Wende Wagner was born in 1941 in Connecticut. She made her television debut in 1959 in an episode of “Gunsmoke”. Her film credits include “Rio Conchos” in 1964 and “The Green Hornet” series on TV in 1966. She died in 1997.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Beautiful, vibrant-looking 60s actress Wende Wagner (her real name) was born in Connecticut in 1941. Of French, German and Native American heritage, her exotic looks would later serve her well on TV and in motion pictures. She inherited her athletic genes from her parents; her father was a former Olympic swimming/diving coach turned Naval Commander and her mother was a champion downhill skier.
The sweet-looking beauty entered the entertainment arena as a model and made her TV debut in 1959 on the Wagon Train (1957) western series. Very much a free spirit, she was more interested in surfing and traveling around the world than a career. She combined both passions when she earned work as an underwater female stunt double forLloyd Bridges on his hit series Sea Hunt (1958) as well as the TV series The Aquanauts(1960), which took her to ideal tropical settings. She also stunted for such movies asSeptember Storm (1960) co-starring Joanne Dru and Mark Stevens.
On that movie set, she met and subsequently married fellow stunt diver Courtney Brown(he was Mr. Stevens’ double in that film), who coached her in underwater shooting. They had a daughter, Tiffany. During this time, they based their lives in the Bahamas where most of their shooting occurred. They divorced, however, after a short time and she returned to Hollywood where she won the role of an Apache girl in the movie Rio Conchos(1964) with Richard Boone, Anthony Franciosa and Stuart Whitman. A few years later, she married actor James Mitchum, Robert Mitchum‘s eldest son, but they too split. Wende’s career continued in the 60s with a couple of movies and a role in the The Green Hornet (1966) TV adventure series but she eventually dropped out of sight. Little was heard from her until reports of her death from cancer in 1997.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.ne
Linda Evans has had two major television shows in her credits. “The Big Valley” with Barbara Stanwyck was hughely popular in the 1960’s and then in the 80’s, “Dynasty” with John Forsythe and Joan Collins was even more popular. Linda Evans was born in 1942 in Hartford, Connecticut. She began her acting career on television in 1960. Her film appearances include “The Klansman” with Richard Burton in 1974, “Avalanche Express” with Robert Shaw and Lee Marvin and in 1980, “Tom Horn” opposite Steve McQueen.
TCM Overview:
Considered one of the most beautiful women on television for more than 20 years, actress Linda Evans personified elegance, style and grace. Getting her start in commercials, Evans quickly segued into television work, landing an early guest appearance on the sitcom “Bachelor Father” (CBS/NBC/ABC, 1959-1962). She instantly became one of TV’s most desirable actresses when she was cast opposite film legend Barbara Stanwyck on the Western melodrama, “The Big Valley” (ABC, 1965-69). Her marriage to actor-director John Derek – a notorious collector of stunning actresses – confirmed her sex-symbol status, although Derek’s eventual desertion of Evans for the much younger ingénue, Bo Derek, was a bitter lesson in the nebulous value of physical beauty. After a decade of infrequent work on television and in films like the action-thriller “Avalanche Express” (1979), she returned in grand style on the opulent primetime soap “Dynasty” (ABC, 1981-89). As Krystle Carrington, the gorgeous wife of fabulously wealthy oil magnate, she lent an air of class to the garish proceedings, even when embroiled in vicious catfights with the conniving Alexis (Joan Collins). In the post-“Dynasty” years, Evans gradually entered into semi-retirement as an actress, although occasional reunion specials and a memoir kept her in the hearts and minds of her loyal fans. Known for her personal virtues as well as her alluring visage, Evans lent credence to the idea the character and beauty need not be mutually exclusive.
The only child of two professional dancers, Evans was born Linda Evanstad in Hartford, CT on Nov. 18, 1942. The family relocated to North Hollywood when she was six months old. Evans enjoyed a childhood among future stars, including fellow Hollywood High School classmate, Stephanie Powers. However, she suffered from extreme shyness during her teen years – so much so that her principal suggested that she take acting classes to develop self-confidence. Ironically, she actually broke into show business shortly thereafter when, while accompanying a nervous classmate on an audition for a TV commercial, she was noticed by an ad agency director and invited to read for the spot. Evans landed the commercial and several others, which lead to acting roles on television and in film, beginning with a guest appearance on the comedy “Bachelor Father” (CBS/NBC/ABC, 1959-1962), as a teen friend of cast member Noreen Corcoran, who develops a crush on her uncle, played by John Forsythe, who would famously become her onscreen husband 20 years later.
More television jobs followed, including repeat appearances on “The Adventure of Ozzie and Harriet” (ABC, 1952-66) and “The Untouchables” (ABC, 1959-63), before she made her film debut in the 1963 courtroom drama “Twilight of Honor” (1963), starring Richard Chamberlain. That same year, she signed a contract with MGM, but appeared mainly in features for other studios, including Disney’s “Those Calloways” (1965) and American International Pictures’ “Beach Blanket Bingo” (1965), in which she crooned two songs as a kidnapped pop singer. That same year, she auditioned for, but failed to land an upcoming Western feature, but the film’s producers offered her a role on a new Western series, “The Big Valley,” which starred Hollywood legend Barbara Stanwyck. The young actress took the role, and at the same time, decided to drop the last syllable of her Scandinavian name in favor of something more Americanized.
