Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 84 of 128

Rita Gam

Rita Gam was born in 1928 in Pittsburgh. She made her film debut in 1952 with Ray Milland in “The Thief”. She went on to make “Night People” with Gregory Peck and “King of Kings” with Jeffrey Hunter. She died at the age of 88 in 2016.

“New York Times” obituary:

Rita Gam, who made her eye-catching Hollywood debut without saying a word and played a real-life bridesmaid at the fairy-tale wedding of her former roommate Grace Kelly, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. She was 88.

The cause was respiratory failure, said Nancy Willen, a spokeswoman for the family. Ms. Gam, who was once married to the film director Sidney Lumet, made her Broadway debut in Ben Hecht’s 1946 play “A Flag Is Born” and, after three more Broadway roles, made her first movie six years later, opposite Ray Milland in “The Thief,” a suspense film without dialogue. Life magazine featured her on its cover that year as a “silent and sexy” star who “can express herself eloquently without words.” In just a few moments on the screen, the magazine said, Ms. Gam “makes a striking movie debut without uttering a word.” She also appeared in two movies with Gregory Peck, “Night People” (1954) and “Shoot Out”(1971); “Sign of the Pagan” (1954), with Jack Palance and Jeff Chandler; “Hannibal” (1959), with Victor Mature; “King of Kings” (1961), in which she played Queen Herodias; and “Klute” (1971), with Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland.

Ms. Gam won a Silver Bear as best actress at the 1962 Berlin Film Festival for her performance in Tad Danielewski’s adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play “No Exit.” She also acted on television and in regional theater and produced two documentary series, “World of Film” and “World of Beauty.”

Rita Eleanore Mackay was born in Pittsburgh on April 2, 1927, to Milton A. Mackay, a native of Alsace-Lorraine who died when she was 4, and the former Belle Fately, who was born in Romania.

She took the name of her stepfather, Benjamin J. Gam, a dress manufacturer, who was born in Russia. (As a synonym for glamorous legs, “gams” predates her film career.)

Raised in Manhattan, she attended the private Fieldston School in the Bronx and at 17 ran away from home (about 25 blocks, to a Midtown hotel), finding work modeling hats and selling stuffed pandas while pursuing an acting career.

She was married and divorced twice, first to Mr. Lumet (from 1949 to 1955) and then to Thomas Guinzburg (1956-63), a book publisher and co-founder of The Paris Review. She is survived by her daughter, Kate Guinzburg, a film producer; her son, Michael Guinzburg, a novelist; and two granddaughters. Thomas Guinzburg died in 2010 and Sidney Lumet in 2011.

As an actress, Ms. Gam befriended and roomed with Grace Kelly and was a bridesmaid at her wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956, a union of European aristocracy and Hollywood glamour that was one of the biggest social events of the decade.

An early participant at the Actors Studio, Ms. Gam also played a leading role, along with Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Zoe Caldwell and others, with the Minnesota Theater Company in 1963 during the opening season of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

After generally being typecast in supporting roles in two dozen films for what Life described as “her sultry face and insinuating voice,” she recalled in 1992, “I looked into the black pit at 40 and wondered, what do I do for an encore?”

Before producing documentaries, she learned to type and wrote two books: “Actress to Actress” (1986), which included a chapter on Grace Kelly, and “Actors: A Celebration” (1988).

‘Telegraph’ obituary in 2016

Rita Gam, who has died aged 88, was a tall, exotic, raven-haired beauty who enjoyed a successful film, television and stage career spanning almost six decades.

Rita MacKay (she later took the surname of her stepfather Benjamin Gam) was born in Pittsburgh on April 2 1927, but later moved with her parents to New York City where she graduated from high school with her eye on a career in the arts.

She started out working as a model before landing a role in A Flag is Born on Broadway in 1946. Directed by Luther Adler, and starring Marlon Brando, A Flag is Born was produced by the American League for a Free Palestine, some of whose members later formed the Actors Studio, of which she became a founder member.

Her next Broadway play, A Temporary Island (1946), failed to impress critics and closed after only six performances. The Insect Comedy (1947) starring José Ferrer at the City Centre Theatre did not fair much better either, closing after a fortnight.

In 1949 Rita Gam married Sidney Lumet, then an aspiring young director. Soon after she befriended Grace Kelly whose move to Hollywood inspired Rita Gam to do the same. In 1952, after screen testing with MGM, she traveled to Los Angeles where she was given a long-term contract with the studio.

