Nita Talbot was born in 1930 in New York City. She has had an extensive career as a major supporting player on film and in television. She made her film debut in “It’s a Great Feeling” in 1949. Her other films include “Montana”, “Caged”, “Bundle of Joy”, “Who’s Got the Action” and “A Very Special Favour”
In 1971, Talbot was cast in the pilot episode of the CBS sitcom Funny Face starring actress-comedienne Sandy Duncan. The original premise of the show had Duncan playing Sandy Stockton, a young UCLA student from Illinois majoring in education and making ends meet by working part-time as an actress in television commercials for the Prescott Advertising Agency. Talbot played Sandy’s agent, Maggie Prescott. Shortly after filming the pilot, CBS picked up the program for the fall of 1971, but slightly revised the format, as a result of which Talbot was dropped from the cast.
Talbot’s most recent acting role was in 1997, when she voiced the character of Anastasia Hardy, the businesswoman mother of Felicia Hardy, the Black Cat, in the animated seriesSpider-Man. .
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.
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 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 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.
Eva Marie Saint
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 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
When Luis Buñuel, during his long exile in Mexico from Spain, was preparing to shoot The Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe (1952), his producers suggested Orson Welles for the title role. But as Buñuel sat down to watch Welles in the film of Macbeth, he immediately thought him “too big and too fat” for the part of the famous castaway. However, the moment the dashing and handsome Dan O’Herlihy, who has died aged 85, appeared as Macduff, Buñuel had found his Crusoe.A film in which an actor is alone on screen for 60 of the 90 minutes running time would seem a foolhardy venture, but the splendid Pathecolour photography, expert editing and O’Herlihy’s well-shaded performance, never allowed it to pall. With superb skill and grace, O’Herlihy moves from a clever but naive youth to the grizzled patriarch, earning himself an Oscar nomination.
The 29-year-old O’Herlihy had been brought to America by Welles for Macbeth (1948) after having made an impression in his film debut as an IRA gunman in Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947). The Wexford-born Irish actor, who had taken up acting to pay for his architectural studies at the National University of Ireland, had already gained a reputation at Dublin’s Gate Theatre (where the teenage Welles had begun his career) in around 50 plays, including the leading role in the first production of Sean O’Casey’s Red Roses For Me (1943). In the text of the play, O’Casey describes Ayamonn Breydon, the working-class Protestant hero, as “tall, well built, twenty-two or so, with deep brown eyes, fair hair, rather bushy, but tidily kept, and his face would remind an interested observer of a rather handsome, firm-minded, thoughtful, and good-humoured bulldog”.O’Herlihy, who eloquently uttered the rousing climactic patriotic speech, fitted the role perfectly. Macbeth led to a 50-year career in Hollywood and on US television, though few leads were forthcoming.
Apart from Robinson Crusoe, one of them was as Alan Breck in a shoestring version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1948) opposite Roddy McDowall (Malcolm in Welles’s Macbeth) as David Balfour. This was followed by several sterling supporting roles in a number of undistinguished swashbucklers such as At Sword’s Point (1952) playing the son of one of the Three Musketeers, and as Prince Hal of Wales in The Black Shield Of Falworth (1954). He was cast as officers in Kiplingesque colonial adventures Soldier’s Three (1952) and Bengal Brigade (1954). He also appeared in Invasion USA (1952), a Red scare sci-fi film, in which he hypnotises patrons drinking at a bar into believing America has been attacked by nuclear weapons.O’Herlihy was sophisticated in Douglas Sirk’s glorious melodrama Imitation Of Life (1959); brutal, in a return to the world of Odd Man Out, as a fanatical, club-footed IRA leader in A Terrible Beauty (1960), and over-the-top in the title role of The Cabinet Of Caligari (1962), a silly remake of the silent expressionistic classic.
One of his best roles in the 1960s was in Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe (1964) as Brigadier General Black, ordered by President Henry Fonda to drop an atomic bomb on New York City to show the Russians that bombing Moscow was an error.Television series, including The Long Hot Summer (1965), ironically in the role played by Orson Welles in the film version; Colditz (1972), Nancy Astor (1982) and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1992) kept him busy. In films, he was Franklin D Roosevelt in MacArthur (1977), starring Gregory Peck, and made himself known to a new generation as the mad toy tycoon in Halloween III: Season Of The Witch (1982), as a lizard-like alien in The Last Starfighter (1984), and eerily effective as the cold-blooded cyborg corporation mogul in Robocop (1987) and Robocop 2 (1990).It was all a long way from his Irish theatrical beginnings, though he recouped some of it in John Huston’s melancholically nostalgic valedictory film The Dead (1987), based on a James Joyce short story, in which he played Mr Brown “the gentleman not of our persuasion”.
