Sonja Henie was born in 1912 in Oslo, Norway to a very wealthy family. From an early age she practiced ice skating and she was a competitor in the 1924 Winter Olympics at the age of eleven. She won her third Olympic title at he 1936 Games. After the Games she became a professional ice skater. While performing in Los Angeles she was signed to a contract by 20th Century Fox. Her first film was “One in a Million”. The peak of her cinema career was between 1936 and 1943 and her films included “Thin Ice”, “Happy Landings”, “Sun Valley Serenade”, “Iceland” and “Wintertime”. She was a hugely popular star and made ice skating also popular. Ten years later Esther Williams was to do the same thing with swimming. Sonja Henie concentrated on ice skating revues after her film career waned. She retired from ice skating in 1956. She invested wisely and was a very wealthy woman when she died while en route by place to Oslo in 1969 at the age of 57.
TCM Overview:
Winner of the Olympic Gold medal in figure skating an impressive three times in a row (1928, 1932, 1936), Henie came to Twentieth Century-Fox shortly after her last win and was built up as a popular star. Nearly a dozen light musical comedies offered the blonde and dimpled Henie plenty of opportunities to don her blades and perform in lavish ice ballets while her leading men beamed and a cast of supporting comics clowned around. When her film career petered out in the mid-1940s she turned to performing in live ice shows.
“Vanity Fair” article on Sonja Henie can be accessed here.
Linda Darnell was born in 1923 in Dallas, Texas. She was spotted by a talent scout and brought to Hollywood with her mother at the age of 15. She signed a contract with 20th Century Fox. She was cast opposite Tyrone Power in the 1939 comedy “Day-Time Wife”. In 1940 she was with Power again in the terrific swashbuckler “The Mark of Zorro” and later on she was with him again and Rita Hayworth in the visually stunningly photographed “Blood and Sand”. Among her other film credits are “Fallen Angel”, “Anna and the King of Siam”, “My Darling Clementine” “A Letter to Three Wives”, and “Forever Amber” where she replaced the very young Peggy Cummins. She continued her career through the 1950’s but by the earky 60’s her cinema career was in decline. Linda Darnell died tragically in 1965 at the early age of 41. She was watching one of her films on television when she fell asleep. She had been smoking a cigarette which smouldered on the settee which got fire and she died from massive burns. She was a true beauty with many great films in her portfolio. Linda Darnell website can be accessed here.
TCM Overview:
Linda Darnell was touted by Hollywood wags as “the girl with the perfect face”, and for once the description fit. Her cameo-cut china doll face was enough to ensure stardom in glamor-obsessed 1940s Hollywood; surely Darnell could easily fit into the top ten most beautiful women the screen has ever known. And as she matured, her voice deepened into a torchy throb that added intensity to the eventual siren image.
The product of a relentless stage mother, Darnell was a star by age 15 at Fox, where she was a contract player for 14 years. For a while she coasted on her looks alone, playing sweet young things (Selznick chose her to embody the Virgin Mary in 1943’s “Song of Bernadette”), before her career took a more interesting turn. Darnell was hampered by being under contract to Fox, which specialized in escapist fare and wasted her for seven unremarkable years.
United Artists cast Darnell on loan-out for a Chekhov adaptation, “Summer Storm” in 1944. She wasn’t ready, but the publicity–with Darnell lolling about a la Jane Russell, combined with that face–launched a transformation beyond pin-up to apprentice love goddess. The rest of the decade found her often in interesting roles that displayed her as willful, sometimes venal, smouldering trouble. Memorable portraits in the Darnell catalog include the strangled (and left to burn) music-hall trollop in Hangover Square (1945), the floozy waitress of Fallen Angel (also 1945, in which she acted circles around reigning studio queen Alice Faye), the ill-fated concubine in “Anna and the King of Siam” (1946, in which Darnell dies prophetically by fire),A Letter to Three Wives (1948, hilariously stealing the show from Jeanne Crain and Ann Sothern), and a gangster’s moll on the lam with Robert Mitchum in Second Chance (1953).
