Millie Perkins was a very pretty model who won a starring part in her very first film. She was born in New Jersey in 1938. She began her career as a model and in her teens was featured on many magazine covers. She auditioned for and won the lead in the 1959 production of “The Diary of Anne Frank” directed by George Stevens. She acted opposite Elvis Presley in “Wild in the Country” and made a few independent movies with Jack Nicholson before he hit the big time. In the late 60’s she retired from the screen to raise her family. She returned to films in the 80’s somewhat more mature but as warm and wining as ever. She continues to play choice character parts such as playing Andy garcia’s mother in “Lost City”. She recently attended a retrospective showing of “The Diary of Anne Frank” with co-star Diane Baker and this can currently be viewed on utube.
TCM Overview:
She won one of the most coveted roles in Hollywood history–Anne Frank, the Jewish teen who still affirms the human spirit while hiding from the Nazis–in George Stevens’ “The Diary of Anne Frank” (1959). Yet the almost fragile, seemingly eternal dark-haired ingenue Millie Perkins failed to ignite with the audience to become a big movie star, partly because she projected an ordinary quality. There was so sense of urgency or recognition of the inherent dangers. After finding steady work in the 1960s, she seemed to disappear in the 70s, only to renew her career as a strong supporting player in the 80s and 90s.
Born in Passaic, New Jersey, the daughter of a sea captain, Perkins was a junior model and cover girl before winning the Anne Frank role. Her second film was “Wild in the Country” (1961) opposite Elvis Presley; it was de rigueur for every ingenue at the time to play opposite Elvis. (In a twist of fate, Perkins would later portray Gladys Presley, Elvis’ mother, in the short-lived 1990 ABC TV series, “Elvis”). She continued her leading lady career in such efforts as “Ensign Pulver” (1964) and even was alongside Jack Nicholson during the Roger Corman period in “Ride in the Whirlwind” (1965), which Nicholson also wrote and co-produced. But by “Wild in the Streets” (1968), it was apparent Perkins’ screen career was faltering. After her marriage to writer-director Robert Thom, Perkins seemingly retired, appearing only sporadically in film and on TV. It was not she was cast as Jon Voight’s ex-wife in “Table For Five” (1983), that Perkins re-emerged. She had retained her delicate, porcelain features–her face had hardly–but her body was sturdier, and she now projected far more personal power and strength. Now relegated to supporting parts, she played Sean Penn’s mother in “At Close Range” (1986), Charlie Sheen’s mom in “Wall Street” (1987) and the parent of murder victims in “The Chamber” (1996).
On the small screen, Perkins first appeared on TV in 1960 on a Bob Hope special, and made her episodic debut on an episode of “Wagon Train” the following year. When she resumed her career in the 80s, she worked with some regularity in character roles. Perkins played a rape victim in “A Gun in the House” (CBS, 1981) and went on to a number of portrayals as wives, married to drunk driver Don Murray in “License of Kill” (1984, CBS) and Ed Asner’s ailing Norman Cousins in “Anatomy of an Illness” (1984, CBS). Even in her first regular series role, she was typecast, playing the estranged spouse of William Devane on the CBS primetime soap “Knots Landing” during the 1983-84 season. Moving into maternal roles, she was cast as the penultimate mother, the Virgin Mary, in the NBC miniseries “A.D.” (1985) and was the parent of the young Patty Duke in 1990 biopic “Call Me Anna” (ABC). Six years later, she appeared alongside Duke as an Amish woman in “Harvest of Fire” (1996, CBS).
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
Loretta Young has had one of the longest cinema careers in the history of movies. She made her first film as a child in the silent “The Primrose Ring” in 1917 and her final movie was the television film “Lady in a Corner” in 1989. She was born in 1913 in Salt Lake City, Utah. In the 1930’s she made several films with Tyrone Power while both were under contract with 20th Century Fox. Among those films were “Cafe Metropole” and “Suez”. In the 1940’s she made such high profile movies as “The Bishop’s Wife” with Cary Grant and David Niven, “China” with Alan Ladd and “The Stranger” with Orson Welles and Edward G. Robinson. She won an Academy Award in 1947 for her performance in “The Farmer’s Daughter”. In the early fifties she became of the first major movie stars to go into television with the long running “Letter to Loretta”. One of her children is Tom Lewis a musician with the rock group Moby Grape. Loretta young was the widow of the movie fashion designer Jean Louis. She died in 2000 at the age of 87.
“The Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan on Loretta Young:
At the Academy Award ceremony of 1947, it seemed a foregone conclusion that Rosalind Russell would win the Oscar for best actress, for Mourning Becomes Electra. But when the envelope was opened, out came the name of Loretta Young. There was a gasp from the audience.
Nobody was more surprised than Young, then aged 35, as she made her way up to the stage. All she could say, on receiving the Oscar for her part in The Farmer’s Daughter, was “At long last”, an understandable comment from a woman who had been in the business so long: she made her first screen appearance at the age of four.
Young, who has died aged 87, was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and was three when her parents separated and her mother moved with her five children to Hollywood, where she opened a boarding house. A year later, the child appeared in The Only Way (1917), paid $3.50 a day for playing a patient weeping on the operating table. At eight, she and her siblings were Arab children in the Rudolph Valentino film, The Sheik (1921). Her three sisters had acting ambitions too; one became the actress Sally Blane.
