Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 106 of 115

Charles Herbert

Charles Herbert was born in 1948 in Culver City, California. He was a brilliant child actor of the 1950’s. His screen debut came in 1954 with “The Long Long Trailer” with Lucille Ball. He went on to make 20 feature films , career highlights being “The View from Pompey’s Head” with Dana Wynter in 1955, “The Fly” with Vincent Price and Patricia Owens in 1958 and “Houseboat” with Cary Grant and Sophia Loren. He died in 2015.

“Telegraph” obituary:

Charles Herbert, who has died of a heart attack aged 66, was a tousle-haired, all-American child star whose life slipped into a spiral of drug abuse after the demise of his career.

Herbert, heavy-browed with an enquiring face, spent little time at school, and made his screen debut at four. He appeared in dozens of films, often in the horror-sci-fi genre, including The Fly (1958), featuring Vincent Price, about an atomic scientist (Al Hedison) experimenting with a teleportation device who accidentally turns himself into a human insect. Herbert played his son, Philippe.

The same year he appeared in the romantic comedy Houseboat, as one of the three children of Cary Grant, a widower who meets a beautiful Italian (Sophia Loren) and moves into a leaky boat with her and his family; in one scene Sophia Loren spins the youngster around a dance floor to the accompaniment of That’s Amore. Herbert featured in numerous television serials as well as films, among them The Twilight Zone, Rawhide, Wagon Train and The Fugitive. In The Miracle Hour (1956), an episode of Science Fiction Theatre, he gave a touching performance as Tommy Parker, a blind boy whose stepfather (Dick Foran) will stop at nothing in his search for a cure.

Charles Herbert (in the dark shirt next to Sophia Loren) in Houseboat Photo: Alamy

By the mid-1960s, however, the telephone had stopped ringing. Herbert found himself, at 21, as another washed-up child actor. “I suffered the curse that inflicts every child star,” he said later. “I grew up. Some, like Shirley Temple, survived. For every Shirley there were a dozen who didn’t.”

Charles Herbert Saperstein was born in the shadow of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Culver City, California, on December 23 1948. His 40-year-old father was an invalid with a heart ailment; his mother, also 40, was his father’s carer. Charles was the family breadwinner by the age of five.

He entered show business when, aged four, he was going shopping on a bus with his mother, and was spotted by a casting agent.

Herbert made his debut in a weekly television show called Half Pint Panel (1952) and soon after that was selected for The Long, Long Trailer (1954), a comedy vehicle for Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. Unfortunately, Herbert’s scenes ended up on the cutting-room floor.

His first proper role was in Secret Interlude (1955), followed by Ransom! (1956) with Glenn Ford and Donna Reed (on whose television show Herbert later became a regular), and The Tattered Dress (1957). The film that launched him as a star was the sci-fi chiller The Colossus of New York (1957), and in director William Castle’s 13 Ghosts (1960) he was given star billing alongside adult stars such as Margaret Hamilton and Rosemary DeCamp. In Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960) he was one of Doris Day’s amusing children, although he later claimed that the star had said only three words to him during filming. He spoke warmly, in contrast, about Sophia Loren and Vincent Price.

Herbert said he was “petrified” when filming his best-known role in The Fly. To elicit the most convincing reaction when the camera was rolling, the director kept Herbert away from the set, and when the boy was first shown the grotesque “fly” head, long after everybody else, he “felt physically sick”.

Herbert gave up acting in 1968, and discovered he was in penury. He once explained that he had spent 39 years of his life “on drugs”. But in later years he shook off his addictions and settled in Las Vegas, where he was happy to hear from sci-fi fans and attend film conventions.

He was unmarried.

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

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Charles Herbert was a mildly popular 1950s child actor with a trademark sulky puss and thick, furrowed eyebrows, who was known for his inquisitive kid besieged by alien beings, including a robot, human fly and several house-haunting ghosts. He racked up over 20 films, 50 TV shows and a number of commercials during his youthful reign. He was born Charles Herbert Saperstein to non-professionals on December 23, 1948, in the Los Angeles area. Noticed by a Hollywood talent agent while riding a bus with his mother, Charles began his career at age 4 on a 1952 TV show entitled “Half Pint Panel”.

