James Cromwell Biography

Actor

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James Cromwell played kindly Farmer Hoggett in the 1995 movie Babe, winning an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor for the role. Cromwell was already a veteran character actor who had begun working in television in the early 1970s. He played Archie Bunker's friend Stretch Cunningham on the sitcom All In the Family and made dozens of guest appearances in shows like M*A*S*H (with Alan Alda) and Three's Company (with Suzanne Somers). He made his feature film debut in the 1976 spoof Murder by Death and worked steadily in character roles until his 1995 breakthrough in Babe. The tall, avuncular Cromwell followed up with a memorable role as a dirty police captain in director Curtis Hanson's L. A. Confidential (1997, starring Russell Crowe). He also appeared in The General's Daughter (1999, starring John Travolta) and played prison wardens in The Green Mile (1999, starring Tom Hanks) and The Longest Yard (2005, with Adam Sandler). He has continued to work steadily on TV, most notably with recurring roles in the medical drama E.R. and the HBO series Six Feet Under.

Extra credit: Cromwell has appeared several times on shows in television's Star Trek franchise, and he co-starred in the 1996 theatrical feature Star Trek: First Contact... Cromwell played President Lyndon Johnson in the 2002 TV movie RFK, Prince Philip in the 2006 film The Queen (with Helen Mirren as Elizabeth II), and William Randolph Hearst in the 1999 TV movie RKO 281 (with Liev Schreiber as Orson Welles).

James Cromwell appears in our loop Critter Defenders, along with other animal rights activists such as Ricki Lake and Pamela Anderson.

He also makes a cameo appearance alongside Babe in the loop I'm Not Dead Yet! And a few more details about his varied career can be found in this 2006 Who2 blog post.

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