Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 72 of 120

Richard Dean Anderson

Richard Dean Anderson was born iu Minnesota in 1950. “MacGyver” on television gave him his big break. The series ran from 1985 until 1992. He then went on to star in “Stargate SG-1 which ran from 1997 until 2005. His movies include “Young Doctors in Love”.

IMDB entry:

The future MacGyver (1985) and Stargate SG-1 (1997) star was born on January 23, 1950, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His father, Stuart Anderson, was a teacher at a local high school and his mother, Jocelyn, was an artist who was talented in both sculpting and painting. He and his two younger brothers, Thomas John and James Stuart, grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis called Roseville. During his childhood and teenage years, he developed a love for sports, music (especially jazz) and acting.

Richard dreamed of becoming a professional hockey player as a teenager, a dream shared by his future Stargate SG-1 (1997) co-star Michael Shanks. However, this was not to be as, at age sixteen, he broke both of his arms in separate incidents, the second of which was so bad that he had to be hospitalized for three months. Although his dream became an impossibility, he never lost his love for the sport. Richard was very much a restless teenager, having had many adventures hitchhiking on the open road. This sense of adventure is most evident from his 5,641-mile bicycle trip from his home in Minnesota to Alaska. Though accompanied by several friends at the beginning of this trip, he traveled the last thirty-three days alone. This experience gave him a more centered sense of direction in his life.

After studying drama at St. Cloud State University and at Ohio University (without completing his degree), he briefly moved to New York before settling in Los Angeles, where he worked as a juggler and a street mime and in a Renaissance-style cabaret. He worked briefly in Marineland, where his jobs included holding fish in his mouth for killer whales to leap up and snatch. Subsequently, he appeared in plays and formed a rock band called “Rick Dean and the Dante” with his friend Carl Dante in which he sang and played the guitar.

His big break came in 1976, when he was cast in the popular daytime drama General Hospital (1963) as Dr. Jeff Webber. He continued to play the role for five years until he felt it was time to move on to prime-time drama. He made numerous guest appearances in series such as The Facts of Life (1979) and The Love Boat (1977) and was cast as the star in two CBS series, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1982) and Emerald Point N.A.S.(1983), but both lasted just one season.

His next big success came in 1985, when he won the role as the title character in the ABC adventure series MacGyver (1985). He was cast because the producers were impressed by the lack of pretension he showed at his audition. As he is nearsighted, it was necessary for him to wear his glasses for the reading. The series lasted seven seasons and ran for 139 episodes. It was hugely successful throughout its run and has continued to be popular all over the world. He reprised his role in two TV movies,MacGyver: Lost Treasure of Atlantis (1994) and MacGyver: Trail to Doomsday (1994), both produced by his own production company, Gekko Film Corp, which he co-founded with Michael Greenburg.

Having made a huge impression in Ordinary Heroes (1986) as a blinded Vietnam veteran struggling to rebuild his life in America, after “MacGyver” ended he moved on to TV movies such as In the Eyes of a Stranger (1992), Through the Eyes of a Killer (1992),Beyond Betrayal (1994), Past the Bleachers (1995) and Pandora’s Clock (1996). He was particularly impressive in Past the Bleachers (1995), in which he played a grieving father struggling to come to terms with his young son’s death.

He returned to series television in 1995, when he was cast as Ernest Pratt/Nicodemus Legend in Legend (1995), an adventure series that aired on UPN. He also served as executive producer of the series, in which one of his co-stars was his close friend John de Lancie. His character was a dime novelist (Pratt) who took on the persona of the protagonist in his novels (Legend). The series was primarily a comedy, a blend of the western and science fiction. It has also been Richard’s favorite role to date.

He found major success again when cast as Colonel (later Brigadier General) Jack O’Neill in Stargate SG-1 (1997), an adventure/science fiction series based on the blockbusterStargate (1994) starring Kurt Russell and James Spader. The series began filming in Vancouver on February 19, 1997, and premiered on Showtime on July 27, 1997 and on Fox Friday nights. The series has remained extremely successful since then, eventually resulting in the creation of a spin-off series, Stargate: Atlantis (2004), in 2004, and the now-canceled video game _Stargate SG-1: The Alliance (2005) (VG)_ in 2005. Both series have aired on the Sci-Fi Channel. He has also appeared, sporadically, in the latest spin-off series, SGU Stargate Universe (2009). Richard’s role in the SG-1 series was substantially reduced in its seventh and eighth seasons, which culminated in his departure from the series in 2005.

He has never married but has dated many women, including actresses Teri Hatcher, Lara Flynn Boyle, Sela Ward and German ice-skater Katarina Witt. Since 1996, his partner has been Apryl A. Prose, who is the mother of his only child, Wylie Quinn Annarose Anderson, who was born on August 2, 1998. Like her father and grandfather (who passed away in 2003), she is fond of jazz. Because of his young daughter, he has temporarily taken a break from acting in order to spend time with her and help her develop. Richard has made it a point throughout his career to choose roles that demonstrate his versatility as an actor. Many of his characters, particularly MacGyver and O’Neill, are strong characters who, although tormented by personal tragedies such as the death of family members and friends, can continue on bravely and valiantly.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gus Fallon

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Beatrice Pearson was born in 1920 in Dennison, Texas. Her only films were leading roles in “Force of Evil” opposite John Garfield in 1948 and “Lost Boundaries” opposite Mel Ferrer the following year. She died in 1986 at the age of 65.

IMDB entry:

American leading actress who made a brief foray into films. A native of Denison, Texas, Pearson worked as an usher in a movie theatre and as a model before becoming an actor. Producer David O. Selznick introduced her to actor John Garfield, who was instrumental in her being cast opposite him in Force of Evil (1948). However, she did scarcely any more film work before retiring from the screen and devoting herself exclusively to the stage.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Jim Beaver <jumblejim@prodigy.net>

Mel Ferrer obituary in “The Guardian” in 2008.

Mel Ferrer was born in New Jersey in 1917. He made his New York stage debut in 1940.His film debut came in 1949 in “Lost Boundaries” opposite Beatrice Pearson. His films include “Lili” in 1953, “War and Peace” opposite his then wife Audrey Hepburn and “The Vintage”. He had an extensive career also on the stage and in television. He died in 2008 in Santa Barbara.

