Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 76 of 120

Patti Page

Patti Page was born in 1927 in Oklahoma. She was avery popular U.S. recoriding star in the 1950’s. Her songs included “Tennessee Waltz” in 1950 and “Old Cape Cod”. She co-starred in the 1962 movie “Boy’s Night Out” with Kim Novak and James Garner. She died in 2013.

Dave Laing’s obituary in “The Guardian”:

With record sales estimated at more than 100m, which included more than a dozen million-selling singles, Patti Page, who has died aged 85, was one of America’s favourite popular singers of the 1950s. She was dubbed “the Singing Rage”, and her alto voice was often double tracked, on hits such as Mockin’ Bird Hill, (How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window and, her signature song, Tennessee Waltz.

Page’s first big hit was With My Eyes Wide Open, I’m Dreaming, in 1950. In the same year, she recorded Tennessee Waltz. This had already been a great success in versions by its composer, the country singer Pee Wee King, and others, but Page’s recording, again with overdubs of her vocals, outsold them all. This inaugurated the period of her greatest popularity. More country songs were given the Page touch, such as Mockin’ Bird Hill and Detour, both bestsellers in 1951, while the 1952 tearjerker I Went to Your Wedding was memorably parodied by the comedy bandleader Spike Jones.

The 1953 novelty (How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window, was Page’s only British hit, and faced strong competition from several other recordings, including one by Carole Carr, with children’s chorus and Rustler the dog, and a version by Lita Roza that reached No 1.

Page also specialised in songs about American places and landscapes, notably Allegheny Moon, which reached No 2 in the charts in 1956, and Old Cape Cod, a No 3 hit the following year. Her final top 10 hit of the decade was Left Right Out of Your Heart in 1958. Among Page’s albums were Folk Song Favorites (1951) and Manhattan Tower (1956), a version of a Gordon Jenkins narrative tone poem produced by her musical director Vic Schoen.

By the end of the 50s, the arrival of rock’n’roll had dented the popularity of Page and her contemporaries. She would have only one more big hit single, the film theme Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, in 1965. However, she continued to record and perform occasionally until the 1990s, finding a new audience among country music fans. She received several honours from the music industry and was due to be presented with a lifetime achievement award at the Grammys ceremony in February 2013.

She was born Clara Ann Fowler in rural Oklahoma, the 10th of 11 children of a railway worker and a farm labourer. While still at school, she started work in the art department of a Tulsa radio station. Her vocal skills soon led to her promotion to become the voice of the Patti Page Show, a daily 15-minute programme sponsored by the local Page Milk Company.

The broadcasts attracted the attention of Jack Rael, the manager of a Texas orchestra, the Jimmy Joy band. She joined the band in 1946, taking with her the name Patti Page. With Rael as her personal manager, Page left the band a year later to essay a solo career, beginning with a broadcast at a Chicago radio station, where she was accompanied by a small group led by Benny Goodman.

Almost immediately, Page was signed by Mercury Records, a recently founded Chicago record company, as their “girl singer”. Her early recordings were supervised by Mitch Miller, a former orchestral oboist. Her first disc, Confess, featured the then novel multitrack technology, enabling Page to provide her own backing vocals.

Page hosted television shows in the 50s, and was a frequent guest on the programmes of Ed Sullivan, Steve Martin and others. She also appeared in the 1960 film Elmer Gantry.

She was married three times, first to Jack Skiba, then to the choreographer Charles O’Curran and thirdly to a maple-syrup magnate, Jerry Filiciotti. Her first two marriages ended in divorce and Filiciotti died in 2009. She is survived by a son, Danny, and a daughter, Kathleen.

• Patti Page (Clara Ann Fowler), singer, born 8 November 1927; died 1 January 2013

• This article was amended on 6 January 2013. The film Elmer Gantry was not a musical.

“The Guardian” obituary on Patti Page can also be accessed here.

Monte Markham was born in 1935 in Florida. His films include “Hour of the Gun” in 1967, “Guns of the Magnificent Seven”, “Midway” and “Airport 77”.

IMDB entry:

Monte Markham was born on June 21, 1935 in Manatee, Florida, USA. He is an actor and producer, known for Baywatch (1989), The Second Hundred Years (1967) and Ginger in the Morning (1974). He has been married to Klaire Keevil Hester since June 1, 1961. They have two children. Received his MFA from the University of Georgia in 1960 and was an instructor at Stephens College, Missouri, from 1960-1962 before he pursued a full-time acting career.

His brother Jess was a pilot for Air America, the CIA airline in southeast Asia.

