November 14 - Brian Keith

Picture borrowed from startrek.com

On this day, in 1921, Robert Alba Keith was born in Bayonne, New Jersey. The son of Robert Keith and Helena Shipman, both actors, his full name could also be Brian Robert Keith, depending on which source you consult. At any rate his professional name was Brian Keith and his career started shortly after his parents divorced when he was two.

When I say his career started, I mean he made an appearance in a silent film, Pied Piper Malone, at the age of three. He would then take a break for a couple of decades. His mother acted on stage and radio in New York while Brian was raised by his grandmother on Long Island. After graduating from East Rockaway High School in 1939, he joined the United States Marine Corps and served as an air gunner during World War II for which he earned an Air Medal.

Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

Following the war, Brian picked up his acting career with small roles on the stage and radio. In 1952, he branched out into television making his debut on an anthology series called Tales of Tomorrow. All kinds of parts followed on everything from The Pepsi-Cola Playhouse to The Adventures of Ellery Queen. In 1955, Brian landed his own show, Crusader, where he played Matt Anders, a journalist who tries to free people stuck in communist countries. It ran for two seasons. For the rest of the Fifties and into the Sixties, he had guest roles on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Rawhide, The Fugitive, 77 Sunset Strip and dozens of other shows.

Brian had also had a variety of roles in movies during the same era, many in film noir genre, including one, Fourteen Hours, with his father. Brian's rugged good looks also made him good for Westerns and he starred in his share of those as well, including Arrowhead with Charlton Heston, The Violent Men with Glenn Ford and Sam Peckinpah's The Deadly Companions.

Picture grabbed from BasementRejects.com

Brian's first film with Disney was Ten Who Dared in 1960, as William Dunn, one of a group of men mapping the Colorado River in 1869. He's probably best known for his next role with the studio, Mitch Evers, the father of Hayley Mills and ex of Maureen O'Hara in 1961's The Parent Trap. He then portrayed Major General Vannerman in the sci-fi comedy Moon Pilot, Uncle Beck Coates in Savage Sam, the 1963 sequel to Old Yeller, and Sheriff Pete Williams in A Tiger Walks with Vera Mills. Brian's final role with Disney was as Cam Calloway in Those Calloways, with Ed Wynn and, again, Vera Mills.

Picture lifted from EmbarrassingTreasures.com

While Brian would continue to appear in dozens of films throughout the rest of his life, his biggest success would come on the small screen. In 1966, he nabbed the role of Uncle Bill Davis on the CBS sitcom Family Affair, which starred another Disney regular, Sebastian Cabot. Brian would earn three Emmy nominations during the shows five year run and become a household name. In 1973, he would get a show named after him, The Brian Keith Show, which would run on NBC for two seasons. His final major television role would be Milton C. Hardcastle on the ABC crime dramedy Hardcastle and McCormick. That show started in 1983 and ran for three seasons.

After several decades of success, Brian's life would end with decidedly tragic notes. In April of 1997, one of his daughters, Daisy, would commit suicide. Two months later, on June 24, 1997, Brian would be found in his Malibu, California home, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His frequent co-star Maureen O'Hara believed that his death was accidental but he was known to be suffering from emphysema and depression and may have been facing financial problems. Brian was cremated and laid to rest next to his daughter, Daisy, at Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles. He was 75.