Morgan Farley

Francis Morgan Farley was born on October 3, 1898, in Mamaroneck, New York, and died on October 11, 1988, eight days after his ninetieth birthday. His ashes were scattered in the rose garden at Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery in North Hollywood, California.

Farley began his theatrical career in 1917 in a stage adaptation of Booth Tarkington's Seventeen, and his Broadway work spanned from 1918 to 1941. His stage credits included A Young Man's Fancy, The Wild Westcotts, Deburau, The Charm School, and An American Tragedy, among other productions. Two decades after his stage debut, he returned to material from Tarkington's Seventeen when he recreated the role of Joe Bullitt for Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre on the Air adaptation, which aired on October 16, 1938.

His career extended across film and television, where he took on a large number of roles of varying size. On screen, he appeared as the church minister in High Noon and as a juror permitted to ask questions in Angel Face. He also served in World War II during the course of his career.

Television brought Farley to new audiences in the 1960s and beyond. He appeared in two episodes of the original Star Trek series, "The Return of the Archons" and "The Omega Glory," and in 1967 played the character Paco in the Big Valley episode "Days of Grace." That same year he portrayed counterfeiter Harry Holmes in The Wild Wild West season three episode "The Night of the Circus of Death," which aired November 2, 1967. He later appeared in the Barnaby Jones episode "See Some Evil...Do Some Evil," which aired April 8, 1973.

Farley was an openly homosexual actor and an activist in the early movement for civil and equal rights for homosexual Americans. He served on the board of ONE, Inc., the first public LGBT organization and publisher of ONE Magazine. His contributions to that effort are documented in Joseph Hansen's book A Few Doors West of Hope, which covers ONE Magazine's main editor, Don Slater, and was published by the Homosexual Information Center.