Fred Gwynne Achieved TV Immortality as Herman Munster

Fred Gwynne was an enormously talented character actor most famous for starring in the 1960s television situation comedies Car 54, Where Are You?" as Officer Francis Muldoon and The Munsters as the Frankenstein clone Herman Munster. He was very tall and had a resonant, baritone voice that he put to good use in Broadway musicals.

Early Life

Frederick Hubbard Gwynne was born on July 10, 1926 in New York City, to a wealthy stockbroker father. The young Fred Gwynne attended the exclusive prep school Groton, where he first appeared on stage in a student production of William Shakespeare's Henry V. His higher education was interrupted by World War II.

Gwynne served in the United States Navy as a radioman on a submarine chaser during World War II, after which he attended the New York Phoenix School of Design before going on to Harvard (Class of 1951). At Harvard, he majored in English and was on the staff of the Harvard Crimson student newspaper, eventually becoming its president. Gwynne studied drawing with artist R.S. Merryman, and drew cartoons for the Crimson.

Gwynne also appeared with the a cappella singing group the Krokodiloes at Harvard. However, it was his participation in dramatics that would have a lasting effect on his life.

A member of the Hasty Pudding Club, he performed in the dining club's theatricals, appearing in the drag revues of 1949 and 1950. After graduating from Harvard in 1951, Gwynne acted in Shakespeare with a Cambridge, Massachusetts repertory company before heading to New York City, where he supported himself as a musician and copywriter.

Gwynne's principal source of income for many years came from his work as a book illustrator and as a commercial artist. His first book, The Best in Show, was published in 1958.

According to his New York Times obituary, Fred Gwynne's dream had been to become a portrait painter. According to the Times, he worked "as an advertising copywriter on the Ford account for the J. Walter Thompson agency, where he devised the slogan 'the world's most beautifully proportioned car.'"

Early Acting Career

Fred Gwynne's height has been listed as anywhere from 6'5" to 6'7", which is very tall for an actor on both stage and screen. An early acting teacher in fact told him that he was too tall to succeed as a professional actor. The warning did not deter him.

On February 20, 1952, Gwynne made his Broadway debut as the character "Stinker", in support of Helen Hayes, in the comic fantasy Mrs. McThing. The play, written by Harvey (1950) author Mary Chase, had a cast featuring Ernest Borgnine, the future "Professor" Irwin Corey and Brandon De Wilde, the young son of the play's stage manager, Frederick DeWilde. The play ran for 320 performances, a modest hit.

Gwynne next appeared on Broadway in Burgess Meredith's staging of Nathaniel Benchley's comedy "The Frogs of Spring, which opened at the Broadhurst Theatre on October 21, 1953. The play flopped, closing on Halloween Day after but 15 performances. He did not appear on Broadway again for almost seven years.

Fred Gwynne made his movie debut, unbilled, as one of mobster/union boss Johnny Friendly's gang of thugs who menace Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan's 1954 Oscar-winning classic On the Waterfront (1954). From 1956 through 1963, he appeared on the TV dramatic showcases Studio One, The Kaiser Aluminum Hour, Kraft Television Theatre, The DuPont Show of the Month, The DuPont Show of the Week (1961) and The United States Steel Hour. It was the "Golden Age" of TV drama, but it was in situation comedies that he made his name and his fame.

TV Success

Fred Gwynne made a memorable guest appearance as Private Honigan on the popular TV sit-com The Phil Silvers Show in1955. Gwynne played a soldier with an enormous appetite that Phil Silvers' Sgt. Bilko character entered into a pie-eating contest, only to discover he could only eat like a trencherman when he was depressed. The spot led to him coming back as a guest in more episodes.

He had a success upon his return to Broadway in the early '60s, appearing as the pimp Polyte-Le-Mou in the Peter Brook-directed hit musical Irma La Douce, the winner of the 1961 Tony Award for Best Musical. Subsequently, Phil Silvers Show producer-writer Nat Hiken cast him in one of the lead roles in the situation comedy "Car 54, Where Are You?" that debuted in the 1961-62 season. The show, in which he revealed his wonderful flair for comedy, had Gwynne appearing as New York City police officer Francis Muldoon, who served in a patrol car in the Bronx with the dim-witted Officer Gunther Toody, played by co-star Joe E. Ross ("Oooh! Oooh!").

