Anybody who has seen the original 1960 Broadway production of Lerner and Lowe’s Camelot or heard the album of the show will never forget the two showstopping numbers delivered by Robert Goulet, who has died while awaiting a lung transplant, aged 73. The handsome singer with the rich baritone voice makes his first entrance as Lancelot singing the self-mocking C’est Moi, but later he sings the hauntingly beautiful If Ever I Would Leave You.Unfortunately, in Joshua Logan’s 1967 movie version, Franco Nero was inexplicably cast and his singing voice dubbed, thus depriving future generations of enjoying Goulet’s standout performance.
Goulet, whom Variety magazine described as “having the looks and the speaking and singing voice of the ideal Lancelot,” seemed assured of a bright future in the musical genre. Judy Garland described him as a living 8 x 10 glossy. Alas, at the time of Camelot, the sort of musical that required Goulet’s kind of powerful modulated singing was on the wane.
Camelot was the high point of his career, but he won a Tony for best actor in a musical as the paterfamilias in Kander and Ebb’s The Happy Time (1968) and, in three television productions, played Tommy Albright in Brigadoon (1966), Billy Bigelow in Carousel (1967) and Fred Graham/Petruchio in Kiss Me Kate (1968), opposite his second wife Carol Lawrence, who had played Maria in the original Broadway production of West Side Story. Around the same period, Goulet started to appear in films, mainly 1960s Hollywood farces such as Honeymoon Hotel and I’d Rather Be Rich (both 1964), after having lent his voice to the feline character of Jaune Tom, “the best mouse catcher in all of Paris”, wooing Mewsette (voiced by Judy Garland) in Gay Purr-ee (1962).
Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Goulet was the son of a textile mill guard and fine amateur singer of French-Canadian extraction. After his father died, when Robert was in his teens, the family moved to Alberta, eventually settling on his grandfather’s farm 200 miles north of Edmonton. At 16, Goulet was singing with the Edmonton Symphony. His performance in Handel’s Messiah earned him a scholarship to the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto.
It wasn’t long before he was appearing in Showtime, Canada’s leading television variety programme, when he was dubbed “Canada’s first matinee idol”. After three years, he left for New York. A theatrical agent recommended him to the librettist Alan Jay Lerner, and composer Frederick Loewe for, Camelot.
Goulet recorded more than 50 albums, made frequent TV appearances and, in 1982, was named Las Vegas entertainer of the year. His rather old-fashioned cabaret show led to him parodying himself as the consummate lounge singer in Louis Malle’s Atlantic City (1980). “If you can’t laugh at yourself, you’re a fool,” Goulet remarked.
He later took himself off in an episode of The Simpsons, arriving at Bart’s treehouse casino:
Goulet: “Are you sure this is the casino? Mr Burns’ casino? I think I should call my manager …”
Nelson: “Your manager says for you to shut up!”
Goulet: “Vera said that?”
Vera was Vera Novak, a Yugoslavian-born writer and artist who became Goulet’s business manager and whom he married in 1982, immediately after his divorce from Lawrence. In her 1990 memoir Carol Lawrence: the Backstage Story, she described Goulet as having a quick temper, mood swings and a drink problem. Goulet’s comment on the book was: “She was terribly angry because when I left I didn’t leave her for another woman.” Of his drinking: “I never was a run-down-in-the-gutter alcoholic. I never missed a performance.”
Goulet returned to Broadway a few times, playing King Arthur in a 1993 revival of Camelot, and took over one of the leads in La Cage aux Folles in 2005. His last performance was in the one-man show A Man and his Music, in September in Syracuse, New York.
He is survived by a daughter from his first marriage and two sons by Lawrence.
· Robert Gerard Goulet, singer and actor, born November 26 1933; died October 30 2007
The American actor James Farentino was endowed with the dashing good looks that should have made him a Hollywood leading man, but he might be remembered more for the women in his life than his screen roles. Four times married, he was also close to being four times divorced. At various times, he and his final wife, Stella, started legal action to end the marriage on the grounds of “irreconcilable differences”, only to withdraw the petitions.
Before his last marriage he had a five-year relationship with Tina Sinatra, daughter of the legendary crooner Frank. In 1994, after it had ended, he was put on probation and ordered to undergo counselling for stalking her, making harassing phone calls and violating a restraining order. Three years earlier, he had made headlines when he was arrested by police who intercepted a package of cocaine being sent to his Canadian hotel room while he was shooting the television film Miles from Nowhere. Then,in 2010, he was arrested for misdemeanour battery after allegedly trying to remove a man physically from his Hollywood home.
These torrid off-screen antics overshadowed Farentino’s acting career and gradually saw it dry up. Before the rot set in, his face was known to worldwide television audiences as Dr Nick Toscanni (1981-82) in the glossy soap Dynasty. In trying to exact revenge on Blake Carrington (John Forsythe) for his role in the death of Nick’s brother, the psychiatrist flirted with the oil tycoon’s wife, Krystle, and bedded his married daughter, Fallon. Later, the actor was seen in a cameo role as Ray Ross, the estranged father reunited with Dr Doug Ross (George Clooney), in several 1996 episodes of the medical series ER.
