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Jeanne Crain

Jeanne Crain TCM Overview

TCM Overview:

Jeanne Crain was a beautiful American actress who was one of the most popular stars from the mid 1940’s until the late 1950’s. She was born in California in 1925. In 1943 she had a small part in the film “The Gangs All Here”. The following year she had great success with the beautifully photographed “Home in Indiana”. She starred in many of the important films of the period including “State Fair”, “Leave Her to Heaven”, “The Fan”, “Pinky”, “A Letter to Three Wives” and “Cheaper by the Dozen”. After her marriage, she put her career on hold to raise her seven children. She resumed acting thereafter. Jeanne Crain died in 2003. She is to my mind a very underappreciated actress and it is well worthwhile seeking out her movies.

TCM Overview:

With her natural beauty and unaffected charm, the young Jeanne Crain was a breath of fresh air in 20th Century-Fox films of the 1940s. Her looks and manner became somewhat brittle as she matured, but she remained a top leading lady at Fox into the early ’50s. The high point of her career was an Oscar® nomination as Best Actress for Pinky(1949), in which she plays a light-skinned black woman who can “pass” for white. Although director Eliza Kazan later wrote that he found her emotionally impassive as an actress, her performance remains a movingone.

She was born Elizabeth Jeanne Crain in Barstow, California on May 25, 1925, and grew up in Los Angeles. She studied drama at UCLA and signed with Fox at the age of 18, making her debut in an uncredited bit in The Gang’s All Here(1943). She first attracted favorable attention as Lon McCallister’s tomboyish love interest in Home in Indiana (1944), a horseracing story that became a big hit. After achieving star billing she had an even bigger success in State Fair(1945), a musical with an original Rodgers and Hammerstein score. Dubbed by Louanne Hogan (who would regularly provide her singing voice in Fox films), Crain performed “It Might as Well Be Spring” and other songs.

She was the “good girl” to Gene Tierney’s evil schemer in another hit, the classic melodrama Leave Her to Heaven (1945), and was dubbed again by Hogan in the Jerome Kern musical Centennial Summer (1946). She gave an especially engaging performance in Apartment for Peggy (1948) as the pregnant bride of an ex-GI played by William Holden. 1949 was a good year for Crain; in addition to Pinky she acted in A Letter to Three Wives, with Oscar®-winning script and direction by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and played Lady Windermere in The Fan, an adaptation of a comedy of manners by Oscar Wilde, with a script co-written by no less than Dorothy Parker.

Among Crain’s 23 films under her Fox contract, other notable entries included the nostalgic comedy Cheaper by the Dozen (1950) and its sequel, Belles on Their Toes (1952), in both of which she is the eldest daughter of a very large family; People Will Talk (1951), a thoughtful comedy of manners in which she is again directed by Mankiewicz and sparkles opposite Cary Grant; and The Model and the Marriage Broker (1951), in which she is at her most beautiful and, under the sensitive direction of George Cukor, enjoys charming byplay with outstanding character actress Thelma Ritter. Crain’s final film before leaving the studio was Vicki (1953), a remake of the 1941 mystery I Wake Up Screaming.

Crain’s follow-up films included two Westerns, Universal’s Man Without a Star (1955), opposite Kirk Douglas; and MGM’s The Fastest Gun Alive (1956), opposite Glenn Ford; and a pair of 1955 musicals, the well-received The Second Greatest Sex for Universal and the poorly received Gentlemen Marry Brunettes for United Artists. In the MGM biopicThe Joker Is Wild (1957), she is one of the women in the life of singer/comedian Joe E. Lewis as played by Frank Sinatra. Crain’s final feature film was Skyjacked (1972). She fleshed out her later career on television, landing the choice role of Daisy Buchanan in a Playhouse 90 production of The Great Gatsby before settling in to make appearances in various series. Sprinkled in were a couple of minor film epics made in Europe. Crain was married to Paul Brinkman and they had seven children together. She died a few months after Brinkman’s death in 2003.

Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Guardian”:

n the glory days of the studio system, movie stars were identified with one particular studio, becoming part of their company’s particular style and aura. From 1943 to 1953, Jeanne Crain, who has died aged 78, was a typical 20th Century Fox girl – charming, youthful and pretty. Fox, which had a smaller roster of stars than the other major studios, kept their contract players busy, and Crain made an average of two films a year, most of them bright and breezy.

Born in California of Irish-Catholic parents, Jeanne (pronounced Jean) Crain won the Miss Long Beach beauty contest in her teens, going on to become Camera Girl of 1942. But she had acting ambitions and, while still at school, took a screen test for Orson Welles for the role of Lucy Morgan in The Magnificent Ambersons. In the event, the slightly older and more experienced Anne Baxter got the part, subsequently pipping her to the post twice more, in All About Eve (1950) and One Desire (1955).

Crain’s problem was that she was mainly perceived at Fox as just a comely juvenile, lacking gravitas, and as a result was also passed over in favour of Susan Hayward in With A Song In My Heart (1952) and of Jean Simmons in The Robe (1953).

Occasionally, however, she did get a chance to reveal her ability, as in Elia Kazan’s Pinky (1949), playing a girl who has passed for white for years until forced to admit her roots. Kazan later commented: “It stirred up all kinds of hell, but it was a phoney picture. If I made it now, I’d never try to make the Fox back-lot look like the south or use Jeanne Crain, the blandest person I ever worked with.” Actually, Crain, who was Oscar nominated, was very affecting, though a black actor should have been cast, if that had been possible at the time.

Crain made her first, albeit brief, appearance on screen posing in a bathing costume in Busby Berkeley’s garish The Gang’s All Here (1943), before being introduced properly to audiences in Home In Indiana (1944), in which she portrayed a horsy girl who rides beautifully but is considered a tomboy.

She played a rather gutsy soldier’s wife in Otto Preminger’s In The Meantime Darling (1944), but became a real star in the Rogers and Hammerstein musical State Fair (1945), giving a delightfully fresh performance as the love-struck daughter of an Iowa farming family. Although her songs were dubbed by Luanne Hogan (who also dubbed her in subsequent musicals), a record of the hit songs, It’s A Grand Night For Singing and It Might As Well Be Spring, was issued under Crain’s name.

