Radio and Television
It was Bendix's appearance in The McGuerins of Brooklyn, playing a rugged blue-collar man, that led to his most famous role. Producer and creator Irving Brecher saw Bendix as the perfect personification of Chester A. Riley, giving a second chance to a show whose audition failed when the sponsor spurned Groucho Marx for the lead. With Bendix stumbling, bumbling, and skating almost perpetually on thin ice, stretching the patience of his otherwise loving wife and children, The Life of Riley was a radio hit from 1944 through 1951, and Bendix brought an adaptation of the film version to Lux Radio Theater. He made Riley's frequent exclamation, "What a revoltin' development this is," into a national catchphrase.
Bendix wasn't able to play the role on television at first—a contracted film commitment prevented it. The role went to Jackie Gleason and the show aired a single season beginning in October 1949. Despite winning an Emmy award, the show ended, in part because Gleason wasn't entirely acceptable as Riley when Bendix was so identified with it on radio. But Bendix was available for a new television version in 1953, and this time the show clicked. The second television version of The Life of Riley ran from 1953 to 1958—long enough for Riley to become a grandfather.
On the 1952 television program This Is Your Life, it was claimed that he was a descendant of the 19th century composer Felix Mendelssohn.
In 1958 Bendix played the lead in Rod Serling's The Time Element, a time-travel adventure about a man who travels back to 1941 Honolulu and tries to warn everyone about the impending attack on Pearl Harbor.
In 1958 Bendix appeared on NBC's The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford. He returned for a second appearance on October 1, 1959, the fourth season premiere of the series in which he and his friend, Tennessee Ernie Ford, perform a comedy skit about a safari.
In 1960 Bendix starred in seventeen episodes of the NBC western series Overland Trail in the role of Frederick Thomas "Fred" Kelly, the crusty superintendent of the Overland Stage Company. Doug McClure, later Trampass on NBC's The Virginian, co-starred as his young understudy, Frank "Flip" Flippen. The program was similar to another offering on ABC the following season, Stagecoach West.
Read more about this topic: William Bendix
Famous quotes containing the words radio and/or television:
“We spend all day broadcasting on the radio and TV telling people back home what’s happening here. And we learn what’s happening here by spending all day monitoring the radio and TV broadcasts from back home.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)
“There is no question but that if Jesus Christ, or a great prophet from another religion, were to come back today, he would find it virtually impossible to convince anyone of his credentials ... despite the fact that the vast evangelical machine on American television is predicated on His imminent return among us sinners.”
—Peter Ustinov (b. 1921)