Lois Smith was born in 1930 in Topeka in Kansas. She made her fim debut iin “East of Eden” with James Dean and then starred in the Western “Strange Lady in Town” with Greer Garson and Dana Andrews. She was excellent in 1970 in “Five Easy Pieces” as the shy, withdrawn classical pianist who is the sister of Jack Nicholson. Other films of note include “How to Make an American Quilt” and “Twister”. Link to her “True Blood” page here.
.TCM Overview:
An esteemed, highly-charged and highly-talented player of stage, TV and film, Lois Smith has not always been regular in the visual media, but she has made the chances count. She made her Broadway debut as a high school student in “Time Out for Ginger” in 1952, and her TV debut in the live production of “The Apple Tree” the next year. Smith made an auspicious film debut as the thwarted barmaid Ann in Elia Kazan’s “East of Eden” (1955). Although she was eclipsed in the public eye by James Dean and Jo Van Fleet, nevertheless, she was rewarded by the critics. Yet it was not until 1970 that Smith again had a showy film role. Her performance as Partita, Jack Nicholson’s sister, in Bob Rafelson’s “Five Easy Pieces,” won her the National Society of Film Critics’ Award as Best Supporting Actress. In 1976, she was the suicidal Anita in Paul Mazursky’s cinematic memoir, “Next Stop, Greenwich Village” Film roles followed at the rate of about one per year, but rarely did she get to showcase her abilities until 1995 when Smith was the adult Sophie, still thinking of her years as a swimming champion, in Jocelyn Moorhouse’s “How to Make an American Quilt” and Susan Sarandon’s mother in “Dead Man Walking.” In Jan De Bont’s “Twister” (1996), she offered stalwart support as scientist Helen Hunt’s aunt while in “Larger Than Life” (also 1996), Smith was a retired circus performer.
Smith’s TV work in the 70s consisted mostly of daytime dramas, with regular roles on both “Somerset” and “The Doctors.” In the 80s, she began to make episodic guest appearances and was featured in several TV-movies, most notably “Skylark” (CBS, 1993). Two years later, she was Harry Truman’s waspish, nasty, bigoted mother-in-law in “Truman” for HBO.
For all her TV and film roles, Smith has worked most consistently on stage. Her list of credits includes many plays on Broadway and in key American theaters, such as the Long Wharf in New Haven, CT, and the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, IL. It was with the latter that Smith created the role of the indomitable Ma Joad in the stage version of “The Grapes of Wrath” in 1988. She toured with the role before bringing it to Broadway in 1990 which earned her a Tony nomination as Best Supporting Actress. Smith knocked ’em dead when she performed a key scene on the Tony Awards TV broadcast that year and in 1991, when the production aired on PBS. Her co-star, Gary Sinise, cast her as Halie, the matriarch of another family, his 1995 Chicago production of Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer-winning play “Buried Child.” Again, Smith recreated the role on Broain dway and earned a second Tony nomination. Smith has branched out a bit as a person of the theatre to playwriting and directing. Her “All There Is” was written in 1982 and last performed in a 1985 workshop by the Ensemble Studio Theatre. Smith has also directed at the Juilliard school.
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
Ramon Novarro was born in 1899 in Durango, Mexico. His family moved to California to escape the Mexican revolution of 1913. He entered silent movies in tiny roles in 1917. He began been promoted as a rival to the Italian Rudolph Valentino. His first major success was “Scaramouche” in 1923. “Ben-Hur” in 1925 was probably his most popular film. After Valentino’s untimely death in 1926, Novarro became the most popular actor in silent film. He made the transition to sound film with relative easre and starred opposite Greta Garbo in “Mata Hari” in 1932. By the late 40’s he had become a reliable character actor and appeard as such in “We Were Strangers” a story about civil unrest in Cuba which starred Jennifer Jones and John Garfield which was made in 1949. Sadly he died in 1968 as a result of a brutal murder by two brothers. Anyone with an interest in silent film, should seek out the movies of Ramon Novarro. A link to “Golden Silents” here.
