The Times (16/Dec/1964) - Obituary: Mr William Bendix
(c) The Times (16/Dec/1964)
MR. WILLIAM BENDIX
Mr. William Bendix, for many years among the most familiar of Hollywood's character actors, died in hospital on Monday at the age of 58, as briefly reported in later editions of The Times yesterday.
He was born in New York on January 14, 1906, and had initially no idea of becoming an actor, his ambitions centring rather on baseball. For a while he was a batboy with the New York Giants, and later achieved a modest notability in minor league baseball. In his thirties he decided to give up his sporting career and settle down as a tradesman, so he became a grocer, and only by chance and persuasion found himself a year or two later on the stage. After playing a variety of small roles on and otf Broadway he achieved in 1939 a major success in William Saroyan's play The Time of Your Life and offers from Hollywood began to come in. After completing the run of The Time of Your Life he decided to try his luck in films, and in 19,42 made his first Brooklyn Orchid.
This proved to be the beginning of a fruitful Hollywood career. From the outset his broken nose, gravelly voice and sportsman's physique made him a natural for tough roles, though as a rule good natured with it. His best remembered films from this period arc mostly hard-hitting thrillers like The Glass Key and The Blue Dahlia but he also appeared in films as varied as George Stevens's sophisticated comedy Woman of the Year and Alfred Hitchcock's allegorical melodrama Lifeboat. His most famous part of all, though, was the title role in the film version of O'Neill's The Hairy Ape, which, in spite of many deficiencies in the adaptation, he played with great force and subtlety, matching almost perfectly O'Neill's original requirements for the role.
In recent years he played character roles in many films — thrillers, Westerns, comedies, costume pieces. Among the best of them were Josef von Sternberg's Macao and William Wyler's Detective Story, but most of the lesser ones, such as Girl in Every Port, which teamed him with Groucho Marx, and Life of Riley, a light family comedy, were nevertheless popular successes — the latter so much so that William Bendix later played for several seasons in a television series based on its central character.
