Eddie Albert

Edward Albert Heimberger was born on April 22, 1906, in Rock Island, Illinois, the eldest of five children of real estate agent Frank Daniel Heimberger and his wife, Julia Jones. When Albert was one year old, the family relocated to Minneapolis, Minnesota. He attended Central High School in Minneapolis, where he joined the drama club and shared a graduating class with Harriet Lake, later known as actress Ann Sothern. After finishing high school in 1926, he enrolled at the University of Minnesota and majored in business. The stock market crash of 1929 left him without steady work, and he took on a variety of jobs including trapeze performing, insurance sales, and nightclub singing. He dropped his surname professionally because it was routinely mispronounced as "Hamburger." Albert moved to New York City in 1933, where he co-hosted a radio program called The Honeymooners – Grace and Eddie Show for three years.

Albert's Broadway career spanned from 1936 to 1983 and included productions such as Brother Rat, Room Service, The Boys from Syracuse, O Evening Star, and No Hard Feelings. Brother Rat opened in 1936, and Albert subsequently took on lead roles in Room Service during 1937 and 1938 and The Boys from Syracuse from 1938 to 1939, where he met Burl Ives, who had a small part in the production. The two briefly shared an apartment in Hollywood's Beachwood Canyon community after Ives moved west the following year. Albert's Broadway work continued into subsequent decades, with appearances in additional productions through 1983.

In 1936, Albert became one of the earliest television performers, appearing live in one of RCA's first television broadcasts in association with NBC. That same year, on November 6, 1936, he wrote and performed in The Love Nest, the first teleplay written specifically for television. Produced live in Studio 3H of the GE Building at Rockefeller Center and broadcast over NBC's experimental station W2XBS, the production was hosted by Betty Goodwin and also featured Hildegarde, The Ink Spots, Ed Wynn, and Grace Bradt. Warner Bros. offered Albert a film contract at the conclusion of his radio show, and in 1938 he made his feature film debut in the Hollywood adaptation of Brother Rat alongside Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman, reprising his stage role as cadet "Bing" Edwards.

On September 9, 1942, Albert enlisted in the United States Coast Guard and was later discharged to accept a commission as a lieutenant in the U.S. Naval Reserve. During the invasion of Tarawa in November 1943, serving as the coxswain of a Navy landing craft and under heavy enemy machine-gun fire, he rescued 47 Marines stranded offshore and supervised the rescue of 30 others. He was awarded the Bronze Star with Combat "V" for these actions. During the war years he also appeared in films including The Great Mr. Nobody, Lady Bodyguard, Ladies' Day, An Angel from Texas again with Reagan and Wyman, and The Wagons Roll at Night with Humphrey Bogart.

Albert's film career produced two Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor, the first for Roman Holiday in 1953 and the second for The Heartbreak Kid in 1972. He also received a BAFTA Award nomination and two Golden Globe Award nominations. Among his other notable film roles were a womanizing Persian peddler in Oklahoma! (1955), a psychiatrist with an enthusiasm for farming in The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), a cowardly and psychotic Army captain in Attack (1956), and appearances in Captain Newman, M.D. (1963), The Longest Yard (1974), and Escape to Witch Mountain (1975).

On television, Albert portrayed Oliver Wendell Douglas in the sitcom Green Acres from 1965 to 1971 and reprised the role in Return to Green Acres in 1990. He played Frank MacBride in the crime drama Switch from 1975 to 1978 and appeared in Falcon Crest, The Carol Burnett Show, and Columbo. Earlier television work included the CBS sitcom Leave It to Larry, which ran from October 14 to December 23, 1952, and his own daytime variety program, The Eddie Albert Show, on CBS in 1953. He also served as host of Saturday Night Revue on NBC beginning June 12, 1954. From 1948 onward, Albert guest-starred in nearly 90 television series. Eddie Albert died on May 26, 2005.