She continued to appear in westerns - Vengeance Valley (1951), Return of the Texan (1952), Outlaw Territory (1953) and The Siege at Red River (1954), but these were routine affairs. Many of Dru's roles were, though, becoming blander - she was a social worker whose fiance takes her for granted in Mr Belvedere Rings the Bell (1951), a schoolteacher who brings a father and son closer in My Pal Gus (1953), the sweetheart of an oil-man prospecting in the Gulf of Mexico in one of Anthony Mann's lesser pieces, Thunder Bay (1953), a nurse taming a troublesome convict in Duffy of San Quentin (1954), and a faithful secretary to Liberace as a concert pianist stricken deaf in the disastrous Sincerely Yours (1956). Rudolph Mate's Forbidden (1953) was a sleek thriller in which a hoodlum (Tony Curtis) journeys to Macao to find Dru, a racketeer's widow, and bring her back to the US with the incriminating evidence she possesses. Dru was the wife of a syndicate boss who falls in love with a former telephone engineer who has ruthlessly risen to be head of the gang. Newman's 711 Ocean Drive (1950) was an efficient film noir (allegedly shot under police guard) exposing gambling syndicates. None of Dru's subsequent films approached the quality of these four, but Joseph H. After the climactic fight, Dru delivers an emotional tirade rebuking the two men and provoking a reconciliation, an ending despised by Clift "because Joanne Dru settles the matter and it makes the showdown between me and John Wayne a farce". Dru was the resolute pioneer who refuses to be separated from Clift whatever the hardships. In this sprawling saga which dramatised the first cattle drive from Texas to Kansas, John Wayne and Montgomery Clift (in his first film) played a ruthless rancher and his rebellious adopted son whose tempestuous relationship climaxes with a violent brawl in which they almost kill one another. Two years later she was luckier when Hawks chose her to play opposite John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in his western classic Red River. Based on a 1922 play which had confounded critics by running for five years, its tale of Jewish and Irish families trading racial insults while feuding over the romance of their son and daughter was hopelessly old-fashioned and tasteless and the film received limited distribution. She made her screen debut inauspiciously as star of Abie's Irish Rose (1946). ![]() She entered show business via a modelling career and was performing in a night-club chorus when she met the crooner Dick Haymes, who took her to Hollywood when he was signed for movies and helped her start an acting career. ![]() Her real name was Joanne LaCock and she was born in West Virginia in 1923. A beautiful brunette with high cheekbones and a provocative personality, she provided the sort of feistiness that both Hawks and Ford sought in their leading ladies. Though never a major star, her work in these films - Howard Hawks's Red River, John Ford's cavalry western She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and his elegiac Wagonmaster, plus Robert Rossen's powerful political drama All the King's Men - has ensured her a permanent place in film history. ![]() In 1948-50 Joanne Dru starred in three of the finest Hollywood westerns and an Academy Award-winning drama.
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