At 14, while at convent school, Young returned to the screen in a supporting role in Naughty But Nice (1927). She got the part by default. Director Mervyn LeRoy wanted one of her sisters, but Young asked if she might do. This led to a contract with First National, and a change of name. The studio thought her real name, Gretchen, “sounded too Dutchy”, and changed it to Loretta, the favourite saint of the star of the film, Coleen Moore.
Young often took herself for her saintly namesake, irritating her colleagues. While working on The Stranger (1945), there was a scene where she was supposed to walk off with Orson Welles instead of attending Sunday morning mass. But as a devout Catholic, she refused to be shown on screen dodging church. Reluctantly, Wells changed it to another day of the week. She always objected to casts and crews swearing, and would set up a “swear box”, giving the fines to Catholic charities.
But saint she was not. She was married three times and divorced twice, and had affairs with, among others, George Brent, Clark Gable (said to be the father of her “adopted” daughter), David Niven, Joseph Mankiewicz, William Wellman and Spencer Tracy. Wellman and the married Tracy came to blows over her. Young and Tracy had played down-and-outs sharing a shanty in Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle (1933). Though it pre-dated the Hays Code, it was censored because of the character’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Of their off-screen romance, Young remarked, “Since Spence and I were both Catholic, and can never be married, we have agreed not to see each other any more.”
In 1930, she had eloped with co-star Grant Withers in imitation of the plot of the film Too Young To Marry. The marriage was annulled the following year, with Withers describing Young as “a steel butterfly”.
She was determinedly litigious. In 1966, she sued NBC for $2.5m when they used the introductions to her old TV shows, because the 1950s fashions dated her; she sued them again in 1972, and won $600,000 for their unlawful exhibition of her TV shows abroad. In 1969, she sued 20th Century-Fox for $54,000 because the movie Myra Breckinridge contained clips from her films, used without her permission. The studio cut them out.
Thirty years before, Young had left Fox, which had labelled her too difficult; then she found that few studios would meet her price of $150,000 a picture, and was advised to lower it. When Columbia mogul Harry Cohn refused to pay $300 for a dress she had bought for her role in Bedtime Story (1942), she made herself available only for night-time fittings, adding to the budget.
According to Robert Preston, her co-star in The Lady From Cheyenne, “she worked with a full-length mirror beside the camera. I didn’t know which Loretta to play to – the one in the mirror or the one that was with me.” Virginia Field, with whom she worked on Eternally Yours, commented, “She was and is the only actress I really dislike. She was sickeningly sweet, a pure phony. Her two faces sent me home angry and crying.”
But Young was physically exquisite, and had a genuine touch of class. She started as a Hollywood leading lady in Laugh Clown, Laugh (1928), playing a tightrope walker. The director Herbert Brenon, who had tested 48 other girls for the role, told Loretta, 15: “Your legs can be padded. Likewise your body. It’s your eyes that are getting you the part.”
She remembered that “my first director taught me not to take myself seriously, but to take my work seriously, never to be satisfied unless I was doing my very best.” She first did her best in minor melodramas and comedies. After acting a miscast Jean Harlow off the screen in Frank Capra’s Platinum Blonde (1931) at Columbia, she was given meatier parts at Warner Bros in Taxi and The Hatchet Man.
When she moved to Fox in 1934, the head of the studio, Darryl F Zanuck decided she was ideal for period pieces. She played Robert Clive’s wife in Clive Of India (1935) and the Empress Eugenie in Suez (1938). She was touching as the deaf girl in The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1938), in which her sisters also had parts.
The Farmer’s Daughter was originally intended for Ingrid Bergman. In a blonde wig and Swedish accent, Young was convincing as a headstrong farm girl whose homespun ideas earn her a seat in Congress in a contest against the man she loves. This was followed by the title roles in the comedy The Bishop’s Wife (1947) and as the 1820 bondswoman in Rachel And The Stranger (1948).
1720950 DeMille avec Loretta Young 1935; (add.info.: The Crusades de CecilB.DeMille avec Loretta Young
1935).
Her career petered out in the early 1950s, to be revived by her long-running TV show. Each 30-minute drama was introduced by the star. “After the audience has seen me well groomed, I can wear horrible clothes and ugly makeup or even a false nose, without anyone wondering whether I’ve aged overnight.”
After her divorce in 1968 from producer/writer Thomas Lewis, with whom she had two children, Young wrote a syndicated lonely-hearts column in Catholic newspapers, and worked as a consultant for the wedding dress firm, Brides Showcase International. At 81 she married costume designer Jean Louis (he did her famous TV show frocks), who died three years ago.
She devoted herself to Catholic charities in the 1980s, selling her Hollywood home and jewels to finance her work. “They are the luxuries of life … If selling a bracelet will help feed children, that is what I want to do,” she explained. She might have been making some progress at last towards her canonisation.
• Loretta (Gretchen Michaela) Young, actress, born January 6, 1913; died August 12 2000
“The Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Johnny Weissmuller will forever be remembered as the greatest film Tarzan of all. He was born in 1904 in Austria. He arrived with his parents in the U.S. the following year. At the age of ine he contracted polio and his doctors advised swimming as a form of therapy. He became so proficint at the sport that by his teens he had achieved a degree of fame as a sports athlete. He competed and won gold medals for swimming at the 1924 Paris and 1928 Amsterdam Olympic Games. In all he won five medals. He signed a contract with MGM to make the Tarzan films in 1932. The first film was “Tarzan the Ape Man” which featured Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane. It is generally recogn ised that they were the test of the many whoo played the roles. They made six Tarzan films together finishing with “Tarzan’s New York Adventure” in 1942. O’Sullivan left to rear her family and Weissmuller continued the films with Brenda Joyce as the new Jane. He also made a series Jungle Jim films. Johnny Weissmuller died in Mexico in 1984 at the age of 79.
