William Broderick Crawford (December 9, 1911 – April 26, 1986) was an American actor. Known for his "bulldog face and barking voice", he was initially a character actor often cast tough-guy or slob roles, but gained widespread acclaim for his portrayal of Willie Stark in the 1949 film adaptation of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. His performance earned him both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Best Actor. He was later known for his starring role as Dan Mathews on the television series Highway Patrol (1955–59).
Crawford was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Lester Crawford (né Lester Crawford Pendergast) and Helen Broderick, who were both vaudeville performers, as his grandparents had been. Lester appeared in films in the 1920s and 1930s. Helen Broderick had a career in Hollywood comedies, including appearances in the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals Top Hat and Swing Time.
Notwithstanding his family's relative prominence, Crawford's childhood and adolescence remain sparsely documented, with a 1977 Saturday Night Live documentary segment essentially intimating that he was raised in the violent, alcohol-sodden and predominantly working class milieu of Midtown Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen district (long favored by actors due to its traditionally low rents and convenient proximity to various entertainment venues, most notably Broadway theatre). In the segment, he also reminisced of overnight sleepovers in Central Park with his friends.
Throughout his childhood, Crawford and his parents performed on the stage for producer Max Gordon. Despite a desultory formal education, he was accepted by Harvard College, where he ultimately enrolled. After three months of studies, he dropped out to work as a stevedore on the New York docks.
Crawford returned to vaudeville and radio, which included a period with the Marx Brothers in the radio comedy show Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel.
He played his first serious character as a footballer in She Loves Me Not at the Adelphi Theatre, London in 1932. Crawford was originally stereotyped as a fast-talking tough guy early in his career and often played villainous parts.
He gained fame in 1937 as Lennie in Of Mice and Men on Broadway. He moved to Hollywood and began working in films.
Crawford made his film debut for Sam Goldwyn in Woman Chases Man (1937). He was in Start Cheering (1938) at Columbia but missed out on reprising his stage performance as Lenny in the film version of Of Mice and Men, losing it to Lon Chaney Jr.
Crawford appeared in several B films before landing supporting roles in Beau Geste starring Gary Cooper, The Real Glory (1939), starring Cooper with David Niven, and Eternally Yours (1939) starring Niven and Loretta Young.
Universal gave Crawford the leading role in a "B" picture, I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby (1940). A series of supporting parts followed, most notably in Seven Sinners (1940), The Black Cat (1941), and Larceny, Inc.(1942).
During World War II, Crawford served in the United States Army Air Corps. Assigned to the Armed Forces Network, he was sent to Britain in 1944 as a sergeant and was one of two announcers for the Glenn Miller Band's weekly program I Sustain the Wings.
All the King's Men and stardom
In 1949, Crawford was cast as Willie Stark, a character inspired by and closely patterned after the life of Louisiana politician Huey Long, in All the King's Men, based on the novel by Robert Penn Warren. The film was a huge hit, and Crawford won the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Crawford went on to make several major films in the first half of the 1950s, including Born Yesterday (1950), Lone Star (1952), Last of the Comanches (1953), and Night People (1954).
In 1955, Crawford took on the starring role of Rollo Lamar, the most violent of convicts in Big House, U.S.A., in which Crawford's character is a hardened convict so violent he commands the obedience of even the most violent and psychotic prisoners in the prison yard, followed by a co-starring role in the hit Not as a Stranger (1955).
In 1955, television producer Frederick Ziv of ZIV Television Productions offered Crawford the lead role in the police drama Highway Patrol, which dramatized law enforcement activities of the California Highway Patrol (CHP). ZIV operated on a low budget of $25,000 per episode, with ten percent of gross receipts going to Crawford. While the show's scripts were largely fictional, the use of realistic, rapid-fire dialogue, stark film noir style and Crawford's convincing portrayal of a hard-as-nails police officer made the show an instant success. Highway Patrol remained popular during its four years (1955–1959) of first-run syndication, and continued in rerun syndication across the United States for many years. From 1955 until 1965, most of Crawford's television roles were for ZIV, which was one of the few producers willing to accept the challenges of working with the hard-living and alcoholic Crawford. Years later, Frederick Ziv said, "To be honest, Broderick could be a handful!"
Highway Patrol revived Crawford's career and cemented his tough-guy persona, which he used successfully in numerous roles for the rest of his life.
During the series' run he was in three significant films: The Fastest Gun Alive (1956) for director Russell Rouse at MGM, Between Heaven and Hell (1956) with Robert Wagner at Fox, directed by Richard Fleischer, and The Decks Ran Red (1958) with James Mason for Andrew L. Stone.