Hollywood Actors Archives

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.

DAVID MCCALLUM. TCM OVERVIEW.

David McCallum was born in 1933 in Glasgow. He began his career in British films in the 1950’s usually as a skinny sullen juvenile deliquent.In the early 1960’s he went to Hollywood and very soon became enourmously in the television series “The Man from Uncle”. He has since gone on to have a very lenghty career on television in the United States. His films include “A Night to Remember”, “Robbery Under Arms” and “The Great Escape”. Interview with David McCallum here.

TCM Overview:

A thoughtful, intense presence on television in America and his native United Kingdom, David McCallum was a pop culture sensation in the mid-1960s as the suave spy, Illya Kuryakin, on “The Man from U.N.C.L.E” (CBS, 1965-68) and later as the avuncular Donald “Ducky” Mallard on “NCIS: Naval Criminal Service Investigation” (CBS, 2003). The Scottish-born McCallum worked his way up the ranks in British film and television before bursting onto the American scene with “U.N.C.L.E.” His cool charm and blonde good looks made him an immediate TV idol, but failed to translate into stardom after the show left the air. McCallum settled into a steady diet of TV appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, frequently essaying mellowed professorial types or pensive government figures, before scoring his late-inning smash with “NCIS.” The rare performer with two major hits to his credit, McCallum’s image and talent ensured his fame for generations of TV fans.

Born David Keith McCallum, Jr. in Glasgow, Scotland on Sept. 19, 1933, he was the son of David McCallum, Sr., the famed principal violinist for numerous orchestras in the United Kingdom, including the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and cellist Dorothy Dorman. Both parents encouraged McCallum and his brother Iain, who later became a novelist, to pursue their chosen fields; for McCallum, this was initially the oboe, which he studied at the Royal Academy of Music. But when a performance from Shakespeare’s “King John” at a local theater group yielded a positive response from its audience, he switched his focus to acting while keeping music as a secondary interest. After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, he made his debut in a 1946 BBC Radio production of “Whom the Gods Love, Die Young.” Bit and supporting roles in British features and on television soon followed, often as troubled youth, as benefiting his brooding intensity. Among his more notable turns during his period was in 1958’s “Violent Playground,” where his psychotic gang member is spurred by poverty and rock and roll to take a classroom of school children hostage

McCallumâ’s American film debut came as the mother-fixated Carl von Schlosser in John Huston’s “Freud” (1962), with Montgomery Clift as the pioneering analyst. The following year, he played Royal Navy Officer Ashley-Pitt, who devised the method of dispersing the dirt from tunnels dug under a POW camp in “The Great Escape” (1963). His co-star in the film, Charles Bronson, later became entangled in a headline-grabbing relationship with McCallum’s wife, actress Jill Ireland. McCallum and Ireland eventually divorced in 1967, which allowed her to marry Bronson. An early American television appearance on “The Outer Limits” (CBS, 1963-65) became one of his most enduring, thanks to the eye-popping makeup applied to McCallum. His character, a bitter Welsh miner, agreed to take part in an evolutionary experiment, which turned him into a hyper-intelligent mutant with a massive domed cranium. The image was memorable enough to make McCallum a go-to for numerous science fiction efforts in the ensuing decades.

In 1964, McCallum was cast as Illya Kuryakin, a minor character on the spy series “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” Despite having only two lines, the producers saw that McCallum and star Robert Vaughn had considerable chemistry together, and boosted the character to co-star status. The move changed McCallum’s career forever. Kuryakin’s cool demeanor, physical proficiency with any weapon, and passion for art, music and science not to mention his wealth of blonde hair made him an immediate favorite among female viewers, whose fan mail to the actor was the most ever received in the history of MGM, which produced the show. For the series three years on the air, McCallum was at the apex of television stardom, and netted two Emmy nominations and a Golden Globe nod, as well as major roles in several films. He was the tormented Judas in George Stevens’s epic Biblical drama “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1965), and took the lead in a number of minor features, including 1968’s “Sol Madrid” and “Mosquito Squadron” (1969), many of which traded on McCallum’s popularity in “U.N.C.L.E.” by casting him in action-oriented roles. During this period, McCallum also orchestrated and conducted a trio of lush, sonically adventurous records that put unique spins on some of the period’s more popular songs

In the 1970s, McCallum was a fixture on television in both America and England. In the States, he was a staple of science fiction and supernaturally-themed TV features, including “Hauser’s Memory” (NBC, 1970), as a scientist who injected himself with a dying colleagues brain fluid to preserve defense secrets from foreign agents, while “She Waits” (CBS, 1972) cast him as the husband to a possessed Patty Duke. He also briefly returned to series work with “The Invisible Man” (NBC, 1975-76) as a scientist who used his invisibility formula to aid a government agency against evildoers. His work in England hewed more towards dramatic fare: in “Colditz” (BBC, 1972-74), he was an aggressive RAF officer who put aside his anger towards the Nazis to help organize an escape from a notorious German war prison, while in “Sapphire & Steel” (ITV, 1979-1982), he and Joanna Lumley played extraterrestrial operatives who investigated strange incidents involving the time-space continuum. In 1983, he reunited with Robert Vaughn for “The Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E.” (CBS), which saw Illya retired from espionage to design womenâ¿¿s clothing in New York. The escape of a top enemy spy brings both U.N.C.L.E. men back into action, albeit with other, younger agents. The TV-movie was intended as the pilot for a new version of the series, but the show was never greenlit.

After logging time on countless, unmemorable series like “Team Knight Rider” (syndicated, 1997-98) and “The Education of Max Bickford” (CBS, 2001-02), McCallum found his next hit with “NCIS,” a police procedural drama about Navy investigators. McCallum played Chief Medical Examiner Donald “Ducky” Mallard, an eccentric but highly efficient investigator with a knack for psychological profiling. A close confidante to Mark Harmon’s Jethro Gibbs, he served as father confessor and paternal figure for the show’s offbeat cast of characters. The show’s slow-building popularity brought McCallum back to a television audience made up in part of the children of viewers who sent him fan letters back in the “U.N.C.L.E.” days, granting him a rare burst of second stardom

British film institute obituary in 2023

At one point in the 1960s, David McCallum, who has died at the age of 90, was the hottest British actor in Hollywood. Nicknamed ‘The Blond Beatle’, he had become a pop culture phenomenon for playing a Russian spy on an American TV show at the height of the Cold War. According to MGM, McCallum received more mail from female fans than any other actor in the studio’s history, including Clark Gable and Elvis Presley. Not bad for someone who only had two lines in the pilot.

