RIP Hal Holbrook

[Vandal]

Hal Holbrook, Emmy and Tony-Winning Actor Who Portrayed Mark Twain, Dies at 95

Emmy and Tony winner Hal Holbrook, an actor best known for his role as Mark Twain, whom he portrayed for decades in one-man shows, died on Jan. 23. He was 95.

Holbrook’s personal assistant, Joyce Cohen, confirmed his death to the New York Times on Monday night.

Holbrook played the American novelist in a solo show called “Mark Twain Tonight!” that he directed himself and for which he won the best actor Tony in 1966. He returned to Broadway with the show in 1977 and 2005 and appeared in it more than 2,200 times (as of 2010) in legit venues across the country. He began performing the show in 1954.

He received an Emmy nomination for a TV adaptation of “Mark Twain Tonight!” in 1967, the first of multiple noms. He won four Emmy Awards.

https://variety.com/2021/film/news/hal- ... 234898102/

[earendel]

He was good in every role he played - as an attorney substituting for Perry Mason in the movie series and on Designing Women. I thought they should have had him play Mark Twain in the ST:TNG episodes "Time's Arrow" parts 1 & 2, but he may have been too expensive

[bazodee]

Hal Holbrook is an answer to a pretty interesting trivia question.

Name the 2 movies (or actors) where every single cast member was nominated for an Acting Academy Award?

One was for Holbrook's portrayal as Harry Truman in "Give'm Hell Harry." {I made a mistake here... I was thinking of James Whitmore... but I'll leave the trivia question up because others have answered it.} You guys can work on the other movie.

[Ritterskoop]

IMDB is only showing an Oscar nomination for Holbrook for 2008's Into the Wild.

They have an Emmy nomination for Mark Twain Tonight, in 1967. He also got a Tony for that show.

As for the Oscars trivia, I am thinking of Sleuth. Olivier and Caine, maybe?

Maybe Give Em Hell, Harry was James Whitmore?

The movie writer from my newspaper had a two-part Final Jeopardy problem like this many years ago, and couldn't get it, for which he was roundly abused.

One of my favorite Holbrook roles is Albie Duncan on The West Wing, twice.

[bazodee]

IMDB is only showing an Oscar nomination for Holbrook for 2008's Into the Wild.

They have an Emmy nomination for Mark Twain Tonight, in 1967. He also got a Tony for that show.

As for the Oscars trivia, I am thinking of Sleuth. Olivier and Caine, maybe?

Maybe Give Em Hell, Harry was James Whitmore?

The movie writer from my newspaper had a two-part Final Jeopardy problem like this many years ago, and couldn't get it, for which he was roundly abused.

One of my favorite Holbrook roles is Albie Duncan on The West Wing, twice.

You are correct. It is Sleuth. And I am wrong... I was thinking of James Whitmore..

[SportsFan68]

It would be hard to find an actor I liked and admired more than Hal Holbrook. My all-time favorite Hal Holbrook performance was as The Senator, 50 years ago now. I'm very grateful to The Vulture so that I'm able to provide this story.

As an aside, I loved The Lawyers and The New Doctors. I have no memory of The Protectors. Maybe the year after it got canceled I got old enough to stay up that late. And another aside, The Senator contains my all-time favorite performance of Burgess Meredith -- "You gotta get down in the mud and keep them hogs happy!" This is not to disparage his turn in Of Mice and Men, which is stellar, just not my favorite.

https://www.vulture.com/2020/12/the-senator-nbc.html if you want to read it in its entirety.

. . .

To stumble upon NBC’s series The Senator today is to discover a thrilling, perfect for its time but also eerily ours artifact from a moment when the medium was beginning to awaken to possibilities it hadn’t previously considered. The show’s history is almost as fascinating as its content. It began in 1969, when NBC ordered an hour-long drama called The Bold Ones, a new programming approach, now abandoned, that was known as the “wheel” series. The idea was that three or four separate dramas, each with its own cast and premise, would take turns in the same time slot, but share the same umbrella branding. By the early 1970s, there were about a half a dozen of these: The most famous was the NBC Mystery Movie, home to the long-running classic Columbo, which alternated with McCloud and McMillan and Wife. (It was the kind of programming premise you could probably only get away with when three major networks held total dominion over a nation’s eyeballs.)

