Irene Tsu was born in 1943 in Shangai in China. She was raised in San Francisco. She was a featured dancer in the film “Flower Drum Song” in 1961. Her other films include “Take Her, She’s Mine” with James Stewart and Sandra Dee, “Paradise Hawaiian Style” with Elvis Presley and “The Green Berets” with John Wayne.
TCM Overview:
Irene Tsu was an actress who was no stranger to being featured in numerous film roles throughout her Hollywood career. Early on in her acting career, Irene Tsu landed roles in various films, including the Jack Lemmon comedy adaptation “Under the Yum Yum Tree” (1963), the James Stewart comedic adaptation “Take Her, She’s Mine” (1963) and the Shirley MacLaine comedy “John Goldfarb, Please Come Home” (1964). She also appeared in “Seven Women” (1965), the Annette Funicello comedy “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini” (1965) and the Elvis Presley musical “Paradise Hawaiian Style” (1966). Her film career continued throughout the seventies and the eighties in productions like “Hot Potato” (1975) with Jim Kelly, “Paper Tiger” (1975) and “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” (1986). She held additional roles in television including a part on “The Single Guy” (NBC, 1995-97). She also was featured in the TV movies “Widow’s Kiss” (HBO, 1995-96) and “Tell Me No Secrets” (ABC, 1996-97). Most recently, Irene Tsu acted on “Law & Order: LA” (NBC, 2010-11).
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
For article on Irene Tsu by in Cinema Retro Tom Lisanti, please click here.
Beatrice Straight obituary in “The Telegraph” in 2001.
Beatrice Straight was born in Old Westbury, New York in 1914 into a wealthy family. She made her Broadway debut in 1939 in the play “Possessed”. Most of her career was spent on stage and television with only sporodic film appearances. Her film debut was in 1952 in “Phone Call from a Stranger”. She was excellent as the Mother Superior in “The Nun’s Story” in 1959. She won an Acadmey Award for her performance opposite William Holden in “Network”. She is also remembered for her role as Lynda Carter’s mother in “Wonder Woman” on television. Beatrice Straight was married to the actor Peter Cookson. She died in 2001 at the age of 86 in Los Angeles.
Her obituary from the “Telegraph”:
BEATRICE STRAIGHT, who has died in Los Angeles aged 86, won an Academy Award for best supporting actress for her portrayal of William Holden’s long suffering wife in Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976). The film tells the story of a network news commentator who starts to speak his mind on live television, and gave Americans the catchphrase “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more!”. Beatrice Straight’s role of a wife struggling to keep her sanity after being left for a younger woman was one of her most high-profile Hollywood performances: she later said that “nobody knew from where I came before Network, and afterwards few cared where I went”. Her other film roles included Dr Lesh, the investigator of the paranormal in Poltergeist (1982) and Mother Christophe in The Nun’s Story (1959), with Audrey Hepburn.
Beatrice Whitney Straight was born on August 2 1914 at Old Westbury, Long Island, New York. Her father was a diplomat, while her mother was a Whitney dynasty heiress and cousin to Gloria Vanderbilt. Beatrice Straight was sent to private schools in England and Scotland, and retained a fondness for Britain. She decided early on to pursue a career in acting and had a string of excellent teachers, including Michael Chekhov. She made her Broadway debut in 1935 in Bitter Oleander. Beatrice Straight’s portrayal of Lady Macduff in Macbeth (1945) was described by one critic as “As good as it gets.” After this, she was the lead in The Heiress; her co-star was the actor Peter Cookson, whom she later married. In 1953, Beatrice Straight was awarded a Tony for best supporting actress for her portrayal of a Puritan accused of witchcraft in the original Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
But she soon felt that “Hollywood was where it was at” and she and Cookson decided to try their luck there. She later remarked: “Marriage to actors seldom work as one partner often gets jealous of the roles given to the other and vice versa. Neither one of us were big stars so that helped.” Beatrice Straight’s first part was in Phone Call from a Stranger (1952), which starred Bette Davis. There followed television roles in Love of Life, a long-running soap opera, and as Cynthia Fortman in Special Delivery, part of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series. Other roles during the 1950s included Goneril in an ABC adaptation of King Lear (1953) and parts in the 1956 films Patterns and The Silken Affair, with David Niven. During the 1960s, Beatrice Straight concentrated on her family, but appeared in The Young Lovers (1964) and gave a wonderfully over-the-top performance as Dr Martha Richards in the television series Mission Impossible (1966). Beatrice Straight won a legion of fans with appearances as the “Queen Mother” in the wildly camp series Wonder Woman in 1976. The next year she helped to found an acting school in New York, where she and Cookson lectured between filming. Most of Beatrice Straight’s roles during the 1970s were on television; she received an Emmy nomination for her role as the matriarch in the mini-series The Dain Curse (1978).
In 1985, she played Rose Kennedy in Robert Kennedy & His Times, and had a long-running stint in St Elsewhere. Her final role was as Goldie Hawn’s mother in Deceived (1991). She married, in 1949, Peter Cookson; he died in 1990. They had one son.
