Vince Edwards was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York. In 1950 he won a contract with Paramount Studios. His first film was “Mr Universe”. His major fame came from the title role in the very popular television series “Ben Casey” which ran from 1961 until 1966. Vince Edward came to the UK in 1967 to make “Hammerhead”. His last film was “The Fear” in 1995. Vince Edwards died in 1996 at the age of 67.
TCM Overview:Stiffly handsome leading man of some 50s features, but mostly remembered as Dr. Ben Casey, neurosurgeon, on “Ben Casey,” an ABC series which aired from 1961-66, Vince Edwards spent his post-Casey career fighting off the image of the brooding, caring doctor who broke a minor TV taboo when he unbuttoned his frock and revealed a forest of chest hair. Edwards had originally dreamed of swimming in the Olympics, but when an appendectomy put a damper on those dreams he turned to acting. He made his Broadway debut in 1947 in “High Button Shoes.” By 1951, he was under contract to Paramount in Hollywood and made his debut in a low-budget programmer, “Mr. Universe,” playing a wrestler being groomed as the “new find.” Hollywood casting practices put him in a version of the Native American legend “Hiawatha” (1952). But his subsequent film roles were of the supporting variety in the 50s, including a small one in “The Three Faces of Eve” (1957). Having begun appearing on TV dramas in the mid-50s, including “Ford Theatre” (1955), Edwards was ripe for a series when “Ben Casey” came his way in 1961. He had been picked by the show’s executive producer and owner, Bing Crosby. The same year ABC premiered “Casey,” NBC premiered the TV version of “Dr. Kildare” and viewers debated their preference for the five years both were on the air. “Ben Casey” was often grittier, dealing with the poignancy of life and death. Edwards also became one of the first TV stars to step behind the cameras, directing about 20 of the 154 “Ben Casey” episodes produced. And he used the show to launch a singing career, recording six albums, including “Vince Edwards Sings,” and playing Las Vegas. But the demise of the series temporarily stymied his career, as if often the case as the audience searches for a new face. In 1964, Edwards appeared in the first 20 minutes of Carl Foreman’s oddly-structured feature “The Victors,” and in 1968, he was helping William Holden create a commando force in “The Devil’s Brigade,” but the period in between roles increased. Edwards turned back to TV in 1970 playing a hip psychiatrist working with teens in the one-season series “Matt Lincoln.” He also made his TV movie debut in “Sole Survivor” for ABC. In 1973, he directed the CBS TV movie “Maneater” and he had strong roles in two TV movies of the decade, “The Rhinemann Exchange,” in which he was a general gathering information from a spying Stephen Collins (NBC, 1977), and “Evening in Byzantium” (1978), one of the first syndicated TV movies. But Edwards found himself less in demand in the 80s. An old friend, manager-producer Jay Bernstein, hired Edwards to co-star in the 1986 TV movie “The Return of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer” and Edwards went on to direct episodes of the “Mike Hammer” series for CBS as well as episodes of “Fantasy Island,” “Police Story,” and “In The Heat of the Night.” In 1988, he made the syndicated TV movie “The Return of Ben Casey,” playing the stalwart doctor as having been in Vietnam, married and divorced. He died of pancreatic cancer in Los Angeles on March 13,
The above TCM overview can be accessed online here.
Vera MilesThe Wrong Man, poster, Henry Fonda, Vera Miles, 1956. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Vera Miles was cast by Alfred Hitchcock in 1957 in “Vertigo” but Miles had to bow out due to pregnancy. She did though make two films for Hitchcock, “The Wrong Man” and “Psycho”. She made two classic Westerns for John Ford, “The Searchers” in 1956 and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” in 1962. Vera Miles was born in 1930. She made her film debut in 1950 in “When Willie Comes Marching Home”. Her major credits include “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms”, “Tarzan’s Hidden Jungle”, “Autumn Leaves” and “23 Paces to Baker Street”. One of her last acting appearances was in a 1991 episode of “Murder She Wrote”.
TCM Overview:
A warm, reliable and likable lead of features and TV beginning in the 1950s, Vera Miles got a prominent start but rarely seemed to get the roles her talent merited. An attractive, composed woman who worked as a model after placing third in the 1948 Miss America contest, she broke into films in 1951. Although her first leads were in modest films, her earnest, outdoorsy heroines suited her well for “The Rose Bowl Story” (1952) and Jacques Tourneur’s stylish “Wichita” (1955). She also kept busy in TV anthologies, where she first worked with the directors who helmed her most important films. John Ford directed Miles in “Rookie of the Year” (1955), an episode of “Screen Directors Playhouse” which led him to cast her as an outspoken frontierswoman in his classic “The Searchers” (1956). Hitchcock, meanwhile, liked her work in “Revenge” (1955) on his “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” so much that he put her under personal contract.
Hitchcock obviously saw in Miles a gift for quietly expressing maturity coping with great tension, beautifully registered in his “The Wrong Man” (1957). As a wife who slowly cracks under the strain as her innocent husband (Henry Fonda) is imprisoned for armed robbery, Miles gave the film’s finest performance, and her stardom seemed set. She occasionally played second lead to a bigger star (Joan Crawford in “Autumn Leaves” 1956, Susan Hayward in “Back Street” 1961), but she more than held her own opposite imposing male stars Van Johnson (“23 Paces to Baker Street” 1956) and James Stewart (“The FBI Story” 1959).
