Richard Widmark R.I.P.

[harryfielder]

Originally Posted by batman Also Who Dares Wins. He was able to bring dignity to a badly written role.

Bats, I got to work with him twice and he really was a fun guy.

And also ''REMEMBER THE ALAMO''

RIP and thank you for your work....

Aitch,

[billy bentley]

John Audley mentions "The Bedford Incident" which is well worth seeing if you never have. Directed by James B.Harris (Kubrick's early partner) it looks well cheap in spots and Sidney Poiier over plays his part, but Widmark is superbly cast and you can spot a very young Donald Sutherland. I hope I haven't crossed over any boundaries as this isn't a British picture, but on the occasion of Widmark's passing I would just like to share my appreciation of his work.

[oxfam1uk]

What a memorable face and voice he had !

I particularly remember him in "Murder on the Orient Express", showing what a slime-ball his character was by being unable (or unwilling) to say "Poirot" correctly !

[Nita St. James]

They don't make 'em like him anymore.

Skip McCoy was one of his best roles, Pickup On South Street.

I liked what he had to say...

He lived quietly and avoided the press, saying in 1971, "I think a performer should do his work and then shut up.".

[Windthrop]

Originally Posted by billy bentley John Audley mentions "The Bedford Incident" which is well worth seeing if you never have. Directed by James B.Harris (Kubrick's early partner) it looks well cheap in spots and Sidney Poiier over plays his part, but Widmark is superbly cast and you can spot a very young Donald Sutherland. I hope I haven't crossed over any boundaries as this isn't a British picture, but on the occasion of Widmark's passing I would just like to share my appreciation of his work.

It was filmed over here

[booby trap]

One of my favourite films when i was a kid was "The Long Ships", i still catch it now when it's shown on Film4.

[JamesM]

Originally Posted by Windthrop He does a wonderful double act (get to see it if you can) with George Cole in an episode of the Madigan TV series. Tom Adams is in it as well.

He had worked earlier with George Cole in A Prize of Gold. He starred in 12 Britmovies and at least one episode of a television show. The ones not mentioned so far are The Domino Principle (not filmed here but made by ITC), The Sell-Out with Oliver Reed and the often forgotten comedy western, A Talent for Loving.

[billy bentley]

Pssst.. More Widmark contraband "Yellow Sky" is a great desert western.

[David Brent]

A great actor who could play a wide range of characters.

He played many memorable roles but one of my favourites was his part as the psychopath in 'Kiss Of Death'.
Another memorable part was his role as a bitter racist in the film 'No Way Out'.
I later read that Widmark was so uneasy about the racist lines that he had to speak in the film that he apologised to Sidney Poitier after each take.

A class act.

Dave.

[julian_craster]

Obituary
Richard Widmark
Hollywood actor as much at home as the hero or villain in a 50-year career


Ronald Bergan
Thursday March 27, 2008
The Guardian

'You're Nick Bianco, aren't you? You're a big man. I'm Tommy Udo. Imagine me on this cheap rap - big man like me, picked up just for shoving a guy's ears off his head. Traffic ticket stuff." These were the first words uttered on screen by Richard Widmark, who has died aged 93. It was one of the most striking debuts in Hollywood history.

The film was Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death (1947), and the nominal stars were Victor Mature and Brian Donlevy. But it was Widmark, in a relatively small part, whom everyone remembered. No matter how far he moved away from Tommy Udo in his long career, even when he played noble characters, that giggling psychopath was always just beneath the surface.

Widmark was born in the farming community of Sunrise, Minnesota, where his Swedish-born father ran the general store. His original ambition was to become a lawyer, so he enrolled at Lake Forest College in Chicago. It was there that he became involved in the dramatic society.

