THE FIVE MOST OVERRATED ACTORS

Most of my top five lists are of my personal favorites, but I thought it would be interesting and thought provoking to make a list of something more negative. I made a list of who I believe are the top five most overrated actors in classic Hollywood. Now, all of the actors on the list have much more talent than I do. I am not saying they did not have talent, but in my opinion they were just overrated. Let me know what you think...



5. ERROL FLYNN (1909-1959)
I think the problem I have with Errol Flynn is I do not care much for the swashbuckler type film that he was famous for in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He was the bad boy Russell Crowe of his day, but I just could never get into Flynn. His personal life and problems I think were much more interesting than any film he ever made.

4. JAMES DEAN (1931-1955)
This may be a controversial view to have, but I feel that actor James Dean was famous because he died. I do not think he would have had the staying power to make it in Hollywood. Yes, he made four popular films, but I still prefer other actors of his day like Paul Newman and Steve McQueen much more. Dean had a look that is forever frozen in time because of his death. He had the look, but I did not see the ability so much.



3. VICTOR MATURE (1913-1999)
Again, I feel that Victor Mature was another actor who made it because of his looks. He made some interesting movies and some pretty bad movies. Has anyone ever seen "Red,Hot,And Blue"(1949) with Mature and Betty Hutton - a real stinker of a movie. As Mature aged, he kept his looks for most of his life but his movie career basically ended by the 1960s. He was perfect person to play Samson in "Samson And Delilah"(1949) with Susan Hayward, but I could not see Victor Mature playing Hamlet.

2. WARREN BEATTY (born 1937)
I have seen interviews through the years that Warren Beatty has done, and personally I just do not like the man. I have tried to sit through a Warren Beatty movie - everything from "Bonnie And Clyde" (1967) to "Dick Tracy"(1990), and I just can not do it. Beatty looks like he does not care what the audiences think. A lot of people flocked to his movies back in the day, but he has been mostly retired since 2000. Maybe it's for the best, if his personality is anything I think it is like - he probably does not want to be viewed as an aging actor who once made it big in tinsel town.



1. RICHARD BURTON (1925-1984)
There are people I see in my every day life that make my skin just itch. Richard Burton is one of those people on the screen who when I see him, I feel dirty and have to itch. Burton just looks simply dirty to me. Even just seeing him on film, I picture his breath smelling like the dinner and booze he had the night before. There has never been a movie I have been able to sit through with him in it. Like many of the stars I picked for the list, Burton was very popular in Hollywood, and his marriage to Elizabeth Taylor was more legendary than any movie he made. However, I do not understand his appeal. Yes, he was British but there were much better British actors out there from Laurence Olivier to James Mason. That is why I picked Richard Burton as the most overrated actor I know...

Any comments...opinions...additions to the list?

WHAT A CHARACTER: JACK CARSON

One of my favorite character actors that died way too young was Jack Carson. His acting was wasted at Warner Brothers for much of his career, but he did make some memorable appearances in classics like: "Arsenic And Old Lace" (1944), "Mildred Pierce" (1945), and "A Star Is Born" (1954). Some of his roles might have been small but his ability was massive. Carson's trademark was the wisecracking know it all who eventually and typically was undone by his own excessive self-confidence.

Carson was born in Carman, Manitoba on October 27, 1910 to Elmer and Elsa Carson. Shortly afterwards the family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which he always thought of as his home town, although there is no known evidence confirming that he took out United States citizenship. He attended high school at Hartford School, Milwaukee and St. John's Military Academy, Delafield, but it was while attending Carleton College that he developed a taste for acting.

Jack Carson, because of his size — 6 ft 2 in (1.9 m) and 220 lb (100 kg), had his first stage appearance as Hercules in a college production. During a performance, he tripped and took half the set with him. A college friend, Dave Willock, thought it was so funny he persuaded Carson to team with him in a vaudeville act—Willock and Carson—and a new career began. This piece of unplanned business would be typical of the sorts of things that tended to happen to Carson during some of his film roles.

During the 1930s, as vaudeville went into decline owing to increased competition from radio and the movies, Willock and Carson sought work in Hollywood. Carson initially landed bit roles at RKO Radio Pictures, including a bit part in Bringing Up Baby (1938), starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. The radio also proved to be a source of employment for the team following a 1938 appearance on the Kraft Music Hall during Bing Crosby's period as program host. This led to a number of other appearances which would culminate in Carson's own radio show in 1943.

