Angie Dickinson

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Angie Dickinson

at the Governor's Ball party after the 1989 Academy Awards
Born Angeline Brown
September 30, 1931 (1931-09-30) (age 77)
Kulm, North Dakota
Years active 1954 - present
Spouse(s) Gene Dickinson, 1952 - 1960
Burt Bacharach, 1965 - 1980

Angie Dickinson (born September 30, 1931) is a Golden Globe-winning American television and film actress, perhaps best known for her role as Sergeant Leann "Pepper" Anderson in the successful 1970s crime drama Police Woman.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Dickinson, the second of four daughters, was born Angeline Brown (but called "Angie" by family and friends) in Kulm, North Dakota, the daughter of Frederica and Leo H. Brown. Her father was a small-town newspaper publisher and editor.[1] In 1942, her family moved to Burbank, California, and she graduated from Bellamarine Jefferson High School in 1947 at just 15 years of age. The previous year, she had won the Sixth Annual Bill of Rights essay contest. She studied at Glendale Community College and in 1954 graduated from Immaculate Heart College with a degree in business. Taking a cue from her publisher father, she had intended to be a writer. While a student from 1950-52, she worked as a secretary at Lockheed Air Terminal in Burbank (now Bob Hope Airport) and in a parts factory.

[edit] Early career

In 1953, she placed second in a beauty pageant. Soon after her first marriage to Gene Dickinson she decided to pursue a career in acting. She studied the craft and a few years later was approached by NBC to guest-star on a number of variety shows, including The Colgate Comedy Hour. She soon met Frank Sinatra who became a lifelong friend. She would later play Sinatra's wife in the film Ocean's Eleven.

On New Year's Eve 1954, Dickinson made her acting debut in an episode of Death Valley Days. This led to other roles in such productions as Buffalo Bill Jr, eight episodes of Matinee Theatre, City Detective, Gray Ghost, General Electric Theater, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Broken Arrow, Northwest Passage, Gunsmoke, Tombstone Territory, Cheyenne, Meet McGraw, The Restless Gun, Perry Mason, Mike Hammer, Wagon Train, Men Into Space, and a memorable turn as the duplicitous murder conspirator in a 1964 episode of the classic The Fugitive series with David Janssen and fellow guest star Robert Duvall. In 1965, she had a recurring role as Carol Tredman on Dr. Kildare.

[edit] Leading lady

 This section contains weasel words, vague phrasing that often accompanies biased or unverifiable information. Such statements should be clarified or removed. (March 2009)

Though Dickinson enjoyed a moderately successful acting career for nearly two decades, and worked with many major directors and top leading men of the 1950s and '60s, she did not rise above the status of an attractive, reliable working actress - real stardom would come later.

Her film career began with small roles in Lucky Me' (1954) with Doris Day, The Return of Jack Slade (1955), Man with the Gun (1955), and Hidden Guns (1956). She had her first starring role in Gun the Man Down (1956) with James Arness, and the Sam Fuller cult film China Gate (1957) which depicted an early view of the internal conflicts in Vietnam.

Rejecting the Marilyn Monroe/Jayne Mansfield style of platinum blonde sex-symbolism because she felt it would narrow her acting options, Dickinson initially allowed studios to lighten her naturally-brunette hair to only honey-blonde.

Casting directors began noticing her enigmatic charisma and her ironic, albeit seductive, delivery - at once femininely fluttery, yet undeniably edgy. She was armed with a fine physique, great legs, deepset brown eyes which could read as either warmly receptive or aloofly dismissive, and a striking, classical face which photographed as oval from the front but angular in profile.

Her atypical screen presence initially caused critics to praise her - if not always the films in which she played, many of those same critics lamenting the decline of the old studio system because newcomers like Dickinson were no longer groomed, valued, or protected in the fashion once commonplace in the 1930s and '40s. She appeared mainly in B-movies early on, westerns, including Shoot-Out at Medicine Bend (1957) co-starring with James Garner.

Dickinson with John Wayne in Rio Bravo

It was another western that finally propelled her into Hollywood's A-list: Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo (1959), in which she played a flirtatious gambler named Feathers who is almost locked up by the town sheriff played by her childhood idol John Wayne. The film co-starred Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson and Walter Brennan. When Hawks sold his personal contract with her to a major studio without her knowledge, she was understandably upset and her hopes that the legendary director would mould her into the next Lauren Bacall seemed dashed.[citation needed]

In the early 1960s, Dickinson starred in numerous movies, making her one of the more prominent leading ladies of the decade, co-starring in The Bramble Bush with Richard Burton and Ocean's Eleven with Frank Sinatra, both released in 1960. These were followed by the political potboiler A Fever in the Blood (1961); a Belgian Congo-based melodrama The Sins of Rachel Cade (1962), in which she played a missionary nurse tempted by lust; and the European travelogue Rome Adventure (also known as Lovers Must Learn) in 1962, where Dickinson gets to deliver relatively wicked seductress dialogue; and Jean Negulesco's Jessica (1962) with Maurice Chevalier, in which she plays a young midwife who is resented by the married women of the town. Angie would also share the screen with friend Gregory Peck in the comedy-drama Captain Newman, M.D.

