The First Fordham Student to win an Acting Oscar
The First Fordham Student to win an Acting Oscar ….
It may not be who you think.
During the evening of the Academy Awards for 1954 the award for Best Performance, from an actor in a supporting role was announced. “... and the winner is Edmond O’Brien.!”
He won for his performance in Joseph Mankiewicz’s mystery/romance, The Barefoot Contessa.
Starring Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner, in the title role, O’Brien plays a sweaty PR specialist and studio yes man who nervously talks faster and faster as each man-made crisis grows. In its review, Variety described Edmond O’Brien, “... as a glib, nervous, perspiring combination of press agent and (apparent) procurer…” It was his one Oscar, but not his one great performance in a career that lasted over 35 years.
At this point, O’Brien was about half way through his career as a major movie character actor. He started his acting career working in summer stock in Yonkers. He made his first Broadway appearance at age 21 in Daughters of Atreus. When Hollywood came calling, he was cast alongside Charles Laughton and Maureen O’Hara as the playwright Gringoire in the 1939 classic The Hunchback of Notre Dame. In 1949 he co-starred-as the good guy-opposite James Cagney’s, psychopathic, oedipal villain in White Heat. His last major cinematic role came in Sam Peckinpah’s western classic The Wild Bunch in 1969 when he was cast as a grizzly old horse trader of questionable morals.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)
He received an additional academy award nomination for his work as a brave Southern Senator in Seven Days in May, set against the backdrop of cold-war tensions and an attempted political cabal in 1964.
A Bronx Boy
Eamon Joseph O'Brien (1915 to 1985) was reportedly a neighbor of Harry Houdini while growing up in The Bronx and decided to emulate Houdini by becoming a magician himself. He took part in student theatrics in high school and majored in drama at Fordham.
The powerful, no nonsense, very human roles seemed suited for the man who was married twice and as Turner Classic Movies stated: “He lived just as large off-screen, where he was noted for his generosity, ability to converse intelligently on almost any topic and heavy drinking.
Lead in B-Movies
For a time O’Brien did play the leading figure. He was the title character in Ida Lupino’s The Bigamist (1953) and in one of the truly great film-noir performances, he played Frank Bigelow, a man, with 48 hours to life, who knows he has been poisoned, in the classic D.O.A. (1949).
Counting both film and television, he completed approximately 120 roles. Both large and small. Or to paraphrase one of the kindest things that can be offered up to career, “second banana”: He may not have kissed the girl, but he could probably have lent money to the guys that did.
The Everyman of Film-Noir
In his 2018 biography of the late actor entitled Edmond O’Brien Everyman of Film-Noir Derek Sculthorpe described the overall context in which the actor worked. “He was a devotee of Shakespeare, impressing John Gielgud in his performance of Casca in Julius Caesar (1953) ... O’Brien also worked in radio and contributed to this medium from the mid-1930s for nearly 20 years between his film and other work.”
He added: “It is often forgotten that he was a stage actor of some reputation before he cast his lot with Hollywood. The verse of the immortal Bard retained a special resonance for him and it was a perpetual joy for him to act in his plays on stage with some of the great Shakespearean players of the time including Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. O’Brien even recorded an album of romantic poems which revealed a far less familiar side of him.”
Since You’ve Read This Far I might have an answer
I have been a fan of Edmond O’Brien since I first saw him in D.O.A. as far back as my late twenties. For a long time after that, I had no idea he had ever attended Fordham University. Perhaps the reason he is not mentioned among our Alma mater’s great acting fraternity of Alan Alda and Denzel Washington (yep, he’s the academy award winner I was thinking of) is that Edmond O’Brien never graduated? After enrolling in Fordham University, he dropped out to join the first class at the Neighborhood Playhouse, studying acting under Sanford Meisner … In my research, I found some unsubstantiated reporting that he left school to earn money to support his family; in any event, he did come of age during the Great Depression.
Though he doesn’t have a diploma, he is among our treasured school family.
Donna Reed Bestows a kiss on Edmund O’Brien on Oscar Night.
Kevin Bergin
Can be reached Fordham Class of 1980 Facebook site: https://www.facebook.com/groups/537184563628982/about/
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