Farentino was born in New York in 1938, where his father was a clothing designer. He dropped out of high school and took various jobs before training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. His stage début came on Broadway with the role of Pedro in The Night of the Iguana (Royale Theatre, 1961-62). He returned to Broadway in revivals of A Streetcar Named Desire (as Stanley Kowalski, Vivian Beaumont Theatre, 1973) and Death of a Salesman (as Biff, Circle in the Square Theatre, 1975).
However, he made his biggest impression on television, first taking one-off character roles in series such as Naked City (1962), The Defenders (1963), Ben Casey (1965) and The Fugitive (1967). Then he was signed up as one of the last contract performers at Universal Studios. He popped up in The Virginian (two roles, 1966, 1970), A Man Called Ironside (1967) and many other programmes, before spending three years as Neil Darrell, one of the trio of lawyers, in The Bold Ones (1969-72). He followed it by playing the globe-trotting private eye Jefferson Keyes in the short-lived Cool Million (1972-73).
Farentino was nominated for aSupporting Actor Emmy for his portrayal of Simon Peter in the epic Anglo-Italian series Jesus of Nazareth (1977). Four years later, he acted Juan Peron in the television film Evita Peron, with Faye Dunaway miscast as the heroine. Then came another starring role, Frank Chaney – alongside a hi-tech policehelicopter – in the crime drama Blue Thunder (1984), but the series was axed after a rival drama, Airwolf, took off to greater heights.
Farentino acted the managing editor Frank DeMarco in Mary (1985-86), but the star, Mary Tyler Moore, asked for the Chicago newspaper sitcom to be taken off after only 13 episodes. His next sitcom co-star, in Julie (1992), was Julie Andrews, who played an actress leaving the bright lights of Broadway for Iowa to marry a vet, but that series was also short-lived.
As television appearances became rarer, Farentino had a short run in the soap Melrose Place as Mr Beck, a shady character seen holding Amanda Woodward (Heather Locklear) hostage in a desolate cabin and demanding a multi-million-dollar ransom.
Most of the films in which the actor appeared were totally forgettable, although he won a Golden Globe as Most Promising Newcomer for his role in the comedy The Pad and How to Use It (1966) as Ted, who gives his friend Bob (Brian Bedford) moral support on a first date but ends up with the young woman, Doreen (Julie Sommars), himself. Later, Farentino was seen alongside Kirk Douglas and Martin Sheen in the time-travel fantasy The Final Countdown (1980).
He had only one screen role in his last 10 years, in the 2006 TV film Drive. “I’ve got a resumé that could choke a horse,” he said, curiously, in 2003. “I’m impressed by it. Producers who are casting people, they’re all in their 20s now. You show it to somebody in the motion picture industry or television, they don’t know and they don’t care.”
James Ferrantino (James Farentino), actor: born New York 24 February 1938; married 1962 Elizabeth Ashley (marriage dissolved 1965), 1966 Michele Lee Dusick (one son; marriage dissolved 1982), 1985 Deborah Mullowney (marriage dissolved 1988), 1994 Stella Torres (one son); died Los Angeles 24 January 2012.
The daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Virgil Gates,[2] Nancy Gates was born in Dallas, Texas, Gates grew up in nearby Denton, and was described as “a child wonder.”A 1932 newspaper article about an Easter program at Robert E. Lee School noted, “Nancy Gates, presenting a soft-shoe number, will open the style show.” That same year, she had a part in the Denton Kiddie Revue.
In 1935,[6] she appeared in the production “A Kiss for Cinderella,” which starred Brenda Marshall and a minstrel show that included Ann Sheridan, both of whom were from Denton. She was in show business before she finished high school, having her own radio program on WFAA in Dallas[ for two years while she was a student at Denton High School,[ from which she graduated. Musically oriented, Gates was featured as a singer in a 1942 concert by the North Texas Teachers College stage band.
Gates entered acting at a young age, receiving a contract with RKO at the age of 15, which required court approval because of her status as a minor.[ Orson Welles screen-tested her for a role in the 1942 film The Magnificent Ambersons. Although she did not get the role, which went to Anne Baxter, the test paved the way for her future entry into film. That same year she had her first credited role, in The Great Gildersleeve. In 1943 she went on contract with RKO, her first film with them being Hitler’s Children that same year. She began receiving roles in mostly B-movies, many of which were westerns or sci-fi, eventually receiving lead roles as the heroine. In 1948 she starred opposite Eddie Dean in Check Your Guns, and in 1949 she played alongside Jim Bannon, Marin Sais, and Emmett Lynn in an episode of the Red Ryder serial, titled Roll, Thunder, Roll. She would star in several other films over the next ten years, especially in westerns like Comanche Station (1960), and in support roles, most notably in two Frank Sinatra films, Some Came Running and Suddenly.
In total Gates starred or co-starred in 34 films and serials. She retired from acting in 1969.
Suddenly, poster, from left: Nancy Gates, Frank Sinatra on poster art, 1954. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Nancy Gates. Obituary in “Daily Telegraph” in 2019.
Nancy Gates, who has died aged 93, was an actress who began her career on radio, hosting her own show in Dallas while still in her early teens.
Signed to RKO at the age of 15, she worked in melodramas and crime thrillers, and was often cast as the female lead in Westerns on film and on television.
Born in Dallas, Texas, on February 1 1926, Nancy Jane Gates attended Robert E Lee School, Denton, and was described by a local newspaper as “a child wonder”. At the age of four, she was named official sweetheart of the Texas College band.
In 1933 her mother enrolled her in the Denton Dance School, where she was given a solo as part of the Denton Kiddie Revue and had a feature role in the play A Kiss for Cinderella, followed by a minstrel show in which she and a fellow “Denton Kiddie”, the future femme fatale Ann Sheridan, also starred.
By the time she entered Denton High School, Nancy already had her own radio show.
After a brief spell at the University of Oklahoma she was offered a contract by RKO Pictures. She made her debut in the jungle action adventure, The Tuttles of Tahiti (1942), starring Charles Laughton.
That year Orson Welles tested her for Lucy Morgan in The Magnificent Ambersons, but felt she was a little immature for the role, which he gave to Anne Baxter; he gave Nancy Gates a bit part.
Nancy Gates
She had her first screen kiss in the 1942 comedy The Great Gildersleeve, after she asked the director Gordon Douglas to give her character more scope.
The following year she appeared in Hitler’s Children, Edward Dmytryk’s propaganda film about the Hitler Youth, and was teamed with Charles Laughton again for the Second World War drama This Land is Mine. She was also in the sequel Gildersleeve’s Bad Day.
There followed a run of B-movies, including the comedy Bride by Mistake and The Master Race, about a Nazi agent who infiltrates a recently liberated Belgian town and tries in vain to turn the inhabitants against the Allies.
By the mid-to-late 1940s, she had slipped down the cast list, though she was busy on radio, and in 1946-47 was in the soap opera Masquerade.
In 1948 she married William Hayes, a Hollywood lawyer and pilot, whom she met when she was a passenger on one of his flights. Away from RKO, Nancy Gates freelanced, taking small roles in such films as the Cecil B DeMille circus epic The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and the Joan Crawford drama Torch Song (1953).
By the middle of the 1950s she was concentrating more on television, though she did enjoy the distinction of shooting a ruthless killer played by Frank Sinatra in the 1954 noir thriller Suddenly. On the small screen there were parts in such shows as Maverick, Rawhide, Laramie, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Perry Mason.
In 1956 came perhaps her most memorable film, alongside Hugh Marlowe, the early sci-fi adventure World Without End, about a group of astronauts caught in a time warp who find themselves on a future planet Earth populated by mutants.
The same year she was in the crime drama Wetbacks, starring Lloyd Bridges, and the crime drama Death of a Scoundrel with George Sanders and Zsa Zsa Gabor, before being reunited two years later with Frank Sinatra in Some Came Running, co-starring Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine.
Nancy Gates retired in 1969 to spend more time with her family.
Her husband died in 1992 and she is survived by their twin daughters and two sons, who are both Hollywood producers.
In the first three series of the television show Mission: Impossible (1966-69), Martin Landau, who has died aged 89, played the ace impersonator Rollin Hand, one of the specialists used by the Impossible Missions Force. Hand was described as a “man of a million faces”. Landau’s own face was instantly recognisable, with its haunted eyes, wide mouth and furrowed brow; even when he broke into a smile, he could seem to be frowning.
Landau was disguised beneath heavy makeup for his best known film role, as the horror actor Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood (1994), Tim Burton’s biopic of the cross-dressing director of trashy movies. Landau’s Lugosi is a tragicomic creation: his wife has left him, he is addicted to morphine and most of Hollywood thinks he is dead. “This business, this town,” he sighs, “it chews you up and then spits you out. I’m just an ex-bogeyman.”
Landau would have known where Lugosi was coming from. After Mission: Impossible, he had been largely typecast, appearing in genre fare with titles that would have shamed Wood himself (such as The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island, 1981).
But his career was rehabilitated by three films for quality directors: Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Ed Wood. All three earned Landau Oscar nominations for best supporting actor; the third resulted in victory (over Samuel L Jackson and Paul Scofield, among others). Lugosi was, he said in his speech, “the part of my life”.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Martin was the son of Jewish parents, Morris, an Austrian-born machinist who attempted a career as a singer, and his wife, Selma. After attending James Madison high school and Pratt Institute, he was employed from the age of 17 as a cartoonist on the Daily News. He worked on Billy Rose’s syndicated column Pitching Horseshoes and assisted Gus Edson on the comic strip The Gumps.
Although offered promotion at 22, he decided to leave the newspaper and concentrate on acting. He juggled a dozen roles in summer stock in New England and auditioned for the Actors Studio in New York: Landau and Steve McQueenwere the only two hopefuls admitted from a batch of 2,000 applicants in 1955. That year was overshadowed by the death in a road accident of Landau’s best friend, James Dean, whom he had met at a TV audition years before.
At the Actors Studio, Landau was taught by the best – Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, Harold Clurman – and began a relationship with a fellow student, Marilyn Monroe. They split up after several months; Landau found Monroe too complicated and was defeated by her frequent costume changes on their dates. When he became a teacher himself, Landau’s students included Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Huston and Harry Dean Stanton. With Mark Rydell, he later ran the Hollywood-based branch of the Actors Studio, set up in 1967.
After a handful of TV appearances, Landau broke into film when Alfred Hitchcock saw him on stage in Los Angeles in a touring production of Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night and cast him opposite Cary Grant in North By Northwest (1959). When Landau asked why he had been chosen for the role of James Mason’s right-hand man, Hitchcock replied: “Martin, you have a circus going on inside you.” Landau decided to make the character gay, adding an extra dimension to the relationship between boss and henchman.
He came to specialise in a particular type of unsettling, debonair heavy. In the epic Cleopatra (1963), Landau was General Rufio, hailing Rex Harrison’s Caesar and doing his dirty work (consulting the auguries, finding the rest of the decapitated Pompey) and later memorably pleading with a bathing Elizabeth Taylor from behind a screen. He had a considerable amount of screen time, yet claimed his best scenes were left on the cutting-room floor.Later came a part as the Jewish high priest Caiaphas in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) and horse operas big and small, including Nevada Smith (1966 ) with McQueen. In the comedy western The Hallelujah Trail (1965) he was a deadpan Sioux tribesman, Chief Walks-Stooped-Over, leading an attack on a wagon train in a fierce sandstorm.
Mission: Impossible brought him primetime exposure and an opportunity to work with his wife, the actor Barbara Bain, whom he had married in 1957. The pilot episode found Rollin Hand disguised as a dictator bent on nuclear destruction. After more than 70 episodes, three Emmy nominations and a Golden Globes award, Landau left the series after a contract dispute.
In They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (1970), he was a preacher caught up in a murder investigation undertaken by Sidney Poitier. The film gave him a fiery sermon, delivered with wild eyes and abundant sweat before a packed congregation.
He and Bain moved to Britain to star in the TV series Space: 1999 (1975-77), created by the husband-and-wife team of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. Landau was John Koenig, the commander of Moonbase Alpha, a character with integrity, humanity and authority. He was proud of how topical events were mirrored in the plots (one episode paralleled Henry Kissinger’s role in the Middle East) but he felt the series became increasingly silly.
After leaving the show, Landau drifted in disappointing material for 10 years. Then came Tucker: The Man and His Dream and a role to savour. Landau excelled as Abe, a financier who hustles up the money for an engineer, Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges), to create “the car of tomorrow, today”. Previously, Landau’s height had mostly been imposing. As Abe, he walked with a hunch, as if carrying the weight of his past. Always complaining, Abe is the antithesis of the exuberant Tucker – the same dynamic would exist between Landau and Johnny Depp’s characters in Ed Wood.
It was not a box-office hit, but Coppola’s film put Landau back on the map and he was rewarded with a rich and unusually large role in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Allen cast Landau as Judah Rosenthal, who intercepts a letter from his mistress to his wife and, after grappling with his conscience, sanctions his mobster brother to arrange a professional hit. Judah is an ophthalmologist who feels the “eyes of God” upon him; and Landau’s troubled gaze, upon hearing that his brother has taken care of the situation, is the film’s defining image. Offset by a comic plot involving Allen and Alan Alda, Landau’s performance is full of anxiety and panic. Unusually for an Allen film, Landau was shown the whole script before filming began (Allen’s actors often just see their section). He told Allen that viewers must be able to identify with Judah, and the character was adapted accordingly.
Another challenging part, as the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal in the TV movie Max and Helen (1990), earned him a phone call from Wiesenthal: “I have something to say to you. You were perfect.” After big-budget, bland choices, such as Sliver (1993) and Intersection (1994), Ed Wood gave Landau a dream role, if a daunting one.
“It’s a Hungarian morphine addict alcoholic who has mood swings,” he said. “That would be hard enough, but it has to be Bela Lugosi!” Ten years earlier, Landau had played Dracula on stage with the same script that had been used for Lugosi’s theatrical performance as Dracula of the 1920s. Not only did Landau learn a Hungarian accent for Ed Wood, but he spoke the dialogue as if trying to conceal his heavy accent – just as Lugosi had.
