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Wallace Maynard Cox was an American television and movie actor.
Background
Wallace Maynard Cox was born on December 6, 1924 in Detroit, Michigan, United States. His father, George Wallace Cox, was an advertising copywriter; his mother, Eleanor Frances Atkinson, was a mystery writer who used the pseudonym Eleanor Blake. Cox's parents divorced when he was young, and he moved with his mother and sister, Eleanor, to New York City.
Education
A shy youth, he did well in school while suffering the usual bullying accorded to socially and physically awkward students. He planned to study botany at City College of New York, but instead he quit school in 1942 in order to work to support his family when his mother became ill and was partially paralyzed. He entered New York University to study handicrafts.
Career
After a number of odd jobs, he was drafted into the army, serving a short stint in Fort Walters, Texas. He set up shop as a silversmith, making accessories for New York haberdashers.
There was little about Cox's life that pointed to a career in show business. While at a party, however, he delivered a comic monologue based on an imitation of a soldier he knew in the army. Cox met with such success that he took his act to other parties, building a reputation along the way. Besides encouragement from his sister, Cox also received advice and praise from actor Marlon Brando, his close friend. Although the pair may have seemed to be an odd couple--Brando was then emerging as the symbol of hip macho--their friendship remained strong throughout Cox's life. Cox was soon circulating among the theater crowd and joined the American Creative Theater Group. At one theater party, a well-connected guest heard Cox and persuaded Max Gordon, owner of the famous New York nightclub, the Village Vanguard, to audition the aspiring comic. Gordon put Cox to work on the night of the audition. The audience responded so enthusiastically that Cox went on to complete a two-month engagement, and his entertainment career was assured.
Cox got his next break when theatrical producer Dwight Deere Wiman chose him for a role in the musical revue Dance Me a Song. Although the revue was largely panned, Cox was a hit. The New York Post declared, "Just put him down as the humorous find of the year. " Cox was soon inundated with offers from nightclubs, Broadway, television, and radio. He accepted several offers and spent the next few years moving from engagements at the Plaza Hotel in New York to appearances on the variety shows of Perry Como, Ed Sullivan, Garry Moore, and Arthur Godfrey.
In 1951 Cox starred in a "Philco Television Playhouse" production, playing a man who was continually and unintentionally the cause of an involved commotion. From this role came the seed of "Mr. Peepers, " a situation comedy on NBC starring Cox as high school science teacher Robinson Peepers, whose earnest efforts to help out always ended in a mess. The show began inauspiciously in July 1952, intended to be an eight-week series to fill a gap in the summer replacement schedule. At the end of the summer, however, more than 8, 000 letters poured into NBC in support of the show, spurred on in part by a glowing review in Time magazine. When an unlucky NBC series called "Doc Corkle" was canceled after three episodes, Cox's show was tapped to fill the slot. Wally Cox had been in the right place at the right time. If Cox's early life gave little hint of his show business future, it at least provided him with the basic material for his most important role.
After the series went off the air in 1954, Cox and writer William Redfield pieced together material from the series to produce Mr. Peepers: A Sort of Novel (1955). "Mr. Peepers" was Cox's greatest triumph, but it also circumscribed his future career. His roles afterward were largely an attempt to recreate this formula, with little success. In 1956, Cox starred in "The Adventures of Hiram Holliday, " in which a meek, mild-mannered proof-reader from a New York newspaper was found to possess amazing skills, including fencing, scuba diving, art forgery, and piloting. The show was canceled in six months. If Cox had difficulty recapturing the glint of stardom, he had no problem finding work. During the 1960's he turned to the movies, taking roles in such films as State Fair (1962), Spencer's Mountain (1963), The Bedford Incident (1965), A Guide for the Married Man (1967), The One and Only Genuine Original Family Band (1968), The Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County (1970), and The Barefoot Executive (1971), none of which garnered much critical acclaim. He also kept busy in television, mostly appearing in single episodes of well-known series, including "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" (1961), "Car 54, Where Are You?" (1962), "The Lucy Show" (1963), "The Twilight Zone" (1964), "Mission: Impossible" (1966), and "Ironside" (1967). Cox always had an urge to write, and during this time he published several books.
In 1961, he wrote My Life As a Small Boy, a semiautobiographical account that he also illustrated. Kirkus Reviews praised the book, noting that "like its author, this collection of short pieces via small town Americana is quietly funny, quietly touching, and quietly slick. " The New York Times also praised it, commenting that "after reading the compassionate and uncomplaining accounts of his past tribulations, one is inclined to subject Mr. Cox to no more bullying. " Cox's next effort, Ralph Makes Good, appears to have gone largely unreviewed by major publications. The Tenth Life of Osiris Oaks, a children's book that Cox wrote with Everett Greenbaum in 1972, gained mixed attention. While the New York Review of Books praised the "cheerful, light-hearted" nature of the book, the New York Times panned it. Cox's big comeback came in 1968, when he became one of the two permanent panelists on the popular game show, "Hollywood Squares. " Once again, Cox took on the role of Mr. Peepers, delivering his lines in the shy, diffident, and slyly comic style that had become his trademark.
Quotations:
"His night club monologues were full of elaborate, stuffy detail which was terribly important in the lives of small, unimportant people and he invested these small facts with such great earnestness that he was hilarious and curiously poignant. "
Connections
Cox married three times, to Marilyn Gennaro, Milagros Tirado, and Patricia Tiernan, and was survived by his third wife and his two children.