Carol Lynley obituary in “The New York Times” in 2019.
Carol Lynley a child model who went on to an intense film acting career mirroring the country’s transformation from the modest Eisenhower era into the sexually frank 1960s, died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 77.
The cause was a heart attack, according to Trent Dolan, a friend.
Ms. Lynley may be best remembered as the naïve, soft-spoken adolescent who becomes pregnant by her equally wide-eyed boyfriend, played by Brandon De Wilde, in the 1959 film “Blue Denim.” It was a role she had originated on Broadway the year before, when she was 16.
Ms. Lynley made at least half a dozen high-profile Hollywood movies over the next eight years, but by the time she was in her mid-20s her star had faded and she was never solidly in the public eye again.
Still, she did make a notable if brief comeback in 1972, when she turned up wearing hot pants and go-go boots in the disaster movie “The Poseidon Adventure,” singing (or at least lip-syncing) the Oscar-winning song “The Morning After.”
Her career may have been, at least partly, a victim of unfortunate marketing. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Hollywood’s publicity machine had three blond teenage actresses to promote. In a case of extreme image segmentation, Sandra Dee was promoted as the pampered rich girl, Tuesday Weld as the bad girl and Ms. Lynley as the good girl — studious, sensitive, wholesome and just a bit prim.
Hound-dog Man, poster, US poster art, from left: Carol Lynley, Fabian, (aka Fabian Forte), 1959. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
This worked well enough with the characters she played in her debut film, the Disney drama “The Light in the Forest” (1958), set in pre-Revolutionary America; in “Blue Denim”; and in “Hound-Dog Man” (1959), in which she starred opposite the teenage idol Fabian. But beginning when she was 19, Ms. Lynley turned to portrayals of more knowing characters, like the small-town author Allison MacKenzie, who has an affair with her publisher, in “Return to Peyton Place” (1961), a disappointing sequel. That film was followed by a sex comedy, “Under the Yum Yum Tree” (1963), with Jack Lemmon and Dean Jones, and by the drama “The Cardinal” (1963), in which she played both Tom Tryon’s wayward sister and her character’s daughter.
She was 23 when she posed discreetly nude in Playboy magazine and played the title role in “Harlow” (1965), a biographical film about the 1930s screen star and sex symbol Jean Harlow. That same year, she won some positive reviews as a distraught young mother in Otto Preminger’s “Bunny Lake Is Missing,” but neither critics nor fans responded to her in the same way as they had during her teenage years.
From the 1970s onward, Ms. Lynley worked mostly in television, doing guest appearances on various shows (she was in the original television film “Fantasy Island” and in at least 10 episodes of the series that it spawned, as well as the television film that later became the Darren McGavin series “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”) and in low-profile movies, some of the straight-to-vid
Brenda Vaccaro was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1939 to parents of Italian origin. She began her acting career on Broadway and starred in “Cactus Flower” with Lauren Bacall and Barry Nelson in 1965. She made an impact on film in 1969 along with Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight in the wonderful “Midnight Cowboy”. She went on to an impressive film career. Her films include “Summertree” with Michael Douglas, “Once is Not Enough” with Kirk Douglas and Alexis Smith in 1975 and more recently she gave a very sensitive performance in “The Boynton Beach Club”.
Her TCM Biography:
A husky-voiced actress who segued from beautiful leading lady to earthy character parts, Brenda Vaccaro enjoyed success in a variety of mediums. She earned three Tony nominations for her stage work in the 1960s, won a Golden Globe nomination for her role as a socialite paying Jon Voight for sex in “Midnight Cowboy” (1969), and an Oscar nomination for “Jacqueline Susann’s Once Is Not Enough” (1975). Although she was an accomplished dramatic actress, audiences embraced her most as a wisecracking second banana to everyone from Faye Dunaway in “Supergirl” (1984) to Barbra Streisand in “The Mirror Has Two Faces” (1996), as well as an in-demand voiceover actress.
The Emmy-winning Vaccaro earned an impressive array of TV credits as well, but found it harder to book jobs as she grew older. She did earn excellent reviews with the lead role in the gentle romantic comedy “Boynton Beach Club” (2005) and for a brilliant supporting turn as Al Pacino’s sister in the Dr. Kevorkian biopic, “You Don’t Know Jack” (HBO, 2010). Even 50 years into her career, Vaccaro remained a vital, formidable actress with the training and talent to deliver award-caliber performances – if Hollywood would only give the veteran performer the chance.
Born Nov. 18, 1939 in Brooklyn, NY to Christine M. and Mario A. Vaccaro, a pair of Italian-American restaurateurs, Brenda Buell Vaccaro was raised in Texas, where her parents co-founded the nationally-renowned Mario’s Restaurant. After high school, Vaccaro returned to New York City to study acting, making her Broadway debut in the 1961 comedy, “Everybody Loves Opal,” for which she won the Theatre World Award. Pairing her unmistakable husky voice with her acting talent, Vaccaro immediately stood out to critics and fans alike, and she earned a long string of Broadway credits, including “Cactus Flower” in 1965, “How Now, Dow Jones” in 1967, and “The Goodbye People” in 1968 – earning a Tony nomination for each of those roles.
Already the owner of a lengthy television résumé, her breakthrough in film came with the controversial hit “Midnight Cowboy” (1969), for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination playing a sexually voracious socialite who helps Jon Voight start up his male hustling business. She also earned a Golden Globe nomination for Most Promising Newcomer with her role of a sharp-witted secretary in “Where It’s At” (1969).
