Rhonda Fleming, femme fatale from Hollywood’s golden age, dies at 97
RHONDA Fleming, a voluptuous, titian-haired Hollywood actress who described herself as ‘a nice clean-cut girl from a Mormon background’ but made her name on-screen as a femme fatale and distinctly adventurous leading lady, died Oct 14 at a hospital in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 97.
The cause was complications from aspiration pneumonia, said her secretary, Carla Sapon.
The daughter of a former fashion model and actress, Fleming grew up in Beverly Hills, was a beauty pageant finalist at 15 and entered movies directly out of high school. Although she proved a capable actress in thrillers and comedies, her career was propelled foremost by her exquisite looks. Her figure ‘practically whistles at itself,’ a film colony scribe observed early in her career, and her red hair and green eyes shone spectacularly in Technicolor.
She made an impression as a nymphomaniac in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Spellbound’ (1945).
“I didn’t even know what a nymphomaniac was,” she later told the Los Angeles Times. “My mother and I had to look it up in the dictionary.”
She appeared in the movie’s opening scene, aggressively flirting with a hospital orderly before breaking his skin with a scratch. “I hate men, I loathe them,” she tells a psychiatrist played by Ingrid Bergman. “One of them so much as touches me, I want to sink my teeth into his hand and bite it off. In fact, I did that once.”
Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper lauded Fleming as a promising starlet. She was subsequently strangled by a maniac in the gothic chiller ‘The Spiral Staircase’ (1946) and played a scheming secretary in ‘Out of the Past’ (1947), a celebrated film noir starring Robert Mitchum.
Her first starring part was in the musical comedy ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’ (1948), as the love interest of Bing Crosby (and as a last-minute replacement for singing star Deanna Durbin, who quit films in 1949). She had trained in light opera and held her own in song, dueting with the popular crooner on numbers including ‘Once and for Always.’
She later used her seductive wiles on Bob Hope in ‘The Great Lover’ (1949) and Ronald Reagan in ‘Tropic Zone’ (1953), in which she played a South America plantation owner.
She was a female pirate in ‘The Golden Hawk’ (1952), had an extended bathtub scene in ‘Pony Express’ (1953) starring Charlton Heston, was a belly dancing con artist in ‘Little Egypt’ (1951) and played Cleopatra in ‘Serpent of the Nile’ (1953), with Raymond Burr as an unlikely Mark Antony.
Fleming’s career was mostly guided by how producers felt she looked in Technicolor – in short, irresistible.
“Suddenly my green eyes were green green,” she later told People magazine.
“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. 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.’ “
She might also have mentioned ‘Yankee Pasha,’ ‘Slightly Scarlet’ and ‘Those Redheads From Seattle.’
When given the chance, Fleming excelled as a sensual villain. Highlights included ‘Cry Danger’ (1951), a revenge story starring Dick Powell; ‘Inferno’ (1953), a desert-set noir with Robert Ryan; and ‘While the City Sleeps’ (1956), in which she played the faithless wife of a newspaper publisher (Vincent Price).
She also played a gambler opposite Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster in the popular western drama ‘Gunfight at the O.K. Corral’ (1957) but was dismayed when much of her role was cut out. Her career fell into rapid decline, leaving her with starring parts in low-grade Italian films, including ‘The Revolt of the Slaves’ (1960).
“My ego demanded it – over there, I was still a big star,” she told author Karen Burroughs Hannsberry for the book ‘Femme Noir: Bad Girls of Film.’
Fleming, who spoke often of her Christian faith, formed a popular gospel quartet in the 1950s with actresses Jane Russell and Connie Haines and British-born singer Beryl Davis. Fleming also kept one foot squarely in the secular world, helping inaugurate Las Vegas’s Tropicana hotel in 1957 with an eye-popping, skintight Don Loper-designed gown.
She guest-starred in TV series such as ‘Kung Fu’ and ‘The Love Boat’ and made her Broadway debut in a short-lived 1971 revival of Clare Boothe Luce’s catty comedy ‘The Women.’ In that production, she played a hardliving former chorus girl opposite film stars Myrna Loy, Kim Hunter and Alexis Smith.
After marrying her fifth husband, millionaire theater-chain magnate Ted Mann, in 1978, she settled into charity work and lived in what one entertainment writer described as ‘baronial splendor on a private estate that was once part of the back lot of 20th Century-Fox.’