A Streetcar Named Desire 1951 premiere
Tuesday September 18th, Warner Beverly Hills Theatre 9404 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, CA 90212
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If a film were made of the life of Vivien Leigh, it would open in India just before World War I, where a successful British businessman could live like a prince. In the mountains above Calcutta, a little princess is born. Because of the outbreak of World War I, she is six years old the first time her parents take her to England. Her mother thinks she should have a proper English upbringing and insists on leaving her in a convent school - even though Vivien is two years younger than any of the other girls at the school. The only comfort for the lonely child is a cat that was in the courtyard of the school that the nuns let her take up to her dormitory. Her first and best friend at the school is an eight-year-old girl, Maureen O'Sullivan who has been transplanted from Ireland. In the bleakness of a convent school, the two girls can recreate in their imaginations the places they have left and places where they would some day like to travel. After Vivien has been at the school for 18 months, her mother comes again from India and takes her to a play in London. In the next six months Vivien will insist on seeing the same play 16 times. In India the British community entertained themselves at amateur theatricals and Vivien's father was a leading man. Pupils at the English convent school are eager to perform in school plays. It's an all-girls school, so some of the girls have to play the male roles. The male roles are so much more adventurous. Vivien's favorite actor is Leslie Howard, and at 19 she marries an English barrister who looks very much like him. The year is 1932. Vivien's best friend from that convent school has gone to California, where she's making movies. Vivien has an opportunity to play a small role in an English film, Things Are Looking Up (1935). She has only one line but the camera keeps returning to her face. The London stage is more exciting than the movies being filmed in England, and the most thrilling actor on that stage is Laurence Olivier. At a party Vivien finds out about a stage role, "The Green Sash", where the only requirement is that the leading lady be beautiful. The play has a very brief run, but now she is a real actress. An English film is going to be made about Elizabeth I. Laurence gets the role of a young favorite of the queen who is sent to Spain. Vivien gets a much smaller role as a lady-in-waiting of the queen who is in love with Laurence's character. In real life, both fall in love while making this film, Fire Over England (1937). In 1938, Hollywood wants Laurence to play Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1939). Vivien, who has just recently read Gone with the Wind (1939), thinks that the role of Scarlett O'Hara is the first role for an actress that would be really exciting to bring to the screen. She sails to America for a brief vacation. In New York she gets on a plane for the first time to rush to California to see Laurence. They have dinner with Myron Selznick the night that his brother, David O. Selznick, is burning Atlanta on a backlot of MGM (actually they are burning old sets that go back to the early days of silent films to make room to recreate an Atlanta of the 1860s). Vivien is 26 when Gone with the Wind (1939) makes a sweep of the Oscars in 1939. So let's show 26-year-old Vivien walking up to the stage to accept her Oscar and then as the Oscar is presented the camera focuses on Vivien's face and through the magic of digitally altering images, the 26-year-old face merges into the face of Vivien at age 38 getting her second Best Actress Oscar for portraying Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). She wouldn't have returned to America to make that film had not Laurence been going over there to do a film, Carrie (1952) based on Theodore Dreiser's novel "Sister Carrie". Laurence tells their friends that his motive for going to Hollywood to make films is to get enough money to produce his own plays for the London stage. He even has his own theater there, the St. James. Now Sir Laurence, with a seat in the British House of Lords, is accompanied by Vivien the day the Lords are debating about whether the St James should be torn down. Breaking protocol, Vivien speaks up and is escorted from the House of Lords. The publicity helps raise the funds to save the St. James. Throughout their two-decade marriage Laurence and Vivien were acting together on the stage in London and New York. Vivien was no longer Lady Olivier when she performed her last major film role, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961).- Actor
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Marlon Brando is widely considered the greatest movie actor of all time, rivaled only by the more theatrically oriented Laurence Olivier in terms of esteem. Unlike Olivier, who preferred the stage to the screen, Brando concentrated his talents on movies after bidding the Broadway stage adieu in 1949, a decision for which he was severely criticized when his star began to dim in the 1960s and he was excoriated for squandering his talents. No actor ever exerted such a profound influence on succeeding generations of actors as did Brando. More than 50 years after he first scorched the screen as Stanley Kowalski in the movie version of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and a quarter-century after his last great performance as Col. Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), all American actors are still being measured by the yardstick that was Brando. It was if the shadow of John Barrymore, the great American actor closest to Brando in terms of talent and stardom, dominated the acting field up until the 1970s. He did not, nor did any other actor so dominate the public's consciousness of what WAS an actor before or since Brando's 1951 on-screen portrayal of Stanley made him a cultural icon. Brando eclipsed the reputation of other great actors circa 1950, such as Paul Muni and Fredric March. Only the luster of Spencer Tracy's reputation hasn't dimmed when seen in the starlight thrown off by Brando. However, neither Tracy nor Olivier created an entire school of acting just by the force of his personality. Brando did.
Marlon Brando, Jr. was born on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska, to Marlon Brando, Sr., a calcium carbonate salesman, and his artistically inclined wife, the former Dorothy Julia Pennebaker. "Bud" Brando was one of three children. His ancestry included English, Irish, German, Dutch, French Huguenot, Welsh, and Scottish; his surname originated with a distant German immigrant ancestor named "Brandau." His oldest sister Jocelyn Brando was also an actress, taking after their mother, who engaged in amateur theatricals and mentored a then-unknown Henry Fonda, another Nebraska native, in her role as director of the Omaha Community Playhouse. Frannie, Brando's other sibling, was a visual artist. Both Brando sisters contrived to leave the Midwest for New York City, Jocelyn to study acting and Frannie to study art. Marlon managed to escape the vocational doldrums forecast for him by his cold, distant father and his disapproving schoolteachers by striking out for The Big Apple in 1943, following Jocelyn into the acting profession. Acting was the only thing he was good at, for which he received praise, so he was determined to make it his career - a high-school dropout, he had nothing else to fall back on, having been rejected by the military due to a knee injury he incurred playing football at Shattuck Military Academy, Brando Sr.'s alma mater. The school booted Marlon out as incorrigible before graduation.
Acting was a skill he honed as a child, the lonely son of alcoholic parents. With his father away on the road, and his mother frequently intoxicated to the point of stupefaction, the young Bud would play-act for her to draw her out of her stupor and to attract her attention and love. His mother was exceedingly neglectful, but he loved her, particularly for instilling in him a love of nature, a feeling which informed his character Paul in Last Tango in Paris (1972) ("Last Tango in Paris") when he is recalling his childhood for his young lover Jeanne. "I don't have many good memories," Paul confesses, and neither did Brando of his childhood. Sometimes he had to go down to the town jail to pick up his mother after she had spent the night in the drunk tank and bring her home, events that traumatized the young boy but may have been the grain that irritated the oyster of his talent, producing the pearls of his performances. Anthony Quinn, his Oscar-winning co-star in Viva Zapata! (1952) told Brando's first wife Anna Kashfi, "I admire Marlon's talent, but I don't envy the pain that created it."
Brando enrolled in Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at New York's New School, and was mentored by Stella Adler, a member of a famous Yiddish Theatre acting family. Adler helped introduce to the New York stage the "emotional memory" technique of Russian theatrical actor, director and impresario Konstantin Stanislavski, whose motto was "Think of your own experiences and use them truthfully." The results of this meeting between an actor and the teacher preparing him for a life in the theater would mark a watershed in American acting and culture.
Brando made his debut on the boards of Broadway on October 19, 1944, in "I Remember Mama," a great success. As a young Broadway actor, Brando was invited by talent scouts from several different studios to screen-test for them, but he turned them down because he would not let himself be bound by the then-standard seven-year contract. Brando would make his film debut quite some time later in Fred Zinnemann's The Men (1950) for producer Stanley Kramer. Playing a paraplegic soldier, Brando brought new levels of realism to the screen, expanding on the verisimilitude brought to movies by Group Theatre alumni John Garfield, the predecessor closest to him in the raw power he projected on-screen. Ironically, it was Garfield whom producer Irene Mayer Selznick had chosen to play the lead in a new Tennessee Williams play she was about to produce, but negotiations broke down when Garfield demanded an ownership stake in "A Streetcar Named Desire." Burt Lancaster was next approached, but couldn't get out of a prior film commitment. Then director Elia Kazan suggested Brando, whom he had directed to great effect in Maxwell Anderson's play "Truckline Café," in which Brando co-starred with Karl Malden, who was to remain a close friend for the next 60 years.
During the production of "Truckline Café," Kazan had found that Brando's presence was so magnetic, he had to re-block the play to keep Marlon near other major characters' stage business, as the audience could not take its eyes off of him. For the scene where Brando's character re-enters the stage after killing his wife, Kazan placed him upstage-center, partially obscured by scenery, but where the audience could still see him as Karl Malden and others played out their scene within the café set. When he eventually entered the scene, crying, the effect was electric. A young Pauline Kael, arriving late to the play, had to avert her eyes when Brando made this entrance as she believed the young actor on stage was having a real-life conniption. She did not look back until her escort commented that the young man was a great actor.
The problem with casting Brando as Stanley was that he was much younger than the character as written by Williams. However, after a meeting between Brando and Williams, the playwright eagerly agreed that Brando would make an ideal Stanley. Williams believed that by casting a younger actor, the Neanderthalish Kowalski would evolve from being a vicious older man to someone whose unintentional cruelty can be attributed to his youthful ignorance. Brando ultimately was dissatisfied with his performance, though, saying he never was able to bring out the humor of the character, which was ironic as his characterization often drew laughs from the audience at the expense of Jessica Tandy's Blanche Dubois. During the out-of-town tryouts, Kazan realized that Brando's magnetism was attracting attention and audience sympathy away from Blanche to Stanley, which was not what the playwright intended. The audience's sympathy should be solely with Blanche, but many spectators were identifying with Stanley. Kazan queried Williams on the matter, broaching the idea of a slight rewrite to tip the scales back to more of a balance between Stanley and Blanche, but Williams demurred, smitten as he was by Brando, just like the preview audiences.
For his part, Brando believed that the audience sided with his Stanley because Jessica Tandy was too shrill. He thought Vivien Leigh, who played the part in the movie, was ideal, as she was not only a great beauty but she WAS Blanche Dubois, troubled as she was in her real life by mental illness and nymphomania. Brando's appearance as Stanley on stage and on screen revolutionized American acting by introducing "The Method" into American consciousness and culture. Method acting, rooted in Adler's study at the Moscow Art Theatre of Stanislavsky's theories that she subsequently introduced to the Group Theatre, was a more naturalistic style of performing, as it engendered a close identification of the actor with the character's emotions. Adler took first place among Brando's acting teachers, and socially she helped turn him from an unsophisticated Midwestern farm boy into a knowledgeable and cosmopolitan artist who one day would socialize with presidents.
Brando didn't like the term "The Method," which quickly became the prominent paradigm taught by such acting gurus as Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Brando denounced Strasberg in his autobiography "Songs My Mother Taught Me" (1994), saying that he was a talentless exploiter who claimed he had been Brando's mentor. The Actors Studio had been founded by Strasberg along with Kazan and Stella Adler's husband, Harold Clurman, all Group Theatre alumni, all political progressives deeply committed to the didactic function of the stage. Brando credits his knowledge of the craft to Adler and Kazan, while Kazan in his autobiography "A Life" claimed that Brando's genius thrived due to the thorough training Adler had given him. Adler's method emphasized that authenticity in acting is achieved by drawing on inner reality to expose deep emotional experience
Interestingly, Elia Kazan believed that Brando had ruined two generations of actors, his contemporaries and those who came after him, all wanting to emulate the great Brando by employing The Method. Kazan felt that Brando was never a Method actor, that he had been highly trained by Adler and did not rely on gut instincts for his performances, as was commonly believed. Many a young actor, mistaken about the true roots of Brando's genius, thought that all it took was to find a character's motivation, empathize with the character through sense and memory association, and regurgitate it all on stage to become the character. That's not how the superbly trained Brando did it; he could, for example, play accents, whereas your average American Method actor could not. There was a method to Brando's art, Kazan felt, but it was not The Method.
After A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), for which he received the first of his eight Academy Award nominations, Brando appeared in a string of Academy Award-nominated performances - in Viva Zapata! (1952), Julius Caesar (1953) and the summit of his early career, Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954). For his "Waterfront" portrayal of meat-headed longshoreman Terry Malloy, the washed-up pug who "coulda been a contender," Brando won his first Oscar. Along with his iconic performance as the rebel-without-a-cause Johnny in The Wild One (1953) ("What are you rebelling against?" Johnny is asked. "What have ya got?" is his reply), the first wave of his career was, according to Jon Voight, unprecedented in its audacious presentation of such a wide range of great acting. Director John Huston said his performance of Marc Antony was like seeing the door of a furnace opened in a dark room, and co-star John Gielgud, the premier Shakespearean actor of the 20th century, invited Brando to join his repertory company.
It was this period of 1951-54 that revolutionized American acting, spawning such imitators as James Dean - who modeled his acting and even his lifestyle on his hero Brando - the young Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. After Brando, every up-and-coming star with true acting talent and a brooding, alienated quality would be hailed as the "New Brando," such as Warren Beatty in Kazan's Splendor in the Grass (1961). "We are all Brando's children," Jack Nicholson pointed out in 1972. "He gave us our freedom." He was truly "The Godfather" of American acting - and he was just 30 years old. Though he had a couple of failures, like Désirée (1954) and The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), he was clearly miscast in them and hadn't sought out the parts so largely escaped blame.
In the second period of his career, 1955-62, Brando managed to uniquely establish himself as a great actor who also was a Top 10 movie star, although that star began to dim after the box-office high point of his early career, Sayonara (1957) (for which he received his fifth Best Actor Oscar nomination). Brando tried his hand at directing a film, the well-reviewed One-Eyed Jacks (1961) that he made for his own production company, Pennebaker Productions (after his mother's maiden name). Stanley Kubrick had been hired to direct the film, but after months of script rewrites in which Brando participated, Kubrick and Brando had a falling out and Kubrick was sacked. According to his widow Christiane Kubrick, Stanley believed that Brando had wanted to direct the film himself all along.
Tales proliferated about the profligacy of Brando the director, burning up a million and a half feet of expensive VistaVision film at 50 cents a foot, fully ten times the normal amount of raw stock expended during production of an equivalent motion picture. Brando took so long editing the film that he was never able to present the studio with a cut. Paramount took it away from him and tacked on a re-shot ending that Brando was dissatisfied with, as it made the Oedipal figure of Dad Longworth into a villain. In any normal film Dad would have been the heavy, but Brando believed that no one was innately evil, that it was a matter of an individual responding to, and being molded by, one's environment. It was not a black-and-white world, Brando felt, but a gray world in which once-decent people could do horrible things. This attitude explains his sympathetic portrayal of Nazi officer Christian Diestl in the film he made before shooting One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Edward Dmytryk's filming of Irwin Shaw's novel The Young Lions (1958). Shaw denounced Brando's performance, but audiences obviously disagreed, as the film was a major hit. It would be the last hit movie Brando would have for more than a decade.
One-Eyed Jacks (1961) generated respectable numbers at the box office, but the production costs were exorbitant - a then-staggering $6 million - which made it run a deficit. A film essentially is "made" in the editing room, and Brando found cutting to be a terribly boring process, which was why the studio eventually took the film away from him. Despite his proved talent in handling actors and a large production, Brando never again directed another film, though he would claim that all actors essentially direct themselves during the shooting of a picture.
