A TELEGRAM
A TELEGRAM
Looking back over her career, Lee Remick named "Wild River" as her favorite film, yet it was while making "Wild River" that Lee went through a very trying experience. A few days before Christmas, Lee received a telegram stating that her husband, producer-director Bill Colleran, had been severely injured in a car accident in Los Angeles. Colleran was driving down Hollywood's Coldwater Canyon late one night after finishing the direction and taping of a Sinatra TV show when he fell asleep at the wheel, missed a turn in the road and piled up against some brick pillars.
"Your husband paralyzed," ran the telegram. "May not live." Elia Kazan, the director of "Wild River" immediately suspended operations while Lee packed her bags for California. "It all happened so fast," Lee said. "The day I got the telegram was the day I left. I was absolutely crushed and destroyed..."
Not knowing whether or not her husband would survive, Lee left the production and flew to California with her 12 month old daughter. "When I arrived at the U.C.L.A. Medical Center," Lee said, "Bill didn't know me. He didn't know where he was. After six days of coma, he just lay there. I tried to help the doctors wake him up by yelling at him. One night, the nurse and I were sitting on opposite sides of the bed, and one of Bill's eyes just began to open. The nurse said, 'Bill, turn your had to the right and tell me who it is.' Up to this moment, Bill hadn't uttered a word. Then he gave her a you-stupid-nurse look and said, very disdainfully, 'That's my wife.' Bill is a medical mystery. If you'd seen him, you wouldn't have given him a chance. They told me he'd be in the hospital for three months and would have to recuperate for three or four more at home, but he got up and walked out in three weeks. Incredible."
Lee finished filming "Wild River," but forfeited a planned return to Broadway in the French comedy, "The Good Soup" so that she could be with her husband during his recuperation period.
Sources: Cosmopolitan – "Lee Remick – The Winsome Witch" by John Whitcomb, "Monty: A Biography of Montgomery Clift" by Robert LaGuardia
-- by Allison