Carlotta Mercedes Agnes McCambridge
(Martha Ellis Bryant)
Stage, Radio, Television and Film Actress
(1916-2004)
Birthplace: Joliet, Illinois, U.S.A.
Education: Mundelein College, Illinois
Radiography:
1938 Your Health
1938 Lights Out
1938 Pulitzer Prize Plays
1939 A Thousand and One Wives
1939 Midstream
1940 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
1941 The Jello Program
1941 The Rudy Vallee Sealtest Show
1941 Salute To Labor
1942 The Great Gildersleeve
1942 Plays For Americans
1942 The Adventures Of Red Ryder
1942 Kraft Music Hall
1942 Suspense
1943 Free World Theater
1943 Cavalcade For Victory
1944 Everything For the Boys
1944 Columbia Presents Corwin
1944 Four For the Fifth
1944 Theater of Romance
1945 Radio Hall Of Fame
1945 Arch Oboler's Plays
1945 New World A'Comin'
1945 Treasury Salute
1946 Inner Sanctum
1946 Front Page Drama
1946 The World's Most Honored Flights
1946 Gang Busters
1946 Mercury Summer Theater
1946 Murder At Midnight
1946 The Shadow
1947 One World Or None
1947 Bulldog Drummond
1947 The Greatest Story Ever Told
1947 Studio One
1947 Cavalcade of America
1947 This Is Nora Drake
1948 Your Playhouse Of Favorites
1948 Radio Reader's Digest
1948 The Big Story
1948 The Mysterious Traveler
1948 Ford Theater
1949 The Whistler
1949 Perry Mason
1949 I Love A Mystery
1950 Academy Awards Program
1951 Screen Director's Playhouse
1951 The Defense Rests (Audition)
1951 Defense Attorney
1953 Family Skeleton
1974 CBS Radio Mystery Theater
Drop Dead
The Cisco Kid |

Mercedes McCambridge before an NBC Mike

LIFE magazine recorded Mercedes McCambridge's range of expressions while reading lines from Portrait of A Girl (49-09-23)

Caption reads -- Son's Boat was sent from Haiti where Miss McCambridge's husband William Fifield, former radio writer, is writing his first full-length book

