Capucine

There have been some very famous mononymous persons – Cher, Sting, Björk, Plato – but of all of them, Capucine must have been the most beautiful. Blake Edwards, who directed her in The Pink Panther (1963), called her “part Mona Lisa. That smile”. Christian Dior, for whom she had modelled in Paris, was struck by her “old eyes, her eyes were impervious”.

These days, if you remember Capucine at all, it is probably from those Pink Panther films, in which she plays Inspector Clouseau’s wife, who can afford her conspicuous head-to-toe Yves Saint Laurent because she’s nicking jewels behind his back. (“On a police inspector’s salary! How many women could save enough out of the housekeeping to buy a mink coat?” asks the besotted Clouseau. “Well, it’s not easy!” she replies.)

The part of Madame Clouseau was also stolen, from Ava Gardner, who was dropped when she became too demanding. Capucine made a better mannequin for the outfits, not unexpectedly.

Born Germaine Lefebvre on the Côte d’Azur in 1928, she ran away to Paris as a teenager. There she became a couture model, discarded her dowdy name and met Audrey Hepburn, who would become her best friend. (She also once shared a cabin, as a cruise ship model in 1952, with a teenage nightclub dancer called Brigitte Bardot.)

Capucine is not thought a great actress – her co-star Laurence Harvey went so far as to call her “ghastly” – but she had a flair for physical comedy that was overlooked. Watch her in The Pink Panther strip off in the lift as her pursuers run up the stairs, so that she emerges (ding!) in total disguise, then grins with relief when she realises she’s fooled them. Capucine is good at switching from dignified to undignified and back again. The trouble is, she was very rarely required to.

Capucine in a publicity still for the 1960 John Wayne picture North to Alaska CREDIT:FOX/KOBAL/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Her point, as Hollywood saw it, was to fill the Grace Kelly slot after Kelly became actual royalty. In the words of William Goetz, the producer who gave Capucine her first lead, as the Russian princess Carolyne Wittgenstein, in a 1960 Dirk Bogarde vehicle: “You can teach a girl to act but nobody can teach her how to look like a princess. You’ve got to start with a girl who looks like a princess.”

This led to some frustrations. The press nicknamed her “the haughty heron”. In 1968, Capucine told an Italian magazine she wished she didn’t always have to be elegant, that she longed to play a “dishevelled woman”, but “since the directors know I was a model, it is obvious that they can’t see me as anything else.” In 1965, she told Time magazine: “Sometimes I feel I would like to cut loose and start throwing pies.”

Flair for physical comedy: Capucine stars alongside Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther (1963) CREDIT:UNITED ARTISTS/KOBAL/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

For someone intended to fill Grace Kelly’s Cinderella slippers, Capucine’s own life turned out to be very uncharmed. Beauty was her great strength, but it was also a limiting factor. “Men look at me like I’m a suspicious-looking trunk, and they’re customs agents,” she once said.

As she aged, she felt unable to present the façade required, and stopped going out. The parts for countesses and princesses dried up. The director Luchino Visconti turned her down for Tadzio’s mother in Death in Venice (1971), a part Bogarde was angling for her, because: “She has a horrible voice and too many teeth. She looks like a horse, a beautiful horse, I know that, I was a trainer. I know all about horses, but I don’t want a horse.”

Capucine, 1962 CREDIT: KOBAL/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

None of this might have mattered, but Capucine was also a suicidal depressive. Hepburn saved her life when she took an overdose of pills, but in 1990 she threw herself from the roof of her Lausanne apartment block. If she hadn’t, she would have been 90 today. She left $100,000 apiece to Unicef and the Red Cross, in honour of Hepburn; her ashes were scattered by Givenchy.

When Capucine died, little was known of her for sure. Her obituaries couldn’t even agree on the number of cats she left behind. Partly this was a symptom of her having been looked at all her life, rather than listened to; partly it was to do with her habit of gently fictionalising her life as she went along (arch in interviews, which she found dull, she invented new dates of birth); partly because she rarely bothered to correct misinformation printed about her.

Capucine with Audrey Hepburn, 1972 CREDIT: REGINALD GRAY/PENSKE MEDIA/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Gossip columnists tied her up in various romances – to the producer Charles K Feldman, to her co-stars William Holden and Bogarde (who said she was the only woman he could ever have married) – but it isn’t clear whether any of these “love affairs” were real. “What is social, they want to make seem sexual,” she told Boze Hadleigh, the Hollywood historian.

The truth is that Capucine, who played Barbara Stanwyck’s love interest in Walk on the Wild Side (1962) and kissed Suzy Kendall on the lips – racy for the time – in Fräulein Doktor (1969), was bisexual off-screen, too. George Jacobs, Frank Sinatra’s valet, said she was one of the very few women who wouldn’t give Frank the time of day. Laurence Harvey, the male lead in Walk on the Wild Side, told her: “Kissing you is like kissing the side of a beer bottle.”

