OCR Text |
Show Cottonwood Maternity Hospital Mr. and Mr.. Gerald Clio, 1401 W. 7600 So., Wed Jordan, boy, April 20. Mr: and Mrs. Richard Carl Win-berg, Win-berg, 9395 So. 1300 W., Riverton, boy, April 22. . Mr. and Mrs. Robert Lee Petnc, 6790 So. 130 E., Midvale, boy, April 24. themIm1 jjj By LYN CONNELLY A NATIVE of Greece who boxed in our midwest as Nick Dennis because ring announcers couldn't pronounce his Hellenic name and became an actor through one of the most bizarre set of circumstances in the history his-tory of show business, plays Nick, a Greek hospital orderly in ABC-TV's ABC-TV's new medical-drama series, "Ben Casey" . . . Dennis was working his way up through the featherweight ranks and seeking a new manager in New York (1935) when the fabulous newsman news-man Damon Runyon tried to persuade him to leave what he termed "the crooked fight racket" rack-et" for an acting career. Runyon staked a meeting between be-tween Dennis and playwright Howard Lindsay in a Gotham hotel room, with Nick laboring under the impression that Lindsay Lind-say was his prospective fight manager ... As Dennis tells it: "It was hot as blazes and those limeades Runyon kept serving me were refreshing . . . Anyhow, I woke up the next morning with a hangover and a contract in my hand . . ." He had been signed to play one of the leads in "A Slight Case of Murder" but when he protested that he had no acting experience a part of a wise-crack- ing messenger boy was written in and he played that. Then followed a series of featured fea-tured roles in Broadway hits including in-cluding "A Streetcar Named Desire" which ran two years on Broadway . . . Nick's personality and performances established strong links with a number of giants of playdom and newspaper-dom newspaper-dom which led to the stage engagements en-gagements named above and featured roles In topflight motion pictures . . . Besides Lindsay and Runyon, he gained firm support from Jose Ferrer, Elia Kazan, Walter Huston, Spencer Tracy, William Saroyan and Earl Wilson. |