Ronald Bergan’s obituary of Mel Ferrer in “The Guardian”:

After conquering his infirmity, Ferrer resumed his varied career. Besides acting, he directed a film for Columbia, The Girl of the Limberlost (1945), a 60-minute melodrama starring Ruth Nelson as a vengeful mother who persecutes her daughter, and assisted John Ford on The Fugitive (1947), in which he also had a bit part. In addition, he helped found the Community Theater at La Jolla, California, with Joseph Cotten, Gregory Peck, Jennifer Jones and Dorothy McGuire.

In the meantime, he had gone through three marriages to two women. He had divorced Frances Pilchard, the mother of his first child and married Barbara Tripp. They had two children, but then he remarried Frances, and had two more children with her.

The 1950s was Ferrer’s most productive period, as well as the time when he was most in the public eye. The latter was due mainly to his marriage to Audrey Hepburn in September 1954. Shortly after being introduced to Hepburn by Peck, he read Jean Giraudoux’s play Ondine. He immediately recognised the play as a perfect vehicle for Hepburn’s other-worldly qualities, and saw himself as Hans the Knight, who falls for the water sprite. Directed by Alfred Lunt, with whom Ferrer argued constantly during rehearsals, the play opened on Broadway in February 1954. On the first night, Lunt was asked: “Did you learn anything about working with a movie star like Mel Ferrer?” He replied: “Yes, I learned that you can’t make a knight-errant out of a horse’s ass.” Hepburn got glowing reviews, while the New York Post wrote of Ferrer: “To my mind, his playing is curiously uninteresting.”

His acting was often wooden and soporific, but he could be soulful, intelligent and even witty. As Mexico’s leading matador in Robert Rossen’s The Brave Bulls (1951), Ferrer’s melancholy face is in constant close-up, while he mumbles about doom and “the fear that is in my heart” after being gored by bulls. Among his best roles was the swashbuckling villain in Scaramouche (1952), the climax of which is a swordfight between Ferrer and Stewart Granger, one of the most outstanding in movie history.

In the same year, he was quietly effective as the rival cowboy for Marlene Dietrich’s affections in Fritz Lang’s western Rancho Notorious (1952), and made a sensitive Prince Andrei to Hepburn’s Natasha in King Vidor’s War and Peace (1956). As the languid, aristocratic dilettante, one of the three beaux from whom Ingrid Bergman has to choose in Jean Renoir’s Elena et les Hommes (1956), he expresses one of the French director’s themes: “My ideal is to achieve perfect idleness… universal idleness for rich and poor.” During his marriage to Hepburn, he controlled most of what she did and, in 1959, he directed her and Anthony Perkins in Green Mansions, a total dud, the only asset of which was the alluring fresh faces of the two young stars – a colt and a filly romping through the artificial undergrowth.

Following the birth of their son Sean in 1960, Hepburn travelled almost everywhere with her husband to locations such as Italy, where Ferrer took the title role in the risible El Greco (1966). But he found it difficult to cope with her fame, wealth and success as his career moved into the doldrums. In 1968, soon after he had produced Wait Until Dark, starring Hepburn, they were divorced.

In 1973, Ferrer was reunited with Renoir and Caron for a TV production of the director’s play Carola, set in Paris under the German occupation during the second world war. Ferrer played General von Clodius, “the last gentleman in the German army”, in his most nonchalant manner. He then continued to appear in a weird mixture of Spanish, French, Italian and German productions, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Lili Marleen in 1981, the year he acquired the film rights to Peter Pan, which he had always wanted to make with Hepburn in the title role. Ferrer – who was living in Lausanne, Switzerland, with his Belgian wife Elizabeth, whom he married in 1971 – then had Mia Farrow in mind, before turning to golden-haired moppet Ricky Schroeder, but Peter Pan remained another unrealised dream.

In all, Ferrer appeared in more than 100 films and made-for-television movies, directed nine films and produced nine more. He is survived by Elizabeth, and the four sons and two daughters of his previous marriages.

· Melchior Gaston Ferrer, actor, born August 25 1917; died June 2 2008.

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

Robert Blake was born in New Jersey in 1933. He made his film debut as a child actor in 1939 in “Bridal Suite” starring Annabella. He went on to make “Humorseque” and “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” in 1948. Among his adult roles are “In Cold Blood” in 1967, “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here” and “Electra Glide in Blue”.

TCM Overview:

Actor Robert Blake began his career as a member of the preadolescent comedy troupe “Our Gang,” and later as an adult actor enjoyed critical notoriety with the docudrama “In Cold Blood” (1967) and achieved breakout fame as the exotic bird-loving star of the popular television series “Baretta” (ABC, 1975-78). It was as the prime suspect in the domestic murder of wife Bonnie Lee Bakley, however, that would ultimately overshadow the onetime revered actor’s career. As a child, Blake’s parents began taking the toddler to auditions in Los Angles in the late 1930s, and for more than a decade he appeared in dozens of films and television programs. After a tumultuous two-year enlistment with the U.S. Army, Blake returned home and underwent intense psychotherapy treatments in an effort to cope with his depression and self-loathing. Having made substantial gains, he resumed his acting career as an adult with supporting roles in such films as “Pork Chop Hill” (1959) and “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1965). With his intense portrayal of murderer Perry Smith in the adaptation of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” Blake was poised for mainstream feature film stardom. Follow up movies failed to capitalize on the earlier success, however, and the actor soon returned to television. As the streetwise titular hero of “Baretta,” it seemed Blake had at last found his star-making role. After his hit cop show was canceled, the actor appeared with some regularity on television before disappearing from screens almost entirely for nearly a decade.

New York Times obituary in 2022:

Michael James Vijencio Gubitosi was born on Sept. 18, 1933, in Nutley, N.J., to James and Elizabeth (Cafone) Gubitosi. His childhood, as he later described it, was a Dickensian one whose horrors began before he was born. He told CNN in 2012 that his mother had twice tried to abort him with a coat hanger. In a series of interviews in 1992 and 1993, he said his father, who worked for a can manufacturer, had been an alcoholic who forced him to eat from the floor, locked him in closets and sexually abused him.

When Michael was 2, his father enlisted him and his two older preschool siblings to dance for money in parks as “the Three Little Hillbillies” while the father played a guitar. “It was either doing that or stealing milk bottles off other people’s porches,” Mr. Blake said in a 1959 interview with The Los Angeles Times.

Inspired by the success of child stars like Shirley Temple, his father in 1938 took his family to Hollywood. Michael was hired as an extra for the “Our Gang” shorts, later shown on television as “The Little Rascals.” When another child actor flubbed a line, Michael told the director, “I can do that.”