Racy for the time: starring alongside Suzy Kendall in Fräulein Doktor (1969) CREDIT: AVALA ITALY/KOBAL/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

When Hadleigh interviewed Capucine for his book Hollywood Lesbians, she told him: “Most Americans think it’s either 100 per cent heterosexual or 100 per cent homosexual. It’s much more complex than that. Look at ancient Greece.” When asked if she would describe herself as heterosexual, she replied: “Oh, I wouldn’t. But if the publicity people would see a need to say that, I don’t care… most publicity is not true.”

Federico Fellini said of Capucine that “she had a face to launch a thousand ships… but she was born too late.” Perhaps. But would more recognition have made her happy? We will never know. Capucine was often described as “sphinx-like” in life, and now, in death, she really is

BFI Obituary in 2024

Glynis Johns obituary: veteran British star of Mary Poppins and Miranda

Johns, who has died aged 100, had a long-running career in film, TV and theatre, playing the mermaid in Miranda and the suffragette mother in Disney’s Mary Poppins.

8 January 2024

By Josephine Botting

Publicity portrait of Glynis Johns for Mad About Men (1954) © Group Film Productions. Preserved by the BFI National Archive

Interviewed in March 1973, Glynis Johns reflected on the advice her father, actor Mervyn Johns, had given her early in her acting career at the age of 12. “He said ‘Always listen for your cue,’” she recalled. “That is good advice both on stage and in life. Listen for your cue and then act on it.”

By this time, Johns’ cues had taken her in many different directions. She had appeared in over 50 films, had survived cancer, and her fourth and final marriage, to American author Elliott Arnold, was nearing divorce. She summed up her marital history wryly: “For me, most relationships with men have been like pregnancies. They last about nine months.”

Yet on a professional level, she had hit a new peak, having just won a Tony Award for her performance on Broadway in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. Sondheim, who described her voice as like “an unmade bed”, famously wrote the show-stopping song ‘Send in the Clowns’ especially for her, and she included it in her Desert Island Discs in 1976.

Johns was born on 5 October 1923 in South Africa, apparently on a train transporting her theatrical family as they toured the country. She was the fourth generation of performers on her father’s side, while her mother was an accomplished pianist, and she made her stage debut at three weeks’ old.

Johns (right) with Deborah Kerr in Perfect Strangers (1945)

Dance was an early passion, and her first professional performance was in a children’s Christmas show at the Garrick Theatre in December 1935. This brought her to the attention of actor Leo Genn who encouraged her to audition for the part of Napoleon’s daughter in the play St Helena. After seeing her in The Children’s Hour, Alexander Korda snapped her up for London Films, and her first screen role was in South Riding in 1938 as Ralph Richardson’s daughter.

Film roles dried up when war broke out, and she considered learning secretarial skills as a fall-back; luckily Michael Powell intervened and she replaced Elisabeth Bergner in his 1941 war drama 49th Parallel, kickstarting her film career.

The British film industry was not quite sure where to place the 5 foot 4 inch husky-voiced actor, but she eventually graduated from minor roles. Ealing Studios and Alexander Korda respectively gave her excellent supporting parts in The Halfway House (1944) and Perfect Strangers (1945), two very different but equally powerful reflections on the British wartime experience.

Her first top billing came in 1948 in Miranda, as a mermaid who inadvertently captivates every man she meets. The film was a huge hit, and its success hinged firmly on her performance, which skilfully balanced childlike innocence with a heavily suggestive flirtatiousness that raised a few eyebrows at the time.

As the eponymous mermaid in Miranda (1948)

Her stature and youthful looks meant that femme fatale roles rarely came her way, and she tended towards fun-loving or practical types. Yet her talent and versatility saw her move between drama, comedy and musicals, and between film, television and theatre during the seven decades of her career.

As suffragette Winifred Banks in Mary Poppins (1964)

High points included a move to Hollywood in the mid-50s, appearing in The Court Jester (1955) with Danny Kaye, a best supporting actress Oscar nomination for The Sundowners in 1961, and her much-loved performance as Winifred Banks in Disney’s 1964 film Mary Poppins. Throughout the 1970s, her theatrical career burgeoned, her performance in Terence Rattigan’s Cause Célébre winning her the Variety Club actress of the year award in 1978.

Among the lows were the closure of Enid Bagnold’s play Gertie on Broadway after just four nights in 1952, mounting debts over back taxes in the early 60s, the break up of four marriages and two engagements, and a battle with alcoholism. Her first marriage, to Anthony Forwood, produced her only child, Gareth, who predeceased her in 2007.

Yet Johns remained resilient, turning to Christian Science and yoga and espousing a healthy lifestyle based on a macrobiotic diet. As she approached middle age, screen roles cultivated her endearing, slightly eccentric qualities. She even got her own US sitcom entitled Glynis, a screwball precursor of Murder She Wrote, with Johns as a sleuthing would-be writer. In 1983, she appeared in Cheers as the upper-class mother of Shelley Long’s character Diane.

Johns approached every role with energy and focus, and her irrepressible humour and vivacity ensured her popularity. While the peaks of her screen career are memorable, a film industry that fully appreciated her talents would have given her many more of them, and it was the theatre that brought her the genuine celebrity she deserved.

Her spirit and determination got her to her 100th birthday, celebrated last year at a Hollywood retirement home. “I do sometimes feel very disappointed that I’ve achieved more as an actress than as a person,” she once confessed. Yet the outpouring of affection that greeted the news of her passing has sparked a well-deserved celebration of those achievements, which continue to bring joy to audiences of all generations.

