Angie Dickinson turns 95 on Wednesday, September 30. She was born Angeline Brown that day in 1931 in Kulm, North Dakota, according to Wikipedia, and her breakthrough came in 1959 opposite John Wayne in Howard Hawks’s ‘Rio Bravo,’ which won her the Golden Globe for New Star of the Year. “It was heaven,” she told Yahoo Entertainment in a rare 2023 interview. “He was so respectful of my freshness.” She hated the hat she wore in her first scene, she added, “but I didn’t win.” A year later she was holding her own with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin in the original ‘Ocean’s 11.’
Sinatra was more than a co-star. “We just liked each other. I was crazy about him,” she said in the same interview. “He was absolutely the love of my life. Though I would not have wanted to be married to him.” She did marry twice, first to Gene Dickinson from 1952 to 1960 and then to composer Burt Bacharach from 1965 to 1981. Their daughter, Nikki, was autistic and died by suicide, according to Wikipedia, a loss Dickinson has spoken about with great tenderness. From 1974 to 1978 she was Sergeant “Pepper” Anderson on ‘Police Woman,’ which brought her a Golden Globe and three Emmy nominations, though she has said the series cost her in Hollywood. “It hurt my movie career,” she told Yahoo. “You can be a star on TV and they don’t give a s—.”
Why Angie Dickinson stepped away from acting
Brian De Palma’s ‘Dressed To Kill’ in 1980 gave her a Saturn Award and a famously shocking opening act. Her last credit was the 2009 Hallmark film ‘Mending Fences,’ and her last public appearance was introducing a restored ‘Rio Bravo’ at the TCM Classic Film Festival in April 2023, according to Yahoo. She keeps to herself now, a vegetarian who admits to the occasional plate of country-fried chicken. Ninety-five years on, the girl from Kulm is still the one the cowboys in ‘Rio Bravo’ could not stop looking at.
