Hollywood Actors Archives

Teresa Wright

TERESA WRIGHT OBITUARY IN “THE GUARDIAN”

Few actresses have had such a meteoric start to their Hollywood careers as the fetchingly unpretentious Teresa Wright. She won Oscar nominations for her first three films, a record still unequalled, and five of her first six movies, including are acknowledged classics.

Muriel Teresa Wright, actress: born New York 27 October 1918; married first 1942 Niven Busch (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1952), secondly 1959 and fourthly Robert Anderson (marriages dissolved), thirdly Carlos Pierre (marriage dissolved); died New Haven, Connecticut 6 March 2005.

However, she was to find herself both the beneficiary and the victim of the studio and contract system of the time. When the producer Sam Goldwyn signed her to a contract, she insisted on a famous clause stipulating that she would not have to “pose for photographers in a bathing suit”. She also avoided fan-magazine interviews and vetoed studio-concocted romances. She was given roles in prestigious productions guided by top directors, but her dislike of publicity, and time off for pregnancies, alienated Goldwyn, who terminated her contract, after which her screen image lost some of its lustre. Her later career was primarily on television and in the theatre, where she continued to win acclaim for her truthful and compassionate performances.

Born Muriel Teresa Wright in 1918 in New York City, she was the only child of an insurance agent and his wife, who separated soon after her birth. She was then raised by family in New York and New Jersey, and did not attend school until she was eight years old. After going on a trip to New York to see Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina, she took an interest in acting and played leading roles in school plays. A teacher helped her get a scholarship to the Wharf Theater in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she was an apprentice for two summers.

After graduating from Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, in 1938, she moved to New York, adopting the name Teresa Wright as there was already a Muriel Wright registered with Equity. In the autumn of 1938 she was given work on Broadway playing a small role and understudying Dorothy McGuire (who had succeeded Martha Scott) in the role of Emily in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. She did not get a chance to play Emily in New York, but played the part on tour in New England in the spring of 1939.

A spell in summer stock preceded her creating the role of Mary, theingénue in Life with Father (1939), the comedy by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse which holds the record as the longest-running straight play in American theatre history. Wright had been playing in the show for almost a year when Sam Goldwyn went to see it. He later recalled that, when he went to see her backstage,

Miss Wright was seated at her dressing table, and looked for all the world like a little girl experimenting with her mother’s cosmetics. I had discovered in her from the first sight, you might say, an unaffected genuineness and appeal.

He offered her a contract the same night, and immediately cast her as Alexandra, the daughter of the ruthless, grasping Regina Giddens, in the screen version of Lillian Hellman’s study of greed in the SouthThe Little Foxes (1941). The final confrontation between mother and daughter, when Alexandra rejects Regina’s offer of conciliation and accuses her of murdering her father, displayed Wright’s ability to reveal the moral strength latent in her character’s ingenuousness.

Superbly directed by William Wyler, with a brilliant central performance by Bette Davis and sterling support from many of the original cast, including Patricia Collinge, Dan Duryea and Charles Dingle, The Little Foxes won critical acclaim, with Wright getting a major share of attention. Variety reported,

Miss Wright is a newcomer to the screen, and is magnificent in a very difficult part. A less talented actress in her place could have ruined the picture.

Wright and Collinge were both nominated for the supporting-actress Oscar. When Wyler moved to MGM to make Mrs Miniver (1942), he personally asked Goldwyn to loan Wright to play the neighbour who marries Mrs Miniver’s son. Her spunk and tenacity were never displayed more appealingly than here, and she was again nominated for a supporting-actress Oscar.

Returning to Goldwyn, she was given her first starring role, in Sam Wood’s Pride of the Yankees (1942), the screen biography of one of the greatest baseball players, Lou Gehrig, first baseman of the New York Yankees, who died at the age of 37 from a form of motor neurone disease now known by his name. Realising that despite the sporting background he would need to lure a mass audience (with women in 1942 making up the majority of the customers), Goldwyn had the film concentrate on the love affair and marriage of Gehrig and a Chicago socialite, Eleanor Twitchell (sensitively played by Wright). He added a dance display by the team of Veloz and Yolanda in a stunning night-club set, and he even paid Irving Berlin $15,000 to use his song, “Always”, which had been the favourite of Gehrig and his wife. Gary Cooper was perfectly cast as the unassuming sportsman.

Released in the same year as Mrs Miniver, the film won Wright another Oscar nomination, as Best Actress. She lost that award to Mrs Miniver herself (Greer Garson) but won the supporting award. (Only nine other players have been nominated in both categories the same year – the latest being Jamie Foxx this year.)

In 1942 Wright married Goldwyn’s scriptwriter and story editor Niven Busch. Goldwyn wanted her to star in his next film, a propaganda piece in praise of America’s Russian allies, The North Star. It was a small role compared with that in Pride of the Yankees, and just a few days before filming she announced she was pregnant. The producer quickly borrowed Anne Baxter from Fox, but later voiced the suspicion that Busch had timed it to prevent Wright’s playing such a small part.

She returned to the screen with a much more important role, when Thornton Wilder suggested to Alfred Hitchcock that he borrow her from Goldwyn to star in Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Given first billing over Joseph Cotten, she played the small-town girl whose beloved uncle (Cotten) turns out to be a serial killer. Hitchcock’s personal favourite of his films, it depicts cosy small-town family life disrupted by the presence of evil, and Wright is compelling as her idealistic view of her uncle is chillingly eroded. According to Hitchcock’s biographer Donald Spoto,

Hitchcock respected Teresa Wright, especially her thorough preparation and quiet professionalism, and their mutual admiration society lasted until his death.

Wright then played in her first routine film, when reunited with Gary Cooper and director Sam Wood for a tepid comedy, Casanova Brown(1944). Her husband Niven Busch wrote Duel in the Sun as a vehicle for her, hoping the part of the torrid half-breed Pearl Chavez would prove a rewarding change of image, but the role in the Selznick production went to Jennifer Jones.

