Actors who have portrayed villains in westerns !
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One of the great movie villains, Clarence Leroy Van Cleef, Jr. was born in Somerville, New Jersey, to Marion Lavinia (Van Fleet) and Clarence LeRoy Van Cleef, Sr. His parents were of Dutch ancestry. Van Cleef started out as an accountant. He served in the U.S. Navy aboard minesweepers and sub chasers during World War II. After the war he worked as an office administrator, becoming involved in amateur theatrics in his spare time. An audition for a professional role led to a touring company job in "Mr. Roberts". His performance was seen by Stanley Kramer, who cast him as henchman Jack Colby in High Noon (1952), a role that brought him great recognition despite the fact that he had no dialogue. For the next decade, he played a string of memorably villainous characters, primarily in westerns but also in crime dramas such as The Big Combo (1955). His hawk nose and steely, slit eyes seemed destined to keep him always in the realm of heavies, but in the mid 1960s Sergio Leone cast him as the tough but decent Col. Mortimer opposite Clint Eastwood in For a Few Dollars More (1965). A new career as a western hero (or at least anti-hero) opened up, and Van Cleef became an international star, though in films of decreasing quality. In the 1980s, he moved easily into action and martial-arts movies and starred in The Master (1984), a TV series featuring almost non-stop martial arts action. He died of a heart attack in December 1989 and was buried at Forest Lawn in the Hollywood Hills.- Actor
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American actor Lee Marvin was born Lamont Waltman Marvin Jr. in New York City. After leaving school aged 18, Marvin enlisted in the United States Marine Corps Reserve in August 1942. He served with the 4th Marine Division in the Pacific Theater during World War II and after being wounded in action and spending a year being treated in naval hospitals, he received a medical discharge. Marvin's military decorations include the Purple Heart Medal, the Presidential Unit Citation, the American Campaign Medal, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, the World War II Victory Medal and the Combat Action Ribbon. Returning to the United States it was while working as a plumbers apprentice, repairing a toilet at a local community theater, that he was asked to stand in for an actor who had fallen ill during rehearsals. He immediately caught the acting bug, moving to Greenwich Village to study at the American Theater Wing and began making appearances in stage productions and TV shows. His film debut came in 'You're in the Navy Now' (1951) but it was his portrayal of villains in 'The Big Heat' (1953) and 'The Wild One' (1953) that brought him to the attention of the public and critical acclaim. Now firmly established as a screen bad guy, he began shifting towards leading man roles and landed the lead role in the popular TV series 'M Squad' (1957-1960). Returning to feature films, Marvin had prominent roles in 'The Comancheros' (1961), 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' (1962), 'Donovan's Reef' (1963) and 'The Killers' (1964) but it was his dual comic role in the offbeat western 'Cat Ballou' (1965) that made him a star and won him the Academy Award for Best Actor. He was now a much sought-after actor and starred in a number of movies as a new kind of leading man including 'The Professionals' (1966), 'The Dirty Dozen' (1967), 'Point Blank' (1967), 'Hell in the Pacific' (1968), 'Monte Walsh' (1970), 'Prime Cut' (1972), 'Emperor of the North' (1973) and 'The Spikes Gang' (1974).Later film credits include 'Shout at the Devil' (1976), 'Avalanche Express' (1979), 'The Big Red One' (1980), 'Death Hunt' (1981) and 'Gorky Park' (1983). His final film role was alongside Chuck Norris in 'The Delta Force' (1986). Lee Marvin died of a heart attack in August 1987. He was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. Marvin paved the way for leading men that didn't fit the traditional mould. An iconic American tough guy and one of the 20th Century's greatest Hollywood stars.- Actor
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Richard Widmark established himself as an icon of American cinema with his debut in the 1947 film noir Kiss of Death (1947), in which he won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination as the killer Tommy Udo. Kiss of Death (1947) and other noir thrillers established Widmark as part of a new generation of American movie actors who became stars in the post-World War II era. With fellow post-War stars Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum, Widmark brought a new kind of character to the screen in his character leads and supporting parts: a hard-boiled type who does not actively court the sympathy of the audience. Widmark was not afraid to play deeply troubled, deeply conflicted, or just downright deeply corrupt characters.
After his debut, Widmark would work steadily until he retired at the age of 76 in 1990, primarily as a character lead. His stardom would peak around the time he played the U.S. prosecutor in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) as the 1950s segued into the 1960s, but he would continue to act for another 30 years.
Richard Weedt Widmark was born in Sunrise Township, Minnesota, to Ethel Mae (Barr) and Carl Henry Widmark. His father was of Swedish descent and his mother of English and Scottish ancestry. He has said that he loved the movies from his boyhood, claiming, "I've been a movie bug since I was 4. My grandmother used to take me". The teenaged Widmark continued to go to the movies and was thrilled by Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931). "I thought Boris Karloff was great", Widmark said. Although he loved the movies and excelled at public speaking while attending high school, Widmark attended Lake Forest College with the idea of becoming a lawyer. However, he won the lead role in a college production of, fittingly enough, the play "Counsellor-at-Law", and the acting bug bit deep. After taking his bachelor of arts degree in 1936, he stayed on at Lake Forest as the Assistant Director of Speech and Drama. However, he soon quit the job and moved to New York to become an actor, and by 1938 he was appearing on radio in "Aunt Jenny's Real Life Stories". He made his Broadway debut in 1943 in the play "Kiss and Tell" and continued to appear on stage in roles that were light-years away from the tough cookies he would play in his early movies.
After World War II, he was signed by 20th Century-Fox to a seven-year contract. After seeing his screen test for the role of Tommy Udo, 20th Century-Fox boss Darryl F. Zanuck insisted that the slight, blonde Widmark - no one's idea of a heavy, particularly after his stage work - be cast as the psychopath in Kiss of Death (1947), which had been prepared as a Victor Mature vehicle. Even though the role was small, Widmark stole the picture. The publicity department at 20th Century-Fox recommended that exhibitors market the film by concentrating on thumping the tub for their new antihero. "Sell Richard Widmark" advised the studio's publicity manual that an alert 20th Century-Fox sent to theater owners. The manual told local exhibitors to engage a job printer to have "wanted" posters featuring Widmark's face printed and pasted up. He won a Golden Globe and an Oscar nod for the part, which led to an early bout with typecasting at the studio. Widmark played psychotics in The Street with No Name (1948) and Road House (1948) and held his own against new Fox superstar Gregory Peck in the William A. Wellman western Yellow Sky (1948), playing the villain, of course. When his pressuring the studio to let him play other parts paid off, his appearance as a sailor in Down to the Sea in Ships (1949) made headlines: Life magazine's March 28, 1949, issue featured a three-page spread of the movie headlined "Widmark the Movie Villain Goes Straight". He was popular, having captured the public imagination, and before the decade was out, his hand- and footprints were immortalized in concrete in the court outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.
The great director Elia Kazan cast Widmark in his thriller Panic in the Streets (1950), not as the heavy (that role went to Jack Palance) but as the physician who tracks down Palance, who has the plague, in tandem with detective Paul Douglas. Widmark was establishing himself as a real presence in the genre that later would be hailed as film noir. Having proved he could handle other roles, Widmark didn't shy away from playing heavies in quality pictures. The soon-to-be-blacklisted director Jules Dassin cast him in one of his greatest roles, as the penny-ante hustler Harry Fabian in Night and the City (1950). Set in London, Widmark's Fabian manages to survive in the jungle of the English demimonde, but is doomed. Widmark was masterful in conveying the desperation of the criminal seeking to control his own fate but who is damned, and this performance also became an icon of film noir. In that same year, he appeared in Oscar-winning writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz's No Way Out (1950) as a bigot who instigates a race riot.
As the 1950s progressed, Widmark played in westerns, military vehicles, and his old stand-by genre, the thriller. He appeared with Marilyn Monroe (this time cast as the psycho) in Don't Bother to Knock (1952) and made Pickup on South Street (1953) that same year for director Samuel Fuller. His seven-year contract at Fox was expiring, and Zanuck, who would not renew the deal, cast him in the western Broken Lance (1954) in a decidedly supporting role, billed beneath not only Spencer Tracy but even Robert Wagner and Jean Peters. The film was well respected, and it won an Oscar nomination for best screenplay for the front of Hollywood 10 blacklistee Albert Maltz. Widmark left Fox for the life of a freelance, forming his own company, Heath Productions. He appeared in more westerns, adventures and social dramas and pushed himself as an actor by taking the thankless role of the Dauphin in Otto Preminger's adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan (1957), a notorious flop that didn't bring anyone any honors, neither Preminger, his leading lady Jean Seberg, nor Widmark. In 1960, he was appearing in another notorious production, John Wayne's ode to suicidal patriotism, The Alamo (1960), with the personally liberal Widmark playing Jim Bowie in support of the very conservative Wayne's Davy Crockett. Along with character actor Chill Wills, Widmark arguably was the best thing in the movie.
In 1961, Widmark acquitted himself quite well as the prosecutor in producer-director Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), appearing with the Oscar-nominated Spencer Tracy and the Oscar-winning Maximilian Schell, as well as with superstar Burt Lancaster and acting genius Montgomery Clift and the legendary Judy Garland (the latter two winning Oscar nods for their small roles). Despite being showcased with all this thespian firepower, Widmark's character proved to be the axis on which the drama turned. A little later, Widmark appeared in two westerns directed by the great John Ford, with co-star James Stewart in Two Rode Together (1961) and as the top star in Ford's apologia for Indian genocide, Cheyenne Autumn (1964). On Two Rode Together (1961), Ford feuded with Jimmy Stewart over his hat. Stewart insisted on wearing the same hat he had for a decade of highly successful westerns that had made him one of the top box office stars of the 1950s. Both he and Widmark were hard-of-hearing (as well as balding and in need of help from the makeup department's wigmakers), so Ford would sit far away from them while directing scenes and then give them directions in a barely audible voice. When neither one of the stars could hear their director, Ford theatrically announced to his crew that after over 40 years in the business, he was reduced to directing two deaf toupees. It was testimony to the stature of both Stewart and Widmark as stars that this was as far as Ford's baiting went, as the great director could be extraordinarily cruel.
Widmark continued to co-star in A-pictures through the 1960s. He capped off the decade with one of his finest performances, as the amoral police detective in Don Siegel's gritty cop melodrama Madigan (1968). With Madigan, one can see Widmark's characters as a progression in the evolution of what would become the late 1960s nihilistic antihero, such as those embodied by Clint Eastwood in Siegel's later Dirty Harry (1971). In the 1970s, he continued to make his mark in movies and, beginning in 1971, in television. In movies, he appeared primarily in supporting roles, albeit in highly billed fashion, in such films as Sidney Lumet's Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Robert Aldrich's Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977), and Stanley Kramer's The Domino Principle (1977). He even came back as a heavy, playing the villainous doctor in Coma (1978).
In 1971, in search of better roles, he turned to television, starring as the President of the U.S. in the TV miniseries Vanished (1971). His performance in the role brought Widmark an Emmy nomination. He resurrected the character of Madigan for NBC in six 90-minute episodes that appeared as part of the rotation of "NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie" for the fall 1972 season. Widmark was married for 55 years to playwright Jean Hazlewood, from 1942 until her death in 1997 (they had one child, Anne, who was born in 1945). He lived quietly and avoided the press, saying in 1971, "I think a performer should do his work and then shut up". Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas thought that Widmark should have won an Oscar nomination for his turn in When the Legends Die (1972) playing a former rodeo star tutoring Frederic Forrest's character.
It is surprising to think that Kiss of Death (1947) represented his sole Oscar nomination, but with the rise of respect for film noir around the time his career began tapering off in the '70s, he began to be reevaluated as an actor. Unlike Bogart, who did not live to see his reputation flourish after his death, Widmark became a cult figure well before he retired.- Henry Silva was born on September 23, 1926 in Brooklyn, New York. He quit public school to attend drama classes at age 13, supporting himself as a dishwasher in a Manhattan hotel. By 1955, Silva had moved up from dishwasher to waiter, and felt ready to audition for the Actors Studio. He was one of five students chosen out of more than 2500 applicants. When the Actors Studio staged Michael V. Gazzo's play "A Hatful of Rain" as a classroom project, it proved so successful it came to Broadway--with students Ben Gazzara, Shelley Winters, Harry Guardino, Anthony Franciosa and, of course, Silva in key roles. Called to Hollywood, he played a succession of heavies in films, including The Bravados (1958), Green Mansions (1959), Ocean's Eleven (1960), The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Johnny Cool (1963).
An Italian producer made Henry an offer he could not refuse--to star as a hero for a change--and he moved his family overseas. Silva's turning-point picture was a spaghetti Western, The Hills Run Red (1966), which made him a hot box office commodity in Spain, Italy, Germany and France. His popularity was enhanced by a gift for languages. He speaks Italian and Spanish fluently and has a flair for the kind of gritty, realistic roles that also catapulted Charles Bronson to European stardom. Returning to the United States, he co-starred with Frank Sinatra in the film Contract on Cherry Street (1977), then signed on as Buck Rogers' evil adversary Kane in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979) and the television series of the same name. Silva now calls the San Fernando Valley home, but makes continual film forays back to Europe's production centers. A dedicated jogger, he puts in five miles a day "to keep in shape and relieve tension". - Actor
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- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Jack Palance quite often exemplified evil incarnate on film, portraying some of the most intensely feral villains witnessed in 1950s westerns and melodrama. Enhanced by his tall, powerful build, icy voice, and piercing eyes, he earned two "Best Supporting Actor" nominations early in his career. It would take a grizzled, eccentric comic performance 40 years later, however, for him to finally grab the coveted statuette.
Of Ukrainian descent, Palance was born Volodymyr Ivanovich Palahniuk (later taking Walter Jack Palance as his legal name) on February 18, 1919 (although some sources, including his death certificate, cite 1920) in Lattimer Mines, Pennsylvania (coal country), one of six children born to Anna (nee Gramiak) and Ivan Palahniuk. His father, an anthracite miner, died of black lung disease. Palance worked in the mines in his early years but averted the same fate as his father. Athletics was his ticket out of the mines when he won a football scholarship to the University of North Carolina. He subsequently dropped out to try his hand at professional boxing. Fighting under the name "Jack Brazzo", he won his first 15 fights, 12 by knockout, before losing a 4th round decision to future heavyweight contender Joe Baksi on December 17, 1940.
With the outbreak of World War II, his boxing career ended and his military career began, serving in the Army Air Force as a bomber pilot. Wounded in combat and suffering severe injuries and burns, he received the Purple Heart, Good Conduct Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal. He resumed college studies as a journalist at Stanford University and became a sportswriter for the San Francisco Chronicle. He also worked for a radio station until he was bit by the acting bug.
Palance made his stage debut in "The Big Two" in 1947 and immediately followed it understudying Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in the groundbreaking Broadway classic "A Streetcar Named Desire", a role he eventually took over. Following stage parts in "Temporary Island" (1948), "The Vigil" (1948), and "The Silver Tassle" (1949), Palance won a choice role in "Darkness of Noon" and a Theatre World Award for "Promising New Personality." This recognition helped him secure a 20th Century-Fox contract. The facial burns and resulting reconstructive surgery following the crash and burn of his WWII bomber plane actually worked to his advantage. Out of contention as a glossy romantic leading man, Palance instead became the archetypal intimidating villain equipped with towering stance, imposing glare, and killer-shark smile.
He stood out among a powerhouse cast that included actors such as Richard Widmark, Zero Mostel and Paul Douglas in his movie debut in Elia Kazan's Panic in the Streets (1950), as a plague-carrying fugitive. He was soon on his way. Briefly billed as Walter Jack Palance before eliminating the first name, the actor made fine use of his former boxing skills and war experience for the film Halls of Montezuma (1951) as a boxing Marine in Richard Widmark's platoon. He followed this with the first of his back-to-back Oscar nods. In Sudden Fear (1952), only his third film, he played rich-and-famous playwright Joan Crawford's struggling actor/husband who plots to murder her and run off with gorgeous Gloria Grahame. Finding just the right degree of intensity and menace to pretty much steal the proceedings without chewing the scenery, he followed this with arguably his finest villain of the decade, that of sadistic gunslinger Jack Wilson who takes on Alan Ladd's titular hero, played by Shane (1953), in a classic showdown.
