Film, TV and stage actor Bradford Dillman dies at 87
Earned early acclaim for role in O’Neill play
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 Jan. 16 in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 87.
The cause was complications from pneumonia, said family spokesman Ted Gekis. 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. — Dillman attended an elite boarding school and graduated from Yale University before pursuing a career in the arts. He wryly noted that, unlike actors who inherited less-than-marquee names, he did not need to change his.
“Bradford Dillman sounded like a distinguished phony theatrical name,” he once quipped, “so I liked it and kept it.”
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, 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.” (Dillman also passed muster with O’Neill’s widow, Carlotta.)
“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. The premiere helped revive widespread interest in O’Neill, who had died three years earlier and was by the 1950s seen as a theatrical anachronism.
For Dillman, the show not only enabled him to squeak out of the bargain he had made with his parents but also introduced him as one of the promising young actors of the era. A critic for the trade paper Variety praised him for his “artful blend of strength and gentleness.”
Twentieth Century Fox signed 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, loosely based on the 1924 Loeb-Leopold “thrill killing,” featured Dillman and Dean Stockwell as the murderers. Dillman’s character — callow and braggadocious — even tries to help the police with clues.
New York Times film critic A.H. Weiler singled out Dillman “as an actor of imposing stature as the bossy, over-ebullient and immature mama’s boy.” He, Stockwell and Orson Welles, who played their Clarence Darrow-esque defense lawyer, shared the best-actor award at the Cannes Film Festival.