Peter Sellers

Peter Sellers wasone of the great film comics of all time. He was born in Portsmouth in 1925. He began his career with ‘The Goons’ on BBC Radio. His first film was “Penny Points to Paradise” in 1951. He had a major role in the Ealing classic of 1955, “The Ladykillers”. He made many terrific movies in the the U.K. in the late 1950’s including “The Smallest Show on Earth” and “The Naked Truth”. In 1963 he had enormous success with “The Pink Panter”. He went to Hollywood soon therafter to make “Kiss Me Stupid” but suffered a heart attack and was replaced by Dean Martin. After recovering he went on to make “What’s New Pussycat” and “The Wrong Box”. One of his last roles was “Being There” and he died of another heart attack in 1980 at the age of 54.

TCM overview:

One of the most accomplished comic actors of the late 20th century, Peter Sellers breathed life into the accident-prone Inspector Clouseau in “The Pink Panther” (1963) and its three sequels, as well as such classics as “Lolita” (1962), “Dr. Strangelove” (1964), “The Party” (1968) and “Being There” (1979). The son of English vaudevillians, his ability to completely transform himself into outrageous comic characters received its first showcase on the legendary radio series “The Goon Show” in the 1950s. Film roles in the 1950s and 1960s were devoted to his knack for mimicry of accents and character types, with Stanley Kubrick’s “Lolita” and “Dr. Strangelove” underscoring his talent for drama as well. His best-known role of Inspector Clouseau surfaced in 1963, and he would return, sometimes reluctantly, to the franchise throughout his life before scoring a personal triumph as the simple-minded gardener who influences the Presidency in Hal Ashby’s “Being There” (1980). Off camera, Sellers could be cold, cruel, even unstable, but when the cameras were rolling, he showed a dedication to performance and humor that made him one of the greatest inspirations to comedians and film fans for decades.

He began life as Richard Henry Sellers on Sept. 8, 1925 in the seaside resort town of Southsea, in Portsmouth, England. His family, who were performers on the British vaudeville circuit, bestowed a particularly morbid nickname upon their son: Peter was the name of a brother who did not survive birth. He took up his family’s profession at an early age, dancing and singing alongside his mother in stage shows when he was just five years old. He became skilled at a variety of talents, including drums, banjo and ukulele, and for a while, he toured as a drummer with various jazz bands. Sellers was also an expert mimic, which he put to excellent use during his service as an airman with the Royal Air Force during World War II. He frequently impersonated his superior officers as a way to gain access into the Officers’ Mess, and made them part of his performances with the Entertainments National Service Association, which put on plays and skits for British troops. His knack for mimicry also served him well in the years after his discharge in 1948. Sellers supported himself by performing stand-up comedy and celebrity impressions on the variety theater circuit, and at one point, secured a meeting with BBC producer Roy Speer by pretending to be radio star Kenneth Horne. The ruse clearly worked, as the 23-year-old Sellers was soon granted an audition, which lead to a role on the popular radio comedy “Ray’s a Laugh,” starring comedian Ted Ray. Audiences had their first glimpse of Sellers’ astonishing voice talent on the series, which allowed him to play everything from an obnoxious little boy to a bizarre older woman.

During this period, Sellers was also performing in an informal group with comics Spike Milligan and Michael Bentine and singer Harry Secombe. The quartet, who dubbed themselves the Goons, recorded their antics at a local pub, and the tape made its way into the hands of a BBC producer, who granted the quartet their own radio series. “The Goon Show” premiered in 1951 and became a massive hit with British audiences, thanks to its surreal humor which parodied traditional radio drama with absurd leaps in logic. Each episode was filled with countless bizarre characters, many of which were voiced by Sellers, including the program’s chief villain, Hercules Grytpype-Thynne; the hapless scoutmaster Bluebottle; the cowardly, flatulent Major Bloodnok (who was based on many of Sellers’ superior officers), and many others. On more than one occasion, Sellers was called upon to voice all of Milligan’s characters as well, and at times, carry out complete conversations between two or more people.

The popularity of the Goons’ radio program led to a few abortive attempts at television series, including “The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d” (ITV, 1956), but most filmed efforts were unable to match the stream of consciousness that comprised their recorded efforts. More successful were the Goons’ comedy LPs and novelty songs, as well as a quartet of films – the feature length “Let’s Go Crazy” (1951), which marked Sellers’ screen debut, “Penny Points to Paradise” (1951), “Down Among the Z Men” (1952), and the shorts “The Case of the Mukkinese Battle Horn” (1956) and “The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film” (1959). The latter, directed by Sellers and Richard Lester, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short, and also served as the impetus for the Beatles – all dedicated Goons fans – to hire Lester to direct “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964). The Goons were also acknowledged influences on the members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Eddie Izzard, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams, Peter Cook, the Firesign Theater and countless British and American television comedies.

In 1954, Sellers began branching out on his own as a supporting player in feature comedies. He quickly established himself as versatile a performer on screen as he was over the radio airwaves, with richly varied characters in some of the greatest British comedies of the late 1950s and early 1960s. He was the nervous Teddy Boy that joined Alec Guinness’s inept criminal crew in Alexander Mackendrick’s “The Ladykillers” (1955), an obsequious game show host in “The Naked Truth” (1957), a baffled military officer in Val Guest’s “Up the Creek” (1958), and most impressively, three roles in “The Mouse That Roared” (1959), including the addled Duchess of the tiny European nation of Fenwick, which declares war on – and defeats – the United States. Several of these pictures were international successes, especially in America, which brought Sellers to the attention of Hollywood. In 1958, he made his stateside debut in “tom thumb” (1958), fantasy director George Pal’s musical adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale about a tiny hero who outwits a pair of thieves (Sellers and Terry-Thomas).

Sellers’ stature as a film star grew in the 1960s, thanks to several key films. “Never Let Go” (1960) was a thriller that afforded him a rare opportunity to play a straight role as a murderous car dealer, while “I’m All Right Jack” (1959) proved he could bring pathos to his comic roles. His turn as a Communist shop steward who becomes a reluctant strike leader in the latter film earned him a BAFTA for Best Actor in 1959. However, it was Stanley Kubrick’s controversial adaptation of “Lolita” (1962) that made him an international star. His protean nature was given full reign as Clare Quilty, the decadent playwright who attempts to lure Sue Lyon’s teenage Lolita into his depraved world, prompting his murder by Humbert Humbert (James Mason). Kubrick’s version expanded the role considerably, allowing Sellers to don several disguises and accents throughout, including a Germanic doctor, Zempf, who foreshadowed Sellers’ turn as Dr. Strangelove two years later. For his efforts, Sellers was critically acclaimed, as well as a Golden Globe nominee for Best Supporting Actor.

In 1963, Sellers made his first appearance in his most iconic role – that of Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau in “The Pink Panther.” Fiercely dedicated to fighting crime and upholding the dignity of France, Clouseau is also wildly accident-prone, egotistical to a fault and burdened with an impenetrable accent that transformed English into a wholly unknown language. A supporting character in “Panther,” which was intended as a comic caper series devoted to star David Niven’s gentleman jewel thief, it was Sellers that captured audiences’ attention, and led to a long and tumultuous series of films. The second in the series, “A Shot in the Dark” (1964), followed a year later with Clouseau now the central character. It too was a success, but the relationship between Sellers and director Blake Edwards deteriorated to such a degree that the pair refused to work together again until 1968’s “The Party.” A third Clouseau film, “Inspector Clouseau” (1968), continued the franchise with Alan Arkin in the title role, but it was not a success, prompting MGM to urge Sellers and Edwards to patch up their differences and return to the series for 1975’s “Return of the Pink Panther.”

Clashes such as the one with Edwards were not uncommon for Sellers during his career. In both Europe and America, he soon developed a reputation as a difficult performer, prone to lashing out at castmates over perceived slights. His personal life was also marked by moments of astonishingly casual cruelty towards his spouses and children. His first marriage, to Anne Howe, ended in a difficult divorce that may have been prompted by an affair with actress Sophia Loren; his second marriage, to actress Britt Ekland, was marked by domestic violence spurred by allegations of infidelity. Biographers surmised that Sellers suffered from depression and anxiety over his career, which he often viewed as a failure. Further evidence of his troubled psyche was glimpsed in interviews that asked him about his penchant for disappearing into his characters. His response was that there was no “Peter Sellers,” but rather, a blank slate that adapted to the needs of the role.

