Barbara Rush, who performed with Frank Sinatra and Paul Newman, dies at 97

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Barbara Rush, a popular actress of the 1950s and 1960s who shared credits with Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman and other top film actors and later had a thriving television career, has died. She was 97 years old.

Rush’s death was announced by her daughter, Fox News reporter Claudia Cowan, who posted on Instagram that her mother died on Easter Sunday. No additional details were immediately provided.

Cowan praised her mother as one of the last of “Old Hollywood royalty” and said she was her mother’s “biggest fan.”

After being discovered in a play at the Pasadena Playhouse, Rush signed a contract with Paramount Studios in 1950 and made her film debut that same year with a small role in “The Goldbergs,” based on the series. radio and television of the same name.

However, he would leave Paramount shortly after, going to work for Universal International and later 20th Century Fox.

“Paramount was not geared toward developing new talent,” he recalled in 1954. “Every time a good role came along, they tried to borrow Elizabeth Taylor.”

Rush appeared in a wide range of films. He starred alongside Rock Hudson in “Captain Lightfoot” and in Douglas Sirk’s acclaimed remake of “Magnificent Obsession,” Audie Murphy in “World in My Corner” and Richard Carlson in the 3D science fiction classic “It Came From Outer Space,” for which he received a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer.

Other film credits include the Nicholas Ray classic “Bigger Than Life”; “The Young Lions” (“The Dance of the Damned”), with Marlon Brando, Dean Martin and Montgomery Clift and “The Young Philadelphians” (“The City in Front of Me”) with Newman. He made two films with Sinatra, “Come Blow Your Horn” and the Rat Pack spoof “Robin and the Seven Hoods,” which also featured Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. .

Rush, who had made guest appearances on television for years, recalled her move into movies as she approached middle age.

“There used to be a terrible Sahara Desert between the 1940s and 1960s, when you went from naive to old,” she said in 1962. “You either didn’t work or you pretended you were 20.”

Instead, Rush took on roles in shows like “Peyton Place,” “All My Children,” “The New Dick Van Dyke Show” and “7th Heaven.”

“I’m one of those people who acts the moment you open the refrigerator door and the light comes on,” he said in a 1997 interview.

His first work was the touring version of “Forty Carats,” a comedy that had been a success in New York. The director, Abe Burrows, helped her with the comedic performance.

“At first it was very, very difficult for me to learn how to synchronize, especially the business of waiting for a laugh,” he said in 1970. But he learned, and the show lasted a year in Chicago and months more on tour.

She then appeared on tours such as “Same Time, Next Year,” “Father’s Day,” “Steel Magnolias,” and her solo show, “A Woman of Independent Means.”

Born in Denver, Rush spent her first 10 years on the move as her father, a lawyer for a mining company, was assigned from town to town. The family eventually settled in Santa Barbara, California, where young Barbara played a mythical dryad in a school play and fell in love with acting.

Rush was married and divorced three times: to movie star Jeffrey Hunter, Hollywood advertising executive Warren Cowan, and sculptor James Gruzalski.

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Veteran Associated Press journalist Bob Thomas, who died in 2014, was the lead author of this obituary. AP journalist Hillel Italie contributed to this report from New York.