“SEVEN NEW PROSPECTS COASTBOUND FOR TESTS”
The seven screen “discoveries from the Warner Bros. talent bureau in the East” were models Patricia Clark, June Fleming and Frances Chisholm; Evelyn McRae, “Miss Canada of 1943”; and George Lambert, Coulter Iwin and Miss Sammie Hill, “from the radio and theatrical fields.”
Of the seven, June Fleming, Frances Chisholm, Evelyn McRae, George Lambert and Sammie Hill made little or no impact on screen, at least in 1944, but Patricia Clark and Coulter Irwin stayed around long enough to actively fail becoming screen commodities. Miss Clark came closest when cast as the much hyped if little seen Mrs. Mona Mars in the Bogie-Bacall noir The Big Sleep (released 1946), but when the powers-at-be demanded new and better footage of the photogenic Miss Bacall, Patricia Clark was summarily replaced by another WB starlet, Peggy Knudsen. As compensation she earned a minor, but featured, role in the Spencer Tracy-Lana Turner failure Cass Timberlane (1947). And that, as they say, was that.
Coulter Irwin, meanwhile, earned a breakthrough of sorts at Columbia Pictures playing the ingenue male lead in a Crime Doctor movie, Crime Doctor's Warning (1945), and that, too, was that. Except for unbilled bit parts in scores of other films and television shows. By the late 1950s, he had become an announcer on a local Long Beach, CA, radio station, famously surviving a 1959 heart attack on the air. He also proved a busy letters-to-the-editor writer, railing against the ever-present threat of communism. Coulter Irwin died on Christmas Eve 1998 in Las Vegas, NV. He was 80 years old.
Thanks for this information on Coulter Irwin. I just saw him in "Night Editor" (1946), and enjoyed his performance enough to want to learn a little more about him.
ReplyDeleteI also just saw him in "Night Editor" and had a similar reaction.
DeleteJust now watching him on GETTV in "Crime Doctor's Warning". He seemed to have talent and good looks. Too bad his acting career wasn't successful.
ReplyDeleteI recently saw an excellent episode of the Highway Patrol called the ‘Trailer Story’ on You Tube and I was interested in finding out who played the bad guy with a scar on his face who had a major part in that episode. I naturally assumed that the first person listed on the credits was him, an actor named Jay Douglas, and although he was about the same age and looked quite a lot like him it turned out that he only had a small role as a police officer in that episode as well as a few HWP episodes. So I went all the way down the list until practically the end and only then did I find out who it was that played the villain on that story. But I’m glad I did - and the scar was definitely fake!
ReplyDelete