Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 100 of 120

Van Johnson

Van Johnson was born in 1916 in Newport, Rhode Island. He started acting on Broadway in 1935. He was Gene Kelly’s understudy in the Broadway musical “Pal Joey”. He was first noticed on film in 1942 in “Murder in the Big House” with Faye Emerson. He replaced Lew Ayres in the Dr Kildare series. He won a contract with MGM and made such movies as “The Human Comedy”, “A Guy Named Joe”, “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” and “Brigadoon”. In his later years he guest starred with June Allyson in Angela Lansbury’s “Murder She Wrote”. Van Johnson died in 2008 at the age of 92.

I”Guardian” obituary:

oyishly handsome leading man among the top 10 Hollywood stars of the 1940s

Brian Baxter

Recalling the life of Van Johnson, who has died aged 92, is not simply to remember a talented, once boyishly handsome film and stage star, but a golden era of Hollywood. A time when MGM could claim “more stars than there are in the heavens” and leading men fell into distinct types, of which Johnson’s freckle-faced boy-next-door was one. He also fell into another significant category, the MGM leading man, the guy who squired the gals. Leading ladies such as Elizabeth Taylor, June Allyson and Esther Williams were paired with him, as was Judy Garland and such male luminaries as Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable and Gene Kelly.

But that was then, and those heydays – in Johnson’s case from the early forties until the mid-fifties – are long gone. In the course of a dozen years he appeared in nearly 50 movies, out of the total of 80 that he notched up between 1942 and 1992. In addition to big screen roles, he starred in many television dramas and mini-series, and guested in such programmes as Batman and Murder, She Wrote. He often returned to the stage, where he began his career in New Faces of 1936, starring in such musicals as The Music Man (on tour and in London) and La Cage aux Folles.

Such a career would have seemed impossible to his resolutely non-showbusiness family. Charles Van Johnson was born in Newport, Rhode Island. His mother, an alcoholic, abandoned the family early on, and he was brought up by his austere Swedish-American father, also called Charles. Johnson’s stepson, Ned Wynn, wrote in his memoir, We Will Always Live in Beverly Hills, that when Johnson became a star he invited his father to Los Angeles and took him to the famous Chasen’s restaurant, only for Charles Johnson to refuse to eat anything but a tuna sandwich. “Van was devastated,” Wynn wrote. “He had wanted to show his father that now, after years of a grey, loveless, miserly life, he was a star, he could afford steak. And the old bastard had beaten him down one more time.”

Johnson moved to New York after finishing high school in 1935. The engaging young man with a bright smile and sandy hair took dancing and singing lessons and began work in the chorus. In 1939 he landed a small part in Pal Joey while understudying the star, Kelly. Just 15 years later, he shared top billing with Kelly in the film version of Brigadoon.

After such useful training, he headed west, making an uncredited debut in Too Many Girls (1940) and securing a contract with Warner Bros. When that lapsed, he was taken up by MGM and became a contract player, joining the illustrious group who made up the largest and most famous group of entertainers ever controlled by one organisation. In an interview in 1985, he recalled his years at MGM with fondness. “It was one big happy family and a little kingdom,” he said. “Everything was provided for us, from singing lessons to barbells. All we had to do was inhale, exhale and be charming. I used to dread leaving the studio to go out into the real world, because to me the studio was the real world.”

Johnson got a lucky break with Dr Gillespie’s New Assistant (1942) where he played the role vacated by Lew Ayres (whose objection to the war made him unemployable in Hollywood for many years). So popular was Johnson that by his third appearance as the assistant he had taken over as star. The following year, Johnson played a pilot guarded over by an angel (Tracy) in A Guy Named Joe, one of the 20 or so films that made him a bobby soxers’ delight. While filming it, however, he had a near-fatal car crash that made him unfit for military service. Helped by the comparative lack of competition – Robert Taylor, James Stewart and Gable had all joined the armed services – he soon became a leading man. In 1944, he received his first top billing in Two Girls and the Sailor. Two years later Johnson entered the list of Hollywood’s top 10 stars, fourth only to Greer Garson, Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman. He was among the all-star cast in the glossy Week-End at the Waldorf (1945), and the dry leading man in two Williams extravaganzas, The Thrill of Romance (1945) and Easy to Wed (1946). By the war’s end he was an established star.

In 1948 he displayed increasing versatility by starring in a sturdy war film, Command Decision, switching to a frothy romance, The Bride Goes Wild, opposite Allyson, and then joining his friend Tracy – and Katharine Hepburn – in Frank Capra’s political satire State of the Union. This sharp movie gave him one of his best parts, and he followed it in 1949 with the engaging In the Good Old Summertime, MGM’s musical reworking (for Garland) of the classic The Shop Around the Corner.

But he was soon back at war in the memorable Battleground (1949), and the early 1950s ushered in even more work – 16 movies between Grounds for Marriage (1951) and his final contract film for MGM, The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), with Taylor. In this busy period he made his last film with Williams, Easy to Love (1953), played a sympathetic priest in When in Rome (1952) and an army captain in Siege at Red River (1954). Also in 1954 came the prestigious but dull Brigadoon.

