Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 70 of 113

Cliff Robertson

Cliff Robertson obituary in “The Guardian” in 2011.

Cliff Robertson was born in 1923 in La Jolla, California. His first film credit in 1955 was the wonderful “Picnic” as Kim Novak’s boyfriend. He starred opposite Joan Crawford in “Autumn Leaves”. In 1962, John F. Kennedy chose him to play Kennedy in the was drama “P.T. 109”. He won an Oscar for his performance in 1968 for “Charly”. He most recently being in the “Spiderman” movies. He died in 2011.

Brian Baxter’s “Guardian” obituary:

The actor Cliff Robertson, who has died aged 88, had many claims to fame, among them being selected by President John F Kennedy to portray him in the 1963 film PT 109 and an Oscar-winning performance in the title role of Charly in 1968, plus a successful directorial debut with JW Coop in 1971. But it was his role at the centre of a Hollywood scandal involving the misappropriation of funds by producer David Begelman at Columbia Studios that brought Robertson additional – and unwanted – celebrity, adversely affecting his subsequent career.

Following a tax demand in 1977, he discovered that he had supposedly been paid $10,000 by the studio. Knowing this to be untrue, Robertson took the matter further. His action led to an internal inquiry, followed by a police investigation and court proceedings that rocked not just the studio but Hollywood in general, as it uncovered wide-ranging corruption and lax accounting proceedings. Although Robertson’s action was simply the springboard for the investigation, his refusal to back down earned him enemies among the Hollywood elite.

Born in La Jolla, California, Robertson came from a wealthy ranching family. His parents divorced when he was a child and he was adopted by his maternal grandmother, growing up within a strict Presbyterian environment that shaped his values. He determined to become an actor while at Antioch college, Ohio, and headed for New York and the Actors Studio. The inevitable round of jobs – including taxi-driving – followed, plus theatre work including Late Love (1953), and television shows, notably a long period in a children’s serial, Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers (1953-54).

In February 1955, he appeared in Joshua Logan’s play The Wisteria Trees, and shortly afterwards Logan offered Robertson his first film role, opposite William Holden in Picnic (1955). Logan, who had a keen eye for talent and handsome young men, made a sexy, though overblown, movie from William Inge’s play. Its popularity led to a Universal contract for Robertson and a good part as the young husband to a neurotic Joan Crawford in Autumn Leaves (1956).

Sadly, only the war movie The Naked and the Dead (1958) and Samuel Fuller’s Underworld USA (1961) were of note among his immediate credits. In the latter, a revenge movie, Robertson had one of his meatiest roles as Tolly Devlin, who hunts down his father’s murderers.

Even though PT 109 (1963) was not a major hit, the endorsement from Kennedy to play him as a heroic navy lieutenant helped Robertson’s career. The best of the many roles that followed was as the overly ambitious rival to Henry Fonda in The Best Man (1964), a political thriller written by Gore Vidal and tautly directed by Franklin Schaffner. It offered the kind of literate, spiky characterisation at which Robertson excelled.

The character found an echo in the witty, if talkative, The Honey Pot (1967), where he was cast as Rex Harrison’s mendacious secretary. Unfortunately few such sinister roles came his way, and he was more often in routine fare such as 633 Squadron and The Devil’s Brigade. He also worked steadily on television, and in 1958 had played the alcoholic PR man in Days of Wine and Roses, though was passed over in favour of Jack Lemmon when the 1962 film was made.

After comparable success in the 1961 TV drama The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon, he astutely bought the rights to the play. It took seven years for him to get backing for a movie version, but eventually his role in Charly as a man with learning difficulties who is operated on and becomes a genius – only to regress again – won him the best actor Oscar, among other awards. He spent considerable effort and money in a publicity campaign and won, admittedly against modest competition, as much for his determination and decency as for his anguished performance. This boost to his career led to roles in Robert Aldrich’s Too Late the Hero (1970), in which he co-starred with Michael Caine, and the intriguing western The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972).

By then he had gained enough clout to direct JW Coop, which he co-wrote, produced and starred in, as a rodeo rider newly released from prison and trying to adjust to society. Stronger on character and small-town atmosphere than narrative, it was an intelligent movie and a modest commercial success.

He followed it with more TV, which included A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1974) and Return to Earth (1976), playing Buzz Aldrin. There were decent movies such as the thriller Three Days of the Condor (1975) and Brian De Palma’s revamp of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, called Obsession (1976), although Robertson lacked the inner anguish to play the obsessed husband. After The Battle of Midway (1976) and the lavish mini-series Washington: Behind Closed Doors (1977), his career seemed secure. It was then that the Begelman scandal broke.

