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James Cromwell
Jan. 27, 1940 – Actor
"I’m not the sort of personality that people stare at
and then ask for an autograph," the actor James Cromwell said to Philip
Wuntch for the Dallas Morning News (June 8, 2002). "People just come up to
me and say, ‘I like your work.’ And that’s what I like to hear." Cromwell
has appeared in films and on television since the 1970s and has
consistently earned plaudits for his portrayals of characters ranging from
insidious lowlifes to wise, empathetic old men. His memorable roles
include those of Stretch Cunningham on the television series All in the
Family and Mr. Skolnick in four Revenge of the Nerds films. He is best
known for his work in the movie Babe (1995), about a pig (the title
character) and a host of other talking animals, in which he played an
Australian farmer named Arthur Hoggett, a performance that earned him an
Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. "Andy Warhol said
everybody gets their 15 minutes of fame," Cromwell said after learning of
the nomination, as quoted in the Plymouth, England, Evening Herald
(September 7, 2004). "And if this is mine, I couldn’t imagine a better 15
minutes." "I owe an incredible debt to the wonderful pig . . . who gave me
my career, which I didn’t have until then," he told Scott Murdoch for the
Queensland, Australia, Courier Mail (December 22, 2004). Before Babe, he
said to Mark Olsen for the Los Angeles Times (August 1, 2004), "I had what
I call a ‘careen,’ where you bounce like a pinball from one thing to
another." In the decade since the release of Babe, Cromwell has had parts
in such films as The People vs. Larry Flynt, Star Trek: First Contact, The
General's Daughter, The Green Mile, and The Longest Yard and in the
popular TV series Six Feet Under.
James Cromwell was born John Oliver Cromwell on January
27, 1940 in Los Angeles, California. Readily available sources do not
indicate when he changed his given name. His mother was the actress Kay
Johnson, who made her silver-screen debut in 1929, as the star of
Dynamite, the director Cecil B. DeMille's first film with audible
dialogue; she had a supporting role in Of Human Bondage (1934), which
starred Leslie Howard and Bette Davis and was directed by John Cromwell,
Cromwell's father. John Cromwell, who was 52 when James was born, was an
acclaimed stage actor--he won a Tony Award for his work in the play Point
of No Return (1952)--as well as a prolific, highly respected film director
who worked with some of Hollywood's leading actors and actresses. The
elder Cromwell and Johnson divorced when James was six years old, and the
boy moved to Waterford, Connecticut, with his mother and brother. (His
father later remarried three times.) As a child Cromwell occasionally
visited his father at work; by his own account, he particularly enjoyed
being on the set of Anna and the King of Siam (1946), which starred Irene
Dunne and Rex Harrison. After he completed high school--the private Hill
School, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania--in 1958, he enrolled at Middlebury
College, in Middlebury, Vermont, with the goal of becoming a mechanical
engineer. He spent the summer of 1960 in Sweden, on the set of a film (A
Matter of Morals) that his father was directing. "I thought, ‘Damn, this
is the life!’" he recalled to Michael A. Lipton and Jeanne Gordon for
People (March 25, 1996). Shortly thereafter he left Middlebury College and
enrolled as a theater major at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (since
renamed Carnegie Mellon University), in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A year
later he quit school "in a huff," in his words; as he explained to Lipton
and Gordon, "Institutions and I get on each other’s nerves something
fierce."
Cromwell spent the next decade acting in and directing a
variety of productions in regional theaters, prominent among them the Mark
Taper Forum, in Los Angeles, California. In 1974 he began working in
television, with roles in the series The Rockford Files, Maude, and All in
the Family. In the last-named show, he appeared in three installments, in
October and November 1974, as Stretch Cunningham, a buddy of the main
character, the cantankerous Archie Bunker, played by Carroll O'Connor. At
around that time O’Connor requested a pay raise that the show's producers
considered exorbitant; for a while they considered killing off Archie and
replacing him with Stretch. Then O’Connor reached an agreement with the
producers, and he returned to the set. "When Carroll came back, he had to
feed me all the straight lines—I had all the jokes—and that was the end of
Stretch Cunningham," Cromwell told Eirik Knutzen for the Washington Times
(November 1, 2001). He told Jim Slotek for the Toronto Sun (May 17, 2002),
"Carroll O’Connor saved my life. He thought Stretch was getting too many
laughs and he refused to let me be a regular character. If he had, the
character might have become like Fonzie and it would have been the end of
my career." (He was referring to the character played by Henry Winkler for
10 years on the TV series Happy Days. Winkler's career suffered because of
the public's close identification of him with Fonzie.) In 1975 Cromwell
was cast as a lead in the TV sitcom Hot L Baltimore, which was soon
cancelled. The following year he landed his first film role, playing the
part of a French manservant in the comedy/mystery Murder by Death, whose
screenplay was written by Neil Simon.
