A tall, fresh-faced leading man, Don Murray first made his mark on the Broadway stage in “The Rose Tattoo” (1951-52), co-starring with Eli Wallach and Maureen Stapleton. The son of a former Ziegfeld girl and a motion picture dance director, Murray was a conscientious objector during the Korean War and worked in Europe assisting refugees and orphans in lieu of military service. When he returned to the USA, he was cast alongside stage legend Mary Martin in Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth” (1955). Based on his performance, director Joshua Logan hired the actor for his first film.r2
“Bus Stop” (1956) provided Murray with a strong role as a naive, yet forceful, cowboy romancing a singer (Marilyn Monroe). For his efforts, the actor earned an Oscar nod as Best Supporting Actor. His two subsequent features, “The Bachelor Party” and “A Hatful of Rain” (1957) both provided meaty roles, but later efforts failed to capitalize on his early promise. Murray moved into producing and screenwriting with “The Hoodlum Priest” (1961), a true story about a clergyman who worked with criminals, in which he also starred. His 1970 directing debut, “The Cross and the Switchblade”, was an earnest but uneven feature. A second feature, “Damien” (1977), a biopic of the priest who worked with lepers in Hawaii, has never been released theatrically. The 80s saw Murray in mostly paternal roles (e.g., “Endless Love” 1981; “Peggy Sue Got Married” 1986).
Murray has been a constant fixture on TV since the late 50s. He served as a celebrity panelist on “Made in America” (CBS, 1964) and starred in the Western series “The Outcasts” (ABC, 1968-69).
TV viewers may remember him from the first two seasons of the CBS primetime soap “Knots Landing” (1979-81) as Michelle Lee’s husband. Two later series, “Brand New Life” (NBC, 1989-90) and “Sons and Daughters” (CBS, 1991) were both short-lived. In his TV-movies, Murray has generally been cast in stalwart roles, generally as politicians or businessmen.
From 1956 to 1961, Murray was married to his “Bus Stop” co-star Hope Lange.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Guardian obituary in Feb 2024
The actor Don Murray, who has died aged 94, made his big screen debut in 1956 opposite Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop. His performance as the gangling, wide-eyed cowboy who falls for a saloon bar singer earned him an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor and a Bafta nomination as most promising newcomer. Monroe was superb as Chérie and Murray as Beauregard, besotted and eager to marry, made the perfect foil.
His career continued strongly in 1957 with The Bachelor Party, in which he played a married man unhappy about the dubious happenings at a stag party, and A Hatful of Rain, as a Korean war veteran addicted to heroin. The director, Fred Zinnemann, described it as “the grimmest film I ever made”. Murray’s performance displayed the commitment that was to characterise much of his work. Few actors have allowed their moral beliefs and sociopolitical concerns to affect their careers so markedly
To-day Julie London is primarily known as a singer. Her recording of “Cry Me A River” is a definite classic. She did also make some fine films. She was born in 1926 in Santa Rosa, California. One of her first major film parts was in “The Red House” in 1947. Her other films of interest were mainly Western e.g. “Man of the West” with Gary Cooper and “Saddle the Wind” with Robert Taylor and John Cassavettes, both films were released in 1958. Julie London also starred in the television series “Emergency” from 1972 until 1979 with her husband Bobby Troup. Julie London died in 2000 at the age of 74.
Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary of Julie London:
One of the most evocative sounds of the mid- to late-1950s, issuing from juke boxes, radios and film soundtracks, was the sexy, whispering voice of Julie London, who has died aged 74. Her own view was that she had “only a thimbleful of a voice, and I have to use it close to the microphone. But it is a kind of oversmoked voice, and it automatically sounds intimate.”
London’s biggest hit was her first single, Cry Me A River, which was released in 1955, included on her first album, Julie Is Her Name, and sold more than 3m copies. Her voluptuous features on the album cover were described by publicists as “generating enough voltage to light up a theatre marquee”.
Similarly, the cover of her Calendar Girl album featured 12 glamorous shots, and, for her 1961 album, Whatever Julie Wants, she was guarded by armed security men as she posed beside $750,000 worth of furs, jewels and piles of money. In her movies, she looked her best in period costume, especially in westerns, where she decorated many a saloon bar.
London was born Julie Peck in California. Her parents, Jack and Josephine, were a vaudeville song-and-dance team, on whose radio show their daughter sang from an early age. In 1941, the family moved to Los Angeles, and, while working as a lift operator in a department store, Julie was discovered by talent agent Sue Carol, Alan Ladd’s wife, and given a screen test.
Her first role, at 18, was as a jungle girl – with flowers in her blonde hair – in the risible Nabonga (1944), whose best friend was the eponymous gorilla, until handsome Buster Crabbe showed up. London acquitted herself well, but the cheapie picture did not lead to big film roles. Meanwhile, however, she was making a reputation as a singer with the Matty Malnech Orchestra.
