Career
Smith served with the Naval Reserve in Hawaii. After a chance meeting with the actor James Cagney, he was encouraged to try a career in Hollywood. (Cagney had also encouraged other young actors, including Don Dubbins, for whom he found roles in two 1956 films.) He would later play Cagney's son in Man of a Thousand Faces.
Smith signed with Columbia Pictures in 1957 and made several films, then moved to Warner Bros. in 1959.
On April 16, 1958, Smith appeared with Charles Bickford in "The Daniel Barrister Story" on NBC's Wagon Train. In this first season episode, Daniel Barrister, played by Bickford, objects to medical treatment for his wife, Jenny, the victim of a wagon accident. Meanwhile, Dr. Peter H. Culver, played by Smith, has successfully fought a smallpox epidemic in a nearby town. He is brought to the wagon train by scout Flint McCullough, portrayed by series regular Robert Horton to treat Mrs. Barrister. Viewers never know if Barrister yielded to allow Dr. Culver to treat Jenny.
His greatest film exposure came with playing the adult nephew Patrick Dennis in Auntie Mame, with Rosalind Russell in the title role.
His signature television role came as Jeff Spencer, a private detective in the firm of Bailey & Spencer partnered with Stuart Bailey, played by Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. in 77 Sunset Strip. Series costars included Edd Byrnes and Richard Long.
Smith appeared in seventy-four episodes of this Warner Bros.-produced series but left the popular ABC program in 1962 because of a blood clot in his brain. He recovered from this injury post-surgery. Several years later his health declined and he was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease. His condition went into remission in 1985. Following his retirement from performing, he managed his wife Ann-Margret's career and produced her popular Las Vegas stage shows.
Smith appeared very rarely on television once his health deteriorated, but did participate on This is Your Life when host Ralph Edwards devoted an episode to Ann-Margret. In addition to the appearances credited below, Smith also has been on several game shows.
Read more about this topic: Roger Smith (actor)
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“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)
“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)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)