Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: May 27, 2025.

Tuesday, May 27th, 2025

Catching up from the three-day weekend:

Phil Robertson, noted beard guy and founder of Duck Commander. He was also on a TV show. NYT.

(I kid a little. I kind of liked what I saw of “Duck Dynasty”.)

Marcel Ophuls, French documentary film maker. He was pretty famous for “The Sorrow and the Pity”, but he first came to my attention when “Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie” was released. I haven’t seen either one, though I feel obligated to. THR.

Charles B. Rangel, former Congressman from New York City.

Ronnie Dugger:

Inspired by Thomas Paine’s treatises on independence and human rights, Mr. Dugger was the founding editor, the publisher and an owner of The Texas Observer, a widely respected publication, based in Austin, that with few resources and a tiny staff took on powerful interests, exposed injustices with investigative reports and offered an urbane mix of political dissent, narrative storytelling and cultural criticism.

James McEachin. Other credits include…well, just about every damn thing. “The F.B.I”, “Play Misty for Me”, “The Bold Ones: The Senator”, “The Bold Ones: The Protectors”…and “Mannix” (“Pressure Point”, season 2, episode 3. He was “Benjy”, but went uncredited.)

Rick Derringer, musician.

Derringer was prolific, working with a range of major acts including Cyndi Lauper, Kiss, Steely Dan, Barbra Streisand, Bonnie Tyler and Ringo Starr. He produced Weird Al Yankovic‘s first six albums, winning a Grammy for “Eat It” (a parody of Michael Jackson’s Beat It) in 1984 for best comedy recording.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Music, Obits, Politics, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 22, 2025.

Thursday, May 22nd, 2025

Jim Irsay. NYT. ESPN.

A lover of rock and roll, Irsay spent millions of dollars collecting rare and significant guitars like Les Paul’s 1954 Gibson Black Beauty, Prince’s Yellow Cloud and David Gilmour’s famed Black Strat. Irsay also owned the manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and the original manuscript of Alcoholics Anonymous, the text that spawned the rehabilitation group. Irsay’s twin passions of music and rare collections culminated in the Jim Irsay Collection, an exhibit of Irsay’s rare items that has traveled the country, and The Jim Irsay Band, a collection of musicians who’ve traveled and played together since 2021, sometimes in conjunction with a display of The Jim Irsay Collection and sometimes in its own concert. For the past two seasons, Irsay and his band have opened the season by playing a free Colts Kickoff Concert at Lucas Oil Stadium, along with a display of the Jim Irsay Collection for Colts fans to enjoy.

George Coulam, also known as “King George”. He founded the Texas Renaissance Festival.

In 2024, the HBO docuseries “Ren Faire” focused on the festival’s succession and Coulam’s eventual retirement, highlighting the tension between his desire to find a romantic partner and his need to choose a successor. It also highlighted Coulam’s strict leadership style.
There have been ongoing legal disputes and potential sales of the festival, with a recent judge’s order in early May mandating the sale of Coulam’s properties, including the festival.

Michael McStay, British actor. Other credits include “EastEnders”, “The Persuaders!”, and “The Sweeney”.

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 21, 2025.

Wednesday, May 21st, 2025

George Wendt. NYT.

Other credits that don’t involve him appearing as Norm include “Larry the Cable Guy’s Christmas Spectacular”, “Columbo: Strange Bedfellows”, and the 1986 “Twilight Zone” revival.

Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D – Virginia).

Vlastimil Hort, chess grandmaster. There’s a great story about Mr. Hort. Actually, there’s probably more than one, but this may be the one he’s most famous for.

In 1977, he was playing Boris Spassky in Reykjavik.

The match was a best-of-12 quarterfinal, whose winner would be one step closer to the top title in chess. After 12 games, they were tied, prompting a two-game playoff.
Then Mr. Spassky fell seriously ill. He was taken to the hospital, and his appendix was removed. According to the rules, he was entitled to three postponements of three days each. He took them all, but was still too unwell to play.
Mr. Spassky would have to forfeit, meaning Mr. Hort would advance to the semifinals.
Then Mr. Hort did something unexpected. To give Mr. Spassky a chance to continue to compete, Mr. Hort requested a three-day timeout, which was granted. It was a choice seen for decades as one of the greatest acts of sportsmanship in the history of the game, and it ended up costing Mr. Hort the match.
By the end of the timeout, Mr. Spassky could resume play, and after Games 13 and 14 were drawn, another two-game playoff was needed. In Game 15, Mr. Hort reached a winning position, but he froze. His time expired before he had made the required number of moves, thus forfeiting the game. After the next game ended in a tie, Mr. Spassky was declared the winner of the match.
Mr. Hort lost his chance to play for the world championship and never qualified again.

