Gaunt, wiry, prolific supporting player with a piercing stare, familiar from the hundreds of films in which he played mean or menacing characters in the course of a seven-decade career. After appearing on the Broadway stage, Wolfe made his film debut in his late 30s and, already balding, quickly won notice as Captain Bligh’s cruel storekeeper and stool pigeon Maggs in “Mutiny in the Bounty” (1935). Wolfe went on to make more than 150 film appearances, often playing English or clerical characters, in films including the horror comedy “Homebodies” (1974, a starring role); Mike Nichols’ “The Fortune” (1975, as the dithery old justice of the peace); “Creator” (1985); “Checking Out” (1988); and “Dick Tracy” (1990). Wolfe also played Wizard Tranquil on the 1983 TV series, “Wizards and Warriors”.
Betty Grable, the Force’s Sweetheart was born in 1916 in St. Louis, Missouri. She was a supporting player in Hollywood films of the 1930’s bu came into her own in the early 1940’s in a series of 20th Century Fox musicals including “Down Argentine Way”, “Tin Pan Alley” and in 1941, “Moon Over Miami”. She starred with Victor Mature in the film noir “I Wake Up Screaming”. She was one of the most popular of stars during World War Two. Her film career lasted until the 1950;s when she made “How to Marry A Millionaire” with the up and coming repacement Marilyn Monroe. Betty Grable continued her career on the stage and in supper clubs. She died in 1973.
TCM Overview:
The biggest box office star of the 1940s and the most desired WWII pin-up girl, acting-singing-dancing triple-threat Betty Grable became the stuff of Hollywood legend after her studio reportedly insured her famously gorgeous legs for $1 million with Lloyd’s of London – the same legs that were captured in one of the most iconic photographic images of the 20th century. After a decade of toiling with minor roles in dozens of films, Grable rose to fame with the musical “Down Argentine Way” (1940). From there it was on to a string of hits alongside leading men that included Victor Mature, Cesar Romero and Dan Dailey in such films as “I Wake Up Screaming” (1941), “Coney Island” (1943) and “Mother Wore Tights” (1947), respectively. So desired was the bubbly blonde that bandleader Harry James became the most envied man in America when he famously wed the pin-up queen in 1943. Grable single-handedly caused Twentieth Century stock to soar for a solid decade before the girl-next-door’s Technicolor reign began to wind down. Even as the sun was setting on Grable’s movie career by the early 1950s – as had her desire to continue to make movies – she enjoyed one final hit as she passed the torch to her successor and fellow Fox contract player, Marilyn Monroe, in “How to Marry a Millionaire” (1953). Grable gracefully retired from film two years later and enjoyed a brief run in a hugely successful Broadway mounting of “Hello, Dolly!” in 1967 before her untimely passing six years later. While some of the films in her incredibly prolific canon may not have stood the test of time, there was no denying the joy Betty Grable brought to many fans, both at home and abroad, during that pivotal decade in American history.
Born Elizabeth Ruth Grable on Dec. 18, 1916 in St. Louis, MO, she was the youngest of three children born to parents Lillian Rose Hofmann and John C. Grable. Having set her sights on stardom for young “Betty” early on, formidable stage mom Lillian enrolled her daughter in ballet and dance lessons at the age of three. Ten years later, Lillian took Betty out West in search of fame, soon securing her 13-year-old a job as chorus girl in the musical “Happy Days” (1929). Being a minstrel show, the blackface Betty wore in her film debut helped to cover her age. However, after a forged identification card was discovered by the producers of her next film, Betty was let go. In a further effort to mask her underage daughter’s youth, the wily Lillian dyed Grable’s brown hair a striking platinum blonde. It was a signature look the entertainer would maintain throughout her entire career. Soon, more jobs came her way, with work as a Goldwyn Girl for producer Samuel Goldwyn in the Eddie Cantor Western musical “Whoopee!” (1930) – in which she led the film’s opening number “Cowboys” – and “Kiki” (1931), starring former silent film star Mary Pickford. After being assigned the stage name of Francis Dean, Grable went on to sing and dance in a series of short projects that included “Crashing Hollywood” (1931) and “The Greeks Had a Word for Them” (1932).
