"When I found out that I could carry a tune, well, I came to realize that I had a gift, that it was a kind of a blessing. And I think if you're given something special, you ought to try and give that something back. If you don't, it's a sin. No question." -- Howard Keel

Tall, well built and ruggedly handsome, Howard Keel was often called the Clark Gable of musicals. Beyond being MGM's new Nelson Eddy, he was a solid actor and comedian gifted with a strong, natural baritone that made him credible singing some of the Broadway and Hollywood's greatest love songs and should have earned him a career in non-musical films as well. His was the classic story of a multi-talented performer arriving in Hollywood at the wrong time. He didn't land his first film contract until 1950, when the studios were in an upheaval trying to cope with shrinking audiences and the forced sale of their impressive theatre chains. As a result, though he starred in some of MGM's best musicals of the era, he never got the studio support he needed to create a sustainable star image.

Music saved Keel from a life of poverty and anger. Born to a hard-drinking miner who died when Keel was 11 and a harshly religious mother, he was a surly teen working as an auto mechanic in the late '30s. He might have gone on that way had he not decided to pursue singing. He trained with an amateur coach who had earlier worked with Gordon McRae and got him a job as a singing waiter in Los Angeles. Needing a better paying job to support his mother, he moved to a position at Douglas Aircraft during World War II, but when management heard his voice they took him off the production line and sent him around the country as a singing sales rep.

Keel took the hint and started pursuing a professional career. He got an agent who arranged an audition with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein in 1946. That led to a job understudying both John Raitt in Carousel and Alfred Drake in Oklahoma! and the chance to star in the London company of the latter. British audiences liked him so much he stayed on after ending his run in the play, eventually making his film debut in a non-singing role as an escaped convict in the British crime drama The Hideout (1949, aka The Small Voice). Keel had already tested for Warner Bros., but they passed on him, feeling he was too similar to contract star McRae.

At the time, MGM was looking for a masculine singing star to compete with McRae and follow in the footsteps of Nelson Eddy. When a talent agent saw Keel's Warners' test, he knew he'd found the perfect choice. Not only could Keel match McRae and Eddy as a singer, but he was a better actor than both. He was scheduled to star opposite Judy Garland in Annie Get Your Gun (1950), but her personal traumas and other problems pushed production back, including the firing of two directors, the death of supporting player Frank Morgan and a broken leg that Keel suffered when the horse he was riding fell. During the delays, Keel was suggested for major roles in That Forsyte Woman and Intruder in the Dust (both 1949), but studio head Louis B. Mayer wanted him to make his MGM debut in a bigger film. Eventually Garland was let go, and he wound up working with Betty Hutton, with whom he never got along. Nonetheless, Annie Get Your Gun was a big hit and that put him in a position to snag most of the studio's top singing roles, particularly in Broadway adaptations.

He starred opposite Kathryn Grayson in Show Boat (1951), which the studio originally had bought for Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. He also beat out Laurence Olivier for the lead in Kiss Me Kate (1953), a role created on Broadway by Drake, whom he would also follow into the big screen version of Kismet (1955). He and Grayson, with whom he also co-starred in Lovely to Look At (1952) and Kiss Me Kate, might well have become the next Eddy and MacDonald had she not left the studio in 1952. In fact, MGM had to sign her as a free lance actress for the latter film.

Keel's best role was probably Adam Pontipee the frontiersman who takes Jane Powell as his wife in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), one of the few original musicals he got to do at the studio. MGM actually thought of the film as a B picture, putting more money into Brigadoon and Rose Marie (both 1954). When those two pictures underperformed at the box office, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers became their big musical of the year and even took over Brigadoon's planned slot at the Radio City Music Hall. Sadly, musicals were on the decline. As production costs rose and the audience shrank, the studios could no longer afford lavish productions like Kismet or Jupiter's Darling (1955), his last of three films with Esther Williams. With that film's box-office failure, all of its contract stars would be gone within a year.

Unlike MGM's top musical stars -- Fred Astaire, Judy Garland and Gene Kelly -- Keel was kept very busy between musicals, though he was usually thrown into lower budget films rather than A quality pictures. He and Jane Greer were wasted in a Desperate Search (1953) for his lost children. He was one of Three Guys Named Mike (1951) courting Jane Wyman. And he didn't even get to sing a duet while keeping Fast Company (1953) with co-star Polly Bergen. Keel's best non-musical at MGM was probably Callaway Went Thataway (1951), a satire of Hollywood and television in which he played a double role, as a one-time Western star who has dropped out of sight and a young cowboy TV star that marketers Fred MacMurray and Dorothy Maguire try to put in his place when the former star's movies become popular on television.

After leaving MGM, Keel had trouble finding suitable film roles elsewhere, even though his deep voice and physique made him a natural for action films like Floods of Fear (1959), in which his prison escape is complicated by a major flood. He floundered badly as Simon Peter in the Biblical epic The Big Fisherman (1959), but found a surprisingly good vehicle oversees as one of the few non-blinded survivors left to fight alien carnivorous plants in the cult classic The Day of the Triffids (1962).

Keel had a chance to shine dramatically when he was cast as Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the original Broadway production of Dore Schary's Sunrise at Campobello, but had to withdraw when he developed pneumonia, giving Ralph Bellamy the role of a lifetime. He finally got to play the part on tour, but his campaign to star in the film version was unsuccessful, and he once again lost out to Bellamy. He kept his voice in shape by doing summer stock and touring productions of Broadway hits like Camelot, South Pacific andMan of La Mancha. He even re-teamed with Grayson for a tour of Show Boat and with Powell for the stage version of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. In the '70s, he and Grayson, one of his favorite co-stars, joined forces for a Vegas night club act.

It was television, however, that brought Keel back to prominence. When Jim Davis died early in the run of the prime-time soap opera Dallas, Lorimar tapped Keel to step in as love interest for his widow, Miss Ellie (Barbara Bel Geddes). Opposite Bel Geddes and, for one season, Donna Reed, he turned in a finely shaded performance as the kind of genteel man of action he should have been playing during Hollywood's golden age. When he left the show after ten years, he continued touring in concerts and the occasional stage production. In love with performing, he promised to keep working as long as his voice held out, which it did for a good long time. Keel died of colon cancer in 2004 at the age of 85.

by Frank Miller