James Whitmore, Versatile Character Actor of Flinty Integrity, Is Dead at 87 (original) (raw)

James Whitmore, Character Actor Skilled in One-Man Shows, Dies at 87

James Whitmore as Harry S. Truman in “Give ’Em Hell, Harry!”Credit...Seymour Kravitz & Company

Feb. 7, 2009

James Whitmore, a leading character actor whose craggy face became a familiar one to film, television and stage audiences for decades and who won wide acclaim for a pair of one-man performances, as the humorist Will Rogers and a vinegary Harry S. Truman, died Friday at his home in Malibu, Calif. He was 87.

The cause was lung cancer, his son Steve told The Associated Press. He said his father had received the cancer diagnosis a week before Thanksgiving.

Mr. Whitmore found success early. He won a Tony Award for his performance in his Broadway debut, as a wisecracking headquarters sergeant in “Command Decision,” a 1947 play about the air bombardment of Germany during World War II. In one of his first films, the 1949 “Battleground,” his performance as a hard-bitten, tobacco-chewing G.I. during the Battle of the Bulge was nominated for an Academy Award as best supporting actor.

During the 1970s, Mr. Whitmore gave three solo stage performances that underlined his ability to go beyond surface details. In “Will Rogers’ U.S.A” (1974), the first of these one-man shows, he brought the homespun humorist to vibrant life on Broadway, his only props being a cowboy hat, a rope and a cheekful of chewing gum.

The following year he took to the stage as an outspoken President Truman in “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry!” That show was promptly filmed, and Mr. Whitmore received his second Oscar nomination, this time for best actor. Then it was another president’s turn. In “Bully” (1977), Mr. Whitmore played Theodore Roosevelt, a man he summed up at the time as “the most neglected important president in our history.”

Mr. Whitmore also appeared Off Broadway. At the Manhattan Theater Club in 1983, he co-starred with his second wife, Audra Lindley, in “Elba,” a play by Vaughn McBride about an elderly couple who escape from the nursing home their children have confined them to.

Mr. Whitmore and Ms. Lindley were divorced in 1979 but continued to perform Off Broadway. In 1990, they co-starred in a double bill at the John Houseman Theater consisting of William Gibson’s “Handy Dandy” he as a conservative judge, she as a liberal nun and Tom Cole’s “About Time,” in which they played characters identified simply as Old Man and Old Woman.

As he aged, Mr. Whitmore’s rough-hewn features became more pronounced, accentuated by the bushy gray eyebrows that virtually became his trademark. In an interview in The New York Times when he was in his mid-50s, he emphasized that he shunned mimicry, “simply because I can’t do it.” Nor, he said, did he ever wear makeup, adding, “I’m allergic to it.”

Image

Mr. Whitmore in “Battleground” (1949), for which he received an Oscar nomination.Credit...MGM

Mr. Whitmore’s acting career spanned six decades and included dozens of films, countless television shows and a handful of Broadway credits, including his solo efforts.

Besides the one in “Battleground,” his film roles included a hunchback diner owner and sometime criminal in John Huston’s “Asphalt Jungle” (1950); a lightfooted thug who, with Keenan Wynn, dances and sings his way through “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” in “Kiss Me Kate” (1953); a white journalist who disguises himself as a black man in "Black Like Me" (1964); a police inspector who may be up to no good in “Madigan” (1968); Admiral William F. Halsey in “Tora! Tora! Tora!” (1970), and an elderly convict and prison librarian in “The Shawshank Redemption” (1994).

Mr. Whitmore was also familiar to many television viewers as the on-screen promoter of Scotts Miracle-Gro plant food. A spokesman for Scotts since 1982, he was replaced by a younger actor, Peter Strauss, in 2002.

James Whitmore was born on Oct. 1, 1921, in White Plains. He attended Choate preparatory school in Connecticut and Yale University, served in the Marine Corps during World War II and studied at the Actors Studio and the American Theater Wing in New York, where he met his first wife, Nancy Mygatt. They had three sons, Daniel, Steven and James Jr., who became an actor and director.

After that marriage ended in divorce, Mr. Whitmore married Ms. Lindley. After they split, he then remarried Ms. Mygatt, only to divorce her again and marry for a fourth time, to Noreen Nash, in 2001.

Besides his son Steve, Mr. Whitmore is survived by his wife, two other sons, James Jr. and Dan, and eight grandchildren.

By the late 1950s and early ’60s, with film offers thinning out, Mr. Whitmore increasingly acted on television, appearing in series like “Playhouse 90,” “Studio One,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Dr. Kildare” and “Gunsmoke.”

In 1960 he had his own series as a crusading lawyer in “The Law and Mr. Jones,” on ABC.

Among his other television roles, Mr. Whitmore was a general assigned to force an Indian tribe to move to a reservation in “I Will Fight No More Forever,” also on ABC, in 1975; the guilty father in a production of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons,” on PBS in 1986; another lawyer in “The Practice,” on ABC, for which he won an Emmy Award in 2000, and a former governor of California whose son becomes a senator, in the NBC series “Mister Sterling” in 2003.

Mr. Whitmore, who said he found acting to be a “daunting” occupation, remained modest about his abilities. “You just hope to be able to grasp the hem of the garment,” he once said, “to give a sense of the man you’re dealing with.”

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT