Angie Dickinson

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Angie Dickinson
Birth name	Angeline Brown
Born	September 30, 1931 (age 75) Kulm, North Dakota, United States
Notable roles	Sgt. Leann "Pepper" Anderson in Police Woman

Angie Dickinson (born September 30, 1931) is a famous American television and film actress who is probably best-known for her Golden Globe-winning role as sultry Sgt. Leann (not Suzanne) "Pepper" Anderson of the popular 1970s crime drama, Police Woman. She also co-starred in Rio Bravo with John Wayne, and in Point Blank with Lee Marvin, and she appeared in both the 1960 and 2001 versions of Ocean's Eleven, with her ex-boyfriend Frank Sinatra, and George Clooney, respectively. She would win the Saturn Award in 1981 for her role as Kate Miller in Dressed to Kill.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Beginnings as a character actress 3 Leading lady 4 Television work 4.1 Police Woman 5 Leading 1980s actress 6 1990s and later work 7 Personal life 8 Filmography 9 External links

[edit] Early life

The daughter of a small-town newspaper publisher, Dickinson was born Angeline Brown, the middle of three sisters, in Kulm, North Dakota, to parents Frederica and Leo H. Brown. She was considered a cute child from an early age. Her first job was to sell Hershey's Kisses for five cents, so her siblings could buy ice cream cones. Her family moved to Burbank, California in 1942, when Angie was 11. While a student at Bellamarine Jefferson High School, she won the Sixth Annual Bill of Rights essay contest late in 1946. She was popular with her class. In 1947, at age 15, she was graduated from high school. At the same time, she was also looking for a job. Prior to attending Glendale Community College and before transferring to Immaculate Heart College, she took a position as a secretary at the former Burbank Airport (now Bob Hope Airport), working in a parts factory from 1950 to late 1952. In 1953, she placed second in a beauty pageant. The following year, she graduated from Immaculate Heart College with a degree in business. She originally intended to be a writer, having grown up with a publishing father.

When she married a football player, she decided to use the name Angie Dickinson and to pursue an acting career. She was approached by NBC to guest-star on a number of variety shows, including The Colgate Comedy Hour, and became a member of the Rat Pack during which time she worked with longtime friend Frank Sinatra. The two would later star in the film Ocean's Eleven and she would remain on good terms with Sinatra until his death in 1998.

[edit] Beginnings as a character actress

After conquering the beauty pageant trail, and beginning to establish a name for herself on the big screen, Dickinson became one of the more versatile, popular and younger leading character actors of the 1950s and 1960s, guest-staring in dozens of TV series.

On New Year's Eve 1954, she made her acting debut in an episode of Death Valley Days. This part led to other roles in such productions as Buffalo Bill Jr, eight episodes of Matinee Theatre, General Electric Theater, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Broken Arrow, Gunsmoke, 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. As a result, Dickinson was becoming a recognizable name to many viewers.

[edit] Leading lady

Though Dickinson enjoyed a somewhat successful movie career for nearly two decades, working with many revered directors and most of the top leading men of the 1950s and '60s, she wouldn't quite rise above the status of attractive, reliable working actress--- real stardom would come later... At first, she played small roles in Lucky Me (a 1954 cameo) 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 gave an early political view of internal conflicts in Viet Nam; her career rose gradually from there.

Rejecting the Marilyn Monroe/Jayne Mansfield image of over-done platinum bleach-blonde stardom because she realized it would narrow her acting options, Dickinson, who at first would only allow the studio to lighten her naturally-brunette hair to a honey-blonde color, instead studied her craft and wanted very much to be "good".

Casting directors and audiences would inevitably begin to notice that Angie Dickinson had an unusual kind of enigmatic charisma and an ironic, albeit seductive, delivery-- both femininely fluttery yet undeniably edgy; visually, she was also armed with a fine physique, great legs, deepset brown eyes that could read as either warmly receptive or aloofly dismissive, and an interesting, strikingly lovely face which photographed as oval from the front but angular in profile, resembling something akin to a Venusian goddess. Angie's atypical screen presence initially caused critics to praise her-- if not always the films she was in-- those same critics lamenting that the Old Studio System was in shambles and that promising newcomers such as she were not being properly groomed, valued or protected.

