William Powell of "Thin Man" Fame
While examining some old files I ran across the following, which I sent to someone a while back in response to inquiry as to my relation to Powell. This is his "official" biography, endorsed by his wife, Diana, shortly after his death:
William Powell was one of the most popular and longest-enduring leading men in Hollywood, his stardom lasting four decades, from the 1920's thru the 1950's, and even beyond his retirement in 1955, and embracing some of the best comedies, detective thrillers and dramas in each of those decades.
William Horatio Powell was born 29 July 1892 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, son of Horatio Warren and Annette "Nettie" Manila (Brady) Powell. In his early teens the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri. His father, an accountant, had planned a career in law for him, but the younger Powell got other ideas after he worked on a high school production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's THE RIVALS.
A quiet and studious boy, he enjoyed the freedom that acting gave him and came to seek out more plays and watch professional actors at work, frequenting the city's theaters and even taking a job as an usher at an opera house to learn what he could by watching actors at work. Powell enrolled in the University of Kansas in an attempt to satisfy his father but was gone almost as soon as he arrived - in pursuit of an acting career. He had to support himself, inasmuch as his father refused to contribute to his study of acting, and went to work for the telephone company in 1910. By the following year, he'd conceived of a plan to go to New York.
He wrote to a wealthy aunt appealing for a loan of $1,400. He got $700, raised the rest himself and was off to New York, where he enrolled in the American Academy Of Dramatic Arts. His classmates included Joseph Schildkraut and Edward G. Robinson. He got his first role, a walk-on in THE NE'ER-DO-WELL in 1912 and in 1913 got a supporting role in WITHIN THE LAW, which was successful enough to keep him employed for two years on tour. He married Eileen Wilson, an actress in the cast of the play, in 1915. The marriage lasted sixteen years and produced a son, William David Powell, born 21 June 1925.
Powell moved between stock companies based in Pittsburgh, Portland (Oregon), Buffalo and Detroit and was back on Broadway in 1917 in THE KING AND THE JUDGE OF ZALAMEA. That same year, he was cast in the musical comedy GOING UP, which became a huge hit for the time, running 351 performances. He spent a season in Boston with the Castle Square Stock Company and then returned to Broadway for what proved to be his star-making role, as the villain "Javier" in SPANISH LOVE, which ran from 1920 thru 1922.
During the run of the show, he was approached backstage and offered a role in a new movie version of SHERLOCK HOLMES, starring John Barrymore and, intrigued by the idea of working in this burgeoning entertainment medium, accepted. He ended up playing the lesser villain, "Fortnam", opposite Barrymore, and was a smashing success. A whole new career opened up for Powell with the release of that movie - he quickly appeared in two more movies that year, and he was done with the theater after one last, unsuccessful play, THE WOMAN WHO LAUGHED (1923).
Over the next seven years, he came to specialize in playing villain roles on the screen, his intense yet suave, mustachioed presence gracing a series of melodramas and costume romances including UNDER THE RED ROBE (1923) and ROMOLA (1925), the latter shot in Italy, where he became a life-long friend of the star, Ronald Colman. That movie, in which he brought a romantic and witty side to the heavy, marked the peak of his silent-era villain portrayals and he was never less than top-billed for the rest of his career.
Powell worked in some of the best movies of the late silent era, including early versions of THE GREAT GATSBY (1925), BEAU GESTE and THE FOUR FEATHERS (both 1928), and was among the top stars at Paramount - but he had an even bigger future ahead of him with the dawn of the sound era. The arrival of synchronized sound hit Hollywood like an earthquake, wiping out the careers of an entire generation of stars. But Powell, as an experienced stage actor, was more than equal to the challenge at hand. It was during this period that he made the transition from villainous to heroic roles and his breakthrough came when he was cast as Philo Vance, the detective created by author S. S. Van Dine.
THE CANARY MURDER CASE (1929), starring Powell and Louise Brooks, was started as a silent film but converted to a talkie after shooting was completed. Brooks refused to return to dub her voice and ended her Hollywood career as a result, but Powell proved even more charismatic with his voice than he had seemed in the silent films - he sounded the way he looked, sophisticated with excellent but natural diction and was very appealing in the part of the detective, essentially carrying the movie when another actress was forced to voice Brook's part.
