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Robert Evans

Robert Evans. TCM Overview.

Robert Evans is a reknowned film producer in Hollywood. However in the 1950’s he had a career as a movie actor. He made his debut in 1957 in “The Sun Also Rises” with Tyrone Power and Ava Gardner. His other films include “Man of A Thousand Faces” with James Cagney and Dorothy Malone and then as part of an all star cast in “The Best of Everything” which aso starred Joan Crawford, Stephen Boyd, Brett Halsey, Suzy Parker and Diane Baker. His most famou acting role was in “The Fiend Who Walked the West” with Dolores Michaels.

TCM Overview:

Perhaps one of the most notorious personages ever to grace motion pictures, producer and former Paramount Pictures studio head Robert Evans blazed a trail through Hollywood that left behind numerous fractured marriages, countless heartbroken starlets, several friends-turned-enemies, and a career brimming with some of the best movies ever made. After receiving his start as an actor in movies like “The Sun Also Rises” (1957) and “The Best of Everything” (1959), Evans turned to producing in the late-1960s, which quickly led to becoming a powerful executive at the struggling Paramount Pictures. Almost immediately, Evans had a profound effect on the studio’s bottom line, churning out hits like “Barefoot in the Park” (1967), “The Odd Couple” (1968) and “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968). In the following decade, he steadied Paramount’s fortunes with huge hits like “Love Story” (1970) and “The Godfather” (1972), before leaving the studio to branch out on his own as a producer with “Chinatown” (1974).

Following up with “Marathon Man” (1976) and “Black Sunday” (1977), Evans seemed impervious to failure. But in 1980, following a cocaine bust and the ridicule endured from producing “Popeye” (1980), Evans hit a career slump that ended with him broke and ostracized from Hollywood. The final straw was “The Cotton Club” (1984), a huge flop that was mired in production excesses that also included the murder of a financier, for which Evans was briefly implicated. Sinking further into debt, depression and cocaine addiction, Evans languished in obscurity for the remainder of the decade. He reemerged with the misfire “Chinatown” sequel, “The Two Jakes” (1990), and spent the rest of the 1990s making critical and financial disasters like “Sliver” (1993), “Jade” (1995) and “The Saint” (1997). He earned a degree of cult status following the self-narrated documentary “The Kid Stays in the Picture” (2002), which introduced Evans to a new generation while reminding older crowds just how integral he had been to one of cinema’s most vibrant eras.

Born on June 29, 1930 in New York City, Evans grew up in a comfortable home headed by his father, Archie Shapera, a dentists, and his mother, Florence, a homemaker. As a child, Evans performed on numerous radio shows – some 300 all told – including “Archie Andrews” (NBC, 1943-1953), “The Aldrich Family” (NBC/CBS, 1939-1953) and “Gang Busters” (NBC/CBS, 1935-1957). Following his television debut on “Elizabeth and Essex” (1947), he went into business with his brother, Charles, and his partner, Joseph Picone, with the fashion company Evans-Picone, for which he did their promotional work. Moving to Hollywood some years later, Evans was lounging poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he was spotted by Golden Age actress, Norma Shearer, who thought him to be a dead-ringer for her deceased husband, Irving G. Thalberg, which happened to be a role in the biopic of actor Lon Chaney, “Man of a Thousand Faces” (1957). Shearer successfully lobbied for Evans to get the part, which wound up becoming his feature debut. Evans went on to appear as Pedro Romero in an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” (1957), despite objections raised by star Ava Gardner and even the author himself.

Continuing his attempt to make it as an actor, Evans enlisted the help of famed acting coach, Stella Adler, for the audition for a supporting role in the relationship melodrama “The Best of Everything” (1959), which helped him land the part. Despite managing to make strides on screen, Evans remained largely dissatisfied with his career. He decided instead to move into producing by joining 20th Century Fox, where he set up “The Detective” (1968) with Frank Sinatra starring as a tough cop is sent to investigate the murder of a department store magnate’s son. Featuring a strong performance from Sinatra, the gritty crime thriller became one of the biggest box office successes of the year. He left Fox to take a studio executive job at Paramount Pictures in 1966, where he served as the Vice President of Production and almost immediately began to turn the ailing studio’s fortunes around, despite his lack of experience. Evans had his first hit with the winning romantic comedy, “Barefoot in the Park” (1967), which starred Robert Redford and Jane Fonda as a pair of newlyweds adjusting to their new lives together. Staying with Neil Simon’s source material, Evans produced another hit with “The Odd Couple” (1968), which pitted Walter Mathau and Jack Lemmon as polar opposite roommates living together in Manhattan.

