Bobby Sherman was born in 1943 in Santa Monica, California. He starred in the TV series “Here Comes the Bride” in 1968 and 1969 and then “Getting Together” in 1971 and 1972. He had a number of Top Ten Hits including “Julie, Do You Love Me”.
Bobby was promoted to Captain on the Los Angeles Police Department, where he taught CPR and life saving techniques to incoming academy recruits. For a few years, he was also one of the members of the Teen Idol Tour, which also included Peter Noone, Davy Jonesand, then later, Micky Dolenz replacing Jones. Bobby is the father of two grown sons, both of them following their famous father into the music industry.
Collin Wilcox was born in 1935 in Ohio. She was a staple guest star of the major U.S. TV series of the 1960’s and 70’s. including “The Twilight Zone” and “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour” among many others. On film, her best remembered performance is from 1962 in “To Kill A Mockingbird” with Gregory Peck. She died in 2009.
Collin Wilcox, who portrayed a young white woman who falsely accuses a black man of rape in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and went on to appear in numerous TV shows and films like ‘Jaws 2,’ died at her home in North Carolina last week. She was 74. Her husband, Scott Paxton, said the actress died on Oct. 14 of brain cancer, the New York Times reports.
As the character Mayella Violet Ewell, who accused Brock Peters’ character of rape, she delivers a court speech that stands out as one of the most memorable scenes in ‘Mockingbird.’ While being cross-examined by Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch, she tearfully responds:
“I got something to say, and then I ain’t gonna say no more. He took advantage of me! And if you fine, fancy, damn … ain’t gonna do nothin’ about it, then you’re just a bunch a’ lousy yella stinkin’ cowards … the … the whole bunch of ya. And your fancy airs don’t come to nothin’. Your manners and your “Miss Mayella,” it don’t come to nothin’ Mr. Finch!” ‘Mockingbird’ was her major-film debut and she later appeared on TV show such as ‘The Twilight Zone,’ ‘The Untouchables’ and ‘Gunsmoke.’
She appeared in several more films, including ‘Catch-22’ and the ‘Jaws’ sequel, before moving back to her native North Carolina where she and her husband founded a children’s arts center.
In addition to her husband, Paxton is survived by her children, Kimberley and Michael.
New York Times obituary in 2009.
Collin Wilcox, Actress in ‘Mockingbird’, Dies at 74
Collin Wilcox, a ubiquitous actress whose face was familiar to television viewers in the 1960s and afterward for her guest appearances on shows like “The Untouchables,” “The Twilight Zone,” “The Defenders” and “Gunsmoke,” died on Oct. 14 at her home in Highlands, N.C. She was 74.
The cause was brain cancer, her husband, Scott Paxton, said.
A fresh-faced Southerner, Ms. Wilcox was also billed over the years as Collin Wilcox-Horne and Collin Wilcox-Paxton. Besides working actively in television, she appeared in Hollywood films and several Broadway plays.
Her best-known film role was as Mayella Ewell, the young white woman who falsely accuses a black man (played by Brock Peters) of rape in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the 1962 adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel. Ms. Wilcox’s tearful testimony on the witness stand as Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch cross-examines her is widely considered one of the movie’s most memorable scenes.
Ms. Wilcox made her Broadway debut in 1958 in “The Day the Money Stopped,” a drama by Maxwell Anderson and Brendan Gill. Though the play closed after four performances, she won the Clarence Derwent Award from the Actors’ Equity Association as the year’s most promising female performer.
Collin Wilcox was born on Feb. 4, 1935, in Cincinnati and moved with her family to Highlands as a baby. In the late 1930s her parents helped found a local theater company, the Highlands Community Theater, where she got her first stage experience.
Ms. Wilcox studied at the University of Tennessee, what was then the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago and the Actors Studio in New York. In Chicago she performed with the Compass Players, an improvisational group that was a forerunner of the Second City theater troupe.
On television Ms. Wilcox came to wide attention in 1958, when she starred in a live television production of “The Member of the Wedding.” (An adaptation of Carson McCullers’s novel, it was directed by Robert Mulligan, who later directed “To Kill a Mockingbird.”) To land the role of Frankie, the story’s preadolescent heroine, Ms. Wilcox, then in her early 20s, appeared at the audition with her hair shorn, her breasts bound with dishtowels and her face dotted with “freckles” of iodine.
One of her television performances that continues to be seen today in reruns was in a 1964 episode of “The Twilight Zone,” titled “Number 12 Looks Just Like You.” Ms. Wilcox played a plain-looking 19-year-old woman in a society of the future who resists a ritual “transformation” procedure to make her physically beautiful (she can choose from among standard models) and give her a longer life.
Ms. Wilcox’s first marriage, to Walter Beakel, ended in divorce, as did her second, to Geoffrey Horne. She is survived by her third husband, Mr. Paxton, whom she married in 1979; three children, Kimberly Horne, Michael G. Paxton and William Horne; and three grandchildren.
Her other television appearances include guest roles on “Dr. Kildare,” “The Fugitive,” “Ironside,” “The Waltons” and “Little House on the Prairie.”
