Zohra Lampert was born in 1937 in New York City. She acted on the Boradway stage before making her film debut in a small role in 1959 in “Odds Against Tomorrow” which starred Harry Belafonte and Gloria Grahame. She had a small but telling role in Elia Kazan’s “Splendour in the Grass” with Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood. In 1971 she had the lead role in the cult thriller “Let’s Scare Jessica to Death”.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Solemn, Middle Eastern-looking Zohra Lampert had a touching, understated quality to her talent that should have gone further in the film business than it did. Somehow she never got the bigger breaks necessary for top-flight stardom. Still and all, this comely actress with soft, vulnerable features managed to contribute a number of genuinely affecting performances, particularly on TV. Born in New York City, the daughter of Russian-born hardware store owners, Lampert attended Manhattan’s High School of Music and Art and later graduated from the University of Chicago. After a stint with the Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre, she made an impressive mark on Broadway with Tony-nominated performances in “Look We’ve Come Through” in 1961 and “Mother Courage and Her Children” in 1963. Films also came her way in the early ’60s and she scored well for her humble, deeply stirring performance as Ernest Borgnine‘s Italian wife in the minor crime story Pay or Die (1960), and stole a touching scene from Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty as Beatty’s careworn spouse in Splendor in the Grass (1961). Those two performances alone should have lifted her to the heights of a star, but strangely they didn’t. Lampert was deemed a chameleon-like actress who didn’t quite fit into the Hollywood structure as a personality type. Instead she moved into a few noticeable supporting film roles along with an occasional low-budget lead, her best being the cult chiller Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971). By the ’70s, she was performing primarily on the small screen in character roles and was earning Emmy-winning notice for her endeavors. In later years, she found some really quirky ladies to inhabit, but has since been seen less and less.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
In the hugely successful US television series Perry Mason (1957-66), Barbara Hale, who has died aged 94, played Della Street, Mason’s secretary. She reprised the role in 29 TV movies between 1985 and 1995. Della’s indefatigable calm and poise established her as a partner to the LA lawyer Mason (Raymond Burr) and his investigator, Paul Drake (William Hopper). Although Hale’s all-American girl-next-door looks had seen her cast typically as supportive wives in her film career, in Perry Mason she was a single career woman, who out-bantered Drake’s flirtatious advances in almost every episode. “When we started it was the beginning of women not working at home,” she said. “I liked it that she was not married.”
The series was a triumph of casting. William Talman, as the always-losing district attorney Hamilton Burger, and Ray Collins, as the police detective Arthur Tragg, were great character actors. Mason’s creator, Erle Stanley Gardner, reportedly leaped from his chair during test screenings for Burr, a classic film noir heavy, shouting “that’s Perry Mason”. Although publicists tried to promote the idea of a romance between Burr and Hale, in reality he lived with a man, though he and Hale became devoted friends, with a common love of horticulture. Burr bred orchids, and named one after his co-star.
Hale’s role in Perry Mason was not big in terms of screen time – she joked that she basically had six scenes and costume changes to denote the changing of days – but its impact was strong enough for her to win an Emmy in 1959 as best supporting actress.
Her path to Hollywood was a highly publicised Cinderella story. Daughter of Willa (nee Calvin) and Luther Hale, she was born in DeKalb, Illinois, and grew up in nearby Rockford, where her father was a landscape gardener. She was 19 and studying at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art when she was spotted by a modelling agent. The agent sent photos to the RKO movie studio, which summoned Hale to Los Angeles. She was sitting in a casting director’s office when a phone call came asking for a starlet to replace one who had fallen ill. Hale was sent to the set of Gildersleeve’s Bad Day (1943) and made her film debut. Although studio publicity trumpeted her instant stardom, in reality she had but a single line, and went unmentioned in the credits.
But she landed a contract at RKO, and got her first screen credit in the Frank Sinatra movie Higher and Higher (1943). Her first starring role came opposite Robert Young in a gambling comedy, Lady Luck (1946). At RKO, she met the actor Bill Williams (born Wilhelm Katt), and after making West of the Pecos (1945) together, in which Hale starred with Robert Mitchum, they married. Williams would go on to star on television as Kit Carson in a successful western series. Hale, a more talented actor, was trapped in lesser studio parts until she too found success on the smaller screen.
