End Credits #28: Cinema's 2015 Lost Treasures Lizabeth Scott
These are some of Cinema's sad departures of 2015 taken from my personal notes soon after the events took place:
She (like the picture above) conveyed a very special combination of charm, innocence and youthful rebellion. Any true lover of film will forever mark the day we lost actress Lizabeth Scott. She was the reigning Queen of film noir and should have been continuously honoured with accolades and awards from the day she retired to the day she died with the most famous of celebrity interviewers clamouring for her time. After all she STARRED alongside some of the biggest names in Hollywood in a bevy of great films, not to mention always giving star worthy, impeccable performances. Consider just some of her inestimable contributions to the craft in an unmatchable resume. A standout supporting turn in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers with Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin and Kirk Douglas. Starring with Humphrey Bogart in Dead Reckoning. Starring in Desert Fury with John Hodiak and Burt Lancaster, and again with both Lancaster and Douglas in I Walk Alone. Starring with Dick Powell in Pitfall, with Charlton Heston in Dark City and again in Bad For Each Other. Starring in The Racket with Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan, with Alan Ladd in Quantrill's Raiders aka Red Mountain, with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in Scared Stiff, with Elvis Presley in Loving You, and her last film performance in 1972, Pulp with Michael Caine.
No, I didn't know her but felt I did. Through interviews given, personal encounters described by fans, one including my own (See: Close Encounters of the Treasured Kind) and the many stellar performances she provided on screen, her's was the brightest living star, a true Hollywood icon, full of warmth, grace, style and most of all class.
Now she's gone and I'm devastated. Perhaps I'm not supposed to be; after all she lived to be 92, and for many decades quite comfortably in the Hollywood Hills. But it's all of those great characters, so full of that one and only Lizabeth Scott infused passion that seemed so real which makes her loss so particularly hard to take. It's my own fault too after being a movie junkie for so long, I subconsciously think of these vivid characters as real people, so when the person who magically became those characters passes, so do they. Crazy huh? Knowing this is not helping me get over her lack of recognition amongst her peers when alive and more painfully, this news of her loss. Lizabeth Scott (September 29, 1922 - January 31, 2015) R.I.P.