Pop Quiz: More Sibling Revelry

Yes, it's another one of those infinitely popular Poseidon's Underworld quizzes! We took a look once before at show business brothers and sisters and now we've returned for one more round. See how many of these you knew or remembered.

1. This craggy character is Grandmama Addams of The Addams Family (1964-1966) as portrayed by Blossom Rock. Ms. Rock's unusual name stemmed from the fact that she'd been going by one of her two middle names (Blossom) and then married a man named Clarence Rock in 1926. To confuse matters, she was also renamed Marie Blake for a time by MGM (Marie being her other middle name.) Edith Marie Blossom's real last name was shared with her younger sister, someone known for her singing voice and her ladylike presence, often garbed in frills, feathers and furs during her showy cinema career.

2.  Here we have amenable stage star-turned-game show host Peter Marshall, most famous for hosting The Hollywood Squares from 1966-1980. In that capacity, he met many, many famous showbiz personalities, from the most zany comedians to the most beautiful starlets. His older sister was a star in her own right, and even appeared as a guest on Squares several times in the late-60's and 1970. Having made a name for herself in some well-regarded late-1940s westerns, she then appeared in an Oscar-winning Best Picture, proceeding to work in films until segueing to TV in the '60s and early-'70s.

3.  This sleek, attractive, but rather severe-looking, actress is named Marisa Pavan. Her time in the cinematic sun was mostly limited to the 1950s, though she continued to work in TV during the '60s and '70s. She had a supporting role in 1955's The Rose Tattoo with Burt Lancaster and Anna Magnani, gave Lana Turner a rough go of it in 1956's period drama Diane and that same year worked with Gregory Peck in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Her sister was also a notable actress, arguably more famous, though her career was permanently halted in 1971. They were twins, but not identical.

4.  No, this is not early Karen Black! Ha! The lady in this portrait and inset had the first name Ann and worked in quite a few 1960s and '70s TV and movie projects. The one of her in uniform is from Captain Nice (1967) on which she had a regular role. Though she popped up as a guest on many series, her slightly older sister was altogether more successful and better known in the business. The sister costarred in several movies that retain fan followings to this day and often worked with her husband, a dark-haired, (often) mustache-wearing comic actor.

5.  This pretty Austrian blonde lady was known for her sweetly smiling expression, one that was often present even though tears. In 1958, she made a Hollywood version of The Brothers Karamazov opposite Yul Brynner. Other American films include Cimarron (1960) with Glenn Ford and The Mark (1961) with Stuart Whitman. Later, she popped up in Voyage of the Damned (1976) and Superman (1978) as a Kryptonian elder. Her younger brother was a handsome, dark-haired leading man who took home a Best Actor Oscar and enjoyed his own four-decade-long career.

6.  The moppet shown here with Fred MacMurray is Dawn Lyn, who played his adoptive/step-daughter during the last few seasons of My Three Sons. (She was on from 1969 to 1972, much to the consternation of a healthy number of Sons fans, who didn't warm up to the freckle-faced cutie, whose very presence went against the concept of the show.) Lyn was the younger sister of a boy whose popularity in the 1970s was incredible, though his career came crashing to a near standstill by the dawn of the '80s.

7.  This handsome gentleman is named Neil. He was yanked out of obscurity in 1967 to play the lead in a movie that spoofed a genre that his older brother had found worldwide fame in. After one more movie in 1969, he worked at his own plaster business, occasionally taking small TV parts here and there over the next several years.  His brother is a household name actor whose career stretched into the mid-2000s and includes a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

8.  This young man was a popular presence on 1970s television and, notably, in teen magazines, though he really didn't star on a hit show. There were a few episodes of Little House on the Prairie in 1974 and two series in which he was a regular that just didn't take (The Fitzpatricks, 1977-1978, and California Fever, 1979.) By the mid-1980s, his acting career was all but over.  His little sister, however, was quite a sensation from her childhood until the early '80s and then enjoyed a second wave of work when she became a sitcom regular from 1988-1995. When that show, a spin-off series airing on NBC, flew the coop, so did her acting career.

9.  This slim, angular beauty (love the hair!) was a popular European actress of the 1960s who sometimes worked with her sister, another beauty who has gone on to considerable success as an actress. Her sister, one year younger, has starred in a couple of key films from the '60s (in genres as varied as thrillers and musicals), some popular successes of the '70s and still works today in her homeland. She also scored a Best Actress Oscar nomination in the early-'90s.

