Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 67 of 128

Laura Devon

Laura Devon was a stringly beautiful actress who had some leads in Hollywood films of the 1960’s but retired early after her marriage to film composer Maurice Jarre. She was born in 1961 in Chicago. She began her career on television and her movie debut came in 1964 in “Goodbye Charlie” with Tony Curtis and Pat Boone. Among her other movies are “Red Line 7000”, “A Covenant With Death” with George Maharis and Katy Jurado and “Gunn” in 1967 with Craig Stevens. She died in 2007.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Gorgeous, well-endowed singer/actress Laura Devon arrived in Tinseltown during the early 1960s, but gave notice less than a decade later and retired permanently after her second marriage. She made only five films. Laura was categorized as one of those beautiful bouffant blondes of film and TV who were usually cast as diverting set decoration — the equally blonde lovelies Sharon Tate, Yvette Mimieux and Dorothy Provine, come first to mind.

She was born Mary Lou Briley in Chicago, Illinois, on May 23, 1931, the daughter of Merrill Devon, an auto engineer of Swedith, Scottish and Irish descent, and a mother of Dutch heritage. Her family later moved to Grosse Point, Michigan, where she attended University High School. Her interest in singing came at a fairly young age and, by her early teens, was performing. Graduating from the University of Michigan where she majored in journalism and political science, she began acting on stage in such musicals as “The Boyfriend” at the Vanguard Playhouse in Detroit.

In 1961, Laura was spotted singing at a Detroit night club by a 20th Century-Fox talent agent and given a screen test. Universal also took an interest in her photogenic beauty and signed her instead. Laura’s first year under contract involved intensive study in acting, singing and dance before she even started making the rounds on TV. Eventually, she appeared in such popular programs as Route 66 (1960) and Twilight Zone (1959), her big break coming when she and another budding actress, June Harding, were hired as ensemble cast members on The Richard Boone Show (1963), an anthology TV series also featuring veterans Boone, Warren Stevens, Jeanette Nolan, Harry Morgan, Robert Blake,Guy Stockwell, Bethel Leslie and Ford Rainey.

Falling easily into the Hollywood scene, Laura had dated handsome actor Brian Kelly back in Detroit (his native city). Their romance ended when he went to Hollywood but rekindled again when she, too, made it to Hollywood in 1961. They married a year later, and the good-looking couple became a part of the “in crowd” while moving up the acting ladder. A couple of months after their June wedding, they appeared together in Lillian Hellman‘s steamy drama “Toys in the Attic” at the Laguna Beach Summer Theater.

Laura made her film debut as a second female lead in the Tony Curtis/Debbie Reynoldsgender-bending romp Goodbye Charlie (1964). Laura figured prominently in all the sexual hijinks happening in the taunting George Axelrod script, but the film was considered a misfire. Laura then got hot and heavy in Red Line 7000 (1965), one of Howard Hawkslater and lesser efforts. Again, Laura (and the other ladies, for that matter) provided diverting distraction from the stock car racing sequences.

Still moving up the ranks, she was prominently displayed on Bonanza (1959), The Rogues(1964), Rawhide (1959), I Spy (1965), The Big Valley (1965) and enjoyed a recurring role on Dr. Kildare (1961). Her last three films were the horror opus Chamber of Horrors(1966), which had Patrick O’Neal stirring up some demented antics as a serial strangler. Again, not hired for her character’s brilliance, Laura does manage the classic one liner, “What am I thinking? He is the easiest man in the world to identify. He only has one hand!” The next film involved her with handsome George Maharis and another strangling in the so-so melodrama A Covenant with Death (1967). Her final film was probably the best received. With Craig Stevens taking his popular Peter Gunn gumshoe character from TV to feature length film, the atmospheric detective story Gunn (1967) had, at the very least, a built-in audience. The singing aspect of Laura also managed to show itself here. She recorded two of Henry Mancini‘s songs from the movie, “I Like the Look” and “Dreamsville”.

By this time, Laura’s first marriage had dissolved. Husband Brian had become a TV star via his Porter Ricks character on the dolphin show Flipper (1964). Within a year of their divorce, Laura married renowned French film composer Maurice Jarre, hailed for his Oscar-winning scores in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965) and A Passage to India (1984). Laura immediately retired and never looked back. She and Jarre divorced in 1984. Little was heard from Laura until notice of her 2007 death at her Beverly Hills residence at age 76. She is survived by her screenwriting son Kevin Jarre.

