Horne was born in Buenos Aires of American parents (his father was a businessman in the oil trade). When he was five he went to live with his mother in Havana. Ten years later he was sent to “a little school in New England for troubled children,” in his words. He attended the University of California, where he decided to be an actor.
Horne moved to New York where he appeared in an off-Broadway flop, then began to get regular work on television, including an adaptation of Billy Budd. He also joined the Actor’s Studio.
Tempest, poster, (aka LA A, front to rear: Silvana Mangano, Geoffrey Horne, Van Heflin, 1958. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
In July 1956, Horne successfully auditioned for a small role in The Strange One (1957), whose cast was composed entirely Actors’ Studio alumni. The film was not a huge hit but was widely acclaimed; it was marked the film debut of Ben Gazzara and George Peppard.
The film was produced by Sam Spiegel who then cast Horne in a role in Bridge on the River Kwai in January 1957.
Spiegel also signed Horne to a long term contract – one film a year for five years. “I know Sam wouldn’t send me down the river,” said Horne. “He’s a man of great taste and talent. And the best of the independents to be linked up with, what with all the old-time studio executive types on the way out… I’m not sure I have what it takes to be a star… Time will tell.”
Otto Preminger borrowed him for a role in Bonjour Tristesse but he would make no further films with Spiegel. He then made Tempest in Yugoslavia.[6]
Grant Williams is best rememberd for his lead performance in the cult science-fiction classic “The Incredible Shrinking Man” which was released in 1957. He was born in 1931 in New York City and began acting as a student with the Actor’s Studio.
His other films of interest was “Four Girls in Town”, “Written on the Wind” and “Susan Slade”. Grant Williams died in 1985 aged 53. To view article on Grant William’s career, please click here.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will host a month-long series of screenings of classic horror films with “Universal’s Legacy of Horror” in October. The series is part of the studio’s year-long 100th anniversary celebration engaging Universal’s fans and all movie lovers in the art of moviemaking.
Pictured: THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, 1957.Grant Williams
John Drew Barrymore obituary in “People” magazine.
Sporadic actor John Drew Barrymore, perhaps best known as the absentee father of Drew Barrymore, died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 72.
No cause or details of his passing were released.
In a statement issued by her publicist, Drew, 29, said: “He was a cool cat. Please smile when you think of him.”
John Drew Barrymore’s parents were actress Dolores Costello and the fabled John Barrymore, who was part of a stage and screen dynasty that included brother Lionel Barrymore and sister Ethel Barrymore.
Drew’s grandfather was the colorful Barrymore – as famous for his magnificent profile as he was for his boozing. He died of pneumonia and cirrhosis of the liver in 1942, though, by then, he had been divorced from Costello since 1935, when their son was barely 3. John Drew, sometimes known as John Jr., claimed he saw his father only once.
In the ’50s, John Drew, already battling well-publicized liquor and drug problems, appeared in such movies as The Sundowners, High Lonesome, Quebec, The Big Night, Thunderbirds andWhile the City Sleeps.
He frequently dropped out of projects, however, or arrived on the set late and unprepared. There were also problems with drunken driving and domestic violence. “I’m not a nice, clean-cut American kid at all,” he told the Associated Press in 1962, by which time he had left Hollywood to make movies in Europe. “I’m just a human being. Those things just happen.”
Drew Barrymore was his daughter by his third wife, Ildiko Jaid Barrymore. He is also survived by John D. Barrymore, a son by his first wife, actress Cara Williams (the 1960 sitcom Pete and Gladys). Barrymore’s second wife was Gaby Palazzolo. All three unions ended in divorce.
Susan Peters was born in 1921 in Spokane, Washington. She was signed to a contract with MGM and was featured in a good role in “Random Harvest” with Ronald Coleman and Greer Garson. She was nominated for an Oscar for her performance. Other roles included “Song of Russia” and “Keep Your Powder Dry”. In 1945 she suffered spinal injuries while duck hunting, when a gun went off and a bullet lodged in her spinal cord. She was confined to a wheelchair which had a limiting effect on her career. Her last major film role was in “Sign of the Ram” in 1948. She starred in a TV series, “Miss Susan” in 1951 but died the following year, aged only 31.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
War-era MGM had a lovely, luminous star in the making with Susan Peters. She possessed a creative talent and innate sensitivity that would surely have reigned as a leading Hollywood player for years to come had not a tragic and cruel twist of fate taken everything away from her.
