The Story on Page One 1959 (NY) premiere
Tuesday January 12th, Rivoli Theatre 1620 Broadway, New York, NY 10019
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- Franciosa was born Anthony Papaleo on October 25, 1928, in New York City. The son of a construction worker and seamstress who divorced when he was a year old, he seldom saw his father after this and never man really got to know the other. After graduating high school, during a visit to a YMCA to take a free dance lesson, Franciosa came across an audition for a play. Intrigued, he auditioned and was offered a part.
Franciosa began acting professionally, taking his mother's maiden name as his stage name, and had his breakthrough in Calder Willingham's play "End as a Man" (1955), which opened off-Broadway at the Theatre de Lys on September 15, 1953 and transferred to Broadway on October 14 after 32 performances. It was directed by Jack Garfein and co-starred Ben Gazzara (who won a Theatre World Award and would appear in the movie version), both of whom were associated with the Actors Studio, as was Franciosa. His first wife, Beatrice Bakalyar, was a writer.
In 1955, he first appeared in the role that would make him famous: "Polo Pope", the brother of a heroin addict, in an Actors Studio workshop production of Michael V. Gazzo's A Hatful of Rain (1957). The production later moved to Broadway, where Franciosa earned an Outer Critics Circle Award and a Tony Award nomination. Hollywood beckoned, and he made his film debut in Robert Wise's This Could Be the Night (1957) with Paul Douglas and Jean Simmons.
He appeared in Actors Studio co-founder Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (1957) before reprising the role of "Polo Pope" in Fred Zinnemann's A Hatful of Rain (1957). Franciosa won an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in 1958 for "Hatful" and, with his good looks, was a very hot commodity in Hollywood. He followed up his strong debut by starring in a variety of top A-list films, including George Cukor's Wild Is the Wind (1957), Martin Ritt's The Long, Hot Summer (1958) and The Naked Maja (1958), in which he played painter Francisco Jose de Goya, opposite Ava Gardner.
Franciosa's career began to run out of momentum almost as quickly as it had started, as he rapidly developed a reputation as a combative personality, earning him a reputation as "difficult". Although he starred in George Roy Hill's adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Period of Adjustment (1962), by 1964 he was reduced to appearing in a TV series, Valentine's Day (1964), which lasted a single season. In 1968 he was cast as one of three alternating leads in the television series The Name of the Game (1968), a spin-off from the 1966 TV movie Fame Is the Name of the Game (1966) (the first TV-movie ever made as a pilot for a TV series that was subsequently picked up as a series). Although the show was popular with audiences, Franciosa was fired after appearing in the first two seasons; NBC justified giving him the sack because the actor's mercurial temper was causing too many problems on the set. Looking back at his career in a 1996 interview, Franciosa acknowledged that he was too inexperienced to handle sudden stardom. "It was an incredible amount of attention, and I wasn't quite mature enough psychologically and emotionally for it".
He starred in the series Matt Helm (1975), which only lasted one season, but his talent and charm meant he was in demand throughout the five decades of his career, though not in the kinds of roles that characterized the first two decades of his star period. He continued to act in supporting roles in movies and starring roles in TV movies and series until he retired in 1996. He appeared in one last project, "Manifest Mysteries: Coronation" (2006), shortly before his death on January 19, 2006 in Los Angeles, at the age of 77, five days after that of his ex-wife, actress Shelley Winters. - Petite American character actress who was celebrated for her definitive portrayal of long-suffering Linda Loman in Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman", a part she played opposite Lee J. Cobb at the Morosco Theatre for 742 consecutive performances between 1949 and 1950. Mildred recreated her role for the screen the following year and was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress, critic Bosley Crowther describing her performance as 'simply superb'. Ironically, Dunnock had not been the first choice for the part for either Miller, or the director, Elia Kazan.
Mildred Dunnock first came to the realisation that she had the potential to perform in public when called upon to read in front of her assembled classmates at Western High School. She quickly discovered that, above all, she had 'a voice'. Her initial training was served at Agora, the dramatic society of Baltimore's Goucher College. After graduation she continued her studies at Columbia, completing a master's degree in theatre arts. She first appeared in college productions at John Hopkins University, her debut being a part in "Penelope" by W. Somerset Maugham in 1924. She had to wait another eight years before making her debut on Broadway in "Life Begins", at the same time earning a crust teaching at a private girl's school. The 1930's were a period of struggle and hardship for the actress and not until the following decade did she gain recognition for her performances in "King Richard II", "Foolish Notion" and "The Corn is Green". One of her biggest hits was as Lavinia Hubbard in Lillian Hellman's "Another Part of the Forest" (1946-47). Going from strength to strength, Mildred followed her triumph in 'Salesman' with a tour-de-force performance in the Tennessee Williams play "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1955-56), originating the role of 'Big Mama'.
Mildred absented herself from the theatre for several years to act in films. Near the beginning of her motion picture career, she was the frail old lady in a wheelchair (in real life she was in her forties) pushed down a flight of stairs by psychopathic killer Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark, in his screen debut) in Kiss of Death (1947).
With her finely etched features and sad, all-knowing eyes, Mildred excelled in equal measure at playing eccentric spinster aunts, understanding wives and mothers, her slight frame belying a powerful, intense presence. In Elia Kazan's Baby Doll (1956), she enacted the relatively small part of simple-minded, perpetually timorous Aunt Rose Comfort with such conviction, that she garnered her second Academy Award nomination (losing to Dorothy Malone for Written on the Wind (1956)). She then appeared as a compassionate teacher (her first real-life profession) in Peyton Place (1957), as the exemplary Sister Margharita in The Nun's Story (1959), and, against type, as Gig Young's glacial and avaricious mother in The Story on Page One (1959). In this, Mildred demonstrated her versatility in a chilling portrayal of motherly domination and ostensible virtue turned to vice.
