William Gargan

William Dennis Gargan was born on July 17, 1905, in Brooklyn, New York, to Bill and Irene Gargan, who had seven children, though only William and his brother Edward survived infancy. His father worked variously as a bookmaker, saloon owner, and gambler, while his mother had been a teacher. Gargan attended St. Francis Xavier grade school and St. James High School in Brooklyn, where he played baseball and basketball and developed an early love of theater, appearing in school productions of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet. He dropped out during his senior year after a teacher made his final year particularly difficult. Before entering show business, he worked as a message runner for a brokerage firm, an investigator for a clothing store, a private detective with a Wall Street agency, and a salesman for Wesson Oil. His first brush with performing came at age seven, when he was paid three dollars and eighty-five cents for a silent film job at Vitagraph Studios.

Gargan's stage career began after his brother Edward, already an actor, introduced him to playwright Le Roy Clemens at the Lamb's Club. Clemens was holding tryouts for his play Aloma of the South Seas, and after Gargan read a line, he was hired on the spot. The production opened in Baltimore in 1924, and within a year Gargan was directing the Philadelphia production. The show ran for forty weeks. He went on to appear on Broadway from 1925 to 1932, with credits including The Animal Kingdom, He, She Lived Next to the Firehouse, Roar China, and Out of a Blue Sky, among other productions. In 1960, he was set to return to the stage in The Best Man, cast as a dying ex-president, but a bout of laryngitis led to medical tests that revealed throat cancer, ending that opportunity.

Gargan's film career encompassed decades of Hollywood work. His first film was Rain, and he subsequently appeared in Misleading Lady, Follow the Leader, Night Flight, Three Sons, Isle of Destiny, and many other productions. He was frequently cast in Irish character roles — policemen, priests, reporters, and adventurers — and starred in three films as detective Ellery Queen. In 1935, he traveled to England to make several films. He played Joe Gallagher in the 1945 film The Bells of St. Mary's, alongside Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman. His most acclaimed film performance came in They Knew What They Wanted, in which he played Joe, the foreman. The role earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1941.

In radio, Gargan's first regular role was Captain Flagg on Captain Flagg and Sergeant Quirt, beginning in February 1942. He also portrayed Ross Dolan in I Deal in Crime and Inspector Burke in Murder Will Out, and served as host of G.I. Laffs. His most significant career chapter in broadcasting began in 1949, when a lunch meeting at 30 Rockefeller Center with RCA's Frank Folsom led to a conversation about television work. Folsom connected Gargan with NBC's vice president of TV and radio, Norm Blackburn, and Gargan was offered the role of a pipe-smoking private detective sponsored by the U.S. Tobacco Company. The resulting series, Martin Kane, Private Eye, debuted on NBC television on August 7, 1949, with the radio version carried by Mutual Broadcasting. The television series aired live on NBC on Thursday nights at 10 PM and became the first detective series on network television, drawing a substantial audience. Kane's TV rating for the 1950–51 season ranked twelfth overall. After eighty-five weeks, Gargan departed the series, which subsequently starred Lloyd Nolan. He then signed a deal with Sonny Werblin of MCA for a new NBC private eye series that eventually became Barrie Craig, Confidential Investigator, which ran from 1951 to 1955. Gargan also starred in 39 episodes of The New Adventures of Martin Kane, a syndicated series that aired on NBC in 1957–58. In 1967, he received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, becoming the fifth recipient in the award's history.

Gargan's later years were marked by a serious health crisis. Doctors discovered throat cancer in 1960 and were compelled to remove his larynx on November 10 of that year, leaving him with a breathing stoma at the base of his throat. He married Mary Elizabeth Kenny in 1928, a woman he had first encountered at the Prospect Park skating rink when he was fourteen. William Gargan died on February 16, 1979.