Barbara Rush, the supremely poised actress who rose to fame with supporting roles in 1950s films such as “Magnificent Obsession” and “The Young Lions,” died Sunday at her home in Westlake Village, Calif., in California County. The Angels. She was 97 years old.
The death, at a senior care facility, was confirmed by his daughter, Claudia Cowan.
If Ms. Rush's portrayals had anything in common, it was a gentle, feminine quality, which she used in films of many genres. She was Jane Wyman's worried stepdaughter in the 1954 romantic drama. “Magnificent obsession” and Dean Martin's loyal wartime girlfriend in “The Young Lions” (1958), set during World War II. In 1950s science fiction films like “It Comes from Outer Space” and “When Worlds Collide,” she was the small-town heroine, the scientist's daughter, the earthling most likely to succeed.
In both “The Young Philadelphians” (1959), with Paul Newman, and “The World in My Corner,” a 1956 boxing film with Audie Murphy, Rush was the prized rich girl. In “Bigger Than Life” (also 1956), with James Mason, she played a vapid but supportive wife. And in “Come Blow Your Horn” (1963), with Frank Sinatra, she played the only “good girl” in the life of a Manhattan bachelor.
But sometimes she transcended type, as the intolerant wife of an Indian agent, for example, in the western “Hombre” (1967), with Paul Newman. She also played Kit Sargent, the Hollywood screenwriter attracted and repelled by the ruthless title character in the classic 1959 television production of “What Makes Sammy Run?”
For much of her career, Ms. Rush was treated more like a pretty face than a serious actress. But she received a Golden Globe in 1954 as Most Promising Newcomer and won the Sarah Siddons Award as Chicago's Best Actress of the 1969-70 season for her stage role as an older woman courted by a younger man in Jay Presson's comedy. Allen. “Forty carats.”
His stage work, in fact, became a second career. Her best-known role was in “A Woman of Independent Means,” a one-woman epistolary saga. But when the show opened on Broadway in 1984, the nicest thing Frank Rich said in The New York Times was that Mrs. Rush was “a pretty woman who tries really hard to be ingratiating.” However, she continued to play the role to appreciative audiences across North America.
Barbara Rush was born on January 4, 1927 in Denver. Her father, Roy, was a lawyer for a mining company and died when she was a teenager. Her mother, Nora (Simonson) Rush, had been a housewife, but she began acting around that time to support the family. She later became a nurse. Barbara attended the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she played Birdie, the innocent alcoholic, in Lillian Hellman's gripping “Little Foxes.”
In 1950, when she was 23, Mrs. Rush received a scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse Theater Arts College and signed a contract with Paramount Pictures. She made her film debut that year in the family comedy “The Goldbergs.”
Television was always a part of her career, with guest appearances beginning in the 1950s. Although she never had a hit series, she starred in several short-lived ones, most memorably as a wealthy Florida wife on “Flamingo Road” (NBC, 1981-82). She was also a Washington newspaper correspondent on “Saints and Sinners” (NBC, 1962-63), an abused wife for one season (1968-69) of ABC’s “Peyton Place,” and a soap opera star for the final year (CBS , 1973-74) from “The New Dick Van Dyke Show.”
His last on-screen appearances were as a recurring character on the family values series “7th Heaven” from 1997 to 2007.
Ms. Rush was married and divorced three times. Her first husband (1950-55) was actor Jeffrey Hunter. The second (1959-70) was Warren Cowan, founder of the public relations firm Rogers & Cowan. Her last marriage (1970-75) was to Jim Gruzalski, a sculptor.
In addition to Ms. Cowan, from Ms. Rush's second marriage, she is survived by a son from her first marriage, Christopher Hunter, and four grandchildren. For about 50 years, she lived in Beverly Hills, in a house once occupied by Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper.
Ms. Rush continued to perform into her 90s and professed an overwhelming love for her work. In 1997, she said The Chronicle of San Francisco“I'm one of those types of people who takes action the moment you open the refrigerator door and the light comes on.”
Alex Traub contributed with reports.
