George Brent made his screen debut in “Under Suspicion” (1930). Initially a slightly tough talking New York type, Brent proved an effective romantic foil to a wide variety of dominant female stars of the 1930s and 40s, most notably at Warner Brothers, where he was tenured from 1932 to 1942. Capable of playing the strong but silent type, or the urbane and cynical, Brent often spent his screen time desiring his leading lady or being pursued by her. His playing was invariably professional and amiable if not dynamic or idiosyncratic, and so he proved a natural in “women’s films” in which the focus was securely on a more galvanizing female actor who was a bigger star. Among his female paramours over the years were Bebe Daniels (“42nd Street,” 1933), Greta Garbo (“The Painted Veil,” 1934), Ginger Rogers (“In Person,” 1935), Myrna Loy (“The Rains Came,” 1939), Barbara Stanwyck (“My Reputation,” 1946), and Claudette Colbert (“Bride for Sale,” 1949).
Brent most often appeared as romantic lead in deferential support to three of Warners’ classiest star actresses: Kay Francis (“Living on Velvet,” 1935, “Give Me Your Heart,” 1936, “Secrets of an Actress,” 1938); Ruth Chatterton (“The Crash,” 1932, “Female,” 1933), to whom he was married from 1932 to 1934; and, particularly, Bette Davis (“Front Page Woman,” 1935, “Jezebel,” 1938, “Dark Victory,” 1939, “The Great Lie,” 1941). He also occasionally enjoyed a role off the beaten path, as in Robert Siodmak’s memorable Gothic melodrama, “The Spiral Staircase” (1946).
Brent sustained his prolific output after he and Warners parted company, but his films gradually diminished in importance in the later 40s. Very much a leading man type, he never made the transition to character roles, and so left the cinema in 1953 after appearing in a series of minor efforts. Two of his other four wives were actresses Constance Worth and Ann Sheridan (opposite whom he made “Honeymoon for Three,” 1941). Brent came out of retirement for 1978’s “Born Again”. The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
For an article on George Brewnt please click here.
Angel On The Amazon, poster, US poster art, George Brent (left), Constance Bennett (second left), Vera Ralston (center), 1948. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)Submarine D-1, poster, Wayne Morris, Pat O’Brien, George Brent on window card, 1937. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)TWIN BEDS, US poster, top from left: George Brent, Joan Bennett, bottom: Mischa Auer, 1942 Courtesy Everett Collection ACHTUNG AUFNAHMEDATUM GESCHÄTZT PUBLICATIONxINxGERxSUIxAUTxONLY Copyright: xCourtesyxEverettxCollectionx MCDTWBE EC002The Purchase Price, poster, from left: George Brent, Barbara Stanwyck, 1932. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)The Great Lie, poster, George Brent, Bette Davis, 1941. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Dictionary of Irish biography:
Brent, George (1904–79), actor, was born George Nolan 15 March 1904 at Main St., Ballinasloe, Co. Galway, son of John Nolan, shopkeeper, and Mary Nolan (née McGuinness). Orphaned in 1915, he moved briefly to New York where he was cared for by an aunt, returning later to Dublin to finish his education. He took up acting at the Abbey Theatre, where he had already played some minor roles but, suspected by the British authorities of IRAinvolvement, he fled to Canada, where he continued to act, working in stock companies for two years. He again travelled to New York, finding work with stock companies and founding three of his own. His appearances on Broadway in the late 1920s were noticed in Hollywood. He was talented, but his good looks and reliability were as important in ensuring that he achieved over a hundred screen credits during his career. Most of these were in Warner Brothers productions (1930–53).
Never a powerful box-office draw, he was employed by the studio to carry middle-ranking projects while providing support to A-list stars in larger undertakings. Unambitious and without pretensions, he was happy to take the money while performing quietly and professionally. This led unkind reviewers to describe his performances as having ‘all the animation of a penguin’ and as varying between those in which he was with or without a moustache. Once he abandoned the ‘rugged hero’ roles in which he was initially cast, he provided competent but understated portrayals, making him an ideal foil for the domineering leading ladies of this period. In 1934 he delivered just such a performance opposite Greta Garbo in the screen adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s ‘The painted veil’. He was also a good foil for Merle Oberon, Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine, Mary Astor, Barbara Stanwyck (four times), Ruth Chatterton (four times), and Bette Davis (eleven times). Davis was one of the many leading ladies with whom he had affairs and Ruth Chatterton was the second (1932–4) of his six wives. He married two other actresses, Constance Worth (1937) and Ann Sheridan (1942–3).
His best performances were probably in Jezebel (1938), for which Davis won an Oscar; Dark victory (1939) with Davis, Humphrey Bogart, and Ronald Reagan; The rains came (1939), a disaster movie with Tyrone Power; and The spiral staircase (1945), a horror-thriller set in England. He never filmed in Ireland, but starred with James Cagney in a movie about an Irish-American regiment, The fighting 69th (1940). His career entered a terminal slide in the late 1940s when he appeared in dross such as The corpse came C.O.D. (1947), a severe decline for someone who had acted in 42nd Street (1933). When the movie offers dried up he starred in a TV series, Wire service (1956–9), before retiring to run his horse-breeding ranch in California. He made one more brief cameo in the movies playing a judge in the dire Born again (1978), the story of Nixon aide George Colson’s discovery of Christianity when jailed after Watergate. He died of emphysema 27 May 1979 in California
Born to a Catholic nationalist family in Belfast, Ireland. Although her mother died when she was two, her father was a landowner farmer, insuring that the family always had income from family land. He soon left for Australia and McGlade was brought up by an aunt, studying at St. Dominic’s School, Belfast, convent schools and inParis. Thinking she would pursue teaching, she enrolled in the South Kensington School of Art.
