Eileen Brennan obituary in “The Guardian” in 2013.
Eileen Brennan was born in 1932 in Los Angeles. She became very popular in films and TV in the 1970’s afer her performance in “The Last Picture Show” in 1971. In 1973 she was leading lady to Paul Newman in “The Sting” and in 1980 was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in “Private Benjamin” with Goldie Hawn. A car accident hampered her career in the 1980’s and after a gap she resumed her career. More recently she was seen to great effect as the acting coach ‘Zelda’ in the TV series “Will & Grace”. Sadly Eileen Brennan died in July 2013.
Eileen Brennan’s obituary by Ryan Gibney in the Guardian:
Eileen Brennan, who has died aged 80, had been a stage actor since the late 1950s, but it was as a largely comic presence in US cinema of the 1970s and early 1980s that she was most widely admired. As the pitiless Captain Doreen Lewis, putting a dippy new recruit – Goldie Hawn – through her paces in the hit military comedy Private Benjamin (1980), she wore her trademark look: a solid frizz of red hair, a clenched, sneering smile and an expression of withering incredulity. Then there was the gravelly voice: a heard-it-all whine to match that seen-it-all face. It sounded like bourbon on the rocks. Actual rocks, that is.
Captain Lewis epitomised the sort of role Brennan was best at – and which she was still playing as late as 2001, when she made the first in a run of appearances as a scabrous acting teacher on the popular sitcomWill & Grace. “I love meanies,” she said in 1988. “You know why? Because they have no sense of humour. If we can’t laugh at ourselves and the human condition, we’re going to be mean.”
She was born Verla Eileen Regina Brennan and raised in Los Angeles, daughter of Regina Menehan, a former silent film actor, and John Brennan, a doctor. She attended Georgetown University in Washington DC, where she excelled at comedy in the Mask and Bauble dramatic society, and later the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. She was briefly a singing waitress, but theatrical success was not long in coming. She won the title role in the off-Broadway parody Little Mary Sunshine in 1959, for which she was named a Theatre World Promising New Personality. She toured in The Miracle Worker, played Anna in The King and I and co-starred in the original 1964 Broadway production of Hello, Dolly!
Brennan branched out into television with an adaptation of Maxwell Anderson’s play The Star Wagon (1966), in which she appeared with Dustin Hoffman, and as part of the original cast of the zany sketch showRowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (alongside her future Private Benjamin co-star, Hawn). She made her film debut in 1967 in the comedy Divorce American Style and was chosen by the up-and-coming director Peter Bogdanovich to play a kindly but bored waitress in his masterful 1971 drama The Last Picture Show.
Bogdanovich also cast Brennan as a society matron in his Henry James adaptation Daisy Miller (1974) and as a singing maid in the reviled musical At Long Last Love (1975). She played the brassy madam of a brothel in the multiple Oscar-winning con-man comedy The Sting (1973). And she was one of a clutch of female character actors who brought unusual shading to Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow (also 1973), which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival.
Later in the 1970s, she gravitated toward comedy, including two films written by the playwright Neil Simon: the nutty whodunit spoof Murder By Death (1976) and the Bogart homage The Cheap Detective (1978). It was Private Benjamin, though, which gave her a career-defining role, as well as an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. Hawn’s comic fizz as the pampered Judy Benjamin was often delightful, and the film was a precision-tooled vehicle for her charms. But the key to that picture’s success was the rain that Brennan dumped on Hawn’s parade. When Private Benjamin was turned into a television sitcom, Brennan went with it, serving the same function opposite Hawn’s replacement, Lorna Patterson. Brennan’s sourness was the spoonful of medicine that helped the sugar go down. She was rewarded with two Emmy nominations and one award. (She received a further four Emmy nominations, for her work in Taxi, Newhart, Will & Grace and thirtysomething.)
Brennan left the Private Benjamin TV series prematurely in 1982, following an accident in Venice Beach, California, in which she was hit by a car. Her injuries included broken legs and a fragmented jaw; all the bones on the left side of her face were also broken. During her slow recovery, Brennan became addicted to painkillers. She returned to acting in 1984 in the sitcom Off the Rack but the show was cancelled after only six episodes and Brennan was admitted to the Betty Ford Centre for rehabilitation. “I had reached the stage where I was taking anything I could get my hands on,” she told People magazine. Poor health and injury became a recurring problem. While playing another comic tyrant – Miss Hannigan, in Annie – she fell from the stage and broke her leg. She also underwent treatment for breast cancer. Still Brennan continued to act, predominantly in television but with notable returns to theatre (the 1998 New York production of Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan) and to cinema.
She was in the underrated ensemble comedy Clue (1985); she reprised her Last Picture Show role in the film’s 1990 sequel, Texasville; and she starred in the drama White Palace (also 1990) as the fortune-telling sister of Susan Sarandon (with whom she had enjoyed theatrical success in 1980 in the two-woman play A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking). Later roles included the Francis Ford Coppola-produced horror Jeepers Creepers (2001) and the Sandra Bullock comedy sequel Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous (2005).
Brennan is survived by two sons, Patrick and Sam, from her marriage to David Lampson, which ended in 1974.
• Verla Eileen Regina Brennan, actor, born 3 September 1932; died 28 July 2013
Anne Helm was born in 1938 in Toronto, Canada. She began working as a John Roberts Power model in New York when she was a teenager. In 1960 she made her film debut in “Desire in the Dust”.
Anne Helm & Gary Lockwood
She starred opposite Elvis Presley in “Follow That Dream” and opposite Robert Goulet in “Honeymoon Hotel”. Most of her acting career though was on primetime U.S. television. She is now a respected children’s writer.
IMDB entry:
Born in Toronto, Anne Helm’s entire Canadian “show biz” career consisted of playing “Alice in Wonderland” at camp and acting in a Christmas pantomime at Montreal’s Her Majesty’s Theatre. When she was 14, she and her mother relocated to New York, where Helm studied ballet and began modeling for John Robert Powers.
