Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 41 of 128

Woody Strode

Woody Strode was born in 1914 in Los Angeles. He wasan outstanding athlete before his entry into movies. He is best known for his performance opposite Kirk Douglas in “Spartacus” and in the title role in 1960 in John Ford’s “Sgt Rutledge”. His other films include “City Beneath the Sea” in 1953, “The Sins of Rachel Cade”, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” and “The Deserter”. He died in 1994.

David Shipman’s obituary in “The Independent”:

Woody Strode was tall of build, bald of pate, with a striking screen presence; had he been born white or later he might have became a star. Sidney Poitier became the first black actor to achieve screen stardom, while Strode was playing supporting roles. Poitier was comfortable, while there was a quality of menace about Strode – the legacy, perhaps, of his years as a professional wrestler

Strode was educated at UCLA before the Second World War and was one of the first blacks to play in integrated college football; he was also a star of the Canadian Football League. In 1941 the producer Walter Wanger gave him a walk-on in one of Hollywood’s then frequent tributes to the British Empire, Sundown, but he did not film again for another decade.

He took up wrestling after war service and was noticed by Walter Mirisch, then producing his Bomba the Jungle Boy series, cut-price adventure junkets starring Johnny Sheffield, who had played the son of Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller. Mirisch invited Strode to appear in The Lion Hunters (1951). Strode continued his wrestling career taking occasional small parts in movies, as in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), in which he was a slave, and Tarzan’s Fight for Life (1958), MGM’s unenthusiastic attempt atreviving the old series, with Gordon Scott replacing Weissmuller.

By this time Strode was getting regular movie offers and became a full-time actor. John Ford chose him the title-role in Sergeant Rutledge (1960), about a court martial during for the Civil War. The charges – of the rape and murder of a white woman – were obviously trumped up, for no screen hero ever looked as noble, or behaved so selflessly or bravely. No one till late in the plot mentions the colour of his skin – all of which suggests that Ford was trying to appear liberal at a time when the civil rights of blacks needed less simplistic solutions. Ford said later that the good sergeant “was the first time we had ever shown the Negro as a hero”, doing himself no credit by overlooking the fact that Poitier and Harry Belafonte had been doing so for several years.

But to his credit Ford used Strode again (if not in leading roles), in three more films, including his last, Seven Women (1966), rather strangely described by Ford as “a hell of a good picture” – a description more apt for either Spartacus (1960), directed by Stanley Kubrick, or Richard Brooks’s The Professionals (1966). Besides Sergeant Rutledge they also gave Strode his best American screen roles; in the former as the Nubian gladiatorial opponent who saves the life of Spartacus (Kirk Douglas), and in

the second as a mercenary hired by a millionaire (Ralph Bellamy) to recover his kidnapped wife.

Strode co-starred with another Tarzan, Jock Mahoney, in Tarzan’s Three Challenges (1963). But too often he was required merely to lend his formidable presence to potboilers. As good Hollywood offers grew fewer he began accepting some from Europe, for ex a mple the gunman killed before the credits in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1969). He also worked regularly in television. Unseen in Britain is Seduta alla sua Destra (1968), in which he had the star role as an African leader modelled on Pa trice Lumumba. He had recently completed filming in The Quick and the Dead, a western starring Sharon Stone.

David Shipman

Woodrow Strode, actor: born Los Angeles 25 July 1914; died Glendora, California 31 December 1994.

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

TCM overview:

Black actor and former pro football player and wrestler who made his film debut in the early 1940s. 6’4″ tall and weighing in at 210 pounds, Strode lent his imposing presence to a number of mostly peripheral roles, such as Kirk Douglas’ sparring partner in “Spartacus” (1960), though he got a chance to flex his underused acting muscles as a soldier wrongly accused of rape in John Ford’s “Sergeant Rutledge” (1960).

Article on Woody Strode in “Tina Aumont’s Eyes” website:

6’4” athlete turned actor Woody Strode, brought his muscular, powerful presence to everything from big budget Hollywood productions to cheap, lesser-known exploitation fare. He was also notable as being the first African-American to play a heroic lead in a big-scale Hollywood western.

Born in California on July 25, 1914, Woody’s screen career began with minor parts in the Gene Tierney western ‘Sundown’ (’41) and the romantic comedy ‘No Time for Love’ (’43). After playing the lion in the Jean Simmons picture ‘Androcles and the Lion’ (’52), he was the king of Ethiopia in Cecil B. DeMille’s ‘The Ten Commandments’ (’56), and then a cowardly private in the Gregory Peck war drama ‘Pork Chop Hill’ (’59). Strode’s big break would come though, through his association with legendary director John Ford.

Strode had begun his association with Ford back in 1939, with an uncredited role in his classic western ‘Stagecoach’. They reunited 20 years later when he played the title role in Ford’s rather neglected 1960 western ‘Sergeant Rutledge’, as a black Cavalry officer unfairly tried for the rape and murder of a white women and her father. Giving a strong dignified performance, it remains one of Strode’s best loved roles. He was also memorable that year in the role of Draba, a towering gladiator defeating Kirk Douglas, in ‘Spartacus’. After playing an Indian in John Ford’s ‘Two Rode Together’ (’61), Woody was John Wayne’s servant in Ford’s ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ (’62). There was tension on set between Strode and Wayne, and the two nearly came to blows, forcing Ford to keep them apart for a few days. It was said that Wayne was jealous of Woody’s football achievements and military career, as Wayne had not served in WWII, even though he wished to and would feel guilty about this the rest of his life. The final film Woody made with Ford was the 1966 missionary drama ‘7 Women’, starring Anne Bancroft and Sue Lyon.

I loved Woody’s strong turn as Jake the longbow expert, in Richard Brooks’ superb all-star adventure ‘The Professionals’ (’66), and it remains one of his best roles. He followed that up with a cameo in Sergio Leone’s ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ (’68), playing Stony, one of Henry Fonda’s heavies. Another western came in 1972 with ‘The Revengers’, a pretty dire effort with a great cast; William Holden, Ernest Borgnine and, in her final film, Susan Hayward. By now Woody was living in Rome, and had already begun appearing in Italian exploitation actioners, earning far more than he did in the US. He made a couple of pictures with Fernando Di Leo; ‘Manhunt in Milan’ (’72), as a hit man, and ‘Loaded Guns’ (’75), with an often naked Ursula Andress. After playing an alcoholic rancher in Enzo G. Castellari’s cult western ‘Keoma’ (’76), Strode supported William Shatner in the enjoyable sci-fi horror ‘Kingdom of the Spiders’ (’77), playing another rancher whose prize calf is killed by a mysterious spider venom. Now aged 65, and still in great shape, Strode had some decent fight scenes in ‘Jaguar Lives!’ (’79), a mediocre actioner with a cast of ex-Bond villains; Christopher Lee, Donald Pleasance and Joseph Wiseman.