Glynis Johns, 5 October 1923 to 4 January 2024

Daily telegraph obituary

Glynis Johns, the actress, who has died aged 100, rose to fame in the late 1940s and early 1950s in a series of film comedies; she became best-known for playing the suffragette mother Mrs Banks in the Walt Disney classic Mary Poppins, while on stage her distinctive, husky voice – described by one critic as sounding like “a princess who is turning into a frog” – was perfect for Send in the Clowns in A Little Night Music, the Broadway hit for which she won a Best Musical Actress Tony award.

She had mistakenly formed the impression that she was up for the title role in Mary Poppins, and was placated by Walt Disney, who told her that the songwriters Richard and Robert Sherman had written a big number for her that they would play for her after lunch. The brothers rapidly set to work and produced in short order the rousing Sister Suffragette.

There was no such confusion in A Little Night Music: Stephen Sondheim wrote Send in the Clowns especially for her, playing the role of the courtesan Desiree in a complicated tale of emotional The show had gone into rehearsal with both book and score unfinished, she recalled, and its director Hal Prince suggested that she and her co-star Len Cariou improvise a couple of scenes to give the book writer Hugh Wheeler a few ideas.

“Hal said: ‘Why don’t you just say what you feel?’ When Len and I did that, he got on the phone to Steve Sondheim and said, ‘I think you’d better get in a cab and get round here and watch what they’re doing because you are going to get the idea for Glynis’s solo.’”

Suitably inspired, Sondheim employed shorter phrasing to suit her smoky voice and her inability to sustain long notes. She described it as “the greatest gift I’ve ever been given in the theatre”.

Throughout her long career Glynis Johns, who was billed at first as “the girl with the upside-down eyes”, was most often cast in comic roles; she played Deborah Kerr’s jaunty military chum in Alexander Korda’s Perfect Strangers (1945), a sophisticated mermaid in Miranda (1948) – which she said was her own favourite film – and its sequel Mad About Men (1954); she also appeared opposite Danny Kaye in The Court Jester”. Although she always presented a witty, vivacious public image, Glynis Johns was described by acquaintances as “shy, wary and insecure”. She claimed that she was “the most intolerant, impatient person in the world” and surprised her fans by her intense and highly disciplined approach to her profession.

Latterly she was better known in the US than in Britain. She appeared in a considerable number of network television series and for a time had her own show, Glynis. Continuing ill health stopped her from performing as often as she would have liked, and by the end of her career Glynis Johns was spending a great deal of her time meditating and resting. “I have to have a lot of rest and be alone a lot of the time” she said. “If I can be alone, doing my exercises and puttering about, I’m fine.”

She admitted to a growing interest in Christian Science and metaphysics. “I couldn’t have got through my illness without metaphysics,” she said. “I firmly believe that what happens to the body is a manifestation of your thoughts.” No doubt wanting to keep all options open, she also claimed that she believed in what she called “little people”, and insisted that she would take a firm stand on their existence until someone positively proved her wrong.

But her dedication to her craft was firmly rooted in the material world. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m not interested in playing the role on only one level,” she said in 1990. “The whole point of first-class acting is to make a reality of it. To be real. And I have to make sense of it in my own mind in order to be real.”Glynis Margaret Payne Johns was born on October 5 1923 in South Africa while her parents, the actor Mervyn Johns and the pianist Alys Steele-Payne, were touring in a musical review, and she made her theatrical debut when three weeks old, appearing as “the baby”. Her maternal grandparents, members of a well-known Australian bell-ringing act, were devout Christian Scientists, as was her mother, and young Glynis was brought up to believe in the healing power of prayer.

The family moved back to London when Glynis was five. She attended South Hampstead High School, where she was a contemporary of Angela Lansbury. She studied ballet and became a child prodigy, gaining her teaching certificates aged 10 and making her professional debut two years later. “I never had enough time to be silly as a child,” she recalled. “Mistakes on stage are too serious to make so I didn’t make any.” In 1935, aged 12, she appeared as the principal ballerina in the pantomime Buckie’s Bears; the child originally cast as the lead was taken ill and she stepped into the role with no rehearsal.

Glynis rapidly made a reputation for herself as a reliable child actress, appearing in a variety of plays including the lead in A Kiss for Cinderella (1937) and Miranda in Quiet Wedding (1938). She made her film debut in South Riding in 1938 after being given a contract by Alexander Korda and subsequently appeared in a series of British films including Michael Powell’s 49th Parallel (1942) and The Adventures of Tartu. Glynis Johns gained “film star” status in 1945 when she played Deborah Kerr’s tomboy friend in Perfect Strangers. In 1948 she starred in Miranda as the mermaid who tires of the sea and comes ashore. The film was a hit and led to offers of other lead roles.

Glynis Johns was divorced for the first time in 1948; she had married Anthony Forwood in 1942 and had a son, Gareth. Anthony Forwood would go on to become Dirk Bogarde’s partner and manager. In 1952 she was married for a second time, to David Foster, a Second World War hero who became the chairman of Colgate Palmolive International; that year she starred as a Channel Islander who helps to smuggle a prize cow out of Nazi hands in Appointment with Venus, opposite David Niven.

