Hollywood Actors Archives

Susan Strasberg

Susan Strasberg obituary in “The Independent” in 1999.

Susan Strasberg was born in New York City in 1938, the daughter of the reknowned Lee Strasberg. She made her film debut in 1955 in “Picnic” as Milly bratty teenage sister of Kim Novak followed by a role in Vincente Minnelli “The Cobweb”. opposite John Kerr. She then retunred to Broadway to win enormous acclaim for the title performance in “The Diary of Anne Frank”. She returned to Hollywood and had a leading role in “Stage Struck” opposite Henry Fonda. Susan Strasberg then made several films in Europe and internationally. She became a very reliable supporting player on film and television. She died in 1999. Article in “Vanity Fair” on Susan Strasberg can be viewed here.

Tom Vallance’s obituary of Susan Strasberg in “The Independent”:The daughter of Lee Strasberg, proponent of the Method and founder of the famed Actors’ Studio, and his wife Paula, who achieved notoriety as Marilyn Monroe’s coach, Susan Strasberg was starring on Broadway in The Diary of Anne Frank at the age of 17; two years later she had the plum role of an aspiring actress in a screen remake of Morning Glory, which in 1933 had won an Oscar for Katharine Hepburn.

It had seemed as if the beautiful, dark-haired actress might have an impact equal to that made by Jean Simmons and Audrey Hepburn as ingenues, but, though she continued acting in films, theatre, and particularly television, Strasberg’s career never fulfilled its early promise, and her story is one of the sadder ones of show business, both her personal and professional life suffering what the actress herself later referred to as “vicissitudes in fortune”.

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Born in New York City in 1938, she attended the High School of Music and Arts, the High School of Performing Arts and the Professional School, and did some modelling before making her stage debut in an off-Broadway play, Maya, at the age of 14. “As far as I can see,” she later said, “about the only thing I’ve missed is a college education.”

In 1953 she made her television debut in Catch a Falling Star on the Goodyear Playhouse, and the following year won praise as Juliet in a live telecast of Romeo and Juliet. Also in 1954, she had a regular role in a fondly remembered though short-lived situation comedy series, The Marriage, which starred Hume Cronyn as a lawyer and Jessica Tandy as his wife with Strasberg as their 15-year-old daughter – the show has the distinction of being the first network series to be telecast in colour.

Strasberg made her screen debut in Vincente Minnelli’s The Cobweb (1955), a static and unpopular portrait of life in a psychiatric clinic, though the scene in which Strasberg and John Kerr (also making his screen debut), as two patients suffering from claustrophobia who give each other courage when they go to a cinema together, was a highlight. The actress was also effective as Kim Novak’s book-worm younger sister in Picnic (1955).

Both films were awaiting release when she was cast as Anne Frank in Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett’s dramatisation of the young girl’s diaries, a role that brought stardom. Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times called her “a slender, enchanting young lady with a heart-shaped face, a pair of burning eyes and the soul of an actress”. Her parents had stayed away from rehearsals and allowed her to be directed by Garson Kanin, and Lee Strasberg stated,

When we saw Susie in action, we were all amazed at her great sensitivity. I just don’t know how she picked it all up. She’s never had any formal training.

Within three months her name was in lights above the title, though Noel Coward, after seeing her wistfully appealing performance, wrote in his diary:

She plays it well, very well indeed, but she knows too much. Poor child, in future years it is to be hoped that she learns to know less.

Strasberg herself, though her childhood had been spent surrounded by theatre folk, had been too young to attend her father’s classes, then after her success did not find the time. “There are so many things I want to do,” she said, “I’m lucky I started young.”

During the two-year run of the play, Strasberg formed a close friendship with Marilyn Monroe, who had been studying with Lee Strasberg and who had come heavily under the influence of Paula Strasberg. “Marilyn used to tell me she envied me having a mother and father,” said the actress. “She said she missed having a home life and parents who cared.” Later Strasberg wrote a book about the friendship, Marilyn and Me – sisters, rivals and friends (1992).

Susan Strasberg’s major chance to attain screen stardom came with her casting as Eva Lovelace, the small-town girl who comes to New York determined to fulfil her destiny as a great actress, in Stage Struck (1955), based on Zoe Akins’s play Morning Glory. Sidney Lumet’s film successfully captured the atmosphere of the incestuous world of the New York theatre, but Strasberg’s mannerisms alienated more viewers than they entranced. (The opposite had been true in 1933, when Hepburn’s equally pronounced mannerisms had annoyed a minority but generally bewitched the public, who flocked to the film, which won her her first Academy Award.)

Strasberg was then bitterly disappointed not to be given the role of Anne Frank in George Stevens’s film of the play, and she later suggested that it was because Stevens was afraid of Paula Strasberg, who was a strong influence on her daughter and who had become intensely disliked in Hollywood because of the trouble she had caused working as a coach for Marilyn Monroe. (Shelley Winters has stated that she went with Stevens to see the play near the end of its two-year run when Strasberg had become “tired and stilted” and this deterred the director. Two years later, with the film nearing production, Winters urged the actress to go to Hollywood and beg to be tested, but she refused in order to stay in New York with her lover Richard Burton.)

Strasberg had returned to the theatre to star with Helen Hayes and Burton in Jean Anouilh’s romantic play Time Remembered (1957), and promptly fell in love with her leading man.

Strasberg and Burton did take an apartment together in New York, but the short-lived affair ended with the actress heart-broken. She confessed later that she had cared too much for the actor, notorious for romancing his leading ladies. Strasberg retained warm memories of Hayes, though: “I was young,” she said. “Miss Hayes really took me under her wing as a woman and actress – and she was fun!” Hayes also had reservations, echoing Coward, of talent blossoming too soon without formal training or the time to accumulate the experience and technique required to sustain a long career.

Strasberg next appeared in Shadow of a Gunman (1958) with a group of Actors’ Studio players, though she had still not attended the studio herself. “I could stand it, but I don’t know if my father could,” she said. She was part of the New York City Centre production of Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life that played at the Brussels World Fair in 1958 before becoming a memorable Armchair Theatre presentation on ITV, its cast including Ann Sheridan, Dan Dailey and Franchot Tone besides Strasberg, and the following year she toured with Tone in Caesar and Cleopatra.

In 1961 she was in a British horror film, playing the wheelchair-bound heroine of Seth Holt’s A Taste of Fear, co-starring with Ann Todd, who later commented, “I thought it was a terrible film. I didn’t like my part and I found Susan Strasberg impossible to work with, all that `Method’ stuff.” In The Adventures of a Young Man (1962), based on the autobiographical short stories of Ernest Hemingway, Strasberg was the ill-starred nurse with whom the wounded hero falls in love during the First World War, then she returned to Broadway to play Marguerite Gautier in Franco Zeffirelli’s lush production of The Lady of the Camelias (1963), but her performance was considered wan compared to the indelible memories of Garbo.