Elsewhere on TV, he showed up regularly on series fronted by such stars as Robert Cummings and Gale Storm. This period was marked by amazingly high-profiled performances such as his blind child on the Science Fiction Theatre (1955) episode,Science Fiction Theatre: The Miracle Hour (1956). On the feature film front, Charles made an inauspicious debut in the Lucille Ball/Desi Arnaz comedy, The Long, Long Trailer(1953). Although director Vincente Minnelli had handpicked him for the role, his part was completely deleted from the movie. Other tyke roles turned out more positively and in a variety of genres, including the film noir pieces, The Night Holds Terror (1955) and The Tattered Dress (1957), the dramas, Ransom! (1956) and No Down Payment (1957), and the comedies, Houseboat (1958) and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960). His most recognized genre, however, was sci-fi, and he appeared in a number of films that are now considered classics of that genre. He started off in a bit part as a boy playing tug-of-war with a dead sailor’s cap in The Monster That Challenged the World (1957). Up front and center, he came into his own playing the young son of dead scientific genius Ross Martin, whose brilliant brain is transplanted into what becomes the robot-like The Colossus of New York (1958). He loses another dad (David Hedison) to a botched experiment in The Fly (1958), also starring iconic master of macabre Vincent Price. Lastly, Charles headed up the cast in the somewhat eerie but rather dull and tame William Castle spookfest, 13 Ghosts (1960). Castle handpicked Charles for the child role and even offered the busy young actor top-billing over the likes of Donald Woods, Rosemary DeCamp, Jo Morrow,Martin Milner and Margaret Hamilton if he would appear in his movie. In this haunted house setting, Castle’s trademark gimmick had audiences using 3-D glasses in order to see the ghostly apparitions.

He had another leading role in the fantasy adventure, The Boy and the Pirates (1960), then film offers for Charles completely stopped. Growing into that typically awkward teen period, he was forced to subsist on whatever episodic roles he could muster up, including bits on Wagon Train (1957), Rawhide (1959), The Fugitive (1963), Family Affair (1966) and My Three Sons (1960). By the end of the 1960s, however, Charles was completely finished in Hollywood, having lost the essential adorableness that most tyke stars originally possessed. Unable to transition into adult roles, his personal life went downhill as well. With no formal education or training to do anything else and with no career earnings saved, he led a reckless, wanderlust life and turned to drugs. Never married, it took him nearly 40 years (clean and sober since October, 2005) to turn his life around. During good times and bad, however, he has appeared from time to time at sci-fi film festivals.

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

Valerie French was born in London in 1928. Her first film was the Italian “Maddalena” in 1954. She subsequently went to Hollywood and made films such as “Jubal” opposite Glenn Ford in and “Decision at undown” with Randolph Scott. Her last major film was “Shalako” with Sean Connery. Brigitte Bardot, Stephen Boyd and Honor Blackman. Valerie French died in 1990 at the age of 62 in New York.

“New York Times” obituary:

Valerie French, who began her career as a much-publicized starlet for Columbia Pictures and became a screen, stage and television actress who specialized in playing a diverse collection of English characters, died Saturday at her home in Manhattan. She was 59 years old. She died of leukemia, said a friend, Tom Seligson, a television producer. Miss French was born in London and spent her early childhood in Spain, returning to England to attend Malvern Girls’ College in Worcestershire and then join the BBC drama department.

After several years in television production, she joined the Theater Royal Repertory Company in Windsor, where she played small parts. After a screen test and a role in the film “The Constant Husband” in 1955, she went to Hollywood and became a contract actress with Columbia Pictures. She starred opposite Glenn Ford and Rod Steiger in “Jubal” (1956) and with Lee J. Cobb in “The Garment Jungle” (1957). On Broadway she acted in “Inadmissible Evidence” (1965) and “Help Stamp Out Marriage!” (1966). In “The Mother Lover,” at the Booth Theater in 1969, she caused something of a sensation by appearing onstage nude with her back to the audience.

Miss French starred Off Broadway in Harold Pinter’s “Tea Party” and “The Basement” in 1968, in a 1980 revival of Noel Coward’s “Fallen Angels,” and as the mother, Helen, in a production of “A Taste of Honey” in 1981. Her television credits include roles in “Have Gun, Will Travel,” “The Prisoner,” “The Nurses,” “Edge of Night” and “Brighter Day.”

Miss French was twice married and twice divorced. In a 1981 interview she said that she and her second husband, the actor Thayer David, had been planning to remarry when he died in 1978.There are no immediate survivors.

Her obituary in “The New York Times” can also be accessed here.

The 27th Day, poster, US poster, Valerie French (bathing suit), 1957. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Chuck Connors was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1921. He was a professional basketball and baseball player. His first film was “Pat and Mike” in 1952 and his movie highlights include “Good Morning Miss Dove” with Jennifer Jones in 1955, “The Big Country” and “Move Over Darling” with Doris Day. He had success on televsion in the series “Rifleman” and “Arrst and Trial”. Chuck Connors died in 1992 at the age of 71.

His IMDB entry:

Born to immigrant parents from the Dominion of Newfoundland (now part of Canada) Chuck Connors and his two-years-younger sister, Gloria, grew up in a working-class section of the west side of Brooklyn, New York, where their father worked the local docks as a longshoreman.

