A Visit to the John

There’s a fair amount of debate (amongst the few folks who would even bother!) over today’s featured actor. Some people find him handsome, some don’t. Some find him to be a talented actor, and again, some don’t! (The truth is these debates could be applied to almost anyone, peoples’ tastes vary so much.) I know that most of the times I’ve seen him, I’ve enjoyed his work, even if sometimes I enjoyed the film itself more. John Ericson enjoyed about a decade of success in the movies before turning to television and foreign productions in order to make ends meet.

Born Joseph Meibes in Düsseldorf, Germany in 1926, his family fled the Nazi regime when he was just a boy. He lived in the U.S. for enough of his youth that he was able to assimilate and become virtually indistinguishable as a foreigner. In fact, he went on to play creditably in many westerns. A slim, but fit, young man, he possessed a thick, beautiful head of wavy hair.

Studying at The American Academy of Dramatic Arts, his class included such varying types as Don Murray, Grace Kelly and Don Rickles. Will someone explain to me how I never knew that Grace Kelly and Don Rickles went to acting school together and probably played scenes in class?!

Things didn’t happen overnight for him, but by 1950 (already 24) he had landed in some TV anthology series and within a year was granted a huge break in films. He was selected by Fred Zinneman (out of three hundred auditionees!) to star in the romantic drama Teresa opposite Pier Angeli. Photo after photo after photo was shot promoting the actor (now re-dubbed John Ericson) both in and out of scenes from the picture.

His fresh, clean looks attracted many a young female fan, though his character in the movie was something of a whiny, troubled, helpless – and most importantly – not terribly sympathetic young man. Playing a soldier returning from the war with a new bride (who’s Italian), he is subject to various family and social pressures and doesn’t handle them very well. Most of the accolades went to the more sympathetic Angeli, granting Ericson’s film debut only middling promise.

He went back to Broadway and did enjoy a success there, the play Stalag 17, in which he had the lead. Unfortunately, when the film was made two years later, he was passed up and the role went to William Holden. (To rub salt in the wound, Holden took home an Oscar for the part!) Ericson eventually returned to the big screen in 1954 (after having married a Milly Coury in 1953) in a colorful and melodic romance, Rhapsody.

Here, he was part of a triangle that included Vittorio Gassman and a captivatingly lovely Elizabeth Taylor, who was making the transition from youthful parts to ingénue roles. He played a concert pianist who falls hard for the beautiful Miss Taylor even though she is already in love with Gassman. Again portraying an ex-G. I., circumstances in the story led his character to alcoholism, meaning that he was once more playing a flawed character on the big screen rather than a heroic one which might have helped build up his early career.

That same year he appeared in two other films. In The Student Prince, he was given third billing behind its leading players, but he’s really not in it much. Also, it is an operetta and he has no singing, further leading him out of the spotlight. Hair dyed blonde, he plays a military cadet in old Heidelberg, who takes umbrage at the title character and challenges him to a duel.

The film is mostly notable for the fact that the intended star, operatic Mario Lanza, walked off the picture and was replaced by non-singing Edmond Purdom. As a way of freeing himself from legal entanglements, Lanza allowed Purdom to lip-sync to his vocals (something Purdom does quite well, actually!) Ann Blyth, who played the leading lady, supplied her own vocals (the part had been offered to Deanna Durbin who steadfastly refused to come out of her remarkably early retirement from the screen.)

Rounding out 1954 was a role in Green Fire, a drama about emerald mining in Columbia that starred Stewart Granger and Ericson’s old classmate Grace Kelly. He played her brother, a young man keen on recovering all the emeralds he can while his sister is left to maintain their coffee plantation with little to no help. The film counts as a minor one on nearly all the participants’ resumes (and shouldn’t it be John and not costar Paul Douglas whose shirt is open that far?!)

The following year, Ericson had a good role in a really strong film filled with solid actors. Bad Day at Black Rock had Spencer Tracy as a man with only one good arm who comes to the title town to locate a man who is no longer there and who everyone keeps trying to avoid talking about. Among the great cast were Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin, Walter Brennan, Dean Jagger and Anne Francis, who played Ericson’s sister. Ericson got to square off with Tracy as did virtually everyone playing a townsperson. I had no desire to see this movie, but one day it was on and its reputation and its 81-minute running time attracted me. It is well worth watching even if you are like me and don’t normally worship at the Spencer Tracy altar the way most people seem to.
Finally getting a leading role in a film all his own, he next starred in The Return of Jack Slade, a western that had him as the son of a gunman who exists under the weight of that legacy until he’s hired as a Pinkerton guard and makes a name for himself. Buried in the cast was newcomer Angie Dickinson in her first fully credited film role while Mari Blanchard had leading lady duties in this one.