His mini biography by Ed Stephen:
Johnny Weissmuller was born in Timisoara, Romania, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, though he would later claim to have been born in Windber, Pennsylvania, probably to ensure his eligibility to compete as part of the US Olympic team.
A sickly child, he took up swimming on the advice of a doctor. He grew to be a 6′ 3″, 190-pound champion athlete – undefeated winner of five Olympic gold medals, 67 world and 52 national titles, holder of every freestyle record from 100 yards to the half-mile. In his first picture, Glorifying the American Girl (1929), he appeared as an Adonis clad only in a fig leaf. After great success with a jungle movie, MGM head Louis B. Mayer, via Irving Thalberg, optioned two of Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ Tarzan stories. Cyril Hume, working on the adaptation of Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), noticed Weissmuller swimming in the pool at his hotel and suggested him for the part of Tarzan. Weissmuller was under contract to BVD to model underwear and swimsuits; MGM got him released by agreeing to pose many of its female stars in BVD swimsuits. The studio billed him as “the only man in Hollywood who’s natural in the flesh and can act without clothes”. The film was an immediate box-office and critical hit. Seeing that he was wildly popular with girls, the studio told him to divorce his wife and paid her $10,000 to agree to it. After 1942, however, MGM had used up its options; it dropped the Tarzan series and Weissmuller, too. He then moved to RKO and made six more Tarzans. After that he made 16 Jungle Jim (1948) programmers for Columbia. He retired from movies to run private business in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Ed Stephan <stephan@cc.wwu.edu>
This IMDB entry can also be accessed on lone here.
“Handsome and brawny, Rod Taylor has nevertheless played comedy with some finesse and drama with considerable sensitivity, but he seems less to want to act than to blaze away as the beefy, breezy hero of what “Variety” called ‘middle-budget action pictures. While the fan magazines refer to him as a ‘Tough Guy’, critics call him ‘underrated’. The public likes him. He says he waits for parts that interest him, then adds that he has little patience with stars who sits around demanding the earth in exchange for their services. If I get the rate for the job, I’m satisfied’. Perhaps this is what has kept him from reaching that area here all the best parts are offered around” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years” (1972).
Rod Taylor has enlivened many adventure films and is one of my favourite actors. He was born in Sydney, Australia in 1930. He began his career there on radio and in film. In 1954 he went to Hollywood and soon began appearing in supproting parts in such films as “Giant” and “The Catered Affair”. In 1960 he had his own series on U.S. television “Hong Kong” and had also the lead in the classic “The Time Machine”. In 1962 Alfred Hitchcok cast him in “The Birds” with Tippi Hedren and Suzanne Pleshette. In the 1960’s he was at the height of his fame with films such as “Sunday in New York” with Jane Fonda. “Fate is the Hunter”, “Young Cassidy” with Maggie Smith and Julie Christie and “Hotel” with Merle Oberon. In 1970 he starred in an excellent TV series “Bearcats”. He has continued working regularly over the years but he is under appreciated and his career is ready for reevaluation. It was great to see Quentin Tarentino cast him in “Inglorious Bastards” as Winston Churchill. Sadly he passed away in 2015. To view the Rod Taylor website, please click here.
“Daily Telegraph” obituary:
Rod Taylor, who has died aged 84, was an early pioneer in what would much later become a flood of talented actors from Australia taking on leading roles in Hollywood.
By the time Alfred Hitchcock cast him opposite Tippi Hedren in The Birds (1963), Taylor had long cast off his Aussie vowels for an American twang as he played a ruggedly handsome hero convincingly menaced, along with the rest of the human cast, by a homicidal avian horde.
It was the sort of role that would have been played in Hitchcock’s earlier films by Cary Grant or James Stewart; but the director admitted that because of the necessarily inflated special effects budget he could not on this occasion afford a bigger star. The screenwriter on the film, Evan Hunter, amusingly described Taylor’s performance as “so full of machismo, you’d expect him to have a steer thrown over his shoulder”.
Not that Taylor was exactly a stranger to Hollywood when Hitchcock picked him for what will probably remain the actor’s most enduring credit across a long career in film and on television. Three years earlier he had played H G Wells’s intrepid time-traveller in The Time Machine (1960) – a film remade more than 40 years later with Guy Pearce. It was the first of many leading roles which had clearly beckoned ever since Taylor had first been signed to the traditional seven-year “slave” contract by MGM in 1956.
As a result of that contract he was given small roles in some extremely high-profile studio productions such as Giant (1956), Raintree County (1957) and Separate Tables (1958). But with star-laden casts that included the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Rock Hudson, David Niven, Wendy Hiller and Deborah Kerr, his “supporting” contributions were effectively invisible. However, after The Time Machine and The Birds, as well as a warm-hearted “voice” performance as Pongo in Disney’s animated canine classic One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), Taylor was to become swiftly translated to “above the title” status.