Thanks to the popular TV program, the newly christened Linda Evans became a star. Her new fame helped hasten an introduction to an actor-turned-director-producer and photographer named John Derek, who had a major weakness for blondes. He took Evans under his wing and essentially managed her career, directing her in a 1969 feature called “Childish Things” and photographing her for Playboy in 1971. The couple married in 1968, but divorced in 1974 when it was discovered that Derek had fallen for his latest discovery, a teenaged actress named Mary Catherine Collins who Derek had nicknamed Bo. Despite the circumstances, Evans and Derek and his new wife remained friendly for many years. For nearly the next decade, Evans worked steadily in episodic television and TV features; she made a stab at returning to series work with the 1977 series “Hunter” (CBS) as a spy opposite James Franciscus, but the show lasted only three months. Film work proved consistent but equally unrewarding. Her features during that period include the Western “Standing Tall,” co-starring Robert Forster, with whom she had previously co-starred in the pilot for his series “Nakia,” (ABC, 1974); the espionage adventure “Avalanche Express” (1979); and one of Steve McQueen’s final films, “Tom Horn” (1980). Evans had also married again, this time to real estate tycoon Stan Herman in 1976, but the couple was divorced in 1981.
The year before, Evans had received a script for a pilot from legendary producer Aaron Spelling called simply, “Oil.” The series, which was later retitled “Dynasty,” ushered in the second and most successful phase of her acting career. As Krystle Carrington, wife to powerful oil magnate Blake Carrington (John Forsythe), Evans was at the center of the show’s high-camp machinations, which frequently had her battling her devious family – especially Blake’s ex-wife, Alexis (played to the hilt by Joan Collins) and all manner of guest stars. Her strong character, coupled with her famous blonde – almost silvery – hair and fabulous Bob Mackie dresses, proved to many television viewers and critics that a forty-something actress could be sexy – an unheard of idea at that time. For her efforts, Evans won a Golden Globe in 1982 and a People’s Choice Award in 1985, as well as earning a nomination for an Emmy in 1983. Taking advantage of her high-profile status, she also became a popular spokesperson for the sugar-free beverage Crystal Light, beginning in 1984. After the iconic Aaron Spelling series wrapped in 1989, Evans returned to play Krystle once again in a 1991 TV movie “Dynasty: The Reunion,” which wrapped up many loose storylines.
Post-“Dynasty,” Evans made infrequent returns to television, appearing in two “Gambler” TV movie sequels with Kenny Rogers, “The Adventure Continues” (1983) and “The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw” (1991), and was part of the massive cast for the 1986 miniseries “North and South: Book II.” In the last decade, she indulged her “Dynasty” fans by participating in sudsier projects like “Dazzle” (1995), a Judith Krantz adaptation which cast her as the matriarch of a wealthy family. “The Stepsister” (1997) mined the same vein, but added a thriller wrinkle with a psychotic stepsister intruding on Evans’ marriage. In 2005, Evans reunited once again with her “Dynasty” nemesis Joan Collins for the stage production, “Legends,” about two combative former movie stars. Evans kept the nostalgia alive when she joined her former castmates for the “Dynasty Reunion: Catfights & Caviar” (CBC, 2006), a retrospective of the long-running primetime soap. Though now retired from acting, she entered as a contestant for the final season of the U.K. version of the cooking competition “Hell’s Kitchen” (ITV, 2004-09). Under the tutelage of moderator-instructor Marco Pierre White and buoyed by the popular vote of the viewing audience, Evans went on to win the competition. Evans later became a published author with the 2011 release of Recipes for Life: My Memories, a combination of candid memoir and inspirational cookbook.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Shirl Conway was born in 1916 in New York. She had a long and prestigous career on the stage. From 1962 until 1965 she was the star of the television series “The Nurses”. She died in 2007 at the age of 90.
Shirl Conway was born on June 13, 1916 in Franklinville, New York, USA as Shirley Elizabeth Crosman. She was an actress, known for The Doctors and the Nurses (1962), Plain and Fancy (1956) and The Strangers Came (1949). She was married to Larson, Gordon, Bernie Wayne and Bill Johnson. She died on May 7, 2007 in Shelton, Washington, USA.
Zina Bethune was born in 1945 in New York City. She was on the Broadway stage in 1960 playing the President’s daughter in “Sunrise Over Campobello”. She was featured in the television series “The Hurses” from 1962 until 1965. She was in Martin Scorsese’s “Who’s That Knocking at My Door” in 1967. She died in 2012.
Her IMDB entry:
Lovely, lithe and light-haired Zina Bethune, noted ballet dancer, choreographer and teacher, also had a promising acting career during the late 1950s and 1960s. The native New Yorker was born on February 17, 1945, the daughter of William Charles Bethune (who died in 1950 when Zina was 5) and established actress Ivy Bethune (née Vigner) ofGeneral Hospital (1963) fame. Formally trained in dance from age 6, she was a student at George Balanchine‘s School of American Ballet, and performed with the New York City Ballet as a teen despite the fact she was diagnosed at various times with scoliosis, lymphedema and hip dysplasia.
As an adolescent, she appeared in several daytime TV dramas, including a breakthrough part (1956-1958) as the first “Robin Lang” on the serial Guiding Light (1952). Over time, she joined the cast of other soaps, including a lengthy running part on Love of Life(1951) from 1965-1971 and, many years later, a recurring part on Santa Barbara (1984). Zina co-starred with Shirl Conway on the TV drama The Doctors and the Nurses (1962) [best known as “The Nurses,” the series was later entitled “The Doctors and the Nurses”], and won touching reviews for her naive student nurse role. She also played the sensitive role of “Amy” in one of several TV adaptations of Louisa May Alcott‘s belovedLittle Women (1958). As a young adult, she continued to demonstrate a formidable dramatic flair on such popular shows as Route 66 (1960), Naked City (1958), Gunsmoke(1955), Lancer (1968), The Invaders (1967), Emergency! (1972) and CHiPs (1977).