Evans’ power at Paramount only grew when he steered “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) to the big screen, director Roman Polanski’s disturbing horror movie about a young wife and mother (Mia Farrow) who grows to realize that her soon-to-be child is not of this world. His unbelievable run continued with the easygoing crime caper, “The Italian Job” (1969), starring Michael Caine, and the charming Western “True Grit” (1969), which starred John Wayne in his only Oscar-winning role. He had his biggest hit with his next film, “Love Story” (1970), which starred Ryan O’Neal and Evans’ real-life wife Ali McGraw as a pair of mismatched lovers who manage to stick together despite the objections of his father (Ray Milland), only to suffer tragic consequences. Though critics were divided, “Love Story” was a big success with audiences, as the picture became the highest-grossing movie made by Paramount up to that point. The film also earned seven Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture. Meanwhile, Evans and McGraw – who happened to be his third wife at this point – had son Josh Evan in 1971.

Also that year, having almost singlehandedly pulling Paramount back from the brink, Evans was given the reigns of the entire studio and named top dog as Executive Vice-President in charge of worldwide production at the studio. He next proceeded to steer “The Godfather” (1972) through production, a process that began as far back as 1968, when a then-unknown author named Mario Puzo brought pages from his unpublished manuscript, Mafia, to Evans in hopes of securing a payday to cover what he owed to bookies. At least that was how Evans claimed the story went. Others connected to the movie claimed it was brought to Paramount through other channels. Regardless of how the manuscript ended up at the studio, there was no doubt that Evans was integral to getting the picture made. In order to make an authentic film about the Italian Mafia, Evans insisted on an Italian-American director. After finally settling for Francis Ford Coppola when most other bigger names had passed on the project, Evans and his new director clashed mightily over which actors to cast. With Coppola championing Al Pacino as Michael Corleone and Marlon Brando as Don Corleone, Evans was pushing for the likes of Warren Beatty and Danny Thomas for Vito, telling Coppola, “A runt will not play Michael.” (Vanity Fair, March 2009). Coppola ultimately won the battle.

Through the course of production, Evans and his producers were plotting to fire Coppola, due to cost overruns and an inability to stay on schedule. Because of his numerous tangles with the director throughout the production – already proving difficult due to death threats from actual mobsters before producer Albert Ruddy smoothed things over – Evans cemented his reputation for being antagonistic towards filmmakers. Regardless of the great difficulty in getting the film made, “The Godfather” proved to be the massive hit Paramount was looking for. The crime saga depicting the decline of an older generation of mobsters in favor of the new was also a big hit with critics, winning three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Throughout the years, Evans became known for personally coveting credit for the success of the film created under his watch, although the extent and merits of his contributions were routinely debated. Meanwhile, Evans and wife Ali McGraw divorced in 1972 after she fell for her co-star, Steven McQueen, in “The Getaway” (1972). Evans later attributed his near-obsession with seeing “The Godfather” through to completion as the straw that broke the camel’s back. He soon followed up with “Serpico” (1973), director Sidney Lumet’s gritty crime drama about rookie police officer Frank Serpico (Al Pacino), whose attempts to shed light on a corrupt system leads to his ultimate downfall. The film went on to became yet another 1970s classic that the high-flying Evans could count as his own.

