Richard Hylton was born in Oklaholma in 1920. He made his film debut in “Lost Boundaries” in 1949. His film credits include “Halls of Montezuma”, “The Secret of Convict Lake” and “Fixed Bayonets”. He died in 1962.
Hollywood Actors
Richard Hylton was born in Oklaholma in 1920. He made his film debut in “Lost Boundaries” in 1949. His film credits include “Halls of Montezuma”, “The Secret of Convict Lake” and “Fixed Bayonets”. He died in 1962.
Maureen Stapleton was born in 1925 in Troy, New York. She made her stage debut in 1946 with Burgess Meredith in “The Playboy of the Western World”. She established herself on stage in the works of Tennessee Williams and William Inge. She made her film debut in 1958 in “Lonelyhearts” with Montgomery Clift and Dolores Hart. She other films include “”Bye Bye Birdie”, “Airport” and “Interiors”. She won the Oscar for her performance in “Reds” in 1981. She died in 2003.
Tom Vallance’s obituary in “The Independent”:
The actress Maureen Stapleton was a versatile, much-feted actress and winner of all three major awards – the Tony, the Emmy and the Oscar. Her film appearances were infrequent, but brought her four Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress, the fourth, for her superb incarnation of the anarchist Emma Goldman in Reds (1981), winning her the award.
Equally convincing whether playing tough or vulnerable, straight or comic, she was particularly noted as an exponent of Tennessee Williams’s characters. In the theatre she created the heroines of The Rose Tattoo and Orpheus Descending, and acted in works by Neil Simon and Lillian Hellman. Simon’s play The Gingerbread Lady, in which she starred, is generally considered to be based on the tempestuous life of Stapleton herself.
Born to staunch Irish Catholics in 1925 in Troy, New York, Stapleton had an alcoholic father who left home when she was a child. She later said that a love of movies and film magazines helped her overcome poverty and low self-esteem. After graduating from high school in 1942, she worked as a clerk for a year before setting off for New York to pursue an acting career.
Following studies at the Herbert Berghof Acting School, she made her Broadway début after telephoning the producer Guthrie McLintock and asking him who was to play Pegeen Mike in his production of The Playboy of the Western World. McLintock cast her as a village girl and to understudy Pegeen, and she actually played the role for the last week of the run.
McLintock and his wife Katharine Cornell took her into their company, and she then became a charter member of the Actors’ Studio. In 1948 she played Masha in a Studio performance of The Seagull and made her television début in the drama Night Club.
In 1951 Stapleton achieved stardom with her performance as the earthy Sicilian widow in The Rose Tattoo. Williams had written the role for Anna Magnani, who felt her English was not good enough to sustain such an intensive stage role. “It was I who found Maureen Stapleton for the part,” the author wrote later. “She was a very young girl at the time but nevertheless I thought she was so brilliant in characterisation that the obstacle of her youth would be overcome.” Stapleton won the Tony as Best Actress and was forever identified with the play, taking the role of Serafina again in revivals in 1966 and 1973.
She also played Flora, the simple-minded young wife in Williams’s 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1955), later filmed as Baby Doll with Carroll Baker as Flora, and she created the role of the passionate shopkeeper Lady Torrance in Orpheus Descending (1957). Magnani played the role on screen opposite Marlon Brando, though Stapleton appeared in the film version in another role. She also triumphed in a revival of Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1965).
In 1960 Stapleton appeared in a big hit, Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic, playing one of two sisters who devote their lives to their brother. Both Stapleton and Anne Revere, who played her sister, were nominated for Tony Awards, with Revere winning.
Neil Simon’s hit comedy Plaza Suite (1968) consisted of three playlets set in the same hotel; it gave Stapleton and George C. Scott the opportunity to play three different couples and prompted the critic Martin Gottfried to comment, “It proved to me for the first time that an Actors Studio-trained actor can play comedy.” Stapleton repeated one of the roles in the film version, which cast three separate actresses in the stories.
In 1971 she won another Tony Award starring in Simon’s The Gingerbread Lady, playing Evy Meara, an alcoholic singer who returns from a drying-out session and attempts to rid herself of her abusive young lover. The character was largely considered to be an amalgam by Simon of Judy Garland and Stapleton herself, which the actress disputed in her autobiography, A Hell of a Life (1995). Stapleton frankly confessed, though, to a tumultuous love life which encompassed many impetuous, ill-fated affairs (including one with the stage director George Abbott that started when he was 81 and she was 43) and two failed marriages.
Stapleton’s sporadic screen career began with her harrowing portrayal of an unscrupulous nymphomaniac in Miss Lonelyhearts (1958), her performance winning an Oscar nomination. She worked with the director Sidney Lumet on adaptations of Williams’s The Fugitive Kind (1960) and Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (1962), then had her first screen comedy role in the musical Bye Bye Birdie (1963).
Her second Oscar nomination was for her long-suffering Inez Guerrero, whose mentally unstable husband (Van Heflin) takes a bomb on a flight to Rome so that his wife can get his travel insurance, in George Seaton’s box-office hit Airport (1970). Woody Allen’s first dramatic film, Interiors (1978) brought a third nomination, and she finally won the award for Warren Beatty’s Reds, based on the life of the liberal activist and journalist John Reed.
Her other films included Cocoon (1985, as one of the elderly folk who discover a means of rejuvenation) and The Money Pit (1986, as a zany real-estate crook). On television, she won an Emmy Award for her performance in Truman Capote’s Among the Paths to Eden (1967).
Celebrated by her colleagues not only for her talent, but her wit, loyalty and warmth, she was described by Tennessee Williams as “self-destructive” but “an absolute genius and one of the total innocents of the world”.
Tom Vallance
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Shirley MacLaine has had a long and varied career. She was born in Virginia in 1934. She made her film debut for Alfred Hitchcock in 1955 in The Trouble With Harry”. Among her films are “Around the World in 80 Days”, “Ask Any Girl”, “Some Came Running”, “The Apartment”, “Irma La Douce”, “Sweet Charity”£, “Can Can”, “Terms of Endearment” and “Steel Magnolias”.
