“I find the process of making movies absolutely boring. It’s so fragmented. You wait and wait and wait and then, look, as Jack Lemmon says, ‘It’s magic time.’ In the theater, once the curtain goes up, the actor is in charge.”
The actor James Whitmore has died at age 87 of lung cancer. He was diagnosed just before Thanksgiving.
Whitmore spent a lot of time onstage, where did one-man shows about Mark Twain, Harry Truman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and just about every other irascible middle-aged male in American history.
That AP obit has a lot of fascinating nuggets (president-to-be Jerry Ford was Whitmore’s football line coach at Yale) and ends this way:
He married Nancy Mygatt in 1947, and the couple had three sons, James, Steven and Daniel. They later divorced, and in 1971 he married an actress, Audra Lindley. They often appeared in plays together, even after their 1979 divorce. He remarried his first wife in the 1980s, but another divorce ensued. Nearing 80 in 2001, Whitmore married actress-writer Noreen Nash.
(Thanks to Mike Duffy for the tip.)
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