Making her first movie appearance as one of the Roosevelt children in Sunrise at Campobello (1960) starring Ralph Bellamy and Greer Garson, she did not make as indelible a mark in film as promised, but did earn semi-cult notice for her moving streetwise role opposite Harvey Keitel in Martin Scorsese‘s autobiographical feature-length debut Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967) [aka Who’s That Knocking at My Door?], a notable predecessor to his acclaimed star-maker Mean Streets (1973).
Zina graced many musicals as a singer/dancer and made her Broadway debut at age 11 playing “Tessie” in “The Most Happy Fella”. A number of touring productions came her way in the form of “Sweet Charity”, “Oklahoma!”, “Damn Yankees!”, “Carnival”, “Carousel” and “The Unsinkable Molly Brown”. Non-musical offerings came in the form of “The Member of the Wedding”, “Barefoot in the Park” and “The Owl and the Pussycat”. In 1992, Zina returned to Broadway as a replacement in “Grand Hotel” in which she portrayed Russian ballerina “Elizaveta Grushinskaya”.
Ms. Bethune’s ultimate passion and commitment, however, has remained in the art of dance…and on many levels. In her prime, she was a highly-regarded prima ballerina. Among her many credits were “Swan Lake”, “Le Corsair”, “Romeo and Juliet”, “Black Swan”, “Giselle”, “Don Quixote” and “Sleeping Beauty”, not to mention Balanchine’s own “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux”. A guest artist with The Royal Danish Ballet, Nevada Dance Theatre and San Francisco Ballet Theatre, she went on to form her own New York-based company in 1969 — Zina Bethune and Company. Her career as a dance director and choreographer has encompassed over 50 plays, films, videos and ballets.
Throughout her life, she has remained steadfast in her contribution to children with physical and mental disabilities. Helping them embrace the art of dance as a means of self-expression and therapy, she was prompted by her own physical ailments diagnosed while growing up. In addition to the Theatredance performance company she founded in 1980, she also organized Dance Outreach (now known as Infinite Dreams) in 1982, which continues to enroll disabled young children in dance-related activities throughout Southern California.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Patrice Munsel was born in 1925 in Spokane, Washington. She had a brilliant career in opera with just the occasional film e.g. “Melba” in 1953. She died in 2016.
Mother of Rhett Schuler, Heidi Schuler, Scott Schuler and Nicole Schuler.
American coloratura soprano, the youngest singer/soubrette who ever starred at the Metropolitan Opera. Following along the path of Lily Pons, she made her official Met debut on December 4, 1943, singing Philine in “Mignon”. Perhaps best known for the saucy role of Adele in “Die Fledermaus”, she performed at the Metropolitan well over 200 times. Trained by legendary voice coach Giacomo Spadoni.
Made only one film. She played the title role of Dame Nellie Melba in the film Melba(1953). She also had her own television series, The Patrice Munsel Show (1956), which ran a season.
In 1958 she ended her career as an opera singer and began to perform in musical comedies and operettas, including such vehicles as “Rose Marie”, “The Merry Widow”, “Song of Norway” and “Kiss Me, Kate”.
Widow of candy heir Robert Schuler, who turned TV producer and produced her own 1950s TV variety series.
Only child of a dentist and an accomplished pianist, her last name was originally spelled “Munsil”.
Studied whistling for seven years with a Spokane whistling teacher, Mrs. Marjorie Clark Kennedy. Her teacher claimed she could have had a real career in whistling and she stuck with it because she did beautiful bird work.
Her first professional job was in her early teens with a small touring opera company that came to Spokane wherein she was given a part in the chorus for the performances of Cavalleria Rusticana, Pagliacci and Carmen.
During the 1950s and ’60s, she was the TV spokesperson for the Camp Fire Girls (now Campfire USA), a non-sectarian youth organization styled along the lines of the Boy and Girl Scouts of America.
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
“New York Times” obituary:
Patrice Munsel, a coloratura soprano who as a teenager became one of the Metropolitan Opera’s youngest stars and later crossed over into television and musical theater, died on Aug. 4 at her home in Schroon Lake, N.Y. She was 91. Her death was confirmed on Wednesday by her daughter Heidi Schuler Bright. Ms. Munsel was 17 when, in March 1943, she won a Met contract and $1,000 after tying for first place in the eighth annual Metropolitan Auditions of the Air, a precursor to the Met’s National Council Auditions, a program to discover promising young opera singers and nurture their careers. (The other first-place winner was Christine Johnson, who originated the role of Nettie Fowler in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Carousel” when it opened on Broadway in 1945.) By November Ms. Munsel had signed a three-year contract with the impresario Sol Hurok for a guaranteed $120,000. On Dec. 4, at 18, she made her Met debut as the temptress Philine in Ambroise Thomas’s “Mignon,” wearing a good-luck ring and a crown lent to her by the soprano Lily Pons.
