- Widmark, Richard
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▪ 2009American actorborn Dec. 26, 1914, Sunrise, Minn.died March 24, 2008, Roxbury, Conn.became an overnight Hollywood sensation following his film debut in Kiss of Death (1947), in which he portrayed a maniacal gangster who giggles as he ties up an older woman in a wheelchair and shoves her down a flight of stairs; the role earned him his only Academy Award nomination. Widmark subsequently won top billing in villainous roles in two thrillers, Road House (1948) and The Street with No Name (1948), but he assumed a nice-guy persona in Panic in the Streets (1950) as a doctor tracking down a pneumonic plague-infected man. Over his almost six-decade-long career, Widmark's roles ranged from sinister to heroic, but his characterizations were always tinged with a sense of cynicism. In other memorable roles he appeared as an ultraracist in No Way Out (1950), Jim Bowie in The Alamo (1960), a rescuer of Comanche prisoners in Two Rode Together (1961), an empathetic army captain in Cheyenne Autumn (1964), a ruthless warship commander in The Bedford Incident (1964), and a hard-boiled detective in Madigan (1968). He reprised the latter role in the television series Madigan (1972–73). Widmark earned an Emmy nomination in 1971 for his first TV role, in which he starred as a fictional U.S. president in Vanished, and in 1990 he was the recipient of the D.W. Griffith Career Achievement Award.
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Universalium. 2010.