Chuck’s natural athletic prowess earned him a scholarship to Adelphi Academy, a private high school, and then to Seton Hall, a Catholic college in South Orange, New Jersey. Leaving Seton Hall after two years, on October 20, 1942, he joined the army, listing his occupation as a ski instructor. After enlistment in the infantry at Fort Knox, he later served mostly as a tank-warfare instructor at Camp Campbell, Kentucky, and then finally at West Point. Following his discharge early in 1946, he resumed his athletic pursuits. He played center for the Boston Celtics in the 1946-47 season but left early for spring training with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Baseball had always been his first love, and for the next several years he knocked about the minor leagues in such places as Rochester (NY), Norfolk (VA), Newark (NJ), Newport News (VA), Mobile (AL) and Montreal, Canada (while in Montreal he met Elizabeth Riddell, whom he married in October 1948. They had four sons during their 13-year marriage). He finally reached his goal, playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, in May 1949, but after just five weeks and one at-bat he returned to Montreal. After a brief stint with the Chicago Cubs in 1951, during which he hit two home runs, Chuck wound up with the Cubs’ Triple-A farm team, the L.A. Angels, in 1952. A baseball fan who was also a casting director for MGM spotted Chuck and recommended him for a part in the Spencer Tracy–Katharine Hepburn comedy Pat and Mike (1952). Originally cast to play a prizefighter, but that role went instead to Aldo Ray. Chuck was cast as a captain in the state police. He now abandoned his athletic hopes and devoted full time to his acting career, which often emphasized his muscular 6’6″ physique.

During the next several years he made 20 movies, culminating in a key role in William Wyler‘s 1958 western The Big Country (1958). Also appearing in many television series, he finally hit the big time in 1958 with The Rifleman (1958), which began its highly successful five-year run on ABC. Other television series followed, as did a number of movies which, though mostly minor, allowed Chuck to display his range as both a stalwart “good guy” and a menacing “heavy”.

Chuck Connors died at age 71 of lung cancer and pneumonia on November 10, 1992 in Los Angeles, California. He is buried in San Fernando Mission Cemetery with his tombstone carrying a photo of Connors as Lucas McCain in “The Rifleman” as well as logos from the three professional sports teams he played for: the Dodgers, Cubs and Celtics.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: dinky-4 of Minneapolis (qv’s & corrections by A. Nonymous)

The above IMDB entry can be accessed online here.

Barbara Loden was born in 1932 in Marion, North Carolina. Her films include “Splendour in the Grass” in 1961 which was directed by her husband Elia Kazan. She directed the film “Wanda” in 1970.Barbara Loden died in 1980 at the age of 48.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

A one-time pin-up beauty and magazine story model, Barbara Loden studied acting in New York in the early 50s and was on the Broadway boards within the decade. She was discovered for films by legendary producer/director Elia Kazan who was impressed with what she did in a small role as Montgomery Clift‘s secretary in Wild River (1960). He moved her up to feature status with her next role as Warren Beatty‘s wanton sister in his classic Splendor in the Grass (1961). As Kazan’s protégé, she appeared as part of Kazan’s stage company in the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater’s production of After the Fall, winning the Tony and Outer Critic’s Circle awards for that dazzling performance. An oddly entrancing, delicate blonde beauty possessed with a Marilyn Monroe-like vulnerability, she impressed in two of his other stage productions as well – But For Whom Charlie and The Changeling . After appearing in the failed movie Fade-In (1968) with Burt Reynolds, she married Kazan and went into semi-retirement. Barbara wrote, directed and starred, however, in a bold independent film entitled Wanda (1970) and became an unexpected art house darling, distinguishing herself as one of the few woman directors whose work was theatrically-released during the period. She won praise in all three departments, nabbing the Venice Film Festival’s International Critics Prize. Supposedly discouraged by a doubting, perhaps even resentful Kazan, Barbara never followed up on this success. She expressed interest and was in the midst of putting together another film, based on the novella The Awakening by Kate Chopin, when she learned in 1978 she had breast cancer. Barbara died two and a half years later, at age 48, after the cancer spread to her liver – before the project ever came to fruition. The Hollywood industry lost a burgeoning talent who just might have opened doors for other women directors had she been given the time.

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

Article on Barbara Loden in “Tina Aumont’s Eyes” website:

Remembered mainly as the second wife of legendary director Elia Kazan, former pin-up and model; Barbara Loden, would later become an award-winning actress of stage and screen, and the first female director to write, direct and star in their own movie.

Born on July 8th, 1932, Barbara began in television, appearing as a scantily clad sidekick on ‘The Ernie Kovacs Show’ in 1956. Around this time Loden met and married promoter Laurence Joachim, with whom she had a son. Studying acting in New York, it wasn’t long before she was spotted by one of the most acclaimed producer/directors of the day; Elia Kazan, quickly becoming his protégé.

