Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 108 of 128

Vic Damone

Vic Damone. TCM Overview

Vic Damone has had world wide success as a popular singer. In the 1950’s he made several movie musicals with MGM. He was born in 1928 in Brooklyn of Italian parents. By the late 1940’s he was well established as a singer. His first movie was “Rich, Young and Pretty” with Jane Powell followed by “Athena” also with Powell and Edmund Purdom and Steve Reeves. He also made “Hit the Deck”, “Deep in My Heart” and “Kismit” with Ann Blyth. In 1960 he had a dramatic role in “Hell to Eternity” with Jeffrey Hunter, Patricia Owens and Miiko Taka.

TCM Overview:

No less a figure than Frank Sinatra once proclaimed singer Vic Damone as possessing the “best pipes in the business,” which he parlayed into a popular recording career in the late 1940s and 1950s with such hits as “You’re Breaking My Heart,” “Again” and “My Heart Cries for You,” among many other lush romantic ballads. Damone also enjoyed a secondary career as an actor, largely as lovestruck youth in such Hollywood musicals as “Deep in My Heart” (1954) and “Kismet” (1955). Like many pop crooners, Damone was unmoored by the rise of rock-n-roll in the early 1960s, though he segued successfully into the casino circuit in the 1970s, where he remained active and in fine voice until his retirement following a stroke in 2001. Though never a cultural institution like Sinatra or Nat “King” Cole, Vic Damone’s rich baritone provided him with a slew of hits in the 1950s and a career on stage that compared with and even outlasted many of his contemporaries.

Born Vito Rocco Farinola on June 12, 1928 in Brooklyn, NY, Vic Damone was one of five children and the only son of electrician Rocco Farinola and his wife, Mamie Damone, both of whom were immigrants who hailed from Sicily. Music was an important component of Damone’s life from an early age; his mother taught piano, while his father played guitar. However, he drew his greatest inspiration from Frank Sinatra, whose meteoric rise to pop stardom inspired the younger man to take singing lessons. These were cut short when his father suffered a serious injury in a work accident, prompting Damone to drop out of school and work as an usher and elevator operator at the Paramount Theater in Manhattan. While bringing Perry Como to his dressing room following a performance at the theater, Damone asked the singer if he would hear him sing in order to judge if he had talent. His rendition of “There Must Be a Way” impressed Como, who referred Damone to a local bandleader. After adopting the stage moniker of Vic Damone, he made his professional debut as a singer in early 1947 with a performance on WHN radio in New York shortly before capturing first place on “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” in April of that year. This in turn led to regular appearances on the Godfrey show, where he met Milton Berle. The comic helped to broker a contract for Damone to perform at the La Martinique and Aquarium nightclubs, which afforded him major exposure. By the summer of 1947, Damone had signed with Mercury Records, which released his debut single, “I Have But One Heart.” The record reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100, as did its immediate follow-up, “You Do.”

Damone was soon hosting his own radio program, Saturday Night Serenade, while playing live dates at major New York theaters such as the Copa and even his previous employers, the Paramount. In 1948, he scored four Top 30 singles, including a duet with Patti Page on “Say Something Sweet to Your Sweetheart,” before returning to the Top 10 with the million-seller “Again” in 1949. His next release that year, “You’re Breaking My Heart,” became his first and only single to top the pop charts, though he would visit the Top 10 on several occasions in the late ’40s and early ’50s, most notably with a 1950 cover of “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” an Israeli folk song adapted by the Weavers, and “My Heart Cries for You,” which reached No. 4 in 1950. That same year, he signed a film contract with MGM, which led to his screen debut as an amorous Frenchman in pursuit of Jane Powell in “Rich, Young and Pretty” (1951). After scoring one more Top 5 hit with “My Truly Truly Fair” in 1951, Damone was inducted into the Army, where he served until 1953. Mercury kept him in the spotlight during this period by releasing a steady string of material recorded by Damone prior to his tour of duty, including the Top 10 hits “Here in My Heart” (1952) and “April in Portugal” and “Ebb Tide,” both in 1953.

Upon his return from military service, Damone resumed his film career, enjoying featured or co-starring roles in major musical productions like “Hit the Deck” (1955) and the screen adaptation of “Kismet” (1955). His singing career, however, entered the doldrums, prompting him to leave Mercury for Columbia in 1956. That year, Damone would score a No. 4 hit with “On the Street Where You Live,” from the musical “My Fair Lady,” but the single would prove his final visit to the Top 10 pop charts. Though his albums performed well, Damone had lost his ground on the singles chart to the growing rock-n-roll movement, and by 1961, he had left Columbia for Capitol. The label attempted to groom Damone into a mature balladeer with 1962’s Linger Awhile with Vic Damone (1962), which, like its five follow-ups, earned him critical acclaim but few record sales. From 1962 to 1963, he hosted an NBC variety series called “The Lively Ones,” which featured an impressive array of jazz and folk performers.

Marisa Pavan, Pier Angeli and Vic Damone.

