Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 77 of 128

Brad Davis

Brad Davis. IMDB.

Brad Davis was a charismatic actor who is best remembered for his role as Billy Hayes in Alan Parker’s “Midnight Express” in 1978.

He was born in 1949 in Florida. His other movies include “A Small Circle of Friends”, “Chariots of Brad Davis was a charismatic actor who is best remembered for his role as Billy Hayes in Alan Parker’s “Midnight Express” in 1978. He was born in 1949 in Florida. .

IMDB entry:

Born in Florida in 1949, Brad Davis moved to Georgia after graduating from high school to pursue an acting career. From there, he moved to New York City, twice, to find work.

By the early 1970s Davis was acting in off-Broadway plays while studying acting at the Academy of Dramatic Arts. His stage work led to his movie debut and to television shows such as the hit Sybil (1976) and the mini-series Roots (1977).

His biggest success was in 1978 with the lead role in Midnight Express (1978) where he played Billy Hayes, a young American imprisoned in Turkey for drug smuggling. It won him a Golden Globe award.

Another memorable movie role in 1982 was playing the title character of Querelle (1982), a ruggedly lethal sailor who seduces and sets both men and women’s hearts aflutter.

Davis contracted AIDS in 1979 apparently from his one-time cocaine addiction, but in response to the anti-AIDS hysteria in Hollywood, Davis kept his illness a secret for a number of years and continued to act.

His later years had him finally revealing that he had AIDS and he became an AIDS activist in bashing the Hollywood industry and US government for ignoring and shunning victims suffering from the hideous disease.

Davis died in 1991 at age 41. His widow, Susan Bluestein, continues his activist work in the fight against AIDS.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Matthew Patay

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Joseph Bottoms is the middle brother of the talented acting family including Timothy and Sam. Joseph was born in 1954 in Santa Barbara. He came to prominence with his major role in “The Dove” in 1974. Other roles include Rudi Weiss in the magnificent television series “Holocaust” in 1978. He manages the Bottoms Arts Galleries in Santa Barbara.

IMDB entry:

Joseph Bottoms was born on April 22, 1954 in Santa Barbara, California, USA. He is an actor, known for Santa Barbara (1984), The Black Hole (1979) and Blind Date (1984).m Bottoms, Ben Bottoms and Timothy Bottoms.

Made his Broadway debut in 1981’s “The 5th of July”.

Began his career performing in community theater productions.

Won the 1975 Golden Globe Award for “New Star Of The Year – Actor” for his work in the film The Dove (1974), which was based on the real life experiences of Robin Lee Graham, a young man who spent five years sailing around the world as a single-handed sailor, starting when he was 16-years old.

The second son of sculptor James “Bud” Bottoms.

Decided to be an actor when 13 after having a premonition that he would dance on stage with Elizabeth Taylor which he later did in the 1978 TV film Return Engagement.

Santa Barbara, California. Lives with his two daughte

Stacy Keach. IMDB.

Stacy Keach was born in 1941 in Savannah, Georgia. His parents were both actors and drama directors. He has had an extensive theatre career as well as playing Philip Marlow on television. His films include the wonderful “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter” in 1968, “The New Centurians”, “Fat City” and “The Ninth Configuration”. He played the leader of a far right wing group in “American History X”.

IMDB entry:

Stacy Keach has played to grand success a constellation of the classic and contemporary stage’s greatest roles, and he is considered a pre-eminent American interpreter of Shakespeare. His SRO run as “King Lear” at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. received the best reviews any national leader has earned in that town for decades. Peter Marks of the Washington yPost called Mr. Keach’s Lear “magnificent”. He recently accepted his third prestigious Helen Hayes Award for Leading Actor in 2010 for his stellar performance. His next stage appearance premiering January 13, 2011 at the Lincoln Center in New York is “Other Desert Cities” by Jon Robin Baitz and teaming him with Stockard Channing, Linda Lavin and Elizabeth Marvel.

His latest television series, Lights Out (2011), on the FX network is a major new mid-season dramatic show, taking him back to the world of boxing which has been a rich setting for him before, notably in Huston’s Fat City (1972) which ignited Keach’s career as a film star.

Versatility embodies the essence of Stacy Keach’s career in film and television as well as on stage. The range of his roles is remarkable. His recent performance in Oliver Stone’s “W” prompted fellow actor Alec Baldwin to blog an impromptu review matching Huston’s amazement at Keach’s power. Perhaps best known around the world for his portrayal of the hard-boiled detective, Mike Hammer, Stacy. Keach is also well-known among younger generations for his portrayal of the irascible, hilarious Dad, Ken Titus, in the Fox sitcom, Titus, and more recently as Warden Henry Pope in the hit series, Prison Break. Following his triumphant recent title role performance in King Lear for the prestigious Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Keach joined the starring cast of John Sayles’ recent film, Honeydripper. In the most recent of his non-stop activities, he has completed filming Deathmatch for the Spike Channel, and The Boxer for Zeitsprung Productions in Berlin, Germany.