It looked for a while as though more characterful roles would beckon as he nudged 40. The best of these was in The Caine Mutiny (1954), playing Lieutenant Maryk, the officer who takes command when Captain Queeg (Humphrey Bogart) loses his marbles, only to find them again in the climactic court scene. His director, Edward Dmytryk, thought so highly of him that he (miscast) him in an adaptation of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (1955), playing the adulterous writer. Much criticism was levelled at the Americanisation of his character. Even so, he returned to Britain to play another writer in the thriller 23 Paces to Baker Street (1956). Here the writer, on the track of a murderer, was hampered by blindness, not guilt, and Johnson received better notices for this.

Sadly these meatier roles did not lead to a sustained change of direction. In 1957, he co-starred with a dog in the amiable Kelly and Me, and later that year took the title role in a television film The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Between then and the late 1960s he alternated between war movies (The Last Blitzkrieg and The Enemy General) and fun comedies (Wives and Lovers and the witty Divorce American Style), but never re-established his earlier fame.

Like other actors of his generation, Johnson found it easier to work in Europe and television, where his experience was more gratefully received than in Hollywood. In the late 1960s and 70s his work in Spain and Italy included Battle Squadron, The Price of Power and The Concorde Affair. These were squeezed between equally forgettable TV dramas such as Call Her Mom (as president) and mini-series such as Rich Man, Poor Man (1976).

I The 1980s and 90s were less busy. He was demoted to vice-president in The Kidnapping of the President (1990), a general in Delta Force Commando II (1990) and a captain in Taxi Killer (1988). There were further films in Italy and some TV work. Among all the dross was a role in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). Even this, playing a supporting role to the tedious antics of the stars, must have been more satisfying than the almost unseen Australian movie, Clowning Around (1992), where after taking fifth billing to a group of nonentities he quietly retired. According to the estimable film-writer Ephraim Katz he could, in his 80s, be found ensconced in a Manhattan penthouse, delighting in his cat Fred and his hobby of painting acrylics.

Though his screen image was generally lighthearted and he referred to himself as “Cheery Van”, Wynn remembered him as anything but. The deprivations of his childhood had made him moody and morose, his stepson wrote. “His tolerance of unpleasantness was minuscule. If there were the slightest hint of trouble with one of the children, or with the house, the car, the servants, the delivery of the newspaper, the lack of ice in the silver ice bucket, the colour of the candles on the dining-room table, Van immediately left the couch, the dinner table, the pool, the tennis court, the party, the restaurant, the vacation, and strode off to his bedroom.”

Johnson had married Ned’s mother, Eve Lynn Abbot, in 1947, only hours after she had divorced the actor Keenan Wynn, a friend of Johnson’s. They had one daughter, Schuyler, but divorced in 1968. Eve died in 2004.

• (Charles) Van Johnson, actor, born 25 August 1916; died 12 December 2008

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

In The Good Old Summertime, poster, US poster, Van Johnson, Judy Garland, 1949. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

George Segal

George Segal was born in 1934 in Great Neck, New York. He is a 1955 graduate of Columbia University. In 1961 he made his movie debut in “The Young Doctors”. Other films in which he had leading roles include “Ship of Fools”, “King Rat”, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and “Lost Command”. He gave a terrific performance in “No Way to Treat A Lady”. George Segal died in 2021 aged 87.

‘Guardian’ obituary in 2021

George Segal, who has died aged 87, was among the leading Hollywood stars from the mid-1960s until the mid-70s, and possessed the gift, as Jack Lemmon did, of making neurotic behaviour not only funny but sympathetic.

In 1965, as the eponymous King Rat in Bryan Forbes’s film set in a Japanese PoW camp, Segal was in his element as a smart-alec American among the stiff-upper-lip British, surviving by conning his fellow prisoners and camp officers. The following year, he was Oscar-nominated as best supporting actor for his role in Mike Nichols’s adaptation of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were magnificent as the tired middle-aged academic and his wife who vent their long-simmering frustrations on two hapless guests, a young lecturer in biology and an understandably nervous wife. Segal and Sandy Dennis in the latter roles were not overshadowed by the virtuoso seasoned performers.

In the same year, Segal was Biff Loman in a CBS television production of Death of a Salesman, opposite Lee J Cobb (the original Willy Loman), and starred in an intriguing espionage thriller about the activities of neo-Nazis in contemporary Germany, The Quiller Memorandum. It was intriguing partly because Segal’s nervy acting style clashed fruitfully with the dry, understated sarcasm of his co-star, Alec Guinness.

In 1968, he appeared as George to Nicol Williamson’s Lennie in a TV production of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and in Sidney Lumet’s Bye Bye Braverman, a New York comedy about a group of Jewish intellectuals who meet at the funeral of an old friend. As the latter proved, Segal’s forte was urbane neuroticism. This was seen to advantage in two films in which he played Jewish sons: No Way to Treat a Lady (1968), as a cop whose girlfriend (Lee Remick) meets disapproval from his mother (Eileen Heckart); and Where’s Poppa? (1970), in which Segal tries to give his mother (Ruth Gordon) a heart attack by dressing in a gorilla suit and jumping on to her bed. “You almost scared me to death,” she cries. “Almost is not good enough,” he replies.

In Loving (1970), Segal was amusing as a New York illustrator who finds that his family life, professional ambitions and extramarital involvements are settling into parallel ruts; and in The Owl and the Pussycat (also 1970), a pleasantly raunchy farce, Segal as a reserved wannabe writer was teamed successfully with Barbra Streisand as a garrulous part-time sex worker.

