Best Known As: Stage and TV actor known for playing Mark Twain
Name at birth: Harold Rowe Holbrook, Jr.
Veteran stage and TV actor Hal Holbrook is best known as the lanky powerhouse who's been playing Mark Twain in theaters since the 1950s. His one-man show, Mark Twain Tonight, was an off-Broadway standard for years before he finally won a Tony award in 1966. From there he became a respected guest star and lead player in TV movies in the 1970s, an Emmy winner for The Bold Ones in 1971, for Pueblo in 1974 and for Lincoln in 1976. Over the years he's had a number or character roles in feature films, including the key role of Deep Throat in 1976's All the President's Men (with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman) and his Oscar-nominated role in Sean Penn's 2007 film Into the Wild (starring Emile Hirsch).
Holbrook's wife is actress Dixie Carter (Julia on TV's Designing Women, 1986-93).
Holbrook, [Harold Rowe Jr.] Hal (b. 1925), actor. A native of Cleveland, he made his professional debut in 1942 and later assumed leading roles in such important Broadway offerings as the 1964 revival of Marco Millions; After the Fall (1964), in which he alternated with Jason Robards; and I Never Sang for My Father (1968). But Holbrook is recalled primarily for his superb one‐man show, Mark Twain Tonight!, which he first performed in 1955 and afterwards toured with for many seasons, returning for a Manhattan reprise as late as 1977. His later New York productions include The Country Girl (1984), as King Lear (1990), and in An American Daughter (1997).
Career Highlights: All the President's Men, Julia, The Firm
First Major Screen Credit: The Group (1966)
Biography
American actor Hal Holbrook broke into performing as a monologist at various esoteric nightspots in San Francisco and Greenwich Village. Holbrook worked on stage in the early 1950s and appeared on the CBS TV soap opera The Brighter Day. He might have spent the rest of his career as a talented but unremarkable performer had Holbrook not decided to bank upon his lifelong fascination with humorist Mark Twain. Donning elaborate Twain makeup and costume and memorizing several hours' worth of the writer's material, Holbrook put together a one man show, Mark Twain Tonight. After touring in small towns, Holbrook brought Mark Twain to an off-Broadway theater, scoring an immediate hit which led to some 2000 subsequent appearances as Twain (one of these in a 1967 CBS one-hour special) and a top-selling record album. The fame attending Mark Twain Tonight enabled Holbrook to flourish as a starring actor in numerous non-Twain projects. Among Holbrook's films are The Group (1966), Wild in the Streets (1968), Magnum Force (1973), The Star Chamber (1987), Wall Street (1987) and The Firm (1993); in 1976 the actor portrayed the shadowy amalgam character "Deep Throat" in All the President's Men. Holbrook has also stayed busy in TV, starring on the weekly series The Senator (1970) and appearing several times as Abraham Lincoln in various network specials.
A multi-Emmy winner, Hal Holbrook spent much of the late 1980s and early 1990s appearing as a regular cast member on the CBS sitcoms Designing Women (from 1986 to 1989, alongside real-life wife Dixie Carter) and Evening Shade (1990-94) in the role of Burt Reynolds' father, Evan Evans. Holbrook's big-screen activity also crescendoed during the 1990s and early 2000s; among many other assignments, he resumed his frequent typecast as a shady businessman with a deceptively paternal exterior in Sydney Pollack's blockbuster Grisham thriller The Firm (1993), provided an animated voice for the children's fantasy Cats Don't Dance (1997), and nastily evoked the prejudices of a bigoted commanding naval officer named Mr. Pappy in the military drama Men of Honor (2000). Holbrook also drew on his vast knowledge of Mark Twain as one of the participants in the epic-length documentary Ken Burns' Mark Twain (2001). The distinguished thespian received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his work in Sean Penn's critically-acclaimed drama Into the Wild (2007). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
at the Hollywood Life Magazine Breakthrough Awards, 2007
Born
Harold Rowe Holbrook, Jr.
February 17, 1925 (1925-02-17)(age 84) Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
Other name(s)
Harold Holbrook
Occupation
Actor
Years active
1954–present
Spouse(s)
Ruby Holbrook (1945–1965)
Carol Eve Rossen (1966–1979) Dixie Carter (1984–present)
Harold Rowe "Hal" Holbrook, Jr. (born February 17, 1925) is an American actor. His television roles include Abraham Lincoln in the 1976 TV series Lincoln, Hays Stowe on The Bold Ones: The Senator and Capt. Lloyd Bucher on Pueblo. He is also known for his role in the 2007 film Into the Wild, for which he was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award and an Academy Award. He has also done a one man show as Mark Twain. He is married to actress Dixie Carter.
According to Playbill, Holbrook's first solo performance as Twain was at Lock Haven State Teachers College in Pennsylvania in 1954. Ed Sullivan saw him and gave Holbrook his first national exposure on his February 12, 1956show. Holbrook was also a member of the Valley Players (1941-1962), a summer stock theater company based in Holyoke, Massachusetts. He was a member of the cast for several years and performed Mark Twain Tonight as the 1957 season opener.[3] The State Department even sent him on a European tour, which included pioneering appearances behind the Iron Curtain. In 1959, Holbrook first played the role Off-Broadway. Columbia Records recorded an LP of excerpts from the show.
Hal did a special production for the New York World's Fair (1964, 1965) for the Bell Telephone Pavilion. Joe Mielziner conceived of an innovative AV experience ride experience and utilizing Hal's acting talents on 65 different action screens for "The Ride Of Communications" with the movie itself known as "From Drumbeats to Telstar".
In 1967, Mark Twain Tonight was presented on television by CBS and Xerox, and Holbrook received an Emmy for his performance. Holbrook's Twain first played on Broadway in 1966, and again in 1977 and 2005; Holbrook was at least 80 years old during his most recent Broadway run, older (for the first time) than the character he was portraying. Holbrook won a Tony Award for the performance in 1966. Mark Twain Tonight has repeatedly toured across the country in what as of 2005[update] has amounted to over 2000 performances. In 1964, Holbrook played the role of the Major in the original production of Arthur Miller's Incident at Vichy. In 1968, he was one of the replacements for Richard Kiley in the original Broadway production of Man of La Mancha, although he had limited singing ability.
Hal Holbrook and Dixie Carter at the 41st Emmy Awards, 1990.
Holbrook co-starred with Martin Sheen in the controversial and acclaimed 1972 television movieThat Certain Summer said to be the first television movie to portray homosexuality in a sympathetic, non-judgemental light. In 1976, Holbrook won further acclaim for his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in a series of television specials based on Carl Sandburg's acclaimed biography. He has also starred in many films and TV programs. He won an Emmy for Lead Actor in a Dramatic Series in the 1970 TV series, "The Bold Ones: The Senator". In 1979 he starred, with Katharine Ross, Barry Bostwick, and Richard Anderson in the made-for-TV movie, "Murder by Natural Causes".
Early in his career he worked on stage and in a television soap opera, The Brighter Day. Holbrook is also famous for his role as the enigmatic Deep Throat (whose identity was unknown at the time) in the film All the President's Men. More recently, Holbrook appeared as a featured guest star in a 2006 episode of the HBO series The Sopranos and the NCIS episode "Escaped".
In 2000 he appeared in Men of Honor where he portrayed a racist and hypocritical officer who endlessly tries to fail an African-American diver trainee.
Holbrook's most recent film is That Evening Sun, which he filmed on location with his wife Dixie Carter in East Tennessee in the summer of 2008. The film was produced by Dogwood Entertainment (a subsidiary of DoubleJay Creative) and is based on a short story by William Gay. That Evening Sun premiered in March 2009 at South By Southwest, where it received the Audience Award for Narrative Feature and a special Jury Prize for Ensemble Cast. Joe Leydon of Variety hailed Hollbrook's performance in the film as a "career-highlight star turn as an irascible octogenarian farmer who will not go gentle into that good night."[5]That Evening Sun also was screened at the 2009 Nashville Film Festival, where Holbrook was honored with a special Lifetime Achievement Award, and the film itself received another Audience Award.[6]
