Van Johnson, 92, whose boy-next- door wholesomeness made him a popular Hollywood star in the ’40s and ’50s with such films as “30 Seconds over Tokyo,” “A Guy Named Joe” and “The Caine Mutiny,” died Friday of natural causes.
Johnson died at Tappan Zee Manor, an assisted-living center in Nyack, N.Y., said Wendy Bleisweiss, a close friend. With his tall, athletic build, handsome, freckled face and sunny personality, the red-haired Johnson starred opposite Esther Williams, June Allyson, Elizabeth Taylor and others during his two decades under contract to MGM.
He proved to be a versatile actor, equally at home with comedies (“The Bride Goes Wild,” “Too Young to Kiss”), war movies (“Go for Broke,” “Command Decision”), musicals (“Thrill of a Romance,” “Brigadoon”) and dramas (“State of the Union,” “Madame Curie”). More recently, he had a small role in 1985 in Woody Allen’s “The Purple Rose of Cairo.”
A heartthrob with bobbysoxers — he was called “the non-singing Sinatra” — Johnson married only once. In 1947 at the height of his career, he eloped to Juarez, Mexico, to marry Eve Wynn, who had divorced Johnson’s good friend Keenan Wynn four hours before. The marriage produced a daughter, Schuyler, and ended bitterly 13 years later.
His big break, with Irene Dunne and Spencer Tracy in the wartime fantasy “A Guy Named Joe,” was almost wiped out by tragedy. On April 1, 1943, his DeSoto convertible was struck head-on by another car. “They tell me I was almost decapitated, but I never lost consciousness,” he remembered. “I spent four months in the hospital after they sewed the top of my head back on. I still have a disc of bone in my forehead 5 inches long.”
Johnson’s vogue faded by the mid-’50s, and the film roles became sparse, though he did have a “comeback” movie with Janet Leigh in 1963, “Wives and Lovers.”
Cardinal Avery Dulles, 90, a convert to Roman Catholicism from a prominent American family who was the only U.S. theologian named a cardinal without first becoming a bishop, died Friday. Dulles, a Jesuit, died in an infirmary at Fordham University in New York, where he was a professor for two decades, said the Rev. Jim Martin of America, a Jesuit magazine that regularly published Dulles’ articles.
Pope John Paul II appointed Dulles in 2001 to the College of Cardinals, making him the first American Jesuit and the first U.S. theologian outside of a diocese to be named a cardinal. He was considered the dean of American Catholic theologians.