The audience gave Ms. Munsel a standing ovation of several minutes. The critics were generally less kind. “For this part her voice is neither sufficiently big, or developed, or brilliant enough,” the critic Olin Downes wrote in The New York Times. “In plain words,” he said, “she was cruelly miscast, in this, one of the most exacting roles in the coloratura soprano’s repertory.” More than 40 years later, in a Los Angeles Times interview, Ms. Munsel said simply, “I didn’t have a clue as to what the part was about.” She performed a total of 225 times at the Met, excelling as the maid Adele in Strauss’s “Die Fledermaus” and earning praise from Downes for her “virtuoso singing” and “very amusing acting.” He declared her born for the role “by personality, wit, temperament.” Rudolf Bing, the company’s general manager during Ms. Munsel’s tenure, is said to have called her “a superb soubrette.”
But Ms. Munsel had given up touring the moment she became engaged to Robert C. Schuler, an adman turned television producer, whom she married in 1952. Not long after returning from their summer-long European honeymoon, she did a star turn on movie screens as Dame Nellie Melba, the 19th-century Australian soprano, in the 1953 biopic “Melba,” produced by the Hollywood legend Sam Spiegel. From there, she strutted her way into the Las Vegas nightclub scene, peeling off a voluminous silk skirt mid-aria at the New Frontier in 1955 to reveal a halter and bejeweled pink capris. Two years later, Ms. Munsel embarked on a television career with “The Patrice Munsel Show,” a variety series on ABC, joining guests like Eddie Albert, Andy Williams, Tony Bennett and John Raitt in a mix of light opera and pop, though she admitted to hating “double-entendre lyrics.” It was canceled after one season.
Ms. Munsel last performed at the Met in 1958 as Mimi in “La Bohème,” a role she had long coveted. She then focused on motherhood, traveling and musical comedies, performing splits in the 1965 Lincoln Center Theater presentation of “The Merry Widow” and occasionally turning productions of “The Sound of Music” and “The King and I” into family affairs with her four children. Besides her daughter Heidi, two other children survive: another daughter, Nicole Schuler, and a son, Scott Schuler, as well as two grandsons and two great-granddaughters. Her husband, who in 2005 chronicled his 50-year marriage to Ms. Munsel in the book “The Diva & I: My Life with Metropolitan Opera Star Patrice Munsel,” died in 2007. Their son Rhett Carroll Schuler died in 2005.
Patrice Beverly Munsil was born on May 14, 1925, in Spokane, Wash. (She later changed the spelling of her surname to Munsel at the Metropolitan Opera’s request.) Her father, Dr. Audley J. Munsil, was a dental surgeon; her mother, Eunice Munsil, was a homemaker and an accomplished piano player.
Ms. Munsel had a lifelong comedic streak. “I’m sure when I emerged from my mother’s womb, the doctor slapped me, I hit a high C and slapped him back,” she wrote in a biographical sketch on her website.
She began studying ballet and tap at 6 and soon, inspired by Walt Disney, decided that she wanted to be a professional whistler. “There were always birds whistling in the background” of films like “Cinderella” and “Snow White,” she explained, “so I decided to whistle my way to Hollywood.”
Her parents, eager to encourage any and all of her artistic aspirations, managed to find her a whistling teacher.
Jane Bryan seemed on the cusp of a great career in movies when in 1940 she retired after marrying a wealthy businessman. She was born in 1918 in Hollywood. In 1937 she had a prominent role in “Marked Woman” with Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart. She went on to star in “Kid Galahad” with Edward G. Robinson and “Each Dawn I Die” with James Cagney. Jane Bryan died in 2009 at the age of 90.
Her “Guardian” obituary:
Mrs Jane O’Brien Dart, who has died aged 90, was a wealthy and influential society hostess, philanthropist, staunch Republican (an intimate of the Reagans) and an art patron and collector. However, for aficionados of 1930s Warner Bros pictures, she was Jane Bryan, the winsome, fresh-faced ingenue who was the innocent foil to the studio’s top gangster stars, James Cagney, George Raft, Edward G Robinson and Humphrey Bogart. She also co-starred in four films with Bette Davis, playing her daughter once (although she was only 10 years younger) and her sister twice.
The first with Davis, who became a close friend, was Marked Woman (1937), Lloyd Bacon’s superb gangster drama. Davis plays a nightclub “hostess”, keeping her profession secret from Bryan as her unworldly college student sister. Bryan brought a touching fragility to the role, especially when she finds herself caught in a web she cannot comprehend, before dying tragically.
In Kid Galahad (1937), the Michael Curtiz film that elevated the boxing movie to more than just a programme filler, Bryan was the virginal sister of fight manager Robinson who falls for one of her brother’s fighters (Wayne Morris). This goads Robinson into almost incestuous jealousy. “We love each other. You can’t keep us apart, you have no reason to,” she pleads. “It’s your own filthy temper and dirty mind. We haven’t done anything wrong.” Davis plays Fluff, Robinson’s girlfriend, who defends Bryan, even though she is in love with the boxer herself.
Bryan was inevitably the blandest of the siblings in Anatole Litvak’s period piece, The Sisters (1938) – the others being Bette Davis and Anita Louise – though she had some good scenes when she discovers her husband (Dick Foran) is fooling around with the local tart. In Edmund Goulding’s The Old Maid (1939), Bryan is good as the spoilt girl brought up by rich widow Miriam Hopkins, not knowing that her real mother is her spinster aunt (Davis). In the final tearjerking scene, Bryan, leaving for her honeymoon, makes a special point of kissing her “Aunt Charlotte” goodbye.
