RIP Johnny Crawford

Johnny Crawford, Young Star of 'The Rifleman,' Dies at 75

The Hollywood Reporter

By Mike Barnes

April 29, 2021

 

He also appeared on the first season of 'The Mickey Mouse Club' and had hit songs on the Billboard Hot 100.

Johnny Crawford, the original Mouseketeer who starred as the young son of the Civil War veteran portrayed by Chuck Connors on the 1958-63 ABC series The Rifleman, died Thursday, it was announced. He was 75.

In 2019, it was revealed that Crawford had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and a GoFundMe campaign organized by Paul Petersen — the advocate for former child actors and onetime star of The Donna Reed Show — was set up to help the family deal with expenses.

Crawford was 12 when he appeared for the first time as Mark McCain, son of the widower Lucas McCain, on The Rifleman. The Four Star Television series, set in the New Mexico Territory with storylines crafted by Sam Peckinpah, ran for five seasons, from September 30, 1958, to April 8, 1963, and then for decades in syndication and reruns.

In a 2018 interview, Crawford noted that the strength of the program was its father-an-son dynamic.

"That, and the fact that there was always a lesson at the end of every episode. Really, it's such a wholesome show — a healthy show," he said. "And Chuck was so perfect. You know, I still miss him [he died in 1992]. He was unique — I'll never meet anybody else like him again. He tried to be a good influence for me, even off-camera. And he treated me like an adult when we were working. He made it much easier than it might have been. He was a lot of fun."

In 1959, when Crawford was nominated for an Emmy for best supporting actor (continuing character) in a dramatic series, his older brother, Robert Crawford Jr., was nominated for best single performance by an actor (for Playhouse 90) and their father, Robert Crawford, was nominated for film editing (for The Bob Cummings Show).

Born in Los Angeles on March 26, 1946, John Ernest Crawford did a tap-dancing routine, showed producers he could fence — his dad was a state champion — and imitated singer Johnnie Ray during his audition for ABC's The Mickey Mouse Club.

That got him a job as one of the 24 original Mouseketeers for the first season (1955-56) of the show. However, when the number of kids was reduced by half for season two, his option was not picked up.

"I was a has-been at nine," he said in 1982. "I told my agent that I would have worked at Disney for nothing. That's when she told me that I was working for them for nothing.

"[But] being able to go in and say that I had just finished working for a year as a Mouseketeer was to my benefit, because they weren't many nine-year-olds who had experience in film. It gave me a certain confidence that I hadn't had before, and I started getting a few small parts."

He had appeared in an uncredited role in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), starring Gregory Peck, then worked on such TV programs as The Lone Ranger, Climax!, Matinee Theatre and The Loretta Young Show before starring in Courage of Black Beauty (1957).

After The Rifleman was canceled, Crawford and Connors worked together again on a 1965 episode of NBC's Branded, and he appeared opposite John Wayne in El Dorado (1967) and on TV shows including Hawaii Five-O, Little House on the Prairie and Murder, She Wrote.

Starting in the late 1950s, Crawford had a recording contract with Del-Fi Records and managed hits including “Cindy’s Birthday,” which reached No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1962, "Rumors," "Your Nose Is Gonna Grow" and "Proud."

In the 1990s, he led the Johnny Crawford Orchestra.

Survivors include his wife, high-school sweetheart Charlotte Samco, whom he married in 1995, and his brother.

CRAWFORD, Johnny (John Ernest Crawford)

Born: 3/26/1946, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A

Died: 4/29/2021, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.

 

Johnny Crawford’s westerns – actor, producer, self:

The Lone Ranger (TV) – 1956 (Tommy McQueen)

Have Gun – Will Travel (TV) – 1957 (Robbie)

The Sheriff of Cochise (TV) – 1957 (Manuel Bernel)

Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok (TV) – 1958 (Johnny)

The Restless Gun (TV) – 1958 (Ned Timberlake)

Tales of Wells Fargo (TV) – 1958 (Tommy Peel)

Trackdown (TV) – 1958 (Eric Paine)

Wagon Train (TV) – 1958 (Jimmy Bennett)

Zane Grey Theater (TV) – 1958 (Billy Prescott)

Indian Paint – 1965 (Nishko)

Branded (TV) – 1965 (Deputy Sheriff Clay Holden)

Rawhide (TV) – 1965 (Aaron Bolt)

El Dorado – 1966 (Luke McDonald)

Lancer (TV) – 1968 (Jeff Dane)

The Big Valley (TV) – 1969 (Deputy Sheriff Billy Norris)

The Making of ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ – 1970 [producer]

The Resurrection of Broncho Billy – 1970 (Broncho Billy)

