Dina Merrill

Dina Merrill obituary in “The Guardian” in 2017.

There has seldom been more closeness between an acting career and a lifestyle than that of Dina Merrill, who has died aged 93. As an heiress, socialite and philanthropist, Merrill had little trouble portraying upper-crust women in films and television.

Her patrician allure led her to be proclaimed “Hollywood’s new Grace Kelly” in 1959. Alas, Merrill was seldom given the chance to shine as much as the star who became a princess. Nevertheless, she had a long career in films from the mid-50s to the mid-60s, and appeared regularly on television from 1955.

Perhaps she was best known on the big screen as Tony Curtis’s love interest in Blake Edwards’ Operation Petticoat (1959). The action comedy starred Cary Grant, who had been married to Merrill’s cousin, the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton. Almost as celebrated was her role as the love rival of Elizabeth Taylor’s character in Butterfield 8 (1960). Despite having won the best actress Oscar for her role, Taylor herself referred to the melodrama as “a piece of shit”. Merrill, who often brought class to tawdry material, was far too ladylike to use such language.

She was born Nedenia Marjorie Hutton in New York City, the only child of Marjorie Merriweather Post (owner of the Post cereal firm, which became General Foods) and her second husband, the Wall Street stockbroker EF Hutton.

Post built the Palm Beach estate Mar-a-Lago a few years before her daughter’s birth, and it was where the family would spend the winter until Post’s death.

The estate was bought by Donald Trump in 1985 after the National Park Service, to which Post left the property, could no longer afford its upkeep.

“Deenie” attended George Washington University, in Washington, DC, for one term, then dropped out and enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. “Of course my parents’ eyebrows shot up when I said I wanted to be an actress. And I guess they said, really between themselves, ‘Let the dear girl try, and fall on her face.’ Because it never occurred to me to ask my father or mother to pay for something they didn’t believe in, I did some modelling while acting off-Broadway.”

Adopting a stage name borrowed from Charles Merrill of Merrill Lynch, a well-known stockbroker like her father, she made her Broadway debut (with three lines) as Dina Merrill in John Van Druten’s play The Mermaids Singing in 1945. She made her feature film debut in Desk Set (1957), as the assistant to a librarian (Katharine Hepburn), one of the staff afraid of losing her job to two giant computers brought in by an efficiency expert (Spencer Tracy). She then brought some dignity to Don’t Give Up the Ship (1959), an asinine comedy in which she co-starred with Jerry Lewis, helping him search for a destroyer he lost during the second world war.

In the same year, Merrill was one of a group of stranded army nurses rescued (reluctantly) by a US submarine captain (Grant) during the second world war in Operation Petticoat. Her presence distracts one of his officers (Curtis) from his duties as he persuades her to let off steam – signified by a whistling kettle after they kiss.

Merrill exuded elegance in the thankless role of the wife of a wealthy businessman (Laurence Harvey) in Butterfield 8, ultimately willing to forgive his philandering with a high-class hooker (Taylor). The wife is actually more concerned that the woman took her $7,000 mink coat after a night with her husband.

In Vincente Minnelli’s The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1963), as a socialite, Merrill, in a black wig, is among the leading contenders to marry the widowed father (Glenn Ford) until rejected by his young son (Ron Howard) because “she has skinny eyes” like the villainesses in his comic books. Back to cool blondeness, Merrill co-starred with Bob Hope in a weary generation gap comedy, I’ll Take Sweden (1965). With a rather wonky Swedish accent, Merrill, who is mainly called upon to laugh at Hope’s wisecracks, portrays an interior decorator whom Hope, playing a businessman, falls for in Stockholm (cue stock shots).

Given her underused and misused talents in Hollywood, it was no wonder that Merrill preferred a career in television. Name any series of the 60s and 70s – Dr Kildare, Bonanza, Rawhide, Mission Impossible, The Love Boat – and Merrill was bound to have appeared in it. She was even in several Batman episodes in 1968, as Calamity Jan opposite her second husband, Cliff Robertson, as Shame.

She returned only rarely to the big screen, working with Robert Altmantwice, in A Wedding (1978), as the bridegroom’s bossy aunt, and as a Hollywood denizen in The Player (1992). Less prestigious was her role as a snobbish society woman in Caddyshack 2 (1988) trying to stop a vulgar nouveau riche tycoon (Jackie Mason) from joining an exclusive golf club. Good sport that Merrill was, she allowed herself the indignity of having Mason chase her with a bulldozer.

Mainly, however, she was involved in numerous charitable and artistic causes. Her son David’s diabetes inspired her to establish the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation; and she served for 12 years as presidential appointee to the board of trustees of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Merrill’s first two marriages ended in divorce. David died in 1973, and the daughter of her second marriage, Heather, also predeceased her. She is survived by her third husband, the film producer Ted Hartley, whom she married in 1989, and by a son, Stanley, and daughter, Nina, from her first marriage, to Stanley Rumbough Jr.

• Dina Merrill (Nedenia Marjorie Hutton), actor, born 29 December 1923; died 22 May 2017

Jane Greer was one of the best of femme fatales. She was born in 1924 in Washington D.C. She made her movie debit in “Pan-Americana” in 1924. She was splendid opposite Robert Mitchum in “Out of the Past” in 1947 and “The Big Steal” in 1949. Her other films include “Down Among the Sheltering Palms” and “Man of A Thousand Faces”. She died in 2001.

Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Independent”:

Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire, could make and break any actress’s career on a whim and often did. In 1943, when Hughes saw a reproduction of a second world war recruitment poster in Life magazine of the petite, almond-eyed, 18-year-old Bettejane Greer, posing in a smart new WAC uniform, he told one of his acolytes to “find this girl as soon as possible and sign her up.” Jane Greer, who has died aged 76, was whisked by Hughes from Washington DC, where she was born, to Los Angeles, and although she eventually became one of the leading actresses in film noir , she had to wait two years to appear on screen.

Her mother, who wrote children’s stories and traced her family back to the poet John Donne, worked in the US war department’s public information office and got her daughter the job modelling the uniform. And it was her mother who accompanied the young Bettejane to Los Angeles. Even so Hughes managed to keep Greer under a kind of house arrest for five months. “Hughes was obsessed with me,” she said many years later. “But at first it seemed as if he were offering me a superb career opportunity.”

As soon as she could manage to evade Hughes and his spies, Greer met Rudy Vallee, the former crooner turned comic supporting actor, and they married a few weeks later. Hughes was enraged and warned her that unless she divorced Vallee, he would drop her. He had signed her to a seven-year contract, but failed to find any roles for her. Frustrated, Greer managed to get out of her contract and join RKO.

However, Hughes continued to pressure Greer and, as a result, her marriage suffered. Soon after her divorce from Vallee in 1944, Greer moved in with Hughes as his lover. At first, RKO gave her bit parts as show girls in three films under her real name of Bettejane Greer. She had taken part in many beauty and talent contests as a child, and began modelling professionally at the age of 12. She dropped out of her senior year at high school to work as a vocalist with a nightclub band, though she only had a chance to sing in her first few films. One of these was The Falcon’s Alibi (1946), in which Greer played a lively band singer who is murdered by crazed disc jockey Elisha Cook Jr. Her first decent role was as one of the three women betrayed by murderous cad Robert Young in They Won’t Believe Me (1947). Chic in a wardrobe of trim suits and hats, she coolly seeks her revenge. In the same year, she came into her own as one of the great two-timing dames in Jacques Tourneur’s superb film noir Out of The Past, a part that was enough to make her one of the icons of the genre.

As the femme fatale who coldly seduces Robert Mitchum in his first starring role, Greer changes character expertly to suit her particular needs, remote one moment, charming the next. “I had never read a part like that,” Greer recalled. “All through the picture they talk about you, so that by the time you come on screen, everyone thinks you’re going to be nine feet tall.”

Of Tourneur, she commented, “He did not tell his actors very much. He said to me, ‘First half of picture, Good Girl. Last half of picture, Bad Girl. No big eyes’.”

She followed this by playing a tough but beautiful gambling house owner in Station West (1948) responsible for the killing of two soldiers. Naturally, Dick Powell, who is on her trail, falls for her before bringing about her demise.

Despite the fact that Greer was now married to an attorney, Edward Lasker, Hughes, in a noirish twist of fate, had just bought RKO, and was still interested in her romantically. When Greer resisted him, Hughes barked out, “As long as I own the studio, you won’t work.” However, he relented and cast her to co-star once again with Mitchum, this time in Don Siegel’s fast-paced The Big Steal (1949).

Greer’s last film for RKO was The Company She Keeps (1950). In it, she was a deceitful ex-con, making a play for the boyfriend of her parole officer (Lizabeth Scott). In one scene, the baby in her arms is Jeff Bridges, making his screen debut.

Thereafter, Greer never again had the chance to use her sassy, sensual charms to full advantage. At MGM, there was not much to get her teeth into, except as the plotting Antoinette de Mauban in the Technicolor remake of The Prisoner Of Zenda (1952), though she was billed sixth.

In 1953, Greer retired to raise her family of three boys, all of them later taking up careers in the movie and music industries. Subsequently, she made only sporadic appearances on screen: in John Boulting’s sluggish Run for the Sun (1956), with Richard Widmark and Trevor Howard, and as the second wife of Lon Chaney (James Cagney) in Man Of A Thousand Faces (1957).

In 1964, she joined two other aging drama queens, Susan Hayward and Bette Davis, in the soap operatics of Where Love Has Gone in which she played a sympathetic probation officer. One of her last appearances was in Against All Odds (1984), a remake of Out of the Past, Greer’s best film. She was given the small part, not in the original, of Rachel Ward’s mother, only as a reminder to cinephiles of the great days of the 1940s when Jane Greer entered the film noir hall of fame.

She is survived by her sons.

