Screen Time: Arthur Kennedy, the biggest actor to ever come out of Worcester (2024)

Craig S. Semon|Worcester Magazine

He was one of the most respected actors in Hollywood.

He wasnominated for five Academy Awards, one for Best Actor and four for Best Supporting Actor.

He worked alongside James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Stewart, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Steve McQueen, Marlene Dietrich, Alan Ladd, Frank Sinatra, Stephen Boyd and Raquel Welch, just to name a few.

He was personal friends with Errol Flynn and Anthony Quinn, who he also worked with twice and four times, respectively, as well as Boris Karloff, William Holden and Harry Morgan, who he had never worked with.

He starred in four Arthur Miller’s plays on Broadway.

In the 1960s, he performed “Becket” onstage with Sir Laurence Olivier and was one of the stars of “Lawrence of Arabia.”

Late in his career, he starred in a science-fiction film, “Fantastic Voyage,” and, a decade later, the chilling horror flick, “The Sentinel.”

He is Arthur Kennedy and he is the biggest actor to ever come out of Worcester bar none.

Grew up in Worcester

Born on Feb.17, 1914, John Arthur Kennedy grew up at 20 Mayfair St. in Worcester.

Kennedy graduated from South High School, Class of 1931, and participated in dramatics at Worcester Academy the following year. He saidin an interview in the Feature Parade Section of the Worcester Sunday Telegram (published May 31, 1953)that he had no intentions of becoming an actor.

If anything, Kennedy said he wanted to play baseball.

More: 'Don't Look Up' director Adam McKay recalls his childhood in city: 'Back then, Worcester was a tough town'

Once described as "an unassuming, young six-footer with thoughtful blue eyes and thick, straight light brown hair," Kennedy’s acting career began accidently.

In his senior year at South, Kennedy, 17, was waiting for a friend who was trying out for “The Skeleton in the Closet,” a school play being put on as a yearbook fundraiser.

“I needed a pasty-faced butler for one of the parts. You know, the kind the audience always suspects,” Charles P. Rugg, a veteran teacher at South High, recalled in the 1953 article. “I looked around the room, and there in a corner sat a thin, cadaverous-looking boy. I had him read a few lines then cast him as Hibbard, the butler.”

Kennedy made his unassuming acting debut on March 27, 1931, in the auditorium of South High School. Nobody, not even Kennedy, knew it at the time, but an actor was born that day.

Shortly after graduating, Kennedy’s father enrolled his son atWorcester Academy to find his future career path, and, boy, did he ever.

First acting award

Kennedy was cast as a lunatic masquerading as an asylum guard in “The Phantom Pilot” and the last survivor of a group of explorers who are cursed after opening a pharaoh’s tomb in “A Message From Khufu.” The latter play won Kennedyhis first acting award, second prize.

After Worcester Academy, Kennedy enrolled at the prestigious Carnegie Tech School of Drama (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh.

At Carnegie, Kennedy fell in love with two things, the collected works of William Shakespeare and classmate and fellow thespian Mary Cheffey. The two married and remained together until her death in 1975.

The couple had two children, Terence and Laurie, the latter of which followed the same career path as her parents.

Laurie made her stage debut in Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” in 1970 in Williamstown and her New York stage debut in “Man and Superman" in 1979, the latter which she won the Theatre World Award and was nominated for a Tony.

Laurie played five different characters in all three primary shows of the “Law & Order” franchise and played City Attorney Felicity Weaver in four episodes of “Homicide: Life on the Street.”

Next for Laurie, she will play an Irish cook named Molly Maguire on Showtime’s “City On A Hill,” starring Kevin Bacon as a corrupt FBI agent. (Is there any other kind?) Laurie starts shooting her episodes in mid-February or mid-March.

“My parents went to college together. They were college sweethearts,” Laurie said. “My mother was an actress and she was the first one from her class to get a job, which totally annoyed my father. He thought that he should have gotten the first job. However, he was the first one to get a film.”

1930s traveling actor

In 1936, Kennedy joined the Globe Theatre traveling repertory, which toured the Midwest offering abbreviated versions of Shakespearian plays given at the Cleveland Dallas Expositions.

In 1937, Kennedy made his Broadway debut in“King Richard II,” opposite noted Shakespearian actor Maurice Evans —best known for playing Dr. Zaius in “Planet of the Apes” and Samantha Stephen’s father, Maurice, on “Bewitched.”

In 1940, Kennedy made his film debut, playing James Cagney's younger brother in ''City for Conquest,"andWarner Brothers Pictures signed himto a five-year contract for $1,000 a week.

In 1941, Kennedy played Red, opposite Humphrey Bogart in “High Sierra,” which was the first of many film noirs Kennedy made in his career.

The same year, Kennedy starred in “They Died with Their Boots On,” with his good friends Errol Flynn and Anthony Quinn, who played Gen. George Armstrong Custer and Chief Crazy Horse, respectively.

“We lived on Mulholland Drive and Flynn had a place further up the road and he didn’t really invite my mother to be along,” Laurie recalled. “He just invited my father because he was drinking. He liked to drink among other things. I don’t think there was any hanky-panky or anything like that. But, it was just, sort of, a man’s night out.”

Laurie also said her father was very close with Anthony Quinn.

“I remember when my father was dying,” Laurie said. “I don’t know how Tony Quinn found out but he called the hospice where my father was and talked to Pop before he died.”

'All My Sons'

On Jan. 29, 1947, Kennedy made his triumphant returned to Broadway in Arthur Miller's Tony Award-winning play "All My Sons," portraying a man who returns from war to find his father exposed as a war profiteer.In reality, Kennedy’s father was a well-respected Worcester dentist.

