Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 65 of 125

Jean Peters

Jean Peters was a very attractive brunette actress under contract with 20th Century Fox in the late 1940’s and early 50’s. She retired early on her marriage to Howard Hughes. She starred opposite some of the most popular leading men of the time including Tyrone Power, Jeffrer Hunter, Joseph Cotten, Robert Wagner, Marlon Brando and Rossano Brazzi. Her credits include “Captain from Castile” in 1947, “Pickup on South Street” in 1951, “Viva Zapata” and “Three Coins in the Fountain”.er acting career on her divorce from Hughes. She died in 2000.

The bruised face of Jean Peters, with a sticking plaster as strategically placed as a beauty patch, was a striking film image of the 1950s; from Sam Fuller’s 1953 A-quality B-movie, Pickup on South Street, in which Peters played an innocent (almost) courier for a commie spy, romanced by Richard Widmark’s pickpocket. Tough movie, savvy dame.That part, and her tailored costumes for Rossano Brazzi in Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), were about the best roles that Peters, who has died aged 73, took on in her screen career: one that lasted from 1947 to 1955 and included the westerns Apache (1954) and Broken Lance (1954).Peters gatecrashed the movie business at 20 after winning a Miss Ohio State University popularity contest. Among its prizes was a 20th Century Fox screen test. Her mother drove her from Canton, Ohio to Los Angeles, where Peters was offered a seven-year contract and the female lead in Captain From Castile (1947), an epic filmed in remotest Mexico. Peters looked terrific, in accord with the period’s preference for spirited females. In Anne of the Indies (1951), it was she who did the swashing as a woman pirate, self-possessed far beyond her years.Peters seemed not to take Hollywood seriously. She avoided lunch in the commissary (she picnicked with hair and makeup assistants on the floor of the set instead) and went along with the studio publicity presentation of herself as a bejeansed farm girl: “Back home I still have three dogs, 18 cats, a goat named Josephine and a lamb called Ali Baba.”This unseriousness might also explain her relationship with the eccentric billionaire, Howard Hughes, who first noticed her at a Santa Catalina Island Fourth of July party in 1946, where her date was the war-hero actor, Audie Murphy. By the next year she had ditched Murphy (so angering him that he tried to bribe Hughes’s guards for an opportunity to take a shot at the man), and resided in a Westwood house which Hughes provided.

It was rumoured – falsely – that the couple married under the stars on Mulholland Drive; though they did see each other at least weekly for movies in his screening rooms (he owned RKO studios). While Hughes publicly dated better-known movie glamour, Peters passed on night life and arrived on set on time – “punctual Pete” – for, among other films, Viva Zapata! (1952), again almost combusting as a fake Latina, and Niagara (1953) as a dignified newlywed up against Marilyn Monroe’s wiggling.

Accounts vary, but either on a plane from Rome where she filmed Three Coins, or because of an airport luggage switch, in 1953 she met a Texas oil man, Lockheed plane executive and possible CIA employee, Stuart Cramer III. Though Hughes was also seeing Susan Hayward and Merry Anderson, he was displeased when newspaper gossip Louella Parsons phoned to get his reaction to the Peters-Cramer engagement. Their marriage in 1954 lasted 33 days before a separation, possibly expedited by the pryings of a private eye hired by Hughes.

Whether because of these matrimonial worries, or her drinking problem (Hughes ordered the Beverly Hills Hotel to serve her no liquor but a half-bottle of champagne on her birthday), Peters was distracted enough to accidentally burn herself with a branding iron on the set of Broken Lance, and to have a fling with co-star Robert Wagner. She made only one film after that, the sombre biopic A Man Called Peter (1955), then endured studio suspension for refusing films and loan-outs.

Peters finally married Hughes in 1957 in Tonopeh, Nevada, under the name Marian Evans (his alias was GA Johnson), followed much later by a properly monikered ceremony on his yacht off Miami Beach.

Hughes expected his staff to be on 24-hour call, and Peters soon found he demanded the same from his wife: she wasn’t even allowed out shopping. Their later cohabitations were tense because of his bizarre hangups (he hated her smoking or using a vacuum cleaner).