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

“In “Crash Dive” Dana Andrews was Tyrone Power’s submarine commander, playing said the ‘New York Times’ with commendable second lead charm’. The chief requirement of second leads was that they did not swamp the star and Andrew’s experience not overpowering Mr Power and others may well have conditioned his subsequent star career. He served his purpose. He never got in anybody’s way. His sober-citizen appearance made it’s own mild contribution to the texture of the films in which he appeared. He projected a certain authority, grave-faced and grave-voiced, a certain masculine concern and an air of restrained heroism – all qualities used well in hos two best film, “The Ox-Bow Incident” and “A Walk in the Sun”. He is so good in both ( in each curiously, as a doomed leader) thus one must assume he only reacted with enthusiasm to the tougher assignments. Most of his parts were routine, and maybe it is a pity – you cannot be sure, there is a case to be made that no one who started as a second lead ever amounted to much as a star. What one recalls best about Andrews is a wry chuckle. It is hardly a very individual characteristic.” in David Shipman’s “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years” (1972).

Dana Andrews had a very long and prolific career from his debut in 1940 until his final movie in 1984. In the 1940’s he had many major movies such as “Laura” in 1944 with Gene Tierney,”State Fair” with Jeanne Crain and “Fallen Angel” with Alice Faye and Linda Darnell. He was born in 1909 in Mississippi and he died in 1992. He always reminded me of another of my favourite actors Joseph Cotten.

Adrian Turner’s “Independent” obituary:

Carver Dana Andrews, actor, born Collins Mississippi 1 January 1909, married 1932 Janet Murray (died 1935; one son deceased), 1939 Mary Todd (one son, two daughters), died Long Beach California 17 December 1992.
THAT’S ‘Day-Na’, not ‘Dah-Na’, Andrews. Reading the name, most of today’s generation of moviegoers would think Dana Andrews was a girl, like Dana Hill. But Dana Andrews was a real man, even if not quite a man’s man in the way that John Wayne was. Perhaps if he had used his first Christian name, Carver, his screen career might have been different. Carver Andrews: scourge of the Pacific.

Andrews was the son of a minister of the church and several of his roles had a touch of piety or moral doubt in them. He was a handsome and sensitive actor, a bit like Ray Milland though less flamboyant than William Holden and less imposing than Henry Fonda. He hunkered down in his parts – dependable, plausible, often flawed and usually sympathetic. Accordingly, he was never nominated for an Academy Award.

Andrews came relatively late to acting. He had qualified as an accountant and worked briefly for Gulf Oil before hitching to Hollywood where he fetched up at the Pasadena Playhouse, a theatre known for drawing studio talent- spotters. And spotted he was, by Sam Goldwyn, who signed him on a seven-year contract. His first job for Goldwyn was to wear a tuxedo and loiter around David Niven, who was duelling with Goldwyn over terms. Niven was being offered the leading role in Raffles (1940) and Andrews’s constant presence, being photographed in the costume of Raffles, was designed to intimidate Niven into signing his own new contract, which he quickly did.

As for Andrews, he made his debut in Lucky Cisco Kid (1940), third-billed as an Army sergeant. He was more prestigiously featured in William Wyler’s The Westerner (1940) and Howard Hawks’s comedy Ball of Fire (1941). Although Goldwyn kept him working, after five years of his contract Andrews knew his best chances were with other studios, such as 20th Century-Fox, who cast him as the articulate victim of a lynch-mob in The OxBow Incident (1943), starring opposite Henry Fonda. In 1944 Goldwyn loaned him out again to Fox for the leading role in Laura, one of the finest and most romantic thrillers ever made. Andrews at last found his screen identity as the insecure detective (not unlike the role later played by James Stewart in Vertigo) who becomes morbidly obsessed by the supposedly murdered heroine, played by Gene Tierney, who had previously appeared with Andrews in John Ford’s Tobacco Road (1941).

