The actor Don Murray, who has died aged 94, made his big screen debut in 1956 opposite Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop. His performance as the gangling, wide-eyed cowboy who falls for a saloon bar singer earned him an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor and a Bafta nomination as most promising newcomer. Monroe was superb as Chérie and Murray as Beauregard, besotted and eager to marry, made the perfect foil.
His career continued strongly in 1957 with The Bachelor Party, in which he played a married man unhappy about the dubious happenings at a stag party, and A Hatful of Rain, as a Korean war veteran addicted to heroin. The director, Fred Zinnemann, described it as “the grimmest film I ever made”. Murray’s performance displayed the commitment that was to characterise much of his work. Few actors have allowed their moral beliefs and sociopolitical concerns to affect their careers so markedly.
Born in Hollywood, California, and brought up in Long Island, in a showbusiness environment – his mother, Ethel (nee Cook), was a former Ziegfeld girl and his father, Dennis, a stage manager and sometime choreographer – Don began acting while at East Rockaway high school. After graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, New York, he began a career in summer stock and in 1951, aged 21, made his Broadway debut in Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo. A year later, he was called up to fight in the Korean war, but refused as a conscientious objector on religious grounds and spent the following three years working with refugees.
He returned to the stage in 1955 in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, subsequently playing Henry Antrobus in the television movie of the play. The performance was seen by the director Joshua Logan, whose legendary eye for spotting handsome and talented young actors led to Murray being cast in Bus Stop. A friendship between Murray and the actor Hope Lange, who also made her movie debut in the film, developed into a romance and in 1956 they got married.
After the gritty dramas of 1957, he played an innocent-looking cowboy in the revenge western From Hell to Texas (1958), stayed out west for These Thousand Hills and took the title role in a television version of Billy Budd (1959). In the same year co-starred with James Cagney in Shake Hands With the Devil, the first film to be shot at Ardmore Studios in Ireland, as an Irish revolutionary who becomes disillusioned by the fanaticism of his leader. Murray then climbed back into the saddle for One Foot in Hell (1960).
These and other successes enabled him to produce a film of his own choosing; as well as producing, Murray also co-wrote (using the pseudonym Don Deer) and starred in The Hoodlum Priest (1961), the story of Father Charles Dismas Clark, who helped juvenile delinquents and former convicts in St Louis during the 1920s. This powerful film took an unfashionable anti-capital punishment stance and urged the rehabilitation of criminals.
It was followed by the best movie of his career, Otto Preminger’s political thriller Advise and Consent (1962). Joining a heavyweight cast (Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, Walter Pidgeon and Lew Ayres), Murray had the pivotal role of a senator who is blackmailed – and who eventually kills himself – because of a homosexual affair during military service in Hawaii. The political intrigue, the suicide and the gay theme were controversial for the period.
Another docudrama, Escape from East Berlin (originally released as Tunnel 28), directed by Robert Siodmak in Germany, was based on a topical true event about a group escaping to the west via a tunnel. Continuing his interest in “real life” subjects, Murray took the lead in One Man’s Way (1964), the story of a journalist turned crusading evangelist. In the underrated drama Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965), he took the second lead to Steve McQueen. This compelling story of a disturbed man suffered from studio interference and timidity on its release.
Such committed movies became increasingly hard to find, and Murray made a couple of westerns before heading for Britain to take the lead as the Roman governor Justinian in a turgid costume romp, The Viking Queen (1967).
After Sweet Love, Bitter, a sombre biopic loosely based on the jazz legend Charlie “Bird” Parker, and the TV series The Outcasts, he wrote and starred in Childish Things (1969), playing an alcoholic ex-GI who gets involved in crime but is redeemed by love. Murray’s sincerity was obvious but his choice of director – John Derek – resulted in a mixture of exploitation and moralising. To gain complete control, Murray made his directorial debut with his own screenplay for The Cross and the Switchblade (1970), another tale of a zealous minister – this time set on the streets of New York and starring the singer and occasional actor Pat Boone, who shared his religious beliefs. It failed commercially and was criticised for its pious tone.
Murray, by now in his 40s, chose to work steadily in commercial movies, including Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), Justin Morgan Had a Horse (1972), Cotter (1973) and the tense thriller Deadly Hero (1975), in which he had an exceptional part as a detective. He took time out to produce Damien’s Island (1976), about a priest who worked with people with leprosy and succumbed to the disease himself, but Murray’s version of the true story was never shown. He returned to television, including the mini-series How the West Was Won (1977), Rainbow (1978), in which he played Judy Garland’s father, Frank, and a three-year stint in the soap Knots Landing (1979-82).
He worked occasionally in good TV movies such as Something in Common (1986) and, less often, in memorable films including Francis Ford Coppola’s undervalued Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), as father to Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner), and a delightful romance by Alan Rudolph, Made in Heaven (1987). But after the lamentable Ghosts Can’t Do It (1989), directed by John Derek, Murray did not appear on screen for five years, and later appeared infrequently and only in supporting roles.
In 2001, he had a leading role in Island Prey, co-starring Olivia Hussey and, after a 30-year absence from the director’s chair, made Elvis Is Alive, a comedy about a Presley impersonator in Paris who might just be the real thing, in which Murray took a role and for which his son Sean provided the music. In 2017 he was tempted out of retirement in Santa Barbara to appear in the revamped television series, Twin Peaks.
Murray is survived by two children, Christopher and Patricia, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce, and three children, Colleen, Sean and Michael, from his second marriage, in 1962, to Bettie Johnson.
• Don (Donald Patrick) Murray, actor, born 31 July 1929; died 2 February 2024
