Oklahoma-bred John Ashley got his start in the movie business while on a vacation in California. A friend from Oklahoma State University got him onto the set of the John Wayne movie The Conqueror (1956), and Wayne in turn steered him toward a job in television in the William Castle series Men of Annapolis (1957). One day, Ashley was at the offices of American International Pictures to pick up his girlfriend, who was auditioning for a part in the company’s Dragstrip Girl (1957). AIP house writer Lou Rusoffsaw Ashley waiting in the hall and decided the young man was the type AIP was looking for to play the Dragstrip Girl (1957) male lead. Ashley acted in a long line of “kids-in-trouble” melodramas, monster movies and in the Beach Party series before carving a lucrative niche for himself as producer-star of a series of Filipino exploitation pictures. He was also producer of several TV series, including The A-Team (1983) and Werewolf(1987).
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Tom Weaver <TomWeavr@aol.com>
With his dark good looks and resonant, deeply accented murmur, Charles Boyer personified European romance in his native France and Hollywood for over four decades in such films as “Algiers” (1938), “All This, And Heaven Too” (1941) and “Gaslight” (1944). Though a studious, retiring figure off-screen, Boyer left female moviegoers swooning in the 1930s and 1940s, earning him four Oscar nominations as dashing, boundlessly erotic men whose lives, spent either in pursuit of crime, fortune or royalty, made them unavailable to the women who fell hopelessly in love with him. He stepped gracefully into character roles in the 1950s, scoring a triumph on Broadway with “Don Juan in Hell” (1951) and moving into production as a co-owner of the successful television company Four Star Pictures. He remained active as a symbol of old Hollywood courtliness throughout the 1960s, earning a final Oscar nod for “Fanny” (1961) before retiring to care for his wife in the late 1970s. Her death in 1978 spurred the grief-stricken actor to take his own life that same year, forever enmeshing his life with his screen image as the tragic lover whose tremendous heart was his greatest burden.
Marilyn Adele Dunlap was born on March 5, 1924 (for her stage name she took her nickname, Myrna, and shortened her middle name, Adele, to “Dell”, which she used as her last name). She started her career as a showgirl in the famous Earl Carroll Revue in New York, and made her film debut in A Night at Earl Carroll’s (1940). Signed by MGM, she appeared in Ziegfeld Girl (1941), but MGM didn’t pick up her option and she returned to Earl Carroll’s. She soon was appearing at the Billy Rose Nightclub, then spent a season in the “George White’s Scandals” revue. However, the taste of Hollywood never left her, and she went back in 1943 and appeared in a string of westerns with such cowboy icons as Bob Steele and Hoot Gibson. She had a small part in the classic Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), and shortly afterwards signed a contract with RKO Pictures. RKO kept her busy, putting her in more than 20 films over the next few years, even appearing with future US President Ronald Reagan in the 1949 comedy The Girl from Jones Beach (1949). She gave a good performance in an atypical role as the ambitious, murderous daughter of a powerful rancher in the offbeat western The Bushwhackers(1951). She worked steadily over the years, not only in films but on TV as well, and had a recurring role in the Dan Duryea adventure series China Smith (1952). At one point she wrote a gossip column, “Hollywood: Then and Now”.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: frankfob2@yahoo.com
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Roland Culver was born on August 21, 1900 in London, England as Roland Joseph Culver. He was an actor, known for Thunderball (1965), Dead of Night (1945) and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). He was married to Nan Hopkins and Daphne Rye. He died on March 1, 1984 in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England.
Tom Drake was born on August 5, 1918 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA as Alfred Alderdice. He was an actor, known for Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), The Green Years (1946) and Raintree County (1957). He was married to Isabelle Dunn. He died on August 11, 1982 in Torrance, California, USA. to MGM during the war years, he will always be remembered as the wholesome “boy next door” that Judy Garland sings about in the musical classic Meet Me in St. Louis (1944).