He could, and he was eventually cast as a lead character, Mickey. He was billed as Mickey Gubitosi in most of the “Our Gang” shorts, and as Bobby Blake in the last few. He acquired the stage name Robert Blake in 1956.

After the “Our Gang” series ended in 1944, he appeared in more than 70 films over the next decade, establishing himself as a tough, fast-talking young character actor with a mischievous grin. In “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” starring Humphrey Bogart, he was the Mexican boy who sold Bogart the lucky lottery ticket that set the plot in motion.

Mr. Blake was thrown out of five schools before finally graduating. He neglected to register for the draft, and the penalty was immediate conscription into the Army. He was stationed in Alaska.

After his discharge, he applied to study at the Actors Studio in New York with the acting guru Lee Strasberg. Strasberg, he said, advised against pursuing an acting career.

Returning to Hollywood, Mr. Blake found work as a stuntman. He continued to act in movies, including “PT 109” (1962), about John F. Kennedy’s wartime experience in the Pacific; he played one of Kennedy’s fellow sailors.

His breakthrough movie was “In Cold Blood,” which received excellent reviews, as did he. But his next few movies struggled at the box office, and after filming “Busting” (1974), a detective drama in which he starred alongside Elliott Gould, he considered suicide, he told Playboy, and checked himself into a hospital for psychiatric treatment.

Mr. Blake returned to television in January 1975 to take the title role in the ABC detective series “Baretta,” a retooled version of “Toma,” which had starred Tony Musante. When Mr. Musante quit after the 1973-74 season, the show was taken off the air, but ABC decided to reactivate it as a midseason replacement and asked Mr. Blake to be the star. He accepted, even though he made it clear in interviews that he considered himself above series television. He proceeded to make many suggestions to shape the renamed show to his liking.

“I could have my name all over ‘Baretta,’ but I’ve never taken credit for writing or directing any of the shows,” he told Playboy.

Mr. Blake won a 1975 Emmy and a 1976 Golden Globe for his performance, and “Baretta” was briefly a Top 10 hit. But it was canceled in 1978.

Speaking of Mr. Blake in an interview with People magazine in 2002, Stephen J. Cannell, the creator of “Baretta,” said: “Complex doesn’t even begin to capture his personality. If you were in business with him, you just had to strap in really tight, because you were going to get lurched around a lot.”

Mr. Blake claimed to be inspired by daredevils like circus high-wire performers and rodeo riders.

“You get on a high wire without a net,” he said in the 2012 CNN interview. “You get on a bull and they open that goddamn chute and there’s nobody in the universe but you and God. And that’s where I’m comfortable, doing something that’s so scary that I can’t sleep at night.”

Mr. Blake became a favorite on late-night talk shows, particularly “The Tonight Show,” where be would make fun of himself in his tough-guy Baretta voice and gesticulate wildly with an unlit cigarette.

Prodded by Johnny Carson, he excitedly shared his positive views on duck-hunting and negative ones on rodents and insulted Orson Welles for being overweight. Mr. Welles replied, “I’m fat and you’re ugly, but I can diet.”

Appearing in a number of television movies, Mr. Blake was praised for his performance as the Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa in “Blood Feud” in 1983. In 1985, he created the NBC series “Hell Town,” in which he starred as a tough-talking slum priest. Though Mr. Blake needed the income from the show to pay for his recent divorce, he walked away from the job, saying he was emotionally exhausted.

He sought solace sleeping in his van, parked in the Hollywood Hills, and worked with a therapist on his childhood traumas. He returned to acting in 1993 in the made-for-TV movie “Judgment Day: The John List Story,” about a real-life New Jersey accountant who murdered his wife, mother and three children.

To get that part, Mr. Blake had offered to forgo his $250,000 salary until the film was finished. He was paid in full. His last acting job was in “Lost Highway” (1997), a psychological thriller directed by David Lynch.

Mr. Blake is survived by two children from his first marriage, Noah and Delinah Blake, and Rose Blake, his daughter with Ms. Bakley. His third marriage, to Pamela Hudak in 2017, ended in divorce in 2019.

After his trial, Mr. Blake told CNN, he grew a beard, lived on Twinkies and liked to wander into pool halls for a game of nine ball. “I was born lonely, I live lonely, and I’ll die lonely,” he said.

Eva Marie Saint. TCM Overview.

Eva Marie Saint was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1924. She began her professional acting career in television drama and made her film debut as Edie Doyle in 1954 in “On the Waterfront” opposite Marlon Brando. She won an Oscar for her performance. Her other films include “Raintree County” opposite Montgomery Clift and “A Hatful of Rain” opposite Don Murray. She gave a magnificent performance opposite Cary Grant as a cool Hitchcock blonde heroine in “North by Northwest” in 1959. Her other major films include “Exodus” in 1960 opposite Paul Newman and “All Fal Down” in 1962 opposite Warren Beatty. In 2005 she starred with Jessica Lange in “Don’t Come Knocking”. Now nearly 95, it is good to see her still working.

TCM Overview:

Though her film appearances were sporadic at best – less than 20 movies between 1955 and 2006 – Academy Award winner Eva Marie Saint enjoyed revered status among her peers due to her emotionally complex performances in several iconic films. She was perhaps best known as the delicate object of affection for dock worker Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront” (1951), which earned her an Oscar. She would play variations on the role in several subsequent features, including “A Hatful of Rain” (1957), though Alfred Hitchcock would tap her inner sexiness as a double agent opposite Cary Grant in “North by Northwest” (1959). Sadly, the majority of Saint’s films never rose to her skill level, so she found more substantive work on television, where she contributed greatly to such projects as “Fatal Vision” (1984) and “People Like Us” (1990). Her return to the big screen in “Superman Returns” (2006) reminded moviegoers not only of her timeless, ethereal beauty, but her acting chops, which – though rarely given their proper showcase – had been substantial enough to hold her own against the Brando’s and Grant’s of the world.

Born July 4, 1924 in Newark, NJ, Saint discovered acting as a student at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University, which would later pay tribute by naming a campus theater after her. Her first exposure to a national audience came via radio and television dramas in the 1940s, where she made a name for herself with sensitive portrayals of young women, most notably as Emily Webb opposite Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra in a production of “Our Town” for “Producers’ Showcase” (NBC, 1954-57) and “Middle of the Night” for “Philco TV Playhouse” (NBC, 1948-1955), which brought her a Emmy nomination in 1955. Saint also scored a professional triumph on Broadway opposite the legendary Lillian Gish in “The Trip to Bountiful,” which earned her a Drama Critics Award in 1953. Saint’s solid reputation among critics was becoming reinforced so often that she was referred to as “the Helen Hayes of television.”

