author collection
Ann Blyth spent more than three decades in summer
theatre. Despite the minor footnote this
may appear in Internet bios, if included at all, it was a huge part of her résumé
and her life, and the world where a great number of fans came to enjoy her
work.
Summer theatre is a special world, to be savored while it is
experienced, and the memory of which to be treasured most especially because it
is a world of the moment. Once the
curtain comes down, it’s gone forever, leaving the longing ache to see it again
ever unfulfilled. Summer theatre,
however, rarely ends with the drawing of an actual curtain, for these
productions are usually in a barn, or tent, or some ramshackle building where
we trod well-worn wooden floors, or climb up temporarily constructed seating
in-the-round style that will be disassembled come September. We walk to our cars in the loveliness of a
warm summer night, or perhaps step carefully through a mud-sodden field in the
rain. The slap of the wooden screen door
at the theater entrance, a moth or two flying around inside, caught in the pale
blue beam of a Fresnel, or the sound of raindrops on the tent are all part of
the experience and the memory.
The stars are quite close to us in summer theatre. We don’t go to big cities to see them. They come to our towns. The stage may be only a few feet away, or if
in-the-round, the star may brush our shoulder with her sleeve as she trots down
the aisle to make her entrance. They
leave the same way we do, through the same doors. The next morning, we may see them at the
coffee shop or grocery store, as for a week or two, our town becomes theirs. Summer theatre is intimate, and
heartfelt. There is very little
Hollywood gloss. Summer stock can’t
afford gloss.
Today we visit that special world and some of Ann Blyth’s
performances from the 1960s through the 1980s.
We’ll explore these musical shows through newspaper reviews and
interviews, which are all we have left to prove they existed.
This is going to be a long post. Pour yourself a root beer, hitch up your shorts, pull your lawn chair up close to the bug
zapper and relax.
One of her very first summer theatre experiences, perhaps
her first, was Carnival in July 1963. She had given birth to her fifth and last child in
April, and according to a syndicated column by Joseph Finnegan in the News-Texan, was already preparing for
this new stage, literally a new stage, in her career.
During her recent
hospital stay after having the baby, Ann was the most entertaining patient on
the maternity ward floor as she rehearsed her singing role in Carnival…Any nurse with spare time could always drop
by Ann’s room to hear a few songs.
Ray Danton played the male lead, and John Smolko and Helon Blount
were also in the cast.
That summer she would also be filming her last appearance on
the TV show Wagon Train, “The Fort Pierce Story,” which we discussed here.
We might well
understand Ann chomping at the bit to perform in a musical again; it had been
nine years since she did Kismet on film, which we discussed here, and there were fewer opportunities for big screen
musicals anymore. Her career always
seemed to flip-flop between periods of dramatic films, and shorter periods of
musicals, with the need to remind producers that she was available for both. Just before her string of 1950s musical
films, she was quoted in Erskine Johnson’s syndicated column in 1951:
I’m grateful for my
wonderful dramatic chances. But I keep
hinting for musicals. I’ve kept up with
my vocal lessons and I could brush up on my dancing with a little practice.
There was another reason for approaching stage musicals: by
the early 1960s films were changing, Hollywood was a different place after the
collapse of the studio system, but on stage, an actress in her mid-thirties could still,
in the tradition of theatre, play ingénue roles. On screen, there were fewer meaty roles left
for “older women” (and women in their thirties were, indeed, considered “older
women”). On stage, Ann played leads, not character roles, through her fifties.
Perhaps the best reason for turning to summer stock was that Ann originally came from
the world of theatre herself, having played on Broadway in Watch on the Rhine as a child, which we covered here.
She explained to Jack Hawn for the Los Angeles Times in February 1985:
"Most actors who
have done theater dearly love getting back to it," she said. "It's
exciting. . . . Once you start, that's it. Nobody's going to say, 'Cut; let's try
it again.' You must continue, but that's part of the excitement. I love it a lot."
It was the heyday of summer theatre, when many Hollywood
stars toured the country in popular plays.
Carnival was a production of
the Kenley Players, which was performed at the Packard Music Hall in Warren,
Ohio, and then played the Veteran’s Memorial Auditorium in Columbus. The very end of Kenley’s season that year
featured Ann’s old movie co-star Howard Keel in Man of La Mancha. Colleagues
and friends from the movie business regularly crisscrossed the country on the
heels of each other’s performances.