Eventually, despite her initial resisitance, she would become one of Hollywood's more notable sex symbols... She also starred in B-movies early on, mostly westerns, including Shoot-Out at Medicine Bend (1957) co-starring onscreen with legendary actor James Garner, which merited her more respect from the industry.

In another western, a film that would propel her into Hollywood's A-list, Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo (1959), she played a flirtatious gambler named Feathers who is almost locked up by the town sheriff played by Angie's child-hood idol John Wayne; the film co-starred Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson and Walter Brennan. Understandably peeved when Hawks sold his personal contract with Angie to a major studio after "Rio Bravo" without her knowledge, her hopes of the legendary director moulding her into the next Lauren Bacall seemed dashed.

In the early 1960s, she 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, (both released in 1960) with Frank Sinatra. 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 earthly lust; and the European travelogue Rome Adventure (also known as "Lovers Must Learn") in 1962, where Dickinson gets to dish comparatively wicked seductress dialogue; and Jean Negulesco's Jessica (1962) with Maurice Chevalier, in which she plays the straightlaced-but-carnal young woman of Italian heritage working as a midwife but resented by the wives of the town's lusting men. 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 sent to the theatres due to its violent content, Angie is slapped by a villainous boyfriend, played by future U.S. President Ronald Reagan in his last movie role. (Dickinson was also rumored to have been romantically involved with John F. Kennedy at one time, thereby providing two intriguing connections to American presidents)^{[citation needed]}. She also co-starred in the so-so comedy The Art of Love (1965), in which she plays the love interest of both James Garner and Dick Van Dyke.

She also enjoyed moderate success in a string of movies made during the latter part of the 1960s and into the 1970s: 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; despite the potential in front and behind the camera, the more controversial aspects of the Lillian Hellman script were blocked, and the film languished in mediocrity--- though its obviously considered a curio today for the cast.

Having married in 1965, Dickinson began to put her career on the back-burner temporarily, though she still appeared in the occasional picture. She would film the westerns The Last Challenge (1967) with Glenn Ford, and the dreary comedy Some Kind of Nut (1969); but arguably her best motion picture of this era was John Boorman's urban, starkly late-'60s cult classic Point Blank (1967) with Lee Marvin as a vengeful Alcatraz escapee, although the movie wouldn't find an audience or undergo critical re-discovery for several years. She starred in another Western, Young Billy Young (1969) with Robert Mitchum and Jack Kelly, as well as Sam Whiskey (1969) where she gave a young Burt Reynolds his first on-screen kiss. She played a lascivious highschool teacher in the dark comedy Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971) with Telly Savalas and Rock Hudson; and portrayed a scary doctor in the sci-fi flick The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler (1971)... One of her best, and best-remembered, movie roles was as the tawdry widow Wilma in Big Bad Mama (1974) with William Shatner and Tom Skerritt, a sexy Depression Era romp in which gorgeous Angie set tongues wagging with her nude scenes--- something unheard of at that time for a 42-year-old star to submit to.

[edit] Television work

[edit] Police Woman

After years of turning down many roles due to her daughter's needs, as well as Dickinson's desire to avoid the grueling schedule involved in a weekly TV series, Dickinson came 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 had decided to turn it into a weekly detective series to be called Police Woman, which would make her the first successful female TV police officer. (Beverly Garland and Anne Francis had actually done it first, but their shows had been short-lived). In a role which proved to solidify and re-define Angie Dickinson's status now as a genuine star, she pioneered over-40 sex symbolism — the series becoming the first successful primetime drama series in history to feature a woman in the title role. She became a pop icon of the 1970s, as Police Woman was seen in over 70 countries, becoming the Number One show in many of them, including in the United States briefly during the Summer reruns in its first season. (It was essentially NBC's feminine answer to the six successful 1970s crime drama series, Hawaii Five-O, Kojak, The Streets of San Francisco, McMillan and Wife, The Rockford Files and Switch (a year later), five consecutive series airing concurrently on three different networks). On Police Woman, she played Sgt. Leann "Pepper" Anderson, a cool, sexy and classy blonde member of the Los Angeles Police Department Criminal Conspiracy Unit during which she would often adopt any number of undercover guises to lure the thugs to justice--- a tough but lovely broad. Co-starring on the show was a familiar actor, Earl Holliman (who replaced Bert Convy, who had portrayed Crowley in the pilot episode), as Sgt. Anderson's half-Italian commanding officer and long-time friend, Sergeant Bill Crowley, and then unknown-stars, Ed Bernard and Charles Dierkop as Investigators Joe Styles and Pete Royster, respectively... On the first day of shooting, both Dickinson and Holliman realized the chemistry between the two worked very well, and the writers quickly began writing to this. (Her character's name, 'Sergeant Pepper' and the glaring connection to the legendary Beatles album was virtually never acknowledged.)

