George C. Scott

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Scott, George C[ampbell] (1927–99), actor. Born in Wise, Virginia, and educated at the University of Missouri, he first gained prominence as an imprisoned nobleman in the Circle in the Square's 1958 revival of Children of Darkness. Among his subsequent assignments were the Judge Advocate Lt. Col. Chapman in The Andersonville Trial (1959), the tough old farmer Ephraim Cabot in Desire under the Elms (1963), Southern businessman Ben Hubbard in The Little Foxes (1967), three hassled New Yorkers in Plaza Suite (1968), Dr. Astrov in Uncle Vanya (1973), Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman (1975), swindler Foxwell J. Sly in Sly Fox (1976), egotistical actor Garry Essendine in Present Laughter (1982), Gramps in On Borrowed Time (1991), and defense attorney Henry Drummond in Inherit the Wind (1996). For the New York Shakespeare Festival he essayed Antony, Richard III, and Shylock. Although the hard‐faced actor was often perceived as a serious dramatic performer, and he showed great skill in such parts, much of his success came from his often overlooked abilities as a comedian. Scott also enjoyed an impressive film career.

George C. Scott (1927-1999) was one of the finest and most versatile stage, television, and film actors of the last half of the twentieth century, best known for his Oscar-winning performance as American General George Patton.

In an acting career that spanned five decades, Scott displayed a natural ability to capture the contradictory characteristics of intense inner anger and external composure. His performances in such films as Anatomy of a Murder, The Hustler, Dr. Strangelove, Patton, and The Hospital earned him a reputation for understated yet powerful performances. Scott's range and professionalism attracted many of American cinema's most acclaimed directors, including Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Kramer, Robert Rossen, John Huston, Otto Preminger, William Friedkin, Peter Medak, Stanley Donen, and Paul Schrader. Featuring rugged facial characteristics, including a nose frequently broken in bar fights, and a gruff voice, Scott was a prodigious drinker until the early 1980s. Scott was remembered for his rejection of the Academy Award he won for Patton in 1971 and of television's Emmy Award for his performance in Arthur Miller's The Price. He considered actors competing for awards "demeaning."

Struggled to Find Career

Scott was born in Wise, Virginia, a small, coal mining community in the Appalachian Mountains, on October 18, 1927. His paternal grandfather was a miner and his father worked as a mining surveyor. His mother wrote poetry and appeared on local radio stations; she died when Scott was young. His father took a job at a General Motors plant in the Detroit area when Scott was eight, moving the family to Michigan, where they lived first in Pontiac and then in Redford.

When he was old enough to enlist, Scott quit high school and joined the Marines for four years. Shortly after he enlisted, World War II ended and Scott spent much of his time assigned to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Scott later said this job prompted him to start drinking regularly to help him cope with his daily contact with grieving family members and the corpses of soldiers.

Intent on becoming a writer, Scott used the G.I. Bill to enroll at the University of Missouri at Columbia and began studying journalism. His writing bent leaned more to creative writing than journalism, and he spent much of his time crafting short stories and submitting them to magazines. None were accepted, and Scott turned to the theater for creative expression. He tried out for the university's production of Terrence Rattigan's The Winslow Boy and earned the part of Sir Robert Morton. Scott was immediately bitten by the acting bug. "It was like tumblers falling in a lock," he later recalled. "I knew what a good safe-cracker felt like." He appeared in several more productions at the University of Missouri and a play at the all-female Stephens University, where he also taught a course in Western literature.

At Stephens, he met his first wife, Carolyn Hughes, and they had a daughter. Scott also fathered an illegitimate child with another Stephens student. He and his wife sought acting work in Ohio, Detroit, and Canada, but with little success. He divorced his wife and returned to Stephens hoping to resume teaching, but his divorce and illegitimate child caused the school to refuse to hire him. He worked one year in construction before auditioning for a semi-professional repertory theater in 1954.

Success on Stage and Screen

By 1956, Scott had married actress Pamela Reed and moved to New York City. He appeared in roles on such 1950s television programs as Hallmark Hall of Fame, Kraft Theatre, Omnibus, and Playhouse 90. In 1957, he won the title role in William Shakespeare's Richard III in Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival. His performance earned him a critical appraisal as "the meanest Richard III ever seen by human eyes," as well as an Obie Award. In 1958, he made his first Broadway appearance in Comes a Day.