After playing Geppetto in a pair of Pinocchio films (1996, 1999) and appearing in the 1998 film of the TV series The X-Files, he took a role in the Capra-esque The Majestic (2001), set against the backdrop of Hollywood in the 50s. On TV, he was Abraham in an all-star biblical epic, In the Beginning (2000), and had recurring roles in Without a Trace and Entourage that brought him Emmy nominations. His greatest later project was the stop-motion animated film Frankenweenie (2012), which reunited him with Burton.
With a heavy accent, Landau was the voice of the sinister science teacher Mr Rzykruski, who terrifies his pupils and has shades of the actor’s knockout performance as Lugosi. In Remember (2015), he played an Auschwitz survivor who helps Christopher Plummer with his revenge mission to track down a former Nazi officer.
Landau and Bain divorced in 1993. He is survived by their daughters, Susan, a writer and producer, and Juliet, an actor.
•Martin Landau, actor, born 20 June 1928; died 15 July 2017
Frank Morrison Spillane (March 9, 1918 – July 17, 2006), better known as Mickey Spillane, was an American crime novelist, whose stories often feature his signature detective character, Mike Hammer. More than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally. Spillane was also an occasional actor, once even playing Hammer himself
Mickey Spillane obituary in The Guardian in 2006.
Pulp writer whose tales of tough guys and cute broads made him the bestselling novelist of the 20th century
‘Women,” he claimed in later life, “liked the name Mickey.” Other accounts suggest that Michael was the middle name his Catholic father had him baptised under; Morrison was the name his Protestant mother put on his birth certificate. Few at his fraught christening would have foreseen the arrival of the 20th century’s bestselling novelist, Mickey Spillane, who has died aged 88.
His father, John Joseph Spillane, was an Irish-American bartender. Young Frank was brought up in the “very tough” neighbourhood of Elizabeth, New Jersey. Under the superintendence of his mother, Catherine, the Spillane home was less tough. He claimed to have read all Melville and Dumas before he was 11. After Erasmus Hall high school, Brooklyn, he went to Kansas State College (now Fort Hays State University), starred briefly on the football field and dropped out. In the de rigueur way, he kicked around in the depression 1930s, working for a while as a Long Island lifeguard – “women” liked that too.
In 1935 he began submitting work to “slick” (ie illustrated) magazines, “working my way down”, as he later recalled, “to the comic books: Captain Marvel, Captain America, Superman, Batman – you name it, I did them all.” It was, he thought, “a great training ground for writers. You couldn’t beat it.” Fast-order work would be Spillane’s speciality. I, the Jury (1947) was written in nine days. When the car containing his manuscript of The Body Lovers was stolen two decades later, he claimed to be only concerned about the loss of his wheels: “the missing manuscript just means another three days’ work.”
Spillane served in the US army airforce during the second world war, enlisting the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked in December 1941. By his own account, he flew fighter missions and taught cadets how to fly. In interviews he claimed two bullet wounds and a civilian knife scar sustained while working undercover with the FBI to break up a narcotics ring. On demobilisation he worked in Barnum and Bailey’s circus as a trampoline artist (the setting is used in his 1962 novel, The Girl Hunters) and claimed a professional proficiency with throwing knives. More profitably, he returned to writing.
Mike Hammer. Stacy Keach som Mike Hammer.
Story-magazines were losing ground to paperback originals – pulp novels selling to the masses at 25 cents. Spillane duly turned out I, the Jury. It drew on the hard-boiled, private investigator tradition pioneered by Black Mask magazine in the 1930s, although the most famous product of that coterie, Raymond Chandler, disdained Spillane as a writing gorilla: “pulp writing at its worst was never as bad as this stuff”.
Spillane himself acknowledged the influence of only one crime writer, the now-obscure John Carroll Daly, creator of the private eye Race Williams. He flaunted his lack of authorial polish, claiming (mischievously) never to introduce characters with moustaches or who drank cognac because he could not spell the words. I, the Jury introduced the series hero Mike Hammer, whose tough-talking, woman-beating, whisky-swilling machismo answered the needs of the postwar “male action” market.
Estimates suggest global sales of around 200 million. By 1980, seven of the top 15 all-time bestselling fiction titles in America were by Spillane. “People like them,” he blandly explained.
Hammer is less a detective than an ultra-violent vigilante. I, the Jury lays down the formula. Mike’s marine “buddy” Jack, who lost an arm saving Hammer’s life in the Pacific, is sadistically murdered. Hammer sets out to avenge him, skirting the niceties of the law, vowing to his friend’s corpse: “I’m going to get the louse that killed you. He won’t sit in the [electric] chair. He won’t hang. He will die exactly as you died, with a .45 slug in the gut, just a little below the belly button.” So it goes – even though “he” turns out to be a gorgeous “she”. Spillane astutely exploited the market he had created with Hammer with Vengeance Is Mine (1950), My Gun Is Quick (1950), The Big Kill (1951) and Kiss Me, Deadly (1952). All hit the mark.