Although Cromwell was seldom cast as a leading man, he
did not lack jobs. During the next two decades, he had parts in some 40
movies for the big and small screens and in more than 50 episodes of
various TV series. He appeared in such silver-screen motion pictures as Oh
God! You Devil (1984), Pink Cadillac (1989), and Romeo Is Bleeding (1993);
made-for-television movies including Barefoot in the Park (1981), Alison’s
Demise (1987), and The Shaggy Dog (1994); and such television series as
the Nancy Walker Show (1976), Born to the Wind (1982), and China Beach
(1988). His better-known roles include that of Mr. Skolnick, the father of
one of the title characters, in the films Revenge of the Nerds (1984) and
Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (1987), as well as the
televised sequels Revenge of the Nerds III and IV, which had the subtitles
The Next Generation (1992) and Nerds in Love (1994). (He is credited in
those films, and a few others, as Jamie Cromwell.)
When Cromwell was offered the part of Arthur Hoggett, a
kindly, laconic Australian sheep farmer, in a movie about a talking pig
who wants to be a shepherd, he had misgivings about the film. But he was
facing a period without work, and as he told Eleanor Ringel Gillespie for
the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (May 31, 2002), he decided to take the
advice of an actor friend, who had told him to accept the role. "You don’t
carry the picture," the friend said. "The pig carries the picture. If it
flops, it’s his fault." "When we saw James, we just saw Hoggett," Chris
Noonan, who directed Babe, told Michael A. Lipton and Jeanne Gordon. "It
was a difficult job," Noonan continued. "Hoggett is very withdrawn. I kept
[telling Cromwell], ‘Do less, don’t smile, don’t give anything away.’
James was brilliant." Babe was the surprise hit of 1995, popular not only
with its intended audience--children--but adults as well. "Babe is a movie
made with charm and wit, and unlike some family movies it does not
condescend, not for a second," Roger Ebert wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times
(August 4, 1995). "It believes it is OK to use words a child might not
know, and to have performances that are the best available." He added,
"James Cromwell, as the farmer, and Magda Szubanski, as his wife, are
always convincing." In the Salt Lake City, Utah, Deseret News (August 4,
1995), Chris Hicks, echoing many other reviewers, described Cromwell's
performance as "wonderfully deadpan."
Cromwell was nominated for a 1995 Oscar for best
supporting actor for his depiction of Farmer Hoggett. Although he did not
win (the award went to Kevin Spacey, for his work in The Usual Suspects),
he soon felt the effects of the publicity that followed his recognition by
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. With his status as an
actor at a new high, he began to be offered roles that were more prominent
and more substantial than nearly all those that had preceded that of
Hoggett. "As an older character actor, you have to accept a lot of junk or
go unemployed for long periods of time—both options drive me crazy," he
told Eirik Knutzen. "Fortunately, the cute Australian pig in Babe changed
all that and gave me a legitimate screen career for the first time."
Cromwell next appeared in, among other films, The People vs. Larry Flynt,
(1996), as the real-life banker and antipornography activist Charles
Keating; Star Trek: First Contact 1996), as the often drunk, brilliantly
inventive, rock-and-roll–loving engineer, Zefram Cochrane (who is
reportedly the only character ever to utter the words "star trek" in any
TV installment or film in that long-running series); L.A. Confidential
(1997), as a sharp-tongued, crafty police captain; and The General's
Daughter (1999), as a general with vice-presidential ambitions whose
daughter has been murdered. Also in 1999 he played a judge in Snow Falling
on Cedars and a prison warden in The Green Mile. He has since appeared on
the silver screen in The Sum of All Fears (2002), I, Robot (2004), and The
Longest Yard (2005). Also among his screen credits are the independent
films The Education of Little Tree (1997) and The Snow Walker (2003), both
of which deal with issues relevant to Native Americans--matters in which
Cromwell has long had a special interest. Some years ago he founded Hecel
Oyakapi (which means "They do it this way" in the Lakota Indian language),
an organization whose goal was to help the Lakota tribespeople of South
Dakota preserve their heritage, language, and culture through traditional
arts.
Meanwhile, on television, Cromwell portrayed the
newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst in the film RKO 281 (1999), and
the following year he appeared in a remake of the movie Fail Safe. In 2001
Cromwell starred in his own series, Citizen Baines, about a former U.S.
senator who is trying to reconnect with his three adult daughters. The
show received mixed reviews, with most critics writing approvingly of
Cromwell's portrayal but disparagingly of the daughter characters, and it
was canceled later the same year. In 2002 Cromwell was cast in a new
version of Orson Welles's 1942 film The Magnificent Ambersons. He also had
a role in the highly lauded 2003 miniseries adaptation, for HBO, of Tony
Kushner’s play Angels in America. Since 2004 he has been starring in the
darkly comedic series Six Feet Under. "One of the reasons I was excited
about doing Six Feet Under is [that] I’ve been [acting for] 40 years now
and I’ve never gotten the girl," he explained to Mark Olsen. On Six Feet
Under he plays George Sibley, the new husband of the widowed Ruth, the
matriarch of the Fishers, who own a funeral home. As the sixth, and
reportedly final, season of Six Feet Under began, in June 2005, George was
descending into madness--a turn of events that angered Cromwell. "They
didn't tell me what was going to happen to [Sibley]--all of a sudden, he
started to fall to pieces, and I had no idea," he complained to Bruce
Fretts for TV Guide (June 12, 2005). "I'm not used to working this way. I
like to know when I'm being led somewhere. . . . I've been doing this for
40 years. I'm not a goof. It doesn't add any more life to keep actors out
of the loop."
