Barbara Rush, the stylish but largely unheralded main girl who sparkled within the Nineteen Fifties melodramas Magnificent Obsession, Larger Than Life and The Younger Philadelphians, has died. She was 97.
Rush, a daily on the fifth and closing season of ABC’s Peyton Place and a favourite of sci-fi followers because of her work in When Worlds Collide (1951) and It Got here From Outer Area (1953), died Sunday, her daughter, Fox Information senior correspondent Claudia Cowan, confirmed to Fox Information Digital.
“My great mom handed away peacefully at 5:28 this night. I used to be together with her this morning and know she was ready for me to return house safely to transition,” Cowan mentioned. “It’s becoming she selected to go away on Easter because it was one in every of her favourite holidays and now, in fact, Easter could have a deeper significance for me and my household.”
A starlet at Paramount, Common and Fox whose profession blossomed on the finish of the Hollywood studio system, Rush additionally performed reverse Frank Sinatra in Come Blow Your Horn (1963) and Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964), the final of the Rat Pack films. Filming on the latter was stopped twice, as soon as when President Kennedy was assassinated and once more when Sinatra’s son was kidnapped.
In Douglas Sirk’s 1954 remake of Magnificent Obsession, Rush portrayed the lovable sister of Oscar nominee Jane Wyman, whose character is blinded in an accident attributable to a reckless playboy (Rock Hudson).
Rush, Hudson and Sirk had warmed to the duty by collaborating on the tongue-in-cheek movie Taza, Son of Cochise (1954), through which the actors performed Native People, and the three would work collectively once more within the Eire-set love story Captain Lightfoot (1955).
Rush portrayed the harried spouse of James Mason, whose life unravels when he turns into hooked on cortisone, in Nicholas Ray’s controversial Larger Than Life (1956), and he or she exceled as a disenchanted socialite pushed away by would-be lawyer Paul Newman in The Younger Philadelphians (1959).
Rush additionally was seen because the despairing spouse whose husband (Kirk Douglas) is having an affair (with neighbor Kim Novak) in Strangers When We Meet (1960), and he or she romanced Dean Martin and Richard Burton, respectively, in The Younger Lions (1958) and The Bramble Bush (1960).
Rush by no means obtained an Oscar or Emmy nomination; she was given a Golden Globe in 1954 as most promising feminine newcomer for her efficiency in It Got here From Outer Area, the place she performed the fiancee of an astronomer (Richard Carlson) in addition to her seductive alien duplicate.
However who wants trophies? She was acknowledged within the 1975 movie Shampoo when Warren Beatty’s Beverly Hills hairstylist and girls man requested for references when making use of for a enterprise mortgage, bragged, “Properly, I do Barbara Rush.”
The high-society Hollywood determine was married to actor Jeffrey Hunter (The Searchers) and legendary showbiz publicist Warren Cowan.
Barbara Rush was born in Denver on Jan. 4, 1927. The household moved to Santa Barbara, and he or she and her dad labored as ushers on the Lobero Theatre. After commencement from UC Santa Barbara, she gained a scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse and was seen by a expertise scout.
Paramount Photos signed her to a contract in 1950, and he or she married Hunter in December of that yr in Boulder Metropolis, Nevada. They turned one in every of Hollywood’s most glamorous {couples} till their acrimonious divorce in 1955.
Rush made her film debut in 1950 in The Goldbergs, primarily based on the favored radio sequence, after which appeared within the 1951 releases Quebec with John Drew Barrymore and in Sirk’s The First Legion reverse Charles Boyer.
Her first starring position for Paramount got here within the interplanetary fantasy When Worlds Collide, through which she performed an astronomer’s daughter in love with a pilot. She moved on to the low-budget horror studio Common Worldwide Photos, which promptly forged her in It Got here From Outer Area, filmed in 3D.
Rush went on to star in Oh, Males! Oh, Ladies! (1957), a uncommon comedy for her, through which she performed the spouse of a psychiatrist (David Niven); in No Down Cost (1957), with Joanne Woodward and Hunter, by then her ex-husband; in Harry Black and the Tiger (1958), reverse Stewart Granger; and in Hombre (1967), again once more with Newman.
Within the Village Individuals disco musical Can’t Cease the Music (1980), directed by Nancy Walker of Rhoda fame, Rush performed the mom of Bruce Jenner’s character.
On Peyton Place, Rush starred as Marsha Russell, who falls in love with Ed Nelson’s character because the sequence concludes. 1 / 4-century later, she was in one other primetime cleaning soap, NBC’s Flamingo Street, enjoying the wealthy Eudora Weldon, whose adoptive daughter (Morgan Fairchild) was a brat.
Rush additionally appeared because the villainess Nora Clavicle, a ladies’s rights activist bent on evil, on the third season of Batman and recurred as Grandma Ruth Camden (Stephen Collins’ mom) on seventh Heaven.
When alternative film tasks eluded her, Rush targeted on theater. She gained a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for her work within the one-woman present A Girl of Unbiased Means. She performed a personality at numerous levels of life from age 7 to her 70s and took the play from Van Nuys to Broadway and dozens of cities in between.
She additionally toured in such productions as 40 Carats, Non-public Lives (with Louis Jourdan), Twigs, Butterflies Are Free, The Unsinkable Molly Brown and I Discovered April.
After her break up with Hunter, Rush was married to PR kingpin Cowan from 1959 to 1968 (their marriage ceremony ceremony befell on the Beverly Hills house of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh) and to sculptor James Gruzalski from 1970 to 1973.
Survivors additionally embrace her son, Christopher Hunter.