After his initial disclosure, the studio had hoped the matter could be hushed up, but Robertson’s intransigence led to an ongoing investigation, bringing to light more fraud and financial misdealings. When film projects were cancelled thanks to pressure being put on producers, Robertson once again retreated to television, with Overboard (1978); the following year he set up his own production of The Pilot (1980), which he also co-wrote and directed, while playing the central role of a commercial pilot battling with alcoholism. It had a small cinema release in the US and went straight to TV in Britain.

There was little work until a television movie, Two of a Kind (1982), then a long run as Dr Ranson in the popular series Falcon Crest. He played Hugh Hefner in Star 80 and a supporting role in the sex comedy Class (both 1983). Two years later, during the resurgence of the New Zealandfilm industry, he went there to star in the caper Shaker Run (1986).

He then worked steadily in television and the cinema, averaging two films a year. This allowed him time for his enthusiasms, tennis and skiing, and for flying, which had been his passion since his teens. Few of the movies were of great note: he played the president in Escape from LA (1996), but was demoted to vice-president in Mach 2 (2001).

Although he notched up relatively few credits in the following years, he was probably seen by larger audiences than at any time during his long career when he was cast as Ben Parker – the hero’s elderly uncle – in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002) and its sequels. Despite his liberal politics and refusal to play the Hollywood game, he had proved himself to be a survivor in a business he described as unstable – “rather like trying to stand up in a canoe with your pants down”.

He was twice married and twice divorced, and is survived by a daughter, Stephanie, and a granddaughter.

• Clifford Parker Robertson, actor, born 9 September 1923; died 10 September 2011

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

Peter Lind Hayes was born in 1915 in San Francisco. He was a popular broadcaster and entertainer who also acted in some films e.g. “The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T”,”The Senator Was Indiscreet” and “Once You Kiss A Stranger”. He died in 1998.

Dick Vosburgh’s obituary in “The Independent”;

HE COW’s gone dry and the hens won’t lay, / The fish quit bitin’ last Saturday, / Troubles pile up day by day, / And now I’m gettin’ dandruff!” Those lugubrious words are from “Life Gets Tee-Jus, Don’t It?”, the 1948 hit recorded by Peter Lind Hayes, whose long career encompassed virtually all the media.

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He was only two when his father, Joseph Conrad Lind Snr, a railroad man and amateur singer, died. Peter attended parochial school in Cairo, Illinois, but, from the age of nine, performed every summer with his mother, Grace Hayes, a vaudeville star. At 16, he wrote a new act for his mother and himself; they appeared in it at New York’s legendary vaudeville theatre the Palace.

In 1939, while Peter was working as a film stand-in, his mother built the Grace Hayes Lodge, a night-club in the San Fernando Valley. An instant success, the club attracted a large film-business clientele, with mother and son starring in the floor-shows. Peter soon graduated from stand-in to film actor; in 1939 he appeared in These Glamour Girls, which starred (naturally) Lana Turner, and in Million Dollar Legs, which (equally naturally) starred Betty Grable.

Under contract to Paramount, he had just acted with Jackie Cooper in Seventeen (1940) when he met Mary Healy, who was under contract to 20th Century-Fox; they married the following year. Also in 1941, the newly weds appeared in Zis Boom Bah, a low-budget musical in which Grace Hayes also played, as a vaudeville star who buys her college student son (Peter) a cafe, which he turns into a successful night-club.

As Victor Mature’s army buddy in Seven Days’ Leave (1942), Hayes sang, danced and did impersonations of Ronald Colman, Lionel Barrymore and Charles Laughton. The day after completing the film, he enlisted in the US Army Air Corps, and was assigned to the corps’s Radio Production Unit, which wrote and presented daily broadcasts. Private Frank Loesser, writer, was also in the unit, and he and Hayes collaborated on “Why Do They Call a Private a Private?”, a song introduced on one of their shows by Ethel Merman. Hayes later joined the all- serviceman cast of Moss Hart’s Air Force play Winged Victory (1943). The following year he appeared in the film version as well.