Evans next steered the financially successful, but critically underappreciated adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic novel, “The Great Gatsby” (1974), which starred Robert Redford as the self-made Gatsby, Mia Farrow as the superficial Daisy Buchanan, and Sam Waterston as the naïve Nick Carraway. Working again with the excitable Coppola, Evans helped shepherd “The Godfather, Part II” (1974) and “The Conversation” (1974) to the big screen. Both were hits, both were critically hailed, and both became staples of 1970s cinema. But it was “The Godfather, Part II” which earned the greatest distinction after winning six Academy Awards, including one for Best Picture. Evans left the studio top spot and became an independent producer in 1974, a highly successful stint that started with producing director Roman Polanski’s classic neo-noir “Chinatown” (1974), a lush, cynical and serpentine neo-noir set in 1930s Los Angeles. The film starred Evans’ close friend, Jack Nicholson, who portrayed Jake Gittes, a dogged private eye whose search for the murderer of a water department official pulls him into a much darker and more sordid scandal involving the official’s wife (Faye Dunaway) and her despicable father (John Houston). After receiving 11 Academy Award nominations, “Chinatown” only took home one for Robert Towne’s Best Original Screenplay. Nonetheless, the film was considered to be one of the best ones made in that period, while Towne’s script was held up as being the best ever written.

Evans continued his unparalleled run with the John Schlesinger thriller “Marathon Man” (1976), starring another longtime pal, Dustin Hoffman, who later had a falling out with the producer over his undeniable impersonation of Evans with his character in “Wag the Dog” (1997). He moved on to produce John Frankenheimer’s popular thriller “Black Sunday” (1977), which featured a stunning climactic scene involving a blimp at the Super Bowl, and the rather underwhelming romantic drama, “Players” (1979), which starred ex-wife Ali McGraw – a film he made while in the midst of a divorce with another wife, former Miss America Phyllis George. Evans entered the next decade on a high note with the country-themed hit “Urban Cowboy” (1980), which capitalized on the then massive popularity of its star, John Travolta, while generating a soundtrack some claimed help propel interest in the pop-country phenomenon that soon followed. But cracks began to appear in Evans’ seemingly impervious façade when he produced director Robert Altman’s unsuccessful and highly-ridiculed take on “Popeye” (1980), starring Robin Williams as the big-armed sailor who is fond of his spinach. Also that year, Evans ran into legal trouble when he was arrested and later convicted on a misdemeanor cocaine charge. Sentenced to probation, he was given the chance to wipe the slate clean with an anti-drug film called “Get High on Yourself” (1981), which he financed with his own money and cast with several famous actor friends.

Regardless of his public condemnation of drugs, Evans continued his habit unabated. In 1983, he became embroiled in further scandal while in the middle of making the period gangster piece, “The Cotton Club” (1984) with Francis Ford Coppola, when his business partner on the project, Roy Radin, was found murdered. Right from the start, “The Cotton Club” appeared doomed to failure. Initially, Evans wanted to direct the film himself, but decided not to and brought in a hopelessly broke Coppola in at the eleventh hour. Having spent some $13 million before Coppola even appeared, Evans resorted to finding money any way he could, including from notorious Saudi Arabian arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, who was later complicit in the Iran-contra scandal. The budget ballooned to almost $50 million – a fortune at the time – while Evans became briefly implicated in Radin’s slaying (In 1991, cocaine dealer Karen Greenberger and three bodyguards were convicted of the crime). The film released to lackluster box office totals, throwing Evans into deep despair, which became exacerbated due to giving trial testimony and the fact that he was now flat broke.

Following an extended hiatus, Evans returned to active producing and corralled Nicholson to direct and star in the inferior, but interesting “Chinatown” sequel, “The Two Jakes” (1990), which failed to capture the attention of anyone at the time and fared poorly at the box office. He moved on to the Sharon Stone erotic thriller, “Sliver” (1993), which was nearly universally panned by critics while performing fairly well in theaters. Evans continued making critically maligned flops with “Jade” (1995), an erotic thriller from the juvenile mind of Joe Eszterhas that starred David Caruso as an assistant D.A. drawn into a murder case involving a sultry psychologist (Linda Fiorentino) and her prominent attorney husband (Chazz Palminteri). Though he received some critical kudos for the comic strip adaptation of “The Phantom” (1996), they were not enough to boost ticket sales. Critics lashed out at his next project, “The Saint” (1997), which starred Val Kilmer as amateur detective, Simon Templar, a character featured in a long-running book series that was previously turned into films, a radio show and even a successful British television series. Unable to rekindle his magic from the 1970s, Evans struck out again with a rather limp remake of the comedy classic, “The Out-of-Towners” (1999), starring Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn.