Laura was a troubled production: the director Rouben Mamoulian, who took a superior attitude to the material, had been fired and his replacement, Otto Preminger, who was also producing the picture, viewed the footage and later proclaimed in his autobiography: ‘The performances were appalling . . . Dana Andrews, and Gene Tierney were amateurish . . .’ Preminger noted that Darryl F. Zanuck, the head of Fox, also ‘hated Andrews’ and called him ‘an agreeable schoolboy’. But it was precisely this quality in Andrews’s performance – a mixture of naivete and darker yearnings – that contributes to the film’s menace and eroticism. Something of a critical failure at the time, though now a widely acknowledged masterpiece of film noir, Laura turned Andrews into a kind of movie star. To call him a second lead would be to diminish his talent.

His next major film has claims to being the greatest – pace Citizen Kane – Hollywood movie of the Forties. This is William Wyler’s three-hour post-war epic The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which served as the model for Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July. The film called for three leading actors to play demobbed soldiers who return and readjust to life after the war. Fredric March and Andrews had not served in the war though Harold Russell had and lost both his hands (Russell, ignominiously, has recently been forced to sell his Oscar to pay for medical fees).

Andrews was superbly cast, drawing on all his reserves of inner torment: a soda jerk before the war, he becomes a highly decorated officer and returns to find that his wife, played by Virginia Mayo, has become a tart. He spends the entire movie trying to preserve a semblance of dignity and find a role in a country in which he has become a social outcast, even a foreigner. Few films have captured as well the shift in American society during this period and Andrews, however briefly, came to represent the bridge between the pre- and post-war US. Along with the war drama A Walk in the Sun, made the same year, this was the peak of Andrews’s screen career.

Sam Goldwyn has been called a ‘one-decade man’, meaning that his best work was all achieved in the Forties, and this applies equally to Andrews who, with Farley Granger, was the last of Goldwyn’s contract players. He began to have problems with alcoholism and the good parts began to dry up. New, aggressive and independent actors, such as Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster and William Holden, had arrived and Andrews was having to face the fact that he would be a supporting player for the rest of his career. Freed from his Goldwyn contact by 1949, he found freelancing difficult (the studio system was a great cushion for men like Andrews) and he toured the US in a stage production of The Glass Menagerie and, later, in The Odd Couple.

Some of us may remember him as the tea-planter Dick Carver (possibly a personal joke), trampled by elephants and Elizabeth Taylor in Elephant Walk (1954), or as the journalist in Fritz Lang’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) who foolishly confesses to a murder he didn’t commit in order to write an expose on capital punishment. He busked in Europe, appearing in the cult British-made horror movie Night of the Demon (1957), and started to appear on television, even an afternoon soap called Bright Promise which started in 1969.

Occasionally, directors like Otto Preminger would call him back for a big-budget war movie like In Harm’s Way (1965) and he was also amongst the top brass in another war epic, The Battle of the Bulge (1965). In Airport 1975 he pilots a small plane which ends up in the cockpit of a jumbo-jet. His last important screen appearance was as Red Ridingwood in Sam Spiegel and Elia Kazan’s unjustly maligned version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon (1976).

Standing alongside John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum and other higher- billed co-stars, his was a familiar face . . . but what is that man’s name? But to recall Dana Andrews hypnotised by the portrait of Laura or working the soda fountain in The Best Years of Our Lives is to recall an actor who turned blandness into an art form.

Fred Williamson was born in 1938 in Gary, Indiana. He was a player in the American Football League in the 1960’s. He turned to acting in the early 1970’s and became very popular in such movies as “That Man Bolt” in 1973.

IMDB entry:

Former Oakland Raiders/Kansas City Chiefs football star who rose to prominence as one of the first African-American male action stars of the “blaxploitation” genre of the early 1970s, who has since gone on to a long and illustrious career as an actor, director, writer, and producer! Burly, yet handsome 6′ 3″ Williamson first came to attention in the TV series Julia (1968) playing love interest, Steve Bruce. However, his rugged, athletic physique made him a natural for energetic roles and he quickly established himself as a street wise, tough guy in films including That Man Bolt (1973), Black Caesar (1973), andMean Johnny Barrows (1976). Talented Williams established his own production company “Po ‘Boy Productions” in 1974, which has produced over 40 movies to date. Like many young American stars of the 1960s and ’70s, Williamson was noticed by Italian producers who cast him in a slew of B-grade action movies that occupied a lot of his work in the 1980s. From the late ’80s onwards, much of his work has been of the “straight to video” fare (often playing police officers), but none could deny he has kept actively busy in movies and TV for over three decades, both in front of and behind the camera. More recently, indie director Robert Rodriguez cast him alongside FX guru Tom Savini as two vampire killing bikers, in his bloody action film From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), and he has most recently appeared on screen (displaying his wonderful comedy skills) playing grumpy Captain Dobey in Starsky & Hutch (2004).

