Clifton Webb

Featured in "Bad Boys: The Actors of Film Noir" by Karen Burroughs Hannsberry (McFarland, 2003).

Acknowledged as the inspiration for Mr. Peabody on The Bullwinkle Show (1959).

Arriving on Sunday 16 December 1955, Noël Coward celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday in Hollywood, at Clifton Webb's house. Noël would begin rehearsing his second CBS "Ford Star Jubilee" ninety minute television production of his play "Blithe Spirit". Using Clifton Webb's residence as both a social and business operations base, Noël used Clifton's living room as a rehearsal space, directing and blocking his cast in Webb's living room until the stage sets, on stage 43 at CBS Television City, were built, set-up and decorated. A successful first cast reading of the play on Sunday 18 December at the Humphrey Bogarts' residence pleased Noël, noting that Betty Bacall (age 31), playing the deceased ghost first wife Elvira opposite Noël's role as the husband Charles, "was word perfect considering she was shooting a film". Claudette Colbert (age 52) played Charles second wife Ruth. Noël commented neither woman was easy to work with; Colbert was 'extremely tiresome', and Bacall was 'no comedienne'. Colbert complained that 'Noël was unremittingly difficult'. When she apologized for fluffing her lines - "I knew them backwards last night", Noël retorted, "yes, and that's the way you're saying them this morning". Colbert had always regretted the fact that the distance between her nape and shoulders was short: "The thing Noël said that hurt me most - but funny it was - he said 'If she had a neck, I'd wring it'". Preparations followed the usual precise requirements: Coward demanded a month of rehearsals on a fully furnished set (in the poltergeist scenes of the play, even the furniture had to be rehearsed), and all but essential personnel were barred ('That's so the men spending their money won't bother their ulcers', Noël told a journalist). He also requested a studio audience for an early rehearsal so that he could judge their reactions. These were unprecedented demands for a medium used to casual drama production methods. But just as camera rehearsals began, an abscess was discovered on Coward's sciatic nerve in his right leg. A doctor sent for, 'and injected the damn thing eight times with the thickest needle I have ever seen'. Numbed with Novocaine, Coward continued, although he seemed bad-tempered for much of the rehearsals. But the ninety-minute show was - 'played without nerves and on nerves...the result was that the performance went like a bomb'. The studio invited audience was described as 'very hep' by the New York Herald-Tribune, who likened it to 'a smart Broadway opening with a terribly fashionable cast, in front of an upper-drawer audience.'.

Webb discovered the body of Countess Dorothy di Frasso on the Los Angeles Limited shortly before it arrived at L.A.'s Union Station on January 4, 1954. The two of them were traveling together from Las Vegas, and she was carrying a quarter-million dollars in jewels with her (worth about $2.4 million in 2020). Di Frasso was supposedly once engaged to gangster Bugsy Siegel and was credited with changing actor Gary Cooper's appearance from a cowboy to a fashion plate.

The part that got away: Ayn Rand wanted him to play suave villain Ellsworth Toohey in the 1949 adaptation of The Fountainhead (1949), but studio chiefs vetoed this idea.

Already trained in dance and theater, he quit school at age 13 to study music and painting. By 19 he was a professional ballroom dancer in New York, and by his mid-twenties he was performing in musicals, dramas on Broadway and in London, and in silent movies. His first real success in film came in middle age as the classy villain Waldo Lydecker in Laura (1944), followed by the part of Elliott Templeton in The Razor's Edge (1946) - both of which won him Oscar nominations. His priggish Mr. Belvedere in a series of films was supposedly not far removed from his fastidious, finicky, fussy, abrasive and condescending real-life persona. He was inseparable from his overbearing mother Maybelle, with whom he lived until her death at 91, six years before his own death.

Created the role of Charles Condomine in Noël Coward's "Blithe Spirit", first in London, followed by appearing in the role of 'Charles' on Broadway from 05 November 1941 through 05 June 1943. In 1946, from 29 October 1946 through 15 March 1947, Clifton performed the role 'Garry Essendine' in Noël Coward's Broadway play "Present Laughter". Clifton Webb established both a professional and life-time friendship with Noël Coward. Clifton Webb's Beverly Hills - Bel Aire residence was Noël Coward's Hollywood base when ever Noël landed on the West Coast to conduct business meetings, social excursions and engagements. Clifton Webb's Mercury convertible was Noël's get-away automobile to tool around the Los Angeles landscape's winding trails. On Sunday 20 May 1955, Noël Coward and pianist-orchestrator Peter Matz arrived at Webb's house from New York City. What followed at Clifton Webb's residence in Beverly Hills, the next ten days, was that Matz and Coward worked on Noël's Las Vegas Desert Inn Casino concert-act material all day every day. Departing Wednesday 1 June for the Desert Inn Hotel, Noël and Peter conducting the casino's house band opened on that Friday night, 3 June, performing two shows nightly through the month till their last night on Monday, the 4th of July. The Las Vegas Casino concert engagement was Noël's cabaret introduction to the American public.

There followed an interlude in Hollywood in 1935 when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer put Webb on a salary of $3,000 a week. While socially it turned out to be a pleasant experience, professionally it was a disaster. For eighteen months, he swam, attended gala parties, met all the important people, but never once appeared in a motion picture. He referred to Hollywood as "a land of endowed vacations.".

Having met with only mild success with what would become a well-loved chestnut. In 1917, when Berlin first tried out the melody for Easter Parade, a different lyric was used, and the title was changed to "Smile And Show Your Dimple," Berlin recycled the tune for his 1932 musical "As Thousands Cheer" (30 September 1932 - 08 September 1934) but this time it was re-titled; "Her Easter Bonnet." , It wasn't until Judy Garland would adding it in Easter Parade (1948) that this song would finally become a hit.

Webb's career ascent on Broadway paralleled Libby Holman, with whom he co-starred in successful Broadway shows in 1929-1930. He tended to dance while she sang. The two (actually three, if you count Webb's mother) became lifelong friends and would re-team for the troubled 1938 production of Cole Porter's You Never Know, which folded after only 73 performances.

Appeared on the New York stage in 1925 in a dance act with Mary Hay.

Debuted on Broadway at age 20 in 1913 in an operetta about Napoleon'c court entitled "The Purple Road".

In 1892, his formidable mother, Mabelle (1869-1960), moved to New York with her beloved "little Webb," as she called him for the remainder of her life. She dismissed questions about his father, Jacob Grant Hollenbeck, a railroad ticket clerk, by saying; "we never speak of him. He didn't care for the theater." Webb and Maybelle lived together until her death at age 91. When Clifton's obsessive grieving for his mother continued on for well over a year, close friend Noël Coward, keeping their lengthy friendship in mind, is said to have remarked with a bit of exasperation, "it must be difficult to be orphaned at seventy." Webb never recovered from his mother's death. He made one last film, then spent the remainder of his life in ill health and seclusion.