Grable at last appeared under her own name with a small role in the film “Probation” (1932), and continued to appear in small roles for various studios in such projects as “What Price Innocence?” (1933) and the Academy Award-winning Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical “The Gay Divorcee” (1934). Broad acclaim and recognition eluded her, however, and during a period in which she continued to toil away with small roles in unremarkable productions, a 21-year-old Grable married former child star Jackie Coogan. Fortune smiled on the young actress, who at the time was considering an early retirement from show business, when her role in the 1939 Broadway production of Cole Porter’s “Du Barry Was a Lady” brought Grable the acclaim she had doggedly pursued for so long. After the short-lived marriage to Coogan – with who she appeared in the aptly-titled “Million Dollar Legs” (1939) – ended in 1940, the actress’ disappointment was counterbalanced by a leading role in “Down Argentine Way” (1940). A Technicolor musical extravaganza co-starring Don Ameche and Carmen Miranda, it became a smash hit and turned Grable into a bona fide movie star. Musical comedies like “Tin Pan Alley” (1940) and “Moon Over Miami” (1941) capitalized on her success, while projects such as the noir “I Wake Up Screaming” (1941) gave her the rare opportunity to tackle dramatic material.
Over the following decade, Grable became the top female star of the 1940s – and third overall, behind Bing Cosby and Bob Hope – in films that accentuated her hard-earned ability and fan appeal. “Song of the Islands” (1942), “Springtime in the Rockies” (1942) and, of course, “Pin Up Girl” (1944) capitalized on the star’s iconic status as a photo favorite of millions of servicemen during the Second World War. It was during her reign that Grable posed for her famous bathing suit pin-up photo, which was taken by studio photographer Frank Powolny in 1943. It was later rumored that the particular pose and angle from behind were chosen to hide the fact that Grable was pregnant at the time by the most “envied man in America.” That same year, she married for a second time to popular bandleader and trumpeter Harry James. Although this union would last for a substantial 22 years and produce two children, it was, by all accounts a marriage fraught with strife and infidelities.
Even in peacetime, Grable’s success continued apace, with popular fare such as “Mother Wore Tights” (1947) – featuring her favorite co-star, Dan Dailey – “That Lady in Ermine” (1948) and “My Blue Heaven” (1950). Despite having fallen off the box office exhibitors list for the first time in 10 years two years earlier, Grable was still more than capable of holding her own on screen opposite cinema sirens Marilyn Monroe and Lauren Bacall in “How to Marry a Millionaire” (1953). As her once irresistible box office draw began to wane, so too did Grable’s relationship with studio executives at 20th Century Fox, and by the mid-1950s she began a transition to television and stage work. Her final big screen appearance came in the form of the forgettable crime comedy “How to Be Very, Very Popular” (1955), a film most notable as being the picture Marilyn Monroe refused to take part in. It also gave Grable the excuse to retire from movies. She would go on to make a smattering of appearances on television programs such as “Star Stage” (NBC, 1955-56), and in 1967 took over for Carol Channing in the long-running hit Broadway musical “Hello, Dolly!” Having divorced from James in 1965 after years of heavy drinking, gambling and infidelity on both their parts, Grable entered into a relationship with Bob Remick, a dancer several years her junior. Although never married, the two remained together until Grable’s death from lung cancer in 1973 at the age of 56.
George Grizzard was born in North Carolina in 1928. He won critical acclaim for his performance in the political drama “Advise & Consent” in 1962. Other films include “From the Terrace” and “Comes A Horseman”. He died in 2007.
Tom Vallance’s “Independent” obituary:
The actor George Grizzard made more than 40 films and countless television appearances, but it was in the theatre that he had his greatest triumphs. He created the role of Nick, the young newlywed academic who finds himself and his wife subject to an evening of malicious teasing by an older couple, in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), which heralded a particular association with the playwright.
