Hume Cronyn, dead at 91.

Hume Cronyn, one of the foremost character actors of the American stage and screen for more than 60 years, died on Sunday at his home in Fairfield, Conn. He was 91.

Cronyn, a compact, restless man who was once an amateur boxer and remained a featherweight 127 pounds all his life, was at home in everything from Shakespeare and Chekhov to Albee and Beckett. Among his notable Broadway successes were "A Delicate Balance," "The Gin Game" and "Coward in Two Keys."

He was nominated for an Oscar for the 1944 film "Seventh Cross" with Spencer Tracy. More than 40 years later, when he was in his 70s, he won fresh recognition on film as Joe Finley, one of a group of elderly people who seek eternal youth in the popular movies "Cocoon" and "Cocoon: The Return."

His performances won him four Tony nominations, and he won in 1964 as Polonius in Richard Burton's "Hamlet." In 1994, he and his wife and frequent acting partner, Jessica Tandy, received the first Tony for lifetime achievement. Tandy died later that year.

Early in Cronyn's career in New York, a casting director at the Theater Guild suggested he go into summer stock, but he said she told him, "You may have a difficult time because you don't look like anything."

He said, "I tell this story to students because I hope it is encouraging." For a young actor, he said, the best hope is that he will walk into an office and somebody will say, "'Ah, you're a lawyer, or a newsboy,' or anything. I didn't look like anything and in the long run it turned out to be the biggest advantage I had."

Reviewing "Triple Play," in 1959, Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic for The New York Times, wrote: "Give Mr. Cronyn a wig, mustache and glasses, and he is about the best character actor in the business.

Cronyn said he followed one rule as an actor: "If you're doing the devil, look for the angel in him. If you're doing the angel, look for the devil in him." He said he saw few parallels between his own life and the lives he depicted on stage. He said, "My idea of a lovely part is a part I can hide behind."

He did some of his best "hiding" with Jessica Tandy, to whom he was married for 52 years. Their first Broadway production together, "The Fourposter," in 1951, helped make them the best-known acting duo since Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, though there were marked differences.

Where the Lunts were legends on Broadway and in regional theaters for sophisticated drawing-room comedy, the Cronyns were known for the classics -- as well as well as the experimental, including the avant-garde plays of Samuel Beckett.

Cronyn said he was always flattered by the comparison with the Lunts and had "extravagant admiration" for them. "But," he said, "the Lunts were fashionable people who played brilliantly in high comedy. We are totally different personalities. We are bread and cheese to their mille-feuilles."

Cronyn remembered reading for the Lunts in 1938.

"I'll never forget how much I wanted to be a member of their company," he said. "I auditioned for 'The Sea Gull.' When they cast someone else I went right to Grand Central Station, took the train to Boston, and on eight hours' notice went into a ridiculous play called 'There's Always a Breeze.' It was a total failure."

Forty years later, when the Cronyns took the Pulitzer Prize-winning play "The Gin Game" to theaters across the country, Lynn Fontanne, then 90 years old, went backstage in Milwaukee to congratulate them on their performance. When Cronyn reminded Fontanne of his failed tryout she said, "You know, Mr. Cronyn, Alfred made a mistake."

The Cronyn family thought it was Hume who made the mistake when he left a life of privilege in Canada for the uncertainties of the theater, where he said he "grabbed" at work -- "in church basements, the YMCA, wherever" -- and did lots of flops: "Failure is the norm; it's success that is the exception." He emerged from this self-inflicted hazing process as one of the pre-eminent character actors of his time with a flair for writing and directing.

Cronyn's mother was a descendant of the wealthy Labatt brewery family; his father, also named Hume, was a financier and a member of Canada's House of Commons, who expected his youngest son to be a lawyer. The younger Hume, born on July 18, 1911, in London, Ontario, was sent to private schools where he said he was miserable.

"I was the smallest boy and subject to chronic bullying," he said. "That's why I learned to box. It was not out of an aggressive nature but I had to defend myself."

In 1932, he chose to leave McGill University in Montreal after his sophomore year to attend the American Academy of the Dramatic Arts despite the fact that during that same year he was nominated for the Canadian Olympic boxing team.

