Stomp Tokyo Video Reviews
Posted on 02/10/2002 8:03:20 AM PST by dighton
GEORGE NADER, who has died aged 80, was a popular B-movie actor of the 1950s and 1960s whose virile screen heroics were admired and emulated by Rock Hudson.
Nader made more than 50 films, including The Female Animal (1957) with Jane Powell; Six Bridges to Cross with Tony Curtis; Four Girls in Town (1956) with Julie Adams; and The Million Eyes of Su-Muru (1967) with Shirley Eaton.
Hudson, who left the bulk of his fortune to Nader after dying of Aids in 1985, first met Nader as a young actor, when they helped each other to conceal their homosexuality from their female admirers. Though they became life-long friends, during his film career Nader often found himself being cast in Hudson's left-overs: "If Hudson didn't want the part," he recalled rather bitterly, "Universal offered it to Curtis; if Curtis said no, then Chandler was third on the list; and if the studio janitor, the postman or the garbage guy said no, they offered it to me."
Nader later turned to television roles and writing. Chrome, published in 1978, was his only published novel; it told the story of love between two gay robots.
George Nader was born at Los Angeles on October 19 1921. He became interested in acting while still at school, and studied English at Occidental College.
During the Second World War, he served as a communications officer in the Navy, based in the Pacific. Afterwards he studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse, appearing in several productions.
This led to small parts in films, mostly Westerns, before Nader won the lead role in the 3-D thriller Robot Monster (1953), a $16,000 cult classic which once earned the distinction of being named one of the 50 worst movies in history. Nonetheless, in the following year Nader was awarded a Golden Globe as Most Promising Male Newcomer of the Year and given a contract with Universal Studios.
Universal left him in little doubt about where his true talents lay: "I was asked to remove my shirt an awful lot," he recalled, although, unlike many of his colleagues, he was not in the habit of shaving his chest.
To burnish Nader's virile image, Universal arranged "dates" for him with many of his leading ladies, including Mitzi Gaynor (his co-star in Down Among the Sheltering Palms, 1953) and Coleen Miller (his co-star in Four Guns to the Border, 1954). The studio was even said to have spread a rumour that he had got two waitresses pregnant.
Mamie van Doren, with whom he starred in The Second Greatest Sex (a musical about women going on a sex strike), gamely played up to the fiction: "Nader was more than beefcake," she said, "he was the whole goddam dessert trolley."
Nader gave perhaps his strongest performance in The Female Animal (1957), in which an ageing star (Hedy Lamarr) pits her wits against her alcoholic daughter (Jane Powell) for the affections of a movie bit-part player (Nader). Nader has affairs with both the mother and daughter, nearly destroying everyone in the process, before fleeing to Mexico to make a bad horror film.
But by the time he made Away All Boats (1956), Nader had passed his physical peak and decided to try his hand at television. He starred as the fictional detective in ABC's Ellery Queen, and as the eponymous hero in the short-lived crime thriller Shannon (1961). In 1962, he moved to Europe, where he appeared in a series of low-budget West German films. He retired from acting in 1974 after developing glaucoma.
Nader was a major source for Rock Hudson: His Story, the biography by Sara Davidson published in 1986. Nader's long-time companion Mark Miller worked as Hudson's personal secretary for 13 years, and the two men were among the few confidants who knew that Hudson had Aids.
Both Nader and Miller benefited under Rock Hudson's will. In recent years they lived quietly together at Palm Springs, California.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2002.
Pia was said to have been playing Anne in a theatrical produciton of "Anne Frank's Diary," and was so bad that when the Nazis came to the house, the audience stood up and yelled: "She's in the attic!"
(This urban legend is supposedly untrue. But still fun.)
Leni
From The Human Duplicators. Can't find much on this flick.
I'll take one of that model on the left, thar...
That'll do. One to go, please.
To burnish Nader's virile image, Universal arranged "dates" for him with many of his leading ladies, including Mitzi Gaynor (his co-star in Down Among the Sheltering Palms, 1953) and Coleen Miller (his co-star in Four Guns to the Border, 1954). The studio was even said to have spread a rumour that he had got two waitresses pregnant.Mamie van Doren, with whom he starred in The Second Greatest Sex (a musical about women going on a sex strike), gamely played up to the fiction: "Nader was more than beefcake," she said, "he was the whole goddam dessert trolley."
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