Richard Wyler

Richard Wyler (also known as Richard Stapley) was born in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex in 1923. He began his career on the London sstage but in the late 1940’s he went to Hollywood with a Hollywood contract. He was featured in “The Three Musketeers” in 1948, “Little Women” “King of the Khyber Rifles” with Tyrone Power and “D-Day 6th of June” with Robert Taylor and Dana Wynter. Richard Wyler died in 2010 at the age of 86.

His “Independent” obituary:

Richard Stapley belonged to a generation of movie actors who plied their trade during the halcyon days of Hollywood – when stars were great and dalliances were discreet. Although predominantly an actor, he had polymath qualities ranging from writer and motorcycle racer to courier.

lamorous world of Hollywood. Born on 20 June 1923 in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, he was the son of a bank manager. He grew up in Brighton and from an early age fell in love with the silver screen. Stapley attended Varndean College in Brighton; one of his contemporaries there was Paul Scofield, with whom he remained friends.

Stapley remembered spending a lot of time at Varndean practising his autograph; destiny would make him a movie actor. However, he did also have a love of writing which would endure throughout his career; he had his first novel published at the age of 17.

After serving in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, Stapley got into repertory theatre and decided at an early age that if he was going to make it in movies he would have to go to the US. Slim, charming, and graced with diamond blue eyes and a deep, educated English accent, Stapley soon caught the eye of the movie-makers – and a number of actresses as well.

Gloria Swanson rented a temporary house in Palm Springs which she shared with Stapley while she was filming the musical Sunset Blvd (1950). Whether it was a practical arrangement or something more was not revealed by Stapley when he reminisced about his days in Hollywood.

The movie breaks soon came, including in 1948 The Three Musketeers, starring Gene Kelly and Lana Turner, Little Women, where he starred alongside Elizabeth Taylor, King of the Khyber Rifles, appearing with Tyrone Power, and the 1956 film D-Day the Sixth of June, playing David Archer alongside Richard Todd and Robert Taylor. Stapley had an uncredited role in Breakfast at Tiffany’s; another small part was in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1972 film Frenzy.

The early 1960s saw him in the TV series Man from Interpol, playing Agent Anthony Smith; for this role he adopted the name Richard Wyler. Some of the scripts for Man from Interpol were penned by Brian Clemens, later the doyen of The Avengers and The Professionals. Man from Interpol ran for 39 episodes between 1960 and 1961; after it ended, Stapley never quite made it back to Hollywood films.

He starred in a number of European films, including El Precio de un Hombre, playing bounty hunter Luke Chilson. He also starred with Jack Palance in The Barbarians, and then in 1969 The Seven Secrets of Sumuru (aka The Girl from Rio) alongside Shirley Eaton and George Sanders. In 1970, Stapley co-starred with Bette Davis and Michael Redgrave in Connecting Rooms.

A follow-up series to Man from Interpol did not follow. Around the same time as he was filming that programme, Stapley had auditioned for the TV series of Ivanhoe, the part of which went to his comrade Sir Roger Moore. Stapley regaled the story of being driven by Roger Moore in his Rolls Royce. Stapley asked Moore what would have happened if he had got the part of Ivanhoe instead – and Moore responded by saying, “You’d be driving this Rolls Royce instead of me… “

Stapley had a steady stream of character parts in many of the mainstream TV series of the 1960s and 1970s, including The Baron, Z Cars, The Saint and Return of the Saint. His work also included appearing in a number of the legendary Imperial Leather soap TV adverts, exuding a sybaritic lifestyle and attaining what can only be described as a lifetime achievement of sharing a bath (on set) with his co-star, namely one Joanna Lumley.

If acting was a love, motorcycles were Stapley’s passion and it is no surprise that he counted among his friends the stunt rider from The Great Escape responsible for the death-defying jump made by Steve McQueen. Stapley himself partook in motorcycle stunts, although one went horrendously wrong and he severely broke his leg – but determined to ride again, he made an ultra-quick recovery.

Stapley rode motorcycles in professional races, including dices with the likes of Mike Hawthorn. He wrote a regular column for Motor Cycling magazine, Richard Wyler’s Coffee Bar Column, recounting tales of his acting exploits or thrills on the race track. He received praise from the Metropolitan Police for dissuading young motorcyclists at the famous Ace Café on London’s North Circular Road from indulging in the potentially lethal dare of “dropping the coin right into the slot” and racing to a given point and back before the record on the jukebox finished.

During the 1960s he also opened one of the first coffee bars near Streatham Ice Rink in south London.

Stapley, using his nom de plume, Richard Wyler, had his own dispatch riders company in London and used his race-track experience on one occasion to get a very important package from central London to Northolt Airfield through heavy traffic in about 30 minutes.

His acting career on slow burn, he tended to write. His work included a novel called Naked Legacy, co-written with Lester Cook III and published in 2004. The story tells of a young man inheriting a manuscript from the father he never knew, which then sends him on a voyage of discovery. He devoted much of his remaining days to working on film scripts that he was determined to see come to fruition, including Tomorrow Has Been Cancelled. Stapley was also completing his autobiography, To Slip and Fall in L.A.

Some unfortunate business deals meant that Stapley’s finances were not good and the last decade of his life was dependant on the generosity of acquaintances.