He received the prestigious Barter Theater Award in 1961 "for outstanding contribution to the theater," and with Tandy was given the Brandeis University Creative Arts medal for a lifetime of distinguished achievement. In 1983, they shared the Common Wealth Award for distinguished service in the dramatic arts. In 1979, Cronyn and Tandy were both elected to the Theater Hall of Fame in recognition of their outstanding contributions to the American Theater. They also received the Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement medal in 1986.

When both of them were nominated for Tonys for "The Gin Game," which he also co-produced with Mike Nichols, only Tandy won. Cronyn insisted that there was never any professional jealousy. "Every triumph that Jessie has I feel in some totally illogical way is my triumph, and I hope she feels that way too." To Tandy there was nothing illogical about it. "His performance is part of mine," she said.

They became a married couple in 1942 but it wasn't until nine years later that they became a stage couple when they appeared together in "The Fourposter." By 1986, when they were acting as husband and wife in "The Petition," the New York Times drama critic Frank Rich was writing of "their legendary theatrical relationship," and of a Cronyn-Tandy moment as "an acting phenomenon now unique in the Broadway theater and possibly never to come its way again." That same year The Times' Mel Gussow called them "two actors at their summit."

For Cronyn, it was a long climb to the summit. It began on Broadway in 1934 with a bit part as a janitor in "Hipper's Holiday," which, according to a later Playbill sketch, "is held by a few die-hards to be the worst play ever written."

He once said, "I did lots of flops and I'm grateful for that because I went from one play to another to another." He was fond of quoting Sean O'Casey, who said the theater "is no place for a man what bleeds easy."

Early in his career Cronyn had the good fortune to cross paths with George Abbott. "Oh, I owe so much to that man," he said. "If you're not lucky enough to cut your teeth on Shakespeare you should cut your teeth on farce."

He landed a role in the touring production of Abbott's "Three Men on a Horse" (1935-1936) and later succeeded Garson Kanin in "Boy Meets Girl" (1936). There were roles in 24 more productions on Broadway and on the road before he was summoned to Hollywood by Alfred Hitchcock to make his movie debut in "Shadow of a Doubt."

As soon as he finished the Hitchcock movie, Cronyn and Tandy were married. After Tandy's death, Cronyn remarried, in 1996, to Susan Cooper an award-winning children's book writer and Cronyn's longtime playwriting collaborator. She survives him, as do three children from his marriage to Tandy: Christopher, of Missoula, Mont., and two daughters, Tandy, of New York, and Susan Tettemer, of Los Angeles, seven grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. Also surviving are two stepchildren, Jonathan Grant and Kate Glennon, both of Scituate, Mass. Cronyn's first marriage, to Emily Woodruff, ended in divorce.

In the mid-1940s, after making "The Seventh Cross," Cronyn said he continued under contract to M-G-M but for 13 months found no parts acceptable. "I was in Hollywood under the star system, but because I wasn't a star it didn't matter." he said. "I wasn't important enough to be fired. My salary wasn't big enough." During those 13 months he wrote -- and sold -- a screenplay that was never produced. In 1946, while still in Hollywood, he directed Tandy in "Portrait of a Madonna," a one-act play by Tennessee Williams. Her luminous performance in a small theater in Los Angeles won for her the role of Blanche DuBois on Broadway in "A Streetcar Named Desire," the role that established her as one of the greats of the American theater.

In all, Cronyn acted in more than 30 feature films including "The Ziegfeld Follies" (1946), opposite Fanny Brice; "The Beginning of the End" (1947), in which he played the role of J. Robert Oppenheimer; "People Will Talk" (1951), with Cary Grant, and "Sunrise at Campobello" (1960), in the role of Louis Howe.

In 1969, during the filming of "There Was a Crooked Man," Cronyn was diagnosed as having cancer of the eye. His left eye was removed, and almost without giving it a thought, he turned immediately to his next role on the stage, as Hadrian VII.

In five films in the 1980s -- "Honky Tonk Freeway" (1980), "Cocoon" (1984), "Batteries Not Included" (1986)and "Cocoon: The Return,"(1988) -- he played opposite Tandy.

He said that he found film easier than the stage, but less satisfying. Nevertheless, he said it was necessary to accept lucrative film parts if he and Tandy were to do plays Off Broadway at wages that barely paid for the car rental to get them to the theater. The Cronyns also did numerous television programs, including a series that ran on NBC during the 1950s called "The Marriage." Cronyn was almost in his 80s when he won an Emmy for his role in "Age-Old Friends" on Home Box Office in 1989. He also appeared in "Christmas on Division Street," on CBS in 1991.