Jane Greer, actor, born September 9 1924; died August 24 2001

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

The Prisoner Of Zenda, poster, Stewart Granger, Jane Greer, James Mason, Deborah Kerr, 1952. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Eleanor Parker’s career is in definite need of reappraisal. She was one of the most strikingly efffective actresses in Hollywood during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950’s. She was born in Cedarville, Ohio in 1922. She made her film debut in 1942 in “Soldiers in White”. She was soon in good supprting roles and by 1946 she was a leading actress in such movies as “Between Two Worlds”, “Pride of the Marines” and “Of Human Bondage” as Mildred. She gave a brilliant performace in 1950 in “Caged”. Among her other major films are “”The Naked Jundgle” with Charlton Heston, “Valley of the Kings” with Robert Taylor and “Interrupted Melody” opposite Glenn Ford. Her last major movie role was as the Countess in “The Sound of Music” in 1965. She died in 2013.

Her Guardian obituary by Ronald Bergan:

n the Hollywood of the 1940s and 50s, when typecasting was an essential constituent of stardom, Eleanor Parker, who has died aged 91, never gained the recognition she deserved, because she refused to be pigeonholed. “It means I’ve been successful in creating the characters that I’ve portrayed – that I’m not just a personality who is seen in a variety of roles.” Dana Andrews, her co-star in Madison Avenue (1962), called her “the least heralded great actress”.

The 1957 film Lizzie is almost a reflection of her career. Parker plays three separate and distinct characters harboured inside one woman – the shy, self-effacing Elizabeth; the wanton, raunchy Lizzie; and the “normal” Beth – and switches brilliantly from one to the other. Parker was always able to be convincing in these three sorts of characters. She was naive as the girl in love with Ronald Reagan in The Voice of the Turtle (1947). In it, Reagan whispers to her: “You’re very sweet. I don’t know what goes on in that funny little head of yours, but you’re very sweet.”

In contrast, she was the cockney waitress Mildred Rogers in Of Human Bondage (1946), who obsesses Paul Henreid as the tormented medical student in the first remake of the Somerset Maugham story. “I can’t help it,” he cries. “Even though I’ve despised her, I yearned for her madly. How can there be a greater torture in this world to love and at the time condemn? She’s in my blood.”

In her third persona, Parker was the sophisticate, as in the role for which she is best known by a later generation, the wealthy and glamorous baroness, love rival of Maria (Julie Andrews), in The Sound of Music (1965). “I’m sure you’ll make a very fine nun,” she tells Andrews, tartly. Almost two decades before, Errol Flynn said to her in Escape Me Never (1947): “I hate to repeat the obvious, but you are beautiful. There’s something so cool and lovely about you; you’re like edelweiss.”

Parker was born in Cedarville, Ohio, the youngest of three children. Her father was a teacher of mathematics, and her family had no theatrical background. Yet, at a young age, she started performing in plays at school. Already a beauty in her teens, she studied at the Rice Summer theatre in Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. While she was there, an agent from 20th Century-Fox offered her a screen test, which she declined in favour of continuing her education. After she graduated from high school, she studied at the Pasadena Playhouse, where a Warner Bros scout spotted her, and she was again asked to do a screen test. She refused. Finally, in 1941, aged 19, she was ready, and called Warners, who signed her to a contract.

Her film debut was in a small part in the Flynn epic They Died With Their Boots On (1941), but she was cut from the final release print. However, she soon had a few ingenue roles. On the set of Mission to Moscow (1943), she met Lieutenant Fred Losse, a navy dentist, and they were married soon afterwards. The marriage lasted for two years.

Parker was kept busy at Warners throughout the 1940s, her first major starring part being in Between Two Worlds (1944), based on the 1924 play Outward Bound. It involves a group of passengers on a mysterious boat who find they are dead and must now face the after-life. Parker gave a sensitive portrayal of a woman who, refusing to be separated from the man she loves (Henreid), has joined him in suicide.

Parker gave another touching performance in Pride of the Marines (1945) as the girlfriend of a war hero (John Garfield) who is blinded fighting on Guadalcanal. But her greatest challenge to date was as the ruthless Mildred in Of Human Bondage (1946), not only because Bette Davis in the same role 12 years previously was still in some people’s minds but because Parker had to reveal a nasty side, which she did with relish, especially in the scene where she smashes up a room with a poker. She tried to perfect her cockney accent for the role. “I got a book dealing with the dialect … and I pretty well wore it out.”

Parker made another reasonably successful attempt at an English accent (this time a posh one) in The Woman in White (1948), a respectable Hollywood adaptation from the Wilkie Collins mystery.

Both Eleanor Parker as the wrongly convicted prisoner and Hope Emerson as the prison matron gained Oscar nominations for their performances in Caged (1950)Her stardom assured, Parker married Bert Friedlob, a would-be film producer, in 1946. Although she took some time off to have two daughters and a son, she was still fairly active on screen. She received the first of her three Oscar nominations for the wrongly convicted prisoner in Caged (1950), in which she clearly defines the gradual changes in the pregnant prisoner’s character, from innocence to corruption. By the time she leaves prison, we see by her walk, her attitude, and even her voice, how life inside has affected her.

In 1950, Parker decided not to renew her contract with Warners and went freelance. Among her best roles in the 1950s was as loving wife to detective James McLeod (Kirk Douglas) in Detective Story (1951), revealing to him that she had an abortion when she was young, before they met. Variety commented that she “plays the wife with a dignity and emotional depth”. For this comparatively short part, Parker was again nominated for an Oscar.

