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PART ONE
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of TheColumnists.com
Few among us failed to hear about the deaths of such super-celebrities as Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett or Patrick Swayze in 2009. The tabloids were full of news about them all year and their obituaries were just the start of the flood of articles and columns about them.
But each year about this time, I take it upon myself to notify our readers of the passing of many, many more celebrities whose deaths failed to churn up headlines around the world. This is by no means the full list. Rather it's MY list of the people I'm going to miss for a variety of reasons now that they're gone.
For instance, you may not even know who Sir John Mortimer was, but he was a major player in my life over the past couple of decades. He wasn't an actor, though he often appeared on camera. He was the British lawyer who turned author and created one of TV's most beloved characters, Horace Rumpole, whose comic courtroom adventures in the TV series "Rumpole of the Bailey" delighted millions of fans around the world, many of whom also devoured the many books Mortimer wrote about Rumpole.
My final tribute to Sir John can be found elsewhere in this edition--a reprint from the past year's archives--but here is the place for me to tell you about some other beloved figures that you may recall very fondly indeed. I'm presenting them to you in several categories, in alphabetical order and NOT in order of their importance to me or anyone else.
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Died March 13, Age 85  BETSY BLAIR with Ernest Borgnine in the Oscar-winning "Marty" in 1955. |
BETSY BLAIR will always be remembered best for her incredibly moving performance as the plain, but loving woman Ernest Borgnine romances in the Oscar-winning 1955 movie version of "Marty." Stage struck at an early age, she met and fell in love with dancer Gene Kelly when she was 17 and they both were little known. They were married from 1941-57, during which time he became a film superstar and her career languished. She was even blacklisted during the McCarthy Era for her Marxist ideas. Though she was nominated for an Oscar for "Marty," she had to go to Europe to find work on film. She divorced Kelly and eventually married Czech director Karel Reisz in 1963. She worked sporadically in films and TV and died of cancer in London. |
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Died April 12, Age 56  |
MARILYN CHAMBERS was the IVORY SNOW girl until her first porn film, "Behind the Green Door," was released and she became the hottest property in the porn world--a beautiful woman who actually liked to do all that nasty stuff. It ruined her deal with the soap company and fixed it so she'd never be able to get a really good role in an "A" movie, although she did star in David Cronenberg's 1977 horror movie, "Rabid." She was still a valuable name in certain circles and her '"Insatiable" is widely considered the quintessential porn flick. She died of a a brain hemorrhage in the mobile home where she lived in Santa Clarita, Calif. |
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Died May 4, Age 75  |
DOM DE LUISE was a guy you couldn't possible dislike. In my one interview with him in the 1980s, he was so jolly that you had to smile all the time, even when he moaned about his diet woes while trying to eat all the bread on the table. The chubby comic actor was very inventive at finding ways to earn decent money. He did cartoon voiceovers, wrote cook books, did TV show hosting gigs (like "Candid Camera"), and even did a magic act. (I once saw him do that at Radio City Music Hall!) He had tight friends in Hollywood who wanted him in all their pictures, among them Burt Reynolds and Mel Brooks. He had three talented sons, who have all made a mark in show business. He died from kidney failure and respiratory problems complicated by his diabetes. |
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Died Jan. 17, Age 84  SUSANNA FOSTER cringes away from Claude Rains in the 1943 "Phantom of the Opera." |
In the late 1930s, Hollywood had a great thirst for beautiful young girls who were just emerging from puberty, equipped with big singing voices. Judy Garland and Deanna Durbin established the formula and were the reigning musical superstars of MGM and Universal studios. Minnesota's Susanna Foster was signed by MGM at age 12 for a film that was never made. She turned down the lead role in MGM's "National Velvet" because it wasn't a singing role. MGM dropped her, but she made her debut for Paramount in "TheGreat Victor Herbert" (1939) and scored her greatest triumph when Universal used her as the female lead opposite Claude Rains in the Technicolor "Phantom of the Opera" in 1943. Possessed of a big operatic voice, Foster peaked early and retired from films in 1945, but worked on in musical theater and in television. Divorced and no longer a star name, she ended up working as a receptonist and answering service phone operator. She died at a retirement home for actors in Englewood, N.J., where she had been living since her late 70s. |