10.  This young lady's name is Darlene. She began acting as a teen in 1960s movies and TV shows, later playing Henry Fonda's daughter on his sitcom The Smith Family (1971-1972.) Her own show, Miss Winslow and Son (1979), seen here, went nowhere fast, though she did play Karl Malden's daughter many times on The Streets of San Francisco between 1973 and 1977. Her older sister was also an actress whose face is internationally known thanks to the stupendously successful Oscar-winning Best Picture movie in which she had a featured part, though she only ever had one other acting credit a year afterwards! Darlene has another older sister who acted as well, but primarily with her voice, providing the low, authoritative one for Wonder Woman that was heard all those years on Super Friends (1973-1983.)

BONUS:  This one concerns not siblings, but cousins. Recognize this young man? He had a regular role on the obscure TV show Joe and Sons (1975-1976) before joining the cast of the hit show Soap (1977-1981.) A spotty acting career followed through the 1980s. His male cousin had the same last name as him and had a far more prominent TV career, still remaining on the scene in various capacities today.





:::::ANSWERS TO FOLLOW!:::::

1.  Edith Marie Blossom MacDonald Rock was the elder sister of Jeanette MacDonald, who enjoyed about a dozen years of starring in operetta type musicals such as The Merry Widow (1934), Rose-Marie (1936) and Maytime (1937), frequently costarring Nelson Eddy. MacDonald also costarred in the wonderful early disaster film San Francisco (1936) along with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. It's earthquake effects still impress today nearly eighty years later. Though MacDonald died in 1965 of a heart attack at only age sixty-one, Rock lived until 1978, passing away at age eighty-two.

2.  Peter Marshall was the younger brother of actress Joanne Dru, who starred in John Ford's westerns Red River (1948) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) as well as Best Picture All the King's Men (1949.) Her husbands included singer Dick Haymes (1941-1949) and John Ireland (1949-1957) as well as two gentlemen after those. She died in 1996 at age seventy-four of lymphedema. Mr. Marshall is still with us today and will be eighty-eight on March 30th! I think you can see plenty of resemblance between the siblings in this photo of Marshall (with Barbara Eden in Swingin' Along, 1961.)

3.  Marisa's fraternal twin sister was fellow Italian actress Pier Angeli, a softer-looking, fragile beauty whose personal life was riddled with problems. Her name was actually Anna Maria Pierangeli! Pavan had been born Maria Luisa Pierangeli, but had been married to a man named Pavan. Angeli starred in Teresa in 1951 with John Ericson and The Story of Three Loves in 1953 opposite Kirk Douglas. She also took part in Paul Newman's disastrous movie debut The Silver Chalice (1954), but made up for that with his 1956 film Somebody Up there Likes Me.

She was deeply in love with James Dean, but her mother forbade them to wed, resulting in a swift marriage to singer Vic Damone which petered out after four years. Still disenchanted with life and with her career, Angeli overdosed on pills in 1971 at age thirty-nine while Pavan is still with us today at eighty-one.

4.  Ann Prentiss was the younger sister (by a year) of Paula Prentiss. Paula costarred in Where the Boys Are (1960), Catch-22 (1970) and The Stepford Wives (1975), among others, often working alongside her husband Richard Benjamin. Paula is seventy-six years old at present, but Ann died in 2010 at age seventy. The sad thing is, she died in prison.  For, you see, somewhere along the way the wheels began to come off and in 1997, she was convicted of making terrorist threats, assault with a firearm, battery and conspiring to have not only Richard Benjamin killed, but her own father, too! Her sentence was for nineteen years, though she passed away before completing it.

5.  Maria Schell was the older sister of Maximilian Schell, who won the Academy Award for his earnest, passionate role in Judgement at Nuremberg (1961.) We like him (and his nipples!) best, though, for Krakatoa: East of Java (1969.) Maria passed away of pneumonia in 2005 at the age of seventy-nine while Max just died this past February (2014) at age eighty-three, also of pneumonia.

6.  Dawn Lynn is the younger sister of Leif Garrett, a screamingly popular teen actor and singer of the mid-'70s. In one 1978 episode of Wonder Woman, Lyn played a rabid fan of the character Garrett was portraying. That was Lyn's last on screen acting gig, her 4' 10" frame limiting her options.

Then, in 1979, Garrett was involved in a terrible car accident that cost his best friend the use of his legs, cost him $7 million in a settlement and helped to fuel an already considerable drug problem, one he has battled off and on ever since. He did continue to act, and occasionally does so today at age fifty-two. Lyn is currently fifty-one. (By the way, WHAT are we seeing in this shot to the left under his shorts?)