…

He was a popular player among his peers, with a sharp wit and a penchant for telling amusing anecdotes; he often called himself a “chess entertainer.”

Posted in Chess, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 19, 2025.

Monday, May 19th, 2025

Jeff Blank, massively influential Austin chef.

Opened in 1984 on a then-two-lane stretch of RM 620 near Lakeway, Hudson’s on the Bend was one of the first restaurants in Central Texas to explore and celebrate regional Texas cuisine. The pastoral restaurant, built in a 1948 limestone ranch house perched on a hill dotted by cedar trees and juniper bushes, helped change the way people thought of fine dining in Texas.

…

Hudson’s on the Bend may have been the boldest of the new regional cuisine practitioners, serving an exotic menu that over time featured venison, antelope, wild boar, partridge, pheasant, guinea fowl, quail and alligator, along with seafood and more traditional proteins.

We ate a couple of birthday dinners there, and it was a swell joint: expensive, but worth the money.

Blank, who bought out Rausch in 1992, operated the restaurant from 1984 until 2016, when he sold it to a group that would be the first of several to make failed attempts at filling the shoes of the singular personality.

We never tried any of the attempts to reboot Hudson’s, though. Right now, that space is being converted into a Wahoo’s Fish Tacos.

Lawrence pointed out to me the obit for Ed Smylie, the man who put duct tape to the highest and best use ever: saving the crew of Apollo 13.

“If you’re a Southern boy, if it moves and it’s not supposed to, you use duct tape,” Mr. Smylie said in the documentary. “That’s where we were. We had duct tape, and we had to tape it in a way that we could hook the environmental control system hose to the command module canister.”

…

The adapter worked. The astronauts were able to breathe safely in the lunar module for two days as they awaited the appropriate trajectory to fly the hobbled command module home.

The Museum of Ice Cream in the Domain in Austin. I guess they just couldn’t come to terms on a new lease, and will be closing when the current one expires. We talked about having some corporate events there, but never actually did. And it seems kind of expensive: $30 will buy me more Amy’s Ice Cream than I can, or should, eat.

Biderman’s Deli off of Far West. This was their last standing location. I went there a few times with Mom: I think she liked their Reuben, and I know I liked their bagels and lox.

Posted in Food, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 16, 2025.

Friday, May 16th, 2025

Charles Strouse, noted Broadway composer. THR.

Mr. Strouse had more than a dozen Broadway shows to his credit and composed some of the most enduring musical theater numbers of his era: “Put On a Happy Face” and “Kids (What’s the Matter With Kids Today?)” from “Bye Bye Birdie,” which opened in 1960 and featured lyrics by his frequent collaborator Lee Adams; “But Alive” from “Applause” (1970), a musical adaptation of the movie “All About Eve” starring Lauren Bacall, with lyrics by Mr. Adams; and “Tomorrow” and “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” from “Annie” (1977), with lyrics by Martin Charnin.

…

Some of Mr. Strouse’s numbers became so ubiquitous that they seemed revered and reviled by the public in equal measure. Each response in its own way was a badge of honor.
There was the time, for instance, that a stranger accosted Mr. Strouse at a party.
“If I have to hear my daughter sing ‘Tomorrow’ one more time,” he thundered, “I’m going to kill myself — and you!”

…

He wrote scores for films as well, including “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) and “The Night They Raided Minsky’s” (1968. For television, he composed the music for “Those Were the Days,” the opening theme of Norman Lear’s groundbreaking sitcom “All in the Family,” with lyrics by Mr. Adams. (It is Mr. Strouse’s piano playing that is heard on the soundtrack as Archie and Edith Bunker sing the song on camera.)

…

Not all of Mr. Strouse’s ventures were successful. “Bring Back Birdie,” a 1981 sequel, closed on Broadway after four performances. Two “Annie” sequels, “Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge” and “Annie Warbucks,” closed out of town before reaching Broadway. The 1991 musical “Nick & Nora,” with a book by Arthur Laurents, lyrics by Richard Maltby Jr. and a cast featuring Barry Bostwick and Joanna Gleason as Dashiell Hammett’s detectives Nick and Nora Charles, played just nine Broadway performances.