Cromwell has always tried to remain true to his
real-life values in his work as an actor. "I have turned down [projects]
that I thought were exploitative of any number of issues: women, violence,
insensitive in terms of race and class," he told Laura Weinert for Adweek
(May 6, 2004). "Mostly my career is directed by my intention to be of
service. There are always two options: You choose things that you like and
exemplify what you stand for, and then there are jobs that you simply do
because you’ve got to pay rent. You don’t want to do something in paying
rent that compromises what you stand for, that limits your ability to
speak out and be effective." Cromwell has believed in the importance of
speaking out since his childhood, when, in the early 1950s, during the
witchhunt for supposed Communists in government and elsewhere that was
sparked by Republican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, Cromwell's
father was falsely accused of harboring Communist sympathies; his failure
to testify to the satisfaction of the House Un-American Activities
Committee led to his blacklisting by Hollywood. Like his father, James
Cromwell is an active member of the Screen Actors Guild. "Early in my
career, people used to tell me to keep my mouth shut. But now nobody cares
as long as you don’t violate the unspoken rule of not messing up the
movie," he told Philip Wuntch.
Cromwell has actively supported causes connected with
non–acting-related issues as well. (He told Laura Weinert, "Neither film
nor theatre causes revolutions. People don’t run out of the theatre and
overthrow governments.") He has traced his passion to make a positive
difference in the world in part to a "series of assassinations of people I
respected and revered and loved and had hopes for"--President John F.
Kennedy, in 1963, and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and U.S. senator
and presidential aspirant Robert F Kennedy, in 1968. "[Those] hopes were
shattered," he told Laura Weinert. In the mid-1960s, a few years after the
efforts by the so-called Freedom Riders, in 1961, to test the
effectiveness of the 1960 Supreme Court ruling outlawing segregation in
all interstate public facilities, Cromwell toured the South with an acting
troupe called the Free Southern Theater. During the summer of 1964, at
about the time that three civil rights workers (James Earl Chaney, Michael
Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman) were murdered in Meridian, Mississippi,
Cromwell took part in the Free Southern Theater's integrated production of
Waiting for Godot, in which he wore blackface and the African-American
actors wore whiteface. Cromwell recollected to Laura Weinert that,
following one of the performances, the civil rights activist Fanny Lou
Hamer spoke to the audience, telling them, "I want you people to take this
play seriously because unlike the two characters in this play, we’re not
waiting for anything. We’re on the road. We’re taking charge. We’re taking
control. So you learn what happens to people who wait for somebody else to
bring them freedom." In the late 1960s Cromwell joined the Committee to
Defend the Panthers, a group that supported the release of 13 leaders of
the Black Panther Party who had been jailed on conspiracy charges. During
that period he was arrested for participating in a protest against the
Vietnam War outside the White House. With his acting career seemingly
stalled, he briefly held a job as a counselor at a Connecticut school for
juvenile delinquents--work that he described to Philip Wuntch as "an
eye-opening and disillusioning experience." "The school was basically a
profit-making endeavor at the expense of the kids, all of whom had
committed crimes because of their backgrounds," he told Wuntch. "The
people in charge didn’t care about the kids. The school was just a
warehouse to keep the kids in. It provided practically the same
environment as the streets."
Cromwell has also been a longtime supporter of animal
rights. He gave up eating red meat years ago, after riding his motorcycle
through stockyards in Texas during a cross-country trip. "It seemed like
the whole day. It just went on and on. There were pens on both sides," he
recalled to Nora Fraser for the Pet Press (2000, on-line). "And the smell
was horrible. The sense of doom and [the cattle’s] awareness—being able to
project and feel that kind of terror of what is coming. I never ate red
meat again!" After filming Babe Cromwell adopted veganism (eliminating all
animal flesh and animal by-products from his diet). In 2001 he was
arrested for demonstrating at a Wendy’s fast-food restaurant in Virginia,
where he had gone at the request of the organization People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). A PETA representative had asked him
if he "wanted to commit this civil disobedience," as he explained to
Philip Wuntch. "I thought, ‘Hey, I haven’t been arrested in a while, so
why not?’ But we were successful. Wendy’s changed their farming practices
to suit PETA." Cromwell, who has adopted Thanksgiving turkeys rather than
eaten them, said to Scott Murdoch that he is trying to prevent "that
creature [from being] reduced to an object which has no more value than
the sum of its parts."
Cromwell's nine-year marriage to Ann Ulvestad ended in
divorce in 1986; the actor retained custody of the couple's three
children, Kate, John, and Colin. Later that year Cromwell married the
actress Julie Cobb, whose father was the actor Lee J. Cobb and who has a
daughter, Rosemary, from a previous marriage. In October 2004 Cromwell and
Cobb separated, and Cromwell has since filed a petition for divorce.
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