MORBID CURIOSITY: Celebrity Tombstones Across America | home
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DECEMBER
DECEMBER
Monday, 1 December
Robert Peterson, stage actor ("Camelot"), of a heart attack, 71.
Tuesday, 2 December
"Father John" Feist, syndicated radio personality ("The Troubleshooter"), of
cancer, age not reported.
Walter T. Redmond, cereal producer (Kellogg Co.), 80.
Wednesday, 3 December
Ellen Drew, actress ("Christmas in July"), of liver trouble, 89.
David Hemmings, actor ("Blow Up"), of a heart attack, 62.
Saturday, 6 December
Jerry Tuite, aka "The Wall", pro wrestler, of a heart attack, 36.
*** I have to list every pro wrestler who dies, or else I will get a lot of
e-mails.
Wednesday, 10 December
Don Wheeler, major-league baseball player (Chicago White Sox), 81.
Sunday, 14 December
Jeanne Crain, actress ("Pinky"), of a heart attack, 78.
Monday, 15 December
Keith Magnuson, NHL hockey player (Chicago Blackhawks), in an auto accident,
56.
Donn Reed, radio reporter (Los Angeles), of cancer, 88.
Tuesday, 16 December
Alfred Lynch, actor (British), of cancer, 72.
Keith McCreary, NHL hockey player (Pittsburgh Penguins), of cancer, 63.
Frank Mills, radio & TV broadcaster (Fort Worth, TX), 90.
Madlyn Rhue, actress (Jean O'Neill in "Murder, She Wrote"), of multiple
sclerosis, 68.
Gary Stewart, country singer ("She's Actin' Single"), shot (suicide), 58.
Wednesday, 17 December
Ed Devereaux, actor (Australian), of heart problems and cancer, 78.
Otto Graham, NFL football player (Cleveland Browns), of a heart aneurysm, 82.
Scott Schmidt, news publisher (Los Angeles Daily News), cause not reported,
66.
Henry Cuesta, clarinetist (the Lawrence Welk Orchestra), of cancer, 71.
Thursday, 18 December
Glenn C. Cunningham, U.S. Congressman (R-NE, 1957-71), 91.
Charles Berlitz, linguist, 90.
Friday, 19 December
Hope Lange, actress ("Peyton Place"), of an intestinal infection, 70.
Les Tremayne, actor (Mentor on "Shazam!"), 90.
Mike Lozansky, aka Mike Anthony, pro wrestler, cause not reported, 35.
Saturday, 20 December
Dick Butler, baseball executive, 92.
Monday, 22 December
Dave Dudley, country singer ("Six Days on the Road"), of a heart attack, 75.
Hans Koller, jazz saxophonist, 82.
Wednesday, 24 December
Herman Keiser, pro golfer (1946 Masters champ), 89.
Thursday, 25 December
Nicholas Mavroules, U.S. Congressman (D-MA, 1979-93), following intestinal
surgery, 74.
Friday, 26 December
Paul Owens, baseball executive (Philadelphia Phillies), after a lengthy
illness, 79.
Yoshio Shirai, boxer (Japanese), of pneumonia, 80.
Saturday, 27 December
Alan Bates, actor ("Zorba the Greek"), of cancer, 69.
Ivan Calderon, major-league baseball player (Montreal Expos), shot (murder),
41.
Vestal Goodman, southern gospel singer (The Happy goodman Family), cause not
reported, age not reported.
John Niemiera, NBA basketball player (Ft. Wayne?), 82.
Dick St. John, pop singer (Dick & Dee Dee), of injuries from a fall, 63.
Sunday, 28 December
Helen Kleeb, actress (Miss Mamie Baldwin on "The Waltons"), 97.
Monday, 29 December
Gerald Gutierrez, Broadway director ("A Delicate Balance"), of respiratory
complications from the flu, 53.
Earl Hindman, actor (Wilson on "Home Improvement"), of lung cancer, 61.
Bob Monkhouse, comedian & TV host (British), of prostate and bone cancer, 75.
Tuesday, 30 December
John Gregory Dunne, author ("True Confessions"), from heart trouble, 71.
Reginald H. Jones, industrial executive (General Electric), after a long
illness, 86.
Patricia Roc, actress (British), of kidney failure, 88.
Wednesday, 31 December
John Franks, racehorse breeder/owner, cause not reported. 78.