…

“When I was a 6-year-old girl, I only based my opinion on people from how they made me feel and how they treated me. When I first met Charles Strouse, I was 100 percent enamored with him,” Danielle Brisebois, who played Molly in the original production, said. “His warm smile and his soulful eyes … He was always encouraging, thoughtful and kind. I had no idea I was in the presence of a legend!”

…

“Everybody has flops,” he said. “When I teach, the students say, ‘How can you work three or four years on a show … and it flops? How do you recover from that?’ The only answer is, you’ve done your best, it didn’t work, what’s next?”

Posted in 1970s, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 15, 2025.

Thursday, May 15th, 2025

Joe Don Baker. Damn.

THR. He was in a lot of good stuff: “Charley Varrick”, “Golden Needles”, “The F.B.I.”, “Lancer”…

He was also in a lot of crap: “Leonard Part 6”, “Final Justice”, and, of course…

Joan O’Brien, actress. Other credits include “Bus Stop” (the series), “Rawhide”, “The Alamo” (the good one, with John Wayne), and “Perry Mason”.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: May 14, 2025.

Wednesday, May 14th, 2025

Robert Benton, noted screenwriter and director. NYT (archived). IMDB.

Richard L. Garwin, physicist.

A polymathic physicist and geopolitical thinker, Dr. Garwin was only 23 when he built the world’s first fusion bomb. He later became a science adviser to many presidents, designed Pentagon weapons and satellite reconnaissance systems, argued for a Soviet-American balance of nuclear terror as the best bet for surviving the Cold War, and championed verifiable nuclear arms control agreements.
While his mentor, the Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, called him “the only true genius I have ever met,” Dr. Garwin was not the father of the hydrogen bomb. The Hungarian-born physicist Edward Teller and the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, who developed theories for a bomb, may have greater claims to that sobriquet.
In 1951-52, however, Dr. Garwin, at the time an instructor at the University of Chicago and just a summer consultant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, designed the actual bomb, using the Teller-Ulam ideas. An experimental device code-named Ivy Mike, it was shipped to the Western Pacific and tested on an atoll in the Marshall Islands.

“The shot was fired almost precisely according to Garwin’s design,” Dr. Teller said in a 1981 statement that acknowledged the crucial role of the young prodigy. Still, that belated recognition got little notice, and Dr. Garwin long remained unknown publicly.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Physics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 12, 2025.

Monday, May 12th, 2025

Hattip to pigpen51 for letting us know about the death of Chet Lemon, center fielder for the Detroit Tigers. ESPN.

Lemon played seven seasons with the Chicago White Sox from 1975 to ’81 and nine with the Tigers from 1982 to ’90. He batted .273 with 215 homers, 884 RBIs, 973 runs and 1,875 hits in 1,988 games.
Lemon set a still-standing American League record for outfielders with 512 putouts during the 1977 season.
He led the American League with 44 doubles in 1979 and made the All-Star teams in 1978, 1979 and 1984.

Baseball Reference.

Johnny Rodriguez, musician. NYT (archived).

Terry Brunk, who used the professional name “Sabu” in his wrestling career. He mostly worked with Extreme Championship Wrestling, though he did spend one year with W.W.E.

Although widely remembered for his use of props and tables in the ring, Mr. Sabu was wary of professional wrestling’s spectacle. He would go on to criticize the larger-than-life stunts that would come to define later iterations of the W.W.E. and other wrestling promotion companies.
“In an Olympic match, you cannot stack a couple tables and then climb something and jump off. That’s a stunt,” Mr. Brunk told an interviewer with Covalent TV at Wrestlecade 2024. “I’m not a stuntman or an actor.”

Somewhat related: a NYT article about wrestlers who died young.

Posted in Music, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 9, 2025.

Friday, May 9th, 2025

For the historical record: David H. Souter, former Supreme Court justice. WP (archived).

James Foley, director. The Saturday Movie Group has seen “Glengarry Glen Ross” and I thought it was pretty good. Other credits include “At Close Range” and “After Dark, My Sweet”.

