Fade to Black: A Book of Movie Obituaries

by Paul Donnelley

  Died July 20, 1973

  Martial artiste. Born in San Francisco’s Chinese Hospital, California, the son of actor Lee Hoi Chuen (b. February 1901, d. February 8, 1965) 5́ 7˝ Lee was raised in Hong Kong where he was cha cha champion in 1958. Hyperactive as a child, his family nicknamed him “Never sits still”. He was born in the Year of the Dragon and began appearing in bit parts in Hong Kong movies from an early age. His movies included: Fu Gui Fu Yun (1948), Xi Lu Xiang (1950), Wei Lou Chun Xiao (1953), Qian Wan Ren Jia (1953), Ku Hai Ming Deng (1953), Fu Zhi Guo (1953), Zao Zhi Dang Cu Wo Bu Jia (1956), Zha Dian Na Fu (1956) and Ren Hai Gu Hong (1960). He travelled to America and was cast as Kato in the television series The Green Hornet, which aired from September 9, 1966, until July 14, 1967. Back in Hong Kong he continued to make films such as Tang Shan Da Xiong (1971) as Cheng Chao-an, Jing Wu Men (1972) as Chen Zhen and Meng Long Guojiang (1972) as Tang Lung but it was when he made Enter The Dragon (1973) as Lee that he became an international star. He married Linda in August 1964 and they had two children: Brandon and Shannon.

  CAUSE: Lee lived in Kowloon, Hong Kong, in an 11-room mansion, with his family. On May 10, 1973, he collapsed while filming in Los Angeles but tests at the hospital showed him to be in fine fettle. On the last day of his life his wife left him in his beloved study at home while she went to lunch with a girlfriend. He later went to a business meeting, where he collapsed. Rushed to hospital, he died officially of a cerebral edema. However, rumours have long circulated about his death. One theory has it that he was murdered by martial artists furious that he had revealed their secret arts to the West. He was buried in Lake View Cemetery, Seattle, Washington. His gravestone reads: “In memory of a once fluid man crammed and distorted by the classical mess.” FURTHER READING: The Life And Tragic Death Of Bruce Lee – Linda Lee (London: Star Books, 1975).

  Jack Lee

  Born January 27, 1913

  Died October 15, 2002

  Warring director. The reputation of Jack Lee rests on two excellent Second World War films that he made: The Wooden Horse (1950) and A Town Like Alice (1956). Wilfred Jack Raymond Lee was born in Slad, Gloucestershire. His father abandoned the family in 1918 leaving Lee’s mother to raise him, his three brothers, three half-sisters and half-brother. One of his brothers was the best-selling novelist Laurie Lee, MBE (b. Slad, Gloucestershire June 26, 1914, d. May 14, 1997) and the story of their childhood was told in his book Cider With Rosie (1959). Jack Lee was reportedly furious with his brother for revealing their childhood poverty. The two brothers later became totally estranged. Jack (but not Laurie) went to Marling Grammar School in Stroud. After leaving he worked in a plastics factory and rose to the position of junior manager. Unhappy, he left to take a course in photography at the Regent Street Polytechnic. In 1938 he joined John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit as an associate producer. He hired Laurie to write scripts. The GPO Film Unit was later merged with the Crown Film Unit and made films for the Ministry of Information during the Second World War. Jack Lee edited the propaganda film London Can Take It (1940) which included actual Blitz footage. His favourite film, he later said, was Children On Trial (1945), a study in juvenile delinquency. His first feature-length film was The Woman In The Hall (1947), about a female who earned money by writing begging letters to wealthy people. It starred Jean Simmons as Joy Blake and Susan Hampshire as the young Joy. His next film was Once A Jolly Swagman (1948) about speedway and starred Dirk Bogarde as Bill Fox. Bogarde was told to take his motorbike home every night, stand it in his bedroom and “love it like a woman” – no easy task for the homosexually inclined actor. In 1948 Lee married Nora Dawson and fathered two sons by her. Two years later, he made The Wooden Horse about a group of POWs who escaped from the Germans in Stalag Luft III by digging a tunnel under a vaulting horse. It starred Leo Genn, David Tomlinson and Anthony Steel. However, Lee disagreed with Ian Dalrymple, the producer, on how the film should end and left the production. Dalrymple finished the film himself. Despite the film’s success Lee was unemployed for a year afterwards. Six years later, he was back working the Second World War milieu. A Town Like Alice was based on Nevil Shute’s 1950 book about women and children escaping in Malaysia after their men had been captured by the Japanese. The film won BAFTAs for Virginia McKenna and Peter Finch. Lee’s last film was Circle Of Deception (1960). In 1963 following the dissolution of his first marriage he married Isabel Kidman (a distant cousin of the actress Nicole Kidman) and settled in Australia. He became chairman of the South Australia Film Commission and helped to launch the careers of, among others, Bruce Beresford and Peter Weir. An attempt to reconcile with brother Laurie was rebuffed and the two men were totally estranged at Laurie’s death.

