Background
Charles Bickford was born on 1 January 1891 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.
Charles Bickford was born on 1 January 1891 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.
Bickford was an engineer bv training who had fought in the First World War. But throughout the 1920s, he had a successful stage career that carried him to Hollywood when sound arrived. His movie debut was in Dynamite (29, Cecil B. De Mille).
In his first years in films he was a lead actor, young enough to be a rough, romantic star: in Hell’s Heroes (29, William Wyler); as a sea captain with a new young bride, Leonore Ulric, in South Sea Rose (29, Allan Dwan); Passion Flower (30, William De Mille); River's Foul (30, Michael Curtiz); The Sea Bat (30, Wesley Ruggles); The Squaw Man (31, G. B. De Mille); fighting with Paul Lukas for Tallulah Bankhead in Thunder Below (32, Richard Wallace); No Other Woman (32, J. Walter Ruben); Vanity Street (32, Nicholas Grinde); This Day and Age (33, C. B. De Mille); Under Pressure (35, Raoul Walsh); as the gunrunner Latigo in The Plainsman (37, C. B. De Mille); and High, Wide and Handsome (37, Rouben Mamoulian).
By now he was securely playing supporting parts, as he did for another twenty-five years, without real alteration: Daughter of Shanghai (37, Robert Florey); Gangs of New York (38. James Cruze); Stand Up and Fight (39, W. S. Van Dyke); Mutiny in the Big House (39, William Nigh); as the friendly foreman in Of Mice and Men (39, Lewis Milestone); Reap the Wild Wind (42, С. B. De Mille); the priest in The Song of Bernadette (43, Henry King); Mr Lucky (43, H. C. Potter); YVmg and a Prayer (44, Henry Hathaway); Fallen
Angel (45, Otto Preminger); Captain Eddie (45, Lloyd Bacon); excellent as the shy suitor to Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun (46, King Vidor); The Farmer's Daughter (47, Potter); as the blind painter in The Woman on the Beach (47, Jean Renoir); as the priest in Brute Force (47, Jules Dassin); lohnmi Belinda (48, Jean Negulesco); Four Faces West (48, Alfred E. Green); Command Decision (49, Sam Wood); Roseanna McCoy (49. Irving Reis); Whirlpool (49, Preminger); Riding High (50, Frank Capra); Branded (51, Rudolph Maté); Man of Bronze (52, Curtiz); so sensitive as the studio boss in A Star is Born (54, George Cukor) it is hard to know why anyone ever had trouble; The Prince of Players (55, Philip Dunne); Not as a Stranger (55, Stanley Kramer); The Court Maiiial of Billy Mitchell (55, Preminger); You Can’t Run Away From It (56, Dick Powell); Mister Cory (57, Blake Edwards); The Big Country (58, Wyler); The Unforgiven (59, John Huston); very touching as the uncomprehending father in Days of Wine and Roses (63, Edwards); and A Big Hand for the Little Lady (66, Fielder Cook).
As if to prove Bickford's actual appeal, when his death was announced, Jennifer Jones attempted suicide with sleeping pills.
Bickford usually had the taciturn ruggedness of an open-air man, drawn grudgingly into a film studio. He played a few villains, but it is a tribute to the feelings he conveyed of decency and reliability that for over thirty years he personified men ill at ease in the dramatic cockpit of a film: in one of his first films, Anna Christie (30, Clarence Brown), he was an uncomplicated seaman who eventually asks the prostitute Garbo to marry him. In terms of self-sufficiency, stem moral conventions, and the flavor of a tough life, Bickford carried a breath of the outside world. He was not glamorous, and that itself was the basis of his Hollywood appeal, so skillfully offered that it became a beautiful portrait in diffident straightforwardness—being polite to shams.