She was born Suzanne Carnahan in Spokane, Washington on July 3, 1921, the eldest of two children. Her father, Robert, a construction engineer, was killed in an automobile accident in 1928, and the remaining family relocated to Los Angeles to live with Susan’s grandmother. Attending various schools growing up, she excelled in athletics and studied drama in her senior year at Hollywood High School where she was spotted by a talent scout. Following graduation, she found an agent and enrolled at Max Reinhardt‘s School of Dramatic Arts. While performing in a showcase, she was spotted by a Warner Bros. casting agent, tested and signed to the studio in 1940.
Making her debut as an extra Susan and God (1940), she saw little progress and eventually became frustrated at the many bit parts thrown her way. Billed by her given name Suzanne Carnahan (known for possessing a zesty stubborn streak, she had refused to use the studio’s made-up stage name of Sharon O’Keefe), Susan was barely given a line in many of her early movies. She did test for a lead role in Kings Row (1942) but lost out to Betty Field. Susan’s first big break came with the Humphrey Bogart potboiler The Big Shot (1942), where she was fourth-billed and had the second female lead. Dropped by Warners, MGM picked up her contract and adopted a new stage name for her, Susan Peters. In the Marjorie Main vehicle Tish (1942), Susan earned a co-starring part and met actor Richard Quine on the set. Quine played her husband in the film. The couple also appeared together in the film Dr. Gillespie’s New Assistant (1942), and married in real life in November of 1943.
Susan won the role of Ronald Colman‘s sister’s teenager stepdaughter (and a potential love interest of the Colman character) in the profoundly moving film Random Harvest(1942) and earned an Academy Award nomination for “Best Supporting Actress” for her efforts. Her potential in that film was quickly discovered and she continued to offer fine work in lesser movies such as the WWII spy tale Assignment in Brittany (1943), the slight comedy Young Ideas (1943) and the romantic war drama Song of Russia (1944), in which she touchingly played Nadya, a young Soviet pianist who falls for Robert Taylor. For these performances, Susan was named “Star of Tomorrow” along with Van Johnsonand others.
Then tragedy struck a little more than a year after her wedding day. While on a 1945 New Year’s Day duck-hunting trip in the San Diego area with her husband and friends, one of the hunting rifles accidentally discharged when Susan went to retrieve it. The bullet lodged in her spine. Permanently paralyzed from the waist down, MGM paid for her bills but was eventually forced to settle her contract. Susan valiantly forged on with frequent work on radio. In 1946 Susan and Richard happily adopted a son, Timothy Richard, but two years later she divorced Quine — some say she felt she was too much of a burden.
Appearing with Lana Turner as a demure soldier’s wife in Keep Your Powder Dry (1945), which was filmed before but released a year after her accident, Susan made a film “comeback” with The Sign of the Ram (1948), the melodramatic tale of an embittered, manipulative, wheelchair-bound woman who tries to destroy the happiness of all around her, but audiences were not all that receptive. She also turned to the stage with tours of “The Glass Menagerie,” in which she played the crippled daughter Laura from a wheelchair (with permission from playwright Tennessee Williams), and “The Barretts of Wimpole Street” opposite Tom Poston, wherein she performed the role of poet and chronic invalid Elizabeth Barrett Browning entirely from a couch.
In March of 1951 she portrayed an Ironside-like lawyer in the TV series Martinsville, U.S.A. (1951) but the show ran for less than one season, folding in December of that year. After this, the increasingly frail actress, who was constantly racked with pain, went into virtual seclusion. Suffering from acute depression and plagued by kidney problems and pneumonia, she finally lost her will to live and died at the age of 31 on October 23, 1952, of kidney failure and starvation, prompted by a developing eating disorder (anorexia nervosa). It was a profoundly sad and most unfortunate end to such a beautiful, courageous spirit and promising talent.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
TCM overview:
A lovely and promising actress who worked her way up the ranks at MGM, Susan Peters’ career was cut short by one of the worst tragedies to affect the Hollywood acting community during the 1940s. After an unpromising start, the Spokane native had her first substantial part in the MGM film “Tish” (1942) and soon became a regular player for the studio. Her most famous credit was the celebrated drama “Random Harvest” (1942), where Peters impressed greatly in a supporting capacity. With an Oscar nomination now on her résumé, she demonstrated further promise in such productions as “Song of Russia” (1944), in which she essayed the female lead role opposite Robert Taylor. In a tragic turn of events, Peters was crippled in a hunting accident, but within a few months, she had resumed acting via radio assignments and was determined to move forward. Her movie days were over after only one more picture, but Peters earned praise for stage performances in travelling revivals of “The Glass Menagerie” and “The Barretts of Wimpole Street,” and she also headlined her own television series for a time. Unfortunately, the strain of dealing with her condition caused Peters to plunge into depression and anorexia nervosa, both of which sapped her will to live and contributed to her premature death at age 31. Although the final years of her life were heartbreaking, Peters displayed considerable courage and the praise for her acting, both before and after the tragedy, was well-deserved.