TCM Overview:
An engaging Latin American vaudevillian and singer who began his film career during the silent era, actor Ramón Novarro took over the role of Hollywoodâ¿¿s top Latin Lover when Rudolph Valentino died in 1926, only to stagnate once talkies came of age. Novarro first came to prominence as a villainous henchman in “The Prisoner of Zenda” (1922), which led to starring roles in popular films like “Scaramouche” (1923) and “The Arab” (1924). He had his greatest success playing wealthy man-turned slave Judah Ben-Hur in “Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ” (1925), a troubled, but successful epic that served as a precursor to William Wylerâ¿¿s 1959 classic. From there, Novarro starred opposite Norma Shearer in “The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg” (1927) and Joan Crawford in “Across to Singapore” (1928). But once he made the transition to talkies after “Devil May Care” (1929), Novarro saw his popularity plummet. By the end of the decade, he was out of a contract and lucky to find work in bit parts or character roles. Meanwhile, he fell into alcoholism â¿¿ due in part to his lifelong struggle with his homosexuality â¿¿ and his career suffered even more. Novarro did have a bit of a revival with character work on popular TV series like Dr. Kildare” (NBC, 1961-66) and “Bonanza” (NBC, 1959-1973), but his murder in 1968 by two prostitute brothers ended his life in a tawdry fashion. Still, Novarro remained a popular figure from the silent era whose contributions to film were undeniable.
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
Jeanne Crain was a beautiful American actress who was one of the most popular stars from the mid 1940’s until the late 1950’s. She was born in California in 1925. In 1943 she had a small part in the film “The Gangs All Here”. The following year she had great success with the beautifully photographed “Home in Indiana”. She starred in many of the important films of the period including “State Fair”, “Leave Her to Heaven”, “The Fan”, “Pinky”, “A Letter to Three Wives” and “Cheaper by the Dozen”. After her marriage, she put her career on hold to raise her seven children. She resumed acting thereafter. Jeanne Crain died in 2003. She is to my mind a very underappreciated actress and it is well worthwhile seeking out her movies.
TCM Overview:
With her natural beauty and unaffected charm, the young Jeanne Crain was a breath of fresh air in 20th Century-Fox films of the 1940s. Her looks and manner became somewhat brittle as she matured, but she remained a top leading lady at Fox into the early ’50s. The high point of her career was an Oscar® nomination as Best Actress for Pinky(1949), in which she plays a light-skinned black woman who can “pass” for white. Although director Eliza Kazan later wrote that he found her emotionally impassive as an actress, her performance remains a movingone.
She was born Elizabeth Jeanne Crain in Barstow, California on May 25, 1925, and grew up in Los Angeles. She studied drama at UCLA and signed with Fox at the age of 18, making her debut in an uncredited bit in The Gang’s All Here(1943). She first attracted favorable attention as Lon McCallister’s tomboyish love interest in Home in Indiana (1944), a horseracing story that became a big hit. After achieving star billing she had an even bigger success in State Fair(1945), a musical with an original Rodgers and Hammerstein score. Dubbed by Louanne Hogan (who would regularly provide her singing voice in Fox films), Crain performed “It Might as Well Be Spring” and other songs.
She was the “good girl” to Gene Tierney’s evil schemer in another hit, the classic melodrama Leave Her to Heaven(1945), and was dubbed again by Hogan in the Jerome Kern musical Centennial Summer (1946). She gave an especially engaging performance in Apartment for Peggy (1948) as the pregnant bride of an ex-GI played by William Holden. 1949 was a good year for Crain; in addition to Pinky she acted in A Letter to Three Wives, with Oscar®-winning script and direction by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and played Lady Windermere in The Fan, an adaptation of a comedy of manners by Oscar Wilde, with a script co-written by no less than Dorothy Parker.