“Rescue: HI-Surf”, the lifeguard series on one of the broadcast networks. I never saw an episode, just promos. But it looked a lot like a version of “Baywatch” that took itself way too seriously.

Also among the dead: “Lopez vs. Lopez” and “Night Court”. I greatly admire John Larroquette. But I also greatly admired Harry Anderson, and I just couldn’t see watching a “Night Court” without him.

“The Real Housewives New York City”. Between Pope Leo XIV and this being cancelled, I think it’s been a good week.

Posted in Law, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: May 7, 2025.

Wednesday, May 7th, 2025

Dr. Philip Sunshine, one of the pioneers of neonatology and a big damn hero.

Before Dr. Sunshine and a handful of other physicians became interested in caring for preemies in the late 1950s and early ’60s, more than half of these unimaginably fragile patients died shortly after birth. Insurance companies wouldn’t pay to treat them.
Dr. Sunshine, a pediatric gastroenterologist, thought that many premature babies could be saved. At Stanford, he pushed for teams of doctors from multiple disciplines to treat them in special intensive care units. Along with his colleagues, he pioneered methods of feeding preemies with formula and aiding their breathing with ventilators.
“We were able to keep babies alive that would not have survived,” Dr. Sunshine said in 2000 in an oral history interview with the Pediatric History Center of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “And now everybody just sort of takes this for granted.”

…

As chief of Stanford’s neonatology department from 1967 to 1989, Dr. Sunshine helped train hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of doctors who went on to work in neonatal intensive care units around the world. When he retired in 2022, at age 92, the survival rate for babies born at 28 weeks was over 90 percent.
“Phil is one of the ‘originals’ in neonatology, a neonatologist’s neonatologist, one of our history’s best,” David K. Stevenson, Dr. Sunshine’s successor as head of Stanford’s neonatal department, wrote in the Journal of Perinatology in 2011. “He stands comfortably among the great leaders in neonatology and is more than simply a pioneer. He is one of the creators of our discipline.”
Dr. Sunshine recognized that caring for preemies required both technical expertise and human connection. He urged hospitals to allow parents to visit neonatal intensive care units so they could hold their children, sensing that skin-to-skin contact between mothers and babies was beneficial.
He also gave nurses more autonomy and encouraged them to speak up when they thought doctors were wrong.
“Our nurses have always been very important caretakers,” Dr. Sunshine said in the oral history. “All through my career, I’ve worked with a nursing staff that often would recognize problems in the baby before the physicians would, and they still do that now. Well, we were learning neonatology together.”

Crew resource management: it isn’t just for airplanes.

For the historical record: NYT obits for Lulu Roman (previously):

“The next thing you know, I’m on a plane to Hollywood and riding a limo to the CBS studios,” Ms. Roman said in 2006. “The first person I saw was Carol Burnett, with my mouth wide open. She said, ‘Shut your mouth, child. You’re fixin’ to be one of us.’”

and Cora Sue Collins (previously).

As Miss Collins aged, her roles dwindled. Before her 17th birthday, she said, she was a victim of harassment when Harry Ruskin, a screenwriter at MGM whom she viewed as a father figure, offered her a big role if she would sleep with him. She turned him down, started to cry and left his office.

…

She reported Mr. Ruskin’s behavior to Louis B. Mayer, the powerful chief of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, where she was a contract player at the time. But, as she recalled, he said, “You’ll get used to it, sweetie.” Soon after, he threatened to keep her from ever working in movies again.
“Mr. Mayer, that’s my heartfelt desire,” she said she told him, adding, “It was the best decision of my life.”

Posted in Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 5, 2025.

Monday, May 5th, 2025

Charley Scalies, actor. Other credits include “12 Monkeys” (the movie), “Homicide: Life on the Street”, and “Law and Order” (also “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit”).

This one is for friend of the blog Dave: Will Hutchins, actor. He was a guest on some Westerns in the 1960s and even had his own show, which I’d never heard of, “Sugarfoot”. Other credits include “Perry Mason”, “The New Perry Mason”, “The Horror at 37,000 Feet”, “The Streets of San Francisco”, and “The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington”.

Posted in Obits, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: May 2, 2025.

Friday, May 2nd, 2025

Ruth Buzzi. NYT (archived).

Other credits include “Night Gallery”, “Emergency”, “Medical Center” (“Ruth Buzzi and Don RIckles portray two comically depressive characters who fall in love at Medical Center.”), and, of course…

I missed this, but: Ted Kotcheff passed away on April 10th. NYT (archived).