She also co-starred with Alec Guinness in The Card (1952), in which she played an ingenuous dance teacher. The following year she made an inauspicious Broadway debut in Gertie, which closed after only five performances.

She returned to Britain and made a sequel to Miranda: in Mad About Men (1954) she resumed the role of sophisticated mermaid, starring opposite . When Glynis Johns moved to Hollywood in 1955, her combination of tomboy good-looks and husky, seductive voice confused casting agents. They cast her first as the virtuous Maid Jean opposite Danny Kaye in The Court Jester (1955) and then in a cameo role as “Sporting Lady’s Companion” in Around the World in Eighty Days (1956).

By then she had begun to suffer from ill health; she was admitted to hospital for a stomach operation and returned to hospital for numerous operations throughout her career. The following year she was divorced for the second time and remained in Hollywood, taking leading roles in films for Universal, United Artists and Paramount.

In 1960 she appeared, again with Deborah Kerr, in the excellent The Sundowners, which starred Robert Mitchum; she was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of a blowsy Australian innkeeper. In a quirk of casting, her suitor in the film was played by her own father. (Following the death of Olivia de Havilland in 2020, she became the oldest surviving actor to have received an Oscar nomination.)

For the remainder of the decade Glynis Johns stayed in the US, where she appeared regularly on television in shows such as The Naked City and General Electric Theatre. After her third divorce in 1962 (she had married Cecil Henderson in 1960) she underwent another operation for cancer of the stomach. “Not living in harmony makes me ill,” she recalled, “I’m sure these terrible worries have contributed to my cancer.” But she made a remarkable recovery after her operation and three weeks later appeared in an episode of Dr Kildare.

In 1963 she starred in her own series, Glynis, playing a murder mystery writer who solves real murders. The series flopped badly and was taken off the air after 13 weeks, and she returned to making films, turning in good performances in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1962) and Mary Poppins two years later. She was married for the last time in 1964, to the writer Elliot Arnold.

In the late 1960s Glynis Johns retired from film and theatre work in order to devote herself to family life. Her health remained poor and she underwent several more operations for cancer. But she eventually decided that she preferred performing to domesticity and after 16 years in the US she returned to the theatre in Britain, starring in a 1966 run of the Anita Loos comedy The King’s Mare, but was forced to leave the show when she found the nightly two-hour performance too taxing.

For Mary Poppins her role was made into a suffragette to explain her absences and the need for a nanny. There was some criticism of the fact that, although she was a proto-feminist out of the house, at home she was conventionally subservient to Mr Banks (David Tomlison); this, however, was not a decision made by her.

In 1970 she starred in John Mortimer’s Come As You Are. “I used to suffer terribly from stage fright before that show,” she recalled, “but after having to do four little plays every night on a revolving stage with different characters, different accents and different costumes for each, I feel I’ve conquered it.”

Her performance in A Little Night Music in 1973 prompted one critic to praise her as “adorable”, while another described her as “fitting her role as snugly as a Gibson Girl’s girdle”, but her success was marred by another bout of illness which resulted in her leaving the show for some time.

In 1976 she returned to London for a production of Terence Rattigan’s Cause Célèbre. Cast against type as an accessory to a murder, she received standing ovations. The production was extremely successful, but as in the past she had to pull out of the show because of ill health. She underwent another operation for cancer in 1977.

During the remainder of the 1970s and 1980s Glynis Johns appeared in very few productions. “The fact is I’m hardly ever offered anything I consider good,” she said. “If I was I’d do more.”

In 1978 she did appear in the ITV production Across a Crowded Room and followed it with a UK tour of Hay Fever opposite Christopher Plummer. After nearly a decade she returned to television in 1982 to play Lady Fitzpatrick Morgan in the mini-series Little Gloria… Happy at Last. That year she also appeared in the American sitcom Cheers, as an eccentric dowager. Two years later, in 1984, she toured Canada in The Boyfriend and in 1985 co-starred with Plummer again, in Peccadillo.

She returned to A Little Night Music in 1991, playing Desiree’s mother Madame Armfeldt, and for the rest of the decade she had a few cameo roles, including the 1995 romcom starring Sandra Bullock, While You Were Sleeping. Her final appearance was in the 1999 comedy Superstar.

When not acting Glynis Johns spent most of her time at her home. “I do a lot” she recalled, “painting, dancing, playing the flute, writing poetry, doing my exercises, but I do it all slowly.”

She was married and divorced four times and suffered from ill health for much of her career.

Glynis Johns’s four marriages all ended in divorce. Her son Gareth Forwood predeceased her in 2007.

Glynis Johns, born October 5 1923, died January 4 2024

Guardian Obituary in 2003

Patricia Roc, who died yesterday aged 88, was the home-grown glamour girl of the British screen, whose sex appeal was nevertheless curiously unerotic; unlike her contemporaries, Margaret Lockwood and Jean Kent, it was impossible to imagine her in a wicked role.

“I was the bouncy, sexy girl next door that mothers would like their sons to marry,” she reckoned, “and the sons wouldn’t have minded, either.”

