Virginia Leith, who has died aged 94, was a smoky-voiced model turned actress who began her career under Stanley Kubrick’s direction, before featuring in the film noir classics Violent Saturday and A Kiss Before Dying, before achieving sci-fi cult status as the disembodied fiancée in The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.
Toward The Unknown, poster, poster art, l-r: Virginia Leith, William Holden, 1956. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
She was born on October 15 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio. After leaving high school, where she had excelled at sports, she worked as a waitress at a drive-in cinema in New York and then combined modelling with work as a hat-check girl in Hollywood.
By 1953 she was modelling full-time, and piqued the interest of Stanley Kubrick, then a photographer for Look magazine, after he shot her for its cover. He cast her in his directorial feature debut, Fear and Desire (1953), which was financed by family and friends.
With a homicidal Robert Wagner in A Kiss Before Dying CREDIT: ULLSTEIN BILD/ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES
An anti-war film made towards the end of the Korean conflict – though not set during any specific war – it portrayed four soldiers trapped behind enemy lines who confront their fears and desires when they capture a local girl (Virgina Leith): posters bore the tagline: “Trapped … 4 Desperate Men and a Strange Half-Animal Girl!”
With little success at the box office, and following the death of its distributor Joseph Burstyn, the film faded from view – which suited Kubrick, who was thought to have destroyed the original negative. In 1994, when a screening was arranged, he discouraged people from attending and described Fear and Desire as “a bumbling amateur film exercise”. Leith, however, did show up.
The film led to a contract with 20th Century Fox, and after playing an uncredited chorus girl in the Bob Hope comedy Here Come the Girls, and small parts in the Ginger Rogers noir vehicle Black Widow and the western White Feather, Virginia Leith landed her breakthrough role, as a nurse in Violent Saturday (1955), which chronicles the planning and execution of a bank robbery in a small mining town.
There was an outcry over its violence, with Lee Marvin grinding a young boy’s hand into the ground and Ernest Borgnine attacking Marvin with a pitchfork; it was, said The New York Times, “an unedifying spectacle”, but it has since been reassessed as one of director Richard Fleischer’s best films.
The following year Virginia Leith had her meatiest role, in the noir classic A Kiss Before Dying – based on Ira Levin’s award-winning novel – as the sister of a murdered mining heiress (Joanne Woodward) who sets out tracks down her killer. It was, wrote one critic, “an icily acute nightmare”.
Making her screen debut with Paul Mazursky in Stanley Kubrick’s first feature, Fear and Desire CREDIT:FILM STILLS
But her best-known part was as the unfortunate girlfriend in The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (shot in 1959 but not released until 1962). It depicted a mad scientist (Jason Evers) experimenting with transplant techniques by keeping alive his fiancee’s head after she is decapitated in a car crash, before going on a homicidal hunt to find a svelte new body for her.
She, meanwhile, begins to communicate telepathically with a mutant locked in a nearby cell, the victim of an experiment gone wrong, with fatal consequences. The film gradually acquired cult status and has spawned several musicals, all of them short-lived.
Leith was linked to a string of Hollywood heartthrobs such as Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra, although she annoyed the celebrated gossip columnist Hedda Hopper by refused to divulge details, earning herself the title of “Hollywood’ Most Uncommunicative Actress”.
To Leith’s surprise, and that of her growing legion of fans, 20th Century Fox cancelled her contract in 1957. She languished in guest roles on television before bowing out of acting when she married the Canadian actor, Robert Harron. They divorced after eight years, and she returned to acting, in series such as Starsky and Hutch.
Virginia Leith is survived by two stepdaughters, one of whom, Mary Harron, director of American Psycho.
Virginia Leith, born October 15 1925, died November 4 2019
She left show business following her 1960 marriage to actor Donald Harron.
Hurd Hatfield was born in 1917 in New York City. He came to fame with his role in “The Picture of Dorian Gray” with Angela Lansbury. His other roles include “El Cid”, “King of Kings” and “The Boston Strangler”. He lived in Ireland and died there in 1998.
The Diary of a Chambermaid
El Cid
The Left Handed Gun
King of Kings
The Boston Strangler
Destination Murder
Crimes of the Heart
The Picture of Dorian Gray
His obituary by Tom Vallance in “The Independent”:
THE ACTOR Hurd Hatfield will always be associated with the film role that made him a star, that of the aesthetic young man who remains youthful through the years while a portrait of himself in the attic displays the aberrations of his life, in MGM’s film version of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.
He would later say, however, that the role was a curse as well as a blessing, for within five years he was appearing in B movies, and throughout the rest of his life he would be associated with that single role, despite a long and varied career in film, television and particularly theatre. “I have been haunted by The Picture of Dorian Gray,” he said. “New York, London, anywhere I’m making a personal appearance, people will talk about other things but they always get back to Dorian Gray.” Coincidentally, until recently Hatfield’s appearance remained remarkably youthful, and he became accustomed to being asked if he kept a painting of himself in his attic.
He was born William Rukard Hurd Hatfield in New York City in 1918. He won a scholarship to study acting at Michael Chekhov’s Dartington Hall company in Devon, England, and made his professional debut in the spring of 1939 playing the Baron in scenes from The Lower Depths at the company’s theatre. Returning to the United States with Chekhov’s company, he toured as Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, Caleb Plummer in Cricket on the Hearth, and Gloucester in King Lear, before making his Broadway debut as Kirilov in The Possessed (1939).
This adaptation of several Dostoevsky works into one sombre 15-scene play ran for only 14 performances, with both the acting and Chekhov’s direction deemed excessively stylised. While the company was playing on the West Coast, Hatfield was signed by MGM and cast as Lao San in the studio’s 1944 adaptation of Pearl Buck’s epic novel Dragon Seed, about the effect of Japanese invasion on a family of Chinese farmers. “That was some experience,” said Hatfield later. “A nightmare! Walter Huston was my father, Katharine Hepburn my sister, Aline MacMahon from New York my mother, Turkish Turhan Bey my brother, Russian Akim Tamiroff my uncle – it was a very odd Chinese family!”
Hatfield then auditioned for the role of vain young sensualist who trades his soul for eternal youth in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). “Oscar Wilde’s original Dorian is blond and blue-eyed,” he said later, “and here I was, this gloomy-looking creature. I almost didn’t go to the audition, and when I did, all these blond Adonises were to the right and left of me. I looked like one of their agents!”
The director Albert Lewin had just written and directed a successful transcription of Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, and he was given a large budget to make an opulent and literate version of Wilde’s novel, though critics objected to the many liberties that were taken with the story. The strict censorship of the time worked to some extent in the film’s favour, making the suggestions of corruption and decadence all the more telling for being oblique.
Harry Stradling’s photography, which blazed into colour from black-and- white when it showed the ageing, increasingly dissolute portrait (by Ivan Albright), won an Academy Award. George Sanders was ideally cast as the cynical misogynist Lord Henry Wotton and Angela Lansbury won an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Sybil Vane, the music-hall singer whose plaintive rendition of “Little Yellow Bird” wins Gray’s heart before he is persuaded by Wotton to jilt her cruelly.
Hatfield’s enigmatic, passive performance was given a mixed reception (one critic described his lack of facial animation to that of an actress playing Trilby while under the hypnotic spell of Svengali). Variety reported, “He plays it with little feeling, as apparently intended, and does it well . . . he’s singularly Narcissistic all the way.” The majority felt that the actor’s immobile features and flat tones suggested the mixture of beauty and depravity called for, but although the film was a great success it failed to ignite Hatfield’s film career. “The film didn’t make me popular in Hollywood,” he commented later. “It was too odd, too avant- garde, too ahead of its time. The decadence, the hints of bisexuality and so on, made me a leper! Nobody knew I had a sense of humour, and people wouldn’t even have lunch with me.”
His next film was an independent production, the off-beat Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), adapted by Burgess Meredith from Octave Mirbeau’s 1900 novel Le Journal d’une femme de chambre and directed by Jean Renoir, who was a great admirer of Paulette Goddard, Meredith’s wife and the star of the film. In this strongly cast production, Hatfield held his own as the consumptive son of a wealthy landowner who finds strength and redemption through the love of a chambermaid, but the film, now regarded as a minor classic, was only a succes d’estime at the time of its release, and Hatfield returned to MGM to play a subsidiary role as one of the scientists working on the atom bomb in the studio’s semi-documentary of the weapon’s development, The Beginning or the End (1947).
