Peter Van Eyck was born in Germany in 1911. In 1931 he left Germany and came eventually to New York where he worked for Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater. He was in Hollywood by 1943 where he made such films as “The Moon is Down”, “Five Graves to Cairo” and “Action in the North Atlantic”. Among his later films was “The Snorkel” with Betta St John and Many Miller in 1959. He died in Switzerland in 1969.
TCM Overview: Peter van Eyck, born Götz von Eick (16 July 1911, Steinwehr, Pomerania, Germany (now Kamienny Jaz, Poland) – 15 July 1969, Männedorf bei Zürich, Switzerland), was a German-American actor. After graduating from high school he studied music. In 1931 he left Germany, living in Paris, London, Tunis, Algiers and Cuba, before settling in New York. He earned a living playing the piano in a bar, and wrote and composed for revues and cabarets. He then worked for Irving Berlin as a stage manager and production assistant, and for Orson Welles Mercury Theatre company as an assistant director. Van Eyck went to Hollywood where he found radio work with the help of Billy Wilder, who later gave him small film roles. In 1943 he took US citizenship and was drafted into the army.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
STATION SIX-SAHARA, US poster, Peter van Eyck hands on hips, Carroll Baker center, 1962 Courtesy Everett Collection ACHTUNG AUFNAHMEDATUM GESCHÄTZT PUBLICATIONxINxGERxSUIxAUTxONLY Copyright: xCourtesyxEverettxCollectionx MCDSTSI EC002The Snorkel, poster, US poster art, Peter Van Eyck 1958. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
He gained international recognition with a lead role in the 1953 film The Wages of Fear. He went to appear in episodes of several US TV series including The Adventures of Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In English-language films he was most often typecast as a Nazi or other unsympathetic German type, while in Germany he was a popular leading man in a wider range of films, including several appearances in the Dr. Mabuse thriller series of the 1960s. Van Eyck was married to the American actress Ruth Ford in the 1940s. With his second wife, Inge von Voris, he had two daughters, Kristina, also an actor, and Claudia.
Mercedes McCambridge obituary in “The Guardian” in 2004.
Mercedes McCambridge was a powerhouse of an actress who only made a few films but made an enormous impact. She was born in 1916 in Illinois to an Irish American Catholic family. She won an Oscar for her first performance in “All the King’s Men” in 1949. Other films include “Giant” in 1956, “Johnny Guitar” striking sparks off Joan Crawford and “Suddenly Last Summer”. She voiced the devil in the persona of Linda Blair in “The Exorcist”. She suffered unbelievable sorrow when her only child, her son Stephen killed his two daughters, his wife and himself in 1987. Mercedes McCambridge died in 2004.
Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Guardian”:
Hollywood has had its fair share of actors turned into lesbian icons – think of Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford or Greta Garbo – but none had a dykier screen persona than Mercedes McCambridge, who has died aged 87.
Mercedes McCambridge
She played up this image in her cameo performance in Orson Welles’s Touch Of Evil (1958), as the duck-tailed, leather-jacketed leader of a band of Mexican bikers, wanting to watch Janet Leigh being raped in the motel room. This was a follow-up to perhaps her most famous role, that of the butch bitch who leads a posse against Joan Crawford in Nicholas Ray’s baroque western, Johnny Guitar (1954).
The question posed by several critics about the latter role was whether McCambridge, as Emma Small, who owns “every head of cattle for 500 miles”, wanted to kill Crawford’s saloon-owning character Vienna, or sleep with her. Whatever the answer, McCambridge’s lynch-happy harpy was one of the most striking portrayals of a forceful woman in cinema.
Mercedes McCambridge
Almost two decades later, she provided one of the eeriest sounds in films by voicing the demon inside Linda Blair, in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). According to Welles, who co-starred with her in the Ford Theater series, it was, in fact, McCambridge’s versatile voice that made her “the world’s greatest living radio actress.”
Born in Joliet, Illinois, she had begun performing on radio while still at Loyola Catholic College, in Chicago, and went on to make a name for herself in the I Love A Mystery radio series, from 1939 to 1949. After a shortlived marriage to William Fifield, among the people she worked with was Canadian actor-writer-director Fletcher Markle, whom she married in 1950. The couple went to Hollywood in 1949, he to direct a few minor films, she to make her screen debut in Robert Rossen’s All The King’s Men, for which she promptly won an Oscar as best supporting actress.
In this movie, McCambridge is superb as Sadie Burke, the hard-boiled henchwoman and lover of populist southern demagogue Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford). Few actors could have taken, or convincingly merited, such a slap across the face as she receives from investigative journalist John Ireland.
It was Ireland again, as a mentally disturbed man on the run from an asylum, who almost murdered McCambridge, playing a tough, singing waitress called Cash And Carry Connie, in The Scarf (1951). She, in turn, was a murderer in King Vidor’s Lightning Strikes Twice (1951), killing Richard Todd’s wife out of jealousy.
Five years later, she was Oscar-nominated as best supporting actress for her performance in George Stevens’s Texas saga, Giant (1956). Here, she expressed an almost incestuous jealousy as Luz Benedict, Rock Hudson’s unmarried older sister, passionately at odds with Elizabeth Taylor, her brother’s wife. Her character is killed when she is thrown from the horse Warwinds, which she symbolically cannot master, in scenes enacted in masterful wide images and close-ups.
