Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 27 of 126

Tony Martin

Tony Martin had a long career as a singer in the U.S. In the 1940’s and 50’s he also had success in Hollywood movies. He was born in 1913 in San Francisco and lived until he was 98. He was long married to Cyd Charisse. He died in 2012.

His “Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan:

The American entertainer Tony Martin, who has died aged 98, was once described as a singing tuxedo. Although he was rather a stiff actor, he was handsome and charming, with a winning, dimpled smile. What mattered most, however, was his mellifluous baritone voice, which he used softly in ballads such as To Each His Own and I Get Ideas, and powerfully in Begin the Beguine and There’s No Tomorrow, all hit records in the 1940s and 50s.

He was one of the top crooners of the period with Vic Damone, Andy Williams and Dick Haymes, all of them just below Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra in esteem and popularity. According to Mel Tormé: “Tony Martin was technically the greatest singer of them all, as well as being the classiest guy around, both as an entertainer and a person.”

He was born Al (Alvin) Morris in San Francisco into a Jewish family and brought up in Oakland. The young boy started singing at his mother’s sewing club. He switched to the saxophone when his voice changed, and quickly mastered that instrument and the clarinet, organised a band and began playing professionally.

One night a Hollywood agent heard him singing on a radio show, saw that he had the good looks to match his voice, and promised to get him to Hollywood on condition he change his name. He took “Tony” from a gambler in a story in Liberty Magazine and “Martin” from the bandleader Freddy Martin. When his father heard of the name change, he shouted: “Tony’s a name for a horse.”

Martin’s first film was the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical Follow the Fleet (1936), in which he had a bit part as a sailor. A contract followed with 20th Century-Fox, where he met his first wife, Alice Faye, soon to be the studio’s leading musical star. Married in 1937 and divorced in 1940, they appeared in four films together, although Martin usually just had a number as a band vocalist. The first, Sing, Baby, Sing, brought him the Oscar-nominated number, When Did You Leave Heaven?, and in You Can’t Have Everything (1937), Faye was the star, while Martin, eighth-billed, sang The Loveliness of You.

In his first starring role, he was billed as Anthony Martin in Sing and Be Happy (1937), little more than a vehicle for what Variety called, characteristically, his “socko vocalisthenics”. He then played the romantic lead and straight man to the Ritz Brothers in Life Begins in College (later known as The Joy Parade, 1937) and Kentucky Moonshine (later Three Men and a Girl, 1938), and to Eddie Cantor in Ali Baba Goes To Town (1937). More satisfying to him was his co-starring with Rita Hayworth in Music in My Heart (1940), a modest Columbia musical.

Martin’s most prestigious film was Ziegfeld Girl (1941) at MGM, in which he warbled You Stepped Out of a Dream to a statuesque Hedy Lamarr, and Caribbean Love Song. The Big Store (1941) is not considered the Marx Brothers’ funniest movie but, for most critics, the comic high spot, albeit unintentionally, was Martin’s heartfelt rendition of the bombasticTenement Symphony – “The sounds of the ghetto inspired the allegretto.”

In the second world war, Martin served briefly in the navy then switched to the army amid rumours that he had tried to buy a navy commission. The rumours persisted after the war, even though he served bravely in the Pacific, and was decorated with a Bronze Star. After the war, Martin returned to Hollywood and Casbah (1948) in which he was miscast as Pépé le Moko, jewel thief in hiding, previously played by Jean Gabin and Charles Boyer, though he did make full use of the tuneful Leo Robin-Harold Arlen songs.

In Two Tickets to Broadway (1951), Martin bravely attempted the Prologue from Pagliacci, less ill-conceived than Sinatra’s version of Mozart’s La Ci Darèm La Mano in It Happened in Brooklyn a few years earlier. He was more at home as a smoothie romancing Esther Williams in Easy to Love (1953), in which he had the best number, That’s What a Rainy Day Is For. Other songs he delivered with panache were Lover Come Back to Me, in Deep in My Heart (1954), and More Than You Know, in Hit The Deck (1955).

