Richard Widmark (1914 - 2008)

            Richard Widmark

Richard Widmark studied acting before debuting on radio in 1938 in 'Aunt Jenny's Real Life Stories'. He hit Broadway in 1943 in 'Kiss and Tell'. His iconic film debut was as the sneering, giggling villain Tommy Udo in 'Kiss of Death' in 1947, for which he won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination. He also became the first recipient of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer.

Within two years, Widmark was placing his hands and feet in concrete outside Grauman's Chinese Theater. Yet his early succes saw him typecast as the heavy in thrillers such as 'The Street with No Name' in 1948 and 'No Way Out' in 1950, and in Westerns such as 'Yellow Sky' in 1948 and 'The Law and Jake Wade' in 1958. But the blond, handsome Widmark could also play tough and resourceful heroes out West, as seen in 'Backlash' in 1956 and 'The Last Wagon' in the same year. A more subtle, demanding role was as the head of a psychiatric clinic in 'The Cobweb' in 1955.

Widmark appeared in a couple of late John Ford Westerns, in tandem with James Stewart in 'Two Rode Together' in 1961, in which they have some highly comic scenes, and in 'Cheyenne Autumn' in 1964. He had a major dramatic role in 'Judgment at Nuremberg' in 1961, as the prosecuting attorney, and a meaty one as the amoral police detective in Don Siegel's thriller 'Madigan' in 1968, a role that he retained in the subsequent TV series.

Later parts, such as that of a general in 'Twilight's Last Gleaming' in 1977, and in 'Murder on the Orient Express' in 1974, were more in the nature of character roles, but he kept working until he retired in 1990 at the age of seventy-six. Widmark was married to Jean Hazlewood, a writer, for 55 years until her death in 1997. He married again, aged eighty-four, to Henry Fonda's ex-wife, Susan Blanchard.