Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 91 of 126

Marc Platt

Marc Platt was born in 1913 in Pasadena, California. He was a brilliant dancer and his film debut was in 1945 in “Tonight and Every Night”. He was also featured in “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” and “Oklahoma”

His “Guardian” obituary:

Marc Platt was one of the first Americans to join the Ballets Russes, and at the time of his death, aged 100, among the very last survivors. Tall and loose-limbed, with red hair and freckles, he must have seemed an unlikely addition to the ranks of the largely Russian company. But when Michel Fokine saw Platoff – as he had been hastily renamed – playing the role of Dodon, the archetypal foolish tsar in his ballet Le Coq d’Or, the choreographer exclaimed: “I didn’t think anyone could be more Russian.”

In 1943, Platt created the leading role of Curly in the dream ballet sequence of the Broadway hit Oklahoma!, and he also appeared as a minor character in the 1955 film version of the show. His two best-known film roles, however, were as brother Daniel Pontipee in the musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) and in the Rita Hayworth film Tonight and Every Night (1945). In the latter, Platt is shown auditioning for a theatre similar to the Windmill in London. Having failed to bring music with him, he dances to music from the radio, changing styles as the theatre owner switches stations, moving instantly and effortlessly between classical, tap, swing and flamenco in a tour de force.

The son of a French violinist who had moved to the US and a soprano singer, Marcel Le Plat was born in Pasadena, California. The family travelled widely but eventually settled in Seattle, where Marcel studied first at the Cornish school (now Cornish College of the Arts) and then for eight years with the dancer and trainer Mary Ann Wells. It was Wells who, in 1935, arranged an audition for him with Wassily de Basil and Léonide Massine, respectively director and choreographer of the Ballets Russes. Once accepted, he immediately joined the company on its tour, making his stage debut a few days later.

By Platt’s own account, the occasion was little short of a disaster. He was taller than any of the troupe’s other men, and once he was on stage his ill-fitting costume began to fall apart. Worse was to come with the last ballet of the evening, the Polovtsian dances from Prince Igor. Equipped like all his fellow dancers with a genuine bow, crossing the stage at full speed he mistakenly turned right instead of left and caught his weapon in that of his neighbour, thus causing a major pileup of warriors. “What you were trying to do? Kill everybody?” hissed one of his fellow dancers, adding, “This is ballet. Not war.”

Platt soon found his place in the company, however, and when Massine broke away to form his own troupe in 1938, Platt was one of the artists invited to join it. Later that year, Massine choreographed his Beethoven ballet, Seventh Symphony, which Platt later recalled as giving him “the best role I ever had. I danced my fool head off.” He also created the part of the Devil in Frederick Ashton’s Devil’s Holiday, sadly never seen outside the US and now largely lost.

That same season saw Platt’s first attempt at choreography. Ghost Town had an American theme and a score by Richard Rodgers. It proved a disappointment, but his fellow dancer Frederic Franklin attributed at least part of the blame to Rodgers, who refused to alter his score to suit the scenario.

Platt left the company in 1942, having risen to the rank of soloist and drawn praise for his “superb character work”. But conditions were hard, the pay was poor and Platt now had a family to support, having married a fellow dancer, Eleanor Marra, with whom he had a son. At this time he abandoned his Russianised name, becoming Marc Platt.

In 1962, he became director of the ballet at Radio City Music Hall, a position he held for eight years before moving with his second wife, Jean Goodall – also a dancer – to Fort Myers, Florida, where together they opened a dance school. (His first marriage had ended in divorce.) Goodall died in 1994 and Platt returned to California to be nearer his family. Once settled, he took great interest in dance in the Bay area, guesting with several companies and always happy to watch rehearsals, coach and provide feedback. “Always do what you love as long as you can,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in an interview published when he was 100.

When, in June 2000, a reunion of all the surviving Ballets Russes veterans was organised, Platt was among the attenders. He also played a prominent part in the subsequent 2005 documentary, his modesty, easy charm and sharp intelligence still very much in evidence.

Platt is survived by the son of his first marriage, the son and daughter of his second, and a grandchild.

• Marc Platt (Marcel Emile Gaston Le Plat), dancer, born 2 December 1913; died 29 March 2014

His “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

One of Hollywood’s more high-flying dancers on film, dimpled, robust, fair-haired Marc Platt provided fancy footwork to a handful of “Golden Era” musicals but truly impressed in one vigorous 1950s classic.

Born to a musical family on December 2, 1913 in Pasadena, California as Marcel Emile Gaston LePlat, he was the only child of a French-born concert violinist and a soprano singer. After years on the road, the family finally settled in Seattle, Washington. Following his father’s death, his mother found a job at the Mary Ann Wells’ dancing school while young Marc earned his keep running errands at the dance school. He eventually became a dance student at the school and trained with Wells for eight years who saw great potential in Marc.

It was Wells who arranged an audition for Marc with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo when the touring company arrived in Seattle. The artistic director Léonide Massineaccepted him at $150 a week and changed his name to Marc Platoff in order to maintain the deception that the company was Russian. A highlight was his dancing as the Spirit of Creation in Massine’s legendary piece “Seventh Symphony”. Platt also choreographed during his time there, one piece being Ghost Town (1939), which was set to music byRichard Rodgers. While there he met and married (in 1942) dancer Eleanor Marra. They had one son before divorcing in 1947. Ted Le Plat, born in 1944, became a musician as well as a daytime soap and prime-time TV actor.

Anxious to try New York, Marc left the ballet company in 1942 and moved to the Big Apple where he changed his marquee name to the more Americanized “Marc Platt” and pursued musical parts. Following minor roles in the short run musicals “The Lady Comes Across” (January, 1942) with Joe E. Lewis, Mischa Auer and Gower Champion and “Beat the Band” (October-December, 1942) starring Joan Caulfield, Marc and Kathryn Sergavafound themselves cast in a landmark musical, the Rodgers and Hammerstein rural classic “Oklahoma!” Choreographer Agnes de Mille showcased them in the ground-breaking extended dream sequence roles of (Dream) Curly and (Dream) Laurey. Platt stayed with the show for a year but finally left after Columbia Pictures signed him to a film contract.

Aside from a couple of short musical films, he made his movie feature debut with a featured role as Tommy in Tonight and Every Night (1945) starring Rita Hayworth. From there he appeared in the Sid Caesar vehicle Tars and Spars (1946) and back with Rita Hayworth in Down to Earth (1947). Columbia tried Marc out as a leading man in one of their second-string musicals When a Girl’s Beautiful (1947) opposite Adele Jergens andPatricia Barry but did not make a great impression. Featured again in the non-musical adventure The Swordsman (1948) starring Ellen Drew and Larry Parks and the Italian drama _Addio Mimi! (1949) based on Puccini’s “La Boheme,” Marc’s film career dissipated.