TCM Overview|:
Broadway hoofer, dramatic talent, spiritual eccentric, activist, Oscar winner… Over the course of a varied and distinguished career, actress Shirley MacLaine earned these titles many times over. A former ballerina hopeful-turned-chorus girl, she rose to fame in the early 1950s after Hollywood producers noticed her in Broadway’s “Pajama Game.” She made the transition to features in a series of roles that emphasized her quirkiness and heartbreaking vulnerability, most notably in “Some Came Running” (1960), “The Apartment” (1960) and “Irma La Douce” (1963). The redheaded pixie dropped out of features in the late 1960s – watching her brother Warren Beatty rise to fame at that time -but reemerged in the late 1970s with several acclaimed performances in such films as “The Turning Point” (1977), “Being There” (1979) and “Terms of Endearment” (1983), the latter of which brought her a long-overdue Oscar for Best Actress. She remained a vital presence in efforts like “Steel Magnolias” (1989), “Postcards from the Edge” (1990) and “Guarding Tess” (1994), while extolling alternative beliefs in reincarnation and extraterrestrials that occasionally earned derision from pundits. Well into her seventies, the actress continued to command attention in acclaimed projects, ranging from the biopic “Coco Chanel” (Lifetime, 2008) to the black comedy “Bernie” (2012). Not that the validation was necessary, but an AFI Life Achievement Award merely punctuated the fact that MacLaine remained among the most gifted of Hollywood and stage performers for over 40 years – a distinction that she continued to earn well into the new millennium.
Born Shirley MacLaine Beaty on April 24, 1934, she was the daughter of teachers Ira Owen Beaty and Kathrine Corrine MacLean, who also raised a son, Warren, later a major Hollywood talent in his own right. MacLaine was born in Richmond, VA, but the family moved to several locations in the state throughout her childhood before settling in Waverly. MacLaine’s most fervent desire was to become a dancer, which she had begun to train for at the age of two; by four, she had made her public debut and would appear on the professional stage just eight years later. So great was her desire to dance that while warming up before a performance of “Cinderella,” she snapped her ankle. Not wishing to bow out, she bound her feet and went through with the production, after which she was dispatched in an ambulance. Eventually, the rigors of ballet proved too great for MacLaine to pursue in earnest, so she shifted her attention to acting. Just one summer shy of high school graduation, she lit out for New York in 1950 to audition for musicals and landed a part in the chorus for a revival of “Oklahoma!” She went back to Virginia to earn her diploma, after which she returned to the Great White Way to seek her fortune. Billed as Shirley MacLaine, she worked as a model while auditioning for musicals, eventually serving as Carol Haney’s understudy in the Broadway production of “The Pajama Game.”
In 1952, MacLaine had her big break in an amusingly showbiz way; Haney, who had garnered a reputation for never missing a performance, broke her ankle before curtain call. MacLaine was called in to replace her. The debut was a rough one, but MacLaine held her own. Three months later, Haney was again forced to miss a show, and MacLaine – now more familiar with the intricacies of the part – stepped in again. This time, director-producer Hal B. Wallis was in the audience and was charmed by her boundless energy. The veteran showman signed her to a five-year contract at Warner Bros., which commenced with “The Trouble with Harry” (1955) for no less than legendary director, Alfred Hitchcock. Though not one of the great filmmaker’s biggest hits, the black comedy helped to establish MacLaine’s screen persona: bubbly, irreverent and unquestionably alluring. She later belied that perception by showing a feistier side while engaging in and winning a highly publicized contract dispute with Wallis. She soon balanced light features like “Artists and Models” (1955) and “Around the World in Eighty Days” (1956) with more dramatic fare, which proved her to be among the more versatile actresses of the period. Most notable among the latter was “Some Came Running” (1960), in which she captivated as a small-town girl who overcomes her bad reputation in an attempt to find true love with Frank Sinatra’s cynical war vet. Critics and audiences responded favorably to the turn, which netted MacLaine Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations. Her participation in the film, which co-starred Dean Martin, made her an unofficial member – some said, sole female mascot – of Sinatra’s Rat Pack, an allegiance that was solidified with her uncredited cameo as a tipsy woman in the group’s iconic heist film, “Ocean’s Eleven” (1960).
MacLaine hit her stride in movies during the early 1960s, where she divided her time equally between straight drama, light comedies, and her roots in musical theater. She received perhaps her best early showcase as the vulnerable young elevator operator who beguiles Jack Lemmon’s salary man in Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” (1960). Her performance, alternately winning and heartbreaking, earned her a second Oscar nod and wins from BAFTA and the Golden Globes. She played variations on that role in “Two for the Seesaw” (1962) with Robert Mitchum, “The Yellow Rolls-Royce” (1964) as a moll for gangster George C. Scott, and “What a Way to Go” (1964), as the seemingly “cursed” widow of Dean Martin, Dick Van Dyke, Paul Newman and Robert Mitchum, among others. She also reunited with Wilder to once again entice Jack Lemmon as the French prostitute “Irma La Douce” (1963), which brought her a third Academy Award nomination and second Golden Globe. However, by the mid-1960s, MacLaine’s career seemed to be in a rut. Musicals had faded as a money-making genre for studios, and executives seemed to have little idea of how to cast MacLaine as anything but the offbeat romantic lead in such largely unremarkable efforts as “Gambit” (1966) and “Woman Times Seven” (1967), in which director Vittorio De Sica had her tackle seven different roles. She continued to land Golden Globe nominations for her work, but the projects were simply not up to the standards of her past projects. She managed to land one final musical with 1969’s “Sweet Charity” for director Bob Fosse. The project turned out to be a miserable failure, though it did leave MacLaine with a signature song, “If They Could See Me Now,” which would later become a highlight of her singing engagements and TV specials.
MacLaine was largely off the screen for much of the late 1960s and early 1970s, preferring instead to work in other capacities. She was frequently on television during the decade, both as the star of her own short-lived sitcom “Shirley’s World” (ABC, 1971-72) and as the star of several well-received TV specials that highlighted her song and dance talents, beginning with 1974’s Emmy-winning “Shirley MacLaine: If They Could See Me Now” for CBS. MacLaine also defied her “kooky” screen persona by becoming deeply involved in politics; first as a delegate from California for Robert F. Kennedy and later, as a campaigner for George McGovern in 1972. The following year, MacLaine toured mainland China and recounted her experiences in a book, You Can Get There from Here, as well as in a documentary, “The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir” (1975), which earned her an Oscar nomination (shared with Claudia Weill) for Best Documentary. MacLaine also penned the first of several candid memoirs, Don’t Fall Off the Mountain in 1973, and mounted an impressive return to Broadway with a one-woman show, “Gypsy in My Soul” in 1976.