The son of a steel contractor and a children’s book writer, Rodney Sturt Taylor was born in Sydney on January 11 1930 and attended Parramatta High School and East Sydney Technical and Fine Arts College. He trained first as a commercial artist before deciding on a career as an actor after seeing various productions, notably Richard III, during Sir Laurence Olivier’s trailblazing Old Vic tour of Australia in 1948.
Work in radio – he played both the intrepid British air ace Douglas Bader in an adaptation of Reach for the Sky and Tarzan – and on stage followed. He then landed his first film roles, as an American in the people-smuggling thriller King of the Coral Sea (1954), and, in the same year, portraying Israel Hands in Long John Silver, a sequel to Treasure Island, the film that had launched a thousand impressions of the peg-legged, be-parroted pirate played by eye-rolling Robert Newton.
It was, however, Taylor’s prowess on the airwaves that led him to quit his native Australia in the 1950s, after winning a radio talent contest. Part of the prize was an air ticket to Los Angeles and London. Taylor stopped off in LA on the first leg – and never really left.
Once he had cemented his stardom in Hollywood, his roles – mostly of the virile, action-man variety – came thick and fast, notably in three films directed by Jack Cardiff, the British film-maker better known for his great cinematography. There was Young Cassidy (1965), as the aspiring Irish playwright Sean O’Casey; The Liquidator (1966), one of the earliest and best of the James Bond spoofs; and The Mercenaries (1968), a bloodily violent adaptation of Wilbur Smith’s Congo-set bestseller, Dark of the Sun, with Taylor as a hard-nosed but well-meaning major caught up in the heart of darkness.
Later in his career Taylor occasionally returned to Australia to make home-grown films such as The Picture Show Man (1977), as a travelling projectionist in the pre-talkies 1920s, and Welcome to Woop Woop (1997), chewing up the scenery as a foul-mouthed, small-town tyrant in the Outback. In these Taylor was able, unusually, to play in his native accent.
He had grabbed that rare opportunity with both hands in Anthony Asquith’s comedy-drama The V.I.P.s (1963), opposite Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Louis Jordan and Margaret Rutherford, as an Australian tycoon giving his secretly adoring assistant Maggie Smith, in a scene-stealing early screen role, a hard time as he tries to seal a last-minute deal.
Urged out of retirement by Quentin Tarantino in 2009, his final showy cameo was, almost unrecognisably, as a cigar-smoking Winston Churchill in Tarantino’s revisionist Second World War thriller romp Inglourious Basterds.
Taylor was thrice married. He is survived by a daughter from his second marriage, Felicia, a reporter for CNN, and by his third wife, Carol, whom he married in 1980.
Rod Taylor, born January 11 1930, died January 7 2015
His IMDB mini biography:
Suave and handsome Australian actor who came to Hollywood in the 1950s, and built himself up from a supporting actor into taking the lead in several well-remembered movies. Arguably his most fondly remembered role was that as George (Herbert George Wells), the inventor, in George Pal‘s spectacular The Time Machine (1960). As the movie finished with George, and his best friend Filby Alan Young seemingly parting forever, both actors were brought back together in 1993 to film a 30 minute epilogue to the original movie! Taylor’s virile, matinée idol looks also assisted him in scoring the lead of Mitch Brenner in Alfred Hitchcock‘s creepy thriller The Birds (1963), the role of Jane Fonda‘s love interest in Sunday in New York (1963), the title role in John Ford‘s biopic of Irish playwright Sean O’Casey in Young Cassidy (1965), and a co-starring role in The Train Robbers (1973) with John Wayne. Taylor also appeared as Bette Davis future son-in-law in the well-received film The Catered Affair (1956). He also gave a sterling performance as the German-American Nazi Major trying to fool James Garner in 36 Hours(1965). Later Taylor made many westerns and action movies during the 1960s and 1970s; however, none of them were much better than “B pictures” and failed to push his star to the next level. Aditionally, Taylor was cast as the lead in several TV series including Bearcats! (1971), Masquerade (1983), and Outlaws (1986); however, none of them truly ignited viewer interest, and they were canceled after only one or two seasons. Most fans would agree that Rod Taylor’s last great role was in the wonderful Australian film The Picture Show Man (1977), about a traveling side show bringing “moving pictures” to remote towns in the Australian outback.
ALEXIS SMITH was an aloof, glacial beauty who was typecast as such. She was soignee, smart, sophisticated, hair swept up (it was a shock to see it falling around her shoulders), with diamante-encrusted collars. She was a leading star who never engaged much popular attention – how could she, in those roles? – or excited the critics. She was a Warner Bros workhorse.
In the Thirties, Warners was fuelled by the star-power of James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart came up about the same time, at the end of the decade, which startled Jack L. Warner, because they had both been under contract for a long while. Also, because they were rebellious, he never liked or understood either of them, but he felt it safer to go with Bette than with Bogey. Basically, Warners stopped making pictures for men (Cagney and Robinson had both left) and the roles that Davis turned down could be taken by Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Ann Sheridan or Ida Lupino. These were all strong women. So was Alexis Smith, but she was last in the pecking order.
Any Number Can Play, poster, US poster art, from left: Alexis Smith, Clark Gable, Audrey Totter, 1949. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
She first made an impact, if a mild one, as the society lady who goaded and taunted Errol Flynn throughout Gentleman Jim (1942), a romanticised life of the prize-fighter James Corbett. In The Constant Nymph (1943), stinking-rich again, she prevented the artless Charles Boyer from realising that he really loves the naive Joan Fontaine.