Ericson and Blanchard were reunited a year later in The Cruel Tower, about the dangerous profession of constructing water towers and the complicated love lives of the workers. Already, during this period, Ericson was also appearing regularly on TV in shows such as Kraft Theatre, G.E. True Theater, Cavalcade of America, Climax! and Schlitz Playhouse.

A film called Forty Guns in 1957 put him as the brother of Barbara Stanwyck, though he was almost two decades her junior. The tough western had John maniacally running roughshod over anyone in his path, even it that included Stanwyck! Directed by Samuel Fuller, it was a stylish and interesting venture. There’s a special nook of The Underworld devoted to this movie because of the arresting sight of an outdoor bathhouse made up of six or so half-barrels with a sudsy cowboy in each one!
Following the familiar pattern of supporting roles in more important films and leading roles in secondary ones, Ericson found himself starring in Oregon Passage, an old-fashioned U.S. Cavalry versus Indians yarn. If you’re an Indian about to be done in, I guess there are worse ways to go than with John Ericson’s genitals pressed up against your ribcage. I’ll take that over a random gunshot from a distance.
Day of the Badman, a western starring Fred MacMurray, was a rehash of High Noon. Ericson plays the pompous and ineffectual sheriff of the town in which MacMurray is a judge being victimized by the family of a murderer he is about to sentence. Ericson would work frequently on television from this film until two years later when he starred in Pretty Boy Floyd as the title character. The film is more notable now, if at all, for an appearance by Peter Falk and the film debut of Al “Grandpa Munster” Lewis in a rare dramatic role.

Under Ten Flags concerned the warfare between British Naval Admiral Charles Laughton and German Captain Van Heflin and was based, in part, on fact. Ericson played a German serving under Heflin (who, in order to make things more palatable, was depicted as not being entirely in line with Hitler’s plans.)

John’s film career began to slow down around this time. As he now had a wife and three children to support, he continued to appear on television, but also began working in Italian productions. He found, as many of his peers had, that good salaries were being paid to name brand American actors who were willing to appear in overseas productions, many of which were sword and sandal epics, westerns or the occasional spy flick.

One of the few Hollywood films he did at this time was 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, a George Pal fantasy starring Tony Randall as the title character who (with the help of elaborate makeup) enacts various different legendary figures as part of his traveling act. Ericson played the heroic and forthright newspaper editor of a small western town who is trying to fight a corrupt land baron, but who is also enamored of a pretty widow played by Barbara Eden. One of the vignettes of the film had Randall as the sexually alert Pan and he eventually transforms into Ericson as Pan, creating a pretty lusty moment for a movie aimed at children!
The opportunity to work regularly on a TV series came when Honey West was produced. Based on a character from 1950s pulp crime novels, the series starred Ericson’s costar from Bad Day at Black Rock, Anne Francis, as the title character and he played her sidekick Sam Bolt. Francis’s sexy black jumpsuits were akin to Diana Rigg’s get-ups from The Avengers. The show lasted for 30 episodes before being cancelled, but it inspired a cult following that still exists today.

Ericson continued to make the occasional American film while heading off intermittently to Italy or Spain to headline something there. Often in these foreign films, he was the only English-speaking actor (and familiar name to U.S. viewers) in the cast. These films also contained a little more skin than U.S. viewers were used to, though that would soon change.
His American films were certainly not of any tremendous caliber and most of them are little known today. The Money Jungle had him with blondes Lola Albright and Leslie Parrish as he tries to determine who is killing geologists from major companies. The Destructors was a spy film starring Richard Egan and Michael Ansara that had a team battling Red China over some rubies that help to power a strong laser weapon.

The Bamboo Saucer had him once again battling the Red Chinese over a missing spacecraft that has fallen in their territory. Most sci-fi fans consider the film better than the title and obscure reputation suggests, but it was still a minor effort, even with the declining Dan Duryea in the leading role.

In 1971, Ericson had a part in the Disney musical, semi-animated extravaganza Bedknobs and Broomsticks. The mammoth film was hacked down at least twice to make it a manageable length for children and still it was not the success that the studio was expecting. Ericson played a Nazi who is thwarted by the spells of amateur witch Angela Lansbury. He was also making many guest appearances on popular TV shows such as Ironside, Marcus Welby, M.D., The Virginian and Medical Center.