After appearing on occasional TV variety shows such as “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Colgate Comedy Hour” and following a single return to Broadway in the musical “Maggie” (1953, Platt returned to film again after a five-year absence but when he finally did, he made a superb impression as one of Howard Keel‘s uncouth but vigorously agile woodsman brothers (Daniel) in MGM’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). The film still stands as one of the most impressive dancing pieces of the “Golden Age” of musicals. He followed this with a minor dancing role (it was James Mitchell who played Dream Curly here) in the film version of Oklahoma! (1955).

When the musical film lost favor in the late 1950’s, Marc finished off the decade focusing on straight dramatic roles on TV with roles in such rugged series as “Sky King,” “Wyatt Earp” and “Dante”. By the 1960s Marc had taken off his dance shoes and turned director of the ballet company at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. He and his second wife, Jean Goodall, whom he married back in 1951 and had two children (Donna, Michael), also ran a dance studio of their own. Following this they left New York and moved to Fort Myers, Florida where they set up a new dance school.

Marc moved to Northern California to be near family following his wife’s death in 1994 and occasionally appeared at the Marin Dance Theatre in San Rafael. One of his last performances was a non-dancing part in “Sophie and the Enchanted Toyshop” at age 89. In 2000, Marc was presented with the Nijinsky Award at the Ballets Russe’s Reunion. He appeared in the 2005 documentary Ballets Russes (2005). Platt died at the age of 100 at a hospice in San Rafael from complications of pneumonia. He was survived by his three children.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

F. Murray Abraham was born in 1939 in Pittsburgh. He made his movie debut in the George C. Scott movie “They Might Be Giants”. He won an Oscar for “Amadeus” in 1984. Other films include “The Big Fix”, “Scarface”, The Name of the Rose” and “A House Divided”

IMDB entry:

Was educated at the University of Texas.

He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and brought up in El Paso, Texas. His father, Frederick Abraham, who was born in Pennsylvania, was from an Assyrian Christian (Antiochian) family, from Syria. His mother, Josephine (Stello) Abraham, was also born in Pennsylvania, to Italian parents.

In July 2004, during a ceremony in Rome, he was awarded the “Premio per gli Italiani nel Mondo”. This is a prize distributed by the Marzio Tremaglia foundation and the Italian government to Italian emigrants and their descendants who have distinguished themselves abroad.

Early in his career, he was one of the “Fruit of the Loom guys” (men dressed up as fruits) in the underwear commercials.

Has two children with his wife Kate Hannan: Mick and Jamili Abraham.

Studied drama under the tutelage of Uta Hagen at the HB Studio in Greenwich Village, New York City for a year in the early 1960s.

After his Academy Award for Amadeus (1984), he turned down roles in films such as Clue(1985) and Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986).

He filmed Scarface (1983) in Los Angeles at the same time as Amadeus (1984) in Prague, necessitating four round trip flights between the two.

One of his first plays in Los Angeles was a dramatization of a work by Ray Bradbury: “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit”. He and Bradbury remained friends until Bradbury’s death.

Attended and graduated from El Paso High School in El Paso, Texas in 1958.

He continues to teach drama classes at Brooklyn College in New York City.

His first major success as an actor was as Antonio Salieri in Amadeus (1984) at age 45.

Learned to play the piano and to conduct for his role of Antonio Salieri in Amadeus(1984).

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Terry Kilburn was born in England in 1926. He began his career as a child actor in British films and his roles included Tiny Tim in the 1938 version of “A Christmas Carol” and one of the pupils of Robert Donat in “Goodbye Mr Chips”. He then went to Hollywood and was featured in such movies as “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” with Basil Rathbone and “The Keys of the Kingdom”.

Interview in “Lavender Magazine”:

Terry Kilburn, actor, director, artistic director, recently talked at length with this Lavender writer about his early life, describing in cinematic detail how the only child of working class parents, Tom and Alice Kilburn, came to star in Hollywood at MGM delivering such coveted film lines as, “God bless us, every one,” and “Goodbye, Mr. Chips.” Born November 25, 1926 in London, he appeared in over 25 films, including, along with those mentioned here in detail, National Velvet (1944, with Liz Taylor), and Only the Valiant (1951, with Gregory Peck). His extensive stage work will appear in part two of this interview.

My father was a bus conductor, taking tickets on those big double-deck buses. He’d run up and down the stairs making jokes and entertaining– sometimes he’d have the whole bus laughing. I think he would liked to have gone on the stage, he was a natural entertainer.

My mother was a housewife, and in the summertime used to run a boarding house at Clackton-on-Sea, where working-class people went for their week’s holiday. She was in the kitchen and making the beds and setting tables from morning to night. My father stayed up in London and would come down on the weekends in a little baby Austin car about the size of this dining table. I had a lot of time to myself.

There was an amusement pier where a man called Clown Bertram ran a little theater. Children would come up on the stage and do a little something, then the one who got the most applause would get a prize. I was much too shy to do that although I loved watching the show.

One time, my mother had some friends who left their two children for her to take care of. The little girl sang a song and did a dance on Clown Bertram’s stage, and she won the first prize. The next day, I got over my shyness enough to go up and I sang a song. I was a big flop, but it broke the ice. I was about seven.

Without realizing it, little Terry had already been learning his craft.

My parents used to take me with them to the movies. Movies then were an incredible source of entertainment for poor and working class people. For a sixpence, or a shilling, you could see the main feature and a companion feature, a newsreel, a short subject, a cartoon. Most theaters still had a couple of stage acts from vaudeville, and on top of all that, up from the orchestra pit would come an organ, all lit up, and you’d have a community sing.

I started impersonating these people that I saw on the screen, Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, Mae West, Zazu Pitts, Charles Laughton, and Ronald Colman. Sometimes, I’d do impersonations for relatives spontaneously, but usually, my shyness overcame me and I couldn’t. But when this girl won the first prize, that got my competitive spirit up. The second time, I went up and did some impersonations and won hands down. It was like an electric light going on over my head. Many actors will tell you of this experience, when they first realize that they have an ability to bring out that response from an audience. From then on, I was on that stage every day.

Terry neglected to tell his parents that Clown Bertram had added him, unpaid, to the regular show. Some guests finally enlightened his astonished mother.

My father was very interested, and when we got back to London he submitted me for amateur night competitions. I worked up a little act, doing my impersonations and I came on singing, “OK Toots,” an Eddie Cantor song. That’s kind of interesting because later on Eddie Cantor played an important part in my life, and I did a little tap dance that I taught myself, having seen Fred Astaire.

The first prize was something like ten pounds, while my father–this was in the Depression–was making two pounds a week. We started going around the circuit, to all these huge old variety houses that seated two thousand people. My big ending was a scene from David Copperfield, where Mr. Murdstone, the wicked stepfather, beats David. I did both parts, and ended sobbing and having hysterics on the floor as David, then standing up with a big smile and bowing.