Among Ms. Wilcox’s other films are “Catch-22” (1970), “Jaws 2” (1978), “Marie” (1985) and the TV movie “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” broadcast on CBS in 1974
Jim Kelly was a great martial artist who made movies in the 1970’s. He died in 2013 at the age of 67. Here is his Guardian obituary.
The martial artist and actor Jim Kelly, best known for his nonchalant turn in the Bruce Lee film Enter the Dragon, has died at the age of 67. Kelly was picked to star in the martial arts classic two years later. He plays the arrogant, insouciant Williams, who competes alongside Lee in a sinister competition organised by the mysterious Mr Han on a James Bond-style island. Kelly’s impressive afro, sideburns and good looks made him the perfect choice for a film shot at the height of blaxploitation.
Kelly has since become a huge cult figure, though his acting career never quite took off despite a good deal of success in similar 1970s fare. Appearances in films such as Black Belt Jones, Three the Hard Way (both 1974) and Black Samurai usually played on the novelty of an African American who practices martial arts. He was little seen on the big screen after 1982’s late-era blaxploitation martial arts effort One Down, Two to Go, and later pursued a career in tennis.
“It was one of the best experiences in my life,” Kelly told salon.com in 2010 when asked whether he enjoyed his time on Enter the Dragon. “Bruce was just incredible, absolutely fantastic. I learned so much from working with him. I probably enjoyed working with Bruce more than anyone else I’d ever worked with in movies because we were both martial artists. And he was a great, great martial artist. It was very good.”
In a separate interview with the LA Times the same year, Kelly said he had “never left the movie business”, adding: “It’s just that after a certain point, I didn’t get the type of projects that I wanted to do. I still get at least three scripts per year, but most of them don’t put forth a positive image. There’s nothing I really want to do, so I don’t do it. If it happens, it happens, but if not, I’m happy with what I’ve accomplished.”
Kelly died on Saturday at his home in San Diego and had been suffering from cancer, according to his ex-wife Marilyn Dishman, who broke the news on Facebook. “Yesterday, June 29, 2013, James Milton Kelly, better known as Jim Kelly, the karate expert, actor, my first husband and Sabrena Kelly-Lewis’s biological father died,” she wrote in a note.
Kelly’s best-remembered line in Enter the Dragon is probably the one where he is challenged by Shih Kien’s villainous Han to prepare himself for inevitable defeat. “I don’t waste my time with it,” sneers Williams. “When it comes I won’t even notice … I’ll be too busy looking good.“
Terry Thomas was one of Britain’s best loved comedians who went on to have a major Hollywood career in the 1960’s. He was born in 1911 in London and after World War Two became popular on BBC Radio. Sadly his later life was marred by ill health and poverty and he died in London
TCM overview:
Gap-toothed comic player who used his expressive eyes, mobile eyebrows and Royal Guards’ mustache to create a variety of asinine British characters, usually in supporting roles, occasionally in leads. His antic personae ranged from the comically malevolent to the naive in “I’m All Right, Jack” (1959), “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” (1963) and, perhaps his signature role, Sir Percival War-Armitage in “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines” (1965
Interesting article on the beloved Terry-Thomas in the Mail On-Line, can be accessed here.
Bonnie Bedelia was born in 1948 in New York City. By the age of twenty, she was being featured in such films as “The Gypsy Moths” with Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr and “They Shoot Horse’s Don’t They” as the dancing partner of Bruce Dern. She is best remebered as the wife of Bruce Willis in “Die Hard”.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
he native New Yorker was born Bonnie Bedelia Culkin on March 25, 1948, the daughter of Phillip Harley Culkin, a journalist, and Marian Ethel Wagner Culkin, a writer and editor. Trained in ballet, her parents guided all of the children at one time or another into acting (which included Christopher (Kit), Terry and Candace Culkin). Bonnie herself attended Quintano School for Young Professionals in New York at one point and Bonnie and Kit went on to appear on the local stage and TV. Brother Kit would later be known more for siring a handful of talented child actors and/or stars (Macaulay Culkin, Kieran Culkin, and the rest).
It was Bonnie who was first spotted among the other acting siblings by a talent scout who happened to catch her in a school production of “Tom Sawyer”, and encouraged her. She made her professional debut at age 9 in a 1957 North Jersey Playhouse production of “Dr. Praetorius” and then was handed a full scholarship to study at George Balanchine‘s New York City Ballet. But the acting bug had bitten and after dancing in only four productions (including playing the role of Clara in “The Nutcracker”), she decided to hang up her ballet slippers. She proceeded to study at both the HB Studio and Actors Studio in New York.
Bonnie nabbed a five-year role as young teen “Sandy Porter” in the New York-based daytime soap Love of Life (1951) starting in 1961. During that time, she took her first Broadway bow in “Isle of Children”, a show that lasted but a week in March of 1962. She was also a replacement in the established hit comedy “Enter Laughing”, a year later. After appearing in the stage play “The Playroom” in 1965, she earned strong reviews for her touching performance in “My Sweet Charlie”, for which she won the 1967 Theatre World Award for “promising new artist”. In it, she played a pregnant young Southern girl on the lam with a black lawyer. Patty Duke recreated the role a few years later on TV and captured an Emmy.
