thedrifter
03-27-08, 07:21 AM
March 27, 2008
Richard Widmark, Film’s Hoodlum and Flawed Hero, Dies at 93
By ALJEAN HARMETZ
Richard Widmark, whose movie debut as a giggling killer made him an overnight star, giving rise to an enduring Hollywood career playing a gallery of chilling hoodlums and flawed heroes, died Monday at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 93.
His death was announced on Wednesday by his wife, Susan Blanchard. His health had been declining since he fractured a vertebra in recent months, she said.
Mr. Widmark first etched his name in film noir history in the 1947 gangster movie “Kiss of Death,” playing Tommy Udo, a snickering, psychopathic ex-convict seeking revenge against an informer (played by Victor Mature). In one indelible scene, he binds the squealer’s mother (Mildred Dunnock) in her wheelchair with a cord ripped from a lamp and shoves her down a flight of stairs to her death.
“The sadism of that character, the fearful laugh, the skull showing through drawn skin, and the surely conscious evocation of a concentration-camp degenerate established Widmark as the most frightening person on the screen,” the critic David Thomson wrote in “The Biographical Dictionary of Film.”
The performance made Mr. Widmark, who had been an established radio actor, an instant movie star, and it brought him his sole Academy Award nomination, for best supporting actor. For the next seven years, as a contract actor, he was given parts in 20th Century Fox’s juiciest melodramas. His mobsters were drenched in evil. But even his heroes were nerve-strained and feral — the daredevil pilot flying into the eye of a storm in “Slattery’s Hurricane” (1949); the doctor who fights bubonic plague in Elia Kazan’s “Panic in the Streets” (1950), and the pickpocket who refuses to be a traitor in Samuel Fuller’s “Pickup on South Street” (1953).
“Movie audiences fasten on to one aspect of the actor, and then they decide what they want you to be,” Mr. Widmark once said. “They think you’re playing yourself. The truth is that the only person who can ever really play himself is a baby.”
In reality, the screen’s most vicious bad guy was a mild-mannered former college instructor who had married his college sweetheart, the playwright and screenwriter Ora Jean Hazlewood, and stayed married to her for nearly 55 years, until her death in 1997. In 1990 Mr. Widmark told a reporter that he had never been unfaithul to Ms. Hazlewood and had never flirted with women because, he said, “I happen to like my wife a lot.”
His trademark villains overshadowed his work in a wide range of roles in a career that spanned six decades and more than 60 movies. In “The Halls of Montezuma,” he led marines in the Pacific in World War II; in “The Cobweb” (1955), he played the head of a psychiatric clinic where the staff seemed more emotionally troubled than the patients; in “Saint Joan” (1957), he was the Dauphin to Jean Seberg’s Joan of Arc; in “The Alamo” (1960), with John Wayne, he was Jim Bowie, the inventor of the Bowie knife; in “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961), he was an American Army colonel prosecuting German war criminals; and in John Ford’s revisionist western “Cheyenne Autumn” (1963), he played an Army captain who risks his career to help the Indians.
The genesis of “Cheyenne Autumn” was Mr. Widmark’s own research, at Yale, on the suffering of the Cheyenne. He showed his work to Ford and, two years later, the director sent Mr. Widmark a screenplay.
Mr. Widmark also created the role of Detective Sgt. Daniel Madigan in Don Siegel’s 1968 film “Madigan.” It proved so popular that he later played the loner Madigan on an NBC television series during the 1972-73 season. Earlier Mr. Widmark won an Emmy nomination for his first television role, playing the president of the United States in a 1971 mini-series based on Fletcher Knebel’s novel “Vanished.”
As his blond hair turned gray, Mr. Widmark played generals in the nuclear thriller “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” (1977) and “The Swarm” (1978), in which he waged war on bees. He was the evil head of a hospital in “Coma” (1978) and a United States senator in “True Colors” (1991).
He was forever fighting producers’ efforts to stereotype him and consistently lent credibility to inferior movies.
“I suppose I wanted to act in order to have a place in the sun,” he once told a reporter. “I’d always lived in small towns, and acting meant having some kind of identity.”
Richard Widmark (he had no middle name) was born on Dec. 26, 1914, in Sunrise, Minn., and grew up throughout the Midwest. His father, Carl Widmark, was a traveling salesman who took his wife, Mae Ethel, and two sons from Minnesota to Sioux Falls, S.D.; Henry, Ill.; Chillicothe, Mo.; and Princeton, Ill., where Mr. Widmark graduated from high school as senior class president.
Movie crazy, he was afraid to admit his interest in the “sissy” job of acting. On a full scholarship at Lake Forest College in Illinois, he played end on the football team, took third place in a state oratory contest, starred in plays and was, again, senior class president.
Graduating in 1936, he spent two years as an instructor in the Lake Forest drama department while acting in stage productions. Then he headed to New York City, where a classmate was producing 15-minute radio soap operas and cast Mr. Widmark in a variety of roles.
“Getting launched was easy for me — too easy, perhaps,” he said of his success playing “young, neurotic guys” on shows like “Stella Dallas,” “Front Page Farrell,” “Aunt Jenny’s Real Life Stories” and “Inner Sanctum.”
In World War II, Mr. Widmark tried to enlist in the Army but was rejected three times because of a perforated eardrum. So he turned to Broadway. In his first stage role, in 1943, he played an Army lieutenant in F. Hugh Herbert’s “Kiss and Tell,” directed by George Abbott. Appearing in the play “Trio,” which was closed by the License Commissioner after 67 performances because it touched on lesbianism, he received glowing reviews as a college student who fights to free the girl he loves from the domination of an older woman.
After a successful 10 years as a radio actor, Mr. Widmark tried the movies with “Kiss of Death,” which was being filmed in New York. He was originally turned down for the role by the director, Henry Hathaway, who told him that he was too clean cut and intellectual for the part. It was Darryl F. Zanuck, the Fox studio head, who, after watching Mr. Widmark’s screen test, insisted that he be given the part.
After the movie was released, Mr. Widmark, older than most new recruits, was, to his surprise, summoned to Hollywood.. “I’m probably the only actor who gave up a swimming pool to go out to Hollywood,” Mr. Widmark told The New Yorker in 1961.
In the seven years of his Fox contract, he starred in 20 movies, inc luding “Yellow Sky” (1948), as the blackguard who menaces Gregory Peck; “Down to the Sea in Ships” (1949), as a valiant whaler; Jules Dassin’s “Night and the City” (1950), as a small- time hustler; and “Don’t Bother to Knock” (1952), in which the tables were turned and he was the prey of a psychopathic Marilyn Monroe.
A passionate liberal Democrat, Mr. Widmark played a bigot who baits a black doctor in Joseph Mankiewicz’s “No Way Out” (1950). He was so embarrassed by the character that after every scene he apologized to the young actor he was required to torment, Sidney Poitier. In 1990, when Mr. Widmark was given the D. W. Griffith Career Achievement Award by the National Board of Review, it was Mr. Poitier who presented it to him.
After his Fox contract ended, Mr. Widmark formed a production company and produced “Time Limit” (1957), a serious dissection of possible treason by an American prisoner of war. Directed by the actor Karl Malden, “Time Limit” starred Mr. Widmark as an Army colonel who is investigating a major (Richard Basehart) who is suspected of having broken under pressure during the Korean War and having aided the enemy.
Mr. Widmark produced two more films: “The Secret Ways” (1961) in which he went behind the Iron Curtain to bring out an anti-Communist leader; and “The Bedford Incident” (1964), another Cold War drama, in which he played an ultraconservative naval captain trailing a Russian submarine and putting the world in danger of a nuclear catastrophe.
