07/30/2020
I didn’t know!
Remembering actor WALTER BRENNAN (1894 – 1974), who was born on July 25th. He is one of three men to win three acting Oscars (the other two being Jack Nicholson and Daniel Day-Lewis), having won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1936, 1938 and 1940. He won the very first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Swan Bostrom in the period film Come and Get It (1936). Two years later he won his second for his performance in the film Kentucky. In Sergeant York (also 1941), he played a sympathetic preacher and dry goods store owner who advised the title character, played by Gary Cooper. In 1942 he played reporter Sam Blake who befriended and encouraged Lou Gehrig (also played by Cooper) in Pride of the Yankees. He was particularly skilled in playing the sidekick to the protagonist or as the "grumpy old man" in films like To Have and Have Not (1944), the Humphrey Bogart vehicle which introduced Lauren Bacall. Though he was hardly ever cast as the villain, notable exceptions were his roles as Judge Roy Bean in The Westerner (1940) with Gary Cooper, for which he won his third best supporting actor Academy Award, 'Old Man' Clanton in My Darling Clementine (1946) opposite Henry Fonda, and the Cinerama production How the West Was Won (1962) as the murderous Colonel Jeb Hawkins in the James Stewart episode. From 1957–1963, he starred in the popular television series The Real McCoys, a situation comedy about a poor West Virginia family that relocated to a farm in southern California. He appeared as an extremely cantankerous sidekick with John Wayne and Dean Martin in Howard Hawks' 1959 western Rio Bravo and also co-starred with James Garner a decade later in Support Your Local Sheriff!, playing the head of the Danby Family.