Attempting to mold Miles to his classic icy blonde prototype, Hitchcock then cast her in “Vertigo” (1958), but she became pregnant and lost the choice role to Kim Novak. She did later star as the woman who initiates the search for her missing sister (Janet Leigh) in Hitchcock’s landmark “Psycho” (1960). It gradually became clear, though, that Miles, whose persona seemed practical rather than glamorous, energetic rather than sparkling, was a fine, low-key actor perhaps more than she was a flashy movie star ready to be molded by a Svengali.
Though she acted less often and in smaller films, Miles continued playing leads into the 80s, a standout being Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962). Beginning with “A Tiger Walks” and “Those Calloways” (both 1964), Miles made six films for Disney Studios over the next eight years, typically as helpful wives (“Follow Me, Boys!” 1966) or self-sufficient widows (“The Castaway Cowboy” 1974). Leads (“Run for the Roses” 1978) then alternated with key supporting roles, the best being her reprisal of her Lila, now considerably embittered, for the remarkably good sequel, “Psycho II” (1983). TV on the whole did better by Miles, from her steely would-be murderess in the experimental “The Forms of Things Unknown” (1964), a famous installment of “The Outer Limits”; to her gritty roles in the TV-movies “And I Alone Survived” (1978) and “Helen Keller–The Miracle Continues” (1984). Divorced from Tarzan actor Gordon Scott and actor/director Keith Larsen.
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
William Eythe had a rather short career as a leading man in Hollywood films of the 1940’s. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1918. His first film was “The Ox-Bow Incident” in 1943 with Henry Fonda and Dana Andrews. He then starred opposite Jennifer Jones in the hughly popular “Song of Bernadette”. His other films of note include the excellent film noir “The House on 92nd Street” and “Meet Me at Dawn”. In 1947 he returned to the stage and died in 1957 at the age of 38.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
He had the requisite charm and dark, thick-browed good-looks of a Tyrone Power that often spelled “film stardom” but it was not to be in the case of actor William Eythe. Spotted for Hollywood while performing on Broadway, he made nary a dent when he finally transferred his skills to film and is little remembered today. Outgoing in real life, he never found his full range in film and a certain staidness behind the charm and good looks prohibited him from standing out among the other high-ranking leading men. Like Power, his untimely death robbed filmgoers of seeing what kind of a character actor he might have made.
Born William John Joseph Eythe on April 7, 1918, in a small dairy town near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he was the son of a contractor. Developing an early interest in theatrics after appearing in an elementary school play, he put on his own shows as an amateur producer/director. Following high school he applied to the School of Drama at Carnegie Tech where he initially focused on set design and costuming due to a stammering problem (it was corrected while there). He also produced some of the school’s musicals in which he also wrote the songs. Graduating from college in 1941, he began leaning towards a professional music theater and started involving himself in musicals and revues in the Pittsburgh era. He appeared in various stock shows in other states as well, including the “borscht circuit”, while radio work in the form of announcing came his way. Following a failed attempt at forming his own stock company, he was discovered by a 20th Century-Fox talent scout while performing impressively on Broadway in “The Moon Is Down” and moved west when the show closed in the summer of ’42.
Benefiting from the fact that many major Hollywood male stars were actively serving in WWII, Eythe. who had “4-F status, was handed an enviable film debut as the wavering son of a lynch mob member in the superb The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). More quality films ensued with The Song of Bernadette (1943) and Wilson (1944) although he didn’t have much of a chance to shine. He received his best Hollywood top-lining assignments as the rural WWII soldier who has telepathic capabilities in The Eve of St. Mark (1944) and as a German-American double agent in the taut espionage drama The House on 92nd Street(1945). When Fox star Tyrone Power turned down the lead role opposite Tallulah Bankhead in the plush costumer A Royal Scandal (1945), Eythe inherited the part. Naturally Tallulah’s histrionics dominated the proceedings and Eythe, though sincere and quite photogenic, was completely overlooked. This happened in other movies as well, and while he was a talented singer/dancer, the only musical film he ever appeared in required minor singing in Centennial Summer (1946). Adding insult to injury, he was dubbed.
Eythe never conformed easily to the strictest of rules that studio head Darryl F. Zanuckimposed and it proved a detriment to his career in the long run. He was either suspended or (in one case) farmed out to England to do a “B” film as punishment for his rebellious nature. A close “friendship” with fellow actor Lon McCallister had to be carefully dampened, and, out of concern, an impulsive marriage in 1947 to socialite and Fox starlet Buff Cobb was the result. It may have ended rumors for a spell but, not unsurprisingly, the couple divorced a little over a year later. Ms. Cobb later married veteran TV newsman Mike Wallace.
In the post-war years, Fox began to lose interest and Eythe was seen with less frequency. He flatlined film-wise in his last two “C” movies that were made by other studios: Special Agent (1949) and Customs Agent (1950). To compensate for the waning of interest, he formed his own production company and appeared on stage in such fare as “The Glass Menagerie” in the showy role of son Tom. He also enjoyed seeing one of his early revues, “Lend an Ear”, revamped by Charles Gaynor and given a Broadway run in 1948. Eythe was one of the show’s producers and singing stars. The musical is best remembered for putting co-star Carol Channing on the map. In addition, Eythe replaced baritone Alfred Drake in “The Liar” a couple of years later. In 1956 he and McAllister, along with Huntington Hartford, produced a musical revue with the hopes of it reaching Broadway but it closed in Chicago. Uninspired TV work did little to alter his decline.
