Hollywood Actors

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Dorothy Bromiley
Dorothy Bromiley
Dorothy Bromiley
 

Dorothy Bromiley was born in 1930 in Manchester.   In 1952 she, along with Joan Elan and Audrey Dalton won major parts in the movie”The Girls of Pleasure Island” which was made in Hollywood.   Ms Bromiley did not stay in the U.S. but pursued her career in Britain.   Among her other films are “It’s Great to be Young” with John Mills in 1956 and “The Servant” which was directed by her one time husband Joseph Losey.   An interesting article on Dorothy Bromiley can be accessed here.

Dorothy Bromiley

Dorothy Bromiley

Dorothy Bromiley Phelan (born 18 September 1930) is a British former film, stage and television actress and authority on historic domestic needlework.

Born in Manchester, Lancashire, the only child of Frank Bromiley and Ada Winifred (née Thornton). Bromiley played a role in a Hollywood film before returning to the UK where, in 1954, she started work as assistant stage manager at the Central Library Theatre, Manchester; followed by a West End stage role in The Wooden Dish directed by the exiled US film and theatre director Joseph Losey(who became Bromiley’s husband from 1956 to 1963). They have a son by this relationship, the actor Joshua Losey. Since 1963 Bromiley has lived with the Dublin-born actor and writer Brian Phelan (who appeared in the 1965 film Four in the Morning), they have a daughter, Kate.

Bromiley attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Bromiley successfully auditioned for the role of Gloria in the Hollywood film The Girls of Pleasure Island (Paramount, 1952). Her major roles in several British films include sixth former Paulette at Angel Hill Grammar School (aged 26 at the time) in It’s Great to Be Young (1956) in which Bromiley’s singing voice for the Paddy Roberts/ Lester Powell Ray Martin song “You are My First Love” was dubbed by Edna Savage (and by Ruby Murray in the pre-credits sequence), Rose in A Touch Of The Sun (1956) co-starring with Frankie Howerd, Sarah in Zoo Baby (1957) with Angela Baddeley, Small Hotel (1957), Angela in The Criminal (1960) and a minor role in The Servant (1963), the latter two directed by Losey.

Bromiley made her television drama debut as Pauline Kirby in “The Lady Asks For Help” (1956) an episode of Television Playhouse produced by Towers of London for ITV.  This was followed by the role of Ann Fleming in “Heaven and Earth” (1957) part of the Douglas Fairbanks Presents series for ATV. Directed by Peter Brook, it also starred Paul Scofield and Richard Johnson, and was set on board a plane that develops engine trouble.  Bromiley also had roles in such popular television series as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1956) as Lady Rowena (“Hubert” episode), Armchair Theatre (1957), Play of the Week (“Arsenic and Old Lace”) (1958), Saturday Playhouse (“The Shop at Sly Corner”) (1960), Z-Cars (1964), The Power Game (1966) and No Hiding Place (1965, 1966), and the television play Jemima and Johnny (1966).  Her last television drama role was as Sarah Malory in Fathers and Families (BBC Television, 1977) directed by Christopher Morahan.

Dorothy Bromiley taught at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) between 1966–72 and left to create The Common Stock Theatre Company, staging socially relevant theatre in colleges and non-traditional halls.

Retired from acting, Dorothy Bromiley lives in Dorset, and has developed an interest in 16th and 17th century amateur domestic needlework, writing on the subject, and curating two major exhibitions

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Dorothy Bromiley, a 21-year-old actress from Manchester, was in her final year at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London when the Hollywood producer F Hugh Herbert came looking for three “typical” British girls. “My agent went all poker-faced, said ‘I want you to get used to interviews’, and sent me to see Mr Herbert,” she recalled.

He was casting for The Girls of Pleasure Island (1953), a comedy about a straitlaced Englishman who lives on a South Sea island with his three daughters. Other than their father the girls have never set eyes on another man. One day their paradise is invaded by 1,500 American marines — who have not seen a woman for months.

Hundreds of actresses were auditioned, nine were called for screen tests and three were selected: Bromiley, Audrey Dalton and Joan Elan, all from different drama schools. “Of course, I’m terribly excited about going to Hollywood,” she told the Manchester Evening News. “But I really want a stage career and I hope to save enough money in Hollywood to help me on the stage.

 

The trio landed in New York on the first day of spring 1952 and Bromiley went for a walk in Central Park. Overwhelmed by her new situation she burst into tears and was comforted by a “wonderful Irish cop” who, when she explained why she was in America, reassured her that “you have the world at your feet”. Two days later she reached California. “Almost at once we were plunged into fittings and wardrobe tests and whatnot,” she said.