Ronald Bergan’s obituary from “The Guardian” in 2001:
Of all the brassy, hip-swinging, sassy blondes of the 1940s, Maisie Ravier, as embodied by Ann Sothern, who has died aged 92, was the most beloved. At that period, when film fans wrote letters addressed to “Maisie, USA”, they went straight to Sothern’s dressing room, so popular and famous was her alter ego.
Ann Sothern, who was born Harriette Lake in North Dakota, was trained as a classical singer by her concert-soprano mother. But she found her temperament and voice were more suited for musical comedy. On Broadway, she soon rose from small parts to leads in Ziegfeld shows under her real name.
In 1933 she went to Hollywood, where she spent six years at various studios playing light-hearted heroines in mostly B pictures. However, she did have a chance to shine opposite Eddie Cantor in Kid Millions, and as Mimi, Maurice Chevalier’s showgirl mistress, in Folies Bergère. In Trade Winds (1938), for United Artists, Sothern, as detective Fredric March’s dumb blonde sidekick, stole the picture from the leading lady, Joan Bennett.
Her performance gained the attention of MGM, who considered Sothern perfect to play the title role in Maisie. The studio had bought the 1935 Wilson Collison novel Dark Dame as a vehicle for Jean Harlow. After Harlow’s premature death in 1937, it was shelved. When the MGM offer came, Sothern was shooting Hotel For Women at 20th Century-Fox, but when she accepted the offer from MGM, Darryl F Zanuck, head of Fox, removed her part out of pique.
Sothern’s comic vitality and warmth gave an added dimension to the character of the scatterbrained, accident-prone but resourceful blonde heroine. In each of the series, which included Congo Maisie, Maisie Was A Lady, Gold Rush Maisie and Swing Shift Maisie, she would start off alone, broke, irritable and vulgar, gradually making friends and money, and becoming charming and well-groomed, usually helping others out of fixes.
With the Maisie movies, MGM had another hit series to add to Dr Kildare, Andy Hardy and Tarzan, and Ann Sothern had little time for other roles. However, her charm, pleasant singing voice and good looks were well used in musicals such as Lady Be Good (1941) and Panama Hattie (1942). She displayed dramatic talent in the all-female Cry Havoc (1943), as a warm-hearted army nurse in Bataan.
Perhaps her best film was Joseph L Mankiewicz’s A Letter To Three Wives (1948), for 20th Century-Fox. In this stringent and witty social comedy, Sothern plays a radio soap writer, married to intellectual schoolteacher Kirk Douglas, who despises his wife’s work. She is particularly effective in the dinner party scene, when she has to try to please both her husband and her sponsors.
After playing Jane Powell’s actress mother in Nancy Goes To Rio (1950) and Anne Baxter’s wise-cracking roommate in Fritz Lang’s The Blue Gardenia (1953), she retired from films, retaining her popularity on TV in 104 episodes of Private Secretary, which she produced herself. She later sold the rights for more than $1m. Sothern also held the rights of the equally popular The Ann Sothern Show, in which she played the assistant manager of a swanky New York hotel. “I think Hollywood has been terrible to me,” she once commented. “Hollywood doesn’t respond to a strong woman, not at all. I was too independent. How dare a woman be competitive or produce her own shows?”
Recurring hepatitis kept her off the screen for some years in the 1950s. During a particularly bad time in her life, she befriended the film actor Richard Egan, under whose influence she converted to Catholicism. Previously, she had been married to two minor screen actors, both of whom she had appeared with in films: Roger Pryor and Robert Sterling (aka socialite William J Hart). Her daughter by the latter, Tisha Sterling, became an actress. (She had a leading role in Coogan’s Bluff with Clint Eastwood.)
