Hal Holbrook

Posted on by Tony CrawleyCategories:Actors

  1. Richard Hayden, The Sound of  Music, 1964.    Two years before the musical reached Broadway in 1959, Paramount secured  rights to the story of the Trapp Family Singers – for Astaire’s Funny Face partner, Audrey Hepburn. She was not interested, When Fox took over the rights (for $1m-plus !), Astaire was asked to be Captain Von Trapp’s pal, Max Detweiler. So were the impeccable Danish pianist-comic Victor Borge and The Master, aka Noël Coward and Hal Holbrook.   Fox got worried when numerous directors walked (well, Gene Kelly danced). William Wyler signed on  but proved too deaf for a musical. Robert Wise changed his mind and had the biggest triumph of his career with his second musical about a girl named Maria.  Critic Pauline Kael famously tried to bury “the sugar-coated lie that people seem to want to eat” but it saved Fox from the near bankruptcy  of the Cleopatra debacle.

  2. William Devane, The Missiles of October, 1974.      “They originally wanted me to play Bobby,” Devane recalled.  “Martin Sheen was going to play Bobby Kennedy if Hal Holbrook played JFK. If Hal didn’t do it, Marty didn’t want to do Bobby… They can’t find anyone who will play JFK. They decided to hire me and the network responded: Are you nuts?”  Holbrook was famous for playing Abraham Lincoln in three TV series, and had been Martin Sheen’s lover in the first US tele-movie to sympathetically portray homosexuality, That Certain Summer, 1972. Holbrook also appeared in two chapters of Sheen’s series, The West Wing, 2000-2001.

  3. Tom Skerrit, Dead Zone, 1983.    For the fourth of Stephen Kings staggering 313 screen credits, Canadian director David  Cronenberg insisted on Holbrook – from the previous year’s King piece, Creepshow – as Sherrif Bannerman. Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis had never heard of him – and as he was controlling the purse strings… Hello, Tom, pleased ta meetcha… Me, Dino, you. sherrif ! 
  4. Jason Robards, Something Wicked This Way Comes, 1983.   Inbetween being written for Gene Kelly and bought by Kirk Douglas, various versions of the Ray Bradbury tale proposed Holbrook, James Garner, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau for Kirk’s favourite character, Charles Holloway.
  5. Martin  Sheen, The West Wing, TV, 1999-2006.    Hardly surprising that creator Aaron Sorkin first thought of Sidney Poitier for his US President.  “Those talks didn’t get far,” Sorkin recalled.  Poitier’s fee was too high for the planned four appearances per season.  Next in line for POTUS: Hal Holbrook (aka Abraham Lincoln  in three TV shows), Alan Alda, John Cullum, Jason Robards. Then producer John Wells remembered  Sheen had played JFK (and RFK) and would be the perfect Josiah Bartlett (named after a signatory of the July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence). In fact, he ruled from his first entrance and was quickly written (front and centre) into all 154 episodes.  Holbrook became Sheen’s  Assistant Secretary of State Albie Duncan  in 2001 and 2002 episodes. 

 Birth year: 1925Death year: 2021Other name: Casting Calls:  5