Ian Hunter was born in 1900 in Cape Town, South Africa. He began his acting career in British silent films with “A Girl of London” in 1925. He pursued his film career in Hollywood and among his more notable movies are “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” in 1935, “Ziegfeld Girl” in 1941 and “Strange Cargo”. In the 1950’s he returned to Britain where he appeared in many films inclunding “North West Frontier” in 1959 with Kenneth More and Lauren Bacall and in 1961, “Dr Blood’s Coffin” with Kieron Moore and Hazel Court. He died in London in 1975.
IMDB entry:
Ian Hunter was born in the Kenilworth area of Cape Town, South Africa where he spent his childhood. In his teen years he and his parents returned to the family origins in England to live. Sometime between that arrival and the early years of World War I, Hunter began exploring acting. But in 1917 – and being only 17 – he joined the army to serve in France for the year of war still remaining. Within two years he did indeed make his stage-acting debut. Hunter would never forget that the stage was the thing when the lure of moving making called – he would always return through his career. With a jovial face perpetually on the verge of smiling and a friendly and mildly British accent, Hunter had good guy lead written all over him. He decided to sample the relatively young British silent film industry by taking a part in Not for Sale (1924) for British director W.P. Kellinowho had started out writing and acting for the theater. Hunter then made his first trip to the U.S. – Broadway, not Hollywood – because Basil Dean, well known British actor, director, and producer, was producing Sheridan’s “The School for Scandal” at the Knickerbocker Theater – unfortunately folding after one performance. It was a more concerted effort with film the next year back in Britain, again with Kellino. He then met up-and-coming mystery and suspense director Alfred Hitchcock in 1927. He did Hitch’sThe Ring (1927) – about the boxing game, not suspense – and stayed for the director’sWhen Boys Leave Home (1927). And with a few more films into the next year he was back with Hitchcock once more for Easy Virtue (1928), the Noel Coward play. By late 1928 he returned to Broadway for only a months run in the original comedy “Olympia” but stayed on in America via his first connection with Hollywood. The film was Syncopation(1929), his first sound film and that for RKO, that is, one of the early mono efforts, sound mix with the usual silent acting. As if restless to keep ever cycling back and forth across the Atlantic – fairly typical of Hunter’s career – he returned to London for Dean’s mono thriller Escape! (1930). There was an interval of fifteen films in toto before Hunter returned to Hollywood and by then he was well established as a leading man. With The Girl from 10th Avenue (1935) with Bette Davis, Hunter made his connection with Warner Bros. But before settling in with them through much of the 1930s, he did three pictures in succession with another gifted and promising British director, Michael Powell. He then began the films he is most remembered from Hollywood’s Golden Era. Although a small part, he is completely engaging and in command as the Duke in the Shakespearean extravaganza of Austrian theater master Max Reinhardt, A Midsummer Night’s Dream(1935) for Warner’s. It marked the start of a string of nearly thirty films for WB. Among the best remembered was his jovial King Richard in the rollicking The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Hunter was playing the field as well – he was at Twentieth Century as everybody’s favorite father-hero – including Shirley Temple – in the The Little Princess(1939). And he was the unforgettable benign guardian angel-like Cambreau in Loew’sStrange Cargo (1940) with Clark Gable. He was staying regularly busy in Hollywood until into 1942 when he returned to Britain to serve in the war effort. After the war Hunter stayed on in London, making films and doing stage work. He appeared once more on Broadway in 1948 and made Edward, My Son (1949) for George Cukor. Although there was some American playhouse theater in the mid-1950s, Hunter was bound to England, working once more for Powell in 1961 before retiring in the middle of that decade after nearly a hundred outings before the camera.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: William McPeak
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Henry Wilcoxon was born in 1905 in the British West Indies. He began his acting career on the stage in Birmingham in the U.K. In 1933 he was spotted by a film talent scout and wnet to Hollywood to pursue a career in films. He had a long professional association with Cecil B. De Mille and appeared in many of his films including “Cleopatra”, “The Crusades” and “Unconquered” in 1947 with Gary Cooper and Paulette Goddard. He was particularly effective as the vicar in “Mrs Miniver” with Greer Garson and Teresa Wright. His last film was “Caddyshack” in 1980. He died in 1984.
IMDB entry:
Henry Wilcoxon was given the lead role of Marc Antony in Cecil B. DeMille‘s Cleopatra(1934). It would prove to be the beginning of a long relationship with DeMille he would become a familiar DeMille character actor and DeMille’s associate producer in the later years of DeMille’s career. However, after DeMille died, he worked sporadically and accepted minor acting roles.
Haya Harareet was born in 1931 in Haifa, Palestine and was one of Israel’s best known actresses in the 1950’s. She came to international fame in 1956 with the movie “Hill 24 Doesnt Answer”. Her best known role came in 1959 as the lading lady of William Wyler’s “Ben-Hur”.
She starred opposite Stewart Granger in “The Secret Partner” which was made in England. In 1962 she went to the U.S, to make “The Interns”. She stopped making movies in 1964. She was long married to the great English director Jack Clayton who died in 1995.
IMDB entry:
Born in Palestine before the inception of the Israeli state in the city of Haifa, she first distinguished herself by winning one of the first beauty contests in the nascent Israel. Haya Harareet (also spelled Hararit) made her debut in Thorold Dickinson‘s film Giv’a 24 Eina Ona (1955) (“Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer”).