Crain’s rise to stardom coincided with her marriage to Paul Brinkman, a businessman and former small-time actor, who went on to become a top executive with an arms manufacturing company. Her mother opposed the marriage, and the two became estranged for some time thereafter. Crain had the first of their seven children, five of whom survive her, in 1947.

Previously, she had appeared in three successful movies. She was jealous Gene Tierney’s sweet foster sister in the lurid Leave Her To Heaven (1945), and Linda Darnell’s love rival sister in Preminger’s Centennial Summer (1946), in which she “sang” Jerome Kern melodies. Best of all was the engaging period musical Margie (1946), which showed Crain at the top of her form as a schoolgirl (though she was actually 21) with a crush on the French teacher and a tendency to lose her bloomers.

She then alternated between playing young wives or teenage daughters in a believable and ingratiating manner. She was married to William Holden in Apartment For Peggy (1948), and to bandleader Dan Dailey in You Were Meant For Me (1948). For Mankiewicz, in the stringent social comedy A Letter To Three Wives (1949), she was a shy newlywed, and, in People Will Talk (1951), she was the pregnant medical student whom gynaecologist Cary Grant marries to prevent her from committing suicide or having an abortion.

In both Cheaper By The Dozen (1950), and its sequel Belles On Their Toes (1952), Crain was the oldest of Myrna Loy’s 12 children, though she did the latter unwillingly after Zanuck refused to loan her out to Paramount for Carrie, opposite Laurence Olivier. There was another disappointment when she had to turn down a lead in Three Coins In The Fountain because her husband refused to let her go on location to Rome – though, in an attempt to compensate, he built his wife a studio in which to enjoy her hobby of painting.

Prior to asking Fox to release her in 1953, she made George Cukor’s enchanting The Model And The Marriage Broker (1952), and she was touching as the poverty-stricken young wife of Farley Granger in The Gift Of The Magi episode from O Henry’s Full House (1952).

Away from Fox, and now in her 30s, Crain made a conscious decision to break with her dewy-eyed juvenile past, dying her hair red and taking on gutsier and sexier roles. Thus she appeared in westerns as bold ranchers, matching Kirk Douglas in Man Without A Star (1955) and Alan Ladd in Guns Of The Timberland (1962), and as sophisticated women, as in The Joker Is Wild (1957), playing nightclub comedian Frank Sinatra’s wife.

As the Hollywood studio system broke up, she followed many other American stars to Italy, to appear in hokum costume epics. She was one of the Roman procurator’s lovers in Pontius Pilate (1961), and a languid Nefertiti in Queen Of The Nile (1962). Meanwhile, her marriage was going through turbulent times, but although Crain, a practising Catholic, sued Brinkman for divorce in 1956, the decree never became final and they got back together again.

Among her last films, when the pickings became slim, were Hots Rods To Hell (1967), in which she and Dana Andrews were parents terrified by young people with souped-up cars; Skyjacked (1972), as a passenger on a plane piloted by Charlton Heston; and The Night God Screamed (1973), playing a court witness hunted by a murderous hooded figure after her testimony had sent other defendants to death row. It was a long way from those well-scrubbed roles in guileless Fox movies of the 1940s.

· Jeanne Crain, actor, born May 25 1925; died December 14 2003

Her “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed here.

She was the “good girl” to Gene Tierney’s evil schemer in another hit, the classic melodrama Leave Her to Heaven(1945), and was dubbed again by Hogan in the Jerome Kern musical Centennial Summer (1946). She gave an especially engaging performance in Apartment for Peggy (1948) as the pregnant bride of an ex-GI played by William Holden. 1949 was a good year for Crain; in addition to Pinky she acted in A Letter to Three Wives, with Oscar®-winning script and direction by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and played Lady Windermere in The Fan, an adaptation of a comedy of manners by Oscar Wilde, with a script co-written by no less than Dorothy Parker.

Jeanne Crain obituary in “The Guardian” in 2003.

Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Guardian”:

MAN WITHOUT A STAR, top left, Kirk Douglas; bottom from left, Kirk Douglas, Jeanne Crain, 1955

· Jeanne Crain, actor, born May 25 1925; died December 14 2003

Her “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed here.

Kerwin Mathews obituary in “The Guardian” in 2007.

Kerwin Mathews is best known as the hero in such cult classics as “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad” in 1958, “The Three Worlds of Gulliver” in 1960 and “Jack the Giant Killer” three years later. He was born in Seattle in 1926. he originally trained to be a teacher. He served in the Army Air Corp during World War Two. In 1954 he was awarded a Columbia film contract and was given a major role in his first film “Five Against the House” with Kim Novak and Guy Madison. Two of hsi major films are “The Garment Jungle” with Gia Scala and “The Devil at 4 O’Clock”.He retired from acting in 1978. Kerwin Mathews died in 2007 at the age of 81.

The Guardian obituary by Ronald Bergan:

It is inevitable that the screen actor Kerwin Mathews, who has died aged 81, should be forever associated with children’s fantasy films, using stop-motion special effects, almost as if he were an animated figure himself. But the handsome Mathews was flesh and blood, and worked hard to make the rather bland heroes, whether Sinbad, Gulliver or Jack the Giant Killer, more than one-dimensional, acting realistically with the many animated creatures he had to confront.

Mathews had to interact with nothing facing him, because all the monsters were added later. “His eyes were always concentrated on the unseen subject,” explained legendary animator Ray Harryhausen, who created the spectacular stop-motion effects for two of Mathews’ biggest successes, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960). In the former, Mathews battled a 30-foot cyclops, a giant roc and its two-headed chick, a fire-spitting dragon and, most famously, a warrior skeleton, with whom he has a climactic sword fight. However, in most of his films, he also had to fight against banal dialogue, often winning the battle by bringing conviction to the roles.

Born in Seattle, Mathews moved with his mother to Wisconsin after his parents’ divorce. Later he was inspired when “a kind high-school teacher put me in a play, and changed my life”. But it was only after serving two years in the wartime Army Air Force, and a spell teaching English, that he started acting professionally at the Pasadena Playhouse, where he was spotted by an agent, who got him a seven-year Columbia Pictures contract. Mathews’s screen debut was in Phil Karlson’s heist drama, 5 Against the House (1955), as the smartest of five students who plan to rob a casino in Reno.