Back on the grimy exploitation scene, Woody appeared in William Lustig’s gritty revenge flick ‘Vigilante’ (’83), and then chewed the scenery as an ex-lawman and mentor, in ‘The Final Executioner’ (’84), one of the poorer Italian post-apocalyptic drama’s. After playing a sleaze-ball in the Sybil Danning kidnap drama ‘Jungle Warriors’ (’84), Woody was thankfully back in an A-list production, Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Cotton Club’ (’84), though it was only a small role as the club’s doorman. A good minor role came in 1987 when he played Yank, a WWII veteran, in Volker Schlöndorff’s wonderful television movie ‘A Gathering of Old Men’, starring Holly Hunter and Richard Widmark.

Back in western territory, Strode’s’ final two movies were ‘Posse’ (’93), as the narrator, and Sam Raimi’s ‘The Quick and the Dead’ (’95), starring Sharon Stone, although it was not released until after his death.

Twice married, Woody died from lung cancer on New Years Eve 1994, aged 80. A quiet- spoken and gentle giant, Woody Strode was an optimistic and honest man who certainly lived life to the full, refusing to give in to old age. Whether playing the quiet hero or murderous mob boss, he remains a role model and cult figure in not only the US but across the globe.

Favourite Film: The Professionals
Favourite Performance: The Professionals

The above article can also be accessed online here.

James Gregory was born in 1911 in The Bronx, New York. He is best known for his performance as Angela Lansbury’s husband in the chilling “The Manchurian Candidate” in 1962. A popular character actor, his other movies include “The AScarlet Hour” and “P.T. 109”. He died in 2002 at the age of 90.

“The Telegraph” obituary:

ames Gregory , the actor who has died aged 90, was one of those performers whose face was recognised by many, even if his name was known to only a few.

His best-known role was probably as the Right-wing Senator Iselin in John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962), about a brainwashed Korean War hero, but in a career spanning more than half a century Gregory appeared in some 35 films and 200 television series.

He was cast in television dramas such as Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Wagon Train, and Rawhide. If an American cop was required on the television screen, the chances were that he would be embodied by James Gregory. He had roles in Columbo, McCloud, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Hawaii Five-O.

From 1959 to 1961 he was Barney Ruditsky in The Lawless Years, a series based on the exploits of a real detective in New York City in the 1920s. He also played Inspector Frank Luger from 1975 to 1982 in Barney Miller, about a Jewish policeman portrayed by Hal Linden.

James Gregory was born in the Bronx on December 23 1911, and grew up in the New York suburb of La Rochelle. In his youth he demonstrated a talent for both acting and golf, and he might have opted for a career in either. But his first proper employment, after a series of jobs as golf caddy, waiter and clerk, was on Wall Street, where he worked as a runner after the crash of 1929; within five years he had been promoted to the post of private secretary to a stockbroker.

But Gregory simultaneously acted with local drama groups, and by the late 1930s he was acting professionally, performing with a travelling company in plays up and down the east coast of America. Then, in 1939, he made his debut on Broadway in a production of Key Largo.

During the Second World War Gregory served in the US Navy and Marine Corps in the Pacific, before returning to the stage; he appeared in a further 25 Broadway productions, including Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, in which he played Biff. In the early 1950s Gregory moved into live television – it is said that at one stage he appeared in five different dramas over a period of only 10 days.

Apart from The Manchurian Candidate, his films included The Young Stranger (1957); Al Capone (1959); The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), in which Gregory played a murderer who kills the witnesses to his crimes; Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1969); and Shootout (1971).

James Gregory died on September 16. He is survived by his wife, Anne Gregory.

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

Jo Van Fleet was born in Oaklands, California in 1914. She had a successful career on Broadway and won an Oscar in 1955 for her performance as James Dean’s mother in “East of Eden”. Her other movies include “Wild River” with Montgomery Clift and “Cool Hand Luke” in 1967 with Paul Newman. She died in 1996.

Tom Vallance’s “Independent” obituary:

Jo Van Fleet was a powerful actress, described by Elia Kazan as “full of unconstrained violence”, who frequently played roles older than herself. She won an Oscar for her first film role, as James Dean’s mother in East of Eden (1955). On both stage and screen she created a gallery of stoic, fiercely dominant women, many of them proud or manipulative mothers.

Born in 1919 in Oakland, California, she was educated at the College of the Pacific in Stockton. Encouraged to go to New York to pursue an acting career, she won a scholarship to study at the Neighbourhood Playhouse under Sanford Meisner. She made her Broadway debut as Dorcas in A Winter’s Tale (1946) and played Regan to Louis Calhern’s King Lear in 1950. Elia Kazan, whom she later credited as a major influence on her life, first directed her in Flight into Egypt (1952), but it was her role as Camille in Tennessee Williams’s controversial Camino Real (1953), also directed by Kazan, that established her.

Kazan brought her to Hollywood for East of Eden, and her success led to other films – The Rose Tattoo (1955), I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955), as an arche- typal stage mother pushing daughter Lillian Roth (Susan Hayward) to stardom, The King and Four Queens (1956) with Clark Gable, and as Doc Holliday’s girlfriend Kate in Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957). Holliday was played by Kirk Douglas, who later recounted his amazement at Van Fleet’s method approach: “In one scene I had to beat up my hooker girlfriend – Jo wanted to be pumped up and asked me to slap her before we did the scene. We did it over and over and every time she asked me to hit her, and hit her harder.”

Returning to Broadway, she won both the Tony and Donaldson awards for her irritable Jessie Mae Watts in A Trip to Bountiful (1957), and the following year won the New York Drama Critics Award for Look Homeward, Angel, in which she played the acquisitive mother of Tony Perkins, who later described the scene-stealing battles in the play. “The worst duel I figured in was between Jo Van Fleet and Hugh Griffith . . . it was always hair-tearing time between them. Hugh would clutch his heart and say, `Do you know what that **** did to me today?’ Her knuckles would turn white when she’d say the same thing about him.”

She returned to the screen to star with Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick in Kazan’s Wild River (1960) as the obdurate 89-year-old matriarch who refuses to leave her farm in a valley about to be flooded by the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1935. Only 41, Van Fleet would spend five hours every morning getting into her make-up and applying wrinkles, insisting that the liver spots were put on her hands even for long shots where they would not be seen. The final wordless scene, in which she sits on the porch of the small townhouse she has been given, her bundled possessions still in her lap, her spirit and will to live gone, was profoundly moving. A commercial failure given limited distribution, the film was later described by Truffaut as “the accomplished work of mature artists”.

Though she continued to act in theatre, films and television (including episodes of Bonanza and – as a nagging wife who becomes a murder victim – in Alfred Hitchcock Presents), Van Fleet’s career did not progress as rewardingly as she hoped. Kazan said: “Jo stagnated, and, since she knew it, was bitter. And as she became bitter, she become more difficult.”

When Bette Davis turned down the role of Paul Newman’s mother in Cool Hand Luke (1967) because it was too small, Van Fleet took the role. In the 1970s she worked a lot in regional theatre. She played mothers again in two television movies, The Family Rico (1972, mother to Ben Gazarra) and Power (1980), a thinly disguised biography of Jimmy Hoffa in which she was mother to Jo Don Baker’s dock-worker turned labour leader. Her last film was Seize the Day (1986), based on Saul Bellow’s novella, in which she was one of several notable actors playing small guest roles in support of Robin Williams.

