Angela Greene was born in Dublin in 1921 and was was an Irish actress.
Before becoming an actress, Greene was a model for the John Robert Powersagency.
Born as Angela Catherine Williams, she was the only daughter of Margaret and Joseph Williams. At the age of six, she was adopted by her uncle Eddie Greene, Margaret’s brother, and moved to Flushing, Queens.
Chris Mitchum is the son of actor Robert Mitchum. He was born in 1943 in Los Angeles. He was a popular actor in the 1970’s and his movies include “Chisum”, “Rio Lobo” and “Big Jake” all with John Wayne.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Christopher Mitchum is the second son of actor Robert Mitchum destined, like older brother James Mitchum, to follow in the footsteps of his famous dad. Chris grew up avoiding the limelight and was educated at the University of Pennsylvania (1962-1966), attending Dublin’s Trinity College as part of his Junior Year Abroad program. He attained a BA at the University of Arizona before developing a serious interest in filmmaking. He began as an extra while at the University of Arizona working in westerns at Old Tucson (1966-1967). That led to to acting jobs on the TV shows Dundee and the Culhane (1967) starring Britisher John Mills and The Danny Thomas Hour (1967), which featured Sammy Davis Jr.. Chris worked as a “gofer” in two of his father’s westerns in 1969 before receiving his big acting break. He auditioned for John Wayne and won a small role in the western Chisum (1970) as Billy the Kid’s sidekick. Duke introduced him to directorHoward Hawks, who screen-tested Chris and gave him a starring roles in Hawks’ last film,Rio Lobo (1970). Chris saddled up one more time with the Duke in Big Jake (1971) before striking out on his own. With such a strong foundation now formed and fully equipped with his father’s laid-back good looks and adventurous nature, Chris proved to be an assured action lead. After a long dry spell, however, he was told by the casting director of Steelyard Blues (1973) that she could not interview him because he had worked with Wayne. In those highly political times, Chris’ career took a downturn and he went to Europe to find work. The films he found, however, were of a lesser grade and quite violent in comparison to his father’s sturdy work, with such obvious titles as Death Feud(1987), SFX Retaliator (1987), Aftershock (1990), Striking Point (1995) and Lycanthrope(1999). He was popular in such foreign market as Spain, Hong Kong, Indonesia and the Phillipines, however, so he continued to churn out product there including Master Samurai(1974), Chinese Commandos (1975), American Commandos (1986) and Final Score(1986). Chris actually prefers writing these days and co-penned the screenplay for Angel of Fury (1992). After a noticeable absence, he filmed a role recently in son Bentley Mitchum‘s horror yarn The Ritual (2009). Chris’ son, who also produced, wrote and directed, is part of a third generation of acting Mitchums, which includes older daughterCarrie Mitchum.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Ann Richards was born in Sydney, Australia in 1917. She began her movie career in Australian films. In 1942 she left for Hollywood and succeeded in obtaining a contract with MGM. Her first major role was as Jennifer Jone’s friend in “Love Letters”. She starred opposite Robert Young in “The Searching Wind” and supported Burt Lancaster and Barbara Stanwyck in “Sorry Wrong Number”. She retired from acting in 1952. In later years she wrote poetry which were published in several volumes. Ann Richards died in California in 2006.
Tom Vallance’s “Independent” obituary:
The Australian actress Ann Richards made a vivid impression in several Hollywood films of the Forties, and might have had a longer screen career had she not suffered some bad luck. The film that should have made her a star, King Vidor’s epic piece of Americana An American Romance, was a major flop, and a second chance of stardom was blighted when a bigger star suddenly became available.
She had notable roles in such films as The Searching Wind and Sorry, Wrong Number, but her most memorable role was a supporting one, that of the enigmatic Dilly in William Dieterle’s enormously popular melodrama Love Letters. Soft-spoken and sincere, she was at her best when conveying depths of wisdom, with a suggestion of passion stoically controlled.
Born Shirley Ann Richards in Sydney, Australia, in 1917, to an American father and New Zealander mother, she acted on stage before becoming a star in the films of the noted producer-director Ken Hall, including It Isn’t Done (1937), Tall Timber (1938), Dad and Dave Come to Town (1939) and Come Up Smiling (1940). She went to Hollywood in 1941 (“on the first ship after Pearl Harbor – the attack was on December 7th 1941, and we left on December 11th”).
Hall had sent a reel of her best scenes to the Hollywood writer Carl Dudley, but the can of film was lost. Richards recalled,
At the time MGM was preparing a short subject called The Woman in the House, about an Englishwoman who becomes a recluse, ageing 40 years. They felt no one under contract could play this role, and of course by then everyone knew my sad story – how I’d sailed across Japanese- infested waters, lost the film Ken Hall had put together for me. All I had was my scrapbook to prove that I had been an Australian movie star.
She won the role, her performance resulting in a contract with MGM and the part of Ronald Colman’s cousin in Random Harvest (1942). “I loved MGM – except for the waiting – there were long periods when I wasn’t being used.” Small roles in Dr Gillespie’s New Assistant (1942) and Three Hearts for Julia (1943, as a cellist) preceded what should have been her breakthrough movie.
Back in 1925 MGM’s production chief Irving Thalberg had given the director King Vidor a choice of subjects. Vidor replied that he favoured three: war, wheat and steel. Thalberg chose war, and the result was the silent classic The Big Parade (1926). Later in Vidor’s career came wheat – Our Daily Bread (1934), another classic – but his epic on steel was to have a bumpy history.
The saga of a poor Czech immigrant who becomes rich and prosperous over the years, An American Romance (1944) was to star Spencer Tracy, but, when he became unavailable, Vidor accepted Brian Donlevy, and later rued his decision not to wait for Tracy, since Donlevy, though a fine actor, did not have the charisma necessary for such an important and symbolic role. Ann Richards was cast as his Irish wife, and though she too was fine the ambitious film was overlong (151 minutes even after some drastic cutting by the studio) and won praise only for its Technicolor shots of furnaces, factories and fields. “They made a mess of it,” said Richards, “cutting out a lot of the personal story and leaving too much of the steel-plant footage.”
After its release, Vidor left MGM never to return, and Richards also departed after promised roles in Gaslight and The Picture of Dorian Gray were not given to her. She accepted the offer of a contract from the producer Hal Wallis, who announced that she would be starring opposite Barry Sullivan in the romantic thriller, Love Letters (1945). The powerful producer David O. Selznick then made one of his manipulative deals, persuading Wallis to use two stars he had under contract, Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten.