German audiences will also see him as one of the co-stars in the multi-million dollar production of Hindenburg (2011), scheduled to air in January, 2011 with worldwide release thereafter. Mr. Keach co-stars in the new FX series entitled Lights Out (2011) about a boxing family, where he plays the Dad-trainer of two boxing sons played by Holt McCallany and Pablo Schreiber. The series is also scheduled to air in January, 2011. Keach returns to the New York stage at the start of the 2011 in Jon Robin Baitz’s new play, “Other Desert Cities,” at the Lincoln Center.

Capping his heralded accomplishment on the live stage of putting his own stamp on some of the theatre world’s most revered and challenging roles over the past year when he headed the national touring company cast of “Frost/Nixon,” portraying Richard M. Nixon, bringing still another riveting characterization to the great legit stages of Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, the nation’s capitol and other major cities. He won his second Best Actor Helen Hayes Award for his outstanding performance. His second triumphant portrayal of King Lear in the past three years, this time for the Shakespeare Theatre Company in the nation’s capital earned reviews heard around the world, with resulting offers for him to repeat that giant accomplishment in New York, Los Angeles and even Beijing.

An accomplished pianist and composer, Mr. Keach composed the music for the film,Imbued (2009), directed by Rob Nilssen, a celebrated film festival favorite, in which Keach also starred. He has also completed composing the music for the Mike Hammer audio radio series, “Encore For Murder”, written by Max Collins, directed by Carl Amari, and produced by Blackstone Audio.

Mr. Keach began his film career in the late 1960’s with _The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter_, followed by _The New Centurions_ with George C. Scott; Doc Holiday with Faye Dunawayin the film ‘Doc’ (1971); an over-the-hill boxer,Billy Tully in Fat City (1972); directed byJohn Huston, and The Long Riders (1980), which he co-produced and co-wrote with his brother, James Keach, directed by Walter Hill. On the lighter side, his characterization of Sgt. Stedenko in Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke (1978), and the sequel, Nice Dreams(1981), gave a whole new generation a taste of Mr. Keach’s comedic flair, which he also demonstrated in Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud (1970), playing the oldest living lecherous Wright Brother; and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) where he played a crazed albino out to kill Paul Newman.

Historical roles have always attracted him. In movies he has played roles ranging from Martin Luther to Frank James. On television he has been Napoleon, Wilbur Wright, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Barabbas, Sam Houston, and Ernest Hemingway, for which he won a Golden Globe as Best Actor in a mini-series and was nominated for an Emmy in the same category. He played an eccentric painter, Mistral, in the Judith Krantz classic,Mistral’s Daughter (1984), a northern spy in the civil war special, The Blue and the Gray(1982), more recently as the pirate Benjamin Hornigold in the Hallmark epic Blackbeard(2006).

As a director, his production of Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy (1973) for PBS was, according to Mr. Miller in his autobiography, Timebends, “the most expressive production of that play he had seen.” He won a Cine Golden Eagle Award for his work on the dramatic documentary, The Repeater, in which he starred and also wrote and directed.

But it is perhaps the live theatre where Mr. Keach shines brightest. He began his professional career with the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1964, doubling as Marcellus and the Player King in a production of Hamlet directed by Joseph Papp and which featured Julie Harris as Ophelia. He rose to prominence in 1967 in the Off-Broadway political satire, MacBird, where the title role was a cross between Lyndon Johnson and Macbeth and for which he received the first of his three Obie awards. He played the title roles in Henry 5, Hamlet (which he played 3 times), Richard 3, Macbeth, and most recently as King Lear in Robert Falls’ modern adaptation at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, which Charles Isherwood of the NY Times called “terrific” and “a blistering modern-dress production that brings alive the morally disordered universe of the play with a ferocity unmatched by any other production I’ve seen.” Mr. Keach’s stage portrayals of Peer Gynt, Falstaff and Cyrano de Bergerac, and Hamlet caused the New York Times to dub him “the finest American classical actor since John Barrymore.”

Mr. Keach’s Broadway credits include his Broadway debut, Indians, where he played Buffalo Bill and was nominated for a Tony award as Best Actor. He starred in Ira Levin’s Deathtrap, the Pulitzer Prize winning Kentucky Cycle (for which he won his first Helen Hayes award as Best Actor), the Rupert Holmes one-man thriller, Solitary Confinement, where Mr. Keach played no less than six roles, all unbeknownst to the audience until the end of the play. In the musical theatre, he starred in the national tour of Barnum, played the King in Camelot for Pittsburgh’s Civic Light Opera, and the King in The King and I, which he also toured in Japan. He starred in the Jon Robin Baitz play, Ten Unknowns, at the Mark Taper Forum in 2003. The LA Times said: “And then there’s Keach. What a performance! How many actors can manage such thunder and such sweet pain. He’s been away from the LA stage too long. Welcome back.”

