Today's featured actor figures heavily in one of the cinema's most enduring sci-fi movies, yet fell short of significant stardom. Still, he has established a career on TV, in films and on stage that is close to sixty years long. Keir Dullea isn't exactly a household name, but has worked with quite a few folks who are (or were.) Glibly written off upon first meeting by famed playwright Noel Coward who uttered the famous phrase, "Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow!," he's actually still active today, 52 years after the remark was made.
Dullea was born on May 30th, 1936 in Cleveland, Ohio, though he was actually raised in New York City. His parents owned and operated a bookstore, lending an intellectual quality to their son which would come through in many of the projects he later took on as an actor. (His mother read Shakespeare to him as "bedtime stories!") Initially attending two universities (Rutgers and San Francisco State), he ultimately sought (and found) work on stage and was employed therein by age twenty.
After a number of theatre credits, Dullea made his TV debut in 1960 with two roles. One was playing the son of tyrannical Everett Sloane in the pilot episode of the popular TV series
Route 66. The other was in a television production of
Mrs. Miniver, which starred
Maureen O'Hara. Dullea appeared, with his Aryan looks used to their best advantage, as the German pilot who crash lands in O'Hara's yard and must be dealt with by the British housewife.
Things picked up swiftly in 1961 when he took part in the Biblical TV-movie
Give Us Barabbas! with James Daly and Kim Hunter, appeared in several other television guest parts and then won a key role in his first big-screen movie,
The Hoodlum Priest, starring Don Murray. In it, he plays a young tough in a low-income neighborhood who is sentenced to die in the gas chamber while Murray, as the title character, tries to intervene on his behalf. Dullea was noted for his gut-wrenching portrayal of a man being executed, still a new experience to witness so graphically on-screen in 1961.
During the filming of
Priest in 1960, Dullea married for the first time to Broadway actress Margo Bennett. The two maintained a (often long-distance, thanks to her work in NYC and his in Los Angeles) marriage until 1968 when they divorced. (She then began a relationship with and later wed Malcolm McDowell until he left her for Mary Steenburgen.)
1962 was a splashy year for Dullea as he starred (alongside newcomer Janet Margolin) in
David and Lisa, a psycho- logical drama in which he, as a young man petrified of being touched, is sent to a sanitarium. There he meets Margolin, a detached young girl who only speaks in rhymes. They form a tentative bond, each of them slowly breaking through to the other.
The movie was rather ground- breaking in its approach to mental health and generated a fair amount of interest and publicity. It was becoming clear that Dullea was capable of generating intense emotion on screen and providing a wide array of characterizations. For his work on
David and Lisa, he won awards including a Golden Globe as Most Promising Newcomer-Male. (A similar award from BAFTA yielded a nomination, but James Fox won it for
The Servant.)
Odd, considering the impact his first leading role made, he worked exclusively (albeit busily) in television for the next year. This was the age of the anthology show and he popped up in several of them along with guest roles on
Bonanza,
Naked City and
Going My Way. In 1964, he wound up in the highly-obscure Italian film
Le ore nude, aka-"The Naked Hours," opposite Rosanna Podesta. In his career, Dullea often found himself doing scenes either bathing, showering or languidly lying in bed with a costar.
That same year brought more traditional cinematic fare as well such as
Mail Order Bride, all about aged westerner Buddy Ebsen keeping a promise to his deceased friend in taming the pal's wild son (Dullea.) The answer Ebsen comes up with is to mate him to the title character, played by Lois Nettleton. The old-fashioned, outdoorsy frolic (renamed in some cases "West of Montana") didn't appear to help or hurt Dullea's career.
A more significant part came with the leading role in
The Thin Red Line, opposite Jack Warden. The well-regarded James Jones war novel had its characters condensed to focus more on the relationship between these two men instead of a more ensemble feel to the story (as the 1998 remake leaned more toward.)
In 1965, Dullea worked for director Otto Preminger on the moody mystery
Bunny Lake is Missing. Starring Laurence Olivier as a police inspector, the story dealt with young mother Carol Lynley fretting over her daughter (the Bunny Lake of the title), who may or may not even exist!
Lynley's brother is played by Dullea and their relationship appears to have hints of incest- uousness to it. (It's nearly a half hour before we discover that Lynley and Dullea aren't husband and wife! Even Olivier seems to think so at first.) The movie features memorable Saul Bass titles in which pieces of black paper are torn away to reveal the credits.
