Eddie Albert

Amiable actor with a six-decade film career

The amiable Eddie Albert, best known for his role in the long-running television sitcom Green Acres, also had a film career that lasted from the Thirties to the Nineties, during which he was twice nominated for an Academy Award. His first Oscar nomination came in 1953 for Roman Holiday and the second in 1972 for The Heartbreak Kid.

Edward Albert Heimberger (Eddie Albert), actor: born Rock Island, Illinois 22 April 1906; married 1945 Margo (died 1985; one son, one adopted daughter); died Los Angeles 26 May 2005.

The amiable Eddie Albert, best known for his role in the long-running television sitcom Green Acres, also had a film career that lasted from the Thirties to the Nineties, during which he was twice nominated for an Academy Award. His first Oscar nomination came in 1953 for Roman Holiday and the second in 1972 for The Heartbreak Kid.

The eldest of five children, born Edward Albert Heimberger, he was a year old when his family moved from Illinois to Minnesota. After owning and managing two small restaurants, his father sold them and went into the insurance business. While attending St Stephen's Parochial School in Minneapolis, young Eddie found he could make his classmates laugh by wiggling his ears. A shy boy, he gained confidence from this approval and played a leading role in the senior class play, J.M. Barrie's A Kiss for Cinderella.

After graduating from the University of Minneapolis, Eddie Albert worked as an insurance salesman until two friends persuaded him to join them in St Louis in a radio singing act. "I decided to do it temporarily in order to eat", he recalled. "I had really sold no insurance at all except to my father".

After appearing in summer stock, he made his Broadway début in a small role in O Evening Star (1936), a five-performance flop. Within months, he was playing the leading role in Brother Rat, a successful farce set in a Virginia military academy. His first musical was The Boys from Syracuse (1938), Rodgers and Hart's adaptation of Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors.

In 1938 Warner Bros not only bought Brother Rat for the screen, they signed Albert to act in the film version. A seven-year contract resulted, and he made On Your Toes, Four Wives (both in 1939), Brother Rat and a Baby, An Angel from Texas, A Dispatch from Reuters (all 1940), Four Mothers, The Wagons Roll at Night and Out of the Fog (all 1941). At this point, Albert's career at Warner Bros suddenly stopped. The studio's Head of Production, Jack L. Warner, discovering that Albert was having an affair with his wife, saw to it that the erring actor received no further assignments from the studio.

In 1942 Albert entered the US Navy, serving until 4 December 1945. The very next day, he married the Mexican actress-singer-dancer Maria Margharita Guadalupe Teresa Estella Bolado de Castilla y Matero, whose professional name was Margo. After a few indifferent postwar films, Albert accepted a leading role in the Broadway musical Miss Liberty (1949). Despite a score by Irving Berlin and a book by Robert E. Sherwood, it lasted for only 308 performances.

In 1952 Albert won his first important post-war role, as the salesman Charles Drouet in the screen version of Theodore Dreiser's Carrie. Putting all his experience as a salesman into the part, he drew praise, and Carrie's producer-director William Wyler cast him again, in Roman Holiday (1953).

His performance as Gregory Peck's photographer friend won him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but he lost to his old friend Frank Sinatra. In 1998, Albert said in a BBC radio interview, "On Oscar Night, Margo and I were doing our nightclub act in Florida, where we found a TV and watched Frank take the Oscar away from me for his performance in From Here to Eternity. If I had to lose I am glad it was to him". He later played Sinatra's friend and pianist in The Joker is Wild (1958).

Other key films of the 1950s included Oklahoma! (1955) in which he was the Persian peddlar, Ali Hakim, and I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955), in which Margo also appeared. He was electrifying as an unstable army officer in Robert Aldrich's film Attack! (1956). "I started out with a belief that there are no villains", he told Lillian and Helen Ross for their book The Player (1962).

A villain may be an honest, sincere man who is his own victim. The captain I played was a highly neurotic man . . . a coward who gets drunk and sends his men out to be killed without good reason . . . I felt miserable in this role. I was supposed to.

Although he had already turned down leading roles in such television successes as My Three Sons and Mr Ed, Albert was quick to accept the part of the lawyer turned farmer Oliver Wendell Douglas in Green Acres (1965-71). "I knew it would be successful", he said in an interview. "It's about the atavistic urge and people have been getting a charge out of that ever since Aristophanes wrote about the plebs and the city folk". Albert had himself long been a dedicated gardener and passionate crusader against environmental pollution.

He was again nominated for an Oscar for his hilariously dyspeptic performance as Cybill Shepherd's father in The Heartbreak Kid (1972). In 1974 he returned to Warner Bros to play a police officer in the John Wayne thriller McQ. It was Albert's first film at the studio for 33 years.

Dick Vosburgh