Nancy Allen was born in 1950 in New York City. She made her film debut in a small role opposite Jack Nicholson in “The Last Detail” in 1973. Other films included “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” in 1978 and three excellent roles in Brian De Palma’s movies, “Carrie” in 1976, “Dressed to Kill” with Angie Dickinson in 1980 and “Blow Out”. She also starred in “Robocop” with Peter Weller.
IMDB entry:
Nancy Anne Allen was the daughter of a police lieutenant from Yonkers, New York. At a young age, she trained for a dancing career at the High School of Performing Arts, and then attended Jose Quintano’s School for Young Professionals. In dozens of television commercials from the age of 15, Nancy made her first film appearance in The Last Detail(1973) with Jack Nicholson. Three years later, she set the standard for all future “bitch-goddess teenagers” as Chris Hargensen in Stephen King‘s Carrie (1976), taken to the big screen by director Brian De Palma. Nancy then married De Palma in 1979. She next appeared in Steven Spielberg‘s I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978); for the next few years, she appeared only in De Palma’s films: Home Movies (1980), Dressed to Kill (1980), and she starred with John Travolta in Blow Out (1981).
After her divorce from De Palma in 1984, Nancy’s film opportunities were supposedly narrowed, but then she surprised the whole world in 1987 when she performed as Officer Anne Lewis in the sci-fi cult film RoboCop (1987), along with Peter Weller. Here, she set another standard as a tough but at the same time feminine policewoman, whose sex would not interfere with her actions. After the success of RoboCop, she performed as Patricia Gardner in the second sequel in the Poltergeist series. She came back inRoboCop 2 (1990) and in order to get more involved with the character Nancy Allen learned martial arts and police training for real. She returned again in RoboCop 3 (1993), though her co-star Peter Weller did not this time. In 1993, Nancy joined several other veteran stars in Acting on Impulse (1993), and married co-star Craig Shoemaker, in the same year. A few years later, she divorced Craig and some time after she married again.
Interested in projecting the image of a strong but at the same time feminine woman, she managed to get away from the victim roles she was always offered, she also was able to get away from the stereotype of the beautiful but dumb woman in most action films. She is an environmentalist that traded her Volvo car for an Hybrid car in order to set the example. She is also an activist against breast Cancer along with her friend actress Wendie Jo Sperber, who created the foundation WeSpark. Her last appearance on television was on the Inside E! story of her co-star John Travolta and the A&E Biography of Travolta – both appearances in 2004. Nowadays, Nancy Allen lives a quiet life along with her family and friends somewhere in the United States.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Eva Dalila Rojano, thanks to Derek Hazell nancy_tribute@hotmail.com
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Sheree J. Wilson was born in 1958 in Minnesota. She is best known for her role as April Stevens in “Dallas” which she was featured in from 1986 intil 1990 and in “Walker, Texas Ranger” from 1993 until 2001. Her movies include “Crimewave” in 1985 and “Hellbound” in 1994.
IMDB entry:
Sheree J. Wilson has gained worldwide recognition starring in two enormously popular long running television series. Appearing in the hit series Dallas for five seasons playing opposite Patrick Duffy, and then for the entire eight year run of Walker, Texas Ranger opposite Chuck Norris. Currently, Ms. Wilson has starred and produced two feature films, Easy Rider: The Ride Back, a prequel to the cult favorite movie Easy Rider, and The Gundown. She also co-produced a zombie/comedy called Dug Up.
While studying for her degree in fashion merchandising and business, Sheree secretly vied for a career in show business. As with many actors, that ‘lucky break’ came shortly after graduation in 1981 while working in Denver on a fashion shoot. One of the photographers thought Sheree was the model, and introduced her to Vicki Light, head of The Light Company. Vicki in turn introduced her to Wilhelmina, the modeling agenCY from New York, who signed her on the spot. Sheree promptly moved to Manhattan and within eighteen months, had appeared in over thirty commercial campaigns for Clairol, Sea Breeze, Keri-Lotion and Maybelline. Her print work ran in such popular magazines as Mademoiselle, Glamour and Redbook.
After three years of modeling, Sheree’s agent, Vicki Light, called her with an audition in a feature film, urging her to move to Los Angeles. She won the starring role, opposite Louise Lasser, Brian James and Reed Burney, in “Crimewave”, a 1984 black comedy directed by Sam Raimi. Three days after that film wrapped, she was cast in “Velvet,” an ABC/Aaron Spelling MOW/series pilot, in which she played a female “James Bond” character opposite Shari Belafonte. Within the next year, she had a lead with Tim Robbins in “Fraternity Vacation”, a summer comedy in which she played an intellectual beauty who was the object of everyone’s desire.
Producers began to take notice of this dynamic newcomer to Hollywood, and soon she starred in the 1985 CBS television miniseries “Kane & Abel,” with Peter Strauss. This immediately led to “Our Family Honor,” a CBS drama about Irish cops vs. the Mafia, in which she starred with Ray Liotta, Michael Madsen and Eli Wallach. Her career continued to grow including “News at Eleven” with Martin Sheen. And then, in 1986, television producer Leonard Katzman called Sheree to talk about a part he thought was tailor-made for someone with her classic beauty and sassy, fun-loving, energetic nature.
The role was that of ‘April Stevens’ on the CBS mega-hit series “Dallas.” For five seasons she played a brainy, wealthy femme fatale. Her character went from being one of the most powerful women in Dallas and J.R. Ewing’s nemesis, to being one of the warmest characters in town, eventually marrying Bobby Ewing, the show’s ultimate good guy. Ultimately, April Stevens was gunned down during her honeymoon in Paris. Bowing out with a bang, Sheree’s performance earned her the “Soap Opera Digest Award” for Best Death Scene.