In the 1960s, having put on a great deal of weight in the interim, Sothern returned to the big screen playing blowsy hookers in three films: Lady In A Cage (1963), tormenting rich widow Olivia de Havilland; in Sylvia (1965), with Carroll Baker; and Chubasco (1967), in which she ran a brothel visited by real-life lover Richard Egan. In The Best Man (1964), she was a sententious and dangerous political committee woman. “It did Adlai Stevenson great harm not having a wife and trying to be funny all at the same time,” she warns an unmarried presidential candidate – which could well have been a reference to Gore Vidal, who adapted his play for the screen.
Apart from some schlocky movies in the 70s and 80s, she was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for her role as the friend and confidante of elderly sisters Lillian Gish and Bette Davis in Lindsay Anderson’s The Whales Of August (1987). A few years ago, Ann Sothern remarked: “Sometimes I’ll watch an old movie on TV and once in a while one of mine will come on and I’ll watch it. And you know something? I’m always amazed at what a lousy actress I was. I guess in the old days we just got by on glamour.”
Those who remember Sothern with affection would violently disagree.
• Ann Sothern, film actress, born January 22 1909; died March 15 2001
The above obituary can also be accessed online here.
Ron Leibman was born on October 11, 1937 in New York City, New York, USA. He is an actor and writer, known for Garden State (2004), Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) and Norma Rae (1979). He has been married to Jessica Walter since June 26, 1983. He was previously married to Linda Lavin
Ron Leibman died in 2019.
TCM Overview:
This charismatic character lead has excelled in quirky, explosive, often Jewish, types and has been prominent on stage and TV since the 1960s. Ron Leibman was particularly applauded as the union organizer Ruben Warshawsky in Martin Ritt’s “Norma Rae” (1979), in his Emmy-winning role as “Kaz” (CBS, 1978-79) and as Roy Cohn in Tony Kushner’s two-part Broadway epic “Angels in America” (1993-94).
Raised in an upper middle class family on Manhattan’s Central Park West, Leibman broke into theater in 1959. After enjoying some success in “Dear Me, the Sky Is Falling” (1963) and “We Bombed in New Haven” (1968), he began making occasional feature films. The actor debuted as the gorilla-dressing brother in Carl Reiner’s “Where’s Poppa?” (1970). His other best-remembered parts included David Greenberg, the real-life street cop who formed half of the team nicknamed “The Super Cops” (1973) and as the smarmy antagonist in “Rhinestone” (1984). Leibman’s other films have proven generally disappointing. He starred in Arthur Hiller’s mistitled “Romantic Comedy” (1983) and was the commandant of a military school in the lame teen farce “Up the Academy” (1980), from which he attempted to have his name removed from the credits. The exceptions were the fine Australian-made horse racing saga, “Phar Lap” (1984) and Sidney Lumet’s “Night Falls on Manhattan” (1997), in which he played an ambitious district attorney.
In general, Leibman has found his talents unrewarded in Hollywood, but he has kept busy onstage in the modestly successful Neil Simon comedies, “I Ought to Be in Pictures” (1980) and “Rumors” (1989), in the latter alongside his second wife, Jessica Walter. He enjoyed a notable triumph onstage with his blistering, Tony-winning portrait of Joseph McCarthy’s venomous right-hand man Roy Cohn in “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” and “Angels in America: Perestroika.” Leibman also garnered controversy for his portrayal of Shylock in a 1994 Off-Broadway production of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.”
Leibman’s larger-than-life approach to roles often seemed ill-suited to the small screen as well. Although he has begun working in TV in the early 60s, he has not been able to find a successful series berth. While he earned praise and an Emmy for “Kaz,” a show which he also created, it did not pull in the ratings. Neither did “Pacific Station” (NBC, 1991), a short-lived detective series. While Leibman brought class and verve to the recurring role of ruthless magazine publisher Allen Rush on the CBS sudser “Central Park West/CPW” (1995-96) and despite a heavy promotional effort, that series was also quickly canceled. He has found some success in the occasional role as the uptight father of Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) on the hit NBC sitcom “Friends.”
Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Guardian” in 2010:
Perhaps the most famous line spoken on screen by the actor Patricia Neal, who has died of lung cancer aged 84, was “Klaatu barada nikto!” in Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). These incomprehensible words, uttered to a robot which carries her into a spaceship, save the world from destruction. Neal won her Oscar for a more down-to-earth performance, as the cynical, world-weary housekeeper Alma Brown in Martin Ritt’s contemporary western, Hud (1963). “It was a tough part to cast,” Ritt remarked. “This woman had to be believable as a housekeeper and still be sexy. It called for a special combination of warmth and toughness, while still being very feminine. Pat Neal was it.”
Perhaps the most telling indication of Neal’s gifts was the fact that, although the role was quite a brief one, the Academy included her in the category of best actress, rather than best supporting actress. One memorable moment in the film was improvised: in response to Paul Newman‘s kiss, Neal swats a fly, which she happened to notice on the set.
Neal had a sexy, husky southern nasal drawl. She was born Patsy Lou Neal in Kentucky, attended Knoxville high school in Tennessee and studied drama at Northwestern University in Illinois. She then went to New York, worked as a model and, in 1945, got a job understudying Vivian Vance in John Van Druten’s The Voice of the Turtle on Broadway, taking over for one night. The following year, aged 20, Neal triumphed as Regina, the spoiled-brat daughter in Lillian Hellman’s family saga Another Part of the Forest, directed by the author. One critic hailed her “a young Tallulah Bankhead” and she won a Tony for best actress.
With her dark hair dyed bright blonde, Neal began her film career inauspiciously with John Loves Mary (1949), in which she played a senator’s daughter engaged to ex-GI Ronald Reagan. In the same year, with a Warner Bros contract, her special qualities were better used in King Vidor’s baroque film of the Ayn Rand bestseller The Fountainhead. As the architecture critic Dominique Francon, she first appears at the edge of a quarry watching, in an erotic manner, a bare-chested Gary Cooper phallically using a pneumatic drill. The sexual chemistry in the film reflected Neal and the married Cooper’s real-life romantic entanglement.
Neal played a nurse in the British-made The Hasty Heart (1949), set in war-torn Burma. She consolidated her friendship with Reagan, again her co-star, confiding in him about her involvement with Cooper. In Bright Leaf (1950), she was a ruthless aristocratic southern girl vying with tart-with-a-heart Lauren Bacall for tobacco tycoon Cooper.
Neal was sparky opposite John Garfield in The Breaking Point (1950), which was truer to Ernest Hemingway’s novel To Have and Have Not than Howard Hawks’s earlier adaptation had been. A few less interesting pictures followed, excepting The Day the Earth Stood Still at Fox, before her three-year affair with Cooper ended. Neal had become pregnant by Cooper and had an abortion, after which she suffered a nervous breakdown. She returned to Broadway in 1952 in a revival of Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, making an impression as a schoolteacher accused of lesbianism. During rehearsals, Neal met Roald Dahl at a party given by Hellman. They married in 1953 and settled in England, where they would bring up five children.
In 1955, Neal was back on Broadway as the mother of a difficult teenage girl in A Roomful of Roses. In March 1956, she took over from Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie in Tennessee Williams’s Cat On a Hot Tin Roof. The play was directed by Elia Kazan, who cast Neal in his next film, A Face in the Crowd (1957). Revealing vulnerability beneath a hard surface, she was brilliant as the executive of a small southern TV station who discovers a folksy country singer, Lonesome Rhodes (Andy Griffith), and turns him into a national institution. Although in love with the singer, she realises she has created a monster and destroys him.
In 1958, Neal appeared with great success in Williams’s one-act play Suddenly, Last Summer at the Arts theatre in London. She was heartbroken to lose out to Elizabeth Taylor when a film of the play was made. In 1959 Neal returned to Broadway to play Helen Keller’s mother in The Miracle Worker. The following year her son, Theo, was injured in a road accident and had to undergo several brain operations. In London in 1961, with her hair dyed red, she appeared in Breakfast at Tiffany’s as a rich society matron known only as “2-E”, a rival of the younger Audrey Hepburn for the affections of George Peppard. In 1962 she suffered another personal tragedy when her seven-year-old daughter Olivia died of measles.