Throughout the 1950s, Palance doled out strong leads and supports such as those in Man in the Attic (1953) (his first lead), The Big Knife (1955) and the war classic Attack (1956). Mixed in were a few routine to highly mediocre parts in Flight to Tangier (1953), Sign of the Pagan (1954) (as Attila the Hun), and the biblical bomb The Silver Chalice (1954). In between filmmaking were a host of television roles, none better than his down-and-out boxer in Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956), a rare sympathetic role that earned him an Emmy Award.
Back and forth overseas in the 1960s and 1970s, Palance would dominate foreign pictures in a number of different genres -- sandal-and-spear spectacles, biblical epics, war stories and "spaghetti westerns." Such films included The Battle of Austerlitz (1960), The Mongols (1961), Barabbas (1961), Night Train to Milan (1962), Contempt (1963), The Mercenary (1968), Marquis de Sade's Justine (1969), The Desperados (1969), It Can Be Done Amigo (1972), Chato's Land (1972), Blood and Bullets (1976), Welcome to Blood City (1977). Back home, he played Fidel Castro in Che! (1969) while also appearing in Monte Walsh (1970), Oklahoma Crude (1973) and The Four Deuces (1975).
On the made-for-television front, Jack played a number of nefarious nasties to perfection, ranging from Mr. Hyde (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1968)) to Dracula in Dracula (1974) to Ebenezer Scrooge in a "Wild West" version of the Dickens classic Ebenezer (1998). He also played one of the Hatfields in The Hatfields and the McCoys (1975). Jack switched gears to star as a "nice guy" lieutenant in the single-season TV cop drama Bronk (1975). In later years, the actor mellowed with age, as exemplified by roles in Bagdad Cafe (1987), but could still display his bad side as he did as an evil rancher, crime boss or drug lord in, respectively, Young Guns (1988), Batman (1989) and Tango & Cash (1989). Into his twilight years he showed a penchant for brash, quirky comedy capped by his Oscar-winning role in City Slickers (1991) and its sequel. He ended his film career playing Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1999).
His three children by his first wife, actress Virginia Baker -- Holly Palance, Brooke Palance, and Cody Palance -- all pursued acting careers and appeared with their father at one time or another. A man of few words off the set, he owned his own cattle ranch and displayed other creative sides as a exhibited painter and published poet.
His last years were marred by both failing health and the 1998 death of his son Cody from melanoma. He was later diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died at the Santa Barbara County home of his daughter, Holly Palance, in 2006.- Actor
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Ernest Borgnine was born Ermes Effron Borgnino on January 24, 1917 in Hamden, Connecticut. His parents were Anna (Boselli), who had emigrated from Carpi (MO), Italy, and Camillo Borgnino, who had emigrated from Ottiglio (AL), Italy. As an only child, Ernest enjoyed most sports, especially boxing, but took no real interest in acting. At age 18, after graduating from high school in New Haven, and undecided about his future career, he joined the United States Navy, where he stayed for ten years until leaving in 1945. After a few factory jobs, his mother suggested that his forceful personality could make him suitable for a career in acting, and Borgnine promptly enrolled at the Randall School of Drama in Hartford. After completing the course, he joined Robert Porterfield's famous Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia, staying there for four years, undertaking odd jobs and playing every type of role imaginable. His big break came in 1949, when he made his acting debut on Broadway playing a male nurse in "Harvey".
In 1951, Borgnine moved to Los Angeles to pursue a movie career, and made his film debut as Bill Street in The Whistle at Eaton Falls (1951). His career took off in 1953 when he was cast in the role of Sergeant "Fatso" Judson in From Here to Eternity (1953). This memorable performance led to numerous supporting roles as "heavies" in a steady string of dramas and westerns. He played against type in 1955 by securing the lead role of Marty Piletti, a shy and sensitive butcher, in Marty (1955). He won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance, despite strong competition from Spencer Tracy, Frank Sinatra, James Dean and James Cagney. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Borgnine performed memorably in such films as The Catered Affair (1956), Ice Station Zebra (1968) and Emperor of the North (1973). Between 1962 and 1966, he played Lt. Commander Quinton McHale in the popular television series McHale's Navy (1962). In early 1984, he returned to television as Dominic Santini in the action series Airwolf (1984) co-starring Jan-Michael Vincent, and in 1995, he was cast in the comedy series The Single Guy (1995) as doorman Manny Cordoba. He also appeared in several made-for-TV movies.
Ernest Borgnine has often stated that acting was his greatest passion. His amazing 61-year career (1951 - 2012) included appearances in well over 100 feature films and as a regular in three television series, as well as voice-overs in animated films such as All Dogs Go to Heaven 2 (1996), Small Soldiers (1998), and a continued role in the series SpongeBob SquarePants (1999). Between 1973 until his death, Ernest was married to Tova Traesnaes, who heads her own cosmetics company. They lived in Beverly Hills, California, where Ernest assisted his wife between film projects. When not acting, Ernest actively supported numerous charities and spoke tirelessly at benefits throughout the country. He has been awarded several honorary doctorates from colleges across the United States as well as numerous Lifetime Achievement Awards. In 1996, Ernest purchased a bus and traveled across the United States to see the country and meet his many fans. On December 17, 1999, he presented the University of North Alabama with a collection of scripts from his film and television career, due to his long friendship with North Alabama alumnus and actor George Lindsey (died May 6, 2012), who was an artist in residence at North Alabama.
Ernest Borgnine passed away aged 95 on July 8, 2012, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, of renal failure. He is survived by his wife Tova, their children and his younger sister Evelyn (1926-2013)- Actor
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One of Hollywood's finest character / "Method" actors, Eli Wallach was in demand for over 60 years (first film/TV role was 1949) on stage and screen, and has worked alongside the world's biggest stars, including Clark Gable, Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Marilyn Monroe, Yul Brynner, Peter O'Toole, and Al Pacino, to name but a few.
Wallach was born on 7 December 1915 in Brooklyn, NY, to Jewish parents who emigrated from Poland, and was one of the few Jewish kids in his mostly Italian neighborhood. His parents, Bertha (Schorr) and Abraham Wallach, owned a candy store, Bertha's Candy Store. He went on to graduate with a B.A. from the University of Texas in Austin, but gained his dramatic training with the Actors Studio and the Neighborhood Playhouse. He made his debut on Broadway in 1945, and won a Tony Award in 1951 for portraying Alvaro Mangiacavallo in the Tennessee Williams play "The Rose Tattoo".
Wallach made a strong screen debut in 1956 in the film version of the Tennessee Williams play Baby Doll (1956), shined as "Dancer", the nattily dressed hitman, in director Don Siegel's film-noir classic The Lineup (1958), and co-starred in the heist film Seven Thieves (1960). Director John Sturges then cast Wallach as vicious Mexican bandit Calvera in The Magnificent Seven (1960), the western adaptation of the Akira Kurosawa epic Seven Samurai (1954). The Misfits (1961), in the star-spangled western opus How the West Was Won (1962), the underrated WW2 film The Victors (1963), as a kidnapper in The Moon-Spinners (1964), in the sea epic Lord Jim (1965) and in the romantic comedy How to Steal a Million (1966).
Looking for a third lead actor in the final episode of the "Dollars Trilogy", Italian director Sergio Leone cast the versatile Wallach as the lying, two-faced, money-hungry (but somehow lovable) bandit "Tuco" in the spectacular The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) (aka "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly"), arguably his most memorable performance. Wallach kept busy throughout the remainder of the '60s and into the '70s with good roles in Mackenna's Gold (1969), Cinderella Liberty (1973), Crazy Joe (1974), The Deep (1977) and as Steve McQueen's bail buddy in The Hunter (1980).
The 1980s was an interesting period for Wallach, as he was regularly cast as an aging doctor, a Mafia figure or an over-the-hill hitman, such as in The Executioner's Song (1982), Our Family Honor (1985), Tough Guys (1986), Nuts (1987), The Two Jakes (1990) and as the candy-addicted "Don Altabello" in The Godfather Part III (1990). At 75+ years of age, Wallach's quality of work was still first class and into the 1990s and beyond, he has remained in demand. He lent fine support to Vendetta: Secrets of a Mafia Bride (1990), Teamster Boss: The Jackie Presser Story (1992), Naked City: Justice with a Bullet (1998) and Keeping the Faith (2000). Most recently Wallach showed up as a fast-talking liquor store owner in Mystic River (2003) and in the comedic drama King of the Corner (2004).
In early 2005, Eli Wallach released his much anticipated autobiography, "The Good, The Bad And Me: In My Anecdotage", an enjoyable reading from one of the screen's most inventive and enduring actors.
Eli Wallach was very much a family man who remained married to his wife Anne Jackson for 66 years. When Wallach died at 98, in 2014, in Manhattan, NY, he was survived by his wife, three children, five grandchildren and several great-grandchildren.- Actor
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Rodney Stephen Steiger was born in Westhampton, New York, to Augusta Amelia (Driver) and Frederick Jacob Steiger, both vaudevillians. He was of German and Austrian ancestry. After his parents' divorce, Steiger was raised by his mother in Newark, New Jersey. He dropped out of Westside High school at age 16 and joined the Navy. He saw action in the Pacific on a destroyer. Steiger returned to New Jersey after the war and worked for the VA. He was part of an amateur acting group, and then joined the Actors' Studio using his GI Bill benefits.
Steiger received his first film roles in the early 1950s. His first major one was in Teresa (1951), but his first lead role was in the TV version of Marty (1953). The movie version, however, had Ernest Borgnine in the lead and won him an Academy Award. Steiger's breakthrough role came in 1954, with the classic On the Waterfront (1954). Since then he has been a presence on the screen as everything from a popular leading man to a little-known character actor. Steiger made a name for himself in many different types of roles, from a crooked promoter in The Harder They Fall (1956) to the title character in Al Capone (1959). He was one of dozens of stars in the epic World War II film The Longest Day (1962). In 1964, he received his second Oscar nomination for The Pawnbroker (1964). The next couple of years he was at the height of his powers. In 1965, he starred in the dark comedy The Loved One (1965), and in David Lean's epic Doctor Zhivago (1965). In 1966, he starred in the BBC Play of the Month (1965) episode "Death of a Salesman" as Willy Loman in the TV version of his stage play "Death of a Salesman," but in 1967, he landed what many consider his greatest role: Sheriff Bill Gillespie in In the Heat of the Night (1967), opposite Sidney Poitier. Steiger deservedly took home the Best Actor Oscar for his work in that film.
He took another controversial role as a man with many tattoos in The Illustrated Man (1969) and as a serial killer in the classic No Way to Treat a Lady (1968). After that, he seemed to have withdrawn from high-profile movies and became more selective in the roles he chose. He turned down the lead in Patton (1970) and also in The Godfather (1972). Among his more notable roles in the 1970s are Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1971), Lolly-Madonna XXX (1973), as Benito Mussolini in The Last 4 Days (1974), Portrait of a Hitman (1979), Jesus of Nazareth (1977), F.I.S.T. (1978) and The Amityville Horror (1979). He starred in the critically acclaimed The Chosen (1981) with Robby Benson and Maximilian Schell, perhaps the highlight of his 1980s movie career. Steiger increasingly moved away from the big Hollywood pictures, instead taking roles in foreign productions and independent movies. As the 1980s ended, Steiger landed a role as the buttoned-up New York City Chief of Police in The January Man (1989).
Steiger was seriously affected by depression for 8 years. As he returned to the screen in the late 1990s he began creating some of his most memorable roles. He was the doctor in the independently-made movie Shiloh (1996), about an abused dog. He was the crazed, kill-'em-all army general in Mars Attacks! (1996) who always called his enemies peace-mongers. He took a small part as a Supreme Court judge in The Hurricane (1999) and as a preacher in the badly produced film End of Days (1999). He was still active in films moving into the new millennium.- Actor
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Robert Francis Vaughn was born on November 22, 1932 at Charity Hospital in New York City, the son of show business parents, Marcella Frances (Gaudel) and Gerald Walter Vaughn. His father was a radio actor and his mother starred on stage. Robert came to the public's attention first with his Oscar-nominated role, in The Young Philadelphians (1959). The next year, he was one of the seven in the western classic The Magnificent Seven (1960). Despite being in such popular films, he generally found work on television. He appeared over 200 times in guest roles in the late 1950s to early 1960s. It was in 1963 that he received his first major role in The Lieutenant (1963). Robert took the role with the intention of making the transition from being a guest-star actor to being a co-star on television. It was due to his work in this series that producer Norman Felton offered him the role of Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964).
Four extremely successful years (1964-68) followed as the series became one of the most popular television series of the 1960s. It made Vaughn an international television star, but he wanted to embark on a career in film, and did so soon after the series ended in 1968 by co-starring in Bullitt (1968) with Steve McQueen. Now working in film full-time, he starred in The Bridge at Remagen (1969) and The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970), before making a change by going back to television, this time in England. He took a lead role in the series The Protectors (1972) and stayed in England for the first half of the 1970s. He returned to the United States in the mid-1970s and embarked on a very successful run of television miniseries roles that resulted in his receiving an Emmy Award in 1978 for Washington: Behind Closed Doors (1977) and a nomination the following year for Backstairs at the White House (1979).
The 1970s proved a important time in Robert's life, as in 1974, he married actress Linda Staab, and completed his thesis on Hollywood blacklisting during the McCarthy "Red Scare" era, published in 1972 as "Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting". During the 1980s, he mixed television with film. Roles in such films as S.O.B. (1981), Superman III (1983), The Delta Force (1986) and Black Moon Rising (1986) were highlights. In television, he appeared in many successful series, most notably in The A-Team (1983) and Emerald Point N.A.S. (1983).
He continued with a diverse range of projects, appearing on stage on numerous occasions. The 1990s saw the same variety of roles. Made-for-TV movies were a popular choice for him, as well as such series as As the World Turns (1956), The Nanny (1993) and Law & Order (1990). He had a role in the 1998 series remake of the classic film in which he appeared, The Magnificent Seven (1998). He also appeared in major features such as Joe's Apartment (1996) and BASEketball (1998), and in smaller roles in subsequent years.
Robert died of acute leukemia on November 11, 2016 in Ridgefield, Connecticut. His last acting credit, Gold Star (2017), was released the year of his death.- Actor
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Of Greek descent on both sides, the son of immigrants, Savalas was a soldier during World War II, although most of his enlistment records were destroyed in a fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1973. He later studied psychology at Columbia University under the GI Bill.
Iconically bald, he often played character roles, sometimes as sadists or psychotics. He became famous in the 1970s when his role as Det. Theo Kojak in the TV movie The Marcus-Nelson Murders (1973) was expanded into the gritty Kojak (1973) TV series (1973-78).- Actor
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Eugene Allen Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California, the son of Ann Lydia Elizabeth (Gray) and Eugene Ezra Hackman, who operated a newspaper printing press. He is of Pennsylvania Dutch (German), English, and Scottish ancestry, partly by way of Canada, where his mother was born. After several moves, his family settled in Danville, Illinois. Gene grew up in a broken home, which he left at the age of sixteen for a hitch with the US Marines.
Moving to New York after being discharged, he worked in a number of menial jobs before studying journalism and television production on the G.I. Bill at the University of Illinois. Hackman would be over 30 years old when he finally decided to take his chance at acting by enrolling at the Pasadena Playhouse. Legend says that Hackman and friend Dustin Hoffman were voted "least likely to succeed."
