paradise to look for work and met Chris Bell, an English-born singer-guitarist of a similar age. Assisted by Bell’s father, and inspired by the chart-topping Everly Brothers, they formed a singing duo called the ‘Allen Brothers,’ making their debut at the Grand Hotel in Coolangatta. Within a year they were based in Sydney, had signed a recording contract, and reached a national audience through the television program Bandstand.

The Allen Brothers toured Australia and Asia. In 1964 the American singer and actress Judy Garland saw them performing at the Hong Kong Hilton and invited them to be the opening act for her upcoming concert tour of the United States of America. Chris and Peter Allen, as they became known, performed in American nightclubs for the rest of the decade, releasing their only album in 1968. On 3 March 1967 in New York, Peter married Garland’s daughter, the singer and actress Liza Minnelli. They separated in 1970 when Allen acknowledged his homosexuality, and were divorced in 1974.

In 1970 Allen also parted ways with Chris Bell and pursued a solo career. Initially performing at small clubs in New York and Los Angeles, he formed a song-writing partnership with Carole Bayer Sager that produced a number of enduring favourites, including ‘Don’t Cry Out Loud’ (1976). His songs were increasingly performed by other artists: Olivia Newton-John’s recording of ‘I Honestly Love You,’ which Allen co-wrote with Jeff Barry, topped the American charts and earned two Grammy awards in 1974, including Record of the Year. In 1977 ‘I Go To Rio,’ from his successful album Taught by Experts (1976), was a hit in Australia, France, and Brazil.

Allen’s biggest successes came in the early 1980s. He presented a series of concerts at New York’s Radio City Music Hall in 1981, becoming the first male performer to dance with the venue’s famous dance troupe, the Rockettes. In 1982 (with Burt Bacharach, Carole Bayer Sager, and Christopher Cross) he won an Academy award for best original song, for ‘Arthur’s Theme’ (from the film Arthur, starring Dudley Moore and Minnelli). His fame and popularity also grew in Australia, which he visited frequently. During his 1980 tour, a Festival Records executive, Alan Hely, noticing that Allen closed his shows by saying ‘I still call Australia home,’ suggested it would make a good song title. Allen agreed and the song became his best loved. His greatest career disappointment was the failure of his musical, Legs Diamond, which was savaged by critics after its premiere on Broadway in 1988.

Allen was charismatic if not conventionally handsome: he had a prominent nose and chin and a receding hairline, but a warm smile and a lithe frame, which was often clad in his trademark Hawaiian shirts. A cheeky, exuberant performer, he was open about his homosexuality at a time when many of his contemporaries were not. From around 1970 he was in a relationship with Greg Connell, a male model from Texas who later worked as the sound and light designer on Allen’s live shows. According to Allen’s biographer, Connell was ‘Peter’s big love’ (Maclean 1996, 166). Connell died from AIDS in 1984.

In 1990 Allen was appointed AM in recognition of his contribution to the performing arts. Diagnosed with throat cancer during a tour of Australia in January 1992, he died of AIDS-related Kaposi’s sarcoma on 18 June 1992 in San Diego, California. The prime minister of Australia, Paul Keating, paid tribute to Allen’s ‘songs of sensitivity which struck an emotional chord with his fellow Australians’ (Jones and Hallett 1992, 11). In 1993 he was posthumously inducted into the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Hall of Fame. His life was retold in a musical, The Boy From Oz (1998), written by Nick Enright and featuring Allen’s greatest hits. The National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, holds a tender portrait (1980) of Allen by the photographer William Yang.

Research edited by Samuel Furphy