In 1960 Barbara had a small role as a secretary in Kazan’s interesting drama ‘Wild River’, then a slightly bigger part, as Warren Beatty’s reckless sister, in his next feature; ‘Splendor in the Grass’ (’61). On stage, Loden received a Tony award for her excellent portrayal of Maggie, in Arthur Miller’s ‘After the Fall’, again directed by Kazan. A very personal project by playwright Miller, ‘After the Fall’ was based on his failed marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Loden was magnificent in the part and showed enormous range, fully encapsulating this troubled and complicated character.

In what was to be her biggest screen role to date, Barbara was later cast as Burt Lancaster’s ex-wife; Shirley Abbott, in the superb drama ‘The Swimmer’ (’68). Unfortunately, a dispute between the film’s producer Sam Spiegel and director Frank Perry, coupled with rumours of Lancaster feeling overshadowed by her performance, resulted in her scenes being re-shot with Broadway actress Janice Rule. This unhappy experience may have led to Barbara wanting to take full control of her work, and to do things her own way. Now separated from her husband, Loden married Kazan in 1968 and, while in semi-retirement, began working on her own material.

In 1970 and armed with a small budget, Loden made her own independent movie, the semi- autobiographical drama ‘Wanda’. Shot in grainy colour, it’s an absorbing study of an unpredictable, emotionally scarred woman. Set in the coal mining region of Pennsylvania, it tells the story of an abused woman, who leaves her unhappy family life and runs away with a petty criminal who’s planning a bank robbery. Largely improvisational in tone, it’s a very good, if seldom seen movie that sustains to this day, due mainly to Barbara’s remarkable and moving performance. Sadly, success at the Venice and Cannes film festivals did little to boost Loden’s career, and her relationship with Kazan also suffered greatly at the time.

Unable to capitalise on her earlier success, Barbara only made a couple of more features; two shorts in 1975. In 1978, having finally found the source material for another film; ‘The Awakening’, based on Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel, Loden learned that she had breast cancer, and the project was abandoned. Sadly, the cancer spread to her liver, and two years later, aged 48, Barbara died on September 5th, 1980. A sexy, natural actress, Barbara was unfortunately overlooked by many in the industry, who strangely ignored instead of embrace her. Hopefully, with a positive re-appraisal of ‘Wanda’ in the last few years, Barbara Loden just may have finally left a lasting legacy for other women harbouring dreams of making movies.

Favourite Movie: ‘Wild River’
Favourite Performance: ‘Wanda’

The above article can also be accessed online here.

Don Murray. TCM Overview

A tall, fresh-faced leading man, Don Murray first made his mark on the Broadway stage in “The Rose Tattoo” (1951-52), co-starring with Eli Wallach and Maureen Stapleton. The son of a former Ziegfeld girl and a motion picture dance director, Murray was a conscientious objector during the Korean War and worked in Europe assisting refugees and orphans in lieu of military service. When he returned to the USA, he was cast alongside stage legend Mary Martin in Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth” (1955). Based on his performance, director Joshua Logan hired the actor for his first film.r2

3463731 Picture Show Magazine Cover, UK, 1950s; (add.info.: Celebrities-Cinema); © The Advertising Archives.

“Bus Stop” (1956) provided Murray with a strong role as a naive, yet forceful, cowboy romancing a singer (Marilyn Monroe). For his efforts, the actor earned an Oscar nod as Best Supporting Actor. His two subsequent features, “The Bachelor Party” and “A Hatful of Rain” (1957) both provided meaty roles, but later efforts failed to capitalize on his early promise. Murray moved into producing and screenwriting with “The Hoodlum Priest” (1961), a true story about a clergyman who worked with criminals, in which he also starred. His 1970 directing debut, “The Cross and the Switchblade”, was an earnest but uneven feature. A second feature, “Damien” (1977), a biopic of the priest who worked with lepers in Hawaii, has never been released theatrically. The 80s saw Murray in mostly paternal roles (e.g., “Endless Love” 1981; “Peggy Sue Got Married” 1986).

Murray has been a constant fixture on TV since the late 50s. He served as a celebrity panelist on “Made in America” (CBS, 1964) and starred in the Western series “The Outcasts” (ABC, 1968-69).

TV viewers may remember him from the first two seasons of the CBS primetime soap “Knots Landing” (1979-81) as Michelle Lee’s husband. Two later series, “Brand New Life” (NBC, 1989-90) and “Sons and Daughters” (CBS, 1991) were both short-lived. In his TV-movies, Murray has generally been cast in stalwart roles, generally as politicians or businessmen.

From 1956 to 1961, Murray was married to his “Bus Stop” co-star Hope Lange.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Julie London obituary in “The Guardian”.

