Linda ChristianEdmund Purdom & Linda ChristianCover of the magazine Epoca. Actress Linda Christian (Blanca Rosa Henrietta Stella Welter Vorhauer) in Venice. Venice, Italy. 1955 (Photo by Mario De Biasi\Mondadori Portfolio\Mondadori via Getty Images)Linda Christian Linda Christian
Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” 2011 obituary:
The phrase “famous for being famous” could have been invented for Linda Christian, who has died aged 87. Her celebrity came from her marriages to the handsome film stars Tyrone Power and Edmund Purdom, and her liaisons with various wealthy playboys and bullfighters, rather than her somewhat limited acting ability.
Christian’s extravagant, cosmopolitan lifestyle derived from her stunning beauty – she was dubbed “The Anatomic Bomb” by Life magazine – and her ability to speak fluent French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and English. She was born Blanca Rosa Welter in Tampico, Mexico, the daughter of a Dutch executive at Shell, and his Mexican-born wife of Spanish, German and French descent. As the family moved around a great deal, living in South America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, she gained a taste for globetrotting.
Christian’s early ambition was to become a doctor, but after winning a beauty contest and meeting Errol Flynn in Acapulco, she was persuaded to try her luck in films in the US. She was soon cast as a Goldwyn Girl in the actor Danny Kaye’s first feature film, Up in Arms (1944), and as a cigarette girl in Club Havana (1945), directed by Edgar G Ulmer. Then, with her name changed to Linda Christian, she signed a contract with MGM, which gave her a small decorative role in the musical Holiday in Mexico (1946), shot in Hollywood, and an exotic one in Green Dolphin Street (1947), as Lana Turner’s Maori maid.
At the time, Turner was having an affair with Power. Rumour has it that Christian overheard Turner say when Power was going to be in Rome. Christian decided to fly to Rome, stay at the same hotel and wangle a meeting with the dashing star. A romance led to Christian and Power getting married in January 1949 at a church in Rome while an estimated 8,000 screaming fans lined the street outside.
Prior to the marriage, the only substantial role MGM had given Christian was as an island girl rescued by Tarzan from the clutches of an evil high priest in Tarzan and the Mermaids (1948), the 12th and final time Johnny Weissmuller played the Ape Man. Christian, wearing a skimpy two-piece costume, is referred to as a mermaid because she swims a lot.
After marrying Power, Christian started to get a few leading roles in B-pictures such as Slaves of Babylon (1953), co-starring Richard Conte. More gratifying was her sitting for a portrait by the great Mexican artist Diego Rivera. The painting, reproduced on the cover of her autobiography, Linda (1962), and for which she was once offered $2m, is now in a private collection.
In 1954, Christian played Valerie Mathis, James Bond‘s former lover now working for the French secret service, in a CBS television version of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, therefore allowing her to lay claim to being the first Bond girl. At this time, the movie fan magazines were full of photos of Power and Christian as a blissfully married couple with two daughters, while the gossip columns intimated that both husband and wife had strayed. In 1954, Christian played Purdom’s snooty fiancee in the MGM musical Athena. Christian had been at the same school as Purdom’s wife, the former ballerina Anita Phillips, and the Powers and the Purdoms became good friends, even going on holidays together. But soon sexual jealousy broke up the once cosy foursome. In 1956, Christian divorced Power, charging mental cruelty.
After the divorce, there was no shortage of millionaires to help keep Christian in the manner to which she was accustomed. Once she was called to testify at a Los Angeles court because she refused to return jewels given to her by the socialite Robert H Schlesinger, whose cheque for $100,000, as partial payment for the jewels, had bounced. Christian was also involved with the racing driver Alfonso de Portago, with whom she was photographed a short while before he died in a crash at the 1957 Mille Miglia car race, in which several spectators were also killed. That year, she and the Brazilian mining millionaire Francisco “Baby” Pignatari went on an around-the-world tour together. In 1962 she married Purdom. They divorced the following year.
Christian continued to appear in routine films such as The Devil’s Hand (1962), as a seductive high priestess of voodoo, opposite her real-life sister Ariadna Welter. In Francesco Rosi’s semi-documentary The Moment of Truth (1965), she played herself as an American in Barcelona who attracts a matador (the bullfighter Miguel Mateo Miguelín). During the filming, she fell for the bullfighter Luis Dominguín, the former lover of Ava Gardner.
In 1968, Christian retired to Rome. She returned to cinema almost 20 years later, at the age of 64, in a couple of dreadful Italian thrillers.
She is survived by her daughters, Taryn and Romina Power.
• Linda Christian (Blanca Rosa Welter), actor, born 13 November 1923; died 22 July 2011
Although little remembered today, Danny kaye was one of the most popular movie stars of the 1940’s & 50’s. He was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York. His first major movie was “Up in Arms” in 1944. He has starred in such classics as “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” with Virginia Mayo in 1947.”hans Christian Anderson” in 1952, the brilliant “The Court Jester” in 1956 with Glynis Johns and Angela Lansbury and “The Five Pennies”. He spent much of his later years as a goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF. He died in 1987.
TCM profile:
An entertainer of prodigious gifts, Danny Kaye blended dance, popular song, classical music, tongue-twisting lyrics and mimicry into a personal style that was at once unique and irresistibly lovable. This exuberant redhead conquered practically every form of show business, ranging from vaudeville, nightclubs and radio to the Broadway stage, television and movies.
Born David Daniel Kaminski in Brooklyn in 1913 to Russian Jewish immigrants, Kaye dropped out of high school to work the “Borscht Circuit” in New York’s Catskill Mountains as a clowning busboy. After performing as part of a dance act and making some two-reel movie shorts, he made his Broadway debut in 1939 in The Straw Hat Revue. Two years later he created a sensation in Broadway’s Lady in the Dark, supporting Gertrude Lawrence and stopping the show nightly with a number called “Tchaikovsky” in which he rattled off the names of more than 50 Russian composers in 39 breathless seconds.
In 1940 Kaye had married Sylvia Fine, who began managing his career and helped create many of the routines, gags and specialty songs that cinched his stardom.
Kaye was signed for films by Samuel Goldwyn and made his feature-film debut in the starring role of Up in Arms (1944), playing a hypochondriac World War II soldier who ends up single-handedly capturing a platoon of Japanese soldiers and wooing songstress Dinah Shore. Two songs co-authored by Fine — “The Lobby Number” and “Melody in 4-F” — spotlight Kaye’s ability with tongue-twisting lyrics.
Goldwyn’s other film showcases for Kaye’s irrepressible personality include The Kid from Brooklyn (1946), a remake of the 1934 Harold Lloyd comedy in which Kaye plays a shy milkman who goes into boxing after accidentally knocking out a champion fighter; and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), with Kaye as James Thurber’s daydreaming would-be hero. Kaye’s last film for producer Goldwyn was the box-office smash Hans Christian Andersen (1952), a fictionalized biography of the great Danish storyteller with a tuneful score by Frank Loesser.
Another huge hit was Paramount’s Irving Berlin musical White Christmas (1954), starring Kaye and Bing Crosby as pals who rescue a failing inn by staging a big musical show. For MGM, Kaye made The Court Jester (1956), a rousing spoof of medieval swashbucklers in which he plays a royal babysitter who poses as a jester in order to help overthrow an evil pretender to the throne. The songs are by Fine and Sammy Cahn, and Kaye performs his justly famous “Pellet with the Poison” routine: “The pellet with the poison?s in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true.” Kaye’s final film part was that of The Ragpicker in The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969), but he earned great notices for a dramatic role as a Holocaust survivor in the television movie Skokie (1981). Earlier he had enjoyed a great success with his own TV series, which ran for four years beginning in 1963 and brought him an Emmy award.