Her best RKO parts came working with child actors, Dean Stockwell in Joseph Losey’s The Boy With Green Hair (1948) and Bobby Driscoll in Ted Tetzlaff’s noirish The Window (1949), her penultimate RKO release. She moved to Columbia, where she generally played adoring wives and steadfast girlfriends. Her light touch saw her cast with James Stewart and James Cagney, and opposite Robert Cummings in the early Frank Tashlin comedy The First Time (1952).
She had the title role in Lorna Doone (1951) but became a feature in low-budget but interesting Columbia westerns, including André de Toth’s remake of Sahara, Last of the Comanches (1953) and Joseph H Lewis’s 7th Cavalry (1956), her last Columbia picture. She then worked in episodic television such as Playhouse 90, and made The Oklahoman (1957) with Joel McCrea, and an interesting picture about a manufactured western movie star, Slim Carter (1957), alongside both her husband and Hopper. Ironically, in her last feature film before Perry Mason, Desert Hell, she played the unfaithful wife of a Foreign Legion commander.
When CBS cancelled Perry Mason, Hale reverted to episodic television, including a spot on Burr’s successful police series Ironside and regular roles in Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. She had a telling part in the original “disaster movie”, Airport (1970), and in 1975 she played the lead opposite Steve Brodie in the unforgettable disaster of a film The Giant Spider Invasion.
When, in 1985, NBC produced a TV movie, Perry Mason Returns, Hale was back as Della, and her son, William Katt, was cast as Paul Drake Jr, replacing Hopper, who had died in 1970. It was so successful that NBC produced 25 more movies before Burr’s death in 1993, and three more starring Hal Holbrook, cast not as Mason but as Wild Bill McKenzie. The last of the three, in 1995, was Hale’s final acting appearance.
Bill Williams died in 1992. Hale is survived by her son, and two daughters, Judy and Juanita.
• Barbara Hale, actor, born 18 April 1922; died 26 January 2017
Original Cinema 1-Sheet Poster – Movie Film Posters
RICHARD Davalos, who has died aged 85, was one of two unknown young actors chosen by director Elia Kazan to play the brothers Cal and Aron Trask in his 1955 film of John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden, a retelling of the biblical story of Cain and Abel in present-day California.
For Davalos the role of the dutiful son Aron marked the start of a film career that lasted more than 50 years and included appearances in Cool Hand Luke (1967), with Paul Newman, and Kelly’s Heroes (1970), with Clint Eastwood, although he never found another role to match it and gradually slipped into obscurity.
Although Dean told the press that he was in love with the actress Pier Angeli, a scene which was later cut from the film, involving a tussle between the two brothers, is said to have been removed because it was too homoerotic.
Meanwhile his co-star made only two more feature films and was dead in a car crash within a year of East of Eden coming out… But it was the death of an actor and the birth of a legend, for it was Davalos’s co-star James Dean who was destined to become the Hollywood icon.
The two young men were the talk of the town even before East of Eden opened. The word was out – this was a new kind of star, with the legendary gossip columnist Hedda Hopper reporting seeing them lounging around in a restaurant, playing with the cutlery and sticking their feet on the seats.
She reckoned they were like “a couple of Roman soldiers resting up from the wars,” and she lamented the death of glamour in Hollywood.
James Dean, as the son desperate for his father’s love, but seemingly unable to do anything right, was a new type of anguished, insecure anti-hero, for a new post-war world.
And his character and performance overshadowed Davalos’s characterisation – notwithstanding Aron’s final mental collapse after Cal spitefully reveals that their mother is a whore. Ultimately it was James Dean’s film and Davalos was destined to be the actor who played the “good” brother, perhaps even the boring brother, in James Dean’s debut film.
Davalos was born in New York City in 1930, into a family with Spanish and Finnish antecedents. He began his screen career in television in the early 1950s. But before East of Eden his experience of the film industry consisted of showing people to their seats while working as a cinema usher.
He and Dean did a screen test together for East of Eden. It survives and can be found on line, with two actors delivering beautifully nuanced performances in a scene that is both powerful and delicate. Paul Newman also did tests and was considered for both roles.
Kazan made arrangements for Davalos and Dean to share rooms in Burbank, near the studios, hoping that Davalos might provide some sort of role model for Dean off-screen too, as Dean’s appetite for late nights on the town in search of drink, drugs and sex were causing some alarm.
