George Macready


George Peabody Macready Jr. was an American stage, film, and television actor often cast in roles as polished villains.

Background

Macready was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and graduated from the local Classical High School and, in 1921, from Brown University, where he was a member of Delta Phi fraternity and won a letter as the football team manager. While in college, Macready sustained a permanent scar on his right cheek after being thrust through the windshield of a Ford Model T when the vehicle skidded on an icy road and hit a telephone pole. He was stitched up by a veterinarian, but he caught scarlet fever during the ordeal. The injury, along with his high brow and perfect diction, gave Macready the Gothic look of an authoritarian or villainous character.
Macready first worked in a bank in Providence and was then briefly a newspaperman in New York City before he turned to stage acting. He claimed to have been descended from the 19th century Shakespearean actor William Macready.

Acting career

Theatre

Macready made his Broadway debut in a 1926 stage adaptation of The Scarlet Letter. Through 1958, he appeared in fifteen plays, both drama and comedy, including The Barretts of Wimpole Street, based on the family of the English poetess, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Macready's penchant for acting was spurred in part by the director Richard Boleslawski. His Shakespearean stage credits included Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, Malcolm in Macbeth and Paris in Romeo and Juliet. On film, he played Marallus in the 1953 film adaptation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. He also portrayed Prince Ernst in the original stage version of Victoria Regina, starring Helen Hayes.

Film

Macready's first film was Commandos Strike at Dawn, which starred Paul Muni. In Gilda, Macready's character Ballin Mundson enters a deadly love triangle with characters played by co-stars with Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford. He would again play opposite Ford several years later in the post-war adventure The Green Glove.
Stanley Kubrick's anti-war film Paths of Glory provided Macready with his other great role, self-serving French World War I general Paul Mireau, who is brought down by Kirk Douglas's character, Colonel Dax. He had worked with Douglas previously in Detective Story, and later he appeared with Douglas in two more films: Vincente Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town and John Frankenheimer's Seven Days in May. In 1965, he was cast in a rare comedy role as General Kuhster in Blake Edwards's film The Great Race.
One of Macready's last film roles was as United States Secretary of State Cordell Hull in Tora! Tora! Tora!, a depiction of the events leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Television

Macready made four guest appearances on Raymond Burr's Perry Mason, including the role of murder victim Milo Girard in the 1958 episode "The Case of the Purple Woman." He was also cast regularly in such series as Four Star Playhouse, General Electric Theater, The Ford Television Theatre, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Adventures in Paradise and The Islanders.
Macready appeared in many western television series produced in the 1950s and 1960s, including Bat Masterson, Bonanza, The Dakotas, Gunsmoke, Have Gun - Will Travel, The Rebel, The Rifleman, Lancer, Riverboat, The Rough Riders, Chill Wills's Frontier Circus, The Texan and Steve McQueen's . Also on TV, he was seen in episodes of The Outer Limits, Boris Karloff's Thriller, Get Smart with Don Adams and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. with Robert Vaughn.
Macready also portrayed Colonel John Barrington in the 1961 episode "Handful of Fire" of the NBC Western series Laramie.
Macready was cast as Cyrus Canfield, a vengeful father searching for his runaway teenaged daughter, played by Floy Dean, in the May 26, 1962, series finale of NBC's The Tall Man.
In the 1960s, Macready performed for three years in the role of Martin Peyton in ABC's Peyton Place, the first prime-time soap opera on American television, with Dorothy Malone in the lead role of Constance MacKenzie.
He played publishing magnate Glenn Howard in the TV movie Fame Is the Name of the Game starring Anthony Franciosa, but was replaced by Gene Barry in the role when the film was subsequently used as the pilot for the television series The Name of the Game with Franciosa, Barry, and Robert Stack revolving in the lead.

Personal life

An art collector, Macready was a partner with colleague Vincent Price in a Beverly Hills art gallery called The Little Gallery, which they opened in 1943. According to Lucy Chase Williams' book The Complete Films of Vincent Price, "The establishment merited photos and two full columns in Newsweek magazine, but rent increases forced The Little Gallery to close after two years."
Macready married actress Elizabeth Dana Patterson. He was the father of actor/producer Michael Macready, Marcia Macready and Elizabeth Dana Macready. He is the grandfather of gymnast John Macready and 3 other grandchildren and 6 great grandchildren.

Death

Macready died of emphysema in 1973 and his body was donated to the UCLA School of Medicine.

Filmography

Peyton Place as Martin Peyton