In 1947, she married the actor Jack Webb, later famous on the radio and television police series, Dragnet, and worked only a little while bringing up their two daughters. She had a good part as Susan Hayward’s amorous younger sister in the southern saga, Tap Roots (1948), and played a navy wife in Task Force (1949), starring Gary Cooper.
After she divorced Webb in 1953, London entered a brief period during which, in her own words, she lacked self-confidence. This changed when she met jazz musician and songwriter Bobby Troup, who guided her singing career and helped her become a top female vocalist from 1955 to 1957. The couple married in 1959, and had a daughter and twin sons.
Troup once remarked: “She is not a Julie London fan. She honestly doesn’t realise how good she is. She’s never really been a performer, she doesn’t have that need to go out and please an audience and receive accolades. She’s always been withdrawn, very introverted. She hated those big shows.”
However, London continued to sing in nightclubs, cut discs, and record title songs from her films, such as Saddle The Wind (1958) and Voice In The Mirror (1958), which she also composed. In the latter, she showed growing maturity as an actress, playing the wife of an alcoholic.
As a dancehall singer, humiliated and raped by Lee J Cobb, then avenged by Gary Cooper, in Anthony Mann’s allegorical Man Of The West (1959), she struck a tragic note. In The Wonderful Country (1959), she was won by Robert Mitchum after her husband had conveniently been killed by Apaches, and, in Night Of The Quarter Moon (1959), she shocked San Francisco society when, as John Drew Barrymore’s bride, she admitted to having a black grandparent.
In 1972, having been out of the public eye for some time, London began her role as Nurse Dixie McCall in the television hospital series, Emergency. The show, which was produced and often directed by her first husband Webb, also starred her second husband, Troup. For five years, London was a star once more, reminding fans of the days when, to quote the writer Joseph Lanza, she “was a blend of Dionysian flesh and Detroit steel, streamlined car and cocktail shaker combined”.
• Julie London, actress-singer, born September 26 1926; died October 18 2000
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Vince Edwards was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York. In 1950 he won a contract with Paramount Studios. His first film was “Mr Universe”. His major fame came from the title role in the very popular television series “Ben Casey” which ran from 1961 until 1966. Vince Edward came to the UK in 1967 to make “Hammerhead”. His last film was “The Fear” in 1995. Vince Edwards died in 1996 at the age of 67.
TCM Overview:Stiffly handsome leading man of some 50s features, but mostly remembered as Dr. Ben Casey, neurosurgeon, on “Ben Casey,” an ABC series which aired from 1961-66, Vince Edwards spent his post-Casey career fighting off the image of the brooding, caring doctor who broke a minor TV taboo when he unbuttoned his frock and revealed a forest of chest hair. Edwards had originally dreamed of swimming in the Olympics, but when an appendectomy put a damper on those dreams he turned to acting. He made his Broadway debut in 1947 in “High Button Shoes.” By 1951, he was under contract to Paramount in Hollywood and made his debut in a low-budget programmer, “Mr. Universe,” playing a wrestler being groomed as the “new find.” Hollywood casting practices put him in a version of the Native American legend “Hiawatha” (1952). But his subsequent film roles were of the supporting variety in the 50s, including a small one in “The Three Faces of Eve” (1957). Having begun appearing on TV dramas in the mid-50s, including “Ford Theatre” (1955), Edwards was ripe for a series when “Ben Casey” came his way in 1961. He had been picked by the show’s executive producer and owner, Bing Crosby. The same year ABC premiered “Casey,” NBC premiered the TV version of “Dr. Kildare” and viewers debated their preference for the five years both were on the air. “Ben Casey” was often grittier, dealing with the poignancy of life and death. Edwards also became one of the first TV stars to step behind the cameras, directing about 20 of the 154 “Ben Casey” episodes produced. And he used the show to launch a singing career, recording six albums, including “Vince Edwards Sings,” and playing Las Vegas. But the demise of the series temporarily stymied his career, as if often the case as the audience searches for a new face. In 1964, Edwards appeared in the first 20 minutes of Carl Foreman’s oddly-structured feature “The Victors,” and in 1968, he was helping William Holden create a commando force in “The Devil’s Brigade,” but the period in between roles increased. Edwards turned back to TV in 1970 playing a hip psychiatrist working with teens in the one-season series “Matt Lincoln.” He also made his TV movie debut in “Sole Survivor” for ABC. In 1973, he directed the CBS TV movie “Maneater” and he had strong roles in two TV movies of the decade, “The Rhinemann Exchange,” in which he was a general gathering information from a spying Stephen Collins (NBC, 1977), and “Evening in Byzantium” (1978), one of the first syndicated TV movies. But Edwards found himself less in demand in the 80s. An old friend, manager-producer Jay Bernstein, hired Edwards to co-star in the 1986 TV movie “The Return of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer” and Edwards went on to direct episodes of the “Mike Hammer” series for CBS as well as episodes of “Fantasy Island,” “Police Story,” and “In The Heat of the Night.” In 1988, he made the syndicated TV movie “The Return of Ben Casey,” playing the stalwart doctor as having been in Vietnam, married and divorced. He died of pancreatic cancer in Los Angeles on March 13,
The above TCM overview can be accessed online here.
