“Cornel Wilde became a competent producer/director/actor, but for years he was a sort of male Maureen O’Hara, confined to medium-budget swashbucklers and action melodramas. Like her, his acting career was at it’s peak in the 40s but unlike her, his charm was limited. Ditto his acting ability. In his marshmallow period, this hardly mattered but in the harsher days of the 50s he had to struggle. It is much to his credit that he staved off oblivion by becoming a director” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years” (1972).
Cornel Wilde was born in 1912 in Hungary. The family moved to New York and he attended college in the city. Laurence Oliver cast him in 1940 in his production of “Romeo and Juliet” with Vivien Leigh. Wilde played the role of Tybalt. He was offered a Hollywood contract. He played many small roles until in 1945 he was cast as Chopin in “A Song to Remember” with Merle Oberon as George Sand. The film was a huge success and Wilde went on to make “Road House”, “The Greatest Show on Earth”, “Leave Her to Heaven” and “Shockproof” among others. Cornel Wilde died in 1989 at the age of 77.
His obituary in “The Los Angeles Times”:
Cornel Wilde, whose athletic abilities first brought him to Hollywood and whose elegant physique, good looks and dramatic talent kept him there for nearly 50 years, died in Los Angeles early Monday.
Wilde, whose film portrayals ranged from the romantic composer Frederic Chopin in “A Song to Remember” (for which he received an Academy Award nomination) to a hunter being tracked down by bloodthirsty African tribesmen in “The Naked Prey,” which he also directed, was 74. Wilde, who was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Sept. 2 suffering from leukemia, died shortly after midnight, said hospital spokeswoman Paula Correia. His son, Cornel Wilde Jr., and daughter, Wendy, were at his side.
During his long and varied career, which spanned the years 1940 to 1987, the aristocratic actor, writer and director was involved in more than 50 movies. “I realized long ago that I could not depend on luck to bring me success,” Wilde once said. “I worked hard, extra hard to improve my chance by increasing my abilities and my experience. It was my goal to accomplish, in my life, something of value and to do it with self-respect and integrity.”
He made one of the first films ever dealing with environmental pollution (“No Blade of Grass” in 1970) and portrayed Revolutionary War spies, Omar Khayam, Constantine the Great, Robin Hood’s son and aesthetic protagonists ranging from the consumptive Chopin to the eccentric Lord Byron. He moved from studio to studio in quest of satisfying roles and from in front of the camera to behind it when he couldn’t find producers and directors who agreed with his point of view.
“Acting is not just ‘another day, another dollar,’ ” he told columnist Hedda Hopper as long ago as 1954. “If I hate a script or think it’s foolish or in bad taste, I’m miserable.”
A linguist with a command of Hungarian, French, German, Italian and Russian, he was born in New York City to Hungarian-Czech parents but spent much of his formative years in Europe, where he became interested in fencing.
After his Hungarian father, who traveled Europe for a cosmetics firm, finally settled in the United States in 1932, Cornelius Louis Wilde studied at City College of New York, intending to become a physician. In 1935, he won a scholarship to Columbia University, where he hoped to study surgery but instead abandoned his classes after appearances in several stock theater companies whetted his interest in things dramatic. He also gave up his membership on the U.S. fencing team that was headed to the 1936 Berlin Olympics; yet it was his skill with a foil that would eventually lead him to Broadway and then to motion pictures.
After several modest stage productions in New York and on the road, he was hired as a fencing instructor and featured player (Tybalt) in the Laurence Olivier-Vivien Leigh stage production of “Romeo and Juliet.” Because of the stars’ movie commitments, some of the play’s rehearsals were held in Hollywood and Wilde was offered, and accepted, a Warner Bros. contract. Originally he was cast as a heavy or lead in B pictures, but his dark good looks and a change in studios (to 20th Century Fox) earned him feature parts in such pictures as “Lady With Red Hair” in 1940 and “High Sierra,” in 1941, where he played an apprentice hoodlum to Humphrey Bogart.
But it was as Chopin opposite Merle Oberon as George Sand that Wilde broke out of the pack. “When ‘A Song to Remember’ came along (1944), I begged for a test,” he told Hopper. “The powers that be wouldn’t consider it. ‘You’re too healthy’ (to play a tubercular musician).” Finally after three months of testing what Wilde described as “every other actor” in town, he was given the role and received an Oscar nomination. (One critic later said he grew paler and wanner with each reel while fingering an impressive sound track on a mute piano. The pianist off screen was Jose Iturbi.) But the success proved a Pyrrhic victory, for afterward producers came to consider him fit only for costume dramas.