– IMDb Mini Biography By: heresun

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Jean Seberg.

Jean Seberg had an unsual career. She was selected at an early age to star in Otto Preminger’s film of G.B. Shaw’s “St Joan” in 1957. She filmed for Preminger again in “Bonjour Tristesse” in France where she also made “Breathless”. She made her home in France for several years. In 1966 she returned to Hollywood to film “Moment to Moment” with Honor Blackman and “Airport” opposite Burt Lancaster in 1970. She died in 1979.

TCM Overview:

Jean Seberg was a gamine, blonde actress who landed the title role in Otto Preminger’s “Saint Joan” (1957) after a much-publicized contest involving some 18,000 hopefuls. She was best-known, however, for her contribution to New Wave cinema. The fresh-faced Iowan started acting in high school, but was a completely unknown 17-year-old when Preminger whisked her off to England. “Saint Joan” and its star were critically slammed, but Preminger went on to star her again in the soap opera “Bonjour Tristesse” (1958), which was scandalous and “modern” enough to buoy Seberg’s career.

After the silly but popular British comedy “The Mouse That Roared” (1959), Seberg was cast in Jean-Luc Godard’s landmark New Wave feature “A Bout de souffle/Breathless” (1959), which brought her renewed international attention. As an American in Paris, selling papers on the streets and romancing wanted criminal Jean-Paul Belmondo, she gave a careless, modern and very hip performance. Still, Seberg had to struggle through five unremarkable features before turning in a memorable performance as a schizophrenic in the title role of Robert Rossen’s “Lilith” (1964).

Seberg hopped back and forth from America to Europe, making a total of 30 films, although only a few of them were remarkable. In Mervyn LeRoy’s “Moment to Moment” (1966), she was a professor’s bored wife who drifts into an affair with murderous results. Seberg was another cheating wife in Irvin Kershner’s “A Fine Madness” (also 1966) and played a woman sold to a hard-drinking prospector (Lee Marvin) in Joshua Logan’s musical “Paint Your Wagon” (1969). Seberg was the passenger relations expert in the all-star blockbuster “Airport” (1970) and a woman going mad in Northern Africa in “Ondata di Calore/Dead of Summer” (1970). Her last feature was “Die Wildente/The Wild Duck” (1976), a German-language version of the Henrik Ibsen play. Seberg made her only US TV appearance in the ABC movie “Mousey” (1974), which co-starred Kirk Douglas and silent film veteran Bessie Love.

Seberg’s private life was far from happy. She was married four times: to Francois Moreuil (1958-60), who directed her in “La Recreation/Playtime” (1961); to Romain Gary (1962-70), who featured Seberg in “Les Oiseaux vont mourir au Perou/Birds in Peru” (1968); to Dennis Berry (1972-78), who helmed “Le Grande delire” (1975); and to Algerian-born Ahmed Hasni (1979), although she was not officially divorced from Berry. She supported the Black Panthers in the 1960s and early 70s, and when she miscarried Gary’s child in 1970, the FBI spread press stories that the baby’s father had been a Black Panther leader in an attempt to ‘neutralize’ her and destroy her career. Seberg, never very emotionally stable, attempted suicide almost yearly on the anniversary of her miscarriage. She was found in the back seat of her car, dead of a drug overdose, in Paris on September 8, 1979. Gary took the FBI to task publicly, and the bureau eventually admitted its complicity. In 1996, she was the subject of the independent film “From the Journals of Jean Seberg”, in which she was portrayed by Mary Beth Hurt

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Ann Miller

Ann Miller was one of key figures in the great MGM musicals of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. She was born in 1923 in Texas. She began her film career with the RKO studio but when she began working in MGM she starred in such favourites as “Easter Parade” in 1948 with Judy Garland and Fred Astaire, “On the Town”, “Kiss Me Kate” and “Hit the Deck”. In 1979 she starred with Mickey Rooney on the stage in several venues throughout the US and UK. Her last film was the cult classic of David Lynch, “Mulholland Drive” in 2001. She died in 2004.