A classically trained actress with extensive stage experience, Beatrice Straight made her mark on film late in her career, but did so with indelible performances that made the most of her keen intelligence and aristocratic manner. A member of the now legendary Group Theater from its inception, Straight won a Tony award for Best Actress in 1953 for her performance as Elizabeth Proctor in “The Crucible.” She also worked frequently in television, beginning in the medium’s early live broadcast era and appearing consistently in TV movies and series until the end of the 1980s. She had appeared in just four feature films before she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Louis Schumacher in Sydney Lumet’s “Network” (1975). Straight held the record for the briefest performance to win an Oscar – a scant five minutes and 40 seconds of screen time. Regardless, in a dazzling display of acting prowess, Straight portrayed the full gamut of the devastated Schumacher’s emotions in a single, intense scene in which her husband, (William Holden), confesses to an affair. The Oscar win brought Straight greater recognition, but also typecast the versatile actress for the first time in her career. From that point, she predominantly played severe matriarchal roles, such as the brittle Dr. Lesh in “Poltergeist” (1982). Having honed her craft in a long and celebrated stage career, Beatrice Straight established a remarkable screen presence as a character actress with finely drawn performances that were as powerful as they were rare.
Beatrice Whitney Straight was born on Aug. 2, 1914 in Old Westbury, NY, the daughter of investment banker Willard Dickerman, a business associate of J.P. Morgan who provided the initial financing for the long-running political magazine The New Republic, and Dorothy Payne, whose family was one of New York’s wealthiest and most socially prestigious. When Dickerman died of influenza on the front lines of WWI, her mother married English agronomist Leonard Elmhirst and raised Straight in both London and New York. An early interest in theater led to extensive acting training with legendary teachers including Michael Chekov, and the Group Theater’s Robert Lewis. Straight was a member of the Group Theater from its founding, and her classmates included Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Patricia O’Neal. She made her first appearance on Broadway at the age of 21 in the 1935 production of “Bitter Oleander,” and over the following two decades she rose to the top of her profession with a series of critically-acclaimed performances, including Lady MacDuff in Michael Redgrave’s 1948 production of “MacBeth,” and steadfast puritan Elizabeth Proctor in the 1953 production of “The Crucible,” for which she won a Tony award for Best Actress. Straight began acting in television in the medium’s early live days on such series as “Somerset Maugham Theater” (CBS, 1950-51; NBC, 1951) and “Lights Out” (NBC, 1946-1952). In 1952, she also broke into feature films playing a devoted widow mourning Michael Rennie in “Phone Call from a Stranger.”
Straight worked almost constantly on television throughout the 1950s and ’60s in seminal series like “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” (CBS, 1955-1960; NBC, 1960-62), “Route 66” (CBS, 1960-64) and “Mission: Impossible” (CBS, 1966-1973), as well as in the 1953 broadcast of “King Lear” starring Orson Welles (CBS). Her work in film was more sporadic, however. Despite the positive reception of her performance in “Phone Call from a Stranger,” it was four years before she would appear on the big screen again. “Patterns” (1956), starring Van Heflin and written by Rod Serling, featured Straight as young engineer Heflin’s worried wife. That same year, she also appeared in “The Silken Affair” (1956), a lackluster British comedy starring David Niven. It was another three years before she appeared as Mother Christophe in “The Nun’s Story” (1959), starring Audrey Hepburn. The latter film was nominated for eight Academy Awards including Best Picture, but there would be another long absence from the movies before Straight returned in “The Young Lovers” (1964), starring Peter Fonda, and another eight before she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in “Network” (1976). It was the briefest performance to ever win an Oscar, with just under six minutes of screen time, but the economy of the performance was perhaps its greatest strength, showcasing Straight’s startlingly genuine spectrum of emotions in a single scene in which her husband, played by William Holden, confesses to an affair with a younger woman.
By John CryeThe above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Having garnered popular attention after such a long and varied career, the then 62-year-old Straight found herself typecast for the first time, playing imperious, often emotionally brittle older women. She had embodied that type on television on “The New Adventures of Wonder Woman” (NBC, 1975-79) playing the Queen Mother of the Amazons, and in her first starring role in a television series, playing the matriarch of a wealthy California family on the short-lived “King’s Crossing” (ABC, 1982). She also began to accept more roles in film, though her selection of material was strictly limited by her desire to work solely with producers, directors, and actors of the highest caliber. “The Formula” (1980) starring George C. Scott and Marlon Brando, Franco Zeffirelli’s “Endless Love” (1981) and Sydney Lumet’s “Power” (1981) were among the few to satisfy Straight’s stringent criteria. Easily her best-known role from that later period was the prickly but comforting paranormal investigator Dr. Lesh in the Steven Spielberg-produced horror film “Poltergeist” (1982). In 1985, she delivered a powerful performance as another imperious matriarch, Rose Kennedy, in the miniseries “Robert Kennedy and His Times” (CBS, 1985). After a final feature appearance playing Goldie Hawn’s mother in the psychological thriller “Deceived” (1991), Straight retired from acting at the age of 77. She died on April 7, 2001 in Los Angeles from pneumonia, following a period of declining health due to Alzheimer’s disease.
The seductive brunette Elaine Stewart, who has died aged 81, may have lacked that ineffable essence that makes up star quality, but she had enough allure to attract attention in several glossy Hollywood movies in the 1950s, both in leading parts and noteworthy supporting roles. Among the best of the latter were her brief though memorable appearances in two films directed by Vincente Minnelli.
She was both bad and beautiful in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) as Lila, a wannabe film star, hoping to make it by sleeping with Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas), the studio head. When told that Shields is a great man, Lila responds, “There are no great men, buster. There’s only men.” The scene which lingers most in the mind is when Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner), who has just triumphed in a Shields movie, leaves a party to be with him at his Hollywood mansion. While she is embracing Shields, Lila’s shadow looms over them. Then Georgia notices Lila at the top of the stairs, barefoot, wearing a slinky dress, a martini glass in hand. “I thought you said you were going to get rid of her quick,” says Lila. “The picture’s finished, Georgia. You’re business, I’m company.”