Damone again changed labels in 1965, moving to Warner Bros., where he earned a Top 30 hit with “You Were Only Fooling.” It also reached No. 8 on the adult contemporary charts, where he would consistently place in the Top 40 for the next half-decade, until earning his final U.S. chart hit with “To Make a Big Man Cry,” which reached No. 31 on the adult contemporary charts in 1969. Damone’s finances took a downward turn in the early 1970s, forcing him to declare bankruptcy. But after staging a major concert in Las Vegas in 1971, he became a staple of the casino and nightclub circuit, which returned him to solvency. Damone soon became such a popular figure in this arena that he expanded his touring to the United Kingdom, where he was received warmly by audiences. Damone’s popularity overseas prompted him to return to recording, issuing several albums through RCA between 1992 and 1995. He remained active until 2000, when a minor stroke brought his stage career to a close with a farewell concert in Palm Beach, FL. In 2009, he penned his autobiography, Singing Was the Easy Part, shortly before breaking his retirement with a special one-off performance in 2011.

By Paul Gaita

This TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Betsy Palmer has had two distinct careers on film. In the 1950’s she was a very pretty female lead and then in the eighties she became associated with horror movies through her starring role in “Nightmare on Elm Street”. She was born in 1926 in Indiana. She made her film debut in “Mr Roberts” in 1955 with Jack Lemmon. She went on to make “Queen Bee” with Joan Crawford, “The True Story of Lynn Stuart” with Jack Lord and “The Tin Star” with Henry Fonda and Anthony Perkins. She died at the age of 88 in May 2015.

IMDB entry:

Betsy Palmer was born Pamela Betsy Hrunek on November 1, 1926 in East Chicago, Indiana. She is probably best known for playing Jason Voorhees’ mother in the horror filmFriday the 13th (1980), but her career as an actress began many years before. Palmer was encouraged to play a young female officer co-starring with Jack Lemmon in Mister Roberts (1955) and in another war film the same year, The Long Gray Line (1955). Throughout the late 1950s, Palmer was recognized as a news reporter on Today (1952) on NBC, then became largely involved in television; from then on she remained in made-for-TV films and notable guest appearances, and then appearing in the horror film Friday the 13th (1980), but continued on with television. Her film The Fear: Resurrection (1999) did not make much impact. Palmer today often spends her time between her home in New York City and Sedona, Arizona. She apparently was offered the role of Jason Voorhees’ mother in Jason X (2001), but turned it down and said to use her original footage from Friday the 13th (1980).

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

“Movies Unlimited” article:

As performers from Fay Wray to Anthony Perkins to Mark Hamillfound out, playing a memorable character in a horror or science fiction film early in your career often comes with the risk of being typecast in that role and finding your professional trajectory changed, not always for the better. For actress Betsy Palmer, who died this past weekend at 88, however, the part that brought her cult acclaim to a generation of “slasher film” fans arrived after she was already a 30-year veteran of the stage, screen and television…but it took the need to buy a new car to convince her to “take a stab” at it.

Born Patricia Betsy Hrunek in East Chicago, Indiana, in 1926, she studied theater at DePaul University and, after graduation, set out to make a name for herself on Broadway. She was only in New York for about a week when, at a party at the apartment of fellow actor (and future Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C. regular) Frank Sutton, Betsy was tapped to appear in an early, 15-minute TV soap opera, Meet Susan. Along with stage roles in South Pacific and Maggie, Palmer found steady work on the small screen, appearing in such shows as Inner Sanctum, Studio One, and Playhouse 90. She was also a regular panelist on the original, prime time version of I’ve Got a Secret from 1958 until its 1967 ending, and appeared as herself on the game show in the 1959 Doris Day comedy It Happened to Jane.

Betsy’s big-screen debut came in a 1955 “B” sea thriller, Death Tide, but that same year she appeared in key roles in two movies directed (at least partly) by John Ford: as the head Army nurse who becomes a target for womanizing ensign Jack Lemmon in the classic WWII drama Mister Roberts, and as the wife (and, later, mother) of West Point cadets under the mentorship of Tyrone Power in The Long Gray Line. 1955 also saw Palmer lock horns with manipulative sister-in-law Joan Crawford in the campy melodrama Queen Bee.

The late 1950s and early ’60s would find Palmer working alongside Henry Fonda and Anthony Perkins in the frontier tale The Tin Star (1957) and Paul Muni and David Wayne in the powerful social drama The Last Angry Man (1959), but over the next two decades she would devote most of her acting time to the stage, with occasional TV turns (Love, American Style, CHiPs, The Love Boat, among others), and spend her home life raising her daughter.

It was when her Mercedes died along a Connecticut highway, however, that the actress decided to take a $10,000 offer to appear in a 1980 horror film that introduced her to a new audience. As Pamela Voorhees, the vengeance-seeking mother of Camp Crystal Lake “drowning victim” Jason Voorhees, in director Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13th, Betsy was able to play against her “good girl” image as (35-year-old Spoiler Alert!) a deranged killer. “I was always trying to prove that I wasn’t the girl next door,” she later stated in the documentary Return to Crystal Lake.

Throughout the ’80s and ’90s Palmer kept up her TV (a recurring role on Knot’s Landing, the telemovie Goddess of Love) and stage (Cactus Flower, Same Time Next Year) work, with the odd film turn here and there, the last in 2007. A chance to reprise her role as Mrs. Voorhees in the 2003 monster mash-up Freddy vs. Jason didn’t come to pass, through…either because the part as offered or the paycheck was too small (the price of cars had gone up since 1980, after all). And while she was at first cool to Friday the 13th’s overwhelming popularity (“Nobody is going to see this thing!” was her initial reaction to the low-budget shocker), Palmer later came to embrace her place in the “slasher movie” pantheon, greeting fans and signing autographs at horror/sci-fi conventions.

