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Emmy and Tony winner Hal Holbrook, an actor best known for his role as Mark Twain, whom he played for decades in one man shows, died on January 23. He was 95 years old.
Holbrook’s personal assistant, Joyce Cohen, confirmed her death to the New York Times on Monday evening.
Holbrook played the American novelist in a solo show titled “Mark Twain Tonight!” which he directed and for which he won the Tony Award for Best Actor in 1966. He returned to Broadway with the show in 1977 and 2005 and appeared there over 2,200 times (in 2010) in legitimate places across the country. He started performing the show in 1954.
He received an Emmy nomination for a TV adaptation of “Mark Twain Tonight!” in 1967, the first of several names. He won four Emmy Awards.
He also drew an Oscar nomination for Supporting Actor for his role in the film “Into the Wild” in 2008. At the time of the nomination, Holbrook, 82, was the oldest performer ever to receive such recognition.
Holbrook’s craggy voice and appearance lent itself to historical performances and other parts that required gravity. Indeed, he also played Abraham Lincoln, winning an Emmy in 1976 for the NBC miniseries “Lincoln” and reprising the role in the ABC miniseries “North and South” in 1985 and its sequel the following year. In addition, he won his first Emmy, in 1970, for his role as the main character in the short but highly regarded series “The Bold Ones: The Senator”. He played the Commander-in-Chief in the 1980 film “The Abduction of the President”; an experienced judge tempted by justice in “The Star Chamber”; and John Adams in the 1984 miniseries “George Washington”. Much later he played Assistant Secretary of State on a few episodes of “The West Wing,” and more recently he played a conservative Republican Congressman in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” and a judge in the historic drama of 2013 “Savannah”.
In 1978 he was nominated for an Emmy for his role in a television adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” as a stage manager, another role with which he is strongly associated.
Previously, he had drawn an Emmy nomination for an outstanding role as the man who revealed his homosexuality to his son, played by Martin Sheen, in the 1972 ABC TV epic “That Certain Summer”.
He returned to Linda Bloodworth’s late 1980s sitcom “Designing Women” as a boyfriend to his real wife, Dixie Carter; his character on that show was killed off so he could take one of the lead roles in another CBS-Bloodworth effort, Burt Reynolds star “Evening Shade,” in which he played the irascible stepfather of Reynolds. He appeared in 79 episodes of the show from 1990 to 1994.
Holbrook also directed four episodes of “Designing Women”.
In 2006, the actor turned to “The Sopranos” as a terminally ill patient who conveys some wisdom to the hospitalized Tony Soprano.
Holbrook’s inimitable voice, filled with world-weary integrity, was inevitably appealing to documentary makers and directors of feature films requiring narration or voiceover. He has narrated docuses such as “The Might Mississippi” and “The Cultivated Life: Thomas Jefferson and Wine” and films including “Water for Elephants” in 2011. He won an Emmy in 1989 for narrating the “Alaska” segment from the documentary series “Portrait of America”.
The actor also made a deep impression on the big screen, playing Deep Throat in “All the President’s Men” – he was the one who sang the famous words “Follow the Money!”; a power-crazed police lieutenant in the Dirty Harry movie “Magnum Force”; and, in a brief and underrated performance, a broker warning of the dangers of ethical breaches on “Wall Street” by Oliver Stone.
Harold Rowe “Hal” Holbrook, Jr. was born in Cleveland; her mother was a vaudeville dancer. He grew up in South Weymouth, Massachusetts, and graduated from Ohio Denison U., where an honors project on Twain led him to develop “Mark Twain Tonight”. Serving in the Army during World War II, Holbrook was stationed in Newfoundland, where he performed in theatrical productions, including the play “Madame Precious”.
Ed Sullivan saw him perform “Mark Twain Tonight” and gave the young thesp his first national exposure on his television show in February 1956.
Holbrook was a member of the legitimate Valley Players summer troupe, based in Holyoke, Mass., And opened its 1957 season with a performance of “Mark Twain Tonight”. The State Department sent him on a tour of Europe that included appearances behind the Iron Curtain, and Holbrook first played the role of Off Broadway in 1959. Columbia Records recorded an album of clips from the show.
On Broadway, Holbrook played the role of major in the original production of Arthur Miller’s “Incident at Vichy” in 1964. In 1968, he was a replacement for Richard Kiley in the original Broadway production of “Man of La.” Mancha ”despite having a limited capacity as a singer.
As Holbrook neared the mid-80s, he remained a busy actor, including multi-episode appearances on FX’s “Sons of Anarchy” and NBC’s “The Event”. In 2011, he was also in an independent film, the thriller “Good Day for It”, in which he was intimately involved in the conception, and he appeared as a science teacher who knows the truth in the anti-fracking film of Gus Van Sant “Promised Land”. “
Holbrook’s memoir “Harold: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain” was published in September 2011.
In 2014, Holbrook was the subject of the documentary “Holbrook / Twain: An American Odyssey,” directed by Scott Teems, which premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival and portrayed Holbrook’s career as Twain. Holbrook appeared as Red Hudmore on the final season of “Bones” in 2017, and appeared in an episode of “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Hawaii Five-0” the same year. In September 2017, Holbrook announced his retirement from “Mark Twain Tonight”.
Holbrook has married three times. He and Carter married in 1984 and stayed together until his death in 2010.
He is survived by his three children and two step-daughters, as well as two grandchildren and two step-grandchildren.
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