Don Murray

Donald Patrick Murray was born on July 31, 1929, in Los Angeles, California, the second of three children born to Dennis Aloisius Murray, a Broadway dance director and stage manager, and Ethel Murray, née Cook, a former Ziegfeld Follies performer. He attended East Rockaway High School in East Rockaway, New York, graduating in 1947, where he participated in football, track, student government, the glee club, and the Omega Gamma Delta Fraternity. He went on to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. A member of the Church of the Brethren, Murray registered as a conscientious objector during the Korean War and was assigned to alternative service in Europe, where he worked with orphans and war casualties. He returned to the United States in 1954.

Murray made his Broadway debut in 1951, playing Jack Hunter in The Rose Tattoo. After returning from Europe, he appeared alongside Mary Martin in a stage production of The Skin of Our Teeth, a performance that led director Joshua Logan to cast him in his first film role. That film, Bus Stop (1956), produced by 20th Century Fox and based on William Inge's play, featured Murray as Beauregard "Beau" Decker opposite Marilyn Monroe. The role earned him both an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and a BAFTA nomination for Most Promising Newcomer. Murray also married his Bus Stop co-star Hope Lange in 1956; the couple had two children, Christopher and Patricia, before divorcing in 1961. In 1962, he married Elizabeth Johnson, with whom he had three children: Colleen, Sean, and Michael.

His film career through the late 1950s and 1960s included several prominent dramatic roles. In 1957, he appeared in The Bachelor Party as bookkeeper Charlie Sampson and took the lead role of morphine-addicted Korean War veteran Johnny Pope in A Hatful of Rain, a part he pursued against director Fred Zinnemann's original casting intentions. He co-starred with James Cagney in Shake Hands with the Devil (1959), with Alan Ladd in One Foot in Hell (1960), and with Henry Fonda and Charles Laughton in Advise & Consent (1962), an Otto Preminger-directed adaptation of Allen Drury's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in which Murray played a blackmailed United States senator. He appeared alongside Steve McQueen and Lee Remick in Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965) and played the ape-hating Governor Breck in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972). In 1976, he starred in Deadly Hero, and a decade later appeared as the father of Kathleen Turner's character in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986).

Beyond acting, Murray pursued work as a screenwriter and director. He co-wrote, co-produced, and starred in The Hoodlum Priest (1961), a biopic centered on Jesuit priest Dismas Clark. In 1970, he wrote and directed The Cross and the Switchblade, a film based on the lives of evangelists David Wilkerson and Nicky Cruz. He also scripted two episodes of the television series Knots Landing in 1980, on which he starred as Sid Fairgate beginning in 1979. Murray departed the series after two seasons, and the character's death — depicted in the second episode of the third season following a season-two cliffhanger involving a car plunging off a cliff — was considered notable at the time for killing off a prominent series regular. Though he distanced himself from the show after his departure, he contributed an interview segment to the 2005 reunion special Knots Landing: Together Again. His other significant television work included the role of Earl Corey in the ABC western series The Outcasts (1968–69), co-starring Otis Young, and the role of Bushnell Mullins in the third season of Twin Peaks in 2017, which marked his return to the screen after a sixteen-year absence.

Murray's Broadway career spanned from 1951 to 1978. He played the title role in the musical Smith and appeared in Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests: Table Manners. He served as a replacement for Ted Bessell in the original Broadway run of Bernard Slade's Same Time, Next Year. In 1977–78, he starred in the national touring production of Neil Simon's California Suite. Murray has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6385 Hollywood Boulevard. In July 2014, a retrospective of his films was held at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. A lifelong member of the Democratic Party, Murray lived in Goleta, California, where he died on February 2, 2024, at the age of 94.