I've remarked many times about how in
the early days of The Underworld, my posts and tributes were so brief
that even though my favorite people were being highlighted, by
comparison to the later, more detailed posts, they wound up being
slighted in the long run. Such was the case with Eleanor Parker, my
second favorite pre-1970 actress. By current Underword standards,
her “
tribute” is shockingly brief. So today we're going to do a
photo-laden recap of some of her roles and expand on them more than
before.
I should add that my life is
completely, totally swamped at the moment, which has prevented me
from posting as much as I would like to. When I started this blog,
my job was extraordinarily undemanding and contained hours and hours
of downtime. Now it is close to high-pressure in the amount of work
I am given! When you factor in my other activities and duties such
as being a single homeowner, rehearsing and performing in local
theatre (my next show opens in a week!), adjudicating local theatre
and still finding time to socialize and actually watch TV and movies,
it's a real challenge to get things done around here! So I just have
to do what I can, when I can and hope that you'll stick with me.
Eleanor Jean Parker was born in the
decidedly un-Hollywood town of Cedarville, Ohio on June 26th,
1922 to a math professor and his wife. The youngest of their three
children, she developed a passion for performing and began to take
part in school plays. Once the family moved to East Cleveland, she
began to think of an acting career in earnest and soon started
attending Rice Summer Theatre in Martha's Vineyard during the summer.
There, she was approached by a 20th Century Fox talent
scout and invited to come to Hollywood for a screen test. However,
still feeling that she lacked experience – not to mention maturity,
she chose to work on the professional Cleveland stage for a time.
After further building up her resume of
parts, though still a teen, she ventured to California and began
studying at the Pasadena Playhouse. There, while simply watching
another group of actors performing, she was approached by a Warner
Brothers scout about taking a screen test. Clearly very determined
about how and when she would turn to screen acting versus the stage,
she turned the offer down in order to complete her instruction at the
Playhouse. When the year of study was up, she contacted the people
at Warners to see if their offer of a test still stood and it did.
Within two days of the test, she was
officially a contracted member of the Warner Brothers acting stable.
Right off the bat she was placed into a small role in Errol Flynn's
They Died with Their Boots On (1941), the story of General George
Custer, but her scene was cut before release. She then worked in a
variety of short films and the screen tests of other actors in order
to gain confidence and presence before the camera.
Finally, she was placed in a real
movie, 1942's WWII Busses Roar, all about a group of passengers on a
commercial bus that has been fitted with a bomb in order for it to
sabotage an oil field alongside its route. Parker is a pert ticket
agent, not on the bus, but star Julie Bishop has to drive it at one
point in order to save the day. Take that, Speed (1994)!
This and other B-pictures were the
order of the day as she continued to learn and grow as an actress.
She next did The Mysterious Doctor (1943) with John Loder, Mission to
Moscow (1943) an A-picture with Walter Huston and Ann Harding, the
memorable Between Two Worlds (1944) with John Garfield and Paul
Henreid (shown here), Crime By Night (1944) starring Jane Wyman and The Last Ride
(1944) which, believe it or not, concerned tire bootleggers. (Rubber
was in short supply during WWII.)
The Very Thought of You (1944) seemed
to mark a positive turn in her career, taking its name from the
popular song written in 1934, and offering up considerable chemistry
between Parker and her leading man Dennis Morgan. After this, Parker
began to win bigger and better roles in the studio's more important
movies. She had also eloped early in 1943 to a dentist, but that
marriage would be finished by the end of 1944.
Back in 1934, Bette Davis had soared to
fame in Of Human Bondage and now a decade later, Parker sought to do
the same. Filmed in 1944, it was shelved and not released until
1946, diminishing its success. The studio felt that it was too grim
and cut several of Parker's best moments. (She had studied her
cockney accent so closely that several of her British costars didn't
realize she was American!) While the remake didn't come close to the
impact of Davis' earlier rendition, Davis was remarkably accepting of
Parker being chosen to do the role and even sent her a good luck
gift.
The director of The Very Thought of
You, Delmer Daves, had employed Parker's voice in Destination Tokyo
(1943) and utilized her among the many stars in Hollywood Canteen
(1944) and so was happy to promote her to leading lady opposite John
Garfield in Pride of the Marines in 1945. She played the concerned
fiancee to his blinded veteran character.