Four months later, Kennedy’s father died suddenly of a heart attack while riding a Worcester bus. Arthur broke off from the play and rushed home to Worcester. He was in Worcester for two days and received four calls from New York to come back.

Two years later, Kennedy had his biggest Broadway triumph with the role of Biff, the oldest son and most bitter disappointment of the play's central character, Willie Loman, in ''Death of a Salesman.''

Though Kennedy wona Tony for playing Biff, newcomer Kevin McCarthy (best known for the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”) played the character in the film made four years later.

“I don’t think Pop minded it at all because everybody called Kevin McCarthy a poor man’s Arthur Kennedy,” Laurie said. “Pop may have been working at the time …Or he had gotten too old for the role."

Kennedy would go on to starin two more Miller plays, 1953’s ''The Crucible'' and 1968’s ''The Price.''

“Oddly enough, I think Arthur Miller got mad at him (Kennedy) because he didn’t attend some honor that he (Miller) was being presented in Texas,” Laurie recalled. “I think Miller always thought of him as the actor that best impersonated him in the roles that were sort of autobiographical in his plays.”

First Oscar nomination

Acting wise, 1949 was a very good year for Kennedy. Not only did he star in “Death of a Salesman” on Broadway, heplayed Connie Kelly, the crippled brother of boxer Michael “Midge” Kelly (Kirk Douglas), in the 1949 movie “Champion,” which gave Kennedy his first Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

In 1951, Kennedy was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for playing a Sgt. Larry Nevins, a WWII vet blinded in the war, who struggles to accept and eventually come to terms with his disability.

To prepare for the demandingrole, Kennedy worked with real-life blind veterans and wore opaque contact lenses over his eyes.

“You can’t see very well through them, but that, of course, was the idea, and they helped me in the part,” Kennedy said in a 1952 Los Angeles Timesinterview. “You do things instinctively with them on that you wouldn’t without them. More importantly, you think differently.”

Kennedy won another Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his role in 1955’s “Trial,” a movie about a Mexican boy accused of rape and murder who is victimized by prejudiced accusers and his communist defender.

“Pop loved ‘Trial,’” Laurie said. “He was very taken by his work in that as I recall. He had a big speech and he was very proud of that piece of work.”

Kennedy’s intense portrayal of an alcoholic who rapes his stepdaughter in 1957’s “Peyton Place” landed him yet another supporting Oscar nod.

Final Academy Award

In 1958, Kennedy earned his fifth and final Academy Award nomination portraying a rigid businessman who is having an affair with his assistant in “Some Came Running,” starring Frank Sinatra.

“My pop and Sinatra got along really well when they were working because my father would do things in one take because he knew Sinatra hated retakes,” Laurie said. “So he would be on his toes with any scene he had with Sinatra."

Despite being nominated for five Oscars without a win, Laurie doesn’t think her Pop was disappointed about never bringing home Oscar gold.

“He never talked about it. So I don’t think he was upset,” Laurie said. “I think he was very happy to have been nominated five times.”

But Laurie said her Pop was thrilled to be recognized with the top theater award.

“He was happy when he got a Tony for his work as Biff,” Laurie said. “He kept that award. Every other award he didn’t keep.” And, from the looks of the Feature Parade article from the ‘50s, many of Kennedy’s awards ended up in the house of his mother when she was still living in Worcester.

Although he received his last Oscar nomination in the Eisenhower Era, Kennedy had a few tricks up his sleeves for the ‘60s, including appearing opposite Sir Laurence Olivier on Broadway as the title character in ''Becket.”

“On his opening night, Pop went off in his lines and started ad-libbing about taxes seeing as it was April,"Laurie said."I wasn’t there but mother said it was hysterical.”

At first, Kennedy was reluctant to be cast alongside the legendary Olivier but Kennedy's old friend, Boris Karloff, convinced him to do “Becket.”

“Boris Karloff was the reason my father did it,” Laurie recalled. “He said ‘John, you can’t pass down a role opposite Sir Olivier. You got to do it.’”

Turned down role

In 1962, Kennedy did, however,turned down the role of George in the original production of Edward Albee's “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

“My father was in the middle of doing ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ and asked Peter O’Toole to read the script. And O’Toole said it’s a great play but it’s the woman’s play and Pop turned it down,” Laurie said. “Big mistake. Big mistake. And he knew it as soon it as it opened."

At the (fish) tail-end of the ‘60s, Kennedy teamed up with another Worcester native, revolutionary director Samuel Fuller, for the film “Shark!” (also known as “Caine” and “Man-Eater”), starring Burt Reynolds.

Three years older than Kennedy, Fuller attended Ledge Street School, just down the hill from Worcester Academy, but Kennedy’s daughter doesn’t have any stories to tell about these two Worcester natives working together, nor has any recollection of ever seeing the movie whatsoever.

Died in 1990

On Jan.5, 1990, Kennedy died at the Connecticut Hospice in Branford. He was 75 years old.

Laurie also said that, despite a successful acting career, her father was rarely recognized by passers-by.

“People would stop him in the street and ask, ‘I know you? Where do I know you from?’ And if they realized he was an actor they always would say, ‘George Kennedy?’ (of “Cool Hand Luke” and “Airport” fame who doesn’t look anything like Arthur Kennedy). They would get the wrong actor, which never bothered him. He actually took it as a compliment that he acted, in a way, that they couldn’t put him in a slot.”

Laurie said she dearly misses her father’s stories and sense of humor.

“Pop could make everybody fall on the floor,” Laurie said. “He would tell these stories that he had from his theater days. He had a wonderful story about Fred Astaire that you can’t really do justice to, just the way he told it. Everybody was convulsing with laughter.”

Screen Time: Arthur Kennedy, the biggest actor to ever come out of Worcester (2024)
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