Hope Lange was born to
showbiz parents in Connecticut in 1933. Dad was a cellist and music
arranger and Mom was an actress. The family, including two sisters and a
brother, moved to Greenwich Village when Hope was a child. After her
father died, her mother opened a restaurant in the Village, which was popular with
the locals, and her children worked there.
At age eight,
Hope sang and danced with other children in the play Life,
Laughter and Tears and the following year she had a small part in
the Broadway play, The Patriots.
First lady Eleanor
Roosevelt maintained an apartment in the Village and ate at the Lange
restaurant. Hope was fond of the First Lady's Scotch Terrier, Fala, and
took the dog on walks, which resulted in a newspaper photograph. That, in
turn, resulted in some modeling assignments.
She first attended
college in Oregon and then returned to New York to attend another one. It
was there that she met Don Murray and they became inseparable. He
was also from a show business family and intended to follow in the same
direction. He encouraged Hope to pursue the same path. Murray's
career was interrupted by the military while she got some television work which
attracted the attention of a 20th Century Fox producer.
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| Happy with Don Murray |
She was not only signed
by Fox but so was Murray. Both would appear in Bus Stop (1956), a
highly-anticipated film, and by no one more than its star, Marilyn Monroe who
hoped it would take her career to places it'd never been before. She
plays a would-be singer who is the object of a lovesick rodeo performer played
by Murray. Lange plays one of the bus passengers who befriends Monroe.
Murray was oddly Oscar-nominated for best supporting Oscar (there is nothing
supporting about it) and he should have won over Anthony Quinn for his brief
role in Lust for Life. Shortly before the movie was released,
Lange and Murray were married.
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| With Marilyn in Bus Stop |
Fox wasted the talents
of Lange, Robert Wagner and Jeffrey Hunter and everyone else connected with the
highly-fictional The True Story of Jesse James. (1957).
She called it a turkey. She plays Wagner's wife. Two years
later she again costarred with Wagner and Hunter, this time as Hunter's wife,
in the very good In Love and War.
In 1957 Lange joined the
large cast of Peyton Place. It would become one of the
two films for which she is best-remembered. She received a
well-deserved Oscar nomination as best supporting actress for her role as
Selena Cross, a hardscrabble teen who is beaten and raped by her
stepfather whom she later kills in self-defense. I thought she was
sensational. I was looking forward to following her career.
The famous pairing of
two of America's most esteemed actors, then and now, Montgomery Clift and
Marlon Brando, is likely the biggest reason that sent the public to The
Young Lions (1958). Along with Dean Martin (in his first
post-Jerry Lewis film), we learn of three soldiers during WWII, two Americans
and one German. I found it to be a virtual school lesson on Nazism.
Each man was paired with a woman and Lange was Clift's. They made a
heart-wrenching couple.
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| With Monty Clift in The Young Lions |
My favorite Lange film of
all is 1959's The Best of Everything. It didn't hurt that I
swooned while playing the Johnny Mathis' version of the title song. Rona
Jaffee's best-selling novel about young women working in the publishing
business in New York was destined to become a movie. When 20th Century
Fox bought the film rights, there was no doubt it would be populated with some
of the studios best and brightest young folk.
Lange is top-billed as
Caroline Bender who ambitiously carves her path from the steno pool (along with
Suzy Parker and Diane Baker) to editor. While there are enough
shenanigans going on at Fabian Publishing to keep things interesting (most
involving orange-haired Joan Crawford), it's the romances, of course, that keep
things hopping.
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| Out dancing with Stephen Boyd |
We won't go into a lot
more now because this film will get its own posting one day. A further
romantic note, however, is that Lange and leading man, Stephen Boyd, enjoyed
some stayovers for a few months after filming completed. They spent
considerable time together as he escorted her all around Europe.
She was still married
during the Boyd romance but the marriage was in its final stage. In
1961 she and Murray were divorced. They had two children. One day,
some years off, they would work together again in the two-person play Same
Time, Next Year.
When she signed on to
play a sassy chorine in A Pocketful of Miracles (1961), she
and leading man Glenn Ford embarked on a two-year romance. Ford met Lange
at the wrong time. She was years his junior and had two young
children. She also wanted to meet a few people after her divorce.
She was not interested in being tied down to any one man nor did she want to
live with one. Ford was crazy-in-love with her but she could never go
there. For her it was a nice romance with no strings.
A Pocketful of Miracles is worth a look. It's a 1920's New
York gangster comedy where thug Ford and his girlfriend Queenie (Lange), as a
gesture of kindness, help a street beggar (Bette Davis) become a refined lady
to meet her grown daughter (Ann-Margret) and the wealthy man she's going to
marry. Everyone, Lange included, is a total delight.
If one were looking for
a clue as to one's status in Hollywood, consider being Elvis Presley's leading
lady. The fact is an older actress in a Presley movie meant your career has seen better days.
In Wild in the
Country (1961) Lange plays troubled Elvis's psychiatrist and they
become a little smitten. Off the set they took smitten to another
level. There was a lot of fooling around on this well-named flick.
