Leslie Parrish

Leslie Parrish

Parrish with Gary Lockwood in Follow the Sun, 1962.
Born Marjorie Hellen
March 18, 1935
Melrose, Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation Actress
Years active 1954–1978
Spouse(s) Eric Marlow (1956–1961) (divorced)
Richard Bach (1977–1999) (divorced)

Leslie Parrish (born March 18, 1935) is an American actress. She worked under her birth name, Marjorie Hellen, until she changed it in 1959.

Education

Parrish was born in Melrose, Massachusetts. She later lived in Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania, and was a promising piano student at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music. She discovered that by modeling she could earn more money than as a concert pianist. She came to New York City in November 1953. Before modeling she worked as a waitress in a diner.

She joined the Home Theatre Group of professional performers who put on plays at a private theater in Hollywood. Ruth Warrick and Mark Herron were also members. Parrish believed the experience of facing a live audience made her a better actress and more capable of transforming a scripted part into a three-dimensional human being.

Movie actress

Parrish signed with 20th Century Fox in 1954, when she was 19. The studio gave her statistics as 5 feet 6 inches, with measurements of 35-24-34. Her hair is reddish gold, and she has gray eyes with a cream complexion. In May 1956, Parrish signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Her two most significant roles are as lithe Daisy Mae in Li'l Abner (1959) and as the doomed Jocelyn Jordan in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). In Portrait of a Mobster (1961) Parrish plays the wife of a detective who consorts with criminals. She is the daughter of a bootlegger who rebuffs the advances of Dutch Schultz, played by Vic Morrow. Eventually she becomes disillusioned with the corruption among the police force, and she leaves her husband to live with Schultz.

She made a number of films of the B-movie and science fiction genres. Among these are Sex and the Single Girl (1964), Three on a Couch (1966), The Money Jungle (1968), The Candy Man (1969), The Devil's 8 (1969), Brother, Cry for Me (1970), The Giant Spider Invasion (1975), and Crash! (1977).

Television

In 1954, NBC-TV borrowed the studios of WPIX every weekday morning. Parrish was employed by NBC as its 'human test pattern' in regard to color tones. She sat for hours on a stool in front of color cameras, while engineers adjusted the tints and the lighting, and worked with costumes in different tints. Parrish was seldom seen on WNBC, Channel 4, since most of her color work was performed on closed-circuit television.

Parrish made numerous television appearances including three episodes of Perry Mason in 1960-1961, playing three different characters: Hope Sutherland in "The Case of the Madcap Modiste," Vivian Ames in "The Case of the Impatient Partner," and Veronica Temple in "The Case of the Left-Handed Liar." She was in an episode of the Kraft Suspense Theatre, "The Kamchatka Incident" (1964). She performed with John Forsythe in a drama which concerned a U.S.-bound airplane's encounter with Russian fighter planes above Siberia - she had worked with Forsythe in a 1962 episode of Bachelor Father, playing petulant actress Kim Fontaine. A part as Lieutenant Carolyn Palamas, who becomes an object of obsession for the god Apollo in the Star Trek episode "Who Mourns for Adonais?" (1967).

She also had a featured role during Season 3 of "The Big Valley" in the episode entitled "Bounty on a Barkley" (Episode #230), which aired: February 26, 1968. She played a love interest of Nick Barkley (played by Peter Breck). Her character was named Layle Johnson, who was constantly let down and often (and currently) estranged from her Bounty-Hunting, professional killer of a husband; all the while Nick not knowing she was married.

Parrish made an appearance with Hollywood Squares host Peter Marshall and gravel-voiced Andy Devine in a skit titled "Love and the Mountain Cabin" on the December 8, 1969 episode of Love American Style. She also appeared in an episode of The Wild Wild West and Mannix. In the 1971 series Bearcats!, she played Liz Blake, an ex-love of lead character Hack Brackett, who is helped by him when her oil business is threatened by a series of mysterious fires.

In the television series Logan's Run (1977), Parrish played the commander of an alien space ship on a Noah's Ark-type mission to gather and study specimens of beings from planets in different solar systems.

Marriages

Parrish married Eric Marlow in 1956 and divorced him in May 1961.

She married Richard Bach, the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, in 1977, whom she met during the making of the movie of the same name.[1] She was a major element in two of his subsequent books—The Bridge Across Forever and One—which primarily focused on their relationship and Bach's concept of soulmates.[1] They divorced in 1997.

Partial filmography

Selected television appearances

References

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Leslie Parrish (I) Biography". Retrieved 2007-03-13.

External links