I think one of the losses of syndication is that we don’t talk as much about fine actors whose best works were on TV decades ago. On the other hand, I don’t much like Green Acres, and the performance of Eddie Albert’s that I talk about most is his performance in Roman Holiday, so I suppose there’s that. He takes a lesser role, one that is kind of the definition of supporting, and steals any number of scenes from Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn. Part of that is the delightful Dalton Trumbo script, but it’s also Albert’s performance, which I don’t think gets talked about often enough. Though apparently, he hated the movie, which I don’t get.

Actually, like Trumbo, Albert came up against the blacklist. Albert had been a hero at Tarawa—he rescued 47 Marines and helped rescue thirty more—and that let him keep his career, but his wife Margo’s seems to have never recovered. He was a dedicated conservationist, personally examining the effects of DDT on pelican populations. He helped create Earth Day. He fought for refugees. He helped produce sex ed films in the ’40s. He led a busy activist life, and in fact he still exercised even after his Alzheimer’s diagnosis and lived to be 99, which is pretty impressive all the way around.

He was even still acting almost to the end. He was in one of those experimental TV broadcasts in 1936, and his last TV roles were sixty years later, including on the great animated Spider-Man show of my youth. On the movie end, he started in the Reagan-Wyman Brother Rat in 1938 and finished out as the narrator of Death Valley Memories in 1994. Even before those, he did Broadway. He basically acted for a full lifetime and then some.

His childhood was not without incident; his birthdate is often listed incorrectly, because his mother had his birth certificate changed to cover up that he was illegitimate. What’s more, his original last name was Heimberger, so when the US joined the Allies during World War I, he was called the enemy. And in fact, he ended up using his middle name as his last name because he was tired of being called “Hamburger.”

In general, he seems to have been a pretty mellow guy. He had a long, interesting career. He was married for just shy of forty years, until the day his wife died. And even if he didn’t like the role, I’m always going to have fond memories of his earthy, jocular Irving Radovich, attempting to sneak around Rome with a camera and only succeeding because he had one hidden in his cigarette lighter. Though I’m not saying the Academy is wrong to have given the Best Supporting Actor Oscar to Frank Sinatra for From Here to Eternity that year instead.