Clifton Webb

For the New Zealand politician, see Thomas Clifton Webb.

Clifton Webb
from the trailer for the film Laura (1944).
Born	Webb Parmelee Hollenbeck November 19, 1889(1889-11-19) Beech Grove, Indiana, U.S.
Died	October 13, 1966(1966-10-13) (aged 76) Beverly Hills, California, U.S.
Years active	1917–62

Clifton Webb (November 19, 1889 – October 13, 1966) was an American actor, dancer, and singer known for his Oscar-nominated roles in such films as Laura, The Razor's Edge, and Sitting Pretty.^[1] In the theatrical world he was known for his appearances in the plays of Noël Coward, notably Blithe Spirit, as well as career on Broadway in a number of incredibly successful musical revues.

Early life

Career

Broadway

By the age of nineteen, using the name Clifton Webb, he had become a professional ballroom dancer, often partnering "exceedingly decorative" star dancer Bonnie Glass (she eventually replaced him with Rudolph Valentino), and performed in about two dozen operettas before debuting on Broadway as Bosco in The Purple Road, which opened at the Liberty Theatre on April 7, 1913, and ran for 136 performances before closing in August. His mother (billed as Mabel Parmalee) was listed in the program as a member of the opening night cast. His next musical was an Al Jolson vehicle, Sigmund Romberg's Dancing Around. It opened at the Winter Garden Theatre on October 10, 1914, and had 145 performances, closing in February, 1915. Later that year, Webb was in the all-star revue Ned Wayburn's Town Topics, which boasted 117 famous performers, including Will Rogers, listed in the Century Theatre opening night program of September 23, 1915. It closed 68 performances later on November 20, 1915. In 1916, he had another short run with Cole Porter's comic opera See America First, which opened at the Maxine Elliott Theatre on March 28, 1916, and closed after 15 performances on April 8, 1916. The World War I year of 1917 proved to be better, with a 233-performance run of Jerome Kern's Love o'Mike, which opened at the Shubert Theatre on January 15, 1917. After moving to Maxine Elliott's Theatre and Casino Theatre, it closed on September 29, 1917. Future Mama star Peggy Wood was also in the cast. Webb's final show of the 1910s, the musical Listen Lester, had the longest run, 272 performances. It opened at the Knickerbocker Theatre December 23, 1918, and closed in August 1919.

Clifton Webb, 1923

The 1920s saw Webb in no fewer than eight Broadway shows, numerous other stage appearances, including vaudeville, and a handful of silent films. The revue As You Were, with additional songs by Cole Porter, opened at the Central Theatre on January 29, 1920, and closed 143 performances later on May 29, 1920. Busy with films, tours and vaudeville, (including an appearance at the London Pavilion in 1921 as Mr. St. Louis in Fun of the Fayre and the next year in Phi-Phi), he did not return to Broadway until 1923, with the musical Jack and Jill (Globe Theatre) which had 92 performances between March 22, 1923, and June 9, 1923, and Lynn Starling's comic play Meet the Wife which opened on November 26, 1923, and ran into the summer of 1924, closing in August. The play's juvenile lead was 24-year old Humphrey Bogart.

In 1925, Webb appeared on stage in a dance act with vaudeville star and silent film actress Mary Hay. Later that year, when she and her husband, Tol'able David star Richard Barthelmess, decided to produce and star in New Toys, they chose Webb to be second lead. The movie proved to be financially successful, but 19 more years would pass before Webb appeared in another feature film.

Webb's mainstay was the Broadway theatre. Between 1913 and 1947, the tall and slender performer who sang in a clear, gentle tenor, appeared in 23 Broadway shows, starting with major supporting roles and quickly progressing to leads. He introduced Irving Berlin's "Easter Parade" and George and Ira Gershwin's "I've Got a Crush on You" in Treasure Girl (1928); Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz's "I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan" in The Little Show (1929) and "Louisiana Hayride" in Flying Colors (1932); and Irving Berlin's "Not for All the Rice in China" in As Thousands Cheer (1933). One of his stage sketches, performed with co-star Fred Allen, was filmed by Vitaphone as a short subject titled The Still Alarm. (Allen's experiences while working with Clifton Webb appear in Allen's memoirs.)