He stayed in costume for “The Bandit of Sherwood Forest” and “Forever Amber,” appeared in such melodramas as “Roadhouse,” and “The Walls of Jericho” and then made the Big Top classic “The Greatest Show on Earth” for Cecil B. Demille in 1952. But the roles had taken on what seemed to Wilde to be a certain unsettling sameness, and he abandoned what was at the time a $150,000-a-picture career to become a writer-producer-director. He formed, with his second wife actress Jean Wallace (they had performed together in “Star of India”), Theodora Productions, and in they 1955 produced “Storm Fear.” The other pictures he starred in, produced or directed included “The Big Combo,” “The Devil’s Hairpin,” “Maracaibo,” “Sword of Lancelot,” “Beach Red” and “The Naked Prey,” in which he spent most of the 94-minute film wearing a loincloth and brandishing a spear as savages pursued him as they would a lion.
Despite the plot’s naivete, it was nominated for an Oscar for its script.
The “Los Angeles” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Original Cinema Quad Poster; Movie Poster; Film PosterTreasure Of The Golden Condor, poster, poster art, top l-r: Cornel Wilde, Constance Smith, 1953. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
His website. Fabian was one of the Philadelphia singers who burst onto the scene in the late 50’s and went to Hollywood to make movies. Frankie Avalon was the other. Fabian was born 1943. His real name is Fabio Forte and his father was a policeman. In the late 50’s he had a string of hits and won a contract with 20th Century Fox. His first film was “Hound Dog Man” in 1959 directed by Don Siegal. He went on to make “North to Alaska” where he cast improbably as the brother of the much older and very British Stewart Granger. John Wayne and Capucine also starred in this highly entertaing movie. Fabian went on to make “The Longest Day”, “Ride the Wild Surf” with Tab Hunter and in 1965 “Dear Brigitte” with James Stewart and Glynis Johns. He began then to concentrate on television but in 1970 was in a very good gangster movie “A Bullet for Pretty Boy” with Jocelyn Lane. Fabian still preforms in concert in the U.S.
North To Alaska, poster, Fabian, Stewart Granger, John Wayne, Ernie Kovacs, Capucine, 1960. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Gary Lockwood was born in Van Nuys, California in 1937. He made is film acting debut in a bit part in the Western “Warlock” in 1959 with Richard Widmark and Dorothy Malone. In 1961 he, Brett Halsey and Barry Coe starred in the TV series “Follow the Sun”. He made two films with Elvis Presley, “Wild in the Country” in 1962 and the following year “It Happened at the World’s Fair”. He is perhaps best known for his role as Dr Frank Poole in “2001: A Space Oddity” in 1968. Interview with Gary Lockwood & Sally Kellerman here.
Mildred Dunnock seemed to be very quiet almost birdlike in her characterisations. She could at times be very moving as in her performance as Elvis Presley’s mother in “Love Me Tender” and as Mother Christophre the strict but kindly nun in chagre of the novices in “The Nun’s Story”. She was born in 1901 in Baltimore. She made her film debut in 1945 repeating her stage role in “The Corn is Green”. Her other films include “Peyton Place”, “Baby Doll” and the woman in a wheelchair who is pushec down the stairs by the giggling psychopath Richard Widmark in the classic film noir “Kiss of Death”. Mildred Dunnock died in 1991 at the ago of 90. Her obituary in the “New York Times” can be accessed here.
TCM Overview:
When Mildred Dunnock quietly demanded that “Attention must be paid” to Willy Loman in the 1949 Broadway premiere of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” opposite Lee J. Cobb, her indelible performance as Linda Loman became the embodiment of Miller’s idealized mother figure: loving, supportive mother and wife and the family’s moral balast. She repeated her landmark performance in the disappointing 1951 Laslo Benedek film opposite Fredric March (winning her first Oscar nomination) and again opposite Cobb in the brilliant 1966 TV adaptation (directed by Alex Segal) and for the Caedmon recording in the 1960s.