Between the production and release of One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Brando appeared in Sidney Lumet's film version of Tennessee Williams' play "Orpheus Descending," The Fugitive Kind (1960) which teamed him with fellow Oscar winners Anna Magnani and Joanne Woodward. Following in Elizabeth Taylor's trailblazing footsteps, Brando became the second performer to receive a $1-million salary for a motion picture, so high were the expectations for this re-teaming of Kowalski and his creator (in 1961 critic Hollis Alpert had published a book "Brando and the Shadow of Stanley Kowalski"). Critics and audiences waiting for another incendiary display from Brando in a Williams work were disappointed when the renamed The Fugitive Kind (1960) finally released. Though Tennessee was hot, with movie versions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) burning up the box office and receiving kudos from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, The Fugitive Kind (1960) was a failure. This was followed by the so-so box-office reception of One-Eyed Jacks (1961) in 1961 and then by a failure of a more monumental kind: Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), a remake of the famed 1935 film.
Brando signed on to Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) after turning down the lead in the David Lean classic Lawrence of Arabia (1962) because he didn't want to spend a year in the desert riding around on a camel. He received another $1-million salary, plus $200,000 in overages as the shoot went overtime and over budget. During principal photography, highly respected director Carol Reed (an eventual Academy Award winner) was fired, and his replacement, two-time Oscar winner Lewis Milestone, was shunted aside by Brando as Marlon basically took over the direction of the film himself. The long shoot became so notorious that President John F. Kennedy asked director Billy Wilder at a cocktail party not "when" but "if" the "Bounty" shoot would ever be over. The MGM remake of one of its classic Golden Age films garnered a Best Picture Oscar nomination and was one of the top grossing films of 1962, yet failed to go into the black due to its Brobdingnagian budget estimated at $20 million, which is equivalent to $120 million when adjusted for inflation.
Brando and Taylor, whose Cleopatra (1963) nearly bankrupted 20th Century-Fox due to its huge cost overruns (its final budget was more than twice that of Brando's Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)), were pilloried by the show business press for being the epitome of the pampered, self-indulgent stars who were ruining the industry. Seeking scapegoats, the Hollywood press conveniently ignored the financial pressures on the studios. The studios had been hurt by television and by the antitrust-mandated divestiture of their movie theater chains, causing a large outflow of production to Italy and other countries in the 1950s and 1960s in order to lower costs. The studio bosses, seeking to replicate such blockbuster hits as the remakes of The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959), were the real culprits behind the losses generated by large-budgeted films that found it impossible to recoup their costs despite long lines at the box office.
While Elizabeth Taylor, receiving the unwanted gift of reams of publicity from her adulterous romance with Cleopatra (1963) co-star Richard Burton, remained hot until the tanking of her own Tennessee Williams-renamed debacle Boom! (1968), Brando from 1963 until the end of the decade appeared in one box-office failure after another as he worked out a contract he had signed with Universal Pictures. The industry had grown tired of Brando and his idiosyncrasies, though he continued to be offered prestige projects up through 1968.
Some of the films Brando made in the 1960s were noble failures, such as The Ugly American (1963), The Appaloosa (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967). For every "Reflections," though, there seemed to be two or three outright debacles, such as Bedtime Story (1964), Morituri (1965), The Chase (1966), A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), Candy (1968), The Night of the Following Day (1969). By the time Brando began making the anti-colonialist picture Burn! (1969) in Colombia with Gillo Pontecorvo in the director's chair, he was box-office poison, despite having worked in the previous five years with such top directors as Arthur Penn, John Huston and the legendary Charles Chaplin, and with such top-drawer co-stars as David Niven, Yul Brynner, Sophia Loren and Taylor.
The rap on Brando in the 1960s was that a great talent had ruined his potential to be America's answer to Laurence Olivier, as his friend William Redfield limned the dilemma in his book "Letters from an Actor" (1967), a memoir about Redfield's appearance in Burton's 1964 theatrical production of "Hamlet." By failing to go back on stage and recharge his artistic batteries, something British actors such as Burton were not afraid to do, Brando had stifled his great talent, by refusing to tackle the classical repertoire and contemporary drama. Actors and critics had yearned for an American response to the high-acting style of the Brits, and while Method actors such as Rod Steiger tried to create an American style, they were hampered in their quest, as their king was lost in a wasteland of Hollywood movies that were beneath his talent. Many of his early supporters now turned on him, claiming he was a crass sellout.
Despite evidence in such films as The Appaloosa (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) that Brando was in fact doing some of the best acting of his life, critics, perhaps with an eye on the box office, slammed him for failing to live up to, and nurture, his great gift. Brando's political activism, starting in the early 1960s with his championing of Native Americans' rights, followed by his participation in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's March on Washington in 1963, and followed by his appearance at a Black Panther rally in 1968, did not win him many admirers in the establishment. In fact, there was a de facto embargo on Brando films in the recently segregated (officially, at least) southeastern US in the 1960s. Southern exhibitors simply would not book his films, and producers took notice. After 1968, Brando would not work for three years.
Pauline Kael wrote of Brando that he was Fortune's fool. She drew a parallel with the latter career of John Barrymore, a similarly gifted thespian with talents as prodigious, who seemingly threw them away. Brando, like the late-career Barrymore, had become a great ham, evidenced by his turn as the faux Indian guru in the egregious Candy (1968), seemingly because the material was so beneath his talent. Most observers of Brando in the 1960s believed that he needed to be reunited with his old mentor Elia Kazan, a relationship that had soured due to Kazan's friendly testimony naming names before the notorious House un-American Activities Committee. Perhaps Brando believed this, too, as he originally accepted an offer to appear as the star of Kazan's film adaptation of his own novel, The Arrangement (1969). However, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Brando backed out of the film, telling Kazan that he could not appear in a Hollywood film after this tragedy. Also reportedly turning down a role opposite box-office king Paul Newman in a surefire script, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Brando decided to make Burn! (1969) with Pontecorvo. The film, a searing indictment of racism and colonialism, flopped at the box office but won the esteem of progressive critics and cultural arbiters such as Howard Zinn. He subsequently appeared in the British film The Nightcomers (1971), a prequel to "Turn of the Screw" and another critical and box office failure.
Kazan, after a life in film and the theater, said that, aside from Orson Welles, whose greatness lay in film making, he only met one actor who was a genius: Brando. Richard Burton, an intellectual with a keen eye for observation if not for his own film projects, said that he found Brando to be very bright, unlike the public perception of him as a Terry Malloy-type character that he himself inadvertently promoted through his boorish behavior. Brando's problem, Burton felt, was that he was unique, and that he had gotten too much fame too soon at too early an age. Cut off from being nurtured by normal contact with society, fame had distorted Brando's personality and his ability to cope with the world, as he had not had time to grow up outside the limelight.
Truman Capote, who eviscerated Brando in print in the mid-'50s and had as much to do with the public perception of the dyslexic Brando as a dumbbell, always said that the best actors were ignorant, and that an intelligent person could not be a good actor. However, Brando was highly intelligent, and possessed of a rare genius in a then-deprecated art, acting. The problem that an intelligent performer has in movies is that it is the director, and not the actor, who has the power in his chosen field. Greatness in the other arts is defined by how much control the artist is able to exert over his chosen medium, but in movie acting, the medium is controlled by a person outside the individual artist. It is an axiom of the cinema that a performance, as is a film, is "created" in the cutting room, thus further removing the actor from control over his art. Brando had tried his hand at directing, in controlling the whole artistic enterprise, but he could not abide the cutting room, where a film and the film's performances are made. This lack of control over his art was the root of Brando's discontent with acting, with movies, and, eventually, with the whole wide world that invested so much cachet in movie actors, as long as "they" were at the top of the box-office charts. Hollywood was a matter of "they" and not the work, and Brando became disgusted.
Charlton Heston, who participated in Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington with Brando, believes that Marlon was the great actor of his generation. However, noting a story that Brando had once refused a role in the early 1960s with the excuse "How can I act when people are starving in India?," Heston believes that it was this attitude, the inability to separate one's idealism from one's work, that prevented Brando from reaching his potential. As Rod Steiger once said, Brando had it all, great stardom and a great talent. He could have taken his audience on a trip to the stars, but he simply would not. Steiger, one of Brando's children even though a contemporary, could not understand it. When James Mason' was asked in 1971 who was the best American actor, he had replied that since Brando had let his career go belly-up, it had to be George C. Scott, by default.
Paramount thought that only Laurence Olivier would suffice, but Lord Olivier was ill. The young director believed there was only one actor who could play godfather to the group of Young Turk actors he had assembled for his film, The Godfather of method acting himself - Marlon Brando. Francis Ford Coppola won the fight for Brando, Brando won - and refused - his second Oscar, and Paramount won a pot of gold by producing the then top-grossing film of all-time, The Godfather (1972), a gangster movie most critics now judge one of the greatest American films of all time. Brando followed his iconic portrayal of Don Corleone with his Oscar-nominated turn in the high-grossing and highly scandalous Last Tango in Paris (1972) ("Last Tango in Paris"), the first film dealing explicitly with sexuality in which an actor of Brando's stature had participated. He was now again a top ten box office star and once again heralded as the greatest actor of his generation, an unprecedented comeback that put him on the cover of "Time" magazine and would make him the highest-paid actor in the history of motion pictures by the end of the decade. Little did the world know that Brando, who had struggled through many projects in good faith during the 1960s, delivering some of his best acting, only to be excoriated and ignored as the films did not do well at the box office, essentially was through with the movies.
After reaching the summit of his career, a rarefied atmosphere never reached before or since by any actor, Brando essentially walked away. He would give no more of himself after giving everything as he had done in Last Tango in Paris (1972)," a performance that embarrassed him, according to his autobiography. Brando had come as close to any actor to being the "auteur," or author, of a film, as the English-language scenes of "Tango" were created by encouraging Brando to improvise. The improvisations were written down and turned into a shooting script, and the scripted improvisations were shot the next day. Pauline Kael, the Brando of movie critics in that she was the most influential arbiter of cinematic quality of her generation and spawned a whole legion of Kael wannabes, said Brando's performance in Last Tango in Paris (1972) had revolutionized the art of film. Brando, who had to act to gain his mother's attention; Brando, who believed acting at best was nothing special as everyone in the world engaged in it every day of their lives to get what they wanted from other people; Brando, who believed acting at its worst was a childish charade and that movie stardom was a whorish fraud, would have agreed with Sam Peckinpah's summation of Pauline Kael: "Pauline's a brilliant critic but sometimes she's just cracking walnuts with her ass." He probably would have done so in a simulacrum of those words, too.
After another three-year hiatus, Brando took on just one more major role for the next 20 years, as the bounty hunter after Jack Nicholson in Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks (1976), a western that succeeded neither with the critics or at the box office. Following The Godfather and Tango, Brando's performance was disappointing for some reviewers, who accused him of giving an erratic and inconsistent performance. In 1977, Brando made a rare appearance on television in the miniseries Roots: The Next Generations (1979), portraying George Lincoln Rockwell; he won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie for his performance. In 1978, he narrated the English version of Raoni (1978), a French-Belgian documentary film directed by Jean-Pierre Dutilleux and Luiz Carlos Saldanha that focused on the life of Raoni Metuktire and issues surrounding the survival of the indigenous Indian tribes of north central Brazil.
Later in his career, Brando concentrated on extracting the maximum amount of capital for the least amount of work from producers, as when he got the Salkind brothers to pony up a then-record $3.7 million against 10% of the gross for 13 days work on Superman (1978). Factoring in inflation, the straight salary for "Superman" equals or exceeds the new record of $1 million a day Harrison Ford set with K-19: The Widowmaker (2002). He agreed to the role only on assurance that he would be paid a large sum for what amounted to a small part, that he would not have to read the script beforehand, and his lines would be displayed somewhere off-camera. Brando also filmed scenes for the movie's sequel, Superman II, but after producers refused to pay him the same percentage he received for the first movie, he denied them permission to use the footage.
Before cashing his first paycheck for Superman (1978), Brando had picked up $2 million for his extended cameo in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) in a role, that of Col. Kurtz, that he authored on-camera through improvisation while Coppola shot take after take. It was Brando's last bravura star performance. He co-starred with George C. Scott and John Gielgud in The Formula (1980), but the film was another critical and financial failure. Years later though, he did receive an eighth and final Oscar nomination for his supporting role in A Dry White Season (1989) after coming out of a near-decade-long retirement. Contrary to those who claimed he now only was in it for the money, Brando donated his entire seven-figure salary to an anti-apartheid charity. He then did an amusing performance in the comedy The Freshman (1990), winning rave reviews. He portrayed Tomas de Torquemada in the historical drama 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), but his performance was denounced and the film was another box office failure. He made another comeback in the Johnny Depp romantic drama Don Juan DeMarco (1994), which co-starred Faye Dunaway as his wife. He then appeared in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), co-starring Val Kilmer, who he didn't get along with. The filming was an unpleasant experience for Brando, as well as another critical and box office failure.
Brando had first attracted media attention at the age of 24, when "Life" magazine ran a photo of himself and his sister Jocelyn, who were both then appearing on Broadway. The curiosity continued, and snowballed. Playing the paraplegic soldier of The Men (1950), Brando had gone to live at a Veterans Administration hospital with actual disabled veterans, and confined himself to a wheelchair for weeks. It was an acting method, research, that no one in Hollywood had ever heard of before, and that willingness to experience life.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Her father, Donald Cole, was a consulting engineer, and died in 1926 when Kim was only three years old. Her mother, Grace Lind, once performed as a concert pianist. She had one brother who was eight years older than she, and she was educated at Miami Beach High.
According to an in-depth article on Kim Hunter by Joseph Collura in the October 2009 issue of "Classic Images", Kim was quiet and painfully shy as a child and overcame it through the guidance of a local dramatics teacher, a Mrs. Carmine. Included were diction, voice and posture lessons.
She studied at the Actors Studio and her first professional appearance was as "Penny" in "Penny Wise" in Miami in November 1939. Then, she joined a repertory group called "Theatre of Fifteen", but it disbanded in 1942 when WWII took away most of its male members.
She made her Broadway debut performance as "Stella" in "A Streetcar Named Desire" at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York, in December 1947 that was the 1947-1948 season's success and for which she won the Critics Circle and Donaldson awards.
A one-time student of the Pasadena Playhouse, she was appearing in the 1942 production of "Arsenic and Old Lace" when she was discovered by an RKO talent hunter who signed her to a seven-year contract for David O. Selznick's company. Selznick suggested she change her first name to "Kim" and a RKO secretary suggested the last name of "Hunter". A few years later, Irene Mayer Selznick, David's ex-wife by then, recommended Kim for her reprise role of "Stella" in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), for which she won an Oscar.- Actor
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Born to a Czech mother and a Serbian father in Chicago as Mladen Sekulovich, on March 22, 1912, Karl Malden did not speak English until he was in kindergarten. After graduating from high school in the nearby steel town of Gary, Indiana, Malden worked in the industry for three years until 1934, when he was frustrated with the drudgery of manual labor. He left to attend the Arkansas State Teacher's College, then the Goodman Theater Dramatic School and never looked back. Three years later, he went to New York City to find fame.