Dunnock's film roles in the 1960's included two films with Geraldine Page: Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), as another gentle-mannered aunt, and What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969), as Page's housekeeper and eventual murder victim. As film roles diminished, she appeared on television and returned to stage work, particularly at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, acting in plays by Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill. In 1971, she received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance for her starring role in "A Place Without Doors" by Marguerite Duras. The much-respected actress spent her final years in relative seclusion at Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, and died there of age-related problems in July 1991. A teaching theatre at Goucher College is named in her honour. - Actor
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Sanford Meisner is one of the most respected and influential acting teachers of the 20th century. Meisner, Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg are generally regarded as America's three greatest acting teachers. Founding member of The Group Theatre, 1931-1941. Began teaching at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in 1935; head of the acting program 1936-1958 & 1964-1990. Head of Twentieth Century-Fox Talent Program 1959-1961. Developed what is known as "The Meisner Technique," influenced by "The Stanislavsky System." His students include Academy Award winners Joan Fontaine, Jennifer Jones, Grace Kelly, Edmond O'Brien, Jo Van Fleet, Joanne Woodward, Gregory Peck, Joel Grey, Lee Grant, Diane Keaton, Jon Voight, Mary Steenburgen and Robert Duvall, as well as directors Bob Fosse and Sydney Pollack. Author of "Sanford Meisner on Acting" (with Dennis Longwell). Subject of the documentary Sanford Meisner: The Theatre's Best Kept Secret (1990), directed by Kent Paul.- Actor
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Enjoyably larger-than-life character actor Hugh Emrys Griffith was born in Marianglas, Anglesey, North Wales, to Mary (Williams) and William Griffith. Griffith left the world of banking (having been employed as a teller) after winning a scholarship to study acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Though he graduated a gold medalist, top of his class of 300, the war put the brakes on his career and he enlisted in the Army in 1940, serving with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in India for six years. Following the war, he enjoyed a successful career on the stage, appearing in Shakespearean plays in Stratford-upon-Avon with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was particularly noteworthy as "Falstaff" and, his favourite role, "King Lear", which he played both in English and in his native Welsh. On the other side of the Atlantic, he made his Broadway debut in 1951 and had a hit starring in "Look Homeward Angel" (1957-59) with Anthony Perkins and Jo Van Fleet. The play ran for 564 performances and earned Griffith a Tony Award nomination for the part of "W.O. Gant". He later jokingly remarked, that, when the producers asked him to play a man from the deep south, he (Griffith) had understood that to mean a man from the deep south of Wales.
Griffith started his film career proper in 1948 with films like Dulcimer Street (1948), followed by the wonderful black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) at Ealing in 1949. A portly, thickly-bearded character with bushy eyebrows, ruddy complexion and a resonant voice, Griffith made a lasting impression for his many portrayals of eccentric, bucolic and, sometimes, raucous types. In 1959, he won the Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor for his "Sheikh Ilderim", who supplies Charlton Heston with the chariot race-winning white stallions in Ben-Hur (1959). He was equally memorable as the lecherous "Squire Western" in Tom Jones (1963), a role for which he was nominated for both an Oscar and a BAFTA Award as Best British Actor. He later appeared in the critically-acclaimed musical version of Oliver! (1968), as a hilarious "King Louis" in Start the Revolution Without Me (1970) and one of Vincent Price's many victims in Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972). On television, he was a noteworthy, rolling-eyed "Long John Silver" in a 1960 version of "Treasure Island", Treasure Island (1960), and roving-eyed funeral director "Caradog Lloyd-Evans" in the comedy Grand Slam (1978).
Griffith was a lifelong friend (and drinking companion) of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.- Actor
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Alfred Ryder, the veteran actor who appeared on radio and Broadway and in the movies and TV and who also was a renowned stage director, was born Alfred Jacob Corn on January 5, 1916, in New York City. He made his professional debut as an actor at the age of eight and attended New York City's Professional Children's School. His Broadway debut came in 1929, when the 13-year-old Ryder played a "lost boy" in Eva Le Gallienne's production of J.M. Barrie's "Peter Pan". Ryder studied acting with Benno Schneider, Robert Lewis and Lee Strasberg. He appeared in the 1938 Broadway production of "Our Town" - his Broadway debut as an adult performer - as well as numerous Broadway productions before World War II, including the 1939 revival of Clifford Odets's "Awake and Sing!". For many years he was the voice of Sammy in the radio serial "Rise of the Goldbergs" Ryder joined the Army Air Force during World War II, eventually appearing in the U.S. Army Air Force's gala Broadway stage show "Winged Victory" in 1943. The following year, he made his movie debut as "PFC Alfred Ryder" in the film version of the show Winged Victory (1944)). After the war he made more films, including director Anthony Mann's classic 1947 film noir T-Men (1947). On Broadway, he appeared as Oswald in the 1948 revival of Henrik Ibsen's "Ghosts" and as Mark Antony in the 1950 production of "Julius Caesar". Also that year, he appeared as Orestes in the Broadway play "The Tower Beyond Tragedy".
Ryder had the singular honor of being cast as the understudy for Laurence Olivier in one of the legendary actor's greatest roles, that of Archie Rice, in the 1958 Broadway production of John Osborne's "The Entertainer". Olivier's Archie Rice is considered one of the greatest performances of the 20th century, and Ryder was chosen to keep the Broadway patrons in their seats in the event the great British theatrical knight couldn't go on. Ryder also appeared in the original Broadway production of Eugène Ionesco's absurdist masterpiece "Rhinoceros" in 1960.
A noted theatrical stage director with such companies as Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage, Ryder made his Broadway directorial debut with the play "A Far Country" in 1961. He subsequently directed two more Broadway productions, "The Exercise" in 1968 and the 1971 revival of August Strindberg's "Dance of Death."
