Hal Holbrook

Harold Rowe Holbrook Jr. (February 17, 1925 – January 23, 2021) was an American actor. He first received critical acclaim in 1954 for a one-man stage show, titled Mark Twain Tonight!, that he developed while studying at Denison University. He won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play in 1966 for his portrayal of Twain.

Holbrook's role as Ron Franz in Sean Penn's Into the Wild (2007) earned nominations for both an Academy Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award in the best supporting actor category.

In 2003, Holbrook was honored with the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush.

Holbrook and his two elder sisters were abandoned by their parents when he was two years old. He graduated from Culver Military Academy (now part of the Culver Academies) and then from Denison University, where an honors project about Mark Twain led him to develop the one-man show for which he became best known, a series of performances titled Mark Twain Tonight!. He also studied acting at HB Studio in New York City.

From 1942 through 1946, Holbrook served in the United States Army in World War II, achieving the rank of staff sergeant; he was stationed in Newfoundland, where he performed in theater productions such as the play Lady Precious Stream. The State Department even sent him on a European tour, which included pioneering appearances behind the Iron Curtain.

In 1967, Mark Twain Tonight! was presented on television by CBS and Xerox, and Holbrook received an Emmy for his performance. Holbrook won a Tony Award for the performance in 1966. In 1966, Holbrook starred opposite Shirley Booth in the acclaimed CBS Playhouse production of The Glass Menagerie.

Holbrook co-starred with Martin Sheen in the controversial and acclaimed 1972 television film That Certain Summer. In 1973, Holbrook appeared as Lieutenant Neil Briggs, the boss and rival of Detective "Dirty" Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) in Magnum Force, an "obsessively neat and prim fanatic" who supports the obliteration of San Francisco's criminals and who is the leader of a rogue group of vigilante officers.

In 1976, Holbrook won acclaim for his portrayal of the sixteenth U.S. President Abraham Lincoln in a series of television specials based on Carl Sandburg's acclaimed biography. and Commander Joseph Rochefort in the World War II battle film Midway. In 1977, he starred in the World War II film Julia, and the British-American thriller film Capricorn One.

In 1979, Holbrook starred with Katharine Ross, Barry Bostwick, and Richard Anderson in the made-for-TV movie Murder by Natural Causes. He appeared in various mini-series, including as the second U.S. President John Adams in George Washington (1984), North and South (1985/1986) and Dress Gray (1986), and continued performing in theatrical productions, such as King Lear. Holbrook was the narrator on the Ken Burns documentary Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery in 1997. Over a short period between 1988 and 1990, Holbrook directed four episodes of the series. Early on in his career, Holbrook worked onstage and in a television soap opera, The Brighter Day. A year later, Holbrook appeared in Men of Honor, where he portrayed a racist and hypocritical officer who endlessly tries to fail an African-American diver trainee. Holbrook played the role of Albie Duncan in two episodes of The West Wing.

He appeared as the host in the documentary The Seventh Day: Revelations From The Lost Pages of History (2005).

Later career He appeared in Sean Penn's critically acclaimed film Into the Wild (2007) and received an Oscar nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role at the 80th Academy Awards. At the time, this rendered Holbrook, at age 82, the oldest nominee in Academy Award history in the Best Supporting Actor category. That Evening Sun also was screened at the 2009 Nashville Film Festival, where Holbrook was honored with a special Lifetime Achievement Award, and the film itself received another Audience Award. President George W. Bush awarding Holbrook with the National Humanities Medal in the Oval Office in November 2003 alongside First Lady Laura Bush Holbrook appeared as a featured guest star in a 2006 episode of the HBO series The Sopranos and the NCIS episode "Escaped". He also had a multiple-episode arc on The Event, an American television series on NBC, appearing in the 2010–2011 season.

In 2011, Holbrook appeared in Water for Elephants. In 2012, Steven Spielberg cast Holbrook to play Francis Preston Blair in Lincoln. His subsequent film roles were in Gus Van Sant's Promised Land (2012), the voice of Mayday the fire engine in the animated Disney film Planes: Fire & Rescue (2014), and in the minor role as Whizzer in the drama film Blackway (2016). On March 23, 2017, he appeared on an episode on Grey's Anatomy playing a retired thoracic surgeon whose wife is a patient, and on Hawaii Five-0 later in the year.

In September 2017, after six decades of playing the role of Mark Twain, Holbrook, then 92, announced his retirement from Mark Twain Tonight! Holbrook indicated that he would like to continue working on movies and television. They had one child and they divorced in 1983.

Holbrook married actress and singer Dixie Carter in 1984 and the couple remained married until Carter's death from endometrial cancer on April 10, 2010. Holbrook appeared as a recurring character on Carter's TV series, Designing Women. He also had a residence in Beverly Hills, California.

In October 2016, aged 91, Holbrook wrote a letter to The New York Times defending actor director Nate Parker over his alleged 1999 rape of a woman and Parker's controversial film The Birth of a Nation. He urged others to "move on" from Parker's past and to view the film, which was "an exceptional piece of artistry and a vital portrait of our American experience". He was a registered independent, but leaned towards the liberal end of the U.S. political spectrum.

In 2016, he castigated then-Republican candidate Donald Trump for not having "the maturity to run the country". Holbrook praised Senator Bernie Sanders for his honesty and called him an exception to politicians "say[ing] what they think might get them elected".

Death Holbrook died at his home in Beverly Hills on January 23, 2021, at age 95; no cause was made public. He was buried in McLemoresville Cemetery in McLemoresville, Tennessee, alongside his wife, Dixie Carter.

Legacy In 2003, President George W. Bush honored Holbrook with a National Humanities Medal for "charming audiences with the wit and wisdom of Mark Twain as Twain's outlook never fails to give Holbrook a good show to put on".

The local community of McLemoresville, hometown of his wife Dixie Carter, constructed the Dixie Theatre for Performing Arts in nearby Huntingdon, Tennessee, which features the Hal Holbrook Auditorium.

Filmography

Awards and nominations