Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
I saw this episode on MeTV a few months ago. I can’t believe it was re-posted on youtube.
Guest star Richard Kiley (1922-1999) was a Tony award-winning legend of the Broadway stage who, while less successful away from it, gave bravura performances in pictures and on TV.
Kiley’s IMDB page lists 261 acting credits in movies and TV, but that was in addition to thousands of performances on the Broadway stage.
(The page says only “136 credits” for acting, but that is because IMDB always undercounts credits, by only counting a series once, no matter now many episodes one appeared in.)
In 1953, Kiley played a murderous communist in Sam Fuller’s masterpiece, Pickup on South Street.
Two years later, Kiley starred in Phil Karlson’s documentary-style exercise in investigative filmmaking, The Phenix City Story, about the Patterson family, which took down an Alabama criminal syndicate even more bloodthirsty than the Mafia, and which cost the elder Patterson (John McIntire) his life. Kiley played the very real son who risked his life to fill his father’s shoes and avenge his murder. As the head of the syndicate, Edward Andrews deserved an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
In 1959, Kiley won his first Tony as male lead in a Broadway musical, Redhead. He would be nominated for four Tonys, winning two, and was known for his rich, baritone singing voice.
In 1962, Kiley was nominated for Best Actor in a Musical for No Strings, with words and music by Richard Rodgers. Rodgers had lost his second musical partner, Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960), to cancer two years earlier. Rodgers used every trick he’d learned from Hammerstein but, alas, it wasn’t enough. “Oscar,” as we refer to him in the Stix household, was in a class by himself. His grandfather and namesake built the theaters of Broadway, and America’s greatest lyric poet filled them. (However, No Strings was a commercial success.)
No Strings was the story of an interracial romance between Kiley’s character and that played by Diahann Carroll (1935-2019; Julia, Claudine, etc.), who was one of the most heavenly creatures on Earth.
In 1965, Kiley was “discovered at 43,” as he would later wryly put it, when he starred as Don Quixote on Broadway in Man of La Mancha, in what became his signature role, debuting the song, “The Impossible Dream.”
In middle age and later in life, Kiley was always in demand. In 1977, he played Diane Keaton’s distant, Catholic father in the disturbing Richard Brooks drama about the sexual revolution, inspired by the real murder of 28-year-old schoolteacher Roseann Quinn, by a sexually confused man she’d picked up in a singles bar, Looking for Mister Goodbar . However, the role was very limited, and could be reduced to the Hollywood cliché, “insensitive, narrow-minded, Catholic hypocrite.”
TV made better use of the aging Kiley’s talents. Nine times he was nominated for an Emmy, winning four times.
For one season, he starred in a dramatic series as a small businessman and patriarch of a large, tight-knit family, A Year in the Life, for which he won the Emmy for “Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series.”
During the mid-1990s, Kiley had a recurring role on David E. Kelley’s Picket Fences, as the pedantic, sadistic, retired English professor who was the father of the town doctor, Jill Brock (Kathy Baker), who was in turn married to Sheriff Jimmy Brock (Tom Skerritt). Kiley was nominated for Emmys for his two guest turns, winning once, on what was then the most brilliant dramatic series on TV.
Kiley also won Golden Globes and other awards for his work on the small screen.
The script of “Bohannon,” by William Kelley, must have been written especially for Kiley. He plays a conman, a faith healer, who is redeemed by the love of a dying boy, and through him, falls in love with the lad’s mother.
Thank you so much, Merri Davey, for re-posting this!
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