Celebrity Biographies
Susan Harrison
He had a very short run, but shared the screen with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis in “Blackmail on Broadway.” Susan Harrison died at the age of 80 on March 5, 2019, in a nursing home in North Hills, California, as Darva Arellano, her daughter, has announced. She “She was incredibly talented, and she was a movie star. For me she was above all my sweet mom ”, she has declared.
Born on August 26, 1938, in Leesburg (Florida), Susan Harrison was the daughter of a married couple of actors dedicated to vaudeville. She graduated from the High School of Performing Arts, a renowned New York institution, before succeeding in the Broadway theater, playing Eliza Doolittle herself in “Pygmalion”, a staging of the famous work by George Bernard Shaw , and Abigail, in “ The Salem Witches” by Arthur Miller .
After a couple of appearances in television series, she made her big screen debut in Blackmail on Broadway (1957), where she was the main female lead. She played Susan Hunsecker, virginal little sister of the powerful unscrupulous columnist played by Burt Lancaster . He believes that she has fallen in love with the wrong man, a jazz musician, so with the help of her hitman Falco ( Tony Curtis ), another real rat, she will try to break the engagement.
Despite the success of the film, which launched Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, Burt Lancaster ‘s own production company , its director, Alexander Mackendric , who was making his Hollywood debut, ended up exhausted by the experience and returned to his native England, where he would occupy few tapes, among them the famous Wind in the sails . Despite her critically praised performance, Susan Harrison was not going to have much projection either, since in the cinema she would only be seen again in When the underworld dictates its law , where she was a member of a ruthless street gang that seeks the silence of the witness to a crime The film was key to the career of Dennis Hopper .
On television, she played a gypsy with whom Michael Landon ‘s character fell in love , in Bonanza . She also starred in one of the most remembered episodes of the Twilight Zone series , “Five characters in search of a way out”, where she was a ballet dancer trapped in a strange room, along with a clown, a homeless man, a military officer and a piper. .
In 1963, Susan Harrison decided to leave her career, to dedicate herself completely to her family. Despite everything, she divorced her husband, Joel Colin, in 1976 to join Cassius Conger, until his death in 1999. One of her daughters, the aforementioned Darva Arellano, enjoys great popularity in the United States, as she won the reality show television show “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?”.