Virginia O’Brien actress: born Los Angeles 8 April 1921 twice married one son three daughters died Woodland Hills California 16 January 2001

Virginia O’Brien, actress: born Los Angeles 8 April 1921; twice married (one son, three daughters); died Woodland Hills, California 16 January 2001.
Fondly remembered for her deadpan delivery of songs in MGM musicals of the Forties, Virginia O’Brien became popular by singing with an unblinking, frozen face. Often teamed with the comic Red Skelton, she also had a wry way with a wisecrack, and it is a tribute to her talent and popularity that her movie career as a top featured player lasted for seven years and 15 films.Born in Los Angeles in 1921, she was a niece (on her mother’s side) of the film director Lloyd Bacon and her father was captain of detectives of the Los Angeles police. Though she studied dancing as a child, she was intending to work as a secretary for her father after graduating from North Hollywood High School, but in 1939 she took a role in a local production of the revue Meet the People, and afterwards claimed that opening-night nerves caused her to freeze on stage and sing motionless.Louis B. Mayer was in the audience and signed her to an MGM contract, though he allowed her to first make her Broadway début in the revue Keep Off the Grass (1940).

The cast included Jimmy Durante, Jane Froman, Ray Bolger and Larry Adler, but O’Brien was the surprise hit. Bosley Crowther reported in The New York Times, “She convulses the audience by removing the ecstasy from high-pressure music.”O’Brien made her screen début with small roles in Hullabaloo and Sky Murder (both 1940), but her first chance to shine was in the Marx Brothers’ vehicle The Big Store (1941) in which she delivered a swinging version of “Rock-a-bye Baby” in her sphinx-like way. She later became known as “Miss Frozen Face”.In Lady Be Good (1941) she played the food-fixated girlfriend of Red Skelton. The couple were subsidiary comic relief in the film, but O’Brien was given a song, “Your Words and My Music”, composed by Roger Edens and Arthur Freed.Skelton graduated to star billing in Ship Ahoy! (1942), in which a young Frank Sinatra introduced the lovely Burton Lane/E.Y Harburg ballad “Poor You”.

In a pattern repeated in several of her films O’Brien then performed her distinctive variation.She had her best role so far in Panama Hattie (1942), a very loose adaptation of the Cole Porter show. O’Brien had her own choruses of the Porter numbers “Fresh as a Daisy” and “Let’s Be Buddies”, plus a solo song written by Walter Donaldson and E.Y. Harburg, “Did I Get Stinkin’ at the Club Savoy?”, which the film’s star Ann Sothern had refused to do.Another Porter show was the basis for DuBarry was a Lady (1943), in which O’Brien again pined for Skelton and in her role as a cigarette-girl had a solo written for her by Roger Edens, “No Matter How You Slice It, It’s Still Salome”.She had become enormously popular, and in MGM’s all-star wartime extravaganza Thousands Cheer (1943) she was given a major production number in which, accompanied by Bob Crosby’s orchestra and flanked by two upcoming starlets, June Allyson and Gloria DeHaven, she gave her special touch to the standard “In a Little Spanish Town”.In the lacklustre screen version of Meet the People (1944), O’Brien’s solo of Earl Brent’s “Say that We’re Sweethearts Again” received the best notices, but significantly, while June Allyson and Gloria DeHaven had graduated to be the stars of Two Girls and a Sailor (1944), O’Brien was still doing a guest spot, singing “Take It Easy”.Ziegfeld Follies (1946) started production in 1944 and after initial previews it was decided that a comedy spot was needed near the start, so O’Brien was given a special number, “Bring on the Beautiful Men”, which she sang glamorously gowned on a carousel horse.She was then given her best screen role, as a waitress out west at the turn of the century in The Harvey Girls (1946). As well as a solo, “The Wild, Wild, West”, O’Brien also was part of a wistful trio with Judy Garland and Cyd Charisse (dubbed by Betty Russell), the three in their night-gowns singing the plaintive “It’s a Great Big World” Her role was curtailed, though, by pregnancy.

The actress said later,Judy Garland wasn’t showing up every day, so I got bigger and bigger, as you might see in the movie I have pillows on my lap when I’m sitting on the train. After six months on the movie I had to quit and they gave my part in the song “Round and Round” to Marjorie Main I still love the movie. It’s my favourite.O’Brien made just three more films for MGM. She gave a delightfully droll rendition of “Life upon the Wicked Stage” in Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), and co-starred in two further films with Red Skelton, The Show Off (1946) and Merton of the Movies (1947). She then did night-club and radio work until retiring to raise her four children. In 1942 she had married the actor Kirk Alyn, who played Superman in the screen serials They divorced in 1955 and she married Harry B. White.Television variety shows prompted her return to performing and in 1972-74 she toured in a nostalgia revue, The Big Show.

She had a small role in Disney’s Gus (1976), and in 1980 had a great success at the Hollywood Palladium, after which she toured the country with a one-woman salute to MGM, a recording of which was issued in 1984. The Los Angeles Times recorded, “Virginia O’Brien is still singing deadpan and drawing huge laughs for her seeming lack of effort”, and the Herald-Examiner called her “a hellava performer”, adding, “She has lost none of that style and showmanship that made her an MGM favourite.”. Huw Weekes, broadcaster: born Newport, Monmouthshire 22 January 1957: married 1985 Sue Williams (one son, two daughters); died Boverton, Vale of Glamorgan 18 January 2001. Huw Weekes, broadcaster: born Newport, Monmouthshire 22 January 1957: married 1985 Sue Williams (one son, two daughters); died Boverton, Vale of Glamorgan 18 January 2001.
Huw Weekes was one of Wales’s most popular and professional broadcasters. A pillar of HTV Wales, he anchored news bulletins and presented a wide range of programmes at the company’s studios on the outskirts of Cardiff with a sure and seemingly effortless touch.He was born in Newport, Monmouthshire, in 1957, the son of Phillip Weekes, a mining engineer who later became director of the National Coal Board in South Wales.