The son of Bert and Laura McWhirter, Kent Franklin McWhirter was born in Los Angeles on September 26, 1942. Planning to become a physical education instructor and football coach, he transferred from Citrus Junior College to the University of Southern California in 1961. There he met Ricky Nelson during a football game and they became good friends. This led to small guest spots on The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet (1952) as one of Ricky’s fraternity brothers. In 1965 McCord signed a contract with Universal Pictures, and three years later he got his big break when Jack Webb picked him to co-star inAdam-12 (1968). During the series’ run he became actively involved in the Screen Actors Guild, and is still involved today. He also keeps busy by acting, doing voiceovers for commercials and documentaries, and working on his website.
Debonair, exceedingly handsome Roger Smith was born in South Gate, California to Dallas and Leone Smith on December 18, 1932. At age 6, his parents enrolled him at a professional school for singing, elocution and dancing lessons. By age 12, the family moved to Nogales, Arizona, a small town on the Mexican border where he appeared in high school theater productions, was made president of the school’s acting club and became a star linebacker for his high school football team. While studying at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Roger entered and won several amateur talent prizes as a singer and guitarist which led to a TV appearance with Ted Mack and his Ted Mack & the Original Amateur Hour (1948) program. While stationed in Hawaii at a Naval Reserve, Roger had a chance meeting with film legend James Cagney. Cagney, impressed with the boy’s clean-cut good looks and appeal, encouraged Roger to give Hollywood a try. Roger did so and it didn’t take long for Columbia Pictures to snap him up 1957. While there, he made such films as No Time to Be Young (1957), Operation Mad Ball (1957) and Crash Landing (1958). He also played the older “Patrick Dennis” role in the madcap Rosalind Russell farce Auntie Mame (1958). Roger reconnected with Cagney around this time who not only hired him to play his son, “Lon Jr.”, in the Lon Chaney biopic Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), but made him his co-star in the musical comedy-drama Never Steal Anything Small (1959). Moving to Warner Bros., Roger won the role of private detective “Jeff Spencer” in the hip TV series 77 Sunset Strip (1958). After a few years of steady employment, doctors discovered a blood clot in his brain, which forced him to leave the show. Wed to budding actress Victoria Shaw in 1956, they had three children, but the marriage crumbled in the mid-60s. He next met singer-actress Ann-Margret and they eventually married in 1967. Roger’s health continued to decline after a co-starring role on the TV series Mister Roberts (1965) and, when he was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, a muscle/nerve disorder, retired from acting, altogether. He stayed in the background and focused instead on managing and nurturing his wife’s career. In the 1970s, he proved instrumental in her successful comeback in Vegas (he produced her stage shows), TV and films while she battled personal tragedy and injuries. A devoted couple married for nearly 40 years, Roger’s health began to stabilize in the mid-1980s. He died in 2017.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
“Los Angeles Times” obituary:
Roger Smith, who brought glamour to the TV detective genre as a hip private eye on “77 Sunset Strip,” has died. He was 84.
Jack Gilardi, who is the agent of Smith’s widow, actress Ann-Margret, said the actor died Sunday morning at a Los Angeles hospital after battling a terminal illness. Smith had fought the nerve disease myasthenia gravis for many years.
The actor launched his career in the 1950s when James Cagney spotted him and recommended him for films. He survived two serious illnesses to have a second career after “77 Sunset Strip” as the manager of his second wife, Ann-Margret.
From 1958 to 1963, he co-starred with Efrem Zimbalist Jr. on the glossy ABC series. It made stars of both men and a teen heartthrob out of Edd Byrnes, who played a colorful parking lot attendant named Kookie.
“77 Sunset Strip” had been created by producer-writer Roy Huggins, who also created “Maverick,” and it spawned a host of spinoffs and knockoffs, including “Hawaiian Eye,” ”Surfside 6″ and “Bourbon Street Beat.”
Smith told the Los Angeles Times that the series aimed to show that private investigators were well-trained, serious men, and not the movie and TV stereotype with “dangling cigarettes and large chips on their shoulders.” He was chosen for the part because “I don’t look like a detective.”
But the show had its glamorous side, too. In its Encyclopedia of Television, the Museum of Broadcast Communications said the show revived the crime drama and became “the epicenter of hipness on television, a sun-drenched world of cocktails, cool jazz and convertibles.”
Smith rejoined “77 Sunset Strip” after recovering and continued in his role as Jeff Spencer until 1963 when the entire cast except Zimbalist was dropped in an attempt to revitalize it. The show lingered for only one more year.
Meanwhile, Smith got the title role in the NBC series based on “Mister Roberts,” based on the 1955 comedy-drama about Navy life. It lasted from 1965 to 1966.
When he first gained fame, he had been married to a glamorous Australian actress, Victoria Shaw, with whom he had three children. They divorced in 1965.
Meanwhile he was dating Ann-Margret, the dynamic singer, dancer and actress of “Bye Bye Birdie,” ”Viva Las Vegas” and other films. They were married quietly in Las Vegas in 1967. Smith later quit acting to manage her career.
“Now in Roger I’ve found all the men I need rolled into one — a father, a friend, a lover, a manager, a businessman,” she told writer Rex Reed in 1972. “It’s perfect for me. I couldn’t exist without a strong man.”
For decades, Smith guided Ann-Margret’s career with great care. She broke her sex kitten stereotype in dramatic fashion in 1971 when she appeared in Mike Nichols’ “Carnal Knowledge” as the abused mistress of Jack Nicholson. Critics praised her performance and she was nominated for an Oscar for supporting actress.
She was nominated again in 1975 for her portrayal of Roger Daltrey’s mother in the film version of the Who’s rock opera “Tommy.”
