Rise to Fame
An honors project at Denison University sent him down a path nobody could have predicted: playing Mark Twain for the next 63 years. The show started in Greenwich Village nightclubs before Ed Sullivan spotted him and put him on national television. By the time Mark Twain Tonight! hit Broadway in 1966, it was already a decade in development. He won a Tony, won an Emmy when CBS broadcast it in 1967, and kept performing it until 2017, when he finally retired the greasepaint and fake mustache at 92.
In the Spotlight
Most actors in their eighties are doing retrospective panels, not earning Oscar nominations. At 82, he picked up a Best Supporting Actor nod for Into the Wild, playing the kind of old man who makes the audience do the crying for him. He'd already cemented his film reputation in the 1970s as Deep Throat in All the President's Men, delivering 'follow the money' before the phrase became a political cliche. Two iconic film roles, neither of them his most famous work.
Side Notes
His parents abandoned him and his two sisters when he was two years old, raised by paternal grandparents in a fractured childhood that bears no obvious connection to the genteel wit of Mark Twain. The theater obsession started in the Army, performing in Newfoundland during World War II. He married three times, the last to actress Dixie Carter. The autobiography he published at 86 was called Harold: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain, which gets at the split better than any review could.
Final Chapter
Steven Spielberg called him 'quite simply, an American classic who brought Mark Twain and so many of our nation's most memorable characters back to life' in a statement to Variety. Jason Alexander described him as 'a giant... a glorious actor of endless charm and dignity.' He was buried beside his wife Dixie Carter at McLemoresville Cemetery in Tennessee. Richard Thomas is now the only actor authorized to perform Mark Twain Tonight! in his place.