The greatest example of the extent to which Sellers could immerse himself into a role was perhaps Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb” (1964). The black comedy, about a series of political blunders which lead to World War III, allowed Sellers to play several roles: U.S. President Merkin Muffley, British officer Lionel Mandrake, and the sinister Dr. Strangelove, a wheelchair-bound nuclear scientist whose crippled body seemed hellbent on betraying his Fascist past. Sellers was initially asked to also play Major T.J. “King” Kong, the U.S. Air Force officer who rides the bomb bronco-style as it descends on the Soviet Union, but an injury forced Sellers to abandon the role, which was given to veteran Western performer Slim Pickens. Sellers found both the humor and the horror of the characters in his performances, which received an Oscar nomination, and seemed to indicate that he could move into dramatic roles – his abiding wish. However, he suffered a string of debilitating heart attacks – 13 over the course of a few days – that curtailed his availability. Desperate to return to work, he sought the aid of psychic healers for his condition, which would continue to deteriorate over the next two decades. He also threw himself headlong into film work, which varied, often wildly, in quality.

Sellers longed to play romantic roles, such as his singing matador in “The Bobo” (1967), but audiences responded more to his buffoonish turns, like the accident-prone Indian actor in Edwards’ “The Party” (1968) or the Italian jewel thief who poses as a film director in order to smuggle gold out of Europe in the Neil Simon-penned “After the Fox” (1966). He attempted to play James Bond in the all-star vanity project “Casino Royale” (1967), but abandoned the film after clashing with co-star Orson Welles and, allegedly, realizing that the film was in fact, a comedy and not a straight action piece. The end of the decade, which saw him diving into the counterculture with “I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!” (1968) and “The Magic Christian” (1969), which co-starred his close friend, Beatle Ringo Starr, also marked the conclusion of his lengthy tenure as a movie star for some years.

The first half of the 1970s was a period of deep personal and public failure for Sellers. His marriage to Eklund had ended on an explosive note in 1968, and his 1970 marriage to Australian model Miranda Quarry followed suit in 1974. His film career was in total freefall; pictures like “There’s a Girl in My Soup” (1970), “Ghost in the Noonday Sun” (1973), which reunited him with Spike Milligan, and “The Great McGonagall” (1974), were box office disasters. Sellers’ health also continued its downward spiral due to his reluctance to treat his condition with Western medicine, and a growing dependence on alcohol and drugs. The spell of bad luck broke in 1974 with the fourth “Pink Panther” film, “Return of the Pink Panther,” which reunited him with Blake Edwards once again. The result was a colossal hit for Sellers, and a career revival that lasted for the remainder of his life.

However, Sellers was mentally and physically unprepared for the rush of attention and work that came in the wake of “Return.” His relationship with Edwards had crumbled. By the time they began the rushed sequel to “Return,” 1976’s “The Pink Panther Strikes Again,” Sellers was unable to perform many of his own physical gags, and Edwards would later describe his emotional state at the time as “certifiable.” “Strikes Again,” however, was another hit, with Golden Globe nominations for the film and its star, who began working in earnest on several films. “Murder By Death” (1976) was an all-star parody of detective films, with Sellers playing a short-tempered version of Charlie Chan, while “The Prisoner of Zenda” (1978) was a lukewarm adaptation of the familiar Anthony Hope novel about a commoner (Sellers) recruited to impersonate his look-alike, the king (also Sellers) of a tiny European country. Sellers, however, had his attention fixed elsewhere.

For several years, he had worked in earnest to secure the film rights to Jerzy Kosinski’s novel Being There, about a simple gardener who becomes the confidante to the rich and powerful. The project went before cameras in 1979, with Sellers giving one of his richest performances in a role that seemed tailor-made for him – a man with no discernible personality, yet the ability to fascinate and inspire so many around him. The film was a critical and audience success, and won Sellers a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. The validation and acclaim, however, would be short lived.

Sellers had suffered another punishing heart attack in 1977, which required him to be fitted for a pacemaker. Though he had resisted having heart surgery for years, he finally relented, and in 1980, was slated to undergo an operation in Los Angeles. Just days before the surgery, Sellers suffered a massive heart attack which sent him into a coma. He died two days later on July 24, 1980, just one day before a scheduled reunion dinner with his Goon Show partners, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe. He was survived by his fourth wife, actress Lynne Frederick, and his three children. At his funeral, the Glenn Miller song “In the Mood” was played for mourners. It was a fitting touch for a man who reveled in the darker side of humor; the song was reportedly one that the 54-year-old Sellers had long hated.

While the Hollywood community mourned his premature loss, the anarchy that swirled around Sellers continued to broil after his death. In 1979, Blake Edwards shocked many by releasing “Revenge of the Pink Panther,” which featured Sellers in outtakes from several of the previous films. It was roundly panned, but did not dissuade him from cobbling together another Clouseau movie, “Trail of the Pink Panther” (1982), from outtakes. Sellers’ final film, a dismal comedy called “The Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu,” which he also co-directed, was released in 1980. Edwards would continue to labor over the Pink Panther franchise for two more films – “Curse of the Pink Panther” (1983), with Ted Wass as a Clouseau-esque policeman, and “Son of the Pink Panther” (1993), with Roberto Begnini as Clouseau’s illegitimate offspring – both of which were disastrous failures. Sellers’ estate was also the source of considerable dismay for his family members. .

The above

Andy Griffith

Andy Griffith (June 1, 1926 – July 3, 2012) was an American actor, television producer, Grammy Award-winning Southern-gospel singer, and writer. He was a Tony Award nominee for two roles, and gained prominence in the starring role in director Elia Kazan‘s film A Face in the Crowd(1957) before he became better known for his television roles, playing the lead characters in the 1960–1968 situation comedy The Andy Griffith Showand in the 1986–1995 legal drama Matlock.

TCM overview:

With his folksy, down-to-earth charm and winning smile, actor Andy Griffith brought a warm sincerity to his most popular roles – small-town Sheriff Andy Taylor on “The Andy Griffith Show” (CBS, 1960-68) and the crafty southern lawyer Ben Matlock on “Matlock” (NBC/ABC, 1986-1995). Prior to becoming a friendly face in many American living rooms, Griffith was a talented musician with early aspirations to be an opera singer. But instead he rose to fame as a monologist, delivering a parody of the Johnny Ray son “Please Mr. Sun” and the woodsy “What it Was, Was Football” (1953), one of the most popular recorded monologues of all time. Griffith turned to television with “No Time for Sergeants” (1955) – a role he reprised for the 1958 film of the same name – and made his feature debut with a thunderous dramatic performance as a manipulative, power-hungry grifter who becomes a television host in Elia Kazan’s “A Face in the Crowd” (1957). He was a regular on “The Steve Allen Show” (1956-1964) before introducing Sheriff Andy Taylor alongside Ron Howard’s Opie on the seventh season of “The Danny Thomas Show” (1953-1964). Following several spin-offs of “Andy Griffith” throughout the decades, he reprised his stardom as “Matlock” and made many noted guest appearances well into the new millennium. Meanwhile, over the course of his career, Griffith returned to his first love of music and won a Grammy for a 1997 gospel album. Often exerting strong creative control over his efforts, Griffith brought a sense of realism, charm and honesty to his shows and characters that managed to never stray into caricature, and whose appeal endured for generations of viewers.

Born on June 1, 1926, in Mt. Airy, NC, Griffith developed a strong interest and talent in music at an early age. First hoping to become an opera singer, he shifted gears and set out to become a preacher, enrolling at the University of Chapel Hill in North Carolina as a pre-divinity student. While in college, his focus turned again to the arts with an emphasis on music and theater, and he eventually earned his degree in 1949. After graduation, he became a music teacher at Goldsboro High School, but still yearned to perform professionally. After three years of teaching, Griffith and his first wife, Barbara Edwards, began developing comedy and music routines that they performed on the road, including a comedy monologue called “What it Was, Was Football,” a first-person point of view of a simple farm boy’s first bewildering experience watching a football game. The skit was released on a record album in 1953.

Griffith honed the monologue to perfection and performed it in one of his four appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show” (CBS, 1948-1971). He was soon tapped to play the lead role in the United States Steel Hour presentation of the Ira Levin play, “No Time for Sergeants” (ABC, 1955). He reprised the role on Broadway the following year, earning a Tony nomination for his performance, and was joined onstage by a young comic actor named Don Knotts, with whom Griffith would enjoy a lengthy professional and personal relationship. He soon caught the eye of acclaimed film director Elia Kazan, who cast him in a startling dramatic role in “A Face in the Crowd” (1957). Griffith played Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, an Arkansas drifter who is plucked out of obscurity and finds fame as a television host, but whose friendly, folksy charm is cover for scheming ambition for political power. Written by “On the Waterfront” (1954) screenwriter Budd Schulberg, the film was based on the alleged onstage phoniness of Will Rogers and Arthur Godfrey. In his first film role, Griffith arguably never again turned in such a powerful performance playing such a dark character.