Following Hud, she filmed three days of John Ford’s Seven Women (1966), before having a stroke. She was replaced in the film by Anne Bancroft. After suffering further strokes, Neal became partially paralysed and incapable of articulate speech, but she learned to walk and talk again. She worked with brain-damaged children and was awarded the American Heart Association’s heart of the year award by President Lyndon Johnson. Several years later she founded the Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Centre in Knoxville for stroke, spinal cord and brain injury patients.
Her remarkable recovery allowed her to return to the cinema. As the embittered wife in The Subject Was Roses (1968), she was again nominated for an Oscar. Among her later roles were a speech therapist in Baxter! (1973); the wife of scientist James Mason, on the run from Nazis in The Passage (1979); the hero’s mother in an adaptation of All Quiet On the Western Front (1979); and Heidi’s grandmother in a TV series (1993) based on Johanna Spyri’s character. She also had a crucial role in Cookie’s Fortune (1999), directed by Robert Altman.
She and Dahl divorced after his affair with Felicity Crosland, whom he married in 1983. Neal returned to live in the US. Her life was recounted in a 1981 TV film starring Glenda Jackson, with Dirk Bogarde as Dahl. In her autobiography, As I Am (1988), Neal, who had found comfort in Catholicism, wrote: “A strong positive mental attitude will create more miracles than any wonder drug.” She is survived by her children Tessa, Ophelia, Theo and Lucy; her brother Pete and sister Margaret; and 10 grandchildren and step-grandchildren.
• Patricia (Patsy Lou) Neal, actor, born 20 January 1926; died 8 August 2010
The above obituary can also be accessed on “The Guardian” on line here.
Bette Midler built a successful stage, screen and recording career on the basis of her self-styled “Divine Miss M” character – a sassy, hip-wagging classic “broad” archetype. She was quick with the comebacks, took no guff and had a tendency to burst into tunes from the Great American Songbook. Her initial stage fame and string of nostalgia-tinged hit albums in the 1970s eventually led to big screen success, with dramas like the pseudo Janis Joplin biopic “The Rose” (1980) and three-hankie chick flick “Beaches” (1990). She also lent appropriately outrageous variations of Miss M to comedies including “Ruthless People” (1986), “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” (1986) and “The First Wives Club” (1996). In an era where stage, screen and recording crossover success was rare, only Liza Minnelli rivaled Midler when it came to endless concert tour schedules and triumph in all genres. More than 30 years into her career, the entertainer was still scoring hits with such albums as 1998’s Bathhouse Betty and the televised special of her acclaimed Caesar’s Palace act “Bette Midler: The Showgirl Must Go On” (HBO, 2010). As a film star, live performer and winner of Grammy, Emmy and Golden Globe awards, Midler was an entertainment icon of the highest order.
The Divine Miss M was born on Dec. 1, 1945 to a seamstress mother and housepainter father from Paterson, NJ. The couple had moved to Hawaii just prior to Midler’s birth, where her father landed a job at a Navy yard. The transplanted Jewish East Coasters were a bit of an oddity in the rural South Pacific sugar cane fields, but Midler developed a quick wit to combat her outsider status, winding up as a well-liked class clown and notorious performer. Along with two other girls, she formed a vocal trio that played school events and eventually began to book gigs entertaining at adult venues. As soon as the senior class president and valedictorian accepted her diploma in 1963, she headed right into the entertainment field, putting in a year in the Drama Department at the University of Hawaii before landing a small role in the film adaptation of James Michener’s “Hawaii” (1966).