Disappointed in her career, Strasberg began to use a variety of drugs, and in 1965, despite having once said, “I’d rather not marry an actor because there isn’t room in the house for two egos”, she married the quixotic young actor Christopher Jones, who was taking LSD. The couple had a daughter, Jennifer, who was born with a congenital birth defect which the actress blamed on the drug-taking. Strasberg and Jones were divorced after just one year of marriage.

She returned to England to appear as Dirk Bogarde’s love interest in Ralph Thomas’s story of anti- British terrorists in 1954 Cyprus, The High Bright Sun (1966), after which her film career became undistinguished, including some youth exploitation movies for American International (The Trip, Psych-Out) and some films in Italy, where she lived for a while, becoming noted for the poker sessions she held in her large apartment. (“At the beginning, when they thought me a novice, I cleaned out a couple of the boys,” she remarked later.)

An independently produced horror film, Who Fears The Devil? (1973), has acquired a cult reputation as an off-beat tale of hill-billies battling the devil, but The Manitou (1978), in which Strasberg sprouted a foetus on her neck, wasted her talents along with those of such veterans as Tony Curtis, Ann Sothern and Burgess Meredith. Her most prolific work was on television, with countless guest appearances in shows including McMillan and Wife, Streets of San Francisco, The Rockford Files, Cagney and Lacey and Murder She Wrote. In 1980 she wrote an autobiography, Bitter Sweet, because, she said later, her career was “stalled”:

It seemed totally untenable to me, acting for 25 years – I had played Juliet, Cleopatra and Anne Frank – and there I was, sitting in Hollywood just waiting for somebody to want me.

She criticised her father for being preoccupied with his acting classes and her mother for alienating prospective employers with the strong supervisory stance she adopted over her daughter’s work. (Knowing that her father had a crush on Jennifer Jones, the 16-year-old Strasberg had aspired to please her father by emulating Jones’s dark hair and eyebrows. “When I saw photos of myself,” she said later, “I realised with a shock that I resembled a young Jennifer Jones.”)

Among Strasberg’s last films were The Delta Force (1986), in which she was a passenger on a hijacked plane, and Prime Suspect (1989) with Frank Stallone.

Back in 1959, when asked about her future, Strasberg had talked excitedly of plans to do The Wild Duck with Sir Laurence Olivier. But that was just four years after the first night of The Diary of Anne Frank when her triumph had been so emphatic that – Lee, Paula, Susan and Marilyn Monroe having taken their places in Sardi’s restaurant after the show, and before the newspapers had appeared – Franchot Tone stood and asked all the patrons to join him in a toast, saying, “Little Susan, you have been launched on a long and glittering career . . .”

Tom Vallance

Susan Strasberg, actress: born New York 22 May 1938; married 1965 Christopher Jones (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1966); died New York 21 January 1999.

Audrey Hepburn obituary in “The Independent” by David Shipman in 1993.

After so many drive-in waitresses in movies – it has been a real drought – here is class, somebody who went to school, can spell and possibly play the piano,’ said Billy Wilder. ‘She’s a wispy, thin little thing, but you’re really in the presence of somebody when you see that girl. Not since Garbo has there been anything like it, with the possible exception of Bergman.’ My generation knew Bergman. Garbo we had never seen. Old pictures were not easy to see in the 1950s. Older cinemagoers talked longingly of Jean Arthur, Carole Lombard, Margaret Sullavan and other enchantresses. From the moment Audrey Hepburn appeared in Roman Holiday (1953), we knew that we had one of our own.

She was born in Brussels to an English banker and a Dutch baroness – and when the war broke out had been trapped in Arnhem with her mother; there they spent the war years, while Hepburn trained as a dancer.

Curiously, several people recognised Hepburn’s particular magic, but few British producers were interested. The revue producer Cecil Landau saw her in the chorus of a West End musical – High Button Shoes (1948) – and engaged her for Sauce Tartare. He liked her so much that he gave her more to do in a sequel, Sauce Piquant. ‘God’s gift to publicity men is a heart-shattering young woman,’ said Picturegoer, ‘with a style of her own . . .’ The magazine mentioned that some people had been to see her perform a couple of dozen times, and among them was Mario Zampi, who was about to direct Laughter in Paradise (1951) for Associated British.

The company’s casting director was equally enthusiastic, but to no avail. She was cast as a hat-check girl: the studio reluctantly allowed her three lines, as against one in the original script. She was signed to a contract, and loaned to Ealing for a couple of lines in the final scene in Lavender Hill Mob (1951), when Alec Guinness is enjoying his ill-gotten loot in South America.

At this point, the producer-director Mervyn LeRoy was looking for a patrician girl to play the lead in Quo Vadis?, MGM’s biggest production in years, and he was excited by Hepburn’s test for him. MGM were not, and the role went to Deborah Kerr. But at last Associated British realised that they might have something in this odd little girl, and they made her a vamp in a parlour-room farce, Young Wives’ Tale (1951), starring Joan Greenwood. It is completely forgotten today, but if you can see it you are likely to be beguiled by two of the most individual actresses who ever appeared in films. They had in common voices with cadences which always alighted on the wrong word to emphasise – as did Sullavan, the other Hepburn, Ann Harding, Irene Dunne, even Judy Garland – turning a statement into a question. In a word, they were never ashamed of their vulnerability; they didn’t seem to be able to cope with life – except to laugh at it. Hepburn’s child-like laugh, deep-throated but tentative, was one of her most distinctive qualities.

But, obviously, it wasn’t unique. Jean Simmons also had it. And it was Simmons who inadvertently launched Hepburn’s screen career. After Young Wives’ Tale, Associated British loaned Hepburn to Ealing again, to play the sister of the star, Valentina Cortese, in a muddled spy drama, The Secret People (1951), and then to a French company for a minor B-movie, Monte Carlo Baby (1951). Hepburn was doing a scene in a Monte Carlo hotel lobby, when Colette happened by. Colette was then working with the American producer Gilbert Miller on a dramatisation of her novel Gigi, about an innocent youngster being trained to appeal – sexually – to men. This wasn’t a subject show-business wanted to know much about. It wasn’t something Hepburn seemed to know about when she played the role on Broadway in 1951.

Meanwhile, contractual obligations prevented Simmons from appearing in Roman Holiday, and Hepburn was successfully tested. The property had been brought to Paramount by Frank Capra and when he left it was inherited by another leading director, William Wyler. It was not a likely subject for either of them but then, like many of our favourite movies – All About Eve, Casablanca – there is no other like it; it resists imitation: the innocent alone in the big city. The innocent is the princess of an unnamed European country who escapes from the embassy to see Rome incognito. She is recognised by an American reporter, played by Gregory Peck, who sees in her a good news-story and doesn’t reckon on falling in love.