He refused to direct the first, “Rambo: First Blood Part II” (1985), because of the violence that the character unleashes.
“I read the script, and I said, ‘In the first film he doesn’t kill anybody,’” he told Filmmaker magazine in 2016. “In this film he kills 74 people.’”

Other credits include “Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?”, “Fun with Dick and Jane” (the 1977 one), and “North Dallas Forty”.

Odile de Vasselot passed away on April 21st. She was 103.

Ms. de Vasselot (pronounced de-VASS-euh-low) was one of thousands of young Frenchwomen and men who quietly went to war against the Germans invaders after the country’s defeat in 1940 during the Battle of France. She began modestly, chalking the Lorraine Cross, adopted by General de Gaulle as a symbol of the Resistance, on walls and tearing down the propaganda posters of the Germans and their French Vichy-regime confederates. By the war’s end, she was going on dangerous nocturnal missions.

…

Her chance came, she said, when a friend put her in touch with a member of a Resistance group known as the Zero network, in June 1943. (Other accounts offer a different chronology.) She was asked to deliver Resistance mail and newspapers to network members in Toulouse, taking the night train on Friday and returning the next day.

…

By the end of the year, arrests had made it dangerous to work with the Zero network. Ms. de Vasselot joined another group, known as the Comet network, and for two months, until early 1944, walked through mud and swamps at the Belgian front, meeting up with Allied airmen and parachutists, giving them money and forged papers, and accompanying them to France, where they could make their way to neutral Spain.

…

She rejoined the Zero network that summer, as the allies were creeping their way toward Paris, and was sent on new missions throughout France.

Bobby Torre, maître d’ at J.G. Melon. This is one of those “questionable notability” ones – a NYC bar guy? – but it is also the kind of obit the paper of record does well, and is kind of fun.

When he was on the job at Melon’s, leaning by the entry on a bar stool a little too tall for him, glasses pushed up on his head and a pencil behind his ear, Mr. Torre would chat you up while you waited for a table and your burger with cottage fries.
Something would remind him of a saloon regular nicknamed Ronda Lasagna. That produced tales of a place he called “the Yankee Stadium of belly dancers.” From there, his mind would travel to a gay bar known as “the Wrinkle Room,” where “every guy with a trick said it was their nephew,” as he recalled. (Mr. Torre had run a mob-connected gay bar himself at one point.)

…

In his heyday there, he could charm rowdy patrons into a bear hug. But he was also capable of pinning a purse snatcher against the bathroom door until officers from the 19th Precinct arrived.
His fervor extended to his Roman Catholic faith. Mr. O’Neill sometimes had to ask Mr. Torre to stop blessing everyone at the bar. But without his religiosity, it is hard to imagine Mr. Torre performing his acts of kindness so cherished by customers.
He covered checks. He made hundreds of annual birthday calls. Melon’s is near several hospitals, and he would spend hours sitting with the ill, relatives of the ill and new mourners. That patient sympathy, offered alongside free cheeseburgers and fries, became part of stories told and retold by families who visited Melon’s during a crisis.

…

Mr. Torre also claimed to be an expert in martial arts. Michael Burrell, a former Melon’s bartender, recalled ribbing him: “Yeah, Bob, you’re a black belt.”
In fact, Mr. Valenti confirmed, his uncle studied not only jiu-jitsu, but also judo, Wing Chun kung fu and hapkido.

Posted in 1970s, Heroism, History, Movies, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: May 1, 2025.

Thursday, May 1st, 2025

Julia Parsons passed away on April 18th at the age of 104.

A lover of puzzles and crosswords while growing up in Pittsburgh during the Great Depression, Mrs. Parsons deciphered German military messages that had been created by an Enigma machine, a typewriter-size device with a keyboard wired to internal rotors, which generated millions of codes. Her efforts provided Allied forces with information critical to evading, attacking and sinking enemy submarines.

…

The unraveling of the Enigma puzzle began in the late 1930s, when Polish mathematicians, using intelligence gathered by French authorities, reverse-engineered the device and began developing the Bombe, a computer-like code-breaking machine. The Poles shared the information with British authorities.

