William Edward "Bill" Phipps - A Remembrance of Actor Bill Phipps

In the past I've written about and posted photographs of my life long friend, William Edward "Bill" Phipps, often called "Uncle Bill" in my home. Sometimes, he was more like an older brother to me. He wasn't really related to me, but he felt like a blood relative, as he worked side by side with my Dad and lived with my parents and I for a bit here on Maui. I've been dealing with his passing since Friday at the age of ninety-six and it's that moment in your adult life when you lose the final connection to your Mom and Dad, as the last of their generation of friends leave this Earth.

Though he was a special person in my life, you may know him from vast numbers of roles he played in motion pictures and television. You may have heard his voice or seen him and never realized it without even knowing his name. If you have ever seen Walt Disney's classic animated film "Cinderella", Bill was the voice of Prince Charming. It was 1949 when my cousin Walt Disney personally hired Bill to voice Prince Charming after hearing his audition tape. According to Bill, he was compensated around $100 for two hours work in a single afternoon. During promotions for "Cinderella", Disney ran a contest in which young women could try to win a trip to Hollywood for a date with the voice of Prince Charming. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Bill met the winner “in front of a live audience on the stage of the Pantages during a coast-to-coast radio broadcast of Art Linkletter’s show.” Bill later recounted, "They gave me (I think) $100 pocket money and a limousine and a driver so we could go anywhere we wanted. We went to Ciro’s and the Mocambo, which were the two most famous places on the Sunset Strip at the time, and we went to the Trocadero, too. At the end of the night, around midnight, the limousine driver and I took her back to the Roosevelt Hotel, where she was staying. And then the chauffeur took me back home, a rooming house we called the House of the Seven Garbos, a home for fledgling actresses, where I lived in a room in the basement for seven dollars a week! The next day I went to the tuxedo rental place and turned in my stuff."

His cinema debut was in 1947’s Oscar-nominated film noir "Crossfire", the Edward Dmytryk feature which centered on the murder of a Jewish man as part of a hate crime by a member of a group of recently discharged soldiers. Bill played one of the suspected soldiers, a quiet young Tennessee boy who works with the police to nail the guilty party. Bill also starred in the classic motion picture "Five". The film was the first movie in cinema history to cover the subject of post-apocalyptic holocaust survivors. The movie was written, directed and produced by Arch Oboler. The title refers to the number of survivors of an atomic bomb disaster that wipes out the rest of the human race.

I always make sure to view Bill waving his white handkerchief to show that he and his two buddies are not armed and mean no harm to the alien spacecraft. Spoiler alert, unfortunately they were the first three humans to be incinerated in George Pal's 1953 film "War Of The Worlds".

Bill passed away on Friday, June 1st at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, California. Bill had been battling lung cancer, which was complicated by pneumonia. That was how he passed away, here is how he lived a life.

Bill was born in Vincennes, Indiana, on February 4th, 1922. Bill's childhood upbringing took place on a farm in Illinois with his brother Jack. In 1939, he enrolled at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois, where he studied accounting and planned to pursue it as a career while continuing what was then an acting hobby on the side.

In 1941, Bill decided to forgo his EIU studies and moved to California to pursue his acting dream. He later enlisted in the Navy after his brother Jack was shot down over the South Pacific, serving as a radioman aboard six ships between 1942 and 1945. After his discharge, he returned to Hollywood and used the G.I. Bill to enroll at the Actors Lab.

One of Bill’s longest industry connections was formed when he was noticed during a Actors Lab production of “Men in White.” Audience members Charles Laughton and Helene Weigel, wife of playwright Bertold Brecht, were impressed by his performance and offered him a role in Brecht’s upcoming production of “Galileo.” Bill appeared in the play and other Laughton stage productions, and remained friends with the actor and his wife Elsa Lanchester until their deaths.

In fact, Bill was quite instrumental in the fifties in keeping his friend Charles Laughton, on top of making a film out of a Davis Grubb book titled "The Night Of The Hunter", which he then enlisted James Agee to do the screenplay. It was a challenging film for Laughton to make and Bill was constantly there to listen to the director's day by day dealings with getting this film made which finally was released in 1955. If it wasn't for that friendship and Bill constantly pushing Charles to make it, the film world would never had ended with such an influential film. In 1992, "The Night of the Hunter" was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. The influential film magazine Cahiers du cinéma selected "The Night of the Hunter" in 2008 as the second-best film of all time, behind "Citizen Kane". The film's lyrical and expressionistic style with its leaning on the silent era sets it apart from other Hollywood films of the 1940s and 1950s, and it has influenced later directors such as David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Terrence Malick, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee and the Coen brothers.

RKO soon placed Bill in the first of the B Westerns that would go on to characterize his film career, “The Arizona Ranger” and “Desperadoes of Dodge City.”

