RHONDA FLEMING

(10 August 1923 - 14 October 2020)

Known as ‘The Queen of Technicolor’ on account of her flame-red hair, the American actress Rhonda Fleming, who has died aged 97, was a gifted player in any role she undertook. Born Marilyn Cheverton Louis in Los Angeles, she acted in high school and at 17 was discovered by a Hollywood agent who renamed her and secured a seven-year contract with producer David O. Selznick. Her first role of any size was in Hitchcock’s Spellbound  (1943) with Gregory Peck, and she was good in Robert Siodmak’s psychological thriller The Spiral Staircase. With Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas she graced Out of the Past (aka Build My Gallows High), Jacques Tourneur’s classic film noir, and then appeared with Bing Crosby in the musical comedy A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and made The Great Lover and Alias Jesse James with Bob Hope. Robert Parrish’s Cry Danger gave her another shot at film noir opposite Dick Powell, as did Inferno with Robert Ryan, Slightly Scarlet with John Payne and While the City Sleeps, Fritz Lang’s dark newspaper drama. Otherwise it was adventure dramas and westerns, the best being Gunfight at the OK Corral, and the occasional crime thriller such as Tropic Zone with Ronald Reagan. She played Jean Simmons’ sister in Home Before Dark (1958), Mervyn LeRoy’s drama about mental illness, and continued working until the mid-1960s, then reappeared in 1980 for her last feature, The Nude Bomb, a Get Smart spin-off. She was on TV from 1951 in guest shots, and did radio and stage work too. Her last film in 1990 was a short, Waiting for the Wind, with Robert Mitchum as a man with a terminal illness. Rhonda Fleming’s husbands were Thomas Wade Lane Jr, Dr Lewis V. Morrill, Lang Jeffries, Hall Bartlett, Ted Mann and Darol Wayne Carlson. With Lane she has a son, Kent, and with Ted Mann she set up the Rhonda Fleming Mann Clinic for Women’s Comprehensive Care at UCLA.

MICHAEL DARVELL