Vera MilesThe Wrong Man, poster, Henry Fonda, Vera Miles, 1956. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Vera Miles was cast by Alfred Hitchcock in 1957 in “Vertigo” but Miles had to bow out due to pregnancy. She did though make two films for Hitchcock, “The Wrong Man” and “Psycho”. She made two classic Westerns for John Ford, “The Searchers” in 1956 and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” in 1962. Vera Miles was born in 1930. She made her film debut in 1950 in “When Willie Comes Marching Home”. Her major credits include “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms”, “Tarzan’s Hidden Jungle”, “Autumn Leaves” and “23 Paces to Baker Street”. One of her last acting appearances was in a 1991 episode of “Murder She Wrote”.
TCM Overview:
A warm, reliable and likable lead of features and TV beginning in the 1950s, Vera Miles got a prominent start but rarely seemed to get the roles her talent merited. An attractive, composed woman who worked as a model after placing third in the 1948 Miss America contest, she broke into films in 1951. Although her first leads were in modest films, her earnest, outdoorsy heroines suited her well for “The Rose Bowl Story” (1952) and Jacques Tourneur’s stylish “Wichita” (1955). She also kept busy in TV anthologies, where she first worked with the directors who helmed her most important films. John Ford directed Miles in “Rookie of the Year” (1955), an episode of “Screen Directors Playhouse” which led him to cast her as an outspoken frontierswoman in his classic “The Searchers” (1956). Hitchcock, meanwhile, liked her work in “Revenge” (1955) on his “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” so much that he put her under personal contract.
Hitchcock obviously saw in Miles a gift for quietly expressing maturity coping with great tension, beautifully registered in his “The Wrong Man” (1957). As a wife who slowly cracks under the strain as her innocent husband (Henry Fonda) is imprisoned for armed robbery, Miles gave the film’s finest performance, and her stardom seemed set. She occasionally played second lead to a bigger star (Joan Crawford in “Autumn Leaves” 1956, Susan Hayward in “Back Street” 1961), but she more than held her own opposite imposing male stars Van Johnson (“23 Paces to Baker Street” 1956) and James Stewart (“The FBI Story” 1959).
Attempting to mold Miles to his classic icy blonde prototype, Hitchcock then cast her in “Vertigo” (1958), but she became pregnant and lost the choice role to Kim Novak. She did later star as the woman who initiates the search for her missing sister (Janet Leigh) in Hitchcock’s landmark “Psycho” (1960). It gradually became clear, though, that Miles, whose persona seemed practical rather than glamorous, energetic rather than sparkling, was a fine, low-key actor perhaps more than she was a flashy movie star ready to be molded by a Svengali.
Though she acted less often and in smaller films, Miles continued playing leads into the 80s, a standout being Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962). Beginning with “A Tiger Walks” and “Those Calloways” (both 1964), Miles made six films for Disney Studios over the next eight years, typically as helpful wives (“Follow Me, Boys!” 1966) or self-sufficient widows (“The Castaway Cowboy” 1974). Leads (“Run for the Roses” 1978) then alternated with key supporting roles, the best being her reprisal of her Lila, now considerably embittered, for the remarkably good sequel, “Psycho II” (1983). TV on the whole did better by Miles, from her steely would-be murderess in the experimental “The Forms of Things Unknown” (1964), a famous installment of “The Outer Limits”; to her gritty roles in the TV-movies “And I Alone Survived” (1978) and “Helen Keller–The Miracle Continues” (1984). Divorced from Tarzan actor Gordon Scott and actor/director Keith Larsen.
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
William Eythe had a rather short career as a leading man in Hollywood films of the 1940’s. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1918. His first film was “The Ox-Bow Incident” in 1943 with Henry Fonda and Dana Andrews. He then starred opposite Jennifer Jones in the hughly popular “Song of Bernadette”. His other films of note include the excellent film noir “The House on 92nd Street” and “Meet Me at Dawn”. In 1947 he returned to the stage and died in 1957 at the age of 38.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
He had the requisite charm and dark, thick-browed good-looks of a Tyrone Power that often spelled “film stardom” but it was not to be in the case of actor William Eythe. Spotted for Hollywood while performing on Broadway, he made nary a dent when he finally transferred his skills to film and is little remembered today. Outgoing in real life, he never found his full range in film and a certain staidness behind the charm and good looks prohibited him from standing out among the other high-ranking leading men. Like Power, his untimely death robbed filmgoers of seeing what kind of a character actor he might have made.
