Lee Remick

Lee Remick
Remick in 1974
Born	Lee Ann Remick (1935-12-14)December 14, 1935 Quincy, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	July 2, 1991(1991-07-02) (aged 55) Brentwood, California, U.S.
Education	Barnard College Actors Studio
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1953–1990
Spouses	Bill Colleran ​ ​ (m. 1957; div. 1968)​ Kip Gowans ​ (m. 1970)​
Children	2

Lee Ann Remick (/ˈrɛmɪk/;^[1] December 14, 1935 – July 2, 1991) was an American actress and singer. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for the film Days of Wine and Roses (1962).

Remick made her film debut in A Face in the Crowd (1957). Her other notable film roles include Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Wild River (1960), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), No Way to Treat a Lady (1968), The Detective (1968), The Omen (1976), and The Europeans (1979).

She won Golden Globe Awards for the TV film The Blue Knight (1973), and for playing the title role in the miniseries Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill (1974). For the latter role, she won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress. In April 1991, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Remick also worked in theatre and in 1966 she was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her Broadway role in Wait Until Dark.

Early life

Remick was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, the daughter of Gertrude Margaret (two sources say Patricia^[2][3]) (née Waldo), an actress, and Francis Edwin "Frank" Remick, who owned a department store.^[4][5][6] She had one older brother, Bruce.^[7] One of her maternal great-grandmothers, Eliza Duffield, was a preacher born in England.^[8]

Remick attended the Swoboda School of Dance and The Hewitt School.^[3]

Career

Broadway and television

Remick made her Broadway theatre debut, age 18, in the 1953 production Be Your Age.^[9] She began guest starring on episodes of TV anthology series such as Armstrong Circle Theatre, Studio One in Hollywood, Robert Montgomery Presents, Kraft Theatre and Playhouse 90.^[10]

Early films

Remick made her film debut in Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (1957). While filming the movie in Arkansas, Remick lived with a local family and practiced baton twirling so that she would be believable as the teenager who wins the attention of Lonesome Rhodes (played by Andy Griffith).

After appearing as Eula Varner, the hot-blooded daughter-in-law of Will Varner (Orson Welles) in The Long, Hot Summer (1958), she appeared in These Thousand Hills (1959) as a dance hall girl, both for 20th Century Fox.

Film stardom

Remick came to prominence portraying a rape victim whose husband is tried for killing her attacker in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959).

She made a second film with Kazan, Wild River (1960), which co-starred Montgomery Clift and Jo Van Fleet. That year she played Miranda in a television version of The Tempest with Richard Burton.

Remick was top-billed in Sanctuary (1961) alongside Yves Montand. She appeared in The Farmer's Daughter (1962) on television. She starred opposite Glenn Ford in the Blake Edwards suspense-thriller Experiment in Terror (1962). The same year, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as the alcoholic wife of Jack Lemmon in Days of Wine and Roses (1962), also directed by Edwards. Bette Davis, also nominated that year for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, said "Miss Remick's performance astonished me, and I thought, if I lose the Oscar, it will be to her." They both lost to Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker.^{[citation needed]}

When Marilyn Monroe was fired during the filming of the comedy Something's Got to Give, the studio announced that Remick would be her replacement. Co-star Dean Martin refused to continue, however, saying that while he admired Remick, he had signed onto the picture strictly to work with Monroe.^{[citation needed]} Remick did The Running Man (1963) with Laurence Harvey and The Wheeler Dealers (1963), with James Garner.

Return to Broadway and 1965 films

Remick next appeared in the 1964 Broadway musical Anyone Can Whistle,^[9] with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book and direction by Arthur Laurents, which ran for only one week. Remick's performance is captured on the original cast recording. This began a friendship between Remick and Sondheim, and she later appeared in the 1985 concert version of his musical Follies.^[11]

Remick returned to films with Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965), with Steve McQueen from a script by Horton Foote, and The Hallelujah Trail (1965) with Burt Lancaster.

In 1966, she starred in the Broadway play Wait Until Dark under the direction of Arthur Penn and co-starring Robert Duvall.^[9] It was a big success, and it ran for 373 performances; Remick was nominated for a Tony award for Best Actress (Dramatic).^[12] It was adapted into a successful film the following year starring Audrey Hepburn.

More films and 1970s

She performed in Damn Yankees! (1967) for TV and starred in No Way to Treat a Lady (1968) with Rod Steiger and George Segal, The Detective (1968) with Frank Sinatra, and Hard Contract (1969) with James Coburn.