She ably supported Robert Mitchum as his sweetheart in the powerful but downbeat “Going Home” (1971), then won an Emmy for her performance in the revue by and about women, “The Shape of Things” (1974). After four years away from the big screen, Vaccaro roared back with a Golden Globe-winning, Oscar-nominated turn as wisecracking magazine editor Linda Riggs in “Jacqueline Susann’s Once Is Not Enough” (1975).
She tackled the tough role of a woman battling a gang of Canadian punks intent on rape in the dark, but cerebral horror thriller, “Death Weekend” (1976) and then earned an Emmy nomination for the short-lived “Sara” (CBS, 1975-1976), about a frontier schoolteacher. Vaccaro played James Brolin’s wife in the NASA conspiracy thriller “Capricorn One” (1977) – for which she earned a Best Supporting Actress Saturn Award nomination – and a threatened passenger in the cheesy-but-effective disaster smash, “Airport ’77” (1977).
Vaccaro worked constantly and successfully in all genres, but comedy was her forte, and she marked memorable turns as a villain’s sexually frustrated wife in “Zorro, the Gay Blade” (1981) and as Faye Dunaway’s wisecracking fellow witch in “Supergirl” (1984). She impressed even in subpar material, perfecting the art of stealing a project from the supporting sidelines. She chewed up scenery to delightful effect as top teen model Nicollette Sheridan’s stage mother/manager in the campy Morgan Fairchild nighttime soap, “Paper Dolls” (ABC, 1984).
Fleshing out her résumé with impressive guest-starring TV credits, Vaccaro kept busy, earning an Emmy nomination for an appearance on “The Golden Girls” (NBC, 1985-1992), as the widow of Dorothy’s cross-dressing, never-seen brother. The actress continued to be an in-demand second banana, ably sparring with Valerie Harper in “Stolen: One Husband” (CBS, 1990) and Ann-Margret in “Following Her Heart” (NBC, 1994), before playing the mother of J y (Matt LeBlanc) in “The One with the Boobies” episode of “Friends” (NBC, 1994-2004).
Besides a small role in “Love Affair” (1994) with Warren Beatty, Annette Bening and Katharine Hepburn (in the latter’s last screen performance), Vaccaro continued to lend her trademark raspy voice to numerous animated TV projects. Whether or not they could identify her by name, millions of children had grown up hearing Vaccaro voice characters on everything from “Nestor, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey” (ABC, 1977), “The Smurfs” (NBC, 1981-89), “The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones” (syndicated, 1987), “Darkwing Duck” (ABC, 1991-92) to “The Critic” (ABC, 1994; FOX, 1995), “Johnny Bravo” (Cartoon Network, 1997-2004) and “American Dad!” (FOX, 2005- ). She essayed great humor and vulnerability on the big screen as Barbra Streisand’s frumpy best friend in the Oscar-nominated hit, “The Mirror Has Two Faces” (1996), in which she had to deal with feelings of abandonment when Streisand transforms from ugly duckling to swan.
A role that ech d her “Midnight Cowboy” success, Vaccaro earned good notices for a sweetly delusional customer of male prostitute James Franco in “Sonny” (2002), as well as for the lead role in the kind-hearted ensemble comedy, “Boynton Beach Club” (2005), which followed the lives and loves of a group of senior citizens in a Florida retirement community. Vaccaro played both tough and tender as a woman who is unexpectedly widowed when a neighbor (Renée Taylor) accidentally runs over her husband; she then must deal with her family and friends’ attempts to help her recover. Despite the vivid proof of her ability, Vaccaro, like many aging actresses, found it difficult find work in later years.
Although she was still able to notch the occasional prominent credit, like an episode of “Nip/Tuck” (FX, 2003-10), the offers slowed to a trickle, and she considered quitting show business completely and moving to France to be near her husband’s family. Luckily, fate conspired to put Vaccaro on the radars of the production team making “You Don’t Know Jack” (HBO, 2010), a pedigreed film about the life and career of controversial doctor-assisted-suicide advocate, Jack Kevorkian. Director Barry Levinson and star Al Pacino – who was an old theater buddy of the actress and at one time had shared a manager with her – were both fans of Vaccaro’s work, and she landed the role of Kevorkian’s protective sister, Margo Janus. Reviewers raved about the film, especially about Vaccaro’s performance, predicting she would be shortlisted for all the top awards. She was indeed nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Movie in 2010. Critics and fans alike hoped that it would be a turning point for the actress, and she would find herself as in-demand as her talent – regardless of her age – deserved.
The TCM biography can also be accessed online here.
Chad Everett is a ruggedly handsome actor who played young Dr. Joe Gannon on the TV drama “Medical Center,” has died. He was 75.
Everett died Tuesday at his home in the Los Angeles area after battling lung cancer, his daughter Katherine Thorp told the Associated Press. Everett’s wife of 45 years, actress Shelby Grant, died of an aneurysm in June 2011 at 74.
Although Everett had a range of TV and movie roles over a career that began in the early 1960s, he made a lasting impression as Dr. Gannon on “Medical Center.” The dramatic series aired on CBS from 1969 to 1976 and followed the personal and professional lives of the staff at a teaching hospital in Los Angeles.
“Understatement is apparently a highly salable commodity on TV,” a Washington Post reporter wrote in a 1975 article on male stardom. “Chad Everett, a big city type, seldom stoops to histrionics as he lethargically makes his rounds on ‘Medical Center.’ ”
Everett arrived in Hollywood from the Midwest. He was born Raymond Lee Cramton in South Bend, Ind., on June 11, 1937, and grew up in Dearborn, Mich., where his father was a race car driver and racing mechanic. He studied drama at Wayne State University in Detroit.
“I went into acting because I’m easily bored,” Everett told The Times in 1966, several years after he had changed his name for professional reasons. “I had tried — in my own juvenile way — music, football, business with my father. All of them bored me. Acting seemed to give vent to a lot of different feelings.”
He landed jobs on episodic TV shows beginning in 1961 and then won a featured role on the TV western “The Dakotas” in 1963.
He signed a contract with MGM in 1964 and appeared in “Made in Paris” with Ann-Margret and “The Singing Nun” with Debbie Reynolds in 1966.
Everett worked steadily in television before and after “Medical Center,” appearing as a regular in “Hagen,” “The Rousters,” “McKenna,” “Melrose Place,” “Manhattan, AZ” and as recently as last year on “Chemistry,” a USA network drama.
His movie roles included parts in “Airplane II: The Sequel” (1982), the 1998 remake of”Psycho”and “Mulholland Dr.” (2001).
Everett was taken to court three times by actress Sheila Scott, who claimed he was the father of her son Dale, who was born in 1973. The long-running paternity dispute ended in 1981 when a Los Angeles County Superior Court jury ruled in favor of Everett, who steadfastly denied the claims.
In addition to Thorp, he is survived by his other daughter, Shannon Everett, and six grandchildren.
TCM Overview:
A masculine leading man on television and in the occasional feature during the late 1960s and 1970s, Chad Everett rose to fame as a young doctor on the popular drama “Medical Center” (CBS, 1969-1976) before enjoying a long career as a series lead and guest player on the small screen for over four decades. Everett left the Midwest in 1960 for Hollywood, where he enjoyed a minor career as a youthful romantic lead in modest features like “Made in Paris” (1966) and “The Singing Nun” (1966). “Medical Center,” which partnered him with James Daly as surgeons at a Los Angeles university hospital, thrust him into stardom, but he never found a subsequent project that equaled its popularity. However, Everett remained a constant presence on television well into the new millennium, playing gracefully aging fathers, stern authority figures and even the occasionally mature romantic role. Though never a critical favorite nor highly lauded for his work, Chad Everett was a dependable performer, which granted him a rarity in show business â¿¿ steady work for over a half-century.
Viveca Lindfors was born in Uppsala, Sweden in 1920. She became a theatre and film star in her native country before coming to Hollywood in 1946. She starred with Ronald Reagan and Virginia Mayo in “Night unto Night”, with Margaret Sullavan in “No Sad Songs for Me” and wih Charlton Heston and Lizabeth Scott in “Dark City”. By the mid 50’s she was make in Europe making films there. She did return on occasion to the U.S. to make films e.g. in 1965 in “Sylvia” with Carroll Baker and in 1973 in “The Way We Were” with Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand. In 1994 she was back in the U.S. again making “Stargate”. Viveca Lindfors died in her home town in Sweden in 1995 at the age of 74.
Her “Los Angeles Times” obituary:
Viveca Lindfors, the sultry Swedish screen and stage actress who delighted Hollywood and Broadway with her liberated lifestyle as well as her acting and in her later years became known for her one-woman shows, died Wednesday. She was 74.
Miss Lindfors died of complications from rheumatoid arthritis in her native Uppsala, Sweden, her daughter, Lena Tabori of New York City, told The Times on Wednesday.
Tabori said her mother, who lived in Manhattan, had been in Sweden to do her one-woman production, “In Search of Strindberg.” She said Miss Lindfors had regretted being unable to attend the Los Angeles Film Festival for the screening of her most recent film, “Summer in the Hamptons,” which is scheduled for release next month. Miss Lindfors appeared in scores of films, plays and television shows over more than half a century, still turning on the charm as her hair grayed.
When the enduring actress toured her one-woman show “I Am Woman” at age sixtysomething, a Times theater critic wrote: “[She] retains a magical, casually battered and untended beauty. When she smiles, the world lights up. There is strength, but also tenderness in the sculptured, kittenish face. Grit, hauteur and dignity are all part of the svelte persona. This is a woman telling us she’s been through it all and, my dear, she’s still here.” Married and divorced four times, Miss Lindfors often earned attention for her sexual politics and lifestyle as well as for her work. She described her colorful life to critical acclaim in a 1981 autobiography, “Viveka . . . Viveca.” One of the vignettes in the book humorously describes her, at the age of 54, refereeing a squabble between her 5-year-old granddaughter and a 61-year-old suitor concerning who would get to sleep with grandmother that night. “I was wild. I was ahead of my time in feeling sexual liberation,” she candidly told The Times in 1975. “I married my first husband because the gossips said no man would ever want to marry anyone as promiscuous as I was.”
The tall and talented brunette beauty, born Elsa Viveca Torstensdotter Lindfors in Uppsala, trained at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater and appeared in several Swedish films and plays before moving to Hollywood in 1946 under contract to Warner Bros. She made her Hollywood debut in “To the Victor” in 1947.
The actress relocated to New York in 1952 for her Broadway breakthrough role as “Anastasia,” and because of what became her longest marriage (18 years), to playwright-director George Tabori.