Born William John Joseph Eythe on April 7, 1918, in a small dairy town near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he was the son of a contractor. Developing an early interest in theatrics after appearing in an elementary school play, he put on his own shows as an amateur producer/director. Following high school he applied to the School of Drama at Carnegie Tech where he initially focused on set design and costuming due to a stammering problem (it was corrected while there). He also produced some of the school’s musicals in which he also wrote the songs. Graduating from college in 1941, he began leaning towards a professional music theater and started involving himself in musicals and revues in the Pittsburgh era. He appeared in various stock shows in other states as well, including the “borscht circuit”, while radio work in the form of announcing came his way. Following a failed attempt at forming his own stock company, he was discovered by a 20th Century-Fox talent scout while performing impressively on Broadway in “The Moon Is Down” and moved west when the show closed in the summer of ’42.
Benefiting from the fact that many major Hollywood male stars were actively serving in WWII, Eythe. who had “4-F status, was handed an enviable film debut as the wavering son of a lynch mob member in the superb The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). More quality films ensued with The Song of Bernadette (1943) and Wilson (1944) although he didn’t have much of a chance to shine. He received his best Hollywood top-lining assignments as the rural WWII soldier who has telepathic capabilities in The Eve of St. Mark (1944) and as a German-American double agent in the taut espionage drama The House on 92nd Street(1945). When Fox star Tyrone Power turned down the lead role opposite Tallulah Bankhead in the plush costumer A Royal Scandal (1945), Eythe inherited the part. Naturally Tallulah’s histrionics dominated the proceedings and Eythe, though sincere and quite photogenic, was completely overlooked. This happened in other movies as well, and while he was a talented singer/dancer, the only musical film he ever appeared in required minor singing in Centennial Summer (1946). Adding insult to injury, he was dubbed.
Eythe never conformed easily to the strictest of rules that studio head Darryl F. Zanuckimposed and it proved a detriment to his career in the long run. He was either suspended or (in one case) farmed out to England to do a “B” film as punishment for his rebellious nature. A close “friendship” with fellow actor Lon McCallister had to be carefully dampened, and, out of concern, an impulsive marriage in 1947 to socialite and Fox starlet Buff Cobb was the result. It may have ended rumors for a spell but, not unsurprisingly, the couple divorced a little over a year later. Ms. Cobb later married veteran TV newsman Mike Wallace.
In the post-war years, Fox began to lose interest and Eythe was seen with less frequency. He flatlined film-wise in his last two “C” movies that were made by other studios: Special Agent (1949) and Customs Agent (1950). To compensate for the waning of interest, he formed his own production company and appeared on stage in such fare as “The Glass Menagerie” in the showy role of son Tom. He also enjoyed seeing one of his early revues, “Lend an Ear”, revamped by Charles Gaynor and given a Broadway run in 1948. Eythe was one of the show’s producers and singing stars. The musical is best remembered for putting co-star Carol Channing on the map. In addition, Eythe replaced baritone Alfred Drake in “The Liar” a couple of years later. In 1956 he and McAllister, along with Huntington Hartford, produced a musical revue with the hopes of it reaching Broadway but it closed in Chicago. Uninspired TV work did little to alter his decline.
Depression eventually set in and he turned heavily to drink with an unfortunate series of tabloid-making arrests resulting. His health in rapid deterioration, he was rushed to a Los Angeles hospital one day for treatment of acute hepatitis and died ten days later, at age 38, on January 26, 1957. For someone so promising, his untimely death merely left another tainted impression of the downside to Hollywood stardom.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Claire Trevor was born in 1910 in Brooklyn, New York. Her mother was from the North of Ireland. By 1932 she was on Broadway and the following year made her movie debut in “Jimmy and Sally”. Her major breakthrough role was in 1939 in John Ford’s “Stagecoach” with John Wayne. In the 1940’s she seemed to specialize as hard-boiled dames in film noir such as “Murder My Sweet” in 1944 and “Johnny Angel”. In 1948 she won an Academy Award for her performance in “Key Largo”. In the 1950’s she developed into an excellent character actress and was seen to great effect in “The High and the Mighty” with Wayne again in 1954. Her final film performance was with Jeff Bridges and Sally Field in 1982 in “Kiss Me Goodbye”. Ms Trevor died in 2000 at the age of 90.
Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:
Claire Trevor, who has died aged 91, will be remembered mainly for playing blondes with tough exteriors that hid her vulnerability. In her best films, she was not only a woman who had kicked around the world, but who had been kicked around by the world.
In John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), which raised the western genre to artistic status, she was “saloon girl” Dallas, who has been forced out of town by puritanical women. When the Ringo Kid (John Wayne) proposes to her, she says, “But, you don’t know me, you don’t know who I am.” “I know all I want to know,” he says. Seeing a glimmer of hope, she asks the drunken doctor (Thomas Mitchell), “Is that wrong for a girl like me? If a man and woman love each other? It’s all right, ain’t it Doc?” Typical as the role was, Stagecoach was one of the few films that sanctioned her happiness.
She was born Claire Wemlinger in in New York of a French father and Northern Irish mother. When her father lost his clothing business during the Great Depression, she went out to work to help the family. Later she managed to attend Columbia University and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, before starting her acting career in stock in the late 1920s. By 1932, she had starred on Broadway opposite Edward Arnold in The Party’s Over, which brought her to the attention of 20th Century Fox, who gave her a five-year contract in 1933.
