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Van Heflin: Johnny Eager
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Van Heflin came to M-G-M after impressing executives with his stage performance alongside Katharine Hepburn in Philip Barry's 1939 play The Philadelphia Story in a role Barry reputedly wrote for Heflin. After a year at the Yale School of Drama, Heflin would go on to win a Best Supporting Actor Oscar® the same year of The Feminine Touch's release, playing an alcoholic intellectual in Johnny Eager (1942). Van Heflin was pragmatic about his abilities as a Hollywood leading man during his MGM run from 1941-1949. "I just don't have the looks and if I don't do a good acting job I look terrible," he is quoted as saying in The MGM Stock Company: The Golden Era by James Robert Parish and Ronald L. Bowers. Always drawn back to the stage, Heflin appeared in Arthur Miller's controversial A View from the Bridge, a role which required him to kiss another man on the lips.
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Heflin worked intermittently as a seaman and an actor before Katharine Hepburn saw him on Broadway and had him cast as the father of her illegitimate child in the film A Woman Rebels (1936). He did not have much further success in Hollywood... and returned to Broadway, where he costarred again with Hepburn in the 1939 hit The Philadelphia Story. He had the reporter role, for which Jimmy Stewart earned an Oscar in the 1940 film version. Heflin's stage success brought him a contract with MGM, and he thereafter appeared regularly in films until his death, except for a brief stint in the army. He was a dependable leading man but never quite achieved stardom and was often cast as the heroine's lover or the hero's pal, as in Johnny Eager, where he played the alcoholic friend of the gangster title character (played by Robert Taylor).
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Heflin began his acting career on Broadway in the early 1930s before being signed to a contract by RKO Studios. He made his film debut in A Woman Rebels (1936). He was signed by MGM Studios, and was initially cast in supporting roles in films such as Santa Fe Trail (1940), and Johnny Eager (1942), winning an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the latter performance.
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