Nancy Kelly was born in 1921 in Lowell, Massachusetts. She was the sister of Jack Kelly who starred with James Garner in “Maverick”. Her films include “Jesse James” with Tyrone Power in 1939, “Murder in the Music Hall” with Vera Ralston in 1945 and repeated her Broadway success in “The Bad Seed” in 1956. She died in 1995 aged 73.
Dick Vosburgh’s obituary in “The Independent”:
Although she made more than 30 films and received an Academy Award Best Actress nomination, Nancy Kelly’s greatest triumphs were in the theatre.
One of New York’s most successful child models from infancy, she made her first appearance on the Broadway stage at the age of 10 in Give Me Yesterday (1931). A role in Rachel Crothers’s Susan and God (1937), which ran for two seasons on Broadway with Gertrude Lawrence heading the cast, led to a 20th-Century Fox screen-test for Kelly, swiftly followed by a long-term contract and a leading role in John Ford’s Submarine Patrol (1938). Frank S. Nugent wrote in the New York Times: “Here’s a morning g un forNancy Kelly, who has the responsibility of being the only girl in the cast, not merely by being as decorative as she is, but with a charming and assured performance. Miss Kelly bears watching; in fact, it will be a pleasure.”
A year later, the same paper’s Bosley Crowther was equally enamoured of Kelly, to the extent that he actually forgave Fox for crowbarring her into Stanley and Livingstone as the patently fictitious object of Henry Morton Stanley’s affection. “We don’t see,” he wrote, “how any one could be so officious as to demand that the presence of an actress so charming must also be supported by documents.”
Despite effusions from critics, Fox assigned Kelly a pallid “Outlaw’s Noble Wife” role in Jesse James (1939), put her into minor fluff like He Married His Wife and Sailor’s Lady (both 1940), and loaned her out for the likes of One Night in the Tropics and Parachute Battalion (both 1941). Her last film for 20th Century-Fox was To the Shores of Tripoli (1942) in which the studio showed its indifference by letting her lose John Payne to Maureen O’Hara.
A return to Broadway to play Alec Guinness’s wife in Terence Rattigan’s London success Flare Path (1942) was a disappointment; the play ran only three weeks. In Tarzan’s Desert Mystery (1943), Kelly was cast as a wisecracking vaudeville magician in a plot that also found room for Nazis, giant spiders, sinister Arabs and dinosaurs. In Show Business (1944) she played a scheming burlesque performer, hell-bent on breaking up the marriage of George Murphy and Constance Moore. Such was the skill of her actingthat she actually managed to simulate convincing lust for Murphy.
After a handful of films in which she was paired with such fading leading men as William Gargan, Lee Tracy and Chester Morris, Kelly returned to Broadway. Her experience with the studios could only have helped her performance as John Garfield’s Hollywood-hating wife in Clifford Odets’s searing play The Big Knife (1949). Four years later she played another tortured Odets wife in a tour of The Country Girl. Her performance as the agonised mother of an eight-year-old murderess in Maxwell Anderson’s Broadwa y hit The Bad Seed (1954-55) won her a Tony Award. Two years later Kelly and other key members of the New York cast journeyed west to make the screen version. She received her Oscar nomination for her work in the film.
Kelly twice received the Sarah Siddons Actress of the Year Award in a theatre career that embraced such disparate playwrights as Shakespeare, Neil Simon and Edward Albee. Her television work included Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Climax and The Pilot (1956), a TV biography of Sister Mary Aquinas, a noted educator and the first nun to be granted a pilot’s licence. Variety reported: “Miss Kelly humanised Sister Mary and made a colourful, interesting and touching character out of her.” For this performance, Nancy Kelly added an Emmy Award to her crowded mantelpiece.
The above “Independent” obituary can be accessed online here.