It is never clear how Spillane’s hero supports himself – or how he pays Velda, his faithful secretary with the “million-dollar legs”. Prodigious cocksman though he is, Hammer respects Velda too much to take sexual advantage of her, although she loves him madly. “Broads” and “hoods” are never in short supply. Hammer is always outnumbered by the criminal enemy: “There are ten thousand mugs that hate me … they hate me because if they mess with me I shoot their damn heads off.”
The climax of a Mike Hammer narrative invariably features sadistic execution. The most hilarious is in Vengeance is Mine, which ends with the line (just before she/he gets it in the gut) “Juno was a Man!”. The link was often made between Spillane and Joe McCarthy, and over the years Hammer’s victims were as likely to be “reds” as “hoods”. In One Lonely Night (1951), the hero mows down 40 communists with a machine-gun (originally there were 80, but the publishers “thought that was too gory”).
Spillane regarded himself as a super-patriot, and was so regarded by others. John Wayne gave him a Jaguar XK140 for his anti-communism and Ayn Rand (author of Atlas Shrugged) commended his prose style to her disciples. Spillane’s patriotism was, however, always tinged with a pessimistic, quasi-religious sense of doom, and in the early 1960s he predicted a race war in America.
The Hammer novels are written as spoken monologue and are stylistically direct. Spillane had great faith in the slam-bang opening, believing that “the first page sells the book”. He claimed never to read galleys or rewrite. He had, however, an odd compulsiveness about punctuation, and once insisted that 50,000 copies of Kiss Me, Deadly be pulped after the comma was left out of the title.
The Hammer novels enjoyed new leases of life in film, radio, comic-strip and television adaptation. I, the Jury was filmed twice (1953, 1982), as were other Hammer books. The only film that has any distinction is Robert Aldrich’s exaggeratedly noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Spillane disliked it – not least because of the missing comma. Possessed of ruggedly good looks, he himself played Hammer in the film of The Girl Hunters (1963), turning in a commendable performance. He also played cameo roles in other films.
There were two successful television series based on Mike Hammer, the first in the late 1950s and the second, 1984-87, starring Stacy Keach in a semi-noir, 1950s setting, with Spillane’s sex and violence carefully bleached out.
As an author of pulp, Spillane’s guiding principle was that “violence will outsell sex every time”, but combined they will outsell everything. As part of the promotion for his novels he adopted a Hammeresque persona, which was transparently an act. He once told a British interviewer, “I always say never hit a woman when you can kick her.” When asked, “Is that the treatment you give Mrs Spillane?”, he primly replied, “We’re talking about fiction.”
There were three Mrs Spillanes. With the first, Mary Ann Pearce, whom he married in 1945, he had two sons and two daughters. Then, in 1964, he divorced her and married Sherri Malinou, a model 24 years his junior, who had caught his eye when she featured on the cover of one of his books. He called the agency and asked them to send over the blonde with the beautiful butt: “they sent her over, and I never sent her back.” He used her (nude) on the cover of The Erection Set (1972).
But the marriage broke up and, in 1983, he married Jane Rodgers Johnson; he had two stepchildren, Britt and Lisa. From 1954 he lived with his successive families at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where he sailed, fished and resolutely did not play golf. He always dressed in black and white; as in the novels, he liked to keep things simple.
There were two long gaps in Spillane’s career. The first followed his conversion to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1952, which led to a 10-year hiatus in novel writing (although he was earning substantially from subsidiary rights over this period). He returned to form in 1961 with what is reckoned to be the best of the Hammer novels, The Deep.
From then until 1972 the novels came out with the old facility, and Spillane created a new series hero for the decade, Tiger Mann – launched with Day of the Guns (1964). Mann is a “secret agent” and witnesses to Spillane’s sense that his thunder had been stolen by James Bond. He claimed not to be worried by Ian Fleming – “he’s a gourmet” – but the reading public, fickle as ever, never returned in their once record-breaking droves. The non-series books, The Erection Set and The Last Cop Out (1973), were heavily hyped but comparative failures, as were the second-generation Hammer books, The Twisted Thing (1966), The Body Lovers (1967) and Survival Zero (1970). Post-Lady Chatterley and post-Last Exit to Brooklyn, Spillane had lost the power to shock.
There was another gap, between 1973 and 1989, during which Spillane again wrote no full-length fiction, though he did try his hand (as a dare with his publisher) at two, well-received children’s books, The Day the Sea Rolled Back (1979) and The Ship That Never Was (1982). During this period he was famous to the American television-watching public for his appearance in Miller Lite beer commercials (though he was reported not to be a heavy drinker).
By the time he returned to Hammer fiction with The Killing Man (1989), Spillane was in his 70s, as were what remained of his faithful readers. A suspicious number of reprints of the early novels were in large-type; the Guardian reviewer of The Killing Man (1990) was kind but dismissive.
Spillane hammered on with Black Alley (1996), although by now his bolt was clearly shot. He reportedly suffered a stroke in his later years. Over the last decades (to his disgust, one suspects) he received increasing critical respect for his contributions to the idiom of crime fiction, and for having played a pioneer’s role in the postwar paperback revolution. His wife and children survive him.
