People You Thought Would Be Stars But Weren't

[Lzcutter]

I always thought David Strathairn would have been a bigger star. He and Chris Cooper started out together in Matewan and both were terrific. It was only as he got older that Cooper became a bigger name.

Strathairn and Holly Hunter in The Firm, I would have paid good money to see that film. Instead it was about Tom Cruise and a bunch of action.

I really like him (and everyone else) as the sleazy Pierce Patchett in LA Confidential

I'm glad he has become a respected character actor but he should have had a bigger career.

[moira finnie]

John Hodiak.

He had a wolfish grin, troubled blue eyes, a beautiful speaking voice, and something more--a certain unspoken sadness that should have made him king of the more perceptive bobby-soxers. Plus he landed in that tub of butter known as MGM Studios, so he had access to the best publicity department this side of the Pentagon, if not the best scripts. His best work turned out to be his films away from MGM. Lifeboat for Hitchcock at Fox, in a Steinbeck script that celebrated his working class roots without ignoring the edginess learned in the streets was really his best script, but his big chances included A Bell for Adano about the impact of a decent American officer on an Italian village (and vice versa), courtesy of John Hershey. Good movie, but William Bendix and Harry Morgan had a lock on the service comedy shtick, and audiences may have found themselves distracted by a startling blonde, Gene Tierney.

Then there was director Joe Mankiewicz's parody of film noir disguised as an amnesiac mystery in Somewhere in the Night, which is atmospheric, silly and entertaining, but no one let John in on the joke. On the set, the ingenue Nancy Guild once remembered making fun of someone's accent, when the usually soft-spoken Hodiak rounded on her and told the privileged college girl she didn't know what she was talking about. It was years before it dawned on Guild that the touchiness came out of his own life. Hodiak, the Pittsburgh-born son of Ukrainian and Polish parents, had grown up in Hamtramck, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. From his early teens on, he had trained himself to speak without any trace of the accent of his roots and to polish his demeanor and talent to such a high gloss, he could pass through the doors of Hollywood one day toward possible success.

Follow that with the talky The Arnelo Affair, The Bribe, a potboiler with style--though the style market was cornered in that movie by Ava, Laughton and cinematographer Joe Ruttenberg. Throw in Desert Fury in which Hodiak, Wendell Corey and Burt Lancaster were involved in a colorful psycho-sexual tug of war with Lizabeth Scott and Mary Astor--and you have one more role when hardly anyone noticed quiet John in that fast company.

I really like John Hodiak, and I think he might have enjoyed a long career as a decent second tier leading man or maybe a character actor eventually, but having high blood pressure at a time when there were almost no Rx for it, going through a divorce with a woman whose career outstripped your own (Anne Baxter), and losing your contract at MGM and moving back in with your parents probably didn't help the man's outlook on life. One morning in 1955, the poor guy woke up, started shaving and keeled over at a mere 41. Jeez! Forty-one is when you just start to get a clue about this "being an adult" bit. Wish he could've made it, but he sure had a great chance at the brass ring.

Btw, people who saw him on Broadway in The Caine Mutiny Court Martial in 53-54 thought he was much better on stage than he ever was in the movies.

Above: Hodiak with the actor he practically worshipped, Clark Gable. John H. even grew one of those mingy mustaches in imitation of Gable at the studio's request. Big mistake. Hodiak's naked, worried face was fine clean-shaven, but fussy with the duster.

[Vecchiolarry]

Hi,

Jody Lawrance was the person who got me intersted in movies finally, when I saw her in "Ten Tall Men" with Burt Lancaster.... I fell in love with her.
She also was in "The Brigand" with Anthony Dexter, but really faded away after that.....

I agree with Lynn about David Streathern. He should have been a bigger name in movies.
I think he stood out in "Dolores Claiborn" as the vile husband of Kathy Bates...

Larry

[mongoII]

It seems like we had this subject once before when I chose Alan Curtis, and who I will choose again.

A good start in the 1930s, then fizzled into B pictures.


Zohra Lampert
Solemn, ethnic-looking Zohra Lampert had a touching, understated quality to her talent that should have gone further in the film business than it did.
Terrific in "Pay or Die" and "Splendor in the Grass".

[Lzcutter]

Joe,

She was terrific on a couple of memorable episodes of Kojak with Telly Savalas. I still remember her in the gypsy episode.

[moira finnie]

I love Zohra Lampert's voice. She makes the most prosaic dialogue interesting and fresh. I agree with Lynn about David Strathairn who might have been a bigger star if he weren't such a good actor capable of making normally unsympathetic characters so appealing in a movie such as Blue Car (2002). This sort of role wasn't going to win him a big build up. I also love Chris Cooper but I do think he was always a character actor first.

[Lzcutter]

King,
Jane Badler was just on the new version of V the other night. She plays the new baddie's mother, so she is sort of reprising her original role!

She looks great. Still has big hair.

Moira and Larry,

I fell in love with David S (and Chris Cooper) when I saw them in Matewan. Cooper had that drawl and Strathairn had that deep voice. They both went the character actor route though David S did have a brief period as a leading man. Passion Fish comes to mind.