Parker's next two movies (Never Say
Goodbye, 1946, and Escape Me Never, 1947) placed her in the arms of
Warner Brothers' chief action star Errol Flynn, though both of these
movies were departures from him from the westerns and swashbucklers
he was known for. Goodbye had them as ex-spouses whose daughter
wants them back together while Escape concerned a love quadrangle set
in 1900. She married for a second time in 1946 to a producer named
Bert Friedlob.
A reasonably high-profile role came in
1947's The Voice of the Turtle, based on a hit Broadway play (a
three-character piece that starred Margaret Sullavan), but the author
John Van Druten publicly drubbed the casting of Ronald Reagan and Ms.
Parker in the lead roles. Despite this (and a truly impenetrable
hairdo), Parker excelled in the role of a struggling actress offering
a spare bed to a soldier during a housing crisis.
1948's The Woman in White is one of my
favorite films starring Parker (alongside Alexis Smith.) Later made
into a Broadway musical (what hasn't?), it tells the Gothic story of
a young heiress (Parker) who's being targeted by a variety of selfish
individuals who don't have her best interests at heart. The title
figure is a frightened, timid thing (also played by Parker) who is
seen flitting around the estate grounds from time to time. A
superlative supporting cast that includes Sydney Greenstreet, Gig
Young, Agnes Moorehead and John Abbott helps give a boost to the
proceedings.
Starring along with the hugely popular
Humphrey Bogart in 1950's Chain Lightning was a sign that she'd fully
arrived as an actress of some consideration. She'd managed to fit
two children into the picture by this time as well, a daughter Susan
born in 1948 and another one, Sharon, in 1950, though her marriage to
Friedlob was tempestuous throughout, with joyous highs and fierce
lows.
Headstrong from the very start about
when and how she would commence her film career, she also set a
Warner Brothers record for the number and length of suspensions she
went on rather that report to a movie or a role she didn't believe
would be appropriate. This doesn't mean that she didn't want to
injure her image, just the opposite as a matter of fact. She sought
parts that would stretch the perimeters of her persona, wanting to
play every sort of character imaginable from docile, "Plain Jane" types
to elegant, sophisticated ones (where she particularly excelled.)
This propensity for changing her acting style and appearance from
part to part would earn her the nickname “Woman of a Thousand
Faces,” though it also prevented her from establishing a star
identity that audiences could come to rely on.
In any case, from 1950 on, her career
began to really take hold. Three Secrets was a hit with audiences
as a trio of ladies (Ruth Roman, Patricia Neal and Parker) sweated it
out over which one of them was the mother of a young boy involved in
a plane crash. Note the similar jawlines and the basic makeup
schemes applied to these ladies as they wended their way through the
cookie-cutter machinations of a 1950s film studio. (Parker had been
set to star in The Hasty Heart in 1949 before it went to Neal.)
The real showcase for Parker of 1950,
however, was Caged, all about a rather fragile girl who is sent to
prison as an accomplice to armed robbery (as committed by her
now-deceased husband.) The horror involves not only a passel of
hardened, trouble-making fellow inmates but also a leering, cruel
matron played by the unforgettable Hope Emerson. Agnes Moorehead, as
a caring warden, lead a cast of colorful character actresses who
filled out the plethora of supporting roles.
Emerson was nominated for an Oscar, but
lost to Josephine Hull in Harvey. Parker scored her first best
Actress nomination, but was in the considerable company of Anne
Baxter and Bette Davis of All About Eve, Gloria Swanson of Sunset
Boulevard and the surprise winner, Judy Holliday of Born Yesterday.
The following year, Parker did the
light comedy A Millionaire for Christy with Fred MacMurray and was
one of the various female love interests for newcomer Anthony Dexter
as Valentino, a highly-fictionalized take on the silent screen
legend. She and her daughters (one and three at the time) narrowly
escaped death that year when she woke in the night to the smell of
smoke to find that their house was on fire!
Professionally, though, the highlight
of 1951 was her role in Detective Story with Kirk Douglas. The film,
based on an acclaimed Broadway play, traced one eventful day in the
life of a busy police precinct. Directed by William Wyler, one of
Hollywood's all-time best helmsmen, she played the loving wife of
driven police detective Douglas who winds up figuring into one of his
current (and controversial) cases. The then-touchy subject matter of
the part had her (and costar Lee Grant) up for an Oscar again as Best
Actress (this time the statuette going to Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar
Named Desire.)