Malden rapidly became involved with the Group Theater, an organization of actors and directors who were changing the face of theater, where he attracted the attention of director Elia Kazan. With Kazan directing, Karl starred in plays such as "All My Sons" by Arthur Miller and "A Streetcar Named Desire" by Tennessee Williams. While Malden had one screen appearance before his military service in World War II, in They Knew What They Wanted (1940), he did not establish his film career until after the war. Malden won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor as Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and showed his range as an actor in roles such as that of Father Corrigan in On the Waterfront (1954) and the lecherous Archie Lee in Baby Doll (1956).
He starred in dozens of films such as Fear Strikes Out (1957), Pollyanna (1960), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), Gypsy (1962), How the West Was Won (1962), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), and Patton (1970) as General Omar Bradley. In the early 1970s, he built a television career on the tough but honest screen persona he had created when he starred as Detective Mike Stone on The Streets of San Francisco (1972), co-starring with Michael Douglas. He also became the pitchman for American Express, a position he held for 21 years. In 1988, he was elected President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a position he held for five years. Following that he, published his memoir entitled, "When Do I Start?: A Memoir", written with his daughter Carla.
Malden also courted controversy by pushing for a special salute to Elia Kazan at the 1999 Academy Awards. Malden defended both Kazan and the award, arguing that Kazan's artistic achievements outshone any shame attached to Kazan's naming names before the Congressional committee investigating Communists in Hollywood. Marlon Brando refused to give Kazan the statuette; Robert De Niro ultimately did. Karl Malden died at age 97 of natural causes at his home in Los Angeles on July 1, 2009. He was buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Westwood, California.- Rudolph Bond was raised in Philadelphia. He got his start at the Neighborhood Players. After World War II, he was invited by Elia Kazan to be a student at the famed "Actors Studio" in New York, working with such future stars as Paul Newman, James Dean, and Marlon Brando. His first big break was a role in the stage production of "A Streetcar Named Desire". Rudy's career included the theater, motions pictures and television.
- Nick Dennis was born on 26 April 1904 in Thessaly, Greece. He was an actor, known for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Spartacus (1960) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955). He died on 14 November 1980 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
- Peg Hillias was born on 24 June 1914 in Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA. She was an actress, known for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Producers' Showcase (1954) and Studio One (1948). She died on 18 March 1960 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.
- Prolific supporting actor, arguably best known for his two guest appearances on Rod Serling 's The Twilight Zone (1959). In one of his later roles he played the chimpanzee veterinarian Dr. Galen in Planet of the Apes (1968) which was also co-scripted by Serling. Wright King studied drama at the St Louis School of Theater, graduating in 1941. During the Second World War he served for three years with the U.S.Navy, stationed in the South Pacific. After being honorably discharged he continued his drama studies in New York at the Actors Studio and at the American Theatre Wing. He did not make his screen debut until 1949. A string of walk-on parts was followed by a critically acclaimed supporting role in the original Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947-49) as well as in the subsequent motion picture. King enjoyed a lengthy career, featuring in stage plays on both sides of the Atlantic and popping up in numerous television episodes (especially westerns). In one season of Wanted: Dead or Alive (1958) he played the sidekick of bounty hunter Josh Randall, played by Steve McQueen (1960) .
A close friend of Eileen Heckart until her death in 2001, King left the acting profession in 1987. With his wife June, he retired to Portland, Oregon. More recently, he resided in Woodland Hills, California, where he died at the venerable age of 95 on November 25 2018. His son is actor Meegan King . - Ann Dere was born in 1868 in Moundsville, West Virginia, USA. She was an actress, known for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Lux Video Theatre (1950) and Robert Montgomery Presents (1950). She died on 4 January 1954 in New York City, New York, USA.
- Edna Thomas was born on 1 November 1885 in Lawrenceville, Virginia, USA. She was an actress, known for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). She was married to Lloyd Carter Thomas. She died on 22 July 1974 in New York City, New York, USA.
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Richard Garrick (born Richard T. O'Brien) was active on stage, in film, television and radio from 1907 through 1957. His New York City acting career began with "The Boys of Company B" (in which Mack Sennett appeared in one of his 2 stage roles).
Garrick went on to become Gaumont's Director General in Tallahassee, Florida where he directed the 5-reel film "The Idol of the Stage," "According to Law" and "The Drifter," among others. He often also acted in these silent films.
In the 1920s Garrick spent time in Europe where he appeared in the films "Trent's Last Case," "Rank Outsider," "The Romance of a Movie Star," "The Pride of the Fancy" and "La Soleil de Minuit." At that time, he also ran "The Hollywood," offering "Tea, Cocktail and Dinner Dances" on Rue Danou in Paris.
When he returned to the United States, Garrick pursued his acting career and assumed the role of The Doctor (sometimes billed as The Stranger) in the Broadway production of "A Streetcar Named Desire," where Marlon Brando made his stage debut. Garrick repeated his stage role on film in 1951, alongside Brando and Vivian Leigh. Other film credits include "Trouble Along the Way" (1953) starring John Wayne, "Desiree" (1954) with Brando and Jeanne Simmons, "East of Eden" (1955) starring James Dean, "A Man Called Peter" (1955), "The Mountain" (1956) starring Spencer Tracy," High Society" with Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra (1956) and "The Three Faces of Eve"(1957) starring Joanne Woodward.
Garrick also toured with the USA Camp Shows in Europe during World War II in the production "Ten Little Indians" by Agatha Christie, had a regular radio program on KRKD in Los Angeles, and appeared on television in shows such as Dragnet, Calvacade of America and My Friend Flicka.- One of Hollywood's staple child actors during the 30s and 40s, Mickey Kuhn played alongside many a top Hollywood star from Leslie Howard and Conrad Nagel's son to playing Dick Tracy's ward. Once he reached the "awkward teens" stage, however, he found himself primarily unemployed or in unbilled parts and looked elsewhere for career satisfaction.
Born Theodore Matthew Michael Kuhn, Jr. on September 21, 1932 in Waukegan, Illinois, he was the younger of two children born to Theodore Sr. and the former Pearl Hicks. The family moved to Hollywood during the Depression where his father found reliable work as a meat cutter. Mickey added to the family income at age 2 when, by chance, he was cast by Fox Studios for the movie Change of Heart (1934) starring the preeminent movie couple at the time, Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell. Attending kindergarten at the Mark-Ken School for professional children, he returned to films as a 5-year-old in A Doctor's Diary (1937) made by Paramount. His devoted mother oversaw and protected him throughout most of his young career. 1939 was a banner year for Mickey as it was for Hollywood itself, appearing as Crown Prince Augustin in the "A" picture Juarez (1939) starring Paul Muni and Bette Davis, and as Ashley Wilkes' son Beau in the Civil War classic Gone with the Wind (1939).
While he did not rise to moppet stardom, the boy proved quite dependable and a fast learner, and was actively involved in a few prestigious pictures during the 1940s, including One Foot in Heaven (1941), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) and Red River (1948). He particularly enjoyed horses and participating in such action fare as S.O.S. Tidal Wave (1939), _Roaring Rangers (1946) and Broken Arrow (1950).
His attention also turned to the stage as a teenager, performing at the Pasadena Playhouse and other Los Angeles-based theaters in between film shoots. Fewer roles came his way, however, and in 1951 he decided to enlist in the Navy. After a four-year term of duty, he returned to films and TV in 1955 but without much fanfare. He married around this time and had two children. Preferring a steadier source of income, he attended L.A. Valley College and Cal State Northridge on his G.I. Bill majoring in Theater Arts while holding an assortment of odd jobs.
In 1965 he was hired by American Airlines and subsequently served as a supervisor to flight attendants. He later became an administrative manager at a Boston airport. Divorced, he remarried in 1984 and retired from the airlines in 1995. More recently he has spent his time conducting historical tours around and about the city of Boston and has appeared at various film festivals. He received the Golden Boot Award for his work in westerns in 2005. - Director
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Known for his creative stage direction, Elia Kazan was born Elias Kazantzoglou on September 7, 1909 in Constantinople, Ottoman Empire (now Istanbul, Turkey). Noted for drawing out the best dramatic performances from his actors, he directed 21 actors to Oscar nominations, resulting in nine wins. He directed a string of successful films, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), and East of Eden (1955). During his career, he won two Oscars as Best Director and received an Honorary Oscar, won three Tony Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards.
His films were concerned with personal or social issues of special concern to him. Kazan writes, "I don't move unless I have some empathy with the basic theme." His first such "issue" film was Gentleman's Agreement (1947), with Gregory Peck, which dealt with anti-Semitism in America. It received 8 Oscar nominations and three wins, including Kazan's first for Best Director. It was followed by Pinky (1949), one of the first films in mainstream Hollywood to address racial prejudice against black people. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), an adaptation of the stage play which he had also directed, received 12 Oscar nominations, winning four, and was Marlon Brando's breakthrough role. In 1954, he directed On the Waterfront (1954), a film about union corruption on the New York harbor waterfront. In 1955, he directed John Steinbeck's East of Eden (1955), which introduced James Dean to movie audiences.
A turning point in Kazan's career came with his testimony as a witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952 at the time of the Hollywood blacklist, which brought him strong negative reactions from many liberal friends and colleagues. His testimony helped end the careers of former acting colleagues Morris Carnovsky and Art Smith, along with ending the work of playwright Clifford Odets. Kazan later justified his act by saying he took "only the more tolerable of two alternatives that were either way painful and wrong." Nearly a half-century later, his anti-Communist testimony continued to cause controversy. When Kazan was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1999, dozens of actors chose not to applaud as 250 demonstrators picketed the event.
Kazan influenced the films of the 1950s and 1960s with his provocative, issue-driven subjects. Director Stanley Kubrick called him, "without question, the best director we have in America, and capable of performing miracles with the actors he uses." On September 28, 2003, Elia Kazan died at age 94 of natural causes at his apartment in Manhattan, New York City. Martin Scorsese co-directed the documentary film A Letter to Elia (2010) as a personal tribute to Kazan.- Producer
- Additional Crew
- Actor
Charles K. Feldman was born on 26 April 1904 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a producer and actor, known for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Casino Royale (1967). He was married to Clotilde Barot and Jean Howard. He died on 25 May 1968 in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
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Tennessee Williams met long-term partner Frank Merlo in the summer of 1948 (Merlo died of lung cancer in the fall of 1963). Though separated briefly in 1961 and again in 1962, the two were partners for 15 years. Merlo acted as his personal manager/secretary.
Williams spent much of his most prolific years in Rome, Italy, and his enduring friendship with Italian stage and screen legend Anna Magnani lasted 24 years and inspired both "The Rose Tattoo" and "Orpheus Descending". Magnani realized the lead parts of these two plays, which were written for her, in their film versions. The turbulent and inspirational friendship shared between Williams and Magnani is the subject of the internationally acclaimed play "Roman Nights" by Franco D'Alessandro.
Aside from his published "Memoirs", the only authorized biographical book on Williams is by Bruce Smith, entitled "Costly Performances - Tennessee Williams; The Last Stage." This book deals with the last four years of Williams' life (1979-1983).- Music Department
- Composer
- Soundtrack
Alex North studied music at the Curtis Institute of Philadelphia, then won a scholarship to Juilliard in New York (1929) and the Moscow Conservatoire (1933), making him the first-ever American to become a member of the Union of Soviet Composers. In Europe, he worked as music director for the Latvian State Theatre, before returning to the U.S. in 1935 to perfect his craft under the auspices of Aaron Copland. At the same time, he produced his first compositions, including two symphonies, chamber music and dance scores for Martha Graham and Agnes de Mille. After a spell in Mexico as conductor/composer, he served as a captain with the U.S. Army, in charge of 'self-entertainment programs' for hospitalised psychiatric patients. He also did his first film work, scoring documentaries for the Office of War Information.
Profoundly influenced by, above all, Duke Ellington, North began to write several innovative compositions in jazz. His 'Revue for Clarinet and Orchestra' was originally commissioned by Benny Goodman and first performed in 1946 under the direction of Goodman and Leonard Bernstein with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Joining ASCAP in 1947, North went on to compose theatrical scores, including 'Death of a Salesman' for Elia Kazan and this opened the door to Hollywood. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) was the first all-jazz score ever written for a motion picture. His next assignment was the film version of Death of a Salesman (1951), followed by Viva Zapata! (1952), for which he used traditional instruments, including marimbas and timbales.
Much of his subsequent work was characterised by sparse instrumentation (as, for example, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and the Oscar-nominated Under the Volcano (1984)). He used jazz again, evocatively, to score The Long, Hot Summer (1958) and The Sound and the Fury (1959), but was rather less successful on more conventional themes, such as The Misfits (1961). One of his most beautiful and lyrical works was the love theme from Spartacus (1960). For the small screen, he composed the music for the two instalments of the popular miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man (1976). Alex North was Oscar-nominated fifteen times but only received the coveted statuette as a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1986.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Multi-Academy Award-nominated cinematographer (13 in all), Harry Stradling was unique in that he established his reputation both in America and in Europe. He was the nephew of Mary Pickford's cameraman Walter Stradling, who provided the connections for his first job in Hollywood. Walter died in 1918 and Harry went on to serve his apprenticeship, working on B-movies and short subjects for lesser companies, like Pathe and Arrow. In 1930, he journeyed to France where he established a fruitful collaboration with the director Jacques Feyder, working on films which have become classics of French cinema: Le grand jeu (1934), La dame aux camélias (1934) and, his first noteworthy success, bringing to life the Flemish paintings of Carnival in Flanders (1935).
The visual quality of this film so impressed producer Alexander Korda, that he hired both Feyder and Stradling for his London Films production, Knight Without Armor (1937), starring Marlene Dietrich - hired by Korda for the then princely sum of $350,000. Despite budgetary constraints, which meant that many sets had be improvised and stylised, Stradling's low key lighting gave the film an impressionistic feel and made it look more 'expensive' than it was. It ended up furthering Dietrich's career and led to other prestige assignments in England, including South Riding (1938), The Citadel (1938) and Alfred Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn (1939). With an impressive portfolio thus in hand, Stradling returned to Hollywood and soon worked with 'Hitch' again on Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) and Suspicion (1941). Who can forget that indelible scene of Cary Grant ascending a staircase with that suspicious glass of warmed milk for poor Joan Fontaine (the contents of the glass rendered even more dubious by being lit from the inside with a light bulb)? The ever- innovative Stradling also impressed critics and audiences alike with his application of double exposure, creating realistic-looking twins of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. for The Corsican Brothers (1941).
