Barbara Rush, actress best known for Peyton Place and the sci-fi classic It Came from Outer Space – obituary
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Barbara Rush, who has died aged 97, was a poised, versatile actress who enjoyed a long Hollywood career, winning a Golden Globe in 1953 for New Star of the Year before becoming soap royalty via ABC’s influential Peyton Place (1964-69).
After working with several starrier male contemporaries – Brando, Newman, Clift, Sinatra – she outlived them all, tallying her final screen credit at 90. As she joked in 1997: “I’m one of those kinds of people who will perform the minute you open the refrigerator and the light goes on.”
On Peyton Place – inspired by the 1956 Grace Metalious novel, its 1957 film adaptation and the initial success of Coronation Street – Rush earned $1,000 per episode playing Marsha Russell, a hardy single mother who spent the show’s fifth and final season navigating divorce from her husband Fred (Joe Maross), her growing attraction to the series regular Dr Michael (Ed Nelson) and the vacillations of her teenage daughter Carolyn (Elizabeth Walker).
The season built towards a cliffhanger – the jailed Michael awaiting trial for Fred’s murder – which went unresolved; with many original characters absent, ratings in freefall and critics decrying the show as an Eisenhower-era relic, Peyton Place was cancelled in June 1969. Rush later acknowledged how far the show had drifted out of touch with the times: “We did scream and carry on when we saw some of the lines.”
Though shortlived, the role established Rush as a fashion icon, to the point her name could be dropped as knowing shorthand for a casually worn Beverly Hills glamour: in Shampoo (1975), Warren Beatty’s gadabout hairdresser tries to impress his bank manager with a mumbled “I do Barbara Rush.” In reality, her streaky, much-coveted Peyton Place hairstyle was a do-it-yourself job, requiring no more outside help than a bottle of Clairol, as the actress insisted to one reporter in 1971: “I can do my hair blindfolded… It’s like braille.”
Barbara Rush was born in Denver, Colorado, on January 4 1927, the middle of three children of a mining company lawyer, Roy Rush, and his wife Marguerite. The family lived in Santa Barbara, California, where Barbara volunteered alongside her father as an usher at the Lobero Theatre; she studied drama at the University of California and the Pasadena Playhouse before signing to Paramount in 1950.
She made her debut in the showbiz drama The Goldbergs (1950), before breaking through in science fiction, seductively leading humanity towards a new dawn in When Worlds Collide (1951), then bursting out of the screen, varyingly demure and shrieking, in It Came from Outer Space (1953), a 3D-appended Ray Bradbury adaptation.
Barbara Rush worked consistently through the 1950s and 1960s, often alongside top-dollar stars. She was the stepdaughter who watches Jane Wyman fall for Rock Hudson in Magnificent Obsession (1954), and was very good as the wife to a pill-popping James Mason in Bigger Than Life (1956). Cast as soldier boy Dean Martin’s love interest in The Young Lions (1958), she got a front-row seat as Method men Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift duelled off-camera.
After being jilted by Kirk Douglas in Strangers When We Meet (1960), she played Marian to the Rat Pack in Robin and the Seven Hoods (1964), singling Frank Sinatra out for praise (“a wonderful, wonderful man”). Yet comparable stardom continually eluded her, as she noted with some regret: “I can safely say that every movie role I was ever offered that had any real quality went to someone else.”
Following Peyton Place, Barbara Rush returned to the theatre – winning the Sarah Siddons award in 1970 for her performance in Jay Presson Allen’s Forty Carats – and worked mostly in television thereafter. In a 1969 episode of Batman, she gave Adam West’s Caped Crusader the runaround as Nora Clavicle, a thinly veiled caricature of Gloria Steinem plotting to blow up Gotham City with TNT-loaded mice.
There were more conventional parts on Ironside (1971-72), The Streets of San Francisco (1973), Police Story (1974) and – by way of light relief – The Love Boat (1979) and Knight Rider (1983). Her one notable movie of the period – the Village People vehicle Can’t Stop the Music (1980) – proved a box-office flop.
She returned to soap, playing the overlooked wife of a paper mill owner in Flamingo Road (1980-82), the grape-growing Nola Orsini in All My Children (1992-94) and granny Ruth in 7th Heaven (1997-2007). She was one of five actors to appear in both the original 1960s run of The Outer Limits (1963-65) and its 1990s reboot (1995-2002). In later life, she occasionally appeared with the Orange County Theatre Guild; her final screen credit was the short Bleeding Hearts (2017).
Her passion project, though, was A Woman of Independent Means, a one-woman show – premiered on Broadway in 1984, and toured thereafter – based on Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey’s novel about a free-thinking Texan matriarch, Bess Steed Garner: “I just admire someone who goes out and learns calculus at 50, or learns, like Grandma Moses, to paint at 70, or who goes to Greece and learns about archaeology. I would like to be that kind of person.”
Rush married three times: first, in 1950, to Jeffrey Hunter, the actor best known for playing Jesus in King of Kings (1961), with whom she had a son; then in 1959 to the publicist, Warren Cowan, with whom she had a daughter, the Fox News journalist Claudia Cowan; and in 1970 to the sculptor, Jim Gruzalski. All three marriages ended in divorce. She is survived by her children.
Barbara Rush, born January 4 1927, died March 31 2024
