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 | | From: | LeMod Pol | | Subject: | 1940s film star Virginia Mayo dies at 84 | | Date: | Tue, 18 Jan 2005 18:25:28 -0500 |
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 | 1940s film star Virginia Mayo dies at 84
By Dennis McLellan | Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
Posted January 18, 2005
[They don't make them like that any more- LP]
Virginia Mayo, the beautiful blond who rose to movie
stardom in the 1940s in comedies opposite Bob Hope and
Danny Kaye and had memorable dramatic turns with James
Cagney in "White Heat" and Dana Andrews in "The Best
Years of Our Lives," died Monday. She was 84.
Mayo died of pneumonia and heart failure after a long
illness in a nursing facility near her home in Thousand
Oaks, said family friend Alex Ben Block.
A former vaudevillian who came under the wing of
producer Samuel Goldwyn, Mayo launched her movie career
with a small part in the 1943 movie "Jack London,"
starring her future husband, Michael O'Shea. She also
received billing as a Goldwyn Girl in "Up in Arms," a
1944 comedy starring Kaye and Dinah Shore.
In the same year, Goldwyn promoted Mayo to leading
lady, casting her as Princess Margaret in "The Princess
and the Pirate," an adventure comedy co-starring Hope.
Over the next few years, she teamed up with Kaye in the
"The Kid From Brooklyn," "A Song Is Born" and, most
notably, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."
As a young star known for her ash blond hair,
peaches-and-cream complexion, green eyes and curvaceous
figure, Mayo caught the fancy of the sultan of Morocco,
who wrote her a fan letter in which he proclaimed her
to be "tangible proof of the existence of God."
Goldwyn cast Mayo against her image as the dream girl
next door in "The Best Years of Our Lives." Mayo was
widely praised for her first major dramatic role as the
two-timing wife of Andrews, a returning war veteran, in
the 1946 Oscar-winning film.
Three years later, after moving to Warner Bros., Mayo
gave one of her best-remembered performances, in "White
Heat," director Raoul Walsh's crime melodrama in which
Mayo played the unscrupulous wife of Cagney, a mentally
disturbed gang boss who alternately cuddles and slaps her.
more story + pix @
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/tv/sns-mayo-obit,0,2243416.story?coll=orl-caltvtop
Copyright © 2005, The Los Angeles Times
--
LP
"We are fighting today for security, for progress,
and for peace, not only for ourselves but for all
men, not only for one generation but for all
generations. We are fighting to cleanse the world
of ancient evils, ancient ills."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
State of the Union Address - 1942
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