Saint’s film debut was equally laudable. Director Elia Kazan cast her as Edie Doyle, the young sister of a murdered dockworker who captures the heart of rough dockhand Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando). A marvel of carefully modulated emotions, alternately delicate and fiery in her scenes with Brando, and especially in her confrontation with Karl Malden’s waterfront priest, Saint’s performance catapulted her to fame and earned her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1954.

The success of her “Waterfront” performance elevated Saint to the forefront of Hollywood actresses, and for a period of five years, she could be counted upon to bring emotional depth and grace to serious dramas. She received a Golden Globe nomination in 1958 as the pregnant wife of Don Murray’s drug-addicted war veteran in “A Hatful of Rain,” and excelled as Montgomery Clift’s jilted sweetheart in Edward Dmytryk’s Civil War drama, “Raintree Country” (1957).

Both roles were squarely in the mold of her “Waterfront” character – lovelorn, seemingly fragile but possessed of a bottomless emotional reserve – but Alfred Hitchcock saw another side to the actress when he cast her in his espionage drama, “North by Northwest” (1959). The Hitchcock thriller – one of the director’s best loved – thrust Saint into entirely new territory as a coolly seductive spy who comes to the aid of but falls in love with advertising executive Cary Grant. The actress, who garnered considerable publicity for trimming her signature waist-length hair for the role, even indulged in several action sequences, most notably the famed showdown on Mount Rushmore that served as the film’s conclusion. While some pundits may have viewed the marriage of a dramatic actress like Saint with an action-thriller as an awkward match, the results were entirely pleasing, and Saint received some of the best reviews of her career for the performance.

Though “Northwest” and her previous efforts had made Saint a star, by 1960 she was actively moving away from the Hollywood machine to spend more time with her husband, director Jeffrey Hayden, and their two children. As a result, her screen performances declined in number as the decade wore on. There were still several high-profile projects, most notably Otto Preminger’s “Exodus” (1960), which cast her as an American nurse who becomes involved in the founding of the state of Israel. Director John Frankenheimer used her in two very different pictures – the Southern drama “All Fall Down” (1962), which cast her as a pregnant girl destroyed by Warren Beatty’s wastrel, and the racing picture “Grand Prix” (1966). There were also supporting roles in “The Sandpiper” (1965) and “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!” (1966), but none were truly showcases for Saint’s talent. By the mid-1960s, she was appearing more frequently on television, which would regularly provide her with work for the next two decades.

1658599 American Actress Eva Marie Saint 1956 (b/w photo); (add.info.: American actress Eva Marie Saint 1956).

Saint made just two features in the 1970s, one of which – Irvin Kershner’s marital drama “Loving” (1970), which cast her as the harried wife of rudderless commercial artist George Segal – offered her one of the meatiest parts to come her way in decades. For the most part, she preferred the shorter commitment and more intimate stories of made-for- TV features. She brought immeasurable prestige to numerous productions, including “Taxi” (NBC, 1978), a two-person drama with Martin Sheen that brought her an Emmy nomination. Saint was also stellar in the POW drama “When Hell Was in Session” (NBC, 1979), as the mother of anorexic teen Jennifer Jason Leigh in “The Best Little Girl in the World” (ABC, 1981), and as the mother who fights to see justice for her slain daughter in “Fatal Vision” (NBC, 1984), which was based on the Jeffrey MacDonald murder trial.

Saint’s television schedule was remarkably active throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In addition to the aforementioned projects, she also appeared in the miniseries “A Year in the Life” (NBC, 1986), which hinged its dramatic arc on the death of her beloved family matriarch, and made several appearances as Cybill Shepherd’s mother on “Moonlighting” (ABC, 1985-89). In the middle of this flurry of work, she returned to moviemaking for the first time in over a decade as Tom Hanks’ mother in the Garry Marshall comedy “Nothing in Common” (1986). Critics applauded her return to features, but Saint was soon back on the small screen in numerous projects, including George C. Scott’s wife in “The Last Days of Patton” (CBS, 1986) and “People Like Us” (1990), an adaptation of a Dominick Dunne novel that won her an Emmy for Best Supporting Actress.

Saint began making inroads back to features in the late 1990s and early 2000s; most went largely unseen, like the Kim Basinger drama “I Dreamed of Africa” in 2000 and Wim Wenders’ “Don’t Come Knocking” (2005), which cast her as the mother of star and screenwriter Sam Shepard. However, “Superman Returns” (2006) afforded her one of her biggest film showcases ever as Martha Kent, the adoptive human mother of the Man of Steel. Saint displayed her enormous capacity for warmth in her scenes with newly-minted Superman, Brandon Routh, who experiences a crisis of conscience while attempting to revive his status as savior of Metropolis. The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Frieda Inescourt. IMDB.

Frieda Inescourt was a patrician lady who appeared mainly in supporting roles in Hollywood films during the Golden Age of cinema. She was born in Edinburgh in 1901. She made her film debut in Hollywood in 1935 in “Dark Angel”. Other notable films included “Mary of Scotland”, “Pride and Prejudice”, “A Place in the Sun”, “The Eddy Duchin Story” and “The Crowded Sky” . She died in 1976.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Tall, dark and regal Frieda Inescort’s placid loveliness and dignified patrician features bode her well in Hollywood during the late 30s and 40s. Born on June 29, 1901, in Edinburgh, Scotland, the stage-established actress didn’t arrive in Hollywood until age 34 (then considered too late for leading lady roles!) but managed to settle fairly comfortably on the supporting sidelines in chic melodrama and tearjerkers.

Her years growing up were unsettling. Born Frieda Wrightman, she was the daughter of Scots-born journalist John “Jock” Wrightman and actress Elaine Inescourt, who was of German and Polish descent. Her parents initially met when he came to review a play she was appearing in. They married in 1899 but eventually parted ways while Frieda was still young. Her impulsive mother, who had strong designs on a theater career and placed it high on her priority list, sent young Frieda off to live with other families and in boarding schools in England and Wales while she avidly pursued her dreams. Although her father divorced Elaine in 1911 charging his wife with abandonment and adultery, Frieda ended up moving to America with her mother. Again, when Elaine found occasional roles in touring shows, Frieda wound up being carted off to convents or boarding schools.

