One of the most memorable of Hollywood’s CHARACTER ACTORS, he usually played old codgers, even as a relatively young man. Appearing in excess of 100 movies in a career that spanned more than 50 years, Brennan made history as the first actor to win three Academy Awards, all of which were won in a five-year stretch between 1936 and 1940.
Although Brennan often played simple country folk, he had studied engineering before finally settling on an acting career. After playing in road shows and appearing in vaudeville without any great success, he decided to give moving pictures a chance. His experience on the stage was only good enough to put him on the fringe of the movie business, working as an extra and occasional stuntman, often in westerns.
In the latter half of the 1920s he finally began to receive billing for small roles in films such as The Ridin’ Rowdy (1927) and The Ballyhoo Buster (1928). For the most part, the roles stayed small, and the movies he appeared in were thoroughly forgettable. By the mid-1930s, however, he began to appear in better films. For instance, he had a tiny role in Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and still larger roles in The Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935) and Barbary Coast (1935).
His big breakthrough came in Come and Get It (1936), for which he won his first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. From that point on, Brennan began to appear more regularly in top-flight movies with good directors and (most importantly) good scripts. He won his second Oscar for his supporting role in Kentucky (1938), and was especially poignant as the vulnerable villain Judge Roy Bean in The Westerner (1940), for which he won his third Oscar in support of Gary Cooper.
Oscars notwithstanding, Brennan’s movie career peaked in the 1940s, not the late 1930s. His most memorable supporting roles were in such classics as Meet John Doe (1941), Sergeant York (1941), Pride of the Yankees (1942), To Have and Have Not (1944), My Darling Clementine (1946), and Red River (1948). Perhaps his most impressive performance was in Swamp Water (1941), in which he had a lead role in the first film Jean Renoir directed in America.
Brennan worked steadily throughout most of the 1950s in increasingly minor movies, with the exceptions of Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), The Far Country (1955), and Rio Bravo (1959). With his film career fading, he wisely agreed to star in the TV series The Real McCoys in 1957 (which ran through the 1963 season), a role that brought him more fame than his movies ever had.
Becoming more of a TV star than a movie actor, Brennan’s appearances on film throughout the 1960s and the early 1970s were mostly minor affairs except for featured roles in How the West Was Won (1962), Those Calloways (1965), and Support Your Local Sheriff (1969). Brennan’s last movie was Smoke in the Wind (1975), released after his death.
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1. Gilbert Andreson alias Broncho Billy and early Hollywood
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