Martha Hyer obit

Martha Hyer, Oscar-nominated actress, dies

She was not on the list.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Martha Hyer, an Oscar-nominated actress who starred alongside the likes of Frank Sinatra and Humphrey Bogart, and later gained notoriety for her extravagant lifestyle, has died.

Hyer passed away May 31 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Raymond Lucero of Rivera Funeral Home told The Associated Press. She was 89.

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, the easygoing actress began her movie career with a small role in the 1946 movie "The Locket," but she got her big break in the 1954 comedy "Sabrina," starring Bogart and Audrey Hepburn. In that movie, she played the fiancée of a character played by William Holden. Hyer would later write in her memoir that Bogart was helpful in scenes with her.

She reportedly once turned down a date request from a young Sen. John F. Kennedy and began acquiring more high-profile roles during the 1950s.

In 1951, Hyer married director C. Ray Stahl, who directed "The Scarlet Spear," which starred Hyer. The marriage ended in divorce three years later.

She was nominated for an Academy Award as best supporting actress for her role in the 1958 "Some Came Running," starring Sinatra, Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine. The movie was based on a James Jones novel and brought her critical acclaim for her role as a schoolteacher being wooed by writer and war veteran, played by Sinatra. Hyer lost the Oscar to Wendy Hiller for her role in "Separate Tables."

After the Oscar nod, Hyer would star in a number of American and foreign films that garnered little attention. But she gain notice for her expensive taste thanks to a 1959 Life magazine photo feature highlighting her Pissarro painting and showing her getting a massage dressed only in a towel. By the 1980s, Hyer found herself millions of dollars in debt to loan sharks.

In 1966, she married film producer Hal Wallis, who took her to New Mexico for the first time during the filming of "Red Sky at Morning." Hyer remained married to him until his death in 1986 and moved to Santa Fe shortly after.

"This country casts a spell, and it never lets go," she would later write about New Mexico.

The Santa Fe New Mexican reported that in her later years Hyer became reclusive, preferring to paint and hike.

Selected filmography

    The Locket (1946) - Bridesmaid (uncredited)

    Born to Kill (1947) - Maid (uncredited)

    Thunder Mountain (1947) - Ellie Jorth

    The Woman on the Beach (1947) - Mrs. Barton (uncredited)