The above “Movies Unlimited” article can also be accessed online here.

New York Times obituary in June 2015:

Betsy Palmer, 88, Dies; From TV Panelist to ‘Friday the 13th’ Villainess

By Bruce Weber

June 1, 2015

Betsy Palmer, an actress bound to be remembered by different generations for different career incarnations — as a performer on live television, as a panelist on game shows and as one of Hollywood’s more bloodthirsty villainesses — died on Friday in hospice care near her home in Danbury, Conn. She was 88.

Her death was announced by her manager, Brad Lemack.

Ms. Palmer began her career in the early 1950s and was cast frequently on anthology drama series, some of them live. Outgoing, friendly, she was known, in the parlance of the era, as a girl-next-door type.

She was also tall and shapely — Newsweek magazine described her in 1958 as a “sugar-cookie blonde” — all of which made her a natural for other types of live programming that flourished in the 1950s and ’60s. For a time she appeared regularly on the “Today” show during its first decade, alongside Dave Garroway, the host.

“Women’s news is provided by Betsy Palmer, one of television’s most photogenic and intelligent performers,” John P. Shanley wrote in 1958 in an assessment of the show in The New York Times.

Baby boomers grew familiar with Ms. Palmer for her nearly 200 appearances on “I’ve Got a Secret,” a long-running game show, hosted by Garry Moore, in which four panelists peppered guests with questions in order to determine a hidden peculiarity about them. (One pair of guests, for instance, claimed to be the world watermelon seed spitting champions.) Ms. Palmer’s colleagues often included Bess Myerson, Henry Morgan and Bill Cullen.

A later generation, however, knows Ms. Palmer better (or perhaps only) as, in her words, “queen of the slashers,” for her appearance as the insanely murderous Mrs. Voorhees, the camp cook bent on bloodily eliminating a roster of teenage counselors, in the 1980 horror film “Friday the 13th,” which has spawned myriad sequels and become one of Hollywood’s most profitable franchises. (As Mrs. Voorhees, Ms. Palmer gets her head cut off with a machete at the end of the film, though she does appear in flashback in at least one of the sequels.)

As she often told the story, Ms. Palmer took the part only because she needed $10,000 to buy a new car, a Volkswagen Scirocco.

“So the script came and I read it, and I said, ‘What a piece of … ’ ” Ms. Palmer recalled in a 2003 documentary, “Return to Crystal Lake: Making Friday the 13th,” discreetly not finishing her sentence. “And I said, ‘Nobody is ever going to see this. It will come and it will go. And I’ll have my Scirocco.’ ”

Patricia Betsy Hrunek was born in East Chicago, Ind., on Nov. 1, 1926. Her father, Rudolph, was a chemist. Her mother, Marie, started and operated the East Chicago School of Business, which Betsy briefly attended before studying drama at DePaul University in Chicago.

She started acting in summer stock and, according to an NBC biography of her in 1957, appeared in a show outside Chicago with the actress and comedian Imogene Coca, who encouraged her to move to New York. There, in addition to her work on television dramas, she did commercials and appeared on game shows, including “Masquerade Party,” in which a panel of celebrities tried to discern the identity of another celebrity who appeared in disguise.

She had a few small parts in movies, including as a nurse in “Mister Roberts” (1955), the hit comedy-drama about life on a Navy ship during World War II with Henry Fonda and Jack Lemmon (who won an Oscar). She played the female lead in a western that starred Fonda, “The Tin Star” (1957).

She also appeared on Broadway in two short-lived comedies: “The Grand Prize” (1955), with Tom Poston and June Lockhart, and “Affair of Honor” (1956), which The Times’s critic, Brooks Atkinson, described as (through no fault of the actors, he pointed out) “dull and odious.”

Ms. Palmer’s marriage to Vincent J. Merendino, an obstetrician, ended in divorce. Her survivors include their daughter, Melissa Merendino.

In 1969 Ms. Palmer replaced Virginia Graham as host of the syndicated talk show “Girl Talk.” Her later credits on television include a recurring role on the prime-time soap opera “Knots Landing” and guest appearances on “Murder, She Wrote,” “Charles in Charge,” “The Love Boat” and “Just Shoot Me!” In the 1960s and the 1970s, she also returned to Broadway as part of replacement casts in “Cactus Flower” and “Same Time, Next Year” and as a star of the Tennessee Williams drama “The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.” For many, if not most, however, it is Mrs. Voorhees and “Friday the 13th” that linger.

“I dismissed it for many, many years, and wouldn’t ’fess up to it at all,” she said in the documentary. “And then it just became such a big thing where everybody seemed to enjoy it so much. I thought, ‘Well, all right, I’m comfortable about it now.’ It’s almost like a badge of honor, in a way. It has become that.

“I’m the queen of the slashers, you know. What am I going to do?”

Barbara Baxley was born in Porterville, Carolina in 1923. She appeared for many years on various U.S. television dramas before making her movie debut in 1962 in William Inge’s “All Fall Down” with Warren Beatty and Angela Lansbury. She gave incisive performances in such films as “No Way To Treat A Lady”, “Nashville” and “Sea of Love”. Barbara Baxley died in 1990 at the age of 67.