He was cast in a multitude of roles over the next few years at Paramount, and was successful in all of them, becoming one of the studio's most reliable leading men and a serious, steady box office draw. In 1931, Powell and his first wife, Eileen, divorced and that same year he married Carole Lombard, at the time an up-and-coming young leading lady with whom he appeared in MAN OF THE WORLD and LADIES MAN (both 1931). They were divorced two years later but always remained on friendly terms.
When he moved over to Warner Brothers briefly during the early 1930's, he took on an even greater diversity of roles, however, including one that - seven decades later - seems a total surprise; the role of a Lower East Side attorney and first-generation American who challenges the prejudices and exclusivity of New York's upscale legal profession in LAWYER MAN (1933), and he succeeded. But Powell's best role at Warner Brothers was in THE KENNEL MURDER CASE that same year, in which he returned to the part of Philo Vance in one of the finest mystery films of its period.
In 1934, Powell moved over to MGM, at the time the "Tiffany's" of Hollywood studios and then ascending to the peak of its artistic and commercial success, joining an array of all-time greats that included Greta Garbo, Wallace Beery, John Barrymore, Marie Dressler and Clark Gable. He was cast with Gable, playing opposite Myrna Loy, in a crime drama called MANHATTAN MELODRAMA (1934), directed by W. S. Van Dyke. One of the studio's top hands, during shooting Van Dyke noticed how unusually well Powell and Loy seemed to get along when they were off the set, awaiting their cues. There was a natural chemistry between the two, a shared wry wit that others enjoyed seeing and he felt that this was something to pursue in another movie.
(MANHATTAN MELODRAMA went on to become a huge hit and achieved footnote status in the annals of American crime lore as the movie playing at the Biogaph Theatre in Chicago when authorities shot and killed notorious bank robber John Dillinger as he was leaving the theater - although speculation has been raised by revisionist crime scholars that it wasn't, in fact, Dillinger who was killed that night but some unknown man and that the FBI, seeking to burnish its image and cover up its mistake, simply claimed it so.)
With that success under his belt, Van Dyke was able to convince MGM to let him try pairing Powell off with Loy in a vehicle of their own, an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's then-recent best-selling mystery novel THE THIN MAN, but so little interest or faith did management have in this "experiment" by Van Dyke, he was given only twelve days in which to shoot the movie, where four weeks would have been a more adequate shooting time for a film that was ninety-three minutes in its final cut.
Cast as Nick and Nora Charles, a fun-loving independently wealthy couple - she a wealthy heiress and he an attorney looking forward to retirement - who solve a murder that has the police baffled, they delighted audiences with their banter and the obvious pleasure they took in their work with each other; viewers actually could believe them as a married couple, and also as a very special type of married couple.
The mystery at the center of the movie was intriguing enough and the supporting cast, including Maureen O'Sullivan, was excellent, but it was the vision of marriage that made the movie something new. Until then, marriage, when it was depicted on screen, had usually been shown in either overly sentimental or comically slapstick terms. Powell and Loy and the script they worked from by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, presented a sometimes passionate, sometimes tart (but always loving) vision of marriage and, for the first time in a talking picture, presented an image of marriage that made the institution look like it was fun.
It was charming enough to get Powell a Best Actor nomination in the Academy Awards for that year. Ironically for Powell - who was just a bit portly - the name "Thin Man" (which had actually referred to a character played by Edward Ellis in the first film) stuck to his character of Nick Charles. Whereas Hammett's novel was billed as "A Nick Charles Mystery" (and the only Nick Charles mystery), the inevitable sequels ordered by the studio all used the "Thin Man" name and he and Loy acquitted themselves beautifully through the first two, AFTER THE THIN MAN (1936) and ANOTHER THIN MAN (1939), under the direction of Van Dyke.
