Guy Madison obituary in “The Independent” in 1996.
Guy Madison made his film debut in “Since You Went Away” a 1944 U.S. film about life on the home front during World War Two. Madison had only a few minutes screen times with the stars Jennifer Jones and Robert Walker, but he made sufficent impact with the general audience that he was awarded a studio contract. He is perhaps best known for his 1950’s television series “Wild Bill Hickcock”, Guy Madison died in 1996.
David Shipman’s obituary on Guy Madison in “The Independent”:Guy Madison was described by his studio’s publicists as “a dreamboat” – one of the several non-threatening leading men of the post-war period, fresh-faced and just on the right side of rugged. He didn’t make it in that capacity, but was to have a prolific 40-year career in westerns. Tallulah Bankhead said, “He made all the other cowboys look like fugitives from Abercrombie and Fitch” (the New York gentlemen’s outfitters).He was a linesman before the Second World War, in which he served as a marine. A picture in a naval magazine (so the story went) caught the attention of a Hollywood talent scout, Helen Ainsworth, who recommended him to David O. Selznick. Selznick gave him a small role in his Home Front morale-booster Since You Went Away (1944), as a marine who heckles Jennifer Jones and Robert Walker in a bowling-alley.
He was only on the screen for three minutes, but the studio received 43,000 fan letters. Selznick’s talent agent, Henry B. Willson, had already seen his potential and had changed the actor’s name, from Robert Moseley to Guy Madison, for his new career – as he would do later for such other handsome movie hulks as Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter. Selznick himself was making few movies, so he loaned Madison and Dorothy McGuire to RKC for Till the End of Time (1946), in which she was a war widow, uncertain whether she should or could make a second start with Madison. The New York Times found itself “quite exasperated by their juvenile behaviour” and added that Madison “is a personable youngster, but he has much to learn about the art of acting”.
Most reviewers felt similarly about Honeymoon (1947), which was situated in Mexico City. Selznick loaned Madison and Shirley Temple to RKO for this, to little benefit for all concerned. After Texas, Brooklyn and Heaven (1948), again on loan-out, Selznick dropped Madison – as he did most of his contract-players, all of whom were straining at the bit because he charged far more for their services than he paid them. Madison went on to play Wild Bill Hickok on radio from 1951 to 1956 and also, from 1952, on television. He was one of the first names from the big screen to enter the new medium.
It revived his career at a time when ironically Hollywood was trying to combat it with new techniques, 3-D and CinemaScope. Warner Bros put Madison in the 3-D western The Charge at Feather River (1953), and 20th Century-Fox into its wide-screen The Command (1954). He never stopped working thereafter, though there were no other major credits. In the 1960s he was one of the several names to go to Italy to make costume spectaculars and spaghetti westerns. In the 1970s and 1980s he worked mainly in television, following a series, Bullwhip, in the 1950s, which was not one of the more memorable of all the television westerns of that time. He joined some other grizzled veterans of the era – James Arness, Ty Hardin, Robert Horton – for an ill-advised telemovie, Red River (1988), which didn’t compare with the Howard Hawks classic on which it was based.
His first wife was the beautiful and haunted Gail Russell, who was already an alcoholic when they married; but for that, her career might have been much more successful than his.
David Shipman
Robert Ozell Moseley (Guy Madison), actor: born Bakersfield, California 19 January 1922; married 1949 Gail Russell (marriage dissolved), 1954 Sheilah Connolly (one son, three daughters; marriage dissolved); died Palm Springs 6 February 1996.
“The Independent” obituary can also be accessed on-line
Though she shared the screen with such stars as Elvis Presley, Montgomery Clift and Anna Magnani in the course of her brief acting career, Dolores Hart received more notice in Hollywood history books for her decision to abandon stardom for life as a nun in 1963
. A pert, intelligent and confident performer, Hart proved equally capable at both high drama like “Wild is the Wind” (1957) and lightweight fare like “Loving You” (1957), the first of two films opposite Presley, and “Where the Boys Are” (1960).
A retreat to the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in 1959 left Hart feeling a void in her life that could not be filled by acting, and in 1963, she left Hollywood to take her vows as a nun. For the next four decades, Hart led the monastic life of a Benedictine nun, returning occasionally to the spotlight to recall her religious calling, most notably for a 2012 documentary short, “God is the Bigger Elvis,” which received an Oscar nomination. Though her film career was an admirable footnote in her life, Hartâ¿¿s dedication to her religious order was proof positive that some things held greater resonance than Hollywood stardom.
She was born Dolores Hicks in Chicago, IL on Oct. 20, 1938. The daughter of actor Bert Hicks and his wife, Harriet, she was also related by marriage, through an aunt, to singer Mario Lanza. Her fatherâ¿¿s career immediately enamored Hart to such an extent that she planned to become an actress at an early age. But her parentsâ¿¿ divorce halted her chances of being a child performer, and she escaped the chaos of their split by relocating to Chicago to live with her grandparents. There, she received an education in Hollywood films from her grandfather, a projectionist at a local movie theater. Hart eventually returned to Los Angeles, where she earned the lead role in a school production of Saint Joan. A friend with connections to Paramount sent word to producer Hal Wallis about Hart, and he brokered a screen test and contract with the studio for her while she was still in her teens.
GOD IS THE BIGGER ELVIS, US poster art, Dolores Hart, 2012. HBO Films/Courtesy Everett Collection HBO/Courtesy Everett Collection ACHTUNG AUFNAHMEDATUM GESCHÄTZT PUBLICATIONxINxGERxSUIxAUTxONLY Copyright: xHBO/CourtesyxEverettxCollectionx MCDGOIS EC010
Hart made a considerable splash with her first film role as Elvis Presleyslove interest in the 1957 musical drama “Loving You” (1957). The success of the film made Hart an in-demand supporting performer, and she was soon cast in major productions like George Cukor’s Wild is the Wind” (1957) with Anthony Quinn and Anna Magnani, and “Lonelyhearts” (1958), a sanitized take on Nathaneal Wests novel Miss Lonelyhearts, with Montgomery Clift, Myrna Loy and Maureen Stapleton.
That same year, she reteamed with Presley for one of his best features, Michael Curtizâ¿¿s “King Creole” (1958). Such a string of prestigious projects seemed to indicate that Hart was destined for stardom.
But while filming the Western “The Plunderers” (1959), Hart began to feel pangs of doubt about the life of a professional actor. She experienced a career triumph that year with her Broadway debut in “The Pleasure of His Company” (1959), which earned her a Tony Award nomination and a Theatre World Award. She was later approached to reprise her performance in a 1961 film version, but soon discovered that Debbie Reynolds had been cast in the role.
Disillusioned and weary from the play’s schedule, she was advised by a friend to take a retreat at the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, CT. Hart found the experience physically and, more important, spiritually rejuvenating, and would return to the abbey several times over the next two years.
Hart worked steadily throughout 1960, scoring a hit with the then-controversial “Where the Boys Are” (1960) as one of four college girls exploring their sexuality while on spring break.
Her turn in “Francis of Assisi” (1961) as a young aristocrat who gave up her worldly possessions to follow the 13th century saint (Bradford Dillman) by becoming a nun proved remarkably prescient; after completing “The Inspector” (1962), an emotionally taxing film in which she played a Holocaust survivor, and the lightweight comedy “Come Fly With Me” (1963), Hart realized that she was in spiritual crisis. She broke off her engagement to Los Angeles businessman Don Robinson and returned to the Regina Laudis abbey, where she turned her back on the motion picture industry and began taking vows to become a nun.
Hart became Sister Dolores Hart after completing her vows in 1970. She embraced the monastic life of the order, which included several hours of prayer a day and maintaining the farm and property at the abbey.
Hart also spearheaded a project to further develop the abbey’s connection to the community around them through yearly theater productions, some of which were co-funded through her relationship with Hollywood talent like Paul Newman and Patricia Neal. In 1999, Hart suffered a crippling bout of peripheral idiopathic neuropathy disorder, a neurological disorder that left her wheelchair-bound for months.
After her recovery, Hart, who became Prioress of the Abbey in 2001, returned to Hollywood for the first time in 43 years to help raise awareness about the disorder, and later testified before a Congressional hearing on her ordeal. In 2012, Hart made headlines for her appearance on the red carpet at the 2012 Academy Awards. She was promoting the documentary short subject “God is the Bigger Elvis” (2012), which chronicled her journey from Hollywood to the abbey. It was her first appearance at a Hollywood event since 1959.
By Paul Gaita
The TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
Dame Olivia de Havilland, who has died aged 104, was one of the last surviving cast members of Gone With the Wind (1939). Her portrayal of the saintly Melanie Hamilton earned her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress and, to the modern eye, while Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett now seems mannered, de Havilland’s precocious maturity is still touching.
She was four times nominated for a best actress Academy Award, and won twice, for To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949). But her impact on her industry extended far beyond her acting ability. Her sufferings under the restrictions of the notorious Hollywood studio system pushed her to take her employers, Warner Brothers, to court. It cost her several years of her career, but her victory – still referred to as the “De Havilland decision” – changed irrevocably the way that actors would be treated by studios.
De Havilland had originally been signed to a seven-year contract at Warner Brothers just as the studio, also home to the director Michael Curtiz and leading man Errol Flynn, was exploring a new physical freedom on sound stages and locations to create a series of swashbucklers.
Her sweetness, and evident crush on Flynn (“You’d have been in trouble, too,” she once said about how overwhelming it was to partner him on screen, at the age of 19) made her the perfect damsel, in Captain Blood (1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), Dodge City (1939), Santa Fe Trail (1940), They Died With Their Boots On (1941), and, best of all, as Maid Marian in the 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood, in which she was sparky enough not to seem soppy.
She began to build a quiet strength and was loaned out to David O Selznick at his request to play the virtuous Melanie in Gone With the Wind. Then, determined not to go back to being “the girl” at Warners, playing ingenues, she rebelled, refusing to take the parts offered to her, and found herself suspended for six months.
She returned to work in The Strawberry Blonde (1941), cast as a plain woman (no prosthetics – plainness was implied in the script and by severity of hair-do) alongside Rita Hayworth, and in Hold Back the Dawn (1941), as a schoolmarm who is a suave con artist’s ticket to a US visa. She was nominated for an Oscar for that.
When her seven years at Warners ended after Princess O’Rourke (1943), the company would not release her, adding her periods of suspension to her contract. “You were a great celebrity but also a slave,” she said, so she read the small print and sued Warners under old Californian laws that prohibited employers from treating workers as serfs. She won and the De Havilland decision, along with a judicial ruling fought for Bette Davis, ended the old studio system by limiting contracts to a total of seven years, suspensions included.
The battles lasted for three years, and, kept off-screen throughout, De Havilland toured US military hospitals in the Pacific where she talked to and comforted wounded service personnel. After her court win Warners warned other studios off her, although she eventually found work at Paramount.
She returned in 1946 in To Each His Own, as the mother of an illegitimate child whose father had been killed in war, and who had turned over the baby for adoption. De Havilland’s good sense tempered the drama’s weepiness, and she won her Oscar at last.
In The Dark Mirror, the same year, she played rivalrous twin sisters; a Hollywood in-joke, for De Havilland’s younger sister, Joan Fontaine, had made a slower professional start, but had beaten her to an Oscar. (The sisters were estranged for most of their adult lives.)
De Havilland went on taking risks: she played a psychiatric patient in Anatole Litvak’s The Snake Pit (1948): meant as a plea for humane treatment in asylums, it now looks as crude as the shock treatment it advocated.
She won her second Oscar in 1949, for William Wyler’s The Heiress, an adaptation of Henry James’s novella Washington Square. Near the end of the film, De Havilland, bundled up in knitted mittens and tippets to conceal her natural glamour, addresses Montgomery Clift, playing a fortune-hunter who years earlier failed to elope with her.
She refuses him another chance. She can be cruel, she says: “I’ve been taught by masters.” You don’t quite believe the cruelty, but you do believe the strength behind the delivery. De Havilland was accused of being unsympathetic, but it took nerve to play a woman who achieves a solitary dignity only after being derided and rejected by father and would-be lover, and it was one of her finest roles.
De Havilland was just into her 30s, yet her career was petering out: her hard-won savvy was not overtly sexual enough. She was offered Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, but felt uncomfortable with the lewdness in the role, which went to Leigh. Fontaine had broken through in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca; De Havilland’s du Maurier film, My Cousin Rachel (1952), was more like a valediction.
She appeared on Broadway as Juliet in 1951, more plausibly as the Shavian wife Candida in 1952, and returned, alongside Henry Fonda, in A Gift of Time, in 1962.
Like other ageing female stars in the 1960s, she was tormented viciously onscreen, beside Davis in Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), and in Sam Peckinpah’s television movie Noon Wine (1966). In the 70s and 80s, retreating to small TV roles, she won a Golden Globe in Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna (1986).
Born in Tokyo, Olivia was the daughter of British parents, Lillian (nee Ruse), an actor, and Walter de Havilland, a patent lawyer related to the family of aviators. After separating from Walter, Lillian took the three-year-old Olivia and the infant Joan to California. Her paternal family originated in the Channel Islands; her cousin Geoffrey was the aircraft designer responsible for producing the famous second world war plane, the Mosquito.
Olivia went to a convent school and, at 17, was spotted in a college production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The director Max Reinhardt, on the lookout for girls with appearances classier than the local cheerleader norm, cast her as Hermia in the same play, first live in the Hollywood Bowl and then in the Warner Brothers film of 1935: “You are my discovering!” he boasted.