This was followed by a leading role in The Garment Jungle (1957), one of his rare sorties into Hollywood realism. In this potent look at the US clothing business, he played the son of Lee J Cobb’s corrupt union official.But The 7th Voyage of Sinbad turned Mathews into an action hero in episodic narratives with interchangeable plots in which the hero sets sail to rescue a beautiful girl, although it was usually the animation that rescued the films. Harryhausen’s Super Dynamation filled The 3 Worlds of Gulliver with tiny (Lilliputian) and huge (Brobdingnagian) people, and Jack the Giant Killer (1962) had a dragon, courtesy of Projects Unlimited.

In the Hammer swashbuckler Pirates of Blood River (1961), Mathews falls into the clutches of Christopher Lee, and in the French-made Shadow of Evil he is a James Bond wannabe named only OSS 117. More ludicrous was Battle Beneath the Earth (1968), a red-baiting thriller in which the Chinese have built a series of tunnels under the US stocked with H-bombs. It is up to Mathews, leading a small army, to eliminate the threat.

Although Mathews felt that none of his films offered him a good acting role, he was most pleased with his performance as Johann Strauss Jnr in Walt Disney’s two-part television biopic, The Waltz King (1963). He spent much of the latter part of his career in bad horror movies such as Octaman (1971), as an ecologist who comes across an upright octopus (a man in a rubber suit) who goes around slapping people to death.

In 1961, he met Tom Nicoll, a British display manager at Harvey Nichols, who became his partner for the next 46 years. In 1978, having retired from acting, he and Nicoll, who survives him, moved to San Francisco, where they ran an antique business.

· Kerwin Mathews, actor, born January 8 1926; died July 5 2007

His Guardian obituary can be accessed online here.

Robert Lansing was born in San Diego, California in 1928. His major acting breakthrough cane in 1961 with his role in the television series “87th Precinct” with Gena Rowlands. His other television series included “12 O’Clock High” and “The Man Who Never Was” with Dana Wynter. His films include “A Gathering of Eagles” and the cult favourite “Empire of the Ants” with Joan Collins in 1978. Robert Lansing died aged 66 in 1994. A website dedicated to Robert Lansing here.

Robert Lansing Wikipedia.

Robert Lansing was born in 1928 was an American stage, film, and television actor. Lansing’s motion picture roles included A Gathering of Eagles with Rock Hudson and Under the Yum Yum Tree opposite Jack Lemmon. On television, he appeared in episodes of such hits as Star Trek, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone and Murder, She Wrote. Lansing is probably best remembered as the authoritarian Brig. Gen. Frank Savage in 12 O’Clock High (1964), the television drama series about World War II bomber pilots.

Born in San Diego, California, Lansing reportedly took his acting surname from the state capital of Michigan. As a young actor in New York City, he was hired to join a stock company in Michigan but was told he would first have to join the Actors’ Equity Association. Equity would not allow him to join as “Robert Brown” because another actor was using that name. Because the stock company was based in Lansing, this became the actor’s new surname.^[4]

Lansing served two years in the United States Army and was stationed in Osaka, Japan, where he worked at Armed Forces Radio.

During his long career, which spanned five decades, Lansing appeared in 245 episodes of 73 television series, 11 TV movies, and 19 motion pictures. ^[5] He gained early acting experience at the Actors Studio.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, he worked under his real name Bob Brown as a radio announcer at WANE in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He also was active as an actor in a Fort Wayne theater group. Lansing first appeared on Broadway in the play Stalag 17(1951) directed by José Ferrer, replacing Mark Roberts in the role of Dunbar at the 48th Street Theater. His rugged good looks, commanding stage presence and stentorian voice earned him continuing stage work and throughout his film career he periodically returned to the New York stage, making his last such appearance in 1991.

José Ferrer asked Lansing to perform in a series of plays at the New York City Center, including as a Cadet of Gascoyne in Cyrano de Bergerac and as the Marquis of Dorset in Richard III. He appeared in Tennessee Williams‘ Suddenly, Last Summer and Eugene O’Neill‘s The Great God Brown in the title role. Other stage performances included roles in Charley’s Aunt, Elmer Rice‘s Cue for Passion, The Lovers, and The Cut of the Axe. Off-Broadway, his work included The Father, the “Sea Plays” of Eugene O’Neill and two one-man shows, Damien and The Disciple of Discontent.

On film, Lansing starred in the 1959 science fiction film 4D Man. He also starred as marine biologist Hank Donner in the 1966 nature drama film Namu, the Killer Whale, which featured one of the first orcas ever displayed in captivity. His other films included Under the Yum Yum Tree, A Gathering of Eagles, The Grissom Gang, Bittersweet Love, Scalpel (a.k.a. False Face), Empire of the Ants and The Nest.

Lansing first appeared on TV on Kraft Television Theatre in 1956.^[3] In the 1961–1962 television season, Lansing was cast as Detective Steve Carella on NBC‘s 87th Precinct series, based on the Ed McBain detective novels. His costars were Gena Rowlands, Ron Harper, Gregory Walcott, and Norman Fell. In 1961, he played the outlaw Frank Dalton in a two-part episode of NBC’s Outlaws with Barton MacLane. Also in 1961, he played Jed Trask, a troubled shooter, in the Bonanza episode, “Cutthroat Junction.”^[10] He played Doc Hollidayin an episode of NBC’s The Tall Man, with Barry Sullivan and Clu Gulager. Lansing would star alongside Clu Gulager again in a 1965 episode of NBC’s The Virginian TV series titled “The Brothers”. Again on NBC, in 1966, Lansing guest-starred as General Custer in a three episode segment of Branded called “Call to Glory”.

Robert Lansing is probably best known for his role as Brigadier General Frank Savage in the first season of the Quinn Martin production, 12 O’Clock High, which aired on the ABC Television Network from 1964 to 1967. At the end of that season, the studio executives reported that a younger-looking lead actor was needed. But another account states that he was fired for being difficult to work with and not showing enough respect.^{[citation needed]} In the first episode of the second season, General Savage was killed in action and replaced by Colonel Joe Gallagher, played by Paul Burke. Burke, though considered more youthful-looking than Lansing, was actually two years older, a fact that TV critics were quick to point out.