To-day Julie London is primarily known as a singer. Her recording of “Cry Me A River” is a definite classic. She did also make some fine films. She was born in 1926 in Santa Rosa, California. One of her first major film parts was in “The Red House” in 1947. Her other films of interest were mainly Western e.g. “Man of the West” with Gary Cooper and “Saddle the Wind” with Robert Taylor and John Cassavettes, both films were released in 1958. Julie London also starred in the television series “Emergency” from 1972 until 1979 with her husband Bobby Troup. Julie London died in 2000 at the age of 74.

Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary of Julie London:

One of the most evocative sounds of the mid- to late-1950s, issuing from juke boxes, radios and film soundtracks, was the sexy, whispering voice of Julie London, who has died aged 74. Her own view was that she had “only a thimbleful of a voice, and I have to use it close to the microphone. But it is a kind of oversmoked voice, and it automatically sounds intimate.”

London’s biggest hit was her first single, Cry Me A River, which was released in 1955, included on her first album, Julie Is Her Name, and sold more than 3m copies. Her voluptuous features on the album cover were described by publicists as “generating enough voltage to light up a theatre marquee”.

Similarly, the cover of her Calendar Girl album featured 12 glamorous shots, and, for her 1961 album, Whatever Julie Wants, she was guarded by armed security men as she posed beside $750,000 worth of furs, jewels and piles of money. In her movies, she looked her best in period costume, especially in westerns, where she decorated many a saloon bar.

London was born Julie Peck in California. Her parents, Jack and Josephine, were a vaudeville song-and-dance team, on whose radio show their daughter sang from an early age. In 1941, the family moved to Los Angeles, and, while working as a lift operator in a department store, Julie was discovered by talent agent Sue Carol, Alan Ladd’s wife, and given a screen test.

Her first role, at 18, was as a jungle girl – with flowers in her blonde hair – in the risible Nabonga (1944), whose best friend was the eponymous gorilla, until handsome Buster Crabbe showed up. London acquitted herself well, but the cheapie picture did not lead to big film roles. Meanwhile, however, she was making a reputation as a singer with the Matty Malnech Orchestra.

In 1947, she married the actor Jack Webb, later famous on the radio and television police series, Dragnet, and worked only a little while bringing up their two daughters. She had a good part as Susan Hayward’s amorous younger sister in the southern saga, Tap Roots (1948), and played a navy wife in Task Force (1949), starring Gary Cooper.

After she divorced Webb in 1953, London entered a brief period during which, in her own words, she lacked self-confidence. This changed when she met jazz musician and songwriter Bobby Troup, who guided her singing career and helped her become a top female vocalist from 1955 to 1957. The couple married in 1959, and had a daughter and twin sons.

Troup once remarked: “She is not a Julie London fan. She honestly doesn’t realise how good she is. She’s never really been a performer, she doesn’t have that need to go out and please an audience and receive accolades. She’s always been withdrawn, very introverted. She hated those big shows.”

However, London continued to sing in nightclubs, cut discs, and record title songs from her films, such as Saddle The Wind (1958) and Voice In The Mirror (1958), which she also composed. In the latter, she showed growing maturity as an actress, playing the wife of an alcoholic.

As a dancehall singer, humiliated and raped by Lee J Cobb, then avenged by Gary Cooper, in Anthony Mann’s allegorical Man Of The West (1959), she struck a tragic note. In The Wonderful Country (1959), she was won by Robert Mitchum after her husband had conveniently been killed by Apaches, and, in Night Of The Quarter Moon (1959), she shocked San Francisco society when, as John Drew Barrymore’s bride, she admitted to having a black grandparent.

In 1972, having been out of the public eye for some time, London began her role as Nurse Dixie McCall in the television hospital series, Emergency. The show, which was produced and often directed by her first husband Webb, also starred her second husband, Troup. For five years, London was a star once more, reminding fans of the days when, to quote the writer Joseph Lanza, she “was a blend of Dionysian flesh and Detroit steel, streamlined car and cocktail shaker combined”.

• Julie London, actress-singer, born September 26 1926; died October 18 2000

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

Vince Edwards was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York. In 1950 he won a contract with Paramount Studios. His first film was “Mr Universe”. His major fame came from the title role in the very popular television series “Ben Casey” which ran from 1961 until 1966. Vince Edward came to the UK in 1967 to make “Hammerhead”. His last film was “The Fear” in 1995. Vince Edwards died in 1996 at the age of 67.