Awarded an honorary Academy Award in 1954 and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1982, Kaye worked extensively with the United Nation’s Children’s Fund, raising millions in benefit concerts. He died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in 1987.
by Roger Fristoe
The above TCM profile can be accessed online here.
Shelley Winter’s obituary by Veronica Horwell from 2006 in “The Guardian”:
Two blondes paid the rent at 8573 Holloway Drive, Los Angeles, a block south of Sunset Boulevard, in 1951. Both were starlets on studio contracts, and they commiserated with each other over the bones in basque bodices, diets and other career impositions. On Saturday mornings, they played classical records and read the accompanying booklets about composers, and once they sat down to list the famous men they dreamed of fucking.
The younger, Marilyn Monroe, listed Albert Einstein and Arthur Miller among her hunks. The wiser woman, Shelley Winters, who has died of heart failure aged 83, stuck to movie studs. She lived to make most of them, and hang out with a couple of Oscars as well.
She was born Shirley Schrift in St Louis, officially in 1922 (though some sources still say 1920) and the family soon moved to Brooklyn. Her father was jailed for arson – and later cleared – when she was nine. On Wednesdays, she would slip into the Broadway theatres to catch the matinees, and as a teenager she competed with half of America for the part of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind. Director George Cukor bought her a Coke and asked her about her acting ambitions, which were serious.
She worked in Woolworth’s – “I wasn’t pretty enough for the candy department so they put me to work selling hardware” – where she led the other girls in a strike for unrestricted access to toilets. They won, but Woollies would not re-employ her. “I’d have made a damn good union organiser,” she said years later. “Look at the facts. There are no more padlocks on the loos in Woolworth’s.”
She went to acting school, took the advice of her opera singer mother, Rose, and stumped round the borscht circuit; she was appearing in the musical Rosalinda on Broadway in the early 1940s when the president of Colombia Pictures, Harry Cohn, went backstage and said, “Listen kid, you think you could do the same thing in front of a camera?”
Her first screen appearance was in What a Woman! (1943). But it took “Shelley” (from her favourite poet) “Winters” (her mother’s maiden name plus a publicist’s “s”) seven years to “climb out of the studio wastebasket”. She did it by way of lowclass victimhood – as a waitress strangled by Ronald Colman in George Cukor’s A Double Life (1947), a gas station Myrtle run over by Gatsby’s car in The Great Gatsby (1949) and a factory girl drowned by the man who got her pregnant in A Place in the Sun (1951), her first Oscar nomination.
Her southern widow, in The Night of the Hunter (1955), was about as far as Winters could develop that persona: “she has a rich body” is the character’s introduction in the screenplay, although she ends up as a dead body, her hair drifting in the river. As Ian Cameron once wrote, Winters too easily played the female equivalent of Peter Lorre, her quivering pathos inviting martyrdom.
While playing an extra in The Big Knife (1955), she said, “Those lousy studios, they louse you up and then they call you lousy.” She seemed to be describing her relative movie non-progress: she had displayed the clavicles and the lips just fine, but her attitude was too visible.
With her press agent, she began to make herself over into “this personality, a dumb blonde with a body and a set of sayings”. She scripted her own wisecracks (“I did a film in England in the winter and it was so cold I almost got married”). Dylan Thomas had sent her letters, and she had sent him to a shrink who failed to cure the drink; on a visit, she “asked why he’d come to Hollywood, and, very solemnly, he said to touch a starlet’s tits. Ok, I said, but only one finger.” Her other literary buddy, Tennessee Williams, didn’t even peek.
But Winters was also a pro, who studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors’ Studio, working towards the “ability to reveal myself, the willingness … you act with your scars … if you want the best, you have to fight for it”. In the year of The Night of the Hunter, she left for the Broadway stage, and did not return to cinema until 1959, when she came back a changed woman – her truer self.
“Overeaters anonymous, it’s my only religion,” she said of her expanded flesh. This emphasised her kept-woman-of-the-Hapsburg-empire appearance, although the calorie intake was all-American, her favourite meal being tuna on rye with a chocolate milk shake.
She won an Oscar for her first substantial role in this mother-matron-madam mode for The Diary of Ann Frank (1959), and made the embonpoint and dirty laugh work for her through the 1960s: a slut of a mum in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1963); the racist mom in A Patch of Blue (1965, another best-supporting Academy award); the bordello boss Polly Adler in A House is not a Home (1964) – a variation on her whore-for-intellectuals in The Balcony (1963); a Tommy-gun-wielding Bloody Mama (1970); and a passenger in The Poseidon Adventure (1972). Only a few films utilised her ability to distance herself funnily – pulling the alarmed Alfie (1966), or unafraid of falling among Indians in The Scalphunters (1968) because “they’re only men”.
For all her lack of the camera-ready face of her friend Liz Taylor, Winters was desired. Maybe it was that rich body. Her under-age affair with a fellow thespian ended in pregnancy, an abortion and her refusal of a marriage offer because “you’re a bit-part actor and I’m a potential star”. There were three brief marriages: the first, in wartime, was to Paul Mayer, a US army air force captain; the others were to an Italian actor, Vittorio Gassman (with whom she had a daughter) from 1952 to 1954, and an Italian-American actor, Anthony Franciosa, from 1957 to 1960.
Winters published two volumes of autobiography, Shelley, Also Known as Shirley (1980) and Shelley II: The Middle of My Century (1989). In those brash works, she consumed much of the beefcake on that 1951 wish list. “The only way to keep warm in this apartment is to get into bed. My body generates a great deal of heat,” mumbled Marlon Brando. “Fuck me please and send a copy of your speech later,” she demanded of a prosy Burt Lancaster. She ended up in bed five times with William Holden after Christmas studio parties.
Winters thought masculine star attempts at style hilarious, and would say so, with her mink eased off the shoulder and a glass of fizz in hand. She once described how, during a private movie showing at Errol Flynn’s house, a bed slipped into the room, complete with small bar, icebox and the top sheet turned back, as the ceiling mirror rolled away to to reveal the heavens through a magnolia tree in flower. She was more a faux-leopard-skin couch gal herself.
In all, there were 150-odd films (“Have you seen them all, honey?” she inquired of a gushy interviewer), including an artistic production shot in Italy but never released as they lost the soundtrack, and a wicked scene in A Portrait of a Lady (1996), where she nearly upstaged John Gielgud on his “death-bed”. She was a success on Broadway in Minnie’s Boys (1970), playing the mother of the Marx Brothers, had variable reviews for her off-Broadway playwriting debut, One Night Stands of a Noisy Passenger (1970), and recurred as TV sitcom Roseanne Barr’s grandmother in kaftan and watch cap. Roseanne did look and sound as if she had inherited granmaw’s motormouth.
Towards the end, Winters lunched with her camp court almost daily in Los Angeles’s Silver Spoon Schwabs, complaining about the hernias those basques had caused and recalling Marilyn fondly. She transported a visiting journalist around town in her limo – “See,” she said, pointing to her gold star in the pavement, “I’m there with all the communists.”
“I could face respectability over 60,” she confided, secure among multiple chins, fur coats and Impressionist paintings: ” I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful … But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience.” She is survived by Jerry DeFord, her companion since the early 1980s and her daughter.
