Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 51 of 116

Don Taylor

Don Taylor was born in 1920 in Freeport. He starred opposite Elizabeth Taylor in “Father of the Bride” and “Father’s Little Dividend”. He went on to become a respected director of such movies as “Damien : Omen Two” and “Escape From the Planet of the Apes”. He was married to British actress Hazel Court. He died in 1998.

Tom Vallance’s “Independent” obituary:

HANDSOME AND affable, the actor, director and writer Don Taylor, who played the fiance of Elizabeth Taylor in the classic comedy Father of the Bride, spent over a decade portraying clean-cut, all-American young men. In 1950 women students at the major Californian universities voted him “the man we’d like best to enrol with”.

He later moved into directing, where his work was considered efficient rather than exciting. He directed over 400 television episodes and dramas, and 15 films, including two successful sequels, Escape from the Planet of the Apes (the third in that series) and Damien – Omen II. As a writer, his scripts included the television movie My Wicked Wicked Ways – The Legend of Errol Flynn (1985), which he also directed.

Born in 1920, in Pittsburgh, and raised in Freeport, Philadelphia, he studied law at Pennsylvania State University, along with speech and drama. A part in a college stage production determined his future. “There was never any question about it,” he said. “Once I put my foot on a stage, I knew I was going to be an actor.”

After graduation, he hitch-hiked to Hollywood, where he was given a screen- test by Warners but rejected because he was liable to be drafted for war service. MGM took him on, and immediately cast him in a tiny role as a soldier returning on leave in Clarence Brown’s touching version of William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy (1943). Small parts followed in Girl Crazy, Swing Shift Maisie, Thousands Cheer and Salute to the Marines, all in 1943, before he enlisted in the army.

While in the service he was chosen by Moss Hart to play a major role in the army air-force production of Hart’s play Winged Victory, which absorbingly followed a group of six youthful air-force recruits through their training, including interludes with their wives, sweethearts and mothers. It opened on Broadway in November 1943 and brought Taylor excellent reviews for his performance in the role of the gregarious “Pinkie” and, billed as “Corporal Don Taylor”, he recreated the role in the film version, directed by George Cukor in 1944.

“Winged Victory was a memorable evening in the theatre,” said Variety, “and the picture is no less worthy.” Proceeds from both the play and the film went to army charities and, like Michael Curtiz’s This is the Army, the film is alas rarely shown today.

Taylor’s first post-war film was Song of the Thin Man (1947), after which he played one of Deanna Durbin’s suitors in For the Love of Mary (1948). He was a young homicide detective working with an older one (Barry Fitzgerald) in The Naked City (1948), made entirely on location in New York City and Taylor’s favourite of his films. “It was one of the first of its kind,” he stated. “It was improvisational in many ways; now it’s very ordinary to go and shoot anywhere, but Naked City did it long before anybody else. The director Jules Dassin shot a lot of it using hidden cameras.”

He was a young war recruit again, but this time taking part in brutal combat, in Battleground (1949), then had his best remembered role, as Elizabeth Taylor’s fiance and ultimately bridegroom, in Vincente Minnelli’s timeless, beautifully judged comedy, Father of the Bride (1950). “That film just goes on and on,” said Don Taylor recently, “and so does Liz!”

The following year he was in the sequel, Father’s Little Dividend, and he also appeared in Flying Leathernecks (1951), The Blue Veil (1951, as a former charge of lifetime nanny Jane Wyman), and King Vidor’s Japanese War Bride (1952), in which he played a GI who finds it difficult to deal with the problems that arise when he returns to the US with an Oriental wife.

He was the missing prisoner-of-war around whom the plot pivots in Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17 (1953) and, by now a heavy drinker, he formed a close friendship with the film’s star William Holden. “Bill and I used to drink like it was going out of style,” said Taylor later. He was able to put his experience to good use when cast in I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955), playing an aviation cadet who goes on the town with singer Lillian Roth (Susan Hayward) and wakes up in a hotel room to find that he is married to her. Not loving each other, the couple go from one party to another over the ensuing months until they divorce.

Taylor’s drinking was due in part to his career’s unsatisfactory pro- gress and it reached its nadir in 1957:

I had just done Hammer’s drecky Men of Sherwood Forest, and was getting a divorce so I called my agent and said, “Listen, I’ve had it. I want to get out of the country – do you have anything?” He said, “Yeah, we’ve got a picture that’s going in Brazil”, and I said, “That’s for me!” I didn’t even read the script, and when I got to Brazil and read it, I was ready to cut my throat.

The film, shot as Women of Green Hell but released as Love Slaves of the Amazon, featured Taylor as an explorer captured by a tribe of green- skinned warrior women. “It was later on TV all the time, and people would call me up at four in the morning laughing so hard they could barely get the words out.”

At this point the actor decided to switch careers. “I had been in about two dozen films and starred or co-starred in most of them, but no longer felt creative forces as an actor.” With the help of Dick Powell, who had formed a television production company, Taylor was given the chance to direct an episode of Four Star Playhouse, which led to further television work including an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. (“I was friendly with Hitchcock, because after Naked City I had auditioned for him for a part in Rope, which I didn’t get.”)

The 30-minute episode, The Crocodile Case (1958), starred Denholm Elliott and Hazel Court (known at the time as “the scream queen of British horror”). Taylor and Court fell in love, were married in 1964 (it was Taylor’s third, his first having been to actress Phyllis Avery, who was in Winged Victory) and were still together when he died.

Taylor became a prolific television director, making occasional returns to acting. In 1961 he appeared in a three-week run of Felicien Marceau’s The Egg in Los Angeles, telling the LA Times: “Once every 30 years a part like this comes along. You read it and say to yourself, `This is the reason I got into acting in the first place.’ “

In 1961 Taylor directed his first feature, Everything’s Ducky, starring Mickey Rooney:

I was directing a TV series with Rod Taylor called Hong Kong when Mickey, who

I’d directed several times on television, called me and asked me to direct a film he was producing. I was hesitant, but Hazel urged me to do it. The trouble was Mickey and his co-star Buddy Hackett wouldn’t stop clowning, and as Mickey was the producer I couldn’t stop him. Stars sometimes have too much power. I was directing an episode of Have Gun, Will Travel with Richard Boone and suggested that he do such and such and he said “Nope, I’ll just walk over there and sit down.” He’s directing, and I’m just directing traffic.

