After spending his childhood as an actor, Hickman retired from entertainment to enter a monastery in 1951, returning to Hollywood just over a year later. He continued acting, but in fewer roles than in the peak of his career. He was cast in 1952 in the episode “Fight Town” of the syndicatedwesterntelevision series, The Range Rider.
In 1954, he appeared as Chet Sterling in the “Annie Gets Her Man” episode of syndicated western series, Annie Oakley, with Gail Davis. In 1957, Hickman appeared in the episode “Copper Wire” of the syndicated western-themed crime dramaSheriff of Cochise. Later that year he appeared as murderer Steve Harris in the second Perry Mason episode, “The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece.” Hickman appeared four times in the 1957-1958 syndicated drama series, Men of Annapolis, about midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He also guest starred in Kenneth Tobey‘s adventure drama, Whirlybirds.
Hickman was cast as Dal Royal in the 1957 episode “Hang ’em High” (1957) of the ABC/Desilu series, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. In the story line, Marshal Wyatt Earp (Hugh O’Brian) and Sheriff Bat Masterson (Mason Alan Dinehart) tangle with secreted vigilantes called the “White Caps” after a judge order’s Royal’s hanging when he refuses to defend himself in court for fear the gang will murder his girlfriend, the daughter of a prominent rancher. The story line includes a fake hanging and burial to smoke out the gang and a rush to obtain justice by Earp and Masterson.[1]
In 1959, Hickman appeared on younger brother Dwayne Hickman‘s CBS sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, playing his older brother Davey in the episode “The Right Triangle.”[2] In 1959, Darryl Hickman appeared in an episode of Wanted: Dead or Alive with Steve McQueen, titled “Rope Law”; on May 9, 1959, he was a guest star on CBS’s Gunsmoke as Andy Hill. He also guest-starred in a 1959 first-season episode of another ABC/Desilu series, The Untouchables, entitled “You Can’t Pick The Number”.
He met actress Merle Oberon while filming Interval in 1973. after filming with Wolders, she married Wolders in 1975. . They were married until her death in 1979.[ In 1980, Wolders became the companion of Audrey Hepburn until her death in 1993. .He died in 2018.
The Times obituary in 2018.
Actor who starred in the Sixties TV western Laredo but was better known as the long-term companion of Audrey Hepburn
Tuesday July 24 2018, 12.01am BST, The Times
Robert Wolders with Audrey Hepburn in Hawaii in 1981COURTESY OF AUDREY HEPBURN ESTATE COLLECTION
When Robert Wolders first met Audrey Hepburn and invited her to dinner, she turned down his invitation, telling him that she had a night shoot for a film.
“I thought it was her gentle way of rejecting me,” he recalled. In fact, her prior engagement on the set of Peter Bogdanovich’s rom-com They All Laughed was genuine and she was as interested in Wolders as he was in her.
To his delight and surprise, she rang him the next day to ask him to join her for a drink at the Pierre hotel, facing Central Park in New York. Drinks led to plates of pasta and they talked for hours in what was the beginning of a loving relationship that sustained Hepburn over the last 12 years of her sometimes troubled existence. “I have a wonderful man in my life, I have my Robert,” she told Barbara Walters in a 1989 television interview. “He takes great care of me. He gives me that marvellous feeling that I’m protected and that I’m the most important thing to him.”
Indeed, Wolders became better known as Hepburn’s partner than for his own acting career, but it never seemed to trouble him. He had arrived in Hollywood two decades earlier when he was quickly typecast as an exotic lover; his Dutch accent added a touch of mystery.
He made his mark starring in the 1960s TV western Laredo as the dashing Texas ranger Erik Hunter, a character he described as “a combination of Errol Flynn, 007 and Casanova”. He also appeared in films such as Beau Geste and Tobruk and made guest appearances in TV shows including The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Bewitched and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
After marrying Merle Oberon, another actress whose CV outshone his own and with whom he co-starred in the 1973 film Interval, he turned his back on acting and never appeared on the big screen again. “Acting for me was a hardship,” he observed in attempting to explain his unexpected retirement before he was 40. “I had no confidence.”
He never regretted the decision, but later admitted that on occasions when he saw a particularly wooden piece of acting he allowed himself the inward satisfaction of thinking, “I could have done better than that.”
When he encountered Hepburn in 1980 he was still grieving for Oberon, who had died the previous year after a stroke. “We met at a time when we each had gone through trials, but we knew exactly what we wanted,” he said. “Togetherness.”
INTERVAL, US poster art, from left: Merle Oberon, Robert Wolders, 1973 ACHTUNG AUFNAHMEDATUM GESCHÄTZT PUBLICATIONxINxGERxSUIxAUTxONLY Copyright: xCourtesyxEverettxCollectionx MSDINTE EC055
At 50 Hepburn was “not in a happy place” either. She was facing the collapse of her relationship with the Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti, who was her second husband.
In Wolders she claimed finally to have met “her spiritual twin”, the man with whom she wanted to grow old. It required little persuasion when she suggested that he abandon his life in America to live with her in Switzerland.
At her estate of La Paisible (The Place of Peace), in Tolochenaz in the foothills of the Alps, they lived a contented life away from the public eye, bringing up Hepburn’s youngest son, Luca, and, in later years, dedicating much of their time to charitable work.
Wolders described an idyllic routine. Their days began with toast spread with Hepburn’s homemade plum jam before they worked together in the dining room. Lunch comprised greens from the garden, French bread and a slice of Gruyère cheese. After a siesta they would take a leisurely walk through the vineyards with a pair of Jack Russell terriers named Penny and Missy, whom Hepburn called “my little hamburgers”. Their evenings were spent watching tapes of their favourite films. “We are married, just not formally,” Hepburn said. The couple’s only regret was that she was too old for them to have a child.
