Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 39 of 125

Gary Cooper

Gary Cooper was one of the true giants of the Golden Age of Hollywood. He won two Oscars, “Sgt York” in 1941 and “High Noon” in 1952. He was born in Helena in Montana in 1901. His first major role was in the silent film “Wings” in 1927. His career highlights include “The Devil and the Deep” in 1932, “A Farewell to Arms”, “Mr Deeds Goes to Town”, “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, “North-West Mounted Police”, “Love in the Afternoon”, “10 North Frederick” and “The Naked Edge”. His leading ladies included Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Lauren Bacall, Deborah Kerr, Madeleine Carroll, Paulette Goddard, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Loretta Young and Suzy Parker. He died in 1961.

TCM overview:

Gary Cooper’s rugged mug, soft-spoken demeanor and earnest, haunted eyes for decades made him the quintessential lonely American of motion pictures, a more stoic, human protagonist versus boisterous, bigger-than-life Hollywood supermen. Privately a debonair ladies’ man with a taste for high society, he crafted an image as just the opposite, from his prototype cowboy talkie “The Virginian” (1929) playing shy, stoic “aw-shucks” heroes. He built that image in such classics as Frank Capra’s “Mr. Deeds G s to Town” (1936) and “Meet John D ” (1941) and celebrated biopics like “Sergeant York” (1941) and “Pride of the Yankees” (1942). Though he cooperated with the U.S. government’s Hollywood witch hunts early in the Cold War, he nevertheless made a triumphant comeback in the anti-blacklisting parable “High Noon” (1952), refusing to dissociate himself from the film’s blacklisted writer, Carl Foreman, karmic punctuation to what had been, on screen anyway, a legacy of a weary everyman who nevertheless stood tall against mob mentality. He was born Frank James Cooper, second son of British immigrants Charles and Alice Cooper, in Helena, Montana on May 7, 1901. Charles Cooper worked as a lawyer and kept a 600-acre ranch outside Helena, where Frank and older brother Arthur spent their early years until their mother, hoping to acculturate her sons, sent them off to school in England. Frank returned to Montana at age 16, upon the U.S.’s entry into World War I, and eventually matriculated at Grinnell College in Grinnell, IA, where he attempted to nurture a passion for drawing – until a serious car accident ended his college days in the summer of 1920. He would recover from his severely injured hip through an odd but painful therapy, horseback riding. This would come in handy four years later as his search for a job as a political cartoonist bore no fruit and Cooper followed his parents to Los Angeles – where they’d moved after his father’s retirement form the Montana Supreme Court – and found work as a stunt horseman in motion pictures. The tall, lean Frank Cooper caught the eye of agent Nan Collins, who took him on as a client and, with somebody already working under his name in show business, redubbed him Gary Cooper, after her Indiana hometown. Another uncredited horseman role in “The Winning of Barbara Worth” (1926) expanded portentously when silent star Vilma Banky’s onscreen suitor fell out and Cooper found himself promoted to third-billing. Variety called the then-unknown Cooper “a youth who will be heard of on the screen,” Paramount made him a contract player at $150 a week and notoriously randy A-list actress Clara Bow set her sights on him, giving him a small role in her next picture “It” (1927) – originating the notion of the “It-girl,” the buzz around their romance making Cooper the original “It-boy.” That led to his first top-billing as a stereotype hero-cowboy in “Arizona Bound” (1927), then another turn supporting Bow in “Wings” (1927), the first film to win the Academy Award as Best Picture. He crossed over to partial-sound pics, most notably in “Wolf Song” (1929), which co-starred his latest love, Mexican actress Lupe Velez. His first full-fledged talkie, Victor Fleming’s “The Virginian” (1929), would take him to a new stratum of stardom, hitting big with audiences and creating an archetype for American westerns, Cooper playing the white-hat hero rigidly following his moral compass versus the black-hats of the chaotic west, along the way wooing the transplanted Eastern schoolmarm. Much in demand, he went on to crank out 11 more movies in the next two years, four of them westerns, but most notably “Morocco” (1930), a French Foreign Legion adventure that would make Marlene Dietrich his love interest both on and off camera. By the time he filmed “His Woman” (1931), his first pairing with screwball comedy ingénue Claudette Colbert, his schedule had worn down his health, as had a tempestuous, sometimes violent cohabitation with Velez and the meddling of his disapproving mother, all bringing Cooper to the brink of nervous exhaustion. Even as he embarked on a sabbatical, Velez notoriously pulled a pistol and fired several rounds at his train car as it departed for Chicago He traveled to Europe, in Italy finding another watershed relationship, with Countess Dorothy di Frasso-nee-Taylor, a socialite ten years his senior who had married into Euro-aristocracy out of Watertown, NY. They began a country-hopping affair, while she undertook his “Pygmallion”-esque refinement. Paramount c rced him back to Hollywood with threats of replacing him on its A-list with a young Cary Grant, then immediately shoved both into naval adventure compromised by a love triangle over stage great Tallulah Bankhead in “The Devil and the Deep” (1932). Cooper proved susceptible to her charms, as most her co-stars did, Bankhead soon ending her unhappy flirtation with the movies and returning to the theater, notoriously averring, “The only reason I went to Hollywood was to f–k that divine Gary Cooper.” His ladies’-man days would end not long after – at least officially – when he met a savvy 20-year-old New York debutante, Veronica “Rocky” Balfe, at a party in early 1933 and married her the next December. In the meantime he stretched his by-now-signature solemn-yet-upright character, sometimes in sober North American expatriate roles such as Hemmingway’s melodrama “A Farewell to Arms” (1932), “Today We Live” (1933) and the hit actioner “Lives of a Bengal Lancer” (1934), more spiritedly in comedies such as “Design for Living” (1933), “One Sunday Afternoon” (1933), “Desire” (1936) and “Mr. Deeds G s to Town” (1936). The latter two would prove pivotal for Cooper in developing his charming rube character, “Desire” reteaming him with Dietrich as a bright-eyed American abroad caught in her criminal web, “Deeds” codifying the character, by way of director Frank Capra, as an archetype of integrity and innocence in the face of sophisticated charlatanry. Longfellow Deeds, a tuba-playing small-town Vermonter inheriting a fortune, plus the big city swells and grifters that follow, “had to symbolize incorruptibility, and in my mind Gary Cooper already was that symbol,” Capra later wrote. His intuition paid off with a hit, earning Cooper his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor, not to mention a separate six-year contract with independent producer Samuel Goldwyn for a movie a year at $150,000 apiece. That move challenged the studios’ perceived exclusivity with their stars. Paramount sued and lost, the court ruling he could still fulfill his obligation to the studio. Cooper continued his share of adventure yarns, playing a mercenary in revolutionary China in “The General Died at Dawn” (1936), Wild Bill Hickok in Cecille B. DeMille’s “The Plainsman,” more conspicuously as the world-spanning explorer in “The Adventures of Marco Polo” (1938) and again as a Legionnaire in the blockbuster “Beau Geste” (1939). Bolstering his manly bona fides, he met Hemingway on vacation in Idaho in 1940, getting a sneak-peak at his forthcoming book, The Sun Also Rises. He kept his hand in comedy, reuniting with Colbert in “Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife” (1938), and with Capra in another rube-against-the-odds picture, “Meet John D ” (1941). A subtle indictment of the fascist machinations inflaming Europe, “D ” had Cooper as a vagabond hired by an unscrupulous newspaper to play the role of a made-up pundit, claiming to be the voice of America’s unheard everymen, unknowingly becoming the key to a plan by the paper’s industrialist owner to garner populist groundswell for his “iron-fist” presidential candidacy. The oft-corny film nevertheless signaled Cooper’s capacity, as a Time cover story posited, to render “a personality that de-schmaltzes sentiment and de-rants rhetoric.” The looming war would color an even more momentous project of 1941, director Howard Hawks in the World War I tale of Sgt. Alvin York, the hayseed pacifist drafted into the U.S. army, overcoming his personal objections and capturing an entire German company single-handed. “Sergeant York” scored 11 Oscar nominations, including Best Actor, which Cooper walked away with the next February. On a roll, he reteamed successfully with Stanwyck in “Ball of Fire” (1942), playing a nerdy English professor who hooks up with a mob-connected showgirl to learn new slang, and then went somber again, earning another Oscar nomination for director Sam Wood’s “Pride of the Yankees,” playing the baseball great Lou Gehrig, whose career was cut short by the disease that bears his name. The inspirational Gehrig farewell speech would become part of his routine when he entertained troops during the war. Wood directed him again in “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1943), during which Cooper reverted to old ways, beginning an affair with co-star Ingrid Bergman. A meandering tale, it nevertheless proved box-office gold in Hollywood’s volume of wartime anti-fascist messages – curious given Cooper and Wood’s helping to found the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals the next year. “The Alliance,” whose members also included Walt Disney, Robert Taylor and Clark Gable (not to mention its influential but unofficial godfather John Wayne), dedicated itself to winnowing “Red” influence out of motion pictures. The studio reteamed Cooper and Bergman in the period romance “The Saratoga Trunk,” shot in 1943 but released in ’45, but by then he had become he became increasingly dissatisfied with his work for Paramount. The contract lapsing that year, he would produce his own first post-studio picture, “Along Came Jones” (1945), as an early revisionist western, parodying his once-rote western roles. 1947 would prove momentous for Cooper, though not for his work. The Alliance invited the Red Scare’s primary catalyst, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), to investigate subversive influences in film, an exercise in paranoia that would ruin careers and have Cooper as a “friendly witness.” Apologists say Cooper addressed the committee ambivalently and never named names of suspected Reds as did other Hollywood denizens who would later find themselves ostracized for their political convenience. Signing with Warner Bros., Cooper would link himself to right-wing canon in King Vidor’s attempt to film Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, a job made difficult by the controlling author. The film’s climactic scene had Cooper, as her heroic architect-turned-terrorist, giving the longest speech in movie history theretofore, but with Rand’s overwrought writing translating miserably to spoken dialogue, Cooper didn’t understand it, appealed to Vidor for it to be simplified, and Rand nearly shut down production until the studio guaranteed her a pristine reading. When released in 1949, the work intended as a testimonial to Rand’s exceptionalism proved a garish bomb. Rumors bubbling about troubles in his marriage also gained traction when he and his “Fountainhead” love interest, 22-year-old Patricia Neal, began an affair, which would become a long-term relationship and particularly problematic as Rocky, a devout Catholic, refused to consider divorce (though they separated in 1951). Cooper as a 50-year-old leading man, meanwhile, was hardly setting the box office afire with by-the-numbers period adventure/romantic fare such as “Dallas” (1950) and “Distant Drums” (1951) as he once did – at least until independent producers Stanley Kramer and Carl Foreman came calling with a Western that would rock the genre. “High Noon,” written by Foreman, told the tale of an aging marshal seeking the aid of townspeople to help fend off a gang whose leader he had put in prison, but finding no allies and only advice to flee with his young Quaker wife before the villains arrive. Cooper turned in a somber performance as the conflicted marshal, even as he reputedly began another amorous dalliance with his young co-star Grace Kelly. The film became a lightning rod, not only for its reversal of the sunny myths of square-jawed western superher s and intrepid pioneer-folk, but also for Foreman’s use of the story as allegory for HUAC witch hunts, with which he himself had refused to cooperate. An overwhelming success financially and critically, it nevertheless became a target of the Alliance and its allies, who lobbied furiously against the film winning any of the seven Oscars for which it had been nominated, Alliance president John Wayne, and Cooper friend, calling it “the most un-American thing I have ever seen in my whole life.” “High Noon” nevertheless won four Oscars, Cooper taking his second Best Actor statue and remaining friends with Foreman, who, now blacklisted, lost production credit on the film and moved to London. Cooper, shooting a new movie during the Academy Awards ceremony, asked Wayne to accept the award for him. With marriage impossible, his relationship with Neal had ended by 1953, and he reunited with Rocky the next year. That year, he did another gun-slinging adventure in “Vera Cruz,” this time as mercenaries with Burt Lancaster amid Mexico’s 1866 revolution, a tale of conscience versus the shifting morals intrinsic to power politics. It gave Cooper a monster hit with another revisionist Western, “Vera Cruz” greatly influencing the coming spaghetti Western movement. Ensuing years would see him work with some of the cinema’s top directors, Otto Preminger for “The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell” (1955), with Cooper as the brash prophet of military air power; William Wyler for “Friendly Persuasion” (1956), a poignant film that had Cooper the head of a Quaker family whose pacifism is tested by the American Civil War; Billy Wilder for “Love in the Afternoon” (1957), with Cooper as the unlikely suitor of Audrey Hepburn; and Anthony Mann for “Man of the West” (1958). Largely considered the best of his final films, “The Hanging Tree” (1959) had Cooper as a frontier doctor attempting to be the moral anchor of a bawdy, troubled mining town and live down a dark past. His last two films, nautical mystery “The Wreck of the Mary Dearer” (1959) and psychological thriller “The Naked Edge” (1961), both showed a diminished, ill-looking Cooper, the result of cancer diagnosed in 1960, but kept from the public. One of his good friends, Jimmy Stewart, knew of Cooper’s medical state when he emotionally accepted a special lifetime Oscar in spring 1961, Cooper spending his final days in his and Ricky’s home in L.A.’s Holm by Hills neighborhood, until his death on May 14, 1961. He and Sidney Poitier share the distinction of being the only actors to have five films in the American Film Institute’s 100 Most Inspiring Movies” list, with “Pride of the Yankees” at No. 22, “High Noon” at 27, “D ” at 49, “York” at 57 and “Deeds” at 83.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