Despite his achievements on the stage, film and radio, Ryder is mostly remembered as a prolific and versatile TV character actor. He made over 100 appearances on TV, including memorable turns on Star Trek (1966) (he appeared as Prof. Robert Crater in the series' very first aired episode, "The Man Trap"), Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964) (two appearances as the ghost of Nazi U-boat commander Capt. Gerhardt Krueger), and The Invaders (1967) (appearing as The Alien Leader). Ryder retired from screen acting in 1976 to concentrate on the stage, both as an actor and director. He died on April 16, 1995 in Englewood, NJ, at the age of 79. He was married to actress Kim Stanley, with whom he had a child, from 1957 until 1964, and he was the brother of actress Olive Deering.- Katherine Squire was born on 9 March 1903 in Defiance, Ohio, USA. She was an actress, known for When Harry Met Sally... (1989), The Story on Page One (1959) and Studs Lonigan (1960). She was married to George Mitchell and Byron McGrath. She died on 29 March 1995 in Lake Hill, New York, USA.
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Actress with a notable career in films and television. Born and raised in Hollywood, she moved to New York at eighteen to study acting with Charles Conrad and ballet with Nina Fonaroff. She continued her training in Los Angeles at the Estelle Harman Workshop, securing a contract with Twentieth Century Fox. Baker's first film assignment was a true prestige picture: legendary director George Stevens cast her as Margot Frank, older sister of Anne, in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). Baker remained at Fox as a contract player performing in films such as Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), The Best of Everything (1959) and Nine Hours to Rama (1963). After her contract ended, she worked on a pair of distinguished projects at Universal Studios: Mirage (1965) with Gregory Peck and Marnie (1964) for director Alfred Hitchcock.
Baker was also a reliable performer in episodic television. She produced sensitive, affecting work in Rod Serling's touching They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar/The Last Laurel (1971) and, in a colorful turn as an unstable dipsomaniac, in Last Salute to the Commodore (1976).
While continuing to perform, Baker moved into producing small, independent films such as Portrait of Grandpa Doc (1977) with director Randal Kleiser and Never Never Land (1980) with Petula Clark, and larger projects such as the Emmy-nominated television miniseries adaptation of Barbara Taylor Bradford's A Woman of Substance (1984) with Deborah Kerr.
More recently, she distinguished herself essaying the role of clan matriarch Rose Kennedy in the CBS miniseries Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis (2000) and performed memorably with Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) as the distraught Senator Ruth Martin and, with Jim Carrey and Matthew Broderick, in The Cable Guy (1996).
In 2005, she acted with Frank Langella in the HBO series Unscripted (2005) directed by George Clooney. She also teaches acting courses in the School of Motion Pictures, Television, and Acting at the Academy of Art University, San Francisco.- Writer
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William Gibson was born on 17 March 1948 in Conway, South Carolina, USA. He is a writer and actor, known for Johnny Mnemonic (1995), Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition. He has been married to Deborah Jean Thompson since 1972. They have two children.- Art Department
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Al Hirschfeld was born on 21 June 1903 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He was an actor, known for Fantasia 2000 (1999), Heroes of Comedy (1995) and Rhapsody in Blue (2000). He was married to Louise Kerz, Dolly Haas and Florence Ruth Hobby. He died on 20 January 2003 in New York City, New York, USA.- Director
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Known for his creative stage direction, Elia Kazan was born Elias Kazantzoglou on September 7, 1909 in Constantinople, Ottoman Empire (now Istanbul, Turkey). Noted for drawing out the best dramatic performances from his actors, he directed 21 actors to Oscar nominations, resulting in nine wins. He directed a string of successful films, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), and East of Eden (1955). During his career, he won two Oscars as Best Director and received an Honorary Oscar, won three Tony Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards.
His films were concerned with personal or social issues of special concern to him. Kazan writes, "I don't move unless I have some empathy with the basic theme." His first such "issue" film was Gentleman's Agreement (1947), with Gregory Peck, which dealt with anti-Semitism in America. It received 8 Oscar nominations and three wins, including Kazan's first for Best Director. It was followed by Pinky (1949), one of the first films in mainstream Hollywood to address racial prejudice against black people. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), an adaptation of the stage play which he had also directed, received 12 Oscar nominations, winning four, and was Marlon Brando's breakthrough role. In 1954, he directed On the Waterfront (1954), a film about union corruption on the New York harbor waterfront. In 1955, he directed John Steinbeck's East of Eden (1955), which introduced James Dean to movie audiences.
A turning point in Kazan's career came with his testimony as a witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952 at the time of the Hollywood blacklist, which brought him strong negative reactions from many liberal friends and colleagues. His testimony helped end the careers of former acting colleagues Morris Carnovsky and Art Smith, along with ending the work of playwright Clifford Odets. Kazan later justified his act by saying he took "only the more tolerable of two alternatives that were either way painful and wrong." Nearly a half-century later, his anti-Communist testimony continued to cause controversy. When Kazan was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1999, dozens of actors chose not to applaud as 250 demonstrators picketed the event.
Kazan influenced the films of the 1950s and 1960s with his provocative, issue-driven subjects. Director Stanley Kubrick called him, "without question, the best director we have in America, and capable of performing miracles with the actors he uses." On September 28, 2003, Elia Kazan died at age 94 of natural causes at his apartment in Manhattan, New York City. Martin Scorsese co-directed the documentary film A Letter to Elia (2010) as a personal tribute to Kazan.- Actress
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Born Rose Louise Hovick in Seattle, Washington, in 1911, but called Louise from early childhood, Gypsy Rose Lee was the daughter of a mild-mannered businessman and a restless, fiery young woman named Rose, who was determined to get out of Seattle and make a life for herself and her daughter in show business. In 1912, Rose had another child, June. Rose thought June was much more beautiful, photogenic and talented than Louise apparently could ever hope to be, which soon caused her to pack up her two children and search for a career in vaudeville (she divorced her husband when he objected to a career in show business). By the time Louise was seven and June five, they had put together a very successful act, Baby June and Her Farmboys. June was, of course, the star, and Louise was put in the chorus, though she did get an occasional moment in the spotlight. The act was making $1500 a week, but the family was not exactly living in high style, having to scrimp and save much of the time in order to buy food, and often in debt. There are many who believe that Rose was squandering the money.