Mercedes McCambridge for Royal Crown Cola in 1950

Mercedes McCambridge was married to Fletcher Markle for 12 years.
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From the April 9th, 1951 Baytown Sun:
Along Broadway:
Actresses' Husband's Day May Prove Too Expensive
By EARL WILSON
NEW YORK--At last, men--what we've been waiting fora Husband's Day!
We're going to be pampered by our loving wives one day of the year (why only one, I don't know). And for this tribute to us for being the superior sex we can thank Mercedes McCambridge and Lucille Ball, the Hollywood actress.
Mercedes is the gal who says women should give up the vote and let their menfolk do the heavy thinking.
"On Husbands Day we'll wait on our husbands hand and foot and our slogan will be, 'My husband is the most wonderful man in the world,'" she announced.
(She seemed rather sane, too.)
"By all means our husbands will be served breakfast in bed to start the day," she said. "And everything that day is for him."
"How about if he wants to go to a ball game or go fishing?"
"Fine! We'll go with him!"
"Maybe he'd rather go alone."
"Fine. Everything he does that day is perfect."
"MAYBE HE'D like to go see his his girl friend, I suggested.
Miss McCambridge said that Husband's Dayor Happy Husband's Day, as she also likes to think of itwill make the husband so delirious with joy that such a thing would be impossible.
"We'll get out the best silver," she rippled on enthusiasticallya fancy tablecloth. There'll be flowers."
"You're gonna send your husband flowers?" I asked in some surprise.
"No, but there'll be flowers in the house. It'll be Sunday. The kids will be out of the house that day."
"Where?"
"We'll send them out. We might even pretend he isn't even your husband. Just your boy friend. It'll be a real arty thing. We'll get a new negligee and . . . oooh, it'll get real illicit and wonderful."
MISS McCAMBRIDGE hugged herself thinking how wonderful it would be.
Miss McCambridge is the gal from Joilet who was the academy award supporting acress in 1950. To promote her ideas about more happiness for husbands, she announced formation of "Magnolias Anonymous," which has no dues, no officers, and, I, suspect, no members.
"When were you going to give us this day?" I inquired suspiciously.
"Let's have Happy Husband's Day in August," she said.
"Maybe the Happy Husband to be happy would like to get loaded," I said.
"Let's get him as loaded as he likes on Happy Husband's Day. It would be wonderful to have champagne for breakfast."
"It seems to me that you've already got something like this in Father's Day," I mentioned.
"Oh, no, father isn't a husband!"
"He'd better be or it ain't legal," I pointed out.
MISS McCAMBRIDGE thought the husband should be expected to light his own cigarets and open his own doors, but he certainly would not be expected to mix his own drinks.
"And at night," she said, "he gets taken to dinner"
"Wonderful!"
"But he pays for it, of course."
At this point in our feverish planning for this word panacea, Miss McCambridge's husband, handsome Fletcher Markle, the Hollywood producer came in. He was quite astonished, because this was the first he had heard he was going to undergo a whole day of pampering.
"What is this going to cost us afterward?" he asked, real husband-like.
"Oh, there'll have to be a pay off, don't worry!" she said.
IT REMINDED US of the story of the fellow who was trying to get a man to go back to his wife.
"Just think," argued the friend, "at night she'll light your pipe and bring your slippers, and in the morning she'll get up and fix you breakfast."
"Yeah," said the husband, "and I think I'll go back to her anyway."
Personally, I'm all for the Happy Husband's Day. In fact, we're having a preliminary one at our house next Sunday just to get certain people in training for the big one next August.
From the April 3rd 2004 edition of The Gettysburg Times:
Actress Mercedes
McCambridge dies at 85
LOS ANGELES (AP) Actress Mercedes McCambridge, who won an Oscar for the 1949 film "All the King's Men" and later provided the raspy voice of the demon-possessed girl in "The Exorcist,"' has died. She was 85.
McCambridge died from natural causes on March 2, the Rev. Joe Carroll, a friend and the founder of a San Diego charity for the homeless, said Tuesday. She had lived in the La Jolla area of San Diego since the 1980s.
McCambridge's strong, radio-trained voice made her an ideal film portrayer of hard-driving women. She received the Academy Award as supporting actress for her screen debut in "All the King's Men," playing a reporter who was the nemesis of the populist Southern governor, Willie Stark.
Broderick Crawford was named best actor for his role as Stark, a close replica of Louisiana's Huey Long, and the drama was honored with a best picture Oscar.
During her film career, McCambridge acquired a reputation as a strong-willed, outspoken woman on and off the screen. When she was hired to play the enemy of Joan Crawford in a 1954 Western. "Johnny Guitar," the pair feuded on the set. In her memoir, McCambridge called Crawford "a mean, tipsy, powerful, rotten-egg lady."
Because of her great vocal skills, McCambridge was hired to portray The Demon in William Friedkin's 1973 smash hit "The Exorcist." After weeks of what she called the hardest work she had done for a film, she had been promised prominent mention in the credits.
But when she attended the preview, her name was missing. As she left the theater in tears, Friedkin tried to explain that there had been no time to insert her credit. The Screen Actors Guild intervened and forced her inclusion in the credits.
Despite the celebrity that followed her Academy Award for "All the King's Men," McCambridge's film career did not flourish. Because she did not fit the glamour girl image that was prevalent in postwar films, her movie work was sporadic.
Among the later films: "Giant" (1956 her second Academy nomination as supporting actress), "A Farewell to Arms" (1957), "Touch of Evil" (1958 with her radio cohort Orson Welles), "Suddenly Last Summer" (1959), "Cimarron" (1960), "99 Women" (1969), "Thieves" (1977), "The Concorde Airport '79" (1979).
In the early 1990s, Neil Simon called with an offer to play the grandmother in "Lost in Yonkers" on Broadway and on the road. McCambridge's return to the New York theater proved triumphant, and she performed the play 560 times.
In her later years, McCambridge also appeared in "Magnum, P.I." and other television series, but her movie work was sparse.
"I don't think the Hollywood community is interested in what I can do," she said in a 1981 interview. "That's all right I've never looked for a job in my life, and I'm not going to start now. I have plenty to keep me busy."
McCambridge battled through much of her life, surviving a long siege of alcoholism, two failed marriages and series of tragedies involving her only child, John Lawrence Fifield. The son, who later took the last name of his mother's second husband, Markle, killed his wife and children and himself in 1987.
Charlotte Mercedes Agnes McCambridge was born to Irish parents on March 17, 1918, on the family farm at Joliet, Ill.
After graduation from Mundelein College in Chicago, she acted in Chicago radio, which then produced several network soap operas and nighttime shows. She married her first husband, William Fifield, at 23.
They eventually wound up in Hollywood, where she resumed her career as a radio actress. Her vocal versatility brought her jobs on shows ranging from "I Love a Mystery" to "Red Ryder."
McCambridge returned to New York for the title role in a radio adaptation of the play "Abie's Irish Rose." She later found steady work in the radio dramas of Welles, who called her "the world's greatest living radio actress."
From 1950 to 1962, McCambridge was married to Canadian-born Fletcher Markle, a radio director who became well-known in the U.S. during the years of live television drama. During the marriage and afterward, she was sometimes hospitalized after episodes of heavy drinking. After years with Alcoholics Anonymous, she achieved sobriety.
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Howard Culver
(Judson Barnes)
Radio, Television, and Film Actor and Announcer
(1918-1984)
Birthplace: Larimer County, Colorado, USA
Radiography:
1937 The Life of Mary Sothern
1942 News Of the World Today
1944 Star Performance
1944 We Deliver the Goods
1946 Strange Wills
1946 The Whistler
1947 All-Star Western Theatre
1947 Mystery In the Air
1947 Stairway To the Stars
1947 Family Theatre
1948 Straight Arrow
1948 Suspense
1948 The Adventures Of Ellery Queen
1948 Chandu the Magician
1948 Make Believe Town
1948 Anacin Hollywood Star Theatre
1948 Stories From the American Scene
1949 Our American Heritage
1949 The Adventures Of Philip Marlowe
1949 Gunsmoke
1949 The Croupier
1949 Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar
1950 The Hour Of St Francis
1950 The Fabulous Mr Manchester
1951 Defense Attorney
1952 Father Knows Best
1952 The Freedom Story
1952 Wild Bill Hickok
1952 Escape
1953 The Roy Rogers Show
1954 Rocky Fortune
1954 Inheritance
1954 The Railroad Hour
1955 Barrie Craig, Confidential Investigator
1956 Fort Laramie
1957 A Joy Forever
1958 Have Gun, Will Travel
1979 Sears Radio Theater
Horizons West
I Devise and Bequeath
Mission Accomplished
When the West Was Young
Hollywood Theatre Group
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Howard Culver as Dr. Bill Hawley in Perry Mason (1957)