The landmark Israeli film, mostly in English, is also the first feature-length production to be shot and processed entirely in Israel, and made for international distribution.
The film was an official selection at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival and Harareet won an award for her role in the film. She plays Miriam Mizrahi, a fourth generation, dark-eyed and beautiful Sabra, working for the underground.
Ms. Harareet was also credited as a presenter for ‘Best Special Effects’ at the 32nd Annual Academy Awards in 1960.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
She was married to the British film director Jack Clayton until his death in 1995.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Dann
The Times obituary in 2021.
When William Wyler was searching for a female lead for his biblical epic Ben-Hur, his mind turned back to a beautiful young Israeli actress he had met two years earlier at the Cannes Film Festival.
He had already cast the title role but was struggling to find the right actress to play Charlton Heston’s love interest, Esther. More than 30 names were considered, including Ava Gardner and Carroll Baker. None of them seemed right, and then the director remembered the little-known Haya Harareet.
Wyler had come across her at Cannes in 1955 when Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer, in which she starred, had been nominated for the Palme d’Or. Directed by Thorold Dickinson, the film did not win but had its own place in history as the first feature-length production to be shot and produced in Israel for international distribution. Harareet shone in the film as a young Jewish woman working for the underground during the war for Israeli independence. When Wyler met her at a reception at one of the swanky hotels on La Croisette overlooking the Mediterranean, he was impressed by her sultry looks and her sharp intelligence.
Two years later Wyler could not remember her name but ordered his production team to “find that Israeli girl I met in Cannes”. It took them weeks to track her down to Paris, where she was living, and when she arrived in Rome, where filming was due to start, he gave her the part on the strength of a 30- second screen test. She also signed a four-year contract with MGM, becoming the first Israeli actress to be taken on by a Hollywood studio.
She might easily have got lost in the epic grandeur of Ben-Hur. The movie cost $15 million to make and at the time was the most extravagant production in cinema history. The set for the film’s climactic chariot race alone covered 18 acres, was five storeys high and took six months to build. More than 300 actors had speaking parts and the film deployed 10,000 extras, not to mention more than 200 camels and 2,500 horses.
Yet Harareet was not overawed and Wyler coached a career-defining performance from her. Variety hailed the emergence of “a performer of stature” and continued: “Her portrayal of Esther, the former slave, is sensitive and revealing. She has a striking appearance and represents a welcome departure from the standard Hollywood ingénue”. The review also gave Wyler “considerable credit for taking a chance on an unknown”.
The film was banned in several Arab countries because of Harareet’s nationality but Ben-Hur was a box-office smash and became the biggest grossing film since Gone with the Wind. Adjusted for inflation, the film made $1.8 billion and to this day sits in the list of the top 20 money-spinning movies of all time. The film also garnered 11 Academy awards, a record until it was equalled by Titanic four decades later.
Harareet at the Cannes film festival in 1960
Harareet became an overnight sensation and was photographed with Heston on the red carpet at glittering premieres in New York and Los Angeles. When she arrived in Britain for the European premiere she noted with satisfaction that the bathroom of her suite at Claridge’s was larger than the entirety of the cramped lodgings she had occupied when living in London several years earlier.
Yet the epic scale of the movie came at a cost. The film’s producer had a heart attack on set and died, and the production supervisor was also forced to retire with stress-related heart problems. Harareet’s health survived the rigours of the nine-month shoot but her career did not. Despite a sheath of press cuttings hailing her as “Hollywood’s brightest new star”, she felt Ben-Hur had typecast her as an “exotic beauty”.
I’m an actress who played the part of Esther. But that doesn’t mean I have to go on playing her for the rest of my life,” she complained. The roles she was offered on the back of Ben-Hur were “boring” and MGM wouldn’t allow her to “grow up”.
To negotiate her escape, she drew the studio’s attention to her friendship with left-wing socialists. “You don’t want to be associated with a communist, do you?” she told the studio provocatively. In truth she had never been a party member but the stink of McCarthyism still lingered in Hollywood. The ruse worked and she was released from her contract.
She was also keen to leave for another reason. At the 1960 Academy awards she met the British director Jack Clayton, whose film Room at the Top was up against Ben-Hur for several awards. It was love at first sight. The following morning he delivered 1,000 roses to her hotel room and as soon as her MGM contract was cancelled she moved to Britain to live with him.
They subsequently married and lived together in leafy Buckinghamshire until Clayton’s death in 1995. They were inseparable for 35 years.
She was cast opposite Stewart Granger in the British-made thriller The Secret Partner in 1961 and appeared in one more Hollywood movie, playing a single mother training to be a doctor in David Swift’s 1962 feature The Interns. After abandoning acting she wrote the screenplay for her husband’s 1967 film Our Mother’s House starring Dirk Bogarde and at the age of 40 took a degree in political science at the London School of Economics. A previous marriage to Nachman Zerwanitzer, an irrigation engineer, ended in divorce before she left Israel.
Haya Neuberg was born in 1931 in Haifa, in what was then the British mandate of Palestine. Her parents, Reuben and Yocheved Neuberg, were Jewish immigrants from Poland. At school she was given the name Hararit (later changed to Harareet), which means “mountainous” in Hebrew.
