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Richard Widmark: New York
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Richard Widmark starred as New York homicide detective Daniel Madigan, a grim-faced loner who lived alone in a sparsely furnished one-room apartment. His cool indifference may well have put people off but in reality his rough exterior hid a genuinely soft centre.
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Widmark's first movie appearance was in 1947's Kiss of Death, as the giggling, sociopathic villain Tommy Udo. His most notorious scene in the film found Udo pushing a wheelchair-bound old woman (played by Mildred Dunnock) down a flight of stairs to her death. Kiss of Death was a commercial and critical success, and started Widmark's seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and won the Golden Globe Award for New Star Of The Year - Actor for his performance. Widmark's character was ... the inspiration for the song, "The Ballad of Tommy Udo", by the band Kaleidoscope.
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Widmark brings a hard, steely intelligence to the role of a psychiatrist in charge of a dysfunctional, high-toned mental clinic, in Vincente Minnelli’s grand all-star adaptation of the William Gibson novel. The action centers around the internal affairs (in both senses of the word) within the clinic, specifically the battle over who will select the new drapes. Will it be Widmark’s neglected wife (Gloria Grahame) or his repressed business-affairs director (Lillian Gish) or his talented young patient (John Kerr)? THE COBWEB is one of the most floridly entertaining melodramas of the ‘50s, featuring a terrific gallery of neurotic staff members and patients (Oscar Levant, Charles Boyer, Lauren Bacall and Susan Strasberg among them) dispersed across Minnelli’s gorgeous, dynamic Scope compositions.
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Acting was Widmark's ultimate goal - a dream he realized in 1938, when a friend offered him an audition for a New York radio soap opera. Widmark won the role and soon became a busy player in broadcasting and on the Broadway stage. But despite his rising career, and happy marriage to his college sweetheart, Jean Hazelwood, the 1940s were a time of great stress for the actor. Unable to serve in World War II due to a perforated eardrum, he spent three anxious years fearing for the life of his brother Donald, a bomber pilot who was injured and held as a prisoner-of-war by the Nazis. Although Donald Widmark was freed at the war's end, his failing health over the next decade would be the most agonizing tragedy in Richard's life.
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Widmark is Dr. Clinton Reed of the New Orleans Public Health Service. When he discovers that a murder victim is infected with pneumonic plague, he spends the next 48 hours helping the local police captain (Paul Douglas) track down the cold-blooded killers (including Jack Palance and, in one of the more colorful performances of that decade, Zero Mostel). The captain wants to bring them to justice and the doctor wants to inoculate them before the plague spreads through the city. Elia Kazan directed this mountingly tense, in-your-face thriller, beautifully shot on location by the great Joseph MacDonald.
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Devoted to the craft of acting but not to the perpetuation of a star image, Widmark maintained a low profile when not in the camera’s range. As a result, Widmark is not always given the credit he deserves as a great star and a fine actor. "I think a performer should do his work and then shut up," he told the New York Times in 1971. This Richard Widmark has done.
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