Whether they would have known what to do with her is more debatable; she once received a fan letter from a teenager who wanted to invite her down to Devon for the weekend. “If it’s fine,” he wrote, “we could cycle into Exeter on Saturday afternoon. It’s only 15 miles.”

She was born to play costume parts and looked so fetching in decollete in such films as The Wicked Lady (1945) and Jassy (1947) that the US censor called for retakes to de-emphasise her cleavage. Not that she exploited it. She was always cast in virginal roles, leaving Lockwood to get on with the seduction scenes.

Patricia Roc played working girls, loyal wives and “bright young things” and was unfailingly “nice” in every film.

She seldom landed big parts, settling instead for second leads. Neither she nor J Arthur Rank, to whom she was under contract at the height of her career, showed any inclination to extend her range. It limited her as an actress, which may be why her career was relatively short.

She first caught the public eye in 1943 with Millions Like Us but by 1952, with Something Money Can’t Buy, her British career was practically over.

Married to a Frenchman, she became a virtual exile, continuing to appear infrequently in Continental films, which achieved only limited distribution in Britain.

Patricia Roc was born Felicia Miriam Ursula Herold, the daughter of a paper merchant. While still an infant, however, she was adopted by a Dutch-Belgian stockbroker, Andre Riese, and grew up believing him to be her real father.

Publicity material gave her date of birth as June 7 1918, but in 1995, as she prepared to celebrate her 80th birthday, she admitted that her agent had trimmed three years off her age and that she had actually been born in 1915.

She attended Francis Holland School at Regent’s Park and then Bartram Gables School at Broadstairs. After briefly attending Rada, she went to France for a test at the Joinville studios. Though she spoke fluent French, the film was shelved and she returned to England crestfallen.

But her luck changed after a chance meeting with the impresario Sydney Carroll led to a West End role in the play Nuts in May, where she was spotted by one of Alexander Korda’s casting directors. It was to be her only stage experience.

Her screen career was launched in 1938 in The Rebel Son, based on Taras Bulba, and then in The Gaunt Stranger, from Edgar Wallace’s story The Ringer.

After a brief marriage to a doctor, Murray Laing, in 1939, Patricia Roc embarked on her career in earnest and between 1939 and 1943 she churned out more than a dozen films, including a version of Eden Philpotts’s play The Farmer’s Wife (1941) and We’ll Meet Again (1943), with Vera Lynn.

The breakthrough came with Millions Like Us (1943), written and directed by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat and widely regarded as the best film made during the war about the home front.

Patricia Roc played one of the many young women who contributed to the war effort by working on factory lines. Married to a young airman (Gordon Jackson) who is killed in action, she had the most sympathetic role in the picture and it made her a star overnight.

It was an ensemble piece, with a large cast of popular players of the time, including Anne Crawford and Joy Shelton. Director Frank Launder followed it with another all-star picture, Two Thousand Women (1944), about an attempt to rescue British women from a concentration camp in France. Patricia Roc shared the acting honours with Phyllis Calvert, Flora Robson, Renee Houston, Anne Crawford and Jean Kent.

Love Story (1944) was the first of several pictures in which she played second fiddle to Margaret Lockwood. Roc was cast as the fiancee of Stewart Granger, a pilot losing his sight, who is stolen from under her nose by the terminally-ill Lockwood. The film, featuring the popular Cornish Rhapsody, was a big hit, but Lockwood had the plum part.

This was also true of The Wicked Lady (1945), with Lockwood as a highway robber and Roc cast as a ninny whose fiance she steals, and of Jassy (1947), where Lockwood again had the juiciest role as a gypsy girl suspected of murder.

It was becoming a pattern, with Roc relegated to supporting roles. In Madonna of the Seven Moons (1944), it was Phyllis Calvert rather than Lockwood who stole her thunder as a sober young woman whose gypsy blood drives her to acts of frantic abandon with Stewart Granger.

Patricia Roc was loaned to Ealing studios for Johnny Frenchman (1945), a tale of the rivalry between Cornish and Breton fishermen, and to Hollywood for Canyon Passage (1946), neither of which was a critical or popular success.

While in Hollywood she was romanced by Ronald Reagan, and they had a brief affair. But Patricia Roc was beginning to suspect that her Rank contract was holding her back and turned down Cardboard Cavalier realising that she would simply have been a stooge to the comedian Sid Field.

In 1947, she played an orphan girl in The Brothers, a melodramatic tale of superstition, jealousy and heavy breathing among Skye fisherfolk at the turn of the century, and a North country lass in So Well Remembered.

In 1948, there were thankless roles in When the Bough Breaks as a London shop girl and in One Night with You. The following year she appeared in The Perfect Woman, a leaden farce in which her uncle invents a robotic woman modelled on her and, through a chapter of accidents, she takes its place.

It was a year of retrenchment in the British film industry and her contract with Rank, which still had three years to run, was terminated by mutual consent. She had just married the French cameraman Andre Thomas and moved with him to France, where she attempted to forge a new career.

She had a small role in The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949), one of Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret thrillers, starring Charles Laughton and shot in Paris, and she played opposite Louis Jouvet in an episode of the portmanteau picture Retour a la Vie (also 1949).