Sullivan was out, and Richards was instead given the role of Jones’s best friend, Dilly. She was given excellent billing (a solo title card) and her character figures prominently in the first half of the film, in which she handles with subtle flair some of the movie’s most intriguing dialogue (by Ayn Rand). First seen giving a party at her Bloomsbury flat, she introduces Cotten to Jones (an amnesiac known only by the name “Singleton”). When Cotten wakes after drinking too much and talking excessively, he is told by Richards to contact her later:
Remember my name . . . and I want you to remember this evening, how I listened when you weren’t aware of it. Turn it over in your mind, and remember particularly how mysterious I was.
Cotton, bemused, replies, “Anybody would think a murder had been committed”, and she responds, “It has.”
Aided by William Dieterle’s moody direction and Victor Young’s haunting theme tune (which became a pop hit), the film was an enormous success. Jones won an Oscar nomination for her performance, but Richards commented years later,
Perhaps things worked out for the best, because I think Dilly was a more human, sympathetic character and remained my late husband’s favourite of my screen performances.
Richards then starred with Sylvia Sidney and Robert Young in another Wallis production, The Searching Wind (1946), also directed by Dieterle but less successfully. Adapted by Lillian Hellman from her Broadway play, its anti-war story was told through the lives of a radical journalist (Sidney), a career diplomat (Young) who constantly sits on the fence and supports Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement efforts, and his socialite wife (Richards), who accepts Young’s ongoing affair with Sidney, and whose son is maimed in the Second World War.
Two years earlier, the film version of Hellman’s earlier anti-Fascism play Watch on the Rhine had found a large audience, but in 1946 few were interested in a talky tract, fascinating though much of it was, and the film flopped. Richards said,
I met two extraordinarily interesting women on Love Letters and The Searching Wind, the novelist Ayn Rand, and Lillian Hellman. I remember a conversation I had with Miss Rand. I mentioned that my mother in Australia was not well and that I might have to take a sabbatical from my career to go and bring her back to America with me. Miss Rand insisted (and I can still see this little woman’s black eyes flashing), “You owe absolutely nothing to anybody! You must not consider doing this thing.” I thought this was rather cruel and said, “But you must help people, especially those dear to you.” And she replied, “You must take care of yourself rather than do anything for anybody else!”. . . Miss Hellman was easier to comprehend: she wouldn’t throw out edicts. Politically, the two were at opposite poles: Miss Rand was super-conservative and Miss Hellman was very liberal.
Hal Wallis next loaned Richards to RKO to be Randolph Scott’s leading lady in the enjoyable western Badman’s Territory (1946), and she was also loaned out for a trivial comedy, Lost Honeymoon (1947), and a thriller, Love from a Stranger (1947), based on an Agatha Christie story about a lottery winner who marries a Bluebeard-type fortune hunter. Sylvia Sidney was the heroine, with Richards her best friend. Her final role for Wallis was also that of a best friend – to Barbara Stanwyck in the taut thriller based on the famous radio play Sorry, Wrong Number (1948).
In 1947 Richards returned to the stage – the previous year Gregory Peck and Dorothy McGuire had formed the Actors’ Company, to enable film players, unable to take the time to appear on Broadway, to perform in revivals of hit shows at a small playhouse in La Jolla, a Californian beach community. Richards starred with McGuire and John Hoyt in a production of Noël Coward’s Tonight at 8:30 that won considerable praise.
Two years later Richards married Edmond Angelo, who produced and directed her last American movie, Breakdown (1952), an ineffectual film noir. Angelo left show business to become a space engineer with a California firm, and the couple, who had three children, maintained a large house in Los Angeles and a mountain house near Big Bear.
Richards wrote a volume of poems, The Grieving Senses (1971), and a verse play, Helen of Troy, which she and her husband occasionally presented at college campuses. She appeared as herself (billed as Shirley Ann Richards) in a documentary about women in the Australian film industry, Don’t Call Me Girlie (1984), and occasionally on television, but otherwise limited her performing to giving readings of poetry, mainly at schools.
Tom Vallance
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Milo O’SheaMilo O’Shea, Pat Boone & Fidelma Murphy
Milo O’Shea
Milo O’Shea obituary in “The Guardian” in 2013.
Great Irish character actor who starred as Leopold Bloom in Joseph Strick’s adapatation of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and as ‘Friar Laurence’ in the 1968 film version of “Romeo and Juliet”. He also starred with Paul Newman, James Mason and Charlotte Rampling in “The Verdict”. He moved to the U.S. and died in New York in 2013.
Michael Coveney’s obituary in “The Guardian”:
For a performer of such fame and versatility, the distinguished Irish character actor Milo O’Shea, who has died aged 86, is not associated with any role in particular, or indeed any clutch of them. He was chiefly associated with his own expressive dark eyes, bushy eyebrows, outstanding mimetic talents and distinctive Dublin brogue.
His impish presence irradiated countless fine movies – including Joseph Strick‘s Ulysses (1967), Roger Vadim‘s Barbarella (1968) and Sidney Lumet‘s The Verdict (1982) – and many top-drawer American television series, from Cheers, The Golden Girls and Frasier, right through to The West Wing (2003-04), in which he played the chief justice Roy Ashland.
He had settled in New York in 1976 with his second wife, Kitty Sullivan, in order to be equidistant from his own main bases of operation, Hollywood and London. The couple maintained a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park by the Dakota building, and formed a spontaneous welcoming committee for any Irish actors or plays turning up on Broadway.
Although he had worked for Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir at the Gate theatre in Dublin, and returned there in 1996 to appear in a revival of Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys opposite his great friendDavid Kelly, his Irish theatre connections belonged to the city of his youth, and he preferred it that way.
His father was a singer and his mother a ballet teacher, so it was inevitable, perhaps, that Milo gravitated towards the stage. He was just 12 when he appeared in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra at the Gate. He completed his education with the Christian Brothers at the Synge Street school (where the actor Donal Donnelly was a classmate) and took a degree in music and drama at the Guildhall School in London; he remained a superb pianist all his life and could – and usually did – sit down at the keyboard and play more or less anything.