This was the instance in which Noel Coward (who portrays a lascivious landlord) uttered, "Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow" to our featured actor, apparently not feeling it - or perhaps just playing with his head. Coward is but one of a few interesting supporting players in the piece including Martita Hunt, Finlay Currie, Clive Revill, Adrienne Corri and Anna Massey.
Next for Dullea was the role in which I was first introduced to him. As a kid of about ten or so, I came into the living room and saw my mother curled up on the couch watching a "woman's picture" on TV. She was utterly captivated and before long I, too, was drawn into the circuitous story line. The movie was 1966's
Madame X, starring Lana Turner as a put-upon heroine who undergoes a roller coaster experience after marrying wealthy John Forsythe, tangling with his mother Contance Bennett and canoodling with Ricardo Montalban.
Turner is sent packing and winds up a degenerate drunk, eventually running afoul of grizzled, boozy old con man Burgess Meredith and eventually stands trial for murder, with the idealistic (and very pretty in color) Dullea assigned as her defense attorney. So tender was he with the degraded Turner and so passionately did he deliver his defense that by the time it was all over, my mother was in tears and I was right there with her (but also strangely drawn to the angelically lit eyes and face of the young actor.) Time was, this movie was a litmus test I used on people I was getting to know. If they didn't have a lump in their throat by the end of the film, I knew we would never be more than acquaintances rather than close friends!
Ever attempting to diversify his roles, Dullea next worked for director Mark Rydell in an adaptation of a D.H. Lawrence novel,
The Fox. The story concerns two female friends (Sandy Dennis and Anne Heywood) running a Canadian chicken farm which is being beset by a fox. Then one day the son (Dullea) of the farm's former owner show up, offering to help them run the place. He becomes something of a figurative fox in their hen house as well. Get it?
A lesbian element figuring into the story was still daunting in 1967. While the movie was daring, it's also looked upon now by many viewers as degrading and insulting, something that can happen when eyes look back on fifty year-old product and expect the same sensibilities of the present day to be found there. Later in 1967, Dullea was chosen by Ira Levin to make his Broadway debut in the short-lived play "Dr. Cook's Garden" opposite Burl Ives.
Based upon his work in
The Fox, and with no reading, audition or any further sort of demonstration of talent, Stanley Kubrick selected Dullea for his upcoming sci-fi epic, a movie that would endure as a classic of its genre and which would come the closest to making Keir Dullea a household name. The movie was
2001: A Space Odyssey.
The meticulous, obsessive Kubrick put gargantuan amounts of time and energy into building the elusive, cerebral, yet compelling and at times psychedelic 1968 film, which is considered by many to be a masterpiece. Dullea (and his fellow astronaut Gary Lockwood) were the "everymen" shown performing routine tasks on board a spacecraft until one day when the computer on board decides it has some ideas of its own.
Initially determined to be confusing and dull (88 minutes of its running time contain no dialogue at all), the movie was almost ready to be yanked from theaters when business picked up thanks to sci-fi buffs and a fair amount of students who enjoyed taking hallucinogenic drugs during a particular visually-elaborate sequence. Eventually, the picture found it audience as well as a place in cinema history (just prior to man's landing on the moon.) Dullea wed in 1969 to Susan Lessons, but the union was over within a year.
Dullea's next project was 1969's confusingly constructed
De Sade, a supposed biopic of the legendarily sexually sadistic Marquis de Sade, though there isn't much fact to be found here. Behind the scenes disagreements led to the narrative being left unclear as Dullea drifts from instance to instance with a startling lack of any engrossing activity.
Instead of any real sexual heat, there is a lot of loud laughter, some scantily-clad ladies cavorting and an extended scene of destruction that quickly becomes both dull and annoying. One bright spot is the luscious Senta Berger as his primary love (as well as elegant Lilli Palmer as his commanding mother-in-law), but generally this film has to count as a miss and obviously contributed to his decline as a motion picture star (right at a time when he ought to be rising.)
Still, he was beautifully photo- graphed (often wearing sky blue to accent those eyes) and it was an opulent production with some staggering settings and eye-catching costumes. And one can never go wrong watching
Senta Berger do anything! She is radiantly beautiful throughout.