In 2004, he starred as Scrooge in Boston’s Trinity Rep musical production of A Christmas Carol; earlier in 2004, he starred as Phil Ochsner in Arthur Miller’s last play Finishing The Picture, directed by Robert Falls at the Goodman Theatre.

As a narrator his voice has been heard in countless documentaries; as the host for the Twilight Zone radio series; numerous books on tape, including the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. In the year 2000, he recorded a CD of all of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. He recently recorded the voice of St. Paul for a new audio version of The New Testament:, The Word of Promise and Job for the Old Testament edition. He is the narrator on CNBC’s new hit show, American Greed (2007), and recently narrated the award-winning documentary, The Pixar Story (2007). He has also reprised his role as Mike Hammer in the Blackstone audio series, the most recent being “Encore for Murder”. A charter-member of LA Theatre Works, Mr. Keach recently played the title role in Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo, recorded both for radio and CD. He was seen on CBS’s hit show Two and a Half Men (2003) as the gay Dad of Charlie’s fiance.

Stacy Keach also believes strongly in ‘giving back’ and has been the Honorary Chair for the Cleft Palate Foundation for the past twenty-five years. He is also the national spokesman for the World Craniofacial organization. He has served on the Artist’s Committee for the Kennedy Center Honors for two decades, is on the board of directors for Genesis at the Crossroads, a Chicago-based organization dedicated to bringing peoples of combatant cultures together through the shared artistic expressions of the visual and culinary arts, music, dance, and theater. He also serves on the artistic board for Washington DC’s Shakespeare Theatre National Council, where he was also honored in 2000 with their prestigious Millennium Award for his contribution to classical theatre. Some years ago Hollywood honored him with a Celebrity Outreach Award for his work with charitable organizations.

He has been the recipient of Lifetime Achievement Awards from Pacific Pioneer’s Broadcasters, the San Diego Film Festival, the Pacific Palisades Film Festival, and The 2007 Oldenburg Film Festival in Germany. Later this year, he will be awarded the 2010 Lifetime Award from the St. Louis Film Festival. In 2008, he received the Mary Pickford Award for versatility in acting.

Mr. Keach was a Fulbright scholar to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, attended the University of California at Berkeley and the Yale Drama School. He has always been a star of the American stage, especially in Shakespearen roles such as Hamlet, Henry 5, Coriolanus, Falstaff, Macbeth, Richard 3, and most recently, King Lear.

Of his many accomplishments, Mr. Keach claims that his greatest accomplishment is his family. He has been married to his beautiful wife Malgosia for twenty-five years, and they have two wonderful children, Shannon Keach (1988), and daughter Karolina Keach (1990).

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Guttman Associates

THe above entries IMDB can also be accessed online here.

Ron Harper was born in 1936 in Turtle Creek near Pittsburgh. After serving in the U.S. navym he commenced an acting career. His first major role was as part of the cast of the dectective series “87th Precinct” with Robert Lansing in 1961. He went on to star opposite Connie Stevens in the series “Wendy and Me and as the son of Jean Arthur in “The Jean Arthur Show” in 1966.

IMDB entry:

Born in Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania–a small town just east of Pittsburgh–Ron Harper became valedictorian of his senior class and won an academic scholarship to Princeton University, where he supplemented his academic studies by appearing in a number of plays and musical comedies. He earned a fellowship to study law at Harvard but the “acting bug” lured him instead to New York, where he studied with ‘Lee Strasberg’. Next came a stint in the US Navy (mostly spent in Panama), followed by a return to New York. After several disappointments he earned a job as Paul Newman‘s understudy in “Sweet Bird of Youth”. Hollywood soon beckoned and Harper appeared in a succession of TV series: 87th Precinct (1961), The Jean Arthur Show (1966), Wendy and Me (1964),Garrison’s Gorillas (1967) and Planet of the Apes (1974).

Following “Apes” he had roles in several soap-operas and guest-starred on various TV shows. He now lives in California.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: dinky-4 of Minneapolis

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Sam Wanamaker was born in 1919 in Chicago. His films include “My Girl Tisa” in 1948 and came to Britain in 1952 and made such movies as “Mr Denning Drives North”, “The Criminal”, “Man in the Middle”. He is well known for his restoration of the Globe Theatre in London. He died in 1993. His daughter is the actress Zoe Wamamaker.

“Independent” obituary by Nick Smurthwaite:

Samuel Wanamaker, actor, director and producer: born Chicago 14 June 1919; CBE 1993; married 1940 Charlotte Holland (three daughters); died London 18 December 1993

IF Sam Wanamaker wasn’t as famous or acclaimed an actor as he might have been, he only had himself to blame. Or rather, his obsession. For over 20 years he poured the lion’s share of his considerable energy into recreating Shakespeare’s wooden ‘O’, the Globe Theatre, on London’s south bank.

