Joan Lorring was born in 1926 in Hong Kong. She made her film debut in “Song of Russia” in 1944. She was Oscar nominated for her role in “The Corn Is Green” with Bette Davis and Mildred Dunnock. Other films incliude “The Bridge of San Luis Rey”, “Three Strangers”and “The Lost Moment”.
Her IMDB entry by Gary Brumburgh:
Joan Lorring was born Mary Magdalene Ellis in Hong Kong on April 17, 1926. She was forced to leave her native country after the outbreak of WWII and, along with her family, arrived in America as a teenager in 1939. After finding radio work in Los Angeles, the Anglo-Russian actress worked her way into films making a minor debut at age 18 in the romantic war drama Song of Russia (1944) and subsequently played the small part of Pepita in the ensemble suspenser The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944).
The following year Joan won the coveted role of the scheming, trampish Bessie oppositeBette Davis in The Corn Is Green (1945), earning a Academy Award nomination for “best supporting actress” in the process. She may have lost the Oscar trophy that year to Anne Revere for National Velvet (1944) but Warner Brothers Studio was more than impressed with the up-and-comer and eagerly signed her up. Joan proved quite able in a number of juicy film noir parts, including Three Strangers (1946) and The Verdict (1946), both opposite the malevolent pairing of Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre.
Unexplicably her film career went into a rapid decline by the end of the decade. As a result she sought work elsewhere and maintained with stage, radio and small screen endeavors into the next decade. On Broadway she made her debut in the prime role of budding college student Marie who sets off the explosive dramatic action in “Come Back, Little Sheba” (1950) starring Shirley Booth and Sidney Blackmer. She continued with strong roles in “The Autumn Garden” (1951), “Dead Pigeon” (1953) and “A Clearing in the Woods” (1957). _Among her many 1950s dramatic showcases on TV was her portrayal of convicted ax-murderess Lizzie Borden’s sister Emma on an Alfred Hitchcock episode. In the 1970s, Joan made a mini comeback in the Burt Lancaster movie The Midnight Man(1974) as Cameron Mitchell‘s wife. She also performed on radio soap operas and appeared for a season on the TV soap Ryan’s Hope (1975) before phasing out her career once again. Long married to New York endocrinologist Dr. Martin Sonenberg, she is the mother of two daughters.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
“LA Times” obituary from May 2014:
Joan Lorring, 88, who was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in the 1945 Bette Davis film “The Corn Is Green,” died Friday, said her daughter, Andrea Sonenberg. Lorring had been ill and died in a hospital in the New York City suburb of Sleepy Hollow.
Davis chose Lorring for the role of the scheming Bessie Watty in the late-19th century drama after reviewing screen tests of several actresses, according to the website of cable channel Turner Classic Movies. It was only the third film for Lorring.
Although Davis was known to speak her mind forceably on movie sets, Lorring said the star was greatly supportive of her. “I have only had one or two teachers in my life about whom I felt as strongly and positively as I did about Bette Davis,” Lorring said, according to the Turner Classic Movie website. Lorring lost the Academy Award for supporting actress to Anne Revere, who was in “National Velvet.”
Lorring went on to juicy parts in “Three Strangers” (1946) and “The Verdict” (1946), both opposite Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, and she was in the 1951 film noir “The Big Night” directed by Joseph Losey.
She had numerous roles in early television series while also appearing on stage. In 1950, Lorring made her Broadway debut in the William Inge drama “Come Back, Little Sheba.” “As the blond and self-centered college girl,” New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson wrote in his review, “Joan Lorring gives a genuine and attractive performance.”
Lorring appeared on TV only a few times in the 1960s and 1970s but returned to play a role in the soap opera “Ryan’s Hope” in 1979. Her final credit was for a 1980 episode of “The Love Boat.”
She was born Madeline Ellis on April 17, 1926, in Hong Kong and moved to the U.S. in 1939. She was married to prominent endocrinologist Martin Sonenberg, who preceded her in death in 2011.
In addition to her daughter Andrea Sonenberg, she is survived by daughter Santha Sonenberg and two grandchildren.
