Barbara Rush, actor who co-starred with Frank Sinatra and Paul Newman amongst others, dies at 97
LOS ANGELES — Barbara Rush, a preferred main actor within the 1950 and 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 demise 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 out there.
Cowan praised her mom as “among the many final of ”Outdated Hollywood Royalty” and known as herself her mom’s “greatest fan.”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 yr with a small function in “The Goldbergs,” primarily based on the radio and TV sequence of the identical identify.
She would depart Paramount quickly after, nonetheless, going to work for Common Worldwide and later twentieth Century Fox.
“Paramount wasn’t geared for growing new expertise,” she recalled in 1954. “Each time function got here alongside, they tried to borrow Elizabeth Taylor.”
Rush went on to seem 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 House,” for which she obtained 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 totally making the transition as she approached center age.
“There was this horrible Sahara Desert between 40 and 60 while you went from ingenue to outdated woman,” she remarked in 1962. “You both did not work otherwise you pretended you have been 20.”
As a substitute, Rush took on roles in such sequence as “Peyton Place,” “All My Youngsters,” “The New Dick Van Dyke Present” and “seventh Heaven.”
“I am a kind 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 troublesome for me to be taught timing at first, particularly the enterprise of ready for fun,” she remarked in 1970. However she discovered, and the present lasted a yr in Chicago and months extra on the street.
She went on to seem in such excursions as “Similar Time, Subsequent 12 months,” “Father’s Day,” “Metal Magnolias” and her solo present, “A Lady 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 faculty play and fell in love with performing.
She pursued drama on the College of California, Berkeley, then gained a scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse Theater Arts Faculty.
Rush was married and divorced thrice — to display star Jeffrey Hunter, Hollywood publicity govt 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.