Julie HarrisThe Haunting, poster, Julie Harris, 1963. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
“Probably the only people who have not minded the infrequency of Julie Harris’s film appearances are New York theatregoers. In that city one is likely to find her on the boards gratifyingly often. She is not perhaps a great actress but she is perhaps a witch, a skinny Lorelei calling to the smitten with a giggle and a coo like a love-sick dove. She casts a spell in films as well but her parts have been uneven.” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years”. (1972)
Julie Harris was born in 1925 in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. She is regarded as one of Broadway’s greatest stars having won five Tonys, a tie with Angela Lansbury. Her screen debut in 1932 was a repeat of her stage triumph in “Member of the Wedding” with Esther Waters and Brandon de Wilde and based on Carson McCuller’s novella. She played opposite James Dean in “East of Eden” in 1955, “Harper” with Paul Newman in 1966 and “Reflections in a Golden Eye” with Marlon Brando in 1967. She was part of the regular cast of “Knot’s Landing” for a few years. She died in 2013.
“The Guardian” obituary by Brian Baxter:
Unable to make sufficient money from her novels, the great American writer Carson McCullers took advice from Tennessee Williams and allowed one of her masterpieces to be adapted for the theatre. The resultant success of The Member of the Wedding (1950) widened her fame, and made a Broadway star of Julie Harris, who has died aged 87.
The play’s main character is Frankie Addams, a gawky 12-year-old who longs for companionship and the “we of me”. Although the second juvenile role, in what is essentially a three-hander, went to a child actor, Brandon de Wilde, the complex part of Frankie fell to Harris, who was then 24. Born in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, and trained at the Yale School of Drama, Harris had made her Broadway debut in It’s a Gift in 1945, but enjoyed only modest success until she made Frankie her own vulnerable creation.
In 1952 Fred Zinnemann directed the film version of the play, in which, once again, Harris was supported by the incomparable De Wilde and Ethel Waters. She received an Oscar nomination as best actress and it mattered little when she lost out to Shirley Booth, since in the interim between play and film, she had triumphed again on Broadway, as the nightclub singer Sally Bowles in I Am a Camera (1951), based on Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. Harris won a Tony award for best actress (the first of a record five) and was lauded by the critic Brooks Atkinson as an “actress of genius”.
In 1955 that play too graduated to the screen with Harris as the outlandish heroine. Although the rest of the film proved a dismal affair, Harris had shown that she could adapt to the more intimate demands of cinema. Her brilliance led the director Elia Kazan to cast her as Abra, opposite James Dean, in East of Eden (1955), but much of the screen work that followed immediately afterwards was feeble, including a British comedy, The Truth About Women (1957) and Sally’s Irish Rogue (1958).
Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962) was an inferior film version of Rod Serling’s TV drama and Harris seemed adrift in the part originally played by Kim Hunter. She fared slightly better on television in an adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (1961), playing the priest’s mistress, and as Ophelia in Hamlet (1964).
Happily, the 1960s yielded three more enduring screen roles, includingRobert Wise‘s classic horror film The Haunting (1963), shot in Britain. Harris was perfectly cast as the timid Eleanor, prey to the terrors of the haunted mansion. In 1966 she played Miss Thing in Francis Ford Coppola’s inspired comedy You’re a Big Boy Now and the following year was reunited with the genius of McCullers in the best film of her career.
In Reflections in a Golden Eye she played the vulnerable Alison, tended by a fey Filipino house-boy, while neglected by her adulterous husband. In the hothouse atmosphere of a southern army camp, Alison is a highly strung instrument playing as part of a discordant quartet, comprising also Brian Keith, Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando, giving his greatest performance as the Major. Harris held her own in this illustrious company, but never again encountered such a heady cocktail of the director John Huston, a superb screenplay and three such co-stars.
Not that she remained idle, making dozens more films, innumerable television appearances and always returning to her first love, the theatre. Stage roles of note included Joan of Arc in The Lark (1955, for which she won another Tony); a musical, Skyscraper (1966); the comedy Forty Carats (1969, a third Tony); The Last of Mrs Lincoln (1972), which although it was not a success won her a fourth Tony; and in 1976 the one-woman show The Belle of Amherst (her fifth Tony), based on the poems and secluded life of Emily Dickinson. She toured extensively in this production, including a trip to London. I vividly recall her command of the inner strength and beauty both of the character and the poetry. A filmed version of the show was seen on British television in 1978.