Her sequence in Brigadoon (1954) begins with a violent cut from the picturesque Scottish village in the Highlands to a bustling Manhattan bar where Stewart, as Gene Kelly’s Park Avenue fiancee, is chatting away about the wedding and shopping. Kelly, whose inner ear is listening to the music to which he had danced with a Scottish lass (Cyd Charisse), doesn’t hear a word the self-absorbed Stewart is saying. A stark contrast is created between the two women: the dream girl and the real thing. Ironically, unlike Kelly, Minnelli was pleased to get away from the feyness and painted scenery of the wilds of Scotland to revel in the noisy bar where the metropolitan Stewart is quite at home.
She was born Elsy Steinberg in New Jersey, one of five children of German-Jewish parents. After a few jobs, she was taken on in her late teens by the Conover modelling agency in New York, which worked with the leading magazines of the day. She was soon getting photo layouts, one of which caught the eye of producer Hal B Wallis at Paramount, who cast her as a sexy navy nurse in the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis comedy Sailor Beware (1952). Stewart made the most of her one scene when she brushes off a pass by Martin, who is told, “When it comes to sailors, she’s colder than a deep freeze.” However, a few minutes later she is seen, to Martin’s astonishment, to be kissing Lewis.
The sequence was enough to land her an MGM contract, and she was offered a few decorative bit parts, culminating in The Bad and the Beautiful. In 1953, she got leading roles opposite Mickey Rooney (A Slight Case of Larceny), Ralph Meeker (Code Two) and Richard Widmark (Take the High Ground!). She is touching in the last of these, her meatiest role, as a neurotic war widow who comes between army sergeants played by Widmark and Karl Malden.
In a very full year, Stewart was also seen losing her head as Anne Boleyn in Young Bess, and was the subject of a Life magazine cover story entitled Budding Starlet Visits the Folks in Jersey. Despite the fact that Stewart had passed the “budding starlet” phase, it was typical of the way she was often characterised.
In 1954, on loan from MGM, she starred in The Adventures of Hajji Baba, a piece of Hollywood exotica, playing, rather more erratically than erotically, an oriental princess being escorted across the desert by John Derek (in the title role) to marry a powerful prince. When told she is extremely innocent, the 24-year-old Stewart replies, “Whose fault is that? Here I am 17 and unwedded. My sisters and cousins were married at 14! I have wasted three years and I will waste no more!”
Having lost a role in The Opposite Sex (1956) to Joan Collins, Stewart left MGM to take on a two-picture deal with Universal, who changed her hair colour to quicksilver blonde. As she told a fan magazine, “To go with my hair, all my jewellery is silver. I have a new silver Mercedes to drive and a silver poodle named Clicquot. I use silver nail polish and eat off silver dishes. And I sleep in a silver bed.”
In the film noir The Tattered Dress (1957), Stewart is seen in the sensational credit sequence having her dress ripped by her lover, then driving home drunk to her jealous husband. The New York Times’s critic, Bosley Crowther, wrote that “Stewart is provocative enough … to distract an avowed misogynist.” She was a little more restrained in Night Passage (1957), in which she tries to stir up past longings in James Stewart on a mission for her wealthy husband. The best of her last few parts was as a treacherous gangster’s moll in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960), which she made after posing nude for Playboy magazine.
Stewart had a short marriage to the actor Bill Carter and, in 1964, married the television producer Merrill Heatter. She retired for a while to start a family, then made a comeback in the 1970s as a host on two TV gameshows, Gambit and High Rollers, on which her husband was executive producer.
Stewart is survived by Merrill and their son, Stewart, and daughter, Gabrielle.
• Elaine Stewart (Elsy Steinberg), actor; born 31 May 1930; died 27 June 2011
The “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Harve Presnell obituary in “The Guardian” in 2009.
“Guardian” obituary:
The Hollywood musical has produced several powerful, handsome baritones, the best of them being Nelson Eddy, Howard Keel and Harve Presnell. Unfortunately, Presnell, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 75, came into the film musical when it was in a rather moribund state. However, he managed to sustain a singing career in stage musicals, where his rich operatic voice could be appreciated, and later, thanks to the Coen brothers’ Fargo (1996), he had a second coming as an imposing character actor on the big screen.
The dramatic strength and beauty of his voice can best be judged in his first film, The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964), in which he played a backwoods prospector who strikes it rich. The 6ft 4in Presnell had created the role of Johnny “Leadville” Brown in Meredith Willson’s musical on Broadway four years previously, opposite Tammy Grimes in the title role of his wife, who survives the sinking of the Titanic. The film version, in which Debbie Reynolds was his buoyant partner, allowed Presnell to open up his lungs and sing I’ll Never Say No and Colorado My Home against the CinemaScope background of Black Canyon National Park in Colorado. According to the Variety critic: “Harve Presnell … makes a generally auspicious screen debut … His fine, booming voice and physical stature make him a valuable commodity for Hollywood.” This was not to be. Presnell was to make only four more feature films during the next three decades, only two of them musicals.
The Unsinkable Molly Brown, poster, Debbie Reynolds (top left), Harve Presnell (right), 1964. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
He was born in Modesto, California. After graduating from Modesto high school, he studied voice at the University of Southern California, although he first went there on a sports scholarship. After university, he performed with the Roger Wagner Chorale and can be heard as soloist on their Christmas album Joy to the World, as well as on Folk Songs of the New World and Folk Songs of the Frontier. In 1960, he recorded the baritone part in Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy.