Awaiting Wright, though, was a screen masterpiece, William Wyler’sThe Best Years of Our Lives (1946), adapted from MacKinlay Kantor’s blank-verse novel Glory for Me (1945), the tale of three men returning from the war to civilian life. As the girl who falls in love with a man who has returned to a wife he wed three weeks before going overseas and who has been unfaithful, she welcomed the opportunity to play the role of a “homewrecker”, as she called it, though the character is basically sympathetic.

When interviewed for the film’s first DVD release, Wright revealed that she had had one serious disagreement with Wyler over a scene in which she berates her parents for their objections to her behaviour, stating that they have “forgotten how it feels to be in love”. “God, how I hated that scene,” she said:

How can this intelligent young woman say that to these beautiful people? She can see what they mean to each other. Willy couldn’t disagree. He said, “It’s true. The only thing is, if you don’t do it we don’t have the next scene.” It finally came down to, like it or not, this is what brings on the beautiful next scene between Myrna Loy and Fredric March.

The Best Year of Our Lives grossed $10m, second only to Gone with the Wind at the time, and remains a film landmark. Wright was then set to star in The Bishop’s Wife, with Cary Grant and David Niven as her leading men, but after all her costumes had been made she found she was pregnant again. “Goldwyn never forgave me for that,” she later said

On loan, she starred opposite Robert Mitchum in the moody, Freudian western Pursued (1947), written by her husband. She returned to star with Niven, Farley Granger and Evelyn Keyes inEnchantment (1948), a story of two generations of lovers in parallel romances. Newsweek commented, “Miss Wright, one of the screen’s finest, glows as the Cinderella who captivated three men”, and The New York Times said, “Teresa Wright plays with that breathless, bright-eyed rapture which she so remarkably commands”, but the wistful, predominantly sad story did not find favour with audiences.

Wright was next to have played the title role in Roseanna McCoy opposide Granger, but illness forced her withdrawal. Goldwyn then terminated her contract, citing her unwillingness to do publicity forEnchantment, and she never worked for him again.

At the time, Wright issued a statement declaring that she looked forward to working for other producers who would probably pay her less but would also treat her with more respect. In 1969, she told theNew York Post with wry awareness, “I was going to be Joan of Arc, and all I proved was that I was an actress who would work for less money.”

She took a sixth of her former salary for her starring role in Fred Zinnemann’s The Men (1950), but her co-star was Marlon Brando, making his screen début, and the film was a worthy piece about paraplegics. Wright once again conveyed grit, shining as the steadfast girlfriend who, when Brando rejects her because of his condition, proposes to him.

Niven Busch both wrote and produced her next film, John Sturges’sThe Capture (1950), an interesting if second-grade western co-starring Lew Ayres, but too many of her subsequent films were minor potboilers like California Conquest (1950), though Wright herself was invariably praised

Wright returned to the stage in the 1950s and in 1959 she married the author of Tea and Sympathy, Robert Anderson, having divorced Busch in 1952. In 1968 she starred in Anderson’s play I Never Sang for My Father. (The couple divorced in the early 1970s but, after Wright’s brief marriage to the actor Carlos Pierre, they remarried and divorced again, though remaining good friends. She won particular acclaim for her performance on Broadway as Linda Loman opposite George C. Scott in a revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman(1975). In 1980 she was part of a superb ensemble, including Maureen O’Sullivan, Gary Merrill and Nancy Marchand, in a beautiful revival of Paul Osborne’s Morning’s at Seven. In 1991 she co-starred in another of Osborne’s plays, On Borrowed Time, with George C. Scott and Nathan Lane.

Her prolific television work included three Emmy-nominated performances. Later films included Roseland (1977), Somewhere in Time (1980) and the role of Miss Birdie, Matt Damon’s eccentric aunt in Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of John Grisham’s The Rainmaker (1997).

For the last 10 years she lived quietly in New England, appearing occasionally at film forums and festivals and at events associated with the New York Yankees.

In 1996 she talked about Hitchcock at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and two years ago she was seen on the Academy Awards show, in a segment honouring previous Oscar-winners.

Tom Vallance

Gary Brumburgh’s entry

Jane Cowl
Jane Cowl in 1920
Born	Jane Bailey December 14, 1883 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	June 22, 1950 (aged 66) Santa Monica, California, U.S.
Resting place	Ashes buried in Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery
Other names	“Crying Jane” C. R. Avery^[1]
Occupation(s)	Actress, playwright
Years active	1903–1950
Spouse	Adolph Klauber (m. 1906; sep. 1930)

Jane Cowl (December 14, 1883 – June 22, 1950) was an American filmand stage actress and playwright who was, in the words of author Anthony Slide, “notorious for playing lachrymose parts“. Actress Jane Russell was named in Cowl’s honor.

PHYLLIS CALVERT OBITUARY IN “THE GUARDIAN” IN 2002

Phyllis Calvert was one of the Gainsborough ladies who were the leading lights of 40’s cinema in Britain. Margaret Lockwood was the leading light followed coosely in popularity bu Phyllis Calvert and then Patricia Roc and Jean Kent. Ms Calvert was born in Chelsea, London in 1915. She made her London stage debut in “A Woman’s Privilege” in 1939. Her breakthrough role on film came with “The Man in Gray” in 1943. Other film highlights include”2,000 Women”, “Fanny by Gaslight”, “Madonna of the Seven Moons” and “The Magic Bow”. She made three films in Hollywood including “Appointment With Danger” in 1951 with Alan Ladd where she played a nun who witnesses a murder. In 1952 she received widespread critical acclaim for “Mandy”. She continued working well into her eighties. Phyllis Calvert died in 2002 at the age of 87

Eric Shotter’s obituary in “The Guardian” :

Phyllis Calvert, who has died aged 87, made her way to the top of British cinema in the 1940s through niceness. As a well-bred, Kensington-accented cornerstone of Gainsborough costume epics, she vied with Margaret Lockwood at the box office.

Regency romps, they were known as. Utter nonsense, with heart-throbs like Stewart Granger and James Mason served up with grace and charm, was quintessential to Calvert’s artistic durability – but to keep it up, without growing dull, required a determined personality and an exceptional talent. It saw her through a long and respectable career in films, plays and television.