After making her film debut in the crime drama The Thief (1952), starring Ray Milland, Rita Gam was given the female lead in Saadia (1953), in which she played a strange Arab girl whose life has been dominated by a local sorceress who has convinced her she has the evil eye and will bring disaster to all those who come in contact with her. Her other screen roles included Night People (1954), with Gregory Peck and Broderick Crawford, the action adventure Sign of Pagan (1954), starring Jack Palance as Attila the Hun, and director William Dieterle’s Magic Fire (1955).

In May 1955 Rita Gam received a call from Grace Kelly, “giddy with excitement” and inviting her to “meet my prince”. “He was no Clark Gable or Robert Taylor,” Rita Gam later recalled, “but he was charming and well educated.” A few months later Grace Kelly asked her friend to be one of her bridesmaids, an occasion which Rita Gam would later recall as “the fairytale affair the media described”. Also in 1955, however, Rita Gam and Sidney Lumet divorced. The following year they were both remarried; he to the socialite Gloria Vanderbilt and she to Thomas Guinzburg, who was the first managing editor of The Paris Review and president of Viking Press.

By the late 1950s, Rita Gam’s career was suffering. Having been dropped from MGM she began freelancing with other studios, but her career was not gravitating in the direction she wanted it to.

The bridesmaids arriving at Saint Nicholas Cathedral, Monaco, for the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier in 1956

There were some positive performances, including the western, Sierra Baron (1956), after which she travelled to Italy, to play the female lead, Rita Elmont, in director Vittorio Sala’s comedy Costa Azzurra, and Sylvia in the epic Hannibal (both 1959), with Victor Mature in the title role.

She then returned to California, where she appeared in Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1961) with Jeffrey Hunter and Siobhan McKenna. Scenes of the crucifixion had to be re-shot later because a preview audience was offended at Jesus having a hairy chest.

In 1962 she travelled to Berlin, sharing the Silver Bear at the 1962 International Film Festival with Viveca Lindfors for their roles as the women in the hotel room in Tad Danielewski’s No Exit, based on the play by Jean-Paul Sartre. The following year, she and Guinzburg divorced.

Combining a second career as a celebrity journalist, Rita Gam divided her time between film, television and the stage, returning to Broadway in 1967 to star in the hit comedy, There’s a Girl in My Soup at the Music Box Theatre.

Rita Gam in Tales of the Unexpected, 1981 CREDIT: REX FEATURES

Her later film roles included the Gregory Peck Western, Shootout (both 1971), and Garden of Death (1974), starring Joe Dallesandro as a sinister landscape gardener who turns into a tree and learns to communicate with his fellow plants, while killing off his previous employers. She joined Piper Laurie in the thriller Distortions (1987) and played Iris Biglow in Rowing Through (1996).

After Grace Kelly’s death in 1982, Rita Gam recalled a rather different version of the actress than the one reflected in the media. Grace Kelly, she explained was not a fashionista at all, rather she was more at home wearing simple shirts and skirts. “Her palace closets,” she said in 2012, “were packed with old sweaters”.

Rita Gam published her autobiography, Actress to Actress, in 1986. Two years later she wrote Actors: A Celebration, which included interviews with stars such as Jack Lemmon, Jeremy Irons and Derek Jacobi. More recently, she produced the Broadway play Fortune’s Fool (2002), which was set in 19th-century Russia and starred Alan Bates and Frank Langella. She also produced the documentary series World of Film, which examined the movie business around the world.

She is survived by her daughter, the film producer Kate Guinzburg, and her son, the novelist Michael Guinzburg

Patricia Morison obituary in “The Guardian” in 2018

A mezzo-soprano, she was the first performer to be heard lustily singing Wunderbar, So in Love and, above all, I Hate Men, in Porter’s greatest stage hit. She appeared in more than 1,000 performances of the show on Broadway, tamed by the baritone Alfred Drake; and in the original London production at the Coliseum in 1951. She also starred in the 1964 television production of the musical (with Howard Keel), which launched BBC2 – after an initial power failure.

Discontented with the parts she was asked to play in films, she abandoned the big screen altogether for the stage and television in the 1950s. In contrast to the shrewish Lilli/Kate in Kiss Me Kate, she took the role of the governess Anna Leonowens opposite Yul Brynner, joining the original production of The King and I on Broadway from 1954.

Born in New York, Patricia was the daughter of William Morison, the Belfast-born playwright, actor and theatrical agent, and Selena Morison (nee Fraser), who worked for British intelligence during the first world war. Patricia studied acting at drama school and also trained as a dancer with Martha Graham.