1952 brought major changes to her
career as she was signed as an MGM contract player, that studio being
the crème de la crème of moviemakers. Up first was the colorful
romp Scaramouche, starring Stewart Granger as a wanted man who
disguises himself as a clown in a theatrical troupe in order to exact
revenge on his enemy Mel Ferrer. Parker played a beautiful fellow performer in the troupe. Janet Leigh also costarred in this
colorful, expensive swashbuckler, one which contains what is believed
to be the longest fencing duel in cinema history.
Her other film this year was Above and
Beyond, about the man who piloted the plane that dropped the atomic
bomb on Hiroshima, effectively ending WWII. Robert Taylor was the
star and Parker played his agonized wife, from whom he must keep many
details of the operation secret. This was the first teaming of
Taylor and Parker and they would develop a strong chemistry together
(with Parker reportedly in love with him.)
In October of '52, she gave birth to
son Richard, though her marriage to Friedlob would be over before
another year had passed. Her next film was 1953's Escape from Fort
Bravo, an attractive Civil War-era western in which she portrayed a
gorgeous Confederate spy opposite William Holden and John Forsythe as
battling officers on either side.
One of my favorite films of hers (and
the first one I ever saw after beginning to delve into her career
prior to The Sound of Music) is 1954's The Naked Jungle. In it
(looking strikingly beautiful throughout), she played the mail-order
bride of surly South American plantation owner Charlton Heston. He
gets far more than he bargained for when she arrives with a
personality and a set of opinions instead of just the warm,
decorative body he'd had in mind.
One scene, improvised by Heston (yes,
it happened!) had him splashing perfume on her during a scuffle,
highlighting the well-matched chemistry they'd developed on screen.
Just as their romantic squabbles are reaching a head, the land is
beset with Marabunta! (cue the threatening, overly-dramatic music!)
Army ants descend on them, devouring everything in their path. (This
and Elizabeth Taylor's Elephant Walk, released the same year, share
similar plot-lines.)
Her next two films placed her in the
arms of Robert Taylor again, Valley of the Kings (1954), set in Eqypt
and concerning the search for a tomb, and Many Rivers to Cross
(1955), a rural tale involving tomboy Parker's pursuit of Taylor.
Parker and Taylor entertained the notion of a permanent relationship
during this period, though he had already met and would soon marry
his second wife, Ursula Theiss, and she proceeded to marry artist
Paul Clemens at the end of 1954.
She put forth two more strong
performances in 1955, one of which was in Otto Preminger's The Man
with the Golden Arm. The provocative drug-addiction drama had Frank
Sinatra as a drummer with a heroin addiction who's riddled with guilt
over his wheelchair-bound wife's condition. Parker, as the wife,
clings to him mercilessly, which ends up sending him into the calming
arms of Kim Novak.
Then there was Interrupted Melody,
which was the big-budget story of opera singer Marjorie Lawrence who
was stricken with polio at the height of her career. Parker studied
laboriously to achieve the correct phrasing and breathing in order to
convincingly match the vocals provided by Eileen Farrell during the
many song performances, requiring only one take on each to get the
desired result. Rather than move her lips to Farrell's singing, she
actually sang along an octave lower to provide more realism in the
sequences.
Beyond that, she was done up in a
wildly varying array of stage costumes, wigs and makeup as she
portrayed the life of an opera diva. This sequence at left always puts me in the mind of Joan Collins! Ha!
Sadly, she also had to contend with the
selfish, devious tactics of costar Glenn Ford who not only insisted
on top-billing for what was not his story, but also stopped at
nothing to diminish Parker's effectiveness while trying to upstage
her and draw focus to himself. In spite of this, she was nominated a
third time for the Best Actress Oscar for her work. This time, Anna
Magnani won for The Rose Tattoo.
She next costarred with Clark Gable in
the western romance The King and Four Queens, about Gable's efforts
to draw the location of a buried fortune out of the four young ladies
who live there with their feisty mother-in-law. Having endured Glenn
Ford's “techniques” during Melody, she had no such trouble with
Gable, but did see him use his clout to have the editors take the
guts out of Jo Van Fleet's performance of the old lady as she was
deemed to be good enough to walk off with all the praise in the movie
otherwise.
In 1957, Parker enjoyed two more
challenging parts. Lizzie was by far the more dynamic as she enacted
the role of a woman with split personalities. She was the shy and
inhibited Elizabeth, the wild and brash Lizzie and the well-rounded,
confident Beth. A similar movie, released several months later,
called The Three Faces of Eve wound up getting far more attention and
won its star Joanne Woodward the Oscar.
Her other film of that year was The
Seventh Sin, a remake of Greta Garbo's 1934 drama The Painted Veil.
