Kenneth Tobey

Prolific actor in sci-fi and monster films

Kenneth Tobey, actor: born Oakland, California 23 March 1919; married (one daughter); died Rancho Mirage, California 22 December 2002.

Craggy faced and red-headed, the actor Kenneth Tobey made nearly 100 films and was a prolific player on stage and television. He is best remembered, though, for his co-starring role as an air force captain who is called to a government outpost at the North Pole after a UFO crashes nearby, in the classic science-fiction film The Thing (1951, aka The Thing from Another World).

The fantasy-film historian Tom Weaver described Tobey as "one of the first – and one of the best – of the great sci-fi movie heroes of the Fifties". The director Joe Dante had such esteem for The Thing that many years later he cast Tobey in cameo roles in his films Gremlins, Gremlins 2, The Howling and Innerspace. Tobey, who had an extensive background in the Broadway theatre, also had roles, often as authority figures, in such films as Twelve O'Clock High, The Wings of Eagles, MacArthur and The Candidate. "I played so many parts in war movies," he once said, "I ought to get a military pension."

On television he had a regular role in Walt Disney's series Davy Crockett, playing the cigar-chomping Jocko, and played Jim Bowie in the "Alamo" episode of the series, which was one of three segments that were joined together to make a feature film, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier (1955). He became particularly well known to television viewers when he co-starred in the adventure series Whirlybirds, which ran from 1957 to 1959.

Born in Oakland, California, in 1919, Tobey was educated at Berkeley and was studying political science when he first started acting. He made his Broadway début in an ill-fated revival of As You Like It (1941). Two months later he was back on stage in Sunny River (1941) a Sigmund Romberg-Oscar Hammerstein II musical that also failed.

Two more flops followed – Johnny on a Spot (1942), a political farce, and Mexican Mural (1942). He finally found himself in a big hit when Janie opened in September 1942. After nine months with the play, Tobey left to take a role playing the brother of Gregory Peck in Irwin Shaw's Sons and Soldiers (1943), after which he was in Elmer Rice's A New Life (1943). In 1946 he had roles in two plays by Maxwell Anderson, the first the short-lived Truckline Café, notable for introducing Marlon Brando, and then in Joan of Lorraine (1946), a personal triumph for its star, Ingrid Bergman.

Tobey made his screen début inauspiciously with a role in the Hopalong Cassidy "B" western Dangerous Venture (1947) and had played several small film roles when he was cast in Howard Hawks's comedy I Was a Male War Bride (1950) starring Cary Grant and Ann Sheridan. Tobey explained,

For some reason Cary and Ann laughed at something I did, and it interested Hawks. He kept writing in things for me to do. Then at the end of the film he said, "I'm going to star you in a picture some day." And he did, in The Thing.

Credited as director on the film is Christian Nyby, who had been the editor of many Hawks films. Tobey said, "Hawks was having union trouble at the time so he didn't want his name on the film." One of Hawks' trademarks evident in The Thing is the use of overlapping dialogue. When asked if that made timing difficult, Tobey replied,

I come from the stage originally. Stage actors pick up cues very quickly. If, at the end of a sentence, it's not too meaningful, you just start talking over the other person. It makes the pace very quick.

The actor Robert Cornthwaite, who played the head scientist in The Thing, recalled that Hawks wanted complete unknowns for the film. "He felt it gave the audience a sense of greater reality," he told the New York Times. "Tobey had a wonderful, understated kind of style as an actor."

The film resulted in better parts for Tobey in general, but it was in sci-fi and monster films that he had his best parts. He was an army colonel in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and received top billing in It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955) as the captain of a naval submarine who first spots a mutant killer octopus (with five tentacles) in the Pacific Ocean. Weaver said,

Most of the other sci-fi heroes of the Fifties were scientists or eggheads, but Tobey always represented the military, and in such a hard-nosed, no-nonsense style that you knew as soon as he came on and started barking orders that the monsters had probably bitten off more than they could chew.

The actor's role in The Thing paid another dividend when he ran into Sammy Davis Jr in a Los Angeles jazz club in the early Sixties. A great fan of the film, Davis asked him to play the key role of his fight manager in the Strouse-Adams musical Golden Boy, which opened on Broadway in 1964.

In the spoof disaster movie Airplane! (1980), Tobey was one of the air traffic controllers, and his many other films included Seven Ways from Sundown (1960), Marlowe (1969), Strange Invaders (1983), and Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (1992). One of his last roles was in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1995).

Tom Vallance