Sunday 17 March 2024

1620) Sarah Lawson

Sarah Elizabeth Lawson (1928 – 2023). English actress, best known for her film and television roles.
Lawson trained at Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, then worked in Perth, Ipswich, Felixstowe and London's West End.
Lawson's films have included The Browning Version (1951), The World Ten Times Over and The Devil Rides Out. Her radio work included The Hostage, Inspector West and Kind Sir.
Lawson's work on television included Time and the Conways, An Ideal Husband, Rupert of Hentzau, Corridors of Power, The White Guard, Crown Court (TV series), Bergerac, and Zero One. She made guest appearances in such series as The Avengers, The Saint, Gideon's Way, The Professionals, The Persuaders! and Danger Man. Lawson's most significant television work was in the Granada TV series The Odd Man, starring Moultrie Kelsall and Edwin Richfield.
 
- "Auburn-haired and high-cheekboned, with a beauty described as “copper and cream”..." https://www.telegraph.co.uk/.../sarah-lawson-actress.../
 
- "Auburn-haired British actress of stage and screen, the youngest of three siblings..." https://www.amazon.com/.../amzn1.dv.gti.f823c59e-695e.../
 

 

1619) Enid Lindeman

Enid Lindeman (1892 - 1973). Australian socialite and heiress.
She was the daughter of a wine merchant.
At 21, she married the 45-year-old American shipping tycoon Roderick Cameron. They had a son, Roderick, but soon after Cameron fell ill with cancer and died. He had left everything from his enormous estate to Enid, and she was now a millionaire.
When WWI broke out, Enid moved to Paris to drive an ambulance for the allies.
In 1917 she married the General Frederick Cavendish. They had two childre, Patricia and Frederick, but in 1931 Cavendish died of brain hemorrhage.
In 1933 Enid married again, this time to Marmaduke Furness, 1st Viscount Furness, a British shipping magnate and the sixth richest man in the world. The marriage was not happy, but by 1940, Furness was seriously ill from cirrhosis of the liver (a consequence of his overindulgence in drink) and died in the month of October in the south of France, turning Enid into a widow for the third time.
At the height of WWII, she managed to get back to England and while she awaited her inheritance from Furness to be settled she met an old boyfriend, the Anglo-Irish aristocrat Valentine Browne, Earl of Kenmare once the most famous gossip columnist in London. The two married in 1943 and moved to Killarney, in Co. Kerry. Eight months later, she was, once again, a widow after Valentine suffered a fatal heart attack. As he died without an heir, Enid, who was fifty-one at the time, fabricated a story that she was pregnant. Remaining at Killarney she kept up the ruse for a year, during which time a baby failed to materialise.
Having been gossiped about the rumour that she had killed four husbands, Somerset Maugham nicknamed her "Lady Killmore".
In her old age Enid lived at Broadlands, a farm in South Africa, from where she bred race horses.
 
- "Standing almost six-feet-tall with red hair and emerald green eyes..." https://themitfordsociety.wordpress.com/tag/enid-cavendish/
 
- "The 21-year-old Enid, nearly six feet tall and with green eyes and red hair..." https://www.factinate.com/people/facts-enid-lindeman
 

 

Monday 4 March 2024

1618) Ada Nield Chew

Ada Nield Chew (1870 – 1945). Campaigning socialist and British suffragist.

She was one of 13 children and left school at the age of 11 to help her mother take care of the house and family.
In 1897 she married George Chew, an organiser of the Independent Labour Party. Their daughter (and only child), Doris, was born in the following year. Chew then became an organiser for the Women's Trade Union League in 1900, working alongside Mary Macarthur.
In the years leading up to the First World War, Chew became an active supporter of the movement for women's suffrage and became a member of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. She worked for this body as an organiser from 1911 to 1914.
After the end of the war, and the achievement of women's suffrage in 1918, Chew withdrew from any major involvement in politics, but still worked to improve the working conditions, diet and health of working-class women. She retired from the business in 1930 and undertook a round-the-world tour in 1935.
 
- "Ada’s first public appearance was made the same year: she would have made quite an impression with her handsome look and stunning red hair.https://www.greatbritishlife.co.uk/lifestyle/23252373.campaign-statue-ada-nield-chew-forgotten-suffragist/
 
- "Ada Nield Chew was very diffident about her personal appearance, but contemporaries record that she was very good-looking, with striking red hair.https://openlearnlive-s3bucket.s3.eu
 
 

 

Saturday 6 January 2024

1617) Madeline Kahn

Madeline Gail Kahn (née Wolfson; 1942 – 1999). American actress, comedian, and singer.
She is known for comedic roles in films directed by Peter Bogdanovich and Mel Brooks, including What's Up, Doc? (1972), Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), High Anxiety (1977), History of the World, Part I (1981), and her Academy Award–nominated role in Paper Moon (1973).
Kahn made her Broadway debut in Leonard Sillman's New Faces of 1968, and received Tony Award nominations for the play In the Boom Boom Room in 1974 and for the original production of the musical On the Twentieth Century in 1978. She starred as Madeline Wayne on the short-lived sitcom Oh Madeline (1983–84) and won a Daytime Emmy Award in 1987 for an ABC Afterschool Special. She received a third Tony Award nomination for the revival of the play Born Yesterday in 1989, before winning the 1993 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for the comedy The Sisters Rosensweig. Her other film appearances included The Cheap Detective (1978), City Heat (1984), Clue (1985), and Nixon (1995).
Kahn was born in Boston, the daughter of Bernard B. Wolfson, a garment manufacturer, and his wife Freda (née Goldberg). She was raised in a nonobservant Jewish family. Her parents divorced when Kahn was two, and she moved with her mother to New York City. In 1953, Freda married Hiller Kahn, who later adopted Madeline; Freda eventually changed her own name to Paula Kahn.