Stapley had enthusiasm and talent to spare, but the constant money worries and failing health at times shadowed the charming and heroic side of his character. He was married to Elizabeth Wyler; the two were estranged, but never divorced. He has one surviving sister.

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

Frances Sternhagen

Frances Sternhagen was born in 1930 in Washington D.C. She has won two Tony awards for her acting on Broadway, in 1974 for “The Good Doctor” and in 1995 for “The Heiress”. She made her film debut in 1967 in “Up the Down Staircase” with Sandy Dennis. Her other films include “The Hospital” in 1972, “Fedora”, “Two People” and opposite Sean Connery in “Outland”. On television she was featured in “Cheers” as the mother of postman Cliff.

TCM Overview:

A respected stage-trained supporting and leading player, Sternhagen made her film debut in “Up the Down Staircase” (1967). She subsequently appeared in a wide range of supporting roles, usually as either prim, slightly disapproving characters as well as warmly maternal women. Sternhagen’s credits include the classic “The Hospital” (1971), “Two People” (1973) and Billy Wilder’s “Fedora” (1978).

She won attention for her portrayal as Burt Reynolds’ relative under whose auspices he meets his new love in Alan J. Pakula’s “Starting Over” (1979) and nearly stole the sci-fi thriller “Outland” (1981), providing comic relief and support to marshal Sean Connery. Sternhagen portrayed a prissy co-worker of Michael J. Fox in “Bright Lights, Big City” (1988), Farrah Fawcett’s mother in Pakula’s “See You in the Morning” (1989), Richard Farnsworth’s wife in “Misery” (1990) and John Lithgow’s psychiatrist in “Raising Cain” (1992).

CHEERS — Pictured: (l-r) Paul Willson as Paul, Frances Sternhagen as Esther Clavin, John Ratzenberger as Cliff Clavin, George Wendt as Norm Peterson — Photo by: NBCU Photo Bank

Sternhagen is a familiar face to TV viewers. She is probably best-known for her recurring role as the mother to mailman Cliff Clavin (John Ratzenberger) on the NBC comedy “Cheers”. Sternhagen began appearing on the small screen in the 1950s and spent the better part of the late 60s and early 70s in a variety of roles on daytime soaps (“Love of Life”, “The Doctors”, “The Secret Storm” and “Another World”). In primetime, she has played regular supporting roles in everything from sitcoms (“Under One Roof”) to drama (“Stephen King’s Golden Years”).

Sternhagen also has extensive stage credits in everything from classic plays to musical comedies. She has received two Tony Awards for Best Supporting Actress in a Play for Neil Simon’s “The Good Doctor” (1974), based on Chekhov works to a revival of “The Heiress” (1995), based on the Henry James’ novella. Sternhagen was married to actor Thomas A. Carlin from 1956 until his death in 1991.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

The Guardian obituary in 2023:

Frances Sternhagen obituary

Award-winning stage, film and TV actor who had memorable roles as meddling mothers in Cheers and Sex and the City

Ryan GilbeyMon 4 Dec 2023 17.32 CET

With her shrewd blue eyes and twitching dormouse nose, the actor Frances Sternhagen, who has died aged 93, could turn on a dime between consoling warmth and implacable frostiness. She was a multiple Emmy nominee for her guest appearances as two comically meddling mothers. In Sex and the City, between 2000 and 2002, she played Bunny, who can manipulate her pampered son, Trey (Kyle MacLachlan), into doing her bidding simply by squeezing his wrist.

Oblivious to boundaries, Bunny enters his apartment late at night to smear Vicks VapoRub on his chest; his wife, Charlotte (Kristin Davis), who is sleeping beside him, wakes up and joins in. “It is both sick and erotic, and Franny was up for it,” said the show’s executive producer, Michael Patrick King. “It’s always more fun to be obnoxious,” said Sternhagen.

She made seven appearances between 1986 and 1993 in the sitcom Cheers, set in a Boston bar. She played Esther Clavin, the mother of one of the regular patrons, the droning postal worker Cliff (John Ratzenberger). In an episode from the fifth season entitled Money Dearest, Cliff brokers a romance between Esther and an ageing millionaire who has no family to inherit his wealth.

When he dies, the formerly reserved Esther breaks down sobbing in Cliff’s arms, only for him to lose patience despite having initially encouraged her outpouring. “You know, there’s a fine line between expressing your feelings and blubbering,” he mutters.

In Esther’s final episode, at the end of the 11th season, Cliff installs her in a retirement home before changing his mind when he claps eyes on the bill.

She also played the regal grandmother of Dr John Carter (Noah Wyle) on ER between 1997 and 2003, and the mother of the deputy police chief played by Kyra Sedgwick on The Closer (2006-12). “I was big on playing mothers,” she said. “Been playing them since I was five.”

Frances Sternhagen as Esther Clavin, with the talkshow host Johnny Carson, in a 1992 episode of the TV sitcom Cheers. Photograph: NBC/Getty Images

It was theatre, though, that was Sternhagen’s great passion. She won her first Tony award in 1974 for The Good Doctor, Neil Simon’s comedy based on stories by Chekhov, in which 27 roles were shared between her and four co-stars, including Christopher Plummer and Marsha Mason. Her second Tony came in 1995 for playing the widowed Aunt Penniman in The Heiress, adapted from Henry James’s Washington Square. The New York Times called her performance “infinitely sad.”