From 1950-51, Carson was one of four alternating hosts of the NBC Television program 4 Star Revue, along with other hosts Jimmy Durante, Ed Wynn. and Danny Thomas. The show aired Wednesday evenings. Carson's second season was his last with the comedy-variety program when its title was changed to All Star Revue.

Carson's radio success on radio led to the start of a lucrative film career. An early stand-out role for Carson was as an undercover G-Man feigning drunkenness opposite Richard Cromwell in Universal Pictures's anti-Nazi action drama entitled, Enemy Agent. Carson shortly thereafter achieved contract-player status with Warner Brothers. While there, he was teamed with Dennis Morgan in a number of films, supposedly to compete with the popular Crosby and Hope road pictures.

However, despite this auspicious beginning, most of his work at Warner Brothers was limited to light comedies with Morgan and later with Doris Day (who in her autobiography would credit Carson as one of her early Hollywood mentors). Critics generally agree that Carson's best work was in Mildred Pierce (1945) where he played the perpetually scheming Wally Fay opposite Joan Crawford in the title role. Another role which won accolades for Carson was publicist Matt Libby in A Star is Born (1954).

Carson's work during this period included a number of appearances on television including The Martha Raye Show, The Guy Mitchell Show and The Polly Bergen Show (both 1957), Alcoa Theatre (1959), Bonanza (Season 1, Ep.9: "Mr. Henry Comstock", 1959), and The Twilight Zone (Season 2, Ep. 14: "The Whole Truth", 1961). Jack Carson also had a brother Robert (Bob) who was a character actor.

In 1962, while rehearsing the Broadway play Critic's Choice, he collapsed and was subsequently diagnosed with stomach cancer. Carson died in Encino in 1963, aged 52. The early death of the burly Carson, whose screen image was one of energy and vitality, made front page news, along with the death of fellow actor and good friend Dick Powell. He was entombed in Glendale's Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery. He has been gone nearly fifty years, but Jack Carson's talent lives on in the great character roles and movies he left behind...

PHOTOS OF THE DAY: MORE ODD PAIRINGS

Last year I posted some pictures of odd Hollywood pairings, or at least unusual ones that you are not always used to seeing. I dug up a few more different pairings that I think are interesting. Only in Hollywood...

FRED ASTAIRE AND ALICE COOPER

BING CROSBY AND JAMES CAGNEY

CHARLES CHAPLIN AND ALBERT EINSTEIN

BOB HOPE AND MARLON BRANDO

ETHEL MERMAN AND ERNEST BORGNINE

GROUCHO MARX AND DIANA ROSS

TO SEE MORE ODD PHOTO PAIRINGS CHECK OUT MY POST FROM APRIL 9, 2011:
HERE

RIP: CELESTE HOLM

Celeste Holm, a versatile, bright-eyed blonde who soared to Broadway fame in "Oklahoma!" and won an Oscar in "Gentleman's Agreement" but whose last years were filled with financial difficulty and estrangement from her sons, died Sunday, a relative said. She was 95.

Holm had been hospitalized about two weeks ago with dehydration after a fire in actor Robert De Niro's apartment in the same Manhattan building. She had asked her husband on Friday to bring her home, and she spent her final days with her husband, Frank Basile, and other relatives and close friends by her side, said Amy Phillips, a great-niece of Holm's who answered the phone at Holm's apartment on Sunday.

Holm died around 3:30 a.m. at her longtime apartment on Central Park West, Phillips said.

"I think she wanted to be here, in her home, among her things, with people who loved her," she said.

In a career that spanned more than half a century, Holm played everyone from Ado Annie — the girl who just can't say no in "Oklahoma!"— to a worldly theatrical agent in the 1991 comedy "I Hate Hamlet" to guest star turns on TV shows such as "Fantasy Island" and "Love Boat II" to Bette Davis' best friend in"All About Eve."

She won the Academy Award in 1947 for best supporting actress for her performance in "Gentlemen's Agreement" and received Oscar nominations for "Come to the Stable" (1949) and "All About Eve" (1950).

Holm was also known for her untiring charity work — at one time she served on nine boards — and was a board member emeritus of the National Mental Health Association.