Mr. Widmark told the British newspaper The Guardian in 1995 that he had not become a producer to make money but to have greater artistic control. “The businessmen who run Hollywood today have no self-respect,” he told the paper. “What interests them is not movies but the bottom line. Look at ‘Dumb and Dumber,’ which turns idiocy into something positive, or ‘Forrest Gump,’ a hymn to stupidity. ‘Intellectual’ has become a dirty word.”
He also vowed that he would never appear on a television talk show, saying, “When I see people destroying their privacy — what they think, what they feel — by beaming it out to millions of viewers, I think it cheapens them as individuals.”
By the 1980s, television movies had transformed the jittery psychopath of his early days into a wise and stalwart lawman. He played a Texas Ranger opposite Willie Nelson’s train robber in “Once Upon a Texas Train,” a small-town police chief in “Blackout” and a bayou country sheriff faced with a group of aged black men who have confessed to a murder in “A Gathering of Old Men.”
“The older you get, the less you know about acting,” he told one reporter, “but the more you know about what makes the really great actors.”
Mr. Widmark, who shunned the limelight, spent his Hollywood years living quietly on a large farm in Connecticut and on an 80-acre horse ranch in Hidden Valley, north of Los Angeles. He sold the ranch in 1997 after the death of Ms. Hazlewood.
Besides his wife, Ms. Blanchard, a former wife of Henry Fonda, Mr. Widmark is survived by his daughter, Anne Heath Widmark, of Santa Fe, N.M., who was formerly married to the Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax.
Well into his later years, Mr. Widmark was sometimes accosted by strangers who expected him to be a tough guy. There is even a story that Joey Gallo, the New York mobster, was so taken by Mr. Widmark’s performance in “Kiss of Death” that he copied the actor’s natty posture, sadistic smirk and tittering laugh.
“It’s a bit rough,” Mr. Widmark once said, “priding oneself that one isn’t too bad an actor and then finding one’s only remembered for a giggle.”
Douglas Martin contributed reporting.
Ellie
Richard Widmark, Film’s Hoodlum and Flawed Hero, Dies at 93
By ALJEAN HARMETZ
Richard Widmark, whose movie debut as a giggling killer made him an overnight star, giving rise to an enduring Hollywood career playing a gallery of chilling hoodlums and flawed heroes, died Monday at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 93.
His death was announced on Wednesday by his wife, Susan Blanchard. His health had been declining since he fractured a vertebra in recent months, she said.
Mr. Widmark first etched his name in film noir history in the 1947 gangster movie “Kiss of Death,” playing Tommy Udo, a snickering, psychopathic ex-convict seeking revenge against an informer (played by Victor Mature). In one indelible scene, he binds the squealer’s mother (Mildred Dunnock) in her wheelchair with a cord ripped from a lamp and shoves her down a flight of stairs to her death.
“The sadism of that character, the fearful laugh, the skull showing through drawn skin, and the surely conscious evocation of a concentration-camp degenerate established Widmark as the most frightening person on the screen,” the critic David Thomson wrote in “The Biographical Dictionary of Film.”
The performance made Mr. Widmark, who had been an established radio actor, an instant movie star, and it brought him his sole Academy Award nomination, for best supporting actor. For the next seven years, as a contract actor, he was given parts in 20th Century Fox’s juiciest melodramas. His mobsters were drenched in evil. But even his heroes were nerve-strained and feral — the daredevil pilot flying into the eye of a storm in “Slattery’s Hurricane” (1949); the doctor who fights bubonic plague in Elia Kazan’s “Panic in the Streets” (1950), and the pickpocket who refuses to be a traitor in Samuel Fuller’s “Pickup on South Street” (1953).
“Movie audiences fasten on to one aspect of the actor, and then they decide what they want you to be,” Mr. Widmark once said. “They think you’re playing yourself. The truth is that the only person who can ever really play himself is a baby.”