After graduating in 1936, he remained at the college as an instructor in speech and drama. In 1937, while he and a friend were touring Europe on bicycles, they shot a short 8mm documentary about Hitler Youth camps. He then moved to New York, where he worked on radio and landed a few Broadway roles, the best of which were directed by Elia Kazan. It was through Kazan's influence that Widmark was auditioned by 20th Century Fox and put under contract, and immediately cast in Kiss of Death, for which he was nominated for an Oscar.

Critic James Agee described the character of Tommy Udo thus: "A rather frail fellow with maniacal eyes who uses a sinister kind of falsetto baby talk laced with tittering laughs. It is clear that murder is one of the kindest things he is capable of." Certainly, Udo seems to delight in pushing an elderly wheelchair-bound woman down a flight of stairs. Of the spine-chilling snigger, Widmark explained that it derived from his nervousness at his first screen role, and "I've always had a goofy laugh."

In the Hollywood tradition of stringent typecasting, Widmark reprised this sadistic character, with slight variations, in his next three movies, all released in 1948. In Street With No Name, he played a crooked fight promoter, wrapped up in a scarf and using inhalers, terrified of catching a cold, who wishes to run his gang "along scientific lines". In one scene, later toned down to get past the censor, he beats up his wife (Barbara Lawrence), whom he suspects of having tipped off the police.

In Road House, he was a psychotic ex-serviceman pushed over the edge by sexual jealousy, and in the William Wellman western Yellow Sky he was the nastiest of the bank robbers opposing reformed outlaw Gregory Peck.

The last of his fanatical chortling villains was in Joseph Mankiewicz's No Way Out (1950), in which he played a hospitalised racist hoodlum under the care of a black doctor (Sidney Poitier). So convincing was Widmark that a great deal of Poitier's anger was genuine. In fact, the two actors became firm friends and appeared together again in two films, The Long Ships (1964) and The Bedford Incident (1965).

From the early 1950s, Widmark edged his way into more sympathetic roles, gradually entering the pantheon of Hollywood heroes. During the transitionary period, he gave one of his best performances in Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950), shot over 60 straight nights on location in London. As a small-time crook with ambitions to be a wrestling promoter, he is forced on the run by a racketeer before being killed and tossed into the Thames.

In the same year, Widmark crossed sides in Kazan's Panic in the Streets, playing a doctor in the New Orleans public health service who hunts a gang of petty criminals carrying pneumonic plague. This time, he himself was upstaged by the villain (Jack Palance, in his screen debut).

More good guys followed in war movies - Halls of Montezuma (1950), The Frogmen (1951) and Destination Gobi (1953) - and westerns Red Skies of Montana (1952), Broken Lance and Garden of Evil (both (1954) in which Widmark turned the steely-eyed, gaunt, albino-like figure of his psychopath characters into a straightforward, blue-eyed, muscular blond. But his white rat persona surfaced from time to time, giggle and all. In Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1953), he played a seedy pickpocket who inadvertently "lifts" some top secret microfilm, which he is prepared to sell to the "commies". Widmark brilliantly presents the moral ambiguity of the man, finally turning against the spies out of revenge, not patriotism.

He was the heavy, challenging Robert Taylor in The Law and Jack Wade (1958), and Mr Ratchett, the millionaire victim in Murder on the Orient Express (1974), so detestable that almost every passenger on the train has a motive to kill him.

On the whole, however, Widmark played mainly hardbitten heroes, especially in a number of westerns, such as John Ford's leisurely Two Rode Together (1961), in which he partnered James Stewart; Alvarez Kelly (1966), as William Holden's antagonist; and The Way West (1967), billed third after Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum. "I love westerns," Widmark commented. "I love the outdoors, I love horses. That's why I raise them."

Apart from his film work, he made a fortune investing in land and owned a couple of ranches for himself. He married former actor and screenwriter Jean Hazelwood in 1942, and claimed never to have even flirted with another woman. "After I was married I thought, 'well, that's it'. I never thought beyond that. I happen to like my wife a lot."