IMDB entry:

Barbara Angie Rose Baxley was born on New Year’s Day 1923 to Emma A. & C. Bert Baxley in Porterville, CA. She was the youngest of their two daughters and was named after her grandmothers; Angie Sibley-Tyler and Iva Matilda Rose-Baxley. Barbara attended and graduated with honors from the University of the Pacific in Stockton where she was raised, and won a scholarship to the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York where she studied with Sanford Meisner. She made her 1948 Broadway debut in Noel Coward‘s Private Lives, starring Tallulah Bankhead and Donald Cook. In 1960 she received a Tony nomination for her role in the Tennessee Williams play Period of Adjustment. She was a charter member of the Actors Studio where she studied with Elia Kazan. She was good friends with and shared an apartment with Tallulah Bankhead for many years. She had many television & film roles, and won critical praise for her role as Sally Field ‘s mother in Norma Rae (1979), but her love was Broadway. Barbara loved cats and had one named Tulah.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Susan Boyer <suebdoo@hollinet.com>

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

New York Times obituary in 1990:

Barbara Baxley, a stage, film and television actress, was found dead Thursday in her Upper West Side apartment. The medical examiner’s office said the apparent cause of death was a heart attack. She was 63 years old.

Since her 1948 Broadway debut as a baffled bride in a revival of Noel Coward’s ”Private Lives,” starring Tallulah Bankhead and Donald Cook, Miss Baxley played a wide variety of roles in productions that ranged from Shakespeare to musical comedies.

In 1960 she played a different bride, this one from Texas, in the Tennessee Williams play ”Period of Adjustment,” for which she received a Tony nomination.

She also won critical praise as Sally Field’s mother in the 1979 film ”Norma Rae” and again in 1981 as a business executive in Wendy Wasserstein’s play ”Isn’t It Romantic.” In his review of ”Isn’t It Romantic,” Mel Gussow of The New York Times cited Miss Baxley’s ”stylish personification of boardroom urbanity.”

Other Broadway Credits

Miss Baxley’s other Broadway credits include ”Whodunnit” (1983), ”The Three Sisters” (1964), ”She Loves Me” (1963), ”The Flowering Peach” (1954), ”The Frogs of Spring” (1953), ”Camino Real” (1953) and ”Out West of Eighth” (1951).

Early in her career, she filled in for Jean Arthur in ”Peter Pan” and took over Julie Harris’s role in ”I Am a Camera.”

Off Broadway, she sang Brecht-Weill songs in ”Brecht on Brecht” (1962) and appeared in ”To Be Young, Gifted and Black” (1969).

She played Isabel in ”Measure for Measure,” a New York Shakespeare Festival production in Central Park in 1966, and Portia in ”The Merchant of Venice” at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Conn., in 1967. At the Yale Repertory Theater she had the title roles in ”Mrs. Warren’s Profession” and ”Major Barbara.”

She starred in the national companies of ”Zorba,” ”The Dark at the Top of the Stairs” and the Kennedy Center Bicentennial production of ”Scarecrow.” In Chicago she co-starred with George Grizzard in ”The Taming of the Shrew” and Moliere’s ”Misanthrope.”

Miss Baxley’s films included ”Nashville” (1975), ”Countdown” (1968), ”No Way to Treat a Lady” (1968), ”All Fall Down” (1962) and ”The Savage Eye” (1960).

Her many guest appearances on television included ”Murder, She Wrote,” ”Hawaii Five-O,” ”The Hitchcock Hour,” ”Studio One” and ”Playhouse 90.” In the Norman Lear series ”All That Glitters,” she played the industrialist L. W. Carruthers.

Miss Baxley, born in Stockton, Calif., graduated with honors in speech and history from the College of the Pacific in Stockton and won a scholarship to the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, where she studied with Sanford Meisner. She was also a charter member of the Actors Studio, where she studied with Elia Kazan.

Miss Baxley received honors including the Actors Studio Award for achievement in 1980.

She leaves no immediate survivors.

Arthur Hill was born in 1922 in Saskatchewan, Canada. He began his career in Britain and appeared in such English films as “Penny Princess” in 1952, “Life With the Lions” and “The Deep Blue Sea! with Vivien Leigh. By 1957 he was in the U.S. and starred in mnay of the plays been shown on television. His Hollywood films included “The Young Doctors” with Ben Gazzara and Ina Balin in 1961, “Moment to Moment” with Jean Seberg and Honor Blackman and “Harper” with Paul Newman and Lauren Bacall. His last role was as a guest star in an 1990 episode of “Murder She Wrote” with Angela Lansbury. He died in 2006 at the age of 84.

His “Independent” obituary:

The Canadian actor Arthur Hill, who created the role of the unhappily married college professor George in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? both on Broadway and in London, was a dependable player who had other Broadway triumphs as Ben, the hero’s frail brother, in Look Homeward, Angel, and the ill-fated father in All the Way Home. On screen, he had notable roles in Harper and The Andromeda Strain, and his countless television performances included the leading role in the series Owen Marshall, Counsellor-at-Law.

The son of a QC, he was born in Melfort, Saskatchewan, in 1922, and educated at the University of British Columbia, with the intention of following his father into the legal profession. After serving as a mechanic with the Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War, he returned to university, where his involvement with college plays engendered acting ambitions.