Barbara Rush was born in 1927 in Denver, Colorado. She made her screen debut with “The Goldbergs” in 1951. She starred among the major actors of the 1950’s including Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, James Mason, Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis. Her film credits include “When Worlds Collide”, “Bigger Than Life” in 1956, “The Bramble Bush” and “Hombre” in 1967. Recently she appeared as Stephen Collin#s mother in the very popular TV series “7th Heaven”. Barbara Rush died aged 97 in 2024
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
The epitome of poise, charm, style and grace, beautiful brunette Barbara Rush was born in Denver, Colorado in 1927 and enrolled at the University of California before working with the University Players and taking acting classes at the Pasadena Playhouse. It didn’t take long for talent scouts to spot her and, following a play performance, Paramount quickly signed her up in 1950, making her debut with The Goldbergs (1950). Just prior to this, she had met fellow actor Jeffrey Hunter, an incredibly handsome newcomer who would later become a “beefcake” bobbysoxer idol over at Fox. The two fell in love quickly and married in December of 1950. Soon, they were on their way to becoming one of Hollywood’s most beautiful and photogenic young couples. Their son Christopher was born in 1952.
Despite the “A” list movies Barbara was piling up, the one single role that could put her over the top never showed its face. By the early 60s, her film career started to decline. She married publicist Warren Cowan in 1959 and bore a second child, Claudia Cowan, in 1964. TV became a viable source of income for Barbara, appearing in scores of guest parts on the more popular shows of the time (Peyton Place (1964), Medical Center(1969), Ironside (1967)) while co-starring in standard mini-movie dramas. She even had a bit of fun playing a “guest villainess” on the Batman (1966) series as temptress “Nora Clavicle”. The stage also became a strong focus for Barbara, earning the Sarah Siddons Award for her starring role in “Forty Carats”. She made her Broadway debut in the one-woman 1980s showcase “A Woman of Independent Means”, which also subsequently earned her the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award during its tour. Other showcases included “Private Lives”, “Same Time, Next Year”, “The Night of the Iguana” and “Steel Magnolias”. The still-beautiful Ms. Rush occasionally graces the big and small screen these days, more recently in a recurring role on TV’s 7th Heaven (1996).
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
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TCM overview:
An attractive leading lady often cast in well-bred roles, Barbara Rush entered films at the tail end of the studio system, making her debut in a small role in “Molly” (1950), based on the popular radio show “The Goldbergs”. She went on to play leading ladies in some top pictures, but appeared in numerous forgettable ones before breaking into TV in the 1960s. Although Rush won her first leading roles in such Paramount films as “The First Legion” (1951), she is probably better remembered as Joan, the woman who loves Paul Newman even after he chooses a job over her hand in marriage, in “The Young Philadelphians” (1959), and opposite Frank Sinatra in “Come Blow Your Horn” (1963). She also had key roles in “The Young Lions” (1958), “The Man” (1972), and an amusing supporting role in “Can’t Stop the Music” (1980).
Rush first worked as a series regular playing a Washington newspaper correspondent in “Saints and Sinners” (NBC, 1962). She garnered some notice for her season-long (1968-69) stint as Marcia Russell on ABC’s primetime soap “Peyton Place”. Rush then tried her hand at comedy, portraying a temperamental soap opera star on “The New Dick Van Dyke Show” (CBS, 1973-74). In the early 80s, it was back to the real thing as the matriarch Eudora Weldon on NBC’s “Flamingo Road” (1981-82) and a brief turn on ABC’s daytime staple “All My Children”.
Approaching the age when actresses find roles difficult to land, Rush stayed active on stage appearing throughout the USA in such fluff as “Forty Carats” and “Same Time, Next Year”. She commissioned and earned rave reviews in the solo theatrical piece “A Woman of Independent Means”, based on the novel by Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey in New York and Los Angeles. More recently, Rush returned to the small screen appearing in the recurring role of Stephen Collins’ mother in “7th Heaven” (The WB
Barbara Rush died aged 97 in 2024
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Ty Hardin was a big television star playing the title character in the hit western series Bronco and so was not too keen on the idea of appearing in a low-budget Italian movie. Instead, the role went to the star of another TV western series, and while A Fistful of Dollars helped to transform Clint Eastwood into a Hollywood superstar, Hardin gradually slipped into obscurity via a Spanish prison cell and an unfulfilled attempt to become president of the US.
The actor, who was also mixed up in Christian fundamentalism and right-wing politics, had no regrets about turning down the landmark spaghetti western. “I didn’t like the film,” he said. “I’m not much [keen] on promoting the use of bad language, excess violence and total neglect [of] our judicial system of checks and balances — bad images for our kids and my Baptist grandmother would turn over in her grave.”
Ty Hardin appeared with Diana Dors in Berserk! (1967). He was married eight timesMOVIESTORE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
He did eventually jump on the bandwagon, but Savage Pampas (1966) did not exactly replicate the success of Eastwood’s breakthrough movie. And, to make matters worse, filming commitments in Europe meant that Hardin missed out on the chance to play Batman in what became one of the big hits of American television in the 1960s.
