Prolific actor known for ’50s melodramas
Barbara Rush, an elegant, hazel-eyed actress who worked with Rock Hudson, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Paul Newman, appearing in mid-century melodramas like Magnificent Obsession as well as the prime time soap opera Peyton Place, died March 31 at a memory care centre in Westlake Village, Calif. She was 97.
Rush had dementia, said her daughter, Claudia Cowan, a senior correspondent for Fox News.
Beginning with ingenue roles in the early 1950s, when she was signed by Paramount Pictures in the twilight of the Hollywood studio system, Rush acted on-screen for almost seven decades, appearing in more than 100 movies and television shows.
“I’m one of those kinds of people who will perform the minute you open the refrigerator door and the light goes on,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1997.
She had acted onstage before entering movies, notably in a pair of Atomic Age science-fiction films. She travelled to an alien planet as the daughter of an astronomer in When Worlds Collide (1951) and investigated the crash of a mysterious spaceship in It Came From Outer Space (1953), a 3D spectacular co-starring Richard Carlson as her fiancé.
Rush went on to work alongside up-and-coming actors including Tony Curtis, as his sister in the costume drama The Black Shield of Falworth (1954), and Hudson, playing the screen idol’s love interest in Captain Lightfoot (1955) and Taza, Son of Cochise (1954), a western in which she and her costar donned dark makeup to play Native Americans.
Rush later played Martin’s love interest in the Second World War epic The Young Lions (1958), with Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift; and appeared in two Sinatra films, the comedy Come Blow Your Horn (1963) and the Rat Pack musical Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964), as a mob boss’s vengeful daughter.
The film offered her a chance to demonstrate her range beyond roles as glamorous suburban women — as did another villainous part, as the almost comically diabolical Nora Clavicle, a feminist activist who plots to blow up Gotham City and collect the insurance money on the TV show Batman.
By the late 1960s, Rush had increasingly turned to television for acting jobs.
At age 80, she was still taking featured parts, playing the mother of Stephen Collins on the WB family drama 7th Heaven.