Mention Hollywood in the swinging ‘60s and ‘70s, and the Catholic Church hardly comes to mind. Yet many celebrities who were Catholic hit the peak of their careers during this era of an emerging pop culture and the Civil Rights Movement.
What’s more, they pushed the envelope by creating roles that challenged previous stereotypes and ushered in a whole new generation.
So, here's 5 more celebs that, at least, had Catholic roots (click here for part one), but, like all of us, lived imperfect lives
Anne Bancroft
Bancroft was best known as the teacher Anne Sullivan, whose groundbreaking work with Helen Keller was memorialized in The Miracle Worker (1962). Bancroft won the Academy Award for Best Actress and had previously picked up a Tony for the same role in the 1960 Broadway version.
Five years later she created the risqué Mrs. Robinson, who seduces a young naïve Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (1967).
Bancroft was born Anna Maria Louisa Italiano in 1931 in the Bronx, New York City, to Italian Catholic immigrant parents from Sicily. She was raised Catholic and spoke openly about her faith.
She often portrayed characters whose religious convictions guided the story. She co-starred as the Mother Superior who falsely accused a priest of bewitching her in the 1965 Broadway production of The Devils, based upon Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudon, an actual — albeit sensationalized — historic event in medieval France.
Bancroft then did a complete turn as Mary Magdalene in the 1977 TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth, followed in 1985 as the resolute mother superior in Agnes of God, for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
Bancroft married Jewish comedian/actor/director/playwright Mel Brooks in a civil ceremony in 1964 and collaborated with him on several films and TV movies. She died in 2005, and during their 41 years of marriage, both maintained their own separate faiths.
“She was my soulmate,” Brooks told Tablet in 2016. “We were glued together.”
Also, from Country Living:
In the 2013 PBS American Masters documentary 'Mel Brooks: Make a Noise,' the director revealed the foundation for their long-lasting partnership. "Anne and I both grew up during the marriage," he said. "We both knew what was really important, and what love meant, and...what doing for each other meant."
Sir Alec Guinness
Today's audiences best remember the British actor as the Jedi Master Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars trilogy. For the first film, later retitled Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977), he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.
Guinness was born in 1914 in London, and his lengthy career on both stage and screen included his Academy Award-winning role of the misguided British commander Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).
Guinness was confirmed in the Anglican Church but had serious doubts about his faith. That all changed when his 11-year-old son was tragically stricken with polio. The child did recover, and shortly afterwards, Guinness, his son Matthew, and his wife actress Merula Salaman (who was of Jewish descent) all converted to Catholicism.
According to the Angelus News, Guinness “made a bargain with God: if Matthew were healed, he wouldn’t object should the boy ever express a desire to convert to Catholicism.”
Guinness’s role as amateur sleuth Father Ignatius Brown in the 1954 British movie The Detective was based upon the character created by G.K. Chesterton, which currently appears in the Father Brown British TV series.
The role also led to the beginning of Guinness' interest in Catholicism. Also from the Angelus News post:
In 1954, he was cast as the lead in “The Detective,” a film based on the character of G.K. Chesterton’s crime-solving priest, Father Brown. On location in France, he was walking down the street one evening, still clad in his stage vestments, when a local child mistook him for a real priest, trustingly took Guinness’ hand, and began accompanying him down the street.
In “Blessings in Disguise,” the first volume of his autobiography, he wrote of the incident:
“Continuing my walk I reflected that a Church which could inspire such confidence in a child, making its priests, even when unknown, so easily approachable could not be as scheming or as creepy as so often made out. I began to shake off my long-taught, long-absorbed prejudices.”
For the psychological thriller The Prisoner (1955), Guinness was a cardinal arrested for his resistance against the Nazis during World War II.
Although more ambiguous with its story of martyrdom than A Man for All Seasons (1966), The Prisoner was awarded the 1956 Grand Prize of the International Catholic Organization for Cinema for its contribution “to spiritual progress and the development of human values.”
Queen Elizabeth II knighted Guinness in 1959 for his service to the arts. He died in 2000, and his funeral was held at St. Laurence Catholic Church in Petersfield, Hampshire, England, and he is buried at Petersfield Cemetery.