Taylor’s last major screen role was in the European western The Savage Guns (1962), after which he was solely a director (though he gave himself a bit role in his musical Tom Sawyer). He replaced the British director Mike Hodges (who was having artistic disagreements with the producer) on Damien – Omen II, though Taylor confessed later that he thought the film tried too hard to be more gory than the first. “Getting Bill Holden for the film was a plus value – we were old friends – but I had overcome my alcohol problem while he was still drinking heavily.”

Taylor also directed Five Man Army (1969), Tom Sawyer (1973, which indicated he had little flair for the musical genre), The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday (1976), The Island of Dr Moreau (1978, starring Burt Lancaster and based on the H.G. Wells fantasy), and The Final Countdown (1980) which had an intriguing premise – an aircraft carrier enters a time-warp and finds itself in the Pacific on the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack – but, as Taylor admitted, a weak ending. “The ending had nothing to do with the whole picture – suddenly they were back in their own era just sailing blithely along. It was produced by its star Kirk Douglas – a superb actor but as a producer a pain in the ass.”

Don Taylor directed many television movies, including Heat of Anger (1972) with his friend Susan Hayward. He considered himself something of a pioneer in breaking through the barrier between acting and directing: “It upsets me when I see someone like Kevin Costner getting $25m to make a film. Apart from a few exceptions – Chaplin, Welles, Olivier – actors were not trusted to direct films in my era. Dick Powell, Ida Lupino, Paul Henried and myself were forerunners of actors becoming directors. I helped break that barrier down, and it is a directors’ medium.”

Donald Ritchie Taylor, actor, director and writer: born Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 20 December 1920; three times married (two daughters); died Los Angeles 28 December 1998.

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

Charles Korvin was born in 1907 in what is now Slovakia. He came to Hollywood in 1944 and made “Enter Arsene Lupin”. Other movies include “This Love Of Ours” with Merle Oberon and “Ship of Fools” in 1965 with Vivien Leigh and Simone Signoret. He died in 1998 in New York.

IMDB entry:

He was born in Piestany, Hungary, and came to the United States in 1940 after ten years studying at the Sorbonne where he worked in still and motion picture photography. After studying acting at the Barter Theater (Abingdon, VA), he made his 1943 debut on Broadway in “Dark Eyes” under the name Geza Korvin. It was then than movie producer Charles K. Feldman signed him to a contract with Universal. There, with the new name Charles Korvin, he played the title role, a French thief, in “Enter Arsene Lupin” (1944). His next three movies paired him romatically with Merle Oberon. After a contract dispute with Universal, and though blacklisted by HUAC in 1951, he played a number villain, thief and philanderer roles for different studios, including the part of the evil Russian agent Rokov in Lex Barker’s “Tarzan’s Savage Fury” (1952). He also appeared in many TV episodes, notably as The Eagle in the “Zorro” series (1957) and as the Latin dance instructor Carlos in “The Honeymooners”. He returned to Hollywood in Stanley Kramer’s “Ship of Fools” (1965). He had homes in Manhattan and Klosters, Switzerland, and died, aged 90, at the Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, survived by his wife, Natasha; a daughter, Katherine Pers of Budapest; a son, Edward Danziger Dorvin of Santa Monica, CA; and three grandchildren.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Ed Stephan <stephan@cc.wwu.edu>

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Harry Belafonte was one of the giants of the American music industry in the 1950’s. He was born in 1927 in Harlem, New York. His songs included “Banana Boat Song” and “Hole in a Bucket”. He ventured into movies with “Carmen Jones” with Dorothy Dandridge and “Island In the Sun”.

TCM overview:

Multi-talented actor and musician Harry Belafonte was the first black performer to win an Emmy Award and the first recording artist to sell over a million copies of an album, though he was doubtlessly most proud of his longstanding work as an activist in international fights against racism, violence and world hunger. Belafonte got his start in New York theater, but his sideline as a nightclub singer propelled his mainstream breakout when his 1954 album Calypsopopularized the music of his Jamaican heritage and hit number one on the charts. A respected authority on international folk music and a world-touring performer, Belafonte also enjoyed a career as an actor and producer, where he was involved in important early African-American productions including “Carmen Jones” (1954), in which he starred alongside Dorothy Dandridge, and Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark play “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” which he produced. Whatever the nature of the work, Belafonte’s style remained solid – the casual friendliness and warm, jaunty humor were sincere; the fierceness and intensity often surprising.

Harold Belafonte was born in Harlem on March 1, 1927, to a seaman and his Jamaican wife, who worked as a domestic. During his peripatetic childhood, the family was so poor that Belafonte was sent to live in Jamaica, where he bounced around between relatives’ homes for five years. He returned as a misfit, a stranger with an unusual accent whose dyslexia made school nearly impossible. He dropped out, spent a year in the Navy during World War II, and returned to Harlem where he held a job as a janitor. One night he attended a performance at the American Negro Theater (ANT), and bitten by the acting bug, he enrolled in classes at Actors Studio and Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research. He financed his new passion by singing pop songs at local nightclubs. Belafonte’s career advanced quickly in Harlem’s thriving creative atmosphere, and he landed a leading role in the ANT’s staging of Sean O’Casey’s “Juno and the Paycock” while his gigs at the Royal Roost Nightclub and the Village Vanguard jazz club won him considerable attention. He also hit the small screen as a regular on the short-lived all-black TV revue, “Sugar Hill Times” (CBS, 1949-1950).

In 1952, Belafonte was signed to a recording deal with RCA Records and released his first single, the popular Caribbean classic, “Matilda.” The year 1953 was a watershed one for Belafonte, beginning with his Tony Award-winning supporting role in the musical revue “John Murray Anderson’s Almanac.” He made his film debut in a leading role as a school principal in the minor but likable “Bright Road” opposite Dorothy Dandridge. He and Dandridge re-teamed in “Carmen Jones” (1954), Otto Preminger’s striking all-black revamp of the classical opera “Carmen.” Belafonte’s warm, rich voice, soft with the slightest touch of grit, was not deemed appropriate for the operatic songs in this musical melodrama, so his singing – like most of the cast members – was dubbed. However his own voice received a widespread showcase with the release of the million-selling album, Calypso (1955). Belafonte made his contribution to the post-War craze for exotic cultures with his melodious, danceable and witty (indeed, often satirical) sing-alongs from his beloved Caribbean, including “Jamaica Farewell” and “Banana Boat Song,” which opened with the singer’s famous field call, “Day-o!”

