and a few of the many signatures that are on offer !(which seem variable!)
History Page
Some of the Real Story of Lee Remick
and a few of the many signatures that are on offer
!(which seem variable!)
Press Extracts relating to Lee
First there are two,which outlined the Glamour expectations,of her early career.
Then there are the Two accounts of her Cancer.
The first when she believed she was cured and
the second about the final re-occurence.
Wednesday, July 3, 1991
Remick Proved a Beautiful Role Model
By: CHARLES CHAMPLIN
SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
The actors and actresses we watch on screens large and small are
sometimes love objects, occasionally role models, but perhaps most often
simply figures of fascination who lead us to wonder what they are really
like in their private lives (when we haven't been told by the checkout
stand tabloids, or even more so when we have).
Both Lee Remick and Michael Landon, who died from cancer within a day
of each other this week, became role models of a special and remarkable
kind in their real lives.
They offered us profiles in courage as they both accepted and, as long
as each could, defied the terrible medical news that came to them as it
comes to so many others.
When I last talked with Lee Remick a year and a half ago, she had been
battling kidney cancer for nearly a year. Her silent struggle had been,
as she said, "drastic and horrible--and successful." Now that she had
conquered it, she felt free to go public with the fight, for the
encouragement of others, and to get on with her career.
She was no longer the sensual but somehow innocent 22-year-old
cheerleader marrying Andy Griffith in the Elia Kazan-Budd Schulberg "A
Face in the Crowd," her unforgettable film debut. But she was a
breathtakingly beautiful mature woman, whose ordeal could be seen only in
a kind of deeper wisdom in her eyes.
Whether in the privacy of her thoughts she was entirely confident she
had beaten the disease I have no way of knowing. But if she wasn't, the
disguise was perfect and she was eager simply to look ahead and talk of
the roles that awaited her.
In the picture gallery of fine American actresses, she holds a special
place. She was always, indubitably, Lee Remick; her beauty, both perky
and patrician, and her obvious intelligence were hers alone. But her gift
as a superior actress, like the gift of all really good actresses, was to
move so far into the role that she ceased to be the actress acting and
became the character. She induced that willing surrender of disbelief.
The range was wonderful, from the sexy and teasing young things of
"The Long Hot Summer" and "Anatomy of a Murder" (in which
she was
sensationally and mischievously fine) to the alcoholic wife in "Days of
Wine and Roses" and the elegant and somehow mysterious lady in "The
Europeans." In her mid-50s (she was 55 when she died), she had succeeded
in the hardest career chore for any actress, moving smoothly up the age
ranges from the nubile newcomer to the riper allure of what the French
call "a woman of a certain age."
She had begun on stage when she was only 16, did summer stock, live
television and a short-lived but unforgettable Stephen Sondheim musical:
his first, "Anyone Can Whistle," with Angela Lansbury. She was going
to
do Sondheim again, his "A Little Night Music" here in Los Angeles,
when
illness overtook her and forced her to abandon the idea.
When film work slowed down, as it has for nearly everyone, she
blossomed again in television, playing the title role as Winston
Churchill's American-born mother "Jennie" and a range of other
productions from "The Blue Knight" to Henry James' "The
Ambassadors" and
"Mistral's Daughters."
When we talked last year, Lee Remick was remembering a curious moment
when she became aware of a woman studying her closely in a restaurant.
Eventually the woman got her nerve together and came to her table and
asked, "You're Lee Remick, aren't you?"
The actress said, "Yes, I'm Lee Remick."
"I thought so," the woman said. "You look so much like her, and
she's
so pretty."
Lee Remick regarded the moment as mystical, almost metaphysical. "Then
I realized that she was separating the me she saw on the screen from the
me she was seeing in person."
When I heard the sad news Tuesday morning, I thought of that
restaurant encounter as Lee Remick had described it. It is true that our
stars have both public and private lives, and probably more often than
not the latter are not as romanticized and idealized as the former, or
the tabloids would have little to write about.
But once in a while there is a beautiful concurrence between the
private person and the public performance. As an actress, Lee Remick was
a role model to inspire any young performer. As a private woman
confronting the hardest news of all with courage and dignity, Lee Remick
was a model for the world.
Another set-back
Looking back over her career, Lee Remick named "Wild River" as her
favorite film, yet it was while making "Wild River" that Lee went
through a very trying experience. A few days before Christmas, Lee
received a telegram stating that her husband, producer-director Bill
Colleran, had been severely injured in a car accident in Los
Angeles. Colleran was driving down Hollywood's Coldwater Canyon
late one night after finishing the direction and taping of a Sinatra
TV show when he fell asleep at the wheel, missed a turn in the road
and piled up against some brick pillars.
"Your husband paralyzed," ran the telegram. "May not live." Elia
Kazan, the director of "Wild River" immediately suspended operations
while Lee packed her bags for California. "It all happened so fast,"
Lee said. "The day I got the telegram was the day I left. I was
absolutely crushed and destroyed..."
Not knowing whether or not her husband would survive, Lee left the
production and flew to California with her 12 month old
daughter. "When I arrived at the U.C.L.A. Medical Center," Lee
said, "Bill didn't know me. He didn't know where he was. After six
days of coma, he just lay there. I tried to help the doctors wake
him up by yelling at him. One night, the nurse and I were sitting on
opposite sides of the bed, and one of Bill's eyes just began to
open. The nurse said, 'Bill, turn your had to the right and tell
me who it is.' Up to this moment, Bill hadn't uttered a word.
Then he gave her a you-stupid-nurse look and said, very disdainfully,
'That's my wife.' Bill is a medical mystery. If you'd seen him, you
wouldn't have given him a chance. They told me he'd be in the
hospital for three months and would have to recuperate for three or
four more at home, but he got up and walked out in three weeks.
Incredible."
(Lee finished filming "Wild River," but forfeited a planned return to
Broadway in the French comedy, "The Good Soup" so that she could be
with her husband during his recuperation period.)
Sources: Cosmopolitan - "Lee Remick - The Winsome Witch" by
John Whitcomb, "Monty: A Biography of Montgomrey Clift" by Robert
LaGuardia
Lee after her first bout with Cancer
People article (7/22/91). It is called:
THE FACE OF COURAGE
Lee Remick exited as she entered - with class
Back in April 1991, when friends heard that Lee Remick had suddenly dropped out
of the musical A Little Night Music, they feared her days were numbered.
On July 2, the elegant actress lost her two-year battle with kidney
and lung cancer drawing her final breaths at home in Brentwood, Calif.
By her side were her husband of 21 years William "Kip" Gowans, 61,
and her kids by an earlier marriage to Bill Colleran - writer
Kate Sullivan, 32, and rock guitarist Matthew, 30.
More than 200 friends gathered at Westwood Mortuary on July 9 to bid
Lee Remick farewell. Jack Lemmon and Gregory Peck delivered eulogies,
and her children sang the title song from Anyone Can Whistle,
her 1964 Broadway musical.
To the end, Remick described her life as "charmed."
The daughter of Frank Remick, a wealthy Quincy, Mass., department-store owner,
and actress Pat Packard, Lee was taken by her mom to New York City at
age 7 after her parents' 1942 divorce. She attended the posh Hewitt School
and Barnard College, dropping out to pursue her dream of acting.
When in 1957 Remick cavorted onscreen as the nubile majorette in A Face
in the Crowd, Hollywood slotted her as a "new Brigitte Bardot."
But she pluckily chose challenging material rather than star fodder--the
alcoholic wife in the film Days of Wine and Roses, the blind heroine
in Broadway's Wait Until Dark and Lady Randolph Churchill in the 1975
TV film Jennie.
She was nominated for an Oscar, six Emmys and a Tony. She never won!
An intensely private person, Remick went public with her illness
to undo its stigma. Accepting the Cancervive 1990 Victory Award, she noted
"Of all the performances in my life, this one counts the most."
Sadly, her final curtain has come down.
Another item added 29th March 2001