    The Judge Steps Out (1947) - Catherine Bailey Struthers III

    The Velvet Touch (1948) - Helen Adams

    Gun Smugglers (1948) - Judy Davis

    Rustlers (1949) - Ruth Abbott

    Roughshod (1949) - Marcia

    The Clay Pigeon (1949) - Miss Harwick - Wheeler's Receptionist

    Outcast of Black Mesa (1950) - Ruth Dorn

    Salt Lake Raiders (1950) - Helen Thornton

    The Lawless (1950) - Caroline Tyler

    Frisco Tornado (1950) - Jean Martin

    The Kangaroo Kid (1950) - Mary Corbett

    Oriental Evil (1951) - Cheryl Banning

    Wild Stallion (1952)- Caroline Cullen

    Geisha Girl (1952) - Peggy Burnes

    Yukon Gold (1952) - Marie Briand

    Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953) - Janie Howe

    So Big (1953) - Paula Hempel

    Riders to the Stars (1954) - Dr. Jane Flynn

    The Scarlet Spear (1954) - Christine

    The Battle of Rogue River (1954) - Brett McClain

    Lucky Me (1954) - Lorraine Thayer

    Down Three Dark Streets (1954) - Connie Anderson

    Sabrina (1954) - Elizabeth Tyson

    Cry Vengeance (1954) - Peggy Harding

    Wyoming Renegades (1955) - Nancy Warren

    Francis in the Navy (1955) - Betsy Donevan

    Kiss of Fire (1955) - Felicia

    Paris Follies of 1956 (1955) - Ruth Harmon

    Red Sundown (1956) - Caroline Murphy

    Showdown at Abilene (1956) - Peggy Bigelow

    Kelly and Me (1957) - Lucy Castle

    Battle Hymn (1957) - Mary Hess

    Mister Cory (1957) - Abby Vollard

    The Delicate Delinquent (1957) - Martha Henshaw

    My Man Godfrey (1957) - Cornelia Bullock

    Paris Holiday (1958) - Ann McCall

    Once Upon a Horse... (1958) - Miss Amity Babb

    Houseboat (1958) - Carolyn Gibson

    Some Came Running (1958) - Gwen French

    The Big Fisherman (1959) - Herodias

    The Best of Everything (1959) - Barbara Lamont

    Ice Palace (1960) - Dorothy Wendt Kennedy

    Mistress of the World (2 films, 1960) - Karin Johansson

    Desire in the Dust (1960) - Melinda Marquand

    The Right Approach (1961) - Anne Perry

    The Last Time I Saw Archie (1961) - Peggy Kramer

    A Girl Named Tamiko (1962) - Fay Wilson

    The Man from the Diner's Club (1963) - Lucy

    Wives and Lovers (1963) - Lucinda Ford

    Pyro... The Thing Without a Face (1964) - Laura Blanco

    The Carpetbaggers (1964) - Jennie Denton

    First Men in the Moon (1964) - Kate / Kate Callender

    Bikini Beach (1964) - Vivien Clements

    Blood on the Arrow (1964) - Nancy Mailer

    The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) - Mary Gordon

    War, Italian Style (1965) - Lt. Inge Schultze

    The Chase (1966) - Mary Fuller

    The Night of the Grizzly (1966) - Angela Cole

    Cuernavaca en primavera (1966) - (segment "El nido de amor")

    Picture Mommy Dead (1966) - Francene Shelley

    The Happening (1967) - Monica

    The House of 1,000 Dolls (1967) - Rebecca

    Another's Wife (1967) - Ana María

    Some May Live (1967) - Kate Meredith

    Catch as Catch Can (1967) - Luisa Chiaramonte

    Once You Kiss a Stranger (1969) - Lee

    Crossplot (1969) - Jo Grinling

    The Day of the Wolves (1971) - Maggie Anderson

Mary Soames obit

Lady Soames obituary

Churchill's daughter who acted as his ADC and went on to become an accomplished writer

 

 She was not on the list.

Mary Soames, who has died aged 91, was the last surviving child of Winston and Clementine Churchill, and the only one of their five children who really came to terms with bearing that distinguished family name. Mary enjoyed a fulfilled life as daughter, wife and mother, before blossoming late into an accomplished writer. Short and stocky, like her father, she inherited his energy and determination, while also displaying her mother's charm and poise. But the empathy, ebullience and sense of fun were all her own.

Mary was born in London, in the same month, September 1922, that Winston bought Chartwell, his beloved country house on the edge of the Kentish Weald. She was by far the most junior of the surviving Churchill children (the infant Marigold having died in 1921), eight years younger than Sarah, the next oldest. She was therefore brought up almost as an only child.

Her older siblings, Diana, Randolph and Sarah, had known a succession of homes but Mary's formative years were spent entirely at Chartwell. There she revelled in country life, particularly horses, and developed a lifelong love of gardening. And, whereas her brother and sisters had suffered a succession of governesses, she was raised largely by Clementine's young cousin, Maryott Whyte, who joined the Churchill household as a nanny at Mary's birth and stayed for over 20 years. "Nana" became the centre of Mary's youth and the nurturer of her lifelong Christian faith.

Relations with her parents were at this stage admiring rather than close. If Clementine made a suggestion, Mary's instinctive reaction was: "I must ask Nana." But in the winter of 1935-36, conscious of the distance between them, her mother took Mary skiing in Austria and this became an annual fixture on the family calendar. "It was chiefly during these lovely skiing holidays," Mary later wrote, "that I started to know my mother more as a person than a deity."

With the outbreak of war in September 1939, Mary followed her parents to London. Then, during the blitz, she was packed off to Chequers, the prime minister's country retreat in Buckinghamshire. Keen for more of the action, she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service in September 1941 and served in one of the new "mixed" anti-aircraft batteries. Life in tents and draughty barracks was a marked change from her privileged lifestyle to date. At one army dance, she teased an American soldier about his big feet, whereupon he put her over his knee and gave her "about 30 good-natured whacks". His buddy told Time magazine: "She's a regular guy and, like her old man, can take it." Mary's battery served in London and on the coast during the V-bomb raids of 1944, before moving on to Belgium and Germany. Excitement of a different sort came from traveling abroad as her father's ADC. In the summer of 1943 she went to Quebec and Washington; in July 1945 she accompanied Winston to Potsdam for the summit with Truman and Stalin.

On 25 July, during a break in the conference, Winston and Mary flew back to London for the results of the general election. Conservative Central Office remained confident of victory; Mary even left half her luggage behind at Potsdam. But the election proved a Labour landslide: for a while, Winston and Clementine were close to a nervous collapse as they struggled to construct a new life.

Mary, demobbed in April 1946, was particularly helpful to her mother as they reopened Chartwell and set up a new home in Hyde Park Gate, London. Her personal life also blossomed. After a whirlwind romance, she and Christopher Soames (later Baron Soames), a Coldstream Guards officer, were married in February 1947 in St Margaret's, Westminster, the same church as her parents. Clementine took some persuading – she had talked Mary out of a rash engagement in 1941. But on honeymoon Christopher was taken ill with a duodenal ulcer, whereupon Clementine proposed that he retire from the Army, live in the farmhouse down the hill from Chartwell and take over running the estate. So Mary returned to her Kentish roots, this time with a home and family of her own.

Between 1948 and 1959 Mary gave birth to three sons and two daughters. She also supported her husband's political career as a Conservative MP for Bedford (1950-66), campaigning vigorously on his behalf. After he lost his seat, she accompanied him on a series of foreign appointments, particularly relishing her time as hostess in the splendid British embassy in Paris (1968-72). The couple were in Brussels from 1973 to 1976, when Christopher was the first British vice-president of the European commission. Between December 1979 and April 1980, when Christopher was the last governor of Southern Rhodesia, the close personal bond forged by the Soameses with Robert Mugabe and his wife, Sally, was essential for the reasonably smooth transfer of power. Mary felt the subsequent fate of Zimbabwe almost as a personal betrayal.

But another Mary was about to bloom. Winston, who died in 1965, was the subject of a multivolume biography, started by Randolph and completed by the historian Martin Gilbert. Christopher suggested that Mary should write a life of her mother and Clementine took up the idea with enthusiasm. Before her death in 1977, Clementine read all the draft chapters, up to the first world war.

Mary was touched and delighted with the commission, but also a little daunted, having "never before written so much as a pamphlet", as she admitted in the preface. Yet Clementine Churchill (1979) was published to enormous acclaim, winning the Wolfson prize and plaudits from reviewers. AJP Taylor called it "a delightful book … affectionate and also frank". It was indeed this remarkable mixture of feeling and detachment that made the book so appealing. Mary showed how much her mother had done to sustain Winston's career – "my life's work", as she put it. But she also revealed the intense strains this imposed on Clementine's highly strung nature.

Suddenly Mary was recognised as her father's daughter, as well as her mother's, with a good deal of Winston's literary talent. Other books followed, including a memoir, Winston Churchill: His Life as a Painter (1990) and a widely read collection of her parents' letters, Speaking for Themselves (1998). She published a revised edition of Clementine Churchill in 2002, drawing on those letters and other new material, and an autobiography up to 1945, A Daughter's Tale (2011), drawing on her extensive diaries.

In 1989 Mary was appointed chairman of the board of trustees of the National Theatre. This was a political appointment, greeted without enthusiasm in thespian circles. The Soameses had not been theatre-goers and, during an early meeting Mary pushed a note to the NT's director, Richard Eyre: "Who is Ian McKellen?" But she threw herself into the new task in a typically hands-on way, developing a keen interest in the theatre and Eyre found her an invaluable support. At her farewell party in 1995, he said how much he would miss her "gossip, guidance, champagne, 7.45am phone calls, enthusiasm, wisdom and friendship". She replied: "You go too far, but then you often do, dear Richard."

Behind the scenes, she quietly maintained a concern for former members of the family's staff and championed many public Churchill causes, not least the archives centre at Churchill College, Cambridge, where she was elected an honorary fellow. She was also an assiduous patron of the International Churchill Society – attending its gatherings and talking freely and informally with all who attended. On one occasion, asked to present a VIP with a picture of Chartwell that had unfortunately failed to arrive, she carried off the potential embarrassment with great aplomb, imaginatively recreating the beauties of the picture with a verve and humour that delighted the whole audience.

She was made a dame in 1980 and in 2005 was appointed a Lady Companion of the Order of the Garter.

British Prime Minister David Cameron called Mary Soames, the last surviving child of Winston Churchill, “an eyewitness to some of the most important moments in our recent history.

Christopher died in 1987. She is survived by their five children, Nicholas, Emma, Jeremy, Charlotte and Rupert.

Joan Lorring obit

Oscar-Nominated Actress Joan Lorring Dies at 88

She was not on the list.

She received a supporting actress nomination in 1946 for "The Corn is Green."

The Oscar-nominated actress Joan Lorring has died more than six decades after appearing opposite Bette Davis in the film The Corn is Green. She was 88.

She died Friday in the New York City suburb of Sleepy Hollow, according to her daughter, Santha Sonenberg.

Lorring was born in Hong Kong and left for the United States with her mother in 1939 to escape the coming Japanese invasion. The two settled in San Francisco, where she started working in radio.

She went on to a career as a stage, screen and television performer. Her earliest American film was the 1944 MGM production "Song of Russia."

Signed with Warner Bros., Lorring was nominated for an Oscar in 1946 for best supporting actress in The Corn is Green, in the role of Bessie Watty.

Lorring also appeared opposite Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre in the 1946 movies Three Strangers and The Verdict.

Broadway roles included Marie in Come Back, Little Sheba, with Shirley Booth, for which she won the Donaldson Award in 1950.

Her many television appearances included The Star Wagon, a 1966 movie with Dustin Hoffman and Orson Bean, and The Love Boat in 1980.

"Right up until her death, she continued to have fans who wrote and sought her autograph and she had a following," Sonenberg said in a statement.

In addition to Sonenberg, she leaves another daughter, Andrea Sonenberg, and grandchildren Josh and Rebecca Jurbala. Lorring's husband, the prominent New York endocrinologist Martin Sonenberg, died in 2011.

Filmography

Film

Year       Title       Role       Notes

1944      Song of Russia   Sonia    

The Bridge of San Luis Rey            Pepita  

1945      The Corn Is Green            Bessie Watty      Nominated - Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress

1946      Three Strangers                Icey Crane          

The Verdict         Lottie Rawson   

1947      The Other Love Celestine Miller                

The Lost Moment             Amelia

The Gangster     Dorothy               

1948      Good Sam           Shirley Mae       

1951      The Big Night     Marion Rostina

1952      Imbarco a mezzanotte   Angela English title: Stranger on the Prowl

1974      The Midnight Man           Judy      

Television

Year       Title       Role       Notes

1950–1956          Robert Montgomery Presents                    5 episodes

1952      The Philco Television Playhouse                                 Episode: The Thin Air

The Doctor                          Episode: No Story Assignment

1954      The Motorola Television Hour                     Episode: A Dash of Bitters

Love Story                           Episode: For All We Know

Danger                  Episode: The Big Man

Suspense                             Episode: The Last Stand

Center Stage      Terry Clayborn   Episode: The Day Before Atlanta

1953, 1955          Goodyear Television Playhouse                 Episode: The Rumor

Episode: The Prizewinner

1954–1955          Valiant Lady        Bonnie Withers #1          

Westinghouse Studio One            Blair

Terry     Episode: Castle in Spain

Episode: Millions of Georges

1955      Norby    Helen Norby      

The Elgin Hour   Maggie Episode: Black Eagle Pass

Kraft Television Theatre                                Episode: Coquette

Appointment with Adventure                     Episode: Return of the Stranger

1956      Star Stage                            Episode: Of Missing Persons

Alfred Hitchcock Presents             Emma Borden    Episode: The Older Sister

General Electric Theater                                Episode: The Shunning

1965      The Nurses         Jean Bower         Episode: Act of Violence

For the People   Jean Bow             Episode: Act of Violence (2)

1966      The Star Wagon                Martha PBS TV-Movie

1979–1980          Ryan's Hope       Anna Pavel         

1980      The Love Boat    Mrs. Cummings                 Episode: Tell Her She's Great..., (final appearance)

Radio appearances

Date      Program               Episode/source Role       Notes

June 23 to September 15, 1942 (second season)                A Date with Judy               Entire season     Judy       Credited as "Dellie Ellis". Sponsored by Pepsodent

August 2, 1945 Suspense             "A Man in the House"     Emily Barrett[15]

August 22, 1946                Suspense             "The Great Horrell"         Alma Horrell[16]

1953      Best Plays            "The Farmer Takes a Wife"[17]                  

December 3, 1961           Suspense             "Luck of the Tiger Eye"

June 2, 1965       ABC's Theatre-Five          "Noose of Pearls"             Maude

January 12, 1974              CBS Radio Mystery Theater          "I Warn You Three Times"

January 15, 1974              CBS Radio Mystery Theater          "The Resident"

January 28, 1974              CBS Radio Mystery Theater          "Three Women"

February 4, 1974              CBS Radio Mystery Theater          "The Lady Was a Tiger"

March 7, 1974   CBS Radio Mystery Theater          "The Creature from the Swamp"

March 20 1974 to January 19, 1976          CBS Radio Mystery Theater          Numerous appearances