published 19/06/1959 at 17:44 PM by Jack Smith

Actress - Born Ethel Mae Blythe on Aug. 15, 1879 in Philadelphia, PA - Died June 18, 1959 of heart ailment in Beverly Hills, CA

Ethel Barrymore was the queen of the American theater's most illustrious family and a dominant figure of the stage and screen for nearly 60 years.

As a young actress, Barrymore was stately and regal and went from hit to hit, enchanting audiences with her eloquently husky voice and her elegant stage presence. It was said that as many as 15 suitors had sought the hand of the statuesque star.

She had first appeared on the motion picture screen in 1914 in "The Nightingale." Although several other films followed she was dissatisfied with the medium and returned to Broadway.

By 1928, she had reached such heights that they built the "Ethel Barrymore Theater" in her honor on West 47th St. and she opened there in "The Kingdom of God."

Barrymore returned to Hollywood in 1933 to make "Rasputin and the Empress," the only film in which she appeared with her brothers Lionel and John. It was 11 years before she came back to Hollywood for "None But the Lonely Heart," for which she won a an Oscar for best supporting actress.

— Jack Smith in the Los Angeles Times June 19, 1959

published 01/12/1986 at 17:48 PM by Cathleen Decker

Actor - Born Archibald Leach on Jan. 18, 1904 in Bristol, United Kingdom - Died Nov. 29, 1986 of stroke in Davenport, IA

Cary Grant was the personification of the self-made man: a one-time child acrobat who had transformed himself into the sophisticated and urbane ideal of men and women throughout the world.

The career that brought him two Oscar nominations ("Penny Serenade," 1941, "None But the Lonely Heart," 1944) and finally a special Oscar in 1970 for "sheer brilliance" began with one desperately simple desire: to get out of Bristol, England.

Virtually from the beginning, when he proved a straight foil for Mae West and then caught his stride in the light comedies of the late 1930s, turning roles for Cary Grant into Cary Grant roles, he magically plied his craft, entertaining his public with interwoven reserve, humor and lightly smoldering charm.

From nasty con man in "Sylvia Scarlett" to absent-minded scientist in "Bringing Up Baby," from rough-hewn city editor in "His Girl Friday" to charming fortune hunter in "Suspicion," from cool counterspy in "Notorious" to reformed cat burglar in "To Catch a Thief," he was the enticing, civilized gentleman women dreamed of for five decades.

But there was more to Cary Grant than that, a thoughtful side that expressed itself in "None But the Lonely Heart," a somber 1944 film reminiscent of his English childhood. But Grant, too, saw the limits of what his audience wanted, and with few exceptions he gave them just that.

"I enjoyed making "None But the Lonely Heart," but it was accepted by the critics, not the public," he later said. "They wanted me to make them laugh.

"I remember this absolutely marvelous feeling when a great laugh went up at something I had done or, even better, at something I had added myself. I felt so good. All the people at that moment had forgotten all their troubles. . . . Perhaps just a twist of my head sets them off."

But he rankled at criticism that he actually played only one role—Cary Grant.

"I've often been accused by the critics of being myself on the screen," he said. "But being one's self is more difficult than you'd suppose. Anyway, who else would I be? Marlon Brando?"

— Cathleen Decker in the Los Angeles Times Dec. 1, 1986

published 15/09/1982 at 17:52 PM by John-Thor Dahlburg and Jack Jones

Actress - Born Nov. 12, 1929 in Philadelphia, PA - Died Sept. 14, 1982 of automobile accident preceded by a stroke in Monaco Hospital, Monaco

Grace Kelly was an Academy Award-winning actress and princess whose cool beauty, glamour and sophistication made her the ideal movie star.

Kelly made her debut on Broadway as the captain's daughter in "The Father," opening in July 1949. She went on to act in television shows, then started her movie career.

Her motion picture debut was not a big one. She had only a small part in "Fourteen Hours," filmed in New York in 1951. It was in fall 1951 that her film career really began: She went to Hollywood to be Gary Cooper's Quaker wife in a memorable western, "High Noon."

MGM signed her to a seven-year contract and Kelly went to Africa for "Mogambo," in which she starred with Clark Gable. After that came Alfred Hitchcock's "Dial M for Murder," then "Rear Window."

It was for her role as the bitter wife of a has-been alcoholic actor (played by Bing Crosby) in the 1954 film "Country Girl" that she won an Oscar.

Some of her other films included "The Bridges at Toko-Ri" with William Holden, "The Swan" and "Green Fire" with Stewart Granger.

Kelly walked away from a meteoric film career after only 11 films to wed Prince Rainier III of Monaco, who relentlessly pursued her after they met at the Cannes Film Festival. Kelly married Rainier in 1956, one of the most publicized events of the 20th century, marking the union of two elites.

She restricted her stage appearances to an occasional poetry reading, usually to support charitable causes. She died Sept. 14, 1982, when she suffered a stroke while driving and her car careened off of a mountainside.

— John-Thor Dahlburg and Jack Jones in the Los Angeles Times April 7, 2005 and Sept. 15, 1982

published 02/08/2001 at 18:04 PM by Eric Lax

Actor | Comedian - Born Joseph Francis Keaton on Oct. 4, 1895 in Piqua, KS - Died Feb. 1, 1966 of lung cancer in Woodland Hills, CA

Buster Keaton was born with the movies in 1895. He learned his timing and honed his comic instincts in vaudeville, beginning at age 5 as the youngest member of the Three Keatons.

His parents, Joe and Myra, used their child as a prop; he was, his biographer Jeffrey Vance writes, "routinely thrown about the stage, and occasionally into the audience, by his irascible father."

For anyone who delights in cinematic sight gags, silents are golden. Whether it was Harold Lloyd dangling from a clock, or Charlie Chaplin spinning on roller skates, or Lillian Gish on an ice floe, actors soon developed an eloquence that needed no words, and few matched the majestically stony countenance of Buster Keaton.

What needs to be said as Keaton opens a newspaper that unfolds and unfolds until it is the size of a bedsheet and envelops him in "The High Sign," or as he spills a bottle of glue on his counter in "The Haunted House," or as he does a swan dive, in "Hard Luck," into the cement next to the pool, leaving a large hole? The visual punch lines speak for themselves.

There was, in fact, no use for dialogue in any of the 45 two-reel and feature silent films he made starting with "The Butcher Boy" in 1917 and ending with "Steamboat Bill, Jr." in 1928.

The advent of talking pictures in 1927 ruined the careers of many actors who looked great mouthing dialogue but had terrible delivery or accents. The problem for Keaton after the silent era was not his voice but rather the studios' insistence that virtually every second of talkies have somebody saying something, regardless of whether it advanced the story. In Keaton's case, words failed him. Nothing was as articulate as his carefully planned pratfalls.

Although Keaton worked almost steadily until his death in 1966, none of his performances in those ensuing 40 years match the incandescence of his early work. Many of the half a dozen MGM films that Keaton made in the 1930s were his greatest commercial successes, but the studio clearly didn't know how to transfer the silent specialness of Keaton to talkies. In his early films, Keaton was a controlled improviser. MGM turned him into a scripted comic, and he disliked these pictures because they came at the expense of comedy and at the promotion of farce.

[Updated Oct 28, 2010: An earlier version said Keaton's death was in 1968, he died in 1966.]

— Eric Lax in the Los Angeles Times Aug. 2, 2001

published 08/09/2008 at 18:16 PM

Actress - Born Anita Pomares on Aug. 4, 1910 in Flushing, NY - Died Sept. 6, 2008 in Van Nuys, CA

Anita Page costarred with some of the giants of film — including Lon Chaney, Ramon Novarro, Buster Keaton and Joan Crawford — at the height of her career.

She costarred in "The Broadway Melody," the 1929 film that was the first talking movie to win the best picture Academy Award. Her performances in "Telling the World," "Our Dancing Daughters" — one of three films she appeared in with Crawford — and "While the City Sleeps" with Chaney made her a star in 1928.

By the late 1920s, the petite, blond actress was reportedly receiving 10,000 fan letters a week. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was said to be a regular correspondent.




— Los Angeles Times Sept. 8, 2008

published 09/03/1971 at 18:27 by Dick Main

Actor | Comedian - Born April 20, 1893 in Burchard, NE - Died March 8, 1971 of cancer in Beverly Hills, CA

Harold Lloyd was a comedian who bumbled through more than 300 films as a bespectacled victim of life’s difficulties. A pair of lens-less spectacles that cost 75 cents helped Lloyd win movie stardom and a fortune.

The pseudo horn-rimmed spectacles became his trademark and his usual role of a young and earnest man involved in improbable situations was familiar to millions around the world.

In "Safety Last" (1923), he played a timid store clerk turned "human fly" who was required to climb a 12-story building. The script called for him to clutch a clock hand at a dizzying height while a mouse ran up his leg.

His films grossed more than $35 million around the world in the 1920s and 1930s and brought in more millions in reissued releases. Other films he is remembered for are "The Freshman" (1925), "For Heaven's Sake" (1926) and "Speedy" (1928).