· Shelley Winters (Shirley Schrift), actor, born August 18 1922; died January 14 2006
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Seemingly born atop the Hollywood A-list, actress Glenn Close established herself as one of the finest performers of her generation – or any other, for that matter – with her first film, “The World According to Garp” (1982), for which she earned the first of several Oscar nominations. For the rest of the 1980s, Close quickly became a top leading lady who eventually achieved infamy with her portrayal of a psychotic woman avenging a lost affair in one of the decade’s most notorious movies, “Fatal Attraction” (1987). Unlike most film stars, however, Close was more than happy to oscillate from the big screen to television to Broadway; often with even more critical and award success. She played Queen Gertrude to Mel Gibson’s “Hamlet” (1990) and voiced Cruella de Vil in the animated classic, “101 Dalmatians” (1996). Close earned critical acclaim as well as Tony Awards for her work on Broadway in “Death and the Maiden” (1992) and the musical “Sunset Boulevard” (1994). Following quality turns in “Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her” (2000) and “Nine Lives” (2005), Close was Emmy-nominated for her portrayal of Capt. Monica Rawling on season four of “The Shield” (FX, 2002-08). But it was her performances as high-stakes litigator Patty Hewes on “Damages” (FX/Audience Network, 2007- ) that proved to be her most significant small screen role. Regardless of the medium, Close remained one of Hollywood’s premier actresses.
Born on March 19, 1947 in tony Greenwich, CT, Close was raised one of four children in an upper-middle class family headed by William Close, a surgeon whose affiliation with the conservative salvation group Moral Re-Armament led him to relocate the family to the Belgian Congo where he ran several medical clinics. At the time, Close was 13 years old and subsequently received her education at boarding schools in Switzerland, followed by Choate Rosemary Hall back in Greenwich. During high school, she took an interest in theater, joining a repertory group called The Fingernails. After she graduated, Close spent several years touring with the folk-singing group Up With People, before leaving to attend the drama school at William and Mary in Virginia. Close graduated late from William and Mary – she was 27 years-old – but immediately found work in New York City with the Ph nix Theatre Company, appearing in “Love for Love” and “The Member of the Wedding.” Close was cast as Mary Tudor in the Richard Rodgers’ musical “Rex” (1976), then jumped to television, making her small screen debut as a homewrecker in the made for television movie, “Too Far to Go” (NBC, 1979).
Close made her breakthrough on Broadway with a supporting role in the musical “Barnum” (1980), playing the patient wife of the famed 19th century showman. Thanks to her performance, acclaimed director George Roy Hill became aware of Close – he was attracted to her sense of composure, the exact quality he was looking for in an actress to play Jenny Fields in “The World According to Garp” (1982). Though nervous about starring in her first feature after years on stage, Close nonetheless was spot-on in her performance as the prim, hard-nosed mother of an aspiring novelist (Robin Williams), whose own novel about her life raising a son as a single mother becomes a feminist rallying cry. Due to her impressive work, Close earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, triggering a run for several Oscar nods in the 1980s – including three consecutive – that ultimately netted zero wins. She next co-starred in the Baby Boomer ensemble comedy-drama “The Big Chill” (1983), earning her second Oscar nod for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as one of seven college friends gathered together to reminisce after the suicide of one of their own.
A third Oscar nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role followed her performance in “The Natural” (1984), starring as the childhood sweetheart of a former bush league ballplayer (Robert Redford) finally getting his chance to play in the big leagues. Returning to Broadway, Close won a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Mike Nichols’ staging of Tom Stoppard’s romantic comedy, “The Real Thing.” With firm footing on stage, television and the silver screen, Close was able to alternate between the three throughout the 1980s, all the while attempting to undertake parts with depth on her path to becoming one of Hollywood’s top leading ladies. In the groundbreaking TV special “Something About Amelia” (ABC, 1984), Close played a woman who gradually comes to realize her husband (Ted Danson) has been having sex with their daughter (Roxanne Zal). She kept alive her award nomination streak, earning a nod for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Special. Her status as a lead actress was confirmed with a solid performance as a lawyer romantically entangled with a client in “Jagged Edge” (1985) and as a woman sharing her home and her body with a ghost of a silent film star (Ruth Gordon) in “Maxie” (1985).
While she steadily earned a reputation as an actress of the highest caliber, Close gained a great deal of notoriety for what became her most controversial role. In “Fatal Attraction” (1987), Adrian Lyne’s dynamic and enormously successful psychological thriller, Close achieved infamy playing Alex Forrest, an obsessive woman with whom a family man (Michael Douglas) engages in a one night stand when the wife and kids are away. When the married man tries to break off the affair, Alex starts to terrorize him and his family in a bizarre and psychotic attempt to win back his affections. For two-thirds of the film, “Fatal Attraction” was a compelling look at the cause and effect of infidelity, until the final third when it digressed into standard revenge thriller territory, complete with a double-scare death scene straight from the horror movie cliché handbook. It was later revealed that Lyne was forced to reshoot the original ending – which depicted Alex committing suicide and framing the cheating husband for murder – after test audiences rejected it. Close later expressed her disappointment with the reshoot, claiming that her portrayal of a damaged, but sympathetic character was undermined by the more fantastical redo. Nonetheless, Close earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role and a whole lot of notoriety, as people often acted afraid of her on the streets, so powerful and frightening was her portrayal.
Close followed her “Fatal Attraction” performance as a sexually manipulative aristocrat in the “Dangerous Liaisons” (1988), which again earned her a nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role. She brought surprising sympathy to the role of the pathetic, frivolous society matron Sunny von Bulow in the darkly humorous “Reversal of Fortune” (1990), then proved rather effective as a youthful Gertrude to Mel Gibson’s mature “Hamlet” (1990). In 1991, Close made her first foray into TV movie-producing with “Sarah, Plain and Tall” (CBS, 1991), a touching drama that depicted Close as a woman who answers a widowed farmer’s newspaper ad for a new wife and mother to his two children. Close earned two Emmy Award nominations; one for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or Special; the other, as a producer for Outstanding Drama or Comedy Special and Miniseries. Back on stage, she won her second Tony Award for her performance on Broadway in the politically charged “Death and the Maiden” (1992), though she subsequently lost out to Sigourney Weaver when the play was adapted to film.
Because of the popularity and success of “Sarah, Plain and Tall,” Close revived her role of replacement wife and mother in “Skylark” (CBS, 1993). On the big screen, Close seemed to be settling into a bit of a rut, starring in “House of the Spirits” (1993), a sweeping melodrama that tried in vain to mimic the sexual tensions of “Dangerous Liaisons” and “Reversal of Fortune.” She bounced back with “The Paper” (1984), playing the power-hungry publisher of a New York City tabloid that is host to an assorted cast of characters, including a beleaguered editor (Michael Keaton) struggling between family and career, an editor (Robert Duvall) with prostate cancer, and an alcoholic columnist (Randy Quaid) who winds up passing out on the couch. Attempting her first leading musical role, Close played silent screen star Norma Desmond in the Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway musical “Sunset Boulevard.” In reincarnating this larger-than-life character immortalized onscreen by Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder’s 1950 classic, Close achieved a personal and creative triumph, though not without controversy. Patti LuPone, who originated the role in London, had been slated for the Broadway production. But Close received better reviews for her characterization in Los Angeles, leading to her taking over the New York production. Though some critics found fault with her singing and over-the-top acting, Close nonetheless won her third Tony Award for Best Actress.
On the heels of her Tony triumph, Close won her first Emmy for her nuanced portrayal of a real-life U.S. Army colonel who disclosed her lesbianism and fought to stay in the military in “Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story” (NBC, 1995). Perhaps as a nod to Norma Desmond, Close chewed the scenery as a Nancy Reagan-like first lady in Tim Burton’s ode to 1950s sci-fi B-movies, “Mars Attacks!” (1996). She carried the Desmond vibe over to her depiction of Cruella De Vil in Disney’s live action take on the cartoon classic, “101 Dalmatians” (1996), a role she also reprised in the sequel “102 Dalmatians” (2000). Close delivered an emotional performance as a mother whose AIDS-afflicted son has come home to die in “In the Gloaming” (HBO, 1997), a role that earned her a fifth Emmy Award nomination. After playing a female prisoner of war in “Paradise Road” (1997), she was a U.S. vice president coping with the kidnapping of the president in Wolfgang Petersen’s goofy action thriller, “Air Force One” (1997).