Willson had heard Presnell singing at a concert in Berlin and immediately suggested him for the part of Johnny Brown on Broadway. The Unsinkable Molly Brown ran for more than 500 performances, with Presnell gaining glowing reviews. After the successful film adaptation, Presnell, his hair dyed blond, was in the misguided swinging 60s version of George Gershwin’s Girl Crazy, retitled When the Girls Meet the Boys (1965), but he got to sing the evergreen Embraceable You. There were no songs in The Glory Guys (1965), a Cavalry vs Indians western that focused mainly on the rivalry between Captain Tom Tryon and scout Presnell over pretty Senta Berger. The two men have a semi-comic fight on a staircase, finally learning mutual respect. Although Presnell lost the girl, his performance won the most plaudits.
Presnell’s last screen musical was Joshua Logan’s elephantine Paint Your Wagon (1969), in which he was the only true singer: his virile rendition of They Call the Wind Maria shows up the inadequate warbling of Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood and Jean Seberg. After a low-budget horror movie, Blood Bath (1975), Presnell’s film career was on hold until 1996.
In the intervening years, Presnell starred in a number of musicals, including the doomed Gone With the Wind at Drury Lane in 1972, in which he had the dubious privilege of playing Rhett Butler, and a revival of Annie Get Your Gun (1977) in San Francisco opposite Reynolds, formerly his Molly Brown. But his biggest success was as Daddy Warbucks in the long-running Annie, in which he toured from 1979 to 1981, and then took over the role on Broadway for two years. He continued to play Warbucks in Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge, which folded during its Washington tryout, and in another version of the story off-Broadway called Annie Warbucks in 1993. Presnell calculated that he played Little Orphan Annie’s millionaire benefactor more than 2,000 times.
For Presnell, 1996 was an annus mirabilis; he appeared in no less than four feature films, and three television shows, including an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. Most significant was his role as Wade Gufstason in Joel and Ethan Coen’s film Fargo. Presnell, who had a dialogue coach to teach him the Minnesotan accent, played William H Macy’s despotic father-in-law. Now bald and with a considerable girth, Presnell was a long way from the handsome young singer of the early 60s. “He actually did a ‘dancin’ in the snow’ musical number but we cut it out for length,” joked Joel Coen.
His other movies of that year were Larger Than Life, The Whole Wide World and The Chamber, in all of which he used his commanding voice playing authoritarian figures. From then on, in marked contrast to the lean years, Presnell was never short of work, whether guest starring in TV series such as Dawson’s Creek (2001) and Andy Barker P.I. (2007), or appearing as General George Marshall in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), or as a congressman in his last film, Evan Almighty (2007).
Presnell is survived by his second wife, Veeva, and six children, three from each of his marriages.
• Harve (George Harvey) Presnell, actor and singer, born 14 September 1933; died 30 June 2009
Barbara Harris was born in Evanston, Illnois in 1935. She began her career on Broadway. She had a waifish pixie appeal in her initial films. Among her relatively few film credits are “A Thousand Clowns” with Jason Robards Jnr in 1965, “Who Is Harry Kellerman And Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Thinga About Me” with Dustin Hoffman, Robert Altman’s brilliant “Nashville” and Alfred Hitchcock’s final film “Family Plot” in 1976.
TCM Overview:
This charming stage-trained comedy specialist had an intermittent but once beguiling screen career dating back to the mid-1960s. Long a critic’s darling, Harris convinces as scatterbrained characters with endearing child-like qualities. This aptitude made her, for a time, something of a thinking man’s Goldie Hawn. Harris made her film debut as social worker Sandra Markowitz (her real name) in the feature version of Herb Gardner’s play “A Thousand Clowns” (1966). Her performances often garnered far better notices than the films that framed them. Harris’ reprisal of her off-Broadway role as what VARIETY called a “nymphet chippie” in “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad” (1967) was deemed the film’s only saving grace in some circles. As a late arriving love interest of discontented rock star Dustin Hoffman in “Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?” (1971), Harris fared better than the star and received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her efforts. British culture mag TIME OUT deemed the “delightful” Harris “wasted” as the married old flame of lecherous film producer Walter Matthau in a segment of Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite” (1971), but she fared well opposite a cranky Jack Lemmon in the James Thurber-inspired “The War Between Men and Women” (1972).
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
A founding member of Chicago’s celebrated Second City Players in 1960, Harris came with them to appear in “From Second City” on the NY stage. Moving to NYC she established a positive reputation on and off-Broadway before alternating between stage and screen. Harris racked up three Tony nominations, including one for her delightful turn as the daffy heroine of “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever” (1966). She won the 1967 Best Actress in a Musical Play Tony for “The Apple Tree,” in which she played multiple roles opposite Alan Alda and Larry Blyden. Two of her most noteworthy feature credits were in memorable 70s films from divergent auteurs Robert Altman and Alfred Hitchcock: in “Nashville” (1975), Harris was Albuquerque, a housewife whose dream of becoming a country-Western singing star seemingly comes true after an unexpected tragedy; in “Family Plot” (1976), she was a phony but basically benign psychic. Hollywood was less kind for the remainder of the decade.
Harris struggled gamely in the Disney comedies “Freaky Friday” (1976) and “The North Avenue Irregulars” (1979) and won some excellent notices as the frustrated wife of a senator (Alan Alda) in “The Seduction of Joe Tynan” (1979) but by then her star had decisively fallen.