Born in Glasgow on 19 September 1933, McCallum was the son of classical musicians who settled in Hampstead when his father became leader of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1936. He became so proficient on the oboe that he took classes at the Royal Academy of Music. However, the thrill of being applauded as Prince Arthur in an amateur production of King John convinced the eight year-old that his future lay in acting.

In 1946, McCallum secured his Equity card after making his radio debut in Whom the Gods Love, Die Young. Several juvenile roles followed at the BBC before McCallum became an assistant stage manager at Glyndebourne on leaving school. Following National Service with the Royal West African Frontier Force, he trained at RADA from 1949 to 1951, where Joan Collins was a classmate.

Repertory stints in Frinton-on-Sea and Oxford ensued before McCallum made his television bow in The Rose and the Ring (1953). More in hope than expectation, he sent photographs to the Rank Organisation and was cast by debuting director Clive Donner as a leather-jacketed James Dean wannabe in the crime drama The Secret Place (1957). Next, he hobbled on crutches as Stanley Baker’s younger brother in the gritty realist thriller Hell Drivers, and married co-star Jill Ireland shortly after the shoot. They were paired as lovers down under in Robbery Under Arms (both 1957) before headlining the seedy crime saga Jungle Street (1960) as a mugger and a stripper.

The Long and the Short and the Tall (1961)

Reuniting with Baker, McCallum impressed as another delinquent in Basil Dearden’s problem picture Violent Playground (1958). His Scouse accent was patchy, although as a gang leader he oozed surly charisma. But two parts as radio operators, in the Titanic drama A Night to Remember (1958) and war story The Long and the Short and the Tall (1961), signalled a shift towards more mature roles, and McCallum left to try his luck in Hollywood.

Although he had been cast as Judas Iscariot in the Biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), delays meant that McCallum was already established by the time it was released. Having suffered from an Oedipus complex in John Huston’s Freud and shown sailor Terence Stamp kindness as a gunnery officer in Peter Ustinov’s Billy Budd (both 1962), McCallum guaranteed his place in cult movie folklore as Eric Ashley-Pitt, the POW who earns the nickname ‘Dispersal’ for devising an ingenious way of shifting tunnel soil in The Great Escape (1963).

Yet it was television that proved McCallum’s métier. He gave notice as a time-tweaking inventor and a mutating Welsh miner in two episodes of the sci-fi series The Outer Limits (1963/64). And it was as Illya Kuryakin in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964 to 1968) that he became a superstar. Having only been a minor character in the feature-length 1963 pilot Solo, the Russian with a blonde mop and a penchant for black turtlenecks became equal partners with Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn), as the agents of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement sought to confound the nefarious schemes of the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity, or THRUSH.

Although Kuryakin was intense, introverted and intellectual, McCallum played him with such cool charm and enigmatic wit over 105 episodes that he earned a Golden Globe and two Emmy nominations. He and Vaughn also made eight spin-off features, as well as The Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E.: The Fifteen Years Later Affair (1983), a teleplay that started with Kuryakin as a fashion designer.

A comeback series didn’t materialise, but McCallum had exploited his peak fame to record four instrumental albums with producer David Axelrod, one of which contained ‘The Edge’, which was sampled by Dr Dre and resurfaced in Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver (2017). His own excursions as an big-screen action man, Sol Madrid (1968) and Mosquito Squadron (1969), underwhelmed, however, and McCallum retreated back into television.

Following the neglected TV horror movies Hauser’s Memory (1970) and She Waits (1972), McCallum returned to Blighty to play a short-fused RAF officer in Colditz (1972 to 74), Jacobite warrior Alan Breck Stewart in an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1978), and an impassive extra-dimensional detective alongside Joanna Lumley in Sapphire & Steel (1979 to 1982). He would later team effectively with Diana Rigg in the miniseries Mother Love (1989) and steal scenes as a gambler in Howard’s Way follow-up show Trainer (1991 to 1992), during a period in which he trod the US guest star circuit following the short-lived sci-fi series The Invisible Man (1975 to 1976).

However, a cameo in the legal series JAG (2003) turned into a 20-year gig, as McCallum reached a new audience as medical examiner Dr Donald Mallard in spin-off show NCIS (2003-). Sporting a bow-tie and dispensing offbeat avuncular wisdom over 457 episodes, ‘Ducky’ so caught McCallum’s imagination that he studied pathology and attended so many autopsies in order to appear credible in the role that he became something of a forensics expert.

David McCallum, 19 September 1933 to 25 September 2023

Victoria Shaw

Victoria Shaw was a beautiful actress who graced U.S. films between the mid 1950’s and the mid 1960’s. She was born in 1935 in Sydney, Australia. She was starting a career as a model when Bob Hope suggested that she travel to Hollywood and attempt a movie career. Her first film was the big box office success “The Eddy DuchinStory” with Tyrone Power and Kim Novak. I think she stole the film from the nominal stars. She went on to make “Edge of Eternity”, “Because Their Young” and “I Aim at the Stars” and the cult “The Crimson Kimono” amongst others. She seemed to put her career on hold after her marriage to actor Roger Moore. After their divorce she returned to film making in “Alverez Kelly” with Richard Widmark and William Holden. She guest starred in many television series. She returned to live in Sydney where she died in 1988 at the age of 53. Her films are in definite need for reappraisal. “Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen” page on Victoria Shaw

TROY DONAHUE OBITUARY IN “THE GUARDIAN” IN 2001.

‘If Troy Donahue could become a movie star, then I could become a movie star,” sings a character in the Broadway musical, A Chorus Line. It is an affectionate put-down of the hunky, blond, blue-eyed teen idol, wildly popular during the era of generation-gap movies in the late 1950s and early 60s.

Donahue, who has died of a heart attack aged 65, shot to star status in A Summer Place (1959), in which he and Sandra Dee made love to the strains of the ubiquitous title-song on a Maine beach. For a short time, the film made him the top fan-mail recipient – mostly from adolescent girls – at Warner Bros studios. “They’d ask me to light a cigarette, and when I did, they screamed and fell down,” he recalled.