Mary Tyler Moore
In The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977), she delighted audiences as associate television producer Mary Richards, who could “turn the world on with her smile." The Emmy-winning TV series catapulted Moore to instant fame as a role model for young women with her career-minded character and amazing kilowatt smile.
But her portrayal as an icy WASP mother in Ordinary People (1981) was quite the opposite of the sweet and loveable Mary Richards. The Robert Redford-directed film stretched her acting abilities, earning her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.
Moore was born in 1936 in Brooklyn, New York, and was from an Irish-Catholic family. She relocated to California and attended the Immaculate Heart High School in Los Angeles.
Moore was barely 25 when she first achieved fame as Van Dyke’s chirpy wife in The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-1966) and later played a nun opposite “King of Rock and Roll” Elvis Presley in Change of Habit (1969). Presley portrayed a doctor and Moore assisted him in an inner-city free clinic. Her character was loosely based on the real-life Sister Mary Olivia Gibson, who worked with speech-impaired children.
Moore died in 2017 and was buried in Oak Lawn Cemetery in Fairfield, CT. A five-foot white statute of a seated angel peacefully gazes over her site.
From the National Catholic Register:
Moore and her mother visited the Vatican in the early 1980s where they had a personal audience with Pope Saint John Paul II.
Here's the trailer for Being Mary Tyler Moore, an HBO documentary about her:
Sharon Tate
Tragically, Tate is best remembered as one of the victims of the horrific Tate-LaBianca Murders in 1969, committed by Charles Manson's followers, that sent shock waves throughout Southern California.
With her gorgeous model figure, flowing blonde hair, and dove-like eyes, she was able to create her own identity as an actress just as the ‘60s began to swing.
Her role as an attractive but tragic chorus girl in Valley of the Dolls (1967) brought her fame, but she took a comical turn in The Wrecking Crew (1968) in which she played a beautiful but clumsy top-secret British agent. Sadly, The Wrecking Crew was Tate’s last film.
Tate was born in 1943 in Dallas, Texas, to a military family and raised Catholic. She attended St. Pius V Catholic School in Pasadena, Texas, and according to her younger sister Debra, Sharon identified as Catholic until her death.
Her husband, film director Roman Polanski, also cited her Catholic upbringing and her desire to have children as reasons for their more “traditional” marriage.
Tate died in 1969 and is buried at Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in Culver City, along with her unborn child Paul, her mother Doris, and her sister Patricia.
Her funeral service was held at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. But her legacy lives on: Doris Tate later founded the Coalition on Victims’ Equal Rights and the Crime Victims Research Bureau and helped pass the Victims' Rights Bill in 1982, all in Sharon’s memory.
Danny Thomas
Thomas played successful nightclub entertainer Danny Williams in his TV shows that ran from 1953 to 1964, under the names Make Room for Daddy and The Danny Thomas Show. The comedian/singer was also the father of Marlo Thomas, star of the TV series That Girl (1965-1971).
Thomas was born Amos Moyad Yaqhoob Kairouz in 1912 in Michigan to parents who were immigrants from Bsharri, Lebanon. His family was Maronite Catholic (the Maronite Church is Eastern Catholic and in full communion with the pope and the worldwide Catholic Church).
He later moved to Ohio, where in 1921 his spiritual advisor Bishop Samuel Stritch of Toledo confirmed him in the Catholic faith.
Thomas vowed that, if he ever became successful, he would open a shrine to St. Jude Thaddeus, patron saint of lost causes and one of the 12 Apostles.
He honored his word, and, in 1962 founded the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, because he believed that “no child should die in the dawn of life." The hospital is dedicated to treating pediatric terminal diseases, especially cancer,
Thomas died in 1991 and is buried on St. Jude Hospital grounds in Tennessee.
Image credits: (top) Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Hollywood, California /Shutterstock; (embedded) grave of Sharon Tate/Angela Aleiss
Angela Aleiss, Ph.D. is an author, writer, and film historian, and has taught at UCLA and CalState Long Beach.
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