At 17 she left home without parental approval to join the Israeli Defence Forces’ equivalent of Ensa, entertaining those fighting in the 1948 Arab–Israeli war. She also won one of the first beauty contests held in the newly formed state, which helped to launch her career as an actress at the Cameri theatre in Tel Aviv.
She left Israel in 1956 for Italy, where she befriended the directors Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, who taught her Italian during long weekends on the island of Capri. From there she moved to London and then Paris, where she learnt French well enough to appear on the stage before Wyler tracked her down.
She made annual trips to Israel to see her family before finally returning one last time, having asked for her ashes to be scattered in the land of her birth.
Haya Harareet, actress, was born on September 20, 1931. She died in her sleep on February 3, 2021, aged 89
Dianne Foster was born in 1928 in Alberta, Canada. In 1953 she had a major role with Charlton Heston and Lizabeth Scott in “Bad for Each Other”. Throughout the 1950’s she had significant parts in such films as “Drive A Crooked Road” with Mickey Rooney”, “The Kentuckian” with Burt Lancaster, “Night Passage ” with James Stewart” and “The Last Hurrah” with Spencer Tracy and Jeffrey Hunter. Dianne Foster died in 2019 aged 90.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
A curvaceous and comely lead and second lead actress of the 1950s and 1960s screen, Dianne Foster was born with the unlikely stage name of Olga Helen Laruska on October 31, 1928 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Of Ukranian parentage, she began her stage career performing in high school plays and in local community theater productions. Her school drama teacher saw extreme promise in her and encouraged her to continue her studies. Dianne then enrolled at the University of Alberta and majored in drama.
She eventually found work in Toronto as a model and as both a radio and stage actress. Encouraged again by her high school teacher, she saved up enough money to go to England for further training and to find work. She won a stage role in the play “The Hollow” starring Jeanne De Casalis that later toured.
Following a radio job with Orson Welles, she was handed (by Welles) the part of Cassio’s whore in a West End production of “Othello” while Laurence Olivier was holding court at the St James Theater. Welles andPeter Finch starred as Othello and Iago, respectively, with Olivier in the director’s seat.
After establishing herself as a “bad girl” second lead in such “B” level British films as The Quiet Woman (1951), in which she played a scheming ex-girlfriend of Derek Bond andThe Big Frame (1952) as a temptress opposite Mark Stevens,
Dianne was encouraged to come to Hollywood in the early 1950’s. Her first role in Hollywood was as a British character in a TV episode of “Four Star Playhouse” opposite ‘David Niven’. As a result of her fine performance, Harry Cohn placed her under a Columbia Pictures contract even though she had yet secured an agent.
Most of her subsequent films were standard adventures in which she provided a pleasant diversion from the rugged action going on around her. On occasional she was handed more substantial roles.
Married twice, Dianne has one child from her first marriage and twins from her second. She retired in order to focused on marriage and family, as well as painting. She continues to live in California.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
The Bamboo Prison, poster, top: Robert Francis, bottom: Dianne Foster on poster art, 1954. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)Bad For Each Other, poster, l-r: Dianne Foster, Lizabeth Scott, Charlton Heston on poster art, 1953. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Sarita Montiel was born in 1928 in Spain. In 1954 she starred in the U.S movie “Vera Cruz” opposite Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster. Her other films include “Serenade” with Mario Lanza and Joan Fontaine and “Run of the Arrow”. She was married to the late great film director Anthony Mann. She died in 2013.
“Independent” obituary by :Alasdair Fotheringham
Sara Montiel is widely considered one of Spain’s greatest female film stars of the 20th century: but it is perhaps more for what she managed, with huge skill, to come to symbolise than for her artistic output that she will be remembered long-term
It is true that she was the first Spanish actress to conquer Hollywood in the 1950s, acting alongside Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper – and her beauty helped her gain a trail of lovers and husbands that ranged from Hemingway (who taught her to smoke cigars) to the film director Anthony Mann.
But for the vast majority of Spaniards during Franco’s era, Montiel simply represented everything that seemed completely unimaginable: international glamour, ridiculous affluence, and a voluptuous feminine sexuality that did not give two hoots for the country’s repressive social mores. As La Vanguardia newspaper put it in its obituary, “In an era of black shawls and hard bread, she kept us in touch with the times.”
Montiel’s fame in Spain reached the point where for over two decades her plunging necklines, richly erotic deep voice and sensual singing of cuplés – a type of popular, often romantic song – in a series of otherwise forgettable movies acted as a kind of pressure valve for censor-bound Spanish society.
El Último Cuplé (“The Last Cuplé”, 1957), a low-budget film which combined cuplés with the classic contemporary Spanish movie format (femme fatale plus willing-to-be-seduced bullfighter plus bullfighter’s morally pure bride-to-be, equals sweeping melodrama) was the biggest of her box-office smashes. Its title song, “Fumando Espero” (“I wait whilst smoking”), recorded in a voice that the producer insisted Montiel made so husky and low she protested she would end up sitting underneath the piano, remained a major hit for years afterwards.
But as much as what she did or how she looked, what fascinated Spaniards was who she knew – which in 1950s Hollywood was just about everybody. In the last photo of a living James Dean, he is next to Montiel, both of them laughing. Friends included Elizabeth Taylor, Billie Holiday and Brando.