Films beckoned at this point and Bonnie made her debut lending topnotch support in The Gypsy Moths (1969) which reunited From Here to Eternity (1953) stars Burt Lancaster andDeborah Kerr. She earned even better marks in her next two films, one performance simply haunting and the other one hilarious. Once again playing pregnant and once again delivering a touching pathos, she played the dirt-poor marathon dancer who pitches songs for pennies and the almost-mother of Bruce Dern‘s child in the superb, award-winning, Depression-era drama They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969). On the other end of the acting spectrum, she played the lovable bride-to-be in the side-splitting comedy classic Lovers and Other Strangers (1970).
By this time, Bonnie had started concentrating on family values. She married scriptwriterKen Luber on April 24, 1969, and bore him a son, Yuri, the following year. The time off to focus on motherhood (she had second son, Jonah Luber, in 1976) proved detrimental to her rising star. The remaining decade was uneventful at best, despite some fine showings in a splattering of TV-movies. Her big comeback came again on the movie trail in the early 1980s when she absolutely nailed the role of race car driver Shirley Muldowney in Heart Like a Wheel (1983). She was surprisingly overlooked at Oscar time, however, despite the praise she received. Despite respected work in subsequent movies such as Violets Are Blue… (1986), The Prince of Pennsylvania (1988), Presumed Innocent(1990) and a running role as Bruce Willis‘s put-upon wife in Die Hard (1988) and its sequel, she found better and more frequent parts on TV. She found her niche in TV-movies with social themes and tugged at more hearts in Switched at Birth (1991), A Mother’s Right: The Elizabeth Morgan Story (1992), Any Mother’s Son (1997) and To Live Again (1998).
In a change of pace, Bonnie joined the ensemble cast of the low-budget cult comedySordid Lives (2000), as “Latrelle”, a homophobic woman dealing with her mother’s death, the imprisonment of her gay brother and her own son’s “coming out”. The movie has recently evolved into a TV series, which is scheduled for some time in 2008 and reunites her with original cast members Leslie Jordan and Olivia Newton-John.
-MDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Linda ChristianEdmund Purdom & Linda ChristianCover of the magazine Epoca. Actress Linda Christian (Blanca Rosa Henrietta Stella Welter Vorhauer) in Venice. Venice, Italy. 1955 (Photo by Mario De Biasi\Mondadori Portfolio\Mondadori via Getty Images)Linda Christian Linda Christian
Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” 2011 obituary:
The phrase “famous for being famous” could have been invented for Linda Christian, who has died aged 87. Her celebrity came from her marriages to the handsome film stars Tyrone Power and Edmund Purdom, and her liaisons with various wealthy playboys and bullfighters, rather than her somewhat limited acting ability.
Christian’s extravagant, cosmopolitan lifestyle derived from her stunning beauty – she was dubbed “The Anatomic Bomb” by Life magazine – and her ability to speak fluent French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and English. She was born Blanca Rosa Welter in Tampico, Mexico, the daughter of a Dutch executive at Shell, and his Mexican-born wife of Spanish, German and French descent. As the family moved around a great deal, living in South America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, she gained a taste for globetrotting.
Christian’s early ambition was to become a doctor, but after winning a beauty contest and meeting Errol Flynn in Acapulco, she was persuaded to try her luck in films in the US. She was soon cast as a Goldwyn Girl in the actor Danny Kaye’s first feature film, Up in Arms (1944), and as a cigarette girl in Club Havana (1945), directed by Edgar G Ulmer. Then, with her name changed to Linda Christian, she signed a contract with MGM, which gave her a small decorative role in the musical Holiday in Mexico (1946), shot in Hollywood, and an exotic one in Green Dolphin Street (1947), as Lana Turner’s Maori maid.
At the time, Turner was having an affair with Power. Rumour has it that Christian overheard Turner say when Power was going to be in Rome. Christian decided to fly to Rome, stay at the same hotel and wangle a meeting with the dashing star. A romance led to Christian and Power getting married in January 1949 at a church in Rome while an estimated 8,000 screaming fans lined the street outside.
Prior to the marriage, the only substantial role MGM had given Christian was as an island girl rescued by Tarzan from the clutches of an evil high priest in Tarzan and the Mermaids (1948), the 12th and final time Johnny Weissmuller played the Ape Man. Christian, wearing a skimpy two-piece costume, is referred to as a mermaid because she swims a lot.
After marrying Power, Christian started to get a few leading roles in B-pictures such as Slaves of Babylon (1953), co-starring Richard Conte. More gratifying was her sitting for a portrait by the great Mexican artist Diego Rivera. The painting, reproduced on the cover of her autobiography, Linda (1962), and for which she was once offered $2m, is now in a private collection.