“Telegraph” obituary:

Ann Miller, who died on Thursday aged 80, was the leading female tap dancer in Hollywood musicals of the 1940s and 1950s, with a reputed speed of 500 taps a minute.

At the height of her popularity her legs were insured for $1 million; and on her passport, in the space reserved for “occupation”, she wrote simply “star lady”. Yet she generally played second fiddle to such singers and dancers as Kathryn Grayson and Cyd Charisse. At the final fade-out, it was always they who got the man, never Ann Miller. But her contributions to musicals such as On the Town (1949) and Kiss Me Kate(1953), in which she sang Too Darn Hot and Always True to You, Darling, in My Fashion, were often more memorable than those of the nominal stars.

Vivacity was her strongest suit – never more so than in On the Town, in which she played an anthropology student with a special attraction to cave men. Her Prehistoric Man routine, danced in a natural history museum with dinosaur bones and a chorus line of neanderthal hunks, is one of the highlights of the film.

Her speciality numbers often outlived the films in which they featured. Few now remember The Kissing Bandit (1948), one of Frank Sinatra’s weakest musicals; but the Spanish Dance of Fury, in which Ann Miller was partnered by Cyd Charisse and Ricardo Montalban, is fondly recalled, as is Shakin’ the Blues Away – the solo number in the Fred Astaire musical Easter Parade (1948) which won her a seven-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn Mayer. Later, in Deep in My Heart (1954), a biopic of Sigmund Romberg, she stole the show with a red-hot Charleston, It.

Because her numbers were often self-contained and did not depend on a knowledge of the plot, they formed ideal extracts for the compilation movies MGM packaged together as That’s Dancing! and That’s Entertainment! For That’s Entertainment! III (1994), Ann Miller acted as one of the guides to the studio’s product.

She was born to dance at MGM, the studio whose initials were waggishly said to stand for Mighty-Good-Musicals. Unlike some of her contemporaries at Culver City, she never had a bad word to say about MGM or its studio boss, Louis B Mayer. “Why, Mr Mayer treated us better than his own horses,” she would insist.

Mayer was captivated by her and, despite giving her 39 years, regularly took her wining, dining and dancing – always with her mother as chaperon. Not that he misbehaved. “Mr Mayer was the Kissinger of his day”, she reported, “very much the gentleman, and he liked me because I was a nice girl.” Unfortunately, he was possessive. One of the more bizarre stories from that era concerned Ann Miller’s nose: she broke it, and disliked the contour after it mended, so she had an artificial extension made. When she and Mayer quarrelled, he would steal the nose and lock it away in his safe so that she could not go out without him.

Then came the fateful day when she fell for an oil millionaire (the first of three in her life) and had to break the news to Mayer. He sobbed, he groaned, he hung up the telephone – and within minutes sent his chauffeur to summon her to his death bed, where he was expiring having swallowed a bottle of sleeping tablets. The ambulance, however, got there first; Mayer recovered, and Ann Miller’s relations with him were never as cordial again.

She lacked the dramatic training to survive on screen when the tide turned against MGM musicals in the late 1950s. “As an actress, I’m terrible”, she admitted, “but if Ava Gardner and Lana Turner can act under a good director, I think I still have a chance.” But it was not enough. Her film career petered out after Hit the Deck in 1955, and she was absent from the screen for 20 years until she made a guest appearance in Won Ton Ton – the Dog Who Saved Hollywood in 1976. She never quit show business, however, switching to television and live theatre instead.

Faux pas were her stock in trade, and Ann Millerisms became almost as legendary as Goldwynisms. Attending a memorial tribute to Oscar Hammerstein, she asked her escort: “Why isn’t Oscar here tonight?” When she was informed that this was what the concert was about, the lyricist having been dead for 10 years, she replied: “Well, how should I know? I’ve been touring in Mame.”

“I do a lot of nutty things, and people think I’m for real,” she acknowledged. “But all my life I’ve tried to be an eight-by-10 glossy. I try to give the impression that everything’s perfect and that star ladies don’t go to the bathroom. It was worse than doing 24 shows a day for those smarty-pants husbands of mine because I was never off-stage. I tried to make them believe I was always gorgeous.”

She was especially renowned for her lacquered coiffure, never a hair of which was out of place. It was a bouffant wig, and gave rise to long-running quips that she was terrified of falling lest she break her hair.

