Howard Keel
Actor Howard Keel, best known for his MGM musicals of the 1950s, died on November 7 in Palm Desert, in Southern California. Keel, who had been suffering from colon cancer, was 85 years old.
He was born in 1919 in Gillespie, Illinois, as Harold Clifford Leek, but had his name changed when he was hired by MGM in the 1940s following a stint in Broadway musicals. The studio’s own musicals were then at the height of their popularity and prestige, and Keel was set to start at the top: playing opposite Judy Garland (as Annie Oakley) in Annie Get Your Gun. Garland eventually dropped out, being replaced by Betty Hutton (borrowed from Paramount), but Keel remained the leading man in what turned out to be one of the biggest moneymakers of 1950.
MGM, however, seemed unsure about their new star’s talents, casting him mostly in programmers, some with music, some not. Yet, Keel was lucky to have starred in George Sidney’s 1951 remake of Show Boat, singing opposite Kathryn Grayson (with whom he made two more films, Lovely to Look At and the critically acclaimed Kiss Me Kate), and Stanley Donen’s 1954 romp Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (top photo), opposite Jane Powell, Keel’s favorite among his films and his only vehicle to receive a Best Picture Academy Award nomination.
Among Keel’s other MGM co-stars were Ann Blyth (Kismet, Rose Marie), Esther Williams (Pagan Love Song, Texas Carnival, Jupiter’s Darling), Dorothy McGuire (Callaway Went Thataway), Jane Wyman (Three Guys Named Mike), and Ava Gardner (Ride, Vaquero, a 1953 Western that boasts what may well be Keel’s finest performance). At Warner Bros., he impersonated Wild Bill Hickock in Doris Day’s best musical, Calamity Jane (above).
With the near complete demise of the MGM-style film musical in the late 1950s, Keel’s Hollywood career came to an abrupt halt. A renaissance would unexpectedly take place nearly 30 years later, when he joined the cast of the hit TV soap Dallas, playing Clayton Farlow, the husband of Barbara Bel Geddes‘ Miss Ellie Ewing. The actor remained with the series until it folded in 1991. His last film was My Father’s House, made in 2002.
"I had a terrible, rotten childhood," Keel once said. "My father made away with himself when I was 11. I had no guidance, and Mom was six feet tall, bucktoothed and very tough. I was mean and rebellious and had a terrible, bitter temper. I got a job as an auto mechanic, and I would have stayed in that narrow kind of life if I hadn’t discovered art. Music changed me completely."
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Tags: Annie Get Your Gun, Betty Hutton, Callaway Went Thatway, Classic Movies, Howard Keel, Jane Powell, Kathryn Grayson, Kiss Me Kate, Musicals, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Show Boat
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