In 1954, Christian played Valerie Mathis, James Bond‘s former lover now working for the French secret service, in a CBS television version of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, therefore allowing her to lay claim to being the first Bond girl. At this time, the movie fan magazines were full of photos of Power and Christian as a blissfully married couple with two daughters, while the gossip columns intimated that both husband and wife had strayed. In 1954, Christian played Purdom’s snooty fiancee in the MGM musical Athena. Christian had been at the same school as Purdom’s wife, the former ballerina Anita Phillips, and the Powers and the Purdoms became good friends, even going on holidays together. But soon sexual jealousy broke up the once cosy foursome. In 1956, Christian divorced Power, charging mental cruelty.
After the divorce, there was no shortage of millionaires to help keep Christian in the manner to which she was accustomed. Once she was called to testify at a Los Angeles court because she refused to return jewels given to her by the socialite Robert H Schlesinger, whose cheque for $100,000, as partial payment for the jewels, had bounced. Christian was also involved with the racing driver Alfonso de Portago, with whom she was photographed a short while before he died in a crash at the 1957 Mille Miglia car race, in which several spectators were also killed. That year, she and the Brazilian mining millionaire Francisco “Baby” Pignatari went on an around-the-world tour together. In 1962 she married Purdom. They divorced the following year.
Christian continued to appear in routine films such as The Devil’s Hand (1962), as a seductive high priestess of voodoo, opposite her real-life sister Ariadna Welter. In Francesco Rosi’s semi-documentary The Moment of Truth (1965), she played herself as an American in Barcelona who attracts a matador (the bullfighter Miguel Mateo Miguelín). During the filming, she fell for the bullfighter Luis Dominguín, the former lover of Ava Gardner.
In 1968, Christian retired to Rome. She returned to cinema almost 20 years later, at the age of 64, in a couple of dreadful Italian thrillers.
She is survived by her daughters, Taryn and Romina Power.
• Linda Christian (Blanca Rosa Welter), actor, born 13 November 1923; died 22 July 2011
Although little remembered today, Danny kaye was one of the most popular movie stars of the 1940’s & 50’s. He was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York. His first major movie was “Up in Arms” in 1944. He has starred in such classics as “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” with Virginia Mayo in 1947.”hans Christian Anderson” in 1952, the brilliant “The Court Jester” in 1956 with Glynis Johns and Angela Lansbury and “The Five Pennies”. He spent much of his later years as a goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF. He died in 1987.
TCM profile:
An entertainer of prodigious gifts, Danny Kaye blended dance, popular song, classical music, tongue-twisting lyrics and mimicry into a personal style that was at once unique and irresistibly lovable. This exuberant redhead conquered practically every form of show business, ranging from vaudeville, nightclubs and radio to the Broadway stage, television and movies.
Born David Daniel Kaminski in Brooklyn in 1913 to Russian Jewish immigrants, Kaye dropped out of high school to work the “Borscht Circuit” in New York’s Catskill Mountains as a clowning busboy. After performing as part of a dance act and making some two-reel movie shorts, he made his Broadway debut in 1939 in The Straw Hat Revue. Two years later he created a sensation in Broadway’s Lady in the Dark, supporting Gertrude Lawrence and stopping the show nightly with a number called “Tchaikovsky” in which he rattled off the names of more than 50 Russian composers in 39 breathless seconds.
In 1940 Kaye had married Sylvia Fine, who began managing his career and helped create many of the routines, gags and specialty songs that cinched his stardom.
Kaye was signed for films by Samuel Goldwyn and made his feature-film debut in the starring role of Up in Arms (1944), playing a hypochondriac World War II soldier who ends up single-handedly capturing a platoon of Japanese soldiers and wooing songstress Dinah Shore. Two songs co-authored by Fine — “The Lobby Number” and “Melody in 4-F” — spotlight Kaye’s ability with tongue-twisting lyrics.
Goldwyn’s other film showcases for Kaye’s irrepressible personality include The Kid from Brooklyn (1946), a remake of the 1934 Harold Lloyd comedy in which Kaye plays a shy milkman who goes into boxing after accidentally knocking out a champion fighter; and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), with Kaye as James Thurber’s daydreaming would-be hero. Kaye’s last film for producer Goldwyn was the box-office smash Hans Christian Andersen (1952), a fictionalized biography of the great Danish storyteller with a tuneful score by Frank Loesser.
Another huge hit was Paramount’s Irving Berlin musical White Christmas (1954), starring Kaye and Bing Crosby as pals who rescue a failing inn by staging a big musical show. For MGM, Kaye made The Court Jester (1956), a rousing spoof of medieval swashbucklers in which he plays a royal babysitter who poses as a jester in order to help overthrow an evil pretender to the throne. The songs are by Fine and Sammy Cahn, and Kaye performs his justly famous “Pellet with the Poison” routine: “The pellet with the poison?s in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true.” Kaye’s final film part was that of The Ragpicker in The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969), but he earned great notices for a dramatic role as a Holocaust survivor in the television movie Skokie (1981). Earlier he had enjoyed a great success with his own TV series, which ran for four years beginning in 1963 and brought him an Emmy award.
Awarded an honorary Academy Award in 1954 and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1982, Kaye worked extensively with the United Nation’s Children’s Fund, raising millions in benefit concerts. He died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in 1987.
by Roger Fristoe
The above TCM profile can be accessed online here.