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Died Sept. 21, age 60  Robert Ginty with John Houseman in TV's "The Paper Chase" |
ROBERT GINTY was one of the original cast members of CBS' acclaimed 1978 "The Paper Chase" TV series, based on the hit movie. He played law student Thomas Anderson, a member of the student group struggling to get through the tough class taught by Prof. Kingsfield (John Houseman). He did not return to the cast when the show was picked up three additional seasons on the Showtime pay cable network. In real life, he married actress Francine Tacker, who played Elizabeth Logan on the series. Ginty scored a leading role in a hit "B" movie--"The Exterminator"--in 1980 and went on to a reasonably busy career as a star or director in "B" action movies. He was married to his third wife, Michelle, when he succumbed to cancer. |
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Died March 29, Age 89  |
MONTE HALE was one of the last "singing cowboy" stars developed by Republic studios, where both Gene Autry and Roy Rogers became stars. He came along a bit too late for lasting fame, but managed to hit the last wave of popularity for "B" westerns in the late 1940s and even had his own comic book (see illustration). His films are mostly forgotten today--"Prince of the Plains," "Law of the Golden West," etc. But he managed to find work in supporting roles in the 1950s--he was in George Stevens "Giant"--and worked steadily at rodeos and western shows until those ceased to exist. In 2004, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. |
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Died Oct. 30, age 76.  Michelle Triola Marvin with actor Lee Marvin at the Academy Awards show in 1966. |
Michelle Triola is best remembered as the woman who established the legal precedent of "palimony" by suing actor Lee Marvin for a share of his wealth after having lived with him from 1965-70 as his common law wife. She changed her surname legally to Marvin though the couple never married. She lost the suit and never collected any money from Marvin. In her professional life, Triola was a lounge singer and dancer who appeared as a dancer in the original Broadway production of "Flower Drum Song." She later played a guest role on TV's "Diagnosis Murder" after she began dating actor Dick Van Dyke. She seemed a normal, somewhat charming lady when I met her once at a Hollywood party and shared a table with her and Van Dyke, with whom she lived from 1976 until her death from lung cancer last October. |
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Died Aug. 15, age 74.  Duke Mitchell, left, clowns with a chimp and Sammy Petrillo while promoting their only film, "Bela Lugosi Meets A Brooklyn Gorilla." |
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SAMMY
PETRILLO had one of the most oddball careers in show business
history. His mother was Alice Faye's double and his father a
Catskills comic. While still in high school, someone noticed
his new short haircut and told him he looked just like comedian
Jerry Lewis, then becoming a rage on early live television. Petrillo
worked up a routine imitating Lewis, which comedian Milton Berle
saw. Berle arranged a meeting with Lewis, who signed 16-year-old
Petrillo to play him as a baby in a sketch on hisnext "Colgate
Comedy Hour" gig with partner Dean Martin. Lewis was not amused, though, when Petrillo teamed up with singer Duke Mitchell and did a pseudo Martin & Lewis act. Mitchell and Petrillo were hired to more or less pretend they were Martin & Lewis in the 1952 horror-comedy "Bela Lugosi Meets A Brooklyn Gorilla," an awful film that enraged Lewis. Petrillo went out as a single later, but without any real success. Mitchell died in 1981 and at the time of his death Petrillo was running a comedy club called The Nut House in Pittsburgh, PA. He died of cancer. |
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Died Jan. 1, 2009, age 84.  |
EDMUND PURDOM was the handsome son of a British film critic and began his acting career on the English stage in his early 20s. While touring America witih Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in 1951-52, he attracted the attention of Hollywood agents and landed small roles in "Titanic" (1953) and "Julius Caesar" (1953). His first big break came when Mario Lanza dropped out of MGM's 1954 "The Student Prince" after recording all the songs. Purdom was cast in his place and lip-synched the songs. Critics howled. Then, when Marlon Brando balked at playing the lead role in the big budget 20th Century-Fox production of Mika Waltari's best-seller "The Egyptain," the studio gambled on Purdom, casting him in the role. Critics howled again. They kept on howling when he landed the lead opposite Lana Turner in another spectacle, "The Prodigal." These and the other major films he landed all were box office disappointments and Purdom never was an "A" player again. He died of heart failure in Rome, where his career had centered in his later years. |
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Died May 4, age 93.  JANE RANDOLPH is stalked by a killer in the classic 1942 horror movie "The Cat People" |
JANE RANDOLPH was a bit player at Warners when RKO picked up her contract and, for a brief time, turned her into one of Hollywood's most popular film noir leading ladies in films like "Railroaded" (1947) --and a "scream queen" in some classic horror movies, including "Cat People," "Curse of the Cat People" and "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein." She retired from films in the late 1940s after marrying into Spanish high society and lived the rest of her life as a society matron, dividing her time between Los Angeles and Gstaad, Switzerland, where she died. |
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Died Dec. 20, age 91.  |
Comic actor ARNOLD STANG once described himself as "a frightened chipmunk," which pretty well says it all about the odd little fellow who sort of sounded like a chipmunk, too. A radio performer from childhood--he was on the classic kid show "Let's Pretend"--and gradually moved up to adult roles with the help of radio stars Henry Morgan, EddieCantor and Milton Berle, who all used him in their shows. He was in movies from the early 1940s and became a regular on Berle's early TV show. He and Arnold Schwarzenegger were partnered in the muscle man's first movie, "Hercules in New York" (1970) and he was the voice of Hanna-Barbera's cartoon character "Top Cat." He died of pneumonia. |
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Died Nov. 27. Age 87.  |
AL ALBERTS was the lead singer for The Four Aces, one of the most popular male singing groups of the 1950s with a long string of hits including "Tell Me Why," "Perfidia," "Three Coins in the Fountain" and "Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing," which the group sang behind the main titles of the hit 1955 film of the same name. Alberts was one of the many Philadelphia boy singers who became chart-toppers in the 1950s and 1960s. Alberts' and the Four Aces first breakthrough hit was "It's No Sin," which brought them a major recording contract. After the group broke up, Alberts became a long-running star of the Philadelphia TV show "Al Alberts Showcase," which ran for 34 years on local TV there until his official retirement in 1994. He died of kidney disease. |
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Died March 7, Age 70  |
Chances are you've heard JIMMY BOYD sing sometime during the past several weeks. His recording of "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" is played just about around the clock during the holidays. He recorded it for Columbia at age 11 and it quickly became a million seller. It still sells every year and by now has racked up 60 million sales. Boyd never duplicated that sensational first smash hit and his career as an actor, which began in 1956 and included many roles in movies and TV shows. He was married twice--his first wife was TV's "Batgirl," Yvonne Craig--and divorced twice. He died of cancer. |
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Died Oct. 13, age 82.  |
AL MARTINO
was another of the Philadelphia boy singers who made it big in
the 1950s, first scoring with the No.1 hit song "Here in
My Heart" made for a local Philadelphia label. Though Tony
Bennett had a bigger-selling version of the song, Martino's record
earned him a Capitol recording contract which produced a number
of major hits, including "Take My Heart" and "Rachel." Martino had hoped earlier to be an opera-style singer like his friend and one-time roommate, Mario Lanza, but he found ready success in clubs as a pop singer and re-invented himself several times over the years. Among his later hits: "Spanish Eyes" In 1972, he landed the role of Johnny Fontane, the Frank Sinatra-like singer embraced by the Mafia in "The Godfather" and his career spiked again. He was still an active perfomrer at the time of his death. |
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April 16, age 75.  James Houston with wife Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. They co-authored the best-seller "Farewell To Manzanar," the story of her childhood in a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II. |
For a short time in the 1980s, JAMES D. HOUSTON and I were neighbors in Santa Cruz, Calif., where he was one of the community's leading literary figures. We attended the same college, San Jose State, which is where he met future wife Jeanne Wakatsuki. His nine novels, starting with "Gig," were filled with his personal experiences and were widely viewed as the work of a gifted writer. His only big commecial success was his wife's story, "Farewell To Manzanar," about her childhood in a World War II internment camp for Americans of Japanese ancestry. The book became an acclaimed 1976 made-for-television movie directed by John Korty for Universal Television and NBC. Houston, his wife and Korty received Emmy nominations for the teleplay. Houston died of complications from lymphoma. He's survived by wife Jeanne and three children. |
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Farewells to Michael Jackson, David Carradine, Dennis Cole, Mollie Sugden, Molly Bee, Phil Carey, Henry Gibson, Pat Hingle, Ed McMahon, Beverly Roberts, Olga San Juan, James Whitmore, Ron Silver, Gale Storm, Claude Berri, Maurice Jarre, Jack Cardiff, Howard Zieff, Mary Travers and many more. |
©2010 by Ron Miller. This column first posted Jan. 4, 2010.
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