
RIP Don Keefer
The Hollywood Reporter
By Mike Barnes
September 25, 2014
Don Keefer, a versatile character actor for six decades
who starred in the original 1949 Broadway production of Death of a Salesman and
made an indelible impression as “a bad man, a very bad man” on The Twilight
Zone, has died. He was 98.
Keefer, a founding member of the legendary Actors Studio
in New York, died Sept. 7 of natural causes in his Sherman Oaks home, his son,
Don M. Keefer, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Keefer is perhaps best known to audiences as the
terrorized, Perry Como-starved man who can't help but think “bad thoughts”
during his birthday party and thus is transformed by a petulant 6-year-old
(Billy Mumy) into a macabre jack-in-the-box with a dunce cap in the disturbing
1961 Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life.” (Cloris Leachman plays the boy's
mom.)
As Bernard, the Loman family’s young next-door neighbor,
Keefer was the last surviving cast member of the original Pulitzer Prize and
Tony Award-winning Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman,
directed by Elia Kazan and starring Lee J. Cobb. He then reprised the role for
his movie debut in the 1951 film version, which Miller detested.
Keefer played the scientist who woke up Woody Allen in
Sleeper (1973), was Carrie Snodgress’ father in the screen adaptation of John
Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1970) and appeared as the school janitor confronted with
a monster in a box in a segment of Stephen King’s Creepshow (1982).
Keefer’s final onscreen appearance came when he portrayed
a homeless panhandler on the courthouse steps in the 1997 box-office hit Liar,
Liar. He improvised his two scenes with star Jim Carrey, and at the end of his
weekend of work, Keefer was escorted off the set by director Tom Shadyac amid
applause by the cast and crew, his son recalled.
Keefer also appeared with Humphrey Bogart in 1954’s The
Caine Mutiny (co-starring Fred MacMurray as the character Lieutenant Keefer);
opposite Ronald Reagan and future wife Nancy Davis in Hellcats of The Navy
(1957); with Carl Reiner and Alan Arkin in The Russians Are Coming, The
Russians Are Coming (1966); with Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch
Cassidy and The Sundance Kid (1969); and with Redford and Barbra Streisand in
The Way We Were (1973).
Keefer also held his own with some big names in the 1940s
and ’50s on Broadway: Helen Hayes in Harriet, Paul Robeson, Uta Hagen and Jose
Ferrer in Othello (he played Iago's henchman Roderigo) and Zero Mostel in
Kazan’s Flight Into Egypt.
Moving to Hollywood from New York in the mid-1950s with
his wife, the late actress Catherine McLeod, Keefer also starred in an
acclaimed stage version of John Hersey’s The Child Buyer and in the John
Houseman productions of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull and Antigone at UCLA in the
’60s.
In the 1970s and ’80s, Keefer created and performed the
titular role in An Evening With Anton Chekhov, a one-man show based on the
writer's early comedic works, at such venues as the Fringe Theater Festival in
Edinburgh, Scotland. That led to an invitation to visit Stanislavski’s Moscow
Arts Theater as part of a State Department-sponsored cultural exchange program
during the Cold War.
A native of Highspire, Pa., Keefer was a regular on the
short-lived 1960-61 Desilu CBS series Angel, featuring French starlet Annie
Fargue; had fun as a beatnik musician on The Jack Benny Show; was Mission
Control Director Cromwell on an episode of Star Trek; and appeared in multiple
installments of Gunsmoke (twice with his wife), Alfred Hitchcock Presents and
The Andy Griffith Show.
He guest-starred on dozens of other series, including
Have Gun, Will — Travel, Bonanza, The Real McCoys, Bewitched, The Munsters,
Mission: Impossible, Starsky and Hutch, Ben Casey, The F.B.I., Columbo, ER and
Highway to Heaven.
Actor Kevin McCarthy (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and
his sister, Mary McCarthy — author of the 1963 best-selling novel The Group —
served as best man and matron of honor at the Keefers’ 1950 wedding, and actor
Montgomery Clift was there too, as a guest.
Keefer’s survivors include two other sons, John and
Thomas, and grandchildren Bryson and Samantha.
KEEFER, Don (Donald Keefer)
Born: 8/18/1916, Highspire, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
Died: 9/7/2014, New York City, New York, U.S.A.
Don Keefer’s westerns – actor:
Have Gun – Will Travel (TV) – 1958, 1960 (Kelso, Colonel
Barlowe, Corcoran)
Wichita Town (TV) – 1959 (clerk)
Hotel de Paree (TV) – 1960 (Red Porterfield)
Rawhide (TV) – 1960 (Hames)
Wagon Train (TV) – 1960 (Major Anderson)
Whispering Smith (TV) – 1961 (Doctor Albert Johnson)
The Dakotas (TV) – 1963 (minister)
The Loner (TV) – 1965 (minister)
Gunsmoke (TV) – 1965, 1966, 1970, 1971, 1973 (Milty Sims,
Wally, Floyd Babcock, drunk, Turner)
The Virginian (TV) – 1966, 1967, 1969 (Russ Tedler,
station master, undertaker)
Dundee and the Culhane (TV) – 1967 (Johnson)
Iron Horse (TV) – 1967 (Blake)
Cimarron Strip (TV) – 1968 (Bolt)
The Outcasts (TV) - 1968
The Guns of Will Sonnett (TV) – 1968, 1969 (prosecutor,
Sawyer)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – 1969 (fireman)
Bonanza (TV) – 1969, 1971 (Billy Harris, Tobias Temple
The High Chaparral (TV) – 1970 (telegrapher)
Alias Smith & Jones (TV) – 1971 (Doctor Hiram Wilson)
Nichols (TV) – 1971 (Burt Lincoln)
Kung Fu (TV) – 1974, 1975 (Stripper, station keeper)