After a third go-round playing a fill-in wife and mother in “Sarah, Plain and Tall: Winter’s Edge” (CBS, 1999), Close further proved her ability for depicting forceful women in Robert Altman’s sunny ensemble comedy “Cookie’s Fortune” (1999), playing the niece of a widowed family matriarch (Patricia Neal) who discovers her body after a suicide and rearranges the death scene to make it look like a murder. In “Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her” (2000), Rodrigo Garcia’s engaging anthology of loosely connected stories about five very different women dealing with various life problems, Close played a successful physician in the segment “This is Dr. Keener,” who cares for an ailing mother while contending with her own loneliness. When a remarkably accurate tarot card reader (Calista Flockhart) makes a house call, Dr. Keener begins to assess the true emptiness of her own condition.
Despite Close’s venerable career as a lead actress, she recognized that major roles were harder to come by for an actress her age. Further retreating into independent and low-budget films seemed to confirm that her time as a top box office draw was at an end. She did, however, experience a rebirth on television, where she once again found challenging roles. In “The Ballad of Lucy Whipple” (CBS, 2001), Close played a widowed mother of three who travels to California during the Gold Rush of 1850 to start a new life, clashing with her spirited 13-year-old daughter who d s not share her mother’s dream. Meanwhile, she tackled the role of Nelly Forbush in an adaptation of the famed musical “South Pacific” (ABC 2001); had a hilariously high camp guest spot as an eccentric photographer on “Will & Grace” (NBC, 1998-2006), which earned her yet another Emmy nod; and starred in “Brush with Fate” (CBS, 2003), an adaptation of Susan Vreelands’ collection of stories that trace the history and ownership of what may be an undiscovered painting by 17th century Dutch painter Jan Vermeer.
Back on the big screen, she essayed a couple of supporting roles, appearing as a dutiful mother obsessively tending to her comatose son in “The Safety of Objects” (2001), then as an American academic in Paris who quietly observes her naive assistant (Kate Hudson) have an affair with a married Frenchman in “Le Divorce” (2003). In 2005, Close tackled a role made famous by Katharine Hepburn, playing Eleanor of Aquitaine in “The Lion in Winter” (Showtime, 2004), the wife of King Henry II (Patrick Stewart) who is newly released from prison after staging a coup. Close earned her first Golden Globe Award for this dynamic portrayal, winning the category of Best Performance by an Actress in a Miniseries or a Motion Picture Made for Television. She also chalked up Best Actress wins at the Screen Actors Guild Awards and the Emmys. Close followed with a part in the ensemble “Strip Search” (HBO, 2004), a look at how crime and punishment had changed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Taking a rare foray into a full-blown comedy, Close grandly hit all the right notes as too-perfect Claire Wellington, the grand dame of the Stepford society of subservient spouses in the otherwise failed satirical remake of the thriller, “The Stepford Wives” (2004). The actress then took on her first regular role in a television series, joining the cast of the gritty crime drama “The Shield” (FX, 2002-08) in its fourth season, playing the shrewd new precinct commander Capt. Monica Rawling, who offered redemption to the series’ antihero Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis). Producers credited a 30 percent rise in viewers due to her presence, but the actress chose to depart at the conclusion of her first season so she could be closer to her East Coast family. Nonetheless, she earned heaps of critical praise, the admiration of the regular cast, and an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 2005. Stepping back into the more comfortable realm of character-driven drama, she appeared in the weighty “Heights” (2005), playing the mother of a New York City photographer (Elizabeth Banks) who begins to rethink her open marriage, while her daughter has second thoughts about her pending nuptials with her lawyer fiancé (James Marsden).
Comfortable shifting from television to film, as she had been throughout most of her career, Close gave a typically strong performance in the ensemble anthology “Nine Lives” (2005), playing a widowed mother whose life has been taken over by her precocious young daughter (Dakota Fanning). After matriarchal supporting roles in “The Chumscrubber” (2005) and “Evening” (2007), Close made a triumphant return to series television with “Damages” (FX, 2007- ), playing the simultaneously revered and reviled Patty Hewes, a high-stakes litigator in New York City who takes on a bright and ambitious protégé (Rose Byrne) during a major class action lawsuit targeting a ruthless corporate CEO (Ted Danson). Hewes shows her protégé exactly what it takes to win at all costs, making it clear that often fortunes – and lives – are at stake. Close’s gritty portrayal earned the actress a Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Drama and an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, both in 2008. Close repeated the triumph when she won the Emmy in the same category the following year. While “Damages” found new life on the Audience Network after being let go by FX, Close found the time to return to movies. She starred in Rodrigo García’s indie drama, “Albert Nobbs” (2011), in which she played a 19th century woman who disguises herself as a man to gain employment in poverty-stricken Ireland, only spend the next 30 years growing increasingly confused about her own identity. The role earned Close a Oscar and Independent Spirit Award nominations for Best Actress.
Thed above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Virile Brooklyn-born actor Harry Guardino, with dark, wavy hair and a perpetual worried look on his craggy-looking mug, started out in the acting school of hard knocks, slumming for nearly a decade in small, obscure ‘tough guy’ film parts in the early to mid 50s. A definite man’s man, he finally attracted some attention on the Broadway stage with “A Hatful of Rain” (1956) and was nominated for a Tony for “One More River” in 1960. By then, juicier film roles began to gravitate his way, stealing the thunder out from under Cary Grant and Sophia Loren as a comic handyman in Houseboat (1958). Harry went on to play other brash guys with and without a comic edge to them in both crime and war stories such as Pork Chop Hill (1959), 5 Branded Women (1960), Hell Is for Heroes (1962), Madigan (1968), Dirty Harry (1971) and The Enforcer (1976), the last two pairing up with Clint Eastwood. He even played “Barabbas” in the classic bible epic King of Kings (1961) for a change of pace and scenery. More and more, however, TV became Harry’s favorite medium. He portrayed district attorney “Hamilton Burger” in the 70s revival series of “Perry Mason” and co-starred in dozens of grim, rugged mini-movies often as a street-smart cop. Not so true to nature, he found an unlikely outlet in musical theatre in later years, going on to star in productions of “Woman of the Year” and “Chicago”. A solid, durable, all-round actor, he died of lung cancer in 1995 at age 69.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
“Independent” obituary by David Shipman:
Harry Guardino will be best remembered on this side of the Atlantic for his Lieutenant Bressler, the permanently perplexed superior officer of Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) in Dirty Harry (1971) and The Enforcer (1976), one of the several sequels. Given that Callahan’s methods of handling both crooks and his fellow officers was anything but orthodox, Bressler had every reason to be worried.
Guardino owed his role in the first of these to the director, Don Siegel, who had originally cast him Hell is for Heroes (1962), as the decent sergeant who gets killed (the film was set in France in 1944). Siegel used him again in Madigan (1968), as Rocky Bonaro, assistant to another eccentric police detective (Richard Widmark). Bonaro had found him easier to handle than Callahan – amused and tolerant and fiercely loyal, but inclined to be edgy when he’s reminded of his lesser status.
Guardino was an engaging actor, always convincing but typecast in movies and television: of the 50 or so roles he played in both media all but a dozen were top cops, men of integrity – so much so that it seems strange to come across him in another 1968 movie, The Hell with Heroes, in which he played a ruthless racketeer, or in Any Which Way You Can (1980), an Eastwood vehicle in which Guardino is a New York mobster.
