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Early life
Born in Los Angeles, California, he was adopted as an infant by playwright Charles MacArthur and actress Helen Hayes. He grew up in Nyack, New York, along with the MacArthurs' biological daughter, Mary. He was educated at Allen-Stevenson School in New York, and later at the Solebury School in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where he starred in basketball, football, and baseball.
In his final year at Solebury, he played guard on the football team; captained the basketball team; was president of his class, the student government, and the Drama Club; rewrote the school's constitution; edited the school paper, The Scribe; and played Scrooge in a local presentation of A Christmas Carol. He also started dating a fellow student, Joyce Bulifant; they were married in November 1958 and divorced nine years later.
MacArthur grew up around the greatest literary and theatrical talent of the time. Lillian Gish was his godmother, and his family guests included Ben Hecht, Harpo Marx, Robert Benchley, Beatrice Lillie, John Barrymore, and John Steinbeck. His first radio role was on Theatre Guild of the Air, in 1948. The Theatre Guild of the Air was the premier radio program of its day, producing one-hour plays that were performed in front of a live audience of 800. Helen Hayes accepted a role in one of the plays, which also had a small part for a child. Her son was asked if he would like to do it, and agreed.
Acting career
He made his stage debut at Olney, Maryland, in 1949, with a two-week stint in The Corn Is Green. His sister Mary was in the play and telephoned their mother to request that James go to Olney to be in it with her. The following summer, he repeated the role at Dennis, Massachusetts, and his theatrical career was underway. In 1954, he played John Day in Life With Father with Howard Lindsay and Dorothy Stickney. He became involved in important Broadway productions only after receiving his training in summer stock.
He also worked as a set painter, lighting director and chief of the parking lot. During a Helen Hayes festival at the Falmouth Playhouse on Cape Cod, he had a few walk-on parts. He also helped the theatre electrician and grew so interested that he was allowed to stay on after his mother's plays had ended. As a result, he lighted the show for Barbara Bel Geddes in The Little Hut and for Gloria Vanderbilt in The Swan. When he visited Paris with his mother as a member of The Skin of Our Teeth Company, he was in charge of making thunder backstage with a sheet of metal.
At the age of 18, he played Hal Ditmar in the television play, Deal a Blow, directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Macdonald Carey, Phyllis Thaxter and Edward Arnold. In 1956, Frankenheimer directed the movie version of the play, which was renamed The Young Stranger, with MacArthur again in the starring role. Again his performance was critically acclaimed, earning him a nomination for Most Promising Newcomer at the 1958 BAFTA awards.[citation needed] He made The Light in the Forest and Third Man on the Mountain, for Walt Disney, during summer breaks from Harvard University, where he was studying history. Deciding to make acting his full-time career, he left Harvard in his sophomore year to make two more Disney movies, Kidnapped and Swiss Family Robinson. These are now regarded as classics, and are still popular. In February 2003, Conrad Richter's novel The Light in the Forest was one of the books selected for Ohio's One Book, Two Counties project. MacArthur was a guest speaker, and talked of how the book was turned into the film and of his experiences making the movie.[citation needed]
He made his Broadway debut in 1960, playing opposite Jane Fonda in Invitation to a March, for which he received a Theater World Award. Although he never returned to Broadway, he remained active in theatre, appearing in such productions as Under the Yum Yum Tree, The Moon Is Blue, John Loves Mary (with his then wife, Joyce Bulifant), Barefoot in the Park and Murder at the Howard Johnson's. He then went on to star in such movies as The Interns, Spencer's Mountain, The Truth About Spring and Cry of Battle, as well as in the rather less successful The Love-Ins and The Angry Breed. On the set of The Angry Breed, in 1968, MacArthur met Melody Patterson, who was to become his second wife. They were married on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai, in July 1970, but divorced several years later. In 1963, he was a runner-up in the "Top New Male Personality" category of the Golden Laurel Awards.[citation needed]
Between movie and theatre roles, MacArthur was also much in demand for television guest appearances, which included parts in Studio One, G.E. Theatre, Bus Stop the play, Bus Stop the television series, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, The Eleventh Hour, The Great Adventure, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Great Adventure, Combat!, The Virginian, Twelve O'Clock High, and co-starred with his mother Helen Hayes in the 1968 episode "The Pride of the Lioness" on the Tarzan television series. MacArthur also gave a particularly chilling performance as baby-faced opium dealer "Johnny Lubin" in The Untouchables episode, Death For Sale.
