Hollywood Actors Archives

Shirley Temple

Shirley Temple is regarded as the most popular child actress ever on film. Her films during the Depression in the 1930’s provided light relief to a weary public. Maybe we need her again to-day. She was born in 1928 in Santa Monica, California. Among her best remembered films are “Heidi”, “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm”, “Little Miss Broaday” and “A Little Princess”. As she matured she film roles became more infrequent although she was very effective in “Since You Went Away” as one of the daughters of Claudette Colbert on the home front. Jennifer Jones was the other. She also starred in John ord’s “Fort Apache” with Henry Fonda. After retiring from film, she entered the world of politics and joined the Republican party. She served as U.S. Ambassador to Ghana from 1974 until 1976 and Ambassador to Czechoslovakia from 1989 till 1992. She died in 2014.

Her obituary in “The Economist”:

THERE had to be a dark side to Shirley Temple’s life. Biographers and interviewers scrabbled around to find it. The adorable dancing, singing, curly-haired moppet, the world’s top-earning star from 1935 to 1938, surely shed tears once the cameras were off. Her little feet surely ached. Perhaps, like the heroine of “Curly Top”, she was marched upstairs to bed afterwards by some thin-lipped harridan, and the lights turned resolutely off.

Not a bit of it. She loved it all, both then and years later, when the cuteness had gone but the dimples remained. Hadn’t her mother pushed her into it? No, just encouraged her, and wrapped her round with affection, including fixing her 56 ringlets every night and gently making her repeat her next day’s lines until sleep crept up on her. Hadn’t she been punished cruelly while making her “Baby Burlesks”, when she was three? Well, she had been sent several times to the punishment box, which was dark and had only a block of ice to sit on. But that taught her discipline so that, by the age of four, she would “always hit the mark”—and, by the age of six, be able to match the great Bill “Bojangles” Robinson tap-for-tap down the grand staircase in “The Little Colonel”.

To some it seemed a stolen childhood, with eight feature films to her name in 1934, her breakthrough year, alone. Not to her, when Twentieth-Century Fox (born out of struggling Fox Studios that year on her glittering name alone) built her a little bungalow on the lot, with a rabbit pen and a swing in a tree. She had a bodyguard and a secretary, who by 1934 had to answer 4,000 fan-letters a week. But whenever she wanted to be a tomboy, she was. In the presidential garden at Hyde Park she hit Eleanor Roosevelt on the rump with her catapult, for which her father spanked her.

The studios were full of friends: Orson Welles, with whom she played croquet, Gary Cooper, who did colouring with her, and the kind camera crews. She loved the strong hands that passed her round like a mascot, and the soft laps on which she was plumped down (J. Edgar Hoover’s being the softest). The miniature costumes thrilled her, especially her sailor outfit in “Captain January”, in which she could sashay and jump even better; as did her miniature Oscar in 1935, the only one ever awarded to somebody so young. Grouchy Graham Greene mocked her as “a complete totsy”, but no one watching her five different expressions while eating a forkful of spinach in “Poor Little Rich Girl” doubted that she could act. She did pathos and fierce determination (jutting out that little chin!), just as well as she did smiles.

Her face was on the Wheaties box. It was also on the special Wheaties blue bowl and pitcher, greeting people at breakfast like a ray of morning sunshine. Advertisers adored her, from General Electric to Lux soap to Packard cars. After “Stand up and Cheer!” in 1934 dolls appeared wearing her polka-dot dress, and after “Bright Eyes” the music for “The Good Ship Lollipop” was on every piano, as well as everyone’s brains: “Where bon-bons play/ On the sunny beach of Peppermint Bay.”

Her parents did not tell her there was a Depression on. They mentioned only good things to her. Franklin Roosevelt declared more than once that “America’s Little Darling” made the country feel better, and that pleased her, because she loved to make people happy. She had no idea why they should be otherwise. Her films were all about the sweet waif bringing grown-ups back together, emptying misers’ pockets and melting frozen hearts. Like the dog star Rin Tin Tin, to whom she gaily compared herself, she was the bounding, unwitting antidote to the bleakness of the times.

A toss of curls

She was as vague about money as any child would, and should, be. Her earnings by 1935 were more than $1,000 (now $17,000) a week—from which she was allowed about $13 a month in pocket money—and by the end of her career had sailed past $3m (now $29m). But when she found out later that her father had taken bad financial advice, and that only $44,000 was left in the trusts, she did not blame him. She remembered the motto about spilt milk, and got on with her life.

Things appeared to dive sharply after 1939, when her teenage face—the darker, straighter hair, the troubled look—failed to be a box-office draw. She missed the lead in “The Wizard of Oz”, too. She shrugged it off; it meant she could go to a proper school for the first time, at Westlake, which was just as exciting as making movies. By 1950 she had stopped making films altogether; well, it was time. She couldn’t do innocence any more, and that was what the world still wanted. Her first husband was a drunk and a disaster, but the marriage brought her “something beautiful”, her daughter Susan. The second marriage, anyway, lasted 55 years. She lost a race for Congress in 1967: but when that door closed another opened, as an ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia. Breast cancer was a low point, but she learned to cope with it, and helped others to cope. “I don’t like to do negatives,” she told Michael Parkinson. “There are always pluses to things.”