It is terrific to see Meryl Streep in her 60’s in major leading roles. She has starred in leading roles since the 1970’s. She was born in 1949 in New Jersey. She began her career on the NY stage and acted with Joseph Papps Theatre. Her film debut was in 1977 in “Julia” with Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave. Her films include “The Deer Hunter” in 1978 with Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken, “Kramer Verus Kramer” with Dustin Hoffman, “Manhattan” with Woody Allen, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” with Jeremy Irons, “Ironweed” with Jack Nicholson,”Silkwood”, “Out of Africa” with Robert Redford, “Mamma Mia” with Pierce Brosnan and “The Iron Lady”.

TCM overview:

Meryl Streep began her acting career with a level of worship typically reserved for seasoned veterans. From her early work in “The Deer Hunter” (1978) and “Kramer vs. Kramer” (1979), it quickly became apparent to the sharpest of critics – even the most casual of moviegoers – that the chameleon-like Streep was an unparalleled master of character, accents and genres. The benchmark was set for every working actress with Streep’s work as a Polish Nazi camp survivor, damaged by the unthinkable decision she was once forced to make in her Oscar-winning performance in “Sophie’s Choice” (1982). Through “Silkwood” (1983), “Out of Africa” (1985) and “A Cry in the Dark” (1988) Streep continued to set a standard few could hope to achieve, primarily with her mastery of accents that included Polish, Danish and Australian, among others. After her peak in the early 1980s, the multi-Oscar winner spent the subsequent decades maintaining her brilliance, showcasing yet another of her talents – singing competently – in “Postcards from the Edge” (1990) and “Mamma Mia” (2008), capturing the aching desire of an aging woman in “The Bridges of Madison County” (1995), and proving she could draw laughter as well as tears in “The Devil Wears Prada (2006). Simply put, Streep could do it all, and generations of actresses coming up behind her often cited her work as the reason they pursued the craft in the first place.