After touring Canada with a community theatre group, he moved to London, where he made his professional début at the Wimbledon Theatre in Arthur Laurents’ play Home of the Brave (1948), an indictment of racial prejudice. Hill played Finch, a soldier serving in the South Pacific with his boyhood friend, a Jew who is persecuted by a bigoted corporal. Hill moved with the play to the Westminster Theatre, where it was retitled The Way Back. (When filmed under its original title by Stanley Kramer in 1949, the oppressed soldier was made a black man, and Hill’s role was played by Lloyd Bridges.)

Hill made his screen début in Val Guest’s Miss Pilgrim’s Progress (1949), starring Guest’s wife, Yolande Donlan. Guest later recalled,

I surrounded Yolande with my usual rep company and one newcomer, a good-looking young Canadian to play the US Consul. His name was Arthur Hill, it was his very first film, and it turned out to be a milestone for him. Not only was he inducted into our rep but later it led to him playing opposite Yolande in Garson Kanin’s play The Rat Race for the BBC, and that in turn impressed Kanin enough to get him cast in the play The Matchmaker, which was to take him to Broadway . . .

Hill appeared in three more Guest movies, Mr Drake’s Duck (1950), The Body Said No (1950) and Life with the Lyons (1954), and other early films included I Was a Male War Bride (1949), Paul Temple Returns (1952) and The Deep Blue Sea (1955, based on Terence Rattigan’s play), in which Hill played the chum of Kenneth More, a feckless RAF pilot.

His roles on the London stage included small parts in The Male Animal (1949), Man and Superman (1951) and Winter Journey (1952), after which he was cast in the prominent role of the adventurous store clerk Cornelius Hackl in Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker (1954) at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, with Ruth Gordon (Garson Kanin’s wife) playing the matchmaking Dolly Levi. When the play went to Broadway in 1955, Hill went with it and was hailed in the New York Herald Tribune as “enormously gifted”.

He then played Ben Gant in Ketti Fring’s fine adaptation of Thomas Wolfe’s 1929 autobiographical novel Look Homeward, Angel (1957), giving a touching performance as the hero’s delicate brother whose death proves cathartic. The hit drama ran for over 500 performances. He gave another acclaimed performance in Tad Mosel’s All the Way Home (1960), also based on an autobiographical novel – James Agee’s poignant Pulitzer Prize-winning A Death in the Family (1957) – in which Hill portrayed a happy-go-lucky inhabitant of a small Tennessee town in 1915, whose happy life with his Catholic wife and their son ends when he is killed in a car accident. (Robert Preston played Hill’s role in the film version.)

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) was to prove his greatest personal success, winning him both the Tony Award and the Drama Critics Award as best actor for his indelible portrayal of a quiet, browbeaten college professor married to a frustrated, foul-mouthed woman (Uta Hagen) who constantly reminds him of his lack of achievement. When they invite a young couple, newly arrived on the campus, for drinks, the evening descends into a drunken session of sado-masochistic invective. The New York Times lauded his “superbly modulated performance built on restraint as a foil to Miss Hagen’s explosiveness”. With Hill and Hagen repeating their roles, the play triumphed at London’s Piccadilly Theatre in 1964.

On screen he was seen giving quietly authoritative performances in The Ugly American (1962) and as Jane Fonda’s doting husband in In the Cool of the Day (1963). In the complex thriller Harper (1960), he had a rare villainous role as the duplicitous lawyer friend of private detective Paul Newman. Robert Wise’s cult sci-fi movie The Andromeda Strain (1970) starred him as one of four scientists investigating a mysterious virus that has killed most of the population of a small desert town, and in Richard Attenborough’s account of the Arnhem disaster, A Bridge Too Far (1977), he had a small but telling role as an American medical colonel.

He made numerous appearances on television, guesting in such shows as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Mission Impossible, The Fugitive and The Untouchables, and he had a long-running hit from 1971 to 1974 when he starred in Owen Marshall, Counsellor at Law. His character, a compassionate defence attorney who always displayed warmth and consideration for the accused, was admired by real-life legal associations and the series won several public-service awards.

Arthur Hill retired after acting in a Murder She Wrote episode, “The Return of Preston Giles”, in 1990.

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

Barnard Hughes was born in 1915 in Bedford Hills, New York. He had a long career on the New York stage before he made his movie debut in 1954 in “Playgirl”. He guest starred on many popular television programmes such as “The Naked City” and “Route 66”. He distinguished himself in such films as “Midnight Cowboy”, “The Borgia Stick”, “Where’s Poppa” and the title role in Hugh Leonard’s “Da”. He died in 2006 at the age of 90.

“Independent” obituary:

Barnard Hughes was an accomplished character actor whose major success came after middle age in a career that included over 400 stage appearances and dozens of television roles. A Tony award-winner for his funny and touching performance in Hugh Leonard’s Irish comedy Da (1978), and an Emmy-winner for his portrayal, the year before, of a senile judge in the series Lou Grant, he started his film career in the Sixties, gaining notable roles in such movies as Midnight Cowboy, The Hospital, The Lost Boys and Sister Act 2. In recent years, he was often cast as crotchety old men or tough, authoritarian figures.