Widowed in 1990 (her husband was the dancer-choreographer William Bales), Van Fleet lived on New York’s West Side, where she became known for her unconventional behaviour. Legend has it that when asked by the check-out assistant in the local supermarket for some form of identification, she unzipped her handbag and pulled out her Oscar.

Tom Vallance

Jo Van Fleet, actress: born Oakland, California 30 December 1919; married William Bales (died 1990; one son); died 10 June 1996.

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

Original Cinema 1-Sheet Poster – Movie Film Posters

TCM overview:

An attractive brunette with angular features, Lee Grant began her career as a child performer with NYC’s Metropolitan Opera. By age 11, she had become a member of the American Ballet Theatre. After music studies at Juilliard, she won a scholarship to attend the Neighborhood Playhouse and switched her focus to acting. Grant understudied the role of Ado Annie in a touring production of “Oklahoma!” before landing her breakthrough stage role as a young shoplifter in Sidney Kingsley’s “Detective Story” in 1949. Hollywood soon beckoned and she recreated the role in William Wyler’s 1951 superb film version. Grant won the Cannes Film Festival Best Actress prize and earned a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for the role. Seemingly on the verge of a brilliant career, the actress found herself the victim of the blacklist when her husband, playwright Arnold Manoff was named before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Grant herself refused to testify and the film offers over the next decade were sporadic.

Returning to Manhattan, Grant found work in TV (e.g., the daytime soap “Search for Tomorrow”) and on stage (i.e., “A Hole in the Head” 1957; “Two for the Seesaw” 1959). After earning an OBIE Award for her work in Genet’s “The Maids” in 1963, her small screen career began to pick up. In 1965, Grant joined the cast of the primetime soap “Peyton Place” as Stella Chernak and picked up an Emmy for her work. She earned a second statuette for her performance as a runaway wife and mother who ends up at a truck stop in California in “The Neon Ceiling” (NBC, 1971).

By the time she had earned her second Emmy, Grant’s feature career had been rejuvenated with her stellar work as the widow of a murder victim in Norman Jewison’s Oscar-winning “In the Heat of the Night” (1967). That same year, she essayed a neurotic in the campy “Valley of the Dolls”. In “The Landlord” (1970), she was the society matron mother of Beau Bridges and her comic portrayal earned her a second Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress. Grant then played the mother of all Jewish mothers, Sophie Portnoy, in Ernest Lehman’s film version of Philip Roth’s novel “Portnoy’s Complaint” (1972). Hal Ashby’s “Shampoo” (1975) finally brought her a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award as a Beverly Hills matron having an affair with her hairdresser. The following year, Grant received a fourth nomination for her deeply moving portrayal of a Jewish refugee in “Voyage of the Damned”.

Her subsequent screen roles have been of varying quality, although Grant always brings a professionalism and degree of excellence to even the smallest role. After striking out as a sitcom lead in the underrated “Fay” (NBC, 1975), she delivered a fine portrayal of First Lady Grace Coolidge in “Backstairs at the White House” (NBC, 1979), was the domineering mother of actress Frances Farmer in “Will There Really Be a Morning?” (CBS, 1983) and excelled as Dora Cohn, mother of “Roy Cohn” (HBO, 1992). On the big screen, Grant lent her substantial abilities to “Teachers” (1984) as a hard-nosed school superintendent, “Defending Your Life” (1991), as an elegant prosecutor sparring with adversary Rip Torn, and “It’s My Party” (1996), as the mother of man suffering from complications from AIDS.

While Grant has continued to act in features and on TV, she has concentrated more on her directing career since the 80s. After studying at the American Film Institute, she made the short “The Stronger” (1976) which eventually aired on Arts & Entertainment’s “Shortstories” in 1988. Grant made her feature debut with “Tell Me a Riddle” (1980), an earnest, well-acted story of an elderly couple facing death. She has excelled in the documentary format, beginning with “The Wilmar 8” (1981), about strike by female bank employees in the Midwest. (Grant later directed a fictionalized account entitled “A Matter of Sex” for NBC in 1984). She steered Marlo Thomas to an Emmy in the fact-based “Nobody’s Child” (CBS, 1986) and earned praise for helming “No Place Like Home” (CBS, 1989), a stark look at the effects of unemployment. A number of her documentaries have been screen as part of HBO’s “America Undercover” series, including the Oscar-winning “Down and Out in America” (1985), about the unemployed, “What Sex Am I?” (1985), about transsexuals and transvestites, “Battered” (1989), about victims of domestic violence, and “Women on Trial” (1992), about mothers who turn to the courts to protect their children. In 1997, she produced, directed and hosted the well-received “Say It, Fight It, Cure It” (Lifetime) which focused on breast cancer survivors and their families.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

TCM overview:

Although she was a stage-trained actress with an impressive theatrical résumé, audiences embraced Calista Flockhart as charming, vulnerable lawyer “Ally McBeal” (FOX, 1997-2002). She and her character became cultural touchstones, both loved and despised for many reasons: her revealing clothing, her rail-thin physique, her self-absorption, her fitness as feminist poster girl, etc. The Golden Globe-winning actress focused more on the work than on celebrity, earning good reviews in “William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1999) and “Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her” (2001) as well as more well regarded stage work. After adopting a son, she resurfaced as the Republican daughter of Sally Field on the hit drama “Brothers & Sisters” (ABC, 2006- ) and made headlines by marrying movie star Harrison Ford. A quiet success, Flockhart seemed less interested in Hollywood ambition than in enjoying her work and her real life.

Born Nov. 11, 1964 in Freeport, IL to Kay, an English teacher, and Ronald Flockhart, an executive for Kraft Foods, Calista Kay Flockhart and her family moved often for her father’s job. She ended up residing in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, New York and New Jersey. After high school, she attended the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Jersey, determined to become an actress. After graduation, she balanced work in regional theater with Manhattan stage performances and the occasional TV or film role. She acted in several off-Broadway plays – including “All for One,” “Sophistry,” “Wrong Turn at Lungfish” – before triumphing on Broadway in the role of Laura opposite Julie Harris in a 1994 revival of “The Glass Menagerie.” Her feature debut was in the tiny part of a college student in Robert Redford’s “Quiz Show” (1994). While appearing to great praise in the stage production of “The Loop,” she came to the attention of Mike Nichols, who gave the actress her breakthrough screen role as a conservative politician’s (Gene Hackman) daughter engaged to the son of two gay men (Robin Williams and Nathan Lane) in the hit comedy “The Birdcage” (1996), a loose remake of “La cage aux Folles” (1978).