Through what we today call “networking,” one thing led to another.

Into our lives came Freddie Newton. He was a Dickensian character, a little Cockney who wore checked suits and sharp hats. He had a candy store and was a bookmaker. He helped polish up my act and took me up to the West End of London to meet an actor, Hugh Wakefield. I did my act and Wakefield commented, “I don’t quite know what I just saw, but whatever it is I think he should meet my agent.’

This turned out to be a woman who went only by “Connie,” Ralph Richardson’s agent, who told his parents, “You’ve got to get him to Hollywood.” She then introduced them to a visiting Hollywood lawyer, Roger Marchetti.

Marchetti said, “If you come to Hollywood, you can count on me. I will do everything I can to see that you get auditioned.” Well, when I heard that! Can you think of a thing in your own childhood, the thing that just meant more to you than anything and obsessed your mind? I used to sit up in bed with a globe and spin it and make it stop on the United States.

I think none of this would have happened if it hadn’t been this particular time during the Depression. People had so little to lose. There was a sense of camaraderie and an atmosphere of, “Well, let’s try it!”

There was a great resistance by the U.S. Consulate in London to giving the whole family visas. In the end, after much finagling, Tom stayed behind while Alice and Terry traveled to the United States.

My mother was an amazing combination of guts and timidity. She would take chances that other women of her generation and education would never have dreamed of doing, but she was frightened to death of dogs and the ocean. She’d never been out of London, let alone England, so she would only go on the Queen Mary. We booked the cheapest third-class passage.

Finally, we arrived in Los Angeles. Now this is in April-May of 1937. In those days, the station in downtown Los Angeles was in Chinatown and it was just awful, an old shack that was falling apart. All of our dreams of Hollywood, and out of this glamorous vision we were seeing this terrible slum. And there, in bright, blooming sunshine, was Mr. Marchetti with a huge bunch of red roses, standing next to this immense Packard convertible and chauffeur. It was a surreal picture.

They had expected to stay with Marchetti and his family but were quickly disabused of that idea. He was very much a bachelor, as well as a handsomely paid celebrity divorce lawyer, e.g., (Myrtle) Hardy vs. (Oliver) Hardy.

He didn’t want some English lady and her little boy in his house, so we ended up in a bungalow court, with Murphy beds that pulled out of the wall. We started on the rounds, seeing producers and so forth, and Mr. Marchetti was good to his word. He certainly did his best, but the problem was me. The excitement of performing on stage, or for somebody in his dressing room, seemed to stimulate me and make me a good performer. Now, to have to go into these big offices with people sitting in big swivel chairs smoking cigars–it was too much for a little boy to cope with. And my personality, everything that had made people say “Yes! He’s got something!” just disappeared.

Even more so when they made screen tests. If Marilyn Monroe hadn’t ever gotten in front of a camera, she would have been working in a beauty parlor. She came to life in front of the camera. It was just the opposite for me. The tests were usually shot in the corner of a sound stage where no movie was being filmed at the time, huge, ghostly sound stages about the size of an airplane hangar. It was overwhelming.

A year went by, and the money had run out. Mr. Marchetti said we could move into an apartment over his garage. My mother agreed. She didn’t know what else to do. So we moved, not into his Florentine mansion, but into the garage apartment. He had two Doberman pinscher dogs. My mother was terrified of them, and the apartment was infested with mice.

The whole venture was coming to a bad end. My mother finally told me, “We have to go back, we can’t just stay here forever.” At that very time, my mother got a letter from my father: “I’m getting a ship and I’m coming to Canada, and I’m going to come through the border because I know people do it all the time. I’m on my way! By the time you get this, I be on the Atlantic.”

And then, the cavalry came riding.

Mr. Marchetti had pretty much given up, but his assistant took pity on us: “One thing we haven’t tried is radio. Let me see what I can do about getting an audition.” Eddie Cantor’s business manager said, “I think Eddie would love him.” I auditioned, and he did!

Cantor’s popular radio program also showcased stars and young actors like Deanna Durbin and Bobby Breen.

We were in rehearsal when a talent scout for MGM showed up. They were about to make a movie called Lord Jeff with Freddie Bartholomew and Mickey Rooney, based on the true story of those famous English orphanages, Doctor Bernardo’s Homes, where they trained young boys to go into the Royal Navy. There was a part for a little Lancashire boy, Albert Baker. The scout asked, “Can you do a Lancashire accent?” I said, “Aye I can, I can do it.” I’d learned “‘hae t’ talk like that,” sort of through my nose. “By goom, that’s champion!” “Oh my God!,” he said. “Sam Wood will just be thrilled.”

Even at that age, an actor will see a part and say, “Oh, that is my part.” Often they’re wrong, but sometimes they’re right, like Vivien Leigh thinking she was Scarlett. So I went to see director Sam Wood, and I did a thing for him, and he said, “The accent’s great, but I really wanted Alfalfa for this part.” Alfalfa could no more do that accent than fly, so that was out. But he wanted a kid like him. I was kind of a pretty little boy, so he said, “I’m sorry, but no.”

Fortunately, Terry’s mother had become friends with Lillian Rosine, MGM’s makeup specialist.

When I came back in tears Lillian said, “Oh, for God’s sake! What does Sam Wood think I’m here for? And she put me in her makeup chair, greased down my hair with Vaseline, blacked out one of my front teeth, put freckles on my face. I’d been crying, so I already looked horrible. Then she took me back and dragged me in and said, “There now, does he look ugly enough for you?” Sam Wood laughed and said, OK.”

One day while we were shooting, somebody came and said, “You’re wanted outside.” So I went out from the dark sound stage into the bright sunshine, and standing there was my father. I just ran and leaped into his arms, and we laughed and cried and it was incredible. Lord Jeff was quite a success. I got fabulous reviews that said, “The busman’s son from London steals the show.” It was thrilling. A dream come true–and my father was there, loving every minute of it.

I also made A Christmas Carol in ’38, and played Tiny Tim. I’ll always remember going onto the set at the MGM lot the first day. I think it was London 1830, and the snow was coming down–they were actually Kellogg’s cornflakes, bleached or something, but it was so beautiful. Oh, you can imagine that for a kid who loved acting and being in fantasy, it was extraordinary.

He attended school at MGM, encountering Lana Turner, Kathryn Grayson, Anne Baxter–and, briefly, Judy Garland.

I sat next to Judy Garland for one day and just fell in love with her. She found my English accent absolutely hilarious. She had this wonderful laugh. And she had a charm bracelet with a tiny gold-framed picture of Clark Gable, because that song had made her a big success: “Dear Mr. Gable.”

He appeared in Sweethearts next, with Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy, and was scheduled to be in a Topperfilm, when his part was cut.

