Showing posts with label Actors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Actors. Show all posts
Saturday, January 10, 2015
Rod Taylor, 84, Target in ‘The Birds’
Rod Taylor,
the ruggedly handsome Australian-born actor who fended off attacks from
above in Alfred Hitchcock’s revered horror film “The Birds” and helped
an 8,000th-century people escape a monster race in the film version of
the science-fiction classic “The Time Machine,” died on Wednesday at his
home in Los Angeles. He was 84.
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Sunday, August 24, 2014
Richard Attenborough, Actor, Director and Giant of British Cinema
Until the early 1960s, Mr. Attenborough was a familiar actor in Britain but little known in the United States. In London he was the original detective in Agatha Christie’s play “The Mousetrap.” On the British screen, he made an early mark as the sociopath Pinkie Brown in an adaptation of Graham Greene’s “Brighton Rock” (1947).
But it was not until he appeared with his friend Steve McQueen and a sterling ensemble cast in the 1963 war film “The Great Escape,” his first Hollywood feature, that he found a trans-Atlantic audience. His role, as a British officer masterminding an escape plan from a German prisoner-of-war camp, was integral to one of the most revered and enjoyable of all World War II films.
Just watched recently, after James garner passed.
But it was not until he appeared with his friend Steve McQueen and a sterling ensemble cast in the 1963 war film “The Great Escape,” his first Hollywood feature, that he found a trans-Atlantic audience. His role, as a British officer masterminding an escape plan from a German prisoner-of-war camp, was integral to one of the most revered and enjoyable of all World War II films.
Just watched recently, after James garner passed.
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Lauren Bacall
Lauren Bacall dies at 89
The actor, best known for The Big Sleep and How to Marry a Millionaire, reportedly dies at family home
Email
Born Betty Joan Perske in New York, Bacall initially worked as an usherette and a Vogue model before moving to Hollywood at the age of 19. Director Howard Hawks paid her $125 a week for what would prove to be her breakthrough role in the 1944 thriller To Have and Have Not. “You know how to whistle, don’t you?” she purred at co-star Humphrey Bogart. “You just put your lips together and blow.”
Off-screen, Bacall threw her weight behind liberal causes, campaigning for Democratic hopefuls Adlai Stevenson and Robert Kennedy, and enjoyed a reputation for being fiery and outspoken; a woman who did not suffer fools gladly. “Happy schmappy,” she scoffed to Vanity Fair. “I don’t think anyone that has a brain can ever really be happy.”
In old age, she raged against what she saw as the mediocrity of contemporary Hollywood, as represented by everything from the career of Tom Cruise to the Twilight movies that her granddaughter dragged her to see. “She said it was the greatest vampire film ever made,” Bacall recalled. “After the film was over, I wanted to smack her across the head with my shoe.”
Robin Williams, Oscar-Winning Comedian
The privileged son of a Detroit auto executive who grew up chubby and
lonesome, playing by himself with 2,000 toy soldiers in an empty room of
a suburban mansion, Mr. Williams, as a boy, hardly fit the stereotype
of someone who would grow to become a brainy comedian, or a goofy one,
but he was both. Onstage he was known for ricochet riffs on politics, social issues and cultural matters both high and low; tales of drug and alcohol abuse;
lewd commentaries on relations between the sexes; and lightning-like
improvisations on anything an audience member might toss at him. His
gigs were always rife with frenetic, spot-on impersonations that
included Hollywood stars, presidents, princes, prime ministers, popes
and anonymous citizens of the world. His irreverence was legendary and uncurtailable.
from WQXR
Robin Williams on Jonathan Winters.
Jonathan Winters obit
Robin Williams birthday wishes
A constant quality
from WQXR
Robin Williams on Jonathan Winters.
Jonathan Winters obit
Robin Williams birthday wishes
A constant quality
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
James Shigeta, 85, Leading Man in ‘Flower Drum Song'
James
Shigeta, an actor who challenged social boundaries when he emerged in
the late 1950s as one of the first Asian-Americans to play leading roles
in Hollywood, died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 85.
The cause was pulmonary failure, his brother Clarence said.
Mr.
Shigeta traveled a distinctive path to stardom. He was born in the
American territory Hawaii to a family of Japanese descent. His native
language was English, but he first became an acting and singing star in
Japan, where he took language lessons while performing in the 1950s. He
served in the American military during the Korean War.
James Shigeta and Nancy Kwan in the 1961 film “Flower Drum Song,” based on the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.
Credit
Universal Studios, via Everett Collection
His
fame in Japan led to performances in Las Vegas, an appearance on “The
Dinah Shore Show” and, in 1959, his first role in Hollywood, in “The Crimson Kimono.” He starred as a detective who falls for a key witness in a case, played by Victoria Shaw.
“YES,
this is a beautiful American girl in the arms of a handsome Japanese
boy!” read a promotional poster for the film that showed the lovers
kissing.
In 1960 he shared a Golden Globe for most promising newcomer. The next year he seemed to be fulfilling the prophecy, with leading roles in two films, “Bridge to the Sun,” about an interracial couple, and “Flower Drum Song,”
an adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical about arranged
marriages — and resistance toward them — among some Chinese-Americans.
Monday, July 21, 2014
Sunday, July 20, 2014
James Garner, TV Star (and a pretty good film actor, too)
from WSJ obit:
First saw his obit in the Washington Post (James Garner, disarming leading man of film and television):
James Garner, a ruggedly handsome and disarming leading man of film and television who was best known for his series “Maverick” and “The Rockford Files” and who delivered compelling portrayals of wartime cowards, alcoholics and self-centered tycoons, died July 19 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86.
Los Angeles police confirmed the death to the Associated Press. No immediate cause was reported, but he had a stroke a few years ago.
I loved his role in The Great Escape an all-time favorite film.
He became an actor more or less by accident, when a friend who had become a stage producer got him a nonspeaking role in the Broadway production of "The Caine Mutiny Court Martial." After a few small TV roles, Mr. Garner signed a studio contract with Warner Bros. in 1956. The studio shortened his name and cast him in "Sayonara," an Army romance set in Japan. The film starred Marlon Brando and the two young actors struck up a friendship.
An unlikely duo.
A real maverick.
An outspoken liberal, Mr. Garner was quoted in news reports as chastising John McCain for calling himself a maverick in his 2008 presidential run. "I never said any of those things," Mr. Garner wrote in his memoir. He added: "But I wish I had."
NYT obit: James Garner, Witty, Handsome Leading Man
Continue reading the main story Slide Show
An understated comic actor, he was especially adept at conveying life’s tiny bedevilments. One of his most memorable roles was as a perpetually flummoxed pitchman for Polaroid cameras in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in droll commercials in which he played a vexed husband and Mariette Hartley played his needling wife. They were so persuasive that Ms. Hartley had a shirt printed with the declaration “I am not Mrs. James Garner.”
James Garner of the TV program 'Maverick' arrives at the Emmy Awards with his wife, Lois Clarke, in 1958.
Associated Press
James Garner,
who died Saturday at the age of 86, was the ultimate affable man of action.
Although
he appeared in over 40 films and was nominated for an Oscar for his
star turn in "Murphy's Romance"—a 1985 comedy about a small-town love
story in which he co-starred with Sally Field — Mr. Garner made his greatest impact on the small screen, first as
the star of the western series "Maverick" and then as detective Jim
Rockford on "The Rockford Files."