In early 1976, she and Holliman were both invited to the Television Broadcasters' Awards to praise the actor's achievement. He lauded the veteran actress's career accomplishments, including her work with such late actors as Frank Sinatra and John Wayne, both of whom acted with Dickinson earlier in her career.

On occasion, Dickinson gave her boss's daughter a chance to play the role of her autistic young sister, Cheryl, during the 1974 season; the role lasted only a few episodes.

In its first season particularly --- generally regarded as the show's best year (before the content was subsequently softened and some of the energy drained) Police Woman was a ratings winner among many other popular 1970s detective series, and Dickinson was nominated for three Emmys as Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series between 1975 and 1977, but did not win. She was also nominated for four Best Actress in a Drama Series Golden Globes between 1975 and 1978, and won the award once in 1975 for the first season.

As she continued to play the no-nonsense cop, her marriage to famed composer Burt Bacharach was in serious turmoil, but she found herself unable to attend very easily to her domestic problems due to the overwhelming hours involved in making the series. By the end of its fourth season in 1978, Police Woman had by far its most difficult year, with the ratings dropping due to increasing schedule changes by NBC and a level of crispness mostly missing from the program--- it was now far from the dynamic, focused, trendsetting series it had started-out as in 1974-1975, the scripts largely lacking the intelligence seen earlier, the formerly taut, even cinematic, direction now by rote.

Subsequently, NBC decided to cancel the series after four seasons and 91 episodes. But by all accounts, Dickinson enjoyed playing the alluring cop on one of television's most influential cop shows ever, and will likely always be fondly remembered for it. (The same year the show came to an end, she reprised her Pepper Anderson 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 impact of Police Woman resulted not only in a rash of sexy-but-strong female-driven series (mostly of a more fanciful nature) like Charlie's Angels, The Bionic Woman and Wonder Woman during the late-'70s, but Angie Dickinson's show inspired a spate of applications from women for employment to police departments around the country--- the effect was seismic; in recent years, journalists have been surprised by how often the Police Woman series has been referenced when asking long-time female law enforcement officials about what inspired them to join the force.

In 1987, the Los Angeles Police Department issued an Honorary Doctorate (they apparently give those) to Miss Dickinson, to which she responded, "now you can call me 'Doctor Pepper'".

[edit] Leading 1980s actress

After appearing in TV mini-series like Pearl (1978) and during the time of a devastating divorce she did not want, Angie Dickinson returned to the big screen in Brian De Palma's thriller Dressed to Kill (1980), which earned her a 1981 Saturn Award for Best Actress; loved by some, derided by others (largely for the violence and a certain crassness), the film featured Dickinson in a 35-minute role early in the film in which her character is brutally killed in an elevator. Critics hailed the actress's performance and, today, the film is viewed as a serious entry in the macabre genre, with Angie's silent stalking through the maze of a New York City museum one of the picture's stylistic highlights.

Despite the career highs of Police Woman in the '70s and Dressed to Kill in 1980, Dickinson's focus as an actress now had begun to wane somewhat — in the 60s and through the early-70s, critics had never questioned her ability.

She had a less-substantial role in Death Hunt with Charles Bronson in 1981, as well as Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen. Earlier that year, she had been producers' first choice to play 'Krystle Carrington' on the Dynasty TV series, but Dickinson turned down the role and it ultimately went to Linda Evans. She tried to make a comeback on TV with Cassie & Co., but the show failed to attract much attention. She also starred in several TV-movies such as, One Show Make it Murder(1983), Jealousy(1984), A Touch of Scandal(1984), Hollywood Wives(1985), and Stillwatch(1987).

