STUART WHITMAN

(1 February 1928-16 March 2020)

The American actor Stuart Whitman, who has died aged 92, had a long career in films and television. He was noted for his athleticism and rugged good looks which made him popular as a leading man. Born to a Russian and Polish Jewish emigrant family, he graduated in law and drama, joined the Army Corps of Engineers and studied acting at the Los Angeles Academy of Dramatic Art. After touring in theatre, he entered films in 1951 in uncredited roles in two sci-fi titles, When Worlds Collide and The Day the Earth Stood Still. He spent a long time uncredited in films while also appearing on television. His first credited role was in Rhapsody (1954) with Elizabeth Taylor and later he was in King of the Carnival, the last of the Republic serials, and in Budd Boetticher’s western 7 Men from Now with Randolph Scott. Often in B-pictures, he had the title role in Johnny Trouble, but on a better level did The Young Invaders with James Garner, Ten North Frederick with Gary Cooper, The Decks Ran Red with James Mason, The Sound and the Fury with Yul Brynner, Don Siegel’s Hound-Dog Man and Guy Green’s The Mark, for which Whitman was Oscar-nominated. Michael Curtiz’s The Comancheros was a fine John Wayne Western with Whitman second-billed. He was in the all-star war film The Longest Day, the Western Rio Conchos with Richard Boone, Signpost to Murder with Joanne Woodward, the epic comedy Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines and See You in Hell, Darling (1966) based on Norman Mailer’s novel An American Dream. Whitman’s career then mainly included genre, action and exploitation movies as well as television series. He went on working until 2000 but little of this output could be considered of much value. The TV work included Fantasy Island, The A Team, Hotel, Knots Landing and Murder, She Wrote. Still, it was a fifty-year career during which Whitman was rarely out of work. He was married three times, to Patricia Ann LaLonde, Caroline Boubis and Julia Vadimovna Paradis, producing five children, Tony, Michael, Linda, Scott and Justin.

MICHAEL DARVELL