Born in Chicago in 1919, Wanamaker had a dogged entrepreneurial zeal that was often mistaken for American excess in the London theatrical establishment, especially since he was always aware of the commercial imperatives attendant upon his dream to rebuild the Globe. The need to make it a going concern was seen by many as thinly veiled Disneyism.

What his detractors often forgot was that Wanamaker was a genuine Shakespearean enthusiast, man and boy. Appropriately, his debut in Shakespeare was in a plywood and paper replica of the Globe at the Chicago World Fair in 1934, when he appeared as a teenager in condensed versions of the Bard’s greatest hits.

Wanamaker was 23 when he first played Broadway in Cafe Crown in 1942. The following year he was called up and spent the next three years doing his US military duty. Returning to the theatre in 1946, he took on a succession of headstrong juvenile leads in long-forgotten plays. What he hankered after was classical theatre of the kind that flourished in England. To this end he created the Festival Repertory Theatre in New York in 1950.

Two years later, by now blacklisted by Senator McCarthy’s

Commie- bashers, he came to London to join Laurence Olivier’s company at the St James’s Theatre, playing alongside Michael Redgrave in Winter Journey, which he also directed. One of the first things he did on arriving in London was to seek out the site of Shakespeare’s Globe. Instead of the elaborate memorial he’d always imagined, Wanamaker found a dirty plaque fixed to the wall of a Courage brewery bottling plant in a particularly drab Southwark back street.

From 1953 to 1960 he produced and acted in plays in London and the provinces, creating the New Shakespeare Theatre in Liverpool, where his productions included A View From the Bridge, The Rose Tattoo, The Rainmaker and Bus Stop. Another American play, The Big Knife by Clifford Odets, was a personal success for Wanamaker as actor-director at the Duke of York’s in 1954. Perhaps his outstanding performance of this period, certainly the one for which he is best remenbered, was Iago to Paul Robeson’s Othello in Tony Richardson’s 1959 production at Stratford.

He first tackled opera in 1962, Tippett’s King Priam, twice revived at Covent Garden. Wanamaker later admitted he relied on others better acquainted with operatic production to tell him what to do, including the composer himself, ‘who kept laughing, patting me on the back and telling me not to worry’.

Later that year his radical reinvention of Verdi’s La Forza del Destino caused a sensation at Covent Garden, and led to many other operatic offers, including, much later, the opening production at Sydney Opera House, Prokofiev’s War and Peace. In 1977 he returned to Covent Garden to produce the premiere of Tippett’s The Ice Break.

Wanamaker’s track record shows a commendable lack of cultural elitism. He would happily go from producing Verdi to playing a cameo in a Goldie Hawn film (Private Benjamin, 1980), or directing an episode of Hawaii Five-0 (1978). He thrived on diversity and contrast, the more challenging the better. Though there were some memorable screen roles in Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines (1964), The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1966), the 1978 television mini-series Holocaust and, most recently, Guilty by Suspicion (1991) with Robert De Niro, Wanamaker never took film seriously enough to claim the first- division status that was his due.

From the late 1960s his colleagues in almost every job he undertook were regaled, like it or not, with the latest chapter in the Globe saga, which sometimes seemed as if it would never reach its climax. From the moment he first presented the Architectural Association with a model of the Globe he had had made at Shepperton Studios in 1969, Wanamaker was a man with a mission – to create an international focus for the study and celebration of Shakespeare.

He found a staunch ally in Theo Crosby, who became chief architect of the scheme, sharing Wanamaker’s determination to make it both commercially viable (since government subsidy always seemed unlikely) and true to the Spartan style of its 16th-century blueprint – hard wooden benches, no heating, no amplification, and no roof to cover the hole in the middle.

Over two decades of fund-raising and bureaucratic battles, Wanamaker’s missionary zeal was stretched to the limit, mostly by the left-wingers of Southwark Council, who tried to sabotage what they saw as indulgent elitism by claiming the Globe site back for council housing. The matter was finally settled in court, where Wanamaker’s contention that the Globe project would bring employment to many and regeneration to a notably depressed area of London finally won the day.

By the late 1980s the Globe had beaten off its chief adversaries, and become virtually unassailable thanks to the patronage of the Duke of Edinburgh, Ronald Reagan, Michael Caine, Dustin Hoffman and a host of other victims of Wanamaker’s persuasive powers. No longer was he perceived as the cranky Yank building castles in the air; despite an unfavourable economic climate and constantly escalating costs, the Globe really would be rebuilt and Wanamaker’s dream vindicated.

In more recent years, the quest for funds took him, appropriately, all over the globe, shored up by his commitment to posterity and the firm belief that there was, just around the next corner, that elusive crock of gold. The first bays of the Globe Theatre were unveiled this year. It is scheduled to open for business in April 1995.