He had a better role in Michael Curtiz’s enjoyable thriller The Unsuspected (1947), as an artist driven to alcohol by his wife’s infidelities. In Walter Wanger’s costly but ponderous Joan of Arc (1948), Hatfield played Father Pasquerel, chaplain to Joan (Ingrid Bergman), but, when this was followed by roles as the villain in two B movies, The Checkered Coat (1950, as a psychotic killer called Creepy) and Chinatown at Midnight (1950), he decided to return to the stage.
In 1952 he appeared on Broadway as Dominic in Christopher Fry’s Venus Observed, directed by Laurence Olivier, and the following year played Lord Byron and Don Quixote in Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real, directed by Elia Kazan. He was Prince Paul in the Broadway production of Anastasia (1954), played the title role in Julius Caesar in the inaugural season of the American Shakespeare Festival at Connecticut, Stratford (1955) and appeared as Don John in John Gielgud’s legendary production of Much Ado About Nothing (1959).
He occasionally returned to Hollywood, notably for two sexually ambivalent roles: the epicene follower of Billy the Kid (Paul Newman) in Arthur Penn’s film of Gore Vidal’s The Left-Handed Gun (1958) and a homosexual antique dealer considered a suspect in The Boston Strangler (1968) – the scene in which he is questioned by a liberal police officer (Henry Fonda) was one of the most potent in the film. He was in two of 1965’s epics, King of Kings and El Cid, and in 1986 returned to the screen to play the ailing grandfather of Jessica Lange, Sissy Spacek and Diane Keaton in Crimes of the Heart.
His prolific television work included The Rivals and The Importance of Being Ernest (both 1950), the title roles in The Count of Monte Cristo (1958) and Don Juan in Hell (1960), episodes of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Murder She Wrote, and in 1963 an Emmy-nominated performance as Rothschild in The Invincible Mr Disraeli. In recent years he toured Germany, Northern Ireland, Latvia and Russia in The Son of Whistler’s Mother, a one-man play about James McNeill Whistler, and in July 1997 he made a personal appearance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in connection with an exhibition of paintings by Albright (including Dorian Gray).
A bachelor, Hurd Hatfield had lived for many years on an estate in Ireland (he also owned a house on Long Island), commuting for acting assignments. He recently stated that he had accepted his permanent association with the role of Gray, even though the film had for him been “a terrible ordeal in self- control, everything being so cerebral”. He added, “But not many actors are fortunate enough to have made a classic. One friend told me it’s a good thing I didn’t make Dracula and have my entire professional life dominated by that!”
William Rukard Hurd Hatfield, actor: born New York 7 December 1918; died Monkstown, Co Cork 25 December 1998.
For “The Independent” obituary on Hurd Hatfield, please click here.
Few actresses have had such a meteoric start to their Hollywood careers as the fetchingly unpretentious Teresa Wright. She won Oscar nominations for her first three films, a record still unequalled, and five of her first six movies, including are acknowledged classics.
Muriel Teresa Wright, actress: born New York 27 October 1918; married first 1942 Niven Busch (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1952), secondly 1959 and fourthly Robert Anderson (marriages dissolved), thirdly Carlos Pierre (marriage dissolved); died New Haven, Connecticut 6 March 2005.
Few actresses have had such a meteoric start to their Hollywood careers as the fetchingly unpretentious Teresa Wright. She won Oscar nominations for her first three films, a record still unequalled, and five of her first six movies, including The Little Foxes, Shadow of a Doubt and The Best Years of Our Lives, are acknowledged classics.
However, she was to find herself both the beneficiary and the victim of the studio and contract system of the time. When the producer Sam Goldwyn signed her to a contract, she insisted on a famous clause stipulating that she would not have to “pose for photographers in a bathing suit”. She also avoided fan-magazine interviews and vetoed studio-concocted romances. She was given roles in prestigious productions guided by top directors, but her dislike of publicity, and time off for pregnancies, alienated Goldwyn, who terminated her contract, after which her screen image lost some of its lustre. Her later career was primarily on television and in the theatre, where she continued to win acclaim for her truthful and compassionate performances.
Born Muriel Teresa Wright in 1918 in New York City, she was the only child of an insurance agent and his wife, who separated soon after her birth. She was then raised by family in New York and New Jersey, and did not attend school until she was eight years old. After going on a trip to New York to see Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina, she took an interest in acting and played leading roles in school plays. A teacher helped her get a scholarship to the Wharf Theater in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she was an apprentice for two summers.
