Jeff Chandler (actor) - Critical Appraisal

Critical Appraisal

Film historian David Shipman once wrote this analysis of Chandler:

Jeff Chandler looked as though he had been dreamed up by one of those artists who specialise in male physique studies, or, a mite further up the artistic scale, he might have been plucked bodily from some modern mural on a biblical subject. For that he had the requisite Jewishness (of which he was very proud) - and he was not quite real. Above all, he was impossibly handsome. He would never have been lost in a crowd, with that big, square, sculpted 20th-century face and his prematurely grey wavy hair. If the movies hadn't found him the advertising agencies would have done - and in fact, whenever you saw a still of him you looked at his wrist-watch or pipe before realising that he wasn't promoting something. In the coloured stills and on posters his studio always showed his hair as blue, heightening the unreality. His real name was Ira Grossel and his film-name was exactly right; his films were mainly dreams spun by idiots. It's hard to believe he really existed.

An obituary of Chandler stated that:

Known for his careful attention to detail in making pictures, Chandler was often described as introverted. But colleagues who worked with him closely said he had an easy, light-hearted approach on the set that helped ease some of the strain of production.