Howard Culver as handwriting expert Rufus Bolding in Perry Mason (1958)

Howard Culver as Rufus Bolding shakes hands with Perry Mason (1958)

Howard Culver as Detective Parker in The Third Man (1959)

Howard Culver as Jury Foreman in The Twilight Zone (1961)

Howard Culver in The Untouchables (1962)
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Diminutive Howard Culver was a giant in Radio and a solid, steadily working character actor in Television. Born in Colorado, Culver grew up in Los Angeles, California. By the age of 19 he was appearing in Radio on The Life of Mary Sothern.
From the outset, Howard Culver's distinctive baritone and straightforward delivery promised a long and successful career for the young actor/announcer. Working regularly at KFI, KNX and Don Lee-Mutual in Los Angeles and with Don Lee-Mutual in San Francisco, Culver had already performed in almost a thousand Radio episodes by the time he entered The Navy during World War II.
Upon his return to civilian life, Howard Culver jumped right back into Radio, as well as early Television. Over a forty year career in Radio, Howard Culver compiled an estimated 4,000 appearances. His Television career, equally successful and prolific saw him in some 200 Television appearances over a 35 year career.
As with many of the truly great character actors of from The Golden Age of Television, Howard Culver was a master of 'disappearing' into a well-directed Television feature--that was, after all, what he was being paid to do. As such it's a foregone conclusion that virtually anyone who watched mainstream Television from The Golden Age has seen Howard Culver a hundred times, and can probably remember him but not specifically place him.
But where Howard Culver's voice is concerned, it's likely that virtually any genuine Golden Age Radio fan can recognize Howard Culver's distinctive voice, irrespective of the vehicle in which he was appearing. He did acquire his own fan following over the years for several memorable leading roles--especially his starring role in Straight Arrow (1948) as Steve Adams for almost three years and three-hundred episodes. Juvenile adventure fans will also recognize Howard Culver from his role as the announcer in the Chandu The Magician (1948) radio series. Culver was also Radio's last Ellery Queen (1948).
Clearly comfortable in juvenile adventure roles, Culver's most diverse body of work in Radio was in the crime, mystery and detective genres which found him appearing in a truly remarkable variety of roles, spanning the entire range of characterizations. Culver was a frequent performer in virtually anything that Jack Webb was ever a party to, as well as numerous appearances in Strange Wills (1946), All-Star Western Theatre (1947), Mystery in The Air (1947) and Defense Attorney (1951).
Working right up until his unexpected passing--while on vacation in Hong Kong--Culver seemed even more in demand as a character actor the more he matured. His voice certainly never wavered and his character performances right through the end of his career were predictably solid--the epitome of a true craftsman.
Howard Culver's widow, Lois--a Radio professional in her own right--remained active in the Vintage Radio community after Howard's passing. |