Born in Los Angeles, the daughter of a lawyer, Bryan made her screen debut aged 18 as the disinherited granddaughter of a murdered millionaire in The Case of the Black Cat (1936), a B feature starring Ricardo Cortez as Perry Mason. As a Warner Bros contract player, she went on to make a further 16 features, all but one (These Glamour Girls, MGM, 1939) for Warners, in the next four years. Among them were Confession (1937), in which she played a naive girl once again, fighting for her honour against scoundrel Basil Rathbone; A Slight Case of Murder (1938), as bootlegger Robinson’s pure, finishing-school-educated daughter; and Each Dawn I Die (1939), as Cagney’s girlfriend trying to get him out of prison.
She was the female lead in We Are Not Alone (1939), an allegorical drama based on a James Hilton novel, starring Paul Muni as a married doctor in love with Bryan as a German girl in England at the beginning of the first world war (arguably her finest performance); in Invisible Stripes (1939), in which she tries to keep her fiance William Holden from following his older brother, George Raft, into crime; and in Girls on Probation (1938), in which she played another innocent, unwittingly getting mixed up with criminals until rescued by district attorney Ronald Reagan. It was the first of three films with him, the others being the military school comedies Brother Rat (1938) and Brother Rat and a Baby (1940). The latter was her last film.
On New Year’s Eve 1939, just as her career was going smoothly, with no real highs or lows, she married a businessman, Justin Dart, who would take over the floundering Rexall drug chain in 1945 and build it into Dart-Kraft Inc, a food and consumer products conglomerate. It is doubtful whether she would have become a big star (though there were glimmerings in We Are Not Alone) and the marriage probably came at the right time.
A few weeks after the Darts’ marriage, Reagan married Jane Wyman, his co-star in the Brother Rat movies, and the two couples met for dinner regularly. “At the time, Reagan was a rabid Democrat,” Dart recalled in 1980. “My wife warned me not to talk politics.” By the time Reagan married Nancy Davis, in 1952, he was shifting to the right and the Darts remained part of their inner circle. They were partly responsible for persuading and aiding Reagan to run for governor of California in 1966 and then, in Gore Vidal’s phrase, to become the “acting president”.
After Dart died in 1984, his wife donated their art collection, containing around 70 paintings, to the Monterey Museum of Art, where she served as a trustee. A devout Catholic, she is survived by two sons and a daughter.
• Jane Bryan (Jane O’Brien Dart), actor, born 11 June 1918; died 8 April 2009
Her obituary by Ronald Bergan in “The Guardian” can be accessed here.
Phil Carey was born in 1925 in New Jersey. He served with the U.S. military in World War Two and again during the Korean War. His film appearances include “This Woman Is Dangerous” with Joan Crawford in 1952, “Calamity Jane” with Doris Day and “Pushover” with Kim Novak. On television he featured in the series “Laredo”. Phil Carey died in 2009 at the age of 83.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Tall, blond and of rugged proportions, handsome actor Philip Carey started out as a standard 1950s film actor in westerns, war stories and crime yarns but didn’t achieve full-fledged stardom until well past age 50 when he joined the daytime line-up as ornery Texas tycoon Asa Buchanan on the popular soap One Life to Live (1968) in 1979. He lived pretty much out of the saddle after that, enjoying the patriarchal role for nearly three decades.
He was born with the rather unrugged name of Eugene Carey on July 15, 1925, in Hackensack, New Jersey. Growing up on Long Island, he served with the Marine Corps during World War II and the Korean War. He attended (briefly) New York’s Mohawk University and studied drama at the University of Miami where he met his college sweetheart, Maureen Peppler. They married in 1949 and went on to have three children: Linda, Jeffrey and Lisa Ann.
The 6’4″ actor impressed a talent scout with his brawny good looks while appearing in the summer stock play “Over 21” in New England, and he was offered a contract with Warner Bros as a result. Billed as Philip Carey, he didn’t waste any time toiling in bit parts, making his film debut billed fifth in the John Wayne submarine war dramaOperation Pacific (1951). Phil could cut a good figure in military regalia and also showed strong stuff in film noir. A most capable co-star, he tended to be upstaged, however, by either a stronger name female or male star or by the action at hand. He was paired up with Frank Lovejoy in the McCarthy-era I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), and Steve Cochran in the prison tale Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison (1951). Warner Bros. starJoan Crawford was practically the whole movie in the film noir This Woman Is Dangerous(1952) co-starring the equally overlooked David Brian and Dennis Morgan; Calamity Jane(1953) was a vehicle for Doris Day; and he donned his familiar cavalry duds in the background of Gary Cooper in the Civil War western Springfield Rifle (1952).
In 1953, Carey left Warner Bros. and signed up with Columbia Pictures where he was, more than not, billed as “Phil Carey.” Here again he fell into the rather non-descript rugged mold as the stoic soldier or stolid police captain. He did find plenty of work, however, and was frequently top-billed. He battled the Sioux in The Nebraskan (1953); played a former subordinate member of the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid gang who has to clear his name in Wyoming Renegades (1954); was a brute force to be reckoned with in They Rode West (1954); and had one of his standard movie roles (as an officer) in a better quality movie, Columbia’s Pushover (1954), which spent more time promoting the debut of its starlet Kim Novak as the new Marilyn Monroe. Overshadowed by James Cagney and Jack Lemmon in Mister Roberts (1955) and by Van Heflin, youngJoanne Woodward (in her movie debut) and villain Raymond Burr in the western Count Three and Pray (1955), Phil turned his durable talents more and more to TV in the late 1950s.