Although she already had several TV credits – including the title role in “The Secret Life of Mary-Margaret: Portrait of a Bulimic” (HBO, 1992) – it was the David E. Kelley-created “Ally McBeal” (FOX, 1997-2002) which vaulted her to stardom. As a fantasy-prone Boston lawyer coping with being a single working woman, Flockhart delivered a performance balanced between comedy and pathos: either you loved Ally or hated her; either you found her an example of a modern woman or a frustratingly regressive caricature. Every detail about the character – from her ultra-short skirts to her self-obsession to her constant search for Mr. Right – was scrutinized in the media and around watercoolers; even an image of her character appeared on the cover of Time magazine as part of the think piece, “Is Feminism Dead?” That was also a position in which the actress found herself with constant speculation over her love life and, more controversially, her weight. Impossibly slender, the actress denied reports that she had an eating disorder or a drug problem, but that did little to quell rumors. She became, in fact, the poster child of “lollipop head” actresses who may or may not have had eating disorders. Half the cast of “McBeal” was accused of the same the same disorder and berated for their affect on young girls’ idea of beauty (Years later, Flockhart would admit that she had over-exercised and under-eaten during this period.) Despite the controversies, for her role as McBeal, the actress earned three Emmy nominations, a Golden Globe and a People’s Choice Award among other honors.

Capitalizing on Flockhart’s newfound fame, earlier projects that had been languishing in distributor limbo began turning up on screens, notably “Jane Doe” (filmed in 1996; screened at festivals in 1999) where she played a charismatic drug addict who falls for a shy writer. On the more mainstream front, Flockhart impressed as the headstrong Helena in Michael Hoffman’s screen adaptation of “William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1999) opposite David E. Kelley’s wife, Michelle Pfeiffer. She returned to her theatrical roots in the summer of 1999, headlining two-thirds of an evening of typically controversial one-acts written by filmmaker Neil LaBute that were collectively titled “Bash: Latter-Day Plays.” She earned raves for her two characterizations – one an intense portrayal of a woman recounting an affair with a teacher and its tragic aftermath; the other as a Mormon woman visiting NYC with her boyfriend – and her mere presence guaranteed that the limited off-Broadway production sold out.

Flockhart hosted an episode of “Saturday Night Live” (NBC, 1975- ) and appeared elsewhere in the David E. Kelley universe as McBeal on “The Practice” (ABC, 1997-2004). She took a dramatic turn in her next feature, “Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her” (2001), playing a remarkably accurate tarot card reader who nurses her cancer-ridden lover (Valeria Golino) while finding solace in recounting the memories of their relationship. Off-screen, the actress made headlines by adopting a son, Liam, as a single mom in 2001, and onscreen, Robert Downey, Jr. was added to the cast of “Ally McBeal” in the fourth season. His romance with Flockhart fueled a revival of both the ratings and Downey’s career. When the series ended, Flockhart joined Matthew Broderick, Alec Baldwin and Toni Collette to make the FBI-sting-operation comedy, “The Last Shot” (2004), which bombed. In her real life, Flockhart began dating mega-star, Harrison Ford, who had recently separated from his second wife, Melissa Mathison. In a typical “meet cute,” Flockhart accidentally spilled a drink on him at the Golden Globes due to her nervousness in meeting him. After that evening, the couple became inseparable.

Flockhart disappeared from cultural radars until her return to regular television work starring on the soapy drama, “Brothers & Sisters” (ABC, 2006- ), a family saga about five siblings who take over the family’s lucrative business after the sudden death of their father (Tom Skerritt). Flockhart played a New York-based, right-wing radio talk show host who returns to her Los Angeles origins to start a television talk show, but must deal with her troubled family – particularly her estranged mother (Sally Field) – while helping to run the business. Despite a wobbly start, the show became an Emmy-winning hit, and Flockhart displayed considerable adult dramatic chops, a welcome evolution from the flightiness of Ally McBeal. Off-camera, the quiet, over-seven-year-long relationship between Flockhart and movie star Harrison Ford became official with their June 15, 2010 wedding in New Mexico.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

David Shipman’s 1992 “Independent” obituary:

Thelma Booth Ford (Shirley Booth), actress, born 30 August 1898, married 1929 Edward Gardner (marriage dissolved 1941), 1943 William Baker (died 1951), died Chatham Massachusetts 16 October 1992

SHIRLEY BOOTH was a magnificent actress with a broad range but she was still unknown in Britain when the film of Come Back Little Sheba appeared in 1953. She had been acting on Broadway since 1925 – and with some success when she played Mabel in Three Men on a Horse 10 years later. Among her later roles were the journalists in The Philadelphia Story (1939) and My Sister Eileen (1940) – played on screen respectively by Ruth Hussey and Rosalind Russell. Booth was a less glamorous version than either, but she was regarded as a sleek career-woman with a nifty line in wisecracks. She used her skill at these in a popular radio show, Duffy’s Tavern, which starred her then husband, Ed Gardner.

As Miss Duffy, she presented a homely image – and that was something she was obliged to take on again in Come Back Little Sheba, on Broadway in 1950. The author, William Inge, was sub- Tennessee-Williams, complete to the poetic titles, and this is certainly his best play. Lola, as played by Booth, shuffled about in a dressing-gown, forgetful and fantasising (about Sheba, the dog of the title), enjoying radio soap operas, spying on the young lovers in the parlour and hoping against hope that her husband has abandoned alcohol without understanding what drew him towards it in the first place – a woman blowsy, good-natured and shabby.

Sidney Blackmer played the dipsomaniac husband, but when the producer Hal Wallis decided to film the play he replaced him, as box-office insurance, with Burt Lancaster. Wallis turned down Bette Davis’s request to play the wife, and cast Booth over Paramount’s objections because, in his own words, ‘she was a great actress’. Britain’s best critic, Richard Winnington, wrote: ‘Miss Booth is a magnificent actress of patently wide range, who accomplishes the miracle of making Lola at once repulsive and beneath her load of pain, longing and stupidity, oddly beautiful.’

Among the other actresses nominated for an Oscar that year were Davis, Joan Crawford and Susan Hayward – whom we may regard as traditional Hollywood actresses when we see that the critic of the New York Herald Tribune wrote that Booth had ‘an acting style like the best modern French and Italian motion pictures’. Booth’s Oscar for Best Actress was an enormously popular one and the film was very successful.

In the meantime she had played Aunt Cissy (the role Joan Blondell took in the movie) in the musical version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1951), with a couple of comic songs, including a hymn to her slob of a husband, ‘He Had Refinement’. Another musical, By the Beautiful Sea (1954), was written especially for her, and she glowed in it. After 30 years in the business she had become one of New York’s most beloved actresses.

Before that, she had had a stunning success in Arthur Laurents’s romantic comedy The Time of the Cuckoo (1952), as a spinster schoolteacher who has her first, and possibly last, affair with an eye-to-the-main-chance Lothario while on holiday in Venice. William Marchant also wrote Desk Set (1955) for Booth, but in both cases the screen versions were offered to Katharine Hepburn (The Time of the Cuckoo became Summer Madness or Summertime on film). Since Hepburn and Booth had been friends since they had appeared on Broadway in The Philadelphia Story, Hepburn asked whether she minded that she took over the roles – but not only did Booth not mind, she gave Hepburn some tips on how the roles should be played.