In The Killers, a film originally intended to be the very first made-for-TV movie but released to theatres due to its violent content, Dickinson, reaching the apex of her skills as a great femme fatale, is slapped by a villainous boyfriend, played by future U.S. President Ronald Reagan in his last movie role.

Dickinson co-starred in the comedy The Art of Love (1965), in which she plays the love interest of both James Garner and Dick Van Dyke. She appeared in the Arthur Penn/Sam Spiegel production, The Chase (1966), flooded with present-and-future stars like Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, Miriam Hopkins and others; the film languished in mediocrity as the result of behind-the-scenes artistic battles, but is considered a curio for its cast.

One of Dickinson's best movie of this era was arguably John Boorman's cult classic Point Blank (1967) with Lee Marvin as a convict escaped from Alcatraz (it was the first movie ever filmed at the infamous prison) out for revenge and the money he believes is due him. Epitomizing the stark urban mood of the period, the film did not acquire an audience or much critical appreciation until years later.

In 1969, she starred in another Western, Young Billy Young with Robert Mitchum and Jack Kelly, and in Sam Whiskey where she gave a young Burt Reynolds his first on-screen kiss. In 1971, she played a lascivious high school teacher in the dark comedy Pretty Maids All in a Row with Rock Hudson, and a scary doctor in the sci-fi flick The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler. One of her best-known movie roles is the tawdry widow Wilma McClatchie in the Great Depression romp Big Bad Mama (1974) with William Shatner and Tom Skerritt.

[edit] Police Woman

Dickinson returned to the small screen in March 1974 to play a character on an episode of the critically-acclaimed hit anthology series Police Story. That one guest appearance proved to be so popular that NBC decided to turn it into a weekly detective series to be called Police Woman, which would become the first "successful" drama series to feature a woman in the title role. In the series, Dickinson played Sgt. Leann "Pepper" Anderson, an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department's Criminal Conspiracy Unit. The show became a significant hit, even reaching Number One in many countries in which it aired.

Co-starring on the show was Earl Holliman as Sergeant Bill Crowley, Andersen's commanding officer; and Charles Dierkop as Investigators Pete Royster; and Ed Bernard as Investigator Joe Styles.

The series ran for four seasons (1974-1978). The same year the show ended, Dickinson reprised her Pepper Andersen role on the television special Ringo, co-starring with Ringo Starr and John Ritter. She also parodied the part in the 1975 and 1979 Bob Hope Christmas Specials for NBC. She would do the same years later on the 1987 Christmas episode of NBC's Saturday Night Live.)

The success of Dickinson's Police Woman resulted in a rash of female-starring series like Charlie's Angels, The Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman, and Cagney and Lacey during the 1970s and 1980s. In 1987, the Los Angeles Police Department awarded Dickinson an honorary Doctorate, which led her to quip, "Now you can call me 'Doctor Pepper.'"

[edit] The 1980s

After appearing in the TV mini-series Pearl (1978), Dickinson returned to the big screen in Brian De Palma's thriller Dressed to Kill (1980). The role earned her a 1981 Saturn Award for Best Actress. The film featured Dickinson in a 35-minute role early in the film which ends with her character's brutal murder in an elevator. Critics hailed her performance and today the film is viewed as a serious entry in the macabre genre, with her silent stalking through the maze of a New York City museum one of the film's stylistic highlights.[citation needed]

She had a less substantial role in Death Hunt (1981) with Charles Bronson, as well as Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen. Earlier that year, she had been the first choice to play 'Krystle Carrington' on the TV series Dynasty, but turned down the role (which went to Linda Evans).[citation needed] After nixing her own Johnny Carson-produced prospective sitcom, The Angie Dickinson Show, in 1980 after only two episodes had been shot because she didn't feel she was funny enough, the private eye series Cassie & Co. became the resultant, unsuccessful attempt at a TV comeback. She then starred in several TV movies such as, One Shoe Makes it Murder (1982), Jealousy (1984), A Touch of Scandal (1984), and Stillwatch (1987). She also appeared in the high-rated mini-series Hollywood Wives (1985), which was based on the novel by Jackie Collins.