He made a London debut in 1949 as a pantry boy in Molly Farrell and John Perry’s Treasure Hunt at the Apollo, appearing in John Gielgud‘s production of the jewellery-theft potboiler alongside Sybil Thorndike, Marie Lohr and Alan Webb. When Queen Mary came backstage, she asked O’Shea where the gems had gone. “Don’t tell her,” whispered Thorndike, “or she won’t come back after the interval.”
Back in Dublin, he appeared in revues at the 37 Theatre Club on Lower O’Connell Street and was part of a group including Maureen Toal, whom he married in 1952, Norman Rodway and Godfrey Quigley at the Globe, as well as appearing at the Pike. He toured America with Louis D’Alton’s company and played a season at Lucille Lortel’s White Barn theatre in Westport, Connecticut.
The 1960s started inauspiciously with a brief run at the Adelphi in London in Mary Rodgers’s Once Upon a Mattress, which lasted just 38 performances. But Brendan Behan had seen and loved Fergus Linehan’s musical Glory Be! and recommended it to Joan Littlewood, who presented it for a season at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in 1961. O’Shea was a hit, leading a cast of young Dublin actors including Kelly and Rosaleen Linehan. Some critics mistook youthful buoyancy for amateurism and likened the show to Salad Days, suggesting it be renamed “Mayonnaise”.
By the end of the decade, O’Shea was fully established on Broadway, winning a 1968 Tony nomination as one of Charles Dyer’s two gay hairdressers in Staircase (the other one was Eli Wallach) and appearing opposite Angela Lansbury as the sewerman in Jerry Herman’s Dear World in the following season.
Around the same time, two major movie performances, following Strick’s admirable but unsatisfactory Ulysses (O’Shea was Leopold Bloom), confirmed his status: as the mad scientist Durand Durand (inspirational name for Simon Le Bon’s pop group Duran Duran), he was seen gibbering ecstatically as he tried to destroy Jane Fonda’s Barbarella with simulated lust waves in his Excessive Machine; and as Friar Laurence in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968) he brought brief hope and humour to the carnally doomed coupling of Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey.
And in 1969 he struck sitcom gold in the BBC’s Me Mammy, scripted by Hugh Leonard, in which he played bachelor Bunjy Kennefick, a West End executive with a luxury flat in Regent’s Park and a mountainous mum, played by Anna Manahan, with her apron strings tied round his neck. The show ran for three series to 1971, and O’Shea was now a household face on both sides of the Atlantic.
After the move to Manhattan, he appeared on Broadway as Eddie Waters, the failed old comedian, in Mike Nichols’s production of Trevor Griffiths’s Comedians; as James Cregan in Eugene O’Neill’s extraordinary A Touch of the Poet, with Jason Robards and Geraldine Fitzgerald; and as Alfred Doolittle in a 1981 revival of My Fair Lady, once again starring Rex Harrison.
But he won his second Tony nomination for his luxury-lifestyle-loving Catholic priest, Father Tim Farley, in Bill C Davis’s debut Broadway play, Mass Appeal in 1982. The critic Frank Rich applauded his comic mischievousness and timing, and noted how the mask slipped on the sham of a life of this lost alcoholic soul who was inducting a rebellious young seminarian; the play was finally about secular and religious love, not the Catholic church at all.
Unfortunately, O’Shea did not return to London with Mass Appeal, but with Gerald Moon’s Corpse! at the Apollo in 1984. He played an Irish war veteran trapped in a basement with Keith Baxter; Baxter was playing a pair of effete twins who each wanted to kill the other (without success, alas). The play was as moribund as its title.
O’Shea will survive, though, whenever we catch a glimpse of him in Silvio Narizzano‘s odd version of Joe Orton’s Loot (1970), or as yet another priest in Neil Jordan’s weird and wonderful The Butcher Boy (1997), or as an incredulous inspector in Douglas Hickox’s critic-baiting Theatre of Blood (1973), or holding the ring between Paul Newman and James Mason, his hair slightly longer than usual, as the trial judge in The Verdict (1982).
His last stage appearance was a homecoming of sorts as Fluther Good in Sean O’Casey’s tremendous tenement tragedy The Plough and the Stars 12 years ago at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, directed by Joe Dowling, with Linehan as Bessie Burgess.
He is survived by Kitty and by his two sons, Colm and Steven, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce in 1974.
• Milo O’Shea, actor, born 2 June 1926; died 2 April 2013
The great director John Huston is part of a dynasty which includes his father the actor Walter Huston and his daughter Anjelica Huston. John Huston was born in 1906 in the U.S. b ut became an Irish citizen in 1964, having lived in St. Clerins in Co Galway since the early 1950’s. His major directorial assignments include “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”, “Beat the Devil”, “Moulin Rouge”, “The Man Who Would be King” and “The Dead”. He has also acted in such films as “The Cardinal” and “Chinatown”.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry: An eccentric rebel of epic proportions, this Hollywood titan reigned supreme as director, screenwriter and character actor in a career that endured over five decades. The ten-time Oscar-nominated legend was born John Marcellus Huston in Nevada, Missouri, on August 5, 1906. His ancestry included English, Scottish, and Scots-Irish. The age-old story goes that the small town of his birth was won by John’s grandfather in a poker game. John’s father was the equally magnanimous character actor Walter Huston, and his mother, Rhea Gore, was a newspaperwoman who traveled around the country looking for stories. The only child of the couple, John began performing on stage with his vaudevillian father at age 3. Upon his parents’ divorce at age 7, the young boy would take turns traveling around the vaudeville circuit with his father and the country with his mother on reporting excursions. A frail and sickly child, he was once placed in a sanitarium due to both an enlarged heart and kidney ailment. Making a miraculous recovery, he quit school at age 14 to become a full-fledged boxer and eventually won the Amateur Lightweight Boxing Championship of California, winning 22 of 25 bouts. His trademark broken nose was the result of that robust activity.
John married his high school sweetheart, Dorothy Harvey, and also took his first professional stage bow with a leading role off-Broadway entitled “The Triumph of the Egg.” He made his Broadway debut that same year with “Ruint” on April 7, 1925, and followed that with another Broadway show “Adam Solitaire” the following November. John soon grew restless with the confines of both his marriage and acting and abandoned both, taking a sojourn to Mexico where he became an officer in the cavalry and expert horseman while writing plays on the sly. Trying to control his wanderlust urges, he subsequently returned to America and attempted newspaper and magazine reporting work in New York by submitting short stories. He was even hired at one point by mogulSamuel Goldwyn Jr. as a screenwriter, but again he grew restless. During this time he also appeared unbilled in a few obligatory films. By 1932 John was on the move again and left for London and Paris where he studied painting and sketching. The promising artist became a homeless beggar during one harrowing point.
