Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 118 of 128

Jacqueline Bisset

Jacqueline Bisset was born in 1944 in Weybridge, Surrey. She began her career in British films and came to prominence in 1967 in “Two for the Road” with Audrey Hepburn anf Albert Finney. The following year she was in Hollywood making “The Detective” with Frank Sinatra and Lee Remick followed by “Bullit” with Steve McQueen. She has had a very profilic career starring opposite major actors like Jon Voight, Charles Bronson, Paul Newman and Michael York. Her most recent film is “The Last Film Festival” with Dennis Hopper.

TCM Overview:

British actress Jacqueline Bisset rose to fame in the 1970s as the object of desire for numerous top actors in features like “Bullitt” (1968), “Airport” (1970), “The Deep” (1977) and “The Greek Tycoon” (1978). Few of these roles allowed her to express anything more than slow-simmering sexuality, but gradually films like Francois Truffaut’s “Day for Night” (1973), George Cukor’s “Rich and Famous” (1981) and John Huston’s “Under the Volcano” (1983) revealed her talent for intelligent, complex performances. Unlike many actresses as they approached their fourth and fifth decades, Bisset remained active and in demand, playing a wide range of parts from stalwart mothers to seductive socialites. What remained constant throughout her four-decade career was her cool elegance, which preserved her iconic status as one of the screen’s great international beauties.

Born Winifred Jacqueline Bisset in the town of Weybridge in Surrey, England on Sept. 13, 1944, she was the daughter of Scottish doctor Max Bisset and his French wife, Arlette, a former lawyer who taught her daughter to speak her native tongue fluently. Bisset’s initial passion was ballet, which she studied as a child, but as she grew into a willowy adolescent, she was considered too tall to pursue dance as a career. Bisset’s teenage years were marked by major upheaval in her family life. After her mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, her father left the family, forcing his daughter to support her mother and younger brother, Max through modeling. The latter job led to an interest in acting, and Bisset made her screen debut as an uncredited extra in Richard Lester’s “The Knack and How to Get It” (1965), which also launched the film careers of Charlotte Rampling and Jane Birkin.

She earned her first lines in Roman Polanski’s “Cul-de-Sac” (1966), but soon settled into a series of ornamental roles that were largely defined by her next picture, the all-star James Bond spoof, “Casino Royale” (1966), which cast her as Miss Goodthighs. Bit roles soon blossomed into supporting parts in “The Detective” (1968), where she replaced Mia Farrow as the wife of a murder victim investigated by Frank Sinatra, and “The Sweet Ride” (1968), a counterculture drama that earned her a Golden Globe nomination as a mystery woman who came between beach bums Tony Franciosa, Michael Sarrazin and Bob Denver. In 1969, she was an innocent teen whose trip to America ends in romantic failure and prostitution in Jerry Paris’ relentlessly downbeat “The Grasshopper.”

Bisset’s star-making role finally came in 1968 with “Bullitt,” where her cool beauty was matched perfectly by Steve McQueen’s frosty dramatics as a tough San Francisco detective with a penchant for hard driving. The film’s popularity elevated Bisset to major Hollywood features in the 1970s, though not more substantive roles; she was pilot Dean Martin’s pregnant mistress – and perhaps the first actress to belt Helen Hayes across the face – in the big-budget disaster film “Airport” (1970), then played elegant love interests for such actors as Alan Alda in “The Mephisto Waltz” (1971), Paul Newman in “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean” (1972), Ryan O’Neal in “The Thief Who Came to Dinner” (1973), Charles Bronson in “St. Ives” (1976) and Anthony Quinn, as a thinly disguised Aristotle Onassis, who romanced Bisset’s ersatz Jacqueline Kennedy in “The Greek Tycoon” (1978). Her most memorable turn of the decade came in “The Deep” (1977), Peter Yates’ adaptation of the popular thriller by Peter Benchley. The film boosted her status as a pin-up thanks to its opening sequence, in which Bisset appeared in a wet t-shirt that left little to the imagination. She later denounced the scene, stating that producer Peter Guber had assured her that it would not be shot in an exploitative way.

Feeling frustrated by the lack of quality projects from Hollywood, Bisset returned to Europe throughout the 1970s, where she played a British actress on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Francois Truffaut’s backstage drama “Day for Night” (1973). The picture, which she later declared as her most fulfilling film role, reversed most critics’ perception of her as little more than a pretty face, and led to more work overseas, including Philippe Broca’s spy spoof “Le Magnifique” (1973), with French movie idol Jean-Paul Belmondo; Sidney Lumet’s Oscar-winning, all-star adaptation of Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express” (1974); and the German thriller “End of the Game” (1975) for director Maximilian Schell. She and Schell also later shared godparent duties for Angelina Jolie, daughter of the film’s star, Jon Voight. Bisset ended the 1970s with a Golden Globe nomination for her turn as a pastry chef targeted by a killer in the charming comedy-thriller, “Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?”

Bisset began the 1980s on a sour note with huge back-to-back flops in Irwin Allen’s disaster film “When Time Ran Out” (1980) and the epic Korean War drama “Inchon” (1981), which earned brickbats for receiving funding by the Unification Church. But she quickly rebounded with a string of successful and mature dramas, starting in 1981 with “Rich and Famous.” Directed by the legendary George Cukor, the film followed a pair of friends (Bisset and Candice Bergen) through four turbulent decades of romances, successes and failures. The film also marked Bisset’s sole effort as a producer in an earnest attempt to wrest control over her career.