By late 1973, feeling that his career could use a jump-start, he agreed to pose for Playgirl magazine in the January 1974 issue. Romping naked through Lion Country Safari with a cub or two used as props, he was shown from behind and with an occasional, partly obscured peek at John Jr. Later, when the magazine wanted to rerun some of the photos for a “Best of” compendium, he agreed so long as the pictures were cropped of any genital exposure and providing his headshot was featured on part of the cover. When the magazine failed to place him on the cover, he sued, winning an eventual $12,500 in damages.

The exercise did very little, if anything, to reignite his career and in time he felt that the layout came off as rather silly. He also married for the second time in 1974, though I don’t know what effect, if any, the layout had on cementing or challenging the relationship. John and Karen (nee Huston) remain together to this day. Though he continued to work regularly on TV, the best he could get for a movie was the sleazy Hustler Squad, a sort of rehash of The Dirty Dozen only with females sleeping with the enemy during WWII in order to beat them! Wife Karen costarred in this gem as well.

John Ericson managed to look younger than he actually was for quite some time. Consider that when he was busily guest-starring on Fantasy Island, CHiPs, The A-Team and Knight Rider, he was well over 50 and didn't seem so. There were some cheap, straight-to-video action movies and the obligatory stop on Murder, She Wrote, among other things, until he went into semi-retirement. He is 84 years old now and worked as recently as 2008 in the cable series Crash. Content mostly to paint at the home in New Mexico he shares with his wife, he has no need to continue working. Surprisingly, his career in TV and movies lasted close to sixty years! He was not able to reach a significant level of stardom, but he worked with some of the top names in the cinema and stayed busy working for most of his lengthy career.

There is Nothin' Like a Dame

One of the screen’s all-time imposing personas is our featured actress today, Dame Judith Anderson. Miss Anderson was born Frances Anderson in South Australia in 1897. Already treading the boards as a professional actress (using the name Francee Anderson) at the age of 17, she worked with other performers of differing national backgrounds. Julius Knight, a Scotsman, was an actor who had a profound impact on her approach to the craft. Some American players she worked with saw enough potential in her to encourage her to try for a career in the United States.

At about twenty years of age, she flew to California, attempting a career there, but was not met with success. Shortly thereafter she tried New York City and, again, found nothing. A very dry period of ill health and a dangerously low amount of ready cash nearly led to her early destruction. However, she finally landed work with a stock company in 1918. She began working with other similar companies, frequently on tour, before making her Broadway debut in 1922 in a show called On the Stairs (billed now as Frances Anderson.) She seems to have a bit of a Norma Shearer thing going here.

Changing her name to Judith Anderson, she enjoyed a rousing success on Broadway with Louis Calhern in Cobra. She was fortunate to be able to tour Australia with that play and two others in 1927. By the time the 30s rolled around, she was an established stage actress with a tremendous reputation. She worked steadily and played roles that would later be reenacted by other ladies when the shows were adapted for the cinema screen, such as As You Desire Me (Greta Garbo), Mourning Becomes Electra (Rosalind Russell) and The Old Maid (Bette Davis.) It’s a testament to her own versatility that the roles she did on stage could be inherited by other, such dissimilar, cinema actresses. She also played Gertrude to John Gielgud’s Hamlet in 1936.

1937 brought her to London in order to portray Lady Macbeth opposite Laurence Olivier. Four years later, she reprised the role with Maurice Evans as Macbeth. (She and Evans would later play these roles on television two separate times as well! The second time the play was made for TV, in 1960, the program was fashioned into a feature film that played in Europe in 1963. Also, she took home an Emmy both times she played Lady M. on TV!)

Anderson had worked on one film in 1933 and was uncharacteristically glamorous, dripping with jewelry in fact, in it. In Blood Money, she was a bordello madam who puts a hit out on a man. It was the type of part that would soon seem inconceivable to her fans and, more in particular, to the studio honchos in Hollywood.

Her major film break came in 1940 when she landed the part of the chilling, severe and intimidating Mrs. Danvers in Alfred Hitchcock’s production of Rebecca. The popular book described a far older and crustier version of the creepy, insinuating housekeeper to Laurence Olivier and his new wife Joan Fontaine. No one was complaining because Anderson was searing in the part and really unforgettable! (And Judith's amazing and distinctive profile was put to good use here and many times later in her career.)

Opting to keep the character’s background as secretive and mysterious as possible, he deliberately filmed her in a way that suggested that she merely appeared rather than having walked to whichever location she was in. With her pitch-dark dress with a pale, terse face resting on top, finished off with a tightly knotted braid around her head, she cut a scary figure to Fontaine’s unsophisticated and shy character. She was the devoted servant to Olivier’s first wife, the deceased title character of the film, and provided, with Hitch’s help surely, an overriding subtext of conflicted lesbian devotion.