Anne Helm
The title role in aShirley Temple’s Storybook (1958) TV production of “The Sleeping Beauty” lured her to the West Coast, where she landed roles in a succession of subsequent feature films and TV series (and was briefly Elvis Presley‘s main squeeze–on-screen and off). More recently billing herself as “Annie Helm”, she is also a writer and illustrator of children’s books.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Tom Weaver <TomWeavr@aol.com>
Kenneth Nelson was born in North Carolina in 1930. His most prominent movie role was in “The Boys in the Band” in 1970. He relocated to the UK and was featured in such movies as “Hellraiser” in 1987 and “Nightbreed”. He died in 1993.
Jonathan Cecil & Anna Sharkey’s obituary in “The Independent”:
KENNETH NELSON was a most versatile and accomplished actor, equally at home in drama, musicals and light comedy.
Born in North Carolina, in 1930, Nelson made his first Broadway appearance in Seventeen (1951). Nine years later he created the part of Matt in the long-running musical The Fantasticks. Perhaps his most celebrated performance was as Michael the host in Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968), which he recreated in London in 1969 and for the film version in 1970.
In 1971 Nelson settled permanently in England, appearing notably in Showboat, Alan Strachan’s compilation Cole (1974), David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Annie and for four years in the West End, then on tour, as the megalomaniac director in 42nd Street. He also made many television appearances, his gifts too often squandered as a ‘useful American type’.
As a performer Nelson will be remembered for his dark-eyed, vital, faun-like charm and his sympathetic, open-vowelled, old-world American voice. He could show a tough mordant streak as in the Crowley and Mamet plays: he also had a fine sense of comedy. In regional productions of Come Blow Your Horn and The Seven-Year Itch, he brought the same kind of subtle, light touch to Neil Simon’s and George Axelrod’s work as Richard Briers and Paul Eddington have brought to Alan Ayckbourn’s. In Cole he gave the most haunting rendition of that long and difficult ballad ‘Begin the Beguine’ since Cole Porter’s personal favourite, the sophisticated cabaret singer Hutch.
A dedicated Anglophile with a remarkable period sense, Nelson embraced his adopted country wholeheartedly: creating country gardens, and appreciating animals and interior design. He was exceedingly generous as a host and in his praise of friends: especially missed will be his congratulatory telephone calls after watching television performances, always to the point and delightfully effusive: ‘Darling, the camera loved you . . .’
During his last, dreadfully debilitating illness he never lost this enthusiasm, still sharing gossip and theatre memories with those whom he called his ‘close ones’, almost literally to the end, when he was cared for by his devoted sister Naomi Burns, as he had been throughout the last two months. Despite his painfully wasted appearance, visiting him was not in any way distressing. As popular with the hospital nursing staff as he had been with colleagues, he brought an almost backstage atmosphere to his room. Eyes lighting up his characteristic wide smile, he showed a most unegotistical eagerness for news from outside.
Kenny Nelson came into our lives just over 20 years ago. He was a warm-hearted, cultivated companion and an exceptional actor. He had a style and finesse not often found on today’s stage but he was by no means old-fashioned in approaching the avant-garde.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
This tall, lean, delicate leading and secondary player made her screen debut as Margot, the older sister, in “The Diary of Anne Frank” (1959) and has gone on to play numerous wives and, in maturity, strong female characters. Diane Baker began her career soon after turning 20 in “Diary”. Also in 1959, she was seen in “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and “The Best of Everything”.
Baker was cast by Alfred Hitchcock in “Marnie” (1964), as Lil, the sister-in-law of Sean Connery who would like to be his next wife.
But by the late 60s, film roles became occasional for Baker, and she was often seen in small, albeit key, roles. In “Silence of the Lambs” (1991), she was Senator Ruth Martin seen pleading for the life of her abducted daughter in a noisy, flashy airport hanger. She was mother to Sandra Bullock in “The Net” (1995) and Matthew Broderick in Ben Stiller’s “The Cable Guy” (1996).
TV has often offered steadier employment. Baker has appeared in numerous anthology series since the early 60s and appeared in one of the first movies made for TV, the 1966 ABC Western, “The Dangerous Days of Kiowa Jones”. She made guest appearances in numerous episodics and appeared in additional TV-movies. Baker was Edward G. Robinson’s doubting daughter-in-law in “The Man Who Cried Wolf” (ABC, 1970) and was Katie Nolan, stalwart Irish-American mother, in the remake of “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (NBC, 1974).
In “The Dream Makers” (NBC, 1975), she was the wife of college professor James Franciscus, watching as her husband becomes corrupted by the music industry. Her only regular series was the short-lived “Here We Go Again” (ABC, 1973) which featured two couples, in which each was formerly married to the gender opposite in the other couple. (Larry Hagman played Baker’s current spouse.)
Baker branched out of acting in 1971, producing the Indian-made documentary “Ashiana/The Nest”, which won the Special Jury Award at the 1971 Atlanta Film Festival. In 1976, she formed Artemis Productions and wrote the 1978 ABC Afterschool Special “One of a Kind”, in which she also starred. In 1986, she starred in the CBS Schoolbreak Special “Little Miss Perfect”, in which she played the overbearing mother of a bulimic teen.
The jewel in Baker’s production efforts came in 1985 when she produced the syndicated miniseries “A Woman of Substance”, based on the Barbara Taylor Bradford novel of society romance. Baker personally lured Deborah Kerr out of her Swiss retirement to star in the project.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Stella StevensOriginal Cinema 3-Sheet Poster – Movie Film Posters
Stella Stevens was born in Mississippi in 1938. She has some fine films to her credit including “The Nutty Professor” opposite Jerry Lewis in 1963, “Girls, Girls, Girls,” opposite Elvis Presley, “The Silencer” with Dean Martin and “The Ballad of Cable Hogue”. Perhaps her most famous movie is “The Poseidon Adventure” in 1972. Her son is the actor Andrew Stevens.