Sometimes a star would perform in several productions of a summer. Ann did Carnival
again in subsequent seasons, and in 1967, her performance in this play at the
Valley Music Hall in Salt Lake City was followed immediately after a two-week
run of The King and I in St. Louis.
A year after Carnival
in 1963, she played her first production of The
Sound of Music in August 1964 at the Tenthouse Theatre in Highland Park,
Chicago. The show also played in Texas as a
Dallas Summer Musicals tour, where the eldest daughter, Liesl was played by a
teenaged Sandy Duncan.
She performed in The
Sound of Music in several other productions through the 1970s, in Miami
Beach, Florida; at the Colonie Coliseum in Latham, New York, among other places. In 1972, she performed it at Milwaukee’s
Melody Top Music Tent, a venue where she remained a huge audience draw for many
years. A review by Jay Joslyn of the Milwaukee Sentinel lauded the opening of
the summer season with:
To combine an
appearance of Ann Blyth with a performance of The Sound of Music has to be the equivalent of box office
overkill…each generates success.
The show broke audience attendance records.
Miss Blyth, her voice
as lovely and true as ever, gives the role of Maria von Trap a wonderful gamin
turn that provides great strength and sympathy.
She’s superb.
Mitchell Gregg played the Captain in this production, where
each of the fourteen performances was sold out.
Ann Blyth took a brief detour from the world of musical
theatre back to drama in May 1967 when she starred in the suspense thriller Wait Until Dark in Chicago, which we discussed here.
Then in August, it was back to musicals in The King and I, which she performed again
in the following year, 1968. Her first
time as Anna occurred in June 1965 at Highland Park, Chicago, at the
Tenthouse. The King was played by James
Mitchell. A review of “T.W” in the
Chicago Tribune:
Ann Blyth’s gracious,
well-sung Anna and James Mitchell’s skillfully played king gave Tenthouse
theater…professional stature, tho both performers were of somewhat limited
range. Miss Blyth projected Victorian
elegance but had no spitfire spark.
The show also played New England in June in Framingham, Massachusetts;
and in Wallingford, Connecticut at the Oakdale Musical Theater in August. A blurb in The Hartford Courant noted her reputation for versatility:
Miss Blyth, who as
built an enviable record of versatility in all entertainment media, will be Anna.
William Chapman of the New York City Center Opera played the
King. The production was directed by
James Hammerstein, son of Oscar Hammerstein II, and the children of the palace
were played by local kids from Connecticut.
From a review by Allen M. Widem in The
Hartford Times, who remarked on the…
…delight at Oakdale
Music Theater of seeing one of Hollywood’s most talented thespians bring Mrs.
Anna to life.
That star is Ann
Blyth. A mere wisp of a thing, with
boundless charm, she is an impressive addition…Miss Blyth is a delightful Anna.
A reader named Ellen, who provided these images of the Oakdale Musical Theatre's production of The King and I, which was theatre-in-the-round, recalled of the performance she attended:
When she started her entrance & on the way to the stage, part of her costume became entangled on a theater chair, but was quickly separated...neither Ann or the orchestra missed a beat. Her performance on Aug. 16, prompted by the orchestra, had the sold-out audience singing "Happy Birthday."
Ann would have turned thirty-seven.
Howard Keel, who had performed here in this tent himself, in his autobiography Only Make Believe, recalled:
When she started her entrance & on the way to the stage, part of her costume became entangled on a theater chair, but was quickly separated...neither Ann or the orchestra missed a beat. Her performance on Aug. 16, prompted by the orchestra, had the sold-out audience singing "Happy Birthday."
Ann would have turned thirty-seven.
Howard Keel, who had performed here in this tent himself, in his autobiography Only Make Believe, recalled:
There isn’t a hotter
place on earth than inside the Wallingford tent on a matinee day with all the
lights on.
