Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Zachary Scott, 1914-1965

Joan Crawford and Zachary Scott in that beach house in a scene from Mildred Pierce (1945)

Today marks the birth anniversary of actor Zachary Scott, who was born on this day in 1914. Scott was a mainstay at Warner Bros. in the second half of the 1940s, playing a bunch of characters whose job it seems to have been to make the female leads look good. There's Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce, in what was probably Scott's best role, and then Crawford again in Flamingo Road at the end of the 1940s.



In between, there was also stuff like Stallion Road, one which TCM doesn't show very often, even though it was a Warner Bros. movie and it's also got Ronald Reagan as the star, with Scott in a supporting role. Alexis Smith [edit: it's not Ann Sheridan as I originally wrote] is the female lead in the photo above.

As for a Scott lead, there's The Southerner, in which Scott plays a sharecropper who decides he's going to try to strike out on his own, with all the problems that causes. At least he's not getting Liv Ullmann pregnant all the time.

2 comments:

joel65913 said...

Scott was a much better actor than given credit for. He got stuck in that weaselly villain role and didn't get the opportunities to expand beyond it. His early death cut off any real chance to be well remembered.

By the way that's Alexis Smith not Ann Sheridan in the photo from Stallion Road.

Ted S. (Just a Cineast) said...

Yeah, I knew that was Alexis Smith from when I cropped the photo. This is what I get for not paying close enough attention.