Wallis had been looking for a screen role for Booth, to follow her Oscar, and he came up with a Back Street-type story, About Mr Leslie, in which she was a night- club singer sharing the life of Robert Ryan for just a couple of weeks every year. It was not a success – which was why Wallis dropped his plan to film The Time of the Cuckoo. He tried twice more with Booth, in 1958. Hot Spell found her as Anthony Quinn’s put-upon wife, and despite too many echoes of other family dramas of the time – including those of Inge and Williams – it worked beautifully because of Booth’s warm performance. Her three films had been directed by Daniel Mann, but Wallis handed her over to Joseph Anthony when he produced Thornton Wilder’s comedy The Matchmaker. In the title-role Booth was much funnier than Ruth Gordon had been on the stage (both in London and New York), and she was probably better than the many stars who played the role when it was musicalised as Hello Dolly].

But once again the public was not very interested, and Paramount’s executives, who had not seen movie-star potential in Booth in the first place, did not encourage Wallis to continue with movie plans for her. She agreed with Paramount; Robert Ryan observed that she was ‘uncomfortable working in the movies. She is a very timid woman and walked part of the way to work before someone told her she could park her car on the Paramount lot. In fact, I told her.’

She turned down other movie roles, including A Pocketful of Miracles and Airport, but continued working on the stage until the Seventies, in, among other plays, Juno and the Paycock and Hay Fever. But she was happiest with a television sitcom, Hazel, based on the Saturday Evening Post cartoon about an obstreperous and none- too-efficient household maid. It began in 1961, and ran for several years, bringing Booth another clutch of awards. During her life it was assumed that Booth was born in 1905, but her family has announced that she was 94 years old at the time of her death.

For myself, I cherish her four screen appearances. I remember vividly her playing Amanda – the mother – in a television version of The Glass Menagerie in 1967. I’m told that she was miscast, but as far as I’m concerned it didn’t matter.

As the New York Post said when reviewing A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Shirley Booth was ‘one of the wonders of the American stage; a superb actress, a magnificent comedienne and all-round performer of seemingly endless variety.’

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

TCM overview:

Though he spent almost a decade struggling to make a name for himself, actor Billy Bob Thornton took matters into his own hands when he wrote, directed and starred in the career-making independent drama, “Sling Blade” (1996), which earned the then-unknown performer an Oscar for Best Screenplay and another nomination for Best Actor. Ever since his sudden rise to stardom, Thornton became a prominent leading man and supporting player whose short-lived but high-profile marriage to offbeat starlet Angelina Jolie overshadowed his exemplary work in films like “Monster’s Ball” and “The Man Who Wasn’t There” (2001). After their divorce, Thornton receded a bit from the public eye, though he continued his streak of fine performances in “Bad Santa” (2003) and “Friday Night Lights” (2004), two wildly different films that displayed his prowess for disappearing into what ever character he played. Occasionally, Thornton incorporated his own personal issues – namely his battles with eating and obsessive-compulsive disorders, like a fear of Louis XIV furniture – into his characters, as he did in “Bandits” (2001). Despite his seemingly bizarre personal life, Thornton nonetheless maintained a steady stream of quality work that always kept him near the top of the game.

Born on Aug. 4, 1955 in Alpine, AK, Thornton was raised in a poor family by his father, Billy Ray, a basketball coach, and Virginia, a psychic. Until he was eight or nine years old, Thornton lived with his grandparents in a small house in a small town that had no electricity nor running water. In fact, the only illumination came from the sun or coal oil lamps. He then moved to a larger town called Malvern – about 20 miles from Hot Springs – where life revolved around the local high school football team. It was around this time that he met future writing partner, Tom Epperson. While in high school, Thornton began acting and eventually decided to pursue a performing career. After graduation, he attended Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, AK, where he majored in psychology until dropping out after two semesters. In 1977, he and Epperson briefly moved to New York before heading westward to Hollywood. Once they settled in Los Angeles, Thornton worked variously as a rock singer, drummer and actor. He and Epperson wrote scripts which they attempted to sell, although they met with little initial enthusiasm.

On the small screen, Thornton played the conveniently named Billy Bob in the busted pilot “Circus” (ABC, 1987) before making his series debut as an ex-greaser who was a surrogate brother to a gang in “The Outsiders” (Fox, 1989). After making his feature debut in the forgettable direct-to-video release “Hunter’s Blood” (1988), he carved a niche portraying good ole’ boys in sitcoms like “Evening Shade” (CBS, 1990-93) and “Hearts Afire” (CBS, 1992-95). He earned acclaim for his featured role in Carl Franklin’s “One False Move” (1992), which he co-wrote with Epperson. His portrayal of a sociopathic ex-con involved with a black woman (Cynda Williams, who was briefly Thornton’s third wife) earned him critical praise and, more importantly, industry recognition, which led to supporting roles in “Bound by Honor” (1993), “On Deadly Ground” (1994) and “Dead Man” (1995). With his career on a roll, Thornton collaborated with Epperson again on, “A Family Thing” (1996), an earnest drama about a white man (Robert Duvall) who discovers he has a black half-brother (James Earl Jones). Duvall brought the germ of the idea to the writing duo, who fashioned a vehicle for the Oscar-winning actor. With Epperson, Thornton co-wrote “Don’t Look Back” (HBO, 1996), directed by Geoff Murphy and starring Eric Stoltz as a musician-addict who stumbles onto drug money with near fatal results.

Thornton finally became a Hollywood player with “Sling Blade” (1996), a film in which he did triple duty as star, screenwriter and director. The project had its genesis in a monologue he created to channel his frustrations on the set of his first television movie, “The Man Who Broke 1,000 Chains” (HBO, 1987). Thornton created Karl Childers, a mentally-challenged murderer, and nurtured the character for close to a decade; first performing the soliloquies on stage then in the short film “Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade” (1994). By the time he expanded the story to feature length, Thornton had made a deal to direct as well as write and star in “Sling Blade,” a film that propelled Thornton into stardom. With close-cropped hair, a clean-shaven face and using slow, raspy vocals punctuated with growls, Thornton was barely recognizable as Karl, whose close bond with a young boy (Lucas Black) leads him to confront and eventually repeat his dark past. And though the film alternated between static set pieces – betraying its stage origins – and leisurely-paced exterior scenes, “Sling Blade” featured a strong cast that included Natalie Canerday as the boy’s mother, John Ritter as a gay man for whom the boy’s mother works and Dwight Yoakam as the mother’s bigoted, abusive boyfriend. In an Oscar year dominated by independent films, “Sling Blade” was a critical darling that earned Thornton an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and another nomination as Best Actor.

Thornton’s career – which had gradually been building steam – exploded with the success of “Sling Blade.” He signed a three-picture deal with Miramax Films and was suddenly one of the most sought-after actors working in Hollywood. He was nearly unrecognizable as a psychotic mechanic in Oliver Stone’s “U-Turn” (1997) before playing a reluctant religious convert in Duvall’s “The Apostle” (1997). The following year found him as a would-be marijuana kingpin in “Homegrown” (1998), a wily southern political advisor patterned after real-life spin doctor James Carville in “Primary Colors” (1998) and the Mission Control leader in the summer blockbuster “Armageddon” (1998). Thornton earned more critical kudos for playing Bill Paxton’s half-wit brother in “A Simple Plan” (1998), a tense character study about three friends whose lives fall apart after finding and trying to keep $4 million. Once again, Thornton significantly altered his appearance on his way to earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Meanwhile, Thornton returned to the director’s chair to helm “All the Pretty Horses” (2000), which he adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel.

