BARBARA RUSH
(4 June 1927 - 31 March 2024)
The American actress Barbara Rush, who has died aged 97 from the results of dementia, was a hardworking performer in films and television as well as always returning to the theatre throughout her career. She was never short of work for nearly sixty years, although she didn’t for some reason become a grade A film celebrity.
Barbara Rush was born in Denver, Colorado, to father Roy, a mining lawyer, and mother Nora who became an actress and a nurse. Barbara studied the theatre programme at the University of California and won a scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse College. She started acting in local theatre and was discovered by Paramount Pictures. Her contract saw her playing parts in several minor films, the first being The Goldbergs, a comedy in 1950. However, she was soon working for director Douglas Sirk on The First Legion (1951) with Charles Boyer, as well as Taza, Son of Cochise, Magnificent Obsession and Captain Lightfoot, all with Rock Hudson.
She received a Golden Globe in 1954 for most promising female newcomer for Jack Arnold’s cult It Came from Outer Space, with Richard Carlson. She went on to make The Young Philadelphians, a legal drama with Paul Newman, The Bramble Bush, a drama of infidelity with Richard Burton, and The Young Lions, a World War II drama with Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Dean Martin.
Other films of the 1950s and 1960s include Strangers When We Meet with Kirk Douglas, No Down Payment with Joanne Woodward and Jeffrey Hunter, Rush’s first husband. Three of the best films she did were Bigger Than Life, Nicholas Ray’s 1956 heated drama in which she was the wife of a family man and teacher (James Mason) overdosing on cortisone. She was also in Martin Ritt’s 1967 revisionist Western, Hombre with Paul Newman, and Robin and the 7 Hoods, a modern day version of the famous myth, with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr and Bing Crosby. Rush played Marian. Many of her appearances were in unexceptional films but she had the stage and television for other work. During her long career she was in plays such as The Little Foxes, Antony and Cleopatra, The Mad Woman of Chaillot, The Fourposter, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Hay Fever, A Delicate Balance and many more. In 1970 she won the Sarah Siddons Award for her role in 40 Carats in Chicago.
After Can’t Stop the Music, the disastrous Village People musical of 1980, Rush concentrated on TV, not just in guest shots but also in long-running series such as 75 episodes of Peyton Place, 38 episodes of Flamingo Road, 35 of All My Children and ten times for 7th Heaven.
Barbara Rush’s marriage to actor Jeffrey Hunter lasted from 1950 to 1955. She married the publicist Warren Cowan from 1959 to 1969, and married the sculptor Jim Gruzalski from 1970 to 1973. She has a son Christopher Hunter and a daughter Claudia Cowan.
MICHAEL DARVELL