Hackman next moved back to New York, where he worked in summer stock and off-Broadway. In 1964 he was cast as the young suitor in the Broadway play "Any Wednesday." This role would lead to him being cast in the small role of Norman in Lilith (1964), starring Warren Beatty. When Beatty was casting for Bonnie and Clyde (1967), he cast Hackman as Buck Barrow, Clyde Barrow's brother. That role earned Hackman a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, an award for which he would again be nominated in I Never Sang for My Father (1970). In 1972 he won the Oscar for his role as Detective Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle in The French Connection (1971). At 40 years old Hackman was a Hollywood star whose work would rise to new heights with Night Moves (1975) and Bite the Bullet (1975), or fall to new depths with The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and Eureka (1983). Hackman is a versatile actor who can play comedy (the blind man in Young Frankenstein (1974)) or villainy (the evil Lex Luthor in Superman (1978)). He is the doctor who puts his work above people in Extreme Measures (1996) and the captain on the edge of nuclear destruction in Crimson Tide (1995). After initially turning down the role of Little Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992), Hackman finally accepted it, as its different slant on the western interested him. For his performance he won the Oscar and Golden Globe and decided that he wasn't tired of westerns after all. He has since appeared in Geronimo: An American Legend (1993), Wyatt Earp (1994), and The Quick and the Dead (1995).- Actor
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Talented and highly capable character actor Geoffrey Lewis, with rustic (sometimes sour-faced) looks, grew up in Rhode Island but was moved out to California at the age of ten. Lewis was very keen on the dramatic arts at high school, but often preferred to put on his own one-man shows rather than participate in larger school productions. His drama teacher took note of his growing talent and referred him to the Plymouth Theater in Massachusetts, where he appeared in summer stock. Afterwards he appeared in several off-Broadway productions in New York City. After spending considerable time traveling, in both the United States and abroad, Lewis turned his attention back to his love of the dramatic arts, and scored his first minor movie role in The Culpepper Cattle Co. (1972) as a somewhat jovial but deadly cowhand. He then cropped up as gangster Harry Pierpont in Dillinger (1973) before beginning a long association with Clint Eastwood, starting off with High Plains Drifter (1973), then as kind-hearted thief Eddie Goody in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), as Clint's buddy Orville Boggs in Every Which Way But Loose (1978) and Any Which Way You Can (1980), then as a henpecked husband in Bronco Billy (1980), as Ricky Z in Pink Cadillac (1989), and in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) also as patient Michael Kahn in Disturbed (1990).
Equally busy on the small screen, he has guest-starred in dozens of episodes of high profile TV series. Additionally, he received a Golden Globe nomination for his performance in the series Flo (1980). Apart from his extensive film and TV exposure, Lewis is also a member of the rather unique musical/storytelling "Celestial Navigations," along with award-winning composer songwriter Geoff Levin. Their performances have received terrific reviews from some of Hollywood's top actors and noted musicians, including Chick Corea. As Geoffrey Lewis approaches his seventh decade, nothing seems likely to slow down this multi-talented actor, storyteller and engaging entertainer!- Handsome, rugged American leading man John Russell (whose credits are often confused with those of child actor Johnny Russell) attended the University of California, where he was a student athlete. Serving in the US Marine Corps in WW II, he earned a battlefield commission and decorations for valor at Guadalcanal. His dark good looks brought him to the attention of a talent scout after the war and he began playing second leads and occasional heavies in major productions. In the 1950s, he branched into television and starred in several popular series, most notably Lawman (1958). His appearances were sporadic after the 1960s, though he was a memorable villain in Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider (1985).
- The archetypal screen tough guy with weatherbeaten features--one film critic described his rugged looks as "a Clark Gable who had been left out in the sun too long"--Charles Bronson was born Charles Buchinsky, one of 15 children of struggling parents in Pennsylvania. His mother, Mary (Valinsky), was born in Pennsylvania, to Lithuanian parents, and his father, Walter Buchinsky, was a Lithuanian immigrant coal miner.
He completed high school and joined his father in the mines (an experience that resulted in a lifetime fear of being in enclosed spaces) and then served in WW II. After his return from the war, Bronson used the GI Bill to study art (a passion he had for the rest of his life), then enrolled at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. One of his teachers was impressed with the young man and recommended him to director Henry Hathaway, resulting in Bronson making his film debut in You're in the Navy Now (1951).
He appeared on screen often early in his career, though usually uncredited. However, he made an impact on audiences as the evil assistant to Vincent Price in the 3-D thriller House of Wax (1953). His sinewy yet muscular physique got him cast in action-type roles, often without a shirt to highlight his manly frame. He received positive notices from critics for his performances in Vera Cruz (1954), Target Zero (1955) and Run of the Arrow (1957). Indie director Roger Corman cast him as the lead in his well-received low-budget gangster flick Machine-Gun Kelly (1958), then Bronson scored the lead in his own TV series, Man with a Camera (1958). The 1960s proved to be the era in which Bronson made his reputation as a man of few words but much action.
Director John Sturges cast him as half Irish/half Mexican gunslinger Bernardo O'Reilly in the smash hit western The Magnificent Seven (1960), and hired him again as tunnel rat Danny Velinski for the WWII POW big-budget epic The Great Escape (1963). Several more strong roles followed, then once again he was back in military uniform, alongside Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine in the testosterone-filled The Dirty Dozen (1967).
European audiences had taken a shine to his minimalist acting style, and he headed to the Continent to star in several action-oriented films, including Guns for San Sebastian (1968) (aka "Guns for San Sebastian"), the cult western Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) (aka "Once Upon a Time in The West"), Rider on the Rain (1970) (aka "Rider On The Rain") and, in one of the quirkier examples of international casting, alongside Japansese screen legend Toshirô Mifune in the western Red Sun (1971) (aka "Red Sun").
American audiences were by now keen to see Bronson back on US soil, and he returned triumphantly in the early 1970s to take the lead in more hard-edged crime and western dramas, including The Valachi Papers (1972) and the revenge western Chato's Land (1972). After nearly 25 years as a working actor, he became an 'overnight" sensation. Bronson then hooked up with British director Michael Winner to star in several highly successful urban crime thrillers, including The Mechanic (1972) and The Stone Killer (1973). He then scored a solid hit as a Colorado melon farmer-done-wrong in Richard Fleischer's Mr. Majestyk (1974). However, the film that proved to be a breakthrough for both Bronson and Winner came in 1974 with the release of the controversial Death Wish (1974) (written with Henry Fonda in mind, who turned it down because he was disgusted by the script).
The US was at the time in the midst of rising street crime, and audiences flocked to see a story about a mild-mannered architect who seeks revenge for the murder of his wife and rape of his daughter by gunning down hoods, rapists and killers on the streets of New York City. So popular was the film that it spawned four sequels over the next 20 years.
Action fans could not get enough of tough guy Bronson, and he appeared in what many fans--and critics--consider his best role: Depression-era street fighter Chaney alongside James Coburn in Hard Times (1975). That was followed by the somewhat slow-paced western Breakheart Pass (1975) (with wife Jill Ireland), the light-hearted romp (a flop) From Noon Till Three (1976) and as Soviet agent Grigori Borsov in director Don Siegel's Cold War thriller Telefon (1977).
Bronson remained busy throughout the 1980s, with most of his films taking a more violent tone, and he was pitched as an avenging angel eradicating evildoers in films like the 10 to Midnight (1983), The Evil That Men Do (1984), Assassination (1987) and Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects (1989). Bronson jolted many critics with his forceful work as murdered United Mine Workers leader Jock Yablonski in the TV movie Act of Vengeance (1986), gave a very interesting performance in the Sean Penn-directed The Indian Runner (1991) and surprised everyone with his appearance as compassionate newspaper editor Francis Church in the family film Yes Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus (1991).
Bronson's final film roles were as police commissioner Paul Fein in a well-received trio of crime/drama TV movies Family of Cops (1995), Breach of Faith: A Family of Cops II (1997) and Family of Cops III: Under Suspicion (1999). Unfortunately, ill health began to take its toll; he suffered from Alzheimer's disease for the last few years of his life, and finally passed away from pneumonia at Los Angeles' Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in August 2003.
Bronson was a true icon of international cinema; critics had few good things to say about his films, but he remained a fan favorite in both the US and abroad for 50 years, a claim few other film legends can make. - Neville Brand joined the Illinois National Guard in 1939, bent on a career in the military. His National Guard unit was activated into federal service shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. It was while he was in the army that he made his acting debut, in Army training films, and this experience apparently changed the direction of his life. Once a civilian again, he used his GI Bill education assistance to study drama with the American Theater Wing and then appeared in several Broadway plays. His film debut was in Port of New York (1949). Among his earliest films was the Oscar-winning Stalag 17 (1953). His heavy features and gravelly voice made Brand a natural tough guy (and he wasn't just a "movie" tough guy--he was among the most highly decorated American soldiers in World War II, fighting in the European Theater against the Germans). "With this kisser, I knew early in the game I wasn't going to make the world forget Clark Gable," he once told a reporter. He played Al Capone in The George Raft Story (1961), The Scarface Mob (1959), and TV's The Untouchables (1959). Among his other memorable roles are the sympathetic guard in Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) and the representative of rioting convicts in Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954). Perhaps his best-known role was that of the soft-hearted, loud-mouthed, none-too-bright but very effective Texas Ranger Reese Bennett of Backtrack! (1969), Three Guns for Texas (1968), and TV's Laredo (1965).
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Tall, dark and handsome, not to mention a charismatic rebel of 1960s Hollywood, actor George Maharis (surname originally Maharias) was born in 1928 in Astoria, New York, one of seven siblings. His immigrant father was a restaurateur. Maharis expressed an early interest in singing and initially pursued it as a career, but extensive overuse of his voice and improper vocal lessons stripped his vocal cords, and he subsequently veered towards an acting career.
Trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse with Sanford Meisner and the Actor's Studio with Lee Strasberg, the "Method" actor found roles on television, including several episodes of Naked City (1958), and secured an early name for himself on the late 1950s off-Broadway scene, especially with his performances in Jean Genet's "Deathwatch" and Edward Albee's "Zoo Story". Producer/director Otto Preminger "discovered" Maharis for film, offering him a choice of five small roles in the upcoming film Exodus (1960), in which the actor eventually played an underground freedom fighter.
One of the episodes Maharis did of the police drama Naked City (1958), entitled "Four Sweet Corners", wound up being a roundabout pilot for the buddy adventure series that would earn him household fame. With the arrival of the series Route 66 (1960), the actor earned intense TV stardom and a major cult following as a Brando-esque, streetwise drifter named Buzz Murdock. Partnered with the fair-skinned, clean-scrubbed, college-educated Tod Stiles (Martin Milner, later star of Adam-12 (1968)), the duo traveled throughout the U.S. in a hotshot convertible Corvette and had a huge female audience getting their kicks off with the show. At the show's peak, Maharis parlayed his TV fame into a recording career with Epic Records, producing six albums in the process and peaking with the single "Teach Me Tonight".
During the middle of the series' third season peak, Maharis abruptly left the series with a number of reasons cited. Often quoted is that the virile, seductive image of a fast-rising star apparently got to him, and that he proved increasingly troublesome as he grew in stature. Tabloids reported that the actor purposefully instigated ongoing clashes with both producers and co-star Milner in order to leave the series and seek film stardom while the irons were hot. Maharis denied this, insisting that his working relationships on the set were solid and that any complaints were vastly overblown. He cited health reasons as the reason for his leaving, claiming that a long-term bout (and relapse) of infectious hepatitis, caught during a 1962 shoot of the series, forced him to abandon the show under doctor's orders. For whatever reason, Maharis left. His replacement, ruggedly handsome Glenn Corbett, failed to click with audiences and the series was canceled after the next season.
Back to working on films, the brash and confident actor, with his health scare over, aggressively pursued stardom with a number of leads, but the duds he found himself in -- Quick, Before It Melts (1964), Sylvia (1965), A Covenant with Death (1967), The Happening (1967), and The Desperados (1969) prime among his list of disasters -- hampered his chances. The best of the lot was the suspense drama The Satan Bug (1965), but it lacked box-office appeal and disappeared quickly. Moreover, a 1967 sex scandal (and subsequent one in 1974) could not have helped. In the 1970s Maharis returned to series TV in the short-lived The Most Deadly Game (1970), co-starring fellow criminologists Ralph Bellamy and Yvette Mimieux (who replaced the late Inger Stevens who committed suicide shortly before shooting was about to start). The decade also included a spate of TV movies, including the more notable The Monk (1969) and Rich Man, Poor Man (1976). In between these he appeared in Las Vegas nightclubs and summer stock, and was one of the first celebrities to pose for a nude centerfold in Playgirl (July 1973).
His last working years brought about the occasional film, most notably as the resurrected warlock in The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982) and an appearance in the horror thriller Doppelganger (1993). With his "bad boy" glory days behind him, Maharis' TV career ended rather routinely with guest parts on such popular but unchallenging shows such as "Fantasy Island" and "Murder, She Wrote". Later years were spent focusing on impressionistic painting. He has been fully retired since the early 1990s.- Emile Meyer was born on 18 August 1910 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. He was an actor, known for Paths of Glory (1957), Shane (1953) and Sweet Smell of Success (1957). He died on 19 March 1987 in Covington, Louisiana, USA.
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Born in Oklahoma, Ben Johnson was a ranch hand and rodeo performer when, in 1940, Howard Hughes hired him to take a load of horses to California. He decided to stick around (the pay was good), and for some years was a stunt man, horse wrangler, and double for such stars as John Wayne, Gary Cooper and James Stewart. His break came when John Ford noticed him and gave him a part in an upcoming film, and eventually a star part in Wagon Master (1950). He left Hollywood in 1953 to return to rodeo, where he won a world roping championship, but at the end of the year he had barely cleared expenses. The movies paid better, and were less risky, so he returned to the west coast and a career that saw him in over 300 movies.- Actor
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Warren Oates was an American character actor of the 1960s and 1970s and early 1980s whose distinctive style and intensity brought him to offbeat leading roles.
Oates was born in Depoy, a very small Kentucky town. He was the son of Sarah Alice (Mercer) and Bayless Earle Oates, a general store owner. He attended high school in Louisville, continuing on to the University of Louisville and military service with the U.S. Marines.
In college he became interested in the theatre and in 1954 headed for New York to make his mark as an actor. However, his first real job in television was, as it had been for James Dean before him, testing the contest gags on the game show Beat the Clock (1950). He did numerous menial jobs while auditioning, including serving as the hat-check man at the nightclub "21".
By 1957 he had begun appearing in live dramas such as Studio One (1948), but Oates' rural drawl seemed more fitted for the Westerns that were proliferating on the big screen at the time, so he moved to Hollywood and immediately stared getting steady work as an increasingly prominent supporting player, often as either craven or vicious types. With his role as one of the Hammond brothers in the Sam Peckinpah masterpiece Ride the High Country (1962), Oates found a niche both as an actor and as a colleague of one of the most distinguished and distinctive directors of the period. Peckinpah used Oates repeatedly, and Oates, in large part due to the prominence given him by Peckinpah, became one of those rare character actors whose name and face is as familiar as those of many leading stars. He began to play roles which, while still character parts, were also leads, particularly in cult hits like Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974).
Although never destined to be a traditional leading man, Oates remained one of Hollywood's most valued and in-demand character players up until his sudden death from a heart attack on April 3, 1982 at the age of 53. His final two films, Tough Enough (1983) (filmed in early 1981) and Blue Thunder (1983) (filmed in late 1981), were released over one year after his death and were dedicated to his memory.- Actor
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Distinguished U.S. actor and longtime civil rights campaigner Robert Bushnell Ryan was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Mable Arbutus (Bushnell), a secretary, and Timothy Aloysius Ryan, whose wealthy family owned a real estate firm. His father was of Irish ancestry, and his mother was of English and Irish descent. Ryan served in the United States Marines as a drill sergeant (winning a boxing championship) and went on to become a key figure in post WWII American Film Noir and western productions.
Ryan grabbed critical attention for his dynamic performances as an anti-Semitic bully in the superb Crossfire (1947), as an over-the-hill boxer who refuses to take a fall in The Set-Up (1949) and as a hostile & jaded cop in On Dangerous Ground (1951). Ryan's athletic physique, intense gaze and sharply delivered, authoritarian tones made him an ideal actor for the oily world of the Film Noir genre, and he contributed solid performances to many Film Noir features, usually as a vile villain. Ryan played a worthy opponent for bounty hunter James Stewart in the Anthony Mann directed western The Naked Spur (1953), he locked horns with an intrepid investigator Spencer Tracy in the suspenseful Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) and starred alongside Harry Belafonte in the grimy, gangster flick Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). Plus, the inventive Ryan excelled as the ruthless "John Claggart" in Billy Budd (1962), and two different WWII US generals - first in the star-filled The Longest Day (1962) and then in Battle of the Bulge (1965).