De Havilland had early been a member of the screen actors’ union and was a staunch liberal, campaigning for Franklin D Roosevelt and Harry Truman; in 1958 she was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, then in its dying throes. The US gave her the National Medal of Arts in 2008, France made her a chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 2010, and in 2017 she was made a DBE.
In the docudrama series Feud: Bette and Joan (2017), chronicling the rivalry between Davis and Joan Crawford, De Havilland was portrayed by Catherine Zeta-Jones. The real-life De Havilland objected to how its creators “used my identity without my consent and put false words in my mouth, including having me publicly calling my sister, Joan Fontaine, a ‘bitch’.” But in March 2018 a California appeals court dismissed her lawsuit on grounds of free speech.
There were romances with James Stewart and John Huston before she married, in 1946, and divorced, in 1952, the novelist Marcus Goodrich, with whom she had a son, Benjamin, who died in 1991.
She met Pierre Galante, then editor of the magazine Paris-Match, at the 1955 Cannes film festival, and moved to France after their marriage. They divorced in 1979, but she cared for him in his last illness in 1998; their daughter, Gisèle, survives her.
• Olivia Mary de Havilland, actor, born 1 July 1916; died 26 July 2020
Cathleen Nesbitt hailed from Belfast where she attended Queen’s University. In 1911 she joined the Irish Players and performed with them in the U.S. in Synge’s “The Well of the Saints” and “The Playboy of the Western World”. She was the love of the poet Rupert Brooke who was to die in World War One. An interesting article on their releationship can be sourced on the Telegraph website here.
Over the next thirty years she made many British theatre and film appearances. In 1951 she was on Broadway with Audrey Hepburn in “Gigi” and made her first American film in 1953 which was “Three Coins in the Fountain”. In 1956 she was back on Broadway again in “My Fair Lady”.Her last film was in 1980 when she made “The Never Never Land” at the age of 92. She died two years later.
IMDB entry:
The Calendar by Edgar Wallace (1875-1932), 1929. Lady Panniford, played by Cathleen Nesbitt (1888-1982), left, and Garry Anson, played bu Owen Nares (1888-1943), right. The Play, vol. 55, no. 331, (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images) *** Local Caption ***Family Plot, lobbycard, (aka LA TRAMA), left top to bottom: Karen Black, Bruce Dern, Barbara Harris, Alfred Hitchcock, center from left: Cathleen Nesbitt, Barbara Harris, 1976. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Diminutive, genteel Cathleen Nesbitt was a grand dame of the theatre on both sides of the Atlantic in a career spanning seven decades. Among almost 300 roles on stage, she excelled at comic portrayals of sophisticated socialites and elegant mothers. Hollywood used her, whenever a gentler, sweeter version of Gladys Cooper was needed, yet someone still possessed of a subtly sarcastic wit and turn of phrase. Cathleen attended Queen’s University in Belfast and the Sorbonne in Paris. Encouraged by a friend of her father – none other than the legendary Sarah Bernhardt – to enter the acting profession, she was taken on by Victorian actress and drama teacher Rosina Filippi (1866-1930). Cathleen’s first appearance on stage was in 1910 at the Royalty Theatre in London. This was followed in November 1911 by her Broadway debut with the touring Abbey Theatre Players in ‘The Well of the Saints’.
From here on, and for the rest of her long life, she was never out of a job, demonstrating her range and versatility by playing anything from villainesses to being a much acclaimed Kate in Shakespeare’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, Perdita in ‘The Winter’s Tale’, Audrey Hepburn‘s grandaunt in ‘Gigi’, the Dowager Empress in ‘Anastasia’ and the gossipy ‘humorously animated’ Julia Shuttlethwaite of T.S. Eliot‘s ‘The Cocktail Party’. Her Mrs. Higgins in ‘My Fair Lady’, Brooks Atkinson described as played with ‘grace and elegance’, which also pretty much sums up Cathleen’s career in films.
Her first motion picture role was a lead in the drama The Faithful Heart (1922), adapted from an Irish play. She then absented herself from the screen for the next decade, resurfacing in supporting roles in British films, though rarely cast in worthy parts, possible exceptions being Man of Evil (1944) and Jassy (1947). Her strengths were rather better showcased during her sojourn in Hollywood, which began in 1952. In addition to prolific appearances in anthology television, she also appeared in several big budget films, most memorably as Cary Grant‘s perspicacous grandmother in An Affair to Remember (1957) and as gossipy Lady Matheson (alongside Gladys Cooper) in Separate Tables (1958). One of her last roles of note was as Julia Rainbird, who instigates the mystery in Alfred Hitchcock‘s final film, Family Plot (1976).
On the instigation of her friend Anita Loos, author of ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’, Cathleen wrote her memoirs, ‘A Little Love and Good Company’ in 1977. For her extraordinarily long career in the acting profession, she was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Honours List the following year. She retired just two years prior to her death in 1983 at the age of 93.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Her obituary in “The Los Angeles Times” can be accessed here.
Margaret Leighton died yesterday at the age of 53. She was an actress as intelligent as she was beautiful. From her youth she had rare poise and period sense qualities evident in her final part, a Compton Burnett dowager in last year’s stage version of “A Family and a Fortune.”
Born in Worcestershire on February 26, 1922, and educated at Birmingham, she was one of Sir Barry Jackson’s Repertory Theatre discoveries. In 1938, as a tall, glowingly fair girl of 16, she began by scrubbing the stage and doing the work of a junior ASM. Early in the war she toured with Basil Langton’s company; but it was at the Repertory, especially between 1942 and 1944, that in such parts as Katharina, Rosalind, Barrie’s Lady Babbie, and the step-daughter in Six Characters”, she made the great regional reputation, justified during three years in London with the Old Vic. During the first three years, 1944-47, of the company’s famous stay at the New Theatre, she acted, among much else, Raina in “Arms and the Man”, Yelena in “Uncle Vanya”, Roxane in “Cyrano de Bergerac”, and a Regan, to Olivier’s Lear.
Always she was far more than decorative. She had a cutting truth, and her repetory training (though she never entirely lost her nervousness) prepared her for anything. From the Vic company she went to to a trio of parts in the Criterion revival of Bridie’s “A Sleeping Clergyman” (1947), welcoming the chance to act with Robert Donat: later she was with him in the film version of “The Winslow Boy”, her introduction to the work of Terence Rattigan.
She was Celia in the London production of “The Cocktail Party” (1950) and 12 months later appeared as Masha in a revival of “Three Sisters” for Festival of Britain year. In 1952, as Stratford upon Avon’s leading lady again, it was said, as the toast of the Midlands, she was Lady Macbeth, a Rosalind of jetting raillery and an Ariel described by a critic as a silver arrow.