Aged 19, she was working as a dress designer and considering a career in either art or dance, when she became understudy to Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina on Broadway in 1936, and then appeared with Drake, her later Kiss Me, Kate co-star, in the operetta The Two Bouquets (1938), in which she sang a number of Victorian ballads

Hitler’s Madman, poster, Alan Curtis, Patricia Morison, John Carradine, 1943. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

This gained her a contract at Paramount, where she stayed for three years until 1942, displaying what the studio claimed was the longest hair in Hollywood (39in long). Among her inconsequential but enjoyable films there were those in which she played opposite the studio’s biggest male contract stars: Ray Milland in Untamed (1940) and Are Husbands Necessary? (1942), and Fred MacMurray in Rangers of Fortune (1940) and One Night in Lisbon (1941).

Morison had more interesting and varied roles when she went freelance in 1942, beginning with top billing in Hitler’s Madman (1943), Douglas Sirk’s first American film. In it she played a brave Czech partisan involved in the assassination of the Nazi official Reinhardt Heydrich (John Carradine), which led to the horrifying reprisals against the town of Lidice.

Nothing as substantial came her way, unless one counts her role in Henry Hathaway’s thriller Kiss of Death (1947), as Victor Mature’s wife who is raped and later takes her own life by putting her head in a gas oven. Unfortunately, her part was cut out of the film completely because the production code refused to allow a rape or suicide to be shown. Nevertheless, Morison’s name still appears on the credits of the film.

Previously, Morison was dropped at the last minute in favour of Veronica Lake in The Glass Key (1942) because she was considered too tall to play opposite Alan Ladd. She had to be content with playing the “other woman” coming between John Garfield and Maureen O’Hara in the film noir The Fallen Sparrow (1943), and a supporting role in the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn vehicle Without Love (1945). She was at her best as a villainous femme fatale in Dressed to Kill (1946), the last of the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes series. Morison also appeared to great effect as a ruthless leader of a expedition to track down animals for zoos in Tarzan and the Huntress (1947).

But after she played Maid Marian to Jon Hall’s Robin Hood in Prince of Thieves (1948), Morison’s main focus was television, which was beginning to burgeon, and the stage. She only returned to feature films briefly, strutting manfully as George Sand in Song Without End (1960), which starred Dirk Bogarde as Liszt.

Her latter years were taken up with painting, and appearing at various shows and reunions celebrating the Cole Porter musical in which she had played such a significant part.

• Ursula Eileen Patricia Augustus Fraser Morison, actor and singer, born 19 March 1915; died 20 May 2018.

Karen Morley was born in 1909 in Iowa. She was awarded a contract with MGM and was in such films as “Mata Hari” with Greta Garbo in 1931, “The Mask of Fu Manchu”, “Dinner At Eight” with Marie Dressler and “Pride and Prejudice” with Greer Garson and Maureen O’Sullivan. She died in 2003.

Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:

A month after director Elia Kazan received the Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 1999 (despite having named names before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee – HUAC), the San Francisco Film Festival honoured Karen Morley, whose career as an actress suffered from “friendly” witnesses. Morley, who has died aged 93, was called before Congress in 1952, but invoked the Fifth Amendment when asked if she had ever been a member of the Communist party. Actors Sterling Hayden and Robert Taylor were among those who denounced her.

She was born Mabel Linton in Ottumwa, Iowa, and moved with her foster family to California in her teens. After graduating from UCLA, she gained some acting experience at the Pasadena Community Playhouse. She broke into movies in 1930, when asked to read lines to actors being tested for the Garbo movie, Inspiration. She was cast, and signed up by MGM as Karen Morley.

In 1932, one of her busiest years, Morley appeared with Garbo in Mata Hari; she had leading roles in Arsene Lupin as gentleman-thief John Barrymore’s love interest; and played three femmes fatales , for which she is most remembered. In Washington Masquerade, she was a sexy lobbyist who married and corrupted a senator (Lionel Barrymore). In John Ford’s uncharacteristic Flesh, Morley trapped wrestler Wallace Beery into marriage; she then took a lover, had a baby by him, and passed it off as her husband’s. She was sympathetic when she declared her love for Beery, in prison for killing her lover. In Howard Hawks’ Scarface, there was little sympathy for her as Poppy, the blonde moll of a minor hoodlum. “She don’t like anybody but me,” he boasted, deluded; she soon made eyes at big gangster Paul Muni. Also in 1932, in The Mask Of Fu Manchu, her loveliness stimulated villainous Boris Karloff’s appetite for evil. The film was co-directed, uncredited, by the Hungarian-born Charles Vidor. He married Morley that year, keeping it secret from studio and press: they later had a son.