She doesn’t know that he’s a reporter till they are introduced formally at a reception, when by a flicker of an eyelid he indicates that he won’t be filing the story. Peck was not the most adroit of light comedians and the direction was rather academic: but Hepburn’s sheer joy at being free and in love was wonderful to experience. You could never forget her eating an ice- cream on the Spanish Steps or putting her hand in the mouth of the stone lion at Tivoli.

The acclaim that greeted Hepburn was instantaneous and enormous – to be matched only a year later by that for Grace Kelly in what became their decade. Simmons, whom she had never met, telephoned to say, ‘Although I wanted to hate you, I have to tell you that I wouldn’t have been half as good. You were wonderful.’ Hepburn was judged the year’s best actress by the New York critics, by the readers of Picturegoer and by the voters of the Motion Picture Academy. Paramount had Hollywood’s brightest new star – only it didn’t: she was under contract to Associated British, which came to a lucrative agreement by which Paramount had exclusive rights to her services.

Billy Wilder directed her in Sabrina (1954), in which she was the chauffeur’s daughter, moving from ugly duckling to glamour, which was a formula followed in several subsequent movies. The plot had her loved by two brothers, played by William Holden and Humphrey Bogart. Bogart got her at the end, establishing another pattern to follow, in which she was wooed by men twice her age: by Fred Astaire in Stanley Donen’s Funny Face (1957), Paris fashions and the Gershwins’ music; by Gary Cooper in Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon (1957), Paris again and a rather vulgar remake of Canner’s delicate Ariane; and Cary Grant in Donen’s Charade (1963), Paris yet again and Hitchcockian situations.

You could understand why these actors took the risk of being described as cradle-snatchers. Astaire said: ‘This could be the last and only opportunity I’d have to work with the great and lovely Audrey and I wasn’t missing it. Period.’ Leonard Gershe, who wrote Funny Face, described her as a joy to work with, ‘as professional as she was unpretentious’. Hollywood’s best directors also clamoured to work with her. King Vidor said that she was the only possible choice to play Natasha in the expensive Italo-American War and Peace (1956), causing William Whitebait in the New Statesman to observe, ‘She is beautifully, entrancingly alive, and I for one, when I next come to read (the book), shall see her where I read Natasha.’ But Tolstoy had done the job for him: physically, temperamentally Hepburn was Natasha.

About this time she might have played another literary heroine. James Mason knew that he would make a superb Mr Rochester, but 20th Century-Fox would only proceed with the project if he could persuade Hepburn to play Jane. He didn’t even try. As he explained: ‘Jane Eyre is a little mouse and Audrey is a head-turner. In any room where Audrey Hepburn sits, no matter what her make- up is, people will turn and look at her because she’s so beautiful.’ Of the many films she turned down the most interesting are MGM’s musicalised Gigi, in her old stage role (and the studio was prepared to pay her far more than Leslie Caron, who was under contract, and who did eventually play the role), and The Diary of Anne Frank, George Stevens’s version of the Broadway dramatisation. She said that that would have been too painful after her own experience of the Occupation (in the event the role was so disastrously cast that the film failed both artistically and commercially).

At the same time Hepburn accepted another difficult subject, with another fine director, The Nun’s Story, for Fred Zinnemann. Kathryn Hulme’s novel was also based on fact, about a novice who finds, in the end, that she doesn’t have enough faith to continue. The film remains Hollywood’s best attempt at playing Church, both because it regards it with respect and not piety, yet at the same time allowing us to make our own decisions about the dottiness of the convent system. She held her own against the formidable opposition of Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft, both playing Mothers Superior with closed minds – and that was partly because the gentle Zinnemann was nevertheless able to blend their different acting styles, and partly because of Hepburn’s innate instinct for what the camera would allow her to do. Despite her voice mannerisms, here at a minimum, Hepburn was the one star of her generation to suggest intelligence and dignity – which is to say qualities which people, as opposed to actresses, have. Grace, beauty and the sine qua non of stardom made her as rewarding to watch as Garbo, and she can’t disguise them in playing this ordinary girl; but she also has gravity.

She was touching as Burt Lancaster’s half-breed sister in John Huston’s huge, vasty western The Unforgiven (1960), but Blake Edwards allowed the latent artifice of her screen persona to surface as Holly Golightly in his film of Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). Capote described the result as ‘a mawkish Valentine to Audrey Hepburn’ and George Axelrod, who wrote the screenplay, criticised her for refusing to convey the fact that Holly was a tramp with no morals or principles. No one else seemed to mind.

She had committed herself to the film only after Marilyn Monroe had turned it down, and when there was an impasse with Alfred Hitchcock over No Bail for the Judge. He was desperate to work with her and had spent dollars 200,000 in preparation, when she had second thoughts about a scene in which she was dragged into a London park to be raped. Furious, Hitchcock abandoned the picture rather than go ahead with another actress.

Hepburn was a controversial choice to play Eliza in My Fair Lady (1964). Warners had paid a record sum of dollars 5.5m for the screen rights to the Lerner and Loewe musical version of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Everyone agreed that its extraordinary success was due to the starring trio of Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews and Stanley Holloway. The last of these was the most expendable, but Jack Warner decided to go with Holloway when James Cagney wisely declined to come out of retirement to play Doolittle. No leading star was prepared to risk a comparison with Harrison’s definitive Higgins (‘Not only will I not play it,’ said Cary Grant, ‘I won’t even go and see it if you don’t put Rex Harrison in it’) which meant Andrews had to be replaced by a solid box-office attraction.

Warners had recently released The Music Man with its Broadway star Robert Preston, but the film’s reception was so spotty that they had not opened it in territories where he was an unknown quality. The irony of the My Fair Lady situation was that, as filming was under way, word was coming from the Disney studio that Andrews was sensational in Mary Poppins. She got an Oscar for it; Harrison got one for My Fair Lady, presented by Hepburn, and was thus photographed with his two Elizas. That Hepburn’s singing voice was dubbed did not help her performance (her non-singing voice had done charmingly by the songs in Funny Face), but she brought a street-wise cunning to the role that Andrews lacked. This may not have been what Shaw intended, but George Cukor, who directed, observed that at the end of the film Hepburn fitted Shaw’s own description of Eliza as ‘dangerously beautiful’.

She made only two more successful films: Donen’s Two for the Road (1967), with Albert Finney, a study of a disintegrating marriage written by Frederic Raphael, and Terence Young’s Wait Until Dark (1967), a thriller about a blind girl terrorised by some thugs because they thought there were some drugs stashed away in her apartment. Mention should be made of two other movies, because they were directed by Wyler: How to Steal a Million (1966), a comedy with Peter O’Toole, and The Children’s Hour (1962), a remake of his own These Three. The original Broadway play hinged on a lie told by a child, that two of her teachers have an unnatural affection for each other. The censor would not permit that in 1936, so the plot of the film depended on the child accusing one teacher of filching the other’s fiance. Wyler’s decision to remake the picture was to restore the lesbian element, but the result was flat, despite the fact that Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine were infinitely better actresses than Miriam Hopkins and Merle Oberon, the stars of the 1936 version.

