Barbara Rush, Actor Who Co-Starred With Frank Sinatra And Paul Newman Among Others, Dies At 97

Los Angeles  — Barbara Rush, a prominent starring actor in the 1950s and 1960s who costarred with Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, and other top film performers before launching a successful television career, has died. She was 97.

Fox News correspondent Claudia Cowan, Rush’s daughter, revealed her mother’s death on Instagram on Easter Sunday. Additional information was not immediately available.

Barbara Rush, Actor Who Co-Starred With Frank Sinatra And Paul Newman Among Others, Dies At 97

Cowan described her mother as “among the last of “Old Hollywood Royalty,” and referred to herself as her mother’s “greatest fan.”

Rush was spotted in a play at the Pasadena Playhouse and signed a contract with Paramount Studios in 1950. That same year, she made her film debut with a small role in “The Goldbergs,” based on the radio and TV series of the same name.

However, she left Paramount shortly after to work for Universal International and eventually 20th Century Fox.

“Paramount wasn’t geared for developing new talent,” she remarked in 1954. “Every time a good role came along, they tried to borrow Elizabeth Taylor.”

Rush went on to act in a variety of films. She played opposite Rock Hudson in “Captain Lightfoot” and Douglas Sirk’s acclaimed remake of “Magnificent Obsession,” Audie Murphy in “World in My Corner,” and Richard Carlson in the 3-D science-fiction classic “It Came From Outer Space,” for which she won the Golden Globe for most promising newcomer.

Other film credits include Nicholas Ray’s classic “Bigger Than Life,” “The Young Lions” starring Marlon Brando, Dean Martin, and Montgomery Clift, and “The Young Philadelphians” with Newman. She collaborated with Sinatra on two films: “Come Blow Your Horn” and the Rat Pack satire “Robin and the Seven Hoods,” which starred Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.

Rush, who had been making TV guest appearances for years, remembers embracing the transformation as she entered middle age.

“There used to be this terrible Sahara Desert between 40 and 60 when you went from ingenue to old lady,” she said when she was sixty-two. “You either didn’t work or you pretended you were 20.”

Instead, Rush appeared on shows such as “Peyton Place,” “All My Children,” “The New Dick Van Dyke Show,” and “7th Heaven.”

Barbara Rush, Actor Who Co-Starred With Frank Sinatra And Paul Newman Among Others, Dies At 97

In a 1997 interview, she joked, “I’m one of those people who will perform as soon as you open the refrigerator door and the light turns on.”

Her debut production was a road company adaptation of the comedy “Forty Carats,” which had been a hit in New York. The director, Abe Burrows, assisted her with comedy acting.

“It was very, very difficult for me to learn timing at first, especially the business of waiting for a laugh,” she said. But she learned, and the play lasted a year in Chicago and several months on the road.

She went on to star in tours like “Same Time, Next Year,” “Father’s Day,” “Steel Magnolias,” and her play, “A Woman of Independent Means.”

Barbara Rush, Actor Who Co-Starred With Frank Sinatra And Paul Newman Among Others, Dies At 97

Rush was born in Denver and spent her first ten years moving around while her father, a mining company lawyer, was moved to different towns. The family eventually settled in Santa Barbara, California, where little Barbara performed as a fabled dryad in a school play and fell in love with acting.

Rush was married and divorced three times: to screen star Jeffrey Hunter, Hollywood publicity executive Warren Cowan, and sculptor James Gruzalski.

SOURCE – AP