HAPPY BIRTHDAY
PAT HINGLE (1924 - 2009)
A notable role was as the father of the character played by Warren Beatty in Splendor in the Grass (1961). He is probably best known in recent times for playing Commissioner Gordon in the 1989 film Batman, and its three sequels. Hingle had a long list of television and movie credits to his name, going back to 1948. Among them are Hang 'Em High (1968), Sudden Impact (1983), Road To Redemption (2001), When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder? (1979), Brewster's Millions (1985), Stephen King's Maximum Overdrive (1986), The Grifters (1990), Citizen Cohn (1992), The Land Before Time (1988), Wings (1996), and Shaft (2000).
He lost the lead role in the film Elmer Gantry (1960), which could have been a turning point in his screen career, when he, trying to escape a stalled elevator in his apartment building on the West Side, fell more than 50 feet down the shaft. He fractured his skull, hip, wrist, and most of the ribs on his left side, also breaking his left leg in three places. A finger had to be amputated. Near death for two weeks, he spent a year relearning to walk. Burt Lancaster inherited the role and won an Oscar.
JUANO HERNANDEZ (1919 - 1970)
He was the son of a Puerto Rican seaman. He was self-educated and spent much of his childhood in Brazil singing on the streets to raise money for food. He became an actor after having been a circus performer, radio actor, and vaudeville performer.
In 1949, he acted in his first mainstream film, based on William Faulkner's novel, Intruder in the Dust, in which he played the role of "Lucas Beauchamp", a poor Southern sharecropper unjustly accused of murder. The film earned him a Golden Globe nomination for "New Star of the Year".
The film was listed as one of the ten best of the year by the New York Times. Faulkner said of the film: "I'm not much of a moviegoer, but I did see that one. I thought it was a fine job. That Juano Hernandez is a fine actor--and man, too."
In the 1950 western Stars In My Crown, directed by Jacques Tourneur, starring Joel McCrea, Hernández plays a freed slave who refuses to sell his land and faces an angry lynch mob.
He was singled out for praise for his performance in the 1950 film The Breaking Point with John Garfield. The New York Times called his performance "quietly magnificent."
He also received favorable notices for his performances in Trial (1955), about a politically charged court case, in which he played the judge, and Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker (1965).
Hernández returned to Puerto Rico late in his life and he died in San Juan on July 17, 1970 of a cerebral hemorrhage and was interred at Cementerio Buxeda Memorial Park, Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico.
PATRICIA MEDINA (1919 - 2012)
Patricia Paz Maria Medina was born in Liverpool, England to a Spanish father and an English mother. She began acting as a teenager in the late 1930s and worked her way up to leading roles in the mid-1940s, where she left for Hollywood. Medina teamed up with British actor Louis Hayward and they appeared together in Fortunes of Captain Blood (1950), The Lady and the Bandit (1951), Lady in the Iron Mask (1952) and Captain Pirate (1952). Voluptuous and exotic-looking, Medina was often typecast in period melodramas such as The Black Knight (1954). Two of her more notable films were William Witney's Stranger at My Door (1956) and Orson Welles' Mr. Arkadin (1955), a follow-up of The Third Man (1949), based on the radio series "The Lives of Harry Lime". Although prolific during the early 1950s, her film career faded away by the end of the decade.
She and her husband, American actor Joseph Cotten, toured together in several plays and on Broadway in the murder mystery "Calculated Risk".
quote: [on working with Lou Costello, in Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion (1950)] He was a perfect gentleman, and so helpful to somebody who hadn't done very much acting. He'd ad-lib out of habit--he just couldn't help it. He certainly didn't do it to throw you, and if he did throw you, he was terribly apologetic and sweet. The only thing was, it was very difficult to look him in the eye without breaking up--he had that angelic face. He was a naughty little Peter Pan, he never grew up. And although he was a child, you can't be that great a performer without being a true sophisticate. And he was that. Many children are most sophisticated, and Lou was a very sophisticated child. I thought he was the greatest comedian I had ever seen. Nice.
Following her death at age 92, she was interred at Blandford Cemetary in Petersburg, Virginia beside her beloved Joseph Cotten.
ISABEL JEWELL (1907 - 1972)
Isabell Jewell, like other actresses in Hollywood in the 1930's, suffered from chronic typecasting. The diminutive, platinum-haired doctor's daughter seemed to be forever playing hardboiled, tough-talking broads: gangster's molls, dumb blondes, prostitutes and, of course, poor 'white trash' Emmy Slattery in Gone with the Wind (1939).
While stardom eluded her for the most part, she nonetheless remained a busy supporting actress with an impressive array of A-budget films to her credit. Signed as an MGM contract player, she reputedly earned up to $3,000 a week - a small fortune at the time.
While her parts were often small, they could also be memorable: for example, Ceiling Zero (1936), Marked Woman (1937), Lost Horizon (1937) and a poignant against-type performance as an ill-fated seamstress on her way to the guillotine in A Tale of Two Cities (1935).
In the 1940's and 50's, her roles diminished from small to bits to uncredited and she fell on hard times: in 1959, she got into trouble with the law in Las Vegas for passing bad cheques, and, two years later, spent five days in jail for drunk driving. She was found dead in her home in April 1972, aged just 64. One of her two former husbands was writer, producer and director Owen Crump (1903-1998). A lasting memory of Isabell Jewell is her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