That didn’t bother me because by this time, just before Christmas, 1938, I was cast in Goodbye Mr. Chips, and was being sent back to England. Robert Donat would not come to this country for tax reasons. Greer Garson had been cast as the wife; she was a total unknown, had never made a movie in Hollywood. We went back on the Normandie. Greer Garson was on the ship, but she was up in first class.

“Chips” was professor Charles Edward Chipping whose career at Brookfield School progresses from young, stuffy classics prof, to beloved “Mr. Chips,” to Head of Brookfield during the Great War. Terry played four generations of Colley boys, and, as the youngest, Peter Colley III, says his iconic line to the elderly Chips who passes in his sleep recalling “his boys.” With Robert Donat, Greer Garson, John Mills, Paul Heinreid, from James Hilton’s novel.

Donat was wonderful, fascinating. I was old enough to see and respect what he was doing. Movie sets are notorious for fooling around. If it’s not much of a movie it doesn’t matter, but Donat realized this was the part of a lifetime, and he was very serous. When he got into playing the old Chips, he stayed in character the whole time, even between shots.

I tried to make each one of the four boys somewhat different, but I could only do as much as the scene allowed. Of course, I got to say, “Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” in this huge, wonderful close-up. Actors would give their souls for a close-up like that.

About that final shot: I wasn’t even supposed to be there since it was against the law for children to work that late. They just looked the other way, and it was almost midnight when I had that close-up.

Actors, like their characters, exist at the whim of chance and happenstance. For instance: What if Terry had known how to swim? What if Mickey Rooney had been taller?

There was a sequence in Lord Jeff where they wanted me to fall in the water. I couldn’t swim. I was terrified, even though they put a life jacket under my little sailor suit. I finally got up enough nerve, but only by looking first and jumping. That wasn’t what they wanted. I was so humiliated, so ashamed that I had disappointed Mr. Wood that my parents got me into swimming. I used to swim all the time, and I think that probably caused me to grow.

When I came back to Hollywood after making Chips, I was scheduled to be in a number of pictures with Mickey Rooney, playing his sidekick. But suddenly, instead of being twelve and looking ten, I was now twelve looking fourteen, and was as tall or taller than Mickey. My option was not taken up, and that began the next period of my life.

The above article can also be accessed online at “Lavender Magazine” here.

A Christmas Carol, poster, Terry Kilburn, Reginald Owen, 1938. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Pert and pretty Mona Freeman was born in 1926 in Baltimore. Her first major film role was in “Junior Miss” in 1945. Other roles include “Dear Ruth”, “Mother Wore Tights”, “The Heiress” and “Battle Cry”. She died in 2014.

Her “Independent” obituary by Tom Vallance:

Freeman was popular for her convincing portrayal of teenagers in films of the 1940s, notably in the hit comedy Dear Ruth (1947) and its two sequels, Dear Wife (1949) and Dear Brat (1951). She played Betty Grable’s daughter in Mother Wore Tights (1947) and was still playing such roles well into her twenties, but though she later played leading lady to such stars as William Holden and Alan Ladd, she never became a top star as an adult, though she made telling impact in Otto Preminger’s disturbing film noir, Angel Face (1952The daughter of a contractor, she was born Monica Elizabeth Freeman in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1926, and she was only 14 years old and still at high school when she started modelling for the famed Powers agency. In May 1941, she became the first winner of the title of the newly conceived “Miss Subways”, an honour bestowed monthly on a subway traveller (parodied by Betty Comden and Adolph Green as “Miss Turnstiles” in their show and film, On the Town). Freeman’s photograph on a magazine cover caught the eye of Howard Hughes, who signed her to a personal contract, which he later sold to Paramount.

Her first screen role was to be as Barbara Stanwyck’s stepdaughter in Billy Wilder’s classic, Double Indemnity (1944), but she photographed too young so was replaced by Jean Heather. Her screen debut was in an uncredited role in National Velvet (1944), then she played a 15-year-old in wartime France in Till We Meet Again (1944), but her first major role was in Robert Florey’s compelling Danger Signal (1945), in which she is deceived by the charms of fortune hunting Zachary Scott and refuses to heed the warning of her older sister (Faye Emerson).

In the 1940s the escapades of teenage heroines were a popular staple of Broadway plays, and Freeman was cast in two delightful screen adaptations, Junior Miss (1945) and Dear Ruth. Peggy Ann Garner had the star role in Junior Miss, but Freeman was amusingly effective as her older sister, embarrassed at Garner’s over-dramatising, and constantly being called on by young suitors. In Dear Ruth she had a central role as a teenager who corresponds with a soldier using the name and photograph of her glamorous older sister (Joan Caulfield), sparking a chain of misunderstandings when the soldier (William Holden) comes to call when on leave.

The film’s success spawned two sequels, Dear Wife and Dear Brat , with Freeman getting top billing in the last and still looking the part, though actually 25 years old. In 1945 she married a millionaire car dealer, Pat Nerney, and while she was filming Mother Wore Tights she discovered that she was pregnant with her only child, Mona Jr, known as “Monie”.

In the Grable musical she had a good role as the oldest daughter of vaudeville performers who misguidedly becomes ashamed of her parents. The film was a big hit, and Grable’s favourite of her films.

One of Freeman’s favourite roles was that of Olivia DeHavilland’s cousin Marion in William Wyler’s masterly The Heiress (1949). Though she was leading lady to William Holden in Streets of Laredo (1949) and Alan Ladd in Branded (1950), Freeman was not happy that her teenage image persisted. “Just like driving the same road day after day, they’ve become a bore to me,” she said, and stated that she wanted to play “wildcats, brazen women, the menacing side of the triangle.”

After she divorced Nerney in 1952 her name was linked with Vic Damone, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. She and Crosby were expected to wed after his wife, Dixie Lee, died, but they were Catholics and Freeman had been divorced. She married businessman H Jack Ellis in 1961. He adopted Monie, and the marriage lasted until his death in 1992 (Mona and her daughter can be glimpsed as part of the circus audience in The Greatest Show on Earth, 1952).

Her last notable screen role was that of the sweetheart of an ambulance driver (Robert Mitchum) who has become fatally seduced by a pathological beauty (Jean Simmons) in Angel Face. One of the best scenes is the first meeting between the two women, Simmons having suggested they have lunch. The cat-and-mouse sparring that follows is superbly played by both actresses.

Freeman made her last film, Dragoon Wells Massacre, in 1957, and the following year she toured opposite Edward G Robinson in Paddy Chayevsky’s play Middle of the Night. She was a regular guest star in television series until the mid-1960s – she played in three episodes of Perry Mason as three separate clients. She then concentrated on her successful career as a portrait painter, owning an art gallery and having an art studio in her home. “I didn’t dislike acting,” she said, “but when I no longer needed the money I lost all interest.”