Her feature film career began to rebuild itself in the mid-1970s with an Oscar-nominated turn as a former ballerina who locks horns with a longtime competitor (Anne Bancroft) in “The Turning Point” (1977). She matched this success with a sexually charged turn as the long-neglected wife of a powerful businessman who attempts to find relief from Peter Sellers’ kindly gardener in Hal Ashby’s “Being There” (1979). Both films helped to put an older but no less spunky MacLaine back on the Hollywood map. But her greatest screen triumph would come four years later with James Brooks’ “Terms of Endearment” (1983). MacLaine unleashed the full brunt of her dramatic talents as the high-maintenance Aurora Greenway, who puts aside her differences with daughter Emma (Debra Winger) to care for her while she endures a terminal illness. The performance was hard-fought; MacLaine quit the production midway through, only to return for its completion, and reports from the set detailed numerous squabbles between the veteran actress and up-and-comer Winger, but it ultimately yielded her an Oscar which she famously won over her onscreen daughter.
Some of the goodwill and buzz generated by the Academy Award win was deflated by the release of MacLaine’s memoir Out on a Limb (1983). The bestseller detailed her ongoing fascination with spirituality, including out-of-body experiences and multiple reincarnations. The decidedly unusual subject matter helped to brand MacLaine as a bit of an eccentric, a label she handled with remarkable good humor, as noted by her appearance as an afterlife version of herself in Albert Brooks’ comedy “Defending Your Life” (1991). MacLaine was off the big screen for about four years after the release of Out on a Limb, during which she appeared as herself in an Emmy-nominated TV adaptation of the book for ABC in 1987. She also penned three similarly-themed follow-ups, Dancing in the Light (1986), It’s All in the Playing (1987) and Going Within (1989); even releasing her own spiritual workout video, “Shirley MacLaine’s Inner Workout” in 1989. She also played to adoring crowds in her second one-woman show on Broadway, “Shirley MacLaine on Broadway,” in 1984.
MacLaine returned to movies with a vengeance in the late 1980s, starting with her Golden Globe win as an eccentric piano teacher in John Schlesinger’s “Madame Sousatzska” (1988). She essayed numerous formidable matrons during this period, most notably Ouiser Boudreaux in the all-star adaptation of “Steel Magnolias” (1989), and a thinly veiled version of Debbie Reynolds in Mike Nichols’ adaptation of Carrie Fisher’s “Postcards from the Edge” (1990), both of which earned BAFTA nominations. Less acclaimed, but no less well played, were Golden Globe-nominated turns as a Jewish mother in “Used People” (1992) and as a flinty First Lady in “Guarding Tess” (1994). MacLaine also returned to Aurora Greenway for “The Evening Star” (1997), the long-awaited sequel to “Terms of Endearment,” but the results paled by comparison to its predecessor, largely due to the absence of Debra Winger and their unique onscreen rapport. In 1998, her considerable body of work in film, television and stage was honored by the Academy with the Cecil B. DeMille Award. MacLaine’s busy schedule in the late 1990s and early 2000s included several returns to made-for-TV efforts; among the most high-profile of these was the Carrie Fisher-penned “These Old Broads” (ABC, 2001), which pitted her against the equally iconic lineup of Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds and Joan Collins. MacLaine also tackled makeup maven Mary Kay Ash in “The Battle of Mary Kay” (CBS, 2002) and lent her star power to a supporting role in Joseph Sargeant’s “Salem Witch Trials” (CBS, 2003). She also made her solo directorial debut with “Bruno” (2000), an unusual indie drama about a young boy with a taste for cross-dressing.
As she approached her seventh decade, MacLaine’s rarefied talents remained in demand for features, and she was showcased in a trio of high-profile supporting performances in 2005. She offered a deliciously arch Endora to rival even Agnes Moorhead’s original in Nora Ephron’s big-screen version of “Bewitched,” then dropped the glam to play the sympathetic grandmother to rival sisters Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette in Curtis Hanson’s “In Her Shoes.” Her comic skills were also given a workout as Jennifer Aniston’s grandmother, who may have been the inspiration for Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate” (1967), in Rob Reiner’s “Rumor Has It.” MacLaine received strong notices for each picture, earning her umpteenth Golden Globe nomination for “In Her Sh s.” She then starred in “Coco Chanel” (Lifetime, 2008), delivering an icy turn as the notorious French fashion maven, which earned her yet another Golden Globe nomination; this time in the Best Actress in a miniseries or movie category. She also earned an Emmy Award nomination for the role in 2009. In her personal life, she continued to explore her spiritual interests in a flurry of books throughout the new millennium, including Out on a Leash: Exploring the Nature of Reality and Love (2003) and Sage-ing While Age-ing(2007).
Showing absolutely no signs of slowing down, MacLaine co-starred with Barbara Hershey in “Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning” (CTV, 2008), the fourth entry in the film series based on the characters of Lucy Maud Montgomery, in which an adult Anne (Hershey) recalls her childhood in the days before she arrived at the iconic Prince Edward Island farm. Two years later, she returned to theater screens as part of the ensemble cast of director Garry Marshall’s romantic comedy “Valentine’s Day” (2010) as a wife struggling with a secret she had kept from her husband (Héctor Elizondo) for many years. After another two-year respite, she co-starred with Jack Black in Richard Linklater’s based-on-fact dark comedy “Bernie” (2012), in which she played a lonely, bitter widow whose intense relationship with a younger, well-liked local mortician (Black) takes a deadly turn. In June of that year, MacLaine was honored with the 40th American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in a ceremony that was later broadcast on the TV Land cable network. Rather than rest on her laurels, MacLaine further demonstrated her artistic vitality when she joined the cast of the critically-acclaimed British period drama “Downton Abbey” (PBS, 2010- ) as Martha Levinson, the widowed American mother of Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern).
Rita Gam was born in 1928 in Pittsburgh. She made her film debut in 1952 with Ray Milland in “The Thief”. She went on to make “Night People” with Gregory Peck and “King of Kings” with Jeffrey Hunter. She died at the age of 88 in 2016.
