Persoonia nutans flower
Persoonia nutans (aka the Nodding Geebung)
An erect to spreading shrub to 2.5 m high with hairy young branches. Restricted to the Cumberland Plain in western Sydney, between Richmond in the north and Macquarie Fields in the south. The species has a disjunct distribution, with the majority of populations (and 99% of individuals) occurring in the north of the species range in the Agnes Banks, Londonderry, Castlereagh, Berkshire Park and Windsor Downs areas. Classified as Endangered. More info here: www.environment.nsw.gov.au/threatenedspeciesapp/profile.a... [Wianamatta Reserve, Cranebrook, NSW]
Nepean River astro II
Agnes Banks, Nepean River,
Sydney, NSW, Australia.
I drove down to the foot of the Blue Mountains to do some astro photography near Yarramundi at Agnes Banks.
Even though the area is sandwiched in between two large towns - Penrith & Richmond - and on the outskirts of a city of over 4 million people, the skies there are relatively dark.
I’d done a bit of planning on The Photographers Ephemeris and worked out a few compositions around the banks of the Nepean River.
There is a narrow peninsula that runs south from the bridge across the river for about a kilometre or so.
I planned to hike out along it and shoot at a couple of locations along the way (you can see the flooded middle section in one of the photos).
There are some lovely & majestic Casuarinas (river she-oaks) along the banks of the river that would make for a nice foreground.
The other comps I planned to shoot were high up on the eastern banks of the river facing west towards where the Milky Way would be.
Well, things don’t always go quite according to plan.
I pulled up at the rather dark carpark near the bridge & was about to get my gear out, when all of a sudden there was a roar of engines.
A few bikers on chopper-style bikes (probably Harleys) and a couple of muscle cars pulled into the carpark and parked down near where the path starts.
I sat in the car and watched as the guys got out, cracked open some cans of booze, lit up some joints, and cranked the stereo up in one of the cars.
Not sure what they were up to, but I felt a bit phased and kinda intimidated.
I sat in the car for a while, then decided to head to the other side of the river.
I drove around to the other side of the bridge and began to scout shooting locations.
There had been a fair bit of rain around recently, and the weeds on the banks of the river had grown quite a bit (you can see this on one of the photos).
They were now around knee height and very thick, and I struggled to find anywhere for my tripod to actually make contact with the ground.
Everywhere I placed my tripod, it was suspended on the thick weeds.
My eyes constantly darted around my surroundings as I felt this was prime snake territory - they could easily hunt here and conceal themselves.
In the end I think I freaked myself out and packed up and decided to go for a drive to another location around Richmond.
I’d wondered about the potential of the Richmond Lowlands for astro photography and decided to investigate as it was only about a 10min drive from where I was.
This turned out to be a waste of time, as the places that I thought could have potential were so dark due to no moon around, that I couldn’t see anything.
Lesson learnt there - don’t try scouting locations at night on a new moon!
So I drove back to the river feeling frustrated at how the night was becoming a bit of a disaster from a photographic point of view.
I arrived back at the carpark to find the bikers gone, with just a trail of empty Jack Daniels cans, bottles, and cigarette butts.
I was pretty unimpressed as there was a bin less than 10m away from where they were partying.
I collected their garbage, tossed it into the bin, and made my way down to the path that leads to the peninsula.
When I reached the banks of the river, I stopped, scanned the river with my head torch looking for the track.
To my dismay there were no remnants of any track to be seen whatsoever.
I stood there a bit confused, then after few mins of thought I realised what had happened.
There had been heavy rains out west and some of the rivers feed into Warragamba Dam, eventually flowing into the Nepean River.
So the river was running very high and where I wanted to shoot from was now under water.
So, feeling a bit bummed, I made way back to the carpark thinking about what my options were.
I decided to try the western banks of the river - even though the likelihood of getting a clear shot of the Milky Way was low.
I made my way along a track that follows the banks of the river and managed to find one spot that had nice reflections and a partial view of the Milky Way.
I explored further upstream, and gradually the track disappeared and I was again out of my comfort zone, picking my way through the dense undergrowth.
I eventually hit a fence from a private property and decided to head back.
My head torch began to fade to my dismay and I was keen to get back to the car & grab the spare one.
I was still feeling frustrated at how the night had gone, so decided to try the eastern banks of the river again.
Again, I found it difficult to setup the tripod, but I persisted.
I thought that the chances of getting sharp images doing 20-30sec exposures whilst using weeds as a platform were pretty low.
To my surprise the shots actually came out pretty good.
I kept shooting until the Milky Way got low in the sky.
I got home around midnight feeling a bit better than earlier on in the night.
I ended up getting some keepers from one of the more stranger nights I’ve had doing astro photography.
Mary Astor
German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 4176/2, 1929-1930. Photo: Fox.
American film actress Mary Astor (1906–1987) was famous for her part as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941) with Humphrey Bogart. She won an Oscar as best supporting actress for The Great Lie (1941). Astor had a long acting career that already started in the silent era in 1921 and included over 100 films.
Mary Astor was born as Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke in Quincy, Illinois, in 1906. She was the only child of Otto Ludwig Langhanke and Helen Marie de Vasconcellos. Both of her parents were teachers. Astor's father taught German at Quincy High School until the U.S. entered World War I. Later on, he took up light farming. Astor's mother, who had always wanted to be an actress, taught drama and elocution. Astor was home-schooled in academics and was taught to play the piano by her father, who insisted she practice daily. Her piano talents came in handy when she played piano in her films The Great Lie (1941) and Meet Me in St. Louis. In 1919, Astor sent a photograph of herself to a beauty contest in Motion Picture Magazine, becoming a semifinalist. When Astor was 15, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, with her father teaching German in public schools. Astor took drama lessons and appeared in various amateur stage productions. The following year, she sent another photograph to Motion Picture Magazine, this time becoming a finalist and then runner-up in the national contest. Her father then moved the family to New York City, in order for his daughter to act in films. He managed her affairs from September 1920 to June 1930. A Manhattan photographer, Charles Albin, saw her photograph and asked the young girl with haunting eyes and long auburn hair to pose for him. The Albin photographs were seen by Harry Durant of Famous Players-Lasky and Astor was signed to a six-month contract with Paramount Pictures. Her name was changed to Mary Astor during a conference among Paramount Pictures chief Jesse Lasky, film producer Walter Wanger, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
Mary Astor's first screen test was directed by Lillian Gish, who was so impressed with her recitation of Shakespeare that she shot a thousand feet of her. She made her debut at age 14 either in the Buster Keaton comedy The Scarecrow (Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton, 1920) - according to IMDb, or in Sentimental Tommy (John S. Robertson, 1921) according to Wikipedia. She then appeared in some short films with sequences based on famous paintings. She received critical recognition for the two-reeler The Beggar Maid (Herbert Blaché, 1921) with Reginald Denny. Her first feature-length film was John Smith (Victor Heerman, 1922), followed that same year by The Man Who Played God (F. Harmon Weight, 1922) starring George Arliss. In 1923, she and her parents moved to Hollywood. After appearing in several larger roles at various studios, she was again signed by Paramount, this time to a one-year contract at $500 a week. After she appeared in several more films, John Barrymore saw her photograph in a magazine and wanted her cast in his upcoming film. On loan-out to Warner Bros., she starred with him in Beau Brummel (Harry Beaumont, 1924). The older actor wooed the young actress, but their relationship was severely constrained by Astor's parents' unwillingness to let the couple spend time alone together. Mary was only seventeen and legally underage. It was only after Barrymore convinced the Langhankes that his acting lessons required privacy that the couple managed to be alone at all. Their secret engagement ended largely because of the Langhankes' interference and Astor's inability to escape their heavy-handed authority, and because Barrymore became involved with Astor's fellow WAMPAS Baby Star Dolores Costello, whom he later married. In 1925, Astor's parents bought a Moorish style mansion with 1 acre (4,000 m2) of land known as Moorcrest in the hills above Hollywood. The Langhankes not only lived lavishly off of Astor's earnings but kept her a virtual prisoner inside Moorcrest. The following year when she was 19, Astor, fed up with her father's constant physical and psychological abuse as well as his control of her money, climbed from her second-floor bedroom window and escaped to a hotel in Hollywood, as recounted in her memoirs. She returned when Otto Langhanke gave her a savings account with $500 and the freedom to come and go as she pleased. Nevertheless, she did not gain control of her salary until she was 26 years old, at which point her parents sued her for financial support. Astor settled the case by agreeing to pay her parents $100 a month. Otto Langhanke put Moorcrest up for auction in the early 1930s, hoping to realise more than the $80,000 he had been offered for it; it sold for $25,000.
Mary Astor continued to appear in films at various studios. When her Paramount contract ended in 1925, she was signed at Warner Bros. Among her assignments was another role with John Barrymore, this time in Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926). She was named one of the WAMPAS (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) Baby Stars in 1926, along with Mary Brian, Dolores Costello, Joan Crawford, Dolores del RÃo, Janet Gaynor, and Fay Wray. On loan to Fox, Astor starred in Dressed to Kill (Irving Cummings, 1928), which received good reviews, and the sophisticated comedy Dry Martini (Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, 1928). When her Warner Bros. contract ended, she signed a contract with Fox for $3,750 a week. In 1928, she married director Kenneth Hawks (brother of Howard Hawks) at her family home, Moorcrest. He gave her a Packard automobile as a wedding present and the couple moved into a home high up on Lookout Mountain in Los Angeles above Beverly Hills. As the film industry made the transition to talkies, Fox gave her a sound test, which she failed because the studio found her voice to be too deep. Though this result was probably due to early sound equipment and inexperienced technicians, the studio released her from her contract and she found herself out of work for eight months in 1929. Astor took voice training and singing lessons in her time off with Francis Stuart, an exponent of Francesco Lamperti, but no roles were offered. Her acting career was then given a boost by her friend, Florence Eldridge (wife of Fredric March), in whom she confided. Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play 'Among the Married' at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead. The play was a success and her voice was deemed suitable, being described as low and vibrant. In early 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox film Such Men Are Dangerous, Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific. Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge gave her the news. Astor remained with Eldridge at her apartment for some time, then soon returned to work. Shortly after her husband's death, she debuted in her first talkie, Ladies Love Brutes (Rowland V. Lee, 1930) at Paramount, in which she co-starred with George Bancroft and her friend Fredric March. While her career picked up, her private life remained difficult. After working on several more films, she suffered delayed shock over her husband's death and had a nervous breakdown.
During the months of her illness, Mary Astor was attended to by Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she married in 1931. That year, she starred as Nancy Gibson in Smart Woman (Gregory La Cava, 1931), playing a woman determined to retrieve her husband from a gold-digging flirtation. In 1932, the Thorpes purchased a yacht and sailed to Hawaii. Astor was expecting a baby in August but gave birth in June in Honolulu. The child, a daughter, was named Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe: her first name combined her parents' names and her middle name is Hawaiian. When they returned to California, Astor freelanced and gained the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932) with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In late 1932, Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros. Meanwhile, besides spending lavishly, her parents invested in the stock market, which often turned out unprofitable. While they remained in Moorcrest, Astor dubbed it a "white elephant", and she refused to maintain the house. She had to turn to the Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills. She appeared as the female lead, Hilda Lake, niece of the murder victims, in The Kennel Murder Case (Michael Curtiz, 1933), co-starring with William Powell as detective Philo Vance. Soon unhappy with her marriage, due to Thorpe having a short temper and a habit of listing her faults, Astor wanted a divorce by 1933. At a friend's suggestion, she took a break from film-making in 1933 and visited New York alone. While there, enjoying a whirlwind social life, she met the playwright George S. Kaufman, who was in a strong but open marriage. She documented their affair in her diary. Thorpe, by now making use of his wife's income, had discovered Astor's diary. He indicated her liaisons with other men, including Kaufman, would be used to claim she was an unfit mother in any divorce proceedings. Thorpe divorced Astor in April 1935. A legal battle drew press attention to Astor in 1936 when a custody battle resulted over their four-year-old daughter, Marylyn. Astor's diary was never formally offered as evidence during the trial, but Thorpe and his lawyers constantly referred to it, and its notoriety grew. Astor admitted that the diary existed and that she had documented her affair with Kaufman, but maintained that many of the parts that had been referred to were forgeries, following the theft of the diary from her desk. The diary was deemed inadmissible as a mutilated document because Thorpe had removed pages referring to himself and had fabricated content. The trial judge, Goodwin J. Knight, ordered it sealed and impounded. News of the diary became public when Astor's role in Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936), as Edith Cortwright, was beginning to be filmed. Producer Samuel Goldwyn was urged to fire her, as her contract included a morality clause, but Goldwyn refused. With Walter Huston in the title role, Dodsworth received rave reviews on release, and the public's acceptance assured the studios that casting Astor remained a viable proposition. Ultimately, the scandals caused no harm to Astor's career, which was actually revitalised because of the custody fight and the publicity it generated. In 1952, by court order, Astor's diary was removed from the bank vault where it had been sequestered for 16 years and destroyed.
In 1937, Mary Astor returned to the stage in well-received productions of Noël Coward's 'Tonight at 8.30', 'The Astonished Heart', and 'Still Life'. She also began performing regularly on the radio. Over the next few years, she had roles in The Prisoner of Zenda (John Cromwell, 1937), John Ford's The Hurricane (1937), Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939) and Brigham Young (Henry Hathaway, 1940), starring Tyrone Power. In John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Astor played scheming temptress and murderer Brigid O'Shaughnessy. The film also starred Humphrey Bogart and featured Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. For her performance in The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941) she won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. As Sandra Kovak, the self-absorbed concert pianist who relinquishes her unborn child, her intermittent love interest was played by George Brent, but the film's star was Bette Davis. Davis wanted Astor cast in the role after watching her screen test and seeing her play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1. She then recruited Astor to collaborate on rewriting the script, which Davis felt was mediocre and needed work to make it more interesting. Astor further followed Davis's advice and sported a bobbed hairdo for the role. The soundtrack of the film in the scenes where she plays the concerto, with violent hand movements on the piano keyboard, was dubbed by pianist Max Rabinovitch. Davis deliberately stepped back to allow Astor to shine in her key scenes. In her Oscar acceptance speech, Astor thanked Bette Davis and Tchaikovsky. Astor and Davis became good friends. Astor was not propelled into the upper echelon of movie stars by these successes, however. She always declined offers of starring in her own right. Not wanting the responsibility of top billing and having to carry the picture, she preferred the security of being a featured player. She reunited with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet in John Huston's Across the Pacific (1942). Though usually cast in dramatic or melodramatic roles, Astor showed a flair for comedy as The Princess Centimillia in the screwball comedy, The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942) with Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea. In February 1943, Astor's father, Otto Langhanke, died in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital as a result of a heart attack complicated by influenza. His wife and daughter were at his bedside. That same year, Astor signed a seven-year contract with MGM, a regrettable mistake. She was kept busy playing what she considered mediocre roles she called "Mothers for Metro". After Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944), the studio allowed her to debut on Broadway in 'Many Happy Returns' (1945). The play was a failure, but Astor received good reviews. On loan-out to 20th Century Fox, she played a wealthy widow in Claudia and David (Walter Lang, 1946). She was also loaned to Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in Desert Fury (Lewis Allen, 1947) playing the tough owner of a saloon and casino in a small mining town. In 1947 Helen Langhanke died of a heart ailment. Back at MGM, Astor continued being cast in undistinguished, colorless mother roles. One exception was when she played a prostitute in the Film Noir Act of Violence (Fred Zinnemann, 1948) with Van Heflin and Robert Ryan. The last straw came when she was cast as Marmee March in Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949). Astor found no redemption in playing what she considered another humdrum mother and grew despondent. She later described her disappointment with her cast members and the shoot in her memoir 'A Life on Film'. The studio wanted to renew her contract, promising better roles, but she declined the offer.
At the same time, Mary Astor's drinking was growing troublesome. She admitted to alcoholism as far back as the 1930s, but it had never interfered with her work schedule or performance. She hit bottom in 1949 and went into a sanitarium for alcoholics. In 1951, she made a frantic call to her doctor and said that she had taken too many sleeping pills. She was taken to a hospital and the police reported that she had attempted suicide, this being her third overdose in two years, and the story made headline news. She maintained it had been an accident. That same year, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and converted to Roman Catholicism. She credited her recovery to a priest, Peter Ciklic, also a practicing psychologist, who encouraged her to write about her experiences as part of therapy. She also separated from her fourth husband, Thomas Wheelock (a stockbroker she married on Christmas Day 1945), but did not actually divorce him until 1955. In 1952, she was cast in the leading role of the stage play 'The Time of the Cuckoo', which was later made into the film Summertime (David Lean, 1955) with Katharine Hepburn, and subsequently toured with it. After the tour, Astor lived in New York for four years and worked in the theatre and on television. During the 1952 presidential election, Astor, a lifelong Democrat, supported the campaign of Adlai Stevenson. Her TV debut was in The Missing Years (1954) for Kraft Television Theatre. In 1954, she also appeared in the episode Fearful Hour of the Gary Merrill NBC series Justice in the role of a desperately poor and aging film star who attempts suicide to avoid exposure as a thief. She also played an ex-film star on the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller, in an episode titled Rose's Last Summer (1960). During these years, she appeared on many big shows of the time, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1958-`1959), Rawhide (1961), and Dr. Kildare (1963-1963). She starred on Broadway again in 'The Starcross Story' (1954), another failure, and returned to Southern California in 1956. She then went on a successful theatre tour of 'Don Juan in Hell' directed by Agnes Moorehead and co-starring Ricardo Montalbán. Astor's memoir, 'My Story: An Autobiography', was published in 1959, becoming a sensation in its day and a bestseller. It was the result of Father Ciklic urging her to write. Though she spoke of her troubled personal life, her parents, her marriages, the scandals, her battle with alcoholism, and other areas of her life, she did not mention the film industry or her career in detail. In 1971, a second book was published, 'A Life on Film', where she discussed her career. It, too, became a bestseller. Astor also tried her hand at fiction. She appeared in several films during this time, including A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956) with Robert Wagner, and A Stranger in My Arms (Helmut Käutner, 1959).