Though “Class” (1983), an ironically class-free sex comedy about a prep school student (Andrew McCarthy) sleeping with friend Rob Lowe’s mother (Bisset) was undoubtedly her most financially successful film of the decade, her subsequent choices were critically acclaimed dramas, including several for American television, which helped to finally establish Bisset as a capable and versatile actress. She earned a Golden Globe nomination as the wife of an alcoholic consul (her “Two for the Road” co-star Albert Finney) in John Huston’s “Under the Volcano” (1984), and then received a CableACE nod as German countess Nina von Halder, who hid her Jewish boyfriend (Jurgen Prochnow) from the Nazis in “Forbidden” (1985). Clare Peploe’s “High Season” (1987) gave her a leading role as a photographer who becomes embroiled in small town dramas on the Greek island of Rhodes, while Paul Bartel’s “Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills” (1989) allowed her a rare shot at comedy as a wealthy widow beset by everything from amorous employees to the ghost of her husband (Paul Mazursky).

As the 1990s ushered Bisset into her fifth decade, she worked largely in independent features and TV movies on both sides of the Atlantic, most notably in Claude Chabrol’s “La Ceremonie” (1995), which earned her a Cesar nomination as a wealthy woman whose cruel treatment of her dyslexic servant (Sandrine Bonnaire) is repaid with violence. In 1999, she received Emmy and Golden Globe nominations as Isabelle d’Arc, mother of French martyr “Joan of Arc” (CBS), then moved to a more historical matriarch – specifically, Mary of Nazareth and Sarah, wife of Abraham – in the miniseries “Jesus” (CBS, 2000) and “In the Beginning” (NBC, 2000), respectively. Her legendary allure also made her a go-to for mature, glamorous and sexually confident women of power, which she essayed in features like “Dangerous Beauty” (1998), where her 16th century courtesan instructed her daughter (Catherine McCormack) in the family business, and “Domino” (2005), which cast her as fashion model Paulene Stone, whose daughter, Domino Harvey, became a bounty hunter. Her versatility allowed her to play both the ruthless head of a black market organ ring in the fourth season of “Nip/Tuck” (FX, 2003-2010), and a kindly 19th century grandmother in “An Old Fashioned Christmas’ (Hallmark Channel, 2008). In 2010, she received the Legion of Honor from French president Nicholas Sarkozy. Bisset co-starred opposite Chiwetel Ejiofor in the 1930s period piece “Dancing on the Edge” (Starz 2013), a miniseries about a black jazz band’s arrival in London society. Her performance as Lady Cremone won Bisset the Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television, but her win was overshadowed by her strange, meandering acceptance speech, punctuated by long silences. It became the most talked-about moment of the 2014 Golden Globes, including a parody on “Saturday Night Live” (NBC 1975- ).

The above TCM overview can be accessed online here.

Jo Stafford was one of the most popular recording artists in the 1950’s. Her songs such as “You Belong to Me”, “Allentown Jail” and “Shrimp Boats” are still played to-day. She was born in 1917 in California’s San Joaquin Valley. She became the lead female singer with the legendary Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. She left the band in 1944 to go solo and had hit after hit.She was featured in the films “Biloxi Blues” in 1988 and “The Two Jakes” in 1990. Jo Stafford was married to the band leader Paul Weston. She died at the age of 90 in 2008.

Her “Guardian” obituary by Veronica Horwell:

The obituary below, of the singer Jo Stafford, incorrectly attributed a quote that she was “a highly educated folk singer working mostly in other idioms of American music” to Nancy Franklin of the New Yorker.

One female voice reigned over American music in the era between Frank Sinatra’s swooning bobbysoxers in the mid-1940s and Elvis Presley getting their little sisters all shook up in 1957. It was freighted with knowledge of trouble and loss but soared sure and clear; the voice of Jo Stafford, who has died aged 90. She was a diamond, gold and platinum disc seller of 25m records in every genre.

She was what she mocked, the third of four daughters of an Appalachian hill country couple, Anna York and Grover Cleveland Stafford. Jo was born at Lease 35, raw land near Coalinga, California, where the family had followed oilfield roughneck Grover in search of work.

They remained Tennessee in accent and music. Anna played five-string banjo. The older girls taught Jo to sing, and as her voice expanded to an octave and a half in a decade, Anna insisted she train as an operatic coloratura. She managed only five years, for lack of cash. The Stafford Sisters sang on radio and in movie musicals, then Jo went into a group, as the sole female – a short, hungry dumpling in horn-rimmed glasses – among seven male Pied Pipers.

Paul Weston, arranger for Tommy Dorsey’s band, heard their balanced voices with lead Stafford shaping the sound. In 1938 he recruited them for Dorsey’s radio show in New York, a gig that ended when the sponsor heard and hated their scat lyrics. But Dorsey summoned the octet, reduced to a quartet, on tour. “Most of the time you never even saw a bed,” she recalled. “You slept and dressed on the band bus.” After another thousand times around the block in the bus, she made a record, Little Man With a Candy Cigar (1941).

Weston gave her a break. He worked with Bing Crosby at Paramount Pictures, and met songwriter Johnny Mercer, co-founder of Capitol Records. Weston formed an orchestra, adding strings and voices to big band ensembles to create what came to be called mood music. Mercer appointed him Capitol’s music director, and in 1944, after Stafford sang for 26 weeks on Mercer’s radio show, signed her as Capitol’s first contract singer.

She could deliver anything with grace. Nancy Franklin wrote in the New Yorker that she was “a highly educated folk singer working mostly in other idioms of American music”, who unconsciously used both operatic pitch vibrato and country and western volume vibrato. Stafford said she simply concentrated on “thinking the tone just before I make it… The voice is a muscle.”