Griffith returned to comedy with a feature film version of “No Time for Sergeants” (1958), working again with Knotts, then returned to the stage and earned another Tony nomination for his performance in the musical “Destry Rides Again” (1960). After a series of occasional guest appearances on “The Steve Allen Show” (NBC, 1956-1960), Griffith landed an episode on the Danny Thomas show, “Make Room for Daddy,” (ABC, CBS, 1953-1965), making his first appearance as the no-nonsense, down-home Sheriff Andy Taylor. The episode served as the inspiration for “The Andy Griffith Show,” which debuted on CBS in 1960, where he expanded his character into one of the most beloved television series of all time. Set in the fictional town of Mayberry, the show centered on Taylor, a widower living with his son Opie (Ron Howard) and his Aunt Bee (Francis Bavier), who worked alongside his earnest, but high-strung deputy, Barney Fife (Knotts). The town itself was populated by an array of quirky townspeople, including Gomer Pyle (Jim Nabors), a dim-witted but well-meaning mechanic; his equally dull cousin Goober Pyle (George Lindsey); gossipy Floyd the barber (Howard McNear); and a rock-throwing town clown named Ernest T. Bass (Howard Morris). Part of the show’s appeal was avoiding the stereotype that Mayberry’s locals were irreproachably moral – the citizenry, including Andy himself, were just as petty, judgmental or selfish as the outsiders who passed through town.

Throughout the years, Griffith made subtle adjustments to his performance. For the second season, he began to rein in some of his wide-eyed, “gee whiz” qualities, and became more of a straight man to comic foil, Knotts. The show was also remarkable for its portrayal of Taylor as a single father going through the dating process; first with Mayberry’s pharmacy clerk Ellie Wakler (Elinor Donahue), then Opie’s schoolteacher, Helen Crump (Aneta Corsaut). Initially, Griffith and Knotts figured on the show running just five years and signed contracts accordingly. But when the first five years were up, Knotts left the series, while Griffith chose to remain until the show finished its run in 1968 after eight seasons. The series remained a ratings success and finished number one in the ratings in its last season. Griffith stepped into an executive producer role for the spin-off, “Mayberry R.F.D.” (CBS, 1968-1971), though he did appear in the pilot episode. Despite setting a ratings record for a new show, the spin-off was nonetheless cancelled when the network elected to rid itself of rural-themed shows.

Griffith went on to occasionally star in movies, but it was mostly forgettable fare like “Angel in My Pocket,” (1969) and “Hearts of the West” (1975). On television, he tried to recapture some of his down-home appeal with the short-lived “The New Andy Griffith Show” (CBS, 1971), a confusing program on which Griffith played Andy Sawyer, a man who made good and left his small rural hometown, only to return to fill in as a replacement mayor. Regarded as distinctly inferior to the original, “The New Andy Griffith Show” was cancelled after a few months on air. Meanwhile, Griffith continued appearing in guest spots on shows like “The Mod Squad” (ABC, 1968-1973), “Hawaii Five-0” (CBS, 1968-1980), “Here’s Lucy” (CBS, 1968-1974) and “The Bionic Woman” (ABC/NBC, 1976-78). Griffith had a leading role in the television movie “Salvage” (ABC, 1979) and its subsequent series, “Salvage 1,” (ABC, 1978-1980), playing Harry Broderick, an ordinary junk dealer who creates a working rocket ship to fly to the moon to retrieve spare parts left behind by NASA astronauts.

After a string of guest spots and the disappointing ratings of “Salvage 1,” Griffith turned in an Emmy-nominated performance as the suspicious father of a woman believed to have been murdered by her plastic surgeon husband in the TV movie-of-the-week “Murder in Texas” (NBC, 1981). He then appeared in the James Burrows-produced old west sitcom “Best of the West” (ABC, 1981-82), before turning in a cameo in a 1982 episode of “Saturday Night Live” (NBC, 1975- ). But in 1983, his acting career was put on hold when he became stricken with Guillen-Barre syndrome, a muscular disease that left him partially paralyzed for several months. But in a few years, he made a triumphant return, joining co-stars Don Knotts, Ron Howard and others for a reunion movie, “Return to Mayberry,” (CBS, 1986). That same year, Griffith made a significant return to series television with the courtroom drama, “Matlock” (NBC, ABC, 1986-1995). His portrayal of lawyer Ben Matlock, whose country charm and simple mannerisms belied a sharp, cunning mind, struck a chord with millions of viewers – many of them older and likely fans of his previous work as a Sheriff Taylor. Griffith also served as executive producer on the show and appeared in all 180 episodes. After the long-running series left the airwaves, he reprised the role in a special guest appearance for two-part storyline on “Diagnosis Murder” (CBS, 1993-2001).

Of all the characters he played over the years, Griffith remarked that Matlock was his favorite. During the show’s run, he played the character in several well-received movies-of-the-week, including “Matlock: The Vacation” (ABC, 1992), “Matlock: The Legacy” (ABC, 1992) and “Matlock: The Heist” (ABC, 1995). Griffith continued working even after the show, playing a villain in the Leslie Nielsen espionage spoof “Spy Hard” (1996), while appearing on episodes of “Dawson’s Creek” (The WB, 1998-2003) and “Family Law” (CBS, 1999-2002). He also recorded a series of Christmas and gospel albums, including I Love to Tell the Story: 25 Timeless Hymns which won a Grammy Award in 1997. Griffith made frequent appearances on television after the death of his old co-star Don Knotts in early 2006, including a tribute to his friend on “Larry King Live” (CNN, 1985-2010). As the years piled on, the aging star appeared less frequently on screen, while several health issues began to take prominence. In 2000, he underwent a successful quadruple bypass surgery. After receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005, Griffith re-emerged for a return to the big screen in the independent romance, “Waitress” (2007), playing Old Joe, a wise patron of a small town diner where an unhappy waitress (Keri Russell) works. Only two months after his “Andy Griffith Show” co-star George Lindsey died, the beloved television star passed away from a heart attack on July 3, 2012 at age 86. Ron Howard released a statement, saying “His pursuit of excellence and the joy he took in creating served generations and shaped my life. I’m forever grateful. RIP Andy.”

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Rosalind Russell was one of the great actresses of Hollywood’s Golden Age. She was born in Waterbury, Connecticut in 1907. In the 1930’s, she gave strong supporting roles in such movies as “China Seas” with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow and “The Women” with Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford. She came into her own in the 1940’s and is especially remembered for her performance opposite Cary Grant in “His Girl Friday”. In 1955 she starred with William Holden and Kim Novak in “Picnic” and then in 1958 in “Auntie Mame”. She was a generous contributor to charitable causes. She died in 1976.

TCM overview:

She was born into wealth and privilege but for Golden Age moviegoers, Rosalind Russell represented the epitome of the working woman. Warehoused as a Universal acquisition and underutilized at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the lanky, dark-eyed actress tested her comic chops in George Cukor’s “The Women” (1939) before coming into her own as Cary Grant’s co-star in Howard Hawks’ “His Girl Friday” (1940) – a role refused by almost every A-list actress in Hollywood. Tailoring the script to the talents of his stars, whom he encouraged to ad lib for the camera, Hawks delivered the rare Hollywood hit to please critics and audiences alike, while Russell made of her brassy distaff journalist Hildy Johnson a role model for American women braving the male-dominated workforce. If Russell’s subsequent films rarely matched the quality of “His Girl Friday,” she found greater satisfaction on stage, winning a Tony for “Wonderful Town” in 1953 and reprising her 1956 Broadway success as “Auntie Mame” in Warner Brothers’ lavish Technicolor film adaptation. The four-time Academy Award nominee transitioned deftly to middle-age, playing a small town spinster in “Picnic” (1955) and mentoring Natalie Wood’s budding burlesque star in “Gypsy” (1962). Diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, Russell threw herself into charity work, for which she received the 1973 Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award only a few years before breast cancer robbed Hollywood of one of its most unique talents, a glamorous leading lady with the soul of a vaudevillian.

Catherine Rosalind Russell was born on June 4, 1907, in Waterbury, CT. The fourth of seven children born to James Edward Russell, a trial attorney, and the former Clara McKnight, a school teacher, Russell was raised in affluence on Waterbury’s Cracker Hill, a conclave of stately Victorian homes shaded by fruit trees and backed by rose gardens. Called Rosalind by her parents, in memory of a happy sea cruise to Nova Scotia aboard the S.S. Rosalind, Russell developed into a tomboy, climbing trees, riding horses from her father’s stable, and cutting classes to attend movies at her local bijou. Upon her high school graduation from the Notre Dame Academy, she enrolled in Tarrytown, New York’s Marymount College, with the stated aim of becoming a teacher. Drawn to campus theatricals, Russell played the Jesuit saint Francis Xavier in a religious play and was given the lead role in a student production of the operetta “The Bohemian Girl.” Leaving Marymount in 1927 after only two years, she enrolled in classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Art in Manhattan, assuring her now widowed mother that a diploma from AADA would enable her to teach voice and diction.