But his happiest pairing was with Glenda Jackson in the delightful A Touch of Class (1973), the kind of witty sex-war saga that was popular in the 70s, and in which Segal excelled.

The film boosted Segal’s career even further, but by the time the partnership was resumed in Lost and Found (1979), a so-called comedy in which Segal and Jackson played a pair of academics who meet and squabble on the ski slopes, it was heading downwards.

However, back in 1973, Segal was still on a roll with Paul Mazursky’s Blume in Love, a comedy both romantic and satirical, and Robert Altman’s California Split (1974), a freewheeling study of compulsive gambling. Despite having proved he had the emotional weight for drama, Segal decided thereafter to opt for light comedy, though his choices could be misguided. His comic flair failed to rescue The Black Bird (1975), a limp send-up of The Maltese Falcon and the 40s private-eye genre, nor could he do much to salvage The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox (1976), a charmless jumble of western parodies and slapstick in which he was teamed with Goldie Hawn, or Fun With Dick and Jane (1977), with Jane Fonda and Segal as yuppie bank robbers.

Although Segal continued to work regularly throughout the following decades, even scaling some heights, his star power had burned itself out. In 1979, he turned his back on a film that might have rejuvenated his career. He walked off the lot on the first day of shooting Blake Edwards’s 10, protesting at the amount of control he felt his co-star, Julie Andrews, wife of the director, had over the film. He also insisted that his wife, Marion Sobel, should participate in the editing and production. Orion Pictures filed a legal action seeking damages and Segal counter-sued. With the crew and cast standing by, Edwards summoned Dudley Moore to take over the romantic lead, and the film was a huge hit.

Segal was born in New York, the youngest of four children of George Segal, a hop and malt agent, and Fannie (nee Bodkin), and grew up in Great Neck, Long Island. Although the family was Jewish, he was educated at a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania. An accomplished banjo player, Segal played with Bruno Lynch and his Imperial Jazz Band before enrolling at Columbia University to study drama. After graduation, he joined the off-Broadway company Circle in the Square. Following three years’ military service, Segal resettled in New York, becoming one of the original members of Theodore J Flicker’s satirical revue The Premise in 1960.

His film debut was in the entertaining hospital soap opera The Young Doctors (1961), as a rather bland intern. In The New Interns (1964), he was far better as a grim-faced ex-con doctor, and in the same year played a bitter civil war veteran, whom Yul Brynner is contracted to kill, in Invitation to a Gunfighter. In 1965, Segal held his own among a starry cast as a tortured artist in Stanley Kramer’s Ship of Fools, and moved into the most successful period of his career.

In the 80s and 90s, as his film roles declined, Segal found work mainly in TV dramas. In a 1994 episode of The Larry Sanders Show, Larry (alias Garry Shandling), a talkshow host, tries to stay awake while Segal (self-mockingly) reels off the titles of all the movies he has acted in recently that have had difficulty getting released. Afterwards, Larry is heard backstage telling everyone that he has got to start getting some fresh new guests.

Yet Segal did pop up in excellent supporting roles, mainly as fathers, in several films, such as the boorish businessman father of Kirstie Alley’s precocious baby in Look Who’s Talking (1989) and Look Who’s Talking Now (1993); Ben Stiller’s neurotic father in David O Russell’s Flirting With Disaster (1996); and Matthew Broderick’s father in The Cable Guy (1996).

From 1997 to 2003, Segal was looking sharp and playing, with comic finesse, the fashion magazine owner Jack Gallo in the TV sitcom Just Shoot Me!, and had another long-running TV role from 2013 onwards as Albert “Pops” Solomon in The Goldbergs. He was back on Broadway in Art in 1999, and in the same role at Wyndham’s theatre in London in 2001.

His marriage to Marion ended in divorce in 1983, after 27 years. His second wife, Linda Rogoff, whom he married in 1983, died in 1996. Later that year he married Sonia Schultz Greenbaum, his high-school sweetheart, whom he ran into at a class reunion. She survives him, as do two daughters, Polly and Elizabeth, from his first marriage.

George Segal, actor, born 13 February 1934; died 23 March 2021

Ronald Bergan died in 2020

One Sheet; Movie Poster; Film Poster; Cinema Poster;

Francis Lederer obituary in “The Guardian”.

Francis Lederer was born in 1899 in Prague. After serving World Ward One he began acting with the New German Theatre. In 1931 he won great success in London in “Volpone” and then Dodie Smith’s “Autumn Crocus” when he then performed in on Broadway. He remained in the U.S. and went on to Hollywood and appeared in “Men of Two Worlds” in 1934, “Midnight”, “Confessions of a Nazi Spy”, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” and “Diary of a Chambermaid”. His film career wound down in the early 1950’s by which time he had become very wealthy through real estate investments. Francis Lederer died in 2000 at the age of 100.

Ronald Bergan’s obituary of Francis Lederer in “The Guardian”:

It could be argued that a pair of lederhosen made the Czech-born actor Francis Lederer, who has died aged 100, into a Hollywood star. He wore them in Dodie Smith’s play, Autumn Crocus, first in London, and then on Broadway in the role of a young married Tyrolean innkeeper with whom an English schoolteacher falls in love. James Agate, reviewing it at the Lyric theatre in April 1931, wrote: “The whole piece hangs or falls by the innkeeper’s charm, and the amount of this commodity produced by Mr Lederer is colossal. In addition, he is an extremely fine actor.”