At MGM, she came into her own in a number of their finest productions. In Scaramouche (1952), she is Lenore, the fiery travelling performer of whom Stewart Granger’s character says: “When you are placid, you are beautiful. When you’re angry, you are superb!” Parker was then paired with Robert Taylor in three movies, one of which was a comedy western, Many Rivers to Cross (1955). She co-starred with William Holden in John Sturges’s superior western Escape From Fort Bravo (1953). Holden introduced her to her third husband, Paul Clemens, an artist, with whom she would have a son.

One of Parker’s greatest roles was as the polio-afflicted Australian dramatic soprano Marjorie Lawrence in Interrupted Melody (1955). With her voice dubbed by Eileen Farrell in the opera sequences, Parker brought superb emotional power to the part. Again, she was nominated for an Oscar. There followed another string of challenging and contrasting roles: Frank Sinatra’s possessive wife in The Man With the Golden Arm (1955); the unhappy wife in The Seventh Sin (1957), based on Maugham’s The Painted Veil; the handsome widow angling for Sinatra in Frank Capra’s A Hole in the Head (1959) and the long- suffering wife of a wealthy Texas land baron (Robert Mitchum) in Vincente Minnelli’s Home from the Hill (1960).

Apart from The Sound of Music, many of Parker’s films in the 1960s were inconsequential. She kept being referred to as an “old lady” as the agent of an over-ambitious actor (Stephen Boyd) in The Oscar (1966), which gives some indication of how Hollywood treated stars moving into middle age.

As films dried up, Parker turned to television. She appeared in a wide variety of shows, including the series Bracken’s World (1969-70). One of her last appearances was in a TV movie called Dead on the Money (1991), a performance of which the New York Post wrote: “Parker as a matriarch flashes so much style with just a cold calculating smile that it’s a shame the veteran actress hasn’t found more regular work.”

Her marriage to Clemens ended in divorce in 1965; and her fourth husband, Raymond Hirsch, whom she married the following year, died in 2001. She is survived by her four children, Susan, Sharon, Richard and Paul.

• Eleanor Jean Parker, actor, born 26 June 1922; died 9 December 2013

Her Guardian obituary can be accessed on-line here:

Helen Reddy was born in 1941 in Melbourne, Australia. She began her show business career in her home land and achieved national there with her appearances on the popular television programme “Bandstand”. She came to New York in 1965 to pursue her career in the U.S. She won a recording contract with Capitol Records and in 1972 she had a massive popular hit with the song “I am Woman”. Her other hits include “Delta Dawn” and “Angie Baby”. In the mid 1970’s she starred in such movies as “Airport 1975” and Walt Disney’s “Pete’s Dragon” with Jim Dale. More recently she has starred in such stage shows as “Shirley Valentine”, “Blood Brothers” and “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”. Helen Reddy died in 2020 at the age of 77.

Helen Reddy obituary

Australian singer who enjoyed huge success with her 1972 feminist anthem I Am Woman

Accepting the 1973 Grammy award in the best female pop vocal category, Helen Reddy rubbed salt into her critics’ wounds by saying: ‘I would like to thank God, because she makes everything possible.’ Photograph: Ian Dickson/Redferns

Caroline Sullivan

Wed 30 Sep 2020 17.44 BST

Every social movement has its definitive song, and feminism got its anthem in 1972, when the Australian singer Helen Reddy released the single I Am Woman. In three elegant minutes, it hewed a portal through which schoolgirls and their mothers saw an empowered future. Reaching No 1 in the US and selling 1m copies there, it also established Reddy, who has died aged 78, as one of the top-selling female vocalists of the decade.

In her pomp during the early to mid-1970s no woman sold more records or scored more No 1 singles in a row (six) on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart; nor did any other female vocalist excite quite such opposing views among the public. Hipsters were repelled by her silky vocal style and smooth arrangements, with Alice Cooper dubbing her “the queen of housewife rock”; conservatives, on the other hand, were unsettled by I Am Woman’s call to arms.

Accepting the 1973 Grammy award in the best female pop vocal category, Reddy rubbed salt into the wound by saying: “I would like to thank God, because she makes everything possible.” For her part, Reddy concurred with Cooper: “[Queen of housewife rock] means I’ve reached a lot of people in a simplistic manner who would never go to a lecture or read an article on women’s lib.”

Helen Reddy performing in London in 1974. Photograph: Ian Dickson/Redferns

She had not expected the song to become a hit, let alone a cultural touchstone. She wrote the lyrics (the music was composed by an Australian guitarist friend, Ray Burton) on impulse, having lain in bed one night and taken stock of the grinding struggle to break through in the music business.

As a jobbing singer in Australia and then Los Angeles, she had been belittled and harassed by male executives and performers, and consequently became part of a Hollywood women’s discussion group. What emerged the day she wrote I Am Woman was effortlessly, unequivocally anthemic: “I am woman, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore … I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman.”

It caught the mood of what was then called the women’s liberation movement just as it was becoming an unstoppable wave; nearly 50 years later, the phrase “hear me roar” is part of the lexicon.

