Actor ‘among the last of Old Hollywood Royalty’
Barbara Rush, a popular leading actor in the 1950 and ’60s who co-starred with Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman and other top film performers and later had a thriving TV career, has died. She was 97.
Rush’s death was announced by her daughter, Fox News reporter Claudia Cowan, who posted on Instagram that her mother died on Easter Sunday. Additional details were not immediately available.
Cowan praised her mother as “among the last of Old Hollywood Royalty.”
Spotted in a play at the Pasadena Playhouse, Rush was given a contract at Paramount Studios in 1950 and made her film debut that same year with a small role in “The Goldbergs,” based on the radio and TV series of the same name.
She would leave Paramount soon after, however, going to work for Universal International and later 20th Century Fox.
Rush starred opposite Rock Hudson in “Captain Lightfoot” and in Douglas Sirk’s acclaimed remake of “Magnificent Obsession,” Audie Murphy in “World in My Corner” and Richard Carlson in the 3-D science-fiction classic “It Came From Outer Space,” for which she received a Golden Globe for most promising newcomer.
Rush, who had made TV guest appearances for years, recalled fully making the transition as she approached middle age.
“There used to be this terrible Sahara Desert between 40 and 60 when you went from ingenue to old lady,” she remarked in 1962. “You either didn’t work or you pretended you were 20.”
Instead, Rush took on roles in such series as “Peyton Place,” “All My Children,” “The New Dick Van Dyke Show” and “7th Heaven.”
“I’m one of those kinds of people who will perform the minute you open the refrigerator door and the light goes on,” she cracked in a 1997 interview.
Rush was married and divorced three times — to screen star Jeffrey Hunter, Hollywood publicity executive Warren Cowan and sculptor James Gruzalski.