George Peppard Movies
Though actor George Peppard could have succeeded on his looks alone, he underwent extensive training before making his first TV and Broadway appearances. The son of a building contractor and a singer, Peppard studied acting at Carnegie Tech and the Actor's Studio. His early TV credits include the original 1956 production of Bang the Drum Slowly, in which he sang the title song. He made his film debut in 1957, repeating his Broadway role in Calder Willingham's End As a Man, retitled The Strange One for the screen. His star continued to ascend in such films as Home From the Hill (1960) with George Hamilton, and Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) as the boyfriend/chronicler of carefree Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn). He was also effective as James Stewart's son in How the West Was Won (1962), a characterization that required him to age 30 years, and as the Howard Hughes counterpart in The Carpetbaggers (1963), in which he co-starred with the second of his five wives, Elizabeth Ashley. In 1978 he made a respectable directorial debut with Five Days From Home, but never followed up on this. A familiar television presence, he starred on the TV series Banacek (1972-1973), Doctors Hospital (1975), and The A-Team (1983-1987), and delivered a powerhouse performance as the title character in the 1974 TV-movie Guilty or Innocent: The Sam Sheppard Case. Forced to retire because of illness, George Peppard died of cancer in the spring of 1994. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide- 1956
First published in early 1956, Mark Harris's baseball novel Bang the Drum Slowly was swiftly adapted for television; on September 24, 1956, a streamlined 60-minute version of the Harris novel was telecast live on The US Steel Hour. Paul Newman plays Henry Wiggen, a slang-happy, unabashedly self-promotional pitcher for the fictional New York Mammoths. Wiggen spends a great deal of his free time protecting his dimwitted roomate, catcher Bruce Pearson (Albert Salmi), from being dropped from the team. It's not that Henry is overly fond of Bruce; it's simply that he knows (but the rest of the team doesn't) that Bruce is dying of Hodgkin's disease. This TV adaptation remains faithful to the first-person singular style of the novel by having Henry periodically step "out" of the drama to address the audience: this device is most effective at the finale when, after tearfully recalling the "ragging" he often gave his now-deceased teammate, Henry sobs "From here on, I rag nobody." A very young George Peppard appears as Piney Woods, the country-boy ballplayer who sings the ballad from which the drama's title is derived. A kinescoped version of Bang the Drum Slowly was included in the 1981 PBS anthology The Golden Age of Television. Harris' novel was later adapted into a 1973 theatrical feature, starring Michael Moriarty as Henry and Robert De Niro as the "doom-ded" Bruce. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Paul Newman, Albert Salmi, (more)