While appearing at the Sahara Hotel at Lake Tahoe in 1972, she fell 22 feet from a scaffold and suffered severe injuries.
“She could quit working tomorrow and we’d have enough money to live on for the rest of our lives,” Smith told Reed in late 1972 as Ann-Margret recovered from her injuries. “But when the time comes, she gets interested in another act or a new film or something that delays it. The fact is, the girl just loves to work.”
In 1965, Smith was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, a disorder that disrupts the transmission of nerve signals to the muscles, causing severe muscle weakness. Despite the disease, Smith continued working when he was able as the effects of the disease varied over time.
“I have this great dream that when Ann-Margret gets out of movies, she and I will co-star in a Broadway play,” he told New York magazine in 1976. “But right now I still think it’s impossible to be married to a successful actress and have your own career and have the marriage work.” Roger LaVerne Smith was born in 1932 in South Gate, near Los Angeles. When he was 6, his parents enrolled him in a professional school in Hollywood where he learned singing and dancing. When he was 12, the family moved to Nogales, Ariz., where he excelled in the high school acting club and on the football team.
Smith served 2½ years in the Navy Reserve, and in Hawaii he sang at social events. Cagney, who was there making a film, suggested that Smith might try for a film career. When Smith’s Navy service ended, he signed a contract with Columbia Pictures.
Cagney recommended Smith for a role in “Man of a Thousand Faces,” the 1957 film biography of silent star Lon Chaney. Cagney was Chaney, while Smith played Chaney’s son as a young man. Smith then was cast in “Auntie Mame,” playing star Rosalind Russell’s nephew, Patrick, as a young man.
He and Ann-Margret had no children; in the 1980s, she told interviewers she had tried in vain to get pregnant for over a decade.
Auntie Mame, poster, from left, top, Roger Smith, Pippa Scott, Rosalind Russell, Forrest Tucker, Coral Browne, Peggy Cass, 1958. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Likeable, reliable leading man who from the mid-1940s to the mid-50s starred in numerous quality films before his career went into decline. Later memorable as the scheming Don Barzini in “The Godfather” (1972). Born in 1910 and died in 1975.
“Hollywood Players: The Forties” by James Robert Parish:
In the 1940s, Italian-descended Richard Conte struggled hard to be the new John Garfield at 20th Century Fox as he plied his craft at that studio. Unfortunately he was consistently overshadowed at Darryl F. Zanuck’s toyland by the more beefcakey Victor Mature, the more sinister Richard Widmark, the more handsome William Eythe and the vastly more popular and handsome Tyrone Power. Many industry insiders at the time would certainly have given odds that Conte’s more American counterpart Dane Clark would have emerged the bigger name performer and he did for a time.
IMDB Entry:
Richard Conte was born Nicholas Richard Conte on March 24, 1910, in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of an Italian-American barber. The young Conte held a variety of jobs before becoming a professional actor, including truck driver, Wall Street clerk and singing waiter at a Connecticut resort. The gig as a singing waiter led to theatrical work in New York, where in 1935, he was discovered by actors Elia Kazan and Julius “Julie” Garfinkle (later known as John Garfield) of New York City’s Group Theatre.
Kazan helped Conte obtain a scholarship to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where he excelled. Conte made his Broadway debut late in “Moon Over Mulberry Street” in 1939, and went on to be featured in other plays, including “Walk Into My Parlor.” His stage work lead to a movie job, and he made his film debut in Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence (1939), in which he was billed as “Nicholas Conte.” His career started to thrive during the Second World War, when many Hollywood actors were away in the military.
Signing on as a contract player with 20th Century-Fox in 1942, Conte was promoted by the studio as, ironically, as “New John Garfield,” the man who helped discover him. He made his debut at Fox, under the name “Richard Conte,” in Guadalcanal Diary (1943). During World War II Conte appeared mostly as soldiers in war pictures, though after the war he became a fixture in the studio’s “film noir” crime melodramas. His best role at Fox was as the wrongly imprisoned man exonerated by James Stewart‘s reporter in Call Northside 777 (1948) and he also shined as a trucker in Thieves’ Highway (1949). In the 1950s Conte essentially evolved into a B-movie actor, his best performances coming in The Blue Gardenia (1953) and Highway Dragnet (1954). After being set free of his Fox contract in the early 1950s, his career lost momentum as the film noir cycle exhausted itself, although he turned in a first-rate performance as a vicious but philosophical gangster in Joseph H. Lewis film-noir classic The Big Combo (1955).
Conte appeared often on television, including a co-starring gig on the syndicated series The Four Just Men (1959), but by the 1960s his career was in turnaround. Frank Sinatracast him in his two Tony Rome detective films, the eponymous Tony Rome (1967) and Lady in Cement (1968), but Conte eventually relocated to Europe. He directed Operation Cross Eagles (1968), a low-budget war picture shot in Yugoslavia in which he also starred in with a not-quite washed-up Rory Calhoun. Conte’s last hurrah in Hollywood role was as Don Corleone’s rival, Don Barzini, in The Godfather (1972), which many critics and filmmakers, including the late Stanley Kubrick, consider the greatest Hollywood film of all time. Ironically, Paramount – which produced “The Godfather” – had considered Conte for the title role before the casting list was whittled down to Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando, who won his second Best Actor Oscar in the title role. After “The Godfather,” Conte – whose character was assassinated in that picture, so does not appear in the equally classic sequel – continued to appear in European films.
Richard Conte was married to the actress Ruth Storey, with whom he fathered film editor Mark Conte. He died of a heart attack on April 15, 1975 at the age of 65.
