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Barbara Rush, the supremely poised actress who rose to fame with supporting roles in 1950s films like \u201cMagnificent Obsession\u201d and \u201cThe Young Lions,\u201d died on Sunday at her home in Westlake Village, Calif., in Los Angeles County. She was 97.<\/p>\n
The death, in a senior care facility, was confirmed by her daughter, Claudia Cowan.<\/p>\n
If Ms. Rush\u2019s portrayals had one thing in common, it was a gentle, ladylike quality, which she put to use in films of many genres. She was Jane Wyman\u2019s concerned stepdaughter in the 1954 romantic drama \u201cMagnificent Obsession\u201d<\/a> and Dean Martin\u2019s loyal wartime girlfriend in \u201cThe Young Lions\u201d (1958), set during World War II. In 1950s science fiction pictures like \u201cIt Came From Outer Space\u201d and \u201cWhen Worlds Collide,\u201d she was the small-town heroine, the scientist\u2019s daughter, the Earthling most likely to succeed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In both \u201cThe Young Philadelphians\u201d (1959), with Paul Newman, and \u201cThe World in My Corner,\u201d a 1956 boxing film with Audie Murphy, Ms. Rush was the prized rich girl. In \u201cBigger Than Life\u201d (also 1956), with James Mason, she played a vapid but supportive wife. And in \u201cCome Blow Your Horn\u201d (1963), with Frank Sinatra, she played the only \u201cnice girl\u201d in a swinging Manhattan bachelor\u2019s life.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But she did transcend type occasionally, as an Indian agent\u2019s bigoted wife, for instance, in the western \u201cHombre\u201d (1967), with Paul Newman. She also played Kit Sargent, the Hollywood screenwriter attracted to and repelled by the ruthless title character in the classic 1959 television production of \u201cWhat Makes Sammy Run?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n For much of her career, Ms. Rush was treated as a pretty face more than a serious actress. But she did receive a Golden Globe in 1954 as most promising newcomer, and she won the Sarah Siddons Award as Chicago\u2019s top actress of the 1969-70 season for her stage role as a mature woman courted by a younger man in the Jay Presson Allen comedy \u201cForty Carats.\u201d<\/p>\n Her stage work, in fact, became a second career. Her best-known role was in \u201cA Woman of Independent Means,\u201d a one-woman epistolary saga. But when the show opened on Broadway in 1984, the nicest thing Frank Rich, writing in The New York Times<\/a>, said about it was that Ms. Rush was \u201ca handsome woman who tries terribly hard to be ingratiating.\u201d She went on to play the role, however, for appreciative audiences throughout North America.<\/p>\n Barbara Rush was born on Jan. 4, 1927, in Denver. Her father, Roy, was a lawyer for a mining company who died when she was a teenager. Her mother, Nora (Simonson) Rush, had been a homemaker but took up acting around that time to support the family. She later became a nurse. Barbara attended the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she played Birdie, the guileless alcoholic, in the blistering \u201cLittle Foxes\u201d by Lillian Hellman.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 1950, when she was 23, Ms. Rush received a scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse Theater Arts College and was signed to a contract at Paramount Pictures. She made her film debut that year in the family comedy \u201cThe Goldbergs.\u201d<\/p>\n Television was always a part of her career, with guest appearances beginning in the 1950s. Although she never had a hit series, she did star in several short-lived ones, most memorably as a wealthy Florida wife in \u201cFlamingo Road\u201d (NBC, 1981-82). She was also a newspaper\u2019s Washington correspondent in \u201cSaints and Sinners\u201d (NBC, 1962-63), an abused wife for one season (1968-69) of ABC\u2019s \u201cPeyton Place,\u201d and a soap opera star during the last year (CBS, 1973-74) of \u201cThe New Dick Van Dyke Show.\u201d<\/p>\n Her final screen appearances were as a recurring character in the family-values series \u201c7th Heaven,\u201d between 1997 and 2007.<\/p>\n Ms. Rush married and divorced three times. Her first husband (1950-55) was the actor Jeffrey Hunter<\/a>. Her second (1959-70) was Warren Cowan<\/a>, a founder of the Rogers & Cowan public relations firm. Her last marriage (1970-75) was to Jim Gruzalski, a sculptor.<\/p>\n In addition to Ms. Cowan, from Ms. Rush\u2019s second marriage, she is survived by a son from her first marriage, Christopher Hunter, and four grandchildren. For about 50 years, she lived in Beverly Hills at a house once occupied by the Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper.<\/p>\n Ms. Rush continued acting until her early 90s<\/a> and professed an overwhelming love of her work. In 1997, she told The San Francisco Chronicle<\/a>, \u201cI\u2019m one of those kinds of people who will perform the minute you open the refrigerator door and the light goes on.\u201d<\/p>\n Alex Traub contributed reporting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n