There were also rumors about Rose during this time, about how she had to dodge the police, who enforced strict child labor laws, and even about how she may have murdered a man she thought was pestering her children. Despite these rumors, June and Louise's act continued to be successful throughout the 1920s. At the end of the decade June was 13 and had been re-christened Dainty June. By this time it was clear that vaudeville was a dying art form. Rose, however, still chased after her dream, and still made June up to be a cute baby. June resented it, and finally she married one of the chorus boys in the act (she was still only 13) and ran away with him. Not even this could stop Rose, however. This time she formed a new act, centering it around Louise. Called Rose Louise and Her Hollywood Blondes, she and her chorus girls performed slightly risqué musical numbers, and were moderately successful. Still, vaudeville continued to die out, which hurt the act. However, there was one form of vaudeville that still drew crowds: burlesque. Eventually, Rose, Louise and company had to take a job in a burlesque house. Sometime during their stay there the star stripper was not able to go on for a performance. Rose, never one to pass up an opportunity, volunteered Louise for the job. So Louise, just 15 at the time, stepped on stage, wearing not much more than a grass skirt, and slowly and teasingly . . . didn't take much off. Audiences responded favorably to this new kind of striptease act, which was more "tease" than "strip," more tantalizing than tawdry. Louise had finally found her calling.
For her stage name she took Gypsy, a nickname she derived from her hobby of reading tea leaves, and combined it with her real first name, Rose, and Lee, which she added on a whim. As Gypsy Rose Lee she launched a hugely successful career in burlesque, incorporating humor and intelligence, as well as the requisite removal of various articles of clothing, into her act. She became extremely popular, even appearing at the last place anyone would expect, high society balls. Once she had conquered the stages of burlesque, she decided to try her hand at movies. Billed under her real name, Louise Hovick--because the studio heads were afraid her stage name would scare people away--she made her film debut in Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937). It was a forgettable film, and her performance wasn't much more memorable. She appeared in three more films in the 1930s, and two more in the 1940s, but her film career was pretty much a bust. She tried her hand at writing with the "burlesque mystery" novel "The G-String Murders" (1941), which was made into the film Lady of Burlesque (1943), starring Barbara Stanwyck. By the 1950s, however, she was comfortable just being a sort of queen mother of burlesque. She had gone through three unhappy marriages, as well as affairs with showman Mike Todd and director Otto Preminger; the latter was the father of her only child, Erik Lee Preminger. She was not close to her sister June, who by this time had changed her name and was known as actress/dancer June Havoc. She also still had to contend with Mama Rose, who constantly tried to extort money from her with vicious threats. It wasn't until Rose died from terminal cancer in 1954 that Gypsy truly felt safe to write her memoirs, without having to worry anymore about her mother's repercussions. Her autobiography, "Gypsy", was published in 1957. Detailing her childhood in vaudeville and her relationship with her mother. It was an immediate bestseller. Broadway producers also noticed it and decided it would make a great musical, and so was born what many consider the best Broadway musical of all time: "Gypsy". With book by Arthur Laurents, music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, it premiered in 1959 and was an immediate smash. However, though Gypsy was an important character, of course, it did not focus on her alone, but rather on the hard-boiled, driven, single-minded, even monstrous stage mother that was Mama Rose.
This time it was Rose who was the star, which, as the musical implies, was perhaps what she always wanted. The musical has been frequently revived and been made into two films. The role of Mama Rose has been played by, among others, Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bette Midler and Betty Buckley. Gypsy Rose Lee was able to enjoy the musical's success in her last years. She had appeared in three films in the 1950s, and made three more in the 1960s, including a cameo in, of all films, the family comedy The Trouble with Angels (1966), opposite Hayley Mills and Rosalind Russell, who played Mama Rose in the first screen version of the play, Gypsy (1962). The real Gypsy even hosted two incarnations of her own talk show. She died of cancer in 1970. Even if her film career wasn't spectacular, she was immortalized on the stage of both burlesque and Broadway.- Actress
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Blonde and blue-eyed with an attractively feline appeal, Carol Lynley began her professional career as Carolyn Lee. She learned ballet at age seven, became a successful child model at age 10 (eventually working for the Sears & Roebuck department store in New York), and got her face nationally recognized as "the Coca-Cola Girl."
Carole Ann Jones was born in New York City to Frances Fuller (Felch) from New England and Irish immigrant Cyril Roland Jones. Trying to branch out into acting early on, in New York City, to Frances Fuller (Felch), from New England, and Cyril Roland Jones, who was an Irish immigrant. Trying to branch out into acting early on, Carol discovered that another individual by that name, born seven years earlier, was already on the books of Actors' Equity, so Carolyn fused "lyn" and "lee" to create 'Lynley'. From age 15 she appeared on Broadway, played juvenile roles in early anthology television, and was featured on the cover of Life Magazine in April 1957. Her first important film roles came in decidedly wholesome fare, beginning with The Light in the Forest (1958) for Walt Disney Productions, in which she played indentured servant Shenandoe. It was a promising start. A New York Times reviewer praised her performance (alongside that of fellow screen newbie James MacArthur), describing both as "real charmers with more than their share of talent." Thrust once more into the limelight, Lynley reprised her earlier Broadway role in the film version of Blue Denim (1959) as a naive girl who becomes pregnant and ponders having an illegal abortion. This performance got her nominated for a Golden Globe Award as Most Promising Newcomer in 1959. That same year, she graduated with a diploma from New York's School for Young Professionals. Lynley went on to play other ingénues and troubled teens before shedding her wholesome image by the early 1960s.
Return to Peyton Place (1961) headlined the actress as a best-selling novelist who controversially reveals the town's darkest secrets and scandals. This was followed by the bawdy (and mostly irritating) sex farce Under the Yum Yum Tree (1963), with Lynley as a virginal college student in a New York apartment block pursued by a lecherous landlord/playboy (played by Jack Lemmon). Luckily, better opportunities to prove her acting mettle turned up with a double role in The Cardinal (1963) (opposite Tom Tryon), and as the tormented mother of a kidnapped child in the superior psychological thriller Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), directed by Otto Preminger and co-starring Laurence Olivier. Cinema magazine commented "With a face like that of a fallen angel, Carol Lynley has beauty that is often awe inspiring".
