Barbara Rush, actress known for 1950s 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 center in Westlake Village, Calif. She was 97.
She 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 traveled 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.
The second film featured eerie desert vistas, a story by author Ray Bradbury and a few “out-there” moments, as film writer Danny Miller once put it in an interview with Rush. “Oh,” she replied gamely, “you mean like when my character is kidnapped and an alien turns into me, but instead of my regular clothes I’m suddenly wearing this strapless black chiffon evening gown with a flowing scarf?”
“I guess the studio just wanted to get me in that dress,” she said.
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 co-star donned dark makeup to play Native Americans.
Many of her early films were forgettable, as she readily acknowledged. “I can safely say that every movie role I was ever offered that had any real quality went to someone else,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1984.
Still, she was featured in at least two movies that have been reclaimed by critics after being ignored or dismissed upon their release. She played Jane Wyman’s stepdaughter in the Douglas Sirk melodrama “Magnificent Obsession” (1954), which reunited her with Hudson, and was the wife of James Mason’s schoolteacher character in Nicholas Ray’s “Bigger Than Life” (1956), an Eisenhower-era examination of mental health, consumerism and prescription-drug abuse.
Rush later played Martin’s love interest in the World War II epic “The Young Lions” (1958), with Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift; starred opposite Newman in “The Young Philadelphians” (1959), as the socialite girlfriend he loses and eventually wins; 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, making guest appearances as a Washington newspaper correspondent in the NBC drama “Saints and Sinners” and starring on the last two seasons of “Peyton Place” as a divorced woman who falls in love with Ed Nelson’s surgeon character.