Lloyd’s first screen role was that of an Indian — a $3-a-day job as an extra in the winter of 1912-1913. He worked as an extra at Universal Studio and later joined Hal Roach as a comedian. In his first pictures, he was Lonesome Luke, an oddly dressed character with a black- and white-striped shirt and a double dab of moustache. The comedian later formed his own company, and the firm’s first picture, "Girl Shy" (1924), grossed nearly $2 million.

In 1952 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored Lloyd as a "master comedian and good citizen."

Reputed to be one of Hollywood’s wealthiest stars, Lloyd devoted his "retirement" years to fraternal orders, sports and hobbies — activities upon which he expended as much time and energy as he did on his film career. His wife, the former actress Mildred Davis who once played his leading lady, died in August 1969.

Ill-fortune entered Lloyd’s life about 18 months before his death. A kidney ailment was finally diagnosed as cancer and on March 8, 1971, he died in his Beverly Hills home.

— Dick Main in the Los Angeles Times March 9, 1971

published 18/06/1967 at 18:41 PM

Actor | Singer | Writer - Born Nov. 20, 1891 in Richmond, United Kingdom - Died June 17, 1967 of stroke in Surrey, England, United Kingdom

Veteran stage and screen actor Reginald Denny appeared in more than 200 motion pictures, including "Around the World in 80 Days" and "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House."

He also played Col. Pickering in "My Fair Lady" on Broadway with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews in 1957-59 and re-created the role at the Valley Music Theater and Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

Denny played his first stage role in London in 1899. He came to the United States in 1911 for a Broadway role in "Quaker Girl."

His film career began in 1920 when he started a series of 18 silent serials called "The Leather Pushers."

The debonair actor also was a designer and manufacturer of model airplanes and developed a radio-controlled target aircraft used by the armed forces in World War II.

— Los Angeles Times June 18, 1967

published 21/10/2010 at 10:44 PM by Michiko Kakutani

He provided the soundtrack for several generations of Americans trying to navigate the rocky shoals of romance and grapple with love and heartbreak. And he became one of 20th-century pop culture’s quintessential men of contradictions: the bullying tough guy whose singing could radiate a remarkable tenderness and vulnerability; the ring-a-ding-ding Vegas sophisticate with an existential outlook on life; the jaunty urbanite who could deliver a torch song like no one else. Fans could recognize his voice from two or three perfectly phrased syllables, and they knew him instantly from his style: the rakishly tilted hat, the coat slung over one shoulder, the Camels and Jack Daniel’s.

Frank Sinatra and ardent fans in Pasadena, Calif., in 1943.

He was the original teeny-bopper heartthrob and the harbinger of a new age of celebrity. When it snowed, one writer observed, “girls fought over his footprints, which some took home and stored in refrigerators.”

The story of Frank Sinatra’s rise and self-invention and the story of his fall and remarkable comeback had the lineaments of the most essential American myths, and their telling, Pete Hamill once argued, required a novelist, “some combination of Balzac and Raymond Chandler,” who might “come closer to the elusive truth than an autobiographer as courtly as Sinatra will ever allow himself to do.”

Now, with “Frank: The Voice,” Sinatra has that chronicler in James Kaplan, a writer of fiction and nonfiction who has produced a book that has all the emotional detail and narrative momentum of a novel.

Mr. Kaplan’s spirited efforts to channel his subject’s point of view can result in some speculative scenes, which make the reader race to the book’s endnotes in an attempt to identify possible source material. For instance Mr. Kaplan tries to recreate Sinatra’s tumultuous romance with Ava Gardner and tries, not always that convincingly, to map his complicated feelings about the mob. But at the same time Mr. Kaplan writes with genuine sympathy for the singer and a deep appreciation of his musicianship, and unlike gossipy earlier biographers like Kitty Kelley and Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, he devotes the better part of his book to an explication of Sinatra’s art: the real reason readers care about him in the first place.

If there aren’t any startling new insights about the music here that haven’t been made before by critics or by Will Friedwald’s superb book “Sinatra! The Song is You” (which drew on dozens of interviews with collaborators), Mr. Kaplan nonetheless does a nimble, brightly evocative job of tracing the development of Sinatra’s craft, showing how he assimilated early influences and gradually discovered a voice of his own.

He shows how Sinatra’s adolescent admiration of Bing Crosby (who pioneered a newly casual and direct form of address) and his youthful crush on Billie Holiday (whose emotionalism resonated with his own) shaped his ambitions. He shows how Sinatra emulated his early boss, the bandleader Tommy Dorsey, in everything from wardrobe and accouterments (including “Dorsey’s Courtley cologne, his Dentist Prescribed toothpaste”) to his stage presence and breath control. And he shows how diligently Sinatra worked on his diction, his phrasing and the storytelling aspects of his singing.

As Sinatra himself once explained, he usually began with a sheet of lyrics without music: “At that point, I’m looking at a poem. I’m trying to understand the point of view of the person behind the words. I want to understand his emotions. Then I start speaking, not singing the words, so I can experiment and get the right inflections. When I get with the orchestra, I sing the words without a microphone first, so I can adjust the way I’ve been practicing to the arrangement. I’m looking to fit the emotion behind the song that I’ve come up with to the music. Then it all comes together. You sing the song.”

That, of course, would remain the most singular aspect of Sinatra’s interpretive art: his ability to make each song his own, to convey its emotional essence by investing it with his own deepest feelings. The loneliness and yearning for love he felt as a child; the fear he experienced as a young singer setting out to make a name for himself; the high he enjoyed as the hot new phenom trailed by swooning girls; the pain and loss he suffered in the wake of the collapse of his marriage to Gardner: all were exposed in his singing, and combined with his extraordinary musicality and perfectionism, they gave him an intuitive connection with his audience and the abiding respect of his peers.

This book ends before Sinatra’s ascent to legendary status; it stops rather abruptly with his winning of the 1953 Academy Award for his supporting role in “From Here to Eternity,” leaving the reader thirsty for a portrait of his remaining years.

That Academy Award was Sinatra’s comeback from a disastrous fall from grace during the postwar years (that escapist era when silly novelty songs were popular, and Sinatra was forced to sing ridiculous things like the “Woody Woodpecker” song), when his divorce from his first wife, Nancy, and his turbulent relationship with Gardner had turned him into tabloid fodder.

Through sheer will and talent, Sinatra would pull himself out of the career gutter — his own publicist George Evans had predicted he would soon be “dead professionally” — and by taking the sort of deal offered new artists (not onetime superstars) and covering his own recording costs, he would go on to reinvent himself, creating at Capitol Records albums like “Only the Lonely” and “In the Wee Small Hours” that would become indisputable classics.

In recounting his subject’s rise and fall and rise again — all before the age of 40 — Mr. Kaplan gives us a wonderfully vivid feel for the worlds Sinatra traversed, from Hoboken and New York to Hollywood and Las Vegas, as well as the rapidly shifting tastes in music that shaped him and were later shaped by him. He introduces us to Sinatra collaborators like Nelson Riddle and rivals like Crosby and Eddie Fisher, and along the way he scatters some delightfully vivid cameos of acquaintances and friends. For instance he describes Tommy Dorsey’s influence as the “gravitational field of an enormous dark star,” and the movie producer Sam Spiegel as “an operator straight out of a Saul Bellow novel: heavy jawed, prow nosed and pinkie ringed.”

As for Sinatra’s hot temper and cold ambition, Mr. Kaplan writes that he would “step on or over everyone in his path until he grasped the brass ring,” that “the master plan for himself was exactly that: for himself. Alone.” Mr. Kaplan also reminds us, however, that Sinatra gave “the world his best self in his music.” And that music, in the end, remains the most revealing autobiography of the singer.

“Having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an overacute capacity for sadness as well as elation,” Sinatra once observed.

“Whatever else has been said about me is unimportant,” he added. “When I sing, I believe I’m honest.”

published 28/11/2010 at 11:00 PM by Stephen Holden

In “Frank: The Voice,” James Kaplan’s riveting 786-page biography of Frank Sinatra’s early years, the author pinpoints the moment in 1943 when the crooner’s new publicist, George B. Evans, came up with his first defining sobriquet.

Fourth billed at the Paramount Theater in New York, below Benny Goodman and His Famous Orchestra, and two comedy duos — the Radio Rogues and Moke and Poke — Sinatra’s name was accompanied by a slogan, “The Voice That Has Thrilled Millions.” The creakiness and sexlessness of those words made Evans cringe.

Certain he could come up with something better, Evans closed his eyes and imagined what drove Sinatra’s fans in bobby socks into a frenzy and suddenly realized he didn’t have to add anything. “All he had to do was subtract. Frank was just ... the Voice.”

If “the Voice” was later superseded by “the Chairman of the Board” and “Ol’ Blue Eyes,” it was the only major nickname to focus on the indispensable ingredient of Sinatra’s success. “Chairman” connotes power and “Ol’ Blue Eyes” longevity; “the Voice” evokes the intangible, mystical alchemy of sound, technique and emotion that fused when the skinny young Sinatra murmured tender endearments into a microphone.