The only great dramatic part that ever came Calvert’s way was Madame Ranevskya in The Cherry Orchard, for the Oxford Playhouse on tour in 1971. Yet, within her permitted range, was a talent which served writers from Terence Rattigan (Flare Path, 1942), JM Barrie (Peter Pan, 1947), Roger MacDougall (Escapade, 1953) and Graham Greene (The Complaisant Lover, 1959), to Noel Coward (Present Laughter, 1965, Blithe Spirit, 1971, Hay Fever, 1973), William Douglas Home (The Reluctant Debutante, 1975), Edward Albee (All Over, 1973), Denis Cannan (Dear Daddy, 1976) and Rodney Ackland (Before The Party, 1980).

Whether as bored wives realising how much their boring husbands need them, long-suffering matriarchs tied to bombastic pacifists or in flight from their rowdy families, or just het up because cook had handed in her notice, Calvert’s galère of gracious British womanhood was hard to take your eyes off. Her sense of comedy never failed her in its dry, sarcastic discipline, and there was always that expressive lower lip, with which she stirred our feelings in the feeblest part

child dancer until an injury forced her to switch to acting, she was born Phyllis Bickle in London, and educated at the Margaret Morris school of dancing and the Institut Français. She first appeared on the stage aged 10, at the Lyric, Hammersmith, with Ellen Terry in Walter de la Mare’s Crossings (1925). She got her chance in films at 12 and, during six or seven prewar years in weekly rep, made a few forgotten talkies.

In Max Catto’s Punch Without Judy (1939), she met her future husband, Peter Murray Hill, better known later as a publisher. With him as Hook, she also acted Peter Pan in the annual Scala revival of 1947. The golden wartime days at Gainsborough studios, with James Mason or Stewart Granger dancing attendance in such epics as The Man In Grey (1943), Fanny By Gaslight (1944), Madonna Of The Seven Moons (1944) and They Were Sisters (1945) had long gone; though she regularly went on making films of even more variable quality for another quarter of a century.

One of the best of the bunch was probably Mandy (1952), in which Calvert got all our tear-ducts going as the mother of the deaf-and-dumb heroine.

Her work on stage and television – especially as a woman’s page writer in the series Kate, and plays like Death Of A Heart (1985) and Across The Lake (1988) – stood her in better stead because it had the backing of years in rep. It gave her a technique of little use before the camera, but invaluable on stage.

As a parent-turned-novelist in Felicity Doulkas’s It’s Never Too Late (1954), Calvert took over from Celia Johnson. As the Countess in Anouilh’s The Rehearsal (1961), she superciliously condoned her husband’s affair with Maggie Smith’s young Lucile; and, as Mrs Arbuthnot in Wilde’s A Woman Of No Importance (1967), she showed how beans could be spilled with style.

It was, however, as Queen Mary – in succession to Wendy Hiller – that her stage authority rose exquisitely to the social occasion in Royce Ryton’s Crown Matrimonial (1973). Struggling – first, as a mother through the constraints of court behaviour, and, second, as an actor through her natural niceness – to speak to her son, Edward VIII (Peter Barkworth), she brought emotional eloquence to the task of reproaching him for putting personal happiness before the monarchy.

She made her final stage appearance at the Chichester festival in 1989, in Henry James’s The Heiress, when she was 74, and came out of retirement to appear in her last film, Mrs Dalloway, in 1997.

The only other times I recall Calvert risking loss of sympathy for an apparent lapse of taste, grace or charm was at the Lyric in 1963, and at the Duke of York’s in 1964. In the first, as Marius Goring’s wife in Ronald Duncan’s Ménage à Trois, she condoned his misconduct – as long as it took place off the premises, herself departing as a lesbian with his mistress as the curtain fell. Then, as the cold, insensitive stepmother in James Saunders’s A Scent Of Flowers, she left no trace of “the rose that sings”. Was it purely coincidental that neither show ran?

Peter Murray Hill died in 1957. Calvert is survived by her son and a daughter.

· Phyllis Calvert, actor, born February 18 1915; died October 8 2002

France Nuyen

France Nuyen (born France Nguyễn Vân Nga on 31 July 1939) is a French-American actress, model, and psychological counselor. She is known to film audiences for playing romantic leads in South Pacific (1958), Satan Never Sleeps (1962), and A Girl Named Tamiko (also 1962), and for playing Ying-Ying St. Clair in The Joy Luck Club (1993). She also originated the title role in the Broadway play The World of Suzie Wong, based on the novel of the same name. She is a Theatre World Award winner and Golden Globe Award nominee.

France Nuyen was born in Marseille. Her mother was French and during World War II, her mother and grandfather were persecuted by the Nazis for being Roma.

Nuyen was raised in Marseille by a cousin she calls “an Orchidaceae raiser who was the only person who gave a damn about me.” Having left school at the age of 11, she began studying art and became an artist’s model

In 1955, while working as a seamstress, Nuyen was discovered on the beach by Lifephotographer Philippe Halsman. She was featured on the cover of 6 October 1958 issue of Life

France Nuyen became a motion picture actress in 1958. In her first role, she appeared as Liat, daughter of Bloody Mary (played by Juanita Hall) in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific.

In 1978 France Nuyen guest-starred with Peter Falk and Louis Jourdan in the Columbo episode “Murder Under Glass“. In 1986 she joined the cast of St. Elsewhere as Dr. Paulette Kiem, remaining until the series ended in 1988.

Ms Nuyen appeared in several films including The Last Time I Saw Archie (1961) Satan Never Sleeps (1962), A Girl Named Tamiko(1962), Diamond Head (1963), Dimension 5 (1966), Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), The Joy Luck Club (1993) and The American Standards (2008).

France Nuyen worked several times with actor William Shatner. At age 19, she was cast in Shatner’s 1958 Broadway play The World of Suzie Wong. The play ran for more than 500 performances and was quite financially successful. Both Nuyen and Shatner later collected notable accolades for their work on the show, at the 1959 Theatre World Awards.

Ms Nuyen worked again with Shatner across three US television projects, starting with “Elaan of Troyius“, a 1968 third season episode of the original Star Trek in which Nuyen was the title character. She would later appear with Shatner in the 1973 made for TV movie The Horror at 37,000 Feet, and afterward in a 1974 episode of the Kung Fu.