Finally they arranged parallel lives. Peters was guarded in a phony French chateau on a Bel Air hilltop, while Hughes remained depressed and dependent on weird aides in his sanitary redoubt above a Las Vegas casino. He proposed reconciliation in 1966, but couldn’t cope with even her vestigial normality: Peters sued for divorce. In return for a $70,000-a-year settlement, granted in 1971, she promised not to return to the movies while he lived, or to discuss their private life.

Not long before his death in 1976, Peters received a last letter from Hughes telling her that he had always loved her. By then, she had remarried 20th Century Fox vice-president Stanley Hough.

After Hughes’s death, she appeared in a few television productions (notably a public broadcasting version of Winesburg, Ohio) and did an old star’s ritual guesting on TV series. She returned to university, too, completing the BA that had been interrupted by 30 years of fame and secrecy. She intended to teach, but never did.

• Jean Peters, movie actress, born October 15 1926; died October 13 2000

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

Small Spanish film poster for the 1952 Oscar winning 20th Century Fox production, Viva Zapata. The movie, directed by Elia Kazan, with a screenplay by John Steinbeck, starred Marlon Brando, Jean Peters and Anthony Quinn. (Photo by Michael Nicholson/Corbis via Getty Images)

Kate Price was an Irish actress who appeared in U.S. films in the first half of the 20th century. She was born Katherine Duffy in Cork in 1872. She began featuring in silent films in 1910 and had an extensive career.In the 1930’s she still appeared on film but often in small and sometimes uncredited roles. Her later movies inluded “Have A Heart” in 1934, “West Point of the Air” andin 1937, “Easy Living” her final film. She died in 1943 in Los Angeles.

Michael Strong was born in 1918 in New York. He was featured in “Point Blank” in 1967 and “Patton” amongst others. He died in 1980.

IMDB entry:

While never one of the big names on screen, Michael Strong was one of those excellent method actors who were often compelling to watch. Unsurprisingly, many of Michael’s screen characters were typical New Yorkers, whether they be cops or thugs, and he imbued them with an edgy ‘in-your-face’ intensity that was all his own. He was already an established stage actor, both on and off-Broadway, with an extensive resume to his name long before transferring his talents to the screen. A graduate of the Actor’s Studio, he was also part of the original crew of the Lincoln Center Repertory Company, performing in key plays by Arthur Miller, S.N. Behrman and Eugene O’Neill. Usually assigned to playing military types or proletarian firebrands, Michael eventually came to note as a young burglar in “Detective Story”, written and staged on Broadway by Sidney Kingsley in 1949. Director William Wyler subsequently brought him to Hollywood to recreate his role for the 1951 motion picture.

A couple of other good roles Michael later enacted for the big screen were his smarmy used-car salesman Stegman in the thriller Point Blank (1967) and Brigadier General Hobart Carver in the Oscar-winning war drama Patton (1970). For the most part, however, television became Michael’s most prolific medium. His furtive looks and nervous demeanor often suggested that his characters had something to hide – and most of them did, particularly those Eastern bloc spy types with names like Malkov and Petrovich. He was at home in just about every major police series of the period, equally adept at NYPD sergeants and contract assassins. Fans of Star Trek (1966) will also remember Michael as the unhinged Dr. Roger Korby who had his consciousness transferred into an android body in the episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”. As tough as some of his characters, Michael continued to act right up until the end.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Nick Long was born in 1906 in Long Island. His movies include “Broadway Melody of 1936”. He died in 1949.

Randy Stuart was born in 1924 in Kansas. She is best known for her role in the cult classic of 1957, “The Incredibale Shrinking Man” with Grant Williams. She had an extensive career on American television. She died in 1996.

Tom Weaver’s IMDB entry:
The daughter of husband-and-wife vaudevillians, Randy Stuart was born in southeastern Iola, Kansas and traveled throughout the South and Midwest with her itinerant parents before making her own stage debut with them at the ripe old age of three. The family eventually settled in California where Randy attended college, acted in school plays and caught the eye of Hollywood talent scouts; she enacted a scene from the play “The Women” in a screen test which impressed 20th Century-Fox executives enough to put her under contract. She made her film debut with an uncredited part in The Foxes of Harrow(1947) starring Maureen O’Hara and Rex Harrison.