As the Hollywood musical declined, so did Martin’s film career – his last musical was the British-made Let’s Be Happy (1957), starring Vera-Ellen. He then began to concentrate on his cabaret shows around the US and abroad, sometimes appearing with his second wife, the leggy dancer Cyd Charisse, whom he married in 1948. They remained together for 60 years until her death in 2008. Martin reappeared on the big screen in 1982 in a German-made film, Dear Mr Wonderful, in which he genially took himself off as a Las Vegas nightclub singer. The voice had not changed much and the tuxedo still fitted him perfectly.

He is survived by Nico Charisse, his adopted son from Cyd Charisse’s first marriage. Tony Martin Jr, his son by Charisse, died last year.

• Tony Martin (Alvin Morris), actor and singer; born 25 December 1913; died 27 July 2012

The “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed on-line here.

Carole Shelley was born in 1939 in London. She made her Broadway debut in 1965 as one of the Pigeon sisters in the play “The Odd Couple”. She subsequently repeated the role on film with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. She also played in the TV series with Tony Randall and Jack Klugman. She also featured in the film “Bewitched” with Nicole Kidman. Carole Shelley died in 2018.

The Fallen Sparrow, poster, US poster art, Martha O’Driscoll, Patricia Morison, John Garfield, Maureen O’Hara, 1943. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Martha O’Driscoll had a brief career in movies in Hollywood films of the 1940’s. Born in 1922 in Tulsa, she featured in such movies as “The Fallen Sparrow” with John Garfield and Maureen O’Hara in 1943 and “Young and Willing”. She retired early after her marriage. She died in 1998.

“The Independent” obituary:

EVEN BY Hollywood standards. Martha O’Driscoll was an actress of uncommon prettiness, with blond hair, blue eyes and a slightly pouting mouth. Though strictly a B movie star (her failure to graduate to bigger things is attributed by some to a dispute she had with her studio early in her career), she commanded a loyal following who were sorry when she retired at the age of 24 (after 11 years and 37 films) to marry a millionaire.

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1922, she was always a pretty girl and at the age of four was modelling children’s clothes. She had started dancing lessons from the age of three, when the family moved to Arizona in 1931. O’Driscoll began appearing in local pageants and plays. The choreographer Hermes Pan spotted her in a production at the Pheonix Little Theatre and suggested to O’Driscoll’s mother that Martha would have a good chance in movies.

They moved to Hollywood in 1935, but Pan was out of town, so they answered an advertisement for dancers and O’Driscoll was given a role in Collegiate (1935), a musical typical of its time in which a playboy inherits a college and, as the new Dean, insists that the students’ principal efforts should be directed toward learning how to sing and dance. Betty Grable had an early leading role in the film and it was also unusual in having its songwriters, Mack Gordon and Harry Revel, playing themselves as co-chairmen of the school’s music department, but otherwise it was unremarkable and O’Driscoll had little to do as a dancing co-ed.

She had other small dancing roles in Here Comes the Band (1935), The Big Broadcast of 1936 (1935) and The Great Ziegfeld (1936), an Oscar-winning success, in which she was spotted by a Universal talent scout who arranged for her to have a screen test, followed by a contract.

Her roles were initially small – in her first Universal film, a B thriller She’s Dangerous (1937), she was billed simply as “blonde girl” and in the Deanna Durbin vehicle Mad About Music (1937) she was billed as “pretty girl”. But her face soon became familiar to film fans because of the many endorsements she did, sanctioned by the studio. Her face appeared on such advertisements as Charm-Kurl Supreme Cold Wave and Max Factor Hollywood Face Powder.

Around this time O’Driscoll met William Lundigan, a former radio actor then making his way in films, and they started an affair that was to last for several years, though they never married.

Universal loaned O’Driscoll to MGM for parts in The Secret of Dr Kildare (1939) and Judge Hardy and Son (1940), but it was RKO who gave O’Driscoll her first two starring roles, as romantic interest to the cowboy Tim Holt in Wagon Train (1940), and notably as Daisy Mae in a transcription of Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner (1940), an attempt to transfer Capp’s stylised county of Dogpatch to the screen which did not really come off, though O’Driscoll was captivating as the beauty desperately trying to win the husky Abner (Granville Owen) for a mate.

