Burgess Meredith

Burgess Meredith
Meredith in a publicity photo (1954)
Burgess Meredith
Born	Oliver Burgess Meredith 11/16/1907
Birthplace	Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
Died	9/9/1997 Malibu, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation	Actor, filmmaker
Known for	Of Mice and Men, The Twilight Zone, Batman, Rocky
Education	Amherst College
Spouse(s)	Helen Derby (1933–1935); Margaret Perry (1936–1938); Paulette Goddard (1944–1949); Kaja Sundsten
Children	2
Awards	Primetime Emmy Award; Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor (×2)

Oliver Burgess Meredith (November 16, 1907 – September 9, 1997) was an American actor and filmmaker whose career encompassed radio, theater, film, and television over a span of more than six decades. A lifetime member of the Actors Studio, Meredith built a reputation as one of the most versatile performers of the twentieth century, moving with ease between classical stage roles, leading film parts, character work, and the popular television villains and mentors for which later generations remembered him. He established himself in Hollywood in the late 1930s with celebrated dramatic performances, served briefly as acting president of the Actors' Equity Association, and went on to receive two Academy Award nominations, a Primetime Emmy Award, and back-to-back Saturn Awards for Best Supporting Actor. To viewers of the 1960s television series Batman he became inseparable from the squawking, umbrella-toting Penguin, while a later generation knew him as the cantankerous boxing trainer Mickey Goldmill in the Rocky film series. Despite the enduring fame of those roles, Meredith's body of work also included Shakespeare, Eugene O'Neill, Samuel Beckett, radio drama, narration, and direction.

Early Life

Burgess Meredith was born Oliver Burgess Meredith on November 16, 1907, in Cleveland, Ohio. His father was a physician, and the family relocated during Meredith's youth, exposing him to a series of communities in the American Midwest and East. As a boy he sang in church choirs, an experience he later credited with giving him his first sense of performance and audience.

Meredith's path into the theater was preceded by a sequence of odd jobs that, by his own later accounts, included work as a reporter, a sailor in the merchant marine, and a business trainee. Those years of itinerant employment, together with the Depression-era milieu in which he came of age, contributed to the sharp, plainspoken quality that critics would later identify in his stage performances.

He attended secondary school at the Hoosac School in upstate New York, where he first appeared on stage in school productions. From there he proceeded to college, beginning the formal education that would carry him into professional acting by the end of the 1920s.

Education

Meredith enrolled at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Although he did not pursue a conventional academic career after leaving the college, the years at Amherst gave him his earliest exposure to a wide repertory of dramatic literature, including the Shakespearean roles he would later interpret on the New York stage.

After leaving Amherst, Meredith moved to New York City, where he studied and worked with Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre. His apprenticeship there in the early 1930s placed him in the company of actors and directors who were reshaping the American theater, and it provided the technical training that prepared him for his first major Broadway role.

Career

Theater and early stardom

Meredith's professional acting career began in 1929. After his time with the Civic Repertory Theatre, he attracted serious critical attention on Broadway in productions by the Phoenix Theatre and other New York companies. His breakthrough came in 1935 with Maxwell Anderson's verse drama Winterset, in which he played Mio Romagna, a young man seeking to clear his executed father's name. The performance, profiled at the time in The New Yorker, made Meredith one of the most discussed young actors on the New York stage.

His standing within his profession was recognized in 1937, when, at the age of 29, he was elected acting president of the Actors' Equity Association, succeeding Frank Gillmore. He served in that capacity until 1938, when he was succeeded by Arthur Byron. Meredith was later inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame, an institution recognizing sustained distinction on the American stage.

Throughout his career Meredith returned repeatedly to the stage, performing in plays by William Shakespeare, Eugene O'Neill, Samuel Beckett, and other dramatists. Mel Gussow, writing in The New York Times, observed that although Meredith's late-career television roles renewed his popularity, "they represented only a small part of a richly varied career in which he played many of the more demanding roles in classical and contemporary theater."

Film: Hollywood leading man

Meredith made the transition to film with Winterset (1936), repeating his Broadway role of Mio Romagna for RKO. The picture established him as a screen actor and led to a string of leading parts at the end of the 1930s and into the 1940s.

The most enduring of those early roles was George Milton, the steady itinerant ranch hand who looks after the mentally impaired Lennie in the 1939 adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Meredith's restrained, naturalistic performance was singled out by contemporary critics, and the film became a touchstone for the late-Depression social realism of Hollywood at the close of the decade.

During the Second World War, Meredith served in the United States Army Air Forces, an episode of military service that interrupted but did not derail his career. He returned to feature filmmaking in 1945 with The Story of G.I. Joe, portraying the war correspondent Ernie Pyle. The film, made with the cooperation of Pyle himself and of veteran combat soldiers, was widely praised for its unsentimental treatment of the infantryman's experience, and Meredith's quiet rendering of the journalist was central to its reception.

Through the late 1940s and 1950s, Meredith continued to work in features but increasingly took character parts rather than leads. His on-screen marriage to Paulette Goddard, with whom he co-starred in several pictures in the mid-1940s, also influenced his career trajectory during the period.