I'm using these fun Asian-flavored wardrobe tests in order to
illustrate this one.
She played the adulterous wife of a
downbeat doctor who takes her to cholera-ridden China with him as
punishment. There she slowly grows as a person and begins to renew
her interest in the husband (Bill Travers.) (By the way, get a load of the flowery description of this dress as shown below in the copy provided by the studio publicity people for this black and white movie!)
Though it was a meaty part and she did
an excellent job (getting to rub elbows with screen scoundrel George
Sanders in the process), the film certainly didn't erase anyone's
memories of the earlier version. (And, in fact, was remade again in
2006 with Naomi Watts and Edward Norton.)
Pregnancy and motherhood for a fourth
time was a factor in keeping her off the screen in 1958 as her son
Paul was born in January of that year. Late in the year, she began
filming what would be a 1959 release, A Hole in the Head with her
Golden Arm costar Frank Sinatra. She portrayed a pretty widow who's
being set up as marriage material with the down on his luck motel
owner played by Sinatra.
This was followed in 1960 by Home from
the Hill, a family drama in which she played the wounded, emotionally
remote wife of Robert Mitchum, who has one son with her (George
Hamilton) and one with another woman (George Peppard.) Directed by
Vincente Minnelli, the movie was attractive to look at, but lacked
enough spark to make it a memorable classic.
A sequel to the smash 1957 hit Peyton
Place was being planned and when virtually none of the original stars
could be retained for it, Parker claimed the Lana Turner role in
Return to Peyton Place (1961.) She played the once-repressed, now
happily-married mother of a burgeoning novelist played by Carol
Lynley. This movie cannot wipe the shoes of the original, but does
offer up a few charms, not the least of which is the staggering Mary
Astor as the town villainess.
When Lynley's book hits the streets, it
causes a whole tidal wave of offense, causing Parker to hit the roof
and send her daughter packing. Then, as in the prior movie, a
climactic courtroom hearing allows characters to have his or her say,
including Parker. It was not in the end a prestigious movie (and was
riddled from the start with casting issues followed by script and
editing problems), but she was one of the few folks who was at home
with the material.
Madison Avenue (1962) with Dana Andrews
and Jeanne Crain marked the last time that Parker was one of the
chief stars of a Hollywood feature film. The advertising arena was
the setting for this ultimately rather unremarkable movie. A
slowdown in order to be part of her four children's lives, marital
squabbles and a fair amount of stalled, cancelled or recast projects
wound up relegating her to limited work in the cinema. At forty-two,
she was beyond that age for an actress to be a go-to person except
those who were still top-tier (Hepburn, Davis, etc...)
She began working on television
anthologies such as The Eleventh Hour (in a performance that scored
her an Emmy nomination – the statue went to Kim Stanley for an
episode of Ben Casey), Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre and
Kraft Suspense Theatre, as well as series like Checkmate and Breaking
Point. She then wound up in the Italian-made conglomeration Panic
Button with Maurice Chevalier, Mike Connors and Jayne Mansfield, of
all people! Just around the corner from this
not-in-any-way-prestigious assignment was, oddly enough, the role
that would assure her a place in the annals of classic cinema, more
so even than the three Oscar-nominated roles that she'd done
previously.
Her Three Secrets director Robert Wise
was about to mount a lavishly appointed film rendition of a hit
Broadway musical. The Sound of Music (1965) was to star a proven
stage actress named Julie Andrews who had yet to be seen by the
public in a movie. As her first film, Mary Poppins (1964) was nearly
ready to be released and he'd seen parts of it, Wise knew that she
was terrific, but there was no guarantee that audiences would take to
her for certain. Knowing that the male lead, Christopher Plummer,
was also not yet a box office draw, he sought to put a familiar
successful actress into the role of Baroness Schraeder, the potential
spoiler for the movie's couple (a retired Austrian sea captain and
his novice nun nanny!)
Parker was given prestige billing (that
large font billing that comes at or near the end of others in the
cast and denotes who they are playing in the movie) that first came
into play when Joan Crawford nestled in with the cast of secretaries
in 1959's The Best of Everything (“Joan Crawford as Amanda
Farrow.”)
The character was polarizing in that
she was depicted as the artificial, shallow villainess who schemes to
get the love-struck nun out of the way and is clearly the wrong
choice for the emotionally-wounded Plummer. However, the potentially
one-dimensional role was given delicious life by Parker (and the
masterful screenwriter Ernest Lehman, who injected sarcastic wit
throughout the dangerously gooey storyline.)