Paramount now became interested in the actress and acquired her contract, casting her first as a maid in Preston Sturges’s classic comedy The Lady Eve (1941). Reap the Wild Wind (1942), Cecil B. De Mille’s epic sea story, had two beautiful stars, Paulette Goddard and Susan Hayward, but O’Driscoll held her own as a Southern belle, her hair in long blond ringlets (it was her first film in colour), evincing polite disapproval when Goddard, as a Scarlett O’Hara-like heroine, shocks a society ball with an off-colour shanty.

O’Driscoll was then given the lead in an enjoyable B film, Pacific Blackout (1942), with Robert Preston as an innocent man convicted of murder who escapes during a blackout practice and uncovers enemy plans to destroy a US city during a mock air-raid. The actress followed this with a good role as a show- business hopeful in Paramount’s Young and Willing (1943), but then the studio let her return to Universal, who cast her in the Olson and Johnson comedy Crazy House (1943), then loaned her to RKO for Richard Wallace’s stylish thriller The Fallen Sparrow (1943).

Unhappy with the progress of her career, O’Driscoll tried to get out of her contract on the basis that she was under age when she signed it, and the studio was forced to sue her. They won the case, and some historians have surmised that the ensuing bitterness may have kept O’Driscoll in B pictures.

Hi Beautiful (1944) was one of five films in which she co-starred with Noah Beery Jnr, the others being Allergic to Love (1944), as a bride who gets hay-fever whenever she is near her husband, Under Western Skies (1945), a pleasant musical about a vaudeville troupe out west, The Daltons Ride Again (1945), as a publisher’s daughter in love with one of the notorious outlaw brothers, and Her Lucky Night (1945), in which she is told by a fortune-teller that she will meet the man of her life in a cinema, so she buys two tickets, throws one away and hopes for the best.

O’Driscoll also featured in House of Dracula (1945) and Week-end Pass (1945, as a socialite who runs away to join the WACS and meets a shipyard worker who has won a weekend off with pay). The B movie specialist Don Miller wrote of the latter: “It approached the surprise-hit status . . . Into its slender narrative director Jean Yarborough managed to cram not only several amusing situations but also 10 song numbers, all in 63 minutes.”

The following year she made her last Universal film, Blonde Alibi, receiving top billing as a girl who sets out to prove her lover (Tom Neal) innocent of murder. Her last film was Edgar G. Ulmer’s Carnegie Hall (1947), after which she retired.

In 1943 she had married a young Lieutenant-Commander in the US Navy, but divorced him 10 months later stating that her husband had no comprehension of the demands on her time made by the studio, while admitting herself that she had not fully understood her duties as the wife of an officer in wartime. The court stayed her divorce for the duration of the Second World War, and in July 1947, less than 48 hours after her decree was final, she married another naval officer, Arthur Appleton, who was also the heir to an industrial empire. On return to civilian life, he became president of his family’s electronics firm in Chicago. At their wedding, his bride announced that she was “definitely through with pictures, stage and all of that”, and so it was to be.

The happy marriage produced three sons and a daughter, all four college graduates pursuing careers away from show business, though the daughter was elected Dartmouth Winter Carnival Queen in 1971. After Appleton’s retirement the couple spent most of their time in their Miami beach house cruising on their yacht, or travelling abroad. They bred and raced thoroughbreds, and founded the Appleton Museum of Art in Ocala, Florida. O’Driscoll served for a time as president of the Women’s Board of the Chicago Boys’ Clubs as well as serving on the board of directors of various Appleton enterprises.

The actress became noted for her reluctance to talk about her past career, and, when interviewed by Richard Lamparski for his Whatever Happened To . . . radio and book series, she gave vague or non-committal replies to his questions and “gave the impression of being very ill at ease throughout the brief exchange”.

In 1987 she attended the annual reunion of Universal contractees, and one of her former colleagues stated afterwards, “It was like being with her sister or double. She remembered everything but as though it happened to someone else. The Martha O’Driscoll I knew doesn’t seem to exist any more. There’s only Mrs Arthur Appleton.” That is doubtless how the former actress wanted it to be. As she told the writer David Ragan some years ago, “My life has been very full since I left Hollywood.”

Tom Vallance

Martha O’Driscoll, actress: born Tulsa, Oklahoma 4 March 1922; married secondly 1947 Arthur Appleton (three sons, one daughter); died Miami, Florida 3 November 1998.

The “Independent” obituary by Tom Vallance can also be accessed here.

