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Pilar Del Rey, the character actress perhaps best remembered for her turn in Giant as the Mexican woman who has a seriously ill newborn who grows up to be the doomed World War II soldier played by Sal Mineo, has died. She was 95.

Del Rey died Sunday in Los Angeles of natural causes, her family announced.

Over four decades, Del Rey appeared in such other films as The Ring (1952), starring Rita Moreno; And Now Miguel (1953), starring Michael Ansara and Pat Cardi; The Siege at Red River (1954), starring Van Johnson and Joanne Dru; and Black Horse Canyon (1954), starring Mari Blanchard and Race Gentry.

In George Stevens’ epic Giant (1956), Del Rey portrays Mrs. Obregón, whose baby, Angel, is cared for thanks to Elizabeth Taylor’s compassionate Leslie Benedict. Leslie’s husband, Bick (Rock Hudson), doesn’t think the family doctor should tend to “those people.” (Mrs. Obregón’s husband, played by Victor Millan,...

Pilar Del Rey, a veteran character actor who appeared with James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor in Giant and guested on dozens of classic TV series, died February 23 of natural causes in Los Angeles. She was 95. A family spokesperson confirmed the news to Deadline.

In George Stevens’ 1956 epic Giant, Del Rey played the sickly Mrs. Obregon, who is cared for along with her baby by Taylor’s Leslie Benedict as an impatient Jett Rink (Dean) tries to rush her. Leslie’s learning of the local Mexican ranch workers’ living conditions and the racist attitudes toward them is a key early plot point in the film, which drew nine Oscar noms including Best Picture. Stevens won for Best Director.

Born on May 26, 1929, in Fort Worth, Texas, Del Rey made her film debut in the late 1940s. A Spanish-American, she portrayed characters from various ethnic backgrounds with depth and authenticity.

She joined the...

Gunsmoke the TV series was a staple of television for 20 years. The iconic Western starring James Arness, Amanda Blake, and Milburn Stone ran on the CBS network from 1955 to 1975, having itself been transitioned from a radio show that would run concurrently with the television series until 1961. But in 1955, the idea of a hard-driving Western action that would appeal to adults was not without detractors. The genre had been seen mostly as a vehicle for children, via such programs as Hopalong Cassidy and The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin.

Yet Gunsmoke transcended what could be considered, for the time, unacceptable concepts on primetime television. Tackling serious subjects such as race, religion, and violence, the sprawling narrative enabled the characters a chance to illustrate themes that laid the groundwork for future Western-driven development in television, movies, and books. From this diverse and long history, there are several highlights to be drawn in spotlighting the show's epic appeal.

Not all Westerns are created equal, and in the case of Death Valley Days, that's most certainly true. The first true Western anthology series, Death Valley Days (not to be confused with the American Horror Story season) continued to celebrate Old West ideals and tradition throughout its impressive 18 seasons in syndication, and it never gave up the fight. Many credit this anthology series with launching the genre into television in the first place, and while there were certainly other Western TV shows before 1952 (such as Hopalong Cassidy), there weren't many and there certainly weren't any other Western anthologies out there. This program was revolutionary in more ways than one, and after nearly 50 years off the air, it's time someone finally stands up and celebrates this anthology series. Here's to you, Death Valley Days!

Noreen Nash, a starlet of the 1940s and ’50s who appeared in such notable films as The Southerner, Giant and The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold, has died. She was 99.

Nash died Tuesday of natural causes at her home in Beverly Hills, her oldest son, Lee Siegel Jr., told The Hollywood Reporter.

Nash worked on about two dozen features during her two-decade career, including several “B” pictures like Phantom From Space (1953), where she portrayed an abducted scientist in a movie shot at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.

The blue-eyed, dark-haired Nash also starred as the wife of an owner of a Palm Springs tennis club on the CBS summer replacement series The Charles Farrell Show — it stood in for I Love Lucy in 1956 — and appeared on episodes of Hopalong Cassidy, The Abbott and Costello Show, My Little Margie, Dragnet and 77 Sunset Strip.

Nash played the...

The Western is back, again. After it died. Prior to which it came back again.