The biography offers an almost day-by-day account of Sinatra’s volatile life and times from his difficult birth in 1915 to the evening in 1954 when his comeback from a severe career downturn was secured, and he was handed an Oscar for best supporting actor in “From Here to Eternity.”

The book does music history a huge favor by reminding us that from his days with Tommy Dorsey to the twilight of his Columbia years, Sinatra was a singularly incandescent vocal phenomenon.

Because in those years pop records were monaural, and the LP and commercial television arrived only in 1949 and ’51 respectively, the considerable Sinatra legacy from the ’40s and early ’50s seems small beside the tonnage of material from his last three decades now inundating the marketplace. The newest addition is a seven-DVD “Concert Collection” that amasses 14 hours of concert and television performances from the late ’50s through the ’80s, when Sinatra the ardent crooner had given way to the imperial swinger.

Although Sinatra went on to make his greatest records for Capitol in the mid-1950s and early ’60s — a period alluded to but not covered in the biography — even on the album widely regarded as his all-time masterpiece, “In the Wee Small Hours,” his singing is tinged with a noirish worldliness and a slight huskiness that steadily coarsened into the hard, punchy sound of the later years.

The continuing deluge of material from a period when everything was recorded, filmed and videotaped explains why generations of younger listeners are mostly familiar with the combative Rat Pack cutup and arena performer and remain only dimly aware of the transcendently beautiful sound of Sinatra in his prime.

The Voice didn’t emerge from nowhere. Sinatra, who had a prescient sense of his destiny along with unlimited ambition, immediately knew what he wanted when he encountered it and badgered fellow performers to teach him what he needed to know (Gene Kelly for dancing in the movie “Anchors Aweigh” and Montgomery Clift for acting in “From Here to Eternity”).

Bing Crosby, his primary inspiration to become a crooner, Mr. Kaplan writes, possessed a “matchlessly rich baritone” that was “simultaneously romantic and (ever so slightly) ironic” and adds, “While Bing’s power was his cool warmth, Frank’s was his unabashed heat.”

On a whim Sinatra attended a Jascha Heifetz concert at Carnegie Hall in 1940 and was captivated by the way “he could get to the end of the bow and continue without a perceptible missing beat in the motion.”

But his most important role model and father figure was the autocratic bandleader and trombonist Tommy Dorsey, whose long-lined phrasing and velvety timbre he strove to emulate.

“Sinatra had heard other singers, even very good ones, take a breath in the middle of a phrase, and he thought it sounded lousy — it showed artifice,” Mr. Kaplan writes. “Singing the phrase straight through showed he really understood, and meant, the words. He saw the way the girls stared at him as he sang. He was telling them something, a story of love, and they were listening.”

The biography doubts the myth that Sinatra built up his lung power, as Dorsey had, by swimming laps underwater. It also debunks another myth that blames Mitch Miller, Columbia Records’ head of artists and repertory, for sabotaging Sinatra’s career during its downswing. Sinatra was not forced to record novelties like “Mama Will Bark,” his notorious duet with the television personality Dagmar, in which he barked like a dog. Far from being Miller’s persecuted victim, Sinatra, in his desperate search for hits, eagerly went along with such stunts.

Another crucial contribution to the magic was the refining of Sinatra’s Hoboken diction with the aid of John Quinlan, a vocal coach and tenor who helped him to “stop sounding like a stevedore.”

“Week in and week out, Frankie did the vocal exercise: ‘Let us wander by the bay,’ running up the scale and back down in all 12 keys.” Quinlan “taught Sinatra that ‘brother’ had an ‘r’ at the end, a ‘th’ in middle. ‘While’ began with an exhalation, as if the ‘h’ came first.”

Without all of these elements, and the gorgeous hearts-and-flowers settings by his steady Columbia arranger Axel Stordahl, the alchemy of his two- or three-dozen greatest sides would not have gelled. But when it does, you are transported to a realm in the neighborhood of heaven.

You have only to listen to his recording of “Laura,” made on Oct. 22, 1947, to hear singing of surpassing beauty. Delivered as one long eloquent sigh of voice and strings, it is as intense a distillation of incorporeal yearning as pop music has produced.

Anna Maria Louisa Italiano, dite Anne Bancroft, née le 17 septembre 1931 à New York et morte le 6 juin 2005 à New York, est une actrice et réalisatrice américaine. Anna Maria Louisa Italiano est née le 17 septembre 1931 à New York, dans le quartier du Bronx, dans une famille d'immigrés italiens. Après des études scientifiques qui devaient la destiner au métier de laborantine, elle débute à la télévision (CBS) sous le nom de Anne Marno. Engagée par Darryl Zanuck pour la 20th Century Fox, elle débute au cinéma en 1952 dans Troublez-moi ce soir de Roy Ward Baker aux côtés de Marilyn Monroe et Richard Widmark.

En 1963, elle obtient l'Oscar de la meilleure actrice pour son rôle dans Miracle en Alabama. En 1964 elle épouse Mel Brooks, avec qui elle tourne plusieurs films, notamment To Be or Not to Be en 1983 ou Dracula, mort et heureux de l'être en 1995 aux côtés de Leslie Nielsen. Elle est connue du public, entre autres, pour son rôle de Mrs. Robinson dans le film Le Lauréat (1967) de Mike Nichols, au côté d’un débutant du nom de Dustin Hoffman. Elle a aussi marqué les esprits en tenant le premier rôle féminin d'Elephant Man de David Lynch, et en jouant la mère juive (et envahissante) de Harvey Fierstein dans Torch Song Trilogy. Elle meurt d'un cancer le 6 juin 2005 à l'hôpital du Mont-Sinaï, à New York.

Filmographie

Actrice

• 1952 : Troublez-moi ce soir (Don't bother to knock) de Roy Ward Baker
• 1953 : Les Plus grandes vedettes du monde (en) (Tonight We Sing) de Mitchell Leisen
• 1953 : Le Trésor du Guatemala (The Treasure of The Golden Condor) de Delmer Daves
• 1953 : The Kid From Left Field (en) de Harmon Jones
• 1953 : Les Gladiateurs (Demetrius and the Gladiators) de Delmer Daves
• 1954 : Par le feu et par l'épée (it) (The Raid) de Hugo Fregonese
• 1954 : Panique sur la ville (it) (Gorilla at Large) de Harmon Jones
• 1955 : A Life in the Balance de Harry Horner
• 1955 : New York confidentiel (en) (New York Confidential) de Russell Rouse
• 1955 : Le Roi du racket (en) (The Naked Street) de Maxwell Shane
• 1956 : La Charge des tuniques bleues (The Last Frontier) d'Anthony Mann
• 1956 : L'homme de San Carlos (en) (Walk The Proud Land) de Jesse Hibbs
• 1957 : Poursuites dans la nuit (Nightfall) de Jacques Tourneur
• 1957 : The Restless Breed d’Allan Dwan
• 1957 : The Girl in Black Stockings (en) d'Howard W. Koch
• 1962 : Miracle en Alabama (The Miracle Worker) d’Arthur Penn
• 1964 : Le Mangeur de citrouilles (The Pumpkin Eater) de Jack Clayton
• 1965 : Trente minutes de sursis (The Slender Thread) de Sydney Pollack
• 1966 : Frontière chinoise (Seven Women) de John Ford
• 1967 : Le Lauréat (The Graduate) de Mike Nichols
• 1972 : Les Griffes du lion (Young Winston) de Richard Attenborough
• 1974 : Le shérif est en prison (Blazing Saddles) de Mel Brooks
• 1975 : Le Prisonnier de la seconde avenue (The Prisoner of Second Avenue) de Melvin Frank : Edna
• 1975 : L'Odyssée du Hindenburg (The Hindenburg) de Robert Wise
• 1976 : La Dernière Folie de Mel Brooks (Silent movie) de Mel Brooks
• 1976 : Viol et Châtiment (Lipstick) de Lamont Johnson
• 1977 : Le Tournant de la vie (The Turning Point) de Herbert Ross
• 1977 : Jésus de Nazareth (Gesù di Nazareth - Jesus of Nazareth) de Franco Zeffirelli
• 1980 : Elephant Man (The Elephant Man) de David Lynch
• 1982 : Marco Polo de Giuliano Montaldo (TV)
• 1983 : To Be or Not To Be de Alan Johnson
• 1984 : À la recherche de Garbo (Garbo Talks) de Sidney Lumet
• 1985 : Agnès de Dieu (Agnes of God) de Norman Jewison
• 1986 : Goodnight, Mother de Tom Moore (en)
• 1987 : 84 Charing Cross Road (en) de David Hugh Jones (en)
• 1988 : Torch Song Trilogy de Paul Bogart
• 1989 : Bert Rigby, You're a Fool (en) de Carl Reiner
• 1992 : Lune de miel à Las Vegas (Honeymoon in Vegas) d'Andrew Bergman
• 1992 : Love Potion No. 9 de Dale Launer
• 1992 : En route pour Manhattan (Broadway Bound) de Paul Bogart
• 1993 : Nom de code : Nina (The Assassin) de John Badham
• 1993 : Malice de Harold Becker
• 1993 : Mr. Jones de Mike Figgis
• 1995 : Le Patchwork de la vie (How to Make an American Quilt) de Jocelyn Moorhouse
• 1995 : Week-end en famille (Home for the Holidays) de Jodie Foster
• 1995 : Dracula, mort et heureux de l'être (Dracula: Dead and Loving It) de Mel Brooks
• 1995 : Sunchaser (The Sunchaser) de Michael Cimino
• 1996 : Les Enfants perdus (Homecoming) de Mark Jean (TV)
• 1997 : À armes égales (GI Jane) de Ridley Scott
• 1997 : Critical Care (en) de Sidney Lumet
• 1997 : De grandes espérances (Great Expectations) d'Alfonso Cuarón
• 1997 : Fourmiz (Antz), (Voix), d’Eric Darnell et Tim Johnson
• 1999 : Il suffit d’une nuit (Up at the Villa) de Philip Haas
• 2000 : Au nom d'Anna (Keeping the Faith) d’Edward Norton
• 2001 : Beautés empoisonnées (Heartbreakers) de David Mirkin