Though fallen out of prominence for some time, Evans’ illustrious career again came to the forefront with the documentary “The Kid Stays in the Picture” (2002). Based on the producer’s life as told in his revealing 1994 autobiography and narrated by Evans himself, the documentary pulled no punches in detailing his outlandish adventures in show business. The title referred to his near-firing from his role in “The Sun Also Rises,” a job that was saved by studio head, Darryl Zanuck, who watched Evans’ first take and made a portentous decree: “The kid stays in the picture.” The book itself was already a hit with Hollywood insiders, particularly the audio version that was narrated by Evans himself. The project came about when rising documentarian team Brett Morgen and Nanette Berstein worked with Evans – who was in the midst of recuperating from a debilitating stroke – in capturing the producer’s chaotic, but always fascinating life on film. Kaleidoscopic, mesmerizing, and entirely subjective, “The Kid Stays in the Picture” was roundly praised by critics, while opening a re-exploration into his works and creating an air of pseudo-celebrity that could only be best described as the Cult of Evans.

The popularity of the film even led Evans and Morgen to develop the animated series, “Kid Notorious” (Comedy Central, 2003-04), which adapted anecdotes from his life into wild cartoon exploits that mixed “South Park”-style scatological gags with snarky, knowing Hollywood insider humor. He also returned to the producing game with the romantic comedy “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” (2003), a minor hit that proved star Kate Hudson’s box office appeal in lightweight fare. Ever the lothario, Evans married in 2002 for a sixth time to Leslie Ann Woodward, a union that was dissolved after a mere eight months, though it was nothing compared to his nine-day marriage to previous wife, actress Catherine Oxenberg, in 1998. Evans next produced and appeared in the documentary “The Last Mogul” (2005), which detailed the life and career of former talent agent and studio executive, Lew Wasserman. Meanwhile, Evans appeared in spirit on the popular Hollywood series “Entourage” (HBO, 2004- ), in the form of Bob Ryan (Martin Landau), a legendary film producer fallen on hard times who is looking to make a comeback. Though initially offered to play the role himself, Evans bowed out, but graciously offered his Beverly Hills mansion as a location.

The TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Robert Evans obituary in “The Guardian” in 2019.

Robert Evans, who has died aged 89, was an extravagant film producer whose exciting, glamorous and sometimes grotesque life threatened frequently to overshadow the movies he made. As head of production at Paramount Pictures in the late 1960s and early 70s, the former actor was responsible for reviving the fortunes of that moribund studio by overseeing hits such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Love Story (1970), The Godfather (1972) and Chinatown (1974).

Robert Evans, celebrated Hollywood producer of Chinatown, dies aged 89

There was no shortage of stories to feed Evans’s larger-than-life image. He cherished and bragged about his friendships with Henry Kissinger, Warren Beatty and Ted Kennedy. He lived in a 16-room Regency house in Beverly Hills and dispatched bottles of Dom Perignon as quickly as he got through sexual partners.

According to Peter Biskind’s 1998 account of 70s Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a housekeeper would bring Evans breakfast in bed each morning accompanied by a piece of paper on which she had written the name of whichever woman happened to be lying beside him. He was married seven times, most famously in 1969 to Ali MacGraw, the star of Love Story, who left him four years later for Steve McQueen. One marriage, to the actor Catherine Oxenberg, lasted for only 12 days.

This life of excess, including an addiction to cocaine, eventually ruined Evans’s career: he went from being worth $11m in 1979 to having $37 to his name 10 years later. In 1980, he was given a suspended prison sentence for cocaine trafficking. As part of his plea bargain, he agreed to make an anti-drugs public information message.

What started as a commercial became a week of star-studded TV specials instigated by Evans. He ploughed $400,000 of his own money into the campaign, which included the tuneless, anodyne celebrity singalong Get High on Yourself. He later admitted that he was still taking cocaine while this media blitz was under way.