In 1987 Hepburn was appointed a goodwill ambassador for Unicef. Wolders accompanied her on many of her missions for the global children’s charity, including a traumatic trip to war-ravaged Somalia in 1992.
Her death at 63 came as a shock. When they returned from Somalia, Hepburn experienced intense abdominal pains that she attributed to a stomach bug; it turned out to be cancer of the appendix. She underwent surgery in Los Angeles, but her doctors warned the couple that she had little time left.
After Hepburn had made it clear that she wanted to spend her final weeks at La Paisible, Wolders arranged with the designer Hubert de Givenchy (obituary, March 13, 2018) to borrow his private jet to take her home; she was too weak to fly on a commercial aircraft. The couple had one last traditional Christmas together before she died in her sleep on January 20, 1993.
In her will she left Wolders two silver candlesticks, while her sons, Sean and Luca, with whom he continued to work on the board of the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund, inherited the estate.
After her death he returned to the US where he had relationships with the actress Leslie Caron and, for the last 20 years of his life, with Henry Fonda’s widow, Shirlee. She was “a great friend of Audrey, and a great friend of Merle,” he said. “Maybe it sounds odd but I knew that Merle would have approved of me being with Audrey, and Audrey would have approved of Shirlee.”
Robert Wolders was born in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The son of an actress, he arrived in the US in the mid-1950s to study psychotherapy at the University of Rochester, where he joined the university stage society. He went on to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. Although he intended to complete his doctorate at Rochester, he was then invited to a screen test in Hollywood.
“I thought it was a lark, and I’d never been to the west coast,” he said. “It was a nice opportunity to come over, then to be sent back with my tail between my legs.” When offered the job he was still minded to turn it down. “I was going to return to my studies,” he said. “Then they told me what they were paying.”
Her death at 63 came as a shock. When they returned from Somalia, Hepburn experienced intense abdominal pains that she attributed to a stomach bug; it turned out to be cancer of the appendix. She underwent surgery in Los Angeles, but her doctors warned the couple that she had little time left.
After Hepburn had made it clear that she wanted to spend her final weeks at La Paisible, Wolders arranged with the designer Hubert de Givenchy (obituary, March 13, 2018) to borrow his private jet to take her home; she was too weak to fly on a commercial aircraft. The couple had one last traditional Christmas together before she died in her sleep on January 20, 1993.
In her will she left Wolders two silver candlesticks, while her sons, Sean and Luca, with whom he continued to work on the board of the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund, inherited the estate.
After her death he returned to the US where he had relationships with the actress Leslie Caron and, for the last 20 years of his life, with Henry Fonda’s widow, Shirlee. She was “a great friend of Audrey, and a great friend of Merle,” he said. “Maybe it sounds odd but I knew that Merle would have approved of me being with Audrey, and Audrey would have approved of Shirlee.”
Robert Wolders, actor, was born on September 28, 1936. He died from undisclosed causes on July 12, 2018, aged 81
William Schallert, a familiar presence on prime-time television for decades, notably as the long-suffering father and uncle to the “identical cousins” played by Patty Duke on the hit 1960s sitcom “The Patty Duke Show,” died on Sunday in Pacific Palisades, Calif. He was 93.
His son Edwin confirmed the death.
Mr. Schallert’s career spanned generations and genres. Over more than 60 years he racked up scores of credits in episodic television as well as noteworthy performances in motion pictures, on the Off Broadway stage and as a voice-over artist.
With his preternaturally mature, intelligent but (by Hollywood standards) unremarkable looks, he was cast almost from the beginning as an authority figure — a father or a teacher, a doctor or a scientist, a mayor or a judge. Most active from the 1950s through the ’80s, Mr. Schallert remained seemingly unchanged in appearance and persona over time, and he was still working in his 90s, dismissing any thoughts of retirement.
On television it sometimes seemed as if he was everywhere. A versatile character actor with a comforting presence, he was equally at home in comedies and dramas, with a résumé ranging from “Leave It to Beaver,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Dr. Kildare” and “The Wild Wild West” to “Melrose Place,” “True Blood” and “Desperate Housewives.”
Before joining the ranks of harried sitcom fathers as Martin Lane on “The Patty Duke Show” (1963-66), he was the equally harried teacher Leander Pomfritt, bane of the title character, on “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” (1959-62). He also earned a permanent place in the hearts of “Star Trek” fans in 1967 when he played Nilz Baris, under secretary in charge of agricultural affairs for the United Federation of Planets, in “The Trouble With Tribbles,” often cited by fans and critics as one of the best episodes of the original “Star Trek” series. Never a leading man, Mr. Schallert was instead a high-caliber embodiment of the working actor.
In an interview for this obituary in 2009, Mr. Schallert said he had never been particularly selective about the roles he played. “That’s not the best way to build a career,” he admitted, “but I kept on doing it, and eventually it paid off.”
While the typical William Schallert character was focused and serious, he expressed particular affection for an atypical role: the wildly decrepit Admiral Hargrade, a recurring character on the spy spoof “Get Smart” (1967-70), who operated in a perpetual state of confusion. (“He reminded me of my grandmother when she got dotty,” Mr. Schallert said.)
The above “New York Times” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Clint Walker obituary in “The Hollywood Reporter” in 2018.
Clint Walker, who flexed his considerable brawn — but only when he had to — as a gentle giant on Cheyenne, the landmark 1950s Western that aired for seven seasons on ABC, has died. He was 90.
Walker, who also starred in such films as Send Me No Flowers (1964), None But the Brave (1965) and the World War II classic The Dirty Dozen (1967), died Monday of congestive heart failure in Grass Valley, California, his daughter Valerie said. !
