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Laura Wagner
Rosemarie Stack, widow of actor Robert Stack passed away on Sunday, January 20, 2019 at her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico. She was 86. A B movie actress who was married for many years to actor Robert Stack, she was one of three children, born in Butte, Montana, and grew up in Tacoma, Washington. "At school in Tacoma, I did a lot of light opera things; my sister Claire, the whole family was very musical... I loved to dance, I took dance most of my life, and so I did a lot of the choreography and I also did parts. Really, we all started performing when we were quite young." After one semester at Tacoma Community College, the beautiful Bowe found work as a model in Tacoma and Seattle. In 1950, she won the “Miss Tacoma” beauty contest. The following year, as her brother was leaving for a hitch in the Korean War, Rosemarie and her mother went to Los Angeles to say goodbye to him. Deciding to stay in California, Bowe went looking for modeling work and she was very successful with her dark beauty and measurements (36-25-36); she was featured on the covers of the magazines EYE, TEMPO, BLIGHTLY, etc., and the big one: LIFE (June 23, 1952). Small roles in movies were also offered her, and Bowe did some uncredited parts at MGM during this time. Columbia president Harry Cohn had seen her LIFE cover and she was put under contract. He promised her a major role in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953), but director Fred Zinnemann balked at the casting choice and Donna Reed was awarded the part instead. "If I had done FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, my whole life would have been different, so it just wasn't meant to be," she said. Columbia loaned her out to R.K. Productions for the lead with John Agar in THE GOLDEN MISTRESS, a treasure-hunt adventure shot on location in Haiti. When she got back to the States, she was in her agent's office when she met actor Robert Stack, and the two started dating. "This was in '53, around Christmas. Bob was doing THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY with John Wayne and I was about to do THE ADVENTURES OF HAJJI BABA so right off the bat, neither one of us had time to see each other that much." By this time, Bowe had asked for and received her release from Columbia. Some TV roles followed (THE FORD TELEVISION THEATRE, THE LONE WOLF, IT'S A GREAT LIFE, etc.) and some featured film roles. Although columnist James Bacon wrote that Bowe was "a young actress with a face like Grace Kelly and a body like Marilyn Monroe," it didn't get her very far, and she never made an impression as an actress. The one she made an impression on was Stack: After two years of dating, they wed in 1956; she was 23, he 36. That year, Bowe was cast in her second and last movie lead, the low-budget indie western THE PEACEMAKER. Marriage curbed any ambition she might have had; she and Stack had two children, Elizabeth (born in 1957) and Charles (1958). Bowe didn't retire completely; there were sporadic TV guest parts (THE DICK POWELL THEATRE, THE THIRD MAN, BURKE'S LAW, OWEN MARSHALL, COUNSELOR AT LAW, etc.) and small roles mostly in telemovies, latterly billed as Rosemarie Stack. Rosemarie appeared with her husband numerous times on screen, including the films DIE HÖLLE VON MACAO, MURDER ON FLIGHT 502, and BIG TROUBLE, and on a 1960 episode of THIS IS YOUR LIFE devoted to him; a proposed small role for her in Stack’s JOHN PAUL JONES (1959) fell through. When not acting, Bowe did charity work and participated in celebrity fashion shows. She and her husband liked to sail, skeet shoot, and play tennis, and were a fixture on the Hollywood party scene. Bowe was lauded for her style, and was consistently named one of the best dressed women. In 1969, she was driving a rental car, with two friends as passengers, to pick up Fred MacMurray and June Haver from the airport. The car's steering wheel locked and the automobile crashed into a concrete wall and plummeted into a ditch. Bowe sustained serious internal and facial injuries. Passenger Kathleen Lund was killed; her husband, singer Art Lund, sued Bowe, claiming she had been speeding. The suit was settled for $40,000. In addition to a few talk show and other television appearances, Bowe only made three movies in the ensuing years, her last being 1986's BIG TROUBLE. In 1984, she and Stack formed Rosemarie Stack Ltd., a company with her as president and he as vice-president, which distributed fragrances from France. In 2003, her 47-year marriage to Robert Stack came to an end upon his death from a heart attack. Today, Bowe is involved in metaphysics and maintains an interest in painting that started in the 1970s.
STACK, Rosemarie
Born: 9/17/1932, Butte, Montana, U.S.A.
Died: 1/20/2019, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico
Rosemarie Stack’s western – actress:
Peacemaker – 1956 (Ann Davis)