Remick went to the UK to make Loot (1970) and A Severed Head (1971). Back in the U.S., she was in Sometimes a Great Notion (1971).

She appeared in Hennessy (1975), with Rod Steiger. She co-starred with Gregory Peck in the 1976 horror film The Omen. The film was a commercial success.

Remick followed it up with leading actress roles in Telefon (1977), with Charles Bronson; The Medusa Touch (1978) with Richard Burton; the television miniseries Wheels (1979) with Rock Hudson; Ike: The War Years (1979) portraying Kay Summersby; and The Europeans (1979) for director James Ivory.^[13]

Remick starred in many TV movies beginning with The Man Who Came to Dinner (1972) with Orson Welles. She followed it with Summer and Smoke (1972) for British TV; And No One Could Save Her (1973); Of Men and Women (1973), an unsuccessful pilot; The Blue Knight (1973) with William Holden; A Delicate Balance (1973) with Katharine Hepburn; QB VII (1974); Touch Me Not a.k.a. The Hunted (1974); Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill (1975), playing the title role, which earned her an Emmy nomination; Hustling (1975) with Jill Clayburgh; A Girl Named Sooner (1975); Breaking Up (1978); and Torn Between Two Lovers (1979) with George Peppard.

1980s

Remick played Margaret Sullavan in Haywire (1980). She had the lead in The Women's Room (1980) and supporting roles in The Competition (1980) and Tribute (1980), the latter with Lemmon.

Remick starred in The Letter (1982), The Gift of Love: A Christmas Story (1983) and a TV adaptation of I Do! I Do! (1984). She had a role in the miniseries Mistral's Daughter (1984), adapted from the novel by Judith Krantz. The reviewer of The New York Times praised Remick for portraying Kate "to fresh-faced clawing perfection".^[14]

Remick was in Rearview Mirror (1984), Toughlove (1985), Of Pure Blood (1986), and Nutcracker: Money, Madness & Murder (1987). She went to Australia to make Emma's War (1987).

Remick's later performances include The Vision (1987) with Dirk Bogarde, Jesse (1988), Bridge to Silence (1989) and playing Sarah Bernhardt in Around the World in 80 Days (1989). Her last performance was the lead in the TV movie Dark Holiday (1989).

Recognition

Remick was awarded the Women in Film Crystal Award in 1990.^[15]

She has a star in the Motion Pictures section on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6104 Hollywood Boulevard. It was dedicated on April 29, 1991.^[16]

Personal life

Remick married producer Bill Colleran, whose credits include Your Hit Parade, The Dean Martin Show and The Judy Garland Show on August 3, 1957. They had two children, Katherine Lee Colleran (b. January 27, 1959) and Matthew Remick Colleran (b. June 7, 1961).^[2] Remick and Colleran divorced in 1968.

Remick married British producer William Rory "Kip" Gowans on December 18, 1970. He was an assistant director on films such as Darling (1965), Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) and The Lion in Winter (1968) before they married, and afterward worked on Sleuth (1972), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and The Human Factor (1979). She moved with Gowans to England and remained married to him until her death.^[3] She starred in four telefilms he produced, The Women's Room (1980), The Letter (1982), Rearview Mirror (1984) and Of Pure Blood (1986). Remick and Gowans spent time in both England and Osterville, Massachusetts, which she considered her "true home".^[17]

Through her daughter, Remick had two grandchildren.

In the spring of 1989, Remick was diagnosed with kidney cancer. Treatments at first seemed to be successful.^[18] However, this proved not to be true, and she died on July 2, 1991, at the age of 55.^[19][20]

Popular culture

Remick was the subject of "Lee Remick", the 1978 debut single by the Australian indie rock band The Go-Betweens. Songwriter Robert Forster mistakenly thought Remick was from Ireland, and he makes references to this idea in the song. In reality, Remick was American-born and raised (as were her parents); after 1970, she divided her time between England (where she had family ancestry) and the U.S.

The British indie rock band Hefner recorded a song titled "Lee Remick" in 1998, unrelated to the Go-Betweens' single.

Filmography

Film

Television

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Lee Remick.

• Lee Remick at AllMovie
• Lee Remick at the Internet Broadway Database
• Lee Remick at IMDb
• Lee Remick at the TCM Movie Database
• Lee Remick at filmreference.com