In 1929, Russell was cast in the lead role in Frederick Lonsdale’s comedy of manners “The Last of Mrs. Cheney,” which also featured another young AADA enrollee – Agnes Moorehead. Upon her graduation from the Academy, Russell transitioned to summer stock, joining a repertory company based at New York’s Saranac Lake, and later traveling for acting work in Boston. As a member of the Adirondack Players, she starred in a regional staging of Edwin Burke’s “This Thing Called Love,” a recent Broadway hit. In 1930, Russell made her Broadway debut with an ensemble role in the Theatre Guild revue “Garrick Gaieties,” alongside future television comedienne Imogene Coca. Equally short-lived was her return to the Great White Way in the Alma Wilson farce “Company’s Coming!,” which closed after a week at the Lyceum Theater. Tapped by Universal Pictures in Hollywood for potential film work, Russell traveled west but her brief time at Universal was an unhappy one. Breaking her studio contract, Russell found a more welcoming home at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, for whom she made her feature film debut in “Evelyn Prentice” (1934), as Myrna Loy’s snooty rival for the love of William Powell.

Despite possessing a flair for comedy, Russell’s initial film roles often cast her as the other woman in such dramas as “West Point of the Air” (1935) with Robert Young and “China Seas” (1935) with Clark Gable. Though romance favored her in the class comedy “It Had to Happen” (1936) with George Raft and in the psychological thriller “Night Must Fall” (1937) with Robert Montgomery, Russell’s unique abilities were largely wasted. A happy exception was her turn as the journalist heroine of Michael Curtiz’s “Four’s a Crowd” (1938), co-starring Errol Flynn, and her breakthrough role as the catty Sylvia Fowler in George Cukor’s madcap “The Women” (1939). The latter classic allowed Russell to bring all of her talents to bear, contrasting her haughty, patrician mien (which so often limited her to playing socialites) with an affinity for slapstick. If “The Women” showed Russell’s great promise as a top-tier comedienne, that promise was fulfilled when she was loaned out to Columbia Pictures to co-star opposite Cary Grant in Howard Hawks’ “His Girl Friday” (1940), a reworking of the Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur stage play with one of the principle roles gender-reversed for a woman.

Russell’s enthusiasm to take the lead in an A-list comedy tailored to her particular talents was tempered initially when she learned that the role of ace reporter Hildy Johnson had been rejected by nearly every major Hollywood comedienne – among them Irene Dunne, Ginger Rogers, Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard and Jean Arthur. Glumly submitting to costume tests for Hawks, the actress boldly voiced her apprehension but was reassured by the veteran director and co-star Grant, with whom she enjoyed a professional relationship of complete equanimity that had little precedent in Hollywood at the time. Though Hawks had a reputation for demanding from his actors absolute fidelity to the shooting script, he allowed and encouraged Russell and Grant to ad lib for the camera, even to the extreme of breaking the presumed forth wall separating players and audience. The film’s manic pacing; overlapping, fast-flying dialogue; and the winning union of Russell and Grant made it a hit with both the critics and moviegoers. The production also had the benefit of bringing Russell together with Frederick Brisson, a Danish expatriate and agency executive whom she would marry in 1941, with Cary Grant as their best man.

Russell earned Academy Award nominations for her roles in the comedy “My Cousin Eileen” (1942), for the historical biopic “Sister Kenny” (1946), and for “Mourning Becomes Electra” (1947), an adaptation of the grim Eugene O’Neill play that proved a disastrous venture for RKO-Radio Pictures. If the majority of her subsequent film roles proved unmemorable, Russell found greater job satisfaction by returning to the stage. She toured with a 1951 production of “Bell, Book and Candle” and won a Tony for starring in the 1953 Broadway production of “Wonderful Town” and George Abbott’s musical adaptation of “My Cousin Eileen.” She stayed with the hit show through 556 performances and reprised the role of Ruth Sherwood for a 1958 television adaptation broadcast by CBS. In the interim, the 47-year-old actress accepted a supporting role as a small town spinster in Joshua Logan’s “Picnic” (1955) but refused a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination when Columbia denied her top billing. In 1956, Russell returned to Broadway for the last time to star as the free-spirited “Auntie Mame,” another box office juggernaut that ran for over 600 performances at the Broadhurst Theater.

When Russell reprised her role as Mame Dennis in Morton DaCosta’s film adaptation of “Auntie Mame” (1958), she had found a signature role to bookend her indelible turn as Hildy Johnson in “His Girl Friday” (1940). The film garnered six Oscar nominations, among them one for Russell as Best Actress, but she had to content herself with a Golden Globe and some of the best reviews of her career. After the diagnosis of breast cancer in 1959 required Russell to undergo a double mastectomy, she worked less often. She played Mama Rose to Natalie Wood’s budding burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee in “Gypsy” (1962) and appeared as a martinet Mother Superior in the convent comedy “The Trouble with Angels” (1966) and its sequel, “Where Angels Go, Trouble Follow” (1968). “Rosie!” (1967) gave the actress another whack at Mame-style irreverence in the role of a widow whose avaricious daughters have her committed to a sanitarium for fear she will spend their inheritance before she dies. Billing herself as C.A. McKnight (in honor of her mother), Russell co-wrote her final film appearance, playing a New Jersey housewife who volunteers for espionage work in the comedy “Mrs. Pollifax – Spy” (1971), based on a series of novels by Dorothy Gilman.

Russell’s final credit was in the ABC telefilm “The Crooked Hearts” (1972), a geriatric romantic comedy which finds her posing as a socialite in order to meet wealthy widowers, only to snag Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., a debonair confidence man targeting wealthy widows. Diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in 1969, Russell refused to acknowledge her disability publicly but devoted herself to charity work, for which she received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 1973 Academy Awards. The metastasis of her cancer brought about Russell’s death in her Beverly Hills home on Nov. 28, 1976. Her autobiography, Life is a Banquet (a title cadged from “Auntie Mame”) was published a year after her death. In 1978, the Rosalind Russell Medical Research Center for Arthritis was founded at UCLA-San Francisco. In 2000, “His Girl Friday” and “Auntie Mame” were included in the American Film Institute’s Top 100 comedies. In 2009, Jonathan Gruber’s documentary “Life Is a Banquet: The Rosalind Russell Story” was exhibited at film festivals nationwide.

By Richard Harland Smith

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Tom Berenger. TCM Overview

Tom Berenger was one of the major movie stars of the 1980’s. Among his films from that period were “The Big Chill”, “Platoon”,”Someone to Watch Over Me” and “Major League”. In 1990 he starred with Richard Harris in “The Field”. In recent years he has emerged as a powerful character actor in such movies as “Inception”.

“When Tom Berenger smiles out of hi studio stills he seems a sweet-tempered gentle ma, but there are others in which he stares out as disdainfully, with his mouth twisted cruelly. That suggests a wide range, which he effortlessly has, but even in villainy he can seem lost, wistful.” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The Independent Years” (1991).

TCM overview :

Having first established himself in brooding, aggressive roles, actor Tom Berenger first came to the public’s attention as the self-effacing Tom Selleck-like television star in Lawrence Kasdan’s iconic drama, “The Big Chill” (1983). But it was his hard-edged turn as the Vietnam War-scarred Sergeant Barnes in “Platoon” (1986) that turned the relatively known actor into a bona fide star. Berenger next emerged in the unlikeliest of places, playing a professional baseball player in the surprise hit comedy “Major League” (1989), a role he reprised five years later in the inferior sequel. From there, he specialized in playing historical figures like Confederate Lt. Gen. James Longstreet in “Gettysburg” (1993) and Theodore Roosevelt in “Rough Riders” (TNT, 1997), while churning out a series of low-quality genre films – many of which went straight to DVD – like “Sniper” (1993) and its two sequels. Whether occasionally popping up in more acclaimed movies like “Training Day” (2001) and “Inception” (2010), co-starring on his first regular primetime series “October Road” (ABC, 2007-08), or winning an Emmy for his work in the acclaimed miniseries “Hatfields & McCoys” (History, 2012), Berenger seemed content playing a wide array of villains and antiheroes in non-theatrical releases.

Born on May 31, 1950 in Chicago, IL, Berenger was raised in a working class home headed by a father who worked as a printer for The Chicago Sun-Times. After graduating Rich East High School in 1967, he attended the University of Missouri to study journalism, only to discover acting after trying out for a school play on a bet. Berenger made his debut in a college production of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?” before moving on to regional theater following graduation. He soon relocated to New York City, where he studied with Uta Hagen and Herbert Berghof at HB Studio while working in off-Broadway productions like “End as a Man” (1975) for the Circle Repertory Company and “The Rose Tattoo” (1977) at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, CT. Making his screen debut, Berenger spent a year portraying Tim Siegel on the daytime soap “Once Life to Live” (ABC, 1968-2012) before landing a small role in the biopic about a young John F. Kennedy (Paul Rudd) in “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye” (NBC, 1977).

