Two Actors In One Biography: Oakland And Tobey
Tough-talking actor Simon Oakland started out as a concert violinist before moving into acting on stage in the late 1940s. In the late 1950s, Oakland made some appearances on television before getting the pivotal role of Edward Montgomery, a newspaper reporter trying to get the full story in Susan Hayward's campy yet harrowing Oscar-winner "I Want to Live!".
After that, in 1960, Oakland earned immortality as a glib doctor trying to offer a pat explanation for the behavior of the killer Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller "Psycho." He appeared in the Oscar-winning musical "West Side Story" in 1961, and then mainly appeared on television shows such as the mind-bending anthology series "Twilight Zone" and the Prohibition-era crime drama "The Untouchables" in the mid-'60s. Oakland played a doctor again on the big screen in Vincente Minnelli's musical "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever" in 1970, and then finished out his career on television. & Solid character actor who also played a few action leads in 1950s films and TV. Tobey began playing bit parts shortly after WWII (a police photographer in Robert Siodmak's noir, "The File on Thelma Jordan," and a sentry in Henry King's war drama, "Twelve O'Clock High," both 1949). His first of a handful of leading roles in features came in one of his best-remembered films, the suspenseful science-fiction classic, "The Thing" (1951). As would be common for much of the rest of his career, Tobey played a dependable, unspectacular, heroic sort, in this case, the captain of a remote frozen outpost whose crew is being killed off by a thawed, murderous monster.
Further leading roles for Tobey came along only occasionally, and then mostly in similar fare (e.g. "It Came from Beneath the Sea" 1955). He did, however, provide sturdy support in Westerns, film noirs, and melodramas, including Otto Preminger's "Angel Face" (1952), Ida Lupino's "The Bigamist" (1953), John Ford's "The Wings of Eagles" (1956). #MovieStars