In its first season, The Bold Ones consisted of three dramas: The Lawyers, The New Doctors, and The Protectors, the last of which explored the dynamic between a conservative white deputy police chief and a Black DA. The first two series survived to a second season; The Protectors did not, and by early 1970, the producers of The Bold Ones, who were starting to consider replacement concepts, had signed Hal Holbrook to star in a made-for-TV movie called A Clear and Present Danger about the son of a senator who decides to run for his retiring father’s office on an antipollution platform. The well-received film earned a series order: The Senator, starring Holbrook (whose character had now been elected), would join the Bold Ones rotation that fall.

Acclaim for the show was instant; the eight topical episodes that were produced took on everything from the government’s mistreatment of Native Americans to the incipient dementia of an elderly senator to Vietnam-era collusion between the Department of Defense and private contractors. At a time when most TV dramas looked like Ironside or Bonanza, The Senator was something new and jolting — a series unafraid to plunder the headlines and to prod the moral gray areas that other shows assiduously avoided. The FCC’s equal-time rules probably spooked NBC into making sure that Holbrook’s patrician, the Kennedy-esque character Hayes Stowe, was never explicitly identified as a Democrat, but there was no missing it; each episode felt like a rebuke of a new aspect of the reactionary domestic politics of the Nixon White House. One subplot in the first hour (which would not require much rewriting to be stingingly relevant today) depicted Stowe’s reluctance to sign onto an anti-crime bill because it contained a provision allowing cops to conduct no-knock raids. “Do you need that?” Stowe, who’s clearly skeptical, asks a veteran policeman. The cop starts talking about hard drugs and Black revolutionaries. They don’t find common ground, and at the end of the episode, the fate of the bill is unknown.

From there, The Senator’s politics only became more pointed. The third episode, “Power Play,” has Stowe in heated discussions with young activists who want him to oppose a political nominee, even though Stowe plans to support the candidate in exchange for another senator’s vote on an education bill he wants passed. The showdown is angry, emotional, and surprisingly specific — a young woman played by the folk singer Holly Near warns him, “We are the only element between peaceful change and the Weathermen, but you do something like this, and I have to think twice about where I want to be, because I’m sick and tired of being disenfranchised!” It’s no accident that the scene feels more like a documentary than a scripted drama; according to Holbrook, the episode’s director threw the actors in a room, put the camera on a turntable, and told them to start improvising an argument. That kind of thing just didn’t happen on network TV in 1970; it doesn’t happen now.

The centerpiece of the series, a two-part episode called “A Continual Roar of Musketry” that, breaking with the Bold Ones format, ran in consecutive weeks, was so incendiary that NBC warned its creators during production that it might never air. The story was a virtually undisguised retelling of the aftermath of the Kent State killings in May 1970; it was written in their immediate wake and filmed that July. In the episodes, Stowe travels to a campus to lead a three-man commission of inquiry alongside a white journalist whose sympathies lie with the National Guard and a Black academic who is more allied with the protesters. It’s an investigation that Stowe is told in advance will come to nothing — and one that NBC told the show’s producers could not reach any conclusion that went beyond the actual Kent State investigation that was then taking place. The producers essentially ignored that order; the second hour ends with a flat, blunt statement condemning the National Guard for use of excessive force and demanding a grand jury investigation and a trial — and along the way, it also touches on the question of whether there can be political justification for vandalism and on the danger of putting troops among civilian populations.

When the Emmy nominations were announced at the end of the 1970 to 1971 season, The Senator led all shows, and at the ceremony in May, it virtually swept its categories, winning Best Drama Series, Best Actor for Holbrook, Best Writing (for which it had received two of the three nominations), and Best Directing (ditto). But by then, it was too late; the series, despite solid ratings, had been canceled. No explanation was ever offered, not even to Holbrook, a liberal firebrand who was eager to do a second season, but the rumor was that the Nixon administration wanted it gone and had pressured NBC.

“I asked this senator friend of mine, why do you think we were canceled?” said Holbrook, now 95, in a 2015 interview. “He said, ‘Hal, in this town, if you’re in power and you want something done, you don’t have to say what you want. The people who work for you know it.” An aide to Senator Ted Kennedy started a petition to get the cancellation reversed and circulated it in the Senate, where the show had fans on both sides of the aisle; even Barry Goldwater signed on. But to no avail. The Senator was gone and soon forgotten.

. . .

[silverscreenselect]

A couple of my favorite Holbrook roles were in Creepshow, where he plays a man who comes up with an inventive way to get rid of nasty wife Adrienne Barbeau, and a TV movie called Murder by Natural Causes (from Richard Levinson and William Link, which flips the script and has him as the target of wife Katharine Ross.

[kroxquo]

Hal Holbrook is an answer to a pretty interesting trivia question.

Name the 2 movies (or actors) where every single cast member was nominated for an Acting Academy Award?

One was for Holbrook's portrayal as Harry Truman in "Give'm Hell Harry." {I made a mistake here... I was thinking of James Whitmore... but I'll leave the trivia question up because others have answered it.} You guys can work on the other movie.

I believe that there is a third - Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

[wbtravis007]

It would be hard to find an actor I liked and admired more than Hal Holbrook. My all-time favorite Hal Holbrook performance was as The Senator, 50 years ago now. I'm very grateful to The Vulture so that I'm able to provide this story.

As an aside, I loved The Lawyers and The New Doctors. I have no memory of The Protectors. Maybe the year after it got canceled I got old enough to stay up that late. And another aside, The Senator contains my all-time favorite performance of Burgess Meredith -- "You gotta get down in the mud and keep them hogs happy!" This is not to disparage his turn in Of Mice and Men, which is stellar, just not my favorite.

https://www.vulture.com/2020/12/the-senator-nbc.html if you want to read it in its entirety.

. . .

To stumble upon NBC’s series The Senator today is to discover a thrilling, perfect for its time but also eerily ours artifact from a moment when the medium was beginning to awaken to possibilities it hadn’t previously considered. The show’s history is almost as fascinating as its content. It began in 1969, when NBC ordered an hour-long drama called The Bold Ones, a new programming approach, now abandoned, that was known as the “wheel” series. The idea was that three or four separate dramas, each with its own cast and premise, would take turns in the same time slot, but share the same umbrella branding. By the early 1970s, there were about a half a dozen of these: The most famous was the NBC Mystery Movie, home to the long-running classic Columbo, which alternated with McCloud and McMillan and Wife. (It was the kind of programming premise you could probably only get away with when three major networks held total dominion over a nation’s eyeballs.)

In its first season, The Bold Ones consisted of three dramas: The Lawyers, The New Doctors, and The Protectors, the last of which explored the dynamic between a conservative white deputy police chief and a Black DA. The first two series survived to a second season; The Protectors did not, and by early 1970, the producers of The Bold Ones, who were starting to consider replacement concepts, had signed Hal Holbrook to star in a made-for-TV movie called A Clear and Present Danger about the son of a senator who decides to run for his retiring father’s office on an antipollution platform. The well-received film earned a series order: The Senator, starring Holbrook (whose character had now been elected), would join the Bold Ones rotation that fall.

Acclaim for the show was instant; the eight topical episodes that were produced took on everything from the government’s mistreatment of Native Americans to the incipient dementia of an elderly senator to Vietnam-era collusion between the Department of Defense and private contractors. At a time when most TV dramas looked like Ironside or Bonanza, The Senator was something new and jolting — a series unafraid to plunder the headlines and to prod the moral gray areas that other shows assiduously avoided. The FCC’s equal-time rules probably spooked NBC into making sure that Holbrook’s patrician, the Kennedy-esque character Hayes Stowe, was never explicitly identified as a Democrat, but there was no missing it; each episode felt like a rebuke of a new aspect of the reactionary domestic politics of the Nixon White House. One subplot in the first hour (which would not require much rewriting to be stingingly relevant today) depicted Stowe’s reluctance to sign onto an anti-crime bill because it contained a provision allowing cops to conduct no-knock raids. “Do you need that?” Stowe, who’s clearly skeptical, asks a veteran policeman. The cop starts talking about hard drugs and Black revolutionaries. They don’t find common ground, and at the end of the episode, the fate of the bill is unknown.

From there, The Senator’s politics only became more pointed. The third episode, “Power Play,” has Stowe in heated discussions with young activists who want him to oppose a political nominee, even though Stowe plans to support the candidate in exchange for another senator’s vote on an education bill he wants passed. The showdown is angry, emotional, and surprisingly specific — a young woman played by the folk singer Holly Near warns him, “We are the only element between peaceful change and the Weathermen, but you do something like this, and I have to think twice about where I want to be, because I’m sick and tired of being disenfranchised!” It’s no accident that the scene feels more like a documentary than a scripted drama; according to Holbrook, the episode’s director threw the actors in a room, put the camera on a turntable, and told them to start improvising an argument. That kind of thing just didn’t happen on network TV in 1970; it doesn’t happen now.

The centerpiece of the series, a two-part episode called “A Continual Roar of Musketry” that, breaking with the Bold Ones format, ran in consecutive weeks, was so incendiary that NBC warned its creators during production that it might never air. The story was a virtually undisguised retelling of the aftermath of the Kent State killings in May 1970; it was written in their immediate wake and filmed that July. In the episodes, Stowe travels to a campus to lead a three-man commission of inquiry alongside a white journalist whose sympathies lie with the National Guard and a Black academic who is more allied with the protesters. It’s an investigation that Stowe is told in advance will come to nothing — and one that NBC told the show’s producers could not reach any conclusion that went beyond the actual Kent State investigation that was then taking place. The producers essentially ignored that order; the second hour ends with a flat, blunt statement condemning the National Guard for use of excessive force and demanding a grand jury investigation and a trial — and along the way, it also touches on the question of whether there can be political justification for vandalism and on the danger of putting troops among civilian populations.

When the Emmy nominations were announced at the end of the 1970 to 1971 season, The Senator led all shows, and at the ceremony in May, it virtually swept its categories, winning Best Drama Series, Best Actor for Holbrook, Best Writing (for which it had received two of the three nominations), and Best Directing (ditto). But by then, it was too late; the series, despite solid ratings, had been canceled. No explanation was ever offered, not even to Holbrook, a liberal firebrand who was eager to do a second season, but the rumor was that the Nixon administration wanted it gone and had pressured NBC.

“I asked this senator friend of mine, why do you think we were canceled?” said Holbrook, now 95, in a 2015 interview. “He said, ‘Hal, in this town, if you’re in power and you want something done, you don’t have to say what you want. The people who work for you know it.” An aide to Senator Ted Kennedy started a petition to get the cancellation reversed and circulated it in the Senate, where the show had fans on both sides of the aisle; even Barry Goldwater signed on. But to no avail. The Senator was gone and soon forgotten.

. . .

Thanks for posting that, Sprots. I would have remembered a fair bit of it without the prompting but this really brought it all back.

[silverscreenselect]

Hal Holbrook is an answer to a pretty interesting trivia question.

Name the 2 movies (or actors) where every single cast member was nominated for an Acting Academy Award?

One was for Holbrook's portrayal as Harry Truman in "Give'm Hell Harry." {I made a mistake here... I was thinking of James Whitmore... but I'll leave the trivia question up because others have answered it.} You guys can work on the other movie.

I believe that there is a third - Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

I'm not sure if you are counting the original Sleuth as one of your choices, but there's a big asterisk here

Spoiler

The film only has two characters, played by Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier, both of whom received Oscar nominations. But the opening credits listed several other people to give the illusion that there were more people in the film when Caine appears in disguise in a couple of scenes.