Rhonda Fleming
Actress
RHONDA FLEMING, who has died at 97, was Hollywood’s original redhead, an actress of enduring appeal whose star lit up the screen opposite Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston and Ronald Reagan at a time when colour film was coming into its own.
However, she was not altogether happy with becoming a star purely on the basis of her hair colour.
“Suddenly my red hair was flaming red, my skin was porcelain white. There was suddenly all this attention on how I looked rather than the roles I was playing,” she said in 1990. It was her first film in colour, the 1949 Bing Crosby musical A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, that sealed her image.
“I’d been painted into a corner by the studios, who never wanted more from me than my looking good and waltzing through a parade of films,” she complained.
She had good reason to be miffed, for she was not only a capable actress but also a fine singer who in later years performed on stage in Las Vegas and on tour. But it was via the big Hollywood studios that she broke into the big time. According to legend, she was on her way to class at Beverly Hills High School when a man followed her in a black car and told her that she ought be in pictures. She ignored him but he turned up at her home and offered to be her agent. At 19, she was handed a six- month contract by David O Selznick, producer of Gone With the Wind, and ordered to change her name from Marilyn Louis to Rhonda Fleming. Selznick gave her a small part in a 1944 wartime drama called Since You Went Away, but she was then spotted by Alfred Hitchcock, who chose her to play a nymphomaniac in Spellbound, opposite Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck.
Its success led to another suspense film, The Spiral Staircase, but Selznick was less interested in his new signing than in promoting the career of wife, Jennifer Jones, and Fleming left him to freelance.
She won the role in A Connecticut Yankee, based on the Mark Twain story, after a few smaller roles in largely forgettable films. Crosby was so impressed with her performance that he recommended her to Bob Hope, with whom she starred in The Great Lover. Her typecasting had begun. She broke character occasionally, however, and appeared in Gunfight at the OK Corral with Lancaster and Douglas, in Fritz Lang’s While the City Sleeps, and as Cleopatra in Serpent of the Nile.
When even the B pictures began to dry up, she took to the stage, and as well as singing in Vegas she starred on Broadway in a revival of Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women.
The theatre was in Fleming’s DNA. Her mother, Effie Graham, had appeared on Broadway with Al Jolson, and her grandfather was a theatrical producer in Salt Lake City.
She married her first husband, her high school sweetheart Thomas Lane, while she was still in her teens. Their son, Kent, was born in 1941. But Fleming’s first flush of stardom came when Lane was away in the army and when he returned they divorced. Three further marriages, to surgeon Lewis Morrill, actor Lang Jeffries and producerdirector Hall Bartlett also ended in divorce. Her fifth husband was the cinema entrepreneur Ted Man. Following Mann’s death in 2001. Ms Fleming married Derol Carlson, who died in 2017.