This is, I confess, another reason for my admiration for
summer stock. For the actors and
techies, it’s rather like going through Marine boot camp. Howard Keel, unlike many actors who write
books about their film careers and give short shrift to summer stock, spends a lot of time covering his years in summer
theatre, mentioning not only on-stage problems, but the mishaps of everyday
life that are magnified for an actor about to go on any minute: emergency root
canal, various injuries and illnesses that he must pretend are not hurting, the
discipline it takes not only to learn one’s craft, but the discipline it takes
to stifle a flu or allergic reaction-prompted need to vomit until one can make
it to the wings after the next scene. Howard Keel affirmed:
I believe summer stock
people are some of the bravest people I know.
This was proven in an horrific incident in a production of Kiss Me Kate in which Ann appeared in
July 1968 in Pittsburgh. Lew Herbert,
who played one of the gangsters in the show felt ill during a performance, but
he soldiered on. After the performance, he
collapsed in his dressing room. He was
taken to the hospital with an apparent heart ailment. He died the next day. The understudy went on that night. The most courageous and yet most brutal
aspect of live theatre is that the show goes on.
Walter Winchell, who scavenged stories like this for his
column, wrote his take on the event two months later in September:
Lew Herbert…was
stricken in his dressing room, Ann Blyth, the star, kissed his cheek to comfort
him. “Now I can die happily,” he
whispered…which he did soon after.
The review of Kiss Me
Kate at the Civic Light Opera was cheerier:
Miss Ann Blyth is a
sight for sore eyes in the role of Lilli Vanessi…she gives a pleasant
performance, somewhere in the middle ground, effective and likeable, but not
striking or distinctive…Her voice is agreeable and natural, but lacks an
emotional range.
The reviewer, Carl Apone’s remarks on male lead Robert
Wright and the director were also tepid.
Along with his review, he interviewed Ann on the state of the film world
that seemingly drove her to the stage.
If things were changing in 1963, it had become an unrecognizable world
for many classic film stars by 1968.
“Filth” was the topic of their conversation, and Ann remarked that the treatment of explicit sex in films…
“…has a bad effect on
young people. They get quite a distorted
sense of something quite beautiful. All
the wondrous and beautiful aspects of sex are gone. For the ideas they see of sex on the screen
tend to drag it into the gutter…I dearly love to perform, but there is no need
to bring myself down to that level.”
Miss Blythe [her
name is misspelled throughout the article],
the mother of five children, looking as beautiful and youthful as she did in
her early movie days, doesn’t mind admitting her age. She will be 40 on August 16.”
This was echoed in 1976 in a syndicated column by Vernon
Scott:
She makes no attempt
to convert anyone to her own lifestyle.
But neither does she compromise on her own strong convictions. She won’t, for instance, appear in movies or
television shows of dubious moral content…
“That’s why I prefer
summer theater. The quality and tone of the shows I do are proved and have high
standards…For the past 13 years, I’ve done almost all of them,” she said. “Last
summer it was Bittersweet, Show Boat and Kiss Me, Kate.
“It’s six weeks of
hard work but a wonderful break from the routine. I enjoy it.
But my children and husband come first.”
We discussed other classic film stars’ opinions on the
changing attitudes of sex and violence in films in this post here.
When she played in Kiss
Me Kate in August 1984 in Flint, Michigan, The Argus Press marveled that she was turning 56 the following
week, and took the opportunity to laud the breadth of her career:
…is one of the few
stars who not only conquered all five mediums of the entertainment world, but
who has scored resounding success in each.
From radio to
legitimate theatre to motion pictures, television and supper clubs, the
singer-actress has traveled back and forth with ease. In doing so, she has built a reputation for
versatility and talent equaled by few.
She returned to Milwaukee’s Melody Top Theatre, one of her
most popular venues, for South Pacific
in 1973 and was presented with their Showstopper Award for helping the show to earn
more money than any in this tent theater’s history. Have a look here at this fan page Melody Top Memories for now defunct
Melody Top Theatre for production photos of Ann Blyth in South Pacific.
Peter Filichia noted in his post at the Theater Mania blog here:
Ann Blyth! My buddy Craig Jacobs, production stage manager for The Phantom of the Opera, worked with her on a summer stock production in Milwaukee. After watching her perform and dance in rehearsals, he told her how he marveled that she never perspired no matter how hard she worked. Days later, after one particularly grueling rehearsal, she came up to him, pointed to her forehead, and said, "Look!" to show him that a single bead of sweat had formed.