Although Cronyn lived in New York, the regional theater attracted him because it was there that he could play the classics. Although in 1964 he did Polonius on Broadway in a production of "Hamlet" that broke records for the play in New York, his Richard III, Hamlet, Bottom and Shylock were performed out of town. The New York Times critic Clive Barnes wrote in 1976 that he was "a magnificent Shylock" in the Stratford (Ontario) Shakespeare Theater production of "The Merchant of Venice." The Cronyns were among the first to offer their services to Tyrone Guthrie when he formed his repertory theater in Minneapolis. During its first season in 1963, Cronyn appeared in "The Miser" and, with Tandy, in "The Three Sisters" and "Death of a Salesman."

With "The Petition" in 1986, the Cronyns swore off "two-handers" -- plays in which they alone performed. Such two-character plays exacerbated the normal problems of acting in tandem.

"There are hazards in working together," he said in an interview in 1986. "If she's insecure, I'm insecure. If I get angry, that disturbs Jessie. If she cannot find her own version of truth, she literally can't play. She won't settle. I will." One of the most difficult moments in their joint career came in Los Angeles in 1985, when they were performing "Foxfire" at the Ahmanson Theater. Tandy collapsed and was taken to the hospital. Cronyn continued the performance with her understudy.

He said that wherever they went, they were asked how they had made their marriage and their joint careers work. "If we had a formula we'd package it and make it rich," he said. "What people see is on the surface, and I hope they see that we like each other, that we love each other. But there have been painful times. I irritate the hell out of her. It's inevitable. And is there a parent who escaped problems with children? We haven't."

In some ways, it was a marriage of opposites. She was always serene and optimistic; he was ridden with anxieties. "I'm a genuine compulsive about many things," he said. "I think it's miraculous that Jessie puts up with it. Most of what I worry about will never happen but I can't stop the anxiety of anticipation." Peter Hall, his director in "The Petition," used to call him "Eeyore," after the pessimistic donkey in "Winnie-the-Pooh."

He said that all his life he was dogged by the remark that he was a "technical" actor.

"What is technique?" he asked. "The actor's technique is that personal and very private means by which you get the best out of yourself. Every actor does it differently. There's never been an artist alive who didn't have to deal with form and content. Those who deal only with content are the ones who act with their guts, but who's interested in their guts? We're interested in Hamlet's guts, or Richard III's guts, and you have to be heard in the back row. Of course you must have content, but you've got to have form. The thing is to marry the two so the form isn't noticed. Form without content, forget it."

His interests went beyond the theater. During World War II, he became a skillful collector of Impressionist paintings, including a Picasso, two Modiglianis, a Renoir, a Mary Cassatt and a rare Georges Rouault nude. He sold all of them at auction in 1953. The Picasso, "Femme aux Bas Bleus," which cost him $3,500, went for $21,000. "From a financial point of view it was the biggest mistake I made in my life, but I did take substantial profits," he said philosophically. "Anyway, I'd had it for 18 years and I was beginning to feel I was a hoarder."

The money was needed to develop Children's Bay Cay, an island in the Bahamas that he had bought in 1946. Elia Kazan, the director, recalled that one of the qualities he found most endearing about Cronyn was his tendency to buy houses in difficult places, fix them up, and then sell them.

A measure of his refusal to be satisfied with his successes was a continuing ambition he harbored. Accordingly, he never stopped working, keeping fit with a daily regimen of Canadian Fior Force exercises. In his later years, he found great pleasure in co-writing with Cooper "Foxfire" and "The Dollmaker." He published a memoir in 1991 which he called "A Terrible Liar" (William Morrow and Co., Inc.) The reference in the title was not to himself but to the fact that one's memory can play tricks, that memory itself can be a terrible liar.

In 1994, when he and Tandy were about to receive the Tony for lifetime achievement, he reflected on his career:

"Not having been on the stage now for eight years," he said, "I'm touched that somebody should have seen fit to give us this award. I like making television shows. I like making films. But my heart belongs to theater, which is really home and mother."


http://www.ajc.com/living/content/living/0603/16cronyn.html