He made his movie debut in Flesh and Fury (1952), in which Tony Curtis played a prizefighter, but was not really noticed till he was seen being understandably impressed by Sophie Loren’s physique in Houseboat (1958), directed by Melville Shavelson. As the boat’s Italian owner (and handyman) he stole every scene in which he appeared; Shavelson cast him as the band player who befriends Red Nichols (Danny Kaye) in The Five Pennies (1959), and in 1961 Guardino played Barabbas in King of Kings (1961).
Throughout this period he commuted between Hollywood and the television studios (such series as Dr Kildare, The Untouchables, The Dick Powell Show and a dozen television movies). He first appeared on Broadway in End as a Man (1953), followed a year later by A Hatful of Rain. With his movie successes under his belt he returned to star in the Stephen Sondheim / Arthur Laurents musical Anyone Can Whistle (1964), playing a visiting physician recruited by the mayoress, Angela Lansbury, to help her solve the town’s problems. Lee Remick was also in the cast, and it was the first musical for the three of them, if for only nine performances. The reviews indicated some self-indulgence, to which Sondheim later admitted, but because of the recording made the day after it closed it is probably the biggest “cult” item of all failed shows.
Guardino was to have better luck in his second musical, but in the meantime he was on Broadway in The Rose Tattoo (1966), in which Maureen Stapleton reprised the role she had first played in 1951. He was less happily employed in another Tennessee Williams play in 1968, The Seven Descents of Myrtle, as the dying Lot whose new wife, Estelle Parsons, dallies dangerously with his despised brother, Chicken, played by Brian Bedford – an odd concoction of bizarre obsessions and incestuous passions which moves dangerously close to self-parody.
In 1981 he was in a musical with Lauren Bacall, Woman of the Year, based on the Tracy-Hepburn movie of 1942, about two journalists of opposing tastes and views who embark on a stormy marriage. Once, when asked why the lady didn’t get top-billing, Tracy replied “This is a movie, not a lifeboat, dunderhead”; in this case Bacall was billed above the title and Guardino below: but as with their predecessors this was not a barrier to a close friendship during the Broadway run and the tour.
David Shipman
His “Independent” obituary can be accessed online here.
Tragic Heath Ledger was one of the best actors on film of his generation. He was born in 1979 in Perth, Western Australia. He began his career In 2000 he went to the U.S,. to play Billy Bob Thornton’s son in “Monster’s Ball”. “A Knight’s Tale” and “Ned Kelly” followed. He delivered a stunning performance in 2005 in “Brokeback Mountain”. He died suddenly in 2008 and was awarded a n Oscat for “The Dark Night” after his death.
TCM overview:
The handsome, curly-haired Australian Heath Ledger was introduced to American audiences as the young star of the Fox adventure series “Roar” (1997) and quickly rose through the ranks to become one of the busiest leading men of his generation, earning particular acclaim for his dramatic turn as a conflicted, closeted homosexual ranch hand in the bittersweet drama “Brokeback Mountain” (2005). Already a small screen veteran in his native land, the tall blond had been featured as the gay cyclist Snowy Bowles in the Australian TV drama “Sweat”, set at an elite training academy for young athletes. Ledger also did extensive guest work on Australian television, with appearances in the series “Ship to Shore”, “Bush Patrol” and “Corrigan”. Despite his status as an unknown in the USA, he was tapped to make his American television debut as the star of “Roar” (Fox, 1997), a medieval-set adventure in which he played Conor, a teenaged Celtic prince who becomes the leader of his people when the Romans murder his father and the rest of his family. With a job description that included bellowing a mighty roar before beating the baddies in addition to dealing with his inner turmoil, Ledger proved an impressive recruit, and was well loved by the series cult audience. Film appearances in the festival screened “Two Hands” (1998) and the teen comedy “10 Things I Hate About You” (1999) followed. The latter promised the rising player the opportunity for a great deal more exposure than a short-lived genre program could offer; he starred as Patrick Verona, a moody student with a reputed criminal past who is enlisted to woo Julia Stiles’ Kat in this modern retooling of “The Taming of the Shrew.” Ledger perhaps reached his widest audience to date, though, as Mel Gibson’s son in the much-heralded “The Patriot” (2000), a Revolutionary War saga about a pacifist (Gibson) forced to choose sides after his soldier son is captured by the enemy. Following the flurry of magazine covers and articles, the in-demand actor starred as medieval swashbuckler set to arena rock standards in “A Knight’s Tale” (2001), and he impressively held his own opposite Billy Bob Thorton as the anguished son of a cold-hearted prison guard in “Monster’s Ball” (2001). He signed on opposite Kate Hudson to headline yet another remake of “Four Feathers” (2002), directed by Shekhar Kapur, but the film made nary a ripple at the box office. Commencing a high-profile romance with slightly older actress Naomi Watts, Ledger quickly became a favorite subject of the paparazzi and entertainment media, and as his public profile rose he sought to shore up his professional reputation with his portrayal of renegade priest Father Alex Bernier who runs afoul of an ancient, secret and evil sect operating within the church in “The Order” (2003). In “Ned Kelly” (2004), Ledger played a good man driven to striking back at a corrupt British colonial system in 19th century Australia after serving a prison term on trumped-up charges for horse theft and the threat of more jail time for attempted murder. Reviews were mixed for the slow-moving western, and despite a cast that included Orlando Bloom, Geoffrey Rush and Naomi Watts, “Ned Kelly” was released by Universal into less than 20 theaters. His next appearance was in “Lords of Dogtown” (2005), the fictionalized rags-to-riches tale of board rats Jay Adams, Tony Alva and Stacy Peralta, Southern California riff-raff who revolutionized skateboarding and propelled themselves into wanton celebrity. Ledger was virtually unrecognizable as Skip Engblom, the stoner surfer-dude who owns a surf shop and forms the skaters into the celebrated Zephyr Skateboard Team. He then teamed with Matt Damon to play totally fictionalized versions of the famed Bavarian fairy tale spinners “The Brothers Grimm” (2005), reimagined by director Terry Gilliam as a pair of curse-removing con artists who are suddenly tasked with solving a genuine magical mystery that ultimately inspires many of their famous stories. Ledger showed some range as the sensitive, conflicted Jacob, but the story ultimately left him too little to do, and the film lacked some of the spark and imagination expected of a Gilliam project. His next project, that same year, more than made up for “Grimm’s” shortcomings: director Ang Lee’s sensitive film adaptation of E. Annie Proulx’s revered short story “Brokeback Mountain,” expanded by screenwriter Larry McMurtry, cast Ledger as Ennis Del Mar, a manly, rough-around-the-edges ranch hand who explores his homosexuality while on a 1960s sheep drive through a mountain range with a fellow cowboy (Jake Gyllenhaal), but continues to live a closeted life with a wife (Michelle Williams) and children even as he continues his on-off gay relationship over the ensuring decades. Ledger’s haunting, convincingly tortured performance was a revelation, his best work to date as he seemed to literally inhabit a character entirely different from his own on-screen image and sparked a wave of awards-season buzz. Ledger, who by the time of filming had also ended his high-profile relationship with Watts, became involved with his co-star Williams, and the two had a child together by the time of the film’s release. Meanwhile, Ledger was honored by a slew of award nominations, including the Oscar for Best Actor, but failed to win much of anything besides a New York Film Critics Circle award thanks to the juggernaut known as Philip Seymour Hoffman. Just weeks after his triumphant performance in “Brokeback Mountain” hit theaters, his final 2005 film debuted: “Casanova,” director Lasse Hallstrom’s fictionalized account of the legendary lothario falling in love, was easily one of the most ill-conceived and disappointing films of the year, despite lavish production values and game performances by Ledger and the rest of the all-star cast. Hot off of the phenomenal success of “Brokeback Mountain” it was announced that Ledger would appear as the legendary comic book villain The Joker opposite Christian Bale’s Batman in “The Dark Knight” (scheduled for release in 2008) in the second film in director Christopher Nolan’s popular revival of the Caped Crusader’s film franchise.
Sabu Dastagir (or Selar Shaik Sabu, depending on your resource) was born on January 27, 1924, in the little town of Mysore, India, which is nestled in the jungles of Karapur. The son of an elephant driver (mahout) in service for the Maharajah of his town, the young stable boy learned responsibility early in life when, at age 9, his father died and Sabu immediately became the ward of the royal elephant stables. As with many Hollywood success stories, good timing and dumb luck allowed the impoverished youth a chance for a better life. By sheer chance the timid 12-year-old orphan was discovered by a British location crew while searching for a youth to play the title role (an elephant driver!) in their upcoming feature Elephant Boy (1937). Quite taken aback by his earnest looks, engaging naturalness and adaptability to wild animals and their natural habitat, the studio handed the boy a film career on a sterling silver platter and was placed under exclusive contract by the mogul Alexander Korda himself.
Sabu and his older brother (as guardian) were whisked away to England to complete the picture and became subsequent wards of the British government. They were given excellent schooling in the process and Sabu quickly learned the English language in preparation for his upcoming films. Elephant Boy (1937) was an unqualified hit and the young actor was promptly placed front and center once again in the film Drums (1938) surrounded by an impressive British cast that included Raymond Massey and Valerie Hobson. With the parallel success of the Tarzan jungle movies in America, Hollywood starting taking a keen look at this refreshingly new boy talent when he first arrived in the U.S. for a publicity tour of the film. Again, his second film was given rave reviews, proving that Sabu would not be just a one-hit wonder.
His third film for Korda is considered one of the great true classics. In the Arabian fantasy-adventure The Thief of Bagdad (1940), Sabu plays Abu the Thief and is not only surrounded by superb actors — notably June Duprez, John Justin, Rex Ingram (as the genie) and Conrad Veidt (as the evil Grand Vizier) — but exceptional writing and incredible special effects. Sabu’s name began stirring international ears. His last pairing with Korda was the excellent adaptation of Rudyard Kipling‘s classic book Jungle Book(1942) playing Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves, who must adapt to the ways of mankind after being returned to his mother. The movie was directed by Alexander’s brother Zoltan Korda.
Following this triumph, Sabu officially became the exotic commodity of Universal Pictures and he settled in America. Although initially rewarding monetarily, it proved to be undoing. Unfortunately (and too often typical), a haphazard assembly-line of empty-minded features were developed that hardly compared to the quality pictures in England under Korda. Saddled alongside the unexceptional Maria Montez and Jon Hall, his vehicles Arabian Nights (1942), White Savage (1943) and Cobra Woman (1944) were, for the most part, drivel but certainly did fit the bill as colorful, mindless entertainment.
Almost 20 years old by the time he became a citizen of the U.S. in 1944, he enlisted in the Army Air Force and earned WWII distinction in combat missions (Distinguished Service Cross, Air Medal, among others) as a tail gunner. By the time Sabu returned to Universal and filming, the charm of his youth had worn off and the boyish stereotype impossible to escape.
Post-war audiences developed new tastes, but Sabu had not choice but to trudge on with retreads of his former glory. Films such as Tangier (1946) again opposite Ms. Montez,Man-Eater of Kumaon (1948) and Song of India (1949) opposite lovely princess Gail Russell did little to advance his career. While filming the last-mentioned movie, Sabu met and married actress Marilyn Cooper who temporarily filled in for an ailing Ms. Russell on the set. The couple went on to have two children.
Sabu actually fared better back in England during the late 40s, starring in the crime drama The End of the River (1947) and appearing fourth-billed as a native general in the exquisitely photographed Black Narcissus (1947). Daring in subject matter, the film hadDeborah Kerr heading up a group of Anglican nuns who battle crude traditions, unexpected passions and stark raving madness while setting up a Himalayan order. By the mid-50s Sabu’s career was rapidly approaching extinction, seeking work wherever he could find it – in low-budget Europe productions, public appearances, etc. An attempt to conjure up a TV series for himself failed. His life was further aggravated by unpleasant civil and paternity suits brought about against him. His last two pictures were supporting roles in Rampage (1963), which starred Robert Mitchum, and A Tiger Walks (1964), a thoroughly routine Disney picture which was released posthumously.
Sabu died unexpectedly at age 39 of a heart attack on December 2, 1963, at his home in Southern California and was buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery in the Hollywood Hills. SonPaul Sabu developed into an accomplished songwriter and even formed a rock band called Sabu; daughter Jasmine Sabu, who died in 2001, was a noted horse trainer whose skill was utilized occasionally for films. Although he went the way of too many of our former stars, Sabu continues to enchant and excite newer generations with his unmatched athletic skills and magnetic charm in those early adventure fantasies of yesteryear.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
SabuThe Thief Of Bagdad, poster, US poster art, top from left: Sabu, John Justin, June Duprez, Rex Ingram, 1940. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
“In an interview once, Rex Harrison referred to Alan Jay Lerner, the writer of ‘My Fair Lady’:’ I owe that man such a great deal’. Few actors are so in debt. ‘My Fair Lady’ cam to him when he was past middle age and transformed him from leading man to super-star. He had even been a formidable light comedian but a fairish run of poor films had kept this Rolls Royce of actors going in only low gear. He is a player of strong personal style, presumably achieved by much work but looking deceptively easy., the aristocratic elegant Englishman, with ingratiating hints of well-being and devilry. He can play with real bite. Noel Coward’s famous crack is not quite fair:’ If next to me, you were not the finest light-comedian in the world, you’d be good for only one thing: selling cars in Great Portland Street’. It suggests that behind Harrison’s smooth surface bravado, there is not very much – which is intriguingly possible; ut it also suggests superb self-confidence and it was that deepened into arrogance, which made him such a marvellous Higgins. To the extent that ‘My Fair Lady’ put him right to the forefront of actors, with roles to match, we all owe Alan Jay Lerner a great deal”. – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years”. (1972).
TCM Overview:
Stagestruck from boyhood, suave British actor Rex Harrison joined the Liverpool Repertory Theatre at the age of 16, beginning a 66-year career that would culminate with his final performance on Broadway, May 11, 1990, three weeks prior to his death. Best known for his Tony- and Oscar-winning portrayal of Professor Henry Higgins in Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s “My Fair Lady”, he made his West End debut in “Getting George Married” (1930) and his Broadway debut in “Sweet Aloes” (1936), but it was a two year run on the London stage in Sir Terrence Rattigan’s “French Without Tears” that made him a star. Appearances in other sophisticated comedies, S N Behrman’s “No Time for Comedy” and Noel Coward’s “Design for Living” (both 1939), established him as what Coward himself called “the best light comedian in the world–after me.”
Harrison’s feature debut came in “The Great Game” (1930), and starring turns in movies like “Night Train to Munich”, (1940) “Major Barbara” (1941) and “Blithe Spirit” (1945) brought him to the attention of Hollywood, leading to a seven-year contract with 20th Century-Fox. He scored a major triumph as the King in “Anna and the King of Siam” (1946) and recorded another success with “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” (1947), but subsequent films performed poorly at the box office, although Preston Sturges’ “Unfaithfully Yours” (1948) later acquired a cult status. Actor and studio parted company by mutual agreement, and Harrison returned to Broadway, earning a Tony for his 1948 performance as King Henry VIII in Maxwell Anderson’s “Anne of the Thousand Days”. Continued acclaim followed for his work in T S Eliot’s “The Cocktail Party” and John van Druten’s “Bell, Book and Candle” (both 1950). He directed and starred in “The Love of Four Colonels” (1953) and a revival of “Bell, Book and Candle” (1954) and helmed “Nina” (1955), all for the London stage. He made his Broadway directing debut with “The Bright One” (1958).