Harris was also well-suited to the role of the wife in On Golden Pond, in which she starred on stage during 1980, although Katharine Hepburn took the role in the film the following year. During the 1990s she enjoyed success in a stage version of Driving Miss Daisy, a tour of Lettice and Lovage and a New York revival of The Glass Menagerie. While appearing in a production of Fossils in 2001 in Chicago, she suffered a stroke.
On screen she was proud of her Mrs Greenwood in the adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1979). Although not a commercial success, it was more to her taste than Harper (1966), in which she was tortured by Robert Webber, or The People Next Door (1970), where she suffered at the hands of a drug-addicted daughter. She faced an even worse fate in two factually based features. In The Hiding Place (1975) she played, with great commitment, Betsie ten Boom, one of two Dutch sisters who gave refuge to Jewish people and suffered the consequences in a concentration camp. A year later in Voyage of the Damned she was a member of an all-star cast playing German Jewish refugees on a ship seeking sanctuary in 1939 but refused a port of call and eventually sent back to Germany.
These films and television dramas, notably House on Greenapple Road (1970), a Columbo feature, Any Old Port in a Storm (1973), the lead in a film version of The Last of Mrs Lincoln (1976) and in 1979 The Gift and then Backstairs at the White House, playing Helen Taft, kept her busy. But the temptation of complete security led to the longest stint of her career. In 1980, having appeared in an early episode of the TV soap opera Knots Landing, she accepted the role of a singer, Lilimae Clements, and stayed for the next seven years of its run, moving from her home in Massachusetts to take temporary residence in Los Angeles. Apart from an uncredited cameo in Crimewave (1985) and the voice of Claire in the ballet film Nutcracker (1986) she was absent from the big screen until 1988, when she returned as the third lead as Roz Carr in Gorillas in the Mist.
She worked non-stop for the next decade, with three TV films in 1988 and an average of one a year after that, from miniseries such as Scarlett (1994) to features such as Ellen Foster (1997) in which she played Grandmother Leonora. She had an enjoyable big screen role in the comedy HouseSitter (1992), and went to Rome to star in a tranquil two-hander, Gentle into the Night (1998), declaring the director Antonio Baiocco the “nicest” of her career. She played Dennis Hopper‘s dying mother in Carried Away (1996), then a doctor in Bad Manners (1997) and the key role of Carlotta in The First of May (1999).
One of her great attributes was a distinctive, silvery voice, an almost musical intonation and impeccable diction. Combined with sharp intelligence and an interest in the arts, this led to voiceover and documentary work. She appeared in works about her famous co-star, James Dean, including The First American Teenager (1976) and James Dean, a Portrait (1996). She was her favourite poet in Emily Dickinson: A Certain Slant of Light (1978). Her interest in literature (she researched historical characters such as Mrs Lincoln thoroughly) led her to make recordings of plays, the poems and letters of Dickinson and readings of Out of Africa and Frankenstein, among others. She also found time to co-author a book, Julie Harris Talks to Young Actors (1971). In 2002 she received a special lifetime achievement Tony award.
Harris was married and divorced three times. She is survived by a son, Peter.
• Julie Harris (Julia Ann Harris), actor, born 2 December 1925; died 24 August 2013
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
A contemplative, blue-eyed lead with classically sculpted features, Peter Weller gained stage experience with notable performances in David Rabe’s “Streamers” and David Mamet’s “The Woods.” He entered film in 1979 and, though best known for his roles in the deadpan cult favorite “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” (1984) and as the armor-clad title character of “RoboCop” (1987) and its first sequel, “RoboCop 2” (1990), Weller has also been effective in more character-driven dramas such as “Shoot the Moon” (1981) and David Cronenberg’s fascinatingly bizarre “Naked Lunch” (1991).
