The Return of the Classic Films Obituary Thread

[CBHagman]

4. From 2020: actress Rhonda Fleming, 97

We have a lot of time to make up, and I'd like to keep this thread accessible, so I hope group members will post articles and tributes, including TCM's wonderful "In Memoriam" videos.

And now for another classic film actor who left us in 2020.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/oct/18/rhonda-fleming-obituary

Rhonda Fleming was a stage name: she was born Marilyn Louis in Los Angeles, the younger of two daughters of Harold Cheverton Louis, an insurance salesman, and his wife, Effie Graham, an actor and model. She grew up in Hollywood, and while attending Beverly Hills high school was spotted by the talent agent Henry Willson, who went on to discover Rock Hudson.

She went straight into films, at first as an extra. Her first substantial supporting parts came in her early 20s in Spellbound and in Robert Siodmak’s Hitchcockian thriller The Spiral Staircase (1946). In Abilene Town (1946), marshal Randolph Scott is torn between Fleming, the grocer’s daughter, and saloon singer Ann Dvorak, predictably settling respectably for the former.

After playing the voluptuous and dangerous lover of hoodlum Kirk Douglas in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, Paramount claimed her, and did not allow her to be much more than decorative. Two aristocratic roles came in 1949: the English heroine with whom Bing Crosby falls in love in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a musical after the novel by Mark Twain – she was a fine singer – and a duchess who fascinates scoutmaster Bob Hope in The Great Lover.

There's more at the link.

Film credits:

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0281766/