First posted here on September 16, 2014
Actor Cameron Mitchell (1921-1994), who played Lauren Bacall’s beau Tom Brookman in How to Marry a Millionaire, will be honoured in Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, beginning with a screening of the 1953 comedy on September 27 at the Zion Church, Glen Rock, the York Daily Record reports. The event will be sponsored by the Glen Rock Historic Preservation Society, with proceeds earmarked for the Cameron Mitchell Scholarship Fund.
Mitchell was born in Pennsylvania. He served as a bombardier during World War II, and was a founding member of the Actors Studio. In February 1949, he appeared as Happy Loman in the orginal Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
Mitchell told Monroe biographer Anthony Summers that he was heading to the Fox Commissary with Marilyn when they met Miller, and Salesman director Elia Kazan, in December 1949. However, most accounts place Marilyn’s first meeting with Miller slightly later, in early 1951, on the set of As Young As You Feel – her first role under a new studio contract at Fox. According to Miller, this was his first visit to Hollywood, and with Kazan, he pitched a screenplay to Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn. The film was never made, but Mitchell would reprise his Salesman role in Columbia’s movie adaptation, released later that year.
“As you know her, you find out she’s no goddamn gold-plated birdbrain. She’s a serious dame,” Mitchell said of Marilyn. “At the time I first met her, she was on a big psychiatry kick. She was studying Freud, Menninger, that kind of thing.” In later life, Mitchell was best-known as Uncle Buck Cannon in the Western TV series, The High Chapparal.
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