Her first hit was a freak. She was in a studio corridor when Joe “Country” Washburn discovered he was minus a vocalist to record Tim-Tay-Shun (1947). Hidden behind the alias Cinderella G Stump, she sold a couple of million, without royalties. She otherwise chose in the 1940s from material laid before her (90 of her singles charted) or took advice from Weston. He did a full orchestral accompaniment in 1946 for The Nightingale, a song Anna had taught Jo. He retrieved the religious duet Whispering Hope from an old phonograph disc – Jo’s 1949 version, with Gordon Macrae.

Stafford was a character player, her own self ignored in the narrative of the number. She avoided live solo performances, initially because of her weight (at more than 13 stone she flopped at her only nightclub booking, New York’s Cafe Martinique, then dieted, achieving photographable size in time to switch from radio to television). She did not have and would not simulate an entertainer’s personality: “I wasn’t driven. I just loved what I did.”

Her engagement was with a microphone in subdued studio light, and through it, with listeners in distant darknesses. Her broadcasts for Radio Luxembourg and Voice of America made her “GI Jo” to US servicemen posted globally. She did record covers of second world war songs – I’ll Be Seeing You and No Love, No Nothin’ – but neither was released until 1959.

Stafford followed Weston when he left Capitol for Columbia in 1950, which subjected her to the novelty regime of Mitch Miller. At best, he supplied her with VistaVision scenarios, mostly recorded from 1950 to 1952 – You Belong to Me, Jambalaya, and Shrimp Boats. He also required her to cut turkeys – Chow Willy, and later Underneath the Overpass (1957). Her fine peak albums – American Folk Songs (1950) and Jo+Jazz (1960) – went unpromoted, and she was relieved to give up the 15 minutes of shivers that preceded TV broadcasts.

Her marriage to Pied Piper John Huddleston over, she converted to Catholicism and married Weston in 1952. They had two children, Tim and Amy, and settled in Beverly Hills.

Stafford and Weston got their revenge on Miller anyway. After recording his worst, she and the band reprised them as they deserved, with Stafford squarely missing each note. Then, at a Columbia sales convention in 1957, Weston dined with A&R staff in a restaurant with a bad piano player. Weston mimicked the pianist’s meandering hands and crumbling thirds. The A&R people imagined an album of this ineptitude – Paul would be “Jonathan Edwards”, Jo his chanteuse wife “Darlene”.

The resulting discs – The Original Piano Artistry of Jonathan Edwards (1957) and its sequels – were bestsellers, even after Time magazine outed their perpetrators. Jo admired Darlene’s quartertones and the fifth beat she added to a 4/4 bar for “an extra stride”.”She’s a nice lady from Trenton, New Jersey, and she does her best,” said Jo of Darlene, otherwise “the only singer to get off the A train between A and B-flat”. The album Jonathan and Darlene in Paris won Stafford’s only Grammy – for comedy in 1960.

The following year the couple spent the summer in London, recording the last series of the Jo Stafford Show for the ATV network.

When in the late 1960s, her voice no longer met her standards – the red needle on the meter must not flicker – she retired, performing one last time, safely in a group, at a tribute to Frank Sinatra (and again as Darlene, for charity). Until his death in 1996, Weston managed the couple’s Corinthian label, which reissued their recordings. Darlene’s pitch was even more challenged when digitally remastered.

Stafford’s offduty passion was the history of the second world war. She knew where the boys had been. A naval officer once contradicted her on a detail of a Pacific action, saying: “Madam, I was there!” A few days later he wrote to apologise. He had consulted his logs. He was wrong.

She is survived by her two children, both of whom went into the music business.

· Josephine Elizabeth Stafford, singer, born November 12 1917; died July 13 2008

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

Gary Crosby was born in 1933 in Los Angeles. He was the son of Bing Crosby and Dixie Lee. He performed on radio and television with his father and three brothers. He made his movie debut in “Mardi Gras” with Pat Boone in 1958. His other films include “Holiday for Lovers” and “A Private’s Affair”. Gary Crosby died in 1995.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

The stocky-framed, lookalike son of singing legend Bing Crosby who had that same bemused, forlorn look, fair hair and jug ears, Gary was the eldest of four sons born to the crooner and his first wife singer/actress Dixie Lee. The boys’ childhood was an intensely troubled one with all four trying to follow in their father’s incredibly large footsteps as singers and actors. As youngsters, they briefly appeared with Bing as themselves in Star Spangled Rhythm (1942) and Duffy’s Tavern (1945). Gary proved to be the most successful of the four, albeit a minor one. As a teen, he sang duet on two songs with his famous dad, “Sam’s Song” and “Play a Simple Melody,” which became the first double-sided gold record in history. He and his brothers also formed their own harmonic singing group “The Crosby Boys” in subsequent years but their success was fleeting. Somewhere in the middle of all this Gary managed to attend Stanford University, but eventually dropped out.