Born Barnard Aloysius Kiernan Hughes in 1915 in Bedford Hills, New York, he was educated at La Salle Academy and Manhattan College, and worked as a dockworker and salesman at Macy’s before a friend’s dare prompted him to audition for the Shakespeare Fellowship Committee in New York. He made his first stage appearance with the group in 1934, playing the Haberdasher in The Taming of the Shrew. He made his Broadway début two years later in Please, Mrs Garibaldi, the only play by the critic and novelist Mary McCarthy. Unanimously slated by critics, it lasted for only four performances and is remembered now only as “the play in which Barnard Hughes made his first appearance on Broadway”. During the Second World War he served with the US Army, after which he performed in a show that toured veterans’ hospitals, in the course of which he met the actress Helen Stenborg, who became his wife in 1950.

He returned to Broadway in 1949 in another short-lived piece, Mervyn Nelson’s The Ivy Green, recounting the life and loves (mainly the latter) of Charles Dickens. It lasted only seven performances, but later Hughes was to be in some major Broadway hits, including A Majority of One (1959) and Advise and Consent (1960). In John Gielgud’s 1964 Hamlet, starring Richard Burton, he played Marcellus – a film preserved the production in a process called “Electronovision”, which involved 15 cameras recording one live performance. In 1967 he appeared in his only musical – though it was a non-singing role as a senator investigating shady Wall Street dealings in How Now, Dow Jones (the music by Elmer Bernstein). In 1972 he was Polonius to Stacy Keach’s Hamlet, and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, winning a Tony nomination in the Supporting category – he later cited these as his favourite roles, along with Serebryakov in Uncle Vanya, a part he played off-Broadway, directed by Mike Nichols, in 1973.

He made, in 1946, the first of many television appearances, playing Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol, but he did not make a feature film until he played a surgeon in Phil Karlson’s vapid soap opera The Young Doctors (1961). His first important screen role was that of a violent client of a male prostitute (Jon Voight) in Midnight Cowboy (1969), followed by a war-mad Colonel in Where’s Poppa? (1970), and Diana Rigg’s religiously fanatic, homicidal maniac father in The Hospital (1971), Paddy Chayefsky’s bitterly sardonic look at the medical profession, directed by Arthur Hiller. He had two memorable roles in films aimed at the teenage audience – as the high priest in Tron (1982), in which a computer expert is sucked into a complex video game and must fight his way out, and as an apparently vacuous grandfather who at the last minute rescues a bunch of youths from vampires in The Lost Boys (1987). Later films included Sister Act 2 (1993) and Cradle Will Rock (1999). Hughes’s greatest triumph was his portrayal of a dead father who materialises to his son as a garrulous living presence in Hugh Leonard’s Da (“Da” as in “Dad”). Hughes won the 1978 Tony Award as best actor for his affecting performance, described by John Simon in New York magazine as

one of the greatest performances of this or any year . . . Put this right alongside the achievements of the Gielguds, Oliviers and Richardsons. Ten years later he starred in Matt Clark’s screen version with Martin Sheen playing his son. Though the film was criticised for some heavy-handed “opening-up”, the New York Times critic Vincent Canby conceded, They haven’t ruined it. Most importantly, they have Mr Hughes at the top of his form, being boastful, wheedling, majestic (when he has absolutely no right to be), senile and, without warning, self-aware (though not for long). Hughes’s other theatrical triumphs included the unsophisticated schoolmaster in Brian Friel’s Translations (1981), and in 1989 he appeared at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, playing the role of Grandpa in You Can’t Take It With You. Hughes and his wife often acted together throughout their careers, and they did so when Hughes made his last Broadway appearance, in a 1999 production of Noël Coward’s Waiting in the Wings.

Barnard Hughes’s daughter, Laura, is an actress and his son, Doug, is a stage director who won last year’s Tony for John Patrick Shanley’s play Doubt

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

Anson Williams was born in 1949 in Los Angeles. He is best known for his role as Potsie in the long running television series “Happy Days”. His films include “I Married A Centrefold” and “Take 2”. He is also an accomplished television director.

Anne Revere was born in 1903 in New York City. She made her Broadway bow in 1931 in “The Great Barrington”. In 1934 she made her movie debut in “Double Door”. She won an Oscar for her performance as Elizabeth Taylor’s mother in “National Velvet” in 1945. She also played Jennifer Jones’s mother in “Song of Bernadette”. Her other films include “Gentleman’s Agreement”, “Body and Soul”, “A Place in the Sun” and “The Keys of the Kingdom”. Anne Revere died in 1990 at the age of 87.

Her IMDB entry:

Veteran character actress Anne Revere became another in the long line of talented artists whose careers would crash under the weight of the “Red Scare” hysteria that tore through Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s. Born in Manhattan and a direct descendant of Revolutionary War figure Paul Revere, Anne graduated from Wellesley College, then trained for the stage at the American Laboratory Theatre.

She made her Broadway bow in 1931 with “The Great Barrington” and her film debut in a version of another Broadway play, Double Door (1934). Returning to Broadway after receiving no other film offers, she would not make another movie until 1940…then she stayed. She went on to epitomize the warm, wise and invariably stoic mother to a number of great “golden age” stars, her understated power and intensity capturing the hearts of critics and war-torn audiences alike. Her plain, freckled, careworn looks appeared equally at home on the frontier or in a tenement setting. Anne was nominated three times for an Oscar for her strong, matriarchal figures — as Jennifer Jones‘ mother inThe Song of Bernadette (1943), Elizabeth Taylor‘s in National Velvet (1944) and Gregory Peck‘s in Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), winning the Oscar on her second try forNational Velvet (1944).

