Barbara Rush has away. She was a well-liked main actress in the 1950s and 1960s who had successful TV careers after costarring with Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, and other well-known actors in films. She was ninety-seven.
Fox News reporter Claudia Cowan, Rush’s daughter, revealed her mother’s death on Instagram, stating that Rush passed away on Easter Sunday. More information was not readily accessible.
Calling herself her mother’s “greatest admirer,” Cowan lauded her mother as “among the last of “Old Hollywood Royalty.”
After appearing in a play at the Pasadena Playhouse, Rush was signed to a contract with Paramount Studios in 1950. The same year, she made her film debut in “The Goldbergs,” which was based on the same-titled radio and television series.
But not long after, she would go from Paramount to work for Universal International and then 20th Century Fox.
In 1954, she said, “Paramount wasn’t geared for developing new talent.” “They tried to borrow Elizabeth Taylor every time a good role came along.”
Rush went on to make several cinematic appearances. She starred with Rock Hudson in “Captain Lightfoot,” Audie Murphy in “World in My Corner,” Richard Carlson in the 3-D science-fiction classic “It Came From Outer Space,” and Douglas Sirk in the critically acclaimed remake of “Magnificent Obsession.” For the latter role, she was awarded a Golden Globe for most promising newcomer.
The Young Lions, starring Marlon Brando, Dean Martin, and Montgomery Clift, and “The Young Philadelphians,” starring Newman, were among the other credits in the Nicholas Ray classic “Bigger Than Life.” She collaborated with Sinatra on two movies: “Come Blow Your Horn” and “Robin and the Seven Hoods,” a Rat Pack parody that also starred Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin.
Years into her TV career, Rush remembered finally completing the change as she got closer to middle age.
“When you went from being an ingenue to an old lady, there used to be this terrible Sahara Desert,” she said in 1962. “You either pretended to be 20 years old or you didn’t work.”
Rather, Rush landed parts in TV shows including “7th Heaven,” “All My Children,” “Peyton Place,” and “The New Dick Van Dyke Show.”
In a 1997 interview, she said, “I’m one of those kinds of people who will perform the minute you open the refrigerator door and the light goes on.”
The road company adaptation of the comedy “Forty Carats,” which had been a smash in New York, was her first play. Her comic acting was aided by filmmaker Abe Burrows.
“At first, I had a really hard time learning timing, especially with waiting for a laugh,” she said in 1970. But she did find out, and the play ran for a full year in Chicago and many more months on the road.
She went on to participate in tours that included “Steel Magnolias,” “Father’s Day,” “Same Time, Next Year,” and her own solo show, “A Woman of Independent Means.”
Rush was born in Denver and moved about during her first ten years of life while her father, a lawyer for a mining firm, was transferred from place to town. After the family moved to Santa Barbara, California, young Barbara became enamored with acting after she performed as a fabled dryad in a school play.
Rush was wed and divorced three times: to Hollywood PR executive Warren Cowan, to screenwriter Jeffrey Hunter, and to artist James Gruzalski.
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