In fact, Sheree was pregnant and wanted to leave in order to fully devote herself to motherhood.
At the end of 1992, she signed to do the lead female role of ‘Alex Cahill’ in “Walker, Texas Ranger,” opposite Chuck Norris, which ran for eight seasons.
The daughter of two IBM executives, Sheree was born in Minnesota and moved to Colorado at the age of seven, where she learned to ride horses. Her superb equestrian skills won her first place riding cutting horses in the 1995 National Multiple Sclerosis Rodeo. Her love of horses continues to this day – as she recently rescued a retired racehorse and in 2008 helped establish the “White Bridle Humane Society”, a horse rescue equine therapy non-profit organization in Texas of which she serves as vice-president.
Currently, Sheree resides in Los Angeles.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Sheree J Wilson
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
James Stacy was born in 1936 in Los Angeles. He made his film debut in “Sayonara” in 1957 which starred Marlon Brando. Other movies include “South Pacific” , “Lafayette Escadrille”and “Summer Magic” in 1963 with Hayley Mills. He is best known for his role in the hit Western television series “Lancer”. His career was curtailed by a road accident in 1973.
IMDB entry:
Born Maurice William Elias in Los Angeles, James Stacy is the son of a Lebanese immigrant father and an American-born mother of Irish-Scottish descent. As a teen, Stacy first aspired to play professional football but settled on a career in the movies after a friend coaxed him into taking some acting classes. Adopting the screen name James Stacy after his cousin Stacy and one of his movie idols, James Dean, he made his film debut in an uncredited role as a reporter in Sayonara (1957)) starring Marlon Brando. Garnering little work or recognition in film, Stacy turned to TV. Although he made notable appearances on The Donna Reed Show (1958) and The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet(1952), it wasn’t until 1968 that he gained his first big break, playing a young gunfighter on the TV series, Lancer (1968). Although the show was canceled in 1970, Stacy continued to land smaller roles on TV. In 1973, Stacy lost his left arm and left leg in a serious motorcycle accident that claimed the life of his girlfriend. The resultant medical bills wiped out Stacy’s savings, but his ex-wives and his Hollywood friends rallied round and threw a benefit for him. Two years later, he made his professional comeback as a newspaper editor in the Western film Posse (1975) in a role created expressly for him by the film’s director, Kirk Douglas. Stacy was nominated twice for an Emmy: for “Just a Little Inconvenience” in 1977 and “Cagney & Lacey” in 1986. He retired in 1991.
Stacy’s personal life has been turbulent. Twice-divorced, he was married to actress and singer Connie Stevens (1963-1966) and actress Kim Darby (1968-1969), with whom he has a daughter, Heather.
In the 1970’s Karen Black seemed to feature in every other film from big-budget movies like “The Great Gatsby” in 1974 to Hitchcock’s final film “Family Plot”, “Nashville”, “Airport 1975” to “Day of the Locusts”. She was born in Illinois in 1939. She made her debut in “You’re A Big Boy Now” in 1966. Her more recent movies include “Irene in Time” in 2009. She died in 2013.
Ryan Gilbey ‘s obituary in “The Guardian”:
The New Hollywood movement was primarily a male, auteur-led phenomenon. But the contribution of performers as adventurous and vital as Karen Black, who has died aged 74 from complications from cancer, should not be overlooked. Black was electrified as well as electrifying: her tornado of hair, her fearless physicality and those indelible feline eyes combined to create a woozy and unapologetic sexual energy. She looked offbeat, and she knew how to use that. “I couldn’t have been an actress in the 1930s,” she said, reflecting on her role as a movie extra in The Day of the Locust (1975). “My face moves around too much.”
It was in the late 1960s and 70s that she became one of the great character actors of US cinema in a series of performances in key New Hollywood works. Partly it was that she exhibited qualities outside the skill set of a conventional female lead – she could play volatile and nerve-jangled, or maligned and wounded, without ever approaching caricature, and suddenly these talents came to be much in demand from countercultural film-makers. “Could actors such as Ellen Burstyn, Karen Black, Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall, with their neediness, blankness, oddity, have become leading players in any other decade?” asked Adam Mars-Jones recently in the Guardian. But if her skew-whiff style and appearance were well-suited to a cinema not guilty of undervaluing the marginal, then the humanity she brought to those characters would surely have been recognised in any era or art form.
Her career overlapped with several key figures of New Hollywood: she made her screen debut in Francis Ford Coppola’s own first film, You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), and collaborated more than once with Jack Nicholson, who cast Black in his 1971 directorial debut, Drive, He Said, after co-starring with her in Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970). She was also a favourite of Robert Altman, who directed her in Nashville (1975), for which she and many of the cast wrote and performed their own songs, and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982). Playing herself in Altman’s The Player (1992), she was one of many such celebrity guest stars in that overpopulated satire to be left on the cutting-room floor.)
These parts were strikingly different from one another, but they had in common Black’s knack for conveying her characters’ rich and troubled inner lives, their cramped or thwarted dreams. The consummate example could be found in her Oscar-nominated performance as Rayette, the Tammy Wynette-loving girlfriend to Nicholson’s discontented antihero Bobby Dupea, in Five Easy Pieces. There was a comical but achingly sad intellectual gap between the two. Bobby resented her. Crucially, the audience never did. “I dig [Rayette], she’s not dumb, she’s just not into thinking,” said Black in 1970. “I didn’t have to know anybody like her to play her. I mean, I’m like her, in ways. Rayette enjoys things as she sees them, she doesn’t have to add significances. She can just love the dog, love the cat. See? There are many things she does not know, but that’s cool; she doesn’t intrude on anybody else’s trip. And she’s going to survive.”
