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Michael Callan, the actor and dancer who portrayed Riff in the original Broadway production of West Side Story before starring in such films as Gidget Goes Hawaiian, The Interns and Cat Ballou, has died. He was 86.
Callan died Monday night of pneumonia at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, his daughter Rebecca Goodman told The Hollywood Reporter.
A contract player at Columbia Pictures, Callan made about a dozen movies at the studio, starting with They Came to Cordura (1959), a Western starring Gary Cooper, Rita Hayworth, Van Heflin and Tab Hunter.
On the 1966-67 NBC comedy Occasional Wife, Callan starred as a confirmed bachelor who sets up a woman (Patricia Harty) in an upstairs apartment so she can pose as his wife in order to help him advance at the baby food company where he works. (His boss believes...
Michael Callan, the actor and dancer who portrayed Riff in the original Broadway production of West Side Story before starring in such films as Gidget Goes Hawaiian, The Interns and Cat Ballou, has died. He was 86.
Callan died Monday night of pneumonia at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, his daughter Rebecca Goodman told The Hollywood Reporter.
A contract player at Columbia Pictures, Callan made about a dozen movies at the studio, starting with They Came to Cordura (1959), a Western starring Gary Cooper, Rita Hayworth, Van Heflin and Tab Hunter.
On the 1966-67 NBC comedy Occasional Wife, Callan starred as a confirmed bachelor who sets up a woman (Patricia Harty) in an upstairs apartment so she can pose as his wife in order to help him advance at the baby food company where he works. (His boss believes...
- 10/11/2022
- by Mike Barnes
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Kurt Russell Teaches Us The Art Of The Steal
By Alex Simon
If you’re a guy of a certain age (think Gen X), Kurt Russell was that actor you discovered as a child who wasn’t just a familiar face on the big and small screen, he was your buddy you grew up with. Not a peer, necessarily, but the cool, slightly older kid who lived next door who you just knew, if you played your cards right, you might grow up to be: handsome, self-assured in sports, with girls and in your place on the planet. Especially if you could hang out with him on a regular basis and learn the tricks to his magic, and magic was something Kurt Russell had from the beginning.
The son of the late actor Bing Russell, best remembered as Deputy Sheriff Clem Foster on Bonanza, Kurt literally grew up on a soundstage,...
By Alex Simon
If you’re a guy of a certain age (think Gen X), Kurt Russell was that actor you discovered as a child who wasn’t just a familiar face on the big and small screen, he was your buddy you grew up with. Not a peer, necessarily, but the cool, slightly older kid who lived next door who you just knew, if you played your cards right, you might grow up to be: handsome, self-assured in sports, with girls and in your place on the planet. Especially if you could hang out with him on a regular basis and learn the tricks to his magic, and magic was something Kurt Russell had from the beginning.
The son of the late actor Bing Russell, best remembered as Deputy Sheriff Clem Foster on Bonanza, Kurt literally grew up on a soundstage,...
- 2/19/2014
- by The Hollywood Interview.com
- The Hollywood Interview
Are There Big Bucks in Daytime Soaps?
By Isobel Silden
The Baltimore Sun
July 27, 1980
The names may not be blaring from the headlines of the movie magazines in the supermarkets, but the top soap opera actors are genuine stars with an adoring--or sometimes angry--public. And there are jealousies, salary disputes and ego problems. Here, in the last of a five-part series, is a look behind the scenes of the soaps.
Everyone involved with daytime TV, either as a performer or a viewer, has favorite cherished stories.
Helen Gallagher (Maeve on Ryan's Hope) says producer Claire Labine cherishes one specific letter. "It was from a girl who'd been raped. She wrote Helen that the aftermath with the police was so awful, she tried to think of the nicest thing she could. That was Maeve Ryan. Helen cries when she talks about it."
Still, all is not sweetness and light with every actor on every soap.
By Isobel Silden
The Baltimore Sun
July 27, 1980
The names may not be blaring from the headlines of the movie magazines in the supermarkets, but the top soap opera actors are genuine stars with an adoring--or sometimes angry--public. And there are jealousies, salary disputes and ego problems. Here, in the last of a five-part series, is a look behind the scenes of the soaps.
Everyone involved with daytime TV, either as a performer or a viewer, has favorite cherished stories.
Helen Gallagher (Maeve on Ryan's Hope) says producer Claire Labine cherishes one specific letter. "It was from a girl who'd been raped. She wrote Helen that the aftermath with the police was so awful, she tried to think of the nicest thing she could. That was Maeve Ryan. Helen cries when she talks about it."
Still, all is not sweetness and light with every actor on every soap.
- 8/17/2011
- by We Love Soaps TV
- We Love Soaps
So Myrna and I are visiting Linda Dozoretz, high in the hills of Beverly... Linda shows Myrna the Google home page with The Flintstones integrated into the Google art celebrating the "50th" Flintstones Birthday. Out flowed from Myrna cathartic (tears/laughter) stories of Ralph Cohn, nephew of Harry Cohn (Columbia Pictures legend) who was entrusted to head up a new division called "Screen Gems". A bit déclassé, this television stuff. They thought TV was "happening" and they needed content. They had to be a player and get on the air. Columbia created what appeared to be two winners: Rin Tin Tin and something called Circus Boy. (Myrna recalls Jay North, later of Dennis The Menace, starring in it). A powerhouse lady named Joyce Selznick (who had been a Columbia casting director and "discovered" the recently...
- 10/7/2010
- by Freddie Gershon
- Huffington Post
Chicago – Tony Curtis was the Prince of Hollywood, he was the original Fantastic Mr. Fox. He took his pretty boy good looks and carved a career that included the classic films “Some Like it Hot,” “Sweet Smell of Success” and “The Defiant Ones.” Tony Curtis died at his Las Vegas home yesterday at the age of 85.
I had the privilege of interviewing Tony Curtis twice for HollywoodChicago.com in the last couple of years. We spoke of his early days as an actor, his relationship with director Billy Wilder and the various ups and downs in his adventurous life. Between the outline of that life I will add some direct quotes given to me by the man.
Tony Curtis poses for HollywoodChicago.com on Dec. 3, 2009.
Photo credit: Joe Arce of Starstruck Foto for HollywoodChicago.com
Born Bernard Schwartz in the Bronx, New York, in 1925, Curtis grew up poor as the son of immigrant parents.
I had the privilege of interviewing Tony Curtis twice for HollywoodChicago.com in the last couple of years. We spoke of his early days as an actor, his relationship with director Billy Wilder and the various ups and downs in his adventurous life. Between the outline of that life I will add some direct quotes given to me by the man.
Tony Curtis poses for HollywoodChicago.com on Dec. 3, 2009.
Photo credit: Joe Arce of Starstruck Foto for HollywoodChicago.com
Born Bernard Schwartz in the Bronx, New York, in 1925, Curtis grew up poor as the son of immigrant parents.
- 9/30/2010
- by adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)
- HollywoodChicago.com
Tony Curtis, who channeled a rough childhood marked by tragedy into a polished and sustained career on the large and small screen for over sixty years, died yesterday of a cardiac arrest at his home in Las Vegas, his daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, reported to Entertainment Tonight. He was 85.
Born Bernard Schwartz in the Bronx in 1925, Curtis grew up in poverty. The eldest child of immigrant parents, he had almost no formal education and began to sneak into the movies with his younger brother Julius as a means of escape. When he was 10 years old, however, the financial strain on the family became too much to bear and Tony and his brother briefly became wards of the state, admitted to an orphanage for a number of weeks before being reclaimed by his parents. This experience helped shape a strong sense of independence in the boy as Curtis was prematurely forced to learn one of life's toughest lessons; namely, that the only person you can count on is yourself.
In 1938, shortly before Curtis’s bar mitzvah, his brother and constant companion Julius was tragically killed in a traffic accident. Devastated, Tony pulled further away from the conventional life that his parents had always hoped for in the belief that life was to be experienced head-on and hands-on and a few years later joined the Navy. He was honorably discharged after three years of service and with no other plans for a career, auditioned for the New York Dramatic Workshop when he realized the GI Bill would pay for acting school. As is so often the case, fate stepped in for Curtis, as he caught the eye of a theatrical agent during one of his many small stage appearances. Joyce Selznick just happened to be the niece of film producer David Selznick, who ended up offering Curtis a seven-year contract with Universal Studios.
Arriving in Hollywood in 1948 at age 23, he changed his name to Tony Curtis and quickly made an impression with a two-minute role in 'Criss Cross' (1949), in which he makes Burt Lancaster jealous by dancing with Yvonne De Carlo. Based on the strength of that role, Curtis finally got the chance to demonstrate his acting flair, as he was cast in a small, but important role in Sierra (1950). This led to his first big-budget movie, Winchester '73 (1950), which allowed the ambitious, yet still raw talent the chance to act alongside Jimmy Stewart.
Curtis worked steadily throughout the early ‘50’s, consciously working in various genres while actively seeking roles in movies that had some kind of social relevance. His breakout performance as the scheming press agent Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success (1957) was the beginning of a great run for the versatile Curtis, who followed an Oscar-nominated performance as a bigoted, escaped convict chained to Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones (1958) and with a broadly comic turn opposite Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot (1959).
He was drawn to roles and films that would challenge audiences. Curtis was advised against appearing as the subordinate sidekick Antoninus in the epic Spartacus (1960), playing second fiddle to Kirk Douglas, but he was taken with the part and the chance to work with the director Stanley Kubrick. He garnered a significant amount of controversy (and critical acclaim) by playing against type the self-confessed murderer Albert DeSalvo in The Boston Strangler (1968). It was around this time that Curtis ventured into television where he co-starred with Roger Moore in the series “The Persuaders!” (1971) and later, created memorable supporting characters in “McCoy” (1975) and “Vega$” (1978).
On the personal front, Curtis was an avid painter throughout his life and one of his surrealist works went on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2007. More famously, as he detailed in his autobiography “American Prince: A Memoir”, Curtis had relationships with a number of famous actresses, including Natalie Wood and a brief, but widely publicized affair with Marilyn Monroe. He was married five times, most notably to Janet Leigh, with whom he had two daughters, Jamie Lee and Kelly Curtis. His last marriage, to Jill Vandenberg, who was 42 years his junior, was in 1998 and lasted until his death. Curtis had six children, five which survive him: two with Leigh, two from his second wife Christine Kaufmann, and two from his third, Leslie Allen.
Born Bernard Schwartz in the Bronx in 1925, Curtis grew up in poverty. The eldest child of immigrant parents, he had almost no formal education and began to sneak into the movies with his younger brother Julius as a means of escape. When he was 10 years old, however, the financial strain on the family became too much to bear and Tony and his brother briefly became wards of the state, admitted to an orphanage for a number of weeks before being reclaimed by his parents. This experience helped shape a strong sense of independence in the boy as Curtis was prematurely forced to learn one of life's toughest lessons; namely, that the only person you can count on is yourself.
In 1938, shortly before Curtis’s bar mitzvah, his brother and constant companion Julius was tragically killed in a traffic accident. Devastated, Tony pulled further away from the conventional life that his parents had always hoped for in the belief that life was to be experienced head-on and hands-on and a few years later joined the Navy. He was honorably discharged after three years of service and with no other plans for a career, auditioned for the New York Dramatic Workshop when he realized the GI Bill would pay for acting school. As is so often the case, fate stepped in for Curtis, as he caught the eye of a theatrical agent during one of his many small stage appearances. Joyce Selznick just happened to be the niece of film producer David Selznick, who ended up offering Curtis a seven-year contract with Universal Studios.
Arriving in Hollywood in 1948 at age 23, he changed his name to Tony Curtis and quickly made an impression with a two-minute role in 'Criss Cross' (1949), in which he makes Burt Lancaster jealous by dancing with Yvonne De Carlo. Based on the strength of that role, Curtis finally got the chance to demonstrate his acting flair, as he was cast in a small, but important role in Sierra (1950). This led to his first big-budget movie, Winchester '73 (1950), which allowed the ambitious, yet still raw talent the chance to act alongside Jimmy Stewart.
Curtis worked steadily throughout the early ‘50’s, consciously working in various genres while actively seeking roles in movies that had some kind of social relevance. His breakout performance as the scheming press agent Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success (1957) was the beginning of a great run for the versatile Curtis, who followed an Oscar-nominated performance as a bigoted, escaped convict chained to Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones (1958) and with a broadly comic turn opposite Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot (1959).
He was drawn to roles and films that would challenge audiences. Curtis was advised against appearing as the subordinate sidekick Antoninus in the epic Spartacus (1960), playing second fiddle to Kirk Douglas, but he was taken with the part and the chance to work with the director Stanley Kubrick. He garnered a significant amount of controversy (and critical acclaim) by playing against type the self-confessed murderer Albert DeSalvo in The Boston Strangler (1968). It was around this time that Curtis ventured into television where he co-starred with Roger Moore in the series “The Persuaders!” (1971) and later, created memorable supporting characters in “McCoy” (1975) and “Vega$” (1978).
On the personal front, Curtis was an avid painter throughout his life and one of his surrealist works went on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2007. More famously, as he detailed in his autobiography “American Prince: A Memoir”, Curtis had relationships with a number of famous actresses, including Natalie Wood and a brief, but widely publicized affair with Marilyn Monroe. He was married five times, most notably to Janet Leigh, with whom he had two daughters, Jamie Lee and Kelly Curtis. His last marriage, to Jill Vandenberg, who was 42 years his junior, was in 1998 and lasted until his death. Curtis had six children, five which survive him: two with Leigh, two from his second wife Christine Kaufmann, and two from his third, Leslie Allen.
- 9/30/2010
- IMDb News
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