After graduating from Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, in 1938, she moved to New York, adopting the name Teresa Wright as there was already a Muriel Wright registered with Equity. In the autumn of 1938 she was given work on Broadway playing a small role and understudying Dorothy McGuire (who had succeeded Martha Scott) in the role of Emily in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. She did not get a chance to play Emily in New York, but played the part on tour in New England in the spring of 1939.
A spell in summer stock preceded her creating the role of Mary, theingénue in Life with Father (1939), the comedy by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse which holds the record as the longest-running straight play in American theatre history. Wright had been playing in the show for almost a year when Sam Goldwyn went to see it. He later recalled that, when he went to see her backstage,
Miss Wright was seated at her dressing table, and looked for all the world like a little girl experimenting with her mother’s cosmetics. I had discovered in her from the first sight, you might say, an unaffected genuineness and appeal.
He offered her a contract the same night, and immediately cast her as Alexandra, the daughter of the ruthless, grasping Regina Giddens, in the screen version of Lillian Hellman’s study of greed in the SouthThe Little Foxes (1941). The final confrontation between mother and daughter, when Alexandra rejects Regina’s offer of conciliation and accuses her of murdering her father, displayed Wright’s ability to reveal the moral strength latent in her character’s ingenuousness.
Superbly directed by William Wyler, with a brilliant central performance by Bette Davis and sterling support from many of the original cast, including Patricia Collinge, Dan Duryea and Charles Dingle, The Little Foxes won critical acclaim, with Wright getting a major share of attention. Variety reported,
Miss Wright is a newcomer to the screen, and is magnificent in a very difficult part. A less talented actress in her place could have ruined the picture.
Wright and Collinge were both nominated for the supporting-actress Oscar. When Wyler moved to MGM to make Mrs Miniver (1942), he personally asked Goldwyn to loan Wright to play the neighbour who marries Mrs Miniver’s son. Her spunk and tenacity were never displayed more appealingly than here, and she was again nominated for a supporting-actress Oscar.
Returning to Goldwyn, she was given her first starring role, in Sam Wood’s Pride of the Yankees (1942), the screen biography of one of the greatest baseball players, Lou Gehrig, first baseman of the New York Yankees, who died at the age of 37 from a form of motor neurone disease now known by his name. Realising that despite the sporting background he would need to lure a mass audience (with women in 1942 making up the majority of the customers), Goldwyn had the film concentrate on the love affair and marriage of Gehrig and a Chicago socialite, Eleanor Twitchell (sensitively played by Wright). He added a dance display by the team of Veloz and Yolanda in a stunning night-club set, and he even paid Irving Berlin $15,000 to use his song, “Always”, which had been the favourite of Gehrig and his wife. Gary Cooper was perfectly cast as the unassuming sportsman.
Released in the same year as Mrs Miniver, the film won Wright another Oscar nomination, as Best Actress. She lost that award to Mrs Miniver herself (Greer Garson) but won the supporting award. (Only nine other players have been nominated in both categories the same year – the latest being Jamie Foxx this year.)
In 1942 Wright married Goldwyn’s scriptwriter and story editor Niven Busch. Goldwyn wanted her to star in his next film, a propaganda piece in praise of America’s Russian allies, The North Star. It was a small role compared with that in Pride of the Yankees, and just a few days before filming she announced she was pregnant. The producer quickly borrowed Anne Baxter from Fox, but later voiced the suspicion that Busch had timed it to prevent Wright’s playing such a small part.
She returned to the screen with a much more important role, when Thornton Wilder suggested to Alfred Hitchcock that he borrow her from Goldwyn to star in Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Given first billing over Joseph Cotten, she played the small-town girl whose beloved uncle (Cotten) turns out to be a serial killer. Hitchcock’s personal favourite of his films, it depicts cosy small-town family life disrupted by the presence of evil, and Wright is compelling as her idealistic view of her uncle is chillingly eroded. According to Hitchcock’s biographer Donald Spoto,
Hitchcock respected Teresa Wright, especially her thorough preparation and quiet professionalism, and their mutual admiration society lasted until his death.