Depression eventually set in and he turned heavily to drink with an unfortunate series of tabloid-making arrests resulting. His health in rapid deterioration, he was rushed to a Los Angeles hospital one day for treatment of acute hepatitis and died ten days later, at age 38, on January 26, 1957. For someone so promising, his untimely death merely left another tainted impression of the downside to Hollywood stardom.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Claire Trevor was born in 1910 in Brooklyn, New York. Her mother was from the North of Ireland. By 1932 she was on Broadway and the following year made her movie debut in “Jimmy and Sally”. Her major breakthrough role was in 1939 in John Ford’s “Stagecoach” with John Wayne. In the 1940’s she seemed to specialize as hard-boiled dames in film noir such as “Murder My Sweet” in 1944 and “Johnny Angel”. In 1948 she won an Academy Award for her performance in “Key Largo”. In the 1950’s she developed into an excellent character actress and was seen to great effect in “The High and the Mighty” with Wayne again in 1954. Her final film performance was with Jeff Bridges and Sally Field in 1982 in “Kiss Me Goodbye”. Ms Trevor died in 2000 at the age of 90.
Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:
Claire Trevor, who has died aged 91, will be remembered mainly for playing blondes with tough exteriors that hid her vulnerability. In her best films, she was not only a woman who had kicked around the world, but who had been kicked around by the world.
In John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), which raised the western genre to artistic status, she was “saloon girl” Dallas, who has been forced out of town by puritanical women. When the Ringo Kid (John Wayne) proposes to her, she says, “But, you don’t know me, you don’t know who I am.” “I know all I want to know,” he says. Seeing a glimmer of hope, she asks the drunken doctor (Thomas Mitchell), “Is that wrong for a girl like me? If a man and woman love each other? It’s all right, ain’t it Doc?” Typical as the role was, Stagecoach was one of the few films that sanctioned her happiness.
She was born Claire Wemlinger in in New York of a French father and Northern Irish mother. When her father lost his clothing business during the Great Depression, she went out to work to help the family. Later she managed to attend Columbia University and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, before starting her acting career in stock in the late 1920s. By 1932, she had starred on Broadway opposite Edward Arnold in The Party’s Over, which brought her to the attention of 20th Century Fox, who gave her a five-year contract in 1933.
At Fox, she played Shirley Temple’s mother in Baby Takes A Bow (1934), supported Spencer Tracy in Dante’s Inferno (1935), and made six films directed by veteran craftsman Allan Dwan, but they were mostly inconsequential programmers. She left Fox hoping for better roles and immediately landed one from Samuel Goldwyn in William Wyler’s Dead End (1937) as hoodlum Humphrey Bogart’s ex-girlfriend, reduced to streetwalking and ravaged by illness. Although she is barely on screen for five minutes, in a memorable seriers of close-ups, she made enough impact to be nominated for a supporting actress Oscar. “I’m tired. I’m sick,” she tells Bogart. “Can you see it? Look at me good. You’ve been looking at me like I used to be.”
Dead End set her off on a series of roles as wanton women: gangsters’ molls in thrillers and saloon bar gals in westerns. In The Amazing Dr Clitterhouse (1938), she played Bogart’s moll who betrays him, and in I Stole a Million (1939), she helps her mobster husband George Raft. However, Trevor had to wait for the rise of 1940s film noir to become one of the leading women of the genre. With her long, blonde hair whisked up above the broad-shouldered gowns and a seen-it-all look in her eyes, she was able to hit her stride.
In Street of Chance (1942), she misleads amnesiac Burgess Meredith by telling him he is wanted for murder, though she is the real killer. As the sexy, two-faced Mrs Grayle in Edward Dmytryk’s Murder My Sweet (1944), she tells Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell), “You shouldn’t kiss a girl when you’re wearing a gun. It leaves a bruise.” In Born to Kill (1947), she is “a silken savage,” a mercenary divorcee with a fatal attraction for a man who has already killed two people. “You’re strength, excitement and depravity,” she is told. Anthony Mann’s Raw Deal (1948) was one of the rare noir movies in which the narration was supplied by a woman, in this case Trevor as the betrayed girlfriend of a racketeer.
In the same year, in Key Largo, for which she won an Oscar for best supporting actress, Trevor played Gaye Dawn, the fading alcoholic mistress of sadistic gangster Johnny Rocco (Edward G Robinson). “She’s a lush,” says Robinson’s fat henchman (Thomas Gomez). “After she bends the elbow a few times, she begins to see things – rats, roaches, bats, you know. A sock in the kisser is the only thing that will bring her out of it.” Pathetically singing Moanin’ Low to please Rocco, Trevor revealed the character’s touching dependence on the brute.
During the next decade, Trevor’s image continued to be “strength, excitement and depravity”, especially in two films of 1951: Best of the Badmen as Robert Preston’s angry and disillusioned wife, and Hard, Fast and Beautiful as the greedy ambitious tennis mother determined to live off her daughter’s earnings. In 1954, she gained another Oscar nomination for The High and the Mighty (1954), this time as a loose woman among imperilled airline passengers. Ironically, Charles, her only child by the second of her three marriages died in an air crash in 1978.
In Vincente Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) as Edward G Robinson’s “worn out, dry, old hag” of a wife, she rants and raves, drinks and smokes. “Don’t take an overdose,” Robinson tells her. “You know how ill it makes me.” Like most of her later roles, such as the man-hating harridan in How To Murder Your Wife (1965), it was a reference to many of the parts she had played in her black-and-white movie past.
She not only enjoyed a Hollywood career spanning five decades, but performed in hundreds of radio and television shows – including an Emmy-winning role in Dodsworth. She retired from acting in 1987 and became a patron of the arts.