However, by the mid-1960s, he was all washed up, so that when producer Robert Evans was offered Marlon Brando for The Godfather (1972), he declared, “Sonny Tufts, Troy Donahue, Tab Hunter, Fabian – put them all together, Brando is colder.”

Troy Donahue was born in New York as Merle Johnson Jr. His father was head of the motion picture division of General Motors; his mother was an aspiring actress. He studied journalism at Columbia University, but acting took up most of his time. After appearing in local rep, his beachboy good looks got him a Hollywood contract and a new name, coined by Henry Willson, the agent who came up with the pseudonyms “Rock Hudson” and “Tab Hunter”.

“It was part of me 10 minutes after I got the name,” Donahue said years later. “It feels so natural. I jump when people call me by my old name. Even my mother and sister call me Troy now.” As an in-joke, he played a character called Merle Johnson in The Godfather Part II (1974).

As part of Universal’s stable of young talent, Donahue made his screen debut in Man Afraid (1957), as a teenage burglar who gets killed in the first few minutes of the movie. The studio then put him into five pictures in 1958, among them This Happy Feeling, in which he spent most of his small part willing a wounded seagull to fly, and Monster On The Campus, which saw him as a student terrified by a giant fish and by a professor turned neanderthal. In Douglas Sirk’s magnificent melodrama, Imitation Of Life (1959), he had the brief but significant role as Susan Kohner’s boyfriend.

But it was Warner Bros who saw Troy Donahue’s potential and cast him in four soap operas directed by Delmer Daves, beginning with A Summer Place. He then got the title role in Parrish (1961), playing a young Connecticut tobacco grower having trouble with three seductive girls (and with his lines).

There followed Susan Slade (1961), in which he was a shy horse-doctor who married Connie Stevens, despite the fact that she was pregnant by another man; and Rome Adventure (1962), in which Suzanne Pleshette opts for the American art student Troy over the Latin charms of Rossano Brazzi.

Troy Donahue and Pleshette married in 1964, though the union only lasted a year. None the less, the couple co-starred in Raoul Walsh’s western, A Distant Trumpet (1964), with Troy as an expressionless lieutenant defending a fort

Previously, he had appeared in two television series, Surfside 6 and Hawaiian Eye. His fleeting time in the limelight came to an end with My Blood Runs Cold (1965), in which he risked his good-guy image as an insane killer who believes he has been reincarnated and is in love with a girl from a past life. It ended his Warner Bros contract.

After a few years away from the screen, Donahue returned, with his clean-cut looks dirtied up, as a Charles Manson-like figure in Sweet Saviour (1971), a nasty exploitation movie. A scene of him knifing people during an orgy was an indication of how much things had changed in the film business.

After his brief moment as a weak Wasp intruder into the Mafia family of The Godfather II, he became addicted to drugs and alcohol, even spending a summer homeless in Central Park, New York. However, by the early 1980s he had sobered up. “I realised that I was going to die,” he explained. “Worse than that, I [thought I] might live the way I was I was living for the rest of my life

In 1989, John Waters gave the almost unrecognisable Donahue a cameo role in Cry-Baby (1989), thus paying tribute to one of the great teen idols of the 1950s, the era in which the film was set. In his latter years, he eked out a living giving acting classes to passengers on the Holland-America cruise line.

Donahue, who was married four times, and was living with the Chinese-born mezzo-soprano Zheng Cao when he died, is survived by a daughter and son

GEORGE NADER OBITUARY IN “THE GUARDIAN” IN 2002

George Nader was born in 1921 in Pasadena, California. He began his film career in 1950 and was under contract to Universal Studios. Among his films are “Carnival Story”, “Away All Boats” and “The Unguarded Moment”. In the mid-1970’s he suffered an eye injury which resulted in him withdrawing from acting and he turned to writing. His 1978 novel”Chrome” is particularly good. He died in 2001. His nephew is the actor Michael Nader.

Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:

Standing 6ft 1in and weighing 180lbs, the he-man film star George Nader, who has died aged 80, was a constant subject of beefcake photos in the 1950s, and frequently exposed his chest in the movies. He stayed in shape most of his life by lifting weights and swimming, and Universal Studios kept trying to bolster his masculine image by setting him up on dates with starlets

In the moral climate of the 1950s, gay stars like Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter and Anthony Perkins were terrified of being exposed, so they all had “beards”, women who provided them with an emblem of spurious virility. But Nader refused to play the game and, although he was not exactly out of the closet, he never married, was seldom seen alone dating a woman, and lived with his longtime companion Mark Miller, who survives him. The couple, who were close friends of Rock Hudson – and beneficiaries of his estate – would often visit restaurants with him.

Many years later, in 1978, Nader had no fears about publishing a homoerotic sci-fi novel called Chrome. The book, now in its sixth printing, tells of a young space cadet who falls in love with a beautiful male robot. In a world where “to love a robot is death”, the earth authorities tear the lovers apart, exiling one to space, the other to earth. Obviously a metaphor about the place of gay men in society, the story is well-written and holds together on its own merits.h

While writing the book, Nader must have found it difficult to forget his first starring role, in Robot Monster (1953), which has, at least, gained a camp reputation as one of the worst films ever made. In it, the poker-faced Nader is one of the last “hu-mans” in existence, battling against the dreaded Ro-man, a gorilla in a space helmet. Shot in four days in Hollywood, in 3-D and stereophonic sound for a paltry $16,000, it raked in more than $1m on its initial run, and got its leading man recognised

Nader, who had gained a BA in theatre arts, and studied acting at the Pasadena playhouse in his home town, had already taken small roles in half a dozen films, mostly B-features. However, a Universal contract in 1954 got him leads in bigger pictures, such as Six Bridges To Cross (1955), playing a kindly cop who takes an interest in criminal Tony Curtis; Lady Godiva (1955), as a Saxon nobleman married to Maureen O’Hara; and the second-rate musical, The Second Greatest Sex (1956), in which he is at the mercy of his bride Jeanne Crain, who organises a sex strike in a small western town to cure the menfolk of their violent tendencies.

Nader, who had won a 1955 Golden Globe award for most promising newcomer, went on to co-star as a navy lieutenant of tough integrity standing up to the unyielding captain Jeff Chandler in Away All Boats (1956), and was a reassuring masculine presence in The Unguarded Moment (1956), as a policeman helping a teacher (a non-swimming Esther Williams) cope with a psychopathic student.