Miss Lindfors commuted between the coasts for decades, never equaling the stardom of her Swedish role models Ingrid Bergman and Greta Garbo, yet always finding producers eager to hire her and audiences willing to enjoy her work. Among her memorable Broadway plays along with “Anastasia” were “Miss Julie” in 1955, “Brecht on Brecht” in 1961, and her later one-woman shows. She won acting honors at the Berlin Film Festival for the feature films “Four in a Jeep” in 1951 and “No Exit” in 1962. Her myriad other films include “No Sad Songs for Me,” “Moonfleet,” “The King of Kings,” “The Way We Were,” “Welcome to L.A.,” “Creepshow” and last year’s “Stargate.” Unlike many beautiful actresses, Miss Lindfors worried little about aging, even when Tabori left her for a much younger woman. “Any qualms I might have had about advancing years were dispelled a long time ago when I decided not to be put down by America’s worship of youth,” she told The Times on her 53rd birthday.
Miss Lindfors is survived by her daughter; two sons, John Tabori of Washington, D.C., and Kristoffer Siegel Tabori of Los Angeles, and four grandchildren. Memorial services will be planned early next year in New York and Sweden, Lena Tabori said.
The above obituary can also be accessed online here.
The Halliday Brand, poster, Viveca Lindfors, 1957. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)Journey Into Light, poster, Sterling Hayden, Viveca Lindfors, 1951. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)Digital Camera
Dack Rambo was born in 1941 in California. He and his brother Dirk were child and then later teenage actors. They both played in “The New Loretta Young Show”. He made many television appearances including “Dallas” and “Murder She Wrote”. His film roles include 1970’s “Which Way to the Front” and “Rich and Famous” in 1981. Sadly his brother was killed in a road accident and Dack Rambo himself died in 1994 at the age of 52.
His IMDB mini biography:
Dack (given name Norman) and identical twin brother, Dirk Rambo (Orman), were born in sunny California in 1941. Dack’s noticeable difference was a mole on his left cheek. Both happened upon an acting career, at age 21, after being discovered by Loretta Young for her TV show, while sitting in a church pew.
The sons of Lester and Beatrice Rambo, the brothers also had another brother and sister, Bill and Beverly. Dack’s early training began as a student of Vincent Chase and Lee Strasberg, and both boys found employment, following the one-season stint on Loretta’s TV show, in 1963. While Dirk found success on episodic-TV (The Virginian (1962), Dragnet 1967 (1967)), Dack went on to a couple of other TV series, including Never Too Young (1965) and The Guns of Will Sonnett (1967). Dirk was tragically killed in 1967, after being struck by a drunken driver.
A stunned Dack ventured on, however, and eventually found a secure place for his dark good looks in 70s and 80s glossy drama and secondary action. He played many a calculating lover in both daytime (All My Children (1970), Another World (1964)) and prime-time (Dallas (1978)) soaps, while showing off his athletic skills in such outdoor adventure series as Sword of Justice (1978). Later in his career, he worked up a few action leads in low-budget filming. In 1991, while appearing on Another World (1964), Dack discovered he had contracted AIDS and made a courageous decision to retire in order to focus on awareness of this deadly disease. He was extremely candid as to his bisexuality and detrimental lifestyle, advocating safe sex and helping to establish an international data bank for AIDS research. He died of complications in 1994 at age 52.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
His IMDB biography can also be accessed online here.
Young Bess, poster, Stewart Granger, Deborah Kerr, Jean Simmons, Charles Laughton, 1953. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Deborak Kerr is rightly regarded as one of the most foremost of British actresses to reach true international stardom. Her CV of both British and U.S. films is extremely impressive. She was born in Glasgow in 1921. She originally trained as a ballet dancer with the Sadler Well’s Ballet Company. However she changed careers and in 1940 made her first film “Contraband” when she 19. She was soon in major roles in such films as “Major Barbara”, “Hatter’s Castle”, “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” and “Black Narcissus” in 1947. She then went to Hollywood and had to wait a few years before she obtained topflight roles. This was achieved with “From Here to Eternity” in 1953 and for the next eight years she gave some terrific performances e.g. “Tea and Sympathy”, “The King and I”, “An Affair to Remember”, “Seperate Tables” and “The Sundowners”. In the late 60’s her cinema career was waning and she returned with great success to the stage. She did though in the 80’s return to film with “The Assam Garden”. Sadly illness curtailed her later career and she died in 2007.
Her “Independent” obituary:
One of the few British actresses to become an internationally successful film star, in 1957 Deborah Kerr was named “The world’s most famous actress” by Photoplay magazine. She had had a highly successful career in British cinema before being poached by Hollywood. There she was regarded as little more than classy, patrician decoration before she famously shocked the town – and many of her admirers – with a steamy performance as the unfaithful wife of an army captain in From Here to Eternity (1953).
Her beach scene with Burt Lancaster, in which they make love as the raging surf envelops them, has become an iconic screen sequence, imitated and parodied as well as celebrated. Kerr’s accomplished skill and versatility resulted in six Oscar nominations (the most for any star in the Best Actress category who has not actually won).
Her many memorable performances included the bewitchingly determined Irish spy of I See a Dark Stranger (1946), the repressed nun of Black Narcissus (1947), the downtrodden sheep-drover’s wife in The Sundowners (1960) and the ambiguous governess in The Innocents (1961). Perhaps best of all she is remembered for her work in two perennial classics of romantic cinema, the musical The King and I (1956), and the tear-jerker supreme, An Affair to Remember (1957). “I adore not being me,” she once said. “I’m not very good at being me. That’s why I adore acting so much.”
The daughter of a civil engineer, she was born Deborah Jane Kerr-Trimmer in 1921 in Helensburgh, overlooking the Firth of Clyde. As a child, she studied dance at a drama school in Bristol run by her aunt, winning a scholarship to Ninette de Valois’s Sadler’s Wells ballet group, with whom she made her London stage début at the age of 17.
