Actress Celeste Holm dead at 95
Celeste Holm, a versatile, bright-eyed blonde who soared to Broadway fame in “Oklahoma!” and won an Oscar in “Gentleman’s Agreement” but whose last years were filled with financial difficulty and estrangement from her sons, died Sunday – a relative said. She was 95.
Holm had been hospitalized about two weeks ago with dehydration after a fire in actor Robert De Niro’s apartment in the same Manhattan building. She had asked her husband on Friday to bring her home, and she spent her final days with her husband (Frank Basile) and other relatives and close friends by her side, said Amy Phillips, a great-niece of Holm’s who answered the phone at Holm’s apartment on Sunday.
Holm died around 3:30 a.m. at her longtime apartment on Central Park West – Phillips said.
“I think she wanted to be here, in her home, among her things, with people who loved her” – she said.
Celeste Holm.
Celeste Holm (a musical comedy star who also showed a flair for dramatic work and won an Academy Award for her sympathetic role in “Gentleman’s Agreement,” Elia Kazan’s influential 1947 film exploring anti-Semitism) died Sunday at her home in New York City. She was 95.
Her great-niece, Amy Phillips, confirmed her death to the Associated Press. Ms. Holm had been hospitalized for dehydration about two weeks ago after a fire in actor Robert De Niro’s apartment in the same Manhattan building.
Ms. Holm came to wide attention in 1943 as the lusty Ado Annie Carnes in the original Broadway staging of “Oklahoma!” She sang the show-stopping number “I Cain’t Say No,” which led critic Burton Rascoe to write at the time that she “simply tucks the show under her arm and lets the others touch it.”
Ms. Holm was summoned to Hollywood in 1946 as a musical comedy performer and landed roles in “Carnival in Costa Rica” and “Three Little Girls in Blue” – films that did not sustain her interest.
She had a hard time persuading Darryl Zanuck, head of Twentieth Century Fox studios, to let her play in “Gentleman’s Agreement” until screenwriter Moss Hart came to her defense.
Within a four-year period, she received three supporting Oscar nominations, including her win, for “Gentleman’s Agreement,” “Come to the Stable” (1949) and “All About Eve” (1950).
The role which really made her name was Ado Annie in the original production of “Oklahoma!” in 1943, in which she sang the showstopper, exclaiming – “I Cain’t Say No!”
She signed with 20th Century Fox and went to Hollywood to make a series of movies starting with “Three Little Girls in Blue” in 1946. “Gentlemen’s Agreement” was her third film.
But she longed for the stage and returned to Broadway, only returning for two movies in the 1950′s — “The Tender Trap” in 1955 and “High Society” the following year.
She once said of her wisecracking smart girl image: “I hated that. It’s stereotyped. I only played that kind of role in two pictures and that was enough, thank you. It’s not me.”
She also began taking television roles, including her own series “Honestly Celeste,” and for two decades was a regular in TV series, mini-series and films made for television.
In 1957, Holm, the son of a Norwegian insurance adjuster and a US writer-artist mother, was made a Knight 1st Class of the Order of St. Olav for her help in saving one of Norway’s national treasures, a schooner.
Holm was married five times, the last to Frank Basile — 46 years her junior — whom she wed on her 87th birthday in 2004.
Shortly afterwards she became embroiled in litigation which lasted for years and cost her 2 million dollars in lawyers’ fees. She confirmed in 2011 that she was no longer speaking to her two sons.
Holm lived in the same New York building as Hollywood icon Robert De Niro, on Central Park West. The Los Angeles Times reported that she was hospitalized for dehydration following a fire in the building.
But she asked her husband to bring her home Friday, and spent the last day or two with him and other relatives and close friends by her side, before dying in the early hours Sunday, it cited her niece as saying.
Basile, 49, told the New York Post before she died that she had heart problems.
“There were some setbacks in the hospital. She championed through and maintained her dignity. But there have been some irrevocable situations, and we are now going home” – he said before taking her from the hospital.
“I told her I wanted to have more good memories together, and she held me and she said: ‘That’s a good memory.’ Celeste told me she always remained happy because she chose to only remember the good things.”