- "She had beautiful skin and auburn hair, high cheekbones." https://moviestvnetwork.com/lists/mel-brooks-remembers-young-frankenstein


- "She was in her early 50s at the time, her red hair was curled and styled, not long..." https://madeline-kahn-being-the-music.blogspot.com/2009/ 


- "In the school-of-Brooks comedy, The Adventure Of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (1975), directed and starring Gene Wilder, she was a red-haired mystery woman..." https://www.theguardian.com/news/1999/dec/06/guardianobituaries2

 


 

Friday 5 January 2024

1616) Eileen Herlie

Eileen Herlie (1918 – 2008). Scottish-American actress.
She was born Eileen Isobel Herlihy to an Irish Catholic father, Patrick Herlihy, and a Scottish Protestant mother, Isobel Cowden, in Glasgow, Scotland. She was trained as a theatre actress. Among her West End London theatre successes were The Eagle Has Two Heads by Jean Cocteau. She was married twice, to Philip Barrett (m 1942) and Witold Kuncewicz (m 1951), both marriages ending in divorce. She had no children. In 1955 she moved permanently to the United States, where she lived and worked for the last fifty-three years of her life.
In 1942 she moved to England to work as a professional actress. Her first role in the London theatre in 1942 was as the second Mrs de Winter in Daphne du Maurier's stage adaptation of her own novel Rebecca.
In 1951 she made her first television appearance in the leading role of Regina in a BBC TV adaptation of Lillian Hellman's stage play The Little Foxes.
Herlie's first big film break was being cast by Laurence Olivier in his screen adaptation of William Shakespeare's Hamlet, shot in 1947. She played Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, for the second time. On this occasion, at 29, she was eleven years younger than her 40-year-old stage son (Olivier).
Herlie's other American film appearances in the 1960s were roles in Freud: The Secret Passion (1962), and The Sea Gull (1968), the first major film version in English of Anton Chekhov's celebrated play. (The second was her last feature film.)
In 1955, Herlie made her Broadway debut as Irene Molloy in The Matchmaker (which was later made into the musical Hello, Dolly!). In 1960, she was nominated for a Tony Award as 'Best Actress in a Musical' for Take Me Along, an adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness!
In May 1976, Herlie made the move to television soap operas in the role of Myrtle Fargate on All My Children, playing the role for virtually the rest of her life. In the 1980s, Herlie was nominated for three consecutive Daytime Emmy Awards (1984, 1985 and 1986). 


- ”I’m sure Eileen is lighting up the skies in heaven with her flaming red hair and lovely Scottish accent,” says Lucci, who’s also currently a contestant on Dancing With the Stars." https://ew.com/.../soap-watch-amc-stars-remember-eileen.../

 
- "The feisty, flaming red-haired Scot took her first Broadway bow in 1955..." https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0379047/


 

Thursday 2 November 2023

1615) Joan Kimball Matthews

Joan Kimball Matthews (1923 - 2021). American magazine model and painter.

She attended Parsons School of Design and in her 20s she was signed by John Powers' top modeling agency, and started modeling for Mademoiselle magazine.
In 1947 Joan married William Cary Matthews, with whom she had four children.
She continued studying painting at the Art Academy in San Francisco and became an abstract expressionist and oil painter. In 1968 Joan had a successful one-woman show at the Corwith Gallery on Union Street, San Francisco.
 
- "... Joan's long auburn hair and glamour caught the eye of John Powers..." https://www.legacy.com/.../name/joan-matthews-obituary...
 

 

1614) Duncan Mackenzie

Duncan Mackenzie (1861 – 1934). Scottish archaeologist, whose work focused on one of the more spectacular 20th century archaeological finds, Crete's palace of Knossos, the proven centre of Minoan civilisation.

He was born in the small, Gaelic-speaking village of Aultgowrie, in the highlands of eastern Scotland, the fourth of nine children of Alexander and his wife, Margaret Kennedy MacKenzie.
He studied philosophy at the University of Edinburgh; and received his PhD from Vienna in classical archaeology.
Appointed field supervisor of the excavation of Phylakopi by the British School at Athens, he worked closely with a team of professional archaeologists including Arthur Evans and David George Hogarth. After a few years they realised that Phylakopi was not going to yield that information. The evidence pointed toward Crete. Purchasing the land at Knossos, Evans began excavation, sending for the third member of the team, MacKenzie, who took up his old position as supervisor of excavation. The two would work together for the next thirty years, long after the excavation was complete (1905). MacKenzie remained as curator of the site, taking up residence in the new Villa Ariadne constructed as headquarters in 1906 on the hill above the site.
According to Evans, Mackenzie came to suffer from severe alcoholism and could not only no longer function as curator, but was fast declining into a demented state. Evans placed him in an institution, where he died not long after.
 
- "Mackenzie was a Scot with an inaudible Highland voice, a brush of red hair, an uncertain temper, a great command of languages, and great experience in keeping the records of an excavation." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Mackenzie
 

Mackenzie is the man on the right, kneeling on the trench.