While making The Girls of Pleasure Island the actresses featured on the cover of Life magazine. Meanwhile, Bromiley was elected as official mascot for the Manchester United football team during their visit to California, kicking off their match against Mexico. Her future looked bright and she was called for screen tests for a film starring Ginger Rogers and William Holden. Yet gradually she realised that she was not in control of matters

 

The Girls of Pleasure Island was released in April 1953 and the cast set out on a publicity tour of America, visiting 35 cities in five weeks. “Don’t ask me which town was Boston or which was Memphis, everything went by so quickly,” she said. Their task was to appear on stage after a screening of the film and act a sketch written by Herbert.

Returning to Hollywood, she bought a green Morgan car and socialised with friends while waiting for Paramount to come up with her next role. “I’d have loved to do some theatre work, but it’s awfully difficult for non-resident aliens to take this up because of American Actor’s Equity rulings,” she said. Her studio contract also meant turning down a Broadway offer from Sir Cedric Hardwicke, the British producer.

In an article for Picturegoer magazine Bromiley said that it dawned on her that there were to be no more scripts and no more films. “As Paramount had launched me as a feature player, it wasn’t going to ‘downgrade’ me into bit parts,” she said, wondering if she had arrived in Hollywood at too high a level.

Eventually she returned home, a little older and a little wiser. “Naturally I’m disappointed, and I’m even a little embarrassed because I’m the Manchester girl who didn’t, after all, make good,” she wrote, adding defiantly: “I don’t intend ever to forget Hollywood. I’m now going to have a fresh shot at show business in Britain. Then one day I’m going to return to California — to show ’em

Dorothy Ann Bromiley was born in Levenshulme, Manchester, in 1930, the only child of Frank Bromiley, a football reporter, and his wife, Ada Winifred (née Thornton). She was educated at Levenshulme High School, appearing on stage in her teens as Joyce Dermot in the Noël Coward comedy I’ll Leave it to You. With her heart set on acting she set off for college in London, abandoning her course midway through the final year for Hollywood

Back in Britain she became assistant stage manager at the Central Library Theatre in Manchester, “much to the disgust of my agent”. At Christmas 1954 she played Wendy in a 50th anniversary production of Peter Pan at the Scala Theatre, London.

Bromiley’s experiences of Hollywood coloured her view of American men, and she claimed that they were afraid to talk about anything intellectual. “They talk down to women as though they didn’t attribute any sense to them at all,” she said. There was one exception. Her West End debut was as the compassionate granddaughter in Edmund Morris’s The Wooden Dish directed by Joseph Losey, an American director blacklisted in the anti-communist McCarthy era. They had met briefly in Hollywood. Now reunited, they married in 1956

On the set of Losey’s neo-noir film The Criminal (1960) with Sam Wanamaker she met the Irish actor, and later playwright, Brian Phelan. Her marriage to Losey was dissolved in 1963 and she lived with Phelan for more than six decades, changing her name by deed poll in 1966 to Dorothy Bromiley Phelan. She died five days before him and is survived by their daughter, Kate, who lives in France, and by a son, Joshua, an actor, from her first marriage.

In time Bromiley also took up teaching at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, imparting her experience to a new generation of actors including Maureen Lipman, Brian Cox, David Suchet and Patricia Hodge. In 1972 she left to create the Common Stock Theatre, a co-operative based in Hammersmith, west London, taking theatre to areas of social deprivation. “We improvised plays on themes suggested by London teenagers in youth clubs and state schools; subsequently playing to audiences not in the habit of going to the theatre,” she wrote.

 

After several years as the company’s administrator she moved to Dorset to recover from her funding battles with the Arts Council. She remained there with Phelan, opening the Sherborne Tapestry Centre and finding her second calling as a specialist in 16th and 17th-century amateur domestic needlework. Her expertise led to a handful of books on the subject including The Point of the Needle: Five Centuries of Samplers (2001) and The Goodhart Samplers (2008). She curated exhibitions at the Dorchester Museum and the Holburne Museum in Bath, was interviewed for Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and undertook research into the artists responsible for the designs used by early embroiderers.

While grateful for her time in Hollywood, Bromiley was sanguine about the experience. “I was just a piece in a machine, so to speak — someone that happened to be immediately at hand to take on a role,” she wrote. “It was my fault, not Hollywood’s, if I thought I was regarded as something of much more importance. Yet that is where Hollywood hits so many youngsters. It hits those who let the high hopes take complete control of them.”

Dorothy Bromiley, actress, was born on September 18, 1930. She died on May 3, 2024, aged

 

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Sondra Locke
Sondra Locke
Sondra Locke

Sondra Locke obituary in “The Guardian” in 2019.

The actor Sondra Locke, who has died aged 74 after suffering from cancer, was closely associated with the film star and director Clint Eastwood: they made six films together and had a 13-year relationship, which ended acrimoniously. 

But it was not Eastwood who made her a star. Eight years before they met, she had already received Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for her accomplished debut as Mick, a southern teenager who befriends a deaf-mute man (Alan Arkin) in the 1968 adaptation of Carson McCullers’ novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. She won the part after a nationwide search to find a suitable newcomer.