7.  Neil Connery is the younger brother of James Bond actor Sean Connery. Neil's first movie was called Operation Kid Brother (1967) and featured some of Sean's Bond costars in it. Sean won an Academy Award for 1987's The Untouchables. Though Sean is eight years older, both men were good looking and both have demonstrated the same type of male-pattern baldness and gray hair in later years. Sean is now eighty three while Neil is seventy-five. You may view more of the handsome Sean here!

8.  Jimmy McNichol was the older brother of child star Kristy McNichol, who as a teenager won two Emmys for her work on the series Family (1976-1980), also starring in Little Darlings (1980) and the jaw-dropping The Pirate Movie (1982) opposite Christopher Atkins. Jimmy is fifty-two and went into the construction and remodeling business in the early-'80s.  Kristy is now fifty-one. A sufferer from bipolar disorder, she is retired apart from teaching acting to young people, lives with her female partner of over two decades and is also an advocate against bullying.

9.  Françoise Dorléac was the sister of the beauteous Catherine Deneuve. The two of them worked in The Door Slams (1960), Male Hunt (1964) and most notably The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967.) Sadly, a horrific accident in which her sports car flipped over took her from us when she was only twenty-five. Deneuve enjoyed acclaim in, among others, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), Repulsion (1965), Belle de Jour (1967), The Hunger (1987) and got that Oscar nom for Indochine (1992.) She is seventy today. 

10. Darlene Carr is the little sister of Charmian Carr, who played Liesl in The Sound of Music (1965.) Their sister Shannon Farnon provided the low, authoritative voice of Wonder Woman on Super Friends. After guest-starring four times on Simon & Simon between 1981 and 1986, Darlene eventually married that show's star Jameson Parker in 1992 and they remain wed today. She is sixty-three, Charmain is seventy-one and Shannon is seventy-two.

Bonus Answer:  Jimmy Baio is the younger cousin (by one year) of Scott Baio. Jimmy is fifty-two today while Scott is fifty-three. Scott's TV credits include Happy Days (1977-1984), Charles in Charge (1984-1990), Diagnosis Murder (1993-1995) and See Dad Run (2012-2014), with much of the 1990s spent directing sitcoms.

Pop Quiz: All in the Family

Oh, my pets... things have been utterly lunatic in The Underworld lately. The latest chapter in the serial that is my life is that my satellite provider completely, without warning, ERASED FOREVER my entire library of saved programs on my DVR.  So there went several posts down the tubes, including part of my proposed 400th one.  Anyway, while I'm wringing the tears out of my hanky, I have had to resort to a different sort of post while I attempt to get my act together again.  If you don't enjoy the quiz, hopefully a couple of the pictures may be interesting at least!

Today's Pop Quiz will involve a celebrity whose parent or child is/was also a performer and you will have to guess who they are.  In most, if not all, cases, the less famous (or well known these days) celeb will be the lead-off and the answer is the slightly more familiar entity.  Stick around at the end for one last amusing photo!

1. This memorably imposing and dour-looking actor is Vic Morrow, perhaps best known for the WWII series Combat! (1962-1967), but also the guest star of many TV shows (such as The Rifleman, Police Story and Charlie's Angels) and supporting actor in movies (including 1955's The Blackboard Jungle, 1958's God's Little Acre, 1960's Cimarron and 1976's The Bad News Bears.)  His final role was in Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) thanks to a horrific on-set accident in which a helicopter decapitated him and killed the two children he was filming with.  His daughter grew up to be a critically popular actress known for her edgy, immersed performances.

2. Fans of the 1975 thriller The Stepford Wives (the only big-screen version that I acknowledge!) will recall this man, who played Katharine Ross' husband.  He maintained an acting career for about two decades from 1966 to 1987, but ultimately switched gears to directing.  His square-jawed daughter (who also appeared as his child in Wives) went on to a successful career in the movies chiefly from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s.

3. This young lady's name is Tisha Sterling, a pretty actress with striking, large eyes.  As a girl, she toiled in plenty of television shows from The Alfred Hitchcock Hour to Batman, segueing to movies such as Coogan's Bluff (1968) with Clint Eastwood and Norwood (1970) with Glen Campbell.  She's shown in the inset with James Franciscus in the 1970 TV-movie Night Slaves.  She inherited her huge eyes from her famous mother, a 1930s beauty who had her own film series in the 1940s before conquering TV in the 1950s.  Sterling played the younger version of her mother's character in her mother's final movie.