In reality, the screen’s most vicious bad guy was a mild-mannered former college instructor who had married his college sweetheart, the playwright and screenwriter Ora Jean Hazlewood, and stayed married to her for nearly 55 years, until her death in 1997. In 1990 Mr. Widmark told a reporter that he had never been unfaithul to Ms. Hazlewood and had never flirted with women because, he said, “I happen to like my wife a lot.”
His trademark villains overshadowed his work in a wide range of roles in a career that spanned six decades and more than 60 movies. In “The Halls of Montezuma,” he led marines in the Pacific in World War II; in “The Cobweb” (1955), he played the head of a psychiatric clinic where the staff seemed more emotionally troubled than the patients; in “Saint Joan” (1957), he was the Dauphin to Jean Seberg’s Joan of Arc; in “The Alamo” (1960), with John Wayne, he was Jim Bowie, the inventor of the Bowie knife; in “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961), he was an American Army colonel prosecuting German war criminals; and in John Ford’s revisionist western “Cheyenne Autumn” (1963), he played an Army captain who risks his career to help the Indians.
The genesis of “Cheyenne Autumn” was Mr. Widmark’s own research, at Yale, on the suffering of the Cheyenne. He showed his work to Ford and, two years later, the director sent Mr. Widmark a screenplay.
Mr. Widmark also created the role of Detective Sgt. Daniel Madigan in Don Siegel’s 1968 film “Madigan.” It proved so popular that he later played the loner Madigan on an NBC television series during the 1972-73 season. Earlier Mr. Widmark won an Emmy nomination for his first television role, playing the president of the United States in a 1971 mini-series based on Fletcher Knebel’s novel “Vanished.”
As his blond hair turned gray, Mr. Widmark played generals in the nuclear thriller “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” (1977) and “The Swarm” (1978), in which he waged war on bees. He was the evil head of a hospital in “Coma” (1978) and a United States senator in “True Colors” (1991).
He was forever fighting producers’ efforts to stereotype him and consistently lent credibility to inferior movies.
“I suppose I wanted to act in order to have a place in the sun,” he once told a reporter. “I’d always lived in small towns, and acting meant having some kind of identity.”
Richard Widmark (he had no middle name) was born on Dec. 26, 1914, in Sunrise, Minn., and grew up throughout the Midwest. His father, Carl Widmark, was a traveling salesman who took his wife, Mae Ethel, and two sons from Minnesota to Sioux Falls, S.D.; Henry, Ill.; Chillicothe, Mo.; and Princeton, Ill., where Mr. Widmark graduated from high school as senior class president.
Movie crazy, he was afraid to admit his interest in the “sissy” job of acting. On a full scholarship at Lake Forest College in Illinois, he played end on the football team, took third place in a state oratory contest, starred in plays and was, again, senior class president.
Graduating in 1936, he spent two years as an instructor in the Lake Forest drama department while acting in stage productions. Then he headed to New York City, where a classmate was producing 15-minute radio soap operas and cast Mr. Widmark in a variety of roles.
“Getting launched was easy for me — too easy, perhaps,” he said of his success playing “young, neurotic guys” on shows like “Stella Dallas,” “Front Page Farrell,” “Aunt Jenny’s Real Life Stories” and “Inner Sanctum.”
In World War II, Mr. Widmark tried to enlist in the Army but was rejected three times because of a perforated eardrum. So he turned to Broadway. In his first stage role, in 1943, he played an Army lieutenant in F. Hugh Herbert’s “Kiss and Tell,” directed by George Abbott. Appearing in the play “Trio,” which was closed by the License Commissioner after 67 performances because it touched on lesbianism, he received glowing reviews as a college student who fights to free the girl he loves from the domination of an older woman.
After a successful 10 years as a radio actor, Mr. Widmark tried the movies with “Kiss of Death,” which was being filmed in New York. He was originally turned down for the role by the director, Henry Hathaway, who told him that he was too clean cut and intellectual for the part. It was Darryl F. Zanuck, the Fox studio head, who, after watching Mr. Widmark’s screen test, insisted that he be given the part.