But Darnell’s big bid for superstardom went awry: taking over the starring role in Kathleen Windsor’s bodice-ripper “Forever Amber” (1947) when Zanuck bounced Peggy Cummins. The movie received monumental publicity but censorship and the heavy hand of Otto Preminger produced dull results. Her scenes during The Great Fire of London produced a paranoia that caused her director to literally drag her before the cameras. Fire was becoming a lifelong fear.
After Letter, the parts Darnell was ready for weren’t offered to her. She received good notices for No Way Out (1950), a race relations drama ahead of its time, but as happened with Rita Hayworth, Hollywood tended to treat mature beauties in nonglamourous roles as if they were finished commercially in the business. The combination of a stormy personal life and alcohol dependence dogged her as she sped through the predictable downward spiral of summer stock, television and cabaret.
In 1965 Darnell was visiting a former secretary in a suburb of Chicago and fell asleep with a lit cigarette after watching a late show of Star Dust (1940), wherein she played a young Hollywood hopeful. Her hostess and her daughter escaped the blaze, but Darnell suffered burns over eighty percent of her body. Some accounts had her escaping the fire only to re-enter the house, thinking her friend’s daughter had not escaped; others alleged she went back to retrieve her mink coat—the last vestige remaining from her glory days. She died two days later, rallying into consciousness only once, when her adopted daughter, Lola, visited her. Linda Darnell, the woman called “almost too beautiful”, left behind an estate of only $10,000, which went to her sixteen-year-old girl. Today Darnell is not remembered as well as many of her less-talented contemporaries, but an examination of her career reveals a gifted beauty whose steamy noir persona made her a tragic, unforgettable entry in Hollywood history.
Rory Calhoun has become a cult name thanks to “The Simpsons”. He was avery popular actor throughout the 1950’s especially in Westerns. He was born in Los Angeles in 1922. He was discovered by Sue Carol an agent who was also the wife of actor Alan Ladd. She managed to secure him a role in the Laurel & Hardy film “The Bullfighters” in 1945. He starred then opposite Rhonda Fleming in “Adventure Island”, “The Red House” with Julie London” and “That Hagen Girl” with Shirley Temple. His career highlights in the 1950’s included “How to Marry A Millionaire” with Betty Grable, Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe in 1953, “The River of No Return” with Monroe again and Robert Mitchum and “Way of a Gaucho” with Gene Tierney. His best performance was probably with Susan hayward in “With A Song in My Heart”. His last film in 1992 was the western “Pure Country”. Rory Calhoun died in 1999 aged 76.
Rory Calhoun’s obituary in “The Independent” by Tom Vallance:A RUGGEDLY handsome actor with black hair and piercing blue eyes, Rory Calhoun was a teenage favourite and a veteran of countless low-budget westerns whose modest film career was counterpointed by a frequently scandalous and newsworthy private life. His early years of juvenile delinquency, tempestuous love affairs and controversial divorce, in which his wife named 79 co-respondents (including the famed pin-up girl Betty Grable), gained him the sort of headlines that his journeyman roles in films rarely did.
The Young And The Brave, poster, from top: Rory Calhoun, William Bendix, Richard Jaeckel, Manuel Padilla Jr, Flame (as Lobo the dog), poster art, 1963. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Born Francis Timothy McCown in 1922, in Los Angeles, he was raised by his mother and a step- father named Nathaniel Durgin. The family was extremely poor, and he gravitated to crime at an early age, spending much of his youth in reformatories and prisons for a series of thefts. He later credited a Catholic priest, the Rev Donald Kanally, with changing his life.
“He took me in hand after I had been sent to the Federal Reform School at El Reno, Oklahoma. He put me on the straight and narrow by teaching me to pray and respect myself, and he taught me values that I hadn’t learned as a youngster. Eventually he became a Monsignor – I hope that anyone who needs a helping hand will be as lucky as I was in having Father Kanally.”
