Carroll O'Connor

Five-time Emmy award-winning actor Carroll O'Connor (1924-2001) was best known for playing Archie Bunker, the big-hearted bigot on the ground-breaking 1970s television comedy "All in the Family".

Early Years

Carroll O'Connor was born in the Bronx, New York, on August 2, 1924. He was the eldest of three sons of a lawyer and schoolteacher raised in an Irish Catholic household. The O'Connors weathered the years of the Great Depression in comfort, living in their single-family home in Forest Hills, Queens, at the time a wealthy neighborhood. His father was a successful attorney and his two brothers became doctors.

O'Connor was a poor student who later attributed his lackluster academic performance to being pushed ahead a year in school. In his memoirs, he described how he skipped kindergarten and entered first grade at the age of five: "Thereafter I became impossible to teach and nobody was comfortable with me." In 1941 O'Connor enrolled at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, but dropped out when the United States entered World War II. He volunteered for the Naval Air Corps but was rejected because of his low grades and bad teeth. Instead, he entered the less-selective United States Merchant Marine Academy and became a midshipman. He eventually joined the National Maritime Union and sailed the North Atlantic, Caribbean, and Mediterranean as a merchant seaman during the late stages of the war.

Discovered Acting

After the war, O'Connor spent a few years uncertain what he wanted to do with his life. In 1946, he left the merchant marines, returned to his mother's house in Queens, and worked for an Irish newspaper run by his family. At the time, his father was serving a prison sentence for a fraud conviction in the Sing-Sing penitentiary in up-state New York. O'Connor considered a career in journalism and in 1948 returned to Wake Forest. He also took courses at Montana State University, where he met his future wife Nancy Fields. He married her in 1951. In 1950 he went to Dublin, Ireland, with his brother, Hugh, and enrolled at University College, Dublin, where he studied Irish history and English literature. O'Connor finished his undergraduate studies at the National University of Ireland, earning a bachelor's degree in 1952.

In the 1950s, O'Connor performed in various plays throughout Europe. Using the stage name George Roberts, O'Connor appeared in productions at Dublin's Gate Theater and in productions of Shakespeare's plays at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland and in Cork, Limerick, and Galway in Ireland.

In 1954, O'Connor returned to New York and struggled to find acting work. For several years, he worked as a substitute teacher in the New York public school system while he earned his master's degree in education. His break came in the late 1950s when his wife noticed a casting call for a stage production of James Joyce's Ulysses. That audition eventually landed him another role, as a Hollywood boss in the off-Broadway production of the Clifford Odets play Big Knife.

In 1960 O'Connor landed the role of a prosecutor in The Sacco-Vanzetti Story for the Armstrong Circle Theater. He earned a reputation as a reliable character actor and started getting movie roles. Over his career, O'Connor appeared in more than 30 films, including A Fever in the Blood (1961), Lad: A Dog (1961), Lonely are the Brave (1962), and Cleopatra (1963).

Debuted as Archie Bunker

All in the Family, an American sitcom that ran from 1971 to 1979, was adapted from the British show Till Death Do Us Part, a serial on BBC. Producer Norman Lear loosely based the character of Archie Bunker on his own father. Bunker's family included his scatterbrained wife Edith, played by Jean Stapleton; their daughter Gloria, played by Sally Struthers; and her liberal and outspoken husband Mike "Meathead" Stivic, played by Rob Reiner.

O'Connor was living in Rome when he received an offer to play Archie Bunker. He was so convinced it would fail that he demanded a round-trip ticket from the producers so he could return to Italy. O'Connor disliked the pilot script, but agreed to play Archie after it was rewritten. The show had some difficulty getting on the air because of its subject matter. ABC rejected it, but CBS broadcast All in the Family for the first time on January 12, 1971.

All in the Family marked a departure from earlier American television shows. Before, the "television landscape … had been largely filled with innocuous characters and … generally steered clear of sensitive topics," noted Brian Lowry in the Los Angeles Times. Americans never saw couples sleeping in the same bed or heard a toilet flush on television before All in the Family. The show talked about topics hitherto taboo on American TV: gender, race, religion, and sex. Though critics initially panned All in the Family, it eventually became one of television's most popular sitcoms, ranking number one for five years and spinning off three successful shows - Archie Bunker's Place, Maude, and The Jeffersons.

Part of the show's success was due to its timing. "Coming out of the 1960s civil rights movement and with Vietnam continuing to jar the country," wrote Allan Johnson in the Chicago Tribune, "it got Americans thinking and talking about race, sexism and social status in the country." The character of Archie Bunker personified the emotions that millions of Americans were experiencing: "the character wasn't just a narrow-minded bigot, he was a confused, sometimes scared middle-aged man who was coming to grips with his place in a world that was changing too fast," explained Johnson.