“New York Times” obituary:
Rita Gam, who made her eye-catching Hollywood debut without saying a word and played a real-life bridesmaid at the fairy-tale wedding of her former roommate Grace Kelly, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. She was 88.
The cause was respiratory failure, said Nancy Willen, a spokeswoman for the family. Ms. Gam, who was once married to the film director Sidney Lumet, made her Broadway debut in Ben Hecht’s 1946 play “A Flag Is Born” and, after three more Broadway roles, made her first movie six years later, opposite Ray Milland in “The Thief,” a suspense film without dialogue. Life magazine featured her on its cover that year as a “silent and sexy” star who “can express herself eloquently without words.” In just a few moments on the screen, the magazine said, Ms. Gam “makes a striking movie debut without uttering a word.” She also appeared in two movies with Gregory Peck, “Night People” (1954) and “Shoot Out”(1971); “Sign of the Pagan” (1954), with Jack Palance and Jeff Chandler; “Hannibal” (1959), with Victor Mature; “King of Kings” (1961), in which she played Queen Herodias; and “Klute” (1971), with Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland.
Ms. Gam won a Silver Bear as best actress at the 1962 Berlin Film Festival for her performance in Tad Danielewski’s adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play “No Exit.” She also acted on television and in regional theater and produced two documentary series, “World of Film” and “World of Beauty.”
Rita Eleanore Mackay was born in Pittsburgh on April 2, 1927, to Milton A. Mackay, a native of Alsace-Lorraine who died when she was 4, and the former Belle Fately, who was born in Romania.
She took the name of her stepfather, Benjamin J. Gam, a dress manufacturer, who was born in Russia. (As a synonym for glamorous legs, “gams” predates her film career.)
Raised in Manhattan, she attended the private Fieldston School in the Bronx and at 17 ran away from home (about 25 blocks, to a Midtown hotel), finding work modeling hats and selling stuffed pandas while pursuing an acting career.
She was married and divorced twice, first to Mr. Lumet (from 1949 to 1955) and then to Thomas Guinzburg (1956-63), a book publisher and co-founder of The Paris Review. She is survived by her daughter, Kate Guinzburg, a film producer; her son, Michael Guinzburg, a novelist; and two granddaughters. Thomas Guinzburg died in 2010 and Sidney Lumet in 2011.
As an actress, Ms. Gam befriended and roomed with Grace Kelly and was a bridesmaid at her wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956, a union of European aristocracy and Hollywood glamour that was one of the biggest social events of the decade.
An early participant at the Actors Studio, Ms. Gam also played a leading role, along with Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Zoe Caldwell and others, with the Minnesota Theater Company in 1963 during the opening season of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.
After generally being typecast in supporting roles in two dozen films for what Life described as “her sultry face and insinuating voice,” she recalled in 1992, “I looked into the black pit at 40 and wondered, what do I do for an encore?”
Before producing documentaries, she learned to type and wrote two books: “Actress to Actress” (1986), which included a chapter on Grace Kelly, and “Actors: A Celebration” (1988).
Rita Gam, who has died aged 88, was a tall, exotic, raven-haired beauty who enjoyed a successful film, television and stage career spanning almost six decades.
Rita MacKay (she later took the surname of her stepfather Benjamin Gam) was born in Pittsburgh on April 2 1927, but later moved with her parents to New York City where she graduated from high school with her eye on a career in the arts.
She started out working as a model before landing a role in A Flag is Born on Broadway in 1946. Directed by Luther Adler, and starring Marlon Brando, A Flag is Born was produced by the American League for a Free Palestine, some of whose members later formed the Actors Studio, of which she became a founder member.
Her next Broadway play, A Temporary Island (1946), failed to impress critics and closed after only six performances. The Insect Comedy (1947) starring José Ferrer at the City Centre Theatre did not fair much better either, closing after a fortnight.
In 1949 Rita Gam married Sidney Lumet, then an aspiring young director. Soon after she befriended Grace Kelly whose move to Hollywood inspired Rita Gam to do the same. In 1952, after screen testing with MGM, she traveled to Los Angeles where she was given a long-term contract with the studio.
After making her film debut in the crime drama The Thief (1952), starring Ray Milland, Rita Gam was given the female lead in Saadia (1953), in which she played a strange Arab girl whose life has been dominated by a local sorceress who has convinced her she has the evil eye and will bring disaster to all those who come in contact with her. Her other screen roles included Night People (1954), with Gregory Peck and Broderick Crawford, the action adventure Sign of Pagan (1954), starring Jack Palance as Attila the Hun, and director William Dieterle’s Magic Fire (1955).
In May 1955 Rita Gam received a call from Grace Kelly, “giddy with excitement” and inviting her to “meet my prince”. “He was no Clark Gable or Robert Taylor,” Rita Gam later recalled, “but he was charming and well educated.” A few months later Grace Kelly asked her friend to be one of her bridesmaids, an occasion which Rita Gam would later recall as “the fairytale affair the media described”. Also in 1955, however, Rita Gam and Sidney Lumet divorced. The following year they were both remarried; he to the socialite Gloria Vanderbilt and she to Thomas Guinzburg, who was the first managing editor of The Paris Review and president of Viking Press.
By the late 1950s, Rita Gam’s career was suffering. Having been dropped from MGM she began freelancing with other studios, but her career was not gravitating in the direction she wanted it to.
There were some positive performances, including the western, Sierra Baron (1956), after which she travelled to Italy, to play the female lead, Rita Elmont, in director Vittorio Sala’s comedy Costa Azzurra, and Sylvia in the epic Hannibal (both 1959), with Victor Mature in the title role.
She then returned to California, where she appeared in Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1961) with Jeffrey Hunter and Siobhan McKenna. Scenes of the crucifixion had to be re-shot later because a preview audience was offended at Jesus having a hairy chest.
In 1962 she travelled to Berlin, sharing the Silver Bear at the 1962 International Film Festival with Viveca Lindfors for their roles as the women in the hotel room in Tad Danielewski’s No Exit, based on the play by Jean-Paul Sartre. The following year, she and Guinzburg divorced.
Combining a second career as a celebrity journalist, Rita Gam divided her time between film, television and the stage, returning to Broadway in 1967 to star in the hit comedy, There’s a Girl in My Soup at the Music Box Theatre.
