Clifton Webb

Clifton Webb born 19 November 1889 (d. 1966)

Clifton Webb was an American actor, dancer and singer.

He was born Webb Parmelee Hollenbeck in Indianapolis. In 1892, his formidable mother, Mabelle, moved to New York with her beloved 'little Webb', as she called him for the remainder of her life, his father was rarely mentioned again.

Privately tutored, Webb started taking dance and acting lessons at the age of five. He made his stage debut at seven and began a successful career as a child actor on the stage and in vaudeville. In between performances, Mabelle saw to it that he studied painting and voice. By his seventeenth birthday in 1906, he was singing in operetta. Upon reaching nineteen, he had become a professional ballroom dancer and, taking the stage name 'Clifton Webb', sang and danced in about two dozen operettas before debuting on Broadway and making several appearances.

The 1920s saw Clifton Webb in no fewer than eight Broadway shows, numerous other stage appearances, including vaudeville, and a handful of silent films. Despite early film appearances Clifton Webb's mainstay was the Broadway theatre. Between 1913 and 1947, the tall and slender performer who sang in a clear, gentle tenor, appeared in 23 Broadway shows, mostly musicals, starting with major supporting roles and quickly progressing to leads.

His Broadway credentials were impressive and his London stage appearances were critically praised, but Hollywood was another story. After his early film appearances he was classified as a character actor and stereotyped as a fussy effete snob. Mother Mabelle also preferred New York to Hollywood with its 'yes men'.

Webb was in his mid-fifties when actor/director Otto Preminger chose him over the objections of 20th Century Fox chief Darryl F Zanuck to play the classy, but evil, radio columnist Waldo Lydecker, who is obsessed with Gene Tierney's character in the 1944 film noir Laura [pictured right]. His performance was showered with acclaim and made him an unlikely movie star. Two years later he had another highly-praised role as the elitist Elliott Templeton in The Razor's Edge (1946).

Webb received Academy Award nominations for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in 1945 for Laura and in 1947 for The Razor's Edge (1946). He received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 1949 for Sitting Pretty, the first in a three-film series of comedic 'Mr Belvedere' features with Webb portraying the snide and omniscient central character.

In 1950's Cheaper by the Dozen, Webb and Myrna Loy played Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, real-life efficiency experts of the 1910s and 1920s, and the parents of twelve children.

Webb's subsequent movie roles include that of college professor Thornton Sayre, who in his younger days was known as silent film idol Bruce 'Dreamboat' Blair. Now a distinguished academic who wants no part of his past fame, he sets out to stop the showing of his old films on television in 1952's Dreamboat. Also in 1952 he was John Philip Sousa in Stars and Stripes Forever. In 1953 he had his most dramatic role as the doomed husband of unfaithful Barbara Stanwyck in Titanic and in 1954 played the (fictional) novelist John Frederick Shadwell in Three Coins in the Fountain. In 1957's Boy on a Dolphin he portrayed a wealthy sophisticate who enjoyed collecting illegally obtained Greek antiquities. In a nod to his own identity, the character's amusingly-chosen name was 'Victor Parmalee'.

Webb's elegant taste kept him on Hollywood's best-dressed lists for decades. Even though he exhibited comically foppish mannerisms in portraying Mr Belvedere and other movie characters, his scrupulous private life kept him free of scandal.

In fact, the character of Lynn Belvedere is said to have been very close to his real life — he had an almost Oedipal-like extreme devotion to his mother Mabelle, who was his companion and who lived with him until her death at age ninety-one. Although he admitted to being gay, he was actually more asexual, given that the object of his love and tenderness was his mother.

When Webb's mourning for his mother continued for a year with no signs of letting up, Noel Coward, in a fit of comic exasperation is said to have finally told Webb, tongue firmly-in-cheek, 'It must be difficult to be orphaned at seventy, Clifton.'

But the twilight had arrived for Webb's life and career. Inconsolable in his grief, he completed a final role as an initially sarcastic, but ultimately self-sacrificing Catholic priest in Satan Never Sleeps (1962).

Webb spent the remaining five years of his life as an ill recluse at his home in Beverly Hills, California, succumbing to a heart attack at the age of 76.