Marc Lawrence
Actor Marc Lawrence died of heart failure in Palm Springs, about 160 km east of Los Angeles, on Nov. 27. He was 95.
The Brooklyn-born (as Max Goldsmith) rough-looking actor, who once described himself as “pock-marked and oily-skinned,” appeared in more than 100 films from the early 1930s to the beginning of the 21st century, generally playing vicious outlaws.
Having begun his acting career with Eva Le Gallienne’s repertory company, Lawrence moved to Los Angeles in 1932 and started playing small parts in films. Four years later, he landed a contract at Harry Cohn’s Columbia Pictures.
Among his dozens of films during that period are Final Hour (1936); Criminals of the Air (1937), with a very young Rita Hayworth (with whom Lawrence claimed he had a brief affair); and, at Warners, San Quentin (1938), with Pat O’Brien, Ann Sheridan, and Humphrey Bogart. In 1939, he received good reviews for his stage portrayal of a gay gangster in Clifford Odets‘ boxing melodrama Golden Boy.
His notable films of the 1940s include two directed by Henry Hathaway: Johnny Apollo (1940), starring Tyrone Power and Dorothy Lamour, and, as a mountaineer, The Shepherd of the Hills (1941), with John Wayne and Betty Field.
There were also This Gun for Hire (1942), the film that turned Alan Ladd into a star; the socially conscious Western The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) with Henry Fonda; and John Huston’s film noir The Asphalt Jungle (1950).
Lawrence’s career came to an abrupt halt in 1951, when he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) while filming the Bob Hope vehicle My Favorite Spy. Following a nervous breakdown, Lawrence, a former member of the Communist Party, named names — including those of actors Sterling Hayden (who had starred in The Asphalt Jungle), Academy Award-winner Anne Revere, and Larry Parks. Yet, Lawrence was blacklisted in Hollywood all the same.
“Being a guy who played nasty guys, I became a symbol of a nasty guy,” Lawrence would later say. “Making that appearance before the committee was death.” Referring to those years, Lawrence recently admitted, “It bothers me, of course . . . I spoke against my own conscience.”
As a political refugee in Europe, he acted in numerous films, mostly B-pictures but sometimes in more prestigious productions such as Helen of Troy (1955), as Diomedes, and Luigi Comencini’s story about the white slave trade, La Tratta delle bianche / Ship of Condemned Women (1953), starring Silvana Pampanini, Vittorio Gassman, Eleonora Rossi Drago, and a young Sophia Loren.
During his lengthy European sojourn, Lawrence also appeared onstage, most notably as the longshoreman Eddie Carbone in a 1959 Liverpool production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge.
Following his return to the United States in the late 1950s, Lawrence began working more often on television, guesting in series such as Playhouse 90 and Peter Gunn. His film career, however, failed to pick up steam. He returned to Europe for more B-thrillers and Westerns, and in 1965 directed Nightmare in the Sun (1965), a crime melodrama starring married couple Ursula Andress and John Derek.
Among his later feature films are the 1971 James Bond nonsense Diamonds Are Forever (”I didn’t know there was a pool down there,” his character remarks after helping push Lana Wood from a high hotel window), Marathon Man (1976, right, with Laurence Olivier), Foul Play (1978), The Big Easy (1987), the TV movie Gotti (1996), and The Shipping News (2001).
His book of memoirs, Long Time No See: Confessions of a Hollywood Gangster, was published in 1991.
The Independent offers a thorough Marc Lawrence obit.
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Tags: Classic Movies, House Un-American Activities Committee, Laurence Olivier, Long Time No See: Confessions of a Hollywood Gangster, Marathon Man, Marc Lawrence, Politics, The Asphalt Jungle
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