Susan Peters was born Suzanne Carnahan on July 3, 1921 in Spokane, WA, but her formative years were spent predominantly in Portland, OR and Los Angeles. She gained her first acting experience in plays at Hollywood High and came to the attention of Lee Sholem, a talent scout and future B-movie director. After acting classes and further stage work, Peters was offered a contract with Warner Brothers. Her first film appearance came with an uncredited bit in the Joan Crawford vehicle “Susan and God” (1940) and she graduated to more screen time and actual billing in the Errol Flynn/Olivia DeHavilland Western “Santa Fe Trail” (1940). After a few more virtually anonymous turns, Peters began to receive bigger opportunities, first in such B-pictures as “Scattergood Pulls the Strings” (1941) and “Three Sons o’ Guns” (1941), and then somewhat more promising fare, like the Humphrey Bogart crime drama “The Big Shot” (1942).
However, it soon became clear that Warner was not interested in doing much with Peters and the studio opted not to renew her contract. Fortunately, she had come to the attention of MGM, which cast Peters in the Marjorie Main dramedy “Tish” (1942). The fitfully entertaining production came and went without much notice, but proved important for Peters: she fell in love with co-star Richard Quine and the pair married the following year. “Tish” had also provided Peters with her first part of any real substance and, impressed with the results, MGM offered her a contract. It was soon decided that she would be the best choice for a role in their romantic drama “Random Harvest” (1942) and it was that film that finally brought Peters notoriety. Cast as the step niece of Ronald Colman Peters’ poignant performance earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
Now busy at Metro, Peters’ career followed the usual path for a young contract player on the way up. She was utilized in the franchise entry “Andy Hardy’s Double Life” (1942), as well as B-movies like “Assignment in Brittany” (1943) and “Young Ideas” (1943). Peters was also the female lead of the more prominent production “Song of Russia” (1944), which gained unwanted attention a few years later when it ran afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee for its pro-Russia sympathies. Sadly, Peters’ life changed forever on Jan. 1, 1945. While out on a family hunting excursion, she picked a rifle up off the ground only to have it discharge and lodge a bullet in her spine. The accident left Peters completely paralyzed from the waist down. After a month in hospital, she recovered enough to be discharged. Peters’ last effort prior to the accident, the Lana Turner “gals in uniform” war drama “Keep Your Powder Dry” (1945), was released in the months that followed and while MGM had been paying her medical bills, Peters asked to be released from her contract.
To her considerable credit, Peters determined that she would not let the condition limit her. After spending some of her initial recovery time writing, she was back working that September in a radio staging of “Seventh Heaven” opposite Van Johnson. She was also able to soon maneuver around effectively in her home and in a specially designed car with hand controls which allowed Peters to drive. In a further extension of her resolve to lead a regular life, Peters also decided to become a mother. In 1946, she and Quine adopted boy whom they named Timothy. Peters also returned to movie screens as the star of “Sign of the Ram” (1948), where she played a wheelchair-bound woman who uses her paralysis as a way of manipulating family members. Unfortunately, it was not a success and no more film offers were forthcoming. During this time, she and Quine also divorced. This was done at Peters’ request, in an apparent attempt to release him from any obligation to care for her.
Peters next turned her attentions to the stage and received good notices for revivals of “The Glass Menagerie” and “The Barretts of Wimpole Street.” In both cases, Peters proved up to the challenge and continued her work in each when they went on tour. Television also offered Peters a new opportunity with the daytime series “Miss Susan” (NBC, 1951). Staged live in Philadelphia, the 15-minute legal serial starred the actress as an Ohio attorney who continues on with her obligations, despite having been disabled in a car accident. However, after production of “Miss Susan” came to an end, Peters sank into a deep depression and spent time in a sanitarium. Although she regained her health sufficiently to do some more stage acting, Peters’ remaining years were spent in a downward spiral of psychological problems and anorexia nervosa. Those conditions, coupled with pneumonia and kidney issues, brought about her passing on Oct. 23, 1952. Peters was posthumously awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
A tall, slender, highly attractive blonde, Canadian-born leading lady Rosemary Forsyth was born in Montreal. In the mid 1960s, she was groomed by Universal after a stretch as a model and a sprinkling of small time TV parts. The soft, demure beauty showed quite a bit of promise amid the rugged surroundings as the young ingénue or romantic co-star to a number of top male veterans. James Stewart in Shenandoah (1965), Charlton Heston inThe War Lord (1965), and both Dean Martin and Alain Delon in Texas Across the River(1966) all utilized her services in their respective film.
