Aug 2, 1924

Manhattan, New York, USA

Carroll O'Connor was, like the best working actors, a man of many faces -- in his
50-year acting career, he played everything from comically high-strung army
generals to fed-up working-class New Yorkers, and even worked in one portrayal of
an eloquent and slightly befuddled alien visitor from Mars. Most viewers will
remember him best for his portrayal of the sometimes belligerent, bigoted Archie
Bunker on the television series All in the Family, but that role only scratched the
surface of ... ... (read more...) O'Connor's talent. Born in the Bronx, NY, to an upper-middle-class Irish
family, his father was a well-connected attorney and his mother was a school
teacher. He was an intelligent boy but an indifferent student, his only real
interest being sports. The family lived well, in the Forest Hills section of
Queens, until O'Connor's father ran afoul of the law and was convicted of fraud.
Despite this setback in the family's well-being, O'Connor managed to attend college
and considered a career as a sportswriter, but those aspirations were interrupted
by the outbreak of World War II. Rejected by the United States Navy, he enrolled
instead in the Merchant Marine Academy, but he later abandoned that pursuit,
instead becoming a merchant seaman. After the war, O'Connor considered journalism
as a career, but a trip to Dublin in 1950 changed the course of his life, as he
discovered the acting profession. While attending college in Dublin, he began
appearing in productions of the Gate Theater and also at the Edinburgh Festival,
where he played Shakespearean roles. Returning to New York in 1954, he and his wife
worked as substitute schoolteachers while he looked for acting work, which he
found, after a long dry spell in which he despaired of ever getting a break, in
Burgess Meredith's production of James Joyce's +Ulysses. O'Connor got a role in
which he received favorable notice from the critics, and that, in turn, led to his
breakthrough part, as a bullying, greedy studio boss in an off-Broadway production
of +The Big Knife. O'Connor jumped next to television, at the very tail-end of the
era of live TV drama in New York. Beginning in 1960 with his portrayal of the
prosecutor in the Armstrong Circle Theater production of The Sacco-Vanzetti Story,
he established himself on the small screen as a good, reliable character actor, who
was able to melt into any role with which he was presented. Over the next decade,
O'Connor worked in everything from Westerns to science fiction. He played taciturn
landowners, likable aliens, enemy agents (on The Man From U.N.C.L.E., in "The Green
Opal Affair"), and other character roles with equal aplomb. He also appeared in
several unsold television pilots during the 1960s, including The Insider with David
Janssen and Luxury Liner, starring Rory Calhoun, playing character roles, and did a
pilot of his own, Walk in the Night, in which he co-starred with Andrew Duggan.
O'Connor's movie career followed quickly from his television debut, starting with
appearances in three dramatic films (most notably Lonely Are the Brave) in 1961. He
was one of many actors who managed to get "lost" in the sprawling 20th Century Fox
production of Cleopatra, but he fared better two years later in Otto Preminger's
epic-length World War II drama In Harm's Way. O'Connor, playing Commander Burke,
was very visible in his handful of scenes with John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, and
Preminger thought enough of the actor to mention him by name along with the other
stars in the film's trailer. He had major supporting roles, serious and comedic,
respectively, in such high-profile movies as Hawaii and What Did You Do in the War,
Daddy?, of which the latter proved critical to his subsequent career.