Returning again to America in 1933, he played the title role in a production of “Abraham Lincoln,” only a few years after father Walter portrayed the part on film for D.W. Griffith. John made a new resolve to hone in on his obvious writing skills and began collaborating on a few scripts for Warner Brothers. He also married again. Warners was so impressed with his talents that he was signed on as both screenwriter and director for the Dashiell Hammett mystery yarn The Maltese Falcon (1941). The movie classic made a superstar out of Humphrey Bogart and is considered by critics and audiences alike— 65 years after the fact— to be the greatest detective film ever made. In the meantime John wrote/staged a couple of Broadway plays, and in the aftermath of his mammoth screen success directed bad-girl ‘Bette Davis (I)’ and good girl Olivia de Havilland in the film melodrama In This Our Life (1942), and three of his “Falcon” stars (Bogart, Mary Astorand Sydney Greenstreet) in the romantic war picture Across the Pacific (1942). During WWII John served as a Signal Corps lieutenant and went on to helm a number of film documentaries for the U.S. government including the controversial Let There Be Light(1946), which father Walter narrated. The end of WWII also saw the end of his second marriage. He married third wife Evelyn Keyes, of “Gone With the Wind” fame, in 1946 but it too lasted a relatively short time. That same year the impulsive and always unpredictable Huston directed Jean-Paul Sartre‘s experimental play “No Exit” on Broadway. The show was a box-office bust (running less than a month) but nevertheless earned the New York Drama Critics Award as “best foreign play.”
Hollywood glory came to him again in association with Bogart and Warner Brothers’. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), a classic tale of gold, greed and man’s inhumanity to man set in Mexico, won John Oscars for both director and screenplay and his father nabbed the “Best Supporting Actor” trophy. John can be glimpsed at the beginning of the movie in a cameo playing a tourist, but he wouldn’t act again on film for a decade and a half. With the momentum in his favor, John hung around in Hollywood this time to write and/or direct some of the finest American cinema made including Key Largo (1948) andThe African Queen (1951) (both with Bogart), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951) and Moulin Rouge (1952). Later films, including Moby Dick (1956), The Unforgiven (1960), The Misfits (1961), Freud (1962), The Night of the Iguana (1964) andThe Bible: In the Beginning… (1966) were, for the most part, well-regarded but certainly not close to the level of his earlier revered work. He also experimented behind-the-camera with color effects and approached topics that most others would not even broach, including homosexuality and psychoanalysis.
An ardent supporter of human rights, he, along with director William Wyler and others, dared to form the Committee for the First Amendment in 1947, which strove to undermine the House Un-American Activities Committee. Disgusted by the Hollywood blacklisting that was killing the careers of many talented folk, he moved to St. Clerans in Ireland and became a citizen there along with his fourth wife, ballet dancer Enrica (Ricki) Soma. The couple had two children, including daughter Anjelica Huston who went on to have an enviable Hollywood career of her own. Huston and wife Ricki split after a son (director Danny Huston) was born to another actress in 1962. They did not divorce, however, and remained estranged until her sudden death in 1969 in a car accident. John subsequently adopted his late wife’s child from another union. The ever-impulsive Huston would move yet again to Mexico where he married (1972) and divorced (1977) his fifth and final wife, Celeste Shane.
Huston returned to acting auspiciously with a major role in Otto Preminger‘s epic film The Cardinal (1963) for which Huston received an Oscar nomination at age 57. From that time forward, he would be glimpsed here and there in a number of colorful, baggy-eyed character roles in both good and bad (some positively abysmal) films that, at the very least, helped finance his passion projects. The former list included outstanding roles inChinatown (1974) and The Wind and the Lion (1975), while the latter comprised of hammy parts in such awful drek as Candy (1968) and Myra Breckinridge (1970).
Directing daughter Angelica in her inauspicious movie debut, the thoroughly mediocre A Walk with Love and Death (1969), John made up for it 15 years later by directing her to Oscar glory in the mob tale Prizzi’s Honor (1985). In the 1970s Huston resurged as a director of quality films with Fat City (1972), The Man Who Would Be King (1975) andWise Blood (1979). He ended his career on a high note with Under the Volcano (1984), the afore-mentioned Prizzi’s Honor (1985) and The Dead (1987). His only certifiable misfire during that era was the elephantine musical version of Annie (1982), though it later became somewhat of a cult favorite among children.
Huston lived the macho, outdoors life, unencumbered by convention or restrictions, and is often compared in style or flamboyancy to an Ernest Hemingway or Orson Welles. He was, in fact, the source of inspiration for Clint Eastwood in the helming of the film White Hunter Black Heart (1990) which chronicled the making of “The African Queen.” Illness robbed Huston of a good portion of his twilight years with chronic emphysema the main culprit. As always, however, he continued to work tirelessly while hooked up to an oxygen machine if need be. At the end, the living legend was shooting an acting cameo in the film Mr. North (1988) for his son Danny, making his directorial bow at the time. John became seriously ill with pneumonia and died while on location at the age of 81. This maverick of a man’s man who was once called “the eccentric’s eccentric” by Paul Newman, left an incredibly rich legacy of work to be enjoyed by film lovers for centuries to come.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
The beautiful Ms Sparv was a popular leading in movies of the 1960’s. She was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1943. She played opposite James Coburn in “Dead Heat on a Merry |Go-Round” in 1966. She starred opposite Hayley Mills in “The Trouble With Angels” and Robert Redford in “Downhill Racer”. She is now retired from acting.
TCM Overview:
Camilla Sparv was an accomplished actress who led an impressive career, primarily on the big screen. Early on in her acting career, Sparv landed roles in various films, including “Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round” (1966), “Murderers’ Row” (1966) with Dean Martin and the comedy adaptation “The Trouble With Angels” (1966) with Rosalind Russell. She also appeared in “Assignment K” (1968) and the Robert Redford dramatic adaptation “Downhill Racer” (1969). She continued to act in productions like “MacKenna’s Gold” (1969) with Gregory Peck, the dramatic biopic “The Greek Tycoon” (1978) with Anthony Quinn and “Winter Kills” (1979). Her work around this time also included a part on the TV movie “Never Con a Killer” (ABC, 1976-77). Toward the end of her career, she tackled roles in “Caboblanco” (1981) and the Chuck Wagner action picture “America 3000” (1986). She also had a part in the TV miniseries “Jacqueline Susann’s “Valley of the Dolls 1981″” (1981-82). Sparv more recently appeared in “The Naked Truth” (Cinemax, 1992-93). Sparv was married to Robert Evans.