In the interim, Powell made many more movies, among them the delightful 1936 screwball comedies LIBELED LADY and MY MAN GODFREY, the former teaming him once again with Loy while the latter (done on loan-out to Universal) played beautifully off of Powell's sophisticated image and teamed him with Carole Lombard as successfully as he had been with Loy. He also played the title role in the studio's blockbuster biographical picture THE GREAT ZIEGFELD, a fanciful all-star tribute (also with Loy) to the late theatrical impresario Florenz Ziegfeld.
In these and a couple of dozen other movies, Powell proved himself a winning presence at the box office - audiences genuinely liked him and the aura of unpretentious sophistication that he brought to his portrayals - and allowed him to elicit that sympathy, going all the way back to his villainous roles in silent films. He was the third most popular actor in Hollywood, based on box office receipts, in 1936 and 1937 seemed destined to be just as successful when fate intervened. He had been teamed with Jean Harlow in two movies, RECKLESS and LIBELED LADY and the two were reportedly engaged to be married at the time of Harlow's sudden death that year, an event that forced him to take a break from acting.
In 1938, although it wasn't revealed until many years later when he began discussing his health issues openly as a way to help others, he was diagnosed with rectal cancer and forced to take an extended leave. Given only a short time to live, Powell succeeded in confounding the illness, as well as the doctors' predictions, with radiation treatments. He even kept his career going with one film each in 1938 and 1939, the latter the second Thin Man sequel, ANOTHER THIN MAN.
Powell was back working full-time if not keeping so heavy a schedule in the early 1940's, when the studio revived the Thin Man movies anew, starting with SHADOW OF THE THIN MAN. With Van Dyke now gone, Powell and Loy proved that they could work their magic in the hands of other filmmakers, in scripts that carried them through World War II and the postwar period: THE THIN MAN GOES HOME (1944) and SONG OF THE THIN MAN (1947).
They also revived the Florenz Ziegfeld character for Powell once more in ZIEGFELD FOLLIES (1946), allowing him to reprise that part from a decade earlier. The following year at Warner Brothers, he got to realize his long-held wish to play Clarence Day, Sr. in LIFE WITH FATHER. He'd been after the play as a film vehicle since 1942, when he'd persuaded MGM to try and buy the film rights. When those proved too expensive and the studio declined to buy them, he waited until Warner Brothers acquired the rights, then auditioned successfully for the part. The result was the best reviews of Powell's entire career and an Oscar nomination as Best Actor (the award went to his old friend Ronald Colman for A DOUBLE LIFE).
Instead, Powell won the New York Film Critics award for his work in that movie and the comedy THE SENATOR WAS INDISCREET, directed by George S. Kaufman and featuring Loy in a gag appearance. Powell continued starring in movies such as MISTER PEABODY AND THE MERMAID (1948) and DANCING IN THE DARK (1949) and later settled into what amounted to starring character roles in films such as HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE (1953), closing out his career in the role of "Doc" in MISTER ROBERTS.
Powell retired happily and comfortably to his home in Palm Springs, California, with his third wife, the former actress Diana Lewis, whom he married in 1940 and who survived him. Ironically, with the advent of the television era and the boom in repertory movie houses in the 1960's and 1970's, and the advent of home video in the early 1980's, Powell's popularity didn't wane after his retirement, as older viewers continually rediscovered The Thin Man and its sequels, as well as his other hits such as MY MAN GODFREY and LIBELED LADY - and new generations came to know those movies as well - he was one of the most consistently popular of retired film stars among the ever-growing audience attuned to older movies, his fame enduring for decades in a manner similar to that of his one-time friends the Gish Sisters (with whom he'd gone to Italy in 1920's for the shooting of ROMOLA).
Powell never re-emerged to give celebrity interviews, apart from discussing his cancer, preferring to keep to himself and a tight coterie of friends (including Loy, who lived on the opposite coast in New York). His personal life also had a tragic side as his son, who had become a story editor and producer, took his own life in 1968.
Loy became one of the better conduits to the public for what information there was about him and later told interviewers that Powell was embarrassed by the gradual hearing loss that had overtaken him.
William Powell died 5 March 1984 at his home in Palm Springs, California.