September 22: Happy Birthday John Houseman

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https://lebeauleblog.com/2021/09/22/...john-houseman/

John Houseman (1902-1988) is pictured above at the 46th Academy Awards, where he won Best Supporting Actor. He is flanked by Ernest Borgnine and Cybill Shepherd, the presenters (I assume you can tell which is which).

Houseman is best known today as an actor, but his screen acting career was almost non-existent until he was past seventy. He made an appearance in Orson Welles’s 1938 silent comedy Too Much Johnson, which was not screened publicly at the time. In 1964, his friend John Frankenheimer asked him to make an uncredited cameo in Seven Days in May.

With those exceptions, Houseman made his screen debut in 1973, with his Oscar-winning (also Golden Globe-winning) performance as Professor Charles Kingsfield in The Paper Chase.

Houseman returned to the role of Professor Kingsfield for a TV series adaptation of The Paper Chase. The series aired for a single season on CBS in the late seventies, and was revived for three more in the early 1980s by Showtime. Houseman won another Golden Globe for the first season.

Houseman was busy with a number of other roles for the final 15 years of his life. He appeared in feature films such as Three Days of the Condor, Rollerball, and Bright Lights, Big City. Fans of The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman may remember him as Dr. Lee Franklin, inventor of the fembots. He was also a Golden Globe nominee for the 1983 miniseries The Winds of War.

Houseman was born in Romania, and grew up in England. He moved to the US in the 1920s, and wrote and directed for Broadway. In the mid-thirties, he and Orson Welles began working together; they worked for the Federal Theatre Project and then founded the Mercury Theatre. The two went to Hollywood together, but had a falling out during the making of Citizen Kane.

Houseman then became a prominent film producer. He produced a 1953 adaptation of Julius Caesar which was a Best Picture nominee. His other production credits included Max Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman, Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night and On Dangerous Ground, and several of Vincente Minnelli’s films. He returned to producing in 1980, with the Emmy-nominated TV movie Gideon’s Trumpet. He also appeared in the latter as Earl Warren.

Some people may also remember Houseman for appearing in a variety of TV ads, notably for investment bank Smith Barney–he told us “they make money the old fashioned way–they earn it.”

[Chocolate Moose]

Oh gosh, yes!!

[stevea]

Whenever Houseman guested on Silver Spoons, he stole the show. In an episode where he allowed Ricky to drive, they crashed the car into the Stratton house and it ended up in the library.

No injuries portrayed, but the ensuing scenes were hilarious.

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Franklyn Seales knew John Houseman from his days at Julliard, so that obviously helped him get cast for Silver Spoons.