Mary Louise Streep was born on June 22, 1949 in Summit, NJ and raised in Bernardsville, the oldest sibling ahead of two older brothers, Harry and Dana. Her mother was a commercial artist; her father, an executive at a pharmaceutical company. Streep was extremely serious about music as a child, taking opera singing lessons from renowned coach, Estelle Liebling. By high school, shedding her braces and bespectacled appearance, she willed herself into a dynamic, blonde-haired social butterfly, cheerleading and swimming on the Bernards High School squads and ultimately becoming its homecoming queen. Her mother devised the shortened version of her name, and “Meryl” was christened. Streep also took acting classes in school, which became the dominant interest, leading her to Vassar College and an exchange program for one semester of playwriting and set design at Dartmouth. After earning her acting degree at Vassar in 1971, she headed to the prestigious Yale School of Drama, where her classmates and friends included actress Sigourney Weaver and playwright Wendy Wasserstein. Streep performed in over 40 plays, including “The Father” with Rip Torn, before obtaining her master’s degree in 1975.

Right out of Vassar, Streep had hit the New York stage and made her professional stage debut with “The Playboy of Seville” in 1971, with her Broadway debut coming years later at Lincoln Center in 1975, just out of Yale with “Trelawney of the Wells,” directed by Joseph Papp as part of the New York Shakespeare Festival. Streep would return over the coming few years to the festival to appear in several plays, including Shakespeare works like “Henry V,” “Measure for Measure” and “The Taming of the Shrew,” but in 1976, earned a Tony Award nomination for Tennessee Williams’ “27 Wagons Full of Cotton,” which she had doubled up alongside Arthur Miller’s “A Memory of Two Mondays.” Streep edged into both television and film by 1977, earning the media’s top honors after only a couple of projects under her belt. She burst onto television screens with CBS’ “The Deadliest Season” (1977) as the wife of a hockey player accused of murdering another player during game play. That year, she also made waves in her feature film debut, “Julia,” starring as the high society friend of Jane Fonda’s Lillian Hellman. Streep was considered for the title character, a WWII resistance member, but her lack of recognition led director Fred Zinnemann to cast Vanessa Redgrave instead.

Streep remained in the World War II period, starring opposite James Woods as Inga, a well-to-do German woman attempting to save her Jewish husband from the Nazi concentration camps in the epic NBC miniseries “Holocaust” (1978), for which she won a leading actress Emmy. Streep’s capacity for playing characters of exceptional depth already seemed vast as she closed the year in another big screen period piece, giving a tour de force performance as Linda, the wife of a Vietnam War soldier forced to cope with the war’s devastating effects and toll on her husband in Michael Cimino’s “The Deer Hunter” (1978). Streep had entered into her first serious romance with the film’s co-star, John Cazale, but was soon living in a hospital room, forced to watch bedside as he slowly succumbed to bone cancer. Six months later, she met a Yale-bred sculptor named Donald Gummer, who was asked by Streep’s brother, Harry to do some work on her Manhattan loft. The two became roommates and then fell in love, marrying in September of 1978.

After Tony and Emmy wins and just shy of her 30th birthday, Streep solidified her early reign over stage and screen with a supporting actress Oscar nomination for the five-time Oscar-winning “Deer Hunter.” Streep’s nod came on the heels of a small, but pivotal role opposite Woody Allen in his sweetly comical “Manhattan” (1979), with her character Jill, as Allen’s former wife, now living with a woman and writing a tell-all book about their love life. Heading into a new chapter of career and life, she was cultivating an audience of fans eager to watch the rising young star’s increasingly staggering command of craft. She wrapped up the decade with Robert Benton’s adaptation of “Kramer vs. Kramer” (1979). Streep won raves opposite Dustin Hoffman, as Joanna Kramer, an unhappy woman who leaves her husband and son, only to return to claim the child in a messy divorce case. Streep’s real life was quite the opposite, as she and Gummer blissfully welcomed a son, Henry, into the fold, with the couple vacating New York to raise their family in northern Connecticut.

At turns sympathetic and icy, Streep’s role in “Kramer” won her an Academy Award in 1980, and the film made winners out of Hoffman, Benton and a nominee out of eight-year-old Justin Henry. Her reputation for immersing herself in character and accents served her well as she donned an impeccable English accent to play both a modern actress and a destitute Victorian woman engaged in parallel love affairs in the Harold Pinter-adapted movie-in-a-movie, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” (1981), bringing her back for a third Oscar nomination. Then came the part by which all others would be measured. Easing flawlessly into a Polish accent with “Sophie’s Choice” (1982), Streep played Sophie Zawistowski, a Brooklyn-based concentration camp survivor living with her schizophrenic lover whose past, as told to their neighbor, reveals her torment from an unthinkable, life-changing decision. Streep’s seamless technique made for one of cinema’s finest and most heartbreaking performances, garnering her a well-earned second Oscar in 1983, a prize rivaled only by that year’s birth of her first daughter, Mary Willa.

She continued to seek out characters with dramatic urgency, and Streep’s instincts proved to be rock solid, as evidenced in “Silkwood” (1983), an account of the doomed, feisty real-life factory whistleblower Karen Silkwood, which netted her another Oscar nomination. Streep lightened things up with the sentimental drama “Falling in Love” (1984), re-teaming with Robert De Niro in a tale of attraction between two modern-day married people, before returning to her trademark sweeping films with Sydney Pollack’s “Out of Africa” (1985). In the grand epic, she gave yet another Oscar-nominated turn as Karen Blixen, a Danish plantation owner embarking on a love affair with a hunter, Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford), amidst an unhappy politically motivated marriage. Following “Africa,” Streep and Gummer took time out to add to their family with a second daughter, Grace.

Looking to reach outside the dramatic confines of her career thus far, Streep inserted a touch of humor into her work with Nora Ephron’s fictionalized account of her failed marriage to Washington reporter Carl Bernstein, trading both loving glances and daggers with Hollywood’s requisite rogue charmer, Jack Nicholson, in “Heartburn” (1986). She and Nicholson played a more desperate pair in their follow-up together, “Ironweed” (1987), a former singer and major league ball player living drink-fueled homeless existences in depression-era America, which brought them both Oscar nominations in 1988. Expertly donning an Australian accent, she also went on to add yet another nomination to her impressive count with that year’s “A Cry in the Dark” (1988), which focused on the country’s infamous Lindy Chamberlain case. In the film, the black-wigged Streep played the pariah Chamberlain, who was accused of coldly murdering her baby despite her insistence that it was eaten by a dingo during a camping trip.