TCM Overview:
A popular screen siren of the early 1960s, actress Stella Stevens lent sex appeal to such popular light dramas and comedies as “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” (1963) and “The Nutty Professor” (1964) before becoming a staple of TV and low-budget films for the next three decades. Though a talented actress, especially in gentle comedies, casting agents found it difficult to see past Stevens’ statuesque frame, which was the subject of three Playboy pictorials. Despite solid turns in Sam Peckinpah’s “The Ballad of Cable Hogue” (1970) as Jason Robards’ feisty lover and “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972), Stevens never found the proper vehicle for her abilities, and spent most of her time under the radar in episodic TV or genuinely awful films like “Monster in the Closet” (1986). Nevertheless, she continued to log appearances well into her seventh decade, which was a testimony to her professionalism, talent and apparent good humor.
Stella Stevens was born Estelle Caro Eggleston on Oct. 1, 1938, the only child of Thomas Ellett Eggleston and his wife, Dovey Estelle Caro. Sources frequently cited her birthplace as Hot Coffee, MS, but the moniker was simply a nickname for the town of Meridian, which lay near the Mississippi-Florida border. When Stevens was four, she moved with her family to Tennessee; there she met Herman Stephens, an electrician whom she married when she was just 15. A year later, she gave birth to her only child, future actor and producer Andrew Stevens. By 17, she had divorced Stephens, but kept a modified version of his surname for her professional career. While studying medicine at Memphis State College, she became interested in acting and modeling, and was reportedly discovered while appearing in a production of “Bus Stop” at the college. Stevens signed with 20th Century Fox, which provided her film debut with “Say One for Me” (1959), a modest musical starring and produced by Bing Crosby. For her minor turn as a chorus girl, Stevens shared the Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer – Female, with fellow up-and-comers Tuesday Weld, Angie Dickinson and Janet Muro.
However, the promising start led to few subsequent opportunities, and Fox dropped her after six months. Stevens turned to the burgeoning gentleman’s magazine Playboy to boost her image, and in 1960, she became the publications Playmate of the Month for January. The layout, which tastefully revealed Stevens’ voluptuous frame, had the desired effect, and that year, she landed the role of Appassionata von Climax in the screen version of “L’il Abner” (1960). A steady stream of television appearances, magazine layouts and features soon followed, but most emphasized Stevens’ physical appeal rather than her talents. Occasionally, she received a solid vehicle for her acting skills, like “Too Late Blues” (1961), director John Cassavetes’ drama about a jazz musician (Bobby Darin) who abandoned his idealistic dreams for a sultry singer (Stevens).
Stevens also had a particular gift for light comedy, as seen in her turns as a former beauty queen who caught Glenn Ford’s eye in “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” (1963) and in particular, Jerry Lewis’ “The Nutty Professor” (1964), where she played the comely college girl who is wooed by the smooth Buddy Love, but saw the good in his alter ego, the hapless Professor Kelp. Despite these highlights, Stevens was found mostly in ornamental roles in features like “Girls! Girls! Girls!” (1962) with Elvis Presley, which she reportedly loathed and was forced to participate in, creating much friction between her and Paramount, and “The Silencers” (1966), one of the Matt Helm spy spoofs with Dean Martin. Stevens would return to Playboy for two subsequent layouts in 1965 and 1968 to help boost her visibility.
Stevens began the 1970s with critically praised turns in Sam Peckinpah’s “The Ballad of Cable Hogue” and “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972). In the former, she played a former prostitute who developed a tender romance with dogged cowboy Jason Robards, while in the latter, she was Ernest Borgnine’s determined ex-streetwalker wife, who survived most of the horrors of the sinking ocean liner, only to perish in the final reel. The pictures helped to solidify the idea that Stevens was more than an attractive figure, and she worked steadily throughout the decade on television and in features, though few were as high profile as her early efforts. By the late 1970s, she had resorted to B-pictures like “The Manitou” (1978), and eventually turned to television, where she co-starred on “Flamingo Road” (NBC, 1980-82) as a kindly madam who aided series lead John Beck. In 1979, she directed a feature length documentary called “The American Heroine,” about women from all walks of life, but the project was never released.
Stevens remained busy as she entered her fifth decade in the 1980s, though quality projects continued to elude actresses – particularly one-time sex symbols – of a certain age. She was a staple of episodic television, but her features had sunk to exploitative trash like “Chained Heat”(1983), a women-in-prison melodrama with Linda Blair, and direct-to-cable softcore efforts like “Body Chemistry III: Point of Seduction” (1994), many of which co-starred her son, Andrew Stevens. In 1989, he joined her for her second directorial effort, a low-budget comedy called “The Ranch,” about a city slicker who turned an inherited ranch into a spa. That same year, she joined the cast of the daytime soap opera “Santa Barbara” (NBC, 1983-1994) as star Robin Mattson’s troublemaking mother, Phyllis Blake. In the 1990s and 2000s, Stevens was a regular on television programs and in the occasional low-budget feature, though the 2004 horror film “Blessed,” produced by her son, was a rare exception. She published her first novel, Razzle Dazzle, in 1999 and launched a line of fragrances for men and women that, like her career itself, emphasized sexiness.
Stella Stevens died in Los Angeles in 2023 aged 84.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Stella Stevens, whose turn as an A-list actress in 1960s Hollywood placed her alongside sex symbols like Brigitte Bardot, Ann-Margret and Raquel Welch, but who came to resent the male-dominated industry that she felt thwarted her ambitions to be more than a pretty face, died on Friday at a hospice facility in Los Angeles. She was 84.
Her son, the producer and actor Andrew Stevens, said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.
Ms. Stevens was among the last stars to emerge from Hollywood’s studio system, an arrangement that guaranteed her work but, she often said, also limited her creative aspirations. She won a Golden Globe in the “most promising newcomer” category for her role in “Say One for Me” (1959), a musical comedy starring Bing Crosby and Debbie Reynolds, but felt coerced into joining the cast of “Girls! Girls! Girls!” (1962), an empty Elvis Presley vehicle.