Locke also later proved herself an idiosyncratic director with the curious fantasy Ratboy (1986), in which she starred. A follow-up, Impulse (1990), a thriller starring Theresa Russell as a police officer working undercover as a prostitute, was a slicker affair.Advertisement

She first starred with Eastwood in the western The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), which he also directed. She played Laura Lee, who joins Josey (Eastwood) on his quest to avenge his family’s destruction during the civil war. “Just as he was about to look away into the distant desert, he caught sight of me,” she wrote in her 1997 autobiography The Good, the Bad and the Very Ugly. “I wasn’t prepared for the way our eyes seemed to instantly fuse.” For the next seven years, she was effectively under contract to Eastwood, who was believed to have left his wife for her. “If you were in Clint Eastwood movies, you were in the Clint Eastwood movie business,” she explained. “People stopped calling. They automatically assumed I was working exclusively with Clint.”

This translated into a period of great productivity while they were together. She starred with him in The Gauntlet (1977), as a prostitute escorted by a cop to testify in a mafia trial, and in the redneck comedies Every Which Way But Loose (1978) and its sequel Any Which Way You Can (1980) – though they were both upstaged in those movies by their co-star, Clyde the orangutan.

The couple’s most delightful collaboration was on Bronco Billy (1980), a comedy starring Locke as a woman who falls in with a travelling circus after being double-crossed by her fiance. It was much preferable to the sadistic thriller Sudden Impact (1983), the fourth in the Dirty Harry series of films about a renegade cop, in which Locke played a victim of rape turned violent avenger. That role was a curious fit for a woman whose appeal lay in her mix of the feisty and the delicate. The enormous eyes set in a petite face gave her the perpetually childlike look of one of Margaret Keane’s big-eyed child paintings. In Eastwood’s more rough-and-tumble outings she could only appear incongruous.

If Sudden Impact, their last film together, seemed brutal, that was nothing compared to the fallout from the couple’s relationship, which ended in 1989 with accusations from both sides: Locke pointed to Eastwood’s infidelities and his tapping of her phone, while he complained that his generosity was being exploited by Locke and her close friend Gordon Anderson (a childhood friend whom she had married in 1967, though he was openly gay). While Locke was on the set of Impulse in 1989, Eastwood changed the locks on their home and dumped her belongings on the lawn.

In the seven years after their split, Locke filed two lawsuits against him, first for palimony in 1989, fighting him in court for a year, all while battling breast cancer and undergoing a double mastectomy, settling in 1990; then for fraud in 1996, when a producing and directing deal at Warner Bros, which was part of the settlement in the original suit (and which spawned no movies), turned out to have been underwritten by Eastwood without Locke’s knowledge. The second lawsuit also ended in a settlement for Locke. “I think he thought I’d go away, because he always gets his way,” Locke said. “He just wills people to do things, he would say that all the time. He was willing me to go away. And I didn’t.”

She was born Sandra in Shelbyville, Tennessee, to Pauline Bayne, a factory worker, and Raymond Smith, a soldier. Her mother married Alfred Locke, a carpenter, when she was four. Sandra went to the local high school, where she met Gordon. They both enrolled at Middle Tennessee State University in 1962, but she left after a year and worked in Nashville as a TV station assistant, while acting with a community theatre group. After taking the stage name Sondra and appearing in several plays, she auditioned for, and won, her part in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

Locke claimed that she was frozen out of Hollywood after her breakup with Eastwood. As an all-American hero, he was untouchable; his public did not want to hear that he was flawed. “I’m sorry he is who he is,” she said just before her book came out. “As sorry as people are going to be, it was far more devastating to me to find out who he really was.”

She made a late return to the screen last year, in a title role in Alan Rudolph’s Ray Meets Helen.

Authorities were notified of her death, but it was not made public until 13 December.

She is survived by Gordon, to whom she remained married.

• Sondra Locke (Sandra Louise Anderson), actor and director, born 28 May 1944; died 3 November 2018

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Leslie Brooks
Leslie Brooks
Leslie Brooks

Leslie Brooks was born in 1922 in Lincoln, Nebraska.   She was featured in two Rita Hayworth vehicles “You Were Never Lovelier” in 1942 and “Cover Girl” in 1944.   Her best film was “Blonde Ice” in 1948.   She died in 2011.

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William Smith
William Smith
William Smith

William Smith was born in 1933 in Missouri.   A lifelong boldybuilder, the 6ft 2″ Smith has featured in over 300 film and television programmes.   He is perhaps best know for his role as the evil ‘Falconetti’ in “Rich Man, Poor Man” mini-series  in 1976 and the TV Western series “Laredo” from 1965 until 1967.   His movies include “Darker Than Amber” with Rod Taylor in 1971,  “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” and  “Any Which Way You Can” with Clint Eastwood in 1980.   He joined the cast of “Hawaii 5 0” for it’s last series in 1979.   He is also known as the last Marlboro Man on cigarette advertisments.