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

Nelson Eddy was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1901. He is best known for his screen partnership with Jeanette McDonald in a series of hughly popular MGM Musicals in the 1930’s and early 1940’s. The titles included “Maytime”, “The Girl of the Golden West”, “New Moon” and “Bitter Sweet”. His other leading ladies included Suzanna Foster, Llona Massey and Rise Stevens.

TCM overview:

Promising opera baritone with a wholesome masculinity and a resounding voice who vaulted to stardom opposite Jeanette MacDonald in a series of enormously popular MGM operettas in the 1930s and early 40s. The duo starred in eight films together, though the first three, “Naughty Marietta” (1935), “Rose Marie” (1936) and “Maytime” (1937), were the team’s best. Though his film career is largely linked with MacDonald’s, Eddy did enjoy some success opposite Eleanor Powell in the lavish “Rosalie” (1938) and with Rise Stevens in the witty “The Chocolate Soldier” (1941). He also provided several voices for the disappointing, uneven Disney offering, “Make Mine Music” (1946), delightfully performing the title role of the segment, “The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met”. After his film career petered out in the late 40s, Eddy returned to occasional concert work and made nightclub appearances.

Cliff Robertson obituary in “The Guardian” in 2011.

Cliff Robertson was born in 1923 in La Jolla, California. His first film credit in 1955 was the wonderful “Picnic” as Kim Novak’s boyfriend. He starred opposite Joan Crawford in “Autumn Leaves”. In 1962, John F. Kennedy chose him to play Kennedy in the was drama “P.T. 109”. He won an Oscar for his performance in 1968 for “Charly”. He most recently being in the “Spiderman” movies. He died in 2011.

Brian Baxter’s “Guardian” obituary:

The actor Cliff Robertson, who has died aged 88, had many claims to fame, among them being selected by President John F Kennedy to portray him in the 1963 film PT 109 and an Oscar-winning performance in the title role of Charly in 1968, plus a successful directorial debut with JW Coop in 1971. But it was his role at the centre of a Hollywood scandal involving the misappropriation of funds by producer David Begelman at Columbia Studios that brought Robertson additional – and unwanted – celebrity, adversely affecting his subsequent career.

Following a tax demand in 1977, he discovered that he had supposedly been paid $10,000 by the studio. Knowing this to be untrue, Robertson took the matter further. His action led to an internal inquiry, followed by a police investigation and court proceedings that rocked not just the studio but Hollywood in general, as it uncovered wide-ranging corruption and lax accounting proceedings. Although Robertson’s action was simply the springboard for the investigation, his refusal to back down earned him enemies among the Hollywood elite.

Born in La Jolla, California, Robertson came from a wealthy ranching family. His parents divorced when he was a child and he was adopted by his maternal grandmother, growing up within a strict Presbyterian environment that shaped his values. He determined to become an actor while at Antioch college, Ohio, and headed for New York and the Actors Studio. The inevitable round of jobs – including taxi-driving – followed, plus theatre work including Late Love (1953), and television shows, notably a long period in a children’s serial, Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers (1953-54).

In February 1955, he appeared in Joshua Logan’s play The Wisteria Trees, and shortly afterwards Logan offered Robertson his first film role, opposite William Holden in Picnic (1955). Logan, who had a keen eye for talent and handsome young men, made a sexy, though overblown, movie from William Inge’s play. Its popularity led to a Universal contract for Robertson and a good part as the young husband to a neurotic Joan Crawford in Autumn Leaves (1956).

Sadly, only the war movie The Naked and the Dead (1958) and Samuel Fuller’s Underworld USA (1961) were of note among his immediate credits. In the latter, a revenge movie, Robertson had one of his meatiest roles as Tolly Devlin, who hunts down his father’s murderers.

Even though PT 109 (1963) was not a major hit, the endorsement from Kennedy to play him as a heroic navy lieutenant helped Robertson’s career. The best of the many roles that followed was as the overly ambitious rival to Henry Fonda in The Best Man (1964), a political thriller written by Gore Vidal and tautly directed by Franklin Schaffner. It offered the kind of literate, spiky characterisation at which Robertson excelled.

The character found an echo in the witty, if talkative, The Honey Pot (1967), where he was cast as Rex Harrison’s mendacious secretary. Unfortunately few such sinister roles came his way, and he was more often in routine fare such as 633 Squadron and The Devil’s Brigade. He also worked steadily on television, and in 1958 had played the alcoholic PR man in Days of Wine and Roses, though was passed over in favour of Jack Lemmon when the 1962 film was made.

After comparable success in the 1961 TV drama The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon, he astutely bought the rights to the play. It took seven years for him to get backing for a movie version, but eventually his role in Charly as a man with learning difficulties who is operated on and becomes a genius – only to regress again – won him the best actor Oscar, among other awards. He spent considerable effort and money in a publicity campaign and won, admittedly against modest competition, as much for his determination and decency as for his anguished performance. This boost to his career led to roles in Robert Aldrich’s Too Late the Hero (1970), in which he co-starred with Michael Caine, and the intriguing western The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972).