Unfortunately, being a foreign actor, Lederer never really fulfilled his potential in America. “The studios didn’t know how to handle him or how to buy stories for him,” wrote Ginger Rogers, his co-star in Romance In Manhattan (1934). “Hollywood was a very parochial place, and once classified, actors could not easily break out of the mould.” Lederer believed his inherent shyness – he hated to do publicity for his films – worked against his becoming as big a romantic star as, say, Charles Boyer.

Born Frantisek Lederer in Prague, the son of a leather merchant, he won a scholarship to the city’s academy of music and dramatic art before he was 18, and began a stage career while still in his teens. By the late 1920s, he was a matinee idol in Berlin, Vienna and other European capitals, notably as Romeo to Elisabeth Bergner’s Juliet in a celebrated Max Reinhardt production.

In 1930, Lederer, who could sing and dance, came to London to appear in Meet My Sister, for which he learned his part phonetically, as he had little English. After it flopped he went into Autumn Crocus, opposite Fay Compton, which ran for 18 months. His success on Broadway in the same play in 1934 led to a contract with RKO studios.

He had made around half a dozen films in Europe previously, including Pandora’s Box (1929), a classic of the German silent cinema, in which he played the young writer Alva, one of many men destroyed by femme fatale Lulu (Louise Brooks). There was an intimate scene between Lederer and Brooks, in which the director GW Pabst insisted she wear nothing underneath her dress. “Who would know?” Brooks asked. “Lederer,” Pabst replied.

In The Wonderful Life Of Nina Petrova (also 1929), he made it perfectly clear to audiences why Brigitte Helm should give up her jewels, villa and rich lover to live modestly with him, a penniless young lieutenant.

Lederer’s Hollywood debut in Man of Two Worlds (1934), was, strangely for someone bought by RKO as a romantic European lead, as an Eskimo introduced into the complexities of western civilisation, a role he played with an ingratiating blend of naivete and bemusement.

In many of his following films, he showed a deftness for light comedy, playing an illegal immigrant helping chorus-girl Ginger Rogers in Romance In Manhattan (1935); a prince posing as a bellboy in William Wyler’s The Gay Deception, (also 1935), and an actor who causes a scandal by accidentally kissing Ida Lupino in the cinema while under the spell of the picture in One Rainy Afternoon (1936). In 1938, he took the title role in The Lone Wolf In Paris, as a jewel thief turned detective – perhaps the only time he appeared as a true American.

After playing a gigolo on whom Claudette Colbert uses her charms to distract him from John Barrymore’s wife in Midnight (1939), Lederer demonstrated more range and depth than he had been able to hitherto in three anti-Nazi movies.

I n Confessions Of A Nazi Spy (1939), as a downtrodden German-American who steals secrets and becomes a Nazi agent to support his family, he managed to imbue this unsympathetic weasel with humanity. In The Man I Married (1940), he played an initially lovable German-American who becomes a rabid Nazi after visiting his father in Germany, and in Voice In The Wind (1944) he was a Czech pianist who is tortured by the Nazis and looses his memory. He was also superb in Jean Renoir’s The Diary Of A Chambermaid (1946) as Joseph, the sadistic valet, given to piercing the throats of geese with a needle. Lederer then returned to the stage for a few years, appearing in Noel Coward’s Relative Values in Germany, and as Anne Frank’s father in The Diary Of Anne Frank in America. When he went back to the screen, his image had eased into a narrower range of character parts.

However, he was still able to be both a charming and sinister vampire in The Return Of Dracula (1958). “They wanted me to wear fangs,” he explained, “but I refused, saying it was old hat and I would have looked foolish.” Neither did he use a cape, but merely wore his overcoat over his shoulders. In his last feature, Terror Is A Man (1958), a Filipino horror film, he was a mad doctor who turned a leopard into a leopard man.

Aside from his stage and screen work, Lederer did a great deal of television, for which he adapted Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and was the chief villain in the first Mission Impossible (1967). He also taught acting for many years, helped found the American National Academy of Performing Arts and the Holly wood museum, was active in civic affairs, and made a fortune from property.

Since 1942, he lived on a ranch in the San Fernando valley with Marion Irving, his third wife.

• Francis Lederer, actor, born November 6 1899; died May 25 2000

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

Karl Malden was born in 1912 in Chicago. In 1934 he began trainig to be an actor at the Goodman School in his native city. He began acting on Broadway in 1937. He scored a big success in Artur Miller’s “All My Sons”. He began his film career in Moss Hart’s “Winged Victory” in 1945 and a few years later had a very profilic career in film. His movie highlights include “A Streetcar Named Desire”, “Halls of Montezuma”, “I Confess”, “On the Waterfront”, “Baby Doll”, “Fear Strikes Out”, “Pollyanna”, “Come Fly With Me” and “Patton”. He had a spectactular television success with Michael Douglas in “The Streets of San Francisco”. Karl Malden died in 2009 at the age of 97.

His “Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan:

For more than six decades Karl Malden, who has died at the age of 97, brought his Method-trained acting talents to bear on powerhouse performances on screen, notably for Elia Kazan in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), for which he won an Oscar, and On The Waterfront (1954), as well as his mature cop in the long-running TV series The Streets of San Franscisco in the 1970s.

