John Carradine--A Life Well-Spent in the Actor’s Trade

The true actor is an actor is an actor is an actor. The salary may be large enough to keep a whole country afloat for several days or so small you can’t afford a second cup of coffee. But all that really matters is that you stride on stage or stand in front of a camera and pretend to be somebody else.

Despite the acclaim, the fame, the riches and even the titles before the name--Sir Richard, Sir John, His Lordship--that reward the luckier ones, the actor is, in his soul, still simply the actor, most likely a mixture of ego and insecurity, Narcissus and neurosis.

The actor traces descent from forebears who wore togas and declaimed in stone amphitheaters, from traveling players who lived like Gypsies and were treated as poorly. Once upon a time the actor ranked just above footpads and cutpurses on the social scale and even now it’s not certain you’d want your child to marry one.

John Carradine, who died earlier this week at the age of 82, was the very model of the actor, although from an earlier incarnation of the breed.

With his proscenium-shaking voice, his red-lined cape, broad-brimmed hats and matching flamboyance, he seemed closer in spirit to Sir Henry Irving and the touring actor-managers of another era.

Sir Donald Wolfit was probably the last of his kind in Britain. He was the real-life model for the Albert Finney character in “The Dresser,” and it is a role that John Carradine could have played to a roaring perfection. Carradine was the last of the large-gesture actors here, not simply by reason of age but of style.

Carradine did so many roles of a nutritious corn-fed hamminess, especially in the later years, that it was easy to forget what a sensitive and characterful performance he could deliver. But there is the evidence of “The Grapes of Wrath” and “Captains Courageous,” among other films, to remind us of his range.

It was just that he did villainy and looniness so well--the thin eyes glittering in the sharp and hollow-cheeked visage--that the gift became an entrapment, keeping him away from the Shakespeare whose resounding rhythms were the music he loved the most.

In his later years he kept his Shakespearean muscles toned up by establishing amateur or semi-professional productions of the plays, leaving the locals to work up the supporting parts and then returning to star. He was theater with large capital T in a lot of places that hadn’t had much since the movies were born.

He observed an older tradition among actors of both stage and screen in that his private life tended to be as theatrical as his professional life, with marriage and romance in abundance but also with a strong sense of family and sons who were happy to have his guidance and follow in his footsteps.

Ironically, the low-keyed naturalism of Keith and David Carradine’s acting is in a far different, later tradition from their father’s grand and operatic style. Yet there is a linking chord of intensity between their approach and his. Like their father, those of his sons who chose to act (one is an architect) are true actors who prize the profession above the celebrity and the trappings.

John Carradine complained from time to time that his talent could have been more amply rewarded with leading roles and larger paychecks. It really was true he was so good at being bad that it too often typecast him. Yet his complaints seemed less an outpouring of deep bitterness than expressions of an actor’s insatiable appetite for more make-believe.

In spite of severe problems with arthritis, Carradine was an actor to the end, and it is pleasing to know that he had come to a festival in Italy--where he died--to be honored for a life’s work.