For the next eight years prior to his untimely death in 1973, Ryan landed some tremendous roles in a mixture of productions each aided by his high-caliber acting skills leaving strong impressions on movie audiences. He was one of the hard men hired to pursue kidnapped Claudia Cardinale in the hard boiled action of The Professionals (1966), a by-the-book army colonel clashing with highly unorthodox army major Lee Marvin in The Dirty Dozen (1967), and an embittered bounty hunter (again) forced to hunt down old friend William Holden in the violent Sam Peckinpah western classic The Wild Bunch (1969). Ryan's final on-screen performance was in the terrific production of The Iceman Cometh (1973) based on the Eugene O'Neill play and also starring Lee Marvin and Fredric March.
Legend has it that Sam Peckinpah clashed very heatedly with Ryan during the making of The Wild Bunch (1969); however Peckinpah eventually backed down when a crew member reminded Sam of Robert Ryan's proficiency with his fists!
Primarily a man of pacifist beliefs, Ryan often found it a challenge playing sadistic and racist characters who very much were at odds with his own personal ideals. Additionally, Ryan actively campaigned for improved civil rights, restricting the growth of nuclear weapons, and he strongly opposed McCarthyism and its abuse of people who many believed were innocent. A gifted, intelligent and powerful actor, Robert Ryan passed away on July 11th, 1973 of lung cancer.- Actor
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This tall, sandy-haired, mustachioed actor from Texas, born Justus McQueen, adopted the name of the character he portrayed in his first film, Battle Cry (1955). Jones, with his craggy, gaunt looks, first appeared in minor character roles in plenty of WWII films including The Young Lions (1958), The Naked and the Dead (1958), Hell Is for Heroes (1962) and Battle of the Coral Sea (1959). However, 1962 saw him team up with maverick director Sam Peckinpah for the first of Jones' five appearances in his films. Ride the High Country (1962) saw Jones play one of the lowlife Hammond brothers. Next he appeared alongside Charlton Heston in Major Dundee (1965), then Peckinpah cast him, along with his real-life friend Strother Martin, as one of the scummy, murderous bounty hunters in The Wild Bunch (1969). Such was the chemistry between Jones and Martin that Peckinpah teamed them again the following year in The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), and Jones' final appearance in a Peckinpah film was in another western, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973). Two years later Jones directed the cult post-apocalyptic film A Boy and His Dog (1975) starring a young Don Johnson. He has continued to work in Hollywood, and as the lines on his craggy face have deepened, he turns up more frequently as crusty old westerners, especially in multiple TV guest spots. He turned in an interesting performance as a seemingly good ol' boy Nevada cowboy who was actually a powerful behind-the-scenes player in state politics who leaned on Robert De Niro's Las Vegas mob gambler in Martin Scorsese's violent and powerful Casino (1995).- Actor
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Edward Asner was born of Russian Jewish parentage in Kansas City, to Morris David Asner (founder and owner of the Kansas City-based Asner Iron & Metal Company) and his wife Elizabeth "Lizzie" (Seliger). After attending college, Ed worked various jobs, including in a steel mill, as a door-to-door salesman and on an assembly line for General Motors. Between 1947 and 1949, he attended the University of Chicago. The onset of the Korean War saw him drafted into the U.S. Army Signals Corps and posted to France where he was primarily assigned clerical tasks. Upon demobilization, Asner joined the Playwrights Theatre Company in Chicago but soon progressed to New York. In 1955, he appeared off-Broadway in the leading role of the beggar king Jonathan Peachum in Brecht's Threepenny Opera. Five years later, he made his debut on the Great White Way in the courtroom drama Face of a Hero, co-starring alongside Jack Lemmon. He also began regular TV work in anthology drama.
From the early '60s, Asner, now based in California, earned his living as a busy supporting actor. His many noted guest appearances included turns in Route 66 (1960), The Untouchables (1959), The Fugitive (1963), Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964) (sinister dictator-in-exile Brynov), The Invaders (1967) (twice -- as aliens) and How the Ghosts Stole Christmas (1998) (one of a couple of ghostly residents in a haunted mansion). Heavy-set and distinctively gravelly-voiced, Asner established his reputation as tough, robust and uncompromising (though, on occasion, good-hearted) authority figures. Excellent at conveying menace, he was memorably cast as the brutish patriarch Axel Jordache in Rich Man, Poor Man (1976) and as the slave ship's morally conflicted master, Captain Thomas Davies, in Roots (1977), which earned him a Primetime Emmy Award in 1977. The immensely prolific Asner (417 IMDB screen credits!) would receive seven Emmys in total (from 21 nominations), all Primetime, and become the only actor to win in both the comedy and drama category for the same role. That was also the part which made Asner a household name: the gruff, snarky newspaper editor Lou Grant (1977). Grant began as a mainstay on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970), a 30-minute sitcom.
When the character was promoted to West Coast editor of The Los Angeles Tribune, Asner went on to star in his own much acclaimed drama series. Despite consistently high ratings, the show was axed after five seasons amid rumours of disharmony between the star and producers, possibly due to the former's outspoken political views. Indeed, Asner has been a controversial figure as an activist and campaigner, engaged in a variety of humanitarian and political issues. A self-proclaimed liberal Democrat, he published a book in 2017, amusingly titled "The Grouchy Historian: An Old-Time Lefty Defends Our Constitution Against Right-Wing Hypocrites and Nutjobs."
Between 1981 and 1985, Asner served twice as President of the Screen Actors Guild, during which time he was critical of former SAG President Ronald Reagan -- then the president of a greater concern -- for his Central American policy. In 1996, he was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame and in 2002 received the Screen Actors Guild's Life Achievement Award. In addition to appearing on screen and stage, he performed extensive work for radio, video games and animated TV series. He voiced the lead character Carl Fredricksen in Pixar's Oscar-winning production of Up (2009), starred as Santa in Elf (2003), and played Nicholas Drago in The Games Maker (2014). Ed passed away in Los Angeles at the age of 91 on August 29, 2021.- Actor
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Two-time Oscar nominee Bruce Dern's tremendous career is made up of playing both modern day heroes and legendary villains. Through decades of lauded performances, Dern has acquired the reputation of being one of the most talented and prolific actors of his generation.
Dern currently appears opposite Kristen Wiig, Allison Janney and his daughter Laura in Apple+ TV's acclaimed comedy series "Palm Royale." He also received critical praise for the last season of the Amazon series "Goliath" opposite Oscar winners Billy Bob Thornton and JK Simmons.
Dern appeared as real-life rancher George Spahn in Quentin Tarantino's 10-time Academy Award nominated "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood." The film also won the Golden Globes & Critics Choice Awards for Best Picture, among others. He also co-starred in the #1 independent film of 2019, "The Peanut Butter Falcon" and he earned rave reviews for Focus Features' "The Mustang." He has recently appeared in several recent independent film projects including "Reminisce," "The Accidental Texan," "Remember Me," "The Artist's Wife," "Emperor," "Badland," "Death in Texas," "Last Call," and "The Gateway."
In 2018, he starred in two high profile independent films - as Joe Kennedy in "Chappaquiddick" and opposite Matthew McConaughey in Sony's "White Boy Rick." In 2017, he appeared with Jane Fonda and Robert Redford in the Netflix film "Our Souls at Night."
On the television side in 2019 - he memorably guested on Showtime's comedy "Black Monday" and was seen in the Stephen King series "Mr. Mercedes" for the AT&T AUDIENCE Network.
In 2015, Dern reteamed with his "Django Unchained" director Quentin Tarantino in the ambitious & critically-acclaimed "The Hateful Eight." In 2013, Dern earned his second Academy Award nomination for his heralded role in Alexander Payne's "Nebraska." That role also garnered him a Best Actor Award from the Cannes Film Festival and the National Board of Review. He was also nominated for a BAFTA, Golden Globe, Independent Spirit Award, Broadcast Film Critics Association Award and Screen Actors Guild Award.
Dern was also nominated for an Emmy in 2011 for his portrayal of polygamist patriarch Frank Harlow in HBO's hit drama "Big Love." A celebrated stage actor, Dern was trained by famed director Elia Kazan at the legendary The Actor's Studio and made his film debut in Kazan's "Wild River" in 1960. In the 60's, Dern also found success as a distinguished television actor. He appeared regularly in contemporary Western TV series, as well as on "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." Mr. Hitchcock was such a fan of Dern's that he cast him in "Marnie" and "Family Plot" (Hitchcock's final film).
Also during the 60's, Dern went on to work with director Roger Corman and appeared in several of his classic and decade defining films including "Wild Angels." He also received critical success during that time for films such as "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" and "Drive, He Said." Dern goes down in history for his role as Long Hair in "The Cowboys," in which he became the only man ever to kill John Wayne on screen.
Dern went on to star in such classic films like "The King of Marvin Gardens" with Jack Nicholson and Ellen Burstyn as well as playing Tom Buchanan in "The Great Gatsby" (for which he received a Golden Globe nomination). It was his brilliant and powerful performance in Hal Ashby's "Coming Home" that earned him both an Academy Award and Golden Globe nomination.
Dern has starred in over 100 films in his career, including: "Monster," "Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte," "Silent Running," "Smile," "Middle Age Crazy," "That Championship Season," "Tattoo," "The 'Burbs," "The Haunting," "All the Pretty Horses," "Masked and Anonymous," "Down in the Valley," "Astronaut Farmer," "The Cake Eaters," "Black Sunday," "After Dark, My Sweet," "Madison," "Diggstown," "Twixt" and "Last Man Standing."
Dern has received several Lifetime Achievement Awards from various film festivals. In 2010, Dern received the prestigious Hollywood Walk of Fame star along with his ex-wife Diane Ladd & daughter Laura Dern, the only family in history to receive their Stars in one ceremony.- Richard Dysart served for four years in the Air Force during the Korean War. He was a founding member of the American Conservatory Theatre, San Francisco. He received the Drama Desk Award in 1972 and a Emmy Award in 1992. He was good friends with Diana Muldaur, who played Rosalind Shays on L.A. Law.
- Actor
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Dan Vadis was born on 3 January 1938 in Shanghai, China. He was an actor, known for High Plains Drifter (1973), Every Which Way But Loose (1978) and The Ten Gladiators (1963). He was married to Sharon Jessup. He died on 11 June 1987 in Lancaster, California, USA.- Actor
- Soundtrack
John Carradine, the son of a reporter/artist and a surgeon, grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York. He attended Christ Church School and Graphic Art School, studying sculpture, and afterward roamed the South selling sketches. He made his acting debut in "Camille" in a New Orleans theatre in 1925. Arriving in Los Angeles in 1927, he worked in local theatre. He applied for a job as as scenic designer to Cecil B. DeMille, who rejected his designs but gave him voice work in several films. His on-screen debut was in Tol'able David (1930), billed as Peter Richmond. A protégé and close friend of John Barrymore, Carradine was an extremely prolific film character actor while simultaneously maintaining a stage career in classic leading roles such as Hamlet and Malvolio. In his later years he was typed as a horror star, putting in appearances in many low- and ultra-low-budget horror films. He was a member of the group of actors often used by director John Ford that became known as "The John Ford Stock Company". John Carradine died at age 82 of natural causes on November 27, 1988.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Charismatic character star Edward James Begley was born in Hartford, Connecticut of Irish parents and educated at St.Patrick's school. His interest in acting first surfaced at the age of nine, when he performed amateur theatricals at the Hartford Globe Theatre. Determined to make his own way, he left home aged eleven and drifted from job to job, had a four-year stint in the U.S. Navy, then worked in a bowling alley replacing pins, joined carnivals and circuses. In 1931, he appeared in vaudeville and was also hired as a radio announcer, his voice broadcast to nationwide audiences. It took him several years to establish himself on the legitimate stage, but in 1943, he had a role in the short-running play 'Land of Fame'.
His first success was the 1947 Arthur Miller play 'All My Sons' and this was followed by the 1925 Scopes Trial fictionalization 'Inherit the Wind' (1955-57), which ran for 806 performances at the National Theatre. Ed, co-starring with Paul Muni, played the part of Matthew Harrison Brady (played in the 1960 motion picture by Fredric March) and won the 1956 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play. Upon Paul Muni's departure from the cast, Ed used the opportunity to play the part of Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy's role in the film) with equal vigor. In 1960, he starred as Senator Orrin Knox in the political drama 'Advise and Consent'. Ed's movie career began with Boomerang! (1947), a murder mystery set in his native Connecticut, directed by Elia Kazan. Heavy-set with bushy eyebrows, the archetypal image of Ed Begley on screen is as a gruff, blustery, often heavily sweating (and sometimes corrupt) politician or industrialist. He proved his mettle in a number of classic films, including Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) and On Dangerous Ground (1951). Whether as the sympathetic executive in Patterns (1956), a bigoted ex-cop turned bank robber in Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), or the crazed billionaire bent on world domination of Billion Dollar Brain (1967), he tackled every part that came his way with conviction. The culmination of his work was a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his role of Boss Finley in Tennessee Williams's Sweet Bird of Youth (1962).
In addition to countless radio broadcasts, Ed was also busy in television in the 1950s and '60s. Among frequent guest-starring appearances, his dynamic characterizations in two episodes of The Invaders (1967) ('The Betrayed' and 'Labyrinth') in particular stand out. Ed Begley died of a heart attack in April 1970 in Hollywood at the age of 69.- Actor
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Emilio "El Indio" Fernandez Romo is the most famous person in the history of Mexican movies. For an era he symbolized Mexico due to his violent machismo, rooted in the Revolution of 1910-17, and because of his staunch commitment to Mexican cultural nationalism. Born to a Mexican (Mestizo) father and a Native American Kickapoo mother, Emilio was himself the "mestizaje" (mestizo) that his films would later glorify.
The teenaged Fernandez abandoned his studies to serve as an officer in the Huertista rebellion, which broke out on 12/4/1923, led by Gen. Adolfo de la Huerta. On July 20th of that year, Pancho Villa had been ambushed and murdered; one theory was that the killing was done by agents of Mexican President Álvaro Obregón. Obregon, when he served as a general during the revolution, had defeated Villa in four successive battles collectively known as the Battle of Celaya, which was the largest military confrontation in Latin-American history before the 1982 Falklands War.
Under the Constitution of 1917 that Obregon himself helped write, Mexican presidents could not succeed themselves (Obregon would later have the constitution amended so he could serve a second, non-consecutive term; after winning the presidential election of 1928, he was assassinated before his inauguration). Obregon had won the presidency in 1920 after inciting a successful military revolt against President Venustiano Carranza, who had planned on naming Ignacio Bonillas as his successor instead of Obregon, who believed that he deserved it. The revolt began when the governor of the state of Sonora, Gen. Huerta, broke with President Carranza and declared the secession of Sonora. This was a signal for the beginning of the successful uprising against Carranza, led by Obregon and supported by Gen. Plutarco Elías Calles. After Carranza was killed in an ambush, Huerta served as provisional president of Mexico from 6/1/1920 to 12/1/1920, until elections could be held. When Obregon won the federal election, Huerta became Minister of Finance in the new government.
Huerta considered himself the natural successor to President Obregon, just as Obregon had considered himself Carranza's natural successor. The murdered Villa was seen as an ally of Huerta, who had publicly announced his candidacy for the presidency. Obregon, however, planned to remain in power by handpicking his successor, a tradition that lasted throughout 20th-century Mexican politics. When he named his anti-clerical Minister of the Interior, the former Gen. Calles, as his heir, Huerta rose up in a rebellion that eventually affected half of the Mexican army. Like Huerta a native of Sonora and a former general in the Mexican army, Calles had preceded him as governor and military ruler of their home state from 1915-16. Huerta thought his service and loyalty to Obregon should have brought him the presidency, but Mexican presidents, not allowed to succeed themselves and limited (mostly) to one term, tried to extend their power by naming political puppets as successors (Calles would outdo Obregon by controlling the Mexican presidency outright or through puppets from 1924-34).