She was once president of the Creative Arts Rehabilitation Center, which treats emotionally disturbed people using arts therapies. Over the years, she raised $20,000 for UNICEF by charging 50 cents apiece for autographs.

President Ronald Reagan appointed her to a six-year term on the National Council on the Arts in 1982. In New York, she was active in the Save the Theatres Committee and was once arrested during a vigorous protest against the demolition of several theaters.

But late in her life she was in a bitter, multi-year legal family battle that pitted her two sons against her and her fifth husband — former waiter Basile, whom she married in 2004 and was more than 45 years her junior. The court fight over investments and inheritance wiped away much of her savings and left her dependent on Social Security. The actress and her sons no longer spoke, and she was sued for overdue maintenance and legal fees on her Manhattan apartment.

The future Broadway star was born in New York on April 29, 1919, the daughter of Norwegian-born Theodore Holm, who worked for the American branch of Lloyd's of London, and Jean Parke Holm, a painter and writer.

She was smitten by the theater as a 3-year-old when her grandmother took her to see ballerina Anna Pavlova. "There she was, being tossed in midair, caught, no mistakes, no falls. She never knew what an impression she made," Holm recalled years later.

She attended 14 schools growing up, including the Lycee Victor Duryui in Paris when her mother was there for an exhibition of her paintings. She studied ballet for 10 years.

Her first Broadway success came in 1939 in the cast of William Saroyan's "The Time of Your Life." But it was her creation of the role of man-crazy Ado Annie Carnes in the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein musical "Oklahoma!" in 1943 that really impressed the critics.

She only auditioned for the role because of World War II, she said years later. "There was a need for entertainers in Army camps and hospitals. The only way you could do that was if you were singing in something."

Holm was hired by La Vie Parisienne, and later by the Persian Room at the Plaza Hotel to sing to their late-night supper club audiences after the "Oklahoma!" curtain fell.

The slender, blue-eyed blonde moved west to pursue a film career. "Hollywood is a good place to learn how to eat a salad without smearing your lipstick," she would say.

"Oscar Hammerstein told me, 'You won't like it,'" and he was right, she said. Hollywood "was just too artificial. The values are entirely different. That balmy climate is so deceptive." She returned to New York after several years.

Her well-known films included "The Tender Trap" and "High Society" but others were less memorable. "I made two movies I've never even seen," she told an interviewer in 1991.

She attributed her drive to do charity work to her grandparents and parents who "were always volunteers in every direction."

She said she learned first-hand the power of empathy in 1943 when she performed in a ward of mental patients and got a big smile from one man she learned later had been uncommunicative for six months.

"I suddenly realized with a great sense of impact how valuable we are to each other," she said.

In 1979 she was knighted by King Olav of Norway.

In her early 70s, an interviewer asked if she had ever thought of retiring. "No. What for?" she replied. "If people retired, we wouldn't have had Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud ... I think it's very important to hang on as long as we can."

In the 1990s, Holm and Gerald McRainey starred in the CBS's"Promised Land," a spinoff of "Touched by an Angel." In 1995, she joined such stars as Tony Randall and Jerry Stiller to lobby for state funding for the arts in Albany, N.Y. Her last big screen role was as Brendan Fraser's grandmother in the romance "Still Breathing."

Holm was married five times and is survived by two sons and three grandchildren. Her marriage in 1938 to director Ralph Nelson lasted a year but produced a son, Theodor Holm Nelson. In 1940, she married Francis Davies, an English auditor. In 1946, she married airline public relations executive A. Schuyler Dunning and they had a son, Daniel Dunning.

During her fourth marriage, to actor Robert Wesley Addy, whom she married in 1966, the two appeared together on stage when they could. In the mid-1960s, when neither had a project going, they put together a two person show called "Interplay — An Evening of Theater-in-Concert" that toured the United States and was sent abroad by the State Department. Addy died in 1996.

Funeral arrangements for Holm haven't been made. The family is asking that any memorial donations be made to UNICEF or to The Lillian Booth Actors Home of The Actors Fund in Englewood, N.J...

SOURCE

WHERE ARE THEY NOW: RICK MORANIS

The name Rick Moranis takes me back to the 1980s when I first started going to the movies. I remember seeing the great comic actor in films such as Strange Brew (1983) and Ghostbusters (1984).

I also recall watching reruns of his television appearances on the Canadian comedy show SCTV and be amazed at his ability. That show introduced the world to the talents of Martin Short, Eugene Levy, John Candy, and Rick Moranis. Unfortunately, Rick Moranis has basically retired from show business.