Formerly a schoolteacher, Dunnock made her stage debut in 1932 and won acclaim on Broadway in 1940 as a Welsh teacher in Emlyn Williams’ autobiographical drama “The Corn Is Green”, a role she reprised in her film debut in 1945. Although she is memorable in the brief role as the wheelchair bound victim whom Richard Widmark pushes down the stairs in “Kiss of Death” (1948), Dunnock gave her finest performances as seemingly genteel spinster types who display surprising inner strength and sympathy.
Dunnock studied acting with Actors Studio founders Lee Strasberg, Robert Lewis and Elia Kazan and after directing her in “Death of a Saleman”, Kazan repeatedly cast her as a figure of quiet moral authority in such films as “Viva Zapata!” (1952) and as Aunt Rose Comfort in Tennessee Williams’ “Baby Doll” (1956) for which she received her second supporting actress Oscar nomination.
Evidently a favorite actress of Williams as well as Kazan, she continued her association with the playwright on Broadway, creating the role of Big Mama in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1955), appearing in “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore” (1963) and starring in a 1966 regional revival of “The Glass Menagerie”. She was also featured as Aunt Nonnie in Richard Brooks’ 1962 film adaptation of “Sweet Bird of Youth”.
Although she didn’t begin acting professionally until she was in her 30s, Dunnock maintained an active career as a superb, understated character actress on stage, screen and TV. Her other notable films include Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Trouble With Harry” (1955), “Love Me Tender” (1956), “Peyton Place” (1957), “Butterfield 8” (1960) and John Ford’s last feature “Seven Women” (1966).
Sigrid GurieAlgiers, poster, Hedy Lamarr, Charles Boyer, Sigrid Gurie on window card, 1938. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Sigrid Gurie was born in Brooklyn in 1911. When she was a child her parents returned to their homeland of Norway where she was educated. She came to Hollywood in 1936. Two years later she was cast opposite Gary Cooper in “The Adventures of Marco Polo”. Her other films include “Algiers”, “Three Faces West” and in 1944 “Voice in the Wind”. Her last film was made in Norway in 1948. She died in Mexico City at the age of 58 in 1969. Webpage on Sigrid Gurie can be accessed here.
“Wikipedia” entry:
She was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Bjørulf Knutson Haukelid (1878–1944) and Sigrid Johanne Christophersen (1877–1969).Her father was a civil engineer who worked for the New York City Subway from 1902 to 1912. Since Sigrid Gurie and her twin brotherKnut Haukelid were born in America, the twins held dual Norwegian-American citizenship. In 1914 the family returned to Norway. Sigrid Gurie subsequently grew up in Oslo and was educated in Norway, Sweden, and Belgium.[ In 1935 Gurie married Thomas Stewart of California; she filed for divorce in 1938.[ Her brother became a noted member of the Norwegian resistance movementduring World War II.
In 1936, Gurie arrived in Hollywood. Film magnateSam Goldwyn reportedly took credit for discovering her, promoting his discovery as “the new Garbo” and billed her as “the siren of the fjords”. When the press discovered Gurie’s birth in Flatbush, Goldwyn then claimed “the greatest hoax in movie history.” She starred as Kokashin, daughter of Kublai Khan, in the 1938 production of The Adventures of Marco Polo, and went on to give worthwhile performances in such films as Algiers (1938), Three Faces West (1940) and Voice in the Wind (1944). She had a minor role in the classic Norwegian film Kampen om tungtvannet (1948). The movie was based principally on the book Skis Against the Atom which was written by her brother.
The above “Wikipedia” entry can also be accessed online here.
Richard Cromwell was born in Long Beach, California in 1910. He was one of the leading young men in films in Hollywood in the 1930’s. His film break through came at the age of twenty in “Tol’able David” in 1930.Among his other film credits are “This Day and Age”, “Life Begins at 40”, “Poppy”, “Storm over Bengal”, “The Lives of a Bengal Lancer”, “Jezebel” He stopped making films in the late 1940’s and established a ceramics business with great success. Richard Cromwell died in 1960.
An article on LA Frontiers.com:
“I became a movie actor so quickly it made my head swim.” —Richard CromwellHe was young. He was handsome. He was a movie star. He was gay. He was an artist. He died at age 50. He is forgotten today. And, oh yes, he was Angela Lansbury’s first husband.
