Susan Oliver

Susan Oliver (February 13, 1932—May 10, 1990) was an American actress, television director and a record-setting pilot.

Early life and family

Born Charlotte Gercke in New York City, she was the daughter of journalist George Gercke and astrology practitioner Ruth Hale Oliver, who divorced when Charlotte was still a child. At the end of World War II, George Gercke joined the United States Information Agency and in 1946 was posted to Japan as a supervisor overseeing news dissemination and instruction in democratic institutions during the U.S. occupation.

While living with her father, Charlotte studied at Tokyo International College from 1949 to 1951 and developed a lifelong interest in Japanese society and its absorption of American pop culture. In 1977, twenty six years after her early experiences in Japan, she wrote and directed Cowboysan, a short film which presents the fantasy scenario of a Japanese actor and actress playing leads in an American western. Following her return from Japan in 1951, Charlotte joined her mother in California, where Ruth Hale Oliver eventually became a well-known Hollywood astrologer.

Early career on stage and television

At the age of twenty, Charlotte went back to the East Coast to begin drama studies at Pennsylvania's Swarthmore College followed by professional training at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City. After working in summer stock, she adopted the stage name Susan Oliver and first appeared on television playing a supporting role in the July 31, 1955 episode of the live drama series Goodyear TV Playhouse, followed by parts in other Golden Age of TV shows.

1957 was a banner year for Susan, including Broadway, numerous TV shows and a starring role in a movie. She began the year with a major ingenue role in her first Broadway play Small War on Murray Hill, a Robert E. Sherwood comedy about the intrigues surrounding General Howe's (Leo Genn) visit to New York in 1776, at the start of the Revolutionary War. It opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on January 3, 1957 and played 12 performances, closing on January 12.

The short run was a disappointment for Susan, but it was immediately followed by meaty roles in live TV dramas on Kaiser Aluminum Hour, The United States Steel Hour and Matinee Theater. She then went to Hollywood, where she appeared on Climax!, one of the few live drama series based on the West Coast, as well as in a number of filmed shows, including the October 30, 1957 episode of Wagon Train and a memorable installment of Father Knows Best (broadcast on March 5, 1958), in which she was the titular Country Cousin of the show's "Anderson Family".

First motion picture role

Later, in 1957, Susan accepted the title role in her first motion picture The Green-Eyed Blonde, a low-budget independent melodrama released by Warner Brothers on the bottom half of a double bill. The film was scripted by renowned blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo using the name of a "front". Despite the alluring title and exploitative publicity stills designed to capitalize on Susan's attractiveness, the storyline was raw social protest mixed with soap opera, portraying outcast teenage girls in reform school, banding together to secretly shelter one of the girls' baby. Susan played the tough veteran inmate considered the unofficial leader of the group. The downbeat ending had the baby being discovered and removed, followed by a riot which resulted in the death of Susan's character. Ironically, The Green-Eyed Blonde, which in black-and-white could never adequately convey the color of her eyes, would turn out to be the only motion picture on which Susan Oliver received first billing.

At the end of the year, Susan returned to New York, appearing in the December 12, 1957 broadcast of the prestigious live drama series Playhouse 90. Her performance in the John Frankenheimer-directed teleplay was well-received and she was invited to Playhouse 90 two more times, March 26, 1959 and January 21, 1960.

The return to stage and television

In 1958 Susan was back in the Golden Age of TV Drama, acting on Kraft Television Theatre and Suspicion, as well as rehearsing for a co-starring role in a Broadway play. Patate (which in French means "spud", but can also mean "chump") was a comedy by Marcel Achard adapted for American audiences by Irwin Shaw. Susan's leading men were veterans Tom Ewell (in the title role) and Lee Bowman. Patate opened at Henry Miller's Theatre on October 28, 1958 and closed on November 1, its 7-performance run being even shorter than that of her first show, Small War on Murray Hill. Nevertheless, Patate won Susan a Theatre World Award for outstanding "breakout" performance. It also turned out to be her final Broadway appearance.

Noted for her striking good looks, the blonde actress spent the remainder of her career in Hollywood, going on to play in more than one hundred different television shows and made-for-TV movies, as well as twelve theatrical features. She appeared in three additional episodes of Wagon Train, four episodes of The Virginian, three episodes each of Adventures in Paradise, Route 66 and Dr. Kildare, as well as a highly-praised October 8-15, 1963 two-part episode of The Fugitive entitled Never Wave Goodbye.

She was fourth-billed in her second theatrical feature 1959's The Gene Krupa Story. The film gave her a meaty femme fatale role as a beautiful big-band singer who seduces Krupa (Sal Mineo) from the faithful girl who truly loves him (Susan Kohner) into a high life of partying and marijuana smoking. Critics noted that Susan Oliver had the film's juiciest dialogue—tempting Krupa to try the "weed", she whispers, "...put your miseries out to pasture, Gino" and when he's arrested, she abandons him with the line, "...now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a town I'd better get out of".

