Many of the finest actors are known for their distinctive speech patterns — think of the purr of Cary Grant or the aw-shucks stops and starts of Jimmy Stewart — but Hal Holbrook was especially at home with two: a whisper and a drawl.
Holbrook, who died on Jan. 23 at the age of 95, came to embody two of the most distinctive real-life personages on the American scene, each of whom spoke as differently as night and day: the murmuring, parking-garage dwelling teller of Watergate truths, Deep Throat, in the masterly 1976 film version of All the President’s Men and the pugnacious, philosophizing Mark Twain in assorted stage appearances beginning in the late 1940s and culminating with the one-man show Mark Twain Tonight!, which was first seen by audiences in 1954 and later debuted on Broadway. Holbrook was the recipient of a Tony Award for his uncanny stage conjuring of Twain and an Emmy for a broadcast version.
Over the course of a distinguished stage and screen career, Holbrook played a bevy of other significant parts, but it was his entirely credible personifications of these two icons of different eras on which his reputation came to rest. In inhabiting Deep Throat and Twain alike, Holbrook contributed a sort of rock-solid believability that many actors strive for but few have the gifts to realize.
In the film version of All the President’s Men, the audience is asked to accept a host of stars as public figures who were then at the forefront of public consciousness. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman acquit themselves well as Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, but the tallest order of all was for Holbrook, who, as Deep Throat, had to stand in for a real person whose identity, appearance, and voice were then complete unknowns.
Yet Holbrook, whose face is just barely discernible in the shadowy cinematography of the brilliant Gordon Willis, made Deep Throat tangible. Speaking in sotto voce, Holbrook convinces us that, yes, Deep Throat might have said that, sounded that way, or used that intonation when he told Redford’s Woodward, famously, to “follow the money.” The performance was a feat of imagination for Holbrook, who, like the rest of us, would not know that Deep Throat was in reality FBI official W. Mark Felt until the rest of the world did in 2005. “It was a brilliant performance,” Woodward told the Washington Post this week. “He captured the intensity and the sense of Mark Felt’s distance.”
Equally lasting was Holbrook’s portrait of a far less amorphous figure: Mark Twain. Honoring the spirit of Twain’s own fabled speaking tours, blessed with a facial structure that resembled the author’s, and gussied up in a white suit, wig, and fake mustache, Holbrook breathed fresh life into a figure who was known only through still photographs, cartoon renderings, and a film clip by Thomas Edison.
In fact, the Missourian Twain was being played by a native of Cleveland, Ohio. Upon being deserted by their parents, including a mother who sought to become a chorus girl, Holbrook and his two sisters were placed in the charge of their grandparents in Massachusetts. Eventually finding his way back to Ohio, Holbrook attended Denison University in Granville, where, egged on by a professor, Holbrook and his first of three wives, Ruby, headlined a traveling show in which they played assorted historical figures. “The first performance was in the suicide ward of the Chillicothe Veterans Hospital, and they couldn’t figure out what are these two people doing talking to each other,” Holbrook said in a 2015 interview.
Soon, however, Holbrook realized that he had tapped into a kind of latent Twain craze: Just as children wore Davy Crockett hats in the 1950s, audiences in the Space Age flocked to listen to the words of Twain recited by his striking double. “Everything about the evening is perfect — the intimate theatre, Mr. Holbrook’s faultless characterization and the uproariously funny selections from Twain that he has chosen,” wrote New York Times critic Arthur Gelb in a 1959 review of Mark Twain Tonight!
Concurrent with his Twain shows, Holbrook nurtured a career that took him from the soap opera The Brighter Day to more demanding parts: the son in a 1966 TV production of The Glass Menagerie, a gay man in the path-breaking TV movie That Certain Summer (1972), Lillian Hellman’s gregarious friend in Julia (1977), the priest in horror classic The Fog (1980).
Yet what stands out is Holbrook’s willingness to twice subsume himself to notable figures in the passing parade — especially Twain. In an open letter announcing he was retiring Mark Twain Tonight! in 2017, Holbrook reflected: “Discussing our country and the way we think, with Mark Twain, has been my privilege and an honor.”
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