Moranis was born in Toronto, Ontario, and went to high school at the Sir Sandford Fleming Secondary School. He went to elementary school with Geddy Lee, frontman of the rock band Rush. His career as an entertainer began as a radio disc jockey in the mid-1970s, using the on-air name of "Rick Alan" at three Toronto radio stations. He also did the voice over for a short lived cartoon series on NBC called Gravedale High.

He left the film industry in 1997, six years after the 1991 loss of his wife, Anne, to liver cancer. He later explained that he "pulled out of making movies in about '96 or '97. "I'm a single parent and I just found that it was too difficult to manage raising my kids and doing the traveling involved in making movies. So I took a little bit of a break. And the little bit of a break turned into a longer break, and then I found that I really didn't miss it".

As of 2004, Moranis was on the Advisory Committee for the comedy program at Humber College. In 2005, Moranis released an album titled The Agoraphobic Cowboy, featuring country songs with lyrics which Moranis says follow in the comic tradition of songwriters/singers such as Roger Miller, Kinky Friedman, and Jim Stafford. The album was produced by Tony Scherr, and is distributed through ArtistShare, as well as Moranis' official web site. Commenting on the origins of the songs, he said that in 2003, "out of the blue, I just wrote a bunch of songs. For lack of a better explanation, they’re more country than anything. And I actually demoed four or five of them, and I'm not sure at this point what I’m going to do with them—whether I’m going to fold them into a full-length video or a movie. But, boy, I had a good time doing that".

On December 8, 2005, The Agoraphobic Cowboy was announced as a nominee for the 2006 Grammy for Best Comedy Album. (A previous album by Moranis was entitled You, Me, The Music, and Me (1989)). On February 3, 2006, Moranis performed Press Pound on Late Night with Conan O'Brien and discussed the development of his music career.

In November 2007, Moranis reunited with Dave Thomas for a 24th anniversary special of Bob and Doug McKenzie, titled Bob and Doug McKenzie's 2-4 Anniversary. The duo shot new footage for this special. Thomas subsequently created a new animated Bob and Doug McKenzie series, Bob & Doug, for his company Animax Entertainment. Moranis declined to voice the role of Bob, which was taken over by Dave Coulier, but remains involved in the series as an executive producer.

On June 24, 2008, Moranis declined to come out of retirement to join the other cast members of Ghostbusters in the production of a new video game based on the films. For almost five years, Rick Moranis has been completely removed from Hollywood and the entertainment industry. Due to overcoming great loss, Moranis realized what was important to him, and a life in Hollywood was not it...

RIP: MARIA HAWKINS COLE

Nat King Cole's widow, Maria Hawkins Cole, dies of cancer, aged 89
BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Nat King Cole's widow, Maria Hawkins Cole, has died in South Florida after a short battle with cancer, aged 89.

The Associated Press cited a family representative as confirming that Maria Cole died Tuesday at a Boca Raton nursing home.

Her daughter, nine-time Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter Natalie Cole, tweeted:

"I just want to thank everyone for their prayers & loving support. Mom has passed, gone to glory, July 10th 2012. She will be next to Dad at Forest Lawn. — Natalie Cole (@NatMCole) July 12, 2012"

Nat King Cole, who died in 1965 — also of cancer — at the age of 45, was buried at the Glendale, California cemetery along with such "Golden Age" Hollywood stars as Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Jean Harlow, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn and Spencer Tracy.

Maria Cole, born in Boston in 1922, moved to North Carolina to stay with an aunt after her mother died, but later moved to New York to pursue a musical career.

She married a Tuskegee Airmen flyer, Spurgeon Ellington, in 1947, who was killed in Georgia two years later during a routine postwar training flight, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

After performing briefly with Count Basie and swing innovator Fletcher Henderson, Maria Cole was hired by Ellington as a vocalist with his orchestra. She worked for him until 1946, when she embarked on a solo career and was performing at Club Zanzibar when she met Nat King Cole. She married him on Easter Sunday in 1948 at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church.

The ceremony, just six days after Nat's divorce from his first wife became final, was administered by then-U.S. Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr.

Maria Cole traveled and performed with Nat King Cole throughout the '50s. After he died, she established the Cole Cancer Foundation.