France Nuyen was married to Thomas Gaspar Morell, a psychiatrist from New York, by whom she has a daughter, Fleur, who resides in Canada and works as a film make-up artist. She met her second husband, Robert Culp, while appearing in four episodes of his television series I Spy. They married in 1967, but divorced three years later. In 1986, Nuyen earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology and began a second career as a counselor for abused women, children and women in prison. She received a Woman of the Year award in 1989 for her psychology work. In the Life cover story on Nuyen, she is quoted as saying a proverb she also repeated in character as a spy in the I Spy episode “Magic Mirror”: “I am Chinese. I am a stone. I go where I am kicked.”

She resides in California.

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Gena Rowlands

Gena Rowlands was born in 1930 is an American actress, whose career in film, stage, and television has spanned over six decades. A four-time Emmy and two-time Golden Globe winner, she is known for her collaborations with her late actor-director husband John Cassavetes in ten films, including A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Gloria (1980), which earned her nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She also won the Silver Bear for Best Actress for Opening Night (1977). In November 2015, Rowlands received an Honorary Academy Award in recognition of her unique screen performances.

Rowlands was born on June 19, 1930, in Madison, Wisconsin. Her mother, Mary Allen (Neal), was a housewife who later worked as an actress under the stage name Lady Rowlands.. Her father, Edwin Myrwyn Rowlands, was a banker and state legislator. He was a member of the Wisconsin Progressive Party, and was of Welsh descent. She had a brother, David Rowlands.

Her family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1939, when Edwin was appointed to a position in the United States Department of Agriculture; moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1942, when he was appointed as branch manager of the Office of Price Administration; and later moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota. From 1947–50, she attended the University of Wisconsin, where she was a popular student already renowned for her beauty. While in college, she was a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma. She left for New York City to study drama at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

In the early 1950s, Rowlands performed with repertory theatre companies and at the Provincetown Playhouse. She made her Broadway debut in The Seven Year Itch and toured in a national production of the play. Rowlands costarred with Paul Stewart in the 26-episode syndicated TV series Top Secret (1954–55), and she guest starred on such anthology television series as Robert Montgomery Presents, Appointment with Adventure, Kraft Television Theatre, and Studio One (1955). In 1956, she starred in Middle of the Night opposite Edward G. Robinson. She appeared alongside her husband John Cassavetes on an episode (“Fly Baby, Fly”) of the 1959–60 NBC detective series Johnny Staccato. She also appeared on an episode of the NBC western series, Riverboat, starring Darren McGavin, and the ABC adventure series, The Islanders, set in the South Pacific. Also in 1959, Rowlands appeared in the Western series Laramie episode titled “Run to Tumavaca”. Rowlands made her film debut in The High Cost of Loving in 1958.

In 1961–62, she starred in David Miller’s “Lonely are the Brave”, with Kirk Douglas and Walter Mathau and Carroll O’Connor. She starred as Jerri Bondi, the wife of Paul Bondi, (Michael Kane) but still deeply caring for ex-lover, cowboy Jack Burns, (Kirk Douglas) in a fantastically moving performance. In that same season, she appeared on ABC‘s Target: The Corruptors!, starring Stephen McNally. She also guest starred in CBS‘s The Lloyd Bridges Show and ABC’s Breaking Point. In 1963, she guest-starred in an episode on the NBC western series, Bonanza, Laramie and The Virginian, and “The Lonely Hours”, “Murder Case” and “Ride The Nightmare” on CBS’s The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. In 1967, she was cast as socialite Adrienne Van Leyden in the prime time ABC soap opera Peyton Place.

Rowlands and Cassavetes made ten films together: A Child Is Waiting (1963), Faces (1968), Machine Gun McCain (1969), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), A Woman Under the Influence (1974; nomination for Academy Award for Best Actress), Two-Minute Warning (1976), Opening Night (1977), Gloria (1980; nomination for Academy Award for Best Actress), Tempest (1982), and Love Streams (1984).

According to Boston University film scholar Ray Carney, Rowlands sought to suppress an early version of Cassavetes’ first film, Shadows, that Carney says he rediscovered after decades of searching.[12] Rowlands also became involved in the screenings of Husbands and Love Streams, according to Carney. The UCLA Film and Television Archive mounted a restoration of Husbands, as it was pruned down (without Cassavetes’ consent, and in violation of his contract) by Columbia Pictures several months after its release, in an attempt to restore as much of the removed content as possible. At Rowlands’ request, UCLA created an alternative print with almost ten minutes of content edited out, as Rowlands felt that these scenes were in poor taste. The alternative print is the only one that has been made available for rental.

In 1985, Rowlands played the mother in the critically acclaimed made-for-TV movie An Early Frost. She won an Emmy for her portrayal of former First Lady of the United States Betty Ford in the 1987 made-for-TV movie The Betty Ford Story.

In 1988, Rowlands starred in Woody Allen‘s dramatic film Another Woman. She played Marion Post, a middle-aged professor who is prompted to a journey of self-discovery when she overhears the therapy sessions of another woman (Mia Farrow). The review in Time Out described the character’s trajectory: “Marion gets to thinking, and is appalled to realise that so many assumptions about her own life and marriage are largely unfounded: in her desire for a controlled existence, she has evaded the emotional truth about relationships with her best friend (Sandy Dennis), brother (Harris Yulin) and husband (Ian Holm).” Time Out praised the “marvellous” performances in the film, adding, “Rowlands’ perfectly pitched approach to a demanding role is particularly stunning.” Film4 called her performance “sublime”, while Roger Ebert noted that it marked a considerable change in tone from her work with Cassavetes, thus showing “how good an actress Rowlands has been all along.”

In 2002, Rowlands appeared in Mira Nair‘s HBO movie Hysterical Blindness, for which she won her third Emmy. She was later seen in The Notebook (2004), which was directed by her son Nick Cassavetes. The same year, she won her first Daytime Emmy for her role as Mrs. Evelyn Ritchie in The Incredible Mrs. Ritchie. In 2005, she appeared opposite Kate Hudson, Peter Sarsgaard, and John Hurt in the gothic thriller The Skeleton Key.

