|
Rhonda Fleming is a gracious mannered, and red-headed, American actress born in 1923 in Hollywood, California. Her real name is Marilyn Louis. She made over forty films, mostly in the forties and fifties, but her face will be familiar to every generation of film fans since, as her films have often been shown on TV. She made five films in the sixties, two in the late eighties and her most recent film was Waiting for the Wind (1990). She also had a large number of drama roles on TV, again mainly in the sixties, and has appeared in several documentries about Hollywood films.
To begin with she had small parts in several films, and then some better roles; including in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) and another classic thriller The Spiral Staircase (1946). She then co-starred with Bing Crosby in one of her best remembered films, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1949) based on a book by Mark Twain. Among her most famous movies are: Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), While the City Sleeps (1956) and The Big Circus (1959). She had many famous co-stars, one of them was future US President Ronald Reagan.
Rhonda Fleming has done plenty of stage work and also successful singing, in stage shows and on TV at the Academy Awards ceremony in 1959. She has done a great deal of work for charities, especially in the field of cancer care, and served on the committees of many related bodies. In 1991 she and her husband set up the Rhonda Fleming Mann Clinic For Women's Comprehensive Care at the UCLA Medical Center.
|