Réalisatrice

• 1980 : Fatso

published 08/06/2005 at 11:38 PM by Matt Schudel

Anne Bancroft, the versatile actress who won an Academy Award for portraying Helen Keller's teacher in "The Miracle Worker," but who may be best remembered as the sultry suburban housewife who seduced Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate," died June 6 of uterine cancer at a New York hospital. She was 73.

In a career spanning more than 50 years, Ms. Bancroft won every major acting award -- the Oscar, Tony and Emmy -- and played such a range of roles that she defied typecasting. She performed opposite such stars as Anthony Hopkins, Sean Penn, Shirley MacLaine and two generations of Fondas, Henry and Jane, and was considered as formidable an acting talent as any of them.

"She was the most wonderfully rich, malleable, interesting, independent actress I ever worked with," Arthur Penn, who directed Ms. Bancroft in the stage and film versions of "The Miracle Worker," said several years ago. "She can play anything."

Besides her Academy Award for "The Miracle Worker" (1962), a role she originated on Broadway in 1959, Ms. Bancroft received Oscar nominations for "The Pumpkin Eater" (1964), "The Graduate" (1967), "The Turning Point" (1977) and "Agnes of God" (1985).

 She received a Tony Award in 1958 for her first starring role on Broadway, playing opposite Henry Fonda in "Two for the Seesaw." The following year, she won her second Tony for the role of Annie Sullivan in "The Miracle Worker," in which she was the teacher working with the blind and deaf Helen Keller, played by 12-year-old Patty Duke.

"She and I spent a moment in time that can never be re-created," a tearful Duke said yesterday from her home in California. "By her example, she was a teacher to me. What she gave me in those times has taken me through my whole life."

Ms. Bancroft lamented that "The Miracle Worker" had become overshadowed in recent years by her role as Mrs. Robinson in "The Graduate." Ms. Bancroft's stocking-clad leg arched across the movie poster, its signature song by Simon and Garfunkel ("Mrs. Robinson") was a huge hit, and the movie's themes of rebellion and alienation made it a cultural touchstone of its generation. With her low, smoky voice and her matter-of-fact seduction of the young college graduate played by Hoffman, Ms. Bancroft could almost be said to have seduced an entire nation.

In a statement, Mike Nichols, who directed "The Graduate," praised Ms. Bancroft for her "combination of brains, humor, frankness and sense. . . . Her beauty was constantly shifting with her roles, and because she was a consummate actress, she changed radically for every part."

In later years, Ms. Bancroft received praise for "Golda," her one-woman portrayal on Broadway of Israeli prime minister Golda Meir in 1977 and 1978; as a mother superior in "Agnes of God"; as the sympathetic wife of the unemployed Jack Lemmon in "Prisoner of Second Avenue" (1974); as a letter-writing bookworm in the charming "84 Charing Cross Road" (1986); as a centenarian widow of a Civil War veteran in "Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All" (1994). For her role as the mother of a mixed-race child in the TV film "Deep in My Heart" (1999), Ms. Bancroft won an Emmy Award.

Explaining her ability to play such diverse roles, she told the Virginian-Pilot in 2001, "To be an actress, you have to be a liar."

She was born Anna Maria Louisa Italiano on Sept. 17, 1931, into a family of Italian immigrants in the Bronx, N.Y. By age 4, she was taking dance and acting lessons. At 9, she wrote on the fence behind her family's house, "I want to be an actress."

She studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York before going to Hollywood in 1950. It was Darryl F. Zanuck, head of Twentieth Century Fox, who gave her the name Bancroft.

 Her first film, "Don't Bother to Knock" (1952), was with Marilyn Monroe and Richard Widmark. She also appeared with such bygone stars as Susan Hayward, Victor Mature and Cornel Wilde.

"I didn't even know what a serious actress was," she later said of her early foray in Hollywood. "I wanted to be a movie star."

In 1957, she quit Hollywood and returned to New York. Emerging from her training in Method acting at the Actors Studio, she was called a "female Marlon Brando."

"To be somebody, to me, meant to be Marlene Dietrich or Jean Harlow and drag fox furs around the floor," she said. "I had no idea that acting meant digging into yourself and coming up with something that resembled truth. That all came to me later. First I had to discover myself."

Director Penn picked her in 1958 for the role of a bohemian ballet dancer in "Two for the Seesaw," then chose her the following year for "Miracle Worker." To prepare for the demanding part as Annie Sullivan, a teacher who was losing her eyesight, Ms. Bancroft spent several weeks at a school for the blind in New York. She placed adhesive tape over her eyes, wore dark glasses and learned sign language. She and Duke became so proficient that they told jokes to each other backstage with their hands.

 In 1962, both actresses transferred their roles from stage to screen for the film version. When the Academy Awards were presented in 1963, Ms. Bancroft was performing on Broadway in "Mother Courage," and her Oscar was accepted by Joan Crawford.

After a busy and critically acclaimed decade, Ms. Bancroft stepped away from acting for several years in the early 1970s to raise her only son, Maximilian. She returned to the stage in 2002 after an absence of more than 20 years, in Edward Albee's "Occupant." She recently played herself on HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm."

She occasionally appeared in films directed by her husband, Mel Brooks. She recommended that he turn his film "The Producers" into a play, and it became a Broadway hit. Their 41-year marriage was considered one of the happiest unions in show business.

An early marriage to Milton A. May ended in divorce.

She is survived by her husband and son.

published 28/07/2013 at 11:52 PM

Chime dedicated to the Fuehrer has Austrian government in tizzy

VIENNA — Like many others in Austria’s countryside, a tower bell above the red-tiled rooftops of Wolfpassing village marks the passing of each hour with an unspectacular “bong.” But this bell is unique: It is embossed with a swastika and praise to Adolf Hitler.

And unlike more visible remnants of the Nazi era, the bell was apparently overlooked by official Austria up to now.

Ensconced in the belfry of an ancient castle where it was mounted by fans of the Nazi dictator in 1939, the bell has tolled on for nearly 80 years. It survived the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, a decade of post-war Soviet occupation that saw Red Army soldiers lodge in the castle and more recent efforts by Austria’s government to acknowledge the country’s complicity in crimes of that era and make amends.

Some of those efforts have focused on identifying relics of that time and ensuring they’re either removed or put in historical context. As an example, officials often cite government moral and material support for the restoration of the Mauthausen concentration camp, where a museum documents atrocities for school children and other visitors.

The Wolfpassing bell pays homage to Hitler for his 1938 annexation of Austria, a move supported back then by the vast majority of the nation’s citizens. It describes Hitler as “the unifier and Fuehrer of all Germans” and says he freed the “Ostmark” — Nazi jargon for Austria — “from the yoke of suppression by foreign elements and brought it home into the Great-German Reich.”

Local historian Johannes Kammerstaetter says most villagers would have known about it. But village mayor Josef Sonnleitner asserts even the villagers had no clue until the first media reports last month on the “Fuehrerglocke,” or “Fuehrer Bell.”

“Nobody cared until all this publicity,” he said on the telephone. He refused a request for a longer interview, saying he was busy for the next two weeks with haying.

In any case, the government’s recent sale of the castle — with all its historical trappings — has suddenly made the bell an issue beyond the sleepy village of 1,500 people about 100 kilometers (60 miles) west of Vienna.

In a country particularly sensitive about suggestions it has not fully faced its Nazi past, officials are scrambling for explanations of why the bell apparently evaded notice for so long. They also are under pressure to justify a ruling by the government agency in charge of historic monuments that it must remain part of the castle as part of its heritage— despite the refusal of the new owner to say what he plans to do with it.

Propagating Nazi values or praising the era is illegal in Austria. Kammerstaetter, the historian, has formally asked state prosecutors to examine whether the government’s sale of the bell is a criminal offence. He says the change of ownership could constitute a case of “spreading National Socialist ideology” on the part of the government agency in charge of state-owned property

Raimund Fastenbauer, a senior official of Vienna’s Jewish community, invokes other concerns, noting that other Hitler-era relics like the dictator’s house of birth in the western town of Braunau have become a magnet for neo-Nazis.

