In his sixty-year career, Burgess Meredith created incredibly diverse characters like the itinerate farm worker George in Of Mice and Men (1939), The Penguin on the Batman television series and as Mickey Goldmill, the boxing trainer in the Rocky films.

Oliver Burgess Meredith was born in Cleveland Ohio on November 16, 1908, to Ida Burgess and Dr. William Meredith. In his autobiography, So Far, So Good he wrote that he suffered from a form of bipolar disorder known as cyclothymia. Meredith's childhood seems to have been traumatic. "All my life, to this day, the memory of my childhood remains grim and incoherent. If I close my eyes and think back, I see little except violence and fear...In those early years I somehow came to understand I would have to draw from within myself whatever emotional resources I needed to go wherever I was headed. As a result, for years I became a boy who lived almost totally within himself." He was able to escape this environment when his boy soprano voice won him a spot in the choir of St. John the Divine in New York City. The church paid for his room, board and education, and he never returned home.

Meredith attended Amherst College and he worked at various jobs including a runner on Wall St., clerking at Macy's, selling vacuum cleaners, a newspaper reporter with The Advocate in Stamford, Connecticut, and then The Cleveland Plain Dealer. He also worked at his brother's haberdashery shop in Cleveland Heights, but acting was where Meredith's heart lay and he moved to Manhattan, where in a short time he was a member of Eva Le Gallienne's New York theater company. "I was no good at anything except the stage", he later told a reporter.

After only two years on the stage, Burgess Meredith became a bona fide star when he appeared in Maxwell Anderson's Winterset , and the following year, 1936, he went to Hollywood to make the film version, which Tennessee Williams wrote in his journals that he "saw... Winterset with Burgess Meredith, an exquisitely fine actor. I have never been strongly impressed by Anderson's poetry but this cinema was certainly full of poetry. Magnificent poetry." Meredith would star in another Anderson play, High Tor in 1937. Lillian Gish later wrote that "Burgess Meredith was an Anderson actor in the way that, years later, Jason Robards was called the O'Neill actor. "

For the rest of his career, except for a brief period in the 1950s when he was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Meredith would alternate between the stage and screen. He made a tremendous impression on audiences as George in Of Mice and Men which has often been called the definitive film version of John Steinbeck's 1937 novel. It was nominated for Best Picture for 1939, the year that also saw Gone with the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Stagecoach, Wuthering Heights and The Wizard of Oz .

At the outbreak of World War II, Meredith joined the Army Air Corps. During the time, he was approached to play journalist Ernie Pyle in The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) , winning the role over James Gleason and Walter Brennan. When the war concluded, Meredith returned to acting full-time, appearing in films such as Mine Own Executioner (1947) and The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946) co-starring his then wife, Paulette Goddard, and directed by Jean Renoir, with Meredith producing.

Meredith had been President of Actors Equity in 1938 and his liberal political views resulted in his being blacklisted by Sen. Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee as an "unfriendly witness" around 1950. Meredith, who considered the committee to be a "witch hunt", took delight in extracting what he called "splendid revenge" thirty years later when he won an Emmy Award for a television film about McCarthy called Tail Gunner Joe (1977). He was able to find steady work in television during the decade, with his best known work from this period being The Twilight Zone . The most famous of his eight episodes was Time Enough at Last (1959) in which he played a book lover who survives a nuclear holocaust only to lose his glasses. He did not appear in films again until 1957.

In the 1960s, Meredith was back working in films such as Advise and Consent (1962) and most famously, Batman (1966) in which he created the character of The Penguin, which he would repeat on the television series. His best known film role came in 1976 when he was chosen to play Mickey Goldmill in Sylvester Stallone's blockbuster Rocky . The part had proven difficult to cast. Producer Robert Chartoff remembered, "Lee Strasberg was up for the part but wanted too much money. "I called Burgess Meredith, who frankly, I wanted all along. We both lived in Malibu, so one evening I dropped off the script to him. Burgess read the script that night and loved it. Ironically, the same night he got a call from Lee Strasberg and they spoke on the phone for awhile. Burgess literally had the script in his lap as he asked Strasberg what film he was doing next. Lee said, "I'm doing a script called Rocky ." Burgess did not let on we had given it to him. Well, you all know how that story ends. Burgess Meredith played a brilliant Mickey." Several notable actors like Lee J. Cobb, Lew Ayres, Victor Jory and Broderick Crawford were considered until - according to Stallone - "Burgess, who'd been nominated [for Best Supporting Actor] the year before for The Day of the Locust (1975) came in and he was great, and he put an end to the whole painful process." Meredith was nominated again for Best Supporting Actor for the film, and would appear in several of the Rocky films until Rocky V (1990).

Burgess Meredith continued to act up until the very end, providing voices for animation and documentary films, His last film appearance was in 1995's Grumpier Old Men in which he played Jack Lemmon's father, despite being only seventeen years older. The beginning stages of Alzheimer's disease had begun to manifest and Meredith was forced to work off of cue cards, but his talent remained undiminished. He would pass away from complications of the disease and melanoma at his home in Malibu, California on September 9, 1997.

by Lorraine LoBianco

SOURCES:
Ernie Pyle's War by James Tobin
The Medium and the Magician by Paul Heyer
This Day in Ohio History by Rebecca Goodman, Barrett J. Brunsman
Lillian Gish By Stuart Oderman
Movie Moguls Speak by Steven Priggé
Popular Pictures of the Hollywood 1940s by John Reid
Notebooks by Tennessee Williams, Margaret Bradham Thornton
Bipolar.about.com
Article, Lakewood Sun Post December 7, 1995 by Dan Chabek
The Internet Movie Database
Wikipedia.org