Richard Garrick

Biography

Richard T. O’Brien slipped into the footlights in 1907, rechristened himself Richard Garrick, and never stepped out of the spotlight again for half a century. His first New York curtain rose on “The Boys of Company B,” where a pre-keystone Mack Sennett shared the boards in one of his rare stage appearances. The tall, angular Irishman soon traded Broadway boards for Florida sun, becoming Gaumont’s Director General in Tallahassee. There he cranked out five-reel silents—“The Idol of the Stage,” “According to Law,” “The Drifter”—calling shots one day and stepping in front of the camera the next. The 1920s found him crossing the Atlantic, turning up in British quickies and Continental co-productions: “Trent’s Last Case,” “Rank Outsider,” “The Romance of a Movie Star,” “The Pride of the Fancy,” and the French-shot “La Soleil de Minuit.” Between takes he opened a slice of transplanted Tinseltown—an expat club called “The Hollywood” on Rue Danou—where Parisians sipped tea at noon and champagne long after midnight. Back home he reclaimed the boards as the quiet, unsettling Doctor (programmes sometimes whispered “The Stranger”) in Tennessee Williams’s steamy “A Streetcar Named Desire,” the very production that let a young Marlon Brando explode into legend. When the 1951 screen version rolled, Garrick reprised his white-coated presence opposite Brando and Vivian Leigh. Cameras continued to seek him out: he stood beside John Wayne in “Trouble Along the Way” (1953), traded barbs with Brando and Jean Simmons in “Désirée” (1954), measured James Dean’s restlessness in “East of Eden” (1955), preached resolve in “A Man Called Peter” (1955), scaled icy heights with Spencer Tracy in “The Mountain” (1956), crooned through “High Society” (1956) with Kelly, Crosby and Sinatra, and helped Joanna Woodward sort her personalities in “The Three Faces of Eve” (1957). Between blockbusters he toured European bases with the USO Camp Shows, trapping Nazi-hunting suspects in Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little Indians,” hosted a music-and-chat hour on Los Angeles station KRKD, and popped up on early-television favorites—“Dragnet,” “Cavalcade of America,” “My Friend Flicka.” From 1907 to 1957—stage, studio, airwaves, and trenches—Richard Garrick spent five decades proving that a name change was the only thing about him that ever stood still.