He was found dead of natural causes Saturday at his home in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles, police said.
First saw his obit in the Washington Post (James Garner, disarming leading man of film and television):
James Garner, a ruggedly handsome and disarming leading man of film and television who was best known for his series “Maverick” and “The Rockford Files” and who delivered compelling portrayals of wartime cowards, alcoholics and self-centered tycoons, died July 19 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86.
Los Angeles police confirmed the death to the Associated Press. No immediate cause was reported, but he had a stroke a few years ago.
I loved his role in The Great Escape an all-time favorite film.
He became an actor more or less by accident, when a friend who had become a stage producer got him a nonspeaking role in the Broadway production of "The Caine Mutiny Court Martial." After a few small TV roles, Mr. Garner signed a studio contract with Warner Bros. in 1956. The studio shortened his name and cast him in "Sayonara," an Army romance set in Japan. The film starred Marlon Brando and the two young actors struck up a friendship.
An unlikely duo.
At a time when the networks were crowded
with hard-eyed, traditional Western heroes, Bret Maverick provided a
fresh breath of air. With his sardonic tone and his eagerness to talk
his way out of a squabble rather than pull out his six-shooter, the
con-artist Westerner seemed to scoff at the genre's values.
"I don't know what it is about people," he once said in an interview. "They like to see me get whipped."
The
series not only launched Mr. Garner, but also helped popularize the
word "maverick," which previously was a mainly Texas slang for stray
cattle. When Warner's writers went on strike in 1960, the studio stopped
paying Mr. Garner, who sued for breach of contract and won.
Mr.
Garner returned to television in 1974 in what became his signature
role, Jim Rockford—a downtrodden everyman who lived in a mobile home in a
parking lot by the beach in Malibu, and took on a new case each week.
The series ran six seasons, produced by Mr. Garner's company, and has
been in syndication since.
In the late
1980s Mr. Garner sued Universal for $21 million for withholding
syndication payments on "Rockford Files." He received an out-of-court
settlement.
A real maverick.
An outspoken liberal, Mr. Garner was quoted in news reports as chastising John McCain for calling himself a maverick in his 2008 presidential run. "I never said any of those things," Mr. Garner wrote in his memoir. He added: "But I wish I had."
NYT obit: James Garner, Witty, Handsome Leading Man
Continue reading the main story Slide Show
James
Garner, the wry and handsome leading man who slid seamlessly between
television and the movies but was best known as the amiable gambler Bret
Maverick in the 1950s western “Maverick” and the cranky sleuth Jim
Rockford in the 1970s series “The Rockford Files,” was found dead of
natural causes at his Los Angeles home on Saturday night, the police
said. He was 86.
Mr. Garner, who smoked for most of his life, even after open-heart surgery in 1988, had suffered a stroke in 2008.
An understated comic actor, he was especially adept at conveying life’s tiny bedevilments. One of his most memorable roles was as a perpetually flummoxed pitchman for Polaroid cameras in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in droll commercials in which he played a vexed husband and Mariette Hartley played his needling wife. They were so persuasive that Ms. Hartley had a shirt printed with the declaration “I am not Mrs. James Garner.”
“Maverick”
had been in part a sendup of the conventional western drama, and “The
Rockford Files” similarly made fun of the standard television detective,
the man’s man who upholds law and order and has everything under
control. A sucker for a pretty girl and with a distinctly ’70s fashion
sense — he favored loud houndstooth jackets — Rockford was perpetually
wandering into threatening situations in which he ended up pursued by
criminal goons or corrupt cops. He tried, mostly successfully, to steer
clear of using guns; instead, a bit of a con artist himself, he relied
on impersonations and other ruses — and high-speed driving skills.
Every
episode of the show, which ran from 1974 to 1980 and more often than
not involved at least one car chase and Rockford’s getting beaten up a
time or two, began with a distinctive theme song
featuring a synthesizer and a blues harmonica and a message coming in
on a newfangled gadget — Rockford’s telephone answering machine — that
underscored his unheroic existence: “Jim, this is Norma at the market.
It bounced. Do you want us to tear it up, send it back or put it with
the others?”
In
his 2011 autobiography, “The Garner Files,” written with Jon Winokur,
Mr. Garner confessed to having a live-and-let-live attitude with the
caveat that when he was pushed, he shoved back. What distinguished his
performance as Rockford was how well that more-put-upon-than-macho
persona came across. Rockford’s reactions — startled, nonplused and
annoyed being his specialties — appeared native to him.
His naturalness led John J. O’Connor, writing in The New York Times, to liken Mr. Garner to Gary Cooper and James Stewart. And like those two actors, Mr. Garner usually got the girl.
James Scott Bumgarner was born in Norman, Okla., on April 7, 1928. His
paternal grandfather had participated in the Oklahoma land rush of 1889
and was later shot to death by the son of a widow with whom he’d been
having an affair. His maternal grandfather was a full-blooded Cherokee.
(Mr. Garner would later name his production company Cherokee
Productions.)
In
1964 he starred with Julie Andrews in “The Americanization of Emily,”
which he called his favorite of all his films. He played the personal
attendant of a Navy admiral, a fish out of water and the voice of the
movie’s pacifist point of view.
Written
by Paddy Chayefsky, it included perhaps the longest and most
impassioned speech of his career: “I don’t trust people who make bitter
reflections about war, Mrs. Barham,” he said, in part. “It’s always the
generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a
hell it is. And it’s always the widows who lead the Memorial Day
parades.”
Mr.
Garner disdained the pretentiousness of the acting profession. “I’m a
Methodist but not as an actor,” he wrote in “The Garner Files.” “I’m
from the Spencer Tracy school: Be on time, know your words, hit your
marks, and tell the truth. I don’t have any theories abut acting, and I
don’t think about how to do it, except that an actor shouldn’t take
himself too seriously, and shouldn’t try to make acting something it
isn’t. Acting is just common sense. It isn’t hard if you put yourself
aside and just do what the writer wrote.”
Nor
did he sit still for the dog-eat-dog business side of Hollywood. In the
early 1980s he again sued his employer, this time Universal, which he
accused of cheating him out of his share of profits on “The Rockford
Files.” Universal settled the case in 1989, reportedly paying him more
than $14 million.
Thursday, June 26, 2014
Fallece el actor Eli Wallach a los 98 años
Los siete magníficos, La conquista del oeste, El padrino III o la reciente Wall Street 2 (2010) fueron algunos de los títulos que lo convirtieron en uno de los actores más queridos de Hollywood.
NYTimes obit:
Eli
Wallach, who was one of his generation’s most prominent and prolific
character actors in film, onstage and on television for more than 60
years, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 98.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Katherine.
A self-styled journeyman actor, the versatile Mr. Wallach appeared in scores of roles, often with his wife, Anne Jackson. No matter the part, he always seemed at ease and in control, whether playing a Mexican bandit in the 1960 western “The Magnificent Seven,” a bumbling clerk in Ionesco’s allegorical play “Rhinoceros,” a henpecked French general in Jean Anouilh’s “Waltz of the Toreadors,” Clark Gable’s sidekick in “The Misfits” or a Mafia don in “The Godfather: Part III.”
