Walk, Don't Run

Charles Powell Walters was born in Pasadena, California, on 17 November 1911. He trained as a dancer and began his career on Broadway in the 1930s, appearing in musicals and eventually choreographing, before Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer brought him to Hollywood in the early 1940s to stage dance numbers for its musicals. He choreographed for films including Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) before moving into directing, and quickly became one of MGM's most trusted directors of musicals and light comedy through the 1940s and 1950s. His work was marked by fluid camera movement built around dance staging and an ability to draw relaxed, warm performances from stars like Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, and Leslie Caron. Easter Parade (1948), pairing Astaire and Garland, and Lili (1953), starring Caron, were among his most celebrated films; Lili earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Director. He continued into the 1950s and 1960s with films including High Society (1956), a musical remake of The Philadelphia Story starring Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, and The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964). His final feature was Walk, Don't Run (1966), a comedy that turned out to mark the end of another career besides his own: it was Cary Grant's last film. Walters worked afterward in television before retiring. He died in Malibu, California, on 13 August 1982.

Samantha Eggar was born in London in 1939 and moved fluidly between British and American productions from the mid-1960s onward, building an international career that began with a striking dramatic breakthrough and continued through decades of film and television work. Her defining early role came in William Wyler's The Collector (1965), playing a young woman held captive by an obsessive butterfly collector, a performance that won her the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. She followed it with the title role opposite Rex Harrison in Doctor Dolittle (1967), one of the more expensive and troubled productions of its decade, and later took a very different kind of genre role in David Cronenberg's body-horror film The Brood (1979), which became a cult touchstone in later decades. Eggar co-starred with Grant in Walk, Don't Run (1966), a comedy set during the Tokyo Olympics and a loose remake of the 1943 film The More the Merrier. It proved to be Grant's final theatrical film; he was fifty-eight when it was released and did not appear in another feature for the remaining twenty years of his life, later citing a wish to spend more time with his young daughter, Jennifer, born the previous year. Eggar continued working steadily in film and television for decades afterward. Her connection to Grant is defined by that single film, but it carries particular historical weight as the closing credit of his acting career.