Captain Black Jack (1952) was a feeble smuggling yarn in which Patricia Roc had fourth billing behind George Sanders, Agnes Moorehead and Herbert Marshall. In Italy, she appeared in The Widow in 1955, but it was never released in Britain.

She made three trips back to England: for the indifferent thriller Circle of Danger (1951), with Ray Milland; for Something Money Can’t Buy (1952) opposite Anthony Steel, a comedy about a couple who start a catering and secretarial agency; and for Bluebeard’s Ten Honeymoons (1960), about the mass-murderer Landru (George Sanders), who throws her under a train.

It was Patricia Roc’s last film (though she ventured out of retirement in 1980 for the stage presentation Night of 100 Stars, at which she received a standing ovation).

After her marriage to Andre Thomas, it transpired that her husband was unable to have children and during the making of Something Money Can’t Buy Patricia Roc embarked on an affair with her co-star, Antony Steel (the Rank Organisation’s “Mr Beefcake”) which resulted in the birth of a son, Michael.

Thomas, though aware of the truth, accepted paternity, but collapsed and died of a stroke when the boy was only two.

In 1964 she married Walter Reif, a Viennese businessman, and the couple moved to the Swiss resort of Minusio, overlooking Lake Maggiore, in 1976. Reif died in 1986.

Patricia Roc is survived by her son.

The irish times obituary in 2011.

Elegant actor and writer of great talent

DANA WYNTER: DANA WYNTER, who has died in Ojai, California, aged 79, was an actor whose screen roles included one of the leads…

Sat May 28 2011 – 01:00

DANA WYNTER:DANA WYNTER, who has died in Ojai, California, aged 79, was an actor whose screen roles included one of the leads in the iconic Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

For the happy few, she was also and mostly a writer. A very good writer. Her memoirs, Other People, Other Places, published in 2005, and her extensive correspondence are a testimony to it. As are her letters to so many different people in so many different places in life. These ranged from Comdt Jacques Cousteau to former US president Richard Nixon, from priests all over the world to shepherds and neighbours in her narrow valley of Glenmacnass, Co Wicklow. They also included directors and actors in Hollywood to animal rights activists and from dedicated artists to charming dilettantes – all exhibit a tremendous natural talent, a perfect ear and a sharp eye, qualities that she brought to full fruition as she became a contributor for publications as diverse as the Guardian, Country Living, the National Reviewor The Irish Times, among others.

Here is her terse description of how George Sanders told Zsa-Zsa Gabor that their marriage (her third at that stage; there are nine to date) was over. “The hum of the hair dryer indicated human presence in the dressing room, and he approached his quarry who was sitting under the machine reading about herself in a glossy fan magazine. Vain attempts at attracting attention ended in a firm rap on the hood of the dryer and she did, briefly, look up, he claimed, but without lifting the hood. Sanders then raised his voice. ‘Zsa-Zsa – I’m leaving you. Forever. Sorry about the marriage. I’ll write’. Obviously not having heard any of this, Zsa-Zsa nodded, flashed a bright smile, waggled her fingers at him and returned to her reading.”

Fast, precise, pitiless. This is how stars used to divorce and it was how Dana Wynter wrote.

Her style might have been influenced by her one and only marriage to Gregson Bautzer, the most famous divorce lawyer of Los Angeles. But her irony, her impeccable sense of humour, her taste and distaste had deeper roots.

Dana Wynter was born Dagmar Winter in Berlin, the daughter of a British surgeon father and a Hungarian mother. She was raised in Scotland, England, Rhodesia and South Africa, on stage in London, on air with Orson Welles and on screen in Hollywood. She learned, at an early age, how small the outside world was. This compelled her to draw on the ground an even smaller circle around her feet with the rule, known only to her, to never cross it.

She divorced her only husband, celebrity attorney Greg Bautzer, in 1981. She and Bautzer had one child – Mark Ragan Bautzer, born in 1960.

In Hollywood, she was described as an oasis of elegance. The film Shake Hands with the Devil (starring James Cagney) brought her to Ireland, where she made a deal with herself that it would be her home for the next 30 years. A sign hung on her gate that said: “You would be more welcome if you had called first.” She often sat in her beautiful library to read Irish poets and Russian novelists.

To a visiting friend, she might say: “Tonight, we’ll have a nice dinner together and tomorrow you will be on your merry way.” The less, the merrier.

Dana Wynter had found her place and her style, and each of her sentences, spoken or written, showed that she was ready to defend them at all costs.

Her newspaper columns and letters illustrated her writing skill. A sample, in which she described an incident at her cottage in Wicklow.

“Why the pheasant chose this particular house is still not clear. Maybe he understood that we were dog-less and firm in our resolve to be free of the domination of any pet, perhaps our thatched roof reminded him of his origins. Or the answer could be more simple – that it was less of an effort to come here than to the neighbouring farmhouse under the great waterfall, an uphill march even when aided by hops, flutters and arching swoops.”