In March 1965, the former teen queen posed nude for an issue of Playboy magazine; later that year she played the title role in a turgid biopic of 1930s Hollywood sex symbol Jean Harlow. While the quality of her films tended to decline after the mid-'60s, there were still entertaining moments in B-pictures like The Shuttered Room (1967) and Once You Kiss a Stranger... (1969) (in this lurid thriller, Lynley rose above her material and was memorable in the role of a psychotic murderess). In Irwin Allen's The Poseidon Adventure (1972), she was merely one of the ill-fated passengers who ended up in Davy Jones' Locker. Still, Variety called her performance "especially effective". After 1967, television provided most of her work, including guest spots in seminal shows like Mannix (1967), The Invaders (1967), Hawaii Five-O (1968) and as co-star of the TV pilot for The Night Stalker (1972) (as Carl Kolchak's girlfriend). In her penultimate role, Lynley played a grandmother in a film titled uncannily similar to the one which had launched her career: A Light in the Forest (2003).
Carol Lynley retired from the screen in 2006. A highly capable actress who should have made a bigger splash in Hollywood, she passed away on September 3, 2019 in Pacific Palisades, California from a heart attack. She was 77.- Leonard Lyons was born on 10 September 1906 in New York City, New York, USA. He was an actor, known for Mr. Broadway (1964), The Sam Levenson Show (1951) and The David Frost Show (1969). He was married to Sylvia Shoenberger. He died on 7 October 1976 in New York City, New York, USA.
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Broadway impresario Billy Rose was born William Samuel Rosenberg on September 9, 1899, in The Bronx, New York. Known as "The Little Napoleon of Showmanship," the diminutive Rose made his name and his legend as a producer, writer, lyricist, composer, director and theatre owner/operator, as well as the husband of "Funny Girl" Fanny Brice.
Young Billy Rosenberg grew up in the immigrant neighborhoods of Manhattan's Lower East Side. He attended New York City's High School of Commerce, and after graduating, he was trained in shorthand by John Robert Gregg. The 16-year-old Rose won a high-speed dictation contest and went to work in Washington, DC, as the shorthand reporter for the War Industries Board in 1917. As a stenographer, he served the great financier Bernard Baruch, who was the head of the Board, during World War I.
Rose first made a name for himself as a lyricist, mostly in collaboration with other songwriters, writing the lyrics to such famous songs as "Me and My Shadow" and "It's Only a Paper Moon" (the latter co-written with E.Y. Harburg). His first hit, a collaboration with Con Conrad, was 1923's "Barney Google," inspired by the comic strip character. Other hits included the novelty song "Does the Spearmint Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?" and "That Old Gang of Mine."
Rose's biographer Earl Conrad wrote that Rose likely didn't write many of the songs he was credited with, other than adding an idea or a phrase or two, but publishers wanted to credit him as the lyricist to boost sales, and his collaborators didn't mind as Rose was successful at plugging "his" songs. Ira Gershwin claimed that Rose, who shares equal credit for "their" song "Cheerful Little Earful," added only a minor change to a single line. Other Rose "co-writers" claimed that Rose insisted upon being credited as an author when he came up with a clever title for their song. Rose's collaborators gave in to his demands because he was a brilliant negotiator who was able to wrest the best terms from music publishers, thus boosting their royalties even when Rose's share was subtracted. Rose would become famous, and infamous, for his hardball business tactics when he became a producer.
Rose had earned respect as a lyricist, and he was undoubtedly unmatched when it came to thinking up great titles for Tin Pan Alley songs. Rose was a great "titles" man who thought up "I Found a Million Dollar Baby (In a Five and Ten-Cent Store)," for Harry Warren and Mort Dixon. They knew that the title alone would ensure the song's success and did not begrudge him authorship credit.
In 1931 Rose was one of the three founders, along with George M. Meyer and Edgar Leslie, of the Songwriters Protective Association (SPA), now known as The Songwriters Guild of America. Created to advance, promote and benefit the songwriting profession, the SPA issued the first Standard Uniform Popular Songwriters Contract in 1932. The SPA was resisted bitterly by music publishers, but the solidarity of the songwriters eventually won its acceptance. Even those songwriters who didn't join the Guild benefited from the SPA's existence because its contracts raised the level of individual publisher's boilerplate contracts. Rose served as the president of the SPA for three years.
Billy Rose married Fanny Brice, the legendary comedienne and singer from Ziegfeld's Follies, in 1929. He produced his first show, the musical revue "Sweet and Low," in 1930. The revue, which opened at Chanin's 46th Street Theatre on November 17, 1930, featured music by Rose and performances by Brice, George Jessel and Arthur Treacher, running for a total of 184 performances. His next two Broadway shows, the 1931 musical revue "Billy Rose's Crazy Quilt" (a reworking of "Sweet and Low"), which was produced, directed, and written by Rose and featured Brice and Ted Healy, closed after only 79 performances at the 44th Street Theatre. He next produced Ben Hecht's drama "The Great Magoo" at the Selwyn Theatre in 1932, and it flopped, lasting but 11 performances. Rose wouldn't produce another Broadway show until 1941, when Clifford Odets's "Clash by Night," starring Tallulah Bankhead and Lee J. Cobb and directed by Lee Strasberg, lasted only 49 performances.
Rose reinvented himself as a showman in 1934. For the second year of the Chicago World's Fair, known officially as "A Century of Progress International Exposition," Rose constructed a huge dinner theatre, Casa Manana, that featured a huge revolving stage on which ecdysiast Sally Rand performed. Rand, whom he had purloined from the "Streets of Paris" concession run by rival impresario Mike Todd, did her "bubble dance" on the revolving stage. The "bubble dance," in which the petite Sally appeared with a large balloon that was as tall as she was, was the enticing sequel to her fabled "fan dance" that had made her a hot number and led to her arrest the year before. This second year of bare-bottomed ballyhoo by Rand helped consolidated her fame as well as make Billy Rose successful again. The great Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. himself had been a promoter at the famous Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893, where he presented the strongman Sandow.