Calhoun then worked as a lumberjack, miner and cowboy until, while riding in the Hollywood hills, he met the movie star Alan Ladd, who was impressed with the young man’s physique and invited him home to meet Mrs Ladd, the agent Sue Carol, who got him a contract with 20th Century-Fox. As Frank McCown, he made his screen debut as a soldier in Something for the Boys (1944), followed by minor roles in Sunday Dinner for a Soldier (1944) and the musical Nob Hill (1945).
When Fox dropped him, the producer David O. Selznick’s chief talent scout, Henry Willson, noted for the distinctive noms d’ecran he would give his discoveries (Guy Madison, Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue), persuaded Selznick to add the young actor to his contract list, renaming him Rory Calhoun. Though Selznick did not cast the young man in his own productions, he gave him publicity and loaned him to other producers.
Calhoun’s first big break came when he played the boxer Jim Corbett in The Great John L (1945), based on the life of the turn-of-the-century heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan and produced by Bing Crosby. The role of Corbett (whose life had earlier been depicted by Errol Flynn in Gentleman Jim, 1942) gave Calhoun the chance to display his impressive physique and athletic prowess. When MGM wanted the Selznick star Shirley Temple for their film That Hagen Girl (1947), the producer insisted they also take Calhoun for the role of Temple’s young suitor who loses her to Ronald Reagan.
The same year Calhoun made a good impression with his role in Delmer Daves’s moody, rustic film noir The Red House starring Edward G. Robinson. Calhoun was one of four young newcomers in the film, sharing some torrid love scenes with Julie London in his role as a ruthless woodman hired by Robinson to repel trespassers who might discover the secret harboured by a mysterious house in the woods.
In 1947 Calhoun started a stormy relationship with the French actress Corinne Calvet. “Our romance was spontaneous and electric,” wrote Calvet later, but she claimed that Calhoun’s volatile temper cooled their ardour – on one occasion when she had a date with the mogul Harry Cohn, she returned to find that Calhoun had wrecked her apartment. Later, after proposing marriage, he abandoned her to spend the evening with his mentor Henry Willson and, when she demanded an explanation, took a shot at her with a pistol.
Yvonne De Carlo was another actress confused by Calhoun’s relationship with Willson. Writing of a date with the actor planned by her studio, she said, “There was Rory, his agent Henry Willson, Marguerite Chapman and me. Ostensibly I was paired with Rory but it didn’t turn out that way. After photographers stopped snapping pictures, Rory and Henry stood huddled deep in conversation. Marguerite and I weren’t even tossed a dangling participle to chew on. After a while I said to Marguerite, `Can you tell me what the hell is going on?’ `Don’t look now, Yvonne,’ she kidded, `but I think I’m your date tonight.’ “
In 1948 Calhoun married the Mexican singer Lita Baron, whom he met when she was leading an orchestra at the Mocambo night-club and, according to DeCarlo, “settled down to a more stable way of life”. Having received star billing in several B movies for which he was loaned out, often with other Selznick players – Rhonda Fleming in Adventure Island (1947), Guy Madison in Massacre River (1949) – Calhoun returned to Fox with a new contract and for several years was used less as a star than as a reliable leading man to the studio’s female super-stars: Susan Hayward in I’d Climb the Highest Mountain (1951) and With a Song in My Heart (1952), Betty Grable in Meet Me after the Show (1951) and How to Marry a Millionaire (1953).
His top-billed roles were generally in minor westerns such as Powder River (1953), Four Guns to the Border (1954) and Treasure of Pancho Villa (1955), but he was more interesting when playing roguishly handsome villains – as a gunslinger hired by a stagecoach company to stop the railroad running on time in A Ticket to Tomahawk (1950), and a cowboy who abandons Marilyn Monroe and Robert Mitchum to hostile Indians and teeming rapids in River of No Return (1954).
In 1958 he formed his own company to produce Apache Territory, in which he starred, but it was not a success and later the same year he began a television series, The Texan, which ran for two seasons and cast Calhoun as a quick-on-the-draw cowboy who travelled from town to town vanquishing law- breakers, helping those in need and occasionally finding romance.