In Rhapsody in Blue (1945) she was a slinky Manhattanite who confused George Gershwin (Robert Alda) no end when he had troubles as to whether he should be writing concerti or Broadway songs; in Night and Day (1946) she reprised the role, in a way, as Mrs Cole Porter, incessantly fed-up because Cole (Cary Grant) cannot stop burning the midnight oil. She was Marian Halcombe in the surprisingly effective version of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1948).
Like all the best stars, there was no one else quite like her, but she did not ‘give’ very much. Her haughtiness should have contrasted well with the cynicism of Bogart – Conflict (1945), The Two Mrs Carrolls (1947) – or the devil-may-care Flynn – San Antonio (1945), Montana (1950) – but you merely admired her coiffure and tailoring. She was loaned to MGM to star opposite Clark Gable in Any Number Can Play and, her Warner contract finished, she went to Paramount to play the stuffy fiancee Bing Crosby drops for a bubbly Jane Wyman in Frank Capra’s Here Comes the Groom (1951).
In the decade that followed she played occasional second leads, returning to Warners to support Paul Newman in The Young Philadelphians (1959). This was Alexis Smith? Stunning as ever – but playing with a warmth never even hinted at before.
She retired, happily married to Craig Stevens, an erstwhile star of ‘B’ movies, but she returned to show business in Stephen Sondheim’s Follies in 1971. This was Alexis Smith? This scintillating redhead, kicking her legs up and having a ball?
She had auditioned for the role, one of the show-business has-beens which comprised most of the cast, and it reflected her rather aristocratic past: but she broke out, revealing glee, radiance, a joie de vivre. She sent her old self up, gloriously, and got a Tony award, the New York Critics’ award and a Time cover.
She played Kirk Douglas’s wife in Jacqueline Susann’s Once Is Not Enough (1974), ‘the world’s fifth richest woman’ and a lesbian. Four years later she played a blue-blooded horse breeder in Martin Ritt’s pleasing Casey’s Shadow, starring Walter Matthau, with more style and warmth than she showed in all her Warner Bros movies put together.
These two qualities were wonderfully in evidence when she sang ‘Nobody’s Chasing Me’ in the tribute to Cole Porter in London two years ago.
Edmund Purdom was born in 1926 in Welwyn Garden City. In 1946 he joined the Northampton Repertory Company. In 1951 he came to the U.S. to appear on Broadway with Laurence Oliver and Vivien Leigh in “Anthony & Cleopatra”. He was spotted by a talent scout and brought to Hollywood and cast as one of the ship’s officers in “Titanic” by 20th Century Fox in 1952. He was then cast to replace Mario Lanza in “The Student Prince” opposite Ann Blyth. Lanz’s singing voice was used in the film. For a brief period Edmund Purdom was cast in big budget MGM films such as “The Prodigal” and “The Egyptian”. However by the mid 50’s his U.S. career seemed to be waning and he went to Italy where he made many films over the coming decades. He died in 2009 at the age of 82.
It was the sad fate of the actor Edmund Purdom, who has died aged 84, that the best known of his films, The Student Prince (1954), is remembered more for the star who wasn’t in it. After the temperamental tenor Mario Lanza was fired from the film, the non-singing unknown Purdom replaced him. Luckily for MGM, Lanza had recorded the songs for the CinemaScope production before shooting began. Thus his voice is heard bellowing incongruously out of the slender frame of Purdom.
Purdom’s reputation as a surrogate is underlined by the fact that he got his first chance of stardom when he replaced Marlon Brando in The Egyptian (1954) after Brando wisely cried off, preferring to play Napoleon in Desirée instead. In addition, Purdom was married to Linda Christian, better known as Tyrone Power’s first wife.
Purdom was born in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, the son of a London drama critic. After being educated by Jesuits at St Ignatius College and by Benedictines at Downside School, he made his acting debut in repertory in 1945, aged 21. Six years later, he appeared with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh on Broadway in alternating performances of Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra, playing respectively a Persian and Thyreus, the unfortunate messenger of Octavius Caesar who gets whipped for his pains.
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The roles gave Purdom an early taste for wearing togas and sandals as he was to do for a great deal of his career. One of his first film roles was in Joseph Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953) as Strato, the young servant of Brutus (James Mason), who holds the sword out for his master to run on to at the climax.
Purdom, with his ex-ballerina wife, Anita Phillips, had gone to Hollywood in 1952 to test for My Cousin Rachel, but Richard Burton got the part. “I was so broke,” Purdom recalled, “that I couldn’t afford to pay the doctor’s bill when my daughter was born. I had no money for bus fare. I had to walk from studio to studio looking for a job. Once we were evicted for not paying the rent.”
Then after two bit parts, he was cast in the title role in The Egyptian, the brilliant physician in the service of the Pharaoh in 18th-dynasty Egypt. Purdom’s striking dark good looks and dimpled cheeks made up for his rather wooden personality and inability to pronounce his ‘r’s, but not even Brando could have known how to react to dialogue such as: “You have bold eyes for the son of a cheesemaker.”