Belafonte’s on-again, off-again acting career kept him busiest in the 1950s, though he faced charges of being “too assimilationist” – much like another black star (and friend) whose rise to stardom paralleled his, Sidney Poitier. Such a claim actually placed far too much weight on Belafonte’s relatively light skin and on his considerable popularity. The film “Island in the Sun” (1957), though fairly tame, was somewhat innovative in suggesting an interracial romance between him and Joan Fontaine. He also gave an excellent performance in the intelligent film noir “Odds Against Tomorrow” (1959), as part of a trio of mismatched burglars whose grand scheme g s awry. Perhaps more importantly, he also executive-produced the film. “The World, the Flesh and the Devil” (1959) was explicitly anti-racist and coincided with Belafonte’s growing involvement in the Civil Rights movement. He was a close friend of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and used his successful position to help organize and finance efforts to end segregation in the South, where, as his own form of protest, he refused to tour.

In 1959, Belafonte won an Emmy (the first for an African-American performer) for his solo TV special, “Tonight with Belafonte” and gave the first of his now-legendary concerts at Carnegie Hall. His two-night engagement proved so popular that he was invited back to give an encore in 1960. In a performance acclaimed for Belafonte’s graciousness in sharing the stage, he introduced such African and African-American talents as Miriam Makeba, Odetta and the Chad Mitchell trio to U.S. listeners. Belafonte received a Grammy Award for the 1960 album Jump Dat Hammer and released the hit albums Jump Up Calypso (1963) and Midnight Special (1962), an album of American folk songs and spirituals featuring then-unknown Bob Dylan on harmonica, but put much of his career on hold to pursue higher callings throughout the remainder of the decade. In 1963, he worked alongside Dr. King to participate in voter registration drives, the interstate Freedom Rides that challenged unconstitutional segregation laws, and helped organize the notorious March on Washington where King gave his historic “I Have a Dream” speech.

Belafonte earned a Grammy in 1965 for the album An Evening with Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba (1965) and teamed up with other female vocalists in television specials, including “Petula” (CBS, 1968) with Petula Clark and “Harry and Lena” (1970), with Lena Horne. He returned to the New York stage to produce Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark work “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” In 1970, he played a contrite angel in Jan Kadar’s affecting and unusual “The Angel Levine” (1970) and narrated a documentary about his slain friend, “King: A Filmed Record Montgomery to Memphis” (1970). He and Poitier co-starred in the Western “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), and Belafonte was directed by Poitier in “Uptown Saturday Night” (1974), in a take-off of Marlon Brando’s “Godfather” characterization. Belafonte released a number of live albums and co-starred in “Grambling’s White Tiger” (1981), a TV movie about a white player on the largely black university’s famed football team, but activism continued to take center stage in his life’s work. Throughout the 1980s, his politically outspoken reputation remained solid when he opposed the U.S. embargo on Cuba, attacked the U.S. invasion of Grenada, and praised Fidel Castro and the Soviet Union’s peace initiatives. He became especially vigorous in the fight against apartheid and was instrumental in organizing the vastly successful 1985 supergroup recording, “We Are the World,” which raised money for famine relief in Ethiopia.

Named a UNICEF goodwill ambassador in 1987, Belafonte returned to Broadway that same year as producer of “Asinamali!” a play about apartheid. He was honored with a Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989, and in 1990, hosted a three-part PBS music documentary “Routes and Rhythm with Harry Belafonte.” He was given the National Medal of Freedom in 1994, and went on to work on behalf of children’s causes in Senegal, Rwanda and Kenya, as well as traveled to South Africa on behalf of a HIV/AIDS awareness campaign. After successfully beating prostate cancer in 1996, he added research and education about that disease to his full roster of advocacy pursuits. In the entertainment realm, Belafonte made a much-anticipated return to the big screen in “White Man’s Burden” (1995), an intriguing if not wholly successful attempt to reconceptualize America’s ongoing race problems, with Belafonte as a racist wealthy man in a society where blacks have the money and the power. He followed up with a turn as a gangster in Robert Altman’s period drama “Kansas City” (1996).

In 2001, Belafonte was featured in a documentary about Fidel Castro and earned some press for his outspoken opposition to the George W. Bush administration and the handling of the September 11th attacks. He earned some backlash the following year for characterizing African-American administration officials Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as slaves who turned their backs on their people for the privilege to serve a master in “the house.” After having upheld a steady performing schedule of 70 to 80 shows a year, Belafonte announced his retirement from live performing in 2003. In 2006, he and Danny Glover ruffled a few more political feathers when the pair traveled to Venezuela to show support for controversial president Hugo Chavez. Later in the year, Belafonte had a cameo appearance in “Bobby,” Emilio Estevez’ chronicle of the 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy – a close friend of Belafonte’s during his civil rights fights of the 1960s.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Robert Young had a great career in both film and television. He was born in 1907 in Chicago. In the 1930’s and 40’s he made such movies as “Secret Agent” for Alfed Hitchcock, “H.M. Pulham Esdq” and “The Enchanted Cotage”. Teh in the 1950’s he had a major success on television in “Father Knows Best” and then in the 1970’s had another very popular TV series “Marcus Welby M.D.”. He died in 1998 at the age of 91,.

TCM overview:

An affable, forthright lead with prototypical “average guy” good looks, Robert Young entered films in 1931 and for 25 years embodied the easygoing but eminently sensible US male. Headlining many programmers and medium-sized “A” productions, he made films in every genre, and was often cast as an agreeable consort to more dominant star actresses. Like the star whose career and image most parallels his, Fred MacMurray, Young moved smoothly in middle age to TV, producing and starring in the landmark family sitcom, “Father Knows Best” (CBS and NBC, 1954-1960). It was only one step from paternal ideal to the avuncular, and Young later enjoyed another popular series with the similarly soothing medical drama, “Marcus Welby, M.D.” (ABC, 1969-1976). Not as big in films as MacMurray, Young was never as edgy or whimsical as James Stewart, or as earnest and striving as Henry Fonda. His TV success was greater than that of any other Golden Era Hollywood Everyman, though, because, regardless of his real talent as an actor, he was relaxed and unthreatening.