Tol’able David, lobbycard, Joan Peers, Richard Cromwell, 1930. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Richard Cromwell was a beauty. He became a full-fledged movie star in 1930 at the age of 20 in the sound remake of the classicTol’able David. He was suddenly famous, even being invited to the White House to meet President Hoover. Good parts followed inEmma with Oscar winner Marie Dressler. In 1935, he had his biggest hit co-starring with Gary Cooper in Lives of a Bengal Lancer. Playing the weakling son of the commander, Cromwell was great, suffering torture at the hands of the infidels. Pauline Kael later wrote about the film, “Part of the picture’s romantic charge is its underlying homeoeroticism.” The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and was Cromwell’s favorite role.At the end of the decade, Richard Cromwell had a good role in Jezebel playing Henry Fonda’s younger brother. This great William Wyler study of a selfish Southern belle not only won Bette Davis her second Academy Award but beat Gone with the Wind to the screen. In 1939, Richard Cromwell had his last great part in John Ford’sYoung Mr. Lincoln playing the young man defended by Henry Fonda in this classic film. Cromwell also was on Broadway in the military drama So Proudly We Hail. His performance received raves: “a striking portrayal” and “astonishing characterization” from the New York press.
In various books Richard Cromwell is said to have carried on a discreet affair with Howard Hughes and was reported to be a frequent visitor at gay director George Cukor’s Sunday “boys only nights.” After serving two years in the Coast Guard, Richard Cromwell came home to find his career pretty much over.In 1945, Hollywood was shocked when a 35-year-old Richard Cromwell married a 19-year-old Angela Lansbury. The marriage only lasted six months, and later Lansbury wrote that it was “a mistake. … I was too young at 19. The marriage shouldn’t have happened.”
Richard Cromwell
According to several sources, Lansbury did not know that Richard Cromwell was gay. This was a bit bizarre, as she had just made her film debut and received her first Oscar nomination for George Cukor’s Gaslight. Apparently Cukor did not discuss his Sunday night pool parties on the set!
In a 2012 interview, Lansbury stated that she came home one day and found Cromwell’s note: “I’m sorry darling, I can’t go on.” She stated, “I knew how to act mature, but I wasn’t. … It was a terrible shock. I was devastated. But once I got over the shock, I said, ‘Alright, then I’m going to take charge of my life and see that I never hurt like this again.'” Lansbury and Cromwell did remain close friends for the rest of his short life.
Richard Cromwell was also an accomplished artist, and his ceramics (especially masks of the stars) were extremely popular. His art deco wall paintings of Adam and Eve still grace the mezzanine of the Pantages Theater in Hollywood.Until his death in 1960 from liver cancer, Richard Cromwell was a respected artist and a popular social figure in the gay community. He was also slated for a film comeback. Cromwell’s artwork has lasted longer than his film career, but for those of us who love old movies and gay actors during their prime, there is no one cuter than Richard Cromwell in Jezebel or Young Mr. Lincolnor being tortured in Lives of a Bengal Lancer.
Richard Cromwell
In his great study of movie stars of the ’30s, author James Robert Parrish summed up the charm and persona of Richard Cromwell: “To the screen of the 1930s, Cromwell brought a refreshing vitality. … His histrionic energy could extend to an imaginative and persuasive recreation of the joys and torments of youth and adolescence.” And Leslie Halliwell in The Filmgoer’s Companion succinctly called Richard Cromwell “the gentle hero of early sound films.”
Robert Culp was born in 1930 in Oakland, California. He made his mark on television with the hit series “I Spy”. He hade a number of feature films including “Bob and Carol, Ted and Alice”, “Hannie Caulder” and “The Pelican Brief”. Robert Culp was at one time ,married to the exquisite actress France Nuyen. He died in 2010 at the age of 79.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Tall, slim and exceedingly good-looking American leading man Robert Culp, a former cartoonist in his teen years, appeared off-Broadway in the 1950s before settling into polished, clean-cut film leads and “other man” supports a decade later. Hitting the popular TV boards in the hip, racially ground-breaking espionage program I Spy (1965), he made a slick (but never smarmy), sardonic name for himself during his over five-decade career with his sly humor, casual banter and tongue-and-cheek sexiness. Though he had the requisite looks and smooth, manly appeal (not to mention acting talent) for superstardom, a cool but cynical and somewhat detached persona may have prevented him from attaining it full-out.
