Oliver Wendell Douglas

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Oliver Wendell Douglas was the major character in the 1960s CBS situation comedy Green Acres. The character's name was inspired by famed Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and possibly also by then-Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas.

Portrayed by Hollywood veteran Eddie Albert, Oliver Wendell Douglas was a New York City attorney who had long harbored a dream of moving to the Midwest and operating a farm rather than practicing law. His wife, Lisa, a glamorous Hungarian immigrant (who was played by Eva Gabor, a glamorous Hungarian immigrant), had absolutely no desire to leave sophisticated New York City for a backward, rural area.

However, once they actually arrived at their newly-purchased farm (a run-down nightmare whose farmhouse was little more than a dilapidated shack), it was Lisa, not Oliver, who immediately fit in to Hooterville and its weird collection of zany characters. Oliver had a high opinion of farmers in theory; he often made a speech in which he referred to "crops shooting up out of the ground" and other platitudes about rural life, which on the program was invariably accompanied by a background of patriotic music; other characters frequently searched for the source of the music. Oliver was usually presented in the light of being the only sane character in an insane world; however, he, too, had his quirks, such as driving his tractor wearing the same three-piece suits that he had formerly worn to practice law and addressing nearly every other person in Hooterville as Mr. or Mrs., though the Hootervillians referred to each other by first names (although they apparently reciprocated by continuing to refer to him as "Mr. Douglas").

Douglas also was either too blinded by pride or too stubborn to admit that he was a totally incompetent failure as a farmer. He did not fit in to a place where everyone took for granted that a "talking" pig, Arnold Ziffel, was his owners' "son", or where one of the two contractor "brothers" constantly remodelling his house was a woman, and somehow always lost out to local confidence man Mr. Haney, from whom he had bought the farm in the first place.

Oliver's denial led him to labor on in vain, year after year, when it was obvious to everyone else that he would be far happier and better adjusted back in his New York law practice, while his wife Lisa, a very reluctant rural dweller, in fact fit right in to her new surroundings and was almost immediately accepted and befriended by nearly everyone.

In a way, Albert was well-suited to his role. He was long active in a series of environmental and agricultural concerns including a project to involve inner-city children in gardening, and was one of the organizers of the original Earth Day, held annually on his birthday, April 22. Additionally, he was one of very few Hollywood actors to grow much of his own food, in a garden on his former Beverly Hills estate, and served as an advocate for organic practices. (Apparently he was far more successful in his real-life efforts to raise food than his character ever was.)