Davalos liked Dean and he readily acknowledged the power of his acting. “Just being in a scene with him could be an unnerving experience,” he said. “He had an instinct to disturb.” After one scene in which Cal hits Aron, Davalos felt so traumatised that he cried for several hours.
However, Davalos found Dean impossible to live with, because of his mood swings, slovenly personal habits and, it was later suggested, Dean’s sexual attraction to him. When they returned from location shooting it was to separate apartments.
On Broadway, Davalos won a Theatre World award for his performance in the Arthur Miller double bill A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays in 1956, he had a starring role in the Civil War television drama series The Americans in 1961, he was one of Paul Newman’s convict co-stars in Cool Hand Luke in 1967 and he played the barber Mr Crosetti in Something Wicked This Way Comes in 1983.
He also made guest appearances in numerous popular television series, though he never again found a part as significant as that of Aron in his first film. And he told one interviewer: “I’ve done films, TV, plays, directed and taught acting, but I’ve never liked being an actor.”
However he did reach a new and completely different audience when his picture was used on the cover of The Smiths album Strangeways, Here We Come (1987) and pictures of him were subsequently used on compilation albums.
Davalos said he was “flattered” and revealed he met Morrissey met at one of The Smiths’ gigs in California, but that he never really got to the bottom of why he used his pictures.
It is believed Davalos was married twice. He is survived by two daughters, Elyssa Davalos, an actress, and Dominique Davalos, an actress, singer and rock musician, who now works in real estate in Texas. The actress Alexa Davalos, star of The Man in the High Castle, is Elyssa’s daughter and his granddaughter.
‘Daily Telegraph” obituary in 2016.
Richard Davalos, who has died aged 85, was a Hollywood actor best known for his role as Raymond Massey’s dutiful son Aaron Task in East of Eden (1955) starring James Dean; in the 1980s he achieved cult status when Morrissey, lead singer of the Smiths, told a friend, “East of Eden is such a wonderful film. It is my ambition to track down and interview Richard Davalos.”
Although it is not known whether Morrissey did contact the actor, a photograph of Davalos, taken during the filming of East of Eden, featured on the cover of the Smiths’ final album Strangeways, Here We Come (1987).
Richard Davalos was born on November 5 1930 in the Bronx, New York City, to Finnish and Spanish parents. Having decided to become an actor, he started out in 1953 in early television with a role in the series Goodyear Playhouse, and in 1955 won a role on stage in the one-act Broadway drama A Memory of Two Mondays, by Arthur Miller.
It was presented in tandem with another play by the author, a one-act version of A View from the Bridge, and in 1956 Davalos won the Theatre World Award for his performances in both plays.
It was Elia Kazan, who was preparing an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden to star James Dean, who lured him to Hollywood, where he arranged for Davalos and Dean to share an apartment above a pharmacy across the street from the Warner Bros studios. Kazan apparently hoped that Davalos’s presence would help keep Dean out of trouble and dissuade him from indulging in the sort of after-hours antics that had been attracting unfavourable attention in the press.
Richard Davalos (standing), James Dean and Julie Harris in East of Eden CREDIT: REX FEATURES
Davalos had not been the first choice to play Aaron Task. Paul Newman was originally given a screen test with Dean (who had been cast as Cal, Aaron’s ne’er-do-well younger brother), but as the actress Lois Smith (who played Anne in the film) observed, “Dean and Newman together – that would have been too much. How would theatre managers have handled the mobs of screaming, adoring, hormonal girls?”
Davalos was not happy about sharing with Dean, whose slovenly personal habits disgusted him and who, he later suggested, had a crush on him.
(l-r) Richard Davalos, James Dean, Julie Harris in East of Eden CREDIT: REX FEATURES
It was Dean who grabbed audiences’ attention, though many critics thought that Davalos had the edge as an actor. Dean’s premature death in 1955 elevated the film, and Dean, to cult status, but Davalos was unable to hitch a lift on the dead star’s coat-tails. After East of Eden, Davalos’s film career faltered. His other credits included The Sea Chase (1955), with John Wayne and Lana Turner, the film-noir thriller I Died a Thousand Times (1955), with Jack Palance and Shelley Winters, and the Alan Ladd and Sidney Poitier Korean War vehicle All the Young Men (1960).
