By Bob Thomas, Entertainment Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) --Barbara Rush, a popular leading actor in the 1950 and 1960s who co-starred with Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman and other top film performers and later had a thriving TV career, has died. She was 97.
Rush's death was announced by her daughter, Fox News reporter Claudia Cowan, who posted on Instagram that her mother died on Easter Sunday. Additional details were not immediately available.
Cowan praised her mother as "among the last of "Old Hollywood Royalty" and called herself her mother's "biggest fan."
Spotted in a play at the Pasadena Playhouse, Rush was given a contract at Paramount Studios in 1950 and made her film debut that same year with a small role in "The Goldbergs," based on the radio and TV series of the same name.
She would leave Paramount soon after, however, going to work for Universal International and later 20th Century Fox.
"Paramount wasn't geared for developing new talent," she recalled in 1954. "Every time a good role came along, they tried to borrow Elizabeth Taylor."
Rush went on to appear in a wide range of films. She starred opposite Rock Hudson in "Captain Lightfoot" and in Douglas Sirk's acclaimed remake of "Magnificent Obsession," Audie Murphy in "World in My Corner" and Richard Carlson in the 3-D science-fiction classic "It Came From Outer Space," for which she received a Golden Globe for most promising newcomer.
Other film credits included the Nicholas Ray classic "Bigger Than Life"; "The Young Lions," with Marlon Brando, Dean Martin and Montgomery Clift and "The Young Philadelphians" with Newman. She made two films with Sinatra, "Come Blow Your Horn" and the Rat Pack spoof "Robin and the Seven Hoods," which also featured Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.
Rush, who had made TV guest appearances for years, recalled fully making the transition as she approached middle age.
"There used to be this terrible Sahara Desert between 40 and 60 when you went from ingenue to old lady," she remarked in 1962. "You either didn't work or you pretended you were 20."
Instead, Rush took on roles in such series as "Peyton Place," "All My Children," "The New Dick Van Dyke Show" and "7th Heaven."
"I'm one of those kinds of people who will perform the minute you open the refrigerator door and the light goes on," she cracked in a 1997 interview.
Her first play was the road company version of "Forty Carats," a comedy that had been a hit in New York. The director, Abe Burrows, helped her with comedic acting.
"It was very, very difficult for me to learn timing at first, especially the business of waiting for a laugh," she remarked in 1970. But she learned, and the show lasted a year in Chicago and months more on the road.
She went on to appear in such tours as "Same Time, Next Year," "Father's Day," "Steel Magnolias" and her solo show, "A Woman of Independent Means."
Born in Denver, Rush spent her first 10 years on the move while her father, a mining company lawyer, was assigned from town to town. The family finally settled in Santa Barbara, California, where young Barbara played a mythical dryad in a school play and fell in love with acting.
Rush was married and divorced three times — to screen star Jeffrey Hunter, Hollywood publicity executive Warren Cowan and sculptor James Gruzalski.
Bob Thomas, a longtime Associated Press journalist who died in 2014, was the principal writer of this obituary. AP National Writer Hillel Italie contributed to this report from New York.
Sony reports healthy profits on strong sales of sensors and games
Sony's profit rose 69% in July-September from a year earlier on the back of strong sales of its image sensors, games, music and network services, the Japanese electronics and entertainment company said on Friday.
Quarterly profit was 338.5 billion yen ($2.2 billion), up from 200 billion yen in the year-earlier period, while consolidated quarterly sales edged up 3% year-on-year to 2.9 trillion yen ($19 billion).
Tokyo-based Sony's latest quarterly results were boosted by healthy demand around the world for image sensors used in mobile products.
Sales also held up in its video games division. During the latest quarter, 3.8 million PlayStation 5 game consoles were sold globally, compared with 4.9 million units sold the same period a year ago.
Demand remained strong for PS5 game software, according to Sony.
The top-selling music releases from Sony for the quarter included "SOS" by SZA, David Gilmour's "Luck and Strange" and Kenshi Yonezu's "Lost Corner."
One area where Sony's business suffered was its pictures division, including TV shows and movies, which was impacted by production delays caused by the strikes in Hollywood.
Among the recent hit films from Sony was "It Ends With Us," a romantic drama based on a novel.
Sony, which also makes digital cameras and TVs, maintained its 980-billion yen ($6.4 billion) profit forecast for the fiscal year through March 2025, up 1% from the previous fiscal year.
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