Hayes left the service in 1945 with a Bronze Star for having entertained more than a million troops in the South Pacific. His first post-war film was Universal’s The Senator Was Indiscreet (1947), the only film directed by the celebrated playwright George S. Kaufman. Although Hayes had made at least a dozen previous screen appearances, his name on the opening credits was, curiously, preceded by “And Introducing”. He played a political publicist, trying to sell the voters the pea-brained Senator Melvin Ashton (William Powell) as their next President. The film fired some witty barbs at American politics (Ashton came out flatly against assassination), but had the bad luck to emerge the same year as the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Universal promoted the satirical Senator very gingerly.

Hayes next played a lovable hansom cab driver in Heaven on Earth (1948), a 12-performance Broadway musical that the New York Star called “the biggest sleeping pill in town”. His other stage work included Norma Krasna’s farce Who Was That Lady I Saw You With? (1958) and Brian Friel’s Lovers (1968).

After establishing themselves as a top night-club team, Hayes and Mary Healy appeared together in such television series as The Chevrolet Show (1949), The Stork Club (1950), Star of the Family (1951-52) and the sitcom Peter Loves Mary (1960-61). For the big screen, they co-starred in The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr T (1953), the Dr Seuss musical about a young boy (Tommy Rettig) who rescues his hypnotised mother (Mary Healy) from his wicked piano teacher (Hans Conreid), with the help of Mr Zabladowski, a friendly plumber (Hayes). A disaster on its first release, this surrealistic classic was successfully revived 20 years later and now enjoys cult status.

In 1952, while appearing with Mary Healy at the London Palladium, Hayes was asked the secret of a successful marriage. He replied, “All you have to do is get your wife in the act – and keep her there.”

Dick Vosburgh

Joseph Conrad Lind (Peter Lind Hayes), actor, composer and writer: born San Francisco 25 June 1915; married 1940 Mary Healy (one son, one daughter); died Las Vegas 22 April 1998.

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

Irene Manning was born in 1912 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her first film in 1936 was “The Old Corral” with Gene Autry. In 1942 she starred with Humphrey Bogart in “The Big Shot” and with Dennis Morgan in two films, “The Desert Song” and “Shine On Moon”. She died in 2004 at the age of 91.

Tom Vallance’s “Independent” obituary:

The actress and lyric soprano Irene Manning was a blonde beauty who had a brief spell as a film star in the early Forties.

Inez Harvuot (Irene Manning), actress and singer: born Cincinnati 17 July 1912; married 1940 Het Manheim (marriage dissolved 1944), 1944 Keith Kolhoff (marriage dissolved 1946), 1948 Clinton Green (marriage dissolved 1951), 1964 Maxwell W. Hunter (died 2001); died San Carlos, California 28 May 2004.

The actress and lyric soprano Irene Manning was a blonde beauty who had a brief spell as a film star in the early Forties. Her most notable roles were those of the singer Fay Templeton in the classic musical Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and as Margot, the heroine of The Desert Song (1944). She also played leading lady to Gene Autry and Humphrey Bogart, and had an extensive career on stage including a Broadway musical by Lerner and Loewe and West End roles in plays and musicals.

The youngest of five children, she was born Inez Harvuot in Cincinnati in 1912. Both her parents were singers who appeared in opera choruses, and at the age of two Inez could sing “The Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia”. Her family moved to Los Angeles when she was 10, and after graduating from Los Angeles High School she gained a scholarship to study voice at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. Classically trained, she gained considerable stage experience in operetta and musicals prior to 1936, when she was given a film contract by Republic.

The studio’s head of publicity Het Manheim, gave her a new name, Hope Manning, and became her first husband:

Het was a good man. Our problem was geographical. Het remained in New York while I was leaping all over the country. As much as we loved each other, we came to realise the marriage wasn’t working.

She made her screen début in The Old Corral (1936), a western starring the studio’s major star, Gene Autry, with whom she sang a duet. After supporting roles in Two Wise Maids (1937) and Michael O’Halloran (1937), she returned to the stage when offered a leading role in a new musical by Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein and Otto Harbach, Gentlemen Unafraid (1938). A Civil War tale of a West Point cadet torn between fighting for the Union or for his home state, Virginia, it opened in St Louis, where it was so poorly received that it closed after just one week. Manning, as the cadet’s sweetheart, introduced “Your Dream is the Same as My Dream”, which acquired a measure of popularity when later reused by the composers in the film One Night in the Tropics.

After appearing in New York in two more short-lived musicals, she toured with the famous baritone John Charles Thomas in Lehar’s operetta Gypsy Baron (1940) and the pair made several Gilbert and Sullivan recordings together. Warner Brothers, who had made an early talkie of the Sigmund Romberg operetta The Desert Song in 1929, were planning a new version, for which Manning tested. She said,

They spent about five years casting The Desert Song. They auditioned everyone, including Gladys Swarth-

out of the Metropolitan Opera. I was given a very expensive test, in Technicolor, and on the strength of it Warners signed me and changed my name to Irene Manning.