He gave solid performances as Blind Dick in Cool Hand Luke (1967), and as Rick Bowman, a street punk who winds up in jail after a street car race goes wrong in Pit Stop (1969). In Kelly’s Heroes (1970) he was Private Gutowski.
His television credits included Bonanza; Rawhide; Perry Mason; The Rockford Files and Hawaii Five-O. He also appeared in some mostly forgettable straight-to-video releases. His final role was as Don Lazzaro in Ninja Cheerleaders (2008).
By his marriage to the dancer Ellen van der Hoeven he had two daughters.
Richard Davalos, born November 5 1930, died March 8 2016
It is surprising that Richard Davalos did not become a major movie star. He gave a brilliant performance as James Dean’s brother in “East of Eden” in 1955. He was born in 1935 in New York City. This film was his movie debut. He followed this with “The Sea Chase” with Lana Turner, John Wayne and Tab Hunter. Other films include “Cool Hand Luke” with Paul Newman, “Kelly’s Hero’s” with Clint Eastwood and “Something Wicked This Way Comes”. He died in 2016.
Geraldine Brooks was a lovely talented actress who landed a starring role in her first movie. She was born in 1925 in New York City to Dutch parents. She acted for a time on Broadway and then in 1947 went to Hollywood to film for Warner Brothers “Cry Wolf” with Errol Flynn and Barbara Stanwyck. She hel her ground against Joan Crawford in “Possessed” and w ent on to make “Embracable You”, “Challenge to Lassie” and “Johnny Tiger” with Robert Taylor in 1966. She was married to author and playwright Budd Schulburg. Geraldine Brooks died in 1977 at the early age of 52.
“Hollywood Players : The Forties” by James Robert Parish:
In the flood of new faces at 1940s Warner Brothers there were among others, Dorothy Malone, Joan Leslie, Martha Vickers, Janis Paige, Andrea King, Faye Emerson, Joan Lorring, Geraldine Brooks and Lauren Bacall. Unquestionably Miss Bacall had such a unique screen charisma that she would have surfaced without even the studio support of husband Humphrey Bogart. But how does one account for the non-emergence of Geraldine Brooks, a petite 5ft 2″ blue-eyed brown-haired beauty. She displayed a particularly radiant smile and even more importantly demonstrated such a marvelous ability at powerhouse acting. Had she checked in to the Burbank studio earlier in the 1940s she might just have won the coveted role of Veda in “Mildred Pierce”, taking it away from Ann Blyth and established herself as the talented lady she was. Instead Geraldine was cast by the post-World War Two Warners into conventional roles, publicised as just another starlet, subject to over-makeup for the camera, and then dumped by the company in their recession shuffle. It has remained for television to provide her with recurring showcases to exhibit her persistent clear beauty and her know for adding dimension to emotionally framatic roles.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
A resolute, blue-eyed brunette with attractive, slightly pinched features, Geraldine Brooks was born to a Dutch couple on October 29, 1925, in New York City. Her parents had a theater-based background — father, James Stroock, owned a top costume company and mother, Bianca, was a costume designer and stylist. In dance shoes from age 2, her closer relatives were also extensively involved in theater — one aunt being a former Ziegfeld Follies girl and another a contralto with the Metropolitan Opera. Growing up surrounding by these theatrical types, it was only natural that it rubbed off on her. She attended the Hunter Modeling School as a young teen and graduated from Julia Richman High School in 1942 as president of her drama club. Older sister, Gloria Stroock, also became an actress, primarily on TV.
In New York, Geraldine studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Art and the Neighborhood Playhouse before apprenticing in summer stock productions. In a pre-Broadway tryout of “Follow the Girls” in 1944, Geraldine subsequently went with the show to Broadway in May of that same year and enjoyed a nine-month run. Following her role as “Perdita” in “A Winter’s Tale” at the Theatre Guild, she was signed by Warner Bros. and made her film debut promisingly as a second femme lead in the mystery thrillerCry Wolf (1947) starring Barbara Stanwyck and Errol Flynn. At this time, she shunned her odd-sounding last name of “Stroock” in favor of the more complementary marquee name of “Brooks”, which was the name of her father’s costume company. Playing Flynn’s cool, conniving niece who gives trouble to Stanwyck, she gave added suspense to the film. In her second movie, Possessed (1947), she is again at odds with another powerhouse star, this time Joan Crawford, but shows more sensitivity against the manic Crawford character in this film-noir chiller.
