HAL HOLBROOK

(17 February 1925 - 23 January 2021)

Although he made his first film, The Group, in 1976, it took a decade for the American actor Hal Holbrook to play his most famous role of Deep Throat, the US government spy, in All the President’s Men, about the Watergate scandal. He had already made Wild in the Streets with Christopher Jones, The People Next Door with Eli Wallach, The Great White Hope with James Earl Jones, They Only Kill Their Masters with James Garner, and Magnum Force with Clint Eastwood, etc. Holbrook, who has died from endometrial cancer at the age of 95, was the reliable film actor when casting for professional men which he played in a long career lasting seventy years. He had a parallel career on television including playing Abraham Lincoln on TV in 1966 and 1974. He also played George Washington and did TV adaptations of The Glass Menagerie and Our Town, and the North and South series - as Abe Lincoln. With his wife Dixie Carter he was in Designing Women. Theatre work included plays by Arthur Miller, Robert Anderson and Thornton Wilder and in 1968 he took over in Broadway’s Man of La Mancha musical. His one-man show Mark Twain Tonight! began in 1954 and he played it on and off for some sixty years. On film he will also be remembered for Battle of Midway (as Commander Joseph Rochefort), Julia with Vanessa Redgrave in the title role, Capricorn One with Elliott Gould, John Carpenter’s The Fog, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, Sydney Pollack’s The Firm, Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (for which he was Oscar nominated), Spielberg’s Lincoln (as the journalist and advisor Francis Preston Blair) and more. Among his awards were several Emmys and a Tony for Mark Twain Tonight! Hal Holbrook married three times, first to Ruby Elaine Johnston, then to Carol Eve Rossen, both of whom he divorced, and finally to the actress and singer Dixie Carter from 1984. He had three children with his first wife.

MICHAEL DARVELL