At MGM, Purdom was given a huge build-up by the studio for The Student Prince after Mario Lanza’s drugs-alcohol-weight problems got the better of him. Purdom made a handsome and likeable Prince Karl of Karlsburg in love with a barmaid (Ann Blyth) in the Heidelberg of 1894 in Sigmund Romberg’s rather dated operetta. Apart from the (mismatched) singing of Lanza, the film’s highlight for today’s audiences is a group of students interlocking arms and warbling: “Come boys, let’s all be gay boys.”
After Vincente Minnelli gave up his attempts to film, with Purdom and Pier Angeli, Green Mansions, WH Hudson’s South American fantasy novel Purdom went into another musical, Athena (1954). This told of an athletic vegetarian family, of which one of seven daughters, Jane Powell, falls for stuffy, meat-eating weakling Purdom, when she could have had Steve “Mr World” Reeves.
More significant was the fact that the Mexican-born beauty Christian, wife of Power, played his snooty fiancée. Christian had been at the same school as Purdom’s wife, and the Powers and the Purdoms became good friends, even going on holidays together. But sexual jealousy broke up the once cosy foursome and, in 1955, Christian divorced Power, citing mental cruelty. Purdom’s name was not mentioned in court. Meanwhile, his short-lived Hollywood stardom was, inevitably, ending. He was bearded to disguise his pretty-boy looks as a highwayman in Restoration England in The King’s Thief (1955), a rather pallid swashbuckler, but the nail in the coffin was The Prodigal (1955). This risible spectacle, based on the Old Testament parable, had Purdom as a young Hebrew leaving his rural life for the big city where he falls under the spell of a beautiful scantily clad pagan priestess (Lana Turner, a former lover of Power’s) who induces him to squander his money and betray his faith. A prodigal flop.
After Purdom’s MGM contract was terminated, Christian found no shortage of millionaires to help keep him in the manner to which he was accustomed. But it was not until 1962 that they were married. The marriage lasted little more than a year.
By the end of the 1950s, like a number of stars for whom Hollywood work had dried up – including Reeves – Purdom went to Italy and into rubbishy costume melodramas such as Herod the Great (1959), The Cossacks, Salambo (both 1960), Suleiman the Conqueror and Nefertiti, Queen of the Nile (both 1961). This stream of Italian films was interrupted by some British television work and, in 1964, two films made in England, The Beauty Jungle, revealing the seedier side of beauty contests, and The Yellow Rolls-Royce. In the latter Rex Harrison, an English peer, finds his French wife (Jeanne Moreau) in the embrace of caddish Purdom in the vehicle of the title.
Then it was back to his home in Rome and a stream of eurotrash horror movies, such as Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks (1974). Purdom directed and starred as a police inspector in a British stalk-and-slash picture called Don’t Open Till Christmas (1984) which features a psychopath hunting down and killing streetcorner santas. Apparently he saw his mother murdered by a Father Christmas when he was a kid.
Purdom, who kept his looks and sense of humour into old age, is survived by his fourth wife, Vivienne, a photographer, and two daughters by Phillips.
• Edmund Purdom, actor, born 19 December 1924; died 1 January 2009
To view “The Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan of Edmund Purdom, also please click here.
Sal MineoSal MineoEscape From Zahrain, poster, US poster, bottom from left: Sal Mineo, Jack Warden, Yul Brynner, Madlyn Rhue, 1962. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)Original Cinema Quad Poster; Movie Poster; Film PosterOne Sheet; Movie Poster; Film Poster; Cinema Poster;
Sal Mineo was born in the Bronx in New York in 1939. As a child he acted on Broadway in”The Rose Tattoo” and “The King and I” with Yul Brynner. In 1955 he was terrific in “Rebel Without a Cause” with James Dean and Natalie Wood and the following year he played a young Mexican in “Giant”. Throughout the late 50’s and early 60’s he was a major played on film. Career highlights include “Exodus” and “The Gene Krupa Story”. His film career seemed to wane by the late 60’s and he turned to the stage and television. He was a victim of a savage attack and died as a result in California in 1976. A website dedicated to Sal Mineo can be accessed here.
Salvatore (Sal) Mineo Jr. was born to Josephine and Sal Sr. (a casket maker), who emigrated to the U.S. from Sicily. His siblings were Michael, Victor and Sarina. Sal was thrown out of parochial school and, by age eight, was a member of a street gang in a tough Bronx neighborhood. His mother enrolled him in dancing school and, after being arrested for robbery at age ten, he was given a choice of juvenile confinement or professional acting school.
Expanding his repertoire, Mineo returned to the theatre to direct and star in the play “Fortune and Men’s Eyes” with successful runs in both New York and Los Angeles. In the late 1960s and 1970s he continued to work steadily in supporting roles on TV and in film, including Dr. Milo in Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) and Harry O (1973). In 1975 he returned to the stage in the San Francisco hit production of “P.S. Your Cat Is Dead”. Preparing to open the play in Los Angeles in 1976 with Keir Dullea, he returned home from rehearsal the evening of February 12th when he was attacked and stabbed to death by a stranger. A drifter named Lionel Ray Williams was arrested for the crime and, after trial in 1979, convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the murder. Although taken away far too soon, the memory of Sal Mineo continues to live on through the large body of TV and film work that he left behind.