Politically, Widmark was a liberal, poles apart from John Wayne, who directed him in The Alamo (1960). Wayne wanted him to play Colonel William Travis, but Widmark insisted on playing Jim Bowie. "You're not big enough," Wayne told him. "I'll be big enough," Widmark replied. And he was.

The following year, he was the belligerent prosecutor in Judgment at Nuremberg, curiously less sympathetic than Maximilian Schell's defence attorney. In 1968, he took the title role in Don Siegel's Madigan as a tough New York detective. Although he is killed at the climax, the character was resurrected for six TV movies in the early 1970s. Widmark played Sergeant Dan Madigan as a cold loner, speaking in metallic tones.

From the 1980s, his light hair turned silver, he made fewer appearances, but whenever he gave an interview, the character of Tommy Udo always came up, even though he had created that monster almost half a century earlier.

Jean died in 1997, but he is survived by his second wife, Susan Blanchard, whom he married in 1999, and his daughter Anne from his first marriage.


Richard Widmark, actor, born December 26 1914; died March 24 2008

[julian_craster]

Richard Widmark: Actor whose first film performance earned him an Oscar nomination

The Independent
Thursday, 27 March 2008

Although Richard Widmark's small Midwestern home town shares its name with one of the most luminously exquisite of all Hollywood productions, F.W. Murnau's silent Sunrise, and although he himself in time came to seem a familiar, even indispensable, fixture of the post-war American cinema, his original ambition was to be a lawyer, and he made his screen début at the relatively mature age of 33.

He was raised in Chicago, and enrolled at Lake Forest College as a first-year law student. It was there that, mostly because of his wiry, athletic physique, he found himself more and more involved with its dramatic society; so much so that after graduating in 1936 he remained at the college as an instructor in speech and drama.

In 1938 he moved to New York, working steadily on radio – in, most memorably, Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre on the Air – and at the same time managing to land a handful of secondary roles in Broadway plays, almost all of them complete flops, but including one directed by the already famous Elia Kazan. Kazan must have been impressed, for he used his influence to have Widmark tested by 20th Century-Fox and immediately put under contract.

It's probably true to say that, with the exception of Welles himself, no American actor has made quite so vivid and haunting an impression with his very first film performance. Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death (1947) was, for the Forties, an uncharacteristically vicious, almost Tarantino-like little shocker whose nominal leads were Brian Donlevy and Victor Mature. But neither of these stolidly inexpressive performers stood a chance when confronted with Widmark's maniacally giggling, psychopathic hitman, the highlight of whose existence was gleefully shoving poor, crippled Mildred Dunnock headlong down a flight of stairs. He was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar – possibly on the strength of that scene alone.

Naturally, having discovered a performer with such a chillingly sadistic line in villainy, the studio was loath to cast him in any other register; and Widmark was condemned for several years to play variations on the role, notably in William Keighley's semi-documentary thriller The Street With No Name (1948), Jean Negulesco's tawdry, velvety melodrama Road House (also 1948) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz's No Way Out (1950), in which Widmark played to the hilt a slimily racist hoodlum of whose machinations Sidney Poitier becomes the helpless victim.

Widmark's range was always an awkwardly narrow one. He was fairly hopeless at comedy, no jeune premier, and not credible for an instant as a charming, personable leading man in the kind of indistinguishable, blandly routine fare which would trundle along Hollywood's assembly line year after year.

Yet this was, after all, a halcyon era for the American cinema, and Widmark was perhaps luckier than most. Two other roles of 1950, for example, stand out; that of a small-time wrestling promoter pursued by gangsters through a weird, warped and expressionistically lit London in a film with one of the classic noir titles, Jules Dassin's Night and the City (it was remade in 1992, much less effectively, with Robert de Niro in the Widmark role, just as Kiss of Death has been remade with the inferior Nicolas Cage); and that of a harassed doctor contending with a lethal outbreak of bubonic plague on the New Orleans waterfront in Kazan's Panic in the Streets.