He continued to work on television and occasional minor western movies, and in 1969 became a stage producer when he persuaded his old friend and co-star Betty Grable to play the title role in a western musical, Belle Starr, planned for the West End. While the show was playing a pre-London opening in Glasgow, Lita Baron sued Calhoun for divorce, naming Grable as one of the 79 women with whom he had committed adultery. The actor responded, “Heck, she didn’t even include half of them”, though both he and Grable denied that they had been more than friends. That friendship was to end when the show flopped and Calhoun and his partner left town without paying Grable or the chorus members their last week’s salary.
The Calhouns’ acrimonious divorce became final in 1970, after which the actor did not work for some time, telling The New York Times, “I figured the more I worked, the more alimony I had to pay her. So I stayed idle.” In 1971 he married a former newspaperwoman from Australia, Susan Langley, whom he had met when she interviewed him in London, but they were divorced five years later.
His appearance becoming increasingly gaunt, Calhoun was a regular guest on television series, including Alias Smith and Jones and Petrocelli, and made some exploitation movies, including Motel Hell (1980), Angel (1984) and its sequel, Avenging Angel (1985). In his last film, Pure Country (1992), he was once more a cowboy and won praise as the best thing in a dull film, after which he retired to concentrate on his hobby as an amateur painter.
Francis Timothy McCown (Rory Calhoun), actor: born Los Angeles 8 August 1922; married 1948 Lita Baron (three daughters; marriage dissolved 1970), 1971 Susan Langley (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1976); died Burbank, California 28 April 1999.
The “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Madys Christians was born in Vienna, Austria in 1892. She made her first film “The Black Hussar” in Germany in 1932. In Hollywood four years later she starred in “Come and Get It” with Frances Farmer. On Broadway she had an enourmous success with “I Remember Mama” in 1944. On film she had fine roles in 1948 in “All My Sons” and “A Letter to an Unknown Woman” which was directed by Max Ophuls. She was blacklisted during the McCarthy era and died in 1951.
From All Movie Guide: Primarily an actress of the European and American stage, she also appeared in many German and Hollywood films. Christians came to the U.S. in 1912 to appear with her parents in a German-speaking theater they established in New York. After making one film in the States, Audrey (1916), she returned to Germany to study with Max Reinhardt. In the ’20s she starred in numerous German plays and films, plus a few Broadway productions. With the coming to power of the Nazis in 1933, she returned to America for good, shuttling between Hollywood and Broadway. In films she tended to play supporting character parts, while on stage she continued to find lead roles. Late in her career she was blacklisted after being labeled a communist sympathizer during the McCarthy-era “witch trials.” ~ Rovi
Kerwin Mathews obituary in “The Guardian” in 2007.
Kerwin Mathews is best known as the hero in such cult classics as “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad” in 1958, “The Three Worlds of Gulliver” in 1960 and “Jack the Giant Killer” three years later. He was born in Seattle in 1926. he originally trained to be a teacher. He served in the Army Air Corp during World War Two. In 1954 he was awarded a Columbia film contract and was given a major role in his first film “Five Against the House” with Kim Novak and Guy Madison. Two of hsi major films are “The Garment Jungle” with Gia Scala and “The Devil at 4 O’Clock”.He retired from acting in 1978. Kerwin Mathews died in 2007 at the age of 81.
The Guardian obituary by Ronald Bergan:
It is inevitable that the screen actor Kerwin Mathews, who has died aged 81, should be forever associated with children’s fantasy films, using stop-motion special effects, almost as if he were an animated figure himself. But the handsome Mathews was flesh and blood, and worked hard to make the rather bland heroes, whether Sinbad, Gulliver or Jack the Giant Killer, more than one-dimensional, acting realistically with the many animated creatures he had to confront.