In the films, her sparkling eyes and chubby open arms included everyone; one toss of her shiny curls was an invitation to fun. Her trademark was, it turned out, that rare thing in the world, and rarer still in Hollywood: a genuine smile of delight.

“The Economist” can also be accessed online here.

Yvonne de Carlo was born in Vancouver in 1922. Her real name is the slightly less glamourous Peggy Middleton. She made many popular films in the 1940’s and 1950’s including “Criss Cross”, “Brute Force”, “The Ten Commandments” and “Band of Angels”. In 1964 she was in the hit TV series “The Munsters” as Lily Munster and won a whole new generation of fans. In 1971 she starred on Broadway in the iconic Sondheim show “Follies” along with Alexis Smith and Gene Nelson. She died in 2007.

Her obituary in “The Independent”:

n her first starring role, Yvonne De Carlo was billed as “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World”. In Hollywood biopics, her beauty inspired both Rimsky-Korsakov and Wagner. Although critics of her earlier assembly-line costume extravaganzas dubbed her “Yvonne the Terrible”, the reliable De Carlo worked steadily for the better part of five decades, appearing on the big screen opposite such icons as Bob Hope, Burt Lancaster, Clark Gable, John Wayne and Charlton Heston, on the small screen as the vampiresque Lily in The Munsters and on Broadway in Follies, singing “I’m Still Here”, Stephen Sondheim’s triumphant anthem of showbiz survival, that boasts the line, “Then you career from career to career.”

Who else could have played Lily Munster, Lola Montez, Calamity Jane, Scheherazade, Mary Magdalene and Moses’s wife Sephora?

She was born Margaret Yvonne Middleton in Vancouver, Canada in 1922. She began dancing at an early age and, after moving to the United States, worked as a dancer and movie extra, graduated to short subjects, and finally made her feature-film début at Columbia Picture in Harvard, Here I Come (1942), a low-comedy “B” picture, starring the boxer “Slapsy Maxie” Rosenbloom. Like the film, her role was small, but a contract with Paramount Pictures followed.

Between 1942 and 1944 she acted in no less than 19 films, making subliminal appearances in This Gun For Hire, Let’s Face it, So Proudly We Hail!, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Road to Morocco and a host of forgotten Paramount quickies.

Throughout the Second World War, the Queen of Universal Pictures was Maria Montez, whose ludicrous pieces of Technicolored high camp earned the studio a fortune. In 1945 De Carlo inherited the Montez mantle, beginning with Salome – Where She Danced (1945). She played an exotic dancer who, when knowledge of her espionage activities during the Franco-Prussian War came to light, fled to America. Soon she so dazzled the hard-bitten citizens of Drinkman’s Wells, Arizona, that they changed the name of their town to Salome, Where She Danced. The critic James Agee called the film “The funniest deadpan parody I have ever seen.”

She consolidated her stardom in Frontier Gal (1945), giving an assured comedy performance (in a role turned down by Montez) and singing three songs. Song of Scheherezade (1947) was the film involving dancer De Carlo’s romance with young Russian naval cadet Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (Jean-Pierre Aumont). This outrageous fantasy ended with her dancing the Scheherezade ballet, the music she had inspired, at the St Petersburg Opera House.

Despite strong performances in two Burt Lancaster films, the taut prison drama Brute Force (1947) and the heist thriller Criss Cross (1949), she was mostly cast in such formula westerns as Black Bart (1948, as Lola Montez), Calamity Jane and Sam Bass and The Gal Who Took the West (both 1949), and such formula easterns as The Desert Hawk (1950, as the actual Princess Scheherazade) and Slave Girl (1947), which was so disastrous the desperate studio added a talking camel and other farcical sequences and released it as a satire.

Harold Arlen and Leo Robin wrote the Oscar-nominated “For Every Man There’s a Woman” and other fine songs for Casbah (1948), a musical remake of Algiers, but De Carlo just had to look sensuous while Tony Martin, as Pepe LeMoko, sang them all. She did sing in Buccaneer’s Girl (1950), but this pirate yarn was a typical Universal all-action potboiler.

Away from Hollywood, she suddenly confounded her detractors with deft comedy performances in two well-received British films. In Hotel Sahara (1952), set during the Second World War, she and her fiancé (Peter Ustinov) ran a small North African inn which kept changing sides according to the nationality of its occupiers. In The Captain’s Paradise (1953), Alec Guinness, the blissfully contented skipper of a Tangier-to-Gibraltar ferry, had ideally contrasting wives in both ports: the fiery De Carlo in Tangier and the cosily domestic Celia Johnson on Gibraltar.

In Sea Devils (1953) De Carlo was a British spy during the Napoleonic wars. That same year she spied for the French in Fort Algiers, singing “I’ll Follow You”, for which she wrote the lyrics. She sang again as a sultry Caribbean café performer in Flame of the Islands (1956), and romanced Richard Wagner (Alan Badel) in the dismal Magic Fire (1956).

In 1957 the veteran Raoul Walsh, who had directed Sea Devils, gave De Carlo her meatiest screen role. Set before the Civil War and filmed largely on location in Louisiana, Band of Angels cast her as a well-reared southern belle who, when it’s revealed that her mother was a slave, is herself sold into slavery. She is bought by a rakish southern millionaire – Clark Gable, making an anticlimactic return to Gone with the Wind territory.

Perhaps because she had played Sephora in The Ten Commandments two years earlier, she was next cast as Mary Magdalene in the Italian film La Spada e la Croce (The Sword and the Cross, 1958). As an attractive widow working as John Wayne’s housekeeper, she aroused the jealousy of Wayne’s estranged wife (Maureen O’Hara) in McLintock! (1963), and in A Global Affair (1964) acted opposite the 61- year-old Bob Hope, severely miscast as the footloose young UN diplomat pursued by a bevy of beautiful women of various nationalities.

From 1964 to 1966 De Carlo lived in a dark, cobwebby mansion at 1313 Mockingbird Lane. As the 137-year-old Lily Munster, she slept in a coffin with, appropriately, a lily clutched to her chest. Her beloved husband Herman (Fred Gwynne), a bashful clone of Frankenstein’s monster, was Lily’s idea of male beauty; after meeting a handsome male in one of the 70 episodes, she commented, “He looks like Cary Grant – poor man!” The success of The Munsters spawned the feature film Munster, Go Home (1966) and the TV movie The Munsters’ Revenge (1981).

At the age of 49, De Carlo, along with her fellow Hollywood veterans Alexis Smith and Gene Nelson, appeared in Stephen Sondheim’s spectacular Broadway musical Follies (1971). The show was set in a crumbling, soon-to-be-razed New York theatre where various editions of the fictitious Weismann Follies had been presented. On its bare stage, Dimitri Weismann held a farewell reunion of some of the performers he had employed in his revues over the years. One of these artistes was Carlotta Champion (De Carlo), an ageing Hollywood star.

Impressed with her large vocal range, Sondheim wrote De Carlo a solo number, the wickedly witty “Can that Boy Fox-Trot” (“A false alarm, / A broken arm, / An imitation Hitler and with littler charm, / But oh, can that boy fox-trot!”). She sang it well and, during the show’s Boston try-out, Sondheim tried to build the number for her, but his efforts failed. “The problem with the one-joke song,” he later said, “is that as the song goes on and on, the joke becomes less funny.”

He solved his problem by sitting down with De Carlo and letting her tell him the story of her life. He then went to his hotel room and proceeded to write her a replacement number, the superb “I’m Still Here” (“First you’re another / Sloe-eyed vamp / Then someone’s mother / Then you’re camp . . .”).

Her Broadway success seemed to mean little to Hollywood, where De Carlo was offered nothing more interesting than TV movies (in one of which she played Zorro’s mother) and such minor films as Satan’s Cheerleaders (1977), Nocturna, Granddaughter of Dracula (1979), The Man with Bogart’s Face (1980), Guyana: cult of the damned (1980), Silent Scream (1980), American Gothic (1987) and Oscar (1991).

Another line in “I’m Still Here” was “I’m almost through my memoirs”. De Carlo’s autobiography, Yvonne, was published in 1987.

Dick Vosburgh

Her “Independent” obituary can also be accessed here.

Marin Sheen was born in 1940 in Dayton, Ohio. He first came to public attention in the brilliant “Badlands”. His other major film credits include “Da”, “Catholics”, “Gettysburg”, “Apocalypse Now” and “Wall Street”. He had a major success with the long running “The West Wing”. Marftin Sheen is a well-known and respected activist. He is the father of actors Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen. He is an Irish citizen.

TCM Overview:

One of the busiest, most conscientious actors who ever worked in Hollywood, Martin Sheen put together a Herculean body of work – though much of it forgettable – that contained enough highlights to consider him to be among the great actors of his generation. After establishing himself as a youth run amok, most notably in “Badlands” (1973), Sheen grew over the years into a patriarchal figure whose rectitude and social responsibility kept with his liberal Catholic activism. A proud family man who saw all four children enter the acting business, with sons Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen enjoying lucrative careers of their own, he was perhaps most noted for his performance in Francis Ford Coppola’s storied “Apocalypse Now” (1979), on which he suffered a near-fatal heart attack while seen onscreen in a drunken, unscripted meltdown the director incorporated into the finished product. But he subdued his rebellious ways with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, while putting his political activism to the fore with an enduring portrayal of an idealistic president on “The West Wing” (NBC, 1999-2006), which allowed him to put his two greatest passions – acting and activism – on full display. …

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Interview on Youtube here.

Peter Brown was born in 1935 in New York City. During his U.S. Army Service in Alaska be became involved in writing and acting. In the late 1950’s he was signed by Warner Brothers on contract and made “Red Nightmare” and “Darby’s Rangers”. His first television series was “Lawman” which ran from 1958 until 1962. He made some films for the Walt Disney Studios and was then given the lead in the popular Western series “Laredo”. He died in 2016.

Hollywood Reporter obituary:

Peter Brown, who starred as the eager young deputy Johnny McKay on the 1958-62 ABC series Lawman, has died. He was 80. Brown, who played a Texas Ranger on NBC’sLaredo, another TV Western, died Monday at his home in Phoenix as a result of Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Kerstin, told The Hollywood Reporter.

In Foxy Brown (1974), the boyishly handsome actor portrayed a bad guy who is castrated by men hired by the revenge-seeking title character (Pam Grier), with his severed genitals being presented to his girlfriend (Kathryn Loder). From 1972-79, Brown played Dr. Greg Peters on NBC’s Days of Our Lives and later worked on other soap operas such as The Young and the Restless, Loving, One Life to Live and The Bold and the Beautiful. On Lawman, one of several series that Warner Bros. had on the air at the time, Brown starred as Johnny, an orphan in the 1880s who gets the job as deputy under Marshal Dan Troop (John Russell) in Laramie, Wyo.

The role “came naturally to me,” he once said. “My character was not a big stretch; he was a pretty nice kid who was adept at what he did and was eager to learn. Johnny liked girls and guns and all the things Peter Brown liked.” Brown returned to the Western genre on the hourlong action comedy Laredo, playing the clever Chad Cooper for two seasons (1965-67). The show’s pilot was an episode of The Virginian.

Born in Manhattan, Brown moved with his family to the West Coast, and he studied acting at UCLA. As the story goes, he met studio chief Jack Warner while working at a gas station, and that led to a contract at Warner Bros. He had small roles in such films at the studio as Too Much, Too Soon (1958), Darby’s Rangers(1958), Onionhead (1958), Marjorie Morningstar (1958) and The Young Philadelphians (1959) before landing his Lawman gig. After leaving Warners, Brown signed with Universal Studios and made three films in 1964: A Tiger Walks, Kitten With a Whip, starring Ann-Margret, and Ride the Wild Surf. Brown also appeared in such films as Summer Magic (1963), Chrome and Hot Leather (1971),Piranha (1972), The Messenger (1986) and The Wedding Planner (2001) and on TV shows including Wagon Train, Mission: Impossible, The Bob Newhart Show, Police Woman, Dallas, Knight Rider and JAG.

Brown married Kerstin, his fifth wife, in 2008. Survivors also include his children Joshua, Matt and Christi, their spouses and three grandchildren.

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

Website on Peter Brown here.

Belita. Obituary in “The Independemt” in 2005.

Belita was a British Olympic figure skater who surprisingfly starred in a few film noirs in Hollywood in the late 1940’s. Belita was born Maria Jepson-Turner in Hampshire in 1923. As wellas ice figure skating, she was a classical trained ballet dancer. Her three film noir movies were “Suspense” in 1946, “The Gangster” and “The Hunted”. In 1953 she appeared in the British made “Never Let Me Go” with Clark Gable and Gene Tierney. She was married to the Irish actor James Kenney. Belita died in France in 2005. Article on Belita by Eddie Mueller here.

The “Independent” obituary by Tom Vallance:

The actress, dancer and ice-skater Belita had the distinction of starring in 1946 in the most expensive film ever made by the “Poverty Row” studio Monogram. It was called Suspense, and its novel mixture of ice-skating and film noir proved enormously popular at the box-office and more than repaid the studio’s investment.

Although the screen’s most famous and successful ice-skating star was undoubtedly Sonja Henie, there was a time in the early Forties when she had two rivals who appeared in more modest productions – Vera Hruba Ralston and Belita. Like Ralston, Belita was more lithe and statuesque than the diminutive Henie, but she won a following with her appearances in such escapist B-movie titles as Silver Skates (1943) and Lady, Let’s Dance (1944). A skilled dancer, too, she later had smaller roles in musicals .

A poster for Gordon Wiles’ 1947 drama ‘The Gangster’ starring Barry Sullivan and Belita. (Photo by Movie Poster Image Art/Getty Images)

Belita’s real name was Gladys Lyne Jepson-Turner and she was born in Nether Wallop, Hampshire, in 1923. She started skating as a child, encouraged by her mother, a former figure-skater, and in 1936 she was a competitor at the Winter Olympics at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria – Henie was the winner, with Belita in 16th place. It was an experience she later recalled as “terrifying”. She told David Jacobs in 1980,

We were woken by the sound of the storm troopers marching, and we were made to do the “Heil Hitler” salute before we worked. Poor little Freddy Tomlin – I don’t know what he said to them but they threw him out in the snow for about two hours, locking the doors of the arena.

In 1937, the 14-year-old starred in the spectacular London show Opera on Ice, and the following year she and her mother, who had separated from Belita’s father, set sail for the United States, where Belita achieved great success as star of the touring revue Ice Capades. She made her screen début in 1941 as a guest skater in Republic’s film version, also titled Ice Capades, which added a slim plot as framework to showcase several of the show’s performers. Among them was Vera Hruba Ralston, who stayed at the studio (and married its boss, Herbert J. Yates).

Belita was given a contract by Monogram, and though her movies had slim plots, the lavish production numbers on ice made them popular fare, and in 1946 she was entrusted with the leading role in Frank Tuttle’s Suspense. “It was the film I most enjoyed making,” she recalled. “It was the first film in which certain camera angles were used, and it was photographed by Karl Struss, who was incredible.”

It was a steamy tale, scripted by Philip Yordan in James Cain fashion, of infidelity, deceit and murder, boosted by lavish skating routines (in the most suspenseful of which, Belita had to jump through a circle of knives). Her skating skill masked any deficiencies as an actress. Her co-star, Barry Sullivan, recalled,

I always had a fondness for Belita because she didn’t know what the fuck was happening! She was a great skater, but acting and particularly filmmaking were totally foreign to her.

The film’s success prompted another thriller, Gordon Miles’s moodily poetic The Gangster (1947) with the same co-stars, after which Belita returned to the UK, where she starred in ice shows including Babes in the Wood on Ice, and White Horse Inn on Ice, with Max Wall. Her film career continued sporadically. She was part of a fine cast in Burgess Meredith’s The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1950), one of the best Simenon adaptations, with Charles Laughton a superb Inspector Maigret.

The spy thriller Never Let Me Go (1953), starring Clark Gable and Gene Tierney, although a poor film, doubtless had pleasant resonances for her because she played a defecting ballerina, and her earliest ambitions had centred on the ballet (she always professed to hate ice-skating). She had further dancing roles in Gene Kelly’s Invitation to the Dance (1953), playing “The Débutante” in the “Ring Around the Rosy” sequence, and (unbilled) in the film version of Cole Porter’s Broadway musical, Silk Stockings (1957), starring Fred Astaire, in which she is part of the ensemble dancing “The Red Blues”.

In March 1957, she opened at the London Coliseum in the starring role in Damn Yankees, the Broadway hit with songs by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross. In this reworking of Faust, in which an ageing baseball fan, Joe Hardy, sells his soul to the Devil in order to play baseball and help his favourite team win the World Series, Belita was Lola, the Devil’s assistant sent to earth to seduce Joe. It proved to be a misguided casting move, for Bob Fosse’s quirky choreography was alien to Belita. A few weeks into the run, she was replaced by Elizabeth Seal, whose gamine qualities were more attuned to the Fosse style.

Belita returned to New York to dance in an off-Broadway production of Ulysses in Nightgown (1958). To be in films with Kelly and Astaire, but get to dance with neither of them, plus the débâcle of Damn Yankees, probably contributed towards Belita’s decision to give up show business in 1959, though she made one more film, appearing as herself in Leopoldo Torre-Nillson’s beguiling tale of disaffected youth, La Terraza, in 1964.

She settled with her second husband, the former actor James Berwick, in Fulham, London, where they owned a garden centre, the Crabtree Gardens Nursery. After Berwick’s death in 2000, she retired to the south of France.

Tom Vallance

Mary Badham was born in 1952 in Birmingham, Alabama. Her film career was very brief, but she will be forever remembered for her unforgetable performance as “Scout” the young daughter of Gregory Peck’s “Atticus Finch” in the classic “To Kill A Mockingbird”. Her other film of note is “This Property is Condemned” as the sister of Natalie Wood. Her brother is the director John Badham who directed “Saturday Night Fever” and many othet popular films.

TCM Overview:

With no prior acting experience, Mary Badham won the role of Gregory Peck’s tomboy daughter Scout in “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1960) over 2000 other applicants. The novice thespian won praise and earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her naturalistic, unaffected performance. Badham only appeared in two other films, as the narrator who recalls the romantic exploits of her older sister (Natalie Wood) in “This Property Is Condemned” and as a girl who assists an heir outwit his murderous relative in and “Let’s Kill Uncle” (both 1966). After a few appearances on TV episodes of shows like “Dr. Kildare” and “Twilight Zone”, she retired from acting and moved to a Virginia farm. Her older brother is director John Badham.

Interview with Mary Badham n “The Daily Telegraph”:

This photograph was taken on the set of Robert Mulligan’s film of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I was 10 years old and played Scout, and Gregory Peck played my father, Atticus Finch. This was an intimate moment when we were just running through lines together between takes. He really guided and encouraged me, not only during the filming of this movie but also throughout my life. I lost both my parents when I was quite young, so he remained a big, big influence in my life until he died in 2003. We were very close and spoke on the phone regularly, even though I acted in only a couple of films after this one. I always called him Atticus and he still called me Scout right up to the end.

This film tells the story of a family who live in a small town. The mother has died and the father looks after his two children on his own. He is a lawyer who is asked to take on the highly controversial case of a young black man who has been accused of raping a white woman. My character, Scout, is a very intelligent, thoughtful child who has to grow up in the real world very quickly.

I hadn’t done any acting before this movie. My mother was a leading lady in a local theatre in Birmingham, Alabama, where I grew up. The theatre director had heard about the castings for To Kill a Mockingbird and told my mother to take me along. I remember going in and talking with the director Mr Mulligan and doing a little something on stage. A lot of the other wannabe actor kids had acts prepared but I just played around. I didn’t have any experience but I was about the right age, size and colouring to pass off as Atticus’s daughter. According to the talent scout, they had seen 4,000 children.

I was pleased to find out I got the part, and happy to go to the film set and see all the movie stars, but my mother guided me and I just trundled through the filming not really understanding what was going on.

The filming took place in California over five months. There was always lots of laughter. Philip Alford, who played my older brother Jem Finch, loved to play chess, so he and Atticus would play together for hours. And Philip and I got on like a real brother and sister. There was a lot of bickering, which in fact translated well on film. He and the other boys on set happily played together but then there was me who wanted to get involved in the fun. They didn’t want me playing with them so they would gang up against me.

When the film came out, I was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. I didn’t win in the end but I was so relieved when Patty Duke won the award for The Miracle Worker because everyone had these wonderful thank-you speeches, and I didn’t have a clue what I was going to say. Atticus won Best Actor, which was just fantastic.