Amazingly, “Silkwood,” “Out of Africa,” “Ironweed” and “A Cry in the Dark” brought her an astounding four Oscar nominations in only five years, for a total of eight. Whatever the roles required and in whichever time or place they required her to be, Streep seemed capable of always finding the center. Still, when it came to comedy, despite inching closer, the weight of her dramatic work was often a liability toward her entry into other genres she was eager to tackle. As the 1980s came to a close, Streep started off her forties intent on indulging those interests. She got off to a rocky start with the ill-fitting “She-Devil” (1989), a dismal comedy vehicle for budding TV star Roseanne Barr which cast Streep as an icy, pulp romance novelist stalked by Barr for the crime of husband theft. Streep found a more suitable vessel channeling novelist/screenwriter Carrie Fisher’s loosely-based life with real-life mom, actress Debbie Fisher, in Mike Nichols’ adaptation of her book “Postcards from the Edge” (1990). In the critical hit, Streep’s actress and recovering addict Suzanne Vale tries to rebuild a bridge to the world by moving in with her alcoholic former actress mother, deftly portrayed by Shirley MacLaine, who managed to steal the scenes from her younger co-star, except when Streep was called on to sing. Not only did she have peerless acting ability, it turned out that had she also possessed surprisingly good pipes, bringing down the house with the film’s finale number, “I’m Checking Out.”

By the time another Oscar nomination came around for “Postcards,” an almost glowing Streep had found her comic groove, signing on to help veteran comic filmmaker Albert Brooks find love in the white-robed hereafter with the charming fantasy “Defending Your Life” (1991). She and Gummer had recently relocated to Brentwood, CA for her work, where Streep gave birth to one more daughter, Louisa. She took one more pass at outrageous humor with “Death Becomes Her” (1992). After finishing up with the Robert Zemeckis comedy, a macabre outing about dueling, immortal Hollywood vixens, she tried her hand at action movies with 1994’s “The River Wild,” starring as a matriarch forced into protector mode on a dangerous rafting excursion. Streep also gave animation voiceovers a try that year, lending her voice to the role of Bart Simpson’s brief church-defying girlfriend on Fox’s “The Simpsons” (1989- ).

In 1995, Streep was back in Connecticut and returned to the hallmark dramas of her early days, appearing with Clint Eastwood in his adaptation of the popular Robert Waller novel “The Bridges of Madison County” (1995), a flashback story of a daydreaming, Iowa-based, Italian-born housewife Francesca and her brief, passionate love affair with the photographer sent to take pictures of her town’s famed bridges. Eastwood and Streep displayed a palpable chemistry, with the actor-director putting Streep’s Academy Award-nominated role center stage. She then reunited with De Niro and along with co-stars Hume Cronyn, Diane Keaton and Leonardo DiCaprio, opened the door to “Marvin’s Room” (1996), playing Lee, a single mother of two, attempting to reconcile with her estranged Leukemia-ridden sister while looking out for their sickly father, Marvin. After a long absence from television, she racked up an Emmy nomination for ABC’s ” First Do No Harm” (1997), a telefilm focusing on the true story of Lori Reimuller, who took on the stubborn healthcare and medical industry in order to get her epileptic son an alternative method of treatment.

Approaching 50 years of age, Streep still had a luminosity that shined through even as she took on the role of the sick patient herself, the cancer-stricken matriarch Kate Gulden of “One True Thing” (1998), based on Anna Quindlen’s book. The film gave Streep her eleventh Oscar nomination in 1999. Before the end of that year, she was back on screens in “Music of the Heart” (1999), earning her 12th Oscar nomination. Madonna eventually landed the role Streep badly wanted – that of Eva Peron in “Evita” (1996) – but this time, Streep replaced Madonna in “Music” and its account of the real Roberta Guaspari, an inspirational Harlem music teacher responsible for initiating a violin program for underprivileged students. Streep’s exacting preparation methods led her to practice the violin for six hours a day for two straight months. In 2001, Streep who had only intermittently returned to the stage since taking up films, appeared as Arkadina alongside her son Henry in Chekov’s “The Seagull” at both New York’s Delacorte and Public Theater, her first appearance since workshopping Wendy Wasserstein’s “An American Daughter” in Seattle back in 1996.

Over the years, Streep actively drew meaning to her life beyond the screen. She was as tireless with her charitable campaigns for children and adults as she was with acting and her family life. The actress often lent her name and time to assisting the efforts of organizations working on the issues of AIDS research, arts and literacy issues, poverty and human rights among others. Not one to merely grandstand, however, Streep co-founded an organization of her own in Connecticut called Mothers & Others in 1989 which educated parents about the dangerous of pesticides in foods. The organization led a fight against the use of Alar, a pesticide used on various common foods such as apples and helped spearhead several government mandates, including the 1996 Food Quality Protection Act regulating pesticides on food before ceasing to exist in 2001.

The holiday season of 2002 brought two unique films for Streep. She was playing Clarissa Vaughan, a woman unraveling in the “Mrs. Dalloway”-inspired world of Michael Cunningham’s “The Hours” at the same time she could be seen playing Susan Orlean, the real author of The Orchid Thief, in “Adaptation,” a film comically documenting idiosyncratic screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s nightmarish real-life attempts to adapt Orlean’s book about orchid poaching. With her 13th Oscar nomination arriving in 2003 for “Adaptation,” she also netted her a second Emmy Award by disappearing into the roles of a ghost, a mother and an old, male rabbi in Mike Nichols’ miniseries version of Tony Kushner’s play about the AIDS crisis, HBO’s “Angels in America” (2003).

The breathing room in Streep’s later career stage was evident, and with much more room to branch out, she seemed more vivacious than ever. In the era of Hollywood remakes, Streep took charge in “The Manchurian Candidate” (2004) as the cunning and ruthless Eleanor Shaw, a woman of political influence masterminding her meek, war veteran son’s vice-presidential nomination. Under the disguise of heavy makeup, she took to a small role in the dark children’s fable “Lemony Snicket: A Series of Unfortunate Events” (2004), for which she provided some comic relief as Josephine Anwhistle, a grammar-conscious, obsessively protective aunt of two orphans. “Lemony Snicket” was met with a mixed reception, but Streep fared slightly better in the comedy “Prime” (2005), as a meddling Jewish therapist trying to navigate her son’s interfaith romance with a woman who just happens to be her patient.

Streep’s prominence as an ensemble player was further displayed in Robert Altman’s meditative swan song, “A Prairie Home Companion” (2006), a funny and somber account of the fictitious last show of Garrison Keillor’s long-running radio program. As Yolanda, one of the country-flavored Johnson Sisters along with co-star Lily Tomlin, Streep acted and served up her robust singing voice yet again. At the same time, Yolanda was as warm as Miranda Priestly, the career-driven fashion editor of “The Devil Wears Prada” (2006), was cold. Her record 14th Oscar nomination showed Streep could even be good by being bad. With a Golden Globe Award for the role as well, she now laid claim to a record six Globe wins. In 2007, Streep also celebrated her first onscreen teaming with her oldest daughter, “Mamie” Gummer in “Evening,” with Gummer subbing for a young Streep as the 1950s Rhode Island bride Lila Wittenborn of Susan Minot’s adapted novel.

Through 2008, she had lined up a variety of projects that would see her slide easily from period pieces like the drama “Doubt” to a musical based on the music of ABBA, “Mamma Mia!” – both of which would garner her Golden Globe nominations for Best Actress in their respective genres. But it was her portrayal of the stern headmistress Sister Aloysius in “Doubt” that earned the decorated actress yet another Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, which was followed by a surprise win for Outstanding Female Actress at the 15th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards. Streep had yet another banner year in 2009, starting with her dead-on portrayal of cooking maven and popular television personality, Julia Child, in Nora Ephron’s winning romantic comedy, “Julie & Julia.” For her portrayal of the famous chef, she earned a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy as well as an Oscar nod for Best Actress. After providing the voice for the animated Mrs. Fox in “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (2009), directed by Wes Anderson, she delivered another winning performance in the romantic comedy, “It’s Complicated” (2009). Streep was a well-adjusted divorceé who finds herself in a state of complicated affairs with her ex-husband (Alec Baldwin) and his much-younger wife (Lake Bell). The role earned Streep a second Golden Globe nomination that year in the same category.