Following his feature debut in “The Sentinel” (1977), Berenger landed a significant role as Gary Cooper White, the psychopathic killer of “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” (1977), who threatens a young teacher (Diane Keaton) looking for sexual excitement outside of her usually mundane existence. He next had his first starring role in the erotic drama, “In Praise of Older Women” (1978), which cast him in the underdeveloped role of a Hungarian stud recalling two decades’ worth of sexual conquests. Berenger fared better as the young Butch Cassidy in Richard Lester’s “Butch and Sundance: The Early Years” (1979) while returning to the small screen to take the leading role of a street tough-turned-prison boxer in the two-part miniseries “Flesh & Blood” (CBS, 1979). After a return to the stage to play Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1981) at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, Berenger played a mercenary soldier opposite Christopher Walken in “The Dogs of War” (1981). Two years later, the actor gained his first widespread attention for his standout performance as an insecure television star in the ensemble drama “The Big Chill” (1983), a film that marked similar breakthroughs for Glenn Close, William Hurt and Jeff Goldblum.

Hot on the heels of “The Big Chill,” Berenger earned a cult following with “Eddie and the Cruisers” (1983), playing the former piano player and lyricist for the leader of the titular band (Michael Pare), whose alleged death in a car accident comes into question a few years later. He was underutilized as a smarmy strip club owner in the derided crime thriller “Fear City” (1984), while in “Rustler’s Rhapsody” (1985) he tried to revive the gentle singing cowboy from 1940s Hollywood Westerns, only to have the film fall off the radar and remain forgotten for the rest of his career. But Berenger hit his stride and became a star with his next film, “Platoon” (1986), director Oliver Stone’s searing and realistic look at the Vietnam War as seen from the eyes of the average infantryman. Berenger played Staff Sgt. Barnes, a battle-scarred leader of a platoon who will stop at nothing to ensure his authority, even if it means killing a rival sergeant (Willem Dafoe) while trying to corrupt a young recruit (Charlie Sheen). With his face masked by prosthetic scar tissue, Berenger delivered perhaps the finest performance of his career, earning numerous award nominations, including one for Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards.

Building off that triumphant performance, Berenger starred opposite Mimi Rogers in the Ridley Scott thriller “Someone to Watch Over Me” (1987), before proving both forceful and unpredictable as the vulnerable macho white supremacist leader in “Betrayed” (1988). As veteran catcher Jake Taylor, whose damaged knees signal the end of his career, Berenger was the heart and soul of the hit baseball comedy “Major League” (1989), thanks in large part to his comedic chemistry with Charlie Sheen and romantic chemistry with Rene Russo. Following a small role in Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989), he projected the smoldering charisma of a young Brando as the half-breed Cheyenne mercenary who goes native in Hector Babenco’s “At Play in the Fields of the Lord” (1991), adapted from Peter Matthiessen’s 1965 novel. He next delivered a solid portrayal of Confederate Lt. Gen. James Longstreet in “Gettysburg” (1993), while appearing in several Hollywood genre films like “Sniper” (1993) and “Sliver” (1993), the former of which fizzled at the box office, while the latter was panned by most critics.

Around this time, Berenger began a short-lived recurring role during the waning days of the hit sitcom, “Cheers” (NBC, 1982-1993), playing the plumber husband-to-be of bar manager Rebecca Howe (Kirstie Alley). His performance earned him an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series. Following a reprisal for Jake Taylor for the woeful sequel “Major League II” (1994), Berenger appeared in a series of misfires like “Chasers” (1994), “Avenging Angel” (1995) and “An Occasional Hell” (1996), which he also executive produced, before playing a mercenary-turned-teacher in “The Substitute” (1996). He next turned in a fine portrayal of Theodore Roosevelt in the original made-for-cable movie, “Rough Riders” (TNT, 1997), which he followed with a supporting role in Robert Altman’s meandering adaptation of John Grisham’s “The Gingerbread Man” (1998). Berenger starred in “One Man’s Hero” (1998), the story of a group of Irish immigrants who fled to Mexico and fought for their adopted country as the St. Patrick Brigade in the Mexican-American War. Meanwhile, he continued appearing in low-quality genre fare like “Enemy of My Enemy” (1999), “Cutaway” (2000) and “Cruel and Unusual” (2001), which did nothing but help dim memories of strong performances like in “Platoon.”

Though only onscreen for a few minutes, Berenger delivered a memorable turn as a powerful lawyer in the District Attorney’s office who runs cover for a corrupt cop (Denzel Washington) in “Training Day” (2001). He reprised his role from the theatrically released “Sniper” for the direct-to-DVD release, “Sniper 2” (2003) and “Sniper 3” (2004), which he followed with a notable guest appearance on “Third Watch” (NBC, 1999-2005) and a supporting role among an all star cast for Steven Spielberg’s epic 12-hour miniseries, “Into the West” (TNT, 2005). For his first regular series role, Berenger played the gruff, but ultimately kindhearted father of an accomplished writer (Bryan Greenberg) who returns home after 10-year sojourn on the short-lived “October Road” (ABC, 2007-08). Berenger returned to features with several small movies like the direct-to-DVD releases “Stiletto” (2008) and “Smokin’ Aces 2: Assassin’s Ball” (2010) and low budget indies “Charlie Valentine” (2009) and “Breaking Point” (2009). He had his first taste of a major Hollywood film in a long time with “Inception” (2010), director Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster psychological thriller inspired by people’s experiences with lucid dreaming. Following a small turn as the nameless warden in the Dwayne Johnson actioner “Faster” (2010), Berenger shined in a standout performance as Jim Vance in the acclaimed miniseries “Hatfields & McCoys” (History, 2012), which brought huge ratings to the cable network and earned praise from all corners. But most importantly for the actor, it earned him an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie in 2012. The TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Mamie Van Doren was promoted as a rival to Marilyn Monroe in the lines of Jayne Mansfield and Diana Dors. She is the only one of those ladies still around. She was born in 1931 in South Dakota. She made her movie debut in 1951 in “His Kind of Woman”. Other film credits include “Untamed Youth”, “Teacher’s Pet” and “High School Confidential”.

TCM overview:

Full-figured, hard-edged leading lady of the late 1950s and early 60s who, next to Jayne Mansfield, was one of the best known of the Marilyn Monroe imitators to emerge at that time. Van Doren, however, was not cast primarily in comedies like the more successful Mansfield; instead, she primarily appeared in schlocky “B” melodramas like “Guns, Girls, and Gangsters” (1958), “The Beat Generation” (1959), and “The Navy vs. the Night Monsters” (1966) and exploitation films like “High School Confidential” (1958), “Sex Kittens Go the College” (1960). Van Doren’s minor cult status was acknowledged in 1994’s “Pulp Fiction”, in which a character named “Mamie Van Doren” was played by Lorelei Leslie.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

American born Gary Cockrell originally trained as a dancer and choreographer before turning to acting. He had studied with Matt Maddox in New York and had danced in several Broadway productions before joining the cast of West Side Story. The play was first performed at the Winter Garden in New York in 1957 before transferring to London’s West End in 1958. Gary moved to London, with the production, which took place at Her Majesty’s Theatre, and lived there throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s. He left West Side Story to play the leading acting role in Tennessee Williams Orpheus Descending at both the Royal Court Theatre and the Mermaid Theatre. Following this, he starred in a production of The Golden Touch at the Piccadilly Theatre and performed in the musical Carnival at the Lyric Theatre in Shafetsbury Avenue.

Although he was based in London, he worked as an actor on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, he had a leading role in the television series The Corridor People and guest-starred in series such as The Saint, Danger Man and The Persuaders. He had a supporting role in Stanley Kubick’s controversial film Lolita and appeared in Gonks Go Beat!. In America, he played opposite Steve McQueen in the film The War Lovers and had small roles in The Americanisation of Emily, The Bedford Incident and Man in the Middle. He acted on television in Wagon Train and Route 66.

He left the UK to live in St. Lucia in the West Indies, where he opened a hotel. Today, Gary is retired and lives in St. Lucia with his wife, Marie.

MGM Singing Sweetheart was born in 1929 in Portland, Oregon. She made her movie debut in 1944 in “Song of the Open Road” and went on to make such hits as “Holiday in Mexico”, “Three Darling Daughters”, “A Date With Judy”, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” and “Deep in My Heart”. Was married to the late actor Dickie Moore.