Since the script for The Desert Song wasn’t ready, she was first cast in Yankee Doodle Dandy as the legendary stage star Fay Templeton, who is won over by the brash composer George M. Cohan (James Cagney) when he composes a song for her, “Only 45 Minutes from Broadway”, in her dressing room while she is performing on stage. Her renditions of “So Long, Mary” and “Mary’s a Grand Old Name” were among the film’s highlights, and Variety called her performance “plenty socko”. Manning later recalled the film as her happiest Hollywood experience.

She was less happy with her next film, a minor thriller, The Big Shot(1942), though she was leading lady to Humphrey Bogart. She described the director, Lewis Seiler, as “not the greatest”:

Just before we started, he said to me, “Are you going to sing your lines?” When I had to be shot to death at the end, I asked how he wanted me to go about it. “I have no idea,” he said.

After another low-budget movie, Spy Ship (1942), Manning took on her most important screen role, starring opposite Dennis Morgan inThe Desert Song, directed by Robert Florey. Morgan played an American bandleader who dons a cape and becomes the mysterious leader of a group of desert tribesmen sabotaging German attempts to build a railroad. Manning said,

The movie had some excellent action sequences and an interesting script. Years later, Gordon MacRae, who starred in the 1953 version, told me he thought ours was the better movie.

The gorgeously photographed film (with Gallup, New Mexico, standing in for the Sahara desert) is generally considered the finest of the operetta’s three screen transcriptions, but it is little known today because copyright problems have kept it out of circulation for several decades.

Surprisingly, the studio failed to capitalise on Manning’s impressive performance, and, despite announcing earlier that she and Morgan would be teamed in a series of musicals similar to those MGM had made with Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy, they instead relegated her to supporting roles. She later said of her boss,

Jack Warner? He wasn’t one of my favourite people. Let’s just say that there was not a lot of class there.

Miles Kreuger, President of the Institute of the American Musical, said that Manning’s “more elegant, more reserved” persona was out of sync during the war years when audiences preferred “young girls who were perky and more accessible” like Betty Grable. “I think that’s why she didn’t catch on a little bit more.”

Manning’s subsequent films included the splendid musical Shine On, Harvest Moon (1944), again starring Morgan but with Ann Sheridan as leading lady and Manning as “the other woman”, and the comedyMake Your Own Bed (1944) with Jane Wyman and Jack Carson.The Doughgirls (1944), based on the hit play about the wartime shortage of hotel accommodation in Washington, was a favourite of the actress, though Eve Arden had the showiest role as a Russian female guerrilla.

After a cameo as herself in Hollywood Canteen (1944), Manning left for England with her own USO unit to entertain servicemen overseas. In England she recorded four songs with Glenn Miller’s Army Air Forces Band. Recorded for the Office of War Information just a few days before Miller disappeared in a small aircraft over the English Channel, the songs were broadcast between propaganda announcements to German troops on the BBC’s German Wehrmacht Hour.

One of the songs, “Begin the Beguine”, was included in the CD setGlenn Miller: The Lost Recordings, and reveals Manning’s voice, pitched in a lower register than usual, blending surprisingly well with the Miller band. Manning also featured in a British film, I Live in Grosvenor Square (1945), making a “courtesy appearance” as herself, pictured entertaining American servicemen in a Piccadilly club with a rendition of the wistful 1931 ballad “Home”.

Manning returned to the stage to star on Broadway in a musical by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, The Day Before Spring(1945), playing a woman who with her husband of 10 years (John Archer) attends a college reunion where she is drawn to an old flame (Bill Johnson). Though the cast and score were praised, the libretto came in for heavy criticism in the mixed reviews.

In 1947 Manning moved to England, making her London stage début in Millocker’s The DuBarry (1947), and appearing in Alan Melville’s hit comedy Castle in the Air (1949) with Jack Buchanan and Coral Browne. She also toured music halls with a variety act, hosted her own BBC television show An American in England, and wrote a weekly show-business column, “Girl About Town”. She said,

I had a wonderful time in England and really matured . . . still, when I came back to the US in 1952, nobody remembered me. So I just started all over again.