The rebellion was a serious threat to Obregon, but he was able to quash it by using loyal army units, battalions of workers and farmers and intervention by the US. By the time the revolt ended in March 1924, 54 generals and 7,000 soldiers were gone, either killed in battle, executed, exiled or dismissed. Obregon banished Huerta to exile in the US (where he lived in Los Angeles, supporting himself as a music teacher). This was the cauldron of violence and nationalism in which the young Fernandez came into his manhood. He received a 20-year prison sentence for his participation in the rebellion on the losing side. Escaping prison by following Huerta into exile in Los Angeles, Fernandez absorbed the rudiments of filmmaking as a bit player and extra working in Hollywood in the 1920s and early 1930s. With the election of Lázaro Cárdenas as president in 1934, the Huertista rebels were granted an amnesty (Huerta himself was recalled from exile by Cardenas in 1935 and served in several posts, including Inspector General of Foreign Consulates and Director General of Civil Pensions). Fernandez returned to Mexico in 1934 and began working in the Mexican movie industry as a screenwriter and actor. His Indian looks, which gave him his nickname "El Indio," also brought him his first lead role, playing an Indian in Janitzio (1935). Due to his imposing physical presence and Indian countenance, El Indio was cast as bandits, charros (cowboys) and revolutionaries.
The Cardenas government of 1934-40 established the framework in which the "Golden Age of Mexican Cinema" could be realized. The political system that dominated Mexico for over half a century was consolidated during his regime. The government incorporated trade unions, campesino (peasant) organizations and middle-class professionals and office workers into the ruling Party of the Mexican Revolution (later the Party of the Institutional Revolution, or PRI). Cardenas oversaw the redistribution of millions of acres of land to peasants and the expansion of collective bargaining rights and wage increases to workers.
Cardenas and all subsequent PRM/PRI presidents (all presidents of Mexico in the 20th century beginning with Calles were PRM/PRI members; Vicente Fox was the first from outside the party in three-quarters of a century) maintained political control of Mexico by granting favors and concessions to their constituencies inside the corporatist party structure in exchange for worker and campesino organizations delivering votes and suppressing discontent among their constituencies. The PRM/PRI itself created an organizational structure for the government that allowed citizens access to the political realm, in the sense that they could interface with government agencies. Once inside the government machine, seeking redress, favors, etc., the non-connected citizen was led through a maze of layers of bureaucracy that never permitted a satisfactory result. Citizens caught in the maze were eventually frustrated and discouraged, but the ingenious if disingenuous system worked as it gave them input--just no guaranteed output. By frustrating them within an institutional structure, the PRM/PRI governments--both federal and state--took the fight out of them. The PRM/PRI sought to control frustration that had led to violence in the past, particularly among the generals who had the power to destabilize the society and economy. That government structure thus served as a homeostatic device for the people's frustration, relieving it and never allowing it to build up again into a revolutionary situation.
Cardenas' most notable achievement arguably was the nationalization of Mexico's oil industry. After unsuccessfully trying to negotiate better terms with Mexican Eagle--the holding company owned by Royal Dutch/Shell and Standard Oil of New Jersey--Cardenas nationalized Mexico's petroleum reserves and expropriated the equipment of the foreign oil companies on 3/18/38. A spontaneous six-hour parade broke out in Mexico City to celebrate the event. Unlike Fidel Castro's nationalization of foreign assets in Cuba, Shell and SONJ were compensated for their expropriated assets. Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) and the Mexican model became a beacon for other oil-producing nations seeking to gain control over their own energy resources from foreign companies. Cardenas was the only PRM/PRI president who did not enrich himself while in office. After retiring as Minister of Defense in 1945--the post he took after relinquishing the presidency--he assumed a modest lifestyle. He spent the last years of his life supervising irrigation projects and promoting education and free medical care for the poor. This was the man who set the tone of the modern Mexico that arose from the revolution and civil wars of the 1920s, who cleared the ground for the economic boom of the 1940s in which the "Golden Age of Mexican Cinema" reached its apogee. Classic Mexican cinema has mostly been ignored in the US due to the language barrier and a colonialist mindset suffused with racism. When Mexican cinema has been addressed by those north of the border, the primary focus fell on the brilliant cinematography of Gabriel Figueroa, who shot films for John Ford and John Huston, or on former Hollywood star Dolores Del Río. Fernandez's reputation was so great that he was even appreciated in the US in his lifetime, but his notoriety as a sort of wildman of the Mexican movie industry and his appearance as an actor in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) overshadowed his greatness as a director. While Mexico has often served as a locale for American films--the genres of sweet (white) young things imperiled by swarthy Mexican bandits and of Americans in revolutionary Mexico, to say nothing of Zorro and The Cisco Kid--have been part of the Yankee cinema since the East Coast-based film companies began relocating to southern California in the early 1910s. Gringo Warner Baxter won the second Oscar ever awarded for Best Actor playing The Cisco Kid in a role originally intended for Raoul Walsh, of all people. Mexico has been the site of such blockbuster films as Viva Villa! (1934), Juarez (1939), Viva Zapata! (1952), Vera Cruz (1954), The Professionals (1966) and "The Wild Bunch," but except for La caza del oro (1972), a Johnny-Come-Lately to the genre, they seldom featured Mexican actors in anything other than bit parts, if at all, with the exception of Anthony Quinn, one of the few Mexican-Americans to achieve superstar status. Mexican performers taken up by Hollywood --such as Ramon Novarro, Rita Hayworth, John Gavin and Raquel Welch--were, like half-Mexican baseball great Ted Williams (born in San Diego), de-ethnicized in a sort of cultural ethnic cleansing. Salma Hayek, who is of mixed Mexican and Lebanese parentage, is arguably the first Mexican since Lupe Velez and Dolores del Rio to cross over as a Hollywood superstar and remain identifiably Mexican (even at the dawn of a new millennium, she was urged by her Hollywood agents to play up her Arabic ethnicity, even with anti-Arab feeling rife in Hollywood and the US at large--their "reasoning" was that no one would go see a Mexican in movies since their cleaning ladies were Mexican),
Until the 1990s, with Like Water for Chocolate (1992) ("Like Water for Chocolate"), Mexican films themselves seldom strayed in the Yankee consciousness, except for the rare one like The Pearl (1947), based on a novel by Californian John Steinbeck and a prize-winner at the Venice Film Festival. "La Perla" was directed by Fernandez, the greatest director to come out of Mexico's golden age of cinema. The first Mexican feature was released in 1906, though production often was eclipsed by political and economic conditions. There were documentaries made about the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s, but very few films were made in the 1920s. Sergei Eisenstein's trip to Mexico in the early 1930s to make Que Viva Mexico (1979), which remained unfinished due to his problems with his American backer, Upton Sinclair, injected a new enthusiasm into the Mexican movie industry.
While most American film historians place the Golden Age firmly in the 1940s--some specifically assigning it to the period 1943-46 and others extending it until the mid-'50s--the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema properly stretches back to 1936, peaks in the mid-'40s (when the Mexican cinema receives international recognition; two of Fernandez's films won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and were nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festivals) and terminates in the mid-'50s, with the end of Fernandez's 25-film collaboration with cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. Figueroa, the Mexican movie industry's first great director, inaugurated the Golden Age in 1936 with two hits, Out on the Big Ranch (1936) ("Out at Big Ranch") and Let's Go with Pancho Villa (1936) ("Let's Go with Pancho Villa"). Both were "political message" movies addressing the social and cultural issues lying at the heart of Mexican Revolution. "Vamonos con Pancho Villa" has the distinction of being the first feature produced at the Mexican government-subsidized studio Cinematografica Latino Americana S.A., while "Allá en el Rancho Grande" made Tito Guízar a star. Guizar eventually became the Mexican movie industry's first superstar by playing in the "comedias rancheras" (ranch comedies) genre that was the most popular type of film in Mexico in the 1930s. A hit with audiences throughout Latin America, "comedias rancheras" were set in an idyllic, pre-revolutionary Mexico. The vaudevillian Mario Moreno, who became a Latin-American superstar under the name Cantinflas, made his short-subject debut in 1936 and would soon become the Latin-American film industry's leading comedian when he made his feature-film debut in You're Missing the Point (1940) ("There is the Detail"). The Cantinflas character is rooted in the image of the "pelado," or poor white trash, and his character deflates respectable society through his sharp repartee. Peace--i.e., a lack of overt domestic political turmoil--laid the groundwork for the development of a truly popular indigenous cinema in the 1930s and '40s. The comedias rancheras and Cantinflas comedies helped make the Mexican cinema commercially viable. With Hollywood distracted by turning out propaganda and military training films during World War II, there was an opening in Latin America that the Mexican industry filled. Without competition from Hollywood, the Mexican movie industry dominated Latin-American cinemas for most of the decade. Movie production tripled in the 1940s compared to the previous decade. The Mexican film industry underwent a consolidation and developed a star system, some of whom crossed over to achieve international recognition. The peak of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema came in the 1940s, spurred by rapid industrialization and a resulting affluence--although inequitably distributed--caused by trade with the US, as World War II boosted American demand for Mexican raw materials. The Mexican movie industry became the world's largest producer of Spanish-language films, helped by the fact that the other large producers, Argentina and Spain, were headed by fascist governments. Though the Mexican government was conservative and repressive in the 1940s, it encouraged the production of nationalist films that helped articulate a Mexican identity. During the 1940s Mexican movie stars and directors became popular icons, and some even became public figures with effective political influence. Among the movie stars blossoming during the decade were Dolores del Rio, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Joaquín Pardavé and María Félix, while Fernandez and Figueroa became globally known. Luis Buñuel moved to Mexico and would direct some of the country's major movies in the following decade.
Mexican movies typically were genre pictures, melodramas, romances, musicals, comedies and horror, which addressed all aspects of Mexican society, from love stories about the "lumpen proletariat" to dramas about the Indians. Mexican movies are a mirror of Mexican society, including history (19th-century dictator Porfirio Díaz and his court, The Revolution and Villa and Emiliano Zapata), obsessions (both familial and erotic) and mythology (Indian and big-city culture). Mexican cinema did this using the classic genres of the the melodrama, the comedy (in its romantic, musical and ranchera versions, and slapstick and farce) and even the horror film. With its proximity to Hollywood, and the fact that many leading lights of the Mexican cinema were familiar with Hollywood production values, the indigenous movie industry set a high standard for itself, as it had to measure up to Hollywood product.
Fernandez made his motion picture debut as an actor in Chano Urueta's El destino (1928), but his early work in movies was in American westerns churned out by Monogram director John P. McCarthy, including the Bob Steele programmers The Oklahoma Cyclone (1930), The Land of Missing Men (1930), Headin' North (1930), The Sunrise Trail (1931) and the Tim McCoy "hoss opera" The Western Code (1932). After a supporting role in Enrico Caruso Jr.'s La buenaventura (1934), he made his return to Mexican pictures in 1934, starring in Heart of a Bandit (1934) and director Fernando de Fuentes' Cruz Diablo (1934).
Fernandez's first film as a director was La isla de la pasión (1942), in 1941, which he also wrote and in which he played a bit part. The movie starred Pedro Armendáriz, who Fernandez would cast in many of his films. Another favorite collaborator was his wife Columba Domínguez. El Indio rapidly gained a reputation as Mexico's premier director making populist dramas. His Maria Candelaria (1944) put Mexican film on the map when it won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1946. It has been variously praised as "the highest triumph of Mexican plastic arts on celluloid" and as "a titanic promise for strictly patriotic [Mexican] cinema." French film critic Georges Sadoul, in his 1954 book "Histoire General du Cinema," praised the film for its "authentic" portrayal of rural Mexican life and for addressing race relations.
The film remains controversial in Mexico due to El Indio's aesthetic choices, which emphasized the exotic and primitive, and his representation of Mexican Indians, which some critics believed was inauthentic or "touristy." The nationalistic Fernandez wanted to articulate an idea of what it meant to be Mexican that was uniquely Mexican, and not influenced by Hollywood, whose films he felt were Americanizing Mexican cinema audiences. Terming his films "autos sacramentales [passion plays] of mexicanidad," Fernandez wanted to create a Mexican cinema that Mexicanized Mexicans. The film stars Dolores del Rio, the Hollywood movie star who had returned to Mexico after becoming disillusioned with the American movie industry, as the daughter of a prostitute trying to survive just before the Revolution. Set in the floating gardens of Xochimilco in Mexico City, del Rio's character is shunned by the locals, who are indigenous people. Her great desire is to marry her lover, played by Pedro Armendariz, but their romance proves to be star-crossed. Fernandez's direction was flawless, and Figueroa's black-and-white cinematography was masterful. The collaborators created one of the classics of not just Mexican movies but of world cinema. When El Indio and Figueroa were making "Maria Candelaria," they were part of a movement in which Mexican filmmakers were consciously attempting to create an indigenous art cinema that could compete with Hollywood product while simultaneously articulating a vision of Mexicans that was rooted in the "indigenismo" and "mestizophilia" of Mexican intellectuals. José Vasconcelos, the Minister of Education during the Obregon administration, was particularly influential due to his concepts of "mexicanos en potencia" and the cosmic race. In Vasconcelos' philosophy, the "barbarous" Indian was redeemed by a modernization program based on education, and by the assimilation of the Indians with the Caucausian Europeans into "la raza" of mestizos ("mestizaje"). Gabriel Figueroa was conscious of the fact that he and Fernandez, a creative team that became known as "Epoca de Oro," invented an idea of rural Mexico that did not actually exist. Figueroa established himself as the leader in imagining a new, post-revolutionary Mexican consciousness, through the vehicle of the visual image. A "painter in light," Figueroa learned his craft from Gregg Toland and Eduard Tisse, Eisenstein's cinematographer. Figueroa is credited with creating the classic Mexican film aesthetic in collaboration with El Indio and other film directors. In over 200 movies, he developed the classic imagery and aesthetic of Mexican cinema, which also influenced and was influenced by contemporary Mexican artists. Figueroa pioneered an indigenous visual vernacular that affected the muralist movement, and he has been referred to as the fourth of the most important Mexican muralist after Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros. Siqueiros himself called Figueroa's cinematography "murals that travel."
In their 25 films together between 1942-58, El Indio and Figueroa created the idea of "mexicanidad" cinema while elevating the mestizaje (mixed-race) identity, as well as the status of the pre-Columbian culture. The epic visual style they developed was indebted to Eisenstein's unfinished "Que viva Mexico." Their style fetishized the Mexican landscape through beautiful, carefully composed, stationary long shots. For two decades Mexican art cinema was identified with the films resulting from the Fernandez-Figueroa collaboration. Their films not only affected Mexican audiences' collective identity, but they affected how their audiences, both domestic and global, viewed Mexico and its history.
The climax of "Maria Candelaria" was an homage to Carlos Navarro's classic "indigenista" film Janitzio (1935). The movie is evocative of the anti-clerical struggles engendered by the Revolution. The secularization of the Mexican state was begun with the 1910 Revolution, continued with the 1917 Constitution, and reached a violent apotheosis in the Cristero Rebellion of 1926-29, when the President tried to crack down on the Roman Catholic church. However, the anti-clericalism of the revolutionaries had to co-exist with the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the symbol that has proved the most powerful and enduring in creating a Mexican national consciousness. Our Lady has served as a symbol for political struggles from the 19th-century wars of independence to the Cristero wars. On one level, "Maria Candelaria" is a paean to the cult of the Virgin Mary, a phenomenon present in much of classical Mexican cinema, which likely is one of the reasons the films Fernandez and Figueroa and others of the 1940s and 1950s proved so popular all over Latin America.
