George Macready - Acting Career

Acting Career

Macready's penchant for acting was spurred in part by the director Richard Boleslawski. His Shakespearean stage credits include Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing (1927), Malcolm in MacBeth (1928), and Paris in Romeo and Juliet (1934). On film, he played Marallus in the 1953 film adaptation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. He also played Prince Ernst in the original stage version of Victoria Regina (1936), starring Helen Hayes.

His first film was Commandos Strike at Dawn in 1942, featuring Paul Muni. As Ballin Mundson in Gilda (1946), Macready is part of a deadly love triangle with the characters played by co-stars Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford. He would again play opposite Ford several years later in the post-war adventure The Green Glove (1952). Stanley Kubrick's anti-war film, Paths of Glory (1957), provided his other great role, self-serving French World War I General Paul Mireau, who is brought down by Kirk Douglas's character, Colonel Dax. He had worked with Douglas previously in Detective Story (1951) and later he appeared with Douglas again in John Frankenheimer's Seven Days in May (1964).

Macready also leaped into the Golden Age of Television, having appeared regularly on Dick Powell's Four Star Playhouse, Ronald W. Reagan's General Electric Theater, The Ford Television Theatre, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

He also appeared in many western television series, including Bat Masterson, Bonanza, The Dakotas, Gunsmoke, Have Gun - Will Travel, The Rebel (once in the role of Confederate General Robert E. Lee), The Rifleman, Lancer, Riverboat, The Rough Riders, Chill Wills's Frontier Circus, Barry Sullivan's The Tall Man, Rory Calhoun's The Texan, and Steve McQueen's Wanted: Dead or Alive.

On December 5, 1961, he played a Colonel John Barrington in the episode "Handful of Fire" of NBC's Laramie western series. Barrington is presumably modeled on John Chivington of the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 in Colorado. Barrington escapes while facing a court martial at Fort Laramie for his role in the Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota in 1890. The episode reveals that series character Slim Sherman (John Smith) was present at Wounded Knee and hence testified against Barrington. Then Barrington's daughter, Madge, played by Karen Sharpe, takes Slim hostage. She has papers which she contends justify her father's harsh policies against the Indians. Slim escapes but is trapped by Sioux in the area and must negotiate with the Indians to save the party from massacre.

In addition to westerns, Macready appeared on Raymond Burr's Perry Mason, The Outer Limits, Thriller with Boris Karloff, and Get Smart with Don Adams.

In the 1960s, Macready appeared for three years in the role of Martin Peyton in ABC's Peyton Place, the first prime-time soap opera on American television, with Dorothy Malone in the title role of Constance MacKenzie.

One of Macready's most effective film roles was also one of his last - the role of United States Secretary of State Cordell Hull in the 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora!, a painstakingly accurate depiction of the events leading up to and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.