She also played the female leads in two stage dramas which were later turned into successful films. In 1979, she originated the part of Ethel Thayer, the devoted wife enjoying her umpteenth summer with her ailing husband at their holiday home, in On Golden Pond. Sternhagen had just turned 49 when the show opened, making her around 20 years younger than Ethel.

Ageing up was also required in 1988 when she took over from Dana Ivey in Driving Miss Daisy. As the retired teacher who develops an unlikely friendship with her African-American chauffeur, Sternhagen, then 58, was required to embody the title character from her early seventies into her late nineties. In both plays, the actor’s sharply glinting intelligence, which was palpable in even her softest characters, added steel to material that could tend toward the lachrymose.

Frances Sternhagen in a scene from the 1981 film Outland. Photograph: PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy

When On Golden Pond and Driving Miss Daisy were adapted for cinema, she was sanguine about being replaced respectively by Katharine Hepburn and Jessica Tandy, both of whom went on to win Oscars for those performances. “Making a movie is an expensive proposition,” she reasoned in 1992. “If they can get Katharine Hepburn, they’re going to take Katharine Hepburn. It hurts a little, but I’ve gotten used to it really.”

She recalled being introduced to Hepburn backstage during the run of On Golden Pond. “She told us how much she liked our performances. And we knew that she was brought in to see the show to see whether she wanted to do the movie.”

Sternhagen still got her share of film work. She played the servant of a reclusive film star in Billy Wilder’s elegiac Fedora (1978), and a woman helping to set up her newly single brother-in-law (Burt Reynolds) on a blind date in the romantic comedy Starting Over (1979). In Outland (1981), which relocated the plot of the western High Noon to one of Jupiter’s moons, she was the doctor who becomes the only ally of the hero (Sean Connery in the Gary Cooper role) as he awaits the assassins sent to kill him.

In Rob Reiner’s Misery (1990), adapted from Stephen King’s novel about a psychotic fan (Kathy Bates) terrorising her favourite novelist (James Caan), Sternhagen and Richard Farnsworth were delightful as an easy-going sheriff and his fondly teasing wife. Their miniature sketch of marital harmony offset the dysfunctional central relationship, providing valuable relief from its hothouse claustrophobia.

In another King adaptation, The Mist (2007), she was a teacher who opts to die in a suicide pact rather than be left to the mercy of monsters. In Julie & Julia (2009), Sternhagen played Irma Rombauer, writer of The Joy of Cooking, who disabuses the budding author and chef Julia Childs (Meryl Streep) of the notion that her career has been a piece of cake.

Frances Sternhagen at the premiere of the film Julie & Julia in New York, 2009. Photograph: Peter Kramer/AP

Sternhagen was born in Washington, DC, to John Sternhagen, a tax court judge, and Gertrude (nee Hussey), a former nurse who later became a volunteer community worker. She was educated at the Potomac and Madeira preparatory schools in McLean, Virginia, and at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She majored in history until her professor nudged her towards drama after seeing her silence a campus dining hall with a speech from Richard II.

After graduating in 1951, she taught drama at Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts. “I always acted, but I didn’t have the nerve to go into the theatre until I had taught for a year,” she said in 1981. “I thought I would try it, see if I liked it, and then get out. But you never get out. It’s an addiction.”

She took acting classes at Catholic University, Washington, where she met her future husband, the actor Thomas Carlin, with whom she went on to have six children.

She made her New York debut in 1955 in Jean Anouilh’s play Thieves’ Carnival, and her Broadway debut the same year in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. Her final Broadway performance was 50 years later in Edward Albee’s Seascape, while her last stage role was opposite Edie Falco in The Madrid in 2013.

Her final movie was Reiner’s comedy And So It Goes (2014) with Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton. The difference between the two art forms was simple, she said. “You don’t use your face as much in film. It has to come through your eyes.”

In 1973, she said: “I think of myself as a character actor. Character actors like to put on faces and find out what makes oddballs come alive.” Stardom was of no interest to her. “All I really want is to be able to work in good material with good people.” She got her wish.

Thomas died in 1991. She is survived by her children, Paul, Amanda, Tony, Peter, John and Sarah, nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Frances Sternhagen, actor, born 13 January 1930; died 27 November 2023

Peter Donat was born in 1928 in Nova Scotia, Canada. He is a nephew of British actor Robert Donat. His films include “The Godfather Part Two” in 1974, “The Hindenburg”, “The China Syndrome” and “Babe”. He has guest starred in virtually all of the major television series in the U.S.

IMDB entry:

The Cando-American actor Peter Donat had a 50-year-long career in TV, motion pictures and theater. So respected was Donat, that Francis Ford Coppola considered casting him in the role of Tom Hagen in The Godfather (1972) that went to Robert Duvall.

The nephew of Oscar-winning actor Robert Donat, Peter was born Pierre Collingwood Donat on January 20, 1928 in Kentville, Nova Scotia. His father, landscape gardener Philip Donat, was Anglo-Canadian while his Marie (née Bardet) was French-Canadian.

