Word: udo
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...many, his visage evoked the cackling, maniacal villain Tommy Udo pushing an old woman tied to a wheelchair downstairs, in the 1947 film Kiss of Death. But offscreen, Richard Widmark played the true gentleman. Over his career, the chiseled, unconventionally handsome actor portrayed a vast array of characters--from frontiersman Jim Bowie in The Alamo to the head of a psychiatric institution in Cobweb to the corruptible boxing promoter Harry Fabian, one of his most memorable roles, in Jules Dassin's Night and the City...
...gentleman was a goon. Richard Widmark, whose death on Monday was announced by his wife Susan Blanchard, had one of the grisliest, most electrifying debuts in movie history. In the 1947 Kiss of Death, he played the psychopathic Tommy Udo, maniacally giggling as he pushed a wheelchair-bound old lady down the cellar stairs to her death. This sort of violence, explosive and explicit, was startling in early postwar films, as were the insane delight glinting in the killer's eye, the sexual thrill in his catarrhal voice. But that was just acting - glorious acting - for Widmark was a well...
...Minn., he got the theater bug at Illinois' Lake Forest College and stayed on to teach acting. From 1943 to 1946 he appeared in five Broadway plays, none lasting as long as four months, before coming to Hollywood. Director Henry Hathaway thought the actor too clean-cut to play Udo, but Darryl Zanuck, the boss of 20th Century-Fox, detected psychological turbulence beneath Widmark's stark, chiseled features, and the role was his, for life. It earned him the sobriquet "the face of film noir" and his only Oscar nomination...
...Rode Together and as Jim Bowie in John Wayne's epic The Alamo. But, again proving his talent too restless to be confined to one character type, or one genre, Widmark played the idiot Dauphin in Otto Preminger's Saint Joan - a kind of sacred-fool version of Tommy Udo...
...cannot believe you did not choose Richard Widmark's Tommy Udo in the 1947 movie Kiss of Death. When he laughed after pushing that wheelchair-bound lady down the stairs, he gave new meaning to the word evil. Joan Donnelly, Flanders, New Jersey...