Camelot singer, Beetlejuice actor Robert Goulet
Actor-singer Robert Goulet died at age 73 on Oct. 30 in Los Angeles. He was 73. Born on Nov. 26, 1933, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Goulet spent much of his youth in Canada.
He became a Broadway star in 1960, after playing Sir Lancelot in the Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical Camelot. His costars were Richard Burton as King Arthur and Julie Andrews as Queen Guenevere.
Robert Goulet movies
In the ensuing decades, besides numerous Las Vegas performances and television appearances (Police Story, Mission: Impossible, Fantasy Island), Robert Goulet was featured in several motion pictures. Among these were the 1964 comedies Honeymoon Hotel, with Nancy Kwan; and more memorably, I’d Rather Be Rich.
The latter is a not disagreeable remake of the It Started with Eve, which had starred Universal’s top box office draw Deanna Durbin. In the Ross Hunter-produced, Jack Smight-directed remake (with music), 1960s Universal star Sandra Dee (in the role originally played by Robert Cummings) is a cute young woman who, while attempting to make her (supposedly) dying grandfather Maurice Chevalier happy, wins the heart of fake fiancé Robert Goulet (Deanna Durbin in the original).
Yet Goulet’s film career never quite took off. When Camelot was made into a movie in 1967, he was replaced by Franco Nero – but then again, none of the three original leads was used: Richard Burton was replaced by Richard Harris and Julie Andrews by Vanessa Redgrave. Joshua Logan directed.
More recent Goulet film fare include Tim Burton’s ghostly comedy blockbuster Beetlejuice (1988); The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991); Toy Story 2 (1999), in which he provided the voice for Wheezy the Penguin; and the Burt Reynolds-directed The Last Producer (2000).
Robert Goulet won a Grammy in 1962 for his first two albums, “Always You” and “Two of Us.” Six years later, he received a Tony for his performance in the musical The Happy Time, a musical loosely based on Samuel A. Taylor’s 1950 hit Broadway play. (Charles Boyer, Marsha Hunt, Louis Jourdan, and Bobby Driscoll starred in Richard Fleischer’s 1952 film version of the play.)
The Naked and the Dead, Marilyn author Norman Mailer
Author Norman Mailer, as well known for his books as for his convoluted private life, died early today of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. He was 84.
Born on Jan. 31, 1923, in Long Branch, New Jersey, Mailer decided to become a writer while attending Harvard University in the early 1940s. His best known literary work is probably the bestselling 1948 World War II novel The Naked and the Dead, though much was said about his fannish Marilyn, as he was accused of plagiarism by other Marilyn Monroe biographers.
Mailer won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Armies of the Night, a 1968 account of the peace march on the Pentagon, and twelve years later won another Pulitzer, for The Executioner’s Song, about the life and death of petty criminal Gary Gilmore.
Raoul Walsh directed the – reportedly bowdlerized – 1958 film adaptation (by Denis and Terry Sanders) of The Naked and the Dead, starring Cliff Robertson, Aldo Ray, and Raymond Massey, while Mailer’s An American Dream was turned into a 1966 movie (adapted by Mann Rubin), directed by Robert Gist, and starring Stuart Whitman, Janet Leigh, and Eleanor Parker.
Mailer himself appeared in a handful of film productions, among them Milos Forman’s 1981 Ragtime, in which he played murder victim Stanford White. He also directed four movies, most notably the 1987 flop Tough Guys Don’t Dance, which he also adapted from his own novel, starring Ryan O’Neal and Isabella Rossellini.
While not writing books, Mailer befriended Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, wrote for The Village Voice, married six times, had nine children, ran for mayor of New York, stabbed his second wife at a party, feuded with Gore Vidal, bashed the women’s liberation movement, and was called a “male chauvinist pig” in, of all news outlets, Time magazine.
Actor Stephen Mailer and producer Michael Mailer are his sons.