TCM overview:

With a light-up-a-room smile, mesmerizing hazel eyes, and a trademark perky demeanor, Jane Powell incarnated the last gasp of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s era of feel-good musicals and the wholesome performers who inhabited these Technicolor extravaganzas. Powell emerged from a troubled childhood to find a spot in MGM’s stable of child stars, doing a string of plucky love-struck teen roles in B-musicals of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Wielding a powerful soprano voice, she would secure a place in the pantheon of classic musicals in the lead of the 1954 film adaptation of “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” Though her movie glory days lasted only a decade, she transitioned into television and eventually took her penchant for classic musicals on regional theatrical tours. Grossly insecure, she would cycle through a series of marriages and struggle with severe depression, belying her longtime public image. Yet she would remain active in stage and television productions late into her life. For a generation, however, Powell would forever embody the archetype of the all-American girl-next-door, remaining a symbol of the proverbial shinier, simpler good ole’ days.

She was born Suzanne Lorraine Burce on April 1, 1929, in Portland, OR, to Paul and Eileen Burce, an unhappy couple who saw in their precocious girl a chance to escape their modest means, seeing her as child-star heir apparent to Shirley Temple. They saved up to pay for dance lessons for Suzanne when she was only three, which three years later drew the attentions of a talent scout who convinced the family to move to Oakland, CA, ostensibly to be a mid-market stopover before conquering Hollywood. A promised project never materialized, the agent took a powder, and the Burces moved back to Portland – all of which was another setback exacerbating Eileen’s alcohol abuse. The actress later confessed in her 1988 autobiography that she felt exploited by her mother and learned to repress her negative feelings for fear of aggravating Eileen, even to the point that after she was molested by other youthful residents in the family’s apartment complex, the youngster said nothing so as not to upset her mother. Meanwhile, Suzanne added singing lessons to her regimen, earned appearances on local radio shows, and by age 11, had her own radio show on Portland radio station KOIN. When the U.S. entered World War II, she was selected Oregon’s “Victory Girl,” appearing across the state at war-bond drives.

In 1943, Suzanne won a spot on a radio talent show in Los Angeles. It led to a succession of radio appearances in the entertainment capital, including one on the popular Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy show, piquing the interest of Shirley Temple’s then-studio, MGM, which signed her to a contract. The Burces moved to L.A., where she attended the studio’s Little Red Schoolhouse, renowned for teaching its famed stable of child stars like Temple, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, but she won little work and initially felt isolated and depressed. Her first two films, in fact, would be loan-outs to United Artists. “Song of the Open Road” (1944) introduced the newly christened Jane Powell, playing a young teen star named Jane Powell who, fed up with her goody-two-shoes public image, makes a musical sojourn to the real world. She followed that with “Delightfully Dangerous” (1945), a standard girl-hoping-to-make-it-big flick. It was not until 1946 that MGM put her in an in-house production, “Holiday in Mexico,” an airy musical whose story basically served as padding between songs by Powell and her castmates. The film became a staging point for her; her onscreen romantic interest, a young Roddy McDowall, became a lifelong friend; producer Joe Pasternak became the shepherd of many of her projects; and the movie’s formula – show folk in fluffy, interchangeable plots enabling song-and-dance in scenic locations – would become the Powell stock-in-trade.

That very same template would manifest with a series of crowd-pleasers, including “Three Daring Daughters” (1948), “A Date with Judy” (1948), co-starring Elizabeth Taylor, “Luxury Liner” (1948), “Nancy Goes to Rio” (1950) and “Two Weeks With Love” (1950). Taylor would stand as Powell’s bridesmaid upon her marriage to ice-skater Geary Steffen the next year. Many of the songs off her chirpy, colorful B-pictures migrated onto Powell albums issued by Columbia Records, such as 1949’s A Date with Jane Powell. MGM moved her song-and-dance routine into the A-picture realm with “Royal Wedding” (1951) by pairing her with none other than Fred Astaire, with the two playing siblings in spite of Astaire being three decades her senior. Later in 1951, during the shooting of the seemingly literalist “Rich, Young and Pretty” (1951), she discovered she was pregnant by her first husband. She bore the first of her and Steffen’s two children, Geary (“G.A.”) Steffen III, with daughter Suzanne arriving the next year. She resumed playing to type as the disarming all-American ingénue in “Small Town Girl” (1953) and “Three Sailors and a Girl” (1953), during the making of which she began an affair with co-star Gene Nelson. They divorced their respective spouses, intending to wed, but Nelson backed out. Insecure about being alone, she married car dealer Patrick Nerney the following year, the union producing a daughter, Lindsey, two years later.

In 1954, Powell would snare her signature role as the Alpha-female in the phalanx of would-be wives in the Stanley Donen-directed Technicolor musical “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” opposite booming baritone and onscreen love interest Howard Keel. MGM returned her to more contemporary song-and-dance comedies in tandem with fellow sprite Debbie Reynolds in “Athena” (1954) and “Hit the Deck” (1955), yet when Louie B. Mayer, MGM’s longtime champion of musical treacle, departed the studio, Powell foresaw the genre’s imminent decline. She quit, she later discovered, not long before new studio chief Dore Schary had planned to cut her loose. The new free agent began turning up in guest appearances on television shows, such as “The Goodyear Theatre” (NBC, 1957-1960), “Alcoa Theatre” (NBC, 1957-1960) and “What’s My Line” (CBS, 1950-1967). She was drawn particularly to variety shows that could showcase her song-and-dance skills, such as Dinah Shore, Judy Garland, Red Skelton and Andy Williams’ eponymous showcases, and two big-ticket made-for-TV remakes of “Ruggles of Red Gap” (1957) and “Meet Me in St. Louis” (1959). She returned to the movies with a triumvirate of 1958 releases – two rare non-musical dramatic outings, playing Hedy Lamarr’s daughter in Lamarr’s final film, “The Female Animal” and a Polynesian girl-next-door in the low-budget Melville adaptation “Enchanted Island,” as well as a last light-hearted movie musical, “The Girl Most Likely.”

Powell continued voluminous TV guest-work through the 1960s, in addition to taking roles in touring and regional versions of Broadway plays, among them such staples as “South Pacific,” “The Sound of Music,” “Oklahoma!” “My Fair Lady,” “Carousel” – some of the productions reuniting her with Keel. By now her relationship with Nerney had floundered and they divorced in 1963. She married Jim Fitzgerald in 1965, who took over managing her career – poorly, by her later estimate. She did, however, make her Broadway debut in 1973 in “Irene,” replacing Debbie Reynolds in the title role of the plucky, blue-collar Irish woman wooed into New York high-society circles. By the mid-1970s, her relationship with Fitzgerald also deteriorated, as would her relationship with children G.A. and Suzanne – all of which led to a nervous breakdown. In 1974, Fitzgerald reportedly intervened in an attempted suicide by Powell. Though she convalesced for a time in a hospital, she did not receive psychiatric treatment until years later. Powell and Fitzgerald divorced the next year. By the end of the 1970s, she settled into a schedule of telefilms and guest appearances on TV staples of the time such as “Fantasy Island” (ABC, 1978-1984), “The Love Boat” (ABC, 1977-1986), and “Murder, She Wrote” (CBS, 1984-1996), eventually taking on a recurring role as the grandmother on the popular family sitcom “Growing Pains” (ABC, 1985-1992).

After another marriage that ended in 1981, she gave an interview to fellow ex-child star Dickie Moore, who was working on a book and the two began a relationship. She moved to New York in 1982, cohabitated with Moore and married him in 1988, the same year she published her confessional autobiography The Girl Next Door and How She Grew. Still spry by the late-1980s, she teamed up with the Arthritis Foundation to appear in the exercise video “Fight Back with Fitness,” specifically designed for senior citizens, In the early 1990s, she periodically stood in for actress Eileen Fulton in her long-running role on the soap “As The World Turns” (CBS, 1956-2010), and continued to add to her stage résumé with a stint in a New York production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella,” an East Coast run in the Anne Meara-penned play “After-Play,” and two 2000 productions, “Avow” and “70, Girls, 70.” In 2003, she took a featured role in the Showtime made-for-TV movie “The Sandy Bottom Orchestra,” and trod the boards again in Chicago and Washington, D.C. runs of Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Bounce.”

By Matthew Grimm

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Telegraph obituary of Jane Powell in September 2021.

Jane Powell, sunny star of MGM musicals who had the role of a lifetime in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers – obituary

With blue eyes and a chirrupy singing voice, she danced with Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding and was viewed as the wholesome girl next doorByTelegraph Obituaries17 September 2021 • 1:29pm

Jane Powell, circa 1948 CREDIT: The Legacy Collection/Avalon

Jane Powell, who has died aged 92, was the singing star of more than a dozen MGM musicals in the Forties and Fifties, and best remembered as the girl who brought Howard Keel and his clan to heel in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954).

It was her only smash hit. Though she enjoyed star status from her earliest pictures, few were big attractions and they were often relegated to the second half of double bills. She was better known as a personality than for her films.

Petite, blonde, blue-eyed and with a relentlessly sunny disposition, Jane Powell could be sugary and cloying on screen. She hankered after meatier roles, but the studio boss Louis B Mayer always refused.