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
Dorothy Lamour was one of the major stars of Hollywood during the 1940’s. She was born in New Orleans in 1914. Many of her films were made for Paramount Studios. She is especially remembered for her roles in the “Road to ” series with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. Her other mvies include “Johnny Apollo”, “The Hurricane”, “Aloma of the South Seas”, “The Greatest Show on Earth” and “Donovan’s Reef”. She died in 1996.
Tom Vallance’s “Independent” obituary:
Hollywood’s “sarong girl” Dorothy Lamour made no claims to be a great actress, but few stars of the screen’s vintage years are regarded with greater affection. She is remembered with such warmth for three reasons: as star of a string of jungle pictures, clad in the sarong that was to become her trademark; as one of the four most popular pin-ups of the Second World War (along with Betty Grable, Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth); and as co-star with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope of the phenomenally successful “Road” films – only the James Bond movies have been more profitable as a lengthy sequence. Lamour was also a seductively sultry singer who introduced several song standards, and became an adept comedienne.
Born Mary Leta Dorothy Slaton in 1914 in New Orleans, she started performing songs at charity shows from the age of four and at 14 won a beauty contest as Miss New Orleans. Taking her stepfather’s surname Lambour, she moved to Chicago and worked in a department store as an elevator-girl while trying to break into show business. Singing in a talent contest she was spotted by the band-leader Herbie Kaye, who signed her as vocalist and changed her name to Lamour.
In 1935 they were married. Kaye’s former college chum Rudy Vallee introduced Lamour to the owner of the famed New York nightspot the Stork Club and she was signed to sing there. This led to more club work, radio performances and her screen debut in a two-reel short, The Stars Can’t Be Wrong (1936). Moving to Hollywood for a regular spot (billed as “the sultry songstress of the airwaves”) on NBC Radio, she was given a screen test by Paramount and cast in The Jungle Princess (1936). As a naive native girl, with only a tiger and a chimpanzee as friends, she rescues a stranded hunter (Ray Milland) who teaches her English and saves her from villainous natives. Lamour introduced a song hit, Frederick Hollander and Leo Robin’s “Moonlight and Shadows”, and clothed only in a sarong, her long black hair caressing her shoulders, scored an instant hit with the public, who made the modest film a surprising smash hit.
Lamour’s next role was a supporting one in Swing High, Swing Low (1937) but her song in it, “Panamania” , was another hit. In Mamoulian’s High, Wide and Handsome (1937) she again had a minor role but sang Kern and Hammerstein’s “The Things I Want”. The director John Ford, preparing to film The Hurricane for the producer Sam Goldwyn, suggested Lamour for the role of Samura, daughter of a native chief, and Goldwyn traded his contract star Joel McCrea with Paramount to secure her. She again scored a great personal success and had another hit song with her recording of the film’s theme tune, “The Moon of Manakoora”.
Paramount, now convinced that Lamour and a sarong were a winning combination, starred her in Her Jungle Love (1938), as a native girl who rescues a stranded aviator (Milland again). He teaches her English (“What is this word `Kiss’?” she asks him) and rescues her from crocodiles, an earthquake and a power-crazy villain. Though Lamour’s jungle films were fantastic and formulaic they were colourful, amusing pieces of pure escapism which the public loved.
Now a top star, Lamour was borrowed by Fox to star with Tyrone Power in the gangster melodrama Johnny Apollo (1940), singing two fine songs with lyrics by Frank Loesser, “This is the Beginning of the End” and “Dancing for Nickels and Dimes”, the latter perform-ed in a fetching urchin outfit that Lamour hated. Paramount next put her back in the jungle for Typhoon (1940) with Robert Preston, another enormous hit.
Then came one of the most fortuitous pieces of casting in screen history. The screenwriters Don Hartman and Frank Butler had adapted an old script of Paramount’s as a tropical adventure-comedy entitled The Road to Mandalay for Fred MacMurray and Jack Oakie, who turned it down. George Burns and Gracie Allen also rejected it before the producer William LeBaron thought of Hope and Crosby, who already had a well-publicised comic feud going on their respective radio shows. The tropical setting made Lamour the perfect choice for heroine. Retitled Road to Singapore (1940), the first of a legendary series went into production.
With the aid of their radio gag-writers Barney Dean and Monty Brice the two male leads were soon improvising material and ad-libbing to an extent that initially perplexed Lamour. “I was trying to follow the script but just couldn’t get my lines out,” she said later. “Finally, I realised that I should just get the general idea of a scene rather than learn the words by heart, then go along with the boys.” Said Hope, “Dottie is one of the bravest gals in pictures. She stands there before the camera and ad-libs with Crosby and me knowing that the way the script is written she’ll come second or third best, but she fears nothing.”
The mixture of ad-libs, asides to the audience and irreverent in-jokes plus the songs of Crosby and Lamour and wisecracks of Hope made the films irresistible. Though not initially planned as the first of a series, the film was swiftly followed by Road to Zanzibar (1941), which was even funnier and had the New York Post commenting: “Dorothy Lamour, ceasing her feverish efforts to become An Actress, begins to shine in a new light.”
Lamour next partnererd Hope in Caught in the Draft (1941), proving again what an admirable foil she was becoming as she adopted a bemused, somewhat acerbic reaction to Hope’s frantic shenanigans. She was reunited with her Hurricane co-star Jon Hall in the vividly coloured Aloma of the South Seas (1941), singing “White Blossoms of Rah-ni” and dealing with the wicked high priests and an erupting volcano in another box-office hit.
She followed this with one of the finest wartime musicals, The Fleet’s In (1942), playing an aloof night-club singer whose heart is melted by William Holden, and introducing the Victor Schertzinger-Johnny Mercer standard “I Remember You”.
Road to Morocco (1942) is considered by many the best of the “Road” films, its surreal pleasures incuding a talking camel and a version of the hit tune “Moonlight Becomes You” in which the three stars sing with each other’s voices.
