Friday, March 25, 2011

Jack Kelly: Happy Birthday Nancy Kelly

"TDS" remembers Jack Kelly's older sister, acclaimed actress Nancy Kelly, who was born 90 years ago today in Lowell, MA. Ms. Kelly is shown above
at age 18 as "Zee" in the 1939
Posted by La Bartista at 11:25 PM
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5 comments:

  1. Michael PowersMarch 26, 2011 at 3:20 AM

    Good to see her on the site!

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  2. AnonymousMarch 26, 2011 at 1:59 PM

    Very nice photo of a young Nancy! Thanks for sharing this.

    -Janet T.

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  3. Michael PowersMarch 29, 2011 at 4:15 PM

    It's such a weird thing. As I pointed out on his article in Wikipedia (before the remark was cut several years later), Jack Kelly was overshadowed by a sibling in both fiction and reality!

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  4. Michael PowersMarch 29, 2011 at 4:44 PM

    The funny thing is how much Nancy Kelly and Jack Kelly resembled each other, and you can see it in a lot of photos. She could never have been on "Maverick" unless she was playing Bart's sister or something, which is probably the reason she never appeared on the show despite almost every other actress in her category turning up there sooner or later as Bret, Bart, Beau, and Brent relentlessly churned through a hundred leading ladies. Are there any pictures of the two of them together as adults? I've never seen one, have you, Bartista? It would've been great had they made her a regular as Bart and Brent's card-shuffling sister, but they never would've thought of it back in those pre-Xena days, I guess.

    I just realized how much Diana Barrymore, the actress (John Barrymore's daughter) who was the subject of the Errol Flynn movie "Too Much, Too Soon," resembled her niece Drew Barrymore. In some photographs it's impossible to tell them apart. The Barrymore babes looked different in profile, though, while the performing Kellys most resembled each other from that angle.

    It's odd, but I'm not the first to point out that you can barely tell what Nancy Kelly looked like from watching "Jesse James" even though she was the leading lady. All the close-ups were reserved for Tyrone Power and young Henry Fonda--long, lingering ones, while Nancy Kelly's whizzed by in a flash that defies even pausing a DVD. She made a lot of movies (look at the list on her Wikipedia page, which I wrote, then I wrote a tiny article for each film). Her career was going strongest in the late '30s and '40s (she did "Jesse James" then "Stanley and Livingstone" opposite Spencer Tracy the same year), and she was quite the knockout. I was amused to read Dick Cavett mention to Kliph Nesteroff in a superb online interview recently that "The Bad Seed" was her first movie and that she'd only done stage work previously. "The Bad Seed," with her only Oscar nomination, was her 34th film.

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  5. PatMay 21, 2011 at 4:39 AM

    How sweet of you to have Jack's big sister on here! :D

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