DON MURRAY

(31 July 1929 – 2 February 2024)

Few actors today, if any, can boast of having starred opposite Marilyn Monroe, James Cagney, Alan Ladd and Henry Fonda, icons of the Golden Age of Hollywood. And yet few filmgoers today could summon up an image of Don Murray – perhaps because he was too conventionally good-looking, perhaps because his name was too ordinary. But his career was really quite something.

His first movie, Joshua Logan’s Bus Stop (1956), in which he wooed Marilyn Monroe, landed him an Oscar nomination. A year later he nailed the male lead (as a Korean War veteran) in Fred Zinnemann’s A Hatful of Rain which, like Bus Stop, was adapted from a Broadway play. And by now he was married to his Bus Stop co-star Hope Lange, a fellow Oscar nominee and the mother of his son Christopher and daughter Patricia. The couple divorced in 1961 and Lange went on to marry the celebrated filmmaker Alan J. Pakula, while Murray moved on to the actress Bettie Johnson, by whom he had another three children.

Before his Hollywood career kicked off, Murray had made his mark on Broadway in Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo, as Jack Hunter, and then registered as a conscientious objector of the Korean war. To fulfil his military duty, he tended to war casualties and orphans in refugee camps in Germany and Italy (and helped purchase 130 acres in Sardinia for them to farm), before returning to Broadway to star opposite Mary Martin in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, where he caught the eye of Joshua Logan. A member of the Brethren Church, Murray always put his principles first and would weigh up the moral implications of a character before accepting a role. For him, film served as a conduit for his social responsibilities and he turned director in 1972 with The Cross and the Switchblade which starred Pat Boone as a pioneering priest. Before then, he co-wrote and co-produced (and starred in) The Hoodlum Priest (1961) and was another cleric in One Man’s Way (1963), the story of Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking.

As a more conventional star, Murray appeared in Delbert Mann’s The Bachelor Party, from the TV play by Paddy Chayefsky; in the Henry Hathaway Western From Hell to Texas (1958); the Anglo-Irish Shake Hands with the Devil (1959) with Cagney; another Western: One Foot in Hell, with Alan Ladd (1960); played a gay senator in Otto Preminger’s Advise & Consent (1965), with Fonda and Charles Laughton; and starred as a mild-mannered sheriff in Robert Mulligan’s Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965), with Steve McQueen. However, he never achieved the lasting fame of his co-stars and settled into a series of supporting turns, playing Brooke Shield’s father in Endless Love (1981), Kathleen Turner’s father in Peggy Sue God Married (1986) and Kelly McGillis’s father in Made in Heaven (1987). Then TV took over, including 34 episodes of Knots Landing (1979-1981) and the role of insurance executive Bushnell Mullins in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (2017). He died at the ripe old age of 94 at his home near Santa Barbara, California.

JAMES CAMERON-WILSON