Her list of lovers, affairs and broken hearts stretched from Dean (whose fatal car crash happened after “an afternoon of love” with her, or so she claimed), to playwright Miguel Mihura, Indalecio Prieto, one of the top ministers in the former Spanish Republic, and even the 1959 Nobel Prize-winning biologist, Severo Ochoa. (Montiel described him as “the great love of my life… but him researching all day and me making films all day just didn’t match.”)
For ordinary Spaniards, another appealing side of Montiel was her working-class background. Montiel was born and brought up in Campo de Criptana, a tiny town on the empty plains of central Castille, before moving to the Valencian coast as a teenager. Her father’s income was so meagre as a field worker, she later claimed that she would dig up roots to eat. (If this recalls Scarlet O’Hara grubbing for potatoes in Gone with the Wind, then it would not be the first or last time that fact and fiction blurred in her life.)
Discovered when singing a religious song by film producer Vicente Casanova in 1944, aged 15, her first film was Te Quiero Para Mí (“I Want You for Me”). Six years and 14 films later, including successes like Locura de Amor (“The Madness of Love”, 1948), she started working in Mexico, performing mostly singing roles. Piel Canela (1953), in which she played a gangster’s moll in a Havana nightclub, saw her shoot up the ladder to Hollywood’s top circle of film stars, despite not speaking a word of English – the first Spanish actress ever to do so.
Together with Gary Cooper (with whom she had a much-publicised romance) she took part in the Western Vera Cruz (1954) and then, while playing a secondary role in Joan Fontaine’s Serenade, she met and fell in love with Anthony Mann. Their wedding, as it was a civil one, was downplayed in Franco’s Spain, as was the divorce in 1961 – in stark contrast to when she married Spanish businessman Jose Vicente Ramirez in 1964 in a massive Catholic church ceremony. (The fact that it only lasted a couple of months before they separated was discreetly ignored).
By then, her cachet as a sex symbol had mushroomed thanks to El Último Cuplé, which kicked off a series of films – La Bella Lola (“Beautiful Lola”, 1962), Noches De Casablanca (“Casablanca Nights”, 1963), La Dama de Beirut (“The Lady of Beirut”, 1965) – which, if unremarkable in their content, gave Montiel a vast following of fans in Spain.
The end of the dictatorship in 1975, though, meant that her appeal suddenly shrank; but Montiel made the perfect sideways move. She began a seemingly interminable series of TV chat show appearances, while well-timed interviews with “intimate revelations” in gossip magazines kept her star from fading.
As if that were not enough, she wrote biographies with suggestive titles like Sara and Sex (2003); sung rap music in her seventies; and, in 2002, married a Cuban film producer 36 years her junior – all of which helped to ensure that she maintained a certain presence.
“I am not your ‘typical woman’,” she said last year. “Not at all. I am 84 and I don’t have a lot of time left. But in the last 54 years there’s been nobody like me.”
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
RUN OF THE ARROW, aka YUMA, US poster art, Sara Montiel aka Sarita Montiel, Rod Steiger, 1957. Courtesy Everett Collection ACHTUNG AUFNAHMEDATUM GESCHÄTZT PUBLICATIONxINxGERxSUIxAUTxONLY Copyright: xCourtesyxEverettxCollectionx MCDRUOF EC058
Susan Howard was born in Texas in 1944. She is best known for her role as Donna Krebbs in the popular television series “Dallas” in the 1980’s. In 1974 she also starred with Barry Newman in the TV series “Petrocelli”.
IMDB entry:
Susan Howard, best known for her eight years as Donna Krebbs in the prime-time soap opera, Dallas (1978) was born Jeri Lynn Mooney in Marshall, Texas. “I grew up with my father telling me that I was talented and beautiful and wonderful. I respected and loved my father, so I believed him – until I grew up and looked in a mirror and saw that my daddy had sort of colored the truth. But, by then, it was too late. I was hooked”, she said of her life-long desire to be an actress and the support she got from her family to realize the dream. After excelling in the dramatic arts at Marshall High, where she won the UIL Best Actress Award, she was accepted at the University of Texas. There, she spent two years before Hollywood lured her farther west. Several years as a member of the Los Angeles Repertory Company, plus her years at the University of Texas, instilled in her the discipline and perspective she needed to finally make it in Hollywood. After several years of guest shots on television shows; including Bonanza (1959), The Flying Nun (1967) and I Dream of Jeannie (1965), Susan was offered the co-starring role opposite Barry Newman in Petrocelli (1974). For her portrayal of “Maggie Petrocelli”, she was nominated for both Emmy and the Golden Globe awards.
The role of “Donna Culver Krebbs” came Susan’s way in 1978, as a one-time guest shot. The producers were so pleased with her performance, they enlarged the part and asked her to stay. She remained until 1987, when the script for the new season called for Donna to begin an affair with one of the other characters. She refused the change and left the show.
She and her husband Calvin Chrane now live outside Austin, Texas. She was appointed by then-Governor George W. Bush to be a commissioner for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. She is also a member of the board of directors for the National Rifle Association where she serves as Chair of the Public Policy Committee. The Chranes have one daughter, Lynn, and two grandchildren, Daniel and Noelle. Susan Howard continues to be a frequent visitor to Marshall where her mother and brother reside. She is an active member of the Writers Guild of America, and continues writing for television, something she began on Dallas (1978).