As film historian and co-host of the How the West was Cast podcast, Andrew Patrick Nelson argues, journalists and historians love to write about the Western being dead just as much as they enjoy writing about its resurgence. However, this ebb and flow is part of a predictable life cycle that has kept the genre alive for over a century.

The origins of the frontier narrative on our public consciousness dates to 1845, when John L. O’Sullivan coined the phrase “manifest destiny” in an essay about America’s perceived right to expansion. As the Wild West came to an end and the frontier became settled, Frederick Jackson Turner introduced his “frontier thesis” in 1893. Turner hit on the binary conflicts that make the Western as a mythological place so engaging. The frontier, as he defined it,...

Claudia Barrett, an actress whose busy television career of the 1950s was destined to be outdone in the public’s memory by her film performance alongside a gorilla-suited alien in the camp sci-fi trash classic Robot Monster, died April 30 of natural causes at her home in Palm Desert. She was 91.

Her death was announced by her family.

“Although she loved acting, by the mid 60s she realized her career wasn’t advancing, so she switched to ancillary jobs in film distribution, publicity, and PR, but was not satisfied,” according to her family-written obituary. “However, in 1981 she found her dream job at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). She worked in the division that produced the awards for scientific and technical advances, got to go to the Academy Awards Show every year, and was able to give tickets to family members in the early years.”

In an image...

Among the true legends of Hollywood’s stunt profession, Mickey Gilbert has always performed a notch above the rest. The stunt double for Robert Redford from 1969’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” through 2018’s “The Old Man & the Gun,” Gilbert has more than 100 film and TV credits as a stunt coordinator and a second-unit director — all of which sprang from Western stunt work dating back more than half a century.

Born April 17, 1936, in Hollywood to Genevieve and Frank Gilbert, he learned to rope and ride amid the alfalfa fields of Van Nuys. Mentored by his father and an old cowboy named Buff Brady from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, Gilbert quickly mastered all things equestrian. “Training in gymnastics with my dad when I was a kid gave me a vertical leap from the saddle that made the horse-to-horse transfer a sure thing,” he says.

Excelling at local...

Glenn Close and Sam Elliott sat down for a conversation for Variety’s Actors on Actors. For more, click here.

Sam Elliott may be a cinematic icon thanks to his craggy voice and résumé of cowboy roles, but he has yet to be recognized with an Oscar nomination. That will probably change with “A Star Is Born,” which has earned Elliott some of the best reviews of his career for his portrayal of Bobby, the brother and manager of Bradley Cooper’s alcoholic superstar Jackson Maine.

Glenn Close, another Hollywood veteran, is no stranger to the awards circuit. Over her distinguished career, she’s earned six Oscar nominations. She’s likely to pick up her seventh nod for “The Wife,” a drama about a woman who is the true literary force behind her Nobel Prize-winning husband. Close and Elliott discussed their respective films, their love of the Western and...

Lois Laurel Hawes, the only daughter of famed comedian Stan Laurel, has died. She was 89.

Hawes died Friday after a long illness at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, Calif., family spokesman Tyler St. Mark announced.

She was married to actor Rand Brooks — who played Scarlett O'Hara's first husband, Charles, in Gone with the Wind and sidekick Lucky Jenkins in a series of Hopalong Cassidy films — and then to writer-actor Tony Hawes.

Her mother was the first of Laurel's four wives, silent-movie actress Lois Neilson. Her brother, also named Stanley, died nine days after his...

Ten years ago I attended the Lone Pine Film Festival for the first time. It was the 17th annual celebration in 2006 of a festival dedicated to the heritage of movies (mostly westerns, but plenty of other genres as well) shot in or near the town of Lone Pine, California, located on the outer edges of the Mojave Desert and nestled up against the Eastern Sierra Mountains in the shadow of the magnificent Mt. Whitney. The multitude of films that could and have been celebrated there were most often shot at least partially in the Alabama Hills just outside of town, a spectacular array of geological beauty that springs out of the landscape like some sort of extra-planetary exhibit, a visitation of natural and very unusual formations that have lent themselves to the imaginations of filmmakers here ever since near the dawn of the Hollywood filmmaking industry.

