LOS ANGELES (AP) – Barbara Rush, a popular leading actress who starred alongside A-list movie stars such as Frank Sinatra and Paul Newman in the 1950s and 1960s and went on to have a flourishing television career, has died. She was 97 years old.
Rush’s death was announced by her daughter, Fox News reporter Claudia Cowan, whose mother posted on Instagram that she passed away on Easter Sunday. Additional details were not immediately available.
Cowan praised his mother as “one of the last of Hollywood royalty” and called himself her mother’s “biggest fan.”
Noted by a play at the Pasadena Playhouse, Rush signed with Paramount Studios in 1950 and made his film debut that same year in a bit role in The Goldbergs, based on the radio and television series of the same name.
However, she soon left Paramount to work for Universal International and then 20th Century Fox.
Barbara Rush introducing Audie Murphy to Chico Vejart in a publicity portrait for the film The World in My Corner, 1956 (Photo Credit: Universal/Getty Images)
“Paramount wasn’t good at nurturing new talent,” she recalled in 1954. “Paramount would rent Elizabeth Taylor every time a good role came along.”
Rush continued to appear in a wide range of films. She starred opposite Rock Hudson in Captain Lightfoot and Douglas Sirk’s acclaimed remake of The Magnificent Obsession, co-starred with Audie Murphy in The Corner, and in the 3D sci-fi classic The Magnificent Obsession. He played opposite Richard Carlson in “It Came from Outer Space”. She won the Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer.
Other film credits included the Nicholas Ray classic “Bigger Than Life.” “Young Lions” by Marlon Brando, Dean Martin, and Montgomery Clift and “Young Philadelphians” by Newman. She made two films with Sinatra, Come Blow Your Horn and the Rat Pack parody Robin and the Seven Hoods, which also starred Martin Davis Jr. and Sammy Davis Jr. .
Rush, who had guest-starred on television for years, recalled making the full transition as she approached middle age.
“There was this horrible Sahara desert between the ages of 40 and 60, when you went from innocence to old woman. You either didn’t work or you were pretending to be 20.” she said in 1962.
Instead, Rush appeared in series such as “Peyton Place,” “All My Children,” “The New Dick Van Dyke Show,” and “7th Heaven.”
“I’m the kind of person who starts acting the moment I open the refrigerator door and the light goes on,” she said in a 1997 interview.
Barbara Rush in a swimming pool in a publicity portrait for the film “The World in My Corner”, 1956 (Photo Credit: Universal/Getty Images)
Her first play was in the Road Company version of the hit New York comedy “Forty Carats.” Her director Abe Burrows helped her with comedic acting.
“Learning timing was very, very difficult at first, especially learning to wait for the laugh,” she said in 1970. But she learned, and the show lasted a year in Chicago and several more months on the road.
She continued to appear in tours such as “Same Time Next Year,” “Father’s Day,” and “Steel Magnolias,” as well as the solo exhibition “A Woman of Independent Means.”
Born in Denver, Rush spent his first 10 years on the road while his father, a mining company attorney, was posted from town to town. The family eventually settled in Santa Barbara, California, where young Barbara fell in love with acting, playing the mythical dryad in a school play.
Rush was married and divorced three times, to movie star Jeffrey Hunter, to Hollywood publicity manager Warren Cowan, and to sculptor James Grzarski.
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Bob Thomas, a longtime Associated Press journalist who passed away in 2014, was the primary author of this obituary. AP National Writer Hillel Italy contributed to this report from New York.