In 1950, the 22-year-old Donat moved to the United States to study drama at Yale. (He is a naturalized U.S. citizen.) Donat frequently returned to Canada for acting work, appearing in the lead in a 1961 production of Donald Jack‘s play “The Canvas Barricade” at the Stratford Festival. He was also in the Canadian TV serial Moment of Truth (1964), which was broadcast on a commercial TV in the States.

Peter Donat was married for 16 years to Emmy-winner Michael Learned. The couple, who divorced in 1972, had three children. when they divorced. They have three children – Caleb, Christopher and Lucas.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: v

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Mary Wickes was a wonderful American character actress. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1910. She first came to screen attention in 1942 in “Now Voyager” with Bette Davis. Her other films include “JUne Bride”, “Anna Lucasta”, “By the Light of the Silvery Moon”, “Good Morning Miss Dove” and “Fate Is the Hunter”. In her eighties she gave sterling performanes in “Postcards from the Edge”, “Sister Act” and “Little Women” with Susan Sarandon. She died in 1995 in Los Angeles. A new biography of Ms Wickes is published in 2013.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

From the grand old school of wisecracking, loud and lanky Mary Wickes had few peers while forging a career as a salty scene-stealer. Her abrupt, tell-it-like-it-is demeanor made her a consistent audience favorite on every medium for over six decades. She was particularly adroit in film parts that chided the super rich or exceptionally pious, and was a major chastiser in generation-gap comedies. TV holds a vault full of not-to-be-missed vignettes where she served as a brusque foil to many a top TV comic star. Case in point: who could possibly forget her merciless ballet taskmaster, Madame Lamond, puttingLucille Ball through her rigorous paces at the ballet bar in a classic I Love Lucy (1951) episode?

Unlike the working-class characters she embraced, this veteran character comedienne was actually born Mary Isabella Wickenhauser on June 13, 1910, in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of a well-to-do banker. Of Irish and German heritage, she grew into a society débutante following high school and graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a degree in political science. She forsook a law career, however, after being encouraged by a college professor to try theater, and she made her debut doing summer stock in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The rest, as they say, is history.

Prodded on by the encouragement of stage legend Ina Claire whom she met doing summer theater, Mary transported herself to New York where she quickly earned a walk-on part in the Broadway play “The Farmer Takes a Wife” starring Henry Fonda in 1934. In the show she also understudied The Wizard of Oz (1939)’s “Wicked Witch” Margaret Hamilton, and earned excellent reviews when she went on in the part. Plain and hawkish in looks while noticeably tall and gawky in build, Mary was certainly smart enough to see that comedy would become her career path and she enjoyed showing off in roles playing much older than she was. New York stage work continued to pour in, and she garnered roles in “Spring Dance” (1936), “Stage Door” (1936), “Hitch Your Wagon” (1937), “Father Malachy’s Miracle (1937) and, in an unusual bit of casting, Orson Welles‘ Mercury Theatre production of “Danton’s Death.” All the while she kept fine-tuning her acting craft in summer stock.

A series of critically panned plays followed until a huge door opened for her in the form of Miss Preen, the beleaguered nurse to an acid-tongued, wheelchair-bound radio star (played by the hilarious Monty Woolley) in the George S. Kaufman/Moss Hart comedy “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” Oddly enough, for once, it was Mary doing the cowering. The play was the toast of Broadway for two wacky years and she went on tour with it as well. She also become a Kaufman favorite.

Hollywood took notice as well, and when Warner Bros. decided to film the play, it allowed both Mary and Woolley to recreate their classic roles. The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942), which co-starred Bette Davis and Ann Sheridan, was a grand film hit and Mary was now officially on board in Hollywood, given plenty of chances to freelance. At Warners she lightened up the proceedings a bit in the Bette Davis tearjerker Now, Voyager (1942) as the nurse to Gladys Cooper. Elsewhere she traded quips with Lou Costello as a murder suspect in the amusing whodunit Who Done It? (1942); played a WAC in Private Buckaroo (1942) with The Andrews Sisters; and dished out her patented smart-alecky services in both Happy Land (1943) and My Kingdom for a Cook (1943).

Mary returned to Broadway for a few seasons, often for Kaufman, and did some radio work as well, but returned to Hollywood and played yet another nurse in The Decision of Christopher Blake (1948), a part written especially for her. She appeared with ‘Bette Davis (I)’ for a third time in June Bride (1948), finding some fine moments playing a magazine editor. Mary went on to perform yeoman work in On Moonlight Bay (1951) and its sequel, By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1953); I’ll See You in My Dreams (1951);White Christmas (1954) and The Music Man (1962), the last as one of the “Pick-A-Little, Talk-A-Little” housewives of River City.

Television roles also began filtering in for Mary as she continued to put her cryptic comedy spin on her harried housekeepers, teachers, servants and other working commoner types. Mary played second banana to a queue of comedy’s best known legends in the 1950s and 1960s, notably Lucille Ball (who was a long-time neighbor and pal off-screen), Danny Thomas, Red Skelton, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Jimmy Durante, Peter Lind Hayes and Gertrude Berg. Her stellar work with Ms. Berg on the series The Gertrude Berg Show (1961) garnered Mary an Emmy nomination. Among babyboomers, she is probably best remembered as Miss Cathcart in Dennis the Menace (1959).