• Claire Trevor (née Claire Wemlinger), film actress, born March 8 1909; died April 8 2000
Her “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Burl Ives was a wonderful folk singer. Two of his songs, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “The Old Woman Who Swallowed the Fly” have become children favourites. He was too a very effective actor who won an Academy Award for his performance in “The Big Country” in 1958. He was born in 1909 in Hunt City in Illinois. He had developed a neat reputation as a singer when he made his first film “Smoky” in 1946. His major films include “East of Eden”, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”. “Let No Man Write My Epitaph”, “The Spiral Road” and “Summer Magic”. He died in 1995 at the age of 85.
David Shipman’s obituary of Burl Ives in “The Independent”:
n 1938 20th Century-Fox had a success with the tale of two feuding families of racehorse owners, Kentucky, one of the few Technicolor films of the time to find wide popularity. Fox liked horse stories in colour and after the success of My Friend Flicka (1943) began to churn them out. One of the 1946 entries, Smoky, has a special credit, “And introducing the Singing Troubadour Burl Ives”: there he is, strumming away on his guitar, cheerfully singing his hits to chums round a Fordian campfire – “The Streets of Laredo”, “I Wish I Was An Apple Tree”, “The Foggy Foggy Dew”, and “The Blue Tail Fly” (“Jimmie Crack Corn”).
The voice was high, reedy, but warm and mellow, caressing the often nonsensical lyrics as intimately as anyone approaching the wit of Lorenz Hart or Cole Porter. Ives seldom sang songs of their quality, but like all the great singers he resembled no one but himself.
A former professional footballer and itinerant worker, Ives was fascinated by folk-songs, researching them and singing them for records, radio and night-clubs. The ballads in Smoky were not unknown in Britain but, since the film hardly started a stampede to the box-office, Ives’s recordings took a while to get off the ground here. In particular, “The Blue Tail Fly” and “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” became popular in the mid-Fifties – while Ives was simultaneously making a career as a character actor in movies.
His identification with folk singing began after he had been in show business for some time. In Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys From Syracuse (1938) he had a small part as tailor’s apprentice, and during the Second World War he sang “God Bless America” and Irving Berlin songs in the touring company of This is the Army. In 1944 he was invited to appear at the Village Vanguard, a night-club frequented by middle-class intellectuals. It had just had a great success with a satirical group, “The Revuers”, whom we know as Judy Holliday, Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Rather than trying to find similar acts, the Vanguard followed with Ives, Josh White, Richard Dyer-Bennett and other folk-singers: and it could be argued that the smart people of Manhattan were looking for the sort of Americana with which they were not familiar.
Certainly these performers all moved uptown to the Blue Angel, the watering- place for caf society in the late 1940s. In the meantime Ives was cast in a Broadway show, Sing Out, Sweet Land (1946), a celebration of old and/or patriotic songs to reflect the post-war mood – and the more folksy ones appealed to Fox, who invited Ives to reprise some of his in order to liven up its otherwise mundane horse opera.
He returned to the studio to help out another of this seemingly interminable series, Green Grass of Wyoming (1948), after which Walt Disney chose him to play kindly Uncle Hiram in So Dear to My Heart (1949), based on Sterling North’s novel Midnight and Jeremiah, about a boy who adopts a black sheep. Disney’s child star, Bobby Driscoll (later to die an anonymous drug addict in an untenanted building), was Jeremiah, while as his granny Beulah Bondi was as sympathetic as Ives – who sang a ditty based on a folk-song, “Lavender Blue”, which brought an Academy Award nomination for its two adaptors.
Ives did not restrict himself to old songs, but chose many, such as “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, which suited his avuncular down-home image. It was not entirely in keeping with the private Ives.
Sing Out, Sweet Land was the first production directed by the drama critic Walter Kerr, who in his inexperience called in Elia Kazan for assistance. Kazan, who enjoyed Ives’s larger-than-life personality, nevertheless recalled seeing him “drunk one night, macho and rampant, aroused to a point where he was looking for a fight, anywhere and with anybody. He was a formidable man, with a frightening temper; he evoked respect for his violence. Late one night, soused again, he reversed his emotion and I was afraid that he was about to throw himself out of a window.”
Ives, whose left-wing views were well-known, gave evidence to the committee at the McCarthy hearings – as did Kazan, Budd Shulberg and others, though only Kazan was to remain in contumely for a long time. He was also the most famous of those who confessed and continued to work; Ives’s budding film career was blighted till Kazan chose him to play the tough but understanding sheriff who takes James Dean under his wing in East of Eden (1955); then, remembering his ferocity and contempt for good manners, he cast him as the red-necked bullying Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
It was a bravura role with a pages-long tirade, and Williams wasn’t sure that Ives could do it, but Kazan knew that he could – “straight out: that was where he had the confidence born of his concert experience, that was the style of performing that he – and I – enjoyed.” Williams, who had based the role on his own father, told Ives that “on opening night he sat in the 14th row and saw Cornelius Williams”.
The role revitalised Ives’s career. He was offered night-club engagements in the sort of territory then unknown for folk-singers, Las Vegas – though by now he was less of a folk archivist than an entertainer courting the widest popular public. He returned to films in star roles, all based to an extent on Big Daddy, beginning with the ruthless and monomaniacal company president in a Robert Taylor vehicle, The Power and the Prize (1956). He was top-billed as the renegade leader of the Swamp Angels in Wind across the Everglades (1958), directed by Nicholas Ray and produced and written by Budd Shulberg. Admittedly his co-stars, Christopher Plummer and Gypsy Rose Lee, were not household names; and he was billed after Sophia Loren and Anthony Perkins in Delbert Mann’s version of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms. Since Loren, as the new wife, and Perkins, as the son who cuckolds him, were both miscast, Ives seems to have hoped to get through the ordeal with one hangdog expression.