Cade’s County (TV) – 1971 (Billy Don Bucknell)

Little House on the Prairie (TV) – 1976 (Ben Shelby)

The Shootist – 1976 (victim)

When the West Was Fun: A Western Reunion (TV) – 1979 [himself]

Kenny Rogers as the Gambler: The Adventure Continues (TV) – 1983 (Masket)

The American Cowboy (TV) - 1985

Paradise (TV) – 1989, 1990 (Doug McKay)

The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw (TV) – 1991 (Mark McCain)

Tales of the Wild West (TV) – 2017 (William S. Hart)

The Marshal – 2012 (William S. Hart)

A Word on Westerns – 2019 [himself]

 

RIP Anne Douglas

 

Anne Douglas, Philanthropist and Widow of Kirk Douglas, Dies at 102

The Hollywood Reporter

By Mike Barnes

4/29/2021

She was a location scout for John Huston, a publicist at Cannes and president of her husband's production company.

Anne Douglas, a film publicist who first met Kirk Douglas on the Paris set of Act of Love in 1953 and married him a year later, died Thursday. She was 102.

Douglas died at the longtime Beverly Hills home she shared with the legendary actor and husband of 66 years, her family announced. He died at age 103 on Feb. 5, 2020.

She worked for director John Huston as a location scout and assistant on Moulin Rouge (1952), then began a three-year stint in 1953 as head of protocol at the Cannes Film Festival, scheduling parties and making sure they were filled with celebrities and media.

Kirk was divorced from actress Diana Dill and secretly engaged to Italian actress Pier Angeli and Anne was married to a Belgian, Albert Buydens, when they met. He offered her a job as her assistant, and she immediately turned him down.

"She finally agreed to work with me on a trial basis, making it clear our relationship would be strictly business," he wrote in Kirk and Anne: Letters of Love, Laughter, and a Lifetime in Hollywood, the 2017 book he co-authored with his wife.

"We talked for hours, and I had a strange feeling in my heart that I could fall in love with this man," she wrote. "I didn't want to, because I had seen too many young women enter into intense affairs with visiting movie stars — Dean Martin, Marlon Brando, Cary Grant among them. Then the film wrapped and the men returned to their wives and families."

Still, they began a complicated relationship on the Anatole Litvak-directed Act of Love that continued when Kirk relocated to Italy to shoot Ulysses (1954) — she was a publicist on that film, too — and then to the Bahamas, Jamaica and the U.S. making 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954).

Finally, during a rare moment when both were in Los Angeles, they spontaneously flew to Las Vegas and were married by a justice of the peace on May 29, 1954. Their sons, Peter and Eric, were born in 1955 and 1958, respectively. (Eric died in 2004 at age 46 of an accidental drug overdose.)

Hannelore Marx was born on April 23, 1919, in Hanover, Germany. Her father owned textile stores in the city and was the exclusive importer of a strain of silk that the government purchased to make parachutes. Her mother was a socialite.

After her parents divorced, she attended boarding school in Switzerland and became fluent in English, French and Italian.

She married Buydens, and they fled Belgium and moved to Paris during World War II. She got a job writing German subtitles for movies, then was hired in 1948 to produce a program for NBC called Paris Cavalcade of Fashion.

She later became president of Kirk's independent film outfit, the Bryna Co., and received producer credit on Peg Leg, Musket & Sabre (1973) and Posse (1975), two films directed by and starring her husband.

Kirk was married to Dill (the mother of two-time Oscar winner Michael Douglas and his brother, Joel) from 1942 until their divorce in 1951. He said their marriage began to fray as he was preparing for his star-making turn in Champion (1949).

The couple split amicably, and Kirk and Anne became good friends with Diana and her new husband, Broadway producer and novelist Bill Darrid.

In 1958, Anne refused to allow Kirk to travel on a private plane from Palm Springs to New York with director Michael Todd. "I don't know what came over me, but I had a strange feeling," she wrote in their book. "Absolutely not, Kirk. I don't want you on that plane. You can fly commercial and meet him there."

Kirk was furious and said that if he couldn't fly with Todd, well, he wouldn't go at all.

On the car ride back to Los Angeles the next day, they heard on the radio that Todd's plane had crashed in New Mexico and that he and the three others on board had been killed. They pulled off to the side of the road and embraced.

"Darling, you saved my life. I will always trust your intuition from now on," Kirk told her.

As Dorothy Chandler's "lieutenant" in the campaign to build the Los Angeles County Music Center, she convinced moguls and movie stars to double and triple their initial contributions to the cause. After it opened in 1964, she served on the boards of the Mark Taper Forum and the Center Theater Group for decades and arranged the Douglas Foundation's large gift to build the CTG's Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City.