She was born Karen Blanche Ziegler in Park Ridge, Illinois, daughter of Norman and Elsie Ziegler, the latter a children’s novelist. She studied at Northwestern University in Illinois from the age of 15, then moved to New York at 17 and took odd jobs and off-Broadway roles. In 1960 she married Charles Black. She was nominated for best actress in the Drama Critics’ Circle awards for playing the lead in The Play Room (1965); Coppola, who was in the audience, cast her in You’re a Big Boy Now. From there, she met Henry Jaglom and Dennis Hopper, both of whom were, like Coppola, part of the coterie of up-and-coming film-makers and actors benefiting from the patronage of Roger Corman. Hopper cast her in Easy Rider as a prostitute who has a bad acid trip in a New Orleans cemetery; Jaglom, who was brought in to help edit the film, insisted that improvised scenes of Black which had been cut should be put back in. Jaglom would continue to help her career as late as 1983 when he gave her the lead in his underrated romantic comedy Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?
She attracted attention for those groundbreaking films with Hopper and Nicholson, and for numerous other fascinating oddities including Cisco Pike (1972), with Kris Kristofferson as a musician turned dealer; a 1972 adaptation of Philip Roth’s comic novel Portnoy’s Complaint; and a foolhardy film version of Ionesco’s absurdist Rhinoceros (1974), with Zero Mostel. But she was not averse to the mainstream. She played the doomed Myrtle in the Coppola-scripted adaptation of The Great Gatsby (1974); she was the flight attendant who must land a plane single-handed in the efficient but much-parodied disaster movie Airport 1975 (1974); and she played a kidnapper in Alfred Hitchcock’s final film, Family Plot (1976). She also became a darling of the horror genre after taking on three roles in the television anthology Trilogy of Terror (1975) and starring in movies such as Burnt Offerings (1976), Invaders from Mars (1986) and House of 1,000 Corpses (2003).
Pickings became steadily slimmer in the 1980s, though her dynamic turn as a post-operative male-to-female transsexual in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean was singled out by Pauline Kael of the New Yorker as Black’s finest work. Kael highlighted her “spectacular tawdry world-weariness” and commended her for “keep[ing] the mawkishness from splashing all over the set. I think this isn’t just the best performance she has given on screen – it’s a different kind of acting from what she usually does. It’s subdued, controlled, quiet – but not parched.” Black worked continuously until becoming ill in 2009. She had a small role in George Sluizer’s Dark Blood, best known now as the film River Phoenix was making when he died in 1993. Illness prevented her from attending the world premiere of a salvaged cut of the film last year in the Netherlands.
Black is survived by her fourth husband, Stephen Eckelberry, whom she married in 1987; and by a son, Hunter, and two daughters, Celine and Diane. Hunter is her son by her third husband, LM Kit Carson, who wrote Paris, Texas, which was filmed with Hunter, then nine years old, playing the main character’s son, also named Hunter.
• Karen Black, actor, born 1 July 1939; died 8 August 2013
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Pia Lindstrom was born in Sweden in 1938. Her mother was Ingrid Bergman and when her mother went to Hollywood to begin her U.S. career, Pia and her father followed. Pia Lindstrom is prinarily known as a television news reporter and commentator but she mas made the occasional film including “Marriage Italian Style” in 1964 and “La Fate” in 1966.
Peter Fonda obituary in “The Guardian” in 2019 by Ronald Bergan
The reputation of Peter Fonda as an actor could never match that of his father, Henry, or his older sister, Jane. Even taken on its own terms, his career was alarmingly erratic. Its peak was probably reached when Fonda, who has died aged 79 of lung cancer, played Captain America in the 1969 road movie Easy Rider, although he took everyone by surprise when, after years in the cinematic wilderness, he gave the best performance of his career (and gained an Oscar nomination) for Ulee’s Gold (1997).
Like his sister, Peter had a troubled childhood. In his 1998 memoir, Don’t Tell Dad, he chronicled his difficult, distant relationship with his famous father. Describing Henry’s role in John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948) as “an unsmiling, bitter, strict hard-ass,” he added, “When people ask me what it was like growing up as Henry Fonda’s son, I ask them if they have seen Fort Apache.”
Born in New York, he and Jane were sent to live with an aunt and uncle in Nebraska following the suicide of their mother, Frances Ford Seymour, in 1950, when Peter was 10. On his 11th birthday, he accidentally shot himself in the stomach and nearly died. Years later, he told John Lennon, during an LSD session, that “I know what it’s like to be dead”, a phrase which ended up becoming part of the lyrics for the Beatles’ song She Said, She Said.
Fonda decided at an early age that he wanted to become an actor, and after studying at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, his father’s hometown, he began performing in the local theatre. His first success was as the lead in Harvey, about an alcoholic who believes he sees a giant rabbit. He made his Broadway debut in 1961 in Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole, an army comedy for which he won a Theatre World award for best actor.
Although being his father’s son became as much of a blessing as a curse, initially it was no drawback. The rangy, goodlooking Fonda, who had something of the laidback, physical grace of his father, made a pleasant enough Hollywood debut in 1963 as the romantic lead, opposite the vibrant teen star Sandra Dee, in Tammy and the Doctor (1963). In the same year, in Carl Foreman’s almost three-hour second world war drama The Victors, which follows a squad of American soldiers in Europe, Fonda is a new recruit who has to watch meekly as some nasty GIs have themselves a little fun testing their prowess as marksmen on a small dog he has adopted.Advertisement
But it was in his third feature, Lilith (1964), Robert Rossen’s strange and intelligent study of schizophrenia, in which he played a vulnerable, bookish, love-stricken mental health patient who veers between violent outbursts and extreme calm, that he first had the chance to prove that there was another Fonda around to be reckoned with.