Weller followed up his success in “Naked Lunch” with several lackluster projects: the action adventure “Fifty-Fifty” (1991); a French romantic comedy “Road to Ruin” (1992); and the thriller “Sunset Grill” (1993), all of which moved quickly to home video. Career matters started looking up with the release of Michael Tolkin’s “The New Age” (1994), where he was paired once again with “Naked Lunch” co-star Judy Davis. Weller got to demonstrate his flair for comedy playing a jobless Hollywood ad man whose marriage is crumbling. Although the film and Weller both received rave reviews, the actor’s profile dimmed through the late 1990s; while he worked steadily, only a few films stood out, such as Woody Allen’s “Mighty Aphrodite” (1995) and director Linda Yellen’s “End of Summer” (1996). He resurfaced in the admired Showtime science-fiction series “Odyssey 5” (2002-03) playing Chuck Taggart, part of a team of space shuttle astronauts who witness the end of the world and travel back in time to prevent the disaster from occurring. Weller was seen on the big screen again in 2003, playing Cardinal Driscoll, a high-ranking church official given to ungodly actions in the secret-sect thriller “The Order.”
Stepping behind the camera as a director, Weller helmed episodes of “Homicide: Life on the Street” (NBC, 1993-99) and “Odyssey 5,” as well as the Elmore Leonard telepic “Gold Coast” (1997), but, for the most part, he stuck to acting. In 2006, he returned to high-profile productions with a recurring stint as a treacherous character on the popular action show “24” (Fox, 2001-2010) and, later, the dark thriller series “Dexter” (Showtime, 2006-2013). Before long, he took up directing again, helming episodes of the tense biker drama “Sons of Anarchy” (FX, 2008- ) and the crime series “Longmire” (A&E, 2012- ), while also appearing on both shows. After voicing Batman in the two-part animated comic-book adaptation “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns” (2012-13), Weller revisited the big screen prominently with a significant role in the hit sci-fi sequel “Star Trek Into Darkness” (2013).
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
James Ellison was born in 1910 in Iowa. He made man Bmovie westerns in the 1930’s including a stint as the sidekick of Hopolang Cassidy. In 1936 he starred in “The Plainsman” with Jean Arthur and Gary Cooper. He starred opposite Frances Dee in the Val Lewton classic “I Walked with a ZXombie”. He also starred with Maureen O’Hara in “They Met in Argentina”. He ceased acting in 1962 and worked in real estate. He died in 1993 at the age of 83.
“Independent” obituary by Dick Vosburgh:
James Ellison Smith, actor: born Guthrie Center, Iowa 1910; twice married (one son, two stepdaughters); died Montecito, California 23 December 1993.
ALTHOUGH James Ellison appeared in nearly 70 films over 20 years, his place in cinema history rests on eight low-budget westerns he made early in his career; from 1935 to 1937 he played the hotblooded young Johnny Nelson in the phenomenally successful Hopalong Cassidy series. After studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse, Ellison was forced to take a job in the printing laboratories at Warner Bros. One day he was spotted on the lot and offered a screen test, which he had the unique experience of developing himself. The test led to a small role in the Warners tearjerker Play Girl (1932), but no studio contract.
Eventually MGM did sign him, but used him in only three films. When the contract ended, Ellison had little confidence in his acting ability, and applied to the National Parks Service for training as a forest ranger. Just as in a bad movie, fate suddenly took a hand: the producer Henry Sherman, who was about to bring the ‘Hopalong Cassidy’ novels to the screen, put him under contract. The role of Johnny Nelson brought him instant popularity, and he was borrowed by Cecil B. De Mille to play Buffalo Bill Cody in The Plainsman (1937), the romanticised story of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane, co-starring Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur. After leaving the Cassidy series, Ellison made a dozen films under contract to RKO, including Next Time I Marry (1939) and You Can’t Fool Your Wife (1940) – both with Lucille Ball – and two with Ginger Rogers: Vivacious Lady (1938) and Fifth Avenue Girl (1940), a reactionary comedy in which Super Patriot Ginger sorted out the problems besetting a tycoon, one of which was Ellison, his rantingly communistic chauffeur. ‘You haven’t the courage to be a capitalist yourself,’ Ginger shouts, ‘So you try to drag everyone down to where you are]’
He also played Jack Chesney in the Jack Benny version of Charley’s Aunt (1941), appeared in such horror films as The Undying Monster (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and even made musicals; in The Gang’s All Here (1944), when Alice Faye sang ‘No love, no nothin’ / Until my baby comes home . . .’, Ellison played the soldier for whom she was saving herself. At the time he was chosen for the Cassidy series, his room-mate at the Los Angeles YMCA was a young film-cutter named Pate Lucid. When Ellison left the series in 1937, he was replaced by Lucid, now using the less Surrealist acting name of Russell Hayden. By 1950, the enormous success of the old Cassidy films on television had made both actors familiar to a new generation, and they capitalised on it by producing and starring in a series of six westerns which, although pretty dire, established some sort of record; they were made simultaneously, using the same supporting actors and settings. With the help of library footage, all six films were completed in a single month.