Like WC Fields and Jimmy Durante, Malden had one of the most celebrated non-Roman noses in cinema. But whereas those of the two former entertainers produced a comic effect — Fields’s bibulous one looked as if it were stuck on like a clown’s, and Durante’s schnozzle was like a carnival mask — Malden’s proboscis seemed to add dramatic intensity to his performances. The more impassioned he became, the more the nose seemed to go on red alert.

This particularity of Malden’s appearance came about because he broke his nose twice as a high school American footballer. He had won a scholarship to Arkansas state teachers college, but had to leave to support himself and his family by working in a steel mill in Gary, Indiana. Born Mladen Sekulovich in Chicago, he was brought up in Gary, where his father, Peter Sekulovich, who had been a provincial actor in Yugoslavia, was working in the mill. Karl also delivered milk to make money to go to New York, where he hoped to satisfy his ambition to become an actor.

In New York, in the late 1930s, Malden joined the leftist Group Theatre, which was devoted to social realities and ensemble acting inspired by Stanislavsky at the Moscow Arts Theatre. Its leading light was the playwright Clifford Odets, in whose Golden Boy (1937) Malden appeared as a boxing manager. Also in the play was future director Kazan, with whom Malden was to work several times on stage and screen.

After Malden returned from army service during the second world war, he became a member of the newly formed Actors’ Studio, among whom were Marlon Brando and Richard Widmark. In 1947, on Broadway, Kazan, one of the founders of the Actors’ Studio, directed Malden in both Arthur Miller’s All My Sons and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. The latter, in which Malden played Mitch opposite Brando and Jessica Tandy, led to a contract with 20th Century-Fox.

At the studio, Malden played vivid supporting roles in gritty thrillers such as Henry Hathaway’s 13 Rue Madeleine and The Kiss Of Death, Kazan’s Boomerang (all 1947) and Otto Preminger’s Where The Sidewalk Ends (1950). He also added realism to the Henry King western The Gunfighter, and Lewis Milestone’s war drama Halls Of Montezuma (both 1950).

During the same period, Malden appeared on Broadway as the Button Moulder in Lee Strasberg’s production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, with John Garfield in the title role, and in Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, as the domineering patriarch.

In 1951, Malden won the best supporting actor Oscar for reprising his stage role of Mitch, the shy, sweaty, balding middle-aged suitor of Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) in A Streetcar Named Desire, again directed by Kazan. The most pitiless moment comes when Malden snaps on the naked bulb to expose Blanche’s ageing, powdered face to “reality”. “I don’t want the light, I want magic,” she entreats. “Oh, I knew you weren’t 16. But I was fool enough to believe you was straight,” he replies, his voice trembling with emotion.

The following year, he was playing a man caught in the clutches of a femme fatale (Jennifer Jones) in King Vidor’s Ruby Gentry and then the persistent cop who suspects Montgomery Clift’s priest of murder in Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953). If it were not already evident from his performances, the intelligence of an actor like Malden could be deduced from the number of major directors with whom he worked. In his best and most personal work he succeeded in exploring depths of moral ambiguity rare in the commercial cinema.

He gave two further powerful performances for Kazan. In On The Waterfront, he was Oscar-nominated for his role as the tough, crusading dockland Catholic priest, Father Barry, who helps bring an end to crooked waterfront politics. Even better was his wonderful portrayal of Archie Lee, the cotton-mill owner husband of a backward thumb-sucking virgin child bride (Carroll Baker) in Baby Doll (1956).

Driven frantic by her refusal to allow him into her bed, even though it is a child’s cot, too small for her ample proportions, the boorish, white-trash character is turned by Malden into a tragicomic figure uttering a sustained cry of sexual frustration. “Most actors want to be heroic, sexy and noble. Karl doesn’t mind if you to make him look silly. He is more a real person than an actor,” Kazan remarked at the time.

In Robert Mulligan’s Fear Strikes Out (1956), he played a well-meaning but domineering father who drives his highly strung son (Anthony Perkins) to the edge of madness — the two leads successfully vying with each other in the emotional stakes.

Apart from having taken over much of the direction from Delmer Daves of the Gary Cooper western The Hanging Tree (1958), in which he had the role of a lecherous half-wit, Malden was credited with one film as director, Time Limit (1957), starring his friend Richard Widmark. This Korean war drama was as taut and gripping as one of his performances, containing many of the pros and cons of his acting style, fervent but sometimes overemphatic.

Brando also directed one film, One Eyed Jacks (1961), a rambling self-indulgent revenge western in which Malden played the heavy, a former outlaw who has betrayed Brando, and who had become a respectable sheriff. Brando’s brooding, somnolent performance was counter-balanced by Malden’s grinning, extrovert one.

Included among Malden’s many varied roles in the 1960s were in two films by John Frankenheimer; as the drunken father in All Fall Down, and the prison warder in Birdman of Alcatraz (both 1962), and was utterly charming in his only musical, Mervyn LeRoy’s Gypsy (1962), though the one number which he got to sing, Together, with Rosalind Russell and Natalie Wood, was cut from the final print. He was also the weak double-dealer in Norman Jewison’s The Cincinnati Kid (1965).

For much of the 1970s Malden was busy playing the veteran police officer Detective Lieutenant Mike Stone in The Streets of San Francisco on television. A widower with 23 years’ experience of the force, he was partnered by Michael Douglas as the 28-year-old Steve Keller, a college graduate.

This lively combination — wise old head versus eager young enthusiast — produced enough sparks to keep it going for five seasons. Before the series began, Kirk Douglas told his son, “If anyone can teach you how to act it’s Karl”.