· Frank Morrison ‘Mickey’ Spillane, writer, born March 9 1918; died July 17 2006
Ronad Bergan’s obituary in 2017 in “The Guardian” :
When Lola Albright appeared in Alexander Singer’s independent movie A Cold Wind in August (1961), critics and audiences wondered where she had been all their lives. But Albright, who has died aged 92, had been in pictures for 14 years, having made little impact, before getting rave reviews for her rare starring role in this cultish low-budget black-and-white sleeper. Filmgoers might have found it hard to believe that Albright, playing a love-starved 30-something stripper who seduces a teenage boy, was the same rather bland actor who had appeared as the obligatory blonde in several minor westerns in the 50s.
Some might have remembered her as one of three women distracting a ruthless, over-ambitious prizefighter (Kirk Douglas) in Mark Robson’s Champion (1949). Albright played a married sculptor who falls for the boxer. “I don’t fall in love easily,” she tells him, “but I’m going to be serious about this.” Unhappily, the boxer is bought off by her rich husband. Champion was Albright’s first relatively substantial role after four decorative bit parts at MGM.
She was born in Akron, Ohio, to Marion (nee Harvey) and John Albright, both gospel singers. Lola sang in public from an early age and, after school, worked as a receptionist and secretary at radio stations, while modelling on the side, which brought her to Hollywood at the age of 23. Her role in Champion did not lead to better parts, though she co-starred with the fine character actor Jack Carson in the slapstick comedy The Good Humor Man (1950). She and Carson were married a couple of years later.
Some of the better films in which Albright was glimpsed were Tulsa (1949), starring Susan Hayward; Silver Whip (1953), in which she played the saloon singer girlfriend of a gunslinger(Dale Robertson); and The Tender Trap (1955), in which she was one of the many beauties trying to trap a happy-go-lucky bachelor (Frank Sinatra) into marriage. One of her few leading roles, in which she managed to keep a straight face, was as a schoolteacher, some of whose pupils turn to stone, in the silly sci-fi movie The Monolith Monsters (1957).
Much more rewarding were Albright’s TV appearances. In Peter Gunn (1958-61), she portrayed a sultry singer at a smoky jazz club, Mother’s, where her sophisticated gumshoe boyfriend (Craig Stevens) hangs out when he’s not tracking down villains. The series gave her a chance to sing jazz evergreens such as How High the Moon.
This was followed by her role in A Cold Wind in August, as a divorcee hoping to give up stripping, who makes a play for her caretaker’s 17-year-old son (Scott Marlowe). She is touched when he asks her to “go steady”. But what starts off as mere flirtatiousness becomes more serious, and leads to heartbreak when he leaves her for a girl nearer his own age.
It gave a new impulse to her film career, leading to parts in Kid Galahad (1962), in which she is the hard-boiled long-time girlfriend of a cynical boxing manager (Gig Young), who takes on a reluctant fighter (Elvis Presley), and René Clément’s bizarre Joy House (1964), in which she is a wealthy widow with a passion for handing out meals to the poor, assisted by her cousin (Jane Fonda). Best of all was her poignant portrayal of the alcoholic cocktail waitress mother of an adolescent (Tuesday Weld) in George Axelrod’s Lord Love a Duck (1966), which won her the Silver Bear at the Berlin film festival.
Around the same time, she replaced Dorothy Malone, who had to undergo emergency surgery, as Constance Mackenzie on the prime-time TV soap opera Peyton Place (1965-66), which Albright called “one of the biggest challenges of my theatrical career”. Although she gave up her feature-film career in 1968, after the prurient The Impossible Years as the despairing wife of a befuddled husband (David Niven), parents of rock’n’rolling teens, she continued to appear regularly on TV until 1984.
Albright was married and divorced three times.
Albright obituary in “The Guardian” in 2017.
Ronad Bergan’s obituary in 2017 in “The Guardian” :
When Lola Albright appeared in Alexander Singer’s independent movie A Cold Wind in August (1961), critics and audiences wondered where she had been all their lives. But Albright, who has died aged 92, had been in pictures for 14 years, having made little impact, before getting rave reviews for her rare starring role in this cultish low-budget black-and-white sleeper. Filmgoers might have found it hard to believe that Albright, playing a love-starved 30-something stripper who seduces a teenage boy, was the same rather bland actor who had appeared as the obligatory blonde in several minor westerns in the 50s.
Some might have remembered her as one of three women distracting a ruthless, over-ambitious prizefighter (Kirk Douglas) in Mark Robson’s Champion (1949). Albright played a married sculptor who falls for the boxer. “I don’t fall in love easily,” she tells him, “but I’m going to be serious about this.” Unhappily, the boxer is bought off by her rich husband. Champion was Albright’s first relatively substantial role after four decorative bit parts at MGM.