Other television roles include portrayals of an alcoholic college professor in ABC‘s drama Channing, as Gil Green in the 1963 episode “Fear Begins at Forty” on the NBC medical drama The Eleventh Hour, as a bounty hunter on Gunsmoke, as a parole officer in a 1968 episode (“A Time to Love — A Time to Cry”) of The Mod Squad, and as interstellar secret agent Gary Seven in the episode “Assignment: Earth” (1968) of Star Trek. The episode was a backdoor pilot for a new series that would have starred Lansing and Teri Garr, but the series never materialized.^[11]

Lansing played an international secret agent in The Man Who Never Was, and Lt. Jack Curtis on Automan. He also played a recurring role, known only as “Control”, on 29 episodes of The Equalizer between 1985 and 1989, which then was spun-off into the made-for-TV movie Memories of Manon which aired on 13 February 1989. He guest-starred in The Twilight Zone episode “The Long Morrow” and in the Thriller episode “Fatal Impulse.” He also guest-starred on other television productions such as NBC’s Law & Order. In the 1980s he did a series of television commercials for Liberty National Bank in Louisville, Kentucky as well as the popular supermarket chain Giant Eagle.

Robert Lansing’s final television role was that of Police Captain Paul Blaisdell, on the series Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. The role was written specifically for Lansing by series writer and Executive Producer Michael Sloan, who had worked with Lansing on the series The Equalizer in the 1980s although Lansing had already been diagnosed with cancer. Despite continuing health problems, Lansing performed in 24 episodes in the first and second season. In the final episode of season 2, titled “Retribution”, Lansing’s character of Blaisdell was written out, with the possibility of the character returning if the actor’s health improved. Unfortunately, the final episode filmed in February 1994, was Lansing’s final acting performance. The episode aired on November 28, 1994, a month after the actor died, and was dedicated to his memory.

Lansing had craggy good looks, a stentorian voice, commanding presence, and characteristic bushy eyebrows.

Lansing had a son, Robert Frederick Orin Lansing (1957–2009), with his first wife, actress Emily McLaughlin; the couple eventually divorced. About a year and a half later, he married Gari Hardy, but this marriage also ended in divorce. The couple had a daughter, Alice Lucille Lansing. His last wife was Anne Pivar, with whom he remained until his death.

From 1991 to 1993, he was president of The Players Club, a theatrical fraternal organization founded by Edwin Booth in 1888.

Lansing was a heavy smoker and died from cancer in 1994 at age 66, one year into his last regular series, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. He was buried at Union Field Cemetery in Ridgewood, Queens.

Richard Ney obituary in “The Guardian”

Richard Ney was an American actor who became an investment counsellor. He was born in 1916 in New York City. His best remembered role was as Vin Miniver the son of Walter Pidgeon and Greer Garson in the classic World War Two drama “Mrs Miniver”. Among his other film credits are “Midnight Lace” with Doris Day and “The Premature Burial” with Ray Milland and Hazel Court. He then became an investment counsellor and wrote three books on the subject. He died in 2004 at the age of 88.

The “Guardian” obituary by Christopher Reed:

In 1970, the actor-turned-writer and investment expert Richard Ney, who has died aged 87, published his acclaimed The Wall Street Jungle. Its theme, that there was “more sheer larceny per square foot” on the floor of the New York stock exchange “than any place else in the world,” so scandalised the New York Times that it never reviewed the book, despite its 11 months on the newspaper’s bestseller list.

Ney’s The Wall Street Gang (1974) and Making It In The Market (1975) followed. Together with his fortnightly Ney Report (1976-99), personal investments and managing portfolios, he did not regret leaving Hollywood in 1961, after a dazzling debut almost 20 years earlier.

Ney was chosen to play Greer Garson’s son Vin in the Oscar-winning Mrs Miniver (1942). The following year he married Garson, who was 11 years older. Ney made 13 more films, including Lady Windermere’s Fan (1949) and Midnight Lace, a London murder mystery (1960). The Secret Of St Ives (1949) was the only one in which he starred.

His 1947 divorce from Garson made him more famous than he wished. The press portrayed him as an impertinent upstart insulting the Anglo-Irish cool queen of Hollywood. He said he went into finance “to be left alone,” but he was well known in Beverly Hills, where he lived and drove a midnight blue and ivory coachbuilt Rolls-Royce.

Almost immediately after leaving Hollywood, Ney featured in Time magazine thanks to his forecast earlier that year of the financial crash of 1962. It had been while working in a Beverly Hills brokerage that the activities of floor specialists caught his notice. An official report after the crash confirmed his suspicions about their manipulations.

Born in New York’s Bronx, the son of a first world war pilot turned insurance salesman, and a secretary, Ney read economics at Columbia University, paying his fees by modelling. He was fired from a New York play after a year for demanding a raise, but, on a trip to LA, a friend took him along to a film studio appointment. Ney wandered into a room where several men were talking. One looked at him and exclaimed: “My god, it’s Vin Miniver.” His film career was interrupted by naval war service in the Pacific.

Ney’s books may have dated, but are still regarded as definitive works on the mysteries of the stock exchange, where “the money stolen from the many is divided among few”. Ney is survived by his fourth wife, Mei-Lee, and a stepdaughter from his third marriage.

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

Milly Vitale was a very pretty actress who was born in Rome in 1933. Her first film was “The Brothers Karamazov” in 1947. She was featured in a number of Italian films when she was given the role of Kirk Douglas’s leading lady in “The Juggler” in 1953. Two years later she was brought to Hollywood to star opposite Bob Hope in “The Seven Little Foys”. She only made the one film in the U.S. and then returned to Europe. She was in the epic “War and Peace”. She was excellent as the World War Two freedom fighter in “The Battle of the V.I.” with Michael Rennie and Patricia Medina. She retired from acting in the 1970’s. Milly Vitale died in 2006. Her link on “Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen” can be accessed here.

“Wikipedia entry:

Camilla “Milly” Vitale (16 July 1933, Rome, Italy – 2 November 2006, Rome, Italy) was an Italian actress. She was the daughter of conductor Riccardo Vitale and choreographer Natasha Shidlowski.

She appeared in numerous post-war Italian films. She appeared in a few Hollywood movies but never achieved star status like her contemporaries Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida. In her most notable U.S. role, she appeared with Bob Hope as “Madeleine Morundo Foy” in The Seven Little Foys (1956). War and Peace She married Vincent Hillyer, a United States citizen, in 1960; the marriage produced two sons, Edoardo and Vincent Jr. The couple divorced in the late 1960s. Vitale retired from acting in the 1970s, after a career of more than 47 films.