Mary Astor made a comeback in Return to Peyton Place (José Ferrer, 1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the 'shocking' novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library and received good reviews for her performance. After a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her Malibu, California home, where she was gardening and working on her third novel. She was offered the small role as a key figure, Jewel Mayhew, in the murder mystery Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1964), starring her friend Bette Davis. In 'A Life on Film', she described her character as "a little old lady, waiting to die". Astor decided it would serve as her swan song in the film business. She only appeared in the drama Youngblood Hawke (Delmer Daves, 1964), which premiered before Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. After 109 films in a career spanning 45 years, she turned in her Screen Actors Guild card and retired. Astor later moved to Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Anthony del Campo (from her third marriage to Mexican film editor Manuel del Campo), and his family, until 1971. That same year, suffering from a chronic heart condition, she moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry's retirement facility in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she had a private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room. She appeared in the television documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980), co-produced by Kevin Brownlow, in which she discussed her roles during the silent film period. Astor died in 1987, at age 81, of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while in the hospital at the Motion Picture House complex. She is interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Astor has a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6701 Hollywood Boulevard.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
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Mary Astor
British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. 240b.
American film actress Mary Astor (1906–1987) was famous for her part as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941) with Humphrey Bogart. She won an Oscar as best supporting actress for The Great Lie (1941). Astor had a long acting career that already started in the silent era in 1921 and included over 100 films.
Mary Astor was born as Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke in Quincy, Illinois, in 1906. She was the only child of Otto Ludwig Langhanke and Helen Marie de Vasconcellos. Both of her parents were teachers. Astor's father taught German at Quincy High School until the U.S. entered World War I. Later on, he took up light farming. Astor's mother, who had always wanted to be an actress, taught drama and elocution. Astor was home-schooled in academics and was taught to play the piano by her father, who insisted she practice daily. Her piano talents came in handy when she played piano in her films The Great Lie (1941) and Meet Me in St. Louis. In 1919, Astor sent a photograph of herself to a beauty contest in Motion Picture Magazine, becoming a semifinalist. When Astor was 15, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, with her father teaching German in public schools. Astor took drama lessons and appeared in various amateur stage productions. The following year, she sent another photograph to Motion Picture Magazine, this time becoming a finalist and then runner-up in the national contest. Her father then moved the family to New York City, in order for his daughter to act in films. He managed her affairs from September 1920 to June 1930. A Manhattan photographer, Charles Albin, saw her photograph and asked the young girl with haunting eyes and long auburn hair to pose for him. The Albin photographs were seen by Harry Durant of Famous Players-Lasky and Astor was signed to a six-month contract with Paramount Pictures. Her name was changed to Mary Astor during a conference among Paramount Pictures chief Jesse Lasky, film producer Walter Wanger, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
Mary Astor's first screen test was directed by Lillian Gish, who was so impressed with her recitation of Shakespeare that she shot a thousand feet of her. She made her debut at age 14 either in the Buster Keaton comedy The Scarecrow (Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton, 1920) - according to IMDb, or in Sentimental Tommy (John S. Robertson, 1921) according to Wikipedia. She then appeared in some short films with sequences based on famous paintings. She received critical recognition for the two-reeler The Beggar Maid (Herbert Blaché, 1921) with Reginald Denny. Her first feature-length film was John Smith (Victor Heerman, 1922), followed that same year by The Man Who Played God (F. Harmon Weight, 1922) starring George Arliss. In 1923, she and her parents moved to Hollywood. After appearing in several larger roles at various studios, she was again signed by Paramount, this time to a one-year contract at $500 a week. After she appeared in several more films, John Barrymore saw her photograph in a magazine and wanted her cast in his upcoming film. On loan-out to Warner Bros., she starred with him in Beau Brummel (Harry Beaumont, 1924). The older actor wooed the young actress, but their relationship was severely constrained by Astor's parents' unwillingness to let the couple spend time alone together. Mary was only seventeen and legally underage. It was only after Barrymore convinced the Langhankes that his acting lessons required privacy that the couple managed to be alone at all. Their secret engagement ended largely because of the Langhankes' interference and Astor's inability to escape their heavy-handed authority, and because Barrymore became involved with Astor's fellow WAMPAS Baby Star Dolores Costello, whom he later married. In 1925, Astor's parents bought a Moorish style mansion with 1 acre (4,000 m2) of land known as Moorcrest in the hills above Hollywood. The Langhankes not only lived lavishly off of Astor's earnings but kept her a virtual prisoner inside Moorcrest. The following year when she was 19, Astor, fed up with her father's constant physical and psychological abuse as well as his control of her money, climbed from her second-floor bedroom window and escaped to a hotel in Hollywood, as recounted in her memoirs. She returned when Otto Langhanke gave her a savings account with $500 and the freedom to come and go as she pleased. Nevertheless, she did not gain control of her salary until she was 26 years old, at which point her parents sued her for financial support. Astor settled the case by agreeing to pay her parents $100 a month. Otto Langhanke put Moorcrest up for auction in the early 1930s, hoping to realise more than the $80,000 he had been offered for it; it sold for $25,000.
Mary Astor continued to appear in films at various studios. When her Paramount contract ended in 1925, she was signed at Warner Bros. Among her assignments was another role with John Barrymore, this time in Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926). She was named one of the WAMPAS (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) Baby Stars in 1926, along with Mary Brian, Dolores Costello, Joan Crawford, Dolores del RÃo, Janet Gaynor, and Fay Wray. On loan to Fox, Astor starred in Dressed to Kill (Irving Cummings, 1928), which received good reviews, and the sophisticated comedy Dry Martini (Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, 1928). When her Warner Bros. contract ended, she signed a contract with Fox for $3,750 a week. In 1928, she married director Kenneth Hawks (brother of Howard Hawks) at her family home, Moorcrest. He gave her a Packard automobile as a wedding present and the couple moved into a home high up on Lookout Mountain in Los Angeles above Beverly Hills. As the film industry made the transition to talkies, Fox gave her a sound test, which she failed because the studio found her voice to be too deep. Though this result was probably due to early sound equipment and inexperienced technicians, the studio released her from her contract and she found herself out of work for eight months in 1929. Astor took voice training and singing lessons in her time off with Francis Stuart, an exponent of Francesco Lamperti, but no roles were offered. Her acting career was then given a boost by her friend, Florence Eldridge (wife of Fredric March), in whom she confided. Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play 'Among the Married' at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead. The play was a success and her voice was deemed suitable, being described as low and vibrant. In early 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox film Such Men Are Dangerous, Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific. Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge gave her the news. Astor remained with Eldridge at her apartment for some time, then soon returned to work. Shortly after her husband's death, she debuted in her first talkie, Ladies Love Brutes (Rowland V. Lee, 1930) at Paramount, in which she co-starred with George Bancroft and her friend Fredric March. While her career picked up, her private life remained difficult. After working on several more films, she suffered delayed shock over her husband's death and had a nervous breakdown.
During the months of her illness, Mary Astor was attended to by Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she married in 1931. That year, she starred as Nancy Gibson in Smart Woman (Gregory La Cava, 1931), playing a woman determined to retrieve her husband from a gold-digging flirtation. In 1932, the Thorpes purchased a yacht and sailed to Hawaii. Astor was expecting a baby in August but gave birth in June in Honolulu. The child, a daughter, was named Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe: her first name combined her parents' names and her middle name is Hawaiian. When they returned to California, Astor freelanced and gained the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932) with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In late 1932, Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros. Meanwhile, besides spending lavishly, her parents invested in the stock market, which often turned out unprofitable. While they remained in Moorcrest, Astor dubbed it a "white elephant", and she refused to maintain the house. She had to turn to the Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills. She appeared as the female lead, Hilda Lake, niece of the murder victims, in The Kennel Murder Case (Michael Curtiz, 1933), co-starring with William Powell as detective Philo Vance. Soon unhappy with her marriage, due to Thorpe having a short temper and a habit of listing her faults, Astor wanted a divorce by 1933. At a friend's suggestion, she took a break from film-making in 1933 and visited New York alone. While there, enjoying a whirlwind social life, she met the playwright George S. Kaufman, who was in a strong but open marriage. She documented their affair in her diary. Thorpe, by now making use of his wife's income, had discovered Astor's diary. He indicated her liaisons with other men, including Kaufman, would be used to claim she was an unfit mother in any divorce proceedings. Thorpe divorced Astor in April 1935. A legal battle drew press attention to Astor in 1936 when a custody battle resulted over their four-year-old daughter, Marylyn. Astor's diary was never formally offered as evidence during the trial, but Thorpe and his lawyers constantly referred to it, and its notoriety grew. Astor admitted that the diary existed and that she had documented her affair with Kaufman, but maintained that many of the parts that had been referred to were forgeries, following the theft of the diary from her desk. The diary was deemed inadmissible as a mutilated document because Thorpe had removed pages referring to himself and had fabricated content. The trial judge, Goodwin J. Knight, ordered it sealed and impounded. News of the diary became public when Astor's role in Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936), as Edith Cortwright, was beginning to be filmed. Producer Samuel Goldwyn was urged to fire her, as her contract included a morality clause, but Goldwyn refused. With Walter Huston in the title role, Dodsworth received rave reviews on release, and the public's acceptance assured the studios that casting Astor remained a viable proposition. Ultimately, the scandals caused no harm to Astor's career, which was actually revitalised because of the custody fight and the publicity it generated. In 1952, by court order, Astor's diary was removed from the bank vault where it had been sequestered for 16 years and destroyed.
In 1937, Mary Astor returned to the stage in well-received productions of Noël Coward's 'Tonight at 8.30', 'The Astonished Heart', and 'Still Life'. She also began performing regularly on the radio. Over the next few years, she had roles in The Prisoner of Zenda (John Cromwell, 1937), John Ford's The Hurricane (1937), Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939) and Brigham Young (Henry Hathaway, 1940), starring Tyrone Power. In John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Astor played scheming temptress and murderer Brigid O'Shaughnessy. The film also starred Humphrey Bogart and featured Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. For her performance in The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941) she won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. As Sandra Kovak, the self-absorbed concert pianist who relinquishes her unborn child, her intermittent love interest was played by George Brent, but the film's star was Bette Davis. Davis wanted Astor cast in the role after watching her screen test and seeing her play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1. She then recruited Astor to collaborate on rewriting the script, which Davis felt was mediocre and needed work to make it more interesting. Astor further followed Davis's advice and sported a bobbed hairdo for the role. The soundtrack of the film in the scenes where she plays the concerto, with violent hand movements on the piano keyboard, was dubbed by pianist Max Rabinovitch. Davis deliberately stepped back to allow Astor to shine in her key scenes. In her Oscar acceptance speech, Astor thanked Bette Davis and Tchaikovsky. Astor and Davis became good friends. Astor was not propelled into the upper echelon of movie stars by these successes, however. She always declined offers of starring in her own right. Not wanting the responsibility of top billing and having to carry the picture, she preferred the security of being a featured player. She reunited with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet in John Huston's Across the Pacific (1942). Though usually cast in dramatic or melodramatic roles, Astor showed a flair for comedy as The Princess Centimillia in the screwball comedy, The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942) with Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea. In February 1943, Astor's father, Otto Langhanke, died in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital as a result of a heart attack complicated by influenza. His wife and daughter were at his bedside. That same year, Astor signed a seven-year contract with MGM, a regrettable mistake. She was kept busy playing what she considered mediocre roles she called "Mothers for Metro". After Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944), the studio allowed her to debut on Broadway in 'Many Happy Returns' (1945). The play was a failure, but Astor received good reviews. On loan-out to 20th Century Fox, she played a wealthy widow in Claudia and David (Walter Lang, 1946). She was also loaned to Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in Desert Fury (Lewis Allen, 1947) playing the tough owner of a saloon and casino in a small mining town. In 1947 Helen Langhanke died of a heart ailment. Back at MGM, Astor continued being cast in undistinguished, colorless mother roles. One exception was when she played a prostitute in the Film Noir Act of Violence (Fred Zinnemann, 1948) with Van Heflin and Robert Ryan. The last straw came when she was cast as Marmee March in Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949). Astor found no redemption in playing what she considered another humdrum mother and grew despondent. She later described her disappointment with her cast members and the shoot in her memoir 'A Life on Film'. The studio wanted to renew her contract, promising better roles, but she declined the offer.
At the same time, Mary Astor's drinking was growing troublesome. She admitted to alcoholism as far back as the 1930s, but it had never interfered with her work schedule or performance. She hit bottom in 1949 and went into a sanitarium for alcoholics. In 1951, she made a frantic call to her doctor and said that she had taken too many sleeping pills. She was taken to a hospital and the police reported that she had attempted suicide, this being her third overdose in two years, and the story made headline news. She maintained it had been an accident. That same year, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and converted to Roman Catholicism. She credited her recovery to a priest, Peter Ciklic, also a practicing psychologist, who encouraged her to write about her experiences as part of therapy. She also separated from her fourth husband, Thomas Wheelock (a stockbroker she married on Christmas Day 1945), but did not actually divorce him until 1955. In 1952, she was cast in the leading role of the stage play 'The Time of the Cuckoo', which was later made into the film Summertime (David Lean, 1955) with Katharine Hepburn, and subsequently toured with it. After the tour, Astor lived in New York for four years and worked in the theatre and on television. During the 1952 presidential election, Astor, a lifelong Democrat, supported the campaign of Adlai Stevenson. Her TV debut was in The Missing Years (1954) for Kraft Television Theatre. In 1954, she also appeared in the episode Fearful Hour of the Gary Merrill NBC series Justice in the role of a desperately poor and aging film star who attempts suicide to avoid exposure as a thief. She also played an ex-film star on the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller, in an episode titled Rose's Last Summer (1960). During these years, she appeared on many big shows of the time, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1958-`1959), Rawhide (1961), and Dr. Kildare (1963-1963). She starred on Broadway again in 'The Starcross Story' (1954), another failure, and returned to Southern California in 1956. She then went on a successful theatre tour of 'Don Juan in Hell' directed by Agnes Moorehead and co-starring Ricardo Montalbán. Astor's memoir, 'My Story: An Autobiography', was published in 1959, becoming a sensation in its day and a bestseller. It was the result of Father Ciklic urging her to write. Though she spoke of her troubled personal life, her parents, her marriages, the scandals, her battle with alcoholism, and other areas of her life, she did not mention the film industry or her career in detail. In 1971, a second book was published, 'A Life on Film', where she discussed her career. It, too, became a bestseller. Astor also tried her hand at fiction. She appeared in several films during this time, including A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956) with Robert Wagner, and A Stranger in My Arms (Helmut Käutner, 1959).
Mary Astor made a comeback in Return to Peyton Place (José Ferrer, 1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the 'shocking' novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library and received good reviews for her performance. After a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her Malibu, California home, where she was gardening and working on her third novel. She was offered the small role as a key figure, Jewel Mayhew, in the murder mystery Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1964), starring her friend Bette Davis. In 'A Life on Film', she described her character as "a little old lady, waiting to die". Astor decided it would serve as her swan song in the film business. She only appeared in the drama Youngblood Hawke (Delmer Daves, 1964), which premiered before Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. After 109 films in a career spanning 45 years, she turned in her Screen Actors Guild card and retired. Astor later moved to Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Anthony del Campo (from her third marriage to Mexican film editor Manuel del Campo), and his family, until 1971. That same year, suffering from a chronic heart condition, she moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry's retirement facility in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she had a private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room. She appeared in the television documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980), co-produced by Kevin Brownlow, in which she discussed her roles during the silent film period. Astor died in 1987, at age 81, of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while in the hospital at the Motion Picture House complex. She is interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Astor has a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6701 Hollywood Boulevard.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
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Mary Astor
Spanish postcard by Editorial Grafica, Barcelona, in the Estrellas del Cine series, no. 126. Photo: First National.
American film actress Mary Astor (1906–1987) was famous for her part as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941) with Humphrey Bogart. She won an Oscar as best supporting actress for The Great Lie (1941). Astor had a long acting career that already started in the silent era in 1921 and included over 100 films.
