Richard Basehart may have been the greatest
American actor ever. Certainly he was
too accomplished a performer ever to be “just another movie star†– his unconventional
good looks and astonishing versatility allowed him to convincingly portray murderers,
heels and suicidal neurotics in a career that spanned 45 years, but he was
equally effective at playing gentle souls, men of action (such as the intrepid
U.S. intelligence agent in Decision
Before Dawn), cowboys and the heroic Admiral Harriman Nelson in the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea science
fiction series on ABC.
“Even
today, Richard Basehart remains one of the great, unrecognized talents of
post-war American films,†writes Mark Gross in Films in Review. “Possibly this is because he is neither
conventionally handsome nor easily identifiable as a character type. Instead,
he seems to become lost in his performances, belied by a surface calmness, with
a subtlety underlined by a sense of abandon in his quest for realism.â€
After six years knocking about Broadway, Ohio-born Basehart's breakthrough came in 1945 in The Hasty Heart, in which he was cast as a proud, dying Scottish
soldier. Basehart won the 1945 New York Drama Critics
Award for his realistic performance and was named the most promising newcomer
of the season. Hollywood came calling, and Basehart was soon signed to a movie
contract. Thus began a globe-trotting screen career that lasted until his death
in 1984.
As his Hollywood career took off, Basehart made every effort
to avoid being typecast, although in his early noirs he seemed to favor parts
in which he was of a villainous or conflicted nature. In preparing for his roles, Basehart spent hours by himself trying
to shape the character. He would sit on the end of the couch in his living room
and be so engrossed in the roles that he was completely oblivious to what was
going on around him.
Â
In He Walked
By Night (1948), a neorealist
thriller, Basehart played a creepily charismatic electronics genius, a
tight-lipped loner responsible for a wave of burglaries and a cop killing... this
criminal is so smart he can even perform surgery on himself to remove a bullet
(an unforgettable and brilliant acting moment).Â
Basehart’s impressive range enabled him to do period pieces – the best one being The Black
Book/Reign of Terror (1949),
in which he delivered an unsettling performance as the reptilian Maximilien (“Don’t
call me Max!â€) Robespierre, the tyrant of the French Revolution who sent
thousands to their death by guillotine. The scene in which Robespierre is shot
in the face is still quite shocking. Basehart’s
frustrated, meek pharmacist in 1949’s Tension
is a masterful depiction of quiet desperation. In 1951, Basehart outdid himself in
the fact-based movie Fourteen
Hours, playing a mentally unstable momma’s boy who stands on the
ledge of a midtown Manhattan hotel, threatening to jump. His pathetic bonding
with policeman and father figure Paul Douglas is hard to watch.Â
After Basehart's
wife died suddenly of a brain
tumor, a shattered Basehart – ever the consummate professional – completed work
on Fourteen Hours and then co-starred
with the ravishing Valentina Cortese
in The House on Telegraph Hill, a superb noir directed by Robert Wise at 20th
Century Fox, in which Basehart played a charming yet increasingly
enigmatic estate trustee trying to murder Cortese for horning in on the action. Despite
the on-screen histrionics, Basehart and Cortese fell in love and were married
in 1951. The two attractive thespians then left the United States, moving to
Italy where Basehart spent much of the 1950s, often appearing in obscure European
films such as Jons und Erdme (with Giulietta Masina) and L’Ambitieuse/The Climbers (with Edmond
O’Brien), but also turning up in movie classics,
notably Federico Fellini’s La Strada
(as a gentle clown and acrobat) and John Huston’s Moby Dick (as Ishmael, the sailor-narrator and sole survivor of the
Pequod).Â
Basehart occasionally returned to Hollywood over the next nine years, co-starring as a
defrocked alcoholic priest in the 1953 Titanic,
as an American army officer accused of aiding the enemy during the Korean War
in Time Limit (1957) and as the
intellectual atheist Ivan Karamazov in Richard
Brooks’ 1958 adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.Â
In Europe,
Basehart played a swashbuckling nobleman out to restore his good name in the
Italian costume epic Cartouche (1954); a luckless ex-GI forced to
commit a criminal act in The
Good Die Young (1954), shot
in London; and a film director whose life is turned upside down by a blackmailer
in Joseph Losey's Hollywood-blacklist-inspired
The Intimate Stranger/Finger
of Guilt (1956), also filmed
in England. By
the end of the fifties, Basehart’s marriage to Cortese was on the
rocks and he decided to return to the United States. He rarely saw his son Jack
(who remained with his mother in Rome) after the divorce. Basehart began a new
life, marrying actress/artist/sculptress Diana Lotery in 1962.Â
Basehart with Fellini on the set of the classic La Strada.
However,
after such a long stint overseas, Basehart found that he was somewhat forgotten
in Hollywood, although
Alfred Hitchcock briefly considered him for the role of Sam Loomis in Psycho. So impressed was gossip columnist Sheilah Graham by
Basehart’s performance in La Strada
that she suggested him for
the role of her lover, the insecure, alcoholic writer and often uncredited
screenwriter F. Scott Fitzgerald, in Beloved
Infidel, but the producers went with the fine, upstanding (and therefore totally
unsuited) Gregory Peck, a bigger box office draw. His only movie offer was
the title role in Stuart Heisler's bizarre 1962 biopic Hitler, in which Basehart gave a distinctly
psychosexual edge to his portrayal of the Nazi führer in a film marred by a
budget far too low for the ambitious scale of the project.
Pushing
50, Basehart knew his leading man days were over (at least as far as films were
concerned) and he made the switch to television, appearing in memorable guest spots
on dramatic series such as Route 66 and Naked City, as well as TV anthologies,
including The
Twilight Zone and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. In
1964, Basehart agreed to star in a TV series,
beginning a four-year run on the Irwin Allen-produced Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. He
filmed more than 100 episodes and became a television star.Â
The
first two seasons of the series were of a high quality, featuring storylines devoted to Cold
War themes involving espionage and sci-fi elements, but by season 3,
producer Allen embraced a silly
monster-of-the-week concept, and Basehart’s
Admiral Harriman Nelson found himself up against a grotesque gallery of wiggly
man-in-rubber-suit monsters. Lurching through the corridors of the Seaviewnuclear
submarine were cyborgs, deadly
dolls, mummies, werewolves, demonic leprechauns, fossil men, flame men, frost
men, wax men and lobster men. Basehart
even struggled against a large talking puppet made in his likeness! Other episodes saw the Seaview
menaced by aliens, monsters of the deep and dinosaurs.Â
When asked by an entertainment reporter
about the quality of the scripts written for Voyage, Basehart said: “There's no greater challenge (for an actor)
than making something out of nothing.†Despite his mixed feelings about Voyage, he did love the camaraderie on the set with the actors and crew,
and was able to arrange for friends such as Warren Stevens to land
guest-starring roles on the show.
Basehart and David Hedison join guest star Vincent Price for a humorous publicity shot on the set of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
Basehart
squeezed in a movie during this financially rewarding but creatively fallow period
– John Sturges' underrated thriller The Satan Bug (1965), based on a novel by Alistair
MacLean – in which he played a terrorist intent on the destruction of humanity.
After Voyage
to the Bottom of the Sea was cancelled in 1968, Basehart appeared in numerous made-for-TV
movies and occasional feature films, popping up as a grizzled posse member with
a thirst for whisky in the 1972 Charles Bronson Eurowestern Chato’s Land. Basehart won critical
acclaim for his work in the 1970 TV drama The Andersonville Trial, directed
by George C. Scott, portraying Lt. Col. Henry Wirz,
commandant of the notorious Confederate prisoner-of-war camp, and took guest
starring roles in many TV series; he was marvelous as a hammy Shakespearean
actor in the Dagger of the Mind episode
of Columbo.Â
During
his final years, even though enduring bouts of ill health, Basehart continued
to give outstanding performances, in particular the lovestruck Hollywood talent
agent Johnny Hyde in Marilyn: The Untold
Story and the Russian diplomat in Being There, but he was also very
much in demand as a narrator, lending his gently authoritative voice to the
mammoth documentary Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War (1980) and to Four Days in November, the 1964 Oscar-nominated account of the assassination
of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, among many other such projects. As well, Basehart’s
pleasing voice became familiar to American TV viewers in a slew of commercials
for Pontiac, Southern Pacific, American Express and Amoco. Basehart’s final public
appearance was as the narrator at the closing ceremonies of the 1984 Summer
Olympics in Los Angeles.
After
suffering a series of strokes, 70-year-old Basehart passed away on September
17, 1984.