Dorothy Bromiley was born in 1930 in Manchester. In 1952 she, along with Joan Elan and Audrey Dalton won major parts in the movie”The Girls of Pleasure Island” which was made in Hollywood. Ms Bromiley did not stay in the U.S. but pursued her career in Britain. Among her other films are “It’s Great to be Young” with John Mills in 1956 and “The Servant” which was directed by her one time husband Joseph Losey. An interesting article on Dorothy Bromiley can be accessed here.

Dorothy Bromiley

Dorothy Bromiley Phelan (born 18 September 1930) is a British former film, stage and television actress and authority on historic domestic needlework.

Born in Manchester, Lancashire, the only child of Frank Bromiley and Ada Winifred (née Thornton). Bromiley played a role in a Hollywood film before returning to the UK where, in 1954, she started work as assistant stage manager at the Central Library Theatre, Manchester; followed by a West End stage role in The Wooden Dish directed by the exiled US film and theatre director Joseph Losey(who became Bromiley’s husband from 1956 to 1963). They have a son by this relationship, the actor Joshua Losey. Since 1963 Bromiley has lived with the Dublin-born actor and writer Brian Phelan (who appeared in the 1965 film Four in the Morning), they have a daughter, Kate.

Bromiley attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Bromiley successfully auditioned for the role of Gloria in the Hollywood film The Girls of Pleasure Island (Paramount, 1952). Her major roles in several British films include sixth former Paulette at Angel Hill Grammar School (aged 26 at the time) in It’s Great to Be Young (1956) in which Bromiley’s singing voice for the Paddy Roberts/ Lester Powell Ray Martin song “You are My First Love” was dubbed by Edna Savage (and by Ruby Murray in the pre-credits sequence), Rose in A Touch Of The Sun (1956) co-starring with Frankie Howerd, Sarah in Zoo Baby (1957) with Angela Baddeley, Small Hotel (1957), Angela in The Criminal (1960) and a minor role in The Servant (1963), the latter two directed by Losey.

Bromiley made her television drama debut as Pauline Kirby in “The Lady Asks For Help” (1956) an episode of Television Playhouse produced by Towers of London for ITV. This was followed by the role of Ann Fleming in “Heaven and Earth” (1957) part of the Douglas Fairbanks Presents series for ATV. Directed by Peter Brook, it also starred Paul Scofield and Richard Johnson, and was set on board a plane that develops engine trouble. Bromiley also had roles in such popular television series as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1956) as Lady Rowena (“Hubert” episode), Armchair Theatre (1957), Play of the Week (“Arsenic and Old Lace”) (1958), Saturday Playhouse (“The Shop at Sly Corner”) (1960), Z-Cars (1964), The Power Game (1966) and No Hiding Place (1965, 1966), and the television play Jemima and Johnny (1966). Her last television drama role was as Sarah Malory in Fathers and Families (BBC Television, 1977) directed by Christopher Morahan.

Dorothy Bromiley taught at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) between 1966–72 and left to create The Common Stock Theatre Company, staging socially relevant theatre in colleges and non-traditional halls.

Retired from acting, Dorothy Bromiley lives in Dorset, and has developed an interest in 16th and 17th century amateur domestic needlework, writing on the subject, and curating two major exhibitions

IMDB entry:

Ted Neeley was born on September 20, 1943 in Ranger, Texas, USA. He is an actor, known for Django Unchained (2012), Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) and Summer Camp Nightmare (1987).

Sondra Locke obituary in “The Guardian” in 2019.

The actor Sondra Locke, who has died aged 74 after suffering from cancer, was closely associated with the film star and director Clint Eastwood: they made six films together and had a 13-year relationship, which ended acrimoniously.

But it was not Eastwood who made her a star. Eight years before they met, she had already received Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for her accomplished debut as Mick, a southern teenager who befriends a deaf-mute man (Alan Arkin) in the 1968 adaptation of Carson McCullers’ novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. She won the part after a nationwide search to find a suitable newcomer.

