Gig Young

Gig Young, murder-suicide, 1978. The victim was his fifth wife; Elizabeth Montgomery had been his third. She divorced him for his alcoholism, which also played havoc with his career; he got fired a lot.

Pauline Kael once described Young as "the most naked of actors - an actor with nowhere to hide" (I'm quoting from memory). It was that quality of Young's that helped make the exquisite "Walking Distance" one of the greatest of all Twilight Zone episodes,

and that won him his Oscar for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?.

 
Young was, apparently, really disappointed in his post-Oscar career, but it is hard to understand what he could have expected. He was 56 when he won the award in 1970. He had always been a supporting actor on the big screen – and an honored one; his Oscar nomination for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? was his third in the Supporting Actor category, after Come Fill the Cup (1951) and Teacher’s Pet (1958). His leads came in theater (There’s a Girl in My Soup was a Broadway hit in 1967-68) and on television; in fact, the year after his Oscar, he was Emmy-nominated as a lead actor in the television movie The Neon Ceiling, with Lee Grant. A lot of actors would have killed for his career, but he was not satisfied.

Like many alcoholics, Young had a nasty streak, that manifested itself long before his life’s shocking finale. One story will suffice. At his time of his divorce from Montgomery, his soon-to-be-fourth wife, Elaine Williams, was pregnant with what would be Young’s only child, Jennifer. Three years later, in the middle of Young’s and Williams’s predictable divorce, he denied paternity of his daughter in order to avoid having to pay child support. He eventually lost that case, but made sure to stick it to his child by leaving her a measly $10 in his will. Shades of Joan Crawford.

Some Young credits that might be worth investigating:

A television movie, Companions in Nightmare (1968), co-starring Anne Baxter and directed by Norman Lloyd. No IMDB comments.  

A Kraft Suspense Theatre episode from 1963, "The End of the World, Baby," directed by the talented Irvin Kershner and co-starring Nina Foch and Peter Lorre. No IMDB comments.

A TV remake of The Spiral Staircase starring Young, then-wife Liz Montgomery, and Lillian Gish, the opening production in NBC's Theatre '62 series (1961-1962). No IMDB comments.   

This Theatre '62 series also included live dramatizations of Intermezzo (Ingrid Thulin, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Teresa Wright - wow!), Notorious (Joseph Cotten, George Grizzard, Barbara Rush, Cathleen Nesbitt), The Farmer's Daughter (Lee Remick, Peter Lawford, Charles Bickford, Murray Hamilton), Spellbound (Hugh O'Brian, Maureen O'Hara, Oscar Homolka), The Paradine Case (Richard Basehart, Viveca Lindfors, Boris Karloff), and Rebecca (James Mason, Joan Hackett, Nina Foch, Lloyd Bochner). The Paley Center for Media has a black-and-white copy of the last one (the original broadcast was in color).