After the movie was released, Mr. Widmark, older than most new recruits, was, to his surprise, summoned to Hollywood.. “I’m probably the only actor who gave up a swimming pool to go out to Hollywood,” Mr. Widmark told The New Yorker in 1961.
In the seven years of his Fox contract, he starred in 20 movies, inc luding “Yellow Sky” (1948), as the blackguard who menaces Gregory Peck; “Down to the Sea in Ships” (1949), as a valiant whaler; Jules Dassin’s “Night and the City” (1950), as a small- time hustler; and “Don’t Bother to Knock” (1952), in which the tables were turned and he was the prey of a psychopathic Marilyn Monroe.
A passionate liberal Democrat, Mr. Widmark played a bigot who baits a black doctor in Joseph Mankiewicz’s “No Way Out” (1950). He was so embarrassed by the character that after every scene he apologized to the young actor he was required to torment, Sidney Poitier. In 1990, when Mr. Widmark was given the D. W. Griffith Career Achievement Award by the National Board of Review, it was Mr. Poitier who presented it to him.
After his Fox contract ended, Mr. Widmark formed a production company and produced “Time Limit” (1957), a serious dissection of possible treason by an American prisoner of war. Directed by the actor Karl Malden, “Time Limit” starred Mr. Widmark as an Army colonel who is investigating a major (Richard Basehart) who is suspected of having broken under pressure during the Korean War and having aided the enemy.
Mr. Widmark produced two more films: “The Secret Ways” (1961) in which he went behind the Iron Curtain to bring out an anti-Communist leader; and “The Bedford Incident” (1964), another Cold War drama, in which he played an ultraconservative naval captain trailing a Russian submarine and putting the world in danger of a nuclear catastrophe.
Mr. Widmark told the British newspaper The Guardian in 1995 that he had not become a producer to make money but to have greater artistic control. “The businessmen who run Hollywood today have no self-respect,” he told the paper. “What interests them is not movies but the bottom line. Look at ‘Dumb and Dumber,’ which turns idiocy into something positive, or ‘Forrest Gump,’ a hymn to stupidity. ‘Intellectual’ has become a dirty word.”
He also vowed that he would never appear on a television talk show, saying, “When I see people destroying their privacy — what they think, what they feel — by beaming it out to millions of viewers, I think it cheapens them as individuals.”
By the 1980s, television movies had transformed the jittery psychopath of his early days into a wise and stalwart lawman. He played a Texas Ranger opposite Willie Nelson’s train robber in “Once Upon a Texas Train,” a small-town police chief in “Blackout” and a bayou country sheriff faced with a group of aged black men who have confessed to a murder in “A Gathering of Old Men.”
“The older you get, the less you know about acting,” he told one reporter, “but the more you know about what makes the really great actors.”
Mr. Widmark, who shunned the limelight, spent his Hollywood years living quietly on a large farm in Connecticut and on an 80-acre horse ranch in Hidden Valley, north of Los Angeles. He sold the ranch in 1997 after the death of Ms. Hazlewood.
Besides his wife, Ms. Blanchard, a former wife of Henry Fonda, Mr. Widmark is survived by his daughter, Anne Heath Widmark, of Santa Fe, N.M., who was formerly married to the Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax.
Well into his later years, Mr. Widmark was sometimes accosted by strangers who expected him to be a tough guy. There is even a story that Joey Gallo, the New York mobster, was so taken by Mr. Widmark’s performance in “Kiss of Death” that he copied the actor’s natty posture, sadistic smirk and tittering laugh.
“It’s a bit rough,” Mr. Widmark once said, “priding oneself that one isn’t too bad an actor and then finding one’s only remembered for a giggle.”
Douglas Martin contributed reporting.
Ellie