In 1966, The Wild Angels provided a complete change of image for the young star. In a time of counterculture, when standard Hollywood output was found wanting, Fonda turned away from his father’s sphere of influence by going to Roger Corman’s independent setup for this hit biker picture. Fonda starred as Heavenly Blues, a sulky, long-haired, leather-clad Hell’s Angels leader, who announces: “We wanna be free! We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. We wanna be free to ride. We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by the man! … And we wanna get loaded. And we wanna have a good time. And that’s what we are gonna do…” (The line was sampled at the start of the 1990 Primal Scream hit Loaded). At the end, when the cops come to arrest some of the gang, his girlfriend (Nancy Sinatra) begs him to leave. He replies, “There’s nowhere to go.”
Peter Fonda
However, at that stage, Fonda knew where he was going. Following the success of Wild Angels, Fonda starred in Corman’s The Trip (1967), shot, according to the posters, in “psychedelic colour”. He plays a confused TV commercial director who takes his first “trip” on LSD, and experiences visions of sex, death, strobe lights, dancing girls, witches, hooded riders and a torture chamber. The Trip, which was written by Jack Nicholson, also featured Dennis Hopper as an acidhead.
It was during a publicity tour for The Trip, after smoking some grass and drinking some beer in his Toronto hotel room, that he claimed, “I understood immediately just what kind of motorcycle, sex, and drug movie I should make next.” Fonda and Hopper then conceived, wrote (with Terry Southern, the three gaining an Oscar nomination), raised the finance for, and starred in Easy Rider. Hopper’s first feature as director, and Fonda’s as producer, was made for $400,000, and took more than $16m at the box office, which rose to more than $60m worldwide in the next three years.
The counterculture hit followed two hippies (Hopper and Fonda), who hit the road on motorcycles “in search of the real America” but instead find hostility from small-town bigots. The odyssey ends when the two are shot down by a truck driver who despises their iconoclastic lifestyle. Stupidity, corruption and violence are set against the potential freedom of America that Fonda and Hopper represent. Tall, thin and cool in black leathers and shades, and wearing a jacket which bore a large American flag across the back, Fonda’s Captain America became an icon of martyrdom.
From then on, Fonda’s career took an uncertain turn, lurching from one Easy Rider rip-off to another. In Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974), he is on the lam in a souped-up car after stealing cash from a supermarket. The film provided plenty of high-speed chases and crashes, as did Race With the Devil (1975), in which Fonda flees after coming across satanic rituals in Texas.
One exception was Spirits of the Dead (1968), three episodes based on the macabre stories of Edgar Allan Poe. In the one episode directed by Roger Vadim, a frisson was caused by the casting of Fonda as the lover of a character played by his sister Jane (Vadim’s wife at the time).
Fonda had three tries at directing features, the first being The Hired Hand (1971), a slow, hippy western, which has a masochistic death-of-the-hero ending popularised by Easy Rider. The director himself starred as a cowboy drifter, but he remained off camera for his second feature, Idaho Transfer (1973). A dirt-cheap time-travel movie set in 2027, it is redolent of the early 1970s.
Fonda returned to show his face again in Wanda Nevada (1979), in which he and a 13-year-old orphan (Brooke Shields) go prospecting for gold. One of the few interesting aspects of the film is that it was the only time Peter and Henry Fonda appeared together on screen, the latter in a cameo role of a loony, grizzled prospector.
From the early 80s to the mid-90s, Fonda’s lifestyle left him virtually unemployable in mainstream films. He picked up a few reasonable parts, but his cool laidback style now looked simply cold and bored. Whether out of choice or necessity, he continued to work in independent low-budget productions, often for a drive-in circuit that hardly existed any more.
But in 1997, Fonda starred in Ulee’s Gold, a low-key drama in which he played a Vietnam-vet beekeeper in Florida, whose quiet life is disturbed by villains. According to Janet Maslin in the New York Times: “This film calls for deep reserves of backbone from its terse hero, and Fonda supplies them with supreme dignity and grace.” However, Fonda could never win. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “Had he made such a film during Henry Fonda’s life, it would have been about as welcome as Frank Sinatra Jr singing My Way. But time has passed … We look at the screen and there’s Peter, wearing little round glasses and doing a Henry gesture: he looks up, winces a little, smiles a little, and looks shy, dignified and quiet. That’s when we realise we’ve been missing Henry Fonda all this time and just didn’t know it.”Advertisement
Ulee’s Gold all but buried the emblematic hippy rebel, resurrecting him as a man of sobriety and responsibility. However, there was still nostalgia in Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey (1999), in which Fonda portrayed a wealthy, super-sleek record producer whom Terence Stamp (another 60s icon) believes had a hand in killing his daughter. This nostalgia is underscored by Fonda saying: “Did you ever dream about a place you never really recall being to before? A place that maybe only exists in your imagination? Some place far away, half-remembered when you wake up. When you were there, though, you knew the language. You knew your way around. That was the 60s.”
Thereafter Fonda seemed content to slip down the credits in supporting roles in dispensable movies. Some of his better late roles were as an orange-eyed Mephistopheles who makes a Faustian deal with a motorcycle stuntman (Nicolas Cage) in Ghost Rider, and as an unscrupulous bounty hunter in 3:10 to Yuma (both 2007).