In later years Mary’s gangly figure filled out a bit as she continued to appear here and there on the small screen in both guest star and series’ regular parts. Later in life she enjoyed a bit of a resurgence. Recalled earlier for her Sister Clarissa in the madcap comedy films The Trouble with Angels (1966) and its sequel, Where Angels Go Trouble Follows! (1968), both with Rosalind Russell, Mary donned the habit once again decades later as crabby musical director Sister Mary Lazarus in the box-office smash Sister Act(1992) and its sequel, Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993). She also churned out a few roles as cranky, matter-of-fact relatives in both Postcards from the Edge (1990) as Meryl Streep‘s grandmother and ‘Shirley Maclaine”s mother, and in Little Women (1994) as Aunt March opposite Winona Ryder Jo. True to form, one of her last roles was voicing a gargoyle in the animated The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), which was released after her death.

The never-married Los Angeles-based performer died in October of 1995 after entering the hospital with respiratory problems. While a patient there, Mary suffered a broken hip from an accidental fall and complications quickly set in following surgery. She was 85 years young. When it came to deadpan comedy, Mary was certainly no second banana. She was a truly a star.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

Peter Allen was born in 1944 in Tenterfield, New South Wales, Australia. He was a terrific singer and songwriter whose career was based mostly in the U.S. He did feature in some films including “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band” in 1978 and “The Pirates of Penzance” in 1982. Peter Allen died in 1992 in San Diego, California at the age of 46.

Australian Dictionary of Irish Biography by Michelle Arrow:

Peter Allen (1944–1992), singer, songwriter, and entertainer, was born Peter Richard Woolnough on 10 February 1944 at Tenterfield, New South Wales, elder of two children of New South Wales-born parents Richard John Woolnough, soldier and grocer, and his wife Marion Bryden, née Davidson. His grandfather, George Woolnough, was a saddle maker, whom he later immortalised in the song ‘Tenterfield Saddler’ (1972). Raised in Armidale, Peter’s performing career began when he was eleven, playing the piano in the ladies’ lounge of the New England Hotel. Educated at Armidale High School, he left school after his violent and alcoholic father committed suicide in November 1958, and moved to Lismore with his mother and sister. In 1959 he went to Surfers Paradise to look for work and met Chris Bell, an English-born singer-guitarist of a similar age. Assisted by Bell’s father, and inspired by the chart-topping Everly Brothers, they formed a singing duo called the ‘Allen Brothers,’ making their debut at the Grand Hotel in Coolangatta. Within a year they were based in Sydney, had signed a recording contract, and reached a national audience through the television program Bandstand.

The Allen Brothers toured Australia and Asia. In 1964 the American singer and actress Judy Garland saw them performing at the Hong Kong Hilton and invited them to be the opening act for her upcoming concert tour of the United States of America. Chris and Peter Allen, as they became known, performed in American nightclubs for the rest of the decade, releasing their only album in 1968. On 3 March 1967 in New York, Peter married Garland’s daughter, the singer and actress Liza Minnelli. They separated in 1970 when Allen acknowledged his homosexuality, and were divorced in 1974.

In 1970 Allen also parted ways with Chris Bell and pursued a solo career. Initially performing at small clubs in New York and Los Angeles, he formed a song-writing partnership with Carole Bayer Sager that produced a number of enduring favourites, including ‘Don’t Cry Out Loud’ (1976). His songs were increasingly performed by other artists: Olivia Newton-John’s recording of ‘I Honestly Love You,’ which Allen co-wrote with Jeff Barry, topped the American charts and earned two Grammy awards in 1974, including Record of the Year. In 1977 ‘I Go To Rio,’ from his successful album Taught by Experts (1976), was a hit in Australia, France, and Brazil.

Allen’s biggest successes came in the early 1980s. He presented a series of concerts at New York’s Radio City Music Hall in 1981, becoming the first male performer to dance with the venue’s famous dance troupe, the Rockettes. In 1982 (with Burt Bacharach, Carole Bayer Sager, and Christopher Cross) he won an Academy award for best original song, for ‘Arthur’s Theme’ (from the film Arthur, starring Dudley Moore and Minnelli). His fame and popularity also grew in Australia, which he visited frequently. During his 1980 tour, a Festival Records executive, Alan Hely, noticing that Allen closed his shows by saying ‘I still call Australia home,’ suggested it would make a good song title. Allen agreed and the song became his best loved. His greatest career disappointment was the failure of his musical, Legs Diamond, which was savaged by critics after its premiere on Broadway in 1988.

Allen was charismatic if not conventionally handsome: he had a prominent nose and chin and a receding hairline, but a warm smile and a lithe frame, which was often clad in his trademark Hawaiian shirts. A cheeky, exuberant performer, he was open about his homosexuality at a time when many of his contemporaries were not. From around 1970 he was in a relationship with Greg Connell, a male model from Texas who later worked as the sound and light designer on Allen’s live shows. According to Allen’s biographer, Connell was ‘Peter’s big love’ (Maclean 1996, 166). Connell died from AIDS in 1984.