Phil was a spokesperson for Granny Goose potato chips commercials, and his deep voice served him well for many seasons as narrator of the nature documentary series Untamed Frontier (1967). One of his best-remembered TV guest appearances, however, was a change-of-pace role on the comedy All in the Family (1971) in which he played a vital, strapping blue-collar pal of Archie Bunker’s whose manly man just happened to be a proud, astereotypical homosexual. His hilarious confrontational scene with a dumbfounded Archie in Kelsey’s bar remains a classic.
Phil’s brief regular role in the daytime soap Bright Promise (1969) in 1972 was just a practice drill for the regular role he would play in 1979 as Texas oilman Asa Buchanan inOne Life to Live (1968). His popularity soared as the moneybags manipulator you loved to hate. Residing in Manhattan for quite some time as a result of the New York-based show, he played the role for close to three decades until diagnosed with lung cancer in January of 2006. Forced to undergo chemotherapy, he officially left the serial altogether in May of 2007, and his character “died” peacefully off-screen a few months later.
Divorced from his first wife, Phil married a much younger lady, Colleen Welch, in 1976 and had two children by her — daughter Shannon (born 1980) and son Sean (born 1983). Phil lost his battle with cancer on February 6, 2009, at the age of 83.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Eddie AlbertEddie Albert ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN, US poster, from left: Eddie Albert, Ike Eisenmann, Kim Richards, Ray Milland (top), 1975
Eddie Albert was born in Rock Island, Illinois in 1906. He is known primarily to-day for the very popular television series “Green Acres” with Eva Gabor. His films include “Brother Rat” and “Roman Holiday” with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn. He died in 2005 aged 99. He was married to Mexican actress Margo ans their son was actor Edward Albert.
Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Independent”
Was there a more likable guy in the movies than Eddie Albert, who has died aged 97? Not conventionally handsome he had a broad, dimpled smile and was generally cast as a friendly innocent or the hero’s good-natured sidekick. If that were all, then Albert would fall into the minor supporting actor category.
But Eddie Albert had a wide-ranging career that included the stage, television, documentaries and personal crusades. Although seldom called upon to act with any depth in the movies, he gave an extraordinary performance as the cowardly army officer in Robert Aldrich’s Attack! (1956).
He also had a pleasant singing voice that enabled him to star on Broadway in The Boys From Syracuse, in which he introduced the Rodgers and Hart song This Can’t Be Love to the world, and The Music Man. Owing to the long-running sitcom Green Acres, he had one of the most famous faces on television and he became a leading campaigner in America in the fight to combat pollution and world hunger.
Born Edward Albert Heimberger in Illinois, he left the University of Minnesota to join a song-and-patter group called the Threesome. When the act became a duo (with Grace Bradt) called The Honeymooners on the radio, and reached New York in 1935, he dropped his surname because he kept being called Eddie Hamburger. After making his Broadway debut a year later, Albert had three huge stage successes in a row, all under George Abbott’s direction.
First as the baseball pitching Virginia military cadet in the forces comedy Brother Rat, then as the hapless “playwright from Oswego” in the farce Room Service, and as Antipholus in the The Boys From Syracuse. During the break between the stage shows, he repeated his role of Bing Edwards (third billed after Wayne Morris and Ronald Reagan) in Warner Bros screen version of Brother Rat (1938), which led to a contract from the studio. One of his best moments in the film was as an expectant father practising baby talk on a stranger’s offspring.
The film engendered two films with the same cast, a sequel, Brother Rat And A Baby, and An Angel From Texas (both 1940), in the latter of which, Albert played a greenhorn fast-talked by Morris and Reagan into investing in a show. These films also starred Priscilla Lane, whose doctor husband Albert played in Four Wives (1939) and Four Mothers (1941). In On Your Toes (1939), an emasculated film version of the Rodgers and Hart musical, he got to (sort-of) dance with ballet dancer Vera Zorina in The Slaughter On 10th Avenue number, and was the lion tamer in a circus run by Humphrey Bogart in The Wagons Roll At Night (1941) of which the New York Times wrote: “Except for the lions and Mr Albert, the film is honky-tonk”.
In Out Of The Fog (I941), Albert played the first of several dullish characters who lose their girlfriends to more charismatic men; in this case Ida Lupino leaves him for gangster John Garfield. A few years later he lost Loretta Young to David Niven in The Perfect Marriage (1946), and Jennifer Jones to Laurence Olivier in Carrie (1952).
In 1942, Albert joined the navy, serving in the Pacific. He returned to the US as a lieutenant and was assigned to training films branch. On the day of his discharge, he married the Mexican film actress Margo, née Maria Marguerita Guadalupe Teresa Estella Bolado Castilia y O’Donnell.
Now freelance, Albert produced and narrated a series of 16mm educational two-reelers, including sex education films, while appearing in a variety of second-string movie roles, though he got to sing for the first time on screen in Hit Parade (1947). Two years later, he returned to Broadway in the Irving Berlin musical Miss Liberty, which ran almost a year.
Despite being Oscar-nominated for best supporting actor for the first time in William Wyler’s Roman Holiday (1953) – he played Gregory Peck’s extrovert, bearded photographer pal – his film parts barely improved. Ironically, as the Persian pedlar Ali Hakim in Oklahoma! (1955),he was the only lead in the film not to have a number. (Even Rod Steiger sang)
Then came Attack!, Robert Aldrich’s powerful film of men in war. “Bob gave me the best role I’ve had in my career,” Albert claimed. “He knew more about the theme of conflict than any director I’ve known.” As the craven army officer, who sends a small platoon behind enemy lines, stranding them without cover, Albert turned his amiable persona inside out, and his portrayal of the man’s mental breakdown was film acting at its naked best. Unfortunately, he had to wait 18 years for almost as challenging a role when Robert Aldrich cast him as the sadistic prison warden (with Nixon characteristics) in The Longest Yard (1974).
