Rhonda Fleming, in 1981 Wally Fong / AP
She was considered the queen of Technicolor in the 1940s and 1950s, when suddenly her red hair and green eyes were competing in the same category of physical resemblance: Maureen O'Hara (who was more talented).
Yesterday Friday, his personal assistant, Carla Sapon, confirmed to
The New York Times
that Rhonda Fleming, one of the last survivors of classic Hollywood, had died on Wednesday in Santa Monica (California) at the age of 97.
Thus an actress with a career in which she worked on 40 films was leaving –among the most outstanding are
Remember
(1945),
While New York Sleeps
(1956) or
Duel of the Titans
(1957) - and with the great gallants of the time: from Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and Charlton Heston to Ronald Reagan.
Marilyn Louis was born in 1923 in Los Angeles.
Daughter of an insurance salesman and of a model and actress, however, she had not thought about it until after leaving Beverly Hills High School, a man from a car told her that she should make movies.
She wouldn't listen to him, but he insisted and showed up at her house: it was Henry Wilson, a famous agent, the guy who drove the emerging careers of Rock Hudson or Robert Wagner.
After three small uncredited roles, Fleming, hired at David O. Selznick's studio, landed her first major character in
Alfred Hitchcock's
thriller
Remember
(1945), starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck.
“They told me I was a nympho.
I ran home, and my mother and I looked up the word in the dictionary, "he said decades later in an interview.
"We were in shock."
With Selznick focused on the career of his wife, Jennifer Jones, Fleming was left free to work with whoever he wanted.
And he chained several films: from
The Street of Conflicts
(1946) and
Return to the Past
(1947), he jumped to
A Yankee in King Arthur's Court
(1948), alongside Bing Crosby.
This amiable musical marked his career: it was his first film in color, and suddenly his red hair and green eyes made him go up in category;
Crosby was so pleased with her that he recommended her to another great box-office comedian of the time, Bob Hope, for
The Great Lover
(1949).
Suddenly, Fleming was a great star, although without being able to demonstrate his talent.
For 15 years he chained film after film, and juicy salaries, but at his side no one screened the scripts or advised him to change his mind.
That is why very few of her later films are saved: The Serpent of the Nile (1953), where she played Cleopatra,
While New York Sleeps
(1956), by Fritz Lang;
The murderer is loose
(1956), by Budd Boetticher, or the mythical western
Duel of the Titans
(1957), with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas under the command of John Sturges.
Instead, Maureen O'Hara found John Wayne and John Ford.
As his film career waned, in the early 1960s, Fleming began singing in Las Vegas, performing on Broadway, and appearing on television in various series and commercials.
Around 1965, after
The American Wife,
with Ugo Tognazzi, the tap was closed and he only played some serial episodic role in the seventies.
His farewell to the screen - if we do not count his appearance in a 1990 short - was in
The Crazy Agent 86
(1980), a failed translation of the delirious adventures of Maxwell Smart (played by Don Adams).
Fleming stood out for his charitable work in favor of research against cancer, a disease from which his sister Beverly died.
Thus, at the beginning of the nineties, she founded the Rhonda Fleming Mann clinic at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, together with her fifth husband, Ted Mann, an entrepreneur of the cinematographic exhibition.
The actress was married six times.