A versatile talent, she extended her range to include a number of brittle, neurotic and even crazy ladies. This all ended abruptly in 1951 when her name appeared as one of 300 on the infamous “Hollywood blacklist”. She had just completed a major role asMontgomery Clift‘s Salvation Army mom in A Place in the Sun (1951). She stood on her Fifth Amendment rights before the Communist-obsessed House Un-American Activities Committee and, as a result, her part in that film was reduced to a glorified cameo. She did not appear in another film for nearly 20 years (a starring role in a new TV series was also taken from her).

In the interim, she and husband Samuel Rosen, a stage actor, writer and director, ran an acting school in Los Angeles before relocating to New York, where she managed to find employment in stock productions and under the Broadway lights. She received the Tony Award during the 1960-1961 season for her fine portrayal of a spinster sister in Lillian Hellman‘s “Toys in the Attic,” a part that went to British actress Wendy Hiller when it transferred to film. TV jobs began coming her way again in the mid-1960s, and by 1970 she was working sporadically on such daytime soaps as Search for Tomorrow (1951) andRyan’s Hope (1975). She appeared briefly in Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon(1970) starring Liza Minnelli, and then earned a showier part in Birch Interval (1976).

Anne passed away after contracting pneumonia at age 87 and was survived by a sister. She had no children. Although a victim of “Cold War” paranoia, she always persevered, showing the same kind of grit and courage that embodied her gallery of characters on film.

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

Her IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

One Crowded Night, poster, US poster art, top left: Gale Storm; bottom left: Gaylord Pendleton; second left: Billie Seward; second right: Paul Guilfoyle, top right: Anne Revere, 1940. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Aline MacMahon was born in 1899 in Pennsylvania. She had a long career on stage and movies from her film debut in “Five Star Final” in 1931. Her films include “Gold Diggers of 1933″, ” The Life of Jimmy Dolan”, “Dragon Seed”, “The Search”, “The Flame and the Arrow”, “The Man from Laramie” and “Diamond Head”. In 1962 she travelled to England to make “I Could Go On Singing” with Judy Garland and Dirk Bogarde.

Bruce Dern was born in Illinois in 1936. His uncle was the famous poet Archibald MacLeish. He made his film debut in 1960 in “Wild River” which starred Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick. He was in the cast of the television series “Stoney Burke” which starred Jack Lord. He was featured in 1964 in “Hush, hush Sweet Charlotte”, “The Wild Angels” and “Hang E’m High”. In 1969 he won critical acclaim for his performance in “They Shoot Horses Don’t They” and then onto starring roles in major films. These movies included “The King of Marvin Gardens”, “The Great Gatsby””Black Sunday” and “Coming Home”. He gave a terrific performance in “Coming Home” with Jane Fonda and Jon Voight in 1978. Recent films include “Choose” and “The Lightkeepers”. Nominated for an Oscar in 2013 for “Nebraska”.

TCM Overview:

An intense character actor who was frequently typecast as a psycho or villain, Bruce Dern started on television with credits on multiple Westerns. He scored film success with roles in Hitchcock’s “Marnie” (1964), Bette Davis’ “Hush Hush, Sweet Charlotte” (1964), and a string of projects with Roger Corman, including “The Wild Angels” (1966). A genre star, Dern was most recognizable for his committed turns in lower quality but vivid productions including the mad scientist film “The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant” (1971), the sci-fi proto-environmental picture “Silent Running” (1972), and the deranged mastermind behind a blimp bombing of the Super Bowl in “Black Sunday” (1977). Other notable film work included “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969), “Support Your Local Sheriff!” (1969), and his infamous turn as a cattle rustler who kills John Wayne in “The Cowboys” (1972). He garnered award recognition as the spoiled Tom Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby” (1974) and as a disillusioned Vietnam vet in “Coming Home” (1978). The ex-husband of fellow actor Diane Ladd and the father of actress Laura Dern, he continued to book roles into later age, including a chilling turn as the domineering father of polygamist Bill (Bill Paxton) on “Big Love” (HBO, 2006-2011). Although he never fully broke out of his typecasting as a genre heavy, Bruce Dern proved he possessed impressive enough acting chops to build a long-lasting career.

Born June 4, 1936 in Chicago, IL, Bruce MacLeish Dern came from a powerful patrician family. He received his start in the theater, where he caught the eye of director Elia Kazan in a 1959 production and was subsequently invited to train at the Actors Studio. After falling in love with Diane Ladd, one of his theatrical co-stars, the two married in 1960, with Ladd giving birth to a daughter, Laura Dern, in 1967. The couple divorced two years later. His first film appearance was an uncredited bit part in Kazan’s “Wild River” (1960), and for the remainder of the decade, Dern moved easily between TV and features. He made guest appearances on “The Fugitive” (ABC, 1963-67) and many Westerns, including episodes of “Wagon Train” (NBC, 1957-1962; ABC, 1962-65), “The Virginian” (NBC, 1962-1971) and a regular role on “Stoney Burke” (ABC, 1962-63), but made his biggest impression as a psycho on “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” (CBS, 1955-1960, 1962-64; NBC, 1960-62, 1964-65), an image he would find difficult to shake professionally.

