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Walter Brennan
Age: 80 (passed away Sep. 21st, 1974)
Height: 5' 11"
Birth Place: Swampscott, Massachusetts, USA
Born: Dec. 31st, 1969
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Walter Brennan's Main TV Roles
NOTE: Complete List of Works can be found at
IMDB
BIOGRAPHY: In many ways the most successful and familiar character actor of American sound films and the only actor to date to win three Oscars for Best Supporting Actor, Walter Brennan attended college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, studying engineering. While in school he became interested in acting and performed in school plays. He worked some in vaudeville and also in various jobs such as clerking in a bank and as a lumberjack. He toured in small musical comedy companies before entering the military in 1917. After his war service he went to Guatemala and raised pineapples, then migrated to Los Angeles, where he speculated in real estate. A few jobs as a film extra came his way beginning in 1923, then some work as a stuntman. He eventually achieved speaking roles, going from bit parts to substantial supporting parts in scores of features and short subjects between 1927 and 1938. In 1936 his role in Come and Get It (1936) won him the very first Best Supporting Actor Academy Award. He would win it twice more in the decade, and be nominated for a fourth. His range was enormous. He could play sophisticated businessmen, con artists, local yokels, cowhands and military officers with apparent equal ease. An accident in 1932 cost him most of his teeth, and he most often was seen in eccentric rural parts, often playing characters much older than his actual age. His career never really declined, and in the 1950s he became an even more endearing and familiar figure in several television series, most famously "The Real McCoys" (1957). He died in 1974 of emphysema, a beloved figure in movies and TV, the target of countless comic impressionists, and one of the best and most prolific actors of his time.
TRIVIA:
- He was offered the lead role in _Herbie Rides Again (1974)_ (qv), but was too ill with emphysema to act. The script was then rewritten as a vehicle for 'Helen Hayes (I)' (qv).
- Director Howard Hawks had related the story that, after completing "Red River" (1948), he was approached by an actor but couldn't quite place the face. The actor removed his teeth and said, "Do you recognize me now?" Hawks immediately recognized him as Walter Brennan.
- He did not have his signature southern, "old coot"-style accent associated with him in real-life, due to being born and raised in Massachusetts.
- After his military service during World War I, Brennan moved to Los Angeles, where he got involved in the real-estate market and made a fortune. Unfortunately the market took a sudden downturn and Brennan lost almost all of his money. Broke, he began taking bit parts in films in order to earn money, and his career progressed from there.
- Interred at San Fernando Mission Cemetery, San Fernando, Los Angeles County, California, USA
- His relatives still live in and around Joseph, Oregon where the actor maintained a functioning ranch.
- Always fiscally and ideologically conservative, he became politically active in later life when he saw many of the things he held dear being eroded by the counterculture movement. He supported 'George Wallace (IV)' (qv)'s presidential campaign in 1968 and in 1972 supported extreme right-wing Republican Representative John Schmitz (father of 'Mary Kay Letourneau' (qv)), as the incumbent President 'Richard Nixon' (qv) was viewed as too progressive by many Republicans.
- During the 1960s, he was convinced that the anti-war and civil rights movements were being run by overseas communists - and said as much in interviews. He told reporters that he believed the civil rights movement, in particular, and the riots in places like Watts and Newark, and demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, were the result of perfectly content "Negroes" being stirred up by a handful of trouble-makers with an anti-American agenda. Those on the set of his last series, _"The Guns of Will Sonnett" (1967)_ (qv) - in which he played the surprisingly complex role of an ex-army scout trying to undo the damage caused by his being a mostly absentee father - said that he cackled with delight upon learning of 'Martin Luther King' (qv)'s assassination in 1968.
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