Shelley Winter’s obituary by Veronica Horwell from 2006 in “The Guardian”:
Two blondes paid the rent at 8573 Holloway Drive, Los Angeles, a block south of Sunset Boulevard, in 1951. Both were starlets on studio contracts, and they commiserated with each other over the bones in basque bodices, diets and other career impositions. On Saturday mornings, they played classical records and read the accompanying booklets about composers, and once they sat down to list the famous men they dreamed of fucking.
The younger, Marilyn Monroe, listed Albert Einstein and Arthur Miller among her hunks. The wiser woman, Shelley Winters, who has died of heart failure aged 83, stuck to movie studs. She lived to make most of them, and hang out with a couple of Oscars as well.
She was born Shirley Schrift in St Louis, officially in 1922 (though some sources still say 1920) and the family soon moved to Brooklyn. Her father was jailed for arson – and later cleared – when she was nine. On Wednesdays, she would slip into the Broadway theatres to catch the matinees, and as a teenager she competed with half of America for the part of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind. Director George Cukor bought her a Coke and asked her about her acting ambitions, which were serious.
She worked in Woolworth’s – “I wasn’t pretty enough for the candy department so they put me to work selling hardware” – where she led the other girls in a strike for unrestricted access to toilets. They won, but Woollies would not re-employ her. “I’d have made a damn good union organiser,” she said years later. “Look at the facts. There are no more padlocks on the loos in Woolworth’s.”
She went to acting school, took the advice of her opera singer mother, Rose, and stumped round the borscht circuit; she was appearing in the musical Rosalinda on Broadway in the early 1940s when the president of Colombia Pictures, Harry Cohn, went backstage and said, “Listen kid, you think you could do the same thing in front of a camera?”
Her first screen appearance was in What a Woman! (1943). But it took “Shelley” (from her favourite poet) “Winters” (her mother’s maiden name plus a publicist’s “s”) seven years to “climb out of the studio wastebasket”. She did it by way of lowclass victimhood – as a waitress strangled by Ronald Colman in George Cukor’s A Double Life (1947), a gas station Myrtle run over by Gatsby’s car in The Great Gatsby (1949) and a factory girl drowned by the man who got her pregnant in A Place in the Sun (1951), her first Oscar nomination.
Her southern widow, in The Night of the Hunter (1955), was about as far as Winters could develop that persona: “she has a rich body” is the character’s introduction in the screenplay, although she ends up as a dead body, her hair drifting in the river. As Ian Cameron once wrote, Winters too easily played the female equivalent of Peter Lorre, her quivering pathos inviting martyrdom.
While playing an extra in The Big Knife (1955), she said, “Those lousy studios, they louse you up and then they call you lousy.” She seemed to be describing her relative movie non-progress: she had displayed the clavicles and the lips just fine, but her attitude was too visible.
With her press agent, she began to make herself over into “this personality, a dumb blonde with a body and a set of sayings”. She scripted her own wisecracks (“I did a film in England in the winter and it was so cold I almost got married”). Dylan Thomas had sent her letters, and she had sent him to a shrink who failed to cure the drink; on a visit, she “asked why he’d come to Hollywood, and, very solemnly, he said to touch a starlet’s tits. Ok, I said, but only one finger.” Her other literary buddy, Tennessee Williams, didn’t even peek.
But Winters was also a pro, who studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors’ Studio, working towards the “ability to reveal myself, the willingness … you act with your scars … if you want the best, you have to fight for it”. In the year of The Night of the Hunter, she left for the Broadway stage, and did not return to cinema until 1959, when she came back a changed woman – her truer self.
“Overeaters anonymous, it’s my only religion,” she said of her expanded flesh. This emphasised her kept-woman-of-the-Hapsburg-empire appearance, although the calorie intake was all-American, her favourite meal being tuna on rye with a chocolate milk shake.
She won an Oscar for her first substantial role in this mother-matron-madam mode for The Diary of Ann Frank (1959), and made the embonpoint and dirty laugh work for her through the 1960s: a slut of a mum in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1963); the racist mom in A Patch of Blue (1965, another best-supporting Academy award); the bordello boss Polly Adler in A House is not a Home (1964) – a variation on her whore-for-intellectuals in The Balcony (1963); a Tommy-gun-wielding Bloody Mama (1970); and a passenger in The Poseidon Adventure (1972). Only a few films utilised her ability to distance herself funnily – pulling the alarmed Alfie (1966), or unafraid of falling among Indians in The Scalphunters (1968) because “they’re only men”.
For all her lack of the camera-ready face of her friend Liz Taylor, Winters was desired. Maybe it was that rich body. Her under-age affair with a fellow thespian ended in pregnancy, an abortion and her refusal of a marriage offer because “you’re a bit-part actor and I’m a potential star”. There were three brief marriages: the first, in wartime, was to Paul Mayer, a US army air force captain; the others were to an Italian actor, Vittorio Gassman (with whom she had a daughter) from 1952 to 1954, and an Italian-American actor, Anthony Franciosa, from 1957 to 1960.