His
first love was the stage. Mr. Wallach and Ms. Jackson became one of the
best-known acting couples in the American theater. But films, even less
than stellar ones, helped pay the bills. “For actors, movies are a
means to an end,” Mr. Wallach said in an interview with The New York
Times in 1973. “I go and get on a horse in Spain for 10 weeks, and I
have enough cushion to come back and do a play.”
Mr.
Wallach, who as a boy was one of the few Jewish children in his mostly
Italian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn, made both his stage and
screen breakthroughs playing Italians. In 1951, six years after his
Broadway debut in a play called “Skydrift,” he was cast opposite Maureen
Stapleton in Tennessee Williams’s “The Rose Tattoo,”
playing Alvaro Mangiacavallo, a truck driver who woos and wins Serafina
Delle Rose, a Sicilian widow living on the Gulf Coast. Both Ms.
Stapleton and Mr. Wallach won Tony Awards for their work in the play.
The
first movie in which Mr. Wallach acted was also written by Williams:
“Baby Doll” (1956), the playwright’s screen adaptation of his “27 Wagons
Full of Cotton.” Mr. Wallach played Silva Vacarro, a Sicilian émigré
and the owner of a cotton gin that he believes has been torched. Karl
Malden and Carroll Baker also starred.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Monday, September 12, 2011
Thursday, June 16, 2011
The General
Ronald William George Barker was born at Bedford on September 25 1929 and brought up in Oxford. From Donnington Junior School he went on to Oxford High School, where he opened his chemistry textbook to find the name TE Lawrence inscribed on the flyleaf.
Barker continued to apply for jobs advertised in the Stage, one of which brought a two-year spell in rep at Bramhall, after which he joined the Oxford Playhouse, where he met the young Maggie Smith - and told her: "If I were you, I'd give up."
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Elizabeth Taylor
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/03/23/elizabeth-taylor-dies/
Elizabeth Taylor's New York Times obiturary writer died six years ago
Los Angeles Times - 16 hours ago
Elizabeth Taylor may have died Wednesday morning, but the writer of the obituary the New York Times published celebrating the film star died six years ago CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
Elizabeth Taylor in 1957.
Elizabeth Taylor, whose name was synonymous with Hollywood glamour, dazzled generations of moviegoers with her beauty.
Interactive Timeline
Slide Show
Critics' Picks: 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf'Tuesday, March 1, 2011
An outlaw in more ways than one
This LA Times blog entry, whilst featuring the clichéd picture of her from the 1940s, begins by emphasizing her rebelliousness; on the other hand, the NY Times headlines her obit both sultry in the headline and voluptuous in the webpage. The LA Times's obit calls her a screen siren.
The 1943 movie, which highlighted Russell's full figure, was eventually released without code approval and made millions, prompting directors such as Otto Preminger to follow suit and setting the stage for much of what is now a given in contemporary moviedom, which cleverly (and sometimes not-so-cleverly) uses sex to sell new releases.
What she did then and how she was featured is so very tanme these days.
And despite her legacy as someone who challenged a repressive status quo, there was this fact: Russell was actually a deeply religious political conservative. More on a colorful career here.
Drawn by the film's notoriety, moviegoers flocked to see it. It had made millions of dollars by the time censors approved it in 1949. As James R. Petersen wrote in Playboy magazine in 1997, "Hughes showed that a film could ignore the code and make a profit." Other challenges to the code followed —including, notably, director Otto Preminger's "The Man With the Golden Arm" and "The Moon Is Blue" in the 1950s. In the late 1960s, the code was replaced by the Motion Picture Assn. of America's ratings system, which permitted the release of explicitly sexual or violent movies as long as audiences were restricted on the basis of age.
The 1943 movie, which highlighted Russell's full figure, was eventually released without code approval and made millions, prompting directors such as Otto Preminger to follow suit and setting the stage for much of what is now a given in contemporary moviedom, which cleverly (and sometimes not-so-cleverly) uses sex to sell new releases.
What she did then and how she was featured is so very tanme these days.
And despite her legacy as someone who challenged a repressive status quo, there was this fact: Russell was actually a deeply religious political conservative. More on a colorful career here.
Drawn by the film's notoriety, moviegoers flocked to see it. It had made millions of dollars by the time censors approved it in 1949. As James R. Petersen wrote in Playboy magazine in 1997, "Hughes showed that a film could ignore the code and make a profit." Other challenges to the code followed —including, notably, director Otto Preminger's "The Man With the Golden Arm" and "The Moon Is Blue" in the 1950s. In the late 1960s, the code was replaced by the Motion Picture Assn. of America's ratings system, which permitted the release of explicitly sexual or violent movies as long as audiences were restricted on the basis of age.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Starred in feminist roles
“I guess people look at me and they think I’m a ladylike character,” Ms. Clayburgh told The New York Times in 1982. “But it’s not what I do best. I do best with characters who are coming apart at the seams.”
And another remembrance.
TCM profile. On Saturday night 6 November I watched Running with Scissors, in which Clayburgh had a role. The movie as a whole was of questionable quality, and her role was equally so, yet it was clear that she was a talented actor who could breathe life into a role. "Nip/Tuck" creator Ryan Murphy was so impressed with the now character actress that he also tapped her to play the depressed adoptive mother of Augusten Burroughs in his film version of the author's best-selling memoir, "Running with Scissors" (2006) - in which she was often cited as the best thing about the depressing, bizarre film.
And another remembrance.
TCM profile. On Saturday night 6 November I watched Running with Scissors, in which Clayburgh had a role. The movie as a whole was of questionable quality, and her role was equally so, yet it was clear that she was a talented actor who could breathe life into a role. "Nip/Tuck" creator Ryan Murphy was so impressed with the now character actress that he also tapped her to play the depressed adoptive mother of Augusten Burroughs in his film version of the author's best-selling memoir, "Running with Scissors" (2006) - in which she was often cited as the best thing about the depressing, bizarre film.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Tony Curtis
Excellent movie. Curtis made a number of good ones. He died yesterday, aged 85.He had an interesting career. Born on Bronx, growing up poor, named Bernie Schwartz
The Defiant Ones was a real good one. Sweet smell of success was one of his film that revolved around New York.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Kevin McCarthy, the suave, square-jawed actor who earned accolades in stage and screen productions of “Death of a Salesman” but will always be best known as the star of the 1956 science fiction movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” died Saturday at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Mass. He was 96 and lived in Sherman Oaks, Calif. His death was confirmed by his daughter Lillah McCarthy.
That is not how I remember him, at all. Although, if I try to nail down a specific role or film, I can not do so easily. A look at his filmography shows a lot of TV work: 203 entries going back to 1944.
Mr. McCarthy, whose sister was the celebrated author Mary McCarthy, was 35 and a veteran of seven Broadway plays when Elia Kazan cast him as Biff, the shallow, elder son of Willy Loman, in the London stage production of “Death of a Salesman,” Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1949 drama about illusion and the common man. His portrayal of Biff in the 1951 film version earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.