Midler spent her first big paycheck on a move to New York City, where, after a short stint as a go-go dancer, she went to an open call for a national tour of “Fiddler on the Roof” and ended up in the Broadway cast, taking over the part of Tzeitel in February 1967 and staying with the role for three years. After a run as The Acid Queen in a Seattle Opera Association production of “Tommy,” Midler returned to New York, determined to focus on her singing career. After rave club reviews which took note of her powerful pipes, she was booked on all the top variety TV shows of the day. She took a 16-week engagement that electrified the towel-clad gay clientele of the Continental Baths, where Barry Manilow backed her on piano. It was at that time that the larger-than-life persona of ‘The Divine Miss M’ – and along with it, a loyal gay following – was born.
Atlantic Records signed Midler to a record deal and released her debut album, The Divine Miss M, in 1972. The bawdy, red-haired performer with the wide, toothy smile built her career on being outrageous, but also balanced the camp by interspersing a few tears for the human spirit amidst the sequins and fringes. Musically, her early work “nailed the nostalgia thing” with Andrews Sisters takeoffs – i.e. “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” – and 1960s girl group numbers, as well as including blues and show tunes in her broad musical spectrum. The album went gold and won her the Grammy for Best New Artist. Midler developed a larger version of her earlier cabaret revue and performed “Clams on the Halfshell” at the Palace Theater, earning a Special Tony Award in 1974. On a complete roll, she spent the next three years on national and international concert tours, wowing the gays and the straights who poured in to worship Ms. Divine.
Unfortunately, sales dropped off sharply for her third LP, Songs for the New Depression (1976), but she retained a loyal concert following and picked up her first Emmy as the star of “Bette Midler: Ol’ Red Hair Is Back” (NBC, 1977). She made her first impact as a film actress in Mark Rydell’s “The Rose” (1978), earning a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her portrayal of a high-strung, burned-out singer loosely based on Janis Joplin. The soundtrack LP went platinum in 1980, aided by the Top Ten title song which became a bona fide smash single. A Midler concert film and soundtrack entitled “Divine Madness” came out later that year, as did her first book, A View from a Broad, a humorous memoir of her first world tour. Midler was at the top of her game, but bad advice from her agent led her to take a screen role in the aptly named comedy “Jinxed!” (1982). She suffered greatly, warring with co-star Ken Wahl and director Don Siegel and ultimately serving as scapegoat when the picture flopped. The film’s failure followed her firing of her back-up singers the Harlettes, who successfully sued and later won a $2 million judgment. The twin debacles helped bring on a nervous breakdown, which kept her off the screen for four years, though she remained busy with concert work and TV specials.
Midler bounced back with a formidable focus on big screen comedies throughout the 1980s. Signed by Disney in 1986, she proved herself a deft, aggressive comedienne in a skein of profitable films, beginning with the bright satire “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” (1986) and continuing through the enjoyable if forgettable “Outrageous Fortune” (1987) and “Big Business” (1988), in which she and Lily Tomlin each played identical twins. Probably the best of her movies during this period was the clever black comedy “Ruthless People” (1986), which hilariously paired her with Danny DeVito as a thoroughly despicable couple. She formed her own production company, All Girl Productions, and made her first foray into producing with the moderately successful “Beaches” (1988), co-starring alongside Barbara Hershey as a charismatic New York cabaret performer in a tale of the lifelong bond between girlfriends. Bette also performed the film’s theme, “The Wind Beneath My Wings,” which became her first No. 1 hit, won a Grammy, and along with “The Rose,” became one of her two definitive numbers.
The studio, sensing it was on to something, cast her in two old-fashioned follow-up tearjerkers, but Jeffery Katzenberg’s wrong-headed passion for “Stella” (1990) earned Premiere magazine’s kiss of death: “A must to avoid.” She fared somewhat better in Rydell’s “For the Boys” (1992) as a World War II USO performer, a seemingly natural fit for Midler, based on her earlier success with the Andrews Sisters’ material. The picture revealed a flair for drama not really tapped since “The Rose” and earned Midler a second Best Actress Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe win, but audiences avoided the big-budget musical like the plague. She next teamed with Woody Allen to portray a married couple for Paul Mazursky’s “Scenes from a Mall” (1991), but it did not come close to Midler’s earlier comedic success. Her outlandish appearance as a long-deceased witch in Disney’s “Hocus Pocus” (1993), suggesting a return to the zany fare that made Midler a bankable movie star seven years earlier, could not save the ghoulish, effects-laden bomb that was deemed a discredit to Disney “family entertainment” by film critic Leonard Maltin.