Although Kazan chose not to direct the film of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – Richard Brooks did – Ives was the only possible choice for Big Daddy, but he was not nominated for an Oscar because MGM insisted that he should be shortlisted for Best Actor. More realistically, United Artists put him up for a Best Supporting Oscar in William Wyler’s The Big Country, in which he played a white-trash land baron at war with the more likeable Charles Bickford. When he won that Oscar the Hollywood Reporter somewhat cruelly referred to the film as “Big Daddy Goes West”. He was a mysterious refugee from Hitler in Our Man in Havana (1959), directed by Carol Reed from a Graham Greene screenplay (from his own novel), which with those two films is the highwater mark of Ives’s career.
Burl Ives was equally convincing whether nice or nasty, but both his rotund figure and his age – not to mention an unkempt goatee – fitted him only for character roles. Those assigned him in later movies were not distinguished, and he was better served by films and mini-series made for television. Ill-health had prevented him from working in recent years.
Although not to everybody’s taste, the pretty modern ditties he recorded should be around for a while yet. He had a hit parade entry in the early Sixties with “Itty Bitty Tear” and again with “The Ugly Bug Ball”, which he had sung in his role of the postmaster in Summer Magic (1963), based on Mother Carey’s Chickens by Kate Douglas Wiggins. The song was written by Richard and Robert Sherman, then warming up for Mary Poppins. The film brought Ives’s career full circle, for the lead was played by the only other genuine Disney child star – apart from Master Driscoll – Hayley Mills.
David Shipman
The above “Independent” obituary can be accessed online here.
Picturegoer’ once observed that Dorothy McGuire belonged to that coterie of players – it includes Margaret Sullavan, Betty Field, Martha Scott and Barbara Bel Geddes – whose charm is uncommon, elusive. It is the charm of … frank unpretty features that can for some at times take on an amazing beauty. In other words, they were not the sort of Hollywood girl you would discover at the soda fountain in a drugstore. They all came from the stage. They were all highly rated by the critics and by the top Hollywood brass, at least at first. None of them had a prolific screen career. One might speculate on the reasons – lack of drive or determination, dislike of type-casting or Hollywood or a combination of any of them. Being most of them very talented ladies, they were individual in style, but ‘Picturegoer’ was right. Sullavan played a tempestuous movie queen once and Field, memorably, a slut. One thinks of them as very gentle and genteel heroines” – David Shipman – “The Great Movie Stars- The International Years”. (1972).
“‘P
Dorothy McGuire was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1916. She had a triumph on Broadway in the title role in “Claudia” an role that she recreated on film in 1943. A gentle, sensitive actress she excelled in mother roles where her kindly nature shone. Her major film roles include “The Enchanted Cottage” with Robert Young, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” in 1945, “The Spiral Staircase”, “Gentleman’s Agreement”, “Three Coins in the Fountain”, “Friendly Persuasion with Gary Cooper and Anthony Perkins, “Old Yeller”, “A Summer Place” with Troy Donahue in 1959, “Swiss Family Robinson”, “Susan Slade” and “Flight of the Doves”. She starred on television in the series “Rich Man, Poor Man” in 1975. Dorothy McGuire died in 2001 at the age of 85.
Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Guardian”:
The image of Dorothy McGuire, who has died aged 83, remained almost the same throughout her 20 years as a movie star. Her persona – on screen and off – was that of an attractive woman of integrity, intelligence and charm, and it imbued the series of loving sweethearts, faithful wives and doting mothers whom she played so sympathetically.
The producer Darryl F Zanuck called her an “angel”, which, according to Elia Kazan, robbed her of her sexuality. She certainly had little chance to exude either sexuality or be malicious, like Bette Davis or Joan Crawford, but there was always room for an actor who was so good at being good.
McGuire’s first screen appearance was in the title role of Claudia (1943), which she had played to acclaim two years earlier on Broadway, receiving the New York critics’ circle award. She was chosen for the role – that of a child woman, too immature to be a wife until a family tragedy shocks her into adulthood – from 200 applicants by the Broadway producer John Golden because “she had a fresh, wind-blown quality and an impressive, though subdued, personality”.
Born to well-off parents in Omaha, Nebraska, at school McGuire wrote plays, directed and acted in them, and joined the Omaha Community Playhouse, where, at the age of 12, she took the lead in JM Barrie’s A Kiss For Cinderella – opposite the 25-year-old Henry Fonda. Her lawyer- father wired her on opening night: “Let your head touch the stars, but keep your feet on the ground.” This caveat characterised her way of life.
In 1937, she left college to concentrate on acting. After doing the rounds in New York, she got a job understudying Martha Scott in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, taking over the part in July 1938, proving lovely and vibrant with emotion as a young girl who dies prematurely after her marriage. She then went into a popular radio soap opera, Big Sister, and toured in plays before landing the role of Claudia, which led to David O Selznick offering her a seven-year film contract. During the Broadway run of Claudia, McGuire married the photographer John Swope.
Wanting to get away from what she called, the “ingenue flutter” of Claudia, she played the poverty-stricken wife of a drunken waiter in A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (1944), Kazan’s first picture. This was followed by The Enchanted Cottage (1945), in which she was touching as a lonely, plain woman married to an embittered, disfigured first world war veteran (Robert Young).