As Hollywood began to focus on sci-fi films in the 1950s, Bill became a regular in the genre. In addition to the Arch Oboler film I mentioned earlier that cast him as a lead in “Five" and my favorite small role in the beginning of "War Of The Worlds", Bill also acted in “The Snow Creature”, “Invaders from Mars” and “Cat-Women of the Moon". Bill was enlisted to work with the great horror director William Castle on a Western called "Jesse James vs. the Daltons" portraying Bill Dalton. The year was 1954, four years before Castle would direct his first horror film, "Macabre". That's several Atomic Age classics, William Castle and a film in which an expedition of botanists stumbles on a yeti den. Outside of those particular roles, I enjoyed his parts in "The Man On The Eiffel Tower", "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit", "The Evil Of Frankenstein" and tanking down glasses of milk as Baby Face Nelson being pursued by James Stewart in "The FBI. Story". Spoiler alert again, if you don't know your American criminal history, Baby Face Nelson didn't make it.

Bill got small roles in numerous television series including; “The Cisco Kid”, "Hawaiian Eye", "Alfred Hitchcock Hour", "Death Valley Days", "Peter Gunn" "Disney's Wonderful World Of Color's both Daniel Boone and Texas John Slaughter", “Rin Tin Tin”, “Perry Mason”, “Rawhide”, “77 Sunset Strip”, “Wagon Train”, “Gunsmoke”, “Lassie”, “Batman”, "Mod Squad", "Mannix", "Judd for the Defense ", "Combat!", "F Troop", "The Green Hornet", "The Munsters", "The Wild Wild West" and “Wyatt Earp” in which he had a semi-regular part as outlaw Curly Bill Brocius.

It was his appearance in a "Twilight Zone" that made me recognize him when he moved to Maui. His wife was killed in an automobiaccident and I got the impression that it troubled so deeply that he could no longer continue to act. It traumatized him to the point that he left the industry and moved to Maui. I don't know if my Mom and Dad were so welcoming him with open arms and my Dad employing him helped with his healing process or if this kid who kept asking him questions about his craft, led to him eventually doing a community play of Neil Simon's "The Odd Couple" in Lahaina which brought him back to the love of acting. Whether if Bill and I were watching Hawaiian sunsets at the beach or watching Saturday morning cartoons, he was always generous and kind to me. I was excited for him to head back to Hollywood to get back to his old love but still a little sad that I would see him as much. Of course, if you know someone who ends up acting, you end up seeing that person quite often on the small screen or the big screen. I felt like he was always there. He didn't have to shave for his first role back in Tinsel town as he was cast perfectly as President Theodore Roosevelt in producer David Susskind's ABC mini-series "Eleanor and Franklin" directed by Daniel Petrie and starring Jane Alexander and Edward Herrmann, among a huge cast. There were truly only a handful of great mini-series in the seventies and this one ranks among that list with eleven Emmy Awards and an incredible score by composer John Barry. The work after that flourished very quickly with Bill being cast in numerous television roles including; "Police Woman", "Sara", "Judge Brody", "McMillan & Wife", "Baretta". "City Of Angels" and "The Rockford Files".

Our home sometimes felt like an actor's agency with the phone ringing and Bill letting us know that he got another role. Each weekly or monthly call meant another acting gig on shows like "Charlie's Angels", "The Waltons", "The Oregon Trail", "Spaceforce", "The Secret Empire", "The Little House On The Prairie". "Lou Grant", "Eight Is Enough", "Flamingo Road" and a cool role as engineer Patrick Callahan on the series "Time Express". There were films made for television like "The Ambush Murders", "Bogie", "Little Girl Lost", "I Want To Live" and "The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald".

Bill kept getting roles throughout the eighties and early nineties including a regular stint on "Boone" as Uncle Link to the late Amanda Peterson (1987's "Can't Buy Me Love")and "Santa Barbara", along with guest appearances on "Man Of The People", "Empty Nest", "227", "Hill Street Blues", "Highway To Heaven", "Dallas", "Murder She Wrote", "T.J. Hooker", "Jake and the Fatman", "Probe", "The Slap Maxwell Story", "The Dukes of Hazzard", "Tales of the Gold Monkey", "Tucker's Witch" and the super eerie television series "Darkroom".

The last time that I got to see Bill on the big screen was at the Kukui Mall Theaters were I watched him save the character of the cat Sassy that Sally Field voiced for "Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey". I took my fellow disc jockey's Nick Jackson's daughter to see that Disney film that also featured Michael J. Fox as Chance, Don Ameche as Shadow and Kim Greist and Robert Hays as the Seavers.

Bill's final movie role was in the 2000 indie film “Sordid Lives”, which he also co-produced. The motion picture had a wonderful cast including; Beau Bridges, Olivia Newton-John, Beth Grant, Delta Burke and Bonnie Bedelia. It's worth seeking out. The film ended up becoming a television series eight years later in 2008.

Bill was married twice. I wrote about his first wife being killed in an automobile accident. Again, because of my youth, I wasn't sure if his love for his first wife is what led to his second marriage ending in divorce. I spoke to him on the phone a number of times when he no longer worked. His final years were spent living in Malibu, where he was a regular sight, walking his dog and frequenting local businesses well into his 90s. The last few years were a challenge to reach him by phone and I appreciate my friend, Jim Racine, helping me reconnect with Bill, through the good old fashioned way of the United States Postal Service.

Those late sixties and early seventies were a treasure of the time that I got to spend with him one on one and I never forgot about it. I will never forget Bill and I'm going to miss him dearly. He lived a long life. Aloha 'Oe...Bill...until we meet again...