Mathews had to interact with nothing facing him, because all the monsters were added later. “His eyes were always concentrated on the unseen subject,” explained legendary animator Ray Harryhausen, who created the spectacular stop-motion effects for two of Mathews’ biggest successes, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960). In the former, Mathews battled a 30-foot cyclops, a giant roc and its two-headed chick, a fire-spitting dragon and, most famously, a warrior skeleton, with whom he has a climactic sword fight. However, in most of his films, he also had to fight against banal dialogue, often winning the battle by bringing conviction to the roles.
Born in Seattle, Mathews moved with his mother to Wisconsin after his parents’ divorce. Later he was inspired when “a kind high-school teacher put me in a play, and changed my life”. But it was only after serving two years in the wartime Army Air Force, and a spell teaching English, that he started acting professionally at the Pasadena Playhouse, where he was spotted by an agent, who got him a seven-year Columbia Pictures contract. Mathews’s screen debut was in Phil Karlson’s heist drama, 5 Against the House (1955), as the smartest of five students who plan to rob a casino in Reno.
This was followed by a leading role in The Garment Jungle (1957), one of his rare sorties into Hollywood realism. In this potent look at the US clothing business, he played the son of Lee J Cobb’s corrupt union official.But The 7th Voyage of Sinbad turned Mathews into an action hero in episodic narratives with interchangeable plots in which the hero sets sail to rescue a beautiful girl, although it was usually the animation that rescued the films. Harryhausen’s Super Dynamation filled The 3 Worlds of Gulliver with tiny (Lilliputian) and huge (Brobdingnagian) people, and Jack the Giant Killer (1962) had a dragon, courtesy of Projects Unlimited.
In the Hammer swashbuckler Pirates of Blood River (1961), Mathews falls into the clutches of Christopher Lee, and in the French-made Shadow of Evil he is a James Bond wannabe named only OSS 117. More ludicrous was Battle Beneath the Earth (1968), a red-baiting thriller in which the Chinese have built a series of tunnels under the US stocked with H-bombs. It is up to Mathews, leading a small army, to eliminate the threat.
Although Mathews felt that none of his films offered him a good acting role, he was most pleased with his performance as Johann Strauss Jnr in Walt Disney’s two-part television biopic, The Waltz King (1963). He spent much of the latter part of his career in bad horror movies such as Octaman (1971), as an ecologist who comes across an upright octopus (a man in a rubber suit) who goes around slapping people to death.
In 1961, he met Tom Nicoll, a British display manager at Harvey Nichols, who became his partner for the next 46 years. In 1978, having retired from acting, he and Nicoll, who survives him, moved to San Francisco, where they ran an antique business.
· Kerwin Mathews, actor, born January 8 1926; died July 5 2007
His Guardian obituary can be accessed online here.
Robert Lansing was born in San Diego, California in 1928. His major acting breakthrough cane in 1961 with his role in the television series “87th Precinct” with Gena Rowlands. His other television series included “12 O’Clock High” and “The Man Who Never Was” with Dana Wynter. His films include “A Gathering of Eagles” and the cult favourite “Empire of the Ants” with Joan Collins in 1978. Robert Lansing died aged 66 in 1994. A website dedicated to Robert Lansing here.
Born in San Diego, California, Lansing reportedly took his acting surname from the state capital of Michigan. As a young actor in New York City, he was hired to join a stock company in Michigan but was told he would first have to join the Actors’ Equity Association. Equity would not allow him to join as “Robert Brown” because another actor was using that name. Because the stock company was based in Lansing, this became the actor’s new surname.[4]
During his long career, which spanned five decades, Lansing appeared in 245 episodes of 73 television series, 11 TV movies, and 19 motion pictures. [5] He gained early acting experience at the Actors Studio.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, he worked under his real name Bob Brown as a radio announcer at WANE in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He also was active as an actor in a Fort Wayne theater group. Lansing first appeared on Broadway in the play Stalag 17(1951) directed by José Ferrer, replacing Mark Roberts in the role of Dunbar at the 48th Street Theater. His rugged good looks, commanding stage presence and stentorian voice earned him continuing stage work and throughout his film career he periodically returned to the New York stage, making his last such appearance in 1991.
