Keefe Braselle was born in 1923. He made a name for himself in playing the title character in “The Eddie Cantor Story”. His other film performances include “A Place in the Sun” and “The Streets of Sin”. He died in 1981. Some comments about Keefe Braselle and his working relationship with Jack Benny can be found here.
“New York Times” obituary:
Keefe Brasselle, a film actor known for his leading role in ”The Eddie Cantor Story,” died last Tuesday in Rancho Los Amigos Hospital in Downey, near Los Angeles. He was 58 years old and had been hospitalized several times during the last few years for a liver ailment. During the early 50’s, Mr. Brasselle was considered a promising talent, appearing in ”A Place in the Sun,” ”Bannerline,” ”Skirts Ahoy,” ”Three Young Texans” and ”Battle Stations.” He gained prominence in 1953 in his first leading role, as Cantor, the song-and-dance man. An effort by Mr. Brasselle to become a television producer was short-lived. Three series he produced and sold to CBS-TV in 1964 – ”The Reporters,” ”Baileys of Balboa” and ”The Cara Williams Show” – were canceled in their first season. In 1968, he published ”The Cannibals,” a thinly disguised expose of controlling figures in the entertainment industry and behind-thescenes intrigue
Marlon Brando is regarded as one of the best cinema actors to grace the screen. He was born in 1924 in Omaha, Nebraska. His sister Jocelyn had commenced an acting career. Marlon went to Broadway in his late teens. He became the toast of Broadway for his part as Stanley Kowaski in Tennessee William’s “A Streetcar Named Desire”. He made his film debut in Fred Zinnemann in “The Men” in 1950. He repeated his Broadway performance in the film version of “Streetcar” in 1951 with Vivien Leigh. He won the Oscar twice for “On the Waterfront” and for “The Godfather”. His other fine performances include “Guys and Dolls”, “Desiree”and “Sayonara”. Marlon Brando died in 2004.
“Guardian” obituary:
He was only an actor, and as he pointed out actors are no more than dishonest entertainers, frauds, pretenders, liars – he could be relentlessly hard on himself. But was it then any defence that he acted so seldom, that he had deserted the stage he had himself brought to life, or that he had come to regard movies with the hurt feelings of a Kong, hiding in his lair, unwilling to make a cheap spectacle of himself for those exploiting showmen? Why trust acting or films, he sometimes said, for these things emerge from the pit of our corruption. Not that he had made himself, as an alternative, a model of quieter, domestic virtues. By his own gloating, but tortured, confession, he was a career womaniser, a glum joke as a husband, and sometimes pitiful as a father. Anything else? Why, yes, of course, he was a hulk, a wreck of obesity and self-indulgence, a hideously fat man – he who once had been so beautiful he altered our idea of maleness.
It can be no surprise that, at the age of 80, Marlon Brando is dead. Rather, it must speak to his will and need that he lived so long, so out of shape and humour. And he was also so resentful of the world, and so scornful of himself, that it is hard to measure lost happiness. The man who published his autobiography Songs My Mother Taught Me, in 1994, was already cynical to the point of nihilism, a tease and a trickster, yet always most mocking of himself. To read that book was to be disturbed at how little he liked himself, no matter the conventional armour of vanity in a grand actor. He could be very vain and very foolish – in part because of the opening they provided for self-loathing later. He did his book for money, and then he ranted against people who were so mercenary. But he needed money for his broken family – and he had never made or kept as much as lesser actors – one son in jail, another child on her way to suicide. A godfather in legend, he was confused in life. You could hear the howls of grief between the lines – yet he had denied himself, and us, a Lear. And Falstaff, and Vanya, and so on.
Yet he was the American actor of modern times, and of the second half of the 20th century, someone who was regularly placed in that small circle of the finest actors, the most potent and dangerous actors who could take a role and their audience into emotional territory that no one had anticipated. What was most remarkable about Brando was that unquestioned eminence rested on so few films and on just one historic stage performance.
Born in Omaha, Nebraska – the state that produced Montgomery Clift, Henry Fonda and Fred Astaire – he was only 23 when he brought Stanley Kowalski to life in A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947. It had not been a comfortable life. He was the child of two drunks, the father domineering, miserly, a womaniser but unloving, the mother creative but weak, broken and helpless. He had grown up feeling unloved and untrusting, hating authority, strong men and needy women. Yet it was far from the worst life imaginable, and it would be wrong to see the youth as wounded. There was, from the outset, a rebelliousness, an ego and an intricate self-pity determined to be wronged. And in that wronging he found energy.
Other people could only fall in with their casting in his drama. For though Brando worked sparingly, he was an actor or a player in his own life, a chronic instigator of intrigues, and a character who lived to find a way of being hostile or difficult with others.
He was educated at Libertyville high school in Illinois and then sent to Shattuck Military Academy. There he was expelled for indiscipline – that had been his plan. He went to the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research in New York in 1943, and studied with Stella Adler, yet he never filled the role of a determined, dedicated actor. On the contrary, he boasted of the chanciness of his career, his laziness, and a deep indifference to acting as art or vocation. But he got parts in I Remember Mama (1944), and Truckline Cafe and Candida in 1946.
He was amazingly beautiful – there is no other way of saying it, or denying its vital thrust in what happened. He had huge eyes, a wide, deep brow, an angel’s mouth, with the upper lip crested. And he could speak softly, like breathing, so the mouth scarcely moved. But he was as male as a wild animal; hunky, husky, sensual, and incoherent or rhapsodic, depending on which style worked best with the young woman of the moment.
Irene Selznick, the producer of A Streetcar Named Desire, had thought of John Garfield or even Burt Lancaster for Stanley. But she had seen Brando in Ben Hecht’s A Flag Is Born in 1946 and had been “galvanized by his power … however risky, he was bound to be interesting”. Elia Kazan, the director, wanted Brando because he knew the actor’s radiance would keep Stanley from being just a villain, the trampler upon Blanche Du Bois’s fragile bloom.
It was left to the playwright, Tennessee Williams, to decide. Brando went to see Williams who was living on Cape Cod. When he got there, both the electricity and the plumbing were out. The actor repaired them both, and then did a reading, with Tennessee taking the other parts. It was 10 minutes before they called Kazan and Selznick and told them yes. Williams wrote to his agent, Audrey Wood: “It had not occurred to me before what excellent value would come through casting a very young actor in the part. It humanises the character of Stanley in that it becomes the brutality or callousness of youth rather than a vicious older man. I don’t want to focus guilt or blame particularly on any one character but to have it a tragedy of misunderstanding and insensitivity to others. A new value came out of Brando’s reading which was by far the best reading I have ever heard. He seemed to have already created a dimensional character, of the sort that the war has produced among young veterans.”
