Rosemary Clooney
Born May 23, 1928
Died June 29, 2002
Georgie’s aunt. The singer who had a successful movie career was born in Maysville, Kentucky, but her parents separated not long after her birth and she was raised by her paternal grandparents. Her grandfather was a political animal and when he ran for the mayoralty Clooney and Betty, her younger sister (b. Maysville, Kentucky, 1931, d. 1976 of a brain aneurysm), sang at the campaign meetings and no doubt their mellifluence helped in his subsequent re-election to three successive terms. In 1941 the Clooney sisters moved to Cincinatti, Ohio, to live with their mother’s parents. They spent their days in school and their nights appearing on local radio station WLW for $20 a night. Their uncle acted as a chaperone and they toured the locale before being signed up by the Tony Pastor Orchestra in 1945. They toured with this band for three years. The sisters were still chaperoned by their uncle but that did not stop Rosemary falling for a bandmember. The mystery man proposed marriage and Rosemary agreed but changed her mind because of her single-minded resolve to get on with her career before getting off with a man. (The man was identified only as “Dave” in her 1977 autobiography This For Remembrance.) With the end of the Second World War came the beginning of the end of the big band era and Rosemary Clooney decided to go solo. In 1946 she recorded ‘I’m Sorry I Didn’t Say I’m Sorry When I Made You Cry Last Night’. She was to say of the session that she “was not able to sing above a whisper. Fear. Fear and this thing I was feeling inside about Dave.” Nonetheless, critics hailed her “new” style. Clooney moved to New York and signed a contract with Columbia Records and recorded some songs with Frank Sinatra before the Chairman of the Board left for Capitol. A meeting with Mitch Miller, the producer, proved fruitful and in 1951 he got her to record ‘Come On-A My House’. The previous year she had appeared on the television show Songs For Sale and then recorded ‘Big Brown Eyes’, which sold more than half a million copies. Despite hating her new song, it went on to sell more than a million copies and hit the number one spot. The hits continued including: ‘Tenderly’, ‘Suzy Flowflake’, ‘Botcha Me’, ‘Hey There’ (UK number four), ‘This Ole House’ (UK number one), ‘Christmas’, and ‘Mambo Italiano’ (UK number one). On July 13, 1953 she married the actor Jose Ferrer in Durant, Oklahoma. They moved into the house in Beverly Hills where the singer Russ Columbo had shot himself on September 2, 1934, and where George and Ira Gershwin had written ‘Foggy Day’. Clooney was signed to Paramount and made her screen début in 1953 in The Stars Are Singing playing Terry Brennan. This was followed by Here Come The Girls (1953) in which she played Daisy Crockett, Red Garters (1954) as Calaveras Kate, and Deep In My Heart (1954). She appeared in White Christmas (1954) playing Betty Haynes opposite Bing Crosby and not long after fell pregnant. Their son Miguel José was born in Santa Monica, California on February 7, 1955. He became an actor in Twin Peaks and Robocop and in 1991 married Leilaui Sarelle (b. September 28, 1959) who played Roxy, Sharon Stone’s lesbian lover in Basic Instinct (1992). The Jose Ferrers were to have four more children (Maria Providencia in August 1956, Gabriel Vincente in 1957, Monsita in 1958 and Rafael on March 23, 1960) but he found it impossible to stay faithful and she found herself unable to sing. They filed for divorce in 1961 and although the decree nisi was issued the decree absolute was never finalised. To compensate she became a vocal supporter of presidential candidate John F. Kennedy and was horrified at his assassination on November 22, 1963. She was angry and disgusted that her husband didn’t share her sorrow. It was the catalyst for their divorce which came in late 1967. In the middle of the flower power era she began a two-year affair with a drummer a decade and a half younger than her. She was later to describe it as “the happiest times I could ever remember having with a man”. On June 5, 1968 she was standing a few feet from Senator Bobby Kennedy when he was assassinated. The awful event caused the end of her relationship and also caused her to have a nervous breakdown. She was sent to a mental hospital. Slowly, she regained her sanity and in 1975 Bing Crosby invited her to go on tour with him. Two years later she formed Four Girls Four with Margaret Whiting, Helen O’Connell and Rose Marie. They toured for the next six years. She appeared in the television hospital drama ER opposite her nephew, George Clooney. She was nominated for an Emmy for her role as an Alzheimer’s sufferer who could only communicate through song. In 1997 she married Dante Di Paulo, whom she had met again in 1973 when he pulled up alongside her at a traffic light.
CAUSE: Rosemary Clooney underwent surgery for lung cancer on January 11, 2002 at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and the upper left lobe of her lung was removed. In early June 2002 the cancer returned with a vengeance. She died aged 74 of lung cancer in Beverly Hills, California. She was surrounded by her husband, her five children and nephew George Clooney.
