Kathleen Nolan

[The Wolf Man]

Kathleen Nolan (born September 27, 1933) is an American actress. She is sometimes confused with actress Jeanette Nolan. From 1957 to 1962, she played the role of Kate McCoy, a housewife in her late twenties, in the Walter Brennan series The Real McCoys.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Nolan

Life and career
Born as Jocelyn Schrum in St. Louis, Missouri, Nolan achieved fame as the first female President of the Screen Actors Guild (1975–1979, two terms). She is a life member of the Actors Studio [1] and a recipient of the Women in Film Crystal Award.

[The Wolf Man]

[johnbear]

a couple of pics

[The Wolf Man]

[johnbear]

[Findcandor]

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Looking peachy in her 1966 appearance
from BEWITCHED, playing a nymph, the
enemy of witches. She has put a curse
on Darren's ancestor, and it's up to his
wife to go back in time, without use of
her powers, to remove the reason for
that curse. Cool plot!

While he was before my VEF time, I see this thread was lovingly begun (ten years ago, and only five posts to date, for God's sake) by a dear departed member, "The Wolf Man," and every time I see that howling wolf thingamajig, the tears get cued to start dropping.


Another view from BEWITCHED; also pictured
are Elizabeth Montgomery and Dick York.

To tell the truth, I didn't have much familiarity with Kathleen Nolan, although of course I've seen a number of the vehicles she has appeared in. The reason I'm here is because she had a small part in the "New Life, Old Dragons" episode of The Rockford Files from 1976 (where Kathy, the name the actress has been credited as in one quarter of her films and TV shows, played the mom of an adopted Vietnamese refugee who hires the detective hero to find her missing brother; the actress who played this daughter was quite pretty, and since she has been ignored on VEF, the road was paved for an additional post on her):






Kathleen was forty-three-years-old here, but you could tell she used to be a babe, assuming she had been in the acting racket in earlier years (and you can bet she was, having started out over twenty years prior to this episode, when she was twenty; in fact, her second credit was a regular role in a short-lived TV series called Jamie, and for her to have landed a juicy part so soon was very impressive. The Playbill bio from below reveals that her singular TV credit that came earlier, a 1953 episode of The Gulf Playhouse, is what led to being cast on the series, what amounted to a stroke of great luck).




Yet she was still getting "babe" roles even in the mid-1970s; for example, she was cast as the attractive lady whom the newspaper reporter hero from Kolchak: The Night Stalker took advantage of (she's a real estate lady who has dreams of being a journalist) in an excellent episode from the series called "The Vampire," from 1974.






Let's go farther back in the lady's career. After years of acting with her family on a showboat, she got a big role on Broadway, playing Wendy and another character in Peter Pan; the year was 1954 when Ms. Nolan was twenty-one, and the play ran for four months, until the next year. (Two telecasts of the play resulted, this one being the first.) The last photo illustrates the big show she was on, playing the good wife on The Real McCoys, which ran for six years (1957-1963; Kathy did not show up in the last year).

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With Mary Martin in the first two photos, and with Walter Brennan in the last (from a 1959 episode, "The Artist").

She returned to Broadway in 1967, in the play Love in E Flat, which lasted three weeks. The Playbill for the show had the following biographical notes for our lady:

KATHLEEN NOLAN (Amy) is returning to Broadway after an absence of almost twelve years. She last enchanted Broadway audiences as the original Wendy in Peter Pan, with Mary Martin, for which she won two major theater awards. She made her stage debut at thirteen months, aboard the Goldenrod, the last of the Mississippi showboats, on which she lived and worked for sixteen years. She is now an owner of the still-in-operation Goldenrod. Miss Nolan and her acting family also toured with tent shows and chautauquas, and had their own Circle Stock Co. In New York she studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse and Actors' Studio. A Philco Playhouse appearance won her a co-starring role on television's Jamie series. She continued in the theatre in Hide and Seek, and on tour with Detective Story, since then has been an integral part of television. Her versatility has been acclaimed on over 600 [800?] guest star appearances. Kate McCoy in the long-running series The Real McCoys established her as one of the major television stars and an international name; as well as winning her two Emmy nominations, and the TV Guide and TV Editor Awards. She has since starred in her own television series Broadside, for ABC. Her free time has been spent in major summer and winter theatres, playing Carousel, Molly Brown, Ready When You Are C.B. and Mr. Krasna's Sunday in New York. She received a Presidential Citation for her recent tour of Vietnam. When asked why she had waited so long to return to Broadway she replied, "Frankly, nobody asked me before!"