Gary concentrated a solo acting career in the late 50s and appeared pleasantly, if unobtrusively, in such breezy, lightweight fare as Mardi Gras (1958), Holiday for Lovers(1959), A Private’s Affair (1959), Battle at Bloody Beach (1961) (perhaps his best role),Operation Bikini (1963), and Girl Happy (1965) with Elvis Presley. Making little leeway, he turned to TV series work. The Bill Dana Show (1963) and Adam-12 (1968) as Officer Ed Wells kept him occasionally busy in the 60s and early 70s, also guesting on such shows as Twilight Zone (1959) and Matlock (1986). Getting only so far as a modestly-talented Crosby son, Gary’s erratic career was hampered in large part by a long-standing alcohol problem that began in his teens. In 1983, Gary published a “Daddy Dearest” autobiography entitled “Going My Own Way,” an exacting account of the severe physical and emotional abuse he and his brothers experienced at the hands of his overly stern and distant father, who had died back in 1977. Mother Dixie, an alcoholic and recluse, died long before of ovarian cancer in 1952. All four boys went on to have lifelong problems with the bottle, with Gary hitting bottom several times. The tell-all book estranged Gary from the rest of his immediate family and did nothing to rejuvenate his stalled career. Two of his brothers, Dennis Crosby and Lindsay Crosby, later committed suicide. Gary was divorced from his third wife and was about to marry a fourth when he learned he had lung cancer. He died on August 24, 1995, two months after the diagnosis.

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

Fernando Lamas was born in 1915 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He began his career acting in South American films and came to Hollywood in 1951 after he signed a contract with MGM. His films included “The Merry Widow” with Lana Turner, “Rose Marie” with Ann Blyth and “Dangerous When Wet”. In later years he moved to directing. Fernando Lamas was married to Esther Williams. He died in 1982. His son is the actor Lorenzo Lamas.

His IMDB entry:

Handsome, dapper Argentine-born actor who came to Hollywood as a romantic lead in several colourful MGM extravaganzas and then succeeded in living up to his Latin Lover image in real life. Lamas studied drama at school in his native country and later enrolled in a law course at college. His strong leaning towards athletic pursuits prevailed and he abandoned his studies to take up horse riding, winning trophies fencing and boxing (middleweight amateur title) and becoming the South American Freestyle Swimming Champion of 1937. While still in his teens he appeared on stage, then on radio, and by the age of 24 in his first motion picture.

All this sporting publicity aroused interest in Hollywood and, in 1951, Lamas was signed by MGM to charm the likes of Lana Turner and Esther Williams in A-grade productions likeThe Merry Widow (1952) and Dangerous When Wet (1953). He also spent time ‘on loan’ to Paramount who featured him in several Pine-Thomas B-movies, such as the 3-D Technicolour Sangaree (1953) and Jivaro (1954). His sole appearance on Broadway was in the 1957 play ‘Happy Hunting’. There was considerable friction between him and co-starEthel Merman, both on and off-stage. Lamas was nonetheless nominated for a Tony Award as Best Actor, but had the misfortune of coming up against Rex Harrison’s Professor Higgins in ‘My Fair Lady’.

In real life, Lamas proudly lived up to his reputation as a ladies man. With two ex-wives back in Argentina, he conducted well-publicised affairs with most of his female co-stars, including one with Lana Turner which began while filming ‘The Merry Widow’. ActressArlene Dahl, who appeared with him in ‘Sangaree’ and The Diamond Queen (1953), became his third wife, and fellow swimming champion Esther Williams his fourth.

In 1963, Lamas directed the Spanish film ‘La Fuente Magica’, with himself and wife Esther Williams playing the lead roles. From then on, he began to concentrate on television, alternating between acting (notable in a recurring role as playboy Ramon de Vega in Run for Your Life (1965) and directing episodes of shows like Mannix (1967),Alias Smith and Jones (1971), The Rookies (1972) and House Calls (1979).

– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

The Law And The Lady, poster, l-r: Michael Wilding, Greer Garson, Fernando Lamas on poster art, 1951. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Anna Maria Alberghetti. IMDB

The dark, delicate and demure beauty of an Anna Maria Alberghetti is what one envisions a princess to look like and, indeed, she did have a chance to play a couple in her lifetime. Reminding one instantly of the equally enchanting Pier Angeli, Anna Maria’s Cinderella story did not take on a tragic storybook ending as it did for Ms. Angeli. On the contrary, Anna Maria continues to delight audiences today on many levels, particularly on the concert and lecture stages.

She was born in a musical home in Pesaro, Italy, in 1936, the daughter of a concertmaster father and pianist mother. They greatly influenced her obvious talent and by age six she was performing with symphony orchestras with her father as her vocal instructor. World War II had forced the Alberghettis from their homeland and after performing in a European tour, Anna Maria’s pure operatic tones reached American ears via her Carnegie Hall debut at age 14. The family decided to settle permanently in the States. The teenager went on to perform with numerous symphony orchestras during this time.

In 1950 Paramount saw a bright future in the making. Within a short time she was capturing hearts on film, making a magical debut in the eerie but hypnotic Gian Carlo Menotti‘s chamber opera The Medium (1951). Opposite the magnificent Marie Powers in the title role as the fraudulent Madame Flora, Anna Maria was directed by Menotti himself in the independently-produced film. While the movie was appreciated in art house form, Paramount wasted no time in placing the photogenic Anna into mainstream filming. Her budding talent was strangely used, however. She had an extended operatic solo in the breezy Capraesque Bing Crosby/Jane Wyman comedy Here Comes the Groom(1951), and played a Polish émigré befriended by a singer (played by Rosemary Clooney) who discovers the girl has musical talent of her own in the so-so The Stars Are Singing(1953). Anna’s songs included the touching “My Kind of Day” and “My Heart Is Home”. Thereafter, for some strange reason, her vocals were not utilized. She acted instead in such rugged adventures as The Last Command (1955) and Duel at Apache Wells (1957), and in the fluffy comedy Ten Thousand Bedrooms (1957) opposite Dean Martin. And, in the end, she was lovely but utterly wasted as the Prince Charming equivalent in the gender-bending Jerry Lewis farce Cinderfella (1960). Not only does she arrive late in the film, but Jerry gave her no songs to sing — he sang them all!