Mary Astor was born as Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke in Quincy, Illinois, in 1906. She was the only child of Otto Ludwig Langhanke and Helen Marie de Vasconcellos. Both of her parents were teachers. Astor's father taught German at Quincy High School until the U.S. entered World War I. Later on, he took up light farming. Astor's mother, who had always wanted to be an actress, taught drama and elocution. Astor was home-schooled in academics and was taught to play the piano by her father, who insisted she practice daily. Her piano talents came in handy when she played piano in her films The Great Lie (1941) and Meet Me in St. Louis. In 1919, Astor sent a photograph of herself to a beauty contest in Motion Picture Magazine, becoming a semifinalist. When Astor was 15, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, with her father teaching German in public schools. Astor took drama lessons and appeared in various amateur stage productions. The following year, she sent another photograph to Motion Picture Magazine, this time becoming a finalist and then runner-up in the national contest. Her father then moved the family to New York City, in order for his daughter to act in films. He managed her affairs from September 1920 to June 1930. A Manhattan photographer, Charles Albin, saw her photograph and asked the young girl with haunting eyes and long auburn hair to pose for him. The Albin photographs were seen by Harry Durant of Famous Players-Lasky and Astor was signed to a six-month contract with Paramount Pictures. Her name was changed to Mary Astor during a conference among Paramount Pictures chief Jesse Lasky, film producer Walter Wanger, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
Mary Astor's first screen test was directed by Lillian Gish, who was so impressed with her recitation of Shakespeare that she shot a thousand feet of her. She made her debut at age 14 either in the Buster Keaton comedy The Scarecrow (Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton, 1920) - according to IMDb, or in Sentimental Tommy (John S. Robertson, 1921) according to Wikipedia. She then appeared in some short films with sequences based on famous paintings. She received critical recognition for the two-reeler The Beggar Maid (Herbert Blaché, 1921) with Reginald Denny. Her first feature-length film was John Smith (Victor Heerman, 1922), followed that same year by The Man Who Played God (F. Harmon Weight, 1922) starring George Arliss. In 1923, she and her parents moved to Hollywood. After appearing in several larger roles at various studios, she was again signed by Paramount, this time to a one-year contract at $500 a week. After she appeared in several more films, John Barrymore saw her photograph in a magazine and wanted her cast in his upcoming film. On loan-out to Warner Bros., she starred with him in Beau Brummel (Harry Beaumont, 1924). The older actor wooed the young actress, but their relationship was severely constrained by Astor's parents' unwillingness to let the couple spend time alone together. Mary was only seventeen and legally underage. It was only after Barrymore convinced the Langhankes that his acting lessons required privacy that the couple managed to be alone at all. Their secret engagement ended largely because of the Langhankes' interference and Astor's inability to escape their heavy-handed authority, and because Barrymore became involved with Astor's fellow WAMPAS Baby Star Dolores Costello, whom he later married. In 1925, Astor's parents bought a Moorish style mansion with 1 acre (4,000 m2) of land known as Moorcrest in the hills above Hollywood. The Langhankes not only lived lavishly off of Astor's earnings but kept her a virtual prisoner inside Moorcrest. The following year when she was 19, Astor, fed up with her father's constant physical and psychological abuse as well as his control of her money, climbed from her second-floor bedroom window and escaped to a hotel in Hollywood, as recounted in her memoirs. She returned when Otto Langhanke gave her a savings account with $500 and the freedom to come and go as she pleased. Nevertheless, she did not gain control of her salary until she was 26 years old, at which point her parents sued her for financial support. Astor settled the case by agreeing to pay her parents $100 a month. Otto Langhanke put Moorcrest up for auction in the early 1930s, hoping to realise more than the $80,000 he had been offered for it; it sold for $25,000.
Mary Astor continued to appear in films at various studios. When her Paramount contract ended in 1925, she was signed at Warner Bros. Among her assignments was another role with John Barrymore, this time in Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926). She was named one of the WAMPAS (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) Baby Stars in 1926, along with Mary Brian, Dolores Costello, Joan Crawford, Dolores del RÃo, Janet Gaynor, and Fay Wray. On loan to Fox, Astor starred in Dressed to Kill (Irving Cummings, 1928), which received good reviews, and the sophisticated comedy Dry Martini (Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, 1928). When her Warner Bros. contract ended, she signed a contract with Fox for $3,750 a week. In 1928, she married director Kenneth Hawks (brother of Howard Hawks) at her family home, Moorcrest. He gave her a Packard automobile as a wedding present and the couple moved into a home high up on Lookout Mountain in Los Angeles above Beverly Hills. As the film industry made the transition to talkies, Fox gave her a sound test, which she failed because the studio found her voice to be too deep. Though this result was probably due to early sound equipment and inexperienced technicians, the studio released her from her contract and she found herself out of work for eight months in 1929. Astor took voice training and singing lessons in her time off with Francis Stuart, an exponent of Francesco Lamperti, but no roles were offered. Her acting career was then given a boost by her friend, Florence Eldridge (wife of Fredric March), in whom she confided. Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play 'Among the Married' at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead. The play was a success and her voice was deemed suitable, being described as low and vibrant. In early 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox film Such Men Are Dangerous, Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific. Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge gave her the news. Astor remained with Eldridge at her apartment for some time, then soon returned to work. Shortly after her husband's death, she debuted in her first talkie, Ladies Love Brutes (Rowland V. Lee, 1930) at Paramount, in which she co-starred with George Bancroft and her friend Fredric March. While her career picked up, her private life remained difficult. After working on several more films, she suffered delayed shock over her husband's death and had a nervous breakdown.
During the months of her illness, Mary Astor was attended to by Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she married in 1931. That year, she starred as Nancy Gibson in Smart Woman (Gregory La Cava, 1931), playing a woman determined to retrieve her husband from a gold-digging flirtation. In 1932, the Thorpes purchased a yacht and sailed to Hawaii. Astor was expecting a baby in August but gave birth in June in Honolulu. The child, a daughter, was named Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe: her first name combined her parents' names and her middle name is Hawaiian. When they returned to California, Astor freelanced and gained the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932) with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In late 1932, Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros. Meanwhile, besides spending lavishly, her parents invested in the stock market, which often turned out unprofitable. While they remained in Moorcrest, Astor dubbed it a "white elephant", and she refused to maintain the house. She had to turn to the Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills. She appeared as the female lead, Hilda Lake, niece of the murder victims, in The Kennel Murder Case (Michael Curtiz, 1933), co-starring with William Powell as detective Philo Vance. Soon unhappy with her marriage, due to Thorpe having a short temper and a habit of listing her faults, Astor wanted a divorce by 1933. At a friend's suggestion, she took a break from film-making in 1933 and visited New York alone. While there, enjoying a whirlwind social life, she met the playwright George S. Kaufman, who was in a strong but open marriage. She documented their affair in her diary. Thorpe, by now making use of his wife's income, had discovered Astor's diary. He indicated her liaisons with other men, including Kaufman, would be used to claim she was an unfit mother in any divorce proceedings. Thorpe divorced Astor in April 1935. A legal battle drew press attention to Astor in 1936 when a custody battle resulted over their four-year-old daughter, Marylyn. Astor's diary was never formally offered as evidence during the trial, but Thorpe and his lawyers constantly referred to it, and its notoriety grew. Astor admitted that the diary existed and that she had documented her affair with Kaufman, but maintained that many of the parts that had been referred to were forgeries, following the theft of the diary from her desk. The diary was deemed inadmissible as a mutilated document because Thorpe had removed pages referring to himself and had fabricated content. The trial judge, Goodwin J. Knight, ordered it sealed and impounded. News of the diary became public when Astor's role in Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936), as Edith Cortwright, was beginning to be filmed. Producer Samuel Goldwyn was urged to fire her, as her contract included a morality clause, but Goldwyn refused. With Walter Huston in the title role, Dodsworth received rave reviews on release, and the public's acceptance assured the studios that casting Astor remained a viable proposition. Ultimately, the scandals caused no harm to Astor's career, which was actually revitalised because of the custody fight and the publicity it generated. In 1952, by court order, Astor's diary was removed from the bank vault where it had been sequestered for 16 years and destroyed.
In 1937, Mary Astor returned to the stage in well-received productions of Noël Coward's 'Tonight at 8.30', 'The Astonished Heart', and 'Still Life'. She also began performing regularly on the radio. Over the next few years, she had roles in The Prisoner of Zenda (John Cromwell, 1937), John Ford's The Hurricane (1937), Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939) and Brigham Young (Henry Hathaway, 1940), starring Tyrone Power. In John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Astor played scheming temptress and murderer Brigid O'Shaughnessy. The film also starred Humphrey Bogart and featured Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. For her performance in The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941) she won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. As Sandra Kovak, the self-absorbed concert pianist who relinquishes her unborn child, her intermittent love interest was played by George Brent, but the film's star was Bette Davis. Davis wanted Astor cast in the role after watching her screen test and seeing her play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1. She then recruited Astor to collaborate on rewriting the script, which Davis felt was mediocre and needed work to make it more interesting. Astor further followed Davis's advice and sported a bobbed hairdo for the role. The soundtrack of the film in the scenes where she plays the concerto, with violent hand movements on the piano keyboard, was dubbed by pianist Max Rabinovitch. Davis deliberately stepped back to allow Astor to shine in her key scenes. In her Oscar acceptance speech, Astor thanked Bette Davis and Tchaikovsky. Astor and Davis became good friends. Astor was not propelled into the upper echelon of movie stars by these successes, however. She always declined offers of starring in her own right. Not wanting the responsibility of top billing and having to carry the picture, she preferred the security of being a featured player. She reunited with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet in John Huston's Across the Pacific (1942). Though usually cast in dramatic or melodramatic roles, Astor showed a flair for comedy as The Princess Centimillia in the screwball comedy, The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942) with Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea. In February 1943, Astor's father, Otto Langhanke, died in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital as a result of a heart attack complicated by influenza. His wife and daughter were at his bedside. That same year, Astor signed a seven-year contract with MGM, a regrettable mistake. She was kept busy playing what she considered mediocre roles she called "Mothers for Metro". After Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944), the studio allowed her to debut on Broadway in 'Many Happy Returns' (1945). The play was a failure, but Astor received good reviews. On loan-out to 20th Century Fox, she played a wealthy widow in Claudia and David (Walter Lang, 1946). She was also loaned to Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in Desert Fury (Lewis Allen, 1947) playing the tough owner of a saloon and casino in a small mining town. In 1947 Helen Langhanke died of a heart ailment. Back at MGM, Astor continued being cast in undistinguished, colorless mother roles. One exception was when she played a prostitute in the Film Noir Act of Violence (Fred Zinnemann, 1948) with Van Heflin and Robert Ryan. The last straw came when she was cast as Marmee March in Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949). Astor found no redemption in playing what she considered another humdrum mother and grew despondent. She later described her disappointment with her cast members and the shoot in her memoir 'A Life on Film'. The studio wanted to renew her contract, promising better roles, but she declined the offer.
At the same time, Mary Astor's drinking was growing troublesome. She admitted to alcoholism as far back as the 1930s, but it had never interfered with her work schedule or performance. She hit bottom in 1949 and went into a sanitarium for alcoholics. In 1951, she made a frantic call to her doctor and said that she had taken too many sleeping pills. She was taken to a hospital and the police reported that she had attempted suicide, this being her third overdose in two years, and the story made headline news. She maintained it had been an accident. That same year, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and converted to Roman Catholicism. She credited her recovery to a priest, Peter Ciklic, also a practicing psychologist, who encouraged her to write about her experiences as part of therapy. She also separated from her fourth husband, Thomas Wheelock (a stockbroker she married on Christmas Day 1945), but did not actually divorce him until 1955. In 1952, she was cast in the leading role of the stage play 'The Time of the Cuckoo', which was later made into the film Summertime (David Lean, 1955) with Katharine Hepburn, and subsequently toured with it. After the tour, Astor lived in New York for four years and worked in the theatre and on television. During the 1952 presidential election, Astor, a lifelong Democrat, supported the campaign of Adlai Stevenson. Her TV debut was in The Missing Years (1954) for Kraft Television Theatre. In 1954, she also appeared in the episode Fearful Hour of the Gary Merrill NBC series Justice in the role of a desperately poor and aging film star who attempts suicide to avoid exposure as a thief. She also played an ex-film star on the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller, in an episode titled Rose's Last Summer (1960). During these years, she appeared on many big shows of the time, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1958-`1959), Rawhide (1961), and Dr. Kildare (1963-1963). She starred on Broadway again in 'The Starcross Story' (1954), another failure, and returned to Southern California in 1956. She then went on a successful theatre tour of 'Don Juan in Hell' directed by Agnes Moorehead and co-starring Ricardo Montalbán. Astor's memoir, 'My Story: An Autobiography', was published in 1959, becoming a sensation in its day and a bestseller. It was the result of Father Ciklic urging her to write. Though she spoke of her troubled personal life, her parents, her marriages, the scandals, her battle with alcoholism, and other areas of her life, she did not mention the film industry or her career in detail. In 1971, a second book was published, 'A Life on Film', where she discussed her career. It, too, became a bestseller. Astor also tried her hand at fiction. She appeared in several films during this time, including A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956) with Robert Wagner, and A Stranger in My Arms (Helmut Käutner, 1959).
Mary Astor made a comeback in Return to Peyton Place (José Ferrer, 1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the 'shocking' novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library and received good reviews for her performance. After a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her Malibu, California home, where she was gardening and working on her third novel. She was offered the small role as a key figure, Jewel Mayhew, in the murder mystery Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1964), starring her friend Bette Davis. In 'A Life on Film', she described her character as "a little old lady, waiting to die". Astor decided it would serve as her swan song in the film business. She only appeared in the drama Youngblood Hawke (Delmer Daves, 1964), which premiered before Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. After 109 films in a career spanning 45 years, she turned in her Screen Actors Guild card and retired. Astor later moved to Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Anthony del Campo (from her third marriage to Mexican film editor Manuel del Campo), and his family, until 1971. That same year, suffering from a chronic heart condition, she moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry's retirement facility in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she had a private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room. She appeared in the television documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980), co-produced by Kevin Brownlow, in which she discussed her roles during the silent film period. Astor died in 1987, at age 81, of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while in the hospital at the Motion Picture House complex. She is interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Astor has a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6701 Hollywood Boulevard.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Mary Astor
Austrian postcard by Iris-Verlag, no. 5429. Photo: Fox.
American film actress Mary Astor (1906–1987) was famous for her part as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941) with Humphrey Bogart. She won an Oscar as best supporting actress for The Great Lie (1941). Astor had a long acting career that already started in the silent era in 1921 and included over 100 films.
Mary Astor was born as Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke in Quincy, Illinois, in 1906. She was the only child of Otto Ludwig Langhanke and Helen Marie de Vasconcellos. Both of her parents were teachers. Astor's father taught German at Quincy High School until the U.S. entered World War I. Later on, he took up light farming. Astor's mother, who had always wanted to be an actress, taught drama and elocution. Astor was home-schooled in academics and was taught to play the piano by her father, who insisted she practice daily. Her piano talents came in handy when she played piano in her films The Great Lie (1941) and Meet Me in St. Louis. In 1919, Astor sent a photograph of herself to a beauty contest in Motion Picture Magazine, becoming a semifinalist. When Astor was 15, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, with her father teaching German in public schools. Astor took drama lessons and appeared in various amateur stage productions. The following year, she sent another photograph to Motion Picture Magazine, this time becoming a finalist and then runner-up in the national contest. Her father then moved the family to New York City, in order for his daughter to act in films. He managed her affairs from September 1920 to June 1930. A Manhattan photographer, Charles Albin, saw her photograph and asked the young girl with haunting eyes and long auburn hair to pose for him. The Albin photographs were seen by Harry Durant of Famous Players-Lasky and Astor was signed to a six-month contract with Paramount Pictures. Her name was changed to Mary Astor during a conference among Paramount Pictures chief Jesse Lasky, film producer Walter Wanger, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
Mary Astor's first screen test was directed by Lillian Gish, who was so impressed with her recitation of Shakespeare that she shot a thousand feet of her. She made her debut at age 14 either in the Buster Keaton comedy The Scarecrow (Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton, 1920) - according to IMDb, or in Sentimental Tommy (John S. Robertson, 1921) according to Wikipedia. She then appeared in some short films with sequences based on famous paintings. She received critical recognition for the two-reeler The Beggar Maid (Herbert Blaché, 1921) with Reginald Denny. Her first feature-length film was John Smith (Victor Heerman, 1922), followed that same year by The Man Who Played God (F. Harmon Weight, 1922) starring George Arliss. In 1923, she and her parents moved to Hollywood. After appearing in several larger roles at various studios, she was again signed by Paramount, this time to a one-year contract at $500 a week. After she appeared in several more films, John Barrymore saw her photograph in a magazine and wanted her cast in his upcoming film. On loan-out to Warner Bros., she starred with him in Beau Brummel (Harry Beaumont, 1924). The older actor wooed the young actress, but their relationship was severely constrained by Astor's parents' unwillingness to let the couple spend time alone together. Mary was only seventeen and legally underage. It was only after Barrymore convinced the Langhankes that his acting lessons required privacy that the couple managed to be alone at all. Their secret engagement ended largely because of the Langhankes' interference and Astor's inability to escape their heavy-handed authority, and because Barrymore became involved with Astor's fellow WAMPAS Baby Star Dolores Costello, whom he later married. In 1925, Astor's parents bought a Moorish style mansion with 1 acre (4,000 m2) of land known as Moorcrest in the hills above Hollywood. The Langhankes not only lived lavishly off of Astor's earnings but kept her a virtual prisoner inside Moorcrest. The following year when she was 19, Astor, fed up with her father's constant physical and psychological abuse as well as his control of her money, climbed from her second-floor bedroom window and escaped to a hotel in Hollywood, as recounted in her memoirs. She returned when Otto Langhanke gave her a savings account with $500 and the freedom to come and go as she pleased. Nevertheless, she did not gain control of her salary until she was 26 years old, at which point her parents sued her for financial support. Astor settled the case by agreeing to pay her parents $100 a month. Otto Langhanke put Moorcrest up for auction in the early 1930s, hoping to realise more than the $80,000 he had been offered for it; it sold for $25,000.
