Hal Holbrook, who achieved a substantial acting career on television and film, but who reached his greatest acclaim on stage, incorporating Mark Twain in all his rugged splendor and vinous wit in a solo show seen all over the world, died on 23 January at his home in Beverly Hills, California. He was 95 years old.
His death was confirmed by his assistant, Joyce Cohen, on Monday night.
Mr. Holbrook has had a long and fruitful career as an actor. He was the dark patriot Deep Throat in “All the President’s Men” (1976); a painfully grandfather character in “Into the Wild” (2007), for which he received an Oscar nomination; and the influential Republican Preston Blair in “Lincoln” by Steven Spielberg (2012).
He himself played the 16th president on television in Carl Sandburg’s “Lincoln”, a 1974 miniseries. The performance earned him an Emmy Award, one of five that he won for his role in television films and miniseries; the others included “The Bold Ones: The Senator” (1970), its protagonist similar to John F. Kennedy, and “Pueblo” (1973), in which he played the commander of a Navy intelligence boat seized by North Korea in 1968.
Mr. Holbrook regularly participated in the 1980s “Designing Women” television series. He played Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman”, Hotspur and King Lear by Shakespeare, and the stage manager in “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder.
But above all, he was Mark Twain, alone on stage in a crumpled white linen suit, weaving an omniscient, incisive and human narrative of human comedy.
Mr. Holbrook never claimed to be a Twain scholar; in fact, he said, he had read only a little of Twain’s work as a young man. He said the idea of doing a staged reading of Twain’s work came from Edward A. Wright, his mentor at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. And Mr. Wright would have been the first to recognize that the idea actually originated from Twain himself – or rather, from Samuel Clemens, who adopted Mark Twain as a kind of stage name and who read his work for years.
Mr. Holbrook was ending his senior year as a major drama in 1947 when Mr. Wright convinced him to add Twain to a production that Mr. Holbrook and his wife, Ruby, were planning to call “Great Personalities”, in which they they would interpret, among others, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
Mr. Holbrook had doubts at first. “Ed, I think this Mark Twain thing is pretty cheesy,” he recalls saying to Wright after the first rehearsals. “I don’t think this is funny.”
But Mr. Wright convinced him to stay with him, and in 1948 the character appeared when the Holbrooks hit the road with a touring production of “Great Personalities”.
They first attempted Twain’s sketch before an audience of psychiatric patients at the veterans’ hospital in Chillicothe, Ohio – a circumstance that Mr. Holbrook explains only vaguely in his 2011 memoirs, “Harold: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain.” In the sketch, grumpy Twain from Mr. Holbrook was interviewed by Ruby Holbrook:
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen in June.”
“Who do you consider the most remarkable man you have ever met?”
“George Washington.”
“But how could you meet George Washington when you’re only nineteen?”
“If you know more about me than I do, what do you ask me?”
The patients looked straight ahead – “Nobody was looking at us,” wrote Holbrook – and laughed at the laugh lines, proving that “the infirmary guys were healthier than they looked” and that the material had legs.
Twain’s play became his most popular sketch for the next four years, as the couple crossed the country performing for school children, women’s clubs, university students and Rotarians.
Holbrook started developing his solo show in 1952, the year that Holbrook gave birth to his first daughter, Victoria. He soon looked like the paper, with a wig that matched Twain’s wayward mop, a walrus mustache and a crumpled white linen suit, the kind that Twain himself wore on stage. From his grandfather, Mr. Holbrook was given an old pocket knife, which he used to cut the ends of the three cigars he smoked during a performance (although he was not sure if Twain ever smoked on stage). He looked for people who claimed to have seen and heard Twain, who died in 1910, and heard his memories.
He had more or less perfected the role in 1954, the year he started a solo show entitled “Mark Twain Tonight!” at Lock Haven State Teachers College, Pennsylvania.
Two years later, he took his Twain to television, performing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Tonight Show”. In the meantime, he got a steady job in 1954 on the TV soap “The Brighter Day”, in which he played a recovering alcoholic. The restriction lasted until 1959, when, tired of papers he no longer cared about, he debuted in “Mark Twain Tonight!” at the Off Broadway 41st Street Theater.
At this point, the metamorphosis was complete. With his staggering gait, Missouri’s slurred speech, shrewd looks and exquisite weather, Hal Holbrook became, for all intents and purposes, Mark Twain.