By then he had gained enough clout to direct JW Coop, which he co-wrote, produced and starred in, as a rodeo rider newly released from prison and trying to adjust to society. Stronger on character and small-town atmosphere than narrative, it was an intelligent movie and a modest commercial success.

He followed it with more TV, which included A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1974) and Return to Earth (1976), playing Buzz Aldrin. There were decent movies such as the thriller Three Days of the Condor (1975) and Brian De Palma’s revamp of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, called Obsession (1976), although Robertson lacked the inner anguish to play the obsessed husband. After The Battle of Midway (1976) and the lavish mini-series Washington: Behind Closed Doors (1977), his career seemed secure. It was then that the Begelman scandal broke.

After his initial disclosure, the studio had hoped the matter could be hushed up, but Robertson’s intransigence led to an ongoing investigation, bringing to light more fraud and financial misdealings. When film projects were cancelled thanks to pressure being put on producers, Robertson once again retreated to television, with Overboard (1978); the following year he set up his own production of The Pilot (1980), which he also co-wrote and directed, while playing the central role of a commercial pilot battling with alcoholism. It had a small cinema release in the US and went straight to TV in Britain.

There was little work until a television movie, Two of a Kind (1982), then a long run as Dr Ranson in the popular series Falcon Crest. He played Hugh Hefner in Star 80 and a supporting role in the sex comedy Class (both 1983). Two years later, during the resurgence of the New Zealandfilm industry, he went there to star in the caper Shaker Run (1986).

He then worked steadily in television and the cinema, averaging two films a year. This allowed him time for his enthusiasms, tennis and skiing, and for flying, which had been his passion since his teens. Few of the movies were of great note: he played the president in Escape from LA (1996), but was demoted to vice-president in Mach 2 (2001).

Although he notched up relatively few credits in the following years, he was probably seen by larger audiences than at any time during his long career when he was cast as Ben Parker – the hero’s elderly uncle – in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002) and its sequels. Despite his liberal politics and refusal to play the Hollywood game, he had proved himself to be a survivor in a business he described as unstable – “rather like trying to stand up in a canoe with your pants down”.

He was twice married and twice divorced, and is survived by a daughter, Stephanie, and a granddaughter.

• Clifford Parker Robertson, actor, born 9 September 1923; died 10 September 2011

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

Peter Lind Hayes was born in 1915 in San Francisco. He was a popular broadcaster and entertainer who also acted in some films e.g. “The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T”,”The Senator Was Indiscreet” and “Once You Kiss A Stranger”. He died in 1998.

Dick Vosburgh’s obituary in “The Independent”;

HE COW’s gone dry and the hens won’t lay, / The fish quit bitin’ last Saturday, / Troubles pile up day by day, / And now I’m gettin’ dandruff!” Those lugubrious words are from “Life Gets Tee-Jus, Don’t It?”, the 1948 hit recorded by Peter Lind Hayes, whose long career encompassed virtually all the media.

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He was only two when his father, Joseph Conrad Lind Snr, a railroad man and amateur singer, died. Peter attended parochial school in Cairo, Illinois, but, from the age of nine, performed every summer with his mother, Grace Hayes, a vaudeville star. At 16, he wrote a new act for his mother and himself; they appeared in it at New York’s legendary vaudeville theatre the Palace.

In 1939, while Peter was working as a film stand-in, his mother built the Grace Hayes Lodge, a night-club in the San Fernando Valley. An instant success, the club attracted a large film-business clientele, with mother and son starring in the floor-shows. Peter soon graduated from stand-in to film actor; in 1939 he appeared in These Glamour Girls, which starred (naturally) Lana Turner, and in Million Dollar Legs, which (equally naturally) starred Betty Grable.

Under contract to Paramount, he had just acted with Jackie Cooper in Seventeen (1940) when he met Mary Healy, who was under contract to 20th Century-Fox; they married the following year. Also in 1941, the newly weds appeared in Zis Boom Bah, a low-budget musical in which Grace Hayes also played, as a vaudeville star who buys her college student son (Peter) a cafe, which he turns into a successful night-club.

As Victor Mature’s army buddy in Seven Days’ Leave (1942), Hayes sang, danced and did impersonations of Ronald Colman, Lionel Barrymore and Charles Laughton. The day after completing the film, he enlisted in the US Army Air Corps, and was assigned to the corps’s Radio Production Unit, which wrote and presented daily broadcasts. Private Frank Loesser, writer, was also in the unit, and he and Hayes collaborated on “Why Do They Call a Private a Private?”, a song introduced on one of their shows by Ethel Merman. Hayes later joined the all- serviceman cast of Moss Hart’s Air Force play Winged Victory (1943). The following year he appeared in the film version as well.