In general, however, Universal, who considered Nader a sub-Rock Hudson, cast him in second features. Thus, after The Female Animal (1958), in which an ageing star (Hedy Lamarr, in her last film role) and her alcoholic daughter (a non-singing Jane Powell) fight over Nader as a movie bit-player, he decided to go freelance.

The move did not exactly enhance his reputation, as the films he appeared in were international hodgepodges, such as The Secret Mark Of D’Artagnan (1962), in which dashing Musketeer Nader attempts to stop an assassination attempt on Louis XIII; or low budget nonsense like The Human Duplicators (1965) and Beyond Atlantis (1973). Nevertheless, Nader achieved widespread fame in Germany, where he played tough FBI agent Jerry Cotton in eight highly successful but rubbishy crime thrillers of the 1960s.

He took to writing sci-fi novels in the mid-1970s, after sustaining an eye injury in a serious car accident. For years, he lived quietly with his partner in Palm Springs, making rare public appearances. Last year, he entered hospital with a life-threatening fever of unknown origin, but, according to his doctor, was “able to put up such a strong fight because of his lifelong devotion to healthy living and fitness”.

· George Nader, actor, born October 19 1921; died February 4 2002

Miiko Taka

Miiko Taka (高美以子, Taka Miiko) (born Miiko Shikata July 24, 1925 – January 2023) was an American actress. She is best known for co-starring with Marlon Brandoas Hana-ogi in the 1957 movie Sayonara. She also worked with James Garner, Bob Hope, Cary Grant, and Toshirō Mifune (whom she also worked alongside of in the 1980 television miniseries, Shõgun).

Taka was born in Seattle, Washington. She grew up in Los Angeles, California. Taka married Japanese-American actor Dale Ishimoto in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1944, and they had one son, Greg Shikata, who works in the film industry, and one daughter. They divorced in 1958. Taka’s death, at the age of 97, was announced by her grandson on January 4, 2023.

The guardian obituary in 2009

On the day of her 25th birthday, 2 March 1944, a fresh-faced, hitherto unknown performer stepped on to the stage of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, in Los Angeles, to receive her best actress Oscar for her performance in the title role of The Song of Bernadette. It was officially the debut of Jennifer Jones, who has died aged 90. She had appeared four years earlier under her real name of Phyllis Isley, but only in a Dick Tracy serial and a B-western. (Actually, she had been born Phylis, but had added an “l”.)

Ingrid Bergman, nominated for her performance in For Whom the Bell Tolls, said of The Song of Bernadette: “I cried all the way through, because Jennifer was so moving and because I realised I had lost the award.” Jones, who had been discovered by the producer David O Selznick four years previously, had been given no publicity build-up, had been prevented from granting interviews and also, because of the nature of the role, kept out of the gossip columns. As a result, her presence on screen as the French girl who, in 1858, saw a vision of the Virgin Mary and discovered a healing spring at Lourdes, came as a refreshing surprise. “While she received extensive training, I would not let her come to Hollywood until she was ready,” explained Selznick. “I refused to launch her until exactly the right role came along

After a six-month search, 20th Century Fox had narrowed the list of young women to play Bernadette down to six. They were each asked by the director Henry King to imagine that the stick he was holding was a vision. “Only Jennifer saw a vision,” King later remarked. Wearing a simple peasant’s dress and a minimum of makeup, she gave a pleasantly natural performance, credibly maturing from the age of 14 to the nun and eventual saint. It might have helped that the Oklahoma-born Jones had attended a Catholic school as a child. Her father owned a few theatres and ran a vaudeville tent show, with which the young Phylis toured and performed occasionally. While attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, she met another aspiring actor, Robert Walker. They married in 1939 and headed for Hollywood.

In 1941, when she was auditioning at Fox for the title role in Claudia (given to Dorothy McGuire), Selznick saw her, put her under contract, changed her name and groomed her rigorously for stardom. From then on, much of Selznick’s activity as a producer was devoted to providing her with suitable roles.

After The Song of Bernadette, he cast her opposite her husband as the girl in love with a young soldier in Since You Went Away (1944), the weepiest, longest and biggest hit about the home front during the second world war. Her role grew with each rewrite of the script by Selznick, and he was still playing the same game almost 20 years later on their last film together, Tender Is the Night. According to King: “David lost all judgment. He always thought that the more there was of Jennifer, the better the film would be

By the time Since You Went Away, for which she was Oscar-nominated, was released, Jones had broken up with Walker and embarked on a relationship with the married Selznick. Walker, a gifted actor, died prematurely in 1951, a victim of depression, drink and sedatives. She had two sons by Walker, both of whom became actors. Meanwhile, Jones was suitably fey as an amnesiac in Love Letters (1945), which earned her another Oscar nomination, and otherworldly in Portrait of Jennie (1949), two poetic dramas directed by William Dieterle, both co-starring Joseph Cotten.

Jones, the embodiment of feminine innocence, seemed an unlikely candidate for eroticising. But if she had not played a number of dark, tempestuous femmes fatales – worlds apart from Bernadette – her career would have been much less interesting. The first was a wild and sexy mixed-race girl, Pearl Chavez, in King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1947), a demented, delirious western, the peak of Hollywood high romanticism. The operatic climax, when Jones and Gregory Peck die in a final embrace after shooting each other, earned the film the nickname of Lust in the Dust. Sex in the Swamps would be an apt description of Ruby Gentry (1952), in which Vidor was again able to bring out the passion in Jones. Thwarted by the man she loves (Charlton Heston), she finally watches him die face downwards in the mud.

Previously, she had portrayed Madame Bovary (1949) in Vincente Minnelli’s glossy version of the Flaubert novel. Considering that Selznick was breathing down Minnelli’s neck throughout the shoot, at one stage accusing the director of sabotaging the “unique loveliness” of the star, Jones emerged with beauty, poise and vivacity, bringing, as one critic remarked, “an almost manic voluptuousness to the part”

However, although Jones had a certain childlike charm as an untamed half-Gypsy Shropshire lass in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Gone to Earth (1950), she lacked the passion she displayed in the Vidor movies. Now her husband, Selznick was as much of a nuisance as ever, cutting 29 minutes from the film, getting directors (including Vidor) to reshoot nearly a third of it in Hollywood, and changing its title to The Wild Heart for the US release. At this stage, Jones, whose career was entirely controlled by Selznick, had fits of depression and attempted suicide with sleeping pills several times. (Her last attempt was in 1967, after Selznick’s death.)

