Melvyn Douglas
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Melvyn Douglas
Douglas, Melvyn [né Melvyn Edouard Hesselberg] (1901–81), actor and director. The suave leading man, who developed into a fine character actor, was born in Macon, Georgia, and made his stage debut in Chicago. He next spent several seasons with Jessie Bonstelle before briefly operating his own company in Madison, Wisconsin. Douglas first appeared in New York as the gambler Ace Wilfong in A Free Soul (1928). His acting in plays landed him a Hollywood contract, but he returned to Broadway in 1934 to play the philandering husband Sheridan Warren in No More Ladies and to win acclaim for his direction of O'Casey's Within the Gates. His next appearances were in failures, and Douglas returned to Hollywood until he re‐emerged after World War II as co‐producer of the ex‐soldier revue Call Me Mister (1946). His post‐war performances of note include newspaperman Tommy Thurston in Two Blind Mice (1949), the callous nightclub owner Wally Williams in The Bird Cage (1950), the middle‐aged bachelor‐father Steve Whitney in Glad Tidings (1951), and the staid banker‐father Howard Carol in the frivolous farce, Time Out for Ginger (1952). Douglas played this part for three seasons, before replacing Paul Muni in 1956 as the Clarence Darrow‐like Henry Drummond in a retelling of the Scopes evolution trial, Inherit the Wind. Following several failures, he won a Tony Award for his portrayal of William Russell, the idealistic presidential candidate, in The Best Man (1960). His last Broadway appearance was as a retired chicken farmer encroached on by suburbanites, the title role in Spofford (1967).
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Melvyn Douglas
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Melvyn Douglas
Biography
American actor Melvyn Douglas began his stage career shortly after being mustered out of World War I Army service. Douglas secured a position with the Owens Repertory Company, making his debut in a production of Merchant of Venice. He spent the first part of the 1920s touring with Owens Repertory and with the Jessie Bonstelle Company, reaching Broadway in the 1928 drama A Free Soul. Brought to Hollywood in the early talkie "gold rush" for stage-trained actors, Douglas made his film bow in 1931's Tonight or Never. With The Old Dark House (1932), the actor established his standard screen character: a charming, blase young socialite who could exhibit great courage and loyalty when those attributes were called upon. After a brief return to Broadway in 1933, Douglas returned to films in 1935, signing a joint contract with Columbia and MGM. Most often appearing in sophisticated comedies, Douglas was one of the busiest stars in Hollywood, playing in as many as eight films per year. One of the actor's better roles was a supporting one: as Cary Grant's beleaguered lawyer and business adviser in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1947), who spends most of the film trying to keep Grant from spending himself into bankruptcy. Douglas found movie roles scarce in the early 1950s thanks to the "Red Scare." The actor was married to Congresswoman Helen Gahagan, the woman labeled by Richard Nixon as the "pink lady" friendly to communism. The more rabid anti-communists in Washington went after Douglas himself, suggesting that because he was Jewish and had changed his name for professional reasons, he was automatically politically suspect. Douglas began recovering his career with a 1950s detective program, Hollywood Off-Beat - ironically playing a disbarred lawyer trying to regain his reputation. He headed back to Broadway, gaining high critical praise for his "emergence" as a topnotch character actor (his prior stage and film credits were virtually ignored). Some of Douglas' stage triumphs included Inherit the Wind (replacing Paul Muni in the Clarence Darrow part) and The Best Man (which had a character based on Richard Nixon) Douglas' long-overdue Academy Award was bestowed upon the actor for his role as Paul Newman's dying father in Hud (1963); other highlights of Douglas' final Hollywood days included I Never Sang for My Father (1971) and Being There (1979), the latter film winning the actor his second Oscar. Melvyn Douglas died at age 80, just before the release of his final film, Ghost Story (1981). ~ Hal Erickson, RoviFilmography:
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Melvyn Douglas
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Melvyn Douglas
| Melvyn Douglas | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | Melvyn Edouard Hesselberg April 5, 1901 Macon, Georgia, U.S. |
| Died | August 4, 1981 (aged 80) New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | Actor |
| Years active | 1930–1981 |
| Spouse | Rosalind Hightower (divorced; 1 son) Helen Gahagan (her death; 1 son, 1 daughter) |
Melvyn Edouard Hesselberg (April 5, 1901 – August 4, 1981), better known as Melvyn Douglas, was an American actor.
Coming to prominence in the 1930s as a suave leading man (perhaps best typified by his performance in the 1939 romantic comedy Ninotchka), Douglas later transitioned into more mature and fatherly roles as in his Academy Award-winning performances in Hud (1963) and Being There (1979).
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Early life
Douglas was born in Macon, Georgia, the son of Lena Priscilla (née Shackelford) and Edouard Gregory Hesselberg, a concert pianist and composer. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Riga, Latvia, then part of Russia. His mother, a native of Tennessee, was Protestant and a Mayflower descendant.[1][2] His maternal grandfather, George Shackelford, was a General and Civil War veteran.[3]
Douglas, in his autobiography, See You at the Movies (1987), writes that he was unaware of his Jewish background until later in his youth: "I did not learn about the non-Christian part of my heritage until my early teens," as his parents preferred to hide his Jewish heritage. It was his aunts, on his father's side, who told him "the truth" when he was 14. He writes that he "admired them unstintingly and modeled" himself on them; they in turn treated him like a son.[1]
Though his father taught music at a succession of colleges in the U.S. and Canada, Douglas never graduated from high school. He took the surname of his maternal grandmother and became known as Melvyn Douglas.
Career
Douglas developed his acting skills in Shakespearean repertory while in his teens and with stock companies in Sioux City, Iowa; Evansville, Indiana; Madison, Wisconsin, and Detroit, Michigan. He established an outdoor theatre in Chicago. He had a long theatre, film and television career as a lead player, stretching from his 1930 Broadway role in Tonight or Never (opposite his future wife, Helen Gahagan) until just before his death. Douglas shared top billing with Boris Karloff and Charles Laughton in James Whale's sardonic horror classic The Old Dark House in 1932.
He was the hero in the 1932 horror film The Vampire Bat and the sophisticated leading man in 1935's She Married Her Boss. He played opposite Joan Crawford in several films, most notably A Woman's Face (1941), and with Greta Garbo in three films: As You Desire Me (1932), Ninotchka (1939) and Garbo's final film Two-Faced Woman (1941).
During World War II, Douglas served first as a director of the Arts Council in the Office of Civilian Defense, and then in the United States Army. He returned to play more mature roles in The Sea of Grass and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. In 1959 he made his musical debut playing Captain Boyle in the ill-fated Marc Blitzstein musical Juno, based on Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock.
From November 1952 to January 1953, Douglas starred in the DuMont detective show Steve Randall (Hollywood Off Beat) which then moved to CBS. In the summer of 1953, he briefly hosted the DuMont game show Blind Date. In the summer of 1959, Douglas hosted eleven original episodes of a CBS Western anthology television series called Frontier Justice, a production of Dick Powell's Four Star Television.
In addition to his Academy Awards (see below), Douglas won a Tony Award for his Broadway lead role in the 1960 The Best Man by Gore Vidal, and an Emmy for his 1967 role in Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. As Douglas grew older, he took on the older-man and father roles, in such movies as The Americanization of Emily (1964), Hud (1963), for which he won his first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, (1966) The Fugitive, The Candidate (1972) and I Never Sang for My Father (1970), for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. He won his second Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the comedy-drama Being There (1979).
Douglas' final screen appearance was in Ghost Story (1981). He did not finish his role in the film The Hot Touch (1982) before his death. Douglas has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for movies at 6423 Hollywood Blvd. and one for television at 6601 Hollywood Blvd.
Personal life
Douglas was married briefly to artist Rosalind Hightower, and they had one child, (Melvyn) Gregory Hesselberg, in 1925. Gregory Hesselberg, an artist, is the father of actress Illeana Douglas.
In 1931 Douglas married actress-turned-politician Helen Gahagan. They traveled to Europe that same year, and "were horrified by French and German anti-Semitism." As a result, they became outspoken anti-Fascists, supporting the Democratic Party and Roosevelt's re-election. As a three-term Congresswoman, she was later Richard Nixon's opponent for the United States Senate seat from California in 1950.[1]
Nixon accused Gahagan of being soft on Communism because of her opposition to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Nixon went so far as to call her "pink right down to her underwear". It was Gahagan who popularized Nixon's epithet "Tricky Dick." Douglas and Gahagan had two children: Peter Gahagan Douglas (1933) and Mary Helen Douglas (1938). The couple remained married until Helen Gahagan Douglas' death in 1980 from cancer. Melvyn Douglas died a year later, in 1981, aged 80, from pneumonia and cardiac complications in New York City.
Academy Awards and nominations
| Year | Award | Film | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1963 | Best Supporting Actor | Hud | Won |
| 1970 | Best Actor | I Never Sang for My Father | Nominated |
| 1979 | Best Supporting Actor | Being There | Won |
Partial filmography
References
- ^ a b c Nissenson, Hugh (January 18, 1987). "He Almost Made Garbo Laugh". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE4DD1E31F93BA25752C0A961948260. Retrieved May 12, 2010.
- ^ 1
- ^ http://www.macon.com/2011/08/21/1672436/melvyn-we-hardly-knew-ye.html
Sources
- Douglas, Melvyn; Tom Arthur (1986). See You At The Movies: The Autobiography of Melvyn Douglas. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. ISBN 0-8191-5390-7.
External links
- Melvyn Douglas at the Internet Movie Database
- Melvyn Douglas (1901-1981) at the New Georgia Encyclopedia
- Melvyn Douglas at the TCM Movie Database
- Melvyn Douglas at the Internet Broadway Database
- Melvyn Douglas at Find a Grave
- www.geoghegan.org: HELEN GAHAGAN DOUGLAS
- Photographs and literature on Melvyn Douglas
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Oxford Companion to American Theatre
The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
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