At the height of her career Hepburn made only one out-and-out stinker, Green Mansions, with Anthony Perkins. It may be that WH Hudson’s novel about Rima the Bird Girl is unfilmable (MGM had started shooting one a few years earlier before giving up), but matters here were made worse by the stodgy direction by Mel Ferrer, at that time married to Hepburn. They had met while appearing in Giraudoux’s Ondine in New York in 1954, and he accompanied her to Italy, to play Prince Andrei in War and Peace. When the marriage broke up in 1968 she married an Italian psychiatrist, Andrea Dotti, and announced that a career and marriage were incompatible; so she only intended to film again if she could do so near her homes in Rome and Switzerland.

She came out of retirement five times, and only the first time was worthwhile: to play an ageing Maid Marian to Sean Connery’s Robin in Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian (1976). She was an industrial heiress in Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline, which was so badly received that she admitted that she had done it because she liked the director, Terence Young. She added that she wanted to go out on a good one – and Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed certainly didn’t provide it. Nobody laughed, including Time-Life, who financed it and dropped it after a few test showings. In 1987 she made a telemovie, Love Among Thieves, and although she herself was praised the press liked neither it nor her co-star, Robert Wagner. In 1989 she played a small role in Always, Steven Spielberg’s remake of A Guy Named Joe, in the role done in the original by Lionel Barrymore as an emissary of the Almighty. She was realistic enough to recognise that there were few meaty roles for actresses of her age – and with Spielberg’s box-office record she hoped to be in a success. She was wrong again.

3rd September 1955: British actress Audrey Hepburn (1929 – 1993) is featured for the cover of Picture Post magazine. Original Publication: Picture Post Cover – Vol 68 No 10 – pub. 1955. (Photo by IPC Magazines/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

She was by now spending most of her time working voluntarily for Unicef and giving interviews to explain what she was doing and what was needed. Unlike some stars whose identification with charities always looked suspicious, as if they wanted to advance their careers, it was clear that in this case there was no career and she wanted to find something useful to do. She also appeared frequently at movie functions, to be awarded lifetime achievement awards or make the special presentation at the end of the evening. Many people had expected her to age badly, because she had been so scrawny as a young woman. The reverse was the case – for she still possessed in middle age what she had always had: radiance, dignity and, above all, style. This last quality may be summed up by a famous exchange of the 1950s, when her clothes were designed by one of the most celebrated couturiers in Paris. ‘Just think what Givenchy has done for Audrey Hepburn.’ ‘No, just think what Audrey Hepburn has done for Givenchy.’

Richard Thomas. Wikipedia.

Richard Thomas was born in New York City in 1951. His parents were dances with the New York School of Ballet. He made his Broadway debut in “Sunrise at Campbello” at the age of seven. In 1969 he won his first major film role as the son of Joanne Woodward in “Winning”. In 1971 he began working on his most famous role as John-Boy in the hugely popular television series “The Waltons”. In recent years he has tended to act more on the stage. A website on Richard Thomas can be found here.

TCM Overview:

Armed with a lifetime of talent and training with which to battle against Hollywood typecasting, actor Richard Thomas would, nonetheless, be forever identified with John-Boy, the earnest eldest son of “The Waltons” (CBS, 1972-1981)

. Born into a New York show business family, he made his Broadway debut at the age of seven, and later on film opposite Paul Newman in “Winning” (1969).

The 20-year-old actor was already gaining modest notoriety as a gifted young star in films like “Last Summer” (1971) by the time his leading role in “The Waltons” made him a bona fide television star. When Thomas left the show in 1977 in order to pursue other roles, it proved difficult to shed the lingering image of the somewhat naÃ¯ve John-Boy.

Campy genre work in films like Roger Cormanâ¿¿s “Battle Beyond the Stars” (1980) was balanced out by more rewarding efforts on stage in such Broadway productions as “Fifth of July.” Thomas garnered accolades for his titular role in the music biopic “Living Proof: The Hank Williams, Jr. Story” (NBC, 1983) and as a man haunted by a childhood terror in “It” (ABC, 1990).

Continuing to mix television work with his theatrical endeavors, he took part in such lauded stage productions as “The Stendhal Syndrome” in 2004 and “Race” in 2009. Decades after leaving Waltons Mountain, Thomas appeared both content with his television legacy and determined to continually seek out new challenges as an actor.

The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.

Patrick McGoohan acheived immortal television fame through his lead role in two cult British series of the 1960’s – “Dangerman” and “The Prisoner”. He was born in New York in 1928 and raised in Co. Leitrim, Ireland and then in Sheffield in the UK. He commenced his career on British films such as “Nor the Moon by Night” and “Hell Drivers”. In 1967 he went to Hollywood to make “Ice Station Zebra”. He made many high profile television appearances in the U.S. in the 70’s and 80’s and in 1995 he starred with Mel Gibson in “Braveheart”. He died in 2002.

“Guardian” obituary:

The handsome and steady-eyed Patrick McGoohan, who has died aged 80, was the star, co-writer and sometimes director of one of British television’s most original and challenging series of the 1960s, The Prisoner. In it, he played Number Six, a mysterious, resigned former secret agent who is always trying to escape from the Village, an apparently congenial community which is in fact a virtual prison for people who know too much. They are allowed to be comfortable there only if they conform completely and do not try to escape.

McGoohan was at the time, 1967, the highest earning British TV star, paid £2,000 a week through appearing in a highly successful secret agent series called Danger Man, in which he was John Drake, a European security man who – on McGoohan’s own insistence – never carried a gun or seduced a woman. But he was becoming disenchanted with the series, whose American purchasers from Lew Grade’s British television company ITC were pressing for more stock banalities such as car chases, shoot-outs and sex scenes.

He was invited to lunch with one American executive, who explained that they wanted pictures of him on the screen with glamorous girls – or, as McGoohan himself put it, “the corny showbusiness formula, the publicity machine grinding away”. He declined, and the lunch lasted only six minutes.

McGoohan, who had his own production company, Everyman Films, suggested to Grade a different, seven-part series for which he and others had prepared scripts, called The Prisoner. Grade cheerfully admitted that he had not understood a word of what McGoohan proposed, but had so much confidence in him that he agreed to fund it immediately.

Grade’s chief international customer, however, wanted a longer series. There were 17 Prisoner programmes, each of them loaded with mysterious psychological nuances, and set in an ideally artificial Village – in reality Portmeirion, an experimental community with exotic buildings designed by the architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, in north Wales.

