![]() I got to know him better over the years, and began to like him much more as an actor. I didn't particularly like him, he was full of oats and swaggering around and being terribly macho - it may have to do with the fact that he wasn't very tall. Goldwyn then sold Kirk's contract to MGM, who gave her a less sympathetic role in the delightful musical Two Weeks With Love, as the haughty beauty at summer camp who patronises her younger friend (Jane Powell) and jealously tries to sabotage a budding romance between Powell and Latin lover Ricardo Montalban. Although Blyth could do little with the main role (her exasperating character needed a good shaking), Kirk was very sympathetic as a girl who envies Blyth the love and support with which she has been raised (Kirk's father is unable to find the time to attend her graduation). She made her screen début in the Goldwyn drama Our Very Own (1950), playing the friend of a teenager (Ann Blyth, the film's star) who is traumatised by the discovery that she is adopted. The play ran for 31 performances, but Kirk's performance was noted by a talent scout for Sam Goldwyn, and after her dispiriting introduction to Broadway, Kirk was glad to accept an offer to go to Hollywood. Before it opened to hostile reviews, Aumont had acrimonious battles with Barry over the adaptation, and when Palmer was hailed as the best thing about the evening, Aumont stated that on opening night she had given an entirely different performance to the one they had been rehearsing for six weeks. Adapted for the United States by Philip Barry, it co-starred Lilli Palmer with Aumont, who played a charming cad whose conquests included Kirk, as a French maid. She went on to appear in more than a dozen other films.My Name is Aquilon was a comedy by the French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont, which had been a hit in Paris. She was born Phyllis Kirkegaard in Plainfield, N.J., and moved to New York in her late teens to study with the well-known acting teacher Sanford Meisner.Īfter appearing in several New York plays, she made her movie debut in "Our Very Own" (1950) with Farley Granger and Ann Blyth. "She was very opinionated and very passionate about her beliefs."Īfter the Watts riots in 1965, she helped establish and fund two preschool programs in the area. "It made headlines, but it hurt her career too," Olson said. She spoke before the California Assembly against the death sentence of Caryl Chessman - who was convicted on robbery, kidnapping and rape charges - and visited him in prison several times before he was executed in 1960. Kirk worked with the American Civil Liberties Union to campaign against capital punishment in the late 1950s. ![]() The pair played sophisticated married sleuths Nick and Nora Charles in the series based on the Dashiell Hammett book and MGM movies that had starred William Powell and Myrna Loy. Kirk told the Web site.ĭuring the rest of the 1950s, she often appeared in television anthologies before being cast opposite Peter Lawford in "The Thin Man," which aired on NBC from 1957 to 1959. "That is no fun! They pour this stuff all over you to make a mold, and then some genius reforms the whole thing into wax," Ms. It also tested her patience: She said she loathed being a model for a wax statue. The movie tested her endurance because she continually had to be filmed running from Price, who played a mentally warped sculptor whose victims are turned into wax figures. Kirk said in a 2004 interview with the Astounding B Monster, a Web site for fans of B movies and cult films. ![]() "I went on to have a lot of fun making 'House of Wax.' It was just fun Vincent Price was a divine man and was a divine actor," Ms. insisted she take the part or be suspended from her contract. She also did not want to act in a movie that relied on a gimmick - the 3-D process required movie patrons to wear colored glasses. Kirk later said, referring to the screaming co-star of " King Kong" (1933). When first asked to appear in "House of Wax," she resisted because she "was not interested in becoming the Fay Wray of her time," Ms. ![]()
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