Extremely disillusioned, Anna Maria departed from films in the early 60s and instead sought out work on the Broadway stage. It was here that she found that elusive star. Following a role in the operetta “Rose Marie” in 1960, Anna Maria won the part of a lifetime as the waif-like Lili in the musical “Carnival”, based on Leslie Caron‘s charming title film role. Anna Maria was utterly delightful and quite moving in the role and for her efforts was awarded the Tony Award — tying in her category with Diahann Carroll for “No Strings”. Anna Maria’s sister Carla replaced her when she left the show. Throughout the 60s she continued to impress in musical ingénue showcases — the title role in “Fanny” (1963), Maria in “West Side Story” (1964), Marsinah in “Kismet” (1967) (which was televised), and Luisa in “The Fantasticks” (1968), to name but a few.

As she matured, she made a mark in other facets of entertainment. On TV Ed Sullivanfirst introduced Anna Maria to millions of households and the public was thoroughly taken by this singing angel. She appeared with Sullivan a near-record 53 times. She also graced a number of popular TV shows with non-singing, damsel-in-distress roles on such shows as “Wagon Train” and “Checkmate”. Her recording career has included associations with Capitol, Columbia, Mercury and MGM Records.

In 1964, Anna married TV director/producer Claudio Guzmán who was almost a decade older. The ten-year marriage produced two daughters, Alexandra and Pilar. She began to downplay her career after this in favor of parenting, particularly after her divorce in 1974.

Returning to the theater on occasion, Anna Maria later reintroduced herself back into TV households as the housewife/pitchwoman for “Good Seasons” salad dressing. Her one-woman stage show led to her interest as a cabaret performer. More recent film appearances have included fun roles in the comedies Friends and Family (2001) and The Whole Shebang (2001).

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

Her IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

“Guardian” obituary in 2020

John Saxon, the actor, who has died aged 83, was probably best-known for his role as the martial artist Roper in Enter the Dragon (1973), Bruce Lee’s final film and the one which made him a star beyond Asia.

By then, Saxon had already tasted stardom himself, and though often still cast for his handsome looks he was leaving behind his years as a leading man to become more of an authority figure character actor. Paradoxically, this ultimately enabled him to show the range of which he was capable in what proved, for a teen idol of the 1950s, a notably long career.

Spotted by a scout coming out of a cinema in Times Square when he should have been in high school, Saxon began as a photographic model. The agent Henry Willson, who promoted good-looking “beefcake” actors such as Rock Hudson, soon noticed a magazine shot of Saxon. Within days, he had a Hollywood contract – though as he was under age his parents signed it for him.

A brief early part was as an usher in the Judy Garland version of A Star is Born (1954). A strong performance as a stalker, of Esther Williams, in The Unguarded Moment (1955) raised his profile, and by the time he was paired with Sandra Dee in The Restless Years (1957) he was receiving 3,000 fan letters a week.

The following year, he shared the Golden Globe award for New Star with James Garner, and appeared with Dee and Rex Harrison in The Reluctant Debutante, and opposite Debbie Reynolds in This Happy Feeling, directed by Blake Edwards.

Saxon – a stage name – was of Italian descent, and his looks allowed him in the Hollywood of the day to be cast as many races, notably as a Mexican outlaw in The Appaloosa (1966), with Marlon Brando, for which Saxon was nominated for a Golden Globe. He was also teamed with Clint Eastwood in Joe Kidd (1972).

This Happy Feeling, poster, US poster art, from left: Debbie Reynolds, John Saxon, Curd Jurgens, 1958. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

The following year came Enter the Dragon, in which Saxon – who had studied some judo and karate – had top billing as a gambler forced by debt to take part in a deadly martial arts tournament on a mysterious island.

Saxon’s standing was such that the script was changed to accommodate his wish that his character, rather than Jim Kelly’s black karate champion, survives the film. Yet while it was Lee’s charisma and skills which made the picture a colossal hit, Saxon was able to display some of the charm and self-deprecating wit that in other circumstances might have made him a bigger star.

The eldest of three children, he was born Carmine Oricco in Brooklyn on August 5 1936. His father was a painter and decorator, and as a boy Saxon worked on the fairground stalls at Coney Island.

From the 1970s onwards, he appeared mainly on television, for instance as a recurring character in The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. He also had spells in Falcon Crest and Dynasty, and guest-starred in shows such as Starsky & Hutch and The A-Team.

On the big screen in that era, he was perhaps best remembered as the father of Freddy Krueger’s adversary Heather in the Nightmare on Elm Street series of horror films. Saxon had been seen over the years in several Italian horror films, or gialli, working with directors such as Mario Bava and Dario Argento, and it became one of his favourite genres. He also featured, with Dennis Hopper, in Roger Corman’s Queen of Blood (1966).

His final roles included From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), which was co-written by Quentin Tarantino, and an episode of CSI directed by him.

John Saxon is survived by his third wife, Gloria, and by two sons.