The dapper, personable Grizzard was praised for his ability to switch moods swiftly and orchestrate the emotional climaxes characteristic of Albee’s work. He won a Tony award as best actor for his performance in the 1996 revival of Albee’s A Delicate Balance, in which he, his wife (Rosemary Harris) and his heavy-drinking sister-in-law (Elaine Stritch) find their home invaded by two married friends fleeing an unidentified terror. In 2005 Grizzard starred with Frances Sternhagen in a revival of Albee’s Seascape, in which a married couple find their peaceful beach-side abode disrupted by the arrival of two inquisitive amphibians.
On screen, he had what was arguably his finest movie role in Otto Preminger’s superb study of American politics, Advise and Consent (1962), and on television he had an intermittently recurring role for several seasons as Arthur Gold, a defence attorney, in the crime series Law and Order.
The son of an accountant, George Cooper Grizzard was born in North Carolina in 1928, and acquired a BA degree at the University of North Carolina. He had his first taste of theatre in 1945 when he played a miner in Emlyn Williams’s The Corn is Green at the Crossroads Theatre in Virginia, but he was working at an advertising agency in Washington when he decided to audition for the city’s newly established Arena Stage company. He later explained his urge to act, stating: “I was an only child and probably very lonely. I made up children to play with . . . I guess that kind of developed into wanting to create people.”
After studying with Sanford Meisner in New York, he returned to the Arena, then made his Broadway dbut in The Desperate Hours (1955), Joseph Hayes’ tense thriller about a family imprisoned in their home and terrorised by escaped convicts. Grizzard was one of the convicts, with Paul Newman playing his older brother. “When we were on stage together, he was the best thing around,” Newman said. He then played the juvenile lead in another hit play, The Happiest Millionaire (1956), Kyle Chrichton’s light-hearted look at the life of the eccentric millionaire Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, played by Walter Pidgeon.
Grizzard received his first Tony nomination (as best featured actor) for his performance in The Disenchanted (1958), based on Budd Schulberg’s biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he received a second nomination in 1961 for his work in Hugh Wheeler’s wry comedy, Big Fish, Little Fish. The following year he was cast in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a four-character play set on a college campus, which caused a sensation with its lacerating barrage of invective, cursing and emotional game-playing. Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill starred as the unhappy, battling spouses, browbeaten history professor George and Martha, daughter of the university’s president, with Grizzard and Melinda Dillon as Nick and Honey, a couple new to the campus, who find themselves cast as foils in the older couple’s sparring and baiting.
Grizzard won praise as a self-confessed ladies’ man who admits that he was trapped into marriage with his mousy wife. Three months into the sell-out run of the play, however, he withdrew, stating that he thought the play “brilliant on so many levels”, but he found the role of Nick a trying one to sustain. “That’s the guy Edward wanted destroyed, and he did a pretty good job of doing just that,” he recalled. “And the audience, every time George and Martha stuck another knife in, they laughed and clapped.”
What lured him away was the possibility of playing Hamlet in a modern-dress production being planned by Tyrone Guthrie at his new theatre in Minneapolis. Grizzard successfully auditioned for the part, and stayed at the Guthrie Theater for two years.
He returned to Broadway to give a moving performance as Tom in a revival of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1965), and he was winningly brash as a young play director Bernie Dodd in a revival of Clifford Odets’ The Country Girl (1972), repeating the role in a television movie version in 1974. He was a somewhat petulant King Edward VIII in the unsuccessful Broadway production of Crown Matrimonial (1973), Royce Ryton’s account of the royal family’s private drama in the days leading up to Edward’s abdication, but he gave a sparkling performance in Ellis Rabb’s hit revival of George Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s satire on the Barrymore clan, The Royal Family (1975). As Tony Cavendish, the heavy-drinking, womanising actor (based on John Barrymore) he was flamboyantly charismatic, and his byplay with co-stars Eva Le Gallienne and Rosemary Harris was a joy to see and hear.