With a chiseled 6-foot-6, 250-pound physique that showed off a 48-inch chest and 32-inch waist, the rugged, blue-eyed Walker was often hired for Westerns and action work. He was tough (and lucky) off the screen as well: He survived a 1971 skiing accident at Mammoth Mountain in California in which his heart was punctured by a ski pole and he was pronounced dead.
In 1955, Walker was cast by Warner Bros. in TV’s first-ever hourlong Western as Cheyenne Bodie, a principled cowboy drifter in the post-American Civil War era who was raised by the Cherokees who killed his parents. Cheyenne, produced by Roy Huggins of Maverick and Rockford Files fame, started out as part of Warner Brothers Presents in a rotation with the movie spinoffs Casablanca and Kings Row.
“I think they had all the leading men available in Hollywood to test for Cheyenne two days in a row, and they had me test with them,” Walker recalled in a 2012 interview for the Archive of American Television. “The first day I was very, very nervous. I could see all these people that I’d seen in pictures over the years and I thought, ‘I don’t stand a chance.’
“The second day, I thought, ‘I’m not going to get the job anyway so why don’t I just relax and enjoy it,’ which I did. Then the next thing I heard about four days later was Jack Warner reviewed all the stuff, pointed to me and said, ‘That is Cheyenne.'”SEE MOREBig Screen Giants: The 11 Tallest Movie Stars Ever
In 1958, Walker, now a household name, went on strike in a contract dispute, and while he was away, Warners replaced him with Ty Hardin as a character named Bronco Layne. When Walker returned to the series in 1959 after his deal was renegotiated, Hardin was given his own show. Cheyenne ran for 103 episodes until December 1962.
Walker, a baritone, also sang on Cheyenne, and the studio produced a 1959 album, Inspiration, with Walker and the Sunset Serenades performing traditional songs and ballads.
Norman Eugene Walker, a twin, was born May 30, 1927, in Hartford, Illinois. He fashioned his own weights out of concrete, joined the Merchant Marine at age 17 and toiled on a riverboat, in a paper mill and on an oil field. Working security at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, he met show-business types who encouraged him to try his luck in Hollywood.
Not surprisingly, Walker’s first role came as an uncredited Tarzan in the Bowery Boys film Jungle Gents (1954).
He heard Cecil B. DeMille was looking for muscular men to cast for his 1956 epic The Ten Commandments. Walker got an appointment with the intimidating director, but on the way to Paramount, he stopped on the freeway to change a flat tire for a woman.
“You’re late, young man,” Walker recalled DeMille saying when he arrived. When he told the director the reason why, DeMille replied, “Yes, I know all about it. That [woman you helped] was my secretary.”
Walker got a small part in the picture.
After Cheyenne got hot, he starred in the title role of Yellowstone Kelly (1959), playing a fur trapper who because of his friendship with the Sioux refuses to join with the U.S. Cavalry in a 1876 raid against the tribe. That movie was sandwiched between the Westerns Fort Dobbs (1958) and Gold of the Seven Saints (1961).
Walker received second billing to Frank Sinatra in None But the Brave, a World War II saga set in the South Pacific that Sinatra also directed. Walker then starred as Big Jim Cole in the adventure movie The Night of the Grizzly (1966), which he said was his favorite film to do.
The big man hit his stride with The Dirty Dozen, which starred Lee Marvin as a hardscrabble officer stuck with the dirty duty of penetrating a German fortress, accompanied by 12 condemned soldiers who have nothing to lose. Walker played Samson Posey, who had been convicted of murder. In his best scene, Marvin goads Walker into flashing his temper, attacking him with a knife before disarming the much bigger guy.
(Years later, Walker lent his authoritative voice to the role of Nick Nitro in Joe Dante’s 1998 animated film Small Soldiers. Dirty Dozen co-stars Ernest Borgnine, Jim Brown and George Kennedy also had roles.)
The good-natured Walker also appeared in much frothier entertainment, most notably in the light comedy Send Me No Flowers (1964) with Rock Hudson, Doris Day and Tony Randall.
He continued to work steadily late in 1960s with roles in Sam Whiskey, More Dead Than Alive and The Great Bank Robbery, all released in 1969. He co-starred in The White Buffalo (1977), one of the quirkiest Westerns ever made, in which Charles Bronson limned Wild Bill Hickok in pursuit of an albino buffalo.
During the 1970s, Walker was seen in the telefilms Yuma from Aaron Spelling, Hardcase and The Bounty Man and in Pancho Villa (1972). He starred in a shortlived Alaska-set series titled Kodiak, in which he played the title character, an Alaska State trooper.
Walker made numerous guest-star appearances on a wide range of TV shows during his career, including on The Jack Benny Program, Maverick, The Lucille Ball Show and Kung Fu: The Legend Continues.
Duane Byrge contributed to this report.
The Times obituary in 2018.
Having heard that Cecil B DeMille was looking for muscular actors to cast for his biblical epic The Ten Commandments, Clint Walker was on his way to audition for the famously intimidating Hollywood director in 1955 when he spotted a woman standing by a stranded car on the side of the freeway.
Although he was an unknown aspirant on his way to an appointment that he hoped would land him his big break in the world of films, he gallantly stopped to change her burst tyre. When Walker eventually arrived at the Paramount studio, considerably less presentable than when he had set out, DeMille looked him up and down. “You’re late, young man,” he said sternly.
Fearing that his career was over before it had started, Walker desperately began to explain the cause of his delay, only for the director to cut him short. “Yes, I know all about that,” he said. “It was my secretary.”
