Rhonda Fleming (August 10, 1923 – October 14, 2020) was an American film and television actress and singer. She acted in more than 40 films, mostly in the 1940s and 1950s, and became renowned as one of the most glamorous actresses of her day, nicknamed the "Queen of Technicolor" because she photographed so well in that medium.
Rhonda Fleming was a stage name: she was born Marilyn Louis in Los Angeles, the younger of two daughters of Harold Cheverton Louis, an insurance salesman, and his wife, Effie Graham, an actor and model. A lyric soprano, She took lessons in light opera for ten years as a child and was trained in voice by an aunt and entered singing contests. She grew up in Hollywood, and while attending Beverly Hills high school was spotted by the talent agent Henry Willson, who went on to discover Rock Hudson.
She went straight into films, at first as an extra. Her first substantial supporting parts came in her early 20s in Spellbound and in Robert Siodmak’s Hitchcockian thriller The Spiral Staircase (1946). In Abilene Town (1946), marshal Randolph Scott is torn between Fleming, the grocer’s daughter, and saloon singer Ann Dvorak, predictably settling respectably for the former.
After playing the voluptuous and dangerous lover of hoodlum Kirk Douglas in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, Paramount claimed her, and did not allow her to be much more than decorative. Two aristocratic roles came in 1949: the English heroine with whom Bing Crosby falls in love in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a musical after the novel by Mark Twain – she was a fine singer – and a duchess who fascinates Scoutmaster Bob Hope in The Great Lover.
The studio also co-starred Fleming with Ronald Reagan and John Payne in a number of minor action pictures. She was given better material when loaned out to other studios: RKO for Cry Danger in which she is a match for ex-con Dick Powell seeking revenge. When told to expect an extra guest for dinner, she replies: “OK, I’ll put more water in the soup.”
At Columbia, in The Golden Hawk (1952), she had fun as a pirate called Rouge, actually a rich woman pirating in order to recover a stolen fortune, and as Cleopatra to Raymond Burr’s Antony in Serpent of the Nile (1953). For Fox, she appeared in 3D in Inferno (1953), as millionaire Robert Ryan’s faithless wife.
Back at Paramount, Fleming became part of the decor again, opposite Charlton Heston as Buffalo Bill in Pony Express (1953) and Jeff Chandler, who rescues her from a harem in Yankee Pasha (1954). The exception was Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), in which she played the long-suffering girlfriend of Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster). In the Western spoof Alias Jesse James (1959), Fleming was the singer at The Dirty Dog Saloon who gets entangled (literally) with Hope.
She, Jane Russell, Connie Haines and Beryl Davis were once part of a travelling gospel quartet at their church called "The Four Girls" and made an album called "Make a Joyful Noise" that sold over a million copies. A one-time Las Vegas showroom singing act at the Tropicana, she also performed at the Hollywood Bowl in a one-woman concert of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin songs. Also did a ten-week tour with Skitch Henderson that focused on the music of George Gershwin. She recorded an album in 1958 for Columbia Records.
As the 1960s dawned, Fleming was more often to be seen on television, with some stage work: in 1973 she had a Broadway run in Clare Boothe Luce’s comedy The Women. Her final TV appearance came in a half-hour drama, Waiting for the Wind (1990), as the religious wife of a farmer, Robert Mitchum (whom she had played alongside in Out of the Past), confronting terminal illness. Her last full movie was The Nude Bomb (1980), as an international fashion designer alongside Don Adams’s spoof spook Maxwell Smart.
Her last film before her move into TV had been the Italian epic The Revolt of the Slaves (1960), and that year she married her co-star in it, Lang Jeffries. He was her third husband, after Thomas Lane, an interior decorator, with whom she had a son, Kent, from 1940 to 1948; and Lew Morrill, a physician, from 1952 to 1958. Her marriage to the producer-director Hall Bartlett in 1965 lasted for seven years until, like the previous three, it ended in divorce. Fleming’s fifth husband, from 1978, was Ted Mann, the owner of the Mann Theatres cinema chain.
Two years after Mann’s death in 2001, Fleming married Darol Carlson; he died in 2017. Rhonda died from aspiration pneumonia on October 14, 2020, in Saint John's Health Center, Santa Monica, California, at the age of 97.
(Edited mainly from Ronald Bergman @ The Guardian & IMDb)