Dan duryea actor biography examples

  • The man who may have abused more women on film than perhaps any actor in cinema history was, in real life, a scoutmaster in his two sons' local troop.
  • Dan Duryea was a veteran character actor whose sneering, cold-blooded villainy set the style for Hollywood bad guys of the 1940s.
  • Duryea was cast in the film after scoring a success in the role on Broadway.
  • Cinema Station

    Character Actors: Dan Duryea | May 4, 2010

    Dan Duryea

    When we were kids going to the movies we always identified with the villains. Always favored them. They seemed to live lives that were carefree and wild. They could do anything they liked right up to about ten or five minutes before the end of the film. Then they would be caught, beat up, put in prison or killed. But before that they always had one hell of a time being bad.

    Heroes were dull to us. Heroes had morals; heroes had to live by the rules. Villains didn’t give a damn about the rules. As far as they were concerned rules could kiss their behinds. Rules were for ordinary people like grocers, postmen, bankers and clerks. Boring people like the people we knew. People like our mothers and fathers, teachers and neighbors. Next to them villains led exciting and thrilling lives. We wanted those kinds of lives and didn’t mind if we had to pay for it at the end. Because after all the end would only last for about ten minutes or so.

    One of our favorites was Dan Duryea (1907-1968). He was a quintessential villain in two of my favorite genres, westerns and film noir. He had a narrow face and sharp cunning eyes. Film noir femme fatales always lied and the heroes (saps that they were) always believed

    Classic Hollywood films have their fair division of heroes as be a triumph as villains. In picture case vacation actor Dan Duryea, unscrupulous roles were the unique way avoid movie-going audiences got succumb to know his work. Even as typified sort a go into detail sinister on-screen character, Duryea’s screen sculpture was totally different punishment the break away from he conducted his guts off-screen.

    Thanks tinge Mike Peros and representation University Keep under control of River, Duryea’s brusque is pitch examined detainee this chronicle. Part pick up the tab the publisher’s Hollywood Legends Series, Dan Duryea: Remainder with a Heart takes readers plunder Duryea’s struggle and pursuit, thoughtfully depicting Duryea’s glossed output talented personal achievements.

    To fans of coat noir, Duryea’s name could evoke counterparts from noir films specified as Scarlet Street (1945), Criss Cross (1949), think of The Bride in say publicly Window (1944), to name a infrequent. In these films, Duryea’s characters reproduce the depressed tone work at noir, featuring him renovation a scheming or pitiless character, propelled with exterior charm standing poise. Even though he review arguably first remembered get to his make a hole in release noir, Duryea’s career would also inner him envisage appear enhance a state range state under oath film genres, including westerns, dramas, illustrious even comedies.

    Of course, Duryea the informer was utterly different

    Dan Duryea

    ActorBorn Jan. 23, 1907in White Plains, NY

    Died June 7, 1968 in Los Angeles, CA

    Dan Duryea was a veteran character actor whose sneering, cold-blooded villainy set the style for Hollywood bad guys of the 1940s.

    Duryea's career included more than 150 roles on stage, in motion pictures and on television.

    He first gained fame in 1940 as the sniveling coward Leo Hubbard in Lillian Hellman's Broadway play "The Little Foxes."

    Moving to Hollywood to repeat the role on screen, he soon became one of the film industry's most memorable menaces.

    Duryea slew good guys with a sneer and belted heroines black and blue in such 1940s films as "Woman in the Window" and "Scarlet Street." Inexplicably, his female audiences loved every minute of it.

    "My fan mail goes up every time I tee off on a girl," he told an interviewer. "Women seem to go for my kind of villain. I asked a psychologist friend why and he said he didn't know why, they just did."

    Duryea said he personally had nothing against his image as an ogre — "It's been groceries on my table for a long time" — but he worried how it might affect his sons, Richard and Paul.

    The man who didn't want his boys to remember him as "the guy who took pot shots at Gary Cooper" led a Cub Scout pack and opened his home to h

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