On the big screen, he played a sailor in Hitchcock’s “Marnie” (1964) and the doomed, married lover of Bette Davis in the Southern gothic horror film “Hush Hush, Sweet Charlotte” (1964). His success in genre projects, especially his longtime association with B-movie king Roger Corman, ensured steady paychecks with roles in the biker drama “The Wild Angels” (1966), the gangster biopic “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” (1967), and the LSD-fueled thriller “The Trip” (1967), but these parts damaged his reputation as a “serious” actor. On TV, he continued to play heavies, especially in law enforcement and Western roles, making multiple appearances on “The F.B.I.” (ABC, 1965-1974), “The Big Valley” (ABC, 1965-69), “Gunsmoke” (CBS, 1955-1975) and “Bonanza” (NBC, 1959-1973).

Dern revealed more versatility with a role as a desperate dance marathon contestant in the taut, Depression-set drama “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969) alongside Jane Fonda, as well as his hotheaded gunslinger in the Western spoof “Support Your Local Sheriff!” (1969). But genre work was never that far away, with roles in the Cline Eastwood Western “Hang ‘Em High” (1968), the Ma Barker shoot-’em-up “Bloody Mama” (1970), and the mad scientist flick “The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant” (1971). He earned a National Society of Film Critics Best Supporting Actor award for his role as a zealous basketball coach in the polarizing Jack Nicholson-helmed drama “Drive, He Said” (1971) and made an indelible mark for many fans as a rebellious botanist in the sci-fi “Silent Running” (1972). Oddly enough, he received real-life death threats for doing the unthinkable: killing John Wayne onscreen in “The Cowboys” (1972).

Achieving a hard-earned reputation as one of the era’s most talented character actors among his peers if not always with critics, Dern reteamed with Jack Nicholson to play a con man in “The King of Marvin Gardens” (1972) and received a Golden Globe nomination as the spoiled Tom Buchanan in the high-profile flop “The Great Gatsby” (1974). The actor reteamed with Hitchcock for the director’s final film, “Family Plot” (1976) and played a deranged blimp pilot intent on suicide bombing the Super Bowl in “Black Sunday” (1977). Critics and fans who thought they knew the extent of Dern’s range, however, were bowled over by his wrenching turn as a disillusioned Marine struggling with PTSD and the unfaithfulness of his wife (Jane Fonda) with a paraplegic Vietnam vet-turned-antiwar protestor (Jon Voight) in the Oscar-winning drama “Coming Home” (1978). Dern earned nominations for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and Golden Globe for his work. His subsequent bid for leading man stardom, “Middle Age Crazy” (1980), flopped, and he retreated to more familiar ground, playing a psycho. His turn as a crazed tattoo artist obsessed with a model (Maud Adams) in the sexually-charged disaster “Tattoo” (1981) was universally reviled, earning him a Razzie nomination, and he further damaged his reputation by claiming that he and Adams had actually had sex on camera during the film. Dern next played a mayor desperately trying to win re-election in “That Championship Season” (1982), but despite its impressive pedigree, the film had little impact. His career slowed as the 1980s wore on, although he appeared in a small role in the dark Tom Hanks comedy “The ‘Burbs” (1989) and briefly sparked some Oscar buzz as a con man in the desert noir flick “After Dark, My Sweet” (1990).

Balancing out small roles in made-for-TV projects, Dern continued to book film work at a slower pace, appearing in the submarine comedy “Down Periscope” (1996), the Western “Last Man Standing” (1996), the supernatural horror film “The Haunting” (1999), the Cormac McCarthy adaptation “All the Pretty Horses” (2000) and the evil stepparents thriller “The Glass House” (2001). He played one of the only supportive male figures in the life of serial killer Aileen Wournos (Charlize Theron) in Patty Jenkins’ Oscar-winning biopic “Monster” (2003) and essayed likable turns opposite Billy Bob Thornton in “The Astronaut Farmer” (2006) and Kristen Stewart in “The Cake Eaters” (2007). On television, he recurred as the domineering and abusive father of polygamist Bill (Bill Paxton) on “Big Love” (HBO, 2006-2011), and was honored in November 2010 with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the same day that his daughter Laura Dern and ex-wife Diane Ladd received their stars. More significantly, Dern earned an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series for his portrayal of Frank Harlow on “Big Love.” Back in features, Dern had roles in the little-seen horror thriller “Twixt” (2011), starring Val Kilmer, and the critically-savaged crime thriller “Inside Out” (2011), with pro wrestler Paul “Triple H” Levesque. From there, he had a supporting turn in Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” (2012), which starred Jamie Foxx as an escaped slave who hunts down two ruthless killers with a white bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz). In 2013, Dern received rave reviews for his role as the surly Woody Grant in director Alexander Payne’s thoughtful road drama, “Nebraska.” Dern’s performance in the film earned him the Best Actor Award at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, thus making the 77-year-old actor an early favorite to receive an Academy Award nomination.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Vic Damone

Vic Damone. TCM Overview

Betsy Palmer

New York Times obituary in June 2015:

Betsy Palmer, 88, Dies; From TV Panelist to ‘Friday the 13th’ Villainess

Barbara Baxley

New York Times obituary in 1990:

Arthur Hill

Barnard Hughes

Anson Williams

Anne Revere

Aline MacMahon

Bruce Dern

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