“After watching and listening to him for five minutes,” wrote Arthur Gelb in The New York Times, “it is impossible to doubt that he is Mark Twain, or that Twain must have been one of the most charming men who ever participated in a lecture tour. “
But for Mr. Holbrook, the Mark Twain cover that he put on every night was a mask; behind it, he wrote in his memoirs, was a loneliness that plagued his youth, beginning when his parents abandoned him as a child. As an adult, he found his marriage, his fatherhood and even his life on stage stuck in an existential stalemate, with “the impulses of survival and suicide working together”. His escape, he said, was punitive for a lot of work, not to mention the company of friends like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.
In his memoirs, Mr. Holbrook described an emotional low point in the early 1950s. He was sitting in a hotel room at the end of a long day, still undecided about doing a Mark Twain show and feeling lost when started rereading “Tom Sawyer” for the first time since high school.
“You heard the voices coming straight off the page,” he wrote. “It was a surprise, and after a while I started to feel good about myself and that was also a surprise. Bitterness receded and in its place a boy appeared, his friends and his family entered, and it was not long before I did not feel so alone anymore. Mark Twain cheered me up. “
Harold Rowe Holbrook Jr. was born on February 17, 1925, in Cleveland. He was 2 years old when his parents left him. Her mother, ex-Aileen Davenport, ran away to join the chorus of “Earl Carroll’s Vanities” magazine. Harold Sr. went to California after leaving young Hal in the care of his grandparents in South Weymouth, Massachusetts.
Young Mr. Holbrook spent his high school years at Culver Military Academy in Indiana and later enrolled in Denison to graduate in the dramatic arts, but his education was interrupted by his service as an Army engineer during World War II. He worked for a time in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where he joined an amateur theater group and met Ruby Elaine Johnston, who became his first wife. The couple returned to Denison after the war, and Mr. Holbrook soon became Mr. Wright’s award-winning student.
After becoming an established attraction in the United States, Mr. Holbrook recorded “Mark Twain Tonight!” to Europe, performing in Britain, Germany and elsewhere. The German audience shouted when he presented Twain’s vision of Wagnerian opera: “I went to Bayreuth and got ‘Parsifal’. I will never forget that. The first act lasted two hours and I liked it, despite the singing. “
Mr. Holbrook toured the country with the show several times a year, accumulating well over 2,000 performances. He compiled about 15 hours of Twain’s writings, which he immersed himself in whenever his routine needed to be renewed. He won a Tony award in 1966 for his first race on Broadway in “Mark Twain Tonight!”
Mr. Holbrook was 29 when he started playing Twain at 70; As he got older, he found that he needed less and less makeup to look old. He continued the act well after his own 70th birthday, returning to Broadway in 2005, when he was 80 years old.
After playing Twain for more than six decades, he abruptly retired from the role in 2017. “I know it must end, this long effort to do a good job,” he wrote in a letter to the Oklahoma theater, where he had been scheduled to perform. “I served my job, I gave my all, heart and soul, as a dedicated actor can do.”
Mr. Holbrook made his Broadway debut in 1961 on the short “Do You Know the Milky Way?” He returned there in the musical “Man of La Mancha”, in “After the Fall” by Arthur Miller and other pieces.
His television appearance scores include “That Certain Summer” (1972), an innovative film in which he starred as a divorced man who must admit to his son that he has a gay lover (Martin Sheen). In the early 1990s, he had a recurring role on the sitcom “Evening Shade”.
Holbrook’s many film roles tended to be small, although there were exceptions. One was like the mysterious informant Deep Throat in “All the President’s Men”, the 1976 film adaptation of the book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on the Watergate cover-up. Another was in “The Firm” (1993), based on John Grisham’s corporate whodunit, in which Holbrook played the role of head of a Memphis law firm.
His Oscar-nominated performance in “Into the Wild”, directed by Sean Penn, was like a retired military man who has a date in the desert with a young man in search of self-knowledge that would take him to the Alaskan desert. His final screen roles were in 2017, when, at the age of 92, he starred in episodes of the television series “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Hawaii Five-0”.
Mr. Holbrook’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1965. In addition to his daughter, Victoria, they had a son, David. His second marriage, to actress Carol Eve Rossen, ended in divorce in 1979. They had a daughter, Eve. In 1984 he married actress Dixie Carter, who died in 2010.
He leaves his children and two stepdaughters, Ginna Carter and Mary Dixie Carter; two grandchildren; and two stepchildren grandchildren.
In adapting Mark Twain’s writing for the stage, Holbrook said he had the best possible guide: Twain himself.
“He had a real understanding of the difference between the word on the page and delivering it on a platform,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2011. “You have to omit many adjectives. The performer is an adjective. “
Richard Severo, Paul Vitello and William McDonald contributed to the report.