Edmond O'Brien

Edmond O'Brien (1915-1985) was an American character actor who appeared in several classic Film Noirs. His supporting role as a press agent in The Barefoot Countess (1954) earned him an Oscar. He was nominated for another Oscar in 1964 for Seven Days in May.


Spanish postcard by JDP, Valencia, no. 1432. Edmond O'Brien and Alexis Smith in The Turning Point (William Dieterle, 1952).


Italian postcard by Bromofoto, Milano, no. 1036. Photo: CEIAD Columbia.

A sympathetic appearance, a robust and virile constitution and a chubby face

Edmond O'Brien was born Eamon Joseph O'Brien in Brooklyn in 1915 as the seventh and last child of Agnes (née Baldwin) and James O'Brien, who hailed from southern Ireland. His father died when he was four years old. As a child, Edmond performed magic shows for the children of the neighbourhood. An aunt who was an English teacher took him to the theatre from an early age. O'Brien developed an interest in acting and a little later he started playing in school plays.

After six months at Fordham University, he went on a scholarship to the Neighbourhood Playhouse School in New York where he studied theatre for two years. He also took classes with the Columbia Laboratory Players group on the works of William Shakespeare. O'Brien made his debut in Yonkers, at the Summer Stock Theatre, a theatre where plays are only performed in the summer. In the process, scenery and costumes are reused by young actors who gain experience that way. O'Brien then made his debut on Broadway in 1936, where he was noticed by Orson Welles. O'Brien had a sympathetic appearance, a robust and virile constitution and a chubby face.

In 1937, he became a permanent member of the Mercury Theatre, a company led by Orson Welles and John Houseman. He appeared with Welles on the radio and in the theatre. His first film role was as an uncredited extra in Prison Break (Arthur Lubin, 1938). He continued to play for Mercury until 1940. Pandro Berman, the boss of RKO Pictures, noticed O'Brien's acting talent in 1939. He gave him the role of a young charming poet who falls in love with the gypsy woman Esmeralda (Maureen O'Hara) in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (William Dieterle, 1939). Charles Laughton starred in the title role of this historical drama based on Victor Hugo's novel of the same name. O'Brien returned to Broadway to play Mercutio opposite Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in 'Romeo and Juliet'.

RKO offered Edmond O'Brien a long-term contract. His roles included a feature spot in A Girl, a Guy, and a Gob (Richard Wallace, 1941) and the co-male lead in Parachute Battalion (Leslie Goodwins, 1941). The latter starred Nancy Kelly, whom O'Brien would later marry. During the first half of the 1940s, Edmond O'Brien appeared only sporadically on the big screen as he served with the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. He appeared in the Air Forces' Broadway play 'Winged Victory' with Red Buttons, Karl Malden, Kevin McCarthy, Gary Merrill, Barry Nelson and Martin Ritt. The Moss Hart play was filmed, Winged Victory (George Cukor, 1944), with O'Brien reprising his stage performance and Judy Holliday co-starring. .

The Film Noir The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946), starring Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner, was perhaps O'Brien's first significant film. He played an insurance company investigator who had to investigate a suspicious murder case: a man with a life insurance policy was killed without resisting. He followed that with the lead in two more Film Noirs, The Web (Michael Gordon 1947) with Ella Raines, and the second lead in A Double Life (George Cukor, 1947) starring Ronald Colman. In late 1948, O'Brien signed a contract with Warner Bros. In White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949), he portrayed an undercover FBI agent who hooks up in prison with a violent gangster boss (James Cagney). He gains his complete trust to find out where the huge loot from a train robbery is hidden. In another classic of the genre, the powerful and haunting Film Noir D.O.A. (Rudolph Maté, 1950), O'Brien played the lead role of a man who was fatally poisoned. He has one day to live and runs a desperate race against time to track down his killer himself.


Italian postcard by Bromofoto, Milano, no, 408. Photo: Paramount. Edmond O'Brien and Yvonne De Carlo in Silver City (Byron Haskin, 1951).

Film Noir films with dramatic, criminal or thriller overtones

Edmond O'Brien's weight increased in the 1950s which sometimes resulted in him having to slim down for a role or being ineligible for certain roles. He was most often directed in Film Noir films with dramatic, criminal or thriller overtones. He also performed roles in Westerns (9 films) and War films (9). He also featured in a dozen comedies and tragicomedies. He was not only cast as a lead actor. Because he did not conform to Hollywood's common ideal of beauty, he was equally cast as a genre actor in supporting roles.