Most of Webb's Broadway shows were musicals, but he also starred in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and his longtime friend Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit and Present Laughter.

Hollywood

Webb was in his mid-fifties when actor/director Otto Preminger chose him over the objections of 20th Century Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck to play the elegant but evil radio columnist Waldo Lydecker, who is obsessed with Gene Tierney's character in the 1944 film noir Laura. (Zanuck reportedly found Webb too effeminate as a person and an actor.) His performance won him wide acclaim, and despite Zanuck's original objection, Webb was signed to a long-term contract with Fox. Two years later he was reunited with Tierney in another highly praised role as the elitist Elliott Templeton in The Razor's Edge (1946). He received Academy Award nominations for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for both.

Webb also received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 1949 for Sitting Pretty, the first in a three-film series of comedic "Mr. Belvedere" features with Webb portraying a snide and omniscient babysitter.

In the 1950 film Cheaper by the Dozen, Webb and Myrna Loy played Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, real-life efficiency experts of the 1910s and 1920s, and the parents of 12 children. The film's success led to a sequel, Belles on Their Toes, with Webb appearing only in a cameo flashback as the movie covers the family's life after the death of the father.

Webb's subsequent movie roles include that of college professor Thornton Sayre, who in his younger days was known as silent film idol Bruce "Dreamboat" Blair. Now a distinguished academic who wants no part of his past fame, he sets out to stop the showing of his old films on television in 1952's Dreamboat which concludes with Webb's alter ego Sayre watching himself star in Sitting Pretty. Also in 1952 he starred in the Technicolor movie biography of bandmaster John Philip Sousa, Stars and Stripes Forever. In 1953, he had his most dramatic role as the doomed but brave husband of unfaithful Barbara Stanwyck in Titanic and in 1954 played the (fictional) novelist John Frederick Shadwell in Three Coins in the Fountain. The 1956 British film The Man Who Never Was saw him playing the part of Royal Navy Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu in the true story of Operation Mincemeat the elaborate plan to trick the Axis powers about the Allied invasion of Italy during World War II. In 1957's Boy on a Dolphin, second-billed to Alan Ladd, with third-billed Sophia Loren, he portrayed a wealthy sophisticate who enjoyed collecting illegally obtained Greek antiquities. In a nod to his own identity, the character's name was "Victor Parmalee".

Webb's final film role was an initially sarcastic, but ultimately self-sacrificing Catholic priest in Leo McCarey's Satan Never Sleeps. The film, which was set in China, showed the victory of Mao Tse-tung's armies in the Chinese civil war, which ended with his ascension to power in 1949, but was actually filmed in England during the summer of 1961, using sets from the 1958 film, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, which had the same setting.

Private life

The never married Webb lived with his mother until her death at age ninety-one in 1960, leading Noël Coward to remark, apropos Webb's grieving, "It must be terrible to be orphaned at 71."^[2]

Actor Robert Wagner, who co-starred with Webb in the movies Stars and Stripes Forever and Titanic and considered the actor one of his mentors, stated in his memoirs, Pieces of My Heart: A Life, that "Clifton Webb was gay, of course, but he never made a pass at me, not that he would have."^[3][4][5]

Death

Because of health problems, Webb spent the last five years of his life as a recluse at his home in Beverly Hills, California, eventually succumbing to a heart attack at the age of 76.^[6] He is interred in crypt 2350, corridor G-6, Abbey of the Psalms in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, alongside his mother.

For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Clifton Webb has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6840 Hollywood Boulevard.

Filmography

Year	Title	Role	Notes
1917	National Red Cross Pageant	Dancer, The Pavane - French episode
1920	Polly with a Past	Harry Richardson	Uncredited
1924	Let Not Man Put Asunder	Major Bertie	Uncredited
1925	New Toys	Tom Lawrence
	The Heart of a Siren	Maxim	Alternative title: The Heart of a Temptress
1930	The Still Alarm
1944	Laura	Waldo Lydecker
1946	The Dark Corner	Hardy Cathcart
	The Razor's Edge	Elliott Templeton
1948	Sitting Pretty	Lynn Belvedere
1949	Mr. Belvedere Goes to College	Lynn Belvedere
1950	Cheaper by the Dozen	Frank Bunker Gilbreth
	For Heaven's Sake	Charles/Slim Charles
1951	Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell	Lynn Belvedere	Alternative title: Mr. Belvedere Blows His Whistle
	Elopement	Howard Osborne
1952	Belles on Their Toes	Frank Bunker Gilbreth	Uncredited
	Dreamboat	Thornton Sayre/Dreamboat/Bruce Blair
	Stars and Stripes Forever	John Philip Sousa	Alternative title: Marching Along
1953	Titanic	Richard Ward Sturges
	Mr. Scoutmaster	Robert Jordan
1954	Three Coins in the Fountain	John Frederick Shadwell
	Woman's World	Ernest Gifford	Alternative title: A Woman's World
1956	The Man Who Never Was	Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu
1957	Boy on a Dolphin	Victor Parmalee
1959	The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker	Mr. Horace Pennypacker
	Holiday for Lovers	Robert Dean
1962	Satan Never Sleeps	Father Bovard	Alternative titles: The Devil Never Sleeps Flight from Terror

Awards and nominations

Year	Award	Result	Category	Film
1945	Academy Award	Nominated	Best Supporting Actor	Laura
1947				The Razor's Edge
1949			Best Actor in a Leading Role	Sitting Pretty
1947	Golden Globe Award	Won	Best Supporting Actor	The Razor's Edge
1953		Nominated	Best Motion Picture Actor - Musical/Comedy	Stars and Stripes Forever

References

1. ^ Regarding Webb's birthdate, though The New York Times states "Clifton Webb was born Webb Parmalee Hollenbeck, in Indianapolis, IN, in 1891 (his date of birth was falsified during his lifetime and pushed up by several years, and some sources list the real year as 1889)", the U.S. Census of 1900 gives his birth year as 1889. That date is also on his grave marker; see http://movies.nytimes.com/person/75151/Clifton-Webb/biography
2. ^ Conner, Floyd (2002). Hollywood's Most Wanted: The Top 10 Book of Lucky Breaks, Prima Donnas, Box Office Bombs, and Other Oddities. Brassey's. p. 107. ISBN 1-574-88480-8. 
3. ^ Robert Wagner with Scott Eyman, Pieces of My Heart: A Life (HarperCollins, 2009)
4. ^ Robert Hofler, The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson (Carroll & Graf, 2006), p. 203
5. ^ Graham Payn with Barry Day, My Life with Noël, (Hal Leonard Corporation, 1996), page 5
6. ^ Obituary Variety, October 19, 1966, page 54.

External links

Biography portal

• Clifton Webb at the Internet Broadway Database
• Clifton Webb at the Internet Movie Database
• Clifton Webb at the TCM Movie Database
• Clifton Webb.com
• AFI Catalog entry for Clifton Webb
• Indiana Hollywood Hall of Fame: Clifton Webb
• Clifton Webb at Find a Grave
• 1921 passport photos of Webb and his mother Mabelle

Persondata
Name	Webb, Clifton
Alternative names	Hollenbeck, Webb Parmalee
Short description	Actor, singer, dancer
Date of birth	November 19, 1889
Place of birth	Beech Grove, Indiana, U.S.
Date of death	October 13, 1966
Place of death	Beverly Hills, California, U.S.