Career
Beaumont began his career in show business in 1931 by performing in theaters, nightclubs, and radio. He began acting in motion pictures in 1940, appearing in over three dozen films. Many of those roles were bit parts and minor roles and were not credited. He often worked with the actor William Bendix. In 1946–47, Beaumont starred in five films as the private detective Michael Shayne, taking over the role from Lloyd Nolan. In 1950 he also narrated the short film A Date with Your Family. [5]
William Bendix was an American film, radio, and television actor, who typically played rough, blue-collar characters. He is best remembered in films for the title role in The Babe Ruth Story. He also portrayed the clumsily earnest aircraft plant worker Chester A. Riley in both the radio and television versions of The Life of Riley. He received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor for Wake Island (1942).
Michael "Mike" Shayne is a fictional private detective character created during the late 1930s by writer Brett Halliday, a pseudonym of Davis Dresser. The character appeared in a series of seven films starring Lloyd Nolan for Twentieth Century Fox, five films from the low-budget Producers Releasing Corporation with Hugh Beaumont, a radio series under a variety of titles between 1944 and 1953, and later in 1960–1961 in a 32-episode NBC television series starring Richard Denning in the title role.
Lloyd Benedict Nolan was an American film and television actor. Among his many roles, Nolan is remembered for originating the role of private investigator Michael Shayne in a series of 1940s B movies.
From 1950 to 1953, Beaumont was the narrator of the Reed Hadley series Racket Squad , based on the cases of a fictional detective, Captain John Braddock, in San Francisco. In a 1953 episode of Adventures of Superman titled "The Big Squeeze", Beaumont played an ex-convict with a wife and son whose trust he must win back after an apparent return to his criminal past. In 1952, he played the role of Reverend Randy Roberts in an episode of The Lone Ranger . In Hadley's second series, The Public Defender , which aired on CBS in 1954 and 1955, Beaumont appeared three times in the role of Ed McGrath. [1]
Reed Hadley was an American film, television and radio actor.
Racket Squad is an American TV crime drama series that aired from 1951 to 1953.
Adventures of Superman is an American television series based on comic book characters and concepts that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created in 1938. The show was the first television series to feature Superman and began filming in 1951 in California on RKO-Pathé stages and the RKO Forty Acres back lot. Cereal manufacturer Kellogg's sponsored the show. The show, which was produced for first-run television syndication rather than a network, has disputed first and last air dates, but they are generally accepted as September 19, 1952, and April 28, 1958. The show's first two seasons were filmed in black and white; seasons three through six were filmed in color but originally telecast in black and white. Adventures of Superman was not shown in color until 1965, when the series was syndicated to local stations.
Before Beaumont and Barbara Billingsley were cast as the parents on Leave It to Beaver, each had appeared separately in the early 1950s on Rod Cameron's syndicated detective series City Detective . Consistent with his interest in the clergy, Beaumont played the Reverend Clifton R. Pond in an episode of the religious anthology series Crossroads . [1]
Barbara Billingsley was an American film, television, voice, and stage actress. She began her career with uncredited roles in Three Guys Named Mike (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Invaders from Mars (1953) and was featured in the 1950s movie The Careless Years, opposite Natalie Trundy before appearing in recurring TV roles such as The Brothers.
Rod Cameron was a Canadian-born film and television actor whose career extended from the 1930s to the 1970s. He appeared in horror, war, action and science fiction movies, but is best remembered for his many westerns.
A detective is an investigator, usually a member of a law enforcement agency. They often collect information to solve crime by talking to witnesses and informants, collecting physical evidence, or searching records in databases. This leads them to arrest criminals and enable them to be convicted in court. A detective may work for the police or privately.
He appeared in one of the early episodes of the CBS Western series My Friend Flicka and guest-starred in an episode of Frank Lovejoy's detective series Meet McGraw . [6] In 1955, he also guest-starred in the Lassie episode "The Well", one of the first two episodes filmed as pilots for the new series. In those initial installments he portrays Mr. Saunders, a water company executive interested in purchasing the Miller family's well. [1]
Western is a genre of various arts which tell stories set primarily in the latter half of the 19th century in the American Old West, often centering on the life of a nomadic cowboy or gunfighter armed with a revolver and a rifle who rides a horse. Cowboys and gunslingers typically wear Stetson hats, neckerchief bandannas, vests, spurs, cowboy boots and buckskins. Recurring characters include the aforementioned cowboys, Native Americans, bandits, lawmen, bounty hunters, outlaws, gamblers, soldiers, and settlers. The ambience is usually punctuated with a Western music score, including American and Mexican folk music such as country, Native American music, New Mexico music, and rancheras.
My Friend Flicka is a 39-episode western television series set at the fictitious Goose Bar Ranch in Wyoming at the turn of the 20th century. The program was filmed in color but initially aired in black and white on CBS at 7:30 p.m. Fridays from February 10, 1956, to February 1, 1957. It was a mid-season replacement for Gene Autry's The Adventures of Champion. Both series failed in the ratings against ABC's The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin.
Frank Andrew Lovejoy Jr. was an American actor in radio, film, and television. He is perhaps best remembered for appearing in the film noir The Hitch-Hiker and for starring in the radio drama Night Beat.
In July 1957, Beaumont played a sympathetic characterization of the Western bandit Jesse James on the series Tales of Wells Fargo . Two months later, he was cast in his best-known role as the wise suburban father Ward Cleaver on the sitcom Leave It to Beaver. During that series' six seasons, Beaumont also wrote and directed several episodes, including the final one, "Family Scrapbook". [1] In 2014, in recognition of his performances as head of the Cleaver household, TV Guide ranked Beaumont number 28 on its list of the "50 Greatest TV Dads of All Time". [7]
In 1959, just before Beaumont began filming the third season of Leave It to Beaver, he flew from his home in Minnesota to Hollywood while his wife, son, and mother-in-law traveled to California by car. An accident on the road killed his mother-in-law and severely injured his son. [8] Jerry Mathers later stated that the tragedy seriously affected Beaumont's participation in the production at the time, with Beaumont often just "walking" through his part. [9]
After Leave It to Beaver ended production and went into syndication in the fall of 1963, Beaumont appeared in many community theater productions and played a few guest roles on such television series as Mannix , The Virginian , Wagon Train , and Petticoat Junction . [1] In February 1966, 11 years after his first appearance on Lassie , he again guest- starred on that popular series, performing in the episode "Cradle of the Deep". [1] He also continued to have success as a writer, selling several television screenplays and radio scripts, as well as short stories to various magazines. [10]
Following his retirement from show business in the late 1960s, Beaumont launched a second career as a Christmas-tree farmer in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. He was forced to retire from that business in 1972 after suffering a stroke from which he never fully recovered.
Personal life and death
Beaumont married only once. In Los Angeles on Easter Sunday, April 13, 1941, he wed actress Kathryn Adams (née Hohn) at the Hollywood Congregational Church. [11] Their union lasted 33 years, until their divorce in 1974. [12] They had three children: Hunter, Kristy, and Mark.
On May 14, 1982, Beaumont died of a heart attack while visiting his son, a psychologist working in Munich, in what was then West Germany. [10] His body was cremated, and the ashes were scattered on the then family-owned island on Lake Wabana, Minnesota, near Grand Rapids. The 1983 telemovie Still the Beaver is dedicated to Beaumont.