Nevertheless, she was able to radiate in William Wyler’s Carrie (1952), opposite Laurence Olivier, and especially in Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955) as the Eurasian doctor in love with an American correspondent, William Holden, in a splendid CinemaScope Hong Kong. She was a touching Elizabeth Barrett in the otherwise clunking The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1957), but seemed to have more fun than ever as a blonde mythomaniac in John Huston’s Beat the Devil (1953). Her only other comedy was Ernst Lubitsch’s Cluny Brown (1946), in which she was charming as a cockney maid, despite the wobbly accent

There were a few miscalculations: Vittorio De Sica’s gloomy Indiscretion of an American Wife (1954), and she was allowed to overact as the doomed nurse Catherine Barkley in the overblown and dull third version of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1957). It was Selznick’s last production, but it did not stop him trying to ruin another modern American classic, Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1962), in which the 43-year-old Jones attempted to play the young neurotic playgirl Nicole Diver.

Selznick’s death in 1965 left Jones utterly bereft, in debt, and with a young daughter, Mary Jennifer, to bring up. (Mary Jennifer killed herself in 1976.) Jones made only a few films afterwards; these included Cult of the Damned (1969), in which she played a former blue-movie star, and she was among the many stars trapped in The Towering Inferno (1974). In 1971, she married the millionaire industrialist art collector Norton Simon, helping him with his business until his death. She then took over the presidency of her late husband’s Pasadena Art Museum. Jones had finally become her own person.

She is survived by her son, Robert Walker Jr.

• Jennifer Jones (Phylis Isley), actor, born 2 March 1919; died 17 December 2009

GUARDIAN ARTICLE IN 2009 BY DAVID THOMPSON:

Mrs Simon, Mrs Selznick, Mrs Walker, Phylis Isley, Jennifer Jones – all of those names were offered her, like landlines in the storm, and she gazed on all of them with insufficient belief or conviction. There was a time, in the 80s and the 90s, when I did everything I could to get Jennifer Jones to speak to me, or just to see me so that she might decide she could speak to me. And all the time I was asking her, or her lawyers, I had another Mrs Selznick crowing in my ear in her best Pierre Hotel witch act, “She doesn’t have anything to say. She won’t remember. She doesn’t care to remember.”

Well, she’s dead now, at 90. Gore Vidal told me maybe 10 years ago how he’d recently had dinner with Jennifer Jones and complimented her on … her looks? Her cooking? Her jokes? Never mind now. But she did tell him that she was actually three years older than her official age. So was she 93 or 90? What’s the difference if you hardly recognise anyone any longer and if you prefer not to talk to the biographer of the husband who named you Jennifer Jones, who got you your Oscar and turned your life into such a melodrama?

There was always argument as to whether Jennifer Jones knew what was happening to her, or if she just followed along in a daze, like an actor playing a part? No one thought she was strong enough to last. She worried, she agonised, she fluctuated all the time, frantically changing her dresses before she appeared at her own party, and attempting suicide several times in her Selznick years. There were those who said that David O had only taken up with her as a brief romance, but then he’d seen her fall for him and he heard her say she might kill herself if he dropped her. So in her DOS years she seemed helplessly driven on in his slipstream, trying to prove his point that she was a great actress and greater than Vivien Leigh, Joan Fontaine or Ingrid Bergman, the ones he’d given up on so that he could concentrate on making Jennifer Jones a legend.

Selznick had noticed her one day – the alert face in an open doorway – early in 1941. She was Phyllis Isley Walker then, married to the young actor Robert Walker and the mother of two boys by him. She had been brought into the Selznick office by Kay Brown, the aide who also found Gone With the Wind, Rebecca and Ingrid Bergman for him. And Selznick could not forget the pretty, anxious face. He hired her. He invented her new name. And he built her career, beginning with the lead in The Song of Bernadette for which she got the Oscar. There was an affair, not necessarily worse than his other affairs, or better. But his wife, Irene, the first Mrs Selznick and the witch at the Pierre, told him to give up Jennifer or his gambling. One or the other.

And he couldn’t make up his mind. So Irene walked out and went to New York to produce A Streetcar Named Desire on the stage and Selznick had four years deciding whether to marry Jennifer. But her marriage to Robert Walker was over as she made Since You Went Away, Love Letters, Duel in the Sun and Portrait of Jennie. That’s when her suicide attempts began. That’s when she posed for endless stills sessions to establish her great beauty – and in David’s eyes it was never quite there.

They were not good for each other. David controlled Jennifer’s career – he kept her out of Laura and put her in A Farewell to Arms and Tender Is the Night. She was a movie star and she had her moments. Away from David’s direct control, she was very touching in Wyler’s Carrie (with Laurence Olivier) and she had a big hit in Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (with William Holden).

Jennifer and David had a daughter, Mary Jennifer. As his career dwindled away, he played dress-up games with her while Jennifer travelled and had affairs, with doctors and Indian gurus. She was not close to her daughter. Then David died in 1965 (he was only 63), and 11 years later Mary Jennifer killed herself – it was a Mother’s Day gift. By then Jennifer had married Norton Simon, the millionaire and art collector, a very powerful man. Until he was stricken with illness, and so in time she buried him, too, and took over some of the authority at his museum in Pasadena. She was very rich but she never talked publicly and never gave any hint of disproving Irene’s admittedly prejudiced barking about not caring to remember. Robert Walker had died badly, too, in 1951, drunk and disturbed, despite his late success as Bruno Anthony in Strangers On a Train. It was widely believed that he had never recovered from being dropped by Jennifer.

I wanted to ask her unaskable questions – such as when David first seduced her, and what he promised her. But she declined to sit through the pain of having to say, “I really don’t remember”, though her lawyer warned me that she would be waiting for my book when it came, ready to sue. She never did sue, and never said a word about the book. I doubt she read it, or had it read to her. I think she had come to the conclusion that history was like one of her poorer movies: nobody assumed it was meant to be believed.