Born in Chicago but raised in California, Young began acting at the Pasadena Playhouse and made his film debut in Fox’s “The Black Camel” (1931). That same year, he was signed by MGM, where his first major role came as Helen Hayes’ son in the mother-love weeper, “The Sin of Madelon Claudet” (1931). Young soon played similarly boyish roles in support of Norma Shearer in “Strange Interlude” (1932) and Marie Dressler in “Tugboat Annie” (1933). He also began playing leads in programmers and “B” pictures, which, over the course of his 14-year stint at Metro included “Lazy River” (1934), “Calm Yourself” (1935), “Miracles for Sale” (1939) and “Joe Smith, American” (1942). Young also vied for the hand of such estimable female stars as Joan Crawford (in several films including Dorothy Arzner’s striking “The Bride Wore Red,” 1937), Margaret Sullavan (the moving “Three Comrades,” 1938) and Jeanette MacDonald (“Cairo,” 1942).

A reliable property who brought likability and an offhand intelligence to his lightweight playboy roles, he was also frequently loaned out to other studios. Young tried to win the favor of Ann Harding (“The Right to Romance,” 1933) and Barbara Stanwyck (“The Bride Walks Out,” 1936) at RKO and Claudette Colbert at Paramount (“The Bride Comes Home,” 1936). A sure rule of thumb determined whether or not Young would prevail: if a bigger male co-star was also in the running, Young was the inevitable good-hearted loser; if not, he was generally deemed a decent catch.

Like MacMurray, Young enjoyed some of his best roles when his “nice guy” demeanor slipped from the casual to the careless, or proved a mere front for villainy. He enjoyed just such a change-of-pace role as a spy in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Secret Agent” (1936), was compelling as a Nazi in “The Mortal Storm” (1940), and enjoyed a hit as a ne’er-do-well in “Those Endearing Young Charms” (1945). Best of all was his opportunist in the striking noir “They Won’t Believe Me” (1947), toying around with Jane Greer, Susan Hayward and Rita Johnson before the richly ironic plot caught up with him. On more sympathetic fronts, his glib, recklessly drunken partygoer parried deliciously with Constance Cummings in James Whale’s cult classic “Remember Last Night?” (1935) and Young was very touching in both “H.M. Pulham, Esq.” (1941), as a stuffy Bostonian, and “The Enchanted Cottage” (1945), as an embittered war veteran.

Although Young acted on multiple occasions with such gifted actresses as Dorothy McGuire, Ruth Hussey and Maureen O’Sullivan, he never became part of a romantic team until TV beckoned. In the late 40s and early 50s, he still appeared in popular films, but his pipe-smoking detective was less riveting than Robert Ryan’s anti-Semitic psycho in “Crossfire” (1947) and he also played second fiddle to Clifton Webb’s prissy babysitter in “Sitting Pretty” (1948). The latter film, with Young as an ordinary breadwinner, pointed toward his popular success on radio with “Father Knows Best” beginning in 1949. By 1954, Young gave up on features altogether when he successfully transplanted insurance manager Jim Anderson and his all-American family to the small screen. An unabashed ode to a patriarchal nuclear family that not only never was but also never could be, “Father Knows Best” won Young two Emmys and compensated for its idealized and conservative coziness with doses of warmth, wit and the chemistry Young evoked with ideal co-star Jane Wyatt and their clean-scrubbed kids.

After Young ended the show’s run, he tried another series with the reflective small-town saga, “Window on Main Street” (CBS, 1961-62), but it didn’t last. The 60s were a lean period for the actor, but when he rebounded as Marcus Welby, the handsomely white-haired Young won a third Emmy with another winning formula, complete with younger sidekick, wisecracking support staff and nostalgic guest stars. Dr. Welby was as reassuring to the 70s as Jim Anderson had been 20 years earlier and Young continued into the 80s with several “Father Knows Best” and “Marcus Welby” TV-movie reunions, another series attempt (“Little Women,” NBC, 1979), and the occasional departure role (as mercy killer Roswell Gilbert in “Mercy or Murder?” NBC, 1987). Young also dominated the small screen in a wide range of TV commercials; having sold his genuine talent and likably ordinary persona for 50 years, the move was inevitable.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Barbara Feldon is best known as the delicious Agent 99 in the hit television series “Get Smart” which ran from 1965 until 1970. She also starred in the movies “Fitzwilly” in 1967 and “Smile” in 1975. Now retired from film acting she currently resides in New York.

TCM overview:

With her innate talent and drive, it was not too difficult to decode actress Barbara Feldon’s formula for success. The former fashion model shot to fame as the statuesque Agent 99 on the classic spy sitcom “Get Smart” (NBC, 1965-69; CBS, 1969-1970), which paired her with Don Adams as the blundering, shrill-voiced Maxwell Smart. Playing the highly competent secret agent whose looks often came in very handy during covert operations punctuated Feldon’s career, but it also limited her choice in roles following the show’s demise. Feldon continued to act, taking on supporting roles on various drama series and sitcoms, as well as earning recognition as a brilliant voiceover artist. Yet, it was Feldon’s role as the slick and sexy Agent 99 that was forever etched in most viewers’ memories, making her one of television’s most unforgettable characters.

Barbara Hall was born on March 12, 1933 in Pittsburgh, PA, where she enjoyed an average middle-class upbringing. By the time she was in first grade, the already ambitious Feldon decided she was going to be an actress. Her passion for the craft continued to flourish, and in 1955, she graduated from Carnegie Mellon University’s (then Carnegie Institute of Technology) drama department and moved to New York City shortly after. In between acting gigs, Feldon worked as a dancer in a Ziegfeld Follies revival. She also became a contestant on the quiz show “The $64,000 Question” (CBS, 1955-58), where she won the title prize for correctly answering all the questions in her particular area of expertise, Shakespeare. In the mid-1960s, the seductive, deep-voiced actress purred and growled her way to recognition after she appeared in a television commercial, sprawled on a tiger skin rug, staring deep into the camera and touting the praises of Top Brass cologne.

In 1964, Feldon landed a guest-starring role on the drama series “East Side/West Side” (CBS, 1963-64) and quickly caught Hollywood’s attention. After a few more guest spots on television, Feldon finally won the role that would provide her with pop culture immortality – the lead role of the striking and intelligent Agent 99 on the wacky spy sitcom “Get Smart” (NBC, 1965-69; CBS, 1969-1970). Starring opposite Don Adams as the bumbling secret agent Maxwell Smart, Feldon’s Agent 99, though much younger, was decidedly more competent than her older counterpart who, in spite of his clumsiness, still managed to fend off their enemies and fight the forces of K.A.O.S. Feldon’s character was frequently seen leaning, sitting, or slouching in the show’s ongoing effort to conceal that she was slightly taller than her male co-star. After “Get Smart” wrapped production after a successful run, Feldon found it hard to shake off her Agent 99 character for years to come.

