Baby boomers know Lloyd Bridges as Mike Nelson, the square-jawed frogman star of the undersea adventure series Sea Hunt. The show ran from 1958-1961 and then continued for years in reruns. Bridges' career was resurrected in a comedic mood when he played a goofy plane dispatcher in the 1980 satire Airplane! and its 1982 sequel Airplane II. He is the father of the actor Beau Bridges and the actor Jeff Bridges, who thanked Lloyd and Dorothy Bridges after winning the Oscar as best actor for the 2009 film Crazy Heart.
Lloyd Bridges was briefly blacklisted for political activism during the McCarthy era... In the 1990s he appeared in two more aerial parodies, Hot Shots! (1991) and Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993)... Lloyd Bridges married the former Dorothy Simpson in 1938, and they remained married until his death. Dorothy Simpson died in February of 2009, just weeks before Jeff Bridges won his Oscar... Dorothy and Lloyd Bridges had four children: Beau (b. 1941), Garrett (b. 1948), Jeff (b. 1949), and Lucinda (b. 1953). Garrett died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in 1948.
Working from the ground up in stock companies, Lloyd Bridges was a member of the progressive Actors Lab company in the mid 1930s. He made his Broadway debut toward the end of that decade in a production of Othello. Signed by Columbia in 1941, Bridges appeared in everything the studio assigned him, from Three Stooges 2-reel comedies to such "A" pictures as Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), Talk of the Town (1942), and Sahara (1943). He began freelancing in 1945, accepting the prescient role of a deep-sea diver in 1948's 16 Fathoms Deep, among other films. The most memorable of his '50s assignments was the leading role in the cult science-fiction programmer Rocketship X-M (1950) and the part of the look-out-for-number-one deputy in High Noon (1952).
Thanks to his earlier involvement in the Actors Lab and his admission at the HUAC hearings that he'd once flirted with communism, Bridges was "graylisted" during the mid-'50s, able to find work only in lesser pictures and TV shows. He was rescued by producer Ivan Tors, who cast Bridges as diver-for-hire Mike Nelson in the TV series Sea Hunt. Filmed between 1957 and 1961, Sea Hunt was the most popular syndicated program of the era, turning Bridges into a millionaire. Alas, neither of his subsequent series of the '60s, The Lloyd Bridges Show (1962) and The Loner (1965), survived their first seasons. Undaunted, Bridges continued working into the '90s, displaying a hitherto untapped flair for zany comedy in such films as Airplane! (1980), Joe vs. the Volcano (1990), and the two Hot Shots films. Bridges was the father of actors Beau Bridges and Jeff Bridges. A committed environmentalist, he was involved in several organizations including the American Oceans Campaign and Heal the Bay, a Los Angeles-based group. Bridges died of natural causes on March 10, 1998. Shortly before his passing, he had completed work on two films, Jane Austen's Mafia and Meeting Daddy; in the latter film, Bridges co-starred with his eldest son Beau. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
Lloyd Vernet Bridges, Jr. (January 15, 1913 – March 10, 1998) was an American actor who starred in a number of television series and appeared in more than 150 feature films. Bridges is best known for his role of Mike Nelson in Sea Hunt, the most-popular syndicated American TV series in 1958.[1] He is the father of actors Beau Bridges and Jeff Bridges.
Bridges was born in San Leandro, California, the son of Harriet Evelyn (née Brown) and Lloyd Vernet Bridges, Sr., who was involved in the California hotel business and once owned a movie theater.[2] His parents were both natives of Kansas. Bridges graduated from Petaluma High School in 1931. He studied political science at UCLA, where he was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.
Career
Bridges made his Broadway debut in 1939 in a production of Shakespeare's Othello. In 1941, he joined the stock company at Columbia Pictures, where he played small roles in features and short subjects. (In Here Comes Mr. Jordan Bridges is the pilot of the plane in the "heaven" scene.) He left Columbia to enlist in the U.S. Coast Guard. Following World War II, he returned to film acting. He was blacklisted briefly in the 1950s after he admitted to the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had once been a member of the Actors' Lab, a group with links to the Communist Party. He resumed working after being cleared by the FBI, finding his greatest success in television.
Bridges garnered press in 1956 for his emotional performance on live anthology program The Alcoa Hour, in an episode titled "Tragedy in a Temporary Town", directed by Sidney Lumet.[3] During the performance, Bridges inadvertently slipped some profanity in while ad-libbing.[4] Although the slip of the lip generated hundreds of complaints, the episode won a Robert E. Sherwood Television Award, with Bridges' slip being defended even by some members of the clergy.[4][5][6] Bridges received an Emmy Award nomination for the role.[7]
Bridges played significant roles in several mini-series, including Roots, How the West Was Won, The Blue and the Gray and Battlestar Galactica. For more than forty-five years, Bridges was a frequent guest star on television series. He received a second Emmy Award nomination four decades after the first when he was nominated in 1998 for his role as Izzy Mandelbaum on Seinfeld.
Bridges and his son Beau at the 44th Emmy Awards, August 30, 1992
Bridges met his wife, Dorothy Bridges (née Simpson) in his fraternity; they married in 1938 in New York City.[8] They had four children: Jeff, Beau, Lucinda, and Garrett, who later died.[citation needed]
A world federalist, Bridges once said, “The devastation caused by war and the pollution of our environment knows no boundaries. Only an effective world government could provide sufficient law and have the power to control these destructive forces".[9] He was also involved in several organizations, including the American Oceans Campaign and Heal the Bay, a Los Angeles-based group.
Death
Bridges died of natural causes at the age of eighty-five. His ashes were given to his family. He was married to Dorothy Bridges (née Simpson; 1915–2009), from 1938 until his death. They had four children: the actors Beau Bridges and Jeff Bridges; a daughter, Lucinda Louise Bridges; and another son, Garrett Myles Bridges (born between Beau and Jeff), who died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome on August 3, 1948. The actor Jordan Bridges is Beau's son and Lloyd's grandson.
Tributes
An episode ("The Burning") in the final Seinfeld season (1998) was dedicated to the memory of Lloyd Bridges. He had played the character of Izzy Mandelbaum in the episodes "The English Patient" in 1997 and "The Blood" in 1998.
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