Like Ms. Welch, who died on Wednesday, Ms. Stevens was ambivalent, if not outright indignant, about being cast as a Hollywood sex symbol. She described herself as introverted and bookish, and she sought to work with auteurs like John Cassavetes, who cast her as the female lead in “Too Late Blues,” his 1961 drama about a jazz musician (played by Bobby Darin).
“I wanted to be a writer-director,” she told the film scholar Michael G. Ankerich in 1994. “All of a sudden I got sidetracked into being a sexpot. Once I was a ‘pot,’ there was nothing I could do. There was nothing legitimate I could do.”
She worked with many of the top directors and actors of the 1960s. She starred as the love interest of the title character, a timid college professor who undergoes a personality transformation, in “The Nutty Professor” (1963), which Jerry Lewis wrote, directed and starred in. She also had prominent roles in “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” (1963), a romantic comedy directed by Vincente Minnelli, and “The Silencers” (1966), a spy spoof starring Dean Martin.
In between, though, she had to take a series of mediocre roles in mediocre movies, and critics came to view her as a star who was perpetually kept from realizing her full potential.
Two exceptions came in the early 1970s: She acted opposite Jason Robards in “The Ballad of Cable Hogue” (1970), a comic western directed by Sam Peckinpah, and as part of an all-star cast assembled for “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972), joining Ernest Borgnine, Shelley Winters, Gene Hackman and others in an overturned ocean liner.
By then her sex-symbol days were fading, and Ms. Stevens hoped to have the time and reputation to become a director. But female directors were almost unheard-of at the time, and her attempts to get support for what she called “a marvelous black comedy” she wanted to make met repeated dead ends.
“Every man I’ve gone to for four years has smiled at me and then double‐crossed me,” she told The New York Times in 1973. “Every man I’ve talked to in every office in this industry has tried his best to discourage me from directing. They don’t want me to find out it’s so easy because it’s supposed to be terribly hard.”
Stella Stevens was born Estelle Caro Eggleston on Oct. 1, 1938, in Yazoo City, Miss., though she often told interviewers she was from Hot Coffee, a nearby community. Her agent said anything sounded better than “Yazoo.”
Her father, Thomas, worked for a bottling company in Yazoo, and her mother, Estelle (Caro) Eggleston, was a nurse. When Stella was still young, they moved to Memphis, where her father worked in sales for International Harvester.
Stella dropped out of high school at 15 to marry Herman Stephens. They had one child, Andrew, and divorced in 1956. (She later changed her surname to Stevens because, she said, it was easier for people to pronounce.)
She returned to school after the divorce and, after earning a high school diploma, enrolled at Memphis State College, now the University of Memphis, with plans to become an obstetrician.
She also took up theater. A role in a college production of William Inge’s “Bus Stop” brought an invitation to audition in New York, and by 1959 she was in Los Angeles, on a three-year contract with 20th Century Fox.
She finished three movies in six months, including “Say One for Me,” but the studio dropped her soon after. With a young son to feed, she took an offer from Playboy to pose nude for $5,000. After the shoot, she said, Hugh Hefner, the magazine’s publisher, would pay her only half and told her that she had to work as a hostess at the Playboy Mansion to earn the rest.
Before the photos ran, she signed a new contract, with Paramount. She asked Mr. Hefner to cancel the magazine feature, but he refused, and she appeared as Playmate of the Month in the January 1960 issue, a few months before winning her Golden Globe.
“People don’t realize how horrible men can be toward a beautiful woman with no clothes on,” she told Delta magazine in 2010.
Her relationship with Playboy remained complicated. Despite her anger at Mr. Hefner, she posed nude for the magazine two more times. She then sued Mr. Hefner and Playboy in 1974, citing several instances of invasion of her privacy, but the case was thrown out because the statute of limitations had expired.
In 1998, Playboy named Ms. Stevens 27th on its list of the 20th century’s sexiest female stars, just behind Sharon Stone.
In addition to her son, Ms. Stevens is survived by three grandchildren. Her longtime partner, Bob Kulick, died in 2020.
Despite her career’s post-1960s fade, Ms. Stevens remained eager to work. She turned to television and had roles in some 80 episodes over the next four decades. Most of them were guest appearances on shows like “Murder, She Wrote,” “The Love Boat” and “Magnum P.I.,” though she was also a member of the regular cast of several shows, including the soap opera “Santa Barbara.”
When she did return to film, it was often for soft-core erotic thrillers and campy horror movies. In “Chained Heat” (1983), she played a prison warden; in “The Granny” (1995), she played a wronged grandmother who comes back to life to get revenge on her scheming family.
She eventually did get into the director’s chair, for “American Heroine,” a 1979 documentary, and “The Ranch,” a 1989 comedy starring her son. She also wrote a novel, “Razzle Dazzle” (1989), which featured a thinly fictionalized version of herself.
“I don’t feel I’ve been successful yet,” she told The Vancouver Sun in 1998. “I’m still waiting to be discovered. I see myself as a work in progress. I keep trying to work and improve and do things I’m proud of.”
An interesting article on Nancy Kwan can be found here. Nancy Kwan was born in 1939 in Hong Kong to a Chinese father and an English mother. She made her movie debut in 1960 in “The World of Suzie Wong” opposite William Holden.
Her other movies include “Flower Drum Song”, “Honeymoon Hotel”, “Fate Is the Hunter” and “The Wild Affair”.
IMDB entry:
At just 18, Nancy Kwan was studying dance with England’s Royal Ballet School, when she was spotted by producer Ray Stark, who tested her and gave her the starring role of a free-spirited Hong Kong prostitute who captivates artist William Holden in The World of Suzie Wong (1960).