Andy Clyde
Born March 25, 1892
Died May 18, 1967
The best friend. Born in Blairgowrie, Scotland, Clyde began his show business career in Twenties vaudeville before becoming an extra at Mack Sennett Studios. He became known for playing the hero’s sidekick, such as Hopalong Cassidy’s grizzled mate California Carlson. He made his début in the silent film A Small Town Idol (1921) and went on to appear in Million Dollar Legs (1932), Annie Oakle y (1935) as MacIvor, Three Men From Texas (1940) as California Carlson, Abe Lincoln In Illinois (1940), The Green Years (1946) as Saddler Boag, Abilene Trail (1951) as Sagebrush and his last film Pardon My Nightshirt (1956). He also appeared on television in The Real McCoys (1957–63) as George MacMichael, Lassie (1958–64) as Cully Wilson and No Time For Sergeants (1964–65) as Grandpa Jim Anderson. Married to actress Elsie Maud Tarron, a Mack Sennett bathing beauty, his brother David (b. 1887, d. San Fernando Valley, California, May 17, 1945) and sister Jean (d. 1962) were also actors.
CAUSE: He died aged 75 of natural causes in Los Angeles, California. He was interred in Forest Lawn Memorial-Parks, 1712 South Glendale Avenue, Glendale, California 91209.
Lee J. Cobb
(LEO JACOB)
Born December 8, 1911
Died February 11, 1976
Mr Menace. Born in New York, Cobb was a child prodigy on the violin until he broke his wrist. His ambition to be an actor was stifled by his parents, so he ran away from home. He appeared in various bit parts in films such as The Vanishing Shadow (1934), North Of The Rio Grande (1937) as Wooden, Ali Baba Goes To Town (1937), Danger On The Air (1938) as Tony while simultaneously working with the influential Group Theater in New York. His apogee on stage came in 1949 with the first production of Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman in which Cobb played the leading role of Willy Loman. His performance became the standard by which all subsequent productions were based. (He recreated the part for a TV movie in 1966.) His film work continued apace; his parts were usually those of big-mouthed yobs or other unpleasant or intimidating characters. Cobb said he was cast in less sympathetic roles because he lost his hair when he was just 20. (He wore a wig on stage, TV and film.) A perfect example of this came in 12 Angry Men (1957) when he played the juror holding out for conviction while Henry Fonda’s character strove to persuade the other jury members that there was an element of doubt in the prosecution’s case. He was twice nominated for Academy Awards. Firstly, for the inappropriately named union racketeer Johnny Friendly in On The Waterfront (1954) and then as the overbearing patriarch Fyodr in The Brothers Karamazov (1958). From September 19, 1962, until 1966 he was a regular on the television series The Virginian, playing Judge Henry Garth. One of his last memorable roles was that of Lieutenant William F. Kinderman in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). Other films included: Golden Boy (1939) as Mr Bonaparte, Tonight We Raid Calais (1943) as Bonnard, Buckskin Frontier (1943) as Jeptha Marr, The Song Of Bernadette (1943) as Dr Dozous, Anna And The King Of Siam (1946) as Kralahome (The Siamese Prime Minister), Boomerang! (1947) as Chief Robinson, Call Northside 777 (1948) as Brian Kelly, Sirocco (1951) as Colonel Feroud, Green Mansions (1959) as Nuflo, Exodus
(1960) as Barak Ben Canaan, Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse (1961) as Julio Madariaga, How The West Was Won (1962) as Marshal Lou Ramsey, Come Blow Your Horn (1963) as Mr Baker, Our Man Flint (1965) as Lloyd C. Cramden, In Like Flint (1967) as Lloyd C. Cramden, Coogan’s Bluff (1968) as Lieutenant McElroy, The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (1973) as Lapchance and That Lucky Touch (1975) as Lieutenant General Henry Steedman.
CAUSE: Cobb died of a heart attack aged 64 in Los Angeles, California.
Charles Coburn
Born June 17, 1877
Died August 30, 1961
Monocled cinematic grandfather. Born Charles Douville Coburn in Savannah, Georgia, he began his theatrical career selling programmes, gradually working his way up the ladder to become theatre manager. He then turned to acting, making his Broadway début in 1901. Among his film credits are: Boss Tweed (1933) his first film, Of Human Hearts (1938) as Dr Charles Shingle, Idiot’s Delight (1939) as Dr Hugo Waldersee, Stanley And Livingstone (1939) as Lord Tyce, The Story Of Alexander Graham Bell (1939) as Gardner Hubbard, The Road To Singapore (1940) as Joshua Mallon IV, Edison The Man (1940) as General Powell, The Devil And Miss Jones (1941) as Merrick, for which he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, Kings Row (1942) as Dr Henry Gordon, Heaven Can Wait (1943) as Hugo Van Cleve, The More The Merrier (1943) as Benjamin Dingle, for which he won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor, Wilson (1944) as Professor Henry Holmes, The Green Years (1946) as Alexander Gow, for which he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, Yes Sir That’s My Baby (1949) as Professor Jason Hartley, Monkey Business (1952) as Mr Oliver Oxley, Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (1953) as Samuel Fulton, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) as Sir Francis Beekman, The Remarkable Mr Pennypacker (1959) as Grampa and Pepe (1960), his final film. He was a keen race-goer and had his own stable of horses. He wore the monocle not for effect but because of an eye complaint.
CAUSE: He died of a heart attack, aged 84, in New York.
James Coburn
Born August 31, 1928
Died November 18, 2002
Rangy leading man. Born in Laurel, Nebraska, James Harrison Coburn III took an early interest in acting, playing Herod in a school play at the age of four. Coburn always said that he had been fascinated by the cinema from the beginning. His father’s garage business, in Laurel, went bust during the Depression and the family moved to Compton, California, where his father worked as a mechanic. When the Second World War broke out in America in 1941 Coburn was a jack of all trades in a cinema: the cleaner, the janitor and the ticket collector. Then he went to Los Angeles City College where he studied acting, though with directing as much as acting in mind. In 1955 Coburn moved to Manhattan, where he found work in a Remington shaving advertisement. He studied under Stella Adler and this led to breaks off-Broadway and on television, including the live Studio One television shows. He made his film début in Ride Lonesome (1959) as Whit and then played Purdy in Face Of A Fugitive (1959) before being cast as Britt in The Magnificent Seven (1960). It made a star of him and he went on to appear in The Murder Men (1961) as Arthur Troy, Hell Is For Heroes (1962) as Corporal Frank Henshaw, The Great Escape (1963) as Flying Officer Louis Sedgwick, Charade (1963) as ruthless killer Tex Panthollow, The Man From Galveston (1963) as Boyd Palmer, The Americanization Of Emily (1964) as Lieutenant Commander ‘Bus’ Cummings, Major Dundee (1965) as Samuel Potts, A High Wind In Jamaica (1965) as Zac, Our Man Flint (1966) as Derek Flint, What Did You Do In The War, Daddy? (1966) as Lieutenant Christian, Dead Heat On A Merry-Go-Round (1966) as Eli Kotch, Duffy (1968) as Duffy (critic Pauline Kael opined of his performance, “James Coburn the actor has disappeared, and his body is now inhabited by a dimpled, grinning star – a spastic zombie”), Candy (1968) as Dr Krankheit, Hard Contract (1969) as John Cunningham, Last Of The Mobile Hot Shots (1969) as Jeb, Una Ragione Per Vivere E Una Per Morire (1972) as Colonel Pembroke, Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid (1973) as Sheriff Patrick J. Garrett, Harry In Your Pocket (1973) as Harry, Bite The Bullet (1975) as Luke Matthews, Hard Times (1975) as Spencer ‘Speed’ Weed, Sky Riders (1976) as Jim McCabe, Midway (1976) as Captain Vinton Maddox, Cross Of Iron (1977) as Sergeant Rolf Steiner, Goldengirl (1979) as Jack Dryden, Loving Couples (1980) as Walter, High Risk (1981) as Serrano, Young Guns II: Blaze Of Glory (1990) as John Chishum, Hudson Hawk (1991) as George Kaplan, Eraser (1996) as Chief Beller, Skeletons (1996) as Frank Jove, Affliction (1997) as Glen Whitehouse (for which he won an Oscar, saying at the ceremony “I’ve been working and doing this work for over half my life and I finally got one right, I guess”), Intrepid (2000) as Captain Hal Josephson, Proximity (2001) as Jim Corcoran, Yellow Bird (2001) as Reverend Increase Tutwiler, Snow Dogs (2002) as Thunder Jack Johnson and American Gun (2002) as Martin. In July 1973 Coburn was a pallbearer at the funeral of the actor (and his martial arts instructor) Bruce Lee. Six years later, in 1979, 6́ 3˝ Coburn began suffering from arthritis that left one hand crippled. In an interview, he said: “I couldn’t stand up. It caused me such difficulty, I never wanted to get up. I’d break out in a sweat every time I tried. An actor’s got to be able to move, and I couldn’t. I was in agony every time I moved. Having rheumatoid arthritis practically stopped my career. Arthritis didn’t affect my voice, so I did narrations, commercials, stuff like that. But I was sick most of that time.” By 1999 he was telling friends that he had “healed himself” by taking sulphur-based pills. Although his knuckles remained gnarled, the pills cured him of the excruciating pain. He once said, “Actors are boring when they are not working. It’s a natural condition, because they don’t have anything to do. They just lay around, and that’s why so many of them get drunk. They really get to be boring people. My wife will attest to that.” Coburn had a long relationship with the singer Lynsey de Paul (b. Cricklewood, June 11, 1948 as Lynsey Reuben). He was married twice. In 1959 he married Beverly Kelly and helped raise her daughter, Lisa (b. 1957), a website designer. Their son, James IV (b. 1961), works as a sound mixer. The couple was divorced in 1979. On November 22, 1993, Coburn married Paula Murad.
CAUSE: On the afternoon of November 18, 2002, Coburn was listening to music at his home in Beverly Hills when he suffered a heart attack. His wife, Paula, was with him. He was pronounced dead at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Coburn and his wife had placed their five-storey home on the market the previous month for £3 million in order, they said, to spend their remaining years travelling the world.
Steve Cochran
(ROBERT ALEXANDER COCHRAN)
Born May 25, 1917
Died June 15, 1965
He-man. Born in Eureka, California, Steve Cochran, the son of a Californian lumberman, was raised in Wyoming and attended university there. A handsome, dark actor with a menacing air that he used to good effect in films, he never quite became an A-list star but his active and turbulent love life kept him busy away from the cameras. He once planned to hire six late-teen foreign domestics so “they couldn’t leave me for two years and I’d always have six girls about the house.” He began his career in the theatre where he worked (in the dressing room and on the stage) with Mae West before he was given a contract with Samuel Goldwyn in 1945 and made his début in Wonder Man (1945) as Ten-Grand Jackson (he first appeared on screen in Hollywood Canteen in 1943). In 1949 he signed a contract with Warner Bros that was to last until 1952. His films included Boston Blackie’s Rendezvous (1945) as James Cook, Boston Blackie Booked On Suspicion (1945) as Jack Higgins, The Kid From Brooklyn (1946) as Speed McFarlane, The Chase (1946) as Eddie Roman, The Best Years Of Our Lives as Cliff Scully, Copacabana as Steve Hunt, A Song Is Born as Tony Crow, White Heat as Big Ed Somers, The Damned Don’t Cry (1950) as Nick Prenta, Highway 301 (1950) as George Legenza, Dallas (1950) as Brant Marlow, Tomorrow Is Another Day as Bill Clark/Mike Lewis, Storm Warning (1951) as Hank Rice, Inside The Walls Of Folsom Prison (1951) as Chuck Daniels, Jim Thorpe – All-American (1951) as Peter Allendine, Raton Pass (1951) as Cy Van Cleave, The Tanks Are Coming (1951) as Francis Aloysius ‘Sully’ Sullivan, Operation
Secret (1952) as Marcel Brevoort and The Lion And The Horse as Ben Kirby. After his contract was dropped Cochran’s career seemed to falter even though he set up his own production company. In May 1953, Cochran was sued for $405,000 after he hit boxer Lenwood ‘Buddy’ Wright over the head with a baseball bat at a New Year’s Eve party. The judge awarded Wright $16,500. That same year he refused to pull over his red Porsche in Culver City after police indicated that he should. A five-mile chase ensued and Cochran only stopped when the police fired warning shots into the air. In 1955 Cochran was arrested in Durban, South Africa. He was accused of adultery with the wife of Arthur Cecil Miller, the jockey. The charges were eventually dropped. His mid- to late-Fifties films included She’s Back On Broadway (1953) as Rick Sommers, Shark River (1953) as Dan Webley, The Desert Song (1953) as Captain Fontaine, Back To God’s Country (1953) as Paul Blake, Private Hell 36 (1954) as Cal Bruner, Carnival Story (1954) as Joe Hammond, Come Next Spring (1956) as Matt Ballot, Slander (1956) as H.R. Manley, The Weapon (1957) as Mark Andrews, Il Grido (1957) as Aldo, I Mobster … The Life Of A Gangster (1958) as Joe Sante, Quantrill’s Raiders (1958) as Wes, The Big Operator (1959) as Bill Gibson and The Beat Generation (1959) as Detective Sergeant Dave Culloran. In August of 1960 Cochran’s boat, a 40-ft schooner, sank in Los Angeles harbour. Aboard were Cochran, two 19-year-old women, Hedy Graaberg and Nicole Mackay, two dogs and a miniature chimpanzee. All scrambled to safety. The following year he made The Deadly Companions (1961) playing Billy. Over the next two years he made just one film, Of Love And Desire (1963) in which he played Steve Corey opposite Merle Oberon. Cochran married three times: to artist Florence Lockwood from whom he was divorced in 1946; singer Fay McKenzie (married from 1946 to 1948) and Jonna Jensen, a 23-year-old Danish-born Beverly Hills secretary, whom he married in 1961 but from whom he was estranged at the time of his death.
Fade to Black: A Book of Movie Obituaries Page 51