Among Crain’s 23 films under her Fox contract, other notable entries included the nostalgic comedy Cheaper by the Dozen (1950) and its sequel, Belles on Their Toes (1952), in both of which she is the eldest daughter of a very large family; People Will Talk (1951), a thoughtful comedy of manners in which she is again directed by Mankiewicz and sparkles opposite Cary Grant; and The Model and the Marriage Broker (1951), in which she is at her most beautiful and, under the sensitive direction of George Cukor, enjoys charming byplay with outstanding character actress Thelma Ritter. Crain’s final film before leaving the studio was Vicki (1953), a remake of the 1941 mystery I Wake Up Screaming.
Crain’s follow-up films included two Westerns, Universal’s Man Without a Star (1955), opposite Kirk Douglas; and MGM’s The Fastest Gun Alive (1956), opposite Glenn Ford; and a pair of 1955 musicals, the well-received The Second Greatest Sex for Universal and the poorly received Gentlemen Marry Brunettes for United Artists. In the MGM biopicThe Joker Is Wild (1957), she is one of the women in the life of singer/comedian Joe E. Lewis as played by Frank Sinatra. Crain’s final feature film was Skyjacked (1972). She fleshed out her later career on television, landing the choice role of Daisy Buchanan in a Playhouse 90 production of The Great Gatsby before settling in to make appearances in various series. Sprinkled in were a couple of minor film epics made in Europe. Crain was married to Paul Brinkman and they had seven children together. She died a few months after Brinkman’s death in 2003.
Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Guardian”:
n the glory days of the studio system, movie stars were identified with one particular studio, becoming part of their company’s particular style and aura. From 1943 to 1953, Jeanne Crain, who has died aged 78, was a typical 20th Century Fox girl – charming, youthful and pretty. Fox, which had a smaller roster of stars than the other major studios, kept their contract players busy, and Crain made an average of two films a year, most of them bright and breezy.
Born in California of Irish-Catholic parents, Jeanne (pronounced Jean) Crain won the Miss Long Beach beauty contest in her teens, going on to become Camera Girl of 1942. But she had acting ambitions and, while still at school, took a screen test for Orson Welles for the role of Lucy Morgan in The Magnificent Ambersons. In the event, the slightly older and more experienced Anne Baxter got the part, subsequently pipping her to the post twice more, in All About Eve (1950) and One Desire (1955).
Crain’s problem was that she was mainly perceived at Fox as just a comely juvenile, lacking gravitas, and as a result was also passed over in favour of Susan Hayward in With A Song In My Heart (1952) and of Jean Simmons in The Robe (1953).
Occasionally, however, she did get a chance to reveal her ability, as in Elia Kazan’s Pinky (1949), playing a girl who has passed for white for years until forced to admit her roots. Kazan later commented: “It stirred up all kinds of hell, but it was a phoney picture. If I made it now, I’d never try to make the Fox back-lot look like the south or use Jeanne Crain, the blandest person I ever worked with.” Actually, Crain, who was Oscar nominated, was very affecting, though a black actor should have been cast, if that had been possible at the time.
Crain made her first, albeit brief, appearance on screen posing in a bathing costume in Busby Berkeley’s garish The Gang’s All Here (1943), before being introduced properly to audiences in Home In Indiana (1944), in which she portrayed a horsy girl who rides beautifully but is considered a tomboy.
She played a rather gutsy soldier’s wife in Otto Preminger’s In The Meantime Darling (1944), but became a real star in the Rogers and Hammerstein musical State Fair (1945), giving a delightfully fresh performance as the love-struck daughter of an Iowa farming family. Although her songs were dubbed by Luanne Hogan (who also dubbed her in subsequent musicals), a record of the hit songs, It’s A Grand Night For Singing and It Might As Well Be Spring, was issued under Crain’s name.
Crain’s rise to stardom coincided with her marriage to Paul Brinkman, a businessman and former small-time actor, who went on to become a top executive with an arms manufacturing company. Her mother opposed the marriage, and the two became estranged for some time thereafter. Crain had the first of their seven children, five of whom survive her, in 1947.
