Career
Born to Fred and Bertha Rogers Simpson, his paternal heritage was Irish. He was the eldest of four sons, one of whom, Richard, died in childhood. When his father, a contractor, was unable to work following the 1929 stock market crash, his mother supported the family as a waitress.
By his twenties, Simpson had grown into a hulking figure and considered a boxing career. He has been referred to in some sources as the 1935 "New York City Heavyweight Boxing Champion," but the only official records of his ring work are for two fights in Los Angeles in 1939, both of which he lost. Simpson, nicknamed "Mickey," arrived in Los Angeles in the late 1930s. Some unconfirmed stories have him working as a chauffeur for Claudette Colbert. In 1939, he reportedly played a tiny bit part in his first film, Stagecoach, a film whose director, John Ford, would loom large in Simpson's career. Simpson found fairly steady movie work as various guards, cops, bouncers, and thugs until his career was interrupted by World War II, in which he served in the U.S. Navy as a Shore Patrolman, keeping drunken sailors and townies from killing each other, while patrolling the many L.A. bars and strip clubs]. When he returned to Hollywood, it was Ford who resurrected his career, giving Simpson a small but notable role as one of Walter Brennan's sons in My Darling Clementine. Simpson would appear in a total of nine Ford films. During the late 1950s he portrayed the role of Boley on the television series Captain David Grief.
Modern viewers will remember Simpson as Rocky Duggan in the Three Stooges film Gents in a Jam. Simpson was a memorable wrestler dubbed "the strongest man in the world." He even offered to tear a telephone book in half for the Stooges, who were hiding his de-clothed wife (Dani Sue Nolan).
Read more about this topic: Mickey Simpson
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)