He worked extensively in regional theatres, in such plays as A Life in the Theatre, A Touch of the Poet, and Tonight at 8.30, and in 1996 he finally won a Tony Award, for A Delicate Balance. London audiences saw him briefly in 1998 when a revival of Show Boat (in which he was Cap’* Andy) had a disappointingly short run at the Prince Edward Theatre. The critic Michael Billington, praising Grizzard’s “effortless timing,” concluded: “It is, in fact, Grizzard’s performance that holds this exuberant, three-hour spectacle together.”
Grizzard made his film dbut with a role in From the Terrace (1960), starring his old friend Newman, then made an indelible impression in Advise and Consent (even when up against such scene-stealers as Henry Fonda and Charles Laughton) as the ruthless, power-seeking senator who blackmails a young politician (Don Murray) about his homosexual past. He appeared in Buzz Kulik’s lively thriller Warning Shot (1967), as an airline pilot who secretly ferries drugs, and in Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks (2000). His last screen role was in Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006), in which he was John “Doc” Bradley, an old man haunted by memories of his younger self (played by Ryan Phillippe) fighting in the battle of Iwo Jima.
On television Grizzard won an Emmy for his supporting role in The Oldest Living Graduate (1980), which starred Henry Fonda, and over a period of eight years he played Arthur Gold in several episodes of Law and Order (1992-2000). In one of the finest segments of the cult series The Twilight Zone, titled “In His Image” (1963), Grizzard gave a tour de force performance in a dual role as a shy, lonely and bitter man and the suave, intelligent and personable robot he has made in his image in the split-screen sequences featuring both men, Grizzard presents two totally different personalities, each equally convincing.
Grizzard played Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Kennedy Center in 2004. He was a long-time resident of New York, where he lived with his companion William Tynan, and his last Broadway play was Paul Rudnick’s comedy Regrets Only (2006), in which he played a fashion designer campaigning for gay rights.
Tom Vallance
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Janet Munro star shone brightly but sadly all to briefly. For a period in the late 1950’s until the very early 1960’s she starred in some very popular and then interesting movies.
She was born in Blackpool in 1934. In 1958 she had a leading role in “The Young and the Guilty” opposite Andrew Ray.
Shortly afterwards she went to Hollywood where she signed a Walt Disney contract and starred opposite Sean Connery in “Darby O’Gill and the Little People” and opposite James MacArthur in both “Swiss Family Robinson” and “Third Man on the Mountain”.
She was leading lady to Tommy Steele in “Tommy the Toredor”, John Stride in “Bitter Harvest” and opposite Edward Judd in the cult classic “The Day the Earth Caught Fire”.
Her film career fizzled out somewhat afterwards and she died at a young age in 1972. She was married to actor Tony Wright and then Ian Hendry who survived her
There has seldom been more closeness between an acting career and a lifestyle than that of Dina Merrill, who has died aged 93. As an heiress, socialite and philanthropist, Merrill had little trouble portraying upper-crust women in films and television.
Her patrician allure led her to be proclaimed “Hollywood’s new Grace Kelly” in 1959. Alas, Merrill was seldom given the chance to shine as much as the star who became a princess. Nevertheless, she had a long career in films from the mid-50s to the mid-60s, and appeared regularly on television from 1955.
Perhaps she was best known on the big screen as Tony Curtis’s love interest in Blake Edwards’ Operation Petticoat (1959). The action comedy starred Cary Grant, who had been married to Merrill’s cousin, the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton. Almost as celebrated was her role as the love rival of Elizabeth Taylor’s character in Butterfield 8 (1960). Despite having won the best actress Oscar for her role, Taylor herself referred to the melodrama as “a piece of shit”. Merrill, who often brought class to tawdry material, was far too ladylike to use such language.
She was born Nedenia Marjorie Hutton in New York City, the only child of Marjorie Merriweather Post (owner of the Post cereal firm, which became General Foods) and her second husband, the Wall Street stockbroker EF Hutton.
Post built the Palm Beach estate Mar-a-Lago a few years before her daughter’s birth, and it was where the family would spend the winter until Post’s death.
The estate was bought by Donald Trump in 1985 after the National Park Service, to which Post left the property, could no longer afford its upkeep.
