Multifaceted, prolific actor of stage and screen
Bradford Dillman, a dashingly handsome star of stage and screen who burst to acclaim as the pensive Edmund Tyrone in the original Broadway run of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and played an arrogant psychopath in the gripping 1959 film “Compulsion,” died Tuesday in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 87.
The cause was complications from pneumonia, said family spokesman Ted Gekis. Mr. Dillman was long married to fashion model and actress Suzy Parker.
Born into a socially prominent family — his father was a stockbroker and partner in the firm E.F. Hutton & Co. — Mr. Dillman attended an elite boarding school and graduated from Yale University before pursuing a career in the arts.
His parents “hit the roof,” he told the American Legends website, when he told them of his acting ambitions. He agreed to acquiesce to their plans for him — a career on Wall Street — if he “did not see any symptoms of success” within five years.
After an off-Broadway apprenticeship, Mr. Dillman had a career breakthrough in 1956 when director José Quintero selected him over 500 other actors to play Edmund in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”
“Long Day’s Journey,” with the tubercular Edmund essentially a stand-in for the tortured young playwright, was an autobiographical play about ruin and regret, filled with family secrets of alcohol and morphine addiction.
The play also starred Fredric March, Florence Eldridge and Jason Robards and was showered with honors, including a Pulitzer Prize for drama and a Tony Award for best play.
For Mr. Dillman, the show not only enabled him to squeak out of the five-year bargain he had made with his parents but also introduced him as one of the promising young actors of the era.
Twentieth Century Fox signed Mr. Dillman to a contract, but his slightly aloof Ivy League air was not a natural fit for conventional fare. He said he was often embarrassed by some of his jobs.
His fortunes changed with “Compulsion,” in which two wealthy Chicago law students set out to prove their Nietzschean superiority by kidnapping and killing a neighbor’s young son and getting away with the crime. The film featured Mr. Dillman and Dean Stockwell as the murderers. Mr. Dillman’s character even tries to help the police with clues.
Mr. Dillman, who cannonballed to stardom, later reflected that he took himself very seriously and piqued studio executives by turning down scripts that called for him to play the brother of pop star Fabian. But after marrying Ms. Parker in 1963 and needing to raise six children, he adjusted his expectations.
To Variety, he described himself as a “Safeway actor” — the kind who “put food on the table.”
In Hollywood, his work included supporting roles as a scientist in “Escape From the Planet of the Apes” (1971), Robert Redford’s best friend in “The Way We Were” (1973) and a police captain in the “Dirty Harry” sequel “Sudden Impact” (1983).
He occasionally won meatier parts, such as the Harvard-educated barfly Willie Oban in a 1973 screen version of O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.”
“I’ve had a wonderful life,” Mr. Dillman told interviewer Harvey F. Chartrand. “I married the most beautiful woman in the world. ... I was fortunate to work in a profession where ... I was rewarded with modest success. ... And there are a few good films out there that I might be remembered for.”