Part Cherokee Indian, Ann Miller shared the tribe’s belief in the psychic, and firmly believed in reincarnation. She considered herself the re-embodiment of Queen Hatshepsut of ancient Egypt, for whose crimes and cruelties she was paying to this day. Under hypnosis she spent many a happy hour regressing to her former life, and was able categorically to reveal that she and her sister had been murdered by her half-brother. Egyptologists, however, were reluctant to pursue the matter.

Her real name was Lucille Ann Collier, and she was of Irish, French and Cherokee descent (on her grandmother’s side). She was born at Cherino, Texas, to a prominent criminal lawyer, John Collier, but brought up in Houston, where she attended the Albert Sidney Johnson High School. Her date of birth was April 12 1923, but later it came to be misquoted and accepted as 1919. This was due to early career pressures when, at the age of 14, she misrepresented herself as 18 in order to secure a contract for full-time work with RKO.

Her early life, according to Hollywood folklore, included dancing lessons from the age of five, as therapy after an attack of rickets, and a first lesson in tap dancing from Bill (“Bojangles”) Robinson, whom she visited with her mother when he was playing at a local theatre. Her parents divorced when she was 10 and she moved with her mother to California.

Being deaf and without alimony, her mother was unable to hold down a job and feed the family; so the young Ann was forced to dance for her supper at sleazy establishments such as the Black Cat Club. Having worked her way up to a four-month stint at the Bal Tabarin in San Francisco, she was spotted by the RKO talent scout Benny Rubin and, in 1937, made her screen debut in New Faces of 1937.

Few of her early screen roles were of any great merit. They included bit parts in Stage Door (1937); Room Service (1938), with the Marx Brothers; and Radio City Revels (1938). There was also a more substantial part as the dance-mad daughter in Frank Capra’s Oscar-winning comedy You Can’t Take It with You (1938).

She asked RKO for a release from her contract because a conflict of interest was arising involving her agent. At that time, the dancer Eleanor Powell was represented by the same agency. She was a big star at MGM (a much more powerful studio than RKO), which was unhappy to see Ann Miller developing as a rival. It became clear that Miller would be the loser if pressure were brought to bear to ensure Powell’s supremacy – so she temporarily quit Hollywood and headed for Broadway. She appeared in the last (1939) edition of the George White Scandals, and, although the show was not successful, everybody admired her big number, the Mexiconga.

Ann Miller returned to Hollywood with a series of short-term contracts, but they were not especially good years. In Melody Ranch (1940), she played opposite the singing cowboy Gene Autry (“I was the first girl he ever kissed, apart from his horse”) and became known as “the Queen of the Bs” in a run of second features such as True to the Army (1942),Priorities on Parade (1942) and Reveille with Beverly (1943), all aimed at encouraging the war effort.

The breakthrough in her career came in 1948, when MGM hired her to replace an injured Cyd Charisse in Easter Parade. It was a small part, and fairly unsympathetic; but her partner in several dances was Fred Astaire, and Ann Miller made a big enough impression to secure a standard seven-year contract. It led directly to On the Town and steady employment in some of MGM’s best-known musicals. Among them wereLovely to Look At (1952), a remake of the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movie Roberta; Kiss Me Kate; Small Town Girl (1953), in which she danced a scorching version of I’ve Got to Hear That Beat; Deep in My Heart (1954); and Hit the Deck (1955).

Her last musical was The Opposite Sex (1956), an ill-advised remake of The Women. In the same year, she played her last film role for 20 years – as the mother of Dean Jones in The Great American Pastime, a non-musical film about baseball. Sensing the end of an era, she devoted herself in future to theatre and television.

On television she made regular appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, Hollywood Palace and Laugh In, and played acting roles in Dames at Sea (1971), a spoof of Hollywood musicals, and in one episode of the long-running soap Love American Style (1972).

Ann Miller also featured in a spectacular television commercial for Great American Soups, dancing on top of an eight-foot soup can, surrounded by 20-foot fountains, a 24-piece orchestra and a long line of high-kicking chorus girls. It ended with her toe-tapping her way into the kitchen, where her husband protested: “Why must you make such a big production out of everything?”

In the theatre she acted and danced in touring productions of Can Can, Hello, Dolly!, Panama Hattie and Blithe Spirit, and made her Broadway comeback (after a 30-year gap) in Mame, assuming the role originally played by Angela Lansbury.