She followed it the next year with the hit musical, Flower Drum Song(1961), and became one of Hollywood’s most visible Asian actresses. Born in China to a Chinese father and British mother, Kwan spent the 1960s commuting between film roles in America and Europe (including the pilot for Hawaii Five-O (1968)), but faded from view in the West, when she returned to her native Hong Kong in 1972 to be with her critically ill father.
Divorced from her second husband, screenwriter David Giler, and with a young son from her first marriage to Austrian hotelier Peter Pock, Kwan intended to stay a year, but wound up staying a decade.
As managing director of her own production company, she produced and directed dozens of commercials for the Southeast Asia market. She also acted in a spate of films made for Southeast Asian audiences, including “Fear” (1977) (aka Night Creature (1978)), which introduced her to filmmaker Norbert Meisel, who became her third husband.
They returned to the US in 1979 so that her teenage son, Bernie Pock, could complete his education. He was a martial-arts master, fluent in Chinese, and became a stunt coordinator and actor before his untimely death.
After returning to the US, Kwan appeared in numerous TV series, the NBC miniseries,Noble House (1988), and the CBS made-for-TV movie, Miracle Landing (1990). She’s politically active as the spokeswoman for the Asian-American Voters Coalition, and touts a beauty product, Oriental Pearl Cream, in TV spots.
Kwan was at the ceremonies in Los Angeles at Hollywood Park, where the Asian community gathered to watch the handover of Hong Kong to the government of China.
James Mitchell had two distinct careers in the performing arts. Initially he was an acclaimed dancer in Broadway musicals and films including “Oklahoma” in 1955 and “Carousel” in 1956. In his later years he starred for many years(until his death) in the day time TV series “All My Children”. He died in 2010 at the age of 89.
Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:
There are legions of actors who are deeply grateful for the existence of long-running television soap operas. James Mitchell, who has died aged 89, was one of them. He enjoyed playing the wily patriarch Palmer Cortlandt in the popular US daytime soap All My Children from 1979 to 2008. It came at the right time in his career. At 59, his dancing days were over and his film acting had failed to catch fire.
The majority of loyal fans of All My Children were probably not aware that the debonair, grey-haired Mitchell, still svelte and handsome, had been a leading dancer for many years, particularly associated with the celebrated choreographer Agnes de Mille. According to De Mille, Mitchell had “probably the strongest arms in the business, and the adagio style developed by him and his partners has become since a valued addition to ballet vocabulary”.
Mitchell, whose parents emigrated from England, was born on a fruit farm in Sacramento, California. He was three years old when his mother left his father and returned to England with his two younger siblings. His farmer father, feeling unable to bring up his son alone, gave him up to foster parents. They were vaudevillians and Mitchell first appeared on stage as part of their act. Some years later his father, who had remarried, claimed him back. Mitchell was devastated. Life on a farm was not for him and he decided to get back on the stage as soon as he could.
At 17, Mitchell made for Los Angeles, where he studied at City College. At the same time, he was introduced to modern dance at the school of the famed teacher and choreographer Lester Horton. Mitchell soon joined Horton’s Dance Theatre of Los Angeles and was one of the Lester Horton Dancers who appeared in a few Hollywood musicals in the early 1940s. He was also featured in a South Sea Island dance duet with Bella Lewitzky in White Savage (1943), a camp piece of Technicolor exotica starring Maria Montez.
In 1944, Mitchell began his long partnership with De Mille when she cast him as a dancer in the Broadway musical Bloomer Girl starring Celeste Holm. He also appeared in the original Broadway productions of Brigadoon (1947) and Paint Your Wagon (1951), both choreographed by De Mille.
In the meantime, Mitchell was beginning to get non-dancing supporting roles in some good movies. In Raoul Walsh’s genuinely tragic western Colorado Territory (1949), he played outlaw Joel McCrea’s nasty cohort; again with McCrea, he was a young doctor in Jacques Tourneur’s Stars in My Crown (1950), and in two gripping Anthony Mann dramas, he was darkened and moustachioed as a Mexican migrant worker in Border Incident (1949), and darkened further as a Native American in Devil’s Doorway (1950).
Mitchell also shone in a few film musicals in which he could display his dancing skills. As bayou fisherman Mario Lanza’s friend in The Toast of New Orleans (1950), he has a spirited duet with Rita Moreno, and an erotic one with Cyd Charisse in an Arabian Nights number from Deep in My Heart (1954), a biopic of the American composer Sigmund Romberg. A year later, he was reunited with De Mille on the movie version of Oklahoma! for the 20-minute dream ballet.
Ironically, Mitchell did not dance in the best musical in which he appeared. In Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon (1953), he has the thankless role of Charisse’s manager, boyfriend and choreographer (an experience he disliked so much he refused to see the film) who is sniffy about his protege deserting the ballet for a Broadway musical. Not so Mitchell himself, who had leading roles in Carnival! (1961), as Marco the Magnificent, and Mack & Mabel (1974), as the movie director William Desmond Taylor.
From 1979, Mitchell settled into the role of Palmer Cortlandt, a man audiences loved to hate. “He adored playing mean,” explained the costume designer Albert Wolsky, Mitchell’s partner since they met on the film The Turning Point in 1977. Albert survives him.
• James Mitchell, actor and dancer; born 29 February 1920; died 22 January
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Yaphet Kotto was born in 1937 in New York. He rose to fame for his role in the first Roger Moore ‘James Bond’ “Live and Let Die” in 1973. His other movies include “The Liberation of L.B. Jones” and “The Running Man”. Yaphet Kotto died in 2021.
