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.
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.
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)American businessman Huntingdon Hartford (1911 – 2008) with his wife, actress Marjorie Steele in London, circa 1955. The couple were divorced in 1960. (Photo by Central Press/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.
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.
Kevin McCarthy obituary in “The Independent” in 2010
Kevin McCarthy a very accomplished actor who had a remarkably long career. He was still acting on film in his 95th year. He was born in Seattle in 1914. His sister is the acclaimed novelist Mary McCarthy (author of “The Group”. He made his film debut “Winged Victory” in 1944. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” in 1951. He alternated netween stage and film and was a good friend of Montgomery Clift. He will always be remembered for hs performance along with Dana Wynter in the 1956 classic favourite “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. A few years ago I met him in Galway when he and his wife Kate performed in “Love Letters”. We joined them for a meal afterwards and he regaled us with stories of acting in movies. A friend of his the Italian actor Sergio Fantoni was also in the group. The two actors had met while making “The Prize” and had remained friends ever since. Kevin McCarthy was a very kind man who died at the age of 96 on September 11th 2010.
His obituary in “The Independent”:The heavy-set, square-jawed Kevin McCarthy was a distinguished actor with an extensive career in the theatre as well as movies and television, but he will be best remembered for his leading role in one of the most famous of screen science-fiction thrillers, Don Siegel’s cult classic, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), in which he was a doctor desperate to convince the authorities that the human race is being taken over by “pod people”
The Fifties was a particularly productive period for fantasy tales that tapped the paranoia instilled in Americans by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist hearings and the Korean War, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers is regarded as one of the finest, with a place alongside such classics as The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), The Thing (1951), Them! (1955) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). A low-budget movie, which was rehearsed for 10 days and had time for few re-takes, it builds suspensefully to the memorable moment when McCarthy rushes into the highway screaming at passing cars and ultimately to the camera (and the audience), “You’re in danger… They’re here already… You’re next! You’re next!”
The son of a lawyer, McCarthy was born in Seattle in 1914, but he, his two brothers and his sister Mary (who was to write The Group), were orphaned in the ‘flu epidemic of 1918, and they were raised by their paternal grandparents in what Mary described in her memoirs as “near Dickensian mistreatment”. After five years, they moved in with their maternal grandfather.
McCarthy was educated at the School of Foreign Service, part of Georgetown University, with ambitions to be a diplomat, then the University of Minnesota, where he first acted. He made his Broadway debut in 1938 playing a small role in Robert E Sherwood’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Abe Lincoln in Illinois. He had the role of a rowdy sailor in Mexican Mural (1942), an experimental play about Mexican religious and secular life. It ran for only four performances but introduced McCarthy to Montgomery Clift, who was to become a close friend.
McCarthy had recently married the actress Augusta Dabney, who later recalled, “I look back on the summer of 1942 as the most joyous time of my life.” Clift once said that Dabney was the only woman he would consider marrying, but Tennessee Williams commented, “A lot of people in the theatre suspected Monty had actually fallen in love with Kevin and that Kevin was the love of his life.”
While serving with the US Air Force during the Second World War, he was one of several future stars to appear in Moss Hart’s ambitious drama about young servicemen at flight-training school, Winged Victory (1943). The play had 86 speaking roles, with all the male parts played by servicemen, and McCarthy toured with the show after its successful Broadway run and appeared uncredited in George Cukor’s 1944 screen version.
After demobilisation he returned to Broadway, where he was a founding member of the Actors Studio and appeared in Maxwell Anderson’s play about returning servicemen, Truckline Café (1946), notable as the play in which Marlon Brando first attracted notice. In 1949 he made his first London appearance, at the Phoenix Theatre playing Biff, the shallow, disillusioned son of salesman Willy Loman (Paul Muni) in Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “tragedy of the little man”, Death of a Salesman. McCarthy’s performance led to his being cast in the 1951 film version, which won him an Oscar nomination as supporting actor and a Golden Globe as most promising male newcomer.
He returned to Broadway to star in a revival of Anna Christie (1952) and in 1953 he took over the role of Freddie Page in Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea. He also appeared prolifically on television in such anthology series as Studio One and Playhouse 90.
In 1956 he was given the leading role in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which aliens assume the appearance of giant pods as they gradually hatch duplicate humans. Adapted by Daniel Mainwaring and an uncredited Sam Peckinpah from a novel by Jack Finney first published in Colliers magazine, the film was originally intended by Siegel to end with Miles (McCarthy) yelling “They’re here already! You’re next!” to camera, but the distributors Allied Artists thought it too downbeat and made Siegel add a prologue and a hopeful ending in which a truckload of giant pods is found in a freeway wreck, prompting the FBI to believe Miles.