She did night-club work, sang on radio with the Andre Kostelanetz and Gordon Jenkins orchestras, appeared in television plays, and starred in both musicals and plays in summer theatres, including The King and I (her personal favourite role).

An accomplished abstract painter, she had exhibitions of her work in New York and Washington, and for the last 30 years she taught voice, acting, personal development, speech dynamics and modelling.

Tom Vallance

Michael Dante was born in 1931 in Stamford, Connecticut. He made his movie debut in 1956 in “Somebody Up There, Likes Me”. His films include “Kid Galahad”, “The Naked Kiss”, “Apache Rifles”, “Harlow” and “Arizona Raiders”.

“Wikipedia” entry:

Michael Dante (born Ralph Vitti; September 2, 1931 in Stamford, Connecticut) is an American award-winning actor of television, films and stage and a former professional minor league baseball player.

As a boy growing up on the West Side neighborhood of Stamford, he would sneak into a local movie theater with his friends to watchwesterns.^[1]

“I grew up wanting to be the sidekick of The Lone Ranger and wanting to follow my heroes,” Dante told a reporter in 2006.^[1]

He was a shortstop on the Stamford High School baseball team, then played for “The Advocate All-Stars” team which won a 1949 New England baseball championship.

After graduating from high school, Dante signed a bonus contract with the Boston Braves. He used his $6,000 bonus went to buy his family a four-door Buick with whitewalls.^[1]

During spring training with the former Washington Senators, Dante took drama classes at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. Bandleader Tommy Dorsey arranged a screen test for him at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. His first film, Somebody Up There Likes Me, was released in 1956.

He changed his name at the urging of studio boss Jack Warner, who thought “Vitti” would not fit well on theater marquees. Warner suggested some first names, from which the actor picked “Michael.” He chose the last name “Dante” because it had been used by some relatives.^[1]

Dante has appeared in 30 films and 150 television shows.^[1] He is notable for spending seven years in supporting roles under contract to three major studios at once: MGM,Warner Brothers and Twentieth Century Fox. He considers his best performances the role that he played in Killer Instinct on the CBS television series Desilu Playhouse, along with his roles in the movies Westbound, Winterhawk and Seven Thieves.^[1]

Dante was cast twice in on the ABC/Warner Brothers western series, Colt .45, starring Wayde Preston. Dante and Forrest Lewis portrayed Davey Lewis and Willy Ford, respectively, in the 1957 episode “The $3,000 Bullet”. Dante then played the role of Ab Saunders in the 1958 episode “The Deserters”, with Angie Dickinson as Laura Meadows and Myron Healey as an unnamed fur trader. That episode was directed by Leslie H. Martinson.^[2]He also appeared on the ABC-WB crime drama, Bourbon Street Beat, withAndrew Duggan, on the syndicated adventure series, Rescue 8, starring Jim Davis and Lang Jeffries, and in three episodes of CBS’s The Texan, starring Rory Calhoun.

Dante made two guest appearances on Perry Mason starring Raymond Burr. In 1959 he played Arthur Manning in “The Case of the Dangerous Dowager,” and in 1965 he played murder victim Douglas Kelland in “The Case of the Feather Cloak.”

His 1967 performance in the “Friday’s Child” episode of Star Trek as a member of an alien race, has garnered him invitations to Star Trek conventions.^[1] He also had a recurring role as the Sioux Chief Crazy Horse in the short-lived ABC military western series, Custer starring Wayne Maunder in the title role of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer.

Dante also has recurring roles on the television serials Days of our Lives and General Hospital.

In the 1970s, Dante met John Wayne, whom he watched on screen as a child. Wayne had seen Dante in Winterhawk and asked him to co-host a charity event in Newport Beach, California. That started a friendship between the two actors, and they co-hosted other events until Wayne’s death in 1979.^[1]

It was one brief co-starring role that wrote Dante into American popular culture. A frequent extra on the original Star Trek television series, he was cast in the role of “Maab” in the 1967 episode, “Friday’s Child” alongside Julie Newmar. Dante’s affable personality makes him a popular draw at Star Trek fan conventions all over the country.

Michael Dante is currently the host of a syndicated radio talk show, On Deck, previously known as the Michael Dante Celebrity Talk Show on which he interviews some of Hollywood’s biggest stars. His program guests have included Milton Berle, Tony Curtis, and Bryant Gumbel.^[1] An avid golfer, he once hosted the annual Michael Dante Celebrity Golf Tournament, a charitable fund-raiser held annually in Palm Springs, California, beginning in 1991.