Two years later Ellison retired from the screen and devoted himself to real-estate development and a fuller family life.
Lois Chiles was born in 1947 in Houston, Texas. In the 1970’s she had some strong leading lady parts beginning in “The Way We Were” with Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand. She played Jordan Baker in the 1974 film of “The Great Gatsby, was part of the all star cast of “Death on the Nile” and was Roger Moore’s leading lady in “Moonraker”.
IMDB entry:
Lois Chiles was born April 15, 1947 in Houston Texas to Barbara Wayne Kirkland and Marion Clay Chiles. She was raised in Alice, Texas, and received higher education at the University of Texas at Austin, and Finch College in New York City. While modeling, she made her film debut appearance as Robert Redford‘s on-screen college sweetheart in The Way We Were (1973), and reunited with Redford in The Great Gatsby (1974). She played the role of the attractive, cynical young golfer Jordan Baker. Four years later, she appeared in the film adaptation of Agatha Christie‘s Death on the Nile (1978) as the murder victim Linnet Ridgeway Doyle. Lois’s most memorable role to date is Bond Girl, Dr. Holly Goodhead opposite Roger Moore as James Bond in Moonraker (1979).
Constance Collier was born in 1878 in Windsor. She made her stage debut at the age of 3 in “A Midsummer’s Night Dream”. In 1905 she married Irish actor Julian Boyles and they performed on the stage until his death in 1918. In the 1940’s she was a stalwart character actress in Hollywood films such as “Kitty” with Paulette Goddard and Ray Milland, “The Perils of Pauline” in 1947 with Betty Hutton and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope” with James Stewart and Farley Granger. Constance Collier died in 1955 in New York.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
In a career that covered six decades, Constance Collier evolved into one of Broadway and London’s finest tragediennes during the first half of the 1900s. While the regal, dark-featured beauty who bore classic Romanesque features enjoyed a transcontinental career like a number of her contemporaries, her theatre success did not encourage an enviable film career. It wasn’t until her senior years that Constance engaged in a number of well-regarded supporting performances on screen. Later respect also came as one of Hollywood’s premiere drama and voice coaches.
She was born Laura Constance Hardie in Windsor, Berkshire on January 22, 1878, the only child of Auguste Cheetham and Eliza Georgina (nee Collier) Hardie, who were both minor professional actors. Young Constance made her stage debut at the age of three as a fairy in a production of “A Midsummer Nights Dream” and the die was cast. By age 6 she was appearing with famed actor/manager Wilson Barrett in “The Silver King”. An early break occurred in her teens (1893) when the tall, under-aged beauty was given consent by her parents to become a member of the famed George Edwardes-Hall “Gaiety Girls” dance troupe. Groomed extensively in singing, dancing and elocution, she managed to stand out among those others in the chorus line and went on to featured status in two of Edwardes-Hall’s biggest hits, “A Gaiety Girl” and “The Shop Girl” (both 1894).
Legit ingénue roles in “Her Advocate”, “Tommy Atkins” and “The Sign of the Cross” followed. Just after the turn of the century (1901) she was invited to join the theatre company of the esteemed Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who had been searching for a comparably tall leading lady to play opposite him. She remained with his company at His Majesty’s Theatre for six years where she built up a formidable classical resumé. Alongside Sir Herbert in such plays as “Ulysses”, “The Eternal City” and “Nero”, Constance also proved a fine Shakespearean with her Olivia, Viola, Portia, Mistress Ford and Cleopatra at the top of the list. She also made a noteworthy Nancy Sykes in “Oliver Twist” which she toured extensively both here and abroad. During this time (1905), she married British-born actor ‘Julian L’Estrange’.
