Touchdown a film position that had been earmarked for Elvis Presley; being spoofed on The Flintstones; mobbed commonly by teenage women – all proof that the singer and actor James Darren, who has died aged 84, was briefly a pop-culture phenomenon.
He first made his mark in a “seashore occasion” film – the archaic style that confirmed youngsters frolicking within the sand to pop music for 90 minutes or so, with a perfunctory light-hearted or romantic narrative connected. The craze, which lasted for a lot of the Sixties, is mostly agreed to have begun with Gidget (1959), starring Sandra Dee as Francine, a Malibu teenager who reveals minimal curiosity in boys till she is rescued from the ocean by the surfer Moondoggie. She then falls in together with his seashore buddies (who nickname her “Gidget”, a mix of “lady” and “midget”) whereas falling in love with him.
Performed by the cherubic, clean-cut Darren, Moondoggie – actual title Jeffrey Matthews – gazes into her eyes and croons: “There’s no such factor as the subsequent smartest thing to like.”
Columbia marketed the movie as a celebration of “the seashore era” and boasted that it confirmed youngsters might be “delightfully juvenile with out being delinquent”. Insurgent With no Trigger this was not.
The half had been supplied to Presley, however he was busy together with his navy service. Darren, the epitome of healthful, puppyish attraction, dispelled all ideas of the King as quickly as he appeared on display. In addition to boosting him as an actor, the movie launched his singing profession as a part of the Colpix Information steady, which additionally included a pre-Monkees Davy Jones.
Darren had been singing since his early teenagers – “Doing three or 4 weddings or bar mitzvahs every week” – in Philadelphia earlier than, as he informed the Baltimore Solar in 1983, transferring on to “locations with a stripper and a saxophonist on the invoice”. He was professionally unproved, nonetheless, and the studio initially thought-about having him lip-sync to a recording.
Amongst his post-Gidget hits was the infectious Goodbye Merciless World. With its jaunty circus-style chorus, it turned a high three Billboard single in 1961 and was not too long ago featured in Steven Spielberg’s nostalgic drama The Fabelmans (2022).
One newspaper sighed over Darren’s “mile-high pompadour and dreamy eyes”. Followers chased him on the street, even yanking him out of a San Francisco studio in a single occasion. “They broke down the plate glass window and pulled me out on the sidewalk,” he claimed. “They began to tear my garments off … I bear in mind mendacity there out on the road on my again and searching up in any respect these faces within the sky, an entire ring of ’em round me. And what? I beloved it. Beloved it!”
In 1964, he offered the singing voice for Yogi Bear in Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear! A 12 months later, he was the inspiration for the pop star Jimmy Darrock in an episode of The Flintstones, the place his animated alter-ego is proven performing Wax Up Your Boards to the adoring cries of feminine followers. Listening to the radio, Wilma and Betty nod their heads approvingly whereas Fred and Barney are unimpressed. Knowledgeable that Jimmy’s browsing anthem is the most well-liked tune within the nation, Fred splutters: “Tune? I assumed we had been tuned in to the mating name of the brontosaurus.”
Darren made two additional Gidget movies, taking part in reverse a special feminine lead in each. In Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961), Dee was changed by Deborah Walley, whereas Cindy Carol took the title position in Gidget Goes to Rome (1963). He later described each sequels, in addition to one other of his seashore occasion films, For These Who Suppose Younger (1964), as “dreadful”.
Thankfully, he had different irons within the fireplace, and expertise to burn. He had already impressed in Drum Loopy (1959), aka The Gene Krupa Story, a biopic of the pioneering jazz drummer performed by Sal Mineo. In what the critic Tim Lucas known as “probably [a] career-best efficiency” which “very almost steals the movie”, Darren performed Krupa’s greatest good friend and bandmate, the fictional trumpeter Eddie Sirota, and will get to sing Let There Be Love.
He was again on the brass in Venus in Furs (1969), aka Paroxismus, albeit with extra ugly outcomes. Discovering a trumpet buried on a seashore, he begins taking part in it, seemingly summoning the corpse of a lady who was murdered at an orgy. The movie ends with the trumpeter discovering his personal corpse – “It’s me! I’ve been useless on a regular basis!” – although the New York Occasions famous that this conclusion “does probably not make clear the plot”.
He was born in Philadelphia, to William Ercolani, an electrician-turned-tailor, and Virginia (nee Lipiano), and educated at Epiphany of Our Lord parish faculty. He went to Hollywood in 1954 “to get found” and later studied performing in New York underneath Stella Adler. Altering his surname to Darren after the Kaiser-Darrin sports activities automotive, he reasoned that Ercolani was not merely unmemorable however “too lengthy for a marquee”. He was put underneath a seven-year contract to Columbia after assembly and impressing Joyce Selznick, niece of the producer David O Selznick.
He made his movie debut as a teenage gang chief in Rumble on the Docks (1956). Within the wake of his success in Gidget, he starred in All of the Younger Males, with Sidney Poitier accountable for an all-white platoon throughout the Korean conflict; Let No Man Write My Epitaph (each 1960), wherein Darren performed the son of a assassin who died within the electrical chair; and the favored wartime journey The Weapons of Navarone (1961) with Gregory Peck.
He was a time-travelling scientist within the short-lived TV collection The Time Tunnel (1966-67), produced by Irwin Allen, and continued performing on tv all through the Nineteen Seventies, popping up as a visitor star on Hawaii 5-O, Fantasy Island and Charlie’s Angels. However his profession had already branched off into cabaret after he met Buddy Hackett in 1970 and shaped a comedy-and-music partnership with him. Within the late 70s and 80s, Darren was a fixture on the cabaret circuit, with residencies in Atlantic Metropolis and Las Vegas. “I hit the nightclubs and by no means regarded again,” he stated.
In 1982, he was forged as a good-natured cop within the prime-time collection TJ Hooker, starring William Shatner and Heather Locklear, and stayed with the present for 4 years. After taking the reins on one episode, he developed an urge for food for guiding, and amassed credit on reveals together with The A-Staff, Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place.
Memorable later performing roles included a wry flip because the lounge singer Vic Fontaine, who seems as a hologram in Star Trek Deep House 9.
Darren broke a 16-year hiatus from performing for what was to be his closing film, Fortunate (2017), wherein he starred reverse Harry Dean Stanton. As a reformed scallywag (described by this paper as a “Christopher Walken soundalike smoothie”), he made a powerful exhibiting, and Selection predicted a potential profession renaissance: “If the appropriate folks see Fortunate, it may do for Darren what Jackie Brown did for Robert Forster.”
The proper folks clearly weren’t paying consideration. However Gidget was sufficient. Requested in 1983 whether or not he nonetheless watched his previous films on tv, Darren stated: “Not if I’ve eaten.”
He’s survived by his spouse, the actor Evy Norlund, whom he married in 1960, and their sons, Christian and Anthony, in addition to by one other son, the tv reporter Jim Moret, from his first marriage, to Gloria Terlitsky, which resulted in divorce in 1958.
