![]() ![]() ![]() She was the tall daughter of a Moline, Ill., businessman who quoted Shakespeare and passed on his passion for acting. He talked his way into Northwestern, where his nonexistent academic skills would have soon caught up with him if he had not met Bonnie Bartlett. Howard Lindsay, coauthor of "Life With Father" with Russel Crouse, had suggested Daniels use the GI Bill to attend a college with a good drama department. Turning 18 in 1945, Daniels was drafted and sent to Italy, where he served as an Army radio station disc jockey. The transformation stuck, with only occasional lapses now around the house. His juvenile parts on "Life With Father" required a Bostonian accent, so he removed every trace of Brooklynese. ![]() He was 15, a bright boy who to this day wonders why he accepted his mother's obsession so gracefully. That set the stage for Daniels winning a part in the long-running Broadway play "Life With Father." His 81-year-old father, who lives with his 81-year-old mother now not far from Daniels' Studio City home, is a retired bricklayer who still speaks with "dees, dose and dem." His mother Irene was a stage mother to the 10th power, a telephone operator with almost no dramatic training who drilled her son and two daughters into a successful song-and-dance team by the time they reached grade school. ![]() The first thing people notice about Daniels is the precise, somewhat Boston-flavored diction, which is why he calls himself "a fabrication." He was born and raised in Brooklyn. I mean, Don Johnson has the real stretch, probably in white." You want to come?' She said, 'No, I can't, my high heels.' I said, 'I'm going!' And I'm yelling, and I'm thinking to myself, they sent me a rotten limousine, Don Johnson's going to beat me, you know, it's just an El Dorado. Here Bonnie is all coiffed, made-up, in this thing, high heels, and I said, 'I'm getting out. "Now they send me this crummy limousine, that doesn't get one mile on the freeway and it breaks down. They've got this young man in these slim suits that everybody is going out to buy, the clothes that he wears, and that's the way show business works. He was very good at being unhappy: "First of all, this is the third year I'm going over there not to get an award, right? We've got a show named 'Miami Vice' that's taken 16 nominations. He had put on the tuxedo and even knotted the tie all by himself, but he wasn't happy. In the process, they will also learn much of the remarkable actress Bonnie Bartlett, who plays Ellen Craig, the surgeon's wife, and is married to William Daniels. Elsewhere" - might have no real connection, that it might be all actors' tricks. Once they hear the full story of that Emmy night, not just the short, sanitized version Daniels gave during his acceptance speech, they can put aside any suspicion that the man and his characters - particularly the redoubtable Dr. William Daniels' devotees are a secret cult, much fortified now by their hero's surprising acquisition of the Emmy for best leading actor in a drama series. His characters are men we have all met somewhere, the demanding martinet, the driven achiever, the bumbling father, yet each with a dimension, a lightly scented whiff of humanity and humor that rescues the part from caricature and forces attention. But there is no easy way to wipe from the memory the spark of those performances. Many who have seen him will struggle to remember his name, even after his latest flash of notoriety. Elsewhere" (airing tonight at 10 on Channel 4) or heard of the voice of the car computer on "Knight Rider," or seen "The Graduate" or "1776" or "Two for the Road" or "A Thousand Clowns" or "The President's Analyst" or "The Parallax View" or "The One and Only" or "Oh, God" or "Reds" or the original off-Broadway production of Edward Albee's "The Zoo Story" or the dozens of other performances that stretch back 53 years in the life of a short, mustachioed, New England-accented 58-year-old actor named William Daniels. You may not understand all that follows if you have never seen the television series "St. This is the story of an actor, two actors really, and how an obsessive devotion to craft and an unusual marriage and a prickly sense of fun can turn a bit part into a joy.įirst be warned. ![]()
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