Hope Lange

I was pretty crazy about her in the mid-50's when she first became a movie actress.  She wasn't my type... meaning she wasn't that smartass type of actress I was so attracted to.  But I noticed not only her cool, blonde beauty but her intelligence which I felt came through loud and clear.  There was a lot of clamor about her when she arrived on the Hollywood scene but her film career seemed to peter out before it should have and she never reached the heights that her talent deserved.  

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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Guilty Pleasures