HAL HOLBROOK was born in Cleveland in 1925. After
graduation from Culver Military Academy in 1942 he got his first paid
professional engagement playing the son in The Man Who Came to Dinner at Cain Park Theatre in Cleveland.
That fall he entered Denison University in Ohio, majoring in theatre under the
tutelage of his lifelong mentor, Edward A. Wright. World War II pulled him out
of there for three years. The Mark Twain characterization grew out of an honors
project at Denison University after the war. Holbrook and his first wife, Ruby,
constructed a two-person show, playing characters from Shakespeare to Twain.
They toured the school-assembly circuit in the Southwest, doing 307 shows in 30
weeks and traveling 30,000 miles by station wagon. Holbrook’s first solo
performance as Mark Twain was at Lock Haven State Teachers College in
Pennsylvania in 1954. Holbrook pursued the Twain character in a Greenwich
Village nightclub, developing his original two hours of material. Ed Sullivan
saw him there and gave his Twain its first national exposure. In 1959 after
honing his material for five years in front of small-town audiences all over
America, he opened at a tiny theatre Off-Broadway and was an "overnight
success." "The critics went wild," (Associated Press). "Mr. Holbrook’s material is uproarious, his ability
to hold an audience by acting is brilliant," (Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times). After a 22-week run in New York he
toured the country again and performed at the Edinburgh Festival. The State
Department sent him on a tour of Europe, where he became the first American
dramatic attraction to go behind the Iron Curtain. When David Merrick offered
him co-star billing playing an 80-year-old Mexican bandit in a new Broadway
musical, he turned down another old character role in favor of playing young Hotspur
at the Stratford, Connecticut, Shakespeare Festival. He made his Broadway debut
in Do You
Know the Milky Way?,
then played Lincoln in Abe
Lincoln in Illinois for
the Phoenix Theatre. In 1963 he joined the original Lincoln Center Repertory
Company for two years, replacing Jason Robards in After the Fall and playing the title role in Marco Millions, the German major in Incident at Vichy and the bailiff in Tartuffe. Other roles on Broadway came along:
The Glass
Menagerie, The Apple Tree, I Never Sang for My Father, Man of La Mancha, Does a
Tiger Wear a Necktie? with
young Al Pacino. He continued touring Mark Twain in some part of every year,
and in 1966 returned to New York at the Longacre Theatre and won a Tony Award,
a Drama Critics Circle Award and a 90-minute CBS television special of Mark Twain Tonight!, which was nominated for an Emmy
Award and seen by 22 million people. In 1970 he was brought to Hollywood to
star in a controversial television series, The Senator, which won eight Emmy Awards and was canceled in one year.
Mr. Holbrook has been nominated for 12 Emmy Awards, won five, and has had
recurring roles in two sitcoms. His movie career began with The Group in 1966 when he was 41 years old.
He’s appeared in more than 35 films, including Magnum Force, Midway, All the President’s
Men, Julia, Wall Street, The Firm, Men of Honor and The Majestic. Throughout his long career Holbrook has continued to perform Mark
Twain every year, including a third New York engagement in 1977 and a world
tour in 1985. He has returned to the stage in New York (Lake of the Woods, Buried Inside Extra, The Country Girl, King Lear,
An American Daughter),
at regional theatres (Our
Town, Uncle Vanya, Merchant of Venice, King Lear and the new plays Eye of God and Hotel
Oubliette) and a
national tour of Death
of a Salesman. In his
51st consecutive year for Mark
Twain Tonight!, Holbrook
continues to add new material every year. He has no set program. With more than
16 hours of material, he chooses his program as he goes along. Holbrook is a
sailor and in 1980 completed the single-handed Transpac Race from San Francisco
to Hawaii in his 40-foot sailboat, Yankee Tar, sailing the 2,300 miles alone. With one or two friends he
has sailed Yankee
Tar through the South
Pacific to Tahiti, Samoa, the Tongas, New Zealand and the Fiji Islands. He has
received honorary degrees from universities, and in 2003 he was selected for
the National Humanities Medal. He also received the Edwin Booth Award and the
William Shakespeare Award and was inducted into the New York Theatre Hall of
Fame. He is married to the actress Dixie Carter. Together they have five
children. In the fall he and Ms. Carter will appear in Ken Ludwig’s new play Be My Baby at the Alley Theatre, Houston, and
early next year in Southern
Comforts, a new play by
Kate Clark, at the Coconut Grove Theatre in Miami.