He was wiser than she knew. Although it seemed to her at the time that she was held back, there is no evidence that she could have played the parts she sought. Rather the reverse: her one stab at heavy drama, The Female Animal – made in 1958 after she had left MGM – required her to play a drunk scene. It was not well received.

A front-of-house or lobby card for the film in which she played Howard Keel’s bride CREDIT: LMPC via Getty Images

What she could do was sing. Her natural talent was spotted, encouraged and trained from childhood, resulting in a chirrupy soprano similar to but less fragile than that of her friend and studio colleague Kathryn Grayson. Grayson, who looked as exotic as an orchid, took risks on the exposed high notes and sometimes came a cropper, but audiences forgave her, even as they winced.

Powell on the other hand took no risks, staying comfortably within her vocal range. But it meant that there was never any excitement – or danger – when she sang. She was a mite predictable, and came to be viewed as the girl next door, or everybody’s kid sister. Film fans never lost their hearts to her – as, with all her vocal faults, they did to Kathryn Grayson.

Placeholder image for youtube video: pyzmIaNy_rI

In private, Jane Powell’s life did not always run smoothly. She divorced one husband for cruelty for deserting her every weekend to pursue sporting activities, and another for extreme cruelty for never allowing her a moment to herself. He once silenced her at a dinner party, she recalled, by saying: “We’ve heard enough about you all evening; now let’s talk about me.”

As an interviewee, she could be naive: waxing lyrical to a reporter about her family’s fully stocked nuclear survival shelters (one at sea), she said the children were so excited that they could hardly wait.

Royal Wedding, 1951: Fred Astaire, Jane Powell, Peter Lawford CREDIT: FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty Images

The daughter of a baby-food salesman, she was born Suzanne Lorraine Burce on April 1 1929 in Portland, Oregon. (Her professional name was taken from the character she played in her first film, Song of the Open Road, in 1944.) At the age of seven, she was singing on a local children’s radio programme, but did not begin professional training until she was 11. Introduced to the manager of the radio station KOIN, she was given her own programme and supported the war effort at patriotic rallies, billed as Oregon’s Victory Girl.

After Grant High School in Portland, she accompanied her parents on a three-week holiday to California, where they entered her in a Los Angeles talent competition. She won, trilling an aria from Carmen, and was spotted by MGM talent scouts. Invited to the studio for an audition, she was, unusually, placed under contract without a screen test. She was only 15.

MGM put her under the wing of producer Joe Pasternak, who had made a star of another teenage canary, Deanna Durbin. In case she did not live up to the studio’s hopes, Jane was lent out for her first two films to United Artists. However, Song of the Open Road and Delightfully Dangerous (1945) amply fulfilled expectations and from then on, MGM kept her on a string.

Her first MGM feature was Holiday in Mexico (1946), in which she sang Ave Maria, followed by a string of minor musicals in which she was generally cast as a schoolgirl. These included Luxury Liner and A Date with Judy (both 1948), and Two Weeks with Love and Nancy Goes to Rio in 1950. The last was intended as the pilot for a series of films in which Nancy would also visit Rome and Paris. But box-office returns were disappointing and the sequels were cancelled.

It was a shaky start, broken in 1951 with Royal Wedding (shown in Britain as Wedding Bells). Jane Powell was not the first choice to be Fred Astaire’s singing and dancing partner. MGM would have preferred Judy Garland or June Allyson, but neither was available. Powell stepped into the breach, to play Fred’s sister, accompanying him to England to see “the” royal wedding (presumably Princess Elizabeth’s, though the film is not explicit).

Drying the dishes with Buster Keaton at the Hollywood Canteen, April 1944 CREDIT: AP

She was called on to dance a bit, too. Nobody would claim that she was one of Astaire’s best dancing partners, but she did well enough and the film earned a place in the record books for the longest song title ever heard in a musical: How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life?

This was the best film she had yet been offered, but she had to revert to three more ingénue roles in Rich, Young and Pretty (1951), Small Town Girl (1953) and Three Sailors and a Girl (1953) before landing the role of a lifetime in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). Once more she was not the automatic choice: MGM toyed with other singers before she won the part.

Based on Plutarch’s account of the rape of the Sabine women, this was the tale of seven rough-and-ready brothers who abduct their brides in the Wild West only to find, as in the Greek play Lysistrata, that conjugal rights are denied until they bathe and acquire some manners.

Jane Powell played Howard Keel’s bride, who organises the sex-ban and drills the boys into shape. A catchy score by Johnny Mercer and Gene de Paul gave everyone in the cast something memorable to sing. Powell’s numbers were the popular Spring, Spring, Spring and Going Courtin’.

Alas, this was the high-water mark of the MGM musical. As tastes changed, the studio began to phase out the genre with which it had come to be identified.

Powell featured in only three more musicals. Athena (1954) was a thin satire on health farms, in which she sang an aria from Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment; Hit the Deck (1955) was a film version of an old Broadway musical; and in Deep in My Heart (1955), a biopic of composer Sigmund Romberg, she made only a guest appearance singing a duet from Romberg’s Maytime with Vic Damone.

Placeholder image for youtube video: 0AAcbUf3jFE

Complaining that MGM had never allowed her to grow up, she did not renew her contract and struck out on her own, signing a three-picture deal with RKO. None was a success. The first was another feeble comedy, The Girl Most Likely (1957), followed by The Female Animal and Enchanted Island (1958), in which she was miscast as a native girl opposite Dana Andrews. It was to be her last film for 27 years.

Instead, like many ex-MGM musical stars, she switched to television, cabaret and the stage. On TV, she co-starred with Michael Redgrave in Ruggles of Red Gap in 1957 and two years later played the Judy Garland role in a remake of Meet Me in St Louis. In 1976, she also featured in a TV movie, Mayday at 40,000 Feet! which secured a cinema release in the UK.

Jane Powell with Fred Astaire in Stanley Donen’s Royal Wedding CREDIT: Mgm/Kobal/Shutterstock

In the theatre, she toured in productions of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, South Pacific and My Fair Lady and scored a personal triumph when she succeeded Debbie Reynolds in the title role of the hit musical revival Irene on Broadway in 1974. But her career petered out.

In 1975, she was cast with Dick Van Dyke in a feature-length cartoon of the children’s musical Tubby the Tuba; she contributed a cameo, singing at a political rally, to the Sissy Spacek movie Marie (1985), and her final television appearance was as a traumatised old lady in a 2002 episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

Jane Powell in 1986 CREDIT: AP Photo/Richard Drew

She made an aerobics video, Jane Powell’s Fight Back with Fitness, and in 1988 published her autobiography, The Girl Next Door … and How She Grew.

Jane Powell was married five times (and divorced four): first to ice skater Geary Steffen; second to stockbroker Patrick Nerney; third to agent James Fitzgerald; fourth to producer David Parlour; and fifth to the former child star Dickie Moore, who died in 2015. She is survived by a son and a daughter from her first marriage, and another daughter from her second.

Jane Powell, born April 1 1929, died September 16 2021

Larry Parks was born in 1914 in Kansas. he is best known for his performances as ‘Al Jolson in “The Jolson Story” in 1946 and “Jolson Sings Again”. His career was seriously derailed by the House of Un-American Activities Committee. He returned to films in John Huston’s “Freud” in 1962. He was married to actress Betty Garrett. He died in 1975.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

When amiable Columbia Pictures actor Larry Parks was entrusted the role of entertainerAl Jolson in the biopic The Jolson Story (1946), his career finally hit the big time. Within a few years, however, his bright new world crumbled courtesy of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Never-say-die Larry managed to continue his career in years to come – both here and abroad, on stage and in nightclubs – alongside steadfast wife Betty Garrett. His film career, however, literally came to a standstill and would never be the same again.

Samuel Klausman Lawrence Parks was born in Olathe, Kansas, on December 13, 1914, of German and Irish descent. As a child growing up in Joliet, Illinois, he was plagued by a variety of illnesses, including rheumatic fever, but persevered with physical exercise and sheer strength of will. Majoring in science at the University of Illinois, his plans to become a doctor dissolved when, to the dismay of his parents, he found a passionate sideline in college dramatics.

He began appearing in touring shows, then made the big move to New York, finding initial employment as an usher at Carnegie Hall and a tour guide at Radio City. Following a number of summer stock shows, he made an inauspicious 1937 Broadway debut with a minor role in the Group Theatre’s presentation of “Golden Boy”. Developing a close-knit relationship with the Group, he was just beginning to build up his resumé in such Broadway outings as “All the Living”, “My Heart’s in the Highlands” and “Pure in Heart” when he had to return to his Illinois home following the death of his father.