John Saxon, born August 5 1936, died July 25 2020

Diane McBain (Wikipedia)

Diane McBain was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She was a Warner Brothers contract player in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. She had a major role in “Ice Palace” in 1960 with a steller cast including Richard Burton, Carolyn Jones, Robert Ryan, Martha Hyer and Ray Danton. In 1961 she starred with Claudette Colbert and Troy Donahue in “Parrish”. In 2014 she published her autobiography “Famous Enough”.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Signed on as a Warner Brothers starlet, bouncy, blonde-coiffed Diane McBain would develop a burgeoning career as lively 60s “bad girl” and “spoiled rich girl” types on film and TV. Born in Cleveland, Ohio on May 18, 1941, the family moved to California while still young and she started things off as a “sweet 16” model in print and commercial ads. Eventually TV got more than just a glimpse of this diverting beauty after a WB talent agent spotted her in a Los Angeles play and signed her on during her senior year at Glendale High School.

After busily apprenticing on various TV projects, Diane made her first big splash in 1960 (age 19) with a prominent role in Ice Palace (1960) co-starring Richard Burton, Carolyn Jones and Martha Hyer. Brimming with style and confidence, Diane was quickly ushered into other films as Warner’s answer to Carroll Baker, winning parts in two consecutive soapers. The first was Parrish (1961) with (again) Donahue and screen legend Claudette Colbert; the other was the title role in Claudelle Inglish (1961) opposite up-and-comersChad Everett and Robert Logan.

Neither the tawdry scripts nor the box office receipts were anything to write home about unfortunately, and her leading lady career in films started to flounder with such fodder as The Caretakers (1963) with Joan Crawford, A Distant Trumpet (1964), yet again with Donahue, and Spinout (1966). The last was one of Elvis Presley‘ later vehicles that signified an inevitable fadeout was on the horizon.

Significantly better was her dizzy good time girl and socialite “Daphne Dutton” on the hip Warner Bros. series Surfside 6 (1960) alongside Van Williams (later TV’s “Green Hornet”) and beef-cake film star Troy Donahue. The show ran for two seasons.

Diane proved popular with the teen set with her devilish débutantes and snobby sophisticates, even accompanying Bob Hope on one of his USO tours of South Vietnam in 1966/67. On the cult series Batman (1966), she played “Pinky Pinkston” (with pink hair, pink outfits and a pink dog). By the late 1960s, however, her career began drifting into exploitation with terrible titles like I Sailed to Tahiti with an All Girl Crew (1968),Maryjane (1968) and The Mini-Skirt Mob (1968) (miscast as a biker chick) representative of what she was being handed.

Diane instead laid low and focused on her child, Evan, more or less splitting from the Hollywood scene. A few plays (Amanda in “The Glass Menagerie”) and lowbudget films came her way, and in the 80s she was seen a bit more on daytime soaps. The still young-looking and ever-elegant Diane was out and about in the 90s as well, playing good-looking grandmas on such shows as Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (1996). The victim of a rape attack in 1982, Diane chose to rise above her traumatic circumstances and help others as a rape counselor.

Diane McBain died in 2022 aged 81.

The Telegraph obituary:

Diane McBain, actress who became good friends with Elvis Presley when she worked with him on his 1966 film Spinout

‘We were both spiritual beings, we’d meditate, if you can believe it, and no sex!’ she said of working with the King

ByTelegraph Obituaries8 February 2023 • 6:00am

Diane McBain, who has died aged 81, was a Sixties screen siren who was perhaps best known for appearing alongside Elvis Presley in his 1966 romp Spinout, after playing a glamorous and intrepid socialite in the hit show Surfside 6; she went on to set a fashion trend with her candy pink hairdo as Pinkie Pinkston, a friend of Bruce Wayne in Batman.

“I was typecast as pretty, sometimes aloof, on occasions bitchy, rich beauties,” she recalled in 2020. “Off screen I couldn’t have been more different.”

In Spinout she played an author writing a book entitled The Perfect American Male, and using Elvis’s character, a racing driver, as one of her subjects. Diane McBain became good friends with the singer, she recalled – because “he needed a friend, not a lover. He had everything, looks, that voice! But he lacked confidence… We were both spiritual beings, we’d meditate, if you can believe it, and no sex! I was blonde, he dug brunettes, I think that’s why our friendship lasted… The drugs were a way of combating acute loneliness. Odd really, as Elvis was never alone – that was also part of the problem.”

Diane McBain was born on May 18 1941 in Cleveland, Ohio, but moved with her family to Los Angeles. In her senior year at high school she was taking modelling assignments, and one job led to stage work at a local theatre.

There, she was spotted by a scout for Warner Bros, who were looking for an unknown to play the granddaughter of Richard Burton in the unjustly forgotten Ice Palace (1960), an historical drama chiefly notable for dramatising the debate over Alaskan statehood.

She played alongside Robert Ryan’s fishing-boat captain, the magnificently named Thor Storm, but had a real-life affair with Burton, who played his friend-turned-rival. It was a source of regret, she recalled, as Burton was married to the pregnant Sybil Williams.

Warners hired her out for such TV shows such as Lawman and 77 Sunset Strip, while on the big screen she joined Troy Donahue and Claudette Colbert in the 1961 family drama Parrish; the same year she was the titular star of Claudelle Inglish, about a farmgirl who wants to marry for love rather than money.

In 1963 she was in The Caretakers (released in the UK as Borderlines) which featured Joan Crawford as a fearsome psychiatric nurse; she was also fearsome away from the camera. “Miss Crawford was so cold towards me, just horrid!” Diane McBain recalled. “She had my scenes cut to almost nothing – it wasn’t easy”.

She fared better playing second fiddle to Debbie Reynolds in the romcom Mary, Mary (1963), before joining Troy Donahue again for the western A Distant Trumpet (1964).

But despite her progress, Diane McBain was feeling typecast, and when she turned down the role of a secretary in the comedy Sex and the Single Girl (1964) Warners sacked her.