Five years and four forgettable films later Mr. McCarthy was cast in a low-budget B movie about a small California town where the residents are gradually replaced by pods from outer space. The pods, resembling giant cucumbers, bubble and foam as they slowly turn into creepy, emotionless duplicates of the townspeople. Miles Bennell (Mr. McCarthy), a handsome bachelor doctor, and Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), a beautiful local divorcée, spend the movie trying to escape podification (mostly just by staying awake; the transformation takes place while people are sleeping) and warn others. The movie, selected for the National Film Registry in 1994 and named one of the Top 10 science fiction films of all time by the American Film Institute in 2008, came to be regarded as a metaphor for the paranoia of the era’s Communist witch hunts. But the film’s leading man, like many moviegoers at the time, saw it differently, as a warning about mindless conformity.
United Artists-Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956)
“I thought it was really about the onset of a kind of life where the corporate people are trying to tell you how to live, what to do, how to behave,” Mr. McCarthy told The Bangor Daily News in Maine in 1997.
Over the decades Mr. McCarthy came to embrace the cult immortality he achieved with “Body Snatchers,” but he cheerily played hundreds of other roles in feature films and on television (including multiple appearances on series from “Studio One” in the 1950s to “The District” in 2000) and continued his stage career. He toured the United States as Harry S. Truman in the one-man show “Give ’Em Hell, Harry” for two decades.
Kevin McCarthy was born on Feb. 15, 1914, in Seattle, the son of Roy Winfield McCarthy and the former Therese Preston. Both parents died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and their four children were sent to live with relatives in Minneapolis. After five years of near-Dickensian mistreatment, described in Ms. McCarthy’s memoirs, the youngsters moved in with their maternal grandfather. After graduating from high school in Wisconsin, Mr. McCarthy studied at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, with an eye toward a diplomatic career. He changed his mind, however, and transferred to the University of Minnesota, where he became interested in acting. After moving to New York he made his Broadway debut in 1938 in “Abe Lincoln in Illinois.” His career was interrupted by World War II, in which he served as a military police officer. After his discharge he became an early member of the Actors Studio, New York’s bastion of Method acting.
Despite his film and television success Mr. McCarthy never abandoned the stage. The 18 Broadway productions in which he appeared included Moss Hart’s “Winged Victory” (in which he was billed as Sgt. Kevin McCarthy), the political drama “Advise and Consent,” Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” and Kurt Vonnegut’s irreverent “Happy Birthday, Wanda June.” Mr. McCarthy matured quickly into roles as judges, generals, politicians and other men of power — sometimes not very nice ones. On “Flamingo Road,” the soapy 1980s television series, he was a greedy small-town Florida millionaire. On the screen, in “The Best Man” (1964), he was a presidential candidate’s henchman, specializing in dirty tricks, and he played a similarly ignoble political type in “The Distinguished Gentleman” (1992). In “Innerspace” (1987) he was a devious industrial spy, in “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” (1976), a grabby publicist.
And although he did relatively little science fiction after “Body Snatchers,” he did star in the horror comedy “Piranha” (1978) as a mad scientist breeding killer fish. He also made a cameo appearance in the 1978 remake of “Body Snatchers,” playing a man who throws himself at the car driven by Donald Sutherland (the remake’s star), shouting, “Help! They’re coming! Listen to me!” and sounding much like his character in the original film. His bad guys weren’t always all bad. He was a roguish poker player in “A Big Hand for the Little Lady” (1966) and Marilyn Monroe’s attractive but distant ex-husband in “The Misfits” (1961).
Mr. McCarthy continued acting well into his 90s. His last screen appearances were in 2009 in “Wesley,” (2008), an 18th-century costume drama, and the short film “I Do.” He married the actress Augusta Dabney in 1941, and they had three children. They divorced in 1961. (Ms. Dabney died in 2008.) In 1979 he married Kate Crane, a lawyer, and they had two children. Ms. Crane survives him, as do three daughters, Lillah, of Los Angeles; Mary Dabney McCarthy, of Cape Cod; and Tess McCarthy, of New York City; two sons, James Kevin McCarthy of San Diego and Patrick McCarthy of Portland, Ore.; a stepdaughter, Kara Lichtman of Boston; a brother, Preston; and three grandchildren. Mr. McCarthy’s sister died in 1989.
Interviewers rarely asked him about subjects beyond “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” (He loved to tell the story about leaving Ms. Wynter a nostalgic trans-Atlantic telephone message: “Becky, it’s Miles. Wake up!”) But in 1991 he told a critic for The San Diego Union-Tribune about his feeling that purposeful employment was a remedy for many ills. “I try to get as much work as I possibly can,” Mr. McCarthy, then 77, said. “I love to work. I love to be in things.”
September 12, 2010 - Kevin McCarthy, Actor, Dies at 96
By ANITA GATES
That is not how I remember him, at all. Although, if I try to nail down a specific role or film, I can not do so easily. A look at his filmography shows a lot of TV work: 203 entries going back to 1944.
Mr. McCarthy, whose sister was the celebrated author Mary McCarthy, was 35 and a veteran of seven Broadway plays when Elia Kazan cast him as Biff, the shallow, elder son of Willy Loman, in the London stage production of “Death of a Salesman,” Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1949 drama about illusion and the common man. His portrayal of Biff in the 1951 film version earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.
United Artists-Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956)
“I thought it was really about the onset of a kind of life where the corporate people are trying to tell you how to live, what to do, how to behave,” Mr. McCarthy told The Bangor Daily News in Maine in 1997.
Over the decades Mr. McCarthy came to embrace the cult immortality he achieved with “Body Snatchers,” but he cheerily played hundreds of other roles in feature films and on television (including multiple appearances on series from “Studio One” in the 1950s to “The District” in 2000) and continued his stage career. He toured the United States as Harry S. Truman in the one-man show “Give ’Em Hell, Harry” for two decades.
Kevin McCarthy was born on Feb. 15, 1914, in Seattle, the son of Roy Winfield McCarthy and the former Therese Preston. Both parents died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and their four children were sent to live with relatives in Minneapolis. After five years of near-Dickensian mistreatment, described in Ms. McCarthy’s memoirs, the youngsters moved in with their maternal grandfather. After graduating from high school in Wisconsin, Mr. McCarthy studied at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, with an eye toward a diplomatic career. He changed his mind, however, and transferred to the University of Minnesota, where he became interested in acting. After moving to New York he made his Broadway debut in 1938 in “Abe Lincoln in Illinois.” His career was interrupted by World War II, in which he served as a military police officer. After his discharge he became an early member of the Actors Studio, New York’s bastion of Method acting.
Despite his film and television success Mr. McCarthy never abandoned the stage. The 18 Broadway productions in which he appeared included Moss Hart’s “Winged Victory” (in which he was billed as Sgt. Kevin McCarthy), the political drama “Advise and Consent,” Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” and Kurt Vonnegut’s irreverent “Happy Birthday, Wanda June.” Mr. McCarthy matured quickly into roles as judges, generals, politicians and other men of power — sometimes not very nice ones. On “Flamingo Road,” the soapy 1980s television series, he was a greedy small-town Florida millionaire. On the screen, in “The Best Man” (1964), he was a presidential candidate’s henchman, specializing in dirty tricks, and he played a similarly ignoble political type in “The Distinguished Gentleman” (1992). In “Innerspace” (1987) he was a devious industrial spy, in “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” (1976), a grabby publicist.
