The 1960’s were Rod Steiger’s decade. He seemed to feature in many of the major films of the period. He was born in New York in 1925. He made his debut in Fred Zinnemann’s “Teresa” with Pier Angeli and John Ericson in 1951. His other films included “On the Waterfront”, “Oklaholma”, “The Big Knife” and “Cry Terror”. His 1960’s films included “The Pawnbroker”, “In the Heat of the Night” and “No Way to Treat A Lady”. Rod Steiger died in 2002.
Philip French’s “Guardian” obituary:
Rod Steiger, who has died at the age of 77 was, with his fellow Actors Studio graduate Marlon Brando, the screen’s greatest exponent of the Stanislavski Method, whereby a performer digs deep into himself and the supposed history of the character he is playing to find the essence of the role. Appropriately, the most memorable single scene in which either appeared (one of the greatest in movie history) was their heartbreaking dialogue in the back of a taxi in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954) as the crooked lawyer Charley Malloy and his punch-drunk younger brother Terry. It ends with the guilt-ridden Steiger going to meet his death, and the redeemed Brando heading for salvation.
On the Waterfront is set in squalid urban New Jersey, where Steiger grew up caring for his alcoholic mother after his father, a third-rate vaudevillian, deserted the family at the height of the Depression. Immediately after Pearl Harbour, the 16-year-old Rod joined the navy, giving a false age, and served in the Pacific.
He began acting while on a postwar shore assignment, before enrolling under the G.I. Bill at drama school – a decision that transformed his life. Like John Frankenheimer, who died on 6 July, he got his first real break during the Golden Age of live TV drama in New York and, like Katy Jurado, who also died a week ago, he got his first Hollywood role, a very small one, in a Fred Zinnemann movie.
Steiger was a stocky, bull-necked man with piercing eyes, a brooding presence and an aggressive body language, and his adult life – recurrent depression, four turbulent marriages, heavy drinking, chronic overeating, a tendency to violence – was as troubled as his childhood.
But if he was an alcoholic, he was also a workaholic, and brought to the playing of a wide range of roles a complex personality, a terrible sense of pain, a burden of guilt, an intense self-interrogation, an obsession with authenticity. He poured so much into his characters that they often overflowed with an excess of emotion. This was the case with his melancholic Jud Fry in Oklahoma! and the string of deranged priests and preachers he played (eg The Amityville Horror, The Ballad of the Sad Café), though one of his best, least-vaunted performances was the unyielding Hasidic rabbi in The Chosen.
He won an Oscar for his most popular role as the small-town Mississippi police chief in In the Heat of the Night, a dim redneck who comes to respect, and be respected by, black detective Sidney Poitier. But he was equally good as the Irish-American soldier in Run of the Arrow, who refuses to accept the South’s defeat in the Civil War and goes West to discover himself among the Sioux, and as the tormented Auschwitz survivor living an embattled life in Harlem in The Pawnbroker. In less sympathetic vein, he was superb as the Neapolitan racketeer in Francesco Rosi’s Hands Over the City and the ruthless Hollywood mogul in The Big Knife. But he always found an element of humanity in the worst people he played, including Al Capone, perhaps the best of his gallery of historical portraits.
Yet, given the chance, which wasn’t often, he could be very funny, especially as the mother-fixated serial killer in the black comedy No Way To Treat a Lady who, like the repressed homosexual soldier he played in The Sergeant, shows the daring he often exhibited.
Sadly, that daring didn’t extend to reprising on the big screen the TV role he created in Marty or accepting the title role in Patton: Lust for Glory, which won Oscars for, respectively, Ernest Borgnine and George C Scott.