Helen Reddy in California last year. Photograph: John Sciulli/Getty Images

Yet Reddy did not fancy its chances in the chart. And, initially, events bore her out. The tune was tucked away on her 1971 debut album, I Don’t Know How to Love Him, which had been hastily recorded after the title track, written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice for the musical Jesus Christ Superstar the previous year, became a medium-sized hit.

For commercial purposes I Am Woman, the fourth song on side one, was just another album track. Though Reddy opened her live shows with it, she maintained that it was “clearly not hit single material”, and if it had not fortuitously been used in the soundtrack of a 1972 Jacqueline Bisset comedy, Stand Up and Be Counted, Reddy would have been proved right.

The exposure in the film persuaded her label to put it out as a single, and her then husband and manager, Jeff Wald, arranged performing slots on nearly 20 American TV programmes. After six months’ slow progress up the chart, I Am Woman finally reached No 1. In Australia, it was No 2; the UK, however, took no notice until the 1974 single Angie Baby became her sole British hit.

For the purveyor of a highly influential song, Reddy herself presented the mildest of figures. Restraint in both performance and appearance was her trademark. In an era when pop-star fashion ran to road-worn denim or glam-rock frippery, Reddy took the middle path: stylish but toned down.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

The #1 Grammy-winning “I Am Woman” became not only THE anthem of the feminist movement during the radical 1970s, but also the signature song for its crop-haired composer and singer Helen Reddy. Three decades later this is the hit people still remember her for, despite the fact she had an abundance of other “top ten” records over the course of her long career.

Helen was born to Australian show-biz parents (comedy actor/producer/writer Max Reddyand singer/soap opera actress Stella Lamond) and began performing at the age of four at the Tivoli Theatre in Perth, Australia, touring much of her native country with her parents. She left boarding school at age 15 to work on the road singing and acting. Her musical style is best described as a light amalgam of rhythm and blues, easy rock and jazz. Her soothing, quivery vocals and equally warm appeal was instantly embraced, eventually earning her own Australian radio show. “Helen Reddy Sings” aired twice weekly on the Australian Broadcasting Commission.

In 1966 Helen won a trip to New York in an Austalian Bandstand International contest and, though she met with little success during this excursion, did meet and marry second husband Jeff Wald, a manager and an agent with the William Morris talent agency. They married the following year and went to Los Angeles. Wald worked Helen into a few performances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962), fifteen appearances total, and the resulting attention earned her her first hit with a top version of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from the Broadway rock musical “Jesus Christ Superstar” in February 1972. Signed by Capitol Records, she enjoyed hit after hit throughout the early 70s, with “Delta Dawn” (1973) and “Angie Baby” (1974) also reaching #1. In 1973 Helen had her own summer-replacement variety show and was a popular hostess for a time on NBC’s late-night variety show The Midnight Special (1972). She tried to parlay her singing success into a film career but the pretty, wholesome-looking entertainer received only a mild reception for the Disney children’s film Pete’s Dragon (1977) and it went no further.

In 1982 she divorced Wald and married a third time the following year to drummer Milton Ruth. Helen has ventured on into the concert and symphony orchestra forums as well as becoming a popular cabaret and nightclub attraction. In recent years she has graced a number of musical theater productions both on Broadway and in London’s West End. Over the years she has been considered a primary interpreter of English playwright Willy Russell, having appeared in four productions of his one-woman show “Shirley Valentine.” Other live musical productions have included “Anything Goes,” “Call Me Madam,” “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” and Russell’s “Blood Brothers”, in which she made her Broadway debut. Lately she is living again in her native Australia and retired from the business in 2002. These days she is a practicing hypnotherapist and motivational speaker.

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

Bill Duke was born in New York in 1943. He is known for his strong imposing persona on film. His movies include “Car Wash” in 1976, “American Gigolio” in 1980 and “Commando”.

IMDB entry:

Shaven headed, imposing looking African American actor, director, producer and writer who received his dramatic arts training at Boston University, New York University’s Tisch School of Arts and at the American Film Institute. Duke first broke into TV in the early eighties directing episodes of well known TV shows including Miami Vice (1984), Cagney & Lacey (1981) and Hill Street Blues (1981). Additionally he directed several made for TV movies that received wide critical acclaim including American Playhouse (1981) (The Killing Floor) and American Playhouse: A Raisin in the Sun (1989). Big Bill Duke’s face then became known to movie goers following his appearance in several high octane action movies of the mid 1980s including fighting (and losing) to Arnold Schwarzeneggerin Commando (1985), as unlucky mercenary “Mac”, in Predator (1987) and as Carl Weathers fiery police chief in Action Jackson (1988). After cutting his directorial teeth on the small screen, Duke directed his first feature film with the crime drama, A Rage in Harlem (1991). This was followed by another impressive crime film Deep Cover (1992), then the, The Cemetery Club (1993), and the comedy sequel, Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993). Duke has since continued to divide his time between appearing both in front of the camera and behind it, and remains a dynamic, stimulating and creative talent in Hollywood.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: firehouse44

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Beverly Adams was born in Edmondton, Alberta, Canada in 1940. She had a recurring role in the Matt Helm spy series starring Dean Martin beginning with “The Silencers”. She retired from acting after her marriage to the hair stylist Vidal Sassoon. After their divorce in 1980 she resumed her acting career.