The 50th anniversary Blu-ray edition of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is out now on Universal Pictures UK

June Duprez was a lovely English actress who made some significent films in the 1940’s both in Britain and the U.S. She was born in Teddington, Middlesex in 1918. Her first film was “The Crimson Circle” in 1936. She won acclain for her performance as the Princess in the wonderful “Thief of Bagdad”. Due to the commencement of World War Two, the shooting of the movie was moved from England to Hollywood. June Duprez stayed on in America and made such films as “None but the Lonely Heart” with Cary Grant, “Bombay” with Alan Ladd and “And Then Tey Were None” with Barry Fitzgerald. She retired early from film acting and died in London in 1984.

Gary Brumburgh;s entry:

Glamorous June Duprez was born in Teddington, England, during an air raid on May 14, 1918. Her father, Fred Duprez, was an American vaudevillian who found stage and film work in England. She herself picked up an interest in performing and eventually joined the Coventry Repertory Company to gather the necessary stage experience.

June made her film debut as an extra in 1935. She married at a young age and her career was initially encouraged by her first husband, a Harley Street doctor. However, once she started flirting with stardom, he became increasingly envious and possessive and their marriage fell apart. Her sultry and exotic appearances in such British films as The Spy in Black (1939), The Four Feathers (1939) and, especially, Alexander Korda‘s The Thief of Bagdad (1940) made a star out of her and she was quickly ushered to Hollywood to capitalize on this newly-found fame. Although she stayed in America throughout WWII, both Korda and June’s agent set her price too high–at $50,000 per picture. This pretty much put her out of contention and she found herself working very little in the next few years. Her most notable American picture during that time was None But the Lonely Heart (1944) opposite Cary Grant.

June subsequently left Hollywood in 1946 and took a few roles on the Broadway stage. She retired altogether when she married for a second time in 1948 to a well-to-do sportsman. They had two daughters but divorced in 1965. June lived in Rome for a time, then returned to London to live out the remainder of her life. She died in 1984 at age 66 following an extended illness.

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

The Thief Of Bagdad, poster, US poster art, top: John Justin, June Duprez; bottom: John Justin, Sabu, 1940. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Marjorie Steele has had a very interesting life. She was born in Reno, Nevada in 1930. She moved with her parents to live in San Francisco When she was just nineteen years of age she married the multimillionaire Huntington Hartford. She made just four films.

She first exhibited at The Brown Thomas Gallery in Dublin in 1970 and soon cultivated a reputation as one of “the foremost exponents of traditional sculpture in Ireland achieving an authentic, formal likeness in the treatment of her subjects”. (Myles Campbell, Sculpture 1600-2000, 2014)

In 1949 she was in “Hello Out There” followed by “Tough Assignment”, “Face to Face” and in 1953 “No Escape”.

After her divorce from Hartford, she married the British actor Dudley Sutton and then she married the Irish write Constantine Fitzgibbon and she came to live in Ireland. In the past few years, Marjorie Steel has concentrated on her painting. Article about Marjorie Steele and Huntington Hartford can be accessed here.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Pert blonde actress Marjorie Steele was in films for a very short time, making only four in all. She was born in Reno, Nevada on August 27, 1930 in a log cabin built by her father, a contractor. Her mother was part Russian and Swedish while her father came from German and Sioux Indian parentage. Marjorie’s family moved to San Francisco when she was 9. It was here that she took an interest in acting while still young. She started with acting lessons and eventually won a scholarship to the Actors Lab in Hollywood. To support herself in the early days, she worked as a cigarette girl at Ciro’s, L.A.’s top nightclub. In what was to become a Cinderella story, the working teenager attracted the attention of multimillionaire Huntington Hartford.

Smitten by her, Hartford not only signed her to a contract with a motion picture company he owned, he married her in 1949–shortly after her nineteenth birthday. She built up her reputation on stage and appeared in two films produced by her husband: Hello Out There (1949) and Face to Face(1952). Her other two “B” films were Tough Assignment (1949) and No Escape (1953).

Marjorie scored well in theater assignments, notably as the title role in “Sabrina Fair” in 1954, which played in London, and on Broadway when she took over the role of Maggie the Cat from Barbara Bel Geddes in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Shortly after this, she suddenly lost interest in her career and decided to retire and raise a family.

She married British actor Dudley Sutton following her 1961 divorce to Hartford, but the marriage lasted only a few years.

Her third husband was author Constantine FitzGibbon, who wrote “When the Kissing Had to Stop” and “The Irish in Ireland,” and was the biographer of friend Dylan Thomas. Together the couple wrote “Teddy in the Tree.” He died in 1983. Living in Ireland, Marjorie occupied her later years with painting and sculpting and has been commissioned for her work.

American actress Marjorie Steele (later Fitzgibbon, 1930 – 2018) with her fiancé, British actor Dudley Sutton (1933 – 2018), on October 20th, 1961. (Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Marjorie Steele obituary in “The Irish Times” in 2018.

Artist Dr Marjorie Steele-FitzGibbon, an American-born and naturalised Irish citizen, enjoyed success in three creative professions: Hollywood film star, stage actor, and artist in both painting and sculpture. She married three times and was the mother of four children and one step-child. Such a remarkable profile had at its root the drive that convinced her that “she could walk through walls”.