I was very surprised when Chris Cooper finally made the big leagues after so long in the trenches. He was great as July in Lonesome Dove and speaking of Matewan, in that film he played the union organizer in the mines of West Virginia in the 1930s and in October Sky he played a coal miner resisting union organizers in the late 1950s.

But, David S will always have a special place in my heart for that incredible smile and look he gives Holly Hunter at the end of The Firm.

Because of that, there's a small handful of films that I watch where a secondary storyline is much, much more interesting to me than the main storyline and I find myself saying, "I'd have paid good money for that movie."

Steel Magnolias is like that for me also. I wanted to see the story between Sam Shepard and Dolly Parton much more than the story the movie was about. Guess I'm weird that way.

[JackFavell]

I've got to agree with every one of the people on you guys' lists. Love both David Strathairn and Chris Cooper, two of the finest actors we have right now, and John Hodiak really should have been a star - he is magnetic. I don't know Jane Badler.


I don't know how much of a star John Clements was in England, but the man gives particularly fine and memorable performances in every movie I've seen him in, and he was good looking to boot. Yet, I don't think Americans ever caught on to him. His one lead role was in Four Feathers, and he is great, as you know.


from Four Feathers

He shows up in movies like Rembrandt, Knight Without Armour, South Riding, and Things to Come, always outstanding, he seems to be on the brink of stardom. However, he never made much of a mark in movies, and I think it might have been his choice - he was too busy doing stage work to care. He appeared in hundreds of plays, founding his own theatre in 1938, and also belonged to the stellar group of actors at The Old Vic during it's heyday, when Olivier, Richardson and Burrell took it to heights that we will likely never see again. His film career was long but his promise as a film actor was never really fulfilled. More's the pity for us that he chose the stage.


from Chetniks, aka Undercover

from This England

from Chetniks

[stuart.uk]

Jimmy Hanley was the hero of The Blue Lamp, but nothing much after that, while co-stars Dirk Bogarde and Jack Warner went onto better things

Harry Carey Jnr, whose bighest role was probably The Wagon Master, but by the 60s he did only small character roles

I wonder if John Ford treated Anna Lee badly. After a great performance in How Green Was My Valley, he started just giving her bit parts, yet he gave her Mrs. Collingwood in Fort Apache, other stalwart effort. Bit parts again, but Ford needing a Brit actress cast her as a police Detective's wife in Gideon's Day with Jack Hawkins. I think Anna at one point wished she stayed in the UK where she had already made First A Girl with Jessie Matthews and King Solomen's Mines

[ken123]

I have the impression that MsLee loved being in Ford films, no matter what the size of the role was to be.

[moira finnie]

A few people who have occurred to me recently who might fit this category:

Phyllis Kirk (1927-2006): cute, elegant and funny, she was quite a bright and sometimes very appealing actress in some really lousy movies and a few good ones, such as House of Wax (1953) and Crime Wave (1954), but she seemed ideal as the small screen version of Nora Charles opposite Peter Lawford in the '50s (these The Thin Man shows are around on DVD and are fun to see).

A childhood bout with polio and an interest in real life concerns such as social, economic and criminal justice, (Kirk was involved in protesting the execution of Caryl Chessman), overwhelmed her acting career eventually. She appears to have been one of those actors who might have been more interesting off-screen. She seemed to be far more intelligent than the characters she was usually asked to play on screen.

David Farrar (1908-1995): an actor described breathlessly as "manly, mysterious, brooding and sexy as all get out," in the American press, the British leading man had charisma to spare in Black Narcissus (1947) as Mr. Dean, the disdainful reprobate who disturbed the serenity of the nuns in that Powell and Pressburger film, even though he'd already been in films for ten years. He went on to appear in three more films with the P & P imprimatur, Hour of Glory (aka The Small Back Room) (1949), Gone to Earth (1950) and The Pursuit of the Graf Spree (1956) as well as some American movies such as The Black Shield of Falworth (1954) and The Sea Chase (1955), though his last movie, The 300 Spartans (1962), in which he played Xerxes, was one of the better ones of his international period. Regarding his retirement from films, the actor explained that "I was tired of the hassles and battles, and conceit might have come into it - I'd always been the upstanding young leading man and I was afraid of parts being hinted at for uncles or the girl's father instead of the lover! I just felt 'the Hell with it all', and walked out into the sunset."

According to Michael Powell's autobiography, the actor's talent was enormous, though it was mitigated by his capacity for drink. Farrar's brilliance playing a bomb expert coping with his alcoholism, along with his tense personal and professional life in wartime Britain in The Small Back Room deserves to be re-discovered by audiences. Years after his moviemaking days were done, he told an inquiring reporter that he found film work "[t]ough, frustrating, but with many wonderful moments and memories. I found being a star a lonely business. I have no friends. Ain't that sad?"

[JackFavell]

David Farrar is awesome! Beautiful write up.

[pvitari]

Speaking of Marc Singer, he's also going to be on V. It's old home week on that show. :) Which I'm enjoying a lot, actually. :)

[mongoII]

Moira, I too thought that Phyllis Kirk would go further in her career. With those high cheek bones and pug nose she was appealing in a variety of her films.
One wonders why she would care about a criminal who tortured and raped women.