TCM overview:
A commanding presence in features and television since the early 1970s, Yaphet Kotto played physically powerful, often intimidating African-American men in such popular films as “Live and Let Die” (1973), “Blue Collar” (1978), “Alien” (1979) and “Midnight Run” (1988). He emerged from the New York stage in the early 1960s, working steadily in small but significant roles in features like “The Thomas Crown Affair” (1967) before moving up to supporting roles and leads in “Across 110th Street” (1971). His star-making turn came as the villainous Dr. Kananga in “Live and Let Die” (1973), which marked Roger Moore’s debut as James Bond and preceded a long run as a popular character actor in such major features as “Alien” (1979) and “Brubaker” (1980). Kotto was stranded in minor-league acting features for much of the 1980s, though he rebounded in the early 1990s as the formidable Lt. Al Giardello on the critically acclaimed “Homicide: Life on the Street” (NBC, 1993-2000). Throughout his long and varied career, Kotto’s performances were marked by an unerring sense of gravity, honesty and intelligence, which served him well in avoiding many of the career pitfalls suffered by African-American actors.
Born Nov. 15, 1939 in New York City, Yaphet Frederick Kotto was the son of Avraham Kotto, a businessman from Cameroon, and his wife Gladys, a nurse and army officer. Both of Kotto’s parents were Jewish, which contributed greatly to a rough childhood spent defending both his faith and his race. As a teenager, he wandered into a screening of “On the Waterfront” (1954) and became captivated by Marlon Brando’s performance. Kotto soon began studying at the Actors’ Mobile Studio and made his professional debut as a performer at 19 in a production of “Othello.” More stage roles preceded his first feature film appearance as an uncredited extra in the Rat Pack Western comedy “4 For Texas” (1963). The following year, he gave a supporting turn in Michael Roemer’s pioneering independent film “Nothing But a Man” (1964), a low-budget drama about contemporary black life produced outside of the studio system. Kotto soon returned to the stage, co-starring with Ossie Davis and Louis Gossett, Jr. in “The Zulu and the Zebra” in 1965 before replacing James Earl Jones in “The Great White Hope” (1969). Between plays, he turned up as a professional thief in “The Thomas Crown Affair” (1967) and a sympathetic bartender in “5 Card Stud” (1969) with Dean Martin and Robert Mitchum.
Kotto avoided many of the stereotypical roles offered to African-American actors during the 1970s, though he would admit in interviews that the paucity of quality projects required him to occasionally participate in Blaxploitation features like “Truck Turner” (1974) and “Friday Foster” (1975). But even in those films, he projected an innately masculine strength and confidence that elevated him above the material. Kotto found better showcases for those qualities in films like “The Liberation of L.B. Jones” (1970), as a young man who exacted terrible revenge on the white landowner who had beaten him, and “Across 110th Street” (1971), a gritty crime drama which pitted his young police lieutenant against Anthony Quinn’s aging lion of a police captain while pursuing crooks with stolen Mob money. During this period, Kotto also directed in “The Limit” (1972), a little-seen action-thriller about a motorcycle cop, played by Kotto, who took on a biker gang led by Ted Cassidy.
Kotto’s work for MGM on “Across 110th Street” led to his casting as Dr. Kananga, a Caribbean dictator who secretly operated a heroin business in the James Bond adventure “Live and Let Die” (1973). The international exposure afforded by the film led to more dramatic roles in high-profile projects including “Roots” (ABC, 1977) and Irvin Kershner’s “Raid on Entebbe” (NBC, 1977), an all-star TV movie based on Operation Entebbe, a raid carried out by Israeli special forces against Palestinian terrorists that had taken an Air France plane and its passengers hostage in Uganda. Kotto received an Emmy nomination for his performance as the charismatic but megalomaniacal Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. He soon returned to features, giving memorable performances as an autoworker who robbed his union headquarters in Paul Schrader’s “Blue Collar” (1978) and as an inmate who aided warden Robert Redford in reforming a troubled prison in “Brubaker” (1980). Kotto was also a standout in the ensemble cast for Ridley Scott’s science fiction classic “Alien” (1979) as Parker, the chief engineer on an ill-fated spaceship stalked by an aggressive extraterrestrial. Shortly after completing the film, Kotto was approached by director Irvin Kershner to play Lando Calrissian in “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980), but declined, citing fears that the character would result in his being typecast as a science fiction actor.
Kotto moved fluidly between features and television throughout the 1980s, earning critical acclaim as a former slave who led an uprising in “A House Divided: Denmark Vessey’s Rebellion” (PBS, 1982). But the quality of Kotto’s film projects went into decline as the decade wore on, with such genre pictures as “Warning Sign” (1986), “Eye of the Tiger” (1986) and the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle “The Running Man” (1987) relying more on his imposing physical presence than his acting abilities. He received a rare comic showcase as an FBI agent with a penchant for stealing cigarettes in “Midnight Run” (1988), with Robert DeNiro and Charles Grodin, but kept a low profile until 1993, when he was cast as Lt. Al Giardello on the critically acclaimed series “Homicide: Life on the Street.” A highly cultured, articulate man of Italian-American and African-American heritage, Giardello served as mentor for the detectives of the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide unit throughout the series’ seven-season run, as well as a reunion TV feature, “Homicide: The Movie” (NBC, 2000), which saw Giardello suffer a fatal shooting while running for mayor. Kotto was reportedly displeased by the lack of substantive storylines given to the character, and turned to penning scripts for several episodes, including a well-regarded 1997 story in which a murder suspect holed up in €a former African Revival Movement headquarters.
By Paul Gaita
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
‘ Guardian” obituary in 2021.
In the 1985 TV movie Badge of the Assassin, Yaphet Kotto, who has died aged 81, is told by Alex Rocco, playing an NYPD detective, that the only reason he has been assigned to the investigation of a black militant murder of two cops is because he is a black detective. As Rocco storms away, Kotto calls out to him: “Who told you I was a black detective?”
This could be a metaphor for Kotto’s career. His considerable acting talent was often subsumed by his appearance, almost the antithesis of what a Hollywood leading man, especially a black one, needed to be in that era. Tall and strongly built, Kotto was not a handsome Sidney Poitier, the breakthrough black actor of the 1960s. “I’m always called powerful, bulky or imposing … I think I have this image as a monster,” Kotto said, but his distinctive broad face, with sleepy eyes, quick smile and a slight lisp, was a character actor’s dream, a tool he manipulated through violence and sensitivity to bring subtleties to even the least subtle of roles.
