Mala Powers

Mary Ellen Powers (Mala Powers), actress: born San Francisco 20 December 1931; married 1954 Monte Vanton (one son; marriage dissolved), 1970 M. Hughes Miller (died 1989); died Burbank, California 11 June 2007.

In 1950, Mala Powers had starring roles in two notable films. She was the victim in Ida Lupino's film Outrage, which caused a minor sensation as the first film to deal frankly with rape, and she played Roxane to José Ferrer's Cyrano in Stanley Kramer's Cyrano de Bergerac. Though her film career failed to maintain such heights, she had a long career in radio, stage and television. She later became a noted university lecturer and teacher, founding the Michael Chekhov Drama Group in Los Angeles and becoming a leading authority on the Chekhov acting technique.

She was born Mary Ellen Powers in 1931 to journalist parents who moved in 1940 to Hollywood, where she started training as an actress at Max Reinhardt's Dramatic Workshop. She made her screen début as a child in Tough as They Come (1942), a low-budget "B" movie in Universal's "Little Tough Guys" series, but on the advice of Reinhardt's wife, the actress Helen Thimig, she continued to study acting rather than seek further child roles. At the age of 16, she started working in radio on such shows as Cisco Kid and Lux Radio Theater.

When Ida Lupino began her search for an unknown to play the lead in Outrage, she stated that that she required someone with "personality, large eyes and a sense of humour", and she interviewed over 200 actresses before selecting Powers. Howard Hughes, whose company RKO was to release the film, gave his approval and placed Mala Powers (as she had become) under contract.

Before Outrage was released, Stanley Kramer heard of Lupino's discovery, viewed a rough cut of the film, and chose Powers to play Roxane in Cyrano de Bergerac. Kramer wrote, "Mala Powers, a young, beautiful, and fairly capable actress, did a competent job, but Ferrer completely held sway over the piece." Ferrer won the Oscar for his performance, and Powers was nominated for a Golden Globe Award.

After co-starring in the gloomy melodrama Edge of Doom (1950), Powers embarked on a USO tour to entertain the troops in Korea, where she contracted a blood disease. An allergy to the drug chloromycetin caused a loss of bone marrow from which it took her nine months to recover.

She returned to the screen with an effective performance as a sultry stripper in John H. Auer's intriguing thriller The City That Never Sleeps (1953), but in such films as City Beneath the Sea (1953), Rage at Dawn, Bengazi (both 1955) and Colossus of New York (1958), her parts were more decorative than dramatic.

Her prolific television work (over 100 shows) included roles in such series as Perry Mason, Maverick, Bonanza and Murder, She Wrote. A long-time advocate of Michael Chekhov's acting methods (an extension of Stanislavsky's), she wrote the preface for his 1991 book On the Technique of Acting and was executrix of his estate. In 2002 she was one of several stars, including Gregory Peck, Patricia Neal, Sharon Gless and Leslie Caron, who appeared in the documentary From Russia to Hollywood, describing the impact that the Russians Chekhov and George Chadanoff had made on screen stars of the Forties and Fifties.

In recent years, as well as lecturing on acting at universities, Powers wrote children's stories, and both wrote and narrated stories for the New York Telephone Company's Dial-A-Children's Story programme. Her last film was the action movie Hitters (2000).

Tom Vallance