A descendant of William Whipple, one of the signatories of the American Declaration of Independence, Hardin was born as Orison Whipple Hungerford Jr in New York City on New Year’s Day 1930. His parents separated when he was an infant and he grew up on his grandparents’ farm in Texas.
He acquired the nickname Ty from his grandmother, who said that he was like “a Texas typhoon coming through the house”. He had behavioural problems and was sent to military school, ran away and was reunited with his mother in Houston.
In a 1958 publicity portrait for BroncoWARNER BROTHERS TELEVISION/ GETTY IMAGES
He went to college on a football scholarship, served in the US army as a pilot in West Germany, studied electrical engineering back in Texas and took a job with Douglas Aircraft in California. He was spotted by a talent scout while shopping for a Hallowe’en costume and invited to take a screen test with Paramount Pictures, which led to a seven-year contract with a starting salary twice that of his engineer’s pay. Over the next few years he appeared in a wide variety of films, including I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), under the name Ty Hungerford.
The strong-jawed Hardin looked like a classic Wild West hero: he could rope and ride, and he hoped to get a part in the western Rio Bravo. Although he was unsuccessful, its star John Wayne introduced him to William T Orr at Warner Bros Television. It was the heyday of the television western series, including Cheyenne with Clint Walker. When Walker fell out with Warner Bros over his contract, the studio was left with a hit show with no star.
Orr bought out Hungerford’s contract with Paramount, changed his name to Hardin — after the outlaw John Wesley Hardin — and cast him in Cheyenne as Bronco Layne, a taciturn former Confederate officer drifting through various adventures and jobs, including deputy US marshal, undercover agent, wagon train boss and ranch hand. When Walker returned to Cheyenne, Warners rebranded Layne’s adventures as Bronco. Between 1958 and 1962 Hardin appeared in 68 episodes, rubbing shoulders with Wild West legends such as Jesse James and Billy the Kid.
Hardin appeared with Jeff Chandler in Merrill’s Marauders (1962). He also had roles in Battle of the Bulge (1965) and Berserk! (1967) with Diana Dors before pursuing his career in Europe and Australia, where he took the role of an American running a charter boat operation in the series Riptide (1969).
Merrill’s Marauders, poster, US poster art, bottom left: Ty Hardin, Jeff Chandler, (above Ty Hardin), 1962. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Irene Tsu was born in 1943 in Shangai in China. She was raised in San Francisco. She was a featured dancer in the film “Flower Drum Song” in 1961. Her other films include “Take Her, She’s Mine” with James Stewart and Sandra Dee, “Paradise Hawaiian Style” with Elvis Presley and “The Green Berets” with John Wayne.
TCM Overview:
Irene Tsu was an actress who was no stranger to being featured in numerous film roles throughout her Hollywood career. Early on in her acting career, Irene Tsu landed roles in various films, including the Jack Lemmon comedy adaptation “Under the Yum Yum Tree” (1963), the James Stewart comedic adaptation “Take Her, She’s Mine” (1963) and the Shirley MacLaine comedy “John Goldfarb, Please Come Home” (1964). She also appeared in “Seven Women” (1965), the Annette Funicello comedy “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini” (1965) and the Elvis Presley musical “Paradise Hawaiian Style” (1966). Her film career continued throughout the seventies and the eighties in productions like “Hot Potato” (1975) with Jim Kelly, “Paper Tiger” (1975) and “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” (1986). She held additional roles in television including a part on “The Single Guy” (NBC, 1995-97). She also was featured in the TV movies “Widow’s Kiss” (HBO, 1995-96) and “Tell Me No Secrets” (ABC, 1996-97). Most recently, Irene Tsu acted on “Law & Order: LA” (NBC, 2010-11).
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
For article on Irene Tsu by in Cinema Retro Tom Lisanti, please click here.
Beatrice Straight obituary in “The Telegraph” in 2001.
Beatrice Straight was born in Old Westbury, New York in 1914 into a wealthy family. She made her Broadway debut in 1939 in the play “Possessed”. Most of her career was spent on stage and television with only sporodic film appearances. Her film debut was in 1952 in “Phone Call from a Stranger”. She was excellent as the Mother Superior in “The Nun’s Story” in 1959. She won an Acadmey Award for her performance opposite William Holden in “Network”. She is also remembered for her role as Lynda Carter’s mother in “Wonder Woman” on television. Beatrice Straight was married to the actor Peter Cookson. She died in 2001 at the age of 86 in Los Angeles.
