Hal Holbrook: Actor who brought historic American figures to life on stage and screen

The performer won a number of awards throughout a decades-long career

Holbrook as Oliver Lambert in 1993’s ‘The Firm’ (Rex)

Hal Holbrook was an actor best known for portraying Mark Twain and other historic American figures on television and on the stage, during a career that spanned six decades.

Holbrook won a Tony Award for his 1966 one-man show as Twain on Broadway, and Emmy Awards for television performances including one as Abraham Lincoln.

He was weeks shy of his 83rd birthday when he finally received an Academy Award nomination, for Best Supporting Actor in Into the Wild, the real-life story of a young adventurer who starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness. Holbrook played a widower befriended by the protagonist. He lost the award to Javier Bardem, honoured for his role in No Country for Old Men.

His best-known film role may have been as the mysterious, cigarette-smoking tipster known as Deep Throat in 1976’s All the President’s Men, the true account of how Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward unravelled the Watergate political scandal. In a key moment in the film, at one of their furtive meetings, Holbrook instructs Robert Redford, playing Woodward, to “follow the money”.

Holbrook initially turned down the Deep Throat role, thinking it was too small, he said in a 2009 interview. He said Redford, a close friend, “came over to the house and said, ‘Hal, I’m going to promise you that this role will be remembered more than anything in the film’. And I said, ‘Come on, you got to be kidding’.”

Holbrook said the Deep Throat character he envisioned and created was, in the end, different from W Mark Felt, the former FBI associate director who, in 2005, finally confirmed that he was the famous Watergate source. Holbrook said he had imagined Deep Throat to be “an elder statesman who had served several presidents of either party, both parties”, one now “faced with an extraordinary choice between his allegiance to his president and his allegiance to his country”.

In the Oliver Stone-directed Wall Street (1987), Holbrook played an old-school stockbroker, Lou Mannheim, aware that booms don’t last forever. “You’re on a roll, kid – enjoy it while it lasts, ’cause it never does,” he warns the brash young trader Bud Fox, played by Charlie Sheen.

And when Fox’s insider dealing finally catches up with him, Mannheim offers this consolation: “Man looks in the abyss, there’s nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss.”

Harold Rowe Holbrook Jr was born on 17 February 1925, in Cleveland, the middle child of three. His shoe-salesman father, Harold, abandoned the family, and his mother, Aileen, a vaudeville dancer, left home to continue her career when Holbrook was two. He and his two sisters were raised mainly by their paternal grandparents in South Weymouth, Massachusetts.

He attended Culver Military Academy in Indiana, served with the US Army Corps of Engineers in the Second World War and studied theatre at Denison University in Ohio, graduating in 1948.

It was at Denison that, for his senior-year honours project, he created a show with his first wife, actor Ruby Johnston, based on his characterisation of Mark Twain, the author and satirist who created Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer and skewered what he saw as absurdity and corruption in 19th-century American politics.

They took their production to schools and clubs across the country over the next five years – “a tiny speck racing across America” in a Ford station wagon, Holbrook recalled in his 2011 memoir, Harold: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain.

Holbrook turned his Twain into a one-man show, performing off-Broadway in New York before taking it on tour. When he brought Mark Twain Tonight! to Broadway in 1966, he won his Tony. A television version for CBS was nominated for an Emmy.

Holbrook continued his Twain performances every year for the rest of his career. The US State Department sent Holbrook’s Twain on a tour of Europe in the late 1950s and of Europe and Asia in the 1980s.

Twain “never has ceased to astound me”, Holbrook told NPR in 2009. “He had a bead on the corruption that went on late in his lifetime, in his country. I mean, the corruption is so similar to what’s going on today.”

Holbrook’s other films included Magnum Force (1973), Midway (1976), The Firm (1993) and Men of Honor (2000).

On television, his Emmys were for The Bold Ones: The Senator, Pueblo, Sandburg’s Lincoln and as host of Portrait of America: Alaska.

His first marriage, to Johnston, produced two children, Victoria and David, before ending in divorce. He had a daughter, Eve, with his second wife, actor Carol Rossen. His 1984 marriage to actor Dixie Carter was the third for each. Carter died in 2010.

Hal Holbrook, actor, born 17 February 1925, died 23 January 2021

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