Her later film roles included the Gregory Peck Western, Shootout (both 1971), and Garden of Death (1974), starring Joe Dallesandro as a sinister landscape gardener who turns into a tree and learns to communicate with his fellow plants, while killing off his previous employers. She joined Piper Laurie in the thriller Distortions (1987) and played Iris Biglow in Rowing Through (1996).
After Grace Kelly’s death in 1982, Rita Gam recalled a rather different version of the actress than the one reflected in the media. Grace Kelly, she explained was not a fashionista at all, rather she was more at home wearing simple shirts and skirts. “Her palace closets,” she said in 2012, “were packed with old sweaters”.
Rita Gam published her autobiography, Actress to Actress, in 1986. Two years later she wrote Actors: A Celebration, which included interviews with stars such as Jack Lemmon, Jeremy Irons and Derek Jacobi. More recently, she produced the Broadway play Fortune’s Fool (2002), which was set in 19th-century Russia and starred Alan Bates and Frank Langella. She also produced the documentary series World of Film, which examined the movie business around the world.
She is survived by her daughter, the film producer Kate Guinzburg, and her son, the novelist Michael Guinzburg
A mezzo-soprano, she was the first performer to be heard lustily singing Wunderbar, So in Love and, above all, I Hate Men, in Porter’s greatest stage hit. She appeared in more than 1,000 performances of the show on Broadway, tamed by the baritone Alfred Drake; and in the original London production at the Coliseum in 1951. She also starred in the 1964 television production of the musical (with Howard Keel), which launched BBC2 – after an initial power failure.
Discontented with the parts she was asked to play in films, she abandoned the big screen altogether for the stage and television in the 1950s. In contrast to the shrewish Lilli/Kate in Kiss Me Kate, she took the role of the governess Anna Leonowens opposite Yul Brynner, joining the original production of The King and I on Broadway from 1954.
Born in New York, Patricia was the daughter of William Morison, the Belfast-born playwright, actor and theatrical agent, and Selena Morison (nee Fraser), who worked for British intelligence during the first world war. Patricia studied acting at drama school and also trained as a dancer with Martha Graham.
Aged 19, she was working as a dress designer and considering a career in either art or dance, when she became understudy to Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina on Broadway in 1936, and then appeared with Drake, her later Kiss Me, Kate co-star, in the operetta The Two Bouquets (1938), in which she sang a number of Victorian ballads
This gained her a contract at Paramount, where she stayed for three years until 1942, displaying what the studio claimed was the longest hair in Hollywood (39in long). Among her inconsequential but enjoyable films there were those in which she played opposite the studio’s biggest male contract stars: Ray Milland in Untamed (1940) and Are Husbands Necessary? (1942), and Fred MacMurray in Rangers of Fortune (1940) and One Night in Lisbon (1941).
Morison had more interesting and varied roles when she went freelance in 1942, beginning with top billing in Hitler’s Madman (1943), Douglas Sirk’s first American film. In it she played a brave Czech partisan involved in the assassination of the Nazi official Reinhardt Heydrich (John Carradine), which led to the horrifying reprisals against the town of Lidice.
Nothing as substantial came her way, unless one counts her role in Henry Hathaway’s thriller Kiss of Death (1947), as Victor Mature’s wife who is raped and later takes her own life by putting her head in a gas oven. Unfortunately, her part was cut out of the film completely because the production code refused to allow a rape or suicide to be shown. Nevertheless, Morison’s name still appears on the credits of the film.
Previously, Morison was dropped at the last minute in favour of Veronica Lake in The Glass Key (1942) because she was considered too tall to play opposite Alan Ladd. She had to be content with playing the “other woman” coming between John Garfield and Maureen O’Hara in the film noir The Fallen Sparrow (1943), and a supporting role in the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn vehicle Without Love (1945). She was at her best as a villainous femme fatale in Dressed to Kill (1946), the last of the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes series. Morison also appeared to great effect as a ruthless leader of a expedition to track down animals for zoos in Tarzan and the Huntress (1947).
But after she played Maid Marian to Jon Hall’s Robin Hood in Prince of Thieves (1948), Morison’s main focus was television, which was beginning to burgeon, and the stage. She only returned to feature films briefly, strutting manfully as George Sand in Song Without End (1960), which starred Dirk Bogarde as Liszt.
Her latter years were taken up with painting, and appearing at various shows and reunions celebrating the Cole Porter musical in which she had played such a significant part.
• Ursula Eileen Patricia Augustus Fraser Morison, actor and singer, born 19 March 1915; died 20 May 2018.
Karen Morley was born in 1909 in Iowa. She was awarded a contract with MGM and was in such films as “Mata Hari” with Greta Garbo in 1931, “The Mask of Fu Manchu”, “Dinner At Eight” with Marie Dressler and “Pride and Prejudice” with Greer Garson and Maureen O’Sullivan. She died in 2003.
Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:
A month after director Elia Kazan received the Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 1999 (despite having named names before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee – HUAC), the San Francisco Film Festival honoured Karen Morley, whose career as an actress suffered from “friendly” witnesses. Morley, who has died aged 93, was called before Congress in 1952, but invoked the Fifth Amendment when asked if she had ever been a member of the Communist party. Actors Sterling Hayden and Robert Taylor were among those who denounced her.
She was born Mabel Linton in Ottumwa, Iowa, and moved with her foster family to California in her teens. After graduating from UCLA, she gained some acting experience at the Pasadena Community Playhouse. She broke into movies in 1930, when asked to read lines to actors being tested for the Garbo movie, Inspiration. She was cast, and signed up by MGM as Karen Morley.
In 1932, one of her busiest years, Morley appeared with Garbo in Mata Hari; she had leading roles in Arsene Lupin as gentleman-thief John Barrymore’s love interest; and played three femmes fatales , for which she is most remembered. In Washington Masquerade, she was a sexy lobbyist who married and corrupted a senator (Lionel Barrymore). In John Ford’s uncharacteristic Flesh, Morley trapped wrestler Wallace Beery into marriage; she then took a lover, had a baby by him, and passed it off as her husband’s. She was sympathetic when she declared her love for Beery, in prison for killing her lover. In Howard Hawks’ Scarface, there was little sympathy for her as Poppy, the blonde moll of a minor hoodlum. “She don’t like anybody but me,” he boasted, deluded; she soon made eyes at big gangster Paul Muni. Also in 1932, in The Mask Of Fu Manchu, her loveliness stimulated villainous Boris Karloff’s appetite for evil. The film was co-directed, uncredited, by the Hungarian-born Charles Vidor. He married Morley that year, keeping it secret from studio and press: they later had a son.
