Hal Holbrook. He was 95, but still, this stinks. THR. Variety.
Mr. Holbrook never claimed to be a Twain scholar; indeed, he said, he had read only a little of Twain’s work as a young man. He said the idea of doing a staged reading of Twain’s work came from Edward A. Wright, his mentor at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. And Mr. Wright would have been the first to acknowledge that the idea had actually originated with Twain himself — or rather Samuel Clemens, who had adopted Mark Twain as something of a stage name and who did readings of his work for years.
Mr. Holbrook was finishing his senior year as a drama major in 1947 when Mr. Wright talked him into adding Twain to a production that Mr. Holbrook and his wife, Ruby, were planning called “Great Personalities,” in which they would portray, among others, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
Mr. Holbrook had doubts at first. “Ed, I think this Mark Twain thing is pretty corny,” he recalled telling Mr. Wright after the first rehearsals. “I don’t think it’s funny.”
…
Mr. Holbrook began developing his one-man show in 1952, the year Ms. Holbrook gave birth to their first child, Victoria. He soon looked the part, with a wig to match Twain’s unruly mop, a walrus mustache and a rumpled white linen suit, the kind Twain himself wore onstage. From his grandfather, Mr. Holbrook got an old penknife, which he used to cut the ends off the three cigars he smoked during a performance (though he was not sure whether Twain ever smoked onstage). He sought out people who claimed to have seen and heard Twain, who died in 1910, and listened to their recollections.
He had more or less perfected the role by 1954, the year he began a one-man show titled “Mark Twain Tonight!” at Lock Haven State Teachers College in Pennsylvania.
Two years later he took his Twain to television, performing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Tonight Show.” In the meantime he had landed a steady job in 1954 on the TV soap opera “The Brighter Day,” on which he played a recovering alcoholic.
The stint lasted until 1959, when, tiring of roles he no longer cared about, he opened in “Mark Twain Tonight!” at the Off Broadway 41st Street Theater.By then the metamorphosis was complete. With his shambling gait, Missouri drawl, sly glances and exquisite timing, Hal Holbrook had, for all intents and purposes, become Mark Twain.
“After watching and listening to him for five minutes,” Arthur Gelb wrote in The New York Times, “it is impossible to doubt that he is Mark Twain, or that Twain must have been one of the most enchanting men ever to go on a lecture tour.”
This is not intended as a shot at Mr. Holbrook, but I do wonder how much of our popular conception of Mark Twain is shaped by Holbrook’s performances.
Another film role that he doesn’t seem to be getting much credit for: “Lt. Briggs” in “Magnum Force”.
Mr. Holbrook had a long and fruitful run as an actor. He was the shadowy patriot Deep Throat in “All the President’s Men” (1976); an achingly grandfatherly character in “Into the Wild” (2007), for which he received an Oscar nomination; and the influential Republican Preston Blair in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” (2012).
He played the 16th president himself, on television, in Carl Sandburg’s “Lincoln,” a 1974 mini-series. The performance earned him an Emmy Award, one of five he won for his acting in television movies and mini-series; the others included “The Bold Ones: The Senator” (1970), his protagonist resembling John F. Kennedy, and “Pueblo” (1973) in which he played the commander of a Navy intelligence boat seized by North Korea in 1968.
I caught a few episodes of “The Senator” back when RetroTV was airing in Austin, and I thought it held up well. The whole series is on DVD (affiliate link) and it looks like there are full episodes on the ‘Tube.
Harlan Ellison was particularly fond of these episodes (it was a two-parter).
He didn’t do a lot of ’70s detective shows, but, oddly, he did some in the 21st century: “NCIS”, “Bones”, and the bad “Hawaii 5-0”, among other credits.
In other news: Jamie Tarses, prominent TV executive.
Finally, Jack Palladino, who the NYT calls a “hard-charging private investigator”.
What makes this interesting is: he worked for the Clintons. Specifically, Bill:
During the 1992 presidential campaign, he was hired by the Clinton campaign after Gennifer Flowers released tapes of phone calls with Mr. Clinton to back up her claim that they had had an affair.
Mr. Palladino embarked on a mission, as he put it in a memo, to impugn Ms. Flowers’s “character and veracity until she is destroyed beyond all recognition.”
“Every acquaintance, employer and past lover should be located and interviewed,” Mr. Palladino wrote. “She is now a shining icon — telling lies that so far have proved all benefit and no cost — for any other opportunist who may be considering making Clinton a target.”
He also did work for R. Kelly and Harvey Weinstein.
In his work for the Clinton campaign, Mr. Palladino’s staff scoured Arkansas and beyond, collecting disparaging accounts from Ms. Flowers’s ex-boyfriends, employers and others who claimed to know her, accounts that the campaign then disseminated to the news media.
By the time Mr. Clinton finally admitted to “sexual relations” with Ms. Flowers, years later, Clinton aides had used stories collected by Mr. Palladino to brand her as a “bimbo” and a “pathological liar.”