The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.

IMDB entry:

A professional model while still in high school, Mona Freeman was signed to a movie contract by Howard Hughes, who then proceeded to sell her contract to Paramount. Starting out in typical juvenile parts, she developed into a very competent actress. As she worked her way out of the teenage ingénue role, however, she found that she had less success in adult roles, and instead of landing parts in “A” pictures she found herself relegated to “B” westerns and somewhat tawdry crime dramas (e.g., Flesh and Fury(1952), Shadow of Fear (1954)). She basically retired from film work in the late 1950s, but worked steadily in television for quite some time after that.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: frankfob2@yahoo.co

Mother of actress Monie Ellis.

Perenially young bobbysoxer of post-war Paramount, she played teens long after she outgrew the roles, and it later stifled her adult career.

The 18-year-old’s first role was as Barbara Stanwyck teen stepdaughter in Billy Wilder‘sDouble Indemnity (1944) but she photographed so young, she was replaced by Jean Heather. She still made her debut in the movie, however, when she was instead handed a one-line bit part as Edward G. Robinson‘s secretary. She was also cast to playElizabeth Taylor‘s older sister in National Velvet (1944) but once again was replaced (byAngela Lansbury) because she did not look old enough. In truth, Mona was six years Taylor’s senior.

Of English, Irish and French heritage. Her father, Stuart Freeman, was a contractor.

To help her brother enter Yale, Mona took it upon herself to find modeling work and became a successful teenage cover girl for John Robert Powers. She also became one of the “Miss Subway” girls in New York.

Howard Hughes discovered her and gave her a two-year contract after seeing one of her photographs on a magazine cover. Frustrated that she was not cast in anything, Paramount wound up buying out her contract from Hughes, having never done a bit of work for the eccentric mogul.She was cast in Angel Face (1952), an RKO/Howard Hughes production.

First husband was Pat Nerney, a wealthy Hollywood auto dealer. They had a daughter, Mona, Jr., called Monie, in 1947.

Her hobbies include portrait and landscape painting.

Her second husband (since June of 1961), Jack Ellis, is a Los Angeles businessman. He officially adopted Mona’s daughter from an earlier marriage who entered show business as Monie Ellis.

I’m not the type to play roles which win Academy Awards. I can’t see myself in a big historical picture or in a difficult emotional role.

You have to forget all that silly nonsense you were taught in pictures. I mean about the importance of the star, the glamour stuff and all that. On a live TV show, everybody works together on the same level. You can learn more about acting in five minutes of television than you can during an entire picture.

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Mother Wore Tights, poster, Betty Grable, Mona Freeman, Dan Dailey, Connie Marshall, 1947. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Janis Carter was born in 1913 in Cleaveland, Ohio. She began her film career in 1941. Her films include “Night Editor” in 1946 and “Framed” the following. In 1951 she played opposite John Wayne in “Flying Leathernecks”. She died in 1994 aged 80.

“Independent” obituary by Tom Vallance:

Janis Dremann (Janis Carter), actress: born Cleveland, Ohio 10 October 1913; married first Carl Prager (marriage dissolved 1951), 1956 Julius Stulman; died Durham, North Carolina 30 July 1994.

A TALL, blonde beauty who could be glacially haughty or stylishly witty, Janis Carter was a welcome presence in films of the Forties, whether starring as duplicitous seductresses in ‘B’ thrillers or vamping the hero as the ‘other woman’ of major melodramas and comedies.

Her cool, high-toned composure, suggesting darker passions under the surface, made her an ideal film noir actress, and among her finer roles were those in William Castle’s Mark of the Whistler (1945), a doom-laden tale based on a Cornell Woolrich story, and Richard Wallace’s Framed (1947, called Paula in Britain), in which she used her seductive charms in a plot to have the innocent drifter Glenn Ford take the blame for murder and larceny. In Douglas Sirk’s Slightly French (1949), an amusing comedy which starred Dorothy Lamour as a honky-tonk performer being passed off as a Parisian belle, Carter displayed such flair as a wise-cracking socialite that it is a pity this aspect of her talent remained under-used.

Born Janis Dremann in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1913, she studied opera in New York but after failing an audition at the Metropolitan turned to the musical stage. She was a showgirl in two Cole Porter musicals, Dubarry was a Lady (1939) and Panama Hattie (1940), both produced by the composer Buddy DeSylva, who became a constant escort during this period. She also became a successful model, and when John Robert Powers formed his agency she was one of the original 10 Powers Girls.

Signed by Twentieth Century- Fox, she took the professional name Carter and made her film debut in Cadet Girl (1941), followed by six other ‘B’ movies. In Secret Agent of Japan (1942), released just four months after Pearl Harbor and advertised as ‘the first film to tell the inside story of the war’, she made a brief but telling impact as a sleekly gowned spy in a Shanghai nightclub passing secrets in her cigarette case to her fellow conspirator Lynn Bari. But Fox were grooming several young actresses, including Bari, and at the end of a year let Carter go. After small roles in MGM’s I Married an Angel (1942) and UA’s Lady of Burlesque (1943), she was signed by Columbia, where she played in farces (Miss Grant Takes Richmond, 1949, A Woman of Distinction, 1950), musicals (Swing Out the Blues, 1944), swashbucklers (The Fighting Guardsman, 1945) and romantic comedies (Together Again, 1944, One Way To Love, 1945), but primarily thrillers, including episodes of the studio’s Boston Blackie and Lone Wolf series. She also made notable appearances in two films in the superior, bleakly cynical ‘Whistler’ series, Henry Levin’s Night Editor (1946), in which she was a socialite having an illicit affair with a married man when they witness a murder, and I Love Trouble (1948), as a glamorous suspects being investigated by the private eye Franchot Tone.

In 1949 Carter moved to RKO, where she had an effective role seducing John Agar into embracing Communism in Howard Hughes’s contribution to the Cold War, I Married a Communist (later retitled Woman on Pier 13). She was a femme fatale again in My Forbidden Past (1951), but after colourless roles in a John Wayne war movie, Flying Leathernecks (1951), and two westerns, Santa Fe (1951) and The Half-Breed (1952), she gave up films. Ironically, it was in her last film that she sung solo for the only time in her film career. For two years she hosted a popular television quiz show, Feather Your Nest, and in 1955 was featured in a television version of Panama Hattie.

Her first marriage, to the composer-musician Carl Prager, had ended in 1951 and in 1956 she married the shipping and lumber tycoon Julius Stulman. The couple kept three homes – an apartment in North Carolina, a penthouse in New York, where Carter could be found during the opera season, and a magnificent condominium in Longboat Key, Florida, described by her friend the actress Ann Savage as ‘lush outside and luxe within’. She was a director of the Ringling Brothers Museum in Florida and was active on the boards of theatre and opera houses in the state.