Wikipedia entry:

Adams was born in Edmonton, Alberta to a Canadian mother and a U.S. Air Force father (who once played minor league baseball) and was raised Roman Catholic. As a child, Adams moved to Burbank, California where, as a teen, she competed in and won beauty contests before becoming an actress.^[1]^[2] During her career, Adams appeared in various guest roles in television series of the 1960s. She also appeared in several films, most notably as the klutzy, redheaded Cassandra in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini and the recurring role of Lovey Kravezit in the Matt Helm movies starring Dean Martin.

After marrying hairstylist Vidal Sassoon in 1966, Adams retired from acting to raise the couple’s four children. During her retirement from acting, Adams published several books and served as a spokeswoman for Vidal Sassoon, Inc. In 1980, the couple divorced and Adams returned to acting. She also launched her own line of pet care products, Beverly Sassoon Pet Care System.^[3]

They had four children, including or in addition to one adopted son:^[4] daughter Catya (1968–2002), an actress who died from a drug-induced heart attack; son Elan BenVidal (b. January 17, 1970);^[5]^[6] son David (b. circa 1972);^[7] and daughter Eden Sassoon (born circa 1973).^[7

Andrea Marcovicci was born in 1948 in Manhattan. In 1977 she starred with Wood Allen in the movie “The Front”. She has also starred in “The Concorde – Airport 79”. She is a popular lounge performer.

IMDB entry:

Andrea Marcovicci was born on November 18, 1948 in New York City, New York, USA. She is an actress, known for The Stuff (1985), The Hand (1981) and The Front (1976). She has been married to Daniel Reichert since February 1, 1993. They have one child. Listed as one of twelve “Promising New Actors of 1976” in John Willis’ Screen World, Vol. 28. Her strong New York stage background include playing Ophelia opposite Sam Waterston’s Hamlet for Joseph Papp, her Broadway debut with Howard Keel in “Ambassador” and starring with Anthony Newley in the musical “Chaplin” portraying all of Chaplin’s wives. In 1993 the soulful singer made her Carnegie Hall solo debut with the American Symphony Orchestra. She was nominated for a 1974 Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Actress in a Principal Role for a Musical for her performance in “Dance on a Country Grave” at the Arlington Park Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Gave birth to her first child at age 46, a daughter Alice Wolf Reichert on August 17, 1995. Child’s father is her husband, Daniel Reichert.

Sophia Loren was born in Pozzuoli in 1934. She made her debut in Italian movies in 1970 and began starring internationally in 1957 in “Boy on a Dolphin” with Alan Ladd. Her Hollywood movies include “Houseboat” with Cary Grant, “Desire Under the Elms” with Anthony Perkins and “The Black Orchid” with Anthony Quinn and Ina Balin. In 1961 she won an Oscar for her performance in “Two Women”. Her career has continued undimmed by time and she starred with Daniel Day-Lewis in “Nine” in 2009.

TCM Overview:

Italian actress and bonafide screen goddess Sophia Loren made over 100 films in her 50-year career, remaining one of the most beloved and recognizable figures in the international film world. Much of her success could be found in the films of Italian director Vittorio De Sica, who called her “the essential Italian woman” and who captured her earthy, authentic sensibilities in romantic comedies and gut-wrenching dramas alike. While a cultural institution in her native country, Loren’s homeland appeal never fully translated to U.S. audiences, though she earned plenty of fans based on her traffic-stopping physical assets. Hollywood’s attempts to insert her into generic “European sex bomb” roles failed to showcase the actress’ depth, even if it sometimes captured her acute wit. Throughout her career, Loren worked with some of film’s most renowned directors and leading men, but the bulk of her artistic achievements remained in Italian cinema and opposite her frequent lead, Marcello Mastroianni. In addition to her many European accolades, Hollywood recognized her with Academy Award nominations, including a Best Actress win for “Ciociara, La” (“Two Women”) (1960) and years later, an honorary Oscar for her many contributions to both American and Italian cinema.

Sophia Loren was born Sofia Scicolone in the charity ward of a Rome hospital on Sept. 20, 1934. Her parents were never married, and her father left her mother Romilda Villani to raise her daughter on her own. Romilda, an aspiring actress and piano player, moved with Sophia and second daughter, Maria, to Pozzuoli, a small town outside Naples and one of the hardest hit during World War II. The family shared a two-room apartment with a grandmother and several aunts and uncles, where the shy, stick thin girl regularly went hungry and had to flee from bombings. Underneath the hardship and poverty, Loren later claimed she was born an actress and sought to perform from the age of 12. There were few financial opportunities for a single parent in the devastated post-war city, so Loren’s ambitious mother decided to take advantage of her 14-year-old daughter’s voluptuous figure and enter her into a local beauty contest. Loren placed second and set off in search of modeling work in Rome, where her exotic looks and pin-up figure found success in “fumetti” – comic-strip serials that used real photos instead of illustrations.