She went on to earn considerable acclaim for her leading role in the biopic “The Iron Lady” (2011), in which she delivered an essence-capturing performance of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Despite some misgivings from Thatcher’s real-life family about her portrayal, the role earned Streep widespread critical acclaim at home and in England, and nabbed her a Golden Globe and an Oscar for Best Actress. Fresh off her latest Oscar win, Streep clearly had a bit of fun when she guest starred on the second season of the cable comedy “Web Therapy” (Showtime, 2011- ) as the founder of a sexual orientation camp endeavoring to help pioneering “web therapist” Fiona Wallice’s (Lisa Kudrow) husband with his sexual confusion. Predictably, the results were both painfully awkward and uproariously funny. For her next film project, she played one-half of a middle-aged couple looking to revitalize their marriage, both in and out of the bedroom, in “Hope Springs” (2012). Streep’s perfectly realized performance alongside Tommy Lee Jones in romantic comedy earned her yet another in a long line of Golden Globe nominations for Best Actress

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Larry Hagman was born in 1931 in Fort Worth, Texas. He was son of the major Broadway star Mary Martin. He began his career on the stage and appeared in London’s West End in the chorus of “South Pacific” which starred his mother in 1951. He made his film debut in 1963 in “Ensign Pulver” which starred Robert Walker Jnr and Millie Perkins. In 1965 he starred with Barbara Eden in the TV series “I Dream of Jeannie” which ran for five years. In 1978 he achieved worldwide fame with his role as ‘J.R. Ewing’ in “Dallas” which ran until 1991. In 2011 he resumed filiming of his role in the new series of “Dallas” but died in November 2012 aged 81.

Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:

On 21 November 1980, 83 million people in the US and 24 million in the UK watched the TV show Dallas to see who had shot the villainous JR Ewing. While working late at the office, the boss of Ewing Oil was suddenly fired on by an unseen assailant. Who shot JR, and would he survive?

Any character who had ever come into contact with the oleaginousTexas oilman had good reason to do away with him, but there was no way he could really have been killed off. If JR had died, then the series would have died, because JR was Dallas – and Larry Hagman, who has died aged 81 after suffering from throat cancer, was JR.

Other actors were at times replaced in their roles, but Hagman was irreplaceable. Nevertheless, just in case, Hagman quickly renegotiated his contract with Lorimar Studios just after the episode in which he was shot, securing an annual salary of around $1m. JR thus survived the attempt on his life, and continued his scheming ways for another 10 seasons.

One should not underestimate Hagman’s achievement in becoming the man the whole world loved to hate, the focal character of this progressively preposterous soap opera. With his bug eyes, smarmy grin and dicey hairpiece, Hagman generated a certain lethal charm as he went about betraying trusts and manipulating innocent people. He was Machiavelli in a Stetson, the evil face of capitalism – though, according to Hagman, “JR has lost Ewing Oil more than $16m.”

Hagman, nominated twice for an Emmy award, though he never won, was the only member of the cast to be in all 357 episodes of Dallas from 1978 to 1991. Ironically, nothing in his previous acting career had indicated Hagman was other than a competent light-comedy actor whose fame would be strictly limited, despite being the son of Mary Martin, known as the “first lady of the Broadway musical”.

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, he was brought up for a while by his grandmother after his parents divorced when he was five; he was then shunted between his mother and his district attorney father, Benjamin Hagman, and was moved around various private schools and psychotherapists.

At the age of 20, Hagman moved to London as a member of the chorus of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, which starred his mother as Nellie Forbush, the role she created on Broadway. Hagman and Sean Connery, a year older, were among the shirtless sailors who sang There Is Nothing Like a Dame.

After a year at Drury Lane, Hagman joined the US air force. Four years later he resumed his acting career in earnest, getting roles on television and in films. Hagman made little impression in his first Hollywood movies, as servicemen in Joshua Logan’s Ensign Pulver (1964) and in Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way (1965). However, he was very good playing weak men in two Sidney Lumet films: as the US president’s nervous Russian interpreter in the nuclear scare story Fail-Safe (1964), and as Joanna Pettet’s playwright husband with a penchant for wine and women in The Group (1966).

In Harry and Tonto (1974), he was the selfish, whining son of retired teacher Art Carney. He hammed it up as an incompetent, gung-ho American colonel in The Eagle Has Landed (1976), and as a caricatured Hollywood studio executive in Blake Edwards’s S.O.B. (1981).

But it was television that was the foundation of his career. Hagman had scores of TV appearances. His first real success came in I Dream of Jeannie (1965-70), in which he played a befuddled bachelor astronaut who finds himself master of a glamorous, 2,000-year-old genie (Barbara Eden). Continuing to display a deft light touch, Hagman went on to appear in other mildly amusing sitcoms.

Then came the long-running Dallas, which Variety initially called “a limited series with a limited future”. Robert Foxworth was originally cast as JR, but he wanted the role softened too much for the producer’s taste, and Hagman was the perspicacious second choice.

Hagman differed from JR in most aspects, being amiable and modest, though his liking for practical jokes and dressing up in different guises, such as an English bobby or French foreign legionnaire, gained him the nickname “Wacky Larry” and “The Mad Monk of Malibu”. He was, like JR, a heavy drinker, which led to his developing cirrhosis of the liver; he had a transplant that saved his life. Thereafter, Hagman was active in several organisations that advocated organ donation and transplantation. A passionate non-smoker, he also served as the chairperson of the American Cancer Society’s Great American Smokeout, from 1981 to 1992.

In 1996, Hagman reprised his infamous alter ego in a TV special called JR Returns, in which the dysfunctional Ewing family is reunited. Then, acting against type, he showed his range as a benevolent judge in Orleans (1997). Among Hagman’s few later feature films was Mike Nichols’s Primary Colors (1998), in which Hagman was convincing as a populist, plain-speaking Florida governor. Hagman himself, a member of the Peace and Freedom party, once described fellow Texan George Bush as “a sad figure, not too well educated, who doesn’t get out of America much. He’s leading the country towards fascism.”

In recent years, Hagman became a prominent campaigner for alternative energy, transforming his California home into one of the world’s biggest solar-powered estates. He revelled in the paradox of TV’s most famous oil man driving an electric car, and his disgust with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill led him to agree to star as JR in a SolarWorld TV advert, in which he parodied vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s use of the phrase “Drill, baby, drill” with the pro-solar slogan “Shine, baby, shine”.

Though he appeared in a couple of 2011 episodes of Desperate Housewives, Hagman largely retired from acting. Nonetheless, earlier this year he joined co-stars Linda Gray and Patrick Duffy in a new 10-episode season of Dallas, adding a further generation to the troubled family and its business.

Hagman married his wife, Maj Axelsson, in 1954. She survives him, as do their son and daughter.

The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.

• Larry Martin Hagman, actor, born 21 September 1931; died 23 November 2012

Nicholas Hammond is best known for two roles, ‘Frederick Von Trapp’ the eldest son in “The Spound of Music” in 1965 and in the TV series “The Amazing Spider-Man” which ran from 1977 until 1979. In the mid 1980’s he went to Australia for a TV series and decided to pursue his career in Australia.

