Manhattan-born thespian William Redfield was influenced early on into an acting career as the son of an orchestra conductor and a former Ziegfeld Follies girl. Born on January 26, 1927, young "Billy Redfield" made his Broadway debut in "Swing Your Lady" in 1936 at the age of 9. Within a few years, the young boy was also heard on radio and appeared in his first movie, the crime drama _Back Door to Heaven , who was born in 1960, also became an actor on stage and TV.
Father of actor Adam Redfield.
Friend of Marlon Brando.
During the filming of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest , fellow actor and real-life psychiatrist Dean R. Brooks diagnosed Redfield with leukemia (this was long before the days of bone marrow transplants) and gave him 18 months to live. Redfield died 18 months later, pretty much to the day.
Played Guildenstern in the 1964 Richard Burton Hamlet (1964/I) directed by John Gielgud , which premiered in Toronto, was previewed in Boston and opened on Broadway on April 9, 1964 and closed on August 8, 1964 after a total of 137 performances, thus breaking the record set by John Barrymore , who himself had broken Edwin Booths record. Burton was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play 1964 while Hume Cronyn won a Tony as Best Featured Actor in a Play as Polonius.
Redfield wrote a memoir of the 1964 stage production of Hamlet (1964/I) directed by John Gielgud and starring Richard Burton that was captured on film. In "Letters from an Actor" (1967, Viking Press), Redfield -- who played Guildenstern -- said that his friend Marlon Brando had been considered the Great White Hope by his generation of American actors. That is, they believed that Brandos more naturalistic style, combined with his greatness as an actor, would prove a challenge to the more stylized and technical English acting paradigm epitomized by Laurence Olivier , and that Brando would supplant Olivier as the worlds greatest actor. Redfield would tell Burton stories of Brando, whom the Welsh actor had not yet met. Refield sadly confessed that Brando, by not taking on roles such as Hamlet, and "betraying" his craft by abandoning the stage, thus allowing his instrument to be dulled by film work), had failed not only as an actor, but had failed to help American actors create an acting tradition that would rival the English in terms of expertise.
He starred in 83 episodes of the "CBS Radio Mystery Theater," which ran on CBS Radio from January of 1974 to December of 1982.
[on Marlon Brando]: Brando, as a young actor, seemed bounded by no,borders at all.
Acting is the most mortal of the arts. Like perishable foods, it must be,taken fresh or not at all. .