The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.

A poster for Nicholas Ray’s 1951 war film ‘Flying Leathernecks’, starring John Wayne (left), Robert Ryan and Janis Carter. (Photo by Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images)

Mie Hama was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1943. She made her film debut in 1960 and virtually her entire cinema career has been in Japanese movies. Her sole English speaking film was the James Bond “You Only Live Twice” with Sean Connery in 1967.

IMDB entry:

Mie Hama was born in Tokyo, Japan on November 20, 1943. She first started out working as a bus fare collector. While working, she was spotted by producer Tomoyuki Tanaka , and was soon employed at Toho Studios. She appeared in a bevy of drama and sci-fi films, including Kingu Kongu tai Gojira (1962), where she became the Giant Ape’s “Damsel in Distress.” She is probably best known in Western Cinema as Bond girl Kissy Suzuki, starring alongside actor Sean Connery in the 007 film You Only Live Twice (1967). That same year, King Kong Escapes (1967) was released, thus, she portrayed the spellbinding “Bond-girlish” villainess Madamn Piranha. Her extended wardrobe and enchanted bed chambers contributed to the film’s “James Bond-ish” atmosphere. In addition, Hama would sometimes be referred to as “Funny Face,” due to her appearances in Japan’s “Crazy Cats” movies.

She became one of the most popular actresses in Japan’s “Golden Age” of Cinema, but has done little acting when Japan’s cinema world experienced severe financial problems. However, she did return to appear in a few films in the 1970s and 1980s, and she is seen, most recently, working as an active environmentalist.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Oliver Chu

The above IMDB entry can be accessed online here.

Lilia Skala was born in 1896 in Vienna, Austria. With World War Two looming in Europe, she and her husband and two children fled to the U.S. She made many appearances on television and made her film debut with “Call Me Madam” in 1953. Other films include “Lilies of the Field” with Sidney Poitier in 1963, “Ship of Fools” with Vivien Leigh and “Caprice” with Doris Day and Richard Harris. Lilia Skala died in 1994 at the age of 98.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Born and raised in Vienna, Austria, Lilia Skala would become a star on two continents. In pre-World War II Austria she starred in famed Max Reinhardt‘s stage troupe, and in post-war America she would become a notable matronly, award-worthy character star on Broadway and in films. Forced to flee her Nazi-occupied homeland with her Jewish husband and two young sons in the late 1930s, Lilia and her family managed to escape (at different times) to England. In 1939, practically penniless, they immigrated to the US, where she sought menial labor in New York’s garment district.

Lilia quickly learned English and worked her way back to an acting career, this time as a sweet, delightful, thick-accented Academy Award, Golden Globe and Emmy nominee. She broke through the Broadway barrier in 1941 with “Letters to Lucerne”, followed by a featured role in the musical “Call Me Madam” with Ethel Merman. In the 1950s she did an extensive tour in “The Diary of Anne Frank” as Mrs. Frank, and performed in a German-language production of Kurt Weill‘s “The Threepenny Opera.” Lilia became a familiar benevolent face on TV in several early soap operas, including Claudia: The Story of a Marriage (1952).

She won her widest claim to fame, however, as the elderly chapel-building Mother Superior opposite Sidney Poitier in Lilies of the Field (1963), for which she won both Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations. That led to more character actress work in films, most notably as the dog-carrying Jewish lady in the star-studded Ship of Fools(1965) and as Jennifer Beals‘ elderly German friend in Flashdance (1983). On TV she played Eva Gabor‘s Hungarian mother in Green Acres (1965) and earned an Emmy nomination for her work in the popular miniseries Eleanor and Franklin (1976)). Lilia died at the ripe old age of 98.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

David Shipman’s “Independent” obituary:

Lilia Skala was a remarkable woman, best known in Britain for a handful of movie appearances. Acting was not her original career, because her parents did not consider it respectable: she chose architecture, and as there were no facilities then fo r a woman to study the subject in her native Vienna, Lilia von Skalla (as she was born) trained at the University of Dresden – she subsequently became the first woman member of the Austrian Association of Engineers and Architects. When she married Erik S kala, however, he encouraged her to pursue an acting career; she joined the Max Reinhardt Repertory Theatre, playing throughout Germany and Austria with, among others, the great Albert Basserman.

Erik Skala was Jewish, and they left for the United States at the time of the Anschluss, in 1938. Partly because of her strong accent she was not able to resume her career till cast as the housekeeper in Letters to Lucerne, on Broadway in 1941. After th a t she worked steadily, but without great eclat, till she played the Grand Duchess of Lichtenburg in Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam (1950), in which he spoofed President Truman’s decision to send the Washington hostess Perle Mesta as ambassador to as small European duchy. The Mesta role was played by Ethel Merman, who was joined by Skala for the movie version in 1953.

Skala did not make a mark in films till 1963, when she plays the headstrong German Mother Superior who encourages the handyman Sidney Poitier to build a chapel for her flock in Lilies of the Field. Ralph Nelson directed the picture, in which few Hollywood people had any faith: for that reason, Poitier worked for a percentage, and netted himself a fortune – and an Oscar. Skala won a Golden Globe and was Oscar-nominated, but earned only $1,000, the Actors Guild minimum fee, for her participation – because, as her son Peter explained, she was anxious not to appear greedy.

Thereafter she was much in demand, usually playing feisty elderly ladies of European origin – as, for instance, in the New York City Opera’s 1965 production of The Threepenny Opera, as Mrs Peachum, and as the old lady in Jewish Repertory Theatre’s 1986

m usical version of the Czech film The Shop on the High Street. She also played the landlady, Frau Schneider, in several productions of Cabaret; other appearances in stock include the role of Zsa Zsa Gabor’s mother in Forty Carats.

She appeared frequently on television, again playing a nun in Ironside (1967) with Raymond Burr, and its telefilm sequel, Split Second to an Epitaph. In movies, she played a bourgeois hausfrau in Stanley Kramer’s Ship of Fools (1965), from Katherine Ann Porter’s novel, and was directed by Ralph Nelson again in Charly (1968), in which she was a psychiatrist helping to rehabilitate the retarded protagonist, Cliff Robertson. She was a psychiatrist again, colleague of the heroine, Lindsay Crouse, in the first film both written and directed by David Mamet (who was then married to Ms Crouse), House of Games (1987).

Movie-goers may also remember her as the former dancer who trained Jennifer Beals in Adrian Lyne’s Flashdance (1983); and they are unlikely to forget her in one of the better Merchant-Ivory productions (before they were Merchant-Ivory), Roseland (1968). This was an episode film about the New York dance-hall, with Skala wonderfully propping up the last section, as an immigrant desperate to win the Peabody Contest while aware that her partner and would-be husband, David Thomas, is unlikely to help her to do so.

