Actor Harry Morgan, best known for his roles as officer Bill Gannon in the TV series Dragnet and Colonel Sherman Potter on M*A*S*H, died today at his home in Los Angeles. There are 159 acting credits listed in Morgan's IMDb entry. He began acting on stage in 1937 and tackled a wide variety of roles over the next half-century.
Harry Morgan was 96. Link -via Metafilter
Mr. Morgan attracted attention almost immediately. In “The Ox-Bow Incident” (1943), which starred Henry Fonda, he was praised for his portrayal of a drifter caught up in a lynching in a Western town. Reviewing “A Bell for Adano” (1945), based on John Hersey’s novel about the Army in a liberated Italian town, Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times that Mr. Morgan was “crude and amusing as the captain of M.P.’s.”
He went on to appear in “All My Sons” (1948), based on the Arthur Miller play, with Edward G. Robinson and Burt Lancaster; “The Big Clock” (1948), in which he played a silent, menacing bodyguard to Charles Laughton; “Yellow Sky” (1949), with Gregory Peck and Anne Baxter; and the critically praised western “High Noon” (1952), with Gary Cooper. Among his other notable films were “The Teahouse of the August Moon” (1956), with Marlon Brando and Glenn Ford, and “Inherit the Wind” (1960), with Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, in which he played a small-town Tennessee judge hearing arguments about evolution in the fictionalized version of the Scopes “monkey trial.” In “How the West Was Won” (1962), he played Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.
After a personable performance as Glenn Miller’s pianist, Chummy MacGregor, in “The Glenn Miller Story” (1954), starring James Stewart, he often played softer characters as well as his trademark hard-bitten tough guys. There were eventually a number of comedies on his résumé, among them “John Goldfarb, Please Come Home” (1965), with Shirley MacLaine and Peter Ustinov; “The Flim-Flam Man” (1967), with George C. Scott; “Support Your Local Sheriff!” (1969), with James Garner and Walter Brennan; and “The Apple Dumpling Gang” (1975), a Disney movie with Tim Conway and Don Knotts.
Harry Morgan was 96. Link -via Metafilter
Comments (11)
Is the world more intolerant to each other, or are we just connected more for debate to become more heated and seen by everyone else? Nothing has changed, it's just that awareness has increased greatly.
And I don't think we're dumbed down, because for those with inquisitive minds, google and wikipedia are heaven.
I think I can confidently say that this generation isn't afraid of writing. I once had an old employer write me a letter of recommendation. He was so reluctant and never did it, so I just had him sign the bottom of a paper and I wrote the letter myself. The same idea with my parents, too. I don't think older generations are as confident as we are (this does not apply to you, Miss Cellania ;D )
Everybody wants to talk - nobody wants to READ.
This is the crunch. Literacy levels are declining in my country, Canada. About half of Canucks can't manage a simple magazine article or novel, despite their spewing of ever greater volumes of broken english on the internet.
So, in this broader respect, i guess it is, at best, a wash, not a net gain.
I'll have to disagree with this to a large extent. Most people who add their voices to the Internet are writing for themselves, not for others, otherwise they would make more of an effort to be coherent. Too much anymore, the responsibility of understanding is shifted to the reader, rather than remaining with the writer.
However, I believe Lynn has a good point in that the stupid didn't have as great a voice before the popularization of the Internet. And they seem to be the ones more apt to open their mouths without thought.
Still, if we're referring to literacy in the sense of reading comprehension, then yes, I wholeheartedly believe we are currently in a state of decline. I do, however, blame this on the schools, not the Internet.
Just saying.