Of the ten listed players in her next movie, the 1960 Elizabeth Taylor vehicle BUtterfield 8, Susan was ninth, the lowest billing of her career. She portrayed Norma, a self-assured young woman to whom Eddie Fisher proposes after realizing the pointlessness of carrying a torch for Taylor's character. In Susan's relatively minor supporting role, her makeup and hairstyle were apparently designed to make her seem rather non-competitively plain.

In 1963 Susan played a psychiatric nurse, one of the mental health care professionals portrayed in the all-star hospital melodrama The Caretakers. At the end of the year, she filmed an episode of the TV western The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, which starred 12-year-old Kurt Russell in the title role. Shown on March 15, 1964 as the show's 26th and final installment, the episode paired Susan with series regular Charles Bronson in a romantic subplot shown in flashback. Even though the series was filmed in black-and-white, the 52-minute episode was expanded into a 90-minute color film entitled Guns of Diablo and released to theaters in Europe to capitalize on Bronson's later popularity there. With an eye towards continental audiences, the additional scenes included an unusually torrid (by 1964 standards) display of passion between Susan and Bronson.

Susan's three other 1964 features were Looking for Love, The Disorderly Orderly and Your Cheatin' Heart, in which she co-starred with George Hamilton, portraying Audrey Williams, wife of country music legend Hank Williams. Hamilton also popped up in a cameo appearance in Love, a Connie Francis vehicle, with Susan in support as Connie's friend. The Frank Tashlin-directed Orderly was another entry in the then-popular Jerry Lewis theatrical series. Amidst the wild slapstick, Susan was cast in an oddly serious role as a beautiful former cheerleader from Jerry's high school days who, after having been used and exploited by men, attempted suicide and wound up in the medical institution where Jerry is the titular character. Jerry has never gotten over his lovesickness for her, and finding out that she is destitute, works overtime to pay for her stay. Unaware of this fact, she rejects him as an apparent Peeping Tom, when in his fumbling eagerness to please her, he manages to fall under her hospital bed. As a basically unsympathetic, neurotic, and ultimately pitiable character, Susan brought a note of pathos to the otherwise knockabout comedy, but to some critics, seemed jarringly out of place with the rest of the proceedings.

Twilight Zone and Star Trek appearances

In 1960, Susan appeared as the character "Teenya" in a Rod Serling-scripted episode The Twilight Zone entitled People Are Alike All Over, which starred Roddy McDowall as "Sam Conrad", an Earth astronaut who lands on Mars. In the episode, Teenya was a beautiful Martian who made Conrad feel safe and secure, but in actuality assisted in having him placed in a zoo-like cage for other Martians to visit and appreciate.

Susan was involved in a similar storyline when she appeared (later, in 1964) in the television show The Original Series. In what has been described as Susan's most iconic role (as "Vina", the lone survivor of a spaceship crash landing on the distant planet Talos IV), she played the love interest for Captain Christopher Pike in the first pilot The Cage (1964, televised in re-edited form 1966 (as the two-part episode The Menagerie). It is also Susan who is seen in the end credit images of early episodes of The Original Series as the green-skinned Orion Slave Girl.

Final theatrical films

In 1966 she appeared in the continuing role of the tragic Ann Howard on ABC's prime-time serial Peyton Place and in 1967 had her most sexually-provocative role in one of the first films to portray the then-newly-emerging counterculture, The Love-Ins. Richard Todd played a Timothy Leary-like professor who promotes himself into an LSD-advocating media star. He lures Susan's character into his hallucinatory world, impregnates and rebuffs her, causing her to suffer a breakdown. In response, her former lover, underground publisher James MacArthur, assassinates the demagogue at one of his mass rallies. Susan's most memorable scene depicts her LSD "trip" in which she visualizes herself as "Alice in Wonderland" dancing in a skimpy outfit and, as the scene ends, tearing off the remnants of her clothing. The sensational nature of the film caused it to be banned in the United Kingdom.

In 1969 Susan was the female lead in three medium-to-low-budget features, the western A Man Called Gannon with Anthony Franciosa and the science-fiction Change of Mind and The Monitors. In the Toronto-filmed Mind, Susan played the racially-torn wife of a district attorney whose brain, at the point of his death from cancer, is transplanted into the head of a just-deceased black man (Raymond St. Jacques). The newly-reborn individual finds a streak of rejectionist racism in all the people he knew, including his own mother. Determined to re-establish himself, he returns to the D.A.'s office and unmasks the racist sheriff (Leslie Nielsen) who pinned the sensational murder of his own black mistress on an innocent black victim. Despite her still-festering bias, Susan, as the wife, now comes to appreciate her husband, in his new body, as the righteous man she originally married. Despite the recently-found freedom of cinematic subject matter, the specter of implied miscegenation was still reflected in the prejudices of the period, thus consigning Mind to exploitation grindhouses. The last of the three, Monitors was an independently-made, poorly-distributed satire, filmed in Chicago by The Second City troupe, about derby-wearing, slogan-chanting aliens who pacify the world "for our own good" by negating human emotions and making us a passive nation, which spends its time watching brainwashed celebrities appear in TV ads designed to perpetuate the regime. The numerous familiar faces in the film included Sherry Jackson, Larry Storch, Avery Schreiber, Keenan Wynn, Ed Begley and Peter Boyle, with cameo appearances by Alan Arkin, Adam Arkin, Xavier Cugat, Stubby Kaye, Jackie Vernon and even Senator Everett Dirksen. These efforts represented Susan's final burst of theatrical films.