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Suzanna Leigh obituary in “The Independent” in 2017.
If there was ever proof of the value of knocking on doors, it’s the life story of actress Suzanna Leigh.
Born plain Sandra Smith in Berkshire, to a property developer mother and professional gambler dad, the convent-educated schoolgirl was aged just 11 when she acted on a family legend that her godmother was Vivien Leigh. When she turned up on the actress’s doorstep in London’s Eaton Place, the original Ms Leigh said she had attended so many christenings that she had no idea if Sandra was her goddaughter or not, but she encouraged the aspiring actress to use her name.
Suzanna Leigh
“It was really exciting,” the actress, who has died aged 72, told The Independent in 1999, which noted a black-and-white photo of Vivien Leigh in her kitchen. “She was so fantastic to me. She said that so many of my dreams seemed like hers.”
Suzanna Leigh
With her glamorous new pseudonym, Suzanna Leigh was 13 when she made her film debut in the 1958 George Pal film Tom Thumb.
It’s said that Leigh was following Vivien’s example when she later knocked on the door of Hollywood producer Hal Wallis. Captivated by her beauty, he cast her opposite Tony Curtis in Boeing Boeing and sent her to Hawaii to play Elvis Presley’s love interest in 1966’s Paradise, Hawaii Style. The rock’n’roll star, whom Leigh once called a “fabulous actor”, became a firm friend.
After playing opposite Elvis, Leigh’s ascent to mega-stardom seemed assured, but while she went on to play the lead in several horror films, including The Deadly Bees (1967), and had her own series in France, Trois étoiles en touraine (1966),politics were to bring her Hollywood acting career to a halt. A dispute between the American Screen Actors Guild and its UK equivalent Equity saw Leigh lose a number of possibly pivotal roles. And while she continued to act in films in the UK, including Son of Dracula (1974), in which she played opposite Ringo Starr, she never recovered the stellar trajectory of her early career.
Bad luck also played its part. In 1972, she became involved with Tim Hue Williams, father of her only child, Natalia. Hue Williams abandoned Leigh during her pregnancy and refused to pay child support. Natalia became Leigh’s sole focus. She sold all her assets to pay for treatment of Natalia’s childhood illness, saying, “It’s only money and I have my daughter.”
Leigh’s early resourcefulness came to the fore again as she fought to ensure her daughter’s health and happiness. She gave classes in diction and etiquette and even sold encyclopaedias – knocking on those doors again – before falling back on her friendship with Elvis to become a celebrity guide at Graceland.
In 2000 Leigh published her biography, Paradise, Suzanna Style. Her friendship with Elvis had continued to define her career. Later she became “plagued with doubts” about the manner of his death. In 2011 Leigh suggested Elvis had been murdered by the mob. As she uncovered evidence, Leigh claims she herself became a target. The wheel nuts on her truck were loosened.
Throughout her life, Leigh was sustained by notions of spirituality. In 2014 compilation book Chicken Soup For The Soul: Touched by an Angel, she recounted several instances in which divine guidance had supposed saved her life.
Nearly 50 years earlier she had refused to board a doomed flight from London to Rome. A year later, she claimed to have heard a voice saying “slow down” just before all four tyres on her car burst. Recalling her friendship with Sharon Tate, she said, “If I’d stayed in Hollywood I might have died! …I’d have been at that lunch where the guests were murdered by Charles Manson… My god, aren’t I lucky!”
Leigh’s career was just beginning to warm up again when she was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer in 2016. She had recently published two more books, and had appeared in 2015’s Grace of the Father.
The Telegraph obituary in 2017:
Suzanna Leigh in 1965 CREDIT: Pierluigi Praturlon/REX/Shutterstock
Suzanna Leigh, who has died aged 72, was a British- born Sixties starlet who dated, among others, Richard Harris, Steve McQueen and Michael Caine; but it was her friendship with Elvis Presley, for whom she supplied the love interest in the 1966 film Paradise, Hawaiian Style, that dominated her life.
In her late teens, she was signed by the Hollywood producer Hal Wallis, who cast her as a beautiful air stewardess in Boeing Boeing (1965) opposite Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis (an “unpleasant snob”, she recalled in her 2000 autobiography Paradise, Suzanna Style), before teaming her with Elvis.
She had been in love with the King since the age of 11, but during the making of the film, in which she played an aviatrix and love interest to Elvis’s helicopter pilot hero, she and Presley were allowed to meet only on the set to avoid any hint of scandal. Except, that is, for an occasion when, in front of photographers, he swept her up and kissed her. “That won’t do your career any harm, baby,” drawled the star.
Suzanna Leigh embraces Elvis Presley in a publicity photo from the 1966 film Paradise, Hawaiian Style CREDIT: AP Photo/courtesy Suzanna Leigh
Although their kisses were otherwise confined to the set, Suzanna Leigh claimed in her autobiography that they “held an intensity that melted my very being. I slipped my arms around his neck and our bodies entwined. This was all madness, but we didn’t stop. A person could go to the gallows with such a kiss lingering on their lips, knowing life had been good.”