“I think the best thing would be if the bell disappeared and was buried somewhere,” he says.

For its part, the government says that the sale was legal, along with the decision to keep the bell in the belfry as an integral component of the castle.

Economics Minister Reinhold Mitterlehner says the agency overseeing the sale was not aware of the inscription.

He notes in a letter to Kammerstaetter that “the bell up to now was neither publicly displayed nor generally accessible,” adding that he does not see the sale as constituting a criminal offense.

Ernst Eichinger, a spokesman for the agency responsible for government real-estate, says that with a portfolio of more than 28,000 buildings — many of them huge — “we cannot search every centimeter” before a sale.

Concerns are heightened by the lack of clarity about what the new owner, Tobias Hufnagl, plans to do with the relict. Two web domains linked to him or his holding company, hufnagl.cc and thinvestments.com, did not open.

Sonnleitner, the Wolfpassing mayor, says has not been able to directly contact Hufnagl, despite weeks of trying.

published 23/07/2013 at 12:00 PM

BERLIN — The Simon Wiesenthal Center launched a poster campaign in several German cities Tuesday appealing for help in tracking down the last surviving Nazi war criminals not yet brought to justice, and promising compensation to those who provide useful information.

About 2,000 posters depicting the entrance gate of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz were put up in the cities of Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne asking the public to come forward with information that may lead to the arrest of Nazis some seven decades after the end of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

 “Unfortunately, very few people who committed the crimes had to pay for them,” Efraim Zuroff, the U.S.-based Jewish center’s top Nazi hunter, told reporters in Berlin. “The passage of time in no way diminishes the crimes.”

The Wiesenthal Center is asking for tips to be called in to a hotline in Germany with as much information as possible.

Underneath the black-and-white picture of the death camp on the poster, the following words are emblazoned in German on a blaring red background: “Late, but not too late. Millions of innocents were murdered by Nazi war criminals. Some of the perpetrators are free and alive! Help us take them to court.”

A reward of 5,000 euros ($6,580) will be paid for the information upon the indictment of a suspect, another 5,000 euros upon conviction, and a further 100 euros per day spent in prison — up to 150 days — for a total of 25,000 euros, Zuroff said.

Zuroff, who is the director of the center’s Israel office, estimated there are still about 60 people alive in Germany who are fit to stand trial for the crimes they allegedly committed. They are suspected of serving as guards at Nazi death camps or being members of death squads responsible for mass killings, particularly early in the war before the death camps were established.

The drive is part of the center’s “Operation Last Chance II” initiative.

It comes more than two years after German prosecutors said the successful conviction of former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk had set a precedent that allowed them to reopen hundreds of investigations and prosecute former death camp guards as accessories to murder, even if they could not prove the defendants personally killed anyone.

Demjanjuk was found guilty in May 2011 of thousands of counts of accessory to murder after a Munich court found he served as a death camp guard. He denied he had served as a guard and died while the case was under appeal.

published 18/06/2013 at 12:11 PM by Megan McDonough

William Z. Slany, a top State Department historian who helped oversee a study in the 1990s that exposed Nazi looting of Jewish property and that led to $8 billion in belated compensation for Holocaust victims and their families, died May 13 at his home in Reston. He was 84.

The cause was heart ailments, said his former wife, Beverly Zweiben.

Dr. Slany was the State Department’s chief historian from 1982 until his retirement in 2000. He drew the most attention for a massive, two-part study that burrowed into the history of Nazi Germany to expose the methodical theft of Jewish property.

The stolen assets encompassed jewelry and other valuables belonging to victims of the regime’s persecution. The looting was so extreme as to include gold teeth taken from concentration camp victims.

In addition, many European Jews had turned to Swiss banks for safekeeping of their savings during Hitler’s rule. Many of those account holders did not survive the Holocaust. Decades later, questions remained about the status of their assets.

A new wave of interest in the dormant, unclaimed accounts came in 1995, after then-Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (R-N.Y.) launched Senate banking committee hearings after being urged on by the World Jewish Congress.

The next year, President Bill Clinton tapped Stuart E. Eizenstat, an undersecretary of state who had served as a special envoy for property claims in Central and Eastern Europe, to investigate. Eizenstat asked Dr. Slany to help.

As the chief historian and principal author of the reports, Dr. Slany oversaw the declassification of nearly 1 million pages of documentation and the indexing of more than 15 million pages by the National Archives and Records Administration.

With contributions from 11 federal agencies, the report was one of the largest interagency historical efforts undertaken by the executive branch.

In an interview, Eizenstat praised Dr. Slany’s “credibility, integrity [and] sharp historian’s eye.”

“They should have been called the Slany Reports because he was the one that envisioned the work plan, stitched together the information, and drafted the report,” he said. “This was his product from start to finish.”

According to the investigation, many of the stolen assets were stored in ostensibly neutral nations, including Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and Argentina. The report’s sharpest criticism was of Switzerland, which was estimated to have possessed as much as $400 million in looted gold.

“The massive and systematic plundering of gold and other assets from conquered nations and Nazi victims was no rogue operation,” Eizenstat said in the 1997 preliminary report. “It was essential to the financing of the German war machine.”

That report also emphasized the shortcomings of the United States, particularly government officials’ reluctance after the war to aggressively seek compensation for Holocaust victims.

Jim Hoagland, a Washington Post foreign affairs columnist, called the preliminary report “a Matterhorn of integrity and truth-telling.” The initiative encouraged more than a dozen nations to set up their own investigative commissions. It also has been credited with setting the groundwork for later settlements, including a landmark $1.25 billion settlement by Swiss banks with Holocaust survivors and their families.

published 07/06/2006 at 12:18 PM by Christopher Lee

The CIA organized Cold War spy networks that included former Nazis and failed to act on a 1958 report that fugitive Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was living in Argentina, newly released CIA records show.

The CIA did not act on a report on the whereabouts of Nazi Adolf Eichmann.

The records were among 27,000 pages of documents made public yesterday at the National Archives. They shed new light on the secret protection and support given to former Nazi officials and Nazi collaborators by U.S. intelligence agencies as fighting communism became the central aim of American foreign policy in the years after World War II.

"It was not U.S. policy to track Nazi war criminals once the Cold War began," said historian Timothy Naftali of the University of Virginia, a Cold War expert who has studied the new documents.

"The CIA based its decisions about using former SS men or unreconstructed Nazis solely on operational considerations. . . . Hiring these tainted individuals brought little other than operational problems and moral confusion to our government's intelligence community," he added.

The subject of postwar collaboration between U.S. intelligence and former Nazis that the government sought to use in the struggle against the Soviet Union has been documented, but historians said the previously inaccessible documents have enabled them to fill in many blanks in the historical narrative.

 About 60,000 pages of CIA records had already been released since 1999, after a 1998 federal law opened up secret government files relating to war crimes by the German and Japanese governments during World War II.

Historians reviewing the records for the government published a 2004 book, "U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis," based on 240,000 pages of FBI records, 419 CIA files and 3,000 pages of U.S. Army information. It detailed the Army's postwar relationship with former officers of the German Wehrmacht's intelligence service, which are available at the National Archives.

The materials released yesterday include operational documents detailing the activities of the CIA and its contacts abroad, historians and other officials said during a news conference at the National Archives.

"It's a rare release of operational files," said Allen Weinstein, head of the National Archives and chairman of the interagency working group overseeing the declassification of records about World War II crimes and criminals. "The files are also more inclusive than any other CIA files made public before. . . . This time, the documents are nearly all without redactions, providing researchers and historians the clearest view yet of the postwar intelligence world."

The release of the records stalled last year with the deadline for the interagency project approaching when the CIA balked at declassifying more detailed documents about the agency's postwar ties to Nazis. But the CIA caved in under pressure from Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio), an author of the original legislation, and other prominent backers of that law. Congress passed a new law extending the life of the interagency panel by two years, to early 2007.

Some of the newly released documents show that between 1949 and 1955, the CIA organized "stay-behind" networks of German agents to provide intelligence from behind enemy lines, should the Soviet Union invade western Germany.

One network included at least two former Nazi SS members -- Staff Sgt. Heinrich Hoffman and Lt. Col. Hans Rues -- and one was run by Lt. Col. Walter Kopp, a former German army officer referred to by the CIA as an "unreconstructed Nazi." The network was disbanded in 1953 amid political concerns that some members' neo-Nazi sympathies would be exposed in the West German press.

In a March 1958 memo to the CIA, the West German foreign intelligence services (BND) wrote that Eichmann, a top Gestapo official who helped orchestrate the mass murder of Jews, "is reported to have lived in Argentina under the alias CLEMENS since 1952." The memo also mentioned a rumor that Eichmann lived in Jerusalem.

In fact, Eichmann was in Argentina and was using the name Ricardo Klement -- but apparently neither the CIA nor the West Germans acted on the information, Naftali said.

"Tragically, at the moment the CIA and the BND had this information the Israelis were temporarily giving up their search for Eichmann in Argentina because they could not figure out his alias," Naftali wrote in an analysis of the documents.