In 1946 Fernandez filmed an adaptation of John Steinbeck's novella "The Pearl," in Spanish- and English-language versions. Shot by Figueroa and starring El Indio's favorite actor, Pedro Armendariz, "La perla" won El Indio a nomination for Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, further solidifying his notoriety as a director and publicizing the Mexican movie industry. The film also won him the Golden Ariel for Best Picture at the 1948 Ariel Awards (the Mexican equivalent of the Oscars), and Fernandez, Figueroa, Armendariz and Juan García won Silver Ariels for Best Direction, Cinematography, Actor and Supporting Actor, respectively. Figueroa won a Golden Globe for Best Cinematography in 1949 from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
In 1948 Salón México (1949) was released, written and directed by Fernandez with cinematography by Figueroa. An urban melodrama, the film was groundbreaking in that it helped usher in a new genre, the "cabaretera" (cabaret) film, racier and just as commercial as the familiar genre of rancheras, which was then fading in popularity. The movie recreates the atmosphere of the famous Mexico City dance hall and won Marga López an Ariel Award for her role as the taxi dancer Mercedes. The movie featured a sensual soundtrack performed by the Afro-Cuban music group Son Clave de Oro. By the end of the 1940s Emilio Fernandez was the most famous and prestigious director in all of Latin America. He would continue his reign as Mexico's premier director into the mid-'50s, when his powers began to decline and Spanish amigra Luis Buñuel took over the title. As the most famous directors and biggest stars aged or died, Mexican cinema began to decline commercially, and the Golden Age of Mexican cinema came to an end (ironically, Bunuel's Mexican oeuvre strengthened as the national cinema went into decline and L'age d'or went into eclipse).
Although Fernandez and Figueroa last worked together in El puño del amo (1958), which starred El Indio's half-brother Jaime Fernández, the collaboration was essentially over by the mid-'50s when they made La rosa blanca (1954) and La Tierra del Fuego se apaga (1955). Their last great film together was La rebelión de los colgados (1954) (based on B. Traven's "Rebellion of the Hanged," it's English-language title), which starred Pedro Armendariz and Emiolio's half-brother Jaime Fernández, both of whom were nominated for Silver Ariel awards as Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, respectively. Jaime Fernandez won the Ariel, as did Amanda del Llano for Best Supporting Actress, Gloria Schoemann for editing and José B. Carles for sound. Antonio Díaz Conde was nominated for a Silver Ariel for Best Score. As his collaboration with Fernandez waned, Figueroa's professional relationship with Bunuel waxed. Figueroa first served as director of photography on Bunuel's classic The Young and the Damned (1950), which won 11 Ariels in 1951, including the Golden Ariel as Best Picture in 1951 and awards for Best Cinematography for Figueroa and Best Director and Original Story for Bunuel. Their other films together were Nazarin (1959) ("This Strange Passion"; winner of the International Prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival), Fever Mounts at El Pao (1959); The Young One (1960), (which won a Special Mention at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival); The Exterminating Angel (1962), ("The Exterminating Angel"); and Simon of the Desert (1965) ("Simon of the Desert"). Of the Golden Age output, "New York Times" movie critic A.O. Scott said, "There is a frankness in these films that would never have passed muster with the Hays Office." The Golden Age had peaked in the 1940s, bolstered by the economic boom caused by the World War II alliance with the US, government support for the industry via state-funded studios, the maturation of a star system, and the rationalization of distribution and exhibition. Aside from Bunuel's pictures, the post-Golden Age era saw indigenous cinema suffer through the 1960s, as the industry became more dependent on formulaic pictures and such popular genres as the "Santo the Wrestler" series. During the 1960s and 1970s many low-grade horror and action movies were produced with professional wrestler Santo and Hugo Stiglitz being the biggest stars. However, the moribund 1960s led to a revival of government support for the industry in the 1970s, which established the base for a revival of Mexican art cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. El Indio continued directing films until 1979, but when his collaboration with Figueroa ended in 1958, his reputation suffered as the artistry of his pictures declined. He began acting more, though he directed a picture every few years. Gradually, the notoriety of his life began overtaking his reputation as a filmmaker. El Indio lived out the fantasy of perhaps every director when he shot a critic, who had dissed one of his movies, in the testicles. A violent man, he shot and killed a farm laborer, which he claimed was in self-defense. Convicted of manslaughter in 1976, he served six months of a 4-1/2-year sentence. By the 1960s Fernandez's off-screen reputation as a violent man led to his typecasting as brutal villains in many Mexican and American films. As an actor, Fernandez appeared with his brother, singer/actor Fernando Fernández, in John Ford's The Fugitive (1947), on which he also served as associate producer. Other American films he appeared in were John Huston's The Unforgiven (1960) (on which he also served as second unit director) and The Night of the Iguana (1964), the John Wayne pictures The War Wagon (1967) and Chisum (1970) (on which he also served as second unit director), Sidney J. Furie's The Appaloosa (1966) in support of Marlon Brando, and Burt Kennedy's Return of the Seven (1966). After assaying the role of renegade Mexican Gen. Mapache in the classic "The Wild Bunch", Fernandez appeared in two other Peckinpah films, as Paco in Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) and as El Jefe, who gives the order to Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974). He was reunited with John Huston in Under the Volcano (1984) and appeared in Roman Polanski's Pirates (1986).
El Indio's last two films as a writer-director were México Norte (1979) and Erótica (1979), in which he also starred. In all, El Indio directed 43 pictures from 1942-79. He was the credited screenwriter on 40 pictures, starting with Beautiful Sky (1936) in 1936. He also served as second-unit director, both credited and uncredited, on such American pictures shot in Mexico as The Magnificent Seven (1960), in which he was attached to the American crew by the Mexican government to ensure that the depictions of Mexicans were not racist or demeaning. Fernandez died in Mexico City on 8/6/86.
Government sponsorship of the industry and the creation of state-supported film helped create the phenomenon known as the "Nuevo Cine Mexicano" ("New Mexican Cinema") that catapulted Mexican movies into prominence on the global market in the 1990s. Amores Perros (2000), And Your Mother Too (2001) and The Crime of Padre Amaro (2002) are just three of the most recent Mexican films that have featured prominently in American art cinemas. The spirit of El Indio lives on!
In 2002 "La Perla" was named to the National Film Preservation Board's National Film Registry, which is maintained by the US Library of Congress. Fernandez and his collaborator Gabriel Figueroa were honored on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of El Indio's birth at the inaugural Puerto Vallarta Film Festival of the Americas held in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, in November 2004.- Actor
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Veteran actor and director Robert Selden Duvall was born on January 5, 1931, in San Diego, CA, to Mildred Virginia (Hart), an amateur actress, and William Howard Duvall, a career military officer who later became an admiral. Duvall majored in drama at Principia College (Elsah, IL), then served a two-year hitch in the army after graduating in 1953. He began attending The Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre In New York City on the G.I. Bill in 1955, studying under Sanford Meisner along with Dustin Hoffman, with whom Duvall shared an apartment. Both were close to another struggling young actor named Gene Hackman. Meisner cast Duvall in the play "The Midnight Caller" by Horton Foote, a link that would prove critical to his career, as it was Foote who recommended Duvall to play the mentally disabled "Boo Radley" in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). This was his first "major" role since his 1956 motion picture debut as an MP in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), starring Paul Newman.
Duvall began making a name for himself as a stage actor in New York, winning an Obie Award in 1965 playing incest-minded longshoreman "Eddie Carbone" in the off-Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's "A View from the Bridge", a production for which his old roommate Hoffman was assistant director. He found steady work in episodic TV and appeared as a modestly billed character actor in films, such as Arthur Penn's The Chase (1966) with Marlon Brando and in Robert Altman's Countdown (1967) and Francis Ford Coppola's The Rain People (1969), in both of which he co-starred with James Caan.
He was also memorable as the heavy who is shot by John Wayne at the climax of True Grit (1969) and was the first "Maj. Frank Burns", creating the character in Altman's Korean War comedy M*A*S*H (1970). He also appeared as the eponymous lead in George Lucas' directorial debut, THX 1138 (1971). It was Francis Ford Coppola, casting The Godfather (1972), who reunited Duvall with Brando and Caan and provided him with his career breakthrough as mob lawyer "Tom Hagen". He received the first of his six Academy Award nominations for the role.
Thereafter, Duvall had steady work in featured roles in such films as The Godfather Part II (1974), The Killer Elite (1975), Network (1976), The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976) and The Eagle Has Landed (1976). Occasionally this actor's actor got the chance to assay a lead role, most notably in Tomorrow (1972), in which he was brilliant as William Faulkner's inarticulate backwoods farmer. He was less impressive as the lead in Badge 373 (1973), in which he played a character based on real-life NYPD detective Eddie Egan, the same man his old friend Gene Hackman had won an Oscar for playing, in fictionalized form as "Popeye Doyle" in The French Connection (1971).
It was his appearance as "Lt. Col. Kilgore" in another Coppola picture, Apocalypse Now (1979), that solidified Duvall's reputation as a great actor. He got his second Academy Award nomination for the role, and was named by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most versatile actor in the world. Duvall created one of the most memorable characters ever assayed on film, and gave the world the memorable phrase, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning!"
Subsequently, Duvall proved one of the few established character actors to move from supporting to leading roles, with his Oscar-nominated turns in The Great Santini (1979) and Tender Mercies (1983), the latter of which won him the Academy Award for Best Actor. Now at the summit of his career, Duvall seemed to be afflicted with the fabled "Oscar curse" that had overwhelmed the careers of fellow Academy Award winners Luise Rainer, Rod Steiger and Cliff Robertson. He could not find work equal to his talents, either due to his post-Oscar salary demands or a lack of perception in the industry that he truly was leading man material. He did not appear in The Godfather Part III (1990), as the studio would not give in to his demands for a salary commensurate with that of Al Pacino, who was receiving $5 million to reprise Michael Corleone.
His greatest achievement in his immediate post-Oscar period was his triumphant characterization of grizzled Texas Ranger Gus McCrae in the TV mini-series Lonesome Dove (1989), for which he received an Emmy nomination. He received a second Emmy nomination and a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in Stalin (1992), and a third Emmy nomination playing Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in The Man Who Captured Eichmann (1996).
The shakeout of his career doldrums was that Duvall eventually settled back into his status as one of the premier character actors in the industry, rivaled only by his old friend Gene Hackman. Duvall, unlike Hackman, also has directed pictures, including the documentary We're Not the Jet Set (1974), Angelo My Love (1983) and Assassination Tango (2002). As a writer-director, Duvall gave himself one of his most memorable roles, that of the preacher on the run from the law in The Apostle (1997), a brilliant performance for which he received his third Best Actor nomination and fifth Oscar nomination overall. The film brought Duvall back to the front ranks of great actors, and was followed by a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod for A Civil Action (1998).
Robert Duvall will long be remembered as one of the great naturalistic American screen actors in the mode of Spencer Tracy and his frequent co-star Marlon Brando. His performances as "Boo Radley" in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), "Jackson Fentry" in Tomorrow (1972), "Tom Hagen" in the first two "Godfather" movies, "Frank Hackett" in Network (1976), "Lt. Col. Kilgore" in Apocalypse Now (1979), "Bull Meechum" in The Great Santini (1979), "Mac Sledge" in Tender Mercies (1983), "Gus McCrae" in Lonesome Dove (1989) and "Sonny Dewey" in The Apostle (1997) rank as some of the finest acting ever put on film. It's a body of work that few actors can equal, let alone surpass.- Actor
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Omar Sharif, the Egyptian actor best known for playing Sherif Ali in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and the title role in Doctor Zhivago (1965), was born Michel Demitri Shalhoub on April 10, 1932 in Alexandria, Egypt to Joseph Shalhoub, a lumber merchant, and his wife, Claire (Saada). Of Lebanese and Syrian extraction, the young Michel was raised Catholic. He was educated at Victoria College in Alexandria and took a degree in mathematics and physics from Cairo University with a major. Afterward graduating from university, he entered the family lumber business.
Before making his English-language film debut with "Lawrence of Arabia", for which he earned a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination and international fame, Sharif became a star in Egyptian cinema. His first movie was the Egyptian film The Blazing Sun (1954) ("The Blazing Sun") in 1953, opposite the renowned Egyptian actress Faten Hamamah whom he married in 1955. He converted to Islam to marry Hamama and took the name Omar al-Sharif. The couple had one child (Tarek Sharif, who was born in 1957 and portrayed the young Zhivago in the eponymous picture) and divorced in 1974. Sharif never remarried.
Beginning in the 1960s, Sharif earned a reputation as one of the world's best known contract bridge players. In the 1970s and 1980s, he co-wrote a syndicated newspaper bridge column for the Chicago Tribune. Sharif also wrote several books on bridge and has licensed his name to a bridge computer game, "Omar Sharif Bridge", which has been marketed since 1992. Sharif told the press in 2006 that he no longer played bridge, explaining, "I decided I didn't want to be a slave to any passion any more except for my work. I had too many passions, bridge, horses, gambling. I want to live a different kind of life, be with my family more because I didn't give them enough time.".
As an actor, Sharif had made a comeback in 2003 playing the title role of an elderly Muslim shopkeeper in the French film Monsieur Ibrahim (2003). For his performance, he won the Best Actor Award at the Venice Film Festival and the Best Actor César, France's equivalent of the Oscar, from the Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma.
Diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2012, Sharif died of a heart attack on July 10, 2015, in Cairo, Egypt.- Actor
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Balding, quietly spoken, of slight build and possessed of piercing blue eyes -- often peering out from behind round, steel-rimmed glasses -- Donald Pleasence had the essential physical attributes which make a great screen villain. In the course of his lengthy career, he relished playing the obsessed, the paranoid and the purely evil. Even the Van Helsing-like psychiatrist Sam Loomis in the Halloween (1978) franchise seems only marginally more balanced than his prey. An actor of great intensity, Pleasence excelled on stage as Shakespearean villains. He was an unrelenting prosecutor in Jean Anouilh's "Poor Bitos" and made his theatrical reputation in the title role of the seedy, scheming tramp in Harold Pinter's "The Caretaker" (1960). On screen, he gave a perfectly plausible interpretation of the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, in The Eagle Has Landed (1976). He was a convincingly devious Thomas Cromwell in Henry VIII and His Six Wives (1972), disturbing in his portrayal of the crazed, bloodthirsty preacher Quint in Will Penny (1967); and as sexually depraved, alcohol-sodden 'Doc' Tydon in the brilliant Aussie outback drama Wake in Fright (1971). And, of course, he was Ernst Stavro Blofeld in You Only Live Twice (1967). These are some of the films, for which we may remember Pleasence, but there was a great deal more to this fabulous, multi-faceted actor.
Donald Henry Pleasence was born on October 5, 1919 in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, England, to Alice (Armitage) and Thomas Stanley Pleasence. His family worked on the railway. His grandfather had been a signal man and both his brother and father were station masters. When Donald failed to get a scholarship at RADA, he joined the family occupation working as a clerk at his father's station before becoming station master at Swinton, Yorkshire. While there, he wrote letters to theatre companies, eventually being accepted by one on the island of Jersey in Spring 1939 as an assistant stage manager. On the eve of World War II, he made his theatrical debut in "Wuthering Heights". In 1942, he played Curio in "Twelfth Night", but his career was then interrupted by military service in the RAF. He was shot down over France, incarcerated and tortured in a German POW camp. Once repatriated, Donald returned to the stage in Peter Brook's 1946 London production of "The Brothers Karamazov" with Alec Guinness although he missed the opening due to measles, followed by a stint on Broadway with Laurence Olivier's touring company in "Caesar and Cleopatra" and "Anthony and Cleopatra". Upon his return to England, he won critical plaudits for his performance in "Hobson's Choice". In 1952, Donald began his screen career, rather unobtrusively, in small parts. He was only really noticed once having found his métier as dastardly, sneaky Prince John in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955). It took several more years, until international recognition came his way: first, through the filmed adaptation of The Guest (1963), and, secondly, with his blind forger in The Great Escape (1963), a role he imbued with added conviction due to his own wartime experience.
