Every April when the Associated Press would send over its compiled list of celebrity birthdays, the wire service would always leave actress Nina Foch off the list.

And every year, at least for the past five years I've been responsible for doing our celebrity birthday list, I'd insert the actress back in with the list of notables, right where I thought she belonged, even if my younger coworkers might ask: "Who is she?"

I knew, no matter how young they might be, all I'd have to say is she played the Egyptian princess who pulls a floating basket from the Nile River among the reeds to discover the tiny biblical baby Moses to adopt as her own in director Cecil B. DeMille's epic 1956 film for Paramount Studios, "The Ten Commandments."

Immediately, they then knew.

Foch, the Dutch-born actress who faded from film to become a respected coach of aspiring actors and directors, died last Friday at age 84.

According to her son, Dr. Dirk De Brito, Foch died at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center of complications from the blood disorder myelodysplasia. According to wire service reports, she became ill last week while teaching at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts.

Foch's son is from her second marriage, to Dennis Brite. She was married and divorced three times.

One of her final film moments was appearing in the critically acclaimed 1993 PBS miniseries version of author Armistead Maupin's "Tales of the City" opposite Olympia Dukakis, Thomas Gibson, Bill Campbell, Laura Linney and Edie Adams.

Another passing

On the subject of additions to The Times daily birthday list of fame, each year I also included long-asleep wealthy socialite Martha "Sunny" von Bulow, the heiress who spent the last 28 years of her life in oblivion after what prosecutors alleged (in a pair of sensational trials) were two murder attempts by her husband Claus von Bulow.

Sunny died Saturday at age 76 at a nursing home in New York, according to her children, who issued a statement via family spokeswoman Maureen Connelly.

It was at the first trial, in 1982, that her hubby Claus, who now lives in London, was convicted of trying twice to kill her by injecting her with insulin at their estate in Newport, R.I., in an attempt to kill her so he could gain her fortune and marry his mistress.

That verdict was thrown out on appeal, and he was acquitted at a second trial in 1985.

The murder case split Newport's high society, produced lurid headlines and later was made into the 1990 film, "Reversal of Fortune," starring Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons. The film was based on the book of the same name written by famed defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who handled the appeal and won the acquittal at the second trial.

Following the trials, Claus agreed to give up any claims to his wife's estimated $40 million fortune and to the $120,000-a-year income of a trust she set up for him. He also agreed to divorce her, leave the country and never profit from their story.

Sales of Sunny's property over the years brought $4.2 million from her ocean-front estate in Newport, $6.25 million from her 12-room apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and $11.5 million from the art and antiques from the residences.

It was on Dec. 21, 1980, that the then-49-year-old heiress fell into what her children described on Saturday as "a persistent vegetative state."

According to the description by the wire services, rather than parties, shopping and travels, slumbering Sunny's world was reduced to a private, guarded room in the Harkness Pavilion and later the McKeen Pavilion of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center before her death two decades later at the Mary Manning Walsh Nursing Home.

Her doctor testified that the cost of maintaining her was $375,000 the first year, 1981.

And though the Associated Press reported that no figures were available for the years that followed, by the early 1990s, room charges were up to about $1,500 a day -- $547,000 a year -- plus $200,000 to $300,000 for round-the-clock private nursing.

It was during Sunny's early years as a wealthy debutante while touring Europe with her mother that she met Prince Alfred von Auersperg, who was younger, penniless and working as a tennis pro at an Austrian resort catering to rich Americans.

They were married in 1957 and divorced eight years later after she returned alone to New York with their young son and daughter.

On June 6, 1966, she married von Bulow, who then quit his job as an aide to oilman J. Paul Getty.

In addition to her two children from her first marriage, Sunny von Bulow is survived by Cosima Pavoncelli, a daughter from her marriage to von Bulow. Pavoncelli sided with her father during the trials.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer. He can be reached at ppotempa@nwitimes.com or 219.852.4327.

celeBirthdays

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