Eventually, Israeli Mossad agents abducted Eichmann in Buenos Aires on May 11, 1960. He was tried in Jerusalem, sentenced to death and hanged on May 31, 1962.

Robert Wolfe, a former federal archivist and an expert on captured German records, said the new CIA documents illustrate the "sorry results" of recruiting former Nazi intelligence personnel to U.S. efforts to keep the Soviet Union in check.

"The alleged intelligence those recruits peddled was mostly hearsay and gossip designed to tell their American interrogators what they wanted to hear, in the hope of escaping retribution for past crimes, or for mercenary gain, or for political agendas not necessarily compatible with American national interests," Wolfe said.

Walter Kopp was Lieutenant Colonel of the Wehrmacht under the Third Reich. After the Nazi defeat in 1945, he became the chief of one stay-behind networks in West Germany, code-named KIBITZ-15. The British and US intelligence services had set up clandestine anti-communist organisations supposed to "stay-behind" in case of a Soviet invasion. Walter Kopp was described by his own North-American handlers as an "unreconstructed Nazi," and the KIBITZ-15 network as "a group with Nazi tendencies" in CIA documents released in June 2006.

In May 1950 Kopp wrote a letter to High Commissioner McCloy stating that he and a group of his friends were concerned over what might happen in case of a Russian invasion of Germany and wished to place themselves at the disposal of the Americans. The offer must have appealed to the CIA since Walter Kopp was made chief agent of the KIBITZ stay-behind network. In May 1953 Kopp's contract with the CIA was terminated "on the friendliest terms".

published 15/10/2012 at 13:00 BST by John Sutherland

My Way has again been named the nation's funeral favourite, despite being a ditty of ineffable banality

Frank Sinatra performing in 1986

There is an intrinsic paradox to My Way being the pop song most commonly chosen as a funeral anthem by British people. Death is a solemn business and one shouldn't mock what is, for most of us, so distressing that thinking straight is difficult. But if the deceased really went through life doing everything "their" way, why choose, for their farewell, the same musical tribute as all the others?

Although the song is indelibly associated with Frank Sinatra and Shirley Bassey, the lyrics were composed by another singer-songwriter, Paul Anka. Those as close as I am to choosing their last song will recall Anka bursting onto the scene, aged 16, in 1957 with his No 1 hit, Diana. Its lyrics were of a feebleness which, to my ear, is still unrivalled:

    "I'm so young and you're so old
    This, my darling I've been told
    I don't care just what they say
    'Cause forever I will pray
    You and I will be as free
    As the birds up in the trees
    Oh, please, stay by me, Diana."

Ten years later the still youthful Anka adapted French hit Comme d'Habitude ("Like I Always Do"), which in turn was translated from an original English song For Me. He did it, said Anka, "for Frank". Apparently Ol' Blue Eyes was accompanied by "two mob guys" when the transaction happened. Offers beyond refusal, etc.

The 26-year-old Anka had undoubtedly made progress as a lyricist but My Way remains a ditty of ineffable banality. The rhymes come in like sledgehammer blows to the skull:

    "And now the end is near
    So I face the final curtain
    My friend, I'll say it clear
    I'll state my case of which I'm certain"

The "case" (is he in court?) includes such declarations as:

    "Yes, there were times, I'm sure you know
    When I bit off more than I could chew
    But through it all when there was doubt
    I ate it up and spit it out
    I faced it all and I stood tall
    And did it my way"

It's not clear to me, at least, what all this gobbling and spitting (surely "spat", by the way) is about. How can you "eat" something (ie swallow it) and then "spit" it out. Surely it should be "puked it out". Myself I think I would replace this stanza with the Sid Vicious rewrite:

    "There were times, I'm sure you knew
    When there was fuck fuck fuck-all else to do
    But through it all, when there was doubt
    I shot it up or kicked it out
    I faced the wall and the world
    And did it my way"

Unlovely, I know, and not suitable for every church in the land, but it makes a lot more sense.

In 1967, when he recorded it, Sinatra (standing tall at 5ft 7in in his elevated shoes) was, aged 51, some 31 years short of his final curtain. At that funeral ceremony the attendees were serenaded with a thunderous version, by Frank himself, of Put Your Dreams Away:

    "Put your dreams away for another day
    And I will take their place in your heart
    Wishing on a star never got you far
    And so it's time to make a new start"

As one of the mourners later recalled: "You could hear everyone gasp … 'Aaaah.' … It was like he rose up on the edge of the coffin; like he was saying, 'Hey, check this out!'" One is reminded of the old Hollywood joke: "I went to his funeral to make sure the old bastard was really dead." So he was. But "the Voice" (as Sinatra was nicknamed) lives on and will do, it seems, as long as people keep dying.

Dorothy Lamour, de son vrai nom Mary Leta Dorothy Stanton, était une actrice et chanteuse américaine née le 10 décembre 1914 à La Nouvelle-Orléans (Louisiane), et décédée le 22 septembre 1996 à Los Angeles (Californie). Dorothy Lamour fut lancée par la Paramount Pictures en 1936. Surnommée la « Princesse au sarong », elle acquit une grande popularité en incarnant la fille de type exotique dans de nombreux films d’aventures. Elle deviendra ensuite la partenaire privilégiée de Bob Hope et de Bing Crosby dans la célèbre série de films des En route vers… avec toujours le même succès. Elle a été élue Miss Nouvelle-Orléans en 1931.

Née à La Nouvelle-Orléans Mary Leta Dorothy Stanton adopte le nom de son beau-père Clarence Lambour, lorsque sa mère se remarie. À 17 ans, elle participe à un concours de beauté et devient Miss New Orléans. Par la suite la jeune femme se rend à Chicago en espérant faire carrière dans la chanson mais ne trouve qu’un emploi de vendeuse dans un grand magasin dans un premier temps. Après une audition, elle est engagée par le chef d’orchestre Herbie Kaye, devient chanteuse dans son big band et l’épouse en 1935. Après une longue tournée, elle participe à une émission hebdomadaire de la NBC et chante dans différents clubs réputés, elle devient très populaire et prend un nouveau pseudonyme plus glamour : Lamour. Elle fait quelques apparitions au cinéma notamment en tant que Chorus girl dans un film de la Warner Bros., Prologue (Footlight Parade) et dans un court métrage The Stars Can't Be Wrong.

Très vite remarquée, la Paramount Pictures l’engage en 1936 et exploite son côté exotique en lui donnant un rôle de sauvageonne dans Hula, fille de la brousse aux côtés de Ray Milland. Pendant féminin de Tarzan, Dorothy fut la parade de la Paramount au Tarzan de la Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer incarné par Johnny Weissmuller. Elle effectue une entrée fracassante et, vêtue d'un sarong, fait rêver toute une génération qui, séduite par sa sensualité et ces dépaysements paradisiaques et exotiques, va réserver un triomphe à ce film. Forte de ce succès, le studio va exploiter ce nouveau filon.

Cinq films en 1937, Dorothy reprend son sarong pour le spectaculaire Hurricane de John Ford, super production qui rapportera 1 400 000 dollars de recettes. La Paramount reprend les mêmes ingrédients mais cette fois en Technicolor et reforme le couple Lamour-Milland avec Toura, déesse de la Jungle en 1938, nouveau succès. Dorothy lance le « deux-pièces », ancêtre du « bikini » inspiré du sarong polynésien. Elle jouera encore les princesses exotiques dans de nombreux films comme Typhon, Nuits birmanes, Aloma, princesse des îles, Mabok, l'éléphant du diable, Lona, la sauvageone. Parallèlement, la Paramount met en valeur ses talents de chanteuse dans des comédies musicales comme La Furie de l'or noir, L'Escadre est au port, Au pays du rythme ou Dixie. Outre les rôles « à sarong », elle est également l’héroïne de nombreux films d’aventure comme Le Dernier Train de Madrid ou Les Gars du large, elle fera de rares incursions dans le drame notamment dans Chirurgiens de Frank Borzage ou dans Johnny Apollo d'Henry Hathaway aux côtés de Tyrone Power.

Dorothy Lamour sera aussi très populaire auprès des G.I.’s et fera partie du panthéon des pin-ups aux photos épinglés à l’instar des Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable ou Lana Turner. Elle fera campagne pour la vente des bons de guerre et mettra aux enchères deux de ses fameux sarongs qui rapporteront pas moins de deux millions de dollars. Parallèlement elle continue à animer des émissions de radio aux côtés de W. C. Fields et Edgar Bergen. Comblée par son métier, Dorothy va négliger sa vie familiale, le studio va d’ailleurs rejeter tous ses désirs de maternité, ce qui conduira son mari, Herbie Kaye, à demander le divorce. Elle se remarie avec le Capitaine William Ross Howard, ils auront deux garçons: Rigely, adopté en 1945 et Richard, né en 1949.

