Word: burgesses
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Ever since I heard the "Rocky" rumor, I've been dying to meet Tommy Rawson. The story is probably apocryphal, but the gossip is that the 88-year-old Rawson, Harvard's boxing coach and resident sports legend, was the basis for Mickey, the character immortalized by Burgess Meredith in the 1976 Academy Award winning film...
...DIED. BURGESS MEREDITH, 89, chameleon-like actor who performed the highbrow and lowbrow with equal enthusiasm and success; in Malibu, Calif. His Mio in Winterset (1936) simmered with earnest indignation; his Penguin in TV's Batman was gloriously over the top. He played the gentle George in Of Mice and Men, the careworn coach in Rocky and even did a gravelly voice-over for Skippy peanut butter. Meredith defended his quirky choices, saying, "I'm a man moved by the rhythms of his time, so I'll just take amusement at being a paradox...
...tribute to a man, go find something he made. In his 89 years, Burgess Meredith directed two films: The Yin and Yang of Mr. Go was not so good; The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949) was considerably better, thanks to Charles Laughton, Franchot Tone, and Meredith's own turn as a hapless myopic accused of double murder. Laughton is Inspector Maigret, the portliest policeman since Orson in Touch of Evil, and Tone is Radek, his "Candide"-quoting psychopathic prey. From behind the camera (reportedly with some help from Laughton), Meredith delivers a lean, cerebral mystery with plenty...
...Burgess Meredith was an actor. It all began with his doomed hero in Winterset, a reprisal of the stage role that launched his career. Then on to 1939's Of Mice and Men, wherein Meredith, opposite the immortal Lon Chaney Jr., fields a lot of questions about rabbits. Finish with the languorous, creepy Hollywood pic The Day of the Locust (1975), with Meredith, Karen Black and Donald Sutherland as a fellow actually named Homer Simpson. It earned Meredith his first Best Supporting Actor nomination (they would stiff him twice...
Today, rewinding to him in Of Mice and Men (1939) alongside Lon Chaney Jr. or Second Chorus (1940) with Fred Astaire is unsettling; the resemblance is evident, yet it seems somehow not to be him. But that other Burgess Meredith was everything else, from a Shakespearean actor to the quacking Penguin in TV's Batman. He directed himself and Charles Laughton in The Man on the Eiffel Tower, co-produced On Our Merry Way with Henry Fonda and James Stewart, and made three Twilight Zone episodes in 1959. He was married four times, served in the Air Force, and crusaded...