He was born Robert Martin Culp on August 16, 1930, in Oakland California. The son of attorney Crozie Culp and his wife, Bethel Collins, who was employed at a Berkeley chemical company, he offset his only-child loneliness by playacting in local theater productions. Culp also showed a talent for art while young and earned money as a cartoonist for Bay Area magazines and newspapers in high school, but the fascination with becoming an actor proved much stronger. He attended Berkeley High School and graduated in 1947. The athletically-inclined Culp dominated at track and field events and, as a result, earned athletic scholarships to six different universities. He selected the relatively minor College of the Pacific in Stockton, California primarily because of its active theater department. Transferring to various other colleges of higher learning (including San Francisco State in 1949), he never earned a degree. After performing in some theatre in the San Francisco area, he moved to Seattle and then New York in 1951.
Studying under famed teacher Herbert Berghof and supporting himself during this time teaching speech and phonetics, Bob eventually found work on the theatre scene, making his 1963 Broadway debut (as Robert M. Culp) in “The Prescott Proposals” with Katharine Cornell. He eventually returned to Broadway with “Diary of a Scoundrel” starring Blanche Yurka and Roddy McDowall in 1956 and with a strong role in “A Clearing in the Woods” (alongside Kim Stanley) a year later. He earned an off-Broadway Obie Award for his very fine work in “He Who Gets Slapped” in 1956, and also appeared in the plays “Daily Life” and “Easter”.
Gracing a few live-TV dramas during his New York days, he returned to his native California for his first major TV role. It was an auspicious one as post-Civil War Texas Ranger “Hoby Gilman” in the western series Trackdown (1957). He earned widespread attention in the series that based many of its stories from actual Texas Ranger files, and the show itself received the official approval not only of the Rangers themselves but by the State of Texas. The series led to a CBS spin-off of its own: Wanted: Dead or Alive(1958), which made a TV star out of Steve McQueen.
From there, Culp guested on a number of series dramas: Bonanza (1959), The Rifleman(1958), Rawhide (1959), The Detectives (1959), Ben Casey (1961), The Outer Limits(1963), Naked City (1958) and Combat! (1962). He also starred in the two-part Disney family-styled program “Sammy the Way Out Seal” (1962), which was subsequently released as a feature in Europe. He and Patricia Barry played the hapless parents of precocious Bill Mumy and Michael McGreevey whose “adopted” pet animal unleashes major chaos in their suburban neighborhood.
During this time, Bob began to seek lead and supporting work in films. Despite his co-starring with Cliff Robertson, Rod Taylor and the very perky Jane Fonda (as her straight-laced boyfriend) in the sparkling Broadway-based sexcapade Sunday in New York (1963); playing Robertson’s naval mate in the popular John F. Kennedy biopic PT 109 (1963); recreating the legendary “Wild Bill” Hickok in the western tale The Raiders (1963); and heading up the adventurous cast of the Ivan Tors‘ African yarn Rhino! (1964) (which included Harry Guardino and the very fetching British import Shirley Eaton), Culp wasn’t able to make a serious dent in the medium.
TV remained his best arena and gave him more lucrative offers, professionally. It rewarded him quite richly in 1965 with the debonair series lead “Kelly Robinson”, a jet-setting, pro-circuit tennis player who leads a double life as an international secret agent in I Spy (1965). Running three seasons, Culp co-starred with fellow secret agent Bill Cosby, who, as “Alexander Scott”, posed as Culp’s tennis trainer. The role was tailor-made for the suave, Ivy-League-looking actor. He looked effortlessly cool posing in sunglasses amid the posh continental settings and remained handsomely unflinching in the face of danger. It was the first U.S. prime-time network drama to feature an African-American actor in a full-out starring role and the relationship between the two meshed perfectly and charismatically on screen. Both were nominated for acting Emmys in all three of its seasons, with Cosby coming out the victor each time. Filmed on location in such cities as Hong Kong, Acapulco and Tokyo, Culp also wrote and directed certain episodes of the show He also met his third wife, the gorgeous Eurasian actress France Nuyen, while on the set. They married in 1967 but divorced three years later. At this stage, the actor already had four children (by second wife, sometime actress Nancy Ashe).