The following year she went missing, and was found after four days hiding out in a San Diego motel under the alias Marilyn Miller. “I was having a breakdown,” she admitted. “I never thought Hollywood would tire of me, I lived and spent like a star, without the realisation that the gloss was lost.”

Freelancing, she followed Spinout with a succession of B-movies: the stock-car romance Thunder Alley; the drug-fuelled Maryjane, about a high school art teacher framed for pushing marijuana; The Mini-Skirt Mob, in which she played the leader of an all-girl bike gang; and the adventure comedy whose title said everything that needed to be said: I Sailed to Tahiti With an All Girl Crew.

On returning from a morale-boosting trip to Vietnam with Tippi Hedren and Joey Bishop, she featured in the crime drama The Delta Factor (1970) but, hankering after regular family life, and sensing that her time was up, she retired.

“Times were changing and so was the appetite of the moviegoer,” she said. “The era of the pretty movie starlet was over – only gritty realism was now in demand.”

But her 1972 marriage to Rodney Burke lasted only two years, leaving her to bring up her son alone, and to make ends meet she returned to acting, with stints on shows such as Charlie’s Angels, Hawaii Five-O, Dallas, Knight Rider and Dr Quinn Medicine Woman.

There were some low points, too: the shipwreck horror The Deathhead Virgin (1974) – “the stupidest screenplay I ever had to work with” – and the TV movie Cab to Canada (1998), which was “so awful it was enough to make me never to want to act again”.

Her star waned, but Diane McBain never sought superstardom, just financial stability as a single mother, and she posed nude for Playboy as well as working as an accountant in the porn industry – “strictly the business side – although nobody knew or cared who I was by then”.

On Christmas Day 1982, arriving home from a party, McBain was beaten, robbed and raped by two men in the garage of her home in West Hollywood. Unsurprisingly, she suffered trauma for the rest of her life – but typically turned negative into a positive, becoming a rape victim counsellor. “As horrible as the act of rape is and as terrible as the effects can be, there is always the life of the survivor on the other side,” she said.

She wrote her autobiography with Michael Michaud in 2014, its focus not on the fickleness of fame but on her spiritual beliefs. It rewarded her with a renewed interest in her work.

Diane McBain is survived by her son.

Diane McBain, born May 18 1941, died December 21 2022

David Brian was born in 1914 in New York City. He was signed to a contract by Warner Brothers in 1949 and starred opposite Joan Crawford in “The Damned Don’t Cry. His other films include “The High and the Mighty” in 1954 with John Wayne and “The Rare Breed” with James Stewart and Maureen O’Hara. He was married to Adrian Booth. David Brian died in 1993 at the age of 78.

IMDB entry:

New Yorker, who, after schooling at City College, found work as a doorman, before entering show business with a song-and-dance routine in vaudeville and in night clubs. He did a wartime stint with the Coast Guard and returned to acting on the New York stage after the war. Persuaded by Joan Crawford to try his hand at film acting, he joined her in Hollywood and, in 1949, signed a contract with Warner Brothers. In his feature debut, Flamingo Road (1949), he played a political boss infatuated with Crawford’s carnival girl. Brian’s most critically acclaimed performance was as the fair-minded, resourceful Southern lawyer defending condemned, but innocent Juano Hernandez from a vicious, bigoted lynch mob, in Intruder in the Dust (1949). For this role, he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award as Best Supporting Actor.

Brian portrayed a powerful gang leader in The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), again opposite Crawford. In spite of his commanding presence in the film, his performance was somewhat compromised by a cliche-laden script. In This Woman Is Dangerous (1952), it was Crawford who played the criminal, and Brian the role of her insanely jealous paramour. For the remainder of the decade and into the 1960’s, Brian played an assortment of western heavies on the big screen notably raider leader Austin McCool in Springfield Rifle (1952) and saloon owner Dick Braden in Dawn at Socorro (1954) – and did the same with equal verve on television, in Gunsmoke (1955). An incisive actor with sardonic looks and a hard-edge to his voice, Brian was more often than not typecast as ruthless or manipulating types. Somewhat against character, he essayed a weakling in the ground-breaking airborne drama The High and the Mighty (1954).

On the right side of the law, he starred as crusading D.A. Paul Garrett in his own courtroom drama series, Mr. District Attorney (1954), reprising his earlier role on radio. In 1968, he also made a contribution to Star Trek (1966), as John Gill, a Federation cultural observer on the planet Ekos, whose experiment in creating a government based on National Socialist principles goes disastrously wrong.

In private life, Brian was a noted fundraiser for the Volunteers of America, a well-known non-profit charitable organisation.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Anthony Franciosa obituary in “The Guardian” in 2006.

Anthony Franciosa was born in 1928 in New York. In 1948 he joined the Cherry Lane Theatre Group. He won wide acclaim for his stage perfomance on Broadway in “A Hatful of Rain” and he recreated the film version in 1957. His other films include “The Long Hot Summer”, “A Face in the Crowd”, “Career” and “The Naked Maja” with Ava Gardner. Anthony Franciosa died in 2006 aged 77.

Tom Vallance’s obituary of Anthony Franciosa in “The Independent”

A powerful actor, with dark and moody looks, Anthony Franciosa entered films in 1957 after several years on the stage. He went on to play leading man to such stars as Jean Simmons, Anna Magnani and Ava Gardner, but his intensity did not always translate well to the screen, although he won an Oscar nomination for his role as a drug addict’s brother in A Hatful of Rain (1957). It was his performance in the same role on stage, opposite his wife at the time, Shelley Winters, that had first attracted the attention of Hollywood. Later he was to have a long career in television.