Before taking up teaching duties, she enrolled in the Abbey School of Acting (affiliated with Dublin‘s Abbey Theatre). She changed her name when she began her acting career with the Abbey Theatre. One her earliest appearances was in George Bernard Shaw‘s The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet in which she played the part of a swaggering American ranch girl. The production played in Dublin as well as in New York, opening 20 November 1911 at the Maxine Elliott Theatre, marking O’Connor’s American debut. By 1913 she was based inLondon where she appeared in The Magic Jug, Starlight Express (1915-16 at the Kingsway Theatre), and Paddy the Next Best Thing. In the early 1920s she appeared as a cockey maid in Plus Fours followed in 1924 by her portrayal of a cockney waitress in Frederick Lonsdale‘s The Fake. In a single paragraph review, an unnamed reviewer noted “Una O’Connor’s low comedy hotel maid was effectively handled.” The latter show also played in New York (with O’Connor in the cast), opening 6 October 1924 at the Hudson Theatre. A review of the New York performances of The Fake recounts details of the plot, but then mentions
…two players of more than ordinary excellence. In the third act of The Fake occurs a scene between Una O’Connor and Godfrey Tearle, with Miss O’Connor as a waitress trying a crude sort of flirtation with Mr. Tearle. He does not respond at all and the longing, the pathos of this servant girl when she has exhausted her charms and receives no encouragement, is the very epitome of what careful character portrayal should be. Miss O’Connor is on the stage for only this single act, but in that short space of time she registers an indelible impression. Rightly, she scored one of the best hits of the performance.
These two plays in which she portrayed servants and waitresses appear to have portended her future career. Returning to London, she played in The Ring o’ Bells (November 1925), Autumn Fire (March 1926), Distinguished Villa (May 1926), and Quicksands of Youth (July 1926). When Autumn Fire toured the U.S., opening first in Providence, Rhode Island, a critic wrote: “Una O’Connor, who plays Ellen Keegan, the poor drudge of a daughter, bitter against life and love, does fine work. Her excellence will undoubtedly win her the love of an American public.”
She made her first appearance on film in the 1929 Dark Red Roses, followed by Murder! (1930) directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and an uncredited part in To Oblige a Lady (1931).
Distinguished Villa, a play by Kate O\’Brien, Little Theatre, London, starring Una O\’Connor and Ivor Barnard.
1926
Despite her lengthy apprenticeship she had not attracted much attention. British critic Eric Johns recalled meeting her in 1931 in which she confessed “I don’t know what I’m going to do if I don’t get work…The end of my savings is in sight and unless something happens soon, I’ll not be able to pay the rent.”[Her luck changed when she was chosen by Noël Coward to appear in Cavalcade at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1933. Expressing surprise that Coward noticed her, Coward responded that he had watched her for years and wrote the part with her in mind. She portrayed an Edwardian servant who transforms herself into a self-made woman. When the curtain came down after a performance attended by Hollywood executives, they exclaimed to each other “We must have that Irish woman. That is obvious.” Her success led her to to reprise her role in the film version of Cavalcade, and with its success, O’Connor decided to remain in the United States.
Among O’Connor’s most successful and best remembered roles are her comic performances in Whale’s The Invisible Man (1933) as the publican’s wife and in Bride of Frankenstein (1935) as the Baron’s housekeeper. She appeared in such films as The Informer (1935). Feeling homesick, in 1937 she went back to London for twelve months in the hope of finding a good part but found nothing that interested her. While in England she appeared in three television films. After her return to America, the storage facility that housed her furniture and car was destroyed in one of The Blitz strikes, which she took as a sign to remain in America.
Her film career continued notably with The Bells of St. Mary’s (1944). She also appeared in supporting roles in various stage productions and achieved an outstanding success in the role of “Janet McKenzie”, the nearly deaf housemaid, in Agatha Christie‘s Witness for the Prosecution at Henry Miller’s Theatre on Broadway from 1954–56; she also appeared in the film version in 1957, directed by Billy Wilder. As one of the witnesses, in what was essentially a serious drama, O’Connor’s character was intended to provide comic relief. It was her final film performance.
After a break from her initial forays in television, she took up the medium again by 1950. In 1952 she was able to state that she had been in 38 production that year alone. In a rare article that she authored, O’Connor called working in television “the most exacting and nerve-racking experience that has ever come my way. It is an attempt to do two things at once, a combination of stage and screen techniques with the compensations of neither…” Noting that many actors dislike television work, O’Connor said that she liked it because it allowed her to play many parts. She lamented that preparation for television work was too short a period for an actor to fully realize the depths of role characterization, but that it showed an actor’s mettle by the enormous amount of work needed. “Acting talent alone is not enough for the job. It requires intense concentration, an alert-quickmindedness that can take changes in direction at the last minute…” O’Connor concluded presciently: “It sounds fantastic and that is just exactly what it is, but it also an expanding field of employment that has come to stay. As such it is more than welcome here, where the living theatre seems determinedly headed the opposite way.”
Reportedly she was “happily resigned” to being typecast as a servant. “There’s no such thing as design in an acting career. You just go along with the tide. Nine times out of ten one successful part will set you in a rut from which only a miracle can pry you.”
Her weak heart was detected as early as 1932, when her arrival in America began with detention at Ellis Island because of a “congenital heart condition.” By the time of her appearance in the stage version of Witness for the Prosecution she had to stay in bed all day, emerging only to get to the theater and then leaving curtain calls early to return to her bed. Her appearance in the film version was intended to be her last.
Eric Johns described O’Connor as
…a frail little woman, with enormous eyes that reminded one of a hunted animal. She could move one to tears with the greatest of ease, and just as easily reduce an audience to helpless laughter in comedies of situation. She was mistress of the art of making bricks without straw. She could take a very small part, but out of the paltry lines at her disposal, create a real flesh-and-blood creature, with a complete and credible life of its own.
She admired John Galsworthy and claimed to have read all his works. She once said “Acting is a gift from God. It is like a singer’s voice. I might quite easily wake up one morning to find that it has been taken from me.”
Barry Coe was an Americanactor who appeared in film and on television from 1956-1978. Many of his motion pictures parts were minor, but he co-starred in one series, Follow the Sun, which aired on ABC during the 1961-1962 season, and also played the recognizable “Mr. Goodwrench” on TV commercials in the 1970s and 1980s.
Born Barry Clark Heacock, his name was changed to Joseph Spalding Coe when his mother Jean Elizabeth Shea married Joseph Spalding Coe Sr. in 1940 in Los Angeles. His father Francis Elmer “Frank” Heacock, a writer and publicist for Warner Brothers, was killed in an auto accident in North Hollywood, CA, April 5, 1940.
Coe attended the University of Southern California and was discovered by a talent scout during a trip with his fraternity to Palm Springs in the mid-1950s. He was signed under contract for 20th Century Fox as an actor.
In 1961 Coe and Brett Halsey played magazinewriters Paul Templin and Ben Gregory, respectively, with Gary Lockwood as their researcher, Eric Jason on the ABC television network series Follow the Sun from September 17, 1961, through April 8, 1962. The program was set in Honolulu, Hawaii, and the writers often ventured into private detective work. Despite some memorable episodes, Follow the Sun was cancelled after twenty-nine segments.
After Follow the Sun folded, Coe appeared in a support role in Fox’s The 300 Spartans (1962)[6] then guest starred in 1962 on the first episode of the fourth season of NBC‘s Western series Bonanza. He portrayed ranch hand Clay Stafford, who reveals himself to be the “fifth” Cartwright, a half brother to Little Joe (Michael Landon) via their mother Marie. Although stepfather Ben Cartwright (Lorne Greene) and Joe take Clay at his word, the other Cartwright brothers, Hoss (Dan Blocker) and Adam (Pernell Roberts) are skeptical and intend to investigate Clay’s claim. The episode called “The First Born” could have introduced Coe as a new cast member. Entertainment writer Hal Ericson reported that friction (i.e. job security) on the set caused Bonanza producers to stick with the three brothers.
From the late 1970s into the early 1980s, Coe was “Mr. Goodwrench” in television advertising for a chain of national auto parts stores under General Motors.[4]
Until his death, Coe was married to the former Jorunn Kristiansen, who was a Norwegian beauty queen in the 1950s and now a painter (born 1940). Their son is William Shea Coe (born 1966). In the 1980s, Barry Coe’s daughter attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Barry Coe had a side business in nutritional supplements—Adventures in Nutrition; labels for the containers were printed by Joe Faust. He lived in Brentwood, Los Angeles, California for several years.
Guy Madison obituary in “The Independent” in 1996.
Guy Madison made his film debut in “Since You Went Away” a 1944 U.S. film about life on the home front during World War Two. Madison had only a few minutes screen times with the stars Jennifer Jones and Robert Walker, but he made sufficent impact with the general audience that he was awarded a studio contract. He is perhaps best known for his 1950’s television series “Wild Bill Hickcock”, Guy Madison died in 1996.
David Shipman’s obituary on Guy Madison in “The Independent”:Guy Madison was described by his studio’s publicists as “a dreamboat” – one of the several non-threatening leading men of the post-war period, fresh-faced and just on the right side of rugged. He didn’t make it in that capacity, but was to have a prolific 40-year career in westerns. Tallulah Bankhead said, “He made all the other cowboys look like fugitives from Abercrombie and Fitch” (the New York gentlemen’s outfitters).He was a linesman before the Second World War, in which he served as a marine. A picture in a naval magazine (so the story went) caught the attention of a Hollywood talent scout, Helen Ainsworth, who recommended him to David O. Selznick. Selznick gave him a small role in his Home Front morale-booster Since You Went Away (1944), as a marine who heckles Jennifer Jones and Robert Walker in a bowling-alley.
He was only on the screen for three minutes, but the studio received 43,000 fan letters. Selznick’s talent agent, Henry B. Willson, had already seen his potential and had changed the actor’s name, from Robert Moseley to Guy Madison, for his new career – as he would do later for such other handsome movie hulks as Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter. Selznick himself was making few movies, so he loaned Madison and Dorothy McGuire to RKC for Till the End of Time (1946), in which she was a war widow, uncertain whether she should or could make a second start with Madison. The New York Times found itself “quite exasperated by their juvenile behaviour” and added that Madison “is a personable youngster, but he has much to learn about the art of acting”.
Most reviewers felt similarly about Honeymoon (1947), which was situated in Mexico City. Selznick loaned Madison and Shirley Temple to RKO for this, to little benefit for all concerned. After Texas, Brooklyn and Heaven (1948), again on loan-out, Selznick dropped Madison – as he did most of his contract-players, all of whom were straining at the bit because he charged far more for their services than he paid them. Madison went on to play Wild Bill Hickok on radio from 1951 to 1956 and also, from 1952, on television. He was one of the first names from the big screen to enter the new medium.
It revived his career at a time when ironically Hollywood was trying to combat it with new techniques, 3-D and CinemaScope. Warner Bros put Madison in the 3-D western The Charge at Feather River (1953), and 20th Century-Fox into its wide-screen The Command (1954). He never stopped working thereafter, though there were no other major credits. In the 1960s he was one of the several names to go to Italy to make costume spectaculars and spaghetti westerns. In the 1970s and 1980s he worked mainly in television, following a series, Bullwhip, in the 1950s, which was not one of the more memorable of all the television westerns of that time. He joined some other grizzled veterans of the era – James Arness, Ty Hardin, Robert Horton – for an ill-advised telemovie, Red River (1988), which didn’t compare with the Howard Hawks classic on which it was based.
His first wife was the beautiful and haunted Gail Russell, who was already an alcoholic when they married; but for that, her career might have been much more successful than his.
David Shipman
Robert Ozell Moseley (Guy Madison), actor: born Bakersfield, California 19 January 1922; married 1949 Gail Russell (marriage dissolved), 1954 Sheilah Connolly (one son, three daughters; marriage dissolved); died Palm Springs 6 February 1996.
“The Independent” obituary can also be accessed on-line
Though she shared the screen with such stars as Elvis Presley, Montgomery Clift and Anna Magnani in the course of her brief acting career, Dolores Hart received more notice in Hollywood history books for her decision to abandon stardom for life as a nun in 1963
. A pert, intelligent and confident performer, Hart proved equally capable at both high drama like “Wild is the Wind” (1957) and lightweight fare like “Loving You” (1957), the first of two films opposite Presley, and “Where the Boys Are” (1960).