One Sheet; Movie Poster; Film Poster; Cinema Poster;

Juanita Hall was born in 1901 in Keypost, New Jersey. Rodgers & Hammerstein selected her to play ‘Bloody Mary’ in the stage musical “South Pacific” in 1959. Nine years later she recreated her part on film with Mitzi Gaynor, Rosanno Brazzi, John Kerr and France Nuyen. She wnet on to star in “Flower Drum Song” with Nancy Kwan and Miyoshi Umeki. She died in 1968.

IMDB entry:

A leading black Broadway performer in her heyday, she was personally chosen by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein to perform the roles she played in South Pacific and Flower Drum Song. In the early 30s, she was a special soloist and assistant director for the Hall Johnson Choir.

Inspired as a child by blues legend Bessie Smith, she only recorded one album of blues in her lifetime.

Married a young actor, Clement Hall, while in her teens. He died in the 1920s. They had no children and she never remarried.

Trained classically at Juilliard.

Although a light-skinned Afro-American, her two most famous roles saw her cast as a Pacific Islander (“South Pacific”) and an Asian-American (“Flower Drum Song”), respectively. She reprised her roles in both productions in the movie versions. Received a Tony Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Musical in the Broadway stage version of “South Pacific”. She sings in the cast album, but was dubbed in the film version by the actress from the London production.

The role of Bloody Mary is based on the only true-life person whom James A. Michener met in Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides, in the South Pacific. She was Tonkinese. Tonkin, at the time, was in China, and after the French left Vietnam, that area became part of North Vietnam. She arrived in the South Pacific to work on a French plantation owner’s farm. Received a 1950 Tony Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Musical in the Broadway stage version of “South Pacific”. She sings in the cast album, but was dubbed in the film version by the actress from the London production.

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Al Martino was one of the great American popular singers of the past sixty years. He was born in 1927 in Philadelphia. He has had numerous Top Ten hists including “”Here In My Heart”, “The Story of Tina”, “Spanish Eyes” and “Mary in the Morning”. He was featured in “The Godfather” in 1971 and “The Godfather 3. Al Martino died in 2009.

Michael Freedland’s obituary in “The Guardian”:

A million young girls believed Al Martino, who has died aged 82, had a place reserved for them when he sang the hit ballad Here in My Heart. He warbled I Love You Because and they had no doubt that he was making a personal statement for their ears only. Such was the power of an early 1950s pop star in a more innocent age when words and melody seemed to mean something.

Martino entered the Guinness Book of Records by having, in 1952, the first No 1 record in the newly launched UK singles chart. Here in My Heart remained at No 1 for nine weeks. He also had 34 “Hot 100” entries in the American hit parade between 1959 and 1977. I Love You Because and I Love You More and More Each Day were both in the Top 10. Hits were very much Martino’s business, most of them revealing the fact that he was in love with a mysterious girl.

There was a time when it seemed that Martino was destined to be the new Frank Sinatra, not least because he first enjoyed success at precisely the time that Sinatra’s career was at a low ebb. The Sinatra connection continued when, in 1972, Martino appeared in the Oscar-winning film The Godfather as Johnny Fontane, a nightclub singer and aspiring actor whose lagging career is given a helping hand by the mob. Fontane’s godfather, Don Vito Corleone (played by Marlon Brando), arranges for a horse’s head to be placed in the bed of a Hollywood mogul to ensure a movie role for his godson. Martino can be seen performing I Have But One Heart (O Marenariello) in the film’s opening wedding scene.

For years it was widely believed that Fontane was based on Sinatra, who, it was alleged, got his own big movie break in From Here to Eternity (1953) thanks to mafia intervention. However, research has disclosed that it was not Sinatra who brought in the mafia, but Martino’s near namesake, Dean Martin, another Italian-American singer enjoying his first hit records. Their voices were at times remarkably similar, except that Martino’s style was more full-throated than the laidback “Dino” approach. When Martino sang Spanish Eyes in 1965, another of his successful singles, he might easily have been mistaken for Martin, who was even at one time wrongly said to be Martino’s brother.

He was born Alfred Cini in Philadelphia. When he left school, he entered the family’s construction business, and in the evenings sang in clubs and bars near his home – a fairly conventional way for singers to get noticed. Like Sinatra, Martino won a contest – in his case, Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scout Show.

Mario Lanza, the operatic tenor who became a pop idol, was a friend of the family and persuaded the young Al to take up singing professionally. Martino recorded Here in My Heart for the BBS label, and it was distributed internationally by Capitol, with huge success.