José Ferrer asked Lansing to perform in a series of plays at the New York City Center, including as a Cadet of Gascoyne in Cyrano de Bergerac and as the Marquis of Dorset in Richard III. He appeared in Tennessee Williams‘ Suddenly, Last Summer and Eugene O’Neill‘s The Great God Brown in the title role. Other stage performances included roles in Charley’s Aunt, Elmer Rice‘s Cue for Passion, The Lovers, and The Cut of the Axe. Off-Broadway, his work included The Father, the “Sea Plays” of Eugene O’Neill and two one-man shows, Damien and The Disciple of Discontent.
Robert Lansing is probably best known for his role as Brigadier General Frank Savage in the first season of the Quinn Martin production, 12 O’Clock High, which aired on the ABC Television Network from 1964 to 1967. At the end of that season, the studio executives reported that a younger-looking lead actor was needed. But another account states that he was fired for being difficult to work with and not showing enough respect.[citation needed] In the first episode of the second season, General Savage was killed in action and replaced by Colonel Joe Gallagher, played by Paul Burke. Burke, though considered more youthful-looking than Lansing, was actually two years older, a fact that TV critics were quick to point out.
Lansing played an international secret agent in The Man Who Never Was, and Lt. Jack Curtis on Automan. He also played a recurring role, known only as “Control”, on 29 episodes of The Equalizer between 1985 and 1989, which then was spun-off into the made-for-TV movie Memories of Manon which aired on 13 February 1989. He guest-starred in The Twilight Zone episode “The Long Morrow” and in the Thriller episode “Fatal Impulse.” He also guest-starred on other television productions such as NBC’s Law & Order. In the 1980s he did a series of television commercials for Liberty National Bank in Louisville, Kentucky as well as the popular supermarket chain Giant Eagle.
Robert Lansing’s final television role was that of Police Captain Paul Blaisdell, on the series Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. The role was written specifically for Lansing by series writer and Executive Producer Michael Sloan, who had worked with Lansing on the series The Equalizer in the 1980s although Lansing had already been diagnosed with cancer. Despite continuing health problems, Lansing performed in 24 episodes in the first and second season. In the final episode of season 2, titled “Retribution”, Lansing’s character of Blaisdell was written out, with the possibility of the character returning if the actor’s health improved. Unfortunately, the final episode filmed in February 1994, was Lansing’s final acting performance. The episode aired on November 28, 1994, a month after the actor died, and was dedicated to his memory.
Lansing had craggy good looks, a stentorian voice, commanding presence, and characteristic bushy eyebrows.
Lansing had a son, Robert Frederick Orin Lansing (1957–2009), with his first wife, actress Emily McLaughlin; the couple eventually divorced. About a year and a half later, he married Gari Hardy, but this marriage also ended in divorce. The couple had a daughter, Alice Lucille Lansing. His last wife was Anne Pivar, with whom he remained until his death.
From 1991 to 1993, he was president of The Players Club, a theatrical fraternal organization founded by Edwin Booth in 1888.
Lansing was a heavy smoker and died from cancer in 1994 at age 66, one year into his last regular series, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. He was buried at Union Field Cemetery in Ridgewood, Queens.
Richard Ney was an American actor who became an investment counsellor. He was born in 1916 in New York City. His best remembered role was as Vin Miniver the son of Walter Pidgeon and Greer Garson in the classic World War Two drama “Mrs Miniver”. Among his other film credits are “Midnight Lace” with Doris Day and “The Premature Burial” with Ray Milland and Hazel Court. He then became an investment counsellor and wrote three books on the subject. He died in 2004 at the age of 88.
The “Guardian” obituary by Christopher Reed:
In 1970, the actor-turned-writer and investment expert Richard Ney, who has died aged 87, published his acclaimed The Wall Street Jungle. Its theme, that there was “more sheer larceny per square foot” on the floor of the New York stock exchange “than any place else in the world,” so scandalised the New York Times that it never reviewed the book, despite its 11 months on the newspaper’s bestseller list.