Watching the progress of her fellow pupils Margot Fonteyn and Beryl Grey convinced Kerr that she would never be a great ballerina, so she concentrated on developing her acting skills and in 1939 did walk-on roles in several Shakespearean productions at the open-air theatre in Regent’s Park. She was spotted there by the powerful film agent John Gliddon, who signed her to a five-year contract.
Michael Powell’s lively thriller Contraband (1940) would have marked her screen début, but her role was excised from the final print. “The film was full of restaurants and night-clubs,” Powell wrote, “in one of which was an adorable little cigarette girl, all lovely liquid eyes and nice long legs, who had a tiny scene with Conrad Veidt that ended up on the cutting room floor.” Kerr was acting with the Oxford Repertory Players when spotted while dining at the Mayfair Hotel by a producer, Gabriel Pascal. Kerr recalled,
He came over to me and said, “Sweet virgin, are you an actress?” I said, “Yes,” and he said, “Then take down your hair, you look like a tart!”
Publicising her as “The Botticelli Blonde”, Pascal cast her as a Salvation Army officer, Jenny Hill, in Major Barbara (1940), based on Bernard Shaw’s play and starring Wendy Hiller and Rex Harrison. Kerr’s Jenny was described by her biographer Eric Braun as “a signpost to the kind of part in which she would excel – moral fortitude concealed by a frail appearance”. Her impressive performance led to her being given the leading role of Sally Hardcastle in a screen adaptation (much delayed by British censors) of Walter Greenwood’s bleak story of the working-class, Love on the Dole (1941), directed by John Baxter. Kerr’s spirited yet touching performance as a girl who becomes the mistress of a wealthy bookie to escape poverty established that a major British star had arrived.
Leading roles in Penn of Pennsylvania (1941), Hatter’s Castle (1941) and The Day will Dawn (1942) followed, before the first of her film classics, Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). When Wendy Hiller, originally cast, became pregnant and had to drop out, Powell gave to Kerr the challenging assignment of the colonel’s ideal woman, who comes into his life in three separate incarnations over a 40-year period. Each incarnation was given individuality by her incisive playing. During the filming, she and Powell became lovers. “I realised,” said Powell, “that Deborah was both the ideal and the flesh-and-blood woman whom I had been searching for.” The film was controversial (Churchill thought it would ruin wartime morale, and the British army refused co-operation), but it proved an artistic and commercial triumph.
Powell had hoped to reunite Kerr and Roger Livesey, who had played Blimp, in his next film, A Canterbury Tale (1944), but Gabriel Pascal had sold her contract to MGM. According to Powell, his affair with Kerr ended when she made it clear to him that she would acccept an offer to go to Hollywood if one was made.
Her first film for MGM paired her with Robert Donat in the British production Perfect Strangers (1945), about a dull couple whose personalities are changed by their wartime experiences. Stewart Granger, who was filming Caesar and Cleopatra at the time, recounts in his autobiography Sparks Fly Upward (1981) that during this period Kerr (whom he described as “devastatingly beautiful”) seduced him in the back of a taxi. Whenever this was mentioned to Kerr by interviewers, she would smile wryly and reply, “What a gallant man!”
In 1945 she and Granger made an eight-week tour of theatres of war in Belgium, Holland and France starring in Patrick Hamilton’s thriller Gaslight. During the tour Granger introduced her to the Battle of Britain pilot Anthony Bartley, who became her first husband. Kerr’s next film was Launder and Gilliatt’s thriller I See a Dark Stranger (1946), in which she was Bridie Quilty, a high-spirited Irish lass. With Kerr and her co-players Trevor Howard and Raymond Huntley all making the most of the witty script, it was a delight.
MGM then loaned her to Powell to star in Black Narcissus (1947). He had initially thought of trying to lure Greta Garbo out of retirement to play the part of troubled Sister Superior, in charge of a group of nuns who try to establish a community from a dilapidated palace in a remote part of the high Himalayas (created entirely at Pinewood). Black Narcissus was a hit in the US as well as the UK, and Kerr won the New York Film Critics’ Award as Actress of the Year. MGM was now ready to launch her American career, and she departed for Hollywood with her husband.
Advertisements for her first film, The Hucksters (1948), proclaimed her as “Deborah Kerr (rhymes with star)” and her photograph was on the cover of Time magazine, tellingly set against a background of English roses. The screenwriter Luther Davis recalled, “The studio were rather in awe of Deborah, treating her like this great legitimate actress who’d deigned to join MGM.” The Hucksters, a satire on radio advertising, was a moderate success, but it was followed by If Winter Comes (1949), a clumsily told melodrama that received limited release.
Kerr had the meaty role of a wife who descends into alcoholism in the screen version of Robert Morley’s play Edward, My Son (1949), and her uncompromising performance won her an Oscar nomination, but the downbeat tale, co-starring Spencer Tracy, did not attract large audiences. Her next film, Please Believe Me (1949), was a minor comedy with Peter Lawford and, unhappy, she told the studio head Dore Schary that there was a story she would love to do, The African Queen.
He replied that the property was owned by Warners, but that he had another African tale, King Solomon’s Mines (1950). “The next thing I knew I was on location 25,000 miles into darkest Africa.” Co-starring Stewart Granger, the film was a great success, and was followed by another blockbuster, the big-budget epic Quo Vadis? (1951), to which she brought her best patrician nobility as Lygia, the Christian slave girl. She was stoic again in Richard Thorpe’s excellent remake of The Prisoner of Zenda (1952).
