Arthur O’Connell

Arthur O’Connell was kept alive by public funds. In 1934, he contracted encephalitis. He was doing some acting then, but he wasn’t a success. He was put into a sanitarium for the indigent. Then, he was on relief. His recovery took seven months, during which he couldn’t work. It was only after that illness that his career took off. Without public funds, we would have lost one of the great character actors of the mid-twentieth century. Who then died in the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital of Alzheimer’s. His life and death are testimonies to the importance of universal health care.

In between, he did a few things the average person may recognize. I don’t know if he ever did any Mercury Theatre roles, but he did meet Orson Welles and played one of the reporters in Citizen Kane. His breakthrough role, both on Broadway and in Hollywood, was as Howard Bevans in Picnic, for which he received his first Oscar nomination.He’s the older cowboy in Bus Stop. His second Oscar nomination came for playing James Stewart’s mentor in Anatomy of a Murder. And if you are me, you will always remember him as the surly Totsin in Operation Petticoat.

He continued to work for years, including being in The Monkey’s Uncle for Disney. Really, the five years including Picnic were the best of his career. But he kept working. He did two Elvis movies. He was a spokesman for Crest Toothpaste. He did an episode of the Shaft TV show, definitely a thing people remember, and a New Perry Mason. He was in The Poseidon Adventure. He was in the version of Huckleberry Finn with songs by the Sherman Brothers. His final TV performance was in Emergency!

He was another one of those guys who tended to play older men than he was because of his general demeanor. That’s okay. He was very good at it. Cary Grant was actually four years older than he was, but I always saw Totsin as being one of those guys who had been in the Navy forever and was going to stay there until they kicked him out. The idea that he was barely fifty at the time is a little surprising to me. The idea that Cary Grant was fifty-five is even more surprising.

I assume O’Connell supported similar programs as the one that saved his life. You never know, but it seems likely. Come to that, the Mercury Theatre was a spin-off of a New Deal program, inasmuch as Welles came to public notice while working for the Federal Theatre Project. If you’ve liked him in anything, you’ve seen one small benefit of the social safety net. Also, if you’ve seen some of what he did, you’ve seen some damn fine acting, which is not nothing.