Ney’s The Wall Street Gang (1974) and Making It In The Market (1975) followed. Together with his fortnightly Ney Report (1976-99), personal investments and managing portfolios, he did not regret leaving Hollywood in 1961, after a dazzling debut almost 20 years earlier.
Ney was chosen to play Greer Garson’s son Vin in the Oscar-winning Mrs Miniver (1942). The following year he married Garson, who was 11 years older. Ney made 13 more films, including Lady Windermere’s Fan (1949) and Midnight Lace, a London murder mystery (1960). The Secret Of St Ives (1949) was the only one in which he starred.
His 1947 divorce from Garson made him more famous than he wished. The press portrayed him as an impertinent upstart insulting the Anglo-Irish cool queen of Hollywood. He said he went into finance “to be left alone,” but he was well known in Beverly Hills, where he lived and drove a midnight blue and ivory coachbuilt Rolls-Royce.
Almost immediately after leaving Hollywood, Ney featured in Time magazine thanks to his forecast earlier that year of the financial crash of 1962. It had been while working in a Beverly Hills brokerage that the activities of floor specialists caught his notice. An official report after the crash confirmed his suspicions about their manipulations.
Born in New York’s Bronx, the son of a first world war pilot turned insurance salesman, and a secretary, Ney read economics at Columbia University, paying his fees by modelling. He was fired from a New York play after a year for demanding a raise, but, on a trip to LA, a friend took him along to a film studio appointment. Ney wandered into a room where several men were talking. One looked at him and exclaimed: “My god, it’s Vin Miniver.” His film career was interrupted by naval war service in the Pacific.
Ney’s books may have dated, but are still regarded as definitive works on the mysteries of the stock exchange, where “the money stolen from the many is divided among few”. Ney is survived by his fourth wife, Mei-Lee, and a stepdaughter from his third marriage.
“The Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Milly Vitale was a very pretty actress who was born in Rome in 1933. Her first film was “The Brothers Karamazov” in 1947. She was featured in a number of Italian films when she was given the role of Kirk Douglas’s leading lady in “The Juggler” in 1953. Two years later she was brought to Hollywood to star opposite Bob Hope in “The Seven Little Foys”. She only made the one film in the U.S. and then returned to Europe. She was in the epic “War and Peace”. She was excellent as the World War Two freedom fighter in “The Battle of the V.I.” with Michael Rennie and Patricia Medina. She retired from acting in the 1970’s. Milly Vitale died in 2006. Her link on “Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen” can be accessed here.
“Wikipedia entry:
Camilla “Milly” Vitale (16 July 1933, Rome, Italy – 2 November 2006, Rome, Italy) was an Italian actress. She was the daughter of conductor Riccardo Vitale and choreographer Natasha Shidlowski.
She appeared in numerous post-war Italian films. She appeared in a few Hollywood movies but never achieved star status like her contemporaries Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida. In her most notable U.S. role, she appeared with Bob Hope as “Madeleine Morundo Foy” in The Seven Little Foys (1956). War and Peace She married Vincent Hillyer, a United States citizen, in 1960; the marriage produced two sons, Edoardo and Vincent Jr. The couple divorced in the late 1960s. Vitale retired from acting in the 1970s, after a career of more than 47 films.
Laurel Goodwin was one of Elvis Presley’s leading ladies in “Girls, Girls, Girls,” where the King sang “Return to Sender” in 1962. She was born Wichita, Kansas in 1942.
She only made three more films including “The Glory Guys” with Tom Tryon and Senta Berger and “Papa’s Delicate Condition” with Jackie Gleason and Glynis Johns. She is remembered by Star Trek buffs for her guest appearance in an episode called “The Cage”.
Entry on Lauren Goodwin on Memory Alpha”:
Goodwin, like Kirstie Alley, was born in Wichita, Kansas. Unlike Alley, however, who had begun her career with proceeds from game-show winnings, Laurel began her career as a child model.