Married to actor Michael Tolan at the time, she suddenly took a leave of absence from filming to have a child. While the occasion, of course, was a joyous and fulfilling one, it managed to put a permanent damper on her career. She returned to filming with the so-so film Where It’s At (1969) starring Robert Drivas and the very mediocre Dick Van Dyke comedy vehicle Some Kind of a Nut (1969), never again reaching the peak prior to her maternity time off.
Rosemary showed up regularly on the small screen, however, in a slew of standard 70s TV-movies and episodic guest roles. On daytime, she took over the role of Laura Horton on Days of Our Lives (1965) from 1976-1980 and also had regular, albeit brief, parts onSanta Barbara (1984) and General Hospital (1963).
In recent years, she has popped up as more arch matrons on such popular shows as Monk (2002), NYPD Blue (1993), andWithout a Trace (2002). Divorced from Tolan, she later married again.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Yvette Mimieux’s career peak was during the 1960’s when she starred opposite such actors as Rod Taylor in “The Time Machine”, Charlton Heston in “Diamond Head”, George Hamilton in “Where the Boys Are” and “The Light in the Piazza”. In 1976 she made something of a comeback in the gritty thriller “Jackson County Jail” with Tommy Lee Jones. Her last film was “Lady Boss” in 1992. Article on Ms Mimieux on “Brian’s Drive-In Theater” here.
TCM Overview:
Statuesque Yvette Mimieux’s film career took off in 1960 with two major parts demonstrating her versatility. In George Pal’s version of “The Time Machine,” she compelled attention as Weena, a primitive cavewoman in a an apocalyptic future.
Later that year, her appearance as a happy-go-lucky teenager on vacation in the ash hit “Where The Boys Are” garnered her praise as much for her portrayal of a young woman struggling with sexual assault as for her bikini scenes.
For the rest of her career, Mimieux struggled to find equally compelling parts that would allow her to show off her dramatic talents as much as her body. While her role as an unjustly imprisoned woman in 1976’s exploitation movie “Jackson County Jail” briefly helped revive her big screen popularity, from the 1970s up to the time of her retirement Mimieux concentrated on TV movies, two of which included parts she wrote or conceived for herself.
As a remorseless assassin in 1974’s “Hit Lady” and a deranged stalker in 1984’s dark drama “Obsessive Love,” Mimieux finally had the chance to demonstrate her range. After her last appearance in the 1992 TV movie “Lady Boss,” Mimieux retired from acting, turning her attention to real estate.
Guardian obituary in 2022.
Midway through an acting career she abandoned early, out of frustrations with her casting, Yvette Mimieux, who has died aged 80, said the parts she was offered were usually “sex objects or vanilla pudding”. Her pale beauty was striking, but ethereal rather than fragile; qualities that led to the early roles that foreshadowed her entire career. “I suppose I have a soulful quality,” she said. “I was often cast as a wounded person, the sensitive soul.”
She was only 15 when the talent agent Jim Byron supposedly spotted her from his helicopter while she walked a horse in the Hollywood Hills; he landed and gave her his card. The other version of the story was more mundane: he spotted her auditioning for a bit part in Elvis Presley’s Jailhouse Rock. He generated publicity for her through beauty contests and modelling.
She reprised the charmingly innocent and unaware Weena in Light in the Piazza (1962), as Olivia de Havilland’s adult daughter rendered permanently a pre-teen girl by a childhood fall from a horse that halted her mental development. On holiday she falls in love with a wealthy Italian, played by George Hamilton, who had acted with her in Where the Boys Are. He was totally unconvincing in the role, but had lobbied as an MGM contract player to replace the Cuban-Italian actor Tomas Milian, who might have provided a better contrast to Mimieux’s American child.
Her celebrity was cemented by Tyger, Tyger, a two-part episode broadcast in early 1964 of the TV hit Dr Kildare, starring Richard Chamberlain. She guest-starred as a surfing-mad teenager who suffers epileptic seizures. Her scenes in a bikini, including one where she balances on her parents’ coffee table to demonstrate her love for surfing to Kildare, are thought to be the first appearance of a navel on US TV. She had, officially, just turned 22 (her birth date is sometimes given as 1939), and had made eight movies, but stardom continued to elude her.