In 1950, the blonde, smoky-voiced actress made a brief impression as the calculating telephone roommate of Eve Harrington (played by Anne Baxter) in the classic backstage film All About Eve (1950). She then moved up front and center as the distaff part of a husband-and-wife spy team in Biff Baker, U.S.A. (1952) which also starred Alan Hale Jr.. Randy later was given her best-remembered role in the cult sci-fier The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) as Louise Carey, the concerned wife of tiny Scott Carey, played byGrant Williams.

The next year she was cast as Nancy Dawson in the western film Man from God’s Country(1958) opposite George Montgomery which was followed by a guest-star appearance in Montgomery’s short-lived television western television series Cimarron City (1958). She also had a one-season (1959-60) regular role on the western series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955).

After this she would remain focused on 60s’ TV, wherein she sporadically appeared in a number of popular series, mostly crime dramas and westerns, such as “Bonanza,” “Maverick,” “Peter Gunn,” “Cheyenne” and “77 Sunset Strip.” Retiring by the mid 60s, she was spotted only a couple of times after that. In the series “Dragnet” she appeared a couple of times as co-star Harry Morgan‘s wife) and she made a single appearance in a mid 70s “Marcus Welby” episode. She died in 1996 at age 71.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Tom Weaver <TomWeavr@aol.com>

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Doe Avedon obituary in “The Guardian”.

Doe Avedon born in 1925 in Old Westbury, New York. She was married at one time to the photographer Richard Avedon and inspired Stanley Donen to model the Audrey Hepburn character in “Funny Face” on Avedon in 1957. Doe Avedon starred opposite John Wayne in “The High and the Mighty” in 1954 and with Jose Ferrer in “Deep in My Heart”. She was long married to director Don Siegel. She died in 2011.

Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:

In 1944, the 21-year-old Richard Avedon, just starting out as a professional photographer after leaving the US merchant marine, walked into a bank in Manhattan, New York, and saw a 19-year-old clerk called Dorcas Nowell. It was love at first sight. He called her Doe because of her deer-like eyes, and they soon married. Doe Avedon, who has died aged 86, was the first muse of the man who was to become America’s leading fashion and portrait photographer.

Richard Avedon, who had begun to get work as a photographer for the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar, made his wife into a top model, against her own inclinations. Although Doe gradually backed out of the limelight as a model – one of the last photos Richard took of her was posing in a fur-lined Christian Dior coat and hat at the Gare du Nord in Paris in 1947 – she began a nine-year long acting career on Broadway, on tele vision and in movies after their divorce in 1949. “I would have crawled to the Bronx on my knees to bring Doe back,” Avedon remarked in 1993.

Dorcas Marie Nowell was born on Long Island, in New York state, where her widower father was butler to a wealthy lawyer. When she was orphaned aged 12, she was brought up by the family of her father’s employer. As soon as she could, the young woman, who had little education but was an avid reader, started work in New York in various offices and eventually the bank where she met her future husband.

Calling herself Betty Harper, and newly divorced, she first appeared in a small part in Jigsaw (1949), a standard gangster movie with pretensions to social significance. In the same year, she made her debut on Broadway in The Young and Fair, written by N Richard Nash, for which she won the Theatre World award for best performer. This was followed almost immediately by another play, My Name is Aquilon, based on a French play by Jean-Pierre Aumont, with whom she co-starred. In a live television broadcast of What Makes Sammy Run? (1949), Paddy Chayefsky’s adaptation from Budd Schulberg’s novel, Avedon was the calculating wife of the eponymous hero (José Ferrer).

Despite these initial successes, Avedon left acting for five years on her marriage to Don Mathews, a fellow actor whom she met during a national tour of Diamond Lil, written by and starring Mae West. After Mathews was killed in a car accident, Avedon returned to acting in 1954 with significant roles in two blockbuster movies.

In Deep in My Heart, Stanley Donen’s lavish biopic of the American composer Sigmund Romberg (José Ferrer), Avedon was somewhat lost among all the numbers performed by many of MGM’s roster of big stars. Nevertheless, she was delicate and decorative as Mrs Romberg, her husband’s inspiration. “What in the name of heaven you want me for, I don’t know,” she says to him. “I’ve no talent, no music or poetry in me.” Romberg replies, “None. Only the look of you and the spirit of you and your hand in mine.”