In 1990 Allen was appointed AM in recognition of his contribution to the performing arts. Diagnosed with throat cancer during a tour of Australia in January 1992, he died of AIDS-related Kaposi’s sarcoma on 18 June 1992 in San Diego, California. The prime minister of Australia, Paul Keating, paid tribute to Allen’s ‘songs of sensitivity which struck an emotional chord with his fellow Australians’ (Jones and Hallett 1992, 11). In 1993 he was posthumously inducted into the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Hall of Fame. His life was retold in a musical, The Boy From Oz (1998), written by Nick Enright and featuring Allen’s greatest hits. The National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, holds a tender portrait (1980) of Allen by the photographer William Yang.

Research edited by Samuel Furphy

Jack Elam was born in 1918 in Arizona. “A Ticket to Tomahawk” in 1950 was his first major film. He made many Westerns including “Rawhide”, “High Noon”, “Rancho Notorious”, “The Far Country” and “Cattle Queen of Montana”. He died in 2003 at the age of 84.

IMDB entry:

Colorful American character actor equally adept at vicious killers or grizzled sidekicks. As a child he worked in the cotton fields. He attended Santa Monica Junior College in California and subsequently became an accountant and, at one time, manager of the Bel Air Hotel. Elam got his first movie job by trading his accounting services for a role. In short time he became one of the most memorable supporting players in Hollywood, thanks not only to his near-demented screen persona but also to an out-of-kilter left eye, sightless from a childhood fight. He appeared with great aplomb in Westerns and gangster films alike, and in later years played to wonderful effect in comedic roles.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Jim Beaver <jumblejim@prodigy.net>

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

“Guardian” obituary:

In Anthony Mann’s classic 1955 western, The Man From Laramie, Jack Elam, who has died aged 86, introduces his character as follows: “I can’t give you any references, but anyone can tell you Chris Boldt is not a man to be trusted.” Later on, he tries to backstab James Stewart and winds up dead in a dark alley. That role, and many more like it, in over 50 other westerns, made Elam one of the best-known, and best-loved, character actors in the genre.
With his bony, stubbled face, beetle-brows looming over a dead left eye, and gravelly voice, he was the very embodiment of a skulking, no-account, two-bit varmint, and the relish with which he played his parts made every appearance, however fleeting, a pleasure.

Jack Elam, the son of an accountant, was born in Miami, Arizona, a small mining town outside Phoenix, in 1916 (though he would later suggest that he had added two years to his age in order to get work). As a child, he earned money gleaning cotton, and, at the age of 12, lost the use of his left eye in an accident at scout camp. After graduating from Phoenix Union high school, he moved to California where he completed business studies at Modesto and Santa Monica junior colleges, before working as a hotel manager, and then an accountant for Standard Oil.

Following two years’ service in the US Navy during the second world war, Elam joined Willam Boyd’s Hopalong Cassidy Productions as an auditor, while also doing outside work for other companies.

In 1948, Elam quit accountancy, after being warned that he was imperilling the sight in his right eye. He agreed to raise finances for three low-budget films in return for acting parts, and, in 1949, made his debut as The Killer in a short film entitled Trailin’ West. Within three years, he had made his mark as a villain in Henry Hathaway’s Rawhide (1951), and notched up appearances in Fritz Lang’s flamboyant Rancho Notorious and Fred Zinnemann’s classic High Noon (both 1952) – in the latter he had a brief scene as Charlie, the town drunk.

In 1954, he could be seen in Robert Aldrich’s influential Vera Cruz, and Anthony Mann’s The Far Country, in which, as baddie John McIntire’s deputy, he is gunned down in the final reel by James Stewart, the usual fate of Elam’s heavies, assuming they lasted that long.

In 1955, Elam cut an alarming figure in a floral-print shirt and shorts as one of Paul Stewart’s henchmen in Aldrich’s seedy and brilliant thriller, Kiss Me Deadly, as well as appearing in Fritz Lang’s costume drama, Moonfleet.

By the mid-1960s, Elam was playing featured parts in big-budget productions. In 1968, he was seen in Vincent McEveety’s Firecreek and, that same year, travelled to Spain for what would become his most celebrated role, as one of a trio of gunslingers in the opening sequence of Sergio Leone’s magnificent Once Upon A Time In The West. Together with Woody Strode and Al Muloch (who had played a part rejected by Elam in Leone’s earlier The Good, The Bad And The Ugly), Elam is seen killing time at Cattle Corner station. A fly crawls over his jowls. Elam tries to dislodge it but it keeps returning. Eventually, he traps it in his gun barrel, a sly, childlike grin on his face. A train arrives. Charles Bronson appears. Words are spoken. Guns fire, and Jack Elam bites the dust, a whole career encapsulated in one, unforgettable scene.

Elam’s later roles tended towards the comic, partly as a result of his success in Burt Kennedy’s comedy westerns, Support Your Local Sheriff (1969) and Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971), and partly as a result of his advancing age. He was in fine form, alongside Ernest Borgnine and Strother Martin, in the improbable Raquel Welch vehicle, Hannie Caulder (1972), as well as the TV mini-series The Sacketts (1979), but his last great part was probably in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid (1973), in which he plays a lawman whose sense of duty forces him into a gunfight that he knows he cannot win. “Least I’ll be remembered,” he says before dying.