In writing about the...

First-time director Richard Wilson's B&W '50s western is different. Robert Mitchum is on-task as a town tamer with believable problems, both in exterminating gunslingers Claude Akins and Leo Gordon, and with making peace with his estranged wife, Jan Sterling. That's not to mention Mitchum's attraction for pacifist Karen Sharpe, and ditzy showgirl Barbara Lawrence. And don't forget an incredibly young Angie Dickinson. Man with the Gun Blu-ray Kl Studio Classics 1955 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 83 min. / Deadly Peacemaker / Street Date September 25, 2015 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95 Starring Robert Mitchum, Jan Sterling, Karen Sharpe, Henry Hull, Emile Meyer, John Lupton, Barbara Lawrence, Ted de Corsia, Leo Gordon, James Westerfield, Jay Adler, Claude Akins, Joe Barry, Norma Calderón, Angie Dickinson, Mara McAfee, Maidie Norman, Robert Osterloh, Maudie Prickett, Stafford Repp. Cinematography Lee Garmes Film Editor Gene Milford Original Music Alex North Written by N.B. Stone Jr., Richard Wilson Produced by Samuel Goldwyn Jr....

I recently stumbled across my earliest photograph: a black & white snapshot I took with my Brownie box camera at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1960. I was 9 years old, going on 10, and I thought it turned out pretty well. (Actually, I still think so. It’s sharp and clear, which is more than I can say for some of the shots I get with my modern, high-tech camera.) My grandmother lived on West 71st Street in Manhattan, so I slept in her apartment the night before, so we could get up in time to walk to Central Park West and watch the parade go by. Here’s where it gets tricky: in the haze of my memory, I seem to recall shaking hands with Hopalong Cassidy (William Boyd, that...

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What do Jerry Lewis, Bugs Bunny, and Hopalong Cassidy have in common? They all recorded special material for an innovative kid-oriented Capitol Records series in the 1940s and ‘50s. This amazing output, perfectly timed for the baby boom of the post-World War II era, has now been exhaustively documented by Jack Mirtle in his self-published book The Capitol Records Childrens' Series: 1944 to 1956: The Complete Discography. The crossover from the movie world is notable, as Capitol featured such talents as Tex Ritter, Margaret O’Brien, William Boyd (as Hopalong Cassidy), Jerry Lewis, Claude Rains (reading Bible stories), and Smiley Burnette, along with the voice artists...

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Established 1974! Our news column requested better digital images two days ago, but they didn’t show up. They must be in the mail.

Updates

This week the U.S. Postal Service issued a set of new first-class stamps honoring pioneering TV shows of the 1950s and early ’60s. They’re led by our people, namely Rod Serling (repping The Twilight Zone), Alfred Hitchcock (Alfred Hitchcock Presents) and Clayton Moore & Trigger (The Lone Ranger). Other classics saluted include I Love Lucy, Dragnet, The Honeymooners, Howdy Doody, Perry Mason, Lassie, You Bet Your Life, The Red Skelton Show, Hopalong Cassidy and Kukla, Fran & Ollie. Postal rules, by the way, ensure that no Living person appear on a stamp so it’s up to deceased people, two late horses, a dead dog and three puppets to carry the classic TV imagery.

Looks like Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus, the fantasy...

When Disney announced a couple of months back that it was bringing back The Lone Ranger, with Jerry Bruckheimer to produce and Johnny Depp to star as Tonto, we guessed it was only a matter of time before other iconic heroes of the Wild West got their shot at the silver screen.And, sure enough, today comes news that Mark Canton – producer of 300 – is behind a move to give Hopalong Cassidy his own movie.Canton has teamed with Pterodactyl Prods. for the movie, which will reboot a character that featured in no fewer than 66 movies (and you thought James Bond was pushing it with 22) that starred William Boyd, and which ran from the Thirties through to the Fifties.Hoppy, a creation of Clarence E. Mulford, actually started life as a bit of a rogue, before coming over all clean-cut for the transition to movies. A white-haired do-gooder who bucked trends by wearing a black hat,...