How can we have a discussion about washed up actors without mentioning…
THE COREYS!!!
Yaaay!
Don’t forget Chet Baker. A picture of the man in his later years would be a perfect anti-drug poster. Damned shame.
Tina Louise got a swelled head, and couldn’t get out of her trailer to do the movie.
Oops! My bad; I mistakenly cross referenced the wrong name with a career. Mary Wickes was best known as a general character actress and voiceover artist. The part about her leaving $2 million to her church is correct, though.
An infuriating thing about Lugosi was that he was almost 50 years old before he ever had a dime to his name, so you’d think he’d have known to save it. Instead, he earned almost one million dollars in one decade, then became so desperate for work that he took a bus and truck tour of DRACULA through England which went broke after a few performances and stranded him; he had to take schlock work just to pay his way home.
Criswell of ED WOOD fame had a benefactress of sorts in Mae West. Among other gifts she gave him her old limo whenever she traded. His wife owned rental property and his regular TV appearances kept him solvent, so apparently the shots he did in Wood’s porn movies (NIGHT OF THE GHOULS being the worst) were just a favor to a friend.
Almost any acting student can tell you that Irene “GRANNY” Ryan (from Beverly Hillbillies) left her entire multimillion dollar estate to acting scholarships. It’s still very active, and a great legacy to a woman who so loved her work she ignored doctor’s warnings to slow down. (She suffered a fatal stroke while performing on Broadway in PIPPIN.)
A biography of Orson Welles states that his last paid acting gig was a radio commercial for an LA hamburger chain. It must have galled him that his old friend turned enemy John Houseman only gained in fame and fortune as he aged while Orson sank (though I think he was quite comfortable financially when he died; at least, he left enough of an estate that his wife and mistress went to court over it.)
A bad ending was Amanda “Miss Kitty” Blake. A bad marriage, medical bills, poor investments, and a disastrous attempt at opening a private zoo bankrupted her and she lived on her credit cards. Greg Morris of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE also died destitute.
Dana Plato at one point was a callgirl in a gentleman’s club. (I never understood why she and other really pathetic struggler never just quit acting and went to nursing school or became teachers or paralegals or taxidermists- there are 900 million careers out there and they all have more dignity that appearing naked in really low budget porn.)
He’s not dead, but Stephen Geoffreys, who played best friend Evil Ed in FRIGHT NIGHT and the nerd prototype in lots of “horny frat boys go to the beach” movies is now a hard core gay porn actor.
Does everybody know about the site
incidentally? It’s devoted to the last days of celebrities and has a very morbid and gay sense of humor. Lots of photos and trivia.
Lamont (Demon Wilson) from SANFORD & SON and Gavin McLeod (LOVE BOAT, MARY TYLER MOORE) are also ministers now.
Gavin is in a new movie for TBN which also stars Hal Linden (BARNEY MILLER) as a turn-of-the-century college professor. Linden is Jewish and a respected stage and screen actor: I wonder why he’s doing schlock for a Fundie movie company? (Of course he’s also in the current Broadway production of CABARET [along with a semi-nude John Stamos], so apparently it’s not a conversion.)
Louise Brooks - thank you Eve. I’ve been trying to think of that name for a week!
(I want to grow my hair out into a Louise Brooks bob. Right now its more of an Audrey Hepburn pixie cut).
Marie Prevost: silent film star who couldn’t make it in the talkies. Died at 38 in her apartment with only a dauschund for company. Unfortunately, nobody found her for several days and, well, a dog has to eat, you know? Immortalized in a Nick Lowe song, but this site offers a more complete story. Judging by the photo, she was one hot mama.
Blast, I forgot to take that “couldn’t make it in the talkies” line out. If you look at the site I linked to, she made several sound movies. Her career decline was due to other causes.
Oh my God, do you mean the “Awinnn Buhhh” guy? This brings a new (and scary!) meaning to his “Got Milk?” commercial.
This depresses me. I always liked his work, and wondered what happened to him. But I guess if he’s happy… (But is he?)
A timely thread…
Paul “Pee Wee” Reubens and Jeffery Jones (the Principal in Ferris Beuler’s Day Off) have just been busted for child porn.
Guilty or not, it’s probably pretty safe to say they’re all done. Pee Wee’s playhouse was brilliant. A sad end indeed.
