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Nancy Reed: If there's a plague here, you're the most important guy in this town.
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Raymond Fitch: Oh, yeah. I went to see my mother-in-law. She was wrestling semifinals...
Richard Widmark
Richard Widmark (Richard Widmark) was born on December 26, 1914 in Sunrise, Minnesota. His main works are " Judgment at Nuremberg ".
Wedemark grew up in Princeton, Illinois, and studied acting at Lake Forest College. After graduating, he taught the acting department at the school, before his first appearance in the radio drama "The True Story of Aunt Jenny" in 1938. In 1943, he made his Broadway debut with "Kiss and Talk." World War II , where he failed to enlist due to tympanic membrane perforation .
For his contributions to action movies, Wedemark has a star at 6800 Hollywood Boulevard on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2002, he was inscribed on the Western Actors List by the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Early Experience
Richard Widmark was born on Boxing Day in 1914 in Sunrise, Minnesota. He said he fell in love with Movies as a child, saying, "I've been a Movie fan since I was four years old, and my grandmother took me to see Movies." As a teenager, Wedemark publicly stated in his high school speech that he loved Movies, At Lake Forest, however, he wanted to be a lawyer. However, in the rehearsal of a drama "Consellor-at-Law" at school, he was the best candidate to play the leading role, and thus his passion for acting began to deepen.
In 1936, after receiving a Master of Arts degree, he taught at the school as a teaching assistant in the Department of Speech and Drama. However, he resigned soon after and went to New York to become an actor.
It wasn't until 1938 that he appeared in the radio drama The Real Life of Aunt Jenny.
Performing Experience
In 1947, he made his first Movie screen appearance in "Kiss of Death", playing the always-giggling sociopathic villain Tommy Woodall. One of his most heinous acts on the show is when he pushes an old lady in a wheelchair (played by Mildred Dunnock) down the stairs and falls to her death. The commercial success of "Kiss of Death" was also controversial. This also opened the way for Wedemark to sign a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox . His role earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and a 1947 Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer. Wedemark's personality was also the inspiration for Kaleidoscope's song "The Ballad of Tommy Woodall."
1950, with Paul Douglas , Barbara Bel Gates, Jack Palance and Zorro Mostel in Elia Kazan's classic Film noir "Street Panic"; the same year with Gene Tierney Performed Jules Dassin 's classic noir " Night and the City ".
Two years later, Wedemark had his own cement handprint at the Grauman's Chinese Theatre. During his time with Fox, he starred in Streets Without a Name, with Marilyn Monroe in other projects including Don't Knock, and with Betty Joan Perske in the later on-screen Movie Vincente Minnelli The popular movie "Conspiracy".
In 1947, his debut performance in Film noir "Kiss of Death" established his own American image symbol, and the role of killer Tommy Wood was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and "Kiss of Death" " and other Black Thrillers made Wedemark part of a new generation of male American movie stars in the post-World War II era. Together with the post-war movie stars Kirk Douglas and Old Rumple Eyes , he brought new features to the screen. The protagonist or supporting role he played had a tough, that is, a less active character, and used it to impress the audience and gain sympathy ( Although Mitchum's shy appearance makes him the most popular of the three). Wedemark doesn't shy away from playing characters that are extremely troublesome, contradictory, or downright morally depraved. After his first gig, Wedemark worked steadily, mostly as an actor, until his retirement in 1990 at age 76.
The American prosecution attorney in Judgment at Nuremberg reached the pinnacle of his stardom and continued from the '50s to the '60s, but he continued his acting career for another 30 years.
His Broadway debut was "Kiss and Tell," and his days on Broadway were far easier than his early movie career.
After World War II, he signed a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox . After auditioning for the role of Tommy Woodo, Fox bosses always thought the thin, blond Wademark couldn't play the lead, especially when watching his stage performance as the psychopath in "Kiss and Talk." He was at best a chauffeur for Victor Matthews.
Although Wedemark's role is small, he's a big shot at the scene. 20th Century Fox's publicity department persuaded exhibitors to go all out to promote the Movie by extolling their new villain.
"Just sell Richard Wedemark!" reads STUDIO's brochure, an important message from 20th Century Fox to theater owners. The brochure says that local exhibitors are busy printing and need a lot of posters featuring Wedemark's portrait.
He won a Golden Globe and an Oscar for his role in recognition of his role, which at the time also led to a large number of genre performances during his early years at STUDIO .
Widmark played psychopaths in " The Street with No Name " and "Road House" (1948), and his style matched that of Fox's rising star Gregory Peck in William Wellman's Western " The Pale Yellow." Unlike Yellow Sky (1949), of course he always played the villain. It was only when he strongly demanded that STUDIO let him play another character type that he played a sailor in "Down to the Sea in Ships" (1949), so much so that he became NewsHead .
On March 28, 1949, Life magazine published a three-page coverage of the Movie, titled "Wedemark's villain turns evil". He was so popular that he captured the public's imagination, and as early as ten years ago, the hall outside the Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood was marked by his indelible cement handprints and footprints.
The Actor's Director made Wedemark play less of a role in the riotous film street commotion—that role was given to Palance—but as the surgeon who tracked down Palance, who had the Black Death, the The character goes hand in hand with detective Paul Douglas. Wedemark really established himself in the genre film and repeated it in a large number of noir films later.