At Fox, she played Shirley Temple’s mother in Baby Takes A Bow (1934), supported Spencer Tracy in Dante’s Inferno (1935), and made six films directed by veteran craftsman Allan Dwan, but they were mostly inconsequential programmers. She left Fox hoping for better roles and immediately landed one from Samuel Goldwyn in William Wyler’s Dead End (1937) as hoodlum Humphrey Bogart’s ex-girlfriend, reduced to streetwalking and ravaged by illness. Although she is barely on screen for five minutes, in a memorable seriers of close-ups, she made enough impact to be nominated for a supporting actress Oscar. “I’m tired. I’m sick,” she tells Bogart. “Can you see it? Look at me good. You’ve been looking at me like I used to be.”
Dead End set her off on a series of roles as wanton women: gangsters’ molls in thrillers and saloon bar gals in westerns. In The Amazing Dr Clitterhouse (1938), she played Bogart’s moll who betrays him, and in I Stole a Million (1939), she helps her mobster husband George Raft. However, Trevor had to wait for the rise of 1940s film noir to become one of the leading women of the genre. With her long, blonde hair whisked up above the broad-shouldered gowns and a seen-it-all look in her eyes, she was able to hit her stride.
In Street of Chance (1942), she misleads amnesiac Burgess Meredith by telling him he is wanted for murder, though she is the real killer. As the sexy, two-faced Mrs Grayle in Edward Dmytryk’s Murder My Sweet (1944), she tells Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell), “You shouldn’t kiss a girl when you’re wearing a gun. It leaves a bruise.” In Born to Kill (1947), she is “a silken savage,” a mercenary divorcee with a fatal attraction for a man who has already killed two people. “You’re strength, excitement and depravity,” she is told. Anthony Mann’s Raw Deal (1948) was one of the rare noir movies in which the narration was supplied by a woman, in this case Trevor as the betrayed girlfriend of a racketeer.
In the same year, in Key Largo, for which she won an Oscar for best supporting actress, Trevor played Gaye Dawn, the fading alcoholic mistress of sadistic gangster Johnny Rocco (Edward G Robinson). “She’s a lush,” says Robinson’s fat henchman (Thomas Gomez). “After she bends the elbow a few times, she begins to see things – rats, roaches, bats, you know. A sock in the kisser is the only thing that will bring her out of it.” Pathetically singing Moanin’ Low to please Rocco, Trevor revealed the character’s touching dependence on the brute.
During the next decade, Trevor’s image continued to be “strength, excitement and depravity”, especially in two films of 1951: Best of the Badmen as Robert Preston’s angry and disillusioned wife, and Hard, Fast and Beautiful as the greedy ambitious tennis mother determined to live off her daughter’s earnings. In 1954, she gained another Oscar nomination for The High and the Mighty (1954), this time as a loose woman among imperilled airline passengers. Ironically, Charles, her only child by the second of her three marriages died in an air crash in 1978.
In Vincente Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) as Edward G Robinson’s “worn out, dry, old hag” of a wife, she rants and raves, drinks and smokes. “Don’t take an overdose,” Robinson tells her. “You know how ill it makes me.” Like most of her later roles, such as the man-hating harridan in How To Murder Your Wife (1965), it was a reference to many of the parts she had played in her black-and-white movie past.
She not only enjoyed a Hollywood career spanning five decades, but performed in hundreds of radio and television shows – including an Emmy-winning role in Dodsworth. She retired from acting in 1987 and became a patron of the arts.
• Claire Trevor (née Claire Wemlinger), film actress, born March 8 1909; died April 8 2000
Her “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Burl Ives was a wonderful folk singer. Two of his songs, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “The Old Woman Who Swallowed the Fly” have become children favourites. He was too a very effective actor who won an Academy Award for his performance in “The Big Country” in 1958. He was born in 1909 in Hunt City in Illinois. He had developed a neat reputation as a singer when he made his first film “Smoky” in 1946. His major films include “East of Eden”, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”. “Let No Man Write My Epitaph”, “The Spiral Road” and “Summer Magic”. He died in 1995 at the age of 85.
David Shipman’s obituary of Burl Ives in “The Independent”:
n 1938 20th Century-Fox had a success with the tale of two feuding families of racehorse owners, Kentucky, one of the few Technicolor films of the time to find wide popularity. Fox liked horse stories in colour and after the success of My Friend Flicka (1943) began to churn them out. One of the 1946 entries, Smoky, has a special credit, “And introducing the Singing Troubadour Burl Ives”: there he is, strumming away on his guitar, cheerfully singing his hits to chums round a Fordian campfire – “The Streets of Laredo”, “I Wish I Was An Apple Tree”, “The Foggy Foggy Dew”, and “The Blue Tail Fly” (“Jimmie Crack Corn”).
The voice was high, reedy, but warm and mellow, caressing the often nonsensical lyrics as intimately as anyone approaching the wit of Lorenz Hart or Cole Porter. Ives seldom sang songs of their quality, but like all the great singers he resembled no one but himself.