Rod Steiger: born 14 April 1925, died 9 July 2002
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Pippa Scott was born in 1935 in New York City. She is the daughter of screenwriter Alan Scott. She made her movie debut in John Ford’s classic “The Searchers” in 1956. She has been a prolific television performer and guest starred in the first episoe of “The Virginian”.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
This smart-looking, reddish-haired actress with the unusual first name seemed bound for a career in the arts from the very start. The daughter of playwright/screenwriter Allan Scott and niece of writer/producer Adrian Scott, Pippa Scott attended Radcliffe and UCLA before traveling abroad to England and studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). Back in the United States, she made an auspicious Broadway debut in “Child of Fortune” in 1956 for which she won the Theatre World Award. This attention led to live television drama and a contract with Warner Bros. She made her first screen appearance in a minor role in the John Ford classic The Searchers (1956), had a co-lead in the little known melodrama As Young as We Are (1958) as a high school teacher caught up in scandal, and was featured in the very last scenes as Pegeen in the madcap movie Auntie Mame (1958) starring Rosalind Russell, but little else came about to further brighten her film star. Instead she alternated between Ttelevision and the stage over the years, tapping into a couple of series roles in the 1960s with the short-lived Mr. Lucky (1959) (1959-1960) and a season on The Virginian (1962) (1962-1963). As she matured she moved into sporadic character parts but little was seen of her by the late 1970s. She did play Dick Van Dyke‘s wife in the amusing film satire Cold Turkey (1971) and found steady work for a time as Jack Warden‘s lady pal on the Jigsaw John (1976) television series in the mid-1970s. In 1989, out of nowhere, she produced the film Meet the Hollowheads(1989).
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Auntie Mame, poster, from left, top, Roger Smith, Pippa Scott, Rosalind Russell, Forrest Tucker, Coral Browne, Peggy Cass, 1958. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
James Drury was born in 1934. He is prinarily best known for his title role in the popular 1960’s television series “The Virginian”. His films include “Love Me Tender” and “Pollyanna” in 1960. James Drury died in 2020.
Obituary in “The Telegraph” in 2020.
James Drury, the actor, who has died aged 85, played the eponymous hero of The Virginian, the popular 1960s television series billed as “Tales from the last frontier of the great American West”.
As foreman of the Shiloh Ranch in turn-of-the-century Wyoming, Drury’s character, invariably sporting the same black hat, was the embodiment of the values of the Old West, coping not just with rustlers and outlaws but also the existential threat of incoming Easterners upsetting the traditional cattleman’s way of life.
The first Western series to be broadcast in 90-minute episodes – which meant there was room for meaty guest roles for stars such as Bette Davis and Lee Marvin – The Virginian ran for almost a decade from 1962.
It was Drury’s good fortune that the producers felt a relative unknown was needed to play the enigmatic hero, whose name was never divulged – friend and foe alike would greet him with a cry of “Hey, Virginian!” – and who rarely revealed details about his past, with the result that the character had much of the enticing air of mystery that would characterise Clint Eastwood’s “Man with No Name” later in the decade.
Drury’s laconic performance convincingly conveyed both the character’s toughness and his decency, and he formed a fine double-act with Doug McClure as his more happy-go-lucky sidekick, Trampas. He was an early crush for many young female viewers in both the US and Britain, where the programme was shown on Friday nights on BBC One for many years.
Later on its popularity flagged and, retitled The Men from Shiloh in its final year in an attempt to freshen it up, it was axed in 1971, to Drury’s regret: “I felt very sad … I would have gone on for another 10 years.”
James Child Drury Jr was born in New York on April 18 1934, the son of James Child and his wife Beatrice (née Crawford). His mother’s family had a ranch in Oregon, where his grandfather, a former cowboy and dirt farmer, taught him to ride and shoot, and told him tales of the Old West: “I was very proud to use some of his mannerisms and expressions in The Virginian.”
He fell in love with acting aged eight when he played Herod for his local children’s theatre group’s Christmas play, and after recovering from a bout of polio made his professional debut at 12 in a touring production of Life with Father.
He was expelled from University High School, Los Angeles, the day before he was due to graduate, but his father, who was a professor of marketing at New York University, pulled strings to enable him to enrol.
