Cara Williams

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Cara Williams (born June 29, 1925 in Brooklyn , New York City ; actually Bernice Kamiat ), also known under the name Bernice Kay , is an American actress .

Life

First film roles

Cara Williams was born Bernice Kamiat in New York in 1925 . Her father was an Austrian immigrant, her mother of Romanian descent. Her parents separated when she was young. Kamiat began working as an actress as a child. As a teenager, she moved to Los Angeles with her mother , where she began dubbing cartoons. She made her film debut in 1941 under the stage name Bernice Kay with a supporting role in Lesley Selander's western The Wolves of Kansas . After starring in Victor Halperin's drama Girls' Town (1942), she was discovered by talent scouts at the age of 17 and signed to the film production company 20th Century Fox in 1942 . Her stage name was then changed to Cara Williams .

By the early 1950s, Williams appeared in nearly a dozen feature films for 20th Century Fox, including dramas, comedies, and musicals. Although she acted in these productions under such ambitious directors as Elia Kazan ( Boomerang , 1947), Walter Lang ( Belvedere cleans up , 1948) or Otto Preminger ( In the Meantime, Darling and Laura , both 1944), she was invariably in supporting roles and subscribed to insignificant extras. In 1950, Williams' career took off when she replaced Judy Holliday in the Broadway production of Born Yesterday and began appearing in television plays including The Philco Television Playhouse , Robert Montgomery Presents , Armstrong Circle Theater and Broadway Television Theater . Larger film roles also followed, including Roy Rowland's music film Tolle Nights in Las Vegas (1956) with Dan Dailey and Cyd Charisse . A year later, Williams was recognized by the New York Times for her portrayal of Alan King's vulgar and understanding friend in Michael Curtiz 's biopic A Life in Rush (1957), in which Ann Blyth, the Broadway star, struggled with drinking problems.

Oscar nomination for "Escape in Chains"

Her breakthrough as a film actress came a year later with Stanley Kramer's Escape in Chains (1958). In the drama, Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier slipped into the roles of two prisoners. Tied to one another, they manage to escape, but both have to learn to overcome racial prejudice and mutual contempt. The film, which for the first time awarded the same fee to a colored lead actor as its white colleague, received benevolent recognition from large parts of the US audience, won the Golden Globe Award and two Academy Awards . In Escape in Chains, Cara Williams took on the role of a young widowed farm owner and mother who gave shelter to the fugitives and dreams of a future together with the white prisoner. Critically praised for her "heartfelt" performance, she was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress for the Golden Globe and Oscar in 1959. In the same year, Williams was also seen as the beautiful and willing companion of James Cagney in the musical film Never Steal Anything Small (1959).

After escaping in chains, Williams was no longer able to build on the previous success with the following film roles. At the beginning of the 1960s, the red-haired artist turned to work on American television with initial success. An Emmy nomination earned her in 1962 the lead role in the CBS series Pete and Gladys (1960–1962), an offshoot of the sitcom December Bride (1954–1959). In over 70 episodes, Williams was seen with Harry Morgan as a spouse trying to hide their marriage from their employer. Marketed by CBS as the new Lucille Ball , Williams benefited from her partnership with producer Keefe Brasselle, who was a close friend of CBS program director James T. Aubrey . Brasselle produced her own sitcom for the actress from 1964, The Cara Williams Show , with Frank Aletter at her side. However, production was stopped after one season in 1965. As Brasselle and Aubrey's careers ended, Williams' fame also waned. Six years later, she returned to the big screen as the alcoholic, divorced wife of Carroll O'Connor in George Schaefer's drama Women of Doctors (1971). By the end of the 1970s, however, only a handful of film and television appearances followed, and her acting career ended in 1978 with the crime film Das Recht am ich aus.

Private life

Cara Williams was married to Alan Gray in her first marriage from 1945 to 1947. The relationship resulted in a child. The actress, known for her volatility, made headlines in the tabloids in 1948 when she had a fight with another actress in a nightclub. In 1952 she met her younger half-brother, actor John Drew Barrymore , at a party at Diana Barrymore's . Both married shortly afterwards in Las Vegas without their family members knowing . In 1954 their son John Blyth Barrymore was born, who would later follow in his parents' footsteps.

The marriage was stormy and was shaped by Barrymore's temperament, which manifested itself in various offenses such as drunk driving, drug problems and public quarrels and violence. “My marriage turned out to be a competition. It was a battle over who loved John more, me or John. And John always won, ” said Williams, who helped her husband continue his film career. The couple separated in September 1958, and Williams and Barrymore divorced a year later. The actress gave as the reason "severe emotional cruelty" and received custody of their son. However, Barrymore never made the required maintenance payments. Williams would later praise her husband as the most talented actor of the well-known actor dynasty , but saw in him the victim of an "egomaniacal, brilliant and unusual, safe but complacent" family.

In his third marriage, Williams is married to the actor Asher Dann.

Filmography (selection)

Feature films

  • 1941: The Wolves of Kansas ( Wide Open Town )
  • 1942: Girls' Town
  • 1943: Happy Land
  • 1944: In the Meantime, Darling
  • 1944: Sweet and Low-Down
  • 1945: The Spider
  • 1947: Boomerang ( Boomerang! )
  • 1948: The Saxon Charm
  • 1951: Monte Carlo Baby
  • 1953: The Girl Next Door
  • 1954: The Great Diamond Robbery
  • 1956: Great Nights in Las Vegas ( Meet Me in Las Vegas )
  • 1957: A Life Intoxicated ( The Helen Morgan Story )
  • 1958: Escape in Chains ( The Defiant Ones )
  • 1959: Never Steal Anything Small
  • 1963: The Man from the Diners Club (The Man from the Diner's Club)
  • 1971: Women of the doctors ( Doctors' Wives )
  • 1976: The Ashes of Mrs. Reasoner (TV)
  • 1977: The White Buffalo ( The White Buffalo )
  • 1978: The Right Am I ( The One Man Jury )

TV Shows

  • 1956–1960: Alfred Hitchcock Presents (4 episodes)
  • 1960–1962: Pete and Gladys (72 episodes)
  • 1961–1962: The Red Skelton Show (3 episodes)
  • 1964–1965: The Cara Williams Show (30 episodes)
  • 1974: Rhoda (2 episodes)

Awards

Web links

Commons : Cara Williams  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. US Census, April 1, 1930, State of New York, County of Kings, enumeration district 355, p. 12-B, family 248
  2. ↑ cf. Cara Williams. In: Ephraim Katz: The Macmillan international film encyclopedia. Macmillan, New York, NY, 1994, ISBN 0-333-61601-4 , p. 1462.
  3. ↑ a b cf. Biography in the All Movie Guide (accessed December 30, 2009)
  4. ↑ cf. A film review by AH Weiler in the New York Times, October 3, 1957
  5. ↑ cf. Escape in chains. In: The large TV feature film lexicon. CD-ROM. Directmedia Publ., 2006, ISBN 978-3-89853-036-1
  6. ↑ cf. Film review by Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, September 25, 1958
  7. ^ A b Vallance, Tom: Obituary: John Drew Barrymore . In: The Independent , December 1, 2004, p. 35
  8. ↑ Cara Williams. In: Turner Classic Movies . Retrieved October 27, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Williams, Cara
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kamiat, Bernice (real name); Kay, Bernice
BRIEF DESCRIPTION US-american actress
DATE OF BIRTH June 29, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn , New York City , New York , United States