Judging from the last two photos above, the show gave a rare opportunity to show off her often concealed cleavage.



With Kevin McCarthy.

Speaking of cleavage, a tiny hint of boob meat was offered the second time Kathleen appeared on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1964, in an episode called "Beast in View." You can see how they made her out to look almost like Charlene Tilton in Monster, maybe a sign of how she wished to get away from her Goody Two-Shoes roles. (In the show, she came across as the obvious villain, but naturally there was a twist.)



The delightful blonde in the last photo would be Susan Oliver.

Her first exposure on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour was two years earlier, in "Annabel," the title role played by Susan Oliver, whom psychopath Dean Stockwell (pictured above) has a fixation for. (In turn, it was Kathleen who was obsessed by Dean Stockwell.) This was the first of two television shows our lady co-acted in with Susan Oliver, and Kathy played second fiddle to the popular blonde in at least this one. Poor Kathy still can't get out from under Susan's shadow; on Kathy's IMDb page, the identifying video that was put up was really about Susan Oliver. (Kathy was just a talking head, among others who gushed about Susan.)






After collecting the photos from above and below, I noticed a good few had already been featured on the thread, but I'm putting them up anyway. In a 1963 episode of The Untouchables called "Blues for a Gone Goose," the Goose of the title named after a jazz club owner who gets pressured by a gangster (played by the dangerous Marc Lawrence; he is in the third photo below, and a couple of others above). Kathleen is the gangster's wife, and the good guy of the show is trumpeter Robert Duvall (last in top row above), who starts making music with her.




This next photo (first one below) is of Kathy with the "manager" of Charlie's Angels (David Doyle), in a 1979 episode entitled, "Terror on Skis." Following shot is from the short-lived TV series Custer, where the soldier (played by Wayne Maunder, pictured) who bought the farm in his famous last stand was depicted as a good guy. (It was 1967, and the U.S. general still enjoyed a good reputation.)

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In 1964, Kathy starred in a short-lived series called Broadside, which was sort of like McHale's Navy, but with women. The ones in the jeep in the first photo below are Lois Roberts, Jimmy Boyd, Sheila James, and Joan Staley. The second shot is a frame grab from the first episode, which was made available on YouTube (as were a good few other episodes). Kathy looks pretty hot in the TV Guide cover finishing the set.



As "The Wolf Man" wrote in this first post from 2013 atop this page, "Nolan achieved fame as the first female President of the Screen Actors Guild (1975–1979, two terms)." Below, posing with Charlton Heston while serving in this role, during a S.A.G. outing in 1977.


(Photo by Ron Galella)


Kathy married a man (seen below; he also happened to be her agent, and became a success in the entertainment biz) in 1962, a union that lasted two-and-a-half years, during which she bore a son.



These next photos are of actors Nick Adams and Rod McKuen, where both may have served as romantic interests. All three shots are from around 1957, and taking place in Los Angeles.

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The video from Kathleen's IMDb page that celebrates Susan Oliver is mostly (if not entirely) excerpted from the 2014 documentary, The Green Girl (so named after Ms. Oliver's notable role of a green-skinned alien from Star Trek), and here is how our lady looked, when she was eighty-one or so.




Kathleen Nolan's last film role was in the heartwarming (and sad) The Last Movie Star from 2017, where Burt Reynolds, playing a legendary movie star, comes to terms with his fame from the past, and the regrets of life. At one point he visits his one true love, first wife Kathleen (who has Alzheimer's).



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Touchingly, the scene juxtaposes with views from a 1964 episode of Gunsmoke entitled "Comanches Is Soft," in which both actors had appeared.

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Our lady will turn ninety in this year's 27th day of September.













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