Some of his best acting Donald reserved for the small screen. In 1962, the producer of The Twilight Zone (1959), Buck Houghton, brought Donald to the United States ("damn the expense"!) to guest star in the third-season episode "The Changing of the Guard". He was given a mere five days to immerse himself in the part of a gentle school teacher, Professor Ellis Fowler, who, on the eve of Christmas is forcibly retired after fifty-one years of teaching. Devastated, and believing himself a failure who has made no mark on the world, he is about to commit suicide when the school's bell summons him to his classroom. There, he is confronted by the spirits of deceased students who beg him to consider that his lessons have indeed had fundamental effects on their lives, even leading to acts of great heroism. Upon hearing this, Fowler is now content to graciously accept his retirement. Managing to avoid maudlin sentimentality, Donald's performance was intuitive and, arguably, one of the most poignant ever accomplished in a thirty-minute television episode. Once again, against type, he was equally delightful as the mild-mannered Reverend Septimus Harding in Anthony Trollope's The Barchester Chronicles (1982).
Whether eccentric, sinister or given to pathos, Donald Pleasence was always great value for money and his performances have rarely failed to engage.- Actor
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Bill McKinney, the movie and television character actor who was one of the great on-screen villains, was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee on September 12, 1931. He had an unsettled life as a child, moving 12 times before joining the Navy at the age of 19 during the Korean War. Once, when his family moved from Tennessee to Georgia, he was beaten by a local gang and thrown into a creek for the offense of being from the Volunteer State.
In his four years on active duty in the Navy, McKinney served two years on a mine sweeper in Korean waters. He was also stationed at Port Hueneme in Ventura County, California, and he would journey to nearby Los Angeles while on liberty from his ship. During his years in the Navy, McKinney decided he wanted to be an actor and would make it his life if he survived the Korean War.
Discharged in Long Beach, California, in 1954, McKinney settled in southern California. He attended acting school at the famous Pasadena Playhouse in 1957, and his classmates included Dustin Hoffman and Mako. McKinney supported himself as an arborist, trimming and taking down trees, a job he continued into the 1970s, when he was appearing in major films. McKinney has had a life-long love affair with trees since he was a child.
After his time at the Pasadena Playhouse, McKinney was admitted to Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio. He made his movie debut in the exploitation picture, She Freak (1967), and was busy on television, making his debut in 1968 on The Monkees (1965) and attracting attention as "Lobo" on Alias Smith and Jones (1971). But it was as the Mountain Man in John Boorman's Deliverance (1972), a movie nominated for Best Picture of 1972 at the Academy Awards, that brought McKinney widespread attention and solidified his reputation as one of moviedom's all-time most heinous screen villains.
In his autobiography, McKinney's Deliverance (1972) co-star, Burt Reynolds (whose character dispatches The Mountain Man with an arrow in the back) said of McKinney, "I thought he was a little bent. I used to get up at five in the morning and see him running nude through the golf course while the sprinklers watered the grass...."
McKinney denies this, and also disputes Reynolds contention that he was overly enthusiastic playing the infamous scene where his character buggers Ned Beatty.
"He always played sickos", Reynolds said of McKinney, "but he played them well. With my dark sense of humor, I was kind of amused by him.... McKinney turned out to be a pretty good guy who just took the method way too far".
McKinney told Maxim magazine in an interview honoring him and his Mountain Man partner 'Herbert "Cowboy" Coward' as the #1 screen villains of all time that Reynolds' stories were untrue. "If you lose control on a movie set", McKinney told Maxim, "it's not acting, it's indulgence".
McKinney's wild-and-reckless screen persona and penchant for on-screen villainy attracted offers from A-list directors, which is a testament to his professionalism. He began appearing in films directed by top directors: Sam Peckinpah's Junior Bonner (1972), John Huston's The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), Peter Yates's For Pete's Sake (1974) and, most chillingly, as the assassin in Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View (1974). (One director who did not hire him was Stanley Kubrick, who had considered him for the role of the Marine drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket (1987) but demurred as he thought he came across as too scary after screening "Deliverance".)
McKinney also appeared in the classic TV movie, The Execution of Private Slovik (1974), while guest-starring on some of the top TV shows, including He'll Never See Daylight (1975) and Columbo (1971).
It was on the set working for a new director, who would go on to win an Oscar that McKinney made a fateful connection. He played the aptly named "Crazy Driver" in Michael Cimino's Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), starring Clint Eastwood. McKinney became part of the Eastwood stock company and enjoyed one of his best roles as the commander of the Red Legs in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), under the direction of Eastwood, himself. McKinney appeared in another six Eastwood films from The Gauntlet (1977) to Pink Cadillac (1989), when the Eastwood stock company disbanded, and had another terrific turn in Eastwood's well-reviewed Bronco Billy (1980), this time playing a member of Bronco Billy's circus, a character that was neither crazy, demented or odd.
The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), which Orson Welles praised as an extremely well-directed film at a time when respectable critics did not associate Clint Eastwood with art, let alone craftsmanship, and Bronco Billy (1980), which was a hit with the critics but not with Eastwood fans, established the laconic superstar's reputation as a director, and McKinney was in both films. In the mid-'70s, McKinney also was a memorable misanthrope as 'Ron Howard''s employer who is done in by John Wayne's The Shootist (1976) in the eponymous film directed by Don Siegel, Eastwood's mentor. Other memorable movies that McKinney has appeared in during his career include the initial Rambo film, First Blood (1982), Against All Odds (1984), Heart Like a Wheel (1983), Back to the Future Part III (1990) and The Green Mile (1999).
He never retired, continuing to act into his late seventies. He also performed as a singer and recorded a CD, "Love Songs from Antry", featuring Sinatra-like numbers and some country & western tunes.
Bill McKinney died on December 1, 2011 in Van Nuys, California from cancer of the esophagus. He was 80 years old.- Actor
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Jackson DeForest Kelley was born in Toccoa, Georgia, to Clora (Casey) and Ernest David Kelley.
He graduated from high school at age 16 and went on to sing at the Baptist church where his father was a minister. At age 17, he made his first trip outside the state to visit an uncle in Long Beach, California. He intended to stay for two weeks but ended up staying a year. Upon returning home, he told his parents he was moving to California to become an actor. His mother encouraged him but the idea did not go over well with his father.
In California, Kelley was spotted by a Paramount talent scout while working on a United States Navy training film. He became a reliable character actor (often in Westerns in which he often played the villain), but hit the big time when he was offered the role of the somewhat irascible Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy on the television series Star Trek (1966). He later reprised his role for a string of successful Star Trek films: Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991).
DeForest Kelley died at age 79 of stomach cancer in his home in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles on June 11, 1999.- Actor
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Character actor Anthony James was born on July 22, 1942 in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Unusually tall (6' 6½) and lanky, with a rough, pockmarked face, a lean, stringy build, and an extremely intense screen presence, James was often cast in Westerns as scary, sleazy villains. He was especially memorable as the racist diner counterman in the outstanding In the Heat of the Night (1967). Other noteworthy parts include a gay hitchhiker in the cult classic Vanishing Point (1971), a priest in The Culpepper Cattle Co. (1972), an outlaw in High Plains Drifter (1973), a deranged psycho in The Teacher (1974), the chauffeur from hell in the chiller Burnt Offerings (1976), and the vicious leader of a gang of ferocious barbarians in the science fiction film Ravagers (1979).
James was hilarious in a rare change-of-pace good guy role as a heroic cannibal (!) in the post-nuke sci-fi romp World Gone Wild (1987), and also parodying his evil persona in The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991). Among the many television shows in which he appeared in guest roles were Married... with Children (1987), Beauty and the Beast (1987), Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987), Simon & Simon (1981), The A-Team (1983), Riptide (1984), The Fall Guy (1981), Hunter (1984), Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979), Quincy M.E. (1976), Charlie's Angels (1976), Vega$ (1978), Starsky and Hutch (1975), S.W.A.T. (1975), Ironside (1967), Hawaii Five-O (1968), Bonanza (1959), Gunsmoke (1955) and The Big Valley (1965).
James's last film appearance to date was as the owner of a seedy bordello in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992). After quitting acting in the early 1990s, he pursued a successful career as an artist. His paintings have been exhibited in galleries in such major cities as New York, Boston and Miami.- Actor
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Richard Donald Crenna was born in Los Angeles, California, into a modest-income family, the only child of Edith J. (Pollette) and Domenick Anthony Crenna, a pharmacist. His parents were both of Italian descent. His mother managed a small hotel in downtown Los Angeles, where Richard and his family resided.
He began his career when he was eleven years old, playing the dimmer half of two youngsters called Herman and Sam in the Los Angeles radio show "Boy Scout Jamboree". He stayed with the series on and off for seventeen years, doing hundreds of other radio shows in between, including voicing Ougy Pringle in "A Date with Judy" (1946). During this time, he graduated from high school with letters in track and basketball, and later enrolled at the University of Southern California, where he majored in Theater Arts.
He was cast as Walter Denton in the radio show "Our Miss Brooks" and stayed in the part when the show moved from radio to television (Our Miss Brooks (1952)). The role called for a gangly, awkward, cracked-voice adolescent. Crenna was a tall, graceful man with a rich voice, yet his acting skills were such that he was easily able to fulfill the character's requirements, leading many viewers to believe that he actually was of high school age, when in fact he was 26 years old at the time. Crenna went on to star in another early television series, The Real McCoys (1957), but it was his role as the dedicated state legislator in the short-lived Slattery's People (1964) that finally established him both as a dramatic actor and a leading man. From that moment on, he was rarely absent from either television or motion pictures. In 1985, Crenna was awarded an Emmy for Best Performance by an Actor for The Rape of Richard Beck (1985). During the 1980s, he also became known for playing Colonel Trautman in the Rambo films (First Blood (1982), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), and Rambo III (1988)). His star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is in a prime position, opposite Mann's Chinese Theatre, two stars down from his Rambo co-star Sylvester Stallone.
Crenna married shortly after his graduation from USC, but the marriage was short-lived. He met and married his last wife in the late 1950s. Richard Crenna died at age 76 of heart failure on January 17, 2003 in Los Angeles, with more than 70 major motion pictures to his credit.- Actor
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WWII veteran, dance instructor and diversely talented stage & screen actor were all inclusions on the resume of this perpetually busy US actor who didn't get in front of the cameras until around the time of his fortieth birthday. The stockily built Charles Durning was one of Hollywood's most dependable and sought after supporting actors.
Durning was born in Highland Falls, New York, to Louise Marie (Leonard), a laundress, and James Gerald Durning. His father was an Irish immigrant and his mother was of Irish descent. Durning first got his start in guest appearances in early 1960's TV shows. He scored minor roles over the next decade until he really got noticed by film fans as the sneering, corrupt cop "Lt. Snyder" hassling street grifter 'Robert Redford' in the multi award winning mega-hit The Sting (1973). Durning was equally entertaining in the Billy Wilder production of The Front Page (1974), he supported screen tough guy Charles Bronson in the suspenseful western Breakheart Pass (1975) and featured as "Spermwhale Whalen" in the story of unorthodox police behavior in The Choirboys (1977).
The versatile Durning is equally adept at comedic roles and demonstrated his skills as "Doc Hopper" in The Muppet Movie (1979), a feisty football coach in North Dallas Forty (1979), a highly strung police officer berating maverick cop Burt Reynolds in Sharky's Machine (1981), and a light footed, dancing Governor (alongside Burt Reynolds once more) in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982). Durning continued a regular on screen association with Burt Reynolds appearing in several more feature films together and as "Dr. Harlan Elldridge" in the highly popular TV series Evening Shade (1990). On par with his multitude of feature film roles, Durning has always been in high demand on television and has guest starred in Everybody Loves Raymond (1996), Monk (2002) and Rescue Me (2004). Plus, he has appeared in the role of "Santa Claus" in five different television movies.- Actor
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Clint Walker was born Norman Eugene Walker in Hartford, southwestern Illinois, to Gladys Huldah (Schwanda), a Czech immigrant, and Paul Arnold Walker, who was from Arkansas. Walker almost single-handedly started the western craze on TV in the 1950s as Cheyenne Bodie in Cheyenne (1955). Growing up in the Depression era meant taking work wherever you could get it, and Walker found himself working at such jobs as Mississippi River boatman, carnival roustabout and golf caddy. He quit high school at 16 and at age 17 joined the Merchant Marine. After the war he worked his way cross country, including working in the oil fields in Brownwood, Texas, and wound up in California, where he worked as an undercover agent for a private detective agency on the Long Beach waterfront. After a while he took a job as a security officer at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. It was there that he met quite a few Hollywood people who told him that his size, physique and good looks would serve him well in Hollywood and that he should go to Los Angeles and give it a try. He met actor Henry Wilcoxon, who introduced him to director Cecil B. DeMille, and Walker found himself playing the part of a Captain of the Guard in The Ten Commandments (1956). Someone from Warner Bros. saw the film, found out that Walker was under contract to producer Hal B. Wallis, bought up Walker's contract and gave him the lead in "Cheyenne". The series was a huge hit and spawned countless other western series, from Warners and other studios. However, Walker was dissatisfied with the way Warners was handling his career -- they would let other contract players make films, for example, but he wasn't allowed to -- and that triggered a dispute which ended up with him taking a walk from the show. He and Warners eventually settled their disagreements. When the show ended Walker began to get supporting parts in features, his biggest and most successful one being The Dirty Dozen (1967). He starred in the well-received The Night of the Grizzly (1966) and the not-so-well received None But the Brave (1965), a WWII film that was Frank Sinatra's one and only stab at directing. He also played the lead in Baker's Hawk (1976), and turned in a good performance as a villain in the TV movie Scream of the Wolf (1974). Lately he and several of his colleagues from "The Dirty Dozen" provided the voices for the animated film Small Soldiers (1998).- Larger than life, Laughtonesque, and with an eloquent, king-sized appetite for maniacal merriment, a good portion of the work of actor Victor Buono was squandered on hokey villainy on both film and television. Ostensibly perceived as bizarre or demented, seldom did Hollywood give this cultivated cut-up the opportunity to rise above the deliciously hammy arrogance that flowed through so many of his cartoonish characters. He loved to make people laugh and while he could have approached his career with more serious attention, the real money was in his madness. In the end, the actor's chronic weight and accompanying health problems took their toll -- a fatal heart attack at the untimely age of 43 -- and a wonderful actor/writer/poet/chef had exited way before his time.
Born on February 3, 1938 in San Diego, California, the son of Victor Francis Buono and Myrtle Belle (née Keller), his interest in entertainment was originally encouraged by his grandmother, Myrtle Glied (1886-1969), who had once been a vaudevillian on the Orpheum Circuit. It was she who taught Victor how to sing and recite in front of company. His initial choice of career was somewhere in the direction of medicine but the pure joy he experienced from several high school performances (playing everything from Aladdin's evil genie to Hamlet himself) led him to dismiss such sensible thinking and take on the bohemian life style of an actor.
The already hefty-framed hopeful started appearing on local radio and television stations in San Diego. At age 18, he became a member of the Globe Theater Players where he was cast in Shakespeare and the classics ["Volpone", "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "Knight of the Burning Pestle", "The Man Who Came to Dinner", "Witness for the Prosecution", "Henry IV, Part I (as Falstaff)", "As You Like It", "Hamlet" (as Claudius)].
In 1959, a Warner Bros. agent happened to scope out the talent at the Globe Theatre and caught Victor's wonderfully robust portrayal of Falstaff (a role he would return to now and then) and gave him a screen test. Looking older than he was, the studio set upon using Victor in weird and wacky ways, such as his bearded poet Bongo Benny in an episode of 77 Sunset Strip (1958). His wry and witty demeanor, fixed stare, huge girth and goateed mug was guaranteed to put him in nearly every television crime story needing an off-the-wall character or outlandish villain.
Following an unbilled appearance in The Story of Ruth (1960), Victor was intriguingly cast by director Robert Aldrich to play Edwin Flagg, the creepy musical accompanist and opportunist who tries to use one-time child celebrity Bette Davis for his own piggy bank in the gothic horror classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). He held his own beautifully opposite the scenery-chewing Davis and was nominated for a Best Supporting Oscar for his efforts. This role also set the tone for the increasingly deranged characters he would go on to play.
Cast as the title menace in The Strangler (1964), Victor delved wholeheartedly into the sick mind of a mother-obsessed murderer and offered a startling, tense portrayal of a child-like monster who gives new meaning to the art of "necking" with women. Director Aldrich used Victor again (albeit too briefly) for his Southern-baked "Grand Guignol" horror Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) this time as Ms. Davis' crazed father. Victor also showed up in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) starring Max von Sydow where he flamboyantly took on the High Priest Sorak role in this epic but criticized retelling of Jesus.