A retreat to the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in 1959 left Hart feeling a void in her life that could not be filled by acting, and in 1963, she left Hollywood to take her vows as a nun. For the next four decades, Hart led the monastic life of a Benedictine nun, returning occasionally to the spotlight to recall her religious calling, most notably for a 2012 documentary short, “God is the Bigger Elvis,” which received an Oscar nomination. Though her film career was an admirable footnote in her life, Hartâ¿¿s dedication to her religious order was proof positive that some things held greater resonance than Hollywood stardom.
She was born Dolores Hicks in Chicago, IL on Oct. 20, 1938. The daughter of actor Bert Hicks and his wife, Harriet, she was also related by marriage, through an aunt, to singer Mario Lanza. Her fatherâ¿¿s career immediately enamored Hart to such an extent that she planned to become an actress at an early age. But her parentsâ¿¿ divorce halted her chances of being a child performer, and she escaped the chaos of their split by relocating to Chicago to live with her grandparents. There, she received an education in Hollywood films from her grandfather, a projectionist at a local movie theater. Hart eventually returned to Los Angeles, where she earned the lead role in a school production of Saint Joan. A friend with connections to Paramount sent word to producer Hal Wallis about Hart, and he brokered a screen test and contract with the studio for her while she was still in her teens.
GOD IS THE BIGGER ELVIS, US poster art, Dolores Hart, 2012. HBO Films/Courtesy Everett Collection HBO/Courtesy Everett Collection ACHTUNG AUFNAHMEDATUM GESCHÄTZT PUBLICATIONxINxGERxSUIxAUTxONLY Copyright: xHBO/CourtesyxEverettxCollectionx MCDGOIS EC010
Hart made a considerable splash with her first film role as Elvis Presleyslove interest in the 1957 musical drama “Loving You” (1957). The success of the film made Hart an in-demand supporting performer, and she was soon cast in major productions like George Cukor’s Wild is the Wind” (1957) with Anthony Quinn and Anna Magnani, and “Lonelyhearts” (1958), a sanitized take on Nathaneal Wests novel Miss Lonelyhearts, with Montgomery Clift, Myrna Loy and Maureen Stapleton.
That same year, she reteamed with Presley for one of his best features, Michael Curtizâ¿¿s “King Creole” (1958). Such a string of prestigious projects seemed to indicate that Hart was destined for stardom.
But while filming the Western “The Plunderers” (1959), Hart began to feel pangs of doubt about the life of a professional actor. She experienced a career triumph that year with her Broadway debut in “The Pleasure of His Company” (1959), which earned her a Tony Award nomination and a Theatre World Award. She was later approached to reprise her performance in a 1961 film version, but soon discovered that Debbie Reynolds had been cast in the role.
Disillusioned and weary from the play’s schedule, she was advised by a friend to take a retreat at the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, CT. Hart found the experience physically and, more important, spiritually rejuvenating, and would return to the abbey several times over the next two years.
Hart worked steadily throughout 1960, scoring a hit with the then-controversial “Where the Boys Are” (1960) as one of four college girls exploring their sexuality while on spring break.
Her turn in “Francis of Assisi” (1961) as a young aristocrat who gave up her worldly possessions to follow the 13th century saint (Bradford Dillman) by becoming a nun proved remarkably prescient; after completing “The Inspector” (1962), an emotionally taxing film in which she played a Holocaust survivor, and the lightweight comedy “Come Fly With Me” (1963), Hart realized that she was in spiritual crisis. She broke off her engagement to Los Angeles businessman Don Robinson and returned to the Regina Laudis abbey, where she turned her back on the motion picture industry and began taking vows to become a nun.
Hart became Sister Dolores Hart after completing her vows in 1970. She embraced the monastic life of the order, which included several hours of prayer a day and maintaining the farm and property at the abbey.
Hart also spearheaded a project to further develop the abbey’s connection to the community around them through yearly theater productions, some of which were co-funded through her relationship with Hollywood talent like Paul Newman and Patricia Neal. In 1999, Hart suffered a crippling bout of peripheral idiopathic neuropathy disorder, a neurological disorder that left her wheelchair-bound for months.
After her recovery, Hart, who became Prioress of the Abbey in 2001, returned to Hollywood for the first time in 43 years to help raise awareness about the disorder, and later testified before a Congressional hearing on her ordeal. In 2012, Hart made headlines for her appearance on the red carpet at the 2012 Academy Awards. She was promoting the documentary short subject “God is the Bigger Elvis” (2012), which chronicled her journey from Hollywood to the abbey. It was her first appearance at a Hollywood event since 1959.
By Paul Gaita
The TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
Dame Olivia de Havilland, who has died aged 104, was one of the last surviving cast members of Gone With the Wind (1939). Her portrayal of the saintly Melanie Hamilton earned her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress and, to the modern eye, while Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett now seems mannered, de Havilland’s precocious maturity is still touching.
She was four times nominated for a best actress Academy Award, and won twice, for To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949). But her impact on her industry extended far beyond her acting ability. Her sufferings under the restrictions of the notorious Hollywood studio system pushed her to take her employers, Warner Brothers, to court. It cost her several years of her career, but her victory – still referred to as the “De Havilland decision” – changed irrevocably the way that actors would be treated by studios.
De Havilland had originally been signed to a seven-year contract at Warner Brothers just as the studio, also home to the director Michael Curtiz and leading man Errol Flynn, was exploring a new physical freedom on sound stages and locations to create a series of swashbucklers.
Her sweetness, and evident crush on Flynn (“You’d have been in trouble, too,” she once said about how overwhelming it was to partner him on screen, at the age of 19) made her the perfect damsel, in Captain Blood (1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), Dodge City (1939), Santa Fe Trail (1940), They Died With Their Boots On (1941), and, best of all, as Maid Marian in the 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood, in which she was sparky enough not to seem soppy.
She began to build a quiet strength and was loaned out to David O Selznick at his request to play the virtuous Melanie in Gone With the Wind. Then, determined not to go back to being “the girl” at Warners, playing ingenues, she rebelled, refusing to take the parts offered to her, and found herself suspended for six months.
She returned to work in The Strawberry Blonde (1941), cast as a plain woman (no prosthetics – plainness was implied in the script and by severity of hair-do) alongside Rita Hayworth, and in Hold Back the Dawn (1941), as a schoolmarm who is a suave con artist’s ticket to a US visa. She was nominated for an Oscar for that.
When her seven years at Warners ended after Princess O’Rourke (1943), the company would not release her, adding her periods of suspension to her contract. “You were a great celebrity but also a slave,” she said, so she read the small print and sued Warners under old Californian laws that prohibited employers from treating workers as serfs. She won and the De Havilland decision, along with a judicial ruling fought for Bette Davis, ended the old studio system by limiting contracts to a total of seven years, suspensions included.
The battles lasted for three years, and, kept off-screen throughout, De Havilland toured US military hospitals in the Pacific where she talked to and comforted wounded service personnel. After her court win Warners warned other studios off her, although she eventually found work at Paramount.
She returned in 1946 in To Each His Own, as the mother of an illegitimate child whose father had been killed in war, and who had turned over the baby for adoption. De Havilland’s good sense tempered the drama’s weepiness, and she won her Oscar at last.
In The Dark Mirror, the same year, she played rivalrous twin sisters; a Hollywood in-joke, for De Havilland’s younger sister, Joan Fontaine, had made a slower professional start, but had beaten her to an Oscar. (The sisters were estranged for most of their adult lives.)
De Havilland went on taking risks: she played a psychiatric patient in Anatole Litvak’s The Snake Pit (1948): meant as a plea for humane treatment in asylums, it now looks as crude as the shock treatment it advocated.
She won her second Oscar in 1949, for William Wyler’s The Heiress, an adaptation of Henry James’s novella Washington Square. Near the end of the film, De Havilland, bundled up in knitted mittens and tippets to conceal her natural glamour, addresses Montgomery Clift, playing a fortune-hunter who years earlier failed to elope with her.
She refuses him another chance. She can be cruel, she says: “I’ve been taught by masters.” You don’t quite believe the cruelty, but you do believe the strength behind the delivery. De Havilland was accused of being unsympathetic, but it took nerve to play a woman who achieves a solitary dignity only after being derided and rejected by father and would-be lover, and it was one of her finest roles.
De Havilland was just into her 30s, yet her career was petering out: her hard-won savvy was not overtly sexual enough. She was offered Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, but felt uncomfortable with the lewdness in the role, which went to Leigh. Fontaine had broken through in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca; De Havilland’s du Maurier film, My Cousin Rachel (1952), was more like a valediction.
She appeared on Broadway as Juliet in 1951, more plausibly as the Shavian wife Candida in 1952, and returned, alongside Henry Fonda, in A Gift of Time, in 1962.
Like other ageing female stars in the 1960s, she was tormented viciously onscreen, beside Davis in Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), and in Sam Peckinpah’s television movie Noon Wine (1966). In the 70s and 80s, retreating to small TV roles, she won a Golden Globe in Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna (1986).
Born in Tokyo, Olivia was the daughter of British parents, Lillian (nee Ruse), an actor, and Walter de Havilland, a patent lawyer related to the family of aviators. After separating from Walter, Lillian took the three-year-old Olivia and the infant Joan to California. Her paternal family originated in the Channel Islands; her cousin Geoffrey was the aircraft designer responsible for producing the famous second world war plane, the Mosquito.
Olivia went to a convent school and, at 17, was spotted in a college production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The director Max Reinhardt, on the lookout for girls with appearances classier than the local cheerleader norm, cast her as Hermia in the same play, first live in the Hollywood Bowl and then in the Warner Brothers film of 1935: “You are my discovering!” he boasted.
De Havilland had early been a member of the screen actors’ union and was a staunch liberal, campaigning for Franklin D Roosevelt and Harry Truman; in 1958 she was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, then in its dying throes. The US gave her the National Medal of Arts in 2008, France made her a chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 2010, and in 2017 she was made a DBE.
In the docudrama series Feud: Bette and Joan (2017), chronicling the rivalry between Davis and Joan Crawford, De Havilland was portrayed by Catherine Zeta-Jones. The real-life De Havilland objected to how its creators “used my identity without my consent and put false words in my mouth, including having me publicly calling my sister, Joan Fontaine, a ‘bitch’.” But in March 2018 a California appeals court dismissed her lawsuit on grounds of free speech.
There were romances with James Stewart and John Huston before she married, in 1946, and divorced, in 1952, the novelist Marcus Goodrich, with whom she had a son, Benjamin, who died in 1991.
She met Pierre Galante, then editor of the magazine Paris-Match, at the 1955 Cannes film festival, and moved to France after their marriage. They divorced in 1979, but she cared for him in his last illness in 1998; their daughter, Gisèle, survives her.
• Olivia Mary de Havilland, actor, born 1 July 1916; died 26 July 2020
Rick Jason was born in 1923 in New York City. In the early 50’s he was groomed as a leading man in Hollywood and starred opposite Linda Darnell in “This Is My Love” in 1954 and “Sombrero” with Pier Angeli. However in the 1960’s he had his biggest success with the hit US TV series “Combat” which ran from 1962 until 1967. He continued to act in TV and film until the 1980’s. He died in 2000.
IMDB entry:
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Loraine Wingham winghaml@mala.bc.ca
The only child of a stockbroker and well-to-do mother, Richard Jason described himself as “second-generation nouveau riche” and a born romantic. Friends say he was affable, charming, driven and a real Renaissance man. A good student, popular with classmates and teachers, Jason’s hellish behavior got him expelled from eight prep schools before he managed to graduate from Rhodes School.
His father bought him a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, but Rick sold the seat and enlisted in the Army Air Corps (1943-45). After the war he attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts on the GI Bill. While attending a New York play he was spotted by actor-director Hume Cronyn, who immediately cast him in “Now I Lay me Down to Sleep”. The role earned Rick a Theater World Award and a Hollywood contract with Columbia Pictures (he was offered contracts by four different studios).
For the first year he was under contract, a frustrated Jason did not work. Meanwhile, MGM was searching for an actor to replace the departed Fernando Lamas in Sombrero(1953). Jason, now released from Columbia, landed the role. This success led to The Saracen Blade (1954) and RKO’s This Is My Love (1954).
Twentieth Century-Fox then signed him for the male lead in The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (1956), after which he was signed to a multi-picture contract. His first project, an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s “The Wayward Bus” (The Wayward Bus (1957)), earned him critical acclaim; a string of strong performances, both in films and TV, followed. Rick was deluged by more than 30 offers for TV series. In 1960 he starred as suave insurance investigator Robin Scott inThe Case of the Dangerous Robin (1960).
The series ran 38 episodes and made Jason the first actor to use martial arts (karate) on TV. In September 1962 he exploded onto prime-time screens as the cool, calm and collected Lt. Gil Hanley in ABC’s hit seriesCombat! (1962), Five seasons and 152 episodes later, Jason was a household name. After “Combat!” Rick returned to theater. He also made films in Japan and Israel. In 1970 he took the lead in the 1970 pilot Prudence and the Chief (1970). His TV career remained strong, and in the ’70s and ’80s he appeared in Matt Houston (1982), Police Woman (1974), Murder, She Wrote (1984), Wonder Woman (1975), Fantasy Island(1977), Airwolf (1984) and Dallas (1978).
In 1973 he was a regular on the soap opera “Young and the Restless, The” (1973). After his retirement he kept busy doing voice-overs for commercials and ran the Wine Locker, a 4,000-square-foot facility used to store fine wines under optimal conditions. Sadly, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot in October 2000.
His obituary in the “Los Angeles Times” can be found here.
Cathleen Nesbitt hailed from Belfast where she attended Queen’s University. In 1911 she joined the Irish Players and performed with them in the U.S. in Synge’s “The Well of the Saints” and “The Playboy of the Western World”. She was the love of the poet Rupert Brooke who was to die in World War One. An interesting article on their releationship can be sourced on the Telegraph website here.
Over the next thirty years she made many British theatre and film appearances. In 1951 she was on Broadway with Audrey Hepburn in “Gigi” and made her first American film in 1953 which was “Three Coins in the Fountain”. In 1956 she was back on Broadway again in “My Fair Lady”.Her last film was in 1980 when she made “The Never Never Land” at the age of 92. She died two years later.
IMDB entry:
The Calendar by Edgar Wallace (1875-1932), 1929. Lady Panniford, played by Cathleen Nesbitt (1888-1982), left, and Garry Anson, played bu Owen Nares (1888-1943), right. The Play, vol. 55, no. 331, (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images) *** Local Caption ***Family Plot, lobbycard, (aka LA TRAMA), left top to bottom: Karen Black, Bruce Dern, Barbara Harris, Alfred Hitchcock, center from left: Cathleen Nesbitt, Barbara Harris, 1976. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Diminutive, genteel Cathleen Nesbitt was a grand dame of the theatre on both sides of the Atlantic in a career spanning seven decades. Among almost 300 roles on stage, she excelled at comic portrayals of sophisticated socialites and elegant mothers. Hollywood used her, whenever a gentler, sweeter version of Gladys Cooper was needed, yet someone still possessed of a subtly sarcastic wit and turn of phrase. Cathleen attended Queen’s University in Belfast and the Sorbonne in Paris. Encouraged by a friend of her father – none other than the legendary Sarah Bernhardt – to enter the acting profession, she was taken on by Victorian actress and drama teacher Rosina Filippi (1866-1930). Cathleen’s first appearance on stage was in 1910 at the Royalty Theatre in London. This was followed in November 1911 by her Broadway debut with the touring Abbey Theatre Players in ‘The Well of the Saints’.
From here on, and for the rest of her long life, she was never out of a job, demonstrating her range and versatility by playing anything from villainesses to being a much acclaimed Kate in Shakespeare’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, Perdita in ‘The Winter’s Tale’, Audrey Hepburn‘s grandaunt in ‘Gigi’, the Dowager Empress in ‘Anastasia’ and the gossipy ‘humorously animated’ Julia Shuttlethwaite of T.S. Eliot‘s ‘The Cocktail Party’. Her Mrs. Higgins in ‘My Fair Lady’, Brooks Atkinson described as played with ‘grace and elegance’, which also pretty much sums up Cathleen’s career in films.
Her first motion picture role was a lead in the drama The Faithful Heart (1922), adapted from an Irish play. She then absented herself from the screen for the next decade, resurfacing in supporting roles in British films, though rarely cast in worthy parts, possible exceptions being Man of Evil (1944) and Jassy (1947). Her strengths were rather better showcased during her sojourn in Hollywood, which began in 1952. In addition to prolific appearances in anthology television, she also appeared in several big budget films, most memorably as Cary Grant‘s perspicacous grandmother in An Affair to Remember (1957) and as gossipy Lady Matheson (alongside Gladys Cooper) in Separate Tables (1958). One of her last roles of note was as Julia Rainbird, who instigates the mystery in Alfred Hitchcock‘s final film, Family Plot (1976).
On the instigation of her friend Anita Loos, author of ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’, Cathleen wrote her memoirs, ‘A Little Love and Good Company’ in 1977. For her extraordinarily long career in the acting profession, she was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Honours List the following year. She retired just two years prior to her death in 1983 at the age of 93.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Her obituary in “The Los Angeles Times” can be accessed here.
“Slinky, sensational – was how Lauren Bacall came to the screen, along with the press releases as to ho her husky voice had been developed by making her shout across a canyon for six months. But she was not a joke at all. James Agate described her – she has cinema personality to burn and she burns both ends against an unusually little middle. Her personality is compounded of percolated Davis, Garbo, West, Dietrich, Harlow and Glenda Farrell, but more than enough of it is completely new to the screen. She had a javelin like vitality, a born dancer’s eloquence in movement, a fierce female shrewdness and a special sweet-sourness. With these faculities, plus a stone-crushing self-confidence and a trombone voice, she manages to get across the toughest girl a piously regenerate Hollywood has dreamed of in a long while. She does a wickedly good job of sizing up male prospects in a low bar, growls a louche song more suggestively than anyone in cinema has dared since Mae est” – David Shioman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International Stars” (1972).