In 1959, Scott was offered a supporting role as the drunk preacher Dr. George Grubb in the Gary Cooper western film The Hanging Tree. His next film role earned him a reputation as an actor's actor. Playing a hotshot big-city prosecuting attorney in Anatomy of a Murder, Scott was the nemesis of James Stewart's small-town defense attorney. Directed by Otto Preminger and featuring a musical score composed and performed by Duke Ellington, the film earned Scott his first Academy Award nomination.

Following Anatomy of a Murder, Scott returned to New York, divorced Reed, and married actress Colleen Dewhurst. In 1961, he returned to film with a critically heralded performance as promoter Bert Gordon in Robert Rossen's adaptation of the Walter Tevis novel about pool players, The Hustler. Writing about Scott's performance in the film, Michael Sragow said: "Scott brought something novel to the screen: an electric wariness. No actor was better at portraying the point where thought and instinct fuse - and he did it best in The Hustler (racking up another supporting-actor nomination). If you saw it as a teenager, his image embodied everything murky and menacing in city life. He was the nightmare image of the man in the back room. … Studying the play of the game, Scott's craggy face oozes alertness from its pores, and his trim, energetic body (Scott grew massive later on) keeps him from seeming sedentary." Once again, Scott was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award. Although Scott refused the nomination, his name remained on the ballot.

Before returning to Hollywood, Scott won another Obie Award for Eugene O'Neill's Desire under the Elms. Scott made his debut as a Hollywood leading man in John Huston's 1963 film The List of Adrian Messenger. During the 1963-64 television season, Scott starred in the weekly series East Side, West Side with Cicely Tyson.

Kubrick, Abraham, and Patton

In 1964, Scott appeared as General Buck Turgidson in Stanley Kubrick's satire of the Cold War, Dr. Strangelove, a role that allowed him to portray comically the anger that he usually repressed on screen. A parody of an insensitive military commander, Turgidson is an Air Force general who orders a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union, speaking such outrageous lines as "I don't say we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than ten to twenty million people killed."

His next big role was quite different. Starring as Abraham opposite Ava Gardner in the 1966 film The Bible, Scott's personal and professional life collided. Becoming romantically obsessed with Gardner, Scott allowed his marriage to Dewhurst to disintegrate while he pursued Gardner and accelerated his alcohol intake. He and Dewhurst divorced. Then he was fired from How to Steal a Million when he arrived on the film's set five hours late. His next film projects were The Flim-Flam Man in 1967 and Petulia with Julie Christie in 1968. He remarried Dewhurst but divorced her again five years later, marrying actress Trish Van Devere.

The film role for which he became best known was as the cantankerous but brilliant World War II military figure General George Patton in the 1970 film Patton. The film was given the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1970 and Scott was nominated and won the Academy Award, Golden Globe Award, and National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actor. Dismissing the awards as a "self-serving meat parade," Scott stayed home to watch a hockey game rather than attend the Oscar ceremonies. Scott reprised his characterization of Patton in 1986 for a television drama The Last Days of Patton. He also refused his 1971 Emmy Award for his performance in Arthur Miller's The Price.

Stating that he loved acting more than stardom, Scott continued to act in both films and television. He portrayed a doctor disgusted with the political and financial aspects of the medical profession in The Hospital. The performance earned him another Academy Award nomination. His other notable films of the 1970s include They Might Be Giants, Islands in the Stream, Movie Movie, Hardcore, and The Changeling. While he continued to make films until his death, his best work in his later career came in television films such as A Christmas Carol, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Last Days of Patton, 12 Angry Men, and Inherit the Wind. For the last, he won an Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award. Scott died on September 22, 1999, in Westlake Village, California.

Books

Video Hound's Golden Movie Retriever, Visible Ink Press, 1994.

Online

"The Films of George C. Scott," Images Journal,http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue04/features/georgecscott5.htm

"George C. Scott," Internet Movie Database,http://us.imdb.com/Bio?Scott,+George+C

"George C. Scott," The Sunday-Times of London, September 24, 1999, http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/09/24/timobiobi02004.html?1996766.