From the opening titles, the programme was no easy ride. An angry secret agent drives into London in his fashionable Lotus 7 as a storm threatens, bursts into his boss’s office, throws his resignation down on to his desk, and storms out again. At home later, he finds an undertaker at his door. Gas comes through the keyhole, and he collapses as he packs his bags to go away. He wakes up in the Village, and no one will tell him where he is or why he is there, only that he is Number Six. ” I am not a number, I am a free man!” is his answer – and battle was joined in 17 attempted escapes.

In the series McGoohan met several sinister Number Twos but could never find out who Number One was until the last episode, improvised by McGoohan and his large writing team at the last moment, when Number One’s false face was pulled off to reveal a monkey’s underneath. When that too was pulled off, it revealed the face of McGoohan’s Number Six himself.

The implication that human beings can imprison themselves was timely in the swinging 60s, while at the same time the notion of the security services as the real enemy was seeping its way into fiction that had previously existed in more black and white terms. The programme achieved cult status for both itself and McGoohan personally, who had involved himself in all aspects of the productions in a way his colleagues thought obsessive. He became a darling of the campuses, but found that The Prisoner was a difficult act to follow.

In 1974, Everyman Films went bankrupt with debts of £63,000, at least half of it owed to the Inland Revenue. By the 1980s, McGoohan had recovered, The movie Kings and Desperate Men (1981) was praised by British critics and he starred on Broadway in Hugh Whitemore’s Pack of Lies.

The cosmopolitan variety of his professional interests owed something to his background. He was born in New York to parents who were once Irish farmers. His father, though barely literate, had an ear for Shakespeare, so that when Patrick read plays to him, he would remember and recite whole passages months later.

The family returned to Ireland when he was six months old and then, when he was eight, moved to Sheffield. Patrick later won a scholarship to Ratcliffe college in Leicester, where he played Lear in a school production. Leaving school at 16, he went to work in a wire mill, rising from the factory floor to the offices and then leaving to work in a bank.

This made him feel caged, so he set up instead as a chicken farmer, until an attack of bronchial asthma put him in bed for six months. He walked around Sheffield looking for work and eventually tried the Sheffield Repertory Company, for which he became assistant stage manager. When members of the cast were off sick, he was asked to step in, and found that he was best in the lighter Shakespeare plays, gaining praise for his Petruchio.

McGoohan stayed for four years, by which time he had appeared in 200 plays, including a touring production of The Cocktail Party in a small mining town, lit by miners’ lamps when the electricity failed. He met and married the actor Joan Drummond, with whom he had three daughters.

He made his first appearance in the West End in 1955 as the lead in Serious Charge. Orson Welles saw him there and asked him to play Starbuck in his production of Moby Dick Rehearsed. At the same time he stood in for Dirk Bogarde during a screen test, and was offered a five-year contract with Rank. But the studio’s “charm school” approach irked him and the contract petered out after four films.

After this, he turned more towards television and appeared in a production of Clifford Odets’s The Big Knife, about a paranoid Hollywood producer and the protege actor who he thinks has betrayed him. It was seen by Grade, who thought McGoohan ideal for John Drake in the Danger Man scripts. From 1960, McGoohan played in 86 episodes. At around this time, he turned down the chance to play James Bond in the first Bond movie, Dr No, seeing the Bond character as a stock gunman who treated women badly.

In 1968, when The Prisoner series was ending, McGoohan left Mill Hill, north London, to live in Switzerland after the local council refused him permission to fence his house off from prying eyes. In 1973 he moved to Pacific Palisades in California. There he wrote poetry, a novel and television scripts. He appeared in, wrote or directed some of the Columbo films in which his American friend Peter Falk appeared as the deceptively ruffled detective.

This redoubtable enemy of dumbing-down remained a highly individual operator into the 1990s. In 1991 he came to London to make the TV version of Whitemore’s play The Best of Friends, in which he played with considerable plausibility and élan another Irishman not frightened to swim against the tide, George Bernard Shaw. In 1995 he was cast as Edward I in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart.

In 2000, he provided the voice of Number Six for an episode of The Simpsons, and gained his last film credit in 2002 as the voice of Billy Bones in Treasure Planet. A proposed film version of The Prisoner has yet to make it to the screen, but a remake of the TV show has recently been filmed by ITV, with the US actor James Caviezel as Number Six, and is due to be transmitted later this year.

McGoohan is survived by his wife, three daughters and five grandchildren.

Patrick Joseph McGoohan, actor, writer and director, born 19 March 1928; died 13 January 2009

• This article was amended on Thursday 15 January 2009. Portmeirion is in north, not south, Wales. This has been corrected.

Dennis Barker’s obituary in “The Guardian” can be accessed here.

Rhonda Fleming was one of the most beautiful women ever on film. Both herself and Maureen O’Hara shared the title “Queen of Technicolour”. She was born in 1923 in Hollywood. Her cinema peak was in the late 40’s and throughout the 1950’s. She starred opposite nearly every leading man of the time including Ronald Reagan, Glenn Ford, Dick Powell, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Burt Lancaster. Rhonda Fleming died in 2020.

“The Telegraph” obituary in 2020:

Rhonda Fleming, who has died aged 97, was a film star of the 1940s and 1950s whose startling flame-haired beauty and reliable screen presence saw her proclaimed “the Queen of Technicolor”.

Though she had made an impressive start at the age of 22, working with Alfred Hitchcock and beginning a lengthy career in westerns, it was the rise of colour films that showed her to her best advantage.

In 1949 her first Technicolor role, opposite Bing Crosby in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, launched her as a leading lady. She would appear in two dozen films over the next decade. But Rhonda Fleming initially disliked the technology, considering it “far too unnatural. If you eyes were green, they were really green, and your skin was so pinky white. I just wanted to prove that I was a good actress.”

Rhonda Fleming and director Alfred Hitchcock on set filming Spellbound, 1945 CREDIT: Alamy

Born Marilyn Louis on August 10 1923 in Hollywood, California, she belonged to a showbusiness family. Her mother, Effie Graham, had been a celebrated New York model and actress, her grandfather, John Graham, an actor in Utah.

The young Marilyn initially aspired to a singing career, taking lessons at Beverly Hills High School; but at 17 her fortunes took a different turn when a car that had been circling the block drew up alongside her. Its occupant was Henry Willson, an agent who would later work for David Selznick’s subsidiary company, Vanguard Pictures. “Young lady”, he said, “have you ever thought of being in motion pictures?”

Willson introduced her to Selznick, who offered her a seven-year contract and a feature role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), alongside Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck. Her character, Mary Carmichael, is a hysterical nymphomaniac, doubling as a scantily clad “kissing bug” for a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali.

Her appearance provoked the disapproval of the Production Code Administration, which insisted that she be substantially “more covered” for the final cut, but the sexual subtext mostly passed her by.

She had grown up in a devout Mormon household, and neither she nor her family were quite prepared for Hollywood’s crude depiction of the newly fashionable discipline of psychoanalysis; she recalled how, when describing the role to her mother, “we had to look the word up in a dictionary, we had no idea what a nymphomaniac was.”

