He must have been several thousand in the hole when he played the bad guy in “Puma Man”…
(a MST3K classic!)
Man, you ain’t kiddin’. Saw Ed Wood a few days ago, so Mr. Neuse brought home Plan 9 from Outerspace, Bride of the Monster, and Glen or Glenda. WOW. The bigger they are, the harder they fall!
OK, I gotta respond to this, too.
The current mythology is that Lugosigot to the point where he just couldn’t do anything else, so he ended up working with Ed Wood because he couldn’t get anything else.
An expert on Lugosi I am not, but I do know a few things. Perhaps in context they look different, but:
1.) Lugosi checed himself in for drug addiction at a hospital in LA and got cleaned up. He looked terrible, but he did the right thing, and he didn’t hie it.
2.) In the early 1950s Lugosi had a Vegas stage show and appeared on TV. I suspect that, had he lived longer and stayed active he would have had the same kind of resurgence that the Three Stooges, Lon Chaney Jr., and others had. (The movie studios released their old holdings to TV, expecting a quick eturn. Nobody expected that it would expose the old stars to a new audience of kids who hadn’t seen them before.) Lugosi died just a little too soon.
3.) While Lugosi was making films with Ed Wood, he lso made a film with other folks – The Black Sleep. It had perennial Ed Wood star Tor Johnson, but it also had John Carradine.
4.) Ed Wood may hve had his faults – lots of them, in fact – but his films still kept a certain minmum quality at least. Woud you rather sit through Plan 9 from Outer Space or Invasion of the Eye Creatures? I’ll take Ed over William “One Shot” Beaudine any day.
I’m not denying that Lugosi had come down in the world, but he was a plugger and he hadn’t hit bottom, and he wasn’t at the very end f his rope.
I recall reading that Connery was talked into reprising the role by his wife. No cite, though, just memory.
Twit-like Nitpick: F. Murray Abraham, not Abrahams.
Sir Rhosis
He was talking about his life on BBC radio a couple of years ago. This is all very much IIRC, but he has apparently been suffering for most of his life from clinical depression, I believe there’s some sort of chemical cause. It was only diagnosed recently, and can happily be ameliorated with drugs.
I’m not saying that Shelly Winters was ever a great actress but at least she got some pretty respectable parts in her youth and did a fair enough job with them.
It’s hard to believe she’s the same person now. Who’d of thought countless affairs and alcohol could be so bad for a person?
Jennifer Biels from Flashdance.
One moment you’ve got every fourteen-year-old girl attacking her sweatshirt with a pair of scissors, the next moment your talking to your agent asking if you got that “The Prophecy II” gig. Lifes funny like that.
C. Thomas Howell. Ponyboy, Soul Man, that beach volleyball flick - and he’s still plummeting. He met Hauer on the way down in The Hitcher.
Huh? I think he’s so cool, especially how he does his evil cerebral, e.g. The Dark Half, Playing God. Has great hair, looks cool smoking a cigarette, was in Taps. I see no skids here.
I can mention a couple of actors who really ended on the skids, though one of them managed to revive her career a bit.
The first one, I think is June Fairchild, mentioned here (fee based link, but excerpts are below) as having had quite a career in the 1960’s, but since fallen on hard times. The article said that while she was working in the 1970 film Myra Breckenridge, which also featured Mae West, the latter was staying in downtown Los Angeles at the Rosslyn Hotel. At that time the Rosslyn was apparently still a good hotel but has since become little more than a skid row flophouse.
Then there was Grace Lee Witney, who played Yeoman Rand in the first season of the original Star Trek. She ended up walking the streets at one point, but has since been tapped to reprise her role in some of the ST feature films.
*I don’t think it appropriate to give the whole article, but here are some excerpts:
**
It’s been a good week for June Fairchild. She and a friend scraped together enough to stay at the Rosslyn Hotel, a tattered building off downtown’s skid row that charges about $28 a night.
(Snip)
In her eyes, it is a glorious place. She doesn’t see the bars shielding the concierge or the worn patches in the deep red carpet. At 54, she would rather remember what it looked like when she was a starlet in Hollywood during the '70s. She would rather tell you how she visited actress Mae West in a Rosslyn room during the filming of the grande dame’s last movie, “Sextette.”
(Snip)
They might ask …[how Fairchild] fell from a promising actress partying alongside film and rock ‘n’ roll legends to a middle-aged woman spending nights curled up in a cardboard box on skid row. They might ask why a woman who wakes up every day at 4:30 a.m. to collect and sell copies of the Daily News in front of the downtown courthouse is talking about acting again.
**
How’s that for being on the skids? Just acting in third rate movies doesn’t compare.
I thought Tim Hutton was doing the Nero Wolfe series on A & E?
Q
Ok, he’s more of a middle-class actor, but shouldn’t John Larroquette be included in this list? I seem to remember his mentioning on a late night talk show that he was once selling plasma when a Night Court rerun came on the television; his first thought was that the experience would make for a good story on The Tonight Show. Yep, there’s nothing like selling your bodily fluids to tide you over until your next late night TV appearance…
IMDB shows his appearing in a few films since he did his show. Has anyone seen them?