In the 1950s, the elegant actor Barbara Rush, who has died aged 97, was extremely visible in films (she made 22 during the decade) and in fan magazines, especially during her marriage to the screen heartthrob Jeffrey Hunter. However, although she appeared opposite some of the top male stars of the day, she did not seem to have that extra je ne sais quoi needed to attain top-drawer status herself.
She met and fell in love with Hunter, who had just been put under contract by 20th Century Fox, a short time after her arrival in Hollywood, signed up by the Paramount studio. They were married in December 1950 before either of them had been seen on screen.
Soon afterwards, Paramount gave Rush leading lady parts in several of their second-league features, in which she was asked to be merely decorative: a western, Flaming Feather (1952), with Sterling Hayden; a swashbuckler, Prince of Pirates (1953), in which she played a haughty Spanish princess opposite John Derek; and When Worlds Collide (1951), an archetypal paranoid 1950s sci-fi movie. At one stage, Rush, as a boffin’s daughter, exclaims, with hardly any emotion: “I’m frightened! You see, I haven’t the courage to face the end of the world!”
After the birth of her son in 1952, Rush left Paramount and signed with Universal-International. There she was cast in another classic sci-fi drama, It Came from Outer Space (1953), in which she is abducted by aliens. Then came three films for Douglas Sirk, as an Apache woman in Taza, Son of Cochise (1954); in the gloriously loopy melodrama Magnificent Obsession (1954) as Jane Wyman’s supportive step-daughter; and as a feisty Irish girl in the period piece Captain Lightfoot (1955), all starring Rock Hudson.
Rush continued to look pretty in two more costume dramas, The Black Shield of Falworth (1954) as Tony Curtis’s sister, and Kiss of Fire (1955), in which she played the pretender to the Spanish throne. In World in My Corner (1956), a boxer played by Audie Murphy, “born in the dumps and educated in an alley”, lusts after money and a poor, little rich girl played by Rush.
At around the same time that her marriage to Hunter ended in the mid-50s, Rush began to get meatier roles. (Although she and Hunter appeared in No Down Payment, 1957, two years after their divorce, they did not share any scenes together.) She was the loving wife of a school teacher (James Mason) in Bigger Than Life (1956), watching him becoming a monster under pain-killing drugs, and the socialite girlfriend of a playboy (Dean Martin) who shames him into joining up in the second world war epic The Young Lions (1958).
In the same year as her marriage to the publicist Warren Cowan, with whom she had a daughter, Rush played another high class girl in The Young Philadelphians (1959), whom a struggling lawyer (Paul Newman) falls for. In Strangers When We Meet (1960), she was architect Kirk Douglas’s practical wife, who does not seem to understand his need for artistic fulfillment, which leads him to stray with Kim Novak. Rush made of the wronged wife a more complex and more sympathetic character than she first appears.
Rush was born in Denver, Colorado, the daughter of Roy Rush, a lawyer, and Nora (nee Simonson), a homemaker who took up acting and later nursing after her husband’s death when Barbara was a teenager. At the University of California in Santa Barbara she won an acting award for her performance as Birdie in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, and won a scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse College of Theatre Arts. It was while she was performing in summer stock that she was spotted by a Paramount talent scout and given a studio contract in 1950. She made her film debut the following year in Molly (AKA The Goldbergs), a comedy starring Gertrude Berg.
When the film roles started to dry up in the mid-60s, Rush continued to work busily in television, especially soaps, from a season of Peyton Place in 1968-69 to a long-running role in 7th Heaven from 1997 to 2007. In an 1968 episode of Batman, she was a guest villainess, Nora Clavicle, who proposes that the miniskirted policewomen of Gotham City could be cowed into submission simply by releasing mice into the community.
She was still famous enough in 1975 to be mentioned by Warren Beatty in Shampoo, when his character, a Beverly Hills hairdresser, says: “I do Barbara Rush’s hair”.
She returned to the stage in the 70s in Forty Carats, and in 1984 made her Broadway debut in the one-woman show A Woman of Independent Means at the Biltmore theatre. In 1989 she appeared as M’Lynn in the first national tour of Steel Magnolias.
Rush’s second marriage ended in divorce, as did a third, to Jim Gruzalski, a sculptor. She is survived by her children, Christopher and Claudia.
• Barbara Rush, actor, born 4 January 1927; died 31 March 2024
Ronald Bergan died in 2020
