Barbara Rush Actress star of ‘Peyton Place’
Barbara Rush, who has died aged 97, was a poised, versatile actress who enjoyed a long Hollywood career, winning a Golden Globe in 1953 for New Star of the Year before becoming soap royalty via ABC’s influential Peyton Place (1964-69).
After working with several starrier male contemporaries — Brando, Newman, Clift, Sinatra — she outlived them all, tallying her final credit at 90. As she joked in 1997: “I’m one of those kinds of people who will perform the minute you open the refrigerator and the light goes on.”
On Peyton Place — inspired by the 1956 Grace Metalious novel, its 1957 film adaptation and the initial success of Coronation Street — Rush earned $1,000 per episode playing Marsha Russell, a hardy single mother who spent the show’s fifth and final season navigating divorce from her husband Fred (Joe Maross), her growing attraction to the series regular Dr Michael (Ed Nelson) and the vacillations of her teenage daughter Carolyn (Elizabeth Walker).
The season built towards a cliffhanger — the jailed Michael awaiting trial for Fred’s murder — which went unresolved; with many original characters absent, ratings in freefall and critics decrying the show as an Eisenhower-era relic, was cancelled in June 1969. Rush later acknowledged how far the show had drifted out of touch with the times: “We did scream and carry on when we saw some of the lines.”
Though shortlived, the role established Rush as a fashion icon, to the point her name could be dropped as knowing shorthand for a casually worn Beverly Hills glamour: in Shampoo (1975), Warren Beatty’s gadabout hairdresser tries to impress his bank manager with a mumbled “I do Barbara Rush”. She made her debut in the showbiz drama The Goldbergs (1950), before breaking through in science fiction, seductively leading humanity towards a new dawn in When Worlds Collide (1951), then bursting out of the screen, varyingly demure and shrieking, in It Came from Outer Space (1953), a 3D-appended Ray Bradbury adaptation. Rush married three times. She is survived by her children.