And although he did relatively little science fiction after “Body Snatchers,” he did star in the horror comedy “Piranha” (1978) as a mad scientist breeding killer fish. He also made a cameo appearance in the 1978 remake of “Body Snatchers,” playing a man who throws himself at the car driven by Donald Sutherland (the remake’s star), shouting, “Help! They’re coming! Listen to me!” and sounding much like his character in the original film. His bad guys weren’t always all bad. He was a roguish poker player in “A Big Hand for the Little Lady” (1966) and Marilyn Monroe’s attractive but distant ex-husband in “The Misfits” (1961).
Mr. McCarthy continued acting well into his 90s. His last screen appearances were in 2009 in “Wesley,” (2008), an 18th-century costume drama, and the short film “I Do.” He married the actress Augusta Dabney in 1941, and they had three children. They divorced in 1961. (Ms. Dabney died in 2008.) In 1979 he married Kate Crane, a lawyer, and they had two children. Ms. Crane survives him, as do three daughters, Lillah, of Los Angeles; Mary Dabney McCarthy, of Cape Cod; and Tess McCarthy, of New York City; two sons, James Kevin McCarthy of San Diego and Patrick McCarthy of Portland, Ore.; a stepdaughter, Kara Lichtman of Boston; a brother, Preston; and three grandchildren. Mr. McCarthy’s sister died in 1989.
September 12, 2010 - Kevin McCarthy, Actor, Dies at 96
By ANITA GATES
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Peter Graves
His best known roles are the cool spymaster of television’s “Mission: Impossible”(as the NY Times obituary has it) and best known to younger audiences for a deadpan line in “Airplane!”. I well remember MI; I watched the show religiously.
Peter Graves, centre, with Greg Morris, Leonard Nimoy and Peter Lupus in Mission: Impossible. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features
I do not recall Nimoy being in the show; missing are Martin Landau and Barbara Bain.Now, having looked at some material on the show, I do not vaguely recall Nimoy being in the show.
The Guardian's obit, and the NY Times's obit follow.
American actor and star of television's Mission: Impossible who made fun of his image in Airplane!
Despite his long career as a serious actor in dozens of films and television shows, Peter Graves, who has died aged 83, might be most remembered for a role that lampooned his square-jawed, stolid screen persona. As the captain of a plane heading for disaster in the spoof movie Airplane! (1980), Graves got laughs by playing it as straight as his other roles. (Although his roles in a number of trashy, low-budget science fiction movies in the 1950s had produced unintentional laughs.)
Audiences around the world were also familiar with Graves as the tall, gruff, deep-voiced, silver-haired Jim Phelps, head of the IMF (Impossible Missions Force), an elite American espionage group, in the TV series Mission: Impossible (1967-73). He won a Golden Globe in the role in 1971.
The show famously opened with the words: "Your mission, Jim, should you decide to accept it, is ..." Following the briefing, Phelps was told: "As usual, should you or any member of your IM Force be captured or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your existence. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Jim." After the puff of smoke cleared, Phelps always accepted the mission, usually involving some un-American foreign power.
Graves was very proud of – and proprietorial towards – Phelps, and when the big-screen version of Mission: Impossible (1996), starring Tom Cruise, was released, Graves was aggrieved that the character played by Jon Voight used the same name. "I am sorry that they chose to call him Phelps. They could have solved that very easily by either having me in a scene in the very beginning, or reading a telegram from me saying, 'Hey boys, I'm retired, gone to Hawaii. Thank you, goodbye, you take over now'," Graves remarked.
Born Peter Aurness in Minnesota, of Norwegian-German stock, he was the son of Rolf Cirkler Aurness, a businessman, and Ruth Duesler, a journalist. His older brother, the actor James Arness, also made his name in a TV series (Gunsmoke). After two years in the US air force, Graves studied drama at the University of Minnesota.
His first credited film roles were as a confused youngster in Rogue River (1951) and as Dane Clark's blind brother in the western Fort Defiance (1951). In 1952, Graves featured in The Congregation, produced by the Protestant Film Commission, an evangelical organisation, and had the leading role in Red Planet Mars, a McCarthyite tract in the guise of a Christian science fiction film. Graves played a scientist who gets messages from Mars, which pretends to be a utopian society but is controlled by Soviet agents, setting out to destroy the freedom of the US. As a result, Christian revolutionaries overthrow the communist government in Russia.
Graves's blond, rather bland good looks were brilliantly used by Billy Wilder in Stalag 17 (1953), revolving around a German informer masquerading as an American PoW. The director's brother, W Lee Wilder, who churned out low-grade science fiction movies, then cast Graves in Killers from Space (1954) as a nuclear scientist captured by aliens (kitted out in hooded sweatshirts, mittens and eyes made out of ping-pong balls), who manages to save Earth from them.
In It Conquered the World (1956) and Beginning of the End (1957), Graves battled against a Venusian and giant (back-projected) grasshoppers. He then reverted to treachery in a series of B-westerns: War Paint (1953), The Yellow Tomahawk (1954), Robbers' Roost (1955) and Canyon River (1956).
But, in 1955, Graves did manage to work in four excellent movies, though in minor roles. In Jacques Tourneur's Wichita, he played Morgan Earp, brother of Wyatt (Joel McCrea), and he appeared as military men in John Ford's The Long Gray Line and Otto Preminger's The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell. He also had a small but key role in Charles Laughton's haunting The Night of the Hunter. As Ben Harper, who shares a prison cell with a "fire and brimstone" preacher (Robert Mitchum), he talks in his sleep about the hidden $10,000 he has stolen from a bank, thus setting the evil preacher on the scent of the money.
In the 1960s, Graves's stern face was seldom off the TV screen. He started the decade with 34 episodes of an Australian western series called Whiplash, in which he played an American, Christopher Cobb, who established the first stagecoach line in Australia in the 1850s. He continued mostly in TV westerns, and the odd film, until he hit the jackpot with Mission: Impossible.
Jim Abrahams, who wrote, directed and produced Airplane! with the Zucker brothers, David and Jerry, thought that Mission: Impossible "was just so stupid and was great to send up". They had the wit to cast the straight-as-a-die Graves as Captain Oveur – much corny play is made of the character's name and that of his co-pilot, Roger Murdock, such as "Roger, Roger" and "Over, Oveur." Oveur is also at the helm with a young boy, Joey, whom he asks questions such as: "You ever seen a grown man naked?"; "Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?"; and "Have you ever been to a Turkish prison?"
It's hard to believe that audiences ever took Graves seriously again, but they did and he returned to a new series of Mission: Impossible from 1988 to 1990. He also hosted more than 50 episodes (between 1994 and 2006) of Biography, in which he sounded like an authority on every subject, whether they were artists, politicians, generals or film stars.
From 1997 to 2007, Graves made a number of guest appearances as John "The Colonel" Camden, the grandfather in the squeaky-clean Christian family in the TV series 7th Heaven. A devout Christian himself, Graves is survived by Joan, his wife since 1950, and by three daughters.
• Peter Graves, actor, born 18 March 1926; died 14 March 2010
The Times obituary has a couple of interesting pictures.
