Dana Andrews

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Andrews

Carver Dana Andrews (January 1, 1909 – December 17, 1992) was an American film actor and a major Hollywood star during the 1940s. He continued acting in less prestigious roles into the 1980s. He is remembered for his roles as a police detective-lieutenant in the film noir Laura (1944) and as war veteran Fred Derry in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), the latter being the role for which he received the most critical praise.

Filmography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Andrews#Filmography

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Birth: Jan. 1, 1909

Death: Dec. 17, 1992 Los Alamitos Orange County California, USA

Actor. Born Carver Dana Andrews, he signed a contract with Samuel Goldwyn and nine years after arriving in Los Angeles was offered his first movie role in William Wyler's The Westerner (1940), starring Gary Cooper. He was also memorable as the gangster in the 1941 comedy Ball of Fire. In the 1943 movie adaptation of The Ox-Bow Incident with Henry Fonda, often cited as one of his best films, he played a lynching victim. Andrews' two signature roles came as an obsessed detective in Laura (1944) opposite Gene Tierney, and as a U.S. Army Air Force officer returning home from the war in the Oscar-winning 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives. He played a crooked cop in Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), also with Gene Tierney. Around this time, alcoholism began to derail Andrews' career, and on a couple of occasions it nearly cost him his life on the highway. By the middle 1950s, Andrews was acting almost exclusively in B-movies. A handful of films Andrews starred in during the late '50s, however, contain memorable work. Two movies for Fritz Lang in 1956, While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, and two for Jacques Tourneur, Night of the Demon (1957) and The Fearmakers (1958), are well regarded. From 1952 to 1954, Andrews starred in the radio series I Was a Communist for the FBI about the experiences of Matt Cvetic, an FBI informer who infiltrated into the Communist Party. In 1963, he was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild. Between 1969 and 1970, he appeared in a leading role as college president Tom Boswell on the NBC daytime soap opera Bright Promise. In 1960 he and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. starred in The Crowded Sky; Zimbalist played the part of a military jet pilot who crashes into a large passenger airliner that Andrews is flying. Coincidentally, fifteen years later, Andrews and Zimbalist appeared in Airport 1975 in which Andrews plays a businessman pilot who has a heart attack and crashes his plane into a 747 that Zimbalist is flying. (bio courtesy of: Wikipedia)

Family links:

Parents:

• Charles Forrest Andrews (1881 - 1940)
• Annis Speed Andrews (1888 - 1967)

Spouses:

• Janet Murray Andrews (1908 - 1935)
• Mary Olive Todd Andrews (1916 - 2003)*

Children:

• David Murray Andrews (1933 - 1964)*
• Infant Andrews (1935 - 1935)*

Cause of death: Pneumonia

Burial: Cremated, Ashes given to family or friend.

Maintained by: Find A Grave Originally Created by: Kenneth McNeil Record added: Jun 12, 2002 Find A Grave Memorial# 6502782

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Remembered for the diffident and handsome average-Joe characters he often played, Dana Andrews was one of Hollywood’s leading men during the 1940s. Born in Collins on New Year’s Day 1909, he was one of thirteen children of a Baptist minister. During his youth, Andrews and his family moved several times before finally settling down in Texas, where he attended Sam Houston State Teachers College.

In 1931 he left his job as an accountant in Austin and hitchhiked to Los Angeles, hoping to find work as an actor or singer in Hollywood. He got a job at a filling station in the suburb of Van Nuys, making enough money to pay for acting and singing lessons. He soon began performing at the small but prestigious Pasadena Playhouse, and he met Janet Murray and married her in 1932. Before her unexpected death in 1935, the couple had one son, David.

In 1938 a talent scout noticed Andrews, leading Samuel Goldwyn Productions to offer him a small contract and several bit parts over the next few years, including a supporting role in William Wyler’s The Westerner (1940). In 1941, Twentieth Century Fox took notice of the promising supporting actor and bought half of Andrews’s contract and cast him in small roles in Tobacco Road (1941) and The Ox-Bow Incident (1943).

He began to take on leading parts in a slew of war pictures and romance films, almost always playing the same signature character: a laconic and brooding yet sensitive figure trying to ignore some unspoken internal hardship. One of his most memorable roles was as brusque detective Mark McPherson in the film noir masterpiece Laura (1944).

Andrews was fairly successful and well known during the war era, starring in some of the decade’s most celebrated films, among them A Walk in the Sun (1945), The Best Years of Our Lives (Best Picture of 1946), and Boomerang (1947). During this time, Andrews met and married Mary Todd; they had three children before their divorce in 1968.

Andrews’s success, however, was short-lived. While he appeared in many more movies and a handful of TV shows, none measured up to his earlier films. Heavy drinking contributed to his problems, and following a brief theater run in the 1950s, he retired from acting in the 1960s. He worked in real estate and toured the country, giving lectures for Alcoholics Anonymous. In 1963 Andrews was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, focusing his efforts on combating the degradation of the acting profession, particularly the way in which actresses were forced to do nude scenes to get roles. In 1972 he became one the first actors to do public service announcements on the dangers of alcoholism.

He lived the latter half of his life in a modest house in Studio City, California. In his last years, Andrews suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, and he died of pneumonia on 17 December 1992.