Car 54, Where Are You? (1961) lasted only two seasons, but it was so fondly remembered by Baby Boomers, it inspired a feature film version in 1994. Gwynne also served as the hand-puppet Lamb Chop's doctor on another Baby Boomer classic The Shari Lewis Show.

"The Munsters"

Fred Gwynne used his singing voice again to great effect in Meredith Wilson's musical Here's Love, which opened at the Shubert Theatre on October 20, 1963 and played for 334 performances, closing on July 25, 1964. It was in 1964 that he would appear in the role that made him a TV legend.

Gwynne was cast as the Frankenstein's monster-like paterfamilias in The Munsters that debuted in the 1964-65 season. His Car 54, Where Are You? co-star Al Lewis, who became a life-long friend, appeared in the series as Gwynne's father-in-law in the ghoulish TV sit-com, which also featured Yvonne DeCarlo as his wife. The Munsters lasted only two seasons, but it has lived on in syndication, becoming another Baby Boomer classic.

In addition to wearing heavy boots with four-inch lifts on them, Gwynne had to wear 40 - 50 lbs of padding and makeup for the role and he reportedly lost ten pounds in one day of filming under the hot lights. He made guest appearances as Herman Munster, most notably on The Red Skelton Show, appearing on April 27, 1965, along with Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, a pop band from The Beatles' native Liverpool. Gwynne appeared in character as Herman Munster in a Freddie the Freeloader comedy sketch.

In 1966, the year the series was cancelled, Gwynne and the cast appeared in a full-length feature Munster, Go Home!.

Back to the Theater

When The Munsters was cancelled after the 1965-1966 season, Gwynne returned to the theatre to escape television typecasting, although he did return for a featured appearance in the 1969 TV version of Arsenic and Old Lace, playing the psychotic Jonathan Brewster in an all-star cast that included his Mrs. McThing co-star Helen Hayes, along with Lillian Gish, Bob Crane, Sue Lyon, Jack Gilford and David Wayne.

Gwynne appeared twice on television in Mary Chase's Harvey, the first time in 1958 on the Dupont Show of the Month version broadcast by CBS, in which he appeared in support of Art Carney as Elwood P. Dodd. Others in the cast included Elizabeth Montgomery, Jack Weston and Larry Blyden. He appeared as the cab driver in the 1972 version, Harvey, in which James Stewart reprised his Oscar-nominated role as Elwood P. Dodd. This version also reunited Gwynne with Helen Hayes.

In 1968, he made a TV series pilot for Screen Gems, Guess What I Did Today?, co-starring Bridget Hanley, who later played the female lead on Here Come the Brides. The pilot, which was made for NBC, was not picked up by the network. Gwynne had trouble making producers forget his Herman Munster character and he started refusing to have anything to do with or even to speak of the show. Years later, when he was under consideration for a major part in the TV series Punky Brewster, he withdrew from the show after a casting director called him Herman Munster instead of his real name.

One of the few TV productions to utilize his fine singing voice was The Littlest Angel, a 1969 TV musical l produced by the Hallmark Hall of Fame. He also sang a bit in the 1987 movie Ironweed, in which he played a bar-tender.

Latter Career

Fred Gwynne's movie and TV appearances were sporadic throughout the 1970s as he worked on- and off-Broadway. In 1972, he appeared at the Plymouth as Abraham Lincoln in the Broadway play The Lincoln Mask, a flop that lasted but one week of eight performances.

His most distinguished performance on Broadway, and the favorite of all of his theatrical roles, was his appearance as Big Daddy in the 1974 Broadway revival of Tennessee William's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Though not as cutting as Burl Ives had been in the original production, he drew raves for his lyrical Big Daddy, though his performance unbalanced the production in that he overpowered Keir Dullea in the role of Brick, who one critic claimed was upstaged by the character's crutch.