Afterwards, though she remained among the first half dozen of English actresses, she never found the sustained full-scale triumph (long runs aside) for which one had hoped. Certainly there were long runs. After a few months as Orinthia to Noel Coward’s Magnus in the Haymarket revival of “The Apple Cart” (1953) and another Eliot heroine, Lucasta in “The Confidential Clerk”, she had nearly four years, in London and on Broadway, as two amply contrasted characters in the double bill of Terence Rattigan’s “Separate Tables”. Her Rose, a former Midland girl, in his “Variations on a Theme” (Globe, London, 1958) had to be less satisfying. She acted a gleaming Beatrice to Sir John Gielgud’s Benedick in New York (September, 1959). Then, after two more London parts – the second of them Ellida in “The Lady From the Sea” (1961) – she spent five years in New York where she won the Antoinette Perry Award for the best actress of 1961-62, as Hannah in Tennessee Williams’s “The Night of the Iguana”. She was also in Enid Bagnold’s “The Chinese Prime Minister” when the dramatist spoke of her as “an extraordinary and shining woman, made of moonshine and talent and deep self-distrust, astonished at success.”
Her return to London (1967) was in an undemanding play “Cactus Flower”. Within two years at the Chichester Festival, she reached the part many thought she should play, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra (to the Antony of Sir John Clements), royal in her aspect but never theatrically voluptuous. But the Festival period was brief. And of her three later parts, two were at Chichester, Mrs Malaprop in “The Rivals” and Elena in “Reunion in Vienna” (also for a short time in London). Finally there was the dowager she acted with such sharp assurance in “A Family and a Fortune” (Apollo, 1975). These were all performances, varying in scope, and of much style and vigour in execution, but without the transcendent quality we knew Margaret Leighton could achieve. We hoped she might again. It is too late now;but she is remembered, as “Maggie”, in and out of the theatre, with deep affection.
Margaret Leighton acted in several films besides “The Winslow Boy”. She received a Best Supporting Actress Award for her performance in “The Go-Between” in 1971, and her other credits included “The Loved One” (1965), “Lady Caroline Lamb” (1972), and “Bequest to the Nation” (1973). She was married three times – to Max Reinhardt, to Laurence Harvey, and lastly to Michael Wilding. The above “Times” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Pier Angeli was born in 1932 and was an Italian-born television and film actress. Her American cinematographic debut was in the starring role of the 1951 film Teresa, for which she won a Golden Globe Award for Young Star of the Year – Actress. She had one son with Vic Damone, her first husband, and another son with Armando Trovajoli, her second husband. Her twin sister is the actress Marisa Pavan.
During the 1960s and until 1970, Angeli lived and worked in Britain and Europe, and was often screen-credited under her birth name, Anna Maria Pierangeli. Her performance in The Angry Silence (1960) was nominated for a Best Foreign Actress BAFTA, and she was reunited with Stewart Granger for Sodom and Gomorrah (1963), in which she played Lot’s wife. She had a brief role in the war epic Battle of the Bulge (1965). 1968 found Angeli in Israel, top billed in Every Bastard a King, about events during that nation’s recent war.
According to Kirk Douglas‘ autobiography, he and Angeli were engaged in the 1950s after meeting on the set of the film The Story of Three Loves (1953). Angeli also had a brief romantic relationship with James Dean. She broke it off because her mother was not happy with their relationship as he was not Catholic.
Angeli was married to singer and actor Vic Damone from 1954 to 1958. During their marriage, they appeared as guests on the June 17, 1956 episode of What’s My Line?. Their divorce was followed by highly publicized court battles for the custody of their only child, son Perry (1955–2014).
Angeli next married Italian composer Armando Trovajoli in 1962. She had another son, Howard, in 1963. She and Trovajoli were separated in 1969.
In 1971, at the age of 39, Angeli was found dead of a barbiturate overdose at her home in Beverly Hills. She is interred in the Cimetière des Bulvis in Rueil-Malmaison, Hauts-de-Seine, France.
Jane Wyman won an Oscar in 1948 for her performance in “Johnny Belinda”. She had spent a long time in small parts in movies and htis film was one of her first starring parts. She had a good ten years as a major leading lady. She was retired for a number of yearswhen she made it big again in the 1980’s with the success of the television series “Falcoln Crest” where she played the matriarch Angela Channing. When the series ended she retired again. She died at the age of 90 in 2007. Jane Wyman was the first wife of Ronald Reagan. Her biography on IMDB can be found here.
Jane Wyman obituary in “The Independent”.
Her “Independent” obituary:
The Oscar-winning actress Jane Wyman, who married the future US president Ronald Reagan when he was still an actor, was a prime example of a film star who paid her dues in the days of the studio system. As a contract player at Warner Bros, she appeared in more than 40 films before achieving star billing, two years after which she won an Academy Award for her moving portrayal of a deaf mute in Johnny Belinda (1948), which heralded a long career as a major star. Best remembered for films in which she suffered nobly, she also shone in comedy, and she could sing too – with Bing Crosby she introduced the Oscar-winning song “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening”. The director Alexander Hall said, “That gal can do anything she sets her mind to; she is one of the most creatively versatile performers the screen has ever boasted.”
A new generation acclaimed her as the matriarch of the television series Falcon Crest. Her place in history is assured, since Reagan was the first US President to have an ex-wife, and though neither liked to talk about their marriage, many contend that he would never have become President had she not left him. “I was divorced in the sense that the decision was made by somebody else,” he once said.
Wyman’s early life is somewhat contentious. Records would indicate that she was born Sarah Jane Mayfield, daughter of Manning J. Mayfield, a labourer at a food company, and Gladdys Hope Christian, in St Joseph, Missouri, in 1917. Her parents, who married in 1916, were divorced in 1921, and Manning died the following year. Gladdys then gave her daughter into the care of Richard Fulks and his German-born wife, the former Emma Reiss. There seems to have been no formal adoption or name change, but when the child was registered for first grade at the Noyes School in St Joseph, Emma listed her name as “Sarah Jane Fulks”.
Wyman later revealed that she loathed school, but her spirited response to dance classes prompted Mrs Fulks to take her to Hollywood at the age of eight, but without success. “I was one of those blonde curly-haired kids and my mother thought I was destined for the movies,” she recalled. The couple returned home, and Jane later reflected, “I was raised with such strict discipline that it was years before I could reason myself out of the bitterness I brought from my childhood.”
She worked as a switchboard operator, waitress and manicurist before trying Hollywood again – she now had a contact, since her dancing instructor in Missouri was the father of the leading film choreographer Leroy Prinz, who gave her a spot in Busby Berkeley’s The Kid from Spain (1932). For the next four years, she toiled in the chorus, occasionally getting a line of dialogue, and she can be spotted in College Rhythm (1934), Rumba (1935), King of Burlesque (1935) and Anything Goes (1936). Finally, she won a contract with Warners in 1936, on the recommendation of the agent and actor William Demarest. The studio is often credited with naming her “Jane Wyman”, but some sources aver that the actress was briefly married in 1931 to a student named Eugene Wyman, while another explanation is that Mrs Fulks had been married before, and her first husband’s name was M.F. Weyman.