Winters published two volumes of autobiography, Shelley, Also Known as Shirley (1980) and Shelley II: The Middle of My Century (1989). In those brash works, she consumed much of the beefcake on that 1951 wish list. “The only way to keep warm in this apartment is to get into bed. My body generates a great deal of heat,” mumbled Marlon Brando. “Fuck me please and send a copy of your speech later,” she demanded of a prosy Burt Lancaster. She ended up in bed five times with William Holden after Christmas studio parties.
Winters thought masculine star attempts at style hilarious, and would say so, with her mink eased off the shoulder and a glass of fizz in hand. She once described how, during a private movie showing at Errol Flynn’s house, a bed slipped into the room, complete with small bar, icebox and the top sheet turned back, as the ceiling mirror rolled away to to reveal the heavens through a magnolia tree in flower. She was more a faux-leopard-skin couch gal herself.
In all, there were 150-odd films (“Have you seen them all, honey?” she inquired of a gushy interviewer), including an artistic production shot in Italy but never released as they lost the soundtrack, and a wicked scene in A Portrait of a Lady (1996), where she nearly upstaged John Gielgud on his “death-bed”. She was a success on Broadway in Minnie’s Boys (1970), playing the mother of the Marx Brothers, had variable reviews for her off-Broadway playwriting debut, One Night Stands of a Noisy Passenger (1970), and recurred as TV sitcom Roseanne Barr’s grandmother in kaftan and watch cap. Roseanne did look and sound as if she had inherited granmaw’s motormouth.
Towards the end, Winters lunched with her camp court almost daily in Los Angeles’s Silver Spoon Schwabs, complaining about the hernias those basques had caused and recalling Marilyn fondly. She transported a visiting journalist around town in her limo – “See,” she said, pointing to her gold star in the pavement, “I’m there with all the communists.”
“I could face respectability over 60,” she confided, secure among multiple chins, fur coats and Impressionist paintings: ” I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful … But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience.” She is survived by Jerry DeFord, her companion since the early 1980s and her daughter.
· Shelley Winters (Shirley Schrift), actor, born August 18 1922; died January 14 2006
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Seemingly born atop the Hollywood A-list, actress Glenn Close established herself as one of the finest performers of her generation – or any other, for that matter – with her first film, “The World According to Garp” (1982), for which she earned the first of several Oscar nominations. For the rest of the 1980s, Close quickly became a top leading lady who eventually achieved infamy with her portrayal of a psychotic woman avenging a lost affair in one of the decade’s most notorious movies, “Fatal Attraction” (1987). Unlike most film stars, however, Close was more than happy to oscillate from the big screen to television to Broadway; often with even more critical and award success. She played Queen Gertrude to Mel Gibson’s “Hamlet” (1990) and voiced Cruella de Vil in the animated classic, “101 Dalmatians” (1996). Close earned critical acclaim as well as Tony Awards for her work on Broadway in “Death and the Maiden” (1992) and the musical “Sunset Boulevard” (1994). Following quality turns in “Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her” (2000) and “Nine Lives” (2005), Close was Emmy-nominated for her portrayal of Capt. Monica Rawling on season four of “The Shield” (FX, 2002-08). But it was her performances as high-stakes litigator Patty Hewes on “Damages” (FX/Audience Network, 2007- ) that proved to be her most significant small screen role. Regardless of the medium, Close remained one of Hollywood’s premier actresses.
Born on March 19, 1947 in tony Greenwich, CT, Close was raised one of four children in an upper-middle class family headed by William Close, a surgeon whose affiliation with the conservative salvation group Moral Re-Armament led him to relocate the family to the Belgian Congo where he ran several medical clinics. At the time, Close was 13 years old and subsequently received her education at boarding schools in Switzerland, followed by Choate Rosemary Hall back in Greenwich. During high school, she took an interest in theater, joining a repertory group called The Fingernails. After she graduated, Close spent several years touring with the folk-singing group Up With People, before leaving to attend the drama school at William and Mary in Virginia. Close graduated late from William and Mary – she was 27 years-old – but immediately found work in New York City with the Ph nix Theatre Company, appearing in “Love for Love” and “The Member of the Wedding.” Close was cast as Mary Tudor in the Richard Rodgers’ musical “Rex” (1976), then jumped to television, making her small screen debut as a homewrecker in the made for television movie, “Too Far to Go” (NBC, 1979).
Close made her breakthrough on Broadway with a supporting role in the musical “Barnum” (1980), playing the patient wife of the famed 19th century showman. Thanks to her performance, acclaimed director George Roy Hill became aware of Close – he was attracted to her sense of composure, the exact quality he was looking for in an actress to play Jenny Fields in “The World According to Garp” (1982). Though nervous about starring in her first feature after years on stage, Close nonetheless was spot-on in her performance as the prim, hard-nosed mother of an aspiring novelist (Robin Williams), whose own novel about her life raising a son as a single mother becomes a feminist rallying cry. Due to her impressive work, Close earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, triggering a run for several Oscar nods in the 1980s – including three consecutive – that ultimately netted zero wins. She next co-starred in the Baby Boomer ensemble comedy-drama “The Big Chill” (1983), earning her second Oscar nod for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as one of seven college friends gathered together to reminisce after the suicide of one of their own.