Following the series’ demise, Culp took on perhaps his most-famous and controversial film role as Natalie Wood‘s husband “Bob” in the titillating but ultimately teasing “flower power” era film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), with Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon as the other-half couple who examine the late 60s “free love” idea of wife-swapping. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards (two went to supporting actors Gould and Cannon). The movie did not reignite Culp’s popularity on the large screen, but it did lead to his rather strange pairing with buxom Raquel Welch in the violent-edged westernHannie Caulder (1971) and a reunion with his I Spy (1965) pal Cosby in the far-more entertaining Hickey & Boggs (1972), which reestablished their great tongue-in-cheek rapport as two weary-eyed private eyes. Culp also directed the film while his real-life wife, actress Sheila Sullivan, played his screen wife as well.
Bob returned to series TV as stern “CIA Chief Bill Maxwell”, whose job was to protect handsome Robert Redford lookalike William Katt, who starred as an ersatz The Greatest American Hero (1981). The show lasted three seasons. Other series guest spots, both comedic and dramatic, included Hotel (1983), Highway to Heaven (1984), The Golden Girls (1985) and an episode of his old buddy’s show The Cosby Show (1984). He was also a guest murderer in three of the “Columbo” episodes. Although he was relegated to appearing in such film fodder as Turk 182! (1985), Big Bad Mama II (1987) and Pucker Up and Bark Like a Dog (1989), the 1990s offered him one of his best film roles in years as the ill-fated President in the Denzel Washington/Julia Roberts political thriller The Pelican Brief (1993). A year later, he again reteamed with Cosby in the TV-movie I Spy Returns (1994).
Culp became very active in the 1960s Civil Rights movement and later became a prominent face in local civic causes, joining in a lawsuit to cease construction of an elephant exhibit at the Los Angeles Zoo and accusing officials there of mistreatment. In the long run, however, the construction was given the green light. Culp also married a fifth time to Candace Faulkner and, by her, had daughter Samantha Culp in 1982. Older sons Jason Culp (born 1961) and Joseph Culp (born 1963) became actors, while another son, Joshua Culp (born 1958), entered the visual effects field. Daughter Rachel, an outré clothing designer for rock stars, was born in 1964.
In later years, Culp could be seen occasionally as Ray Romano‘s father-in-law on the hugely popular Everybody Loves Raymond (1996). His last film, the family drama The Assignment (2010), was unreleased at the time of his death. On March 24, 2010, the 79-year-old Culp collapsed from an apparent heart attack while walking near the lower entrance to Runyon Canyon Park, a popular hiking area in the Hollywood Hills. Found by a hiker, Culp was transported to a nearby hospital where he died from the head injuries he sustained in the fall. Five grandchildren also survive.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Article on Robert Culp in “Tina Aumont’s Eyes” website:
With his lean frame and serious manner, handsome lead actor Robert Culp often played authority figures, both good and bad. He may not have made the big time, but he did have a run of interesting projects in the Seventies, and although he is best remembered for his television work, he did appear in some first-rate cult features.
Born in California on August 16th 1930, Culp made his screen debut in 1953 and after a clutch of television appearances he won the role of Texas Ranger Hoby Gilman, in the CBS western series ‘Trackdown’, which ran for 2 seasons from 1957 until 1959. Culp’s movie debut came in 1963 when he played Jane Fonda’s ex in the romantic comedy ‘Sunday in New York’, and the western ‘The Raiders’, as ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok. Culp would become a household name in 1965 when he took the role of secret agent Kelly Robinson in the popular series ‘I Spy’, which ran until 1968.
The following year Culp had a lead role when he played Natalie Wood’s husband in Paul Mazursky’s infidelity comedy ‘Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice’ (’69). A commercial hit it remains Robert’s best known performance. Another cult part came a couple of years later when he played bounty hunter Thomas Luther Price in the quirky Raquel Welch western ‘Hannie Caulder’ (’71). A violent and sometimes comical revenge flick, it contains perhaps my favourite Culp performance.