His version of the Italian ballad Volare was big not only in the US, but in Italy too – a coals-to-Newcastle triumph of amazing proportions. The song reached the top of the charts across Europe in 1975.

In the glory days of the vinyl LP, Martino had a string of albums that sold extraordinarily well. In Britain, he was billed as “America’s answer to Val Doonican”, a compliment if ever there was one.

He is survived by his wife, Judi, son Alfred and daughter Allison.

• Alfred Cini (Al Martino), singer, born 7 October 1927; died 13 October 2009

• This article was amended on 15 October 2009. The original stated that Martino was born Alfred Cini Martino, that he recorded Here in My Heart for the Capitol record label, that his version of Volare was released in 1956, and that Bert Kaempfert wrote Spanish Eyes for him. This has been corrected.

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

Terry Moore was born in 1929 in Los Angeles. Her first major film role was in 1949 in “Mighty Joe Young”. She wnt on to leading roles in such movies as “Come Back Little Sheba”, “King of the Khyber Rifles” and “Peyton Place”.

TCM overview:

Lively, full-figured lead of the post-WWII era, never a top star but one whose career, in retrospect, sums up much of 1950s attitudes about women, sexuality, and permissiveness. A photographer’s child model, Moore entered films in 1940 in “Maryland” and played small parts in a variety of films under first her real name, and then as Judy Ford and Jan Ford. At 19 she played a girl convinced that her horse was the reincarnation of a dead uncle in the odd comedy “The Return of October” (1948). She attracted more attention the following year, however, in another strange, but decidedly better, film about a woman and her pet, “Mighty Joe Young” (1949). For many buffs, the most indelible image of Moore’s career was of her born aloft by her bush-league King Kong, playing “Beautiful Dreamer” on a piano.

Although Moore began playing innocents, during her peak she often played boldly flirtatious ingenues, sometimes from the wrong side of the tracks, sometimes from “old money”, whose burgeoning sexuality often leads her into fast cars with reckless Romeos who had been drinking too much at the prom. Sometimes her gallery of teases and tramps was to the betterment of the picture: well-cast, she copped an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress as the downstairs neighbor in “Come Back, Little Sheba” (1952). Moore also did well in a typical role in the surprisingly good small-town expose, “Peyton Place” (1957) and in very restrained and appealing supporting work in “Daddy Long Legs” (1955). But too often Moore was exploited for her vivacity and figure; as she approached 30 the cheerleader roles didn’t suit her and, by the time of “Why Must I Die?” (1960), a revamp of the Susan Hayward hit “I Want to Live” (1958), she hadn’t been groomed to move into tough melodrama territory.

Moore did the next best thing, TV, starring in the well-done proto-“Dallas” Western soaper, “Empire” (1962-64) and later bringing a professional seasoning to occasional leads and supporting roles in minor features ranging from “Town Tamer” (1965) to “Hellhole” (1984). Part of the sensationalistic aspect of Moore’s persona had always been her private life: her three marriages and many beaus (including Henry Kissinger) had always been good tabloid material, and Moore again garnered attention when she wrote of her secret marriage to reclusive, eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. A woman of considerable drive, Moore ventured into cosmetics with a company called “Moore’s More”, appeared on the cover of a 1984 issue of Playboy and even formed a production company with partner Jerry Rivers, co-producing, acting in and co-writing the original story for the minor satire, “Beverly Hills Brats” (1989).

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

This photo of actress Terry Moore was taken by the Wikimedia Commons user Gazebo in 2015 and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For more information about this license, please visit on the Web or write to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042 USA.

Robert Forster – An Appreciation

Robert Forster, the handsome and omnipresent character actor who got a career resurgence and Oscar nomination for playing bail bondsman Max Cherry in Jackie Brown, died in October 2019. He was 78.

Publicist Kathie Berlin said Forster died of brain cancer following a brief illness. He was at home in Los Angeles, surrounded by family, including his four children and partner Denise Grayson.

Condolences poured in Friday night on social media. Bryan Cranston called Forster a “lovely man and a consummate actor” in a tweet. The two met on the 1980 film Alligator and then worked together again on the television show Breaking Bad and its spinoff film, El Camino, which launched Friday on Netflix.

“I never forgot how kind and generous he was to a young kid just starting out in Hollywood,” Cranston wrote.

His Jackie Brown co-star Samuel L. Jackson tweeted that Forster was “truly a class act/Actor!!”

A native of Rochester, New York, Forster quite literally stumbled into acting when in college, intending to be a lawyer, he followed a fellow female student he was trying to talk to into an auditorium where Bye Bye Birdie auditions were being held. He would be cast in that show, that fellow student would become his wife with whom he had three daughters, and it would start him on a new trajectory as an actor.

