- Melvyn Douglas
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Melvyn Douglas 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).
Contents
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. He briefly hosted the DuMont game show Blind Date in the summer of 1953. 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 0819153907.
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
Awards for Melvyn Douglas Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play (1947–1975) José Ferrer / Fredric March (1947) · Henry Fonda / Paul Kelly / Basil Rathbone (1948) · Rex Harrison (1949) · Sidney Blackmer (1950) · Claude Rains (1951) · José Ferrer (1952) · Tom Ewell (1953) · David Wayne (1954) · Alfred Lunt (1955) · Paul Muni (1956) · Fredric March (1957) · Ralph Bellamy (1958) · Jason Robards, Jr. (1959) · Melvyn Douglas (1960) · Zero Mostel (1961) · Paul Scofield (1962) · Arthur Hill (1963) · Alec Guinness (1964) · Walter Matthau (1965) · Hal Holbrook (1966) · Paul Rogers (1967) · Martin Balsam (1968) · James Earl Jones (1969) · Fritz Weaver (1970) · Brian Bedford (1971) · Cliff Gorman (1972) · Alan Bates (1973) · Michael Moriarty (1974) · John Kani / Winston Ntshona (1975)
Complete list · (1947–1975) · (1976–2000) · (2001–2025) Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor (1961–1980) George Chakiris (1961) · Ed Begley (1962) · Melvyn Douglas (1963) · Peter Ustinov (1964) · Martin Balsam (1965) · Walter Matthau (1966) · George Kennedy (1967) · Jack Albertson (1968) · Gig Young (1969) · John Mills (1970) · Ben Johnson (1971) · Joel Grey (1972) · John Houseman (1973) · Robert De Niro (1974) · George Burns (1975) · Jason Robards (1976) · Jason Robards (1977) · Christopher Walken (1978) · Melvyn Douglas (1979) · Timothy Hutton (1980)
Complete list · (1936–1940) · (1941–1960) · (1961–1980) · (1981–2000) · (2001–2020) Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture (1961–1980) George Chakiris (1961) · Omar Sharif (1962) · John Huston (1963) · Edmond O'Brien (1964) · Oskar Werner (1965) · Richard Attenborough (1966) · Richard Attenborough (1967) · Daniel Massey (1968) · Gig Young (1969) · John Mills (1970) · Ben Johnson (1971) · Joel Grey (1972) · John Houseman (1973) · Fred Astaire (1974) · Richard Benjamin (1975) · Laurence Olivier (1976) · Peter Firth (1977) · John Hurt (1978) · Melvyn Douglas/Robert Duvall (1979) · Timothy Hutton (1980)
Complete List · (1943–1960) · (1961–1980) · (1981–2000) · (2001–present) Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor – Miniseries or a Movie (1952–1975) Thomas Mitchell (1952) · Robert Cummings (1954) · Lloyd Nolan (1955) · Jack Palance (1956) · Peter Ustinov (1957) · Fred Astaire (1959) · Laurence Olivier (1960) · Maurice Evans (1961) · Peter Falk (1962) · Trevor Howard (1963) · Jack Klugman (1964) · Alfred Lunt (1965) · Cliff Robertson (1966) · Peter Ustinov (1967) · Melvyn Douglas (1968) · Paul Scofield (1969) · Peter Ustinov (1970) · George C. Scott (1971) · Keith Michell (1972) · Laurence Olivier (1973) · Anthony Murphy (1973) · Hal Holbrook (1974) · William Holden (1974) · Laurence Olivier (1975) · Peter Falk (1975)
Complete list · (1952–1975) · (1976–2000) · (2001–2025) Categories:- 1901 births
- 1981 deaths
- Actors from Georgia (U.S. state)
- American film actors
- American military personnel of World War II
- American people of English descent
- American people of Jewish descent
- American stage actors
- American television actors
- Best Supporting Actor Academy Award winners
- California Democrats
- Cardiovascular disease deaths in New York
- Deaths from pneumonia
- Disease-related deaths in New York
- New York Democrats
- Spouses of members of the United States House of Representatives
- Tony Award winners
- Upper Canada College alumni
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