In 1949, Loren was runner-up in the Miss Italy contest and began to make small film appearances under the name Sofia Lazzaro. While attending the Miss Rome beauty contest, she met judge Carlo Ponti, an up-and-coming film producer and key player in the post war European cinema scene. He had already launched actress and model Gina Lollobrigida into stardom, and he sensed similar potential in Loren though her’s was a less glamorous, more salt-of-the-earth appeal. The newcomer took drama lessons and appeared in over a dozen small films as directors struggled to find a niche for her charismatic presence. Her first sizeable role – and the first in which she used the Ponti-created stage name Sophia Loren – was 1952’s “La Favorita,” but her starring role in the 1953 film adaptation of Verdi’s “Aida” was a major breakthrough which earned her critical notice and a production deal with Ponti. Vittorio De Sica’s “Gold of Naples” (1954), which featured an inordinately long tracking shot of Loren as she swayed her hourglass figure through a village street, was her star-making performance and one that established her persona as a sensuous working class earth mother. It also began a fruitful, career-long collaboration with De Sica.

With “Gold of Naples,” critics who had written her off as a pin-up girl now understood that Loren possessed originality, talent and palpable onscreen passion. She advanced to the forefront of Italian cinema with starring roles as plucky peasants, street thieves, and fishmongers in a dozen films, including “Too Bad She’s Bad” (1954), which began her career-long on-screen pairing with Marcello Mastroianni. Loren co-starred with Anthony Quinn in the French production “Attila” (1954) and began to study English in anticipation of branching out internationally. Some of her films had been dubbed in English and released overseas to lukewarm reception, but Hollywood producers were certain she could become a star on U.S. soil if she were showcased in typical American-made fare. While still in Europe, she got her Hollywood feet wet in the Napoleonic epic “The Pride and the Passion” (1957), which billed Loren third after stars Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant, and proved to be one of the top U.S. box office successes of the year.

Loren’s personal life grew extremely complicated during the production, however, as co-star Grant fell instantly in love with Loren and vowed to divorce his wife and marry her. The pair dated for a while (despite the fact that Grant was married and 30 years her senior), but Loren did not fall as hard as Grant did, despite the fact that she had grown up with a schoolgirl crush on the movie star. At the same time, Ponti – also married and 30 years her senior – stepped forward to declare that he, too, was in love with Loren. The pair had grown close during their years working together, with Ponti serving as a career mentor and also a kind, guiding father figure for the fatherless young adult. Later in the year, when Loren arrived in Hollywood preceded by a huge press campaign, Ponti’s lawyers obtained a Mexican divorce for him and he and Loren were married. The actress jetted back to Cinecitta studios in Rome to shoot the silly aquatic romance “The Boy on the Dolphin” (1957), which sought to capitalize more on Loren’s figure in a bathing suit than her insightful acting or wit. Grant was understandably devastated by Loren’s decision of choosing Ponti over him and it took him a long time to recover.

The young ingénue was paired with dusty screen cowboy John Wayne in “Legend of the Lost” (1957), a lackluster African adventure, but was given more of a chance to use her talents in the adaptation of Eugene O’Neil’s “Desire Under the Elms” (1958), where she was the center of a love triangle between a New England father (Burl Ives) and son (Anthony Perkins). It was the first product of a newly-inked deal between Loren and Paramount. What followed next was the hit romantic comedy “Houseboat” (1958) co-starring spurned lover Cary Grant as a single dad and Loren as their nanny. Not unexpectedly, the shoot was difficult for both, with Grant still harboring love for his ex. Loren was embraced by American audiences, though many of her supporters were disappointed to see her “dolled up” and playing a European aristocrat, which was about as far from her native appeal as possible. Paramount was intent on maintaining this image of Loren and again she appeared as a sophisticated urban woman in Sidney Lumet’s clichéd melodrama “That Kind of Woman” (1959). Martin Ritt finally gave Loren a meaty character to inhabit in “The Black Orchid” (1958), where she played opposite Anthony Quinn as a hard-working mob widow. Her performance was recognized with a Best Actress honor at the Venice Film Festival, but the film did not draw American filmg rs.

When box office numbers for George Cukor’s offbeat Western “Heller in Pink Tights” (1960) failed to excite Paramount execs, they cut Loren loose from her contract. Her final Paramount release – the romantic comedy “It Started in Naples” (1960) co-starring yet another older male co-star, Clark Gable – was a summer success, but by the time it was released, Loren and Ponti had returned to Europe. The pair received a chilly reception in Italy, which did not recognize divorce and considered Ponti a bigamist. The Catholic Church annulled Loren and Ponti’s marriage, so the pair and Ponti’s first wife moved to France, where divorce was legal, and began to establish citizenship with an eye towards clearing up the whole mess. Loren got right back to work, co-starring opposite Peter Sellers in the hit British comedy “The Millionairess” (1960), where she built on comic singing talents she had begun to display as a cabaret singer in “It Started in Naples.” But she experienced the biggest success of her career when she reunited with director De Sica for “Two Women” (1960), which saw Loren reliving her war-torn youth to play a widow desperately trying to protect her daughter from danger, only to end up in a destructive love triangle with a young radical (Jean Paul Belmondo). She earned a Best Actress Academy Award, the first actress ever to do so for a foreign language performance.