Ms. Collier made a successful American stage debut in 1908 with “Samson” at the Garrick Theatre in New York opposite well-known American actor/playwright William Gillette, thereby placing herself solidly among the most popular and respected actresses of the day. Among her subsequent Broadway offerings were “Israel” (1909), “Trelawney of the Wells” (1911), “Oliver Twist” (1912), “Othello” (1915) and “The Merry Wives of Windsor” (1917).
Sir Herbert and Constance both appeared as extras in the silent D.W. Griffith classicIntolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916). While still in the U.S., he filmed Macbeth (1916) with Constance as his Lady Macbeth. Not only was the Shakespearean film poorly received but her starring appearances in two other silents released earlier that year, The Tongues of Men (1916) and The Code of Marcia Gray(1916), were also overlooked.
Tragedy struck in October of 1918. She and husband L’Estrange had begun a Broadway run together of “The Ideal Husband” only a month earlier. During the run he contracted the deadly Spanish influenza which had spread worldwide and died of pneumonia at the untimely age of 40. The grief-stricken actress finished the play’s run into November then returned to England where she appeared in the films The Impossible Woman (1919),Bleak House (1920) and The Bohemian Girl (1922). Among her London theatre successes were “Our Betters” (1923) at the Globe Theatre, which ran for over twelve months, and “Hamlet” wherein she played Queen Gertrude opposite John Barrymore‘s Great Dane (1925) at the Haymarket Theatre. Constance also moved into writing and penned her own play “Forever”, which was based on the Daphne Du Maurier novel “Peter Ibbetson”. She then co-wrote with actor/friend Ivor Novello the play “The Rat” (1924) in which Novello starred and Constance produced.
The advent of sound provided the exciting opportunity for the eloquent Collier to work in the U.S., but not necessarily as an actress. By helping established silent film stars transition into talkies, she became Hollywood’s foremost drama and voice coach. Finding less and less time for stage work, she directed a Broadway production of “Camille” in 1931. She did, however, manage to appear in productions of “Peter Ibbetson” (1931), which she also staged, “Dinner at Eight (1932) and “Hay Fever” (1933) all in New York. Her final Broadway curtain call was taken as Madame Bernardi in “Aries Is Rising” (1939) at New York’s Golden Theatre.
In later years, she continued to coach (among her students were Marilyn Monroe) and write, but she also found time to return to the large screen in a dozen or so films, usually providing stately support. She appeared in a range of movies from the Shirley Temple vehicle Wee Willie Winkie (1937) to the film noir piece The Dark Corner (1946). Better known roles during this period include those in Stage Door (1937), playing, quite appropriately and amusingly, the resident drama coach, An Ideal Husband (1947), excellent as Lady Markby, and Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rope (1948). Her last film was Whirlpool(1949).
Constance died of natural causes in New York on April 25, 1955, and left behind her 1929 memoirs “Harlequinade”. She had no children.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Kevin Dobson was born in New York City in 1943. He first came to prominence as the sidekick Crocker to Telly Savalas’s “Kojack” which ran from 1973 until 1978. His films include “Midway” in 1976, “All Night Long” with Barbra Streisand and “Dirty Work”. He starred in the TV series “Knot’s Landing” from 1982 until 1993.