Fonda made appearances in several horror movies, among them The Harvest, as a well-meaning grandfather, and House of Bodies (both 2013), as a serial killer. In The Runner (2015), a political drama about the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill – a subject close to Fonda’s heart – he played an ex-politician whose career was ruined by booze. Unfortunately, in one of his better movies, the old-fashioned western The Ballad of Lefty Brown (2017), Fonda doesn’t survive very long.
He is survived by his third wife, Parky (Margaret) DeVogelaere, whom he married in 2011, and by his children, Bridget, an actor until her retirement in 2002, and Justin, from his first marriage, to Susan Brewer.
• Peter Henry Fonda, actor, born 23 February 1940; died 16 August 2019
“Gene Tierney was as sleek and as beautiful as a lynx – a shade warmer perhaps, but nowhere near as agile. Once she emerged from the miscasting which almost wrecked her career at the outset, she was neither very good or very bad. She was simply there on the screen – which when you come to look at her, was not at all a bad place for her to be” – David Shipman – “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years” (1972)
Gene Tierney was one of the most beautiful actresses of Hollywood movies of the 1940’s. She was born in 1920 in New York. She made her stage debut on Broadway in 1838 in “What A Life”. In 1940 she won a contract for movies with 20th Century Fox and came West. Her debut was in “The Return of Frank James” opposite Henry Fonda, a well regarded Western. She made a number of film classics including “Laura” in 1944, “The Ghost and Mrs Muir” and magnificant “Leave Her to Heaven” with Jeanne Crain. Her film career tapered off in the 1960’s although she made occasional television appearances including “Scruples” in 1980. She died in 1991.
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TCM Overview:
When Paramount Pictures fumbled Gene Tierney’s proposed film debut in its aborted adaptation of “National Velvet,” 20th Century Fox saw promise in the gimlet-eyed beauty with the regal cheekbones and curiously beguiling overbite. Honing her craft under extreme conditions – she brooked the tempers of such autocratic émigrés as Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch and Otto Preminger – Tierney emerged as a leading lady of equal beauty and depth. Gliding seamlessly from smoldering sensuality in Preminger’s “Laura” (1944), to sang froid psychopathy in John M. Stahl’s “Leave Her to Heaven” (1945), to a maturity and grace far beyond her years in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” (1947), Tierney attained a strata of celebrity that put her on par with fellow sirens Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner and Ava Gardner. Her personal life was no less dramatic, punctuated by a controversial marriage to designer Oleg Cassini, the traumatic birth of her first child, whose severe mental retardation resulted in lifelong institutionalization, love affairs with several leading men and a future U.S. president, and a devastating bipolar disorder that effectively quashed her career. Tierney’s 1979 memoirs laid bare the devastation wrought by her inner demons while allowing the troubled actress to emerge on the far side of her troubles at some measure of peace with her legacy as “the most beautiful woman in film history.”
Gene Eliza Tierney was born on Nov. 19, 1920, in Brooklyn, NY. The second of three children of insurance broker Howard Sherwood Tierney and the former Belle Lavina Taylor, Tierney was named after a maternal uncle who had died from diabetes at age 17. When Tierney was five, the family traded Brooklyn for a modest country home in Green’s Farms, CT. Over the years, Howard Tierney would buy up increasing amounts of the surrounding land, ultimately building a more ostentatious family manor in the meadow across the street and filling it with servants and a German nanny for his three children. Educated first at the all girls’ St. Margaret’s School in Waterbury, which her mother had attended as a child, Tierney continued her studies at the arts-centered Unquowa School in Fairfield. A budding poet, she had her first works published in the school newspaper and played Jo in a student production of “Little Women.” At her own insistence, Tierney was packed off to finishing school in Switzerland, to the Brillantmont International School in Lausanne.
At Brillantmont, Tierney spoke only French and spent Christmas holidays with fellow students in England and Norway. Returning to the United States a more mature, albeit pudgier young woman, Tierney topped off her education at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, where the rigorous academic and athletic regime helped her shave 20 pounds off of her 5′ 4″ frame. Upon graduation in 1938, Tierney was sent with her mother and siblings on vacation to California. Through a connection at Warner Brothers, Howard Tierney got his family onto the lot to watch the shooting of “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex” (1939) and meet with star Bette Davis. According to the legend, director Anatole Litvak spotted Tierney on the sidelines and exclaimed “Young woman, you ought to be in pictures!” Her screen test was scheduled for the next day, at which time she was asked to read a Dorothy Parker monologue. That evening, she was offered a studio contract.
Feeling that his underage daughter would be better served by returning home to make her society debut, Howard Tierney called his daughter back to Connecticut. She had her coming out party at the Fairfield Country Club in September 1938, in a dress copied from one Bette Davis wore in “Jezebel” (1938). Despite this concession to propriety, Tierney had no interest in the life of a debutante. If Hollywood was denied her, she would try her luck on Broadway. Success was not immediately forthcoming and she was offered more jobs as a model than as an actress. Between assignments, Tierney studied acting with Broadway director Benno Schneider while becoming a protégée of esteemed producer-director George Abbott. Abbott gave the newcomer a walk-on in his production of “What a Life!” in 1938 and hired her as an understudy for “Primrose Path” the following year. Tierney made her Broadway debut for Abbott in “Miss O’Brien Entertains” at the Lyceum Theater in February 1939.