Her most successful stage appearance was in Sugar Babies (1979), a $1.3 million extravaganza based on the rise of burlesque; her co-star was Mickey Rooney, who had once been her teenage classmate at an acting school in Hollywood. The show was brought to London in 1988, where she received some of the most favourable notices of her career.

In 1998 she appeared in a successful revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey. In 2001 she played Coco, an ageing Hollywood matron, in David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive.

Ann Miller published her autobiography, Miller’s High Life, in 1972, and a book about psychic phenomena, Tapping Into the Force (1990).

She was married three times: to Reese Milner in 1946; to William Moss in 1958; and to Arthur Cameron in 1961. All three were oil millionaires. The first two marriages ended in divorce, the third was annulled. There were no children.

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

Alfred Lunt & Lynn Fontanne

Alfred Lunt was one of the great figures on Broadway in the early part of the 2oth century. He formed a legendary acting legacy with his wife Lynn Fontanne. He was born in 1892 in Wisconsin. Among his Broadway shows are “The Guardsman” in 1924, “Design for Living” and “Idiot’s Delight”. His few films include “Backbone” in 1923 and film of his stage hit “The Guardsman” in 1931. He died in 1977.

Ron O’Neal was a very charismatic actor who starred in some successful movies in the 1970’s. He was born in New York City in 1937. He achieved fame on the stage and made his film debut in 1971 in “The Organisation”. He gained stardom with his performance as Youngblood Priest in “Superfly” in 1972. His other movies include “A Force of One” in 1979, “When A Stranger Calls” and “The Final Countdown” in 1980. He died in 2004.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Forever tagged as the super baaaaaaad “Super Fly,” actor Ron O’Neal has spent his entire post 70s career trying to break the chains of a stereotype that made him his fortune. Of tough, humble beginnings, Ron was the son of a wannabe jazz musician who became a factory worker in order to support the family, growing up in Cleveland’s black ghetto. He managed to attend Ohio State University for a single semester before developing an interest in theater and joining Cleveland’s Karamu House, an interracial acting troupe, training there for nine years (1957-1966). He arrived in New York in 1967 and taught acting in Harlem to support himself, jointly appearing in summer stock and off-Broadway shows at the same time. He received critical notice in 1970 in Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre production of “No Place to Be Somebody,” in which he won the Obie, Drama Desk, Clarence Derwent and Theatre World awards for his dynamite performance. The timing couldn’t have been more ‘right on’ for this dude with the tough, streetwise style and attitude to spare — perfect for Hollywood what with the arrival of the “blaxploitation” films that were taking over at the time. Ron became an overnight star as the hip, funky anti-hero in the action-driven flick Super Fly (1972), playing one cool drug dealer who wants out of the business, taking out the entire syndicate one by one (or two by two as need be). He made his debut as a director the following year with the equally violent sequel, Super Fly T.N.T. (1973), which again starred himself. But the genre soon turned to uncool parody and within a couple of years, O’Neal was struggling badly, playing support roles and even less by the end of the decade. Although he managed to co-star in the TV series “Bring ‘Em Back Alive” and “The Equalizer” in the 80s, it’s been an uphill battle all the way for him to obliterate this stubborn image of the supercool Priest with his fu-manchu like beard and dazzling white suit. He has appeared as both hero and villain in a number of action low budgets since, including Mercenary Fighters (1987), Trained to Kill (1988) and Up Against the Wall (1991), which he also directed. In 1996, he joined other former 70s black action stars, including Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, Richard Roundtree and Pam Grier, in a revival of the violent genre entitled Original Gangstas (1996). He passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2004.

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

Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:

Ron O’Neal, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 66, spent most of his professional life trying to live down his role of the bad-ass Youngblood Priest in Superfly (1972), one of the key blaxploitation movies of the decade. His interpretation of the long-haired, ultra-hip, ultra-violent cocaine dealer, who wore tight white suits and drove a customised Cadillac, made him into an instant star, mainly among the vast urban black movie-going public.

They delighted in seeing their people no longer treated on the screen as servants or saints, or as a “problem”. The blaxploitation movies would eventually lead to such films as Beverly Hills Cop and Lethal Weapon, and O’Neal, with Richard Roundtree (Shaft), Jim Brown (Slaughter), Pam Grier (Foxy Brown), Fred Williamson (Black Caesar) and Richard Pryor (The Mack), became a role model for the likes of Eddie Murphy, Danny Glover, Martin Lawrence and Halle Berry.