Mother and daughter eventually returned to London following World War I and the young girl, now solely on her own, managed to find employment as a personal secretary to British Member of Parliament Waldorf Astor (2nd Viscount Astor), who was then Parliamentary Secretary to British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George. She also assisted the American-born Lady (Nancy) Astor. While accompanying Lady Astor on a trip to the United States in July 1919, Frieda decided to stay in the States and terminated her position with the Astors. In New York she continued finding secretarial work that supported both her and her unemployed actress-mother. She worked at one point with the British consulate in New York.

Noticing a number of American actors cast in British parts on Broadway, Frieda was encouraged in the early 1920s to test the waters out as British actresses were in short supply. By chance, she was introduced to producer/director Winthrop Ames, who gave the unseasoned hopeful a small but showy role in his Broadway comedy “The Truth About Blayds” (1922). The play turned out to be a hit. Playwright Philip Barry caught her stage performance and offered her a starring role in his upcoming comedy production “You and I”. The show proved to be another winner and Frieda, a star on the horizon, finally saw the end of her days as part of a secretarial pool.

For the rest of the decade Frieda alternated between stage comedy and drama and became a vital force on Broadway with prominent roles in “The Woman on the Jury” (1923), “The Fake” (1924), “Hay Fever” (1925), “Mozart” (1926), “Trelawney of the Wells” (1926) and “Escape” (1927). Frieda’s happenstance into acting and her sudden surge of success triggered deep envy and jealousy within her mother, who was unemployed. This led to a bitter and long-term estrangement between the two that never managed to heal itself. Elaine died in 1964.

While working in the late 20s as an assistant for Putnam’s Publishing Company in New York, Frieda met assistant editor Ben Ray Redman. They married in 1926 and Redman later became a literary critic for the New York Herald Tribune. Frieda, in the meantime, continued to resonate on the New York and touring stage with such plays as “Springtime for Henry” and “When Ladies Meet”.

For over a decade, Frieda had resisted the cinema, having turned down several offers in silent and early talking films. When her husband was offered a job with Universal Studios as a literary adviser and author, however, and the couple had to relocate to Hollywood, she decided to take a difference stance. Discovered by a talent scout while performing in a Los Angeles play, Frieda was signed by The Samuel Goldwyn Company and made her debut supporting ‘Fredric March’ and Merle Oberon in the dewy-eyed drama The Dark Angel (1935) in which she received attractive notices and rare sympathy as blind author March’s secretary.

She did not stay long at Goldwyn, however, and went on to freelance for various other studios. During the course of her movie career, Frieda could be quite charming on the screen playing a wronged woman (as she did in Give Me Your Heart (1936)), but she specialized in haughtier hearts and played them older and colder than she really was off-camera. She soon gained a classy reputation for both her benign and haughty sophisticates. After Warner Bros. signed her up, she showed promise in Another Dawn(1937), Call It a Day (1937) and The Great O’Malley (1937), all 1937 releases. After this, however, Warner Bros. lost interest in her career and loaned her out more and more to other studios. Some of these films were leads — including the “B”-level Woman Doctor(1939) opposite Henry Wilcoxon, A Woman Is the Judge (1939) with Otto Kruger,Shadows on the Stairs (1941) co-starring Paul Cavanagh, and, in particular, the title role in Portia on Trial (1937). For MGM she played the irrepressibly snobbish Caroline Bingley who sets her sights on Darcy (Laurence Olivier) in the classic Jane Austen film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (1940). Besides competing with (and losing out) to Greer Garson in that film, she also played the “other woman” in Beauty for the Asking (1939) starringLucille Ball.

When her career starting to lose steam, Frieda returned to New York and the Broadway stage with matronly parts in Soldier’s Wife” (1944), “The Mermaids Singing” (1945) andGeorge Bernard Shaw‘s successful revival of “You Never Can Tell” (1948). After the tour of the Shaw play folded, she returned to Hollywood. Finding it difficult to pick up where she left off in films, Frieda focused on the relatively new medium of TV in the early 1950s. She appeared as Mrs. Archer on the Meet Corliss Archer (1951) series (based on the popular bobbysoxer’s radio program) but was replaced by Irene Tedrow in its second and final season. She also graced a number of dramatic TV showcases. The films she did do later that decade, including The She-Creature (1956), Senior Prom (1958), Juke Box Rhythm (1959), were generally dismissed by the critics.

While filming her last picture, The Crowded Sky (1960), for Warner Bros., Frieda began experiencing health problems. She was quickly diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis. By the next year, she was forced to retire and had to walk with the aid of a cane. Things got worse that year when her husband, who had grown despondent over personal and financial issues, committed suicide with pills at their California home on August 2, 1961. By the mid-60s the former actress was virtually incapacitated and confined to a wheelchair but valiantly worked for the multiple sclerosis association when she could muster the strength. In 1973 Frieda finally had no choice but to move permanently into the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, where she died at age 74 on February 21, 1976.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

Robert De Niro is a true icon of the cinema and one of the very best of American actors. He was born in 1943 in New York City. He made his film debut at the age of 20 in 1963 in Brian De Palma’s “The Wedding” with Jill Clayburgh. In 1973 he came to international acclaim for his performance in “Bang the Drum Slowly”. The folowing year he won a major role in “TYhe Godfather Part 2” and won a best supporting actor for his performance.His other major films include “Mean Streets”, “Taxi Driver”, “Raging Bull (for which he won a Best Actor Oscar) ,”The King of Comedy”, “Goodfellas”, “Casino” and “Heat”

TCM overview:

Often regarded as one of the greatest actors of all time, Robert De Niro was also one of the most enigmatic and remained famously tight-lipped about his personal life throughout his career. After gaining attention in “Bang the Drum Slowly” (1973), De Niro exploded onto the public’s consciousness as the reckless Johnny Boy in “Mean Streets” (1973), which commenced his partnership with Martin Scorsese, one of the greatest actor-director combos of all time. He earned his first Academy Award as a young Vito Corleone in “The Godfather Part II” (1974) and delivered his most iconic performance as would-be vigilante Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver” (1976). De Niro offered a haunting turn as a Vietnam veteran in “The Deer Hunter” (1978), before gaining 60 pounds to play boxer Jake La Motta in “Raging Bull” (1980). From there, he delivered great performances in “The King of Comedy” (1983), “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984), “The Untouchables” (1987) and “Awakenings” (1990). He reunited with Scorsese for “Goodfellas” (1990) and “Casino” (1995), and starred opposite Al Pacino in “Heat” (1995), but took a surprising turn to comedy in “Analyze This” (1999) and “Meet the Parents” (2000), both commercial hits that opened him up to criticism that he had sold out. Despite calls that he was past his prime, there was never any doubt as to where De Niro stood in the history of acting – he was a towering figure with an amazing body of work unmatched by most actors of any generation.

