Actress known as “The Queen of Technicolor”
Rhonda Fleming, who has died aged 97, appeared in several black and white classics, including Hitchcock’s in 1945, and the 1946 psychological horror – but it was in the 1950s, when the movies embraced dazzling colour, that she became a star. Along with fellow redhead Maureen O’Hara, she became known as “the Queen of Technicolor” – but she didn’t welcome this. “Suddenly my green eyes were green green. My red hair was flaming red. My skin was porcelain white,” she said in 1991. “There was 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 was born Marilyn Louis in 1923, and brought up in Los Angeles, the daughter of an insurance salesman and an actress. As a girl she took singing lessons, and hoped to become a singer, but when she was 16, a man stopped her in the street and told her: “You ought to be in pictures.” He turned out to be the Hollywood agent Henry Willson, who later “discovered” Rock Hudson. Willson introduced her to David O. Selznick, and before long, she had signed a seven-year contract, changed her name – and been offered a supporting role in “Hitch told me I was going to play a nymphomaniac,” she said later. “I remember rushing home to look it up in the dictionary and being quite shocked.” She starred alongside Robert Mitchum, in 1947’s (aka
Then, in 1948, she was cast opposite Bing Crosby in
My Gallows High).
Out of the Past Corral
The Last Outpost,
Spellbound.
Build
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
– her first film in Technicolor, and the one that launched her as a leading lady. In the next decade, she starred in over 20 films, including
(with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas) and one of four films she made with Ronald Reagan, whom she held in lasting affection. He was, she said, a “wonderful peacemaker”, very good at soothing irascible directors.
Gunfight at the O.K.
She largely retired from screen acting in 1966, but made some appearances on Broadway in the 1970s, following the collapse of her fourth marriage. Then, in 1990, her sister died of ovarian cancer, and she began what she referred to as her greatest production: the founding of The Rhonda Fleming Mann Clinic for Women’s Comprehensive Care, and – three years later – the Rhonda Fleming Mann Resource Centre for Women with Cancer, both in Los Angeles. Her fifth and sixth husbands predeceased her; she is survived by a son, from her first marriage.