Barbara Rush dies at 97; 1950s-era film star remembered as ‘Old Hollywood Royalty’

By Bob Thomas | Associated Press

LOS ANGELES — Barbara Rush, a popular actress of the 1950s and 1960s who co-starred with Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman and other film greats and who later had a thriving television career, has died. She was 97 years old.

Rush’s death was announced by his daughter, Fox News reporter Claudia Cowan, who posted on Instagram that her mother died on Easter Sunday. Additional details were not immediately available.

Cowan praised her mother as “among the last of the ‘old Hollywood royalty'” and called herself her mother’s “biggest fan.”

Spotted in a play at the Pasadena Playhouse, Rush earned a contract at Paramount Studios in 1950 and made her film debut that same year with a small role in “The Goldbergs,” based on the radio and television series of the same name. .

However, she would leave Paramount shortly after to work for Universal International and later 20th Century Fox.

“Paramount was not designed to develop new talent,” she recalled in 1954. “Every time a good role came along, they tried to borrow Elizabeth Taylor.”

Rush went on to appear in a wide range of films. She starred opposite Rock Hudson in “Captain Lightfoot” and Douglas Sirk’s acclaimed remake of “Magnificent Obsession,” Audie Murphy in “World in My Corner” and Richard Carlson in the sci-fi classic in 3D “It Came From Outer Space,” for which she received a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer.

Other film credits included the Nicholas Ray classic “Bigger Than Life”; “The Young Lions”, with Marlon Brando, Dean Martin and Montgomery Clift and “The Young Philadelphians” with Newman. She made two films with Sinatra, “Come Blow Your Horn” and the Rat Pack parody “Robin and the Seven Hoods,” which also starred Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.

Rush, who had appeared on television for years, remembers fully transitioning as she approached middle age.

“There was this terrible Sahara desert between the ages of 40 and 60, when you went from ingénue to old lady,” she remarked in 1962. “Either you didn’t work, or you pretended to be 20 years old. »

Instead, Rush took on roles in series such as “Peyton Place,” “All My Children,” “The New Dick Van Dyke Show” and “7th Heaven.” She also appeared in “The Love Boat”, “Fantasy Island”, “Magnum, PI” and “Murder, She Wrote”.

“I’m one of those kinds of people who happens as soon as you open the refrigerator door and the light comes on,” she said in a 1997 interview.

His first play was the traveling version of “Forty Carats,” a comedy that had been a hit in New York. The director, Abe Burrows, helped her with her comedic performance.

“At first it was very, very difficult for me to learn timing, especially waiting to laugh,” she remarked in 1970. But she learned, and the show lasted a year in Chicago and additional months on the road.

She later participated in tours such as “Same Time, Next Year”, “Father’s Day”, “Steel Magnolias” and her solo exhibition, “A Woman of Independent Means”.

Born in Denver, Rush spent her first 10 years on the move while her father, a mining company lawyer, was assigned from city to city. The family eventually settled in Santa Barbara, California, where young Barbara played a mythical dryad in a school play and fell in love with theater.

Rush married and divorced three times – to movie star Jeffrey Hunter, Hollywood advertising executive Warren Cowan and sculptor James Gruzalski.

Bob Thomas, a longtime Associated Press journalist who died in 2014, was the primary writer of this obituary. AP National Writer Hillel Italy contributed to this report from New York.