"Piper Laurie Remembers George C. Scott," Salon.com, September 30, 1999, http://www.salon.com

Scott, George C. (George Campbell Scott), 1927-99, American actor, b. Wise, Va. Fiery and intense, Scott played his first major roles in Richard III, The Merchant of Venice, and As You Like It for the New York Shakespeare Festival. Other plays included The Andersonville Trial (1959), Uncle Vanya (1973), an elderly Huckleberry Finn in The Boys in Autumn (1986), and a lawyer based on Clarence Darrow in Inherit the Wind (1996). He gradually began to devote more attention to film, proving to be a strong, sometimes overpowering presence. His films include Anatomy of a Murder (1959), The Hustler (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1964), Hospital (1972), Islands in the Stream (1977), Taps (1982), and Gloria (1999). He won an Academy Award for Patton (1970), usually considered his finest film performance, but refused it. He reprised his role as the four-star general in a 1986 television movie. Late in his career he also directed plays and films.

Biography

One of the finest American actors of his generation, George C. Scott was born in Virginia and raised in Detroit. After serving in the Marines from 1945 to 1949, Scott enrolled at the University of Missouri, determined to become an actor. Though his truculent demeanor and raspy voice would seem to typecast him in unpleasant roles, Scott exhibited an astonishing range of characterizations during his seven years in regional repertory theater. He also found time to teach a drama course at Stephens College.

By the time Scott moved to New York in 1957, he was in full command of his craft; yet, because he was largely unknown outside of the repertory circuit, he considered himself a failure. While supporting himself as an IBM machine operator, Scott auditioned for producer Joseph Papp. Cast as the title character in Papp's production of Richard III, Scott finally achieved the stardom and critical adulation that had so long eluded him. Amidst dozens of choice television guest-starring performances, Scott made his movie debut in 1959's The Hanging Tree. That same year, he earned the first of four Oscar nominations for his incisive portrayal of big-city attorney Claude Dancer in Anatomy of a Murder. Over the next few years, Scott appeared in a dizzying variety of roles, ranging from Paul Newman's mercenary manager Bert Gordon in The Hustler (1961) to erudite British detective Anthony Gethryn in The List of Adrian Messenger (1962) to ape-like General "Buck" Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove (1963). After turning down several TV series offers, Scott accepted the role of social director Neil Brock on the David Susskind-produced "relevance" weekly East Side/West Side (1963-1964). He left the series in a huff in early 1964, citing the censorial idiocies of the program's network and sponsors; he also vowed to never again appear in a TV series -- at least until 1987, when the Fox network offered him 100,000 dollars per episode to star in the nonsensical sitcom Mr. President.

In 1971, Scott made international headlines by refusing to accept his Best Actor Oscar for his performance in the title role of Patton, deriding the awards ceremony as a "meat parade." Two years later, he turned down an Emmy for his work in the TV adaptation of Arthur Miller's The Price. Curiously, he had no qualms about accepting such honors as the Golden Globe or Canada's Genie Award for the 1980 film The Changeling. Gravitating toward directing, Scott staged both the Broadway and TV productions of The Andersonville Trial, and he also directed two of his films: Rage (1973) and The Savage Is Loose (1974). In 1976, he added singing and dancing to his accomplishments when he starred on Broadway in Sly Fox, a musicalization of Ben Jonson's Volpone. In the '80s, Scott played Fagin in Oliver Twist (1982), Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1984), and Dupin in The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1987); he also starred in a 1987 TV biopic of Mussolini, and enacted one of the most excruciatingly drawn-out death scenes in television history in The Last Days of Patton (1986). Making his cartoon voice-over debut in the anti-drug TV special Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue (1988), Scott served up more vocal villainy in the Disney-animated feature The Rescuers Down Under (1990).

Not until his later years did he show signs of slowing down; in 1996, while appearing as Henry Drummond in the National Actors Theater production of Inherit the Wind, he suddenly took ill in mid-performance, excused himself, and left the stage, obliging director Tony Randall to take over the part for the balance of the show. He made one of his final appearances in an Emmy-winning performance in the all-star TV remake of 12 Angry Men with Jack Lemmon.

Scott was married five times; his third and fourth wife was the distinguished actress Colleen Dewhurst, while wife number five was another stage and film actress, Trish Van Devere. Two of his children, Devon and Campbell, have also pursued acting careers. Scott died on September 22, 1999. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Gloria Buy this Movie	Rocky Marciano Buy this Movie	Inherit the Wind Buy this Movie	12 Angry Men Buy this Movie
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