William Smith

William Smith. Wikipedia.

William Smith (born March 24, 1933) is an American actor who has appeared in almost three hundred feature films and television productions,[1] with his best known role being the menacing Anthony Falconetti in the 1970s television mini-series Rich Man, Poor Man.

Smith is also known for films like Any Which Way You Can (1980), Conan The Barbarian (1982), Rumble Fish (1983), and Red Dawn(1984), as well as lead roles in several exploitation films during the 1970s.

Born in Columbia, Missouri, Smith began his acting career at the age of eight in 1942; he entered films as a child actor in such films as The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Song of Bernadette and Meet Me in St. Louis.

Smith served in the United States Air Force. He won the 200 pound (91 kg) arm-wrestling championship of the world multiple times and also won the United States Air Force weightlifting championship. A lifelong bodybuilder, Smith is a record holder for reverse-curling his own body weight. His trademark arms measured as much as 19½ inches. Smith held a 31-1 record as an amateur boxer.

During the Korean War he was a Russian Intercept Interrogator and flew secret ferret missions over the Russian SFSR. He had both CIAand NSA clearance and intended to enter a classified position with the U.S. government, but while he was working on his doctorate studies he landed an acting contract with MGM.

He was a regular on the 1961 ABC television series The Asphalt Jungle, portraying police Sergeant Danny Keller. One of his earliest leading roles was as Joe Riley, a Texas Ranger on the NBC western series Laredo (1965–1967). In 1967, Smith guest starred as Jude Bonner on James Arness‘s long-lived western Gunsmoke.

Smith was cast as John Richard Parker, brother of Cynthia Ann Parker, both taken hostage in Texas by the Comanche, in the 1969 episode “The Understanding” of the syndicated television series Death Valley Days, which was hosted by Robert Taylor. In the story line, Parker contracts the plague, is left for dead by his fellow Comanche warriors, and is rescued by his future Mexican wife, Yolanda (Emily Banks).[2]

He played the outlaw turned temporary sheriff Hendry Brown in the 1969 episode “The Restless Man”. In that story line, Brown takes the job of sheriff to tame a lawless town, begins to court a young woman (again played by Emily Banks), but soon returns to his deadly outlaw ways in search of bigger thrills.[3]

On Gunsmoke, Smith appeared in a 1972 episode, “Hostage!”; his character beats and rapes Amanda Blake‘s character Miss Kitty Russell and shoots her twice in the back. Smith has been described as the “greatest bad-guy character actor of our time”.

Smith joined the cast of the final season of Hawaii Five-O (as Detective James “Kimo” Carew, a new officer in the Five-O unit). He had previously appeared with Jack Lord in Lord’s prior series Stoney Burke. Smith starred in one episode each of the Adam West Batman TV series (in the episode “Minerva, Mayhem and Millionaires” as Adonis, one of the minions of the title guest villainess portrayed by Zsa Zsa Gabor), I Dream of Jeannie (in the episode “Operation: First Couple on the Moon” as Turk Parker), Kung Fu, and as The Treybor, a ruthless warlord, in the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century episode “Buck’s Duel to the Death”. Smith also made guest appearances opposite James Garner in the 1974 two-hour pilot for The Rockford Files (titled “Backlash of the Hunter” and also featuring Lindsay Wagner and Bill Mumy), and George Peppard in The A-Team (in two appearances as different characters, in the first season’s “Pros and Cons” and the fourth season’s “The A-Team Is Coming, The A-Team Is Coming”).

In the 1976 television miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man, he portrayed Anthony Falconetti, nemesis of the Jordache family, and reprised the role in the sequel Rich Man, Poor Man Book II. Other 1970s TV appearances included the Kolchak: The Night Stalker episode “The Energy Eater”, as an Indian medicine man who advises Kolchak, and an early Six Million Dollar Man episode “Survival of the Fittest” as Commander Maxwell. He also appeared in the 1979 miniseries The Rebels as John Waverly, and in an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard as Jason Steele, a bounty hunter hired by Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane to frame the Duke Boys into jail.

On the big screen, Smith became the star of several cult movies from the early seventies. Smith appeared as heavy Terry Bartell in Darker than Amber in 1970. Also that year, Smith was also featured in two biker flicks Nam’s Angels (originally released under the title “The Losers”) co-starring Bernie Hamilton and C.C. and Company with Ann-Margret, Joe Namath, Jennifer Billingsley and genre favorite Sid Haig, the latter of which was directed by Seymour Robbie and written by Ann-Margret’s husband, actor Roger Smith. He starred in 1972’s Grave of the Vampire as James Eastman (co-starring with Michael Pataki and Lyn Peters), and 1973’s Invasion of the Bee Girls (co-starring Victoria Vetri, Anitra Ford and Katie Saylor, written by Nicholas Meyer and directed by Denis Sanders), and 1975’s The Swinging Barmaids (starring Ms. Saylor, Bruce Watson and Laura Hippe, and directed by Gus Trikonis). In 1972 and 1975, respectively, he appeared in two popular Blaxploitation films, Hammer and the controversially titled Boss Nigger, both with Fred Williamson.