TCM Overview:
Leading man with appeal to both women and blue collars, who still has traces of his Queens, NY, accent, and who has sustained 25 years of TV stardom, Kevin Dobson is best recalled as the right hand to “Kojak,” Lt. Bobby Crocker (CBS, 1973-1978), and as Mack MacKenzie on the long-running “Knots Landing” (CBS, 1982-1993). Dobson was attending NYU and working on the Long Island Railroad to support himself when his girlfriend — whom he later married — suggested he try to do TV commercials for make money instead of railroad work while trying to study. He won a few commercials and toured with a production of “The Impossible Years” by Walter Kerr. When he returned to New York, he was hooked, and began studying at the Neighborhood Playhouse. He won bit parts in three films made in the east — “Love Story” (1970), “Klute” (1971), and “The French Connection” (1971) — before heading to Los Angeles, where his first TV gig was in an episode of “The Mod Squad,” but he found himself working as a fireman on the Santa Fe Railroad to make ends meet. The break came when he was cast as Lt. Crocker in “Kojak” (CBS, 1973-1978). Telly Savalas bossed Dobson around for 100 episodes, but Dobson won the hearts of the younger women watching the show. Under contract to Universal, which made the series, he was put into a co-starring role in the feature film “The Battle of Midway” (1976) and in his first TV movie, “The Immigrants” (syndication, 1978). He holds the distinction of having been one of Barbra Streisand’s screen husbands, but, alas for Dobson, it was in one of La Streisand’s few box office turkeys, “All Night Long” (1981). In 1981, Dobson had his first TV series as a lead, “Shannon” (CBS), playing a New York police detective who relocates to San Francisco with his son. The show lasted only a season, but he then joined “Knots Landing” as tough federal prosecutor MacKenzie, who eventually married Michele Lee. Starting in 1988, Dobson also frequently directed episodes of the series. “Knots Landing” also gave Dobson the profile to star in TV movies, many produced through his own company — and for which his wife, Susan, was executive producer. Among the more recent were “Dirty Work” (USA, 1992), in which he was an ex-cop turned bailbondsman, and “If Someone Had Known” (CBS, 1995), in which he must arrest his own daughter. In 1996, he was the older and wiser Leo McCarthy on “FX: The Series” for syndication, and he returned to “Knots Landing: Back to the Cul-de-Sac” (CBS, 1997). As for Lt. Crocker, according to his appearance in “Kojak: It’s Always Something” (ABC, 1990), which reprised the 1970s characters, Crocker had become an attorney and Assistant DA.
Kim Darby is to-day best known for her performance as Mattie Ross in the original version of “True Grit” which starred John Wayne back in 1969. Kim Darby was born in 1947 in Los Angeles. She made her film debut in “Bye Bye Birdie” in 1963. She went on to feature in the underrated “Bus Riley’s Back in Town” with Michael Parks and “The Strawberry Statement”. She is married to actor James Westmoreland.
TCM Overview:
Kim Darby rose to fame as the young woman who asks John Wayne to help her avenge her father’s murder in “True Grit” (1969), but while Wayne won an Academy Award for his efforts, Darby’s spunky quality did not translate into ingenue status and she proved hard to cast. By the 1980s, her work had become sporadic.
A Hollywood native, Darby began performing as a child (billed as Derby Zerby) with her parents, who were known professionally as ‘The Dancing Zerbies’. She was a teen-ager when she appeared as an extra in the film “Bye Bye Birdie” (1963) and made her speaking debut on an episode of the TV series “Mr. Novak” (NBC, 1964). She had her first speaking role in a film with “Bus Riley’s Back in Town” (1965), but did not get her big break until “True Grit”. She was rushed into several subsequent films, including “Norwood” (1970), a vehicle to help launch Glen Campbell in films in which Darby played a pregnant and rejected woman he chances to meet. The same year she was the protesting woman whose presence lures Bruce Davison into the anti-war movement in “The Strawberry Statement” (1970). In 1978, Henry Winkler pursued Darby in “The One and Only” and she was the professor dismayed by the changes in Jason Bateman in “Teen Wolf Too” (1987).
