Oscar Profile #32: Dean Stockwell

Born March 5, 1936 to actors Harry Stockwell and his wife, Nina Olivette, Dean Stockwell was one of the most successful child actors of all time and one of the very few to have a major lifelong career.

His father is probably best known today for voicing Prince Charming in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, while his older brother, Guy, who died in 2002 at the age of 67, is probably best remembered for his numerous TV roles. Dean, however, has remained popular since his second film, 1945’s Anchors Aweigh, in which the cherubic nine year-old stole major scenes from stars Frank Sinatra Sinatra and Gene Kelly. Though billed below several other actors, it’s his performance that carries the 1946 film version of A.J. Cronin’s The Green Years in which he plays the orphaned son of an Irish Catholic father and a Scottish Protestant mother raised by his penny-pinching mother’s family in a religion they don’t approve of.

Having played Gregory Peck’s son in the closing scenes of 1945’s The Valley of Decision, he got to play Peck’s son throughout 1947’s Gentleman’s Agreement, for which he won a Golden Globe. That same year he was William Powell and Myrna Loy’s son in Song of the Thin Man, the last film in that successful franchise.

Stockwell won further acclaim for Joseph Losey’s 1948 film, The Boy With Green Hair as the war orphan with the weight of the world on his shoulders, then gave Margaret O’Brien a run for the tear ducts in 1949’s The Secret Garden and went Down to the Sea in Ships with Richard Widmark and Lionel Barrymore that same year. He had the title role in 1950’s Kim with Errol Flynn, and played Joel McCrea’s son the same year’s Stars in My Crown.

He continued to work on screen and in television throughout the 1950s. In 1959, the now twenty-three year old actor shared the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival with co-stars Bradford Dillman and Orson Welles for Compulsion, a fictionalized account of the Leopold-Loeb murders of the 1920s. His next film, 1960’s Sons and Lovers provided him with perhaps his greatest role as the protagonist in the film version of D.H. Lawrence’s controversial novel, for which he received a Golden Globe nomination. He followed that with the landmark 1962 film version of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. For that he again shared acting honors at Cannes along with co-stars Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson and Jason Robards, making him the first of only three two time Best Actor winners in Cannes history. He was subsequently joined by Jack Lemmon twenty years later and Marcello Mastroainni five years after that.

Although he was continuously busy throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he did not appear in another film of major significance until 1984 when he appeared in two, Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas and David Lynch’s Dune. Two more major roles in William Friedkin’s 1985 film, To Live and Die in L.A. and Lynch’s Blue Velvet in 1986 assured that his career was back on track. His appearances in two 1988 films, Tucker: The Man and His Dream and Married to the Mob won him numerous awards, the latter resulting in his only Oscar nomination to date.

His co-starring role in the TV series Quantum Lap won him a Golden Globe in 1990 and nominations in each of the next three years. He was nominated for an Emmy all four years, as well.

More recent films include 1997’s The Rainmaker; 1999’s Rites of Passage and 2004’s The Manchurian Candidate. On TV, he co-starred on Battlestar Galactcia from 2006-2009

Still acting at 75, Dean Stockwell remains one of our most interesting actors.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR (1948), directed by Joseph Losey

Twelve year-old Stockwell is terrific as the war orphan who slowly opens up to child psychologist Robert Ryan, telling the story of how he was sent from foster home to foster home until re-uniting with his grandfather (Pat O’Brien) and how the local children shunned him when his hair turned green. A parable encompassing themes of war and social intolerance, its pacifist themes somewhat ahead of their time, the film’s reputation continues to grow with each passing year. Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy” is the film’s theme song.

COMPULSION (1959), directed by Richard Fleischer

The Leopold-Loeb murders of the 1920s had previously been the subject of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film, Rope. That film centered on the thrill killing and its immediate aftermath, this one centers on the police investigation, the killers’ arrests and eventual trial. Stockwell had starred in the 1957 Broadway version with fellow former child actor, Roddy McDowall. Bradford Dillman replaced McDowall in the screen version and Orson Welles played the boys’ attorney, based on Clarence Darrow. The three actors shared the Best Actor award at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival.

SONS AND LOVERS (1960), directed by Jack Cardiff

Stretching the bounds of the Hollywood Production Code, Cardiff’s film of D.H. Lawrence’s novel is beautiful to look at as you would expect from one of the screen’s great cinematographers. Perhaps the censors were so busy looking at Freddie Francis’ Oscar winning cinematography that the sexual affair of young Stockwell and older woman Mary Ure and later the frank sex talk between Stockwell and Heather Sears passed them by. Stockwell and co-star Trevor Howard as his brute of a coal miner father were both nominated for Golden Globes for Best Actor and Howard repeated in the same category at the Oscars. Both Howard and Wendy Hiller as Stockwell’s overprotective mother claimed that Cardiff gave the actors no direction, that their uniformly brilliant performances were the result of their own making.

LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (1962), directed by Sidney Lumet

Sidney Lumet directed the film’s four stars, Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell to acting awards at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival. Robards would go on to win the year’s Best Actor award from the National Board of Review and Hepburn would receive Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for her work, but Richardson and Stockwell received no further awards. Nevertheless they are all award worthy, including Stockwell as a thinly disguised version of author Eugene O’Neill.

MARRIED TO THE MOB (1988), directed by Jonathan Demme

Stockwell could often be wry and amusing in his films, but he rarely got to play out and out comedy. Here he does as a mafia boss, securing his only Oscar nomination in the process. Michelle Pfeiffer, Matthew Modien and Alec Baldwin co-starred.