Geraldine moved to dramatic lead status with Embraceable You (1948) opposite Dane Clark, and played daughter to real wife-and-husband team Fredric March and Florence Eldridge in An Act of Murder (1948), a drama that dealt with the topic of euthanasia. Less impressive was the standard Warner Bros. “B” western The Younger Brothers (1949) and her MGM loanout appearance in Challenge to Lassie (1949). Floundering a bit at this time and failing to strike a star-making chord with audiences, she attempted a few continental film assignments, one in which she played Anna Magnani‘s younger sister, but grew quickly disillusioned there as well and returned to America.
Focusing instead on stage and TV, including a Broadway stint in “Time of the Cuckoo” starring Tony-winning Shirley Booth, Geraldine eventually went back to studying acting again. In 1956, she became a member of the Actor’s Studio and became a strong exponent of its method style. Despite this renewed, enlightening acting technique, her film career found no momentum at all. In fact, she appeared in only two films in the oncoming years as brittle, harder-core ladies in Street of Sinners (1957) and Johnny Tiger(1966). Her greater notices were to be found guesting on various popular TV series. Particularly noteworthy were her roles on Perry Mason (1957), The Defenders (1961), Bus Stop (1961) (for which she earned an Emmy nomination), the pilot of Ironside (1967) and the last final climactic episode of The Fugitive (1963). A regular as Dan Dailey‘s secretary on the mildly received Faraday and Company (1973), she also appeared in the 70s episodes of Kung Fu (1972), Cannon (1971), Barnaby Jones (1973) and McMillan & Wife(1971), the last in which sister, Gloria Stroock, had a recurring role as Rock Hudson‘s secretary.
Geraldine’s later theater included her Tony-nominated role in “Brightower” (1970) (despite it closing after only one performance) on Broadway and as wife “Golde” in the musical “Fiddler on the Roof”. Her final movie part came in the rather ho-hum crimer Mr. Ricco (1975) alongside Dean Martin. A short-lived series regular as the matriarch of The Dumplings (1976), a rare comedic venture for her, and a stage production of Jules Feiffer‘s “Hold Me!” in 1977 capped her capable but somewhat unsatisfying career. She deserved much better attention than she got, especially in films. Divorced from TV writerHerbert Sargent after only three years (1958-1961), she married author Budd Schulberg(best known for his screenplay of On the Waterfront (1954)), in 1964. The couple moved to Los Angeles and opened a writers’ workshop together for the underprivileged. She also collaborated with Schulberg on the book Swan Watch (1975), a study on the elegant birds in which she also took photographs. In addition, she wrote poetry for children although she herself never had any. Sadly, Geraldine died in 1977 at age 51 of a heart attack while battling cancer, thus depriving the entertainment industry of a valuable talent. She was survived by her husband, mother and sister.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Ann Doran is best known for two roles, James Dean’s mother in 1955’s “East of Eden” and the mother again of Velvet Brown in the 1961 TV series “National Velvet”. She was born in Amarillo, Texas in 1911. She had a very profilic career as a character actress in films beginning with “Paid to Dance” in 1937. Her other films included “His Girl Friday” in 1940, “So Proudly We Hail”, “A Summer Place” and “The Arrangement” in 1970. Ann Doran died in 2000 at the age of 89.
Andy Williams is of course one of the most celebrated of popular singers, but he did make an attempt at film making in the early 1960’s. He was born in 1927 in Iowa. He and his brothers were a popular singing group in the 1940’s and in that de cade he did feature in a few films including “Janie” in 1944 and “Something in the Wind” in 1947. In 1964 he starred with Sandra Dee and Robert Goulet in a comedy “I’d Rather be Rich”. He sang the Top Ten hit “Almost There” in the film. He did not though pursue a career on film and returned to his very popular recording and concert career. He died in 2012.
“Guardian” obituary:
Through the popularity of his television show and his mellifluous tenor voice, Andy Williams, who has died aged 84 after suffering from bladder cancer, was one of the best-loved figures in American popular culture. In a career that spanned eight decades, he sold more than 100m albums. Ronald Reagan described Williams’s distinctive voice as a “national treasure”.