March 15, 2010
Peter Graves, ‘Mission: Impossible’ Star, Dies at 83
By MICHAEL POLLAK
Peter Graves, the cool spymaster of television’s “Mission: Impossible” and the dignified host of the “Biography” series, who successfully spoofed his own gravitas in the “Airplane!” movie farces, died on Sunday. He was 83.
He died of a heart attack at his home in Pacific Palisades, Calif., said Fred Barman, his business manager.
It was a testament to Mr. Graves’s earnest, unhammy ability to make fun of himself that after decades of playing square he-men and straitlaced authority figures, he was perhaps best known to younger audiences for a deadpan line in “Airplane!” (“Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?”) and one from a memorable Geico car insurance commercial (“I was one lucky woman”).
Born Peter Aurness in Minneapolis, the blond, 6-foot-2 Mr. Graves served in the Army Air Forces in 1944 and ’45, studied drama at the University of Minnesota under the G.I. Bill of Rights and played the clarinet in local bands before following his older brother, James Arness, to Hollywood.
His first credited film appearance was in “Rogue River” (1950), with Rory Calhoun. Mr. Graves’s getting a Hollywood contract for the picture persuaded his fiancée’s family to let her marry him. He changed his name for that movie to Graves, his maternal grandfather’s name, to avoid confusion with his older brother.
He soon found himself in classics like Billy Wilder’s “Stalag 17” (1953), where he played a security officer with a secret; Charles Laughton’s “Night of the Hunter” (1955); Otto Preminger’s “Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell” (1955); and John Ford’s “Long Gray Line” (1955).
Mr. Graves became known for taking all his roles seriously, injecting a certain believability into even the campiest plot. He appeared in westerns like “The Yellow Tomahawk” (1954) and “Wichita” (1955); a Civil War adventure, “The Raid” (1954); and gangster movies (“Black Tuesday,” 1954, and “The Naked Street,” 1955). He played earnest scientists in science fiction/horror films: “Killers From Space” (1954), “It Conquered the World” (1956) and “Beginning of the End” (1957, about giant grasshoppers in Chicago). There was also cold war science fiction anti-Communism: “Red Planet Mars” (1952).
Other movies included “East of Sumatra” (1953), “Beneath the 12-Mile Reef” (1953), “A Rage to Live” (1965), “Texas Across the River” (1966), “Sergeant Ryker” (1968), “The Ballad of Josie” (1968), “The Five-Man Army” (1969), “The Clonus Horror” (1979), “The Guns and the Fury” (1981), “Savannah Smiles” (1982), “Number One With a Bullet” (1986), “Addams Family Values” (1993), “The House on Haunted Hill” (1999) and “Men in Black II” (2002).
In 1955 Mr. Graves began his career as a television series regular as the star of “Fury,” a western family adventure series about a rancher named Jim Newton, his orphaned ward and the boy’s black stallion. It ran until 1959 on NBC, helped pioneer television adventure series and solidified Mr. Graves’s TV credentials.
Some of his hundreds of television credits include “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Whiplash” (1961), “The Dean Martin Show” (1970), the Herman Wouk mini-series “The Winds of War” (1983) and “War and Remembrance” (1988), “Fantasy Island” (1978-83) and “7th Heaven” (1999-2005). He served as the host or narrator for numerous television specials and performed in television movies of the week like “The President’s Plane Is Missing” (1973), “Where Have All the People Gone” (1974) and “Death Car on the Freeway” (1979).
Mr. Graves played his most famous television character from 1967 to 1973 in “Mission: Impossible,” reprising it from 1988 to 1990. He was Jim Phelps, the leader of the Impossible Missions Force, a super-secret government organization that conducted dangerous undercover assignments (which he always chose to accept). After the tape summarizing the objective self-destructed, the team would use not violence, but elaborate con games to trap the villains. In his role, Mr. Graves was a model of cool, deadpan efficiency.
But he was appalled when his agent sent him the script for the role of a pedophile pilot in “Airplane!” (1980). “I tore my hair and ranted and raved and said, ‘This is insane,’ he recalled on “Biography” in 1997. Some of the role’s lines (“Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?”) looked at first as if they could get him thrown in jail, never mind ruining his career. He told his agent to tell David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, the director-producers, to find themselves a comedian. He relented when the Zucker brothers explained that the secret of their spoof would be the deadpan behavior of the cast; they didn’t want a comedian, they wanted the Peter Graves of “Fury” and “Mission: Impossible.”
Mr. Graves used his familiar earnest, all-American demeanor in service of some of the comic movie’s most outrageous moments. He reprised the role of Captain Oveur in “Airplane II” in 1982.
Starting in the mid-1980s Mr. Graves was the host of a number of television science specials on “Discover.” In 1987, he became the host of the Arts and Entertainment Network’s long-running “Biography” series, narrating the lives of figures like Prince Andrew, Muhammad Ali, pioneers of the space program, Churchill, Ernie Kovacs, Edward G. Robinson, Sophia Loren, Jackie Robinson, Howard Hughes, Steven Spielberg and Jonathan Winters.
In 1997, Mr. Graves was the subject of his own “Biography” presentation, “Peter Graves: Mission Accomplished.” In 2002, Mr. Graves was interviewed for a special about the documentary series, “Biography: 15 Years and Counting.”
Mr. Graves won a Golden Globe Award in 1971 for his performance in “Mission: Impossible” and in 1997, he and “Biography” won an Emmy Award for outstanding informational series.
In 1998, he joined his wife, Joan, in an effort to get Los Angeles to ban gasoline-powered leaf blowers from residential areas, testifying before the City Council, “’We’re all victims of these machines.”
In addition to his brother, he is survived by his wife, Joan Graves, and three daughters, Amanda Lee Graves, Claudia King Graves and Kelly Jean Graves.
Derrick Henry contributed reporting.
I do not recall Nimoy being in the show; missing are Martin Landau and Barbara Bain.Now, having looked at some material on the show, I do not vaguely recall Nimoy being in the show.
The Guardian's obit, and the NY Times's obit follow.
American actor and star of television's Mission: Impossible who made fun of his image in Airplane!
Despite his long career as a serious actor in dozens of films and television shows, Peter Graves, who has died aged 83, might be most remembered for a role that lampooned his square-jawed, stolid screen persona. As the captain of a plane heading for disaster in the spoof movie Airplane! (1980), Graves got laughs by playing it as straight as his other roles. (Although his roles in a number of trashy, low-budget science fiction movies in the 1950s had produced unintentional laughs.)
Audiences around the world were also familiar with Graves as the tall, gruff, deep-voiced, silver-haired Jim Phelps, head of the IMF (Impossible Missions Force), an elite American espionage group, in the TV series Mission: Impossible (1967-73). He won a Golden Globe in the role in 1971.
The show famously opened with the words: "Your mission, Jim, should you decide to accept it, is ..." Following the briefing, Phelps was told: "As usual, should you or any member of your IM Force be captured or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your existence. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Jim." After the puff of smoke cleared, Phelps always accepted the mission, usually involving some un-American foreign power.
Graves was very proud of – and proprietorial towards – Phelps, and when the big-screen version of Mission: Impossible (1996), starring Tom Cruise, was released, Graves was aggrieved that the character played by Jon Voight used the same name. "I am sorry that they chose to call him Phelps. They could have solved that very easily by either having me in a scene in the very beginning, or reading a telegram from me saying, 'Hey boys, I'm retired, gone to Hawaii. Thank you, goodbye, you take over now'," Graves remarked.