Undaunted, she continued to make TV appearances, guest starring on a number of drama series as well as taking on supporting roles in numerous made-for-TV movies, most notably the 1975 satire “Smile” (CBS) where she portrayed a prudish yet obsessive beauty contest organizer. She was a regular player on the short-lived “The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine” (ABC, 1972) and, with Jackie Cooper, co-hosted “Dean Martin’s Comedy World” (NBC, 1974). Feldon also found constant work as a voiceover artist for commercials such as Nice Cough Drops and Campbell Soup, and was a regular panelist on classic game shows such as “The Hollywood Squares” (syndicated, 1965-1982) and “The $20,000 Pyramid” (syndicated, 1973-1992). In 1993, she made a rare TV appearance on the NBC comedy series “Mad About You” (1992-99), where she played a former star of a ’60s spy series called “Spy Girl.” Feldon reprised Agent 99 alongside Adams as Smart in the ABC reunion TV movie “Get Smart, Again!” (1989), in several episodes of the short-lived series revival “Get Smart” (Fox, 1995), and in the documentary special “Inside TV Land: Get Smart” (TV Land, 2001). She also indulged a lifelong passion for writing by penning the 2003 book Living Alone and Loving It, which chronicled the path she took to become content and comfortable while living single.

By Candy Cuenco

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Richard Lynch was born in Brooklyn, New York to Irish parents. He served in the U.S. Marine Corp. A brilliant character actor he featured in “Scarecrow” with Al Pacino and “The Seven-Ups”. He died in 2012.

“Independent” obituary by John Riley:

The son of an alcoholic, Richard Lynch began using drugs himself. Then in 1967 he had an accident in Central Park, setting himself on fire in the middle of an LSD trip. After massive reconstructive surgery he eventually rebuilt enough confidence to return to acting. His height and distinctive scarred appearance made him ideal casting for villains in sci-fi, fantasy and horror films, and he became a favourite character actor among cult film fans.

Lynch was one of seven children from a Brooklyn-Irish Catholic family; his younger brother Barry also became an actor. Through his parents Lynch held Irish citizenship and frequently visited the country. After a spell in the US Marine Corps, he studied theatre at Herbert Berghof’s HB Studio and the Actors’ Studio

Lynch appeared in dozens of on- and off-Broadway plays. In 1965 he played Louis XIII opposite Anne Bancroft and Jason Robards in Michael Cacoyannis’s production of John Whiting’s The Devils. Eleven years later Tony Richardson directed Lynch and Vanessa Redgrave in Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, and in 1977 he appeared opposite Al Pacino in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel.

The year after his accident, Lynch appeared with Timothy Leary in the documentary LSD – Trip to Where? The scarring, along with his six-foot frame, brought roles as cops, heavies and the like. His film debut came in Scarecrow (1973) in which he played a thuggish prisoner. Two years later he was a cop in the Xaviera Hollander biopic The Happy Hooker.

The following year saw him in a more substantial role. In Larry Cohen’s fantastically subversive God Told Me To, random murders are carried out by New Yorkers who use the title of the film to explain their crimes. Each of these events is presaged by an appearance from a strange Christ-like figure played by Lynch.

His TV appearances included episodes of Serpico (1976), Police Woman and The Streets of San Francisco (both 1977) and The Bionic Woman (1978). He also played three different roles in Starsky and Hutch (1975, 1978 and 1979). In 1978 he appeared in Battlestar Galactica and two years later returned for the lower budget Galactica 80. Battlestar Galactica: the Second Coming (1999) is a rarely-seen trailer the makers hoped would interest a studio in a reboot of the franchise.

In between, Lynch had secured a couple of starring roles. In the film Delta Fox (1979) he played an ex-con who gets tied up in a labyrinthine kidnapping plot. He turned his scarring to good effect, deflecting questions about it to add to the mystery of his character’s back story. The widely praised TV movie Vampire was intended as the pilot for a series.

In 1981 he finally got a series, The Phoenix, the story of an archaeological expedition to Peru that discovers an alien. Unfortunately the first series was also the last, and Lynch returned to B-movies and television, in 1985 playing the first of several Russians, as a Soviet terrorist in Chuck Norris’s commie-basher Invasion USA.

Menahem Golan and his cousin Yoram Globus had long been producers and directors of everything from trash to arthouse. Lynch’s work with them included a Soviet general in Armstrong (1998), while Lima: Breaking the Silence (1999), the true-life story of a Peruvian kidnapping, gave him the chance to play an Irish role, as an ambassador.

After that came the micro-budget basketball crime drama Death Game (2001). If Golan hoped the following year’s modern-day adaptation of Crime and Punishment would be a prestige product – its impressive cast included John Hurt and Vanessa Redgrave – it was scuttled by his directorial ineptitude. Final Combat (2003) was a martial arts drama.

Lynch’s height and a Rutger Hauerish mane of silver-white hair brought a certain authority, allowing him to play the US President in the Mexican wrestling drama Mil Mascaras and the Aztec Mummy (2007). That year also saw him in a somewhat mainstream hit – to the satisfaction of cult film fans – with Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween in which he played the small role of the headmaster of Michael Myers’ school. Zombie recalled, “I’ll never forget the way he scared the crap out of the kid actors. As soon as I said ‘Action!’, he dove right into his role of Principal Chambers at top volume.”

After that, Zombie didn’t even audition him for the forthcoming The Lords of Salem in which Lynch takes charge of a 17th-century witch trial. His son Christopher by his first wife, the actress Béatrix, appeared with him in the time-travel drama Trancers II (1991) but died of pneumonia in 2005. Lynch was discovered dead in his home.

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

Peter Falk is of course well known for his performance as Lt Columbo in the long running detective series “Colombo” which ran from 19761 until 1978 and then again from 1989 until 2003. He has though many other great acting credits to his name including an Oscar nominated performance as a gangster in “Murder Inc” in 1960. His other movies include “Pocket Full of Miracles”. “The Great Race” and “Murder By Death” with Maggie Smith, Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers and Eileen Brennan. He died in 2011 at the age of 83.

Brian Baxter’s “Guardian” obituary:

Show-business history records that the American actor Peter Falk, who has died aged 83, made his stage debut the year before he left high school, presciently cast as a detective. Despite the 17-year-old’s fleeting success, he had no thoughts of pursuing acting as a career – if only because tough kids from the Bronx considered it an unsuitable job for a man. Just 24 years later, Falk made his first television appearance as the scruffy detective, Columbo, not only becoming the highest paid actor on television – commanding $500,000 an episode during the 1970s – but also the most famous.