Robert Evans studying a script by the pool at his home in Beverly Hills, California, 1968. Photograph: Alfred Eisenstaedt/The Life Picture Collection via Getty Images

He had always idolised and fraternised with gangsters (he was close friends with the mob lawyer and Hollywood “fixer” Sidney Korshak). In 1983, Evans’s life spilled over from the showbusiness pages to the crime ones when he became a suspect in the murder of the producer and promoter Ray Radin, who was involved with him in a co-financing deal on the expensive flop The Cotton Club (1984).

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Evans got his producing career temporarily back on track in the mid-90s, even returning to a deal at Paramount, but suffered a series of strokes in 1998 which restricted dramatically his mobility.

Even this setback could not keep him down, and he returned to the limelight in 2003 to narrate a popular documentary about himself, The Kid Stays in the Picture, which shared its title with his own bestselling 1994 autobiography.

Those words had first come from the mouth of the producer Darryl F Zanuck, who had cast Evans as the bullfighter Pedro Romero in a 1957 adaptation of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Ten days before shooting started, Zanuck received a signed petition from the rest of the cast, including Ava Gardnerand Tyrone Power, asking him to remove Evans from the film. It read: “With Robert Evans playing Pedro Romero, The Sun Also Rises will be a disaster.” Zanuck arrived on set and told the assembled cast and crew: “The kid stays in the picture. And anybody who doesn’t like it can quit!”

Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, 1974. Robert Evans promised each of them either an Oscar nomination for their work on the movie or a luxury car. Photograph: Paramount/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock

Evans credited that moment with teaching him to stick to his guns when he became a producer. Of course, we only have his word for what happened, and the autobiography is knowingly hyperbolic, written in the hard-boiled, cornball slang of a dime-store detective novel. When he and MacGraw split, for example, he reports Kissinger telling him: “If I can negotiate with the North Vietnamese, I think I can smooth the way with Ali.” To which Evans replies: “Henry, you know countries, you don’t know women. When it’s over, it’s over.”Advertisement

Some of the book’s stories were later contested, including Evans’s claim that he helped Mario Puzo in 1968 with the “rumpled pages” that eventually became The Godfather. (Puzo claimed not to have met at Evans at that stage.) But then Evans usually had the monopoly on telling his own story. When asked for a comment on him, the Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne replied: “Why? Why bother? Bob says it all himself.”

He was born Robert J Shapera in New York City – “the J sounding good but standing for nothing I knew of”. His father, Archie Shapera, was a dentist who had a clinic in Harlem, while his mother, Florence, raised Robert and his brother, Charles, and sister, Alice; it was wealth from Florence’s family that accounted for Evans’s privileged upbringing on the city’s Upper West Side.

He was educated at Joan of Arc junior high school, the Bronx high school of science and Haaren high school, and was auditioning for acting roles from the age of 12. (He claimed to have had more than 300 parts on radio as a child.) He put this career on hold and became a disc jockey, a clothing model and a salesman. At 20, he started a successful women’s fashion business, Evan Picone, with his brother.

Robert Evans in Rome in 1971 with Ali MacGraw, the star of Love Story, who was the third of his seven wives. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

But acting beckoned him back unexpectedly, when he was approached at a hotel swimming pool by Norma Shearer, who asked him to play her late husband, Irving J Thalberg, in the film Man of a Thousand Faces (1957). He accepted and she coached him obsessively on every aspect of his performance. He also starred in The Fiend Who Walked the West (1958) and The Best of Everything (1959), before his confidence took a knock when he lost out to Warren Beatty for the male lead in The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (1961).Advertisement

He went back to fashion and made a fortune when Revlon bought his business. He used the windfall to pursue an ambition to become a producer, paying a friend, George Weiser, who worked at Publishers Weekly, to tip him off about any hot literary properties that were about to hit the shelves. Evans had his first decisive success in that field when he snapped up Roderick Thorp’s novel The Detective, which was adapted by 20th Century Fox into a film starring Frank Sinatra. The terms of the option stated that whichever studio bought the rights had to buy Evans as producer also.