She was born in Akron, Ohio, to Marion (nee Harvey) and John Albright, both gospel singers. Lola sang in public from an early age and, after school, worked as a receptionist and secretary at radio stations, while modelling on the side, which brought her to Hollywood at the age of 23. Her role in Champion did not lead to better parts, though she co-starred with the fine character actor Jack Carson in the slapstick comedy The Good Humor Man (1950). She and Carson were married a couple of years later.
Some of the better films in which Albright was glimpsed were Tulsa (1949), starring Susan Hayward; Silver Whip (1953), in which she played the saloon singer girlfriend of a gunslinger(Dale Robertson); and The Tender Trap (1955), in which she was one of the many beauties trying to trap a happy-go-lucky bachelor (Frank Sinatra) into marriage. One of her few leading roles, in which she managed to keep a straight face, was as a schoolteacher, some of whose pupils turn to stone, in the silly sci-fi movie The Monolith Monsters (1957).
Much more rewarding were Albright’s TV appearances. In Peter Gunn (1958-61), she portrayed a sultry singer at a smoky jazz club, Mother’s, where her sophisticated gumshoe boyfriend (Craig Stevens) hangs out when he’s not tracking down villains. The series gave her a chance to sing jazz evergreens such as How High the Moon.
This was followed by her role in A Cold Wind in August, as a divorcee hoping to give up stripping, who makes a play for her caretaker’s 17-year-old son (Scott Marlowe). She is touched when he asks her to “go steady”. But what starts off as mere flirtatiousness becomes more serious, and leads to heartbreak when he leaves her for a girl nearer his own age.
It gave a new impulse to her film career, leading to parts in Kid Galahad (1962), in which she is the hard-boiled long-time girlfriend of a cynical boxing manager (Gig Young), who takes on a reluctant fighter (Elvis Presley), and René Clément’s bizarre Joy House (1964), in which she is a wealthy widow with a passion for handing out meals to the poor, assisted by her cousin (Jane Fonda). Best of all was her poignant portrayal of the alcoholic cocktail waitress mother of an adolescent (Tuesday Weld) in George Axelrod’s Lord Love a Duck (1966), which won her the Silver Bear at the Berlin film festival.
Around the same time, she replaced Dorothy Malone, who had to undergo emergency surgery, as Constance Mackenzie on the prime-time TV soap opera Peyton Place (1965-66), which Albright called “one of the biggest challenges of my theatrical career”. Although she gave up her feature-film career in 1968, after the prurient The Impossible Years as the despairing wife of a befuddled husband (David Niven), parents of rock’n’rolling teens, she continued to appear regularly on TV until 1984.
Barry Brown (April 19, 1951 – June 25, 1978) was an American author, playwright and actor who performed on stage and in television dramas and feature films, notably as Frederick Winterbourne in Peter Bogdanovich‘s Daisy Miller (1974), adapted from the classic Henry James novella (1878). Bogdanovich praised Brown’s contribution to the film, describing him as “the only American actor you can believe ever read a book.”
BornBarry Brown in San Jose, California, he was the eldest child of Donald Bernard Brown and Vivian Brown (née Agrillo). His sister was the actress Marilyn Brown, who committed suicide in 1997 at the age of 44. His brother is the novelist James Brown (Final Performance, Hot Wire), who etched an intimate portrait of their dysfunctional family in his acclaimed memoir, The Los Angeles Diaries, published by HarperCollins in 2003.
Brown began his acting career as a child of five and took part in many television and live performances. He appeared withVan Johnson in a stage production of The Music Man at the age of ten.
Brown was 19 when he made his first major screen appearance in Halls of Anger (1970), followed by The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972) and his breakthrough role as the American Civil Wardraft dodger Drew Dixon in Robert Benton‘s critically acclaimed Bad Company (1972), co-starring with Jeff Bridges. The publicity and promotion for this film was capped by an article in Esquire introducing filmgoers to the “dashing, brooding Brown” in color photographs by Chris von Wangenheim, along with a text mention of Brown’s obituary collection focusing on little-known and forgotten Hollywood personalities.
An authority on actors and film history, Brown was a contributor to Scream Queens: Heroines of the Horrors by Calvin Beck and Bhob Stewart. Published by Macmillan in 1978, the book features illustrated biographical profiles of 29 fantasy film actresses and directors. Brown did a similar survey, the unpublished Unsung Heroes of the Horrors, covering the lives of some lesser known Hollywood talents, and he also contributed to various magazines, including Films in Review and Castle of Frankenstein. The book Who Was Who on Screen Third Edition, by Evelyn Mack Truett was dedicated to Brown, whom she credited with giving data support for the previous edition.
Brown’s marriage to Jennie Vlahos on March 4, 1972 ended in divorce May 1972. In June 1978, Brown committed suicide at his home in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, California.
A wide-ranging character actor with Broadway experience, Bissell entered films in 1943 with “Holy Matrimony” and went on to appear in over 80 more. specializing as ineffectual types and high-strung professionals. He is perhaps best remembered for his role as the scientist who turned Michael Landon into a wolfman in “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” (1957).