Harris all but disappeared in the 80s, surfacing briefly in Hal Ashby’s disastrous “Second-Hand Hearts” (1980), where even her performance was savaged by reviewers; a bit as Kathleen Turner’s mom in Francis Coppola’s time-traveling “Peggy Sue Got Married” (1986); and a small part as a wealthy traveler conned by a scheming Michael Caine in the comedy “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” (1988). Harris should not be confused with the young character actor of 80s film and TV with the same name.
James Brolin was born in 1940 in Los Angeles. His television debut came in 1961 in an episode of “Bus Stop”. In 1963 he had a small part in the James Stewart film “Take Her, She’s Mine” followed two years later by “Dear Brigitte” which starred Stewart again and Glynis Johns and Fabian. In 1969 he had significant success with the television series “Marcus Welby M.D.” which ran until 1976 and also starred Robert Young. He then starred in some big budget films incuding “Gable and Lombard” with Jill Clayburgh in 1976, “Capricorn One” and “The Amityville Horror” in 1979. He had another television success with “Hotel” from 1983 until 1988. James Brolin had a recurring role in “The West Wing”. He is the father of actor Josh Brolin and husband of Barbra Streisand. Interview with “Huffington Post” here.
“Quinlan’s Movie Stars”: Tall, dark-haired (now gray) American leading man reminscent of Clint Walker. He had trouble getting decent roles in Hollywood until television fame as a junior partner in “Marcus Welby”. His cinema portrait of Clark Gable was not a success and after a couple of box-office hits in the late 1970s he was relegated to tough heroes of minor action films.
TCM Overview:
As the son of James Brolin, stepson of Barbra Streisand and husband of Diane Lane, actor Josh Brolin forged his career in the shadow of three formidable talents. In fact, ever since his debut in “The Goonies” (1985), Brolin languished for years in roles that were well below his station. Adding to his self-determined persona was an ability to get into occasional trouble , whether it was being mauled by a mountain lion, crashing his motorcycle weeks before shooting a major film, or making headlines with an arrest for a domestic dispute Brolin had a knack for generating publicity in interesting ways. Meanwhile, he worked steadily throughout his career, though he suffered a string of mediocre movies that included “The Road Killers” (1994), “The Mod Squad” (1999) and “Hollow Man” (2000). But he began to step away from such lowbrow fare with a turn in Woody Allen’s serio-comedy “Melinda and Melinda” (2005) and eventually broke free with his acclaimed performance in the Oscar-winning “No Country for Old Men” (2007). He played a crooked cop in “American Gangster” (2007), the bumbling President of the United States in “W.” (2008), and San Francisco politician and assassin Dan White in “Milk” (2008). Though he stumbled a bit as the lead in “Jonah Hex” (2010), Brolin rebounded with “True Grit” (2010), proving that his transformation into a highly sought after leading man was no fluke.
“Hollywood, in the fallow 60s, was suddenly blessed with a group of talented ladies in their middle years, actresses who literally bridged the gap between the new ingenues and the older stars like Davis and Hepburn. Most of them had made their reputations in the theatre and were just as experienced in TV – Geraldine page, Julie Harris, Kim Stanley(though the last has made only a few films because she dislikes the medium). But not all: Anne Bancroft like Patricia Neal, was a Hollywood failure who went aay and returned a star” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International years”. (1972) “A blueprint example of a terrific actress who was practically discarded by the studio system. Anne Bancroft managed to pull a complete about face , rising above the doldrums of her early career to become one of the most respected performers in the business” – Barry Monush in “The Encyclopedia of Hollywood Film Actors” (2003).
Anne Bancroft was born in 1931 in New York City. She made her film debut in “Don’t Bother to Knock” with Richard Widmark and Marilyn Monroe. In the 1950’s she starred in a few glamour parts and after some years returned to Broadway. She won huge acclaim for her performance as Annie Sullivan in “The Miracle Worker”. She repeated the role on film in 1962 and won an Academy Award. She resumed her film career and starred in “The Pumpkin Eater”, ” 7 Women”, “The Graduate” and “To Be or Not to Be” with her husband Mel Brooks. Anne Bancroft died in 2005.
Brian Baxter’s “Guardian” obituary:
After a youthful flirtation with television, a near-disastrous relationship with Hollywood and a failed marriage, the actor Anne Bancroft, who has died aged 73, fled the west coast and returned home to New York. It was 1959 and in her own words “life was a shambles … I was terribly immature. I was going steadily downhill in terms of self-respect and dignity”. She needed to reclaim her life and career.
Happily, it worked and within three years she had won Tonys for her Broadway roles in Two for the Seesaw and as Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker. When the latter was transferred to the screen by its author William Gibson and director Arthur Penn, she again took the demanding role of Helen Keller’s teacher, winning the best actress Oscar in 1963.
This success relaunched her career, leading to prestige roles in the theatre including Mother Courage, Sister Jeanne in The Devils and Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes. There were film roles too, in The Pumpkin Eater (1964) and, most famously, as the seductive Mrs Robinson in the modish and popular The Graduate (1967). This movie, in which Dustin Hoffman made his screen debut, became so closely associated with Bancroft as a 1960s archetype that it somewhat obscured her subsequent career.