After that, he played a vindictive sergeant in Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977) with an all-star cast headed by Burt Lancaster and Richard Widmark, a drag-racing legend in Fast Company (1979) also co-starring Claudia Jennings and John Saxon, the main character’s father in Conan the Barbarian (1982) with Arnold Schwarzenegger, bad guy Matt Diggs in The Frisco Kid (1979) opposite Gene Wilder and Harrison Ford, and Clint Eastwood‘s bare-knuckle nemesis Jack Wilson in 1980’s Any Which Way You Can (a sequel to 1978’s Every Which Way But Loose in which Smith did not appear), and also had a top villainous role of the Soviet commander in the hit 1984 theatrical film Red Dawn. In 1983, Smith appeared in two films from Francis Ford Coppola, in The Outsiders as a store clerk and in Rumble Fish as a police officer. In 1985, Smith landed the starring role of Brodie Hollister in the Disney mini-series Wildside, created by writer-producer Tom Greene, and another role as the bookmaker’s enforcer known as “Panama Hat” in director Richard Brooks‘s final movie, Fever Pitch (1985) opposite Ryan O’Neal.

William Smith died aged 88 in California in August 2021.

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Robert Ginty
Robert Ginty
Robert Ginty

Robert Ginty was an American actor best known for his lead performance in the movie “The Exterminator” .   He spent some time living in Dublin.  He was born in 1948 and died in 2009.

His Independent obituary by Tom Vallance is as follows:

The actor Robert Ginty became a leading star of action movies after he played the title role in the low-budget hit The Exterminator (1980). For the next decade he was the cut-price equivalent of Schwarzenegger or Stallone, making violent thrillers that invariably went straight to video but built him a large following of action fans. Ginty was usually the hero, often a war veteran using his skills to clean up the city streets, or a mercenary fighting corruption in the far corners of the world (where hordes of extras could be hired cheaply for scenes of mayhem). He was a man of many talents, however, and later found favour as an activist for experiment in the arts, a champion of human rights, a writer, a theatre and opera director, curator, artist and photographer.

 

Born Robert Winthrop Ginty in 1948 in Brooklyn, New York, where his father worked as a construction engineer and his mother worked for the government, he was of Irish ancestry and a direct descendent of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, member of Parliament and disciple of Thomas Paine, who died in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Ginty’s first love was rock music, and at the age of 16 he was touring with bands, playing drums with Carlos Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and John Lee Hooker.

He was educated at Yale and the City College of New York, then studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, the Actor’s Studio, and with Robert Lewis at the Yale School of Drama. He starred in Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending and Eugene O’Neill’s More Stately Mansions at the Provincetown Playhouse, and at the New Hampshire Shakespeare Festival he played Hotspur in Henry IV, Part One and Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The producer Harold Prince saw these performances and hired him as both an assistant and actor for his Broadway productions of The Great John Brown (1972), Don Juan (1973) and The Government Inspector (1974). After returning to New Hampshire to star in Israel Horovitz’s one-act play The Indian Wants the Bronx, he moved to California, where he developed a reputation as a rugged player who could fill television roles that demanded physical action.

He was in episodes of Police Woman and The Rockford Files, and he had small roles in the films Bound for Glory (1976), and Two-Minute Warning (1976). His first notable role was in the TV series Baa Baa Black Sheep (1976-78), about the exploits of a Second World War flying ace and his squadron of misfits. Ginty was Lt. T. J. Wiley, one of what he later described as “a bunch of gung-ho young kid pilots”. The series prompted him to take up flying, a lifelong passion that culminated in his becoming in 2004 an honorary captain in the United States Navy’s Blue Angels.

Hal Ashby, director of Bound for Glory, then gave Ginty a strong supporting role in the powerful Vietnam war-drama Coming Home (1978), starring Jane Fonda. Ginty was the best friend of a marine (Bruce Dern) whose wife falls in love with a paraplegic while her husband is overseas.

Ginty next acted in the acclaimed television series The Paper Chase (1978-9), based on the movie about student life in a competitive law school. Ginty portrayed one of the students; another was played by Francine Tacker, who became the second of his three wives. Despite being hailed as the best new series of the year, The Paper Chase was cancelled after one season.

Ginty was on the verge, however, of his major breakthrough. He was cast in The Exterminator as a Vietnam veteran out for revenge on the gang who beat up his comrade. Deploying his most brutal combat skills, he battles the police and CIA as well as various criminals, at one point thrusting a villain through a meat grinder. Cheaply produced, the film made a huge profit, and though Ginty was billed third to Christopher George (as chief villain) and Samantha Eggar, he stole the film, and would often be billed afterwards as Robert “Exterminator” Ginty.

