Don
Murray, who has died aged 94, was a seasoned American stage, film and TV actor
who earned BAFTA and Oscar nominations for his debut movie role as Beauregard
“Beau” Decker, the unworldly cowpoke who treats Marilyn Monroe’s singer Cherie
like cattle in the grabby Fox melodrama Bus Stop (1956).Ripped
from William Inge’s Broadway sensation, the story was just seamy enough to ensure
box-office success, and the tall, athletic, conventionally handsome Murray
found himself squarely at its centre. “Hollywood’s newest hunk of man!” boomed the
film’s lustiest trailer. Yet it was fanciful casting, by Murray’s own
admission: “No-one could have been less equipped for the job. I was a New
Yorker who’d never ridden a real horse and had tackled football players but
never a 500-pound steer.”
As
Murray maintained, Monroe was “very supportive”, even while succumbing to
nerves herself: “We did a bed scene, she was actually naked under the sheets,
and I could see her body covered with this red rash. She got so nervous that
she’d break out… and she had to cover it with make-up. She had done so many
films, and yet she was so frightened.”
He
worked consistently thereafter, earning his Walk of Fame star as early as 1960,
without ever becoming a household name: “I came to Hollywood, and they said I
needed to establish a persona that the audience could relate to and would be a
reliable thing for them to get behind. I did the exact opposite.”
Initially,
he sought out ambiguous parts in trickier projects: a morphine-addled veteran
in A Hatful of Rain (1957), the student pulled into the Irish Troubles
(and armed conflict with professor James Cagney) in Shake Hands with the
Devil (1959), the closeted Senator in Advise & Consent (1962).
By
the 1970s, Murray was settling into patrician roles, notably the authoritarian
Governor Breck in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), the fourth
in the enduring sci-fi series. As dealership owner Sid Fairgate, he was an
early pillar of Dallas spin-off Knots Landing (1979-93), only to
quit after two seasons.
In
the Eighties, he played dad to prominent younger stars: Brooke Shields in Endless
Love (1981), Helen Hunt in Quarterback Princess (1983), Kathleen
Turner in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). He earned a Daytime Emmy
nomination in 1994 for an episode of ABC’s issue-driven Afterschool Special
strand, playing an ageing rancher resisting relocation to a nursing home.
Murray
announced his retirement from acting in 2001, before a touchingly unexpected
comeback as Bushnell “Battling Bud” Mullins, former prizefighter turned chipper
manager of an insurance firm beset by supernatural forces in Twin Peaks: The
Return (2017). He’d travelled some way from Bus Stop: as the show’s detective
hero Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) declared in Murray’s final scene, “You are a
fine man, Bushnell Mullins. I will not soon forget your kindness and decency.”
Donald
Patrick Murray was born on July 31, 1929, the second of three children to Fox choreographer
Dennis Murray and his wife Ethel (née Cook), a sometime performer with
the Ziegfeld Follies.
The
following year, the family relocated to New York, where the young Donald
attended East Rockaway High, excelling in gridiron, track athletics and theatre
club. He studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan,
making his TV debut as Biondello in a 1950 adaptation of The Taming of the
Shrew, opposite Charlton Heston as Petruchio.
After
graduating, Murray made his Broadway debut in Tennessee Williams’ The Rose
Tattoo, but his career was paused as military service loomed. As an Anabaptist
Christian – guided by a strictly pacifist doctrine – he was spared the Korean
War; he was instead posted to an internment camp in Naples housing those
displaced during WW2, where he helped build a school and taught the locals
basketball (“I had the toughest time getting them to use their hands, instead
of feet!”).
Following
honourable discharge in 1954, he founded the non-profit HELP (Homeless European
Land Program) with his first wife, the actress Hope Lange; they raised $100,000
and bought a plot of land in Sardinia to establish a farming community for
refugees. Murray returned to the region in 2013, when he was made an honorary
citizen of Simaxis. One resident told Murray’s actor son Christopher “if it weren’t
for your father, I’d be a grain of sand.”
Murray’s
faith informed his directorial debut The Cross and the Switchblade
(1970), a drama about the real-life bond between a pastor (Pat Boone) and a gang
member (future CHiPs star Erik Estrada); later efforts – such as Elvis
is Alive (2001), which found the King working as an Elvis impersonator in
Paris, and Breathe! (2008), a subaquatic thriller written by another son,
Mick – were less favourably reviewed.
With
the passing of Tony Curtis in 2010, he became the last of Monroe’s leading men
still extant. He signed off by returning to the range, cameoing in low-budget
Western Promise (2021).
He
is survived by his second wife Betty, whom he married in 1962, and five
children, three from this second marriage, two from his earlier marriage to
Lange.
Don
Murray, born July 31, 1929, died February 2, 2024.
