Steve Cochran

Steve Cochran, born Robert Alexander Cochran on May 25, 1917, in Eureka, California, was an American actor who worked across stage, film, and television. He died on June 15, 1965.

Before pursuing acting, Cochran worked as a cowpuncher and a railroad station hand. He later enrolled at the University of Wyoming, where he also played basketball, but left college in 1937 to pursue a career in Hollywood. His path to the screen ran through the theatre, where he built his skills in local productions before advancing to Broadway. Cochran was rejected for military service during World War II due to a heart murmur, but he directed and performed in plays at Army camps during the war years. In December 1943, he was appearing alongside Constance Bennett in a touring production of Without Love when producer Sam Goldwyn signed him.

Cochran's Broadway career spanned 1944 to 1949. He appeared in Hickory Stick in 1944, and later returned to Broadway to support Mae West in a short-lived revival of her play Diamond Lil, a production that renewed Hollywood's interest in him.

Goldwyn brought Cochran to Hollywood in 1945 and loaned him to Columbia Pictures, where he appeared in two Boston Blackie films: Booked on Suspicion and Blackie's Rendezvous, playing a villain in the latter. Goldwyn cast him as a gangster in the Danny Kaye vehicle Wonder Man, which co-starred Virginia Mayo and Vera-Ellen, and later placed him in two additional Kaye films with the same co-stars: The Kid from Brooklyn and A Song is Born, the latter directed by Howard Hawks. United Artists borrowed Cochran to play a gangster in The Chase, and he subsequently appeared in the acclaimed drama The Best Years of Our Lives, portraying a man conducting an affair with a character played by Virginia Mayo whose husband, played by Dana Andrews, has returned from war. He also had a supporting role opposite Groucho Marx in Copacabana for United Artists.

Cochran made his television debut in 1949 with appearances in Dinner at Antoine's for The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse and Tin Can Skipper for NBC Presents. That same year, he signed with Warner Bros., where he played Big Ed Somers, a power-hungry henchman to James Cagney's mobster, in White Heat, again opposite Virginia Mayo. Warner Bros. eventually acquired both Cochran's and Mayo's contracts from Goldwyn. At Warners, he supported Joan Crawford in The Damned Don't Cry and received his first lead role in Highway 301. He played a villain opposite Gary Cooper in Dallas and appeared as a Ku Klux Klan member in Storm Warning alongside Ginger Rogers and Doris Day. Additional Warner Bros. credits included the lead in Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison, which has been cited as an inspiration for Johnny Cash's song Folsom Prison Blues, as well as Tomorrow Is Another Day, a film noir originally intended for Burt Lancaster, and The Tanks Are Coming. He co-starred with Cornel Wilde in Operation Secret and appeared alongside Virginia Mayo in She's Back on Broadway and Gordon MacRae and Kathryn Grayson in The Desert Song.

After leaving Warners, Cochran starred in Shark River for United Artists and appeared as a villain in Rock Hudson's Back to God's Country at Universal. He traveled to Germany to make Carnival Story for the King Brothers, his first European production, and co-starred with Ida Lupino and Howard Duff in Don Siegel's Private Hell 36, playing a crooked cop. He went to the United Kingdom to lead The Weapon and to Italy to star in Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Grido alongside Alida Valli and Betsy Blair, a production that required seven months of filming. He also produced Come Next Spring for Republic Pictures, in which he played Ann Sheridan's love interest. Additional film credits from this period include Quantrill's Raiders, the Roger Corman gangster film I Mobster, and two Albert Zugsmith productions: The Beat Generation and The Big Operator. He appeared opposite Merle Oberon in Of Love and Desire, shot in Mexico, and led Mozambique for producer Harry Alan Towers.

Television work occupied much of Cochran's later career. He guest-starred in episodes of Bonanza, The Untouchables, Route 66, Bus Stop, The Naked City, The Virginian, Death Valley Days, Burke's Law, and The Twilight Zone, among others. He starred in the television movie The Renegade and appeared in Sam Peckinpah's debut feature film, The Deadly Companions; the two had first collaborated when Peckinpah served as dialogue director on Private Hell 36.

In 1953, Cochran established his own production company, Robert Alexander Productions, which developed several projects including The Tom Mix Story, in which he was set to play Mix, and a television pilot called Fremont the Trailblazer, in which he portrayed John C. Frémont alongside Barbara Wilson and James Gavin. He also wrote, produced, directed, and starred in Tell Me in the Sunlight in 1965.

Cochran was married and divorced three times, to actresses Fay McKenzie, Florence Lockwood, and Jonna Jensen. He and Lockwood had one daughter, Xandra, through whom he became the grandfather of Alex Johns, a co-executive producer on more than seventy episodes of the animated series Futurama. In her 1987 autobiography Playing the Field: My Story, Mamie Van Doren wrote about her relationship with Cochran. In the 2002 documentary The Importance of Being Morrissey, Steven Morrissey stated that his parents named him after Steve Cochran.