Locke also later proved herself an idiosyncratic director with the curious fantasy Ratboy (1986), in which she starred. A follow-up, Impulse (1990), a thriller starring Theresa Russell as a police officer working undercover as a prostitute, was a slicker affair.Advertisement

She first starred with Eastwood in the western The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), which he also directed. She played Laura Lee, who joins Josey (Eastwood) on his quest to avenge his family’s destruction during the civil war. “Just as he was about to look away into the distant desert, he caught sight of me,” she wrote in her 1997 autobiography The Good, the Bad and the Very Ugly. “I wasn’t prepared for the way our eyes seemed to instantly fuse.” For the next seven years, she was effectively under contract to Eastwood, who was believed to have left his wife for her. “If you were in Clint Eastwood movies, you were in the Clint Eastwood movie business,” she explained. “People stopped calling. They automatically assumed I was working exclusively with Clint.”

This translated into a period of great productivity while they were together. She starred with him in The Gauntlet (1977), as a prostitute escorted by a cop to testify in a mafia trial, and in the redneck comedies Every Which Way But Loose (1978) and its sequel Any Which Way You Can (1980) – though they were both upstaged in those movies by their co-star, Clyde the orangutan.

The couple’s most delightful collaboration was on Bronco Billy (1980), a comedy starring Locke as a woman who falls in with a travelling circus after being double-crossed by her fiance. It was much preferable to the sadistic thriller Sudden Impact (1983), the fourth in the Dirty Harry series of films about a renegade cop, in which Locke played a victim of rape turned violent avenger. That role was a curious fit for a woman whose appeal lay in her mix of the feisty and the delicate. The enormous eyes set in a petite face gave her the perpetually childlike look of one of Margaret Keane’s big-eyed child paintings. In Eastwood’s more rough-and-tumble outings she could only appear incongruous.

If Sudden Impact, their last film together, seemed brutal, that was nothing compared to the fallout from the couple’s relationship, which ended in 1989 with accusations from both sides: Locke pointed to Eastwood’s infidelities and his tapping of her phone, while he complained that his generosity was being exploited by Locke and her close friend Gordon Anderson (a childhood friend whom she had married in 1967, though he was openly gay). While Locke was on the set of Impulse in 1989, Eastwood changed the locks on their home and dumped her belongings on the lawn.

In the seven years after their split, Locke filed two lawsuits against him, first for palimony in 1989, fighting him in court for a year, all while battling breast cancer and undergoing a double mastectomy, settling in 1990; then for fraud in 1996, when a producing and directing deal at Warner Bros, which was part of the settlement in the original suit (and which spawned no movies), turned out to have been underwritten by Eastwood without Locke’s knowledge. The second lawsuit also ended in a settlement for Locke. “I think he thought I’d go away, because he always gets his way,” Locke said. “He just wills people to do things, he would say that all the time. He was willing me to go away. And I didn’t.”

She was born Sandra in Shelbyville, Tennessee, to Pauline Bayne, a factory worker, and Raymond Smith, a soldier. Her mother married Alfred Locke, a carpenter, when she was four. Sandra went to the local high school, where she met Gordon. They both enrolled at Middle Tennessee State University in 1962, but she left after a year and worked in Nashville as a TV station assistant, while acting with a community theatre group. After taking the stage name Sondra and appearing in several plays, she auditioned for, and won, her part in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

Locke claimed that she was frozen out of Hollywood after her breakup with Eastwood. As an all-American hero, he was untouchable; his public did not want to hear that he was flawed. “I’m sorry he is who he is,” she said just before her book came out. “As sorry as people are going to be, it was far more devastating to me to find out who he really was.”

She made a late return to the screen last year, in a title role in Alan Rudolph’s Ray Meets Helen.

Authorities were notified of her death, but it was not made public until 13 December.

She is survived by Gordon, to whom she remained married.

• Sondra Locke (Sandra Louise Anderson), actor and director, born 28 May 1944; died 3 November 2018

Leslie Brooks was born in 1922 in Lincoln, Nebraska. She was featured in two Rita Hayworth vehicles “You Were Never Lovelier” in 1942 and “Cover Girl” in 1944. Her best film was “Blonde Ice” in 1948. She died in 2011.

William Smith was born in 1933 in Missouri. A lifelong boldybuilder, the 6ft 2″ Smith has featured in over 300 film and television programmes. He is perhaps best know for his role as the evil ‘Falconetti’ in “Rich Man, Poor Man” mini-series in 1976 and the TV Western series “Laredo” from 1965 until 1967. His movies include “Darker Than Amber” with Rod Taylor in 1971, “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” and “Any Which Way You Can” with Clint Eastwood in 1980. He joined the cast of “Hawaii 5 0” for it’s last series in 1979. He is also known as the last Marlboro Man on cigarette advertisments.

William Smith. Wikipedia.

William Smith (born March 24, 1933) is an American actor who has appeared in almost three hundred feature films and television productions,^[1] with his best known role being the menacing Anthony Falconetti in the 1970s television mini-series Rich Man, Poor Man.

Smith is also known for films like Any Which Way You Can (1980), Conan The Barbarian (1982), Rumble Fish (1983), and Red Dawn(1984), as well as lead roles in several exploitation films during the 1970s.

Born in Columbia, Missouri, Smith began his acting career at the age of eight in 1942; he entered films as a child actor in such films as The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Song of Bernadette and Meet Me in St. Louis.

Smith served in the United States Air Force. He won the 200 pound (91 kg) arm-wrestling championship of the world multiple times and also won the United States Air Force weightlifting championship. A lifelong bodybuilder, Smith is a record holder for reverse-curling his own body weight. His trademark arms measured as much as 19½ inches. Smith held a 31-1 record as an amateur boxer.

During the Korean War he was a Russian Intercept Interrogator and flew secret ferret missions over the Russian SFSR. He had both CIAand NSA clearance and intended to enter a classified position with the U.S. government, but while he was working on his doctorate studies he landed an acting contract with MGM.

He was a regular on the 1961 ABC television series The Asphalt Jungle, portraying police Sergeant Danny Keller. One of his earliest leading roles was as Joe Riley, a Texas Ranger on the NBC western series Laredo (1965–1967). In 1967, Smith guest starred as Jude Bonner on James Arness‘s long-lived western Gunsmoke.

Smith was cast as John Richard Parker, brother of Cynthia Ann Parker, both taken hostage in Texas by the Comanche, in the 1969 episode “The Understanding” of the syndicated television series Death Valley Days, which was hosted by Robert Taylor. In the story line, Parker contracts the plague, is left for dead by his fellow Comanche warriors, and is rescued by his future Mexican wife, Yolanda (Emily Banks).^[2]

He played the outlaw turned temporary sheriff Hendry Brown in the 1969 episode “The Restless Man”. In that story line, Brown takes the job of sheriff to tame a lawless town, begins to court a young woman (again played by Emily Banks), but soon returns to his deadly outlaw ways in search of bigger thrills.^[3]

On Gunsmoke, Smith appeared in a 1972 episode, “Hostage!”; his character beats and rapes Amanda Blake‘s character Miss Kitty Russell and shoots her twice in the back. Smith has been described as the “greatest bad-guy character actor of our time”.

Smith joined the cast of the final season of Hawaii Five-O (as Detective James “Kimo” Carew, a new officer in the Five-O unit). He had previously appeared with Jack Lord in Lord’s prior series Stoney Burke. Smith starred in one episode each of the Adam West Batman TV series (in the episode “Minerva, Mayhem and Millionaires” as Adonis, one of the minions of the title guest villainess portrayed by Zsa Zsa Gabor), I Dream of Jeannie (in the episode “Operation: First Couple on the Moon” as Turk Parker), Kung Fu, and as The Treybor, a ruthless warlord, in the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century episode “Buck’s Duel to the Death”. Smith also made guest appearances opposite James Garner in the 1974 two-hour pilot for The Rockford Files (titled “Backlash of the Hunter” and also featuring Lindsay Wagner and Bill Mumy), and George Peppard in The A-Team (in two appearances as different characters, in the first season’s “Pros and Cons” and the fourth season’s “The A-Team Is Coming, The A-Team Is Coming”).

In the 1976 television miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man, he portrayed Anthony Falconetti, nemesis of the Jordache family, and reprised the role in the sequel Rich Man, Poor Man Book II. Other 1970s TV appearances included the Kolchak: The Night Stalker episode “The Energy Eater”, as an Indian medicine man who advises Kolchak, and an early Six Million Dollar Man episode “Survival of the Fittest” as Commander Maxwell. He also appeared in the 1979 miniseries The Rebels as John Waverly, and in an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard as Jason Steele, a bounty hunter hired by Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane to frame the Duke Boys into jail.

On the big screen, Smith became the star of several cult movies from the early seventies. Smith appeared as heavy Terry Bartell in Darker than Amber in 1970. Also that year, Smith was also featured in two biker flicks Nam’s Angels (originally released under the title “The Losers”) co-starring Bernie Hamilton and C.C. and Company with Ann-Margret, Joe Namath, Jennifer Billingsley and genre favorite Sid Haig, the latter of which was directed by Seymour Robbie and written by Ann-Margret’s husband, actor Roger Smith. He starred in 1972’s Grave of the Vampire as James Eastman (co-starring with Michael Pataki and Lyn Peters), and 1973’s Invasion of the Bee Girls (co-starring Victoria Vetri, Anitra Ford and Katie Saylor, written by Nicholas Meyer and directed by Denis Sanders), and 1975’s The Swinging Barmaids (starring Ms. Saylor, Bruce Watson and Laura Hippe, and directed by Gus Trikonis). In 1972 and 1975, respectively, he appeared in two popular Blaxploitation films, Hammer and the controversially titled Boss Nigger, both with Fred Williamson.

After that, he played a vindictive sergeant in Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977) with an all-star cast headed by Burt Lancaster and Richard Widmark, a drag-racing legend in Fast Company (1979) also co-starring Claudia Jennings and John Saxon, the main character’s father in Conan the Barbarian (1982) with Arnold Schwarzenegger, bad guy Matt Diggs in The Frisco Kid (1979) opposite Gene Wilder and Harrison Ford, and Clint Eastwood‘s bare-knuckle nemesis Jack Wilson in 1980’s Any Which Way You Can (a sequel to 1978’s Every Which Way But Loose in which Smith did not appear), and also had a top villainous role of the Soviet commander in the hit 1984 theatrical film Red Dawn. In 1983, Smith appeared in two films from Francis Ford Coppola, in The Outsiders as a store clerk and in Rumble Fish as a police officer. In 1985, Smith landed the starring role of Brodie Hollister in the Disney mini-series Wildside, created by writer-producer Tom Greene, and another role as the bookmaker’s enforcer known as “Panama Hat” in director Richard Brooks‘s final movie, Fever Pitch (1985) opposite Ryan O’Neal.

William Smith died aged 88 in California in August 2021.

Robert Ginty was an American actor best known for his lead performance in the movie “The Exterminator” . He spent some time living in Dublin. He was born in 1948 and died in 2009.

His Independent obituary by Tom Vallance is as follows:

The actor Robert Ginty became a leading star of action movies after he played the title role in the low-budget hit The Exterminator (1980). For the next decade he was the cut-price equivalent of Schwarzenegger or Stallone, making violent thrillers that invariably went straight to video but built him a large following of action fans. Ginty was usually the hero, often a war veteran using his skills to clean up the city streets, or a mercenary fighting corruption in the far corners of the world (where hordes of extras could be hired cheaply for scenes of mayhem). He was a man of many talents, however, and later found favour as an activist for experiment in the arts, a champion of human rights, a writer, a theatre and opera director, curator, artist and photographer.

Born Robert Winthrop Ginty in 1948 in Brooklyn, New York, where his father worked as a construction engineer and his mother worked for the government, he was of Irish ancestry and a direct descendent of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, member of Parliament and disciple of Thomas Paine, who died in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Ginty’s first love was rock music, and at the age of 16 he was touring with bands, playing drums with Carlos Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and John Lee Hooker.

He was educated at Yale and the City College of New York, then studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, the Actor’s Studio, and with Robert Lewis at the Yale School of Drama. He starred in Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending and Eugene O’Neill’s More Stately Mansions at the Provincetown Playhouse, and at the New Hampshire Shakespeare Festival he played Hotspur in Henry IV, Part One and Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The producer Harold Prince saw these performances and hired him as both an assistant and actor for his Broadway productions of The Great John Brown (1972), Don Juan (1973) and The Government Inspector (1974). After returning to New Hampshire to star in Israel Horovitz’s one-act play The Indian Wants the Bronx, he moved to California, where he developed a reputation as a rugged player who could fill television roles that demanded physical action.

