George C. Scott

George C. Scott

LOS ANGELES - George C. Scott, whose eagle profile and gravel-voiced, commanding air brought life to Gen. George S. Patton and eared him an Oscar he refused to accept, has died. He was 71.
Scott died Wednesday at his home in Westlake Village, about 40 miles northwest of Los Angeles, said Pat Mahoney, the wife of Scott's publicist.
She said today she didn't know the cause of death.
"They just found him and are trying to find out what happened," she said. "He was on again, off again for a while. He just expired."
The answering service for the Ventura County Coroner's office confirmed Scott had died but had no other information. The coroner planned to release a statement this moring, Sheriff's Sgt. Paul Higgason said.
Scott captivated audiences in roles ranging from the dangerously explosive, yet sympathetic Patton in 1970 to the fatuous blowhard Gen. Buck Turgidson in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 classic "Dr. Strangelove."
For all his success in motion pictures, Scott disdained movie making, sayıng it was tedious and he did it only for the money.
"I have to work in the theater to stay sane," he said. "You can attack the stage fresh every night."
When Scott rose from a sickbed at age 68 to star in the 1996 Broadway revival of "Inherit the Wind," one critic said it was like watching a horse buggy powered by a Ferrari engine.
In private life, Scott was for years a bellicose drinker whose profile was marked by a nose broken five times, in four barroom brawls and one mugging. He was married five times - twice to the same woman, actress Colleen Dewhurst.
Scott was born in Wise, Va., on Oct. 18, 1927, but grew up in Detroit. He joined the Marines in 1945, too late for action in World War II, and spent his four years in service burying the dead at Arlington by day and boozing at night.
He left journalism school in 1950 without a degree and threw himself into acting, spending seven years performing more than 100 roles with stock companies in Toledo, Ohio, Washington, and Ontario, Canada.
His breakthrough came when he was 30 years old and caught the eye of Joseph Papp, impresario of the New York Shakespeare Festival.
In rapid succession, the unknown Scott played the title role in "Richard III" in November 1957, Jacques in "As You Like It" in January 1958 and a poisoning peer in the off-Broadway "Children of Darkness" in March 1958.
For his work in all three productions he received the off-Broadway best actor Obie and a Theatre World award as a "promising personality." For the Shakespeare performances, he won a Clarence Derwent Award as most promising actor and a Vernon Rice Award for contribution to off-Broadway theater.
Later in 1958, his Broadway debut in "Comes a Day" earned the first of his four Tony Award nominations. The others were for "The Andersonville Trial" in 1959, "Uncle Vanya" in 1974, and "Death of a Salesman," which he also directed, in 1975.
In his career, he also won a second Obie, two television Emmys out of five nominations, and was nominated for Oscars four times.
His film debut came in 1959, as a charismatic loony who stirs up a lynch mob against Gary Cooper in "The Hanging Tree.
The same year, "Anatomy of a Murder" brought his first Academy Award nomination. He said nothing about it.
When he was nominated again in 1962 for "The Hustler" he wired the academy "no thanks." The academy did not withdraw his name, but he didn't win.
Scott said later he didn't think he'd be nominated again and regretted only that "I wasn't able to shock the academy into doing something constructive" about what he viewed as a meaningless popularity contest.
The academy ignored his withdrawal again in 1970 and gave Scott the best-actor Oscar, to go along with Golden Globe and New York Film Critics honors, for "Patton." As the film collected seven Academy Awards, Scott spent the evening watching hockey.
His last nomination was for "The Hospital" in 1971.
He won Emmys for directing "The Andersonville Trial" on PBS in 1970 and acting in "The Price" on the Hallmark Hall of Fame in 1971. He also was a nominee for acting in Hallmark's 1976 "Beauty and the Beast."
Early marriages to Carolyn Hughes and Patricia Reed produced two daughters, Victoria and Devon, and a son, Matthew. Scott also acknowledged a child born out of wedlock during his school years.
He met Dewhurst when they appeared together in "Children of Darkness" and they were married in 1960, divorced in 1965, remarried in 1967 and divorced in 1972. They had two sons, Alexander and Campbell. He married actress Trish Van Devere in 1972.