Though not all his movie parts were starring roles, and some were quite brief, they were usually pivotal to the plot. His role in The Bedford Incident was that of a young ensign who becomes so rattled by the needling of his Captain (Richard Widmark) that he accidentally fires an ASROC at a Soviet submarine, thus (we are given to understand) starting World War III.
In Battle of the Bulge he again played the role of a young and inexperienced officer. This time, however, the officer finds courage and a sense of responsibility. His brief but memorable appearance in the Clint Eastwood movie, Hang 'Em High eventually led to his role as Dan Williams in Hawaii Five-O, popularizing the catch phrase "My heart's an open book."
Hawaii Five-O
In 1967, Leonard Freeman, the producer of Hang 'Em High, made the pilot for a new television cop show, Hawaii Five-O. Before it went to air, the pilot was well-received by test audiences, except for some dislike of the actor playing Dan Williams. Freeman remembered MacArthur's portrayal of the traveling preacher in Hang 'Em High: He had come on the set and done the scene in one take. He called MacArthur and offered him the role of Dan Williams. Hawaii Five-O ran for twelve years — eleven with MacArthur. Leaving Hawaii Five-O at the end of its eleventh season, MacArthur returned to the theatre, appearing in The Lunch Hour with Cybill Shepherd.
Post- Hawaii Five-O
He appeared in A Bedfull of Foreigners in Chicago in 1984, and in Michigan in 1985. He followed this with The Hasty Heart, before taking a year out of show business. In 1987, he returned to the stage in The Foreigner, then played Mortimer in the national tour of Arsenic and Old Lace with Jean Stapleton, Marion Ross and Larry Storch. In 1989, he followed another stint in The Foreigner with Love Letters and, in 1990–1991, A Bedfull of Foreigners, this time in Las Vegas.
After leaving Hawaii Five-O, McArthur guest-starred on such television shows as Murder, She Wrote, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island and Vega$, as well as in the mini series Alcatraz: The Whole Shocking Story and The Night the Bridge Fell Down, and in the 1998 television movie Stormchasers: Revenge of the Twister, with Kelly McGillis.
Semi-retirement
Throughout his career, MacArthur had also found time for various other ventures. From 1959–60, he partnered with actor James Franciscus and Alan Ladd, Jr. in a Beverly Hills telephone answering service; in June 1972, he directed The Honolulu Community Theatre in a production of his father's play The Front Page, and, for a period in the 1990s he was part-owner of Senior World publication, as well as writing the occasional celebrity interview. In 2000 MacArthur was awarded his own "sidewalk star" in Palm Springs. He continued to appear at conventions, collectors' shows, and celebrity sporting events. A keen golfer, he was the winner of the 2002 Frank Sinatra Invitational Charity Golf Tournament.
He appeared in television and radio specials and interview programs. His most recent appearances include spots on Entertainment Tonight, Christopher's Closeup and the BBC Radio 5 Live obituary program Brief Lives, in which he paid tribute to his Hawaii Five-O castmate, the late Kam Fong. In April 2003, he traveled to Honolulu's historic Hawaii Theatre for a cameo role in Joe Moore's play Dirty Laundry, appearing as a priest accused of molestation.
Death
MacArthur died of natural causes on October 28, 2010, age 72, at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. He was survived by his third wife, H. B. Duntz, and his four children and six grandchildren
Quelle: wikipedia.org
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