Like many contract stars, however, Widmark was also forced into a dispiriting number of less stimulating films – films which would tend, in his case, to emphasise the least attractive side of his screen personality, a sort of sneering macho boorishness which would cause his delivery of dialogue to degenerate into a perpetual snarl and his never particularly comely facial features to assume a series of disfiguring grimaces.

This side was much to the fore in Lewis Milestone's unambiguously jingoistic war movie The Halls of Montezuma (1951); in Red Skies of Montana (1952), a wearily routine yarn about parachuting forest fire-fighters directed (as if it mattered) by Joseph M. Newman; and in Richard Brooks's Take the High Ground (1953), where he played a drill sergeant so convincingly tough, foul-mouthed and obnoxious he was as intolerable to the film's spectators as to the poor young Marines in his charge.

In fact, Widmark tended to be strongest when working with a director of real distinction (which is not necessarily the case with every actor). He was excellent in a pair of punchily violent Samuel Fuller thrillers, Pickup on South Street (made in 1953, at the very height of the Cold War, its rabid anti-Communism – Fuller is a right-wing maverick and doesn't care who knows it – was transformed in several European dubbed versions to an anti-narcotics theme) and Hell and High Water (1954), about the mission of an American submarine into Arctic waters.

And he seemed agreeably mellowed in two late westerns by John Ford: Two Rode Together (1961) in which he played a cavalry officer assigned to accompany an excursion to rescue a group of pioneers captured by Comanche Indians (on the movie's release in France, its title had somehow got mangled en route, ending up as "Two Rode to Get Her", a perfectly accurate encapsulation, nevertheless, of its plot); and the self-consciously elegiac, belatedly pro-Indian Cheyenne Autumn (1963). It has to be admitted, on the other hand, that he was ludicrously ill-cast as the idiot Dauphin in Otto Preminger's dull, misconceived adaptation of Shaw's Saint Joan in 1957.

Although he was to make another 20-odd films before his eventual retirement from the cinema in 1990, turning up in an incoherent ragbag of titles including Sidney Lumet's Murder on the Orient Express (1974; he was the arch-meanie of a murder victim), Stanley Kramer's The Domino Theory (1977) and Irwin Allen's The Swarm (1978, a preposterously "has-been studded" disaster movie which has secured a niche in every cinephile's Pantheon of the pits), his last truly stand-out performance was in the title role of Don Siegel's razor-sharp thriller Madigan (1968), as a maverick police officer for whom the ends justify even the most dubious of means (such a character was not yet the cliché it would soon become).

So successful was the film (an obvious precursor of Siegel's own, and still more phenomenally popular, Dirty Harry, starring Clint Eastwood) that Widmark, who had declined numerous offers to appear on television, was at last persuaded to reprise his role in a long-running television series of the same name.

Widmark was a deeply private man, seldom photographed at gala premieres and the like, and little is known of his personal life: unusually for a Hollywood star, his first marriage, to the screenwriter and former actress Jean Hazlewood, lasted for 55 years, and he was never alleged to have been an "item" with any of his feminine co-stars. But even if not precisely of, as they say, the first magnitude, his reputation is secure – if for no other reason, because he shoved Mildred Dunnock downstairs.

Gilbert Adair

Richard Widmark, actor: born Sunrise, Minnesota 26 December 1914; married 1942 Jean Hazlewood (died 1997; one daughter), 1999 Susan Blanchard; died Roxbury, Connecticut 24 March 2008.

[julian_craster]

From The Times
March 27, 2008

Richard Widmark: The Times obituary
Actor who created some of Hollywood’s most memorably chilling villains but never quite filled the role of screen hero

Had Richard Widmark stuck to playing villains, he might well have been one of the great Hollywood stars. Instead, as soon as he was big enough to choose his own parts, he chose to play the clean-cut, conscientious hero and, with that shift, some of his charisma was lost. As a hero he could never compete in the same league as Cagney, Bogart or Flynn. He had none of their bravura or sexual appeal. As a good guy he remained a dependable actor, but essentially in the Second Eleven of stars.

As a villain, however, there was none finer than Widmark. No actor was more capable of dropping his vanity before the camera and playing thoroughly unbalanced drifters. As one biographer described him, with only a hint of exaggeration: “With his gangster’s slouch, his machinegun diction and his stiletto grin, the only place he looks really at home is in an electric chair.”

Physically, although he stood at 5ft 11in, he appeared small on screen. He used his slightness in his work. When playing opposite a strong, masculine presence such as Sidney Poitier in No Way Out (1950) he made his character ferret-like and full of grievances against the world. The slightly weak good looks he used to his advantage when playing villains. The eyebrows which were so fair they had to be pencilled in on screen, combined with a soft jaw, made him look like a man who had learnt to fight to be noticed.

His screen debut in 1947 was in a film called Kiss of Death. Victor Mature gave one of his better performances as an ex-convict, but it was Widmark as the dimwitted killer who stole the film. The most chilling scene was when Widmark prepared to thrust an invalid old lady down a flight of stairs, and cackled before he did so. That laugh made Widmark an “overnight” star, and earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

He remained an authentic star. He was “old Hollywood”, and in old age reached that level of authority as an icon where he found himself cast as “the General” or “the President” in films. He achieved all that against a domestic background of exemplary normality. Far from drawing on personal experience for his villains, Widmark appeared to have been the lamb in the Hollywood jungle. He was quiet, thoughtful and well-read. He married a girl he met at college and remained happily married. He rarely drank, worked hard and invested his money in property. The excitement of Widmark was all contained on screen in a handful of electrifying performances.

He was born in Sunrise, Minnesota, a small town so obscure that when he tried to retrace it as an adult, he gave up. His parents were both Swedish-born, and he was educated in towns all over the Midwest, following his father, a travelling salesman.

As a young man he went on a bicycle tour of Nazi Germany. He was barred from visiting Dachau, then a camp for political prisoners, but still managed to infiltrate a youth camp where he watched some “ferocious old boy yelling Nazi doctrines at these little kids”. He shot some film, returned to America and began giving illustrated lectures on the topic.

He was shy but he found that he was good at public speaking. That gave him the confidence to turn to acting at Lake Forest College, Illinois, where he had won a scholarship to read law in the early 1930s. Widmark stayed on at the college during the latter 1930s, teaching in the drama department and, though he weighed less than ten stone, playing American football.

In 1938 he tried his luck in New York. Because he was turned down for active service in the war, he spent the next ten years there working on radio soap operas and Broadway shows.

The break came when his agent took him to meet the producer Henry Hathaway, who was looking for a villain to play in an underworld thriller, Kiss of Death. Hathaway took one look at Widmark and politely said: “Sorry, too well-bred, too intellectual.” Out of embarrassment, Widmark picked up the script and began silently to read the part of the moronic killer, Tommy Udo. “Read it aloud,” said Hathaway, “then you’ll see what I mean about the part being unsuitable.” Widmark, who had never played a villain in his life, found a suitably menacing voice and began reading. Hathaway was completely entranced and his skin prickled. Then, during the killing scene, Widmark threw in a macabre chuckle. Hathaway offered him the part on the spot.

Although he would have preferred to stay independent, Widmark was persuaded to sign a seven-year contract for Twentieth Century Fox. With the Oscar nomination, that meant a good deal of typecasting. In his first seven films he killed or was killed in all but one.

As a welcome change, Down to the Sea in Ships (1948) was a whaling drama, which cast Widmark in a sympathetic role opposite Lionel Barrymore, as a young man who reluctantly becomes a father-figure to Barrymore’s grandson. In his next good film, Panic in the Streets (1950), a thriller about an outbreak of bubonic plague in New Orleans, he played a noble medical officer.

He reverted to type in Joseph Mankiewicz’s No Way Out (1950), as a thoroughly unpleasant racial bigot who tries to stir up a lynch mob against Sidney Poitier, the young doctor he wrongly blames for his brother’s death. Racism was new territory for Hollywood, and Widmark gave a chilling performance. It was not one, however, likely to raise his stock with female fans, and he was big enough now to demand to play no more such parts.

From then on Widmark was cast increasingly in more likeable, less exceptional roles, often in poor films. Widmark proved not to be too fine a judge of scripts or people. He said of Marilyn Monroe, his co-star in Knock (1952): “That broad will never make it. She’s much too obvious.”

In 1955 he ended his contract and took control of his own career, with mixed results. He gave such an embarrassing performance as the Dauphin in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan (1957) that he was, he said: “scared to leave the house for two weeks. I wasn’t worth five bucks.”

Redemption was at hand with Time Limit (1957), a screen version of the Broadway play about a courtmartialling during the Korean War; and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). John Wayne then offered him the part of the drunk Jim Bowie in The Alamo (1960). Wayne was also directing and he and Widmark were in a state of constant tension on set, but somehow it was not reflected on film.

Working with “the Duke” gave Widmark an entry into John Ford’s stock company. He starred in the disappointing Two Rode Together (1961) with James Stewart; and in Cheyenne Autumn (1964), a film whose grandiose intentions ended in a dispirited mess. Widmark idolised Ford, and regretted the failure of their projects together.

Just as Widmark’s career appeared to be running out of steam, he pulled out two of his finest performances. The first was in The Bedford Incident (1965) which he also produced. Again he played opposite Poitier, although this time, for the first time ever in a film, Poitier’s colour was not mentioned. Widmark played the skipper of the USS Bedford, a destroyer which chases a Soviet submarine in the Arctic and accidentally fires an atomic weapon.

After a few more action films came Madigan (1968), a big-city adventure yarn with Widmark as a dedicated policeman who is not above using his badge for a few fringe benefits. Widmark was at his best, and appeared in a good if short-lived television series of the same name (1972).

Widmark did not reach such heights again. The parts for an ageing lead dried up. He often supported younger stars in films such as Against All Odds (1984), or Who Dares Wins (1982), when a touch of old Hollywood class was called for. He could usually count on appearing in a film or two a year throughout the 1970s and 1980s; there was more TV and he returned to villainous form in Coma (1978).

He relished spending more time on his ranch in Connecticut. He had never enjoyed hustling for parts, one reason why, as Elia Kazan put it, he remained “vastly underrated”. Another reason was that, like James Stewart, Widmark never looked as if he was acting at all. His ease in front of the camera told against him when compared to flashier types. But that ease also enlivened many humdrum films, while in the right film, he could be superb.

His first wife died in 1997. He is survived by his second wife, Susan, whom he married in 1999, and a daughter.

Richard Widmark, actor, was born on December 26, 1914. He died on March 24, 2008, aged 93

[Rennie]

I am shocked; my partner is mortified, He was her favourite actor of all time. From recent pictures of him I really thought he would make 110!

How disgusting, that once again the UK press and TV let the death of a one of Hollywood's true mega mega stars go unmentioned. (Well I didn't hear anything).

I still cannot forgive myself at having missed his appearence at the NFT in 2002.

BFI | Features | NFT Interviews | Richard Widmark

He sure did have a screen presence. We will deeply miss him, but thank God we still have his films.

The true great film actors get fewer and fewer, as we get older and older. Not many more to go.

RIP.

[julian_craster]

Richard Widmark

DT
27/03/2008

Richard Widmark, who died on Monday aged 93, was one of Hollywood's most skilled exponents of cold cruelty and off-hand violence. Grey-eyed, pasty-faced, fair-haired and metallic-voiced, Widmark made his name in his first film - Henry Hathaway's 1947 melodrama Kiss of Death - as Tommy Udo, a giggling gangster who, without a qualm, pushed an elderly lady in a wheelchair (Mildred Dunnock) down a flight of stairs, remarking as he did so: "Dames are no good if you wanna have some fun." His sniggering, menacing manner in the commission of this deed caused something of a sensation among audiences.

This fine, edgy performance rendered Widmark Hollywood's most frightening contemporary acquisition; and when he was nominated for an Academy Award as best supporting actor it might have been predicted that he would spend the rest of his career in such blood-curdling roles. As James Agee observed of Widmark's craft: "Murder is one of the kindest things he is capable of."

In an effort to prove himself capable of kindlier things, and to demonstrate his range, Widmark used the end of his seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox to move, as it were, up the social scale and into the professional classes. Thus he began to play doctors, lawyers, senior soldiers and sailors, and other persons of a law-abiding tendency; and it was not held against him by the critics. He also enjoyed a degree of control as a producer on several of the pictures in which he appeared.

Richard Widmark was born at Sunrise, Minnesota, on Boxing Day 1914, the son of a travelling salesman of Swedish descent, and was brought up in South Dakota, in Missouri and in Chicago. When Richard was four his Scottish grandfather took him to see silent films, instilling in the boy an admiration for Boris Karloff. He went on to study Law at Lake Forest College, Illinois - but found himself more attracted to football and acting, and excelled in debating. He remained a keen student of newspaper comment pages, and attracted attention by being the only Hollywood actor who did not turn immediately to the entertainment or sports sections. After graduation in 1936 he stayed on at college for two years to teach Drama.

For a time he worked in New York as a radio actor, a job in which he was remarkably successful and which led, at one stage, to his appearing on several programmes a day. By the early 1940s he was earning around $100,000 a year; when he finally went to Hollywood, he joked that he was the only actor who had had to give up his swimming pool to try his luck out West.

On the outbreak of war Widmark attempted to enlist in the US Army, but was turned down three times because of a perforated ear-drum; so in 1943 he turned to acting on Broadway. He made his debut there as the juvenile lead in the domestic comedy Kiss and Tell. He also appeared in several of Elia Kazan's stage productions, and was later to act for Kazan in Hollywood.

Though these productions did not fare well at the box office, they received considerable critical acclaim, and Widmark let it be known that he would welcome the chance to work on the big screen (though he had anticipated working on his own terms in one or two films a year, rather than being placed on contract with Fox). He soon received the call from Hathaway.

In his film debut Kiss of Death (1947), Widmark's portrayal of a gunman, with what one critic called "homicidal mania in his voice", made him an overnight star. His white teeth, which showed if he snarled or sneered, were considered more alarming than fangs, and he bared them in several subsequent thrillers, such as Jean Negulesco's Road House (1948), in which he played the owner of a small-town night club, and in William Keighley's drama documentary The Street with No Name (1948), in which he played a gangster with a neurotic fear of germs - sniffing at a nasal inhaler and fretting about draughts.

It was this eye for human detail which counted in his acting. As a nervy crook on the run in London's underworld in Jules Dassin's film noir Night and the City (1950) he ran up and down Soho alleys in fear of a vengeful nightclub king (Francis L Sullivan).

In Joseph Mankiewicz's No Way Out (1950) he gave a typical, menacing account of a bigoted petty criminal so moved by the death of his brother in hospital that he tries to blame the black doctor (Sidney Poitier in his first film) and in so doing nearly provokes a race riot. Widmark, impeccably liberal on the subject of race in his private life, apologised to Poitier at the end of every filming session.

On the other hand, in Kazan's Panic in the Streets (1950), another shadowy thriller shot entirely on location, Widmark found himself for once on the side of the law, as a health inspector on the trail of a man with bubonic plague; though even here he managed to convey a dangerous, highly-strung tension in the character. In Samuel Fuller's thriller Pickup on South Street (1953), he reverted to the New York underworld as a pickpocket in the McCarthy era who helps the FBI, not for patriotic reasons but to settle an old score.