Despite having, in his own words, a vocal range of “one-and-a-half notes”, Harrison talked his way through the numbers of Lerner and Loewe’s “My Fair Lady” (1956), directed for the stage by Moss Hart, and became the darling of the critics, playing the show for two years in New York and another in London. His waspish professor of phonetics was “crisp, lean, complacent and condescending until at last a real flare of human emotions burns the egotism away,” wrote Brooks Atkinson in THE NEW YORK TIMES, and the success of “My Fair Lady” once again brought Harrison important film offers. He earned his first Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Julius Caesar in “Cleopatra” (1963), stealing the picture from his more famous co-stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Reprising Higgins for the 1964 film version of “My Fair Lady” opposite Audrey Hepburn brought him a Best Actor Oscar and international fame, and “Dr. Dolittle” (1967) introduced him to a new generation of moviegoers as he shamelessly enjoyed himself playing the fanciful jungle gentleman who conversed with wildlife.
Harrison devoted most of his remaining years to his first love, the stage, taking parts in such diverse plays as Luigi Pirandello’s “Henry IV” and Rattigan’s “In Praise of Love” (both 1974). He co-starred with Claudette Colbert in a Broadway production of “The Kingfisher” (1978), and, after returning to Broadway in “My Fair Lady” (1981), garnered some of the best reviews of his career for a Broadway revival of “Heartbreak House” (1983), later captured for posterity in a 1985 Showtime cable special. Harrison portrayed Lord Grenham in London and Broadway productions of “Aren’t We All?” (1984-85) and Grand Duke Cyril Romanov in the NBC miniseries, “Anastasia: The Story of Anna” (1986). He last appeared on the London stage in “The Admirable Crichton” (1988) and bowed out in a Broadway revival of W Somerset Maugham’s “The Circle”, playing eight times a week just prior to his June 1990 death. The oft-married man dubbed ‘Sexy Rexy’ by Walter Winchell never wanted to be anything but an actor and never intended to retire. “He died with his boots on, no doubt about it,” said “The Circle” producer Elliot Martin.
The Foxes Of Harrow, poster, Rex Harrison, Maureen O’Hara, Vanessa Brown, 1947. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)Rex Harrison
Article from 2009 in “The Guardian” by David Thomson:
James Mason had good friends, and sometimes that is the measure of a man, especially in the picture business, where it’s all too easy to lose contact as golden opportunities fade away. Consider his situation in the late 1940s. After giving his youth and his early beauty to British pictures and theatre, he decided to go to Hollywood. There must have been people who told him he was too patrician, too intelligent, as well as too old to break through in America. But he made wonderful contacts. There was a chance of doing the Svengali-Trilby story (with Jane Wyman), and Mason longed to have Jean Renoir as its director because he could see that the Frenchman loved actors. Alas, that project fell through, but then Renoir offered Mason the role of the wounded veteran in his Indian picture, The River. I can’t do it, sighed Mason; I’m set to play the male lead in La Duchesse de Langeais – which was to be the comeback picture for Greta Garbo.
Historians still argue as to why that picture collapsed. Advancing into his 40s, Mason had reason to think of bad luck as he played Erwin Rommel in a couple of movies, Rupert of Hentzau in a remake of The Prisoner of Zenda and “Hendrik van der Zee” in the dotty but deliriously beautiful romance, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. In Britain, there were already superior figures in acting who marvelled over what was happening to “poor Jimmy Mason”. But as we come to celebrate today what would have been his 100th birthday, there are those who only wish there was more of Pandora, more Rommel and an entire picture about Rupert of Hentzau, the only interesting person in that whole Zenda nonsense.
In every decade, from the 1930s to the 80s, James Mason did some poor work in disappointing pictures, just as he missed out on mouth-watering opportunities. So, yes, it’s lamentable that he was to have been Prospero for Michael Powell, only for that Tempest to blow out. But don’t forget that their long friendship did lead somewhere: to Australia, for the quirky but vivid Age of Consent, where Mason was the film’s co-producer and he and Powell managed to discover the 18-year-old Helen Mirren to be the muse for the beachcomber painter Mason plays.
Yes, I know you can see Mason in these parts, but it’s just as evident that you hear him and, before we go any further, it’s vital to consider the unique and languid but impassioned voice of this man. Is it enough to say that he was a lad born in Huddersfield (the son of a wool merchant) who was sent to Cambridge to speak properly? Should we consider also his years on the Dublin stage as a prelude to his tragic figure in Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out – the film above all that promoted him from British pictures to a Hollywood player? Or is there not still something in Mason’s voice – aristocratic, but full of connoisseurship, too – that allowed the actor to become his true self just once, as the voice of Humbert Humbert in the film of Lolita? Humbert is not American. He is a scholar of comparative literature, as well as a judge of nymphets. He is a very bad man (if you like, or if you don’t like), but he may be the purest-spoken scoundrel in all the movies. For he has to deliver Nabokovian prose as if to say it was the most normal and sensible way of speaking the English language yet invented.
So Mason could be lord and nobleman, a very upper-class fellow – he did that from his Flaubert in the silly MGM production of Madame Bovary to Brutus in the same studio’s Julius Caesar, from Mr Jordan in Heaven Can Wait to the “prince of darkness” lawyer, Ed Concannon, in The Verdict. He could say something to another person so that one word seemed like a lash or a curare dart delivered in slow motion. This Mason was Mr Elocution, if you like, the personification of affectation and lingering insult or innuendo. But the same voice could burn with conviction – it does in Lolita, when he talks to his Lo, just as much as it did in A Star Is Born, with Judy Garland, in North By Northwest, with Eva Marie Saint, or in The Reckless Moment, with Joan Bennett, where he has the fine judgment to know that he is falling in love with the woman he is supposed to blackmail.
Pause over North By Northwest a moment. Why is it that, over the years, that crazed film calmly urges itself forward as maybe Hitch’s most entertaining picture? Well, of course, it’s the demented plot by Ernest Lehman, with the cornfields of Iowa leading to Mount Rushmore. And it’s also Cary Grant. But run the picture in your head a moment and isn’t it Mason’s voice you hear as Vandamm, the villain? Look at it again, if you doubt me – he’s the heart and head of the picture, and he is delighted to realise that North By Northwest is a frolic, a dance in mid-air, a fabulous absurdity. Of course, we love Grant and Saint and everyone else in it, but just look at Grant’s face and see the pleasure he feels at being placed beside so sublime a screen being as James Mason. (Time for a joke: in the year for which North By Northwest was eligible, 1959, Charlton Heston and Hugh Griffith won the acting Oscars for Ben-Hur.)
Mason never won an Oscar, though he was nominated three times – for A Star Is Born, The Verdict and Georgy Girl (the latter one of those pictures where he let his Yorkshire accent run riot and where, apparently, he took a deep shine to his co-star, Lynn Redgrave).
You might have thought that in a thousand words (so far), I’d have been able to mention all the worthwhile Mason films. But I haven’t even touched the Gainsborough period yet. In the war years (when Mason was a conscientious objector), he defined a new type in British pictures – the handsome, cruel mastermind who is irresistible to women. That is the Mason of The Man in Grey, a costume romance, where he dismantles Margaret Lockwood and Phyllis Calvert; The Wicked Lady, where he and Lockwood are highway robbers; and the cult classic, The Seventh Veil, where he is Ann Todd’s unkind guardian.