Graced with gimlet green eyes, imperious cheekbones, and a pronounced overbite that often made her closed lips appear to be in perpetual pucker, Tierney’s beauty never failed to attract critical attention no matter how small the role, prompting The New York Herald Tribune to suggest that she had a bright future in theatre unless she were kidnapped for pictures. That very thing occurred when Tierney was offered a limited contract by Paramount. Having acquired rights to Enid Bagnold’s 1933 novel National Velvet, the studio thought Tierney a perfect fit to play an English schoolgirl who poses as a male jockey to enter the Grand National Steeplechase. When Paramount passed the property to MGM – who made it in 1944 with a 12 year-old Elizabeth Taylor – Tierney returned to Broadway, scoring a critical coup in the James Thurber-Elliot Nugent comedy “The Male Animal.” During the play’s seven month run, Tierney was photographed by Vogue, Life and Colliers Weekly, which caught the eye of 20th Century Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck. He was quick to offer an exclusive contract to Tierney, whom he would later characterize as “unquestionably the most beautiful woman in movie history.”
Tierney made her film debut for Fox in “The Return of Frank James” (1940), directed by German émigré Fritz Lang. The autocratic Lang clashed mightily on set with stars Henry Fonda and Jackie Cooper and spared Tierney little of his trademark ire. To her credit, Tierney took Lang’s often cruel criticisms to heart, gleaning from his insults pearls of practical advice for film acting. With the success of the Lang picture, additional roles followed for Tierney, who was paired with Paul Muni in Irving Pichel’s historic drama “Hudson’s Bay” (1941) and joined the ensemble cast of John Ford’s “Tobacco Road” (1941), the studio’s highly-anticipated adaptation of the novel by Erskine Caldwell. Just as “Tobacco Road” had been Fox’s bid to capitalize on the success of Ford’s “The Grapes of Wrath” (1939), so the popularity of “Gone with the Wind” (1939), which Selznick had produced with MGM, was channeled into another Technicolor costumer. Tierney received star billing for playing “Belle Starr” (1941), a highly sanitized take on the short life and troubled times of the Wild West outlaw.
Despite starring in her first Hollywood film, Tierney was still considered a minor in the eyes of the law. Though her parents had by this point separated, Howard and Belle Tierney continued to exert influence over their daughter’s career, for which they had set up the Belle-Tier Corporation. With her self-confidence undermined by her parents’ rapidly dissolving marriage, Tierney suffered from a host of anxiety-related gastrointestinal ailments and an ocular disability that held up production of “Belle Starr.” During her convalescence, she sought refuge in the arms of boyfriend Oleg Cassini, the Paris-born son of an Italian countess and Edith Head’s assistant in the Paramount costume department. In June 1941, Tierney and Cassini flew to Las Vegas to be married in a civil ceremony. The controversial marriage worsened Tierney’s relationship with her parents while alarming Hollywood executives to the degree that Cassini was fired by Paramount. Tierney also discovered that her father has siphoned off her Hollywood earnings via the Bel-Tier Corporation.
At this point in her career, Tierney could at least count on a wealth of work offers. In addition, the appreciation of her Hollywood stock enabled her to retain Cassini as her personal costumer. She was given a plum role in Ernst Lubitsch’s Technicolor comedy “Heaven Can Wait” (1943), as doomed rogue Don Ameche’s long suffering wife. Tierney locked antlers often with Lubitsch during production while also attempting to conceal from her coworkers the fact that she was pregnant. The joy to which Tierney and Cassini (then fulfilling his wartime military service with the United States Army at Fort Riley in Kansas) looked forward was cruelly dashed when the actress contracted rubella after making an appearance at The Hollywood Canteen. Their first child, daughter Antoinette Daria Cassini, was born two months prematurely and suffered from severe mental retardation, ultimately requiring lifelong institutionalization. She would later learn that it was her own stardom that impacted the child’s health when a fan later told her she had broken quarantine for rubella to meet her at the Canteen. The tragedy caused a strain on the Tierney-Cassini marriage, leading to a separation. The pair reconciled and their second child, Tina, was born without complications in 1948.
Tierney was kept out of the picture for most of Otto Preminger’s seminal film noir “Laura” (1944), in the role of a presumed murder victim whose haunting portrait inspires detective Dana Andrews to track down her killer. A multiple Academy Award nominee (and Oscar winner for Best Black & White Cinematography), “Laura” urged Tierney on to a larger role in an even darker psychological thriller. As the femme fatale of “Leave Her to Heaven” (1945), Tierney was nominated for an Academy Award as an icy beauty so venal she allows a handicapped boy to drown so that she might maintain an emotional stranglehold on leading man Cornel Wilde. The film was Fox’s most successful of the decade and marked Tierney’s entre to the A-list while also securing her a measure of cult notoriety on par with Barbara Stanwyck in “Double Indemnity” (1944), Rita Hayworth in “Gilda” (1946) and Lana Turner in “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1946). While filming “Dragonwyck” (1946) during her separation from Cassini, Tierney enjoyed a dalliance with war hero John F. Kennedy, then pointed towards a brilliant political career.
Persuasive as a spoiled rich girl who cannot share Tyrone Power’s spiritual interests in “The Razor’s Edge” (1946), Tierney offered moviegoers a dramatic about-face in her next film, as the widowed heroine of Mankiewicz’s “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” (1947). Tierney’s heartfelt performance as a single mother who accepts companionship and a second chance at love from spectral sea captain Rex Harrison, was a hit with moviegoers. She reteamed with Otto Preminger for the thrillers “Whirlpool” (1949) and “Where the Sidewalk Ends” (1950), and traveled to England for a choice role opposite Richard Widmark in blacklisted director Jules Dassin’s “Night and the City” (1950). On loan to other studios, Tierney showed a lighter side in the Paramount screwball comedy “The Mating Season” (1951) while playing it straight in the adoption drama Close to My Heart” (1951), with Ray Milland. Divorced from Oleg Cassini in 1952, she had relationships with Spencer Tracy while shooting “Plymouth Adventure” (1952) and with Clark Gable between takes on “Never Let Me Go” (1953).