Rose went back to Broadway as a producer. He produced the extravaganza "Jumbo" at New York's Hippodrome Theatre, which stretched a full city block, at a cost of $350,000 (approximately $5.8 million in 2005 dollars), the highest budget for a Broadway show at that time. The show combined a Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart musical with circus acts, including aerial stunts, high-wire acts and wild animals. Headlined by the great comic Jimmy Durante, and Paul Whiteman, then known as "The King of Jazz," the show garnered good reviews. Despite playing for 233 performances to full houses, "Jumbo" failed to become profitable due to its exorbitant cost. It did, however, make Billy Rose famous.
He produced "Sally Rand's Nude Ranch" at the 1936 Fort Worth Centennial as part of his Casa Manana show at the fairgrounds. The "Ranch" consisted of 18 girls clad in cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, a green bandanna and a short skirt. These wild gals of the naked west were "branded" (rubberstamped) with a large SR on their rumps. Rand was paid $1,000 a week (apprxomimately $13,500 in 2005 dollars) as the headliner of the act.
In 1937 Rose introduced The Aquacade at Cleveland's Great Lakes Exposition. A floating amphitheater, the Aquacade featured water ballet and hundreds of swimmers, including former Olympic swimming champ Johnny Weissmuller, more famous as the cinema's "Tarzan," and Olympian Eleanor Holm. At the height of the Great Depression, a group of New York City businessmen decided to create an international exposition for the Big Town, and the New York World's Fair was realized in 1939. Rose had returned to New with his "Billy Rose's Aquacade," which was the hit of the World's Fair. The Aquacade remained the hit attraction of the World's Fair the following year, despite his nemesis Mike Todd's attempt to box him in with his neighboring attraction, Gay New Orleans. The water show was billed as "a brilliant 'girl' show of spectacular size and content" (years later, a bankrupt Todd would try his own variation of the Aquacade at Jones Beach).
Rose, who had divorced Fanny Brice in 1938, married Eleanor Holm in 1939. Their marriage would last 15 years before it broke up in spectacular fashion worthy of the Rose reputation.
Rose took the Aquacade to San Francisco for that city's world's fair in 1940. He also opened Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe nightclub in New York that year, which was the sensation of the city with its vaudeville-style entertainment, including a chorus line of 250-pound women. Rose's nightclub, which helped launch the career of its choreographer Gene Kelly, was featured in a 1945 movie.
Rose was famous for his huge ego. When he applied for the position with the government as the head of military entertainment during World War II, he wrote in a letter to the commanding general that the job should be his, not just because he knew everyone and had done everything in show business, but because he had also "paid over a million dollars in taxes last year!" Rose was passed over for the position.
In 1943, Rose produced Oscar Hammerstein II's "Carmen Jones," an operetta with an all-African American cast based on Georges Bizet's 19th-century opera "Carmen." With a World War IIcontemporary narrative told from an African-American viewpoint, it was a huge hit. The NY Telegraph called it "far and away the best show in New York," while The NY Times said it was "beautifully done . . . just call it wonderful." The show played for 502 performances.
Billy Rose made the cover of the June 2, 1947, edition of "Time" magazine, which featured a painting of Rose amidst a circle of women's well-turned-out gams. The cover story, entitled "Sweet Corn at Glen Island," was about Rose's new nightclub, the refurbished Glen Island Casino, which opened with saxophonist Tex Beneke heading Glenn Miller and His Orchestra. In 1944 Billy Rose bought the old Ziegfeld Theatre at 54th St. and 6th Ave., which had been a movie house for the previous 11 years, and turned it back into a legitimate theater. It remained a theater for 11 more years, until NBC acquired it and turned it into a TV studio. Before being turned back into a grindhouse, albeit of the TV variety, Rose's Ziegfeld Theatre presented many top entertainments, including "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," the Laurence Olivier-Vivien Leigh twin-bill "Casear and Cleopatra"/"Antony and Cleopatra," "Porgy and Bess" and "Kismet." Rose lived in an apartment above the Ziegfeld, where he reportedly carried on numerous affairs. When his ex-lover Joyce Mathews, the ex-wife of Milton Berle, slit her wrists in his bathroom, it became a major scandal fanned by the New York tabloids. The notoriety led to messy divorce from his second wife Eleanor Holm, which the press called "The War of the Roses" (after his divorce from Holm, Rose wed Matthews in 1956; the marriage ended in divorce three years later, although they briefly remarried. Rose subsequently married Doris Warner Vidor in 1964, but she filed for divorce after just six months on the grounds of "extreme mental cruelty").
In 1947 Rose began writing a syndicated newspaper column, "Pitching Horseshoes," that featured illustrated stories recounted by Rose. One of the illustrators was future Oscar-winning actor Martin Landau, who was then a staff cartoonist on the NY Daily News. The column eventually appeared in over 200 newspapers, and excerpts were used by Rose in his autobiography "Wine, Women and Words," which was illustrated by Salvador Dalí.
In its June 12, 1950, edition, "Time" Magazine ran a piece entitled "Billy Rose Gives A Party" in which it noted the similarity between a Rose story in his "Pitching Horseshoes" column and a short story written by Evelyn Waugh. Both featured downcast and absent-minded women who died broken-hearted after they staged a party, but no one came, as they had forgotten to send out the invitations. When queried for his reaction, '"Time" reported that "Rose, who had never read the Waugh story [said]: 'It's one of those stinking, unbelievable coincidences.'"
In 1950 Rose hosted The Billy Rose Show (1950) on the ABC television network, a 30-minute dramatic series that debuted on October 3. The show, which was directed by Broadway legend Jed Harris, featured adaptations of stories that had appeared in "Pitching Horseshoes." Two of the shows were entitled "The Night Billy Rose Shoulda Stood in Bed" and "The Night They Made a Bum out of Helen Hayes." Among the actors appearing on the show were the Broadway actors Alfred Drake, Leo G. Carroll and Burgess Meredith. The show was canceled on March 27, 1951.