Previously, she had appeared in three successful movies. She was jealous Gene Tierney’s sweet foster sister in the lurid Leave Her To Heaven (1945), and Linda Darnell’s love rival sister in Preminger’s Centennial Summer (1946), in which she “sang” Jerome Kern melodies. Best of all was the engaging period musical Margie (1946), which showed Crain at the top of her form as a schoolgirl (though she was actually 21) with a crush on the French teacher and a tendency to lose her bloomers.
She then alternated between playing young wives or teenage daughters in a believable and ingratiating manner. She was married to William Holden in Apartment For Peggy (1948), and to bandleader Dan Dailey in You Were Meant For Me (1948). For Mankiewicz, in the stringent social comedy A Letter To Three Wives (1949), she was a shy newlywed, and, in People Will Talk (1951), she was the pregnant medical student whom gynaecologist Cary Grant marries to prevent her from committing suicide or having an abortion.
In both Cheaper By The Dozen (1950), and its sequel Belles On Their Toes (1952), Crain was the oldest of Myrna Loy’s 12 children, though she did the latter unwillingly after Zanuck refused to loan her out to Paramount for Carrie, opposite Laurence Olivier. There was another disappointment when she had to turn down a lead in Three Coins In The Fountain because her husband refused to let her go on location to Rome – though, in an attempt to compensate, he built his wife a studio in which to enjoy her hobby of painting.
Prior to asking Fox to release her in 1953, she made George Cukor’s enchanting The Model And The Marriage Broker (1952), and she was touching as the poverty-stricken young wife of Farley Granger in The Gift Of The Magi episode from O Henry’s Full House (1952).
Away from Fox, and now in her 30s, Crain made a conscious decision to break with her dewy-eyed juvenile past, dying her hair red and taking on gutsier and sexier roles. Thus she appeared in westerns as bold ranchers, matching Kirk Douglas in Man Without A Star (1955) and Alan Ladd in Guns Of The Timberland (1962), and as sophisticated women, as in The Joker Is Wild (1957), playing nightclub comedian Frank Sinatra’s wife.
As the Hollywood studio system broke up, she followed many other American stars to Italy, to appear in hokum costume epics. She was one of the Roman procurator’s lovers in Pontius Pilate (1961), and a languid Nefertiti in Queen Of The Nile (1962). Meanwhile, her marriage was going through turbulent times, but although Crain, a practising Catholic, sued Brinkman for divorce in 1956, the decree never became final and they got back together again.
Among her last films, when the pickings became slim, were Hots Rods To Hell (1967), in which she and Dana Andrews were parents terrified by young people with souped-up cars; Skyjacked (1972), as a passenger on a plane piloted by Charlton Heston; and The Night God Screamed (1973), playing a court witness hunted by a murderous hooded figure after her testimony had sent other defendants to death row. It was a long way from those well-scrubbed roles in guileless Fox movies of the 1940s.
· Jeanne Crain, actor, born May 25 1925; died December 14 2003
Her “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed here.
With her natural beauty and unaffected charm, the young Jeanne Crain was a breath of fresh air in 20th Century-Fox films of the 1940s. Her looks and manner became somewhat brittle as she matured, but she remained a top leading lady at Fox into the early ’50s. The high point of her career was an Oscar® nomination as Best Actress for Pinky(1949), in which she plays a light-skinned black woman who can “pass” for white. Although director Eliza Kazan later wrote that he found her emotionally impassive as an actress, her performance remains a movingone.
She was born Elizabeth Jeanne Crain in Barstow, California on May 25, 1925, and grew up in Los Angeles. She studied drama at UCLA and signed with Fox at the age of 18, making her debut in an uncredited bit in The Gang’s All Here(1943). She first attracted favorable attention as Lon McCallister’s tomboyish love interest in Home in Indiana (1944), a horseracing story that became a big hit. After achieving star billing she had an even bigger success in State Fair(1945), a musical with an original Rodgers and Hammerstein score. Dubbed by Louanne Hogan (who would regularly provide her singing voice in Fox films), Crain performed “It Might as Well Be Spring” and other songs.
