Early Casualties

[Part of the discussion on "early casualties" at The Blackboard.]

Like so many of his generation, Frank Lovejoy died quite young by our standards, of a heart attack at age 50. All that post-war smoking was a killer! And it (along with heavy drinking in some cases) aged the actors very fast. Look at William Holden in his two "Oriental romances," Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955) and The World of Suzie Wong (1960). In the five years between ages 36 and 41, he ages a ton. I think the late 30s is when you see the change in a lot of these actors.

This has become part of my mind-set in watching all post-war films: these people (and their real-life counterparts) have so little time, really. It's not like now, where a guy in his mid-30s can look forward to another five or six decades. It makes those post-war films seem uniformly melancholy to me at a certain level.

[I picked up the theme a few days later with respect to David Janssen.]

When I spoke in my recent post on Frank Lovejoy about the hard smokin', drinkin', and livin' that did in postwar males, I might have put forward David Janssen as my poster boy. The poor guy died of a heart attack at 48. That seems such a waste. He was a ferociously busy actor, of course, as a glance at his exhausting IMDB credits will prove; that probably didn't help his general health. Guys in those days lived as if there was no tomorrow, and there wasn't.

[I added a bit more on William Holden on his birthday, April 17.]

Tastes will vary, of course, but I can't think of any actor in his prime who was handsomer than Bill Holden. And he had acting chops, and the awards recognition to prove it: an Academy Award and two other nominations. Like Burt Lancaster and some others, he took his career seriously and chose his roles carefully. I'm a big fan.

[As Blackboarders including myself kept adding names to the necrology, I made an additional observation.]

I am 100% convinced that the early mortality rate for male directors of this era is much, much lower than that for male actors. Three possible partial explanations:

(a) Being in front of the camera is more stressful over the long haul than being behind it.

(b) Directors are more in control than actors; people who feel in control of their lives live longer.

(c) The actors led more "fast lane" type lifestyles (although if that didn't kill Robert Mitchum, it shouldn't have killed anyone).

I don't know if any of these explanations are true. I'm partial to (b), though.

UPDATE (6/20/2009): I'm interested enough in David Janssen that I read his ex-wife Ellie Janssen's memoir David Janssen: My Fugitive. I can't say as it was very edifying, although it gives some sense of the life of a Hollywood wife in the Sixties. Not pretty. I'm reminded of Steve Martin's memorable quip when he hosted the 2001 Oscars -- "It's not easy to keep a marriage together in Hollywood because, well, we sleep with so many people."