But her best screen work is in an unlikely screen venture,Richard Pearce’s Heartlands (1980), which was based on papers left by a widow who in 1910 advertised for a position as a housekeeper in Wyoming. Rip Torn played the dour, taciturn Scot who responds to the ad; Conchata Ferrell was the widow, strong and understanding but afraid that she had bitten off more than she could chew. Skala was her hardbitten neighbour, always ready with support and succour; and for learning to ride a horse in her mid-eighties she was entered into the Western Hall of Fame.

David Shipman Reute Lilia von Skalla, actress and architect: born Vienna 28 November 1896; married 1922 Erik Skala (deceased; two sons; marriage dissolved); died Bay Shore, Long Island 18 December 1994.

Jane Randolph was born in 1915 in Youngstown, Ohio. In 1942 she was given a contract with RKO Studios and made “Highways by Night”. She is best known for her roles ih the classics’ “Cat People” and “Curse of the Cat People” both which starred Simone Simon. She died in Switzerland in 2009.

“Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan:

Hollywood film star known for her role as Alice in Cat People

Ronald Bergan

Late at night, an attractive woman is walking home alone. The sound of her high heels echoes down the deserted, shadowy streets. She hears footsteps behind her. Terrified, she quickens her pace. A tree sways menacingly in the breeze. There is a sudden hissing noise. It is the sound of doors opening on a bus. The relieved woman hops on to it. This eerie sequence is from Jacques Tourneur’s classic noir Cat People (1942), and the woman was played by Jane Randolph, who has died aged 93.

Later in the film, Randolph goes for a swim in the indoor pool at her club. Again, she is alone. She hears what seems like the growling of some feline beast. She quickly dives into the pool and treads water. The light reflected from the surface of the pool causes unsettling patterns to creep along the walls. She screams for help. When she gets out of the pool, she discovers that her dressing gown has been torn to threads. What made these scenes so effective was the suggestion of horror rather than its depiction (a speciality of the producer Val Lewton), and the fact that Alice, played superbly by Randolph, is not a timid person, but an intelligent, level-headed, liberated woman. She is the audience’s surrogate – her screams are our screams. The blonde Randolph is the representative of normality, the antithesis of her nemesis, the mysterious, dark-haired cat-woman (Simone Simon). Inevitably, out of the 20 films Randolph made between 1941 and 1948, Cat People stands out. This was further stressed by her appearance in the Lewton-produced The Curse of the Cat People (1944), the quasi-sequel in which Randolph played the same character, now married and the mother of a young girl who has an invisible friend, the “ghost” of the cat-woman.

Born Jane Roemer in Youngstown, Ohio, to a steel-mill designer and his wife, she went to Hollywood in 1939 to study at the director Max Reinhardt’s school of acting. Two years later, aged 26, she was given a contract by Warner Bros, which sent her to its talent-grooming school, but gave her only bit parts in four movies. Randolph’s film career proper began in 1942 at RKO, for which she made five films, including Cat People.

In her first film for the studio, she landed the female lead as Marcia Brooks, the intrepid fashion reporter on the scent of a crime in The Falcon’s Brother (1942). The fourth in the enjoyable Falcon series, it was the last starring George Sanders, who was then replaced by his real-life lookalike, soundalike brother, Tom Conway. It was followed by The Falcon Strikes Back (1943), with Randolph as the same character but this time as Conway’s girlfriend, proving she could hold her own with both brothers. Around the same time, Randolph became the first pin-up for Yank, the weekly magazine of the US Army, and posed for one of two humans used for the ice-skating sequence in Bambi (1942). After leaving RKO, Randolph, as a freelance, found herself in several B pictures: supporting the Bowery Boys in In Fast Company (1946), Hopalong Cassidy in Fool’s Gold (1947), and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). The best of the bunch was Anthony Mann’s Railroaded! (1947), in which Randolph plays a sultry femme fatale, who gets caught up in a fight with pure Sheila Ryan. In 1948, Randolph retired from show business when she married the business- man Jaime del Amo. The couple spent much of their time in Spain. After her husband’s death, Randolph returned to Los Angeles and kept a home in Switzerland, where she died.

She is survived by her daughter, Cristina.

The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.

The Falcon’s Brother, poster, Jane Randolph, Tom Conway, George Sanders, 1942. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Eartha Kitt was born in South Carolina in 1927. She is forever remembered for the feline quality in her very distinctive voice. Her songs include “Old Fashioned Girl” and “Under the Bridges of Paris”. Her films include “New Faces of 1954” and “Anna Lucasta” in 1958. Eartha Kitt died in 2008 at the age of 81.

Adrian Jack’s “Guardian” obituary:

For six decades, the American entertainer Eartha Kitt, who has died aged 81 of colon cancer, was a showbusiness force of nature. At home, on stage and in the recording studio, and an effective performer on movie and television screens, she made an impact all the greater as an African-American woman breaking new ground.

Her official birth details were established in 1997, when she challenged a group of students to find the certificate that declared her to have been born Eartha Mae Keith in the town of North, South Carolina.

Her father, William Kitt, was a share-cropper in South Carolina and chose the Christian name, it is said, because Eartha was born the year of a good harvest. He left Eartha’s mother, Anna Mae Riley, less than two years later, and the destitute black-Cherokee woman persuaded black neighbours to take in Eartha and her younger half-sister Pearl. Pearl was black and pretty, but Eartha had bushy red hair, which she later dyed, and lighter skin; she was dubbed “that yella gal”.

Eventually, her aunt, Marnie Lue Riley, sent for her and gave her a home in the Puerto Rican-Italian part of Manhattan. Their relationship was difficult, but Eartha had piano lessons paid for as well as savings she knew of only later. She ran away several times, but once she achieved independence, Marnie became mother, and Eartha came to believe that she was really her biological mother.

Down south, Kitt had already impressed the local church congregation with her singing. At school in New York she won respect and popularity with her talent for reading aloud, and she was lucky enough to have teachers who were genuinely interested in her. She also went down well at the local Caribbean dances, where she picked up routines that were to stand her in good stead, not only as a professional entertainer, but also amusing her fellow-workers when she took factory jobs.

Just after her 16th birthday, she auditioned, more or less by accident, for the Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe, whose style was based on Afro-Caribbean folklore. She won a full scholarship to study ballet as well as Dunham’s own technique and her first appearance on Broadway was dancing in Blue Holiday with Ethel Waters and Avon Long. Dunham told “Kitty” she would never make a real dancer because her breasts were too large, but chose her for the troupe which toured the US, Mexico, South America and Europe; increasingly, Kitt took on solo roles, singing as well as dancing, and made her film debut, uncredited, in Casbah (1948).