A third Oscar nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role followed her performance in “The Natural” (1984), starring as the childhood sweetheart of a former bush league ballplayer (Robert Redford) finally getting his chance to play in the big leagues. Returning to Broadway, Close won a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Mike Nichols’ staging of Tom Stoppard’s romantic comedy, “The Real Thing.” With firm footing on stage, television and the silver screen, Close was able to alternate between the three throughout the 1980s, all the while attempting to undertake parts with depth on her path to becoming one of Hollywood’s top leading ladies. In the groundbreaking TV special “Something About Amelia” (ABC, 1984), Close played a woman who gradually comes to realize her husband (Ted Danson) has been having sex with their daughter (Roxanne Zal). She kept alive her award nomination streak, earning a nod for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Special. Her status as a lead actress was confirmed with a solid performance as a lawyer romantically entangled with a client in “Jagged Edge” (1985) and as a woman sharing her home and her body with a ghost of a silent film star (Ruth Gordon) in “Maxie” (1985).
While she steadily earned a reputation as an actress of the highest caliber, Close gained a great deal of notoriety for what became her most controversial role. In “Fatal Attraction” (1987), Adrian Lyne’s dynamic and enormously successful psychological thriller, Close achieved infamy playing Alex Forrest, an obsessive woman with whom a family man (Michael Douglas) engages in a one night stand when the wife and kids are away. When the married man tries to break off the affair, Alex starts to terrorize him and his family in a bizarre and psychotic attempt to win back his affections. For two-thirds of the film, “Fatal Attraction” was a compelling look at the cause and effect of infidelity, until the final third when it digressed into standard revenge thriller territory, complete with a double-scare death scene straight from the horror movie cliché handbook. It was later revealed that Lyne was forced to reshoot the original ending – which depicted Alex committing suicide and framing the cheating husband for murder – after test audiences rejected it. Close later expressed her disappointment with the reshoot, claiming that her portrayal of a damaged, but sympathetic character was undermined by the more fantastical redo. Nonetheless, Close earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role and a whole lot of notoriety, as people often acted afraid of her on the streets, so powerful and frightening was her portrayal.
Close followed her “Fatal Attraction” performance as a sexually manipulative aristocrat in the “Dangerous Liaisons” (1988), which again earned her a nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role. She brought surprising sympathy to the role of the pathetic, frivolous society matron Sunny von Bulow in the darkly humorous “Reversal of Fortune” (1990), then proved rather effective as a youthful Gertrude to Mel Gibson’s mature “Hamlet” (1990). In 1991, Close made her first foray into TV movie-producing with “Sarah, Plain and Tall” (CBS, 1991), a touching drama that depicted Close as a woman who answers a widowed farmer’s newspaper ad for a new wife and mother to his two children. Close earned two Emmy Award nominations; one for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or Special; the other, as a producer for Outstanding Drama or Comedy Special and Miniseries. Back on stage, she won her second Tony Award for her performance on Broadway in the politically charged “Death and the Maiden” (1992), though she subsequently lost out to Sigourney Weaver when the play was adapted to film.
Because of the popularity and success of “Sarah, Plain and Tall,” Close revived her role of replacement wife and mother in “Skylark” (CBS, 1993). On the big screen, Close seemed to be settling into a bit of a rut, starring in “House of the Spirits” (1993), a sweeping melodrama that tried in vain to mimic the sexual tensions of “Dangerous Liaisons” and “Reversal of Fortune.” She bounced back with “The Paper” (1984), playing the power-hungry publisher of a New York City tabloid that is host to an assorted cast of characters, including a beleaguered editor (Michael Keaton) struggling between family and career, an editor (Robert Duvall) with prostate cancer, and an alcoholic columnist (Randy Quaid) who winds up passing out on the couch. Attempting her first leading musical role, Close played silent screen star Norma Desmond in the Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway musical “Sunset Boulevard.” In reincarnating this larger-than-life character immortalized onscreen by Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder’s 1950 classic, Close achieved a personal and creative triumph, though not without controversy. Patti LuPone, who originated the role in London, had been slated for the Broadway production. But Close received better reviews for her characterization in Los Angeles, leading to her taking over the New York production. Though some critics found fault with her singing and over-the-top acting, Close nonetheless won her third Tony Award for Best Actress.
On the heels of her Tony triumph, Close won her first Emmy for her nuanced portrayal of a real-life U.S. Army colonel who disclosed her lesbianism and fought to stay in the military in “Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story” (NBC, 1995). Perhaps as a nod to Norma Desmond, Close chewed the scenery as a Nancy Reagan-like first lady in Tim Burton’s ode to 1950s sci-fi B-movies, “Mars Attacks!” (1996). She carried the Desmond vibe over to her depiction of Cruella De Vil in Disney’s live action take on the cartoon classic, “101 Dalmatians” (1996), a role she also reprised in the sequel “102 Dalmatians” (2000). Close delivered an emotional performance as a mother whose AIDS-afflicted son has come home to die in “In the Gloaming” (HBO, 1997), a role that earned her a fifth Emmy Award nomination. After playing a female prisoner of war in “Paradise Road” (1997), she was a U.S. vice president coping with the kidnapping of the president in Wolfgang Petersen’s goofy action thriller, “Air Force One” (1997).
