Veteran glamour girls return to the screen

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32860, 8 March 1972, Page 6

Veteran glamour girls return to the screen

(By

GENE HANDSAKER.

?, of the Associated Press, through N.Z.P.A.)

HOLLYWOOD.

As if to show the younger actriesses how it’s done, the veterans among screen glamour girls have been flocking back to the sound stages. •

“I need- to work,” said the Academy Award winner, Olivia de Havilland, seen recently as “The Screaming Woman,” an ABC-ZV film. “I need creative activity, and communication with people —large groups of them.” Says Susan Hayward, another Oscar holder, back in Hollywood from 15 years residence in Florida and making her television film debut in CBS’s “Heat Of Anger”: “Both my sons are now grown up and married. The best thing for me to do is to go back to work.” But Paulette Goddard, when asked if NBC’s forthcoming “The Snoop Sisters” marks a resumption of her film career after 18 years, said: “Absolutely not. This is a one-shot thing that Helen Hayes and (producer)

Leonard Stern talked me into.”

The two-hour film is the plot for a projected series starring Miss Hayes and Mildred Natwick, who with Sylvia Sidney and Myrna. Loy recently appeared on ABC as matrons who met a murderer whjle seeking adventure through a computer dating system. Two other veterans besides Susan Hayward will appear soon: Eve Arden as a retired schoolteacher whosehobby is solving crimes, on ABC’s “A Very Missing Person,” and Jane Wyman, as the compassionate pediatrician Amanda Fallow on NBC’s “The Bold Ones.” Bette Davies plays a retired judge who runs an investigative agency in “The Judge And Jake Wyler,” a forthcoming NBC “world premiere.” A roster of other famed feminine faces seen recently in prime-time television drama includes: ’Joan Bennett, as “Gidet’s”

mother and as Peter Haskell’s aunt.

June Allyson, as Eddie Albert’s wife in her first film in 12 years. . . . June Havoc, in Hollywood from her New Orleans repertory theatre for "MeMilland Wife.” Dorothy McGuire as David McCallum’s mother in CBS “She Waits,” a story of witchcraft. Ida Lupino, actressdirector, on “Medical Centre.” Peggy Lee, doing her first dramatic acting in 16 years on an “Owen Marshall," explained: “It is fun. It gives you a chance to be someone else for a while.” Ann Sothern, in costume as a queen for “Fol-de-rol” on ABC deplored the state of Hollywood’s film business: “It is very quiet right now. It’s too bad. It is rather like a dying giant.” Cyd Charisse, who played a butterfly, a witch, and princess on the show, agreed. “There are no studios as we

knew them. With pictures going overseas to be made, we have no production in California any more, which is a shame.”

But Susan Hayward was more optimistic: “It is still an exciting town. Something good is going to happen, I know it must. You’ve still got your audience. All you have to do is get it back.” Widowed for six years, house hunting in Hollywood and hoping that her “Friday Night Movie” will become a series, she said: “In Fort Lauderdale, I’m a freak. Here, I’m just a freak among freaks.” Olivia de Havilland said she was just “passing through town” when offered the “Screaming Woman” role, which she said proved “a gratifying experience. “Anybody with a long career has a public trust,” she said. “I think the audience felt I hadn’t let them down.”