Clifton Webb

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Clifton Webb

from the trailer for the film Laura (1945).
Born November 19, 1889
Beech Grove, Indiana, USA
Died October 13, 1966
Beverly Hills, California, USA

Clifton Webb (November 19, 1889 – October 13, 1966) was an American actor, dancer and singer.

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[edit] Biography

He was born Webb Parmelee Hollenbeck in a rural part of Marion County, Indiana which would, in 1906, become Beech Grove, a self-governing city entirely surrounded by Indianapolis. As a result, virtually all printed sources give the larger city as his place of birth. Webb's parents were Jacob Grant Hollenbeck (1867–May 2, 1939), the son of a grocer from a multi-generational Indiana farming family and Mabelle A. Parmelee (again, most sources give "Parmalee" or "Parmallee") (March 24, 1869–October 17, 1960), the daughter of a railroad conductor.

In 1892, his formidable mother, Mabelle, moved to New York with her beloved "little Webb", as she called him for the remainder of her life. She dismissed questions about her husband Jacob, a ticket clerk who, like her father, worked for the Indianapolis-St. Louis Railroad, by saying, "We never speak of him. He didn't care for the theatre."

Privately tutored, Webb started taking dance and acting lessons at the age of five. He made his stage debut at seven in the impressive setting of Carnegie Hall by performing with the New York Children's Theatre in Palmer Cox's The Brownies. This success was followed by a vaudeville tour playing The Master of Charlton Hall, succeeded by leading roles as Oliver Twist and Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn. In between performances, Mabelle saw to it that he studied painting with the renowned Robert Henri and voice with the equally famous Victor Maurel. By his seventeenth birthday in 1906, he was singing one of the secondary leads in the Boston-based Aborn Opera Company's production of the operetta Mignon.

Upon reaching nineteen, he had become a professional ballroom dancer and, taking the stage name "Clifton Webb", sang and danced in about two dozen operettas before debuting on Broadway as Bosco in The Purple Road, which opened at the Liberty Theatre on April 7, 1913 and ran for 136 performances before closing in August. His mother (billed as Mabel Parmalee) was also listed in the program as a member of the opening night cast. His next musical was an Al Jolson vehicle, Sigmund Romberg's Dancing Around. It opened at the Winter Garden Theatre on October 10, 1914, and had 145 performances, closing in February 1915. Later that year, he was in the all-star revue Ned Wayburn's Town Topics, which boasted 117 famous performers, including Will Rogers, listed in the Century Theatre opening night program of September 23. 68 performances later, it closed on November 20. The following year, he had another short run with Cole Porter's operetta See America First, which opened at Maxine Elliott's Theatre on March 28, 1916, and closed after 15 performances on April 8. The World War I year of 1917 proved to be better, with a 233-performance run of Jerome Kern's Love o'Mike, which opened at the Shubert Theatre on January 15. After moving to Maxine Elliott's Theatre and Casino Theatre, it closed on September 29. Future Mama star Peggy Wood was also in the cast. His final show of the 1910s, the musical Listen Lester, had the longest run, 272 performances. It opened at the Knickerbocker Theatre December 23, 1918 and closed in August 1919.

The 1920s saw Clifton Webb in no less than eight Broadway shows, numerous other stage appearances, including vaudeville, and a handful of silent films. The revue As You Were, with additional songs by Cole Porter, opened at the Central Theatre on January 29, 1920 and closed 143 performances later on May 29. Busy with films, tours and vaudeville, he did not return to Broadway until 1923, with the musical Jack and Jill (Globe Theatre) which had 92 performances between March 22 and June 9, and Lynn Starling's comic play Meet the Wife which opened on November 26 and ran into the summer of 1924, closing in August. The play's male ingenue was 24-year old Humphrey Bogart.

In 1925 he appeared on stage in a dance act with vaudeville star and silent film actress Mary Hay. Later that year, when she and her husband, Tol'able David star Richard Barthelmess, decided to produce and star in their own film vehicle New Toys, they chose Webb to be second lead. The movie proved to be financially successful, but nineteen more years would pass before Webb appeared in another feature film.

Clifton Webb's mainstay was the Broadway theatre. Between 1913 and 1947, the tall and slender performer who sang in a clear, gentle tenor, appeared in 23 Broadway shows, starting with major supporting roles and quickly progressing to leads. He introduced Irving Berlin's Easter Parade as well as George and Ira Gershwin's I've Got a Crush on You in Treasure Girl (1928); Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz's I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan in The Little Show (1929) and Irving Berlin's Not for All the Rice in China in As Thousands Cheer (1933).

Most of his Broadway shows were musicals, but he also starred in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and his longtime friend Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit and Present Laughter, in parts that Coward wrote with him in mind.

He was a friend, and Broadway co-star, of the lesbian singer Libby Holman. Webb and his mother used to take frequent vacations with Holman, and they would remain friends until the mid-1940s (see [1]).

His Broadway credentials were impressive and his London stage appearances were critically praised, but Hollywood was another story. After New Toys and another 1925 silent The Heart of a Siren, he was classified as a character actor and stereotyped as a fussy effete snob. Mother Mabelle also preferred New York to Hollywood with its "yes men".

Webb was in his mid-fifties when actor/director Otto Preminger chose him over the objections of 20th Century Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck to play the classy, but evil, radio columnist Waldo Lydecker, who is obsessed with Gene Tierney's character in the 1944 film noir Laura. His performance was showered with acclaim and made him an unlikely movie star. Two years later he had another highly-praised role as the elitist Elliott Templeton in The Razor's Edge (1946 film) (1946).

Webb received Academy Award nominations for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in 1945 for Laura and in 1947 for The Razor's Edge (1946 film).

Mark Stevens and Clifton Webb in The Dark Corner
Mark Stevens and Clifton Webb in The Dark Corner

He received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 1949 for Sitting Pretty, the first in a three-film series of comedic "Mr. Belvedere" features with Webb portraying the snide and omniscient central character. In the 50s and 60s TV producers unsuccessfully continued trying to revive "Mr. Belvedere" as a sitcom character—Reginald Gardiner was the star of the first TV series pilot in 1956, followed by Hans Conried in 1959 and Victor Buono in 1965. It might be purely coincidental but when it finally did become a popular ABC series that ran for five years starting in 1985, "Mr. Belvedere", now reborn as the all-knowing male housekeeper to Bob Uecker, was portrayed by another gay actor, Christopher Hewett.

In 1950s Cheaper by the Dozen, Webb and Myrna Loy played Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, real-life efficiency experts of the 1910s and 1920s, and the parents of twelve children.

Webb's subsequent movie roles include that of college professor Thornton Sayre, who in his younger days was known as silent film idol Bruce "Dreamboat" Blair. Now a distinguished academic who wants no part of his past fame, he sets out to stop the showing of his old films on television in 1952's Dreamboat. Also in 1952 he was John Philip Sousa in Stars and Stripes Forever. In 1953 he had his most dramatic role as the doomed husband of unfaithful Barbara Stanwyck in Titanic and in 1954 played the (fictional) novelist John Frederick Shadwell in Three Coins in the Fountain. In 1957's Boy on a Dolphin, second-billed to Alan Ladd, with third-billed Sophia Loren, he portrayed a wealthy sophisticate who enjoyed collecting illegally obtained Greek antiquities. In a nod to his own identity, the character's amusingly-chosen name was "Victor Parmalee".

Webb's elegant taste kept him on Hollywood's best-dressed lists for decades. Even though he exhibited comically foppish mannerisms in portraying Mr. Belvedere and other movie characters, his scrupulous private life kept him free of scandal. In more open modern times, comedian Bob Newhart once told Johnny Carson about being at a Hollywood party in the early 1960s, and being fairly startled when Webb asked him if he would like to dance.

In fact, the character of Lynn Belvedere is said to have been very close to his real life—he had an almost Oedipal-like extreme devotion to his mother Mabelle, who was his companion and who lived with him until her death at age ninety-one. Although he admitted to being gay, he was actually more asexual, given that the object of his love and tenderness was his mother (see [2]).

When Webb's mourning for his mother continued for a year with no signs of letting up, Noel Coward, in a fit of comic exasperation is said to have finally told Webb, tongue firmly-in-cheek, "It must be difficult to be orphaned at seventy, Clifton".

But the twilight had arrived for Webb's life and career. Inconsolable in his grief, he completed a final role as an initially sarcastic, but ultimately self-sacrificing Catholic priest in Leo McCarey's Satan Never Sleeps. The film, which was set in China, showed the brutality of the 1949 Communist takeover, but was actually filmed in England during the summer of 1961, using sets from the 1958 film, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, which had the same milieu.

Webb spent the remaining five years of his life as an ill recluse at his home in Beverly Hills, California, succumbing to a heart attack at the age of 76.

He is interred in crypt 2350, corridor G-6, Abbey of the Psalms in Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

Clifton Webb has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6840 Hollywood Boulevard.

[edit] Filmography

  • Polly with a Past (1920) (Metro Pictures) ... Harry Richardson (uncredited)
  • Let Not Man Put Asunder (1924) (Vitagraph) ... Major Bertie (uncredited)
  • New Toys (1925) (First National Pictures) ... Tom Lawrence
  • The Heart of a Siren (1925) (First National Pictures) ... Maxim
  • The Still Alarm (1930) comedy short of Broadway skit (Vitaphone) ... Business man sharing a room in burning hotel
  • Laura (1944) (20th Century Fox) ... Waldo Lydecker
  • The Dark Corner (1946) (20th Century Fox) ... Hardy Cathcart
  • The Razor's Edge (1946) (20th Century Fox) ... Elliott Templeton
  • Sitting Pretty (1948) (20th Century Fox) ... Lynn Belvedere
  • Mr. Belvedere Goes to College (1949) (20th Century Fox) ... Lynn Belvedere
  • Cheaper by the Dozen (1950) (20th Century Fox) ... Frank Bunker Gilbreth
  • For Heaven's Sake (1950) (20th Century Fox) ... Charles/Slim Charles
  • Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell (1951) (20th Century Fox) ... Lynn Belvedere
  • Elopement (1951) (20th Century Fox) ... Howard Osborne
  • Dreamboat (1952) (20th Century Fox) ... Prof. Thornton Sayre/Dreamboat/Bruce Blair
  • Stars and Stripes Forever (1952) (20th Century Fox) ... John Philip Sousa
  • Titanic (1953) (20th Century Fox) ... Richard Ward Sturges
  • Mister Scoutmaster (1953) (20th Century Fox) ... Robert Jordan
  • Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) (20th Century Fox) ... John Frederick Shadwell
  • Woman's World (1954) (20th Century Fox) ... Ernest Gifford
  • The Man Who Never Was (1956) (20th Century Fox) ... Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu
  • Boy on a Dolphin (1957) (20th Century Fox) ... Victor Parmalee
  • The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker (1959) (20th Century Fox) ... Mr. Horace Pennypacker
  • Holiday for Lovers (1959) (20th Century Fox) ... Robert Dean
  • Satan Never Sleeps (1962) (20th Century Fox) ... Father Bovard

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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