Word: kirklanders
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...Though Kirkland went Hollywood, Hollywood didn?t go him. Somehow, this fine-featured fellow with the light voice, wavy blond hair and earnest manner didn?t strike sparks with the camera. Within three years he was back on Broadway in 1933, as a member of the radical Group Theatre...
...bare facts: Phyllis Adams Kirkland Jenkins was born into privilege on the East Side of Manhattan in 1923; came of age in a dazzling period for New York society; trod the boards as a young actress; reported on the Nuremberg trials of top Nazis; helped pioneer the daytime talk show; married a handsome actor and then an even handsomer designer of sets for stage and screen; gave unstintingly to Amnesty International and other worthy charities; left behind a loving, lovely family and a host of bereft friends...
...strange byproduct of this kind of death is learning how much you didn?t know about your friend. Phyllis occasionally referred in passing to her first husband, the actor Alexander Kirkland. His name and work were unfamiliar to me; but a glance at his career on IMDb and IBDb (Internet Broadway Database) opens a host of other connections in Phyllis? life, and raises a dozen questions that, alas, she can?t answer...
...fine features of a leading man, and that?s what he was. He made his Broadway debut in December 1925, when Phyllis was a year old. A few years later, when the movies became the talkies, Kirkland was among the hundreds of stage actors lured west. He had a contract at Fox (?The Devil?s Lottery,? ?Charlie Chan?s Chance? and the first talkie version of ?Black Beauty?), but his two notable films were made at Paramount - where he co-starred with Tallulah Bankhead in George Cukor?s first solo directorial feature, ?Tarnished Lady? - and MGM, where he got third...
...patrician stage manner might seem out of place among all those urban, lumpen actors with revolutionary dreams - Luther and Stella Adler, Lee J. Cobb, Elia Kazan, Bobby Lewis, Clifford Odets, Jules (later John) Garfield - but the Group needed a leading-man figure, and Kirkland filled the bill. In ?Men in White,? he played the doctor role that Gable would take in the MGM film adaptation the following year. He appeared in Odets? ?Till the Day I Die? and in the title role of ?Case of Clyde Griffiths,? an adaptation of ?An American Tragedy? staged by Lee Strasberg. After leaving...