A statement by Natalie Cole with her twin sisters Timolin and Casey Cole, cited by the AP, read: "Our mom was in a class all by herself. She epitomized, class, elegance, and truly defined what it is to be a real lady. ... She died how she lived — with great strength, courage and dignity, surrounded by her loving family."

SOURCE

PAST OBITS: JACKIE GLEASON

It is hard to believe that one of the greatest comedian and actors of all time, Jackie Gleason has been gone now for 25 years. This story of Gleason was featured in People magazine at the time of his death on July 13, 1987. Twenty five years later, Gleason is still missed, and his talent will never be repeated or seen again...

Save a table for me, pal." With this wry but heartfelt scribble, sent along with flowers, Jackie Gleason said au revoir to his best friend, Toots Shor, the Manhattan tavern keeper, who died in 1977. Just over a week ago Gleason arrived to claim his reservation. After a three-month battle with cancer of the colon, the Volkswagen-shaped leprechaun who reigned as Mr. Saturday Night during the Golden Age of TV comedy died peacefully at home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 71. "If God wants another joke man," he said just before the end, "I'm ready."

Two days later, while tapes of Melancholy Serenade and other Gleason compositions played softly in the background, some 2,000 mourners filed past his closed casket in a Miami funeral parlor. The next day family and close friends prayed for his soul at a requiem Mass. Geraldine and Linda, Gleason's daughters by his first wife, were there with his widow, Marilyn, and drove with her to Our Lady of Mercy Cemetery. Audrey Meadows, Gleason's co-star in The Honeymooners, was the only famous performer who showed up at the service, but Art Carney, Jackie's close friend and comic sidekick, sent flowers. So did Perry Como, Mickey Rooney and Bob Hope, who spoke for millions when he said: "Jackie was a supercomic, bigger than life as a talent and as a man."



Gleason would surely have agreed. Orson Welles dubbed him "The Great One," and he wore the epithet as proudly as an emperor wears ermine, charming and tickling and bullying us until we took him at his own measure. Gross in physique, gargantuan in gourmandise, oceanic in liquid capacity, prodigal of purse, a fire hose of libido and a Niagara of comic invention, the B man was excess personified and § one of the great entertainers of the I age. He was the last of the dear mad I Irishmen who from Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley) to Frank Fay to Fred Allen have made America laugh at their inspired shenanigans, and he died in an Indian summer of his renown. Yet another generation has fallen in love with his finest work, The Honeymooners, and it is in that vintage series, more than anywhere else, that we can still feel the beating of his big, crazy heart.

Who would have imagined that such a wild Irishman would live to enjoy a happy old age? But he did. He persuaded Gen at last to give him that divorce, weathered another unworkable marriage, this time to ex-secretary Beverly McKittrick, and in 1975 finally wed the widow of his dreams: his old girlfriend Marilyn. Their golden years were not without dark moments—in 1978 Gleason had a triple bypass operation. But he restrained his lust for lunch, had an eye job and a chin tuck, made MasterCard commercials, played the steaming sheriff in the Smokey and the Bandit movies, grew a riverboat-gambler mustache that crawled across his face like a hairy, black caterpillar, built up a multimillion-dollar estate and basked in the afterglow of mass adoration.



What revived the glory that was Gleason? In recent years a creeping fascination with The Honeymooners has become a national addiction. Since they first went into reruns, back in 1958, the 39 episodes Gleason telecast in 1955-56 have never been off the air. Now aired by 100 stations worldwide, the skits have been shown more than 100 times in some areas. In 1985 Gleason gave his Honeymoonies—who have set up the Royal Association for the Longevity and Preservation of The Honeymooners(R.A.L.P.H.)—a massive bonus of delight. He revealed the existence of "lost" kinescopes of The Jackie Gleason Show, including Honeymooners sketches first telecast between '52 and '57, that had sat unseen for 30 years in a refrigerated vault. For a sum in excess of $5 million, he sold distribution rights to Viacom Enterprises. Edited into 70 new episodes of The Honeymooners, the shows were aired on Showtime in 1986 and then released for syndication.

It's a grand legacy, befitting a grand Irish life. "Almost everything I wanted to do," he said not long ago, "I've been able to do, and most of it turned out pretty good. Everybody's been damn nice to me."

And how would he like to be remembered? "Aw, hell. I'd just like to be remembered."

That he will be...



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