In between, an easy-going Albert was seen in The Teahouse Of The August Moon (1956) as the army psychiatrist who is sent to Okinawan village to help Glenn Ford, but ends up going native; as an expatriate American in Pamplona, who is drunk most of the time, and runs the bulls (with an equally inebriated Errol Flynn) in The Sun Also Rises (1957) and as the grinning heavy in The Gun Runners (1958), another Hemingway adaptation (from To Have And Have Not).
In 1960, Albert successfully took over from Robert Preston in the showy role of the conman in The Music Man on Broadway. But his biggest success in the 1960s was the TV sitcom Green Acres, in which he played a big city lawyer who fulfils a lifelong dream of becoming a farmer and drags his glamorous wife (Eva Gabor) to the broken down rural nightmare he has bought.
Among his better parts in films of the period were as the only man among missionaries in China in John Ford’s final film, Seven Women (1966), and the wealthy father of snobbish Cybill Shepherd in The Heartbreak Kid (I972). His nonplussed reaction to nebbish Charles Grodin’s asking for his daughter’s hand, although Grodin is on his honeymoon with another, was worth the Oscar nomination he received. Aldrich again exploited Albert’s dark side in Hustle (1975), in which he was appropriately slimy as a corrupt lawyer involved in a call-girl racket.
In the same year, he starred in another TV series called Switch as a tough ex-cop in the private eye business with ex-con Robert Wagner. But the role Eddie Albert enjoyed most in life, other than as husband to Margo (who died in 1985), and father of the actor Edward Albert and adopted daughter Maria (both of whom survive him), was as a supporter of agronomy around the world to combat hunger. In fact, in 1986, he was given a presidential citation for his work in that field. As long ago as the 1950s, he had visited the Congo to discuss malnutrition with Albert Schweitzer.
Once referred to by an interviewer in 1970 as an ecologist, Albert retorted: “Ecologist, hell! Too mild a word. Check the department of agriculture – 60% of the world is hungry already. With our soil impoverished, our air poisoned, our wildlife crippled by DDT, our rivers and lakes turning into giant cesspools, and mass starvation an apparent inevitability by 1976, I call myself a human survivalist!” About his dire prognostications, Albert commented: “I went around scaring the hell out of a lot of people.” Something he hardly ever did on screen.
· Eddie Albert, actor, born April 22 1908; died May 26 2005
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Douglas Fairbanks Jnr. obituary in “The Guardian” in 2000.
Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was born in 1909 in New York City. He was never eclipsed by his father’s fame and made many fine films including “The Prisioner of Zenda” in 1937 with Madeleine Carroll, “State Secret” with Glynis Johns and “Guanga Din”. He died in 2000 at the age of 90.
Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Independent”:
Douglas Fairbanks Jr, who has died aged 90, carried his father’s name proudly, though he had to overcome paternal neglect and the comparison with one of Hollywood’s legendary stars. Although an attractive and competent actor, he was also runner-up to similar dashing, well-spoken, romantic leads such as Errol Flynn, an exact contemporary, and Ronald Colman. Nevertheless, he managed to carve out a satisfactory career for himself in the movies, and become a prominent personality in other fields.
Despite having all the advantages of a Hollywood kid, his childhood and adolescence were not propitious. Because there could be only one Douglas Fairbanks, his father and mother, Anna Beth Sully, a Rhode Island heiress, referred to their child as “the boy”. His Irish nurse pronounced it “bye’, and from then on he was called Bye by his family and friends.
Douglas Sr, always insecure despite his stardom, later confessed that he had “no more paternal feelings than a tiger in the jungle with his cub.” As Bye grew into a chubby child, and his father was forced on occasions to take his son out, he was obviously uncomfortable at being seen with him. This reserve and restraint rubbed off on the boy. “I never kissed him until he was on his deathbed,” Doug Jr recalled.
Out of guilt, his father gave his son a pony, but one day the boy came home to find that his father had given it to Prince Hirohito of Japan. His mother, on the other hand, tried to give him double helpings of love. He was brought up by her from the age of nine when his parents divorced.
The young Fairbanks sculpted and painted from early youth, exhibiting at 13, and made his screen debut at the same age in Stephen Steps Out, an unsuccessful attempt by Jesse Lasky to exploit the magic of the Fairbanks name.
A few years later, when Doug Jr told his father, now married to Mary Pickford, that he wanted to become an actor and not go to Harvard, he threatened to disown his son, and cut him out of his will.
Without his father’s financial assistance, Fairbanks accepted bit parts and wrote titles for silent films. Gradually, he started to get juvenile leads, notably in Stella Dallas (1925) as Loise Moran’s upper-class beau.
In 1927, he was set to star opposite Greta Garbo in Women Love Diamonds, but when the Swedish star went on strike for more pay, he got Pauline Starke instead. However, the following year he was recompensed by being fourth-billed in Garbo’s film A Woman of Affairs.
In 1929, he married up-and-coming star Joan Crawford. His father called her a cradle snatcher (she was five years older than the groom) and an opportunist who wanted to marry a famous name.
Doug Jr and Joan appeared together as a married couple in Women Love Dia monds, but were divorced four years later after she had deceived him with Clark Gable.