The Andy Williams Show was also a favourite on British television and he had numerous UK hits in the 1960s and 70s. Among the biggest were Can’t Get Used to Losing You (1963), Can’t Help Falling in Love (1970) and Where Do I Begin (1971), the theme from the 1970 film Love Story. Williams’s British career was revived in 1998 when his 30-year-old hit Can’t Take My Eyes Off You was used in a commercial for Peugeot cars. Soon, a Fiat advertisement revived Music to Watch Girls By, and The Most Wonderful Time of the Year (from one of his eight Christmas albums) was chosen for a Marks & Spencer Christmas campaign in 2002. He even appeared in an episode of Strictly Come Dancing in 2009 to sing Moon River.
Williams grew up in Wall Lake, Iowa, the second youngest of six children, to Jay and Florence Williams. His father, a railway worker, arranged for Andy and his three elder brothers, Bob, Don and Dick, to be the choir at the town’s Presbyterian church. The quality of their harmonising inspired Jay to train the quartet for a professional career, beginning with performances at weddings and socials. His ambition for the boys led the family to move to Des Moines in 1936 to seek a regular radio show. There, Jay’s perfectionism hardened into an obsession: Andy was to claim that his self-confidence was deeply dented by Jay’s edict that “you have to practise harder because you’re not as good as others out there”.
The Williams Brothers were eventually awarded their own 15-minute show on a station where Reagan was a sports reporter. But the family were still not well off, and when the youngest child died of spinal meningitis, the only way the family could pay the funeral costs was for the brothers to sing hymns at the funeral parlour after school for several months.
There were further moves to Chicago and Cincinnati so that the Williams Brothers could perform on more prestigious radio stations, and in 1944 the family uprooted again to Los Angeles. There, Jay Williams, by now his sons’ full-time manager, negotiated a studio contract with MGM, which gave the quartet cameo roles in several B movies. He also persuaded Bing Crosby to employ them as backing singers on his hit record Swinging on a Star.
The group broke up as each brother was called up for second world war service – the 17-year-old Andy was briefly in the merchant navy – and did not re-form until 1947. They next performed as a cabaret act, appearing in Las Vegas and the Café de Paris in London before splitting up in 1953. The actor and choreographer Kay Thompson then launched Andy on a solo career, which ignited when he landed a job as resident vocalist on Steve Allen’s late night television show on NBC (1954-56).
In 1956 he signed a recording contract with Cadence, and the following year had a No 1 hit in both the US and Britain with Butterfly. Although Williams studied Elvis Presley’s recordings, he avoided rock’n’roll and had four more top 10 hits with ballads. In 1961 CBS offered him a lucrative record deal.
The 1960s were to be his golden decade. The Andy Williams Show ran on NBC from 1962 to 1971, with consistently high ratings, and he had at least one album in the US top 10 in every year, aided by his musical director, the acclaimed jazz pianist Dave Grusin. The essential blandness of the show was reassuring to middle America, but it introduced new singers, notably the Osmonds, whom Jay Williams had spotted performing at Disneyland, and the fledgling Jackson Five, featuring a seven-year-old Michael.
The popularity of the show kept the crooning Williams afloat during the tidal wave of pop in the 1960s. Also, while contemporaries such as Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett were baritones, Williams, a tenor, shared his vocal range with the Beatles and Beach Boys.
All his albums of the 1960s sold more than 1m copies each, with Moon River and Days of Wine and Roses each selling almost 2m. The latter was No 1 in the album charts for 16 weeks in 1963. When his contract with CBS came up for renewal in 1966, his manager, Alan Bernard, negotiated an unprecedented guarantee against royalties of $1.5m. In return, Williams agreed to record 15 albums over the next five years.
The formula for his albums was carefully calculated to attract fans of the television show. Williams seldom recorded new or unknown songs. Instead, he chose a mix of titles from successful movies, Broadway shows and versions of recent pop hits. Williams and his producer, Bob Mersey, were careful to include material by songwriters of the rock era, albeit their most melodic numbers. Thus, he recorded songs from the pens of Lennon and McCartney (Michelle), Burt Bacharach (Don’t You Believe It) and Jim Webb (McArthur Park).
On one occasion, he decided to experiment with a “concept” album of songs by the arranger Mason Williams (no relation), depicting existence from birth to death. Clive Davis, the head of CBS Records, warned him that sales would suffer. After some haggling, the concept songs took up one side of the LP Bridge Over Troubled Water. Davis was proved right and the album sold only half a million copies.