While Darby began in TV in the mid-60s on “Mr. Novak” as a high school student with problems, and subsequently appeared in the pilots for both “Ironside” (1967) and “The Streets of San Francisco” (1972), her work on the small screen has been infrequent. She had a supporting role as Virginia Calderwood on the original “Rich Man, Poor Man” miniseries during the 1976-77 season, and also co-starred in “The Last Convertible” (NBC, 1981). Darby made her TV-movie debut with “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” (ABC, 1973) and was still making occasional TV appearances in the 90s: she had a small role in the children’s movie “Secret of the Lizard Woman”, a 1995 ABC Saturday Special.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
James Shigeta was born in Hawaii in 1933. He served in the U.S Marine Corps during the Korean War. His breatkthrough role came in 1959 in Samuel Fuller’s cult classic “The Crimson Kimono” with Glenn Corbett and Victoria Shaw. His other films include “Bridge to the Sun” with Carroll Baker, “Flower Drum Song” with Miyoshi Umeki and Nancy Kwan and “China Cry” with France Nuyen in 1990. He died in August 2014.
His obituary in “The Independent”:
he Japanese-American actor and singer James Shigeta starred in two major films of 1961, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Flower Drum Song, in which he sang the hit ballad, “You Are Beautiful”, and the drama Bridge to the Sun, in which he played a Japanese diplomat married to an American (Carroll Baker).
The latter was the US’s official entry in the Venice Film Festival, and Shigeta was hailed as the first Oriental romantic leading man since Sessue Hayakawa in the silent era. His big-screen stardom, though, was not sustained, but he continued to have an active career on TV and stage, and became a notable character actor. His memorable roles include supplying the voice for General Li in Disney’s animated feature, Mulan (1998), and a telling few minutes in Die Hard (1988), in which he played the executive who refuses to give a bank security code to a vicious terrorist (Alan Rickman). “You’re just going to have to kill me,” he says, prompting Rickman to shoot him in the head.
Known as a “Sansei”, a third-generation American of Japanese ancestry, Shigeta was born in Honolulu in 1929, one of six children of a plumber. He attended New York University to major in creative writing, but switched to his first love, music, winning a popular talent show before enlisting as a Marine in the Korean War, rising to the rank of Staff Sergeant.
After the war he headed the cast of a musical revue in Japan, achieving immense popularity. His record of “Love Letters in the Sand” (a hit for Pat Boone in the US and UK) sold more than 2m copies, at the time the best-selling record in Japanese history. He had to find a tutor to teach him the Japanese language, and headlined both television and stage musicals. Returning to the US to star in television spectaculars with Dinah Shore and Shirley MacLaine, he headlined a revue, Holiday in Japan, in Las Vegas produced by MacLaine’s husband Steve Parker.
He made his US screen debut in Samuel Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono (1959) as one of two cops who fall for a key witness. He then played featured roles in Walk Like a Dragon (1960), as a Chinese man in the turn-of-the-century West who resents the treatment of his race, and Cry for Happy (1961), a farce dealing with culture clash as Navy men invade a Japanese brothel.
He sang on screen for the first time when given the romantic lead in Flower Drum Song as Wang Ta, who is in love with showgirl Nancy Kwan, unaware that he is loved by two others, a shy Chinese immigrant (Myoshi Umeki) and an older woman (Reiko Sato). A dramatic dream ballet depicting the confused passions, choreographed by Hermes Pan, featured Shigeta in close-ups while a masked double handled the more ambitious dance movements.
In 1962 Shigeta signed to a record label co-founded by Fred Astaire, Choreo, and made an album, We Speak The Same Language, featuring mainly show tunes, such as Rodgers and Hart’s “This Funny World” and Strouse and Adams’ “I’ve Just Seen Her”. It revealed an appealing baritone, but his acceptance the same year of a guest spot in TV’s Naked City indicated that screen roles were not being offered.
It was five years before his next film, supporting Elvis Presley in Paradise, Hawaiian Style (1966), subsequent films including Lost Horizon (1973), The Yakuza (1975), and Midway (1976) as Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo. In 1969 he returned to the stage as star of a highly successful touring version of The King and I.
He appeared in over 100 television series and films, including Dr Kildare, The Outer Limits, Perry Mason, Hawaii Five-O, Kung Fu, Streets of San Francisco, The Rockford Files, The Love Boat and Murder, She Wrote. His last television role was in Avatar: The Last Airbender. Throughout his career, he refused to be questioned about his private life.
James Shigeta, actor and singer: born Honolulu 17 June 1929; died Los Angeles 28 July 2014.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