DeMille cast Walker as the captain of the guard to the Pharaoh Rameses, played by Yul Brynner. It was his first credited part and led in the same year to his best-known role, as the lead character in the pioneering TV western Cheyenne. Walker played Cheyenne Bodie, a rugged yet big-hearted cowboy drifter who fought baddies and dished out frontier justice.
He got the part over a number of more famous actors. “They had all the leading men available in Hollywood to test for Cheyenne two days in a row,” he recalled. “The first day I was very nervous. I could see all these people that I’d seen in pictures over the years and I thought, ‘I don’t stand a chance.’ ” By the second day he had decided to “relax and enjoy it”. A week later he was told that Jack Warner, the head of Warner Brothers, had reviewed the screen tests, pointed at Walker and said: “That is Cheyenne.”
Initially paid $175 an episode (about £1,200 today), he joked that he had only got the role because he was cheap. Yet it was easy enough to see why Warner was prepared to take a gamble on the unknown actor. With his blue eyes, chiselled features and muscular physique, every inch of Walker’s rugged 6ft 6in frame resembled the perfect romantic image of a cowboy: from chest to waist to hip he measured 48-32-36. Such appeal meant that his shirt came off in an astonishing number of episodes. According to The New York Times, he was “the biggest, finest-looking western hero ever to sag a horse, with a pair of shoulders rivalling King Kong’s”.
His non-acting CV lent him an impressive authenticity too. He had worked on Mississippi riverboats, in the Texas oil fields and as a carnival roustabout before ending up as a deputy sheriff in Las Vegas. There he lived in a trailer and encountered the showbusiness types who frequented the casinos, including the actor Van Johnson, who had just starred in Brigadoon with Gene Kelly and suggested he try his hand in Hollywood.
Walker eagerly embraced the idea and headed for Los Angeles. “I’m not going to get that far carrying a gun and a badge, and it doesn’t pay that well,” he reasoned. “If you make movies, you make good money — plus the bullets aren’t real!”
The only attribute he lacked as a convincing cowboy was that he had never been on horseback. His height meant that he was impressively tall in the saddle, but when filming of the first series began, he confessed to considerable nervousness when he was required to mount his steed. “You’ll either be a good rider or a dead one,” he was told. There were times when he “wondered which one it was going to be”.
In Long Beach, California, he worked as an agent for a detective agency and in Las Vegas he combined his duties as deputy sheriff with working for security at the Sands Hotel and Casino.
By the time he arrived in Hollywood he was married to Verna Garver, a waitress, with whom he had a daughter. They divorced in 1968 and he married the actress and dancer Giselle Hennessy. After her death in 1994 he married Susan Cavallari, who survives him. They made their home in Grass Valley, California, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. He is also survived by Valerie Walker, his daughter from his first marriage, who is a retired pilot and was one of the first women to fly for a leading airline.
At the height of Cheyenne’s success Walker went on strike for nine months in a contract dispute with Warner Brothers and was replaced by a Bodie clone called Bronco Layne, who was played by Ty Hardin (obituary, August 14, 2017). When Walker returned on improved terms, Hardin was given his own spin-off series.
After Cheyenne finished, his most notable film appearances included None but the Brave, Frank Sinatra’s only movie as a director, and The Dirty Dozen, in which he had a memorable fight scene with Lee Marvin.
He survived a skiing accident in 1971 in the Sierra Nevada when his heart was punctured by a ski pole. “They rushed me to a hospital, where two doctors pronounced me dead,” he said. Fortunately a third doctor thought he could detect the faintest pulse and Walker was given open-heart surgery. Two months later he was back at work on the set of the movie Pancho Villa.
One of his final appearances before retirement came in 1995, when he reprised the character of Cheyenne Bodie in an episode of the TV series Kung Fu: The Legend Continues.
“I feel action is what I owe the public,” he once said. “When I see a hero yak-yak-yakkin’ I lose all interest.”
Former blonde starlet who played Laurence Harvey’s love interest in “The Manchurian Candidate” (1960) and later fledging producer with husband Richard Bach, author of “Jonathan Livingston Seagull.”
Leslie Parrish (born Marjorie Hellen; March 13, 1935) is an American actress, activist, environmentalist, writer, and producer. She worked under her birth name for six years, changing it in 1959.
As a child, Leslie Parrish lived in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. At the age of 10, she finally settled in Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania. At the age of 14, Parrish was a talented and promising piano and composition student at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music. At the age of 16, Parrish earned money for her tuition by working as a maid and a waitress, and by teaching piano. At the age of 18, to earn enough money to be able to continue her education at the Conservatory, her mother persuaded her to become a model for one year.
In April 1954, as a 19-year-old model with the Conover Agency in New York City, Parrish was under contract to NBC-TV as “Miss Color TV” (she was used during broadcasts as a human test pattern to check accuracy of skin tones). She was quickly discovered and signed with Twentieth Century Fox in Hollywood. In 1956, she was put under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Because acting allowed her to help her family financially, she remained in Hollywood and gave up her career in music.
Parrish co-starred/guest-starred in numerous films and television shows throughout the 1960s and 1970s. She first gained wide attention in her first starring role as Daisy Mae in the movie version of Li’l Abner (1959), where she changed her name from Marjorie Hellen to Leslie Parrish at the director’s request. She appeared in the film The Manchurian Candidate (1962), playing Laurence Harvey‘s on-screen fiancée , Jocelyn Jordan. Other film credits include starring opposite Kirk Douglas in For Love or Money (1963) and Jerry Lewis in Three on a Couch (1966), among others.