Mimieux was born in Los Angeles. Her father, René, was French, and worked as a film extra and electrician; her mother, Maria (nee Montemayor) was Mexican. Some of her publicity claimed she had studied archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and that she had met Engber there.
As one of the last wave of MGM contract players she was doubly typecast, first by studio executives there, and then by other studios who sought her on loan to play those types of roles. She showed some talent in the adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic (1963), but she was back playing a young married woman too innocent for sex in Joy in the Morning (1965), and standard love interests in various action films.
In The Desperate Hours (1967), an early TV movie remake of the Humphrey Bogart thriller, she was literally a vulnerable hostage. Her best part came while she was loaned to American International for the black comedy Three in the Attic (1968), as one of three women holding their womanising boyfriend prisoner.
She moved to starring in a TV detective series, The Most Deadly Game (1970-71), alongside Ralph Bellamy and George Maharis; she got the part following the death of Inger Stevens. She featured in another TV movie remake, of Death Takes a Holiday, opposite Monte Markham, and the growing market for TV movies meant that between 1971 and 1984 she made 13 of them, mostly forgettable, but including a remake of Bell, Book and Candle (1976) in which she took the role played by Kim Novak in the 1958 film.
In 1972 she married the director of musicals Stanley Donen. He moved back to the US from the UK in 1975, but his career was waning, and they never worked together
By the time she was 17 she had landed an uncredited bit part in the film of Françoise Sagan’s A Certain Smile (1958), and appeared in the popular TV shows Yancy Derringer, Mr Lucky and One Step Beyond. MGM put her under contract, and gave her a small, bikini-clad role in Platinum High School (1960).
But she caught the public eye opposite Rod Taylor in George Pal’s adaptation of HG Wells’s The Time Machine (1960), playing Weena, the beautiful Eloi blissfully unaware that she and her fellows are raised in idyllic peace as cattle to be eaten by the underground Morlocks. In the erstwhile hit comedy Where the Boys Are, she proved the “spring break” movie’s darkness as a student who is a victim of date rape and gets hit by a car as she staggers down the highway in her torn dress.
She made the cover of Life magazine in 1961, described as a “warmly wistful starlet”, but Modern Romances scooped Life by using an earlier, anonymous modelling photo of her on their cover the same week. A week later, the press reported that the teenage star had been married in 1959, to a student, Evan Engber, who was now doing his military service
Growing more frustrated, Mimieux wrote the TV movie Hit Lady (1974), to give herself a meatier role. But her career’s apotheosis came in Jackson County Jail (1976), a Roger Corman B-movie, which cast her as a California teacher – falsely accused in the deep south of a crime – who kills her jailer when he tries to rape her. It was as if Mimieux, teamed with Tommy Lee Jones, was fighting back against years of being cast as victims.
She co-wrote and produced the TV movie Obsessive Love (1984), in which she played a John Hinckley-inspired role as an over-the-top fan of a soap star. In 1985 she was cast in a TV series, Berrenger’s, a Dallas-like drama set in a New York department store.
That year she and Donen divorced; she retired from acting and married the entrepreneur Howard Ruby. She began painting, pursued her interests in archaeology and Haitian art, and together they took up the cause of protecting Arctic wildlife from exploitation. She came out of retirement briefly in 1992 to play an Ivana Trump-like character in the TV series Lady Boss.
Mimieux is survived by her husband and five stepchildren.
Yvette Carmen Mimieux, actor, born 8 January 1942; died 17 January 2022.
Tom Tryon had a successful career in film when he decided to retire from movies and he became a very popular author of best-sellers. He was born in 1925 in Hartfort, Connecticut. His first film was “The Scarlet Hour”.
He was very effective opposite Diana Dors in “The Unholy Wife” in 1957. He starred in many Westerns including “Three Violent Men”, “Texas John Slaughter”, “The Glory Guys” and “Winchester 73”.
He also became identified with the cult classic “I Married a Monster from Outer Space”. In 1963 Otto Preminger surprisingly chose him to play the lead in the big-budget movie “The Cardinal”.
He also starred in Preminger’s “In Harm’s Way”. Preminger a difficult taskmaster made film making difficult for Tryon.
His interest in acting waned and he took up a new and extremely successful career as a writer. His books include “The Other”, “Harvest Home” and “Fedora”, all of which were subsequently filmed.