All was not lost, however, as he did return to Broadway late in 1969, this time in a successful play, "Butterflies Are Free," as a young blind man trying to live life on his own. He worked with Blythe Danner as a kooky, free-spirited neighbor and
Eileen Heckart as his controlling mother. Dullea was thirty-three, but his boyish looks allowed him to portray characters younger than he (for a while.)
He and Danner spent a significant stretch of the show in their under- clothes, part of the permiss- iveness (though mild when compared to "Oh, Calcutta!" and "Hair") that was then seeping into both the stage and onto the big-screen. By the time this show was turned into a movie in 1972, Edward Albert and Goldie Hawn had inherited the roles, though Heckart kept hers (and won an Oscar for her trouble.)
He appeared in a few TV-movies during this time such as
Black Water Gold (1970, with, as shown here, Ricardo Montalban and Aron Kincaid),
Montserrat (1971, a filmed play in which he played the title role) and the British-made
A Kiss is Just a Kiss (1971) with David Hedison.
It was in fact 1972 before he made another movie himself, the Franco-Italian mystery thriller
Devil in the Brain, which had him involved in a murder in which a young boy is suspected of killing his father, but cannot recall the details, thanks to shock. That same year he made an uncredited appearance in Liv Ullman's
Pope Joan. Also, in 1972, he wed Suzanne Fuller, an actress he met while working in the London production of "Butterflies Are Free."
1973 brought the Canadian- made
Paperback Hero, with
Elizabeth Ashley. He played a cocky hockey star who likes to strut around town in a cowboy hat making plays for various women, asserting himself and generally getting into trouble. (His teammate shown here is John Beck.)
He and Ashley share an extended, fully nude shower scene wherein they contort themselves to keep from displaying their full montys, yet manage to reveal copious amounts of skin nonetheless. Ashley was in tip-top physical condition at this point and those who saw her in it found themselves more than pleased. She and Dullea share some particularly intimate moments with her soaping him up and massaging his inner thigh.
A mustached Dullea then took part in a Canadian sci-fi series called
The Starlost. (The title no doubt inspired somewhat by the name "Starchild" from Dullea's
2001 film.) It concerned a futuristic space ark with hundreds of domes containing samples of Earth life (the planet having been destroyed years before), which is on a collision course with an uncharted solar star and must be righted. Among the guest stars was
Star Trek's Walter Koenig, though the low-budget show (much of which was eaten up in securing Dullea as the lead) only lasted 16 episodes.
In 1974, Dullea had a featured role in
Paul and Michelle, which was a sequel to the 1971 sleeper hit
Friends (in which he did not appear.) A more enduring work was the low-budget thriller
Black Christmas, in which he starred with Olivia Hussey, John Saxon and Margot Kidder as an intensely driven pianist. The chiller, about sorority house murders, was fondly remembered by genre fans and was later remade in 2006 (to no great effect, as is often the case.)
This was also the year he returned to Broadway, this time in an updated production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," which featured a revised script by the author Tennessee Williams. Dullea played the sexually-tormented alcoholic whose wife (Elizabeth Ashley) has slept with his best friend, resulting in tragedy.
Meanwhile, his father "Big Daddy" (Fred Gwynne) is unknowingly dying of cancer, to the distress of his mother (Kate Reid.) The well-regarded production found Dullea's
Paperback Hero costar Ashley receiving most of the attention and acclaim, though Dullea (who'd worked earlier with Cat's original Big Daddy Burl Ives) would later revisit this piece.
He returned to Broadway (albeit briefly) in 1975 with "P.S. Your Cat Is Dead!" opposite Tony Musante as a married robbery victim who begins to have feelings for the gay thief who's trying to rip him off! (From the looks of this ineffectual Playbill cover it may as well have been called "Pardon Me, But Your Turtleneck is Showing!") Tragedy struck in 1976 when Dullea was set to costar with Sal Mineo in a Los Angeles production of this play (which Mineo had successfully mounted just prior in San Francisco), but Mineo was murdered in a robbery one night after rehearsal.
During this sojourn on the stage, Dullea's on-screen credits were limited to a guest appearance on
Switch (seen here with fellow guest Julie Sommars) as a blackmailing actor and the TV-movie
Law and Order, about a family of police officers.