Original Cinema Quad Poster – Movie Film Posters

Laurel Goodwin

Laurel Goodwin was one of Elvis Presley’s leading ladies in “Girls, Girls, Girls,” where the King sang “Return to Sender” in 1962. She was born Wichita, Kansas in 1942.

She only made three more films including “The Glory Guys” with Tom Tryon and Senta Berger and “Papa’s Delicate Condition” with Jackie Gleason and Glynis Johns. She is remembered by Star Trek buffs for her guest appearance in an episode called “The Cage”.

Entry on Lauren Goodwin on Memory Alpha”:

Goodwin, like Kirstie Alley, was born in Wichita, Kansas. Unlike Alley, however, who had begun her career with proceeds from game-show winnings, Laurel began her career as a child model.

She majored in drama at San Francisco State University, with her break coming when she was selected to star opposite Elvis Presley in the 1962 filmGirls! Girls! Girls! During the 1960s, Goodwin made three more feature films and performed in a handful of television guest star roles.

Tired of “pounding the pavement,” she abandoned acting in 1971.

Beth Poole in a scene from the film ‘The Glory Guys’, 1965. (Photo by United Artists/Getty Images)

For many years she lived with her husband, business executive Walter Wood, in New York. Together they produced several films, most notably–in partnership with Hugh Wilson and others–the Burt Reynolds film, Stroker Ace, which Hal Needham directed and in which Warren Stevens was featured.

As of early July of 2012, they were living in Palm Springs, where Goodwin pursued a career in home nursing.

Although she had attended a few Elvis conventions over the years, it was not until 2005 that she attended her first Trek convention, along with Peter Duryea.

Laurel Goodwin died in 2022 at the age of 79.

This article can also be accessed online here.

The Hollywood Reporter obituary in March 2022.

Laurel Goodwin, who made her movie debut opposite Elvis Presley in Girls! Girls! Girls! and starred alongside Jeffrey Hunter in “The Cage,’ the rejected first pilot made for Star Trek, has died. She was 79.

Goodwin died Feb. 25 in Cathedral City, California, her sister, Maureen Scott, announced.

Goodwin also portrayed the elder daughter of Jackie Gleason and Glynis Johns’ characters in Papa’s Delicate Condition (1963) and appeared in The Glory Guys(1965), written by Sam Peckinpah.

After working in the 1964 feature Westerns Stage to Thunder Rock and Law of the Lawless and The Glory Guys, Goodwin was cast as Yeoman J.M. Colt opposite Hunter as Capt. Christopher Pike and Nimoy as Mr. Spock in “The Cage” for Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek

The pilot, finished in early 1965, didn’t sell, but the producers held on to her, Hunter and Nimoy with the goal of trying again. Meanwhile, Goodwin had a choice: she had offers to make pilots for two network comedies.

“I said, ‘Oh, no. Star Trek is it. I’ve got to do Star Trek. It’s great, it’s gonna be wonderful,’” she recalled in a 2016 interview for StarTrek.com.

When negotiations with Hunter broke down, it was decided that Goodwin was no longer needed. William Shatner came aboard as Capt. James T. Kirk to star later in 1965 in the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and NBC picked up the Desilu series.

“In the meantime, I had turned down the two comedies, pulled my name out of consideration,” she said. “They both sold, and both were highly successful.”

Born on Aug. 11, 1942, in Wichita, Kansas, Goodwin and her family moved to San Diego and then San Francisco. She began working as a model when she was 7, then attended Lowell High School and San Francisco State.

After she served as a babysitter for the children of photographer Kurt Gunther, he circulated her photos at Paramount, and the studio wound up signing her to a seven-year contract when she was 19.

“I got in during the very last remnants of the old studio system, which believe me, lasted about six to eight months,” she said in Tom Lisanti’s 2003 book, Drive-in Dream Girls: A Galaxy of B-Movie Starlets of the Sixties. “I did a lot of press when Paramount signed me.”

In Hollywood, she studied acting with Jeff Corey and, when he was away, his fill-in, Nimoy.

In the Hawaii-set Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962), Goodwin played the wholesome rich girl Laurel Dodge, who battles with a singer (Stella Stevens) for the affections of Elvis’ tuna fisherman and helps him get the boat he always wanted. The two memorably share a dance in the clever “The Wall Have Ears” number.

Lazy loaded image — Laurel Goodwin and Elvis Presley in 1962’s ‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’ COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION

Following her Star Trek disappointment, Goodwin appeared on episodes of Get Smart, The Beverly Hillbillies and Mannix before retiring from acting in 1971 and going into nursing.

Footage from “The Cage,” meanwhile, was incorporated into the 1966 two-part Star Trek episode “The Menagerie” before the entire pilot was seen for the first time on VHS in 1986.

Goodwin co-produced the Burt Reynolds-Loni Anderson film Stroker Ace(1983) alongside her husband, Walter Wood, who had acquired the rights to the book on which the movie was based. They had a 43-year relationship that ended with his death in 2010

Jill St. John. IMDB

Jill St John was born in 1940 in Los Angeles. She made her film debut in 1958 in “Summer Love” with John Saxon. Throughout the late 50’s and sixties, she made many films including “The Lost World”, “Tender Is the Night”, “The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone” and “Honeymoon Hotel”. In 1971 she played Tiffany Case in the popular James Bond movie “Diamonds Are Forever” and the following year was in “Sitting Target” with Oliver Reed, a gritty British thriller.Since the 1980’s she has acted intermittingly. She is married to actor Robert Wagner.

Her IMDB entry:

Jill St. John absolutely smoldered on the big screen, a trendy presence in lightweight comedy, spirited adventure and spy intrigue who appeared alongside some of Hollywood’s most handsome male specimens. Although she was not called upon to do much more than frolic in the sun and playfully taunt and tempt as needed, this tangerine-topped stunner managed to do her job very, very well.

