Robert Preston

Robert Preston Meservey, known professionally as Robert Preston, was born on June 8, 1918, in Newton, Massachusetts, to Ruth L. (née Rea) and Frank Wesley Meservey, a garment worker and a billing clerk for American Express. The family relocated to Los Angeles during his youth, and Preston graduated from Lincoln High School in January 1935. He married actress Catherine Craig in 1940 and died on March 21, 1987.

Before reaching Broadway, Preston trained at the Pasadena Playhouse, where he appeared in a production of Idiot's Delight and in a stock company staging of Julius Caesar. His mother, who was employed by Decca Records and acquainted with talent agent Everett Crosby, arranged for Crosby to attend one of Preston's Pasadena Playhouse performances, which led to a contract with the Crosby agency and a film deal with Paramount Pictures. A Paramount attorney had also taken notice of his work independently. The studio required him to drop his family name, and he performed under the name Robert Preston for the remainder of his career. His screen debut came in 1938 with the crime dramas King of Alcatraz and Illegal Traffic. Among his early Paramount films were Beau Geste (1939), in which he played Digby Geste alongside Gary Cooper and Ray Milland, the Cecil B. DeMille epic Union Pacific (1939), North West Mounted Police (1940), and the noir This Gun for Hire (1942), in which he played a Los Angeles police detective.

World War II interrupted his film career when Preston joined the United States Army Air Forces following the attack on Pearl Harbor. He served as an intelligence officer with the 9th Air Force's 386th Bombardment Group, holding the rank of Captain and the designation of S-2 Officer. His duties included receiving intelligence reports from 9th Air Force headquarters and briefing bomber crews before missions. At the end of the war in Europe, he and the 386th were stationed in Sint-Truiden, Belgium. After the war, Preston resumed acting in 1947 as a freelance character actor, taking roles at Paramount, RKO, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and various independent studios. In a 1984 interview he reflected that he had played leads in lower-budget productions and villains in larger ones, and that it had become clear he had reached a ceiling in his film career. He also took on television roles during the 1950s.

Preston made his Broadway debut in The Male Animal in 1952, and his stage career spanned from 1950 to 1976. The role that defined his career came in 1957, when he originated the part of Professor Harold Hill in Meredith Willson's The Music Man — his first musical. He later recalled that the production had exhausted its list of musical comedy performers before casting him. The performance earned him the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical in 1958 and placed him on the cover of Time magazine on July 21, 1958. In 1961, at the request of the President's Council on Physical Fitness, Preston recorded Chicken Fat, a song composed by Willson, during sessions for The Music Man soundtrack. The recording was distributed by Capitol Records to elementary schools across the country for use during student calisthenics. In 1962, Preston reprised the role of Harold Hill in the film adaptation opposite Shirley Jones, despite not having been the studio's first choice. That same year he appeared in the MGM epic How the West Was Won as wagonmaster Roger Morgan.

Preston's Broadway work continued with the 1964 musical Ben Franklin in Paris, in which he played the title role. He then originated the role of Henry II in the stage production of The Lion in Winter, a part later portrayed by Peter O'Toole in the film version, for which O'Toole received an Academy Award nomination. In 1966, Preston starred opposite Mary Martin in the two-person musical I Do! I Do!, earning his second Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical in 1967. In 1974, he starred as Mack Sennett, the silent film director, alongside Bernadette Peters in Jerry Herman's Broadway musical Mack & Mabel, a role for which he received a Tony nomination in 1975. That same year, the film version of the Jerry Herman musical Mame was released, with Preston playing Beauregard Burnside opposite Lucille Ball. His Broadway career also included the play Sly Fox. In 1978, Preston starred in The Prince of Grand Street, a musical in which he played a matinee idol of New York's Yiddish theater who refused to abandon the roles of his youth; the production folded during its Boston tryout.

His film work during the 1970s included the role of Ace Bonner in Sam Peckinpah's Junior Bonner (1972) alongside Steve McQueen, Joseph Dobbs in Sidney Lumet's Child's Play, and a role in Semi-Tough (1977). He collaborated with director Blake Edwards on S.O.B. (1981) and Victor/Victoria (1982), the latter earning him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. His final theatrical film was The Last Starfighter (1984), in which he played an interstellar military recruiter named Centauri — a role written with his Harold Hill performance in mind, and one he approached using the same method. On television, Preston starred in the CBS film Rehearsal for Murder (1982) as a playwright investigating his fiancée's murder, portrayed an aging gunfighter in the CBS Western September Gun (1983) opposite Patty Duke and Christopher Lloyd, and starred in the HBO film Finnegan, Begin Again (1985) with Mary Tyler Moore. He also played patriarch Hadley Chisholm in the CBS Western miniseries The Chisholms (1979) alongside Rosemary Harris, reprising the role when the series continued as a weekly program before his character's death in the fifth episode. His final role was in the CBS film Outrage! (1986), in which he played a father seeking justice after his daughter's murder.