Richard Boone

Richard Boone
Boone in 1959
Born Richard Allen Boone
(1917-06-18)June 18, 1917
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Died January 10, 1981(1981-01-10) (aged 63)
St. Augustine, Florida, U.S.
Occupation Actor
Years active 1949–1980
Spouse(s)
Jane H. Hopper
(m. 1937; div. 1940)

Mimi Kelly
(m. 1949; div. 1950)

Claire McAloon
(m. 1951; his death 1981)
Children 1

Richard Allen Boone (June 18, 1917 – January 10, 1981) was an American actor who starred in over 50 films and was notable for his roles in Westerns and for the TV series Have Gun – Will Travel.

Early life

Boone was born in Los Angeles, California, the middle child of Cecile (née Beckerman) and Kirk E. Boone, a corporate lawyer. His father was a descendant of Squire Boone, brother to frontiersman Daniel Boone.[1][2] His mother was Jewish, the daughter of immigrants from Russia.[3]

Richard Boone graduated from Hoover High School in Glendale, California. He attended Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where he was a member of Theta Xi fraternity. He dropped out prior to graduation and went to work in oil-rigging, bartending, painting, and writing. He joined the United States Navy in 1941 and served on three ships in the Pacific during World War II, seeing combat as an aviation ordnanceman, enlisted Naval Aircrewman and tail gunner on Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers.

Acting career

Early training and work

In his youth, Boone had attended the San Diego Army and Navy Academy in Carlsbad, California, where he was introduced to theatre under the tutelage of Virginia Atkinson. After the war, Boone used the G.I. Bill to study acting at the Actors Studio in New York. "Serious" and "methodical," Boone debuted on the Broadway theatrical scene in 1947 with the plays Medea, Macbeth (1948) and The Man (1950).

Elia Kazan used Boone to feed lines to an actress for a film screen-test done for director Lewis Milestone. Milestone was not impressed with the actress, but he was impressed enough with Boone's voice to summon him to Hollywood, where he was given a seven-year contract with Fox.[4]

From films to television

In 1950, Boone made his screen debut as a Marine officer in Milestone's Halls of Montezuma. In 1953, he played Pontius Pilate in the first Cinemascope film released, The Robe. He had only one scene in the film, in which he gives instructions to Richard Burton, who plays the centurion ordered to crucify Christ. When he was ordered to appear in another film for Fox made at the same time as The Robe, he ended his contract with the studio.[5]

During the filming of Halls of Montezuma he befriended Jack Webb, who was then producing and starring in Dragnet, whose writer was preparing a series about a doctor for NBC. From 1954–56, Boone became a familiar face in the lead role of that medical drama, titled Medic,[5] and in 1955 received an Emmy nomination for Best Actor Starring in a Regular Series. While on Medic, he also guest-starred as the character Everett Brayer on NBC's Frontier anthology series, in the episode "The Salt War". He appeared in the 1954 Dragnet film based on Webb's series.

Have Gun – Will Travel

Boone's next television series, Have Gun – Will Travel, made him a national star because of his role as Paladin, the intelligent and sophisticated, but tough, gun-for-hire in the late 19th-century American West. The show had first been offered to actor Randolph Scott, who turned it down and gave the script to Boone while they were making the film Ten Wanted Men.[6] The show ran from 1957–63, with Boone receiving two more Emmy nominations, in 1959 and 1960.

John Wayne and Boone at premier of Big Jake, 1971

Alongside John Wayne

Boone starred in four movies with John Wayne: The Alamo as Sam Houston, Big Jake, and The Shootist.[7]

Return to Broadway

Boone appeared on Broadway in 1959, starring as Abraham Lincoln in “The Rivalry”.[8]

Work on 1960s television

During the 1960s, Boone appeared regularly on other television programs. He was an occasional guest panelist and also a mystery guest on What's My Line?, the Sunday night CBS-TV quiz show. On that show, he talked with host John Charles Daly about their days working together on the TV show The Front Page. Boone had his own television anthology, The Richard Boone Show. Although it aired only from 1963–64, he received his fourth Emmy nomination for it in 1964. Along with The Danny Kaye Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show. The Richard Boone Show won a Golden Globe for Best Show in 1964.[9]

After the end of the run of his weekly show, Boone and his family moved to Honolulu, Hawaii. While he was living on Oahu, Boone helped persuade Leonard Freeman to film Hawaii Five-O exclusively in Hawaii. Prior to that, Freeman had planned to do "establishing" location shots in Hawaii, but principal production in Southern California. Boone and others convinced Freeman that the islands could offer all necessary support for a major TV series and would provide an authenticity otherwise unobtainable.[10]

Freeman, impressed by Boone's love of Hawaii, offered him the role of Steve McGarrett; Boone turned it down, however, and the role went to Jack Lord, who shared Boone's enthusiasm for the region, which Freeman considered vital. Coincidentally, Lord had appeared alongside Boone in the first episode of Have Gun – Will Travel, titled "Three Bells to Perdido." At the time, Boone had shot a pilot for CBS called Kona Coast, which he hoped CBS would adopt as a series, but the network went instead only with Hawaii Five-O.[11]

The six-foot-one-inch (1.85 m) actor continued to appear in movies, typically as the villain, including The Raid (1954), Man Without a Star (1955 King Vidor), The Tall T (1957 Budd Boetticher), The War Lord (1965 Franklin Schaffner), Hombre (1967 Martin Ritt), The Arrangement (1969 Elia Kazan), The Kremlin Letter (1970 John Huston), Big Jake (1971 George Sherman), The Shootist (1976 Don Siegel), and a second rendition of The Big Sleep (1978 Michael Winner).

Work on 1970s television

In the early 1970s, Boone starred in the short-lived TV series Hec Ramsey, which Jack Webb produced for Mark VII Limited Productions, and which was about a turn-of-the-20th-century Western-style police detective who preferred to use his brain and criminal forensic skills instead of his gun. Ramsey had been a frontier lawman and gunman in his younger days, and the older Ramsey was now the deputy chief of police of a small Oklahoma city, still a skilled shooter and carrying a short-barreled Colt Single Action Army revolver. Boone said to an interviewer in 1972, "You know, Hec Ramsey is a lot like Paladin, only fatter."[12] This quote was often misinterpreted to mean that Hec Ramsey was a sequel to Have Gun – Will Travel, when it actually was not. In the mid-1970s, Boone returned to The Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, where he had once studied acting, to teach.

Work outside television

In the 1960s and 1970s, Boone assisted the Israeli film industry at its inception. He appeared in the first Israeli-produced film shot outside Israel, the Western Madron (1970), with a story set in the American West of the 1800s.[2] In 1979, he received an award from Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin "for his contribution to Israeli cinema."[2]

In 1965, he came in third in the Laurel Award for Rio Conchos in Best Action Performance; Sean Connery won first place with Goldfinger and Burt Lancaster won second place with The Train. Boone provided the character voice of the dragon Smaug in the 1977 animated film version of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.[13]

Personal life

Boone was married three times: to Jane Hopper (1937–1940), Mimi Kelly (1949–1950), and Claire McAloon (from 1951 until his death). His son with Claire McAloon, Peter, worked as a child actor in several of his father's Have Gun – Will Travel television shows.[14]

Richard Boone moved to St. Augustine, Florida, from Hawaii in 1970 and worked with the annual local production of Cross and Sword, when he was not acting on television or in movies, until shortly before his death in 1981. In the last year of his life, Boone was appointed Florida's cultural ambassador.[15]

During the 1970s, he wrote a newspaper column for the St. Augustine Record called "It Seems To Me". He also gave acting lectures at Flagler College in 1972–1973.[16] In his final role, Boone played Commodore Matthew C. Perry in The Bushido Blade.

Death

Richard Boone died soon afterward in St. Augustine of pneumonia while suffering from throat cancer. His ashes were scattered in the Pacific Ocean off Hawaii.

Filmography

Film

TV

References

  1. ↑ The Kelsay Family from the Ancestry website; accessed April 11, 2017.
  2. 1 2 3 Bloom, Nate (March 6, 2012). "Interfaith Celebrities: On and Off the Screens, Today and Yesteryear". InterfaithFamily. Retrieved 2016-01-03.
  3. ↑ Rothel, 2001
  4. ↑ Rothel, p. 14
  5. 1 2 Rothel p. 15
  6. ↑ Rothel p. 48
  7. ↑ Landesman, Fred (2007). The John Wayne Filmography. Jefferson NC: McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-0786432523.
  8. ↑ http://www.playbill.com/production/the-rivalry-bijou-theatre-vault-0000001393
  9. ↑ "Richard Boone Show, The". goldenglobes.com. Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Retrieved 5 May 2017.
  10. ↑ Newcomb, Horace (2004). Encyclopedia of Television. NY: Routledge. p. 290. ISBN 978-1579583941. Retrieved 5 May 2017.
  11. ↑ Rothel p. 58
  12. ↑ Quotes from and about Richard Boone
  13. ↑ Bogstad, Janice M. and Philip E. Kaveny. Picturing Tolkien: Essays on Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings Film Trilogy. Jefferson NC: McFarland. p. 67. ISBN 978-0786446360. Retrieved 5 May 2017.
  14. ↑ Peter Boone profile, IMDB.com; accessed April 11, 2017.
  15. ↑ Profile, msn.com; accessed April 11, 2017.
  16. ↑ TV-dot-Com: Biography-Richard Boone

Bibliography

  • Rothel, David. Richard Boone: A Knight Without Armor in a Savage Land ; Empire Publishing; August 2001; ISBN 978-0944019368
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