In one of the better offerings from the “historic epic” trend of the era, Loren co-starred opposite Charlton Heston in “El Cid” (1961), a grand-scale adaptation of the life of the 11th century Castilian military general. She continued to work steadily in Italian, French and American productions, earning steady accolades for her work with De Sica and Mastroianni in the Best Foreign Film Academy Award winner “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” (1963) and “Marriage, Italian Style” (1964), which earned Loren an Academy nomination again for Best Actress. Among her bigger English language successes of the 1960s was Stanley Donen’s stylish comic thriller “Arabesque” (1966) which co-starred Gregory Peck. The British production “A Countess from Hong Kong” (1967), co-starring Loren and Marlon Brando, was a flop but notable for being the final film directed by comic-turned-director, Charles Chaplin. The same year, Loren returned to her film roots with her role as a Spanish peasant opposite Omar Sharif as a marriage-minded prince in the lighthearted fairy tale “More than a Miracle” (1967). Off-screen, her own fairy tale romance finally had a happy ending when she and Ponti, now French citizens, were officially married.

After several miscarriages and a highly-publicized struggle to become pregnant, Loren gave birth to son Hubert Leoni Carlo Ponti in 1968. She returned to the screen to star opposite Mastroianni in De Sica’s war drama “I Girasoli” (1972) and the following year, gave birth to her second son, Eduardo. Italian authorities dismissed Ponti’s outstanding bigamy charges and the family was free to move back to their homeland, where Loren spent the majority of the decade in Italian productions. 1974’s “Il Viaggio” marked the final directorial effort of De Sica, but Loren continued to enjoy onscreen success opposite Mastroianni in the mob comedy “La Pupa del Gangster” (1975) and in Ettore Scola’s considerably more sophisticated drama, “A Special Day” (1977), which found favor with American audiences and earned a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. Seeking to capitalize on Loren’s latest U.S. success, Hollywood tapped Loren for a pair of thrillers – the WW II-set “The Brass Target” (1978) and “Firepower” (1979) which offered her a central role as a widow seeking answers in the murder of her chemist husband.

During the 1980s, Loren made only a few feature films while she raised her teenaged sons, but her status as a “legend” and a “survivor” was unshakably secure. She released the autobiography Sophia Loren: Living and Loving in 1979, and the following year starred in a made-for-TV adaptation entitled “Sophia Loren: Her Own Story” (1980), where she played both herself and her mother. In 1981, she became the first female celebrity to launch her own perfume, Sophia, and a brand of eyewear followed soon thereafter. Still an international symbol of beauty well into her 40s, she published another book, Women and Beauty (1984). More American TV movies followed, including “The Fortunate Pilgrim” (1988), Mario Puzo’s miniseries about the Italian American experience. In 1990, Loren was awarded a second, honorary Oscar for her lifetime achievement in film, and in 1994, she returned to U.S. theaters in Robert Altman’s much ballyho d (but disappointing) take on the French fashion scene, “Ready to Wear,” which paired her one last time with Mastroianni. She followed up with her biggest U.S. hit in decades, the aging buddy comedy “Grumpier Old Men” (1995) starring Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau and Ann-Margret as clashing citizens of a sleepy Minnesota town.

In 2007, Loren proved that she still had sizzle when she posed in a calendar for Italian racing tire giant Pirelli, appearing tousled and partially clothed in an unkempt bed. Sadly, that same year she lost her husband of 50 years, Carlo Ponti, who was said to have continually wo d his wife during all those decades by giving her a single rose every day of their marriage. The secret to their marital success was simple. Despite their position as showbiz royalty in their native land, the pair had relished their discrete, low profile lifestyle, with Loren claiming through the years that “show business is what we do, not what we are.”

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Gila Golan. IMDB.

Gila Golan was born in Krakow in Poland in 194o. She came to Israel in 1951 and continued her studies there.In 1960 she won the beauty contest “Miss Israel” and came second in the “Miss World” contest of the same year. She went to New York where she became a model and then secured a movie contract with Columbia Studios. Among her films are “Ship of Fools” in 1965 with Vivien Leigh, “Three On a Couch” with Jerry Lewis and “The Valley of Gwangi” in 1969, the year she retired from acting on her marriage.

IMDB entry:

Gila Golan’s career started as an Israeli fashion model, which led to appearances as a film actress. She was apparently born in Krakow, Poland, for she was discovered there in a train station during the German occupation in 1940.

She was adopted by a Roman Catholic couple and later sent to a boarding school in France before emigrating to Israel after World War II where she changed her name from Zusia Sobetzcki to Miriam Goldberg.

She became interested in fashion and her being spotted by an American photographer led to appearing in the Israeli magazine La’isha. It was a natural step for her to extend her fashion activities into the 1960 competition which led to her being crowned “Na’arat Israel” – Israel’s Maiden of Beauty (IMB) – or using international usage, “Miss Israel.” For this competition she changed her name to Gila Golan.

Such a change of names to one more typically Israeli was common at the time, but she may have done this to prevent any embarrassment to her religiously conservative family and friends. She went on to place second in the Miss World competition held later that year in London where she met the Columbia Pictures executive William Cohan and his wife.

This led to her entrance into films with a debut in Ship of Fools (1965). Cohen and his wife came to view her as sort of a foster daughter. She married three times and has several children and reportedly she now runs an investment business.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Brian Greenhalgh

The anove IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.