Lauren Bacall will be forever associated with the films she made with her husband Humphrey Bogart. They made four films together and three of them “To Have and Have Not”, “The Big Sleep” and “Key Largo” are regarded as classics. Ms Bacall has many other fims to her credit including “Murder On the Orient Express” and “North West Frontier”. She died in 2014 at the age of 89..
Vernioca Horwell’s obituary in the Guardian”:
She was a nice Jewish girl brought up right by mother in two rooms on the wrong side of the tracks in Manhattan, her father long fled from their lives. She was so nervous in her first film role, at all of 19 years old, that her head shook; so she tilted her chin down to steady herself, and had to look up from under at the camera. She stood at the bedroom door of “a hotel in Martinique in the French West Indies” – the Warner Bros lot in Hollywood – looked up, and askedHumphrey Bogart for a match. And defined her life.
At that incendiary moment in 1944 when she made her screen debut in To Have and Have Not, Lauren Bacall, who has died aged 89, was still Betty Bacall, and had been recently Betty Perske, a stagestruck teenager whose poor family finances bought her a bare year at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (fellow pupil and first crush, Kirk Douglas), and whose fought-for early parts were in flops. She had to pay her way as an usherette and model, an unglam garment trade live dummy, until her photogenic potential was spotted by Diana Vreeland, fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Vreeland had an instinct for the face of the times, for a movie in a single still; and the shot that begat Bacall was a Bazaar cover, Betty besuited before a Red Cross office door. It’s lit noirishly, and she is acting independent – a frank, clever gal caught up in the war effort.
It was seen in Hollywood by David O Selznick, and Columbia pictures; both inquired after her. But the real connection was made by Nancy “Slim” Hawks, wife of the director Howard Hawks, who seems to have recognised in Betty’s stance a style much like her own, plus the physical substance of her husband’s dreams. She alerted Hawks, and Bacall was invited to travel by train across America on the 20th Century Limited to be screen-tested; Hawks offered her a personal contract. Bacall treated him as a surrogate father, and understood only later that he always wanted to be Svengali, making over a kid from nowhere into his desirable girl. His fantasy woman was sexually experienced and insolent; Hawks had hung out with Ernest Hemingway and company, who (as Slim complained after the marriage was over) wanted females who did not wimp out or whinge about the big game hunting, the hard drinking and harder bullshitting – but who were young enough not to be equals, so that they were never a threat.
Bacall sweated out months in Hollywood, showing off on demand as a protege at parties or sitting in her first car up a canyon bawling The Robe aloud by the hour to lower her voice – Hawks disliked women screeching; she bottomed out close in tone to a trombone. Two packs of cigarettes a day helped the baritone. At last Hawks developed a character for her, a near-tramp named “Slim”, in an approximate adaptation of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, starring Jack Warner’s alpha male, Bogart. The film was a wittier riff on Bogart’s previous smasheroo, Casablanca, and it was a hell of a way for a girl to sashay into movies.
Hawks’s creation became the fantasy of a generation when she growled at Bogart that he need do nothing but whistle – “You know how to whistle, don’t you? … You just put your lips together and blow.” If the lines had been delivered by a savvy contemporary of Bogart (say his Maltese Falcon co-star Mary Astor), and not a naive girl acting worldly, most men in the audience would have hid under the seat for a week. The critic James Agee thought Bacall provocative and preposterous, both a wolfwhistle and a belly laugh. He was wrong about her “stonecrushing confidence” (she had none and acquired little), but he did understand that she was a construct.
What had not been invented, though, what made the film hot, was the reactive chemistry between Bacall (renamed “Lauren”, a Hawks attempt at swank) and Bogart, then 44 and on his third marriage, to the drunk, slugging actor Mayo Methot. B & B called each other by their characters’ names, Steve and Slim, they joshed, they lit each other’s cigarettes in instinctive rapport, they fell in love, although whether with the reality of each other or with the parts they were playing no one will ever know. Long after, even she couldn’t say.
Hawks was jealous. He warned Bacall not to risk ending her career just as it began: the film was a big pop success. Since in Hollywood no therm of sexual heat can be wasted, he then cast Bacall and Bogart in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1946). The edgy ruefulness of that movie probably derived from their relationship during the shooting; Bogart wanted to marry his fresh start and also to behave like a gent towards Mayo; Bacall was obsessed with her adoring hero. They shared a private humour in their scripted exchanges – Bacall’s part bumped up on the suggestion of the sharp talent agent, Charlie Feldman – and their innuendo was wicked; no onscreen shag could show what Bacall suggested just by scratching her stockinged thigh. Yet you sense that nothing is sure between them. Bogart missed days on set, drunk, depressed: then he made up his mind. As his divorce crawled through, he sent her a wire: “Please fence me in Baby – the world’s too big out here and I don’t like it without you.” They married in 1945. Bacall walked willingly into his world – the pals of his generation, his continuing affair with his toupee-maker, his liquor consumption (high, but controlled), his refuge of a yacht, the Santana – as if her wedding vows had been those of the biblical Ruth: “Thy people shall be my people, and thy land” – well-staffed houses in the Hollywood Hills above Sunset Strip – “my land.
Hawks had been spot on about her career, as was the playwright Moss Hart, who told her: “You realise from here you have nowhere to go but down.” Those two films were the best she did. Without Bogart, in The Confidential Agent (1945), she seemed cold not cool, minus the zap of her Hawksian dames. She was cast with Bogart again in Dark Passage, and in John Huston’s Key Largo (1948), but in both she was sombre and self-effacing, having by degrees dwindled into wifely respectability. Bogart did not want her to be actor first and wife second – his own King Kong-like fantasy of a woman was that she should fit into a man’s pocket, to be displayed on the palm of his hand, expanded to full-size when desired, and contracted back on command.
