Movies This article is more than 9 years oldObituaryMartha Hyer obituary
This article is more than 9 years oldHollywood actor who specialised in playing classy, cold beauties and starred with Frank Sinatra in Some Came RunningThere was a time in the 1950s and 60s when film buffs would have known what was meant by a "Martha Hyer role". It evoked a classy, beautiful but cold woman, usually the one the hero aspires to, but realises, by the end, would not be good for him. This was typified by Hyer's portrayal of the frosty schoolteacher in Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running (1958), for whom a would-be writer (Frank Sinatra) hopelessly falls. "Your hands on me aren't the least persuasive," she tells him, unpersuasively. Later, in the film's most subtle sequence, she is seduced, sobbing in silhouette while Sinatra picks the pins out of her hair. Hyer, who has died aged 89, deservedly earned a best supporting actress Oscar nomination for her performance.
Hyer was born in Fort Worth, Texas, one of three daughters of Agnes (nee Barnhart) and Julien Hyer. Her father was a judge who later took part in the trials at Nuremberg after the second world war. She studied speech and drama at Northwestern University in Illinois, before going to the Pasadena Playhouse in California. After being rejected by both Paramount and 20th Century Fox, she was finally given a contract with RKO in 1946.
After a few bit parts, she played pretty and bland female leads in several routine westerns. After her RKO contract ended, she starred in the low-budget fantasy thriller Oriental Evil (1951), as an American woman in Tokyo looking for the dastardly opium runner responsible for the death of her brother. The producer was Ray Stahl. Hyer and Stahl soon married and spent a year in Japan where Stahl co-produced and co-directed Geisha Girl (1952), in which Hyer played a detective disguised as a flight attendant on the track of Japanese gangsters.
Although she was seen in many cheesecake poses in film fan magazines, her screen career failed to catch fire, mainly because of her association with the schlock produced by her husband. In 1953, after finishing her scenes for the lame colonial adventure The Scarlet Spear in Kenya, Hyer left Stahl in Africa and, realising that she would always come second to his mother in his affections, divorced him.
From the mid-50s, aside from playing straight woman to Abbott and Costello and Francis the Talking Mule, Hyer started to establish her snooty screen persona in better parts in better movies: in 1954 the heiress engaged to a playboy (William Holden) in Billy Wilder's Sabrina, the antithesis of Sabrina (Audrey Hepburn), who steals Holden's heart; and, in Lucky Me, an oilman's snobbish daughter standing in the way of Doris Day and Robert Cummings. In a similar vein, Hyer was the socialite who employs a hobo (David Niven) as her butler in the remake of My Man Godfrey (1957) and attempts to prevent a widower (Cary Grant) from falling in love with his children's nanny (Sophia Loren) in Houseboat (1958).
In the following years, the elegant Hyer was seen in a number of soapy sagas such as The Best of Everything (1959), Ice Palace (1960) and The Carpetbaggers (1964), hardly ever loosening her hairpins. She was the epitome of Alfred Hitchcock's "cool blonde" who just lost out to Janet Leigh for the role of Marion Crane in Psycho (1960). If only she had got the part, she might have avoided Bikini Beach (1964), Pyro (1964), in which she is a jealous mistress who starts a fire that kills her lover's wife, and Picture Mommy Dead (1966), in which she is a wicked stepmother. She had a chance to play a goodie in First Men in the Moon (1964), loosely based on HG Wells, in which Hyer and two male companions soar to the moon from Victorian England in a spherical capsule propelled by an anti-gravity element cooked up in the professor's country lab.
In 1966, after being linked romantically to a number of handsome stars, including George Nader, who happened to be also seeing Rock Hudson at the time, Hyer married Hal Wallis, one of the biggest Hollywood producers. After the marriage, she cut down on acting, preferring to travel with Wallis and leading a ritzy social life. In fact, to finance her extravagant lifestyle, unbeknown to her husband she got into debt with loan sharks. But, in the early 1980s, Hyer was finally forced to confess. Wallis called in the FBI and the problems were solved with lawyers at great expense.
At the same time, Hyer found God among the glitz, a revelation she detailed in Finding My Way: A Hollywood Memoir (1990).
Wallis died in 1986.
Martha Hyer, actor, born 10 August 1924; died 31 May 2014
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