Mais Dorothy Lamour ne se contentera pas de jouer les filles des îles et les chanteuses, elle révélera également un talent comique qui va exploser dans la série à succès des En route vers… Complices à la radio, les acteurs Bob Hope et Bing Crosby sont accompagnés du producteur Harlan Thompson et du réalisateur Victor Schertzinger lorsqu’ils lancent l’idée d’un film les réunissant tout en leur ajoutant une saveur exotique, Dorothy Lamour. En route vers Singapour sera le premier d’une série de sept films loufoques où Crosby et Hope vont se livrer à une joute amicale ininterrompue de jeu de mots et vacheries. Ils se disputeront à chaque film les faveurs de Dorothy Lamour qui campe un faire-valoir pleine d’entrain. Autre ingrédient de taille, « le plus joyeux trio d’Amérique », selon le slogan publicitaire, interprète des numéros musicaux et des chansons à succès qui feront pour beaucoup dans la popularité de ces films. Ils feront le tour du monde avec En route vers En route vers Singapour, En route vers Zanzibar, En route vers le Maroc, En route vers l'Alaska, En route vers Rio et En route vers Bali pour la plus grande joie du public. Ils termineront avec Astronautes malgré eux, dans lequel Dorothy Lamour cédera sa place à Joan Collins tout en faisant une apparition.

À partir des années 1950, ses apparitions se feront plus rares et l’on peut retenir deux compositions savoureuses, celle de la meneuse de revue de Sous le plus grand chapiteau du monde de Cecil B. DeMille et de la truculente tenancière de bar dans La Taverne de l'Irlandais de John Ford. Elle fera encore des apparitions sur scène et à la télévision dans Arabesque, Pour l'amour du risque ou encore La croisière s'amuse. Dorothy Lamour est morte à son domicile à 81 ans, le 22 septembre 1996 à Los Angeles d’une crise cardiaque.

Filmographie

Actrice

• 1933 : Prologue (Footlight Parade) de Lloyd Bacon
• 1936 : The Stars Can't Be Wrong - Court métrage
• 1936 : L'Appel de la folie (College Holiday) de Frank Tuttle
• 1936 : Hula, fille de la brousse (The Jungle Princess) de Wilhelm Thiele
• 1937 : Trompette Blues (Swing High, Swing Low), de Mitchell Leisen
• 1937 : Le Dernier Train de Madrid (Last train From Madrid) de James Patrick Hogan
• 1937 : La Furie de l'or noir (High, Wide and Handsome) de Rouben Mamoulian
• 1937 : Hurricane (The Hurricane) de John Ford
• 1937 : Romance burlesque (Thrill of a Lifetime) de George Archainbaud
• 1938 : Big Broadcast of 1938 (The Big Broodcast of 1938) de Mitchell Leisen
• 1938 : Toura, déesse de la Jungle (Her Jungle Love) de George Archainbaud
• 1938 : La Belle de Mexico (Tropic Holiday) de Theodore Reed
• 1938 : Les Gars du large (Spown of the North) de Henry Hathaway
• 1939 : St. Louis Blues de Raoul Walsh
• 1939 : L'Irrésistible Monsieur Bob (Man about Town) de Mark Sandrich
• 1939 : Chirurgiens (Disputed Passage) de Frank Borzage
• 1940 : Johnny Apollo (Johnny Apollo) d'Henry Hathaway
• 1940 : Typhon (Typhoon) de Louis King
• 1940 : En route vers Singapour (Road to Singapore) de Victor Schertzinger
• 1940 : Nuits birmanes (Moon Over Burma) de Louis King
• 1940 : La Roulotte rouge ou La Belle écuyère (Chad Hanna) de Henry King
• 1941 : En route vers Zanzibar (Road to Zanzibar) de Victor Schertzinger
• 1941 : L'Engagé volontaire (Caught in the Draft) de David Butler
• 1941 : Aloma, princesse des îles (Aloma of the South Seas) de Alfred Santell
• 1942 : L'Escadre est au port (The Fleet's In) de Victor Schertzinger
• 1942 : Mabok, l'éléphant du diable (Beyond the Blue Horizon) de Alfred Santell
• 1942 : En route vers le Maroc (Road to Morocco) de David Butler
• 1942 : Au pays du rythme (Star Spangled Rhythm) de George Marshall
• 1943 : They got me covered de David Butler
• 1943 : Dixie (Dixie) de A. Edward Sutherland
• 1943 : Jour de chance (Riding high) de George Marshall
• 1944 : Quatre flirts et un cœur (And the Angels Sing) de George Marshall
• 1944 : Lona la sauvageonne (Rainhow Island) de Ralph Murphy
• 1945 : A Medal for Benny de Irving Pichel
• 1945 : Duffy's Tavern de Hal Walker
• 1945 : Mascarade à Mexico (Masquerade in Mexico) de Mitchell Leisen
• 1945 : En route vers l'Alaska (Road to Utopia) de Hal Walker
• 1947 : La Brune de mes rêves (My Favourite Brunette) de Elliott Nugent
• 1947 : Hollywood en folie (Variety Girl) de George Marshall
• 1947 : Les Corsaires de la terre (Wild Harvest) de Tay Garnett
• 1947 : En route vers Rio (Road to Rio) de Norman Z. McLeod
• 1948 : La Folle enquête (On Our Merry Way), de King Vidor et Leslie Fenton
• 1948 : Lulu Belle (Lulu Belle) de Leslie Fenton
• 1948 : The Girl from Manhattan de Alfred E. Green
• 1949 : L'Homme au chewing-gum (Manhandled) de Lewis R. Foster
• 1949 : The Lucky stiff de Lewis R. Foster
• 1949 : Slightly French de Douglas Sirk
• 1951 : Si l'on mariait papa (Here Comes the Groom) de Frank Capra
• 1952 : Sous le plus grand chapiteau du monde (The Greatest Show on Earth) de Cecil B. DeMille
• 1952 : En route vers Bali (Road to Bali) de Hal Walker
• 1962 : Astronautes malgré eux (The Road To HongKong) de Norman Panama
• 1963 : La Taverne de l'Irlandais (Donovan's Reef) de John Ford
• 1964 : Pyjama Party de Don Weiss
• 1970 : The Phynx de Lee H. Katzin
• 1976 : Won Ton Ton, le chien qui sauva Hollywood (Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood) de Michael Winner
• 1987 : Creepshow 2 de Michael Gornick

Julie London, de son vrai nom Gayle Peck, est une chanteuse et actrice américaine née le 26 septembre 1926 à Santa Rosa et morte le 18 octobre 2000 à Encino en Californie. Célèbre pour sa voix grave et sensuelle, première interprète de la chanson Cry Me a River en 1955, elle connaît la gloire durant les années 1950.

Sa carrière d'actrice s'étend sur plus de 35 ans, jusqu'à son rôle de l'infirmière Dixie McCall, dans la série télévisée Emergency! (1972–1979). Elle est la fille de Jack et Josephine Peck, un couple de danseurs et chanteurs de vaudeville. Lorsqu'elle a 14 ans, sa famille déménage à Los Angeles. En 1945, à 19 ans et après quelques apparitions au cinéma, elle obtient le diplôme de la Hollywood Professional School.





Albums

• Julie Is Her Name (1955, U.S. #2)
• Lonely Girl (1956, U.S. #16)
• Calendar Girl (1956, U.S. #18)
• About the Blues (1957, U.S. #15)
• Make Love to Me (1957)
• Julie (1958)
• Julie Is Her Name, Volume II (1958)
• London by Night (1958)
• Swing Me an Old Song (1959)
• Your Number Please (1959)
• Julie...At Home (1960)
• Around Midnight (1960)
• Send for Me (1961)
• Whatever Julie Wants (1961)
• The Best of Julie London (1962)
• Sophisticated Lady (1962)
• Love Letters (1962)
• Love on the Rocks (1962)
• Latin in a Satin Mood (1963)
• Julie's Golden Greats (1963)
• The End of the World (1963, U.S. #127)
• The Wonderful World of Julie London (1963, U.S. #136)
• Julie London (1964)
• In Person at the Americana (1964)
• Our Fair Lady (1965)
• Feeling Good (1965)
• By Myself (1965, produced exclusively for the Columbia Record Club)
• All Through the Night: Julie London Sings the Choicest of Cole Porter (1965)
• For the Night People (1966)
• Nice Girls Don't Stay for Breakfast (1967)
• With Body & Soul (1967)
• Easy Does It (1968)
• Yummy, Yummy, Yummy (1969)
• The Very Best of Julie London (1975)

Filmographie

• Nabonga (1944)
• Diamond Horseshoe (1945)
• On Stage Everybody (1945)
• A Night in Paradise (1946) (bit part)
• La Maison rouge (The Red House, 1947)
• Le Sang de la terre (Taps Roots) (1948)
• Horizons en flammes (Task Force) (1949)
• Return of the Frontiersman (1950)
• The Fat Man (1951)
• The Fighting Chance (1955)
• La Blonde et moi (The Girl Can't Help It, 1956)
• Crime Against Joe (1956)
• The Great Man (1956)
• Drango (1957)
• Libre comme le vent (1958)
• Voice in the Mirror (1958)
• L'Homme de l'Ouest (Man of the West) (1958)
• Night of the Quarter Moon (1959)
• L'Aventurier du Rio Grande (The Wonderful Country, 1959)
• A Question of Adultery (1959)
• The Third Voice (1960)
• The George Raft Story (1961)

Ann Sheridan (de son vrai nom : Clara Lou Sheridan) est une actrice et productrice américaine née le 21 février 1915 à Denton, Texas (États-Unis), morte le 21 janvier 1967 à Los Angeles, (Californie). Ann Sheridan est encore étudiante à l’Université de North Texas lorsque sa sœur envoie une photo d'elle aux studios Paramount Pictures. Elle est alors invitée à participer à un concours de beauté, la lauréate ayant droit à un rôle de figuration dans un film. C’est ainsi qu'elle fait ses débuts à l'écran en 1934, à 19 ans, dans un film intitulé Search for Beauty avec Buster Crabbe. Elle décide d'abandonner ses études pour se consacrer au cinéma et joue des rôles de figurantes (non crédités au générique) jusqu'en 1936.