He quickly came to the attention of Charles Bludhorn, the head of Paramount’s parent company, Gulf + Western. Evans maintained in his autobiography that Bludhorn had decided to hire him as head of production after reading a New York Times article about him by Peter Bart, though it came to light much later that Bart’s piece had been only a tiny factor in the decision.

In fact, it was Greg Bautzer, Evans’s powerful lawyer, known as “the Kingmaker”, who had convinced Bludhorn to appoint him. “Bobby was a charming guy,” said Albert S Ruddy, one of the producers of The Godfather. “He looked good, with a great tan, and he was down at the Racquet Club all the time hanging around with Greg. [Bautzer] gave Bludhorn a line of bullshit about how this kid knew everyone in Hollywood.”

The industry reacted scornfully to the appointment of Evans, but he silenced the naysayers by turning Paramount’s fortunes around. It was true that he made many bad calls on The Godfather. He was vehemently opposed to the casting of Al Pacino and to the use of Nino Rota’s score. Viewing dailies of Marlon Brando mumbling in the title role, he fumed: “What the fuck’s going on? Are we going to put subtitles on this movie?”

But he helped save the film after the director Francis Ford Coppola turned in an early cut described by Evans as “a long, bad trailer for a really good film”. Though the studio had stipulated a running time of scarcely more than two hours, Evans encouraged the director to make it longer: “I remember lots of wonderful things you shot. They’re not there. Put ’em back.” Bart, whom Evans had hired as his righthand man, observed that “a superbly shot but ineptly put-together film was transformed into a masterpiece”.

Robert Evans on set with with the actor John Wayne in 1969. Photograph: Alfred Eisenstaedt/The Life Picture Collection via Getty Images

Evans showed just as much commitment in making Chinatown. Bludhorn allowed him to co-produce the movie independently while also remaining in his post at the studio, as a sweetener for the prosperity he had brought to Paramount.Advertisement

Though Towne’s neo-noir script was initially incomprehensible, Evans stuck by it in the face of industry advice to the contrary and assigned Roman Polanski to help knock it into shape. The production was stormy. Polanski locked horns on set with the actor Faye Dunaway, and Evans only brokered peace by promising each of them either an Oscar nod for their work on the movie or a luxury car. (Both were nominated.) A Chinatown sequel, The Two Jakes, was almost made in 1985 with Evans in one of the lead roles, until it became obvious that he was not up to the job. It was eventually made in 1990, with Evans producing.

After Chinatown, Evans left Paramount to independently produce such films as Marathon Man (1976), Black Sunday (1977) and Popeye (1980). His career plummeted following the controversy surrounding The Cotton Club (also directed by Coppola).

During the 90s, he produced a handful of movies, including two, Sliver (1993) and Jade (1995), written by the Basic Instinct screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. The lean years, which included a spell in a psychiatric institution, had done nothing to humble Evans or to temper his vulgarity: to show his high regard for Eszterhas’s work, he paid a woman to visit the writer with a note of congratulation concealed in what Eszterhas described as “a certain intimate body part”. It read: “Best first draft I’ve ever read. Love, Evans.”

Evans was nothing if not vain. He professed to be furious when the actor Dustin Hoffman used him as the basis for his portrayal of a crass producer in the Hollywood satire Wag the Dog (1997), though Evans had already inspired another such character, played by Robert Vaughn, in the comedy S.O.B. (1981).

But on those occasions when he facilitated or came into contact with great material, Evans’s determination resulted in some of the most unambiguously brilliant American films of all time. Despite his bluster and brazenness, he had his charms. “Bob was unpretentious and usually said or seemed to say exactly what he thought,” noted Puzo. “He said it the way children tell truths, with a certain innocence that made the harshest criticism or disagreement inoffensive.”

In 2013, Evans published a second volume of memoirs, The Fat Lady Sang. In 2017, the theatre company Complicite mounted a stage adaptation of The Kid Stays in the Picture at the Royal Court in London, with Danny Huston (son of the director – and Chinatown villain – John Huston) as Evans. On the occasion of that production, Evans gave the Guardian his verdict on modern Hollywood. “I’m not into machines. I’m not into Mars. I like feelings. How does it feel? That, to me, is the turn-on. And story. If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the screen, or anywhere else.” Reflecting on his life he said: “I like myself. For not selling out. There are people who have bigger homes, bigger boats. I don’t care about that. No one has bigger dreams.”