She was the “good girl” to Gene Tierney’s evil schemer in another hit, the classic melodrama Leave Her to Heaven(1945), and was dubbed again by Hogan in the Jerome Kern musical Centennial Summer (1946). She gave an especially engaging performance in Apartment for Peggy (1948) as the pregnant bride of an ex-GI played by William Holden. 1949 was a good year for Crain; in addition to Pinky she acted in A Letter to Three Wives, with Oscar®-winning script and direction by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and played Lady Windermere in The Fan, an adaptation of a comedy of manners by Oscar Wilde, with a script co-written by no less than Dorothy Parker.
Among Crain’s 23 films under her Fox contract, other notable entries included the nostalgic comedy Cheaper by the Dozen (1950) and its sequel, Belles on Their Toes (1952), in both of which she is the eldest daughter of a very large family; People Will Talk (1951), a thoughtful comedy of manners in which she is again directed by Mankiewicz and sparkles opposite Cary Grant; and The Model and the Marriage Broker (1951), in which she is at her most beautiful and, under the sensitive direction of George Cukor, enjoys charming byplay with outstanding character actress Thelma Ritter. Crain’s final film before leaving the studio was Vicki (1953), a remake of the 1941 mystery I Wake Up Screaming.
Crain’s follow-up films included two Westerns, Universal’s Man Without a Star (1955), opposite Kirk Douglas; and MGM’s The Fastest Gun Alive (1956), opposite Glenn Ford; and a pair of 1955 musicals, the well-received The Second Greatest Sex for Universal and the poorly received Gentlemen Marry Brunettes for United Artists. In the MGM biopicThe Joker Is Wild (1957), she is one of the women in the life of singer/comedian Joe E. Lewis as played by Frank Sinatra. Crain’s final feature film was Skyjacked (1972). She fleshed out her later career on television, landing the choice role of Daisy Buchanan in a Playhouse 90 production of The Great Gatsby before settling in to make appearances in various series. Sprinkled in were a couple of minor film epics made in Europe. Crain was married to Paul Brinkman and they had seven children together. She died a few months after Brinkman’s death in 2003.
Jeanne Crain obituary in “The Guardian” in 2003.
Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Guardian”:
n the glory days of the studio system, movie stars were identified with one particular studio, becoming part of their company’s particular style and aura. From 1943 to 1953, Jeanne Crain, who has died aged 78, was a typical 20th Century Fox girl – charming, youthful and pretty. Fox, which had a smaller roster of stars than the other major studios, kept their contract players busy, and Crain made an average of two films a year, most of them bright and breezy.
Born in California of Irish-Catholic parents, Jeanne (pronounced Jean) Crain won the Miss Long Beach beauty contest in her teens, going on to become Camera Girl of 1942. But she had acting ambitions and, while still at school, took a screen test for Orson Welles for the role of Lucy Morgan in The Magnificent Ambersons. In the event, the slightly older and more experienced Anne Baxter got the part, subsequently pipping her to the post twice more, in All About Eve (1950) and One Desire (1955).
Crain’s problem was that she was mainly perceived at Fox as just a comely juvenile, lacking gravitas, and as a result was also passed over in favour of Susan Hayward in With A Song In My Heart (1952) and of Jean Simmons in The Robe (1953).
Crain’s rise to stardom coincided with her marriage to Paul Brinkman, a businessman and former small-time actor, who went on to become a top executive with an arms manufacturing company. Her mother opposed the marriage, and the two became estranged for some time thereafter. Crain had the first of their seven children, five of whom survive her, in 1947.
MAN WITHOUT A STAR, top left, Kirk Douglas; bottom from left, Kirk Douglas, Jeanne Crain, 1955
Occasionally, however, she did get a chance to reveal her ability, as in Elia Kazan’s Pinky (1949), playing a girl who has passed for white for years until forced to admit her roots. Kazan later commented: “It stirred up all kinds of hell, but it was a phoney picture. If I made it now, I’d never try to make the Fox back-lot look like the south or use Jeanne Crain, the blandest person I ever worked with.” Actually, Crain, who was Oscar nominated, was very affecting, though a black actor should have been cast, if that had been possible at the time.
