Hal Holbrook

Biography

Harold Rowe "Hal" Holbrook Jr. (Cleveland, Ohio, 1925 - Beverly Hills, California, 2021) was an American actor whose career spanned the stage, television and film for more than six decades. He is best remembered for a one-man show in which he played Mark Twain, but he was also a sought-after supporting actor in Hollywood, able to make even brief parts memorable through careful, understated work.

After his parents left him and his two older sisters when he was two, Holbrook was raised by his paternal grandparents, first in Massachusetts and later in a suburb of Cleveland. He attended Culver Military Academy and then Denison University, where an honors project on Mark Twain led him to write the monologue Mark Twain Tonight!, the piece that would define his career. He later trained at HB Studio in New York City. From 1942 to 1946 he served in the United States Army during the Second World War, and while stationed in Newfoundland he took part in theatre productions.

His first real national breakthrough came in 1956, when Ed Sullivan saw him perform and booked him for The Ed Sullivan Show. The show took him across the United States and Europe, and the State Department even sent him on a tour that reached behind the Iron Curtain. In 1966 he won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his Twain, and a television version produced by CBS the following year earned him an Emmy. The character stayed with him for decades: the show toured the country for more than 2,100 performances before he retired it in 2017, when his health no longer allowed it.

On screen he built a career on character parts. He made his film debut in Sidney Lumet's The Group (1966), but his international fame came from playing the mysterious Deep Throat in All the President's Men (1976), an identity that was still unknown at the time. That same year he played Commander Joseph Rochefort in the war film Midway, and in 1977 he appeared in Julia and the thriller Capricorn One. Earlier, in 1973, he had played Lieutenant Neil Briggs, the rival of Harry Callahan, in Magnum Force. In the 1980s and 1990s he turned up in The Fog, Creepshow, Wall Street and The Firm, often as figures of authority of doubtful morals.

His television work was just as wide-ranging. He won five Primetime Emmy Awards in total, and in 1976 he was acclaimed for playing Abraham Lincoln in a series of specials based on Carl Sandburg's biography. He also played Reese Watson on Designing Women, opposite his wife Dixie Carter, and had a major role throughout the run of the sitcom Evening Shade. In 1997 he narrated Ken Burns's documentary on Lewis and Clark.

The late stage of his career brought belated recognition. In 2007 he appeared in Sean Penn's Into the Wild and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. At 82 he became the oldest nominee in that category in Academy Award history. That period also brought That Evening Sun, filmed with Dixie Carter, and in 2012 Steven Spielberg cast him as Francis Preston Blair in Lincoln. His legacy lies in a long and varied career, in which a one-man show of his own became a recognisable artistic identity and he remained a steady presence on screen.

Key films

• All the President's Men (1976): his Deep Throat, the mysterious informant that brought him international fame.
• Magnum Force (1973): Lieutenant Neil Briggs, Harry Callahan's rival in the sequel.
• Julia (1977): a role in the Second World War drama opposite Jane Fonda.
• Into the Wild (2007): his Oscar-nominated turn as Ron Franz in Sean Penn's drama.
• Lincoln (2012): Francis Preston Blair in Steven Spielberg's film about the president.