Born Peter Aurness in Minnesota, of Norwegian-German stock, he was the son of Rolf Cirkler Aurness, a businessman, and Ruth Duesler, a journalist. His older brother, the actor James Arness, also made his name in a TV series (Gunsmoke). After two years in the US air force, Graves studied drama at the University of Minnesota.
His first credited film roles were as a confused youngster in Rogue River (1951) and as Dane Clark's blind brother in the western Fort Defiance (1951). In 1952, Graves featured in The Congregation, produced by the Protestant Film Commission, an evangelical organisation, and had the leading role in Red Planet Mars, a McCarthyite tract in the guise of a Christian science fiction film. Graves played a scientist who gets messages from Mars, which pretends to be a utopian society but is controlled by Soviet agents, setting out to destroy the freedom of the US. As a result, Christian revolutionaries overthrow the communist government in Russia.
Graves's blond, rather bland good looks were brilliantly used by Billy Wilder in Stalag 17 (1953), revolving around a German informer masquerading as an American PoW. The director's brother, W Lee Wilder, who churned out low-grade science fiction movies, then cast Graves in Killers from Space (1954) as a nuclear scientist captured by aliens (kitted out in hooded sweatshirts, mittens and eyes made out of ping-pong balls), who manages to save Earth from them.
In It Conquered the World (1956) and Beginning of the End (1957), Graves battled against a Venusian and giant (back-projected) grasshoppers. He then reverted to treachery in a series of B-westerns: War Paint (1953), The Yellow Tomahawk (1954), Robbers' Roost (1955) and Canyon River (1956).
But, in 1955, Graves did manage to work in four excellent movies, though in minor roles. In Jacques Tourneur's Wichita, he played Morgan Earp, brother of Wyatt (Joel McCrea), and he appeared as military men in John Ford's The Long Gray Line and Otto Preminger's The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell. He also had a small but key role in Charles Laughton's haunting The Night of the Hunter. As Ben Harper, who shares a prison cell with a "fire and brimstone" preacher (Robert Mitchum), he talks in his sleep about the hidden $10,000 he has stolen from a bank, thus setting the evil preacher on the scent of the money.
In the 1960s, Graves's stern face was seldom off the TV screen. He started the decade with 34 episodes of an Australian western series called Whiplash, in which he played an American, Christopher Cobb, who established the first stagecoach line in Australia in the 1850s. He continued mostly in TV westerns, and the odd film, until he hit the jackpot with Mission: Impossible.
Jim Abrahams, who wrote, directed and produced Airplane! with the Zucker brothers, David and Jerry, thought that Mission: Impossible "was just so stupid and was great to send up". They had the wit to cast the straight-as-a-die Graves as Captain Oveur – much corny play is made of the character's name and that of his co-pilot, Roger Murdock, such as "Roger, Roger" and "Over, Oveur." Oveur is also at the helm with a young boy, Joey, whom he asks questions such as: "You ever seen a grown man naked?"; "Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?"; and "Have you ever been to a Turkish prison?"
It's hard to believe that audiences ever took Graves seriously again, but they did and he returned to a new series of Mission: Impossible from 1988 to 1990. He also hosted more than 50 episodes (between 1994 and 2006) of Biography, in which he sounded like an authority on every subject, whether they were artists, politicians, generals or film stars.
From 1997 to 2007, Graves made a number of guest appearances as John "The Colonel" Camden, the grandfather in the squeaky-clean Christian family in the TV series 7th Heaven. A devout Christian himself, Graves is survived by Joan, his wife since 1950, and by three daughters.
• Peter Graves, actor, born 18 March 1926; died 14 March 2010
The Times obituary has a couple of interesting pictures.
March 15, 2010
Peter Graves, ‘Mission: Impossible’ Star, Dies at 83
By MICHAEL POLLAK
Peter Graves, the cool spymaster of television’s “Mission: Impossible” and the dignified host of the “Biography” series, who successfully spoofed his own gravitas in the “Airplane!” movie farces, died on Sunday. He was 83.
It was a testament to Mr. Graves’s earnest, unhammy ability to make fun of himself that after decades of playing square he-men and straitlaced authority figures, he was perhaps best known to younger audiences for a deadpan line in “Airplane!” (“Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?”) and one from a memorable Geico car insurance commercial (“I was one lucky woman”).
Born Peter Aurness in Minneapolis, the blond, 6-foot-2 Mr. Graves served in the Army Air Forces in 1944 and ’45, studied drama at the University of Minnesota under the G.I. Bill of Rights and played the clarinet in local bands before following his older brother, James Arness, to Hollywood.
His first credited film appearance was in “Rogue River” (1950), with Rory Calhoun. Mr. Graves’s getting a Hollywood contract for the picture persuaded his fiancée’s family to let her marry him. He changed his name for that movie to Graves, his maternal grandfather’s name, to avoid confusion with his older brother.
He soon found himself in classics like Billy Wilder’s “Stalag 17” (1953), where he played a security officer with a secret; Charles Laughton’s “Night of the Hunter” (1955); Otto Preminger’s “Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell” (1955); and John Ford’s “Long Gray Line” (1955).
Mr. Graves became known for taking all his roles seriously, injecting a certain believability into even the campiest plot. He appeared in westerns like “The Yellow Tomahawk” (1954) and “Wichita” (1955); a Civil War adventure, “The Raid” (1954); and gangster movies (“Black Tuesday,” 1954, and “The Naked Street,” 1955). He played earnest scientists in science fiction/horror films: “Killers From Space” (1954), “It Conquered the World” (1956) and “Beginning of the End” (1957, about giant grasshoppers in Chicago). There was also cold war science fiction anti-Communism: “Red Planet Mars” (1952).
Martin Agency -Mr. Graves in a Geico commercial, spoofing his own image.
In 1955 Mr. Graves began his career as a television series regular as the star of “Fury,” a western family adventure series about a rancher named Jim Newton, his orphaned ward and the boy’s black stallion. It ran until 1959 on NBC, helped pioneer television adventure series and solidified Mr. Graves’s TV credentials.
Some of his hundreds of television credits include “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Whiplash” (1961), “The Dean Martin Show” (1970), the Herman Wouk mini-series “The Winds of War” (1983) and “War and Remembrance” (1988), “Fantasy Island” (1978-83) and “7th Heaven” (1999-2005). He served as the host or narrator for numerous television specials and performed in television movies of the week like “The President’s Plane Is Missing” (1973), “Where Have All the People Gone” (1974) and “Death Car on the Freeway” (1979).
Mr. Graves played his most famous television character from 1967 to 1973 in “Mission: Impossible,” reprising it from 1988 to 1990. He was Jim Phelps, the leader of the Impossible Missions Force, a super-secret government organization that conducted dangerous undercover assignments (which he always chose to accept). After the tape summarizing the objective self-destructed, the team would use not violence, but elaborate con games to trap the villains. In his role, Mr. Graves was a model of cool, deadpan efficiency.