Tom Tryon died in 1991 in Los Angeles.Tall, ruggedly handsome leading man of the 1950s and 60s who after a 16-year career gave up acting in 1971 to write the best-selling novels “Crowned Heads” and “Harvest Home”
. After beginning in a stock theatre company as a set painter and assistant manager, and later becoming a production assistant with NBC-TV, the Yale-educated Tryon entered film in 1955 with “Scarlet Hour”.
He appeared in mostly forgettable fare including “I Married a Monster from Outer Space” (1958) (as a stone-faced alien), and as the title character in the 1958 Walt Disney TV series “Texas John Slaughter”. The height of his acting career was the starring role in Otto Preminger’s “The Cardinal” (1963). In 1971, Tryon wrote the highly popular, supernatural thriller “The Other”, which he adapted to the screen the following year, and then switched full time to his eventually more successful writing career.
His novel “Harvest Home” was made into a 1978 TV movie “The Dark Secret of Harvest Home”, and his “Crowned Heads” was adapted in part for the 1978 Billy Wilder film, “Fedora”.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
TCM Overview:
Blog on Tom Tryon:
It was Noel Coward’s partner, Gertrude Lawrence, who encouraged Tom to try acting. He made his Broadway debut in 1952 in the chorus of the musical “Wish You Were Here.” He also worked in television at the time, but as a production assistent. In 1955 he moved to California to try his hand at the movies, and the next year made his film debut in “The Scarlet Hour” (1956). Tom was cast in the title role of the Disney TV series “Texas John Slaughter” (1958) that made him something of a household name.
He appeared in several horror and science fiction films: “I Married a Monster from Outer Space” (1958) and “Moon Pilot” (1962) and in westerns: ‘Three Violent People’ (1956) and ‘Winchester ’73’ (1967). He was part of the all-star cast in ‘The Longest Day’ (1962), a film of the World War II generation, credited with saving 20th Century Fox Studios, after the disaster of ‘Cleopatra.” He considered his best role to be in ‘In Harm’s Way’(1965), which is also regarded as one of the better films about World War II.
While filming the title role in ‘The Cardinal’ (1962), Tom suffered from Otto Preminger’s Teutonic directing style and became physically ill. Nevertheless, Tom was nominated for a Golden Globe award in 1963. He appeared with Marilyn Monroe in her final film, “Something’s Got to Give” (1962), but the studio fired Monroe after three weeks, and the film was never finished. That experience, along with the “Cardinal” ordeal, left Tom wary of studio games and weary at waiting around for the phone to ring.
After viewing the film “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) Tom was inspired to write his own horror novel, and in 1971 Alfred Knopf published “The Other.” It became an instant bestseller and was turned into a movie in 1972, which Tom wrote and produced. Thereafter, despite occasional film and TV offers, Tom gave up acting to write fiction fulltime. This he did eight to ten hours a day, with pencil, on legal-sized yellow tablets. Years later, he graduated to an IBM Selectric.
The Other was followed by Lady (1975) which concerns the friendship between and eight-year-old boy and a mysterious widow in 1930s New England. His book Crowned Heads became an inspiration for the Billy Wilder film “Fedora” (1978), and a miniseries with Bette Davis was made from his novel Harvest Home (1978). All That Glitters (1986), a quintette of stories about thinly disguised Hollywood greats and near-greats followed. Night of the Moonbow (1989), tells of a boy driven to violence by the constant harassment he endures at a summer camp. Night Magic, about an urban street magician with wonderous powers, written shortly before his death in 1991, was posthumously published in 1995. The dust jackets and end papers of Tom’s books, about which he took unusual care, are excellent examples of his gifts as an artist and graphic designer, further testimony to the breadth of his talents. Blog can be accesssed online here.
Valentina Cortese was born in Milan in 1923. She made her movie debut in Italian films in 1940. When she made the British film based in the Dolomites entitled “The Glass Mountain”, she achieved international recogniton 1949. Hollywood came calling. She made three films there of which two “Thieve’s Highway” and “The House on Telegraph Hill” are fine examples of film noir. She was though unhappy in Hollywood and returned to European film making. Cortese was nominated for an Academy Award in 1973 for “Day for Night”. Her last film credit was in 1993..
TCM Overview:
European leading lady with dark hair and slightly sharp, Mediterranean features, in English language films from 1948 with “The Glass Mountain.” Cortese married “House on Telegraph Hill” (1951) co-star Richard Basehart in 1951 and enjoyed a prolific career in international cinema spanning over 50 years. She was especially notable as the older actress in Francois Truffaut’s affectionate, insightful, endlessly reflexive film about filmmaking, “Day for Night” (1973
Les Miserables, poster, (aka I MISERABILI), poster, Gino Cervi (top right), Valentina Cortese (center insert), 1948. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Valentina Cortese obituary in “The Guardian” in 2019.