Takashi Ishihara, automobile manufacturer (Nissan), of heart failure, 91.
Paula Ramona Wright (Paula Raymond), actress: born San Francisco 23 November
1924; married 1944 Floyd Patterson (one daughter deceased; marriage dissolved
1946); died Los Angeles 31 December 2003.
A tall, dark-haired beauty, the actress Paula Raymond never achieved top
stardom, but enjoyed a period of popularity in the early Fifties, first as a
contract player at MGM, then as a freelance.
Her best-known role is that of a scientist's protégée in the classic Fifties
sci-fi film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, which initiated the cycle of movies
featuring monsters unleashed by nuclear energy.
In a life that was also marked by personal tragedies, she served as leading lady
to such stars as Robert Taylor, Cary Grant and Dick Powell. "I was a working
actress," she said:
The reason I went to work as an actress was that it was the only thing I knew
how to do to earn a living. And I needed a job.
Born Paula Ramona Wright in San Francisco in 1923, she was the daughter of a
lawyer and his Irish-born wife, who leased property. As a child she studied
ballet, voice, music and piano, singing coloratura roles in junior opera
productions.
While accompanying her mother on a trip to Hollywood, she made her screen début
at the age of 13 in Keep Smiling (1938), in which she was billed as Paula Rae
Wright. Playing a spoilt child actress, she was soaked by a bowl of mush aimed
by the film's star Jane Withers. "It was cold and wet," she later recalled:
I was drenched and miserable and almost lost any desire I might have had to be
an actress right there and then.
After completing her education at the Hollywood High School, graduating in 1942,
she studied law in San Francisco while appearing with theatre groups.
She did her only singing on film when she dubbed the singing voice of Hedy
Lamarr in Jacques Tourneur's Experiment Perilous (1944), but she gave up career
ambitions when she married a marine captain in 1944. When they divorced in 1946
just after the birth of their daughter, Raymond moved to Hollywood, where her
striking looks soon brought her work as a model. A contract with Columbia
Pictures resulted in roles in five "B" pictures, including Blondie's Secret
(1948) and Challenge of the Range (1949).
Raymond was appearing on television when she was spotted by a movie talent
scout, who recommended her to the agent Elsie Cukor, who arranged for her
brother George Cukor to direct a screen test. The result was an MGM contract,
and a small role in Cukor's Adam's Rib (1949) as the society girlfriend of David
Wayne. "I'm sure George invented that role to show me off," Raymond later told
the reporter Dan Van Neste:
There was no reason for David Wayne to have a companion in the party scene where
my character first enters. I believe that Cukor was probably introducing me to
the studio.
After a role in East Side, West Side (1949) as James Mason's secretary, she was
given her first major assignment, that of Robert Taylor's leading lady in the
offbeat western Devil's Doorway (1950). Distinguished by a literate script by
Guy Trosper, superb photography by John Alton, and incisive direction by Anthony
Mann, Devil's Doorway was a brave film for its time. It not only depicted the
unfair treatment of native Americans but included a brief romance between Taylor
(playing a member of the Shoshone tribe) and Raymond, and ended with the hero's
death in order to avert a massacre of his people.
Though hailed as "a whopping action film" by The New York Times, the film did
poorly at the box office. It was remembered by Raymond later for the difficulty
she had fending off the advances of her director:
The hell he put me through! He was after me. He even tried to ply me with
liquor. I've never been a drinker. He ordered a drink for me, a brandy
Alexander. It tasted like a spicy milkshake. When he asked me out for dinner, I
would always ask the publicity man along. It was a matter of self-preservation!
Raymond next played the role she regarded as her favourite, a lovelorn secretary
pining for her boss in the musical Duchess of Idaho (1950). The film starred the
swimmer Esther Williams as Raymond's best friend, and it gave Raymond some
delightful comic moments, especially her gauche reactions when in the company of
the man she secretly loves.
She had fewer opportunities in another musical, Grounds for Marriage (1950), in
which she played the fiancée of a divorcee (Van Johnson) still in love with his
former wife (Kathryn Grayson), but it was followed by one of her finest roles,
as Cary Grant's wife in Richard Brooks's suspenseful drama Crisis (1950). Crisis
was Brooks's first film as a director, and the production was marred by several
violent arguments between Brooks and his director of photography, Ray June.
