Clifton Webb

Clifton Webb, born Webb Parmelee Hollenbeck on November 19, 1889, in Indianapolis, Indiana, was an American actor, singer, and dancer who built one of the most distinguished careers in twentieth-century American entertainment. He died on October 13, 1966. His parents, Jacob Grant Hollenbeck, a ticket clerk whose family came from Indiana farming stock, and Mabel A. Parmelee, the daughter of a railroad conductor, married in Kankakee, Illinois on January 18, 1888, and separated in 1891 shortly after their son's birth. In 1892, Mabel relocated to New York City with her young son. By 1900, she had remarried, and census records from that year show her and Webb living on West 77th Street under the surname Raum with her husband Green B. Raum Jr., a copper-foundry worker and son of General Green Berry Raum, former U.S. Commissioner of Internal Revenue and former U.S. Commissioner of Pensions. Webb's father, Jacob, later married Ethel Brown and died in 1939.

Adopting the professional name Clifton Webb, he became a ballroom dancer by 1909 at the age of nineteen, frequently partnering with dancer Bonnie Glass in approximately two dozen operettas. His Broadway debut came when The Purple Road opened at the Liberty Theatre on April 7, 1913, where he played the role of Bosco across 136 performances before the production closed in August. His mother, billed as Mabel Parmalee, appeared in the opening-night cast. The following year, Webb joined the Al Jolson vehicle Dancing Around, a Sigmund Romberg musical that opened at the Winter Garden Theatre on October 10, 1914, and ran for 145 performances. In 1915, he was part of Ned Wayburn's Town Topics, an all-star revue featuring 117 performers including Will Rogers, which opened at the Century Theatre on September 23, 1915, and closed after 68 performances. Cole Porter's comic opera See America First followed in 1916, opening at the Maxine Elliott Theatre on March 28 and closing after only 15 performances on April 8. The year 1917 brought a more sustained run with Jerome Kern's Love O' Mike, which opened at the Shubert Theatre on January 15 and accumulated 233 performances before closing on September 29, moving through Maxine Elliott's Theatre and the Casino Theatre during its run. Webb also appeared that year in the National Red Cross Pageant, a filmed stage production benefiting the American Red Cross. His final Broadway production of the decade, the musical Listen Lester, proved his longest run of the 1910s, opening at the Knickerbocker Theatre on December 23, 1918, and running for 272 performances before closing in August 1919.

The 1920s saw Webb appear in eight Broadway productions alongside vaudeville engagements and a handful of silent films. The revue As You Were, which included additional songs by Cole Porter, opened at the Central Theatre on January 29, 1920, and ran for 143 performances through May 29. In 1921 and 1922, Webb performed in London, appearing at the London Pavilion as Mr. St. Louis in Fun of the Fayre and in Phi-Phi. He returned to Broadway in 1923 with the musical Jack and Jill at the Globe Theatre, which ran 92 performances between March 22 and June 9, followed by Lynn Starling's comic play Meet the Wife, which opened November 26, 1923, and ran through the summer of 1924. Among the cast of Meet the Wife was a twenty-four-year-old Humphrey Bogart. In 1925, Webb appeared in a stage dance act with vaudeville star and silent film actress Mary Hay, and was subsequently chosen as second lead in the film New Toys, produced by and starring Mary Hay and her husband Richard Barthelmess. The film was financially successful, though nearly two decades would pass before Webb appeared in another feature film.

Across his Broadway career, which spanned from 1913 to 1946, Webb appeared in 23 productions and introduced several songs that became standards. In 1928, he introduced George and Ira Gershwin's "I've Got a Crush on You" in Treasure Girl. The following year, he introduced Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz's "I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan" in The Little Show. He introduced "Louisiana Hayride" in Flying Colors in 1932, and Irving Berlin's "Easter Parade" in the revue As Thousands Cheer in 1933, the same production in which his duet with Libby Holman of "Moanin' Low" became a nightly highlight. A stage sketch he performed with Fred Allen was filmed by Vitaphone in 1930 as the short subject The Still Alarm, and Allen later wrote about the experience in his memoirs. Beyond musicals, Webb also starred in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and in two plays by his longtime friend Noël Coward, Blithe Spirit and Present Laughter.

Webb's film career gained significant momentum in his mid-fifties when director Otto Preminger cast him as the elegant but villainous radio columnist Waldo Lydecker in the 1944 film noir Laura, overcoming the objections of 20th Century Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck, who had preferred Laird Cregar for the role. The performance earned Webb an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role and led to a long-term contract with Fox, for whom he worked exclusively for the remainder of his career. His first film under that contract was The Dark Corner (1946), a film noir directed by Henry Hathaway in which he again played a suave villain. That same year he appeared alongside Gene Tierney in The Razor's Edge, playing the elitist Elliott Templeton, a role that brought him a second Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. His starring role as the know-it-all babysitter Mr. Belvedere in Sitting Pretty earned him a third Oscar nomination, this time for Best Actor in a Leading Role, and the film was a major commercial success. Fox followed it with the sequel Mr. Belvedere Goes to College in 1949. In Cheaper by the Dozen (1950), Webb and Myrna Loy portrayed real-life efficiency experts Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, parents of twelve children, a film that became his third consecutive hit and led exhibitors to rank him the seventh biggest star in the United States.