She wanted to make him happy, to be Bogart’s Baby and to have Bogart’s babies. In 1947, she went to Washington with a well-intentioned but politically innocent group, including Bogart and John Huston, to protest against the anti-leftwing bullying of the House Un-American Activities Committee; five years later she campaigned for the unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, another father mentor. She bore Bogart’s children, Steve and Leslie, supplied antibiotics to sick location crews on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The African Queen, learned to sip Jack Daniel’s through a long evening. When the Hollywood rat pack (qualifications: nonconformity, drinking, laughing) was first formed in a private room at Romanoff’s, she was voted Den Mother, never out of humour.
Bacall was playing for real a high-grade version of the postwar homemaker bride, but she was not in many movies. Hawks sold her contract to Jack Warner, who suspended her 12 times for refusing poor roles; 50s models of women were rolling off a new production line. Class now meant the aloofness of Grace Kelly; sass meant the vulnerable trashiness of Marilyn Monroe. None of them were sensual as Bacall had been, or as direct, straight-talking and brave. What happened to the image of women after 1945 is summed up in the difference between Bacall unfazed by Bogart’s drunk sidekick in To Have and Have Not (who grudgingly admits “Lady, you’re all right”) and Bacall unamused as the mink-pursuer in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). And that was considered a good part. She bought out her contract, but all that expensive gesture purchased was a soapy role in Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956) through which, you hope hopelessly, she will take tormented Robert Stack out for a belt of bourbon; and another refrigerated career girl in Designing Woman (1957).
Warner Bros was planning in 1956 to team Bogart and Bacall again, in the love story of a military man and a journalist. Just perfect, only it never got made, because that was the year Bacall watched Bogart die from cancer of the oesophagus at the age of 57. In her 1978 autobiography, By Myself, she described his dissolution with the unflinching candour he would have expected of her: the odour of decay on his kiss, the old robe from Dark Passage she wore the night he died in the bed they had long shared, the sack in which his body was taken away to Forest Lawn crematorium.
She displayed a model of the Santana at the funeral – a spirit ship indeed – and sold the real boat. The role of the Widow Bogart, relict of a myth, was not the lifetime part she wanted, although the relative honour of his Hollywood meant more to her as decades passed. His death was the beginning of the bad times. Her comforting but uncomfortable affair with Frank Sinatra froze over: her second marriage, to the actor Jason Robards, produced her third child, Sam, but foundered because of his drinking, and maybe because she was growing into the maturity she had always implied.
The heroine she could have been onscreen was seen for the last time in an unpretentious British adventure, North West Frontier (1959): her governess, boarding a trainload of corpses to retrieve a live baby, has a warmth and strength still not often allowed women in the movies. And certainly not Bacall thereafter. “Film is not a woman’s medium,” she wrote: “If you weren’t the hottest kid in town, men stayed away from you.” She was a mere 42 when she took a cameo as a jaded California invalid in the noir-lite Harper (1966), and most of her subsequent film turns exhibited her as a matron – sometimes amiable (James Caan’s literary agent in Misery, 1990, John Wayne’s landlady in The Shootist, 1976), more often monstrous – a tragedienne disguised as a parvenu in Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Barbra Streisand’s mother – less of a dinosaur than the daughter – in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), for which she won a Golden Globe as best supporting actress. She needed the money; Bogart had bequeathed her custodianship of the legend but not megabucks, as the studio system never generated millions for its stars.
Real work satisfaction came more from her long-delayed Broadway career. George Axelrod constructed his 1959 comedy Goodbye Charlie around her; then she starred in Cactus Flower (1965), in the theatre where she had once ushered in white cuffs – although Ingrid Bergman stole her part in the movie. In 1970, she grabbed the Bette Davis role as an ageing diva of the Martini in Applause, a musical adaptation of All About Eve. It wasn’t much of a musical, but who gave a damn; she got the chance to be the Bacall she had always wanted to be – as Alistair Cooke wrote, as “fragile as a moose”. Her leading man, Len Cariou, was her lover for a while; she picked up a Tony award; a Life magazine cover showed a sexy woman laughing, arm flung up in triumph. The earned success was transient, although she won another Tony in an update of Katharine Hepburn‘s journalist role in a musical of the film Woman of the Year (1981).
Bacall kept on working, admitting that every job, especially on stage, reverted her to youthful nervousness. Harold Pinter directed her in the first London production of Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth (1985), and Terry Hands less successfully in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit at Chichester in 1995. As age broadened that 24-inch waist and chiselled face, she decisively restyled herself, with help from a trainer and the make-up artist Kevyn Aucoin, as a lioness in winter, her wavy mane tamed, the better to emphasis the graphic eyebrows, always her most distinctive feature, and gruff voice. A late magnificence was visible in Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter (1995), and in her awesome matriarchs in Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005), and Jonathan Glaser’s Birth (2004).
That worked-on voice retained its power to the last, especially for witches (voiceovers in Howl’s Moving Castle, 2004, and Scooby-Doo and the Goblin King, 2008), and for aged dames who were still trouble (The Forger, 2012). The most accurate casting was her turn as a Washington social grandee in Paul Schrader’s neo-noir The Walker (2007), demolishing Woody Harrelson’s gay escort with the line: “Memory is a very unreliable organ: it’s right up there with the penis.”
She herself went unescorted in age, unbothered about it, and was proprietorial about the definition of a movie “legend” after over 60 years in gainful employment: less than a couple of decades of stardom, she said, and you were just a beginner. In 2009 she received an honorary Oscar.
Lunching with her was an audience with the last empress of Byzantium, imperiousness interspersed with a really dirty laugh, perhaps the sound of her true self. Every online search sends you back to a picture of her at 19 giving The Look: “You know, Steve, you don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to do anything. You just have to whistle.”
She is survived by Steve, Leslie and Sam.
• Lauren Bacall (Betty Joan Perske), actor, born 16 September 1924; died 12 August 2014
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
A link to her biography on “The Jewish Virtual Library” can be accessed here.