She was also famously married to the Jewish actor-director Mel Brooks whose mother, told that he was going to marry an Italian-American Catholic, replied “bring the girl over, I’ll be in the kitchen – with my head in the oven”. Despite these and other comments about a mis-match, the marriage proved one of the most stable in show business. It was also creative, and Brooks served as executive producer on movies in which Bancroft excelled, including The Elephant Man (1980) and the two-hander 84 Charing Cross Road (1986). These and other films made for his own company redeemed his often frantic comedies, three of which involved Bancroft. In Silent Movie (1976) she – among other stars – glamorously played herself as a highlight of the film. Sadly, she was less well served when co-starring opposite Brooks in his lumpen remake of the Ernst Lubitsch classic To Be or Not to Be (1983) and by her cameo appearance in his dire spoof Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995).
Bancroft was born in the Bronx to a working class family. It was the height of the depression, but even when her father became unemployed in the late 1930s, Anna was allowed tap dancing lessons, then enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Her graduation piece was seen by the actress Frances Fuller, who recommended the 18 year old for television work. Bancroft debuted as Anne Marno in The Torrents of Spring and when a popular radio show The Goldbergs transferred to television she became a member of the TV family, working steadily for two years.
Having helped a fellow actor with a screen test, it was Bancroft who got the call from 20th Century Fox offering a $20,000-a-year contract. It was to prove a mixed blessing. Under her new name Anne Bancroft she made her movie debut in Don’t Bother to Knock, made in 1952 but held up for a year. Within five years she made 15 films, as various as Demetrius and the Gladiators, a baseball movie The Kid from Left Field and Gorilla at Large (1954). There were several routine westerns, modest thrillers including Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall, plus the dismal The Girl in Black Silk Stockings (1957). By this time she admitted to over indulging in alcohol and being unhappily married to someone “who calls himself an actor but whose real occupation is playing a rich boy”. She was also in psychoanalysis.
The road back involved work with a vocal coach, regular attendance at The Actors Studio and study with Herbert Berghof. Plus three sessions a week with her therapist. Then came a triumphant return to acting, playing first opposite a difficult Henry Fonda, followed by the explosive and physically demanding role in The Miracle Worker. When the film version was announced, the backers wanted either Elizabeth Taylor or Audrey Hepburn, but Penn refused and budgeted it at only $500,000, shooting in New Jersey. At 31 Bancroft became an Oscar winner and in the words of one critic, “she left Hollywood a failure and returned a star”.
Her subsequent career was far from conventional. Her intelligence and fierce independence ensured that she never conformed to movie stardom. Working at her own pace and inclination, she turned down Funny Girl, which subsequently made Barbra Streisand famous. She played Mother Courage on stage and waited two years for a new film that was shot in Britain.
Harold Pinter adapted the Pumpkin Eater from Penelope Mortimer’s novel depicting the disintegration of a marriage. The rather cold, over-stylised direction by Jack Clayton could not obscure the riveting central performances by James Mason and Bancroft. Her harrowing portrayal as the distressed wife won her the 1964 best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival, a Bafta film award and the second of her five Oscar nominations.
In 1966 she took the lead in John Ford’s last movie, 7 Women. It was a curiosity that failed commercially. The same fate did not await The Graduate. The rapacious Mrs Robinson gained her another Oscar nomination and the third of her seven Bafta nominations as best actress.
It was also a commercial success and she and director Mike Nichols worked together again on The Little Foxes. Then Bancroft, who had married Brooks in 1964, took extended time off from work, giving birth to their son Maximilian in 1968.
She returned to the screen in 1972, playing Jenny Churchill in Young Winston, prompting Richard Attenborough to describe her as “the greatest actress of her generation”. Two years later she starred in the Neil Simon comedy, The Prisoner of Second Avenue – a welcome return to comedy where she was perfectly cast opposite the frenetic Jack Lemmon.
Her seesaw career took a downturn with the dull The Hindenburg (1975), in which she played a Countess, and hit rock bottom with the garish revenge thriller Lipstick (1976). She was, more happily, herself in Silent Movie and as Mary Magdalene in Franco Zeffirelli’s mini-series Jesus of Nazareth. Her luck improved when Audrey Hepburn declined the role of the prima ballerina in The Turning Point (1977), giving Bancroft a substantial role as the bitchy rival to Shirley Maclaine.
After another long career gap, she returned to the screen with Fatso (1980), which she also wrote and directed. It was little shown and she was grateful for the tellingly elegant role of Mrs Kendal in The Elephant Man. This was her second film with Anthony Hopkins and they were reunited – albeit from opposite sides of the Atlantic – for the rather less distinguished 84 Charing Cross Road (1986).
She was busy on the screen during the 1980s, working little in the theatre after a disappointing response to Golda, another play by William Gibson. There were substantial roles in Garbo Talks (1984) and as the Mother Superior in Agnes of God (1985). She was an altogether different Ma in Torch Song Trilogy (1988), where an over-the -top performance was a mixed blessing in a high camp version of a theatrical success.
There was a touch of Mrs Robinson in her flirtatious role in the comedy You’re a Fool Bert Rigby and in her mellower Kate Jerome in the television version of Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound (1991). Throughout that decade she broke her tradition of long absences between movie roles, notching up a couple of appearances – often in character parts – each year. Amidst Hollywood’s welter of juvenile, special effects-led films her warmth, intelligence and stylish presence became somewhat sidelined. She took the title role in the TV drama Mrs Cage and had a fun time in the oddball comedy Honeymoon in Vegas (both 1992). There were fraught moments in the thrillers Malice and a remake of Luc Besson’s Nikita re-titled Assassin. In this she played the role originally created by Jeanne Moreau, an actress of similar sophistication. She was wasted as a doctor in Mr Jones, which director Mike Figgis disowned after studio interference.