Lamour’s role opposite Crosby in Dixie (1943), a loose biography of the minstrel star and composer Dan Emmett, was a disappointing one in which she had no song solos, but in And The Angels Sing (1944), she introduced the Johnny Burke-Jimmy Van Heusen standard, “It Should Happen to You”.
During the war, besides being a favourite pin-up of the forces, Lamour made many tours to promote the sale of war bonds. Road to Utopia (made in 1944 but released two years later) was another gem, this time set in the Yukon during gold-rush days. Lamour had a further hit song with the Burke-Van Heusen “Personality” though she stormed off the set one day after waiting hours in costume for her leading men then finding they had gone to play golf. “They always joked about my temperament after that,” she stated, “but they never did that to me again!”
Two demanding roles – in an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s scathing portrait of wartime hypocrisy A Medal for Benny (1945) and in Claudette Colbert’s former role in an ineffectual remake of Midnight entitled Masquerade in Mexico (1945) – exposed Lamour’s thespian limitations, but in My Favourite Brunette (1947) she again proved a splendid foil for Hope, while in the all-star Variety Girl (1947) she engagingly partnered tough-guy Alan Ladd as he made his singing debut duetting “Telahassee”.
When Paramount had announced that Road to Utopia would be the last of the series they received over 75,000 letters of protest, so in 1947 Road to Rio was released, another hit though it would mark the end of Lamour’s golden period. Paramount were shedding many of its stars including Lamour, and as a freelance her films and performances met with mild response, though Slightly French (1949) was an amusing farce in which Lamour got laughs as a carnival dancer masquerading as a French cabaret star.
In 1950 and again in 1958 she triumphed at the London Palladium (the audience roaring its approval when she donned her sarong) and in 1952 played in two major films. She was a circus performer in De Mille’s The Greatest Show on Earth – a small part but it included a brief Hawaiian song and dance – and Road to Bali, the sixth film in the series. Night- clubs and television were now her main professional outlets, but she was once more international news in 1961 when Hope and Crosby announced that they would be making Road to Hong Kong but (at Crosby’s insistence) with a younger leading lady.
The public outcry that ensued led to Lamour being offered a cameo role which, with the encouragement of Hope, she accepted. In a generally dire film, Lamour was to have the brightest moment when, asked by the two stars to help them hide from gangsters, she listen to their summary of the plot so far then replies, “OK, boys, I’ll hide you.” “From the gangsters?” they ask. “No,” she says, “From the critics.”
Her feeling for Crosby was cool after this, particularly when he failed to use her in publicising the film. John Ford gave her a small role in Donovan’s Reef (1963) and in 1967 she had a great success with a lengthy tour of Hello, Dolly on stage. She published an autobiography, My Side of the Road, in 1980 and continued to appear in clubs and nostalgic stage shows (including a charity show in London a few years ago) until ill-health forced her retirement.
Mary Leta Dorothy Slaton (Dorothy Lamour), actress: born New Orleans 10 December 1914; married 1935 Herbie Kaye (marriage dissolved 1939), 1943 William Ross Howard (died 1978; two sons); died Los Angeles 22 September 1996.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Signe HassoThe House On 92nd Street, poster, from left: William Eythe, Signe Hasso, Lloyd Nolan, Leo G. Carroll, 1945. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Signe Hasso was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1915. She came to Hollywood in 1940 when she won an RKO contract. Her movies include “Heaven Can Wait”, “A Double Life” and “The House on 92nd Street|”. She died in Los Angeles in 2002.
Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Guardian”:
Although in no way competing with her compatriots Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman, the Swedish actor Signe Hasso, who has died aged 91, had her fair share of Hollywood fame in the 1940s.
The decade was a good one for European actors in America because of the plethora of second world war dramas and films noirs , in which anyone with a foreign accent could play French, Dutch, German, Russian or Polish characters – on the assumption that audiences would be none the wiser. Hasso, for example, became French in at least four films, including Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait (1943), in which she was a saucy French maid.
She was also chosen for George Cukor’s A Double Life (1948), where she had to play Desdemona in scenes from Othello, although her slight Swedish intonation was briefly referred to. In this, her most demanding role, she was touching as the stage partner and former wife of actor Ronald Colman, who nearly strangles her. But despite her good reviews and the film’s two Oscars (for Colman and composer Miklos Rozsa), Hasso’s screen career gathered little impetus, and she returned to the theatre.
She was born Signe Larsson in Stockholm and, at the age of 12, appeared in productions at the Royal Dramatic Theatre. At 16, she became the youngest person to enrol in the theatre’s academy. Her first success was in the title role of Schiller’s Maria Stuart, and she continued to act under her own name until her marriage to Swedish producer Harry Hasso in 1933, the year she entered films.
In 1940, she decided to go to the United States with her young son because she had been offered a contract by RKO, her marriage had broken down and the Nazis had invaded Norway. But RKO failed to come up with any roles, and, after a short runon the New York stage, she made her Hollywood debut for MGM with a brief part in Journey For Margaret (1942) – just as her friend Garbo departed both the studio and films for ever.
In Assignment In Brittany (1943), Hasso co-starred with Jean-Paul Aumont in a story set in Nazi- occupied France. In Fred Zinnemann’s The Seventh Cross (1944), she supplied the love interest as a Dutch waitress helping concentration camp escapee Spencer Tracy regain his faith in humanity. In the same year, Cecil B DeMille cast her as a Dutch nurse loved by missionary medic Gary Cooper, in The Story Of Doctor Wassell.
Hasso then went back to being a French refugee, in Johnny Angel (1945). More effective, from her point of view, was her performance as a Nazi spy-ring leader disguised as a glamorous New York dress-shop owner, in Henry Hathaway’s The House On 92nd Street (1945).
Hasso then appeared in Douglas Sirk’s classy A Scandal In Paris (1946), and in a Ninotchka-type role in Where There’s Life (1947). Her last major Hollywood part was as Isabel Farrago, the cool wife of José Ferrer’s South American dictator, in Crisis (1950). On stage in the 1950s, she app- eared in Uncle Vanya and The Apple Cart, as well as in live television dramas. After her son died in a car accident in 1957, she returned to Sweden for a while, though she was soon acting again both in Sweden and the US, mostly on stage and in television.