She was the second-eldest of four daughters of her second-generation Swedish immigrant mother, Ora, and salesman father, Jack Steele, whose mother was a native American. Her rise from humble origins living in “an honest-to-God log cabin” in Reno, Nevada, to Hollywood fame and marriage to a millionaire and subsequent marriages to an English actor of film and stage, and an Irish-American writer, is the stuff of romantic fiction. Yet her talents, striking beauty and sheer grit did not shield her from domestic tragedy, premature deaths and an inherited temperamental imbalance, all of which she faced with integrity and courage.

When she was 18 years old, Marjorie Steele, dressed in homemade yet elegant clothes, left her then home in a poor suburb of San Francisco with all that drive and confidence of youth and headed for Los Angeles. There her creativity found direction and opportunity: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for painting, and the Actors Lab for stage-craft, where she won a scholarship.

She also took a part-time job as a cigarette girl in Ciro’s Nightclub on Sunset Strip where a regular patron, the multimillionaire film-producer playboy Huntington Hartford, was dazzled by her fresh beauty amid all the glitz. Much to the chagrin of his date, film actress Lana Turner, he bought all her cigarettes – although he didn’t even smoke. They married a year later, in 1949, she an impressionable 19-year-old – “she was mad for him” – he an older, more worldly-wise thirty-nine. The “Cinderella wedding” offered rich pickings to the paparazzi and provoked snide comments by the art critics as Marjorie rose from acclaimed stage-actress in Tennessee Williams’s New York production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) to movie star. When on tour with a mixed-race crew Marjorie challenged Actors’ Equity to change a racially biased law regarding separate accommodation by defying the ban herself.

The glamorous couple played host to Hollywood celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood, yet Marjorie confided that while they were “all very interesting, they were just people”. Influenced by his artist wife, “Hart” channelled his wealth into promoting the arts by establishing an arts colony near Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles.

Marjorie relocated her parents to an impressive ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains; yet, despite his dream come true, her father took his own life, an act which had repercussions for his family.

The marriage lasted seven years until Marjorie filed for divorce, when Huntington’s old, philandering ways resurfaced. They had two children, John and Catherine. The drug-related death of her daughter at 28 was a profound sorrow for Marjorie. She always acknowledged her love for “Hart” and her indebtedness to him for educating her and encouraging her creativity. They divorced in 1960.

Through “the best divorce lawyer”, Marjorie met her second husband, the handsome actor of television and film fame, Dudley Sutton – the gay biker in Leatherboys (1964) – with whom she had a whirlwind romance. They married in 1961, entailing Marjorie’s renunciation of her considerable alimony. They had a son, Peter, with whom Marjorie later lived until being hospitalised in 2017. Marjorie, no longer acting, socialised with many of his famous theatrical colleagues such as Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, John Hurt and the director Joan Littlewood.

Marjorie went for rehabilitation to an exclusive London health farm and there she met another housemate and fellow American, Constantine Fitzgibbon, the former husband of the food writer Theodora Fitzgibbon. Constantine’s brilliant mind captivated her. Summing up her previous romantic life, Marjorie described herself as “a self-destructive fool”.

Another divorce and marriage ensued. Marjorie was Constantine’s fourth and last wife and he her third husband. Constantine was a writer of Anglo-Irish extraction. They had a daughter, Oonagh. He also adopted Marjorie’s son, Peter. After a short spell in west Cork, the family lived in Killiney in south Co Dublin, and then in the city.2

Honeymooning in Greece ,the stunning classical sculptures there were the catalyst that drew her into sculpture and prompted her to wonder why she had wasted so much time working in two dimensions. Thus began a prolific period of artistic renewal which her great friend Micheál Mac Liammóir, describing her many sculpted heads of Irish literati, said: “Ms Fitzgibbon was born to do what she had done; fill the room with uncannily living persons.”

Her public works beloved of Dubliners include her iconic, larger-than-life-size statue of James Joyce in North Earl Street and a bust of the author in St Stephen’s Green facing Joyce’s alma mater, Newman House. Visitors to RTÉ are reminded of the charismatic presenter Eamon Andrews by her life-size statue in the foyer.

Dr Marjorie Steele-Fitzgibbon is survived by her daughter, Oonagh Brault, sons Jack and Peter Fitzgibbon, step-son Francis Fitzgibbon, grandchildren Hannagh and Niamh Jacobsen, and her ex-husband Dudley Sutton.

Lizabeth Scott obituary in “The Guardian” in 2014.

In the mid-1940s, Paramount described their latest star signing, Lizabeth Scott, who has died aged 92, as “beautiful, blonde, aloof and alluring” and, in anticipation of her becoming another tough-girl siren of the period, nicknamed her The Threat. However, during her 12-year film career, the critics and public never saw her as a threat to the two other noirish dames she most resembled, Lauren Bacall and Veronica Lake, although they rarely played duplicitous dames, as Scott did. Only later, some years after her career was in tatters, was she appreciated for being her own woman.

Scott was strong and sultry, her heavy dark eyebrows contrasting with her blonde hair. Like Bacall, she had a low and husky voice, but she was far harder; in fact, she was able to suggest hidden depths of depravity – the ideal femme fatale of the 1940s. As Burt Lancaster says to her in I Walk Alone(1948), “What a fall guy I am – thinking just because you’re good to look at, you’d be good all the way through!”