Due in large part to the guilt and sadness related to her daughter’s institutionalization, Tierney began to suffer from an undiagnosed bipolar disorder which took a toll on her work. She excused herself from John Ford’s “Mogambo” (1953), for which she was replaced by Grace Kelly, and sought psychiatric help after wrapping Edward Dmytryk’s “The Left Hand of God” (1955). Tierney’s treatments would drag on for years, comprising nearly 30 sessions of shock therapy and days wrapped in icy sheets to control her wild mood swings. Released from one East Coast clinic, Tierney’s suicidal ideations drove her to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, KS. During a hiatus from treatment, she worked briefly as a store clerk in at Talmage’s Ladies Apparel Shop in nearby Westboro, until the press got wind of her situation and forced Tierney to go public with her humbling personal history. In 1958, Tierney met Texas oilman Howard Lee, then the estranged husband of actress Hedy Lamarr. Tierney and Lee married in 1960 and settled in Houston, where the former actress wrote a newspaper column and became an expert at contract bridge.
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By Richard Harland Smith
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Editorial use only. No book cover usage.
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Mgm/Kobal/Shutterstock (5871066d)
Spencer Tracy, Gene Tierney, Van Johnson, Leo Genn, Dawn Addams
Plymouth Adventure – 1952
Director: Clarence Brown
MGM
USA
Lobby Card/PosterHenry Fonda is grabbed by Gene Tierney in movie art for the film ‘Rings On Her Fingers’, 1942. (Photo by 20th Century-Fox/Getty Images)
Despite her self-imposed exile in Texas, Tierney received work offers from Hollywood, prompting her to mull a comeback. She tested the waters by appearing in a November 1960 broadcast of “General Electric Theater” (CBS, 1953-1962), during which time she discovered that she was again pregnant. Slated to appear in Fox’s “Return to Peyton Place” (1961), she withdrew from the production after suffering a miscarriage. She contributed a small role as the catty Washington mistress of Senate Majority Leader Walter Pidgeon in Otto Preminger’s “Advise and Consent” (1962) and appeared as Dean Martin’s domineering mother-in-law in “Toys in the Attic” (1963), George Roy Hill’s film adaptation of the stage play by Lillian Hellman. She made her final feature film appearance in “The Pleasure Seekers” (1963), opposite Ann-Margret and Brian Keith. At the distance of several years, she returned to television in “Daughter of the Mind” (1969), reuniting with old co-star Ray Milland in the chilling tale of a scientist haunted by the specter of his long-dead daughter.
In 1979, Tierney published her memoirs, detailing her cherished childhood memories, her schoolgirl years abroad, her triumphs on Broadway and in Hollywood, and the nightmare years of her descent into mental illness. Lured out of retirement yet again, she signed on to play lesbian magazine publisher Harriet Toppingham in the CBS miniseries “Scruples” (1980), based on the best-selling novel by Judith Krantz. The following year, Howard Lee died. Tierney remained in Houston for the next decade, during which time she was diagnosed with emphysema, which she developed from a lifelong cigarette habit adopted in Hollywood as a means of lowering the timbre of her speaking voice. Gene Tierney died on Nov. 6, 1991, two weeks shy of what would have been her 71st birthday
Jackie Cooper was born in 1922 in Los Angeles. He was one of the leading child actors in Hollywood in the 1930’s. He starred in the “Our Gang” series and in 1931 signed a contract with MGM. He starred opposite Wallace Beery in a series of movies including the well-regarded tearkerker “The Champ”. Among his other films was “Life with Henry” in 1941. He became a well-respected television direcor who acted on occasion. In the late 1970’s he played Perry White in the ‘Superman@ films. He died in 2011.
Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:
Jackie Cooper, who has died aged 88, was the first child star of the talkies, paving the way for Freddie Bartholomew, Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney. While they could turn on the waterworks when called for, Cooper beat them all easily at the crying game. Little Jackie, from the age of eight until his early teens, blubbed his way effectively through a number of tearjerkers. Sometimes he would try to suppress his tears, pouting and saying, “Ah, shucks! Ah, shucks!” As a critic wrote in 1934: “Jackie Cooper’s tear ducts, having been more or less in abeyance for the past few months, have been opened up to provide an autumn freshet in Peck’s Bad Boy.”
Cooper had started off in the movies billed as “the little tough guy” in eight of Hal Roach’s Our Gang comedy shorts. He was a manly little fellow and complained to his mother when, during the shooting of the fight scene in Dinky (1935), the other children were warned to be careful not to hurt him. “I don’t want fellows like these to treat me like a sissy!” he said.
The sobbing all began with Skippy (1931), based on a popular comic strip, for which Cooper was Oscar-nominated (aged nine and still the youngest best actor nominee) in his first starring role. When he refused to do a crying scene on the set, the film’s director, Norman Taurog, who was also his uncle, threatened to shoot Jackie’s dog. (The title of Cooper’s 1981 autobiography was Please Don’t Shoot My Dog.)
“Later, people tried to rationalise to me that I had gained more than I lost by being a child star,” Cooper wrote. “They talked to me about the money I made. They cited the exciting things I had done, the people I had met, the career training I had had, all that and much more … But no amount of rationalisation, no excuses, can make up for what a kid loses – what I lost – when a normal childhood is abandoned for an early movie career.”