She made one believe that under
different circumstances (such as with no kids around!) she and
Plummer could have been a couple. She also came to terms with the
fact that she wasn't going to sway the tide of love and when the time
came, nudged her fiance in the direction of the other woman and
gracefully exited the scene.
In addition, she was staggeringly
elegant and glamorous at all times! Parker was forty-three (is that
all?!?!?) and a real-life mother of four who maintained a svelte,
linear figure that showed off Dorothy Jeakins costumes to a tee.
Doubtless her habit of smoking helped curb her appetite, too, it must
be noted.
Now Parker has her detractors, both
regarding this film and others before and after, but in The
Underworld, I say what's good or bad and, to me, she is nothing short
of sensational throughout! Everything she says is either playfully
flirtatious, sarcastically funny or haughtily wicked and I doubt that
there is a line of dialogue of hers that I don't know by heart. (One
critic asked just who she thought she was, “Anne Baxter playing
Joan Crawford in blonde wig?” to which I answer, “so what if she
was!”)
Parker, who really could sing in real
life, had her two songs with the Uncle Max character removed from the picture as the tone of her
role was shifted somewhat, but in return was granted several more
scenes, all of which are wondrously glamorous and amusing, sometimes
even touching. Few of us can forget her, smothered in lipstick,
asking costar Richard Haydn why he didn't tell her to bring her
harmonica to the tune-filled Von Trapp estate!
For reasons completely unknown, she is
and always has been just this side of ignored when it comes to
reunions, retrospectives, reflections and so on, though she is and
always will be my very favorite character in the film! This is
especially surprising when you know that she was completely on board
with the cast and crew, cutting up with her adult costars and playing
with the young ones between takes (though some of them were a bit
awe-struck by her effortless aura of star power.)
Now divorced from Clemens after a
series of failed reconciliations, Parker determined that it was time
for an image change. She would now resist the tightly-wound, cool
types and the long-suffering wives and opt for more spice in her
roles. Part one of this effort was the howlingly over-the-top (and
thank God for it!)
The Oscar (1966.)
She played a stylish and confident
talent agent who is enraptured by the brash up-and-coming actor
Stephen Boyd and lives to regret it.
I love, love, love the look she is
sporting here (in a scene - and costume - that never made it into the
final cut.) After regally sashaying through The Sound of Music and
having remained dignified in most of her previous roles, she filmed a
post-coital bedroom scene in The Oscar that had her desperately
railing at Boyd for using her and then leaving in a rush.
Her other 1966 film took things even
further. An American Dream was a disjointed movie starring Stuart
Whitman and Parker's old Scaramouche costar Janet Leigh with Parker
playing Whitman's outrageously venomous wife.
The near-deranged, drunken Parker is
shown cavorting in bed with a pick-up (played by Jerry Douglas, who
would later spend years on The Young and the Restless as patriarch
John Abbott.)
As she cackles and crows at the TV set
on which Whitman's character is appearing, she tugs at and devours
little bits of the scenery.
She slithers around on the bed like a
she-serpent...
...and even briefly shows a bare nipple
for those in 1966 who had razor sharp eyes!
Later in a scene with Whitman, she goes
all-out to practically rip the set to pieces with her virulent, feral
performance!
Nevertheless, as seen here, she was
still very lovely in close-up. In 1966, she flew to Las Vegas and
married Raymond Hirsch, the man she would finally find lasting
marital success with until his death in 2001.
Next came a made for TV movie called
Warning
Shot starring David Janssen that wound up being released to movie
theaters instead of aired. The tantalizing cast included
JoanCollins, Lillian Gish,
Stefanie Powers and Parker as a boozy,
not-exactly-grieving widow.
This type of harridan role was quickly
becoming the norm for her instead of the departure that it was
intended to be when she stepped away from all the restrained parts.
She went to Italy to play Vittorio Gassman's wife in The Tiger and
the Pussycat (1967), donning a long, dark wig in order to
(unsuccessfully) appear Italian. Ann-Margret costarred as an art
student who threatens to steal Gassman away.
She filmed a two-part episode of The
Man from U.N.C.L.E. that had her dressed in mod clothing and
portraying an enemy of the spies. The episodes were cobbled into an
ersatz feature film called How to Steal the World, which was released
overseas and in some parts of the U.S.