This callous, domineering role (which would become iconic and spoofed many times) of a woman who would rather die than allow her mistress’s things to be destroyed won Anderson a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. Amazingly enough, it was the only time she would ever be nominated for the little gold man (she lost to Jane Darwell in The Grapes of Wrath.)

A spate of film roles came her way, though her looks were always considered of a character sort, preventing her from playing heroines and most leads. She was able to shake off the spectre of Mrs. Danvers by immediately going into Forty Little Mothers, an Eddie Cantor comedy in which she was a girl’s school headmistress. In Free and Easy, the following year, she also played a lighter type of role, a flighty, wealthy woman being charmed by Bob Cummings.

Despite playing the title character in Lady Scarface, she was still very much a supporting performer. More screen time went to Dennis O’Keefe and his female sidekick Frances Neal, though Anderson gave the same caliber of commitment and toughness to her role that she had in her best-known part.

All Through the Night had her involved in the strange story of mobsters (such as Humphrey Bogart) attempting to thwart Nazis (such as Conrad Veidt, shown here with her.) Kings Row in 1942 was a sort of precursor to Peyton Place in that it dealt with the unsavory and secret goings on in a small town. She played the mother of one of Kings Rows’ troubled inhabitants.

The Errol Flynn actioner Edge of Darkness had her fighting the Nazis again and working with Walter Huston and Ruth Gordon. She had just done a heavily lauded Broadway production of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters with Gordon and Katharine Cornell. The play was greeted with such enthusiasm that Time Magazine did a feature story on it and placed the three actresses on its cover. Anderson, while working regularly in films, had not turned her back on the (doubtlessly more satisfying) stage.

A pair of future classics came about in 1944 and ’45. First up was Laura, a nourish mystery about the death of a beautiful girl (played by Gene Tierney.) Anderson played her aunt, who is involved mostly with Vincent Price. Price looks remarkably handsome here, I must say. Then came And Then There Were None, an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, in which she was the prim Emily Brent. This film version is still considered by many people to be the best one (the story has been remade many times since.) She was allowed to toss out the hilariously blase line, "Very stupid to kill the only servant in the house. Now we don't even know where to find the marmalade."

In Anderson’s next two films, she managed to expand her range to include a hysterically obsessive lady of the house in Diary of a Chambermaid and an exacting ballet instructor in Specter of the Rose. It’s not unusual to find her all but stealing the show in these films or at least walking away with the acting kudos. More opportunities in the cinema came her way when she was cast as Barbara Stanwyck’s wicked aunt in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and later when she portrayed the adoptive mother of Robert Mitchum in the dark, flashback-ridden western Pursued. In it, she must try to dissuade the embittered and one-armed Dean Jagger from killing her boy until he grows up to be Mitchum and can possibly defend himself.

She played Edward G Robinson’s spinster sister in The Red House and had a bland role in the colorful Tycoon as the unappreciated tutor to Larraine Day. The John Wayne film had him romancing Day with Anderson’s help, but at the risk of revenge from her disapproving father Cedric Hardwicke. Fans of the later The Ten Commandments may get a mild kick out of seeing Anderson and Hardwicke acting in such a different way in Tycoon than they did in the Egyptian epic. It’s not that she was terrible in “nice” roles like this. It just seems such a waste when she could be such a charismatic and steely villainess.

One of her greatest ever triumphs of this period would be on the Broadway stage. She played Medea in 1947, taking home a Tony award and thrilling audiences for years afterwards in touring productions. The legendary role of a woman who kills her own children seemed tailor-made for Anderson, who projected both passion and power. Famed Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini allegedly got so caught up in applause for her in this role that he nearly fell out of his box seat! Working in Medea kept Anderson off the screen for a couple of years. (She would also appear in a televised rendition of it in 1959.)

In 1950, she squared off with another tough chickie, Barbara Stanwyck, in The Furies. Stanwyck played the feisty and headstrong daughter of a wealthy rancher (Walter Huston) whose plans to inherit the spread are threatened by his relationship with Anderson, a widow. The ladies butt heads and it’s one time Anderson found herself taking on someone who wasn’t easily intimidated.

Anderson began working on the then-popular television anthologies (even playing Laura Hope Crews’ smothering mother role in an adaptation of The Silver Cord.) In 1953, Rita Hayworth produced a colorful Biblical epic for herself called Salome and Anderson was hired to play Herodias, her evil mother. Charles Laughton played Anderson’s husband Herod. (She's seen here with Arnold Moss.) The film garnered most of its attention for the elaborate and erotic (for 1953) dance that Hayworth performs, though the script ignored The Bible and had Salome dancing to save John the Baptist rather than have him beheaded as was written in the text! Some of the snarkier viewers wondered if Salome got her slam-bang looks from her (unseen) father...