Inevitably the lieutenant dedicated to unravelling the villainy of the wealthy and glamorous dominated his career, although – unlike some actors – he escaped the straitjacket, or in his case shabby raincoat, of typecasting. In addition to stage work, he made numerous film and television appearances, notably for John Cassavetes in Husbands (1970) and A Woman Under the Influence (1974). There were also war films such as Anzio (1968), comedies including The Great Race (1965) and dramas ranging from Jean Genet’s The Balcony (1963) to David Mamet‘s Lakeboat (2000).

Falk was the only child of Michael and Madeleine Falk, east European Jews who had emigrated to America, settling first on New York’s East side, then moving to the Bronx, where Peter was born – two years before the stock-market crash heralded the depression. At the age of three, a tumour was diagnosed behind his right eye and, in an emergency operation, both the tumour and the eye were removed. The resultant disability made for a precarious school life, compensated for by his defiant humour, sporting prowess and subversive behaviour.

Unable to serve in the navy because of his eyesight, he enlisted in the merchant marines, working as a cook. After graduating in political science from the New School of Social Research, New York City, he gained a master’s degree in public administration from Syracuse University, in upstate New York. He travelled in Europe before taking his first regular job, as an efficiency expert in Hartford for the Connecticut budget bureau. By his late 20s, he knew that he had to escape financial administration.

Despite earlier misgivings, he had enjoyed acting in college productions, and, while working, enrolled with the actor-teacher Eva Le Gallienne, who in 1955 urged him to quit his job and return to New York City. With intriguing looks and a strong personality, but little training, he took her advice.

A disastrous debut in an off-Broadway production of Molière’s Don Juan was followed a few months later by a happier experience as the bartender in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1956), with Jason Robards. Over the next two years he acted in many plays including St Joan and The Lady’s Not for Burning, paying the rent by appearing in TV series such as Have Gun Will Travel, Wagon Train and The Untouchables.

His big-screen debut came in Nicholas Ray’s ecological adventure Wind Across the Everglades (1958), but with his city accent and nervy, method-oriented style he soon specialised in playing hoodlums in films including Pretty Boy Floyd (1959) and Murder Inc (1960), the latter attracting great attention for his powerful performance as a vicious killer. It earned him an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor, and he became the first person to be nominated for an Emmy within the same year, after playing a heroin addict in the television drama The Law and Mr Jones.

In 1961, Frank Capra remade his classic Lady for a Day as A Pocketful of Miracles. Now in colour and drenched in syrup, the movie gained Falk a second Oscar nomination. The following year, he received an Emmy for his performance as a truck driver in The Price of Tomatoes. Although he had come to acting late, within a few years he established himself as a significant presence.

He felt confident enough to marry his girlfriend from college days, Alyce Mayo, and took steady work in films, playing a psychiatrist in Pressure Point (1962) and the police chief in The Balcony (1963). He was on the periphery of Sinatra’s rat pack in Robin and the Seven Hoods (1964) and for TV co-starred in Brigadoon (1966). He joined his friend Jack Lemmon when the actor decided to produce Murray Schisgal’s play Luv for the screen. Sadly, the transfer resulted in a dismal movie farce. This and a couple of other duds led to a lull in Falk’s career, until he heard that Bing Crosby had turned down the part of a detective in a scheduled television show. At the age of 40, Falk landed the part, making his debut as Columbo in the pilot episode, Prescription Murder. When a series was proposed he declined, preferring to work with Cassavetes on Husbands and to return to the stage in Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue.

By this time he and Alyce had adopted two daughters, Jacqueline and Catherine, so the security of a television series took on new appeal. Falk signed with NBC, initially for six episodes. He even provided the clothing for the Los Angeles homicide investigator from his own wardrobe, including the infamous raincoat. Later he observed that the dogged, working-class detective sprang from his own personality: “He’s obsessive, relentless, meticulous about his work and definitely not a good dresser.”

Falk became deeply involved with the production, whose format was distinctive in that the murder was shown at the outset, making the mystery for the viewer not a matter of identity, but of explanation. He contributed ideas and directed two episodes, Blueprint for Murder and Etude in Black. Between 1971 and 1978 he starred in 40 episodes, becoming a multimillionaire in the process.

In what time was left, he joined Cassavetes and his wife Gena Rowlands in financing A Woman Under the Influence as an independent movie. Falk’s supportive role as a manual worker coping with the problems of his emotionally scarred wife, played by Rowlands, revealed his talent as a character actor. There were few such substantial roles for a while, and he was another detective – indebted to Humphrey Bogart – in the star-studded flop Murder By Death (1976). He played opposite Cassavetes in the thriller Mikey and Nicky (also 1976) and then took a cameo role in his friend’s superb Opening Night (1977).

Falk had reached an important crossroads in his life and career. The Columbo series was coming to an end, and in 1976 he and Alyce agreed to an amicable divorce. He found himself enjoying golf and his greatest pleasure – drawing and sketching – as much as his career. Although increasingly reclusive, in 1977 he married the actor Shera Danese and embarked on further films, including the lively caper The Brink’s Job (1978), based on a robbery in Boston in 1950, and the commercial hit The In-Laws (1979), co-starring Alan Arkin. A sequel, Big Trouble (1985), directed by Cassavetes, failed to repeat that success, the director proving himself unsuited to banal comedy material.

Falk’s movie career became increasingly busy and varied. He was the storyteller-grandfather in the whimsical The Princess Bride, and took the lead in an enjoyable remake of a Claude Lelouch film retitled Happy New Year (both 1987). He returned to the stage in David Mamet’s challenging Glengarry Glen Ross (1986) and Moss Hart’s Light Up the Sky (1987).

However, he was deeply affected by the premature death of Cassavetes in 1989, and a need to immerse himself in work coincided with an offer to resume playing his most memorable creation. Falk was offered huge financial inducements, plus creative control of the new series as executive producer. He began the new run with Columbo Goes to the Guillotine (1989), and more than 20 feature-length TV movies followed until Murder With Too Many Notes (2000).

His movie career ran in tandem, often in character roles or, memorably, playing himself – in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987) and Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) – plus documentaries about Frank Capra and Cassavetes. Occasionally Falk took on more demanding roles, playing a grandfather over three decades in the sentimental Roommates (1995), and appeared in many television movies, including A Storm in Summer (2000), directed by the veteran Robert Wise.