The rest of his film career was rather patchy; he made up the cast of a few disaster films, turned up in Blake Edwards’s misconceived “existential” western The Wild Rovers (1971), appeared in the dire sequel The Sting II (1982), but made a convincing General Omar Bradley in Patton (1970), having spent some time with the general before taking on the role. His last appearance on screen was as a priest in an episode of The West Wing (2000).

From 1989 Malden was president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Ten years later, he urged the academy to award an honorary Oscar to Elia Kazan. This was bitterly opposed by many who had never forgiven Kazan for being a “friendly witness” before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. However, the apolitical Malden prevailed. “If anyone deserved this honorary award because of his talent and body of work, it was Kazan,” he remarked.

Malden, who is survived by his wife of more than 70 years, the former actor Mona Graham, and two daughters, once commented: “I’ve been incredibly lucky. I always knew I wasn’t a leading man — take a took at this face! But I felt: if I can make it the way I look, others can.”

The “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed here.

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Charles Dierkop was born in 1936 in Wisconsin. He is best known for his role with Angie Dickinson in television’s “Police Woman”. His films include “The Hustler” and “Blood Red”.

Dennis Weaver was born in 1924 in Missouri. His first role on Broadway was as understudy in William Inge’s “Come Back Little Sheba” . In 1952 he got a contract with Universal studios and made his movie debut in “The Redhead from Wyoming” which starred Maureen O’Hara. He went on to make “Touch of Evil” with Charlton Heston and Orson Welles in 1958 and in 1967 in “Duel at Diable” a Western with James Garner, Sidney Poitier and Bill Travers. It is though on television that he achieved his greatest fame, in “Gunsmoke” as Chester Goode and as the title character in “McCloud” which began in 1970. He died in 2006 at the age of 81.

Anthony Hayward’s obituary of Dennis Weaver in “The Independent”:

Dennis Weaver was familiar in his Stetson to television viewers worldwide – first as the limping deputy sheriff, Chester Goode, to James Arness’s Matt Dillon in the classic western series Gunsmoke, then as the cowboy- lawman causing mayhem in the big city in McCloud. “McCloud was the kind of role I left Gunsmoke to get,” he said. “I wanted to be a leading man instead of a second banana.”

But the second banana was part of one of the biggest success stories in television’s so-called Golden Age. He played the sheriff’s number two during Gunsmoke’s early years (1955-64), speaking with a twang and always calling his 6ft 7in boss “Muster Dellon”.

The series, set in Dodge City during the late 19th century and styled as an “adult” western, but effectively a weekly morality play, began on radio and was given John Wayne’s seal of approval on screen when the film star – who turned down the lead role but recommended Arness – introduced the first episode. (In Britain, the programme was entitled Gun Law.) It continued until 1975, making it television’s longest-running western, but Weaver – whose performance won him an Emmy Best Supporting Actor award in 1959 – left halfway through, looking to be top banana himself.

He eventually resurfaced in McCloud (1970-77), as the law enforcer from Taos, New Mexico, despatched to New York to study policing methods in the Big Apple’s 27th Precinct. But, wearing a cowpoke hat, sheepskin jacket and boots, Deputy Marshal Sam McCloud went his own way and treated Manhattan like the Wild West.

Inspired by the 1968 Clint Eastwood film Coogan’s Bluff, the series had its tongue firmly in its cheek. McCloud was watched over by Police Chief Peter B. Clifford (J.D. Cannon), who was bemused as he watched his horse-riding subordinate bring rush-hour traffic to a halt on the streets of New York. Talking in a folksy, “down on the range” manner, McCloud brought with him from down south the catchphrase “There you go”.

Weaver was himself from south-west Missouri, born in 1924 in Joplin, where his father worked for the electric company and farmed 10 acres during the Depression. Weaver excelled as a track and field athlete, served in the US Navy during the Second World War, then graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a fine arts degree.

Although, in 1948, he came sixth in the United States’s decathon trials for the London Olympics, he opted for a stage career and studied at the Actors Studio, New York. After making his professional début as understudy for the role of a college athlete, Turk, in the Broadway production of Come Back, Little Sheba (Booth Theatre, 1950), he toured in that play with Shelley Winters and Sidney Blackmer, before gaining further stage experience in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire (as Stanley Kowalski), and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons.

On the recommendation of Winters, Universal signed Weaver to a film contract and he made his screen début in the western Horizons West (alongside Robert Ryan and Rock Hudson, 1952). Twenty pictures followed, many of them westerns, as well as five bit parts in the television police series Dragnet (1954-55), before Weaver landed the role of Chester Goode in Gunsmoke.

He then had moderate success in two family dramas, as a vet and horse trainer who adopts a Chinese orphan in Kentucky Jones (1964-65) and the park ranger, Tom Wedloe, in Gentle Ben (1967-69), featuring a friendly, 600lb black bear.

While he was taking off as McCloud, Weaver also made waves in an American television film that gained cinema screenings around the world. Directed by Steven Spielberg, Duel (1971) starred the actor as a salesman driving along California backroads who finds himself in a nightmare tussle with a menacing petrol tanker.

He never quite left his western background behind, starring in the television series Buck James (1987-88) as a Texas hospital doctor who has a passion for ranching and the patriarch, Henry Ritter, trying to save his ranch from financial ruin while offering a new life to an 18-year-old girl out of a teen detention centre in Wildfire (2005).