TCM Overview:Stiffly handsome leading man of some 50s features, but mostly remembered as Dr. Ben Casey, neurosurgeon, on “Ben Casey,” an ABC series which aired from 1961-66, Vince Edwards spent his post-Casey career fighting off the image of the brooding, caring doctor who broke a minor TV taboo when he unbuttoned his frock and revealed a forest of chest hair. Edwards had originally dreamed of swimming in the Olympics, but when an appendectomy put a damper on those dreams he turned to acting. He made his Broadway debut in 1947 in “High Button Shoes.” By 1951, he was under contract to Paramount in Hollywood and made his debut in a low-budget programmer, “Mr. Universe,” playing a wrestler being groomed as the “new find.” Hollywood casting practices put him in a version of the Native American legend “Hiawatha” (1952). But his subsequent film roles were of the supporting variety in the 50s, including a small one in “The Three Faces of Eve” (1957). Having begun appearing on TV dramas in the mid-50s, including “Ford Theatre” (1955), Edwards was ripe for a series when “Ben Casey” came his way in 1961. He had been picked by the show’s executive producer and owner, Bing Crosby. The same year ABC premiered “Casey,” NBC premiered the TV version of “Dr. Kildare” and viewers debated their preference for the five years both were on the air. “Ben Casey” was often grittier, dealing with the poignancy of life and death. Edwards also became one of the first TV stars to step behind the cameras, directing about 20 of the 154 “Ben Casey” episodes produced. And he used the show to launch a singing career, recording six albums, including “Vince Edwards Sings,” and playing Las Vegas. But the demise of the series temporarily stymied his career, as if often the case as the audience searches for a new face. In 1964, Edwards appeared in the first 20 minutes of Carl Foreman’s oddly-structured feature “The Victors,” and in 1968, he was helping William Holden create a commando force in “The Devil’s Brigade,” but the period in between roles increased. Edwards turned back to TV in 1970 playing a hip psychiatrist working with teens in the one-season series “Matt Lincoln.” He also made his TV movie debut in “Sole Survivor” for ABC. In 1973, he directed the CBS TV movie “Maneater” and he had strong roles in two TV movies of the decade, “The Rhinemann Exchange,” in which he was a general gathering information from a spying Stephen Collins (NBC, 1977), and “Evening in Byzantium” (1978), one of the first syndicated TV movies. But Edwards found himself less in demand in the 80s. An old friend, manager-producer Jay Bernstein, hired Edwards to co-star in the 1986 TV movie “The Return of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer” and Edwards went on to direct episodes of the “Mike Hammer” series for CBS as well as episodes of “Fantasy Island,” “Police Story,” and “In The Heat of the Night.” In 1988, he made the syndicated TV movie “The Return of Ben Casey,” playing the stalwart doctor as having been in Vietnam, married and divorced. He died of pancreatic cancer in Los Angeles on March 13,

The above TCM overview can be accessed online here.

William Eythe had a rather short career as a leading man in Hollywood films of the 1940’s. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1918. His first film was “The Ox-Bow Incident” in 1943 with Henry Fonda and Dana Andrews. He then starred opposite Jennifer Jones in the hughly popular “Song of Bernadette”. His other films of note include the excellent film noir “The House on 92nd Street” and “Meet Me at Dawn”. In 1947 he returned to the stage and died in 1957 at the age of 38.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

He had the requisite charm and dark, thick-browed good-looks of a Tyrone Power that often spelled “film stardom” but it was not to be in the case of actor William Eythe. Spotted for Hollywood while performing on Broadway, he made nary a dent when he finally transferred his skills to film and is little remembered today. Outgoing in real life, he never found his full range in film and a certain staidness behind the charm and good looks prohibited him from standing out among the other high-ranking leading men. Like Power, his untimely death robbed filmgoers of seeing what kind of a character actor he might have made.

Born William John Joseph Eythe on April 7, 1918, in a small dairy town near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he was the son of a contractor. Developing an early interest in theatrics after appearing in an elementary school play, he put on his own shows as an amateur producer/director. Following high school he applied to the School of Drama at Carnegie Tech where he initially focused on set design and costuming due to a stammering problem (it was corrected while there). He also produced some of the school’s musicals in which he also wrote the songs. Graduating from college in 1941, he began leaning towards a professional music theater and started involving himself in musicals and revues in the Pittsburgh era. He appeared in various stock shows in other states as well, including the “borscht circuit”, while radio work in the form of announcing came his way. Following a failed attempt at forming his own stock company, he was discovered by a 20th Century-Fox talent scout while performing impressively on Broadway in “The Moon Is Down” and moved west when the show closed in the summer of ’42.

