Edmond O'Brien

Edmond O'Brien: The Man Who Reported His Own Murder

*D.O.A.* opens with a man walking into a police station to report a homicide. Asked who was killed, he says: "I was." Frank Bigelow has been given a slow luminous poison and has perhaps a day left to find out who did it and why. The role required an actor who could play terror, exhaustion and dogged competence at once for ninety minutes without a single glamorous frame, and who could sweat convincingly on camera. Edmond O'Brien could do all of that. He built a forty-year career out of it.

Brooklyn, Seventh of Seven

Eamon Joseph O'Brien was born in Brooklyn on 10 September 1915, the seventh and youngest child of Agnes Baldwin and James O'Brien, Irish immigrants from Tallow, County Waterford. His father died when he was four. His brother Liam became a writer, and would later supply him with material.

He lasted six months at Fordham University before a scholarship took him to the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, where he spent two years studying under Sanford Meisner alongside Betty Garrett. He also worked with the Columbia Laboratory Players, an outfit that drilled him in Shakespeare. This is an unusually rigorous foundation for a man who would spend most of his life in crime pictures, and it shows in everything he did.

Mercutio, and the Mercury

His Broadway debut came at twenty-one, in *Daughters of Atreus* in 1936. He joined Orson Welles's Mercury Players in 1937. He played the gravedigger in *Hamlet* and Mercutio in *Romeo and Juliet* opposite Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh — one of the great supporting parts in the language, opposite the most celebrated stage actor of the age — and appeared in Maxwell Anderson's *The Star Wagon* with Lillian Gish and Burgess Meredith. During the war he served in the Army Air Forces and toured for two years in the service production of *Winged Victory*, sharing the stage with a young Mario Lanza.

Hollywood, and the Wrong Kind of Face

RKO signed him in 1939 and cast him as Gringoire, the impetuous street poet, in *The Hunchback of Notre Dame* — a romantic lead. He did comedy with Lucille Ball and George Murphy in *A Girl, a Guy, and a Gob*, and co-starred in *Parachute Battalion* with Nancy Kelly, whom he married in 1941; the marriage lasted a year.

The leading-man phase never quite took. What replaced it was better. Returning to Universal after the war, O'Brien became one of the defining faces of American film noir: the enterprising insurance investigator Jim Reardon in *The Killers* in 1946, then *The Web* and *A Double Life* in 1947, then Bigelow in *D.O.A.* Warner Bros. signed him in late 1948 and put him opposite James Cagney in *White Heat*, where he played the undercover cop Hank Fallon posing as Vic Pardo. O'Brien remembered Cagney's direction to him on set — a tap on the chest and the instruction, "Play it from here, kid" — advice about authenticity over technique that he seems never to have forgotten.

By the early 1950s his weight was fluctuating badly and the work was thinning. He noticed: the prestige of his pictures and his casts, he said, had begun to diminish. He was drifting into character parts, and he was frank about why he kept taking crime films rather than serious drama — "I've found it pays."

Oscar Muldoon

Joseph L. Mankiewicz rescued him in 1954 by casting him as Oscar Muldoon in *The Barefoot Contessa*: a sycophantic, permanently perspiring Hollywood press agent, a portrait of professional self-abasement. It won O'Brien the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Ten years later he was nominated again, for *Seven Days in May*, as a hard-drinking senator who turns out to be the picture's conscience.

The range in between is the real evidence. Casca in *Julius Caesar* in 1953. Winston Smith — the protagonist of Orwell's novel — in the 1956 *1984*. A Runyonesque gangster in *The Girl Can't Help It* the same year. The drunken newspaperman Dutton Peabody in Ford's *The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance*. The wrecked, cackling old outlaw Freddie Sykes in Peckinpah's *The Wild Bunch* in 1969. And finally, back where he started, in Orson Welles's unfinished *The Other Side of the Wind*, released in 2018, thirty-three years after his death.

Radio, Television, and Two Films of His Own

From February 1950 to October 1952 he starred on CBS Radio as the title character in *Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar* — a two-fisted insurance investigator — across 103 half-hour episodes in thirty-one months. He worked constantly in live television drama: *Pulitzer Prize Playhouse*, *Lux Video Theatre*, *Schlitz Playhouse of Stars*, *Playhouse 90*, and later *Sam Benedict*, in which he co-starred for twenty-eight episodes in 1962–63. To headline the syndicated crime series *Johnny Midnight* in 1959, producers made him lose at least fifty pounds on a crash vegetarian diet with no alcohol.

He directed, too: *Shield for Murder* in 1954, co-directed, and the neo-noir *Man-Trap* in 1961 with Jeffrey Hunter and Stella Stevens. In 1958 he directed and starred in a television drama written by his brother Liam.

Why Edmond Is Called a Genius

O'Brien diagnosed himself more accurately than any critic has. "People never say 'that's an Eddie O'Brien part,'" he observed. "They say, 'That's a part Eddie O'Brien can play.'" That distinction is the whole case. Stars possess a persona and bend material toward it; O'Brien possessed almost none, and bent himself toward the material instead. The specific faculty is a rare kind of self-erasure combined with total technical control — and it is craft, not intellect, though it was built on genuine intellectual training under Meisner and on years of Shakespeare.

Concretely, the skill consisted of instrument management. He described his working philosophy as keeping "your tools ready — your body, your voice, your speech." He used all three as variables: gaining and shedding fifty pounds to fit a role, deploying that famous capacity for visible strain — he specialised, as one profile puts it, in parts requiring sweat — and carrying a trained classical voice into pictures that did not require one. The proof is the span. Mercutio opposite Olivier, Winston Smith, Casca, a poisoned accountant, a fawning press agent, a senator, and a toothless old bandit in the Peckinpah West are not variations on a type. They are different men.

The counter-case is real and he half-conceded it. O'Brien never carried a great film alone; his Oscar came for a flamboyant supporting turn rather than for the sustained work in *D.O.A.*, which is the performance people actually remember. He admitted taking crime pictures because they paid, and his own assessment of the 1950s — declining material, declining casts — was accurate. His two directing credits went nowhere. He is a supreme professional and a supporting actor of the highest order, which is not the same as an artist who changed the form. What he offers instead is the argument that flawless adaptability, sustained across stage, radio, film and television for four decades, is itself a species of brilliance.

Legacy

He won two Golden Globes and took two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, both dedicated on 8 February 1960 — motion pictures at 1725 Vine Street, television at 6523 Hollywood Boulevard. He married the actress Olga San Juan in 1948; they had three children, Bridget, Maria and Brendan, and divorced in 1976. Alzheimer's disease took hold in the late 1970s, and his daughter Maria's memory of visiting him in 1983, in a straitjacket at a veterans' hospital, screaming, is among the bleaker endings in Hollywood. He died on 8 May 1985 in Inglewood, California, at sixty-nine. *D.O.A.* has never gone out of circulation.

Achievements

• Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor — 1955
• Golden Globe Awards
• Affiliated with Warner Bros. Entertainment
• Educated at Columbia University, Fordham University and Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre
• Worked as film actor, stage actor and television actor