Category: entertainment

George Maharis: Film History Series

Eddie Colbert, “George Maharis”, circa 1960s, Studio Portrait, Gelatin Silver Print, 20.3 x 25 cm, Private Collection

Born in the Astoria, Queens neighborhood of New York City in September of 1928, George Maharis was an American actor, singer and visual artist who appeared in off-Broadway shows as well as film and television series.

The third of six children born to Greek immigrants Vasidos and Demetra Stranis, George Maharis spent his formative years in the working-class Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of mid-town Manhattan. He attended the Flushing High School in Queens where he was recognized for his singing. Leaving high school before his graduation, Maharis joined the United States Marine Corps in which he served for eighteen months. Returning to school, he earned his high school diploma.

After graduation and appearances in several musicals outside New York City, Maharis achieved his first television acting role as Marlon Brando on NBC’s 1952 comedy series “Mister Peepers”, a situation comedy starring comedian Wally Cox. Maharis followed this role with classes at the Actors Studio under noted actors and teachers Sanford Meisner and Lee Strasberg. After acting with a stock theater in Cincinnati, he returned to New York City and received recognition for his roles in several off-Broadway productions.

George Maharis received critical acclaim for his roles in a production of Tennessee Williams’s “27 Wagons Full of  Cotton” and Jean Genet’s “Deathwatch. He won a Theatre World Award for his performance in playwright Edward Albee’s Off-Broadway premiere of “The Zoo City” at the Provincetown Playhouse in January of 1960. Despite this success, Maharis found it difficult to procure Broadway theater roles. He did find work in the field of television with roles in such shows as “Studio One”, “Kraft Television Theater, and screenwriter Stirling Silliphant’s procedural crime show “Naked City”.

Maharis began his film career with an uncredited role in director William Berke’s 1958 noir-crime film “The Mugger” and the credited role of Yoav in Otto Preminger’s 1960 epic historical drama “Exodus”. Beginning in 1960, he co-starred with actor Martin Milner in the CBS television series “Route 66”; his work in the series earned him an 1962 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Series. After appearances in eighty-two episodes, he left the series during its third season for health reasons including hepatitis.

George Harris returned briefly upon recovery; however, he left finally due to the effect of excessive work hours upon his health. After settling a contractual dispute in court with CBS, Maharis made one final appearance on “Route 66” in July of 1963. He began appearing in a series of starring film roles between 1964 and 1969 for several studios. Among these were Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s 1964 comedy “Quick, Before It Melts”, United Artist’s 1965 science-fiction suspense film “The Satan Bug”, and Columbia Pictures’s 1969 Western “The Desperados”.

Maharis returned to television in 1970 with the starring role as criminologist Ethan Arcane in Aaron Spelling’s 1970 “The Most Deadly Game”, a twelve episode series that ended in January of 1971. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he had featured roles in several television movies and appeared as a guest star in multiple television series, including “Mission: Impossible”, “Fantasy Island”, “Kojak”, “Police Story”, “McMillan & Wife”, and “Murder, She Wrote”. Maharis was also given the film role of Machelli Cromwell in Albert Pyun’s 1982  cult-classic “The Sword and the Sorcerer”.

Early in his career, George Maharis added singing to his theatrical acting. He began releasing albums and singles through the Epic Records label, his first being the 1962 “George Maharis Sings!” which peaked at number ten on the Billboard’s Album Chart. Maharis’s 1962 single “Teach Me Tonight” reached number eight on the Easy Listening Chart. His singing debut on television occurred in 1963 on Episode Eight of the “The Judy Garland Show”, aired on the twentieth of October, in which he sang “Side by Side” alongside Garland.

During an era of strict anti-homosexuality laws, Maharis did not publicly acknowledge a long-term or steady gay partner. His personal life and romantic relationships were largely kept private. When George Maharis died in Beverly Hills on the twenty-fourth of May in 2023 from hepatitis at the age of ninety-four, his death was confirmed by his longtime friend and caretaker Marc Bahan. Maharis’s body was cremated.

