James Whitmore, the veteran Tony and Emmy Award-winning actor who brought American icons Will Rogers, Harry Truman and Theodore Roosevelt to life in one-man shows, died Friday. He was 87.
Mr. Whitmore died of lung cancer at his home in Malibu, said his son, Steve. He was diagnosed with the disease a week before Thanksgiving.
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“He cared about acting; his whole life was dedicated to the theater and to movies,” said actor David Huddleston, a longtime friend who appeared in Mr. Whitmore’s 1964 movie “Black Like Me,” and did a couple of plays with him. “I asked James Cagney one time to tell me the best thing you can about acting. He said never to get caught at it. That’s kind of how I’d sum up Jim Whitmore.”
James Arness, who appeared with Mr. Whitmore in the movies “Them!” and “Battleground,” said Mr. Whitmore was “an actor’s actor,” adding that “it was always a treat to work with him.”
Arness also remembered the “great intensity” Mr. Whitmore could bring to a role.
“When we wanted to get an actor to play a character who had that quality, Jimmy was the guy you’d think of,” said Arness, who starred in “Gunsmoke,” a TV series that Mr. Whitmore appeared on a number of times.
A stocky World War II Marine Corps veteran who bore a resemblance to actor Spencer Tracy and shared Tracy’s down-to-earth quality, Mr. Whitmore earned early acclaim.
In 1948, he won a Tony Award for outstanding performance by a newcomer in the role of an amusingly cynical Army Air Forces sergeant in the Broadway production of “Command Decision.”
Mr. Whitmore’s Broadway success brought him to Hollywood, where he received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor in his second movie, the hit 1949 World War II drama “Battleground,” in which he played a tobacco-chewing, battle-weary Army sergeant.
Supporting roles and occasional leads in some 50 movies followed over the next 50-plus years, including “The Asphalt Jungle,” “Kiss Me Kate,” “Battle Cry,” “Oklahoma!,” “Planet of the Apes,” “Tora! Tora! Tora!,” “The Serpent’s Egg,” “Nuts,” “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Majestic.”
Although he starred in productions of plays such as “Our Town,” “Inherit the Wind” and “Death of a Salesman,” Mr. Whitmore was best known for his three one-man shows: as Roosevelt in “Bully,” as Truman in “Give ’em Hell, Harry!” and as Rogers in “Will Rogers’ U.S.A.”
The 1975 film of his performance in “Give ’em Hell, Harry!” earned Mr. Whitmore a best actor Oscar nomination.
But the one-man-show character he said he “always felt most comfortable with” was Rogers.
“He was wise with a sense of humor, and that’s an unbeatable combination,” Mr. Whitmore told the Manchester, N.H., Union Leader in 2003.
Mr. Whitmore ultimately had about eight hours of Rogers’ various comments about the topics of the day memorized, changing the show each time he did it.
“I tried to use whatever seemed to be of interest to the folks in the audience that day,” he told the Tulsa World in 2001. “I took the news from today’s newspaper but didn’t change what Will Rogers said. It’s amazing how little things have changed since Will was about.”
Mr. Whitmore completed 30 years of on-and-off touring as Rogers at Ford’s Theatre in Washington in 2000, and his costume is now housed in the Smithsonian Institution.