Dan O’Herlihy is survived by Elsa Bennett, his wife of 59 years, two daughters and three sons.
· Daniel O’Herlihy, actor, born May 1 1919; died February 17 2005
His Guardian obituary by Ronald Bergan can also be accessed here.
Dictionary of Irish Biography:
O’Herlihy, Dan (Daniel Peter) (1919–2005), actor, was born 1 May 1919 at Odessa Cottage, Wexford town, son of John Robert O’Herlihy, a civil servant from Cork who later worked in the Department of Industry and Commerce, and his wife Ellen (née Hanton), from Wexford; they had at least one daughter, and a younger son, Michael O’Herlihy (1929–97), a television director. The family moved to Dublin when Daniel was one year old. Educated at CBS Dún Laoghaire, as a teenager he developed literary ambitions. On entering UCD, he applied to study law, but rapidly switched to architecture, which allowed him to use his drawing skills. While a student he published political cartoons in Irish newspapers, under the initials TOC.
Enlisted despite his minimal acting experience to perform in a production of the UCD dramatic society when a cast member walked out two days before an amateur festival, O’Herlihy accepted the offer in a spirit of adventure, won a medal, and was offered a part in a play at the Abbey theatre. He appeared as a ‘semi-pro’ in about sixty Abbey productions, but was turned down for the permanent company because Ernest Blythe (qv) thought his Irish insufficient (though he spoke and wrote Irish fluently). He also appeared in Gate theatre productions, and joined touring companies during the holidays. He played Major Sirr (qv) at the Gate in ‘Lord Edward’ (1941) by Christine Longford(qv), and took the lead role of Ayamonn Breydon in the world premiere at the Olympia theatre of ‘Red roses for me’ (1944) by Sean O’Casey (qv). His commitment to acting being motivated in part by a desire to supplement his allowance of half a crown a week from his father, he further augmented his income by working as a relief announcer on Radio Éireann.
After graduating from UCD, O’Herlihy worked part-time for one year in Dublin Corporation’s architecture department, surveying the city’s buildings to determine how they might be protected against air raids. He married (16 August 1945) Elsie Bennett, a wartime WAAF and TCD pre-medical student; they had three sons and two daughters. (In a favourite anecdote, he described his future father-in-law asking how he would support his daughter and a family on an architect’s salary, and his provoking scorn by observing that he also acted in the evenings; when O’Herlihy further asserted that he would make a fortune in Hollywood, he was thrown out of the house.) He abandoned architecture as a profession after landing roles in two films with Irish settings (but shot at Denham Studios, England): Hungry Hill(1947, dir. Brian Desmond Hurst) and Odd man out (1947, dir. Carol Reed); both films paid more for one day’s work than two months as an architect. (He retained a lifelong interest in architecture, and a sense that he was an architect who happened to act; he sometimes designed and/or built his own houses and those of friends and family. His last residence, in Trancas Canyon, Malibu, California, was designed by his architect son Lorcan, and built by O’Herlihy himself.)
O’Herlihy was brought to Hollywood in 1947 by the agent Charles Feldman, with whom he fell out after refusing two studio contracts: ‘I didn’t want anyone to own me.’ O’Herlihy feared that as a studio contract player he could be forced to accept unsuitable roles, thus destroying his long-term prospects. Through a period of considerable financial strain on his young and growing family, he initially got by on radio work, which dried up with the spread of television. Turning down the worst film scripts and accepting the average, in the expectation that good parts would come in time, O’Herlihy deferred to his wife’s judgment of scripts; she also helped him to rehearse as ‘unpaid script girl’. In later interviews the couple observed that the shared struggles of this period helped them to achieve a notably successful and remarkably plainspoken marriage.
Between 1948 and 1955 O’Herlihy appeared, mostly as a supporting player, in thirteen costume drama pictures; these were mainly low-budget productions, such as William Beaudine’s adaptation of Kidnapped (1948), from the adventure novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, for the ‘Poverty Row’ studio Monogram, in which O’Herlihy played Alan Breck Stewart to the David Balfour of Roddy McDowall. Although O’Herlihy’s height (over 6 ft (1.83m)) and reddish-blond good looks were well-suited to this genre, he actively resisted typecasting. In Sword of Venus (1953, dir. Harold Daniels), he was made up effectively to play the role of the elderly villain. Such versatility laid the basis for his later success as a character actor, with a reputation as an ‘actor’s actor’, placing a strong emphasis on spontaneity.
