- Harry Carey, The Prisoner of Shark Island, 1935. Change of the prison commandant – where the prisoner was Dr Samuel Mudd, jailed in 1865 as a conspirator in Lincoln’s assassination, simply because he innocently treated the broken leg of killer John Wilkes Booth. In 1869, Mudd was pardoned and released by President Andrew Jackson and yet, despite repeated attempts by family members, the conviction has never been overturned. Holt had ad such a granite-jawed hero look ,the silent and talkies star was the model for two comic-strip detectives: Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy and Al Capp’s Fearless Fosdick.
- Walter Connolly, Nancy Steele Is Missing, 1936. Nancy’s millionaire father, in the the post-Lindbergh baby kidnapping drama, went through six actors: Holt, John Halliday, Lionel Barrymore, Jean Hersholt, Otto Kruger, Osgood Perkins (Tony’s dad)… before director George Marshall found the perfect Steele in the guy first cast by previous director Otto Preminger as the convict Sturm.
- Victor McLaglen, Call Out The Marines, 1941. The (unknown) directors kept changing – from Jack Hively to Leslie Goodwin to the shared credit for William Hamilton and Frank Ryan – the father-son team of Jack and Tim Holt churned into McLaglen and Edmund Lowe. Just as their gals went from Anne Shirley and the French Simone Simon to London’s Binnie Barnes and Rhode Island’s Dorothy Lovett. The Holts (John Ford stars, both), eventually played father and son in a 1947 Western programmer, The Arizona Ranger, one of Jack’s B-oaters (some hot in a week). Clark Gable’s Across The Wide Missouri, 1951, was Holt’s 191st and final screen role since 1914.
Birth year: 1888Death year: 1951Other name: Casting Calls: 3