LOS ANGELES (AP) — Barbara Rush, a well-liked main actor within the 1950 and Nineteen Sixties who co-starred with Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman and different prime movie performers and later had a thriving TV profession, has died. She was 97.
Rush’s dying was introduced by her daughter, Fox Information reporter Claudia Cowan, who posted on Instagram that her mom died on Easter Sunday. Further particulars weren’t instantly obtainable.
Cowan praised her mom as “among the many final of “Previous Hollywood Royalty” and referred to as herself her mom’s “greatest fan.”
Noticed in a play on the Pasadena Playhouse, Rush was given a contract at Paramount Studios in 1950 and made her movie debut that very same 12 months with a small position in “The Goldbergs,” based mostly on the radio and TV collection of the identical title.
She would go away Paramount quickly after, nevertheless, going to work for Common Worldwide and later twentieth Century Fox.
“Paramount wasn’t geared for creating new expertise,” she recalled in 1954. “Each time a superb position got here alongside, they tried to borrow Elizabeth Taylor.”
Rush went on to look in a variety of movies. She starred reverse Rock Hudson in “Captain Lightfoot” and in Douglas Sirk’s acclaimed remake of “Magnificent Obsession,” Audie Murphy in “World in My Nook” and Richard Carlson within the 3-D science-fiction traditional “It Got here From Outer Area,” for which she acquired a Golden Globe for many promising newcomer.
Different movie credit included the Nicholas Ray traditional “Larger Than Life”; “The Younger Lions,” with Marlon Brando, Dean Martin and Montgomery Clift and “The Younger Philadelphians” with Newman. She made two movies with Sinatra, “Come Blow Your Horn” and the Rat Pack spoof “Robin and the Seven Hoods,” which additionally featured Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.
Rush, who had made TV visitor appearances for years, recalled absolutely making the transition as she approached center age.
“There was this horrible Sahara Desert between 40 and 60 while you went from ingenue to previous woman,” she remarked in 1962. “You both didn’t work otherwise you pretended you have been 20.”
As a substitute, Rush took on roles in such collection as “Peyton Place,” “All My Kids,” “The New Dick Van Dyke Present” and “seventh Heaven.”
“I’m a type of sorts of people that will carry out the minute you open the fridge door and the sunshine goes on,” she cracked in a 1997 interview.
Her first play was the street firm model of “Forty Carats,” a comedy that had been a success in New York. The director, Abe Burrows, helped her with comedic performing.
“It was very, very tough for me to be taught timing at first, particularly the enterprise of ready for fun,” she remarked in 1970. However she realized, and the present lasted a 12 months in Chicago and months extra on the street.
She went on to look in such excursions as “Similar Time, Subsequent 12 months,” “Father’s Day,” “Metal Magnolias” and her solo present, “A Girl of Unbiased Means.”
Born in Denver, Rush spent her first 10 years on the transfer whereas her father, a mining firm lawyer, was assigned from city to city. The household lastly settled in Santa Barbara, California, the place younger Barbara performed a legendary dryad in a college play and fell in love with performing.
Rush was married and divorced 3 times — to display star Jeffrey Hunter, Hollywood publicity government Warren Cowan and sculptor James Gruzalski.
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Bob Thomas, a longtime Related Press journalist who died in 2014, was the principal author of this obituary. AP Nationwide Author Hillel Italie contributed to this report from New York.
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