In 2003, she appeared as Mrs. Hellman in Numb3rs. She played a Nazi survivor whose whole family was killed. The family owned a painting that the Nazis confiscated. Later on the painting reappeared. The new owner lent the painting to an art gallery in Los Angeles but while on display it was stolen. The F.B.I. agent, played by Don Eppes, tries to figure out what really happened. Rowlands received rave reviews for this role. She has been a spokesperson for people who were persecuted by the Nazis so this role was a perfect match for her.

In 2007, she played a supporting role opposite Parker Posey and Melvil Poupaud in Broken English, an independent American feature written and directed by her daughter Zoe Cassavetes. In 2009, she appeared on an episode of Monk (“Mr. Monk and the Lady Next Door”). On March 2, 2010, she appeared on an episode of NCIS as lead character Leroy Jethro Gibbs‘s former mother-in-law, who is embroiled in a murder investigation.[citation needed] In 2014, she starred in the film adaptation of Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks.

Rowlands was married to John Cassavetes from April 9, 1954, until his death on February 3, 1989. They met at the American Academy at Carnegie Hall where they were both students. They had three children, all actor-directors: Nick, Alexandra, and Zoe. Rowlands married retired businessman Robert Forrest in 2012.

Rowlands has stated that she was a fan of actress Bette Davis while growing up. She played Davis’s daughter in Strangers.

Rowlands has been nominated for two Academy Awards, eight Primetime Emmy Awards, one Daytime Emmy Award, eight Golden Globe Awards, three Satellite Awards, and two SAG Awards. Some of her notable wins are a Silver Bear for Best Actress, three Primetime Emmy Awards and one Daytime Emmy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, two National Board of Review Awards, and two Satellite Awards.

In January 2015, Rowlands was presented with a lifetime achievement award by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.At the 2015 Governors Awards, she received an Honorary Academy Award. The press release described Rowland as “an original talent” whose “devotion to her craft has earned her worldwide recognition as an independent film icon”.

Carol White

Carol White was one of the gifted young actors who rose to prominence with the rise of British cinema in the 1960’s. She made a huge impact in the television programme “Cathy Come Home” directed by Ken Loach. She went on to work with Loach again in “Poor Cow” opposite Terence Stamp in 1968. The following year she went to Hollywood and made a tense triller “Dayy’s Gone A Hunting” but sadly her career tapered off significantly thereafter. She died in reduced circumstances in 1991 in Miami at the age of 48.

Her obituary from Bob Meade’s website:

CAROL WHITE, the actress who has died in Florida aged 49, was celebrated for her powerful performance in the title role of Cathy Come Home, Jeremy Sandford’s coruscating account of homelessness on BBC Television, which caused a national sensation in the 1960s. Cathy Come Home was not so much a television play as fierce propaganda. Sandford traced the painful downhill journey of a young couple who began their married life full of hope and gaiety and ended it, separated from their children, as casualties of the Welfare State. After an accident cut the husband’s earnings, the couple lived with unfriendly relations, were evicted from squalid tenements, were driven out of a caravan site and found refuge in a rat-ridden hostel. For all its overemphasis, the production showed with compassion the raw degradation of hostel life. In a tour-de-force of naturalistic acting the highly photogenic Carol White succeeded in making Cathy likeable and eventually extremely moving as the courage and optimism in her wasted away. The diminutive Miss White, a London scrap merchant’s daughter who had already made her mark in the television version of Nell Dunn’s Up the Juction (1965), consequently became something of a Sixties icon. She went on to bring warmth and a plausible innocence to the film Poor Cow, a raw and realistic picture of South London life which opened with a graphic scene of Miss White giving birth while reflecting on the shortcomings of her absent husband (“He’s a right bastard”).

Subsequently Miss White was rather miscast as a jolly virginal girl in Michael Winner’s all too forgettable I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name. However, she made a good impression — when she remembered to substitute a Gloucestershire accent for her native Cockney — as a comely country lass in Dulcima (1971) adapted from a story by H. E. Bates

Miss White showed promise of better things as an actress opposite Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde and lan Holm in the film of Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer. Her performance as Raisl Bok won her a Hollywood contract in 1968 to make Daddy’s Gone-A-Hunting.

But from then on nothing seemed to go right, and the rest of her career was distinctly chequered. Miss White’s attempts to establish herself in America were dogged by ill fortune. Her name — forever bracketed with her role of Cathy — became more familiar in the press in connection with her amours, divorces, court appearances, drink and drugs than with her acting. “I came to America thinking I was at the very top,” she recalled shortly before her death from liver failure, “and that no one could touch me. But pimps, pushers, liars and ex-husbands brought me crashing down.”-• In 1982 she returned to London to take over the role of Josie from Georgina Hale, in Nell Dunn’s play Steaming, but her comeback ended unhappily when her contract was terminated following several missed performances.

Carol White was born in Hammersmith, London, on April 1 1942. She described her father as “a scrap-metal merchant and a spieler in a fairground and a door-to-door salesman of the elixir of life”. At the age of 11 Carol heard about theatre schools from a hairdresser and thereafter attended the Corona. Miss White made her film debut three years later in Circus Friends and went on to appear in Carry On Teacher, Beat Girl and Never Let Go, in which she played Peter Sellers’s girlfriend. “In those days in British films,” she recalled, “brunettes were ladies and blondes were bits. I wore my hair white and painted my lips red and my eyes dark.” She then married Michael King of the King Brothers singing act and gave up acting for a few years. She returned, this time on the smaller screen in Emergency — Ward 10 and, more notably, as a bright Battersea girl in Nell Dunn’s exhilarating sketch of South London life, Up the Junction. Miss White’s later films for the cinema — not a distinguished collection — included The Man Who Had Power Over Women, Something Big, Made, Some Call It Loving, The Squeeze, The Spaceman and King Arthur and Nutcracker.