She was born Emma Matzo, the daughter of John Matzo and his wife Mary (nee Pennock) in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Despite her parents’ opposition to an acting career, she went to the Alvienne School of Drama in New York. She got her first professional engagement with the touring company of Hellzapoppin, where she had little to do but appear in stunning gowns in a series of comedy blackouts.

Back in New York, unable to get an acting job, she landed work as a fashion model with Harper’s Bazaar at $25 an hour. In 1942 she was taken on as understudy for Tallulah Bankhead in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth on Broadway. Bankhead proved to be unusually healthy, and Scott sat backstage for almost a year before leaving the company. However, she did get to play the lead on tour, taking over from Miriam Hopkins.

The Weapon, poster, US poster art, bottom from left: Steve Cochran, Lizabeth Scott, Nicole Maurey, Herbert Marshall, 1956. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

But it was a four-picture spread in an issue of Harper’s Bazaar that led to her long-term Hollywood contract with Hal Wallis, who now had his own producing organisation through Paramount Studios. “I wanted to be a great stage actress. I never once thought of movies,” Scott explained. “But it was off season on Broadway and since I wasn’t able to find a job there, I thought it might be a good experience to come to Hollywood and find out what it was all about.”

Wallis starred Scott in her first film, You Came Along (1945), as a treasury department employee charged with looking after three pilots on a patriotic bond-selling tour. It is later discovered that one of the pilots (Robert Cummings) has an incurable disease. “Promise me one thing. Never grieve for me,” he tells her. There was little such sentimentality in most of the other movies she made.

In her second film, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), Scott, as a young woman wrongly jailed – sensuously announcing, “My name is Toni Marachek” – was rather peripheral to the plot and, besides, she had Barbara Stanwyck to contend with.

She made more of an impression in Dead Reckoning (1947) as a gangster’s wife, almost luring Humphrey Bogart into her corruptive trap. Scott plays a woman of mystery, emphasised by the fact that she is shot in oblique angles and low-key lighting. In the garish melodrama Desert Fury (1947), Scott, stylishly dressed by Edith Head, is perfect as the good girl gone bad becoming good again. The most rational of the characters, Scott, by now pushing 25, plays Mary Astor’s rebellious 19-year-old daughter who has run away from finishing school and fallen for a psychotic gambler (John Hodiak), who is obsessed with her mother, while his sidekick (Wendell Corey) is obsessed with him. Burt Lancaster is a clean-cut cop trying to redirect Scott’s libido.

Billed as “the blonde with the brown voice”, and co-starring with Lancaster again, Scott played a nightclub singer (the first of several) in I Walk Alone. Ironically, although Scott had a good singing voice – she made an LP of songs in 1957 called Lizabeth – her songs in films were always dubbed. In the atmospheric Pitfall (1948), solid married man Dick Powell is caught in the tentacles of fashion model Scott, even though he is aware that she’s dangerous. She was more decadent than ever in Too Late for Tears (1949), having killed two husbands because she wanted “to move out of the ranks of the middle-class poor”.

In another film noir, Dark City (1950), she is a nightclub singer again who drifts on the edges of a shadowy criminal world, though her love for gambler Charlton Heston (in his first Hollywood role) is uplifting. There followed similar roles of a woman willing to change her louche ways, but doomed to find a worthwhile man to love her only when she had already passed the point of redemption.

She rarely appeared in comedies, and for that reason alone one of her favourite films was Scared Stiff (1953) with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

In September 1954, a front-page story in the magazine Confidential claimed that Scott was a lesbian and was linked to “the little black books kept by Hollywood prostitutes”. It was also said that on a trip to Paris she had taken up with Frede, that city’s most notorious lesbian entertainer. Some months later, her lawyer instituted a $ 2.5m suit against Confidential, accusing the magazine of “holding the plaintiff up to contempt and ridicule and implying in the eyes of every reader indecent, unnatural and illegal conduct in her private and public life”. Scott lost her suit on a technicality, however, and, given the witch-hunting atmosphere of the times, the case certainly harmed her. Compounding her plight was her rebellious nature, having never paid conventional homage to the film establishment and to gossip columnists Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper. Luckily, she had invested her money wisely.

Her last film, excepting a quirky appearance as an nymphomaniac princess in Mike Hodges’s Pulp (1972), was as a press agent who discovers country boy singer Elvis Presley in Loving You (1957) and sets him on the road to fame.

In the last decades of her life, aside from doing voiceovers for commercials, she set about training her body and mind, attending health clubs regularly and studying literature, philosophy and languages. “I simply decided there was more to life than just making films,” Scott said in a 1970s interview she gave at her house in the Hollywood Hills, where she lived alone. “And, I proceeded to explore all of life’s other facets. None of us is ever too young or too old or too smart to learn or to create.”

• Lizabeth Scott (Emma Matzo), actor, born 29 September 1922; died 31 January 2015Topics

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

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Belita. Obituary in “The Independemt” in 2005.

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Marjorie Steele obituary in “The Irish Times” in 2018.

Lizabeth Scott

Lizabeth Scott obituary in “The Guardian” in 2014.

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