1953 was a very fruitful year for him. O'Brien starred for the first time in a film by Don Siegel: the adventure war film China Venture in which, as a captain, he heads a group of soldiers tasked with locating and interrogating a crashed Japanese admiral. O'Brien starred in two films by Ida Lupino, the most important female filmmaker working in the 1950s during the Hollywood studio system. In the Film Noir thriller The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953) with Frank Lovejoy, he is one of two friends forced by a psychopathic hitchhiker to take him to Mexico. The Film Noir drama The Bigamist (Ida Lupino, 1953) shows how a simple businessman, unhappily married to an ambitious businesswoman (Joan Fontaine) who cannot have children, ends up in a bigamist state.

In the successful biopic Julius Caesar (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1953), O'Brien portrayed Casca, one of Julius Caesar's assassins. For his role as a sweaty, chatty, self-confident and despicable publicity agent in the drama The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954), O'Brien won the Oscar for Best Male Supporting Actor and also the Golden Globe in the same category. In the Jayne Mansfield vehicle The Girl Can't Help It (Frank Tashlin, 1956), O'Brien played a gangster boss, who wants his sexy blonde girlfriend to become a successful singer at all costs. The dramatic Sci-fi film 1984 (Michael Anderson, 1956) was the first feature-length adaptation of George Orwell's novel of the same name. O'Brien took the lead role of Winston Smith, an ordinary member of the ruling party in a future London who disagrees with the government's totalitarian control and repression. From 1959 to 1960, O'Brien portrayed the title role in the syndicated crime drama Johnny Midnight, about a New York City actor-turned-private detective. The producers refused to cast him unless he shed at least 50 pounds, so he went on a crash vegetarian diet and quit drinking.

Of the nine Westerns in which Edmond O'Brien appeared, two were by reputable Western directors: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962) and The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969) were therefore by far the best-known and the best. In the John Ford classic, O'Brien gave colour to the editor of the local village newspaper. In Sam Peckinpah's groundbreaking and violent revisionist Western, he starred as an older cantankerous outlaw who accompanies the ‘wild Bunch’, a depleted and outlawed gang disappointed by a failed robbery, to other enders. He co-starred in the Disney comedy Moon Pilot (James Neilson, 1962), and the star-studded ensemble cast of the World War II epic The Longest Day (Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, Bernhard Wicki, 1962). John Frankenheimer called on O'Brien twice: first for his biographical drama Birdman of Alcatraz (John Frankenheimer, 1962) in which O'Brien embodied journalist Thomas E. Gaddis, visiting the incarcerated ‘birdman’ (Burt Lancaster) to write a book about him. Two years later, he voiced the role of an alcoholic US senator and intimate confidant of the unpopular president threatened by a coup in the political thriller Seven Days in May (John Frankenheimer, 1964). This earned him a second Golden Globe for Best Male Supporting Actor. Still in 1964, more than a decade after China Venture, O'Brien featured again in a film by Don Siegel: in the dramatic crime film The Hanged Man (Don Siegel, 1964), he shared the lead role with Robert Culp.

O'Brien was a cast member of The Other Side of the Wind, Orson Welles' unfinished 1970s film that finally was released in 2018. One of his last major roles was that of a Federal Bureau of Narcotics inspector in Lucky Luciano (Francesco Rosi, 1973), a biographical gangster film about mafia boss Salvatore Lucania (Gian Maria Volonté). O'Brien directed two films: the Film Noir Shield for Murder (co-directed with Howard W. Koch, 1954) in which he played the lead role of a police lieutenant who degenerates into a corrupt and depraved man after 16 years of service. The Neo Noir film Man-Trap (1961) starring Jeffrey Hunter and Stella Stevens, shows how a Korean War veteran becomes involved in an enticing but risky theft of illegal weapons via a friend-veteran. For over two decades (1951-1974), O'Brien was a regular on the small screen. He often contributed to anthology series, especially in the 1950s, his most prolific television period. He also played the title role in the courtroom drama Sam Benedict (28 episodes, 1962-1963). In the successful dramatic series The Long, Hot Summer (1965-1966), he was the powerful, lying and dastardly patriarch bank owner. Between 1941 and 1942, Edmond O'Brien was first married to actress Nancy Kelly. Actress Olga San Juan became his second wife in 1948 and the mother of his three children: television producer Bridget, actress Maria (1950) and actor Brendan (1962-2023). The couple divorced in 1976. In the late 1970s, the actor was stricken with Alzheimer's disease. In 1985, Edmond O'Brien died at the age of 69 as a result of complications from the disease. He is buried in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.


British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. W. 873. Photo: United Artists.


American postcard by H.S. Crocker Co., Inc., San Francisco, no. HSC 307. Edmond O'Brien in the TV series Johnny Midnight (1960). Caption: Edmond O'Brien is a versatile actor who has included both motion pictures and television in his career. Eddie is the star of the TV series, Johnny Midnight, filmed at Revue Studios. It is the story of an adventurous theatrical agent in New York City.

Sources: Jon C. Hopwood (IMDb), Wikipedia (Dutch, German and English) and IMDb.