News

Dick Contino, a hip-swiveling accordionist who was a regular on The Ed Sullivan Show and starred in the 1958 rock 'n' roll film Daddy-o, has died. He was 87.

Contino died Wednesday in his hometown of Fresno, Calif., the Las Vegas Review Journal reported.

Popular with the kids back in the day, Contino lost a drag race to Sandra Giles and portrayed a singer and truck driver in Daddy-o — which was scored by John Williams in his feature debut — and then appeared in The Beat Generation (1959), Girls Town (1959) and The Big Night (1960).

By some...

Sandra Giles, an actress and Hollywood pinup queen who appeared in such films as Daddy-o and Elvis Presley's It Happened at the World's Fair, has died. She was 84.

Giles died in Los Angeles on Christmas Day after a battle with bullous pemphigoid, an autoimmune skin disease, her daughter, singer Sandra Piller, told The Hollywood Reporter.

In her big-screen debut, Giles bested singer-accordionist Dick Contino in a drag race and danced to some rock 'n' roll in Daddy-o (1958), which was scored by John Williams in his feature debut. The starlet also appeared in The Matchmaker, A Lust to Kill and...

When it comes to actresses, the movie business has always had an eye for beautiful faces. Unfortunately, it has often only been an afterthought as to whether or not that beautiful face could do anything other than be beautiful. Leaf through the archives of any of the movie glamour magazines from long ago and you’ll find them a cemetery of beautiful faces primped and hyped by the Hollywood PR machine to be The Next Great Thing. Some never made it past a screen test, while others managed to survive a few screen roles, but through lack of talent, charisma, the right roles — whatever mysterious magic it is that causes a performer to click with an audience — soon disappeared, never to be heard of again. It’s a long, looong casualty list of forgotten pretties like Merrilyn Grix, Eleanor Counts, Kathy Marlowe, Myrna Dell, Sandra Giles, Jean Colleran, Sunnie O’Dea,...