Thorton’s most critically acclaimed role since “Sling Blade” came when he starred opposite Halle Berry in “Monster’s Ball” (2001). Thornton played a hardened jail warden whose life is emerged in his own bitter history and ingrained racism. His character transforms and ends up falling in love with a black woman whose husband he executed. Thornton’s exquisite portrait of an agonized man trying to embrace love for the first time in years earned him an impressive array of critical plaudits and award nominations, though in the end he was overshadowed by Berry’s Oscar-winning performance. Thornton may have been his own worst enemy when it came to competing for Oscar gold, as he also turned in particularly fine performances in two other films that same year with a comedic turn in Barry Levinson’s “Bandits” (2001) and a sharp, haunting role as the barber drawn into a dark melodrama in the Coen Brothers’ loopy noir “The Man Who Wasn’t There” (2001). Oscar-watchers suggested that Thornton split his own vote among the three roles, resulting in zero nominations for the actor.

Thornton’s always-reliable acting was also often overshadowed by his bizarre tabloid-made relationship with the much-younger actress Angelina Jolie, who became his fifth wife in 2000 after the two met on the film “Pushing Tin” (1999) and he broke off his engagement with Laura Dern. Their surprise union was characterized by dramatic, obsessive affectations which included acquiring tattoos of each other’s names and wearing vials that contained a drop of the other’s blood when separated. But the marriage lasted only two years: Jolie filed for divorce in 2002, shortly after adopting a Cambodian orphan who took Thornton’s name. On screen in 2002, the actor appeared in a pair of low-profile duds, playing a philanderer in the offbeat comedy “Waking Up in Reno” which also starred Charlize Theron, Patrick Swayze and Natasha Richardson, then a parolee who becomes involved with the unknowing wife of the man he killed in “Levity.” But Thornton was in fine, appropriately over-the-top form when he reunited with the Coen Brothers’ screwball effort “Intolerable Cruelty” (2003), playing a Texas billionaire who’s about to become the latest victim of a gold-digging serial divorcee (Catherine Zeta-Jones). The actor followed with a pleasing low-key cameo as a libidinous U.S. president in the witty British romantic comedy “Love, Actually” (2003).

Thornton returned to center stage in peak form in director Terry Zwigoff’s deliriously cynical holiday comedy, “Bad Santa” (2003) – based on a one-line concept by the Coen Brothers – playing the whiskey-slugging, womanizing safecracker Willie T. Stokes who annually arises from a hazy hibernation to team up with three-foot-tall, foul-mouthed mastermind Marcus (Tony Cox) and – under the benevolent cover of Santa and Elf – clean out the department store where they are employed. Thornton’s performance was a comedic masterstroke, especially when he let loose with his stinging, profane and sarcastic invective. He followed with a measured, intelligent portrayal of high school football coach in the gridiron-obsessed small town of Odessa, TX, in the hit film “Friday Night Lights” (2004). He took on a less serious sports-minded project when he accepted the role of Little League baseball coach Morris Buttermaker (originally played by Walter Matthau) in the remake of the classic “The Bad News Bears” (2005). As a high school baseball sensation who once earned a Major League tryout in his youth, Thornton was well-suited to the role of the inebriated, washed-up Buttermaker riding herd over a profane team of young misfits. But the film suffered in its adherence to the original and a refusal to sharpen the story’s edges for a more contemporary audience.

Thornton took on his second anti-Christmas-themed film with “The Ice Harvest” (2005), director Harold Ramis’ film noir with pitch black comic undercurrents, playing the potentially untrustworthy partner in crime of a mob accountant (John Cusack) who steals a bundle from his boss and endures a perilous Christmas Eve as they prepare to flee. For his next feature, Thornton wasted his talents as a lifestyle coach for losers in “School for Scoundrels” (2006), a lame and rather predictable comedy from Todd Phillips about a top secret confidence-building class run by a deviant huckster (Thornton) whose tough love tactics and compulsion for prying into his students’ lives leads them to overcome their deep-rooted anxieties to exact revenge. Thornton remained productive in the following year, starring in “The Astronaut Farmer” (2007), a satirical look at an astronaut forced to leave NASA to save his family’s farm, and “Mr. Woodcock” (2007), which featured Thornton as a sadistic gym teacher who terrorizes a best-selling self-help author (Seann William Scott) in his youth and is now ready to marry the writer’s widowed mother (Susan Sarandon). He next played a government agent hunting down two fugitives (Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan) in the paranoid thriller “Eagle Eye” (2008). After several years spent working in low-budget films like Mark Polish’s comedy-drama “The Smell of Success” (2009) and his own late ’60s period piece “Jayne Mansfield’s Car” (2013), Thornton returned to television as the villain in “Fargo” (FX 2014- ), a comedy-drama based on Joel and Ethan Coen’s film of the same name.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Hong Kong Affair, poster, US poster art, Jack Kelly, 1958. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Jack Kelly was born in 1927 in Astoria, Queens, New York. His sister was the actress Nancy Kelly. He was featured in the science-fiction classic “Forbidden Planet” in 1956. In 1957 he starred with James Garner in the very popular TV series “Maverick” which ran until 1962. Kelly stayed with the series for the duration. His films innclude “Commandos” with Lee Van Cleef in 1968 and “Young Billy Young” in 1969 with Robert Mitchum and Angie Dickinson. In his later years he entered politics. He died in 1992 at the age of 65.

IMDB entry:

Jack Kelly started acting at age two, modeling in soap ads and garnering a lifetime supply of soap for his pay. Jack continued to model until the age of nine when he appeared in his first play with Hope Emerson called “Swing Your Lady”. Broadway shows and radio followed until his family moved to California in 1938. He attended St. John’s Military Academy and spent two years as a law student at the University of California in Los Angeles. For three years Jack dropped acting to concentrate on school and making money. He worked as a shoe salesman, gas station attendant, lifeguard, grocery delivery boy, and mens clothing salesman. In 1945, Jack was inducted into the army taking basic train at Camp Roberts in California. He was sent to Alaska as a weather observer and was on the first B-29 to fly over the Arctic circle. After his discharge in 1946, Jack returned to UCLA and worked nights on various radio programs including, “Lux Radio theater”, “Suspense”, “Tell It Again”, and “Romance of the Ranchos”. Upon leaving school he joined the circle Theater in Los Angeles appearing in “Time of Your Life”, “The Adding Machine”, and “Love On The Dole”. In 1949 he acted in “Anna Lucasta” at the coronet Theater. This performance brought Jack to the attention of several Hollywood directors. He then made his film debut in “Fighting Man Of The Plains” starring Randolph Scott. In 1955, Jack was signed by Warner Bros. to star as Dr. Parris Mitchell in the “King’s Row” series of “Warner Bros. Presents.” The show debuted in September, 1955. He had served an acting apprenticeship that included movies, television, radio, and stage. His hobbies include ship models, reading historical literature, sculpturing, and listening to show tunes records. He also enjoyed such sports as sailing, badminton, skin diving, golf, horseback riding and flying.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Bill Hafker thehuntzie@yahoo.com

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

James Taylor was born on 12th March 1948 in Boston where his father was a doctor. His career is of couse as a major singer/songwriter. He has though appeared on film and had a leading role in the movie “Two-Lane Blacktop” directed by Monte Hellman in 1971.