Screen kisses aside (she admitted later that her publishers had asked her to spice them up), she claimed that they had a brother-and-sister relationship, bonding over their shared belief in guardian angels. It had been Elvis who advised her to break off her affair with the “Long John Silverish” Richard Harris (of whom she wrote: “Everything about him was larger than life”), because Harris was a married man.
Elvis Presley with Suzanna Leigh in Paradise, Hawaiian Style CREDIT: Keystone-France
“I was supposed to be a huge, huge star,” she said. But the dream did not last. She had been scheduled to make another film with Presley and had hopes of being cast in Barefoot in the Park (1967, the role eventually went to Jane Fonda) when “out of the blue came an edict from the Screen Actors’ Guild saying that I couldn’t take the part. British Equity had refused to allow Charlton Heston to film his scenes as Gordon of Khartoum in Britain, so the Guild had retaliated by making it very difficult for British actors to get parts in Hollywood.” Nor did it help that Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s manager, never liked her.
Assuming it would take a while to sort out the problem, she flew back to England, effectively ending her Hollywood career.
Suzanna Leigh in 1963 CREDIT: ITV/REX/Shutterstock
She was born Sandra Eileen Anne Smith to well-to do parents in Berkshire on July 26 1945 and educated in convent schools. At the age of five she decided she wanted to be a film star, an ambition encouraged by her father, a professional gambler. He died when she was six, but not before telling her that she was the god-daughter of Vivien Leigh. At the age of 11 she trotted round from her mother’s house in Cadogan Square to the actress’s house in Eaton Place and introduced herself. “She said … she had been to hundreds of christenings and didn’t remember mine [but] didn’t mind a bit if I used her name.”
Suzanna Leigh spent only two terms at drama school, recalling that “there was no chance in Hollywood to turn up at 22. You had to hit it quick when you were very young.” She began with bit parts in The Saint and was given her own television series in France. But when her agent rang her to tell her that Hal Wallis was in London looking for the new Shirley MacLaine, she jumped on a plane, rushed to the Dorchester where Wallis was staying, and burst into his room, exclaiming: “I’m the one you’re looking for”.
PARSIPPANY, NJ – OCTOBER 28: Suzanna Leigh attends 2016 Chiller Theatre Expo Day 1 at Parsippany Hilton on October 28, 2016 in Parsippany, New Jersey. (Photo by Bobby Bank/WireImage)
During her brief Hollywood career, Suzanna Leigh lived the high life, mixing with beautiful people and driving a Rolls-Royce. She visited a clairvoyant with Natalie Wood, hobnobbed with Sharon Tate, had a one-night stand with Michael Caine, dated Steve McQueen and Patrick Lichfield, was the recipient of the unwanted attentions of Harry Cohn, Roman Polanski (who told her he could only direct women with whom he had slept) and Peter Finch (“I kneed him in the groin and whacked him on the jaw and he passed out on the floor.”), and was presented to the Queen at a Royal Command Performance, though the Queen apparently only wanted to talk about Elvis. “It happened exactly the way it did in Sunset Boulevard,” she said. “I thought ‘That’s it, I need no more’. It’s the most amazing feeling when all your dreams come true.”
Suzanna Leigh with her poodle Kimshum in 1966 CREDIT: Aubrey Hart/ANL/REX/Shutterstock
Back in London after the Screen Actors Guild debacle, she won a cult following as a “Hammer Glamour” girl. In The Deadly Bees (1966) she was a resting pop star doing entomological battle on an island infested with the eponymous insects. She acquired a gay following for her performance in The Lost Continent (1968), a high camp horror in which she was seen being squeezed by sausage-like sea monster tentacles in a series of frocks which she designed herself. In Lust for a Vampire (1971) she played a gym mistress puzzled as to why her students keep disappearing, and in the dire musical comedy Son of Dracula (1974), she appeared opposite the singer Harry Nilsson as Count Downe and Ringo Starr as Merlin the Magician. Her television credits at this time included The Persuaders.
“And that,” she recalled, “was it really.”
Her daughter Natalia Leigh Denny, who also became an actress, wrote of her mother’s death: “The world will forever be a little less light and magical.”
Suzanna Leigh in 1969 CREDIT: Ling/ANL/REX/Shutterstock
In the early 1980s she had a daughter by a man with whom she subsequently became involved in a protracted legal battle over his failure to pay maintenance. Her daughter, Natalia, suffered from health problems as a child, and, struggling to make ends meet, Suzanna Leigh started an interior design firm which failed; gave lessons in etiquette; ran elocution classes; sold the Encyclopaedia Britannica at Heathrow Airport and flogged many of her possessions.
By 1997 she was reported by be “struggling to keep Natalia on £72 a week income support” and two years later, according to the Independent, was living in a small rented flat in “an unlovely London suburb, just across from the grey concrete bulk of the Northolt Swimarama leisure centre, with her daughter and her sheltie dog Sukie.”
After publishing her memoir, however, she returned to the United States, moving to Memphis for several years in hopes of capitalising on her Elvis Presley connection. In 2011 she was reported to be intending to publish a book claiming that Elvis had been killed by the Mafia to prevent him from testifying in a big Mob trial.
For all the problems she encountered, Suzanna Leigh remained irrepressibly upbeat: “Who knows, if I’d stayed in Hollywood I might have died! Sharon Tate was my best friend; perhaps I’d have been at that lunch where the guests were murdered by Charles Manson … My god, aren’t I lucky! I made it this far!”