Her obituary from the “Telegraph”:
BEATRICE STRAIGHT, who has died in Los Angeles aged 86, won an Academy Award for best supporting actress for her portrayal of William Holden’s long suffering wife in Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976). The film tells the story of a network news commentator who starts to speak his mind on live television, and gave Americans the catchphrase “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more!”. Beatrice Straight’s role of a wife struggling to keep her sanity after being left for a younger woman was one of her most high-profile Hollywood performances: she later said that “nobody knew from where I came before Network, and afterwards few cared where I went”. Her other film roles included Dr Lesh, the investigator of the paranormal in Poltergeist (1982) and Mother Christophe in The Nun’s Story (1959), with Audrey Hepburn.
Beatrice Whitney Straight was born on August 2 1914 at Old Westbury, Long Island, New York. Her father was a diplomat, while her mother was a Whitney dynasty heiress and cousin to Gloria Vanderbilt. Beatrice Straight was sent to private schools in England and Scotland, and retained a fondness for Britain. She decided early on to pursue a career in acting and had a string of excellent teachers, including Michael Chekhov. She made her Broadway debut in 1935 in Bitter Oleander. Beatrice Straight’s portrayal of Lady Macduff in Macbeth (1945) was described by one critic as “As good as it gets.” After this, she was the lead in The Heiress; her co-star was the actor Peter Cookson, whom she later married. In 1953, Beatrice Straight was awarded a Tony for best supporting actress for her portrayal of a Puritan accused of witchcraft in the original Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
But she soon felt that “Hollywood was where it was at” and she and Cookson decided to try their luck there. She later remarked: “Marriage to actors seldom work as one partner often gets jealous of the roles given to the other and vice versa. Neither one of us were big stars so that helped.” Beatrice Straight’s first part was in Phone Call from a Stranger (1952), which starred Bette Davis. There followed television roles in Love of Life, a long-running soap opera, and as Cynthia Fortman in Special Delivery, part of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series. Other roles during the 1950s included Goneril in an ABC adaptation of King Lear (1953) and parts in the 1956 films Patterns and The Silken Affair, with David Niven. During the 1960s, Beatrice Straight concentrated on her family, but appeared in The Young Lovers (1964) and gave a wonderfully over-the-top performance as Dr Martha Richards in the television series Mission Impossible (1966). Beatrice Straight won a legion of fans with appearances as the “Queen Mother” in the wildly camp series Wonder Woman in 1976. The next year she helped to found an acting school in New York, where she and Cookson lectured between filming. Most of Beatrice Straight’s roles during the 1970s were on television; she received an Emmy nomination for her role as the matriarch in the mini-series The Dain Curse (1978).
In 1985, she played Rose Kennedy in Robert Kennedy & His Times, and had a long-running stint in St Elsewhere. Her final role was as Goldie Hawn’s mother in Deceived (1991). She married, in 1949, Peter Cookson; he died in 1990. They had one son.
A classically trained actress with extensive stage experience, Beatrice Straight made her mark on film late in her career, but did so with indelible performances that made the most of her keen intelligence and aristocratic manner. A member of the now legendary Group Theater from its inception, Straight won a Tony award for Best Actress in 1953 for her performance as Elizabeth Proctor in “The Crucible.” She also worked frequently in television, beginning in the medium’s early live broadcast era and appearing consistently in TV movies and series until the end of the 1980s. She had appeared in just four feature films before she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Louis Schumacher in Sydney Lumet’s “Network” (1975). Straight held the record for the briefest performance to win an Oscar – a scant five minutes and 40 seconds of screen time. Regardless, in a dazzling display of acting prowess, Straight portrayed the full gamut of the devastated Schumacher’s emotions in a single, intense scene in which her husband, (William Holden), confesses to an affair. The Oscar win brought Straight greater recognition, but also typecast the versatile actress for the first time in her career. From that point, she predominantly played severe matriarchal roles, such as the brittle Dr. Lesh in “Poltergeist” (1982). Having honed her craft in a long and celebrated stage career, Beatrice Straight established a remarkable screen presence as a character actress with finely drawn performances that were as powerful as they were rare.
Beatrice Whitney Straight was born on Aug. 2, 1914 in Old Westbury, NY, the daughter of investment banker Willard Dickerman, a business associate of J.P. Morgan who provided the initial financing for the long-running political magazine The New Republic, and Dorothy Payne, whose family was one of New York’s wealthiest and most socially prestigious. When Dickerman died of influenza on the front lines of WWI, her mother married English agronomist Leonard Elmhirst and raised Straight in both London and New York. An early interest in theater led to extensive acting training with legendary teachers including Michael Chekov, and the Group Theater’s Robert Lewis. Straight was a member of the Group Theater from its founding, and her classmates included Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Patricia O’Neal. She made her first appearance on Broadway at the age of 21 in the 1935 production of “Bitter Oleander,” and over the following two decades she rose to the top of her profession with a series of critically-acclaimed performances, including Lady MacDuff in Michael Redgrave’s 1948 production of “MacBeth,” and steadfast puritan Elizabeth Proctor in the 1953 production of “The Crucible,” for which she won a Tony award for Best Actress. Straight began acting in television in the medium’s early live days on such series as “Somerset Maugham Theater” (CBS, 1950-51; NBC, 1951) and “Lights Out” (NBC, 1946-1952). In 1952, she also broke into feature films playing a devoted widow mourning Michael Rennie in “Phone Call from a Stranger.”
Straight worked almost constantly on television throughout the 1950s and ’60s in seminal series like “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” (CBS, 1955-1960; NBC, 1960-62), “Route 66” (CBS, 1960-64) and “Mission: Impossible” (CBS, 1966-1973), as well as in the 1953 broadcast of “King Lear” starring Orson Welles (CBS). Her work in film was more sporadic, however. Despite the positive reception of her performance in “Phone Call from a Stranger,” it was four years before she would appear on the big screen again. “Patterns” (1956), starring Van Heflin and written by Rod Serling, featured Straight as young engineer Heflin’s worried wife. That same year, she also appeared in “The Silken Affair” (1956), a lackluster British comedy starring David Niven. It was another three years before she appeared as Mother Christophe in “The Nun’s Story” (1959), starring Audrey Hepburn. The latter film was nominated for eight Academy Awards including Best Picture, but there would be another long absence from the movies before Straight returned in “The Young Lovers” (1964), starring Peter Fonda, and another eight before she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in “Network” (1976). It was the briefest performance to ever win an Oscar, with just under six minutes of screen time, but the economy of the performance was perhaps its greatest strength, showcasing Straight’s startlingly genuine spectrum of emotions in a single scene in which her husband, played by William Holden, confesses to an affair with a younger woman.
By John CryeThe above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Having garnered popular attention after such a long and varied career, the then 62-year-old Straight found herself typecast for the first time, playing imperious, often emotionally brittle older women. She had embodied that type on television on “The New Adventures of Wonder Woman” (NBC, 1975-79) playing the Queen Mother of the Amazons, and in her first starring role in a television series, playing the matriarch of a wealthy California family on the short-lived “King’s Crossing” (ABC, 1982). She also began to accept more roles in film, though her selection of material was strictly limited by her desire to work solely with producers, directors, and actors of the highest caliber. “The Formula” (1980) starring George C. Scott and Marlon Brando, Franco Zeffirelli’s “Endless Love” (1981) and Sydney Lumet’s “Power” (1981) were among the few to satisfy Straight’s stringent criteria. Easily her best-known role from that later period was the prickly but comforting paranormal investigator Dr. Lesh in the Steven Spielberg-produced horror film “Poltergeist” (1982). In 1985, she delivered a powerful performance as another imperious matriarch, Rose Kennedy, in the miniseries “Robert Kennedy and His Times” (CBS, 1985). After a final feature appearance playing Goldie Hawn’s mother in the psychological thriller “Deceived” (1991), Straight retired from acting at the age of 77. She died on April 7, 2001 in Los Angeles from pneumonia, following a period of declining health due to Alzheimer’s disease.
The seductive brunette Elaine Stewart, who has died aged 81, may have lacked that ineffable essence that makes up star quality, but she had enough allure to attract attention in several glossy Hollywood movies in the 1950s, both in leading parts and noteworthy supporting roles. Among the best of the latter were her brief though memorable appearances in two films directed by Vincente Minnelli.
She was both bad and beautiful in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) as Lila, a wannabe film star, hoping to make it by sleeping with Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas), the studio head. When told that Shields is a great man, Lila responds, “There are no great men, buster. There’s only men.” The scene which lingers most in the mind is when Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner), who has just triumphed in a Shields movie, leaves a party to be with him at his Hollywood mansion. While she is embracing Shields, Lila’s shadow looms over them. Then Georgia notices Lila at the top of the stairs, barefoot, wearing a slinky dress, a martini glass in hand. “I thought you said you were going to get rid of her quick,” says Lila. “The picture’s finished, Georgia. You’re business, I’m company.”