When voices were raised against the blaxploitation movies – for giving a stereotypical view of blacks, and glorifying crime – O’Neal protested that the point of the film was missed. He claimed that Youngblood Priest got into his drug-pushing life, not out of choice, but because of his social and economic position, and that he “actually wants out of the business after one last big score.”

In order to address some of the criticism levelled at Superfly, O’Neal directed and starred in the sequel Superfly T.N.T. (1973), transplanting Youngblood Priest from Harlem to a small African country, and getting him to fight for the greater good. It was no surprise, however, that the film was a box-office failure; everything that had made its predecessor so entertaining was jettisoned.

O’Neal’s career never fully recovered, and, after the 1970s, he found it difficult to make the transition from blaxploitation movies into more mainstream films. “Outside New York, people assumed I really was a hustler,” he told an interviewer in 1979. “Superfly took me from relative obscurity, but I haven’t been offered that many roles since.”

O’Neal was born in Utica, in New York state, and grew up in the Cleveland ghetto, the son of a wannabe jazz musician who became a factory worker to support the family. After one academically disastrous term at Ohio State University, the young O’Neal went to see an amateur production of the musical Finian’s Rainbow, in which a bigoted southern senator turns black. “It blew my mind,” he recalled. “I’d never seen a play before.”

He immediately joined Karamu House, an interracial theatre troupe, with whom, for the next six years, he played everything from Walter Lee, in A Raisin In The Sun, to Stanley Kowalski, in A Streetcar Named Desire. He earned money working as a house painter.

After moving to New York in the mid-1960s, he taught acting in Harlem, and performed in summer stock and off Broadway. He first gained recognition in 1970, starring in the Joseph Papp/Public Theatre production of Charles Gordone’s No Place To Be Somebody, as a pimp and barkeeper trying to take control of local rackets. The work earned him a number of awards, and caught the attention of the Superfly producers.

O’Neal’s subsequent film career was undistinguished, made up mainly of appearances in low-budget, violent thrillers, such as A Force Of One (1979).

On television, aside from guest appearances in series like Murder She Wrote and Hill Street Blues, he took leading roles in the mini-series Bring ‘Em Back Alive (1982-83) and The Equalizer (1985-89). In 1996, he joined blaxploitation stars Pam Grier, Fred Williamson, Jim Brown and Richard Roundtree in Larry Cohen’s Original Gangstas, but it was a pale copy of the films that made their reputations. His last movie was On The Edge (2002), in which he appeared with Williamson and the rapper Ice-T.

He is survived by his wife Audrey.

· Ron O’Neal, actor, born September 1 1937; died January 14 2004

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

Creighton Hale was born Patrick Fitzgerald in Cork in 1882. He acheived US fame for his role in “Inian Summer” on Broadway. In 1914 he made his film debut in the silent “The Exploits of Elaine”. He starred opposite Lillian Gish in “Way Down East” in 1920 and “Orphans of the Storm” with Lillian and her sister Dorothy. His career survived the coming of sound and he was featured in films such as “The Maltese Falcon” in 1941 and “Casablanca”. He died in 1965.

Akim Tamiroff & Leonid Kinskey

The great character actor was born in Georgia, Russia in 1899. He came to the United States in 1923. His film debut came in 1932 in “Okay, America”. He developed a solid reputation as a supporting player and was featured in such movies as “The Lives of a Benal Lancer” in 1935, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” in 1943 and “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” amongst several others. He died in 1972. He was married to the actress Tamara Shayne.

TCM overview:

Flamboyant, husky character actor in the US from 1923, who acted with the New York Theatre Guild before entering films. Ubiquitous in Paramount productions of the late 1930s, he usually played eccentric Slavic types, though he had a rare leading role in “The Way of the Flesh” (1940). From the early 1950s Tamiroff appeared in many European productions, with memorably baroque performances in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville” (1965) and three Orson Welles films. (He also played the title character of Welles’ unfinished “Sancho Panza”.)

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Laura Devon

Dana Andrews

Fred Williamson

Jean Seberg

Ann Miller

Alfred Lunt

Ron O’Neal

Creighton Hale

Akim Tamiroff

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