Orson Bean

Orson Bean (born July 22, 1928) is an American film, television, and stage actor. He appeared frequently on televised game shows in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, but is perhaps best known as a long-time panelist on the television game show To Tell the Truth.

Bean was born Dallas Frederick Burrows in Burlington, Vermont, to George Frederick Burrows and his wife Marian A. Pollard. Burrows was a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, a fund-raiser for the Scottsboro Boys' defense, and a 20-year member of the campus police of Harvard College.^[1] Bean is a second cousin to Calvin Coolidge, who was President of the United States at the time of Bean's birth.^[2]

Acting career

In the early 1950s Orson Bean was a rising young actor with a pleasant personality and a quirky sense of humor. These talents won him a guest appearance on NBC Radio's weekly jazz series The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street in 1952. Bean's mock-serious approach to the tongue-in-cheek scripts was noted by the show's producer, who hired Bean to host the final year of the series. Each week master of ceremonies "Dr. Orson Bean" introduced the musicians and offered humorous commentary between selections. His professorial delivery and under-the-breath musings belied the fact that Dr. Bean was only 24 years old.

Like many New York-based performers, Bean made frequent appearances on television. He often guested on The Tonight Show (with both Jack Paar and Johnny Carson), and steadily appeared on game shows originating from New York. He was a regular panelist on To Tell the Truth in versions from the late 1950s through 1991, and also appeared on Super Password among other game shows. He hosted a pilot for a revamped version of Concentration in 1985 which was picked up later on in 1987 as Classic Concentration with Alex Trebek.

He played the title character in the 1960 Twilight Zone episode "Mr. Bevis (The Twilight Zone)". In 1961, for the CBS anthology series The DuPont Show with June Allyson, he starred as John Monroe, with Adolphe Menjou as Fitch and Sue Randall as Ellen Monroe, in "The Secret Life of James Thurber", based on the works of the American humorist James Thurber.

Bean greatly admired movie comedians Laurel and Hardy and was one of the founding members of The Sons of the Desert, the international Laurel and Hardy Society.

On Broadway, he was the star of the original cast of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1955), and was featured in Subways Are For Sleeping (1961), for which he received a Tony Award nomination as Best Featured Actor in a Musical, as well as Never Too Late (1962). He also starred opposite Melina Mercouri in Illya Darling, the 1967 musical adaptation of the film Never on Sunday. In 1964 he produced the Obie Award winning Home Movies and appeared on Broadway in I Was Dancing.

He was a regular on both Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and its spin-off, Fernwood 2Nite, and also played the shrewd businessman and storekeeper Loren Bray on the television series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman throughout its six-year run on CBS in the 1990s. He played John Goodman's homophobic father on the short-lived sitcom Normal, Ohio. Two of his significant credits were playing the main characters Bilbo and Frodo Baggins in the 1977 and 1980 Rankin/Bass animated adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, and The Return of the King.

In 2005, Bean appeared in the sitcom Two and a Half Men, in an episode entitled "Does This Smell Funny to You?", playing a former playboy whose conquests included actresses Tuesday Weld and Anne Francis. More recently, he appeared in a 2007 episode of How I Met Your Mother.

Personal life

Bean was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios in the 1950s for attending two Communist Party meetings but made numerous appearances on television and in the theater.^[3] He is now a conservative and has converted to Christianity, though he still considers himself "a dirty, old man." He is father-in-law to Andrew Breitbart and describes his own children, who are all married, as "little communists."

Bean has been married three times. His first wife was actress Jacqueline de Sibour (stage name Rain Winslow),^[4] whom he married in 1956 and divorced in 1962. She was the daughter of Vicomte Jacques J. de Sibour, a French nobleman and pilot, and his wife, Violette B. Selfridge (later Mrs Frederick T. Bedford), a noted aviatrix who was a daughter of British department-store magnate Harry Gordon Selfridge.^[5][6] Jacqueline and Orson Bean had one child, Michele.

His second wife was fashion designer Carolyn Maxwell.^[7] They married in 1965 and divorced in 1979. They had three children: Max, Susannah, and Ezekiel.

His third and present wife is actress Alley Mills, who is twenty-three years his junior and whom he married in 1993. Mills is most well known for her role as Kevin's mother in The Wonder Years.

Additional filmography

• Safe Harbor (2009)
• Alien Autopsy (2006)
• Being John Malkovich (1999)
• Innerspace (1987)
• Forty Deuce (1982)
• Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

Books

• Me and the Orgone (1972) ISBN 0-9679670-1-5
• Too Much Is Not Enough (1988) ISBN 0-8184-0465-5
• 25 Ways to Cook a Mouse for the Gourmet Cat (1994) ISBN 1-55972-199-5
• Mikey^[8] (2007)

Recordings

• At The Hungry i (1959 Fantasy UFAN 7009), comedy
• I Ate The Baloney (1969 Columbia CS 9743), comedy

References

External links

• Orson Bean at the Internet Movie Database
• Orson Bean at Allmovie