Hollywood Reporter obituary:
Sharon Acker, the Canadian actress who portrayed Lee Marvin’s unfaithful wife in the 1967 neo-noir classic Point Blank and the right-hand woman Della Street opposite Monte Markham on a rebooted Perry Mason in the 1970s, has died. She was 87.
Acker died March 16 in a retirement home in her native Toronto, her daughter Kim Everest, a casting director, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Star Trek fans know Acker for her January 1969 turn as Odona, a desperate woman from an overpopulated planet, on the third-season episode “The Mark of Gideon.”
She also starred on a 1976-77 CBS adaptation of Executive Suite, playing the wife of Mitchell Ryan‘s Dan Walling. (Acker and Ryan assumed the parts performed by William Holden and June Allyson in the 1954 MGM film directed by Robert Wise.)
In John Boorman’s Point Blank, Acker’s character takes up with John Vernon’s Mal Reese after he shoots Walker (Marvin) and leaves him for dead after they rob a courier on Alcatraz. When Walker returns seeking revenge and his share of the loot, he manhandles her and riddles her bed with bullets.
Seven years after Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason, starring Raymond Burr as the iconic defense lawyer and Barbara Hale as his loyal secretary, concluded its nine-season run, CBS rebooted the series with Markham and Acker in 1973. However, it lasted just 15 episodes before being canceled.
Sharon Eileen Acker was born in Toronto on April 2, 1935, and adopted when she was 9. She attended Davisville Public School, John Fisher Public School and Northern Vocational School, where she studied art and graduated in 1953.
In 1956, she played the teacher Mrs. Stacey on a 1956 CBC adaptation of Anne of Green Gables and joined the Stratford Shakespeare Festival company, starring as Anne Page opposite future Star Trek co-star William Shatner in a production of The Merry Wives of Windsor.
The She traveled to Europe to perform with the Stratford company in Henry Vand remained there to make her big-screen debut in Lucky Jim (1957), starring Ian Carmichael and Terry-Thomas. British producers John and Ray Boulting called her “freshly appealing” and signed her to a seven-year contact, but she broke things off after getting married and having a child.
Back home, she appeared often on the acclaimed CBC series Festival and in 1961 portrayed Lady MacDuff alongside Sean Connery and Zoe Caldwell on a five-part adaptation of Macbeth, directed by Paul Almond.
Boorman hired her after seeing her on the CBC, and Point Blank marked her first role in the U.S. To promote the film, she and Angie Dickinson (who played her sister in the movie) appeared on the pages of Lifemagazine in August 1967 modeling “Well-Dressed Moll Styles in Alcatraz.”
After that, she was a welcome sight in guest stints on episodes of The Wild Wild West, Get Smart, It Takes a Thief, Lancer and Star Trek.
Acker was a divorcée who has a brief affair with a businessman (Arthur Hill) in the Canadian drama Don’t Let the Angels Fall (1969), which played in competition at Cannes. She was selected by the Motion Picture Exhibitors of Canada as their Film Star of Tomorrow that year.
And in 1970, she portrayed the wife of Hal Holbrook‘s idealistic Sen. Hays Stowe on the NBC drama The Bold Ones: The Senator.
Acker’s TV résumé also included such series as Alias Smith and Jones, Gunsmoke, Mission: Impossible, Mod Squad, Marcus Welby, M.D., Cannon, Barnaby Jones, The Streets of San Francisco, The Rockford Files, Police Storyand Quincy, M.E.
Her last movie was the horror film Happy Birthday to Me (1981), and her final TV appearance came on The Young and the Restless in 1992. She retired from acting in ’94, returned to Canada with her late second husband, Peter Elkington, to live in a cottage in Muskoka, Ontario, and continue her passion for painting and sculpting.
Elkington died in 2001. Survivors include her children, Kim and Gillian; granddaughter Alexis; great-granddaughter Berkeley; and stepchildren Kim and Caitlin
Sharon Acker, actress who appeared in Star Trek and played Lee Marvin’s wife in Point Blank – obituary – Daily Telegraph
She appeared in a 1961 TV production of Macbeth with Sean Connery, whom she described as ‘dreamy but something of a meanie’
Sharon Acker, the Canadian actress, who has died aged 87, is best known to sci-fi fans as Odona in the 1969 Star Trek episode “The Mark of Gideon” and as the courageous Anne in Galactica 1980, a reboot of the popular 1970s series, Battlestar Galactica. Away from sci-fi she played Lee Marvin’s ill-fated wife in John Boorman’s hardboiled and highly regarded crime thriller Point Blank.
Sharon Eileen Acker was born in Toronto on April 2 1935, and was adopted when she was nine. She graduated from a four-year commercial art course at Northern Collegiate Vocational School in the city in 1953.
She made her acting debut around the same time with minor television roles, most notably in Anne of Green Gables (1956). She then joined the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, securing a small part in Henry V with a pre-Captain Kirk William Shatner in the title role.
When the Festival travelled to England, Sharon Acker elected to stay. “I had to give it a shot,” she said in 2005. She was rewarded with the part of Christine Callaghan, principal love interest of the hero Jim Dixon (Ian Carmichael) in the 1957 adaptation of Kingsley Amis’s novel Lucky Jim, produced by the Boulting brothers John and Roy and co-starring Terry-Thomas. She was, wrote the Telegraph reviewer “R. P. M. G.”, “a very stunning newcomer”.
But despite favourable column inches, she secretly married her Canadian sweetheart Ronald MacDonald and returned to Canada – angering the Boultings, who had offered her a seven-year contract. “It is a great pity Miss Acker has chosen marriage and babies,” Roy Boulting told reporters, “as she is the most promising, the most talented young actress we’ve found in quite a while.”
Back home in Canada, she played Lady Macduff in a five-part CBC production of Macbeth (1961), featuring Sean Connery, who was shortly to become the biggest film star in the world as James Bond. “He was dreamy but something of a meanie,” she recalled. “Let’s say Sean wasn’t one to offer to buy lunch.”
Besides her acting, Sharon Acker did some lucrative modelling work, and by 1967 she had found her way to Hollywood, where she was signed by John Boorman for Point Blank, playing the unfaithful wife of Lee Marvin’s gangster, Walker.
Two years later she was Odona in Star Trek, playing an inhabitant of a severely overpopulated planet planning to introduce a virus to bring down the numbers; naturally, as the episode’s leading lady, she shared a passionate clinch with William Shatner as Captain Kirk.
The same year she played a divorcee having an affair with a married man (Arthur Hill) in Don’t Let the Angels Fall, the first Canadian feature-length film to play in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, despite mixed reviews and mediocre box office back home.
For the next two decades Sharon Acker’s career consisted largely of one-off appearances in such programmes as Alias Smith and Jones, Mission: Impossible, McMillan and Wife, The Streets of San Francisco, The Rockford Files and Murder, She Wrote, and she was in several episodes each of the soaps Days of Our Lives and The Young and the Restless.
In 1973 she was in all 15 episodes of The New Perry Mason as the titular defence lawyer’s secretary Della Street (played in the original series by Barbara Hale). It was cancelled mid-series after failing to overtake NBC’s The Wonderful World of Disney and ABC’s The FBI in the Sunday-night ratings.
She retired in 1994 to concentrate on her art, particularly sculpture. She settled back home in Ontario with her second husband, the actor and producer Peter J Elkington. He died in 2001, and she is survived by two daughters, including the casting director Kim Everest.
Sharon Acker, born April 2 1935, died March 16 2023
