All All. Sign In. Celebrity Suicides. List activity. Stuart Adamson. He was married to Sandra Davidson and Melanie Shelley. Ross Alexander. Actor Soundtrack Captain Blood The tragically brief life of fresh-faced, boyishly handsome Ross Alexander, who seemed to have everything going for him, plays these days like a bad Hollywood movie.
Alexander was a charming, highly engaging young actor whose pleasant voice and breezy personality aided greatly in his transition from Broadway teen player to young adult Warner Bros.
Off-camera, however, Ross, a closeted homosexual, became an acutely self-destructive young man whose career instability and domestic tragedy would take its toll. The tormented Ross ended his own life at age Raised in Rochester, New York, he pursued both drama and athletics in high school soccer, swimming and sidelined in little theater productions in town.
In between he took his first Broadway bow as a young teen in Blanche Yurka 's long-running comedy success "Enter Madame. The latter play introduced Ross to producer John Golden and marked an immoderate two-year association which would include the plays "After Tomorrow" and "That's Gratitude" Paramount apparently saw Ross' potential and started him off in pictures with The Wiser Sex , but nothing happened.
Warners signed him to appear in its popular backstage Depression-era musicals and collegiate capers. Alexander's fresh look and carefree, slightly cynical demeanor made him an instant favorite and he soon began humming with popular second leads in such musicals as Flirtation Walk Trouble started brewing, however, behind the scenes. Ross was being perceived by Warners as a second-ranked Dick Powell. A probable marriage of convenience to budding starlet Aleta Friele, who appeared on Broadway using the name Aleta Freel, ended disastrously with the year-old actress taking her own life with a rifle in their Hollywood Hills home.