The image would carry him through a decade of low-budget, violent thrillers, shot in France, Italy, Mexico and Thailand, with such titles as Gold Raiders (1983), Maniac Killer, Programmed to Kill, Mission: Kill, Code Name Vengeance (all 1987), and Cop Target (1990). He also both starred in and produced Exterminator 2, an inevitable sequel to his biggest hit. He wrote and directed The Bounty Hunter (1989), and he also produced, directed and acted in Vietnam, Texas (1990), about a priest (Ginty) who discovers he fathered a son while on a tour of duty in Vietnam, though few priests would be as handy with a gun or their fists as Ginty proved to be. The film won him Best Director awards at the Houston International Film Festival and the Taormina Film Festival in Italy.

As his phase as an action star waned, he worked more frequently in television as both an actor and director. He appeared in seven episodes of Falcon Crest (1989-90) and such shows as Father Dowling Mysteries and Murder, She Wrote, and he directed episodes of Nash Bridges, Charmed and Tracker.

In 1994 Ginty responded to his heritage by becoming artistic director of the Irish Theatre Arts Center in Hollywood, whose goal is to sponsor stage, film and music projects dealing with the Irish experience, as well as allowing playwrights to hear their works read by actors in front of an audience. He lectured regularly at Trinity College, Dublin, and with film-makers Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan he founded the Director’s Guild of Ireland.

Ginty also became noted as a champion of experimental theatre. In 2004 he directed a hip-hop version of A Clockwork Orange in Toronto, and in 2005 at the Edinburgh Festival he directed Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, set in Iraq. As a stage director, Ginty favoured modern playwrights, staging revivals of Sam Shepherd’s True West, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia and David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross.

An exhibition of his paintings and photographs was presented at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2006. He was also a Unesco Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Global Market Place and a member of the International Centre for Human Rights. A staunch advocate of preserving classical American architecture, in 2005 he was appointed as ambassador for the Prince’s Trust by Prince Charles.

He and his family, who lived in Toronto for several years, were also patrons of several arts bodies, including the Royal Ontario Museum, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the National Ballet of Canada. When asked how he felt about his period as a top action hero, he replied that he had no regrets. “I’ve played a very violent repertory of movies, and what they’ve done for me is given me an economically viable career.”

Tom Vallance

Robert Winthrop Ginty, actor and director: born Brooklyn, New York 14 November 1948; three times married (one son); died Los Angeles, California 21 September 2009.

This obituary can be accessed also on line here.

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Betsy Brantley
Betsy Brantley
Betsy Brantley

Betsy Brantley was born in 1955 in North Carolina.   She studied acting in London and made her movie debut in a major role opposite Sean Connery in “Five Days, One Summer” directed by Fred Zinneman in 1982.   The film was not a success though.   Her other movies include “Another Country” and “The Princess Bride”.

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Barbara Bel Geddes
Barbara Bel Geddes
Barbara Bel Geddes

Barbara Bel Geddes is remembered today for her performance as’Miss Ellie’ in TV’s long-running “Dallas” which ran from 1978 until 1991.   She did though star in some fine movies during the 1940’s and 1950’s such as “The Long Night” opposite Henry Fonda in 1947, “I Remember Mama” in 1948 and “Vertigo” opposite James Stewart and Kim Novak in 1958.   She died in 2005.

“Guardian” obituary:

To viewers, all over the world, of the television series Dallas, Barbara Bel Geddes, who has died of cancer aged 82, was Miss Ellie, mother of the evil JR and his younger, wimpish brother Bobby. As the matriarch of the Ewing oil clan, she starred in that extraordinarily successful television series from its premiere in 1978.

When Jim Davis – the actor who portrayed Ellie’s ruthless husband Jock Ewing – died of cancer at 72 in 1981, scripts for Dallas were rewritten so that he was killed in a South American helicopter crash. Miss Ellie finally came into her own, copiously grieving for Jock, but now firmly at the centre of the hilariously complicated family intrigue.

In Dallas, Bel Geddes brilliantly portrayed the kind of mother one has always longed for, or had nightmares about. Without batting a tearful eye she automatically gave absolution to her children, husband and in-laws for their seemingly endless cycle of chicanery. The family was all; one felt she would have forgiven Hitler if only he had been a Texas Ewing.

Most Dallas fans had little idea Bel Geddes had a long stage and film career. Born in New York City, she was the daughter of the futuristic architect and stage designer Norman Geddes and an English teacher, Helen Belle Sneider. Educated at private schools, at 16 she was expelled from Putney School in Vermont for being a “disturbing influence” – she had apparently kissed a boy.