He enhanced a number of lightweight 1960s movies including 4 for Texas (1963), Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964), The Silencers (1966) and Who's Minding the Mint? (1967) with his clever banter and gleeful menace. The lurid title said it all when Victor gamely took on the horror movie The Mad Butcher (1971) [aka The Strangler of Vienna] wherein he played a former mental patient preying on women again. This deranged low-budget German/Italian co-production added a "Sweeney Todd" meatpie tie in.
Victor's hearty, scene-stealing antics dominated late 1960s television series. Recurring madmen included his Count Carlos Manzeppi on The Wild Wild West (1965) and King Tut who habitually wreaked havoc on Gotham City on Batman (1966). One could always find his unsympathetic presence somewhere on a prime-time channel (Perry Mason (1957), Get Smart (1965), I Spy (1965)) but his roles ended up more campy than challenging. However, one heartfelt, serious portrayal was his portrayal of President William Howard Taft in the epic miniseries Backstairs at the White House (1979). Elsewhere, he recorded a self-effacing comedy album ("Victor Buono: Heavy!") and even wrote comic poetry ("Victor Buono: It Could Be Verse". He was indeed a sought-after raconteur on daytime and nighttime talk shows.
Continuing with the theatre but on a more infrequent basis, his one-man stage shows included "Just We Three", "Remembrance of Things Past" and "This Would I Keep". He also appeared as Pellinore opposite Robert Goulet and Carol Lawrence in a 1975 performance of "Camelot" and earned minor cult status for his memorable performance in the play "Last of the Marx Brothers' Writers" in a return to the Old Globe Theatre in 1977.
The never-married actor felt compelled to conceal his homosexuality. A well-regarded gourmet chef and an expert on Shakespeare, he died of a massive heart attack at his ranch in Apple Valley, California on January 1, 1982. Before his death was announced, Buono had just been cast in the Broadway-bound play "Whodunnit?" by Anthony Shaffer. The show finally arrived in New York without him and almost a year to his death (December 30, 1982). - Actor
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Billy Wilder proclaimed William Holden to be "the ideal motion picture actor". For almost four decades, the handsome, affable 'Golden Holden' was among Hollywood's most durable and engaging stars. He was born William Franklin Beedle Jr., one of three sons to a high school English teacher, Mary Blanche (Ball), and a chemical and fertilizer analyst, William Franklin Beedle, head of the George W. Gooch Laboratories in Pasadena. His father, a keen physical fitness enthusiast, taught young Bill the art of tumbling and boxing. During his days as a student at South Pasadena High, he also became adept at team sports (football and baseball), learned to ride and shoot and to be proficient on piano, clarinet and drums.
To his father's chagrin, Bill had no inclination of following in dad's footsteps, though he did major in chemistry at Pasadena Junior College. A trip to New York and Broadway had set Bill's path firmly on an acting career. He had already performed in school plays and lent his voice to several radio plays in Los Angeles by the time he was spotted by a Paramount talent scout (playing the part of octogenarian Eugene Curie) at the Pasadena Workshop Theatre. In early 1938, he was offered a six-month studio contract for a weekly salary of $50. Naturally, the name Beedle had to go. Several alternatives were bandied around -- including Randolph Carey and Taylor Randolph - until the head of Paramount's publicity department settled on the name Holden (based on a personal friend who was an associate editor at the L.A. Times, also named Bill).
Having joined Paramount's Golden Circle Club of promising young actors, Bill was now groomed for stardom. However, it was a loan-out to Columbia that secured him his breakthrough role. He was the sixty-sixth actor to audition for the part of an Italian violinist forced to become a boxer in Golden Boy (1939). His earlier training as a junior pugilist proved somewhat beneficial but it was self-effacing co-star Barbara Stanwyck who turned out to be most instrumental in helping him rehearse and overcoming his nerves to act alongside her and thespians Lee J. Cobb and Adolphe Menjou. The picture was a minor hit and Columbia consequently acquired half his contract. For the next few years, Bill continued playing wholesome, guy-next-door types and rookie servicemen in pictures like Our Town (1940), I Wanted Wings (1941) (which was the making of 'peek-a-boo' star Veronica Lake) and The Fleet's In (1942). His salary had been enhanced and he now earned $150 a week. In July 1941, he married 25-year old actress Brenda Marshall, who commanded five times his income.
In 1942, he enlisted in the Officers Candidate School in Florida, graduating as an Air Force second lieutenant. He spent the next three years on P.R. duties and making training films for the Office of Public Information. One of his brothers, a naval pilot, was shot down and killed over the Pacific in 1943. After war's end, he was demobbed and returned to Hollywood to resume playing similar characters in similar movies. He later commented that he found "no interest or enjoyment" in portraying the same type of "nice-guy meaningless roles in meaningless movies". That was to change - along with his image - when he was invited to play the part of caddish, down-on-his-luck scriptwriter Joe Gillis in Sunset Blvd. (1950). The brilliantly acidulous screenplay was by Charles Brackett and director Billy Wilder (from their story A Can of Beans) and the story was narrated in flashback by Bill's character, opening with Gillis floating face-down in the swimming pool of a decrepit mansion "of the kind crazy people bought in the 20s".
With Sunset Blvd. (1950), Holden had effectively graduated from leading man to leading actor. No longer typecast, he was now allowed more hard-edged or even morally ambiguous roles: a self-serving, cynical prisoner-of-war in Stalag 17 (1953) (for which he won an Academy Award); an unemployed drifter who disrupts and changes the lives (particularly of womenfolk) in a small Kansas town, in Picnic (1955); a happy-go-lucky gigolo (who, as Billy Wilder explained the part to Bill, gets the sports car while Bogey -- Humphrey Bogart -- gets the girl), in the delightful Sabrina (1954); and an ill-fated U.S. Navy pilot in The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), set during the Korean War. Clever dialogue and the Holden likability factor also improved what potentially could have turned out dull or maudlin in pictures like Forever Female (1953) and Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955).
Already one of the highest paid stars of the 1950s, Holden received 10% of the gross for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), making him an instant multi-millionaire. He invested much of his earnings in various enterprises, even a radio station in Hong Kong. At the end of the decade, he relocated his family to Geneva, Switzerland, but spent more and more of his own time globetrotting. In the 1960s, Holden founded the exclusive Mount Kenya Safari Club with oil billionaire Ray Ryan and Swiss financier Carl Hirschmann. His fervent advocacy of wildlife conservation now consumed more of his time than his acting. His films, consequently, dropped in quality.
Drinking ever more heavily, he also started to show his age. By the time he appeared as the leader of an outlaw gang on their last roundup in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), his face was so heavily lined that someone likened it to 'a map of the United States.' He still had a couple more good performances in him, in The Towering Inferno (1974) and Network (1976), until his shock death from blood loss due to a fall at his apartment while intoxicated. In 1982, actress Stefanie Powers, with whom he had been in a relationship since 1972, helped set up the William Holden Wildlife Foundation and the William Holden Wildlife Education Center in Kenya. Bill also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. His wanderlust has left traces of him all over the world.- Actor
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Colorful American character actor equally adept at vicious killers or grizzled sidekicks. As a child he worked in the cotton fields. He attended Santa Monica Junior College in California and subsequently became an accountant and, at one time, manager of the Bel Air Hotel. Elam got his first movie job by trading his accounting services for a role. In short time he became one of the most memorable supporting players in Hollywood, thanks not only to his near-demented screen persona but also to an out-of-kilter left eye, sightless from a childhood fight. He appeared with great aplomb in Westerns and gangster films alike, and in later years played to wonderful effect in comedic roles.- Actor
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Although this pint-sized actor started out in films often in innocuous college-student roles in mid-30s rah-rahs, playing alongside the likes of a pretty Gloria Stuart or a young, pre-"Oz" Judy Garland, casting directors would soon enough discover his flair for portraying intense neurotics or spineless double-dealers. Thus was he graduated from the innocuous to the noxious. In Warners' They Won't Forget (1937), for example, he plays the role of a student whose social engagement with a young Lana Turner, debuting here in a featured role, seems to have been broken by her whereas, possibly unbeknownst to him, she has quite mysteriously been murdered. Cook becomes so enraged, venting such venom, that the movie audience can only look upon him as a prime suspect in Lana's demise. In Universal's Phantom Lady (1944), he portrays a nightclub-orchestra drummer who, under the intoxicating influence of some substance or other, encounters Ella Raines during an afternoon's band practice. Thoroughly taken with her slinky allure, he enacts a drum-solo piece that is of such crescendo, and played with such innuendo, as to suggest - glaringly - nothing except his own fantasized sexual journey from cymbal foreplay through bass-drum climax.- Actor
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Son of character actor Robert Keith and stage actress Helena Shipman. He grew up on the road with his parents while they toured in plays. First appeared at age 3 in film Pied Piper Malone (1924) with his father. Began acting in radio programs and on stage before World War II. Joined the Marines and served as a machine gunner. Returned to Broadway stage after the war and branched out into television and film. Worked as an extra in several films before achieving speaking roles and subsequent stardom.- Actor
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Character actor John Quade was born John William Saunders III on April 1, 1938 in Kansas City, Kansas. Quade transferred from Perry Rural High School in Perry, Kansas to Highland Park High School in Topeka, Kansas in 1954. John was a football tackle and participated in both track and basketball at Highland Park High School. Moreover, he was a member of the Stamp, Radio, and Chess/Checkers clubs. Quade graduated from high school in 1956 and attended Washburn University. John worked for the Santa Fe Railway repair shop in Topeka, Kansas.
Quade moved to California in 1964 and met an engineer building missile silos in Kansas, which led to a job in California working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as an aerospace engineer. Some of the parts Quade constructed are still on the Moon.
After meeting a movie industry talent scout he made his television acting debut in 1968 on an episode of "Bonanza." He acted in his first movie in 1972. With his strong, stocky build, distinctive rough face, drawling accent, squinty eyes, and often aggressive and intimidating screen presence, John was frequently cast as either mean, nasty heavies or hostile redneck law enforcers. Quade was probably best known as Cholla, the bumbling leader of the inept biker gang the Black Widows in the Clint Eastwood comedy vehicles "Every Which Way But Loose"" and "Any Which Way You Can." He had previously acted alongside Eastwood as despicable villains in the Westerns "High Plains Drifter" and "The Outlaw Josey Wales." John was likewise memorable as Sheriff Biggs in the epic TV mini-series "Roots." Quade had regular roles on the short-lived TV shows "Flatbush" and "Lucky Luke." Among the many television programs John made guest appearances on are "Gunsmoke," "Ironside," "Kung Fu," "Kojak," "Starsky and Hutch," "The Bionic Woman," "Charlie's Angels," "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century," "Vega$," "The Dukes of Hazzard," "CHiPs," "Hill Street Blues," "The A-Team," "Hunter," "Werewolf," and "Baywatch." After he stopped acting in the 1990s, Quade became a devout Christian activist and outspoken opponent of the American government and its New World Order. John was opposed to the 14th Ammendment, Social Security numbers, and drivers' licenses. He supported the Alledial Title belief in common law. Quade was married to his wife Gwen for thirty-eight years and was the father of six children.
John Quade died sleeping as the result of a heart attack at age 71 at his home in Rosamond, California, on August 9, 2009.- Actor
- Producer
The younger son of vaudeville great Clarence Stroud (of the Stroud Twins) and singer Ann McCormack, who toured the world with Frank Sinatra, Don Stroud grew up on the beach in Honolulu, Hawaii, where his stepfather, Paul Livermore, and his mother, Ann, owned and operated the popular Embers steakhouse/nightclub where his mother performed nightly. He thrived on Waikiki Beach under the watchful eyes of such mentors as Blackout, Mud, Buckshot, Rabbit and Steamboat. In 1960, at the age of 17, he placed fourth in the "Duke Kahanamoku World Surfing Championship" at Makaha, Hawaii.
Don was surfing at Waikiki when he was discovered. Actor Troy Donahue was filming Hawaiian Eye (1959) and needed a stunt double for his surfing scenes. At 18, 6' 2" and 175 pounds, Stroud stepped up and was hired on the spot. He decided to go to Hollywood to give it a try. Upon arriving in L.A., he landed a variety of jobs, including parking cars, bouncer and then manager of the world famous "Whiskey A Go-Go" nightclub on the Sunset Strip, where such greats as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison of the "Doors" appeared. It was at the "Whiskey" that actor Sidney Poitier turned Don on to his acting career. He has appeared in more than 100 movies and 175 television shows to date. He starred in four television series, notably The New Mike Hammer (1984) and The New Gidget (1986).- Actor
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Multi-talented and unconventional actor/director regarded by many as one of the true "enfant terribles" of Hollywood who led an amazing cinematic career for more than five decades, Dennis Hopper was born on May 17, 1936, in Dodge City, Kansas. The young Hopper expressed interest in acting from a young age and first appeared in a slew of 1950s television shows, including Medic (1954), Cheyenne (1955) and Sugarfoot (1957). His first film role was in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), quickly followed by Giant (1956) and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957). Hopper actually became good friends with James Dean and was shattered when Dean was killed in a car crash in September 1955.
Hopper portrayed a young Napoléon Bonaparte (!) in the star-spangled The Story of Mankind (1957) and regularly appeared on screen throughout the 1960s, often in rather undemanding parts, usually as a villain in westerns such as True Grit (1969) and Hang 'Em High (1968). However, in early 1969, Hopper, fellow actor Peter Fonda and writer Terry Southern, wrote a counterculture road movie script and managed to scrape together $400,000 in financial backing. Hopper directed the low-budget film, titled Easy Rider (1969), starring Fonda, Hopper and a young Jack Nicholson. The film was a phenomenal box-office success, appealing to the anti-establishment youth culture of the times. It changed the Hollywood landscape almost overnight and major studios all jumped onto the anti-establishment bandwagon, pumping out low-budget films about rebellious hippies, bikers, draft dodgers and pot smokers. However, Hopper's next directorial effort, The Last Movie (1971), was a critical and financial failure, and he has admitted that during the 1970s he was seriously abusing various substances, both legal and illegal, which led to a downturn in the quality of his work. He appeared in a sparse collection of European-produced films over the next eight years, before cropping up in a memorable performance as a pot-smoking photographer alongside Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen in Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now (1979). He also received acclaim for his work in both acting and direction for Out of the Blue (1980).
With these two notable efforts, the beginning of the 1980s saw a renaissance of interest by Hollywood in the talents of Dennis Hopper and exorcising the demons of drugs and alcohol via a rehabilitation program meant a return to invigorating and provoking performances. He was superb in Rumble Fish (1983), co-starred in the tepid spy thriller The Osterman Weekend (1983), played a groovy school teacher in My Science Project (1985), was a despicable and deranged drug dealer in River's Edge (1986) and, most memorably, electrified audiences as foul-mouthed Frank Booth in the eerie and erotic David Lynch film Blue Velvet (1986). Interestingly, the offbeat Hopper was selected in the early 1980s to provide the voice of "The StoryTeller" in the animated series of "Rabbit Ears" children's films based upon the works of Hans Christian Andersen!
Hopper returned to film direction in the late 1980s and was at the helm of the controversial gang film Colors (1988), which was well received by both critics and audiences. He was back in front of the cameras for roles in Super Mario Bros. (1993), got on the wrong side of gangster Christopher Walken in True Romance (1993), led police officer Keanu Reeves and bus passenger Sandra Bullock on a deadly ride in Speed (1994) and challenged gill-man Kevin Costner for world supremacy in Waterworld (1995). The enigmatic Hopper continued to remain busy through the 1990s and into the new century with performances in All the Way (2003), The Keeper (2004) and Land of the Dead (2005).
As well as his acting/directing talents, Hopper was a skilled photographer and painter, having had his works displayed in galleries in both the United States and overseas. He was additionally a dedicated and knowledgeable collector of modern art and had one of the most extensive collections in the United States. Dennis died of prostate cancer on May 29, 2010, less than two weeks after his 74th birthday.