The loss of his television show led to falling record sales for Williams in the early 1970s. However, his celebrity enabled him to play lucrative concerts and cabaret engagements throughout the US and Europe. In 1992 he opened his own Moon River theatre in Branson, Missouri, where he appeared for several months each year.
Although he was a lifelong Republican, Williams became a close friend of Robert and Ethel Kennedy in the mid-60s. He was present when Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles during the 1968 campaign for the presidential nomination. Williams sang The Battle Hymn of the Republic at the funeral and voted for George McGovern at the Democratic party convention, having been nominated as a delegate by Kennedy. More in keeping with his political convictions was his outspoken criticism of Barack Obama, and he allowed the rightwing radio commentator Rush Limbaugh to broadcast his recording of Born Free with added gunshot sounds. Sony Music (now the owner of CBS Records) forced Limbaugh to remove it.
Williams was married twice. He had three children, Noelle, Christian and Bobby, named after Robert Kennedy, with his first wife, the singer and dancer Claudine Longet. After their divorce, he was publicly supportive when, following the death of her new partner in a shooting incident, she was found guilty of criminally negligent homicide in 1977. He is survived by his second wife, Debbie Haas, and his children.
• Andy (Howard Andrew) Williams, singer, born 3 December 1927; died 25 September 2012
The above “Guardian” obituary by Dave Laing can also be accessed online here
Allyn Ann McLerie. Obituary in “Playbill” in 2018.
Allyn Ann McLerie was born in Canada in 1926. She starred on Broadway in “Where’s Charlie” in 1948. She went on to make the film of the show in 1952. Her two best known film roles are “Calamity Jane” with Doris Day and Howard Keel in 1953 and “They Shoot Horses Dont’ They” with Jane Fonda, Michael Sarrazin and Susannah York in 1969.
Allyn Ann McLerie, who had a celebrated career on the Broadway stage before exploring a variety of roles on screen, has died at the age of 91 following a battle with Alzheimer’s disease. Her death was confirmed to The New York Times by her daughter, Iya Gaynes Falcone Brown.
Ms. McLerie made her Broadway debut at the age of 16 in the dancing ensemble of 1943’s One Touch of Venus. She then appeared in the original production of On the Town, marrying co-star Adolph Green the following year (they divorced in 1953).
She next starred in Frank Loesser and George Abbott’s Where’s Charley? opposite Ray Bolger. Her performance as Amy Spettigue (who sings the soprano staple “The Woman In His Room”) earned Ms. McLerie a 1949 Theatre World Award.
Her later Broadway credits includedthe musical comedies Miss Liberty and Redhead and the 1960 revival of West Side Story (in which she played Anita opposite the musical’s original stars, Larry Kert and Carol Lawrence; Chita Rivera, who originated the role, was on Broadway at the same time in Bye Bye Birdie). Ms. McLerie made her last Broadway appearance in 1963 in the musical revue The Beast in Me.
On screen, Ms. McLerie is known for her work in such films as Calamity Jane and Cinderella Liberty, as well as on TV in Cannon, The F.B.I., The Tony Randall Show, and, later in her career, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd.
Ms. McLerie married the late actor George Gaynes in 1953; the two briefly shared the screen as love interests in a two-episode arc of Punky Brewster. She is survived by their daughter, as well as a granddaughter and two great-granddaughters
Adrian Booth was born in 1917 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She also acted under the name of Lorna Gray. Her films include “Daughter of Don Q” in 1946 and “Dakota”. She was long married to actor David Brian.
BRIMSTONE, US poster, top from left: Rod Cameron, Adrian Booth, Walter Brennan, bottom right: Forrest Tucker, 1949
New York Times obituary in 2017.
Adrian Booth, a versatile film actress who also took pies to the face alongside the Three Stooges, died Sunday, April 30, 2017. She was 99.
Relatives of the actress announced Booth’s death in a post via social media.
Booth appeared in several Three Stooges short films including a memorable pie-throwing scene in “Three Sappy People.” She played Sherry, a spoiled wife. Other Stooges shorts included “You Nazty Spy!”, “Oily to Bed, Oily to Rise,” and “Rockin’ Thru the Rockies.”
She was born Virginia Pound July 26, 1917, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
During the 1930s, when she became a contract player with Columbia Pictures, studio executives renamed her Lorna Gray. She played parts in “Flying G-Men” alongside Robert Paige, “Pest From the West” with Buster Keaton, and the above-mentioned Stooges film shorts.
