Joel Higgins

Joel Franklin Higgins, born September 28, 1943, in Bloomington, Illinois, is an American actor, singer, and writer whose career in theater, television, and film has spanned more than five decades. A graduate of Michigan State University, where he earned a degree in advertising and joined Delta Tau Delta International Fraternity, Higgins supported himself during his college years by performing in coffeehouses. After graduation he spent six months working for General Motors before traveling to Europe to pursue performing.

In 1968, Higgins enlisted in the United States Army and was stationed at Camp Casey in Korea, where he served as Special Services Sergeant in charge of Entertainment. During that period he and several collaborators created a musical revue called The Green Apple Nasties. After his discharge, he sold the show to a producer and toured with it for two and a half years. A performance in Louisville, Kentucky, led to an offer to play Sky Masterson in a regional production of Guys and Dolls, which took him on a seventeen-week Midwest tour.

Higgins arrived on Broadway in 1973, having first spent a year on the first national tour of Grease playing the role of Vince. He then joined the pre-Broadway tryout of Shenandoah, ultimately performing the role on Broadway and earning the Theatre World Award in 1975 for that performance. The following year he returned to Broadway in Music Is. In 1978, Higgins played Ben Gant in the Broadway musical Angel, a production that closed after five performances but earned him a Drama Desk Award nomination. He later appeared on Broadway in Oklahoma! and, in the 1991–92 season, starred as Stone/Stein in City of Angels.

Alongside his stage work, Higgins built a substantial television career. In 1975 he joined the CBS daytime drama Search for Tomorrow as Bruce Carson. He moved to primetime in 1979 with a starring role in the ABC series Salvage 1, opposite Andy Griffith. In 1981 he starred in the ABC sitcom Best of the West as United States Marshal Sam Best, a Civil War veteran who relocates his family to the frontier; the series was canceled after one season. His most prominent television role came in 1982 when he was cast as Edward W. Stratton III in the NBC sitcom Silver Spoons, playing the childlike heir to an industrial fortune who discovers he has a twelve-year-old son, portrayed by Ricky Schroder. The series ran through 1987, its first four seasons on NBC and its fifth in first-run syndication. In the spring of 1989 Higgins appeared in the ABC comedy Have Faith, playing a church monsignor alongside co-stars Ron Carey and Stephen Furst; the series ended after a short run.

During the late 1970s and 1980s Higgins appeared in several films, including Bare Essence, Threesome, First Affair, and Killing at Hell's Gate. He also wrote more than 200 advertising jingles for brands including Kool-Aid, Kal Kan, M&M's, and Coors Light, and composed a theme song for Lucille Ball's ABC series Life with Lucy. He continued performing regionally throughout the 1990s and 2000s at venues including The Muny in St. Louis, The Starlight in Kansas City, and The Fox in Atlanta, and starred in She Loves Me at the Music Center in Los Angeles.

As a writer, Higgins co-wrote and starred in The Fields of Ambrosia, which premiered at the George Street Playhouse in New Jersey before transferring to the Aldwych Theatre in London's West End. He also co-wrote and directed Johnny Guitar at the Century Center Theater for the Performing Arts in New York, a production that received multiple Drama Desk, Drama League, and Lucille Lortel Award nominations and won the Outer Critics Circle Award as Best Musical of 2004. The show subsequently received more than thirty productions across the country. Higgins has continued to appear in films including Dead Canaries and No Pay, Nudity, and in 2017 released an EP of original songs titled A World Away on CD Baby under his full name, Joel Franklin Higgins.