There were further television dramas, The Mother (1994), Homecoming (1996) and most potent of all Deep in My Heart (1999) for which she received an Emmy as best supporting actress. There was a nonsensical desire on the part of directors to cast her years above her attractive self: she played a centenarian in The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and a great aunt in the worthily dull How to Make an American Quilt.
Among her gallery of elderly grotesques none was more triumphant than the terrifying Mrs Dinsmoor in the stylish updating of Great Expectation (1998). There were few such lush movies to be had, but she made a feisty, inherently corrupt senator in GI Jane and was ideally cast voicing the Queen in the animated hit Antz.
There were also documentaries to narrate and the inevitable personal appearances saluting husband Brooks and co-star Dustin Hoffman or indeed the whole history of American cinema in the AFI’s 100 Years, 100 Movies.
Bancroft could always be relied on to add a touch of class to movies – especially if they had literary, religious or social themes and she kept busy with Up at the Villa, the factually-based Haven and Edward Norton’s directorial debut Keeping the Faith. Some lighter relief came with the smart comedy Heartbreakers (2001), where she was played dual roles in a story about mother and daughter con artists who relieve widowers of their wealth. She played the third side of the triangle, belatedly revealed as one of the tricksters.
It was a reminder of her comedic talent – something that had been rewarded by a lifetime achievement in the 1996 American Comedy Awards, but which Hollywood had not sufficiently recognised during her long career. Perhaps one comedian in the Bancroft-Brooks household was considered enough.
· Anne Bancroft, actor, born Anna Marina Louisa Italiano, September 17 1931; died June 6 2005
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
It was thought that Anna Kashfi was from India but she was in fact born Joan O’Callaghan in 1934 in Cardiff in Wales. Her entire career was in movies and television shows in Hollywood. Her major films were “The Mountain” in 1955 with Spence Tracy and Robert Wagner, “Cowboy” with Jack Lemmon and Glenn Ford and “Battle Hymn” with Rock Hudson and Martha Hyer. Her career seemed to stall after her short lived marriage to Marlon Brando. She died in 2015 at tyhe age of 80.
Her obituary in the ” Telegraph”:
Anna Kashfi, who has died aged 80, was an actress of exotic appearance who was the first wife of Marlon Brando, and the mother of his first child, Christian; she played “foreigners” in several Hollywood films of the 1950s. Her origins were never clarified beyond doubt: when she was thrust into the spotlight there were suggestions that she had invented her Indian ancestry, with one newspaper offering the theory that she browned her skin by bathing in coffee. She insisted that she was Indian, the daughter of Devi Kashfi, an architect, and a woman called Selma Ghose. But the day after she married Marlon Brando in late 1957 – she wore a sari for the ceremony – one William O’Callaghan from Cardiff and his wife Phoebe emerged claiming to be her parents. Her real name, they said, was not Anna Kashfi but Joan O’Callaghan. The truth may be that, as the actress explained in her memoirs, she was the result of an “unregistered alliance” and was subsequently adopted by O’Callaghan.
Her films included, most notably, her debut The Mountain (1956), a thriller starring Spencer Tracy in which she played a Hindu woman who survives an aeroplane crash in the French Alps. Edward Dmytryk, the director, told reporters at the time that he was aware of Anna Kashfi’s “real” name, but assumed she was Anglo-Indian. It was during production that she met Marlon Brando in the Paramount studio commissary. Recalling the meeting years later, the actress wrote: “The face, with an incipient heaviness about the jawline, reflected a wistfulness, an open sensuality, and an ineffable indifference.” She was pregnant by the time she married the star and they were divorced within two years. Their relationship had been violent and tempestuous while they were together – Anna Kashfi was reported to have thrown a tricycle at Brando – and it remained difficult. For 15 years a painful dispute rumbled on over custody of their son Christian, whom Anna Kashfi preferred to call by his second name Devi. During legal proceedings it was claimed that she had been emotionally unstable and at times reliant on alcohol and barbiturates. Christian was also troubled: he dropped out of school, failed to make a career out of acting, and was sent to prison after shooting dead the boyfriend of his half-sister Cheyenne. He died at the age of 49 of pneumonia.
Anna Kashfi was born Joan O’Callaghan on September 30 1934 in Darjeeling, where her father was a traffic superintendent on Indian state railways; she was brought up there until she was 13, when the family moved to Cardiff, where William O’Callaghan worked in a factory producing steel. Anna attended St Joseph’s Convent School then the Cardiff School of Art. Early on she had jobs in a butcher’s shop in the city and in an ice cream parlour at Porthcawl. She soon started modelling and in 1952 was spotted by an MGM talent scout. Her flourishing as an actress was brief. After The Mountain she played a Korean woman in Battle Hymn (1957), opposite Rock Hudson as a Christian minister turned fighter pilot; then the daughter of an over-protective Mexican cattle baron whom Jack Lemmon has fallen for in Cowboy (1958); the next year she had a small part in Night of the Quarter Moon. Anna Kashfi published a “tell-all” memoir, Brando for Breakfast, in 1979.
Latterly she lived in California and then in Washington state. In 1974 she married James Hannaford, a salesman. He died in 1986.
The above “Telegraph” obituary can also be accessed online here.