From 1930 to 1935, Fairbanks was in great demand, playing, as he remarked, “big roles in little pictures, and little roles in big pictures.” The big pictures included Howard Hawks’ The Dawn Patrol, in which he was Neil Hamilton’s kid brother sent on a fatal mission, and Little Caesar when he was Edward G Robinson’s driver with ambitions to gangsterhood.
The best of the smaller pictures were the screwball comedy Love is a Racket, the real-time one-location drama Union Depot, and the boxing melodrama The Life of Jimmy Nolan, with excellent varied performances from Fairbanks. In Morning Glory (1933), he played a writer in love with actress Katharine Hepburn, an unrequited emotion he felt for her offscreen.
The following year, he came to England to play the Grand Duke Peter opposite Elisabeth Bergner in Catherine the Great for Alexander Korda. Fairbanks coped well as the Tsar who loses his wits, while Bergner turned on her over-girlish charm, encouraged by the indulgent direction of Paul Czinna, her Hungarian husband.
Goebbels did not ban the film in Germany but got the Nazi press to call it a film “produced by and starring Jews”. (Fairbanks’ paternal grandfather was a Jewish lawyer called Hezekiah Charles Ulman.)
In 1935 Fairbanks was living beyond his means, and immersed in an affair with Gertrude Lawrence with whom he starred as the Bohemian Rudolphe in the film Mimi, and in the West End in Moonlight is Silver. However, he managed to raise enough capital to set up his own English-based company, Criterion Productions.
The Amateur Gentleman (1936) – the first and best of three pictures for Criterion, was set in Regency times. He played an innkeeper’s son who poses as a gentleman pugilist to gain entrance to the court of the Prince Regent.
His father (reconciled with his son) arrived with Lord and Lady Louis Mountbatten at Elstree to watch the shooting. They were suitably impressed by the largest set built for a British film to date, a 13,000sq ft reconstruction of the ballroom at Carlton House for the Prince Regent’s ball. But the picture didn’t do as well at the box-office as was hoped, and Criterion struggled on with two more lame productions.
Fairbanks was carrying on an affair with Marlene Dietrich, who used to smuggle him into her hotel room at Claridge’s, when he met socialite Mary Lee Hartford at a party given by Merle Oberon. His wild oats sown, he married her in 1938, a marriage that lasted for 50 years until her death.
Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, Fairbanks had made a splendid Rupert of Henzau, the soldier-swordsman in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) whose confrontation with the film’s hero, Ronald Colman, provides the film’s exciting climax.
A number of good parts followed, in which he was able to put on his pukka accent and a pith-helmet in British colonial adventures. In fact, his accent bore a striking resemblance to Ronald Colman’s distinctive British tones. “By Golly” was one of his favourite expressions.
In George Stevens’ Gunga Din (1939) Fairbanks was the gentleman soldier at the side of rough Victor McLaglen and cheeky Cary Grant, a devil-may-care trio fighting a murderous sect of religious fanatics in India. (It was filmed in Lone Pine, California.) In the same year that his father died aged 56, Fairbanks made a conscious decision to emulate his celebrated swashbuckling style.
He took the title roles in The Corsican Brothers (1941), with 21-year-olds Mario and Lucien (Fairbanks was a young-looking 32) setting out to avenge their father’s death. The picture was reminiscent of his father’s 1922 Robin Hood, and after the second world war Doug Jr gave an acrobatic performance as Sinbad the Sailor (1947), a reasonable attempt to rival his father’s in The Black Pirate. In The Fighting O’Flynn (1949), he portrayed a kind of Irish musketeer, scaling walls and leaping across roofs with reckless abandon.
During the war, as a lieutenant commander in the US Navy, Fairbanks had participated in several combined Anglo-American operations (recalled in his memoirs, A Hell of a War) and in 1949 he was made an Honorary Knight of the British Empire for “furthering Anglo-American amity.” Other honours he received were the Légion d’Honneur and Knight Grand Officer of King George I of Greece.
After retiring from the screen in the early 1950s Fairbanks, an avid Anglophile, settled in London for many years with his wife and three daughters. He thrived on eminent social and political connections, which included a close relationship with the royal family.
“I am not a socialite,” he once declared, “though I seem to have got the reputation for being one. I have some very good friends who happen to be in so-called Society; but Society as such is a bore and holds no fascination for me.”
However, whoever was invited to No 8 The Boltons in Kensington, from the highest in the land to the lowliest of hacks, was greeted with charm and impeccable courtesy.
During the 1960s, he introduced and sometimes acted in a British TV drama series Douglas Fairbanks Presents, from which he made a lot of money to add to the fortune gained from the manufacture of popcorn, and from the rights to his father’s films.
In 1973 he and his wife sold their London home and settled in Palm Beach, Florida. Soon after, Fairbanks returned to the stage in My Fair Lady in LA and San Francisco, The Secretary Bird in Chicago and Present Laughter in Washington.
In 1976 he appeared at the Phoenix Theatre in London in The Pleasure of his Company in a role that could have been written for him, that of a rich, witty and urbane globetrotter.
In 1990, Fairbanks married again at the age of 81 to Vera Shelton who survives him as do three daughters from his second marriage. Two years later, he was named as the mysterious headless man in a photo used in the Duchess of Argyle divorce case of 1963. He always denied that it was he, though the Duchess was a close friend. By golly, what a life!
Douglas Fairbanks Jr, actor and socialite, born December 9 1909; died May 7 2000
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