He is survived by Joshua, his son from his marriage to MacGraw, and a grandson.

• Robert Evans, film producer and actor, born 29 June 1930; died 26 October 2019

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).

‘Telegraph’ obituary in 2016

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.

The bridesmaids arriving at Saint Nicholas Cathedral, Monaco, for the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier in 1956

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.

Rita Gam in Tales of the Unexpected, 1981 CREDIT: REX FEATURES

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

Patricia Morison obituary in “The Guardian” in 2018

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

Hitler’s Madman, poster, Alan Curtis, Patricia Morison, John Carradine, 1943. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

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.

BORIS AND NATASHA (1992), directed by CHARLES MARTIN SMITH.

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

Telegraph obituary in Feb 2022:

Sally Kellerman, actress best known as Major ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan in Robert Altman’s Korean War satire MAS*H – obituary

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.

With Donald Sutherland (left) as Hawkeye and Elliott Gould as Trapper John in M.A.S.H. CREDIT: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

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.

With William Shatner as Captain Kirk in Star Trek in 1966 CREDIT: CBS via Getty Images

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.

With Jack Nicholson in the 1970s CREDIT: Stills/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

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.

Keene Curtis was born in Salt Lake, Utah in 1923. He made his film debut in 1948 in “Macbeth” which starred Orson Welles. His other films included “Heaven Can Wait” and “Sliver”. He died in 2002.

IMDB entry:

Keene Curtis was born on February 15, 1923 in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA as Keene Holbrook Curtis. He was an actor, known for Sliver (1993), I.Q. (1994) and Mother Teresa: In the Name of God’s Poor (1997). He died on October 13, 2002 in Bountiful, Utah.

Awarded a Tony in 1971 for supporting actor in the musical, “The Rothschilds.”

Curtis spent 12 years as a stage manager, beginning in 1949 as an assistant stage manager on a tour of the Martha Graham Dance Company, and later for Katharine Cornelland Guthrie McClintock.

He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Utah, where he was a student actor and cheerleader.

Served three years with the Navy.

Discovered by Orson Welles when Welles directed a college production of “Macbeth”. Welles cast him in the role of Lennox the following year in his 1948 motion picture adaptation of the play, which launched his film career.

Endowed a scholarship to help graduates embark on their own acting careers and donated his Tony Award, theater memorabilia, and personal correspondence to his alma mater, the University of Utah.

Best known for his bald-pated Daddy Warbucks in “Annie” and flamboyant Alban in “La Cage aux Folles” on the musical stage, he later won a bit of notice as a recurring character on TV’s Cheers (1982) — the snippy, calculating upstairs restaurant owner, John Allen Hill.

Won Broadway’s 1971 Tony Award as Best Supporting or Featured Actor (Musical) for “The Rothschilds.”

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Marilyn Maxwell was born in 1921 in Iowa. Her movie debut was in “Lost in a Harem” in 1944. She was featured in “Champion” with Kirk Douglas, “The Lemon Drop Kid” with Bob Hope and “Rock-A-Bye Baby” in 1958. She died at the age of 50 in 1972.

TCM overview:

Source: not available

Marilyn Maxwell (August 3, 1921 – March 20, 1972), born Marvel Marilyn Maxwell, was a platinum blonde, curvaceous movie actress and entertainer who, in addition to appearing in many films and radio programs, also entertained the troops during World War II and the Korean War on USO tours with Bob Hope. She also appeared in a number of Hope’s shows as a sexy but comic foil. She started her professional entertaining career as a radio singer while still a teenager before signing with MGM in 1942 as a contract player. Among the programs in which she appeared was The Abbott and Costello Show. The head of MGM, Louis B. Mayer, insisted she change the “Marvel” part of her real name. She dropped her first name and kept the middle. Some of her memorable film roles included Lost in a Harem (1944), Champion (1949), The Lemon Drop Kid (1951), and Rock-A-Bye Baby (1958)