A gregarious man who enjoyed “cigars, Cutty Sark, and a good poker game”, Elam is survived by his second wife and daughter, and a son and daughter from a previous marriage.

· Jack Elam, actor, born November 13 1916; died October 20 2003

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

Jimmie Rodgers is primarily known as a country/pop singer but he has featured on film. He was born in 1933 in Washington State. His more popular songs include “Kisses Sweeter than Wine”, “Are You Really Mine” and “English Country Garden”. His film include “The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come” in 1960 and “Back Door to Hell”.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:.

He was born September 18, 1933 in Camas, Washington, a few months after beloved Country Music Hall of Fame singer Jimmie Rodgers (known as “The Singing Brakeman”) died of consumption. They were not related but perhaps Jimmie’s mother, a piano teacher who often played for silent movie houses, was inspired to name her son after the country legend as the same exact spelling of the first name occurred. His mother taught the musically-inclined Jimmie the piano and guitar. He formed bands and served at one time with the U.S. Air Force. He later was discovered on Arthur Godfrey‘s talent show and was signed by Roulette Records, an offshoot of RCA.

In the late 50s, Jimmie’s easy folk-pop style and melodic renderings caught on fast. A wonderful alternative to the rock-and-roll, he found a #1 overnight hit with the song “Honeycomb” in 1957 and followed things up with a handful of “top 10” singles including “Oh-Oh, I’m Falling in Love Again,” “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine,” “Secretly,” “Waltzing Matilda” and “Are You Really Mine.” Signed by Roulette Records, he severed ties with the record company in 1960 after a money dispute and signed with Dot Records the following year.

Jimmie became a popular commodity during these years, touring with the likes of Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and Frankie Avalon. He made TV appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “American Bandstand” to the delight of his fans, and even parlayed his singing fame into a brief movie career with lead performances in the remake of The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1961), in which he co-starred with Disney’sLuana Patten, and the war drama Back Door to Hell (1964). Both were only mildly received.

Things looked very promising with a TV summer series “The Jimmie Rodgers Show.” Not an electric performer by any stretch, the good-looking singer with the trademark cleft chin had a natural and easygoing charm that appealed to the masses. In 1967, however, right after signing with A&M, Jimmie’s life and career changed forever. In December of 1967, he was stopped by an off-duty police officer on the freeway after leaving a party. The details are sketchy and the incident remains a mystery, but Jimmie somehow suffered a severe skull fracture as a result of the encounter and claims the police brutally attacked him. The police report maintains that Rodgers was intoxicated and hurt himself when he stumbled and fell. Jimmie later sued the City of Los Angeles and settled out of court. His life, however, would never be the same.

I Jimmie attempted a comeback of sorts, appearing regularly on “The Joey Bishop Show” in 1969, but after three brain surgeries he still suffered from convulsions and had trouble with balance. A portion of his face also sagged and he did not like appearing on camera for that reason. Forced into retirement in later years, he devoted himself to religion and performed only on occasion in the concert venue. Some of his more popular songs can still be heard on commercials. He was married three times and has five children.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

New York Times obituary in 2021:

Jimmie Rodgers, whose smooth voice straddled the line between pop and country and brought him a string of hits — none bigger than his first record, “Honeycomb,” in 1957 — died on Jan. 18 in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 87.

His daughter Michele Rodgers said that the cause was kidney disease and that he had also tested positive for Covid-19.

Mr. Rodgers was a regular presence on the pop, country, R&B and easy listening charts for a decade after “Honeycomb,” with records that included “Oh-Oh, I’m Falling in Love Again” (1958) and “Child of Clay” (1967), both of which were nominated for Grammy Awards.

He might have continued that run of success but for an ugly incident in December 1967, when he was pulled over by a man who, he later said, was an off-duty Los Angeles police officer and beat him severely.

Three brain surgeries followed, and he was left with a metal plate in his head. He eventually resumed performing, and even briefly had his own television show, but he faced constant difficulties. For a time he was sidelined because he started having seizures during concerts.

“Once word gets out that you’re having seizures onstage, you can’t work,” he told The News Sentinel of Knoxville, Tenn., in 1998. “People won’t hire you.”

Mr. Rodgers was found to have spasmodic dysphonia, a disorder characterized by spasms in the muscles of the voice box, a condition he attributed to his brain injury. Yet he later settled into a comfortable niche as a performer and producer in Branson, Mo., the country music mecca, where he had his own theater for several years before retiring to California in 2002.

James Frederick Rodgers was born on Sept. 18, 1933, in Camas, Wash., in the southwest part of the state. (Four months earlier, a more famous Jimmie Rodgers, the singer known as the father of country music, had died; the two were unrelated.) His mother, Mary (Schick) Rodgers, was a piano teacher, and his father, Archie, worked in a paper mill. Jimmie started out singing in church and school groups.

After graduating from high school, he briefly attended Clark College in Washington State but left to enlist in the Air Force, serving in Korea during the Korean War. In a 2016 interview with The Spectrum, a Utah newspaper, he recalled one particular evening near Christmas 1953.

