CAUSE: Dana died of an overdose of the painkiller Loritab in a caravan in Moore, Oklahoma, which was parked outside the home of Menchacha’s mother. On May 21, 1999, the coroner ruled her death a suicide because of the high level of drugs in her system and her previous attempts to kill herself. She was just 34 years old. In a sickening attempt to raise money Menchacha offered to sell pictures of Dana’s body and what he claimed were her dying breaths over the internet.
Louise Platt
Born August 3, 1915
Died September 6, 2003
The last passenger. Born in Stamford, Connecticut, the daughter of a high-ranking naval doctor, Louise Platt spent most of her childhood in Annapolis near the navy academy. She was educated in New York, Manila and Hong Kong and then joined a repertory company. On August 25, 1936 she made her Broadway début at the Empire Theater in Philip Barry’s short-lived comedy Spring Dance. The play closed after 23 performances, although it was made into a film as Spring Madness in 1938, starring Maureen O’Sullivan, Lew Ayres, Burgess Meredith, Ruth Hussey and Frank Albertson. Spring Dance was produced and directed by the libidinous Jed Harris (b. Vienna, Austria, February 25, 1900 as Jacob Horowitz, d. New York, November 14, 1979) who numbered Katharine Hepburn and Margaret Sullavan among his bedmates. Soon Louise Platt was to join their number. Perhaps she was bedazzled by Harris’ undoubted genius – he became a Broadway legend when, at the age of 28, he produced four straight smash hits (Broadway, Coquette, The Royal Family and The Front Page) in the space of 18 months, a feat never again matched on the Great White Way – but probably not by his temperament: he was misogynistic, angry, bitter and held grudges. Whatever the attraction they were married in Mexico City in 1939. On the way back to California, however, he told her that he was sorry he had married her. “When we did Spring Dance he was even-tempered, really brilliant,” she recalled. “He could control his temper, he could deal with people. But when things began to dry up and more people turned against him, that was when his quest for power over people became frightening.” It was a violent marriage and Platt was terrified of her husband but his animus was usually directed at objects, hurling ashtrays or kicking out windows. When Platt gave birth to their daughter, Abigail, on April 27, 1941 they were already divorced. The birth of the child reunited them for a time. “Louise adored Jed,” remembered her friend Doris Johnson, the wife of the writer Nunnally Johnson. “She was almost worshipful.” Time was not a healer and her memories of Harris were so traumatic that she cut him out of all the pictures in her photo albums. She played Brenda, a wealthy and selfish student in her first film, I Met My Love Again (1937), which starred Henry Fonda and Joan Bennett. Her love for Fonda was not reciprocated. In Spawn Of The North (1938), she was Dian Turlon, a newspaper editor’s daughter, who was chased by Fonda. Her next film was playing the prim and pregnant Lucy Mallory in John Ford’s classic Western Stagecoach (filmed November–December 1938, released in 1939). Of all the passengers on the vehicle, she was the last survivor. Lucy was on her way to rejoin her cavalry officer husband and did not take kindly to the friendship advances from Dallas the prostitute (Claire Trevor). Her fellow passengers were the alcoholic Doctor Josiah Boone (Thomas Mitchell for which he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar), an absconding banker called Henry Gatewood (Berton Churchill), the gambler Mr Hatfield (John Carradine), Samuel Peacock, the timid whiskey salesman (Donald Meek) and Marshal Curly Wilcox (George Bancroft). John Wayne, as Henry the Ringo Kid, joined the group near the start of their journey. After Stagecoach Jed Harris asked his friend, the writer Ed Chodorov, to use his influence at MGM to get Platt work. She was hired as Ellen Frazier to star opposite Melvyn Douglas in Tell No Tales (1939), a fast-paced melodrama in which she was the witness to a kidnapping. The plan to propel her to stardom was unsuccessful and she made just three more films – the appropriately entitled Forgotten Girls (1940) as Judy Wingate, Captain Caution (1940) as Corunna and Street Of Chance (1942), generally regarded as her best film, in which she played Virginia Thompson opposite Burgess Meredith. She returned to Broadway and appeared in Five Alarm Waltz which opened at the Playhouse Theatre on March 13, 1941 and closed four performances later. Directed by Jed Harris, it told the tale of what might have happened had the writers William Saroyan and Claire Booth Luce married. Apart from the very short run, it was notable only as Elia Kazan’s last performance as an actor. Platt retired to raise her daughter, returning in Maxwell Anderson’s Anne Of The Thousand Days at the Shubert Theatre on December 8, 1948. She played Mary Carey, Anne Boleyn’s sister who was the king’s mistress for several years before he married Anne. The affair ended in the mid-1520s but she was favoured enough for Henry to name a ship after her. Platt’s final play, Herman Wouk’s Cold War thriller The Traitor, was produced and directed by Harris and opened at the 48 Street Theater on April 4, 1949. It ran for only 67 performances despite being lauded by Variety as “tautly written, superbly produced, and convincingly performed”. Platt moved to the small screen and played Ruth Jennings Holden in the soap opera The Guiding Light from 1958 to 1959. The Saxon Charm, a 1947 Frederic Wakeman novel, is said to be based on Harris and one of the female characters is thought to be an amalgam of Platt and Rosamond Pinchot (b. New York, October 26, 1904), an actor and former socialite who killed herself on January 24, 1938 in Old Brookville, New York, because of him. Following her divorce from Harris, Platt married Stanley Gould, a thoughtful academic who was Jed Harris’ stage manager. She gave birth to another daughter.