Her daughter survives her.
Suzanna Leigh, born July 26 1945, died December 11 2017
Suzanna Leigh, actress, born 26 July 1945, died 11 December 2017
Teresa Brewer was born in 1931 in Toledo, Ohio. She was one of the most popular female vocalists in the U.S. in the 1950’s. Her top ten hits included “Music, Music, Music”, “Nora Malone”, “”A Tear Fell” and “You Send Me”. In 1953 she went to Hollywood to make the musical “Those Redheads from Seattle” with Rhonda Fleming, Guy Mitchell and Agnes Moorhead. She died in 2007.
Spencer Leigh’s “Independent” obituary :
Teresa Brewer was among the biggest-selling stars of the early 1950s and part of the lyric of her 1950 million-seller, “Music! Music! Music!”, “Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon” has passed into common parlance. Despite her huge successes, she only continued her career sporadically, regarding family responsibilities as more important and calling her children “her biggest hits”. This was in sharp contrast to her own childhood when her mother and her aunt had encouraged her to perform, hoping that she would be another Shirley Temple.
The eldest of five children, she was born Theresa Veronica Breuer in 1931 in Toledo, Ohio, where her father worked as an inspector in a glass factory. When only two years old, she was singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on Uncle August’s Kiddies Show for local radio. Although she had no vocal training, she took tap dancing lessons and became a proficient singer and dancer. Until she was 12, she toured and made radio appearances with Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour, and then concentrated on her studies.
In 1948, she was invited to appear in New York on the TV talent show Stairway to the Stars, and adjusted her name to Teresa Brewer. She remained in New York, staying with her aunt, and then meeting her first husband, Bill Monahan, with whom she had four daughters.
When the British record label Decca established a subsidiary, London, in America, Jack Pleis was instructed to find appropriate talent. The speakers outside one Manhattan club broadcast what was happening on stage and he was intrigued when he heard Brewer’s voice. He gave her a contract with London, but her first record, “A Man Wrote a Song”, did nothing. For her second, he teamed her with some good jazz players, the Dixieland Jazz-Stars, and they made “Copenhagen” as an A-side and “Music! Music! Music!” for the flip.
The disc-jockeys soon pointed out which was better and London Records changed their attention to “Music! Music! Music!”, which topped the US charts for four weeks. Although there were no UK record charts in 1950, “Music! Music! Music!” became the best-selling sheet music and Brewer’s version is easily the best-known of the 10 which were released. Brewer said in later years that her record sounded “painfully slow” and she performed it at tongue-twisting pace in concert.
She followed her success with some novelty nonsense, “Choo’* Gum” and “Molasses Molasses”, before being shunted to another new Decca label, Coral, where she sang “You’ll Never Get Away” with Don Cornell. In 1952, she topped the US charts for a further five weeks with a song based on a Strauss waltz, “Till I Waltz Again With You”. Brewer became a redhead for a role alongside Guy Mitchell in the musical western Those Redheads From Seattle, filmed in 3D, in 1953 and made a TV series with Mel Tormé.
Good songs were hard to come by and so anything decent would be covered by several artists. When the record producer Mitch Miller, heard a song that was being used by Alcoholics Anonymous, called “Let Me Go, Devil”, he commissioned a new lyric, “Let Me Go, Lover”. His production of Joan Weber’s recording topped the US charts, although Brewer’s cover only made the Top 20. In the UK, it was a different story, with four versions making the Top 20 – Dean Martin (number three), Ruby Murray (five), Teresa Brewer (nine) and Joan Weber (16). Brewer lost out in the UK to Joan Regan with “Ricochet” (1953) and “Jilted” (1954) and to Alma Cogan with “Bell Bottom Blues” (1954) and “The Banjo’s Back In Town” (1955). Cogan had a similar effervescence to Brewer on bouncy, up-tempo numbers.
Many white American singers covered songs by black artists, knowing that the original artists would only receive restricted airplay. This practice is reviled with hindsight but it has to be viewed in context, and certainly none of the performers involved, including Johnnie Ray, Pat Boone, Georgia Gibbs and Brewer herself, felt they were doing anything wrong. Brewer’s versions of Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love”, LaVern Baker’s “Tweedle-Dee”, Fats Domino’s “Bo Weevil”, Ivory Joe Hunter’s “A Tear Fell” and Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” all had some commercial success.
With the advent of rock’*’roll, Brewer fell out of favour. “I Love Mickey!” (1956), for the baseball player Mickey Mantle, could only have limited appeal, and with “The Hula Hula Hoop Song” (1958), she was backing the wrong craze, but she had occasional hits like “A Sweet Old-Fashioned Girl” (1956), “Nora Malone” (1957) and “How Do You Know It’s Love” (1960). Furthermore, she had set the stage for the next generation of female singers. Connie Francis emulated the plaintiveness of her ballads, while the similarly petite Brenda Lee captured her vivaciousness. Ed Sullivan would introduce Brewer as “the little girl with the big voice”.
Brewer retired to raise her family, although she still made occasional albums and appeared on television. By the time she was a guest on The Muppet Show (1971), she was already a grandmother. When her first marriage failed, she married the jazz producer Bob Thiele, who made a long string of albums with her – Songs of Bessie Smith (1973), A Sophisticated Lady (1981), Midnight Café (1982) and I Dig Big Band Singers (1983) being among them.