In 2006, Dante told an interviewer that he had written a script for a sequel to Winterhawk and was trying to get funding for the projected movie.^[

The above “Wikipedia” entry can also be accessed online here.

Michael Ansara was born in 1922 in Syria. In 1956 he starred in the very popular television series “Broken Arrow” where he paid the Indian chief Cochise. His films include “Only the Valient” in 1951, “The Ten Commandments”and “Texas Across the River”. He died in 2013. Was married to Barbara Eden at one time.

Nita Talbot was born in 1930 in New York City. She has had an extensive career as a major supporting player on film and in television. She made her film debut in “It’s a Great Feeling” in 1949. Her other films include “Montana”, “Caged”, “Bundle of Joy”, “Who’s Got the Action” and “A Very Special Favour”

“Wikipedia” entry:

Born in New York City, Talbot began her acting career appearing as a model in the 1949 film It’s a Great Feeling. She was afforded a wealth of varied screen roles from the love-starved switchboard operator in A Very Special Favor (1965), to the brassy Madame Esther in Buck and the Preacher (1972). She also appeared in such films as Bright Leaf(1950), This Could Be the Night (1957), I Married a Woman (1958), Who’s Got the Action? (1962), Girl Happy (1965), The Day of the Locust (1975), Serial (1980), Chained Heat(1983), Fraternity Vacation (1985), and Puppet Master II (1991).

A TV-series mainstay, Talbot was seen as Mabel Spooner opposite Larry Blyden‘s Joe Spooner in Joe and Mabel (1956), Iris Anderson in the 1958 Perry Mason episode, “The Case of the Pint-Sized Client,” con-woman Blondie Collins in the second season of The Thin Man (1958–1959), con-woman/struggling actress Susan Reed in first season ofMickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer – Beautiful, Blue and Deadly (1958-1959), resourceful girl Friday, Dora Miles, on The Jim Backus Show (aka: Hot Off the Wire), snooty socialite Judy Evans in Here We Go Again (1973), ultra cynical Rose (opposite Bill Daily) in Starting from Scratch (1988), and as the White Russian spy Marya in Hogan’s Heroes.

Talbot has been either the star or co-star of several other series, including: Man Against Crime, Bourbon Street Beat (four episodes as Lusti Weather), The Secret Storm, andSupertrain while guest starring on others. Talbot also had long-running roles in Search for Tomorrow and General Hospital.

In 1971, Talbot was cast in the pilot episode of the CBS sitcom Funny Face starring actress-comedienne Sandy Duncan. The original premise of the show had Duncan playing Sandy Stockton, a young UCLA student from Illinois majoring in education and making ends meet by working part-time as an actress in television commercials for the Prescott Advertising Agency. Talbot played Sandy’s agent, Maggie Prescott. Shortly after filming the pilot, CBS picked up the program for the fall of 1971, but slightly revised the format, as a result of which Talbot was dropped from the cast.

Talbot’s most recent acting role was in 1997, when she voiced the character of Anastasia Hardy, the businesswoman mother of Felicia Hardy, the Black Cat, in the animated seriesSpider-Man.
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Richard Dean Anderson was born iu Minnesota in 1950. “MacGyver” on television gave him his big break. The series ran from 1985 until 1992. He then went on to star in “Stargate SG-1 which ran from 1997 until 2005. His movies include “Young Doctors in Love”.

IMDB entry:

The future MacGyver (1985) and Stargate SG-1 (1997) star was born on January 23, 1950, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His father, Stuart Anderson, was a teacher at a local high school and his mother, Jocelyn, was an artist who was talented in both sculpting and painting. He and his two younger brothers, Thomas John and James Stuart, grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis called Roseville. During his childhood and teenage years, he developed a love for sports, music (especially jazz) and acting.

Richard dreamed of becoming a professional hockey player as a teenager, a dream shared by his future Stargate SG-1 (1997) co-star Michael Shanks. However, this was not to be as, at age sixteen, he broke both of his arms in separate incidents, the second of which was so bad that he had to be hospitalized for three months. Although his dream became an impossibility, he never lost his love for the sport. Richard was very much a restless teenager, having had many adventures hitchhiking on the open road. This sense of adventure is most evident from his 5,641-mile bicycle trip from his home in Minnesota to Alaska. Though accompanied by several friends at the beginning of this trip, he traveled the last thirty-three days alone. This experience gave him a more centered sense of direction in his life.