Better still was Robert Siodmak’s chiller, The Spiral Staircase (1945), in which McGuire played a mute servant girl living in fear of being murdered by a maniac. She showed how the layers of trust peeled away from an intrinsically sunny- dispositioned young woman.
In Edward Dmytryk’s post-war readjustment drama, Till The End Of Time (1946), McGuire was perfect as a confused and lonely war widow in love with ex-Marine Guy Madison. Kazan’s Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) saw her nominated for an Oscar for her role as a socialite divorcee who believes she is free from anti-semitism until her journalist fiance (Gregory Peck) has to pose as a Jew for a series of articles.
Around the same time, with Peck, Jennifer Jones, Mel Ferrer and Joseph Cotten, McGuire formed the La Jolla Playhouse Group, for which she appeared in The Importance Of Being Earnest, I Am A Camera and The Winslow Boy. She returned to Broadway in 1951 as the Actor opposite Richard Burton’s Musician in Jean Anouilh’s Legend Of Lovers. In the 1950s, her roles on screen were mostly unchallenging, as in Three Coins In The Fountain (1954).
Her best film of the decade was William Wyler’s Friendly Persuasion (1956), in which she played a warm-hearted Quaker wife trying to prevent her husband (Gary Cooper) and son (Anthony Perkins) from fighting in the American civil war.
She had now found a niche playing ideal mothers: the Texas frontier mother in Old Yeller (1957); the mother of eight – taking care of Clifton Webb’s nine as well – in The Remarkable Mr Pennypacker (1959); the practical, shipwrecked mother in The Swiss Family Robinson (1960); the mother in a loveless marriage in The Dark At The Top Of The Stairs (1960); and the protective mothers of teen- agers Troy Donahue, in A Summer Place (1960), Connie Stevens in Susan Slade (1961) and Hayley Mills in Summer Magic (1963). This run of mothers culminated in the role of the Virgin Mary in George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).
As the film offers dwindled in the 1970s, McGuire was seen more in the theatre, notably in Tennessee Williams’s Night Of The Iguana and Terence Rattigan’s Cause Celebre in 1979, the year her husband died. After three years of not working, she returned to Broadway in the play Winesburg, Ohio, as glowingly reassuring as ever.
She is survived by her daughter and son.
•Dorothy McGuire, actor, born June 14 1918; died September 13 2001
“The Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Rosenda Monertos was born in 1935 in Veracruz, Mexico. Her first film was “A Woman’s Devotion” in 1956. She was the leading lady in the classic “The Magnificent Seven” with Yul Brynner and Horst Buchholz. Her other films include “Thiara Tahiti” in 1962 with John Mills and James Mason. Ms Monteros died in 2018.
New York Times obituary in 2018:
Rosenda Monteros, a Mexican actress remembered for her turn as one of the few women in John Sturges’s classic western “The Magnificent Seven,” died on Dec. 29 at her home in Mexico.
A spokeswoman for her family, who is also a representative for the National Theater Company of Mexico, said the cause was pelvic cancer. The spokeswoman said Ms. Monteros was 86, although according to Spanish-language news media accounts and other sources she was 83.
Ms. Monteros, a successful actress in Mexican theater, films and television for more than five decades, played a small but important part in “The Magnificent Seven,” the 1960 remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film “Seven Samurai.” In the Hollywood version, seven gunslingers are hired by local farmers to defend their Mexican village from bandits.
Ms. Monteros’s character, Petra, goes into hiding with the other women in the village when the gunmen arrive, but she is soon discovered. Bolder than many of the villagers, she pursues a romance with Mr. Buchholz’s character, the temperamental Chico.
“I wasn’t afraid of you — it’s my father,” Petra says to Chico in one scene. “He says stay away from those men, they are brutes, they are cruel.”
“He’s right, you know that?” Chico replies. “He’s right.”
Their courtship is the only romantic thread in that testosterone-fueled film, and her part is one of the biggest among its Mexican actors.
“The Magnificent Seven” was shot in Mexico, where a government censor kept a close eye on the production to make sure that Mexicans were depicted positively. Mr. Sturges told The New York Times in 1960 that the censor was “an autocrat” who operated “on the theory that anything debatable should be stricken out.”
Mr. Sturges took note of one major change to the script: Instead of setting out to hire American fighters from the start, the farmers tried to buy guns for themselves.
“The script had to be checked and revised very carefully to make sure that there were no images that denigrated the country,” she said. “Because of the importance of the coproduction, we had to get the film off the ground one way or another. It was good for the country.”
Rosa Méndez Leza was born in Veracruz, Mexico, on Aug. 31, in either 1932 or 1935. She was active in Mexican theater from a young age and moved to Mexico City when she was 17. She also performed in Europe, where she studied mime and performed with Marcel Marceau.
Her marriage to the director Julio Bracho ended in divorce. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
Ms. Monteros’s other films included Luis Buñuel’s “Nazarin” (1959); “Tiara Tahiti” (1962), which starred James Mason; and “Cauldron of Blood” (1970), which starred Boris Karloff in one of his last roles. On television, she had a long-running part in the telenovela “Lucía Sombra.”
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
“The Magnificent Seven” is still beloved by western fans. It was remade by Antoine Fuqua in 2016, but without the character Petra and her romantic subplot
Born Olive Dines, Felicia Farr appeared in several modeling photo shoots and advertisements during the 1950s and 1960s. Her earlist screen appearances date from the mid-fifties and included the Westerns Jubal (1956) and 3:10 to Yuma (1957), both starring Glenn Ford and The Last Wagon (1956) starring Richard Widmark.