The year 1993 marked Midler’s overdue return to live concert performances with “Experience the Divine,” which was capped by a record-breaking 30-night stand at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. That same year, she gave a tour-de-force performance as Mama Rose in a TV remake of the musical classic “Gypsy” (CBS), which earned her a second Golden Globe Award. Midler returned to big screen comedy full-force when teaming with Diane Keaton and Goldie Hawn in Hugh Wilson’s “The First Wives’ Club” (1996), a film about women whose husbands have left them for younger beauties which – thanks to the collective star power of the threesome – became one of the surprise hits of the season. She also starred with Dennis Farina in “That Old Feeling” (1997), about a divorced couple whose romantic yearnings are rekindled at their daughter’s wedding, as well as returned to the mic to earn an Emmy for “Bette Midler – Diva Las Vegas” (HBO, 1997). She garnered another Emmy nomination for her guest turn as a secretary in the final episode of the long-running CBS series “Murphy Brown” (CBS, 1988-1998) in 1998, before kicking off the international “Divine Miss Millennium” tour the following year, welcoming in 2000 with a New Year’s Eve performance at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.
After a pair of box office failures with the Jacqueline Susann biopic “Isn’t She Great?” (2000) and the pallid comedy “Drowning Mona” (2000), Midler agreed to headline a sitcom in an effort to revive her acting career. In “Bette” (CBS, 2000-01), she played a variation of herself – a showbiz veteran juggling the demands of career, marriage and motherhood. Despite initially positive reviews, ratings were so-so and negative gossip about behind-the-scenes problems plagued the series’ image. After dabbling in the executive producer role when she helped bring “The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” (2002) to the big screen, Midler reunited with former collaborator Barry Manilow to record Bette Midler Sings the Rosemary Clooney Songbook for Columbia Records. The album was a bit of a surprise hit and went gold, in addition to earning the pair a Grammy nod.
Midler spent the following year-plus back on the road with her “Kiss My Brass” concert tour and made a return to theaters in 2004 with her role as Bobbie Markowitz, a Jewish writer and recovering alcoholic in the remake of the cult classic “The Stepford Wives.” Midler and Manilow recreated their previous album success with 2005’s Bette Midler Sings the Peggy Lee Songbook and Midler returned to the studio in 2006 to record Cool Yule, a Grammy-nominated album of pop holiday classics. Helen Hunt lured Midler back to the big screen to star as her biological mother in Hunt’s pet project, the comedic drama “Then She Found Me” (2008). That same year, the 62-year-old powerhouse began a two-year run of “Bette Midler: The Showgirl Must Go On” at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.
Midler appeared in theaters for a second time that year in an updating of George Cukor’s 1950s melodrama “The Women” (2008) co-starring with Meg Ryan, Annette Bening and Eva Mendes. Unfortunately, despite the star power of its all-female cast, the reinvention of “The Women” did little to improve upon the original and quickly disappeared from screens. Midler took part in a far more successful, if artistically less ambitious project two years later when she voiced the eponymous feline super villain in the family action-comedy “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore” (2010). Recognized for doing what she did best, “Bette Midler: The Showgirl Must Go On” (HBO, 2010) picked up an Emmy nomination the following year and the 2010 album Memories of You found Midler waxing nostalgic with a compilation of her lesser known standards. Beginning in 2011, Midler uncharacteristically stayed behinds the scenes as one of the producers on the Broadways production of the musical “Priscilla: Queen of the Desert” and went on to win the Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012.
By Susan Clarke
The above TCM overview can also be accessed on line here.