When the Dunham company was in Paris, Kitt was offered her first nightclub engagement at Carroll’s, whose formidable lesbian owner Fred told the waitresses “this one must not be touched”. Kitt later claimed she had no act to speak of at that time, though she had been to the club and seen Juliette Greco’s show. Yet she quickly became a sensation, and when Carroll’s opened a new club, Le Perroquet, the café-au-lait performer was the main attraction, with songs in English, Spanish and French that she prepared with the help of the Cuban bandleader. Singing C’est Si Bon for the first time, she forgot the words and ad-libbed, with such success, she repeated her list of desirables, “mink coat, big Cadillac car” and so on, ever after.

Between the two club engagements, Kitt was cast by Orson Welles as Helen of Troy in his own version of the Faust story, Time Runs, sharing what limelight could be snatched from Welles himself with Michael McLiammoir and Hilton Edwards. If Welles thought her “the most exciting woman in the world”, Kitt later reflected, it was because they never went to bed together. He ate, she watched; he talked, she listened. She was always an admirer of Great Men, and went to considerable lengths to meet Albert Einstein and Jawaharlal Nehru.

After Le Perroquet, Kitt’s next night-club engagement was at the cosmopolitan Karavansari in Istanbul. There she learned a number of Turkish songs by ear, including Usku Dara, which she later recorded as her first single for RCA Victor. By the time she opened at La Vie En Rose in New York, she claimed to sing in seven languages.

Despite an inventive campaign of newspaper ads, which read “Learn to say ‘Eartha Kitt’ “, she was not a success, and her two-week contract was terminated after six days.

Whatever went wrong, La Vie En Rose’s loss was the Village Vanguard’s gain, and a short engagement at its sister club, The Blue Angel, was extended to 25 weeks. She was spotted by the producer of a long-established revue. For New Faces of 1952, she sang Monotonous while crawling catlike from one chaise-longue to the next. Thereafter, Kitt found it hard to do without at least one such piece of furniture, and for a Royal Variety Performance in the 1960s, she appeared on it through the stage trapdoor.

Kitt became the unquestioned star of New Faces and a film version followed in 1954. Meanwhile, she starred in Mrs Patterson, her first major Broadway success, and fell in love with Arthur Loew Junior, heir to a chain of cinemas. Feelings were mutual, but the affair never came to anything because his mother opposed it. In London, Kitt had appeared briefly at Churchill’s in the early 1950s, but she really arrived with her act at the Café de Paris, wearing an aquamarine silk satin dress designed by Pierre Balmain. Lord Snowdon photographed her.

The 1950s were the golden decade of Kitt’s record hits. After Usku Dara came Monotonous, I Want To Be Evil and Santa Baby, among others, which established the image of a teasing, self-mocking “sex kitten”. She recorded Just An Old-Fashioned Girl, the song that became her signature tune in Britain, in 1955, but Thursday’s Child and The Day That The Circus Left Town, recorded a short while later, said more about her as the wistful waif people thought weird.

There have been many attempts to describe her extraordinary voice. Kenneth Tynan got it wrong when he spoke of her vibrato, for she hardly used it. Although she cultivated a tremor for special effect, her pitch was remarkably clean, and she would bend it, very often sharp, with slow deliberation. She said she understood everything her voice could and couldn’t do. She played off a gritty chest register against a cooing falsetto, and as she savoured its sound, she would experiment with verbal distortions. Welles complained that she seemed to come from nowhere.

Kitt’s very distinctive style made it hard for her to develop her career and diversify. If she was not 100% herself, you felt cheated. Yet she never stopped trying.

Her films included St Louis Blues (with Nat King Cole) and Accused (1957), Anna Lucasta (with Sammy Davis Jr) and Mark Of The Hawk (1958), Saint Of Devil’s Island (1961), Synanon (1965) and Dragonard (with Oliver Reed, 1971).

Apart from many celebrity appearances on TV, she found one role tailormade as Catwoman in Batman (1967-68). She took further parts on Broadway, in Shinbone Alley (1957) and Timbuktu (1978), an all-black musical based on Kismet. In London she played Mrs Gracedew in Henry James’s The High Bid (1970) and the title role in Bunny (1972).

In 1988 her appearance in Sondheim’s Follies at London’s Shaftesbury theatre — she spent most of it elegantly posed in a long mink coat until she stopped the show with I’m Still Here — led the following year to her first one-woman show, Eartha Kitt in Concert. Prancing around with three toy boys, she was pretty well as lissome as ever, and even more over the top. In Manchester, she even tried panto, as the Genie of the Lamp in Aladdin.

Also in 1989 came her autobiography, I’m Still Here: Confessions of a Sex Kitten. It retells and updates her earlier memoirs, the first volume of which, Thursday’s Child, was published in 1957. I’m Still Here ends with Kitt’s struggle to come to terms with the marriage of her only daughter, Kitt, of whom she was fiercely possessive.

Her own marriage to Kitt’s father, Bill McDonald, in 1960 soon fizzled out. Kitt made no bones about the fact that the thing she needed most, after the love of her daughter, was the applause of an audience: I once saw her give everything she’d got to what was virtually an empty house, at the New Theatre, Oxford, one weekday matinee.

She looked like almost losing her American public after she upset Lady Bird Johnson by speaking her mind about the Vietnam war at a 1968 luncheon at the White House. The CIA described her as “a sadistic nymphomaniac”. America’s temporary loss was Britain’s gain, for Kitt spent more time here, touring variety clubs in the north of England.

At the opposite cultural extreme, she made two extraordinary concert appearances in London with Richard Rodney Bennett, as pianist and arranger, and the Nash Ensemble, singing songs by Kurt Weill, Cole Porter and other American standards.

Kitt’s occasional attempts to move with the times — she even dipped into disco funk — had qualified success. In 1984 she was back in the charts with Where Is My Man and I Love Men. She did not need to update herself, and a live recording of a concert she gave with jazz musicians in Wuppertal, Germany, in 1992 shows that she was best given a tight format – never better than in the immaculate arrangements of Henri René and his Orchestra in the early days. An album called I’m Still Here came out the same year as the book, and in 1993 Rollercoaster issued a five-disc compilation representing her entire repertoire to date.

Her work continued, notably in cabaret: in 2000 she provided the voice of Yzma for the Disney animation The Emperor’s New Groove; her appearance at the Cheltenham jazz festival last April saw her in yet another medium, the live performance on DVD; and she continued to perform until last October.

Her album Back in Business (1995) had made a bid for the universal by dressing up old favourites by Cole Porter, Rogers and Hart, Duke Ellington, and Kurt Weill, not to mention Henry Mancini’s Moon River, in highly produced, sumptuous jazz arrangements. One of the more straightforward is the classic of the 1930s depression, Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?, and here Kitt rings true with raw anger.

Eartha Mae Kitt (Keith), singer and entertainer, born 17 January 1927; died 25 December 2008

The above obituary can also be accessed online here.