A former professional footballer and itinerant worker, Ives was fascinated by folk-songs, researching them and singing them for records, radio and night-clubs. The ballads in Smoky were not unknown in Britain but, since the film hardly started a stampede to the box-office, Ives’s recordings took a while to get off the ground here. In particular, “The Blue Tail Fly” and “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” became popular in the mid-Fifties – while Ives was simultaneously making a career as a character actor in movies.
His identification with folk singing began after he had been in show business for some time. In Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys From Syracuse (1938) he had a small part as tailor’s apprentice, and during the Second World War he sang “God Bless America” and Irving Berlin songs in the touring company of This is the Army. In 1944 he was invited to appear at the Village Vanguard, a night-club frequented by middle-class intellectuals. It had just had a great success with a satirical group, “The Revuers”, whom we know as Judy Holliday, Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Rather than trying to find similar acts, the Vanguard followed with Ives, Josh White, Richard Dyer-Bennett and other folk-singers: and it could be argued that the smart people of Manhattan were looking for the sort of Americana with which they were not familiar.
Certainly these performers all moved uptown to the Blue Angel, the watering- place for caf society in the late 1940s. In the meantime Ives was cast in a Broadway show, Sing Out, Sweet Land (1946), a celebration of old and/or patriotic songs to reflect the post-war mood – and the more folksy ones appealed to Fox, who invited Ives to reprise some of his in order to liven up its otherwise mundane horse opera.
He returned to the studio to help out another of this seemingly interminable series, Green Grass of Wyoming (1948), after which Walt Disney chose him to play kindly Uncle Hiram in So Dear to My Heart (1949), based on Sterling North’s novel Midnight and Jeremiah, about a boy who adopts a black sheep. Disney’s child star, Bobby Driscoll (later to die an anonymous drug addict in an untenanted building), was Jeremiah, while as his granny Beulah Bondi was as sympathetic as Ives – who sang a ditty based on a folk-song, “Lavender Blue”, which brought an Academy Award nomination for its two adaptors.
Ives did not restrict himself to old songs, but chose many, such as “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, which suited his avuncular down-home image. It was not entirely in keeping with the private Ives.
Sing Out, Sweet Land was the first production directed by the drama critic Walter Kerr, who in his inexperience called in Elia Kazan for assistance. Kazan, who enjoyed Ives’s larger-than-life personality, nevertheless recalled seeing him “drunk one night, macho and rampant, aroused to a point where he was looking for a fight, anywhere and with anybody. He was a formidable man, with a frightening temper; he evoked respect for his violence. Late one night, soused again, he reversed his emotion and I was afraid that he was about to throw himself out of a window.”
Ives, whose left-wing views were well-known, gave evidence to the committee at the McCarthy hearings – as did Kazan, Budd Shulberg and others, though only Kazan was to remain in contumely for a long time. He was also the most famous of those who confessed and continued to work; Ives’s budding film career was blighted till Kazan chose him to play the tough but understanding sheriff who takes James Dean under his wing in East of Eden (1955); then, remembering his ferocity and contempt for good manners, he cast him as the red-necked bullying Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
It was a bravura role with a pages-long tirade, and Williams wasn’t sure that Ives could do it, but Kazan knew that he could – “straight out: that was where he had the confidence born of his concert experience, that was the style of performing that he – and I – enjoyed.” Williams, who had based the role on his own father, told Ives that “on opening night he sat in the 14th row and saw Cornelius Williams”.
The role revitalised Ives’s career. He was offered night-club engagements in the sort of territory then unknown for folk-singers, Las Vegas – though by now he was less of a folk archivist than an entertainer courting the widest popular public. He returned to films in star roles, all based to an extent on Big Daddy, beginning with the ruthless and monomaniacal company president in a Robert Taylor vehicle, The Power and the Prize (1956). He was top-billed as the renegade leader of the Swamp Angels in Wind across the Everglades (1958), directed by Nicholas Ray and produced and written by Budd Shulberg. Admittedly his co-stars, Christopher Plummer and Gypsy Rose Lee, were not household names; and he was billed after Sophia Loren and Anthony Perkins in Delbert Mann’s version of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms. Since Loren, as the new wife, and Perkins, as the son who cuckolds him, were both miscast, Ives seems to have hoped to get through the ordeal with one hangdog expression.
Although Kazan chose not to direct the film of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – Richard Brooks did – Ives was the only possible choice for Big Daddy, but he was not nominated for an Oscar because MGM insisted that he should be shortlisted for Best Actor. More realistically, United Artists put him up for a Best Supporting Oscar in William Wyler’s The Big Country, in which he played a white-trash land baron at war with the more likeable Charles Bickford. When he won that Oscar the Hollywood Reporter somewhat cruelly referred to the film as “Big Daddy Goes West”. He was a mysterious refugee from Hitler in Our Man in Havana (1959), directed by Carol Reed from a Graham Greene screenplay (from his own novel), which with those two films is the highwater mark of Ives’s career.