After studying drama at St. Cloud State University and at Ohio University (without completing his degree), he briefly moved to New York before settling in Los Angeles, where he worked as a juggler and a street mime and in a Renaissance-style cabaret. He worked briefly in Marineland, where his jobs included holding fish in his mouth for killer whales to leap up and snatch. Subsequently, he appeared in plays and formed a rock band called “Rick Dean and the Dante” with his friend Carl Dante in which he sang and played the guitar.

His big break came in 1976, when he was cast in the popular daytime drama General Hospital (1963) as Dr. Jeff Webber. He continued to play the role for five years until he felt it was time to move on to prime-time drama. He made numerous guest appearances in series such as The Facts of Life (1979) and The Love Boat (1977) and was cast as the star in two CBS series, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1982) and Emerald Point N.A.S.(1983), but both lasted just one season.

His next big success came in 1985, when he won the role as the title character in the ABC adventure series MacGyver (1985). He was cast because the producers were impressed by the lack of pretension he showed at his audition. As he is nearsighted, it was necessary for him to wear his glasses for the reading. The series lasted seven seasons and ran for 139 episodes. It was hugely successful throughout its run and has continued to be popular all over the world. He reprised his role in two TV movies,MacGyver: Lost Treasure of Atlantis (1994) and MacGyver: Trail to Doomsday (1994), both produced by his own production company, Gekko Film Corp, which he co-founded with Michael Greenburg.

Having made a huge impression in Ordinary Heroes (1986) as a blinded Vietnam veteran struggling to rebuild his life in America, after “MacGyver” ended he moved on to TV movies such as In the Eyes of a Stranger (1992), Through the Eyes of a Killer (1992),Beyond Betrayal (1994), Past the Bleachers (1995) and Pandora’s Clock (1996). He was particularly impressive in Past the Bleachers (1995), in which he played a grieving father struggling to come to terms with his young son’s death.

He returned to series television in 1995, when he was cast as Ernest Pratt/Nicodemus Legend in Legend (1995), an adventure series that aired on UPN. He also served as executive producer of the series, in which one of his co-stars was his close friend John de Lancie. His character was a dime novelist (Pratt) who took on the persona of the protagonist in his novels (Legend). The series was primarily a comedy, a blend of the western and science fiction. It has also been Richard’s favorite role to date.

He found major success again when cast as Colonel (later Brigadier General) Jack O’Neill in Stargate SG-1 (1997), an adventure/science fiction series based on the blockbusterStargate (1994) starring Kurt Russell and James Spader. The series began filming in Vancouver on February 19, 1997, and premiered on Showtime on July 27, 1997 and on Fox Friday nights. The series has remained extremely successful since then, eventually resulting in the creation of a spin-off series, Stargate: Atlantis (2004), in 2004, and the now-canceled video game _Stargate SG-1: The Alliance (2005) (VG)_ in 2005. Both series have aired on the Sci-Fi Channel. He has also appeared, sporadically, in the latest spin-off series, SGU Stargate Universe (2009). Richard’s role in the SG-1 series was substantially reduced in its seventh and eighth seasons, which culminated in his departure from the series in 2005.

He has never married but has dated many women, including actresses Teri Hatcher, Lara Flynn Boyle, Sela Ward and German ice-skater Katarina Witt. Since 1996, his partner has been Apryl A. Prose, who is the mother of his only child, Wylie Quinn Annarose Anderson, who was born on August 2, 1998. Like her father and grandfather (who passed away in 2003), she is fond of jazz. Because of his young daughter, he has temporarily taken a break from acting in order to spend time with her and help her develop. Richard has made it a point throughout his career to choose roles that demonstrate his versatility as an actor. Many of his characters, particularly MacGyver and O’Neill, are strong characters who, although tormented by personal tragedies such as the death of family members and friends, can continue on bravely and valiantly.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gus Fallon

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Beatrice Pearson was born in 1920 in Dennison, Texas. Her only films were leading roles in “Force of Evil” opposite John Garfield in 1948 and “Lost Boundaries” opposite Mel Ferrer the following year. She died in 1986 at the age of 65.

IMDB entry:

American leading actress who made a brief foray into films. A native of Denison, Texas, Pearson worked as an usher in a movie theatre and as a model before becoming an actor. Producer David O. Selznick introduced her to actor John Garfield, who was instrumental in her being cast opposite him in Force of Evil (1948). However, she did scarcely any more film work before retiring from the screen and devoting herself exclusively to the stage.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Jim Beaver <jumblejim@prodigy.net>

Mel Ferrer obituary in “The Guardian” in 2008.

