Ben Johnson (actor)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ben Johnson (* 13. June 1918 in Foraker , Osage County , Oklahoma , † 8. April 1996 in Mesa , Arizona ) was an American actor, stuntman and rodeo - cowboy who especially with Western films became known. Johnson won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Last Performance (1971) .

Life

Ben Johnson was born the son of a farmer and has ridden horses since childhood. As a very successful rodeo cowboy, he won numerous important competitions, such as the 1953 World Championship in Team Roping . In 1939 Johnson delivered some horses to Hollywood for a film shoot and because the pay in the film business was better, he got stuck in Hollywood and worked as a stuntman and doubled stars like John Wayne , Gary Cooper and James Stewart . In addition to stunt work, he also took on extras and extras in some films. Star director John Ford first employed Johnson as a stuntman for his film To the Last Man (1948). In the process, Ford discovered Johnson's acting talent and gave him a smaller role in his next film, Footprints in the Sand . In the following years Johnson played major roles in several John Ford westerns, in 1950 he was even allowed to play the leading role in West St. Louis . Although the film is mostly well-reviewed today, it wasn't a huge hit when it was released and didn't bring Johnson the hoped-for leap to star. Other projects with Johnson as the lead actor, such as Panic for King Kong (1949), also failed.

In the early 1950s he fell out with his mentor Ford, but later, before Ford's death, a reconciliation came about. Even without Ford, Johnson was well established as an actor that he still got bigger supporting roles, for example as Chris Calloway in George Stevens ' My Great Friend Shane (1953) or as one of the bandits in Sam Peckinpah's late-western The Wild Bunch ( 1969). Ben Johnson's cinematic home was the western, he had appearances in numerous western films and western television series such as Bonanza and At the foot of the blue mountains . Johnson received the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 1971 for a non-western role : In Peter Bogdanovich's youth drama The Last Performance , he played a former cowboy who became a landlord and theater owner in a small town. For this role he also received the British Film Prize and a Golden Globe Award . He did n't want to play the role in The Last Performance at first because it contained too many slippery words for him. It was only through the mediation of John Ford that he accepted the role and, with the permission of director Bogdanovich, rewrote his own dialogues so that they contained fewer swear words.

His most common characters were mostly simple but honest men from the Wild West - such as cowboys, sheriffs and southerners. In his private life, too, he was considered a humble and authentic man: “I'm not good with fake people, and there are many of them in Hollywood. I've built my life around the principles of honesty, realism, and respect, and when the people in Hollywood are so inflated that they can't handle it, I say, To hell with them! ”Johnson remained a busy man until his death Character actors, for example as the father of a murdered girl in Straßen der Nacht (1975) by Robert Aldrich , as the father of Lea Thompson in the war film The Red Flood (1984) and as the owner of a baseball club in the sports comedy Angels - Angels really exist! (1994). Johnson's final film, Years of Tenderness , wasn't released until after his death.

In 1982 Johnson was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame . In 1994 he was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame . In 1941, Ben Johnson married Carol Elaine Jones, the daughter of actor Buck Jones . They were married for 53 years until Carol passed away on March 27, 1994. The couple remained childless. After her death, he lived in a retirement home near his mother, Susan Johnson (1899-2000). He died of a heart attack in 1996 at the age of 77 .

Filmography (selection)

reception

In Haruki Murakami's novel Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World , the hero encourages himself to flee by thinking of Ben Johnson: “I recalled all of his horse scenes. Ben Johnson in Fort Defiance , Ben Johnson in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon , in Wagonmaster and in Rio Grande . The sun-drenched prairie, in the sky as white as painted clouds. Herds of buffalo stand in the valleys, women step out the door and wipe their hands on white aprons. A river, light trembling in the wind and people singing. Ben Johnson chases through this landscape like an arrow. And the mobile camera chases with you, the stately rider always in its sights. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ben Johnson at the Rodeo Hall of Fame
  2. ^ Obituary for Ben Johnson in the Independent
  3. ↑ IMDb quota
  4. ↑ Haruki Murakami: Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World . btb, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-442-73627-0 , p. 255 (from the Japanese by Annelie Ortmanns).
personal data
SURNAME Johnson, Ben
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American actor, stunt performer, and rodeo cowboy
DATE OF BIRTH June 13, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Foraker , Osage County , Oklahoma
DATE OF DEATH April 8, 1996
Place of death Mesa , Arizona