Movie Career and Army Service
Despite showing initial reluctance, Forsythe began an acting career at the suggestion of his father. He met actress, Parker McCormick (December 1918 – July 1980), and the couple married in 1939; they had a son, Dall (born in 1943), and divorced in 1943. As a bit player for Warner Brothers, Forsythe successfully appeared in several small parts. As a result he was given a small role in Destination Tokyo (1943). Leaving his movie career for service in World War II, he appeared in the U.S. Army Air Forces play and film Winged Victory, then worked with injured soldiers who had developed speech problems.
Also in 1943, Forsythe met Julie Warren, initially a theatre companion, but later a successful actress in her own right, landing a role on Broadway in Around the World. Warren became Forsythe's second wife and in the early 1950s the marriage produced two daughters – Page and Brooke. In 1947, Forsythe joined the initial class of the soon-to-be prestigious Actors Studio, where he met other promising young actors including Marlon Brando and Julie Harris. During this time he appeared on Broadway in Mister Roberts and The Teahouse of the August Moon.
In 1955 Alfred Hitchcock cast Forsythe in the movie The Trouble with Harry, with Shirley MacLaine in her first movie appearance, for which she won a Golden Globe.
Read more about this topic: John Forsythe
Famous quotes containing the words movie, career, army and/or service:
“Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, with Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervishlike repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstacy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“The ability to think straight, some knowledge of the past, some vision of the future, some skill to do useful service, some urge to fit that service into the well-being of the community,—these are the most vital things education must try to produce.”
—Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (1877–1965)