Les studios Paramount mettant peu d’enthousiasme à valoriser la jeune actrice, elle signe un contrat avec Warner Bros., et adopte un nom de scène : Ann Sheridan. Sa beauté la rend bientôt célèbre. Surnommée The Oomph Girl (« la fille qui a du peps »), elle est l’une des pin-ups les plus célèbres du début des années 1940 : en l’espace d'une semaine, elle reçoit 250 demandes en mariage1. Kathryn Heisenfelt en fait l'héroïne d'un roman de gare, Ann Sheridan and the Sign of the Sphinx (1943).

Ses premiers rôles les plus célèbres sont dans Les Anges aux figures sales (1938) avec James Cagney et Humphrey Bogart, Les Conquérants (1939) avec Errol Flynn et Olivia de Havilland, Torrid Zone (1940) avec Cagney, Une femme dangereuse (1940) avec George Raft et Bogart, L'Homme qui vint dîner (1942) avec Bette Davis, et Crimes sans châtiment (1942) avec Ronald Reagan, Robert Cummings et Betty Field. Excellente chanteuse, Ann tourne également plusieurs comédies musicales, notamment It All Came True (1940) et Navy Blues (1941). Son jeu dans Nora Prentiss et The Unfaithful, deux films sortis en 1947, marque son époque.

Pourtant, à la fin des années 1940, sa carrière décline. Si Allez coucher ailleurs!, de Howard Hawks (1949), où elle partage l'affiche avec Cary Grant, est encore un succès, elle ne trouve plus désormais que de petits rôles. Elle entame alors une seconde carrière à la télévision. En 1950, on la retrouve dans un show télévisé de ABC, Stop the Music, puis au milieu des années 1960, dans un soap opera de NBC intitulé Another World, et un feuilleton de western, Pistols 'n' Petticoats (1966). C'est son dernier rôle : elle meurt d'un cancer de l'œsophage et du foie à Los Angeles (Californie) l'année suivante. Le tournage du feuilleton est interrompu avant qu'elle ne meure, mais certains épisodes ont été diffusés par la suite. Dans au moins l'un de ces épisodes, sa voix est doublée (pour des raisons faciles à deviner).

Elle s'adonnait à la cigarette depuis des années et James Cagney affirme dans son autobiographie que lorsqu'elle apprit son cancer, elle était déjà perdue (« she didn't have a chance »). Elle est incinérée et ses cendres sont déposées au Chapel of the Pines Crematory de Los Angeles, puis au Hollywood Forever Cemetery en 2005. Ann Sheridan s'est mariée trois fois. Son mariage avec l'acteur George Brent, son partenaire dans Honeymoon for Three (1941), n'a duré qu'un an. En reconnaissance de sa place dans le cinéma américain, elle a son étoile sur le Walk Of Fame, au n°7024 de Hollywood Boulevard.

Filmographie

comme actrice

• 1934 : Search for Beauty : Texas Beauty Winner
• 1934 : Bolero : Bit Part
• 1934 : Come on Marines : Loretta
• 1934 : Murder at the Vanities : Lou
• 1934 : Shoot the Works : Secretary
• 1934 : Kiss and Make Up : Beautician
• 1934 : The Notorious Sophie Lang : Extra
• 1934 : Ladies Should Listen : Adele
• 1934 : You Belong to Me : First Girl
• 1934 : Wagon Wheels : Young Lady
• 1934 : The Lemon Drop Kid : Bit Role
• 1934 : Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch : Bit Part
• 1934 : College Rhythm : Gloves Salesgirl
• 1934 : Ready for Love
• 1934 : Star Night at the Cocoanut Grove : Model, Sands of the Desert
• 1934 : Behold My Wife : Mary White
• 1934 : Limehouse Blues : Bit Part
• 1934 : One Hour Late : Girl
• 1935 : Enter Madame : Bit Part
• 1935 : Home on the Range : Singer
• 1935 : Rumba : Dancer
• 1935 : Car 99 : Mary Adams
• 1935 : Rocky Mountain Mystery : Rita Ballard
• 1935 : Mississippi : Schoolgirl
• 1935 : The Red Blood of Courage : Beth Henry
• 1935 : The Glass Key : Nurse
• 1935 : Les Croisades (The Crusades) : Christian Slave Girl
• 1935 : Fighting Youth : Carol Arlington
• 1937 : Black Legion : Betty Grogan
• 1937 : The Great O'Malley : Judy Nolan
• 1937 : San Quentin
• 1937 : Wine, Women and Horses : Valerie
• 1937 : The Footloose Heiress : Kay Allyn
• 1937 : Alcatraz Island : Flo Allen
• 1937 : She Loved a Fireman : Margie Shannon
• 1938 : The Patient in Room 18 : Nurse Sara Keate
• 1938 : Mystery House : Nurse Sarah Keate
• 1938 : Little Miss Thoroughbred : Madge Perry Morgan
• 1938 : Cowboy from Brooklyn : Maxine Chadwick
• 1938 : Letter of Introduction : Lydia Hoyt
• 1938 : Broadway Musketeers : Fay Reynolds Dowling
• 1938 : Les Anges aux figures sales (Angels with Dirty Faces) : Laury Ferguson
• 1939 : Je suis un criminel (They Made Me a Criminal) : Goldie West
• 1939 : Les Conquérants (Dodge City) de Michael Curtiz : Ruby Gilman
• 1939 : Fausses notes (Naughty But Nice) : Zelda Manion
• 1939 : Indianapolis Speedway : Frankie Merrick
• 1939 : Winter Carnival : Jill Baxter
• 1939 : The Angels Wash Their Faces : Joy Ryan
• 1940 : Castle on the Hudson : Kay Manners
• 1940 : Rendez-vous à minuit (It All Came True) : Sarah Jane Ryan aka Sal
• 1940 : Torrid Zone : Lee Donley
• 1940 : Une femme dangereuse (They Drive by Night) de Raoul Walsh : Cassie Hartley
• 1940 : Ville conquise (City for Conquest) : Peggy 'Peg' Nash
• 1941 : Honeymoon for Three : Anne Rogers
• 1941 : Navy Blues : Marge 'Margie' Jordan
• 1942 : L'Homme qui vint dîner (The man who came to dinner) : Lorraine Sheldon
• 1942 : Crimes sans châtiment (Kings Row) : Randy Monaghan
• 1942 : Juke Girl : Lola Mears
• 1942 : Wings for the Eagle : Roma Maple
• 1942 : La Maison de mes rêves (George Washington Slept Here) : Connie Fuller
• 1943 : L'Ange des ténèbres (Edge of Darkness) : Karen Stensgard
• 1943 : Remerciez votre bonne étoile (Thank your lucky stars) : Elle-même
• 1944 : L'Amour est une mélodie (Shine on Harvest Moon) : Nora Bayes
• 1944 : The Doughgirls : Edna Stokes Cadman
• 1946 : One More Tomorrow : Christie Sage
• 1947 : L'Amant sans visage (Nora Prentiss) : Nora Prentiss
• 1947 : The Unfaithful : Chris Hunter
• 1948 : Le Trésor de la Sierra Madre (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) : Streetwalker
• 1948 : La Rivière d'argent (Silver River) : Georgia Moore
• 1948 : Ce bon vieux Sam (Good Sam) : Lucille 'Lu' Clayton
• 1949 : Allez coucher ailleurs (I Was a Male War Bride) : Lt. Catherine Gates
• 1950 : Stella : Stella Bevans
• 1950 : Dans l'ombre de San Francisco (Woman on the Run) : Eleanor Johnson
• 1952 : Steel Town : 'Red' McNamara
• 1952 : Just Across the Street : Henrietta Smith
• 1953 : Take Me to Town : Vermilion O'Toole aka Mae Madison
• 1953 : Les Révoltés de la Claire-Louise (Appointment in Honduras) : Sylvia Sheppard
• 1956 : Come Next Spring : Bess Ballot
• 1956 : Sneak Preview (série TV)
• 1956 : Calling Terry Conway (TV) : Terry Conway
• 1956 : The Opposite Sex : Amanda Penrose
• 1957 : Woman and the Hunter : Laura Dodds
• 1964 : Another World (série TV) : Kathryn Corning (1965-1966)

comme productrice

• 1950 : Dans l'ombre de San Francisco (Woman on the Run)