IMDB entry:

Nicholas Hammond was born on 15th May, 1950, in Washington DC. His parents, Col. Thomas W. Hammond and actress Eileen Bennett, married since 1945, already had one son, David (born in Paris in 1946).

When Nicholas was 6 years old, the family moved to Europe. In 1959, his mother took him to see the musical “My Fair Lady” (with Julie Andrews) on stage in London. After seeing this show, Nicholas decided he wanted to be an actor. The family returned to the US when Nicholas was 10 years old. He landed his first part (a small role in movie Lord of the Flies (1963) shortly after that. Nicholas appeared on Broadway and on television before he landed the role of Friedrich in the hit movie The Sound of Music (1965).

Nicholas made a visit to Australia in the mid 1980s but also did some acting while he was there. After a year, he realized he liked living in Australia and decided to stay. He lives in Sydney where he works as an actor, screenwriter, and director.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: SOM fan

Maureen Arthur was born in 1934 in San Jose, California. She made her film debut in 1958 in “Hot Rod Gang”. Her other movies include “How to Suceed in Business Without Really Trying” in 1967 and the “WIcked Dreams of Paula Schultz”.

Lawrence Matarese

Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Guardian”:

I turned around to look at her. She was facing straight ahead, so I couldn’t see her eyes. She was young – not more than 24. Man, she looked like she had been thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world! Yet in spite of that, I got the impression of beauty, not the beauty of a movie actress, mind you, or the beauty you dream about with your wife, but a natural beauty, a beauty that’s almost homely, because it’s so real.” This is the description of Vera when first seen by the luckless anti-hero (Tom Neal) of Edgar G Ulmer’s Detour (1945). Vera, one of the most hellish femmes fatales in the history of the cinema, was the benchmark role of Ann Savage, who has died aged 87.

Unlike the usual manipulative, glamorous heroines of noir, Savage, as the bitter, blackmailing hitchhiker, does not use her sex appeal. She makes her first appearance a full 32 minutes into Detour, a manic cinematic night ride, a fatalistic drama of sex and money, and one of the bleakest of films noirs. “I wasn’t aware of the term ‘film noir’ until the 70s,” Savage commented later in life. “I read up on it. It was a revelation to me when I learned Detour was a film noir … I was very young and ignorant of the facts. I only worked three-and-a-half days on the movie, though that was more than half the time it took to shoot.”

Born Bernice Maxine Lyon in Columbia, South Carolina, she was taken to Los Angeles by her widowed mother, a jewellery buyer, while still a child. In her teens, she trained at Max Reinhardt’s acting school. The school’s manager was Bert D’Armand, who later became her agent and subsequently her second husband in 1945. (She had been married briefly when she was 18.)

She changed her name to Ann Savage for a workshop production of Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy that led to a contract at Columbia Pictures. Despite resisting the studio boss Harry Cohn’s sexual advances, she was put to work on 11 films in 1943, many of which were part of the entertaining B-films being run by the studio – in series such as Lone Wolf (One Dangerous Night, Passport to Suez), Boston Blackie (After Midnight With Boston Blackie) and Blondie (Footlight Glamour). Also in the same year, she appeared in Two Señoritas from Chicago, Saddles and Sagebrush, Dangerous Blondes and Klondike Kate, the latter being the first of four films in which she co-starred with Neal, her partner in crime in Detour. Their off-screen relationship, however, was said to be chilly. Except for Passport to Suez, opposite the unjustly forgotten Warren William, where she played a femme fatale, she was all sweetness and light. She had little respect for such roles, however: “They were mindless,” she said in 1985. “The actresses were just scenery. The stories all revolved around the male actors; they really had the choice roles. All the actresses had to do was to look lovely, since the dialogue was ridiculous.”

She gradually began to get feistier roles in 1944, such as Two-Man Submarine and The Unwritten Code, in which she and Neal fought the Nazis, though nothing prepared audiences for Detour the following year. “My first scene was in the car,” she recalled. “I read the lines and Edgar Ulmer corrected the tempo, and that was the last bit of coaching he gave me. He had given me the key, which was the tempo. It was difficult to speak that quickly, but it helped give the character her craziness – it was just right. I didn’t see the rushes, so I had no idea I was coming over as hard as I was.” She had been startled, she said, by how unkempt they wanted her to look: “I had just come off a lot that kept me looking absolutely perfect. But Vera was not a pretty woman. She was maniacal. Edgar objected to my hair looking so neat and had the hairdresser run cold cream through it to make it streaky and stringy. “

Detour was made by Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), the most notorious Poverty Row film company, as was Apology for Murder (1945), which Savage called “an out-and-out cloning of Double Indemnity”. Certainly the plot of this cheap 67-minute B-movie bore a striking resemblance to Billy Wilder’s 1944 classic. As Savage herself admitted, “I’m certainly no Barbara Stanwyck,” but it was reasonably gripping and, as usual, she was a hypnotic presence on screen. However, Paramount, the producers of Double Indemnity, got it pulled after two days, and the film languished unseen for some years.

For the next eight years, Savage appeared in several negligible productions, in which she sparkled in shoddy settings. Apart from a few parts on television, she retired following The Woman They Almost Lynched in 1953, when she had moved down the casting list. Following her husband’s death in 1969, she taught herself law by working as an attorney’s clerk and also learned to fly a plane. Savage returned to the big screen after a 33-year absence, playing a nun in Fire With Fire (1986). Then, when she was 86, the Canadian director Guy Maddin cast her in My Winnipeg (2007). According to Maddin: “We finished the script for My Winnipeg, a plunge back into the mythically inchoate days of my own – and my city’s – childhood. These were days lived completely under the dominion of a fearsome maternal titan, years trembled out beneath the scented fist of my mother’s gorgeous and glamorous dictatorship, and I knew there was only one person alive, who had ever lived, who could play her role: Ann Savage.”

• Ann Savage (Bernice Maxine Lyon), actor, born 19 February 1921; died 25 December 2008

The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Brad Dexter can claim cinema fame on two counts. He is the least known of “The Magnificent Seven” and for movie buffs, he seems always to be the last actor named in quiz competitions. He also earned the eternal gratitude of Frank Sinatra when he resuced him from drowning when they were making the movie “None But the Brave” in 1964 in Hawaii where they were on location for the World War Two film. Finatra subsequently used Dexter in his production “Von Ryan’s Express”. Dexter died in California aged 85 in 2002.

Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:

A question that comes up regularly in film trivia quizzes is to name the magnificent seven, of the 1960 John Sturges western. Easy to start with: Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn and Horst Buchholz. But if Brad Dexter, who has died aged 85, is usually the last to be mentioned, it is mainly because of the fame of the others; actually, he was rather good as the most mercenary of the septet.

As the cool and taciturn Harry Luck, he is the second to be selected by Brynner to defend a village of poor Mexican farmers from bandits. He believes the village is guarding a gold mine, despite everyone telling him that there is none. As he lies dying from a gunshot wound, he asks Brynner, “There really was gold up in those hills, wasn’t there?” In his last breath, he needs to know that he is not dying merely for the sake of some peasants. “Of course there was,” lies Brynner. “Lots of gold.” Dexter looks relieved: “Gee, that would’ve been swell.” And he dies happy.

As in The Magnificent Seven, Dexter was overshadowed in life by his friends. He played supporting roles to singer Peggy Lee, his first wife, in a stormy marriage that lasted barely one year (1953); was a confidant of Marilyn Monroe, with whom he appeared in The Asphalt Jungle (1950); became a personal and professional colleague of Frank Sinatra, and a buddy of Karl Malden.

