12/16/2023 0 Comments Brandon de wildeOkay, so towards the end, the roles and projects weren’t as prestigious, but it seems probable, even likely, that he would have found his way back to top-of-the-line projects again. Shane! Come Back! Actually, don’t bother - *I’ll* Be Shane! And then another classic: he played Paul Newman’s worshipful nephew in Martin Ritt’s Hud (1963) with Patricia Neal, Melvyn Douglas, Whit Bissell, and Yvette Vickers. He continued to ride high as Warren Beatty’s doting brother in John Frankenheimer’s All Fall Down (1962), scripted by William Inge and produced by John Houseman, with Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden, and Angela Lansbury. In 1959 he starred in Philip Dunne’s Blue Denim, a drama about teenage pregnancy (a sort of Peyton Place meets Rebel Without a Cause) with Carol Lynley, McDonald Carey, and Warren Berlinger. At age 15, he got another starring role in the period drama The Missouri Traveler (1958), with Lee Marvin, Gary Merrill, Ken Curtis, Paul Ford, Kathleen Freeman, Frank Cady, and Will Wright. Flippen, Dan Duryea, Hugh Beaumont, Jack Elam, Paul Fix, and Ellen Corby. Night Passage (1957) was another western, which cast him amongst Jimmy Stewart, Audie Murphy, Jay C. He starred in William Wellman’s boy-and-his-dog drama Goodbye, My Lady (1956) with Phil Harris, Walter Brennan, Sidney Poitier, and Louise Beavers, one year before Old Yeller. He was in nearly a dozen additional films, many or most of them prestige dramas of one sort or another that put him amidst top Hollywood players. The show ran one season and part of a second before being cancelled.Īfter this high point, de Wilde’s star hardly sank like a stone. From 1953 through 1954, he starred in his own sit-com Jamie, featuring stage and screen veteran Ernest Truex as his grandfather, and Alice Pearce (the first Gladys Kravitz on Bewitched) as a comical maid. While these two screen performances established de Wilde with enviable gravitas, by some measures his next gig, though now forgotten, was an even greatest measure of his professional success. Both parents were actors, although his father Frederick de Wilde (1914-1980), found his greatest success as a Broadway stage manager, with credits including the original productions of Odets’ The Flowering Peach (1954), Inge’s Bus Stop (1955), Durrenmatt’s The Visit (1958), Neil Simon’s Come Blow Your Horn (1961), Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons (1961), Arthur Miller’s After the Fall (1964), Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular (1974) and dozens of others. Since he was a descendent (and the namesake) of Dutch surgeon merchant, landowner and planter Andries de Wilde (1781-1865), I’ll go with that way of styling it.ĭe Wilde came from a theatrical family. There should be no doubt in any reasonable person’s mind that, had he lived longer, he’d have done a lot more.Īs regards the spelling of his last name: it presents the same problem as DeMille and DeWolfe, and I’ve seen deWilde, DeWilde, de Wilde and De Wilde. But de Wilde was the real deal from beginning to end, the farthest thing from a one-hit wonder, and kept doing good work in film and television and on the stage until his early death at age 30. It’s both because Shane is what I first saw him in, and because he made such a great impression in it. I have an unfortunate tendency to think of de Wilde as “the kid from Shane“, though he had a substantial career both before and after that early peak. Today would have been the 80th birthday of that evergreen exemplar of youth personified, Brandon de Wilde (Andre Brandon de Wilde, 1942-72).
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