Mel Ferrer was born in New Jersey in 1917. He made his New York stage debut in 1940.His film debut came in 1949 in “Lost Boundaries” opposite Beatrice Pearson. His films include “Lili” in 1953, “War and Peace” opposite his then wife Audrey Hepburn and “The Vintage”. He had an extensive career also on the stage and in television. He died in 2008 in Santa Barbara.

Ronald Bergan’s obituary of Mel Ferrer in “The Guardian”:

After conquering his infirmity, Ferrer resumed his varied career. Besides acting, he directed a film for Columbia, The Girl of the Limberlost (1945), a 60-minute melodrama starring Ruth Nelson as a vengeful mother who persecutes her daughter, and assisted John Ford on The Fugitive (1947), in which he also had a bit part. In addition, he helped found the Community Theater at La Jolla, California, with Joseph Cotten, Gregory Peck, Jennifer Jones and Dorothy McGuire.

In the meantime, he had gone through three marriages to two women. He had divorced Frances Pilchard, the mother of his first child and married Barbara Tripp. They had two children, but then he remarried Frances, and had two more children with her.

The 1950s was Ferrer’s most productive period, as well as the time when he was most in the public eye. The latter was due mainly to his marriage to Audrey Hepburn in September 1954. Shortly after being introduced to Hepburn by Peck, he read Jean Giraudoux’s play Ondine. He immediately recognised the play as a perfect vehicle for Hepburn’s other-worldly qualities, and saw himself as Hans the Knight, who falls for the water sprite. Directed by Alfred Lunt, with whom Ferrer argued constantly during rehearsals, the play opened on Broadway in February 1954. On the first night, Lunt was asked: “Did you learn anything about working with a movie star like Mel Ferrer?” He replied: “Yes, I learned that you can’t make a knight-errant out of a horse’s ass.” Hepburn got glowing reviews, while the New York Post wrote of Ferrer: “To my mind, his playing is curiously uninteresting.”

His acting was often wooden and soporific, but he could be soulful, intelligent and even witty. As Mexico’s leading matador in Robert Rossen’s The Brave Bulls (1951), Ferrer’s melancholy face is in constant close-up, while he mumbles about doom and “the fear that is in my heart” after being gored by bulls. Among his best roles was the swashbuckling villain in Scaramouche (1952), the climax of which is a swordfight between Ferrer and Stewart Granger, one of the most outstanding in movie history.

In the same year, he was quietly effective as the rival cowboy for Marlene Dietrich’s affections in Fritz Lang’s western Rancho Notorious (1952), and made a sensitive Prince Andrei to Hepburn’s Natasha in King Vidor’s War and Peace (1956). As the languid, aristocratic dilettante, one of the three beaux from whom Ingrid Bergman has to choose in Jean Renoir’s Elena et les Hommes (1956), he expresses one of the French director’s themes: “My ideal is to achieve perfect idleness… universal idleness for rich and poor.” During his marriage to Hepburn, he controlled most of what she did and, in 1959, he directed her and Anthony Perkins in Green Mansions, a total dud, the only asset of which was the alluring fresh faces of the two young stars – a colt and a filly romping through the artificial undergrowth.

Following the birth of their son Sean in 1960, Hepburn travelled almost everywhere with her husband to locations such as Italy, where Ferrer took the title role in the risible El Greco (1966). But he found it difficult to cope with her fame, wealth and success as his career moved into the doldrums. In 1968, soon after he had produced Wait Until Dark, starring Hepburn, they were divorced.

In 1973, Ferrer was reunited with Renoir and Caron for a TV production of the director’s play Carola, set in Paris under the German occupation during the second world war. Ferrer played General von Clodius, “the last gentleman in the German army”, in his most nonchalant manner. He then continued to appear in a weird mixture of Spanish, French, Italian and German productions, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Lili Marleen in 1981, the year he acquired the film rights to Peter Pan, which he had always wanted to make with Hepburn in the title role. Ferrer – who was living in Lausanne, Switzerland, with his Belgian wife Elizabeth, whom he married in 1971 – then had Mia Farrow in mind, before turning to golden-haired moppet Ricky Schroeder, but Peter Pan remained another unrealised dream.

In all, Ferrer appeared in more than 100 films and made-for-television movies, directed nine films and produced nine more. He is survived by Elizabeth, and the four sons and two daughters of his previous marriages.

· Melchior Gaston Ferrer, actor, born August 25 1917; died June 2 2008.

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