William Holden in 1956, according to ‘Picturegoer’ was ‘Dependable, sturdy, cornerstone of solid box-office winners. Likeable, man-in-the-street face and splendid physique, backed by consistent performances, rather than electrifying talent, mark his success. He said he did not enjoy acting for hich reason, said Billy Wilder, he was fond of Holden. He was never hammy. Wilder stated ‘ He is the ideal motion-picture actor. He is beyond acting.’
You never doubt or question what he is. James Stewart is a prime example of that sort of actor. So is Gary Cooper. There is no crap about them. Yes, but Stewart and Cooper retained their individuality as they aged. Having little to start with, Holden had only a certain weary integrity when his youthful charm had gone.” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International years”. (1972).
William Holden was born in 1918 in O’Fallon, Illinois. His first film role was “Golden Boy” with Barbara Stanwyck in 1939. His career was curtailed by World War Two in which he served with the United States Army Air Force. His career took off in a major way in 1950 when Billy Wilder cast him in “Sunset Boulevard” with Gloria Swanson. He had a string of box office successes including “Picnic”, “The Bridges of Toko-Ri”, “Stalag 17”, “Love Is a Many Splendoured Thing”. The above photograph is from “The Wolrd of Suzie Wong” which was started with France Nuyen (see seperate blog on Ms Nuyen). Ultimately the film was completed with Nancy Kwan. Holden did not age well and in his later films like “Network” he looks much older than his actual age. He died in 1981 at the age of 63.
TCM Biography:
ew Hollywood actors have conveyed spiritual and physical pain with the charismatic authority of William Holden. This scion of a wealthy family in the chemical business first registered in films as a clean-cut, affably handsome lead in the 1940s and he matured into more rough and tumble roles. Along the way his earnest qualities yielded to cynicism, perhaps most notably for writer-director Billy Wilder in “Sunset Boulevard” (1950) and in his Oscar-winning performance in “Stalag 17” (1953). Over the years, the rigors of life and drink re-sculpted his features into an expressive leather that gave testimony to the ravages of the moral ambiguity that had characterized many of his best roles. This quality may have been most eloquently expressed by his central performance as the desperado cowboy Pike in Sam Peckinpah’s violent autumnal Western classic, “The Wild Bunch” (1969).
Holden became a star with his first substantial feature role as the boxer-violinist in “Golden Boy” (1939), a part that cast him opposite screen siren Barbara Stanwyck, who would later become his mentor and life-long booster. Holden was soon getting cast in fairly innocuous roles: the boy-next-door; the quintessential All-American in such films as “Arizona” as the amiable lover of a determined corruption buster Jean Arthur; the idealistic small town hero in “Our Town”; a hell-raising Joe College in “Those Were the Days” (all 1940). He was pitted against Glenn Ford, rivaling for the affections of Claire Trevor, in “Texas” (1941), tried to heat up an ice-cool Dorothy Lamour in the musical “The Fleet’s In” (1942), and was a poor boy who gets married in “Meet The Stewarts” (1942).
Holden joined the Air Force, fought in WWII and returned to the screen with a more complex personality. He starred in several films which, though unremarkable, were box-office favorites (“Dear Ruth” 1947 and “Rachel and the Stranger” 1948) before being cast against type to play a psycho killer in the low-budget noir “The Dark Past” (1949). 1950 proved to be Holden’s watershed year: he starred in two career landmarks, “Born Yesterday” as Judy Holliday’s culture tutor-cum-lover, and Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard”, as Norma Desmond’s hack screenwriter gigolo. With the latter portrayal, Holden’s screen persona began to move into the gray areas that were further explored in later roles like that of the pessimistic POW suspected of being a Nazi informer in Wilder’s “Stalag 17” (1953), a role which garnered Holden a Best Actor Oscar. Wilder discovered and expertly exploited the dichotomy between the actor’s wholesome All-American appearance and his potential for conveying moral darkness. Holden went on to become a leading box-office star between 1954-58 and reigned as the top-grosser in 1956. Notable roles of this period included playing an ambitious company man in “Executive Suite”, a ne’er-do-well playboy in Wilder’s “Sabrina” (both 1954) and the drifter who breaks Kim Novak’s heart in “Picnic” (1956).
Holden remained active for nearly three more decades, showing up in a pivotal role in “The Bridge on the River Kwai” (1957). While many of his 60s credits were routine and worse (e.g. “Paris When It Sizzles” 1963), the decade also boasted some undeniable triumphs, including his portrayal of a double agent in the fine thriller “The Counterfeit Traitor” (1962) and a career highlight in Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” (1969). The 70s found Holden in a number of mediocre action and adventure vehicles (“Towering Inferno” 1974, “Ashanti” 1979, “The Earthling” 1980) as well as a few winners including the highly acclaimed “Network” (1976), as a conscientious TV executive, and Wilder’s sadly underrated “Fedora” (1978), as a producer trying to encourage a Garbo-esque star to come out of self-imposed retirement. Fairly late in his career, Holden made his TV debut, winning an Emmy for his work in the detective miniseries about the L.A. police department “The Blue Knights” (1973). His final film performance came in Blake Edwards’ caustically comic look at Hollywood, “S.O.B.” (1981).
Holden died from an accidental fall in his apartment in 1981.