Burl Ives was equally convincing whether nice or nasty, but both his rotund figure and his age – not to mention an unkempt goatee – fitted him only for character roles. Those assigned him in later movies were not distinguished, and he was better served by films and mini-series made for television. Ill-health had prevented him from working in recent years.
Although not to everybody’s taste, the pretty modern ditties he recorded should be around for a while yet. He had a hit parade entry in the early Sixties with “Itty Bitty Tear” and again with “The Ugly Bug Ball”, which he had sung in his role of the postmaster in Summer Magic (1963), based on Mother Carey’s Chickens by Kate Douglas Wiggins. The song was written by Richard and Robert Sherman, then warming up for Mary Poppins. The film brought Ives’s career full circle, for the lead was played by the only other genuine Disney child star – apart from Master Driscoll – Hayley Mills.
David Shipman
The above “Independent” obituary can be accessed online here.
Picturegoer’ once observed that Dorothy McGuire belonged to that coterie of players – it includes Margaret Sullavan, Betty Field, Martha Scott and Barbara Bel Geddes – whose charm is uncommon, elusive. It is the charm of … frank unpretty features that can for some at times take on an amazing beauty. In other words, they were not the sort of Hollywood girl you would discover at the soda fountain in a drugstore. They all came from the stage. They were all highly rated by the critics and by the top Hollywood brass, at least at first. None of them had a prolific screen career. One might speculate on the reasons – lack of drive or determination, dislike of type-casting or Hollywood or a combination of any of them. Being most of them very talented ladies, they were individual in style, but ‘Picturegoer’ was right. Sullavan played a tempestuous movie queen once and Field, memorably, a slut. One thinks of them as very gentle and genteel heroines” – David Shipman – “The Great Movie Stars- The International Years”. (1972).
“‘P
Dorothy McGuire was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1916. She had a triumph on Broadway in the title role in “Claudia” an role that she recreated on film in 1943. A gentle, sensitive actress she excelled in mother roles where her kindly nature shone. Her major film roles include “The Enchanted Cottage” with Robert Young, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” in 1945, “The Spiral Staircase”, “Gentleman’s Agreement”, “Three Coins in the Fountain”, “Friendly Persuasion with Gary Cooper and Anthony Perkins, “Old Yeller”, “A Summer Place” with Troy Donahue in 1959, “Swiss Family Robinson”, “Susan Slade” and “Flight of the Doves”. She starred on television in the series “Rich Man, Poor Man” in 1975. Dorothy McGuire died in 2001 at the age of 85.
Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Guardian”:
The image of Dorothy McGuire, who has died aged 83, remained almost the same throughout her 20 years as a movie star. Her persona – on screen and off – was that of an attractive woman of integrity, intelligence and charm, and it imbued the series of loving sweethearts, faithful wives and doting mothers whom she played so sympathetically.
The producer Darryl F Zanuck called her an “angel”, which, according to Elia Kazan, robbed her of her sexuality. She certainly had little chance to exude either sexuality or be malicious, like Bette Davis or Joan Crawford, but there was always room for an actor who was so good at being good.
McGuire’s first screen appearance was in the title role of Claudia (1943), which she had played to acclaim two years earlier on Broadway, receiving the New York critics’ circle award. She was chosen for the role – that of a child woman, too immature to be a wife until a family tragedy shocks her into adulthood – from 200 applicants by the Broadway producer John Golden because “she had a fresh, wind-blown quality and an impressive, though subdued, personality”.
Born to well-off parents in Omaha, Nebraska, at school McGuire wrote plays, directed and acted in them, and joined the Omaha Community Playhouse, where, at the age of 12, she took the lead in JM Barrie’s A Kiss For Cinderella – opposite the 25-year-old Henry Fonda. Her lawyer- father wired her on opening night: “Let your head touch the stars, but keep your feet on the ground.” This caveat characterised her way of life.
In 1937, she left college to concentrate on acting. After doing the rounds in New York, she got a job understudying Martha Scott in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, taking over the part in July 1938, proving lovely and vibrant with emotion as a young girl who dies prematurely after her marriage. She then went into a popular radio soap opera, Big Sister, and toured in plays before landing the role of Claudia, which led to David O Selznick offering her a seven-year film contract. During the Broadway run of Claudia, McGuire married the photographer John Swope.
Wanting to get away from what she called, the “ingenue flutter” of Claudia, she played the poverty-stricken wife of a drunken waiter in A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (1944), Kazan’s first picture. This was followed by The Enchanted Cottage (1945), in which she was touching as a lonely, plain woman married to an embittered, disfigured first world war veteran (Robert Young).
Better still was Robert Siodmak’s chiller, The Spiral Staircase (1945), in which McGuire played a mute servant girl living in fear of being murdered by a maniac. She showed how the layers of trust peeled away from an intrinsically sunny- dispositioned young woman.