Warners put Wyman to work with a string of bit parts – wise-cracking girl friends, telephonists, secretaries, chorus girls – that would lead to starring roles in “B” movies with, it seemed, little chance of rising higher, though Dick Powell, who starred in three films that featured Wyman, stated, “Janie had something you couldn’t learn – presence.” The director William Keighley reflected, “I was surprised big things didn’t happen for the Wyman girl a lot faster than they did.” William Demarest was to say of Wyman’s lifestyle during those years, “She couldn’t keep still for a second, loved nightclubs, dancing, singing with her friends. ‘There’s a lot of living to be done, and I’m going to do it,’ she’d say.” Her penchant for elaborate clothes and costume jewellery prompted gossip columnist Louella Parsons to call her “a walking Christmas tree”. In 1937 Wyman married Myron Futterman, a dress manufacturer and divorcee with a teenage daughter, but the marriage lasted only a year.
Wyman was given her first leading role in a “B” movie titled Public Wedding (1937), and around this time she met a new contract player, the former radio sports announcer Ronald Reagan. She confessed later that she was attracted to the actor and flirted with him, but he would not consider a relationship because, although separated, she was still married. Demarest said, “She was far more worldly and experienced than he was, although she was three years his junior. I think Ronnie at first was somewhat bewildered by her fast come-on; then he started to like it, then her, and then he fell in love.”
Their relationship flourished during the shooting of William Keighley’s Brother Rat (1938), in which they played a marine cadet and his sweetheart. Wyman and Reagan were total opposites. He was an outdoor enthusiast and an ardent Democrat who was soon involved in the Screen Actors Guild, fighting for the rights of contract players. Wyman was apolitical, stating, “When I first met Ronnie I was a nightclub girl. I just had to go dancing and dining every night to be happy.”
By the time Reagan proposed to her – on the set of a sequel, Brother Rat and a Baby (1940) – Wyman had developed some interest in politics and athletics, and had even taken up golf, an enthusiasm she retained for the rest of her life. Meanwhile she had supported Alice Faye in Tailspin (1939) and starred as resourceful reporter Torchy Blane in Torchy Plays with Dynamite (1939).
Wyman and Reagan were wed in 1940. Their daughter, Maureen, was born in 1941, and in 1945 they adopted a baby boy, Michael. While Reagan’s career seemed to be going upwards, Wyman’s followed its familiar pattern. “I’m queen of the sub-plots,” she confessed. “For years I’ve been the leading lady’s confidante, adviser, pal, sister, severest critic.”
Drafted when the United States entered the Second World War, Reagan was stationed with an army film unit in Culver City, where he was a personnel officer when not acting in training films. Wyman toured military camps, using a talent for singing that she had rarely displayed on screen. Knowing that the studio had purchased the rights to the life story of torch singer Helen Morgan, Wyman campaigned for the role but was instead cast in support of Ann Sheridan in The Doughgirls (1944). Sheridan had become one of her closest friends, and commented, “Jane used to tell me that Ronnie was such a talker that he even made speeches in his sleep.”
Wyman’s career received a boost when Billy Wilder asked her to read the screenplay he and Charles Brackett had fashioned from Charles Jackson’s novel about alcoholism, The Lost Weekend, to be filmed for Paramount. She said, “I was so conditioned to think of myself as a comedienne, I was completely floored when Billy said he wanted me for the part of girlfriend to the hero.” Brackett said, “We wanted a girl with a gift for life. We needed some gusto in the picture.” (He omitted to tell Wyman that both Katharine Hepburn and Jean Arthur had turned down the role.)
Wilder and Brackett’s adaptation omitted the hero’s latent homosexuality, enlarged the part of the girl, and added an optimistic ending, but otherwise it was an uncompromising and brilliant study of a hopeless alcoholic (an Oscar-winning Ray Milland), with Wyman splendid as his down-to-earth sweetheart. “It changed my whole life,” said Wyman, though she was still under-rated by her own studio and found herself cast as a chirpy chorus girl in a wildly inaccurate biography of Cole Porter, Night and Day (1946).
Though release of The Lost Weekend was delayed for nearly a year – the studio had qualms about it, and the liquor industry offered them $5m to destroy the negative – trade insiders had seen it, and MGM negotiated to borrow Wyman for their screen version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a boy’s love for a fawn, The Yearling. Its star Gregory Peck, who personally acted with Wyman in her test, told her afterwards, “You were wonderful”, to which she replied, “Good God, don’t act so surprised.” When The Lost Weekend opened, critics displayed similar wonder. The World-Telegram referred to her “unsuspected talent” and The New York Times stated, “Jane Wyman assumes with great authority a different role.”
Her part in The Yearling (1947) as careworn Ma Baxter, who toils in the backwoods of 1870 Florida, required delicate shading in her portrayal of a mother who must have her son’s beloved fawn killed because it is eating their crops. Wyman’s performance was described by Life magazine as “beyond reproach”. Wyman won an Oscar nomination and, though she lost to Olivia De Havilland in To Each His Own, her status as a star was now established, and she was soon to play the part for which many best remember her.
The producer Jerry Wald had persuaded Warners to buy the rights to a Broadway hit of 1940, Johnny Belinda, despite the studio’s misgivings about a story in which a deaf mute is raped, has a child, then kills the father when he tries to take it from her. (Shortly before shooting commenced in late 1947, Wyman’s second child, a daughter, had died a few hours after her premature birth.) Wyman learned sign language and lip reading for the film, but later recalled, “Something was missing. Suddenly I realised what was wrong. I could hear.”
She and the director Jean Negulesco decided that her ears should be blocked with wax to cut out all noise except percussion. Wyman’s performance was beautifully modulated, avoided bathos, and won her a deserved Oscar against formidable competition (Ingrid Bergman, Barbara Stanwyck, Olivia De Havilland and Irene Dunne). Her acceptance speech was one of the briefest and most effective in Oscar’s history: “I accept this award very gratefully – for keeping my mouth shut for once. I think I’ll do it again.”
She was accompanied to the ceremony by the actor Lew Ayres, who was rumoured to have consoled her during the shooting because of her marital problems. Reagan’s political work and fervent campaigning for President Truman had strained their relationship, but when Wyman announced to the press, “We’re through. We’re finished. And it’s all my fault”, she was making it clear that it was her own decision to end the marriage. “I love Jane,” said Reagan, “and I know she loves me. I don’t know what this is all about and I don’t know why Jane has done it.”
Shortly afterwards, Reagan was in London filming The Hasty Heart, and his co-star Patricia Neal later commented, “Although I was a young, pretty girl, he never made a pass at me. Of course there were splendid reasons. I was wildly in love with Gary Cooper and he was still in love with Jane Wyman.” The couple’s divorce became final in July 1949. Wyman refused throughout her life to talk of their marriage or divorce, claiming that it was “bad taste” to discuss such matters.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950) took Wyman to London where she renewed a friendship with Laurence Olivier, who had won his Oscar for Hamlet on the same night she won hers. Hitchcock had personally asked for Wyman, but he was later to accuse her of getting out of character by refusing to look too drab compared to her glamorous co-star, Marlene Dietrich. The film’s lukewarm reviews, though, were the fault of the director, who made a rare error of judgement by opening the mystery with Wyman’s boyfriend (Richard Todd) relating an incident told in flashback (in an era when flashbacks were taken literally) though in fact he is lying. Critics were incensed by the perceived “cheating”, and the film proved a box-office disappointment.
The Glass Menagerie (1950), based on Tennessee Williams’ lyrical play, also proved disappointing, though Wyman gave what The New York Times called a “beautifully sensitive” portrayal of Laura, a crippled girl who finds solace from loneliness in her collection of glass figurines.
In 1952 Wyman had two contrasting box-office hits. The first was Frank Capra’s musical comedy, Here Comes the Groom, in which Wyman was teamed with her singing idol, Bing Crosby. The pair had relaxed fun with a novelty number, “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening”, which Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer had written for an unrealised Betty Hutton musical based on the life of Mabel Normand. It was a complicated production number that took the couple through several sets as they sang, and Capra decided to record the song live, with tiny radios in the stars’ ears so that they could hear the orchestra. The song won an Oscar, the stars’ recording was a big hit, and Decca signed Wyman to a recording contract. Her co-star Franchot Tone said, ‘Everybody got caught up in the fun Bing and Jane were obviously having together.’
The producer Jerry Wald had bought the rights to a French film hit, Le Voile Bleu (1947), hoping to tempt Greta Garbo out of retirement to play a woman who loses her husband and child in the First World Warand devotes her life to being governess to other people’s children. When Garbo refused, he asked Wyman to take the role, in which the woman goes from home to home until, old and working as a janitor, she is given a surprise party attended by all her former progeny. It was blatantly manipulative, but Wyman brought dignity and conviction to her part. Variety called it “a personal triumph”, and The Blue Veil won Wyman her third Oscar nomination, though she was up against two powerhouse performances, Katharine Hepburn’s in The African Queen, and Vivien Leigh’s (the winner) for A Streetcar Named Desire.
The success of both Here Comes the Groom and The Blue Veil put Wyman into the year’s top ten box-office draws, and she won two Golden Globe awards – as best actress, for The Blue Veil and as “World Film Favourite Actress of the year”. Wyman rejoined Crosby to take a role planned for Judy Garland (who was not fit enough to do it) in Just for You (1952). Its brightest spot was another catchy duet with Crosby. Wyman was reunited with Ray Milland for Let’s Do It Again (1952), a musical remake of a comedy classic, The Awful Truth. Milland, usually sparing with compliments, said of Wyman, “She could sing and dance with the best of them and her comedy timing was top-notch. She inspired everyone around her to give their best, and she was very down-to-earth and democratic.”
Making the film, Wyman met Fred Karger, an assistant to the studio’s music director, Morris Stoloff, and before shooting finished, Karger had become Wyman’s husband. They were divorced in 1955, remarried in 1961, and divorced again in 1965.
Wyman had to go from young woman to old lady again in Robert Wise’s So Big (1953), the third screen version of Edna Ferber’s novel. It proved popular, but not as much as her next film, another property filmed twice before, Magnificent Obsession (1954). In this, the first of a string of lush melodramas produced by Ross Hunter, wastrel Rock Hudson indirectly causes both the death of Wyman’s doctor husband and then Wyman’s blindness. Reformed, he becomes a surgeon and restores Wyman’s sight for a tearful climax. Most critics directed any praise they offered to Wyman’s sincere underplaying, which won her a fourth Oscar nomination (she lost to Grace Kelly in The Country Girl).
Directed by Douglas Sirk, the film was a huge money-maker, though it is less well regarded today than another film with the same production team and stars, All That Heaven Allows (1955). The latter, in which a widow falls in love with her young gardener to the horror of her selfish children and her conformist friends, was dismissed by most critics as just another piece of glossy kitsch, but is now perceived as a cuttingly perceptive attack on middle-class hypocrisy and the expectation that ageing widows should need nothing more from life than the country club and a TV set.
It was not entirely original (My Reputation had tackled a similar subject a decade earlier) but Sirk’s subversion of his material and use of colour made his film more than just a star vehicle. (In a celebrated shot, he has Wyman’s face reflected in the glass screen of the television to symbolise her entrapment.) Fassbinder’s Fear Eats the Soul (1974) was inspired by the film, though his ending was much bleaker.
In 1955, after starring with Van Johnson in the sentimental Miracle in the Rain, Wyman refused the role of Gary Cooper’s wife in Friendly Persuasion, and instead became president of the company that produced the television anthology series Fireside Theater. Rechristened The Jane Wyman Theater, it featured a variety of plays, with Wyman starring in around a third of each season’s 34 half-hour episodes, and ran until 1959. For the next 22 years, she made occasional guest appearances in TV shows such as Wagon Train and The Love Boat, and played only four more film roles, notably as Hayley Mills’ stern Aunt Polly in Pollyanna (1960). Semi-retired, she enjoyed painting, golf and seeing her children.
Her career, it seemed, was virtually over when in 1981, at the age of 64, she was asked to star as Angela Channing, wine tycoon, in the television series Falcon Crest. The “pilot” show left her with stringent demands. “Not only was Angela too mean and vicious, but she was just plain boring. I wanted her to be an interesting character.” When the former superstar Lana Turner joined the show as Wyman’s sister-in-law, Turner’s entourage and star demands did not sit well with Wyman, who displayed her power by having Turner’s character killed off after one season. Falcon Crest ran until 1990, and by the end of the show’s fifth season, the already-wealthy Wyman was estimated to be earning $3m a year (10 times Reagan’s salary).
When Reagan died in 2004, Wyman broke her long silence to say, “America has lost a great President and a great, kind and gentle man.”
Tom Vallance
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Robert Wagner recently celebrated his 90th birthday and he is still making movies after sixtyseven years in show business. He published his autobiography “Pieces of My Heart” in 2008. He first came to public attention as the young injured soldier in “With A Song in My Heart” which starred Susan Hayward. He had a contract with 20th Century Fox and throughout the 50’s he made some very popular films including “Beneath the Twelve Mile Reef”, “Prince Valient”, “A Kiss before Dying”, “Broken Lance”, “Titanic” and “In Love and War”. In the 1960’s he made the transition to television and over the years he had several popular series including “Hart to Hart”. More recently he has starred in the Austin Power movies. Robert Wagner’s website can be accessed here.