Last week was the 70th anniversary of the opening of Gone With the Wind on 15 December 1939, in Atlanta. David Selznick’s great film played last week on TCM and it looked pretty good still. Its bounty does not diminish, and that music and that colour now remind us all of our past. Irene died in 1990, in her own exact and decisive way: she made a few advisory calls to friends (“Don’t let’s discuss it”) and then she was gone. Suicide? There needs to be another word for the firmness of her act and the way in which she believed she remembered everything still as it had happened.

Anyway, for those years I used to dream sometimes of being shown in to see Jennifer Jones in some immense Pasadena salon, asking her timid, polite questions, working my way up to the big ones. And getting tired of the sweet, blank look on her face. As Irene had warned me, it was a time when – like it or not – I had had to be a member of the complicated Selznick family. I liked it and I remember the feeling that lingered of Los Angeles being still run by a few dysfunctional families

JOHN DEREK OBITUARY IN “THE INDEPENDENT” IN 1998.

John Derek was an American actor who began his career as a ‘pretty boy’ but quickly developed into a good solid actor with a legacy of fine performances. He was born in 1926 in Hollywood. He had his first major role in “Knock on Any Door” with Humphrey Bpgart in 1949. The same year he played Broderick Crawford’s wayward son in “All the King’s Men”. His other notable films include “The Hoodlum Saint”, “The Ten Commandments” and “Exodus”. Married four times, three of his wives were famous actresses., Ursula Andress, Linda Evans and Bo Derek. John Derek died in 1998.

Tom Vallance’s obituary on John Derek in “The Independent”:WITH HIS dark, wavy hair and clean-cut handsomeness, John Derek became a favourite film star of teenagers in the early Fifties, but never fulfilled the promise as an actor that his early performances in such films as Knock on Any Door and All the King’s Men suggested. He eventually concentrated on photography and film production, and became best known as the husband and Svengali-like manager of Bo Derek.26, he had a film-oriented background, his father being the silent film-maker Lawrence Harris and his mother a minor film actress, Dolores Johnson. The producer David Selznick put him under contract as a teenager, and gave him small roles (billed as Derek Harris) in the Selznick productions Since You Went Away (1944, as a boyfriend of Shirley Temple) and I’ll Be Seeing You (1945, as a sailor

After war service, he was cast in the important role of a young man prompted by social conditions to turn to a life of violent crime in Nicholas Ray’s Knock on Any Door (1949). Produced by Humphrey Bogart’s Santana company, it starred Bogart as a lawyer who defends a boy on a murder charge, and though unsuccessful (Derek is sentenced to death), makes a strong plea for the erosion of the social injustices which cause such delinquency.

As a hardened youth, whose dictum is to “live fast, die young and make a good-looking corpse”, Derek made a favourable impression and was immediately cast in Robert Rossen’s All The King’s Men (1949) as the disillusioned adopted son of an initially honest politician corrupted by power. Derek’s sincere performance in the Oscar-winning film was critically praised, but Santana, having brought Dorothy Hughes’ book In A Lonely Place as a vehicle for Derek, instead converted the hero to an older man so that Bogart could do it.

Had Derek starred in this Nicholas Ray masterpiece his career might have progressed differently. Instead, capitalising on his popularity with the young, Columbia, who had acquired his contract, starred him in several popular but routine swashbucklers including Rogues of Sherwood Forest (1950, as the son of Robin Hood), Mask of the Avenger (1950), Prince of Pirates (1952) and The Adventures of Hajji Baba (1954).

David Miller’s Saturday’s Hero (1951) was a good expose of colleagues who promote sport over study, with Derek in fine form as a student who discovers his esteem vanishes when an injury curtails his prowess on the football field. Nicholas Ray used him again to star with James Cagney in the western Run For Cover (1955), but the director Fred Zinnemann refused to consider the studio’s request that he cast Derek in the prime role of Prewett in From Here To Eternity (1954), stating that either Montgomery Clift played it or he would not direct.

Cecil B. De Mille cast him in the important role of Joshua in The Ten Commandments (1956) when Cornel Wilde turned the part down, and he had a good role in Otto Preminger’s epic of the founding of Palestine, Exodus (1960), but most of his other roles were in minor films and, after spending a season in the television series Frontier Circus (1961), he decided to develop his increasing interest in still photography and film production.

The actress Ursula Andress had become his second wife (his first was the starlet Patti Behrs), and in 1964 he co-produced Nightmare in the Sun, an exploitation movie starring Andress and directed by the former actor Marc Lawrence who made the film in 15 days. “Derek promised to allow his wife Ursula to do a nude scene with Aldo Ray,” Lawrence later wrote, “but the day before shooting he changed his mind. Years later he did a nude layout of Ursula for Playboy and got $15,000 for his art.”

The following year Derek himself directed Andress in Once Before I Die, a war story about a bunch of soldiers (including Derek) and a lone woman trying to survive in the Philippines – slow-moving and self-consciously photographed, it was given a limited release

Derek’s marriage to Andress ended when she embarked on an affair with the French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, and he next married the actress Linda Evans, who starred in another little-seen movie directed and photographed by Derek, Childish Things (1969).

In 1972, Derek fell in love with Mary Cathleen Collins, a 16-year-old Californian (younger than his son and daughter) who was acting in a film he was directing in Greece, Fantasies. To avoid legal complications, he took her to Germany and as soon as she turned 18 he divorced Evans to marry her, also taking charge of her career.

As Bo Derek, she became famous starring with Julie Andrews and Dudley Moore in Blake Edwards’s 10 (Bo epitomising in the film the ultimate score that a woman could achieve for desirability), starting a new fashion craze with her cornrow hairstyle. The guidance she accepted afterwards from her husband is generally considered to have harmed her career.

He directed and photographed her in Tarzan, The Ape Man (1981), one of the most ridiculed of films, and followed this with two which are often described as little more then soft-core home movies, Bolero (1984) and Ghosts Can’t Do It (1990). Their sex scenes frequently provoked fits of laughter from audiences.

The marriage survived the derision that greeted their films, despite some alleged discord between after Derek told chat-show hostess Barbara Walters on television, when quizzed about his glamorous wives, that he liked at a certain point to trade his companions for newer models. Very wealthy, the couple lived on a ranch and were considered reclusive. “I have very few friends,” said Derek some years ago, “and almost no acquaintances”.