The New York Times critic Walter Kerr called Gwynne's Big Daddy "astonishingly effective." Howver, it was Elizabeth Ashley who garnered the lion's share of kudos, winning a Tony Award for her portrayal of Maggie the Cat. The success of the production gave Tennessee Williams his first big success in a decade, albeit in a revival.

Fred Gwynne also was memorable as the elderly, wheelchair-bound Ku Klux Klansman in the first two parts of The Texas Trilogy in the 1976-77 Broadway season. He was nominated for a Drama Desk Award Outstanding Actor in a Play. However, Gwynne's next two appearances on the Great White Way were flops: the 1978 musical Angel, a adaptation of Thomas Wolfe's novel Look Homeward, Angel lasted but five performances, and the Australian pro football club drama Players lasted only 23 performances.

His last appearance on Broadway was in Anthony Shaffer's Whodunnit, which opened at the Biltmore Theatre on December 30, 1983 and closed May 15, 1983 after 157 total performances. Off-Broadway, Fred Gwynne appeared with the Joseph Papp Public Theatre/New York Shakespeare Festival. Other Off-Broadway roles were in More Than You Deserve in the 1973-1974 season and Grand Magic during the 1978-1979 season, for which he won an Obie Award.

Fred Gwynne used his remarkable voice as a radio actor. On the radio, he appeared in 79 episodes of The CBS Radio Mystery Theatre between 1975 and 1982.

Reprise

Thirteen years after the cancellation of The Munsters, in 1979, Fred Gwynne spoke of the role that made him a TV immortal, but that also typecast him.

"Funny thing, yesterday morning I found my youngest son and daughter watching the rerun of an old Munsters episode and I said, 'My God, THAT'S not still on, is it?' Well, even so, I was very lucky and it was great fun to be as much of a household product as something like Rinso. I almost wish I could do it all over again."

In 1981, he reprised the character in the TV movie, The Munsters' Revenge. In 1988, the old series was resuscitated as a syndicated TV series, The Munsters Today , but Herman Munster was played by John Schuck.

Latter Film Career

With time, as his characterization of Herman Munster began to fade in the public eye, Fred Gwynne escaped type-casting and began to establish himself as a character actor of note in film in the 1980s. He turned in well-reviewed appearances in The Cotton Club (1984), Ironweed (1987), Disorganized Crime (1989) and Pet Sematary (1989), in which his character, Jud Crandall, was based on author Stephen King, who himself is quite tall.

Gwynne also made a memorable turn as the judge who battles with the eponymous My Cousin Vinny (1992), his last film. Critic and cinema historian Mick LaSalle cited Gwynne's performance as Judge Chamberlain Haller in his August 2003 article "Role Call of Overlooked Performances is Long, writing: "Half of what made Joe Pesci funny in this comedy was the stream of reactions of Gwynne, as the Southern Judge, a Great Dane to Joe Pesci's yapping terrier."

Fred Gwynne sang professionally, painted, sculpted, wrote & illustrated children's books, including: "The King Who Rained (1970); A Chocolate Moose for Dinner (1976); A Little Pigeon Toad (1988) and Pondlarker (1990). He wrote 10 books in all and The King Who Rained, A Chocolate Moose for Dinner and A Little Pigeon Toad, which all were published by the prestigious house Simon & Schuster, are still in print.

Private Life

In the first part of his professional life, Gwynne lived a quiet life in suburban Bedford, New York and avoided the Hollywood and Broadway social scenes. He married his first wife Foxy in 1952. They had five children and divorced in 1980. Gwynne and his second wife Deb, whom he married in 1981, lived in a renovated farmhouse in rural Taneytown, Maryland. His neighbors described him as a good friend and neighbor who kept his personal and professional lives separate.

Fred Gwynne died on July 2, 1993, in Taneytown, Maryland, after a battle with cancer of the pancreas. He was just eight days shy of turning 67 years old. He is sorely missed by Baby Boomers who grew up delighted by his Officer Francis Muldoon and Herman Munster and were gratified by his late-career renaissance on film.

Walter Kerr in The Times described as "astonishingly effective"

Sources:

An earlier version of this biography originally appeared on the Internet Movie Database