"Richard Brooks did not know how to use the camera," said Raymond:
The pressures on him were so severe - he was responsible for the screenplay as
well as his directorial début. He would yell at everybody in the cast. It's the
first time in cinema history that a boom "accidentally" ran over a director's
foot, but it was the crew, not Ray June, that hated him.
The film was an exciting piece, in which Grant and Raymond (as a physician and
his wife) are kidnapped while on holiday in South America. Grant is ordered to
operate on a brutal dictator (José Ferrer), while Raymond is taken captive by
insurgents who insist that Grant botch the operation. Raymond's part had
originally been conceived as that of the doctor's sister, to be played by Nancy
Davis (later Reagan) but after Grant was given the lead MGM insisted that the
role be rewritten as love interest, and it was recast with Raymond.
Her next film was another fine thriller, The Tall Target (1951), starring Dick
Powell and directed by Anthony Mann ("This time he left me alone. He had learned
his lesson"). Based on the little-known facts surrounding a plot to assassinate
Abraham Lincoln before his first inauguration in 1861, the film was set almost
entirely on a train peopled with myriad suspects. Raymond played a Southern
belle travelling with her cadet brother (Marshall Thompson) and maid (Ruby Dee),
the three of them playing a major part in the denouement.
Despite her prominent roles, Raymond had failed to attract a strong following,
and the studio next gave her three minor roles, in the musical Texas Carnival,
the gambling drama Inside Straight and the thriller The Sellout (all 1951). She
fired her agent Elsie Cukor, and later blamed that move for incurring the wrath
of George Cukor and establishing an unofficial blackballing. After a year, she
left MGM to freelance.
Though her career was never to regain the lustre it had had at MGM, she went
straight into the film for which she is best remembered, Eugène Lourié's The
Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). Adapted from Ray Bradbury's short story "The
Foghorn", it told of a rhedosauraus (a fictional monster, part brontosaurus and
part tyrannosaurus) which wreaks havoc after being thawed from its Arctic home
by atomic tests. Raymond was the assistant of a palaeontologist (Cecil Kellaway)
in the gripping tale, the first of many in which nuclear energy frees a monster
that embarks on mass destruction.
The first major film to employ Ray Harryhausen and his innovative stop-motion
special effects, it cost $250,000 to make and grossed over $5m. Raymond said:
That film was embarrassing for me at the time, because it was the first film I
did after leaving MGM, and, compared to the production values of a big studio,
it was embarrassing . . . Of course, the movie was later bought by Warners, was
a huge hit and has become an important cult film.
In both John Auer's compelling film noir The City That Never Sleeps (1953) and
Joseph M. Newman's gritty thriller The Human Jungle (1954) Raymond had
colourless roles as a cop's wife. After a low-budget western, The Gun That Won
the West (1955), and the inane King Richard and the Crusaders (1955), Raymond
left movies: "I had a daughter to support. So, I looked in the classified ads."
She worked as a receptionist, bookkeeper and insurance clerk, then in 1958 she
hired a new agent and began to find work in television, doing guest roles on
such series as The Untouchables, Maverick, Perry Mason, Have Gun Will Travel and
77 Sunset Strip. She returned to the big screen with roles in The Flight That
Disappeared (1961) and Hand of Death (1962).
Tragedy struck when, in August 1962, she was a passenger in a car that went out
of control on Sunset Boulevard and crashed into a tree. Trapped under the front
seat, she was pulled out moments before the car blew up.
Initially pronounced dead at the hospital, she was revived by a neurologist, but
she had a skull fracture and her nose had been severed from her face. A plastic
surgeon worked all night on her, and though he did a remarkable job her nervous
system continued to suffer from the effects of the accident for the rest of her
life.
In 1963 she returned to television work, and made three more movies, an expanded
version of a Man From U.N.C.L.E. episode, The Spy With My Face (1966), Blood of
Dracula's Castle (1967), in which she played wife to John Carradine's Dracula,
and a western, Five Bloody Graves (1969). "It was hell coming back," she said.
From 1979 she worked with a film distribution company for five years, but plans
to return to acting were thwarted. Given a role in the daytime soap opera Days
of Our Lives in 1977, she tripped over a telephone cord on her third day,
breaking her ankle, and was written out. In 1984 she broke both hips, in 1993
her daughter died, and in 1994 she broke her shoulder.
Asked in 1997 how she spent her time, she replied, "Writing poetry, music, my
income properties, and fan mail."