Derek Harris (John Derek), actor and film director: born Hollywood, California 12 August 1926; married first Patti Behrs (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved), second Ursula Andress (marriage dissolved), third Linda Evans (marriage dissolved), fourth Mary Cathleen Collins; died Santa Maria, California 22 May 1998.

SUZY PARKER OBITUARY IN “THE DAILY TELEGRAPH” IN 2003.

Suzy Parker who died on Saturday aged 69, was once said to be the highest-paid model in the world, earning more than £30,000 a year in the 1950s; she later embarked on a brief career as an actress in Hollywood.

Blessed with excellent bone structure, copper-coloured hair and seaweed-green eyes, Suzy Parker enchanted the great names of fashion in the 1950s. Christian Dior called her the most beautiful model in the world; she became the “signature” face for Coco Chanel and was photographed by Richard Avedon and Milton H Greene.

She was born Cecilia Anne Renee Parker on October 28 1933. Her elder sister was the model Dorian Leigh, who had been a magazine “cover girl” since the 1940s; and it was she who introduced the future Suzy Parker to modelling when she was a girl of only 14, taking her to see the modelling agent Eileen Ford. The agent’s initial impression was not favourable: she insisted that the teenager was, at 5 ft 9 ins, too tall to be a successful model

But Diana Vreeland, the fashion editor at Harpers Bazaar for 25 years and editor-in-chief of Vogue, disagreed; the influential arbiter of style and elegance immediately offered to use the 14 year old in fashion shoots. Suzy Parker soon became one of the most recognisable faces of the 1950s, and a forerunner of today’s “supermodels”.

It was perhaps inevitable that she should turn to Hollywood, and in 1957 Suzy Parker made her film debut in the musical Funny Face, which starred Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn – Hepburn was to become a good friend. Suzy Parker danced in a number called Think Pink, a send-up of editors such as Diana Vreeland

Further films followed. Also in 1957, Suzy Parker appeared opposite Cary Grant in Kiss Them for Me; the next year she was seen in Ten North Frederick, starring Gary Cooper. She appeared in The Best of Everything (1959); Circle of Deception (1961); The Interns (1962); andChamber of Horrors (1966).

There were also roles on the television screen, including parts in Tarzanand The Twilight Zone – in one episode of The Twilight Zone in 1963, entitled “Number Twelve Looks Just Like You”, she played six different characters.

In the film Circle of Deception, a spy thriller, she found herself playing opposite Bradford Dillman. They fell in love, and in 1963 they were married on board an ocean liner by the ship’s master. Five years later, she and Dillman abandoned the glamour of Hollywood for a more down-to-earth existence at Montecito, California. For the remainder of her life, the woman who had been one of the world’s most famous models shunned the limelight, preferring to be known as Suzy Parker Dillman.

Suzy Parker’s marital status, before her union with Dillman, had been somewhat mysterious. In 1958 she had broken both her arms, and her father had been killed, when the car in which they were travelling collided with a goods train at Saint Augustine, Florida

then emerged that Suzy Parker had been secretly married, since 1955, to a French journalist and novelist called Pierre La Salle. It did not last, however, Suzy Parker telling one interviewer: “Being married to a Frenchman is interesting – you hardly ever see your husband.” They divorced in 1961.

It also emerged that, at 17, Suzy Parker had eloped from high school to marry a childhood sweetheart, Charles Staton, apparently to escape going to college.

She is survived by Bradford Dillman, four children and two stepchildren

Tribute to Suzy Parker by Mike McCrann in “LA Frontiers”:
The days of the “supermodel” have pretty much disappeared. Today we have celebrities hawking everything from watches to perfumes. The models used in today’s high-fashion ads are mostly anonymous girls with little or no personality.

In the old days, there were legendary models like Jean Shrimpton, Twiggy, Cheryl Tiegs, etc. But there was one beauty who transcended all the rest. Her name was Suzy Parker, and she ruled the ’50s as the most gorgeous icon of them all. Suzy Parker also became a movie star—very briefly—before retiring to Santa Barbara with her last husband, actor Bradford Dillman.

Suzy Parker’s older sister was another famous model, Dorian Leigh. Leigh was pretty famous too, but I must say I can’t figure out why, looking at her photos. But kid sister Suzy (born Cecilia Ann Parker in 1932) came to New York to visit Dorian, and this led to the Ford Modeling Agency signing the young beauty to a contract.

Suddenly the 5’10” carrot red head was as famous as any beauty of her day. She was The Revlon Girl. Her face was on every magazine in the world. Suzy became legendary photographer Richard Avedon’s muse. (Years later, Parker said “The only joy I ever got out of modeling was working with Dick Avedon.”) Suzy Parker became the highest paid model in the world, earning over $100,000 a year—a fortune in those days.

Suzy Parker went to Hollywood hoping to become a movie star. Her first film was Kiss Them For Me with Cary Grant and the buxom Jayne Manfield. The movie was pretty bad, and Suzy was upstaged by Jayne’s two assets. A good supporting role followed in Ten North Frederick, where she played the young girl who falls in love with married man Gary Cooper. Parker was lovely in this part, and the last scene in the movie is a great wedding scene when Cooper’s daughter happily realizes that Suzy is the girl that had brought her father the only happiness at the end of his life.

Finally, in 1959, Suzy Parker got the one great role of her career in the fabulous melodrama The Best of Everything. This study of career girls in New York (from the novel by Rona Jaffee) is a cult classic. With Hope Lange, Diane Baker and Joan Crawford, The Best of Everything gives the most glamourous role to Parker. She plays gorgeous Gregg Adams, an aspiring actress who runs around New York in sexy gowns and dark glasses. Greg is wildly in love with Louis Jordan, and most of her scenes are with him and Joan Crawford. When Jordan dumps Greg, she goes off the deep end, spying on him, going through his trash and finally tumbling from his fire escape. Suzy Parker was so gorgeous that she stole the film from her more experienced co-stars.

Superstardom was predicted for Suzy Parker, but life has a funny way of not following the script. After two divorces, plus the death of her father in a car accident (with Suzy also injured), Suzy Parker had enough of fame and empty adulation. She had met actor Bradford Dillman (Compulsion, The Way We Were) while co-starring in 1960’s Circle of Deception. Parker married Dillman and retired. She had four children (three with Dillman) and apparently was quite happy just being a mother. Bad health plagued the former super model, and she died in 2003 at age 70.