Weaver was President of the Screen Actors Guild, 1973-75, and donned his western gear for Great Western Bank commercials from 1982, a role he took over from John Wayne after “The Duke’s” death.

A keen environmentalist, he had his solar-powered, 8,500sq ft, 16-room Colorado home built out of 3,000 recycled tyres and 3,000 aluminium cans and called it his “Earthship”. He also founded the Institute of Ecolonomics to tackle both economic and environmental problems. Appropriately, when he reprised one of his most famous characters in the television film The Return of Sam McCloud (1989), the law enforcer had become a New Mexico senator fighting for new environmental laws.

Anthony Hayward

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

Betty Garde was born in 1905 in Philadelphia. She played Aunt Eller in the 1945 Broadway production of “Oaklahoma”. Her film roles were few but choice. In 1950 she was one of the inmates in “Caged”. She was also featured in “Call Northsie 777” and “Cry of the City”. Betty Garde died in 1989 at the age of 84.

Her IMDB entry:

Betty Garde was a versatile actress, who began in show business after winning a playwriting competition at high school. Joining Actor’s Equity in 1922, she became a noted performer on stage in Boston and Philadelphia, eventually making her debut on Broadway in 1925. Betty, at least early in her profession, was particularly noted for her penchant for comedy, often receiving high praise from the critics. During the 1930’s and 40’s, she became a prolific radio actress, at the same time maintaining a busy career in the theatre. In addition to voice acting, she also produced and directed her own drama series on CBS, entitled “Another Chance”. She starred in and directed the soap opera “My Son and I” in 1939. Additionally, she featured on Eddie Cantor‘s show, in specials forOrson Welles and in the radio anthology series “Theater Guild on the Air”.

Her film and television roles became more frequent from the late 1940’s. She was effectively reprehensible as Wanda Skutnik, the key witness who sends innocent Richard Conte to jail in the gripping drama Call Northside 777 (1948). Another ‘tough’ role was her prison inmate Kitty Stark in Caged (1950), a minor film noir. Her most famous role was as Aunt Eller in the original Broadway production of “Oklahoma!” (1943). Among many guest-starring roles on the small screen, her stand-out performance has to be that of Lois Nettleton‘s overwrought landlady, Mrs. Bronson, in the seminal Twilight Zone(1959) episode ‘The Midnight Sun’.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Bebe Daniels was born in 1901 in Dallas, Texas. At the age of 10 she starred in the silent film “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”. In the 1920’s she was under contract to Paramount Studios. Her talkie pictures included “My Past” in 1931 and “42nd Street” in 1933. In 1935 she moved to London and rebuilt her career there with her husband Ben Lyon with considerable success. They had a very popular BBC radio series “Life With the Lyons” which later made the transition to television. She died in 1971. Ben Lyon was born in 1901 in Atlanta, Georgia. “Flaming Youth” in 1923 bright him to fame. “Hell’s Angels” in 1930 is his most popularly remembered role.

Ben Lyon’s IMDB entry:

Ben Lyon was your average boyish, easy-going, highly appealing film personality of the Depression-era 1930s. Although he never rose above second-tier stardom, he would enjoy enduring success both here and in England. Born Ben Lyon, Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia, the future singer/actor was the son of a pianist-turned-businessman and youngest of four. Raised in Baltimore, he started performing in amateur productions as a teen before earning marquee value on Broadway opposite such stars as Jeanne Eagels.

Hollywood took notice of the baby-faced charmer and soon Ben was ingratiating filmgoers opposite silent film’s most honored leading ladies. He appeared with Pola Negri in Lily of the Dust (1924), Gloria Swanson in Wages of Virtue (1924), Barbara La Marr in The White Moth (1924), Mary Astor in The Pace That Thrills (1925) and Claudette Colbert, in her only silent feature, in For the Love of Mike (1927). He advanced easily into talkies and was particularly noteworthy as the dashing hero in Howard Hughes‘ Hell’s Angels (1930), in which Ben actually piloted his own plane (Ben had trained as a pilot during WWI) and filmed some of the airborne scenes for Hughes himself. That same year was also a banner year for him in his personal life after marrying Paramount Pictures film star Bebe Daniels, with whom he had appeared in Alias French Gertie (1930).

As both of their movie careers started to decline, the talented twosome decided to work up a husband-and-wife music hall and vaudeville act. They took their show to England and became a hit at the London Palladium. At one point he served in the U.S. Army Air Force and rose to the rank of Lt. Colonel in charge of Special Services for the U.S. Air Corps in England. Soldiers, sailors and airmen (from 1939) listened to Ben and Bebe weekly on the air waves with their popular, long-running BBC broadcast “Hi, Gang!” The couple remained in England throughout WWII performing on stage and doing their valid part to entertain and honor the troops.

After a brief postwar stay in Hollywood in 1946, where Ben had taken an executive position with Fox, the couple returned to England and headlined another popular 1950s radio show, “Life with the Lyons,” which spawned two family-styled films that included children Barbara Lyon and Richard Lyon. In the early 1960s Bebe suffered multiple strokes and left the limelight, passing away in 1971. Ben remarried (to former actressMarian Nixon) and settled in the US, where he died in 1979 of a heart attack while on vacation.