When Ingrid Bergman received her Oscar as best supporting actress for Murder on the Orient Express (1974), she concluded her acceptance speech by saying: “Please forgive me, Valentina. I didn’t mean to.” She was referring to the vibrant Italian actor Valentina Cortese, who was nominated alongside her for her role in François Truffaut’s La Nuit Américaine (Day for Night, 1973).
In that film, Cortese, who has died aged 96, played Severine, an ageing star who quaffs champagne while working, cannot find the right door to enter or exit, and blames her failure to remember her lines on the makeup girl. Cortese was already an established actor with the best part of her career behind her at the time of Truffaut’s inspirational casting. “A real character, extremely feminine and very funny,” he remarked of her at the time.
Born in Milan, to a single mother who left her in the care of a poor farming family, Cortese was sent to live with her maternal grandparents in Turin when she was six. She enrolled in the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome aged 15, and started in films shortly after – mainly costume dramas in which she played ingenue roles. It was only after the second world war that she was given a chance to reveal her acting talents, beginning with Marcello Pagliero’s neorealist drama Roma Città Libera (1946), in which she gave an expressive performance as a typist who, unable to pay her rent and facing eviction, becomes a prostitute.
In 1948 she starred as both Fantina and Cosetta in one of the many screen adaptations of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and played a concentration camp victim in L’Ebreo Errante (The Wandering Jew, 1948), an updated version of Eugène Sue’s novel.
These roles brought her to the attention of the British producers of The Glass Mountain (1949), a romantic drama set and shot in the Dolomites. Cortese played an Italian partisan who rescues an RAF pilot and composer, portrayed by Michael Denison.
So began her international career. She made several films in Hollywood billed as Valentina Cortesa, working for different studios and so retaining her freedom. The first and best of these was Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway (1949), in which she brought a whiff of neorealism to her role as a prostitute.
“You look like chipped glass,” says Richard Conte as the truck driver enticed to her room. “Soft hands,” he tells her. “Sharp nails,” she retorts. According to Variety, “Even in a cast as effortlessly talented as this, Cortese stands out. Jaggedly beautiful and yet possessed of a warm wit, she fluctuates from animal seduction to cosy repartee in the blink of an eye.”
In Black Magic (1949) – cast as the faithful Gypsy friend of Orson Welles, portraying Cagliostro, an 18th-century hypnotist, conjuror and charlatan – Cortese had to play second fiddle to the insipid Nancy Guild. In Malaya (1949), she was the obligatory love interest, playing alongside the smugglers Spencer Tracy and James Stewart.
On a short return to Italy, Cortese appeared in Géza von Radványi’s Donne Senza Nome (Women Without Names, 1950) as a pregnant Yugoslav widow incarcerated in a camp for displaced women after the end of the second world war. Back in Hollywood, in The House on Telegraph Hill (1951), a richly layered film noir directed by Robert Wise, she portrayed a survivor from a Nazi concentration camp who assumes the identity of a dead prisoner in order to enter the US. Vulnerable but inwardly strong, Cortese interacts superbly with Richard Basehart, playing a man trying to murder her for her estate. She and Basehart married soon after the film was completed.
Destined to play tragic roles for most of the 1950s, Cortese was a refugee in London in Thorold Dickinson’s Secret People (1952), plotting to kill a visiting dictator. Audrey Hepburn, in one of her first substantial roles, played her young ballerina sister.
Basehart and Cortese settled in Rome and appeared together in Avanzi di Galera (Jailbirds, 1954). While he led a peripatetic existence, working in different European countries, she appeared in prestigious productions such as Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954), as the doomed nobleman Rossano Brazzi’s caring sister.
By far the best of her films at this time was Michelangelo Antonioni’s Le Amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955), which involved the affairs of five haute-bourgeois women, with Cortese giving a sensitive and subtle performance as a ceramic artist, the most serious-minded and talented among them, married to an unsuccessful artist. As one of the women puts it to justify stealing her husband, “A woman with more talent than her man is unfortunate.”
In 1960, Basehart and Cortese divorced. He returned to the US, leaving her with custody of their son, Jackie. Cortese continued to appear, usually hamming it up, in a variety of European co-productions with international casts including one of Mario Bava’s tongue-in-cheek horror movies, La Ragazza Che Sapeva Troppo (The Evil Eye, 1963).
