Television
Widmark was a guest on What's My Line? in 1954. The following year, he made a rare foray into comedy on I Love Lucy, portraying himself when a star-struck Lucy trespasses onto his property to steal a souvenir. Widmark finds Lucy sprawled out on his living room floor underneath a bear skin rug.
Returning to television in the early 1970s, Widmark received an Emmy nomination for his performance as the U.S. President in the TV movie Vanished (1971), a Fletcher Knebel political thriller. In 1972-73, he reprised his detective role from Don Siegel's Madigan (1968) with six 90-minute episodes on the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie. The mini-series Benjamin Franklin (1974) was a unique experiment of four 90-minute dramas, each with a different actor performing the title role: Widmark, Beau Bridges, Lloyd Bridges, Eddie Albert, Melvyn Douglas and Willie Aames (Franklin at age 12). The series won a Peabody Award and five Emmys. During the 1980s, Widmark returned to TV with a half-dozen TV movies.
Read more about this topic: Richard Widmark
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.
In Beverly Hills ... they don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.
Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.”
—Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876)
“It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.”
—Shirley Chisholm (b. 1924)
“All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.”
—Clive James (b. 1939)