Vidor introduced her into politics, especially to anti-fascist groups. She left MGM after Dinner at Eight (1933) in which she shone as the forgiving wife of a philandering doctor, and went on to appear in Our Daily Bread (1934), an independent production about an attempt to start a farming cooperative. The film, directed by King Vidor (no relation), and called “pinko” by the Hearst press and “capitalist propaganda” in the Soviet Union, was a brave, raw attempt to inject contemporary issues into Hollywood cinema. As much as she could, Morley chose films with some political content such as Black Fury (1935) about racketeers muscling in on the Mine Worker’s Union, and The Last Train From Madrid (1937) in which she was a passenger fleeing the civil war. In 1940, Morley returned to MGM for one film, Pride And Prejudice. Soon after, she joined a tobacco workers’ organising drive in the South, having followed leftwing actor Lloyd Gough there. They married after her divorce from Vidor in 1943.
Morley made a number of minor films in the 1940s, while active as one of the few radicals in the Screen Actors Guild. She organised a strike, but it broke when Guild members, including Frank Sinatra and Robert Mitchum, crossed the picket lines. In 1951, she appeared in M, the remake of Fritz Lang’s German classic. Morley, with Joseph Losey, the director, Waldo Salt, the co-writer, and other members of the cast, was blacklisted in 1952. Lloyd Gough was also subpoenaed and blacklisted. Because Gough had played the important part of the heavy in Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1952), he could not be cut from the film, but he was not named in the final credits. Morley and Gough struggled to make a living over the next years, with a few parts in theatre and television. “It was really murder to find work after being blacklisted, for all actors who were prominent, because their faces were well known,” Morley explained. “People in the theatre like to say that it didn’t have a blacklist, and technically it didn’t. But people went out the back door when I tried to look for work in the theatre.”
In 1954, Morley, retired from acting, ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant-governor of New York State on the American Labor Party ticket. Gough worked in television series; he died in 1984.
· Karen Morley (Mabel Linton), actor, born December 12 1909; died March 8 2003
Frank Wolf was born in San Francisco in 1928. He starred in Elia Kazan’s “America, America” in 1963 and “Once Upon A Time in the West” in 1968. He died in 1971 in Rome.
Sally Kellerman was born in 1937 in Long Beach, California. Studied at the Actor’s Studio in New York and worked extensively on television during the 1960’s. Her breakthrough role came with the film “Mash” as ‘Hot Lips Houlihan’ in 1970. Her other films included “Lost Horizon” in 1973, “Brewster McCloud”, “S.O.B.” and “Pret-A-Porter_ in 1994.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Sally Kellerman arrived quite young on the late 1950s film and TV scene with a fresh and distinctively weird, misfit presence. It is this same uniqueness that continues to makes her such an attractively offbeat performer today. The willowy, swan-necked, flaxen-haired actress shot to film comedy fame after toiling nearly a decade and a half in the business, and is still most brazenly remembered for her career-maker — the irreverent hit MASH(1970), for which she received supporting Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. From there she went on to enjoy a number of other hallmark moments as both an actress and a vocalist.
California native Sally Clare Kellerman was born on June 2, 1937, in Long Beach to John Helm Kellerman and Edith Baine (née Vaughn) Kellerman. Raised along with her sister in the San Fernando Valley area, Sally was attracted to the performing arts after seeingMarlon Brando star in the film Viva Zapata! (1952). Attending the renowned Hollywood High School as a teenager, she sang in musical productions while there, including a version of “Meet Me in St. Louis”. Following graduation, she enrolled at Los Angeles City College but left after a year when enticed by acting guru Jeff Corey‘s classes.
Initially inhibited by her height (5’10”), noticeably gawky and slinky frame and wide slash of a mouth, Sally proved difficult to cast at first but finally found herself up for the lead role in Otto Preminger‘s “A”-level film Saint Joan (1957). She lost out in the end, however, when Preminger finally decided to give the role of Joan of Arc to fellow newcomer Jean Seberg. Hardly compensation, 20-year-old Sally made her film debut that same year as a girls’ reformatory inmate who threatens the titular leading lady in the cult “C” juvenile delinquent drama Reform School Girl (1957) starring “good girl” Gloria Castillo and “bad guy” Edd Byrnes of “777 Sunset Strip” teen idol fame, an actor she met and was dating after attending Corey’s workshops. Directed by infamous lowbudget horror film Samuel Z. Arkoff, her secondary part in the film did little in the way of advancing her career. At the same time Sally pursued a singing career, earning a recording contract with Verve Records.
The 1960s was an uneventful but growing period for Kellerman, finding spurts of quirky TV roles in both comedies (“Bachelor Father,” “My Three Sons,” “Dobie Gillis” and “Ozzie and Harriet”) and dramas (“Lock Up,” “Surfside 6,” “Cheyenne,” “The Outer Limits,” “The Rogues,” “Slattery’s People” and the second pilot of “Star Trek”). Sally’s sophomore film was just as campy as the first but her part was even smaller. As an ill-fated victim of theHands of a Stranger (1962), the oft-told horror story of a concert pianist whose transplanted hands become deadly, the film came and went without much fanfare. Studying later at Los Angeles’ Actors’ Studio (West), Sally’s roles increased toward the end of the 1960s with featured parts in more quality filming, including The Third Day(1965), The Boston Strangler (1968) (as a target for killer Tony Curtis) and The April Fools (1969).
Sally’s monumental break came, of course, via director Robert Altman when he hired her for, and she created a dusky-voiced sensation out of, the aggressively irritating character Major Margaret (“Kiss My ‘Hot Lips'”) Houlihan. Her highlighting naked-shower scene in the groundbreaking cinematic comedy MASH (1970) had audiences ultimately laughing and gasping at the same time. Both she and the film were a spectacular success with Sally the sole actor to earn an Oscar nomination for her marvelous work here. She shouldn’t have lost but did to the overly spunky veteran Helen Hayes in Airport (1970).
