The Vanishing Arthur Kennedy

Few are the American actors as significant and solid yet as unknown and forgotten as Arthur Kennedy (1914-1990).

Kennedy’s chief claim to enduring fame is his having created key roles in the original Broadway productions of several Arthur Miller plays: Chris in All My Sons (1947), Biff in Death of a Salesman (1949), John Proctor in The Crucible (1953), and Walter in The Price (1968). He was also Tom in the 1950 screen version of The Glass Menagerie. Kennedy plays prominent parts in a long list of well-remembered Hollywood movies…and yet he himself is not remembered. He was nominated for five Oscars (and won a Tony and a Golden Globe) and (anecdotally anyway) even film buffs draw a blank at his name. I had seen him in countless pictures, perhaps a dozen, before he began to slowly make his way into my consciousness. I find such things interesting. How can an actor fade into the woodwork right before our very eyes? Sure, Kennedy’s seldom the star of his films, but he is very often the second lead. We’re not talking about a bit player. It’s almost as though he does his work a little too well. His head is completely in the game, but he’s not the kind of guy to dunk or spike the ball, or dance in the end zone. Over time it dawned on me that he is a kind of precursor to guys like Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall, actors who disappear into roles, and that’s the best way to appreciate him. He’s not an entertainer, he’s an artisan.

Originally from Worcester, Mass., Kennedy studied drama at Carnegie Tech (the current Carnegie Mellon) and then joined the Group Theatre, which is assuredly where he developed his naturalistic aesthetic. I am amused to learn that he followed that up with a stint in Maurice Evans‘ company, Evans being among the hammiest of thespians, polar opposite to the kind of actor Kennedy was. One of Kennedy’s first screen roles was the lead in Knockout(1941), a boxing picture with echoes of Odets’ Golden Boy; by the end of the decade he played second fiddle to Kirk Douglas in the similar Champion (1949), one year before they were re-teamed in The Glass Menagerie.

If you’re among the many who don’t recognize Kennedy’s name you may be astonished to learn the number of famous movies he was in, in which he played major parts: Peyton Place (1957), Some Came Running (1958), A Summer Place (1959), Elmer Gantry (1960), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Fantastic Voyage (1966). Much like Van Heflin, a similarly non-descript character lead, Kennedy was in many very excellent westerns, and this, too, is among the reason many vintage movie fans don’t know his work, for I have found that many otherwise intelligent people avoid this important American genre completely. Some of the better known ones Kennedy appeared in include They Died With Their Boots On (1941), Bend of the River (1952), Rancho Notorious (1952), The Man from Laramie (1955), Cheyenne Autumn (1964), Nevada Smith (1966), Day of the Evil Gun (1968), and A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die (1968). Starting in the ’60s through the end of his life, Kennedy worked in Rome almost as much as he did in Hollywood, not just in spaghetti westerns, but also Biblical pictures, crime stories, and war movies.

Like many an old Hollywood warhorse of the day, Kennedy spent a lot of his later years in cheesy horror films. The best of them was The Sentinel (1977), but he’s also in such things as Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974), The Antichrist (1974), Cyclone (1978), and The Humanoid (1979). Fortunately, he rounded out his career on a dignified note in the drama Signs of Life (1989) with Beau Bridges,Vincent D’Onofrio, Will Patton, Kate Reid, Kathy Bates, Mary-Louise Parker, and — whoa! — Georgia Engel!