She was happy to play the small role of Portia in Julius Caesar (1953), but was then given the role of Catherine Parr in Young Bess (1953), in which both she and Stewart Granger played second fiddle to the performances of Jean Simmons (as Bess) and Charles Laughton (as Henry VIII). “I came over to act,” she said, “but it turned out all I had to do was to be high-minded, long-suffering, white-gloved and decorative.”
After asking for MGM to let her freelance between assignments, she was delighted when a new agent, Bert Allenberg, persuaded the Columbia chief Harry Cohn to cast her as Karen Holmes in From Here to Eternity when Joan Crawford, originally given the part, walked out after requesting her own cameraman. Under Fred Zinnemann’s direction, Kerr effectively conveyed the sad, quiet desperation of her character, an alcoholic nymphomaniac. Said Kerr, “I studied voice for three months to get rid of my accent and I changed my hair to blonde. I knew I could be sexy if I had to.”
A third Oscar nomination resulted, and she consolidated her new status with her début on the Broadway stage in Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy (1953), as Laura Reynolds, the schoolmaster’s wife who offers compassion to a troubled pupil suspected of homosexuality. In the controversial closing scene, she seduces the boy for his own good, and has one of the most famous closing lines in modern drama, “Years from now, when you talk about this – and you will – be kind.” The performance earned her two Donaldson Awards, (Best Actress and Best Début), the Variety Drama Critics’ Poll, and when she toured in the play she won Chicago’s Sarah Siddons Award.
She returned to the screen in Edward Dmytryk’s British-made The End of the Affair (1955), and followed this with one of her greatest triumphs, as Anna Leonowens, the governess who travels to Siam to teach the King’s many children, in The King and I, Walter Lang’s screen version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. Victorian determination sparked her spirited exchanges with the King (Yul Brynner), genteel warmth pervaded her scenes with the children, and the voice of Marni Nixon blended seamlessly with Kerr’s own recitative introductions to the songs, resulting in one of Hollywood’s finest dubbing achievements. Kerr was nominated for an Oscar, and Brynner won one for his forceful portrayal.
In 1957 Kerr was seen in the screen version of Tea and Sympathy. Although stylishly directed by Vincente Minnelli, the project inevitably suffered from the screen censorship of the time. Kerr’s Hollywood career was now at its peak. She starred with William Holden in The Proud and Profane (1956), Holden describing her as “the most no-problem star I ever worked with, and she has a salty sense of humour which surprises everyone”. She played a nun again, teamed with Robert Mitchum (“Such a wonderful actor”) in Heaven Knows, Mr Allison (1956), for which she received her fourth Oscar nomination, then starred with Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember (1957), one of her best-loved films. As a couple who fall in love during an ocean trip, and promise to meet in six months if they feel the same, Grant and Kerr merge a delightfully light bantering touch with suggestions of genuine passion.
The following year Kerr won her fifth Oscar nomination, for her depiction in Separate Tables of a dowdy spinster cowed by a domineering mother. It is one of the actress’s most debated performances, detractors finding it too studied, though few will deny the frisson of the moment when she finally defies her mother and consorts with the disgraced, phony major (David Niven, in another instance where Kerr’s co-star won a statuette but she did not). She had an entirely different role with Niven in Otto Preminger’s under-rated version of Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1958), playing the glamorous widow Anne, whom Niven’s daughter (Jean Seberg) sees as a threat to the life-style she enjoys with her father.
She partnered Brynner again in the cold war thriller The Journey (1958), co-written by Peter Viertel, who was to become her second husband. She played the columnist Sheilah Graham in Beloved Infidel (1959), based on Graham’s account of her tempestuous love affair with the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, but the film was diluted when Gregory Peck agreed to play Fitzgerald only on condition that the first part of the script, dealing with Graham’s fascinating rise to fame, was excised.
In 1960 Kerr submerged completely any trace of her patrician persona with an immensely moving depiction of a downtrodden sheep-drover’s wife in Fred Zinnemann’s The Sundowners. It features one of the most memorable moments in Kerr’s career, as her weatherbeaten Ida, sitting on a station platform, sees an elegant woman adjusting her make-up in a train compartment, and the ladies’ eyes meet in mutual rapport.
It is the performance which many think should at last have won her the Oscar – it was the year Elizabeth Taylor won for Butterfield 8. “I should have won that year,” she told the writer Christopher Frayling, “I should’ve!” It is an undoubted miscarriage of justice that Kerr was not made a Dame, though she was appointed CBE in 1997. She won the New York Critics’ Awards for her performances in Heaven Knows, Mr Allison and Separate Tables, was given a British Film Institute Fellowship in 1986, and received a Bafta Special Award in 1991.
In 1961 Kerr made Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, arguably (with Robert Wise’s The Haunting) one of the two best ghost stories of the Sixties. She was superb as the enigmatic governess who comes to believe that her two charges are possessed by an evil spirit in this superb transcription of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. Although she was fine as the mysterious Miss Madrigal, a governess with a criminal past, in The Chalk Garden (1963), and particularly as the kind and gentle artist in The Night of the Iguana (1964), based on Tennessee Williams’s play, a string of second-rate movies caused her career to dim in the mid-Sixties.
Marriage on the Rocks (1965), Eye of the Devil (1966), in which she replaced Kim Novak, Casino Royale (1967) and Prudence and the Pill (1968) were all poorly received, and John Frankenheimer’s The Gypsy Moths (1969) pleased critics more than audiences. It was her last film for 13 years, Kerr announcing her retirement from films and stating afterwards, “I didn’t want to do disaster movies, ending up in an airplane at the bottom of the sea.”