Becoming extremely good friends with Altman during the movie shoot, Sally went on to film a couple more of the famed director’s more winning and prestigious films of the 1970s, beginning with her wildly crazed “angelic” role in Brewster McCloud (1970), and finishing up brilliantly as a man-hungry real estate agent in his Welcome to L.A. (1976), directed by Alan Rudolph. Sally later regretted not taking the Karen Black singing showcase role in one of Altman’s best-embraced films, Nashville (1975), when originally offered.
Putting out her first album, “Roll With the Feelin'” for Decca Records around this time (1972), Sally continued to be a quirky comedy treasure in both co-star and top supporting roles of the 1970s. She was well cast neurotically opposite Alan Arkin in the Neil Simoncomedy Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972) and again alongside ex-con James Caan as a sexy but loony delight in Slither (1973), a precursor to the Coen Bros.’ darkly comic films. She also co-starred and contributed a song (“Reflections”) to the Burt Bacharach/Hal David soundtrack of the Utopian film Lost Horizon (1973), a musical picture that proved lifeless at the box office.
More impressive work came with the movies A Little Romance (1979) as young Diane Lane‘s quirky mom; Foxes (1980) as Jodie Foster‘s confronting mother; Serial (1980), a California comedy satire starring Martin Mull; That’s Life! (1986), a social comedy withJack Lemmon and Julie Andrews; and Back to School (1986), comic Rodney Dangerfield‘s raucous vehicle hit.
Kellerman’s films from the 1980s on have been pretty much a mixed bag. While some, such as the low-grade Moving Violations (1985), Meatballs III: Summer Job (1986),Doppelganger (1993) Live Virgin (1999) and Women of the Night (2001) have been completely unworthy of her talents, her presence in others have been, at the very least, catchy such as her Natasha Fatale opposite Dave Thomas‘ Boris Badenov in Boris and Natasha (1992); director Percy Adlon‘s inventive Younger and Younger (1993), which reunited her with MASH co-star Donald Sutherland, and in Robert Altman‘s rather disjointed, ill-received all-star effort Prêt-à-Porter (1994) in which she plays a fashion magazine editor.
When her quality film output faltered in later years, Sally lent a fine focus back to her singing career and made a musical dent as a deep-voiced blues and jazz artist. She started hitting the Los Angeles and New York club circuits with solo acts. In 2009, Kellerman released her first album since “Roll With The Feelin'” simply titled “Sally,” a jazz and blues-fused album. Along those same lines, Sally played a nightclub singer in the comedy Limit Up (1989) and later co-starred in the movie Night Club (2011) where friends and residents start a club in a retirement home. Sally’s seductively throaty voice has also put her in good standing as a voice-over artist of commercials, feature films and TV.
Divorced in the 1970s from TV writer/director Rick Edelstein, Sally later married Jonathan D. Krane. She has three adopted children.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
She took her most famous part despite a rant at the director and went on to be nominated for an Oscar
ByTelegraph Obituaries25 February 2022 • 3:34pm
Sally Kellerman, who has died aged 84, was a hard-working jobbing screen actress for more than a decade before finally finding stardom with her bravura performance as the sultry, alluring head nurse, Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan, in the film version of M*A*S*H.
The director, Robert Altman, originally auditioned her for another role eventually played by Jo Ann Pflug in the 1970 movie, a satire on the Korean War at the time American soldiers were dying in Vietnam.
“My agent said that I was reading for the part of Lieutenant Dish,” she said, “so I thought that I had better put on some red lipstick to look more ‘dish-y’.”
Sally Kellerman impressed Altman to the extent that he told her: “I’ll give you the best role in the picture, Hot Lips.” She took away a script but found that the character had just the odd line here and there, and disappeared halfway through.
Feeling that the director was making a fool of her, she later admitted going into a rant with him at their next meeting. “I had spent years playing roles on TV,” she explained. “I was already 31 years old. I didn’t want a career playing hard-bitten drunks in Chanel suits who get slapped by their husbands.”
Altman dealt with Sally Kellerman’s tantrum by casually telling her to “take a chance”. She accepted the role and “Hot Lips” turned out to be a central character – and gained her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress.
The theme song, with its “suicide is painless” lyric, instantly set the black comedy tone before cinemagoers were introduced to the cynicism of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital’s surgeons led by “Hawkeye” Pierce, “Duke” Forrest and “Trapper John” McIntyre, played by Donald Sutherland, Tom Skerritt and Elliott Gould respectively.
Major Margaret Houlihan, the highest-ranking female officer and a stickler for regulations, becomes a target for the camp’s pranksters, who set out to humiliate her. When she falls into the arms of another surgeon, Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), the public address system operator, Radar O’Reilly (Gary Burghoff), sneaks a microphone into the room to capture for all the sounds of their passionate lovemaking.
It is the scene where, in a variation from the novel, the nickname of Sally Kellerman’s character is introduced. “Oh, Frank, my lips are hot,” she tells him. “Kiss my hot lips!”
Later, when a $20 bet is placed on whether Hot Lips is a true blonde, the tent sides are pulled off while she is showering. As her naked body is revealed, an audience led by Hawkeye and Trapper John is lined up outside cheering.
In a 2016 interview, Sally Kellerman revealed that Altman’s own high jinks helped to spark her reaction in front of the camera.
“When I looked up,” she recalled, “there was Gary Burghoff stark naked standing in front of me. The next take, [Altman] had Tamara Horrocks – she was the more amply endowed nurse – without her shirt on. So I attribute my Academy Award nomination to the people who made my mouth hang open!”
This scene was followed by Hot Lips running to complain to Henry Blake (Roger Bowen), the commanding officer, that this is no hospital but an “insane asylum”, only to find him in bed with a female lieutenant.
Critics who later referred to such sexism and misogyny could point to the fact that neither scene was in the original book.
Like all of the film’s other stars apart from Burghoff, Sally Kellerman did not reprise her role in the subsequent long-running TV series, with Loretta Swit taking over as Hot Lips.
She did continue in other films with Altman, enjoying the freedom he gave actors to interpret and ad-lib scripts, although none attained the same status.
Frustration also came with Neil Simon’s disappointing adaptation of his own stage comedy Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972), where her performance as a waspish vamp luring a restaurant owner into the first of a series of mid-life-crisis affairs was better than the film itself.