CAUSE: She died, aged 88, in Greenport, New York, and was cremated.
Donald Pleasence, OBE
Born October 5, 1919
Died February 2, 1995
Sinister star. Born in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, 5́ 7˝ Pleasence worked for the railways at Swinton, South Yorkshire, when he left Ecclesfield Grammar School but dreamed of acting. His first stage performance came in May 1939 at the Playhouse, Jersey, where he was stage manager, as Hareton in Wuthering Heights. His London début came three years and a month later, in June 1942, as Curio in Twelfth Night. That same year he joined the RAF only to be captured two years later, spending two years in a POW camp. His first post-war job was in June 1946 at the Hammersmith Theatre playing Mavriky in The Brothers Karamazov. Five and a half years later, in December 1951, he made his Broadway début, appearing with Laurence Olivier’s company in Shakespeare’s Rome. His film début came in The Beachcomber (1954) as Tromp. Pleasence was to appear in almost 200 films and television movies but seemed to be most at home in villainous roles or in horror films such as the Halloween series. His movies included: 1984 (1956) as R. Parsons, Barnacle Bill (1957) as a bank clerk, Look Back In Anger (1958) as Hurst, The Flesh And The Fiends (1959) as William Hare, Killers Of Kilimanjaro as Captain, Circus Of Horrors as Vanet, Hell Is A City (1960) as Gus Hawkins, Sons And Lovers (1960) as Mr Puppleworth, Spare The Rod (1961) as Mr Jenkins, What A Carve Up! (1962) as Everett Sloane, Dr Crippen (1962) as Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, The Great Escape (1963) as Colin Blythe, The Caretaker (1964) as Mac Davies/Bernard Jenkins, The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) as the Dark Hermit/Satan, Cul-De-Sac (1966) as George, Fantastic Voyage (1966) as Dr Michaels, The Night Of The Generals (1967) as General Kahlenberge, You Only Live Twice (1967) as Ernst Stavro Blofeld, The Madwoman Of Chaillot as the prospector, THX 1138 as SEN 5241, Soldier Blue as Isaac Q. Cumber, Kidnapped as Ebenezer Balfour, The Mutations (1973) as Professor Nolter, Henry VIII And His Six Wives (1973) as Thomas Cromwell, Escape To Witch Mountain (1975) as Lucas Deranian, The Last Tycoon (1976) as Boxley, The Eagle Has Landed (1976) as Heinrich Himmler, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978) as B.D. Brockhurst, Tomorrow Never Comes (1978) as Dr Todd, Halloween (1978) as Dr Sam Loomis, Dracula (1979) as Dr Jack Seward, Halloween II (1981) as Dr Sam Loomis, Nosferatu A Venezia (1986) as Don Alvise, Prince Of Darkness (1987) as Father Loomis, Halloween 4: The Return Of Michael Myers (1988) as Dr Sam Loomis, Ten Little Indians (1989) as Judge Wargrave, Halloween 5: The Revenge Of Michael Myers (1989) as Dr Sam Loomis and
Halloween: The Curse Of Michael Myers (1995) as Dr Sam Loomis. He was awarded the OBE in 1993. Pleasence, who eschewed alcohol, was married four times. His first wife, on August 7, 1941, was the actor Miriam Raymond by whom he had two daughters, the actor Angela Daphne Pleasence and Jean Denise Pleasence. They divorced in 1958. Number two on May 15, 1959 was the actor-singer Josephine Crombie by whom he had a further two daughters, Lucy Alice Maria (b. May 14, 1961) and Polly Jo Alexis Helena Pleasence. The couple were divorced in 1970. That year, on October 10, he married the singer Meira Shore by whom he had daughter Miranda (b. Chapeltown, Yorkshire, 1969). They divorced in 1988. Finally in January 1989 he married the red-headed Linda Woollen (b. 1947) with whom he had begun an affair in 1970 after meeting her in a Manchester bar. She had a daughter, blonde, blue-eyed Nikola (b. 1967), by a previous relationship.