In the event, he did not complete his studies, having been offered a contract by MGM. He played bit parts in Blackboard Jungle (1955) and Forbidden Planet (1956) before being dropped, and then signed up to 20th Century Fox, for whom he played opposite Pat Boone in Bernardine (1957) and as one of Elvis Presley’s brothers in the King’s debut film Love Me Tender (1956).
He was dropped again but found plenty of work in television, particularly supporting roles in Western series such as Gunsmoke and Rawhide, for which he was in demand as the possessor of genuine riding skills: “Most of the actors would lie about it, and the posse would ride off in all directions,” he recalled.
He had a juicy role as a boozy villain in Sam Peckinpah’s film Ride the High Country (1962), but before his movie career could take off he was cast in The Virginian. Although he looked the part he had little experience in the art of screen fighting, and left Hugh O’Brian, who was the guest star in The Virginian’s first episode, badly bruised.
In his spare time he played with a band, the Wilshire Boulevard Buffalo Hunters, who spent three weeks in Vietnam playing for US troops in 1966.
After The Virginian finished he worked mainly in the theatre; his television comeback as a fireman in Firehouse (1974) was short-lived because, as he recalled, every episode comprised “three disasters in 21 minutes” and there was no time for viewers to get to know the characters.
Thereafter he became a successful horse breeder and, after moving to Texas, made a great deal of money in oil, although he missed showbusiness. In 2000 he had a cameo in a television movie remake of The Virginian starring Bill Pullman.
He was delighted by the continuing popularity of repeat showings of The Virginian and was a fixture at Western conventions, where fans found him, in contrast with his most famous role, voluble and relaxed.
After two marriages that ended in divorce, James Drury’s third marriage, to Carl Ann Head, endured for 40 years until her death last year. He is survived by two sons, two stepsons and a stepdaughter.
James Drury, born April 18 1934, died April 6 2020
Tommy Kirk, a child star who played in Disney films such as “Old Yeller” and “The Shaggy Dog,” has died. He was 79.
Kirk’s longtime friend and former child star, Paul Petersen, said he was found dead in his Las Vegas home on Tuesday. The cause of death has not been released.
Petersen said Kirk lived a private life as a gay man and was estranged from what “remains of his blood family.”
“He was very much a part of our kid star community,” Peterson said. “He made some wonderful films back in the day. We saw and enjoyed them. He was respected in his church. He lived a quiet, but full life.”
Kirk started his career with several television shows including the Mickey Mouse Club’s serialized adventure “The Hardy Boys: The Mystery of the Applegate Treasure” and “The Hardy Boys: The Mystery of the Ghost Farm,” which aired in 1956-1957. His big break came when he starred as Travis Coates in the 1957 film “Old Yeller,” a story about a teenage boy and his heroic yellow dog.
In “The Shaggy Dog,” Kirk portrayed a teenage boy who was cursed with occasionally turning into a sheepdog. He played the middle son alongside James MacArthur and Kevin Corcoran — who played his brothers — in the 1960 film “Swiss Family Robinson.”
Kirk played in a slew of other films in the 1960s including “The Absent-Minded Professor” and its sequel “Son of Flubber.” He also starred in “The Misadventures of Merlin Jones.”
In 1973, Kirk publicly came out as gay during an interview. The actor opened up 20 years later that he realized he was gay at age 17 or 18 and that his career was destroyed by his sexual orientation.
Kirk made some appearance in the 1990s and 2000s in films such as “Billy Frankenstein” and “The Education of a Vampire,” his final film.
Mala Powers was born in 1931 in Burbank, California. The actress Ida Lupino was supportive of Mala Powers and cast her in some of her directorial work. Mala Powers was Roxanne opposite Jose Ferer in “Cyrano de Bergerac” in 1950. Her other films include “City Beneath the Sea” with Anthony Quinn and film noir “The City That Never Sleeps” with Gig Young. Her last major film was “Daddy’s Gone-A-Hunting” with Carol White and Paul Burke. She died in 2007.
“Guardian” by Ronald Bergan:
The long-nosed poet-duellist Cyrano de Bergerac, addressing the object of his love as the proxy of the tongue-tied Christian, declaims: “Your name is like a golden bell hung in my heart; and when I think of you, I tremble, and the bell swings and rings – Roxanne!, Roxanne!”
The name of Mala Powers, who has died of leukaemia aged 75, usually rings a bell as a beautiful, dignified Roxanne in the 1950, Stanley Kramer-produced version of the Edmond Rostand verse drama, for which José Ferrer, in the title role, won the best actor Oscar. “I never loved but one man in my life, and I have lost him twice,” Roxanne says when she realises it was Cyrano’s words that wooed her, at the poignant end of Powers’ most memorable performance.
Yet, despite this achievement, for which she won a Golden Globe nomination, and having studied with Michael Chekhov (nephew of the playwright), of whose acting methods she became a passionate advocate, Powers’ film career was, on the whole, a curiously undistinguished one.
Born in San Francisco, to journalist parents who moved to Hollywood after losing their jobs, she began studying acting at Max Reinhardt’s junior dramatic workshop and, at 11, got a small part as Billy Halop’s kid sister in Tough As They Come (1942), part of Universal’s Dead End Kids and Little Tough Guys series. She was advised by Reinhardt’s wife, Helen Thimig, to continue her studies rather than become a child star, and it was not until five years later, by then 16, that she started working in radio, in such programmes as The Cisco Kid, Red Ryder and Screen Guild on the Air.
It was on the last of these that she met Ida Lupino, then casting the lead for her second feature as director. The Outrage (1950) was one of the few Hollywood films to take rape as a subject, although the act could not be shown or the word itself used. But Powers was excellent as the victim of a “criminal assault”, who felt so “dirty” that she ran away to start a new life until a preacher helped her overcome her trauma. In that same year, aged 19, she made Cyrano de Bergerac and appeared touchingly in Mark Robson’s Edge of Doom, a social-conscience film noir, in which she played disturbed youth Farley Granger’s girlfriend.
Sadly, after these successes, Powers suffered a blood disease while on a forces entertainment tour of Korea in 1951, and almost died. She was treated with chloromycetin, but a severe allergic reaction resulted in the loss of much of her bone marrow. She began working again nine months later while still on medication, though it hardly seemed to affect her performances in City Beneath the Sea, opposite Robert Ryan and Anthony Quinn, or as a nightclub dancer in City That Never Sleeps (both 1953).
These were followed by a B-western, The Yellow Mountain (1954), in which she played Nevada Wray, one of the causes of rivalry between gold prospectors Howard Duff and Lex Barker. In 1955, she was again the love interest, this time in the mediocre Randolph Scott western Rage at Dawn, and in Bengazi, as the Irish daughter of Victor McLaglen.
Before leaving the big screen for television – as guest star in such series as Bonanza, Dr Kildare, Bewitched and Charlie’s Angels – Powers starred in a couple of tawdry horror movies, The Unknown Terror (1957) and The Colossus of New York (1958), in which she played the widow of a man whose brain has been transplanted into an eyeless, 12-foot killer robot. She returned to the cinema in Doomsday Machine (shot in 1967; released in 1972), as Major Bronski, a Soviet cosmonaut who sees the Earth burned to a crisp by nuclear explosions.
In contrast, Powers wrote children’s stories, and Michael Chekhov on Theatre and the Art of Acting: The Five-Hour Master Class, as well as teaching acting. From 1970 till his death in 1989, she was married to the publisher Hughes Miller. She is survived by a son from her first marriage.
· Mala (Mary Ellen) Powers, actor, born December 20 1931; died June 11 2007
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Richard Haydn was a British character actor who spent most of his career working in Hollywood usually as prissy fusspots. He was born in Camberwell, London in 1905. His many films include “Forever and a Day” in 1943, “The Late George Apley”, “Cluny Brown” as the boyfriend of Jennifer Jones and son of Una O’Connor, “Five Weeks in a Balloon” and his most wekk known role as Max loyal friend of the Trapp family in “The Sound of Music”. It was good to see him in “Young Frankenstein”. He died in 1985 in Los Angeles.
IMDB entry:
Inimitable London-born character actor, noted for his put-on nasal delivery and pompous, fussy manner. Richard Haydn had a laborious start to his show business career, selling tickets in the box office of London’s Daly Theatre. This was followed by an unsuccessful stint with a comedy act in musical revue. For a change of pace, he became overseer of a Jamaican banana plantation only to see it wiped out by a hurricane. Returning home, he appeared in the 1926 West End production of ‘Betty of Mayfair’ and, soon after, also began to act on radio. It was in this medium, where he first found success, creating his signature character, the perpetually befuddled nasally-voiced fish expert and mother’s boy Edwin Carp. Haydn later immortalised the character in a book, The Journal of Edwin Carp.
The Carp routine opened the door for Haydn to appear with Beatrice Lillie on Broadway in ‘Noel Coward (I)”s ‘Set to Music’ (1939) and this, in turn, resulted in a contract with 20th Century Fox. While his screen debut in Charley’s Aunt (1941) was relatively straight-laced, he was more often seen in comedic roles where his lugubrious face and dignified, sometimes unctuous presence could be employed to scene-stealing effect. His notable characterisations in this vein include the over-enunciating Professor Oddly in Ball of Fire(1941), Rogers the butler in And Then There Were None (1945) and Mr. Wilson in Cluny Brown (1946). He essayed a rare villainous role as the odious Earl of Radcliffe in the period drama Forever Amber (1947) and was back in his best form as Mr.Appleton inSitting Pretty (1948). In The Late George Apley (1947), he played the character of Horatio Willing, ‘with a broad edge of wheezy burlesque’ (Bosley Crowther, New York Times, March 21 1947).
In the late 40’s, Haydn made a brief foray into directing. Of his three films for Paramount, the Bing Crosby vehicle Mr. Music (1950) enjoyed the best critical reviews. Among his later appearances on screen, that of Trapp family friend and promoter Max Detweiler in The Sound of Music (1965), is the one which most often comes to mind. Over the years, Haydn also made an impression as a voice actor in animated cartoons, notably on Warner Brothers Looney Tunes (‘Super-Rabbit’, 1943) and as the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland (1951). He had frequent guest roles on television and starred in one of the best-remembered episodes of Rod Serling‘s Twilight Zone (1959), ‘A Thing About Machines’ (1960), as the pedantic, machine-hating egocentric Bartlett Finchley. He also caricatured a Japanese businessman in an episode of Bewitched (1964).
In private life, Richard Haydn was a rather reclusive individual who liked horticulture, shunned interviews and was never particularly integral to the closely-knit British colony in Hollywood.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Tyrone Power was born in 1914 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He had a terrific film career and starred in such films as “Lloyds of London”, “Marie Antoniette”, “The Mark of Zorro”, “Blood and Sand”, The Black Swan” and “Witness for the Prosecution”. His leading ladies included Simone Simon, Loretta Young, Madeleine Carroll, Maureen O’Hara, Gene Tierney, Rita Hayworth, Linda Darnell, Joan Fontaine, Betty Grable and Ann Blyth. He died of a heart attack in Spain in 1958 while on a location shoot for”Solamon & Sheba” with Gina Lollobrigida. He was 44.
TCM Overview:
Stunningly, darkly handsome romantic lead of the 1930s and 40s whose affability and charm was put to good use in a number of stylish dramas. Power came to the fore at Twentieth Century-Fox (with whom he would stay for almost his entire career) in the costume drama “Lloyds of London” (1936) and he was soon paired with such leading stars as Alice Faye (“In Old Chicago” 1938), Norma Shearer (“Marie Antoinette” 1938, on a rare loan-out to MGM), and Sonja Henie (“Thin Ice” 1937). Power also proved a dashing action lead who intriguingly combined a bit of the fey with masculine bravado in such swashbucklers as “The Mark of Zorro” (1940) and “The Black Swan” (1942). After WWII service Power, his features somewhat more grim and set, gave memorable performances as the phony spiritualist of “Nightmare Alley” (1947), as a man searching for faith in “The Razor’s Edge” (1946) and as the earnest, but ultimately caddish, defendant in “Witness For the Prosecution” (1957). He suffered a heart attack while filming “Solomon and Sheba” (1957) and, upon his death, was replaced by Yul Brynner. Son of American stage actor Tyrone Power, Sr.; husband of actresses Annabella (1939-48) and Linda Christian (1949-55); and father of Tyrone, Jr., Taryn and Romina, all of whom have appeared in films.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
To view Tyrone Power Website, please click here. T
Nightmare Alley, poster, from left, Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray, Helen Walker, 1947. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)Editorial use only. No book cover usage.
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Kobal/Shutterstock (5877895a)
Tyrone Power
Tyrone Power
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“Independent” obituary:VICTOR MATURE was once billed by his studio as “a beautiful hunk of man” and in the Forties he came to personify the latest term signifying male sex-appeal – beefcake.
Victor Mature obituary in “The Independent”.
“‘Actually, I am a golfer. That is my real occupation. I never was an actor, ask anybody, particularly the critics. This is my first Hollywood film in ten years and I only did it because I was getting bored – Victor Mature in 1968. Still, he must have had something to have got regular employment as an actor over a 30 year period. When he started, he was christened ‘the Hunk’ and had a strong shopgirl following. His name became a synonym for beefcake, 40s male sex appeal. He had therefore few fans among men, despite the fact that most of his films were actioners. He was never a sympathetic hero but on occasion made a convincing villain – tough, disdainful, sinister. He was impervious to the situations around him. You never got an inkling of what he was thinking or feeling. But , in the sense that he moved comfortably before a camera and knew what chalk marks to stand on, he was an actor”. – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years”. (1972).
Victor Mature was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1913. He was a very popular leading man in the 1940’s and 50’s and made such classics as “My Darling Clementine” directed by John Ford in 1946, “The Robe”, “Demetrius and the Gladiators” and “Violent Saturday”. His leading ladies included Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, Susan Hayward, Jean Simmons and Esther Williams. Victor Mature died in 1999 at the age of 86.
His craggy features, with their full lips and heavily lidded eyes were more controversial – women either loved them or loathed them – and in one of his films, Wabash Avenue, the heroine Betty Grable actually calls him “fishface”. But his physique made him a perfect Samson and hero of biblical epics such as The Robe. He never professed to be a great actor, and stated in 1968, “Actually, I am a golfer. I never was an actor; ask anybody, particularly the critics.”
The son of an Austrian scissors-grinder and a Frenchwoman, Mature was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1913, and was a rebellious youth, thrown out of four schools. At 15 he took his first job, as a candy salesman, and aged 20 decided to try his luck in Hollywood. To gain experience he became a student actor at the Pasadena Playhouse. After appearing in over 60 plays he was given a leading role on stage in Ben Hecht’s To Quito and Back, in which he was seen by the producer Hal Roach, who was looking for an actor with the physique to play a prehistoric man in One Million BC (1940).
Roach first gave him a small role as a gangster in the black comedy The Housekeeper’s Daughter (1939) before starring him with Carole Landis in the caveman saga in which the pair battled gigantic reptiles. After two more films, Mature took a role on Broadway as one of the men in the life of a fashion magazine editor (Gertrude Lawrence) in the hit musical Lady in the Dark (1941). He was described in the show as “the most beautiful hunk of man you ever saw in your life”, and his performance brought him a contract with 20th Century-Fox.
After playing opposite Betty Grable in Bruce Humberstone’s entertaining mystery I Wake Up Screaming (1941), he was loaned to United Artists to portray the Arab lover of a gambling den-owner, Madame Gin Sling, in Joseph von Sternberg’s heavily sanitised version of the stage drama The Shanghai Gesture (1941). He then made four musicals, all released in 1942: Song of the Islands and Footlight Serenade, both with Grable, Seven Days Leave, with Lucille Ball, and My Gal Sal, with Rita Hayworth. (In both this film and Song of the Islands Mature’s singing voice was dubbed.)
In all four films, he played cocky, self-confident heroes, but the actor displayed throughout his career an engaging degree of self-deprecating humour. “Directors and actors who make films with one eye cocked on the Academy Award dismiss me as ham, uncured and uncurable,” he once said, “and scripters find it hard to resist the temptation to take a poke at me by writing cute little scenes in which I am supposed to cavort as a strong boy of sorts. But don’t get me wrong. I picked this racket and I love it.” Later he would delight in telling of his attempt to join a country club that did not permit actors. “I told them, `Hell, I’m no actor and I’ve got 28 pictures and a scrapbook of reviews to prove it.’ “
With America’s entry into the Second World War, Mature served 14 months of active duty prior to being cast in the service revue Tars and Spars. He returned to the screen as the tubercular “Doc” Holliday in John Ford’s great western My Darling Clementine (1946) and received some of the best reviews of his career. The critic Richard Griffith wrote,
Mature is hardly an obvious choice for the role of a tubercular gunman concealing under silken menace his despair at the loss of a Boston medical career. But the performance comes off amazingly. Mr Mature’s face is a basilisk, his eyes look inward; in detail of manner and appearance he successfully suggests the desperate remittance-man.
Henry Hathaway’s Kiss Of Death (1947) starred Mature as a thief who collaborates with the police in order to get out of prison. Time magazine said, “Mature apparently needed nothing all this time but the right kind of role.” Robert Siodmak’s Cry of the City (1948) was another fine thriller in which Mature was a cop who has to hunt down his former childhood friend.
The following year Mature had his best remembered role in Cecil B. DeMille’s spectacular Samson and Delilah (1949). Mature later described his co-star Hedy Lamarr as “not exactly a ball of fire – she just seemed to be loping along”. The film was an enormous hit though critically dismissed, Groucho Marx famously quipping, “I don’t like any movie where the leading man’s chest is bigger than the leading lady’s.” Mature had one major disagreement with his director:
DeMille came up to me and said, “Victor my boy, we’re ready to do the scene where you fight the lion. We have a real lion, but he’s very tame, a sweet old lion. His name is Jackie. When you fight him, I’d like you to put your head in his mouth. Now don’t worry – Jackie has no teeth.” I said, “Mr DeMille, I don’t even want to be gummed!” I did not do the stunt.
Despite the film’s success, subsequent roles for Mature were not distinguished – they included the Grable musical Wabash Avenue (1950), a thriller The Las Vegas Story (1952) with Jane Russell, a dull transcription of Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion (1953) with Jean Simmons, and a romantic comedy with Simmons, Affair With A Stranger (1953). Then he was cast as Demetrius, the slave whose violent nature is tamed by conversion to Christianity, in The Robe (1953), the first film released in CinemaScope. The following year he starred in a sequel, Demetrius and the Gladiators, then played two villainous roles, as the soldier who becomes Pharaoh in The Egyptian (1954), and a Second World War traitor in Betrayed (1954).
After the thriller Violent Saturday (1955) he left Fox to freelance. Much of his work after this was done in Europe, but they were mainly mediocre action films, including Safari (1956), Zarack (1957), The Long Haul (1957) and No Time To Die (1958). He returned to the United States to work with the veteran director Frank Borzage on China Doll (1958), a bizarre flop about a man who accidentally buys an Oriental wife, then ominously starred in Escort West (1959) for Francis D. Lyon, who specialised in directing low-budget westerns featuring fading stars.
Italy was proving a viable source of income for former Hollywood names, and Mature starred there in two historical adventures, Annibale (1960), in which he played the title role of the Carthaginian general, and I Tartari (1961), co-starring Orson Welles. After the latter Mature officially “retired” but he reappeared to endearingly parody his old screen image in Vittorio DeSica’s After The Fox (1966), written by Neil Simon and starring Peter Sellers. He continued to do occasional films, including Every Little Crook and Nanny (1972), in which his performance as an ageing Mafioso was described by Esquire as “massive, vigorous, vulgar, authentic, and splendid”.
In the television film Samson and Delilah (1984), he played Samson’s father. Asked how he felt about the role, he replied, “I’d have played Samson’s mother if they’d asked me.” He did not, though, need the money, since he was extremely wealthy, having invested in property, restaurants and electronics, and enjoyed life on his luxury ranch near San Diego. “I loaf very gracefully,” he commented. “There’s a lot to be said for loafing if you know how to do it gracefully.”
Victor John Mature, actor: born Louisville, Kentucky 29 January 1913; five times married (one daughter); died San Diego, California 4 August 1999.
The above “Independent” obituary can now be accessed online here.
William Atherton was born in 1947 in Orange, Connecticut. He has had major roles in such movies as “The Sugarland Express” in 1974 opposite Goldie Hawn, “”The Day of the Locust” and “Looking for Mr Goodbar” with Diane Keaton.
TCM Overview:
A pale, fair-haired, lanky performer, William Atherton first distinguished himself in the theater. After becoming the youngest member of the Long Wharf Theater Company (New Haven, Connecticut) while still a high school student, he went on to off-Broadway where he originated the part of Ronnie Shaughnessy in John Guare’s “The House of Blue Leaves”, as well as the title roles of David Rabe’s “The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel” (both 1971) and David Wiltse’s “Suggs in the City” (1972). That year also saw him make his Broadway debut in the short-lived “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” and his feature debut in “The New Centurions”. Often cast as weaklings or high-strung characters, Atherton attracted attention as the likably charismatic escaped convict husband of Goldie Hawn in Steven Spielberg’s “The Sugarland Express” (1974) and struck the correct balance of ambition and bewilderment as the aspiring art director whose perceptions of Hollywood shape John Schlesinger’s “The Day of the Locust” (1975). He also turned up as a persistent suitor of Diane Keaton in “Looking For Mr. Goodbar” (1977), his last feature for seven years.
During that hiatus, Atherton concentrated primarily on stage work, including a one-man show and Broadway productions of Arthur Miller’s “The American Clock” (1980) and Herman Wouk’s “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial” (1983). He roared back to features as Walter Peck, the zealous bureaucrat opposed to the methods of the “Ghostbusters” (1984), arguably the most memorable in a series of high profile supporting roles that included the comically unctuous professor in “Real Genius” (1985) and a zealous newsman in “Die Hard” (1988) and its first sequel “Die Hard 2: Die Harder” (1990). Atherton’s Dr. Noah Faulkner in the box office disaster “Bio-Dome” (1996) was really a variation on the creepy academic from “Real Genius”, and his transparently vacuous local anchor in “Mad City” (1997) was a rehash of his Thornburg character from the “Die Hard” franchise. The 90s also saw him essay a number of historical figures: Allan Pinkerton in HBO’s “Frank and Jesse” (1995), then-state prosecutor Thomas E Dewey in “Hoodlum” (1997) and Hollywood mogul Darryl Zanuck in Martha Coolidge’s “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge” (HBO, 1999).
The above TCM overview can now be accessed online here.
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