TCM Overview:
The epitome of the handsome and debonair Hollywood star, actor Robert Wagner – known to friends as “R.J.” – played romantic heroes and upstanding young men in a string of mostly unmemorable 1950s-60s-era features, before finding lasting fame as one of television’s smoothest-of-the-smooth leading men. Wagner brought old-school class to the ABC action-drama “It Takes a Thief” (ABC, 1968-1970) and, more importantly, showed a knack for light comedy with his roles in “Switch” (CBS, 1975-1980) and “Hart to Hart” (ABC, 1979-1984). He also made headlines in his personal life – most notably for being half of one of Hollywood’s most beloved couples – after marrying the beautiful Natalie Wood – not once but TWICE. It was her tragic, mysterious death by drowning which sealed their legend and caused an outpouring of love and support for the actor.
Original Cinema Quad Poster – Movie Film Posters
This good will carried over year after year as the veteran actor aged gracefully, settled into a happy marriage with actress Jill St. John, and was always welcomed warmly with numerous appearances on both the big and small screen – most memorably as Mike Meyer’s Number Two in the “Austin Powers” film franchise. Born Robert John Wagner Jr. on Feb. 10, 1930 in Detroit, MI, Wagner’s father was a steel industry executive, leaving the family to relocate to Los Angeles when he was in grade school. He was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, but after a turn in drag (as Priscilla Alden) in a high school production of “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” Wagner began to think about acting as his profession. A job at the Bel-Air Country Club, where he caddied to such stars as Clark Gable, gave him further inspiration, so he announced to his father than he intended to become an actor. Robert Wagner Sr. gave his son an ultimatum – he would have one year to find success in Hollywood or quit and get into the steel business. Fortunately for Wagner Jr., his first job came shortly after his father’s declaration with a bit part in “The Happy Years” (1950). More small roles followed, but his appearance as a hospitalized paratrooper in “With a Song in My Heart” (1952), about American singer Jane Froman (Susan Hayward), led to a contract with 20th Century Fox. Supporting roles in notable films like John Ford’s “What Price Glory” (1952) and the John Phillip Sousa biopic “Stars and Stripes Forever” (1953) – for which he earned a Golden Globe nomination – eventually led to starring roles – though pictures like “Beneath the 12-Mile Reef” (1953) and “Prince Valiant” (1954) asked little more of him than to look handsome. It took the intervention of actor Spencer Tracy to pull him out of the teen idol doldrums. The much respected Tracy took the young man under his wing and asked that he be cast as his son Joseph, who is tormented by his brothers for being half-Native American, in the dramatic Western “Broken Lance” (1954). The opportunity led to other substantial parts for Wagner, including “A Kiss Before Dying” (1956), which had him playing against type as a psychotic killer, and “Between Heaven and Hell,” for which he played a wealthy playboy who undergoes an emotional transformation during World War II. Wagner underwent a transformation of his own in 1956 when he became involved with another up-and-coming talent, former child actress (“Miracle on 34th Street” (1947)), Natalie Wood. The attractive pair was splashed across numerous magazine covers, and their marriage in 1957 earned them even further press. But their personal lives and careers floundered. Despite having proven his talents, Wagner’s status as a leading man faltered in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and after Wood’s contract was suspended for refusing to appear in a film in Europe, the couple experienced significant financial difficulties.
The pressures caused a strain on their marriage, and Wagner and Wood eventually divorced in 1962. They would later admit that they were simply too young to get married. Extremely distraught, Wagner fled to Europe, where he appeared as a soldier in the war epic, “The Longest Day” (1962). While there, he met and became involved with a fellow actor, Marion Marshall. The new couple was married in 1963, and a daughter, Katie, followed in 1964. Wagner’s film career slowed considerably during the 1960s. He enjoyed a few notable projects, including “The Pink Panther” (1963) – he was blinded for a month after an accident on the set involving industrial cleaning agents – and two films with Paul Newman – “Harper” (1966) and the racing drama “Winning” (1969) – but for the most part, he was tapped for his good looks and resonant voice in forgettable movies like “Don’t Just Stand There!” (1968) and “The Biggest Bundle of Them All” (1969. In 1968, he took the supposed step down by signing on to his first television series with “It Takes a Thief.” As a suave burglar turned spy, Wagner’s looks and charm were a considerable asset. Although the show lasted just two seasons, it gave his star a considerable boost, earning him his second Golden Globe nomination and first Emmy nod. From 1970, Wagner worked constantly and almost exclusively on television, guesting on series like “The Streets of San Francisco” (ABC, 1972-77) and the acclaimed World War II drama, “Colditz” (BBC, 1972-74). He also reunited romantically with Wood after a chance encounter in 1971. Though Wood was married and with a daughter at the time (future actress Natasha Gregson Wagner), the couple reignited their relationship, and, to the delight of true romance fans everywhere, remarried in 1972. A daughter, Courtney, was born in 1974 – their only biological child together.
Finally happy together, Wagner and Wood appeared in several highly regarded television projects, most notably a production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1976) with Laurence Olivier as Big Daddy. Wagner also made several theatrical features during this period, including the star-packed “The Towering Inferno” (1974) and “Midway” (1976). In addition to all his responsibilities, he found time to dabble in TV production, offering up to producer Aaron Spelling an idea he and Wood had conjured up; an idea which blossomed into the iconic jiggle show of them all – “Charlie’s Angels” (ABC, 1976-1981). In 1975, Wagner starred in his second series, “Switch,” a drama co-starring his lifelong friend, Eddie Albert, whom he had met on the set of “The Longest Day.” The pair played detectives who specialized in elaborate cons to trap criminals. A relatively popular series, it lasted two seasons before ending its network run in 1978. The following year, Wagner signed on to play millionaire Jonathan Hart, who dabbled in detective work with his wife Jennifer (Stephanie Powers), in “Hart to Hart.” Created by novelist Sidney Sheldon and produced by Aaron Spelling, the series was glossy, campy fun and a huge hit. Wagner earned numerous Golden Globe and Emmy nods for his tongue-in-cheek work. network run in 1983, Wagner was only too content to concentrate solely on raising his three daughters. But Wagner’s popularity did not allow him to stay away for too long. By 1985, he was appearing regularly in episodic series and TV movies, including the short-lived drama series, “Lime Street” (CBS, 1985) – which was touched by tragedy when, only a few episodes in, Wagner’s onscreen daughter, Samantha Smith, died in a plane crash, hastening the series’ demise.
He hosted “Saturday Night Live” (NBC, 1975- ) in 1989, and appeared in a string of popular “Hart to Hart” reunion TV-movies between 1993-96. Wagner also took time from his newly busy schedule in 1990 to marry actress and long-time girlfriend, Jill St. John, with whom he appeared in many stage productions for charity. Still undeniably handsome as he reached his sixth decade, Wagner settled comfortably into the role of “old Hollywood pro,” contributing numerous supporting turns in big budget films like “Wild Things” (1997), “Crazy in Alabama” (1999) and “Play It To The Bone” (1999). He even parodied his own smooth-as-silk image, starring as the diabolical but dense Number Two, henchman to Dr. Evil in “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery” (1997), “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me” (1999), and briefly in “Austin Powers in Goldmember” (2002). In the latter film, Wagner shared the role with Rob Lowe, who played a younger version of Number Two and who offered a note-perfect imitation of Wagner’s plummy voice and gentlemanly demeanor.
Robert Wagner
Wagner remained exceptionally busy for the next few years, appearing on countless television shows and providing his unique perspective on Hollywood for many show business documentaries. He also served as the host for the “Hour of Stars” (Fox Movie Channel, 2002- ), which showcased episodes from the TV anthology series “The 20th Century Fox Hour” (CBS, 1955-57), on which Wagner had once appeared. Long considered one of the most pleasant and friendly men in the entertainment business, Wagner showed an aggressive side in 2000, when he sued Aaron Spelling Productions for breach of contract over his participation in a failed revival of “Charlie’s Angels” called “Angels 88.” He filed suit again in 2003 for profits from the “Angels” theatrical features, but a California appeals court ruled against him in 2007. Back onscreen and staying contemporary for the kiddies, Wagner made memorable guest appearances on hit shows like “Las Vegas” (NBC, 2003- ), “Hope & Faith” (ABC, 2003-06) and “Boston Legal” (ABC, 2004- )
Joseph Cotten obituary in “The Independent” in 1994
Joseph Cotten has starred in many of the all time classic films including !”Citizen Kane”, “The Magnificent Ambersons”, “Shadow of a Doubt”, “Portrait of Jeannie”, “Duel In the Sun”, “Love Letters”, “September Song” and “The Third Man”. His leading ladies have included such screen beauties as Jennifer Jones, Deanna Durbin, Teresa Wright, Loretta Young, Ava Gardner, Olivia de Havilland, Dorothy Malone, Alida Valli and Patricia Medina. Ms Medina became his wife in 1960. Joseph Cotten died at the age of 88.
The 1994 obituary in “The Independent”:
THERE was no one else quite like Joseph Cotten. He holds a high place in the Hollywood hierarchy, as Orson Welles’s friend and collaborator and as a star of the Forties whom the girls pinned up alongside Clark Gable and Gregory Peck. He was tall, rugged, handsome, with wavy hair and a courteous demeanour, especially towards women. Like Robert Taylor and Errol Flynn immediately before him, Cotten was emulated by the models for pullover patterns in women’s magazines, which now featured romantic heroes looking very much like him.
Cotten worked with Welles’s Mercury Theatre, on the stage and radio, from 1937 – taking time out to star opposite Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story (1940). When Welles was offered a contract by RKO he cast his first film, Citizen Kane (1941), almost entirely with his Mercury colleagues. The brouhaha which surrounded the film – that Hollywood’s wonder-boy was making a mockery of the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst – meant that Cotten’s smooth performance as a drama critic was overlooked. Its very notoriety augured badly for Welles’s second film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), which was sent out in support of one of the ‘Mexican Spitfire’ cheapie series in the US and denied a West End showing in Britain.
Cotten wrote to Welles – who was in South America – about one of the previews of Ambersons, when a receptive audience became indifferent and then hostile. The film still inspires strong feelings, because of its brilliance, both technically and as an evocation of the American past; and because it was hacked about in Welles’s absence and had inserted in it some late sequences not by Welles at all. In the circumstances Cotten’s performance – as the faithful suitor of the widowed Isobel Amberson (Dolores Costello) – was again overlooked.
This second debacle put Welles in a precarious position in the industry, and he rushed into production a commercial thriller, Journey Into Fear (1942), based on a novel by Eric Ambler and with the direction credited to Norman Foster. This was again heavily cut, to just over an hour, though a longer version was issued the following year.
When RKO cancelled Welles’s contract, David O. Selznick signed Cotten, and loaned him and Hitchcock to Universal for Shadow Of a Doubt (1943), to play the beloved and admired Uncle Charlie, prepared to kill again when his niece (Teresa Wright) suspects that he is the perpetrator of the ‘Merry Widow’ murders. As the Johnny- on-the-Spot in Journey Into Fear Cotten had been likeable but unable to suggest desperation: but for Hitchcock he was superb, masking deadly menace with a suave charm.
He stayed at Universal to be the handsome flyer for whose sake the headstrong Deanna Durbin goes to work in a munitions factory in Hers To Hold (1943). He was an idealised hero and ideal as such, and Durbin’s yen for him at a time when she was a leading box-office star shot him into the front rank of sought-after actors. He was the Scotland Yard man who comforted Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight (1944), after Charles Boyer has tried to scare her to death; and the handsome family friend, dazzling in his white uniform, ready to step in if Claudette Colbert’s husband is killed at the front, in Since You Went Away (1944).
Selznick produced that (and wrote the script), also using Cotten in the last three films he made for his own company: I’ll Be Seeing You (1945), as a shell-shocked soldier; Duel in the Sun (1946), fighting with his dastardly brother Gregory Peck over the half-breed Jennifer Jones; and Portrait of Jennie (1948), as an artist who meets Jones in Central Park and later realises that she is less substantial than his painting of her. Like I’ll Be Seeing You, this was directed by William Dieterle, who had worked with them earlier at Paramount in Love Letters (1946).
Also at Paramount Dieterle helmed September Affair (1950), which cynics saw as Hollywood’s ‘take’ on Brief Encounter, with Joan Fontaine and Cotten committing adultery in an impossibly lush Italy; but since it starts with views of the Bay of Naples to Walter Huston’s version of ‘September Song’ the viewer may stay in a high mood till the end.
A reunion with Hitchcock was dicey at best: Under Capricorn (1949), with Cotten as an unfeeling ex-convict husband in old Sydney to an alcoholic Ingrid Bergman, overlaying her Swedish accent with an Irish one. Another 1949 reunion was in a triumphant project, with Cotten a writer searching for his old buddy Harry Lime in The Third Man: Welles was Harry, Selznick co-produced with Alexander Korda, and Carol Reed directed from Graham Greene’s screenplay.
With his Selznick contract at an end Cotten’s career began to founder. His last really memorable work is to be seen in two films in which he was cast with two of the screen’s more formidable stars: Bette Davis and Marilyn Monroe. The two films are, alike, melodramas to be enjoyed on their own terms: Beyond the Forest (1949), with Cotten as the husband Davis is running away from – and, as she said, ‘Who would want to leave Joe Cotten?’; and Niagara (1953), as the honeymooning husband Monroe wants to be rid of, trying to persuade her lover to push him into the Falls.
During the Fifties Cotten returned to Broadway and in 1960 he married, as his second wife, Patricia Medina, the British actor Richard Greene’s ex-wife. They were among Hollywood’s happiest couples, as Cotten confirmed in his memoir Vanity Will Get You Somewhere (1987): so it clearly did not matter that he had appeared in mostly junky films for almost 40 years, including telemovies and spaghetti westerns. But the old spark was there when he was challenged, as when cast as an alcoholic rancher with Kirk Douglas, in The Last Sunset (1961); and as a scheming doctor with Davis in Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964).
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