Archie was a political conservative who thought the Democratic Party was a front for Communism and admired Republican President Richard Nixon. Frustrated by his dead-end job and unfulfilling life, Archie reacted with fear toward his bosses and with antagonism toward women and blacks. His distrust extended to anyone who was not a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. He insulted Jews, Roman Catholics, blacks, Hispanics, and other ethnic groups. But while using racial slurs broke down a barrier in television broadcasting, it also drew criticism. Whitney Young, Jr., head of the Urban League, found nothing funny about Archie's racial epithets, calling them "gratuitous insults." "In the role of Archie, O'Connor tapped into angst, anger and unthinking prejudice that buffeted the U.S. in the Vietnam-war ear," a CNN obituary noted. "He admitted his character was both loved and hated, but said he just played Archie as truthfully as he knew how."

At its height, the show drew 50 million weekly television viewers. The show became a national icon and Archie Bunker a household name. O'Connor won four Emmy Awards for his performances. The furniture from the show's living room set was installed in the Smithsonian museum in Washington, DC. Eventually the other actors decided to leave the show, and All in the Family morphed into Archie Bunker's Place, with O'Connor playing a co-owner of a bar. That show, which ran from 1979 to 1983, never garnered the same popularity or critical acclaim as its predecessor.

Broke Color Barriers

After the Archie Bunker role had run its course, O'Connor wrote or acted in several unsuccessful productions. His first Broadway flop was Brothers (1983), which he directed and in which he played a father with four sons. He then wrote and produced a television movie called Brass and played the lead character, a chief of detectives for the New York police.

In 1984 he was in Home Front, a play about a father, mother, and daughter terrorized by a son who is a Vietnam vet. It closed after 13 performances. In 1995 O'Connor's play, A Certain Labor Day, opened in San Francisco with O'Connor in a starring role. The San Francisco Chronicle called it a "heartfelt bungle of a new play" and nothing more than a "transformation of O'Connor's most enduring creation, television's Archie Bunker." The review embittered O'Connor and reinforced his dislike of the press.

In 1988, O'Connor finally landed a role on another hit television series. He played Sheriff Bill Gillespie in the drama series In the Heat of the Night. The show, which ran for six seasons, was based on the 1967 Oscar-winning film. O'Connor also served as executive producer and head writer for the series. He directed several episodes and his adopted son, Hugh, played a police officer.

The show was remarkable for its controversial subject matter. In the Heat of the Night featured a romantic relationship between a white man and a black woman. Gillespie had an affair with a black city councilwoman, and the two married in the final episode of the series. This was ground-breaking material for television, and O'Connor won awards from the NAACP for his role on the drama. He also earned his fifth Emmy Award.

Shattered by Son's Suicide

In 1995, O'Connor's son, Hugh, committed suicide after a long battle with cocaine addiction. The event inspired O'Connor to start a crusade against the man who sold the drugs to Hugh. He called Harry Perzigian "a partner in murder" and a "sleazeball." Perzigian filed a defamation lawsuit against the actor. In 1997, a California jury threw out the case. In an interview on CNN's Larry King Live soon after the verdict, O'Connor said he would never be able to put his son's death behind him. "I can't forget it. There isn't a day that I don't think of him and want him back and miss him, and I'll feel that way until I'm not here anymore," he said. O'Connor became an advocate against drug abuse and appeared in several television anti-drug commercials.

O'Connor suffered from poor health in his final years. He lost a toe to complications from diabetes and underwent gall bladder surgery. He also had a coronary artery bypass operation in 1989. His last project was the role of Minnie Driver's grandfather in the movie Return to Me in 2000.

Despite his well-rounded repertoire, O'Connor will be remembered for his indelible role as Archie Bunker. O'Connor said in a 1994 interview that the character of Archie "wasn't even close" to who he was as a person. Still, the actor conceded, "I'll never play a better part than Archie. He was the best character, the most fulfilling character, and I never thought it was going to develop that way. There's no role that can top that."

Books

Contemporary Theatre, Film and Television, Volume 27, Gale Group, 2000.

O'Connor, Carroll, I Think I'm Outta Here, Simon & Schuster, 1998.

Periodicals

Chicago Tribune, June 22, 2001.

Los Angeles Times, June 22, 2001.

New York Times, June 22, 2001.

Washington Post, June 22, 2001.

Search unanswered questions...