Throughout his career O’Herlihy remained involved in theatre, which he regarded as the actors’ medium par excellence (film being a director’s medium). He made his only Broadway appearance as Charles Dickens in ‘The ivy green’ (1949) by Mervyn Nelson. In 1955 he co-founded the Hollywood School of Drama with his boyhood friend and lifelong associate Charles Davis. When a bit player fell ill during the school’s production of ‘Finian’s rainbow’, O’Herlihy recruited Marlon Brando – who shortly before had lamented to O’Herlihy that he had not appeared on stage for some time – to take on the part for two nights (to the surprise of audience members). In later life O’Herlihy remarked that the writer was the central creative force in drama and that he would have liked to have been a writer. He wrote several unproduced scripts, and between 1985 and 1997 produced a one-man show of his own devising, ‘Five men with a pen’, in which he impersonated writers and recited from their works, including W. B. Yeats (qv), James Joyce (qv), George Bernard Shaw (qv), and Mark Twain. In the television movie Mark Twain: behind the laughter (1979), he gave a much-admired performance as the elderly Twain recalling his life, with his actor son Gavan playing Twain’s younger self.
In 1948 O’Herlihy joined Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre, and played Macduff in Welles’s low-budget film of Macbeth (1948), exercising his architectural skills to design most of the sets, and translating additional dialogue written by Welles into Irish. Welles did not credit O’Herlihy’s work as set designer, and their later relations were tense. O’Herlihy’s performance in the film led in time to his breakthrough role, the lead in The adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1954); the director, Luis Buñuel, responding to a proposal that he cast Welles in the role, screened Macbeth and fixed instead on O’Herlihy. Filmed over a lengthy period in Mexico, the story of a shipwrecked man surviving for twenty-eight years on a remote island demanded that O’Herlihy be alone on screen for the film’s first fifty minutes, and that he deploy his acting skills to portray his character ageing from young manhood to late middle age. He also appears briefly as Crusoe’s elderly father, glimpsed in a fever-driven nightmare. Critically praised for the performance, O’Herlihy received his only Academy Award nomination, for best actor; he was runner-up in the voting to Marlon Brando for On the waterfront (the other nominees were James Mason for A star is born , Humphrey Bogart for The Caine mutiny, and Bing Crosby for The country girl). O’Herlihy received a letter from his father praising his success in his ‘hobby’ and asking when he would return to his profession (i.e., architecture).
Beginning in the mid 1950s O’Herlihy appeared frequently on television, some such performances being among his best work. He generally refused to make long-term commitments to a television series, believing that, while potentially profitable, they were especially vulnerable to commercial constraints and could inflict long-term career damage through typecasting. (He turned down a role in the hit 1960s series Lost in space.) The major exceptions were The travels of Jaimie McPheeters (1963–4), a western in which he played the showman father of the juvenile protagonist (Kurt Russell), and The long hot summer (1965–6), for which he was recruited mid-series to replace Edmond O’Brien (who had quarrelled with the producers) as the town boss, Will Varner.
O’Herlihy’s career advancement was hindered by consequences of his determined and forceful character. He continued to refuse unsuitable roles, courted notoriety with outspoken political views, and clashed bitterly with his powerful talent agency. Espousing liberal political views from the 1950s (he supported the Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, the darling of the decade’s liberal intellectuals), he moved further leftward over time, arousing suspicions in some quarters of his being a communist. His remark that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover – whom the cast of a film were about to meet – would be better described not as an American patriot but as a traitor resulted in his being informally shut out from future work for Warner Brothers Pictures. Some of his films had political themes. In Fail-safe (1964, dir. Sidney Lumet), which depicted an accidental American nuclear attack on Moscow, O’Herlihy plays a ‘dovish’ American air force general who argues for restraint, and is obliged by the president (Henry Fonda) to destroy New York to convince the Soviets that the attack on them was accidental. O’Herlihy expressed satisfaction that the film deconstructed the Cold War image of Russians as ruthless fanatics. His contempt for Russophobia increased owing to a lengthy period in 1969 in Uzhgorod, western Ukraine, during the filming of Waterloo (1970, dir. Sergei Bondarchuk), in which he played Marshal Ney. (Personal sympathy for Russians did not equate to admiration for the Soviet system; he noted that the USSR had its own rigid class system, and predicted a future youth revolt resembling that of the late 1960s in the West.) O’Herlihy’s portrayal of Franklin D. Roosevelt in MacArthur (1977, dir. Joseph Sargent) is regarded as one of his finest, and reflected the intellectual fascination with power and its workings that informed his political commitment.