IMDB mini biography:
Anna Kashfi has appeared in a number of films including The Mountain (1956) (withSpencer Tracy) and Battle Hymn (1957) (with Rock Hudson) but is best known for beingMarlon Brando‘s first wife. Kashfi is often thought of as being Indian but is, in fact, the daughter of a Welsh factory worker, William Callaghan, and simply reinvented herself to increase her screen appeal. She met Brando in 1955 in the Paramount commissary and after an on-off relationship (mainly due to Brando’s relentless womanizing) married him in 1957. (Brando claimed that he married her only because she had become pregnant.) She gave birth in May 1958 to their son, Christian, who became notorious in 1990 for shooting dead Dag Drollet, a crime that earned him a ten-year jail sentence. Kashfi divorced Brando in 1959.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Charles Lee < charleslee@tinyworld.co.uk
Barry Sullivan has starred in over 100 movies in a wide variety of film genre – Westerns, film noir, war movies and melodramas. He was born in 1912 in New York City. He was a very good football player and came into film in 1936 with a short “Strike You’r Out”. His major films include “Suspense” in 1946. “The Gangster”,”Bad Men of Tombstone”, “The Great Gatsby” and “Strategic Air Command”. Barry Sullivan died in 1994.
David Shipman’s “Independent” obituary of Barry Sullivan:
Patrick Barry (Barry Sullivan), actor: born New York City 29 August 1912; married three times (one son, two daughters); died Los Angeles 6 June 1994.
BARRY SULLIVAN redefined the term ‘leading man’, being neither a genuine star, although billed above the title, nor a character actor, since he was seldom called upon to play anyone but himself – nice and reliable, the old standby. There were many others of his generation competing for the same roles – Wendell Corey, with his somewhat charming gloom, the cynical but easygoing Van Heflin, the acquiescent but dangerous Robert Ryan.
Many cinemagoers found the Sullivans and Ryans more rewarding than the bona fide box-office champs but, like them, they could be counted upon when it came to facing up to the great ladies of the screen. Ryan, Corey and Heflin all gave Barbara Stanwyck a run for her money, but Sullivan did no more than hold his own with her. When he threatens her in The Maverick Queen (1956) she taunts him, ‘I did what I had to do to get to the top,’ and he’s soon eating out of her hand, the two of them confronting Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Married to her in Jeopardy (1953), he spends the film trapped under a derelict jetty as the tide rises, while she grapples with some weirdos who would rather occupy themselves menacing her.
When faced with Stanwyck’s two contemporaries who also specialised in playing strong, rampaging women – Bette Davis and Joan Crawford – Sullivan stood his ground. Lesser men would have buckled under. Sullivan’s first real starring role was as a corporation attorney, the husband trying to dump Davis in Payment on Demand (1951): she fights back, but even before she realises that it is all her doing we know he is never going to win. Married to Crawford (‘Any man’s my man because I want him to be’) in Queen Bee (1955), he is not the only member of the cast who wants to murder her; but her death at the end is not entirely his fault.
Sullivan was the husband of the equally splendiferous Loretta Young in Cause for Alarm (1950), his strongest study in villainy, so insanely jealous of her that he sets her up for a murder rap; and he was an ambitious Hollywood director, wanting to make Lana Turner’s next movie, in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).
There were quieter times: psychoanalysing Ginger Rogers in Lady in the Dark (1944), his third feature after seven years of supporting roles on the Broadway stage; engaged to his factory-owner boss, played by Young, in And Now Tomorrow; engaged again in a remake of the old farce Getting Gertie’s Garter (1945), this time to Marie McDonald, who wants that eponymous article back before he finds out about it; The Great Gatsby (1949), probably the best (the first is lost) of the three film versions, as Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband; and A Life of her Own (1950), as a playboy ill-treating Ann Dvorak, the pathetic friend of the heroine, played by Turner.
This last was made for MGM, to whom Sullivan had moved after five years with Paramount; but MGM weren’t quite certain what to do with him either. The Three Guys Named Mike (1951) were Van Johnson, Howard Keel and Sullivan, all competing for Jane Wyman. Although it is Keel’s film by sheer dint of personality, it is obvious that Johnson will get Wyman. Sullivan, as an advertising executive, got nowhere with the film or the girl, but MGM looked more kindly upon him after watching him trade insults with Davis in Payment on Demand, on loan to RKO. He returned to RKO to support another of the screen’s great ladies, Claudette Colbert, in Texas Lady (1955) – and support in every sense, as fellow-gambler, lover and henchman. Westerns then were one of the last refuges of fading stars, and Sullivan made several in the late Fifties, including another with Stanwyck, Forty Guns (1957).
Sullivan’s debut on television (in 1955) was prestigious, when he and Lloyd Nolan repeated their Broadway performances in the Pulitzer prize-winning The ‘Caine’ Mutiny Court Martial, adapted by Herman Wouk from his own best- selling novel. He appeared regularly on the small screen, including several series, A Man Called X (1955-56), Harbourmaster (1957), The Tall Man (1960-61) and The Road West (1966). He continued to be seen in movies for the cinema, looking increasingly distinguished, even as most of them were going in the other direction. He invariably played diplomats, politicians or senior officers – always with discretion and candour, but often with too little screen time to make his presence felt. One exception was Earthquake (1974), in which he plays the head of the seismological institute who refuses to believe the warnings of his assistant.
His last considerable movie role was in 1961, with another of the leading female stars of that period, Olivia de Havilland, in The Light in the Piazza. She played the mother of Yvette Mimieux, whom she was hoping to marry to a wealthy young Italian (George Hamilton). Sullivan played her husband, breezing into the film halfway through, determined that they shouldn’t leave their hotel room until they had enjoyed themselves. It was rare for movies to imply that hotel rooms were used for such purposes; and unique to suggest that middle-aged people ever did such things in the first place