TCM overview:

The epitome of the sensitive singer-songwriter in the 1970s, James Taylor’s warm, introspective music soothed a generation of listeners worn down by the turmoil of the 1960s, who longed for the simple joys of his best songs like “Carolina in My Mind,” “Fire and Rain,” “Shower the People” and “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You).” His best material reflected his own life, which was marked in its early years by depression and drug addiction before finding spiritual rebirth and redemption as a father and husband to singer Carly Simon in the mid-1970s. The collapse of that marriage in the early 1980s followed a downward turn in his career and health before he rebounded later in the decade to become a gentle, avuncular figure for music fans who came to his annual summer shows to bask in the nostalgic pleasures of his song catalog. The 1990s and 2000s saw a major return to form with Grammy-winning albums and a lucrative reunion with Carole King, who had penned his only No. 1 hit, “You’ve Got a Friend.” Throughout his countless trips up and down the music industry ladder, Taylor’s graceful voice and presence, and his unerring ability to strike an emotional chord through his music, not only went untouched but gained strength, gravity and undeniable beauty over the course of his four-decade career.

James Vernon Taylor was born on March 12, 1948 at Massachusetts General Hospital in Lenox, MA, where his father, Dr. Isaac Taylor, was a resident physician. He was the second of five children by Dr. Taylor and his wife, Gertrude, including older brother Alex and younger siblings Kate, Livingston and Hugh, all of whom would go on to enjoy their own music careers in subsequent decades. In 1951, three-year-old Taylor and his family moved to Chapel Hill, NC, where his father served as Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. There, the family lived in relative wealth, frequently returning to New England for summers on Martha’s Vineyard, but Dr. Taylor’s career required him to be away from home for lengthy stays in Maryland or in Antarctica as part of the military-coordinated Operation Deep Freeze. Taylor began playing cello as a child before switching to guitar at the age of 12. His primary influences at the time were folk singers like Woody Guthrie, as well as rhythm and blues and more traditional music like gospel hymns and holiday carols. In 1961, he began attending Milton Academy, a prep boarding school in Massachusetts, before returning to Martha’s Vineyard for the summer of 1962. There, he met Danny Kortchmar, an aspiring guitarist from New York with whom he founded an immediate and lasting friendship. Kortchmar was astonished by the power and soulfulness of Taylor’s voice, and the pair became a staple of the island’s coffeehouses as the duo Jamie & Kootch.

By 1963, Taylor was beginning to struggle with the high pressures of study at Milton Academy, and soon returned to North Carolina to finish his junior year. While there, he joined his brother Alex’s band, The Corsayers, and cut a single, “Cha Cha Blues” (1964), which was his first recorded single. He then returned to Milton to complete his studies there, and began applying to colleges. But Taylor, who had always been a sensitive soul, began to experience severe bouts of depression, and committed himself to a nine-month stay at the McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA. Upon his release in 1966, Taylor moved to New York to join Kortchmar in a new band, The Flying Machine, which attracted a following in Greenwich Village on the strength of Taylor’s highly confessional songs, which often addressed his stint at McLean. But Taylor’s personal demons soon got the better of him, and he developed an addiction to heroin that cut deeply into their ability to perform and record songs. The Flying Machine disbanded in 1967, and Taylor slid into dissolution and despair until his father came to New York to bring him home for treatment.

After completing rehabilitation and throat surgery to repair his damaged vocal chords, Taylor moved to London, where he recorded several demos as a solo act. The tracks were brought to Peter Asher, formerly of the pop group Peter and Gordon, who in 1967 was working as the head of A&R for the Beatles’ label, Apple Records. The songs impressed Paul McCartney, who made Taylor the label’s first non-British act. Both McCartney and George Harrison played on “Carolina in My Mind,” one of several songs Taylor had written for his solo debut, along with “Something in the Way She Moves.” While completing the recording sessions in 1968, Taylor fell back into heroin use, and underwent methadone treatment before returning to Massachusetts for rehabilitation at the Austen Riggs Center. Apple released his eponymous debut album in early 1969 to critical acclaim, but Taylor’s hospitalization prevented him from promoting the record with live performances, and it soon disappeared from the charts.

That same year, Asher left Apple Records as it began to fall apart from disorganization and internal strife, and instead became Taylor’s manager. He arranged for a six-night stand at Los Angeles’ acclaimed Troubadour nightclub, which helped to develop interest in Taylor’s music. A closing night stint at the Newport Folk Festival was well received and seemed to indicate that Taylor was gaining some momentum, but the upward swing was halted when the singer broke both hands and feet in a motorcycle accident on Martha’s Vineyard. He wrote songs throughout his recuperation, and by October 1969, had a record deal with Warner Bros.

In 1969, Taylor recorded his second album, Sweet Baby James, which featured one of his most enduring tunes, “Fire and Rain.” A haunting remembrance of a childhood friend, Suzanne Schnerr, who committed suicide while he was recording his first album in London, as well as his battles with drug addiction, the song’s lyrical progression from darkness to redemption, as well as Taylor’s heartfelt vocals, sent it to No. 3 on the Billboard singles charts and helped make the album a million seller in its first year. More importantly, it minted Taylor as a leading voice in the singer-songwriter movement, which soon took note of his blend of folk, soul and intimate lyrics and adopted him as its standard bearer. A second single from Sweet Baby James, the gentle “Country Road,” broke the Top 40 in 1971, while interest in Taylor sparked a revival of his debut album and sent “Carolina in My Mind” up the charts as well.

While Sweet Baby James climbed the charts, Taylor made his acting debut in Monte Hellman’s cult favorite “Two-Lane Blacktop” (1971) as a sullen, car-obsessed driver locked in a seemingly pointless road race with Warren Oates’ loud-mouthed GTO owner. Though not a hit, the film, along with his music, helped to establish Taylor as a sort of thinking-man’s pop idol, especially among female listeners, who responded positively to a 1971 TIME magazine cover feature that compared him to Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights. Taylor shunned such coverage, preferring to focus on his music, and in 1972, released his third album, Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, which featured his first No. 1 single, a Grammy-winning cover of Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend.” Taylor’s then-girlfriend, Joni Mitchell, provided backing vocals on the track, but the relationship soon ended due to his involvement with up-and-coming singer Carly Simon.

