Eddie Albert
by Andre Soares
Eddie Albert, Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday
Actor Eddie Albert, a reliable supporting player in dozens of films and the star of the long-running TV series Green Acres, has died of pneumonia at his home in the Los Angeles suburb of Pacific Palisades. He was 99.
Albert appeared in more than 70 motion pictures from the late 1930s to the late 1980s, including the army comedy Brother Rat (1938), with Wayne Morris and Priscilla Lane; My Love Came Back (1940) with Olivia de Havilland; The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956) with Marlon Brando and Glenn Ford; The Sun Also Rises (1957) with Tyrone Power and Ava Gardner; and Robert Aldrich’s prison comedy-drama The Longest Yard (1974), in which Albert played a vicious and conniving warden reportedly inspired by disgraced U.S. president Richard Nixon.
He was nominated for two best supporting actor Academy Awards: For Roman Holiday (1953), in which he was Gregory Peck’s sidekick, and for The Heartbreak Kid (1972), as the irascible father of bride Cybill Shepherd.
Albert also had a successful career on television. Besides acting in more than twenty made-for-TV movies and several miniseries, he starred in two hit shows: Green Acres with Eva Gabor and Switch with Robert Wagner. In Green Acres, Albert played his most popular character, Oliver Douglas, the befuddled New York attorney who moves with his chic and glamorous wife to a rural community called Hooterville.
According to his son, actor Edward Albert, Jr., Eddie Albert Heimberger was born out of wedlock in 1906 in Rock Island, Ill. After getting married, his mother changed his birth certificate to read 1908, which explains why the latter date is the one found in references about him. Raised in Minneapolis, Albert studied drama at the University of Minnesota for two years before embarking on a show business career.
Following stints in amateur theater, magic shows, and singing engagements in nightclubs and on radio, Albert — who dropped his surname because people mispronounced it as “hamburger” — worked in summer stock and later on Broadway.
He gained recognition in 1936, with the George Abbott production of Fred F. Finklehoffe and John Monks, Jr’s Broadway hit Brother Rat, a comedy about the misadventures of three friends at the Virginia Military Institute. Also on Broadway, Albert played in Abbott’s comedy Room Service (1937) and in the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart musical The Boys from Syracuse (1938).
When Warner Bros. bought the rights to Brother Rat, they brought Albert along for a secondary role in the 1938 film version. The movie, starring several up-and-coming Warner performers — Wayne Morris, Priscilla Lane, Jane Bryan, Ronald Reagan, and Jane Wyman — was quite popular, leading to a sequel with the same cast, Brother Rat and a Baby, two years later.
Although Warners cast Albert in no less than six 1941 releases, his film career failed to take off. He spent some time in Mexico, working in a one-ring touring circus as an aerialist and clown while reportedly gathering intelligence for the United States Army about Nazi activities in that country. He eventually enlisted in the U.S. Navy during World War II, receiving a Bronze Star for his rescue of wounded Marines at Tarawa in the South Pacific. During his time with the Navy, Albert also took part in that institution’s training films branch.
Upon his return to Hollywood, Albert launched Eddie Albert Productions, which made 16-millimeter industrial and educational films, the most controversial of which, Human Growth and Human Beginnings, were sex-education films for 11-year-olds and 6-year-olds respectively.
Although, in his own words (to the Toronto Star in 1988), “utterly forgotten, and rightly so,” Albert managed to successfully freelance at various studios. But if jobs were relatively plentiful, good parts and good movies were rare.
Besides the aforementioned Roman Holiday, other important films he made during those years were Carrie (1952), directed by William Wyler, and starring Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones; Oklahoma! (1955), Fred Zinnemann’s popular rendition of the hit Broadway musical; and Robert Aldrich’s well-respected Attack (1956), a war drama in which Albert played an ambitious and cowardly captain. (”There’s no actor working today who can be as truly malignant as Eddie Albert,” Aldrich told TV Guide in 1975, referring to Albert’s nasty warden in The Longest Yard. “He plays heavies exactly the way they are in real life. Slick and sophisticated.”)
On the stage, Albert replaced Robert Preston in The Music Man in 1960.
But from the mid-1950s onwards, Albert’s professional focus lay on television. He appeared in a number of shows including live dramas for Playhouse 90, Studio One, and the General Electric Theater, plus the variety series Nothing But the Best and Saturday Night Revue. (Earlier in the decade, he’d also starred in the short-lived family situation comedy Leave It to Larry.)
Albert reached the peak of his popularity with Green Acres (above, with Eva Gabor), which ran from 1965 to 1971. A made-for-TV movie, Return to Green Acres, in which Albert reprised his old role, was broadcast in 1990.
In 1970, Albert remarked to an interviewer that “some people think that because of the bucolic background Green Acres is corny, but we get away with some of the most incredible lines on television.” Nearly two decades later, he became a semi-regular in another series with “some of the most incredible lines on television,” the anything-but-bucolic Falcon Crest.
Aside from acting, Albert was dedicated to environmentalist and humanitarian causes in the United States and abroad, traveling the world for UNICEF and other agencies. As he explained in a 1970 TV Guide interview, Albert preferred not to be called an “ecologist,” for “with our soil impoverished, our air poisoned, our wildlife crippled by DDT, our rivers and lakes turning into giant cesspools, and mass starvation an apparent inevitability by 1976, I call myself a human survivalist!” Also in 1970, on his birthday — April 22 — he assisted in the festivities of the first Earth Day.
In 1945, he married the Mexican-born actress Margo, best known as the woman who ages rather rapidly in the 1937 version of Lost Horizon. The marriage lasted until her death, of brain cancer, in 1985. Albert and Margo both had roles in the melodrama I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955), which starred Susan Hayward, and in the comedy Who’s Got the Action? (1962), starring Dean Martin and Lana Turner. They also performed in a successful nightclub act in 1954.
Both were committed to assisting the Hispanic population of Southern California, helping in the founding of Plaza de la Raza, a community arts center in the Lincoln Heights area of Los Angeles that has been in operation since 1970.
Their son, Edward Albert, Jr., starred in Butterflies Are Free (1972), opposite Goldie Hawn, and 40 Carats (1973), with Liv Ullmann.
In the last several years of his life, Eddie Albert suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, though he remained physically active. His son acted as his primary caregiver.
Franchot Tone: Biographer Lisa Burks Discusses the 1930s MGM Leading Man
Ann Sheridan Biographer Ray Hagen Discusses the 1940s Warner Bros. Star
Comments
Leave a Reply
Note: All comments are moderated. Different views and opinions are welcome, but abusive/bigoted/flaming comments will NOT be approved. Also, please be aware that the Alternative Film Guide has NO contact information for the talent mentioned in this blog or any information pertaining to or access to distributors'/producers' film prints.
