Career
His work on stage included Kismet; Richard Rodgers's first musical for which he wrote both music and lyrics, No Strings; the Buddy Hackett vehicle I Had a Ball; and the lead roles in Redhead, Man of La Mancha, and the play The Incomparable Max.
He starred in the television play, Patterns (Kraft Television Theatre), which aired live on January 12, 1955. It caused a sensation, and won an Emmy for its screenwriter Rod Serling.
He won Tony Awards as Best Actor in a musical for the first two. The dual role of the middle-aged Miguel de Cervantes and Don Quixote is one of the few musical roles which entails both the role of the leading man and that of a character actor at the same time, rather than the conventional handsome hero who wins the girl. Kiley had gone on record as saying that he had grown tired of the regular "leading man" role but was always grateful for having been given the chance to play it. Tony Martinez played Sancho Panza to Kiley's Don Quixote.
Read more about this topic: Richard Kiley
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)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“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)