Vidor introduced her into politics, especially to anti-fascist groups. She left MGM after Dinner at Eight (1933) in which she shone as the forgiving wife of a philandering doctor, and went on to appear in Our Daily Bread (1934), an independent production about an attempt to start a farming cooperative. The film, directed by King Vidor (no relation), and called “pinko” by the Hearst press and “capitalist propaganda” in the Soviet Union, was a brave, raw attempt to inject contemporary issues into Hollywood cinema. As much as she could, Morley chose films with some political content such as Black Fury (1935) about racketeers muscling in on the Mine Worker’s Union, and The Last Train From Madrid (1937) in which she was a passenger fleeing the civil war. In 1940, Morley returned to MGM for one film, Pride And Prejudice. Soon after, she joined a tobacco workers’ organising drive in the South, having followed leftwing actor Lloyd Gough there. They married after her divorce from Vidor in 1943.

Morley made a number of minor films in the 1940s, while active as one of the few radicals in the Screen Actors Guild. She organised a strike, but it broke when Guild members, including Frank Sinatra and Robert Mitchum, crossed the picket lines. In 1951, she appeared in M, the remake of Fritz Lang’s German classic. Morley, with Joseph Losey, the director, Waldo Salt, the co-writer, and other members of the cast, was blacklisted in 1952. Lloyd Gough was also subpoenaed and blacklisted. Because Gough had played the important part of the heavy in Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1952), he could not be cut from the film, but he was not named in the final credits. Morley and Gough struggled to make a living over the next years, with a few parts in theatre and television. “It was really murder to find work after being blacklisted, for all actors who were prominent, because their faces were well known,” Morley explained. “People in the theatre like to say that it didn’t have a blacklist, and technically it didn’t. But people went out the back door when I tried to look for work in the theatre.”

In 1954, Morley, retired from acting, ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant-governor of New York State on the American Labor Party ticket. Gough worked in television series; he died in 1984.

· Karen Morley (Mabel Linton), actor, born December 12 1909; died March 8 2003

Frank Wolf was born in San Francisco in 1928. He starred in Elia Kazan’s “America, America” in 1963 and “Once Upon A Time in the West” in 1968. He died in 1971 in Rome.

BORIS AND NATASHA (1992), directed by CHARLES MARTIN SMITH.

Sally Kellerman was born in 1937 in Long Beach, California. Studied at the Actor’s Studio in New York and worked extensively on television during the 1960’s. Her breakthrough role came with the film “Mash” as ‘Hot Lips Houlihan’ in 1970. Her other films included “Lost Horizon” in 1973, “Brewster McCloud”, “S.O.B.” and “Pret-A-Porter_ in 1994.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Sally Kellerman arrived quite young on the late 1950s film and TV scene with a fresh and distinctively weird, misfit presence. It is this same uniqueness that continues to makes her such an attractively offbeat performer today. The willowy, swan-necked, flaxen-haired actress shot to film comedy fame after toiling nearly a decade and a half in the business, and is still most brazenly remembered for her career-maker — the irreverent hit MASH(1970), for which she received supporting Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. From there she went on to enjoy a number of other hallmark moments as both an actress and a vocalist.

California native Sally Clare Kellerman was born on June 2, 1937, in Long Beach to John Helm Kellerman and Edith Baine (née Vaughn) Kellerman. Raised along with her sister in the San Fernando Valley area, Sally was attracted to the performing arts after seeingMarlon Brando star in the film Viva Zapata! (1952). Attending the renowned Hollywood High School as a teenager, she sang in musical productions while there, including a version of “Meet Me in St. Louis”. Following graduation, she enrolled at Los Angeles City College but left after a year when enticed by acting guru Jeff Corey‘s classes.

Initially inhibited by her height (5’10”), noticeably gawky and slinky frame and wide slash of a mouth, Sally proved difficult to cast at first but finally found herself up for the lead role in Otto Preminger‘s “A”-level film Saint Joan (1957). She lost out in the end, however, when Preminger finally decided to give the role of Joan of Arc to fellow newcomer Jean Seberg. Hardly compensation, 20-year-old Sally made her film debut that same year as a girls’ reformatory inmate who threatens the titular leading lady in the cult “C” juvenile delinquent drama Reform School Girl (1957) starring “good girl” Gloria Castillo and “bad guy” Edd Byrnes of “777 Sunset Strip” teen idol fame, an actor she met and was dating after attending Corey’s workshops. Directed by infamous lowbudget horror film Samuel Z. Arkoff, her secondary part in the film did little in the way of advancing her career. At the same time Sally pursued a singing career, earning a recording contract with Verve Records.