Browse: Unanswered questions | Most-recent questions | Reference library

5min Related Video:

Carroll O'Connor

Top

Actor:

Carroll O'Connor

Top

Born: Aug 02, 1924 in Bronx, New York, New York
Died: Jun 21, 2001 in Culver City, California
Occupation: Actor, Writer
Active: '60s-'70s
Major Genres: Comedy
Career Highlights: All in the Family, Lonely Are the Brave, Return to Me
First Major Screen Credit: Lonely Are the Brave (1962)

Biography

Carroll O'Connor was, like the best working actors, a man of many faces -- in his 50-year acting career, he played everything from comically high-strung army generals to fed-up working-class New Yorkers, and even worked in one portrayal of an eloquent and slightly befuddled alien visitor from Mars. Most viewers will remember him best for his portrayal of the sometimes belligerent, bigoted Archie Bunker on the television series All in the Family, but that role only scratched the surface of O'Connor's talent. Born in the Bronx, NY, to an upper-middle-class Irish family, his father was a well-connected attorney and his mother was a school teacher. He was an intelligent boy but an indifferent student, his only real interest being sports. The family lived well, in the Forest Hills section of Queens, until O'Connor's father ran afoul of the law and was convicted of fraud. Despite this setback in the family's well-being, O'Connor managed to attend college and considered a career as a sportswriter, but those aspirations were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. Rejected by the United States Navy, he enrolled instead in the Merchant Marine Academy, but he later abandoned that pursuit, instead becoming a merchant seaman. After the war, O'Connor considered journalism as a career, but a trip to Dublin in 1950 changed the course of his life, as he discovered the acting profession. While attending college in Dublin, he began appearing in productions of the Gate Theater and also at the Edinburgh Festival, where he played Shakespearean roles. Returning to New York in 1954, he and his wife worked as substitute schoolteachers while he looked for acting work, which he found, after a long dry spell in which he despaired of ever getting a break, in Burgess Meredith's production of James Joyce's Ulysses. O'Connor got a role in which he received favorable notice from the critics, and that, in turn, led to his breakthrough part, as a bullying, greedy studio boss in an off-Broadway production of The Big Knife. O'Connor jumped next to television, at the very tail-end of the era of live TV drama in New York. Beginning in 1960 with his portrayal of the prosecutor in the Armstrong Circle Theater production of The Sacco-Vanzetti Story, he established himself on the small screen as a good, reliable character actor, who was able to melt into any role with which he was presented. Over the next decade, O'Connor worked in everything from Westerns to science fiction. He played taciturn landowners, likable aliens, enemy agents (on The Man From U.N.C.L.E., in "The Green Opal Affair"), and other character roles with equal aplomb. He also appeared in several unsold television pilots during the 1960s, including The Insider with David Janssen and Luxury Liner, starring Rory Calhoun, playing character roles, and did a pilot of his own, Walk in the Night, in which he co-starred with Andrew Duggan. O'Connor's movie career followed quickly from his television debut, starting with appearances in three dramatic films (most notably Lonely Are the Brave) in 1961. He was one of many actors who managed to get "lost" in the sprawling 20th Century Fox production of Cleopatra, but he fared better two years later in Otto Preminger's epic-length World War II drama In Harm's Way. O'Connor, playing Commander Burke, was very visible in his handful of scenes with John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, and Preminger thought enough of the actor to mention him by name along with the other stars in the film's trailer. He had major supporting roles, serious and comedic, respectively, in such high-profile movies as Hawaii and What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?, of which the latter proved critical to his subsequent career.

O'Connor had been in demand for television roles since the early '60s. In an episode of The Outer Limits, he revealed his flexibility by playing a somewhat befuddled alien investigator from Mars, masquerading as a pawnshop owner in a seedy section of New York, and jumping from a slightly affected, carefully pronounced diction in one line to a working-class dialect and manner in the same shot (for benefit of a human onlooker in the scene). He had also given a very warm, memorable, and touching performance in "Long Live the King," an episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and producer Irwin Allen had wanted O'Connor for the role of Dr. Smith on Lost in Space early in the character's conception, when the Smith figure was thoroughly villainous. Although he didn't get the part of Dr. Smith, O'Connor later appeared in "The Lost Patrol" episode of Allen's science fiction series The Time Tunnel. He had also been up for the role of the Skipper in Sherwood Schwartz's series Gilligan's Island, a role that was finally won by Alan Hale Jr. At the end of the 1960s, while O'Connor was busying himself in movies ranging from Westerns to crime films and mysteries, including Warning Shot, Waterhole No. 3, Marlowe, and For Love of Ivy, and distinguishing himself in all of them, CBS began preparing a television series called Those Were the Days. Adapted from a British series, it dealt life from the point-of-view of Archie Bunker, a fed-up, bigoted working-class resident of New York's outer borough of Queens. The network had tried for a big name, approaching Mickey Rooney to play the part, but he turned it down, and then co-producer Bud Yorkin remembered O'Connor's blustery comic performance as General Bolt in What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? O'Connor was offered the role and accepted, but had little confidence in the series' prospects; one condition on which he agreed to do the pilot was that the network had to provide him with transportation back to Rome, where he was making his home at the time. He was as busy as ever with movie work, including his portrayal of a memorably boisterous and comical general in Kelly's Heroes, which was shot in Europe in 1970, and the series -- now called All in the Family -- didn't seem a likely or essential prospect for success.

Within weeks of All in the Family's premiere in January of 1971, however, O'Connor had become one of the most recognizable and popular leading men on television. O'Connor had never played more than major supporting roles in movies, so there were no feature films to license starring the new pop culture hero; but CBS did pull Walk in the Night, the unsold pilot from three years earlier, starring O'Connor as a detective in a race against time to save a man's life, and aired it with the kind of fanfare normally reserved for major feature films. From 1971 on, O'Connor never looked back: He got star billing the next year in the network television production Of Thee I Sing (1972), and got his first chance to star in a feature film in Law and Disorder, in 1974. O'Connor would play nothing but leads from then on, and command a leading man's salary, a matter that led to a contractual dispute in 1974 that resulted in the actor absenting himself from All in the Family for a series of shows before it was resolved. From then on, entire productions, such as the TV-movie adaptation of The Last Hurrah (1977), would be built around him. He also returned to the theater periodically with far less success, starring in and directing a handful of theatrical productions that seldom got good notices or lingered long on-stage. O'Connor earned four Emmy awards as Archie Bunker, a recognition of the convincing mixture of warmth and anger that he brought to the character, and such was his popularity in the role, that he was able to parlay it into a spin-off series for four seasons called Archie Bunker's Place. It seemed for a time in the 1980s that O'Connor would be forever locked into the role, until 1987 when he got the part of laconic small-town Southern police chief Bill Gillespie in the television series In the Heat of the Night. Taking over a part originated on screen by Rod Steiger, O'Connor rebuilt the character from the ground up, making Gillespie a strong-willed, yet soft-spoken, flawed, sometimes crude, even occasionally bigoted man who was learning to be better. O'Connor's Gillespie was a lot more than Archie Bunker with a Mississippi drawl, as a man who was learning to be as reflective as he really was tough. O'Connor's Gillespie freely admitted to being imperfect, especially in his past, and in one episode confronted his own guilt, dating from his days as a patrol officer, in helping to bury the investigation of the bombing of a synogogue during the 1960s; by the end of the series' run, Gillespie, older and wiser, was romancing a black member of the Sparta, MS, town council, played by Denise Nicholas. His work in the series earned O'Connor an additional Emmy, and he eventually took over control of the production, transforming In the Heat of the Night from a routine cop show into one of the better dramatic series of its era, with police work only incidental to its content (and hardly a car chase in sight), in a run lasting through 1994. He had heart by-pass surgery early in the program's run, but that didn't take nearly as much out of O'Connor as the suicide, in 1995, of his son, Hugh, who had co-starred on In the Heat of the Night. Long troubled by drug use, the younger O'Connor's decision to kill himself turned Carroll O'Connor into a crusader for the first time in his public career against drug abuse and, even more so, against drug dealers. He had spent much of the last five years as an anti-drug activist, appealing to other parents, in particular, to intervene in their children's lives if necessary. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

Filmography:

Carroll O'Connor

Top

Show More Movies

Carroll O'Connor

Born	John Carroll O'Connor August 2, 1924(1924-08-02) Manhattan,^[1] New York, United States
Died	June 21, 2001 (aged 76) Culver City, California United States
Occupation	Actor, comedian, producer, director
Years active	1960 – 2000
Spouse(s)	Nancy Fields O'Connor

	36 Hours to Die (1999 Thriller Film)
	Brass (1985 Mystery Film)
	The Last Hurrah (1977 Drama Film)

	In the heat of the night tv series carroll o'connor will it come on dvds? Read answer...
	Where is CY O'Connor from? Read answer...
	O'Connor in Irish? Read answer...

	What was the area where the blacks lived in the night of the night with carroll o'connor?
	In the heat of the night Carroll O'Connor will it come on dvds?
	How many emmys did carrol o'connor win?

		Biography. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved. Read more
		Actor. Copyright © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved. Read more
		Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Carroll O'Connor". Read more

Carroll O'Connor

Carroll O'Connor

Carroll O'Connor

Carroll O'Connor

Biography

Carroll O'Connor

Carroll O'Connor

Early life

Prolific character actor

Considered roles

Television roles

All in the Family

Archie Bunker's Place

In the Heat of the Night

Career honors

Other honors

Later life

Death

Friendship with other actors

Personal Quotes

Partial credits

Starring roles

Films/made for TV movies

Writer

Producer

Director

Crew

Composer

Series music

Author

Guest starring

Misc

Archive footage featuring Carroll O'Connor

References

External links