Dexter, who was born Boris Milanovich, the son of Serbian immigrants in Nevada, and grew up speaking Serbo-Croat, shared a central European heritage with Malden. They met while serving in the wartime US army air corps, and were both cast in Moss Hart’s epic tribute to the air corps, Winged Victory, which opened on Broadway in 1943, before repeating their roles in the George Cukor film version the following year.

After jobs as a shoeshine boy and meat packer, Dexter took up acting seriously, studying at the Pasadena Playhouse and changing his name to Barry Mitchell. In 1949, while appearing on Broadway in the comedy Magnolia Alley, he was spotted by John Huston, who gave him the role of a hoodlum in The Asphalt Jungle, for which he became Brad Dexter.

In 1952, he continued in the same vein, as gangsters in Macao and The Las Vegas Story, both starring Jane Russell. In the former, directed by Josef Von Sternberg, he has a brutal fight with Robert Mitchum. In Phil Karlsen’s 99 River Street (1953), he was a sinister heavy making John Payne’s life a misery; he was a bank robber in Violent Saturday (1955), and played the smooth racketeer Bugsy Siegel in The George Raft Story (1961). “I love playing heavies,” Dexter commented. “It’s the best-written character. The hero is always bland.”

In 1965, while they were filming None But The Brave on a Hawaiian island, Dexter saved Sinatra’s life after diving in to save the director and star, who had been hit by a freak wave and dragged out to sea. His reward was to be made executive producer of Sinatra’s film company, although their friendship ended acrimoniously in 1967, while Sinatra was making The Naked Runner, produced by Dexter, in London, and after Dexter had advised Sinatra against marrying Mia Farrow, more than 30 years his junior.

Dexter continued to concentrate on producing, his best work being Lady Sings the Blues (1972), starring Diana Ross as Billie Holiday. He also produced a television series called Skag, starring Karl Malden as a union foreman who has a crippling stroke.

Dexter’s second wife, the Star-Kist tuna heiress Mary Bogdonovich, predeceased him. He is survived by his third wife, June Deyer, and a stepson.

· Brad Dexter (Boris Milanovich), actor, born April 9 1917; died December 12 2002

The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.

“‘Dependable’ was a good word to use about Gene Hackman as a supporting actor (and John Simon did, about his performance in “Downhill Racer”). And then, by virtue of a role turned down by at least seven other actors and it’s accompanying Oscar, he became a star. His acting, if anything, became more finely honed – but stardon brought his problems. As Bart Mills wrote in London in ‘The Guardian’ : It’s not easy being a star who knows he has no right to be a star. Gene Hackman never got near the honey pot till he was past 40. He has about as muich sex appeal as your balding brother-in-law. He dreams fondly of retiring. He’s aware that somebody somewhere made a big mistake.. The mistakes, as it happened, were all his”. – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years”. (1972).

Hackman was one of the giants of the U.S. screen from the late 1960’s into the 1990’s. He was born in 1930 in San Bernadino, California. He came to fame in a supporting role
in 1967 in “Bonnie & Clyde”. He won an Oscar in 1971 for “The French Connection” and another in 1990 for Clint Eastwood’s “The Unforgiven”. A great, great actor now sadly retired.

TCM overview:

One of the most versatile and well-respected actors in American cinema history, Gene Hackman enjoyed a productive career that spanned over six decades, encompassing exquisite performances on stage and in feature films. Once voted by his acting school classmates as the least likely to succeed, Hackman essayed some of filmdom’s most memorable characters, a few of which earned the gruff, but sensitive actor several Academy Award nominations. Beginning as a reliable character player on stage, Hackman emerged as an unlikely hero of the counterculture with a bombastic turn in Arthur Penn’s seminal “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967). Just a few years later, he secured himself an Oscar for Best Actor with his tough-guy performance as the unforgettable Popeye Doyle in “The French Connection” (1971). Hackman again delivered the goods in Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoid thriller, “The Conversation” (1974) and followed through as the comically maniacal Lex Luther in “Superman: The Movie” (1978). Though he entered a premature retirement brought on by his exhaustive work schedule, Hackman returned to the fore in Warren Beatty’s “Reds” (1981) and entered into what proved to be the busiest part of his career, which culminated in an Academy Award nomination for “Mississippi Burning” (1988) and a Best Supporting Actor win for “Unforgiven” (1992). After portraying a sleazy B-movie producer in “Get Shorty” (1995) and the rascally patriarch of a dysfunctional family in “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001), Hackman drifted off into an unofficial retirement that allowed him time to nurture his writing career while leaving behind a remarkable legacy.

Born on Jan. 30, 1930 in San Bernardino, CA, Hackman endured a nomadic childhood with his father, Eugene, and his mother, Lyda, before finally settling in Illinois, where he was raised by his maternal grandmother, Beatrice. Unchallenged by school, he dropped out at age 16 and lied about his age to enlist in the U.S. Marines. Trained as a radio operator, Hackman served in China where his radio background helped land him work as a disc jockey. While suffering from two broken legs following a 1950 motorcycle accident, Hackman decided to pursue a career in radio, moving to New York City after his discharge to study at the School of Radio Technique. Throughout the early part of the decade, he worked his way across America’s heartland, developing his resonant vocal abilities as a radio announcer at various stations. Fast approaching 30, Hackman decided to translate his radio experience into an acting career, enrolling at the famed Pasadena Playhouse, where he was dubbed by an instructor “least likely to succeed,” an honor he shared with fellow classmate Dustin Hoffman. Despite making his stage debut with a supporting role in “The Curious Miss Caraway” (1958), Hackman was asked to leave the Pasadena Playhouse.

With nowhere else to turn, Hackman moved back to New York City, where he struggled alongside Hoffman and Robert Duvall to try to succeed despite assurances of failure from his old classmates and instructors. He flourished under the tutelage of George Morrison, a former instructor at the Lee Strasberg Institute, who trained the aspiring performer in the famed ‘Method’ approach to acting. Meanwhile, Hackman made his stage debut in “Chaparral” (1958) and began finding employment in various small screen productions like the “U.S. Steel Hour” (ABC/CBS, 1953-1963) and the premiere episode of the courtroom drama, “The Defenders” (CBS, 1961-65). A few years after joining the improvisational troupe, The Premise, Hackman truly arrived as a stage actor with a supporting performance opposite Sandy Dennis in a Broadway production of “Any Wednesday” (1964). That same year, he had his first substantial film role, playing the romantic rival for an occupational therapist (Warren Beatty) who falls for a wealthy mental patient (Jean Seberg) in the downer psychological drama, “Lilith” (1964).

When it came time to cast the role of Buck, the older brother of outlaw Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty), in the seminal counterculture crime drama “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), Beatty remembered Hackman from “Lilith” and offered him the role. Bringing a Brandoesque spin to the role, Hackman turned what could have been just a murderous rube into a character infused with a righteous innocence, which helped earn the actor who was once voted least likely to succeed his first Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor. He was excellent as the driven Olympic coach in the documentary-like “Downhill Racer” (1969) and picked up a second Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod as he mined the autobiographical parallels of a son who cannot communicate with his dad in “I Never Sang for My Father” (1970). The following year brought him a once-in-a-lifetime role, playing the tough, uncompromising New York City narcotics cop Popeye Doyle in “The French Connection” (1971). While the film was perhaps best remembered for a brilliantly staged car chase with Doyle going after a runaway subway, Hackman managed not to be overshadowed, skillfully crafting a warts-and-all portrait of a vulgar sadist. Accolades rained on Hackman, who capped a banner year with an Academy Award for Best Actor.