It was via her father that she got her first jobs in summer theatre in Connecticut in her teens and had her first walk-on in the comedy, Out Of The Frying Pan, in 1940. In 1945 she was chosen by the director Elia Kazan for the leading role in Deep Are The Roots, an interracial love story for which she won the New York Drama Critics Award as the outstanding young actress of the year.

It was around then that she told a journalist that she wanted to appear in the movies: her ambition, she said, was to work for directors like Kazan, Frank Capra, George Cukor or Alfred Hitchcock. She didn’t abandon Broadway but, in 1946 signed her first film contract, with RKO, which stipulated that she had to make only one movie a year; however, as she said later, she loved movies. She was very effective as the innocent waif in her first film, Anatole Litvak’s The Long Night (1947), a remake of Le Jour Se Lève in which Henry Fonda rescues her from the Svengali-like embrace of Vincent Price.

The following year she won an Academy Award nomination for playing Irene Dunn’s 17-year-old daughter in George Stevens’s I Remember Mama – Bel Geddes was 26 at the time. In 1948 she co-starred with Robert Mitchum in an impressive western, Blood On The Moon, directed by Robert Wise. Then Howard Hughes purchased RKO and dropped Bel Geddes, because, he decided, she wasn’t sexy enough.

She was deeply upset, and refocused on Broadway, while remaining in the movies. In 1949 she starred in Caught, directed by Max Ophuls, opposite James Mason, and distributed by MGM. The following year Kazan cast her as yet another worried nice girl in Panic In The Streets for Twentieth Century Fox.

In 1951 she appeared in Henry Hathaway’s thriller Fourteen Hours. That was her last film until Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). There she played James Stewart’s former fiancée, who witnesses his deranged pursuit of Kim Novak. Her work with the director extended to television’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In 1958 she played the wife who batters her husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb – and then eats it.

On Broadway she was in The Moon Is Blue (1951) and Graham Greene’s The Living Room (1954). In 1955 she played Maggie in Tennessee Williams’s Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, but she was rarely given a chance to explore this angry, sexual side of herself. Thus, Bel Geddes never quite outgrew ingenue roles – in one interpretation, Miss Ellie is only a cute teenager with developmental problems.

After Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, she was in Terence Rattigan’s The Sleeping Prince (1956) on Broadway and in 1959 played opposite Henry Fonda in Robert Anderson’s Silent Night, Holy Night. Her greatest commercial triumph on Broadway came two years later with Jean Kerr’s comedy Mary, Mary, which ran for 1,500 performances. In 1967 she starred in Edward Albee’s Everything In The Garden.

While Bel Geddes was often typecast as a chronic worrier over impending disaster, there was another quality buried deep inside her performances that was seldom allowed release: a certain maternal malice, a penchant for psychic murder while smiling through tears. In the suspenseful run-up to the climactic “who shot JR?” episode of Dallas, a surprising number of viewers predicted (wrongly) that Miss Ellie did it. They saw something in her that most directors preferred to ignore or sublimate.

After the 1950s, Bel Geddes’ movie roles had dwindled. In 1959 she featured as the wife of Red Nichols (Danny Kaye) in a biopic about the jazz cornet player, after which there were only a further four films. Indeed, she had retired from acting to tend for her sick husband Windsor Lewis, who died of cancer in 1972.

In resuming her career she had trouble finding parts until, in 1978, Dallas came along. In 1984 Bel Geddes had a heart attack, with the result that the role of Miss Ellie was taken over by Donna Reed. But, after six months Bel Geddes returned – Reed sued to keep the job – and remained in the role until a year before Dallas ended in 1991.

Bel Geddes also wrote and illustrated two children’s books.

Her first marriage, in 1944, was to Carl Schreur, an electrical engineer; they had a daughter, and divorced in 1951. She married Lewis, a Broadway director that year, and had a daughter. Her daughters survive her.

· Barbara Bel Geddes, actor, born October 31 1922; died August 8 2005

 Her Guardian obituary can also be accessed here.

The Long Night, poster, US poster art, top, from left: Barbara Bel Geddes, Henry Fonda, 1947. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Blood On The Moon, poster, from left: Robert Mitchum, Barbara Bel Geddes, 1948. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
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Jack Palance
Jack Palance
Jack Palance

Jack Palance was born in 1920 in  Pennsylvania to parents from the Ukraine.   He understudied Marlon Brando on Broadway as ‘Stanley’ in “A Streetcar Named Desire”.   He made his film debut in “Panic in the Streets” in 1950.   He starred opposite Joan Crawford and Gloria Grahame in “Sudden Fear” in 1952 and was a brilliant villain opposite Alan Ladd in the classic Western “Shane” .  He had a long career in film winning an Oscar in 1991 fir “City Slickers”.   He died in 2008 at the age of 87.