Between 1942 and 1949, Harry worked at MGM, where his close-ups of the changing face of Hurd Hatfield, in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), further established him as one of the most versatile cinematographers in the business. For Republic, he imbued Nicholas Ray's off-beat Trucolor western Johnny Guitar (1954) with an immense visual style which adds to the almost lyrical quality of the picture. Glamour and technicolour were also key ingredients in Stradling's musicals for MGM, foremost among them The Barkleys of Broadway (1949) and Guys and Dolls (1955). In 1955, Harry went across to Warner Brothers . During his nine year-long tenure there, he earned four Academy Award nominations, culminating in a second Oscar for his much lauded 70 mm filming of My Fair Lady (1964). Towards the end of his career, he contributed to boosting Barbra Streisand's, particularly through his meticulous soft-focus photography of Hello, Dolly! (1969) and Funny Girl (1968). Harry died on the job, during filming of another Streisand vehicle, The Owl and the Pussycat (1970), and was replaced by Andrew Laszlo.- Producer
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David Weisbart was born on 21 January 1915 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He was a producer and editor, known for Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Mildred Pierce (1945) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). He died on 21 July 1967 in Los Angeles County, California, USA.- Actress
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Joan Crawford was born Lucille Fay LeSueur on March 23, 1906, in San Antonio, Texas, to Anna Belle (Johnson) and Thomas E. LeSueur, a laundry laborer. By the time she was born, her parents had separated, and by the time she was a teenager, she'd had three stepfathers. It wasn't an easy life; Crawford worked a variety of menial jobs. She was a good dancer, though, and -- perhaps seeing dance as her ticket to a career in show business -- she entered several contests, one of which landed her a spot in a chorus line. Before long, she was dancing in big Midwestern and East Coast cities. After almost two years, she packed her bags and moved to Hollywood. Crawford was determined to succeed, and shortly after arriving she got her first bit part, as a showgirl in Pretty Ladies (1925).
Three films quickly followed; although the roles weren't much to speak of, she continued toiling. Throughout 1927 and early 1928, she was cast in small parts, but that ended with the role of Diana Medford in Our Dancing Daughters (1928), which elevated her to star status. Crawford had cleared the first big hurdle; now came the second, in the form of talkies. Many stars of the silents saw their careers evaporate, either because their voices weren't particularly pleasant or because their voices, pleasing enough, didn't match the public's expectations (for example, some fans felt that John Gilbert's tenor didn't quite match his very masculine persona). But Crawford wasn't felled by sound. Her first talkie, Untamed (1929), was a success. As the 1930s progressed, Crawford became one of the biggest stars at MGM. She was in top form in films such as Grand Hotel (1932), Sadie McKee (1934), No More Ladies (1935), and Love on the Run (1936); movie patrons were enthralled, and studio executives were satisfied.
By the early 1940s, MGM was no longer giving her plum roles; newcomers had arrived in Hollywood, and the public wanted to see them. Crawford left MGM for rival Warner Bros., and in 1945 she landed the role of a lifetime. Mildred Pierce (1945) gave her an opportunity to show her range as an actress, and her performance as a woman driven to give her daughter everything garnered Crawford her first, and only, Oscar for Best Actress. The following year she appeared with John Garfield in the well-received Humoresque (1946). In 1947, she appeared as Louise Graham in Possessed (1947); again she was nominated for a Best Actress from the Academy, but she lost to Loretta Young in The Farmer's Daughter (1947). Crawford continued to choose her roles carefully, and in 1952 she was nominated for a third time, for her depiction of Myra Hudson in Sudden Fear (1952). This time the coveted Oscar went to Shirley Booth, for Come Back, Little Sheba (1952). Crawford's career slowed after that; she appeared in minor roles until 1962, when she and Bette Davis co-starred in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Their longstanding rivalry may have helped fuel their phenomenally vitriolic and well-received performances. (Earlier in their careers, Davis said of Crawford, "She's slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie", and Crawford said of Davis, "I don't hate [her] even though the press wants me to. I resent her. I don't see how she built a career out of a set of mannerisms instead of real acting ability. Take away the pop eyes, the cigarette, and those funny clipped words, and what have you got? She's phony, but I guess the public really likes that.")
Crawford's final appearance on the silver screen was in the flop Trog (1970). Turning to vodka more and more, she was hardly seen afterward. On May 10, 1977, Joan died of a heart attack in New York City. She was 71 years old. She had disinherited her adopted daughter Christina and son Christopher; the former wrote a tell-all book called "Mommie Dearest", The Sixth Sense published in 1978. The book cast Crawford in a negative light and was cause for much debate, particularly among her friends and acquaintances, including Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Crawford's first husband. (In 1981, Faye Dunaway starred in Mommie Dearest (1981) which did well at the box office.) Crawford is interred in the same mausoleum as fellow MGM star Judy Garland, in Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.- Actor
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Despite many a powerful performance, this actor's actor never quite achieved the stardom he deserved. Ultimately, Richard Basehart became best-known to television audiences as Admiral Harriman Nelson, commander of the glass-nosed nuclear submarine 'S.S.R.N Seaview' in Irwin Allen's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964), shown on ABC from 1964 to 1968. Basehart's distinctively deep, resonant voice also provided narrations in feature films, TV mini-series and for documentaries.
Born in Zanesville, Ohio, on August 14 1914, Basehart was one of four siblings born to a struggling and soon-to-be widowed editor of a local newspaper. Upon leaving college, he worked briefly as a radio announcer and then attempted to follow in his father's journalistic footsteps as a reporter. Controversy over one of his stories led to his departure from the paper and cleared the path to pursue acting as a career. In 1932, Basehart made his theatrical bow with the Wright Players Stock Company in his home town and subsequently spent five years playing varied and interesting roles at the Hedgerow Theatre in Philadelphia. From 1938, he began to work in New York on and off-Broadway. Seven years later he received the New York Drama Critics Circle Best Newcomer Award for "The Hasty Heart", a drama by John Patrick, in which Basehart played a dying Scottish soldier. In 1945, he received his first film offers. When he heard director Bretaigne Windust was seeking an authentic Scot for the lead role in The Hasty Heart, Basehart not only effected an authentic enough burr to win the part, but won also the 1945 New York Critic's Award as the most promising actor of the year. His accent was so good that a visiting leader of a Scottish clan told the actor he knew his clan.
Basehart made his debut on the big screen with Repeat Performance (1947) at Eagle-Lion, a minor film noir with Joan Leslie, followed at Warner Brothers with the Gothic Barbara Stanwyck thriller Cry Wolf (1947). His third picture finally got him critical plaudits for playing a sociopathic killer, relentlessly hunted through drainage tunnels in He Walked by Night (1948), a procedural police drama shot in a semi-documentary style. Variety gave a positive review, commenting "With this role, Basehart establishes himself as one of Hollywood's most talented finds in recent years. He heavily overshadows the rest of the cast..."
It was the first of many charismatic performances in which Basehart would excel at tormented or introverted characters, portraying angst, foreboding or mental anguish. His gallery of characters came to include the notorious Robespierre, chief architect of the Reign of Terror (1949), set during the French Revolution. He was one of the feuding Hatfields in Roseanna McCoy (1949) and in Fourteen Hours (1951) (based on a real 1938 Manhattan suicide) had a tour de force turn as a man perched on the high ledge of an office building threatening to jump. For much of the film's duration, the camera was firmly focused on the actor's face. Basehart later recalled "It was an actor's dream, in which I hogged the camera lens, and the role called on me to act mostly with my eyes, lips and face muscles". The New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther called his performance 'startling and poignant'.
Eschewing conventional movie stardom, Basehart meticulously selected and varied his roles, avoiding, as he put it, "stereotyping at the expense of not amassing an impressive bank account.'' In the wake of the sudden death of his first wife, Basehart left the U.S. for Italy. In March 1951, he got married a second time (to the actress Valentina Cortese) and appeared in a succession of European movies, playing the ill-fated clown Il Matto in Federico Fellini's classic The Road (1954); against type, essayed a swashbuckling nobleman reclaiming his titles and estate in Cartouche (1955), and (again for Fellini), played a member of a gang of grifters in The Swindle (1955). He was also ideally cast as the mild-mannered Ishmael in John Huston's excellent version of Moby Dick (1956) and as Ivan, one of The Brothers Karamazov (1958).
By 1960, Basehart's second marriage had ended in divorce and the actor returned to America where he found movie opportunities few and far between. The small screen to some extent reinvigorated his career with numerous series guest appearances and his lengthy stint in the popular Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. He also received critical praise for his role as Henry Wirtz, commandant of the Confederacy's most infamous prison camp, in the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning television drama The Andersonville Trial (1970).
Not only an active human rights campaigner, Basehart was also strongly opposed to the experimental use of animals. With his third wife Diana Lotery he set up the animal welfare charity, Actors and Others for Animals, in 1971. He died after suffering a series of strokes in Los Angeles on September 17 1984 at the age of 70.- Actress
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Additional Crew
Valentina Cortese was born in Milan on New Year's Day of 1923. She made her movie debut in 1940 and played many "ingenue" parts in Italian films of that period, before making a real sensation in Caccia all'uomo (1948) and Tempesta su Parigi (1948), playing both female leads, Fantine and Cosette (the film was a competent screen adaptation of the Victor Hugo classic "Les misérables"). The international success of the British-made melodrama The Glass Mountain (1949) brought her some Hollywood offers: she was very sensual as a truck-driver's mistress in Jules Dassin's film noir Thieves' Highway (1949), and particularly effective in Robert Wise's thriller The House on Telegraph Hill (1951), in which she portrayed a woman pursued by a killer.
She then returned to Europe and worked with many great directors, like Michelangelo Antonioni, who cast her in The Girlfriends (1955), and Federico Fellini, who gave her a supporting part in his surrealist fantasy Juliet of the Spirits (1965). She had an especially robust part in Francois Truffaut's Day for Night (1973) as a fading alcoholic movie star (she was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for this performance). She also had a stage career, working with writers and directors such as Giorgio Strehler and Franco Zeffirelli and starring in the title roles of Schiller's "Mary Stuart" and Wedekind's "Lulu".- Actress
- Director
- Soundtrack
Piper Laurie was a three-time Oscar nominee, nominated by BAFTA as well as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for best performance by an actress in 'The Hustler' with Paul Newman.
Laurie was born Rosetta Jacobs in Detroit, Michigan, to Charlotte Sadie (Alperin) and Alfred Jacobs, a furniture dealer. She had an elder sister. Her family was of Russian Jewish and Polish Jewish descent.
Young Rosetta had been studying acting with Benno and Betomi Schnider for three years when she auditioned for Universal Studios, who signed her to a long term contract and was renamed Piper Laurie. She made more than twenty films, appearing opposite such actors as Tony Curtis, Rock Hudson and Tyrone Power.
Disgusted with the lack of serious roles, Laurie finally broke her lucrative Hollywood contract, moved to New York, lived on a budget, worked on live television and theater, and within two years changed her life and her career.
She stopped working for fifteen years after 'The Hustler' to devote her energies to the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, feeling acting was less important. When she accepted work again she was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress for 'Carrie' with Sissy Spacek, and again as Best Supporting Actress in 'Children of a Lesser God' with Marlee Matlin. She won the Golden Globe for her role in the David Lynch cult favorite 'Twin Peaks' and was nominated for an Emmy for both Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress in 'Twin Peaks'.
She was nominated a total of twelve times for the Emmy, including one for the original and celebrated live broadcast of 'The Days of Wine and Roses' with Cliff Robertson, directed by John Frankenheimer, as well as for her comedic performance in 'Frasier'. She won an Emmy for her performance in 'Promise' opposite James Woods and James Garner. She was Harvard's Hasty Pudding Woman of the Year, and she also received an SFECA award for her performance as Dolly in the film 'The Grass Harp'.
In 2010, she played an elderly grandma who learns to smoke a bong in the feature film 'Hesher', with Joseph Gordon Levitt and Natalie Portman. Most recently she appeared as Grandma Hershe in White Boy Rick, starring Matthew McConaughey, and as Rose Muller in 'Snapshots', directed by Melanie Mayron. In 2013, she made her musical stage debut in 'A Little Night Music' as Madame Armfeldt.
Laurie performed on Broadway in the Tony-nominated Lincoln Center production of 'Mornings at Seven' directed by Dan Sullivan at the Lyceum Theatre. She also appeared on Broadway in the 20th Anniversary production of 'The Glass Menagerie', in which she played Laura Wingfield, with Maureen Stapleton (only 7 years older) as her mother, Amanda, at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre.
Off-Broadway, she appeared in Molly Kazan's 'Rosemary and the Alligators' and in Larry Kramer's 'The Destiny of Me'. She toured in a one-person play about Zelda Fitzgerald, written by Bill Luce. In 2010 she directed Jim Brochu in his one-man show 'Zero Hour', for which he received the Drama Desk Award for best solo performance on or off Broadway, playing Zero Mostel.
Laurie was divorced from Wall Street Journal's movie critic, Pulitzer Prize-winner Joe Morgenstern. They had a daughter. Laurie's autobiography, Learning to Live Out Loud, was published by Crown in 2011 to rave reviews and is now available as an audio book on audible.com.- Actress
- Soundtrack
The blonde, sultry, dreamy-eyed beauty of Dorothy Malone, who was born Mary Maloney in Chicago on January 29, 1924, took some time before it made an impact with American film-going audiences. But once she did, she played it for all it was worth in her one chance Academy Award-winning "bad girl" performance, a role quite unlike the classy and strait-laced lady herself.
Raised in Dallas, she was one of five children born to an accountant father and housewife mother. Two older sisters died of polio. Attending Ursuline Convent and Highland Park High School, she was quite popular (as "School Favorite"). She was also a noted female athlete while there and won several awards for swimming and horseback riding. Following graduation, she studied at Southern Methodist University with the intent of becoming a nurse, but a role in the college play "Starbound" happened to catch the eye of an RKO talent scout and she was offered a Hollywood contract.
The lovely brunette started off in typical RKO starlet mode with acting/singing/dancing/diction lessons and bit parts (billed as Dorothy Maloney) in such films as the Frank Sinatra musicals Higher and Higher (1943) and Step Lively (1944), a couple of the mystery "Falcon" entries and a showier role in Show Business (1944) with Eddie Cantor and George Murphy. RKO lost interest, however, after the two-year contract was up. Warner Bros., however, stepped up to the plate and offered the actress a contract. Now billed as Dorothy Malone, her third film offering with the studio finally injected some adrenaline into her floundering young career, when she earned the small role of a seductive book clerk in the Bogart/Bacall classic The Big Sleep (1946). Critics and audiences took notice of her captivating little part. As a reward, the studio nudged her up the billing ladder with more visible roles in Two Guys from Texas (1948), Romance on the High Seas (1948), South of St. Louis (1949) and Colorado Territory (1949), with the westerns showing off her equestrian prowess if not her acting ability.
Despite this positive movement, Warner Bros. did not extend Dorothy's contract in 1949 and she returned willingly back to her tight-knit family in her native Dallas. Taking a steadier job with an insurance agency, she happened to attend a work-related convention in New York City and grew fascinated with the big city. Deciding to recommit to her acting career, she moved to the Big Apple and studied at the American Theater Wing. In between her studies, she managed to find work on TV, which spurred freelancing "B" movie offers in the routine form of Saddle Legion (1951), The Bushwhackers (1951), the Martin & Lewis romp Scared Stiff (1953), Law and Order (1953), Jack Slade (1953), Pushover (1954) and Private Hell 36 (1954).
Things picked up noticeably once Dorothy went platinum blonde, which seemed to emphasize her overt and sensual beauty. First off was as a sister to Doris Day in Young at Heart (1954), a musical remake of Four Daughters (1938), back at Warner Bros. She garnered even better attention when she appeared in the war picture Battle Cry (1955), in which she shared torrid love scenes with film's newest heartthrob Tab Hunter, and continued the momentum with the reliable westerns Five Guns West (1955) and Tall Man Riding (1955) but not with melodramatic romantic dud Sincerely Yours (1955) which tried to sell to the audiences a heterosexual Liberace.