Lee Farr was her first husband, a marriage which produced a daughter, Denise Farr Gordon, who became the wife of actor Don Gordon. Farr’s second husband was the film star Jack Lemmon; they married in 1962, while Lemmon was filming the comedy Irma La Douce in Paris, and remained married until his death in 2001.
During her marriage to Jack Lemmon, Farr gave birth to a daughter, Courtney, in 1966. She is also the stepmother of Lemmon’s son, actor and author Chris Lemmon.
“Farley Granger was once under contract to Sam Goldwyn, who thought he would become the biggest star in movies. It did not happen. He was a nice looking kid with a neat line in both under privileged heroes and wealthy weaklings. Clark Gable he was not.” – David Shipman – “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years” (1972).
Farley Granger’s obituary in “The Guardian” by Brian Baxter:
Early on in his career, the actor Farley Granger, who has died aged 85, worked with several of the world’s greatest directors, including Alfred Hitchcock on Rope (1948) and Strangers On a Train (1951), Nicholas Ray on They Live By Night (1949) and Luchino Visconti on Senso (1953). Yet Granger failed to sustain the momentum of those years, meandering into television, some stage work and often indifferent European and American movies.
The reasons were complicated, owing much to his sexuality and an unwillingness to conform to Hollywood pressures, notably from his contract studio, MGM, and Samuel Goldwyn. Granger refused to play the publicity or marrying game common among gay and bisexual stars and turned down roles he considered unsuitable, earning a reputation – in his own words – for being “a naughty boy”.
Include Me Out My Life from Goldwyn to Broadway. By Farley Granger with Robert Calhoun.
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He was also the victim of bad luck, notably when Howard Hughes, the egomaniacal owner of RKO studios, took against They Live By Night, shelving it for a year before releasing it without fanfare. While his contemporary Charlton Heston had maintained that it was impossible not to launch his own acting career from two Cecil B DeMille movies, Granger had the far more difficult task of springboarding from his Hitchcock films, where the director had been the star.
Granger was born in San Jose, California, and first appeared on a school stage aged five. A dozen years later he was working in theatres around Los Angeles, when his dazzling good looks were noticed by a local talent scout. Aged 18 he made his screen debut as a curly-haired Russian soldier in Lewis Milestone’s The North Star (1943).
Milestone also cast him in the role of a sergeant in The Purple Heart (1944), but by then the real war had caught up with the actor who, following his military service, took a long while to re-establish himself. Ray cast him in the leading role of They Live By Night, as the emotionally unstable crook Bowie, and by the time the film was released, he had appeared in the feeble Enchantment (1948) and the bucolic Roseanna McCoy (1949).
Punch cartoons by Robert Sherriffs
Film Review ;
They Live by Night ; Cathy O’Donnell and Farley Granger
Luckily, he had also been loaned out for the claustrophobic Rope, filmed in 10-minute takes, resulting in an elegantly artificial movie, with the actors even more puppet-like than was usual with Hitchcock. Granger and John Dall were ideally cast as gay students who murder a friend to display a Nietzschean concept of supremacy. Granger played the highly strung Phillip, who cracks under the probing of their tutor (James Stewart). The public were less than enthusiastic. The director Jean Renoir scathingly dismissed the film, adding that it was “a film about homosexuals in which they don’t even show the boys kissing”.
Moving on, in 1950 Granger starred in the fast-paced thriller Side Street, directed by Anthony Mann, Edge of Doom and Our Very Own, before being rescued from the routine by Hitchcock, who cast him in another movie with a gay subtext, Strangers On a Train. He took the more conventional role of a handsome tennis champion, Guy Haines, mentally seduced by the unhinged Bruno (Robert Walker). Bruno obligingly murders the sportsman’s wife, who is holding back Guy’s career and social ambitions. When the killer wants repayment in kind – via the death of his own bullying father – matters go horribly wrong. Granger was bland rather than urbane, perplexed rather than intimidated, and despite charm, good looks and an attractive voice, he found his career not taking off.
Instead, routine fare such as Behave Yourself! (1951) and Small Town Girl (1953) followed. Even the sympathetic Vincente Minnelli made little of the star opposite Leslie Caron in The Story of Three Loves (1953). Granger needed to get out of his contract and was happy when he was loaned out by Goldwyn to star in Visconti’s Senso. He was intriguingly cast as the embittered romantic Franz Mahler, an Austrian soldier who betrays the married woman besotted with him. She in turn betrays not only her country, Italy, but also those struggling politically against the invading forces. With dialogue by Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles, the film took heady flight into a sumptuous period melodrama. It took many months to shoot and Granger relished new freedom in Europe, buying a house in Rome. Despite this he never worked again in anything comparable to Visconti’s masterpiece.
Returning sporadically to the US, he played in The Naked Street (1955) as a hoodlum taken under the overly protective wing of Anthony Quinn, then had a better role as the murderous roué in Richard Fleischer’s The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955).
He returned to the stage, acting in The Carefree Tree on Broadway in 1955, and touring with The Seagull, Hedda Gabler and She Stoops to Conquer. Television offered the occasional bit of intelligent casting, including the grasping would-be lover in The Heiress (1961). The role had been a triumph for Montgomery Clift in the cinema in 1949 and one could see the rationale behind the new casting. After a decade mainly in the theatre and TV and little-seen movies such as Rogues’ Gallery (1968), Granger returned to a more congenial Europe.