His military commanders (Halls of Montezuma (1950); The Bedford Incident (1965); Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977)), usually took their unpopularity for granted, and he made a sound, sneering sergeant in Take the High Ground (1953).

In Westerns he ranged from a bank robber whose gang distrusts him in William Wellman's Yellow Sky (1949) to an avenging parent whose Indian family has been slain in The Last Wagon (1956). He was a somewhat bottled-up, but still vicious and heroic, Jim Bowie in The Alamo (1960), with John Wayne, and was splendid as James Stewart's companion as a cavalry officer on their way to rescue Comanche prisoners in John Ford's Two Rode Together (1961).
advertisement

He shone again as a cavalry officer attempting to come to the aid of Indians in Ford's stirring epic Cheyennne Autumn (1964) - a plot which he had suggested to Ford - and as a dissipated old rodeo rider in When the Legends Die (1972).

In The Cobweb (1955) he was the ambitious head of a psychiatric clinic. In Saint Joan (1957) he made an affectingly timid Dauphin. In The Tunnel of Love (1959) he was Doris Day's high-spirited husband, and in Judgment at Nuremburg (1961) the American army prosecutor, appearing beside his great hero, Spencer Tracy.

No one ever doubted Richard Widmark's range, but everyone was pleased when, in 1968, he returned to his old fictitious beat in Don Siegel's Madigan, as one of the toughest cops in the history of cinema.

He was given 72 hours to track down the kind of criminal he himself had created so memorably 21 years earlier, and in turn his ruthless, mature policeman became effective enough to inspire a popular television series four years later with Widmark in the title role. He had already broken, in 1971, his long boycott of television by appearing as a president of the United States in a four-hour, two part-drama which brought him an Emmy nomination.

Among his many other films were Death of a Gunslinger (1969), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Rollercoaster (1977), Hanky Panky (1982), Who Dares Wins (1982) Against All Odds (1983) and Blackout (1985).

His opinion of present-day films was low; he suggested that they appeared to be made for the benefit of teenage boys. Widmark took a particularly dim view of much of Hollywood's output, telling The Guardian in 1995 that producers "have no self-respect. What interests them is not movies but the bottom line. Look at Dumb and Dumber, which turns idiocy into something positive, or Forrest Gump, a hymn to stupidity."

But his own output was not immune from criticism: in 1978 he appeared in The Swarm, as an American colonel who, with a world-famous entomologist (Michael Caine, in an astounding piece of miscasting), fights off a swarm of killer African bees which threatens to destroy Texas. The film, directed by Irwin Allen, consisted of Caine and Widmark shouting dreadful dialogue at one another; it was not regarded as a success.

Firmly sheltering his private life from publicity, Widmark was famously careful with his money (he invested in property) and teetotal. He was a keen pipe-smoker.

He lived simply on a farm in Connecticut and also maintained an 80-acre ranch north of Los Angeles, where he bred horses. In his later years he became increasingly interested in environmental and conservation issues.

He married, first, in 1942, the former actress and screenwriter Jean Hazlewood, with whom he enjoyed a remarkably happy and long marriage by the standards of the film industry. She died in 1997. Two years later he married Susan Blanchard, who survives him, together with a daughter from his first marriage.

[john audley]

Originally Posted by billy bentley John Audley mentions "The Bedford Incident" which is well worth seeing if you never have. Directed by James B.Harris (Kubrick's early partner) it looks well cheap in spots and Sidney Poiier over plays his part, but Widmark is superbly cast and you can spot a very young Donald Sutherland. I hope I haven't crossed over any boundaries as this isn't a British picture, but on the occasion of Widmark's passing I would just like to share my appreciation of his work.

It was a British film made at Pinewood (probably American money though)

(Addition) This film also starred our own great Eric Portman as an ex UBoat captain - acting adviser to Richard Widmark the American captain. It was previously said that he went to Nazi Germany to observe and one can easily conclude that Widmark is playing a 'Nazi type' in the Bedford Incident and one will conclude also, as a political statement.