In 1954 at the Royale Theatre, Rose produced an adaptation of 'Andre Gide''s novel "The Immoralist," starring Geraldine Page and Louis Jordan. The play, which ran for 96 performances, featured James Dean's last performance on Broadway. Dean won a 1954 Theatre World Award portraying the lusty Arab boy Bachir, who seduces the repressed homosexual Michel, played by Jourdan, with an electrifying "scissors dance." In 1959 the National Theatre was renamed the Billy Rose Theatre (it still exists as the Nederlander Theatre) and opened under Rose's management with a revival of George Bernard Shaw's "Heartbreak House" starring Maurice Evans, who had broken Edwin Booth's record as Hamlet in a production produced by Mike Todd.
One of Rose's last major contributions to the theater was providing his theater for the staging of the latest play by Edward Albee, who had shocked the establishment with the vulgarity of his "Zoo Story." His new play, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", opened at the Billy Rose Theater on October 13, 1962, and closed on May 16, 1964, after a total of 664 performances. The production, which cost $42,000 to mount (approximately $260,000 in 2005 dollars), won five Tony Awards for Best Play, Best Producer, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress. It was the sensation of the theatrical season, if not of the decade of the 1960s. In addition to providing the theater, Rose also was one of the angels for the play.
Rose once again took over operation of the Ziegfeld Theatre when NBC gave up the lease. The last two shows to appear in Billy Rose's lifetime, at the Ziegfeld, where "An Evening with Maurice Chevalier" and a Danny Kaye revue, both in 1963. The Ziegfeld Theatre subsequently was razed to make room for a skyscraper.
Billy Rose donated his collection of sculptures to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. To house the collection, Isamu Noguchi designed the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden from 1960-65, in which the sculptures were placed in courtyards with sparse vegetation, stone-paved terraces, and intimate spaces.
Billy Rose died of lobar pneumonia on February 10, 1966, at his vacation home in Montego Bay, Jamaica. He was 66 years old.
The collection of performance materials at The New York Public Library was named after Rose. The Billy Rose Theatre Collection is one of the greatest theatrical archives in the world, covering the performance arts in all their diversity. The Collection's holdings cover virtually every type of performance art, including drama, musical theatre, film, television, radio, the circus, magic, vaudeville, and puppetry.- Actor
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One of Hollywood's finest character / "Method" actors, Eli Wallach was in demand for over 60 years (first film/TV role was 1949) on stage and screen, and has worked alongside the world's biggest stars, including Clark Gable, Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Marilyn Monroe, Yul Brynner, Peter O'Toole, and Al Pacino, to name but a few.
Wallach was born on 7 December 1915 in Brooklyn, NY, to Jewish parents who emigrated from Poland, and was one of the few Jewish kids in his mostly Italian neighborhood. His parents, Bertha (Schorr) and Abraham Wallach, owned a candy store, Bertha's Candy Store. He went on to graduate with a B.A. from the University of Texas in Austin, but gained his dramatic training with the Actors Studio and the Neighborhood Playhouse. He made his debut on Broadway in 1945, and won a Tony Award in 1951 for portraying Alvaro Mangiacavallo in the Tennessee Williams play "The Rose Tattoo".
Wallach made a strong screen debut in 1956 in the film version of the Tennessee Williams play Baby Doll (1956), shined as "Dancer", the nattily dressed hitman, in director Don Siegel's film-noir classic The Lineup (1958), and co-starred in the heist film Seven Thieves (1960). Director John Sturges then cast Wallach as vicious Mexican bandit Calvera in The Magnificent Seven (1960), the western adaptation of the Akira Kurosawa epic Seven Samurai (1954). The Misfits (1961), in the star-spangled western opus How the West Was Won (1962), the underrated WW2 film The Victors (1963), as a kidnapper in The Moon-Spinners (1964), in the sea epic Lord Jim (1965) and in the romantic comedy How to Steal a Million (1966).
Looking for a third lead actor in the final episode of the "Dollars Trilogy", Italian director Sergio Leone cast the versatile Wallach as the lying, two-faced, money-hungry (but somehow lovable) bandit "Tuco" in the spectacular The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) (aka "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly"), arguably his most memorable performance. Wallach kept busy throughout the remainder of the '60s and into the '70s with good roles in Mackenna's Gold (1969), Cinderella Liberty (1973), Crazy Joe (1974), The Deep (1977) and as Steve McQueen's bail buddy in The Hunter (1980).
The 1980s was an interesting period for Wallach, as he was regularly cast as an aging doctor, a Mafia figure or an over-the-hill hitman, such as in The Executioner's Song (1982), Our Family Honor (1985), Tough Guys (1986), Nuts (1987), The Two Jakes (1990) and as the candy-addicted "Don Altabello" in The Godfather Part III (1990). At 75+ years of age, Wallach's quality of work was still first class and into the 1990s and beyond, he has remained in demand. He lent fine support to Vendetta: Secrets of a Mafia Bride (1990), Teamster Boss: The Jackie Presser Story (1992), Naked City: Justice with a Bullet (1998) and Keeping the Faith (2000). Most recently Wallach showed up as a fast-talking liquor store owner in Mystic River (2003) and in the comedic drama King of the Corner (2004).
In early 2005, Eli Wallach released his much anticipated autobiography, "The Good, The Bad And Me: In My Anecdotage", an enjoyable reading from one of the screen's most inventive and enduring actors.
Eli Wallach was very much a family man who remained married to his wife Anne Jackson for 66 years. When Wallach died at 98, in 2014, in Manhattan, NY, he was survived by his wife, three children, five grandchildren and several great-grandchildren.- Actress
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Shelley Winters was born Shirley Schrift of very humble beginnings on August 18, 1920 (some sources list 1922) in East St. Louis, Illinois. Her mother, Rose Winter, was born in Missouri, to Austrian Jewish parents, and her father, Jonas Schrift, was an Austrian Jewish immigrant. She had one sibling, a sister, Blanche. Her father moved the family to Brooklyn when she was still young so that he, a tailor's cutter, could find steadier work closer to the city's garment industry. An unfailing interest in acting began quite early for Shelley, and she appeared in high school plays. By her mid- to late teens she had already been employed as a Woolworth's store clerk, model, borscht belt vaudevillian and nightclub chorine, all in order to pay for her acting classes. During a nationwide search in 1939 for GWTW's Scarlett O'Hara, Shelley was advised by auditioning director George Cukor to get acting lessons, which she did. Apprenticing in summer stock, she made her Broadway debut in the short-lived comedy "The Night Before Christmas" in 1941 and followed it with the operetta "Rosalinda" (1942) initially billing herself in both shows as Shelley Winter (without the "s").