Brian Baxter’s obituary in “The Guardian”:

It was George Stevens’s western Shane (1953) that established Jack Palance, who has died aged 87, in cinemagoers’ minds. Dressed in black, he was photographed from below, emphasising his domination of the farmers he had been hired to terrorise, or kill. That portrait of gunslinger Jack Wilson earned him a second Oscar nomination. The previous benchmark had been for Sudden Fear (1952), in which he played a murderous husband who is after the money and the life of millionairess Joan Crawford.

But it would be another four decades before Palance, with City Slickers (1991), would finally win an Oscar, as best supporting actor alongside Billy Crystal. In that film, he played Curly, an old trail boss who introduces four urbanites to the rugged life out west. The reward was as much for a career that took in more than 100 films as for that role. His acceptance speech proved a highlight of the evening. His series of one-armed push-ups dispelling any notion that he was a decrepit old-timer.

Palance was born in Lattimer Mines, Pennsylvania, the third son of Ukrainian immigrants. Like his father, he was a miner, but, by the end of the 1930s, Palance, tall and well-built was working as “Jack Brazzo”, a professional boxer. Other jobs included modelling, waiting, and working as a lifeguard. In 1942, he enrolled in the US army air corps, but a year later while training in Arizona his B24 Liberator bomber crashed and he suffered severe burns, which needed extensive plastic surgery.

Postwar, via the GI bill, Palance graduated in 1947 in drama from Stanford University, California, and almost immediately got parts on Broadway. In 1948 he began understudying for Anthony Quinn’s Stanley Kowalski in the touring production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and he then replaced Marlon Brando in the Broadway production of Streetcar, which brought him to the attention of director Elia Kazan.

He made his television debut in 1950 and his first films – as Walter Jack Palance. Kazan’s Panic in the Streets, in which Palance played Blackie, a bubonic plague carrier who is being pursued across New Orleans by the police, was followed by the war movie Halls of Montezuma. Then came came Sudden Fear, Shane, the Oscar nominations and a part in Arrowhead (1953) as an Apache.

There was plenty of TV work and in 1954 he played Attila the Hun in Sign of the Pagan (1954), one of Douglas Sirk’s lesser films. In 1955 he starred in I Died a Thousand Times – a remake of High Sierra, which had starred Humphrey Bogart. Palance enjoyed greater success in the Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956), winning an Emmy in the television version of Rod Serling’s boxing drama. In Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife (1955), the sometime leftist writer Clifford Odets’s attack on Hollywood, Palance starred as Charles Castle, a famous actor blackmailed by a vicious studio boss into signing a new contract. Palance and Rod Steiger battled it out at full volume. Aldrich then cast him in Attack! (1956) as a dedicated soldier, who realises that his cowardly commanding officer (Eddie Albert), is endangering his men. Palance brought force and integrity to the role.

It ushered in two decades where, despite working prolifically in American television and films, Palance found most of his employment abroad – mainly in Italy, often working in sword-and-sandal epics and westerns, or occasionally for American directors shooting abroad. The latter included Richard Fleischer’s Barabbas (1962) and the superior suspense western, The Professionals (1966), with Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin. But among other material in that decade was Le Mépris (Contempt 1963) Jean Luc Godard’s swipe at movie moguls which starred Brigitte Bardot and Palance, and also featured Fritz Lang – as himself. There was also Torture Garden (1967), a British horror flick. A decent western, Monte Walsh, followed in 1970.

A stream of European films in the 1970s was interrupted by Palance’s moving portrayal of the Count in a television version of Dracula and the prestigious, if dull, Oklahoma Crude (both 1973). By the beginning of the 1980s he was moving into an extended break to concentrate on his Californian cattle ranch.

But then, in 1988 he made a spectacular return in the lively western Young Guns and the German director Percy Adlon’s cult comedy Bagdad Cafe. In the latter he played an oddball painter dressed in snakeskin boots. In 1989 he returned triumphantly to the big time as Carl Grissom in Batman, the first and best of the revived series. After that he worked with Andrei Konchalovsky as a gun-runner in the action movie Tango and Cash and had a couple of outings in sword-and-sorcery movies. Then came the plum part in City Slickers.

For the rest of the decade he remained busy in television movies. He took on a series of classic parts – Scrooge in Ebenezer (1997) and Long John Silver in yet another version of Treasure Island (1999).

He made four screen appearances in the 21st century – and his sixth decade in the movies. The last was on TV, in Back When We Were Grownups (2004).

From the late 1950s Palance had been an amateur artist and in 1996 he wrote and illustrated the prose poem Forest of Love: A Love Story in Blank Verse.

His marriage to Virginia Baker in 1949 ended in divorce in 1966. They had three children, Brooke, Holly, and Cody, who predeceased him. In 1987 he married Elaine Rogers, but that marriage also ended in divorce.

· Jack Palance (Vladimir Palahniuk), actor, born February 18 1919; died November 10 2006

His obituary can be seen in “The Guardian” here.

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ABOUT ME

Anyone who knows me are aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been collecting signed photographs of my favourite actors. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I like.

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