In Edward Dmytryk’s post-war readjustment drama, Till The End Of Time (1946), McGuire was perfect as a confused and lonely war widow in love with ex-Marine Guy Madison. Kazan’s Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) saw her nominated for an Oscar for her role as a socialite divorcee who believes she is free from anti-semitism until her journalist fiance (Gregory Peck) has to pose as a Jew for a series of articles.
Around the same time, with Peck, Jennifer Jones, Mel Ferrer and Joseph Cotten, McGuire formed the La Jolla Playhouse Group, for which she appeared in The Importance Of Being Earnest, I Am A Camera and The Winslow Boy. She returned to Broadway in 1951 as the Actor opposite Richard Burton’s Musician in Jean Anouilh’s Legend Of Lovers. In the 1950s, her roles on screen were mostly unchallenging, as in Three Coins In The Fountain (1954).
Her best film of the decade was William Wyler’s Friendly Persuasion (1956), in which she played a warm-hearted Quaker wife trying to prevent her husband (Gary Cooper) and son (Anthony Perkins) from fighting in the American civil war.
She had now found a niche playing ideal mothers: the Texas frontier mother in Old Yeller (1957); the mother of eight – taking care of Clifton Webb’s nine as well – in The Remarkable Mr Pennypacker (1959); the practical, shipwrecked mother in The Swiss Family Robinson (1960); the mother in a loveless marriage in The Dark At The Top Of The Stairs (1960); and the protective mothers of teen- agers Troy Donahue, in A Summer Place (1960), Connie Stevens in Susan Slade (1961) and Hayley Mills in Summer Magic (1963). This run of mothers culminated in the role of the Virgin Mary in George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).
As the film offers dwindled in the 1970s, McGuire was seen more in the theatre, notably in Tennessee Williams’s Night Of The Iguana and Terence Rattigan’s Cause Celebre in 1979, the year her husband died. After three years of not working, she returned to Broadway in the play Winesburg, Ohio, as glowingly reassuring as ever.
She is survived by her daughter and son.
•Dorothy McGuire, actor, born June 14 1918; died September 13 2001
“The Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Rosenda Monertos was born in 1935 in Veracruz, Mexico. Her first film was “A Woman’s Devotion” in 1956. She was the leading lady in the classic “The Magnificent Seven” with Yul Brynner and Horst Buchholz. Her other films include “Thiara Tahiti” in 1962 with John Mills and James Mason. Ms Monteros died in 2018.
New York Times obituary in 2018:
Rosenda Monteros, a Mexican actress remembered for her turn as one of the few women in John Sturges’s classic western “The Magnificent Seven,” died on Dec. 29 at her home in Mexico.
A spokeswoman for her family, who is also a representative for the National Theater Company of Mexico, said the cause was pelvic cancer. The spokeswoman said Ms. Monteros was 86, although according to Spanish-language news media accounts and other sources she was 83.
Ms. Monteros, a successful actress in Mexican theater, films and television for more than five decades, played a small but important part in “The Magnificent Seven,” the 1960 remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film “Seven Samurai.” In the Hollywood version, seven gunslingers are hired by local farmers to defend their Mexican village from bandits.
Ms. Monteros’s character, Petra, goes into hiding with the other women in the village when the gunmen arrive, but she is soon discovered. Bolder than many of the villagers, she pursues a romance with Mr. Buchholz’s character, the temperamental Chico.
“I wasn’t afraid of you — it’s my father,” Petra says to Chico in one scene. “He says stay away from those men, they are brutes, they are cruel.”
“He’s right, you know that?” Chico replies. “He’s right.”
Their courtship is the only romantic thread in that testosterone-fueled film, and her part is one of the biggest among its Mexican actors.
“The Magnificent Seven” was shot in Mexico, where a government censor kept a close eye on the production to make sure that Mexicans were depicted positively. Mr. Sturges told The New York Times in 1960 that the censor was “an autocrat” who operated “on the theory that anything debatable should be stricken out.”
Mr. Sturges took note of one major change to the script: Instead of setting out to hire American fighters from the start, the farmers tried to buy guns for themselves.
“The script had to be checked and revised very carefully to make sure that there were no images that denigrated the country,” she said. “Because of the importance of the coproduction, we had to get the film off the ground one way or another. It was good for the country.”
Rosa Méndez Leza was born in Veracruz, Mexico, on Aug. 31, in either 1932 or 1935. She was active in Mexican theater from a young age and moved to Mexico City when she was 17. She also performed in Europe, where she studied mime and performed with Marcel Marceau.
Her marriage to the director Julio Bracho ended in divorce. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
Ms. Monteros’s other films included Luis Buñuel’s “Nazarin” (1959); “Tiara Tahiti” (1962), which starred James Mason; and “Cauldron of Blood” (1970), which starred Boris Karloff in one of his last roles. On television, she had a long-running part in the telenovela “Lucía Sombra.”
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
“The Magnificent Seven” is still beloved by western fans. It was remade by Antoine Fuqua in 2016, but without the character Petra and her romantic subplot