Siegel removed most of the black humour Peckinpah had put into the script, and gives the film remarkable pace and mounting suspense, culminating in the chilling scene in which Miles and his sweetheart Betty (Dana Wynter), knowing the aliens take over the humans as they sleep, take refuge in a cave where Betty allows herself to fall asleep. Earlier, Miles has joked that he will always know that Betty is Betty by her kiss, and when he kisses her in the cave he recoils in horror as he realises she is a duplicate. When reissued in 1979, the imposed prologue and ending were removed.
The film has been seen as a reaction to McCarthyism, either as a case against the witch-hunts or an allegory about communist infiltration. Siegel and Kevin McCarthy denied these interpretations. “There was no assignment of political points of view,” McCarthy said. “People began to think of McCarthyism later. I thought it was about the onset of a kind of life where the corporate people are trying to tell you how to live, what to do, how to behave.”
Notable among his other films is the superior film noir, Maxwell Shane’s Nightmare (1956), adapted from a short story by Cornell Woolrich, in which he gave a strong performance as a jazz musician who dreams that he stabbed to death a man in a mirrored room, then wakes to find indications that it was not a dream. He made over 50 films, including The Misfits (1961), written by Arthur Miller, in which he played the husband Marilyn Monroe divorces in the opening scene. He initially refused the part, claiming it was too small. “I finally said I would do it if they paid me $100 a word. They said they would. Turns out I had 29 words.” He also had good roles in The Prize (1963), playing a Nobel prize-winner for medicine who becomes embroiled in a criminal plot, The Best Man (1964), a gripping adaptation of Gore Vidal’s tale of political manoeuvring, and Edward Dmytryk’s convoluted mystery, Mirage (1965).
In 1976 he played a cameo role in the remake of Body Snatchers, but he had more challenging opportunities in the theatre. In 1959 he took over from Henry Fonda on Broadway in Two for the Seesaw, a play he would frequently return to for touring productions. In Advise and Consent (1960) he was chilling as a ruthless, power-hungry politician who blackmails a colleague about a homosexual incident, and he also starred in Brecht on Brecht (1963) and played Vershinin in The Three Sisters (1964). For over 20 years he toured in a one-man show, Give ‘Em Hell, Harry, giving a many-faceted performance as President Harry Truman (McCarthy was a distant cousin of the US senator and presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy). In recent years a frequent presence at science-fiction fairs and movie conventions, he said he had no intention of retiring (“I love to work. I love to be in things.”), and he appeared this year in a short film, Drawback.
In 2008 the American Film Institute named Invasion of the Body Snatchers one of the top 10 science fiction movies of all time. “I must say,” said McCarthy, “I’m enthralled by the power of the picture all over the world… the toasts just keep coming my way.”
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
Constance Ford obituary in “The Los Angeles Times”.
Constance Ford was a terrific character actress who managed to get some choice roles in glossy melodramas in the late 50’s and early 60’s. She was born in the Bronx, New York City in 1923. She began her career on Broadway and then on to live television. Her film debut came in 1956 with “The Last Hunt” a good Western with Robert Taylor and Stewart Granger. She was terrific as Sandra Dee’s uptight mother in “A Summer Place” in 1959. A few years later she was equally good in “Rome Adventure” with Troy Donahue, Suzanne Pleshette and Angie Dickinson. Here she played a lonely Americna woman running a book shop in Rome. In just a few minutes she was able to create a character of real substance. From the late 60’s on, she worked steadily in television and had a long running stint in “Another World”. She died in 1993.
Her obituary in “The Los Angeles Times”:
Constance Ford, a supporting player in films, a featured actress on stage and for 25 years the enthusiastic mother in the NBC daytime serial “Another World,” has died at 69.
Murray Schapiro, her manager, said she died of cancer Saturdayat New York Hospital in New York City.
A New York native, she attended Hunter College and studied privately before making her Broadway debut in 1949 as Willie Loman’s paramour in the original production of “Death of a Salesman.” She also was on Broadway with James Dean in “See the Jaguar,” and performed in “Say Darling,” “Golden Fleecing” and “Nobody Loves an Albatross,” opposite Robert Preston.