“Deenie” attended George Washington University, in Washington, DC, for one term, then dropped out and enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. “Of course my parents’ eyebrows shot up when I said I wanted to be an actress. And I guess they said, really between themselves, ‘Let the dear girl try, and fall on her face.’ Because it never occurred to me to ask my father or mother to pay for something they didn’t believe in, I did some modelling while acting off-Broadway.”
Adopting a stage name borrowed from Charles Merrill of Merrill Lynch, a well-known stockbroker like her father, she made her Broadway debut (with three lines) as Dina Merrill in John Van Druten’s play The Mermaids Singing in 1945. She made her feature film debut in Desk Set (1957), as the assistant to a librarian (Katharine Hepburn), one of the staff afraid of losing her job to two giant computers brought in by an efficiency expert (Spencer Tracy). She then brought some dignity to Don’t Give Up the Ship (1959), an asinine comedy in which she co-starred with Jerry Lewis, helping him search for a destroyer he lost during the second world war.
In the same year, Merrill was one of a group of stranded army nurses rescued (reluctantly) by a US submarine captain (Grant) during the second world war in Operation Petticoat. Her presence distracts one of his officers (Curtis) from his duties as he persuades her to let off steam – signified by a whistling kettle after they kiss.
Merrill exuded elegance in the thankless role of the wife of a wealthy businessman (Laurence Harvey) in Butterfield 8, ultimately willing to forgive his philandering with a high-class hooker (Taylor). The wife is actually more concerned that the woman took her $7,000 mink coat after a night with her husband.
In Vincente Minnelli’s The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1963), as a socialite, Merrill, in a black wig, is among the leading contenders to marry the widowed father (Glenn Ford) until rejected by his young son (Ron Howard) because “she has skinny eyes” like the villainesses in his comic books. Back to cool blondeness, Merrill co-starred with Bob Hope in a weary generation gap comedy, I’ll Take Sweden (1965). With a rather wonky Swedish accent, Merrill, who is mainly called upon to laugh at Hope’s wisecracks, portrays an interior decorator whom Hope, playing a businessman, falls for in Stockholm (cue stock shots).
Given her underused and misused talents in Hollywood, it was no wonder that Merrill preferred a career in television. Name any series of the 60s and 70s – Dr Kildare, Bonanza, Rawhide, Mission Impossible, The Love Boat – and Merrill was bound to have appeared in it. She was even in several Batman episodes in 1968, as Calamity Jan opposite her second husband, Cliff Robertson, as Shame.
Dina Merrill
She returned only rarely to the big screen, working with Robert Altmantwice, in A Wedding (1978), as the bridegroom’s bossy aunt, and as a Hollywood denizen in The Player (1992). Less prestigious was her role as a snobbish society woman in Caddyshack 2 (1988) trying to stop a vulgar nouveau riche tycoon (Jackie Mason) from joining an exclusive golf club. Good sport that Merrill was, she allowed herself the indignity of having Mason chase her with a bulldozer.
Mainly, however, she was involved in numerous charitable and artistic causes. Her son David’s diabetes inspired her to establish the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation; and she served for 12 years as presidential appointee to the board of trustees of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Merrill’s first two marriages ended in divorce. David died in 1973, and the daughter of her second marriage, Heather, also predeceased her. She is survived by her third husband, the film producer Ted Hartley, whom she married in 1989, and by a son, Stanley, and daughter, Nina, from her first marriage, to Stanley Rumbough Jr.
• Dina Merrill (Nedenia Marjorie Hutton), actor, born 29 December 1923; died 22 May 2017
Vogue magazine tribute in 2017.
That famous fur coat in Butterfield 8 (the one that Elizabeth Taylor steals from a swanky Upper East Side closet) belonged to the frustrated Park Avenue wife played to perfection by Dina Merrill.
If Merrill, who passed away today at the age of 93, was so convincing as that character, it was a role she came by naturally. Unlike the hardscrabble past of many actors, hers was a strikingly different back story: Born Nedenia Marjorie Hutton, she was the daughter of Post Cereals heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post and Wall Street stockbroker Edward Francis Hutton.
