Eldergays, please tell me about Tuesday Weld
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Was she very famous ? Was she a major teen idol,  the like of Natalie Wood's magnitude ? Were people accross the nation fangirling over her ? What should I see ? What was her bravura piece ? I only ...
the DataLounge
I worked in a hospital that had a crazy ass dr on staff in the 1990s. He wore a Ben Casey shirt to work every day. He’d had some minor fame as an anti-drug, singing doctor in the late 50s or early 60s. He brought in his album covers and a teen celeb magazine he’d appeared in. I flipped through the magazine and there was a story on the handsome, brooding young star Anthony Perkins. The story focused on how seriously Perkins took his acting. He was an artist. He wanted to be the best. He still took acting classes. He read about all the famous actors throughout history. He was so busy focusing on his career, the story said, that he didn’t have time to date.

In the late 50s there was a game show host named Hal March III. The joke went, if Tuesday Weld married Hal March, her name would be Tuesday March the Third. Tuesday Weld was all over fan magazines back in the 60s, much more beautiful than most starlets of the time, but never really had the career she should have.

And how COOL is Sheila Kuehl? LOVE her!

Pauline Karl loved her.

She gave very natural performances and had an exuberance that fit perfectly with a film like Lord Love a Duck, though I don’t really see that film as a comedy, or if it is, it’s very dark.

Pretty Poison is a nice companion piece to LLaD. She’s a teenage femme fatale.

In neither film would you want to be her mother!

Jane Fonda never interracts with other big female names in these home movies. She is always away, in her own circle. with men only. Odd. I read her book. It's obvious she didn't like Natalie and was jealous of her for getting the part she wanted in 'splendour'. She throws some pretty bad shade over Nat, but you would think she didn't know her personally at all when you read the book. And then you see she spent days at the beach with her.... Not good Jane. Tuesday and Natalie have a lot in common I think.

[quote]I just watched a short YouTube tribute to Dudley Moore. Dudley was a huge deal in the 60s (with Peter Cook) in the UK. Sad end of lif Dudley had

I was a bigger fan of Dudley (and Cook) than Tuesday Weld, she was before my time. I saw her as some type of blond bimbo starlet from the 1960s. I admit knowing little about her, I was quite shocked when I heard she got married to Dudley. Besides being part of the very famous Dudley & Moore comedy duo as well as an actor, Dudley was a very accomplished jazz pianist. I have his tribute album to Errol Garner. Yes, what a sad ending for such a talented man, his last wife seemed like a total evil beast.

Tuesday Weld didn't have a very happy childhood. She was put to work as a child model when she was very young, and then started TV and film work when she was a teen. This caused problems for her later as an adult, which in turn affected her career in a negative way.

She was charming in the Dobie Gillis TV show, where she first gained fame. She played a beautiful teenage flirt who was only interested in money. Poor Dobie didn't have a chance with her, but she loved to drive him crazy anyway.

She left TV and started making movies as a teen star, and her talents were wasted in sex kitten roles comparable to Ann-Margret. She played Bob Hope's teen daughter in I'll Take Sweden, a godawful comedy that was the nadir of her career. Like Ann-Margret, it took years before she was taken seriously as an actress, and she missed out on a lot of good roles, such as Lolita.

She slowly built up her reputation by starring in small films like Lord Love a Duck , Pretty Poison and especially Play It As It Lays, which garnered her excellent reviews. None of these movies made a lot of money, however.

She got a supporting actress nomination for Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Then made another acclaimed film called Who'll Stop the Rain. But her career never really reached the heights of contemporaries such as Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Faye Dunaway or even Ann-Margret.

She started making interior TV movies, such as playing the Lana Turner role in a remake of Madame X, before she gave it up and sank into obscurity. Her last credit listed on IMDB was in 2001, but she had not been very busy for a while.

She was truly beautiful and a good actress who never had the breaks or the drive to pursue a career.

Tuesday Weld turned down some high-profile roles in the late 60s:

Rosemary's Baby (1968)

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969)

Cactus Flower (1969)

True Grit (1969)

"Around this time Weld became famous for turning down roles in films that succeeded at the box office, such as Bonnie and Clyde, Rosemary's Baby, True Grit, Cactus Flower and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. In a 1971 interview with the New York Times, Weld explained that she had chosen to reject these roles precisely because she believed they would be commercial successes: "Do you think I want a success? I refused 'Bonnie and Clyde' because I was nursing at the time, but also because deep down I knew it was going to be a huge success. The same was true of 'Bob and Carol and Fred and Sue' or whatever it was called. It reeked of success.""

Classic DL post from the older thread on Tuesday Weld:

If Sienna Miller was talented, if Jennifer Jason Leigh washed her hair or if Sandra Dee ate a sandwich, Tuesday Weld would still exist. The oddest living movie star we have. She did not do it all, she did many of the same things over and over again. Then a few things different. Then no more. And she lived to not tell and have no one wonder. That's one definition of success.

Tuesday Weld was one of the lead contenders for the part of Frances Farmer in "Frances" (1982). Executive Producer Mel Brooks wanted to cast her, but by the 1980s, Weld's film career wasn't exactly on fire. So director Graeme Clifford convinced him to take a risk and go with Jessica Lange, whose stalled career was starting to warm up again. 1970s Lange bared a striking resemblance to Weld.

Ironically (since Natalie Wood was mentioned), Wood was attached to play Frances Farmer since the 1960s, but the project never got off the ground. By the time this iteration was ready to go into production, Wood's film career, like Weld's, was on life support.

I've always thought Tuesday Weld would have been perfect as Rosemary Woodhouse.

From the "Rosemary's Baby" page at IMDb:

Casting for this film presented its own problems: Roman Polanski at first saw Rosemary as an "All-American Girl" and sought Tuesday Weld for the lead, but she passed. Jane Fonda was then approached, but turned down the offer so she could make Barbarella (1968) in Europe with then-husband Roger Vadim. According to his memoirs, Polanski for a while had the idea of having his future wife Sharon Tate on the part of Rosemary, but he decided not to because it would have been unethical. Other actresses considered for the part were Julie Christie, Elizabeth Hartman and Joanna Pettet. Robert Evans suggested Mia Farrow based on her TV work and her media appeal (at the time she was Mrs. Frank Sinatra).