There was a sub-text, too, for why Streetcar worked so well. Williams was gay. There was a latent sense in which Blanche was a male surrogate, the spirit of refinement and gentility, confronted by a far more brutal and modern male force. But Kazan was a devout heterosexual, and a director of the new breed that needed to find himself in the work. So he identified with Brando’s Stanley and a crude upstart vitality reducing the pretentious lady to his own level. The play surpassed its text in production, and in some profound way 1947 was ready for every fantasy that was appealed to.
Because of the special details of casting and production, Streetcar was revealed as one of those especially American works, in which energy encounters refinement, and in which the role of gender was suddenly complicated. It was an early glimpsing of a bisexuality that many people were as thrilled by as they were alarmed. But no one quite knew what was happening that first night – December 3 1947 – except that they had been poleaxed.
The audience stood. The curtain calls lasted half an hour. Jessica Tandy played Blanche Du Bois, and she was universally admired. But Brando changed the culture.
As Kazan saw it, Brando had changed the play – audiences liked Stanley more or as much as Blanche (it was only later that Streetcar became a play about Blanche). A kind of rutting force was let loose, a feeling of native American force. Brando was seen on stage half-naked (he had a flawless torso then), discarding a sweaty T-shirt, alive, urgent, unruly and golden. People of both sexes fell for him at the same moment as a classical male persona had been explored or layered, and only Brando could have held the human beast and the brooding angel in balance. It began to be possible for the American hero to be beautiful, and not just handsome.
That insurrectionary actor never again worked on stage once the heady run of Streetcar was over. There would be no Hamlet, no Coriolanus, no Antony (on stage). This was an actor who never did Chekhov or O’Neill – over the years, imagine him in three of the roles from Long Day’s Journey Into Night, or why not four? He never did Pinter, Hare, Shepard or Mamet. Never again elected to be there pretending, just a matter of a few feet away, in the same electric space and air as the audience.
Why? He was not a heartfelt actor, he said, and he was certainly not charitable. There was a mean streak in Brando, a cunning country boy’s lust for money and fame and adulation – all the poisons he would turn from in horror once he had tasted them. So he went to Hollywood and became a movie actor – it was what Stanley would have done; it was also the quicker way for someone who wanted to despise himself. In 1950 came The Men.
Of course, that was far from ruin. But one might as well say, without apology or explanation, that most of the film work he did was shameful junk, ill-chosen, slapdash and devoid of soul. Get ready, it is a long list and included: Désiree (1954); The Teahouse Of The August Moon (1956) Sayonara (1957); The Young Lions (1958); Mutiny On The Bounty (1962); The Ugly American (1963); Bedtime Story (1964); The Saboteur Codenamed Morituri (1965) Appaloosa (1966); A Countess From Hong Kong (1967); Candy (1968); The Night Of The Following Day (1969); The Nightcomers (1971); Superman (1978); The Formula (1981); Christopher Columbus (1992). That is a lot of rubbish to clean out in the search for gold – and it must be pointed out that Brando, quite early on, had unusual power in determining his own projects.
He is the great actor, and the idol of a generation of actors who have been directors, producers and the arbiters of their own careers. Brando directed once – on One-Eyed Jacks (1959) – before boredom and sourness took over, but seldom had the patience, the stamina or the courage to be master of his own fate. Instead, he liked to be seen as the victim of a malign, stupid system, for that came to the aid of his tricky mixture of indolence, disbelief and hypocrisy. Still, a lesser actor – Paul Newman, say, only a few months younger – built up a far more consistent body of work than Brando dared.
That said, there are films, or passages from films, that explain the way so many people felt – not least Newman, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro … and so on, to the bottom of the page. Nearly every American actor since has moved through his own work mindful of Brando’s record and potential.
He was doing pictures early, in an age when William Holden, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster and John Wayne were the rage. Their style was clearcut, confident and unambiguous. So it meant all the more that Brando’s acting was made, palpably, out of indecision – in pauses, aborted gestures, frustrated eloquence, and a feeling of the enormous, untidy accumulation of experience that could not just deliver on “Action!” He was laughed at for this: comedians did Brando impersonations. But the new attitude – Method or beyond Method – was the future. Every young actor, from James Dean on, and every rock singer, from Elvis down the line, was affected by Brando’s pent-up inwardness.
He was a paraplegic in Fred Zinnemann’s The Men – the first role that defined his affinity with frustration. He reprised Stanley in Kazan’s film of Streetcar (1951) – with Vivien Leigh instead of Tandy, in a censored version, but still our nearest to a record of 1947. He was the hero in Viva Zapata! (1952), and a fine, if unprofound, Antony in Joseph Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953).
John Gielgud (Cassius) beheld him, and then invited Brando to come to England for a season of plays they would do together – Brando declined, and lived on to see the noble creative vitality of Gielgud, working, working. Brando was Johnny the biker in The Wild One (1953), a very camp figure, a gay icon, but a sulky kid who, when asked “What are you rebelling against?”, knew young America’s cool answer, “What have you got?”
Then, in 1954 he was the ex-boxer, the one who could have been a contender, in On The Waterfront, that curious apologia for informing made by Kazan and Budd Schulberg after they had testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Brando got an Oscar for that film after being nominated four years in a row – for Streetcar, Zapata, Julius Caesar and Waterfront. The film doesn’t wear too well. Too much of it looks like Actors’ Studio guys pretending to be dockers and lowlifes. But Brando’s deliberately battered beauty was as poignant as the self-discovery in a dumb kid that he had let himself be used too often.
That was his first period, his youth, and it is fascinating to note that it ended as James Dean arrived on the scene. They met, warily. Dean was younger, hungrier – and Brando had been offered the role that Dean played in East Of Eden; indeed, Kazan had wanted Brando and Montgomery Clift as the brothers. Brando felt older, more experienced, both tired and bored by the fame of being an idol. He diversified – that’s where the trouble started. He was amusing doing Sky Masterson in Guys And Dolls (1955), where he sang and danced like an old boxer anxious not to rip his new suit. But too many of the films were beneath him, and too many of the attempts to dress up and do an accent were patronising.
He was superb, with Anna Magnani and Joanne Woodward, in Sidney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind (1960) – from Tennessee Williams again – a truly neglected picture. In One-Eyed Jacks, he could not see beyond the mean-spirited vengefulness of the story; he shot miles of footage and gave up on the editing. Some have made a cult of the film, but it is inert and pretentious.
And so his career became a mystery. There were inexplicably wasteful projects, and then suddenly the authentic actor was back – in The Chase (1966), Reflections In A Golden Eye (1967), or in 1969 in the very adventurous Burn! (also released as Queimada). That picture was made by Gillo Pontecorvo in Latin America, and it cast Brando as an English adventurer in the service of corrupt imperialism. It was a picture made out of political conscience and in defiance of Hollywood, and it is well worth pursuing.