…

At the U.S. Naval Communications Annex in Washington, Mrs. Parsons and hundreds of other women used the Bombe to decipher German military radio transmissions, revealing information that was instrumental in shortening and winning the war, historians have said.
“We tried to figure out what the message was saying, then we drew up what we called a menu showing what we thought the letters were,” she told The Washington Post in 2022. “That was fed into the computer, which then spat out all possible wheel orders for the day. Those changed every day and the settings changed twice a day, so we were constantly working on them.”

…

More than 100,000 women joined the WAVES during the war. In 1943, she left Pittsburgh for officer training at Smith College, in Massachusetts, where she took courses on cryptology, physics and naval history. After her training, she was sent to the Naval Communications Annex, in Washington.
One day, an officer there asked if anyone could speak German. She had taken two years of the language in high school, so she raised her hand.
“They shot me off to the Enigma section immediately, and I began learning how to de­code German U­-boat message traffic on the job, Day 1,” Mrs. Parsons said in an interview with the Veterans Breakfast Club, a nonprofit organization. “Enemy messages arrived all day from all over the North Atlantic, plus the North Sea and the Bay of Biscay.”

…

In 1997, Mrs. Parsons visited the National Cryptologic Museum near Washington, just another tourist interested in American history.
“The exhibits there astounded me,” she said in the Veterans Breakfast Club interview. “Here was every sort of Enigma machine — early models, late models — on display for all to see, with detailed explanations of how they worked.”
She asked a tour guide why the machines were on display. The guide replied that the Enigma work had been declassified in the 1970s. Mrs. Parsons hadn’t known. She spent rest of her life visiting classrooms and giving interviews, eager to tell her story.“It’s been good to break the silence,” she said. “Good for me, and for history.”

Posted in Cryptography, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 30, 2025.

Wednesday, April 30th, 2025

David Horowitz, noted conservative commentator. Twitter X. NYT. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Priscilla Pointer, actress. Other credits include “Blue Velvet”, “C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud”, “Quincy, M.E.”, “McCloud”, and “Mrs. Columbo”.

Andrew Gross, thriller writer. He may have been best known for the books he wrote with James Patterson.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Movies, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 29, 2025.

Tuesday, April 29th, 2025

The paper of record ran a nice obit for Peter Lovesey. (Previously.)

Except for the grumpy part, Mr. Lovesey’s son said, Superintendent Diamond was a stand-in for his creator, who was bitterly opposed to technology. Mr. Lovesey wrote in longhand for decades before briefly and reluctantly switching to an electric “golf ball” Olivetti typewriter and then, finally, a word processor, which threw him entirely. During the pandemic, his son said, he mistakenly downloaded Zoom 25 times.

Cora Sue Collins, actress. She was 98.

Collins was born on April 19, 1927, in Beckley, West Virginia. Her mom brought her and her older sister to Los Angeles just before Collins turned 4.
“On the third day we were here, I went with my mother to enroll my older sister in school,” she told Danny Miller in a wonderful 2015 interview. “We were walking up to the entrance of the school, my sister and I each holding one of my mother’s hands, when this huge car came screeching up.
“A woman jumped out of the car and said, ‘Excuse me, would you like to put your little girl in pictures?’ Of course my mother said, ‘Yes!’ The woman said, ‘Get in the car with me, there’s a big casting going on right now at Universal.’”
They made it on their own to the studio, where Collins was quickly tapped to play Pudge in the 1932 comedy The Unexpected Father, starring ZaSu Pitts and Slim Summerville. “Wait till you see Cora Sue,” wrote one reviewer of her performance. “Just four, she walks away with everything.”

…

…Collins portrayed Sylvia Sidney’s daughter in Jennie Gerhardt and was the main attraction at the premiere of Queen Christina at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where she was accompanied by MGM chief Louis B. Mayer after arriving in a miniature coach pulled by Shetland ponies. (Garbo refused to do any publicity for her films.)
Collins signed a contract with MGM in 1934 for $250 a week — about $5,900 in today’s dollars — and appeared in 10 features that year, including Black Moon with Fay Wray, The Scarlet Letter with Colleen Moore, The World Accuses with Dickie Moore and Treasure Island with Jackie Cooper.

…

She played the juvenile delinquent daughter of a court judge in Youth on Trial (1945) and appeared in Week-End at the Waldorf (1945), then retired from acting at age 18. “I wanted to enjoy the luxury of anonymity,” she said.

IMDB.

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

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