Leslie Parrish in makeup room off-camera from the film ‘The Manchurian Candidate’, 1962. (Photo by United Artists/Getty Images)
Parrish was the Associate Producer on the film version of Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973). Among other things, she hired the director of photography Jack Couffer—who later received an Academy Award nomination for his efforts—and she was responsible for the care of the film’s real-life seagulls, which she kept inside a room at a Holiday Inn for the duration of the shoot. When the relationship between author Richard Bach and director Hall Bartlett disintegrated and a lawsuit followed, Parrish was appointed as the mediator between the two men. However, her final credit was demoted from Associate Producer to “Researcher”. In 1975, Parrish appeared in the low budget B-MovieThe Giant Spider Invasion which is now regarded as a cult film.
While acting provided financial stability, her main interest was in social causes including the anti-war and civil rights movements and, as far back as the mid 1950s, the environment.
Parrish’s interests and activities in social movements and politics grew to become her main work. She was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, a member of the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, a group of notable women who fought against the war and for civil rights. In 1967, she participated in a peace march in Century City (near Beverly Hills) where she and thousands of other protestors were attacked and beaten by police and the National Guard. President Lyndon Johnson was present at the Century Plaza Hotel and helicopters were flying overhead with machine guns pointed at the marchers.
Parrish started to make speeches in the Los Angeles area, telling residents what the media did not report and speaking out against the war. Impressed with her speaking abilities, several professors from UCLA aligned with the anti-war movement asked her to organize more like-minded actors and actresses who would be willing to speak out. Two weeks later Parrish had created “STOP!” (Speakers and Talent Organized for Peace), an organization of two dozen members ready to engage the public. Shortly thereafter, the organization grew to 125 speakers, and many more subsequently.
On August 6, 1967, Parrish helped organize a protest march of 17,000 people on the “Miracle Mile” of Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, which received extensive media coverage and national attention. She also created a popular bumper sticker: ‘Suppose they gave a war and no one came’. Leslie Parrish and her friends distributed hundreds of them from their vehicles. Walter Cronkite reported that Bobby Kennedy had one in his plane. Someone later published the bumper sticker, changing the original wording to ‘WHAT IF they gave a war and no one came’ but to Parrish, the important thing was spreading that message.
In October 1967, a private meeting was arranged between Parrish and Bobby Kennedy by mutual friend and well-known Kennedy photographer, Stanley Tretick. She begged Kennedy to run for president, telling him that huge, influential organizations opposed to the war in Vietnam were ready to support him were he to run. Kennedy refused again and again, saying he could not oppose Lyndon Johnson, a sitting president.v On November 30, Eugene McCarthy, a little-known senator, declared he would run against the war and challenge Johnson. Parrish was elected chair of his speaker’s bureau and utilized STOP! to develop support for McCarthy.[26] On March 12, 1968, McCarthy almost defeated Johnson in the New Hampshire primary winning 42% of the vote. On March 16 (four days later) Bobby Kennedy announced that he would run for president. Two weeks later, on March 31, Johnson declared that he would not run for re-election. Parrish remained loyal to McCarthy and was elected a delegate to represent him in August at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
On April 4, 1968, Parrish and Leonard Nimoy (who was a STOP! member and supporter of Eugene McCarthy) flew to San Francisco to open McCarthy’s new headquarters there. After they left, they learned of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Nimoy and Parrish cried during the speeches they gave that evening.
Hubert Humphrey was nominated by the convention but lost the election to Richard Nixon. While still in Chicago, the peace movement began working toward the 1972 election, hoping to elect George McGovern. McGovern did win primaries and Parrish served as a delegate at the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami, Florida. But McGovern lost to Richard Nixon.
During this era of political activism, Parrish worked in numerous political campaigns (presidential, gubernatorial, senatorial, congressional, mayoral) and with many different organizations, producing public events and fund-raisers for them. Her last major production was the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE) held November 16, 1969 at San Francisco’s Polo Grounds.
. She supported and campaigned for a former police lieutenant named Tom Bradley who was then the city’s first black city councilman. Despite high polling numbers prior to the election, Bradley lost to Yorty, giving rise to what was later known as “The Bradley Effect.”[35] Next day, he decided to run again, and over the next four years Parrish worked with him closely to help secure his victory in the next mayoral election. In 1973, Tom Bradley became Los Angeles’s first black mayor. Parrish was one of forty activist citizens who served on Bradley’s Blue Ribbon Commission to choose new Los Angeles Commissioners.Over the next 20 years, Tom Bradley brought massive development to the city and was reelected five times, setting a record for length of tenure. Parrish and Tom Bradley remained friends for many years.
Parrish’s concern for the environment dates back to the 1950s when Los Angeles’ severe smog, and the reason for it, worried her. In 1979, she and her then-husband, Richard Bach, built an experimental home in southwest Oregon using 100% solar power with no cooling or heating systems, in order to prove it could be done.
In 1999, Parrish created a 240-acre wildlife sanctuary on Orcas Island (in the San Juan Islands, Washington State) to save it from normal development techniques which include logging. She named it the “Spring Hill Wildlife Sanctuary”. For seventeen years, she carefully developed the ridge-top property by creating nearly a dozen small, hidden home sites on 25% of the land while preserving the remainder in perpetuity within the San Juan Preservation Trust. While the property is now fully developed there are no breaks in the heavily forested ridge line. The developed land is invisible from the island community and the forest is intact.
Parrish married songwriter Ric Marlow in 1955; the couple divorced in 1961. In 1981, she married Richard Bach,vthe author of the 1970 book Jonathan Livingston Seagull, whom she met during the making of the 1973 movie of the same name. She was a major element in two of his subsequent books—The Bridge Across Forever (1984) and One (1988)—which primarily focused on their relationship and Bach’s concept of soulmates.They divorced in 1999
One of the finest and most familiar of screen character actors, the short and shifty-eyed Elisha Cook Jnr was the eternal loser.He could play anything, from farce (riddled with bullets in Hellzappoppin’, he drinks a glass of water which spurts through a dozen holes) to tragedy (as the luckless homesteader gunned down by Jack Palance in Shane – one of his rare good guy roles), but his memory will be treasured most for his gallery of petty hoodlums whose aspirations and bravado rarely equalled their abilities. ”Keep on riding me,” he tells Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, ”and they’re gonna be picking iron out of your liver”, but his quavering voice and outsize overcoat make the threat derisory.
Born in San Francisco in 1906, Cook studied at the Chicago Academy of Dramatic Art before making his stage debut in vaudeville at 14. Joining the Theatre Guild, he appeared on the Broadway stage with Ethel Barrymore, and came to London in Coquette (1929). After an isolated film role in The Unborn Child (1929), repeating the romantic lead he had on stage, he returned to the theatre until 1936, when he settled in Hollywood.
Roles ranged from a brainy collegiate in Pigskin Parade (1936) to an ingenuous song-writer in Tin Pan Alley (1940), but it is to the genre of film noir that he made his most memorable contributions. In Boris Ingster’s The Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) which, with its moody lighting is often credited as the first true film noir, Cook was an innocent taxi- driver convicted of murder. He followed this with perhaps his best known role as Wilmer, Sydney Greenstreet’s twitchy henchman, in Huston’s classic The Maltese Falcon (1940).
Often vulnerable to and exploited by women, he had a lethal passion for Carole Landis in I Wake Up Screaming (1941), was a disc jockey who kills for love of the venal Jane Greer in The Falcon’s Alibi (1945) and a small- time hoodlum who dies to protect Sonia Darrin in The Big Sleep (1946), a role which gave him some rare, if pathetic, integrity. After he has witnessed Bogart being beaten up and Bogart asks why he did not come to his aid, he replies, ”Listen, when a guy’s doing a job, I don’t kibbitz.” (The line, cited by Cook as his favourite piece of dialogue, was written by the director Howard Hawks.)
Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944) includes one of the most famous sequences in cinema history in which Cook, as the trap-drummer Cliff March, works himself to an orgiastic frenzy drumming in a jazz-club while sensuously encouraged by Ella Raines garbed in clinging black silk. It is both a prime example of how film-makers would circumvent the Production Code and a quintessential piece of noir cinema, its extreme angles, harsh lighting and staccato editing influenced by German Expressionism. In Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), Cook and the splendid Marie Windsor give the most indelible performances of a fine cast as the passive race-track cashier involved in a doomed caper, and his disdainful wife. Rising to her baiting, Cook tells Windsor that he is going to get half a million dollars. “Of course you are darling,” she replies. ”Did you put the right address on the envelope when you sent it to the North Pole?”
Andre DeToth’s Dark Waters (1944), in which Cook perishes in quicksand, Robert Wise’s Born to Kill (1947), in which he dies amid sand dunes, and Jules Dassin’s under-rated Two Smart People (1946), where he meets a macabre death during a Mardi Gras, were among other noirs where he was the perennial loser. Even when well-meaning, as in Roy Baker’s Don’t Bother to Knock (1952), he gets bashed with an ash-tray after arranging a baby-sitting job for his neurotic niece (Marilyn Monroe).
Cook later did a lot of work in television, including a continuing role as a crime baron in Magnum P.I.; and he was still making films until his eighties. In a 54 year career, Elisha Cook Jnr was always a welcome presence on the screen.
Tom Vallance
Elisha Cook Jnr, actor: born San Francisco 26 December 1906; died Big Pine, California 18 May 1995.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
TCM Overview:
Diminutive, wiry character player memorable for his numerous roles as cowardly villians and neurotics. Originally from vaudeville and the Broadway stage, Cook, who briefly entered films in 1929 before returning to the stage, made a strong impression with his definitive sniveling gunsel in “The Maltese Falcon” (1941), and followed with similar roles as weaklings or sadistic loser-hoods: Harry Jones in “The Big Sleep” (1946) and George Peatty in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Killing” (1956) over a more than sixty-year care
The son of a runaway slave turned minister and a schoolteacher, Paul Robeson proved to be an unique figure in American history. A tall, handsome man with a commanding stage presence and mellifluous, booming baritone, he was not only a distinguished actor and singer but also a scholar, athlete and lawyer. Born and raised in New Jersey, Robeson won a scholarship to Rutgers and was only the third black to enroll at the school. He excelled at athletics, earning letters in four sports (basketball, track, baseball and football) and was twice named to the All-American Football Team. Robeson made Phi Beta Kappa and was his class valedictorian. Moving to NYC, he entered Columbia University’s Law School, playing professional football for three seasons (1920-23) and acting and singing to help defray the expenses. In 1921, he had an early stage role in the biblically-themed “Simon the Cyrenian” and later joined the cast of the all-black musical “Shuffle Along” in 1922. Admitted to the New York State Bar, Robeson found work at a law firm but left when a Caucasian secretary refused to take dictation from him. Gravitating towards the stage, this singularly versatile talent found success alternately the leads in two Eugene O’Neill dramas, “The Emperor Jones” and the controversial “All God’s Chillun Got Wings.” As the latter depicted an interracial marriage, it was the subject of debate and condemnation, but the actor triumphed.
His stage success led to film work. Robeson debuted in a dual role of an unscrupulous preacher and his more virtuous brother in Oscar Micheaux’s silent “Body and Soul” (1924). While Jerome Kern wanted the singer-actor to originate the role of Joe in the Broadway premiere “Show Boat” (Robeson had even signed a contract), production delays and conflicting bookings led to Robeson being replaced. He did get to play the role in London and his stirring delivery of “Ol’ Man River” became the definitive version of the song for generations. Settling in Europe where he felt a person of color could find more diverse employment opportunities, Robeson appeared in the experimental feature “Borderline” (1930). He briefly returned to America to film “The Emperor Jones” (1933), considered by many critics to be his best work despite the inherent flaws of the material. Declining the opportunity to perform in “Aida” in Chicago, he returned to England to undertake the role of an African chief in the ill-advised “Sanders of the River” (1934). He fared only slightly better in a similar role in the first filming of H Rider Haggard’s adventure novel “King Solomon’s Mines” (1937). Robeson accepted the film version of “Show Boat” (1936) primarily for the money, but it at least provided a record of his signature vocals for “Ol’ Man River.” As roles for blacks in Hollywood were severely limited to caricatures and menials, he returned to England and appeared in a handful of films that, while routine, at least offered less stereotypical roles. He twice played a dockworker in films that also showcased his rich baritone. “Song of Freedom” (1936) cast him as a laborer turned opera star who discovers he is heir to an African throne while “Big Fella” (1937) teamed him with Elizabeth Welch in an offbeat tale of blackmail and kidnapping. “Jericho/Dark Sands” (1938) saw Robeson portraying a court-martialed American who escapes to Africa. Some find the film charming while others decry its now blatant racist overtones. He was again a noble figure in “The Proud Valley” (1939), playing a coal miner in Wales who sacrifices his life for his fellow workers. It was to be the last of his leading roles. Robeson returned to the USA and made only one other film appearance in the omnibus “Tales of Manhattan” (1942), teamed in a sketch with Eddie ‘Rochester’ Anderson and Ethel Waters that reduced these fine performers to ridiculous stereotypes as sharecroppers. That same year, he narrated the civil rights documentary “Native Land” which received a very limited release.
Robeson returned to the stage, starring in an acclaimed 1942 production of “Othello” that cause some controversy over his kissing his Caucasian co-star Uta Hagen. The show began in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and went on to play nearly 300 performances on Broadway in 1943 and toured extensively. As the decade wore on, though, Robeson came under attack for many of his political views. Having been warmly welcomed in the Soviet Union, he became a vocal advocate of Communism and other left-wing causes. Willing to risk his career for viewpoints that some found objectionable, he constantly called attention to bigotry and the limited opportunities for persons of color, including picketing the White House and calling for a crusade against lynching. Called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1946, Robeson proved a strong presence. Responding to a query as to why he didn’t go to live in the USSR, he told the Committee “Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay right here and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?” Yet, some of his views were controversial, notably his call for black youth not to participate if there was a war with the Soviet Union. Like many other artists of the time, Robeson was blacklisted and his passport was revoked for eight years (1950-58). By the time the US Supreme Court restored his right to travel, his health had begun to fail. In 1958, he published his autobiography, “Here I Stand” but few major newspapers would review it. He twice tried to commit suicide and suffered a series of breakdowns that led him to withdraw from public life. He died of complications from a stroke in 1976. Three years later, he was the subject of the documentary “Paul Robeson: Portrait of an Artist” and over the next thirty years, his reputation as an artist and world citizen was gradually restored.
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
In 1975, the TV Times described Virginia Christine as “one of the small but select band of character actresses who are indispensable to any casting director”. At the time Christine had appeared in more than 50 films, hundreds of television shows, and was currently starring in one of the longest-running commercials in television history. Swedish on her mother’s side, Virginia Christine was born in Stanton, Iowa, a town she described as “All Swedes”. At 17 she won a national drama competition. While attending college in Los Angeles, she met the comedy character actor Fritz Feld. They were married in 1940, and two years later Feld directed her in a Los Angeles stage production of Hedda Gabler, to which he invited representatives from the major film studios.
Christine accepted a contract with Warner Bros, for whom she made Truck Busters, Edge of Darkness, Mission to Moscow and a recruitment short for the Women’s Army Corps called Women at War (all in 1943). Warners then dropped her, and she accepted a contact with Universal Pictures, starting with The Mummy’s Curse (1944), in which she played Princess Princess Ananka, an Egyptian mummy who, restored to life, joined fellow mummy Lon Chaney Jnr in terrorising a small Louisiana community. She wore a black wig over her blonde hair and a clinging white nightgown, inspiring the New York Post’s film critic to write: “You will be safe in assuming that there never has been a mummy half as well-built or a quarter as good-looking.” For the next five years, she played, in the main, cowgirls, saloon girls, vamps, convicts and gun molls in a succession of “B” movies and serials.
Christine’s career took an upturn when she was cast as the wife of a paraplegic war veteran in Marlon Brando’s first film The Men (1950). Hers wasn’t a prominent role, but the film’s producer, Stanley Kramer, liked her work, and used her as a nun in Cyrano de Bergerac (1950) and as a townswoman in High Noon (1952). When he made Not as a Stranger (1955), he gave her a two-way contract: both to coach Olivia de Havilland in her Swedish accent and to play a friend and countrywoman.
In Judgement at Nuremberg (1961), Kramer cast her as the German housekeeper of American judge Spencer Tracy, chillingly disavowing any national responsibility for the Holocaust. Her most impressive role in a Kramer film was as Katharine Hepburn’s haughty business associate in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). On hearing that Hepburn’s daughter (Katharine Houghton) intended to marry a black doctor (Sidney Poitier), Christine reacted with undisguised horror, after which Hepburn walked her briskly down to her car and sacked her – a scene which rarely failed to draw applause.
“I only ever fought for one part,” said Christine, who campaigned vigorously for the role of Kitty Collins, the femme fatale in the first screen version of Hemingway’s The Killers (1946). She lost out to Ava Gardner, but Mark Hellinger, the film’s producer, was impressed with Christine’s test, and cast her as the sympathetic wife of policeman Sam Levene. Eighteen years later, she appeared in Don Siegel’s remake of The Killers (1964), having also acted in his Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and Flaming Star (1960).