This limpid style brings forth in a flawless metaphor the simplicity of a beautiful life, where hopping and swooping are no longer considered necessary. It was one of her many lives. In an article titled St Patrick’s Angels, she wrote: “When their time as choristers is over and the voice must rest, most of the boys go on to take up another instrument . . . ”

She died from congestive heart failure having suffered from heart disease in later years. Her son Mark said she “stepped off the bus very peacefully”.

Dana Wynter: born June 8th, 1931; died May 5th, 2011

The Telegraph obituary

A dark-haired, pale-skinned beauty, Dana Wynter (playing Becky Driscoll) was more than qualified to scream and clutch the arm of her love interest, Dr Miles Bennell, as they fled (unsuccessfully, in her case) the extraterrestrial scourge. Filming got under way in 1955, at the height of Joseph McCarthy-inspired hysteria about Reds under the bed.

“It was just supposed to be a plain, thrilling kind of picture,” Dana Wynter recalled in 1999. “That was what Allied Artists thought they were making.” But after its release in 1956 it soon became clear that the plot, in which a small-town doctor learns that the population of America is being replaced by emotionless alien duplicates grown in pods, was being credited with a double meaning.

Both the director, Don Siegel, and the scriptwriter, Dan Mainwaring, denied any such subtext. But Dana Wynter insisted that the cast “realised that we were making an anti-ism picture. Anti-fascism, anti-communism, all that kind of thing.” Certainly it is hard to avoid the hint of a political message when the leading man, desperately seeking to alert his fellow Americans to the looming menace, turns to camera and shouts: “They’re here already. You’re next.” Either way, the film was an instant box-office hit.

Dagmar Winter was born in Berlin on June 8 1931, the daughter of a surgeon, Peter Winter. Her family soon moved to England. A few years later her parents divorced and she moved with her father to Southern Rhodesia. Following graduation from a private school she trained in Medicine at Rhodes University in South Africa. She also tried her hand at amateur theatre there, and returned to England in the early 1950s to take up acting seriously.

During a performance at the Hammersmith Apollo she was spotted by an American agent and a few bit parts followed, including in Lady Godiva Rides Again (1951), co-starring Diana Dors, and The Crimson Pirate (1952), with Burt Lancaster as the swashbuckling hero. In November 1953, having changed her name to Dana Wynter, she set out to try her luck in Hollywood.

There, despite initial disappointment in film, she stayed to carve out a career for herself in television. In March 1955 she won a Golden Globe Award for “Most Promising Newcomer”, and was placed under contract with Twentieth Century Fox, making her debut in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Despite excellent reviews Dana Wynter was unable to replicate her success, appearing mostly in war movies – such as D-Day the Sixth of June (1956) – and on television. She appeared in series including Hart to Hart, The Rockford Files and Magnum P.I., returning to the big screen for two cameo roles: in Airport, which reunited her with Burt Lancaster, and in Triangle (both 1970).

From 1978 to1980 she played Jill Daly in the soap opera Bracken, with Gabriel Byrne. It began her love affair with Ireland, where she bought a house in Co Wicklow. Her final role was as Raymond Burr’s wife in The Return of Ironside (1993).

Dana Wynter was married to the Hollywood lawyer Greg Bautzer. She is survived by her son

Jocelyn Lane. (Jackie Lane)

Jocelyn Lane, born Jocelyn Olga Bolton in 1937, was a former actress and model known for her beauty and talent in the 1950s and 1960s. She started her career as a model in the UK under the name Jackie Lane, later transitioning to Hollywood where she starred in various films, including alongside Elvis Presley in “Tickle Me” in 1965. Lane’s striking beauty often drew comparisons to Brigitte Bardot, and she was featured in Playboy magazine in September 1966. After retiring from acting in the early 1970s, she married Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe-Langenburg in 1973 and had a daughter named . She later ventured into designing feather necklaces under the brand Princess J Feather Collection in California and London. Lane’s legacy remains tied to her iconic roles in 1960s pop culture, particularly her role as Cathy in the film “Hell’s Belles” (1969)

Maria Montez

Robert DuVall

Robert Selden Duvall^[1] (/duːˈvɔːl/; born January 5, 1931) is an American actor. With a career spanning seven decades, he is the recipient of an Academy Award, four Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award.

Duvall began his career on TV with minor roles in 1960 on Playhouse 90 and the Armstrong Circle Theatre TV series before transitioning to Broadway and film. Duvall made his Broadway debut in the play Wait Until Dark in 1966. He returned to the stage in David Mamet‘s play American Buffalo in 1977, earning a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Play nomination. He made his feature film acting debut portraying Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Other early roles include Captain Newman, M.D. (1963), Bullitt (1968), True Grit (1969), M*A*S*H (1970), THX 1138(1971), Joe Kidd (1972), and Tomorrow (1972), the last of which was developed at the Actors Studio and is his personal favorite.

Duvall won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in the film Tender Mercies(1983). His other Oscar-nominated films

include The Godfather (1972), Apocalypse Now (1979), The Great Santini (1979), The Apostle (1997), A Civil Action (1998), and The Judge (2014). Other notable roles include The Outfit (1973), The Godfather Part II(1974), The Conversation (1974), Network (1976), True Confessions (1981), The Natural (1984), Days of Thunder (1990), The Handmaid’s Tale (1990), Rambling Rose(1991), Falling Down (1993), The Paper (1994), The Scarlet Letter (1995), Sling Blade(1996), Open Range (2003), Four Christmases (2008), Crazy Heart (2009), Get Low(2010), Jack Reacher (2012), and Widows (2018).