Peter Filichia noted in his post at the Theater Mania blog here:
Ann Blyth! My buddy Craig Jacobs, production stage manager for The Phantom of the Opera, worked with her on a summer stock production in Milwaukee. After watching her perform and dance in rehearsals, he told her how he marveled that she never perspired no matter how hard she worked. Days later, after one particularly grueling rehearsal, she came up to him, pointed to her forehead, and said, "Look!" to show him that a single bead of sweat had formed.
Perhaps her biggest and most performed show of the 1970s was
Show Boat, which she first performed
in 1970. (“Life Upon the Wicked Stage,”
the title of this post, as many of you probably know, is the title of a song in
Show Boat.) Andy Devine, who appeared
with her in one of her early Universal musicals, Babes on Swing Street (1944), which we’ll cover later in the year,
played her father, Cap’n Andy. She would
play Magnolia again several times through the decade.
author collection
author collection
In September that year, Edwin Steffe was her father for two
weeks in Milwaukee that closed the Melody Top season. From Michael H. Drew of the Milwaukee Journal:
Miss Blyth is lithe
and lovely as film fans remember her.
And, praise be, she brings us a Real Voice –not one of those sound stage
concoctions that—in person—side step the high notes and undersell the big
ones…when that dastardly Gaylord Ravenal (Lowell Harris) abandons her, tears
flood her comely cheeks. The World Almanac claims she’s 42. It surely lies.
The rival paper, the Sentinel,
agreed, calling Ann…
…a leading lady of
truly stellar stature and charm…Ann Blyth, the show’s captivating Magnolia, is
a superlative actress, whose winning ways are bolstered by one of the sweetest
voices around. She demonstrates why the show’s Jerome Kern music has never
died.
In a 1975 performance at the Music Circus in Sacramento,
California, Jesse White, who played with her in Katie Did It (1951) played Cap’n Andy, and the wonderful
Kathleen Freeman was her mother, Parthy.
Show Boat closed
the 1976 summer season at the Storrowton Theatre in West Springfield,
Massachusetts. Sam Hoffman of the Springfield Daily News reviewed the
play:
Miss Blyth has lost
none of her beautiful lyric soprano voice or any of her beauty. She is a delight to see and to hear…Miss
Blyth not only sings [the songs] for all their worth, she is capable of giving
each a dramatic touch.
Magnolia just never
looked as beautiful or was in finer voice than Miss Blyth.
Here Jay Garner filled in for an ill Andy Devine as Cap’n
Andy, and Ed Evanko played Gaylord Ravenal.
In a follow-up article, Mr. Hoffman confessed his admiration
for Ann Blyth was a torch he’d been carrying for some time.
…I remember her lovely
lyric soprano voice that seemed to float right out of the screen in my
direction. I always managed to blot out
the male star to make sure it was me she was singing to and not someone else.
I was even a bit
jealous when she upped and married a doctor for Ann Blyth has always been one
of my favorite screen stars, someone I didn’t particularly care to share with
another person.
He also noted in his interview with her, that she hoped to get in some tennis before the Thursday evening show.
He also noted in his interview with her, that she hoped to get in some tennis before the Thursday evening show.
One of the treats of summer theatre at this time was getting to
see up close those Hollywood stars who before this era were rarely seen except
on screen. That they appeared in town as flesh and blood people was a bit of a
shock for many, such that even star-struck interviewers sometimes paid a bit
too much attention to the star’s private lives and not enough on their
performances. Have a look here at this1970 television interview of Ann Blyth by Bette Rogge of local TV station WHIO-TV in
Dayton, Ohio. Ann was in town for Show Boat, which you can hear rehearsing
in the background, but despite the excitement, Miss Rogge is more interested in Ann’s dress size and
vacation plans in Hawaii.
In 1969, Ann returned to operetta in The Merry Widow, at the Starlight Theatre in Swope Park, Kansas City, Kansas, which she recalled for columnist Jay Horning in 1994 was one of her favorite shows.
In 1969, Ann returned to operetta in The Merry Widow, at the Starlight Theatre in Swope Park, Kansas City, Kansas, which she recalled for columnist Jay Horning in 1994 was one of her favorite shows.
“The music is so
beautiful, so singable, and for audiences, so hummable,” she said, “So walking
out of the theater they’re able to whistle a happy tune. You want to leave an audience feeling good.”
Toward the end of her stage career in the later 1970s and
1980s she would turn more to operetta, in a way bringing her career full circle.
In 1975 she played in Noel Coward’s Bittersweet at Milwaukee’s Melody Top. Columnist Jack O’Brian referred to it as an
“even-when-first-produced nostalgia trip,” denoting operetta as something
quaint and too artificial to be taken seriously.
From the Milwaukee
Journal:
Veteran star of
Hollywood, and currently, Hostess TV commercials, was satisfactory in a show so
musically demanding that her third act was almost a recital. While pretty rather than prodigious, her
soprano glittered brightly.
One audience member saw Ann the next day at the
local mall, as recounted in this Memories of Melody Top website:
BITTER SWEET, an operetta by Noel Coward, was charming,
as was Ann Blyth when I encountered her over a table of sale items in Marshall
Field's at Mayfair Mall the day after I saw her performance…I couldn't resist
telling her I didn't want to bother her when she was shopping, but I had to say
how much I enjoyed her performance the previous evening. I immediately took
off, only to hear her yelling after me, "That's no bother!"
There was Sigmund Romberg’s The Desert Song in August 1979 at the Starlight Theatre, and at the
MUNY, famous for its outdoor productions in St. Louis.
Song of Norway in
1985 with the Long Beach Civic Light Opera in Long Beach, California, a show
which seemed to carry enough of a reputation for being clunky that few
reviewers seemed kindly toward it, was reviewed by Don Shirley for the Los Angeles Times:
Any production of Song
of Norway had better be well sung. The
dramaturgy in this slab of aging shmaltz [sic] is primitive, and the spectacle—at least as designed for the Long
Beach Civic Light Opera—is dull.
Only one of the Long
Beach voices, Ann Blyth’s comes close to justifying the experience. Her dark-hued solo of “North Star—Soveig’s
Song” in the second act is the show’s only scene that casts any sort of
spell. Perhaps she also deserves some
credit for the fact that her character, ostensibly the villain, is marginally
less tiresome than the others.
Her male lead in this production was Bill Hayes, who first
starred with in a 1967 production of Brigadoon
at the St. Louis MUNY, which Mr. Hayes called in an interview with the Daily Breeze of Torrance, California, “the Brigadoon to end all Brigadoons.” Bill Hayes would, in the next decade, become
Ann’s singing partner in yet another phase of her career – singing in
concert. We’ll get to that in a future
post.
The Daily Breeze
called Song of Norway, “pleasant fare"…
That’s largely because
its stars, Ann Blyth and Bill Hayes, don’t take themselves too seriously and
play with enough camp to liven up the stilted tale. And the orchestration is delightful…Blyth is
amazing in that she is one of Hollywood’s most successful stars and still looks
good more than 30 years after reaching the top.
Lowell Harris, who played opposite Ann in Show Boat in 1970, here played the
friend of Bill Hayes, Susan Watson played the lovely Nina, and the trio of
friends is broken up by “the lusty Countess Louisa” played by Ann and her
lothario husband played in a comic role by Ray Stewart.
We conclude with New
Moon in 1987, when Ann performed the lead, at 58 years old, for the Long
Beach Civic Light Opera. Neither of these Long Beach shows were actually "summer" theatre, but I include them for convenience. Sandra
Kreiswirth of the Daily Breeze of
Torrance, California interviewed her on the second day of the two-week
rehearsal.
…although it’s a dark,
rainy afternoon, Blyth enters a Long Beach tearoom looking as if she stepped
out of a fashion layout—casual, but definitely chic.
She’s in terrific
shape thanks to her three-times-a-week workout regime.
The article was a biography of her life and career, events
and circumstances Ann rehashed many times over many decades with patient
cooperation in order to sell tickets.
From a review by Lewis Segal in the Los Angeles Times:
Ripples of excited
recognition spread through the house at the first hint of “Stout-hearted Men”
in the overture. And if they became
ripples of giggles by the time Ann Blyth sang the very, very, very last solo
reprise of this 1928 Sigmund Romberg anthem, no matter: The Long Beach Civic
Light Opera had incontestably delivered a generous sampling of the vocal
overkill and off-the-wall character comedy endemic to Broadway operetta…
This was all pure
hokum, of course, most of the time utterly unrelated to human behavior as we
know it on this planet.
Operetta, as we’ve mentioned in this series this month, is
an acquired taste.
Blyth made a spunky,
likeable Marianne…All but obliterated in the ball scene by a gown exploding
with ruffles, polka dots, ribbons, bows and lamè, Blyth nevertheless radiated
great poise and style.
But at 58, her voice
must be carefully husbanded and, even so, frequently sounded pinched or hooded
on Saturday.
In 2002 when Opera
News writer Brian Kellow interviewed her, Ann Blyth was still singing in
supper clubs and concert venues.
She still takes her
singing quite seriously and works to keep the voice in shape. “It’s the old story,” she says, “You’ve got
to find out if it’s there every day.”
She was seventy-three.
If anyone has any memories to share of attending one of Ann's musical theatre productions, I'd love to hear from you. See, I've got this here book to write.
This concludes our month of Ann Blyth's musicals. Come back next Thursday when we start a month of Ann's historical costume dramas. We'll take a second look at her
time-travel romance, I’ll Never Forget You (1951)
Posted by Jacqueline T. Lynch at Another Old Movie Blog.
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The Argus Press
(Owoss, Michigan), August 10, 1984,
p. 19.
Daily Breeze
(Torrance, California), March 8, 1985, review by James Bronson, p. E24;
February 24, 1987, article by Sandra Kreiswirth, p. C1; October 19, 1992, article by Sandra
Kreiswirth, p. C1.
The Hartford Courant,
August 18, 1965.
The Hartford Times,
August 18 1965, review by Allen M. Widem, “Ann Blyth Able Anna in “The King and
I.”
Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World, May 29, 1969, p. 14.
Lodi News (Lodi,
California), July 24, 1975, p. 7 “Show Boat Docks at Music Circus.”
Los Angeles Times,
February 28, 1984, articled by Jack Hawn, “A Blyth Spirit from an Earlier Era”;
March 8, 1985, review by Don Shirley, p. 16
Milwaukee Journal,
September 2, 1970, review by Michael H. Drew, part 2, p. 13; July 9, 1975, Part
2; January 27, 1976, syndicated by Vernon Scott.
Milwaukee Sentinel,
September 2, 1970, “Showboat’s Here and Wow!”; June 7, 1972, part 1, page 9,
review by Jay Joslyn; September 29, 1972; July 2, 1973, p. 12, part 1
The News-Texan,
May 22, 1963, p.2, syndicated column by Joseph Finnegan.
The Northeast
Missourian, October 24, 1951, syndicated column by Erskine Johnson.
Opera News, August
2002, article by Brian Kellow.
The Pittsburgh Press,
July 28, 1968, “Filth in Movies Saddens Ann Blyth” by Carl Apone, p. 13,
section 5; July 29, 1968, p. 14, review by Carl Apone; article by Kaspar
Monahan.
Bette Rogge, 1970 interview, WHIO-TV, University of Dayton collection:
Sarasota (Florida)
Journal, April 15, 1975, syndicated
column by Jack O’Brian, p. 5B.
The Spartanburg
Herald-Journal, September 1, 1968, syndicated column by Walter Winchell, p.
B-10.
Springfield Daily News
(Springfield, Mass.), August 31, 1976, review by Sam Hoffman, p. 8; September
1, 1976, article by Sam Hoffman, p.25.
St. Joseph News-Press
(Missouri) p. 11.
St. Petersburg Times,
September 18, 1994, column by Jay Horning, p. 12A.
Theater Mania blog, post by Peter Filichia, August 10, 2003. (http://www.theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/news/08-2003/taking-stock_3796.html).
Theater Mania blog, post by Peter Filichia, August 10, 2003. (http://www.theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/news/08-2003/taking-stock_3796.html).
Toledo Blade, June
2, 1963, section 7, p. 1, article by Ray Oviatt.
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TRIVIA QUESTION: I've recently been contacted by someone who wants to know if the piano player in Dillinger (1945-see post here) is the boogie-woogie artist Albert Ammons. Please leave comment or drop me a line if you know.
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UPDATE: This series on Ann Blyth is now a book - ANN BLYTH: ACTRESS. SINGER. STAR. -
Also in paperback and eBook from Amazon, CreateSpace, and my Etsy shop: LynchTwinsPublishing.
"Lynch’s book is organized and well-written – and has plenty of amusing observations – but when it comes to describing Blyth’s movies, Lynch’s writing sparkles." - Ruth Kerr, Silver Screenings
"Jacqueline T. Lynch creates a poignant and thoroughly-researched mosaic of memories of a fine, upstanding human being who also happens to be a legendary entertainer." - Deborah Thomas, Java's Journey
"One of the great strengths of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is that Lynch not only gives an excellent overview of Blyth's career -- she offers detailed analyses of each of Blyth's roles -- but she puts them in the context of the larger issues of the day."- Amanda Garrett, Old Hollywood Films
"Jacqueline's book will hopefully cause many more people to take a look at this multitalented woman whose career encompassed just about every possible aspect of 20th Century entertainment." - Laura Grieve, Laura's Miscellaneous Musings''
"Jacqueline T. Lynch’s Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is an extremely well researched undertaking that is a must for all Blyth fans." - Annette Bochenek, Hometowns to Hollywood
Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.
by Jacqueline T. Lynch
The first book on the career of actress Ann Blyth. Multitalented and remarkably versatile, Blyth began on radio as a child, appeared on Broadway at the age of twelve in Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine, and enjoyed a long and diverse career in films, theatre, television, and concerts. A sensitive dramatic actress, the youngest at the time to be nominated for her role in Mildred Pierce (1945), she also displayed a gift for comedy, and was especially endeared to fans for her expressive and exquisite lyric soprano, which was showcased in many film and stage musicals. Still a popular guest at film festivals, lovely Ms. Blyth remains a treasure of the Hollywood's golden age.
UPDATE: This series on Ann Blyth is now a book - ANN BLYTH: ACTRESS. SINGER. STAR. -
*********************
The audio book for Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is now for sale on Audible.com, and on Amazon and iTunes.
The audio book for Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is now for sale on Audible.com, and on Amazon and iTunes.
Also in paperback and eBook from Amazon, CreateSpace, and my Etsy shop: LynchTwinsPublishing.
"Lynch’s book is organized and well-written – and has plenty of amusing observations – but when it comes to describing Blyth’s movies, Lynch’s writing sparkles." - Ruth Kerr, Silver Screenings
"Jacqueline T. Lynch creates a poignant and thoroughly-researched mosaic of memories of a fine, upstanding human being who also happens to be a legendary entertainer." - Deborah Thomas, Java's Journey
"One of the great strengths of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is that Lynch not only gives an excellent overview of Blyth's career -- she offers detailed analyses of each of Blyth's roles -- but she puts them in the context of the larger issues of the day."- Amanda Garrett, Old Hollywood Films
"Jacqueline's book will hopefully cause many more people to take a look at this multitalented woman whose career encompassed just about every possible aspect of 20th Century entertainment." - Laura Grieve, Laura's Miscellaneous Musings''
"Jacqueline T. Lynch’s Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is an extremely well researched undertaking that is a must for all Blyth fans." - Annette Bochenek, Hometowns to Hollywood
Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.
by Jacqueline T. Lynch
The first book on the career of actress Ann Blyth. Multitalented and remarkably versatile, Blyth began on radio as a child, appeared on Broadway at the age of twelve in Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine, and enjoyed a long and diverse career in films, theatre, television, and concerts. A sensitive dramatic actress, the youngest at the time to be nominated for her role in Mildred Pierce (1945), she also displayed a gift for comedy, and was especially endeared to fans for her expressive and exquisite lyric soprano, which was showcased in many film and stage musicals. Still a popular guest at film festivals, lovely Ms. Blyth remains a treasure of the Hollywood's golden age.
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A new collection of essays, some old, some new, from this blog titled Movies in Our Time: Hollywood Mimics and Mirrors the 20th Century is now out in eBook, and in paperback here.
