This Guy Owned the Sixties

It is interesting to me that while some other character actors of the sixties ended up with Oscars for their work and "elevated" careers -- I am thinking Walter Matthau and Martin Balsam -- nobody probably worked as much and in as varied a manner as Edward Andrews. That was part of the problem, I guess -- he was everywhere, took everything and anything.

You can find him a lot in Universal comedies of the time. He's in The Thrill of It All(starring Doris Day) and Send Me No Flowers(starring Doris Day.) He's in Forty Pounds of Trouble (with Tony Curtis.)

But he's also in the MGM comedy "Glass Bottom Boat"(starring Doris Day...I see a pattern here.)

On the other hand, Andrews managed to land two important supporting roles in two "major movies" playing fairly famous fictional characters: in Elmer Gantry(1960), he is Babbitt, a very famous character in literature. And in Advise and Consent(1962), he is US Senator Orrin Hatch, a very famous character in a big best seller of that time.

Edward Andrews made the TV series circuit, too. He did at least one famous Twilight Zone -- about a man who commits hit and run with his car and is harassed and persecuted by the CAR into turning himself in.

Andrews never got a supporting role in a Hitchcock movie during this peak time(too bad) but he is in a puckish Alfred Hitchcock Hour in which his tall, bespectacled everyman turned out to be a professional hit man available to suburban couples to kill off spouses.

That was another thing about Andrews...his looks and manner were "white bread"(those glasses, that pleasant face, that resonant voice) ...but his size was formidable: very tall, very strapping. When Andrews WANTED to play bad guys, he could. (He's a Southern mob boss quite capable of ordering children and DAs killed in the gripping Phenix City Story..and he does that one without his glasses.)

Came the 80's, Edward Andrews ubiquity in the 60s was played for heavy nostalgia. He's in Gremlins and 16 Candles, "the new kids wanted him." But he died shortly after making those, and is left to his sixties dominance.

An observation:

Andrews gladly took the so-so supporting role of a doctor in Send Me No Flowers only after Walter Matthau had turned it down. Matthau was already developing some "serious" bona fides(after appearing in Lonely are the Brave and Charade) and Matthau found the doctor role "beneath him." Matthau said he would do it for a very high sum; Universal balked and Andrews took the role.

The next year, Matthau set the same terms(high pay) to play a supporting role under Gregory Peck in Mirage. But this was a better role than the doctor role in Flowers. Peck gave up some of his pay to get Matthau, and was glad he did. Matthau was fine in Mirage --its his final supporting role before becoming a star in "The Fortune Cookie."

While Matthau was hard-managing his career from supporting to stardom, Edward Andrews just putted along, but did well(he was living in Pacific Palisades at the time of his death; that's Steven Spielberg's neighborhood.)

But this: in 1972, past the studio-run 60's, Billy Wilder was making a movie in Italy called "Avanti" starring his old pal Jack Lemmon. Walter Matthau had agreed to fly over and play a cameo as a CIA man. But Matthau had to back out.

Wilder hired...Edward Andrews.