Out Of The Past, a classic film noir with Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas and Rhonda Fleming, 1947 CREDIT: LMPC via Getty Images

On set with Hitchcock, she learned fast. The director loved to shock his actors, and would confront her in the middle of shooting, whispering “How’s your sex life?”. Selznick hired Anita Colby – known as “The Face” for her hugely successful modelling work – to teach Rhonda how to walk like a bona fide film star. She struggled with a lisp throughout, but the performance earned her widespread critical acclaim.

During the same year she played a supporting role in Robert Siodmark’s The Spiral Staircase, released in 1946.

With Robert Mitchum in Out Of The Past, aka Build My Gallows High, directed by Jacques Tourneur, 1947 — With Robert Mitchum in Out Of The Past aka Build My Gallows High, directed by Jacques Tourneur, 1947 CREDIT: Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images

In 1947, as the femme fatale in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (known in the UK as Build My Gallows High), she involved Roger Mitchum’s hero Jeff in a web of deception, described by the film critic Roger Ebert as “so labyrinthine it’s remarkable even the characters can figure out who is being double-crossed, and why”.

She would again portray a double-dealing beauty in a film noir four years later, with star billing about the title, opposite Dick Powell in Cry Danger.

The Great Lover (1949), seven months after the release of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, was her second leading role, this time alongside the actor and comedian Bob Hope. Hope hired her on the set of A Connecticut Yankee, and the pair remained great friends throughout Hope’s life, appearing together in several of his television specials.

Rhonda Fleming with Bob Hope in a scene from The Great Lover — With Bob Hope in a scene from The Great Lover CREDIT: AFP/Getty

Rhonda Fleming left Selznick International Pictures in 1950 and starred in The Eagle and the Hawk, though her natural liveliness as an actress was somewhat inhibited by her costumes, the heaviest of which weighed 12 pounds. But she acquitted herself well enough to play the lead in The Redhead and the Cowboy the following year.

Co-starring with Glenn Ford, she was required in one scene to ride at full-pelt towards a hilltop, and then rear up. Though she was an experienced rider, the stunt nearly ended disastrously when the horse fell back on top of her and knocked her unconscious. Later, Ford required hospital treatment when she accidentally struck him in the eye during a fight scene.

Her second film of that year, The Last Outpost, was her first and arguably her best collaboration with Ronald Reagan. Grossing $1,225,000 upon its release, the film was the biggest commercial success to emerge from Pine-Thomas Productions.

She and Reagan worked together on three further occasions, the last being Tennessee’s Partner in 1955. They remembered each other with great affection. To Rhonda, Reagan was “a wonderful peacemaker”, capable of soothing even the most irascible directors. On a visit to the White House many years later she greeted the newly-inaugurated President of the United States with an embrace and the words “Hi, Tennessee’s partner.”

Rhonda Fleming and Margaret Thatcher: the actress worked with Ronald Reagan CREDIT: Bei/Shutterstock

In 1966 she retired from acting following her fourth marriage, to the producer Hall Bartlett. But before long the couple were estranged from each other. They divided up the rooms of their Los Angeles home and established a rota for use of the kitchen and swimming pool, before finally agreeing upon a divorce in 1972.

Rhonda soon discovered that Hollywood loyalties were fleeting. After six years away from the industry, she struggled to find work, and turned instead to Broadway, making her stage debut in the 1973 revival of Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women. Her film career never regained its former momentum, and she was mainly remembered, albeit fondly, as a relic of Hollywood’s golden era, an impression given further credence in one of her few roles of the period, a cameo as “Rhoda Flaming” in Michael Winner’s 1976 spoof Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood.

In 1990, following the death of her sister Beverly from ovarian cancer, Rhonda Fleming retired for good. She dedicated her remaining years to charitable pursuits, with a particular focus on cancer research. The Rhonda Fleming Mann Clinic for Women’s Comprehensive Care opened at the UCLA Medical Center in 1991. A second facility followed three years later, the Rhonda Fleming Mann Resource Center for Women with Cancer, dedicated to providing support and information for families affected by the illness.

Intensely religious from the age of 18, Rhonda was a close associate of Media Fellowship International, an organisation dedicated to nurturing Christian values in the entertainment industry.

Rhonda Fleming married, first, in 1940, to Thomas Lane, an interior decorator. The marriage was dissolved and in 1952, she married, secondly, Dr Lew Morrell. They divorced in 1958, and she married the actor Lang Jeffries two years later. Her fourth marriage, to Hall Bartlett, was dissolved in 1972. In 1978 she married the producer Ted Mann. He died in 2001, and in 2003 she married Darol Wayne Carlson, who died in 2017. She is survived by a son from her first marriage.

Rhonda Fleming, born August 10 1923, died October 14 2020

Had she wanted it, Diana Wynyard might have had a screen career as long and distinguished as that of Davis or Hepburn. As a stage actress she was excellent but seldom outstanding, nor was her later screen work likely to make anybody’s eyes pop out.

But her early film work is quite, quite stunning. Quiet, cool, gracious, ladylike, she was warmer and more believable than those adjectives imply: either her acting has not dated an iota or it was years before it’s time.

In “Rasputin and the Empress” the Barrymores are acting away like mad and about as convincing as a tree-full of parrots, but Wynyard simply exists ion the same way that someone like Spencer Tracy existed.

In “One More River” the cast are expectedly more subdued, the film is still Galsworthy junk but when Wynyard is on screen at any point, you might be watching a film made yesterday” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars” (1970).

E5NBEF THE FUGITIVE, (aka ON THE NIGHT OF THE FIRE), top left: Ralph Richardson; right, from top: Mary Clare, Romney Brent, Diana

Diana Wynyard was born in London in 1906. She had a cool calm presence on film and was seen to best effect in the UK made “Gaslight”, and “An Ideal Husband”.

In the earlier part of her career she made films in Hollywood including “Rasputin and the Empress” and “Cavalcade” by Noel Coward. Diana Wynyard had a flourishing stage career and was in rehersal for a new play with Maggie Smith when she died suddenly in 1964. An article reviewing Diana Wynyard and her role in “Cavalcade” can be found here.

TCM Overview:

A luminous and intelligent British actress, Diana Wynyard brought genteel grace and an aristocratic dignity to a highly successful stage career. With a carriage and mien well-suited to period drama, she briefly made her mark in several classy roles in Hollywood during the depths of the Depression in the 1930s. Her US film stardom didn’t take, however, but she was sporadically active in British film for 20 years thereafter, leaving behind several outstanding performances that made one wish she had done more in film.