On Memories of Louis (1991), she was accompanied by many of the greatest jazz trumpeters. Her husband had written Louis Armstrong’s hit “What a Wonderful World”, and Brewer made an album of the same name with Stéphane Grappelli and Ruby Braff in 1989. Critics questioned whether her high-pitched, brassy voice would work with such musicians, but her voice had become smoother with age. Quite possibly, though, she was better suited to the down-home charm of Chas and Dave for her album Teresa Brewer In London (1982), also produced by Thiele. Thiele died in 1996 and Brewer never recorded again.
Sybil Jason was born in 1927 in Cape Town, South Africa. She began her acting career as a child perfomer in Britain. She spotted by a Warner talent scout and brought to Hollywood. Her first U.S. film was “Little Big Shot” in 1935. She went on to feature in “Stella Parish”, “The Singing Kid” and “The Great O’Malley” among others. She supported Shirley Temple in “The Little Princess” and “The Blue Bird” in 1940 and then retired from acting.
Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Guardian”:
From 1935 to 1938, Shirley Temple was the world’s biggest and smallest movie star. During this period, Warner Bros launched their answer to Temple in the cute, dark-haired, wide-eyed, button-nosed Sybil Jason, who has died aged 83. Jason made six feature films and four Technicolor two-reelers for the studio over these years. Unfortunately, most of her films and roles shamelessly resembled those of Temple’s at 20th Century-Fox, and never equalled them in popularity. However, according to Time magazine in 1936: “Among child actresses, Sybil Jason is to Shirley Temple as Jean Harlow is to Ann Harding – less wholesome but more refreshing.”
She was born Sybil Jacobson in Cape Town, South Africa, where her father ran a shoe business. As her mother was in fragile health, the girl was brought up mainly by her older sister Anita, who nurtured her precocious talent, which consisted of playing the piano, dancing, singing and impersonating such stars as Greta Garbo, Maurice Chevalier and Jimmy Durante, all before her fifth birthday.
By then, her uncle, Harry Jacobson, who had settled in Britain, where he was known as “the Crooning Pianist”, playing with British dance-bands such as the Savoy Orpheans and Ray Noble’s Orchestra, as well as being Gracie Fields’s accompanist, invited Anita and Sybil to stay with him and his wife in London. Harry taught Sybil several songs, which she performed for guests, one of whom was the singer Frances Day, who got Jason a spot in a benefit show at the London Palladium.
This led to the child being cast in Barnacle Bill (1935), a minor British drama starring Archie Pitt, Fields’s husband. Jason later recalled that her sister’s advice to her before she went on set for the first time was: “Remember, Sybee, don’t act!” At the same time, Irving Asher, head of the Warner Bros London branch, sent Jason’s screen test to Jack Warner in Hollywood. The studio boss soon replied by telegram, which read merely: “Sign her.”
Jason’s first Hollywood movie was Little Big Shot (1935), a Damon Runyonish tale in which she played an orphan who softens the hearts of two hard-boiled conmen (Robert Armstrong and Edward Everett Horton). Jason was very effective in a couple of dance numbers, and turning on the waterworks when the cons have to give her up to the orphanage. (Audiences’ sugar tolerance was much higher in those days.) The New York Times found her “an engaging infant … although her British accent makes many of her lines unintelligible”. (Jason had somehow managed to avoid acquiring a South African accent.)
One of Jason’s most high-profile performances came in The Singing Kid (1936) as another orphan, though a more cheerful one. She singsYou’re the Cure for What Ails Me with Al Jolson, in his last leading role. In The Great O’Malley (1937), Jason was second billed (after Pat O’Brien, typecast as a moralising Irish cop), portraying the disabled daughter of Humphrey Bogart.
She had further occasions to display her histrionic abilities in two weepies, I Found Stella Parish (1935) and Comet Over Broadway (1938), in both of which she played the daughter of the melodrama queen Kay Francis. Both films also starred Ian Hunter, another Cape Town-born actor.
But after the latter film, Warner Bros decided not to renew her contract. Although Jason was just as musically versatile, enchanting, funny and cloying as the curly-topped, dimpled Temple, it seemed that Hollywood was not big enough to accommodate two multi-talented moppets. Ironically, in Jason’s last two films, she played supporting roles to Temple, as Becky, the little cockney scullery maid at the Victorian girls’ school in The Little Princess (1939), and in The Blue Bird (1940), as a girl who cannot walk, but in the end is cured. Unfortunately, her part was considerably cut in the latter, apparently at the request of Temple’s mother, who was afraid it might overshadow her daughter’s performance. Nevertheless, Jason and Temple remained lifelong friends. As it turned out, The Blue Bird was Temple’s first flop.
Now retired, aged 13, Jason returned to school in South Africa, where she spent several years before heading back to America, where she married Anthony Drake, a writer of radio plays.
When I was a child growing up in South Africa, and beginning to take an interest in movies, I was delighted to be told that I was related, albeit distantly, to Jason. Her memoir, My 15 Minutes: An Autobiography of a Child Star of the Golden Era of Hollywood, was published in 2005, a year before her husband died. She is survived by a daughter.
• Sybil Jason (Sybil Jacobson), actor, born 23 November 1927; died 23 August 2011
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed here.