There were still a number of TV movies in her future, as well as a reunion with her old friend Jerry Lewis in his self-directed comeback vehicle, the "hardly-released" Hardly Working, with Susan playing Jerry's long-suffering sister. As in The Disorderly Orderly, the role was not comedic, but Susan was singled out in a couple of reviews as the better part of a film that sat on the shelf for almost two years, before a perfunctory release in 1980-81.

From actor to director

By the 1970s, Susan was working mainly in television where she directed several shows including a 1982 episode of M*A*S*H. During 1975-76 she was a regular cast member of the soap opera Days of Our Lives and received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Supporting Actress in the 1976 made-for-TV drama, Amelia Earhart. Playing Amelia's (Susan Clark) friend and mentor, aviatrix Neta "Snookie" Snook was a natural for Susan, a genuine flying enthusiast who piloted her own aircraft. Her penultimate theatrical feature, Ginger in the Morning (1974) showed her with a rarely-seen black hairdo (apparently not a wig, since her hair stylist received a separate credit). Monte Markham was billed first and Susan second, but she made her initial appearance 45 minutes into the 90-minute film, which gave its real star fourth billing: "and Sissy Spacek as Ginger". Susan, playing a feisty southern-accented divorcee, was well-received in her few scenes, but the talky film had the look and feel of a filmed stage play. The final movie for theatrical distribution, in which Susan Oliver appeared, turned out to be an obscure Spanish-made item entitled Nido de viudas, which was barely shown in Los Angeles in December 1977 as Widow's Nest. Despite a cast which included Oscar winners Patricia Neal and Lila Kedrova, the film quickly disappeared and has remained elusive.

From actor to aviator

After surviving a 1966 plane crash that almost took her life, she co-piloted her Piper Comanche (a different aircraft from the one shown in the photo to the right) to victory in 1970 in the 2,760 mile transcontinental race known as the "Powder Puff Derby". She was named Pilot of the Year that same year. In 1967 Susan became the first woman to fly a single-engined aircraft solo from New York City across the Atlantic Ocean as part of her attempt to fly to Moscow. Her odyssey ended in Denmark after the government of the Soviet Union denied her permission to enter its air space. Susan wrote about her aviation exploits in an autobiography published in 1983 as Odyssey: A Daring Transatlantic Journey.

Susan continued to act through the 1980s, playing strong supporting roles in her final two films, Tomorrow's Child and International Airport, both TV movies made for ABC. Child, broadcast on March 22, 1982, was the second of two consecutive TV films about the then-sensational topic of surrogate motherhood (the first one, CBS' The Gift of Life was seen on March 16). Airport, shown on May 25, 1985, was an all-star unsold pilot integrating multiple stories and characters into a plot-driven mix of suspense and danger at a giant airport. Produced by Aaron Spelling, it had most of the multi-star-multi-plot elements typical of his successful television show The Love Boat, which had already hosted Susan in its January 24, 1981 episode.

In 1985 Susan was also seen in two episodes of Murder, She Wrote, March 31 and December 1. She had a 45-second scene in the February 12, 1987 episode of Simon and Simon, in which she was almost unrecognizable in a black wig. It may have been worn to mask the effects of chemotherapy and radiation, since by 1988, in her final two appearances in front of the camera, her hair has a different look. The January 10 episode of the NBC domestic drama Our House and the November 6 episode of the syndicated horror anthology Freddy's Nightmares show her clearly ravaged by illness. In the Nightmares hour-long entry Judy Miller, Come on Down, she appears in the second half-hour as a mysterious cleaning maid who, with great chagrin, reveals herself to the young title character as seemingly her own gray-haired future self and warns her of dire events to come. In Susan's prophetic final scene, she leaves Judy's house, slowly walking and disappearing into the fog-shrouded darkness.

Death and year of birth uncertainty

A cigarette smoker, Susan Oliver died from lung cancer in Woodland Hills, California. Her age at death would appear to have been 58, although an argument was put forward for 61 (see discussion). Many printed reference sources continue to perpetuate outdated biographical details, giving her birth year as 1936 or 1937, although evidence exists that she may actually have been born as early as 1929. However, considering that her attendance at institutions of higher learning occurred between 1949 and 1953, most recent biographies have apparently accepted 1932 as the correct year.

External link

From Filmbug, this link is an example of the Susan Oliver "year of birth dispute." This article contradicts itself, listing 1932 (at the top) and 1937 (at the bottom) as her year of birth.