He was born Anthony Papaleo in the Little Italy district of New York in 1928. His parents, a construction worker and a seamstress, separated when he was only a year old and he was raised by his mother and aunt. He later recalled going every week to his father’s apartment to pick up an $8 cheque for child support, and he said of his upbringing in the city slums, “Getting in the first blow was something I learned in my childhood.”

After leaving high school, he worked as a welder, ship steward and cook; then, at the age of 18, he attended an audition for a YMCA production of The Seagull, and the small role he was given stimulated his interest in the theatre. He played several small roles in off-Broadway plays, adopting his mother’s maiden name of Franciosa, and between acting jobs worked as a CBS mail boy, getting to know television producers, who gave him work in live television. He also studied at the Actors’ Studio and the New School for Social Research.

In 1950 he had a featured role in a San Francisco production of Detective Story, and three years later he made his Broadway début in End as a Man, Calder Willingham’s study of life at a military school, starring Ben Gazarra as a student who wields sadistic power over younger cadets. The following year, he starred opposite Lee Grant in Theodore Reeves’s Wedding Breakfast. It was seen by Shelley Winters, who was impressed by both the play and the young actor. Though both were married at the time, they began an affair that was to lead to marriage and a relationship described by Winters as “fun and fights and grand passion and low comedy”.

In 1954 Winters starred with Gazzara and Franciosa in the Actors’ Studio production of Michael V. Gazzo’s A Hatful of Rain, reputed to be the first Broadway show to deal openly with drug addiction. Gazzara played Johnny, a young man who becomes an addict while in a military hospital, Winters was his pregnant wife and Franciosa his brother Polo, who tries to help Johnny by giving him money, which he spends on heroin.

Franciosa was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance, and the director Elia Kazan offered him a major role as a cynically manipulative personal manager of a TV star in his film version of Budd Schulberg’s A Face In the Crowd (1957). He then recreated his role of Polo in Fred Zinnemann’s transcription of A Hatful of Rain (1957), with Don Murray as Johnny and Eva Marie Saint as the wife. Franciosa received an Oscar nomination for his persuasive portrayal of the well-meaning brother.

Playing opposite Jean Simmons in Robert Wise’s likeable romantic comedy This Could Be the Night (1957), he displayed a charmingly light touch as a New York gangster bemused by the fact that school-teacher Simmons should want to moonlight with a job in his nightclub. Franciosa’s fourth prestigious movie of 1957 (and the first to have his name above the title) was George Cukor’s Wild is the Wind, in which he was a lusty ranch-hand to whom Anna Magnani turns when neglected by her husband (Anthony Quinn).

Rumours of an affair between Franciosa and Magnani prompted Shelley Winters to fly from California to the film’s Nevada location, and she and Franciosa were married later that year. Their tempestuous marriage lasted three years. Winters wrote in her autobiography, “If sex were an event at the Olympics, Tony Franciosa would have been captain of the team.”

Franciosa was part of a distinguished cast in Martin Ritt’s The Long Hot Summer (1958), but his career began to falter after the failure of The Naked Maja (1959), in which he played the painter Francisco Goya, with Ava Gardner as the Duchess of Alba. Franciosa gave one of his finest performances as a struggling actor in Career (1959), but The Story on Page One (1959), with Rita Hayworth, and Go Naked in the World (1960), with Gina Lollobrigida, were disappointments.

He had the chance to display his comic flair again in Period of Adjustment (1962), with Jane Fonda, but film roles were becoming fewer, partly due to the actor’s own temperament. In 1957 he spent 10 days in jail for hitting a press photographer, in 1959 he served 30 days at an open-prison farm for possession of marijuana, and tales of his battles with directors and other actors were rife. In a 1966 interview he confessed that Hollywood stardom had come a little too early: “It was an incredible amount of attention, and I wasn’t quite mature enough psychologically or emotionally for it.”

Franciosa’s first television series was the short-lived Valentine’s Day (1964-65), but The Name of the Game (1968-71), was a hit in which he alternated with Gene Barry and Robert Stack as publishing executives, though he was ultimately sacked for “erratic behaviour”. Shelley Winters wrote regretfully in 1989,

There were performances of A Hatful of Rain where audiences stood and yelled “Bravo” at his brilliant acting. Nowadays he seems content to do television series. Like Winters, Franciosa was also an avid civil rights supporter, joining Marlon Brando and Paul Newman at a desegregation drive in Atlanta in 1963, and The Rev Jesse Jackson was one of his close friends.

His acting was possibly most appreciated by his peers – Newman said, “Tony was as good as it gets – smart, probing, explosive, and he had it all at his fingertips.” The actress Janet Waldo recalled him as “a bit temperamental, but people understood that and indulged him . . . he was self-critical because he was such a perfectionist.” She recalled the producer Hal Kanter once telling him, “Tony, you can’t be Hamlet every week.”

Tom Vallance

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

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Jacqueline Bisset

Jo Stafford

Gary Crosby

Fernando Lamas

Anna Maria Alberghetti

Anna Maria Alberghetti. IMDB

John Saxon

“Guardian” obituary in 2020

Diane McBain

Diane McBain (Wikipedia)

The Telegraph obituary:

Diane McBain, actress who became good friends with Elvis Presley when she worked with him on his 1966 film Spinout

David Brian

Anthony Franciosa

Anthony Franciosa obituary in “The Guardian” in 2006.

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