In 1970 he made a western, My Name Is Trinity, and then a complicated spy thriller, The Serpent, where he co-starred with Henry Fonda, Yul Brynner and Dirk Bogarde, all gentlemen of a certain age in search of elusive work. He again worked in American television, in such popular series as Matt Helm, Ellery Queen, The Love Boat and Murder, She Wrote, and also contributed to the documentary The Celluloid Closet (1995), an examination of homosexuality in Hollywood movies.
In 2001 he appeared in his last film, The Next Big Thing, and came to London for his West End stage debut, in a revival of Noël Coward’s once-controversial play Semi-Monde. He later withdrew because of difficulties in remembering his lines. He said that he had become bored with the process of film-making and retired, devoting himself to travel and his greatest love, the theatre, now as a spectator. In 2007, he published a memoir, Include Me Out, co-written with his long-term partner, the producer Robert Calhoun, who died in 2008.
• Farley Earle Granger, actor, born 1 July 1925; died 27 March 2011
To view “The Guardian” Obituary, please click here.
Tribute to Farley Granger by Mike McCrann in “LA Frontiers”:
Openly gay actor Farley Granger was one of the most beautiful men to ever appear in films. During his heyday, Granger was almost too pretty, and his beauty and sexuality made it difficult to get good roles. And Farley Granger did not have a large studio behind him, as he was under contract to Sam Goldwyn, who only made one or two pictures a year. All of Farley Granger’s great movies were on loan out, including the two Alfred Hitchcock films he is best remembered for.
Mr. Granger, who died in 2011 at the age of 85, was discovered in Los Angeles by a Sam Goldwyn talent scout. He was cast in the infamous pro-Russian film The North Star as a Russian teenager fighting Nazi aggression. A few years later, HUAC attacked this Lillian Hellman-written film as proof of the pro-communist forces working in Hollywood. Farley survived this epic and was signed to a long-term contract with Goldwyn. Farley Granger’s three best films were made away from Goldwyn.
In the Nicholas Ray classic They Live By Night, Granger and Cathy O’Donnell played Bowie and Keechie, two lovers on the run. This forerunner to Bonnie and Clyde is one of the true film noir classics, and Granger was impressive and sexy as the young criminal hounded by fate and the police. Farley Granger was then cast by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1948 film Rope. This story of two young men who commit a murder for the fun of it was based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case. Compounding the irony of this story of two gay men who kill for the thrill of it was the fact that both stars, Farley Granger and John Dall, were gay themselves, and the script was written by Arthur Laurents, who was not only gay but Farley Granger’s lover.
Punch cartoons by Robert Sherriffs
Film Review ;
They Live by Night ; Cathy O’Donnell and Farley Granger
Arthur Laurents later wrote the books for the classic musicals West Side Story and Gypsy. Laurents and Granger began a long-time affair during this period. Laurents actually outed Farley Granger in his 2000 tome Original Story, in which he writes of their first sexual encounter:
“There we were, rolling on the floor on a shag rug in the living room of a sublet on the wrong side of Doheny in mid-afternoon, me and my movie star! Oh frabjous day!”
In a 1999 interview, Granger discussed the making of Strangers on a Train: “I had a great time. Oh, I loved it. I got to know Hitch pretty well—and his family, which was terrific and it was fun.”
Farley Granger’s own book, Include Me Out, would not come out until seven years after this sizzling revelation. Arthur Laurents and Farley Granger were a pretty openly gay couple during the most repressive period in American history.
Though Rope was one of Alfred Hithcock’s few flops, he cast Granger again in Strangers on a Train. This great Hitchcock film was not only one of the maestro’s best, but it gave Farley Granger the best movie role of his career. Co-starring the star-crossed Robert Walker as the psychopath Bruno Anthony, who suggests they swap murders (Granger’s slutty wife and Walker’s rich father), this film allowed Farley Granger to show his athletic abilities (tennis) and his acting process in one of the best films of the 1950s
. There was also a none-too-subtle gay subtext, as it is farily obvious that the Bruno character is gay.
Farley Granger had few great parts left once he bought his way out of his Goldwyn contract. The great gay Italian director Luchino Visconti cast Granger in the sumptuous Senso opposite another former Hithcock star, Alida Valli. The rest of Farley Granger’s career was basically spent on TV and in the theater.
Farley Granger was not a great actor, but when given the right part, he could be totally mesmerizing. He was also one of the truly beautiful American movie stars. Farley Granger was also one of the first important male movie stars to live openly as a gay man. Although he always claimed to be bisexual and had a number of romances with women, Granger spent the later part of his life (1963-2008) with partner Robert Calhoun.
SMALL TOWN GIRL, top from left: Farley Granger, Ann Miller, Bobby Van; from bottom far right: Jane Powell, 1953
In his fascinating autobiography, Granger simply states after his first sexual experience with both a man and a woman occurred on the same night: “I finally came to the conclusion that for me, everything I had done that night was as natural and as good as it felt. … I was never ashamed and I never felt the need to explain or apologize for my relationships to anyone. I have loved men. I have loved women.”
Farley Granger was handsome, talented and a true gay icon for being one of the few movie stars of his era to live his life openly and honestly. Like many a gay man today, Farley Granger stated, “I looked forward to the time when I could be myself. And that’s how I have lived and still continue to live my life. Fortunately, it has been many years since I felt the need to be secretive.”
The above article can also be accessed online here.