She started in motion pictures in 1956 in “The Last Hunt” and went on to make such films as “Bailout at 43,000,” “The Goddess,” “A Summer Place,” “Home From the Hill,” “All Fall Down,” “Claudelle Inglish,” “Rome Adventure,” “99 44/100% Dead” and more.
She was a featured player on several episodes of TV’s “Zane Grey Theater,” “Kraft Television Theatre,” “Danger,” “Studio One” and others.
For her performances as the perennially sunny Ada Davis on “Another World” she was awarded a certificate of merit for outstanding contribution to daytime drama by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Her “Los Angeles Times” obituary can be also accessed here.
Richard Hart acted mainly on the stage but for a brief time he was a leading man in Hollywood. He was born in 1915 in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1945 he had a success on Broadway with “Dark of the Moon”. He was spotted by a talent scout from MGM and offered a contract. He appeared opposite Lana Turner and Donna Reed in the big budget “Green Dolphin Street” and with Greer Garson in “Remember Me”. Unhappy in Hollywood he left and returned to New York to the stage. He was in two successes, “Goodbye My Fancy” and “The Happy Time”. He died suddenly from a heart attack at the age of 35 in 1951.
IMDB Entry:
While he had a short life and very short film career, sleekly handsome actor Richard Hart, with his dark and virile looks, demonstrated much promise in those few years, especially on Broadway and in TV’s “Golden Age.” It all ended quickly, however, with his sudden demise at age 35.
Born Richard Comstock Hart, in Providence, Rhode Island on April 14, 1915, the middle child of a prominent local lawyer, Henry Clay Hart. His grandfather, Richard Comstock, was also a lawyer. Following education at the Quaker-run preparatory Moses Brown School, he majored in English and psychology upon entering Brown University. After attaining his degree, his interest changed and he took journalism classes and had a brief job at Gorham, the silver company, and also took journalism classes before pursuing acting.
A summer stock job in nearby Tiverton, Rhode Island, decided things for Hart and he moved to New York City to pursue a professional stage career. Wife (and high school sweetheart) Eugenia did not adjust to the Manhattan life style and returned to Providence with son Christopher in tow. They abruptly divorced. Following his Broadway debut in “Pillar to Post” in December of 1943, he then went out on tour with Constance Bennett in “Without Love.” A superb performance in a repertory production of “Dark of the Moon,” led to him being cast in the Broadway version, winning a Theatre World Award in the process and continuing on the national tour. He met second wife, theatre actress Louise Valery, during the run of the show. MGM saw the dark-haired actor with the trimmed mustache as potential leading man material after seeing his stage success and, with no film training at all, signed Richard and gave him the chance to perform in three prominent movies. In Desire Me (1947) he replaced Robert Montgomery as the man who takes Robert Mitchum away from Greer Garson. In Green Dolphin Street (1947) he was the love interest of both Lana Turnerand Donna Reed. In B.F.’s Daughter (1948) he loses Barbara Stanwyck to Van Heflin. A terrible experience in the first picture mentioned (numerous rewrites, retakes, added scenes and director changes in Desire Me (1947)) disillusioned Hart in pursuing career film work. Not helping was his rather diffident performances on film and a burgeoning alcohol problem.
Following a dismal MGM loan-out opposite Arlene Dahl in Reign of Terror (1949) [aka The Black Book], Hart asked for a release from his contract. Returning to New York, he replaced Sam Wanamaker in the 1949 production of “Goodbye, My Fancy” and co-starred with Charlton Heston and Coleen Gray in the short-lived “Leaf and Bough” which closed the next day. He then enjoyed a major success in “The Happy Time” with Eva Gabor, Leora Dana and Claude Dauphin the following year. Hart also found a valuable medium in TV, appearing in numerous live productions of Fireside Theatre, NBC Presents, Ford Theatre Hour and Studio One. He also returned to his “Dark of Moon” stage success on TV for a Phico-Goodyear Television Playhouse presentation and appeared in such classics as “Hedda Gabler” and “Julius Caesar” (as Marc Antony). In 1950 he became the first Ellery Queen on TV, appearing in the low budget Dumont series “The Adventures of Ellery Queen.”
On January 2, 1951, Hart died suddenly of a coronary occlusion, possibly triggered by his proliferate alcohol intake. He was divorced once and estranged from his second wife at the time he died. He left a son, Christopher, from his first marriage; two daughters from his second; there is also a debate about another possible son, Richard Lee Hart, from an out-of-marriage relationship to Phyllis Buswell.