She majored in drama at San Francisco State University, with her break coming when she was selected to star opposite Elvis Presley in the 1962 filmGirls! Girls! Girls! During the 1960s, Goodwin made three more feature films and performed in a handful of television guest star roles.
Tired of “pounding the pavement,” she abandoned acting in 1971.
Beth Poole in a scene from the film ‘The Glory Guys’, 1965. (Photo by United Artists/Getty Images)
For many years she lived with her husband, business executive Walter Wood, in New York. Together they produced several films, most notably–in partnership with Hugh Wilson and others–the Burt Reynolds film, Stroker Ace, which Hal Needham directed and in which Warren Stevens was featured.
As of early July of 2012, they were living in Palm Springs, where Goodwin pursued a career in home nursing.
Although she had attended a few Elvis conventions over the years, it was not until 2005 that she attended her first Trek convention, along with Peter Duryea.
Laurel Goodwin, who made her movie debut opposite Elvis Presley in Girls! Girls! Girls! and starred alongside Jeffrey Hunter in “The Cage,’ the rejected first pilot made for Star Trek, has died. She was 79.
Goodwin died Feb. 25 in Cathedral City, California, her sister, Maureen Scott, announced.
Goodwin also portrayed the elder daughter of Jackie Gleason and Glynis Johns’ characters in Papa’s Delicate Condition (1963) and appeared in The Glory Guys(1965), written by Sam Peckinpah.
After working in the 1964 feature Westerns Stage to Thunder Rock and Law of the Lawless and The Glory Guys, Goodwin was cast as Yeoman J.M. Colt opposite Hunter as Capt. Christopher Pike and Nimoy as Mr. Spock in “The Cage” for Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek
The pilot, finished in early 1965, didn’t sell, but the producers held on to her, Hunter and Nimoy with the goal of trying again. Meanwhile, Goodwin had a choice: she had offers to make pilots for two network comedies.
“I said, ‘Oh, no. Star Trek is it. I’ve got to do Star Trek. It’s great, it’s gonna be wonderful,’” she recalled in a 2016 interview for StarTrek.com.
When negotiations with Hunter broke down, it was decided that Goodwin was no longer needed. William Shatner came aboard as Capt. James T. Kirk to star later in 1965 in the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and NBC picked up the Desilu series.
“In the meantime, I had turned down the two comedies, pulled my name out of consideration,” she said. “They both sold, and both were highly successful.”
Born on Aug. 11, 1942, in Wichita, Kansas, Goodwin and her family moved to San Diego and then San Francisco. She began working as a model when she was 7, then attended Lowell High School and San Francisco State.
After she served as a babysitter for the children of photographer Kurt Gunther, he circulated her photos at Paramount, and the studio wound up signing her to a seven-year contract when she was 19.
“I got in during the very last remnants of the old studio system, which believe me, lasted about six to eight months,” she said in Tom Lisanti’s 2003 book, Drive-in Dream Girls: A Galaxy of B-Movie Starlets of the Sixties. “I did a lot of press when Paramount signed me.”
In Hollywood, she studied acting with Jeff Corey and, when he was away, his fill-in, Nimoy.
In the Hawaii-set Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962), Goodwin played the wholesome rich girl Laurel Dodge, who battles with a singer (Stella Stevens) for the affections of Elvis’ tuna fisherman and helps him get the boat he always wanted. The two memorably share a dance in the clever “The Wall Have Ears” number.
Laurel Goodwin and Elvis Presley in 1962’s ‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’ COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION
Following her Star Trek disappointment, Goodwin appeared on episodes of Get Smart, The Beverly Hillbillies and Mannix before retiring from acting in 1971 and going into nursing.
Footage from “The Cage,” meanwhile, was incorporated into the 1966 two-part Star Trek episode “The Menagerie” before the entire pilot was seen for the first time on VHS in 1986.
Goodwin co-produced the Burt Reynolds-Loni Anderson film Stroker Ace(1983) alongside her husband, Walter Wood, who had acquired the rights to the book on which the movie was based. They had a 43-year relationship that ended with his death in 2010