By this time she had signed with Universal. Following a few more westerns for good measure (At Gunpoint (1955), Tension at Table Rock (1956) and Pillars of the Sky (1956), Dorothy won the scenery-chewing role of wild, nymphomaniac Marylee Hadley in the Douglas Sirk soap opera Written on the Wind (1956) co-starring Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall and Robert Stack. Stack and Malone had the showier roles and completely out-shined the two leads, both earning supporting Oscar nominations in the process. Stack lost in his category but Dorothy nabbed the trophy for her splendidly tramp, boozed-up Southern belle which was highlighted by her writhing mambo dance.
Unfortunately, Dorothy's long spell of mediocre filming did not end with all the hoopla she received for Written on the Wind (1956). The Tarnished Angels (1957), which reunited Malone with Hudson and Stack faltered, and Quantez (1957) with Fred MacMurray was just another run-of-the-mill western. Two major film challenges might have changed things with Man of a Thousand Faces (1957) as the unsympathetic first wife of James Cagney's Lon Chaney Sr, and as alcoholic actress Diana Barrymore in the biographic melodrama Too Much, Too Soon (1958). Cagney, however, overshadowed everyone in the first and the second was fatally watered down by the Production Code committee.
To compensate, Dorothy, at age 35 in 1959, finally was married -- to playboy actor Jacques Bergerac (Ginger Rogers's ex-husband). A daughter, Mimi, was born the following year. Fewer film offers, which included Warlock (1959) and The Last Voyage (1960), came her way as Dorothy focused more on family life. While a second daughter, Diane, was born in 1962, the turbulent marriage wouldn't last and their divorce became final in December 1964. A bitter custody battle ensued with Dorothy eventually winning primary custody.
It took the small screen to rejuvenate Dorothy's career in the mid-1960s when she earned top billing of TV's first prime time soap opera Peyton Place (1964). Dorothy, starring in Lana Turner's 1957 film role of Constance MacKenzie, found herself in a smash hit. The run wasn't entirely happy however. Doctors discovered blood clots on her lungs which required major surgery and she almost died. Lola Albright filled in until she was able to return. Just as bad, her the significance of her role dwindled with time and 20th Century-Fox finally wrote her and co-star Tim O'Connor off the show in 1968. Dorothy filed a breach of contract lawsuit which ended in an out-of-court settlement.
Her life on- and off-camera did not improve. Dorothy's second marriage to stockbroker Robert Tomarkin in 1969 would last only three months, and a third to businessman Charles Huston Bell managed about three years. Now-matronly roles in the films Winter Kills (1979), Vortex (1982), The Being (1981) and Rest in Pieces (1987), were few and far between a few TV-movies -- which included some "Peyton Place" revivals, did nothing to advance her. Malone returned and settled for good back in her native Dallas, returning to Hollywood only on occasion.
Dorothy's last film was a cameo in the popular thriller Basic Instinct (1992) as a friend to Sharon Stone. She will be remembered as one of those Hollywood stars who proved she had the talent but somehow got the short end of the stick when it came to quality films offered. She retired to Texas and died in Dallas shortly before her 94th birthday on January 19, 2018.- Actress
- Soundtrack
After achieving modest fame as an ice skater in her native Czechoslovakia, Vera Hruba was brought to the United States by Republic Pictures head Herbert J. Yates, who hoped to turn her into the next Sonja Henie. After featuring her in two "Ice Capades" movies, he added "Ralston" to her name and tried to pass her off as a leading lady. Hruba's English was so limited, she was forced to learn her lines phonetically. Her English improved, and directors said she tried hard to learn her craft, but bad acting and a thick accent made it difficult for audiences to accept her.- Actor
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Hungarian-born S.Z. Sakall was a veteran of German, Hungarian and British films when he left Europe because of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement. In Hollywood from shortly after the outbreak of World War II, Sakall began appearing in comedies and musicals, often playing a lovable if somewhat excitable and/or befuddled uncle, businessman or neighborhood eccentric. Memorable as the waiter in Casablanca (1942) and as a somewhat lecherous Broadway producer in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). He retired from films in 1954 and died of a heart attack in Hollywood in 1955.- Actor
- Producer
- Writer
Keefe Brasselle was born on 7 February 1923 in Elyria, Ohio, USA. He was an actor and producer, known for The Eddie Cantor Story (1953), A Place in the Sun (1951) and If You Don't Stop It... You'll Go Blind!!! (1975). He was married to Arlene DeMarco and Norma Jean Aldrich. He died on 7 July 1981 in Downey, California, USA.- Actor
- Stunts
- Soundtrack
The well-worn phrase "Tall in the saddle" is certainly one easy way of describing (and perhaps pigeon-holing) leathery, wiry-framed 1940s and early 1950s western film star Rod Cameron, although he proved quite capable in crime stories, horrors and even swing-era musicals.
The 6'4" Canadian-born actor was born Nathan Roderick Cox on December 7, 1910, and raised in Alberta. Once his aspirations of becoming a Royal Canadian Mountie passed, he decided to seek fame and fortune as an actor in New York and initially grabbed some work as a laborer on the Holland Tunnel project in Manhattan. When no progress was made acting-wise, he moved to California where he made his "debut" in an unbilled bit in one of Bette Davis' scenes in The Old Maid (1939). Upon release, however, he discovered his bit in the scene had been deleted.
Cameron found a slight "in" (as in "stand-in") with Paramount Pictures for such stars as Fred MacMurray while managing to find himself sparingly used in other Paramount films. To supplement his income he also played leading man in the studio's screen tests for starlet wanna-bes and his athleticism paid off playing stunt double for such established cowboy icons as Buck Jones. Cameron toiled as a bit player for quite some time and appeared insignificantly in such classics as Christmas in July (1940) and North West Mounted Police (1940) (where he fulfilled his early wish by playing a Mountie!). Occasionally he would find a noticeable secondary role, in such lesser films as The Monster and the Girl (1941), The Forest Rangers (1942) and as Jesse James in The Remarkable Andrew (1942).
Cameron's banner year was 1943, when he finally broke out of the minor leagues and into the major ranks. His breakout screen role was as clench-jawed Agent Rex Bennett, out to bring down the foreign enemy and save the world, in the Republic serial cliffhangers G-Men vs. The Black Dragon (1943) and Secret Service in Darkest Africa (1943). From there he was signed by Universal to appear in a flurry of low-budget westerns with Fuzzy Knight as his comic sidekick. Aside from the rough-hewn heroics he was paid to display, he would occasionally show a softer side for the ladies, such as with fellow Canadian Yvonne De Carlo in Salome, Where She Danced (1945), Frontier Gal (1945) and River Lady (1948). Seldom would he venture outside the action genre, however, one of the few times being his role as a symphony conductor in Swing Out, Sister (1945). For the most part he remained rooted in westerns and the only variance within that realm was the occasional black-hatted bad guy.
Among Cameron's many dusty showcases (more often than not made at Republic or Universal), Brimstone (1949), Stampede (1949), Dakota Lil (1950) and San Antone (1953) are worth a good look. Cameron never found his Stagecoach (1939) or Shane (1953), a vehicle that might have held him even "taller" in the saddle, but between 1953 and 1955 he was still ranked "top 5" box-office.
In the 1950s Cameron found time to settle into a couple of syndicated TV series. Both City Detective (1953) and State Trooper (1956) lasted a couple of seasons. He also guested on the more popular western series, such as Bonanza (1959), Laramie (1959) and The Virginian (1962). When his movie career began to fade in the early 1960s, he went to Spain for a few spaghetti westerns and appeared in a couple of low-budget westerns such as Requiem for a Gunfighter (1965) and The Bounty Killer (1965), which was noticed more for reuniting sagebrush stars from yesteryear than for its high quality. He also played an aging rodeo star who dies early in the story in the biopic Evel Knievel (1971).
The only serious tabloid scandal he ever found himself in was when he divorced wife Angela Alves-Lico (1950-1960) and then immediately married his ex-wife's mother, Dorothy, who was a few years older than him. An extended battle with cancer finally claimed the 73-year-old actor in 1983 at a Gainesville, Georgia, hospital.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Dark-haired beauty Jeanne Carolyn Cagney was born in New York City, New York on March 25, 1919 - just a few months after the end of World War I. She and her four brothers - including James Cagney and William Cagney - were raised by her widowed mother. Jeanne majored in French and German during her years at Hunter College High School, and starred in plays produced by the Hunter College of City College of New York. Upon graduating from college, she studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse in California.
She began her movie career in 1939, with a role in the obscure comedy All Women Have Secrets (1939). This succeeded an appearance on Bing Crosby's radio program. However, she did not become known until three years later, when she acted in the highly-acclaimed biographical musical Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) alongside her brother, James (who won an Academy Award for his performance as George M. Cohan). Regrettably, Jeanne only made sporadic appearances in film and television until her retirement from acting in 1965. Notable movies include Quicksand (1950) - in which she played a femme fatale - and the Marilyn Monroe thriller Don't Bother to Knock (1952). Jeanne also made three more films with her brother James (The Time of Your Life (1948), A Lion Is in the Streets (1953), and Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)), and, in 1948, appeared on stage in a production of 'The Iceman Cometh'.
Jeanne was married to actor Ross Latimer from 1944 to 1952. She later wed Jack Sherman Morrison, a faculty member in theater arts at UCLA, in 1953, with whom she had two daughters: Mary and Terry. Jeanne and Morrison ended their marriage in 1973.
Jeanne Cagney was sadly diagnosed with lung cancer later on in her life, and died of the disease on December 7, 1984. She was 65. While not a household name, Ms. Cagney is remembered today among modern-day aficionados of 1940s and 1950s cinema.- Actor
- Music Department
- Composer
Award-winning songwriter ("Stardust", "Ole Buttermilk Sky", "Georgia on My Mind"), composer, pianist, actor and singer, educated at Indiana University (LL.B). He played piano in the college bands, and later gave up a law practice for a career in songwriting. He joined ASCAP in 1931, and his chief musical collaborators included Mitchell Parish, Stuart Gorrell, Frank Loesser, Johnny Mercer, Sammy Lerner, Stanley Adams, Edward Heyman, Paul Francis Webster, Jack Brooks, Ned Washington, and Jo Trent.
His autobiographies are "The Stardust Road" and "Sometimes I Wonder". His other popular-song compositions include "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening" (Academy Award, 1951), "Washboard Blues", "Riverboat Shuffle", "Little Old Lady", "Lazybones", "Rockin' Chair", "One Morning in May", "Snowball", "Lazy River", "Thanksgivin'", "Judy", "Moonburn", , "Small Fry", "Ooh, What You Said", "The Rhumba Jumps", "Two Sleepy People", "Heart and Soul", "Skylark", "The Nearness of You", "When Love Walks By", "Daybreak", "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief", "Ivy", "Memphis in June", "Hong Kong Blues", "I Get Along Without You Very Well", "Blue Orchids", "The Old Music Master", "How Little We Know", "The Lamplighter's Serenade", "I Walk With Music", "Come Easy Go Easy Love", "Can't Get Indiana Off My Mind", "I Should Have Known You Years Ago", "Baltimore Oriole", "Rogue River Valley", "Who Killed 'Er (Who Killed the Black Widder?)", "Moon Country", "When Love Goes Wrong", "Mediterranean Love", "Music, Always Music", "There Goes Another Pal of Mine", "Just For Tonight" and "My Resistance is Low".- Actor
- Soundtrack
A cigar-smoking, monocled, swag-bellied character actor known for his Old South manners and charm. In 1918 he and his first wife formed the Coburn Players and appeared on Broadway in many plays. With her death in 1937, he accepted a Hollywood contract and began making films at the age of sixty.- Director
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Gene Nelson was barely a teen when he saw the Fred Astaire movie Flying Down to Rio (1933), which would change his life. It was then that he decided he would be a dancer. After graduating from high school, Nelson joined the Sonja Henie Ice Show and toured for 3 years before joining the Army in World War II. After he was discharged, he appeared in a handful of movies before 1950. He worked with Debbie Reynolds in The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady (1950), Doris Day in Tea for Two (1950) and Virginia Mayo in She's Working Her Way Through College (1952). He would be best known for his role of cowboy Will Parker in Oklahoma! (1955), where he would twirl the lasso to the tune of "Kansas City".
After his dancing days ended he turned to directing TV and films, including two Elvis Presley movies, Kissin' Cousins (1964) and Harum Scarum (1965). For television he directed episodes of I Dream of Jeannie (1965), Star Trek (1966), The Rifleman (1958), The Donna Reed Show (1958) and many others.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Albert Gordon MacRae was born on March 12, 1921, in East Orange, NJ. During his early years, he resided in Syracuse, NY, and, while in high school, spent much of his time singing and acting in the Drama Club. It was also during this time that he learned to play the piano, clarinet and the saxophone. At 19, he entered a singing contest and won a two-week engagement at The World's Fair in New York, performing with the Harry James and Les Brown bands. In 1940, while working in New York City as a page, he was "discovered" and hired to sing for the Horace Heidt Band. After a two-year stint, he joined the Army Air Corps and worked as a navigator for the next two years. He made his Broadway debut in a show called "Junior Miss", as a replacement in the role of "Tommy Arbuckle". Next, he appeared, again on Broadway, in Ray Bolger's 1946 revue, "Three To Make Ready". It was here that he was spotted by Capitol Records and signed to a long-term recording contract in 1947. He stayed with the label for more than 20 years. In October 1948, on ABC, he starred on the radio show "The Railroad Hour". The show moved to NBC in October 1949 and continued until June of 1954. It presented operettas and musical dramatizations, all starring Gordon and many different leading ladies. Also in 1948, he was signed to a seven-year contract with Warner Brothers Pictures and, soon after, made his film debut in the non-musical, The Big Punch (1948), opposite Lois Maxwell (well-known later as "Miss Moneypenny" in the James Bond films). What followed was a string of hit musicals, starting with Look for the Silver Lining (1949), in which MacRae had a featured role opposite June Haver and Ray Bolger, and five fondly remembered films with Doris Day, beginning with Tea for Two (1950). Perhaps his two best and well-known films were two of his last: Oklahoma! (1955) and Carousel (1956), both written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II and both opposite screen newcomer Shirley Jones. MacRae began to suffer, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, from bouts of heavy drinking and, by his own admission, developed into an alcoholic. He revealed that he had been "picked up for drunk driving" during the filming of "Carousel". He conquered the disease in the 1970s and went on to counsel other alcoholics. He continued recording and performing on dozens of television shows. He and his wife, Sheila MacRae, appeared together frequently and even released an album together. His daughters, Meredith MacRae and Heather MacRae, acted in films and on TV. On September 22, 1974, he appeared as a sheriff on an episode of McCloud (1970), starring Dennis Weaver, entitled "The Barefoot Girls of Bleeker Street". His final film came in 1979, a fine dramatic role in The Pilot (1980), which starred Cliff Robertson. He suffered a stroke in 1982. He continued on with the support of his second wife, Elizabeth, and his five children. This brilliant performer continued to tour, when his health would permit, allowing audiences to relive some of his biggest film hits. On January 24, 1986, Gordon MacRae died at the age of 64, at his home in Lincoln, NE, of pneumonia, the result of complications from cancer of the mouth and jaw.- Writer
- Actor
- Producer
One of the most recognisable character actors of the 1950s, Boston Massachusetts-born Dick Wesson began his career with his older brother, Gene Wesson, in a comedy act that made the rounds of the nightclub circuit. He made his film debut in the sci-fi classic Destination Moon (1950), and spent his career specializing in playing the rambunctious, wisecracking smart alec, often in westerns and war films, easily recognizable by his big smile, crew-cut and amazing comedic timing. In addition to his film appearances, his extensive TV credits included The Bob Cummings Show (1955), The Danny Thomas Show (1953) (aka The Danny Thomas Show), Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers (1974) (aka The Paul Sand Show), The People's Choice (1955), just to name a few. In the 60s, his comedic talents took him to directing and producing in such shows as The Beverly Hillbillies (1962) and Petticoat Junction (1963).- Actress
- Soundtrack
The dark, petulant beauty of this petite American film and musical star worked to her advantage, especially in her early dramatic career. Anne Marie Blythe was born of Irish stock to Harry and Annie (nee Lynch) Blythe on August 16, 1928 in Mt. Kisco, New York. Her parents split while she was young and she, her mother and elder sister, Dorothy, moved to New York City, where the girls attended various Catholic schools. Already determined at an early age to perform, Ann attended Manhattan's Professional Children's School and was already a seasoned radio performer, particularly on soap dramas, while in elementary school. A member of New York's Children's Opera Company, the young girl made an important Broadway debut in 1941 at age 13 as the daughter of the characters played by Paul Lukas and Mady Christians in the classic Lillian Hellman WWII drama "Watch on the Rhine", billed as Anne (with an extra "e") Blyth. She stayed with the show for two years.
While touring with the play in Los Angeles, the teenager was noticed by director Henry Koster at Universal and given a screen test. Signed on at age 16 as Ann (without the "e") Blyth, the pretty, photographic colleen displayed her warbling talent in her debut film, Chip Off the Old Block (1944), a swing-era teen musical starring Universal song-and-dance favorites Donald O'Connor and Peggy Ryan. She followed it pleasantly enough with other "B" tune-fests such as The Merry Monahans (1944) and Babes on Swing Street (1944). It wasn't until Warner Bros. borrowed her to make self-sacrificing mother Joan Crawford's life pure hell as the malicious, spiteful daughter Veda in the film classic Mildred Pierce (1945) that she really clicked with viewers and set up her dramatic career. With murder on her young character's mind, Hollywood stood up and took notice of this fresh-faced talent.
Although Blyth lost the Best Supporting Actress Oscar that year to another Anne (Anne Revere), she was borrowed again by Warner Bros. to film Danger Signal (1945). During filming, she suffered a broken back in a sledding accident while briefly vacationing in Lake Arrowhead and had to be replaced in the role. After a long convalescence (over a year and a half in a back brace) Universal used her in a wheelchair-bound cameo in Brute Force (1947).
Her first starring role was an inauspicious one opposite Sonny Tufts in Swell Guy (1946), but she finally began gaining some momentum again. Instead of offering her musical gifts, she continued her serious streak with Killer McCoy (1947) and a dangerously calculated role in Another Part of the Forest (1948), a prequel to The Little Foxes (1941) in which Blyth played the Bette Davis role of Regina at a younger age. Her attempts at lighter comedy were mild at best, playing a fetching creature of the sea opposite William Powell in Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid (1948) and a teen infatuated with a much-older film star, Robert Montgomery, in Once More, My Darling (1949).
At full-throttle as a star in the early 1950s, Blyth transitioned easily among glossy operettas, wide-eyed comedies and all-out melodramas, some of which tended to be overbaked and, thereby, overplayed. When not dishing out the high dramatics of an adopted girl searching for her birth mother in Our Very Own (1950) or a wrongly-convicted murderess in Thunder on the Hill (1951), she was introducing classic standards as wife to Mario Lanza in The Great Caruso (1951) or playing pert and perky in such light confections as Katie Did It (1950). A well-embraced romantic leading lady, she made her last film for Universal playing a Russian countess courted by Gregory Peck in The World in His Arms (1952). MGM eventually optioned her for its musical outings, having borrowed her a couple of times previously. She became a chief operatic rival to Kathryn Grayson at the studio during that time. Grayson, however, fared much better than Blyth, who was given rather stilted vehicles.
Catching Howard Keel's roving eye while costumed to the nines in the underwhelming Rose Marie (1954) and his daughter in Kismet (1955), she also gussied up other stiff proceedings like The Student Prince (1954) and The King's Thief (1955) will attest. Unfortunately, Blyth came to MGM at the tail end of the Golden Age of musicals and probably suffered for it. She was dropped by the studio in 1956. She reunited with old Universal co-star Donald O'Connor in The Buster Keaton Story (1957). Blyth ended her film career on a high note, however, playing the tragic title role in the The Helen Morgan Story (1957) opposite a gorgeously smirking Paul Newman. She had a field day as the piano-sitting, kerchief-holding, liquor-swilling torch singer whose train wreck of a personal life was destined for celluloid. Disappointing for her personally, no doubt, was that her singing voice had to be dubbed (albeit superbly) by the highly emotive, non-operatic songstress Gogi Grant.
Through with films, Blyth's main concentration (after her family) were musical theatre and television. Over the years a number of classic songs were tailored to suit her glorious lyric soprano both in concert form and on the civic light opera/summer stock stages. "The Sound of Music", "The King and I", "Carnival", "Bittersweet", "South Pacific", "Show Boat" and "A Little Night Music" are but a few of her stage credits. During this time Blyth appeared as the typical American housewife for Hostess in its Twinkie, cupcake and fruit pie commercials, a job that lasted well over a decade. She made the last of her sporadic TV guest appearances on Quincy M.E. (1976) and Murder, She Wrote (1984) in the mid-1980s.
Married since 1953 to Dr. James McNulty, the brother of late Irish tenor Dennis Day, she is the mother of five, Blyth continues to be seen occasionally at social functions and conventions.- Actor
- Producer
- Soundtrack
Burly American character actor Ralph Meeker first acted on stage at his alma mater, Northwestern University, alongside other budding performers Charlton Heston and Patricia Neal. He graduated as a music major because his dean had discouraged him from pursuing a theatrical career. Ignoring that advice, Meeker nevertheless moved to New York to study method acting and performing in local stock companies. After being injured during a brief wartime stint with the navy and consequently discharged from active duty, Meeker went overseas to play his part in entertaining the troops as a member of the USO. He finally arrived on Broadway in 1945 and was given small roles in two plays produced by José Ferrer, making his stage debut in "Strange Fruit". He was still relatively unknown in 1947 when he replaced Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire" two years later, in the process giving a commanding and critically acclaimed performance. After playing Kowalski in the touring company of 'Streetcar', Meeker was again critically acclaimed for his part in the original production of "Mister Roberts" . As a result, he had several European motion picture offers and elected to play the role of an army sergeant in Teresa (1951), co-starring Pier Angeli. That same year, he was in another continental drama shot on location in Switzerland, entitled Four in a Jeep (1951). After a two-year sojourn at MGM, Meeker returned to Broadway to star as the swaggering, likable, larger-than-life rogue Hal Carter in William Inge's play "Picnic" on Broadway. His performance not only was highly praised by reviewers like Brooks Atkinson but also won him the New York Critics Circle Award. In later years, Meeker claimed to have spurned Columbia's offer of reprising his role on screen because he disdained being shackled by a studio contract. In any case, the prize role went to William Holden, and Meeker ended up being consigned for the next thirty years to provide support (with the odd exception) as hard- nosed guys on either side of the law (or bullies with a yellow streak). He did, nonetheless, leave his mark with several top-notch performances.
One of his best early screen roles was that of the disgraced ex-Union officer Roy Anderson in Anthony Mann's brilliant revenge western The Naked Spur (1953). As one of four men stripped of humanity by greed and hatred (the others were James Stewart, Robert Ryan and Millard Mitchell), Ralph Meeker gave a convincing portrayal of a cynical and callous opportunist.
Meeker's defining role was that of Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly (1955). The film was unusual in that Hammer was played -- unlike the gumshoes of previous films noir -- as a basically unsavoury character. His was one of the first antiheroes who began to appear in films of the 1960s. Under the direction of Robert Aldrich, Meeker's characterisation as Mike Hammer effectively contrasted a smooth, handsome facade with an undercurrent of arrogance, unmitigated ruthlessness and greed. After the film was released, it ran into censorship trouble, the Kefauver Commission labelling it the Number One Menace to American Youth for 1955. While "Kiss Me Deadly" acquired a cult following over the years, it certainly failed to advance the career of Ralph Meeker.
He did, however, manage to get second billing for the part of Corporal Paris, one of three World War I French infantry men randomly selected for execution (because their regiment had refused a suicidal mission) in Stanley Kubrick's harrowing anti-war drama Paths of Glory (1957). He gave another finely etched performance through his character's gradual deterioration from swaggering bravado to abject fear. Also that year, Meeker played a snarling, Indian-hating Yankee officer in Run of the Arrow (1957) and co-starred as Jane Russell's unlikely kidnapper in the failed Norman Taurog comedy The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown (1957).
In between numerous television appearances during the '60s, Meeker returned to the stage as member of the Lincoln Centre Repertory Theatre, where he was reunited with Elia Kazan (who had directed him in 'Streetcar') to act in Arthur Miller's play "After the Fall" (1964-65). He also worked with Robert Aldrich again in "The Dirty Dozen" and that same year with Roger Corman playing George 'Bugs' Moran (who Meeker allegedly resembled), the Chicago mobster whose gang was famously 'rubbed out' by Al Capone in The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1967).
After the decline of the studio system, Meeker found much gainful employment in television and even had his own syndicated series, Not for Hire (1959), playing a tough Honolulu investigator. However, the show came up against the similarly themed Hawaiian Eye (1959) and only ran to 39 episodes. Meeker then guest-starred on numerous other shows and had noteworthy roles as, among others, a boorish tycoon who discovers a prehistoric amphibious creature in The Outer Limits (1963) episode "The Tourist Attraction", an ex-cop turned derelict in Ironside (1967) ('Price Tag: Death Details'), and FBI agent Bernie Jenks in the TV pilot of The Night Stalker (1972). Add to that a gallery of snarling or harassed law enforcers from The Girl on the Late, Late Show (1974) to Brannigan (1975) and episodes of Harry O (1973), The Rookies (1972) and Police Story (1973). Ralph Meeker remained a much-in-demand character actor until his death of a heart attack in August 1988.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Pittsburgh-born John Hodiak was one of several up-and-coming male talents who managed to take advantage of the dearth of WWII-era superstars (MGM's Clark Gable, Van Johnson, Robert Taylor and James Stewart, among others) who were off serving their country. John's early death at age 41, however, robbed Hollywood of a strong player and promising character star.
Born on April 16, 1914, the eldest of four (one daughter was adopted), John was eight years old when his middle-class family moved to a thriving Polish community in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan. His father, Walter, was born in the Ukraine and his mother, Anna, was Polish. Expressing interest in music and drama at an early age, he was encouraged by his father who had appeared in amateur shows. He found roles in school plays (done in Hungarian or Polish), sang in the Ukrainian church choir, played the clarinet, and even took diction lessons. Not to be outdone, his athletic skills were also put on display. At one point, he was considered by the St. Louis Cardinals for their farm league but he declined the offer in favor of pursuing an acting career.
Following high school, John found work as a golf caddy and stockroom clerk (at a Chevrolet company) before breaking into radio (WXYZ) in Detroit and (later) Chicago. His more notable roles was as the title figure in "L'il Abner" (a role created on radio) and in the serials "Ma Perkins" and "Wings of Destiny". While in Chicago he was noticed by MGM talent agent Marvin Schenck and signed. Proud of his heritage, he refused to change his name to a more marquee-friendly moniker despite mogul Louis B. Mayer's concerns. Hodiak made his debut as a walk-on in A Stranger in Town (1943), and had a bit part in one of Ann Sothern's "Maisie" series Swing Shift Maisie (1943) before becoming her leading man in a subsequent entry (Maisie Goes to Reno (1944)) the following year.
His inability to sign up for military duty due to his high blood pressure ended up giving him a starring career. Attention started being paid after he played Lana Turner's soldier husband in Marriage Is a Private Affair (1944). An interested Alfred Hitchcock then borrowed John for the role of Kovac, the torpedoed ship's crew member, in one of his classic war dramas Lifeboat (1944) starring the irrepressible Tallulah Bankhead at 20th Century-Fox. The studio was so impressed with John's work in this that it cast him in two other quality films: Sunday Dinner for a Soldier (1944) and A Bell for Adano (1945), both of which showed off his quiet but rugged charm.
In the former he played the patriotic title role and co-starred with Anne Baxter. No sparks as of yet between these two, but a year or so later they reconnected at a party and started dating. They married on July 6, 1946. The second film, the exquisitely sensitive and moving war picture A Bell for Adano (1945) made him a star by Hollywood standards. Co-starring a rather miscast Gene Tierney (as a blonde Italian village girl) and William Bendix, John was more than up to the challenge of playing the role of U.S. Major Joppolo, originally created on Broadway by Fredric March. The irony of it all is that the actor never found better roles (at MGM) than the ones he filmed while lent out to Fox.
Back at MGM, John went through the usual paces. He was overlooked in the rousing Judy Garland vehicle The Harvey Girls (1946), but seemed much more at home in the film noir Somewhere in the Night (1946) and in the WWII drama Homecoming (1948) that starred Clark Gable and Lana Turner, with John and wife Anne Baxter serving as second leads.
With MGM's male roster of talent back home now from the war, John was unceremoniously relegated to second leads that supported the top-tier actors, including Gable, Spencer Tracy, Robert Walker, James Stewart and Robert Taylor. While several of his subsequent post-war films drew desultory reviews, notably the Greer Garson "Miniver" sequel The Miniver Story (1950), Hedy Lamarr's so-called tale of intrigue A Lady Without Passport (1950), and the Clark Gable western Across the Wide Missouri (1951), John did manage to co-star in two of MGM's more stirring war pictures -- Command Decision (1948) and Battleground (1949). Occasionally deemed "glum" and "wooden" by his harsher critics, John's MGM contract expired in 1951 and he began to freelance. Most of the work that followed were starring roles in low-budget entries. Battle Zone (1952) had John and Stephen McNally as two Korean war photographers distracted by the lovely Linda Christian, and Conquest of Cochise (1953) featured a miscast John as the famed Indian warrior.
John reaped better rewards on the stage during this time. Receiving excellent reviews following his 1952 Broadway debut as the sheriff in "The Chase" (he received the Donaldson Award), the actor returned to Broadway as Lieutenant Maryk in "The Caine Mutiny Court Martial (1954) co-starring Henry Fonda. He was extremely disappointed when former fellow MGM player Van Johnson was cast as the lieutenant in the acclaimed film version starring Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg.
The father of daughter Katrina Baxter Hodiak, who was born in 1951, John and Anne's varied backgrounds (he was middle class and she more high society -- her grandfather being the renowned Frank Lloyd Wright) and their busy film careers created significant problems. They divorced on January 27, 1953. John later built a home for his parents and younger brother in Tarzana, California and eventually lived there with them. His later years grew difficult and were plagued by self-doubt, a diminishing career and an equally diminishing social life.
John's key Broadway success in "Mutiny" led to a fine comeback role on screen as a prosecuting attorney in Trial (1955), finding "guest artist" work on dramatic TV as well. What might have led to a strong resurgence, however, was sadly cut short. On the morning of October 19, 1955, 41-year-old John suffered a coronary thrombosis and died instantly while shaving in the bathroom of his home. He was on his way to the 20th Century-Fox lot to complete final work on his last film, On the Threshold of Space (1956), when he was stricken.
The movie was released posthumously with John's role left intact. While no previous record of a heart ailment, per se, was ever uncovered, the hypertension that kept him out of the service, at a relatively young age, no doubt contributed to his death. It was an extreme shock to lose someone so relatively young, and even sadder for those he loved and left behind, including his 4-year-old daughter. Katrina Hodiak later became a composer, an actress and a theater director). John was interred at the Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Anne Baxter was born in Michigan City, Indiana, on May 7, 1923. She was the daughter of a salesman, Kenneth Stuart Baxter, and his wife, Catherine Dorothy (Wright), who herself was the daughter of Frank Lloyd Wright, the world-renowned architect. Anne was a young girl of 11 when her parents moved to New York City, which at that time was still the hub of the entertainment industry even though the film colony was moving west. The move there encouraged her to consider acting as a vocation. By the time she was 13 she had already appeared in a stage production of 'Seen but Not Heard'", and had garnered rave reviews from the tough Broadway critics. The play helped her gain entrance to an exclusive acting school.
In 1937, Anne made her first foray into Hollywood to test the waters there in the film industry. As she was thought to be too young for a film career, she packed her bags and returned to the New York stage with her mother, where she continued to act on Broadway and summer stock up and down the East Coast. Undaunted by the failure of her previous effort to crack Hollywood, Anne returned to California two years later to try again. This time her luck was somewhat better. She took a screen test which was ultimately seen by the moguls of Twentieth Century-Fox, and she was signed to a seven-year contract. However, before she could make a movie with Fox, Anne was loaned out to MGM to make 20 Mule Team (1940). At only 17 years of age, she was already in the kind of pictures that other starlets would have had to slave for years as an extra before landing a meaty role. Back at Fox, that same year, Anne played Mary Maxwell in The Great Profile (1940), which was a box-office dud. The following year she played Amy Spettigue in the remake of Charley's Aunt (1941). It still wasn't a great role, but it was better than a bit part. The only other film job Anne appeared in that year was in Swamp Water (1941). It was the first role that was really worth anything, but critics weren't that impressed with Anne, her role nor the movie. In 1942 Anne played Joseph Cotten's daughter, Lucy Morgan, in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). The following year she appeared in The North Star (1943), the first film where she received top billing. The film was a critical and financial success and Anne came in for her share of critical plaudits. Guest in the House (1944) the next year was a dismal failure, but Sunday Dinner for a Soldier (1944) was received much better by the public, though it was ripped apart by the critics. Anne starred with John Hodiak, who would become her first husband in 1947 (Anne was to divorce Hodiak in 1954. Her other two husbands were Randolph Galt and David Klee).
In 1946 Anne portrayed Sophie MacDonald in The Razor's Edge (1946), a film that would land her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She had come a long way in so short a time, but for her next two films she was just the narrator: Mother Wore Tights (1947) and Blaze of Noon (1947). It would be 1950 before she landed another decent role--the part of Eve Harrington in All About Eve (1950). This film garnered Anne her second nomination, but she lost the Oscar to Judy Holliday for Born Yesterday (1950). After several films through the 1950s, Anne landed what many considered a plum role--Queen Nefretiri in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956). Never in her Hollywood career did Anne look as beautiful as she did as the Egyptian queen, opposite Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner. After that epic, job offers got fewer because she wasn't tied to a studio, instead opting to freelance her talents. After no appearances in 1958, she made one film in 1959 Season of Passion (1959) and one in 1960 Cimarron (1960).
After Walk on the Wild Side (1962), she took a hiatus from filming for the next four years. She was hardly idle, though. She appeared often on stage and on television. She wasn't particularly concerned with being a celebrity or a personality; she was more concerned with being just an actress and trying hard to produce the best performance she was capable of. After several notable TV appearances, Anne became a staple of two television series, East of Eden (1981) and Hotel (1983). Her final moment before the public eye was as Irene Adler in the TV film Sherlock Holmes and the Masks of Death (1984). On December 12, 1985, Anne died of a stroke in New York. She was 62.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Joan Geraldine Bennett was born on February 27, 1910, in Palisades, New Jersey. Her parents were both successful stage actors, especially her father, Richard Bennett, and often toured the country for weeks at a time. In fact, Joan came from a long line of actors, dating back to the 18th century. Often, when her parents were on tour, Joan and her two older sisters, Constance Bennett, who later became an actress, and Barbara were left in the care of close friends. At the age of four, Joan made her first stage appearance. She debuted in films a year later in The Valley of Decision (1916), in which her father was the star and the entire Bennett clan participated. In 1923 she again appeared in a film which starred her father, playing a pageboy in The Eternal City (1923). It would be five more years before Joan appeared again on the screen. In between, she married Jack Marion Fox, who was 26 compared to her young age of 16. The union was anything but happy, in great part because of Fox's heavy drinking. In February of 1928 Joan and Jack had a baby girl they named Adrienne. The new arrival did little to help the marriage, though, and in the summer of 1928 they divorced. Now with a baby to support, Joan did something she had no intention of doing--she turned to acting. She appeared in Power (1928) with Alan Hale and Carole Lombard, a small role but a start. The next year she starred in Bulldog Drummond (1929), sharing top billing with Ronald Colman. Before the year was out she was in three more films--Disraeli (1929), The Mississippi Gambler (1929) and Three Live Ghosts (1929). Not only did audiences like her, but so did the critics. Between 1930 and 1931, Joan appeared in nine more movies. In 1932 she starred opposite Spencer Tracy in She Wanted a Millionaire (1932), but it wasn't one she liked to remember, partly because Tracy couldn't stand the fact that everyone was paying more attention to her than to him. Joan was to remain busy and popular throughout the rest of the 1930s and into the 1940s. By the 1950s Joan was well into her 40s and began to lessen her film appearances. She made only eight pictures, in addition to appearing in two television series. After Desire in the Dust (1960), Joan would be absent from the movie scene for the next ten years, resurfacing in House of Dark Shadows (1970), reprising her role from the Dark Shadows (1966) TV series as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Joan's final screen appearance was in the Italian thriller Suspiria (1977). Her final public performance was in the TV movie Divorce Wars: A Love Story (1982). On December 7, 1990, Joan died of a heart attack in Scarsdale, New York. She was 80 years old.- Actor
- Producer
- Art Department
John Wayne was born Marion Robert Morrison in Iowa, to Mary Alberta (Brown) and Clyde Leonard Morrison, a pharmacist. He was of English, Scottish, Ulster-Scots, and Irish ancestry.
Clyde developed a lung condition that required him to move his family from Iowa to the warmer climate of southern California, where they tried ranching in the Mojave Desert. Until the ranch failed, Marion and his younger brother Robert E. Morrison swam in an irrigation ditch and rode a horse to school. When the ranch failed, the family moved to Glendale, California, where Marion delivered medicines for his father, sold newspapers and had an Airedale dog named "Duke" (the source of his own nickname). He did well at school both academically and in football. When he narrowly failed admission to Annapolis he went to USC on a football scholarship 1925-7. Tom Mix got him a summer job as a prop man in exchange for football tickets. On the set he became close friends with director John Ford for whom, among others, he began doing bit parts, some billed as John Wayne. His first featured film was Men Without Women (1930). After more than 70 low-budget westerns and adventures, mostly routine, Wayne's career was stuck in a rut until Ford cast him in Stagecoach (1939), the movie that made him a star. He appeared in nearly 250 movies, many of epic proportions. From 1942-43 he was in a radio series, "The Three Sheets to the Wind", and in 1944 he helped found the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a Conservative political organization, later becoming its President. His conservative political stance was also reflected in The Alamo (1960), which he produced, directed and starred in. His patriotic stand was enshrined in The Green Berets (1968) which he co-directed and starred in. Over the years Wayne was beset with health problems. In September 1964 he had a cancerous left lung removed; in 1977 when Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope was being made, John Waynes archive voice was used for the character Garindan ezz Zavor, later in March 1978 there was heart valve replacement surgery; and in January 1979 his stomach was removed. He received the Best Actor nomination for Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and finally got the Oscar for his role as one-eyed Rooster Cogburn in True Grit (1969). A Congressional Gold Medal was struck in his honor in 1979. He is perhaps best remembered for his parts in Ford's cavalry trilogy - Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950).- Actor
- Writer
David Brian was born Brian James Davis on August 5, 1914 in New York City. After graduating from City College, he found work as a doorman before entering show business with a song-and-dance routine in vaudeville and nightclubs. He did a wartime stint with the United States Coast Guard and returned to acting on the New York stage after World War II.
Persuaded by Joan Crawford to try his hand at film acting, he joined her in Hollywood and, in 1949, signed a contract with Warner Brothers. In his feature debut, Flamingo Road (1949), he played a political boss infatuated with Crawford's carnival girl. His most critically acclaimed performance was as the fair-minded, resourceful Southern lawyer defending condemned but innocent Juano Hernandez from a lynch mob in Intruder in the Dust (1949). For this role, he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award as Best Supporting Actor.
Brian portrayed a powerful gang leader in The Damned Don't Cry (1950), again opposite Crawford. In spite of his commanding presence in the film, his performance was somewhat compromised by a cliche-laden screenplay. In This Woman Is Dangerous (1952), it was Crawford who played the criminal and Brian the role of her insanely jealous paramour. For the remainder of the decade and into the 1960s, Brian played an assortment of western heavies on the big screen -- notably raider leader Austin McCool in Springfield Rifle (1952) and saloon owner Dick Braden in Dawn at Socorro (1954) -- and did the same with equal verve on television, in Gunsmoke (1955). An incisive actor with sardonic looks and a hard edge to his voice, he was often typecast as ruthless or manipulating types. Somewhat against character, he essayed a weakling in the ground-breaking airborne drama The High and the Mighty (1954).
On the right side of the law, he starred as crusading District Attorney Paul Garrett in Mr. District Attorney (1954), reprising his earlier role on radio. In 1968, he also made a contribution to Star Trek (1966) as John Gill, a Federation cultural observer on the planet Ekos whose experiment in creating a government based on National Socialist principles goes disastrously wrong. In private life, he was a celebrated fundraiser for the Volunteers of America, a non-profit charitable organization. On July 15, 1993, David Brian died at age 78 of cancer and heart disease in Sherman Oaks, California.- Producer
- Actor
- Writer
Known primarily as a TV actor, he starred as a nightclub singer on the popular The Danny Thomas Show (1953).
He also served TV behind the cameras partnering with Sheldon Leonard and Aaron Spelling to create such shows as Dick Van Dyke's show, The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961), The Andy Griffith Show (1960) and Mod Squad (1968).
He was also dedicated to building the St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, which he founded in 1962.- Actress
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
When Kansas-born Patrice Wymore was only six years of age, she began touring with her family in tent shows and in vaudeville, her mother being a pianist and singer on the circuit. In contrast, her father was a trucking line exec. Trained in voice, the lovely, fair-haired teenager gambled on a try in New York and it paid off. Performing in "Up in Central Park" in 1947, she made her Broadway debut a year later in the musical "Hold It!" and won the Theatre World Award for "promising actress." Following her Broadway role in another musical, "All for Love" in 1949, the wide set-eyed beauty was handed a starlet contract by Warner Bros. and headed west to seek her fame and fortune. She found a little bit of both.
Patrice made her debut in a singing role in the nostalgic Doris Day/Gordon MacRae tunefest Tea for Two (1950). Fate took a hand when she was cast opposite the much older Errol Flynn in Rocky Mountain (1950), one of the aging actor's lesser-known efforts. Patrice became the final Mrs. Errol Flynn in October of 1950 after a hasty marriage in Monaco. Daughter Arnella, who later would become a model in Europe, was born in 1953. The couple moved to Jamaica and also traveled by yacht overseas. By the time of his marriage, Flynn was already in a severe decline both physically and mentally and the marriage was a difficult one. After typically playing the "other woman" in several other Warner efforts, including I'll See You in My Dreams (1951), She's Working Her Way Through College (1952), The Big Trees (1952), She's Back on Broadway (1953), and in the British-made King's Rhapsody (1955).
Patrice felt compelled to retire in order to tend to her ailing husband and the raising of their daughter. His drug/alcohol addictions, however, became too overwhelming, and she eventually was forced to separate from Flynn. They never divorced by the time he died at age 50 in October of 1959, although he was living with someone else. Patrice never remarried.
Following Flynn's passing, Wymore attempted a comeback and began performing in a nightclub act in Vegas and in stock musicals such as "Carnival," Guys and Dolls," "Irma La Douce," and "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." On camera she was cast in the short-lived soap opera Never Too Young (1965) and appeared secondarily in the films Ocean's Eleven (1960) and Chamber of Horrors (1966).
Patrice eventually retired again in the late 1960s and returned to Jamaica with her daughter to the mansion Flynn built and bequeathed to her along with a cattle ranch and 2,000-acre coconut plantation. She also went into business operating a boutique and wicker furniture manufacturing plant. Patrice also continued to be active in her late husband's estate and attends tributes and dedications to him.
Tragedy struck when her daughter Arnella, who gave Patrice a grandson (actor Luke Flynn), died of a drug overdose in 1998. Patrice herself died of pulmonary complications on March 22, 2014.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Virginia Gibson was born on 9 April 1925 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. She was an actress, known for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), Funny Face (1957) and Stop, You're Killing Me (1952). She died on 25 April 2013 in Newtown, Pennsylvania, USA.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Lucille Norman was a professional singer first and then transfered over to films in mostly second female leads except with "Randolph Scott" in "Carson City" in 1952 where she played his leading lady. Soon after she retired from movies and later in life she became the companion and part-owner/saleswoman of "Charles Crenshaw Piano Store" in Burbank, California.- Actor
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Tall, blond and of rugged proportions, handsome actor Philip Carey started out as a standard 1950s film actor in westerns, war stories and crime yarns but didn't achieve full-fledged stardom until well past age 50 when he joined the daytime line-up as ornery Texas tycoon Asa Buchanan on the popular soap One Life to Live (1968) in 1979. He lived pretty much out of the saddle after that, enjoying the patriarchal role for nearly three decades.
He was born with the rather unrugged name of Eugene Carey on July 15, 1925, in Hackensack, New Jersey. Growing up on Long Island, he served with the Marine Corps during World War II and the Korean War. He attended (briefly) New York's Mohawk University and studied drama at the University of Miami where he met his college sweetheart, Maureen Peppler. They married in 1949 and went on to have three children: Linda, Jeffrey and Lisa Ann.
The 6'4" actor impressed a talent scout with his brawny good looks while appearing in the summer stock play "Over 21" in New England, and he was offered a contract with Warner Bros as a result. Billed as Philip Carey, he didn't waste any time toiling in bit parts, making his film debut billed fifth in the John Wayne submarine war drama Operation Pacific (1951). Phil could cut a good figure in military regalia and also showed strong stuff in film noir. A most capable co-star, he tended to be upstaged, however, by either a stronger name female or male star or by the action at hand. He was paired up with Frank Lovejoy in the McCarthy-era I Was a Communist for the F.B.I. (1951), and Steve Cochran in the prison tale Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison (1951). Warner Bros. star Joan Crawford was practically the whole movie in the film noir This Woman Is Dangerous (1952) co-starring the equally overlooked David Brian and Dennis Morgan; Calamity Jane (1953) was a vehicle for Doris Day; and he donned his familiar cavalry duds in the background of Gary Cooper in the Civil War western Springfield Rifle (1952).
In 1953, Carey left Warner Bros. and signed up with Columbia Pictures where he was, more than not, billed as "Phil Carey." Here again he fell into the rather non-descript rugged mold as the stoic soldier or stolid police captain. He did find plenty of work, however, and was frequently top-billed. He battled the Sioux in The Nebraskan (1953); played a former subordinate member of the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid gang who has to clear his name in Wyoming Renegades (1955); was a brute force to be reckoned with in They Rode West (1954); and had one of his standard movie roles (as an officer) in a better quality movie, Columbia's Pushover (1954), which spent more time promoting the debut of its starlet Kim Novak as the new Marilyn Monroe. Overshadowed by James Cagney and Jack Lemmon in Mister Roberts (1955) and by Van Heflin, young Joanne Woodward (in her movie debut) and villain Raymond Burr in the western Count Three and Pray (1955), Phil turned his durable talents more and more to TV in the late 1950s.
The man of action took on the role of Canadian-born Lt. Michael Rhodes on the series Tales of the 77th Bengal Lancers (1956) alongside Warren Stevens. He eventually left Columbia studios to do a stint (albeit relatively short) playing Raymond Chandler's unflappable detective Philip Marlowe (1959). Most of the 60s and 70s, other than a few now-forgotten film adventures such as Black Gold (1962), The Great Sioux Massacre (1965) and Three Guns for Texas (1968), were spent either saddling up as a guest star on The Rifleman (1958), Bronco (1958), The Virginian (1962) and Gunsmoke (1955) or hard-nosing it on such crime series as 77 Sunset Strip (1958), Ironside (1967), McCloud (1970), Banacek (1972) and The Felony Squad (1966). He also played the regular role of a stern captain in the Texas Rangers western series Laredo (1965).
Phil was a spokesperson for Granny Goose potato chips commercials, and his deep voice served him well for many seasons as narrator of the nature documentary series Untamed Frontier (1967). One of his best-remembered TV guest appearances, however, was a change-of-pace role on the comedy All in the Family (1971) in which he played a vital, strapping blue-collar pal of Archie Bunker's whose manly man just happened to be a proud, astereotypical homosexual. His hilarious confrontational scene with a dumbfounded Archie in Kelsey's bar remains a classic.
Phil's brief regular role in the daytime soap Bright Promise (1969) in 1972 was just a practice drill for the regular role he would play in 1979 as Texas oilman Asa Buchanan in One Life to Live (1968). His popularity soared as the moneybags manipulator you loved to hate. Residing in Manhattan for quite some time as a result of the New York-based show, he played the role for close to three decades until diagnosed with lung cancer in January of 2006. Forced to undergo chemotherapy, he officially left the serial altogether in May of 2007, and his character "died" peacefully off-screen a few months later.
Divorced from his first wife, Phil married a much younger lady, Colleen Welch, in 1976 and had two children by her -- daughter Shannon (born 1980) and son Sean (born 1983). Phil lost his battle with cancer on February 6, 2009, at the age of 83.- Actor
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Most familiar to TV audiences as no-nonsense Sheriff Roy Coffee on the long-running western series Bonanza (1959), Ray Teal was one of the most versatile character actors in the business. In his almost 40-year career he played everything from cops to gunfighters to sheriffs to gangsters to a judge at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials. He could play a kindly grandfather in one film and a heartless, sadistic killer in the next, and be equally believable in both roles. A native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, he was a musician who worked his way through college playing the sax in local bands. At UCLA in the 1920s he formed his own band and led it until 1936. He appeared in several films in minor bit parts, and it wasn't until 1938 that he had a somewhat more substantial part, in Western Jamboree (1938). The next year he had a bigger part in the splashy Spencer Tracy adventure Northwest Passage (1940) as one of Rogers' Rangers. He appeared in serials, westerns, crime dramas, costume epics (he even appeared as Little John in The Bandit of Sherwood Forest (1946)!), war pictures, had a small but memorable part as an anti-Semitic blowhard who gets knocked into a store display by Dana Andrews in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and a bigger and more memorable part as one of Spencer Tracy's fellow judges in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). He also made many appearances on TV, in everything from The Lone Ranger (1949) to Green Acres (1965). He died of natural causes in 1976.- Born in South Dakota, the son of a railway and factory worker, Hagerthy arrived in Glendale, California at the age of four when his family moved there. After graduating from school, he studied at Glendale City College and gained his first acting experience in amateur school and college plays. While on stage, he was 'talent scouted', invited to an audition at Warner Brothers and subsequently recruited for a part in the crime drama I Was a Communist for the F.B.I. (1951). Hagerthy then briefly worked as an ambulance driver before being conscripted into the army. Initially trained as an infantryman at Fort Ord, he was later seconded to a television subsidiary of the army and became involved in the production of the syndicated TV show The Gray Ghost (1957) (the story of Confederate cavalry officer John S. Mosby and his battalion, known as Mosby's Raiders). He made a guest appearance in a 1957 episode.
Hagerthy became best-known as co-star of the TV series Sky King (1951) as 'Clipper', the lead character's nephew. He also featured in the pilot episode of The Beverly Hillbillies (1962) as the geologist who first discovers oil on the Clampett's property. On the big screen, Hagerthy romanced Janice Rule as a bashful Air Force pilot in the musical Starlift (1951) and played a naive juvenile who falls in with criminals in City That Never Sleeps (1953). His TV credits have included more than a fair share of westerns (he was an adept horseman from childhood), among them Annie Oakley (1954), Tales of Wells Fargo (1957), Gunsmoke (1955), Have Gun - Will Travel (1957), Rawhide (1959) and The High Chaparral (1967). He later said in an interview "I played eighteen years old for 10 years. I always looked young, and I guess I still do."
Hagerthy retired from acting in 1968 and eventually worked in management for a real estate company in Century City, Los Angeles. He later set up his own agency in Orange County. - Actress
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Aileen Stanley Jr. is known for About Face (1952), Your Favorite Story (1953) and School House (1949).- Actress
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One of the most versatile actresses, Janice Rule was born in Norwood, Ohio, on August 15, 1931. Janice made her screen debut in the star-studded movie Goodbye, My Fancy (1951). She played the rival for James Stewart's affections, and was driven away by witch Kim Novak, in Bell Book and Candle (1958), a pre-Bewitched (1964) comedy. Janice appeared in the first season of the ground-breaking science fiction series The Twilight Zone (1959) playing "Helen Foley" (named after Rod Serling's favorite teacher). In 1961, Janice married Ben Gazzara and they had one daughter, Elizabeth Gazzara (they divorced in 1979). After marrying, Janice took off a few years from movie acting, then returned to the silver screen and gave her best performances. In a change of pace role, she was the party girl in The Chase (1966); and Janice showed a real flair for comedy as "Matt Helm"'s partner in The Ambushers (1967) with Dean Martin. She did a wonderful job realistically portraying a frontier woman in Welcome to Hard Times (1967), and received acclaim for her performance as a disturbed artist in 3 Women (1977). The last movie Janice appeared in was American Flyers (1985), and her last TV appearance was in the science fiction genre, The Ray Bradbury Theater (1985) in 1992. From science fiction, to comedy, to portraying loose women, to playing strong women - Janice Rule covered the whole spectrum of human emotion and life.- Eve Miller was born on 8 August 1923 in Los Angeles, California, USA. She was an actress, known for There's No Business Like Show Business (1954), April in Paris (1952) and The Big Trees (1952). She died on 17 August 1973 in Van Nuys, California, USA.
- Ginger Crowley is known for She's Working Her Way Through College (1952), Precious Victims (1993) and Reasonable Doubts (1991).
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Ronald Reagan had quite a prolific career, having catapulted from a Warner Bros. contract player and television star, into serving as president of the Screen Actors Guild, the governorship of California (1967-1975), and lastly, two terms as President of the United States (1981-1989).
Ronald Wilson Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois, to Nelle Clyde (Wilson) and John Edward "Jack" Reagan, who was a salesman and storyteller. His father was of Irish descent, and his mother was of half Scottish and half English ancestry.
A successful actor beginning in the 1930s, the young Reagan was a staunch admirer of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (even after he evolved into a Republican), and was a Democrat in the 1940s, a self-described 'hemophiliac' liberal. He was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1947 and served five years during the most tumultuous times to ever hit Hollywood. A committed anti-communist, Reagan not only fought more-militantly activist movie industry unions that he and others felt had been infiltrated by communists, but had to deal with the investigation into Hollywood's politics launched by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, an inquisition that lasted through the 1950s. The House Un-American Activities Committee investigations of Hollywood (which led to the jailing of the "Hollywood Ten" in the late '40s) sowed the seeds of the McCarthyism that racked Hollywood and America in the 1950s.
In 1950, U.S. Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas (D-CA), the wife of "Dutch" Reagan's friend Melvyn Douglas, ran as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate and was opposed by the Republican nominee, the Red-bating Congressman from Whittier, Richard Nixon. While Nixon did not go so far as to accuse Gahagan Douglas of being a communist herself, he did charge her with being soft on communism due to her opposition to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Nixon tarred her as a "fellow traveler" of communists, a "pinko" who was "pink right down to her underwear." Gahagan Douglas was defeated by the man she was the first to call "Tricky Dicky" because of his unethical behavior and dirty campaign tactics. Reagan was on the Douglases' side during that campaign.
The Douglases, like Reagan and such other prominent actors as Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson, were liberal Democrats, supporters of the late Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, a legacy that increasingly was under attack by the right after World War II. They were NOT fellow-travelers; Melvyn Douglas had actually been an active anti-communist and was someone the communists despised. Melvyn Douglas, Robinson and Henry Fonda - a registered Republican! - wound up "gray-listed." (They weren't explicitly black-listed, they just weren't offered any work.) Reagan, who it was later revealed had been an F.B.I. informant while a union leader (turning in suspected communists), was never hurt that way, as he made S.A.G. an accomplice of the black-listing.
Reagan's career sagged after the late 1940s, and he started appearing in B-movies after he left Warner Bros. to go free-lance. However, he had a eminence grise par excellence in Lew Wasserman, his agent and the head of the Music Corp. of America. Wasserman, later called "The Pope of Hollywood," was the genius who figured out that an actor could make a killing via a tax windfall by turning himself into a corporation. The corporation, which would employ the actor, would own part of a motion picture the actor appeared in, and all monies would accrue to the corporation, which was taxed at a much lower rate than was personal income. Wasserman pioneered this tax avoidance scheme with his client James Stewart, beginning with the Anthony Mann western Winchester '73 (1950) (1950). It made Stewart enormously rich as he became a top box office draw in the 1950s after the success of "Winchester 73" and several more Mann-directed westerns, all of which he had an ownership stake in.
Ironically, Reagan became a poor-man's James Stewart in the early 1950s, appearing in westerns, but they were mostly B-pictures. He did not have the acting chops of the great Stewart, but he did have his agent. Wasserman at M.C.A. was one of the pioneers of television syndication, and this was to benefit Reagan enormously. M.C.A. was the only talent agency that was also allowed to be a producer through an exemption to union rules granted by S.A.G. when Reagan was the union president, and it used the exemption to acquire Universal International Pictures. Talent agents were not permitted to be producers as there was an inherent conflict of interest between the two professions, one of which was committed to acquiring talent at the lowest possible cost and the other whose focus was to get the best possible price for their client. When a talent agent was also a producer, like M.C.A. was, it had a habit of steering its clients to its own productions, where they were employed but at a lower price than their potential free market value. It was a system that made M.C.A. and Lew Wasserman, enormously wealthy.
The ownership of Universal and its entry into the production of television shows that were syndicated to network made M.C.A. the most successful organization in Hollywood of its time, a real cash cow as television overtook the movies as the #1 business of the entertainment industry. Wasserman repaid Ronald Reagan's largess by structuring a deal by which he hosted and owned part of General Electric Theater (1953), a western omnibus showcase that ran from 1954 to 1961. It made Reagan very comfortable financially, though it did not make him rich. That came later.
In 1960, with the election of the Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the black and gray lists went into eclipse. J.F.K. appointed Helen Gahagan Douglas Treasurer of the United States. About this time, as the civil rights movement became stronger and found more support among Democrats and the Kennedy administration, Reagan - fresh from a second stint as S.A.G. president in 1959 - was in the process of undergoing a personal and political metamorphosis into a right-wing Republican, a process that culminated with his endorsing Barry Goldwater for the Republican presidential nomination in 1964. (He narrated a Goldwater campaign film played at the G.O.P. Convention in San Francisco.) Reagan's evolution into a right-wing Republican sundered his friendship with the Douglases. (After Reagan was elected President of the United States in 1980, Melvyn Douglas said of his former friend that Reagan turned to the right after he had begun to believe the pro-business speeches he delivered for General Electric when he was the host of the "G.E. Theater.")
In 1959, while Reagan was back as a second go-round as S.A.G. president, M.C.A.'s exemption from S.A.G. regulations that forbade a talent agency from being a producer was renewed. However, in 1962, the U.S. Justice Department under Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy successfully forced M.C.A. - known as "The Octopus" in Hollywood for its monopolistic tendencies - to divest itself of its talent agency.
When Reagan was tipped by the California Republican Party to be its standard-bearer in the 1965 gubernatorial election against Democratic Governor Pat Brown, Lew Wasserman went back in action. Politics makes strange bedfellows, and though Wasserman was a liberal Democrat, having an old friend like Reagan who had shown his loyalty as S.A.G. president in the state house was good for business. Wasserman and his partner, M.C.A. Chairman Jules Styne (a Republican), helped ensure that Reagan would be financially secure for the rest of his life so that he could enter politics. (At the time, he was the host of "Death Valley Days" on TV.)
According to the Wall Street Journal, Universal sold Reagan a nice piece of land of many acres north of Santa Barbara that had been used for location shooting. The Reagans sold most of the ranch, then converted the rest of it, about 200 acres, into a magnificent estate overlooking the valley and the Pacific Ocean. The Rancho del Cielo became President Reagan's much needed counterpoint to the buzz of Washington, D.C. There, in a setting both rugged and serene, the Reagans could spend time alone or receive political leaders such as the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, and others.
Reagan was known to the world for his one-liners, the most famous of them was addressed to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. "Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall" said Reagan standing in front of the Berlin Wall. That call made an impact on the course of human history.
Ronald Reagan played many roles in his life's seven acts: radio announcer, movie star, union boss, television actor-cum-host, governor, right-wing critic of big government and President of the United States.- Actress
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Nancy Reagan was born on 6 July 1921 in New York City, New York, USA. She was an actress, known for Hellcats of the Navy (1957), Night Into Morning (1951) and Donovan's Brain (1953). She was married to Ronald Reagan. She died on 6 March 2016 in Los Angeles, California, USA.