Actors - Darren McGavin

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	Actors - Darren McGavin

William Lyle Richardson (May 7 1922 – February 25 2006), who adopted the name Darren McGavin, was an American actor best known for playing the title role in the television horror series Kolchak: The Night Stalker
, and also his portrayal in the movie A Christmas Story
of the grumpy father given to bursts of profanity that he never realizes his sons overhear. He also appeared as the tough-talking, funny detective in the TV series Mike Hammer.

Childhood

McGavin was born in Spokane, Washington, to Reid Delano Richardson and Grace McGavin. However, some sources list his birthplace as San Joaquin, California.

In magazine interviews during the 1960s, he stated that his parents divorced when he was very young and that his father, not knowing what else to do, put him in an orphanage at the age of 11. McGavin began to run away, often sleeping on the docks and in warehouses. He ended up in three orphanages. The last one was a boy's home, which turned out to be a safe haven for McGavin. He lived there for a few years where there were farm chores assigned, along with several other boys who were abandoned like himself. McGavin said that the owners of the home helped him to establish a sense of pride and responsibility, and that this helped to turn his life around.

Career

Still untrained as an actor, McGavin worked as a painter in the paint crew at the Columbia Pictures movie studios in 1945. When an opening became available for a bit part in A Song to Remember
, the movie set on which he was working, McGavin applied for the role. He was hired for it, and that was his first foray into movie acting. (He had spent a year at College of the Pacific in Stockton, California.) Shortly afterwards, he moved to New York City and spent a decade of learning the acting craft in TV and the plays there. McGavin studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Actors Studio under the famous teacher Sanford Meisner and began working in live TV drama and on Broadway. A few of the plays in which he starred included "The Rainmaker" (where he created the title role on Broadway), "The King and I" and "Death of a Salesman".

McGavin returned to Hollywood and became a busy actor in a wide variety of TV and movie roles; in 1955 he broke through with notable roles in the films Summertime
and The Man with the Golden Arm
. Over the course of his career, McGavin starred in seven different TV series and guest-starred in many more; these roles on television increased in the late 1950s and early 1960s with leading parts in series such as Mike Hammer and Riverboat. He was the top contender to replace Larry Hagman as the male lead of the television series I Dream of Jeannie, but the producers chose not to replace Hagman.

McGavin was also known for his role as Sam Parkhill in the miniseries adaptation of The Martian Chronicles. He appeared as a regular in The Name of the Game in 1971 after Tony Franciosa was dismissed; he, Peter Falk, Robert Culp, and Robert Wagner stepped in to rotate in the lead role with Gene Barry and Robert Stack.

The first of his two best-known roles came in 1972, in the supernatural-themed TV movie The Night Stalker (1972). With McGavin playing a reporter who discovers the activities of a modern-day vampire on the loose in Las Vegas, the film became the highest-rated made-for-TV movie in history; and when the sequel The Night Strangler (1973) also was a strong success, a subsequent television series Kolchak: The Night Stalker
(1974) was begun. In the series, McGavin played Carl Kolchak, an investigative reporter for a Chicago-based news service who regularly stumbles upon the supernatural or occult basis for a seemingly mundane crime; although his involvement routinely assisted in the dispelment of the otherwordly adversary, his evidence in the case was always destroyed or seized, usually by a public official or major social figure who sought to cover up the incident. He would write his ensuing stories in a sensational, tabloid style which advised readers that the true story was being withheld from them.

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Actors - Darren McGavin

Childhood

Career

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