The couple were wed at a post-concert party following Taylor’s performance at Radio City Music Hall in November 1972, and for a while, the pair was the focus of considerable media attention. But as Simon’s stock rose on the strength of songs like “Anticipation” and “You’re So Vain,” Taylor’s career began an inexorable slide that would last for the better part of the decade. His fourth LP, a concept album called One Man Dog, failed to match the success of its previous releases, with its lead single, “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight,” barely breaking into the Top 20. He took off much of 1973 to prepare for the birth of his daughter, Sally, who was born in 1974. He began recording sessions for his fifth album, Walking Man, that same month, but despite contributions from Paul McCartney, it too failed to find an audience.

A brief reprieve came with 1975’s Gorilla, which featured a hit cover of Marvin Gaye’s “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You” and the sunny “Mexico,” which featured David Crosby and Graham Nash on backing vocals. But its follow-up,In The Pocket (1976) failed to reproduce its success, despite the presence of such all-star guests as Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Wonder and Art Garfunkel. The album also signaled the end of his contract with Warner Bros., which releasedJames Taylor’s Greatest Hits at the end of the year. The album, which featured re-recorded versions of “Something In the Way She Moves” and “Carolina in My Mind” due to difficulties in obtaining the original song masters from Apple, became his best-selling release over the course of the next three decades.

Taylor rebounded again with 1977’s JT, his first for Columbia Records. The album featured a remarkably relaxed, soulful take on the Jimmy Jones oldie “Handy Man,” which broke the Top Five on Billboard‘s Hot 100, and brought him a Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. Another single, the sunny “Your Smiling Face” landed in the Top 20, which helped to make JT his second best-selling studio album. A Top 20 cover of Sam Cooke’s song “Wonderful World” with Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel preceded a year-long break, during which he worked on and appeared in a Broadway musical version of journalist Studs Terkel’s study of the middle class, Working. The production was short-lived, and Taylor folded his two contributions, “Millworker” and “Brother Trucker,” into his 1979 album Flag, which also featured his Top 30 cover of the Drifters’ “Up on the Roof.” He closed out the year with a memorable duet with Simon of Charlie and Inez Foxx’s “Mockingbird,” which they performed as part of the No Nukes concert at Madison Square Garden, which was captured in the documentary “No Nukes” (1980).

Taylor’s tireless work schedule provided a cover for the turmoil of his personal life. He had lapsed back into drug addiction, specifically heroin addiction, which caused considerable friction in his marriage to Simon. Allegations of physical abuse and lack of solid parenting for his children, which included a son, Benjamin, born in 1977, led to an ultimatum from Simon: either cut back on his touring and recording or face a divorce. Taylor’s response was summed up in the title of his 1981 album, Dad Loves His Work. Its melancholy tone was echoed in its hit single, a duet with J.D. Souther called “Her Town Too.” Though it reached No. 10 on the album charts, its success was entirely overshadowed by his separation from Simon that same year, with the divorce becoming final in 1983.

Inspired in part by the drug-related deaths of close friends John Belushi and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, Taylor defeated his heroin addiction for good in 1983, and devoted more time to his children while weighing the option of retiring from the music business. But a performance at Brazil’s colossal Rock in Rio Festival in 1985 spurred his creative energies, and he responded with That’s Why I’m Here, a lovely, polished collection of original songs celebrating his mental and spiritual rebirth, as well as a spry cover of Buddy Holly’s “Every Day.” That same year, he married actress Kathryn Walker, and began a tradition of launching yearly summer tours that brought longtime fans and first-timers in a familial get-together bound by the warmth of Taylor’s presence and his established songs. He recorded sporadically during this period, scoring a minor hit with 1988’s Never Die Young before earning a platinum disc with 1991’s New Moon Shine. Critics noted that the “new” Taylor’s work had lost much of its youthful angst; instead focusing on nostalgic looks at times gone by or celebrating the innocent pop of his childhood. Listeners responded overwhelmingly to the soothing balm of his voice and words, and by the late ’90s, Taylor had come full circle again, returning back to the top of the charts while enjoying his newfound status as one of pop’s elder statesmen and best-loved father figures.

Taylor continued to focus much of his energies on his live performances, while carefully honing new material for his albums. In 1997, he scored his first Top 10 album in nearly two decades with Hourglass, a contemplative look back at his troubled past as seen from the perspective of a survivor who felt both amazed and rueful about his present. The alcohol-related death of his brother, Alex, in 1993, weighed heavily on the song “Enough to be on Your Way,” and “Jump Up Behind Me” reflected on the long drive from New York to North Carolina taken by Taylor and his father after his bottoming out in 1966. The failure of his marriage to Walker also lent a note of sadness and depth to the album, which won a Grammy for Best Pop Album in 1998.

The new millennium found Taylor more popular than ever as a live act and a recording artist, while his past achievements continued to reap considerable rewards. In 2000, his Greatest Hits collection attained Diamond status for selling over 10 million copies, and was soon followed by Greatest Hits, Volume 2, covering the late ’70s through the mid-’90s. He closed out the year with inductions into both the Rock and Roll and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and launched 2001 by marrying Caroline Smedvig, the public relations director for the Boston Pops, with whom he would have twin sons, Rufus and Henry. This wave of joy seemed to inform his 2002 release, October Road, his last for Columbia, which earned two Grammy nominations and platinum sales status. In 2003, the Chapel Hill Museum in North Carolina opened a permanent exhibit about Taylor’s life, while a highway bridge over Morgan Creek near the site of his childhood home was named in his honor.

Taylor spent much of 2004 and beyond stumping for various liberal causes, including benefit concerts for John Kerry’s presidential campaign. He released James Taylor: A Christmas Album that year through Hallmark Cards, then re-released it in a slightly different form two years later as James Taylor at Christmas through Columbia/Sony; the album earned a Grammy nomination in 2007. His song “Our Town” for the Pixar animated film “Cars” (2006) received an Oscar nomination in 2007, the same year he released One Man Band through Hear Music, a new label owned by the Starbucks coffee company. The album presented some of his best-loved material in a stripped-down format with anecdotes about their creation. Taylor also reunited with Carole King and members of his original touring band, including Danny Kortchmar, for a six-night stint at the Troubadour to celebrate the beginning of their careers in the 1970s, with ticket sales benefiting an array of charitable organizations.

He returned to recording in 2008 with a collection of country and soul covers titled, appropriately enough, Covers, which netted two Grammy nominations and generated a mini-album follow-up, Other Covers, in 2009. That same year, he performed “Shower the People” with John Legend and Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland at Barack Obama’s presidential election, and contributed a humorous cameo as himself in Judd Apatow’s critically acclaimed feature “Funny People.” In 2010, he launched a wildly successful reunion tour with Carole King, which found the pair playing arenas in order to accommodate the extraordinary response from generations of fans who had grown up listening to their music. The following year found him firmly established as one of America’s cultural icons with a performance at the dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial.

The above TCM overview can be accessed online here.

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Woody Strode

James Gregory

Jo Van Fleet

Lee Grant

Calista Flockhart

Shirley Booth

Billy Bob Thornton

Jack Kelly

James Taylor

ABOUT ME

CATEGORIES

RECENT POSTS