With the decline of the classic studio system, agents became the major brokers in Hollywood; in 1958 the powerful talent agency MCA acquired Universal Studios, creating a conflict of interest in its representation of clients. When O’Herlihy resisted pressure to reprise the Robinson Crusoe role for a Universal television series (stating that he was loathe to go from Buñuel to TV hack direction), the agency ordered him ‘put on ice’. O’Herlihy fired the agency, went public with his complaints, and gave evidence at an anti-trust inquiry, mounted by the Justice department under Attorney General Robert Kennedy, which forced MCA to dissolve its agency component so as to retain control of Universal and its music operations. O’Herlihy’s role in the agency’s defeat was remembered by MCA executives, who exercised considerable power within Hollywood; their enmity inflicted considerable short-term damage on his career and contributed to his spending more time in Ireland.
O’Herlihy had worked in Ireland on the filming of A terrible beauty(1960; dir. Tay Garnett) as a local IRA commander collaborating with Nazi Germany in the 1940s; the film starred Robert Mitchum. Maintaining that his regular visits to Ireland prevented him from romanticising the country, he noted that the socially ambitious Irish middle classes of the relatively affluent 1960s and 1970s resembled their counterparts in California’s San Fernando Valley. He compared the speculatively redeveloped Dublin cityscape of the period to a dishevelled and gap-toothed old man, remarking that it was easy to see from the standard of new building that most Irish architects had emigrated. He and his family lived in Ireland in the mid 1960s and again in 1970–75. Briefly rejoining the Abbey company, he played the lead role of the JFK-emulating publican in the premiere of Tom Murphy’s ‘The White House’ (1972). Asked to become a Labour candidate in the 1973 general election, he declined owing to the impossibility of combining electoral office with the extensive travelling required by his acting career. Finding it necessary to be American-based to remain in demand as a Hollywood actor, and because his children had grown up as Americans, O’Herlihy moved back to America in 1975; he took American citizenship in 1980.
Late film roles included Grig, the friendly alien ‘iguana man’, in The last starfighter (1984; dir. Nick Castle); the Old Man (boss of the malevolent corporation OmniCorp) in RoboCop (1987; dir. Paul Verhoeven, whom O’Herlihy regarded as one of the best contemporary directors) and in RoboCop 2 (1990; dir. Irvin Kershner); the tipsy protestant guest Mr Brown in The dead(1987), adapted by John Huston (qv) from the story by James Joyce; and the sawmill owner Andrew Packard in six episodes of the surreal television serial Twin Peaks (1990–91). His last role was as Joseph Kennedy Sr in the television movie The Rat Pack(1998).
O’Herlihy died 17 February 2005 in Malibu, California, and is buried in St Ibar cemetery, Wexford. Four of his five children worked in theatre and film: Gavan, Cormac, and Patricia as actors, and Olwen as a producer and visual artist. His grandson Colin O’Herlihy became an actor, and his granddaughter Micaela O’Herlihy a multimedia artist.
Sources
GRO (birth cert.); O’Herlihy Papers, UCD Archives, IE UCDA P202 (permission of O’Herlihy family required for consultation; includes catalogue with biographical introduction and filmography; see esp.: P202/18 (collection of published interviews); P202/22 (outline of projected documentary on O’Herlihy); P202/110–11 (Robinson Crusoe material); P202/238 (biographical material); P202/240 (obituaries)); Des Hickey and Gus Smith (ed.), Flight from the Celtic twilight (1973); Kevin Rockett, The Irish filmography: fiction films 1896–1996 (1996); Revisiting Fail-safe, short documentary on 2000 DVD release of Fail-safe; Ir. Times, 19 Feb. 2005; Daily Telegraph, 19 Feb. 2005; Sunday Independent, 20 Feb. 2005; Independent (London), 21 Feb. 2005; Internet Movie Database, www.imdb.com; Internet Broadway Database, www.ibdb.com; Irish Playography, www.irishplayography.com (websites accessed July 2011); information from Olwen O’Herlihy Dowling (daughter
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.