Crain made her first, albeit brief, appearance on screen posing in a bathing costume in Busby Berkeley’s garish The Gang’s All Here (1943), before being introduced properly to audiences in Home In Indiana (1944), in which she portrayed a horsy girl who rides beautifully but is considered a tomboy.
She played a rather gutsy soldier’s wife in Otto Preminger’s In The Meantime Darling (1944), but became a real star in the Rogers and Hammerstein musical State Fair (1945), giving a delightfully fresh performance as the love-struck daughter of an Iowa farming family. Although her songs were dubbed by Luanne Hogan (who also dubbed her in subsequent musicals), a record of the hit songs, It’s A Grand Night For Singing and It Might As Well Be Spring, was issued under Crain’s name.
Previously, she had appeared in three successful movies. She was jealous Gene Tierney’s sweet foster sister in the lurid Leave Her To Heaven (1945), and Linda Darnell’s love rival sister in Preminger’s Centennial Summer (1946), in which she “sang” Jerome Kern melodies. Best of all was the engaging period musical Margie (1946), which showed Crain at the top of her form as a schoolgirl (though she was actually 21) with a crush on the French teacher and a tendency to lose her bloomers.
She then alternated between playing young wives or teenage daughters in a believable and ingratiating manner. She was married to William Holden in Apartment For Peggy (1948), and to bandleader Dan Dailey in You Were Meant For Me (1948). For Mankiewicz, in the stringent social comedy A Letter To Three Wives (1949), she was a shy newlywed, and, in People Will Talk (1951), she was the pregnant medical student whom gynaecologist Cary Grant marries to prevent her from committing suicide or having an abortion.
In both Cheaper By The Dozen (1950), and its sequel Belles On Their Toes (1952), Crain was the oldest of Myrna Loy’s 12 children, though she did the latter unwillingly after Zanuck refused to loan her out to Paramount for Carrie, opposite Laurence Olivier. There was another disappointment when she had to turn down a lead in Three Coins In The Fountain because her husband refused to let her go on location to Rome – though, in an attempt to compensate, he built his wife a studio in which to enjoy her hobby of painting.
Prior to asking Fox to release her in 1953, she made George Cukor’s enchanting The Model And The Marriage Broker (1952), and she was touching as the poverty-stricken young wife of Farley Granger in The Gift Of The Magi episode from O Henry’s Full House (1952).
Away from Fox, and now in her 30s, Crain made a conscious decision to break with her dewy-eyed juvenile past, dying her hair red and taking on gutsier and sexier roles. Thus she appeared in westerns as bold ranchers, matching Kirk Douglas in Man Without A Star (1955) and Alan Ladd in Guns Of The Timberland (1962), and as sophisticated women, as in The Joker Is Wild (1957), playing nightclub comedian Frank Sinatra’s wife.
As the Hollywood studio system broke up, she followed many other American stars to Italy, to appear in hokum costume epics. She was one of the Roman procurator’s lovers in Pontius Pilate (1961), and a languid Nefertiti in Queen Of The Nile (1962). Meanwhile, her marriage was going through turbulent times, but although Crain, a practising Catholic, sued Brinkman for divorce in 1956, the decree never became final and they got back together again.
Among her last films, when the pickings became slim, were Hots Rods To Hell (1967), in which she and Dana Andrews were parents terrified by young people with souped-up cars; Skyjacked (1972), as a passenger on a plane piloted by Charlton Heston; and The Night God Screamed (1973), playing a court witness hunted by a murderous hooded figure after her testimony had sent other defendants to death row. It was a long way from those well-scrubbed roles in guileless Fox movies of the 1940s.
· Jeanne Crain, actor, born May 25 1925; died December 14 2003
Her “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed here.
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.