He may be best remembered for doing just that in the James Bond film Live and Let Die (1973) – in which he played the African ruler Dr Kananga and his gangster alter ego, Mr Big, making subtlety even more difficult (“I was too afraid of coming off like Mantan Moreland,” he said, referring to the vaudevillian known for his exaggerated facial expressions) – and in Midnight Run (1988), as the FBI agent Alonzo Mosely, whose chase for his lost ID card drives the plot. His finest film was Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar (1978), a landmark study of both race and class in the US, which would have lost its power had Schrader cast matinee idols instead of Kotto, Harvey Keitel and Richard Pryor.
Kotto’s Bond role may have drawn on his Emmy-nominated performance as the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the TV movie Raid on Entebbe (1976), while his memorable Parker in Alien (1979) echoed Blue Collar when he and Harry Dean Stanton threaten to strike. Sadly, when Kotto became the first black actor to play Othello in a feature film, it was in Liz White’s little-seen 1980 version.Advertisementhttps://afb74697ca0eda81d327be34133576a3.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Kotto was born in New York City. His mother, Gladys Marie, was a nurse of Antiguan and Panamanian background; his father was, in Kotto’s telling, a businessman, Njoki Manga Bell, descended from Cameroonian royalty, who jumped ship in the US and changed his name to Avraham Kotto. His father adopted Judaism, as did his mother, a former Roman Catholic. From the age of three, after his parents divorced, Kotto was raised in the Bronx by his maternal grandparents, though he retained his Jewish identity.
Kotto’s life changed at 16 when he saw Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. He “knew from that moment I wanted to be an actor”. He enrolled in a local theatre school and made his stage debut as Othello at 19. His first film role was uncredited in Four for Texas (1963); his first credit came in the 1964 civil rights drama Nothing But a Man, starring Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln and Julius Harris, who 24 years later played Kotto’s henchman Tee Hee in Live and Let Die.
But he concentrated on the stage: in 1965 he played on Broadway in The Zulu and the Zayda, and the actor Judy Holliday became his mentor, which led to his understudying and then replacing James Earl Jones in The Great White Hope. Kotto drew critical praise for his portrayal of the boxer Jack Jefferson (based on Jack Johnson).
After Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, Kotto released a record, Have You Ever Seen the Blues, reading his own words over what Billboard called “an infectious dance beat”. His film career expanded and in 1972 he played the title role in Larry Cohen’s Bone, a black comedy American B-movie take on Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning. He was Anthony Quinn’s police foil in Across 110th Street, and played the villain Harvard Blue in Jonathan Kaplan’s Truck Turner, with Isaac Hayes as the eponymous Shaft manqué.
By the 1980s his jobbing work was interspersed with occasional meatier roles, as in Peter Hyams’ The Star Chamber (1983) and alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Running Man (1987), but he turned down a part in the civil war drama Glory (1989), saying the movie was about the white man commanding a regiment of black soldiers. “Do you see me taking orders like that?” he asked, though Denzel Washington won an Oscar rebelling against orders in the film. He also turned down Billy Dee Williams’ Star Wars role as Lando Calrissian and Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
But his career revived with one of his greatest roles. In the longrunning (1993-99) TV series Homicide: Life on the Street, he played the shift commander Lt Al Giardello, whose background, described by the show’s creator, David Simon, as “the unlikeliest Sicilian”, was never explained, simply taken for granted. After a Homicide movie in 2000, Kotto’s only other film role was reprising his Midnight Run character in the aptly titled Witless Protection (2008).
By that time Kotto had moved to Manila with his Filipino third wife, Tessie Sinahon, with whom he ran an artists’ retreat in southern Leyte. Both earlier marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by Tessie, by a daughter, Natasha, and two sons, Fred and Robert, from his first marriage, to Rita Ingrid Dittman, and three daughters, Sarada, Mirabai and Salina, from his second, to Antoinette Pettyjohn.
Yaphet Frederick Kotto, actor, born 15 November 1939; died 15 March 2021
Richard Anderson was born in 1926 in New Jersey. He made his movie debut in 1950 in “The Magnificent Yankee”. In the 1950’s he starred in “Forbidden Planet” and “The Long Hot Summer”. In the 1970’s he starred in the hit TV series “The Six Million Dollar Man” and “The Bionic Woman”.
TCM overview:
A staple on episodic television since the early 1960s, actor and producer Richard Anderson hit his stride in the mid-1970s as the authoritative if sartorially challenged Oscar Goldman, boss to both “The Six Million Dollar Man” (ABC, 1974-78) and “The Bionic Woman” (ABC, 1976-77; NBC, 1977-78). The role was among the high points in a long career that encompassed such varied films as the sci-fi classic “Forbidden Planet” (1956), Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory” (1957) and the Paul Newman classic “The Long Hot Summer” (1958), as well as countless television shows and movies. His bionic-related projects, however, retained a fan base for decades after their departure from the airwaves, ensuring him an enduring popularity among television viewers – particularly for the 1970s-born generation – for years to come.
Born in Long Branch, NJ on Aug. 8, 1926, Richard Norman Anderson relocated to Los Angeles at the age of 10 with his parents, Harry and Olga Anderson, and his brother, Robert. Legendary screen actor Gary Cooper had inspired him at an early age, and influenced his decision to become an actor. School productions provided his first performance outlet, but World War II interrupted. Like millions of young men at that time, Anderson served a stint in the U.S. Army. After his discharge, he returned to Los Angeles to study at the Actors’ Laboratory, which preceded a season of summer stock in nearby Laguna Beach and Santa Barbara.
By the late 1940s, Anderson was making appearances in features. The 1947 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s “The Pearl” was among his first screen roles, as was an uncredited turn as a wounded airman in “Twelve O’Clock High” (1949). After displaying his talents on a screen test-style TV series called “Lights! Camera! Action!” (NBC, 1950), he was offered a screen test and a contract at MGM. He chose a scene from the Gary Cooper picture “The Cowboy and the Lady” (1938) for his audition, and from all accounts, nailed it. By 1951, he was appearing in no less than 10 films a year; largely in minor or supporting roles. Among his most notable turns during this period was as the ill-fated friend of Stewart Granger’s “Scaramouche” (1952), whose death sets in motion a plan of revenge against Mel Ferrer’s cruel Marquis. Anderson also met an untimely end at the hands – or claws – of the “Id” monster in the science fiction classic, “Forbidden Planet” (1956), but survived the hype surrounding “The Search for Bridey Murphy” (1956), a low-budget attempt to cash in on a popular book about reincarnation.
In 1957, Anderson asked to be released from his contract. It proved to be the right move for the up-and-comer, as he began landing parts in major features like Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory” (1957), for which he played the French prosecuting officer; Martin Ritt’s “The Long, Hot Summer” (1958), in which he was cast as Joanne Woodward’s weak-willed boyfriend, and “Compulsion” (1959), starring as the brother of accused murderer Dean Stockwell. There were also a few B-pictures like “Curse of the Faceless Man” (1958), which afforded him a rare lead in its tale of a Pompeii victim that returns to life. Anderson’s television output also increased during this period. He had a recurring role on the Disney series “Zorro” (ABC, 1957-59), appearing as a suitor to the masked hero’s love interest, and in 1961, landed his first regular role on a series as a small town lawyer on “Bus Stop” (ABC, 1961-62). That show’s producer, Roy Huggins, would remember Anderson two years later for his drama “The Fugitive” (ABC, 1963-67), and cast him in several roles throughout its tenure on TV, including that of Richard Kimball’s (David Janssen) brother-in-law, Leonard Taft, in the two-part series finale. Anderson also played homicide investigator Lt. Steve Drumm, who took over for Ray Collins’ Lt. Arthur Tragg on the courtroom staple, “Perry Mason” (CBS, 1957-1966).
Whether he wanted it to or not, television eventually came to dominate Anderson’s resume, though there were still plenty of features in the 1960s, including John Frankenheimer’s alarming “Seconds” (1966), where he played one of the plastic surgeons who turn an aged Rock Hudson into an Adonis, and “Tora! Tora! Tora!” (1970), in which his Captain John Earle makes the fatal mistake of ignoring early signs of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II. Anderson’s natural gravitas made him a sought-after spokesman for various companies and organizations for several decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, Anderson was the “Shell Answer Man,” the corporate spokesperson for the Shell Oil Company in a series of television commercials. Later, he was the face of the Kiplinger Newsletter and spokesperson for the National Fragile X Foundation, which benefitted gene research to combat mental impairment in children.
Anderson was exceptionally busy in the years leading up to his most memorable role – there were numerous TV movies, including a turn as a centuries-old physician with a homicidal bent in “The Night Strangler” (ABC, 1973) – the sequel to the phenomenally popular “Night Stalker” (ABC, 1972) – and a recurring role as a police chief in the Burt Reynolds detective series, “Dan August” (ABC, 1970-71). In 1972, Martin Caidin’s science fiction-espionage novel,Cyborg, was adapted into a TV movie for ABC called “The Six Million Dollar Man.” The role of Oscar Goldman, adviser to astronaut-turned-bionic-super agent Steve Austin (Lee Majors) was originally played by Darren McGavin, but following the success of the TV movie, Anderson was brought into play the role in two subsequent ABC TV features – 1973’s “Wine, Women and War” and “Solid Gold Kidnapping” – and eventually, the “Six Million Dollar Man” TV series. Anderson’s Goldman was both boss and friend to Austin, who on more than one occasion risked life and bionic limb to rescue his OSI (Office of Scientific Intelligence) chief. And it was Anderson’s voice that intoned the famous phrase recycled by pop culture enthusiasts for decades after: “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.”
In 1975, a “Six Million Dollar Man” spin-off was built around the character of Jaime Sommers, Steve Austin’s girlfriend, who is given bionic abilities after suffering a terrible parachuting accident. Sommers later becomes an OSI agent like her boyfriend, and Anderson’s Oscar Goldman became her advisor as well on the equally popular series, “The Bionic Woman.” The double duty made him one of the few actors in television history to play the same role on two different television series for two separate networks. Both series were sizable hits during their relatively brief network runs, leaving the actor part of a much-loved childhood memory for a generation of children who grew up in the early 1970s amassing “Six Million Dollar Man” lunchboxes, toys, T-shirts and bedspreads – all of them embossed not only with Majors’ likeness, but Anderson’s as well. He would go on to reprise the role in three TV movie reunions – “The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman” (NBC, 1987), “Bionic Showdown: The Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman” (NBC, 1989) – which featured Sandra Bullock in one of her earliest screen appearances – and the supremely campy “Bionic Ever After?” (CBS, 1994), which saw Goldman giving Jaime away at her wedding to Steve Austin. Anderson also served as co-producer on the last two projects.
Following the end of the bionic series’ television runs, Anderson returned to regular appearances in TV movies and on episodic programs. Among the highlights were the highly regarded suspense thriller, “Murder by Natural Causes” (CBS, 1979), and a turn as President Lyndon B. Johnson in “Hoover vs. the Kennedys: The Second Civil War” (1987). He also returned to series work on several occasions, including the very Oscar Goldman-like Henry Towler, who oversees photographer Jennifer O’Neill and the late model-turned-actor Jon-Erik Hexum’s international capers on “Cover Up” (CBS, 1984-86), and a recurring stint as conservative senator Buck Fallmont on “Dynasty” (ABC, 1981-89). In the 1990s, Anderson’s distinctive voice could be heard in a wide variety of projects, including the narration for “Kung Fu: The Legend Continues” (TNT, 1993-97).
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