Wedemark has proven he can handle other roles, and he doesn't shy away from playing a role in a quality film. Director Jules Dassin , who soon became Hollywood's blacklist, landed him one of his greatest roles as Harry Fabian, the money-making pimp on " Night and the City ." Set in London, Wedemark's Fabian tries desperately to survive in the jungle of debauched women, but is doomed. Wedemark's superb acting skills are that he is good at conveying the desperation and desperation of prisoners facing doomsday who want to control their own destiny, and this kind of performance is regarded as the symbol of Film noir . That same year, he played the rioting paranoid in author-director Joseph Mankiewicz's "No Way Out."
In the 1950s, Wedemark starred in Western , war films, and occasionally thriller films. He starred in Don't Bother to Knock (1953) with Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe, and in director Samuel Fowler's Pick Up on South Street the same year. His seven-year contract with Fox was about to expire, and Zanuck was reluctant to improve his contract, so he still played a key supporting role in "Broken Lance" (1954), but the salary was higher than Spencer Tracy low, even lower than those of Robert Wagner and Jean Peters . The film was critically acclaimed, and it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Writing Adapted Screenplay , but was held back by Albert Maltz being blacklisted from Hollywood.
Wedemark left Fox to become a freelancer and set up his own company, Heath Studio. He did more westerns , adventures and social dramas, his own role as Dauphin in Otto Preminger's adaptation of Bernard Shaw's St. John didn't do him any favors, one didn't bring anyone Bad movie to honor, without Preminger's share, without its heroine Jane Seberg or himself Wedemark.
In 1960, he starred in another bad movie, " The Alamo ," called "John Wayne's Suicide Patriotic Ode ." Because he's secretly playing David Colocott, played by Liberal Jim Bowie backing die-hard Conservative Wayne. Along with character actor Chill Wills , Wedemark is the best in the movie.
In 1961, Wedemark performed very well as the Plaintiff in producer-director Stanley Kramer 's " Judgment at Nuremberg ," which also featured Oscar-nominated Spencer Tracy and Oscar-winner Maximilian Schell , superstar Burt Lancaster , and acting genius Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland . In addition to being on the same stage with all these A-list stars, Wedemark's personality became the central axis of the play.
Later on, Wedemark starred in the next two Westerns, Two Rode Together , directed by big director John Ford , with James Stewart . The other was a starring role in " Cheyenne Autumn ," in which Ford apologized for the Indian massacre . During the filming of "Two Rode Together," Ford upset Stewart with his hat. Because Stewart insisted on wearing that hat, in the 1950s he starred in the Western box office champion and hat is not unrelated. And he and Wedemark both have back-of-the-ear (also bald, so they need a makeup artist to prepare wigs for them), so Ford sat far away from them on the set and gave out stage directions that were barely audible, if not even personal. No one heard what the director said, and Ford exaggeratedly shouted to the production crew that he was going to step back to direct two bald and deaf guys in the next 40 years of his Movie career. This shows that stars like Wedemark and Stewart have been insulted the most by Ford, and it also shows that the big director is quite ruthless.
Throughout the 1960s, Wedemark played A-plctur . He managed to have one of his best performances once in a decade, playing an indiscriminate cop in Don Siegel's cop melodrama Madigan . Watching the film, one sees that Wedemark's personality was a driving factor as he evolved into the villainous characters of the late '60s, such as Clint Eastwood in Don Siegel's later Dirty Harry .
He lived peacefully and avoided the media, saying in 1971: "I think it's better for an actor to keep his mouth shut when he's done what he's supposed to do." Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas argued that Wedemark deserved Oscar nominee for his role in When the Legends Die (1972, playing a retired radio star as Frederic Forrest's tutor). It's odd that "Kiss of Death" is considered his only Oscar-nominated masterpiece. But with the rise and increasing attention of Film noir, towards the end of his acting career in the 1970s, people began to reassess his worth as an actor; unlike Humphrey Bogart , who didn't live to see his own fame So high after his death, and all the rage before Wedemark retired.
In the 1970s, he still had a prominent position in the movie industry, and from 1971, he entered the television industry. In the movie world, he mostly plays supporting roles, albeit in the higher-paid ones, such as Sidney Lumet 's Murder on the Orient Express , Robert Aldrich 's Twilight's Last Gleaming and Stanley Kramer The Domino Theory (The Domino Theory, 1977). He even returned to the doctor who played the villain of a leading role in Coma (1978).
in 1971. Looking for a better role, he turned to television and played the president of the United States back in the TV movie Vanished. His acting role brought Wedemark back an Emmy nomination. To save the revival of NBC, he played Madigan, in the fall of 1972, as part of a run of six 90-minute episodes of the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie.
On March 24, 2008, in the United States State of Connecticut--CTRoxbury died.
Personal Life
Wedemark enjoyed a fifty-year marriage to playwright Jean Hazlewood, from 1942 to her death in 1997 (they had one child, Anne, born in 1945). Wedemark was married to his first author wife, Jane Hezelwood, from April 5, 1942, until her death on March 2, 1997.
Their daughter, Anne Heath Widmark, an artist and writer, married baseball legend Sandy Koufax on January 1, 1969, 1982 , Anne Wedemark divorced him.
In September 1999, Wedemark married Susan Blanchard, previously Henry Fonda 's third wife.
Since the 1950s, he has settled in Roxbury, CT, State of Connecticut .
Extended Reading