A remarkably bright woman in real life, she was smart enough to play the Hollywood game to her advantage and did so for nearly two decades before looking elsewhere for fun and contentment. Jill St. John was actually born Jill Oppenheim on August 19, 1940 in Los Angeles. On stage and radio from age five, she was pretty much prodded by a typical stage mother. Making her TV debut in a production of “A Christmas Carol,” Jill began blossoming and attracting the right kind of attention in her late teens. She signed with Universal Pictures at age 16 and made her film debut as a perky support in Summer Love(1958) starring then-hot John Saxon. Moving ahead, she filled the bill as a slightly dingy love interest in such innocuous fun as The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker (1959), Holiday for Lovers (1959), Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed? (1963), Who’s Minding the Store?(1963) and Honeymoon Hotel (1964). Whether the extremely photogenic Jill had talent or not was never a fundamental issue with casting agents. In the late 1960s she matured into a classy, ravishing redhead who not only came equipped with a knockout figure but some sly, suggestive one-liners as well that had her male co-stars (and audiences) more than interested. She skillfully traded sexy quips with Anthony Franciosa in the engaging TV pilot to the hit series The Name of the Game (1968) and scored a major coup as the ever-tantalizing Tiffany Case, a ripe and ready Bond girl, in Diamonds Are Forever (1971) opposite Sean Connery’s popular “007” character. She co-starred with Bob Hope in the dismal Eight on the Lam (1967), but she would be included in a number of his NBC specials over the years. She was also a part of Frank Sinatra‘s “in” crowd and co-starred with him in both Come Blow Your Horn (1963) and Tony Rome (1967). On camera her glossy femme fatales had a delightfully brazen, tongue-in-cheek quality to them. Off-camera, Jill lived the life of a jet-setter and was known for her romantic excursions with such eligibles as Sinatra and even Henry Kissinger. Of her four marriages (she never had children), which included millionaire Neil Dublin, the late sports car racer Lance Reventlow, son of Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, and popular crooner Jack Jones, she seems to have found her soul mate in present husband actor Robert Wagner, whom she married in 1990 following an eight-year courtship.

Jill worked with Wagner decades before in the soapy film drama Banning (1967) as well as a TV movie. Abandoning acting out of boredom, she has returned on rare occasions. She played against type as a crazed warden in the prison drama The Concrete Jungle (1982) and has had some fun cameos alongside Wagner both on film (The Player (1992)) and even TV (Seinfeld (1989)). In the late 1990s they started touring together in A.R. Gurney’s popular two-person stage reading of “Love Letters.” Jill’s lifelong passion for cooking (her parents were restaurateurs) has turned profitable over the years

. She has written several cookbooks and actually appeared as a TV chef and “in house” cooking expert on morning TV (Good Morning America (1975)). She also served as a food columnist for the USA Weekend newspaper.

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

This IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

The amazine Luise Rainer is still going strong at 100 years old. She recently flew from her home in London to Los Angeles for a TCM celebration of her work on film. Her career in Hollywood was very brief but within that time in the 1930’s, she won two back-to-back Oscars, the only actress to have achieved this distinction. She was born in 1910 in Dusseldorf, Germany. She began her acting career under the tutalege of Max Reinhardt in Vienna and was spotted there by an MGM talent scout and brought to Hollywood in 1936. Her two Oscars were for “The Great Ziegfeld” and “The Good Earth”. However she was very unhappy in Hollywood and by 1940 she had moved to New York. She subsequently moved to London. She made intermittent film and television appearances over the years. Gradually film writers became aware that she was one of the last surviving stars of the Golden Era and she has become much sought after as a witty, interesting interviewee. Luise Rainer died at the age of 104 in December 2014.

This article by Kate Webb in “Culture” in “Aljazeera America”can also be accessed online here.

Her “Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan:

There are very few actors whose culture and friendships ranged so widely, and who knew so many of the great names of the 20th century, as Luise Rainer, who has died aged 104. She was married for three tempestuous years to the radical American playwright Clifford Odets; she was a key member of Max Reinhardt’s theatre company; she was the lover of the German expressionist playwright Ernst Toller; Bertolt Brecht wrote The Caucasian Chalk Circle for her. She is frequently mentioned in the diaries of the writer Anaïs Nin, who was fascinated by her; she was an intimate of Erich Maria Remarque and Albert Einstein; Federico Fellinibegged her to be in La Dolce Vita; and George Gershwin gave her a first edition of the score of Porgy and Bess, with a fulsome dedication to her from the composer.

In addition, Rainer was the first movie star to win a best actress Oscar in successive years, the first for The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and the second for The Good Earth (1937). And yet, she lived the latter part of her life in comparative obscurity in London, under the name Mrs Knittel.

Rainer was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, of well-to-do parents: Heinz Rainer, a German-American businessman, and his wife Emmy (nee Königsberger), a pianist from an upper-class German-Jewish family. Luise, who had dark, expressive eyes in a mobile, wistful face topped by a mass of shiny black hair, was her father’sAugapfel, the apple of his eye. However, she also experienced what she described as his “tyrannical possessiveness”.

Feeling lost and out of place in an “average bourgeois surrounding”, she sought solace in the arts: “I was always very rebellious. I felt constricted. My rebellion was against the superficial. My wealthy parents were both immensely musical and cultured, but my father wanted me to marry and have children.” At 16, she made up her mind to go on the stage. “I became an actress only because I had quickly to find some vent for the emotion that inside of me went around and around, never stopping. I would have been happy instead of turning to the stage, to write, to paint, to dance, or, like my mother, to play the piano beautifully.”

Behind closed doors, she studied the part of Lulu in Pandora’s Box by Frank Wedekind. After she auditioned at the theatre in Düsseldorf, no one could believe that she had had no previous training. “I could feel the warmth and the love coming to me from the audience and yet I could remain at a protective distance. It was what I needed.”

Her parents refused to see her act, and were horrified when she took the leading role in Wedekind’s then-shocking Spring Awakening. Thereafter she appeared in a number of productions, many with Reinhardt’s company, including Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, for which she was praised personally by the playwright. A newspaper dubbed her “the wunderkind of drama”. At the time, Toller was in love with her. “He was nothing to me but a man. I was in my teens, and his fame didn’t mean anything to me. But I had no room for him in my life because there were so many other men in love with me at the time.”

An MGM talent scout saw Rainer performing in a Viennese production of An American Tragedy in 1934, and she was immediately signed to a seven-year contract as the studio’s secret weapon to keep Greta Garbo in line. So, in 1935, in her late teens, speaking fluent French and German, but little English, Rainer arrived in Hollywood. Her first film for the studio, the spy drama Escapade (1935), in which she replaced Myrna Loy as a Viennese girl opposite William Powell, made her a star.

Her new-found status triggered her first clash with the studio boss Louis B Mayer. He wanted to loan her to 20th Century-Fox to co-star with Ronald Colman in The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo. Rainer talked him into giving her a much smaller role in the new Powell picture. “There’s this little scene I think I can do something with,” she told him. This “little scene” – which Mayer ordered out after the first previews but later restored – was the short, poignant telephone scene from The Great Ziegfeld. “I wrote the scene myself,” Rainer stated, “though I stole it from Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine.” As Anna Held, she telephones her ex-husband Florenz Ziegfeld to congratulate him on his marriage. It was enough to sway the voters of the Academy and it also established Rainer as an expert exponent of the laughter-through-tears school of acting.

The following year, Rainer made an exceptional jump to the role of the downtrodden Chinese peasant woman O-Lan in The Good Earth, based on Pearl Buck’s Pulitzer prizewinning novel. She works silently in the fields with her husband, bears his children, begs for food during the famine, and dies quietly years later when the family has achieved some prosperity. When it was shown to the Chinese government, Madame Chiang Kai-shek reportedly could not believe Rainer was not herself Chinese, and Buck later wrote: “I was much moved by the incredibly perfect performance of Luise Rainer … marvelling at the miracle of her understanding.”

But so convinced was Rainer that she had no chance of winning the coveted Oscar for the second year running that on the night of the ceremony she stayed at home in her pyjamas. At 8.35pm, the names of the winners were given to the press, and a member of the Academy telephoned her to tell her she had won. She had to change quickly into evening dress and dash across town with Odets, whom she had married the previous year, to receive her second statuette. That night, she recalled, she and Odets were having a terrific row. She was in tears by the time they got to the Biltmore hotel, and they had to walk around the building five times before she had calmed down sufficiently to go in and accept the award.

Rainer never made big money in Hollywood. She had opportunities to increase her salary, but was disinclined to accept the method of negotiation offered by Mayer. The mogul said to her: “Why don’t you sit on my lap when we’re discussing your contract, the way the other girls do?” The fiery Rainer told him to throw her contract in the bin. “We made you and we’re going to kill your career,” Mayer roared. She replied: “Mr Mayer, I was already a star on the stage before I came here. Besides, God made me, not you!”

Thereafter her films were mediocre, except for The Great Waltz (1938), though her part as Johann Strauss’s wife was considerably trimmed. A nonconformist, Rainer walked around Hollywood in slacks, wearing no make-up, her hair in disarray at the height of 1930s glamour. She also decided to expend her energies elsewhere than on her film career. She helped refugee children from Spain and later, with the US first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, assisted European victims of Nazi Germany.

When her disastrous marriage to Odets ended in divorce in 1940, she was living in New York. There she became friendly with Nin, famous for her erotica and her passionate affair with the writer Henry Miller. “My strongest impression when I met her [Rainer] was that you were twins of a sort,” Miller wrote to Nin. “Neither of you belong in this world.” After Nin attended a play in which Rainer was performing, she wrote long descriptions of the actor in her diary. Rainer becomes a “flame” when she performs, says Nin, and certainly “would have been loved by [the French playwright Antonin] Artaud”.

Before she left Hollywood, Rainer was told by Brecht that he would like to write a play for her. She suggested an adaptation of Der Kreidekreis (The Chalk Circle) by AH Klabund, based on a Chinese tale, which became The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Later, she and the playwright fell out, and she never performed in it.

Soon after, in 1945, Rainer retreated into a long and happy marriage with the publisher Robert Knittel. They travelled extensively and lived for many years in Switzerland. She became a mother, painted and did a play from time to time, notably Maxwell Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine, Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, and Chekhov’s The Seagull, in which she played Nina. But for most people, Rainer had disappeared from the public eye.

In the late 50s, Rainer and her family moved to Britain. She appeared in some television plays on the BBC, including Stone Faces (1957), a play written for her by JB Priestley. She also played Regina in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes at the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna, where she had performed with Reinhardt many years before. In 1973, she took the taxing part of the narrator in Honegger’s oratorio Judith, in French, with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, with Jessye Norman singing the soprano part.

In 1997, she was enticed into returning to the big screen for the first time in over half a century in The Gambler, based on Dostoevsky. Though the film received lukewarm reviews, Rainer was universally praised. According to Variety: “The pic briefly gets a real lift when the legendary Luise Rainer bursts on the scene in a wonderfully showy part as a gambling-addicted granny.”

When I met Rainer at her London flat in 1996, she was an incredibly energetic 86-year-old whom I recognised as the same woman described by Miller as having “wonderful gesture and bearing, such a gracious way of carrying her head, such delicacy”, and the intense and dark eyes that shone from the screen over half a century before.

She is survived by her daughter, Francesca.

• Luise Rainer, actor, born 12 January 1910; died 30 December 2014

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

Gayle Hunnicutt was born in Forth Worth, Texas and was a fashion model before she became an actress. She had her first major role opposite George Peppard in “P.J.” and then 1970 she settled in England after her marriage to actor David Hemmings. She made a number of films with him including “Running Scared”. She starred opposite Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and Paul Scofield in “Scorpio” in 1973. Between 1989 and 1991 she returned to the U.S. to play a love interest of Larry Hagman in “Dallas”. Article on Gayle Hunnicut in “MailOnline” here.

Article in “Daily Telegraph”:

By Richard Eden

Gayle Hunnicutt, who told Mandrake in 2008 that she had initiated divorce proceedings against Sir Simon Jenkins, the chairman of the National Trust, after a 30-year marriage, has a reason to smile again. The glamorous actress is enjoying an emotional reunion with the BBC tennis commentator Richard Evans, who was her boyfriend until the year before she married Sir Simon.

Shadowman, poster, (aka NUITS ROUGES), US poster, Gert Frobe (left), Gayle Hunnicutt (right), 1974. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

“I am spending quite a lot of time with this lovely man in Florida,” she told me at the launch of the paperback edition of Miranda Seymour’s bookChaplin’s Girl: The Life and Loves of Virginia Cherrill, at The House of Hardy Amies in Savile Row, London. “It is lovely being with someone who knows you so well and understands you.