Merrill enjoyed a childhood of almost unimaginable privilege. She summered on the Sea Cloud, her family’s sumptuous yacht; she wintered at the family’s Palm Beach estate, Mar-a-Lago.
When she decided to pursue acting, she didn’t ask her parents for any money. Instead, she took $10 an hour modeling jobs (including for Vogue.) Though she was over 30 by the time she got her first role, Merrill had a long and varied career—at one point starring with Cary Grant in Operation Petticoat. (Among that actor’s many wives was Merrill’s cousin, Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton.)
But she didn’t always play the moneyed ice princess: cast against type, Merrill appeared with her second husband, Cliff Robertson, on the TV show Batman, as the villainous Calamity Jan. And in 1979, she even deigned to set sail on the Love Boat, a vessel far from the Sea Cloud, but just as American, and just as iconic.
Jane Greer was one of the best of femme fatales. She was born in 1924 in Washington D.C. She made her movie debit in “Pan-Americana” in 1924. She was splendid opposite Robert Mitchum in “Out of the Past” in 1947 and “The Big Steal” in 1949. Her other films include “Down Among the Sheltering Palms” and “Man of A Thousand Faces”. She died in 2001.
Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Independent”:
Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire, could make and break any actress’s career on a whim and often did. In 1943, when Hughes saw a reproduction of a second world war recruitment poster in Life magazine of the petite, almond-eyed, 18-year-old Bettejane Greer, posing in a smart new WAC uniform, he told one of his acolytes to “find this girl as soon as possible and sign her up.” Jane Greer, who has died aged 76, was whisked by Hughes from Washington DC, where she was born, to Los Angeles, and although she eventually became one of the leading actresses in film noir , she had to wait two years to appear on screen.
Her mother, who wrote children’s stories and traced her family back to the poet John Donne, worked in the US war department’s public information office and got her daughter the job modelling the uniform. And it was her mother who accompanied the young Bettejane to Los Angeles. Even so Hughes managed to keep Greer under a kind of house arrest for five months. “Hughes was obsessed with me,” she said many years later. “But at first it seemed as if he were offering me a superb career opportunity.”
As soon as she could manage to evade Hughes and his spies, Greer met Rudy Vallee, the former crooner turned comic supporting actor, and they married a few weeks later. Hughes was enraged and warned her that unless she divorced Vallee, he would drop her. He had signed her to a seven-year contract, but failed to find any roles for her. Frustrated, Greer managed to get out of her contract and join RKO.
However, Hughes continued to pressure Greer and, as a result, her marriage suffered. Soon after her divorce from Vallee in 1944, Greer moved in with Hughes as his lover. At first, RKO gave her bit parts as show girls in three films under her real name of Bettejane Greer. She had taken part in many beauty and talent contests as a child, and began modelling professionally at the age of 12. She dropped out of her senior year at high school to work as a vocalist with a nightclub band, though she only had a chance to sing in her first few films. One of these was The Falcon’s Alibi (1946), in which Greer played a lively band singer who is murdered by crazed disc jockey Elisha Cook Jr. Her first decent role was as one of the three women betrayed by murderous cad Robert Young in They Won’t Believe Me (1947). Chic in a wardrobe of trim suits and hats, she coolly seeks her revenge. In the same year, she came into her own as one of the great two-timing dames in Jacques Tourneur’s superb film noir Out of The Past, a part that was enough to make her one of the icons of the genre.
As the femme fatale who coldly seduces Robert Mitchum in his first starring role, Greer changes character expertly to suit her particular needs, remote one moment, charming the next. “I had never read a part like that,” Greer recalled. “All through the picture they talk about you, so that by the time you come on screen, everyone thinks you’re going to be nine feet tall.”
Of Tourneur, she commented, “He did not tell his actors very much. He said to me, ‘First half of picture, Good Girl. Last half of picture, Bad Girl. No big eyes’.”
She followed this by playing a tough but beautiful gambling house owner in Station West (1948) responsible for the killing of two soldiers. Naturally, Dick Powell, who is on her trail, falls for her before bringing about her demise.