He was in episodes of Police Woman and The Rockford Files, and he had small roles in the films Bound for Glory (1976), and Two-Minute Warning (1976). His first notable role was in the TV series Baa Baa Black Sheep (1976-78), about the exploits of a Second World War flying ace and his squadron of misfits. Ginty was Lt. T. J. Wiley, one of what he later described as “a bunch of gung-ho young kid pilots”. The series prompted him to take up flying, a lifelong passion that culminated in his becoming in 2004 an honorary captain in the United States Navy’s Blue Angels.

Hal Ashby, director of Bound for Glory, then gave Ginty a strong supporting role in the powerful Vietnam war-drama Coming Home (1978), starring Jane Fonda. Ginty was the best friend of a marine (Bruce Dern) whose wife falls in love with a paraplegic while her husband is overseas.

Ginty next acted in the acclaimed television series The Paper Chase (1978-9), based on the movie about student life in a competitive law school. Ginty portrayed one of the students; another was played by Francine Tacker, who became the second of his three wives. Despite being hailed as the best new series of the year, The Paper Chase was cancelled after one season.

Ginty was on the verge, however, of his major breakthrough. He was cast in The Exterminator as a Vietnam veteran out for revenge on the gang who beat up his comrade. Deploying his most brutal combat skills, he battles the police and CIA as well as various criminals, at one point thrusting a villain through a meat grinder. Cheaply produced, the film made a huge profit, and though Ginty was billed third to Christopher George (as chief villain) and Samantha Eggar, he stole the film, and would often be billed afterwards as Robert “Exterminator” Ginty.

The image would carry him through a decade of low-budget, violent thrillers, shot in France, Italy, Mexico and Thailand, with such titles as Gold Raiders (1983), Maniac Killer, Programmed to Kill, Mission: Kill, Code Name Vengeance (all 1987), and Cop Target (1990). He also both starred in and produced Exterminator 2, an inevitable sequel to his biggest hit. He wrote and directed The Bounty Hunter (1989), and he also produced, directed and acted in Vietnam, Texas (1990), about a priest (Ginty) who discovers he fathered a son while on a tour of duty in Vietnam, though few priests would be as handy with a gun or their fists as Ginty proved to be. The film won him Best Director awards at the Houston International Film Festival and the Taormina Film Festival in Italy.

As his phase as an action star waned, he worked more frequently in television as both an actor and director. He appeared in seven episodes of Falcon Crest (1989-90) and such shows as Father Dowling Mysteries and Murder, She Wrote, and he directed episodes of Nash Bridges, Charmed and Tracker.

In 1994 Ginty responded to his heritage by becoming artistic director of the Irish Theatre Arts Center in Hollywood, whose goal is to sponsor stage, film and music projects dealing with the Irish experience, as well as allowing playwrights to hear their works read by actors in front of an audience. He lectured regularly at Trinity College, Dublin, and with film-makers Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan he founded the Director’s Guild of Ireland.

Ginty also became noted as a champion of experimental theatre. In 2004 he directed a hip-hop version of A Clockwork Orange in Toronto, and in 2005 at the Edinburgh Festival he directed Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, set in Iraq. As a stage director, Ginty favoured modern playwrights, staging revivals of Sam Shepherd’s True West, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia and David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross.

An exhibition of his paintings and photographs was presented at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2006. He was also a Unesco Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Global Market Place and a member of the International Centre for Human Rights. A staunch advocate of preserving classical American architecture, in 2005 he was appointed as ambassador for the Prince’s Trust by Prince Charles.

He and his family, who lived in Toronto for several years, were also patrons of several arts bodies, including the Royal Ontario Museum, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the National Ballet of Canada. When asked how he felt about his period as a top action hero, he replied that he had no regrets. “I’ve played a very violent repertory of movies, and what they’ve done for me is given me an economically viable career.”

Tom Vallance

Robert Winthrop Ginty, actor and director: born Brooklyn, New York 14 November 1948; three times married (one son); died Los Angeles, California 21 September 2009.

This obituary can be accessed also on line here.

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Tony Martin

Carole Shelley

Martha O’Driscoll

Dorothy Bromiley

Ted Neeley

Sondra Locke

Sondra Locke obituary in “The Guardian” in 2019.

Leslie Brooks

William Smith

William Smith. Wikipedia.

Robert Ginty

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