Bradford Dillman

Prolific Hollywood and television actor

Bradford Dillman, a Broadway and film actor known for his roles in Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Compulsion, has died in Santa Barbara, California. He was 87.

Dillman began acting professionally in 1953 but had his breakthrough three years later, in the original Broadway production of Eugene O’neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. He played Edmund Tyrone, the peacekeeping younger brother in a dysfunctional family. It earned him a 1957 Theater World Award and a 20th Century Fox contract.

In 1959, he won a Golden Globe for most promising newcomer and starred with Orson Welles and Dean Stockwell in Compulsion, a film based on the Leopold and Loeb murders in Chicago.

Bradford Dillman was born in San Francisco on April 14, 1930, to Dean Dillman, a stockbroker, and Josephine Moore. He attended the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut and earned a degree in literature from Yale in 1951. He served in the Marines during the Korean War, reaching the rank of first lieutenant.

His acting career was prolific, with at least 140 film and TV credits. He rarely turned down a job. “I had six kids and had to put food on the table,” he told Variety in 1995.

Dillman played roles in The Enforcer and Sudden Impact, the third and fourth films in the Dirty Harry series. He also acted in the TV series Murder, She Wrote, starring his friend Angela Lansbury.

Offscreen, he was a writer of fiction and non-fiction, including a memoir, Are You Anybody? An Actor’s Life (1997).

Dillman was married to Frieda Mcintosh from 1956 to 1962, and to Suzy Parker, a model and actress, from 1963 until her death in 2003. He is survived by a sister, five children, a stepdaughter, eight grandchildren and two stepgrandchildren. New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service