He toiled for a time in Chicago as a Pullman inspector on the New York Central Railroad until the possibility of a film role had him re-setting his acting sights on Los Angeles. Although the film deal fell through, Larry stayed in L.A. and somehow made ends meet working construction. Columbia expressed interest in the fledgling actor and signed him up in 1941 after a favorable screen test. He stayed for nine years. His buildup was slow-moving, taking his first small step with a minor role in Mystery Ship (1941). Time, however, did not increase the tempo or quality of his movies. Either he was oddly cast, such as his role as an Indian opposite exotic Yvonne De Carlo in The Deerslayer (1943), or completely dismissed, as co-star of such obscurities as The Black Parachute (1944),Sergeant Mike (1944) or She’s a Sweetheart (1944).

His association with the Group Theatre back in New York led to a chance introduction to musical actress Betty Garrett and the couple married in 1944. Larry had settled by this time in Hollywood but Betty was a hot item on Broadway. MGM finally offered her a contract and she relocated to Los Angeles to join her husband. The couple eventually had two children, one of whom, Andrew Parks, became a fine actor in his own right. Their other son, Garrett Parks, served as composer for the film Diamond Men (2000).

Larry scored an Oscar nomination playing Jolson (which was originally offered to bothJames Cagney and Danny Thomas), and hoped for equally challenging roles. His hopes were dashed as the studio instead continued casting him haphazardly in mild-mannered comedies and swashbuckling adventures. Other than the box-office sequel Jolson Sings Again (1949), most of Larry’s films were hardly worthy of his obvious talent. To compensate somewhat, he managed to find a creative outlet in summer stock, and both he and Betty put together a successful vaudeville act with one tour ending up playing London’s Palladium.

Following the completion of Love Is Better Than Ever (1952) with Elizabeth Taylor, the political scandal erupted and erased all of his chances to do film. One of many casualties of Hollywood “blacklisting”, he was forced to end his association with Columbia, and he and Betty, whose own career was damaged, traveled to Europe to find work.

He found some TV parts after the controversy died down, and Betty and Larry were a delightful replacement for Judy Holliday and Sydney Chaplin on Broadway in “Bells Are Ringing”. During the many meager times, he concentrated on becoming a successful businessman, including building apartment complexes. He made only two more films, last playing a doctor in the Montgomery Clift starrer Freud (1962). By the time he died of a heart attack on April 13, 1975, at age 60, Larry had long faded from view. Betty, however, managed to revitalize her career on TV sitcoms with regular roles on All in the Family (1971), Laverne & Shirley (1976), and roles on numerous other TV series before passing on February 12, 2011.

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

Elizabeth McGovern is best known known for her major role as ‘Lady Cora’ in TV’s “Downton Abbey”. She has however had a very respectable film career also. She made her first impact on film in 1980 in Robert Redford’s “Ordinary People”. Her other films include “Ragtime”, “Once Upon A Time in America” and “The Handmaid’s Tale”. Born in Illinois, she is now a resident in Britain.

TCM overview:

A stage-trained actress with a vulnerable, vibrant screen presence, Elizabeth McGovern made her film debut as the sympathetic girlfriend to Timothy Hutton in the Oscar-winning “Ordinary People” (1980), and followed it up with an Oscar- and Golden Globe-nominated turn as chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit in Milos Forman’s “Ragtime” (1981). She was memorably paired with Robert De Niro in “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984) and Kevin Bacon in “She’s Having a Baby,” (1988), as well as impressed as a lesbian rebel in the dystopia-set “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1990) and in the unusual romantic comedy “The Favor” (1994). She moved to Great Britain to marry English producer-director Simon Curtis in 1992 but returned to the States for work, appearing in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s “Wings of Courage” (1995), various theatrical productions, and starring with Hank Azaria on her own sitcom, “If Not for You” (CBS, 1995). The actress took supporting roles in a string of highly acclaimed, literary-inspired projects, including the Oscar-nominated “The Wings of the Dove” (1997) and “The House of Mirth” (2000). She landed big screen roles as mothers to the heroes of “Kick-Ass” (2010) and “Clash of the Titans” (2010) but dazzled critics on the small screen with her masterful portrayal of the Countess of Grantham on the international smash “Dowtown Abbey” (ITV, 2010). A fascinating talent, Elizabeth McGovern brought a unique intelligence and beauty to her roles that only deepened and improved with age.

Born July 18, 1961 in Evanston, IL, Elizabeth McGovern moved with her family to Los Angeles when her father was hired at UCLA as a professor. Growing up, she appeared in many theatrical productions and was spotted by an agent in a performance of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.” Determined to hone her craft, McGovern began her formal training at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco before transferring to Juilliard. She dropped out, however, when she earned her first film role, as Jeannine, the supportive girlfriend of the suicidal Conrad (Timothy Hutton) in the Oscar-winning “Ordinary People” (1980). McGovern’s luminous beauty and vivid intelligence helped her stand out on screen, and she followed up her initial success with a stunning turn as Evelyn Nesbit in Milos Forman’s adaptation of “Ragtime” (1981). Playing a willowy chorus girl sexually and emotionally enmeshed in a murder, McGovern earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination as well as a Golden Globe nomination.

Established as a fascinating new talent, McGovern played the object of Robert De Niro’s obsession in Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984) and soldier Sean Penn’s sweetheart in “Racing with the Moon” (1984), with the latter onscreen romance becoming a brief, real-life engagement. Mainstream audiences were more familiar with McGovern’s work as Kevin Bacon’s pregnant wife in John Hughes’s “She’s Having a Baby” (1988). She stood out in the chilling film adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1990), with an earthy performance as a lesbian rebelling against a futuristic, misogynistic society, but all too often delivered memorable turns in underperforming or lower-profile projects. She took supporting roles in the 1950s-set comedy “Tune in Tomorrow ” (1990) and Steven Soderbergh’s Depression-era drama “King of the Hill” (1993). McGovern nabbed a bigger role opposite Harley Jane Kozak, Bill Pullman and a young Brad Pitt in the romantic dramedy “The Favor” (1994), but it failed to achieve its hoped-for sleeper hit status.

Part of the reason for the slowing of McGovern’s mainstream professional momentum was her move to England in 1992 after she married producer-director Simon Curtis, but she continued to work in a variety of interesting projects, including the groundbreaking “Wings of Courage” (1995), Jean-Jacques Annaud’s period adventure and the first dramatic film shot in the IMAX 3-D format. Showing her flair for comedy, McGovern charmed opposite Hank Azaria as a pair of accident-prone but destined-for-each-other co-workers in the short-lived romantic comedy sitcom “If Not for You” (CBS, 1995) and guested as a mysterious woman who repeatedly crosses paths with a jewel thief in and out of his dreams in an especially memorable episode of “Tales from the Crypt” (HBO, 1989-1996). Supplementing all of her screen work, McGovern continued to grace the stage in various productions, including “Painting Churches,” “A Map of the World” and a Central Park performance of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”

She notched an acclaimed supporting role opposite Helena Bonham Carter in the Oscar-nominated Henry James adaptation of “The Wings of the Dove” (1997) and delighted as Richard E. Grant’s wife in the TV series version of the classic “The Scarlet Pimpernel” (BBC, 1999-2000). Enjoying a lower-profile stardom but high-quality roles in challenging projects, McGovern essayed well-received supporting roles in the Edith Wharton adaptation opposite Gillian Anderson in “The House of Mirth” (2000) and the Martha Coolidge comedy “The Flamingo Rising” (CBS, 2001). She booked a series regular role on the David E. Kelley dramedy “The Brotherhood of Poland, New Hampshire” (CBS, 2003) and the lead role on the aggressively quirky fantasy series “Three Moons Over Milford” (ABC Family, 2006). Active in the U.K. entertainment industry, the actress played Ellen Doubleday, a love interest of the famed author Daphne Du Maurier in “Daphne” (BBC Two, 2007), as well as appearing as an American expatriate actress in the semi-autobiographical, three-part comedy series “Freezing” (BBC, 2007-08) opposite Hugh Bonneville.

Continuing to work in literary-themed projects, she played Lucy Honeychurch’s free-spirited mother in the TV adaptation of “A Room with a View” (ITV, 2007) and returned to the U.S. to play a teacher hiding secrets in an episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” (NBC, 1999- ). She guested in an episode of “Agatha Christie’s Poirot” (ITV, 1989- ) and earned two small but memorable roles as doomed mothers to an unlikely superhero in “Kick-Ass” (2010), as well to Perseus (Sam Worthington) in the remake of “Clash of the Titans” (2010). It would be back on television, however, where McGovern would once again dazzle critics and audiences alike as the good-natured but long-suffering Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham, on the international smash “Downton Abbey” (ITV, 2010- ). Presided over by the prickly dowager Dame Maggie Smith, the series told the sprawling tale of a British country estate and the legal complications of its inheritance after the death of its male heirs on the Titanic. A fascinating panorama of upstairs and downstairs life in a dying class and service system, the series was rapturously received, with McGovern earning an Emmy nomination for her masterful portrayal.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.