She also acted under the direction of Vincente Minnelli in The Cobweb (1955), Billy Wilder in The Spirit of St Louis (1957) and Mark Robson in The Prize (1963). She and Fritz Feld acted in two films together: Wife of Monte Cristo (1946) and Four for Texas (1963). They had been married for 53 years when Feld died in 1993.
As well as the feature film Dragnet (1954), Christine appeared in its earlier television incarnation. Her other TV series included 77 Sunset Strip, Perry Mason, The Untouchables, The Fugitive, The Abbott and Costello Show, Mr Ed, The Adventures of Superman, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, The Long Ranger, Rawhide, Wagon Train, The Virginian, Gunsmoke, Bonanza and Tales of Wells Fargo.
Virginia Christine’s most lucrative television assignment began in 1960, when Bob Palmer, the casting director who had given her the part of Princess Ananka, persuaded her to audition for a commercial. For the next 20 years she played Mrs Olson, a kindly, Swedish-accented housewife who kept solving domestic problems by recommending Folger’s Mountain-Grown Coffee to a succession of married couples. The citizens of Stanton, Iowa somewhat bizarrely celebrated the celebrity status of their native daughter by converting a local water tower into a giant, ornately decorated coffee- pot.
Dick Vosburgh
Virginia Ricketts (Virginia Christine), actress: born Stanton, Iowa 5 March 1917; married 1940 Fritz Feld (died 1993; two sons); died Los Angeles 24 July 1996.
Chester Morris (February 16, 1901 – September 11, 1970) was an American stage, film, television and radio actor. He had some prestigious film roles early in his career, and was nominated for an Oscar. But he is best remembered today for portraying Boston Blackie, a criminal-turned-detective, in the modestly budgeted Boston Blackie film series of the 1940s.
He was born John Chester Brooks Morris in New York City, one of four children of Broadway stage actor William Morris and stage comedian Etta Hawkins. Morris dropped out of school and began his Broadway career at 15 years old opposite Lionel Barrymore‘sThe Copperhead. He made his film debut in the silent comedy-drama film An Amateur Orphan for Thanhouser/Pathé.
After appearing in several more Broadway productions in the early 1920s, Morris joined his parents, sister and two brothers, Gordon and Adrian (who also became a film actor), on the vaudeville circuit.[4] The family’s act consisted of a comedy sketch entitled “The Horrors of Home”. Morris toured with his family for two years before returning to Broadway with roles in The Home Towners (1926) and Yellow (1927). While appearing in the 1927 play Crime, Morris was spotted by a talent agent and was signed to a film contract.
By the mid-to-late 1930s, Morris’ popularity had begun to wane and he was cast as the lead actor such B-movies as Smashing the Rackets (1938) and Five Came Back (1939). In 1941, Morris’ career was revived when he was cast as criminal-turned-detective Boston Blackie. Morris appeared in a total of fourteen Boston Blackie film serials for Columbia Pictures, beginning with Meet Boston Blackie. He reprised the role of Boston Blackie for the radio series in 1944. He was replaced after one season. During World War II, Morris performed magic tricks in over 350 USO shows. He had been practicing magic since the age of 12 and was considered a top amateur magician.[8]
While appearing in the Boston Blackie series, Morris continued to appear in roles in other films mostly for Pine-Thomas films forParamount Pictures.[ After appearing in 1949’s Boston Blackie’s Chinese Venture, the final Boston Blackie film, Morris largely retired from films. During the 1950s, he focused mainly on television and regional theatre role. During this time, Morris also appeared in guest spots for the anthology seriesCameo Theatre, Lights Out, Tales of Tomorrow, Alcoa Premiere, Suspense, Danger, Robert Montgomery Presents, The Web, Phillip Morris Playhouse, Studio One, and Kraft Television Theatre. He briefly returned to films in 1955 with a role in the prison drama Unchained, followed by a role in the 1956 science-fiction horror film The She-Creature. In 1960, he had recurring role as Detective Lieutenant Max Ritter in the CBS summer replacement series,Diagnosis: Unknown. After the series was canceled after a year, Morris appeared in the NBC television film A String of Beads. In November 1960, he returned to Broadway as “Senator Bob Munson” in the stage adaptation of the 1959 novel Advise and Consent. Morris remained with the production until it closed in May 1961. In October, he reprised his role for the touring production.
Morris was married twice. He first married Suzanne Kilbourne on November 8, 1926. They had two children, John Brooks and Cynthia.[1]Kibourne was granted an interlocutory divorce in November 1939 which was finalized on November 26, 1940.[On November 30, 1940, Morris married socialite Lillian Kenton Barker at the home of actor Frank Morgan.[13] They had a son, Kenton, born in 1944. The couple remained married until Morris’ death in 1970.
In mid-1968, Morris starred opposite Barbara Britton in the touring production of Where Did We Go Wrong?. After the production wrapped, he returned to his home in Manhattan where his health began to decline. Morris was later diagnosed with stomach cancer. Despite his declining health, Morris began work on what would be his last film role, as “Pop Weaver” in biographical drama The Great White Hope (1970). The film was released after his death. After filming wrapped, Morris joined the stage production of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania.
On September 11, 1970, Lee R. Yopp, the producer and director of Caine, was scheduled to have lunch with Morris. After Yopp could not reach Morris by phone at his motel room, he went to Morris’ room where he found the actor’s body lying on the floor. The county coroner attributed Morris’ death to an overdose of barbiturates. His remains were cremated and scattered over a German river.