At the time considered the very definition of middle-aged sex-appeal, in 1982 a collection of Hollywood Designers and Make-up artists compiled a list of Best Female Star Bodies — with Angie Dickinson, at age 50 (and pre-surgery) at Number One.

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 once again with old friend Telly Savalas. She co-starred with Willie Nelson and numerous old buddies in the 1988 TV-western Once Upon a Texas Train.

[edit] 1990s and later work

As she approached her sixties, Angie Dickinson wasn't always getting the best roles, but she kept active and working.

In addition to appearing in the Oliver Stone-produced futuristic shocker TV-miniseries Wild Palms (1993) in which she played a sadistic wife of a media mogul, Angie starred as a ruthless Montana spa owner in Gus Van Sant's too-bizarre-to-be-believed Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993) with Uma Thurman and a cast of stellar cameos--- which couldn't save the picture, generally cited as the Single Worst Movie of the 1990's; Dickinson played Burt Reynolds's wife in The Maddening (1995) - a middling thriller; she appeared in the 1995 remake of Sabrina with Harrison Ford; and she also co-starred with Rick Aiello and Robert Cicchini as their mother in the National Lampoon's The Don's Analyst comedy.

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

Finally, she returned to make a brief cameo as herself in Ocean's Eleven (2001), a stylish remake of a less-skillful Rat Pack heist film in which she'd also appeared four decades earlier.

[edit] Personal life

In 1952, Angie married Gene Dickinson, a former football player. While Angie was busy working on guest-starring roles, she also began dating Frank Sinatra. The marriage to Dickinson ended in divorce in 1960.

She was married to musician/composer Burt Bacharach from 1965 to 1981. In 1966 Dickinson had a daughter with Bacharach, Lea Nikki Bacharach, born three months premature and much later diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. Known as Nikki, she committed suicide in January 2007.^[1] Nikki had spent 3 1/2 years at the Wilson Center, a psychiatric residential treatment facility for adolescents located in Faribault, MN.

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

[edit] Filmography

• Lucky Me (1954)
• Tennessee's Partner (1955)
• The Return of Jack Slade (1955)
• Man with a Gun (1955)
• Hidden Guns (1956)
• Down Liberty Road (1956) (short subject)
• Tension at Table Rock (1956)
• Gun the Man Down (1956)
• The Black Whip (1956)
• Shoot-Out at Medicine Bend (1957)
• China Gate (1957)
• Calypso Joe (1957)
• Run of the Arrow (1957) (dubbing voice for Sara Montiel)
• I Married a Woman (1958)
• Cry Terror! (1958)
• Rio Bravo (1959)
• Frontier Rangers (1959)
• I'll Give My Life (1959)
• The Bramble Bush (1960)
• Ocean's Eleven (1960)
• A Fever in the Blood (1961)
• The Sins of Rachel Cade (1961)
• Rome Adventure (1962)
• Jessica (1962)
• Captain Newman, M.D. (1963)
• The Killers (1964)
• The Art of Love (1965)
• The Chase (1966)
• Cast a Giant Shadow (1966)
• The Poppy Is Also a Flower (1966)
• The Rock (1967) (short subject)
• Point Blank (1967)
• The Last Challenge (1967)
• Sam Whiskey (1969)
• Some Kind of a Nut (1969)
• Young Billy Young (1969)
• Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971)
• The Outside Man (1972)
• Big Bad Mama (1974)
• The Angry Man (1979)
• Klondike Fever (1980)
• Dressed to Kill (1980)
• Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen (1981)
• Death Hunt (1981)
• Big Bad Mama II (1987)
• Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993)
• The Maddening (1995)
• Sabrina (1995)
• The Sun, the Moon and the Stars (1996)
• The Last Producer (2000)
• Duets (2000)
• Pay It Forward (2000)
• Scene Smoking: Cigarettes, Cinema & the Myth of Cool (2001) (documentary)
• Big Bad Love (2001)
• Ocean's Eleven (2001) (Cameo)
• Elvis Has Left the Building (2004)
• 3055 Jean Leon (2006) (documentary)

[edit] External links

• Angie Dickinson at the Internet Movie Database