Helen Walker was a U.S. actress who had a short career and died young in 1968. She did however make many good movies, three in particular are worthy of attention – ” Call Northside 777″, “The Big Combo” and “Nightmare Alley”. In the latter she was chillingly effective as a psychatrist who manipulates Tyrone Power. Great article on Helen Walker can be found on “Moviemoorelocks” website here.

TCM Overview:

Helen Walker was an actress who made a successful career for herself in film. In her early acting career, Walker appeared in such films as “The Man in Half Moon Street” (1944), “Brewster’s Millions” (1945) and “Murder, He Says” (1945). She also appeared in the comedy “Cluny Brown” (1946) with Charles Boyer, “Her Adventurous Night” (1946) and the Vera Ralston crime picture “Murder in the Music Hall” (1946). She kept working in film throughout the forties and the fifties, starring in “Nightmare Alley” (1947) with Tyrone Power, the Cornel Wilde dramatic sports film “The Homestretch” (1947) and the James Stewart drama “Call Northside 777” (1948). She also appeared in “My Dear Secretary” (1948), “Impact” (1949) and “Problem Girls” (1953).

Walker was most recently credited in the Daniel Craig hit action film “Quantum of Solace” (2008). Walker continued to exercise her talent in the fifties through the early 2000s, taking on a mix of projects like “The Big Combo” with Cornel Wilde (1955), “The Marriage Broker” (CBS, 1956-57) and “Birdland” (1991-94). Her credits also expanded to “The Darkest Light” (2000), “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” (2004) starring Clive Owen and “Notes on a Scandal” (2006) starring Judi Dench. Walker was previously married to Edward DuDomaine and Robert F Blumofe. Walker passed away in March 1968 at the age of 48

The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.

Nightmare Alley, poster, from left, Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray, Helen Walker, 1947. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

She is fondly remembered for her dancing in “Words and Music” and “On the Town” both with Gene Kelly. In “Words and Music” they perform a magnificent dance to the music of “Slaughter on 10th Avenue”. She retired early from the screen in 1957 with the film “Let’s Be Happy”. Vera-Ellen died in 1981 at the age of sixty.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

One of the most vivacious and vibrant musical film talents to glide through Hollywood’s “Golden Age” in the 40s and 50s was Vera-Ellen Westmeyer Rohe, better known to her fans simply by her hyphenated first name. Whether performing solo or dueting with the best male partners of her generation, including Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor, Vera-Ellen gave life to some of the most extraordinary dance routines ever caught on film. Sadly, out-and-out stardom eluded her, and she never did quite earn the recognition or accolades that were bestowed upon many of her musical peers and co-stars.

Born of German descent in Cincinnati, Ohio on February 16, 1921 (some sources incorrectly indicate 1926), the only child of a piano tuner, she was painfully shy and frail as a youngster and had developed severe health issues by age 9. Using dance as both physical and emotional therapy, what was once recreational became a soulful and burning passion, and her talent became obvious nearly from the onset. As a teen she appeared in nightclub acts and became one of the Rockettes’ youngest members, quickly graduating to the “Great White Way” for work. Vera-Ellen made her Broadway debut with “Very Warm for May” at age 18 in 1939, which also featured another young hopeful, June Allyson. She then segued into “Higher and Higher” (1940), which also had Allyson in the cast, “Panama Hattie” (1940) which starred Ethel Merman, “By Jupiter (1942) with Ray Bolger, and a revival of “A Connecticut Yankee” (1943).

Blessed with a sweet, apple blossom appeal and elfin charm, Vera-Ellen’s movie career started to take shape in 1945. Supposedly her mother thought that since her daughter looked much younger than she was, it might be wise to shave five years off of her age in order to promote the dancing teen sensation image. Her first two films were musical vehicles for the up-and-coming Danny Kaye. Wonder Man (1945) and The Kid from Brooklyn (1946) were both hits and people soon fell in love with the lovely lady’s fresh-faced innocence. A hard-working, uncomplicated talent, she paired famously with Gene Kelly in MGM’s Words and Music (1948) in which their “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” number was a critical highlight. The landmark musical On the Town (1949), in which she played “Miss Turnstiles” and the apple of Kelly’s eye, served as the pinnacle of her dancing work on film. The versatile and acrobatic Vera could be counted on now to perform any kind of dancing requested — tap, toe, jazz, adagio — whether solo or with partners and/or props. She became the woman of a thousand dance moves. Her light singing voice, however, was usually dubbed by a more capable song stylist (Carol Stewart, Anita Ellis, Carol Richards, etc.).

Vera-Ellen went on to appear twice with Fred Astaire albeit in two of his lesser vehicles,Three Little Words (1950) (choreographed by Hermes Pan) and The Belle of New York(1952), where their formidable dance numbers outshined the flimsy story. She also shared dance steps with the equally agile Donald O’Connor in Call Me Madam (1953). One of her all-time favorite dances was in this film with O’Connor to the tune of “Something to Dance About,” choreographed by the renowned Robert Alton. The warm and fuzzy yuletide favorite White Christmas (1954) is usuallly considered her best-remembered movie in which she played one-fourth of a glamorous quartet consisting ofBing Crosby, Danny Kaye and (sister) Rosemary Clooney.

Musicals went out of vogue by the late 50s and, as Vera-Ellen was practically synonymous with musicals, her career went into a sharp decline. But that was only one reason. A light acting talent, she might have continued in films in dramatic roles, as she had in the movie Big Leaguer (1953) with Edward G. Robinson, but dark, outside influences steered her away altogether. Personal unhappiness and ill health would quickly take their toll on her.

Singing films had lost their fashionable appeal in the late 1950s and Vera’s cinematic career ended with the bland British musical Let’s Be Happy (1957) co-starring Tony Martinin which she appeared to look gaunt and unhealthy. Variety appearances on such TV showcase shows as “The Colgate Comedy Hour,” “Kraft Music Hall” and “The Dinah Shore Chevvy Show” dominated the late 1950s career of Vera-Ellen. She also decided to star in a 1955 Las Vegas dancing revue, which wound up highly successful.

Vera’s career died down in the late 1950s once filmed musicals lost their fashion. It was later discovered that, due to the dancer’s compulsive dieting obsession, she had silently battled anorexia throughout much of the 50s before anyone was even aware or doctors had even coined the term or devised treatments. Moreover, she had developed severe arthritis which forced an early retirement. In order to combat it, she reverted back to taking dance lessons again. The worst blows suffered, however, was in her personal life. On top of of two two failed marriages, she lost her only child, Victoria Ellen Rothschild, to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) in 1963. With one unhappy and tragic event compounded by another, she became a virtual recluse.

Little was heard for decades until it was discovered that she had died on.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

Article about Vera-Ellen’s later years can be found here.