Plenty of TV work continued until Cecil B. DeMille began his monumental epic The Ten Commandments. The mammoth, exceedingly colorful (and campy) 1956 film was packed with stars (including old costars such as Robinson, Hardwicke and Price) and Anderson took her rightful place among them in the advertising. Her role was small, but memorable. She portrayed Memnet, the servant to the Egyptian princess (Nina Foch) who finds and raises the infant Moses as her own.

Once Moses has grown up into Charlton Heston and is in love with Anne Baxter, for whom Anderson is now a servant as well, Anderson threatens to reveal the true origins of Heston’s birth. It was a decidedly unglamorous part and one who isn’t familiar with her could be forgiven for thinking that this is a photo of a man! Still, her craggy, sour presence adds a lot of fun to her few brief scenes.

In ’58, she played the fretful, forceful, fussy and frantic Big Mama in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The great cast included Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor and Burl Ives (as well as the divinely snotty Madeleine Sherwood!) It’s still causing genetic scientists fits as to exactly how the sperm of Burl Ives and the egg of Judith Anderson could possibly have resulted in the blisteringly beautiful Paul Newman! Jack Carson, as their other son, seems a more likely offspring.

Jerry Lewis used her as his wicked stepmother in the strained comic spoof Cinderfella, which had him as the put upon stepsibling (trapped in servitude) who wants to go to the ball to meet a princess while his stepbrothers Henry Silva and Robert Hutton are given all the attention from Anderson. He even had a fairy godfather played by Ed Wynn.

Next was a supporting role in the Richard Todd-Elke Sommer sex comedy Why Bother to Knock. (Some sources erroneously list her as being in Don’t Bother to Knock, which was an earlier black & white Marilyn Monroe film!) She’s seen here with actress June Thorburn who, six years later, was killed in a plane crash while five months pregnant. Prior to the film’s 1961 release, Anderson was named a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her work in the performing arts.

Anderson went into semiretirement soon after this with occasional TV or stage projects. In 1970, she joined Richard Harris in A Man Called Horse as a weathered American Indian woman with the incredibly delicate, feminine and flattering name of Buffalo Cow Head. The memorably violent film had Harris strung up by his chest with hooks in a ceremonial ritual. It was her first big screen credit using the moniker “Dame Judith Anderson.”
She then, at age 74, got to fulfill a lifelong dream. She, as many actresses before her had done in a longstanding theatrical conceit, played Hamlet in a touring production!

In 1975, Joan Bennett was set to star in an unusual Australian horror western called Inn of the Damned, but pulled out after a disagreement with the director over her character. Anderson stepped into the part and it can count as her horror-battle axe credit. She and her husband were proprietors of the title business who were out for revenge over the abduction of their two children years earlier.

Then in 1982, after more than twenty years away and after more than two-dozen productions to her credit there, Anderson returned to the Broadway stage. It was, again, in the play Medea, but this time she portrayed the role of the nurse. Receiving a Tony nomination, it was a fitting end to her stage career in The Big Apple. The play was filmed and presented on television the following year (with some publicity material centering more on her than on the star of the production!)

The attention she got from Medea quite possibly led to her being cast as the Vulcan High Priestess in the feature film Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Duded out in the famous Vulcan pointy ears and swathed in layers of fabric, she lent just the right touch of vaguely menacing authority and stature to the brief role. Some of the cast photos from the film show her seated in the center while all the others are gathered around her in proper respect for her (and her character’s) position. It was a job that suggested she wasn’t afraid to try new things, though she was, by now, 87 years of age!
She had one final surprise in store and that was when she helped to launch the daytime soap opera Santa Barbara in 1984. Playing the matriarchal Minx Lockridge, her name and face appeared all over the press. (And I must say I adore her expression here as the perfectly named grande dame, Minx!) Unfortunately for her, she was not utilized nearly enough for her satisfaction during her stint on the show, though she did limp along for three years, making periodic appearances. She also took her honored place in the center of the cast shots. When she departed in 1987, the character was written out only to be restored three years later with the twenty-five years younger Janis Paige taking over the part!!
Anderson really did live in Santa Barbara and that is where she resided until her death at 94 from pneumonia. There were two reasonably brief (one two-year and one five-year) childless marriages in her life, both after she was forty and both over and done with by 1951. Many sources outright declare her lesbianism, though she lived most of her life in an era where such things would never be openly discussed in any case. A treasure of the stage and a memorable cinema actress as well, there really was nothin’ like Dame Judith Anderson!