He was born John Cooper Jr into a movie family in Los Angeles. His father, John, was a studio production manager who walked out on his family when Jackie was two. His mother, Mabel, was a picture palace pianist. Jackie started in show business at the age of three, appearing as an extra with his grandmother, who used to tote him along while looking for film work.
In 1931 Cooper made the three films that launched his career. Skippy told of the adventures of two friends, Cooper, in the title role, and Bobby Coogan (younger brother of Jackie “the Kid” Coogan) as Sooky, from different sides of the tracks. Both gave entirely natural performances, and a sequel almost as popular, called Sooky, also directed by Taurog, followed.
King Vidor’s The Champ was a touching tale of an ex-champion prizefighter (Wallace Beery) and his small son (Cooper) trying to scrape a living in Tijuana, Mexico. Beery is addicted to gambling and drink, but in the eyes of his hero-worshipping son, he’s still “Champ”. Despite warnings from his doctor about his heart, he wins a comeback fight, but the terrible beating he has taken in the process causes him to collapse and die in the dressing room, in the arms of his weeping son.
Cooper was the antithesis of the grizzled, good-bad ugly guy Beery, yet the chemistry between them was remarkable. Cooper would relate years later that Beery off-camera was a disagreeable man. Cooper remembers that he once impulsively threw his arms around Beery after an especially well-played tender scene and that the gruff Beery pushed him away. Cooper produced genuine tears.
The duo would make three further films together. In Raoul Walsh’s rousing The Bowery (1933) and the sentimental O’Shaughnessy’s Boy (1935), the oafish Beery tries to win Cooper’s affection. However, the film that Cooper was justifiably most proud of was Treasure Island (1934), in which both he, as Jim Hawkins, and Beery, as Long John Silver, were excellent.
The Devil Is a Sissy (1936) starred MGM’s three top child actors: prissy Bartholomew, a hit in the title roles of David Copperfield and Little Lord Fauntleroy; lachrymose Cooper; and the up-and-coming, pugnacious Rooney. “The studio used to threaten my mother with Bartholomew, and even me,” Cooper commented in adulthood. “They’d say, ‘Now, if you’re not better in this today, we’re going to get Freddie Bartholomew.’ They set up this kind of competition, which isn’t nice.”
By 1936, despite his popularity, Cooper had reached his teens, and MGM decided not to renew his contract. After leaving the glossiest of Hollywood studios, he went to Monogram, the poorest, for an atmospheric programmer called Boy of the Streets (1937). He continued to be active playing teenagers for the next six years, appearing mostly in B-movies, with a few exceptions: That Certain Age (1938), as Deanna Durbin’s young beau, and in Ziegfeld Girl (1941), as Lana Turner’s brother. In Glamour Boy (1941), Cooper played an ex-child star who suggests the studio remake Skippy, the film that made him famous, with a new kiddie.
When America entered the second world war, Cooper served in the US navy with the rank of captain. After the war, he found little work in Hollywood and moved to television, having overcome a drinking problem. There were a couple of notable TV series: The People’s Choice (1955-58), a sitcom in which he had a basset hound whose thoughts were given voice for the audience; and Hennesey (1959-62), in which Cooper was a naval doctor at a US military base.
Cooper returned to the big screen after 13 years in an inane comedy, Everything’s Ducky (1961), with Rooney and a talking duck. But most of his time was taken up as an executive producer for Screen Gems, the TV subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, where he worked on the sitcoms Bewitched, The Donna Reed Show and Hazel.
In 1972 Cooper directed his only feature film, Stand Up and Be Counted, starring Jacqueline Bisset. Touted as the first American film about women’s lib, it received tepid reviews – such as one in the New York Times claiming that “it erratically skips between comedy and serious causes, with somewhat less than impressive impact either way”. More rewardingly, Cooper was busy directing numerous TV shows, and won Emmy awards for episodes of M*A*S*H (1974) and The White Shadow (1979).
More than four decades after he had been the biggest little star around, Cooper found himself in the full spotlight again when he was cast as the tough-talking, cigar-chomping Perry White, editor-in-chief of the Daily Planet, in four Superman films (1978-87). Cooper got the nod after the original choice, Keenan Wynn, had to drop out while on the set in London, due to heart problems.
Cooper was married three times and had four children, of whom his two sons, John and Russell, survive him. None of them went into show business, on the wishes of their father. “It’s no way for a kid to grow up,” Cooper explained.
• Jackie (John) Cooper, actor and director, born 15 September 1922; died 3 May 2011
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Cornelia Sharpe was born in 1943 in Selma, Alabama. For a time in the 1970’s she had some leading roles in major movies opposite such famous actors as Al Pacino in “Serpico” in 1932 and Sean Connery in “The Next Man” in 1976.
IMDB entry:
Cornelia Sharpe was born on October 18, 1943 in Selma, Alabama, USA. She is an actress, known for Serpico (1973), The Next Man (1976) and S+H+E: Security Hazards Expert (1980). She has been married to Martin Bregman since 1981. They have one child. Former fashion model. Her father is Warner Jack Sharpe, Jr., a dental supplier and her mother is Evelyn Horne Sharpe, a dental assistant and secretary. She was raised in Jacksonville, Florida and graduated from Robert E Lee High School in Jacksonville in 1961. Her daughter with husband Martin Bregman Marissa Cornelia Bregman was born in 1982. Mother of Marissa Bregman. Stepmother of Michael Bregman and Christopher Bregman.
