Bradford Dillman obit

Bradford Dillman, Star of Broadway and Hollywood, Dies at 87

He was not on the list.

Bradford Dillman, a Broadway and film actor known for his roles in the original Broadway production

of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and the movie “Compulsion,” died on Jan. 16 in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 87.

His manager, Ted Gekis, said the cause was complications of pneumonia.

Mr. Dillman began acting professionally in 1953 and had his breakthrough three years later in “Long Day’s Journey,” playing Edmund Tyrone, the peacekeeping younger brother in a deeply dysfunctional family. The director, José Quintero, picked him out of 500 applicants, The New York Times reported in 1959.

It was a very different role from the dark characters he would become known for, but it earned him a 1957 Theater World Award and a contract with 20th Century Fox.

In 1959, Mr. Dillman won a Golden Globe for most promising newcomer, starring that year with Orson Welles and Dean Stockwell in “Compulsion,” a film based on the Leopold and Loeb murders in Chicago.

In the movie, Mr. Dillman portrayed Artie Straus (a stand-in for the real-life Richard Loeb), an arrogant law student from a socially prominent family who persuades a classmate (Mr. Stockwell) to help him commit the perfect crime as a demonstration of their superior intellect.

It would become one of his best-known performances.

“Bradford Dillman emerges as an actor of imposing stature as the bossy, over-ebullient and immature mama’s boy, Artie,” A. H. Weiler wrote in a Times review.

In an interview with The Times shortly after “Compulsion” was released, Mr. Dillman gave some insight into his acting philosophy, criticizing what he called “ ‘the beat’ acting style.” He said it made a mockery of the Actors Studio and Lee Strasberg’s Method.

“To me this much-touted new ‘technique’ is a reversion to the animalistic, a declaration of spiritual bankruptcy, a shedding of hard-won civilized sentiments like tenderness, honor, self-respect, loyalty, friendship, love,” he said. “All this glaring out at the world from beneath furrowed brows, these shufflings and shamblings and evasivenesses, the self-hate projections, the affected stammerings and word repetitions and vowel swallowings. To me these are ridiculous, infantile.”

The Times’s Lawrence J. Quirk quoted him approvingly and wrote: “Dillman is an individualist and a breaker of rules. He dares to dress neatly. He dares to be a gentleman. He scorns white buckskins, clean or dirty. He doesn’t scratch. He doesn’t mumble. He doesn’t spout phrases like ‘gas it, man!’ He doesn’t hate himself. He isn’t lonely.”

Bradford Dillman was born in San Francisco on April 14, 1930, to Dean Dillman, a stockbroker, and the former Josephine Moore. After attending St. Ignatius High School in San Francisco, he went cross-country to enroll in the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, where he performed in school plays before graduating and entering Yale.

He continued to act in amateur productions as a student at Yale and, during summer breaks, in Santa Barbara, Calif., where his parents lived. He earned a degree in literature from Yale in 1951. After graduation, he served in the Marines during the Korean War. He was discharged with the rank of first lieutenant in 1953.

After his military service he turned down a scholarship to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London when he was offered a role in an Off Broadway production.

His acting career was prolific, with at least 140 film and television credits. He rarely turned down a job.

He had children, he said, “and had to put food on the table,” he told Variety in 1995, calling himself “a Safeway actor.”

Mr. Dillman played prominent roles in “The Enforcer” and “Sudden Impact,” the third and fourth films in the “Dirty Harry” series, and won a Daytime Emmy Award in 1975 for his work on the TV series “The ABC Afternoon Playbreak.”

In 1973, he returned to Eugene O’Neill’s work, playing Willie Oban in a film adaptation of “The Iceman Cometh.” He also acted occasionally on the TV series “Murder, She Wrote,” starring Angela Lansbury, a friend.

Offscreen, Mr. Dillman was a writer of both fiction and nonfiction. His books include “Inside the New York Giants” (1995) and “Dropkick: A Football Fantasy” (1998), as well as the novels “That Air Forever Dark” (2001) and “Kissing Kate” (2005). He also wrote a memoir, “Are You Anybody? An Actor’s Life” (1997).

Mr. Dillman was married twice: to Frieda Harding McIntosh from 1956 to 1962, and to Suzy Parker, a model and actress, from 1963 until her death in 2003.

He is survived by three sons, Jeffrey, Charlie and Christopher; two daughters, Pamela Dillman Haskell and Dinah Dillman Kaufmann; a sister, Corinne Dillman Lansill; a stepdaughter, Georgia Thoreau LaSalle; eight grandchildren; and two step-grandchildren.