A role in the 1965 Broadway production Mrs Dally Has a Lover put him on the radar of Darryl Zanuck, who signed him to a studio contract. He would soon make his film debut in the 1967 John Huston film Reflections in a Golden Eye, which starred Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor.Advertisement

Forster would go on to star in Haskell Wexler’s documentary-style Chicago classic Medium Cool and the detective television series Banyon. It was an early high point that he would later say was the beginning of a “27-year slump”.

He worked consistently throughout the 1970s and 1980s in mostly forgettable B-movies — ultimately appearing in over 100 films, many out of necessity.

“I had four kids, I took any job I could get,” he said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune last year. “Every time it reached a lower level I thought I could tolerate, it dropped some more, and then some more. Near the end, I had no agent, no manager, no lawyer, no nothing. I was taking whatever fell through the cracks.”

It was Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 film Jackie Brown that put him back on the map. Tarantino created the role of Max Cherry with Forster in mind; the actor had unsuccessfully auditioned for a part in “Reservoir Dogs,” but the director promised not to forget him.

In an interview with Fandor last year, Forster recalled that when presented with the script for Jackie Brown, he told Tarantino, “I’m sure they’re not going to let you hire me.” Tarantino replied: “I hire anybody I want.”

“And that’s when I realised I was going to get another shot at a career,” Forster said. “He gave me a career back and the last 14 years have been fabulous.”

The performance opposite Pam Grier became one of the more heartwarming Hollywood comeback stories, earning him his first and only Academy award nomination. He ultimately lost the golden statuette to Robin Williams, who won that year for Good Will Hunting.

After Jackie Brown, he worked consistently and at a decidedly higher level than during the “slump”, appearing in films like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, Me, Myself and Irene, The Descendants, Olympus Has Fallen, and What They Had, and in television shows like Breaking Bad and the Twin Peaks revival. He said he loved trying out comedy as Tim Allen’s father in Last Man Standing.

He’ll also appear later this year in the Steven Spielberg-produced Apple+ series Amazing Stories.

Even in his down days, Forster always considered himself lucky. “You learn to take whatever jobs there are and make the best you can out of whatever you’ve got. And anyone in any walk of life, if they can figure that out, has a lot better finish than those who cannot stand to take a picture that doesn’t pay you as much or isn’t as good as the last one,” he told IndieWire in 2011. “Attitude is everything.”

Forster is survived by his four children, four grandchildren and Grayson, his partner of 16 years.

Original Cinema 1-Sheet Poster – Movie Film Posters

Rex Allen was, after Roy Rogers, the most popular cowboy actor on film in the 1950’s. His movies were a staple diet for baby boomers at Saturday morning screenings. He was born in Wilcox, Arizona in 1920. His films include “Under Mexican Stars” in 1950, “Utah Wagon Train”, “Old Overland Trail” and “Down Laredo Way”. Rex Allen died in 1999.

Tom Vallance’s “Independent” obituary:

REX ALLEN was the last of the “singing cowboys”, a genre of western hero unique to the Hollywood cinema from the Thirties to the Fifties. The most famous were Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, and Allen carried on in their tradition after his film debut in The Arizona Cowboy in 1950. He made more than 30 films for Republic Studios, who had made stars of Autry and Rogers, and had a regular sidekick, played by Buddy Ebsen or Slim Pickens, in many of them.

He had a second career as narrator of a series of Walt Disney wildlife films in the Sixties, his affable manner and soft tones a perfect match for the stunning nature shots of the movies. He also toured live venues, billed as “The Arizona Cowboy” and partnered by his stallion, “Koko, the Wonder Horse”, and had a successful recording career.

One of the best western singers, Allen was one of the few western stars who actually was a cowboy, having been a ranch hand and a bronco rider on the rodeo circuit in his younger days. He also became a musician while in his teens, playing guitar and singing with his fiddle-playing father at local dances.

He was born in Willcox, Arizona, in 1921, and entered show business professionally when he won a state-wide talent contest in 1939, which led to a singing job on the radio. In 1946 he became a regular on the National Barn Dance, one of the top country-and-western radio shows in the country, and this led to a recording contract with Mercury and his own CBS radio show in Hollywood. Republic signed him in 1949, released his first film, The Arizona Cowboy, in 1950, and the following year Allen was the fifth biggest money- maker of western stars (after Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Tim Holt and Charles Starrett). From 1952 to 1954 he was third only to Rogers and Autry.

