Earl Holliman, whose acting career included a Golden Globe-winning role in The Rainmaker on the big screen and the TV crime drama Police Woman opposite Angie Dickinson, died Monday afternoon at his home in Studio City, California. He was 96 years old.
In memory of the prolific actor, here are 12 factoids worth noting about Holliman’s life and career:
1) Per IMDb: An uncredited role in the 1952 western Pony Solider was Earl Holliman’s first appearance on screen.
2) Earl Holliman’s first regularly scheduled TV series role was as Sundance, a reformed gunslinger just released from prison who drifts into the town of Georgetown, Colorado in the 1959-60 western Hotel de Paree.
3) Holliman turned down the lead roles in TV dramas Laramie (1959), Riverboat (1959), and The Deputy (1959) to play Sundance in Hotel de Paree.
4) Holliman was the last surviving cast member of the 1956 classic science fiction film Forbidden Planet.
5) For his work in The Rainmaker, Holliman is one of only seven actors to win the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor in a motion picture without receiving an Oscar nomination for the same performance. The other six are, in chronological order: Millard Mitchell in My Six Convicts (1956), Stephen Boyd in Ben-Hur (1959), Oskar Warner in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965), Richard Attenborough in The Sand Pebbles (1966) and Doctor Doolittle (1967), Richard Benjamin in The Sunshine Girls (1975), and Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Nocturnal Animals (2016).
6) Originally, Holliman did not want to play Bob Dace in the 1956 epic drama Giant. After meeting with director George Stevens, however, he accepted when he learned that Stevens had personally chosen him for the role.
7) From 1958 to 1963, Holliman had a brief career as a singer, and had a record deal with such notable recording studios as Capitol Records, Prep and HiFi.
8) In 1959, Holliman guest-starred in the first episode of TV’s The Twilight Zone in the installment titled “Where Is Everybody?” He played a man finds himself totally alone in a small town.
9) Holliman’s second regularly scheduled TV series role was as Mitch Guthrie in the 1962-63 western Wide Country.
10) His second Golden Globe nomination was for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television for the 1993 sitcom Delta, starring Delta Burke.
11) Holliman served as president of Actors and Others for Animals for 34 years and worked with Dian Fossey to help save mountain gorillas. In 1977, he received a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.
12) From 1974 to 1978, Holliman portrayed Sergeant Bill Crowley opposite Angie Dickinson in all 91 episodes of Police Woman (which he once remarked “changed his life”).
RIP Earl Holliman.
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