In 2012, Anne and Kirk announced pledges totaling $50 million to five nonprofit organizations, including the Motion Picture & Television Fund, through their foundation. They donated another $15 million to the MPTF home in 2015. To date, their foundation has contributed more than $118 million to worthy causes.

Survivors include children Peter, Michael and Joel; daughters-in-law Catherine and Lisa; grandchildren Cameron, Dylan, Carys, Kelsey, Tyler, Jason and Ryan; great-grandchildren Lua Izzy and Ryder; and sister Merle.

"She brought out the best in all of us, especially our father," Michael Douglas said in a statement. "Dad would never have had the career he did without Anne's support and partnership. Catherine and I and the children adored her; she will always be in our hearts."

Donations in her memory may be made to the Anne Douglas Center at the Los Angeles Mission, 310 Winston St., Los Angeles, CA 90013.

 

DOUGLAS, Anne (Hannelore Marx)

Born: 4/23/1919, Hanover, Lower Saxony, Germany

Died: 4/29/2021, Beverly Hills, California, U.S.A.

 

Anne Douglas’ westerns – casting, producer:

Indian Fighter – 1955 [casting]

Scalawag – 1973 [producer]

Posse – 1975 [producer]

RIP Mae Wynn

 

May Wynn, Actress in 'The Caine Mutiny,' Dies at 93

The Hollywood Reporter

By Mike Barnes

4/29/2021

 

She played the love interest of Robert Francis' character in the Bogart classic and appeared in four films with Jack Kelly, her first husband.

May Wynn, the 1950s starlet who had a supporting role in the acclaimed Humphrey Bogart military legal thriller The Caine Mutiny, where she adopted her character's name for her stage name, has died. She was 93.

Wynn died March 22 in Newport Beach, California, Grace Wickersham, a spokesperson for Our Lady Queen of Angels church in Newport Beach, told The Hollywood Reporter. Wynn had served as a school aide at the church for 28 years beginning in 1989.

Wynn wed actor Jack Kelly in 1956 after they appeared together in They Rode West (1954) and The Violent Men (1955), and the couple co-starred in Taming Sutton's Gal (1957) and The Hong Kong Affair (1958) before divorcing in 1964.

She also played a secretary in a veterinary hospital headed by Paul Burke and Victor Rodman on the Jack Webb-produced 1956-57 NBC series Noah's Ark.

The daughter of a vaudevillian, Donna Lee Hickey was born on Jan. 8, 1928, in New York. She started work as a showgirl at the Copacabana nightclub when she was 17, then signed with 20th Century Fox and moved to Los Angeles.

She appeared in uncredited roles in such films as Dreamboat (1952), My Wife's Best Friend (1952) and The Girl Next Door (1953) before being billed under her birth name in The Farmer Takes a Wife (1953), starring Betty Grable and Dale Robertson.

Signed by Columbia Pictures, she tested for the part of social club employee Alma/Lorene in From Here to Eternity (1953) but lost out to Donna Reed, who would win the supporting actress Oscar for her performance.

For the Edward Dmytryk-directed The Caine Mutiny (1954), Hickey was hired the play the nightclub singer May Wynn, the love interest of Ensign Willie Keith (Robert Francis). The character appears in the 1951 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Herman Wouk on which the film is based.

"Stanley Kramer, the producer, said there hadn't been a May on the screen since the days of May McAvoy and Mae Murray," she told the AP's Bob Thomas in 1953 interview. "He also said May was good because it couldn't be mispronounced."

Wynn reunited with Francis (who would die in a July 1955 plane crash at age 25) in They Rode West and played Glenn Ford's fiancee in The Violent Men. She then appeared in The Man Is Armed (1956), The White Squaw (1956), The Unknown Terror (1957) and on a 1960 episode of Shotgun Slade, her final onscreen credit.

Wynn, who worked in real estate after show business, was married to realtor Jack Wesley Custer from 1968 until their 1979 divorce. Survivors include a step-daughter.

Our Lady Queen of Angels gave her a surprise 90^th birthday party in 2018.

 

WYNN, Mae (Donna Lee Hickey)

Born: 1/8/1928, New York City, New York, U.S.A.

Died: 3/22/2021, Newport Beach, California, U.S.A.

 

Mae Wynn’s westerns – actress:

They Rode West – 1954 (Mani-ten)

The Violent Men – 1955 (Caroline Vail)

The White Squaw – 1956 (Eetay-O-Wahnee)

The Restless Gun (TV) – 1957 (Bess Harcourt)

Shotgun Slade (TV) – 1960