Mary Astor continued to appear in films at various studios. When her Paramount contract ended in 1925, she was signed at Warner Bros. Among her assignments was another role with John Barrymore, this time in Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926). She was named one of the WAMPAS (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) Baby Stars in 1926, along with Mary Brian, Dolores Costello, Joan Crawford, Dolores del RÃo, Janet Gaynor, and Fay Wray. On loan to Fox, Astor starred in Dressed to Kill (Irving Cummings, 1928), which received good reviews, and the sophisticated comedy Dry Martini (Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, 1928). When her Warner Bros. contract ended, she signed a contract with Fox for $3,750 a week. In 1928, she married director Kenneth Hawks (brother of Howard Hawks) at her family home, Moorcrest. He gave her a Packard automobile as a wedding present and the couple moved into a home high up on Lookout Mountain in Los Angeles above Beverly Hills. As the film industry made the transition to talkies, Fox gave her a sound test, which she failed because the studio found her voice to be too deep. Though this result was probably due to early sound equipment and inexperienced technicians, the studio released her from her contract and she found herself out of work for eight months in 1929. Astor took voice training and singing lessons in her time off with Francis Stuart, an exponent of Francesco Lamperti, but no roles were offered. Her acting career was then given a boost by her friend, Florence Eldridge (wife of Fredric March), in whom she confided. Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play 'Among the Married' at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead. The play was a success and her voice was deemed suitable, being described as low and vibrant. In early 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox film Such Men Are Dangerous, Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific. Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge gave her the news. Astor remained with Eldridge at her apartment for some time, then soon returned to work. Shortly after her husband's death, she debuted in her first talkie, Ladies Love Brutes (Rowland V. Lee, 1930) at Paramount, in which she co-starred with George Bancroft and her friend Fredric March. While her career picked up, her private life remained difficult. After working on several more films, she suffered delayed shock over her husband's death and had a nervous breakdown.
During the months of her illness, Mary Astor was attended to by Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she married in 1931. That year, she starred as Nancy Gibson in Smart Woman (Gregory La Cava, 1931), playing a woman determined to retrieve her husband from a gold-digging flirtation. In 1932, the Thorpes purchased a yacht and sailed to Hawaii. Astor was expecting a baby in August but gave birth in June in Honolulu. The child, a daughter, was named Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe: her first name combined her parents' names and her middle name is Hawaiian. When they returned to California, Astor freelanced and gained the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932) with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In late 1932, Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros. Meanwhile, besides spending lavishly, her parents invested in the stock market, which often turned out unprofitable. While they remained in Moorcrest, Astor dubbed it a "white elephant", and she refused to maintain the house. She had to turn to the Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills. She appeared as the female lead, Hilda Lake, niece of the murder victims, in The Kennel Murder Case (Michael Curtiz, 1933), co-starring with William Powell as detective Philo Vance. Soon unhappy with her marriage, due to Thorpe having a short temper and a habit of listing her faults, Astor wanted a divorce by 1933. At a friend's suggestion, she took a break from film-making in 1933 and visited New York alone. While there, enjoying a whirlwind social life, she met the playwright George S. Kaufman, who was in a strong but open marriage. She documented their affair in her diary. Thorpe, by now making use of his wife's income, had discovered Astor's diary. He indicated her liaisons with other men, including Kaufman, would be used to claim she was an unfit mother in any divorce proceedings. Thorpe divorced Astor in April 1935. A legal battle drew press attention to Astor in 1936 when a custody battle resulted over their four-year-old daughter, Marylyn. Astor's diary was never formally offered as evidence during the trial, but Thorpe and his lawyers constantly referred to it, and its notoriety grew. Astor admitted that the diary existed and that she had documented her affair with Kaufman, but maintained that many of the parts that had been referred to were forgeries, following the theft of the diary from her desk. The diary was deemed inadmissible as a mutilated document because Thorpe had removed pages referring to himself and had fabricated content. The trial judge, Goodwin J. Knight, ordered it sealed and impounded. News of the diary became public when Astor's role in Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936), as Edith Cortwright, was beginning to be filmed. Producer Samuel Goldwyn was urged to fire her, as her contract included a morality clause, but Goldwyn refused. With Walter Huston in the title role, Dodsworth received rave reviews on release, and the public's acceptance assured the studios that casting Astor remained a viable proposition. Ultimately, the scandals caused no harm to Astor's career, which was actually revitalised because of the custody fight and the publicity it generated. In 1952, by court order, Astor's diary was removed from the bank vault where it had been sequestered for 16 years and destroyed.
In 1937, Mary Astor returned to the stage in well-received productions of Noël Coward's 'Tonight at 8.30', 'The Astonished Heart', and 'Still Life'. She also began performing regularly on the radio. Over the next few years, she had roles in The Prisoner of Zenda (John Cromwell, 1937), John Ford's The Hurricane (1937), Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939) and Brigham Young (Henry Hathaway, 1940), starring Tyrone Power. In John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Astor played scheming temptress and murderer Brigid O'Shaughnessy. The film also starred Humphrey Bogart and featured Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. For her performance in The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941) she won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. As Sandra Kovak, the self-absorbed concert pianist who relinquishes her unborn child, her intermittent love interest was played by George Brent, but the film's star was Bette Davis. Davis wanted Astor cast in the role after watching her screen test and seeing her play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1. She then recruited Astor to collaborate on rewriting the script, which Davis felt was mediocre and needed work to make it more interesting. Astor further followed Davis's advice and sported a bobbed hairdo for the role. The soundtrack of the film in the scenes where she plays the concerto, with violent hand movements on the piano keyboard, was dubbed by pianist Max Rabinovitch. Davis deliberately stepped back to allow Astor to shine in her key scenes. In her Oscar acceptance speech, Astor thanked Bette Davis and Tchaikovsky. Astor and Davis became good friends. Astor was not propelled into the upper echelon of movie stars by these successes, however. She always declined offers of starring in her own right. Not wanting the responsibility of top billing and having to carry the picture, she preferred the security of being a featured player. She reunited with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet in John Huston's Across the Pacific (1942). Though usually cast in dramatic or melodramatic roles, Astor showed a flair for comedy as The Princess Centimillia in the screwball comedy, The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942) with Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea. In February 1943, Astor's father, Otto Langhanke, died in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital as a result of a heart attack complicated by influenza. His wife and daughter were at his bedside. That same year, Astor signed a seven-year contract with MGM, a regrettable mistake. She was kept busy playing what she considered mediocre roles she called "Mothers for Metro". After Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944), the studio allowed her to debut on Broadway in 'Many Happy Returns' (1945). The play was a failure, but Astor received good reviews. On loan-out to 20th Century Fox, she played a wealthy widow in Claudia and David (Walter Lang, 1946). She was also loaned to Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in Desert Fury (Lewis Allen, 1947) playing the tough owner of a saloon and casino in a small mining town. In 1947 Helen Langhanke died of a heart ailment. Back at MGM, Astor continued being cast in undistinguished, colorless mother roles. One exception was when she played a prostitute in the Film Noir Act of Violence (Fred Zinnemann, 1948) with Van Heflin and Robert Ryan. The last straw came when she was cast as Marmee March in Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949). Astor found no redemption in playing what she considered another humdrum mother and grew despondent. She later described her disappointment with her cast members and the shoot in her memoir 'A Life on Film'. The studio wanted to renew her contract, promising better roles, but she declined the offer.
At the same time, Mary Astor's drinking was growing troublesome. She admitted to alcoholism as far back as the 1930s, but it had never interfered with her work schedule or performance. She hit bottom in 1949 and went into a sanitarium for alcoholics. In 1951, she made a frantic call to her doctor and said that she had taken too many sleeping pills. She was taken to a hospital and the police reported that she had attempted suicide, this being her third overdose in two years, and the story made headline news. She maintained it had been an accident. That same year, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and converted to Roman Catholicism. She credited her recovery to a priest, Peter Ciklic, also a practicing psychologist, who encouraged her to write about her experiences as part of therapy. She also separated from her fourth husband, Thomas Wheelock (a stockbroker she married on Christmas Day 1945), but did not actually divorce him until 1955. In 1952, she was cast in the leading role of the stage play 'The Time of the Cuckoo', which was later made into the film Summertime (David Lean, 1955) with Katharine Hepburn, and subsequently toured with it. After the tour, Astor lived in New York for four years and worked in the theatre and on television. During the 1952 presidential election, Astor, a lifelong Democrat, supported the campaign of Adlai Stevenson. Her TV debut was in The Missing Years (1954) for Kraft Television Theatre. In 1954, she also appeared in the episode Fearful Hour of the Gary Merrill NBC series Justice in the role of a desperately poor and aging film star who attempts suicide to avoid exposure as a thief. She also played an ex-film star on the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller, in an episode titled Rose's Last Summer (1960). During these years, she appeared on many big shows of the time, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1958-`1959), Rawhide (1961), and Dr. Kildare (1963-1963). She starred on Broadway again in 'The Starcross Story' (1954), another failure, and returned to Southern California in 1956. She then went on a successful theatre tour of 'Don Juan in Hell' directed by Agnes Moorehead and co-starring Ricardo Montalbán. Astor's memoir, 'My Story: An Autobiography', was published in 1959, becoming a sensation in its day and a bestseller. It was the result of Father Ciklic urging her to write. Though she spoke of her troubled personal life, her parents, her marriages, the scandals, her battle with alcoholism, and other areas of her life, she did not mention the film industry or her career in detail. In 1971, a second book was published, 'A Life on Film', where she discussed her career. It, too, became a bestseller. Astor also tried her hand at fiction. She appeared in several films during this time, including A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956) with Robert Wagner, and A Stranger in My Arms (Helmut Käutner, 1959).
Mary Astor made a comeback in Return to Peyton Place (José Ferrer, 1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the 'shocking' novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library and received good reviews for her performance. After a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her Malibu, California home, where she was gardening and working on her third novel. She was offered the small role as a key figure, Jewel Mayhew, in the murder mystery Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1964), starring her friend Bette Davis. In 'A Life on Film', she described her character as "a little old lady, waiting to die". Astor decided it would serve as her swan song in the film business. She only appeared in the drama Youngblood Hawke (Delmer Daves, 1964), which premiered before Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. After 109 films in a career spanning 45 years, she turned in her Screen Actors Guild card and retired. Astor later moved to Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Anthony del Campo (from her third marriage to Mexican film editor Manuel del Campo), and his family, until 1971. That same year, suffering from a chronic heart condition, she moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry's retirement facility in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she had a private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room. She appeared in the television documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980), co-produced by Kevin Brownlow, in which she discussed her roles during the silent film period. Astor died in 1987, at age 81, of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while in the hospital at the Motion Picture House complex. She is interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Astor has a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6701 Hollywood Boulevard.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Mary Astor
German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 4996/2, 1929-1930. Photo: Fox.
American film actress Mary Astor (1906–1987) was famous for her part as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941) with Humphrey Bogart. She won an Oscar as best supporting actress for The Great Lie (1941). Astor had a long acting career that already started in the silent era in 1921 and included over 100 films.
Mary Astor was born as Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke in Quincy, Illinois, in 1906. She was the only child of Otto Ludwig Langhanke and Helen Marie de Vasconcellos. Both of her parents were teachers. Astor's father taught German at Quincy High School until the U.S. entered World War I. Later on, he took up light farming. Astor's mother, who had always wanted to be an actress, taught drama and elocution. Astor was home-schooled in academics and was taught to play the piano by her father, who insisted she practice daily. Her piano talents came in handy when she played piano in her films The Great Lie (1941) and Meet Me in St. Louis. In 1919, Astor sent a photograph of herself to a beauty contest in Motion Picture Magazine, becoming a semifinalist. When Astor was 15, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, with her father teaching German in public schools. Astor took drama lessons and appeared in various amateur stage productions. The following year, she sent another photograph to Motion Picture Magazine, this time becoming a finalist and then runner-up in the national contest. Her father then moved the family to New York City, in order for his daughter to act in films. He managed her affairs from September 1920 to June 1930. A Manhattan photographer, Charles Albin, saw her photograph and asked the young girl with haunting eyes and long auburn hair to pose for him. The Albin photographs were seen by Harry Durant of Famous Players-Lasky and Astor was signed to a six-month contract with Paramount Pictures. Her name was changed to Mary Astor during a conference among Paramount Pictures chief Jesse Lasky, film producer Walter Wanger, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
Mary Astor's first screen test was directed by Lillian Gish, who was so impressed with her recitation of Shakespeare that she shot a thousand feet of her. She made her debut at age 14 either in the Buster Keaton comedy The Scarecrow (Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton, 1920) - according to IMDb, or in Sentimental Tommy (John S. Robertson, 1921) according to Wikipedia. She then appeared in some short films with sequences based on famous paintings. She received critical recognition for the two-reeler The Beggar Maid (Herbert Blaché, 1921) with Reginald Denny. Her first feature-length film was John Smith (Victor Heerman, 1922), followed that same year by The Man Who Played God (F. Harmon Weight, 1922) starring George Arliss. In 1923, she and her parents moved to Hollywood. After appearing in several larger roles at various studios, she was again signed by Paramount, this time to a one-year contract at $500 a week. After she appeared in several more films, John Barrymore saw her photograph in a magazine and wanted her cast in his upcoming film. On loan-out to Warner Bros., she starred with him in Beau Brummel (Harry Beaumont, 1924). The older actor wooed the young actress, but their relationship was severely constrained by Astor's parents' unwillingness to let the couple spend time alone together. Mary was only seventeen and legally underage. It was only after Barrymore convinced the Langhankes that his acting lessons required privacy that the couple managed to be alone at all. Their secret engagement ended largely because of the Langhankes' interference and Astor's inability to escape their heavy-handed authority, and because Barrymore became involved with Astor's fellow WAMPAS Baby Star Dolores Costello, whom he later married. In 1925, Astor's parents bought a Moorish style mansion with 1 acre (4,000 m2) of land known as Moorcrest in the hills above Hollywood. The Langhankes not only lived lavishly off of Astor's earnings but kept her a virtual prisoner inside Moorcrest. The following year when she was 19, Astor, fed up with her father's constant physical and psychological abuse as well as his control of her money, climbed from her second-floor bedroom window and escaped to a hotel in Hollywood, as recounted in her memoirs. She returned when Otto Langhanke gave her a savings account with $500 and the freedom to come and go as she pleased. Nevertheless, she did not gain control of her salary until she was 26 years old, at which point her parents sued her for financial support. Astor settled the case by agreeing to pay her parents $100 a month. Otto Langhanke put Moorcrest up for auction in the early 1930s, hoping to realise more than the $80,000 he had been offered for it; it sold for $25,000.
Mary Astor continued to appear in films at various studios. When her Paramount contract ended in 1925, she was signed at Warner Bros. Among her assignments was another role with John Barrymore, this time in Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926). She was named one of the WAMPAS (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) Baby Stars in 1926, along with Mary Brian, Dolores Costello, Joan Crawford, Dolores del RÃo, Janet Gaynor, and Fay Wray. On loan to Fox, Astor starred in Dressed to Kill (Irving Cummings, 1928), which received good reviews, and the sophisticated comedy Dry Martini (Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, 1928). When her Warner Bros. contract ended, she signed a contract with Fox for $3,750 a week. In 1928, she married director Kenneth Hawks (brother of Howard Hawks) at her family home, Moorcrest. He gave her a Packard automobile as a wedding present and the couple moved into a home high up on Lookout Mountain in Los Angeles above Beverly Hills. As the film industry made the transition to talkies, Fox gave her a sound test, which she failed because the studio found her voice to be too deep. Though this result was probably due to early sound equipment and inexperienced technicians, the studio released her from her contract and she found herself out of work for eight months in 1929. Astor took voice training and singing lessons in her time off with Francis Stuart, an exponent of Francesco Lamperti, but no roles were offered. Her acting career was then given a boost by her friend, Florence Eldridge (wife of Fredric March), in whom she confided. Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play 'Among the Married' at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead. The play was a success and her voice was deemed suitable, being described as low and vibrant. In early 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox film Such Men Are Dangerous, Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific. Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge gave her the news. Astor remained with Eldridge at her apartment for some time, then soon returned to work. Shortly after her husband's death, she debuted in her first talkie, Ladies Love Brutes (Rowland V. Lee, 1930) at Paramount, in which she co-starred with George Bancroft and her friend Fredric March. While her career picked up, her private life remained difficult. After working on several more films, she suffered delayed shock over her husband's death and had a nervous breakdown.
During the months of her illness, Mary Astor was attended to by Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she married in 1931. That year, she starred as Nancy Gibson in Smart Woman (Gregory La Cava, 1931), playing a woman determined to retrieve her husband from a gold-digging flirtation. In 1932, the Thorpes purchased a yacht and sailed to Hawaii. Astor was expecting a baby in August but gave birth in June in Honolulu. The child, a daughter, was named Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe: her first name combined her parents' names and her middle name is Hawaiian. When they returned to California, Astor freelanced and gained the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932) with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In late 1932, Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros. Meanwhile, besides spending lavishly, her parents invested in the stock market, which often turned out unprofitable. While they remained in Moorcrest, Astor dubbed it a "white elephant", and she refused to maintain the house. She had to turn to the Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills. She appeared as the female lead, Hilda Lake, niece of the murder victims, in The Kennel Murder Case (Michael Curtiz, 1933), co-starring with William Powell as detective Philo Vance. Soon unhappy with her marriage, due to Thorpe having a short temper and a habit of listing her faults, Astor wanted a divorce by 1933. At a friend's suggestion, she took a break from film-making in 1933 and visited New York alone. While there, enjoying a whirlwind social life, she met the playwright George S. Kaufman, who was in a strong but open marriage. She documented their affair in her diary. Thorpe, by now making use of his wife's income, had discovered Astor's diary. He indicated her liaisons with other men, including Kaufman, would be used to claim she was an unfit mother in any divorce proceedings. Thorpe divorced Astor in April 1935. A legal battle drew press attention to Astor in 1936 when a custody battle resulted over their four-year-old daughter, Marylyn. Astor's diary was never formally offered as evidence during the trial, but Thorpe and his lawyers constantly referred to it, and its notoriety grew. Astor admitted that the diary existed and that she had documented her affair with Kaufman, but maintained that many of the parts that had been referred to were forgeries, following the theft of the diary from her desk. The diary was deemed inadmissible as a mutilated document because Thorpe had removed pages referring to himself and had fabricated content. The trial judge, Goodwin J. Knight, ordered it sealed and impounded. News of the diary became public when Astor's role in Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936), as Edith Cortwright, was beginning to be filmed. Producer Samuel Goldwyn was urged to fire her, as her contract included a morality clause, but Goldwyn refused. With Walter Huston in the title role, Dodsworth received rave reviews on release, and the public's acceptance assured the studios that casting Astor remained a viable proposition. Ultimately, the scandals caused no harm to Astor's career, which was actually revitalised because of the custody fight and the publicity it generated. In 1952, by court order, Astor's diary was removed from the bank vault where it had been sequestered for 16 years and destroyed.
In 1937, Mary Astor returned to the stage in well-received productions of Noël Coward's 'Tonight at 8.30', 'The Astonished Heart', and 'Still Life'. She also began performing regularly on the radio. Over the next few years, she had roles in The Prisoner of Zenda (John Cromwell, 1937), John Ford's The Hurricane (1937), Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939) and Brigham Young (Henry Hathaway, 1940), starring Tyrone Power. In John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Astor played scheming temptress and murderer Brigid O'Shaughnessy. The film also starred Humphrey Bogart and featured Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. For her performance in The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941) she won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. As Sandra Kovak, the self-absorbed concert pianist who relinquishes her unborn child, her intermittent love interest was played by George Brent, but the film's star was Bette Davis. Davis wanted Astor cast in the role after watching her screen test and seeing her play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1. She then recruited Astor to collaborate on rewriting the script, which Davis felt was mediocre and needed work to make it more interesting. Astor further followed Davis's advice and sported a bobbed hairdo for the role. The soundtrack of the film in the scenes where she plays the concerto, with violent hand movements on the piano keyboard, was dubbed by pianist Max Rabinovitch. Davis deliberately stepped back to allow Astor to shine in her key scenes. In her Oscar acceptance speech, Astor thanked Bette Davis and Tchaikovsky. Astor and Davis became good friends. Astor was not propelled into the upper echelon of movie stars by these successes, however. She always declined offers of starring in her own right. Not wanting the responsibility of top billing and having to carry the picture, she preferred the security of being a featured player. She reunited with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet in John Huston's Across the Pacific (1942). Though usually cast in dramatic or melodramatic roles, Astor showed a flair for comedy as The Princess Centimillia in the screwball comedy, The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942) with Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea. In February 1943, Astor's father, Otto Langhanke, died in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital as a result of a heart attack complicated by influenza. His wife and daughter were at his bedside. That same year, Astor signed a seven-year contract with MGM, a regrettable mistake. She was kept busy playing what she considered mediocre roles she called "Mothers for Metro". After Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944), the studio allowed her to debut on Broadway in 'Many Happy Returns' (1945). The play was a failure, but Astor received good reviews. On loan-out to 20th Century Fox, she played a wealthy widow in Claudia and David (Walter Lang, 1946). She was also loaned to Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in Desert Fury (Lewis Allen, 1947) playing the tough owner of a saloon and casino in a small mining town. In 1947 Helen Langhanke died of a heart ailment. Back at MGM, Astor continued being cast in undistinguished, colorless mother roles. One exception was when she played a prostitute in the Film Noir Act of Violence (Fred Zinnemann, 1948) with Van Heflin and Robert Ryan. The last straw came when she was cast as Marmee March in Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949). Astor found no redemption in playing what she considered another humdrum mother and grew despondent. She later described her disappointment with her cast members and the shoot in her memoir 'A Life on Film'. The studio wanted to renew her contract, promising better roles, but she declined the offer.
At the same time, Mary Astor's drinking was growing troublesome. She admitted to alcoholism as far back as the 1930s, but it had never interfered with her work schedule or performance. She hit bottom in 1949 and went into a sanitarium for alcoholics. In 1951, she made a frantic call to her doctor and said that she had taken too many sleeping pills. She was taken to a hospital and the police reported that she had attempted suicide, this being her third overdose in two years, and the story made headline news. She maintained it had been an accident. That same year, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and converted to Roman Catholicism. She credited her recovery to a priest, Peter Ciklic, also a practicing psychologist, who encouraged her to write about her experiences as part of therapy. She also separated from her fourth husband, Thomas Wheelock (a stockbroker she married on Christmas Day 1945), but did not actually divorce him until 1955. In 1952, she was cast in the leading role of the stage play 'The Time of the Cuckoo', which was later made into the film Summertime (David Lean, 1955) with Katharine Hepburn, and subsequently toured with it. After the tour, Astor lived in New York for four years and worked in the theatre and on television. During the 1952 presidential election, Astor, a lifelong Democrat, supported the campaign of Adlai Stevenson. Her TV debut was in The Missing Years (1954) for Kraft Television Theatre. In 1954, she also appeared in the episode Fearful Hour of the Gary Merrill NBC series Justice in the role of a desperately poor and aging film star who attempts suicide to avoid exposure as a thief. She also played an ex-film star on the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller, in an episode titled Rose's Last Summer (1960). During these years, she appeared on many big shows of the time, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1958-`1959), Rawhide (1961), and Dr. Kildare (1963-1963). She starred on Broadway again in 'The Starcross Story' (1954), another failure, and returned to Southern California in 1956. She then went on a successful theatre tour of 'Don Juan in Hell' directed by Agnes Moorehead and co-starring Ricardo Montalbán. Astor's memoir, 'My Story: An Autobiography', was published in 1959, becoming a sensation in its day and a bestseller. It was the result of Father Ciklic urging her to write. Though she spoke of her troubled personal life, her parents, her marriages, the scandals, her battle with alcoholism, and other areas of her life, she did not mention the film industry or her career in detail. In 1971, a second book was published, 'A Life on Film', where she discussed her career. It, too, became a bestseller. Astor also tried her hand at fiction. She appeared in several films during this time, including A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956) with Robert Wagner, and A Stranger in My Arms (Helmut Käutner, 1959).
Mary Astor made a comeback in Return to Peyton Place (José Ferrer, 1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the 'shocking' novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library and received good reviews for her performance. After a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her Malibu, California home, where she was gardening and working on her third novel. She was offered the small role as a key figure, Jewel Mayhew, in the murder mystery Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1964), starring her friend Bette Davis. In 'A Life on Film', she described her character as "a little old lady, waiting to die". Astor decided it would serve as her swan song in the film business. She only appeared in the drama Youngblood Hawke (Delmer Daves, 1964), which premiered before Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. After 109 films in a career spanning 45 years, she turned in her Screen Actors Guild card and retired. Astor later moved to Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Anthony del Campo (from her third marriage to Mexican film editor Manuel del Campo), and his family, until 1971. That same year, suffering from a chronic heart condition, she moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry's retirement facility in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she had a private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room. She appeared in the television documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980), co-produced by Kevin Brownlow, in which she discussed her roles during the silent film period. Astor died in 1987, at age 81, of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while in the hospital at the Motion Picture House complex. She is interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Astor has a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6701 Hollywood Boulevard.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
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Mary Astor
Dutch postcard, no. 648. Photo: Warner Bros.
American film actress Mary Astor (1906–1987) was famous for her part as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941) with Humphrey Bogart. She won an Oscar as best supporting actress for The Great Lie (1941). Astor had a long acting career that already started in the silent era in 1921 and included over 100 films.
Mary Astor was born as Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke in Quincy, Illinois, in 1906. She was the only child of Otto Ludwig Langhanke and Helen Marie de Vasconcellos. Both of her parents were teachers. Astor's father taught German at Quincy High School until the U.S. entered World War I. Later on, he took up light farming. Astor's mother, who had always wanted to be an actress, taught drama and elocution. Astor was home-schooled in academics and was taught to play the piano by her father, who insisted she practice daily. Her piano talents came in handy when she played piano in her films The Great Lie (1941) and Meet Me in St. Louis. In 1919, Astor sent a photograph of herself to a beauty contest in Motion Picture Magazine, becoming a semifinalist. When Astor was 15, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, with her father teaching German in public schools. Astor took drama lessons and appeared in various amateur stage productions. The following year, she sent another photograph to Motion Picture Magazine, this time becoming a finalist and then runner-up in the national contest. Her father then moved the family to New York City, in order for his daughter to act in films. He managed her affairs from September 1920 to June 1930. A Manhattan photographer, Charles Albin, saw her photograph and asked the young girl with haunting eyes and long auburn hair to pose for him. The Albin photographs were seen by Harry Durant of Famous Players-Lasky and Astor was signed to a six-month contract with Paramount Pictures. Her name was changed to Mary Astor during a conference among Paramount Pictures chief Jesse Lasky, film producer Walter Wanger, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
Mary Astor's first screen test was directed by Lillian Gish, who was so impressed with her recitation of Shakespeare that she shot a thousand feet of her. She made her debut at age 14 either in the Buster Keaton comedy The Scarecrow (Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton, 1920) - according to IMDb, or in Sentimental Tommy (John S. Robertson, 1921) according to Wikipedia. She then appeared in some short films with sequences based on famous paintings. She received critical recognition for the two-reeler The Beggar Maid (Herbert Blaché, 1921) with Reginald Denny. Her first feature-length film was John Smith (Victor Heerman, 1922), followed that same year by The Man Who Played God (F. Harmon Weight, 1922) starring George Arliss. In 1923, she and her parents moved to Hollywood. After appearing in several larger roles at various studios, she was again signed by Paramount, this time to a one-year contract at $500 a week. After she appeared in several more films, John Barrymore saw her photograph in a magazine and wanted her cast in his upcoming film. On loan-out to Warner Bros., she starred with him in Beau Brummel (Harry Beaumont, 1924). The older actor wooed the young actress, but their relationship was severely constrained by Astor's parents' unwillingness to let the couple spend time alone together. Mary was only seventeen and legally underage. It was only after Barrymore convinced the Langhankes that his acting lessons required privacy that the couple managed to be alone at all. Their secret engagement ended largely because of the Langhankes' interference and Astor's inability to escape their heavy-handed authority, and because Barrymore became involved with Astor's fellow WAMPAS Baby Star Dolores Costello, whom he later married. In 1925, Astor's parents bought a Moorish style mansion with 1 acre (4,000 m2) of land known as Moorcrest in the hills above Hollywood. The Langhankes not only lived lavishly off of Astor's earnings but kept her a virtual prisoner inside Moorcrest. The following year when she was 19, Astor, fed up with her father's constant physical and psychological abuse as well as his control of her money, climbed from her second-floor bedroom window and escaped to a hotel in Hollywood, as recounted in her memoirs. She returned when Otto Langhanke gave her a savings account with $500 and the freedom to come and go as she pleased. Nevertheless, she did not gain control of her salary until she was 26 years old, at which point her parents sued her for financial support. Astor settled the case by agreeing to pay her parents $100 a month. Otto Langhanke put Moorcrest up for auction in the early 1930s, hoping to realise more than the $80,000 he had been offered for it; it sold for $25,000.
Mary Astor continued to appear in films at various studios. When her Paramount contract ended in 1925, she was signed at Warner Bros. Among her assignments was another role with John Barrymore, this time in Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926). She was named one of the WAMPAS (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) Baby Stars in 1926, along with Mary Brian, Dolores Costello, Joan Crawford, Dolores del RÃo, Janet Gaynor, and Fay Wray. On loan to Fox, Astor starred in Dressed to Kill (Irving Cummings, 1928), which received good reviews, and the sophisticated comedy Dry Martini (Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, 1928). When her Warner Bros. contract ended, she signed a contract with Fox for $3,750 a week. In 1928, she married director Kenneth Hawks (brother of Howard Hawks) at her family home, Moorcrest. He gave her a Packard automobile as a wedding present and the couple moved into a home high up on Lookout Mountain in Los Angeles above Beverly Hills. As the film industry made the transition to talkies, Fox gave her a sound test, which she failed because the studio found her voice to be too deep. Though this result was probably due to early sound equipment and inexperienced technicians, the studio released her from her contract and she found herself out of work for eight months in 1929. Astor took voice training and singing lessons in her time off with Francis Stuart, an exponent of Francesco Lamperti, but no roles were offered. Her acting career was then given a boost by her friend, Florence Eldridge (wife of Fredric March), in whom she confided. Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play 'Among the Married' at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead. The play was a success and her voice was deemed suitable, being described as low and vibrant. In early 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox film Such Men Are Dangerous, Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific. Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge gave her the news. Astor remained with Eldridge at her apartment for some time, then soon returned to work. Shortly after her husband's death, she debuted in her first talkie, Ladies Love Brutes (Rowland V. Lee, 1930) at Paramount, in which she co-starred with George Bancroft and her friend Fredric March. While her career picked up, her private life remained difficult. After working on several more films, she suffered delayed shock over her husband's death and had a nervous breakdown.
During the months of her illness, Mary Astor was attended to by Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she married in 1931. That year, she starred as Nancy Gibson in Smart Woman (Gregory La Cava, 1931), playing a woman determined to retrieve her husband from a gold-digging flirtation. In 1932, the Thorpes purchased a yacht and sailed to Hawaii. Astor was expecting a baby in August but gave birth in June in Honolulu. The child, a daughter, was named Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe: her first name combined her parents' names and her middle name is Hawaiian. When they returned to California, Astor freelanced and gained the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932) with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In late 1932, Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros. Meanwhile, besides spending lavishly, her parents invested in the stock market, which often turned out unprofitable. While they remained in Moorcrest, Astor dubbed it a "white elephant", and she refused to maintain the house. She had to turn to the Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills. She appeared as the female lead, Hilda Lake, niece of the murder victims, in The Kennel Murder Case (Michael Curtiz, 1933), co-starring with William Powell as detective Philo Vance. Soon unhappy with her marriage, due to Thorpe having a short temper and a habit of listing her faults, Astor wanted a divorce by 1933. At a friend's suggestion, she took a break from film-making in 1933 and visited New York alone. While there, enjoying a whirlwind social life, she met the playwright George S. Kaufman, who was in a strong but open marriage. She documented their affair in her diary. Thorpe, by now making use of his wife's income, had discovered Astor's diary. He indicated her liaisons with other men, including Kaufman, would be used to claim she was an unfit mother in any divorce proceedings. Thorpe divorced Astor in April 1935. A legal battle drew press attention to Astor in 1936 when a custody battle resulted over their four-year-old daughter, Marylyn. Astor's diary was never formally offered as evidence during the trial, but Thorpe and his lawyers constantly referred to it, and its notoriety grew. Astor admitted that the diary existed and that she had documented her affair with Kaufman, but maintained that many of the parts that had been referred to were forgeries, following the theft of the diary from her desk. The diary was deemed inadmissible as a mutilated document because Thorpe had removed pages referring to himself and had fabricated content. The trial judge, Goodwin J. Knight, ordered it sealed and impounded. News of the diary became public when Astor's role in Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936), as Edith Cortwright, was beginning to be filmed. Producer Samuel Goldwyn was urged to fire her, as her contract included a morality clause, but Goldwyn refused. With Walter Huston in the title role, Dodsworth received rave reviews on release, and the public's acceptance assured the studios that casting Astor remained a viable proposition. Ultimately, the scandals caused no harm to Astor's career, which was actually revitalised because of the custody fight and the publicity it generated. In 1952, by court order, Astor's diary was removed from the bank vault where it had been sequestered for 16 years and destroyed.
In 1937, Mary Astor returned to the stage in well-received productions of Noël Coward's 'Tonight at 8.30', 'The Astonished Heart', and 'Still Life'. She also began performing regularly on the radio. Over the next few years, she had roles in The Prisoner of Zenda (John Cromwell, 1937), John Ford's The Hurricane (1937), Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939) and Brigham Young (Henry Hathaway, 1940), starring Tyrone Power. In John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Astor played scheming temptress and murderer Brigid O'Shaughnessy. The film also starred Humphrey Bogart and featured Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. For her performance in The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941) she won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. As Sandra Kovak, the self-absorbed concert pianist who relinquishes her unborn child, her intermittent love interest was played by George Brent, but the film's star was Bette Davis. Davis wanted Astor cast in the role after watching her screen test and seeing her play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1. She then recruited Astor to collaborate on rewriting the script, which Davis felt was mediocre and needed work to make it more interesting. Astor further followed Davis's advice and sported a bobbed hairdo for the role. The soundtrack of the film in the scenes where she plays the concerto, with violent hand movements on the piano keyboard, was dubbed by pianist Max Rabinovitch. Davis deliberately stepped back to allow Astor to shine in her key scenes. In her Oscar acceptance speech, Astor thanked Bette Davis and Tchaikovsky. Astor and Davis became good friends. Astor was not propelled into the upper echelon of movie stars by these successes, however. She always declined offers of starring in her own right. Not wanting the responsibility of top billing and having to carry the picture, she preferred the security of being a featured player. She reunited with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet in John Huston's Across the Pacific (1942). Though usually cast in dramatic or melodramatic roles, Astor showed a flair for comedy as The Princess Centimillia in the screwball comedy, The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942) with Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea. In February 1943, Astor's father, Otto Langhanke, died in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital as a result of a heart attack complicated by influenza. His wife and daughter were at his bedside. That same year, Astor signed a seven-year contract with MGM, a regrettable mistake. She was kept busy playing what she considered mediocre roles she called "Mothers for Metro". After Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944), the studio allowed her to debut on Broadway in 'Many Happy Returns' (1945). The play was a failure, but Astor received good reviews. On loan-out to 20th Century Fox, she played a wealthy widow in Claudia and David (Walter Lang, 1946). She was also loaned to Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in Desert Fury (Lewis Allen, 1947) playing the tough owner of a saloon and casino in a small mining town. In 1947 Helen Langhanke died of a heart ailment. Back at MGM, Astor continued being cast in undistinguished, colorless mother roles. One exception was when she played a prostitute in the Film Noir Act of Violence (Fred Zinnemann, 1948) with Van Heflin and Robert Ryan. The last straw came when she was cast as Marmee March in Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949). Astor found no redemption in playing what she considered another humdrum mother and grew despondent. She later described her disappointment with her cast members and the shoot in her memoir 'A Life on Film'. The studio wanted to renew her contract, promising better roles, but she declined the offer.
At the same time, Mary Astor's drinking was growing troublesome. She admitted to alcoholism as far back as the 1930s, but it had never interfered with her work schedule or performance. She hit bottom in 1949 and went into a sanitarium for alcoholics. In 1951, she made a frantic call to her doctor and said that she had taken too many sleeping pills. She was taken to a hospital and the police reported that she had attempted suicide, this being her third overdose in two years, and the story made headline news. She maintained it had been an accident. That same year, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and converted to Roman Catholicism. She credited her recovery to a priest, Peter Ciklic, also a practicing psychologist, who encouraged her to write about her experiences as part of therapy. She also separated from her fourth husband, Thomas Wheelock (a stockbroker she married on Christmas Day 1945), but did not actually divorce him until 1955. In 1952, she was cast in the leading role of the stage play 'The Time of the Cuckoo', which was later made into the film Summertime (David Lean, 1955) with Katharine Hepburn, and subsequently toured with it. After the tour, Astor lived in New York for four years and worked in the theatre and on television. During the 1952 presidential election, Astor, a lifelong Democrat, supported the campaign of Adlai Stevenson. Her TV debut was in The Missing Years (1954) for Kraft Television Theatre. In 1954, she also appeared in the episode Fearful Hour of the Gary Merrill NBC series Justice in the role of a desperately poor and aging film star who attempts suicide to avoid exposure as a thief. She also played an ex-film star on the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller, in an episode titled Rose's Last Summer (1960). During these years, she appeared on many big shows of the time, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1958-`1959), Rawhide (1961), and Dr. Kildare (1963-1963). She starred on Broadway again in 'The Starcross Story' (1954), another failure, and returned to Southern California in 1956. She then went on a successful theatre tour of 'Don Juan in Hell' directed by Agnes Moorehead and co-starring Ricardo Montalbán. Astor's memoir, 'My Story: An Autobiography', was published in 1959, becoming a sensation in its day and a bestseller. It was the result of Father Ciklic urging her to write. Though she spoke of her troubled personal life, her parents, her marriages, the scandals, her battle with alcoholism, and other areas of her life, she did not mention the film industry or her career in detail. In 1971, a second book was published, 'A Life on Film', where she discussed her career. It, too, became a bestseller. Astor also tried her hand at fiction. She appeared in several films during this time, including A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956) with Robert Wagner, and A Stranger in My Arms (Helmut Käutner, 1959).
Mary Astor made a comeback in Return to Peyton Place (José Ferrer, 1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the 'shocking' novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library and received good reviews for her performance. After a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her Malibu, California home, where she was gardening and working on her third novel. She was offered the small role as a key figure, Jewel Mayhew, in the murder mystery Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1964), starring her friend Bette Davis. In 'A Life on Film', she described her character as "a little old lady, waiting to die". Astor decided it would serve as her swan song in the film business. She only appeared in the drama Youngblood Hawke (Delmer Daves, 1964), which premiered before Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. After 109 films in a career spanning 45 years, she turned in her Screen Actors Guild card and retired. Astor later moved to Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Anthony del Campo (from her third marriage to Mexican film editor Manuel del Campo), and his family, until 1971. That same year, suffering from a chronic heart condition, she moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry's retirement facility in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she had a private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room. She appeared in the television documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980), co-produced by Kevin Brownlow, in which she discussed her roles during the silent film period. Astor died in 1987, at age 81, of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while in the hospital at the Motion Picture House complex. She is interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Astor has a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6701 Hollywood Boulevard.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
180504_Sydney_CDI_Fri_YR_CDI-Y_4672.jpg
Tayla Desmet riding RODRIGO III; Sex/YOB/Col/Hgt/Born/Breed: G/00/DC/170/GER/HANN; Sire/Dam/Dam Sire: Rotspon/Mona Lisa/-; Breeder: -; Owner: Philip Desmet; n the Agnes Banks Equine Clinic Young Rider FEI Individual Test CDI-Y at the 2018 Sydney CDI*** on 04-05-2018 at Sydney International Equestrian Centre, Horsley Park.
Mary Astor
German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 3135/1, 1928-1929. Photo: Defina / First National.
American film actress Mary Astor (1906–1987) was famous for her part as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941) with Humphrey Bogart. She won an Oscar as best supporting actress for The Great Lie (1941). Astor had a long acting career that already started in the silent era in 1921 and included over 100 films.
Mary Astor was born as Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke in Quincy, Illinois, in 1906. She was the only child of Otto Ludwig Langhanke and Helen Marie de Vasconcellos. Both of her parents were teachers. Astor's father taught German at Quincy High School until the U.S. entered World War I. Later on, he took up light farming. Astor's mother, who had always wanted to be an actress, taught drama and elocution. Astor was home-schooled in academics and was taught to play the piano by her father, who insisted she practice daily. Her piano talents came in handy when she played piano in her films The Great Lie (1941) and Meet Me in St. Louis. In 1919, Astor sent a photograph of herself to a beauty contest in Motion Picture Magazine, becoming a semifinalist. When Astor was 15, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, with her father teaching German in public schools. Astor took drama lessons and appeared in various amateur stage productions. The following year, she sent another photograph to Motion Picture Magazine, this time becoming a finalist and then runner-up in the national contest. Her father then moved the family to New York City, in order for his daughter to act in films. He managed her affairs from September 1920 to June 1930. A Manhattan photographer, Charles Albin, saw her photograph and asked the young girl with haunting eyes and long auburn hair to pose for him. The Albin photographs were seen by Harry Durant of Famous Players-Lasky and Astor was signed to a six-month contract with Paramount Pictures. Her name was changed to Mary Astor during a conference among Paramount Pictures chief Jesse Lasky, film producer Walter Wanger, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
Mary Astor's first screen test was directed by Lillian Gish, who was so impressed with her recitation of Shakespeare that she shot a thousand feet of her. She made her debut at age 14 either in the Buster Keaton comedy The Scarecrow (Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton, 1920) - according to IMDb, or in Sentimental Tommy (John S. Robertson, 1921) according to Wikipedia. She then appeared in some short films with sequences based on famous paintings. She received critical recognition for the two-reeler The Beggar Maid (Herbert Blaché, 1921) with Reginald Denny. Her first feature-length film was John Smith (Victor Heerman, 1922), followed that same year by The Man Who Played God (F. Harmon Weight, 1922) starring George Arliss. In 1923, she and her parents moved to Hollywood. After appearing in several larger roles at various studios, she was again signed by Paramount, this time to a one-year contract at $500 a week. After she appeared in several more films, John Barrymore saw her photograph in a magazine and wanted her cast in his upcoming film. On loan-out to Warner Bros., she starred with him in Beau Brummel (Harry Beaumont, 1924). The older actor wooed the young actress, but their relationship was severely constrained by Astor's parents' unwillingness to let the couple spend time alone together. Mary was only seventeen and legally underage. It was only after Barrymore convinced the Langhankes that his acting lessons required privacy that the couple managed to be alone at all. Their secret engagement ended largely because of the Langhankes' interference and Astor's inability to escape their heavy-handed authority, and because Barrymore became involved with Astor's fellow WAMPAS Baby Star Dolores Costello, whom he later married. In 1925, Astor's parents bought a Moorish style mansion with 1 acre (4,000 m2) of land known as Moorcrest in the hills above Hollywood. The Langhankes not only lived lavishly off of Astor's earnings but kept her a virtual prisoner inside Moorcrest. The following year when she was 19, Astor, fed up with her father's constant physical and psychological abuse as well as his control of her money, climbed from her second-floor bedroom window and escaped to a hotel in Hollywood, as recounted in her memoirs. She returned when Otto Langhanke gave her a savings account with $500 and the freedom to come and go as she pleased. Nevertheless, she did not gain control of her salary until she was 26 years old, at which point her parents sued her for financial support. Astor settled the case by agreeing to pay her parents $100 a month. Otto Langhanke put Moorcrest up for auction in the early 1930s, hoping to realise more than the $80,000 he had been offered for it; it sold for $25,000.
Mary Astor continued to appear in films at various studios. When her Paramount contract ended in 1925, she was signed at Warner Bros. Among her assignments was another role with John Barrymore, this time in Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926). She was named one of the WAMPAS (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) Baby Stars in 1926, along with Mary Brian, Dolores Costello, Joan Crawford, Dolores del RÃo, Janet Gaynor, and Fay Wray. On loan to Fox, Astor starred in Dressed to Kill (Irving Cummings, 1928), which received good reviews, and the sophisticated comedy Dry Martini (Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, 1928). When her Warner Bros. contract ended, she signed a contract with Fox for $3,750 a week. In 1928, she married director Kenneth Hawks (brother of Howard Hawks) at her family home, Moorcrest. He gave her a Packard automobile as a wedding present and the couple moved into a home high up on Lookout Mountain in Los Angeles above Beverly Hills. As the film industry made the transition to talkies, Fox gave her a sound test, which she failed because the studio found her voice to be too deep. Though this result was probably due to early sound equipment and inexperienced technicians, the studio released her from her contract and she found herself out of work for eight months in 1929. Astor took voice training and singing lessons in her time off with Francis Stuart, an exponent of Francesco Lamperti, but no roles were offered. Her acting career was then given a boost by her friend, Florence Eldridge (wife of Fredric March), in whom she confided. Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play 'Among the Married' at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead. The play was a success and her voice was deemed suitable, being described as low and vibrant. In early 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox film Such Men Are Dangerous, Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific. Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge gave her the news. Astor remained with Eldridge at her apartment for some time, then soon returned to work. Shortly after her husband's death, she debuted in her first talkie, Ladies Love Brutes (Rowland V. Lee, 1930) at Paramount, in which she co-starred with George Bancroft and her friend Fredric March. While her career picked up, her private life remained difficult. After working on several more films, she suffered delayed shock over her husband's death and had a nervous breakdown.
During the months of her illness, Mary Astor was attended to by Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she married in 1931. That year, she starred as Nancy Gibson in Smart Woman (Gregory La Cava, 1931), playing a woman determined to retrieve her husband from a gold-digging flirtation. In 1932, the Thorpes purchased a yacht and sailed to Hawaii. Astor was expecting a baby in August but gave birth in June in Honolulu. The child, a daughter, was named Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe: her first name combined her parents' names and her middle name is Hawaiian. When they returned to California, Astor freelanced and gained the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932) with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In late 1932, Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros. Meanwhile, besides spending lavishly, her parents invested in the stock market, which often turned out unprofitable. While they remained in Moorcrest, Astor dubbed it a "white elephant", and she refused to maintain the house. She had to turn to the Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills. She appeared as the female lead, Hilda Lake, niece of the murder victims, in The Kennel Murder Case (Michael Curtiz, 1933), co-starring with William Powell as detective Philo Vance. Soon unhappy with her marriage, due to Thorpe having a short temper and a habit of listing her faults, Astor wanted a divorce by 1933. At a friend's suggestion, she took a break from film-making in 1933 and visited New York alone. While there, enjoying a whirlwind social life, she met the playwright George S. Kaufman, who was in a strong but open marriage. She documented their affair in her diary. Thorpe, by now making use of his wife's income, had discovered Astor's diary. He indicated her liaisons with other men, including Kaufman, would be used to claim she was an unfit mother in any divorce proceedings. Thorpe divorced Astor in April 1935. A legal battle drew press attention to Astor in 1936 when a custody battle resulted over their four-year-old daughter, Marylyn. Astor's diary was never formally offered as evidence during the trial, but Thorpe and his lawyers constantly referred to it, and its notoriety grew. Astor admitted that the diary existed and that she had documented her affair with Kaufman, but maintained that many of the parts that had been referred to were forgeries, following the theft of the diary from her desk. The diary was deemed inadmissible as a mutilated document because Thorpe had removed pages referring to himself and had fabricated content. The trial judge, Goodwin J. Knight, ordered it sealed and impounded. News of the diary became public when Astor's role in Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936), as Edith Cortwright, was beginning to be filmed. Producer Samuel Goldwyn was urged to fire her, as her contract included a morality clause, but Goldwyn refused. With Walter Huston in the title role, Dodsworth received rave reviews on release, and the public's acceptance assured the studios that casting Astor remained a viable proposition. Ultimately, the scandals caused no harm to Astor's career, which was actually revitalised because of the custody fight and the publicity it generated. In 1952, by court order, Astor's diary was removed from the bank vault where it had been sequestered for 16 years and destroyed.
In 1937, Mary Astor returned to the stage in well-received productions of Noël Coward's 'Tonight at 8.30', 'The Astonished Heart', and 'Still Life'. She also began performing regularly on the radio. Over the next few years, she had roles in The Prisoner of Zenda (John Cromwell, 1937), John Ford's The Hurricane (1937), Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939) and Brigham Young (Henry Hathaway, 1940), starring Tyrone Power. In John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Astor played scheming temptress and murderer Brigid O'Shaughnessy. The film also starred Humphrey Bogart and featured Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. For her performance in The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941) she won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. As Sandra Kovak, the self-absorbed concert pianist who relinquishes her unborn child, her intermittent love interest was played by George Brent, but the film's star was Bette Davis. Davis wanted Astor cast in the role after watching her screen test and seeing her play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1. She then recruited Astor to collaborate on rewriting the script, which Davis felt was mediocre and needed work to make it more interesting. Astor further followed Davis's advice and sported a bobbed hairdo for the role. The soundtrack of the film in the scenes where she plays the concerto, with violent hand movements on the piano keyboard, was dubbed by pianist Max Rabinovitch. Davis deliberately stepped back to allow Astor to shine in her key scenes. In her Oscar acceptance speech, Astor thanked Bette Davis and Tchaikovsky. Astor and Davis became good friends. Astor was not propelled into the upper echelon of movie stars by these successes, however. She always declined offers of starring in her own right. Not wanting the responsibility of top billing and having to carry the picture, she preferred the security of being a featured player. She reunited with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet in John Huston's Across the Pacific (1942). Though usually cast in dramatic or melodramatic roles, Astor showed a flair for comedy as The Princess Centimillia in the screwball comedy, The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942) with Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea. In February 1943, Astor's father, Otto Langhanke, died in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital as a result of a heart attack complicated by influenza. His wife and daughter were at his bedside. That same year, Astor signed a seven-year contract with MGM, a regrettable mistake. She was kept busy playing what she considered mediocre roles she called "Mothers for Metro". After Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944), the studio allowed her to debut on Broadway in 'Many Happy Returns' (1945). The play was a failure, but Astor received good reviews. On loan-out to 20th Century Fox, she played a wealthy widow in Claudia and David (Walter Lang, 1946). She was also loaned to Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in Desert Fury (Lewis Allen, 1947) playing the tough owner of a saloon and casino in a small mining town. In 1947 Helen Langhanke died of a heart ailment. Back at MGM, Astor continued being cast in undistinguished, colorless mother roles. One exception was when she played a prostitute in the Film Noir Act of Violence (Fred Zinnemann, 1948) with Van Heflin and Robert Ryan. The last straw came when she was cast as Marmee March in Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949). Astor found no redemption in playing what she considered another humdrum mother and grew despondent. She later described her disappointment with her cast members and the shoot in her memoir 'A Life on Film'. The studio wanted to renew her contract, promising better roles, but she declined the offer.
At the same time, Mary Astor's drinking was growing troublesome. She admitted to alcoholism as far back as the 1930s, but it had never interfered with her work schedule or performance. She hit bottom in 1949 and went into a sanitarium for alcoholics. In 1951, she made a frantic call to her doctor and said that she had taken too many sleeping pills. She was taken to a hospital and the police reported that she had attempted suicide, this being her third overdose in two years, and the story made headline news. She maintained it had been an accident. That same year, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and converted to Roman Catholicism. She credited her recovery to a priest, Peter Ciklic, also a practicing psychologist, who encouraged her to write about her experiences as part of therapy. She also separated from her fourth husband, Thomas Wheelock (a stockbroker she married on Christmas Day 1945), but did not actually divorce him until 1955. In 1952, she was cast in the leading role of the stage play 'The Time of the Cuckoo', which was later made into the film Summertime (David Lean, 1955) with Katharine Hepburn, and subsequently toured with it. After the tour, Astor lived in New York for four years and worked in the theatre and on television. During the 1952 presidential election, Astor, a lifelong Democrat, supported the campaign of Adlai Stevenson. Her TV debut was in The Missing Years (1954) for Kraft Television Theatre. In 1954, she also appeared in the episode Fearful Hour of the Gary Merrill NBC series Justice in the role of a desperately poor and aging film star who attempts suicide to avoid exposure as a thief. She also played an ex-film star on the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller, in an episode titled Rose's Last Summer (1960). During these years, she appeared on many big shows of the time, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1958-`1959), Rawhide (1961), and Dr. Kildare (1963-1963). She starred on Broadway again in 'The Starcross Story' (1954), another failure, and returned to Southern California in 1956. She then went on a successful theatre tour of 'Don Juan in Hell' directed by Agnes Moorehead and co-starring Ricardo Montalbán. Astor's memoir, 'My Story: An Autobiography', was published in 1959, becoming a sensation in its day and a bestseller. It was the result of Father Ciklic urging her to write. Though she spoke of her troubled personal life, her parents, her marriages, the scandals, her battle with alcoholism, and other areas of her life, she did not mention the film industry or her career in detail. In 1971, a second book was published, 'A Life on Film', where she discussed her career. It, too, became a bestseller. Astor also tried her hand at fiction. She appeared in several films during this time, including A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956) with Robert Wagner, and A Stranger in My Arms (Helmut Käutner, 1959).
Mary Astor made a comeback in Return to Peyton Place (José Ferrer, 1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the 'shocking' novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library and received good reviews for her performance. After a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her Malibu, California home, where she was gardening and working on her third novel. She was offered the small role as a key figure, Jewel Mayhew, in the murder mystery Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1964), starring her friend Bette Davis. In 'A Life on Film', she described her character as "a little old lady, waiting to die". Astor decided it would serve as her swan song in the film business. She only appeared in the drama Youngblood Hawke (Delmer Daves, 1964), which premiered before Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. After 109 films in a career spanning 45 years, she turned in her Screen Actors Guild card and retired. Astor later moved to Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Anthony del Campo (from her third marriage to Mexican film editor Manuel del Campo), and his family, until 1971. That same year, suffering from a chronic heart condition, she moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry's retirement facility in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she had a private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room. She appeared in the television documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980), co-produced by Kevin Brownlow, in which she discussed her roles during the silent film period. Astor died in 1987, at age 81, of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while in the hospital at the Motion Picture House complex. She is interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Astor has a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6701 Hollywood Boulevard.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Mary Astor
Austrian postcard by Iris-Verlag, no. 5428. Photo: Fox.
American film actress Mary Astor (1906–1987) was famous for her part as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941) with Humphrey Bogart. She won an Oscar as best supporting actress for The Great Lie (1941). Astor had a long acting career that already started in the silent era in 1921 and included over 100 films.
Mary Astor was born as Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke in Quincy, Illinois, in 1906. She was the only child of Otto Ludwig Langhanke and Helen Marie de Vasconcellos. Both of her parents were teachers. Astor's father taught German at Quincy High School until the U.S. entered World War I. Later on, he took up light farming. Astor's mother, who had always wanted to be an actress, taught drama and elocution. Astor was home-schooled in academics and was taught to play the piano by her father, who insisted she practice daily. Her piano talents came in handy when she played piano in her films The Great Lie (1941) and Meet Me in St. Louis. In 1919, Astor sent a photograph of herself to a beauty contest in Motion Picture Magazine, becoming a semifinalist. When Astor was 15, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, with her father teaching German in public schools. Astor took drama lessons and appeared in various amateur stage productions. The following year, she sent another photograph to Motion Picture Magazine, this time becoming a finalist and then runner-up in the national contest. Her father then moved the family to New York City, in order for his daughter to act in films. He managed her affairs from September 1920 to June 1930. A Manhattan photographer, Charles Albin, saw her photograph and asked the young girl with haunting eyes and long auburn hair to pose for him. The Albin photographs were seen by Harry Durant of Famous Players-Lasky and Astor was signed to a six-month contract with Paramount Pictures. Her name was changed to Mary Astor during a conference among Paramount Pictures chief Jesse Lasky, film producer Walter Wanger, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
Mary Astor's first screen test was directed by Lillian Gish, who was so impressed with her recitation of Shakespeare that she shot a thousand feet of her. She made her debut at age 14 either in the Buster Keaton comedy The Scarecrow (Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton, 1920) - according to IMDb, or in Sentimental Tommy (John S. Robertson, 1921) according to Wikipedia. She then appeared in some short films with sequences based on famous paintings. She received critical recognition for the two-reeler The Beggar Maid (Herbert Blaché, 1921) with Reginald Denny. Her first feature-length film was John Smith (Victor Heerman, 1922), followed that same year by The Man Who Played God (F. Harmon Weight, 1922) starring George Arliss. In 1923, she and her parents moved to Hollywood. After appearing in several larger roles at various studios, she was again signed by Paramount, this time to a one-year contract at $500 a week. After she appeared in several more films, John Barrymore saw her photograph in a magazine and wanted her cast in his upcoming film. On loan-out to Warner Bros., she starred with him in Beau Brummel (Harry Beaumont, 1924). The older actor wooed the young actress, but their relationship was severely constrained by Astor's parents' unwillingness to let the couple spend time alone together. Mary was only seventeen and legally underage. It was only after Barrymore convinced the Langhankes that his acting lessons required privacy that the couple managed to be alone at all. Their secret engagement ended largely because of the Langhankes' interference and Astor's inability to escape their heavy-handed authority, and because Barrymore became involved with Astor's fellow WAMPAS Baby Star Dolores Costello, whom he later married. In 1925, Astor's parents bought a Moorish style mansion with 1 acre (4,000 m2) of land known as Moorcrest in the hills above Hollywood. The Langhankes not only lived lavishly off of Astor's earnings but kept her a virtual prisoner inside Moorcrest. The following year when she was 19, Astor, fed up with her father's constant physical and psychological abuse as well as his control of her money, climbed from her second-floor bedroom window and escaped to a hotel in Hollywood, as recounted in her memoirs. She returned when Otto Langhanke gave her a savings account with $500 and the freedom to come and go as she pleased. Nevertheless, she did not gain control of her salary until she was 26 years old, at which point her parents sued her for financial support. Astor settled the case by agreeing to pay her parents $100 a month. Otto Langhanke put Moorcrest up for auction in the early 1930s, hoping to realise more than the $80,000 he had been offered for it; it sold for $25,000.
Mary Astor continued to appear in films at various studios. When her Paramount contract ended in 1925, she was signed at Warner Bros. Among her assignments was another role with John Barrymore, this time in Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926). She was named one of the WAMPAS (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) Baby Stars in 1926, along with Mary Brian, Dolores Costello, Joan Crawford, Dolores del RÃo, Janet Gaynor, and Fay Wray. On loan to Fox, Astor starred in Dressed to Kill (Irving Cummings, 1928), which received good reviews, and the sophisticated comedy Dry Martini (Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, 1928). When her Warner Bros. contract ended, she signed a contract with Fox for $3,750 a week. In 1928, she married director Kenneth Hawks (brother of Howard Hawks) at her family home, Moorcrest. He gave her a Packard automobile as a wedding present and the couple moved into a home high up on Lookout Mountain in Los Angeles above Beverly Hills. As the film industry made the transition to talkies, Fox gave her a sound test, which she failed because the studio found her voice to be too deep. Though this result was probably due to early sound equipment and inexperienced technicians, the studio released her from her contract and she found herself out of work for eight months in 1929. Astor took voice training and singing lessons in her time off with Francis Stuart, an exponent of Francesco Lamperti, but no roles were offered. Her acting career was then given a boost by her friend, Florence Eldridge (wife of Fredric March), in whom she confided. Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play 'Among the Married' at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead. The play was a success and her voice was deemed suitable, being described as low and vibrant. In early 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox film Such Men Are Dangerous, Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific. Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge gave her the news. Astor remained with Eldridge at her apartment for some time, then soon returned to work. Shortly after her husband's death, she debuted in her first talkie, Ladies Love Brutes (Rowland V. Lee, 1930) at Paramount, in which she co-starred with George Bancroft and her friend Fredric March. While her career picked up, her private life remained difficult. After working on several more films, she suffered delayed shock over her husband's death and had a nervous breakdown.
During the months of her illness, Mary Astor was attended to by Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she married in 1931. That year, she starred as Nancy Gibson in Smart Woman (Gregory La Cava, 1931), playing a woman determined to retrieve her husband from a gold-digging flirtation. In 1932, the Thorpes purchased a yacht and sailed to Hawaii. Astor was expecting a baby in August but gave birth in June in Honolulu. The child, a daughter, was named Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe: her first name combined her parents' names and her middle name is Hawaiian. When they returned to California, Astor freelanced and gained the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932) with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In late 1932, Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros. Meanwhile, besides spending lavishly, her parents invested in the stock market, which often turned out unprofitable. While they remained in Moorcrest, Astor dubbed it a "white elephant", and she refused to maintain the house. She had to turn to the Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills. She appeared as the female lead, Hilda Lake, niece of the murder victims, in The Kennel Murder Case (Michael Curtiz, 1933), co-starring with William Powell as detective Philo Vance. Soon unhappy with her marriage, due to Thorpe having a short temper and a habit of listing her faults, Astor wanted a divorce by 1933. At a friend's suggestion, she took a break from film-making in 1933 and visited New York alone. While there, enjoying a whirlwind social life, she met the playwright George S. Kaufman, who was in a strong but open marriage. She documented their affair in her diary. Thorpe, by now making use of his wife's income, had discovered Astor's diary. He indicated her liaisons with other men, including Kaufman, would be used to claim she was an unfit mother in any divorce proceedings. Thorpe divorced Astor in April 1935. A legal battle drew press attention to Astor in 1936 when a custody battle resulted over their four-year-old daughter, Marylyn. Astor's diary was never formally offered as evidence during the trial, but Thorpe and his lawyers constantly referred to it, and its notoriety grew. Astor admitted that the diary existed and that she had documented her affair with Kaufman, but maintained that many of the parts that had been referred to were forgeries, following the theft of the diary from her desk. The diary was deemed inadmissible as a mutilated document because Thorpe had removed pages referring to himself and had fabricated content. The trial judge, Goodwin J. Knight, ordered it sealed and impounded. News of the diary became public when Astor's role in Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936), as Edith Cortwright, was beginning to be filmed. Producer Samuel Goldwyn was urged to fire her, as her contract included a morality clause, but Goldwyn refused. With Walter Huston in the title role, Dodsworth received rave reviews on release, and the public's acceptance assured the studios that casting Astor remained a viable proposition. Ultimately, the scandals caused no harm to Astor's career, which was actually revitalised because of the custody fight and the publicity it generated. In 1952, by court order, Astor's diary was removed from the bank vault where it had been sequestered for 16 years and destroyed.
In 1937, Mary Astor returned to the stage in well-received productions of Noël Coward's 'Tonight at 8.30', 'The Astonished Heart', and 'Still Life'. She also began performing regularly on the radio. Over the next few years, she had roles in The Prisoner of Zenda (John Cromwell, 1937), John Ford's The Hurricane (1937), Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939) and Brigham Young (Henry Hathaway, 1940), starring Tyrone Power. In John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Astor played scheming temptress and murderer Brigid O'Shaughnessy. The film also starred Humphrey Bogart and featured Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. For her performance in The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941) she won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. As Sandra Kovak, the self-absorbed concert pianist who relinquishes her unborn child, her intermittent love interest was played by George Brent, but the film's star was Bette Davis. Davis wanted Astor cast in the role after watching her screen test and seeing her play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1. She then recruited Astor to collaborate on rewriting the script, which Davis felt was mediocre and needed work to make it more interesting. Astor further followed Davis's advice and sported a bobbed hairdo for the role. The soundtrack of the film in the scenes where she plays the concerto, with violent hand movements on the piano keyboard, was dubbed by pianist Max Rabinovitch. Davis deliberately stepped back to allow Astor to shine in her key scenes. In her Oscar acceptance speech, Astor thanked Bette Davis and Tchaikovsky. Astor and Davis became good friends. Astor was not propelled into the upper echelon of movie stars by these successes, however. She always declined offers of starring in her own right. Not wanting the responsibility of top billing and having to carry the picture, she preferred the security of being a featured player. She reunited with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet in John Huston's Across the Pacific (1942). Though usually cast in dramatic or melodramatic roles, Astor showed a flair for comedy as The Princess Centimillia in the screwball comedy, The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942) with Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea. In February 1943, Astor's father, Otto Langhanke, died in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital as a result of a heart attack complicated by influenza. His wife and daughter were at his bedside. That same year, Astor signed a seven-year contract with MGM, a regrettable mistake. She was kept busy playing what she considered mediocre roles she called "Mothers for Metro". After Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944), the studio allowed her to debut on Broadway in 'Many Happy Returns' (1945). The play was a failure, but Astor received good reviews. On loan-out to 20th Century Fox, she played a wealthy widow in Claudia and David (Walter Lang, 1946). She was also loaned to Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in Desert Fury (Lewis Allen, 1947) playing the tough owner of a saloon and casino in a small mining town. In 1947 Helen Langhanke died of a heart ailment. Back at MGM, Astor continued being cast in undistinguished, colorless mother roles. One exception was when she played a prostitute in the Film Noir Act of Violence (Fred Zinnemann, 1948) with Van Heflin and Robert Ryan. The last straw came when she was cast as Marmee March in Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949). Astor found no redemption in playing what she considered another humdrum mother and grew despondent. She later described her disappointment with her cast members and the shoot in her memoir 'A Life on Film'. The studio wanted to renew her contract, promising better roles, but she declined the offer.
At the same time, Mary Astor's drinking was growing troublesome. She admitted to alcoholism as far back as the 1930s, but it had never interfered with her work schedule or performance. She hit bottom in 1949 and went into a sanitarium for alcoholics. In 1951, she made a frantic call to her doctor and said that she had taken too many sleeping pills. She was taken to a hospital and the police reported that she had attempted suicide, this being her third overdose in two years, and the story made headline news. She maintained it had been an accident. That same year, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and converted to Roman Catholicism. She credited her recovery to a priest, Peter Ciklic, also a practicing psychologist, who encouraged her to write about her experiences as part of therapy. She also separated from her fourth husband, Thomas Wheelock (a stockbroker she married on Christmas Day 1945), but did not actually divorce him until 1955. In 1952, she was cast in the leading role of the stage play 'The Time of the Cuckoo', which was later made into the film Summertime (David Lean, 1955) with Katharine Hepburn, and subsequently toured with it. After the tour, Astor lived in New York for four years and worked in the theatre and on television. During the 1952 presidential election, Astor, a lifelong Democrat, supported the campaign of Adlai Stevenson. Her TV debut was in The Missing Years (1954) for Kraft Television Theatre. In 1954, she also appeared in the episode Fearful Hour of the Gary Merrill NBC series Justice in the role of a desperately poor and aging film star who attempts suicide to avoid exposure as a thief. She also played an ex-film star on the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller, in an episode titled Rose's Last Summer (1960). During these years, she appeared on many big shows of the time, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1958-`1959), Rawhide (1961), and Dr. Kildare (1963-1963). She starred on Broadway again in 'The Starcross Story' (1954), another failure, and returned to Southern California in 1956. She then went on a successful theatre tour of 'Don Juan in Hell' directed by Agnes Moorehead and co-starring Ricardo Montalbán. Astor's memoir, 'My Story: An Autobiography', was published in 1959, becoming a sensation in its day and a bestseller. It was the result of Father Ciklic urging her to write. Though she spoke of her troubled personal life, her parents, her marriages, the scandals, her battle with alcoholism, and other areas of her life, she did not mention the film industry or her career in detail. In 1971, a second book was published, 'A Life on Film', where she discussed her career. It, too, became a bestseller. Astor also tried her hand at fiction. She appeared in several films during this time, including A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956) with Robert Wagner, and A Stranger in My Arms (Helmut Käutner, 1959).
Mary Astor made a comeback in Return to Peyton Place (José Ferrer, 1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the 'shocking' novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library and received good reviews for her performance. After a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her Malibu, California home, where she was gardening and working on her third novel. She was offered the small role as a key figure, Jewel Mayhew, in the murder mystery Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1964), starring her friend Bette Davis. In 'A Life on Film', she described her character as "a little old lady, waiting to die". Astor decided it would serve as her swan song in the film business. She only appeared in the drama Youngblood Hawke (Delmer Daves, 1964), which premiered before Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. After 109 films in a career spanning 45 years, she turned in her Screen Actors Guild card and retired. Astor later moved to Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Anthony del Campo (from her third marriage to Mexican film editor Manuel del Campo), and his family, until 1971. That same year, suffering from a chronic heart condition, she moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry's retirement facility in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she had a private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room. She appeared in the television documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980), co-produced by Kevin Brownlow, in which she discussed her roles during the silent film period. Astor died in 1987, at age 81, of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while in the hospital at the Motion Picture House complex. She is interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Astor has a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6701 Hollywood Boulevard.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Southern Star Trails
Taken last night at Agnes Banks in Western Sydney. It's my first attempt on Star Trails. Not sure if I did it right as I wasn't so sure on what I was doing but I kinda like the outcome.
Hope you all had a wonderful weekend. Will catch up on your posts later.
Updated: I thought I'd convert it to monochrome
Eastern Brown Snake, Pseudonaja textilis
Agnes banks, Sydney, Australia
Colour Flourishes Above The Clouds || FOGGY MORNING
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I took this shot from Hawkesbury Panoramic Lookout in Hawkesbury Heights at about 5am...
================================================================
From Sydney:
80kms · 75 mins by car
Quick Stats:
425 population · 264m elevation
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Hawkesbury Panoramic Lookout
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Hawkesbury Heights also offers a newly rebuilt youth hostel also known as the North Springwood Youth Hostel and the area contains a Flora & Fauna Reserve.
From Hawkesbury lookout there is a winding drive down the Blue Mountains which regularly experiences falling rocks. At the foot of the descent to the left hand side a short distance into the bush is a hidden attraction...
Evidence of the Daruk tribe who inhabited the area in ages past can be seen through aboriginal art carved into rock. Remarkably preserved today is the ancient rock carving known as "the flight of the Great Grey Kangaroo".
Hawkesbury Road continues through to Yarramundi, Agnes Banks, and then on to Richmond, about 15 minutes drive from Hawkesbury Lookout.
Over Agnes Banks
Virgin Atlantic, Agnes Banks, Sydney, NSW
Sunrise Star Trails || HAWKESBURY PANORAMIC LOOKOUT
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I took this shot from Hawkesbury Panoramic Lookout in Hawkesbury Heights at about 5am...
================================================================
From Sydney:
80kms · 75 mins by car
Quick Stats:
425 population · 264m elevation
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Hawkesbury Panoramic Lookout
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Hawkesbury Heights also offers a newly rebuilt youth hostel also known as the North Springwood Youth Hostel and the area contains a Flora & Fauna Reserve.
From Hawkesbury lookout there is a winding drive down the Blue Mountains which regularly experiences falling rocks. At the foot of the descent to the left hand side a short distance into the bush is a hidden attraction...
Evidence of the Daruk tribe who inhabited the area in ages past can be seen through aboriginal art carved into rock. Remarkably preserved today is the ancient rock carving known as "the flight of the Great Grey Kangaroo".
Hawkesbury Road continues through to Yarramundi, Agnes Banks, and then on to Richmond, about 15 minutes drive from Hawkesbury Lookout.
Sunset at Agnes Banks
Just enjoying a Sunday afternoon photo shoot in my local area of Nepean. Canon 60D | f.16 | 1/6 | 24mm
Westward To The Blue Mountains || AGNES BANKS
I eye this location off all the time... Like a lot of the places I take my photos, they appear very average during the bright day time hours... But you have to be persistent, and find the right conditions for the right photograph... This shot is 1 such example... I have taken 15 - 20 different shots of this place, all on different days, and this is the only one I have been happy with...
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Agnes Banks is a suburb of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Agnes Banks is located 68 kilometres west of the Sydney central business district, in the local government areas of the City of Penrith and City of Hawkesbury.
It is part of the Greater Western Sydney region.
Agnes Banks is connected to Penrith by Castlereagh Road which runs alongside the Nepean River between Richmond and Penrith. Natural woodlands and sandy deposits make up the higher landscape of this suburb. Agnes Banks is a rural outpost of the City of Penrith which has kept its intrinsic agricultural value and rural lifestyle.
Persoonia nutans
Persoonia nutans (aka the Nodding Geebung)
An erect to spreading shrub to 2.5 m high with hairy young branches. Restricted to the Cumberland Plain in western Sydney, between Richmond in the north and Macquarie Fields in the south. The species has a disjunct distribution, with the majority of populations (and 99% of individuals) occurring in the north of the species range in the Agnes Banks, Londonderry, Castlereagh, Berkshire Park and Windsor Downs areas. Classified as Endangered. More info here: www.environment.nsw.gov.au/threatenedspeciesapp/profile.a... [Wianamatta Reserve, Cranebrook, NSW]
Nepean River Reflections
Agnes Banks, Nepean River,
Sydney, NSW, Australia.
I drove down to the foot of the Blue Mountains to do some astro photography near Yarramundi at Agnes Banks.
Even though the area is sandwiched in between two large towns - Penrith & Richmond - and on the outskirts of a city of over 4 million people, the skies there are relatively dark.
I’d done a bit of planning on The Photographers Ephemeris and worked out a few compositions around the banks of the Nepean River.
There is a narrow peninsula that runs south from the bridge across the river for about a kilometre or so.
I planned to hike out along it and shoot at a couple of locations along the way (you can see the flooded middle section in one of the photos).
There are some lovely & majestic Casuarinas (river she-oaks) along the banks of the river that would make for a nice foreground.
The other comps I planned to shoot were high up on the eastern banks of the river facing west towards where the Milky Way would be.
Well, things don’t always go quite according to plan.
I pulled up at the rather dark carpark near the bridge & was about to get my gear out, when all of a sudden there was a roar of engines.
A few bikers on chopper-style bikes (probably Harleys) and a couple of muscle cars pulled into the carpark and parked down near where the path starts.
I sat in the car and watched as the guys got out, cracked open some cans of booze, lit up some joints, and cranked the stereo up in one of the cars.
Not sure what they were up to, but I felt a bit phased and kinda intimidated.
I sat in the car for a while, then decided to head to the other side of the river.
I drove around to the other side of the bridge and began to scout shooting locations.
There had been a fair bit of rain around recently, and the weeds on the banks of the river had grown quite a bit (you can see this on one of the photos).
They were now around knee height and very thick, and I struggled to find anywhere for my tripod to actually make contact with the ground.
Everywhere I placed my tripod, it was suspended on the thick weeds.
My eyes constantly darted around my surroundings as I felt this was prime snake territory - they could easily hunt here and conceal themselves.
In the end I think I freaked myself out and packed up and decided to go for a drive to another location around Richmond.
I’d wondered about the potential of the Richmond Lowlands for astro photography and decided to investigate as it was only about a 10min drive from where I was.
This turned out to be a waste of time, as the places that I thought could have potential were so dark due to no moon around, that I couldn’t see anything.
Lesson learnt there - don’t try scouting locations at night on a new moon!
So I drove back to the river feeling frustrated at how the night was becoming a bit of a disaster from a photographic point of view.
I arrived back at the carpark to find the bikers gone, with just a trail of empty Jack Daniels cans, bottles, and cigarette butts.
I was pretty unimpressed as there was a bin less than 10m away from where they were partying.
I collected their garbage, tossed it into the bin, and made my way down to the path that leads to the peninsula.
When I reached the banks of the river, I stopped, scanned the river with my head torch looking for the track.
To my dismay there were no remnants of any track to be seen whatsoever.
I stood there a bit confused, then after few mins of thought I realised what had happened.
There had been heavy rains out west and some of the rivers feed into Warragamba Dam, eventually flowing into the Nepean River.
So the river was running very high and where I wanted to shoot from was now under water.
So, feeling a bit bummed, I made way back to the carpark thinking about what my options were.
I decided to try the western banks of the river - even though the likelihood of getting a clear shot of the Milky Way was low.
I made my way along a track that follows the banks of the river and managed to find one spot that had nice reflections and a partial view of the Milky Way.
I explored further upstream, and gradually the track disappeared and I was again out of my comfort zone, picking my way through the dense undergrowth.
I eventually hit a fence from a private property and decided to head back.
My head torch began to fade to my dismay and I was keen to get back to the car & grab the spare one.
I was still feeling frustrated at how the night had gone, so decided to try the eastern banks of the river again.
Again, I found it difficult to setup the tripod, but I persisted.
I thought that the chances of getting sharp images doing 20-30sec exposures whilst using weeds as a platform were pretty low.
To my surprise the shots actually came out pretty good.
I kept shooting until the Milky Way got low in the sky.
I got home around midnight feeling a bit better than earlier on in the night.
I ended up getting some keepers from one of the more stranger nights I’ve had doing astro photography.
Nepean River astro I
Agnes Banks, Nepean River,
Sydney, NSW, Australia.
I drove down to the foot of the Blue Mountains to do some astro photography near Yarramundi at Agnes Banks.
Even though the area is sandwiched in between two large towns - Penrith & Richmond - and on the outskirts of a city of over 4 million people, the skies there are relatively dark.
I’d done a bit of planning on The Photographers Ephemeris and worked out a few compositions around the banks of the Nepean River.
There is a narrow peninsula that runs south from the bridge across the river for about a kilometre or so.
I planned to hike out along it and shoot at a couple of locations along the way (you can see the flooded middle section in one of the photos).
There are some lovely & majestic Casuarinas (river she-oaks) along the banks of the river that would make for a nice foreground.
The other comps I planned to shoot were high up on the eastern banks of the river facing west towards where the Milky Way would be.
Well, things don’t always go quite according to plan.
I pulled up at the rather dark carpark near the bridge & was about to get my gear out, when all of a sudden there was a roar of engines.
A few bikers on chopper-style bikes (probably Harleys) and a couple of muscle cars pulled into the carpark and parked down near where the path starts.
I sat in the car and watched as the guys got out, cracked open some cans of booze, lit up some joints, and cranked the stereo up in one of the cars.
Not sure what they were up to, but I felt a bit phased and kinda intimidated.
I sat in the car for a while, then decided to head to the other side of the river.
I drove around to the other side of the bridge and began to scout shooting locations.
There had been a fair bit of rain around recently, and the weeds on the banks of the river had grown quite a bit (you can see this on one of the photos).
They were now around knee height and very thick, and I struggled to find anywhere for my tripod to actually make contact with the ground.
Everywhere I placed my tripod, it was suspended on the thick weeds.
My eyes constantly darted around my surroundings as I felt this was prime snake territory - they could easily hunt here and conceal themselves.
In the end I think I freaked myself out and packed up and decided to go for a drive to another location around Richmond.
I’d wondered about the potential of the Richmond Lowlands for astro photography and decided to investigate as it was only about a 10min drive from where I was.
This turned out to be a waste of time, as the places that I thought could have potential were so dark due to no moon around, that I couldn’t see anything.
Lesson learnt there - don’t try scouting locations at night on a new moon!
So I drove back to the river feeling frustrated at how the night was becoming a bit of a disaster from a photographic point of view.
I arrived back at the carpark to find the bikers gone, with just a trail of empty Jack Daniels cans, bottles, and cigarette butts.
I was pretty unimpressed as there was a bin less than 10m away from where they were partying.
I collected their garbage, tossed it into the bin, and made my way down to the path that leads to the peninsula.
When I reached the banks of the river, I stopped, scanned the river with my head torch looking for the track.
To my dismay there were no remnants of any track to be seen whatsoever.
I stood there a bit confused, then after few mins of thought I realised what had happened.
There had been heavy rains out west and some of the rivers feed into Warragamba Dam, eventually flowing into the Nepean River.
So the river was running very high and where I wanted to shoot from was now under water.
So, feeling a bit bummed, I made way back to the carpark thinking about what my options were.
I decided to try the western banks of the river - even though the likelihood of getting a clear shot of the Milky Way was low.
I made my way along a track that follows the banks of the river and managed to find one spot that had nice reflections and a partial view of the Milky Way.
I explored further upstream, and gradually the track disappeared and I was again out of my comfort zone, picking my way through the dense undergrowth.
I eventually hit a fence from a private property and decided to head back.
My head torch began to fade to my dismay and I was keen to get back to the car & grab the spare one.
I was still feeling frustrated at how the night had gone, so decided to try the eastern banks of the river again.
Again, I found it difficult to setup the tripod, but I persisted.
I thought that the chances of getting sharp images doing 20-30sec exposures whilst using weeds as a platform were pretty low.
To my surprise the shots actually came out pretty good.
I kept shooting until the Milky Way got low in the sky.
I got home around midnight feeling a bit better than earlier on in the night.
I ended up getting some keepers from one of the more stranger nights I’ve had doing astro photography.
The View Of The Sydney Basin || HAWKESBURY LOOKOUT
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--------------------------------------------------------------------
Hawkesbury Panoramic Lookout
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Hawkesbury Heights also offers a newly rebuilt youth hostel also known as the North Springwood Youth Hostel and the area contains a Flora & Fauna Reserve.
From Hawkesbury lookout there is a winding drive down the Blue Mountains which regularly experiences falling rocks. At the foot of the descent to the left hand side a short distance into the bush is a hidden attraction...
Evidence of the Daruk tribe who inhabited the area in ages past can be seen through aboriginal art carved into rock. Remarkably preserved today is the ancient rock carving known as "the flight of the Great Grey Kangaroo".
Hawkesbury Road continues through to Yarramundi, Agnes Banks, and then on to Richmond, about 15 minutes drive from Hawkesbury Lookout.
Twilight @ Yarramundi
Yarramundi,
Nepean River, Sydney.
Photo Reconnaissance
I spent a few hours yesterday hiking & driving around the Nepean River looking for good spots for sunrise & sunset shots. This was one of the places I liked around Agnes Bank.
It didn’t end up being a great sunset, but I took a few long exposures with the Hoya NDX400 10 stop filter.
This was a test shot but I’m pretty happy with the end result.
Whilst processing the colour version, I realised it actually had good potential as a black & white shot. I did quite a bit of dodging & burning in Lightroom before I opened the image in Nik Silver Efex Pro for the final edit. I tweaked the image to go for the Ansel Adams high contrast, underexposed look.
Effie, aged 10 years, and Mary, aged 7 years by R. McGuffie & Co. (late 1899)
Cabinet card.
Studio of R. McGuffie & Co., Elizabeth Street, Hobart.
Found in a junk shop in Darlinghurst, Sydney.
"Effie 10 yrs April 6th 99
Mary 7 yrs Aug. 18 99
for Uncle Percie
on his Birthday
1899"
Agnes Effie Connop Thirlwall, born at "Hazeldean", Queen Street, Hobart on 6 April 1889 [Trove], and Augusta Mary Connop Thirlwall, born at "Brynhyfryd", near the Domain [Trove], Hobart on 18 August 1892 [Trove], were daughters of Lawrence Connop Thirlwall (?-1944) and Augusta Annie Parsons (1851-1938). Mary died on 3 August 1983, aged 90 years. Effie died in 1987 on her 98th birthday. Both sisters never married.
Uncle Percie/Percy was the girls' mother's brother Percival Howard White Parsons (sometimes styled White-Parsons) (1861-1954). From 1897 to 1908 he was manager of the Commonwealth Bank in Oatlands [Trove]. He married Beatrice Mary Hudspeth, daughter of Rev. Canon Hudspeth, of "Highfield", Hobart, on 7 June 1899 [Trove], and died in Brisbane on 23 June 1954, aged 92 years [Trove].
City Under Fog || STAR TRAILS
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I took this shot from Hawkesbury Panoramic Lookout in Hawkesbury Heights at about 5am...
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From Sydney:
80kms · 75 mins by car
Quick Stats:
425 population · 264m elevation
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Hawkesbury Panoramic Lookout
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Hawkesbury Heights also offers a newly rebuilt youth hostel also known as the North Springwood Youth Hostel and the area contains a Flora & Fauna Reserve.
From Hawkesbury lookout there is a winding drive down the Blue Mountains which regularly experiences falling rocks. At the foot of the descent to the left hand side a short distance into the bush is a hidden attraction...
Evidence of the Daruk tribe who inhabited the area in ages past can be seen through aboriginal art carved into rock. Remarkably preserved today is the ancient rock carving known as "the flight of the Great Grey Kangaroo".
Hawkesbury Road continues through to Yarramundi, Agnes Banks, and then on to Richmond, about 15 minutes drive from Hawkesbury Lookout.