Following that, McCambridge made the most of her short screen time as Taylor’s avaricious mother prepared to permit her daughter, who “went off her rocker in Europe”, to have a lobotomy in Joseph L Mankiewicz’s film of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer (1959). Her line in boot-faced characters continued in Angel Baby (1961), as the shrewish wife of evangelist promoter George Hamilton.
It was about this time that McCambridge, recently divorced from Markle, with a young son to bring up, started to drink heavily. A devout Catholic, she claimed to have lost her faith. Along struggle against alcoholism ensued until she gave up drink in 1969, becoming a leading member of the US National Council on Alcoholism, while regaining her Catholic faith. (Her experiences were noted down in an autobiography, The Quality Of Mercy, in 1981.)
But none of this stopped her appearing as the sadistic, lesbian supervisor of a women’s prison on a Caribbean island in the exploitative 99 Women (1969), or happily lending her voice to the demon in The Exorcist. According to Friedkin: “When I started making The Exorcist, I had no idea how we were going to do the demon voice. I knew I wanted a voice that was neutral – neither male nor female – but with both male and female characteristics. In the end, the name Mercedes McCambridge came into my head. I spoke to her on the phone, and, to my joy, she sounded exactly as she had sounded 30 years earlier on the radio.
“She worked for, maybe, three weeks doing the demon voice. She was chain-smoking, swallowing raw eggs, getting me to tie her to a chair – all these painful things just to produce the sound of that demon in torment. And as she did it, the most curious things would happen in her throat. Double and triple sounds would emerge at once, wheezing sounds, very much akin to what you can imagine a person inhabited by various demons would sound like. It was pure inspiration.”
Unfortunately, when The Exorcist was released, Warner Brothers failed to credit her, so McCambridge sued the studio. On later prints, her credit reads, not “the voice of the demon”, as she would have preferred, but simply “and Mercedes McCambridge”.
Meanwhile, McCambridge was more active in the theatre: in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf on tour, and in the military courtroom drama, The Love Suicide Of Schofield Barracks, on Broadway in 1972, for which she was nominated for a Tony award. She also guest-starred in a number of television western series, among them Gunsmoke and Bonanza.
In 1987, a tragedy hit her family. Her son, John Markle, a high-flying economist, became involved in a financial scandal, and subsequently shot his wife and two daughters, and then himself. McCambridge soldiered on, continuing to perform on stage and winning plaudits in Los Angeles for her role in Neil Simon’s Lost In Yonkers (1992), as the grandmother who rules the household with a rod of iron.
Even then, she had lost little of what made her one of the most memorable of supporting actors.
· Charlotte Mercedes Agnes McCambridge, actor, born March 16 1916; died March 2 2004 The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Carlos Rivas was born in 1928 in Texas. His best known role was as Lun Tha in “The King and I” in 1956. He was also featured in “Comanche”, “The Deerslayer”, “The Miracle”. He died in 2003 at the age of 74
“Wikipedia” entry:
Carlos Rivas was an American actor, best remembered as Lun Tha inThe King and I (1956), Dirty Bob in True Grit (1969), and Hernandez in Topaz (1969). Rivas was born in El Paso, Texas, to a German father and Mexican mother. English was his first language. Carlos Rivas was discovered in a bar in Mexico. He began his career in Mexican and Argentinian westerns, though his Argentinian films were actually filmed in Mexico.
Douglass MontgomeryA poster for George Cukor’s 1933 drama ‘Little Women’ starring Katharine Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Jean Parker, and Frances Dee. (Photo by Movie Poster Image Art/Getty Images)
Douglass Montgomery was born in 1907 in Los Angeles. He began his career in Hollywood films of the 1930’s notably “Little Women” opposite Katherine Hepburn in 1933. In the 1940’s he went to the United Kingdom where he made many fine films especially “The Way to the Stars” in 1945. He died on the 23rd of July 1966 on the same day as another great Hollywood actor called Montgomery died – Montgomery Clift.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Montgomery, on stage by his teens, was scouted by MGM. The studio changed his name to Kent Douglass and cast him in dashing or romantic roles opposite some of MGM’s powerhouse actresses, such as Joan Crawford (in Paid (1930) ) and Katharine Hepburn (inLittle Women (1933), in which he played the role of Laurie).
Just as he was gaining ground, MGM inexplicably changed his name again, to Douglass Montgomery, and lent him to other studios. Although he forged ahead with Mystery of Edwin Drood (1935), Harmony Lane (1935) (in which he portrayed composer Stephen “Suwanee River” Foster), and Bob Hope’s comedy classic The Cat and the Canary (1939), his career was in decline by WWII. He enlisted with the Canadian infantry and served for four years. Montgomery returned to acting but was scarcely noticed. He starred in a few routine British films, then returned to the US for a few more and for some work in television. He died in 1966.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
TCM overview:
jessgalchutt ( 2006-12-05 )
Source: www.imdb.com
A strapping young man with chiseled, handsome looks and a naive, innocent demeanor, this actor’s career might just have been hampered by a change of screen names. Actor Douglass Montgomery was born Robert Douglass Montgomery in 1907. On stage in his teens, MGM scouts nabbed him, signed him up, and changed his name to Kent Douglass for films in 1930. With a suitably dashing and romantic presence similar to that of Leslie Howard, the fair-haired young man played second leads opposite some of MGM’s powerhouse ladies, including Joan Crawford in Paid (1930) and Katharine Hepburn in Little Women (1933) in which he played the role of Laurie. Just as he was making grounds, his moniker was inexplicably changed to Douglass Montgomery, and he was loaned out to other studios. Although he forged ahead with Mystery of Edwin Drood (1935), Harmony Lane (1935) , in which he portrayed composer Stephen “Suwanee River” Foster, and Bob Hope’s comedy classic The Cat and the Canary (1939), by WWII, his career had waned. He enlisted with the Canadian infantry, serving for four years. Montgomery returned but was scarcely noticed. He starred in a few routine British films following this period, then returned to the US for a couple more and some TV work. He died in 1966.
The above TCM overview can be accessed online here.
Joan Tetzel was born in 1921 in New York City. She acted on Broadway and on the West End in London. Her film appearances include “Duel in the Sun” with Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck and with Peck again in 1947 in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Paradine Case” with also starred Louis Jourdan, Alida Valli and Ann Todd. Joan Tetzel was married to actor Oscar Holomka. She died in 1977 aged 56.
Joan Tetzel
IMDB entry:
Aside from her movie career, Joan Tetzel was well known as a Broadway and London stage actress. She played nurse Ratchett in the Broadway edition of “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.” During the early seventies, she appeared in the London play, “How The Other Half Loves.” During this period, she had a running part in the TV series “Policewoman.” As a noted stage actress, her picture appeared on the front cover of Life Magazine on February 14, 1948. She died in Sussex England from cancer.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: <tcampbel@p05.ahcpr.gov>
She worked with Alfred Hitchcock in his TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. She played “Eve Ross” in the Alfred Hitchcock Presentsepisode “Guest for Breakfast”. She appeared as Marian Stuart, wife of the title character, in the 1963 Perry Mason episode, “The Case of the Decadent Dean.” She also made appearances on Thriller in the episode “An Attractive Family”, and Gunsmoke. Aside from her movie career, Tetzel was a well-known stage actress. She appeared in the 1940 revival of Liliom, the original stage production of I Remember Mama, and portrayed Nurse Ratched in the stage production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on Broadway. As a noted stage actress, her photo appeared on the front cover of Life Magazine on February 16, 1948.
Her first husband was radio producer John E. Mosman. Her second husband was Oscar Homolka (1898–1978), whom she married in 1949. Joan Tetzel died October 31, 1977, at her home Beri-Be-Dahn, Fairwarp, Sussex, England, aged 56, from cancer.
Paul Burke was born in New Orleans in 1926. He has acted in three very popular television series, “Harbourmaster” in 1957, “Naked City” fron 1960 until 1963 and “12 O’Clock High” from 1964 until 1967. His film roles include “The Valley of the Dolls'” with Barbara Parkins in 1969 and then two years later “Daddy’s Gone A Hunting” with Carol White.
Gayr Brumburgh’s entry:
Tall, dark, and handsome is how Hollywood liked their leading men back in the 1950s and 1960s, and actor Paul Burke certainly fit the bill. While his career fell short of outright stardom, he managed to stand out in a couple of acclaimed TV cop series series in the 1960s and “enjoyed” semi-cult notice by co-starring in one of the screen’s most celebrated turkeys of all time.
The New Orleans-born actor was born on July 21, 1926, the son of Martin Burke, a prizefighter who later became a well-known promoter and French Quarter nightclub owner (“Marty Burke’s”). Educated at prep schools, he was drawn to acting and moved to Hollywood in the late 1940s, studying at the Pasadena Playhouse for a couple of years. Screen director Lloyd Bacon, a friend of his father Marty, helped the fledgling actor along by giving him an unbilled part in the Betty Grable musical Call Me Mister (1951). From there, he managed to scrounge up bit/uncredited parts in such 1950s films as Fearless Fagan (1952); Francis Goes to West Point (1952), Three Sailors and a Girl (1953), South Sea Woman (1953), and Spy Chasers (1955). He moved up the ladder a bit to featured status in another Francis the talking mule picture, Francis in the Navy (1955), and inScreaming Eagles (1956), then earned a starring role in the voodoo/jungle horror flick The Disembodied (1957), opposite the “50-Foot Woman,” herself, Allison Hayes.
Better yet, Paul found steady work on the small tube with grim-faced roles in a number of crime series such as Highway Patrol (1955),
The Lineup (1954), M Squad (1957), and Dragnet (1951). He also appeared in Adventures of Superman (1952). Via an association with “Dragnet” producer/director Jack Webb, he received his own TV series, albeit short lived, in the form of Noah’s Ark (1956), portraying veterinarian “Dr. Noah McCann.” He followed that by co-starring with Barry Sullivan in another one-season series, Harbormaster (1957), a New England coast adventure yarn, and then in Five Fingers (1959), a spy drama headlining David Hedison. Another hit series came with 12 O’Clock High (1964), based on the hit film drama of the same name.
Paul’s best-known TV role, however, was as “Detective Adam Flint” in the highly praised police series Naked City (1958), replacing James Franciscus. He joined the program in the second season as the young partner of “Lt. Mike Parker” (portrayed by Horace McMahon), just as the half-hour show format was being extended to an hour. Based on the gritty, groundbreaking cop movie The Naked City (1948), the series did the film more than justice with excellent story lines, and Burke walked away with two Emmy nominations out of the three seasons he appeared.
His only movie role in the early 1960s was the Joan Crawford starrer Della (1964) (aka Fatal Confinement), which was actually a failed pilot to a prospective TV series. Winning the co-lead role of fledgling writer “Lyon Burke” in the highly anticipated film adaptation of Jacqueline Susann‘s monstrous best seller, Valley of the Dolls (1967). It could have been the break to turn things around on film. It did not-far from it. The Susann book was, if anything, a guilty pleasure as readers were reeled in by the trashy Hollywood themes of drugs, fame, and sex. The movie was a laughable misfire-riddled with bad acting, bad dialogue and inept directing. It earned instant cult infamy, making many “top 10” lists for worst movie ever. It also damaged the screen careers of many of the talent involved. In reality, Paul and Barbara Parkins, who played his paramour in the movie, actually came off better and more grounded than most. Unfortunately, good or bad, they were identified with a huge turkey, and it stuck.
Despite Paul’s co-star cop role, opposite Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, in the stylish thriller The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), the very next year, it was not able to right the wrong of “Dolls.” Thereafter, Paul tended to be overlooked in his later film, which included standard starring roles both here and abroad in such fare as Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (1969), Once You Kiss a Stranger… (1969), and Maharlika (1970). TV crime, however, proved again to be a reliable paycheck for Paul with guest roles in such popular 70s series as The Rookies (1972), The New Perry Mason (1973), Police Woman (1974),Harry O (1973), Mannix (1967), Ironside (1967), and the acclaimed Police Story (1973) series. TV movies also came his way, as well, with the starring role of tycoon “C.C. Capwell” (replacing Peter Mark Richman), in the daytime soap opera Santa Barbara(1984). Paul himself was replaced after a relatively brief time.
He played assured roles in the series Hot Shots (1986) and Dynasty (1981), the latter as scheming “Congressman Neal McVane,” who frames Joan Collins‘ character for murder. Paul’s last film, (The Fool (1990), which was shot in England) and last TV guest role (in an episode of “Columbo”) both came out in 1990.
Divorced from Peggy Pryor, the mother of his three children, Paul married actress Lyn Peters in 1979. They met while she was appearing in the 12 O’Clock High (1964) episode12 O’Clock High: Siren Voices (1966). The couple eventually retired to Palm Springs, where the actor died at age 83 of leukemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in September of 2009.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
His “Independent” obituary:
Paul Burke will best be remembered for the three years he spent as the star of the highly regarded television series, The Naked City, which was filmed on the streets and in the buildings of Manhattan.
Inspired by the 1948 film of the same name, it was innovative in its use of location shooting all over the metropolis, from the Staten Island Ferry to Times Square, which gave it a semi-documentary feel, and though Burke was not the most animated of actors, he was handsome and had a tight-lipped doggedness that suited his portrayal of the tough police detective who manages to maintain his integrity and idealism despite confronting the worst aspects of Manhattan life. (The show could never be accused of glamorising New York City.)
“There are eight million stories in the naked city… this has been one of them,” intoned the narrator-producer Mark Hellinger at the end of the movie, and the same words were uttered at the climax of every episode of the television series (shown in the UK by ITV). Although Burke starred in other television shows and had a recurring role in Dynasty, his film career was chequered, despite his playing the leading male role in the colossal hit Valley of the Dolls (1967) and giving arguably his finest performance as the police detective determined to outwit bank robber Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968).
Born in New Orleans in 1926, Burke was the son of the prize fighter Martin Burke (who once fought the world heavyweight champion Gene Tunney). After retiring from the ring, he opened a restaurant and night club, Marty Burke’s, in the city’s French Quarter. Paul used to help out in the club, and later stated that seeing some of the customers affected his outlook: “I stayed up late watching the barflies, the brawlers. I watched the effect of wasted lives. It gave me a strong feeling of urgency about my own life.”
In his early 20s he moved to Hollywood and studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. The director Lloyd Bacon, one of his father’s friends, got him his first screen roles, uncredited parts in the musicals Golden Girl and Call Me Mister (both 1951), the latter a Betty Grable vehicle in which he played a soldier. He was a soldier also in Sam Fuller’s Fixed Bayonets (1951), and he had small roles in two films featuring Francis, the talking mule – Francis Goes to West Point (1952) and Francis in the Navy (1955), plus South Sea Woman (1953), with Burt Lancaster and Virginia Mayo.
He graduated to guest-star roles in such television series as Highway Patrol, Dragnet and M Squad, and in 1964 he co-starred with Joan Crawford and Diane Baker in a TV movie, Della, a fanciful tale in which he was Crawford’s lawyer who falls in love with her daughter, unaware that she has a skin disease that will be fatal if she is exposed to sunlight. His first recurring role on television was that of a veterinarian in a short-lived television series, Noah’s Ark (1956-57), followed by Harbourmaster (1957-58) with Barry Sullivan, and an unsuccessful spy series, Five Fingers (1959), which was loosely based on the Joseph L. Mankiewiez film of 1952.
The Naked City began its television life as a weekly 30-minute show in 1958, with John McIntire and James Franciscus playing the roles originated in the movie by Barry Fitzgerald and Don Taylor. Despite good reviews, its ratings were poor. McIntire’s character was killed off halfway through the season, and the show itself was cancelled at the end of the year, but the production staff and one of the sponsors successfully lobbied the network, ABC, to revive it as an hour-long series, which first aired in 1960, starring Burke as Detective Adam Flint with Nancy Malone playing his loyal, if sometimes stressed, girlfriend. Harry Bellaver was Burke’s older partner and Horace McMahon his crusty superior.
Burke received two Emmy nominations for his performance, and was admired for doing several of his own stunts. “Once I had to jump from one roof to another,” he told the columnist Hedda Hopper, “when the stuntman refused because it was too windy to take a chance.” To prepare for the role, he accompanied police detectives on raids, commenting, “I know areas of the city that are truly jungles. I wouldn’t be a detective there for $1,000 a day.” Before an episode in which his character was to witness an execution, he spent a night in Sing Sing prison. “The area of the condemned has barred windows that look down over the Hudson,” he said. “You can see trains going by, as if to emphasise the life outside that is to be taken away. I was not against capital punishment before we made that show – but now, I don’t know.”
When The Naked City ended its run in 1963, it was described by the Los Angeles Times as, “television’s finest weekly hour. It took the police show and gave it a dignity and compassion that at times approached high tragedy.” Stirling Silliphant, later to win an Oscar for scripting In The Heat of the Night, was primary writer on the series, Billy May provided the jazzy theme music, and directors included John Brahm, Buzz Kulick, Arthur Hiller and Tay Garnett.
The New York location offered a pool of theatrical acting talent, some of them newcomers on the threshold of distinguished careers – they included Robert Redford, Tuesday Weld, Walter Matthau, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, Peter Falk, Martin Sheen, Rip Torn, Jon Voight and Christopher Walken. The show’s quality, and its tradition of building shows more around the guest stars than its regular cast, also prompted seasoned performers to seek out roles, among them Eli Wallach, Viveca Lindfors, Betty Field, Sylvia Sidney, Steve Cochran and Kim Hunter.
Burke had further success on television when he starred as a Second World War Air Force colonel in the series Twelve O’Clock High (1964-67). He played his first starring role in a movie when given the male lead (billed third to Barbara Parkin and Patty Duke) in Valley of the Dolls (1967), Mark Robson’s screen version of Jacqueline Susann’s best-selling novel about addiction to pills (the “dolls” of the title). Though Robson had made a splendid job of transferring a similarly exploitative novel, Peyton Place, to the screen in 1957, Valley of the Dolls was a tawdry effort which nevertheless made a fortune while doing little for Burke, whose role as a young lawyer who befriends the film’s three heroines and has an affair with Parkin, was colourless.
Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), primarily a glossy vehicle for Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, gave Burke his best screen role, as a police detective partnering insurance investigator Dunaway to trap millionaire bank robber McQueen. He was a lawyer again in Mark Robson’s Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (1969), a thriller in which his wife (Carol White) is terrorised by an ex-boyfriend who wants her to kill her own baby because she once concealed an abortion from him. Risibly melodramatic, it effectively ended the Hollywood careers of both Burke and White.
Burke returned to television, guest-starring in such shows as The Love Boat, Starsky and Hutch, Charlie’s Angels and Murder, She Wrote. In the lavish soap opera Dynasty, he had a recurring role from 1982-88 as Congressman Neal McVane, who murders the ex-husband of Krystle Carrington, a crime for which Alexis Carrington (Joan Collins) is convicted. He also had a recurring role as Rear Admiral Hawkes in Magnum, P.I., starring Tom Selleck.
In 1990, after a role in Columbo, Burke retired to Palm Springs with his second wife, Lyn, whom he had married in 1979. “Acting is more exciting than living,” he told TV Guide during the run of The Naked City. “It’s more electric, more immediate. That’s because life is full of random elements. In acting, you select, you choose the elements. This selection allows you to get to the essence of the character, the essence of an experience.” He is survived by his wife, and three children from his first marriage.
Paul Burke, actor: born New Orleans 21 July 1926; twice married (two daughters, one son); died: Palm Springs, California 13 September 2009.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Marsha HuntCarnegie Hall, poster, US poster, center: Marsha Hunt, Harry James, 1947. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Marsha Hunt was born in 1917 in Chicago. She has had a very long career and her films include “Irene”, “Pride and Prejudice” in 1940, “The Human Comedy”, “Carnegie Hall”, “Diplomatic Passport” and “Blue Denim”.
IMDB entry:
Stardom somehow eluded this vastly gifted actress. Had it not perhaps been for her low-level profile compounded by her McCarthy-era blacklisting in the early 1950s, there is no telling what higher tier of stardom Marsha Hunt might have reached. Perhaps her work was not flashy enough, too subdued, or perhaps her intelligence too often disguised a genuine sex appeal to stand out among the other lovelies. Two studios, Paramount in the late 30s and MGM in the early 40s, failed to complete her star. Nevertheless, her talent and versatility cannot be denied. This glamorous, slimly handsome leading lady offered herself to well over 50 pictures during the 1930s and 1940s alone.
Christened Marcia Virginia Hunt, the Chicago-born actress was the younger of two girls born to an attorney and voice teacher/accompanist. The family relocated to New York when she was quite young and she attended such schools as P.S. No. 9 and Horace Mann School for Girls. She developed an exciting interest in acting at an early age (3), performing around and about in school plays and at church functions. Following her high school graduation, the young beauty found work as a John Powers model and also as a singer on radio, a gift obviously inherited from her mother. Marcia (she later changed the spelling of her first name to Marsha) studied drama at the Theodora Irvine Drama School (one of her fellow students was Cornel Wilde).
Encouraged to try Hollywood by various New York people in the business, the young photogenic hopeful moved there in 1934. She was still only 17 but was accompanied by her older sister. It didn’t take long for the studios to take interest in her and she was signed up by Paramount not long after. Marsha’s very first first movie was in a featured role opposite Robert Cummings and Johnny Downs in the old-fashioned The Virginia Judge (1935). Displaying an innate, fresh-faced sensitivity, she moved directly into her second film playing the title role in Gentle Julia (1936), this time with Tom Brown as her romantic interest.
Marsha continued to show promise but these well-acted roles were, more often than not, overlooked in mild “B” level offerings. Appearing in co-starring roles in everything from westerns (Desert Gold (1936) and Thunder Trail (1937)) to folksy or flyweight comedyEasy to Take (1936) and Murder Goes to College (1937), she could not find decent enough scripts at Paramount. Though she was once deemed one of Paramount’s promising starlets, one her last films for the studio was another prairie flower role —Born to the West (1937) — with cowboys John Wayne and Johnny Mack Brown vying for her attention. At about this time (1938) she married Jerry Hopper, a Paramount film editor who turned to directing in the 1950s. This marriage lasted but a few years.
Freelancing for a time for many studios, Marsha’s more noticeable war-era work in sentimental comedy and staunch war dramas came from MGM, and she finally signed with them in 1939. The roles offered, which included a featured part as one of the sisters inPride and Prejudice (1940) starring Greer Garson, and again as a sister to Garson inBlossoms in the Dust (1941), showed much more promise. Some of her better war-era roles came in the films Cheers for Miss Bishop (1941), Kid Glove Killer (1942) and The Affairs of Martha (1942). During this time she also sang on extended USO tours and found busy work on radio. Her best known film is arguably The Human Comedy (1943) but she wasn’t the star. Other film roles served in support to others, such as Margaret Sullavan in Cry ‘Havoc’ (1943), little Margaret O’Brien in Lost Angel (1943), and Greer Garson again in The Valley of Decision (1945). Leading roles did not come in “A” pictures.
Her MGM contract was allowed to lapse in 1945 and a second marriage in 1946 to screenwriter Robert Presnell Jr. became a higher priority. The marriage was long and happy (exactly 40 years), and lasted until his passing in June of 1986. The few pictures she made were, again, uneventful or in support of the star, although she did have a catchy, unsympathetic role in the Susan Hayward starrer Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947) as a plotting secretary. In Raw Deal (1948) starring Dennis O’Keefe, she got the “raw deal” being overshadowed as a “good girl” by the “bad girl” posturings ofClaire Trevor. At this point of her career, she decided to try the stage and made her Broadway debut in “Joy to the World” (1948). Other plays down the road would include “The Devil’s Disciple” with Maurice Evans, “The Lady’s Not for Burning” with Vincent Priceand “The Little Hut” with Leon Ames. She even had a chance to return to her beloved singing as Anna in a production of “The King and I” and (much later) in productions of “State Fair” and “Meet Me in St. Louis”. TV also yielded some new work opportunities, including a presentation of “Twelfth Night” in which she portrayed Viola.
The seams of her film career fell apart in the early 1950s. During the late 1930s and into the 1940s she signed a number of petitions promoting liberal ideals, and was a member of the Committee for the First Amendment. A strong supporter for freedom of speech, these associations led to her name appearing in the pamphlet Red Channels. Although she and her writer husband, Robert Presnell Jr., were never called before the House Un-American Activities Commission, their names were nevertheless smeared in Hollywood. While she still found film work on occasion, it was rare. Working busily from 1935 until 1949, in over 50 films, she made only three films in the next eight years. Her screenwriter husband would be credited for only one film from 1948 to 1955.
Semi-retired by the early 1960s, stage and TV became Marsha’s focal points. She also devoted herself to civil rights causes and such humanitarian efforts as UNICEF, The March of Dimes and The Red Cross. She became actively involved with the United Nations. On the acting front she semi-retired in the 1960s, appearing only in smaller roles in five films but in numerous TV programs and mini-movies playing everything from judges to grandmas. She became the Honorary Mayor of Sherman Oaks, California in 1983, and published a book on fashion entitled “The Way We Wore” in 1993. Widowed by her second husband in 1986, the ever-vibrant Marsha, in her 90s, continues to serve on the Advisory Board of Directors for the San Fernando Valley Community Mental Health Center, a large non-profit in the San Fernando Valley that advocates for adults and children affected by homelessness and mental illness. As recently as 2006, she appeared to good advantage in the movie Chloe’s Prayer (2006).
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
TCM Overview:
Marsha Hunt (born Marcia Virginia Hunt October 17, 1917 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American film, theater, and television actress. With big, bright eyes, standing five-foot-six, and always very slender, Hunt was considered very attractive in her early career. She was also a very good singer, and was a model, before Paramount Pictures signed her to a contract in 1934. During the late 1930s and into the 1940s she signed a number of petitions promoting liberal ideals. She was also a member of the Committee for the First Amendment. On October 27, 1947 she flew with a group of about 30 actors, directors, writers, and filmmakers, to Washington D.C. to protest the actions of Congress. She had worked steadily from 1935 until 1949, appearing in 52 films. After being blacklisted, she appeared in only three films in the next eight years. Some of her best outing were: Pride and Prejudice (1940), The Human Comedy (1943)and The Valley of Decision (1945). Since 1980 she has been the honorary mayor of Sherman Oaks, California. As of 2007, Marsha Hunt has served for many years and continues to serve on the Advisory Board of Directors for the San Fernando Valley Community Mental Health Center, a large non-profit in the San Fernando Valley.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
The Times obituary in 2022:
Actress who appeared with Laurence Olivier in Pride and Prejudice but found her career torpedoed by anti-communist paranoia
Hunt, right, with Greer Garson in Pride and Prejudice (1940): she had to learn to sing out of tune for the roleALAMY
Marsha Hunt looked back fondly on her role as the plain and bookish Mary, the third of the Bennet sisters in MGM’s 1940 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. “[It was] a delicious character for me to play — squinting through glasses, singing off-key, wearing sausage curls,” she recalled, adding self-deprecatingly: “I wouldn’t cause one male heart in a thousand to miss a beat.”
There was, however, a problem with her singing. She was so naturally musical that she struggled to perform sufficiently out of tune to justify Mr Bennet’s immortal line, “That will do extremely well, child. You have delighted us long enough”, and had to be coached for several weeks in the art of singing badly.
She was offered the role without an audition, having been seen by an MGM producer at previous try-outs. “I didn’t want it at first,” she said at the time of the film’s release. “But when I found I was going to be a near-sighted, squinting, priggish wallflower who sang flat and busted up romances — oh boy.”
Later she spoke of the remarkable costumes and the affect they had on the cast. “Before daylight we’d report for work. It was chilly, and we wore sweaters, sneakers . . . it didn’t matter what we came to work in,” she told Persuasions, the journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America. “But once in those costumes, everything changed — the way we stood, sat, even spoke to each other. We became different people. Not that each wasn’t enacting her own character that she was assigned in the film. But it really does transpose you, in a curious way.”
Previously Hunt, who was tall and willowy with sparkling blue eyes, had deservedly been described as “Hollywood’s youngest character actress”. Before being snapped up by MGM she had been signed by Paramount, playing her first featured role at the age of 18 opposite Robert Cummings and Johnny Downs in The Virginia Judge (1935), lisping “I love you” in a southern accent.
Despite obviously being a New Yorker, she was cast in four westerns. When she complained that she should be in easterns instead, she was told that she was best suited to westerns because her height meant she would look tall in the saddle against the skyline.
Despite making more than 50 films between 1935 and 1950, the “red scare” meant that Hunt never managed to fulfil her early promise. In October 1947 she joined the Committee for the First Amendment, a group of prominent Hollywood actors founded by the directors William Wyler and John Huston. They were flown to Washington to witness congressional hearings at which the so-called Hollywood Nineteen, a group of screenwriters, were questioned about their alleged communist affiliations.
Members of the committee were subjected to a concerted campaign of smear, misquotation and misrepresentation. “In my own case, I was quoted as saying things I would never say, at a function I never attended,” Hunt explained. When the committee returned to Hollywood, Humphrey Bogart and his wife Lauren Bacall, who had been the most prominent actors on the trip, came under pressure from Warner Brothers and announced that the trip had been “ill-advised”.
Before long Hunt was being attacked by Red Channels, an anti-communist gossip sheet. In summer 1950, after a successful Broadway performance in The Devil’s Disciple, she was on holiday in Paris when Red Channels branded her a “patriotically suspect citizen”. The publication falsely listed several affiliations under her name and listed others that were innocent. Suddenly, the offers of film roles all but dried up.
She had just returned from a radio broadcast “selling US savings bonds as a public service for my country”, when Stanley Kramer bravely cast her in The Happy Time (1952), in which she played Charles Boyer’s wife. However, she was told that her contract would be broken unless she denounced the 1947 trip to Washington as having been organised by communists. She refused, saying this would have been a lie. Instead, she gave a statement “expressing my pride and affection for my country’s form of government”, which was just enough for her to retain the role. Throughout shooting, the producers received frequent letters from members of the American Legion objecting to her presence in the cast and threatening to picket cinemas at which the film would be shown. Although The Happy Timewas a light comedy, she recalled that the film’s title and subject was belied by her off-screen burden. Although never officially proscribed, Hunt found herself “greylisted”, reduced to a virtual non-person in the film industry by way of nods and winks. “I was never subpoenaed [by committees investigating communism],” she told an interviewer many years later. “I was never a communist. I was never a figure of public controversy. I just stopped working.” Marcia Virginia Hunt was born in Chicago in 1917, the younger of two sisters. While growing up she was called Betty, because Marcia sounded too much like Marjorie, her older sister, a teacher who died in 2002. Their father, Earl Hunt, was a lawyer of conservative Republican disposition, and their mother, Minabel, was an accompanist and singing teacher, who was “instilling music into me since I was five years old”. ADVERTISEMENT The family soon moved to New York, where she attended public school followed by the Horace Mann School for Girls, performing in school plays and church events. After leaving high school she became a model and sang on the radio. At around this time she changed the spelling of her first name to Marsha and studied at the Theodora Irvine Drama School. She moved to Hollywood in 1934 with her sister and in 1938 married Jerry Hopper, a Paramount editor. Paramount never got the measure of her and after freelancing for a while she fared better under contract to MGM from 1930 to 1945. After Pride and Prejudice she was Garson’s sister again in Blossoms in the Dust (1941). She played a spoilt rich girl in The Human Comedy (1943) with Mickey Rooney; was given top billing as a Polish teacher in André De Toth’s None Shall Escape (1944), the first film to depict Nazi atrocities against the Jews; and played the programme manager who ages from her teens to her late sixties in Carnegie Hall (1947). She also made her debut on Broadway in 1948 in Joy to the World.
Her first marriage was dissolved in 1945 and the following year she married the screenwriter Robert Presnell Jr. Her only child, a daughter who was born prematurely, died at a day old in 1947 and Hunt and Presnell subsequently became foster parents. He died in 1986 and she always treasured a comical utterance he made to her before they went to sleep one night during the blacklist years: “Cheer up, it gets worse.” By all accounts, Hunt was a political innocent. She joined the board of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), filling out the term of Franchot Tone, who had gone east to do a play. For the first few months she simply sat and listened, because she had no familiarity with political or union activities. She served on an exploratory committee with Robert Montgomery, the former guild president, to determine whether it should affiliate with the writers’ and directors’ guilds. Montgomery demanded that the other guilds disavow communism and bar communists from being members. This put paid to any merger, but he blamed the failure of the talks on other factors. When Hunt gave a contradictory version of events to the SAG board, she was politely heard in silence but ignored. She was marked down by some members as a dangerous liberal and was not proposed for the next board. For reasons she never understood, her husband was never blacklisted. Indeed, he even served as a “front” by allowing the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo to use his name on a film, though he did not charge for the privilege as others did. With no film work available, Hunt turned to the stage, performing in numerous plays around the US during the 1950s and 1960s. Here she was paid only for the weeks of performance, not for rehearsal time, and was required to meet her own accommodation expenses. She called it “a costly way to make a living”, but was determined to make a contribution to the household. By the time the blacklist petered out, Hunt was of an age when strong featured roles for women were few and her acting career never regained momentum. She played the mother of Natalie Wood in Bombers B-52 (also known as No Sleep till Dawn, 1957). Her other film appearances included in Blue Denim (1959), which was directed and co-written by Philip Dunne, one of the organisers of the 1947 trip to Washington, and as Timothy Bottoms’s mother in Johnny Got His Gun(1971), written by Trumbo. ADVERTISEMENT She told how her film career “tallied just a few more romantic leads than supporting feature roles”, adding: “I was not dreaming of stardom. I just wanted to become the best actress I could, and mostly those opportunities came in featured roles rather than in lead roles.” Hunt also appeared in TV shows, including Zane Grey Theater in the 1950s, The Outer Limits in the 1960s, Ironside and Harry O in the 1970s, and Star Trek: The Next Generation in the late 1980s. Her last film role was in The Grand Inquisitor (2008), a short film noir in which she played the possible wife of one of America’s most notorious unapprehended serial killers. One little-known aspect of her creative life was that she wrote 50 songs, two of which were included in a CD she produced, Tony London: Songs From The Heart with the Page Cavanaugh Trio. In 1993 she published The Way We Wore: Styles of the 1930s and ’40s and Our World Since Then, a curious combination of memoir and fashion history. Looking back on how the blacklist had blighted her career, she always looked for the positive aspect. Having been “closeted on a soundstage” until the blacklist came along, she found herself with time on her hands and decided to make good use of it by becoming a champion for social activism, presenting telethons for cerebral palsy, campaigning for UN projects and fundraising for the American Red Cross. It was typical of Hunt’s generous spirit that she was never bitter. The key to her survival, she said, was her fulfilling family life. In later years she was able to reflect on the pernicious nature of the blacklist era as someone who fell into the category of what the historian Victor Navasky called, with intended irony, a “guilty bystander”. Marsha Hunt, actress, was born on October 17, 1917. She died on September 7, 2022, aged 104
Lupita TovarThe Fighting Gringo, poster, US poster art, second right: George O’Brien; right: Lupita Tovar, 1939. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)East Of Borneo, poster, Rose Hobart (top), Charles Bickford, Lupita Tovar, 1931. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Lupita Tovar was born in Mexico in 1910. She was discovered by the documantary filmmaker Robert Flaherty. She came to Hollywood in 1929 and starred in “Dracula”, She retired early from acting when she married agent Paul Kohner in 1932. Susan Kohner the actress is their daughter. She died at the age of 106 in 2016.
IMDB entry: Born in Oaxaca, Mexico, Lupita Tovar appeared first in silent Fox films before making the move to Universal and co-starring in the Spanish-language version of 1930’s “The Cat Creeps” (La voluntad del muerto (1930)). For the same producer, Czech-born Paul Kohner, she appeared as Eva Seward (the Spanish-language counterpart of Helen Chandler‘s Mina) in Universal’s Spanish Dracula (1931). In 1932, she married Kohner, who later became one of the top agents in Hollywood. (Their actress-daughter, Susan Kohner, was Oscar-nominated for her performance in Universal’s 1959 Imitation of Life (1959); their son, Pancho Kohner, is a producer). Tovar gave up films in the 1940s and has been widowed since 1988.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Tom Weaver <TomWeavr@aol.com>
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
“The Wrap” obituary:
Mexican screen siren Lupita Tovar has died at the age of 106.
The actress starred in the 1931 Spanish-language version of “Dracula,” which was filmed simultaneously with the popular English-speaking version with Bela Lugosi. Tovar died in her Los Angeles home on Saturday, according to a Facebook post by actress Lucy Tovar, her niece.
Tovar was the mother of Oscar-nominated “Imitation of Life” actress Susan Kohner and the grandmother to Hollywood film writers, brothers Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz. Both were nominated for an Oscar for writing 2002’s “About a Boy.” Tovar was married to high-power Hollywood producer Paul Kohner, who worked more than 50 years with icons including Greta Garbo, Lana Turner, John Huston, Lana Turner, Ingmar Bergman, Yul Brynner, David Niven, Billy Wilder and Charles Brons In “Dracula,” Tovar portrayed Eva Steward, the damsel who becomes inextricably enthralled by Dracula (Carlos Villar). Lupita starred in Mexico’s first talking film “Santa,” released in 1932. She starred opposite Buster Keaton in “The Invader,” and also notably appeared in “Blockade” with Henry Fonda. She starred in only 32 films, according to IMDb, as she chose to focus on raising her family by the mid-1940s.
