Steven Hill (1922-2016): Memories of a Magnificent Actor

Steve Hill, in 1962

[“50 Years Later, and I Still Remember It! See the Last Episode of Naked City, the Legendary TV Drama that Starred the Streets of New York City, Guest Starring Steven Hill: S04E34 “Barefoot on a Bed of Coals” (1963)”; and

“‘S—t!’: On Network TV, Another Taboo Falls, but Nobody Notices.”]

By RM and N.S.
tuesday, november 7, 2023 at 2:16:00 a.m. est

These episodes aren’t available online, so I can only describe them.

In “Downfall” on The Untouchables, Mr. Hill is a train-obsessed gangster who is fascinated by his toy railroad, with a faraway look in his eye, as though his life were already long over.

When Ness has it out with him at the end, Hill tosses out something like, “You’ll never get me alive!,” and Ness retorts, “Too late – you’ve been dead for years!” -which is exactly how Hill had been playing the part.

On Ben Casey, Hill has a Cagney-esque role as a condemned gangster who is persuaded to donate his corneas to help a blind girl after his death. He easily surmounts the clichéd aspects of the part and is truly moving.

And on Casey again, he’s teamed with the stunning Bethel Leslie as a pair of opposing-personality cripples who are thrown together in the ward and end up helping each other survive.

Memories of a magnificent actor (though I thought Mission Impossible seemed a walk-through for him. And he was supposedly cantankerous in other ways beyond the not-working-Saturday bit).-RM

N.S.: The editor of the wonderful Web site, Jump the Shark, used to mock what he called “Very Special Episodes,” which were often ratings gimmicks during “sweeps months” (November, February, and May), when TV commercial rates were set for the year, but I loved them.

In a VSE, a show’s top writer would slave over a brilliant script for a particular actor, whether a guest star or a regular. On ER, before all of the original stars departed and the place became a politically correct train station, Neal Baer would write the best VSEs, which revolved around the death of the George Clooney character’s father (what I dubbed the “Route 66” episode), the degeneration and death of the Anthony Edwards’ character’s father (played by the great John Cullum), and the “On the Beach” episode, in which Edwards’ character succumbed to a brain tumor.

(George Clooney was born to be a TV star; he did by far his best work on ER.)

I have no doubt that the episodes of The Untouchables and Ben Casey to which RM referred, were written specifically for Steve Hill and Bethel Leslie, respectively. (In the wee small hours of the morning today, after watching the Naked City episode guest starring Hill, I serendipitously landed on the imdb pages for Zohra Lampert, who is still alive at 87, and Bethel Leslie (1929-1999).

When the U.S. Supreme Court, the succession problem (as the pioneer studio moguls died off, or were pushed out), and the ascent of TV combined to destroy the grand studio system, TV proved to be the salvation of character actors—and great dramatists. And if people condemned the new medium as a “wasteland,” heck, they’d earlier condemned the studio system.