July 6 - Sebastian Cabot

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On this day, in 1918, Charles Sebastian Thomas Cabot was born in London, England. When he was 14, Sebastian dropped out of school and began working at a garage. Through that job, he was able to secure the position of chauffeur and valet to Frank Pettingell, a well-established English actor of the times. Working for Frank not only improved Sebastian’s diction and manner of speaking, it also got him interested in the acting profession. He was eventually able to join a repertory theater by completely lying about his previous acting experience. He unabashedly admitted his tactics later in life saying that all of acting was lying anyways so, since it worked, maybe he wasn’t lying about his acting ability after all.

Sebastian’s first appearance on the big screen came in 1935’s Foreign Affairs. He received his first screen credit in Old Mother Riley Overseas as a Bar Steward in 1943. He continued to appear in British films throughout the rest of the Forties and into the Fifties, gradually gaining bigger and bigger parts. Highlights from this period include playing Iago in a condensed version of Othello, the villain Fouracada in Dick Barton Strikes Back and Lord Capulet in an Italian production of Romeo and Juliet.

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In the mid Fifties, Sebastian decided his career needed a boost and hopped the pond to Los Angeles, California. He made his American film debut in 1956 as Bissonette in a western produced by the Walt Disney Studio, Westward Ho the Wagons! The following year, he appeared in another Disney western, Johnny Tremain, as Jonathan Lyte. Sebastian spent the next several years playing small roles in a variety of movies, his career pretty much in the same place it was back in England, just on another continent. Then he changed mediums and things began to heat up for him.


First, Sebastian made the leap to the small screen. He had numerous guest roles on television programs like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Bonanza and The Twilight Zone. His first break came in 1960 when he was chosen to costar with Anthony George and Doug McClure on the CBS detective show, Checkmate. He spent two seasons as Dr. Carl Hyatt, a college professor who aids two private investigators. This led to being a regular panelist on the gameshow Stump the Stars. Sebastian’s most well-known television role started in 1966 when he became Brian Keith’s gentleman’s gentleman, Giles French, on Family Affair. The show was a hit for five seasons, made Sebastian’s face recognizable across the country and created a live action typecast for him that he wouldn’t ever be able to shake. Luckily, he had a second facet to his career to combat that.

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Sebastian did his first bit of voice over work for the Walt Disney Company in 1963. He was cast as both the Narrator and Sir Ector in The Sword and the Stone. Even though Stone was a disappointing movie at the box office, that didn’t keep Sebastian from coming back for more. In fact, each of his next two roles would have cemented his place in Disneyana all on their own. For Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, the studio’s first Pooh short, released in 1966, Sebastian was again asked to provide his soothing tones for the part of the Narrator.  He was so good at it, he narrated the next three shorts and recorded extra lines for the 1977 feature The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. As if being Pooh’s Narrator wasn’t enough, Sebastian also gave voice to Bagheera, the wise yet fussy panther in The Jungle Book (who did narration duty in the film; I’m sensing a pattern here). And he hasn’t been made Legendary yet? We need to get someone on this right away.

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Following the end of Family Affair in 1971, Sebastian only had a few more roles. He played Kris Kringle in a 1973 television adaptation of Miracle on 34^th Street and appeared in an animated special The City That Forgot About Christmas in 1974. That same year, he suffered a mild stroke and withdrew to British Columbia, Canada to recover. Three years later, on August 22, 1977, Sebastian suffered a second fatal stroke. He was cremated and interred in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. He was only 59.