Checked her out on IMDb.
Her most recent credit was an appearance in a 1989 movie called… Death Scenes… oh dear:eek:
I read the link you gave, very sad story.
I’m a big fan of BR-particularly in his role as “Sherlock Holmes”. I heard that he lived into his 90’s, and he died in poverty as well…does anybody know if he had any roles late in life, ot did his career end in the 1940’s?
Ramon Novarro had a sad, bloody end (especially sad since his murderers were both free men within a few years of their incarceration).
http://crimemagazine.com/Celebrities/ramonnov.htm
A happier ending of a gay silent film star was that of romantic lead William Haines. He didn’t make the transition to talkies (he had a hillbilly accent which didn’t translate well to film) and he lost most of his money in the Depression. However, his own home was so stunningly decorated that he and his live-in boyfriend became two of the top decorators in Los Angeles for the next forty years, recouping their fortune many times. (Semi-sad ending- Haines died of natural causes in his 70s; his boyfriend, who’d shared his life for 50 years, committed suicide the next month, ala Charles Boyer’s Seconal OD after his wife’s death.)
"What happened to Basil rathbone?
I’m a big fan of BR-particularly in his role as “Sherlock Holmes”. I heard that he lived into his 90’s, and he died in poverty as well…does anybody know if he had any roles late in life, ot did his career end in the 1940’s?"
I seriously doubt that he died in poverty like Lugosi. I think he had to trade-in the mansion (where he and his wife Ouida were some of the major party hosts [especially for the English colony] in LA during the Golden Age) for lesser digs, but there weren’t tenements involved. It is true that he did a lot of low budget horror movies towards the end, but he also wrote a bestselling autobiography (still-in-print) in old age so I doubt he missed any meals. (According to imdb.com, he was 75 when he died, btw, and his last movie was “Hillbillies in a Haunted House”.)
Is that as in “this week”? I knew there was a raid on Pee-Wee’s (play)house a few months ago, but I never heard more about it.
Awful about Jeffery Jones- he’s one of my favorite character actors (Amadeus, The Crucible, Devil’s Advocate, Ed Wood). I hope he’s innocent as it otherwise destroys his contribution to film.
I looked up the story on Jones and Pee-Wee. (Evidently they found DNA on some of the stains on Chairy when they raided his playhouse.)
The odd thing: both men are charged with “misdemeanor possession of child pornography”. I assumed anything connected to possessing it was felonious. (Jones is charged with a felony for hiring a minor for sexually explicit purposes, but the news story didn’t say how old or what gender the minor is.)
I started a thread on General Questions to learn more about child pornography law.
Say, wasn’t Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane in the Superman movies, found wandering the streets raving out of her mind? Seems she’d been reduced to semi-poverty due to some crippling mental illness and was living in some cramped little one bedroom apartment somewhere.
Yep, Margot Kidder is manic-depressive. She went off her medicine, entered a major depressive cycle when her computer crashed (taking with it the novel she’d worked on for years), and was found delusional and missing teeth several days later. She was broke due to bad business advice and probably in part due to paying for manic sprees, but, to quote John Astin from NIGHT COURT, she’s “much better now”.
Speaking of John Astin and manic-depression, Patty Duke is also manic-depressive. Now that she’s diagnosed it’s more or less under control, but before she was unable to keep money because she’d rent Lear jets for any or no reason and fly to D.C. to be with the president who was sending her coded messages on the radio. She also made a guy she met on a bus her business manager and decided to build an ark from Barstow to Bakersfield, CA.
(Interesting sidenote: she’d never known who the biological father of her son, Sean Astin, was, though she narrowed it down to John Astin or Desi Arnaz, Jr… Since John raised the child as his own, there was never any question of who the “real” father was, but as an adult Sean had DNA testing done and it proved neither man was his biological father. His sperm-father was the man to whom his mother was married for two weeks- Patty Duke has no memory of the marriage ever having been consummated and denies the DNA results.
John Astin is now a professor of drama and tours in a one-man show about Edgar Allan Poe (www.astin-poe.com).
emolson, puhleeze! Veronica Lake is a major major babe.
http://silverscreensirens.com/galleries/lake28.htm
don’t forget my rita died suffering from alzheimer’s… sniff.