Cortese also had supporting roles in Bernhard Wicki’s The Visit (1964), Federico Fellini’s Giulietta degli Spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits, 1965), Robert Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Claire (1968), in which she portrayed a flashy costume designer, and Joseph Losey’s The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), as the spouse of Richard Burton in the title role.
Her Oscar nomination for Day for Night did nothing to improve her roles or the pictures she appeared in subsequently. Many were real turkeys, such as the disaster movie When Time Ran Out (1980). Her last role was as Mother Superior in Franco Zeffirelli’s inferior tearjerker Sparrow (1993).
In 2012 she published her autobiography, Quanti Sono i Domani Passati, from which Francesco Patierno made a documentary, Diva! (2017) – with eight actors portraying her at different stages of her life.
Jackie died in 2015. Ronald Bergan
John Francis Lane writes: Among the many films in which Valentina Cortese starred during the wartime years was Quarta Pagina (1942), on which she first met the upcoming scriptwriter Federico Fellini, an “engaging, intelligent young man who scribbled the day’s dialogue on bits of paper”. It was through Cortese that Fellini cast Richard Basehart as the tightrope-walking Fool in his classic film La Strada (1954).
One of Cortese’s liveliest roles came in Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits, in which she appeared in the grotesque seance scene as one of the exotic friends of the eponymous medium; her character was called Valentina.
Cortese enjoyed considerable success on stage as well as on screen. Her professional and private relationship with the theatre and opera director Giorgio Strehler resulted in some of her greatest performances – and much heartache. For him she played in Chekhov, Shakespeare, Brecht and, most memorably, Pirandello’s unfinished The Mountain Giants, as the enigmatic actor-countess whose company never gets to perform.
She became a cult figure for addicts everywhere of high camp. Her fans in Italy even adored her in the short-lived Roman run, in 1973, of Luchino Visconti’s travesty of Harold Pinter’s Old Times. Cortese was encouraged by the ailing director to make explicit the lesbian relationship only subtly hinted at in Pinter’s original.
Though she only gets a brief mention in Zeffirelli’s autobiography – he recalls her terror of earthquakes while they were filming Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972) in Umbria – Cortese was for many years a grande dame at the Zeffirelli court. On the opening night of his production of Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart in 1983, she seemed eager to replay her famous Truffaut role and forgot her lines.
• Valentina Cortese, actor, born 1 January 1923; died 10 July 2019
Peter Ibbetson, poster, Gary Cooper, Ann Harding, 1935. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Ann Harding was a beautiful elegant blonde actress whose career in film was at it’s peak in the 1930’s. Later in the 50’s and 60’s she resumed film making as a character actress. She was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1903. She made her film debut in 1929 opposite Fredric March in “Paris Bound”. She was nominated for an Academy Award for “Holiday” in in 1931. She starred Gary Cooper in “Peter Ibbetson”. She did not make any movies between 1937 and 1942 .
TCM overview:
Established Broadway lead who landed a contract in 1929 with Pathe (very soon thereafter part of RKO) and starred in a series of soap operas through the mid-1930s, most typically as suffering heroines who must make noble sacrifices for the men they love. With her ash-blonde hair usually swept back into a bun, the patrician Harding brought a gentle, serene strength to such worthy star vehicles as “When Ladies Meet” (1933) and “The Life of Vergie Winters” (1934) but fared less well in such awkward efforts as “Devotion” (1931) and “Enchanted April” (1935). Ideal for the philosophical sophistication of playwright Phillip Barry, Harding shone in fine adaptations of two of Barry’s best comedy-drama talkfests: “Holiday” (1930), for which she received an Oscar nomination as Best Actress, and “The Animal Kingdom” (1932). Two of her best films came late in her reign as a star: the haunting, almost surreal love story “Peter Ibbetson” (1935, opposite Gary Cooper) and the taut suspense melodrama “Love from a Stranger” (1937, with Basil Rathbone).
Harding’s boxoffice power declined sharply after 1935 partly as a result of her typecasting in virtuous roles and she retired two years later after marrying symphony conductor Werner Janssen. In 1942, however, she returned to the screen in the enjoyable mystery “Eyes in the Night”, and subsequently kept intermittently busy in a series of maternal character roles through the mid 50s. Her best part during this time was as the wife of Oliver Wendell Holmes (played by Louis Calhern) in “The Magnificent Yankee” (1950), but the gracefully maturing Harding also played notable roles in “Those Endearing Young Charms” (1945) and “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” (1955).
Interesting interview with Harding’s biographer Scott O’Brien here.