She wrote a racy volume of memoirs, Carol Comes Home (1982), in which the Swinging Sixties of purple hearts and Courreges boots gave way to the excesses of Hollywood (“the assault course of a hundred different bedrooms . . . with broken hearts and broken promises left at every corner”), as well as a beauty book, Forever Young. After her divorce from King she married Dr Stuart Lerner, a psychiatrist, and then Michael Arnold, a musician. She had two sons from her first marriage. Jeremy Sandfbrd writes: In her early films Carol captured powerfully the quality of the urban girl-next-door from the less prosperous areas. And in Cathy Come Home she seemed the archetypal young mother, every mother who has ever struggled not to be separated from her children. I last saw her some 10 years ago when she had come over to London and asked me to help her write her autobiography. She had devastating tales to tell about double-dealing Hollywood psychiatrists. Unknown to her, she told me, hers had been paid double her fee by an ex-boyfriend, to “muck her up”. She told me she had come home for good to live the simple life back in Hammersmith, and I never dreamed she would go back to America. She later wrote the book with help from another writer and I have regretted since that it wasn’t me. It seems the classic tale of the pretty but unsophisticated girl who goes to Hollywood. There is no simple moral, though, because Carol, besides being pure and straight, was always reckless, always something of a life gambler.

September 20 1991

The above obituary can also be accessed online here.

Article from Tina Aumont’s Eyes:

Known as the ‘Battersea Bardot’, Carol White used her working class background to enable her to give several natural performances in British dramas, which sometimes mirrored her own turbulent life. Unfortunately, a later problem with alcohol and drug abuse would harm her career, and ultimately end her life.

Born Carole Joan White in Hammersmith, London, on April 1st 1943, Carol studied drama at the Corona Stage Academy. This led to early minor appearances in many of the UK’s best known products at the time. There were ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ parts in ‘Doctor at Sea’(1956), ‘Blue Murder at St. Trinian’s’(1957), ‘Carry on Teacher’, and ‘The 39 Steps’( both 1959). After another dozen or so bits in mainly sexy background roles, Carol’s breakthrough came in Ken Loach’s 1966 social drama ‘Cathy Come Home’, a ground-breaking production, shot as part of ‘The Wednesday Play’ television series. White’s performance was so realistic that for many years afterwards, Carol would quite often be stopped in the streets by people believing her to be Cathy, and offer her money to help her out.

Following ‘Cathy Come Home’, Ken Loach cast Carol as Joy in what would become White’s signature film, the mostly improvised ‘Poor Cow’ (1967). Carol was superb once again as a struggling young mother, married to an abusive criminal (John Bindon). Carol’s final scene where her character gives an interview to camera is astonishingly real and powerful, leaving the viewer with a slight hope of optimism for the much put-upon Joy. The success of ‘Poor Cow’ had everybody knocking on White’s door, with Frank Sinatra and Warren Beatty just two of Carol’s famous new fans.

Travelling to America, White’s Hollywood career got off to an interesting start. Taking the lead role in Mark Robson’s stalker flick ‘Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting’ (1969), the film has gained a cult reputation over the years. A pretty good thriller, it tells the exciting story of a woman who is menaced by the man whose baby she once aborted.

Favourite Movie: The Squeeze
Favourite Performance: Poor Cow

Tony Curtis

Tony Curtis was born 1925 in New York City. He was one of the giants of Hollywood cinema during the 1950’s and early 1960’s. He was under contract to Universal Studios alongside Rock Hudson and Clint Eastwood. Eastwood took a lot longer to break through into film than Curtis and Hudson. Among Tony Curtis’s many fine films are “Some Like it Hot”, “The Great Race”, “Houdini”, The Vikings”, “The Defiant Ones” and “Taras Bulba”, Tony Curtis died in 2010.

His “Guardian” obituary by Brian Baxter:
Born into a family of Hungarian Jews who had emigrated to the US, Bernard Schwartz – the boy who became the actor Tony Curtis – could scarcely have dreamed of the wealth, fame and rollercoaster life that awaited him. Curtis, who has died aged 85, starred in several of the best films of the 1950s, including Sweet Smell of Success (1957), The Defiant Ones (1958) and Some Like It Hot (1959). He enjoyed a long career thanks to his toughness and resilience (despite insecurities that demanded years of therapy).

He grew up in the Bronx, New York, the eldest of three sons. As a child, he was ill-treated by his mother, Helen, and spent time in an orphanage. One of his brothers, Robert, was a schizophrenic and the other, Julius, was killed in a traffic accident when Tony was 12. At school he became a member of a gang involved in petty crime, but he escaped into the Scouts. He endured poverty and the Depression and, in 1943, joined the US navy, serving as a signalman in the second world war.
He emerged, aged 20, into a world of opportunities – the first being postwar government funding for GIs to train for a career. He decided on acting (his father, Emanuel, had been an actor before becoming a tailor) and entered the Dramatic Workshop in New York. He took the lead in a Greenwich Village revival of Golden Boy, written by Clifford Odets, and was spotted by a studio talent scout and offered a contract by Universal. He first chose Anthony Adverse as his professional name, inspired by the eponymous hero of a novel by Hervey Allen. A casting director persuaded him otherwise, so he kept “Anthony” and added “Curtis”, anglicising a common Hungarian surname.

Like the far grander MGM, or the Rank Organisation’s “charm school” in the UK, Universal had a policy of training promising talent. The prerequisites were good looks and ambition. Curtis had both in abundance. He made his uncredited film debut in Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross (1949), as a gigolo who dances with Yvonne de Carlo, watched by the male lead, Burt Lancaster, who later played a significant part in Curtis’s career.%

After this 30-second screen exposure, he notched up 10 appearances in two years, including the westerns Sierra and Winchester 73 (both 1950). He later said that the performances were “guided by testosterone, not talent”. He and the other Universal proteges, including Rock Hudson, were trained in acting, fencing, riding and dancing. By 1951 he was considered ready for the lead in a swashbuckler, The Prince Who Was a Thief, and was married to the starlet Janet Leigh, who later appeared alongside him in films including The Vikings (1958).

Curtis went on to star in a slew of second-grade movies, such as Son of Ali Baba (1952) and Houdini (1953). His big break into A-features came when Lancaster chose him as his co-star in Trapeze (1956). They made a convincing pair of high flyers, and the glossy movie, directed by Carol Reed, was an international hit.