  CAUSE: Lee died aged 89 in Sydney, New South Wales, from natural causes.

  Alison Leggatt

  Born February 7, 1904

  Died July 15, 1990

  Sturdy stalwart. Born in Kensington, London, 5́5½˝ Alison Joy Leggatt never really reached stardom but nor did she ever really reach the unemployment queue. In 1924 she was awarded the prestigious Gold Medal at the Central School of Dramatic Art and that year made her stage début. She appeared regularly with Noël Coward and was featured in, among others, the following films: Nine Till Six (1932) as Freda, Waterloo Road (1944) as Ruby, This Happy Breed (1944) as Aunt Sylvia, Here Come The Huggetts (1948) as Miss Perks, Marry Me (1949) as Miss Beamish, The Day Of The Triffids (1962) as Miss Coker, One Way Pendulum (1965) as Mrs Groomkirby, Far From The Madding Crowd (1967) as Mrs Hurst, Goodbye, Mr Chips (1969) as the Headmaster’s Wife and The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976) as Mrs Hudson. She was married to Lieutenant-Commander Shene Clark, R.N. but it ended in divorce.

  CAUSE: She died in London of natural causes aged 86.

  Janet Leigh

  (JEANETTE HELEN MORRISON)

  Born July 6, 1927

  Died October 3, 2004

  Scream queen. Although she made 63 films it was her role as Marion Crane, the office worker who became the murder victim of Norman Bates (Tony Perkins) in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (released on June 17, 1960) for which she is famous. She earned an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress, a Golden Globe, a Golden Apple award as Hollywood’s most co-operative actress and a place in cinematic history. “I thought it was cleverly done,” Leigh said. “We weren’t allowed to show nudity or a knife entering a body but most people believe they saw it. They did in their imaginations. Having restrictions like that, I think, was good because it forced film-makers to be more creative.” The 45-second killing was voted best screen death by Total Film magazine in 2004. Born in Merced, California, the only child of Fred Morrison (b. 1910, d. August 12, 1962), an insurance and real estate agent, and Helen Lita Westergaard, who moved frequently. She was a bright, but troubled teenager, eloping to Reno, Nevada, and marrying when she was just 14 in 1942 to Kenny Carlyle. The marriage was annulled but not before it was consummated. She left high school at 15, and in September 1943 went on to the College of Pacific, where she majored in Music. On October 5, 1945 she married Stanley Reames but the marriage ended in divorce in July 1948. In February 1946 she was discovered by the actress Norma Shearer (who had retired from MGM in 1942), who spotted Leigh’s picture at the front desk of a ski lodge near Reno, Nevada where Fred Morrison was reception manager and his wife a maid. Shearer – the widow of boy genius Irving Thalberg – was highly regarded at MGM, and her recommendation opened doors for 5́ 5˝ Leigh and ensured her a seven year contract and careful grooming through a series of inconsequential romantic comedies designed to appeal to impressionable teens. As Leigh herself said of MGM, “They used to keep about 150 people under contract, and if they got one or two out of the 150 that would be great, because they were only paying them $50 a week.” The name Janet Leigh was coined by Van Johnson, also an MGM hopeful at that time. Leigh made her first movie, playing Lissy Anne MacBean in the post-Civil War drama The Romance Of Rosy Ridge, in 1947 and was soon fêted for her classic beauty and hour-glass figure.
She quickly became one of Hollywood’s most sought-after actresses averaging around four films a year. Among her personal favourites was the 1949 classic That Forsyte Woman (in which she played June Forsyte and Errol Flynn was Soames), set in the Victorian era, and Little Women (premièred on March 10, 1949) in which she played Meg March. “They were such beautiful pictures,” Leigh said in a newspaper interview the year she died. “They were just pretty to look at and wonderful escapism. Somehow the studios weren’t afraid to make beautiful pictures then.” In 1948 she made the Rodgers & Hart biopic Words And Music playing Dorothy Feiner Rodgers. Her early Fifties films are forgotten and she did not really come into her own until her marriage to Tony Curtis (b. The Bronx, New York, June 3, 1925 as Bernard Schwartz) on June 4, 1951 in Greenwich, Connecticut. They were the Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman of their day. They had two daughters: Kelly (b. Santa Monica, June 17, 1956 at 2.14pm) and Jamie Lee (b. Los Angeles, November 22, 1958 at 8.37am). Her movies included Two Tickets To Broadway (1951), and the Rafael Sabatini costume epic Scaramouche (1952). After her marriage to Curtis, MGM loaned her to Paramount for