Benefiting from the fact that many major Hollywood male stars were actively serving in WWII, Eythe. who had “4-F status, was handed an enviable film debut as the wavering son of a lynch mob member in the superb The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). More quality films ensued with The Song of Bernadette (1943) and Wilson (1944) although he didn’t have much of a chance to shine. He received his best Hollywood top-lining assignments as the rural WWII soldier who has telepathic capabilities in The Eve of St. Mark (1944) and as a German-American double agent in the taut espionage drama The House on 92nd Street(1945). When Fox star Tyrone Power turned down the lead role opposite Tallulah Bankhead in the plush costumer A Royal Scandal (1945), Eythe inherited the part. Naturally Tallulah’s histrionics dominated the proceedings and Eythe, though sincere and quite photogenic, was completely overlooked. This happened in other movies as well, and while he was a talented singer/dancer, the only musical film he ever appeared in required minor singing in Centennial Summer (1946). Adding insult to injury, he was dubbed.

Eythe never conformed easily to the strictest of rules that studio head Darryl F. Zanuckimposed and it proved a detriment to his career in the long run. He was either suspended or (in one case) farmed out to England to do a “B” film as punishment for his rebellious nature. A close “friendship” with fellow actor Lon McCallister had to be carefully dampened, and, out of concern, an impulsive marriage in 1947 to socialite and Fox starlet Buff Cobb was the result. It may have ended rumors for a spell but, not unsurprisingly, the couple divorced a little over a year later. Ms. Cobb later married veteran TV newsman Mike Wallace.

In the post-war years, Fox began to lose interest and Eythe was seen with less frequency. He flatlined film-wise in his last two “C” movies that were made by other studios: Special Agent (1949) and Customs Agent (1950). To compensate for the waning of interest, he formed his own production company and appeared on stage in such fare as “The Glass Menagerie” in the showy role of son Tom. He also enjoyed seeing one of his early revues, “Lend an Ear”, revamped by Charles Gaynor and given a Broadway run in 1948. Eythe was one of the show’s producers and singing stars. The musical is best remembered for putting co-star Carol Channing on the map. In addition, Eythe replaced baritone Alfred Drake in “The Liar” a couple of years later. In 1956 he and McAllister, along with Huntington Hartford, produced a musical revue with the hopes of it reaching Broadway but it closed in Chicago. Uninspired TV work did little to alter his decline.

Depression eventually set in and he turned heavily to drink with an unfortunate series of tabloid-making arrests resulting. His health in rapid deterioration, he was rushed to a Los Angeles hospital one day for treatment of acute hepatitis and died ten days later, at age 38, on January 26, 1957. For someone so promising, his untimely death merely left another tainted impression of the downside to Hollywood stardom.

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

Burl Ives was a wonderful folk singer. Two of his songs, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “The Old Woman Who Swallowed the Fly” have become children favourites. He was too a very effective actor who won an Academy Award for his performance in “The Big Country” in 1958. He was born in 1909 in Hunt City in Illinois. He had developed a neat reputation as a singer when he made his first film “Smoky” in 1946. His major films include “East of Eden”, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”. “Let No Man Write My Epitaph”, “The Spiral Road” and “Summer Magic”. He died in 1995 at the age of 85.

David Shipman’s obituary of Burl Ives in “The Independent”:

n 1938 20th Century-Fox had a success with the tale of two feuding families of racehorse owners, Kentucky, one of the few Technicolor films of the time to find wide popularity. Fox liked horse stories in colour and after the success of My Friend Flicka (1943) began to churn them out. One of the 1946 entries, Smoky, has a special credit, “And introducing the Singing Troubadour Burl Ives”: there he is, strumming away on his guitar, cheerfully singing his hits to chums round a Fordian campfire – “The Streets of Laredo”, “I Wish I Was An Apple Tree”, “The Foggy Foggy Dew”, and “The Blue Tail Fly” (“Jimmie Crack Corn”).

The voice was high, reedy, but warm and mellow, caressing the often nonsensical lyrics as intimately as anyone approaching the wit of Lorenz Hart or Cole Porter. Ives seldom sang songs of their quality, but like all the great singers he resembled no one but himself.

A former professional footballer and itinerant worker, Ives was fascinated by folk-songs, researching them and singing them for records, radio and night-clubs. The ballads in Smoky were not unknown in Britain but, since the film hardly started a stampede to the box-office, Ives’s recordings took a while to get off the ground here. In particular, “The Blue Tail Fly” and “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” became popular in the mid-Fifties – while Ives was simultaneously making a career as a character actor in movies.

His identification with folk singing began after he had been in show business for some time. In Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys From Syracuse (1938) he had a small part as tailor’s apprentice, and during the Second World War he sang “God Bless America” and Irving Berlin songs in the touring company of This is the Army. In 1944 he was invited to appear at the Village Vanguard, a night-club frequented by middle-class intellectuals. It had just had a great success with a satirical group, “The Revuers”, whom we know as Judy Holliday, Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Rather than trying to find similar acts, the Vanguard followed with Ives, Josh White, Richard Dyer-Bennett and other folk-singers: and it could be argued that the smart people of Manhattan were looking for the sort of Americana with which they were not familiar.