Throughout his career, Duvall has starred on numerous television programmes. He won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Limited Series and Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series for the AMC limited series Broken Trail (2007). His other Emmy-nominated roles are in the CBS miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989), the HBO film Stalin(1992), and the TNT film The Man Who Captured Eichmann (1996

Sally Blane

Sally Blane (born Elizabeth Jane Young; July 11, 1910 – August 27, 1997) was an American actress who appeared in more than 100 movies.

Blane was born in Salida, Colorado.

^[She was the sister of actresses Polly Ann Youngand Loretta Young, and the half-sister of Georgiana Young, who was the wife of Mexican actor Ricardo Montalbán

Blane had her film debut at the age of seven when she appeared in Sirens of the Sea in 1917. She returned to the film business as an adult in the 1920s, playing small parts in a number of silent films. Her career continued into the 1930s when Blane appeared in several low-budget films, including Once a Sinner (1930), A Dangerous Affair (1930), Arabian Knights (1931), Annabelle’s Affairs (1931), Hello Everybody! (1933),^[2] City Limits (1934), Against the Law (1934), The Silver Streak (1934), and This is the Life(1935). Some of her scenes, including one in Annabelle’s Affairs, in which she appeared in skimpy lingerie with Jeanette MacDonald and Joyce Compton, were risqué for their day, pre-dating the industry’s Hays Code that largely forbade such shots after 1934. The footage from Annabelle’s Affairs is considered lost.

Although her appearances began to fade toward the late 1930s, Blane acted in more than 100 films. She appeared onscreen at one time or another with all her sisters, for example with all three in The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939). After this, Blane appeared in only four more films in small supporting roles: Fighting Mad (1939), Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939), La Fuga, (1944) and A Bullet for Joey (1955).

Blane, at one time romantically linked to singer Russ Columbo, married actor and director Norman Foster in October 1935. In June 1936, they had their first child, Gretchen, named after Blane’s sister Loretta Young, whose birth name was Gretchen. They later had a son named Robert. Blane was Catholic and was educated in convent school.

Blane died at her home near Beverly Hills, California, on August 27, 1997, of cancer (as did her sisters Polly, who died seven months prior, and Loretta, who died in 2000) at the age of 87

Tony Mordente

Tony Mordente (born December 3, 1935) is an American dancer, choreographer, actor, and television director.

Born in Brooklyn, the son of a beer truck driver, Mordente went to dance school at the age of thirteen. He attended the High School of Performing Arts and won a scholarship to the American Ballet Theater School. There he was discovered by the choreographer Michael Kidd, who cast him as Lonesome Polecat in the 1956 Broadway musicaladaptation of the Al Capp comic strip Li’l Abner.

Mordente was then featured in the Broadway (1957) and West End productions and film version of West Side Story, during which time he met his future wife Chita Rivera, who played Anita in the original Broadway cast. In the stage version Mordente played A-Rab, and in the film he played Action. “He wanted to play his original role in the movie and was very disappointed to be Action and I asked why they switched his role,” Seth Rudetsky wrote in Playbill. “He said he never asked because sometimes you ask and you don’t like the answer. Regardless, he wound up being very featured in the movie.”

Rudetsky said the actors told him that the Broadway cast had specific instructions that the Sharks and Jets were not allowed to fraternize. “Well, not only did [Rivera] fraternize with a Jet (Tony Mordente), they wound up having a daughter (Lisa Mordente)! Chita remembers seeing Tony in rehearsal and feeling like he literally flew.”^[

Mordente was the voice of Oliver Cool on the 45 rpm single recording, “Oliver Cool” b/w “I Like Girls” by Oliver Cool (Roulette R-4292). The record did not chart nationally in the US but was a big hit in Australia in 1961.

He understudied the title role and served as assistant to Gower Champion in Bye Bye Birdie (1960). He next teamed again with Kidd for Ben Franklin in Paris (1964) and the ill-fated Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1966), which closed during previews.He received his first credit as sole choreographer for Here’s Where I Belong (1968), which never made it past opening night.

As an actor, Mordente appeared in the film Love with the Proper Stranger (1963)^[ and had guest appearances on the tv series Combat! and The Outer Limits. He began to choreograph for television variety shows, including The Ed Sullivan Show and The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour.

Mordente began to direct for television in the mid-1970s. His credits include twenty-nine episodes of Rhoda, ten episodes of Matlock, thirty-seven episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger,^[8] five episodes of The A-Team, four episodes of The Love Boat, and thirty-three episodes of 7th Heaven, in addition to episodes of The Practice (1976), Busting Loose, Love, Sidney, Family Ties, Day by Day, M*A*S*H, and Burke’s Law, among other television shows.

Mordente was married to Chita Rivera from 1957 to 1966.^[10] They are the parents of actress Lisa Mordente.

He married Jean G. Fraser in 1978. They are the parents of screenwriter Adriana Mordente

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors