RIP Barry Nelson
Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 1:59 pm
From The New York Times:
April 14, 2007
Barry Nelson, Broadway and Film Actor, Dies at 86
By STUART LAVIETES
Barry Nelson, an actor who had a long career in film and television, starred in some of the more durable Broadway comedies of the 1950s and ’60s, and achieved a permanent place in the minds of trivia buffs as the first actor to portray James Bond, died last Saturday, his wife said yesterday. He was 86.
The cause was not immediately known. His wife, Nansi Nelson, said he died while traveling in Bucks County, Pa., The Associated Press reported.
Mr. Nelson became familiar to many moviegoers in his middle years, appearing in films like “Airport” and “The Shining.” But it was onstage more than half a century ago that he made perhaps a more enduring mark. Though not a matinee idol, he was blond and handsome and excelled in light romantic comedies, often playing the somewhat overmatched partner of an irrepressible leading lady.
He was a likable young architect who picked up a chirpy Barbara Bel Geddes in one of the most popular Broadway shows of the early 1950s, “The Moon Is Blue.”
He and Ms. Bel Geddes teamed again from 1961 through 1964, this time as a divorcing couple in Jean Kerr’s “Mary, Mary.” Soon after that show closed, he embarked on another long run opposite Lauren Bacall in “Cactus Flower.”
Mr. Nelson maintained his popularity in the 1970s, even as Broadway comedies began to take a darker view of relationships and marriage.
He starred with Deborah Kerr in Edward Albee’s “Seascape” and played a leading role in Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy, “The Norman Conquests.”
He continued to perform in pure entertainments as well, earning a Tony nomination in 1978 for best actor in a musical for his role in the Liza Minnelli showcase “The Act.”
Born Robert Haakon Nielsen in San Francisco on April 16, 1920, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1941. Spotted by a talent scout, he was soon signed to an MGM contract and appeared in studio films like “Shadow of the Thin Man” (1941) and “Johnny Eager” and “Dr. Kildare’s Victory,” both in 1942. He landed a lead role the same year in “A Yank on the Burma Road,” playing a cabdriver who winds up leading a convoy of trucks for the Chinese government.
Joining the Army and assigned to an entertainment unit, he made his Broadway debut in 1943, billed as Pvt. Barry Nelson, in Moss Hart’s wartime morale builder, “Winged Victory.” He also appeared in the 1944 film version of the play.
Mr. Nelson starred in a number of television series in the 1950s, including a cold war spy adventure, “The Hunter”; a domestic comedy, “My Favorite Husband”; and a Canadian fur-trapping saga, “Hudson’s Bay.”
But it was in an unremarkable one-hour television production in 1954 that he left a lasting mark, or asterisk. That was when he played Jimmy Bond, an Americanized version of Ian Fleming’s ladykilling international spy, in an adaptation of “Casino Royale” for the CBS anthology series “Climax!”
Sean Connery’s Bond followed Mr. Nelson’s eight years later, in “Dr. No.”
In 1964 he starred in one of the most memorable episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” “Stopover in a Quiet Town,” in which a stranded couple wake up in a typical small town to find that it is completely deserted and deathly quiet except for the sound of a child’s laughter.
He appeared in another creepy classic, Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film, “The Shining,” playing the manager of the haunted and virtually empty hotel.
Mr. Nelson’s movie credits also include the 1963 adaptation of “Mary, Mary,” with Debbie Reynolds in the Barbara Bel Geddes role, and the 1970 disaster film “Airport,” in which he played an airline captain. He was a familiar face to television viewers throughout the 1970s and 1980s, appearing in cameo roles on many popular shows, including “Cannon,” “Taxi,” “Dallas” and “The Love Boat.”
Mr. Nelson’s first marriage, to the actress Teresa Celli, ended in divorce in 1951. He and his wife, Nansi, were married in 1992. He had no children from either marriage.