1969 developed into a busy year for
Parker as she appeared in a TV-movie musical version of Hans Brinker,
singing a couple of songs and then proceeded to star in the
television series Bracken's World, in which she played the efficient
executive secretary to an unseen movie studio head. Her work on the
show led to a Golden Globe nomination as Best Actress-Drama, but the
award went to Linda Cristal of The High Chapparal. Dissatisfied with
the caliber of the storylines and her role, she declined to return
for a second season and the series was retooled, then swiftly
cancelled.
This was also the year in which Parker
appeared in the colorful thriller Eye of the Cat, the “holy grail”
movie of hers that I have yet to see and have on my bucket list.
Playing a crippled socialite (people
loved to put her in wheelchairs for some reason!), she lives in San
Francisco with an assortment of cats and is attended to by nephew
Michael Sarrazin and his girlfriend Gayle Hunnicut, who wish to do
her in and collect the inheritance.
Once a staple of late-night television,
the movie has all but disappeared in recent years, but one of these
days I'm going to get my paws on a good, uncut copy of it and savor
some late-'60s Eleanor Parker in distress!
But for one “blink and you'll miss
it” appearance in 1979's Sunburn (a troubled and quite awful Farrah
Fawcett vehicle), this was the final feature film that Parker ever
made. It wasn't the last time she worked, far from it, but it was
primarily the last time she had a significant role in a movie.
During the early-1970s, she made
several telefilms, from Maybe I'll Come Home in the Spring (1971), in
which she played hippie Sally Field's fretful mother to the
wondrously campy and hooty Home for the Holidays (1972) in which she
played Sally Field's older sister (!) as well as one to Jill Haworth
and Jessica Walter! They, their father and step-mother (Walter Brennan and Julie Harris!) seem to be under the threat of an axe-wielding pschopath.
There was also The Great American
Beauty Contest (1973) with Bob Cummings, involving scandal at a pageant with Parker as a
concerned coordinator, a TV-pilot Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1975)
based on the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn film with Parker and
Richard Dysart taking on those roles (!) and the 1978 miniseries The
Bastard, starring Andrew Stevens. She also returned to work on stage in the musical "Applause!" and "Night of the Iguana" (as Maxine.)
As her career continued to slow down,
she took part in such projects as
She's Dressed to Kill (1979) as an
outre fashion designer whose models are being bumped off. She gives
her best Tallulah Bankhead impersonation in that one. She also
guest-starred on
Hawaii 5-O,
Vega$,
The Love Boat,
Fantasy Island (below with Craig Stevens, the real-life husband of Parker's two-time costar Alexis Smith) and
Hotel, along with the requisite appearance on
Murder, She Wrote.
In 1981, she took on the old Constance
Bennett role of the mother-in-law from hell in
Madame X, a sub-par television version of the
perennial tale of a woman (in this instance, Tuesday
Weld) married to a prominent man and forced to give up her child and
pretend to be dead because of a scandal. The film's chief misstep
was in making the child a girl instead of the far more Oedipal son
that it was in every previous version.
Miss Parker has not appeared on camera
since the 1991 cable-film Dead on the Money, starring Corbin Bernsen
and his wife Amanda Pays. Though not then seventy, she retired for
good to Palm Springs, California where she has been ever since, ever
shunning the limelight and all the fuss that goes with having been a
movie star, though she has given the rare radio interview from time
to time.
A hard-to-find (and expensive when
found) 1989 biography was penned about her by prolific movie star writer
Douglas McClelland called Woman of a Thousand Faces, but it revealed
precious little about the private life of its subject (something she
was generally guarded about from the very beginning of her career.)
Always shy of the press (and never one to walk the red carpet at
premieres), she has chosen to live quietly and enjoy her home and
family, even though countless fans would love to hear her stories on
DVD commentaries or in interviews on TCM.
As of this writing she is ninety-one
and has been generally out of the public eye for two decades.
Reportedly, she does respond to fan mail, though a lengthy (think
about who you're dealing with here!) letter from me went unanswered
back in 1986. Her reluctance to get out and sell herself the way
many other stars have has helped contribute to a certain level of
obscurity today, but I can tell you that it is rare to watch one of
her movies from the late-'40s through the mid-'60s and not come away
impressed with what she offered up.
She is a heroine in The Underworld not only for her eye-catching, at times risk-taking performances, but for the indelible rendition she delivered of Baroness Elsa Schraeder for whom every other actress who's ever been seen in the part on stage ever since (and there have been plenty!) has always failed to measure up or even come remotely close in looks or style!