Most of the supermodels of the ’50s and ’60s are names attached to bygone eras—faded magazine covers and advertisements. But Suzy Parker’s glorious beauty and talent are permanently on display in the few films she made. If you want to see gorgeous Suzy at the peak of her radiance, rent or buy The Best of Everything. The film is a campy time capsule of its era, but Suzy Parker is the real deal. You cannot take your eyes off her when she is on screen. Model or actress, Suzy Parker was a goddess

NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARY IN 2003.

Suzy Parker, the willowy, red-headed beauty whose elegant poses on scores of magazine covers defined glamour in the 1950’s and paved the way for the supermodels to follow, died on Saturday at her home in Montecito, Calif. She was 69.

Her husband, the actor Bradford Dillman, said she had suffered from a number of serious ailments over the last six years.

In the period just after World War II, models were becoming celebrities. Fashion’s influence was inexorably expanding from high society to society at large, and Suzy Parker, along with other models like Dovima and Lisa Fonssagrives, signified a postwar world of stylish promise for all. When Miss Parker posed in one of fashion’s first bikini shots, America noticed.

Miss Parker was the first model to make more than $100 an hour and $100,000 a year, said Eileen Ford, the doyenne of modeling agents. She also worked as a professional photographer and editor, and she appeared in lead roles in movies with Cary Grant and Gary Cooper.

Ms. Ford said she was simply staggered when the famed model Dorian Leigh, Miss Parker’s oldest sister, introduced her to Suzy, then 15.

”She was the most beautiful creature you can imagine,” Ms. Ford said. ”She was everybody’s everything.”

Miss Parker’s trademark in photographs and later on the movie screen was icy sophistication, often likened to that of Grace Kelly, but in person she exuded a girl-next-door prettiness and a sort of wacky loquaciousness. Audrey Hepburn’s role in ”Funny Face,” as a fast-talking beatnik who somewhat unwillingly becomes a world-famous model, was inspired by her, and she made a cameo appearance in the film, her first movie role.

Miss Parker adored slouch hats of the sort favored by Garbo and collected Coco Chanel’s classic designs for herself. Richard Avedon, the photographer, called her ”my most challenging and complicated of muses.”

Cecilia Ann Renee Parker was born in San Antonio on Oct. 28, 1933. While still in high school in Jacksonville, Fla., she modeled in the summers for Ford Models, and after graduation went to work full time for the agency. In a silent profession Miss Parker was outspoken.

”Suzy Parker didn’t stop talking when I first tried to take her picture,” Horst, the photographer, said. ”I said, ‘You keep talking,’ and I left. When she got into the movies, I joked that maybe she would do for the movies what she would never do for me — hold still.”

She publicly condemned drinking and smoking and said marriage killed romance. The New York Daily News reported her lecturing a French economist about the French economy. She said she talked too much for most men.

Her often-quoted remark that she could love a man more when she was not married to him exploded in headlines when it turned out she was secretly married.

That marriage, to Pierre de la Salle in 1958, was actually her second; she had been briefly married to a high school sweetheart. She and Mr. de la Salle, from whom she was later divorced, had a daughter, Georgia, of Paris, who survives her.

In 1963 she married Mr. Dillman, who survives her, along with their daughter, Dinah Kaufman of Irvine, Calif.; their sons Charles, of Los Angeles, and Christopher, of Encinitas, Calif.; and four grandchildren.

Her sisters Dorian Leigh of Paris and Florian Boice of Annapolis, Md., also survive her.

Miss Parker said she looked in the mirror each day and thanked God for her cheekbones. But she insisted that she modeled only for money and had other professional ambitions. In the mid-1950’s she temporarily abandoned being a cover girl for several years to be a photographer herself, apprenticing with Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris and working for the French edition of Vogue.

It was through Mr. Avedon that Miss Parker parlayed her modeling fame into a movie career. As visual consultant in the movie ”Funny Face,” Mr. Avedon selected her for a brief but conspicuous appearance. Written by Leonard Gershe and directed by Stanley Donen, the 1957 film depicted a high-fashion photographer not unlike Mr. Avedon, played by Fred Astaire. Miss Parker was the inspiration for Audrey Hepburn’s character in the film, a somewhat kooky intellectual and free spirit.

Hepburn, in turn, became such a cheerleader that Miss Parker called the actress her ”Hollywood press agent.”

Miss Parker was cast opposite Cary Grant in ”Kiss Them for Me” in 1957, getting bad reviews. She appeared with Gary Cooper the next year in ”Ten North Frederick.” This time, Bosley Crowther in The New York Times said she underplayed her part ”neatly.”

She appeared in 1959 in ”The Best of Everything,” based on Rona Jaffe’s novel. In 1961 she played opposite Mr. Dillman in ”A Circle of Deception.” They wed in 1963.

Miss Parker was in several more movies and became a sought-after television guest in the 1960’s. Her most famous television appearance was in a 1963 episode of ”Twilight Zone” in which she played six different parts.

She retired from acting in the mid-1960’s and moved with Mr. Dillman to the Santa Barbara area.

In his book ”Cover Girls and Supermodels, 1945-1965” (Marion Boyars, 1996), the French journalist Jean-Noël Liaut said Miss Parker had escaped the unhappy outcomes of other stellar models.

He wrote, ”She became a perfect housewife, even to the extent of baking her own bread

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

William Reynolds

David McCallum

DAVID MCCALLUM. TCM OVERVIEW.

British film institute obituary in 2023

Victoria Shaw

Troy Donahue

TROY DONAHUE OBITUARY IN “THE GUARDIAN” IN 2001.

George Nader

GEORGE NADER OBITUARY IN “THE GUARDIAN” IN 2002

Miiko Taka

Jennifer Jones

The guardian obituary in 2009

GUARDIAN ARTICLE IN 2009 BY DAVID THOMPSON:

John Derek

JOHN DEREK OBITUARY IN “THE INDEPENDENT” IN 1998.

Suzy Parker

SUZY PARKER OBITUARY IN “THE DAILY TELEGRAPH” IN 2003.

NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARY IN 2003.

ABOUT ME

CATEGORIES

RECENT POSTS