Now firmly established as a leading man, Hackman began to undertake a series of roles that further demonstrated his range and versatility. He proved effective as a crusading preacher and de facto leader of a group of survivors of a sea disaster in the enjoyably cheesy adventure yarn, “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972), and effectively partnered with Al Pacino in the buddy road movie “Scarecrow” (1973). Meanwhile, director Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” (1974) offered one of the richest characterizations of his long career, in which he played a surveillance expert whose personal involvement in one of his cases leads to a plunge into paranoia and suspicion. Hackman next delivered a short, but well-remembered cameo role as a blind hermit who fumbles his efforts to provide aid and comfort to the misunderstood monster (Peter Doyle) in Mel Brooks’ horror spoof, “Young Frankenstein” (1974), starring Gene Wilder and Teri Garr. For the first time, audiences were able to see Hackman’s sharp comic abilities, which to that point were woefully unexplored. Following starring roles in the Western “Zandy’s Bride” (1974) and the noir crime drama “Night Moves” (1975), Hackman reprised Popeye Doyle, who tracks down the escaped Frog One (Fernando Rey) to Marseilles, in the mediocre, but still well-acted sequel, “The French Connection II” (1975).

By the mid- to late-1970s, Hackman’s career went into a bit of a slide, following starring turns in such underwhelming movies like “March or Die” (1977) and “The Domino Principle” (1977). By the time he was showcasing his high camp villain Lex Luthor in “Superman” (1978), Hackman had prematurely announced his retirement after nearly non-stop work that had left him physically and emotionally drained. Spending his time painting in a West Los Angeles apartment, Hackman was eventually pulled back into the game by old friend Warren Beatty, who convinced the actor to play magazine editor Peter Van Wherry in the epic historical drama “Reds” (1981). While he was miscast opposite Barbra Streisand in the triangular romantic comedy “All Night Long” (1981), he was right at home in the action-adventure “Uncommon Valor” (1983) and the gripping political thriller “Under Fire” (1983). Hackman brought depth and conviction to his performance as a straying husband undergoing a mid-life crisis in “Twice in a Lifetime” (1985), perhaps in part inspired by his 1982 divorce from first wife, Faye Maltese. Re-energized after his self-imposed exile, Hackman went on to etch several memorable characterizations in the 1980s, including a small-town high school basketball coach in “Hoosiers” (1986) and a cold-hearted Secretary of Defense in the thriller “No Way Out” (1987).

Following a reprisal of Lex Luther in the unnecessary “Superman IV: The Quest for Peace” (1987), Hackman delivered a searing performance as a good ole boy FBI agent investigating the murders of civil rights workers in the 1960s-era drama, “Mississippi Burning” (1988), for which he picked up another Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. As he entered the 1990s, Hackman remained exceptionally busy, churning out a wide variety of roles. After playing a practical-minded cop who teams up with a partner (Dan Aykroyd) suffering from multiple personality disorder in the miserable “Loose Cannons” (1990), he was a lawyer who enters the courtroom opposite his attorney daughter (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) in Michael Apted’s “Class Action” (1991). Though surgery in 1990 for heart problems provoked another hiatus, Hackman roared back with another fascinating role, playing sadistic, but smiling sheriff Little Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s revisionist Western “Unforgiven” (1992). Infusing the effective lawman with a streak of decency, the actor sketched a character that was profoundly ambiguous; one that could be either heroic or villainous. Critics and audiences embraced the film and Hackman’s character and he earned not only stellar reviews but numerous prizes, all of which was capped by a second Oscar, this time as the year’s Best Supporting Actor.

Healthy and in-demand, Hackman embarked on another round of seemingly non-stop roles. While Sydney Pollack cast him as the burnt-out lawyer and mentor to Tom Cruise who is powerless to help his protégé in “The Firm” (1993), the actor displayed a sudden fondness for Westerns. He was a sympathetic general in “Geronimo: An American Legend” (1993), the moral compass of “Wyatt Earp” (1994) as the family’s patriarch, and in an almost-spoof of Little Bill, played a gunslinger in the loopy “The Quick and the Dead” (1995). Loosening up a bit, Hackman displayed his assured comedic gifts as a schlock horror filmmaker who runs afoul of a Mafia boss (Dennis Farina) tracking down a loan collector (John Travolta) who embarks on a movie career in “Get Shorty” (1995). After a turn as a conservative politician who plays straight man – on more than one level – to Robin Williams and Nathan Lane in “The Birdcage” (1996), Hackman began to display a darker side, playing a sinister surgeon in “Extreme Measures” (1996) and a racist killer on death row in “The Chamber” (1996). He excelled in his next two performances, playing a U.S. President embroiled in a murder investigation in “Absolute Power” (1997) and a renegade NSA agent in the thriller “Enemy of the State” (1998), a role that was an overt nod to his performance in “The Conversation.”

Having done all he could do in Hollywood, Hackman entered the world of publishing with his first novel, Wake of the Perdido Star (1999), which he co-wrote with author Daniel Lenihan. While 1999 marked the first year he failed to appear in a single feature film, Hackman returned the following year with a turn in “The Replacements” (2000), playing the NFL coach of a rag-tag group of players filling in for a striking team. Later he was featured in “Under Suspicion,” Stephen Hopkins’ nervy reworking of the French film “Garde a vu” (1982), playing a wealthy attorney suspected of rape and murder. After an uncredited cameo in “The Mexican” (2001), he had a charming role as a billionaire reeled in by mother-daughter beauties (Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt) in the unremarkable con-women comedy “Heartbreakers” (2001). Next he headed the impressive cast of David Mamet’s low-key thriller, “Heist” (2001), with a note-perfect and effortless performance that was tinged with both bravado and vulnerability as an almost untouchable veteran master thief. Hackman followed up with a role as a steely admiral who risks his career when he puts people over politics in an effort to save a maverick navigator (Owen Wilson) shot down in Bosnia in “Behind Enemy Lines” (2001).

Though he was a steady presence on the big screen, Hackman’s career began to show signs of slowing down. While at the time most were unaware, the veteran actor was on his way to retirement. He did, however, have one more great performance in him, which he delivered in Wes Anderson’s droll family dramedy, “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001), in which he played the titular patriarch of a dysfunctional family of geniuses (Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow and Luke Wilson). Anderson admitted to creating the funny, but ultimately endearing role for Hackman, though the actor had vocally opposed such endeavors in the past. Any objections were quickly silenced when the actor won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. After receiving a special Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes ceremony in 2003, Hackman was next seen on screen in “Runaway Jury” (2003), playing Rankin Fitch, a high-priced and morally bankrupt jury consultant who stops at nothing to control the outcome of a crucial trail verdict. For the first time in his career, Hackman played opposite his friend and fellow actor voted least likely to succeed, Dustin Hoffman.

In the political satire “Welcome to Mooseport” (2004), Hackman played a former U.S. president who runs for mayor of a small Maine town against a local hardware store owner and plumber (Ray Romano). Not his best work by any stretch, “Mooseport” wound up being the final film Hackman appeared in to date, marking the start to his unofficial retirement. Hackman confirmed on a 2004 airing of “Larry King Live” (CNN, 1985-2010) that he had no projects lined up and believed that his acting career was indeed over. Meanwhile, he continued to co-author novels with Daniel Lenihan, including Justice for None (2006) and Escape from Andersonville (2009), which dramatized a prison break from Fort Sumter during the Civil War.

By Shawn Dwyer

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Gary Cooper

Meryl Streep

Larry Hagman

Nicholas Hammond

Maureen Arthur

Lawrence Matarese

Ann Savage

Brad Dexter

Gene Hackman

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