Robert is also remembered fondly for his appearances in three ‘Columbo’ mysteries from 1971, 72 & 73, each time playing the ‘special guest murderer’. He did appear in another episode in 1990, but this time he was the father of a murderer and not the culprit himself. In 1972 Culp directed himself in the rather bleak detective flick ‘Hickey & Boggs’. Playing a private eye in search of a missing girl, it saw him reunited with his ‘I Spy’ co-star Bill Cosby. After making the bizarre horror ‘A Name for Evil’ (’73) with Samantha Eggar, Culp co-starred with Eli Wallach in the excellent TV movie ‘A Cold Night’s Death’ (’73), an atmospheric chiller with a neat twist ending.
1976 was a good year for Robert, with appearances in some interesting and entertaining projects. There was the Lee Marvin sleeper ‘The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday’, Bob Clark’s interesting drama ‘Breaking Point’, with Bo Svenson, and the pretty good thriller ‘Sky Riders’, playing an industrialist whose wife (Susannah York) and children are kidnapped by terrorists, and it’s up to York’s ex-husband James Coburn to rescue them. A small role in another James Coburn film followed with Joseph Sargent’s entertaining science-fiction drama ‘Goldengirl’ (’79), which had Susan Anton as a hormone injected Olympic hopeful.
Robert fell out of fashion in the 1980’s and so concentrated largely on television work. From 1981 until 1983 he played FBI Agent Bill Maxwell in the series ‘The Greatest American Hero’, which had William Katt as a schoolteacher turned superhero. A return to movies came in 1987 when he co-starred with Angie Dickinson in the exploitation sequel ‘Big Bad Mama II’. A video rental favourite followed with the Michael Biehn sci-fi thriller ‘Timebomb’ (’91), a watchable actioner with a good supporting cast. Robert’s later jobs included much voice-over work including some for popular video games, although he did have a good recurring role in the TV hit ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’. Culp’s final appearance came in the 2010 Adam Baldwin feature ‘The Assignment’, a decent coming-of-age drama with an air of mystery.
Married five times, Robert Culp died in California on March 24th 2010, aged 79. A reliable and very talented actor, he always took his roles seriously no matter how big or small the part. He lent gravitas to some lesser films and worked well in both comedy and drama. The mark of a true professional.
Favourite Movie: Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice Favourite Performance: Hannie Caulder
The above article can also be accessed onliue here.
Perry King was born in 1948 in Ohio. He made his film debut in 1972 in “Slaughterhouse -Five”. Two years later he garnered critical acclaim for his performance with Sylvester Stalloine in “The Lords of Flatbush”. His other credits on film including “The Possession of Joel Delaney” with Shirley MacLaine, “Mandingo”, “Andy Warhol’s Bad”, “The Choirboys” and more recently “The Day After Tomorrow. He has appeared in most of the major popular television programmes over the past thirty years.
TCM Overview:
With his handsome, square-jawed blond looks and patrician bearing, Perry King quickly landed leading roles in films and TV in the 1970s and 80s.
Original Cinema Quad Poster; Movie Poster; Film Poster
As he aged, he gracefully made the transition to character roles, generally cast as villains or father figures. The grandson of famed book editor Maxwell Perkins, King attended prep school, earned an Ivy League education at Yale and received his acting training under John Houseman at Juilliard.
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
After debuting on stage in the replacement cast of the Tony-winning drama “Child’s Play” in 1971, he quickly landed supporting roles in two 1972 features: “Slaughterhouse-Five” cast him as the son of the main character while he was Shirley MacLaine’s troubled younger brother in “The Possession of Joel Delaney.”
After creating a strong impression as the leather-jacketed suitor of Susan Blakely in “The Lords of Flatbush” (1974), he pursued a different career path from his co-stars Sylvester Stallone and Henry Winkler, spending most of the 70s and 80s as the romantic lead in countless TV-movies and miniseries like “Captains and the Kings” (NBC, 1976) and “The Last Convertible” (NBC, 1979). He eventually earned semi-stardom as co-star (with Joe Penney) of the adventure series “Riptide” (NBC, 1984-86).
It must have been galling for the actor John Gavin, who has died aged 86, to have often been called “the poor man’s Rock Hudson”, but comparisons between the two actors were inevitable. Both were tall, dark, well built and handsome romantic leads. Both starred in glossy Ross Hunter productions during the 1950s and 60s, at the peaks of their careers. Moreover, both actors were favourites of the director Douglas Sirk, who gave them some of their finest roles. But Gavin could also claim to have worked with Alfred Hitchcock(in Psycho) and Stanley Kubrick (in Spartacus), which Hudson never did.