The full TCM overview can be accessed here.

It is surprising and disappointing that Ann Sheridan is not better known today. In her prime years in the 1940’s she was one of Warner Brothers most famous leading ladies on the same pedestal as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Her career is in urgent need of positive reappraisal. She was born in 1915 in Texas. She made her film debut in 1934 in “Search for Beauty”. Her more famous movies include “Angels With Dirty Faces” with James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart in 1938, “Dodge City” opposite Errol Flynn, “King’s Row”, “Nora Pre ntiss” and “The Unfaithful”. She was starring in the television series “Pistols’n Petticoats” when she became ill and died in 1967 at the age of 52.

TCM overview:

She was Warner Brothers’ “Oomph Girl” and a popular WWII pin-up but Ann Sheridan fought to be taken seriously in Hollywood. After a fruitless start at Paramount, the ravishing redhead allowed the Warners publicity mill to make her an overnight sensation, channeling the buzz to barter for better roles. She enjoyed name-above-the-title status for “It All Came True” (1940), in a role rejected by Bette Davis, then teamed with Davis for the screwball classic “The Man Who Came to Dinner” (1942), and more than held her own opposite studio mates George Raft and Humphrey Bogart in “They Drive By Night” (1940). It was as the small town heroine of “King’s Row” (1942) opposite Ronald Reagan, that Sheridan became a bone fide star, but her tenure at Warners was punctuated by suspensions for turning down roles. Prior to breaking with the studio in 1948, she scored as a Frisco chanteuse who compels doctor Kent Smith to fake his own death in the noir sleeper “Nora Prentiss” (1947). As a free agent, Sheridan enjoyed one of her better roles opposite Cary Grant in “I Was a Male War Bride” (1949) but a downturn in her industry stock drove the aging actress to television. She capped her 30-year career as the star of the CBS western sitcom “Pistols ‘n’ Petticoats” (1966-67) but was felled by cancer before the end of the first season. Gone at 51, Ann Sheridan escaped in death the humiliating career twilights of aging rivals Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, remaining in the eyes of movie lovers a quick-witted comedienne and a sensuous dramatic actress rolled into one unforgettable package.

Ann Sheridan was born Clara Lou Sheridan in Denton, TX on Feb. 21, 1915. The last of five surviving children born to George W. Sheridan, a garage mechanic and direct descendant of Union general Philip Henry Sheridan, and the former Lula Stewart Warren, Sheridan grew up a tomboy, riding horses, playing touch football, and standing up to bully boys twice her size. After completing her primary education at Robert E. Lee Grade School and Denton Junior High School, she enrolled in North Texas State Teachers College with a mind toward studying art. Growing frustrated with the disciplines required of fine art, Sheridan drifted towards campus dramatics and participated in the school band, dreaming of traveling to New York City to become a Broadway chorus dancer. In 1932, Sheridan’s older sister Kitty enrolled the 17-year-old in a national contest sponsored by Paramount Pictures in Hollywood as publicity for the upcoming film “Search for Beauty” (1934). Sheridan was one of 30 finalists invited to Hollywood for the privilege of a screen test.

Despite pudgy cheeks, unmanageable hair, and a gap-tooth smile, Sheridan was offered a six-month contract with Paramount, earning a then-admirable $50 a week. After her 10-second bit as a pageant contestant in “Search for Beauty,” Sheridan was given little to do on the Paramount backlot, apart from taking drama lessons from the studio’s resident coach Nina Mousie, and appearing in plays staged for the exclusive pleasure of the studio front office. While appearing as a character named Ann in the Harry Clork-Lynn Root comedy “The Milky Way,” Sheridan was advised by her handlers at Paramount to change her name so that it might fit more comfortably on a marquee. Adopting her character’s name, Clara Lou Sheridan became Ann Sheridan. A friendship with director Mitchell Leisen led to a featured role, as a stenographer driven by snobbery to suicide, in “Behold My Wife!” (1934), which allowed the young hopeful to break from the purgatory of extra work and doubling that her been her lot as a Paramount contract player.

Sheridan enjoyed her first lead role in Charles Barton’s “Car 99” (1935), as rookie cop Fred MacMurray’s telephone operator girlfriend. She was paired with cowboy star Randolph Scott for Barton’s “Rocky Mountain Mystery” (1935) but was bumped back to bits, playing a nurse who bandages George Raft in “The Glass Key” (1935) and a Saracen slave in Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Crusades” (1935). While she was on loan to Ambassador Pictures for “Red Blood of Courage” (1935), Paramount dropped Sheridan’s option. She made one film for Universal, playing a spoiled rich girl who flirts with campus radicalism in Hamilton McFadden’s college comedy “Fighting Youth” (1935), before finding her way to Warner Brothers, her home base until 1948. Though her scenes were cut from Ray Enright’s musical comedy “Sing Me a Love Song” (1936), she found work in Warners’ steady output of crime films, appearing in prominent roles in Archie Mayo’s “Black Legion” (1937), Lloyd Bacon’s “San Quentin” (1937) and Michael Curtiz’s “Angels with Dirty Faces” (1938) alongside fellow contract player Humphrey Bogart. Between 1936 and 1938, Sheridan was married to B-movie actor Edward Norris.

In 1939, Sheridan became the focus of an unusual Warners publicity stunt, inspired by a comment made by gossip columnist Walter Winchell that Sheridan, as gangster James Cagney’s social worker girlfriend in “Angels with Dirty Faces,” had “umph.” Recoining the phrase slightly, the studio assembled a team of 13 judges – including choreography Busby Berkeley, designer Orry-Kelly, photographer George Hurrell, producer-director Earl Carroll, and bandleader-actor Rudy Vallee – charged with naming “America’s Oomph Girl.” Following a highly-publicized but patently rigged competition, Sheridan was awarded the honor, beating out (so the Warners publicity mill had moviegoers believing) Alice Faye, Carole Lombard, Hedy Lamarr and Marlene Dietrich. Hurrell’s elegant portraits of the titian-tressed actress helped put Sheridan across to the public, creating curiosity and sensation where there had once been disinterest. As a result, Sheridan would soon become one of the most popular pin-ups of the Forties, but she always derided her nickname as the sound an old man makes when bending over to tie his shoes.