After playing the lead in Blake Edwards’s Mister Cory (1957), Curtis joined Lancaster again in Sweet Smell of Success, produced by Lancaster’s company. A superb screenplay, co-written by Odets, was the launchpad for Alexander Mackendrick’s vividly achieved portrait of obsession and betrayal. Lancaster played the reptilian, all-powerful, New York columnist besotted with his sister. Curtis was Sidney Falco, an unprincipled press agent in thrall to (and fear of) the man who could make him king of the jungle, and willing to sell his pride and soul for the title. It gave Curtis the reviews and credibility for which he had yearned.

Routine movies followed until The Defiant Ones gave him his first and only Oscar nomination, for best actor. This modestly liberal story – an archetypal Stanley Kramer film – proved important for Curtis, who insisted that his black co-star Sidney Poitier share top billing. It was significant as a commercially successful film, making a plea for racial tolerance, directed and acted with force and integrity. Although he did not get the Oscar (which went to David Niven for Separate Tables), Curtis was soon to receive a greater prize – the second great movie of his career, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot.

After this movie, Curtis’s career declined in quality, if not quantity. Edwards capitalised on his two best roles and cast him opposite his hero Grant in the bright and funny Operation Petticoat (1959), where he played a jokey variation of Sidney Falco. The following year he was in heady if duller company in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, playing Antoninus, the handsome slave who flees from the overtures of his master, Laurence Olivier.

Appearing alongside Jack Lemmon and – less happily – a difficult Marilyn Monroe, Curtis enjoyed three sublime manifestations in the film. First, as one of two jazz musicians who flee from gangsters after witnessing the St Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago in 1929. Second, in drag as a member of the all-girl band which provides his camouflage. And last as a fake oil millionaire – out to seduce Marilyn – played as a wonderful homage to Cary Grant. “Marilyn was an enigma,” he later said. “She was very difficult to read. Marilyn and I were lovers in 1949, 1950, 1951 … It was an important relationship for me.”

He then made two films with the director Robert Mulligan – The Rat Race (1960) and The Great Impostor (1961) – and starred in The Outsider (1961) as Ira Hayes, the Native American hero of the battle of Iwo Jima during the second world war. As Curtis’s career progressed, his marriage to Leigh – who had sacrificed her work for him and their children, Jamie Lee and Kelly – began to disintegrate. They divorced in 1962, and the following year he married the actor Christine Kaufmann, with whom he had two daughters, Alexandra and Allegra. He had some success with Jerry Lewis in the comedy Boeing Boeing (1965) and rejoined Edwards on The Great Race (1965), parodying his charismatic persona with a cocky grin and effortless charm

He had less success with Mackendrick’s Don’t Make Waves (1967), a slow-burn comedy which suffered from studio interference. He then made a strenuous effort for critical acclaim with his role as the serial killer Albert DeSalvo in The Boston Strangler (1968), flashily directed with use of a split screen. More routine films, and a lucrative two-year stint in the television series The Persuaders (1971-72), kept him busy, as did his increased interest in his painting, art collecting and writing. He married the model Leslie Allen in 1968 (having divorced Kaufmann the year before) and dedicated his frantic, exhausting novel, Kid Andrew Cody and Julie Sparrow (1977), to her. He had two sons with Allen, Nicholas and Benjamin.

Occasional meaty parts continued to come his way, including the eponymous gangster in Lepke (1975) and the fading, impotent movie star in the lugubrious The Last Tycoon (1976). He returned to the stage in the 1979 Los Angeles run of Neil Simon’s play I Ought to Be in Pictures. His best work on television was in The Scarlett O’Hara War (1980), as the producer David O Selznick, and the series Vega$ (1978-81). But he had lost his comic lightness of touch and decent parts were rare, although he relished his role as the Senator in Nicolas Roeg’s Insignificance (1985). He was admitted to the Betty Ford clinic for treatment for his alcohol and drug abuse, and his other 80s credits, such as Lobster Man from Mars (1989), revealed his diminishing standing.

Curtis and Allen had divorced in 1982, and he married the lawyer Lisa Deutsch in 1993. They divorced the following year. Curtis talked of quitting show business to open an art gallery in Europe. There were also rumours of a return to the stage opposite Lemmon and of a second novel. In the event, he returned to big and small screens in a desire not to earn money but to keep working. His autobiography was published in 1993, and in the mid-90s he suffered personal trauma as he underwent heart surgery and his son Nicholas died of a heroin overdose.

He married Jill VandenBerg, more than 40 years his junior, in 1998, and said he had never been happier. Curtis relished being remembered for the Mackendrick movies above all, and for his quirky cameos (often uncredited) in numerous films – not least as the “voice” in Rosemary’s Baby (1968). But he remained bitter about the lack of official recognition for his best work, convinced that he lost out on an Oscar for The Defiant Ones because of his “pretty boy” image. On the occasions I met him at his London home in Chester Square, Belgravia, he was always interested in showing his work as an artist. His paintings have been exhibited in Europe and the US, at galleries including the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Curtis is survived by Jill, his daughters Jamie Lee, Kelly and Allegra (who all became actors), another daughter, Alexandra, and his son Benjamin.

• Tony Curtis (Bernard Schwartz), actor, born 3 June 1925; died 29 September

TAINA ELG (WIKIPEDIA)

Taina Elg is one of the few actresses who hail from Finland to star in Hollywood films. She was born in Helsinki in 1930. She trained originally as a ballet dancer. She joined the Sadler Welles Ballet company in London. She was noticed by an American film producer and offered a Hollywood contract. Her first U.S. film was “The Prodigal” with Edmund Purdom and Lana Turner in 1955. She made a number of other films for MGM including “Gaby” and “Diane”. She went on to star with Kay Kendall, Gene Kelly and Mitzi Gaynor in “Les Girls” amusical with songs by Cole Porter. She then went to Britain to film the remake of “The 39 Steps” with Kenneth More. Her film career waned somewhat during the early 1960’s and she acted more frequently on stage and on television. Her son is the famous jazz guitarist Raoul Bjorkenheim. Interview with Taina Elg on “Finland Center” website here.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

One of her country’s most celebrated performers, Finnish actress and dancer Taina Elg was born in 1931 in Impilahti, in Southeastern Finland (located near the Finnish/Russian border). Her home later became a target during the Finnish-Soviet wars between 1939 and 1944 and when it became part of the Soviet Union, the family was forced to leave.