She returned to the theatre in 1972, recreating her role in Separate Tables in a one-performance Midnight Matinee in honour of Sir Terence Rattigan. Later that year she had a personal success in a West End production of The Day After the Fair, an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s short story “On the Western Circuit”. The following year she toured the United States and Canada in the same play. In 1975 she starred on Broadway in Edward Albee’s short-lived Seascape, and in London she played the title role in Shaw’s Candida (1977). She returned to film in a television movie of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution (1982).
She was honoured by the Cannes Film Festival in 1984, and the following year she made her last feature film, The Assam Garden. In a revival of Emlyn Williams’s The Corn is Green (1985), she portrayed the admirable school-teacher Miss Moffat who recognises the talent in one of her miner pupils, but the run was marred by apparent nerves and fluffing of lines. On television she had particular success with the mini-series A Woman of Substance (1983), sharing with Jenny Seagrove the role of the founder of a department store dynasty.
In 1994 Kerr was finally awarded an honorary Oscar. Elia Kazan, who directed her on stage in Tea and Sympathy and on screen in The Arrangement (1968), said,
Deborah Kerr is a great lady. Let that stand by itself. She is also a fine actress, a joy to work with, devoted, understanding and gifted with a sense of humour. She is outstandingly fair to her fellow performers. She is regally handsome. That’s enough. If I say any more it might embarrass her or swell her head. And I wouldn’t want that.
“Cornel Wilde became a competent producer/director/actor, but for years he was a sort of male Maureen O’Hara, confined to medium-budget swashbucklers and action melodramas. Like her, his acting career was at it’s peak in the 40s but unlike her, his charm was limited. Ditto his acting ability. In his marshmallow period, this hardly mattered but in the harsher days of the 50s he had to struggle. It is much to his credit that he staved off oblivion by becoming a director” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years” (1972).
Cornel Wilde was born in 1912 in Hungary. The family moved to New York and he attended college in the city. Laurence Oliver cast him in 1940 in his production of “Romeo and Juliet” with Vivien Leigh. Wilde played the role of Tybalt. He was offered a Hollywood contract. He played many small roles until in 1945 he was cast as Chopin in “A Song to Remember” with Merle Oberon as George Sand. The film was a huge success and Wilde went on to make “Road House”, “The Greatest Show on Earth”, “Leave Her to Heaven” and “Shockproof” among others. Cornel Wilde died in 1989 at the age of 77.
His obituary in “The Los Angeles Times”:
Cornel Wilde, whose athletic abilities first brought him to Hollywood and whose elegant physique, good looks and dramatic talent kept him there for nearly 50 years, died in Los Angeles early Monday.
Wilde, whose film portrayals ranged from the romantic composer Frederic Chopin in “A Song to Remember” (for which he received an Academy Award nomination) to a hunter being tracked down by bloodthirsty African tribesmen in “The Naked Prey,” which he also directed, was 74. Wilde, who was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Sept. 2 suffering from leukemia, died shortly after midnight, said hospital spokeswoman Paula Correia. His son, Cornel Wilde Jr., and daughter, Wendy, were at his side.
During his long and varied career, which spanned the years 1940 to 1987, the aristocratic actor, writer and director was involved in more than 50 movies. “I realized long ago that I could not depend on luck to bring me success,” Wilde once said. “I worked hard, extra hard to improve my chance by increasing my abilities and my experience. It was my goal to accomplish, in my life, something of value and to do it with self-respect and integrity.”
He made one of the first films ever dealing with environmental pollution (“No Blade of Grass” in 1970) and portrayed Revolutionary War spies, Omar Khayam, Constantine the Great, Robin Hood’s son and aesthetic protagonists ranging from the consumptive Chopin to the eccentric Lord Byron. He moved from studio to studio in quest of satisfying roles and from in front of the camera to behind it when he couldn’t find producers and directors who agreed with his point of view.
“Acting is not just ‘another day, another dollar,’ ” he told columnist Hedda Hopper as long ago as 1954. “If I hate a script or think it’s foolish or in bad taste, I’m miserable.”
A linguist with a command of Hungarian, French, German, Italian and Russian, he was born in New York City to Hungarian-Czech parents but spent much of his formative years in Europe, where he became interested in fencing.
After his Hungarian father, who traveled Europe for a cosmetics firm, finally settled in the United States in 1932, Cornelius Louis Wilde studied at City College of New York, intending to become a physician. In 1935, he won a scholarship to Columbia University, where he hoped to study surgery but instead abandoned his classes after appearances in several stock theater companies whetted his interest in things dramatic. He also gave up his membership on the U.S. fencing team that was headed to the 1936 Berlin Olympics; yet it was his skill with a foil that would eventually lead him to Broadway and then to motion pictures.
After several modest stage productions in New York and on the road, he was hired as a fencing instructor and featured player (Tybalt) in the Laurence Olivier-Vivien Leigh stage production of “Romeo and Juliet.” Because of the stars’ movie commitments, some of the play’s rehearsals were held in Hollywood and Wilde was offered, and accepted, a Warner Bros. contract. Originally he was cast as a heavy or lead in B pictures, but his dark good looks and a change in studios (to 20th Century Fox) earned him feature parts in such pictures as “Lady With Red Hair” in 1940 and “High Sierra,” in 1941, where he played an apprentice hoodlum to Humphrey Bogart.
