The Big Picture

Robert Nott |

1/1/2009 - 1/2/09

Still shining

We lost Moses and that ghoul lady who came out of the grave in the cult classic Plan 9 From Outer Space. Yes, Charlton Heston and Vampira were just two of the many great screen personalities (which doesn't mean they were always great actors) who died in 2008. As in previous years, I'm paying tribute to them before the Academy Awards do. So, in alphabetical order, here's a partial list of film actors who are now in Hollywood heaven.

Robert (Bob) Arthur: One of those perpetually youthful-looking second leads from the waning years of the Golden Era of Hollywood films, Arthur may best be known for his work in Billy Wilder's 1951 classic Ace in the Hole (shot in New Mexico). He was born (and died) in Aberdeen, Washington, and went to Hollywood after military service. Other film credits include Twelve O'Clock High (1950) and Hellcats of the Navy (1957). He died in October at 83.

Cyd Charisse: They don't make legs like hers anymore. She danced with Fred Astaire in my favorite MGM musical, The Band Wagon (1953). Charisse bumped around Hollywood for about a decade before breaking through in a supporting role in the 1952 classic Singin' in the Rain, in which she vamped and danced with Gene Kelly. "It was a dream to walk through that lot," she once said of MGM, where she made most of her movies. In 1992, she appeared on Broadway in the stage musical Grand Hotel. She died in June at 86.

Nina Foch: What a career — Return of the Vampire (1943), Cry of the Werewolf (1944), My Name Is Julia Ross (1945), An American in Paris (1951), 1954's Executive Suite (for which she earned an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress), and The Ten Commandments (1956). Plus she was in one of my favorite George Raft vehicles,
Johnny Allegro (1949). Foch could be coolly sensuous or coolly intimidating. She later became an acting coach and taught at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. She died in December at 84.

Beverly Garland: She ran her own hotel in Hollywood for years, but before that she was the woman engaged to a guy who turns into a reptile in The Alligator People (1959) and Fred MacMurray's wife on television's My Three Sons. Other great B films include Swamp Women (1955) — featuring more alligators — It Conquered the World (1956), and Gunslinger (1956). Somebody should start a film festival in her honor. She died in December at 82.

Charlton Heston: "You never get it right," he said in a 1986 interview about acting. Still, despite his often wooden performance style, Heston got it right a few times: Ben-Hur (1959) netted him an Oscar, and he was movingly effective as a lonely frontiersman in the overlooked Will Penny (1968). He segued into science-fiction films in the late 1960s — Planet of the Apes (1968), The Omega Man (1971), and Soylent Green (1973) come to mind. Later, he was president of the National Rifle Association. His often entertaining memoir, The Actor's Life: Journals 1956-1976, can be found in the main branch of the Santa Fe Public Library. He died in April at 83.

Van Johnson: Though he was one of the top box-office draws in the 1940s thanks to his contribution to numerous MGM musicals and comedies, he was at his best when playing cynical observers, as in The Caine Mutiny and Brigadoon (both 1954). He raised eyebrows back in '47 when he married his friend Eve Wynn within a day of her divorce from actor Keenan Wynn. His last film role of importance was in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), but he kept busy in theater and TV when movie offers dried up. He died in December at 92.

Evelyn Keyes: Four words sum up my feelings about her: va va va voom! They must have invented the term "bedroom eyes" for Keyes, who gained more notoriety for her tell-all autobiography Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister: My Lively Life In and Out of Hollywood (1977) than for her movie work. She made some nifty film noirs, including Johnny O'Clock (1947), The Prowler (1951), and 99 River Street (1953). Among her husbands were bandleader Artie Shaw and film director John Huston. She died in July at 91.

Heath Ledger: The Australian actor had come a long way in less than a decade, from a teen-heartthrob turn in the 1999 comedy Ten Things I Hate About You to a Golden Globe-nominated performance as The Joker in The Dark Knight (2008). He also nabbed an Oscar nomination for his role as a lovesick cowboy in Brokeback Mountain (2005). He died in January at 28, a bottle of sleeping pills by his side. His last film, the Terry Gilliam fantasy The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, is scheduled for release later this year.

Paul Newman: "If Marlon Brando and James Dean defined the defiant American male as a sullen rebel, Paul Newman recreated him as a likable renegade, a strikingly handsome figure of animal high spirits and blue-eyed candor whose magnetism was almost impossible to resist," wrote Aljean Harmetz of The New York Times when Newman died in September at 83. Unlike Brando and Dean, Newman's rebels often (though not always) came out as winners or at least got to survive until the closing credits. Great films include Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963), Cool Hand Luke (1967), and The Verdict (1982).

Anita Page: She worked with Buster Keaton, and that's good enough for me. One of the last surviving actors from the silent-film era — until her death in September at 98 — she also played opposite Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford, and Walter Huston. She preferred working in silents to talkies: "Silent pictures were much easier for me. If you didn't get your lines right, it didn't make much difference."

Vampira (aka Maila Nurmi): She had a silent bit as a ghoul lady in Ed Wood Jr.'s notoriously awful film Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), but Vampira really made her career in TV with the short-lived The Vampira Show (1954-1955). That's when she introduced her slinky lost-soul seductress character — commenting on low-budget horror films on KABC-TV in Los Angeles. Wood hired her to play in his film (see Tim Burton's 1994 biopic Ed Wood), and she later played in Sex Kittens Go to College (1960) and, more recently, I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1998). Check out her Web site vampirasattic.com. She died in January at 85.

Richard Widmark: The Dan Duryea of A pictures, Widmark came out of the gate swinging with an Oscar-nominated role as a psycho killer in the classic noir Kiss of Death (1947) and went on to play a variety of characters, from cowboy to sub commander, from pickpocket to a lively old widower, over the next 40 years or so. Unlike the modern screen rebel of the postwar period, Widmark's characters cared — about themselves, that is. They just didn't give a damn about anyone around them. He died in March at 93.

As well as actors, we lost a lot of writers, directors, and film technicians. Among them were Oscar-winning director Sidney Pollack (Tootsie, Out of Africa); Oscar-nominated director Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird); director Joseph Pevney, who churned out very agreeable A and B pics at Universal in the 1950s (remember Debbie Reynolds in Tammy?); screenwriter John Michael Hayes, who wrote four films for Alfred Hitchcock, including Rear Window; and comedy writer Irving Brecher, who penned two Marx Brothers films (At the Circus and Go West), co-wrote the holiday classic Meet Me in St. Louis (1945), and created, wrote, and produced the radio series The Life of Riley, featuring William Bendix. His autobiography — The Wicked Wit of the West: The Last Great Golden-Age Screenwriter Shares the Hilarity and Heartaches of Working With Groucho, Garland, Gleason, Burns, Berle, Benny, & Many More — is due to be published in 2009. And as we were going to press, we lost a few other notable figures: noir actress Ann Savage, sultry siren Eartha Kitt, and playwright/screenwriter Harold Pinter.