Her films included “Red River Range,” a 1938 film starring John Wayne; “O, My Darling Clementine,” a 1943 film starring the country music singer Roy Acuff as a singing sheriff; and “Hold ‘Em Navy.” In the latter film, her birth name appeared in the credits.
Booth also played the lead character’s secretary, Gail Richards, in Republic Pictures’ 1944 “Captain America” film serials about the comic book superhero.
After leaving Columbia in 1945, she took a different stage name, Adrian Booth, and had retained the name ever since. She retired from her film career after marrying the actor David Brian in 1949; he preceded her in death in 1993.
In 2007, Booth told writer John Beifuss that she had a great time working for Republic Pictures in films such as “Along the Oregon Trail” and “Home on the Range.”
“They were so good to me,” Booth said. “Every time I started a picture, my boss would send me flowers.”
After appearing in the Three Stooges film shorts, she became good friends with the Stooge Larry Fine. She called Fine, who died in 1975, “a very sweet boy.”
For her work in Western films and TV series, Booth received the Golden Boot Award in 1998. She was a frequent film festival attendee even into her 90s.
Alvy Moore was born in 1921 in Indiana. His first role was in 1952 in “Okinawa”. His other films include “Susan Slept Here” in 1954, “5 Against the House”, “Screaming Eagles” and “Early Warning”. Despite been featured prominently in many feature films, he was often credited in the cast lists which is a shame as he was always a fine actor. He died in 1997 in Palm Desert, California.
TCM Overview:
A comic player of feature films and TV, Alvy Moore will always be remembered as county agent Hank Kimball on the long-running CBS sitcom “Green Acres” (1965-71). Wearing a trademark hat, Hank Kimball made Eddie Albert’s life nuts by never quite knowing the answer to any agricultural question, but hedging the situation with double-talk.
Moore studied drama in his native Indiana before serving in the Marines during WWII, during which he participated in the battle for Iwo Jima. Post-war, he furthered his training at the Pasadena Playhouse. Moore succeeded David Wayne in the role of Ensign Pulver opposite Henry Fonda’s “Mister Roberts” on Broadway, and later toured with the play. As if life were following art, he made his screen debut playing the quartermaster in “Okinawa” (1952). For much of the 1950s, he was relegated to small roles in features, like his turns opposite Marilyn Monroe in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953) and as Mitzi Gaynor’s boyfriend in “There’s No Business Like Show Business” (1954). Frustrated by his stalled career, Moore supplemented his income by purchasing an interest in an iron foundry that made tile tabletops and considered abandoning his dream. He had one of his better roles as the wisecracking member of a group out to rob a casino in the crime caper “Five Against the House” (1955), co-starring Brian Keith and Kim Novak. While he appeared in support of stars like Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall in “Designing Woman” (1957) and Jack Lemmon in “The Wackiest Ship in the Army” (1961), his roles remained decidedly supporting. He remained active in features into the 1980s, generally in small parts such as a gas station mechanic in a sheriff in “Dr. Minx” (1975), and a chili salesman in “The Horror Show” (1989), among others. With L Q Jones, he formed a producing partnership that resulted in the above-average thriller “The Brotherhood of Satan” (1971), about a town overtaken by a coven of witches, and the futuristic black comedy “A Boy and His Dog” (1975), starring Don Johnson. Moore also reprised the voice for Grandpa in “Here Comes the Littles” (1985), a feature based on the 1983 ABC animated series.
Moore found his greatest success on the small screen. In 1955, he was the narrator for the ABC series “Border Collie” and that same year appeared as a reporter in the “What I Want To Be” segments of “The Mickey Mouse Club” (ABC). He amassed numerous guest credits on series, including “My Little Margie”, “Pete and Gladys”, “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “The Andy Griffith Show”. Moore remained active into the 1990s, with guest appearances on “Frasier” (NBC, 1994, as a patient) and “The Pursuit of Happiness” (NBC, 1995, as a wedding guest).
In TV longforms, Moore played a distraught father in “Cotton Candy” (NBC, 1978) and the first mayor in “Little House: The Last Farewell” (NBC, 1989). He also revived the character of Hank Kimball in “Return to Green Acres” (CBS, 1990).
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
