![]() But what they do give him is the incredibly posh and WASPy name of Peterson Price Porterhouse and the film puts forth the proposition that if you've got a high falutin' name like that doors just automatically open with the right gift of gab. Their five children survive him.Borrowing quite liberally from the Mark Twain short story classic The Million Pound Note, Fun On A Weekend doesn't even give protagonists Eddie Bracken and Priscilla Lane even a note for a $1.25. Much more challenging was his role as the grandfather in Arthur Miller's television film The American Clock (1993), but he was still delighting audiences in Stephen Sondheim's Follies (2000) and as the Starmaker in an off-Broadway production of Carousel (2001).īracken's actor wife Connie Nickerson, to whom he was married for 63 years, died four months ago. He resumed his film career with small parts in National Lampoon's Vacation (1983), Home Alone 2: Lost In New York (1992) and Baby's Day Out (1994). In the early 1970s, Bracken lost $2m trying, unsuccessfully, to establish a chain of stock theatres. On Broadway, he was Felix Ungar in The Odd Couple (1966), and Horace Vandergelder in Hello Dolly, for which he was nominated for a Tony award. ![]() He was in Three Men On A Horse (1957) at Drury Lane, London, and in touring companies of The Seven Year Itch and Teahouse Of The August Moon. In the 1957 Broadway musical Shinbone Alley, he was Archy, the lovesick philosophical cockroach, to Eartha Kitt's hedonistic cat Mehitabel - he also did the voice for the 1971 animated film version. However, his shtick was becoming overfamiliar and, with his screen career tailing off, Bracken returned to the stage, where he was seldom out of work. As a freelance, he hammed it up in The Girl From Jones Beach (1949), perhaps to compensate for Ronald Reagan's woodenness, and was effective as the stuffy fiancé of farm girl Judy Garland in Summer Stock (1950). Sadly, however, the film fun ended in 1947 after Paramount dropped him. He also proved an able partner to Lake in three 1945 films: Bring on the Girls, Out Of This World, and Hold That Blonde. ![]() I added a St Vitus' Dance, and the real sneeze routine, and the nervousness, and the excitement."īracken is amusing in Rainbow Island (1944), where his resemblance to a local god saves him from being sacrificed by the natives, among whom is Lamour. So I decided to steal the scenes that I'm in, or do everything I could do to steal them. Sturges assured Bracken that it would not happen on his set, but, as the actor recalled, "When I read the script, I saw that her part was at least eight times the size of my part. He wound up with the ear-splitting, jitterbugging Hutton in The Fleet's In (1942), Star-Spangled Rhythm (1942) and Happy Go Lucky (1943), although he declined to play opposite her in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek on the grounds that she always hogged the limelight. This led to a contract with Paramount, where he co-starred, most often in uniform, with Dorothy Lamour, Veronica Lake and Betty Hutton. At 13, he hitchhiked to California, and got a small part in Mary Pickford's last film, Secrets (1933).īack on Broadway, in the Rogers and Hart college musical Too Many Girls (1939), Bracken was asked to repeat the role of Jojo Jordan in a film version. He appeared in four Our Gang shorts, and in six episodes of The New York Kiddie Troopers. Educated at the Professional Children's school, New York, he was acting and singing on stage before the age of 10. By the time he took these roles, the 29-year-old was already a show-business veteran.
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