In William Wellman’s The High and the Mighty, the prototype of the Airport disaster movies of the 70s, Avedon is a flight attendant from heaven, keeping her cool while everyone else is flipping out. On television, Avedon was prominent in nine episodes of the newspaper drama series Big Town (1955-56) and on the big screen in Byron Haskin’s The Boss (1956), an efficiently directed film noir written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, in which she is an attractive schoolteacher who rejects the marriage proposal of John Payne as a corrupt politician.

After her marriage to the director Don Siegel in 1957, Avedon retired to bring up their four children. About 10 years previously, the screenwriter Leonard Gershe, a friend of the Avedons, had written the book for a stage musical called Wedding Day about a famous fashion photographer who had made his wife into a top model, although she had no interest in such a career. However, it remained on the shelf until Gershe adapted it as the screenplay for the film musical Funny Face (1957), directed by Donen, with Richard Avedon credited as special visual consultant. Fred Astaire played the photographer “Dick Avery” who transforms a young, beatnik salesgirl (Audrey Hepburn) into a high-class model. Very few reviewers and audiences, then as now, made the connection between the film and Doe’s true story. She returned to the screen briefly, over two decades later, in John Cassavetes’ Love Streams (1984), having divorced Siegel.

Avedon is survived by her partner, the actor Michael Liscio; her two daughters, Anney and Kit; and two sons, Nowell and Jack.

• Doe Avedon (Dorcas Marie Nowell), model and actor, born 7 April 1925; died 18 December 2011

Her “Guardian” obituary can be accessed here.

Delphi Lawrence

Delphi Lawrence was born in 1926 in Herfordshire. She made many films in England during the 1950’s including “The Feminine Touch” with Belinda Lee in 1956, “Just My Luck” with Norman Wisdom and “Son of Robin Hood”. In the 1960’s she went to Hollywood and made such movies as “The Last Challenge” with Glenn Ford and Angie Dickinson in 1967. She died in New York in 2002.

IMDB entry:

Delphi Lawrence was born on March 23, 1932 in Hertfordshire, England. She was an actress, known for Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), Murder on Approval (1955) and Element of Doubt (1961). She died on April 11, 2002 in Northport, Long Island, New York, US In the film Wild for Kicks (1960), despite having several lines of dialogue and performing a task crucial to the plot, both her name and that of her character, Greta, are missing from the film’s closing credits! She was nominated for a 1974 Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Actress in a Principal Role for her performance in “Separate Tables”, at the Ivanhoe Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Anglo-Hungarian leading lady of British B-films in the 1950’s and 60’s. Initially trained as a concert pianist.

Hampton Fancher is a Hollywood producer and screenwriter who had a brief career as an actor mainly in the early 1960’s. He was born in 1938 in Los Angeles. Among his screen credits are “Parrish” with Troy Donahue in 1961 and “Rome Adventure” with Donahue again, Suzanne Pleshette and Angie Dickinson.

Betsy Drake was born in 1923 in Paris of American parents. She made her film debut in 1948 in “Every Girl Should be Married”. Other films include “Dancing in the Dark” with William Powell and “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter” with Jayne Mansfield in 1957. She was at one time married to Cary Grant. She died in 2015 at the age of 92.

IMDB entry:

Betsy Drake was born on September 11, 1923 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France as Betsy Gordon Drake. She is an actress and writer, known for Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), Room for One More (1952) and The Second Woman (1950). She was previously married to Cary Grant.

Was a first-class passenger on the Andrea Doria along with Ruth Roman, and her son Dickie. Was saved from the ship after going onto the port side of the ship and finding that side’s boats useless because of the severe list. She was later rescued from the sinking liner.

She lost over $200,000 worth of jewelry as well as a book manuscript she was working on in the Andrea Doria accident in July 1956.

Her grandfather, Tracy C. Drake, and his brother built the Drake Hotel in Chicago.

“Telegraph” obituary:

Betsy Drake, who has died aged 92, was an actress who became the third, and most long-lasting, wife of Cary Grant.

Grant had first set eyes on Betsy on the London stage in 1947, and when, by coincidence, they both found themselves on the Queen Mary returning to the United States, he effected an introduction. When the liner docked in New York, Betsy bolted into the heart of the city to get away from him, but he sought her out. Within months he had persuaded her to move to Los Angeles, where she signed with RKO and David O Selznick and then found screen stardom opposite Grant in Every Girl Should Be Married (1948), as a woman in pursuit of her romantic prey.

Fan magazines of the late 1940s reported a fairy-tale courtship. The pair made headlines when they flew to Arizona to marry on Christmas Day 1949, with their pilot and Grant’s best man, Howard Hughes. Betsy Drake went on to appear in starring roles in Dancing in the Dark (1949) with William Powell, Pretty Baby (1950) with Dennis Morgan, and Room for One More (1952), with her husband, before she decided to put her marriage ahead of her career.

Grant’s first marriage, to the actress Virginia Cherrill, had lasted only a year, and his second, to the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, ended after three years. But as far as the public was concerned, he and Betsy had perfected the ideal marriage, and Betsy was often asked for her advice on how to maintain a happy relationship. She was at her husband’s side in Cannes in 1954 while he made To Catch a Thief with Alfred Hitchcock, and in 1956 she travelled to Spain to join him on the set of The Pride and the Passion.

But it was there she realised her husband was falling in love with his co-star Sophia Loren. Furious and upset, she ran off before the press found out and sailed back to New York on the ill-fated Italian liner Andrea Doria, which collided with another ship off the coast of Nantucket and capsized. Betsy Drake was one of the 1,660 passengers and crew rescued. She lost $200,000 worth of jewellery and, although she was physically unharmed, the disaster seems to have had a huge psychological impact.

The actress Rosalind Russell later recalled that Betsy Drake “simply stopped functioning, either as an actress or in any other field in which she had once been interested”.

Things went from bad to worse after Sophia Loren came to America to star with Grant in the romantic comedy Houseboat (1958). Betsy Drake had written an early script for the film, hoping that it would be a vehicle for her and Grant. But Grant insisted the script be reworked with Sophia Loren playing Betsy’s role.

Looking for a way to alleviate her emotional turmoil, Betsy took the advice of a friend who recommended she try a new therapy called LSD. She became a fervent convert and persuaded her husband that he might benefit from it too. Grant became involved in some 100 therapy sessions over several years and became the hallucinogenic drug’s most visible advocate several years before Dr Timothy Leary. Indeed Leary recalled that it was reading about the actor’s use of the drug that persuaded him to give LSD a try.

Betsy Drake credited LSD with giving her the courage to leave her husband. “After an LSD session, one morning in bed while we were both having breakfast, Cary asked me a question and I said, ‘Go f— yourself’,” she recalled. “He jumped out of bed, buttoning the top of his pyjamas, his bare bottom showing, and slammed the bathroom door. That was the true beginning of the end.”

She and Grant were divorced in 1962 after 13 years of marriage.

Betsy Gordon Drake was born at Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris, on September 11 1923 to wealthy parents. Her grandfather had built Chicago’s Drake and Blackstone hotels. After the crash of 1929 the Drakes returned to Chicago, where Betsy was parked at the Drake with a nanny while her parents lived at the Blackstone. They soon divorced and Betsy’s mother suffered a nervous breakdown. Betsy spent the rest of her childhood being shuttled between relatives in Washington DC, Virginia, and Connecticut.

She found solace in acting and, after dropping out of high school, made the rounds of New York auditions, modelling and understudying on Broadway until she was cast by Elia Kazan for a production of Deep Are the Roots, opening in London. It was there that she was spotted by Cary Grant.

When rumours circulated that Grant was gay, Betsy Drake memorably replied to the effect that they were too busy making love for her to ask (she used an earthier expression). But she reflected later that she felt he had never loved her: “I lost myself trying to please him. The only way we could see to save us was by getting into yoga and LSD, but that didn’t work either.”

She and Grant, who married twice more, remained friendly. Meanwhile her experiences with LSD led her to take an interest in mental health and she began volunteering at hospitals for the mentally ill. In the early 1970s she published a novel and enrolled at Harvard, earning a Master’s of Education in Psychology.

Betsy Drake eventually moved to London. She never remarried.

Betsy Drake, born September 11 1923, died October 27 2015

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

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Jean Peters

Kate Price

Michael Strong

Nick Long

Randy Stuart

Doe Avedon

Doe Avedon obituary in “The Guardian”.

Delphi Lawrence

Hampton Fancher

Betsy Drake

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