Angie Dickinson

Born on September 30, 1931 in Kulm, North Dakota, Angeline Brown was the daughter of the editor of The Kulm Messenger, a local newspaper. When she was eleven years old, her family moved to Burbank, California. Her adolescence was marked because she was an exceptional student, who won a school contest for ‘nerds’. Young Angie was going to be a journalist, but she ended up entering the Miss America contest, and came in second place, which opened the doors of television for her, as she was offered work on various programs, such as The Mickey Rooney Show . Her participation in the series The Millionaire , which was all the rage in the mid-50s, makes young Angie a celebrity. Since then she began to be offered small roles in very mediocre films, such asTragic anxiety , Gun the Man Down , The Black Whip and others equally forgotten, and also in television series, among which Perry Mason stands out . She married Gene Dickinson in 1952, and although she divorced eight years later, she always kept her last name.

Dickinson did not lack for work, but it did not look like he was going to have a memorable career, until his talent was noticed by one of the greats, Howard Hawks , who gave him the role of a lifetime, in Rio Bravo , a classic western. “The most important film of my life”, according to Dickinson herself. In her role as Feathers, an attractive card player, she wowed moviegoers as much as John Wayne ‘s character , who despite his attraction to her, resists formalizing the relationship. “I felt very far from him, because he was a Republican and I was a Democrat, but despite everything it was very comfortable to work with him, because he was a kind man,” she says of her work with Wayne. She became more friends with another of her co-stars,Dean Martin , and ended up being part of a group of his cronies, the famous Rat Pack, led by Frank Sinatra , a man who impressed him. Dickinson was for ten years one of the many occasional lovers of the actor and singer, known for his lively and party character, but also for his great elegance. “My mother was always against her making me an actress. Until I introduced him to Frank Sinatra,” said the actress. She played Sinatra’s frustrated wife in The Gang of Eleven , which also featured Dean Martin and the rest of the ‘Rat Pack’.

The box office success accompanied Angie Dickinson in films such as Captain Newman , The Shadow of a Giant , Gunslinger , Beyond Love , or Jessica , a little gem by Jean Negulesco and Oreste Palella , where she plays the newly arrived midwife to a small town on the Sicilian coast, which leaves all the men fascinated, which causes the women to draw up a plan to get rid of her. She shone as the wife of Sheriff Calder ( Marlon Brando ) in The Human Pack , and also in his two forays into film noir, Point Blank and Underworld., which contains the memorable sequence in which he rides in the race car with John Cassavettes.

The actress was romantically linked to Burt Bacharach , popular pianist and composer of songs like ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head’. The couple, together until 1980, had a daughter, Nikki, who suffered from a severe form of autism known as Asperger syndrome, and who ended up committing suicide at the age of forty.

In the 1970s, Angie Dickinson continued to shoot a lot of movies ( A mom without brakes ), but above all she triumphed on television, with Police Woman , an unforgettable series where she was Sergeant ‘Pepper’ Anderson, who disguised herself to infiltrate the world of crime. underworld. She started the 80s by changing this heroic image, with Dressed to Kill , where her character is much grayer, a dissatisfied married woman who goes to the psychiatrist to solve her obsession with sex. “I can’t play this role. I am the policewoman!” the actress reportedly said when the director, Brian De Palma , sent him her script. Dickinson aged gracefully, delivering impeccable portrayals of mature women in titles like Pay It For It., They also get depressed and Sabrina (and her loves) . She also dropped in for a brief intervention in Ocean’s Eleven , the famous remake of the aforementioned The Gang of Eleven .