More interestingly, he joined a starry cast as the Pierman in Mamet’s Lakeboat. Then in 2001 came Made, a crime movie, and a character role in the comedy Corky Romano, followed by another television movie, A Town Without Christmas. The next year saw him in the Walter Hill boxing drama Undisputed, and as Waldo in Three Days of Rain, based on several Anton Chekhov stories.

He expressed no regrets concerning his career or his dedication to Columbo, though reflected somewhat ruefully, “no one was put on this earth to be so well known by two billion strangers”. That modest disclaimer of his success and fame did not deter him from playing the shabby detective just one more time in the 2003 episode, Columbo Likes the Nightlife. The same year he stayed with television as the star of a feel-good movie, Wilder Days, cast as the grandfather. This was quickly followed by his role as the angel Max in Finding John Christmas and a year later, for the same team, he was in Christmas Angel. He mined that cosy vein further in Checking Out (2005), and a year later published his memoir Just One More Thing, with a title taken from his famous line in Columbo.

His health and his career declined in the following years, after his appearance as one of four grumpy men in a weak comedy, Three Days to Vegas (2007). He was finally seen in small roles in Next (also 2007) and the independent movie American Cowslip (2009). In 2008 he was injured in a car crash and the same year was hospitalised for a hip operation.

Falk was subsequently diagnosed as suffering from dementia as the consequence of Alzheimer’s disease, and Shera took over his affairs; she and his daughters survive him. Not long before he fell ill, he denied that his raincoat had been donated to a museum, saying that it was still part of his wardrobe.

• Peter Michael Falk, actor, born 16 September 1927; died 23 June 2011

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

Doris Lloyd, was born in Walton Liverpool in 1896. She began her acting career on Broadway in 1925 and began making movies in 1929. She became a well known character actress. Her movies include “Tarzan, The Ape man” in 1932, “Back Street”, “The Letter”, “Shining Victory”, “Midnight Lace” and later “Rosie” and “The Sound of Music”. She died in California in 1968.

IMDB entry:

Doris Lloyd was born on July 3, 1896 in Liverpool, England as Hessy Doris Lloyd. She was an actress, known for The Sound of Music (1965), Alice in Wonderland (1951) and The Time Machine (1960). She died on May 21, 1968 in Santa Barbara, California, USA. British stage actress who came to Hollywood in 1925 and stayed playing domestic and/or dowager support roles in costumers. Was a very popular radio & television actress, appearing in over 150 movies. Versatile character actress, who first appeared on stage with the Liverpool Repertory Theatre Company in 1914. Intended to merely visit her sister in the United States, but ended up settling down in California. Her lengthy movie career began in 1925 and included countless small parts as (British) charwomen, landladies and, occasionally, society matrons. Notable as a spy in ‘Disraeli’ (1929) and Nancy Sykes in the Monogram version of ‘Oliver Twist’ (1933). On Broadway in ‘An Inspector Calls’ (1947-1948,as Sybil Birling).

Jean Simmons obituary in “The Guardian” in 2010.

Jean Simmons has always been taken for granted, As a child player in Britain she was expected to be one of the best child players and she was: she was expected to become a big international name and she did. In Hollywood for over 20 years she was given good roles because she was reliable and she played them, or most them, beautifully. But she was never a cult figure, one of those who adorn magazine covers, or someone the fan magazines write about all the time. It was not or is not that she simply did or does her job – she is much better than that, she is not a competent actress, she is a very good one – by Hollywood standards a great one, if you take the Hollywood standard to be those ladies who have won Oscars. She was not even nominated for Best Actress Oscar till 1969. She not even nominated for “Elmer Gantry” (and that year Elizabeth Taylor won). Maybe it does not help to have been so good so young” – David Shipman – “The Great Movie Stars – 2 The International Years” (1972)

Jean Simmons was a major star actress in British movies of the late 1940’s with important roles in such films as “Great Expectations” in 1946, “Hungry Hill”, “Black Narcissus” and The Clouded Yellow”. She went to Hollywood in 1950 and was a major international star for over ten years starring in “The Robe” opposite Richard Burton in 1953, “Young Bess” with Spencer Tracy”, “Guys and Dolls” with Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra and in 1960, “Elmer Gantry” opposite Burt Lancaster. She continued acting in film, television and on the stage up to her death at the age of 80 in 2010.

David Thompson’s “Guardian” obituary:

Jean Simmons, who has died aged 80, had a bounteous moment, early in her career, when she seemed the likely casting for every exotic or magical female role. It passed, as she got out of her teens, but then for the best part of 15 years, in Britain and America, she was a valued actress whose generally proper, if not patrician, manner had an intriguing way of conflicting with her large, saucy eyes and a mouth that began to turn up at the corners as she imagined mischief – or more than her movies had in their scripts. Even in the age of Vivien Leigh andElizabeth Taylor, she was an authentic beauty. And there were always hints that the lady might be very sexy. But nothing worked out smoothly, and it is somehow typical of Simmons that her most astonishing work – in Angel Face (1952) – is not very well known.

At first, she was a schoolgirl given her dream. Born in north London, she grew up in the suburb of Cricklewood, and was swept from dancing classes to the studio to be Margaret Lockwood’s younger sister in Give Us the Moon (1944). Several other films followed, with modest roles: Mr Emmanuel; Kiss the Bride Goodbye; Meet Sexton Blake; a singer in The Way to the Stars; and a slave girl for Leigh in Caesar and Cleopatra.

But then David Lean cast her as Estella in Great Expectations (1946); Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger chose her to be the temple dancer with a jewel in her nose for Black Narcissus (1947); and Laurence Olivier borrowed her away from her J Arthur Rank contract so that she could be a blonde Ophelia in his Hamlet (1948). It was noted at the time that an anxious Leigh, Olivier’s wife, chose to be on set whenever Simmons was working – just in case.

Hamlet won the Oscar for best picture, and Simmons was nominated for best supporting actress; in fact, she lost to Claire Trevor in Key Largo. However, she was by then an expert at the Oscars, for she attended the previous year and four times was on stage to accept awards on behalf of Great Expectations and Black Narcissus. Cecil B DeMille, in the audience, was so impressed that he offered her the female lead in his upcoming Samson and Delilah (the Hedy Lamarr role). She had to decline – for Hamlet’s sake – but no young actress was being talked about more.

