Actress Barbara Rush has died aged 97, Fox News Digital reports.
She was born in Denver in 1927, and raised in California. While at university in Santa Barbara, Barbara joined the college theatre program. After graduating, she moved to Los Angeles and lived at the Hollywood Studio Club, a hostel for young women working in the film industry. Among Barbara’s fellow residents was Marilyn Monroe, who lived there in 1946-47, and again in 1948.
“Oh yes, we were friends,” Barbara told Fox News reporter Stephanie Nolasco in 2018. “We were in the Studio Club together. At least with me, when you first come to Hollywood, and I went to Paramount, they put me immediately in the Studio Club. It’s kind of like a sorority house. And Marilyn Monroe was there. I loved her. Marilyn was such a darling lady. She was very sweet and nice. All the girls in the Studio Club just had a good time.”
After performing onstage at the Nobero Theatre in Santa Barbara and the prestigious Pasadena Playhouse, Barbara made her movie debut with a supporting role in Paramount’s The Goldbergs (1950), an adaptation of the long-running radio and TV show about a Jewish family in the Bronx.
In the same year Barbara married actor Jeffrey Hunter, then under contract at Twentieth Century-Fox. Their son Christopher was born in 1952. In a 1953 interview for Movies magazine, Marilyn Monroe named Hunter among the most exciting men in Hollywood, noting his youthful good looks and devotion to family.
Barbara played larger parts in films including a Douglas Sirk melodrama, The First Legion (1951); a disaster movie, When Worlds Collide (1951); and Flaming Feather (1952), a Western starring Sterling Hayden.
Her breakthrough role came in Universal’s sci-fi classic, It Came From Outer Space (1953.) Based on a story by Ray Bradbury, the film cast Barbara as Ellen Fields, schoolteacher and fiancée of an author and amateur astronomer (Richard Carlson.) While stargazing in the Arizona desert, the couple witness a spaceship falling to earth. Barbara was awarded a Golden Globe as Best Newcomer for her iconic performance.
In 1954, she reunited with director Douglas Sirk for one of his most successful films, Magnificent Obsession, playing Jane Wyman’s daughter. Barbara had recently worked with Sirk and leading man Rock Hudson in the 3D Western, Taza – Son of Cochise (1954), and they would team up again for Captain Lightfoot (1955.)
Her marriage to Jeffrey Hunter ended in 1955. She then played a boxer’s wife in the film noir, World in My Corner (1956.) She was cast as the wife of a disturbed schoolteacher (James Mason) in Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life (1956), filmed at Twentieth Century-Fox that spring, while Marilyn was shooting Bus Stop on the lot. Although not a box-office hit, Bigger Than Life is now considered one of the best films of the 1950s.
After a rare comedic role in Nunnally Johnson’s Oh, Men! Oh, Women! (1957), Barbara appeared in another film noir, No Down Payment (1957), with ex-husband Jeffrey Hunter also featured. In 1958, she joined an all-star cast for The Young Lions, an epic World War II drama headed by Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and Dean Martin. Then in 1959 she played the love interest to Paul Newman in a glossy legal drama, The Young Philadelphians.
In the same year, Barbara married Hollywood publicist Warren Cowan, whose firm had recently merged with Arthur P. Jacobs’ company, which represented Marilyn Monroe. (A telegram of congratulations, sent to Marilyn by Cowan and his associate Pat Newcomb after seeing a preview of Some Like It Hot on January 31, 1959 was sold for $1,280 at Julien’s Auctions in 2022.)
Barbara went on to co-star with Richard Burton and Angie Dickinson in The Bramble Bush (1960), based on a bestselling novel; and she played a betrayed wife in Strangers When We Meet (1960), with Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak.
In the early hours of August 5th, 1962, Barbara and Warren were woken by an urgent phonecall, as a colleague informed Cowan that Marilyn Monroe had been found dead at her Los Angeles home. “It was in the middle of the night when we got the call,” Barbara told Stephanie Nolasco. “My husband, who handled her, was very shocked. So shocked. I just kept hearing him go, Oh my God, over and over… We were all just very disturbed by it.”
Their daughter Claudia was born in 1963. Barbara then made two films with Frank Sinatra, Come Blow Your Horn (1963) and the final Rat Pack movie, Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964.) She was paired with Paul Newman again in the revisionist Western, Hombre (1967.)
Following guest spots on hit shows like The Outer Limits, Dr Kildare, and The Fugitive, in 1966 Barbara landed one of her most memorable parts, as the villainous Nora Clavicle in TV’s Batman. This led to a longer stint in the soap opera, Peyton Place.
Barbara returned to the stage in the Chicago production of Forty Carats, winning the Sarah Siddons Award in 1970. Ironically, the accolade was named after a fictional prize depicted in the opening scene of All About Eve (1950), which also included an early performance from Marilyn Monroe.
After divorcing Warren Cowan in 1969, Barbara married sculptor Jim Gruzalski. They parted in 1973. She appeared in episodes of The Mod Squad, Ironside, Maude, The Streets of San Francisco, The Bionic Woman (as Lindsay Wagner’s mother), Mannix, and The Love Boat.
Following a big-screen cameo in Can’t Stop the Music (1979), a cult musical starring disco sensations The Village People, Barbara had a two-year stint as the neglected wife of a small-town tycoon in the 1980s soap opera, Flamingo Road, inspired by a 1949 movie starring Joan Crawford. Barbara’s co-star Kevin McCarthy had previously played Marilyn Monroe’s ex-husband in her last completed movie, The Misfits (1961.)
In 1984, Barbara made her Broadway debut in a one-woman show, A Woman of Independent Means, at the Biltmore Theatre. Back on the small screen, she played guest roles on Matt Houston, Knight Rider, Fantasy Island, Hotel, Magnum P.I. and Murder, She Wrote. And in 1992 she began a two-year run in another TV soap opera, All My Children.
Barbara’s later credits include a 1998 guest spot on a rebooted version of sci-fi series The Outer Limits, on which she had first appeared in 1964. Over the next decade she had a recurring role as the mother of a church minister (Stephen Collins) and grandmother to his seven children in the family drama, 7th Heaven.
Interestingly, Barbara’s daughter-in-law on the show was played by Catherine Hicks, who also starred in the 1980 biopic, Marilyn: The Untold Story; and at the time of her death, Barbara had been a resident for almost 25 years at Greenacres, the Beverly Hills estate once owned by silent film comedian Harold Lloyd, who photographed Marilyn there in 1953.
“My wonderful mother passed away peacefully at 5:28 this evening,” Claudia Cowan confirmed on March 31, 2024 (Easter Sunday.) “I was with her this morning and know she was waiting for me to return home safely to transition. It’s fitting she chose to leave on Easter as it was one of her favorite holidays and now, of course, Easter will have a deeper significance for me and my family.”
The Marilyn Report 