“I bought a beat-up old guitar from a guy for $10 and started playing and singing one night and all the guys joined in,” he said. “We were sitting on the floor with only candles for light, and these tough soldiers had tears running down their cheeks. I realized if my music could have that effect, that’s what I wanted to do with my life.”

Back in the States and stationed near Nashville, he started performing in a nightclub for $10 a night and free drinks before returning to Washington after mustering out. In 1957 he traveled to New York to perform on a TV talent show and also snagged an audition for Roulette Records, singing “Honeycomb,” a Bob Merrill song he had learned off a recording by Georgie Shaw and had been performing in the Nashville club.

“They basically said, ‘Don’t go any further, that’s great,’” he said in an interview with Gary James for classicbands.com.

Mr. Rodgers was taken to a studio to record what he thought would be a demo with musicians he had only just met.

“They brought in four players and three singers and we recorded it in about two hours — no charts, no music,” he said in a 2010 oral history for the National Spasmodic Dysphonia Association.

A week or two later, he was surprised to hear the song on the radio. It reached the top of the Billboard pop and R&B charts.

Later that year he had another success with his version of a song that had been a hit for the Weavers, “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine,” giving it an up-tempo kick and injecting key changes similar to what he had used in “Honeycomb.”

“I was told that they won’t sell — records that change keys, people can’t sing along with them,” Mr. Rodgers recalled in an oral history recorded in 2002 for the National Association of Music Merchants. The public disagreed.

His early songs, released as Elvis Presley was shaking up the music scene, were a sort of comfort food, jaunty yet melodic and not too earthshaking. In 1959 his quick popularity earned him his own television variety show, which ran for one season.

“If his singing style calls for more emphasis on beat than lilt,” Jack Gould wrote of its premiere in The New York Times, “at least it has the virtue of being well this side of rock ’n’ roll.”

Mr. Rodgers dabbled in acting in the 1960s, including a leading role in “Back Door to Hell,” a 1964 war movie whose cast also included Jack Nicholson. In 1965, “Honeycomb” found new life when Post introduced a cereal by that name, repurposing the song to advertise it, the jingle sung by Mr. Rodgers. He also sang a SpaghettiOs jingle that riffed on his “Oh-Oh, I’m Falling in Love Again.”

Mr. Rodgers said he was under consideration for a featured role in the 1968 movie musical “Finian’s Rainbow” when the encounter on the freeway derailed his career. In his telling, he was driving home late at night when the driver behind him flashed his lights. He thought it was his conductor, who was also driving to Mr. Rodgers’s house, and pulled over.

“I rolled the window down to ask what was the matter,” he told The Toronto Star in 1987. “That’s the last thing I remember.”

He ended up with a fractured skull and broken arm. He said the off-duty officer who had pulled him over called two on-duty officers to the scene, but all three scattered when his conductor, who went looking for Mr. Rodgers when he hadn’t arrived home, drove up.

The police told a different story: They said Mr. Rodgers had been drunk and had injured himself when he fell. Mr. Rodgers sued the Los Angeles Police Department, prompting a countersuit; the matter was settled out of court in his favor to the tune of $200,000.

During his long recovery Mr. Rodgers got another shot at a TV series, a summer replacement variety show in 1969.

“I looked like a ghost,” he admitted in a 2004 interview.

His marriages to Colleen McClatchy and Trudy Ann Buck ended in divorce. In 1978, he married Mary Louise Biggerstaff. She survives him.

In addition to her and his daughter Michele, he is survived by a son, Michael, from his first marriage; two sons from his second marriage, Casey and Logan; a daughter from his third marriage, Katrine Rodgers; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Perry Lopez was born in New York City in 1929. He began his career on the New York stage. His films include “Creatures from the Black Lagoon” and “Young Guns”. He had a major role in Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” in 1974 with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. Perry Lopez died in 2008.

“Mitzi Gaynor flashed but briefly on cinema screens, a happy chirpy girl seemingly hurt once musicals stopped staple product at each studio.” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International Stars”. (1972)

Mitzi Gaynor was born in 1931 in Chicago of Hungarian parents. She made her movie debut in 1950 in “My BLue Heaven” which starred Betty Grable. Throuhout the 1950;s she starred in such musicals as “There’s No Business Like Show Business”, “Anything Goes”, “The Joker Is Wild”, “Les Girls” and her most popular movie “South Pacific” in 1958. During the 1960’s she toured with her own show and made many television spectactulars over the next 20 years.

TCM Overview:

This blonde dancer and light actress appeared in Hollywood musicals beginning in the early 1950s. Among her more notable efforts were “There’s No Business Like Show Business” (1954), the 1956 remake of “Anything Goes,” with Bing Crosby and Donald O’Connor, and “Les Girls” (1957), opposite Gene Kelly. Gaynor had two outstandig screen roles: as a girlfriend of nightclub comedian Joe E Lewis (played by Frank Sinatra) in “The Joker Is Wild” (1957) and as Nellie Forbush in the the screen version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific” (1958).Beginning in the late 1950s, Gaynor began to appear on various variety series, eventually headlining her own NBC special in 1968, “Mitzi.” Between 1973 and 1978, she appeared annually on CBS in a series of high-concept, entertaining variety specials.

Her website here.