4. This one's such a gimme, I shouldn't even include it, but we must balance out the more difficult ones, mustn't we?  Stage actress Blythe Danner, who went on to film success in 1776 (1972), The Great Santini (1979) and more recently Meet the Parents (2000) is the mother of an actress who achieved tremendous popularity (and even managed to wrangle an Oscar.)  The daughter has lately become associated with a popular, CGI-laden, superhero film franchise.

5. Most of you won't be too familiar with this young man, Kyle Johnson, who enjoyed a brief run at acting in the mid-'60s to the mid-'70s (starring in The Learning Tree, shown here, in 1969, regarding social and racial issues in small town 1920s Kansas.)  He also popped up in Rock Hudson's 1971 dark comedy Pretty Maids All in a Row.  Johnson's mother was a groundbreaking TV actress who was and is part of a major fan favorite franchise so great that the followers were given their own name.

6. Here we have television actress Whitney Blake, a TV actress from the 1950s through the 1970s who costarred on the Shirley Booth sitcom Hazel (1961-1965) and guest-starred on many other shows.  her daughter became a highly-successful television actress as well as part of a 1976-1980 drama series and then a 1981-1989 sitcom in which she, too, played the mom.  She proceeded to star in popular TV-movies and still works frequently today.

7. These two writer-producer-director gents are brothers, Paul and Chris Weitz.  They have collaborated on several movies from the hugely-popular gross-out comedy American Pie (1999) to the far more sensitive About a Boy (2002) to the big-budget misfire The Golden Compass (2007), among other things.  Their father was a German fashion designer and writer named John Weitz.  Their mother, prior to having her sons and retiring, was a promising, thriving actress who won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar for one of her more memorable roles.

8. This young man is Paul Clemens, who starred as an unfairly accused murderer in the 1978 TV-movie A Death in Canaan before landing supporting roles in the 1979 movies Promises in the Dark and The Passage.  As seen here, he also starred in 1982's The Beast Within as the product of rape between a woman and diabolical creature!  His acting career petered out for the most part, though he did segue into art (his father was a portrait painter of the same name.)  His mother is a thrice Oscar-nominated actress who enjoyed considerable fame, including one film that is a bonafide family classic for the ages.

9. The glamour-puss shown here is Marjorie Lord, the TV wife of Danny Thomas on The Danny Thomas Show (known also as Make Room for Daddy) from 1957-1964.  The glam quotient is notable since she replaced Jean Hagen on the show after the first three seasons, partly because Thomas didn't approve of Hale's appearance.  The two-time Emmy nominee (three, actually, because of a special category) was allegedly once told by Thomas, "For God's sake, Jean.  Put on a little lipstick!" Anyway, Hagen wasn't happy on the show, but Lord was.  Lord's daughter went on to significant fame as an actress, scoring an Oscar nomination for her part in a major blockbusting thriller.

10. This is another pretty easy one.  Sean Astin got started in television and movies as a preteen, with The Goonies (1985) a cult favorite.  Later, he starred in Toy Soldiers (1991) and Rudy (1993) before the triple-whammy of the three The Lord of the Rings movies (in 2001, 2002 and 2003.)  He maintains a very busy career now.  His mother was also a teen star of stage, screen and television and won an Oscar while still a youth.

11. This man was a reliable character actor in movies from the 1910s until his premature death at only age fifty-seven of a liver ailment.  As a Warner Brothers contract player, he wound up in more than a dozen films that featured screen swashbuckler Errol Flynn, as seen here in the inset.  He had a similar-looking son named after him who was placed in movies as a child and who grew up to work in many films and television shows.  Although the son worked until the late-1980s, he is chiefly known for his iconic role on a sitcom that only ran for three seasons (yet has never left the airwaves in reruns since!)

12. This exotic French beauty, shown in the inset with James Cagney, was a considerable movie actress of the 1920s and '30s when she met and married an up and coming hunk in 1935.  His career soon shot off like crazy while hers dwindled.  They had one child together before divorcing and she continued to draw spousal support from her ex until he was dead and gone.  Their very handsome son took a stab at acting, too, in less than ten movies (mostly foreign made) before switching gears to photojournalism.

13. Fans of the 1937 movie Lost Horizon will recall Margo (seen here with Horizon's Ronald Coleman), a Mexican actress who worked sporadically in TV and film up through the mid-'60s.  Though married first to actor Francis Lederer, she wed another, more familiar actor in 1945 and they were together until her death forty years later.  Their handsome son, named after his father, but resembling his mother more, went on to a more than forty-year career before the cameras himself when he was prematurely taken by lung cancer at only age fifty-five.

That concludes the quiz.  The answers will be shown below with a tad more commentary accompanying each answer!



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1.  Vic Morrow's daughter is Jennifer Jason Leigh, costar of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), The Hitcher (1986), Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989), Miami Blues (1990), Single White Female (1992) and Dolores Claiborne (1995), among many others.

2. The actor-director's name is Peter Masterson and his daughter is Mary Stuart Masterson, star of Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), Chances Are (1989), Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), Benny & Joon (1993) and Bad Girls (1994), among others.

3. Tisha Sterling's mother was Ann Sothern, through her six-year marriage to Robert Sterling.  Tisha played the young version of Sothern's character in The Whales of August (1987) for which Sothern was Oscar-nominated.

4. Blythe Danner is the mother of Gwyneth Paltrow through her thirty-two-year marriage to writer-producer-director Bruce Paltrow.

5. Kyle Johnson's mother is none other than Star Trek's Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura) from her brief marriage to Foster Johnson.

6. Whitney Blake's daughter is Meredith Baxter (star of Family and Family Ties) from her first marriage to Tom Baxter.  Ironically, Blake's name on Hazel was "Dorothy Baxter," though by then Blake was divorced from Baxter.

7. The Weitz brothers are the sons of Imitation of Life's Susan Kohner.  Kohner was married to John Weitz from 1964 until his death in 2002.

8. Paul Clemens is the son of The Sound of Music's (1965) elegant Baroness Schraeder, Eleanor Parker.  She was wed to artist Paul Clemens (Sr) from 1954-1965.

9. Marjorie Lord's daughter is Anne Archer, of Fatal Attraction (1987) and many other movies. Lord was married to actor John Archer from 1941 to 1953.

10. Sean Astin's mother is Patty Duke, who won an Oscar for The Miracle Worker (1962), was the star of The Patty Duke Show (1963-1966) and is part of the cult gay phenomena Valley of the Dolls (1967.)  Astin got his name from Duke's marriage to John Astin (1972-1985), but his father was really someone else.  During a manic phase of her bipolar disorder, she had slept with rock promoter Michael Tell, John Astin and Lucille Ball's son, Desi Arnaz Jr!  She married Tell for less than two weeks to "give her baby a name" all the while believing that Arnaz was the father.  Then she married Astin, who raised Sean.  Years later DNA tests confirmed that Tell was Sean's biological father.  If all this had been the plot of one of her movies, audiences would have claimed it was too far-fetched...

11. The character actor is Alan Hale and his son, Alan Hale Jr, played Skipper on Gilligan's Island from 1964-1967 and in a few reunion movies.

12. Actress Lili Damita wed Errol Flynn and gave birth to Sean Flynn.  Sean went missing during a photojournalism jaunt in Cambodia and was presumed dead in 1971 (officially declared so in 1984.)  A desperate Damita tried and tried to recover her son and only child, or at least his remains, but was unsuccessful.  After Errol Flynn's death (and the end of his spousal checks), Damita wed for a third time, but divorced again after twenty-one years.

13. Margo was married to movie actor and star of Green Acres (1965-1971) Eddie Albert and their son, Edward Albert, starred in Butterflies Are Free (1972) and many subsequent films.

My little bonus photo is coming up.  One of the most (in)famous parent-child Hollywood relationships was that of Joan Crawford and her adopted daughter Christina, who pursued acting as a girl.  (Most fans of Joan will recall her stepping into Christina's role on the daytime serial The Secret Storm for a couple of days during an illness.)  Apart from jobs that Joan helped arrange (like 1961's Wild in the Country), Christina had to settle for TV guest spots and work on the regional stage.  By 1972, she was completely done with screen acting after just a handful of jobs.

This photo, a promotional picture for the very popular series Medical Center (1969-1976) starring Chad Everett, was meant to publicize her guest appearance on a 1970 installment, but the newspaper thought so little of her that they cropped it to feature ONLY Everett and X-ed her out of the shot entirely!!  At the time, such a thing would have probably enraged Joan, who wished for Christina to succeed, but in retrospect, she's probably looking at this now from the great beyond with a karmic smirk.

Till the next moment I can rejoin you, my friends. Best wishes!