“We first met in 1975 and were together for two and a half years. As he is in the tennis world, he travels constantly. I had a career and a child to raise, so I couldn’t always be travelling around the world and we never married.” Hunnicutt, 67, was previously married to David Hemmings, the late star of the cult Sixties film Blow-Up. She added of Evans: “The person who introduced us in 1975 reintroduced us last summer. We both became separated and neither of us knew. It is one of those extraordinary things.”

Gayle Hunnicutt died in 2023

The Telegraph obituary in 2023:

Gayle Hunnicutt, who has died aged 80, was a strikingly glamorous American actress better known for her appearances in gossip columns than for most of her films, having divorced the wayward young British star David Hemmings in 1974 and married the writer and journalist Simon Jenkins.

Cast as elegant sexpots in thrillers like Marlowe (1969) with James Garner, Fragment of Fear (1970), her first British film, in which she co-starred with Hemmings, and Michael Winner’s spy caper Scorpio (1973), Gayle Hunnicutt dazzled with her inordinate good looks.

Gayle Hunnicutt in London, circa 1980 CREDIT: Terry Fincher/Popperfoto via Getty Images

The Telegraph’s critic Richard Last was agog as he ascribed to her “the most luminously beautiful face on television”, while an equally appreciative Clive James, gazing on her ravishing Titian hair and porcelain complexion, was smitten by her “sweet violence to the eye”.

There were others for whom the mere mention of her exotic name suggested a character who had stepped from the pages of an Ian Fleming novel; indeed, in 1972 she was canvassed as a Bond girl opposite Roger Moore in Live and Let Die, but it was not to be.

In the late 1980s millions saw her make a splash on British television as JR Ewing’s old flame, an English countess called Vanessa Beaumont, in the glitzy American soap Dallas.

Gayle Hunnicut with husband David Hemmings arrive at a party in Los Angeles, circa 1968 CREDIT: Earl Leaf/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Had she remained in Hollywood rather than marrying David Hemmings and moving to London in 1968, she would probably have had a more illustrious film career, but she considered herself lucky to escape.

In Britain she sought to establish herself as a serious actress, and in the 1970s featured on television in costume dramas including an adaptation of Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl, Colette’s The Ripening Seed (both 1973) and as Tsarina Alexandra in the classic serial Fall of Eagles (1974).

Offers of film parts continued to flow and she was busy on the stage, too, appearing in productions of Shakespeare and Shaw and in lighter fare such as revivals of Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story (Oxford Playhouse, 1981) and Clifford Odets’s The Big Knife (Albery, 1987), in which she co-starred with Martin Shaw.

In 1993, with her second husband, the cerebral Simon Jenkins, once described as “the acceptable face of fogeyism”, she hosted a joint 50th birthday celebration at St James’s Palace, previous venues for their annual extravaganzas having included Battersea Power Station and the Science Museum.

Gayle Hunnicutt with her husband Simon Jenkins, then editor of The Evening Standard CREDIT: Monitor Press Features Limited

Sir Christopher Bland, chairman of London Weekend Television and a future chairman of the BBC, used the occasion to make mischief, spreading a story that Gayle Hunnicutt and Jenkins had spent their wedding night at Henry James’s old home, Lamb House at Rye, reading Middlemarch.

The disintegration of her first marriage put paid to her appearance as Thérèse Raquin in Michael Voysey’s stage adaptation of Emile Zola’s novel of that name at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford in August 1974.

She pulled out a couple of days before the play opened, explaining that she was suffering from laryngitis, but her “indisposition” coincided with her final split from the serially unfaithful Hemmings, who was reportedly being “consoled” by his secretary, Prudence de Casembroot, 26.

The only child of a US Army colonel, Virginia Gayle Hunnicutt was born on February 6 1943 in Fort Worth, Texas. When the family moved to Beverly Hills in the mid-1950s, she won a scholarship to the University of California in Los Angeles, as near to Hollywood as a student of English and drama could get, and dabbled in acting during the summer holidays.

With Hermings in Fragment of Fear CREDIT: Film Stills

Her break came when a Warner Brothers talent scout spotted her in a student production, and after graduating with a BA in English Literature she made her first film, The Wild Angels, with Peter Fonda in 1966, followed by New Face in Hell starring George Peppard. In the same year she was cast on American television in two episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies.

In 1967, at a beach party for Steve McQueen thrown by the Rat Pack member Peter Lawford in Santa Monica, she met David Hemmings, the British actor who had rocketed to international stardom in Michelangelo Antonioni’s quintessential Swinging London film Blow-Up, and followed him to Turkey, where he was shooting The Charge of the Light Brigade. They married in Beverly Hills the following year.

When her marriage to Hemmings broke up in the mid-1970s, she decided to remain in Britain and “its wonderful, wonderful theatres”. She was cast in Twelfth Night at Greenwich, The Tempest at Oxford, A Woman of No Importance at Chichester and JM Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton, also at Greenwich. In 1979 she became the first American actress to play Peter Pan in the West End.

With James Garner in Marlowe, 1968 CREDIT: Alamy

Her tight schedule continued throughout the 1980s, with stand-out projects including the role of the retired opera singer and femme fatale Irene Adler, opposite Jeremy Brett, in the first episode (“A Scandal in Bohemia”) of the ITV series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1984 and the following year taking the female lead in Arthur Penn’s action adventure film Target (1985) opposite Gene Hackman and Matt Dillon.

In one of her last West End roles, aged 52, she donned a stunning backless evening dress in a revival of JB Priestley’s psychological thriller Dangerous Corner (Whitehall, 1995). She once said she did not wish to be remembered as “a lady Texan starlet with a good face”, and as an actress she was always memorable, even if unstretched; the suspicion lingered that her potential was never thoroughly explored.

At their Victorian home in Primrose Hill, north London, she became a notable social asset to her second husband, especially following his appointment as editor of The Times in 1990. “Simon is part of the Establishment,” she declared, “and as his wife, I am too.”

She was the author of the books Health and Beauty in Motherhood (1984), and Dearest Virginia (2004), a collection of her father’s wartime letters written between 1942 and 1944.

With David Hemmings, Gayle Hunnicutt had a son, the actor Nolan Hemmings, named after the character Hemmings played in The Charge of the Light Brigade. After her divorce she married Simon Jenkins in 1978 and had a second son, Edward, who became a journalist. That marriage ended in 2009.

Gayle