His trick pony, Koko the Wonder Horse, made his debut in Allen’s second film, The Hills of Oklahoma, and was to be in all his other films and later became an integral part of Allen’s touring live act, billed as “The Miracle Horse of the Movies”, until he died in 1968 at the age of 28.

Allen’s Republic films, 31 in five years, included Under Mexicali Stars (1950, the first in which he had Buddy Ebsen as a comic sidekick, and one of Allen’s best roles, as a singing Treasury agent who catches a gang of smugglers who are using a helicopter to get stolen gold across the border), Rodeo King and the Senorita (1951, a remake of an earlier John Wayne film, The Cowboy and the Lady, and one of Allen’s personal favourites), and Colorado Sundown (1952, with Slim Pickens replacing Ebsen).

Like many of Allen’s films, Colorado Sundown was directed by Republic’s veteran William Witney, one of the great serial directors noted for his energetic style. “Witney was my favourite director,” said Allen. “He could get more on the screen for a dollar than any director I’ve ever known.” That skill was put to good use on Down Laredo Way (1953), made with a noticeably lower budget than the earlier films and a sign that the genre was fading. Allen’s last western for Republic was The Phantom Stallion, made in 1954, the year the B western officially died.

Allen already had a thriving record career, his hit records for the Mercury label including Streets of Laredo (1947) and Crying in the Chapel (1953), and in 1958 he appeared in his first television series, Frontier Doctor. He also made personal appearances, did television commercials, and in 1961 was one of five stars who appeared on a rotating basis in the television show Five Star Jubilee, the others being Snooky Lanson, Tex Ritter, Jimmy Wakely and Carl Smith. (The show was never telecast in New York because of its primarily rural appeal.)

In 1962 Allen narrated Walt Disney’s live-action feature about the life of a wolf, The Legend of Lobo, “a tale of the old West told in story and song”, for which he also provided music with the Sons of the Pioneers, and his warm approach was greatly admired. The critic Bosley Crowther commented, “The theme and the drama, what little of the latter there is, is carried in the narration, which cheerily endows the wolf with a great deal more charm and character than is evidenced on the screen”, while the historian Leonard Maltin recently wrote: “Lobo’s biggest asset, aside from the always first-rate raw footage, is the soundtrack . . . Allen, a former cowboy star, became a Disney favourite in the 1960s, and with good reason. His friendly, easy-going approach to the script brings a great deal of life to any subject.”

Allen ultimately narrated more than 80 Disney films and television shows, including The Incredible Journey (1963) and Charlie the Lonesome Cougar (1967), and in 1973 narrated the Hanna-Barbera animated feature Charlotte’s Web. He also made guest appearances on television variety shows such as The Red Skelton Show.

In the 1970s, though retired from film and television, he still led an active life. He owned a 20-acre ranch, the Diamond X, in Malibu Canyon, and spent over half the year on personal appearance tours – after Koko died, he would be accompanied by Koko junior, a chocolate-coloured stallion with a honey mane exactly like his famous sire. (The original Koko is commemorated by a life-size statue looking down from the highest hill in the valley.)

One of his children, Rex Allen Jnr, followed him into show business, and had a successful career as a Nashville recording artist.

Tom Vallance

Rex Allen, actor: born Willcox, Arizona 31 December 1921; married (three sons); died Tucson, Arizona 17 December 1999.

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

Tito Guizar was born in 1908 in Guadalajara, Mexico. He trained as an opera singer and performed in Carnegie Hall in New York. His films include “Tropoc Holiday” in 1938, “Brazil” and “The Gay Ranchero” in 1948. He died in 1999 in San Antonio, Texas.

IMDB entry:

Federico Arturo Guízar Tolentino was born on April 8, 1908, in Guadalajara, Mexico. Over the objections of his father, he trained early as a singer and, as such, was sent to New York in 1929 to record the songs of Agustín Lara. While there he had a radio show, “Tito Guízar y su Guitar”, and studied opera. In 1932 he married another Mexican singer, Carmen Noriega. He performed both operatic and Mexican cowboy songs at Carnegie Hall. His 1936 movie Out on the Big Ranch (1936) launched the singing cowboy film in Mexico and succeeded as well in the United States. From there he went to Hollywood, playing with such stars as Roy Rogers, Dorothy Lamour and Mae West. He continued playing series parts in Mexican television well into the 1990s. Tito Guízar died at age 91, survived by a son, two daughters and five grandchildren.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: A. Nonymous

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

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.

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Patti Page

Monte Markham

Juanita Hall

Al Martino

Terry Moore

Robert Forster

Robert Forster – An Appreciation

Rex Allen

Tito Guizar

Richard Hylton

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