Wright then played in her first routine film, when reunited with Gary Cooper and director Sam Wood for a tepid comedy, Casanova Brown(1944). Her husband Niven Busch wrote Duel in the Sun as a vehicle for her, hoping the part of the torrid half-breed Pearl Chavez would prove a rewarding change of image, but the role in the Selznick production went to Jennifer Jones.
Awaiting Wright, though, was a screen masterpiece, William Wyler’sThe Best Years of Our Lives (1946), adapted from MacKinlay Kantor’s blank-verse novel Glory for Me (1945), the tale of three men returning from the war to civilian life. As the girl who falls in love with a man who has returned to a wife he wed three weeks before going overseas and who has been unfaithful, she welcomed the opportunity to play the role of a “homewrecker”, as she called it, though the character is basically sympathetic.
When interviewed for the film’s first DVD release, Wright revealed that she had had one serious disagreement with Wyler over a scene in which she berates her parents for their objections to her behaviour, stating that they have “forgotten how it feels to be in love”. “God, how I hated that scene,” she said:
How can this intelligent young woman say that to these beautiful people? She can see what they mean to each other. Willy couldn’t disagree. He said, “It’s true. The only thing is, if you don’t do it we don’t have the next scene.” It finally came down to, like it or not, this is what brings on the beautiful next scene between Myrna Loy and Fredric March.
The Best Year of Our Lives grossed $10m, second only to Gone with the Wind at the time, and remains a film landmark. Wright was then set to star in The Bishop’s Wife, with Cary Grant and David Niven as her leading men, but after all her costumes had been made she found she was pregnant again. “Goldwyn never forgave me for that,” she later said.
On loan, she starred opposite Robert Mitchum in the moody, Freudian western Pursued (1947), written by her husband. She returned to star with Niven, Farley Granger and Evelyn Keyes inEnchantment (1948), a story of two generations of lovers in parallel romances. Newsweek commented, “Miss Wright, one of the screen’s finest, glows as the Cinderella who captivated three men”, and The New York Times said, “Teresa Wright plays with that breathless, bright-eyed rapture which she so remarkably commands”, but the wistful, predominantly sad story did not find favour with audiences.
Wright was next to have played the title role in Roseanna McCoy opposide Granger, but illness forced her withdrawal. Goldwyn then terminated her contract, citing her unwillingness to do publicity forEnchantment, and she never worked for him again.
At the time, Wright issued a statement declaring that she looked forward to working for other producers who would probably pay her less but would also treat her with more respect. In 1969, she told theNew York Post with wry awareness, “I was going to be Joan of Arc, and all I proved was that I was an actress who would work for less money.”
She took a sixth of her former salary for her starring role in Fred Zinnemann’s The Men (1950), but her co-star was Marlon Brando, making his screen début, and the film was a worthy piece about paraplegics. Wright once again conveyed grit, shining as the steadfast girlfriend who, when Brando rejects her because of his condition, proposes to him.
Niven Busch both wrote and produced her next film, John Sturges’sThe Capture (1950), an interesting if second-grade western co-starring Lew Ayres, but too many of her subsequent films were minor potboilers like California Conquest (1950), though Wright herself was invariably praised.
Wright returned to the stage in the 1950s and in 1959 she married the author of Tea and Sympathy, Robert Anderson, having divorced Busch in 1952. In 1968 she starred in Anderson’s play I Never Sang for My Father. (The couple divorced in the early 1970s but, after Wright’s brief marriage to the actor Carlos Pierre, they remarried and divorced again, though remaining good friends. She won particular acclaim for her performance on Broadway as Linda Loman opposite George C. Scott in a revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman(1975). In 1980 she was part of a superb ensemble, including Maureen O’Sullivan, Gary Merrill and Nancy Marchand, in a beautiful revival of Paul Osborne’s Morning’s at Seven. In 1991 she co-starred in another of Osborne’s plays, On Borrowed Time, with George C. Scott and Nathan Lane.
Her prolific television work included three Emmy-nominated performances. Later films included Roseland (1977), Somewhere in Time (1980) and the role of Miss Birdie, Matt Damon’s eccentric aunt in Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of John Grisham’s The Rainmaker (1997).
For the last 10 years she lived quietly in New England, appearing occasionally at film forums and festivals and at events associated with the New York Yankees.
In 1996 she talked about Hitchcock at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and two years ago she was seen on the Academy Awards show, in a segment honouring previous Oscar-winners.
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
