The TV show I do ['Dr Quinn'] is the day job that enables me to work with this theater [Pacific Resident Theatre Ensemble]. That's all I live for. That's what I care about. There's no dough in it. Nothing to do but lose money. But it's all from the heart, and that's why it's so much fun.
-Orson Bean
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| Orson Bean (born Dallas Frederick Burrows) July 22, 1928 – February 7, 2020 |
Orson Bean was born in Burlington, Vermont in 1928, while his third cousin twice removed, Calvin Coolidge, was President of the United States. Bean is the son of Marian Ainsworth (née Pollard) and George Frederick Burrows. His father was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a fund-raiser for the Scottsboro Boys' defense, and a 20-year member of the campus police of Harvard College. Bean said his house was "full of causes". He left home at 16 after his mother committed suicide.
Bean graduated from the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in 1946. He then joined the United States Army and was stationed in Japan for a year. Following his military service, Bean began working in small venues as a stage magician before transitioning in the early 1950s to stand-up comedy. He studied theatre at HB Studio.
In an interview on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1974, Bean recounted the source of his stage name. He credited its origin to a piano player named Val at "Hurley's Log Cabin", a restaurant and nightclub in Boston, Massachusetts, where he had once performed. According to Bean, every evening before he went on stage at the nightclub, Val would suggest to him a silly name to use when introducing himself to the audience. One night, for example, the piano player suggested "Roger Duck," but the young comedian got very few laughs after using that name in his performance. On another night, the musician suggested "Orson Bean," and the comedian received a great response from the audience, a reaction so favorable that it resulted in a job offer that same evening from a local theatrical booking agent. Given his success on that occasion, Bean decided to keep using the odd-sounding but memorable name.
Bean claimed that his name was a blend of the pompous and the amusing. He recalled that Orson Welles once called him over to a table and said "You stole my name," then dismissed him with a wave.
In 1952, Bean made a guest appearance on NBC Radio's weekly hot-jazz series The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street, giving the young comic his first national exposure. The series, burlesquing stuffy symphonic and operatic broadcasts, had the host (always introduced as a doctor of music) reciting dignified commentary in jazz-musician slang. NBC had broadcast the series off and on since 1940, and it was revived for a 13-week run with "Dr. Orson Bean" now as full-time host. Bean's august, bemused delivery belied the fact that this eminent professor was only 24 years old.
For 10 years, he was the house comic at New York's Blue Angel comedy club. In 1954, The New York Times noted in a review of The Blue Angel, Bean's delivery was always well played, even if a joke fell flat. He once hosted a television show "Blue Angel" on CBS.[4] He "maintained a steady career since the 1950s and cut his teeth on and off Broadway before becoming a live-television staple."
Bean was placed on the Hollywood blacklist for attending Communist Party meetings while dating a member, but he continued to work through the 1950s and 1960s. “Basically I was blacklisted because I had a cute communist girlfriend,” he said in a 2001 interview. He only stopped working in TV for a year. An appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show was cancelled due to his being on the "black list," and he was rendered persona non grata there for years because of it. Sullivan eventually relented and rebooked him, opining that he was the master of his own show, not "Campbell's Soup."
On Broadway he starred in the original cast of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? with Walter Matthau and Jayne Mansfield. Then, in 1961, he was featured in Subways Are for Sleeping with Sydney Chaplin, for which he received a Tony Award nomination as Best Featured Actor in a Musical, He performed in Never Too Late the following year. In 1964, he produced the Off-Off-Broadway musical Home Movies — which won an Obie Award. And the same year appeared in the Broadway production I Was Dancing. He starred in the musical “John Murray Anderson’s Almanac”. He also voiced and sang the role of Charlie Brown on MGM's original 1966 concept album of the musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown and starred in Illya Darling, the 1967 musical adaptation of the film Never on Sunday.[7][citation needed]
He was a chief creator and "mainstay" of The Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice, California.
He played the title character in the Twilight Zone episode "Mr. Bevis" (1960). For the CBS anthology series The DuPont Show with June Allyson, he starred as John Monroe in "The Secret Life of James Thurber" (1961), based on the works of the American humorist James Thurber.