Certainly these performers all moved uptown to the Blue Angel, the watering- place for caf society in the late 1940s. In the meantime Ives was cast in a Broadway show, Sing Out, Sweet Land (1946), a celebration of old and/or patriotic songs to reflect the post-war mood – and the more folksy ones appealed to Fox, who invited Ives to reprise some of his in order to liven up its otherwise mundane horse opera.

He returned to the studio to help out another of this seemingly interminable series, Green Grass of Wyoming (1948), after which Walt Disney chose him to play kindly Uncle Hiram in So Dear to My Heart (1949), based on Sterling North’s novel Midnight and Jeremiah, about a boy who adopts a black sheep. Disney’s child star, Bobby Driscoll (later to die an anonymous drug addict in an untenanted building), was Jeremiah, while as his granny Beulah Bondi was as sympathetic as Ives – who sang a ditty based on a folk-song, “Lavender Blue”, which brought an Academy Award nomination for its two adaptors.

Ives did not restrict himself to old songs, but chose many, such as “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, which suited his avuncular down-home image. It was not entirely in keeping with the private Ives.

Sing Out, Sweet Land was the first production directed by the drama critic Walter Kerr, who in his inexperience called in Elia Kazan for assistance. Kazan, who enjoyed Ives’s larger-than-life personality, nevertheless recalled seeing him “drunk one night, macho and rampant, aroused to a point where he was looking for a fight, anywhere and with anybody. He was a formidable man, with a frightening temper; he evoked respect for his violence. Late one night, soused again, he reversed his emotion and I was afraid that he was about to throw himself out of a window.”

Ives, whose left-wing views were well-known, gave evidence to the committee at the McCarthy hearings – as did Kazan, Budd Shulberg and others, though only Kazan was to remain in contumely for a long time. He was also the most famous of those who confessed and continued to work; Ives’s budding film career was blighted till Kazan chose him to play the tough but understanding sheriff who takes James Dean under his wing in East of Eden (1955); then, remembering his ferocity and contempt for good manners, he cast him as the red-necked bullying Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

It was a bravura role with a pages-long tirade, and Williams wasn’t sure that Ives could do it, but Kazan knew that he could – “straight out: that was where he had the confidence born of his concert experience, that was the style of performing that he – and I – enjoyed.” Williams, who had based the role on his own father, told Ives that “on opening night he sat in the 14th row and saw Cornelius Williams”.

The role revitalised Ives’s career. He was offered night-club engagements in the sort of territory then unknown for folk-singers, Las Vegas – though by now he was less of a folk archivist than an entertainer courting the widest popular public. He returned to films in star roles, all based to an extent on Big Daddy, beginning with the ruthless and monomaniacal company president in a Robert Taylor vehicle, The Power and the Prize (1956). He was top-billed as the renegade leader of the Swamp Angels in Wind across the Everglades (1958), directed by Nicholas Ray and produced and written by Budd Shulberg. Admittedly his co-stars, Christopher Plummer and Gypsy Rose Lee, were not household names; and he was billed after Sophia Loren and Anthony Perkins in Delbert Mann’s version of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms. Since Loren, as the new wife, and Perkins, as the son who cuckolds him, were both miscast, Ives seems to have hoped to get through the ordeal with one hangdog expression.

Although Kazan chose not to direct the film of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – Richard Brooks did – Ives was the only possible choice for Big Daddy, but he was not nominated for an Oscar because MGM insisted that he should be shortlisted for Best Actor. More realistically, United Artists put him up for a Best Supporting Oscar in William Wyler’s The Big Country, in which he played a white-trash land baron at war with the more likeable Charles Bickford. When he won that Oscar the Hollywood Reporter somewhat cruelly referred to the film as “Big Daddy Goes West”. He was a mysterious refugee from Hitler in Our Man in Havana (1959), directed by Carol Reed from a Graham Greene screenplay (from his own novel), which with those two films is the highwater mark of Ives’s career.

Burl Ives was equally convincing whether nice or nasty, but both his rotund figure and his age – not to mention an unkempt goatee – fitted him only for character roles. Those assigned him in later movies were not distinguished, and he was better served by films and mini-series made for television. Ill-health had prevented him from working in recent years.

Although not to everybody’s taste, the pretty modern ditties he recorded should be around for a while yet. He had a hit parade entry in the early Sixties with “Itty Bitty Tear” and again with “The Ugly Bug Ball”, which he had sung in his role of the postmaster in Summer Magic (1963), based on Mother Carey’s Chickens by Kate Douglas Wiggins. The song was written by Richard and Robert Sherman, then warming up for Mary Poppins. The film brought Ives’s career full circle, for the lead was played by the only other genuine Disney child star – apart from Master Driscoll – Hayley Mills.

David Shipman

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