Sally Clare Kellerman was born in Long Beach, California, on June 2 1937 to Edith (née Vaughn), a piano teacher, and John Kellerman, a Shell Oil executive.
She sang in musicals while attending Hollywood High School and had ambitions to be a jazz singer. Aged 18, she landed a contract with Verve Records, but she never went beyond making demo records when stage fright meant she could not perform live.
Instead, she switched to acting, taking classes at Los Angeles City College, and made her screen debut in the 1957 film Reform School Girl.
Many one-off television roles followed, including Dr Elizabeth Dehner, the USS Enterprise’s psychiatrist, in an early episode of Star Trek in 1966 (made as the sci-fi series’s second pilot the previous year). In The Boston Strangler (1968) she played an intended victim of Albert DeSalvo (Tony Curtis), but she manages to bite his hand, causing him to flee.
After M*A*S*H, Sally Kellerman worked with Altman again on three films: Brewster McCloud (1970), playing “fairy godmother” to a young recluse (Bud Court) who wants to build wings and fly, and singing Rock-a-Bye Baby as she bathes him; The Player (1992), appearing as herself in a movie about Hollywood; and Prêt-à-Porter (1994), as a magazine editor in a satire on the fashion industry.
She also played a real estate agent in Welcome to LA (1976, produced by Altman) and starred alongside Laurence Olivier and Diane Lane in A Little Romance (1979) and Jodie Foster in Foxes (1980).
Sally Kellerman resurrected her singing career with a 1972 album titled Roll With the Feelin’. Then, while struggling to find good film roles, she performed a cabaret act in nightclubs for a while – describing herself as “Billie Holiday without the drugs”.
Returning to acting, she alternated between television and films, and recorded the 2009 album, Sally. Her autobiography, Read My Lips: Stories of a Hollywood Life, was published in 2013.
Sally Kellerman married the future Starsky & Hutch TV director Rick Edelstein in 1970, but the couple divorced five years later. In 1980, she married the film producer Jonathan D Krane, who died in 2016. She is survived by an adopted son and daughter.
Sally Kellerman, born June 2 1937, died February 24 2022
Nancy Marchand was born in 1928 in Buffalo, New York. She had built up extensive stage experience before coming to television and then on to film. Her films include “Me, Natalie”, “Tell Me that You Love Me, Junie Moon”, “The Hospital” and “The Bostonians”. She is most famous though for two television roles, Mrs Pynchon in “Lou Grant” and Livia Soprano in “The Sopranos”. Nancy Marchand died in 2000.
Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:
For most people, Nancy Marchand, who has died of lung cancer the day before her 72nd birthday, will be remembered as Mrs Margaret Pynchon, the imperious, but essentially fair-minded and liberal owner of the fictional Los Angeles Tribune, in the 1970s television series, Lou Grant. City editor Grant (Ed Asner) complained about her superior and sardonic air, but most journalists would love to work for someone like Mrs Pynchon.
Hers was also one of the few TV roles showing an intelligent woman in a powerful position, who managed to suggest that strength and warmth need not be mutually exclusive. Marchand once described Mrs Pynchon as “a strange combination of being very imposing and down-to-earth”. She won four Emmy awards for the role, each of which acted as a leg of a coffee table in her home.
More recently, however, Marchand managed to obliterate this perception of herself as a patrician woman by brilliantly playing Livia Soprano, the monstrous, whin ing, half-senile, domineering mother of mob boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) in the Home Box Office series, The Sopranos. She never forgives her son for putting her into a nursing home, and becomes the cause of much of his guilt. “I think Livia is the first role I’ve ever had where the makeup crew tries to make me look bad,” March-and commented. “I may be getting older, but I don’t look quite that decrepit.”
In fact, Marchand started off a long way from the well-groomed, tasteful ladies with which she became associated on the small screen. She was in at the exciting beginnings of TV drama in America, her most famous role being Clara, the lonely, plain young school- mistress in the original 1953 live broadcast of Paddy Chay- evsky’s Marty, opposite Rod Steiger in the title role.
“I got the role of Clara because I wasn’t cutesy,” Marchant explained. “I never have been – and I had a bony face.” The actress was a close friend of Chayevsky’s, appearing in several of his television plays, including The Catered Affair and The Bachelor Party, making her feature debut in the film version of the latter.
But, despite the wider recognition of television, Marchand had a long, varied and distinguished stage career. After studying at the Actor’s Studio – with the likes of Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and John Cassavetes – she made her New York debut as the Tavern Hostess in The Taming Of The Shrew in 1951, going on to play many larger Shakespearean roles, including Nerissa, in The Merchant Of Venice, the Nurse, in Romeo And Juliet, and the Princess of France, in Love’s Labours Lost. It was while acting in Shakespeare and Shaw at the Brattle theatre, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that she met and married Paul Sparer, with whom she acted, on and off, until his death last November.
In 1960, she won an Obie award for the role of the Madame of the kinky brothel in Jean Genet’s The Balcony. It was then back to the classics at the American Shakespeare festival at Stratford, Connecticut, and the Lincoln Centre repertory theatre, where she was splendidly regal as Queen Elizabeth in Schiller’s Mary Stuart.
In 1980, commuting between Lou Grant in California and New York, Marchand triumphed on Broadway in a revival of Paul Osborn’s back-porch family comedy, Mornings At Seven, as the youngest, and most homely, of four sisters. Among her best film roles were Mrs Burrage, in James Ivory’s The Bostonians (1984), the Los Angeles mayor, in The Naked Gun (1988), and as a crusty, snobbish dowager waking up audiences in the soporific Sabrina (1995) – somehow managing to combine elements of Mrs Pynchon and Livia Soprano.
In real life, Marchand, who is survived by two daughters and a son, was very different from the strong-willed characters she played.
“I’m always very uncomfortable with people,” she once admitted. “It’s something that I get upset with myself for, but that’s the way I am. But I love people. And when I’m on the stage, I can embrace people and still feel safe. There are a lot of different facets to my personality that I don’t use all the time in my house, or in everyday life, that I can experience and share when I’m on a stage.”
• Nancy Marchand, actress, born June 19 1928; died June 18 2000
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Anyone who knows me are aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been collecting signed photographs of my favourite actors. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I like.