Her sequence in Brigadoon (1954) begins with a violent cut from the picturesque Scottish village in the Highlands to a bustling Manhattan bar where Stewart, as Gene Kelly’s Park Avenue fiancee, is chatting away about the wedding and shopping. Kelly, whose inner ear is listening to the music to which he had danced with a Scottish lass (Cyd Charisse), doesn’t hear a word the self-absorbed Stewart is saying. A stark contrast is created between the two women: the dream girl and the real thing. Ironically, unlike Kelly, Minnelli was pleased to get away from the feyness and painted scenery of the wilds of Scotland to revel in the noisy bar where the metropolitan Stewart is quite at home.
She was born Elsy Steinberg in New Jersey, one of five children of German-Jewish parents. After a few jobs, she was taken on in her late teens by the Conover modelling agency in New York, which worked with the leading magazines of the day. She was soon getting photo layouts, one of which caught the eye of producer Hal B Wallis at Paramount, who cast her as a sexy navy nurse in the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis comedy Sailor Beware (1952). Stewart made the most of her one scene when she brushes off a pass by Martin, who is told, “When it comes to sailors, she’s colder than a deep freeze.” However, a few minutes later she is seen, to Martin’s astonishment, to be kissing Lewis.
The sequence was enough to land her an MGM contract, and she was offered a few decorative bit parts, culminating in The Bad and the Beautiful. In 1953, she got leading roles opposite Mickey Rooney (A Slight Case of Larceny), Ralph Meeker (Code Two) and Richard Widmark (Take the High Ground!). She is touching in the last of these, her meatiest role, as a neurotic war widow who comes between army sergeants played by Widmark and Karl Malden.
In a very full year, Stewart was also seen losing her head as Anne Boleyn in Young Bess, and was the subject of a Life magazine cover story entitled Budding Starlet Visits the Folks in Jersey. Despite the fact that Stewart had passed the “budding starlet” phase, it was typical of the way she was often characterised.
In 1954, on loan from MGM, she starred in The Adventures of Hajji Baba, a piece of Hollywood exotica, playing, rather more erratically than erotically, an oriental princess being escorted across the desert by John Derek (in the title role) to marry a powerful prince. When told she is extremely innocent, the 24-year-old Stewart replies, “Whose fault is that? Here I am 17 and unwedded. My sisters and cousins were married at 14! I have wasted three years and I will waste no more!”
Having lost a role in The Opposite Sex (1956) to Joan Collins, Stewart left MGM to take on a two-picture deal with Universal, who changed her hair colour to quicksilver blonde. As she told a fan magazine, “To go with my hair, all my jewellery is silver. I have a new silver Mercedes to drive and a silver poodle named Clicquot. I use silver nail polish and eat off silver dishes. And I sleep in a silver bed.”
In the film noir The Tattered Dress (1957), Stewart is seen in the sensational credit sequence having her dress ripped by her lover, then driving home drunk to her jealous husband. The New York Times’s critic, Bosley Crowther, wrote that “Stewart is provocative enough … to distract an avowed misogynist.” She was a little more restrained in Night Passage (1957), in which she tries to stir up past longings in James Stewart on a mission for her wealthy husband. The best of her last few parts was as a treacherous gangster’s moll in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960), which she made after posing nude for Playboy magazine.
Stewart had a short marriage to the actor Bill Carter and, in 1964, married the television producer Merrill Heatter. She retired for a while to start a family, then made a comeback in the 1970s as a host on two TV gameshows, Gambit and High Rollers, on which her husband was executive producer.
Stewart is survived by Merrill and their son, Stewart, and daughter, Gabrielle.
• Elaine Stewart (Elsy Steinberg), actor; born 31 May 1930; died 27 June 2011
The “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Harve Presnell obituary in “The Guardian” in 2009.
“Guardian” obituary:
The Hollywood musical has produced several powerful, handsome baritones, the best of them being Nelson Eddy, Howard Keel and Harve Presnell. Unfortunately, Presnell, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 75, came into the film musical when it was in a rather moribund state. However, he managed to sustain a singing career in stage musicals, where his rich operatic voice could be appreciated, and later, thanks to the Coen brothers’ Fargo (1996), he had a second coming as an imposing character actor on the big screen.
The dramatic strength and beauty of his voice can best be judged in his first film, The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964), in which he played a backwoods prospector who strikes it rich. The 6ft 4in Presnell had created the role of Johnny “Leadville” Brown in Meredith Willson’s musical on Broadway four years previously, opposite Tammy Grimes in the title role of his wife, who survives the sinking of the Titanic. The film version, in which Debbie Reynolds was his buoyant partner, allowed Presnell to open up his lungs and sing I’ll Never Say No and Colorado My Home against the CinemaScope background of Black Canyon National Park in Colorado. According to the Variety critic: “Harve Presnell … makes a generally auspicious screen debut … His fine, booming voice and physical stature make him a valuable commodity for Hollywood.” This was not to be. Presnell was to make only four more feature films during the next three decades, only two of them musicals.