The same years include two other remarkable films: A Place of One’s Own, where he is the elderly husband, and The Upturned Glass – a film that Mason helped write – about a doctor fascinated with the psychology of murder. To say the least, that side of Mason – the mind that had ideas for films – was what made him most endearing to directors.
Once in America, he forged bonds with two of the least likely artists. First, he fell for Max Ophuls, effectively in exile, and did two films for him: Caught and The Reckless Moment. In the first, he is the doctor with a busy urban practice who takes in Barbara Bel Geddes as a secretary when she flees from her marriage to the tyrannical Robert Ryan. In The Reckless Moment, he plays a weak-willed villain, a man whose blackmail plans are thwarted by his own sentiments.
In both cases, Mason’s struggle to be decent and ordinary provides a foundation for the film. Equally, in every situation, Mason was the defender of Ophuls, a high-strung, stylistic perfectionist who was having a hard time in Hollywood.
A few years later, Mason became friends with another movie director, and an even more self-destructive man, Nicholas Ray. They wanted to do a story they had seen in the New Yorker about an idealistic teacher who is warped by his addiction to cortisone. The result, Bigger Than Life, is one of the great American films of the 50s, in which Ray’s dynamic use of colour and form is steadily attached to Mason’s tragic performance. In the slow reappraisal of American film by American critics, it’s worth saying that Caught, The Reckless Moment and Bigger Than Life (none of which was a hit) have now become standards by which other films are judged. In all these cases, the completion of the picture, as well as its initiation, owed a lot to the creative vision of an actor who was serving as an extra producer.
Is that all? By no means. To the end of his time (he died in 1984), Mason was doing intriguing small films such as Dr Fischer of Geneva and The Shooting Party. He was the star of works as different as The Deadly Affair, Mandingo, Cross of Iron and The Seagull (where he played Trigorin). He made Cry Terror! and The Decks Ran Red for that master of suspense, Andrew L Stone.
He was Sir Edward Carson to Peter Finch’s lead in The Trials of Oscar Wilde. He was toxic in The Pumpkin Eater and cool syrup in The Fall of the Roman Empire. He made every trashy costume seem as natural as a good suit and, for all his life, he seemed carried forward by the odd mixture of yearning and fatalism that prompted Humbert Humbert.
Graham Greene called it the marriage of sadness and pride. It is still there, to be treasured in something like 40 special films.
Odd Man Out (1947)
After making his name as the dashing, cruel-eyed star of wartime period costume pics, Mason did a 180-degree turn to play an made gunman staggering wounded through Belfast. Director Carol Reed assembles an arsenal of expressionist techniques to make this an early, and effective, British noir.
North By Northwest (1959)
Arguably Hitchcock’s finest, and maybe Mason’s, too – even though he didn’t have the lead role. Here he plays super-smooth microfilm smuggler Vandamm, egging on henchman Martin Landau to dispose of pesky Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint.
Lolita (1962)
Nabokov’s professorial paedophile terrified the life out of Hollywood’s star names, but Mason stepped up to play Humbert Humbert for Stanley Kubrick.(Both Laurence Olivier and David Niven turned it down.) Mason’s stuffed-shirt reticence, allied to his lasciviously clipped vowels, made him ideal for the role.
“The Times” obituary:
Mr James Mason, who died yesterday in Lausanne, Switzerland, at the age of 75, was a highly intelligent and creative cinema performer who appeared in more than 100 films. And though many of them were unworthy of his talent he could lift the poorest material just as he could enrich the best. He made a reputation in parts calling for moody and tyrannical introspection, notably as Ann Todd’s sadistic guardian in The Seventh Veil, before maturing into a versatile and dependable character player.
One of his best performances came under Sir Carol Reed’s direction in 1947, when he played a dying gunman on the run in Belfast in Odd Man Out. Soon afterwards, expressing his disenchantment with the British cinema, he left for Hollywood where, after a difficult start, he successfully built a new career.
James Mason was born in Huddersfield on May 15, 1909, the son of a textile merchant. He was educated at Marlborough and Peterhouse College, Cambridge where he took a first in architecture and got a taste for acting. His professional debut was at the Theatre Royal, Aldershot, in 1931 and two years later he made his first London appearance in Gallows Glorious at the Arts Theatre. He joined the Old Vic company and then the Gate Theatre in Dublin, where he played between 1934 and 1937.
He entered films in 1935, playing a reporter in Late Extra, but for several years most of his parts were in low budget “quota quickies”. In 1939, with two friends, Roy and Pamela Kelli-no, he set up his own film, I Met a Murderer, a crime story in which he was the killer of the title. He and Pamela Kellino were married two years later.
During the Second World War, he worked with ENSA and his film career finally took off through a series of costume melodramas which gave him the opportunity to create a memorable gallery of suave and vicious villains. The film that made him into a star was The Man in Grey, in which he took a whip to Margaret Lockwood; Fanny by Gaslight, They Were Sisters, and The Wicked Lady, also with Margaret Lockwood, followed in similar vein.
The Seventh Veil proved to be the most successful of all and from 1944 to 1947 Mason was voted Britain’s top box-office star. Among those who admired his performance in The Seventh Veil was the veteran American director, D W Griffith. But Mason had become increasingly unhappy with the films he was bing offered, and with what he saw as a monopolistic stranglehold on the industry by J Arthur Rank; and at the peak of his popularity he departed for Hollywood.
It was to be some time before the move paid off. Mason’s outspokenness did not endear him to Hollywood and his choice of parts was not always happy. He appeared in two films for the emigre director, Max Ophuls, Caught and The Reckless Moment, and made a splendid Rommel in The Desert Fox; while his Brutus in the 1953 production of Julius Caesar helped to make it one of the best screen versions of Shakespeare.
But it was not until 1954 when he played opposite Judy Garland in George Cukor’s remake of A Star is Born that he managed a major performance, a harrowing study of a man’s tragic decline, for which he gained an Oscar nomination. He brought the same nervous intensity to the part of a drug addict in Bigger Than Life (1956), a film which he also produced.
The best of his later roles was Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick’s film of the Nabokov novel, Lolita, which appeared in 1962. To his portrayal of a middle-aged man’s infatuation with a 12-year-old girl, Mason brought a degree of sympathy, combined with wry humour, that few other actors could have managed. With Odd Man Out, it ranks as his outstanding screen achievement.
Three years earlier he had been a memorable villain in Alfred Hitchcock‘s North by Northwest and had given an engagingly tongue in cheek performance in an adaptation of the Jules Verne story, Journey to the Centre of the Earth. He maintained a prolific output through the 1960s and 1970s, making two and three films a year, though many were routine assignments easily, and perhaps best, forgotten.
There was still, however, much to relish. His Timonides in The Fall of the Roman Empire was a bright spot in an otherwise dreary epic and he had good supporting parts in The Pumpkin Eater and as Gentleman Brown in Conrad’s Lord Jim. He added to his stock of German officers inThe Blue Max (1966) and in the same year he was in Georgy Girl, a story of the “swinging sixties”, and a John Le Carre thriller, The Deadly Affair.
In 1969 he turned producer again for Age of Consent, directed in Australia by Michael Powell; but a long-cherished Powell project, The Tempest, with Mason as Prospero, proved abortive. The martinet Yorkshire father in Spring and Port Wine was a tailor-made part, there were more Germans in Cross of Iron and The Boys From Brazil and a well judged Mr Jordan in the fantasy, Heaven Can Wait. He was superb as the old tutor recalling his days in India in James Ivory’s Autobiography of a Princess.
Once he became established in films, Mason returned only occasionally to the stage. He was in an unsuccessful Broadway play, Bathsheba, in 1947, and during the 1950s played Angelo in Measure for Measure and Oedipus in Oedipus Rex at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario.