By 1970 or so, the man was a mess and a figure sinking beyond the cultural horizon. He lived a good deal in Tahiti. He had acquired three marriages – to Anna Kashfi (Anglo-Indian), Movita Castenada (Mexican) and Tarita (Tahitian). There were many more affairs, and he was the father of at least 11 children. He liked to seduce married women, then abandon them. He would humiliate husbands and sometimes he exulted in a kind of mutual sexual degradation. Equally, there were women who said he was a magical lover and an enormous influence on their lives. There was also the feeling that as an actor he had become so unpredictable and wayward as to be out of control.
Then in two years, close to the age of 50, he grabbed at work so extraordinary that he secured his reputation – and made his subsequent vanishing all the more tragic. He did two films, one entirely conventional, the other so radical it risked being banned. In The Godfather (1972), he was Vito Corleone, that old standby – a master criminal and the rock on which family is built. It was not a difficult part for him, once he had got the look, the voice, and the cotton wool in his mouth. But the film was a smash hit (his first such success) and Vito was a model of the new American ambiguity: a killer, a pioneer of criminal method, and a man with a sense of love, duty and respect. His boys and followers – James Caan, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, John Cazale – attended to him like disciples with their master. He won a second Oscar and sent an alleged Apache maiden to refuse it, with a long speech about American abuse of native Americans. The maiden wore buckskins and false eyelashes; it turned out she was some kind of actress.
And then he agreed to do Last Tango In Paris (1972) for Bernardo Bertolucci – the last dissolute, shabby, vile act of the former angel, a role that mined his own past (because he let it), that depended on his own great fascination with sex and its power, as well as his tormented feelings towards women. And he did it casually, without the vibrato of “this is hugely dangerous and difficult”. If anyone doubts Brando’s greatness, see this film and absorb the sheer absent-mindedness of the performance – he is so deeply into his role that he exposes only a fraction of the man’s life. He seems not on show, yet we see more of human nature than film has ever prepared us for. In Last Tango, the “has-been” suddenly appeared 10 miles ahead, not even bothering to smile at all the rare, new places he had been. The film is lacerating, but Brando’s pain in character is subdued by the achievement of the acting. Yet the whole thing was sly and subversive, for it whispered, see, see what you have been missing.
The missing became greater still after Last Tango. He worked far less often. He began to put on fearsome weight. He let it be known that the world and its audiences hardly deserved him. But he made grotesque monetary demands for the nonsense of Superman.
And in a film like The Missouri Breaks (1975) – with Jack Nicholson, the latest next Brando – he kept changing his character, as if to ridicule such things. The result was hilarious – we have always seen too little of Brando the comic – but neither Nicholson nor director Arthur Penn could keep up with his whims.
Equally, on Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1977), Brando added to the hideous burdens of that production by imposing himself as a terribly overweight and under-prepared actor, determined to philosophise about the part and the picture, ready to embark on profuse improvisations and diversions. The result was not pretty or effective – and it was less than generous to the director who had made The Godfather with him.
He made four films then in 15 years, with only the gentle, amusing The Freshman (1990) and Don Juan De Marco (1994) in the plus column. In the latter, he was a sleepy, dreamy psychotherapist fascinated by Johnny Depp’s claim to be Don Juan, and brought back into merry contact with his wife, played by Faye Dunaway. Though a love scene between them was played in near dark, there was little attempt to mask Brando’s bulk, and every sign of his abiding skill.
But his family life was chaotic and destined for the courts and the tabloids. He gave occasional interviews in which he sneered at the process and seemed to glory in his own monstrousness. When he came to write his autobiography, he remarked publicly on the idiocy of publishers paying so much money – and he even had a plan once to have several women from his life do a chapter each, over which he would preside as silent, taunting pasha.
The autobiography is neither helpful nor appealing, though its account of his early years is fresh and intriguing. Peter Manso published a very lengthy biography, Brando (1994), that gave all too rich a portrait of the ugly manipulation of much of his life. Will there ever be a book that “explains” the man? I doubt it. He was a tragedy of his own wilful, self-abusive resolve. He was a complex masquerader in life’s unwinding and that form challenged him so much more than the texts for plays or films. There might one day be a great novel founded on a figure like Brando. But there is reason to suspect he preferred to leave mystery, wreckage and a confounded public. In all of which he succeeded.
Acting does date. It is already a cause for perplexity that John Barrymore was once passionately regarded as the greatest of American actors. Brando’s Method persona was parodied from the outset, and his true Stanley is now “remembered” by very few people. But we will have The Men, Zapata, On The Waterfront, The Fugitive Kind, The Chase, The Godfather, Last Tango … it is enough, I suspect, for him to become as representative of cinema as Garbo, Chaplin and Mickey Mouse. And as the travail and melodrama of the awkward life passes, so we can look at the movies and recall that we were young, once, when Marlon Brando was doing such things. It was often veiled, supercilious and sinister, but on screen he made us an offer we couldn’t refuse.
· Marlon Brando, actor, born April 3 1924; died July 1 2004
His obituary by David Thompson in “The Guardian” can be accessed here.
Robert Drivas was born in 1938 in Chicago. He studied at the Greek Playhouse in Athens. In 1958 he made his Broadway debut in “The Firstborn” with Anthony Quale. His first film role was with Paul Newman in “Cool Hand Luke” in 1967. His other films of note include “The Illustrated Man” and “Where It’s At”. He died in 1986. His obituary in “The New York Times” can be accessed here.
“New York Times” obituary:
Robert Drivas, an award-winning director and actor of stage, screen and television, died Sunday at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He was 50 years old and lived in Manhattan.
Mr. Drivas made his Broadway debut in 1958 as Ramses in ”The Firstborn,” Christopher Fry’s verse play about Moses in conflict with the Pharaoh over the bondage of the Israelites. The play starred Katherine Cornell and Anthony Quayle. The first play he directed was Terrence McNally’s ”Bad Habits” (1974), for which he won an Obie Award.
The actor, who was born in Coral Gables, Fla., became interested in the theater while studying at the University of Chicago and later at the University of Miami. While studying in Florida, he acted at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami in ”Thieves Carnival,” ”The Lady’s Not for Burning” and ”Tea and Sympathy.” Tennessee Williams saw his performance in the latter play and asked him to take the lead in his play ”Sweet Bird of Youth,” which had its premiere at the Coconut Grove in 1956. Off Broadway Debut in O’Neill
Among his other Broadway roles were Jocko in ”One More River,” Stefan in ”The Wall,” Alfred Drake’s son in ”Lorenzo” and an English beatnik in ”The Irregular Verb to Love.”