For a while she remained in Britain. She was also in the Daphne du Maurier tale of an Irish feud, Hungry Hill (1947); and she was suitably preyed upon by Derrick DeMarney in Uncle Silas, adapted from the Sheridan Le Fanu novel. Then, in 1949, with Donald Houston, she was one of two young people shipwrecked on a desert island in The Blue Lagoon. Showing a good deal of flesh for its day (Brooke Shields took her role in the 1980 remake), this was reckoned as a rather daring film – and it was almost certainly viewed, and re-viewed, by Howard Hughes. Then, in the same year, she played the adopted daughter of Stewart Granger in Adam and Evelyne. In fact, the handsome Granger was 16 years her senior, and married once, having divorced Elspeth March in 1948. But the couple fell deeply in love, married and would soon set out together for Hollywood as a kind of middleweight Olivier and Leigh.

25th August 1956: British-American actress Jean Simmons (1929 – 2010) is featured for the cover of Picture Post magazine. Original Publication: Picture Post Cover – Vol 72 No 8 – pub. 1956. (Photo by IPC Magazines/Picture Post/Getty Images)

But that was not before three 1950 films – So Long at the Fair, a period thriller in which she was romantically paired with Dirk Bogarde; Cage of Gold; and The Clouded Yellow, in which she established a fascinating mood with Trevor Howard. And so, aged only 21, she went to Hollywood. But whereas Granger was under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (and would play Allan Quartermain, the Prisoner of Zenda and Scaramouche), she was the oblivious dream child of Hughes at RKO, which had bought her contract from Rank. The strange tycoon was obsessed with her personally, and he laid siege to her romantically and professionally so that she did not work for over a year. Only one thing emerged from the stand-off, Angel Face, in which she is a spoiled child and lethal temptress who seduces nearly everyone she meets (most notably Robert Mitchum). The brilliant picture was directed by Otto Preminger and photographed by the great veteran Harry Stradling. Thus it contains – and she sustains – some of the most luminous close-ups ever given to a femme fatale. How far she understood the picture is unclear. One can only say that it is a rare tribute to unrequited love.

Hughes yielded in the courts in 1952, and Simmons was able to begin a run of costume films, some of them important productions (such as The Robe), but many of them giving her too little to do: in Androcles and the Lion; as Elizabeth I in Young Bess (with Granger, Deborah Kerr and Charles Laughton); very good, though too pretty, as the young Ruth Gordon in George Cukor’s The Actress – she worked especially well with Spencer Tracy. But then the films grew more routine: Affair With a Stranger (with Victor Mature); with Richard Burton and CinemaScope in The Robe – there may have been a fling with Burton; She Couldn’t Say No – she should have; the dreary The Egyptian; A Bullet Is Waiting, in which she was expected to take Rory Calhoun as co-star; Désirée – ruined by the languid mockery of co-star Marlon Brando; and Footsteps in the Fog (with Granger).

She took a risk, singing If I Were a Bell and The Eyes of a Woman in Love, to be Sister Sarah in the movie of Guys and Dolls (1955). The producer, Sam Goldwyn, had wanted Grace Kelly for the part. But director Joseph L Mankiewicz was more than happy with Simmons: “An enormously underrated girl. In terms of talent, Jean Simmons is so many heads and shoulders above most of her contemporaries, one wonders why she didn’t become the great star she could have been.” No one argued, though many observers noted that Mankiewicz was also deeply in love with his actress. Still, it is worth speculating, and noting that nothing sounds wrong or unpromising about this schedule – Jean Simmons in Roman Holiday, in Vertigo, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?

• Jean Merilyn Simmons, actor, born 31 January 1929; died 22 January 2010

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

When one considers that she was barely past 25 in 1955, it is all the stranger that her films slipped so far in quality: Hilda Crane; as secretary to gangster Paul Douglas in This Could Be the Night; with Paul Newman in Until They Sail; with Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston in the big western, The Big Country; This Earth is Mine. One notable exception to this trend was Home Before Dark (1958), where Simmons was outstanding as a woman who has had a nervous breakdown.

By then, her marriage to Granger had come apart. But in 1960, she married again, the writer-director Richard Brooks, and he immediately raised her horizons by casting her as the evangelist opposite Burt Lancaster in Elmer Gantry. Lancaster and Shirley Jones won Oscars in that film, but Simmons was not even nominated. Thereafter, she sportingly played the female lead in Spartacus, and had some overlong, giggle-making love scenes with its star, Kirk Douglas – “Put me down, Spartacus, I’m having a baby!”

That would prove to be her last big picture, for the slide was now evident: The Grass is Greener (1960, a rather middle-aged comedy); All the Way Home, adapted from James Agee’s novel, in which she was very good, but which went unnoticed; Life at the Top (done back in Britain); Mister Budd- wing; Divorce American Style and Rough Night in Jericho. Then Brooks did all he could to revive her fortunes in The Happy Ending (1969), about a miserable wife whose dreams of marriage, based on the movie Father of the Bride, have turned to disillusion. She got an Oscar nomination for it (she lost to Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), but rather more out of respect than conviction. In truth, she always seemed too strong-willed and amused for weepy material. Indeed, she might have done Jean Brodie.

More or less, in the early 1970s, she seemed to retire. The marriage to Brooks came to an end in 1977, and there were stories that she was drinking too much. In the early 1980s she checked herself in to the Betty Ford clinic and spoke publicly about her addiction.

Then she started to work in television, and sometimes it was only the end credits that told one that that had been Jean Simmons. She was in The Thorn Birds (1983); she did a TV version of Great Expectations where she was Miss Havisham (1989); was an admiral called in for an investigation in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1991); and was in How to Make an American Quilt (1995). She went into semi-retirement and was often too shy to accept invitations to film festivals. But around 75, she changed: she did a wonderful voice performance in Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), and she was deeply touching as a dying poet in Shadows in the Sun (2009). She attended the Telluride Film Festival, Colorado, in 2008 and she was interviewed at a Lean centenary celebration in Los Angeles where she was still as pretty, seductive and mischievous as she had been as Estella in Great Expectations.

The recollection of those early years brings out the paradox of her career, for if she had made only one film – Angel Face – she might now be spoken of with the awe given to Louise Brooks. She is survived by her daughters Tracy, from her marriage to Granger, and Kate, from her marriage to Brooks.

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Don Taylor

Charles Korvin

Harry Belafonte

Robert Young

Barbara Feldon

Richard Lynch

Peter Falk

Doris Lloyd

Jean Simmons

Jean Simmons obituary in “The Guardian” in 2010.

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