Doing stand up comedy, magic tricks and passing on wit and wisdom, he became a regular on I've Got a Secret, What’s My Line? and To Tell the Truth. Bean was a frequent guest on The Tonight Show (with both Jack Paar and Johnny Carson), and appeared on game shows originating from New York. He was a regular panelist on To Tell the Truth in versions from the late 1950s through 1991. On July 5, 1965, his father appeared as a subject of the panel and he had to disqualify himself from participating. He appeared on Super Password and Match Game, among other game shows. He hosted a pilot for a revamped version of Concentration in 1985, which was picked up later on in 1987 as Classic Concentration with Alex Trebek.
He guest starred on television talk and variety shows, e.g., The Ed Sullivan Show, The Mike Douglas Show, and The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson. Among dozens of appearances, he starred in Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, and Desperate Housewives while tallying guest appearance credits, e.g., How I Met Your Mother, Modern Family, Two and a Half Men, The Closer. Bean was a regular in both Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and its spin-off Fernwood 2Nite. He also portrayed the shrewd businessman and storekeeper Loren Bray on the television series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman throughout its six-year run on CBS in the 1990s. He played John Goodman's homophobic father on the sitcom Normal, Ohio. He played the main characters Bilbo and Frodo Baggins in the 1977 and 1980 Rankin/Bass animated adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, and The Return of the King. He also played Dr. Lester in Spike Jonze's 1999 film, Being John Malkovich.
Bean appeared as a patient in the final two episodes of 7th Heaven's seventh season in 2003. In 2005, Bean appeared in the sitcom Two and a Half Men in an episode titled "Does This Smell Funny to You?", playing a former playboy whose conquests included actresses Tuesday Weld and Anne Francis. He appeared in the 2007 How I Met Your Mother episode "Slapsgiving" as Robin Scherbatsky's 41-year-old boyfriend, Bob. In 2009 he was cast in the recurring role of Roy Bender, a steak salesman, who is Karen McCluskey's love interest on the ABC series Desperate Housewives. At the age of 87, Bean in 2016 appeared in "Playdates", an episode of the American TV sitcom Modern Family. He appeared in a 2017 episode of Teachers (TV Land, season 2, episode 11, "Dosey Don't"). He appeared as the elderly Holocaust survivor in the 2018 film The Equalizer 2.
An admirer of Laurel and Hardy, Bean, in 1965, served as a founding member of The Sons of the Desert, the international organization devoted to sharing information about the lives of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy and preserving and enjoying their films.
In 1966 he helped found the 15th Street School in New York City, a primary school using the radical democratic free school, Summerhill, as a model. Bean wrote an autobiographical account about his life-changing experience with the orgone therapy developed by Austrian-born psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Published in 1971, the account is titled Me and the Orgone: The True Story of One Man's Sexual Awakening.
Bean was married three times. His first marriage was in 1956 to actress Jacqueline de Sibour, whose stage name was Rain Winslow and who was the daughter of the French nobleman and pilot Vicomte Jacques de Sibour and his wife, Violette B. Selfridge (daughter of American-born British department-store magnate Harry Gordon Selfridge). Before their divorce in 1962, Bean and Jacqueline had one child, Michele.
In 1965, he married actress and fashion designer Carolyn Maxwell with whom he had three children: Max, Susannah, and Ezekiel. The couple divorced in 1981. Their daughter Susannah married journalist Andrew Breitbart (died 2012) in 1997. Bean's third wife was actress and Dr. Quinn co-star Alley Mills, 23 years his junior. They married in 1993, and lived in Los Angeles until his death in 2020.
He was a "distant cousin" of President Calvin Coolidge. In later life, "his politics turned more conservative." His daughter married Andrew Breitbart, and Bean authored intermittent columns for Breitbart News. He ventured the thought that being a conservative in 21st-century Hollywood was a lot like being a suspected Communist back in the 1950s.
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| Good Night Mr. Bean |
For much of his career and to his death, he was represented by the Artists & Representatives agency. In its brief statement after his death, they noted he was an assiduous nurturer of rising talent.
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