The Unsinkable Molly Brown, poster, Debbie Reynolds (top left), Harve Presnell (right), 1964. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
He was born in Modesto, California. After graduating from Modesto high school, he studied voice at the University of Southern California, although he first went there on a sports scholarship. After university, he performed with the Roger Wagner Chorale and can be heard as soloist on their Christmas album Joy to the World, as well as on Folk Songs of the New World and Folk Songs of the Frontier. In 1960, he recorded the baritone part in Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy.
Willson had heard Presnell singing at a concert in Berlin and immediately suggested him for the part of Johnny Brown on Broadway. The Unsinkable Molly Brown ran for more than 500 performances, with Presnell gaining glowing reviews. After the successful film adaptation, Presnell, his hair dyed blond, was in the misguided swinging 60s version of George Gershwin’s Girl Crazy, retitled When the Girls Meet the Boys (1965), but he got to sing the evergreen Embraceable You. There were no songs in The Glory Guys (1965), a Cavalry vs Indians western that focused mainly on the rivalry between Captain Tom Tryon and scout Presnell over pretty Senta Berger. The two men have a semi-comic fight on a staircase, finally learning mutual respect. Although Presnell lost the girl, his performance won the most plaudits.
Presnell’s last screen musical was Joshua Logan’s elephantine Paint Your Wagon (1969), in which he was the only true singer: his virile rendition of They Call the Wind Maria shows up the inadequate warbling of Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood and Jean Seberg. After a low-budget horror movie, Blood Bath (1975), Presnell’s film career was on hold until 1996.
In the intervening years, Presnell starred in a number of musicals, including the doomed Gone With the Wind at Drury Lane in 1972, in which he had the dubious privilege of playing Rhett Butler, and a revival of Annie Get Your Gun (1977) in San Francisco opposite Reynolds, formerly his Molly Brown. But his biggest success was as Daddy Warbucks in the long-running Annie, in which he toured from 1979 to 1981, and then took over the role on Broadway for two years. He continued to play Warbucks in Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge, which folded during its Washington tryout, and in another version of the story off-Broadway called Annie Warbucks in 1993. Presnell calculated that he played Little Orphan Annie’s millionaire benefactor more than 2,000 times.
For Presnell, 1996 was an annus mirabilis; he appeared in no less than four feature films, and three television shows, including an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. Most significant was his role as Wade Gufstason in Joel and Ethan Coen’s film Fargo. Presnell, who had a dialogue coach to teach him the Minnesotan accent, played William H Macy’s despotic father-in-law. Now bald and with a considerable girth, Presnell was a long way from the handsome young singer of the early 60s. “He actually did a ‘dancin’ in the snow’ musical number but we cut it out for length,” joked Joel Coen.
His other movies of that year were Larger Than Life, The Whole Wide World and The Chamber, in all of which he used his commanding voice playing authoritarian figures. From then on, in marked contrast to the lean years, Presnell was never short of work, whether guest starring in TV series such as Dawson’s Creek (2001) and Andy Barker P.I. (2007), or appearing as General George Marshall in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), or as a congressman in his last film, Evan Almighty (2007).
Presnell is survived by his second wife, Veeva, and six children, three from each of his marriages.
• Harve (George Harvey) Presnell, actor and singer, born 14 September 1933; died 30 June 2009
Barbara Harris was born in Evanston, Illnois in 1935. She began her career on Broadway. She had a waifish pixie appeal in her initial films. Among her relatively few film credits are “A Thousand Clowns” with Jason Robards Jnr in 1965, “Who Is Harry Kellerman And Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Thinga About Me” with Dustin Hoffman, Robert Altman’s brilliant “Nashville” and Alfred Hitchcock’s final film “Family Plot” in 1976.