Hasso, who held dual citizenship, also wrote music and lyrics for the album Scandin-avian Folk Songs Sung And Swung, and published novels, short stories and articles. In 1972, Sweden made her a knight first-class in the Royal Order of Vasa, and, in 1994, she was granted a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Last year, Hasso was seen paying fulsome tribute to her compatriot in the television documentary, Greta Garbo: A Lone Star. But unlike Garbo, although a widow from her second marriage, Hasso lived out her life in Los Angeles, surrounded by friends and admirers.
· Signe Hasso (Signe Larsson), actor, born August 15 1910; died June 8 2002
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
“‘La-dee-dah’ said Diane Keaton as ‘Annie Hall’. ‘Wow’ and ‘Oooh’ and ‘Oh’ and ‘Right’ and ‘Yeah’, putting them into various permutations. Her director and co-star Woody Allen had lived with her at one time and we all suspected that the film was more autobiographical than they cared to admit in interviews. We did’nt care either for it told us more than we needed to know: but since she won an Oscar for it we may say that this is the most valuable self-portrait of an Oscar winner that we have. The films success was surely due to her: seemingly spontaneous, healthy looking, a free spirit bubbling with merriment – and occasional doubts- ‘Wow’, /Right’. ‘Yeah’,’Oh’, ‘Wo'”. – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The Independent Years
Diane Keaton was born in 1946 in California. She made her film debut in 1971 in the excellent “Lovers and Other Strangers”. She also starred in several movies with Woody Allen such as “Play It Again Sam”, “Manhatten” and “Annie Hall”. She also starred in “Reds” with Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson.
Manhattan Murder Mystery
Radio Days
Mad Money
Because I Said So
Manhattan
Breaking Through
Something’s Gotta Give
The Only Thrill
Tennessee Valley
The Little Drummer Girl
Interiors
Hanging Up
And So It Goes
Morning Glory
The Family Stone
The Big Wedding
Title
Reds
Caption
Alt Text
Description
Deselect
Reds
I Will, I Will for Now
Surrender, Dorothy
Town & Country
Plan B
Crossed Over
Marvin’s Room
Father of the Bride Part Two
Play It Again, Sam
Baby Boom
The Godfather Part Three
Sister Mary Explains It All
Father of the Bride
Amelia Earhart
Looking for Mr Goodbar
Shoot the Moon
The Godfather Part Two
Harry and Walter go to New York
Annie Hall
Smoother
The Price of Passion
The Godfather
Ruth and Alex
Mama’s Boy
Crimes of the Heart
Sleeper
Mrs Soffel
Darling Companion
Love the Coopers
The Lemon Sisters
Love and Death
TCM overview:
As a multi-faceted actress, director and producer, Diane Keaton received her start as a favorite actress – as well as off-screen girlfriend – of filmmaker Woody Allen, earning a Best Actress Academy Award for her breakout performance in “Annie Hall” (1977). Prior to that, she was the troubled wife of Michael Corleone in “The Godfather” (1972) and “The Godfather, Part II” (1974), and further displayed her dramatic chops as a promiscuous schoolteacher in “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” (1977). Following a role in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” (1979), she earned another Oscar nod for Warren Beatty’s “Reds” (1981) and had another critical success with “Crimes of the Heart” (1986). Keaton made her directing debut with the documentary “Heaven” (1987) and segued into television with “The Girl with the Crazy Brother” (CBS, 1990). Along the way, she starred opposite Steve Martin in “Father of the Bride” (1989), reprised Kay Corleone for “The Godfather, Part III” (1990) and had her last role with Allen in “Manhattan Murder Mystery” (1993). Meanwhile, she scored a big hit with “The First Wives Club” (1996), directed the box-office dud “Hanging Up” (2000) and revived that failure with an acclaimed turn opposite Jack Nicholson in the comedy “Something’s Gotta Give” (2003). By the time she starred in the romantic comedy “Morning Glory” (2010), the ever stylish Keaton was well known for showcasing powerful emotional journeys of typically non-conformist characters, while having made significant contributions to movies, television, photography, interior design and fashion.
Keaton was born Diane Hall on Jan. 5, 1946, and raised in Santa Ana, CA. The eldest of four kids born to an engineer and amateur photographer, Keaton displayed an enormous range of creative talent growing up, enjoying photography and designing her own clothes while appearing in school plays and harboring dreams of becoming a singer. She spent several years at local colleges after graduating from Santa Ana High School in 1964, but soon moved to New York City, where she studied at Sanford Meisner’s renowned Neighborhood Playhouse. She sang on small nightclub stages, but her acting career was first to take off, and in 1968 Keaton landed a long Broadway run in the original cast of “Hair” (1968), where she became known as the one girl who declined to remove her clothes during the finale. The following year, she was cast in Woody Allen’s Broadway production “Play It Again, Sam” (1970), earning a Tony Award nomination for the comedy and beginning a long working relationship (as well as romantic relationship) with writer and co-star Allen.
After making her feature debut in “Lovers and Other Strangers” (1970), Keaton had already earned an industry reputation for her eccentric leanings, and it was just that undertone that Francis Ford Coppola was looking for in the character of Kay Adams, Michael Corleone’s innocent girlfriend in “The Godfather” (1972). Keaton teamed up with Allen on the big screen in the screwball futuristic comedy “Sleeper” (1973), reprised her role as the now-Mrs. Michael Corleone in “The Godfather Part II” (1974), and retreated to Allen’s skewed world with “Love and Death” (1975). As Allen’s film style evolved into studies of creative, intellectual New Yorkers, he brought Keaton with him and she became an Oscar-winning movie star with her co-starring role opposite him in the landmark “Annie Hall” (1977), a film loosely based on the pair’s now defunct relationship. Keaton made a huge impact in the film, establishing her persona as a multi-dimensional modern woman, smart and culturally sophisticated, but grappling with emotional insecurities. The actress also unwittingly became a style icon whose penchant for men’s vintage clothing and odd vest and hat pairings was widely adopted by the fashion world.
Later that year, Keaton gave another excellent performance in “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” (1977), where her free-spirited persona and ability to embody “mainstream” values added to the impact of her portrayal of a newly “liberated” teacher who forays into the gritty pre-AIDS singles bar scene. After accompanying Allen in the anguished “Interiors” (1978) of his first drama and co-starring as the off-putting know-it-all who eventually woos his character away from his teenaged girlfriend in “Manhattan” (1979), Keaton landed the meaty role of leftist writer-artist Louise Bryant in then-beau Warren Beatty’s ambitious “Reds” (1981). Her complex portrait of lover, heroine and feminist earned her another Best Actress Oscar nomination and solidified her position at the top of Hollywood’s A-list. Keaton left her flair for comic characters in the background, going on to give fine performances as strong-willed women in dramas “Shoot the Moon” (1982), “The Little Drummer Girl” (1984), and “Mrs. Soffel” (1984), where she starred opposite Mel Gibson as a prison warden’s wife who falls in love with an inmate.