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

Bebe Daniels’s IMDB entry:

Bebe Daniels already had toured as an actor by the age of four in a stage production of Richard III the US, she had her first leading role at the age of seven and started her film career shortly after this in movies for Imperial, Pathe and others. At 14 she was already a film veteran, and was enlisted by Hal Roach to star as Harold Lloyd‘s leading lady in his “Lonesome Luke” shorts distributed by Pathe. Lloyd fell hard for Bebe and seriously considered marrying her— but her drive to pursue a film career along with her sense of independence clashed with HL’s Victorian definition of a wife. The two eventually broke up but would remain lifelong friends. Bebe was sought out for stardom by Cecil B. DeMille, who literally pestered her into signing with Paramount. Unlike many actors, the arrival of sound posed no problem for her; she had a beautiful singing voice and became a major musical star, with such hits like Rio Rita (1929) and 42nd Street (1933). In 1930 she married Ben Lyon, with whom she went to England in the mid-30s, where she became a successful Westend stage star and with her husband, a famous radio team. Her movie career drifted away after the mid-30s.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Stephan Eichenberg <eichenbe@fak-cbg.tu-muenchen.de>

Buddy Ebsen was born in 1908 in Illinois. In 1935 he was awarded an MGM< contract and made “Captain January” with Shirley Temple and “Broadway Melody of 1938”. He was cast at the tinsman in “The Wizard of Oz” but became ill and had to relinquish the part. He had two massive television sucesses, “The Beverly HillybilliesLike his most famous character – the hillbilly who found oil on his land – Buddy Ebsen, who has died of respiratory failure aged 95, finally struck it rich as the star of The Beverley Hillbillies. After three decades in show business, from 1962 to 1971 he delighted television viewers as the unkempt and unwilling billionaire Jed Clampett, the bane of all those who tried to take advantage of his naivety, dismissive of the lotus-eating life in Los Angeles and wanting to return to his shack in the Ozarks.

Ironically, he got the part when he was thinking of retiring from acting, at the age of 54. He had just appeared as Audrey Hepburn’s husband in Breakfast At Tiffany’s (1961), having made his name in the 1930s as a gangling eccentric dancer in a number of endearingly silly film musicals. He might also have been remembered as the Tin Man in the classic Judy Garland film of The Wizard Of Oz (1939), but for an accident that nearly killed him.

Ebsen was initially cast as the Scarecrow, alongside Ray Bolger’s Tin Man. He then good-naturedly accepted Bolger’s plea to switch roles, only to find that when the make-up people covered him with aluminium paint, it got into his lungs. Ten days into production, he recalled, “after dinner, I took a breath – and nothing happened.”

Ebsen was rushed to LA’s Good Samaritan hospital, while irate studio chiefs complained that a major picture was behind schedule. Unwilling to wait for him to recover, MGM replaced him with the far less talented Jack Haley, and allowed his contract to lapse.

Curiously for an actor who came to typify American hickdom, Ebsen was born the son of a Danish father and Latvian mother who spoke German as their home language. He trained in his father’s dance school in Belleville, Illinois, before forming a song-and-dance act with his sister Vilma and toured in vaudeville.

In 1928, he was part of the cowboy chorus in the Eddie Cantor hit show Whoopee, and went to other Broadway shows, often with Vilma. They reached the screen in Broadway Melody Of 1936 (1935), in which they did a sprightly rooftop number called Sing Before Breakfast, soon after which Vilma retired.

Ebsen’s leisurely hoofing, smooth singing and unsophisticated persona were seen at their best when he was dancing with Shirley Temple in Captain January (1936), romancing Frances Langford in Born To Dance (1936) and dueting with the 15-year-old Judy Garland in Broadway Melody Of 1938. He also provided light relief in The Girl Of The Golden West (1938), as Jeanette MacDonald’s donkey-riding friend who sings The West Ain’t Wild Anymore.

After MGM dropped him in 1939, Ebsen appeared in several B-pictures, before joining the US navy in 1943. Emerging as a lieutenant in 1945, he attempted to revive his screen career, though it was only rescued from the doldrums in Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett (1955), playing the hero’s sidekick George Russell, which, in 1956, spawned a television series.

That same year, Ebsen was superb as a grizzled, respected soldier in a platoon under siege in Attack!, Robert Aldrich’s hard-hitting depiction of the perfidious attitude of certain officers in the second world war.

From 1973 to 1980, he was seen on television as the soft-spoken, milk-drinking Barnaby Jones, a retired private detective who takes over the practice when his son is killed. According to Ebsen, “Barnaby Jones encouraged men not to give up at 65.”

This was followed in the 1980s with Matt Houston, another popular series in which he played the private-eye hero’s uncle, a retired investigator. His last screen appearance was a cameo in The Beverley Hillbillies (1994), a feature-film version of the television series which only proved that there was no substitute for the original Jed Clampett.

When not appearing in television westerns, Ebsen relaxed by sailing his 35ft catamaran, with which he won a number of races. He also painted in oils, and his romantic novel Kelly’s Quest (2001) was a big seller.

He had two daughters from his first marriage, and four daughters and a son from his second marriage. The children all survive him, as does his third wife, Dotti.

· Christian Rudolph ‘Buddy’ Ebsen, actor and dancer, born April 2 1908; died July 6 2003

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

” in the 1960’s and “Barnaby Jones” in the 1980’s. Buddy Ebsen died in 2003 at the age of 95.

His “Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan: