Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 94 of 128

Juliet Prowse

Juliet Prowse obituary in “The Independent” in 1996.

Juliet Prowse was a terrific dancer whose presence graced films of the early 60’s. She was born in Bombay, India in 1936 but raised in South Africa. Her first film was “Can-Can” in 1960 with Frank Sinatra and Louis Jourdan. She was Elvis Presley’s leading lady in “G.I. Blues” and in 1965 starred with Sal Mineo in the cult movie “Who Killed Teddy Bear”. Juliet Prowse had a very busy career on the music stage and in concert halls and Las Vegas. She died in 1996.

Her obituary by Tom Vallance in “The Independent” newspaper:A tall actress-dancer with red hair, pouting lips (she was once called “a trim Brigitte Bardot”) and a great high kick, Juliet Prowse appeared on screen with Frank Sinatra (who proposed marriage) and Elvis Presley during an all too brief film career, shocked Nikita Khrushchev with her dancing in Can-Can, became a London stage favourite (notably in Sweet Charity), and a sensational night-club performer, where her father worked as a travelling salesman.

Her father, an Englishman born in South Africa, died when she was three and her mother then took her to relatives in Durban, but finally settled in Johannesburg. “Juliet showed an aptitide for dancing from the time she could walk,” stated her mother, who enrolled her daughter in ballet school at the age of four. At 14 she was in the corps of Johannesburg’s Festival Ballet, dancing in Swan Lake, Coppelia and Les Sylphides. Two years later she played the Queen of the Wilis in Giselle – cast because of her outstanding elevation, she was the youngest dancer ever to play the role in South Africa. “I never graduated from college,” said Prowse, “because I became so interested in dancing that when I was 16 I quit to study with the ballet teacher Marjorie Sturmm in Johannesburg.”

Going to London two years later to continue her studies, she received the biggest disappointment of her life when turned down by Anton Dolin for the London Festival Ballet because she was too tall (nearly 5ft 8in).

Prowse turned to show dancing and successfully auditioned for Jack Cole, who was choreographing the film Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1955) in London. Though she appeared in only one of the film’s numbers, Cole was impressed and asked her to work with him again in the London production of Kismet. She played the role of Princess Samaris, with an impressive solo dance to “Not Since Nineveh”, then after a 20-month run accepted an offer to dance in La Nouvelle Eve night-club in Paris, an engagement terminated when she injured her ankle in a motor-scooter accident.

While touring Italy in a revue starring the comic Macario, she fell in love with another dancer, Sergio Fadini, and with a third dancer they formed an act, the Prowse Dancers, and toured the European night-club circuit. Ambitious for her, Fadini polished her acting, singing and dancing technique and when he heard that Hermes Pan was in Rome he arranged an interview for her.

Pan, about to return to Hollywood to work on Can-Can, recommended her to 20th Century-Fox, who assigned her to appear in the movie. Having been given her featured role in Kismet on stage when the previous dancer dropped out at the last minute, Prowse now had her role of Celestine expanded to include the part of Claudine when Barrie Chase suddenly withdrew from Can-Can. “I’ve always had it easy,” Prowse said later. “I’ve never had to fight to get parts.”

Her role now included two major dancing roles plus a prominent acting role as the girl to whom Frank Sinatra sings “It’s Alright With Me”. An overlong and dull version of Cole Porter’s stage hit, Can-Can was considered notable mainly for the dancing of Prowse, particularly her solo as the Snake in the “Adam and Eve Ballet”, sliding sensually down branches of the Tree of Life dressed in blue-green snakeskin, a big red apple in her hand.

Khrushchev, after his famous visit to the set during the film’s making, described the number as “lascivious, disgusting and immoral”, but Frank Sinatra described Prowse as “the sexiest dancer I’ve ever seen”. He began an affair with her and featured her in two of his television specials, the first of which (in December 1959) showcased Prowse in an enormous production number staged in the California desert.

Regarding the well- publicised relationship, Prowse stated, “Gossip doesn’t worry me – I’m an open person. I’ve mixed around in this business long enough not to be embarrassed by anything pertaining to sex.” Fadini, her former boyfriend, commented, “Juliet is a sweet, shy, reserved girl – I don’t see what she sees in a man like him.”

When Sinatra proposed marriage with the condition that Prowse give up her career, she refused. “I am ambitious and have possibilities to be great,” she said.

Prowse went straight from Can-Can to the starring role opposite Elvis Presley in G.I. Blues (1960), based on a play filmed several times before (notably as The Fleet’s In in 1942) about a military unit who bet their company Lothario that he cannot melt the heart of a haughty night-club star. As the cabaret performer, Prowse won praise from critics for her exciting dance routines and her pert performance, and the director Norman Taurog later recounted that he had to shout “Cut!” several times to sepaarate the two stars during their kissing scenes.

Of Presley, Prowse stated, “He would make a damn fine dancer – he’s got fabulous rhythm”, and she would later do a perfect impersonation of the rock star in her night-club act.

With the end of her relationship with Sinatra, Prowse’s film career faltered. Fox, who had signed her to a seven-year contract, put her only into a minor musical, The Right Approach (1961), with Frankie Vaughan, a routine adventure, The Fiercest Heart (1961), about battling Boers and Zulus in 1837 South Africa, and in support of Debbie Reynolds in the comedy The Second Time Around (1961) before letting her go. (Her description of Hollywood as “a demoralising hick-town” had not endeared her to the moguls.)

She returned to South africa in 1965 to film Jamie Uys’s Dingaka, and the same year starred as a discotheque dancer admired by both a voyeur/serial killer (Sal Mineo) and a lesbian (Eliane Stritch) in an exploitation movie made in New York, Who Killed Teddy Bear?, which has recently inexplicably been rediscovered and was hailed by some critics as a masterpiece of underground cinema when revived earlier this year at New York’s enterprising Film Forum cinema.

Prowse was now concentrating on television and the theatre. After touring in such shows as Damn Yankees, Irma La Douce and The Boy Friend, she was cast in the Las Vegas production of Sweet Charity and played there to capacity for six months. In 1967 she enchanted London in the same piece as the gullible dance-hall hostess, stopping the show nightly cavorting through “If My Friends Could See Me Now”, and touchingly conveying the heroine’s unshakeable faith in human nature.

She returned to London in 1969 to star in Mame at Drury Lane while Ginger Rogers took a holiday, again winning acclaim, and in 1976 starred opposite Rock Hudson in a limited season of the two-character musical I Do! I Do!, one critic commenting that “Juliet Prowse is fast enough on her feet to prevent any damage to her toes when Rock is called on to do an occasional stiff-backed military two-step”.

Although she often confessed an ambition to have an original stage musical written fo her, Prowse’s principal career was now in night-clubs. In 1971 she made a sensational success with an act at Desert Inn in Las Vegas. Produced by Tony Charmoli, it was praised for its simplicity and finesse compared to the usual brash glitter of Vegas revues. It was climaxed, after Prowse had danced variations on the charleston, cha-cha and jitterbug, performed comedy sketches and sung ballads, with a memorable 15-minute ballet to Ravel’s “Bolero”.

She did guest appearances on all the leading television shows, including those of Perry Como, Bob Hope, Danny Kaye and Ed Sullivan, had her own situation comedy show, Mona McCluskey, (produced by Geoge Burns) in 1965 and her own television special, The Juliet Prowse Show, in 1979. She loved her work, and put herself through a gruelling twice-nightly schedule during her days as a night-club star, but always referred wistfully to her biggest regret.

“I’ve never starved,” she once said, “and my family always encouraged me, as did everyone else. But my really big disappointment was beng told I was too tall for the ballet.”

Juliet Prowse, actress and dancer: born Bombay 25 September 1936; married 1969 Eddie James (marriage dissolved 1970), 1972 John McCook (one son); died Los Angeles 14 September 1996.

The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed on-line here.

New York Times obituary in 1996:

Juliet Prowse Is Dead at 59; Star of Musicals and Clubs

By Robert Mcg. Thomas Jr.

Sept. 16, 1996

Juliet Prowse, the tall, leggy dancer with the sultry smile and the bee-sting lips who became a tabloid celebrity when she offended Khrushchev and captivated Frank Sinatra, died on Saturday at her home in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles. She was 59 and had been a staple of Las Vegas nightclub acts, television specials and touring musicals for more than 30 years.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, a spokesman said.

Although Miss Prowse was an accomplished dancer who had been trained in classical ballet in London and South Africa and had had a successful career in Europe before being discovered in Italy by the choreographer Hermes Pan, she was an unknown in the United States when Mr. Pan recruited her to appear with Mr. Sinatra and Shirley Maclaine in the movie-musical ”Can-Can.”

Then came the day in 1959 when Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, visited the ”Can-Can” set in Hollywood during a celebrated state visit to the United States and pronounced the entertainment ”immoral.”

Within hours Miss Prowse’s scantily-clad image was in virtually every newspaper in America and she was being hailed by Hollywood as another Betty Grable.

Miss Prowse, who knew propaganda when she heard it translated (Khrushchev had been all smiles during the visit, she said), was nonplused. ”Let’s face it,” she said. ”The cancan is a pretty raucous number. It’s not exactly ‘Swan Lake.’ ”

Although she won enthusiastic praise for both her acting and her dancing in ”Can-Can,” Miss Prowse was two decades late for the era of the big Hollywood musical and she appeared in only a few, largely forgettable movies, among them, ”The Second Time Around,” with Debbie Reynolds; ”Who Killed Teddy Bear?” with Sal Mineo, and ”G.I. Blues,” with Elvis Presley.

But the Khrushchev remark, a romance with Mr. Sinatra (they were engaged for six weeks in 1962) and a simultaneous fling with Mr. Presley made her an enduring darling of the gossip columns and enhanced her popularity as a television and night club performer.

Juliet Prowse, whose father was a British manager for Westinghouse who died when she was 3, was born in Bombay, India, and grew up in South Africa, where she emerged as such a skilled dancer that at 14 she was the ”baby ballerina” star of the Festival Ballet in Johannesburg.

At 17 she was pursuing her career in London, but had to switch to modern dance when she grew too tall, 5 feet, 7 inches, for her partners. ”When I got on my toes,” she said, ”some of those male partners were way down there.”

A part in the London production of ”Kismet” led to an engagement at a celebrated topless dance club in Paris, but Miss Prowse was not allowed to appear uncovered.

”I was considered English,” she later said. ”In those shows, nudity was the guarded right of the French and German girls.”

She later appeared in Madrid, helped form what amounted to a traveling review and was dancing in Rome when she was spotted by Mr. Pan, Fred Astaire’s longtime collaborator, who told friends she was the best feminine dancer he had ever seen.

Miss Prowse never became a major movie star, but in the years after ”Can-Can” she was rarely out of work partly because, for all her gossip- column celebrity, she was a hard-working, disciplined professional whose performances were almost always well received.

She made a virtual career touring in ”Mame’ and won such acclaim for her Las Vegas performance in ”Sweet Charity,” in 1966, that the show was taken to London, where Miss Prowse won the British equivalent of a Tony Award.

After she broke off her engagement with Mr. Sinatra, Miss Prowse settled down to a series of long-term relationships but generally avoided matrimony. There was a brief early marriage she never talked about, and in 1980, just after giving birth to their son, she married John McCook, an actor. They were later divorced.

To those who worked with her, Miss Prowse’s most striking feature was neither her long, shapely legs nor her dancing skills, but her sunny disposition and her perpetual good cheer even in the face of one disaster or another, like the time in 1987 when she was mauled by a leopard while rehearsing for a television special called ”Circus of the Stars.”

As her longtime manager, Mark Mordoh, noted on Saturday, none of her friends were surprised that Miss Prowse was convinced that the same dedication and hard work that had brought her a successful show business career would lead to a victory over her cancer, discovered in 1994.

”Even while she was getting chemotherapy,” Mr. Mordoh said, ”she was teaching yoga classes.”

Miss Prowse is survived by her son, Seth McCook, of Los Angeles; her mother, Phylis Polte, and a brother, Dr. Clive Prowse, both of Vanderbijl Park, South Africa, and her companion, B. J. Allen

Ginny Simms was born in 1915 in San Antonio ,Texas. She was a big band singer who also acted on film. Her films include “Here We Go Again” with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, “Hit the Ice” with Abbott and Costello and “Night and Day” with Cary Grant, Alexis Smith and Dorothy Malone in 1946. S

War-era songstress Ginny Simms was born Virginia Simms on May 23, 1913, in Texas but was raised in California, which accounts for her lack of a Southern accent in her speaking/singing voice. Though she studied piano as a child, it was her vocal gifts that launched her career, which started when she formed a singing trio while studying at Fresno State Teachers College. Ginny was performing at a club in San Francisco when she was heard by bandleader/radio star Kay Kyser. She became his featured singer and the big attraction of Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge, a comedy revue done in the style of a quiz show with music. They also became a romantic item. In addition to radio, she kept busy recording swing and pop albums.

After Ginny broke into films as a guest vocalist in three of Kyser’s films for RKO–That’s Right – You’re Wrong (1939), You’ll Find Out (1940) and Playmates (1941), she decided to stay in Hollywood, abandon the tour scene with Kyser, and seek solo fame and fortune. Kyser would replace Ginny with Georgia Carroll both professionally and personally and they later married. Ginny earned her own popular radio show and involved herself deeply in the war effort, earning praise for her tireless work. Some of her well-known recordings (with and without Kyser) include “Deep Purple,” “Indian Summer,” “I’d Like to Set You to Music,” “I Can’t Get Started,” “I Love Paris,” and “Stormy Weather.” A dazzling beauty with high cheekbones and megawatt smile, Ginny seemed made for the screen. She co-starred with Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in one of their earlier and funniest comedies, Hit the Ice (1943), and scored some important second-lead roles over at MGM with Broadway Rhythm (1944) with George Murphy and Gloria DeHaven, in which she played a movie star who sang “All the Things You Are,” and the Cole Porter biopicNight and Day (1946) starring Cary Grant and Alexis Smith, in which she sang some of Porter’s best loved standards (“I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “Just One of Those Things,” “I Get A Kick Out of You” and “You’re the Top”), but her career lost momentum rather quickly (the story at the time was that she had turned down a marriage proposal by newly divorced MGM head Louis B. Mayer, who retaliated by immediately dropping her contract at the studio).

Ginny left Hollywood altogether in 1951 and her recording career ended not long after. She subsequently retired and ran a travel agency for a time while developing an interest in interior decorating (her first husband, Hyatt Dehn, was the man who started the Hyatt Hotel chain, for which she did much of the interior decorating). She also was involved in real estate with third husband Donald Eastvold. The mother of two sons from her first marriage, Ginny died of a heart attack in 1994 at age 78.

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

She died in 1994.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Here We Go Again, poster, (top l-r): Ginny Simms, Harold Peary, Charlie McCarthy, Edgar Bergen, Mortimer Snerd, 1942. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Evelyn Venable was born in 1913 in Cincinnati, Ohio and made her film breakthrough in “Death Takes a Holiday” in 1934 opposite Fredric March. Her other film of note is “Cradle Song”. She retired in 1943 to spend more time with her family. Evelyn Venable died in 1993 at the age of 80.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Lovely and ethereal in looks, and quite unassuming in nature, 1930s actress Evelyn Venable was born in 1913 in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she grew up and received her schooling. Both her father, Emerson Venable, and grandfather were writers/teachers. In her high school drama department, Evelyn played the top leads in their productions of “Romeo and Juliet” (Juliet) and “As You Like It” (Rosalind). Critics were so bowled over by her performances that she was cast in a professional production of “Dear Brutus” in the nearby area. Following graduation, she earned a four-year non-acting scholarship to Vassar but left after the first year to study at the University of Cincinnati. After college the acting bug returned. Encouraged by classical actor/director Walter Hampden, who was a family friend, he invited her to join his touring company where she eventually performed Ophelia to his Hamlet and Roxanne to his Cyrano. Film scouts at Paramount caught these productions and invited her to Hollywood.

Evelyn made her film debut with Cradle Song (1933) and proceeded to take on sensitive, soft-spoken leads or second leads in a number of “A” class fare including Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1934) with Pauline Lord; the classic fantasy Death Takes a Holiday(1934) starring Fredric March, which is deemed her best role; David Harum (1934) andThe County Chairman (1935), both Will Rogers‘ vehicles; and Alice Adams (1935) starringKatharine Hepburn in the title role. In each of these Evelyn looked simply luminous and proved most able, but perhaps her modest, rather delicate nature didn’t carry off enough weight to make her a star. In any event, she was thereafter relegated to working at “poverty-row” studios. She started appearing in movies with titles that indicated a downhill slide was imminent — Vagabond Lady (1935), Streamline Express (1935), North of Nome (1936), Racketeers in Exile (1937), The Headleys at Home (1938) and Hollywood Stadium Mystery (1938). One bright spot would be her sooth voicing of the “Blue Fairy” in the Disney animated classic Pinocchio (1940).

By this time, Evelyn had married Hal Mohr, the Oscar-winning cinematographer she had met on the set of one of Will Rogers‘ films, and bore him two daughters, Dolores and Rosalia. Interest waned for the actress, who decided that family came first and completely retired after appearing opposite Stuart Erwin Jr. in the light comedy He Hired the Boss (1943). Evelyn gamely returned to college (UCLA) where she studied Greek and Latin and attained a Master’s degree. Invited to join the UCLA staff as a drama instructor, she stayed there contentedly for decades. She and Mohr lived in Brentwood, California in later years and enjoyed a 40-year marriage that lasted until his death in 1974. Evelyn died in Idaho of cancer in 1993.

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

Independent obituary in 1993:

Evelyn Venable, actress: born Cincinatti, Ohio 8 October 1913; married 1934 Hal Mohr (died 1974; two daughters); died Post Falls, Idaho 16 November 1993.

ALTHOUGH she retired after only 10 years on the screen, Evelyn Venable was seen in more films than most superstars; she was the first model for Columbia Pictures’ Statue of Liberty logo.

Her father was Emerson Venable, a college professor and noted Shakespearean authority. Evelyn began acting in high school plays, and at 15 played Juliet at the Cincinatti Civic Theater. She attended Vassar, but stayed only briefly at the University of Cincinatti, leaving to join a stock company run by the actor Walter Hampden, with whom she appeared in Cyrano de Bergerac and Hamlet. When the company played Los Angeles, her Ophelia impressed a talent scout, and she was signed to a Paramount contract. In her first film, Cradle Song (1933), she was liked as the foster daughter of a nun (Dorothea Wieck, the German star of Madchen in Uniform). In Death Takes a Holiday (1934), she played the sensitive Grazia, with whom Death (Fredric March) falls in love. Mordaunt Hall wrote in the New York Times: ‘Miss Venable lends to her acting a praiseworthy earnestness.’ A loan-out to Fox for David Harum (1934) changed her life; she and Hal Mohr, the film’s cinematographer, fell in love and were married that same year.

The Headleys At Home, poster, top from left: Evelyn Venable, Alicia Adams, Betty Roadman, Grant Mitchell, 1938. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

After austere roles in Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1934), Will Rogers’s The County Chairman (1935), The Little Colonel (1935), Alice Adams (1935) and the Stephen Foster biopic Harmony Lane (1935), she was given a rare chance to let her hair down in Hal Roach’s farcical Vagabond Lady (1935). Variety enthused: ‘She plays with a dash and genuine comedy spirit that will amaze those who have seen her in her previous assignments. She’s entitled to the right sort of parts.’ She didn’t receive them, but her mellifluous tones made her the ideal for the voice of the Blue Fairy in Disney’s Pinocchio (1940). ‘I recorded it line by line, emphasising different words each time,’ she said. ‘Then they chose whichever recording captured the dramatic feeling they wanted.’ She retired from the screen in 1943 to concentrate on her growing family. Mohr died in 1974, after which his widow finally completed her college education. She spent her last years teaching at the University of Southern California.

Bob Mathias was an American athlete who was a two time Gold medal winner who also acted on film. He starred as himself in “The Bob Mathias Story” and appeared on television in “The Troubleshooters”. He died in 2006 at the age of 75.

“Guardian” obituary:

Bob Mathias, who has died of cancer aged 75, was the greatest in the long line of American decathletes who dominated the event at international level for the four middle decades of the 20th century. He was the first athlete successfully to defend an Olympic decathlon title, and he remains the youngest man ever to win a track and field gold medal.
Mathias’s emergence as a decathlete on to the postwar scene was the stuff of schoolboy fiction. His high-school track coach in Tulare, an unremarkable town in central California, was sufficiently impressed by the raw strength and speed of his football and basketball that he suggested, as late as the spring of 1948, that his pupil might be happy with the challenge of the decathlon, the ultimate test of all-round athletic prowess and usually the province of experienced and hard-grained campaigners. Mathias was already an accomplished sprinter, high-jumper and discus-thrower, but had never in his life thrown the javelin or long-jumped seriously – and had not even attempted the pole-vault. However, within a few weeks, working mainly from training manuals, he had made enough progress to win the Southern Pacific Amateur Athletic Union title in Los Angeles. Hectic fundraising in Tulare enabled him and his coach to travel to Bloomfield, New Jersey, and the US national championships, which doubled as the Olympic selection trials. His field-event techniques improving by the day, Mathias beat the reigning champion by a clear 123 points, and the rest of the field by a lot more to earn his place on the US Olympic team.

At the games in London, still three months short of his 18th birthday, he overcame two nervous moments to finish the first day’s competition (100 metres, long jump, shot-put, high jump, 400 metres) in third place. But he unwittingly broke a technical rule in the shot-put, which annulled his best throw, and he came close to elimination at a very modest height in the high jump. The second day (110 metres hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin, 1500 metres) confronted all the athletes at Wembley stadium with English summer weather at its worst. The competition, already unwieldy because of an unexpectedly high entry – and now handicapped by constant heavy rain – fell disastrously behind schedule. After eight events Mathias had forced his way into the lead, but he was desperately tired and the last two events were among his weakest. By the time the javelin began, officials were using hand-held torches to illuminate the competitors’ run-up; for the culminating 1500 metres, which did not start until 10.30 in the evening, the knee-high lights around Wembley’s dog-track had to be augmented by commandeered cars with headlights blazing to give the runners some idea of where they were putting their feet. Despite grinding out a painfully slow time over the sodden cinder track, Mathias held on to his lead and beat the world’s best.

The tiny knot of spectators who had stayed on to cheer him home included his parents and two brothers. Nine time zones away and clustered for the past two days round every available wireless set, the people of Tulare erupted in celebration; factory whistles and sirens blared for three-quarters of an hour, and a spontaneous parade of cars and trucks clogged up the town and the interstate highway for three hours. The hero himself was so exhausted that he had to be woken by team officials the next afternoon to ensure he reached the medal ceremony on time. Later that year Mathias received the annual Sullivan award as the outstanding amateur sportsman in the US and took his place at Stanford University, where his athletics shared the stage with gridiron football; as fullback he featured prominently in Stanford’s victory over the University of Southern California which took them to the 1952 Rose Bowl, a further manifestation of his extraordinary sporting versatility. By now the rough edges of Mathias’s teenage track performance had been smoothed out, and he was indisputably the most accomplished decathlete in the world. He had broken the 14-year-old world record in 1950, and he improved on it at his own home track a month before the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki. Here there was never a doubt. Mathias broke his own world record yet again to take his second decathlon gold medal – a double that has been achieved by only one other athlete, Britain’s Daley Thompson – by the almost unbelievable margin of 912 points.

Mathias retired from international athletics at the absurdly young age of 21, quickly made $50,000 from advertising appearances, served for a while as an officer in the US marines, took up acting – his six undistinguished films included The Bob Mathias Story (released in Britain as The Flaming Torch), in which he played the lead – and married his childhood sweetheart. In the 1960s he turned to politics. He served four terms as a Republican congressman for California – concentrating on environmental affairs, but displaying a breadth of interests that saw him serve on the house agriculture and foreign affairs committees – until, like many of his Republican colleagues, he lost his seat in the 1974 Democrat landslide in the wake of Watergate. He was subsequently appointed director of the US Olympic Training Centre, and before his retirement he ran the National Fitness Foundation. He is survived by his second wife and four children.

· Robert Bruce Mathias, athlete and politician, born November 17 1930; died September 2 2006.

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

Gene Raymond was born in 1908 in New York City. In 1931 he made his film debut in “Personal Maid”. Other films include “Zoo in Budapest” with Loretta Young, “Flying Down to Rio” with Dolores Del Rio, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and “Smilin Through” with his wife Jeanette MacDonald”. He died in 1998 at the age of 89.

Tom Vallance’s obituary in “The Independent”;

An actor who had a long career in film, television and theatre, Gene Raymond will nevertheless be best remembered as the husband of the singing star Jeanette MacDonald. Though Raymond made over 40 films, his career never equalled his wife’s in stature. Blond and dashingly handsome, he was a capable leading man in many movies, but tended to play second-leads in the really big ones – he was Mary Astor’s cuckolded husband in the Gable-Harlow Red Dust (1932) and third billed to Robert Montgomery and Carole Lombard in Hitchcock’s Mr and Mrs Smith (1941). One of the biggest hits in which he starred, Flying Down to Rio (1933), is notable more for the first teaming of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, in supporting roles. The actor’s most fondly remembered film is Smilin’ Through (1941), the only time he played opposite his wife.

Born Raymond Guion in New York City in 1908 and educated at the Professional Children’s School, he made his theatrical debut at the age of five and had his first Broadway role at the age of 12. By the time he was 21 he had played major roles in five Broadway shows, including Cradle Snatchers (1925), in which young Humphrey Bogart was the juvenile lead. He was billed under his real name in all these shows, but Paramount rechristened him Gene Raymond in 1931 when they brought him out to Hollywood. His first two films, Personal Maid (1931), with Nancy Carroll, and Ladies of the Big House (1931), with Sylvia Sidney, set a pattern in which he was frequently overshadowed by strong leading ladies. In Ann Carver’s Profession (1933) he was the weakling husband of a lawyer (Fay Wray), who ends up defending him for murder; in Brief Moment (1933) a rich loafer reformed by the love of nightclub singer Carole Lombard, and he was also teamed with Bette Davis in Ex-Lady (1933), and Barbara Stanwyck in both The Woman In Red (1934) and the featherweight comedy The Bride Walks Out (1936). Among his best films were the lyrical, beautifully photographed Zoo in Budapest (1933), in which he displayed a rarely tapped sensitivity as an animal-loving young man who lives in the zoo where he works and falls in love with a runaway waif (Loretta Young) hiding there, and two films with Ann Sothern, the perky musical Hooray for Love (1935) and a comedy The Smartest Girl in Town (1936).

Raymond had a pleasant tenor voice, and introduced on screen two minor standards, Brown and Freed’s “All I Do Is Dream of You” in the Joan Crawford vehicle Sadie McKee (1933), and with Harriet Hillyard, “Let’s Have Another Cigarette” by Magidson and Wrubel. Smilin’ Through, shot in lush colour, was his last film before war service, during which he served as a pilot in the B-17 bomber group that inaugurated precision bombing. Resuming his career, he was the fiance of the kleptomaniac Laraine Day in the complex film noir The Locket (1946), then produced and directed a modest mystery movie, Million Dollar Weekend (1947), in which he played the starring role as an embezzler. The film was not a success, and Raymond concentrated on television and theatre. He was host, panellist or actor on many television shows including Fireside Theatre, Ironside and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. and had appeared in touring or summer stock productions of popular plays like The Voice of the Turtle, Private Lives and the musical Kiss Me Kate. He also wrote several songs for his wife to perform on her concert tours. He returned to films with the thankless role of an ageing actor trying to seduce Jane Powell in the musical Hit The Deck (1957), but had a good role in the fine political drama written by Gore Vidal and directed by Franklin Schaffner, The Best Man (1964).

In 1967, as a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, he flew jets into South Vietnam on high- priority missions and won the Legion of Merit. His last film credit came in 1969 when he provided the Voice of Death in the western Five Bloody Graves. Apart from an occasional character role on television he concentrated during his final years on his investments and business interests. Always involved in the affairs of the industry, he was at various times a board member of the Screen Actors Guild and Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, president of the Motion Picture and Television Fund, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Air Force Association and vice president of the Arthritis Foundation. He married Jeanette MacDonald in 1937 (her famous co-star Nelson Eddy sang “O Promise Me” at their wedding) and he was at her bedside when she died in 1965, her last words allegedly being “I love you”. Raymond married a second time in 1974 and was widowed again in 1995.

Raymond Guion (Gene Raymond), actor: born New York 13 August 1908; twice married; died Los Angeles 3 May 1998.

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

Marc Platt was born in 1913 in Pasadena, California. He was a brilliant dancer and his film debut was in 1945 in “Tonight and Every Night”. He was also featured in “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” and “Oklahoma”

His “Guardian” obituary:

Marc Platt was one of the first Americans to join the Ballets Russes, and at the time of his death, aged 100, among the very last survivors. Tall and loose-limbed, with red hair and freckles, he must have seemed an unlikely addition to the ranks of the largely Russian company. But when Michel Fokine saw Platoff – as he had been hastily renamed – playing the role of Dodon, the archetypal foolish tsar in his ballet Le Coq d’Or, the choreographer exclaimed: “I didn’t think anyone could be more Russian.”

In 1943, Platt created the leading role of Curly in the dream ballet sequence of the Broadway hit Oklahoma!, and he also appeared as a minor character in the 1955 film version of the show. His two best-known film roles, however, were as brother Daniel Pontipee in the musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) and in the Rita Hayworth film Tonight and Every Night (1945). In the latter, Platt is shown auditioning for a theatre similar to the Windmill in London. Having failed to bring music with him, he dances to music from the radio, changing styles as the theatre owner switches stations, moving instantly and effortlessly between classical, tap, swing and flamenco in a tour de force.

The son of a French violinist who had moved to the US and a soprano singer, Marcel Le Plat was born in Pasadena, California. The family travelled widely but eventually settled in Seattle, where Marcel studied first at the Cornish school (now Cornish College of the Arts) and then for eight years with the dancer and trainer Mary Ann Wells. It was Wells who, in 1935, arranged an audition for him with Wassily de Basil and Léonide Massine, respectively director and choreographer of the Ballets Russes. Once accepted, he immediately joined the company on its tour, making his stage debut a few days later.

By Platt’s own account, the occasion was little short of a disaster. He was taller than any of the troupe’s other men, and once he was on stage his ill-fitting costume began to fall apart. Worse was to come with the last ballet of the evening, the Polovtsian dances from Prince Igor. Equipped like all his fellow dancers with a genuine bow, crossing the stage at full speed he mistakenly turned right instead of left and caught his weapon in that of his neighbour, thus causing a major pileup of warriors. “What you were trying to do? Kill everybody?” hissed one of his fellow dancers, adding, “This is ballet. Not war.”

Platt soon found his place in the company, however, and when Massine broke away to form his own troupe in 1938, Platt was one of the artists invited to join it. Later that year, Massine choreographed his Beethoven ballet, Seventh Symphony, which Platt later recalled as giving him “the best role I ever had. I danced my fool head off.” He also created the part of the Devil in Frederick Ashton’s Devil’s Holiday, sadly never seen outside the US and now largely lost.

That same season saw Platt’s first attempt at choreography. Ghost Town had an American theme and a score by Richard Rodgers. It proved a disappointment, but his fellow dancer Frederic Franklin attributed at least part of the blame to Rodgers, who refused to alter his score to suit the scenario.

Platt left the company in 1942, having risen to the rank of soloist and drawn praise for his “superb character work”. But conditions were hard, the pay was poor and Platt now had a family to support, having married a fellow dancer, Eleanor Marra, with whom he had a son. At this time he abandoned his Russianised name, becoming Marc Platt.

In 1962, he became director of the ballet at Radio City Music Hall, a position he held for eight years before moving with his second wife, Jean Goodall – also a dancer – to Fort Myers, Florida, where together they opened a dance school. (His first marriage had ended in divorce.) Goodall died in 1994 and Platt returned to California to be nearer his family. Once settled, he took great interest in dance in the Bay area, guesting with several companies and always happy to watch rehearsals, coach and provide feedback. “Always do what you love as long as you can,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in an interview published when he was 100.

When, in June 2000, a reunion of all the surviving Ballets Russes veterans was organised, Platt was among the attenders. He also played a prominent part in the subsequent 2005 documentary, his modesty, easy charm and sharp intelligence still very much in evidence.

Platt is survived by the son of his first marriage, the son and daughter of his second, and a grandchild.

• Marc Platt (Marcel Emile Gaston Le Plat), dancer, born 2 December 1913; died 29 March 2014

His “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

One of Hollywood’s more high-flying dancers on film, dimpled, robust, fair-haired Marc Platt provided fancy footwork to a handful of “Golden Era” musicals but truly impressed in one vigorous 1950s classic.

Born to a musical family on December 2, 1913 in Pasadena, California as Marcel Emile Gaston LePlat, he was the only child of a French-born concert violinist and a soprano singer. After years on the road, the family finally settled in Seattle, Washington. Following his father’s death, his mother found a job at the Mary Ann Wells’ dancing school while young Marc earned his keep running errands at the dance school. He eventually became a dance student at the school and trained with Wells for eight years who saw great potential in Marc.

It was Wells who arranged an audition for Marc with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo when the touring company arrived in Seattle. The artistic director Léonide Massineaccepted him at $150 a week and changed his name to Marc Platoff in order to maintain the deception that the company was Russian. A highlight was his dancing as the Spirit of Creation in Massine’s legendary piece “Seventh Symphony”. Platt also choreographed during his time there, one piece being Ghost Town (1939), which was set to music byRichard Rodgers. While there he met and married (in 1942) dancer Eleanor Marra. They had one son before divorcing in 1947. Ted Le Plat, born in 1944, became a musician as well as a daytime soap and prime-time TV actor.

Anxious to try New York, Marc left the ballet company in 1942 and moved to the Big Apple where he changed his marquee name to the more Americanized “Marc Platt” and pursued musical parts. Following minor roles in the short run musicals “The Lady Comes Across” (January, 1942) with Joe E. Lewis, Mischa Auer and Gower Champion and “Beat the Band” (October-December, 1942) starring Joan Caulfield, Marc and Kathryn Sergavafound themselves cast in a landmark musical, the Rodgers and Hammerstein rural classic “Oklahoma!” Choreographer Agnes de Mille showcased them in the ground-breaking extended dream sequence roles of (Dream) Curly and (Dream) Laurey. Platt stayed with the show for a year but finally left after Columbia Pictures signed him to a film contract.

Aside from a couple of short musical films, he made his movie feature debut with a featured role as Tommy in Tonight and Every Night (1945) starring Rita Hayworth. From there he appeared in the Sid Caesar vehicle Tars and Spars (1946) and back with Rita Hayworth in Down to Earth (1947). Columbia tried Marc out as a leading man in one of their second-string musicals When a Girl’s Beautiful (1947) opposite Adele Jergens andPatricia Barry but did not make a great impression. Featured again in the non-musical adventure The Swordsman (1948) starring Ellen Drew and Larry Parks and the Italian drama _Addio Mimi! (1949) based on Puccini’s “La Boheme,” Marc’s film career dissipated.

After appearing on occasional TV variety shows such as “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Colgate Comedy Hour” and following a single return to Broadway in the musical “Maggie” (1953, Platt returned to film again after a five-year absence but when he finally did, he made a superb impression as one of Howard Keel‘s uncouth but vigorously agile woodsman brothers (Daniel) in MGM’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). The film still stands as one of the most impressive dancing pieces of the “Golden Age” of musicals. He followed this with a minor dancing role (it was James Mitchell who played Dream Curly here) in the film version of Oklahoma! (1955).

When the musical film lost favor in the late 1950’s, Marc finished off the decade focusing on straight dramatic roles on TV with roles in such rugged series as “Sky King,” “Wyatt Earp” and “Dante”. By the 1960s Marc had taken off his dance shoes and turned director of the ballet company at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. He and his second wife, Jean Goodall, whom he married back in 1951 and had two children (Donna, Michael), also ran a dance studio of their own. Following this they left New York and moved to Fort Myers, Florida where they set up a new dance school.

Marc moved to Northern California to be near family following his wife’s death in 1994 and occasionally appeared at the Marin Dance Theatre in San Rafael. One of his last performances was a non-dancing part in “Sophie and the Enchanted Toyshop” at age 89. In 2000, Marc was presented with the Nijinsky Award at the Ballets Russe’s Reunion. He appeared in the 2005 documentary Ballets Russes (2005). Platt died at the age of 100 at a hospice in San Rafael from complications of pneumonia. He was survived by his three children.

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

F. Murray Abraham was born in 1939 in Pittsburgh. He made his movie debut in the George C. Scott movie “They Might Be Giants”. He won an Oscar for “Amadeus” in 1984. Other films include “The Big Fix”, “Scarface”, The Name of the Rose” and “A House Divided”

IMDB entry:

Was educated at the University of Texas.

He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and brought up in El Paso, Texas. His father, Frederick Abraham, who was born in Pennsylvania, was from an Assyrian Christian (Antiochian) family, from Syria. His mother, Josephine (Stello) Abraham, was also born in Pennsylvania, to Italian parents.

In July 2004, during a ceremony in Rome, he was awarded the “Premio per gli Italiani nel Mondo”. This is a prize distributed by the Marzio Tremaglia foundation and the Italian government to Italian emigrants and their descendants who have distinguished themselves abroad.

Early in his career, he was one of the “Fruit of the Loom guys” (men dressed up as fruits) in the underwear commercials.

Has two children with his wife Kate Hannan: Mick and Jamili Abraham.

Studied drama under the tutelage of Uta Hagen at the HB Studio in Greenwich Village, New York City for a year in the early 1960s.

After his Academy Award for Amadeus (1984), he turned down roles in films such as Clue(1985) and Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986).

He filmed Scarface (1983) in Los Angeles at the same time as Amadeus (1984) in Prague, necessitating four round trip flights between the two.

One of his first plays in Los Angeles was a dramatization of a work by Ray Bradbury: “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit”. He and Bradbury remained friends until Bradbury’s death.

Attended and graduated from El Paso High School in El Paso, Texas in 1958.

He continues to teach drama classes at Brooklyn College in New York City.

His first major success as an actor was as Antonio Salieri in Amadeus (1984) at age 45.

Learned to play the piano and to conduct for his role of Antonio Salieri in Amadeus(1984).

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Terry Kilburn was born in England in 1926. He began his career as a child actor in British films and his roles included Tiny Tim in the 1938 version of “A Christmas Carol” and one of the pupils of Robert Donat in “Goodbye Mr Chips”. He then went to Hollywood and was featured in such movies as “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” with Basil Rathbone and “The Keys of the Kingdom”.

Interview in “Lavender Magazine”:

Terry Kilburn, actor, director, artistic director, recently talked at length with this Lavender writer about his early life, describing in cinematic detail how the only child of working class parents, Tom and Alice Kilburn, came to star in Hollywood at MGM delivering such coveted film lines as, “God bless us, every one,” and “Goodbye, Mr. Chips.” Born November 25, 1926 in London, he appeared in over 25 films, including, along with those mentioned here in detail, National Velvet (1944, with Liz Taylor), and Only the Valiant (1951, with Gregory Peck). His extensive stage work will appear in part two of this interview.

My father was a bus conductor, taking tickets on those big double-deck buses. He’d run up and down the stairs making jokes and entertaining– sometimes he’d have the whole bus laughing. I think he would liked to have gone on the stage, he was a natural entertainer.

My mother was a housewife, and in the summertime used to run a boarding house at Clackton-on-Sea, where working-class people went for their week’s holiday. She was in the kitchen and making the beds and setting tables from morning to night. My father stayed up in London and would come down on the weekends in a little baby Austin car about the size of this dining table. I had a lot of time to myself.

There was an amusement pier where a man called Clown Bertram ran a little theater. Children would come up on the stage and do a little something, then the one who got the most applause would get a prize. I was much too shy to do that although I loved watching the show.

One time, my mother had some friends who left their two children for her to take care of. The little girl sang a song and did a dance on Clown Bertram’s stage, and she won the first prize. The next day, I got over my shyness enough to go up and I sang a song. I was a big flop, but it broke the ice. I was about seven.

Without realizing it, little Terry had already been learning his craft.

My parents used to take me with them to the movies. Movies then were an incredible source of entertainment for poor and working class people. For a sixpence, or a shilling, you could see the main feature and a companion feature, a newsreel, a short subject, a cartoon. Most theaters still had a couple of stage acts from vaudeville, and on top of all that, up from the orchestra pit would come an organ, all lit up, and you’d have a community sing.

I started impersonating these people that I saw on the screen, Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, Mae West, Zazu Pitts, Charles Laughton, and Ronald Colman. Sometimes, I’d do impersonations for relatives spontaneously, but usually, my shyness overcame me and I couldn’t. But when this girl won the first prize, that got my competitive spirit up. The second time, I went up and did some impersonations and won hands down. It was like an electric light going on over my head. Many actors will tell you of this experience, when they first realize that they have an ability to bring out that response from an audience. From then on, I was on that stage every day.

Terry neglected to tell his parents that Clown Bertram had added him, unpaid, to the regular show. Some guests finally enlightened his astonished mother.

My father was very interested, and when we got back to London he submitted me for amateur night competitions. I worked up a little act, doing my impersonations and I came on singing, “OK Toots,” an Eddie Cantor song. That’s kind of interesting because later on Eddie Cantor played an important part in my life, and I did a little tap dance that I taught myself, having seen Fred Astaire.

The first prize was something like ten pounds, while my father–this was in the Depression–was making two pounds a week. We started going around the circuit, to all these huge old variety houses that seated two thousand people. My big ending was a scene from David Copperfield, where Mr. Murdstone, the wicked stepfather, beats David. I did both parts, and ended sobbing and having hysterics on the floor as David, then standing up with a big smile and bowing.

Through what we today call “networking,” one thing led to another.

Into our lives came Freddie Newton. He was a Dickensian character, a little Cockney who wore checked suits and sharp hats. He had a candy store and was a bookmaker. He helped polish up my act and took me up to the West End of London to meet an actor, Hugh Wakefield. I did my act and Wakefield commented, “I don’t quite know what I just saw, but whatever it is I think he should meet my agent.’

This turned out to be a woman who went only by “Connie,” Ralph Richardson’s agent, who told his parents, “You’ve got to get him to Hollywood.” She then introduced them to a visiting Hollywood lawyer, Roger Marchetti.

Marchetti said, “If you come to Hollywood, you can count on me. I will do everything I can to see that you get auditioned.” Well, when I heard that! Can you think of a thing in your own childhood, the thing that just meant more to you than anything and obsessed your mind? I used to sit up in bed with a globe and spin it and make it stop on the United States.

I think none of this would have happened if it hadn’t been this particular time during the Depression. People had so little to lose. There was a sense of camaraderie and an atmosphere of, “Well, let’s try it!”

There was a great resistance by the U.S. Consulate in London to giving the whole family visas. In the end, after much finagling, Tom stayed behind while Alice and Terry traveled to the United States.

My mother was an amazing combination of guts and timidity. She would take chances that other women of her generation and education would never have dreamed of doing, but she was frightened to death of dogs and the ocean. She’d never been out of London, let alone England, so she would only go on the Queen Mary. We booked the cheapest third-class passage.

Finally, we arrived in Los Angeles. Now this is in April-May of 1937. In those days, the station in downtown Los Angeles was in Chinatown and it was just awful, an old shack that was falling apart. All of our dreams of Hollywood, and out of this glamorous vision we were seeing this terrible slum. And there, in bright, blooming sunshine, was Mr. Marchetti with a huge bunch of red roses, standing next to this immense Packard convertible and chauffeur. It was a surreal picture.

They had expected to stay with Marchetti and his family but were quickly disabused of that idea. He was very much a bachelor, as well as a handsomely paid celebrity divorce lawyer, e.g., (Myrtle) Hardy vs. (Oliver) Hardy.

He didn’t want some English lady and her little boy in his house, so we ended up in a bungalow court, with Murphy beds that pulled out of the wall. We started on the rounds, seeing producers and so forth, and Mr. Marchetti was good to his word. He certainly did his best, but the problem was me. The excitement of performing on stage, or for somebody in his dressing room, seemed to stimulate me and make me a good performer. Now, to have to go into these big offices with people sitting in big swivel chairs smoking cigars–it was too much for a little boy to cope with. And my personality, everything that had made people say “Yes! He’s got something!” just disappeared.

Even more so when they made screen tests. If Marilyn Monroe hadn’t ever gotten in front of a camera, she would have been working in a beauty parlor. She came to life in front of the camera. It was just the opposite for me. The tests were usually shot in the corner of a sound stage where no movie was being filmed at the time, huge, ghostly sound stages about the size of an airplane hangar. It was overwhelming.

A year went by, and the money had run out. Mr. Marchetti said we could move into an apartment over his garage. My mother agreed. She didn’t know what else to do. So we moved, not into his Florentine mansion, but into the garage apartment. He had two Doberman pinscher dogs. My mother was terrified of them, and the apartment was infested with mice.

The whole venture was coming to a bad end. My mother finally told me, “We have to go back, we can’t just stay here forever.” At that very time, my mother got a letter from my father: “I’m getting a ship and I’m coming to Canada, and I’m going to come through the border because I know people do it all the time. I’m on my way! By the time you get this, I be on the Atlantic.”

And then, the cavalry came riding.

Mr. Marchetti had pretty much given up, but his assistant took pity on us: “One thing we haven’t tried is radio. Let me see what I can do about getting an audition.” Eddie Cantor’s business manager said, “I think Eddie would love him.” I auditioned, and he did!

Cantor’s popular radio program also showcased stars and young actors like Deanna Durbin and Bobby Breen.

We were in rehearsal when a talent scout for MGM showed up. They were about to make a movie called Lord Jeff with Freddie Bartholomew and Mickey Rooney, based on the true story of those famous English orphanages, Doctor Bernardo’s Homes, where they trained young boys to go into the Royal Navy. There was a part for a little Lancashire boy, Albert Baker. The scout asked, “Can you do a Lancashire accent?” I said, “Aye I can, I can do it.” I’d learned “‘hae t’ talk like that,” sort of through my nose. “By goom, that’s champion!” “Oh my God!,” he said. “Sam Wood will just be thrilled.”

Even at that age, an actor will see a part and say, “Oh, that is my part.” Often they’re wrong, but sometimes they’re right, like Vivien Leigh thinking she was Scarlett. So I went to see director Sam Wood, and I did a thing for him, and he said, “The accent’s great, but I really wanted Alfalfa for this part.” Alfalfa could no more do that accent than fly, so that was out. But he wanted a kid like him. I was kind of a pretty little boy, so he said, “I’m sorry, but no.”

Fortunately, Terry’s mother had become friends with Lillian Rosine, MGM’s makeup specialist.

When I came back in tears Lillian said, “Oh, for God’s sake! What does Sam Wood think I’m here for? And she put me in her makeup chair, greased down my hair with Vaseline, blacked out one of my front teeth, put freckles on my face. I’d been crying, so I already looked horrible. Then she took me back and dragged me in and said, “There now, does he look ugly enough for you?” Sam Wood laughed and said, OK.”

One day while we were shooting, somebody came and said, “You’re wanted outside.” So I went out from the dark sound stage into the bright sunshine, and standing there was my father. I just ran and leaped into his arms, and we laughed and cried and it was incredible. Lord Jeff was quite a success. I got fabulous reviews that said, “The busman’s son from London steals the show.” It was thrilling. A dream come true–and my father was there, loving every minute of it.

I also made A Christmas Carol in ’38, and played Tiny Tim. I’ll always remember going onto the set at the MGM lot the first day. I think it was London 1830, and the snow was coming down–they were actually Kellogg’s cornflakes, bleached or something, but it was so beautiful. Oh, you can imagine that for a kid who loved acting and being in fantasy, it was extraordinary.

He attended school at MGM, encountering Lana Turner, Kathryn Grayson, Anne Baxter–and, briefly, Judy Garland.

I sat next to Judy Garland for one day and just fell in love with her. She found my English accent absolutely hilarious. She had this wonderful laugh. And she had a charm bracelet with a tiny gold-framed picture of Clark Gable, because that song had made her a big success: “Dear Mr. Gable.”

He appeared in Sweethearts next, with Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy, and was scheduled to be in a Topperfilm, when his part was cut.

That didn’t bother me because by this time, just before Christmas, 1938, I was cast in Goodbye Mr. Chips, and was being sent back to England. Robert Donat would not come to this country for tax reasons. Greer Garson had been cast as the wife; she was a total unknown, had never made a movie in Hollywood. We went back on the Normandie. Greer Garson was on the ship, but she was up in first class.

“Chips” was professor Charles Edward Chipping whose career at Brookfield School progresses from young, stuffy classics prof, to beloved “Mr. Chips,” to Head of Brookfield during the Great War. Terry played four generations of Colley boys, and, as the youngest, Peter Colley III, says his iconic line to the elderly Chips who passes in his sleep recalling “his boys.” With Robert Donat, Greer Garson, John Mills, Paul Heinreid, from James Hilton’s novel.

Donat was wonderful, fascinating. I was old enough to see and respect what he was doing. Movie sets are notorious for fooling around. If it’s not much of a movie it doesn’t matter, but Donat realized this was the part of a lifetime, and he was very serous. When he got into playing the old Chips, he stayed in character the whole time, even between shots.

I tried to make each one of the four boys somewhat different, but I could only do as much as the scene allowed. Of course, I got to say, “Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” in this huge, wonderful close-up. Actors would give their souls for a close-up like that.

About that final shot: I wasn’t even supposed to be there since it was against the law for children to work that late. They just looked the other way, and it was almost midnight when I had that close-up.

Actors, like their characters, exist at the whim of chance and happenstance. For instance: What if Terry had known how to swim? What if Mickey Rooney had been taller?

There was a sequence in Lord Jeff where they wanted me to fall in the water. I couldn’t swim. I was terrified, even though they put a life jacket under my little sailor suit. I finally got up enough nerve, but only by looking first and jumping. That wasn’t what they wanted. I was so humiliated, so ashamed that I had disappointed Mr. Wood that my parents got me into swimming. I used to swim all the time, and I think that probably caused me to grow.

When I came back to Hollywood after making Chips, I was scheduled to be in a number of pictures with Mickey Rooney, playing his sidekick. But suddenly, instead of being twelve and looking ten, I was now twelve looking fourteen, and was as tall or taller than Mickey. My option was not taken up, and that began the next period of my life.

The above article can also be accessed online at “Lavender Magazine” here.

A Christmas Carol, poster, Terry Kilburn, Reginald Owen, 1938. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Pert and pretty Mona Freeman was born in 1926 in Baltimore. Her first major film role was in “Junior Miss” in 1945. Other roles include “Dear Ruth”, “Mother Wore Tights”, “The Heiress” and “Battle Cry”. She died in 2014.

Her “Independent” obituary by Tom Vallance:

Freeman was popular for her convincing portrayal of teenagers in films of the 1940s, notably in the hit comedy Dear Ruth (1947) and its two sequels, Dear Wife (1949) and Dear Brat (1951). She played Betty Grable’s daughter in Mother Wore Tights (1947) and was still playing such roles well into her twenties, but though she later played leading lady to such stars as William Holden and Alan Ladd, she never became a top star as an adult, though she made telling impact in Otto Preminger’s disturbing film noir, Angel Face (1952The daughter of a contractor, she was born Monica Elizabeth Freeman in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1926, and she was only 14 years old and still at high school when she started modelling for the famed Powers agency. In May 1941, she became the first winner of the title of the newly conceived “Miss Subways”, an honour bestowed monthly on a subway traveller (parodied by Betty Comden and Adolph Green as “Miss Turnstiles” in their show and film, On the Town). Freeman’s photograph on a magazine cover caught the eye of Howard Hughes, who signed her to a personal contract, which he later sold to Paramount.

Her first screen role was to be as Barbara Stanwyck’s stepdaughter in Billy Wilder’s classic, Double Indemnity (1944), but she photographed too young so was replaced by Jean Heather. Her screen debut was in an uncredited role in National Velvet (1944), then she played a 15-year-old in wartime France in Till We Meet Again (1944), but her first major role was in Robert Florey’s compelling Danger Signal (1945), in which she is deceived by the charms of fortune hunting Zachary Scott and refuses to heed the warning of her older sister (Faye Emerson).

In the 1940s the escapades of teenage heroines were a popular staple of Broadway plays, and Freeman was cast in two delightful screen adaptations, Junior Miss (1945) and Dear Ruth. Peggy Ann Garner had the star role in Junior Miss, but Freeman was amusingly effective as her older sister, embarrassed at Garner’s over-dramatising, and constantly being called on by young suitors. In Dear Ruth she had a central role as a teenager who corresponds with a soldier using the name and photograph of her glamorous older sister (Joan Caulfield), sparking a chain of misunderstandings when the soldier (William Holden) comes to call when on leave.

The film’s success spawned two sequels, Dear Wife and Dear Brat , with Freeman getting top billing in the last and still looking the part, though actually 25 years old. In 1945 she married a millionaire car dealer, Pat Nerney, and while she was filming Mother Wore Tights she discovered that she was pregnant with her only child, Mona Jr, known as “Monie”.

In the Grable musical she had a good role as the oldest daughter of vaudeville performers who misguidedly becomes ashamed of her parents. The film was a big hit, and Grable’s favourite of her films.

One of Freeman’s favourite roles was that of Olivia DeHavilland’s cousin Marion in William Wyler’s masterly The Heiress (1949). Though she was leading lady to William Holden in Streets of Laredo (1949) and Alan Ladd in Branded (1950), Freeman was not happy that her teenage image persisted. “Just like driving the same road day after day, they’ve become a bore to me,” she said, and stated that she wanted to play “wildcats, brazen women, the menacing side of the triangle.”

After she divorced Nerney in 1952 her name was linked with Vic Damone, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. She and Crosby were expected to wed after his wife, Dixie Lee, died, but they were Catholics and Freeman had been divorced. She married businessman H Jack Ellis in 1961. He adopted Monie, and the marriage lasted until his death in 1992 (Mona and her daughter can be glimpsed as part of the circus audience in The Greatest Show on Earth, 1952).

Her last notable screen role was that of the sweetheart of an ambulance driver (Robert Mitchum) who has become fatally seduced by a pathological beauty (Jean Simmons) in Angel Face. One of the best scenes is the first meeting between the two women, Simmons having suggested they have lunch. The cat-and-mouse sparring that follows is superbly played by both actresses.

Freeman made her last film, Dragoon Wells Massacre, in 1957, and the following year she toured opposite Edward G Robinson in Paddy Chayevsky’s play Middle of the Night. She was a regular guest star in television series until the mid-1960s – she played in three episodes of Perry Mason as three separate clients. She then concentrated on her successful career as a portrait painter, owning an art gallery and having an art studio in her home. “I didn’t dislike acting,” she said, “but when I no longer needed the money I lost all interest.”

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

IMDB entry:

A professional model while still in high school, Mona Freeman was signed to a movie contract by Howard Hughes, who then proceeded to sell her contract to Paramount. Starting out in typical juvenile parts, she developed into a very competent actress. As she worked her way out of the teenage ingénue role, however, she found that she had less success in adult roles, and instead of landing parts in “A” pictures she found herself relegated to “B” westerns and somewhat tawdry crime dramas (e.g., Flesh and Fury(1952), Shadow of Fear (1954)). She basically retired from film work in the late 1950s, but worked steadily in television for quite some time after that.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: frankfob2@yahoo.co

Mother of actress Monie Ellis.

Perenially young bobbysoxer of post-war Paramount, she played teens long after she outgrew the roles, and it later stifled her adult career.

The 18-year-old’s first role was as Barbara Stanwyck teen stepdaughter in Billy Wilder‘sDouble Indemnity (1944) but she photographed so young, she was replaced by Jean Heather. She still made her debut in the movie, however, when she was instead handed a one-line bit part as Edward G. Robinson‘s secretary. She was also cast to playElizabeth Taylor‘s older sister in National Velvet (1944) but once again was replaced (byAngela Lansbury) because she did not look old enough. In truth, Mona was six years Taylor’s senior.

Of English, Irish and French heritage. Her father, Stuart Freeman, was a contractor.

To help her brother enter Yale, Mona took it upon herself to find modeling work and became a successful teenage cover girl for John Robert Powers. She also became one of the “Miss Subway” girls in New York.

Howard Hughes discovered her and gave her a two-year contract after seeing one of her photographs on a magazine cover. Frustrated that she was not cast in anything, Paramount wound up buying out her contract from Hughes, having never done a bit of work for the eccentric mogul.She was cast in Angel Face (1952), an RKO/Howard Hughes production.

First husband was Pat Nerney, a wealthy Hollywood auto dealer. They had a daughter, Mona, Jr., called Monie, in 1947.

Her hobbies include portrait and landscape painting.

Her second husband (since June of 1961), Jack Ellis, is a Los Angeles businessman. He officially adopted Mona’s daughter from an earlier marriage who entered show business as Monie Ellis.

I’m not the type to play roles which win Academy Awards. I can’t see myself in a big historical picture or in a difficult emotional role.

You have to forget all that silly nonsense you were taught in pictures. I mean about the importance of the star, the glamour stuff and all that. On a live TV show, everybody works together on the same level. You can learn more about acting in five minutes of television than you can during an entire picture.

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.