Marilyn Monroe’s last surviving leading man who was Oscar-nominated for his film debut Bus Stop
DON MURRAY, who has died aged 94, was a seasoned American stage, film and TV actor who earned Bafta and Oscar nominations for his debut movie role as Beauregard “Beau” Decker, the unworldly cowpoke who treats Marilyn Monroe’s singer Cherie like cattle in the grabby Fox melodrama Bus Stop (1956).
Ripped from William Inge’s Broadway sensation, the story was just seamy enough to ensure box-office success, and the tall, athletic, conventionally handsome Murray found himself squarely at its centre. “Hollywood’s newest hunk of man!” boomed the film’s lustiest trailer.
Yet it was fanciful casting, by Murray’s own admission: “No one could have been less equipped for the job. I was a New Yorker who’d never ridden a real horse and had tackled football players but never a 500-pound steer.”
As Murray maintained, Monroe was “very supportive”, even while succumbing to nerves herself: “We did a bed scene, she was actually naked under the sheets, and I could see her body covered with this red rash. She got so nervous that she’d break out… and she had to cover it with make-up. She had done so many films, and yet she was so frightened.”
After Bus Stop, Murray sought out ambiguous parts in trickier projects: a morphine-addled veteran in A Hatful of Rain (1957), the student pulled into the Irish Troubles (and armed conflict with professor James Cagney) in Shake Hands with the Devil (1959), the closeted senator in Advise & Consent (1962). He worked consistently, earning his Walk of Fame star as early as 1960, but without ever becoming a household name: “I came to Hollywood, and they said I needed to establish a persona that the audience could relate to and would be a reliable thing for them to get behind. I did the exact opposite.”
Donald Patrick Murray was born on July 31 1929, the second of three children to the Fox choreographer Dennis Murray and his wife Ethel, née Cook, a sometime performer with the Ziegfeld Follies.
The following year, the family moved to New York, where the young Donald attended East Rockaway High, excelling in gridiron, track athletics and theatre club. He studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan, making his television debut as Biondello in a 1950 adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, opposite Charlton Heston as Petruchio.
After graduating, Murray made his Broadway debut in Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo, but his career was paused as military service loomed. As an Anabaptist Christian – guided by a strictly pacifist doctrine – he was spared the Korean War, and posted instead to an internment camp in Naples housing those displaced during the war, where he helped to build a school and taught the locals basketball.
Following honourable discharge in 1954, he founded the non-profit HELP (Homeless European Land Program) with his first wife, the actress Hope Lange, who had also been in Bus Stop; they raised $100,000 and bought a plot of land in Sardinia to establish a farming community for refugees.
By the 1970s, Murray was settling into patrician roles, notably the authoritarian Governor Breck in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972). As dealership owner Sid Fairgate, he was an early pillar of the Dallas spin-off Knots Landing (1979-93), only to quit after two seasons. In the 1980s he played dad to younger stars: Brooke Shields in Endless Love (1981), Helen Hunt in Quarterback Princess (1983), Kathleen Turner in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986).
Murray’s faith informed his directorial debut The Cross and the Switchblade (1970), a drama about the real-life bond between a pastor and a gang member; later efforts – such as Elvis Is Alive (2001) and Breathe! (2008), a sub-aquatic thriller written by his son, Mick – were less favourably reviewed.
Murray announced his retirement from acting in 2001, before a touchingly unexpected comeback as Bushnell “Battling Bud” Mullins, former prizefighter turned chipper manager of an insurance firm beset by supernatural forces in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). With the death of Tony Curtis in 2010 he became the last of Monroe’s leading men still extant. He signed off by returning to the range, cameoing in the lowbudget Western Promise (2021).
Don Murray is survived by his second wife Betty, whom he married in 1962, and five children, two from his first marriage, and three from his second.