Within a short time, Shelley pushed ahead for a career out west. Hollywood proved to be a tough road. Toiling in bit roles for years, many of her scenes were excised altogether during her early days. Obscurely used in such movies as What a Woman! (1943), The Racket Man (1944), Cover Girl (1944) and Tonight and Every Night (1945), her breakthrough did not occur until 1947, and it happened on both the stage and big screen. Not only did she win the replacement role of Ado Annie Carnes in "Oklahoma!" on Broadway but, around the same time, scored excellent notices on film as the party girl waitress who ends up a victim of deranged strangler (and Oscar winner) Ronald Colman in the critically-hailed A Double Life (1947) directed by Cukor. From this moment, she achieved a somewhat earthy film stardom, playing second-lead broads who often met untimely ends (as in Cry of the City (1948) and The Great Gatsby (1949)), or tawdry-black-stockinged and feather-boa-adorned leads, as in South Sea Sinner (1950) in which her eclectic co-stars included Macdonald Carey and Liberace!
As a tarnished glamour girl and symbol of working-class vulgarity in Hollywood, Shelley was about to be written off in pictures altogether when one of her finest movie roles arrived on her front porch. Her best hard luck girl storyboard showed up in the form of depressed, frumpy-looking Alice Tripp, a factory girl seduced and abandoned by wanderlust Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun (1951). Favoring gorgeous society girl Elizabeth Taylor who is totally out of his league, Clift is subsequently blackmailed by Winters' pathetic (and now pregnant) character into marrying her. For her desperate efforts, she is purposely drowned by Clift after he tips their canoe. The role, which garnered Shelley her first Oscar nomination, finally plucked her out of the sordid starlet pool she was treading and into the ranks of serious femme star contenders. But not for long.
Winters just couldn't escape the lurid bottle-blonde quality she instilled in her characters. During what should have been her peak time in films were a host of badly-scripted "B" films. The obvious, two-dimensional chorines, barflies, floozies and gold diggers she played in Behave Yourself! (1951), Frenchie (1950), Phone Call from a Stranger (1952), Playgirl (1954), and also Mambo (1954), in which co-starred second husband Vittorio Gassman, pretty much said it all. She grew extremely disenchanted and decided to return to dramatic study. Earning membership into the famed Actors' Studio, she went to Broadway and earned kudos, thereby reestablishing her reputation as a strong actress with the drug-themed play "A Hatful of Rain" (1955). Co-starring in the show was the up-and-coming Anthony Franciosa, who became her third husband in 1957. Her renewed dedication to pursuing quality work was shown by her appearances in a number of heavyweight theater roles including Blanche in "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1955). In later years, the Actors' Studio enthusiast became one of its most respected coaches, shaping up a number of today's fine talents with the Strasberg "method" technique.
By the late 1950s, she had started growing in girth and wisely eased into colorful character supports. The switch paid off. After a sterling performance as the ill-fated wife of sadistic killer Robert Mitchum in Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955), she scored big in the Oscar department when she won "Best Supporting Actress" for the shrill and hypertensive but doomed Mrs. Van Daan in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). From this period sprouted a host of revoltingly bad mamas, blowsy matrons, and trashy madams in such film fare as Lolita (1962), The Chapman Report (1962), The Balcony (1963) Wives and Lovers (1963), and A House Is Not a Home (1964). She topped things off as the abusive prostitute mom in A Patch of Blue (1965) who was not above pimping her own blind daughter (the late Elizabeth Hartman) for household money. The actress managed to place a second Oscar on her mantle for this riveting support work.
With advancing age and increasing size, she found a comfortable niche in the harping Jewish wife/mother category with loud, flashy, unsubtle roles in Enter Laughing (1967), Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976) and, most notably, The Poseidon Adventure (1972). She earned another Oscar nomination for "Poseidon" while portraying her third drowning victim. At around the same time, she scored quite well as the indomitable Marx Brothers' mama in "Minnie's Boys" on Broadway in 1970.
In the 1970s and 1980s, she developed into an oddly-distracted personality on TV, making countless talk show appearances and becoming quite the raconteur and incessant name dropper with her juicy Hollywood behind-the-scenes tales. Candid would be an understatement when she published two scintillating tell-all autobiographies that reached the bestsellers list. "Shelley, Also Known as Shirley" (1981) and "Shelley II: The Middle of My Century" (1989) detailed dalliances with Errol Flynn, Burt Lancaster, Marlon Brando, William Holden, Sean Connery and Clark Gable, to name just a few.
Thrice divorced (her first husband was a WWII captain; her only child, Vittoria, was the daughter of her second husband, Gassman), she remained footloose and fancy free after finally breaking it off with the volatile Franciosa in 1960. Her stormy marriages and notorious affairs, not to mention her ambitious forays into politics and feminist causes, kept her name alive for decades. She worked in films until the beginning of the millennium, her last film being the easily-dismissed Italian feature La bomba (1999). She enjoyed Emmy-winning TV work and had the recurring role of Roseanne Barr's tell-it-like-it-is grandmother on the comedienne's self-named sitcom. Her last years were marred by failing health and, for the most part, she was confined to a wheelchair. Suffering a heart attack in October of 2005, she died in a Beverly Hills nursing home of heart failure on January 14, 2006.
It was reported that only hours earlier on her deathbed she had entered into a "spiritual" union with her longtime companion of 19 years, Gerry McFord; a relationship of which her daughter disapproved. Gregarious, brazen, ambitious and completely unpredictable -- that would be Shelley Winters, the storyteller, whose amazing career lasted over six colorful decades.