O'Connor had been in demand for television roles since the early '60s. In an episode
of The Outer Limits, he revealed his flexibility by playing a somewhat befuddled
alien investigator from Mars, masquerading as a pawnshop owner in a seedy section of
New York, and jumping from a slightly affected, carefully pronounced diction in one
line to a working-class dialect and manner in the same shot (for benefit of a human
onlooker in the scene). He had also given a very warm, memorable, and touching
performance in "Long Live the King," an episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,
and producer Irwin Allen had wanted O'Connor for the role of Dr. Smith on Lost in
Space early in the character's conception, when the Smith figure was thoroughly
villainous. Although he didn't get the part of Dr. Smith, O'Connor later appeared in
"The Lost Patrol" episode of Allen's science fiction series The Time Tunnel. He had
also been up for the role of the Skipper in Sherwood Schwartz's series Gilligan's
Island, a role that was finally won by Alan Hale Jr. At the end of the 1960s, while
O'Connor was busying himself in movies ranging from Westerns to crime films and
mysteries, including Warning Shot, Waterhole No. 3, Marlowe, and For Love of Ivy,
and distinguishing himself in all of them, CBS began preparing a television series
called Those Were the Days. Adapted from a British series, it dealt life from the
point-of-view of Archie Bunker, a fed-up, bigoted working-class resident of New
York's outer borough of Queens. The network had tried for a big name, approaching
Mickey Rooney to play the part, but he turned it down, and then co-producer Bud
Yorkin remembered O'Connor's blustery comic performance as General Bolt in What Did
You Do in the War, Daddy? O'Connor was offered the role and accepted, but had little
confidence in the series' prospects; one condition on which he agreed to do the
pilot was that the network had to provide him with transportation back to Rome,
where he was making his home at the time. He was as busy as ever with movie work,
including his portrayal of a memorably boisterous and comical general in Kelly's
Heroes, which was shot in Europe in 1970, and the series -- now called All in the
Family -- didn't seem a likely or essential prospect for success.
Within weeks of All in the Family's premiere in January of 1971, however, O'Connor
had become one of the most recognizable and popular leading men on television.
O'Connor had never played more than major supporting roles in movies, so there were
no feature films to license starring the new pop culture hero; but CBS did pull Walk
in the Night, the unsold pilot from three years earlier, starring O'Connor as a
detective in a race against time to save a man's life, and aired it with the kind of
fanfare normally reserved for major feature films. From 1971 on, O'Connor never
looked back: He got star billing the next year in the network television production
Of Thee I Sing (1972), and got his first chance to star in a feature film in Law and
Disorder, in 1974. O'Connor would play nothing but leads from then on, and command a
leading man's salary, a matter that led to a contractual dispute in 1974 that
resulted in the actor absenting himself from All in the Family for a series of shows
before it was resolved. From then on, entire productions, such as the TV-movie
adaptation of The Last Hurrah (1977), would be built around him. He also returned to
the theater periodically with far less success, starring in and directing a handful
of theatrical productions that seldom got good notices or lingered long on-stage.
O'Connor earned four Emmy awards as Archie Bunker, a recognition of the convincing
mixture of warmth and anger that he brought to the character, and such was his
popularity in the role, that he was able to parlay it into a spin-off series for
four seasons called Archie Bunker's Place. It seemed for a time in the 1980s that
O'Connor would be forever locked into the role, until 1987 when he got the part of
laconic small-town Southern police chief Bill Gillespie in the television series In
the Heat of the Night. Taking over a part originated on screen by Rod Steiger,
O'Connor rebuilt the character from the ground up, making Gillespie a strong-willed,
yet soft-spoken, flawed, sometimes crude, even occasionally bigoted man who was
learning to be better. O'Connor's Gillespie was a lot more than Archie Bunker with a
Mississippi drawl, as a man who was learning to be as reflective as he really was
tough. O'Connor's Gillespie freely admitted to being imperfect, especially in his
past, and in one episode confronted his own guilt, dating from his days as a patrol
officer, in helping to bury the investigation of the bombing of a synogogue during
the 1960s; by the end of the series' run, Gillespie, older and wiser, was romancing
a black member of the Sparta, MS, town council, played by Denise Nicholas. His work
in the series earned O'Connor an additional Emmy, and he eventually took over
control of the production, transforming In the Heat of the Night from a routine cop
show into one of the better dramatic series of its era, with police work only
incidental to its content (and hardly a car chase in sight), in a run lasting
through 1994. He had heart by-pass surgery early in the program's run, but that
didn't take nearly as much out of O'Connor as the suicide, in 1995, of his son,
Hugh, who had co-starred on In the Heat of the Night. Long troubled by drug use, the
younger O'Connor's decision to kill himself turned Carroll O'Connor into a crusader
for the first time in his public career against drug abuse and, even more so,
against drug dealers. He had spent much of the last five years as an anti-drug
activist, appealing to other parents, in particular, to intervene in their
children's lives if necessary.
Past away 21 June 2001, Culver City, California, USA. (heart attack brought on by
complications from diabetes)