The casting of Jessica Lange, Sissy Spacek and Keaton as quirky Southern sisters in “Crimes of the Heart” (1986) did not transform Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play into a hit film, but the actress did finally enjoy some mainstream success with Charles Shyer’s “Baby Boom” (1987), a fluffy comedy she headlined about a devoted career woman suddenly saddled with a baby. Keaton’s lifelong passion for photography eventually led her to directing, so in the late 1980s she began to get her feet wet with music videos and a documentary glimpse at the hereafter called “Heaven” (1987). Keaton rejoined Coppola and the “Godfather” team for the franchise’s ill-received third installment, “The Godfather Part III” (1990) and retreated behind the camera to direct the made-for-TV movies, The CBS Schoolbreak Special, “The Girl with the Crazy Brother” (1990) and “Wildflower” (1991), and episodes of the drama series “China Beach” (ABC, 1988-1991) and “Twin Peaks” (ABC, 1990-91). Back on the silver screen, the mild comedy remake “Father of the Bride” (1991) marked the beginning of a new onscreen era for Keaton; one that often found her as matriarchs of upper middle class families.
Keaton played an eccentric writer involved with Presidential candidate Ed Harris in “Running Mates” (HBO, 1992) before a hilarious and long overdue re-teaming with Allen in “Manhattan Murder Mystery” (1993), a lighthearted caper whose real star was the pair’s undiminished comic chemistry. Back on the small screen, she gave an Emmy Award-nominated starring performance in “Amelia Earhart: The Final Flight” (TNT, 1994), where she was appropriately coiffed for the period and bore a striking resemblance to the famous aviatrix who disappeared over the Pacific in 1937. Back in the director’s chair, Keaton helmed her first fictional feature, “Unstrung Heroes” (1995), receiving mostly good notices for her examination of a boy’s adventures growing up in an off-center Jewish family of the 1960s. In her first big hit since “Annie Hall” nearly a decade earlier, Keaton co-starred with Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler in Hugh Wilson’s “The First Wives Club” (1996) and scored big for her wickedly witty characterization of one of a group of gleefully vengeful exes who have been replaced by younger counterparts.
That uptick in Keaton’s profile led to an Oscar-nominated turn in Marvin’s Room” (1996), an intimate exploration of family love and sacrifice which paired her and Meryl Streep as estranged sisters forced by circumstance to resume their relationship. With neither “The Only Thrill” (1997) nor “The Other Sister” (1999) finding an audience, the Disney Channel’s “Northern Lights” (1997), for which she also served as executive producer, offered arguably her best role for the balance of the decade. As a smart, unsentimental and childless widow who unwillingly takes on the responsibility for her late brother’s nine-year-old, Keaton allowed softer edges to emerge in her delightfully comic performance. Her second feature as director, “Hanging Up” (2000), revisited the sister dynamic, and this time she starred with Meg Ryan and Lisa Kudrow as siblings coping with the impending death of their father (Walter Matthau). After appearing in the all-star ensemble of the comic misfire “Town & Country” (2001) opposite ex-boyfriend Warren Beatty, Keaton scored on television in the amusing “Sister Mary Explains It All” (2001), playing a tough-as-nails nun facing a foursome of former students whose lives her teachings ruined.
Behind the scenes, Keaton served as the executive producer of the critically championed but little-watched series “Pasadena” (Fox, 2001), for which she also directed episodes. She went on to star in the CBS telepic “Crossed Over” (2002), the real-life story of a mother whose son was killed by a hit-and-run driver and overcame her grief and depression by befriending a woman on death row in Texas. A third quality telepic, the Lifetime movie “On Thin Ice” (2003) – based on the true story of a single, widowed mother who dealt drugs during a financial emergency only to late become an FBI drug informant – also earned kudos for Keaton as the lead. Keaton made a triumphant return to the big screen opposite Jack Nicholson in the over-50 romantic comedy “Something’s Gotta Give” (2003). In one of Keaton’s most endearing roles, she gave a bravura performance as a tightly wound novelist who finds herself falling in love with her daughter’s much older, womanizing boyfriend (Jack Nicholson) after he suffers a heart attack at her house. Her palpable chemistry with her co-star, both on the screen and off, fueled the film’s crowd-pleasing appeal and earned Keaton her fourth Oscar nomination as Best Actress (giving her a nod in four different decades), as well as a Golden Globe victory. It even led to rumors of life imitating art, with tabloids whispering of the seemingly ageless Keaton dating her younger co-star from the film, Keanu Reeves. They claimed to be simply friends.
In 2003, Keaton served as executive producer of “Elephant” (2003), director Gus Van Sant’s much-praised exploration of a high school shooting, but returned to comic outings with the 2005 holiday film “The Family Stone” (2005), where she played the matriarch of a bohemian family who welcomes home her son (Dermot Mulroney) and his new girlfriend (Sarah Jessica Parker), a high-powered and controlling New Yorker who is greeted with awkwardness, confusion and hostility. As one of the few middle-aged actresses in much demand, the ever-fashionable 60-year-old, who was outspoken about her anti-plastic surgery stance, was even selected to become a spokesmodel for L’Oreal beauty products. The following year, she appeared opposite former teen singing sensation, Mandy Moore, in “Because I Said So” (2007), a romantic comedy about a well-intentioned but overzealous mother who goes on a mission to find the right man for her daughter. Unfortunately, the film was one of the worst reviewed of the year, with critics slamming Keaton for her choice in vehicle and accusing her of mining the onscreen neurotic act a bit longer than necessary. “Mad Money” fared slightly better with critics, though the implausible female-powered caper starring Keaton, Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes, disappeared from theaters within a few short weeks. Undaunted, the comedy of errors “Smother” (2008) gave Keaton slightly more to work with in her role as a flighty mom who moves in with her grown son (Dax Shepard) and his wife (Liv Tyler). She went on to play a morning show anchor opposite Harrison Ford in the underwhelming comedy “Morning Glory” (2010) and the following year released her memoirs, Then Again, which relied on her mother’s private journals.
By Susan Clarke
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