Hedy Lamarr was often described as the most beautiful woman ever on film. She was born in Vienna in 1913. She gained international prominence for her role in “Ecstasy” in 1933. She came to Hollywood with an MGM contract. Her first American film was “Algiers” with Charles Boyer. She career was it’s peak in the early 1940’s when she starred opposaite such luminaries as James Stewart, Clark Gable, Specner Tracy and John Garfield. It was recently reported that Hedy Lamarr was surprisingly the inventor of a secret communication system that was used by U.S. military ships. A biography of Ms Lamarr by Ruth Barton was published in 2010.

Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:

In the 1940s, Hedy Lamarr, who has died aged 86, was thought to be the most beautiful woman in films and was the byword for glamour. “Her beauty made up for whatever she lacked in acting ability,” remarked King Vidor, who directed Lamarr in one of her best pictures (HM Pulham Esquire) and one of her worst (Comrade X) . “Acting probably didn’t come naturally to her but the note of unsureness in what she did seemed to give her a certain childish attractiveness.”

She herself thought, “Any girl can be glamorous: all you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” Although Hedy never looked stupid – she had a certain self-mocking twinkle in the eyes – she was often called upon to be no more than a marble mannequin, as in Ziegfeld Girl (1941), stiffly parading around in a star-spangled costume as Tony Martin sang You Stepped Out Of A Dream to her.

Born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Austria, she had a privileged upbringing as her father was director of the Bank of Vienna. She started acting with Max Reinhardt’s theatre company in Berlin, where she appeared in The Weaker Sex and Private Lives, as well as Elizabeth of Austria in Sissi in Vienna. Her name was changed by Louis B Mayer to Lamarr after the silent screen beauty Barbara LaMarr, and also because he thought Kiesler sounded too much like a Yiddish slang word for buttocks.

It certainly wasn’t her acting that obtained her an MGM contract. As Hedy Kiesler, the 18-year-old had gained international notoriety by appearing fleetingly naked in a couple of scenes in Ecstasy (1932), a Czech film directed by Gustav Machaty. Pope Pius XII denounced it, Hitler banned it, and the offending scenes were excised from most European and American versions. It was much ado about nothing on. The film itself, shot partly on location, is full of lyrical beauty and stylish eroticism, and Hedy’s “kiesler” is hardly seen. Her husband, German munitions magnate Fritz Mandl, a man in his 50s, spent millions trying to buy up all the prints of the film. As his decorative wife, she entertained dinner guests such as Gustav Mahler, Frantz Werfel, as well as Hitler and Mussolini.

Finally, disguising herself as one of her servants, she fled to Paris by train with enough jewels to pay for her passage to New York on board the Normande, on which she met Louis B Mayer. Before the liner had docked, she had secured a new name and a seven-year contract starting at $500 a week. Mayer personally supervised every detail of her star grooming though he was uncertain of what to do with her.

In fact, Mayer loaned her out to Walter Wanger for her Hollywood debut in Algiers (1938), in which Charles Boyer did not say, “Come with me to the Casbah,” though the phrase stuck to him for most of his life. Lamarr was ravishing enough to tempt the fugitive Boyer out of the Casbah, into her arms and those of the police. More exoticism came in Lady of the Tropics (1939), her first MGM movie after two years under contract. The film, co-starring Robert Taylor, flopped, despite the publicity line of “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World”.

I Take This Woman (1940), starring Spencer Tracy and Lamarr, took two years to reach the screen, by which time it had been dubbed I Retake This Woman; it had been in and out of production for 18 months with three changes of director and miles of rejected footage. The marital melodrama failed to ignite the public, and Mayer cooled towards Hedy. She only got fourth billing in Boom Town (1940), below Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert and Spencer Tracy, playing “the other woman”, a role she also took in HM Pulham Esquire (1941), this time enlivening staid Robert Young’s existence.

As Dolores “Sweets” Ramirez in Tortilla Flat (1942), she gave what she herself considered her best performance, and if the film had been a success, MGM might have found better roles for her. Certainly better than the sultry hip-swinging half-caste whispering “I am Tondelayo” in White Cargo (1942). At first, MGM considered her for Gaslight (1944), but the studio had lost faith in her, giving the role to Ingrid Bergman instead, who won an Oscar. This led to Lamarr leaving MGM in 1945 to form her own production company, for which she played a number of femme fatales in rather dreary soap operas.

She was virtually a has-been when Cecil B DeMille chose her to play the most famous femme fatale of all in Samson And Delilah (1949). In it, she looked gorgeous in a number of Old Testament off-the-shoulder creations by Edith Head, and managed satisfactorily to deliver lines like, “I shall find the swiftest camels in Gaza, my silver will open the gates that bar your way. All Gaza will be there.” Samson And Delilah was by far the biggest box-office hit of her career, which seemed about to be relaunched. But when Cecil B.DeMille offered her a role in The Greatest Show on Earth she declined, because she found the director too autocratic, and disliked his obsession with her feet.

She made only a few more films, including a Western, Copper Canyon (1950), opposite Ray Milland, took the title role in My Favourite Spy (1951) in which she got an unreluctant Bob Hope in her clutches, and was Joan of Arc screaming “Attack!” to her minions in the ludicrous The Story of Mankind (1957). Her final film was The Female Animal (1958), in which she virtually played herself as an ageing movie star.

But retirement did not keep her out of the headlines. She was arrested for shoplifting in 1966 and again in 1991, when she allegedly took $25 worth of toiletries from a Florida chemist. She was cleared of the charge both times. She also became litigious, suing the ghost writers of her titillating autobiography Ecstasy and Me, as well as Mel Brooks for using her name without permission in Blazing Saddles, in which a character called Hedley Lamarr is infuriated by being continually called Hedy Lamarr. She gained nothing on both occasions, and was forced to sell many of her valuable possessions.

She was married six times: her second husband was screenwriter Gene Markey, her third the actor John Loder (with whom she had two children), her fourth was Texas oil millionaire W Howard Lee, the fifth restaurateur-bandleader Ernest Stauffer, and lastly, her own divorce lawyer, Lewis W Boles Jr.

Another aspect of her life was revealed only recently. During the war, she and the composer George Antheil invented a system of preventing the jamming and scrambling of signals via radio frequencies. A patent was granted to them, but the army considered the system too complicated to put into practice. However it was taken up by the military in 1957 and its first application was during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. It was classified as a top secret defence mechanism until the mid-1980s, when the system was used commercially, especially in the prevention of interception of cell phones by telecommunications.

Her son Anthony Loder explained: “My mother was an extremely intelligent woman, always seething with new ideas. She was known as being just a beautiful face, but is now recognised as having invented a brilliant scientific concept, although she never made a cent out of it.”

To the scientists who rather tardily paid homage to her, she sent a message. “I am happy that my invention was not conceived in vain”. Occasionally, as an old woman living alone in Florida, she would meet people and say, “Would you believe I was once a famous star? It’s the truth.”

Hedy Lamarr (Hedwig Kiesler), actress, born November 9 1913; died January 19 2000

The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.

A website on Hedy Lamarr can be found here.