Mr. Drivas made his Off Broadway debut in Eugene O’Neill’s ”Diff’rent” and appeared in ”Mrs. Dally Has a Lover.”
He also directed ”The Ritz” (1976), ”Legend,” ”It Has to Be You” and a revival of Neil Simon’s ”Little Me.” He directed and co-starred with James Coco in ”Monsters (Side Show-Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie).”
As a member of the Yale Repertory Theater in the 1970’s, he played the title roles in ”Dracula,” Gustave Flaubert’s ”St. Julian the Hospitaler,” and Terrence McNally’s ”Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone,” the latter a role he repeated in the New York production.
He made his movie debut in ”Cool Hand Luke,” and starred in ”The Illustrated Man,” ”Where It’s At,” ”Road Movie” and ”Crazy American Girl.”
He appeared in many television productions, including ”The Defenders,” ”The Nurses,” ”The Fugitive,” ”Twelve O’Clock High” and ”For the People.”
Mr. Drivas last appeared on the stage in a January 1985 production at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater of Milan Kundera’s ”Jacques and His Master,” a play about Jacques Diderot, the French encylopedist.
He is survived by his mother, Harriett Choromokos of Coral Gables; a sister, Sandra Miller, of Miami, and two brothers, James Choromokos of Alexandria, Va., and Earl Choromokos of Cincinnati.
During the late 1960s Mills began performing in theatrical plays, and played in more mature roles. The age of contracts with studios soon passed. For her success with Disney she received the Disney Legend Award. Although she has not maintained the box office success or the Hollywood A-list she experienced as a child actress, she has continued to make films and TV appearances, including a starring role in the UK television mini-series The Flame Trees of Thika in 1981, the title role in Disney’s television series Good Morning, Miss Bliss in 1988, and as Caroline, a main character in Wild at Heart (2007–2012) on ITV in the UK.
Mills was born in Marylebone, London. She was 12 when she was discovered by J. Lee Thompson, who was initially looking for a boy to play the lead role in Tiger Bay, which co-starred her father, veteran British actor Sir John Mills. The movie was popular at the box office in Britain.
Bill Anderson, one of Walt Disney‘s producers, saw Tiger Bay and suggested that Mills be given the lead role in Pollyanna. The role of the orphaned “glad girl” who moves in with her aunt catapulted Mills to stardom in the United States and earned her a special Academy Award (the last person to receive the Juvenile Oscar). Because Mills could not be present to receive the trophy, Annette Funicello accepted it for her.
Disney subsequently cast Mills as twins Sharon and Susan who reunite their divorced parents in The Parent Trap. In the film, Mills sings “Let’s Get Together” as a duet with herself. The film was a hit around the world, reaching number 8 on a US TOP TEN list.
Mills received an offer to make a film in Britain for Bryan Forbes, Whistle Down the Wind(1961), about some children who believe an escaped convict is Jesus. It was a hit at the British box office and Mills was voted the biggest star in Britain for 1961.
Mills was offered the title role in Lolita by Stanley Kubrick but her father turned it down. “I wish I had done it,” she said in 1962. “It was a smashing film.”
Mills returned to Disney for an adventure film, In Search of the Castaways (1962) based on a novel by Jules Verne. It was another popular success and Mills would be voted the fifth biggest star in the country for the next two years.
In 1963 Disney announced plans to film I Capture the Castle, from the novel by Dodie Smith, with Hayley Mills in the role of Cassandra. However, Disney never produced the film.
Her fourth movie for Disney did less well though was still successful, Summer Magic (1963), a musical adaptation of the novel Mother Carey’s Chickens.
Mills had a change of pace with Sky West and Crooked (1965), set in the world of gypsies, written by her mother and directed by her father. It was not very popular. In contrast, her last film with Disney, the comedy That Darn Cat!, did very well at the box office.
During her six-year run at Disney, Mills was arguably the most popular child actress of the era. Critics noted that America’s favourite child star was, in fact, quite British and very ladylike. The success of “Let’s Get Together” (which hit No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, No. 17 in Britain and No. 1 in Mexico) also led to the release of a record album on Disney’s Buena Vista label, Let’s Get Together with Hayley Mills, which also included her only other hit song, “Johnny Jingo” (Billboard No. 21, 1962). In 1962 British exhibitors voted her the most popular film actress in the country.
For Universal, Mills made another movie with her father, The Truth About Spring (1965), co-starring Disney regular James MacArthur as her love interest. It was mildly popular. However The Trouble with Angels (1966), was a huge hit; Mills played as a prankish Catholic boarding school girl with “scathingly brilliant” schemes, opposite screen veteran Rosalind Russell, and directed by another Hollywood veteran, Ida Lupino. She then provided a voice for The Daydreamer (1966).
Shortly thereafter, Mills appeared alongside her father and Hywel Bennett in director Roy Boulting’s critically acclaimed film The Family Way (1966), a comedy about a couple having difficulty consummating their marriage, featuring a score by Paul McCartney and arrangements by Beatles producer George Martin. She began a romantic relationship with Roy Boulting, and they eventually married in 1971.
She then starred as the protagonist of Pretty Polly (1967), opposite famous Indian film actor Shashi Kapoor in Singapore.
Mills made another movie for Boulting, the controversial horror thriller Twisted Nerve in 1968, along with her Family Way co-star Hywel Bennett. She made a comedy, Take a Girl Like You (1970) with Oliver Reed, and made her West End debut in The Wild Duck in 1970. She worked for Boulting again on Mr. Forbush and the Penguins (1971), replacing the original female lead.
In 1981 Mills returned to acting with a starring role in the UK television mini-series The Flame Trees of Thika, based on Elspeth Huxley‘s memoir of her childhood in East Africa. The series was well received, prompting Mills to accept more acting roles. She then returned to America and made two appearances on The Love Boat.
Mills recalled her childhood in the 2000 documentary film Sir John Mills’ Moving Memories which was directed by Marcus Dillistone and written by her brother Jonathan. In 2005 Mills appeared in the acclaimed short film, Stricken, written and directed by Jayce Bartok. In 2007 she began appearing as Caroline in the ITV1 African vet drama, Wild at Heart; her sister Juliet Mills was a guest star in series 4 of the drama.
In 2010 Mills appeared in Mandie and the Cherokee Treasure, based on one of the popular Mandie novels of Lois Gladys Leppard.
Mills made her stage debut in a 1966 West End revival of Peter Pan. In 2000 she made her Off-Broadway debut in Sir Noël Coward‘s Suite in Two Keys, opposite American actress Judith Ivey, for which she won a Theatre World Award. In 1991 she appeared as Anna Leonowensin the Australian production of The King and I. In December 2007, for their annual birthday celebration of “The Master”, The Noël Coward Society invited Mills as the guest celebrity to lay flowers in front of Coward’s statue at New York’s Gershwin Theatre, thereby commemorating the 108th birthday of Sir Noel.
In 1997, Mills starred in the U.S. national tour of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I.
Mills later had a second son, Jason Lawson, during a relationship with British actor Leigh Lawson.
Mills’ partner since 1997 is actor and writer Firdous Bamji, who is 20 years her junior.
Mills had involvement with the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (the “Hare Krishna” movement). She wrote the preface to the book, The Hare Krishna Book of Vegetarian Cooking, published in 1984. However, in a 1997 article of People magazine, Mills stated that “she is ‘not a part of Hare Krishna’, though she delved into Hinduism and her own Christianity for guidance.”
In 1988 Mills co-edited, with Marcus Maclaine, the book My God, which consisted of brief letters from celebrities on their beliefs, or lack thereof, regarding God and the afterlife. Mills has been a pescetarian since the late 1990s.
On 18 April 2008, Mills was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had surgery and started, but quickly abandoned, chemotherapy after only three sessions due to the severity of side effects. Mills credits her survival to the alternative treatments she tried out. She told Good Housekeeping magazine in January 2012 that she had fully recovered.
Mills is a trustee of the children’s arts charity Anno’s Africa.
References to Mills sometimes appear in fiction and music. The 1985 song ‘Goodbye Lucille’ by the British band Prefab Sprout refers in passing to Mills.
Brett Halsey was born in 1933 in Santa Ana in California. In his late teens he won a contract with Universal studios where me met another aspiring young actor Clint Eastwood. Brett Halsey starred in a number of B movies during the 50’s e.g. “High School Hellcast” and “Cry Baby Killer”. In the late 1950’s he won a 20th Century Fox contract and appeared in such prestigious movies as “The Best of Evertthing” and “Return to Peyton Place”. He also played the lead in “Return of the Fly”.
In 1961 he was in the television series “Follow the Sun”. At the end of that decade he went to Italy where he made a series of spagatti Westerns and some spy movies. In more recent years he has become a published author.
Brett Halsey was born in 1933 in Santa Ana, California and is an American film actor, sometimes credited as Montgomery Ford. He had a prolific career in B pictures and in European-made feature films. He originated the role of John Abbott on the soap operaThe Young and the Restless, a role he filled only from May 1980 to March 1981, when he was replaced by Jerry Douglas.
Interested in acting since he was a child, young Brett was employed as a page at CBSTelevision studios, where he met Jack Benny and Benny’s wife, Mary Livingstone, who presented him to William Goetz, the head of Universal Pictures, who placed him in a school with other aspiring actors for the studio.
Halsey appeared as Swift Otter, a Cheyenne Indian in the 1956 episodes “The Spirit of Hidden Valley” and “The Gentle Warrior” of the CBS western series, Brave Eagle, starring Keith Larsen as a young Indian chief.
In 1961, Halsey won the Golden Globe Award for “New Star of the Year”. His Follow the Sun co-star, Barry Coe, had won the same honor in 1960. The award was discontinued in 1983.
Alex Cord was born in 1933 in Floral Park, New York. He had a brief run as a leading man on film in the late 1960’s and early 70’s. He played Kirk Douglas’s brother in “The Brotherhood” and was also in “Stiletto” and “The Scorpio Letters” with Shirley Eaton. His best remembered role though was on television as Archangel in “Airwolf”. Alex Cord’s website can be accessed here.
His IMDB entry:
Tall (6 foot) in the saddle, brawny, ruggedly handsome, and very much oriented towards outdoor life, actor Alex Cord became best known in Hollywood for his 60s and 70s work in action adventure. Born Alexander Viespi in Long Island, New York in 1933, he was riding horses from the age of 2. Stricken with polio at the age of 12, he was confined to a hospital and iron lung for a long period of time before he overcame the illness after being sent to a Wyoming ranch for therapy. He soon regained his dream and determination of becoming a jockey or professional horseman.
A high school dropout at the age of sixteen, he was too tall to become a jockey so he joined the rodeo circuit and earned a living riding bulls and bareback horses. During another extended hospital stay, this time after suffering serious injuries after being thrown by a bull at a rodeo in New York City’s Madison Square Garden, he contemplated again the direction of his life and decided to finish his high school education by way of night school. A voracious reader during his long convalescence, he later studied and received his degree in literature at New York University.
Prodded by an interest in acting, Alex received dramatic training at the Actors Studio and began his professional career in summer stock (The Compass Players in St. Louis, Missouri) and at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut where he played “Laertes” in a production of “Hamlet”. A British producer saw his promise and invited him to London where he co-starred in four plays (“Play With a Tiger”, “The Rose Tattoo”, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “The Umbrella”). He was nominated for the “Best Actor Award” by the London Critics’ Circle for the first-mentioned play.
The strapping, light-haired, good-looker eventually sought a Hollywood “in” and found one via his equestrian prowess in the early 60s. Steady work came to him on such established western TV series as Laramie (1959) and Branded (1965) and that extended itself into roles on crime action series (Route 66 (1960) and Naked City (1958)). Gaining a foothold in feature films within a relatively short time, Alex starred or co-starred in more than 30 movies, a number of them opposite Hollywood’s loveliest of lovelies. He peaked at the very beginning as a dope addict in Synanon (1965) with Stella Stevens, as a cowboy in the remake of John Wayne‘s Stagecoach (1966) with Ann-Margret, and as a jet-setting hitman in Stiletto (1969) with Britt Ekland. Co-starring with Kirk Douglas in the mafia drama The Brotherhood (1968), he wound up marrying beautiful actress Joanna Pettet that same year. The couple had one child, then divorced in 1976.
Later interest in Alex was drawn from his title role in Grayeagle (1977), a viable remake of the John Wayne film, The Searchers (1956), in which he played the Indian kidnapper ofBen Johnson‘s daughter. Lana Wood, sister of star Natalie Wood (who appeared in the original), also co-starred in this film. Alex can still be seen from time to time in lowbudget film entries and a TV episode or two, but other interests have now taken up his time.
Outside of the entertainment field, his ultimate love for horses extended itself into work for numerous charities and benefits. He was a regular competitor in the Ben Johnson Pro-Celebrity Rodeos that raised money for children’s charities, and he is one of the founders of the Chukkers for Charity Celebrity Polo Team which has raised more than $3 million for worthy causes. He also chairs “Ahead with Horses”, an organization that provides therapeutic riding programs for the physically and emotionally challenged. Alex and his second wife, Susannah, are both actively involved on their horse ranch in north Texas where she is a dressage trainer and he ropes and rides cutters. Alex also turned to writing, thus far publishing two novels: “Sandsong” and “A Feather in the Rain”. A third book, “Harbinger”, was never printed. He has written and sold three screenplays, as well. Of his two children, daughter Toni Aluisa and son Damien Zachary Cord, his son (by Ms.Joanna Pettet) died tragically in 1995 of a heroin overdose at the age of 26. Alex, more recently, became a grandfather of twins, a boy and a girl. Alex Cord died in August 2021 aged 88.
Obituary
Alex Cord, who co-starred with Jan-Michael Vincent and Ernest Borgnine in the 1980s attack-helicopter series Airwolfand had a long career onscreen, died Monday morning at his home in Valley View, TX. He was 88.
His talent agent and friend of 20 years, Linda McAlister, confirmed the news to Deadline.
Cord had been working in films and TV for more than 20 years before he landed his signature role as the mysterious, eyepatch-sporting Archangel on Airwolf. The CBS drama debuted in 1984 — the year all three broadcast networks bowed helicopter dramas following the theatrical success of Blue Thunder. Airwolf starred Vincent as Stringfellow Hawke, a brooding loner who was tasked with recovering the titular attack copter from its creator, who had stolen the craft with plans to sell Airwolf to Libya.
Cord was his contact at the Firm, an ultrasecret government group that recruited Hawke. Nattily dressed in crisp white suit, cane and that eyepatch, Archangel teamed with an old war buddy, Dominic Santini (Borgnine) on missions for the Firm. The midseason-replacement series never really clicked in its Saturday night slot, failing to make the year-end Top 30 primetime shows in the three-network universe. CBS canceled the show in July 1986, and it went on to air for a season on USA Network with a new cast.
While that would be Cord’s signature role, he had scores of others — ranging from guest slots on such classic series as Route 66, Night Gallery, Gunsmoke, Mission: Impossible, Police Story and The Six Million Dollar Man to a lead in the short-lived 1978 NBC primetime soap W.E.B. He played Jack Kiley, the no-nonsense programming chief at Transatlantic Broadcasting System, a fictional TV network whose behind-the-scenes drama fueled the series. It lasted for about a half-dozen episodes.
He also was a regular on Cassie & Company,Angie Dickinson’s follow-up series to Police Story. Cord played her ex-husband and DA Mike Holland on the NBC detective drama, which aired 13 episodes in 1982.
He also appeared in films, starring alongside Ann-Margret, Mike Connors, Bing Crosby and others in 1966’s Stagecoach. Other film roles included Synanon, The Last Grenade The Brotherhood, Stiletto and The Dead Are Alive!
Born on May 3, 1933, on Long Island, Cord battled polio as a child and became a prolific horseman. He parlayed those skills into acting gigs in the popular Western genre of the late 1950s and early ’60s.
Cord continued to work onscreen throughout the 1980s and ’90s, guesting on such hit dramas as Murder, She Wrote, Simon & Simon, Jake and the Fatman and Walker, Texas Ranger
David Dukes was a very reliable young character actor who was born in San Francesco in 1945. He is best remembered for his role as ‘Leslie Slote’ in the dual television miniseries “The Winds of War” and “War and Rememberance”. He also played major roles onstage in such plays as “Dracula”, “Amadeus”, “M Butterfly” and “Bent”. His first film was “The Strawberry Statement” in 1970. Among his other films were “Without a Trace” and “Gods and Monsters”. He died suddenly of a heart attack while on location making the TV film “Rose Red” . Tribute to David Dukes by his wife can be accessed here.
TCM Overview:
This classically-trained American repertory actor has gone on to a busy career as a leading man in Broadway shows, TV and films. Since the 1970s, David Dukes has often played diplomats, surgeons and other high-powered professionals and bluebloods. He is particularly remembered for his portrayal of low-level career diplomat Leslie Slote, who finds inner courage, in the ABC miniseries based on the Herman Wouk novels “The Winds of War” (1983), and “War and Remembrance” (1988). Dukes also spent three seasons as the wealthy doctor husband of Swoosie Kurtz’s Alex on the NBC drama series “Sisters.” seasons of the NBC series “Sisters.”
The son of California highway patrolman, the handsome, dark-haired actor trained at the American Conservatory Theatre and had appeared in 37 professional productions before making his Broadway debut at age 25 in Moliere’s “School for Wives.” Dukes’ subsequent Broadway work has included playing Horst, a gay concentration camp inmate who dares to love a fellow prisoner (Richard Gere) in Martin Sherman’s “Bent” (1979), succeeding Ian McKellen as Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s award-winning “Amadeus” (1982) and replacing John Lithgow as the diplomat protagonist of David Henry Hwang’s “M. Butterfly” (1988).
Dukes made his TV debut as the son of a wealthy Irish-American family in “Beacon Hill” (CBS, 1975), a lavish soap set in the 1920s. His subsequent TV credits of note include “Harold Robbins’ ’79 Park Avenue'” (NBC, 1977) as immigrant Mike Koshko, “Mayflower: The Pilgrim’s Adventure” (CBS, 1979), as Miles Standish, “Portrait of a Rebel: Margaret Sanger” (CBS, 1980), as the husband of the pioneer for contraceptive rights, “Sentimental Journey” (CBS, 1984), as clothing manufacturer Levi Strauss, “The Josephine Baker Story” (HBO, 1991), as orchestra leader Jo Bouillon, the husband of the celebrated music hall performer, and the Emmy-winning “And the Band Played On” (HBO, 1993), as a medical researcher.
In 1996, he played playwright Arthur Miller in the HBO film “Norma Jean & Marilyn.” His most notorious TV guest shot came in 1977 on a special hour-long episode of “All in the Family” wherein he played a would-be rapist who detains Edith (Jean Stapleton) at gunpoint in her living room while friends and family await her at her 50th birthday party. Dukes also worked in the Norman Lear stable in the short-lived 1977 syndicated serial “All That Glitters,” playing a male-rights activist (the series reversed gender power). More recent TV series have not proven successful, nor given Dukes roles through which he could shine. He was husband to Marilyn Kentz in the short-lived bomb “The Mommies” (NBC, 1993), and in 1997 was father to Pauly Shore on the equally short-lived Fox sitcom “Pauly.”
In feature films, Dukes had a rare lead role in “The First Deadly Sin” (1980), as a psychotic killer pursued by detective Frank Sinatra. He was Kate Nelligan’s estranged husband in the missing child drama “Without a Trace” (1983), and Marsha Mason’s playwright former lover in “Only When I Laugh” (1981). Dukes played a stiff college professor in “The Men’s Club” (1986), a poorly received talkfest about a men’s encounter group and was Alice Krige’s pianist husband in “See You in the Morning” (1989). Most of his 90s credits have been in direct-to-video releases, except for “Fled” (1996), in which he played a prosecuting attorney and 1998’s “Gods and Monsters” which featured him as the lover of famed early Hollywood horror director James Whale.
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
Alexander Livingston Nicol, actor: born Ossining, New York 20 January 1916; married 1948 Jean Fleming (two sons, one daughter); died Montecito, California 29 July 2001.
The actor Alex Nicol played occasional leading roles on screen, for which his fair-haired good looks and sturdy physique seemed to qualify him, and when, on stage, he played Brick in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams wrote that Nicol captured the part exactly as he had conceived it. But it was as a character actor that he spent most of his career, with a particular flair for portraying villains with a weak or pathological nature, epitomised by his fine performance in the western The Man From Laramie. He also directed several films, and appeared frequently on television.
Alex Nicol
He was born Alexander Livingston Nicol Jnr, in Ossining, New York, in 1916, though when his movie career started 34 years later he was astute enough to adjust the year to 1919. “I was a little older than some of the other people under contract so I thought, ‘Well, I’ll cure that right now’,” he later confessed. His father was a prison warden at Sing Sing and his mother a head matron at a women’s detention centre, so it was ironic that he studied at the Fagin School of Dramatic Arts before joining Maurice Evans’ theatrical company, with whom he made his Broadway début with a walk-on in Henry IV Part One (1939).
His career was interrupted by a five-year spell in the army, in which he served with the National Guard and Cavalry Unit and attained the rank of Technical Sergeant, after which he enrolled at the Actor’s Studio. “With Evans, I was the least important member of the cast. I was learning my craft in public. Then it all got put on hold until the end of the war, after which I became one of the original members of the Actor’s Studio. Marty Ritt and Elia Kazan were running the Studio then.” Nicol returned to Broadway in a revival of Clifford Odets’ potent pro-union dramaWaiting for Lefty (1946), followed by roles in Sundown (1948) and Forward the Heart (1948).
Alex Nicol
He was part of the original cast of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s classic musical South Pacific (1949), playing one of the marines, but after a few weeks in the show he successfully auditioned to replace Ralph Meeker as the sailor Mannion in the hit playMister Roberts, and was also made understudy to the play’s star Henry Fonda:
But I never made it! He never missed a performance! Henry’s wife at the time killed herself during the run of the show and he still didn’t miss the performance. We were one minute from curtain time when Fonda walked in, in costume, and he just walked right out, hit his mark and played the performance as though nothing had happened.
(Fonda’s proprietorial approach to the part became legendary. After he heard that James Stewart had expressed a willingness to replace him when he left the show, he stayed with it for the entire three-year Broadway run and subsequent tour, a total of nearly 1,700 performances.)
While acting in Mister Roberts, Nicol was seen by the Universal director George Sherman, who was in New York to prepare The Sleeping City (1950), to be filmed entirely on location. He cast Nicol as a young doctor who commits suicide after stealing drugs to pay off gambling debts. “It was a very showy, flashy part,” said the actor. “The whole thing was shot in a really grim, Neo-Realist style.” Nicol was given a contract by Universal, and Sherman also directed his second film, Tomahawk (1951), in which he played a cavalry officer with a hatred of Indians.
Roles as a prisoner-of-war in Target Unknown (1951) and a trainee pilot in Air Cadet (1951) preceded Nicol’s first major part, co-starring with Frank Sinatra and Shelley Winters in the musical drama Meet Danny Wilson (1952). Winters wrote, “Alex Nicol was a very mature, menschie guy (for an actor). He was great fun and lovely to work with.” As the lifelong protector and best friend of a bumptious singer (Sinatra), Nicol handled a difficult part with conviction. However, in his next film he was cast as a heavy again, causing Loretta Young to be wrongly sent to prison, then blackmailing her on her release, in Because of You (1952), and he was a troublesome sergeant in Red Ball Express (1952), directed by Budd Boetticher. “A talented guy,” said Nicol, “but he was the only director in my whole career whom I couldn’t get along with. He had a very big ego.”
Nicol’s first starring role was opposite Maureen O’Hara in The Redhead from Wyoming (1953), a lacklustre western directed by Lee Sholem:
“Roll ‘Em Sholem” they used to call him. All he would say before every scene was “Roll ‘Em!” And then when you got to the end of the scene he’d say “Cut!” and then he’d look at the script clerk and say, “Did they say all the words?”, and if she said “Yes” then that was it. When the picture was over I went to the front office at Universal and asked to be released from my contract. They thought I was crazy. But I thought, “If this is my big break, then I’m not going very far.”
As a freelance, Nicol was directed by the former Actor’s Studio teacher Daniel Mann in About Mrs Leslie (1953) starring Shirley Booth and Robert Ryan. “The script wasn’t as strong as it might have been, but it was a great cast.” He returned to Universal (at a much larger fee than he had been getting as a contract player) to appear in two George Sherman films, Lone Hand (1953) andDawn at Socorro (1954). “George was really a fan of mine and always wanted to work with me, so he kept bringing me back to Universal.” Nicol then made three films in England, most notably Ken Hughes’s The House Across the Lake (1954), in which he was a failed novelist who becomes involved in crime:
It was a great script, and Sidney James, a wonderful actor, was in it, along with Hillary Brooke. Eventually I got back to the United States and I was glad to come back. Those British pictures kept me working, but they were really fast, really cheaply budgeted.
Anthony Mann directed Nicol in his role as a pilot in Strategic Air Command (1955), and it was Mann who then gave the actor his best- remembered role, that of the weak, psychopathic son of a patriarch rancher (Donald Crisp) in the darkly compelling western (allegedly inspired by King Lear) The Man from Laramie (1955), starring James Stewart. “Tony was very creative, great to work with, and I admired him.”
Jacques Tourneur’s Great Day in the Morning (1956) was another superior western, but it became apparent to Nicol that his Hollywood career was not progressing, and in 1956 he returned to Broadway to replace Ben Gazzara in the leading role of Brick, the former athlete who has become a guilt-ridden alcoholic in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It brought the accolade from Williams and when the Broadway run ended Nicol starred in the tour.
He had the chance to create a role on stage when he was starred with Shelley Winters in the play Saturday Night Kid (1958), but it closed in Philadelphia without reaching Broadway and he returned to Hollywood where he made his first film as a director,The Screaming Skull (1958), in which he also starred:
I wasn’t doing the kind of films as an actor that I wanted to do, so I thought, “Well, I’ll try directing.” We shot the picture in six weeks and it did very well, so I was happy with that.
Nicol travelled to Italy when the director Martin Ritt gave him a role in Five Branded Women (1959), and while there he was offered parts in other European movies, so he settled there for two years with his family. (In 1948 he married the actress Jean Fleming and they had three children.)
We lived in Rome; God, it was beautiful. We did a lot of films very quickly, with backing from Italian and Yugoslavian finance sources. It was one of the happiest times of my life.
Returning to the United States in 1961, he played Paul Anka’s father in the thriller Look in Any Window (1961), then produced and directed a war film in Rome, Then There Were Three (1961), in which he co-starred with the American expatriate Frank Latimore. Subsequent acting roles included two spaghetti westerns, The Savage Guns (1962) and Gunfighters of the Casa Grande (1964), and Roger Corman’s gangster movie based on the life of criminal Ma Barker, Bloody Mama (1969), in which Nicol played the husband of Shelley Winters.
Nicol had made his television début in 1949 in Lux Video Theater. Other shows included Studio One, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Twilight Zone and The FBI, and he directed episodes of Daniel Boone and The Wild Wild West. The last film in which he acted was A*P*E (1976), an independent movie made by a friend of the actor.
In 1996 Nicol told the interviewer Wheeler Winston Dixon,
Starting in the 1960s, I started putting money aside to buy a couple of apartment houses, which was the smartest move I ever made because I’m living on that money now. I like it here in Santa Barbara, living in a rather elegant area. I’m winding up pretty much the way I wanted to.
George HamiltonGeorge Hamilton DOCTOR, YOUVE GOT TO BE KIDDING!, U.S. poster, top left: George Hamilton, Sandra Dee; middle row: Dick Kallman, Bill Bixby, Dwayne Hickman, Celeste Holm, Mort Sahl, 1967
George Hamilton was born in Memphis in 1939. “Whwrw the Boys Are” released in 1960 ith Dolores Hart and Connie Francis was his first film lead role to achieve major recognition. He was also noticed in “Home from the Hill” a lurid melodrama where he was the weakish son of Robert Mitchum and Eleanor Parker. In 1979 he had an un expected major hit with “Love at First Bite” a spoof of the Dracula films. He followed this movie with another succesful film “Zorro the Gay Blade”. However he did not sustain his career momentum as a leading man and began to take television roles. In 1990 he was featured in “The Godfather Part 3”. He has recently published his autobiography “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here” which won praise for it’s self-deprecating humour. A “MailOnline” interview with George Hamilton can be accessed here.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Noted these days for his dashing, sporting, jet-setter image and perpetually bronzed skin tones in commercials, film spoofs and reality shows, George Hamilton was, at the onset, a serious contender for dramatic film stardom. Born George Stevens Hamilton IV in Memphis, TN, on August 12, 1939, the son of gregarious Southern belle beauty Ann Potter Hamilton Hunt Spaulding, whose second husband (of four) was George Stevens “Spike” Hamilton, a touring bandleader. Moving extensively as a youth due to his father’s work (Arkansas, Massachusetts, New York, California), young George got a taste of acting in plays while attending Palm Beach High School. With his exceedingly handsome looks and attractive personality, he took a bold chance and moved to Los Angeles in the late 1950s.
MGM (towards the end of the contract system) saw in George a budding talent with photogenic appeal. It wasted no time putting him in films following some guest appearances on TV. His first film, a lead in Crime & Punishment, USA (1959), was an offbeat, updated adaptation of the Fyodor Dostoevsky novel. While the film was not overwhelmingly successful, George’s heartthrob appeal was obvious. He was awarded a Golden Globe for “Most Promising Newcomer” as well as being nominated for “Best Foreign Actor” by the British Film Academy (BAFTA). This in turn led to an enviable series of film showcases, including the memorable Southern drama Home from the Hill (1960), which starred Robert Mitchum and Eleanor Parker and featured another handsome, up-and-coming George (George Peppard); Angel Baby (1961), in which he played an impressionable lad who meets up with evangelist Mercedes McCambridge; and Light in the Piazza (1962) (another BAFTA nomination), in which he portrays an Italian playboy who falls madly for American tourist Yvette Mimieux to the ever-growing concern of her mother Olivia de Havilland. Along with the good, however, came the bad and the inane, which included the dreary sudsers All the Fine Young Cannibals (1960) and By Love Possessed (1961) and the youthful spring-break romps Where the Boys Are (1960), which had Connie Francis warbling the title tune while slick-as-car-seat-leather George pursued coed Dolores Hart, and Looking for Love (1964), which was more of the same.
Not yet undone by this mixed message of serious actor and glossy pin-up, George went on to show some real acting muscle in the offbeat casting of a number of biopics — asMoss Hart in Act One (1963), an overly fictionalized and sanitized account of the late playwright (the real Moss should have looked so good!), as ill-fated country star Hank Williams in Your Cheatin’ Heart (1964), and as the famed daredevil Evel Knievel (1971).
The rest of the ’60s and ’70s, however, rested on his fun-loving, idle-rich charm that bore a close resemblance to his off-camera image in the society pages. As the 1960s began to unfold, he started making headlines more as a handsome escort to the rich, the powerful and the beautiful than as an acclaimed actor — none more so than his 1966 squiring of President Lyndon Johnson‘s daughter Lynda Bird Johnson. He was also once engaged to actress Susan Kohner, a former co-star. Below-average films such as Doctor, You’ve Got to Be Kidding! (1967), A Time for Killing (1967) and The Power (1968) effectively ended his initially strong ascent to film stardom.
From the 1970s on George tended to be tux-prone on standard film and TV comedy and drama, whether as a martini-swirling opportunist, villain or lover. A wonderful comeback for him came in the form of the disco-era Dracula spoof Love at First Bite (1979), which he executive-produced. Nominated for a Golden Globe as the campy neck-biter displaced and having to fend off the harsh realities of New York living, he continued on the parody road successfully with Zorro: The Gay Blade (1981) in the very best Mel Brooks tradition.
This renewed popularity led to a one-year stint on Dynasty (1981) during the 1985-1986 season and a string of fun, self-mocking commercials, particularly his Ritz Cracker and (Toasted!) Wheat Thins appearances that often spoofed his overly tanned appearance. In recent times he has broken through the “reality show” ranks by hosting The Family(2003), which starred numerous members of a traditional Italianate family vying for a $1,000,000 prize, and participating in the second season of ABC’s Dancing with the Stars(2005), where his charm and usual impeccable tailoring scored higher than his limberness. On the tube he can still pull off a good time, whether playing flamboyant publisher William Randolph Hearst in Rough Riders (1997), playing the best-looking Santa Claus ever in A Very Cool Christmas (2004), hosting beauty pageants or making breezy gag appearances.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