Television: The Twilight Zone and Batman

By the late 1950s Meredith had become a familiar presence in American television drama, appearing in anthology series and dramatic specials. He was cast in four episodes of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone, a record matched by few other actors on the series. His most often-cited appearance is "Time Enough at Last" (1959), in which he played Henry Bemis, a bookish bank clerk who survives a nuclear catastrophe only to break his reading glasses.

In 1966, Meredith was cast as Oswald Cobblepot, alias the Penguin, in the ABC television series Batman opposite Adam West and Burt Ward. The role made him one of the most recognizable villains on American television. Meredith devised the character's distinctive squawking laugh during production. By his own later account, he was a long-time smoker and found that vocalising at length on set aggravated a cough; the staccato "quack" provided a means of disguising the cough while keeping the character vocally distinctive on camera. He was the first actor to play the Penguin in live action.

The Penguin became Meredith's most widely recognized screen creation, but he expressed ambivalence about the role's effect on his standing as a serious actor. In later interviews he suggested that, despite the affection of fans, the part may have "done me more harm than good," obscuring his stage work and dramatic film performances in the public mind.

Later film career: The Day of the Locust and Rocky

The 1970s brought Meredith two of the most acclaimed performances of his later career. In John Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust (1975), an adaptation of Nathanael West's novel about the fringes of Hollywood in the 1930s, he played the door-to-door salesman Harry Greener. The performance earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

The following year he was cast as Mickey Goldmill, the aging, sharp-tongued boxing trainer who reluctantly takes on the Philadelphia club fighter Rocky Balboa, in John G. Avildsen's Rocky (1976). The role brought Meredith a second Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and introduced him to a new audience as Sylvester Stallone's on-screen mentor. He reprised the part in Rocky II (1979) and Rocky III (1982), the role's emotional centrality to the series being reinforced in the latter film through flashback after the character's death.

Meredith continued to appear in feature films into the 1980s and 1990s. He played Sam Wainwright Sr.-like elder roles in studio comedies and fantasy films, including Foul Play (1978) opposite Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase, and Desmond Davis's Clash of the Titans (1981), in which he played the playwright Ammon. In addition to acting, he undertook extensive narration for documentaries and feature films, a strand of work he pursued until the end of his career.

Personal Life

Meredith married four times. His first marriage, to Helen Derby, lasted from 1933 to 1935 and ended in divorce. His second, to the actress Margaret Perry, ran from 1936 to 1938 and likewise ended in divorce. In 1944 he married the actress Paulette Goddard, with whom he co-starred in several films; that marriage ended in divorce in 1949. His fourth and final marriage, to Kaja Sundsten, lasted until his death and produced his two children.

Meredith was politically active and identified with the Democratic Party. During the postwar period of political investigations in the entertainment industry, his career was affected by the climate surrounding accusations of communist sympathies in Hollywood, a circumstance that contributed to a shift from leading roles to character work during the late 1940s and 1950s.

He spent much of his later life in California. Meredith died on September 9, 1997, at his home in Malibu, California, at the age of 89. The cause was reported as complications from Alzheimer's disease and melanoma.

Recognition

Meredith's professional honors spanned both film and television. He received two nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, for The Day of the Locust (1975) and Rocky (1976). He won a Primetime Emmy Award during his television career and was the first male performer to win the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor on two occasions.

His standing in the American theater was acknowledged through his election to the American Theater Hall of Fame. The community of Pomona, New York, where Meredith long maintained a residence, named a public park in his honor, Burgess Meredith Park, marking his association with the village.

Obituaries published in The New York Times, The Independent, and on CNN at the time of his death cataloged the range of his work across stage, screen, and broadcast media, with Gussow describing him as an actor equally at ease "playing good guys and villains."

Legacy

Meredith's career stretched from the New York stage of the early 1930s, through the studio era of Hollywood, the live and filmed television of the 1950s and 1960s, and on into the New Hollywood of the 1970s and the franchise filmmaking of the 1980s and 1990s. Few American performers of the twentieth century worked productively across so wide a range of formats. His Winterset, Of Mice and Men, and The Story of G.I. Joe belong to the canon of late-1930s and 1940s American dramatic film, while his appearances in The Twilight Zone contributed to the program's enduring critical reputation.

The dual character roles of the Penguin and Mickey Goldmill secured him a second life in American popular culture. His Penguin established a vocal and physical template that subsequent screen interpretations of the character have continued to reckon with, and the squawk he improvised on the Batman set passed into the vocabulary of the character itself. Mickey Goldmill, meanwhile, gave the Rocky films much of their emotional ballast; the trainer's death in Rocky III is among the most frequently cited scenes in the series, and the character's catchphrases and gravelly counsel have become part of the franchise's iconography.

Critics writing at the time of Meredith's death emphasized the breadth rather than the celebrity of his career. The Independent described him as one of the most accomplished American actors of his generation, and Gussow's New York Times obituary characterized his work as a sustained engagement with "the more demanding roles in classical and contemporary theater" alongside his film and television appearances. The combination of those threads—classical theater, prestige film, popular television, and feature-film franchise—remains a reference point for the kind of career that an American character actor of the studio era and after could build.