1977 brought two more Canadian- made features for him. There was the sci-fi/western hybrid
Welcome to Blood City, costarring Jack Palance and Samantha Eggar, in which he plays a man who finds himself awakening in a kill-or-be-killed old west town in which violence reigns supreme (and is overseen by scientists), clearly inspired by
Westworld.
Also, he costarred with Mia Farrow in
The Haunting of Julia, playing her wealthy husband who thinks she may need to be locked up when she begins seeing visions of a little girl in the wake of the death of their young daughter. (The two scarcely shared any screen time together for whatever reason.) A third 1977 film,
Three Dangerous Ladies, was actually cobbled together from three British TV episodes, his being "The Mannikin" opposite Ronee Blakley.
Dullea had by now worked almost exclusively in Canadian and U.K. projects for years rather than in Hollywood and 1978 would prove no differently.
Leopard in the Snow (a "Harlequin Romance" production!) had him playing a reclusive former race car driver who is discovered by Susan Penhaligon. Also in the film were Kenneth More, Billie Whitelaw, Jeremy Kemp and Gordon Thomson. Next he costarred with Karen Black in
Because He's My Friend, an Australian TV-movie about a naval sergeant with a developmentally disabled son who moves there with his wife for submarine training.
Back in the U.S., he popped up (as General Custer!) in the 1979 telefilm
The Legend of the Golden Gun. Then 1980 brought two more TV-movies,
Brave New World, an adaptation of Aldous Huxley's sci-fi novel, and
The Hostage Tower, this one casting him as a criminal mastermind who holds the Eiffel Tower for a $30 million ransom.
A colorful cast included Peter Fonda, Billy Dee Williams, Maud Adams, Britt Eckland and others. The campy, uninten- tionally funny heist flick had him cavorting with Eckland in a steamy bathtub and wearing ridiculous sunglasses, though he soon underwent a makeover and was back to the more handsome look we're used to, seen below.
I definitely recall the 1981 TV film
No Place to Hide, which placed him in support of Kathleen Beller and Mariette Hartley in a story which had someone terrorizing young heiress Beller. In any case, he made an impression on Hartley who shared love scenes with him and got so worked up that she went home each night and took it out on her husband!
More sci-fi based movies followed, most of them lesser-known, such as 1982's
Brain- waves (shown above), wherein his injured and comatose wife was given a transplant that allowed her to see snippets from the donor being murdered, and
Blind Date (1984), in which he played a doctor (with fluffy blond hair) who uses an electronic device to allow a blind man (Joseph Bottoms - but for who? LOL) to "see" again in a fashion. Bottoms has to prevent a girl he adores from being sliced up. (The killer ends the movie in a Speedo, by the way. Gotta love the '80s.) In 1983, he and third wife Suzanne Fuller founded the Theater Artists Workshop in Westport, CT.
1984 also brought
The Next One, in which he played a time traveler who washes up on the shore of a Greek island to find single mother Adrienne Barbeau. He was also put to use in the belated sequel to
2001: A Space Odyssey,
2010, which featured Roy Scheider, John Lithgow and Helen Mirren.
Once again, Dullea headed to Broadway for a final time. He took over John Cullum's role in the play "Doubles," which took place in the locker room of a racquet club. Cliff Gorman and Robert Reed were among the cast in this moderately successful comedy.
Following this, Dullea still acted on screen from time to time, but was mostly busy somewhere on the stage. There was the Canadian
Oh, What a Night in support of Corey Haim (!) in 1992, a role in
The Audrey Hepburn Story (2000) as the actress's father (Audrey played here by Jennifer Love Hewitt) and guest roles on shows like
Witchblade,
Ed and
Law & Order.
He has continued to work in various movies and on popular shows such as
Castle and
Damages. In
The Good Shepherd (2006), he played a senator and the father of star Angelina Jolie. He has movies in pre-production as I type including
Valley of the Gods with John Hartnett and John Malcovich. He is eighty-one at present.
Stage-wise, things came full circle for Dullea in 2013 when he portrayed Big Daddy in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" at the Province- town Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, nearly forty years after having played Brick. In this production, Big Mama was played by Dullea's wife since 1999, Mia Dillon. (His previous wife had died in 1998 at only age fifty-eight.)
We always enjoy seeing the soft-spoken (and well-spoken) Dullea in many movies and on lots of television, though he is most fondly remembered in The Underworld for his idealistic young defense attorney in
Madame X.