Jody McCrea was born in 1934 in Roswell, New Mexico. He was the eldest son of actors Frances Dee and Joel McCrea. He had a striking resemblance to his father. He made his television debut in a series with is father called “Wichita Town” in 1959. His films include “The Young Land” and “Law of the Lawless”. In the sixties he achieved culd following for his roles in some Beach movies. In 1968 he starred in a biker movie “The Glory Stompers”. His last film was in 1970, “Cry Blood Apache”. He retired and became a rancher like his father previously had done. Jody McCrea died in 2009 at the age of 74.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Just as strapping (6′ 3″) and amiably handsome as his actor/father, Joel McCrea, Jody was born Joel Dee McCrea on September 6, 1934 in Los Angeles, California, and bore a strong resemblance to his famous namesake. The oldest of three children, his mother was actress Frances Dee and his two younger brothers are David McCrea and Peter McCrea. Jody had little interest in the entertainment field until his early 20s when he began appearing in minor film roles. Making his unbilled debut in Lucy Gallant (1955), he was afforded the opportunity of first working with his dad in the films The First Texan(1956) and Trooper Hook (1957). He moved up to co-star status in the short-lived TV western series Wichita Town (1959), which again starred his dad.
From there, he found employment in other western and action films including Lafayette Escadrille (1958), All Hands on Deck (1961), The Broken Land (1962) and Young Guns of Texas (1962). However, he is most fondly remembered for his recurring comic role as the dim-eyed, carefree lug “Deadhead” (later named “Bonehead”) in a number of the frivolous “Beach Party” flicks, starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, which were released by American International Pictures between the years 1963 and 1965. As a trivia note, Jody was the only cast member other than Robert Cummings who could really surf.
Jody appeared on TV over the years as well and kept his genial personality an attractive trademark. Although he secured a footing in the business, McCrea found it difficult to escape the shadow of his father, especially in western drama, but comedy served as a welcome individualistic approach. Nevertheless, outside of performing occasionally in community theater over the next few years, McCrea decided to retire from acting altogether in 1970 after appearing in and producing the film Cry Blood, Apache (1970). For the remaining decades, he became a cattle rancher in New Mexico. His wife of 20 years, Dusty McCrea (aka Dusty Iron Wing), who appeared as the Indian “Dancing Moon” in the film Windwalker (1980), died of complications from diabetes in 1996. Jody passed away in 2009 of cardiac arrest at his Roswell ranch.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.n
Jody McCrea’s “Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan:
The actor Joel McCrea and his son Jody were both tall (6ft 3in), well-built and ruggedly handsome. But Jody, who has died of a heart attack aged 74, found it difficult to fill his famous father’s shoes. Joel McCrea had a long and varied acting career, working with many of Hollywood’s leading directors. Jody’s career, during which he made many westerns in the shadow of his father, was more limited, though he came into his own in six of the seven Beach Party movies in the 1960s.
Almost all of the series, made for the youth market, starred Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, with slow-drawling McCrea in the supporting cast and ancient Hollywood stars on their last legs as guest stars. The plots usually involved a group of young, scantily clad surfers defending their right to continue their love-ins and gyrations to surf music without interference from killjoy “squares”.
McCrea played a character variously called Deadhead, Big Lunk and Bonehead, who could always be counted on to say something idiotic, much to the despair of his comparatively brighter companions. “It took me four pictures to figure it out. The kids liked Deadhead because they felt superior to me, to him,” McCrea said many years later.
Jody was born and brought up in Los Angeles, where he was surrounded by showbusiness friends of his father and mother, Frances Dee, a star in the 1930s and 40s, who met Joel on the film The Silver Cord (1933). His ambition was to become a rancher like his father, rather than follow him into films. Nevertheless, he studied drama at the University of California, in Los Angeles, before making his official screen debut as a soldier in The First Texan (1956), starring Joel as Sam Houston. Two more westerns with his father followed, Trooper Hook and Gunsight Ridge (both 1957), in which he was hardly noticeable.
He was more visible in William Wellman’s Lafayette Escadrille as a young first world war flying ace in a team with Tab Hunter and Clint Eastwood, and as a bully in the heated, small-town drama The Restless Years (both 1958). On television, he played deputy to his father’s town marshal in Wichita Town (1959). It lasted for only four episodes. Thereafter, he started making a career for himself, helped by his father’s semi-retirement. But inter-generational comparisons were unavoidable, especially in Young Guns of Texas (1962), which had the gimmick of casting Jody McCrea with two other Hollywood juniors who failed to make a mark on acting, James Mitchum (son of Robert) and Alana Ladd (daughter of Alan).
Then Beach Party (1963) came to the rescue. Directed by William Asher, it concerned an anthropology professor, Robert Cummings, studying the “mating habits” of the teenage denizens of Malibu beach. In the next two years, there followed Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Pajama Party, Beach Blanket Bingo and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.
Though his dimwitted beach bum character was gradually given some love scenes, McCrea was pleased to abandon the series’ typecasting by making two biker pictures, The Girls from Thunder Strip (1966) and The Glory Stompers (1968), the latter featuring him and Dennis Hopper as heads of rival motorcycle gangs.
His final film was the substandard western Cry Blood, Apache (1970), in which his father played a cameo. He retired from acting the same year, when he married Dusty Iron Wing, a Native American woman. The couple ran a cattle and elk ranch in Hondo, New Mexico. She died in 1996. McCrea is survived by his two younger brothers, David and Peter, and two stepchildren.
• Jody (Joel Dee) McCrea, actor, born 6 September 1934; died 4 April 2009
For “The Guardian” Obituary on Jody McCrea, please also click here.
