By BOB THOMAS (AP Entertainment Writer)
Barbara Rush, who was a popular leading actress in the 1950s and 1960s and appeared in films alongside Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, and other top actors, has died. She was 97 years old.
Rush’s daughter, Fox News reporter Claudia Cowan, announced her mother's death on Easter Sunday via Instagram. More details about her death were not immediately available.
Cowan praised her mother as one of the last from Old Hollywood Royalty and described herself as her mother's biggest fan.
Barbara Rush was discovered while performing in a play at the Pasadena Playhouse, which led to a contract with Paramount Studios in 1950. She made her film debut that same year with a small role in “The Goldbergs,” based on the radio and TV series of the same name.
However, she soon left Paramount to work for Universal International and later 20th Century Fox.
In 1954, she recalled, “Paramount wasn’t focused on developing new talent. Every time a good role appeared, they tried to cast Elizabeth Taylor.”
Rush went on to star in a variety of films. She appeared opposite Rock Hudson in “Captain Lightfoot,” 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 received a Golden Globe for most promising newcomer.
Her film credits also included the Nicholas Ray classic “Bigger Than Life”; “The Young Lions,” with Marlon Brando, Dean Martin, and Montgomery Clift; and “The Young Philadelphians” with Newman. She made two films with Sinatra, “Come Blow Your Horn” and the Rat Pack spoof “Robin and the Seven Hoods,” which also featured Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.
Rush, who had made TV guest appearances for years, remembered fully transitioning as she approached middle age.
In 1962, she remarked, “There used to be this terrible Sahara Desert between 40 and 60 when you went from ingenue to old lady. You either didn’t work or you pretended you were 20.”
Instead, Rush took on roles in series such as “Peyton Place,” “All My Children,” “The New Dick Van Dyke Show,” and “7th Heaven.”
In a 1997 interview, she joked, “I’m one of those people who will perform the minute you open the refrigerator door and the light goes on.”
Her first play was the road company version of “Forty Carats,” a comedy that had been a hit in New York. The director, Abe Burrows, assisted her with comedic acting.
She found it very difficult at first to learn timing, especially the business of waiting for a laugh, but she eventually learned, and the show lasted a year in Chicago and months more on the road.
She went on to appear in tours such as “Same Time, Next Year,” “Father’s Day,” “Steel Magnolias,” and her solo show, “A Woman of Independent Means.”
Barbara Rush was born in Denver and spent her first 10 years moving from town to town with her father, a mining company lawyer. The family finally settled in Santa Barbara, California, where young Barbara played a mythical dryad in a school play and fell in love with acting.
She studied drama at the University of California, Berkeley, and then received a scholarship to attend the Pasadena Playhouse Theater Arts College.
Rush was married and divorced three times — to screen star Jeffrey Hunter, Hollywood publicity executive Warren Cowan, and sculptor James Gruzalski.
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