Hayes left the service in 1945 with a Bronze Star for having entertained more than a million troops in the South Pacific. His first post-war film was Universal’s The Senator Was Indiscreet (1947), the only film directed by the celebrated playwright George S. Kaufman. Although Hayes had made at least a dozen previous screen appearances, his name on the opening credits was, curiously, preceded by “And Introducing”. He played a political publicist, trying to sell the voters the pea-brained Senator Melvin Ashton (William Powell) as their next President. The film fired some witty barbs at American politics (Ashton came out flatly against assassination), but had the bad luck to emerge the same year as the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Universal promoted the satirical Senator very gingerly.

Hayes next played a lovable hansom cab driver in Heaven on Earth (1948), a 12-performance Broadway musical that the New York Star called “the biggest sleeping pill in town”. His other stage work included Norma Krasna’s farce Who Was That Lady I Saw You With? (1958) and Brian Friel’s Lovers (1968).

After establishing themselves as a top night-club team, Hayes and Mary Healy appeared together in such television series as The Chevrolet Show (1949), The Stork Club (1950), Star of the Family (1951-52) and the sitcom Peter Loves Mary (1960-61). For the big screen, they co-starred in The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr T (1953), the Dr Seuss musical about a young boy (Tommy Rettig) who rescues his hypnotised mother (Mary Healy) from his wicked piano teacher (Hans Conreid), with the help of Mr Zabladowski, a friendly plumber (Hayes). A disaster on its first release, this surrealistic classic was successfully revived 20 years later and now enjoys cult status.

In 1952, while appearing with Mary Healy at the London Palladium, Hayes was asked the secret of a successful marriage. He replied, “All you have to do is get your wife in the act – and keep her there.”

Dick Vosburgh

Joseph Conrad Lind (Peter Lind Hayes), actor, composer and writer: born San Francisco 25 June 1915; married 1940 Mary Healy (one son, one daughter); died Las Vegas 22 April 1998.

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

Irene Manning was born in 1912 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her first film in 1936 was “The Old Corral” with Gene Autry. In 1942 she starred with Humphrey Bogart in “The Big Shot” and with Dennis Morgan in two films, “The Desert Song” and “Shine On Moon”. She died in 2004 at the age of 91.

Tom Vallance’s “Independent” obituary:

The actress and lyric soprano Irene Manning was a blonde beauty who had a brief spell as a film star in the early Forties.

Inez Harvuot (Irene Manning), actress and singer: born Cincinnati 17 July 1912; married 1940 Het Manheim (marriage dissolved 1944), 1944 Keith Kolhoff (marriage dissolved 1946), 1948 Clinton Green (marriage dissolved 1951), 1964 Maxwell W. Hunter (died 2001); died San Carlos, California 28 May 2004.

The actress and lyric soprano Irene Manning was a blonde beauty who had a brief spell as a film star in the early Forties. Her most notable roles were those of the singer Fay Templeton in the classic musical Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and as Margot, the heroine of The Desert Song (1944). She also played leading lady to Gene Autry and Humphrey Bogart, and had an extensive career on stage including a Broadway musical by Lerner and Loewe and West End roles in plays and musicals.

The youngest of five children, she was born Inez Harvuot in Cincinnati in 1912. Both her parents were singers who appeared in opera choruses, and at the age of two Inez could sing “The Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia”. Her family moved to Los Angeles when she was 10, and after graduating from Los Angeles High School she gained a scholarship to study voice at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. Classically trained, she gained considerable stage experience in operetta and musicals prior to 1936, when she was given a film contract by Republic.

The studio’s head of publicity Het Manheim, gave her a new name, Hope Manning, and became her first husband:

Het was a good man. Our problem was geographical. Het remained in New York while I was leaping all over the country. As much as we loved each other, we came to realise the marriage wasn’t working.

She made her screen début in The Old Corral (1936), a western starring the studio’s major star, Gene Autry, with whom she sang a duet. After supporting roles in Two Wise Maids (1937) and Michael O’Halloran (1937), she returned to the stage when offered a leading role in a new musical by Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein and Otto Harbach, Gentlemen Unafraid (1938). A Civil War tale of a West Point cadet torn between fighting for the Union or for his home state, Virginia, it opened in St Louis, where it was so poorly received that it closed after just one week. Manning, as the cadet’s sweetheart, introduced “Your Dream is the Same as My Dream”, which acquired a measure of popularity when later reused by the composers in the film One Night in the Tropics.

After appearing in New York in two more short-lived musicals, she toured with the famous baritone John Charles Thomas in Lehar’s operetta Gypsy Baron (1940) and the pair made several Gilbert and Sullivan recordings together. Warner Brothers, who had made an early talkie of the Sigmund Romberg operetta The Desert Song in 1929, were planning a new version, for which Manning tested. She said,

They spent about five years casting The Desert Song. They auditioned everyone, including Gladys Swarth-

out of the Metropolitan Opera. I was given a very expensive test, in Technicolor, and on the strength of it Warners signed me and changed my name to Irene Manning.

Since the script for The Desert Song wasn’t ready, she was first cast in Yankee Doodle Dandy as the legendary stage star Fay Templeton, who is won over by the brash composer George M. Cohan (James Cagney) when he composes a song for her, “Only 45 Minutes from Broadway”, in her dressing room while she is performing on stage. Her renditions of “So Long, Mary” and “Mary’s a Grand Old Name” were among the film’s highlights, and Variety called her performance “plenty socko”. Manning later recalled the film as her happiest Hollywood experience.

She was less happy with her next film, a minor thriller, The Big Shot(1942), though she was leading lady to Humphrey Bogart. She described the director, Lewis Seiler, as “not the greatest”:

Just before we started, he said to me, “Are you going to sing your lines?” When I had to be shot to death at the end, I asked how he wanted me to go about it. “I have no idea,” he said.

After another low-budget movie, Spy Ship (1942), Manning took on her most important screen role, starring opposite Dennis Morgan inThe Desert Song, directed by Robert Florey. Morgan played an American bandleader who dons a cape and becomes the mysterious leader of a group of desert tribesmen sabotaging German attempts to build a railroad. Manning said,

The movie had some excellent action sequences and an interesting script. Years later, Gordon MacRae, who starred in the 1953 version, told me he thought ours was the better movie.

The gorgeously photographed film (with Gallup, New Mexico, standing in for the Sahara desert) is generally considered the finest of the operetta’s three screen transcriptions, but it is little known today because copyright problems have kept it out of circulation for several decades.

Surprisingly, the studio failed to capitalise on Manning’s impressive performance, and, despite announcing earlier that she and Morgan would be teamed in a series of musicals similar to those MGM had made with Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy, they instead relegated her to supporting roles. She later said of her boss,

Jack Warner? He wasn’t one of my favourite people. Let’s just say that there was not a lot of class there.

Miles Kreuger, President of the Institute of the American Musical, said that Manning’s “more elegant, more reserved” persona was out of sync during the war years when audiences preferred “young girls who were perky and more accessible” like Betty Grable. “I think that’s why she didn’t catch on a little bit more.”

Manning’s subsequent films included the splendid musical Shine On, Harvest Moon (1944), again starring Morgan but with Ann Sheridan as leading lady and Manning as “the other woman”, and the comedyMake Your Own Bed (1944) with Jane Wyman and Jack Carson.The Doughgirls (1944), based on the hit play about the wartime shortage of hotel accommodation in Washington, was a favourite of the actress, though Eve Arden had the showiest role as a Russian female guerrilla.

After a cameo as herself in Hollywood Canteen (1944), Manning left for England with her own USO unit to entertain servicemen overseas. In England she recorded four songs with Glenn Miller’s Army Air Forces Band. Recorded for the Office of War Information just a few days before Miller disappeared in a small aircraft over the English Channel, the songs were broadcast between propaganda announcements to German troops on the BBC’s German Wehrmacht Hour.

One of the songs, “Begin the Beguine”, was included in the CD setGlenn Miller: The Lost Recordings, and reveals Manning’s voice, pitched in a lower register than usual, blending surprisingly well with the Miller band. Manning also featured in a British film, I Live in Grosvenor Square (1945), making a “courtesy appearance” as herself, pictured entertaining American servicemen in a Piccadilly club with a rendition of the wistful 1931 ballad “Home”.

Manning returned to the stage to star on Broadway in a musical by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, The Day Before Spring(1945), playing a woman who with her husband of 10 years (John Archer) attends a college reunion where she is drawn to an old flame (Bill Johnson). Though the cast and score were praised, the libretto came in for heavy criticism in the mixed reviews.

In 1947 Manning moved to England, making her London stage début in Millocker’s The DuBarry (1947), and appearing in Alan Melville’s hit comedy Castle in the Air (1949) with Jack Buchanan and Coral Browne. She also toured music halls with a variety act, hosted her own BBC television show An American in England, and wrote a weekly show-business column, “Girl About Town”. She said,

I had a wonderful time in England and really matured . . . still, when I came back to the US in 1952, nobody remembered me. So I just started all over again.

She did night-club work, sang on radio with the Andre Kostelanetz and Gordon Jenkins orchestras, appeared in television plays, and starred in both musicals and plays in summer theatres, including The King and I (her personal favourite role).

An accomplished abstract painter, she had exhibitions of her work in New York and Washington, and for the last 30 years she taught voice, acting, personal development, speech dynamics and modelling.

Tom Vallance

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Brad Davis

Brad Davis. IMDB.

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Stacy Keach. IMDB.

Ron Harper

Sam Wanamaker

Nelson Eddy

Cliff Robertson

Cliff Robertson obituary in “The Guardian” in 2011.

Peter Lind Hayes

Irene Manning

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