At a very young age, she began her training in ballet and acting. When the family moved to Helsinki, Taina continued with her dance and acting training and eventually was invited to join the Finnish National Ballet. She appeared in a few homeland movies as early as age 10 and found a couple of obscure film roles as a teenager, one in which she danced.

Taina’s international reputation began to grow when she joined the famed Sadler’s Wells ballet dance company (The Royal Ballet) in London and then the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas, in Paris. A serious injury forced her to rethink her dancing career. Fortunately, she was discovered in London by American film producer Edwin H. Knopf and, on the heels of the spectacular Hollywood success fellow Scandinavian Anita Ekberg was having, MGM decided to sign Taina for a seven-year Hollywood contract.

She made her American debut for MGM with the secondary role of Elissa in the Lana Turner biblical costumer The Prodigal (1955). The following year MGM utilized her acting talents in their films Diane (1956), again starring Ms. Turner, and Gaby (1956) withLeslie Caron. For the afore-mentioned work she was honored with a Golden Globe award for female “foreign newcomer”.

Taina was subsequently handed her best all-around opportunity by MGM to display her sublime dancing, sexy figure and comedic acting skills when asked to portray Angèle Ducros in Cole Porter‘s musical Les Girls (1957) opposite Gene Kelly and alongside fellow dazzlers Mitzi Gaynor and Kay Kendall. Receiving her second consecutive Golden Globe (tying with Kendall) for “Best Actress” in a musical, Les Girls (1957) also won the Golden Globe for “Best Picture – Musical” and an Oscar for its costume design.

More films came her way with Imitation General (1958) starring Glenn Ford and Red Buttons; the remake of the classic The 39 Steps (1959) opposite Kenneth More; the African adventure Watusi (1959) with George Montgomery and David Farrar and the war story Mission of Danger (1960), which was actually culled from a few TV episodes. None, however, could match the quality of Les Girls (1957

Ms. Elg’s Hollywood film career went into a steep decline at this juncture and she began focusing on TV projects, foreign films and especially theatre roles. Appearing on stage in such 1960s productions as “Redhead,” “Silk Stockings,” “Irma La Douce,” “West Side Story,” “The Sound of Music” and “There’s a Girl in My Soup,” she finally made her Broadway debut with the musical “Look to the Lilies” in 1970, which was based on the Oscar-winning film Lilies of the Field (1963).

She never found a strong footing again in films and has appeared in less than a handful since. Other than the 1961 Italian spectacle Bondage Gladiator Sexy (1961), she showed up in the musclebound Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s vehicle Hercules in New York (1969),Liebestraum (1991), and the Barbra Streisand feature The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996).

Her love for the stage was obvious and she remained as colorful than ever gracing such musicals as Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music” (1973) in which she sang the haunting “Send in the Clowns.” She also returned to Broadway in later years with the musicals “Where’s Charley?”, for which she earned a Tony nomination, “Nine” and “Cabaret”. She appeared in the national tour of the musical “Titanic” in 1998-1999. On the non-musical stage she had strong roles in “Uncle Vanya,” “I Hate Hamlet” “O Pioneers!” and, more recently, “Requiem for William” and Memory of a Summer” (both 2003).

In 2004, the actress received a special honor from her native Finland, when she was knight by the Order of the Lion of Finland. She is a naturalized American citizen.

The jazz guitarist Raoul Björkenheim is Taina’s son from her first marriage (1953-1958) to Carl “Poku” Björkenheim. In 1985 she was married to Rocco Caporale, an Italian educator and professor of sociology. The couple lived in New York City until his death in 2008.

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

William Reynolds

William Reynolds, who portrayed Special Agent Tom Colby for six seasons on the television series The F.B.I., died August 24 from non-Covid pneumonia complications, his son Eric Regnolds confirms. He was 90.

Born William de Clercq Regnolds on December 9, 1931, in Los Angeles, he began his career under contract to Universal Pictures and had credits in Carrie (1952), as Laurence Olivier’s son, and The Son of Ali Baba, where he was Tony Curtis’ best friend. For 20th Century Fox, he portrayed Rommel’s son opposite James Mason in The Desert Fox

Following his military service in Japan during the Korean War, Reynolds co-starred in Cult of the Cobra (1955). In 1959, he starred as trumpeter Pete Kelly in the television series Pete Kelly’s Blues. In 1960-1961, he starred as air charter entrepreneur and adventurer Sandy Wade on the The Islanders, while also appearing as a World War II oﬃcer in Rod Serling’s acclaimed Twilight Zoneepisode “The Purple Testament”.

Other film credits include The Battle at Apache Pass, Francis Goes to West Point, The Mississippi Gambler, Gunsmoke, There’s Always Tomorrow, Away All Boatsand The Land Unknown. Television work included roles in Bronco, Wagon Train, The Roaring 20s, Cheyenne, Dragnet and Maverick.

After making guest appearances on the first two seasons of The FBI, Reynolds won the big break of his career, taking on the part of stalwart and heroic Agent Colby, opposite Efrem Zimbalist’s Inspector Erskine, for six seasons on the hit ABC series.

Reynolds quit Hollywood after his role on The F.B.I. and became a businessman. He was married for 42 years to actress Molly Sinclair, until her passing in 1992. The couple had two children, Carrie Regnolds Jones (Brian Jones) and Eric Regnolds (Nikki Camello), two grandchildren, Anthony Regnolds Jones and Nicholas Camello Regnolds, and one great grandchild, Gianni Camello Regnolds.

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Teresa Wright

TERESA WRIGHT OBITUARY IN “THE GUARDIAN”

Jane Cowl

Phyllis Calvert

PHYLLIS CALVERT OBITUARY IN “THE GUARDIAN” IN 2002

France Nuyen

Gena Rowlands

Carol White

Tony Curtis

Taina Elg

TAINA ELG (WIKIPEDIA)

William Reynolds

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