Interest in Sheridan’s crowning as the Oomph Girl had a retroactive effect on several movies in which she had already appeared. Though she played small roles in both, Sheridan received preferential placement on the posters for Busby Berkeley’s “They Made Me a Criminal” (1939) and Michael Curtiz’s Errol Flynn starrer “Dodge City” (1939). Ill at ease at having achieved success through crass studio duplicity, Sheridan was given a backlot pep talk by actor Paul Muni, who advised her to use the exposure from the stunt for the betterment of her career. She was selected by producer Mark Hellinger to star in Lewis Seiler’s “It All Came True” (1940), a role turned down by Bette Davis. Cast as a down-at-heel nightclub singer given a second chance at stardom when mobster Humphrey Bogart turns her boarding house into a nightclub, Sheridan charmed audiences and sang two songs. Now boasting name recognition with moviegoers, Sheridan enjoyed an elevated status in her subsequent film assignments and was, like teen starlets Bonita Granville and Deanna Durbin, made the heroine sleuth of her own mystery novel, marketed by the Whitman Publishing Company for young readers.

Cast again opposite George Raft and Humphrey Bogart in Raoul Walsh’s “They Drive By Night” (1940), Sheridan played the good girl to Ida Lupino’s bad egg. On the lighter side, she donned furs and jewels to play a conniving actress in William Keighley’s “The Man Who Came to Dinner” (1942), winding up packed inside a mummy’s case for her troubles and shipped to Nova Scotia, and teamed with Jack Benny for Keighley’s “George Washington Slept Here” (1942), with the pair cast as city dwellers who buy a tumbledown Pennsylvania farm house. Sheridan enjoyed top billing as the tomboy heroine of Sam Wood’s “King’s Row” (1942), an adaptation of the 1940 novel by Harry Bellaman, which made a star of Sheridan’s fellow Warners contract player Ronald Reagan. Though the studio publicity department announced Sheridan and Reagan as the proposed stars of the upcoming “Casablanca” (1942), the actors were never seriously considered for the roles that went ultimately to Ingrid Berman and Humphrey Bogart.

In 1942, Sheridan married actor George Brent, her co-star in Lloyd Bacon’s “Honeymoon for Three” (1941), a union that lasted just one year. The actress’ star turn in “Shine on Harvest Moon” (1944), a biopic of vaudeville singer Nora Bayes, was pitched by Warners as “Sheridandy” though the actress loathed the picture, eager to expand into edgier material and more demanding roles. Placed on suspension for refusing assignments after the troubled production of “One More Tomorrow” (1946), Sheridan sat out most of 1946 before a writer’s strike and the looming expiration of her Warners contract left her with bargaining leverage. The result was a six-picture deal for which Sheridan was given script approval and enjoyed an uptake in her asking price. The first film out of the gate under these new terms was Vincent Sherman’s “Nora Prentiss” (1947), a noir-flavored woman’s picture recounting the tragic love affair of Sheridan’s slinky nightclub singer and Kent Smith’s guilt-wracked surgeon, who fakes his own death as the start of an ill-advised midlife do-over.

Sheridan reteamed with Sherman for “The Unfaithful” (1948), which found her charged with murder for the fatal stabbing of her ex-lover. She finished out her Warners contract with an uncredited bit as a Mexican prostitute in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948), done as a favor for director John Huston, and by playing a comely mine owner in “Silver River” (1948) opposite Errol Flynn. As a free agent, Sheridan made few remarkable films but many satisfying ones. Among these was Howard Hawks’ “I Was a Male War Bride” (1949) at Fox, in which she and co-star Cary Grant played American and French allies who fall in love while on a mission and employ the War Bride Act in order to remain together in the United States. Sheridan had the title role in Claude Binyon’s “Stella” (1950), as an upwardly mobile woman duped into helping her hayseed relatives cover up an accidental death, and received top billing for George Sherman’s “Steel Town” (1952), a class conscious melodrama co-starring John Lund and Howard Duff. She took a producer’s role for Norman Foster’s “Woman on the Run” (1950), in addition to headlining as a San Francisco housewife who works with newspaper reporter Dennis O’Keefe to track down her errant husband, material witness to a gangland murder.

Less in demand as she approached middle age, Sheridan shifted the focus of her labor to live television, appearing in episodes of such anthology series as “Schlitz Playhouse of Stars” (CBS, 1951-59), “Playhouse 90” (CBS, 1956-1961) and “The Ford Television Theater” (NBC, 1952-57). In 1965, the year she turned 50, she joined the ranks of fading Hollywood stars agreeing to lend their big screen credibility to the medium of daytime drama and appeared in the second season of the NBC soap opera “Another World” (1964-1999). Just as discriminating in the downward arc of her career as she had been at its apex, Sheridan passed on the part of a French brothel owner in Norman Jewison’s “The Art of Love” (1965), a role that went instead to Ethel Merman. In 1966, she married actor Scott McKay. She capped her career as the star of the Western sitcom “Pistols ‘n’ Petticoats” (CBS, 1966-67). Diagnosed during the first (and only) season with esophageal cancer, Ann Sheridan died at age 51 on Jan. 21, 1967.

by Richard Harland Smith

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

American actress Ann Sheridan (1915 – 1967) poses on the cover of the January 1939 issue of PIC magazine. (Photo by Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images)

A poster for William Clemens’ 1937 romantic film ‘The Footloose Heiress’ starring Ann Sheridan. (Photo by Movie Poster Image Art/Getty Images)

New york times obituary in 1967.

Ann Sheridan, the actress who was once billed as “the oomph girl” died today after a long illness in her San Fernando Valley home. She would have been 52 years old Feb. 21. The cause of her death was not divulged.

Miss Sheridan had recently returned to the limelight as star of the televison series, “Pistols ‘n’ Petticoats” on the Columbia Broadcasting System.
Beauty Contest Winner

Ann Sheridan, with her reddish-gold hair and youthful face and figure, was one of the very few beauty-contest winners ever to be heard from again after arriving in Hollywood.