But it was as Chopin opposite Merle Oberon as George Sand that Wilde broke out of the pack. “When ‘A Song to Remember’ came along (1944), I begged for a test,” he told Hopper. “The powers that be wouldn’t consider it. ‘You’re too healthy’ (to play a tubercular musician).” Finally after three months of testing what Wilde described as “every other actor” in town, he was given the role and received an Oscar nomination. (One critic later said he grew paler and wanner with each reel while fingering an impressive sound track on a mute piano. The pianist off screen was Jose Iturbi.) But the success proved a Pyrrhic victory, for afterward producers came to consider him fit only for costume dramas.
He stayed in costume for “The Bandit of Sherwood Forest” and “Forever Amber,” appeared in such melodramas as “Roadhouse,” and “The Walls of Jericho” and then made the Big Top classic “The Greatest Show on Earth” for Cecil B. Demille in 1952. But the roles had taken on what seemed to Wilde to be a certain unsettling sameness, and he abandoned what was at the time a $150,000-a-picture career to become a writer-producer-director. He formed, with his second wife actress Jean Wallace (they had performed together in “Star of India”), Theodora Productions, and in they 1955 produced “Storm Fear.” The other pictures he starred in, produced or directed included “The Big Combo,” “The Devil’s Hairpin,” “Maracaibo,” “Sword of Lancelot,” “Beach Red” and “The Naked Prey,” in which he spent most of the 94-minute film wearing a loincloth and brandishing a spear as savages pursued him as they would a lion.
Despite the plot’s naivete, it was nominated for an Oscar for its script.
The “Los Angeles” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Original Cinema Quad Poster; Movie Poster; Film PosterTreasure Of The Golden Condor, poster, poster art, top l-r: Cornel Wilde, Constance Smith, 1953. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Gary Lockwood was born in Van Nuys, California in 1937. He made is film acting debut in a bit part in the Western “Warlock” in 1959 with Richard Widmark and Dorothy Malone. In 1961 he, Brett Halsey and Barry Coe starred in the TV series “Follow the Sun”. He made two films with Elvis Presley, “Wild in the Country” in 1962 and the following year “It Happened at the World’s Fair”. He is perhaps best known for his role as Dr Frank Poole in “2001: A Space Oddity” in 1968. Interview with Gary Lockwood & Sally Kellerman here.
Mildred Dunnock seemed to be very quiet almost birdlike in her characterisations. She could at times be very moving as in her performance as Elvis Presley’s mother in “Love Me Tender” and as Mother Christophre the strict but kindly nun in chagre of the novices in “The Nun’s Story”. She was born in 1901 in Baltimore. She made her film debut in 1945 repeating her stage role in “The Corn is Green”. Her other films include “Peyton Place”, “Baby Doll” and the woman in a wheelchair who is pushec down the stairs by the giggling psychopath Richard Widmark in the classic film noir “Kiss of Death”. Mildred Dunnock died in 1991 at the ago of 90. Her obituary in the “New York Times” can be accessed here.
TCM Overview:
When Mildred Dunnock quietly demanded that “Attention must be paid” to Willy Loman in the 1949 Broadway premiere of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” opposite Lee J. Cobb, her indelible performance as Linda Loman became the embodiment of Miller’s idealized mother figure: loving, supportive mother and wife and the family’s moral balast. She repeated her landmark performance in the disappointing 1951 Laslo Benedek film opposite Fredric March (winning her first Oscar nomination) and again opposite Cobb in the brilliant 1966 TV adaptation (directed by Alex Segal) and for the Caedmon recording in the 1960s.
Formerly a schoolteacher, Dunnock made her stage debut in 1932 and won acclaim on Broadway in 1940 as a Welsh teacher in Emlyn Williams’ autobiographical drama “The Corn Is Green”, a role she reprised in her film debut in 1945. Although she is memorable in the brief role as the wheelchair bound victim whom Richard Widmark pushes down the stairs in “Kiss of Death” (1948), Dunnock gave her finest performances as seemingly genteel spinster types who display surprising inner strength and sympathy.
Dunnock studied acting with Actors Studio founders Lee Strasberg, Robert Lewis and Elia Kazan and after directing her in “Death of a Saleman”, Kazan repeatedly cast her as a figure of quiet moral authority in such films as “Viva Zapata!” (1952) and as Aunt Rose Comfort in Tennessee Williams’ “Baby Doll” (1956) for which she received her second supporting actress Oscar nomination.
Evidently a favorite actress of Williams as well as Kazan, she continued her association with the playwright on Broadway, creating the role of Big Mama in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1955), appearing in “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore” (1963) and starring in a 1966 regional revival of “The Glass Menagerie”. She was also featured as Aunt Nonnie in Richard Brooks’ 1962 film adaptation of “Sweet Bird of Youth”.
Although she didn’t begin acting professionally until she was in her 30s, Dunnock maintained an active career as a superb, understated character actress on stage, screen and TV. Her other notable films include Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Trouble With Harry” (1955), “Love Me Tender” (1956), “Peyton Place” (1957), “Butterfield 8” (1960) and John Ford’s last feature “Seven Women” (1966).
She won acting honors at the Berlin Film Festival for the feature films “Four in a Jeep” in 1951 and “No Exit” in 1962. Her myriad other films include “No Sad Songs for Me,” “Moonfleet,” “The King of Kings,” “The Way We Were,” “Welcome to L.A.,” “Creepshow” and last year’s “Stargate.” Unlike many beautiful actresses, Miss Lindfors worried little about aging, even when Tabori left her for a much younger woman. “Any qualms I might have had about advancing years were dispelled a long time ago when I decided not to be put down by America’s worship of youth,” she told The Times on her 53rd birthday.
