Dan O'Herlihy
A tall, distinguished-looking leading man, and later a character player, Irish-born actor Daniel O'Herlihy, who died on February 17 at his home in Malibu, California, aged 85, appeared in a total of 64 films and dozens of TV shows. O'Herlihy was born...
A tall, distinguished-looking leading man, and later a character player, Irish-born actor Daniel O'Herlihy, who died on February 17 at his home in Malibu, California, aged 85, appeared in a total of 64 films and dozens of TV shows.
O'Herlihy was born in Wexford, Ireland, and made his acting debut with Dublin's Abbey Players before coming to Hollywood in the late 1940s, appearing in Odd Man Out in 1947 with James Mason and Cyril Cusack.
He appeared afterwards in Orson Welles's Macbeth, released in 1948 playing Macduff; as Alan Breck in Kidnapped co-starring with Roddy McDowall (1948); as Robin in The Highwayman with Charles Coburn (1951); with Cornel Wilde and Karl Malden in Operation Secret (1952); and as Robinson Crusoe in Luis Bunuel's The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, released in 1954, and for which he received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor in the 1955 Oscars. However that year the Academy Award was won by Marlon Brando for his part in On the Waterfront.
Among other films we find: The Virgin Queen (1955); One Foot in Hell (1960); Fail-Safe (1964); Waterloo with Rod Steiger and Christopher Plummer (1970); The Carey Treatment with James Coburn (1972); The Tamarind Seed with Julie Andrews and Omar Sharif (1974); as US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in MacArthur with Gregory Peck (1977); RoboCop (1987) and it's sequel RoboCop 2 (1990).
His last role was as Joe Kennedy in the 1998 TV movie The Rat Pack.
O'Herlihy also appeared in 11 TV series, including Colditz (1972), Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill (1974), and Mark Twain - Beneath the Laughter (1979).