Actor of the ’40s and ’50s popular for her vivid hues
LOS ANGELES — Rhonda Fleming, the fiery redhead who appeared with Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston, Ronald Reagan and other film stars of the 1940s and 1950s, has died. Shewas 97.
Fleming’s assistant Carla Sapon told The New York Times that Fleming died Wednesday in Santa Monica, California.
From her first film in color, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” (1949) with Bing Crosby, Fleming became immensely popular with producers because of her vivid hues.
It was an attraction she would later regret.
“Suddenly my green eyes were green. My red hair was flaming red. My skin was porcelain white,” Fleming remarked in a 1990 interview. “Therewas suddenly all this attention on how I looked rather than the roles Iwas playing.
“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 like ‘The Redhead and the Cowboy.’ ”
Before Reagan entered politics, the actor costarred with him in “Hong Kong,” “Tropic Zone,” “The Last Outpost” and “Tennessee’s Partner.”
In the big-studio era, many new personalities were publicized as having been discovered in quirky ways: Kim Novak while riding a bicycle past an agent’s office, Lana Turner spotted in a malt shop.
In Fleming’s case, young Marilyn Louis was reported to have been headed to class at Beverly Hills High School when a man followed her in a car and told her, “You ought to be in pictures.” She eluded him, but he turned up at her
home and offered to be her agent.
At 19, Louis was awarded a six-month contract at the studio of David O. Selznick and a new name: Rhonda Fleming. She played a bit part in the 1944 wartime drama “Since You Went Away,” and then Alfred Hitchcock chose her to appear in “Spellbound,” starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck.
She won a role in “A Connecticut Yankee,” a Crosby musical based on the Mark Twain story. Crosby was so impressed that he recommended her to Bob Hope, with whom she starred in “The Great Lover.”
Ironically, the Crosby/ Hope films that established her as a luminary proved to be ones she was never able to top. She remained a star for 15 years, but except for the Lancaster-Douglas “Gunfight at the OK Corral,” most of her performances came in B-pictures that exploited her looks.
“I made the mistake of doing lesser films for good money,” she reflected in a 1976 interview. “I was hot — they all wanted me— but I didn’t have the guidance or background to judge for myself.”
Among her 1950s films were “While the City Sleeps,” directed by Fritz
Lang and co-starring Dana Andrews. She played Cleopatra in the 1953 film “Serpent of the Nile.”
After her film career cooled off, Fleming took a singing act to Las Vegas, appeared in TV shows and commercials, starred on Broadway in a revival of “The Women” and sang as the temptress Lalume in “Kismet” for the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera.
She was born in Los Angeles in 1923. Her mother, Effie Graham, had appeared in a 1914 Broadway musical with Al Jolson, and her grandfather was a theatrical producer in Salt Lake City. She studied acting, but as a backup also took classes in shorthand, typing and bookkeeping.
In 1977 Fleming married mogul Ted Mann, who built the Mann Theater chain, and the marriage lasted until his death in 2001.
After Fleming’s sister, Beverly Engel, died of cancer in 1991, Fleming and her husband established the Rhonda Fleming Mann Resource Center for Women with Cancer at the UCLA Medical Center.
A couple of years after Mann died, Fleming married for a sixth time, to Derol Carlson, who died in 2017.