But he was appalled when his agent sent him the script for the role of a pedophile pilot in “Airplane!” (1980). “I tore my hair and ranted and raved and said, ‘This is insane,’ he recalled on “Biography” in 1997. Some of the role’s lines (“Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?”) looked at first as if they could get him thrown in jail, never mind ruining his career. He told his agent to tell David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, the director-producers, to find themselves a comedian. He relented when the Zucker brothers explained that the secret of their spoof would be the deadpan behavior of the cast; they didn’t want a comedian, they wanted the Peter Graves of “Fury” and “Mission: Impossible.”
Mr. Graves used his familiar earnest, all-American demeanor in service of some of the comic movie’s most outrageous moments. He reprised the role of Captain Oveur in “Airplane II” in 1982.
Starting in the mid-1980s Mr. Graves was the host of a number of television science specials on “Discover.” In 1987, he became the host of the Arts and Entertainment Network’s long-running “Biography” series, narrating the lives of figures like Prince Andrew, Muhammad Ali, pioneers of the space program, Churchill, Ernie Kovacs, Edward G. Robinson, Sophia Loren, Jackie Robinson, Howard Hughes, Steven Spielberg and Jonathan Winters.
In 1997, Mr. Graves was the subject of his own “Biography” presentation, “Peter Graves: Mission Accomplished.” In 2002, Mr. Graves was interviewed for a special about the documentary series, “Biography: 15 Years and Counting.”
Mr. Graves won a Golden Globe Award in 1971 for his performance in “Mission: Impossible” and in 1997, he and “Biography” won an Emmy Award for outstanding informational series.
In 1998, he joined his wife, Joan, in an effort to get Los Angeles to ban gasoline-powered leaf blowers from residential areas, testifying before the City Council, “’We’re all victims of these machines.”
In addition to his brother, he is survived by his wife, Joan Graves, and three daughters, Amanda Lee Graves, Claudia King Graves and Kelly Jean Graves.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Operatic Film Star
MGM, via Photofest - Kathryn Grayson in “Kiss Me Kate.”
February 19, 2010
Kathryn Grayson, Operatic Film Star, Dies at 88
By ANITA GATES
Kathryn Grayson, the petite singer and actress whose operatic voice and campus-sweetheart beauty embodied the glamour of Hollywood movie musicals in the 1940s and ’50s, died Wednesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 88. Her death was confirmed by her secretary of 31 years, Sally Sherman.
Ms. Grayson, a coloratura soprano, was best known for three film roles: the movie hopeful who attracts the attentions of two sailors (Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra) on shore leave in Hollywood in “Anchors Aweigh” (1945); Magnolia Hawks, the captain’s innocent daughter, who falls for the handsome gambler Gaylord Ravenal (Howard Keel), in the Technicolor remake of “Show Boat” (1951); and the sophisticated, comically shrewish actress starring in a Shakespearean musical with her ex-husband (Mr. Keel again) in “Kiss Me Kate” (1953), Hollywood’s adaptation of the Broadway hit.
MGM - Ms. Grayson flanked by Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in “Anchors Aweigh.”
Her screen duets with Mr. Keel included “Make Believe” and “You Are Love” from “Show Boat,” “So in Love” from “Kiss Me Kate” and “Lovely to Look At” from the film of the same name. Along with Sinatra, she also introduced movie audiences to “Time After Time.”
After her movie career, during which she often played opera stars, she went on to perform in actual operas, primarily in summer theaters. She also toured the country in the 1980s and ’90s with a one-woman stage show; in the late ’90s, she toured with an old movie co-star, Van Johnson.
In 1996, looking back at her experiences in Hollywood, Ms. Grayson shared her thoughts about the death of American movie musicals with The New York Times. “The audience did not change,” she said. “The studios changed. They wanted to make cheap movies and grab the money and run.”
Zelma Kathryn Elisabeth Hedrick was born on Feb. 9, 1922, in Winston-Salem, N.C., the third child of Charles and Lillian Hedrick. The family moved to Kirkwood, Mo., near St. Louis, where she studied voice and aspired to an opera career. Her parents moved to California, and when she was 15 she was signed by Red Seal, the classical arm of RCA Victor Records. Seen and heard by MGM executives, she was persuaded to abandon her opera ambitions and do her singing in the movies instead.
She made her film debut in the title role in “Andy Hardy’s Private Secretary” (1941), opposite Mickey Rooney. This, the seventh full-length feature in the series about wholesome prewar teenagers, gave the 19-year-old Ms. Grayson the opportunity to sing Johann Strauss’s “Voices of Spring” and the mad-scene aria from Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” onscreen.
Over the next 15 years she made 20 films, including “That Midnight Kiss” (1949) and “The Toast of New Orleans” (1950), both with the tenor Mario Lanza; “So This Is Love” (1953), a biography of the opera star Grace Moore; “It Happened in Brooklyn” (1947), a romantic musical in which Sinatra starred as a soldier home from the war; and her disappointing swan song, “The Vagabond King” (1956), a costume musical set in 15th-century France.
She never made it to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, but she did appear on Broadway, replacing Julie Andrews as Guenevere in “Camelot” in 1962. The following year she began a national tour of the show but dropped out because of what was described as nervous exhaustion.
Ms. Grayson also acted in a handful of television series, beginning in the 1950s. She was nominated for a 1956 Emmy Award for her dramatic role in an episode of “General Electric Theater.” Her final screen appearance was in 1989 on the CBS detective series “Murder, She Wrote,” one of three she made on that show as a small-town gossip.
In 1941, when Ms. Grayson was 19, she eloped with John Shelton, an actor and singer, whom she divorced in 1946. She and the radio singer Johnnie Johnston were married from 1947 to 1951 and had a daughter, Patricia Towers, who survives her, along with two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
Ms. Grayson never seemed to consider her film career life-defining, perhaps because it was something of an accident. “After seeing my screen test, I wanted desperately to get out of my contract,” she told Hedda Hopper in a 1951 interview for The Los Angeles Times. However, she added, she had grown to enjoy movie acting: “If you don’t get fun out of a particular type of work, why do it?”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 20, 2010
An obituary on Friday about the actress and singer Kathryn Grayson referred incorrectly to the opera singer Grace Moore, whom Ms. Grayson portrayed in the 1953 film “So This Is Love.” Ms. Moore was not paralyzed. The obituary also erroneously attributed a distinction to Ms. Grayson’s on-screen performance of the song “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Irene Dunne sang it in the 1935 film “Roberta,” 17 years before Ms. Grayson sang it in “Lovely to Look At”; Ms. Grayson did not “introduce movie audiences” to the song.
The London Independent obituary has this curious paragraph: With her heart-shaped face, turned-up nose and ample bust, she portrayed a more mature persona than the young Durbin, and in 1946 Pasternak signed another soprano, Jane Powell, but the two were not rivals – while Powell's films had great appeal for teenagers and paired her romantically with adolescent males, Grayson's leading men included Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Mario Lanza and Howard Keel. Keel, a frequent co-star, described her as "the most beautiful woman in the history of movies"
The Telegraph obit has this opening paragraph: Possessed in youth of an hour-glass figure and a chest appropriate to a much bigger voice, she had a pert expression, bee-stung lips and a retroussé nose that her studio, if not always her public, thought would be irresistible. She appeared in 20 films, all but three for MGM – but only one, the 1952 remake of Show Boat, was a big hit.
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