It was one of the singer's better films.
In 1962 she was hired to
play the part of George Peppard's wife in How the West Was Won but
then it was decided to forego the role and Lange was paid off and
released. Later when it was decided to include the part after all, she
was in Europe making another film and Carolyn Jones filled the role.
Lange got to enjoy
Europe while she made Love Is a Ball (1963). The
comedy centers on the professional matchmaking of titled but impoverished young
men with untitled but rich young women. It was cute enough but nothing
original. Ricardo Montalban and Charles Boyer added international allure
and the locations were gorgeous. So were the ladies. Lange never
looked more glamorous on screen.
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| It would soon be goodbye to Glenn Ford |
The brass at United Artists wanted
Shirley Jones to play opposite Ford in Love Is a Ball but he
saw it as one more opportunity to try to win Lange over to marriage so she got
the job. She admitted they had a fabulous time together but she saw it as
a lovely way to end a lovely romance.
Ford went into a lengthy, deep depression when he read that Lange had married Alan
Pakula, director of such films as Klute, All the
President's Men and Sophie's Choice. It was his
first marriage and since her career was going nowhere, she got back into the
wife mode and they managed eight years' of marriage. As a director of
such good films, I've always wondered why he didn't use her in some of
them.
In the late 1960's Lange
engaged in a years' long relationship with author John Cheever who was
a severe alcoholic, manic-depressive, neurotic, narcissist, bisexual and
married man. It must have been such fun. They smiled for the
cameras but it was obviously a relationship fraught with problems.
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| I've always loved this photo.... from Peyton Place |
For the next 10 years,
Lange appeared almost exclusively on television. Among the offerings were
a two-year run reprising the Gene Tierney role in The Ghost and Mrs.
Muir. I would have said no one could have successfully replaced
Tierney but Lange did a credible job, winning a couple of Emmys in the
process. She had turned herself into a deft comedienne. From
1971-74, she was in another series, this time starring Dick Van Dyke.
Another project was
1972's That Certain Summer, opposite Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen,
in one of the first gay-themed TV projects that I can recall. She played
Holbrook's ex-wife. It was high drama for the time and a ratings blaster.
A big light went off in
my head when I saw her in Death Wish (1974). I think
most name actresses would have turned down the part of Charles Bronson's wife
who is brutally murdered and we see a great deal of it. No, no,
not Hope Lange. She was in it about 10 minutes. They obviously
used her for name-value but how was that otherwise working for her movie
career?
It was a death wish for
her film work... about that I had no doubt and the years have proved it
correct. Her film work was undistinguished while her TV projects were
mainly guest shots and some TV movies.
I read about Lange in 1981. She gave apparently a stunning eulogy for her longtime friend Natalie Wood.
In 1986 she joined a
fascinating group of actors-- Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Laura Dern,
Dean Stockwell and Dennis Hopper-- to make David Lynch's Blue Velvet.
Depending on your take, you may find it a masterpiece or you might have run
screaming from the theater or stopped going to movies altogether. I
suppose no one says... Blue Velvet?... oh it's ok. I have
always found it haunting. I knew some who found it disturbing.
The story, or all I'm
about to tell, concerns a man who finds a severed ear in a field. He
reports it to a detective who requests that the man tell no one else his
story. But the detective is overheard by his daughter who connects with
the guy who found the ear. The couple then becomes involved with another
couple and this very strange story becomes airborne.
Lange plays the
detective's wife and while I found it a joy to rediscover her, I came away
thinking... hmmm, from Peyton Place and The Best of
Everything to an Elvis flick to Death Wish and Blue
Velvet. It just kind of takes your breath away.
One reason I always liked Murder, She Wrote is because it invited former stars an opportunity to get back in the acting harness. She had her episode, as had her first husband. Then
suddenly she had small roles in two films with major male stars... Clear
and Present Danger (1994) with Harrison Ford and Just Cause (1995)
with Sean Connery. The latter would be her final big screen appearance.
In 1986 she
married theatrical producer Charles Hollerith, with whom she stayed for
the rest of her life.
Hope Lange died in Santa
Monica at age 70 in 2003 of colitis.
Why did she not make it
big in films? Why was she not able to maintain her early momentum? As far
as I'm concerned-- and adding to the mystery-- her movie career went downhill after
she made The Best of Everything which was the best of
everything for her. It was the leading role, she nailed it and the film
was immensely popular. So what happened? I wish I knew. She
was certainly talented enough. Lange would later say that her early roles
all presented her as strong inside and soft outside and that
typecasting may have resulted in a short-lived major career.
Perhaps. Perhaps
not. After her divorce from Murray (her shortest marriage) she was
certainly known as a bit of a playgirl but I thought she was far more discrete
than some. While I never heard of her being accused of being difficult to
work with, I did read that she was strong and opinionated. Perhaps it was
the long hiatuses that she took from acting when there was a new man in her
life or that she turned to television.
I much admired her as an
actress. Loved her looks, loved her voice, loved her directness and I
always saw humor. There were many with half her talent who went way
further. Tis a shame.
Next posting:
Guilty Pleasures
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