The 1960s was an uneventful but growing period for Kellerman, finding spurts of quirky TV roles in both comedies (“Bachelor Father,” “My Three Sons,” “Dobie Gillis” and “Ozzie and Harriet”) and dramas (“Lock Up,” “Surfside 6,” “Cheyenne,” “The Outer Limits,” “The Rogues,” “Slattery’s People” and the second pilot of “Star Trek”). Sally’s sophomore film was just as campy as the first but her part was even smaller. As an ill-fated victim of theHands of a Stranger (1962), the oft-told horror story of a concert pianist whose transplanted hands become deadly, the film came and went without much fanfare. Studying later at Los Angeles’ Actors’ Studio (West), Sally’s roles increased toward the end of the 1960s with featured parts in more quality filming, including The Third Day(1965), The Boston Strangler (1968) (as a target for killer Tony Curtis) and The April Fools (1969).

Sally’s monumental break came, of course, via director Robert Altman when he hired her for, and she created a dusky-voiced sensation out of, the aggressively irritating character Major Margaret (“Kiss My ‘Hot Lips'”) Houlihan. Her highlighting naked-shower scene in the groundbreaking cinematic comedy MASH (1970) had audiences ultimately laughing and gasping at the same time. Both she and the film were a spectacular success with Sally the sole actor to earn an Oscar nomination for her marvelous work here. She shouldn’t have lost but did to the overly spunky veteran Helen Hayes in Airport (1970).

Becoming extremely good friends with Altman during the movie shoot, Sally went on to film a couple more of the famed director’s more winning and prestigious films of the 1970s, beginning with her wildly crazed “angelic” role in Brewster McCloud (1970), and finishing up brilliantly as a man-hungry real estate agent in his Welcome to L.A. (1976), directed by Alan Rudolph. Sally later regretted not taking the Karen Black singing showcase role in one of Altman’s best-embraced films, Nashville (1975), when originally offered.

Putting out her first album, “Roll With the Feelin'” for Decca Records around this time (1972), Sally continued to be a quirky comedy treasure in both co-star and top supporting roles of the 1970s. She was well cast neurotically opposite Alan Arkin in the Neil Simoncomedy Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972) and again alongside ex-con James Caan as a sexy but loony delight in Slither (1973), a precursor to the Coen Bros.’ darkly comic films. She also co-starred and contributed a song (“Reflections”) to the Burt Bacharach/Hal David soundtrack of the Utopian film Lost Horizon (1973), a musical picture that proved lifeless at the box office.

More impressive work came with the movies A Little Romance (1979) as young Diane Lane‘s quirky mom; Foxes (1980) as Jodie Foster‘s confronting mother; Serial (1980), a California comedy satire starring Martin Mull; That’s Life! (1986), a social comedy withJack Lemmon and Julie Andrews; and Back to School (1986), comic Rodney Dangerfield‘s raucous vehicle hit.

Kellerman’s films from the 1980s on have been pretty much a mixed bag. While some, such as the low-grade Moving Violations (1985), Meatballs III: Summer Job (1986),Doppelganger (1993) Live Virgin (1999) and Women of the Night (2001) have been completely unworthy of her talents, her presence in others have been, at the very least, catchy such as her Natasha Fatale opposite Dave Thomas‘ Boris Badenov in Boris and Natasha (1992); director Percy Adlon‘s inventive Younger and Younger (1993), which reunited her with MASH co-star Donald Sutherland, and in Robert Altman‘s rather disjointed, ill-received all-star effort Prêt-à-Porter (1994) in which she plays a fashion magazine editor.

When her quality film output faltered in later years, Sally lent a fine focus back to her singing career and made a musical dent as a deep-voiced blues and jazz artist. She started hitting the Los Angeles and New York club circuits with solo acts. In 2009, Kellerman released her first album since “Roll With The Feelin'” simply titled “Sally,” a jazz and blues-fused album. Along those same lines, Sally played a nightclub singer in the comedy Limit Up (1989) and later co-starred in the movie Night Club (2011) where friends and residents start a club in a retirement home. Sally’s seductively throaty voice has also put her in good standing as a voice-over artist of commercials, feature films and TV.

Divorced in the 1970s from TV writer/director Rick Edelstein, Sally later married Jonathan D. Krane. She has three adopted children.

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

Telegraph obituary in Feb 2022:

Sally Kellerman, actress best known as Major ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan in Robert Altman’s Korean War satire MAS*H – obituary

She took her most famous part despite a rant at the director and went on to be nominated for an Oscar

ByTelegraph Obituaries25 February 2022 • 3:34pm

Sally Kellerman, who has died aged 84, was a hard-working jobbing screen actress for more than a decade before finally finding stardom with her bravura performance as the sultry, alluring head nurse, Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan, in the film version of M*A*S*H.

The director, Robert Altman, originally auditioned her for another role eventually played by Jo Ann Pflug in the 1970 movie, a satire on the Korean War at the time American soldiers were dying in Vietnam.

“My agent said that I was reading for the part of Lieutenant Dish,” she said, “so I thought that I had better put on some red lipstick to look more ‘dish-y’.”

Sally Kellerman impressed Altman to the extent that he told her: “I’ll give you the best role in the picture, Hot Lips.” She took away a script but found that the character had just the odd line here and there, and disappeared halfway through.

Feeling that the director was making a fool of her, she later admitted going into a rant with him at their next meeting. “I had spent years playing roles on TV,” she explained. “I was already 31 years old. I didn’t want a career playing hard-bitten drunks in Chanel suits who get slapped by their husbands.”

Altman dealt with Sally Kellerman’s tantrum by casually telling her to “take a chance”. She accepted the role and “Hot Lips” turned out to be a central character – and gained her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress.

The theme song, with its “suicide is painless” lyric, instantly set the black comedy tone before cinemagoers were introduced to the cynicism of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital’s surgeons led by “Hawkeye” Pierce, “Duke” Forrest and “Trapper John” McIntyre, played by Donald Sutherland, Tom Skerritt and Elliott Gould respectively.

With Donald Sutherland (left) as Hawkeye and Elliott Gould as Trapper John in M.A.S.H. CREDIT: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

Major Margaret Houlihan, the highest-ranking female officer and a stickler for regulations, becomes a target for the camp’s pranksters, who set out to humiliate her. When she falls into the arms of another surgeon, Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), the public address system operator, Radar O’Reilly (Gary Burghoff), sneaks a microphone into the room to capture for all the sounds of their passionate lovemaking.

It is the scene where, in a variation from the novel, the nickname of Sally Kellerman’s character is introduced. “Oh, Frank, my lips are hot,” she tells him. “Kiss my hot lips!”

Later, when a $20 bet is placed on whether Hot Lips is a true blonde, the tent sides are pulled off while she is showering. As her naked body is revealed, an audience led by Hawkeye and Trapper John is lined up outside cheering.

In a 2016 interview, Sally Kellerman revealed that Altman’s own high jinks helped to spark her reaction in front of the camera.

“When I looked up,” she recalled, “there was Gary Burghoff stark naked standing in front of me. The next take, [Altman] had Tamara Horrocks – she was the more amply endowed nurse – without her shirt on. So I attribute my Academy Award nomination to the people who made my mouth hang open!”

This scene was followed by Hot Lips running to complain to Henry Blake (Roger Bowen), the commanding officer, that this is no hospital but an “insane asylum”, only to find him in bed with a female lieutenant.

Critics who later referred to such sexism and misogyny could point to the fact that neither scene was in the original book.

Like all of the film’s other stars apart from Burghoff, Sally Kellerman did not reprise her role in the subsequent long-running TV series, with Loretta Swit taking over as Hot Lips.

With William Shatner as Captain Kirk in Star Trek in 1966 CREDIT: CBS via Getty Images

She did continue in other films with Altman, enjoying the freedom he gave actors to interpret and ad-lib scripts, although none attained the same status.

Frustration also came with Neil Simon’s disappointing adaptation of his own stage comedy Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972), where her performance as a waspish vamp luring a restaurant owner into the first of a series of mid-life-crisis affairs was better than the film itself.

Sally Clare Kellerman was born in Long Beach, California, on June 2 1937 to Edith (née Vaughn), a piano teacher, and John Kellerman, a Shell Oil executive.

She sang in musicals while attending Hollywood High School and had ambitions to be a jazz singer. Aged 18, she landed a contract with Verve Records, but she never went beyond making demo records when stage fright meant she could not perform live.

Instead, she switched to acting, taking classes at Los Angeles City College, and made her screen debut in the 1957 film Reform School Girl.

Many one-off television roles followed, including Dr Elizabeth Dehner, the USS Enterprise’s psychiatrist, in an early episode of Star Trek in 1966 (made as the sci-fi series’s second pilot the previous year). In The Boston Strangler (1968) she played an intended victim of Albert DeSalvo (Tony Curtis), but she manages to bite his hand, causing him to flee.

After M*A*S*H, Sally Kellerman worked with Altman again on three films: Brewster McCloud (1970), playing “fairy godmother” to a young recluse (Bud Court) who wants to build wings and fly, and singing Rock-a-Bye Baby as she bathes him; The Player (1992), appearing as herself in a movie about Hollywood; and Prêt-à-Porter (1994), as a magazine editor in a satire on the fashion industry.

With Jack Nicholson in the 1970s CREDIT: Stills/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

She also played a real estate agent in Welcome to LA (1976, produced by Altman) and starred alongside Laurence Olivier and Diane Lane in A Little Romance (1979) and Jodie Foster in Foxes (1980).

Sally Kellerman resurrected her singing career with a 1972 album titled Roll With the Feelin’. Then, while struggling to find good film roles, she performed a cabaret act in nightclubs for a while – describing herself as “Billie Holiday without the drugs”.

Returning to acting, she alternated between television and films, and recorded the 2009 album, Sally. Her autobiography, Read My Lips: Stories of a Hollywood Life, was published in 2013.

Sally Kellerman married the future Starsky & Hutch TV director Rick Edelstein in 1970, but the couple divorced five years later. In 1980, she married the film producer Jonathan D Krane, who died in 2016. She is survived by an adopted son and daughter.

Sally Kellerman, born June 2 1937, died February 24 2022

Nancy Marchand was born in 1928 in Buffalo, New York. She had built up extensive stage experience before coming to television and then on to film. Her films include “Me, Natalie”, “Tell Me that You Love Me, Junie Moon”, “The Hospital” and “The Bostonians”. She is most famous though for two television roles, Mrs Pynchon in “Lou Grant” and Livia Soprano in “The Sopranos”. Nancy Marchand died in 2000.

Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:

For most people, Nancy Marchand, who has died of lung cancer the day before her 72nd birthday, will be remembered as Mrs Margaret Pynchon, the imperious, but essentially fair-minded and liberal owner of the fictional Los Angeles Tribune, in the 1970s television series, Lou Grant. City editor Grant (Ed Asner) complained about her superior and sardonic air, but most journalists would love to work for someone like Mrs Pynchon.

Hers was also one of the few TV roles showing an intelligent woman in a powerful position, who managed to suggest that strength and warmth need not be mutually exclusive. Marchand once described Mrs Pynchon as “a strange combination of being very imposing and down-to-earth”. She won four Emmy awards for the role, each of which acted as a leg of a coffee table in her home.

More recently, however, Marchand managed to obliterate this perception of herself as a patrician woman by brilliantly playing Livia Soprano, the monstrous, whin ing, half-senile, domineering mother of mob boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) in the Home Box Office series, The Sopranos. She never forgives her son for putting her into a nursing home, and becomes the cause of much of his guilt. “I think Livia is the first role I’ve ever had where the makeup crew tries to make me look bad,” March-and commented. “I may be getting older, but I don’t look quite that decrepit.”

In fact, Marchand started off a long way from the well-groomed, tasteful ladies with which she became associated on the small screen. She was in at the exciting beginnings of TV drama in America, her most famous role being Clara, the lonely, plain young school- mistress in the original 1953 live broadcast of Paddy Chay- evsky’s Marty, opposite Rod Steiger in the title role.

“I got the role of Clara because I wasn’t cutesy,” Marchant explained. “I never have been – and I had a bony face.” The actress was a close friend of Chayevsky’s, appearing in several of his television plays, including The Catered Affair and The Bachelor Party, making her feature debut in the film version of the latter.

But, despite the wider recognition of television, Marchand had a long, varied and distinguished stage career. After studying at the Actor’s Studio – with the likes of Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and John Cassavetes – she made her New York debut as the Tavern Hostess in The Taming Of The Shrew in 1951, going on to play many larger Shakespearean roles, including Nerissa, in The Merchant Of Venice, the Nurse, in Romeo And Juliet, and the Princess of France, in Love’s Labours Lost. It was while acting in Shakespeare and Shaw at the Brattle theatre, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that she met and married Paul Sparer, with whom she acted, on and off, until his death last November.

In 1960, she won an Obie award for the role of the Madame of the kinky brothel in Jean Genet’s The Balcony. It was then back to the classics at the American Shakespeare festival at Stratford, Connecticut, and the Lincoln Centre repertory theatre, where she was splendidly regal as Queen Elizabeth in Schiller’s Mary Stuart.

In 1980, commuting between Lou Grant in California and New York, Marchand triumphed on Broadway in a revival of Paul Osborn’s back-porch family comedy, Mornings At Seven, as the youngest, and most homely, of four sisters. Among her best film roles were Mrs Burrage, in James Ivory’s The Bostonians (1984), the Los Angeles mayor, in The Naked Gun (1988), and as a crusty, snobbish dowager waking up audiences in the soporific Sabrina (1995) – somehow managing to combine elements of Mrs Pynchon and Livia Soprano.

In real life, Marchand, who is survived by two daughters and a son, was very different from the strong-willed characters she played.

“I’m always very uncomfortable with people,” she once admitted. “It’s something that I get upset with myself for, but that’s the way I am. But I love people. And when I’m on the stage, I can embrace people and still feel safe. There are a lot of different facets to my personality that I don’t use all the time in my house, or in everyday life, that I can experience and share when I’m on a stage.”

• Nancy Marchand, actress, born June 19 1928; died June 18 2000

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

Keene Curtis was born in Salt Lake, Utah in 1923. He made his film debut in 1948 in “Macbeth” which starred Orson Welles. His other films included “Heaven Can Wait” and “Sliver”. He died in 2002.

IMDB entry:

Keene Curtis was born on February 15, 1923 in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA as Keene Holbrook Curtis. He was an actor, known for Sliver (1993), I.Q. (1994) and Mother Teresa: In the Name of God’s Poor (1997). He died on October 13, 2002 in Bountiful, Utah.

Awarded a Tony in 1971 for supporting actor in the musical, “The Rothschilds.”

Curtis spent 12 years as a stage manager, beginning in 1949 as an assistant stage manager on a tour of the Martha Graham Dance Company, and later for Katharine Cornelland Guthrie McClintock.

He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Utah, where he was a student actor and cheerleader.

Served three years with the Navy.

Discovered by Orson Welles when Welles directed a college production of “Macbeth”. Welles cast him in the role of Lennox the following year in his 1948 motion picture adaptation of the play, which launched his film career.

Endowed a scholarship to help graduates embark on their own acting careers and donated his Tony Award, theater memorabilia, and personal correspondence to his alma mater, the University of Utah.

Best known for his bald-pated Daddy Warbucks in “Annie” and flamboyant Alban in “La Cage aux Folles” on the musical stage, he later won a bit of notice as a recurring character on TV’s Cheers (1982) — the snippy, calculating upstairs restaurant owner, John Allen Hill.

Won Broadway’s 1971 Tony Award as Best Supporting or Featured Actor (Musical) for “The Rothschilds.”

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Marilyn Maxwell was born in 1921 in Iowa. Her movie debut was in “Lost in a Harem” in 1944. She was featured in “Champion” with Kirk Douglas, “The Lemon Drop Kid” with Bob Hope and “Rock-A-Bye Baby” in 1958. She died at the age of 50 in 1972.

TCM overview:

Source: not available

Marilyn Maxwell (August 3, 1921 – March 20, 1972), born Marvel Marilyn Maxwell, was a platinum blonde, curvaceous movie actress and entertainer who, in addition to appearing in many films and radio programs, also entertained the troops during World War II and the Korean War on USO tours with Bob Hope. She also appeared in a number of Hope’s shows as a sexy but comic foil. She started her professional entertaining career as a radio singer while still a teenager before signing with MGM in 1942 as a contract player. Among the programs in which she appeared was The Abbott and Costello Show. The head of MGM, Louis B. Mayer, insisted she change the “Marvel” part of her real name. She dropped her first name and kept the middle. Some of her memorable film roles included Lost in a Harem (1944), Champion (1949), The Lemon Drop Kid (1951), and Rock-A-Bye Baby (1958)

Champion, poster, Ruth Roman, Kirk Douglas, Marilyn Maxwell, 1949. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Rita Johnson was an attractive supporting performer who made her mark as “the other woman” on screen. She was born in 1912 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her Broadway debut was in 1935 and her movie debut came in 1937. The 1940’s were her era and she gave sterling performances in such films as “Here Comes Mr Jordan” in 1941, “They Won’t Believe Me”, “The Big Clock” with Charles Laughton and “The Affairs of Susan” with Joan Fontaine. She died in 1965.

IMDB entry:

Rita Johnson was born on 8/13/13 in Worcester Ma. She attended the New England Conservatory of Music, did summer stock, then moved on to Broadway in 1935. She was an extremely versatile actress, who played virtually every type of role. Unfortunately, her career came to a halt in 1948 when a hair dryer fell on her head causing brain damage. Brain surgery was performed, but thereafter her screen time was very limited . She died in Los Angeles County General Hospital on Oct. 31, 1965. Miss Johnson was only 52 years old.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous