ANNE JEFFREYS

28 Sept

(26 January 1923 - 27 September 2017)

The American actress and singer Anne Jeffreys, who has died aged 94, began her career as a model while also training to be an opera singer, making her debut in La Bohème (1940). A live Hollywood revue led to her being cast in I Married an Angel, a musical film with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. A contract at the Republic Studios saw her in several B-westerns and she was in a couple of Dick Tracy thrillers. She co-starred with Sinatra in Step Lively, with Mitchum in Nevada, with Lawrence Tierney in Dillinger, and with Pat O’Brien in Riff-Raff. Many minor films, musical and otherwise, followed, while Jeffreys also kept her hand and voice in by appearing in theatre shows such as Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, Puccini’s Tosca, Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate and Sigmund Romberg’s My Romance. Divorced from her first husband Joseph Serena, she married Robert Sterling and they toured their cabaret act but then along came television and the series Topper, in which she played Marion the ghost. She still occasionally played in stage musicals – such as Camelot and The King and I. Anne Jeffreys made a few more films, including Panic in the City, The Southern Double Cross, Clifford and Richard III with David Carradine. With husband Sterling (who died in 2006) she had three sons, Jeffrey, Robert and Tyler.

MICHAEL DARVELL

Michael Darvell

Michael Darvell trained as a librarian at Watford and in Surrey before joining Ealing Libraries where he became Music Librarian for the borough. He edited Masthead, the magazine of the University of North London School of Librarianship, The Surrealist, the staff magazine of Surrey County Library, and contributed to the Assistant Librarian and London Librarian professional journals. A freelance film reviewer since 1970, he has written for Film, Films Illustrated, Film Review, Movie Maker and Radio Times, as well as editing Montage, the London film societies magazine, for ten years. A change of career saw him joining What’s On in London as Features Editor and he eventually stepped into the shoes of the late F. Maurice Speed (founding father of Film Review annual) as the magazine’s Editor. From 2007 to 2015, he was co-editor of the Film Review annual with Mansel Stimpson. As well as writing about films, Michael has reviewed theatre for The Stage newspaper, and has written about music theatre and cabaret for the Classical Source and Musical Theatre Review websites. He is also a former restaurant critic for the ViewLondon website. Michael has been a member of the London Film Critics’ Circle since 2005.

ANNE JEFFREYS

BENJAMIN WHITROW

HUGH HEFNER