After a third go-round playing a fill-in wife and mother in “Sarah, Plain and Tall: Winter’s Edge” (CBS, 1999), Close further proved her ability for depicting forceful women in Robert Altman’s sunny ensemble comedy “Cookie’s Fortune” (1999), playing the niece of a widowed family matriarch (Patricia Neal) who discovers her body after a suicide and rearranges the death scene to make it look like a murder. In “Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her” (2000), Rodrigo Garcia’s engaging anthology of loosely connected stories about five very different women dealing with various life problems, Close played a successful physician in the segment “This is Dr. Keener,” who cares for an ailing mother while contending with her own loneliness. When a remarkably accurate tarot card reader (Calista Flockhart) makes a house call, Dr. Keener begins to assess the true emptiness of her own condition.
Despite Close’s venerable career as a lead actress, she recognized that major roles were harder to come by for an actress her age. Further retreating into independent and low-budget films seemed to confirm that her time as a top box office draw was at an end. She did, however, experience a rebirth on television, where she once again found challenging roles. In “The Ballad of Lucy Whipple” (CBS, 2001), Close played a widowed mother of three who travels to California during the Gold Rush of 1850 to start a new life, clashing with her spirited 13-year-old daughter who d s not share her mother’s dream. Meanwhile, she tackled the role of Nelly Forbush in an adaptation of the famed musical “South Pacific” (ABC 2001); had a hilariously high camp guest spot as an eccentric photographer on “Will & Grace” (NBC, 1998-2006), which earned her yet another Emmy nod; and starred in “Brush with Fate” (CBS, 2003), an adaptation of Susan Vreelands’ collection of stories that trace the history and ownership of what may be an undiscovered painting by 17th century Dutch painter Jan Vermeer.
Back on the big screen, she essayed a couple of supporting roles, appearing as a dutiful mother obsessively tending to her comatose son in “The Safety of Objects” (2001), then as an American academic in Paris who quietly observes her naive assistant (Kate Hudson) have an affair with a married Frenchman in “Le Divorce” (2003). In 2005, Close tackled a role made famous by Katharine Hepburn, playing Eleanor of Aquitaine in “The Lion in Winter” (Showtime, 2004), the wife of King Henry II (Patrick Stewart) who is newly released from prison after staging a coup. Close earned her first Golden Globe Award for this dynamic portrayal, winning the category of Best Performance by an Actress in a Miniseries or a Motion Picture Made for Television. She also chalked up Best Actress wins at the Screen Actors Guild Awards and the Emmys. Close followed with a part in the ensemble “Strip Search” (HBO, 2004), a look at how crime and punishment had changed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Taking a rare foray into a full-blown comedy, Close grandly hit all the right notes as too-perfect Claire Wellington, the grand dame of the Stepford society of subservient spouses in the otherwise failed satirical remake of the thriller, “The Stepford Wives” (2004). The actress then took on her first regular role in a television series, joining the cast of the gritty crime drama “The Shield” (FX, 2002-08) in its fourth season, playing the shrewd new precinct commander Capt. Monica Rawling, who offered redemption to the series’ antihero Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis). Producers credited a 30 percent rise in viewers due to her presence, but the actress chose to depart at the conclusion of her first season so she could be closer to her East Coast family. Nonetheless, she earned heaps of critical praise, the admiration of the regular cast, and an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 2005. Stepping back into the more comfortable realm of character-driven drama, she appeared in the weighty “Heights” (2005), playing the mother of a New York City photographer (Elizabeth Banks) who begins to rethink her open marriage, while her daughter has second thoughts about her pending nuptials with her lawyer fiancé (James Marsden).
Comfortable shifting from television to film, as she had been throughout most of her career, Close gave a typically strong performance in the ensemble anthology “Nine Lives” (2005), playing a widowed mother whose life has been taken over by her precocious young daughter (Dakota Fanning). After matriarchal supporting roles in “The Chumscrubber” (2005) and “Evening” (2007), Close made a triumphant return to series television with “Damages” (FX, 2007- ), playing the simultaneously revered and reviled Patty Hewes, a high-stakes litigator in New York City who takes on a bright and ambitious protégé (Rose Byrne) during a major class action lawsuit targeting a ruthless corporate CEO (Ted Danson). Hewes shows her protégé exactly what it takes to win at all costs, making it clear that often fortunes – and lives – are at stake. Close’s gritty portrayal earned the actress a Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Drama and an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, both in 2008. Close repeated the triumph when she won the Emmy in the same category the following year. While “Damages” found new life on the Audience Network after being let go by FX, Close found the time to return to movies. She starred in Rodrigo García’s indie drama, “Albert Nobbs” (2011), in which she played a 19th century woman who disguises herself as a man to gain employment in poverty-stricken Ireland, only spend the next 30 years growing increasingly confused about her own identity. The role earned Close a Oscar and Independent Spirit Award nominations for Best Actress.
Thed above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