Both these films came out in 1960, when Gavin was at the height of his fame. In Spartacus, he played a muscular, youthful Julius Caesar, wary of opposition. In Psycho, he was Sam Loomis, boyfriend of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), and in the film’s voyeuristic opening sequence was seen bare-chested with Leigh in her underwear on the bed in a cheap hotel room, in one of the sexiest scenes Gavin ever played.
He later appears at the Bates motel, a virile character in vast contrast to Anthony Perkins’s twisted Norman Bates. Hitchcock is said to have referred to Gavin as “the stiff” for his rather placid approach to acting.
He was born in Los Angeles as Juan Vincent Apablasa. His father, Juan Vincent Sr, was of Chilean descent and his mother, Delia Diana Pablos, a Mexican-born aristocrat. When Juan was two, his parents divorced and his mother married Herald Ray Golenor, who adopted Juan and changed his name to John. After attending Catholic schools in California, he studied at Stanford University, and then served in the US navy as an intelligence officer during the Korean war.
With this experience, he was made an adviser on the second world war film Battle Stations (1955), and Bryan Foy, its producer, encouraged him to take a screen test, although he had never previously considered acting. He was given a contract by Universal, which already had Hudson and George Nader, similar types, on their roster of stars. In 1956, billed as John Gilmore, he appeared in a Rory Calhoun western, Raw Edge, then, under the name John Golenor, as a small-time criminal in the prison drama Behind the High Wall. He was tough and unshaven (a rare sight in his clean-cut career) as a trigger-happy gunman in the western Quantez (1957), by now credited as John Gavin.
Sirk’s downbeat anti-war drama A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), based on the book by Erich Maria Remarque and set on the Eastern Front and in Nazi Germany, was Gavin’s breakthrough to stardom. Universal decided to cast two relative unknowns, Gavin and the Swiss actor Liselotte Pulver, in the leads, as a young German officer and his lover. Sirk, who had wanted Paul Newman originally, came to admire Gavin. “He was fresh, good looking, not pretty though, earnest,” the director explained. “And he had this little dilettante quality I figured would be quite the thing for the lead in this picture.”
Sirk cast him again in the superior melodrama Imitation of Life (1959) as the love interest of a glamorous film and stage star, Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), and also the object of desire of her teenage daughter (Sandra Dee). Gavin is effective in a pivotal role as a photographer expressing his patriarchal attitude to Lora’s desire for fame, asking her vainly to give up her acting career: “I want to give you a home, take care of you, what you’re after isn’t real.”
In 1960, Gavin appeared in four major pictures, most notably Psycho and Spartacus. He also played an American businessman opposite Sophia Lorenin A Breath of Scandal, a frothy romance. To wind up the year, the seemingly straight-as-a-die Gavin was seen in Midnight Lace comforting a distraught Doris Day, who had received death threats in a foggy London.
Gavin was cast with Dee again in two films the following year – Romanoff and Juliet, Peter Ustinov’s cold war satire, and Tammy Tell Me True, as a hunky speech professor. It was back to melodrama with the glossy Back Street (1961), in which Gavin, ideal as a soap opera cut-out hero, is an unhappily married man in love with a fashion designer (Susan Hayward). At the same time, although he had often been criticised for resembling a model in an upmarket men’s magazine, he began advertising Arrow shirts.
In Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), an amusing pastiche of the 1920s starring Julie Andrews, Gavin spoofed his own persona, as Millie’s self-absorbed boss. In 1971, he was signed to play James Bond in Diamonds are Forever after George Lazenby left the role, although Sean Connery was eventually tempted back with a highly lucrative offer.
After guest appearances in TV shows and starring roles in two series, Destry (1964) and Convoy (1965), in 1973 Gavin danced and sang on Broadway in the musical Seesaw. During its run he told an interviewer: “I used to play one-dimensional people. But looking backwards my work has been varied. Some people have said rich.”
In 1981 Gavin, a Republican, accepted the post of US ambassador to Mexico and served until 1986.
He is survived by his second wife, the actor Constance Towers, whom he married in 1974, and by two daughters, Cristina and Maria, from his first marriage, to the actor Cicely Evans, which ended in divorce.
• John Gavin (Juan Vincent Apablasa), actor and diplomat, born 8 April 1931; died 9 February 2018