Houdini (1953), their first film together. It was a box office hit, paving the way in 1954 for another costume epic, The Black Shield Of Falworth. In 1958, Leigh and Curtis made a third film together, The Vikings, which attracted a certain notoriety thanks to the scene in which Curtis removed her Saxon tunic to enable her to row more comfortably. They never made a modern-themed film together. Asked once to describe herself, Leigh said she was “a small-town girl who got lucky and worked hard to learn and improve whatever God had given me”. There was a darker side to her, however, and she characterised herself as “mild-mannered until crossed, then ballistic”. Josef von Sternberg’s Jet Pilot (1957) probably marked the breakthrough that might have happened earlier, had it been released when originally made in 1950. One of Howard Hughes’ aviation adventures, it was held back for years on his personal whim. In the end, history had overtaken it, and the action scenes that would have looked impressive seven years earlier no longer appeared so. What did work, however, was the humorous badinage between John Wayne and Leigh as Lieutenant Anna Marladovna, a Russian jet ace. It was after seeing her in this film that Orson Welles cast her as Susie Vargas in Touch Of Evil (released on April 2, 1958), the last work that Welles was able to finish in America. She played Charlton Heston’s wife, kidnapped in a Mexican border town and threatened by Mercedes McCambridge’s butch gangster’s moll. Despite being set in Mexico it was shot on location in a seedy part of Venice, California. Leigh remembered, “We shot all night long, which I hated. It was a terrible place to work, but also fascinating because we worked in actual derelict hotels.” She also worked throughout the film with a broken arm, having suffered an accident shortly before shooting began. “I had my arm set in an unobtrusive way, and I’d have a coat over it and gesture a lot with my other arm.” Psycho began filming on November 30, 1959 and Leigh was paid $25,000 which worked out at more than $1,000 per minute of screen time that her character was alive. Having stolen $40,000 from her boss, she stays at the Bates Motel but has a change of heart and decides to return her ill-gotten gains. Before she can do so, she is stabbed to death in the shower by the Oedipus complex-suffering Norman Bates. Hitchcock shot the shower sequence in fragments, 71 in all, each lasting between two and three seconds; but such a scene required a huge number of takes – far more than appear in the finished film – to give the editor enough material to work with. In all, it took seven days to shoot, but there is no truth in the rumours that Janet Leigh was naked throughout. In fact, she wore a flesh-coloured moleskin. She later recalled the experience matter-of-factly: “Hitchcock followed the storyboard precisely. We worked on it for about a week, but it went very professionally and quickly. It was, of course, gruelling to stand in a shower getting drenched for a week.” It put her off showers for life. There was trouble with censors who claimed they could see 36C-21-36 Leigh’s nipple in one shot. Hitchcock took the film back, changed nothing, resubmitted it and the censors were happy. In fact, the hot water did loosen the moleskin and a nipple was exposed. Hitchcock whipped up anticipation by banning press previews and stipulated that no one should be allowed into the cinema after the film had started. He deferred his $250,000 salary and agreed to keep the film within budget, shooting in black and white, which facilitated the use of chocolate sauce in the murder scene. Filming ended on February 1, 1960, and only Ben-Hur did better at North American cinemas in that year. Leigh had a cameo role as Eugenie Rose Chaney in the Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate (opened on October 24, 1962), directed by John Frankenheimer. None of her subsequent films matched the quality of her earlier work. Night Of The Lepus (1972), a straight-faced horror-thriller in which America is terrorised by giant rabbits, did little to revive her career. She considered retiring after working with her daughter Jamie Lee in the John Carpenter horror flick The Fog (1979). She was reunited with her daughter on screen in 1998 in Jamie Lee Curtis’ film Halloween H20. On September 15, 1962 following her divorce from Tony Curtis on July 11 of that year, she married her fourth husband Robert Brandt, a stockbroker.

  CAUSE: Janet Leigh died of vasculitis, inflammation of the blood vessels, an ailment she had battled for a year, surrounded by her family including her husband Robert Brandt and actress-daughters Jamie Lee and Kelly Curtis. She was 77.

  FURTHER READING: There Really Was A Hollywood – Janet Leigh (New York: Jove, 1985).

