Orson Bean
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Orson Bean (born July 22, 1928) is an American film, television, and stage actor, as well as an author. He is known for his numerous appearances on a variety of game shows in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
Born Dallas Frederick Burroughs in Burlington, Vermont), he was a second cousin to Calvin Coolidge, who was President of the United States at the time of his birth [1]. He attended Cambridge High School and Boston Latin School.
Bean is perhaps best known as a long-time panelist on the television game show To Tell the Truth, which provided a fitting forum for his affable wit. On a 1965 episode, the panel was to guess which of three contestants was the real Harvard University Chief of Police, George Burroughs, who was Bean's father, and the happily stunned panelist disqualified himself from the questioning.
Bean made frequent guest appearances on The Tonight Show (with both Jack Paar and Johnny Carson). He was a regular on both Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and its spin-off, Forever Fernwood, and also played storekeeper Loren Bray on the television series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman throughout its five-year run on CBS in the 1990s. He played John Goodman's homophobic father on the short-lived sitcom Normal, Ohio. On Broadway, he was the star of the original cast of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1955), and was featured in Subways Are For Sleeping (1961), for which he received a Tony Award nomination as Best Featured Actor in a Musical, and Never Too Late (1962). He also starred opposite Melina Mercouri in Illya Darling, the 1967 musical adaptation of the film Never on Sunday.
Two of his significant credits were playing the main characters Bilbo and Frodo Baggins in the 1977 and 1980 Rankin/Bass animated adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, and The Return of the King.
Bean was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios in the 1950s [2].
Bean has been married three times: to Jacqueline De Sibour (1956 - 1962); to Caroline Maxwell (1965 - 1981); and to actress Alley Mills (who is twenty-three years his junior) since 1993.
[edit] Additional filmography
[edit] Books
- Me and the Orgone (1971) ISBN 0-9679670-1-5
- Too Much Is Not Enough (1988) ISBN 0-8184-0465-5
- 25 Ways to Cook a Mouse for the Gourmet Cat (1994) ISBN 1-55972-199-5
[edit] External links
- Orson Bean at the Internet Movie Database
- Orson Bean at the Notable Names Database