Notes: The Judy Garland Project website has an article on the eighth episode of “The Judy Garland Show” in which George Maharis, Jack Carter and The Dillards appeared:

https://judygarlandproject.wordpress.com/2017/10/20/the-judy-garland-show-with-george-maharis-jack-carter-and-the-dillards-show-8-aired-on-20th-october-1963/

The online “The Tinseltown Twins”, a site that offers information on classic movies, has an excellent article on George Maharis that includes photos as well as the full video of Season 1 Episode 1 of “Route 66” starring Maharis and Martin Milner: https://thetinseltowntwins.wordpress.com/2023/05/28/rip-george-maharis-1928-2023/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “George Maharis as Buz Murdock”, 1960-1963, “Route 66” Studio Portrait, Color Print, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Director John Sturges, “The Satan Bug”, 1965, Cinematographer Robert Surtees, Production John Sturges, United Artists

Third Insert Image: Director Lamont Johnson, “A Covenant with Death”, 1967, Cinematography Robert Burks, William Conrad Productions, Warner Brothers Pictures

Bottom Insert Image: David Livingston, “George Maharis, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences”, November 2006, Color Print, David Livingston/Getty Images

Calendar: March 21

Year: Day to Day Men: March 21

Cool and Refreshed

The twenty-first of March in 1867 marks the birth date of Florenz Edward Ziegfeld Jr. who was an American Broadway impresario. 

Born in the Illinois city of Chicago, Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. was the son of Roselie de Hez, the Belgian grandniece to General Count Étienne Maurice Gérard, and German-born Florenz Ziegfeld, son of the mayor of Jever, the capital city of the Friesland district, Germany. The father founded Roosevelt University’s Chicago Academy of Music 1n 1867 and later opened the Trocadero nightclub to profit from the 1893 World’s Fair. 

During a trip to London in 1896, Florence Ziegfeld Jr. met the Polish-French singer Anna Held and brought her to the United States as his common-law wife. Held enjoyed several successes on Broadway including the 1901 “Little Duchess” and 1906 “A Parisian Model”. One of Broadway’s celebrated leading ladies, she became both a well-known and wealthy woman. It was Held who presented the idea of an American version of the Parisian Folies Bergère to Ziegfeld. 

Ziegfeld’s stage spectaculars, which became known as the Ziegfeld Follies, began with ‘Follies of 1907’ which opened in July of that year and continued annually until 1931. These productions with their elaborate costumes and sets featured beautiful women, the Ziegfeld Girls, chosen personally by Ziegfeld. The extravaganzas were choreographed to the works of such popular composers as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. The Follies featured many well-known theatrical performers including Fanny Brice, W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers, Bert Williams and Ann Pennington.

In 1927, the sixteen-hundred seat Ziegfeld Theater opened on the west side of  Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue between 54th and 55th Streets. Designed by architects Joseph Urban and Thomas W. Lamb, the Art Deco theater’s auditorium was egg-shaped with the stage at the narrow end. A large medieval-styled mural by Lillian Gaertner, “The Joy of Life”, covered the walls and ceiling. To finance the construction cost of of 2.5 million dollars, Ziegfeld borrowed money from newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, who took control of the theater after Ziegfeld’s death.

The Ziegfeld Theater’s opening production in February was Ziegfeld’s “Rio Rita” which ran for almost five hundred performances. The second production, “Show Boat” with stage sets by Urban and a score by Jerome Kern, was a success with a run of five hundred seventy-two performances. This musical continues to be revived on Broadway and has won multiple Tony Awards. In May of 1932 during the Depression, Ziegfeld staged a revival of “Show Boat” that ran for six months. In the same year, a production with the Follies’ theatrical stars entitled “The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air” was broadcast on CBS Radio.  

Anna Held divorced Florenz Ziegfeld in January of 1913. In April of 1914, he married stage and screen actress Billie Burke; they had one child, Patricia Burke Ziegfeld. The Ziegfeld family lived at their New York estate in Hastings-on-Hudson and their residence in Palm Beach, Florida. In 1932 after spending a period in a New Mexico sanitarium, Florenz Ziegfeld traveled to Los Angeles, California. A few days later, he died in Hollywood from an existing lung infection, pleurisy, on the twenty-second of July in 1932.

Ziegfeld’s death left Billie Burke with substantial debts, one of the reasons that she steered her career toward film acting. She moved to Beverly Hills and returned to a successful career as an actress with such films as George Cukor’s “Dinner at Eight”, Norman Z. McLeod’s 1937 “Topper”, Victor Fleming’s 1939 “The Wizard of Oz”, and William Keighley’s 1942 “The Man Who Came to Dinner”. In the late 1950s, failing memory led to Burke’s retirement from show business; she died of natural causes at the age of eighty-five in May of 1970. Burke is interred beside Ziegfeld at Kensico Cemetery in Valhall, New York.