On the big screen, she reprised her role as Wilma in Big Bad Mama II (1987), and completed the TV movie Kojak: Fatal Flaw, in which she was reunited with Telly Savalas. She co-starred with Willie Nelson and numerous old buddies in the 1988 TV western Once Upon a Texas Train.

Dickinson also hosted the December 12, 1987 Saturday Night Live Christmas installment, and satirized her Police Woman image.

[edit] 1990s and later

In 1993, Dickinson appeared in the cyber-shocker TV-miniseries Wild Palms, produced by Oliver Stone, in which she played the sadistic, militant sister of Senator Tony Kruetzer, played by Robert Loggia. Dana Delany, Jim Belushi, Kim Catrall, and Nick Mancuso, also starred in the ABC mini-series. The same year, she starred as a ruthless Montana spa owner in Gus Van Sant's bizarre Even Cowgirls Get the Blues; Uma Thurman and a cast of stellar cameos could not save the picture, which has been called the Single Worst Movie of the 1990s.[citation needed] In 1995, she played Burt Reynolds's wife in the thriller The Maddening, appeared in the remake of Sabrina with Harrison Ford, and played the mother of Rick Aiello and Robert Cicchini in the comedy National Lampoon's The Don's Analyst. In 1997, she seduced old flame Artie (Rip Torn) in an episode of HBO's "The Larry Sanders Show" called "Artie and Angie and Hank and Hercules."

During the first decade of the new millennium, Dickinson played an alcoholic homeless mother to Helen Hunt in Pay it Forward (2000) with Kevin Spacey; grandmother to Gwyneth Paltrow in Duets (2000); and as Arliss Howard's mother in the critically well-received though little-seen Big Bad Love (2001) with Debra Winger.

Having appeared in the original Ocean's Eleven (1960) with good friends Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, she four decades later made a brief cameo in the 2001 version with George Clooney. Dickinson is often referred to as an honorary member of the Rat Pack.

An avid poker player, Dickinson during the summer of 2004 participated in the second season of Bravo's Celebrity Poker Showdown. After announcing her name, host Dave Foley said "Sometimes, when we say Celebrity, we actually mean it."[citation needed]

Dickinson is a recipient of the state of North Dakota's Roughrider Award.

In 1999, Playboy Magazine ranked Dickinson #42 on their list of the '100 Sexiest Stars of the Century'. And in 2002, TV Guide ranked her #3 on their list of the '50 Sexiest TV Stars of All Time', behind Diana Rigg and George Clooney (who'd tied for #1).

[edit] Personal life

Angie was married to Gene Dickinson, a former football player, from 1952 to 1960.

She was romantically linked to Frank Sinatra, whom Dickinson called "the most important man in my life" (because of the power he held when they first met in the mid-1950s) and with whom she shared "a very comfortable relationship" on and off for ten years.[citation needed] They remained friends until his death in 1998. She was also linked to actor David Janssen, and allegedly to President John F. Kennedy, although she has chosen not to address those rumors.[citation needed]

She was married to musician/composer Burt Bacharach between 1965 and 1980.[2] Dickinson temporarily put her career on hold, although she still appeared in the occasional picture such as the western The Last Challenge (1967) with Glenn Ford, and the comedy, Some Kind of Nut (1969).

Their daughter, Lea Nikki, known as Nikki, was born three months prematurely in 1966 and was eventually diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. Her problems caused Dickinson to decline many roles as Dickinson focused on caring for her daughter. Nikki spent several years at the Wilson Center, a psychiatric residential treatment facility for adolescents located in Faribault, Minnesota. Although Nikki had earned a degree in geology, poor eyesight resulting from her premature birth made it impossible for her to pursue a career in that field. Unable to cope with the effects of Asperger's, Nikki ultimately committed suicide in her Los Angeles condo in January 2007.[3]

Angie Dickinson is referenced in a song, "Putting The Damage On", by American singer-songwriter Tori Amos.

[edit] Award nominations

[edit] Emmy Awards

Nominations in the category of Outstanding Lead Actress - Drama Series :

  • 1975 - Police Woman
  • 1976 - Police Woman
  • 1977 - Police Woman

[edit] Golden Globe Awards

Golden Globe Award wins Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Drama Series :

  • 1975 - Police Woman

Nominations in the category of Best TV Actress - Drama :

  • 1976 - Police Woman
  • 1977 - Police Woman
  • 1978 - Police Woman

[edit] Filmography

Features:

Short Subjects:

  • Down Liberty Road (1956)
  • The Rock (1967)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Angie Dickinson Biography (1931-)
  2. ^ Angie Dickinson - Overview - MSN Movies
  3. ^ FOXNews.com - Burt Bacharach, Angie Dickinson's Daughter Commits Suicide - Celebrity Gossip | Entertainment News | Arts And Entertainment

[edit] External links

Search Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Angie Dickinson


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