CAUSE: Donald Pleasence died aged 75 at 6.20am at his home in St Paul de Vence, France, from a heart complaint. Each of his daughters wrote a letter which they placed in his coffin. He left £213,536. In May 1998 his stepdaughter Nikola admitted that she was an alcoholic. On June 12, 1989, her estranged husband tried to run her down and she ended up in a coma for a fortnight and then a further two years in hospital. Eighteen months in a wheelchair followed and 32 operations before her final discharge in September 1997. Pleasence paid for her surgery.
Cole Porter
Born June 9, 1891
Died October 15, 1964
Gay songsmith. One of the most popular composers and lyricists of the twentieth century was born in Peru, Indiana, the son of a pharmacist. As with Anthony Perkins, Cole Albert Porter grew up in a household dominated by his mother where his father (alive, unlike Perkins’) played little or no part. Porter’s mother was wealthy, probably the cause of her husband’s emasculation, and she spared her son no luxury or indulgence. In 1902 a waltz written by Porter was published and distributed by his mother at her own expense. After a grand tour of Europe he entered Yale where he excelled in socialising rather than academia. After gaining a BA there, he entered Harvard Law School but dropped out after 12 months to concentrate on songwriting. See America First was his first Broadway musical but it closed after just 15 performances in 1916. In 1917 he moved to France but, contrary to his own claims, he neither served in the French army nor the Foreign Legion. He met socialite Linda Lee Thomas and they married on December 18, 1919. However, it was a marriage of convenience. Her first husband had been sexually demanding, unlike Porter, whose demands for sex didn’t include her. It seems unlikely, as some have suggested, that Mrs Porter was a lesbian. It is more probable that she was asexual. Porter would indulge his tastes by going cruising with gay actor Monty Woolley and picking up rough trade. One of Porter’s lovers was actor Jack Cassidy. Nine years later, Porter had his first major hit on his hands with ‘Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall In Love’. The following year he began writing for films and his work appeared in The Battle Of Paris (1929). After that came Paree, Paree (1934), The Gay Divorcee (1934), Anything Goes (1936), Broadway Melody Of 1940 (1940), Du Barry Was A Lady (1943), Kiss Me Kate (1953), High Society (1956), Anything Goes (1956), Silk Stockings (1957), Les Girls (1957) and Can-Can (1960). After finishing work on Rosalie (1937) in the autumn of 1937 he went out riding and was thrown by his horse, breaking his legs so badly that amputation seemed likely. He eventually learned to walk again, albeit with the help of callipers, crutches and sticks.
CAUSE: In April 1958 osteomyelitis forced doctors to amputate Porter’s right leg at the hip. Depression set in and he stopped composing. His weight dropped to just over 5st and he was unable to fight off simple infections. He had to be carried everywhere, though he still insisted on using a sun lamp to keep his tan topped up. He died aged 73 in Santa Monica, California, of pneumonia following surgery for a kidney stone. He was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, West 12th Street, Peru, Indiana 46970.
FURTHER READING: Genius And Lust: The Creativity And Sexuality Of Cole Porter And Noël Coward – Joseph Morella & George Mazzei (London: Robson Books, 1996).
Nyree Dawn Porter, OBE
(NGAIRE PORTER)
Born January 22, 1936
Died April 10, 2001
Kiwi beauty. Nyree Dawn Porter was born in Napier, New Zealand, the first daughter and first child of Kenneth Norman Porter, a master butcher and property developer, and Edna May Porter. Her original forename was a Maori word meaning “little white flower”. Kenneth Porter walked out on his family in 1944 and he rarely saw them afterwards. Porter trained at the New Zealand Royal Academy of Ballet before joining the New Zealand Players Trust. In 1958 she won the title Miss Cinema New Zealand, a competition organised by the Rank Organisation, and moved to London with her new husband Bryon O’Leary. She began appearing on the stage and made her film début in 1960 playing Betty in Sentenced For Life, then moved to television playing the lead in Madame Bovary (1964). From January 7 until July 1, 1967 she appeared in the BBC 2 drama The Forsyte Saga as Irene Forsyte née Heron. The role made her “the first romantic sex symbol of the television era” and when it was later shown on BBC 1 attracted 18 million viewers. The role won Porter the Best Television Actress Award from the Society of Film and Television Arts. She played Blanche in the film Jane Eyre (1970) but found she was typecast by Irene. In 1970 her husband died from an accidental drugs overdose after a nervous breakdown. Another television role, Contessa Caroline di Contini in The Protectors (September 29, 1972–March 15, 1974), gave Porter another lease of professional life. On August 15, 1975 she married the actor Robin Bernard Halstead, seven months after the birth of their daughter Natalya (b. January 10, 1975), known as Tassy. The girl was to suffer from anorexia for many years. The marriage to Halstead ended in 1987 in divorce. Porter appeared on television game shows and her last film was playing Margot Fonteyn in Hilary And Jackie (1998).
Fade to Black: A Book of Movie Obituaries Page 141