Despite the fact that Greer was now married to an attorney, Edward Lasker, Hughes, in a noirish twist of fate, had just bought RKO, and was still interested in her romantically. When Greer resisted him, Hughes barked out, “As long as I own the studio, you won’t work.” However, he relented and cast her to co-star once again with Mitchum, this time in Don Siegel’s fast-paced The Big Steal (1949).
Greer’s last film for RKO was The Company She Keeps (1950). In it, she was a deceitful ex-con, making a play for the boyfriend of her parole officer (Lizabeth Scott). In one scene, the baby in her arms is Jeff Bridges, making his screen debut.
Thereafter, Greer never again had the chance to use her sassy, sensual charms to full advantage. At MGM, there was not much to get her teeth into, except as the plotting Antoinette de Mauban in the Technicolor remake of The Prisoner Of Zenda (1952), though she was billed sixth.
In 1953, Greer retired to raise her family of three boys, all of them later taking up careers in the movie and music industries. Subsequently, she made only sporadic appearances on screen: in John Boulting’s sluggish Run for the Sun (1956), with Richard Widmark and Trevor Howard, and as the second wife of Lon Chaney (James Cagney) in Man Of A Thousand Faces (1957).
In 1964, she joined two other aging drama queens, Susan Hayward and Bette Davis, in the soap operatics of Where Love Has Gone in which she played a sympathetic probation officer. One of her last appearances was in Against All Odds (1984), a remake of Out of the Past, Greer’s best film. She was given the small part, not in the original, of Rachel Ward’s mother, only as a reminder to cinephiles of the great days of the 1940s when Jane Greer entered the film noir hall of fame.
She is survived by her sons.
Jane Greer, actor, born September 9 1924; died August 24 2001
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
The Prisoner Of Zenda, poster, Stewart Granger, Jane Greer, James Mason, Deborah Kerr, 1952. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Helen Reddy was born in 1941 in Melbourne, Australia. She began her show business career in her home land and achieved national there with her appearances on the popular television programme “Bandstand”. She came to New York in 1965 to pursue her career in the U.S. She won a recording contract with Capitol Records and in 1972 she had a massive popular hit with the song “I am Woman”. Her other hits include “Delta Dawn” and “Angie Baby”. In the mid 1970’s she starred in such movies as “Airport 1975” and Walt Disney’s “Pete’s Dragon” with Jim Dale. More recently she has starred in such stage shows as “Shirley Valentine”, “Blood Brothers” and “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”. Helen Reddy died in 2020 at the age of 77.
Helen Reddy obituary
Australian singer who enjoyed huge success with her 1972 feminist anthem I Am Woman
Accepting the 1973 Grammy award in the best female pop vocal category, Helen Reddy rubbed salt into her critics’ wounds by saying: ‘I would like to thank God, because she makes everything possible.’ Photograph: Ian Dickson/Redferns
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
The #1 Grammy-winning “I Am Woman” became not only THE anthem of the feminist movement during the radical 1970s, but also the signature song for its crop-haired composer and singer Helen Reddy. Three decades later this is the hit people still remember her for, despite the fact she had an abundance of other “top ten” records over the course of her long career.
Helen was born to Australian show-biz parents (comedy actor/producer/writer Max Reddyand singer/soap opera actress Stella Lamond) and began performing at the age of four at the Tivoli Theatre in Perth, Australia, touring much of her native country with her parents. She left boarding school at age 15 to work on the road singing and acting. Her musical style is best described as a light amalgam of rhythm and blues, easy rock and jazz. Her soothing, quivery vocals and equally warm appeal was instantly embraced, eventually earning her own Australian radio show. “Helen Reddy Sings” aired twice weekly on the Australian Broadcasting Commission.
In 1966 Helen won a trip to New York in an Austalian Bandstand International contest and, though she met with little success during this excursion, did meet and marry second husband Jeff Wald, a manager and an agent with the William Morris talent agency. They married the following year and went to Los Angeles. Wald worked Helen into a few performances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962), fifteen appearances total, and the resulting attention earned her her first hit with a top version of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from the Broadway rock musical “Jesus Christ Superstar” in February 1972. Signed by Capitol Records, she enjoyed hit after hit throughout the early 70s, with “Delta Dawn” (1973) and “Angie Baby” (1974) also reaching #1. In 1973 Helen had her own summer-replacement variety show and was a popular hostess for a time on NBC’s late-night variety show The Midnight Special (1972). She tried to parlay her singing success into a film career but the pretty, wholesome-looking entertainer received only a mild reception for the Disney children’s film Pete’s Dragon (1977) and it went no further.
In 1982 she divorced Wald and married a third time the following year to drummer Milton Ruth. Helen has ventured on into the concert and symphony orchestra forums as well as becoming a popular cabaret and nightclub attraction. In recent years she has graced a number of musical theater productions both on Broadway and in London’s West End. Over the years she has been considered a primary interpreter of English playwright Willy Russell, having appeared in four productions of his one-woman show “Shirley Valentine.” Other live musical productions have included “Anything Goes,” “Call Me Madam,” “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” and Russell’s “Blood Brothers”, in which she made her Broadway debut. Lately she is living again in her native Australia and retired from the business in 2002. These days she is a practicing hypnotherapist and motivational speaker.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Bill Duke was born in New York in 1943. He is known for his strong imposing persona on film. His movies include “Car Wash” in 1976, “American Gigolio” in 1980 and “Commando”.
IMDB entry:
Shaven headed, imposing looking African American actor, director, producer and writer who received his dramatic arts training at Boston University, New York University’s Tisch School of Arts and at the American Film Institute. Duke first broke into TV in the early eighties directing episodes of well known TV shows including Miami Vice (1984), Cagney & Lacey (1981) and Hill Street Blues (1981). Additionally he directed several made for TV movies that received wide critical acclaim including American Playhouse (1981) (The Killing Floor) and American Playhouse: A Raisin in the Sun (1989). Big Bill Duke’s face then became known to movie goers following his appearance in several high octane action movies of the mid 1980s including fighting (and losing) to Arnold Schwarzeneggerin Commando (1985), as unlucky mercenary “Mac”, in Predator (1987) and as Carl Weathers fiery police chief in Action Jackson (1988). After cutting his directorial teeth on the small screen, Duke directed his first feature film with the crime drama, A Rage in Harlem (1991). This was followed by another impressive crime film Deep Cover (1992), then the, The Cemetery Club (1993), and the comedy sequel, Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993). Duke has since continued to divide his time between appearing both in front of the camera and behind it, and remains a dynamic, stimulating and creative talent in Hollywood.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: firehouse44
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Beverly Adams was born in Edmondton, Alberta, Canada in 1940. She had a recurring role in the Matt Helm spy series starring Dean Martin beginning with “The Silencers”. She retired from acting after her marriage to the hair stylist Vidal Sassoon. After their divorce in 1980 she resumed her acting career.
Wikipedia entry:
Adams was born in Edmonton, Alberta to a Canadian mother and a U.S. Air Force father (who once played minor league baseball) and was raised Roman Catholic. As a child, Adams moved to Burbank, California where, as a teen, she competed in and won beauty contests before becoming an actress.[1][2] During her career, Adams appeared in various guest roles in television series of the 1960s. She also appeared in several films, most notably as the klutzy, redheaded Cassandra in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini and the recurring role of Lovey Kravezit in the Matt Helm movies starring Dean Martin.
After marrying hairstylist Vidal Sassoon in 1966, Adams retired from acting to raise the couple’s four children. During her retirement from acting, Adams published several books and served as a spokeswoman for Vidal Sassoon, Inc. In 1980, the couple divorced and Adams returned to acting. She also launched her own line of pet care products, Beverly Sassoon Pet Care System.[3]
They had four children, including or in addition to one adopted son:[4] daughter Catya (1968–2002), an actress who died from a drug-induced heart attack; son Elan BenVidal (b. January 17, 1970);[5][6] son David (b. circa 1972);[7] and daughter Eden Sassoon (born circa 1973).[7