She was one of 33 young girls brought to Hollywood in 1933 by Paramount Pictures as part of a promotional campaign for a picture called “Search for Beauty,” and she was the only one who developed a career out of this publicity stunt.

During a Hollywood career in movies and television that spanned more than 30 years she was often suspected by studios – or went on strike as she used to call it – either because she felt she was not getting enough money or did not like the roles chosen for her.

In 1941, she went on a six month strike against Warner Brothers because she wanted more than the $600-a-week they were paying. But she lost and went back to work.

After World War II, she stayed out of pictures for 14 months because she was not allowed to choose her own roles. She took another sabbatical in 1956.

But eight years ago, her film career waning, Miss Sheridan turned to the stage and toured in “Kind Sir” with Scott McKay, who she married last June.
At Home in Many Roles

In her acting roles – which began with a one-picture contract she signed after winning the beauty contest — Miss Sheridan was equally adept as a schoolmarm, dance hall queen, gangster’s moll or comedienne. Before moving to Warner Brothers in 1939, she made five Westerns for Paramount, then quite to freelance.

As a relative newcomer to screen in 1935, Miss Sheridan palyed in “Car 99” the story of a manhunt, opposite Fred MacMurray.

Another early role cast her as a rowdy frontier dance-hall hostess with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland in “Dodge City.”

By the early 1940’s Miss Sheridan had reached stardom. One of her best-known roles was hat of the feline actress in “The Man Who Came to Dinner” who tries to steal a young man from an unsophisticated Bette Davis.

Also in that 1942 screen version of the George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart were Monty Woolley, Jimmy Durante and Billie Burke.

In the same year she starred as the wife of Jack Benny in “George Washington Slept Here” which is revived each Washington’s Birthday on television.

Miss Sheridan appeared opposite Zachary Scott in “The Unfaithful” and James Cagney in “Angels with Dirty Faces.”

In the wartime comedy, “I Was a Male War Bride” her leading man was Cary Grant.

Among her other films were “Kings Row” — one of several in which she starred with Ronald Reagan — “Shine on Harvest Moon” with Dennis Morgan and Jack Carson, and “The Opposite Sex.”

In 1940, the Harvard Lampoon created a stir by characterizing her as the actress who was “the most unlikely to succeed,” to which she quipped back, “Harvard is the home of the unadulterated heel — and you may quote me.”

She often admitted that she had no idea what “oomph” meant and described it as “what a fat man says when he leans over to tie his shoelace in a telephone booth.”

Ann Sheridan was born Clara Lou Sheridan on Feb. 21, 1915 in Denton, Texas, a small town northwest of Dallas.

Miss Sheridan first married S. Edward Norris, a stage actor, in August 1936. They were divorced in October, 1937 having separated after just 375 days of marriage. Her second marriage to George Brent, another actor, on Jan. 5, 1942 lasted only 263 days.

In the 1940’s she was linked romantically to the publicity agent Steve Hannagan. They were often reported about to be married, but Hannagan died a bachelor in 1953. He left Miss Sheridan nearly $250,000.

Rise Stevens is a reknowned mezzo-soprano who was born in New York City in 1913. She has had a lenghty career in opera and in concert. In the 1940’s she branched out into some Hollywood films including “The Chocolate Soldier” with Nelson Eddy in 1941 and “Going My Way” with Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald in 1944. Her son is the actor Nicolas Surovy. She died in 2013 in her 100th year.

Tribute in “Huffington Post” by Susanne Mentzer :

The first eleven years of my life were spent in suburban Philadelphia in Springfield, Delaware County, to be exact. We were one of the working class families living in the numerous identical, small, brick houses of the cul-de-sac. In our living room we had a rather wide, two door, dark wood console that housed a black and white TV. Remember the kind that took forever to warm up starting with a small white dot that slowly grew into the picture? There was also a turntable that rolled out with space underneath for LPs. The one and only opera LP we owned was the RCA 33 1/3 rpm long-playing Bizet’s Carmen– black-covered and about one half inch thick. The sultry Risë Stevens was the seductress, facing the camera posed in a sort of feline crouch ready to pounce any minute. Until my late teens this was all I knew of opera. I am sure mom wore out the grooves listening to the overture, and the arias “Habañera” and “Séguidilla”. I knew these, too, by osmosis. (I have written here about some other memories from back then. See “My Mother’s Voice“).

My mother always raved about Risë Stevens. In my mind this singer was larger than life and possessed a voluptuous sexy sound. She was an amazing beauty too and had a really exotic name. As far I knew, she was the only opera singer in the world even though Robert Merrill and Jan Pierce were also on the recording. Mom, being a mezzo/contralto only spoke of Risë Stevens. I cannot help but think this early exposure influenced my choice of being a mezzo with high notes.

Many years later, I sang the trouser role of Octavian in Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalierat the Met. (Mezzo’s often are cast as young men or boys in certain operas. A former classmate at a high school reunion once said, “It is a tough job but someone’s got to do it.”) There was an evening on which there was a small gathering at the Opera Club at the Met honoring artists who had sung this role. Little did I know I would be in the company of Jarmila Novotná (another legend) and the one and only Risë Stevens. In my ignorance I somehow never imagined Miss Stevens singing anything other than Carmen and the news that she had been Octavian — the role of a young nobleman in love with two women — knocked me flat. Moreover, she sang the role exclusively for a period of ten years. There was an era at the Met when a singer famous for a particular role would be the only person to sing that role over a long period of time. Not only that, here was this petite woman, older but still stunningly beautiful, with a New York accent and low speaking voice, who in my mind, as I mentioned above, was larger than life and the epitome of female sexuality. It was an experience I will never forget. She was so generous and warm to me. I have a photo to remember that evening. I only wish I could have heard her live and really known her. She accomplished far more than her operatic career, later being a leader in the arts.

Risë Stevens died last week at the age of 99. For many of my generation — whether into opera or not — it is the passing of a legend. Although many younger people might have no idea who she is, she was once a household name on Gibbons Road in Springfield, Delaware County, PA. and beyond.

The above “Huffington Post” tribute can be accessed also online here.

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Richard Dean Anderson

Beatrice Pearson

Mel Ferrer

Mel Ferrer obituary in “The Guardian” in 2008.

Robert Blake

New York Times obituary in 2022:

Eva Marie Saint

Eva Marie Saint. TCM Overview.

Frieda Inescort

Frieda Inescourt. IMDB.

Robert De Niro

Ann Sheridan

New york times obituary in 1967.

Rise Stevens

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