TCM Overview:
This charming stage-trained comedy specialist had an intermittent but once beguiling screen career dating back to the mid-1960s. Long a critic’s darling, Harris convinces as scatterbrained characters with endearing child-like qualities. This aptitude made her, for a time, something of a thinking man’s Goldie Hawn. Harris made her film debut as social worker Sandra Markowitz (her real name) in the feature version of Herb Gardner’s play “A Thousand Clowns” (1966). Her performances often garnered far better notices than the films that framed them. Harris’ reprisal of her off-Broadway role as what VARIETY called a “nymphet chippie” in “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad” (1967) was deemed the film’s only saving grace in some circles. As a late arriving love interest of discontented rock star Dustin Hoffman in “Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?” (1971), Harris fared better than the star and received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her efforts. British culture mag TIME OUT deemed the “delightful” Harris “wasted” as the married old flame of lecherous film producer Walter Matthau in a segment of Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite” (1971), but she fared well opposite a cranky Jack Lemmon in the James Thurber-inspired “The War Between Men and Women” (1972).
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
A founding member of Chicago’s celebrated Second City Players in 1960, Harris came with them to appear in “From Second City” on the NY stage. Moving to NYC she established a positive reputation on and off-Broadway before alternating between stage and screen. Harris racked up three Tony nominations, including one for her delightful turn as the daffy heroine of “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever” (1966). She won the 1967 Best Actress in a Musical Play Tony for “The Apple Tree,” in which she played multiple roles opposite Alan Alda and Larry Blyden. Two of her most noteworthy feature credits were in memorable 70s films from divergent auteurs Robert Altman and Alfred Hitchcock: in “Nashville” (1975), Harris was Albuquerque, a housewife whose dream of becoming a country-Western singing star seemingly comes true after an unexpected tragedy; in “Family Plot” (1976), she was a phony but basically benign psychic. Hollywood was less kind for the remainder of the decade.
Harris struggled gamely in the Disney comedies “Freaky Friday” (1976) and “The North Avenue Irregulars” (1979) and won some excellent notices as the frustrated wife of a senator (Alan Alda) in “The Seduction of Joe Tynan” (1979) but by then her star had decisively fallen.
Harris all but disappeared in the 80s, surfacing briefly in Hal Ashby’s disastrous “Second-Hand Hearts” (1980), where even her performance was savaged by reviewers; a bit as Kathleen Turner’s mom in Francis Coppola’s time-traveling “Peggy Sue Got Married” (1986); and a small part as a wealthy traveler conned by a scheming Michael Caine in the comedy “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” (1988). Harris should not be confused with the young character actor of 80s film and TV with the same name.
James Brolin was born in 1940 in Los Angeles. His television debut came in 1961 in an episode of “Bus Stop”. In 1963 he had a small part in the James Stewart film “Take Her, She’s Mine” followed two years later by “Dear Brigitte” which starred Stewart again and Glynis Johns and Fabian. In 1969 he had significant success with the television series “Marcus Welby M.D.” which ran until 1976 and also starred Robert Young. He then starred in some big budget films incuding “Gable and Lombard” with Jill Clayburgh in 1976, “Capricorn One” and “The Amityville Horror” in 1979. He had another television success with “Hotel” from 1983 until 1988. James Brolin had a recurring role in “The West Wing”. He is the father of actor Josh Brolin and husband of Barbra Streisand. Interview with “Huffington Post” here.
“Quinlan’s Movie Stars”: Tall, dark-haired (now gray) American leading man reminscent of Clint Walker. He had trouble getting decent roles in Hollywood until television fame as a junior partner in “Marcus Welby”. His cinema portrait of Clark Gable was not a success and after a couple of box-office hits in the late 1970s he was relegated to tough heroes of minor action films.
TCM Overview:
As the son of James Brolin, stepson of Barbra Streisand and husband of Diane Lane, actor Josh Brolin forged his career in the shadow of three formidable talents. In fact, ever since his debut in “The Goonies” (1985), Brolin languished for years in roles that were well below his station. Adding to his self-determined persona was an ability to get into occasional trouble , whether it was being mauled by a mountain lion, crashing his motorcycle weeks before shooting a major film, or making headlines with an arrest for a domestic dispute Brolin had a knack for generating publicity in interesting ways. Meanwhile, he worked steadily throughout his career, though he suffered a string of mediocre movies that included “The Road Killers” (1994), “The Mod Squad” (1999) and “Hollow Man” (2000). But he began to step away from such lowbrow fare with a turn in Woody Allen’s serio-comedy “Melinda and Melinda” (2005) and eventually broke free with his acclaimed performance in the Oscar-winning “No Country for Old Men” (2007). He played a crooked cop in “American Gangster” (2007), the bumbling President of the United States in “W.” (2008), and San Francisco politician and assassin Dan White in “Milk” (2008). Though he stumbled a bit as the lead in “Jonah Hex” (2010), Brolin rebounded with “True Grit” (2010), proving that his transformation into a highly sought after leading man was no fluke.