  Vivien Leigh

  (VIVIAN MARY HARTLEY)

  Born November 5, 1913

  Died July 7, 1967

  Limited but beautiful actress. Born in Shannon Lodge, Darjeeling, India, within sight of Mount Everest, one of her fellow boarders at a Catholic school was Maureen O’Sullivan. Both women became successful actresses but Leigh was to have the higher profile. In February 1932 she enrolled at RADA. On a brisk February day in the same year Vivien was waved at by an elegant man on horseback in the Devon village of Holcombe. He was Herbert Leigh Holman, a 31-year-old, Cambridge-educated barrister who bore more than a passing resemblance to Leslie Howard. Vivien decided then and there she would marry him, even though he was engaged at the time to another girl. On December 20, 1932, the determined Vivien got her wish and married Leigh Holman at St James’s, Spanish Place, London, and lost her virginity to him that night. Budapest-born film director Sir Alexander Korda was the undisputed king of British film in the Thirties. Among his successes were The Private Life Of Henry VIII (1933) with Charles Laughton, Binnie Barnes, Robert Donat, Elsa Lanchester and Merle Oberon and The Scarlet Pimpernel (1935) with Leslie Howard, Merle Oberon, Raymond Massey and Nigel Bruce. Korda asked to see Vivien Leigh with a view to offering her a movie contract. The interview at Isleworth Film Studios did not go well. Korda left the actress cooling her heels outside while he dealt with others. It was obvious from the start that Leigh did not particularly impress him. He thought there was nothing to single her out from numerous other beauties he already had in his stable, including his wife Merle Oberon, Wendy Barrie and Diana Napier. Unsurprisingly, Leigh was disappointed but knuckled down to learn her trade. She appeared in two films and a critically acclaimed play before, on May 15, 1935, at the Ambassador’s Theatre, Korda watched Leigh in The Mask Of Virtue and witnessed an exquisite performance. After the show he went backstage and congratulated the star. “Even a Hungarian can make a mistake,” he said. Five years after making her film début in Things Are Looking Up (1934), Leigh became world famous in 1939 when she played the role of southern belle Scarlett O’Hara in the movie version of Margaret Mitchell’s epic Civil War novel Gone With The Wind. Her performance garnered Leigh her first Best Actress Oscar and numerous plaudits from around the globe. Look out for the following bloopers in the famous film. When Scarlett and Melanie (Leigh and Olivia De Havilland) are looking after the wounded, their shadows on the wall behind them do not match their movements. In the scene in Tara’s cotton patch, Scarlett slaps her sister, Suellen (Evelyn Keyes), and is then admonished by t
heir father, Gerald O’Hara (Thomas Mitchell), for telling off the servants but no such ticking off is in the film; it was cut before release. After the night of passion with Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) Scarlett lies in bed reliving the fun they had. In comes Mammy (Hattie McDaniel) and takes away a tray containing a silver service – but where did it come from? If they didn’t know that the tray had been brought in by Scarlett’s daughter (and how could they when that scene had been cut?) audiences were left wondering whether Rhett’s seduction techniques included a midnight feast. When Scarlett flees Atlanta she is bareheaded but as she and Rhett ride through the depot she is wearing a black bonnet. In the next scene on the road to Tara the bonnet disappears. George Reeves (later to become famous as Superman and to die under very mysterious circumstances) played Stuart Tarleton, one of Scarlett’s beaux. Curiously, on the credits he is listed as Brent Tarleton. Leigh and her first husband were divorced on August 26, 1940. Five days later, in Santa Barbara, Leigh married acting legend Laurence Olivier. Despite the marriage and a second Academy Award for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) playing Blanche Dubois, Leigh wasn’t a particularly well or satisfied woman. She had bouts of tuberculosis and alcoholism and in 1953 showed the first symptoms of what were euphemistically termed ‘mental’ problems, plus she was a manic depressive. She became a schizophrenic suffering a persecution complex making her ‘an instant enemy of everyone’. One of the symptoms of her mental disorder was an irresistible urge to utter obscenities. The tuberculosis heightened Leigh’s sex drive dramatically, resulting in her asking friends to arrange anonymous bouts of sex with strangers. Most of her friends demurred. An affair with Peter Finch followed (“Which one of you is coming to bed with me?” she once asked the two men), but the marriage to Olivier was over. In his autobiography Olivier recounted attempts “to try fucking our love back into existence,” but without success. They divorced in 1960. She spent her final years with actor John Merrivale. She invented a party game called “Ways to Kill a Baby,” whereby players had to invent bizarre methods of slaughtering infants. Her films included: Look Up And Laugh (1935) as Marjorie Belfer, Fire Over England (1937) as Cynthia, Storm In A Teacup (1937) as Victoria Gow, A Yank At Oxford (1938) as Elsa Craddock, Waterloo Bridge (1940) as Myra, 21 Days (1940) as Wanda, That Hamilton Woman (1941) as Emma, Lady Hamilton, Caesar And Cleopatra (1946) as Cleopatra, Anna Karenina (1948) as Anna Karenina, The Deep Blue Sea (1955) as Hester Collyer, The Roman Spring Of Mrs Stone (1961) as Karen Stone and Ship Of Fools (1965) as Mary Treadwell. Despite being regarded as one of the most beautiful women in the world she did not have a high opinion of herself: “My neck’s too long, my hands too big and my voice too small,” she once wailed.